accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham’s power
was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward he
openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
“revelation” which he pretended had been received nine years before by
Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to
the day of his death.
Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and
steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively as
a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and
publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all
Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the
will of heaven; “prophet,” “seer,” “revelator.” There was but one
dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and
took that–he proclaimed himself a God!
He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to
accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and
his heavenly status advanced accordingly.
Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been
ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with
the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of
these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children
likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it
be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,
driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they
journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes
with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their
dead–and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in
the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the
true one. Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be
hard to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our
people and our government.
That hatred has “fed fat its ancient grudge” ever since Mormon Utah
developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and
strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was
for the Mormons. The United States tried to rectify all that by
appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon
localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his
dominions difficult. Three thousand United States troops had to go
across the plains and put these gentlemen in office. And after they were
in office they were as helpless as so many stone images. They made laws
which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges
opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday
spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at–for there was nothing to try,
nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit,
the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,
and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it
and no officer could execute it. Our Presidents shipped one cargo of
officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same–they
sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day
by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its
reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of
a more and more dismal nature–and at last they either succumbed and
became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and