Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  The church developed rapidly from these small, eccentric beginnings. Partly this was because Joseph Smith, in spite of many failings, was a religious genius, a man of huge creativity, who never let things get dull. Like all such leaders he assured his followers that they were the chosen people of God, which was excellent for their self-respect; he received a constant flow of divine revelations, and was forever creating new bodies of government, inspiration and privilege – the Twelve Apostles, led by Brigham Young, ‘the Lion of the Lord’, the Sons of Dan, the Council of Fifty. Even the doctrine of polygamy seems to have been introduced, in part, to keep the pot boiling. But more important than Smith’s dynamism (and good looks) was the suitability of his new creed to the frontier society which gave it birth. Mormon had the answers to all the questions which tormented the pioneers. Most of the original converts, including Brigham Young, were barely literate, but they came from New England and had a deep respect for anything that could pass for learning or take on the authority of Scripture. It was therefore very necessary to found a new church on a new Testament. And this particular Testament ministered to the fact that although Americans of the time were enormously proud of their country, they also felt inferior when they heard about the history and achievements of the Old World. It was very soothing to be assured by Joseph Smith that the Garden of Eden had been in America – to be precise, in Missouri. Then, Mormon answered questions that many were asking. For instance, one of the Indian cultures of the pre-Columbian age had left huge sacred mounds as conspicuous monuments in the Ohio country. Settlers there were naturally curious, and as they had no means whatever of learning anything true about the history of the mounds, they invented various unsound theories. One, that the mounds were the work of a non-Indian race which had since vanished, found its way not only into the Book of Mormon, but into Alexis de Tocqueville’s great commentary on American society, Democracy in America, which was published five years after Mormon, a work with which it otherwise has nothing in common.

  It was also understandable that the Mormons went in for faith-healing. Medical science, even at the centre of civilization, was still in its infancy; in the American West it was almost non-existent. Yet people could not submit to pain and illness without a struggle; and it was natural for them to seek physical as well as spiritual salvation from their religion. This was the root of the Church of Christ, Scientist, founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) as well as many other nineteenth-century experiments in alternative medicine. So it is not surprising that this movement found expression among the Mormons. Heber Chase Kimball, Young’s brother-in-law, could cure the sick by sending them a handkerchief which he had blessed or by throwing his old cloak onto their beds. It was at least as much in order for him to do this as for more conventional practitioners to offer useless bleedings, purgings and pills. Indeed, a religion which did not offer medicines for the body as well as for the soul was not going to get very far.

  Even polygamy, the most contentious of Mormon practices, should be looked at in the same light. The practice is quite unacceptable in an advanced society, such as the United States was becoming; but the old Puritan sexual morality had become an intolerable burden to many, and something had to be put in its place.9 The literature of nineteenth-century America is suffused with sexual guilt and longing; significantly, one of its most powerful and convincing expressions, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (published in 1850), is set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The misery caused to many by the iron code of Puritanism was an evil to be fought; and Joseph Smith, a decided womanizer, by heeding his own impulses and then universalizing them, opened the way to reform of a kind. It was not an easy victory. Brigham Young, for instance, longed for death when commanded by the Prophet to take extra wives to himself; but he got over the difficulty, and in the end was ‘husband’ to seventy women. Few other Saints approached such a total; the practice was generally condemned by the Gentiles (as non-Mormons were called); but given the frequent association at this time of religious and sexual radicalism, it cannot be doubted that this too, or something like it, was what many male Americans wanted. And virtuous New England wives and spinsters were amazingly ready to fall in with polygamy. Perhaps they too were tired of Bostonian sexual primness.

  Polygamy remained a scandal nearly to the end of the nineteenth century; in the infancy of the church other accusations were heard. Yet they too show how much Mormonism was a thing of the frontier. Smith was said to be a swindler because in 1837 he established a Mormon bank which issued large quantities of virtually worthless bank notes. In January 1838 he had to flee from Ohio in the dead of night to escape his creditors; but if he was dishonest it was only in the fashion of the West, where everyone counted on getting rich so quickly that all promises would be redeemed without effort. Smith was one of hundreds who launched banks with insufficient capital. Like many others he fell a victim to the panic of 1837, which closed banks and shattered fortunes throughout the country. He had done his best for his followers. In the same way his deep involvement in the more squalid processes of American party politics, which ended as disastrously as his financial speculations, may be excused: corruption, in a way, was only an extension of land speculation, and at first it rewarded the Mormons handsomely.

  Land, indeed, was the key to Mormon success: land and organization. It was an egalitarian, democratic age, and at first sight the extremely autocratic rule of the Prophet was inconsistent with it; but in fact Smith’s autocracy ensured that the Mormons would enjoy equality in the one respect that really mattered. This was still the People Greedily Grasping for Land. Mormon towns and villages were laid out by authority; Mormon business ventures were all co-operative; Mormons could have dealings with Gentiles only through the church. A Mormon settlement, in other words, was somewhat like a company town, the company being the hierarchy of apostles and bishops. Mormon discipline and unity created a monopoly. In the free-and-easy conditions of the frontier, where it was usually each man for himself, the operations of this phalanx of co-operative farmers were irresistible. The resultant prosperity naturally encouraged members of the church to convert others. Missionary work thus proved another strength, for promises were made which could be kept. As Brigham Young was to boast in 1855, after the settlement in Utah,

  We have taken the poor and the ignorant from the dens and caves of the earth and brought them here, and we have laboured day and night, week after week, and year after year, to make ourselves comfortable, and to obtain all the knowledge there is in the world, and the knowledge that comes from God, and we shall continue to do so. We shall take the weak and the feeble and bring them up to the standard that God requires.

  In 1838 Young carried this glad message to England, which like America was suffering from an economic crisis; he made many converts, and from then on a stream of recruits crossed the Atlantic. When they could not come immediately, they sent money. Either way, it was a welcome addition. In return, the converts got economic security for the first time in their lives. Here, once again, the influence of the time and place can be seen. Smith had picked up the communist ideas that were so popular among reform enthusiasts in the early nineteenth century. Not much good in that: the Pilgrim Fathers had tried to hold property in common and been beaten by the desire for individual property. So were most of the humanitarians and early socialists (among them the Welshman Robert Owen) who tried out their ideas in the American back-country. Mormon arrangements were more successful, by luck or by skill.

  Or perhaps by persecution. The Mormons were extremely unpopular. Life on the frontier was dominated by the struggle for the best land: wherever the Latter-Day Saints appeared, the best land rapidly became theirs (rather as slave plantations competed successfully against free farmers in the South). Furthermore, Mormon practices revolted those whom they did not entrance. Psychologically, the total surrender of the individual will to the church seemed deeply un-American.10 Polygamy was immoral. Smith and Young seemed to be men whose capacity
for deceiving themselves was only surpassed by their taste for deceiving others. As if all that were not enough, Mormons further affronted their neighbours by their total cynicism about democracy. This was the period when the American political system was maturing; 11 men took their duties and privileges as citizens very seriously. It was no light matter that the Mormons abandoned their political rights and freedoms to the Prophet, who sold their votes unscrupulously to political leaders, as if he were the boss of a late nineteenth-century city machine. When, for instance, the Mormons established themselves in Illinois, at the place on the Mississippi they named Nauvoo, Whigs and Democrats in the state legislature fell over themselves to grant a city charter and various unusual privileges, both parties hoping to get the solid block of Mormon votes in return.

  That was in 1841. Before then the Saints, growing in numbers but not in acceptability, had wandered from the Burned-Over District to Kirtland, Ohio, and Jackson County, Missouri.12 Wherever they went they met ferocious hostility; in Missouri, indeed, a state rent by violent passion on many issues (including slavery), there had been something like a miniature civil war: blood had been shed on both sides. Joseph Smith eventually cursed Jackson County, prophesying its destruction (a prophecy that came true during the great Civil War). Matters were soon as bad in Illinois. Nauvoo and its neighbourhood acquired a population of 25,000 Mormons who prospered exceedingly. They began to throw their weight around, politically, economically and morally: the secret of polygamy began to leak out. They formed their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, answerable only to Smith, and a secret society, the Sons of Dan, not unlike a secret police or the Ku Klux Klan. The Gentiles resorted increasingly to violence, which reached a climax in the summer of 1844. Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested for destroying the printing press of an apostate Mormon newspaper. They were thrown into jail and lynched there.

  After that the feeling was that it was open season on the Mormons, and only their willingness to resist by force of arms taught their enemies a little prudence. Thanks to Brigham Young, who instantly asserted his authority as Smith’s de facto successor, the church stayed together, though there were some alarming defections. Yet if it remained at Nauvoo there would be war on the frontier. Closing ranks, the Saints ran dissidents out of town and (literally) whipped others into line; a leading Son of Dan ambushed and shot one of Smith’s assassins. But the Gentiles were more numerous and reckless. Many of them had come up the Mississippi from the slave South, where violence was all too common a technique. They took to burning down Mormon houses. The state authorities indicated that they could not and would not protect the Mormons indefinitely (not that they had ever done so very effectively). The Saints were just completing the Nauvoo temple; but in the circumstances it is not surprising either that Smith, before his death, had begun to talk of moving on again; or that Young now took the great decision.

  His task was formidable, and probably he alone of all Mormons could ever have accomplished it. For all his gifts, Smith had also something of the knowing rogue about him: he could smile even at polygamy. The earthier Young had no sense of humour, great executive ability and an indomitable will. Now he had to organize the journey of 16,000 or so Saints to some refuge in the Far West where they would be safe from the citizens of the United States for long enough to build up an unassailable position. The cost in money would be enormous: could he raise the funds? The religious costs might be higher: could he maintain the faith and discipline of the people on the long journey?

  This business of finding ‘the White Horse of safety’ of which Smith had spoken in prophecy might not have been possible but for a great widening of prospects which had come about in the previous half-century. American settlers had begun to cross the Mississippi into Spanish Louisiana (the territory between the great river and the crest of the Rockies) even before the end of the eighteenth century, as we saw in the story of Daniel Boone; the process had been hugely accelerated when, in 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte first cozened the Spanish out of Louisiana and then sold it to the United States for $11.5 million – a useful sum for his war-chest – and for $3.75 million with which to settle the claims of private U S citizens against France. The Louisiana Purchase was one of the most important episodes in American history. It not only eliminated the French from the imperial competition, it roughly doubled the size of the trans-Appalachian American empire and correspondingly enhanced its prospects. It began to seem certain that the United States would one day stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and President Jefferson immediately sent out an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new domain and find, if they could, a good route to the Pacific. Lewis and Clark had succeeded magnificently, ending their transcontinental journey by sailing down the Columbia river to the sea; and they soon had many followers. By 1845 the West had been pretty thoroughly explored. It had been criss-crossed by hundreds of mountain men – the last generation of old-style fur-trappers and traders – and military missions. It was known that the valley of the Columbia in Oregon territory was a good place for farm settlements, and there were already the makings of the Oregon Trail to lead pioneers there. Explorations were going ahead to open a practicable route to California, which was also very promising country. But for that very reason the Mormons could not go to either region: too many other migrants would press in before them and beside them; and, although California was still legally Mexican territory, and the British claimed Oregon, it would probably not be long before the United States took both.

  Yet there was a place, and, thanks to earlier explorations, Brigham Young had heard of it. What he wanted would probably be found in the Great Basin, just across the continental Divide, where, travellers reported, there were high barren mountains and a great salt lake; also good farming land and fertile valleys full of timber – none of which was yet claimed.

  A cold going they had of it: just the wrong time of the year for prairie travel. On the eastern rivers the late winter was the most usual season for pioneers’ departure. It meant that they got to the new settlement in time to get the ground cleared and seeded at the earliest possible moment. On the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries it was common in March to see a big raft floating down the waters, a cow or two forward, a haystack amidships, and, aft, a family trying to lead a normal life. The Mormons were to have a different experience. They had no choice: as soon as the news got about that they were really leaving, the Gentiles hurried to make sure that they did not change their minds, using methods that had already been perfected for dislodging the Cherokees from their ancestral lands (indeed the Mormons too were driven to take a Trail of Tears, though it led to a happier destination). A favourite device was to force a family to leave its house, carrying what it could in the way of furniture and belongings, and then set fire to the building while the owners watched, standing miserable in the snow. It was clear that it would be unsafe to linger; so on 4 February 1846 the first emigrants began to cross the Mississippi. It was very cold, but the huge river, between three-quarters of a mile and a mile-and-a-half wide at the Nauvoo bend, 13 though full of floating ice, was not yet frozen over, and several of the Mormons’ craft capsized in the water, all passengers drowning. A day or two later the Mississippi froze completely, so the crossing was safer; but frost and blizzard made conditions for travel quite appalling. Nevertheless the Saints moved on westward through Iowa, at a snail’s pace. In March the snow ceased, but they were not much better off, for the rains came, fearful spring torrents, turning the ground into ‘shoe-mouth deep’ mud, slowing progress to a minimum, sometimes to no more than a mile a day. In the steady downpour it was often impossible to get food cooked or keep clothes and bedding dry. When at last summer came the people and the oxen drawing their covered wagons were plagued by black clouds of mosquitoes, and some were killed by the bites of rattlesnakes. Preparations for the journey had gone on for more than a year; but few of the Saints had really understood what such a journey required of them. At times Brigham Youn
g was almost at his wits’ end for money to support them even as far as the river Missouri; cattle and babies, children and the elderly began to die. The starving time of Utah occurred when its settlers were still nineteen months and a thousand miles away.

  The survival of these new Pilgrims must finally be explained by the fact that their heroic virtues outweighed their vices. Many were idle, backsliding, quarrelsome or just plain silly, but most found in themselves the qualities necessary for survival. At bottom they were honest plain Americans; brave, patient and practical; stiffened and disciplined by their apocalyptic faith. Little things helped them: there was an English brass band among the converts, to whose music they danced in the evenings, after prayer, at every stopping-place (weather permitting). And as Bernard De Voto shrewdly remarks, every pioneer train was a village on wheels; 14 the villagers had the usual consolations of the frontier to keep them sane. When the women had done with their sewing, patching and cooking, and with trying to teach their children the alphabet, they could gather for gossip; when the men rested from driving the herds and the wagons and from the endless round of maintenance that prairie schooners required, they could enjoy a game of cards or dominoes, or a practical joke (once, towards the end of the long trek, Brigham Young gave them a fearful dressing-down for enjoying them too much). Both sexes liked the dancing, the prayers and the priests’ harangues. These things seem paltry enough, but they strengthened the spirit to endure.