American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  Where Joseph had been dilatory, Young was assiduous. Where Joseph claimed charismatic inspiration, Young generally eschewed divine revelation. Joseph contributed 135 canonized revelations to church doctrine. In contrast, Young offered only one, concerning the organization of the exodus to Utah. “I never pretended to be Joseph Smith,” Young declared. “I’m not the man that brought forth the ‘Book of Mormon.’”

  Brigham had his own revelation en route to Nauvoo, which convinced him that he, not Rigdon, was the true inheritor of Joseph’s mantle. “By vision of the spirit,” Young had learned that the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles should assume the presidency of the entire church. In a preliminary meeting with Rigdon, Young claimed not to “care who leads the church, even though it were Ann Lee,” the charismatic Shaker leader who thought she was Jesus Christ. “But one thing I must know,” Young said, “and that is what God says about it. I have the keys and the means of obtaining the mind of God on the subject.”

  The two rivals agreed to compete as verbal gladiators for the favor of the assembled church. On Thursday, August 8, the two claimants appeared in the East Grove at 10:00 a.m. for a dramatic rhetorical showdown. This was the same natural theater where several of the young religion’s most dramatic scenes had already played out, including Joseph’s apocalyptic King Follett sermon and his final Sunday sermon to the Saints. Five thousand onlookers gathered to hear first Rigdon, then Brigham, plead for their vote to sustain one man’s leadership.

  Rigdon, the fabled orator, appeared first on the rickety wooden stand in front of the assembled Saints. But a powerful wind was blowing in his face, so he walked through the audience to a buckboard wagon at the back of the crowd. The audience turned around on their benches to face him. Standing in the wagon box, he delivered the most important speech of his life.

  Victors write the history, and by most accounts, Rigdon failed to mesmerize the Mormons. “He was dry as sticks in his preaching,” Benjamin Ashby, age fifteen at the time, later remembered. “He made a silly, boastful speech about leading the church back to Pittsburgh, and twirling the nose of Queen Victoria.” The wiry Rigdon, who suffered occasional bouts of mania, again mined the Armageddon theme, promising to “dethrone kings and emperors, and lead the armies of Israel to fight the great battle of Gog and Magog.” There is no reliable record of his ninety-minute talk, during which he repeated his claim to be Joseph’s spokesman and the designated guardian of the church. There is a record of Brigham Young’s dramatic entrance, however. Just as Rigdon was about to ask the faithful to vote him as their leader, “Lo! To his grief and mortification, [Brigham Young] stepped upon the stand and with a word stayed all the proceedings of Mr. Rigdon,” according to one of Young’s allies, Apostle Orson Hyde.

  “I will manage this voting for Elder Rigdon,” Young shouted from the opposite end of the grove, yelling into the stiff wind. “He does not preside here. This child [i.e., Young himself] will manage this flock for a season.”

  Brigham had staged a theatrical reversal. While Rigdon was speaking, he had climbed up the wooden platform at the other end of the grove. When he interrupted Rigdon, the entire audience swiveled around in their seats to hear him. Then, supposedly, a miracle occurred, buttressed by many testimonies over the years. “It was Joseph’s voice,” reported twenty-six-year-old Benjamin Johnson, who remembered turning his gaze from the wagon to the wooden platform where Brigham was standing. “As soon as he spoke, I jumped on my feet,” Johnson said. “His person, in look, attitude, dress and appearance was Joseph himself, personified, and I knew in a moment the spirit and mantle of Joseph was upon him.” The apostle Hyde remembered that he was sitting in the grove with his two wives; when Brigham started talking, “One of them said: ‘It is the voice of Joseph! It is Joseph Smith!’” Hyde’s other wife remarked more prosaically, “I do not see him, where is he?” Curiously, Young had just alluded to the Bible passage, John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”*

  Brigham’s mystical “transfiguration” deserves to be treated skeptically. Historian Richard Van Wagoner noted that Orson Hyde’s dramatic testimony of the August 8 events could not be his own; on presidential assignment in “Babylon,” Hyde didn’t return to Nauvoo until August 13. Mormon elder John D. Lee likewise left a dramatic account (“Brigham Young arose and roared like a young lion, imitating the style and voice of Joseph the Prophet”), but he wasn’t in Nauvoo, either. Lee arrived in Nauvoo on August 20.

  In fact, there was hardly any similarity between Joseph and the man later to be called “the Lion of the Lord.” Joseph was taller than Brigham, and he spoke in a very different, folksy cadence. The robust Brigham had long, light-red hair, whereas Joseph had dark brown locks. The epiphany later recorded by so many faithful Saints appeared in no contemporary accounts of Brigham’s talk. Four apostles, including Young himself, wrote diary entries for August 8, and none mentioned Brigham speaking in the voice of Joseph. This detail likewise eluded Nauvoo’s two faith-promoting newspapers, the Nauvoo Neighbor and the Times and Seasons.

  Whatever voice he was speaking in, Brigham utterly demolished Rigdon’s feeble claim on the Saints’ allegiance. Brigham knew his audience, fully one-third of whom were struggling immigrants from Britain. He and the apostles had converted many of them during the legendary missionary trip to Britain in 1840. “I know your feelings,” Brigham boomed. “Do you want me to tell you your feelings?” He judged that the forlorn Saints were “like children without a father, and sheep without a shepherd.”

  Young gambled that the Saints weren’t looking for a replacement prophet in the immediate aftermath of Joseph’s death. God revealed prophets to his believers, and Rigdon didn’t make the grade. “Do you want a spokesman?” as Rigdon claimed to be, Young taunted. “Do you want the church properly organized, or do you want a spokesman to be chief cook and bottle washer?” If Rigdon was so eager to be Joseph’s spokesman, Young thundered, “he must go to the other side of the vail”—in other words, he must die—“for the Prophet is there, but Elder Rigdon is here.”

  The Twelve “were appointed by the finger of God,” Young thundered. “Here is Brigham, have his knees ever faltered? Have his lips ever quivered?” The twelve apostles, Young insisted, have “the Keys of the Kingdom to all the whole world so help me God.” The keys were the code words and signs that would allow faithful Mormons to enter heaven in the afterlife. “We have all the signs and the tokens to give to the Porter and he will let us in the quay,” Young explained. Joseph had the keys, and he passed them to the Twelve, according to Young. Rigdon had nothing, save his own questionable, self-serving revelation.

  Now Brigham called for a vote. Would the Saints sustain the authority of the Twelve, or elect Rigdon as their leader? As the cowed Rigdon sat slump-shouldered on the wooden stand next to Young, 5,000 hands shot into the air, unanimously choosing Brigham Young, president of the Twelve, to lead them into an uncertain future.

  Unbeknownst to the Saints assembled in the Nauvoo grove, this was a signal moment in Mormon history; the faithful would never elect their church leader again. Since then, church leaders have ascended to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles as counseled by divine revelation, and the most senior apostle has assumed the church presidency. Brigham Young, who ruled the church for thirty years, would be the last president chosen by the will of the people.

  JOSEPH KNEW THAT THE MOST SERIOUS CHALLENGE TO HIS authority could come only from a rival prophet. The Saints accepted that God had spoken to, and directed the affairs of, their revelator. But suppose another prophet happened onto the scene, asserting the same claims as Joseph? Or worse, asserting the primacy of his revelations over Joseph’s?

  There was precedent for such a threat. In 1835, Joseph briefly embraced a character named Joshua the Jewish Minister (real name: Robert Matthews), who claimed to be the resurrected Matthias, the apostle chosen to replace Judas in the original Twelve. Matthias wandered around the Saints’ Kirtland, Ohio, settlement sport
ing a green frock, harlequin-colored pantaloons, bound with a crimson sash with twelve tassels. Matthias had come directly to Kirtland from Sing Sing prison, where he had served a four-month term for beating his daughter. Smith initially lent an ear to Matthias’s odd ravings about King Nebuchadnezzar and the prophet Daniel’s dream, and even invited the itinerant felon to preach to the Saints. But Smith quickly realized that Matthias had a screw loose. After two nights in Kirtland, Joseph showed his new acquaintance the gate, saying that “his God is the Devil, and I could not keep him any longer.”

  Much closer to home, a ten-year-old Mormon boy named James Colin Brewster claimed to have received a visit from the angel Moroni while living in Kirtland. Brewster’s claims surfaced at a time of intense conflict within the church. Joseph had just launched his short-lived, rogue banking experiment, the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, which would quickly bankrupt many Saints and Gentiles, and prompted Joseph to flee Ohio in the dead of night. Moroni confirmed to young James that the church was in trouble and “had not lived according to the former revelations,” and that “the High Council was in transgression.” Predictably, the High Council, chaired by Joseph’s uncle John Smith, disfellowshipped Brewster and anyone who refused to denounce his teachings.

  Brewster’s career trajectory began to closely parallel that of Joseph Smith. Soon he discovered the “lost books of Esdras,” an ancient Hebrew prophet. Esdras denounced the current state of the church: “Woe to the shepherds that will not feed the flock,” the writings stated; “I say unto you that the enemy of all righteousness has laid snares to destroy the saints of the most high, and he hath led many away into darkness.” Brewster’s father, Zephaniah, who had helped him transcribe Esdras’s revelations, fretted that his son might be a heretic. He brought the Esdras manuscript to Joseph Smith. “I enquired of the Lord and the Lord told me the book was not true,” Joseph proclaimed. In the Times and Seasons newspaper, John Taylor accused young Brewster of money digging—the very charge leveled against Joseph Smith several years earlier—and called Esdras “a perfect humbug.” Taylor reminded the Saints of Joseph’s own revelation, canonized in the church’s Doctrine and Covenants (28:2), when God said, “No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith.”

  Brewsterism had no lasting impact on the Mormon church, and no one knows where the precocious boy prophet ended his days. But his brief career did prove that the Saints, who were predisposed to believe in angelic interventions, sacred tablets, and lost stories of Israel, might succumb to the blandishments of a new prophet, if one appeared on the horizon.

  Almost immediately after Joseph Smith’s death, one did. In early August 1844, at a gathering of Mormons at Florence, Michigan, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer and recent convert to the church named James J. Strang brandished a letter supposedly signed by Joseph Smith. In the letter, almost certainly a forgery, a disconsolate Joseph (“The wolves are upon the scent, and I am waiting to be offered up”) related that God appeared to him and declared Strang to be Smith’s lawful successor: “And now behold my servant James J. Strang hath come to there from far from truth . . . my servant James shall lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes of Zion.” Joseph ordered the Saints to gather to Strang’s tiny colony in Voree, Wisconsin, about 275 miles northeast of Nauvoo, not far from Lake Michigan: “There shall my people have peace and rest and wax fat and pleasant in the presence of their enemies.” Strang later claimed that an angel appeared to him at 5:30 p.m. on June 27, 1844, the very moment of Joseph’s death. The angel extended his hand, anointed Strang’s head with oil, and proclaimed him to be the successor prophet to Joseph Smith.

  The Michigan Mormons promptly excommunicated Strang, and when word of his claims reached Nauvoo, Brigham Young and the apostles excommunicated him a second time for good measure. Two could play this game. As a purported true prophet, Strang quickly excommunicated Brigham and most of the Nauvoo apostles, for “usurping the authority belonging to the first presidency, taking to themselves the powers and duties of the high quorums, and commanding the church to go into the wilderness.” He pronounced this baroque curse on the Brighamite leadership: “May their bones rot in the living tomb of their flesh; may their flesh generate from its own corruptions a loathe-some life for others; may their blood swarm with a leprous life of motelike, ghastly corruption feeding on flowing life—” and so on. The Twelve gave as good as they got, calling Strang “a successor of Judas Iscariot, Cain & Co., Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of His Most Gracious Majesty Lucifer.”

  Strang quickly raised the stakes. In 1845, he announced that an angel had informed him about some ancient brass plates buried not far from his home. To decipher the Michigan plates, the angel provided Strang with the same divining tools, the spectacle-like Urim and Thummim, used by Joseph Smith to translate the Book of Mormon. Like Joseph’s golden tablets, these plates told the tale of an ancient nation that lived in North America and perished in a tumultuous battle that ended their civilization. Joseph’s muse, the angel Moroni, provided him with the entire Book of Mormon to translate, but Rajah Manchou of the ancient civilization of Vorito left Strang only a few hundred words of evidence. Like Moroni, Rajah had survived a cataclysm, but his people had not. “My people are no more,” Rajah reported. “They sleep with the mighty dead, and they rest with their fathers.” In the desolate land, “The forerunner men shall kill, but a mighty prophet there shall dwell. I will be his strength, and he shall bring forth thy record.” The forerunner was of course Joseph Smith, and Strang was the mighty prophet.

  A few years later, an angel led Strang to the Plates of Laban, which enabled him to translate the Book of the Law of the Lord. (“A fresh plate-digger, translator and prophet has arisen in the West,” the Washington-based National Intelligencer cynically reported.) The Book of the Law, deemed to be an Old Testament text so sacred that many Jews never knew it existed, would have reminded Mormons of Joseph’s translation of the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses, two of his canonical confections.

  Like Joseph, the slight, bearded Strang was eloquent and charismatic. He wrote with panache, and his anti-polygamy tirades, as well as his broadsides aimed at the “usurper” Brigham, found an audience in Nauvoo. By the second half of 1845, the Gentiles had resumed their harassment of the Mormons in Hancock County. By fall, Young realized the Saints would have to migrate again, this time westward across the Mississippi to lands beyond the reach of the American government. Strang proffered an alternative. Don’t travel to “an unexplored wilderness among savages in trackless deserts, where the footprint of the white man is not found,” Strang urged the Nauvoo Saints. Instead, journey with me, to a peaceful, welcoming Mormon community in Wisconsin. Strang cannily exploited the church’s split on the subject of polygamy, which he called an “abomination.” “My opinions on the subject are unchanged, and I regard them as unchangeable,” he wrote. “They are established on a full consideration of ALL the scriptures, both ancient and modern, and the discipline of the church shall conform thereto.”

  Even though Strang never set foot in Nauvoo after Joseph’s death, his pamphleteering and his missionaries were finding an audience. Diarist William Clayton noted in January 1846 that “Bishop Reuben Miller reports that Strang is making heavy breaches in the church, and drawing many after him.”

  In one place 30 families have left the church and gone with him. It is also rumored that many of the Saints here are full of Strangism and talking hard in his favor.

  That same month, Brigham Young complained that Bishop Miller was “considerably bewildered by Strang[’s] new-fangled Revelation—rendered him almost devoid of Reason although apparently honest in what he was doing—& said that the word of the Lord would be decidedly satisfactorily to him.” On the spot, Young obliged Miller with the following revelation:

  Thus saith the Lord unto Reuben Miller through Brigham Young: that Strang is a wicked & corrupt man & that his
revelations are as false as he is—therefore turn away from his folly—& never let it be said of Reuben Miller—that he ever was led away & entangled—by such nonsense.

  Miller would soon abandon Young and travel east to join forces with Strang.

  Strang continued to woo Saints away from Nauvoo, so God addressed the Strangite heresy a second time, now in a revelation to Apostle Orson Hyde. “Behold James J. Strang hath cursed my people by his own spirit and not by mine.”

  Never at any time have I appointed that wicked man to lead my people, neither by my own voice, nor by the voice of my servant Joseph Smith, neither by the voice of mine angel: but he hath sought to deceive and Satan helpeth him.

  Let my saints gather up with all consistent speed and move westward. . . .

  In a letter to the British church, Hyde assured the Saints that tales of Strang’s mass conversions were much exaggerated. “I do not know of ten persons in Nauvoo that have joined Mr. Strang,” Hyde insisted. “There are none who join him except a few Rigdonites . . . Strangism is but a second and revised edition of Rigdonism.”

  Hyde’s fellow apostle, Heber Kimball, scoffed that “Strangism was not worth investigating—it was not worth the skin of a fart.”

  Even though Brigham threatened to sanction any Saint caught reading a Strangite publication or listening to one of the Wisconsin missionaries, several prominent Saints rallied to Strangism, for a time. William Marks, Emma Smith, and William Smith briefly considered themselves Strangites, as did Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, Apostle George Adams, and Martin Harris, an original witness to the creation of the Book of Mormon. Strang knew that the support of the Smith family would validate his shaky succession claim. In one exchange, Strang offered to appoint William Smith to be patriarch of his new church, if William relocated to Wisconsin with his mother, and with the Egyptian mummies and the famous papyrus scrolls. Strang also asked William to bring along the cadavers of his dead brothers, Joseph and Hyrum. William did travel to Voree, but no living or dead family members, and no funerary paraphernalia, accompanied him. William was one of about a thousand or so Saints who answered James Strang’s call, gathering first at Voree, and then going to Beaver Island, Strang’s remote fastness in the middle of Lake Michigan.