Almost at once, Young followed his “sledgehammer’s” lead and took up the cudgel of denunciation. In a speech on September 14, just twelve days before the Ellsworth and McArthur Companies would roll into Salt Lake, he “worked up the people with his tongue” (in the words of the Apostle who summarized the harangue for the Deseret News). Young “justly, Strictly & strongly chastized & rebuked” the Saints who formed his audience, “for lying, stealing, swareing, commiting Adultery, quarelling with Husbands wives & children & many other evils.”
Of course no such large-scale reform movement can truly be born solely from an overheated mule. Gustive Larson, an LDS scholar who sees the Reformation in a mostly positive light, points out that a full year earlier, on July 13, 1855, Grant had warned a Provo congregation that “The Church needs trimming up, and if you will search, you will find your wards contain branches which had better be cut off.” In that speech, Grant first used the word by which the movement would come to be called: “I would like to see the works of reformation commence, and continue until every man had to walk the line.”
Larson and others see the Reformation as ultimately having its roots in the disastrous crop failures of 1855 and 1856. To devout Mormons, such punishments betokened not simply the ravages of grasshoppers, but divine retribution for unacknowledged sins.
For weeks after the mass rebaptism, Grant addressed the congregation in the Tabernacle every Sunday. According to one witness,
The bishops were “whipped” for dereliction of duty, for being “old fogies,” and not being strict in making the Saints pay their tithing to “the Lord.” All were called upon to confess their sins, and to make known to God’s servant the crimes of which they were guilty…. Individuals were hinted at and sins imputed to them which they dared not deny, nor even attempt to defend themselves, however innocent they might be.
The tithing, an obligation that persists today in the LDS church, was a mandatory contribution (usually 10 percent) of one’s earnings and property.
On November 3, in dramatic fashion, Young added what would come to be known as the catechism to the rhetorical thunder of the Reformation. Inside the Social Hall in Salt Lake City, he had the doors locked, then pulled from the breast pocket of his coat a long piece of paper. Reading from it out loud, he dunned the audience with the following list of questions:
Have you shed innocent blood or assented thereto?
Have you committed adultery?
Have you betrayed your brother?
Have you borne false witness against your neighbor?
Do you get drunk?
Have you stolen?
Have you lied?
Have you contracted debts without prospect of paying?
Have you labored faithfully for your wages?
Have you coveted that which belongs to another?
Have you taken the name of the Lord in vain?
Do you preside in your family as a servant of God?
Have you paid your tithing in all things?
Later the catechism would be expanded with such questions as, “Do you pray in Secret?” and “Do you wash your bodies once a week?” (The Prophet himself was obliged to confess that he sometimes failed to observe this last commandment. He did not bathe once a week, Young admitted, although “he had tried it.”)
The catechism was no mere laundry list of admonitions for the Saints to dwell upon in the privacy of their consciences. It was the text for an inquisition. With the Reformation underway, a pair of church officials visited every household in the territory and grilled its inhabitants under oath. If too many wrong answers escaped the trembling lips of a Saint being examined, he or she might be summarily cut off from the church.
The Mormon Reformation is often compared to the Salem witch trials of 1692. As at Salem, in Utah brainwashed citizens confessed to sins they were not in fact guilty of. At one all-male meeting in the Social Hall, according to an eyewitness, Young suddenly announced, “All you who have been guilty of committing adultery, stand up.” To his astonishment and chagrin, more than three-fourths of the congregation promptly got to their feet.
The preoccupation with adultery may seem to modern readers a curious one. Yet in the orthodox Mormon thinking of the 1850s, sleeping with another man’s wife, or with an unmarried woman, was the polar opposite of polygamy. Adultery, in fact, was so serious a sin that it could be punishable by death.
The bizarre but logical consequence of the Reformation’s focus on adultery was to touch off an epidemic of plural marriages. One scholar demonstrated that “there were sixty-five percent more [plural] marriages during 1856 and 1857 than in any other two years of this experiment.” By 1859, after the Reformation had sputtered out, the number of polygamous marriages dropped to one-fifth of the 1857 total.
Young himself was fully aware that many wives in Utah felt only misery in having to share their husbands with other women, but he had little sympathy for their unhappiness. On September 21, he announced that he would give all Mormon plural wives two weeks to decide whether or not to accept their fate with good cheer. “If they decided to stay with their husbands,” he decreed, “they should keep the law of God & not murmur or Complain.” If not, “I will set all at liberty”—i.e., grant the recalcitrant wives divorces and probably excommunicate them.
On November 5, 1856, the Deseret News published a “psalm” in praise of the Reformation, written by one W. G. Mills. It began, “The reformation has commenced,/ All hail! the glorious day,” and contained two stanzas that celebrated plural marriage in much the same vein as Young’s lecture:
Now, sisters, list to what I say,
With trials this world is rife
You can’t expect to miss them all,
Help husband get a wife!
Now, this advice I freely give,
If exalted you would be
Remember that your husband must
Be blessed with more than thee.
Then, O, let us say,
God bless the wife that strives
And aids her husband all she can
T’obtain a dozen wives.
The Reformation’s emphasis on cleanliness seems to have been Jedediah Grant’s peculiar crotchet. In one tirade, he lashed his congregation thus:
Do you keep your dwellings, outhouses, and door yards clean? The first work of the reformation with some should be to clean away the filth about their premises. How would some like to have President Young visit them and go through their buildings, examine their rooms, bedding, &c.? Many houses stink so bad that a clean man could not live in them, nor hardly breathe in them. Some men were raised in stink, and so were their fathers before them.
If the Reformation took on the character of a general inquisition, its most frightening aspect was the doctrine of blood atonement, the joint brainchild of Grant and Young. This principle was first announced by the Prophet and his Second Counselor in a meeting in the bowery on September 21, 1856. According to historian David Bigler, this neo-biblical doctrine “was founded on the belief some sins were so serious they could not be cleansed by the blood of animals or even Christ’s sacrifice.”
At the bowery meeting, Young urged the Saints not only to report on one another, but to participate in the “shedding of blood” of the malefactors—which the audience clearly understood to mean execution. Asked the President,
Will you love your brothers or sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the sheding of their blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood? That is what Jesus Christ meant.
Grant then elaborated on this doctrine in more lurid language, urging sinners to seek their own punishment. He advised the guilty to present themselves to the Prophet “and ask him to appoint a committee to attend to their case; and then let a place be selected, and let that committee shed their blood.” The “sledgehammer” continued, “And you who have committed sins that cannot be forgiven through baptism, let your blood be shed and let the smo
ke ascend, that the incense thereof may come up before God as an atonement for your sins, and that the sinners in Zion may be afraid.”
This was the doctrine of blood atonement. That it intimidated the Saints in Zion, there is no denying. Yet ever since the 1850s, scholars have argued over how much blood was actually shed during the brief spasm of the Reformation. The literature of future apostates is rich in sensational accounts of the carrying out of sentences of blood atonement. Thus Fanny Stenhouse:
The wife of one Elder, when he was absent on a mission, acted unfaithfully to him. Her husband took counsel of the authorities, and was reminded that the shedding of her blood alone could save her. He returned and told her, but she asked for time, which was readily granted. One day, in a moment of affection, when she was seated on his knee, he reminded her of her doom, and suggested that now when their hearts were full of love was a suitable time for carrying it into execution. She acquiesced, and out of love he cut her throat from ear to ear.
Yet one LDS theologian, Bruce R. McConkie, writing of blood atonement, denies that “there has been one event or occurrence whatever, of any nature, from which the slightest inference arises that any such practice existed or was taught.”
Was the doctrine, then, merely an empty threat, a rhetorical tactic aimed at terrorizing potential sinners into toeing the line? From the vantage point of a century and a half of history, we cannot solve this question. It seems likely, however, that the mid-1850s witnessed a proliferation of real acts of terror on the part of the notorious Danites, Young’s secret police. The President himself (as noted above) denied that any such band existed. But there are too many accounts of beatings, robberies, and assassinations carried out in the territory during these years to ignore the phenomenon. A few of those accounts were written by Danites themselves.
Among the most notorious was Bill Hickman, who late in life published a startlingly candid memoir, under the title Brigham’s Destroying Angel. In matter-of-fact prose, Hickman describes the first assassination he carried out under Young’s orders, that of an Indian in 1848. This unnamed victim had converted to the church, but after an unhappy meeting with the President at Winter Quarters, had left in a rage, threatening publicly to enlist Indian allies to the west who would help him scalp Young. According to Hickman,
Brigham sent me word to look out for him. I found him, used him up, scalped him, and took his scalp to Brigham Young, saying: “Here is the scalp of the man who was going to have a war-dance over your scalp; you may now have one over his, if you wish.” He took it and thanked me very much. He said in all probability I had saved his life, and that some day he would make me a great man in the kingdom.
(By 1848, the phrase “use him up” already had long standing as Mormon shorthand for murder.)
In Salt Lake City, Hickman continued his useful services to the Prophet, using up a horse thief in 1852, another shortly thereafter. The destroying angel’s unquestioning loyalty to Young sprang, by his own testimony, from a conviction that had become general in the Utah Territory by 1854: “The satisfied point and undoubted fact that God had established His kingdom in the mountains, and Brigham was conversant with the Almighty, was a settled question.”
Sometimes the victim was a Gentile, such as a young, good-looking lawyer named Hartley, who had come to Utah from the Oregon Territory and married “a respectable lady of a good family” from Provo. For some reason, Hartley aroused Young’s wrath: at the April General Conference, the Prophet thundered denunciations against the lawyer, declaring “that he ought to have his throat cut.” Fearing for his life, Hartley fled toward Fort Bridger, but he was followed by Hickman.
Hickman’s orders came from Apostle Orson Hyde, who was also stalking Hartley, and who said he in turn was acting under the Prophet’s command. In East Canyon, not far from Salt Lake, as Hartley, on horseback, forded the stream, Hickman and another Danite ambushed the lawyer and shot him dead. “When I returned to camp,” Hickman later wrote, “Orson Hyde told me that was well done; that he and some others had gone on the side of the mountain, and seen the whole performance.”
Hickman continued his assassinations into the 1860s, well after the Reformation had run its course. But then he and Young had a serious falling-out, which led to the gunslinger’s being disfellowshiped from the church (disfellowship being a less severe punishment than excommunication, because it could be reversed). Orthodox Mormon historians have tended to dismiss Brigham’s Destroying Angel as pure fiction, concocted by an embittered ex-lieutenant as revenge against the Prophet. The memoir, which was published in 1872, was in fact dictated from prison to a rabidly anti-Mormon editor, J. H. Beadle.
That very imprisonment throws a monkey wrench into the theory that Hickman’s memoir was fiction. At the time, the Danite was awaiting trial for the murder of a trader named Richard Yates. In Hickman’s telling, Young ordered the assassination because he suspected that Yates was a spy for the U.S. Army, which was nearing Utah. After the Danite fell out with the President, Young (according to Hickman) hung him out to dry by sanctioning the trial. There is no doubt that a sense of betrayal colors every page of Brigham’s Destroying Angel. But it is hard to come up with an explanation as to why Hickman would have murdered Yates—a man with whom he had no apparent quarrel—on his own.
The killings most often associated with the doctrine of blood atonement—a complicated chain of events about which historians still argue today—are known as the Parrish-Potter murders. They were triggered by the tragic fate of one of the handcart pioneers.
On Christmas Eve 1856, in an eastern suburb of Salt Lake City, a woman who had come by handcart to Zion allegedly committed suicide by slitting her throat. Indian agent Garland Hurt—no friend of Brigham Young—testified that she had taken her life rather than be forced into a polygamous marriage with the head of the household in which she had been lodged upon her arrival in Salt Lake. According to Hurt, she was told she would be denounced as a prostitute and refused food and shelter if she did not submit to marriage. (Hurt gave the woman’s last name as Williams, but she cannot be conclusively matched with any of the Williams women in the rosters of the five 1856 handcart companies in the LDS Archives.)
Even at the time, there were suspicions that the suicide was actually a murder. That was the interpretation of William Parrish, living in Springville, a town fifty miles south of Salt Lake. Though a practicing Mormon, Parrish had heard about (and been appalled by) the doctrine of “killing to save.” With his two sons, aged eighteen and twenty-two, Parrish attempted to flee the territory under cover of darkness in March 1857. The guide he entrusted to lead him planned instead to march the three Parrishes into an ambush. In the ensuing gun battle and knife fight, William Parrish and his older son were killed, as was the treacherous guide, Gardner Potter, by mistake. No one was ever brought to trial for the killings.
Whatever the reality of blood atonement as a practice rather than merely a doctrine, there is no gainsaying the pall of fear and recrimination that the Reformation cast over Zion, beginning in September 1856. Yet in Young’s view, that pall was a blessing. All through the autumn months of 1856, as he dictated letters to his far-flung aides while he tried to manage the handcart migration, he inserted in virtually every epistle a paragraph proclaiming the moral improvement the Reformation was working. An example:
There is quite a reformation springing up in many of the Settlements…. A General desire to renew their covenants and live nearer to the Lord, to serve him more perfectly and to be more Circumspect and alive to the interests of Zion…. This awakening spirit is much needed, as it is too unusually the case that when the Elders come home they throw off their armour, and the people too frequently follow their example…. Now that much of the chaff of the winters threshing floor has been floated off by the summer breezes, we trust that the Saints who are really such will awake from their lethargy.
Viewed in retrospect, the Mormon Reformation can well be seen as an episode of mass hysteria. Morris Werner, Br
igham Young’s skeptical 1925 biographer, characterizes the movement as “the height of fanatical Puritanism.” Werner adds:
But the worst effect of the Reformation was its influence on the state of mind of the community. Murder became a righteous duty at times, and against sinners and enemies it was no longer regarded as a sin. Obedience to the leaders of the Church was considered a supreme duty, and the entire Mormon population was keyed up to a pitch of fiery faith by the psychological effect of the terrifying doctrine of blood atonement.
Mormon apologists, on the other hand, downplay or deny the murders and emphasize the moral improvement. Thus Gustive Larson: “The call to repentance in the Reformation was generally heeded, and as a result, in the words of historian Andrew Neff, ‘the spiritual tone of the entire Mormon commonwealth was markedly raised.’”
One strategy for dealing with the Reformation as a potential embarrassment to the church is to ignore it altogether. Leonard J. Arrington manages in his 522-page Brigham Young: American Moses to mention blood atonement not once, the Reformation itself in only a single sentence, as he waves it aside as a minor historical nuisance: “During the Reformation of 1856 the Saints got carried away by the hellfire and damnation sermons of Grant, George A. Smith, and others.”
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