Violence in Deseret

[_The Erotic Apologist]

I found a wonderful piece by Will Bagley on religious violence in Deseret at MormonThink. It is well worth checking out, and I think shows the distant roots of the milder forms of Mormon social and ecclesiastical violence we still see today in shunning, disowning, and excommunication.

According to Michael Marquardt, enemies of the Church regularly had their mail opened, read, and sometimes confiscated per instructions from Brother Brigham. An inflammatory letter from Jesse Thompson Hartley, an attorney in SLC to Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, resulted in Hartley's murder.

http://user.xmission.com/~research/mormonpdf/storm.pdf

Hartley’s letter never reached Davis. How it came to rest in Brigham Young’s papers at
the LDS Church History Library is a mystery, but the attorney seemed unaware that
Mormon officials had been systematically reading the territory’s outgoing mail for years. “I
know this is a grave charge, but I fear it is too true,” wrote the Reverend Jotham Goodell
when he reported in 1852 “that no letters deposited in the post-office, by either gentiles or
Mormons, ever left the valley without its contents being known! If it contained nothing
prejudicial to the Mormons, it was suffered to fulfil its mission, but if it did, it was
destroyed.” Goodell said Mormons told him this during the winter of 1850–51, after he
arrived in the territory with his family, too late to finish his trek to Oregon. During his stay,
Goodell wrote letters describing “the vile practices of that people” and others that
“purposely avoided all allusion to them. The latter reached their destination in safety, the
others my friends never received.” Goodell told a wry story of a young man who mailed a
letter at the Salt Lake post office. “A day or two after, he was passing in the rear of some out
houses near to the post-office, and his attention was arrested by observing a large pile of
waste paper, and actually fished from that pile, pieces of the identical letter he had mailed, one
of which, if I mistake not contained his signature.” Other federal officials and emigrants
made similar charges, including Major William Singer, an army paymaster; David H. Burr,
surveyor general of Utah; and overland guidebook author Nelson Slater.4

[_Quasimodo]

Now you have me wondering if they were just keeping an eye on us.

Of course they were keeping an eye on you, but they also believed they were being genuinely caring and helpful.

No doubt. The teachers always consisted of the same older gentleman and a revolving group of young men. After the first visit or so, the conversation ceased to be about religion (we were a lost cause), but the older fellow and my dad had a shared interest in fly fishing.

There may have been some reconnaissance going on, but I think that his main reason for coming may have been an opportunity to learn about good fishing spots.

[_ludwigm]

links

Unfortunately, the NG ones unavailable for me:
"This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

[_Kishkumen]

Brigham Young murdering Hartley. Damn. Totally awful.

[_Symmachus]

The formalization of the violence, as you put it Kish, is an interesting aspect, if by that you mean the way in which violence was channeled towards ends that served the Church's interests. Much of the violence in Brigham's Mormondom it seems to me is typical of the violence between groups on the western frontier who were in fierce competition of resources (I'm thinking of Patricia Limerick's book The Legacy of Conquest; I heard Bagley reference her on a Mormon Expression podcast, so I wonder whether he ever thinks along these lines).

Grounding the violence in Nauvoo as Runtu does shows this even more clearly, I think, but it's not about, or at least not just about, the personal interests of Church leaders in establishing their control over the organization but about the ways that groups on the frontier were in constant struggale with each other. This struggle is obvious in the Nauvoo period and nakedly expressed by the opponents of Mormonism and the Mormons themselves at that time, but you could see the same thing in Missouri. It is less obvious in the Utah period because of this view, as persistent as it is false, that the Mormons were somehow the lone group along the Wasatch range and south, except for some natives.

Where I really part ways with some of the discussion on this thread is the notion that the leadership is primarily (or solely) responsible for the introduction of the violence, all in the ends of their authoritarianism. In some cases it is certainly true, but I don't buy the implication of it: that the Mormons, on the whole, would not have committed violent acts otherwise. As frontier people, I think it is a safe assumption to say that the Mormons were as quickened by violence as any other group in these environments. Utah Mormonism did not turn gentle pacifists into violent idiots. They were already violent idiots.

Nor do I buy the idea that the violence in Utah was primarily about terror: terror for whom? Apostates and Church enemies, yes, but on the other hand surely there were lots of people who took sweet comfort in the fruits of the Gospel, by which I mean they enjoyed watching apostates and enemies of the Church get what they deserve. It is comforting to know that the good guys are getting the bad guys.

Richard F. Burton's The City of the Saints is any interesting read in that respect. The British and Victorian Burton, famous for his undercover adventures in Arabia, went to Salt Lake in the 1860s and his description of the place is utterly surreal. Burton's acocunt makes Utah in the 1860s look much like Saudi Arabia does today. It is a bitter antidote to the saccharin stories Mormons tells themselves about their ancestors, ancestors whom even ex-Mormons never tire of reminding people about. But several times in that book he describes incidents of violence that he witnessed or learned about that have nothing to do with the leadership and cannot have been organized from above. These incidents start over small disputes and quickly take on a quasi-ethnic tinge, with the Mormons on one side and the Gentiles on the other. At least according to what I remember from reading Burton's account, the Church did not step into settle disputes, which is telling in itself.

If we're thinking about the Church structure, this is where I think the Walker-Turley crowd go wrong and where I think the "formalization of violence" explains a lot. The W-T argument is basically along the lines I'm describing, and it has the rhetorical benefit of harmonizing with contemporary scholarship on frontier violence, but they push it into something like an "everybody was doing it" kind of argument. Duh, is the reply. What is telling is how the Church tapped into the streams of violence that flowed through frontier life. Whether or not they ever find a document proving that Brigham was colluding on the massacre at Mountain Meadows (in addition to the clean up/cover up) or coercing others to carry it out, I think everything one needs to know about how the Church used violence can be encapsulated in the fact that someone like Isaac Haight was called as a Stake President at all (and Jacob Hamblin a mission president, etc. etc. etc.). The Church sure did its part to organize these violent idiots—"enabling" would be a modern and a kind way of putting it.

Mormon leaders in Utah were certainly authoritarians who used violent people as tools, but there were so many violent people around, so many hammers in search of nails. Where there's coercion, there is usually collusion, too, and the emphasis on coercion makes the Church look bad (as it should) while obscuring the collusion of the Mormon population in the violence that the Church perpetrated and from which they often benefited (e.g. the Black Hawk War). I would like to see the research on the Mormon reaction to violence on non-Mormons and/or apostates in the mid to late 19th century. I would especially like to see some arguments showing that the Mormons in Utah were overwhelmingly appalled and outraged by the Mountain Meadow massacre. Given how many Mormons in 2015 generally react to how the contemporary Church treats contemporary apostates and the indifference (at best) that contemporary Mormons have to something like Mountain Meadows—to say nothing of the awkward and insincere gestures of the Church—my hunch is that any such arguments would suffer from a severe lack of evidence.

Like their descendants, they weren't saints in any sense of the word.

[_Kishkumen]

The formalization of the violence, as you put it Kish, is an interesting aspect, if by that you mean the way in which violence was channeled towards ends that served the Church's interests.

Greetings, consul, as always you manage to bring both greater clarity and greater nuance to the question at hand. Yes, I am primarily concerned about the way in which violence was channeled towards ends that served the Church's interests. I agree with you wholeheartedly when you observe that the American frontier was much more routinely violent than the present. So, one can't really expect the LDS Church of the time to have been an exception. So, are we to say that Mormonism itself caused the violence? No. Indeed not.

What interests me is how Mormonism participated in that violence and was changed by that participation. How did Mormons think of the violence they saw and participated in religious terms? How did Mormon practices change in the process?

I suppose that the answers to those and other related questions can help us understand certain social dynamics in the LDS Church today.

As for the coercion versus collusion question, of course both were at play. And they are today too.

I find W-T most frustrating because they seem to want to maintain the fiction that church authorities in SLC were somehow less implicated in the actions at MMM. Their theologically driven perspective is that this only impacts Brigham if he directly commanded the massacre. I think they go to extra lengths to diminish an possible connection between Brigham and the event. I was particularly interested in how their timeline got fuzzier the closer it came to the event itself. So, in W-T's view, the people of Iron County just got out of hand, taking the somewhat provocative rhetoric of George A. Smith and running way too far with it. This interpretation is, in my view, absolutely ludicrous.

[_Symmachus]

Thanks for the kind response, Noble Kishkumen.

I suppose that the answers to those and other related questions can help us understand certain social dynamics in the LDS Church today.

That is an interesting problem. I am in general wary of giving the distant past much weight in determining present cultural conditions. For example, Shiites and Sunnis did not fight a religious (as opposed to political) war until the 20the century; the Balkans were not a mess until the rise of nationalism in the 19th century; Egyptians did not vote for Sisi because their ancestors worshiped pharaohs, etc. However, the Mormon past in question is not very distant, especially when we think about how long a generation can last in the hierarchy. Spencer W. Kimball, for instance, was not that far removed from the cultural assumptions of his grandfather Heber C. Kimball (and he was Joseph Smith's nephew, after all!), and he was a significant presence in the institutional Church into the late 1970s. The majority of the current leadership at the apostle level came up in the Church when people like Kimball and even Joseph Fielding Smith were commanded a great deal of cultural authority. Fielding Smith was born in the early 1870s for god's sake. When we look at the generations of the Church leadership, we are only a few generations away from Brigham Young, so the surprising thing would not be the presence of some kind of continuity in attitude but the absence of it.

So, in W-T's view, the people of Iron County just got out of hand, taking the somewhat provocative rhetoric of George A. Smith and running way too far with it. This interpretation is, in my view, absolutely ludicrous.

Yes and the Carthage Greys just let the rhetoric of Thomas Sharp and other local leaders get to their heads, so no big deal.

[_Kishkumen]

That is an interesting problem. I am in general wary of giving the distant past much weight in determining present cultural conditions. For example, Shiites and Sunnis did not fight a religious (as opposed to political) war until the 20the century; the Balkans were not a mess until the rise of nationalism in the 19th century; Egyptians did not vote for Sisi because their ancestors worshiped pharaohs, etc. However, the Mormon past in question is not very distant, especially when we think about how long a generation can last in the hierarchy. Spencer W. Kimball, for instance, was not that far removed from the cultural assumptions of his grandfather Heber C. Kimball (and he was Joseph Smith's nephew, after all!), and he was a significant presence in the institutional Church into the late 1970s. The majority of the current leadership at the apostle level came up in the Church when people like Kimball and even Joseph Fielding Smith were commanded a great deal of cultural authority. Fielding Smith was born in the early 1870s for god's sake. When we look at the generations of the Church leadership, we are only a few generations away from Brigham Young, so the surprising thing would not be the presence of some kind of continuity in attitude but the absence of it.

We certainly can't simply assume the kind of continuity we are talking about here. And, we want to question our own intuition that there is continuity when we see something that has a familiar ring. Nevertheless, following such hunches and testing such continuities can be a great starting point for further inquiry. In my case, I had always assumed that there was less continuity between 19th century Mormonism and today. I fell into the trap of the familiar trope of the narrative of historical decline. So, as I have looked more closely at issues of obedience to the priesthood, to cite a related issue, it has been something of a surprise to see the degree to which the gospel of obedience was in the ascendant in early Deseret.

Now, doubtless some will say, "so you are basically admitting your ignorance, then." Guilty as charged. I have always been so interested in Joseph Smith that I have given short shrift to the study of Brigham's theocratic reign. I have a long way to go before I begin to feel I have a handle on these things, but one thing I am confident about at this point is that the avuncular, if grouchy, image of Brigham Young in the LDS Church doesn't do justice to the rough character of the man. There is much territory to be explored in regards to the problem of the succession and how Brigham Young both came to see himself as a prophet and asserted himself as such to others. The Reformation is a good place to begin. And, one thing that is quite striking about the Reformation are these creeds expressing the importance of loyalty to Joseph Smith and his successor, Brigham Young. There is a lot of rhetoric about obedience to the priesthood at the same time.

On my ghost story thread, you can see another reason why I find all of this so intriguing. My gggreat-grandfather stands accused of causing the deaths of his fellow-travelers through disobedience to the priesthood. He was something of an object lesson on the perils of not following the counsel of one's leaders in the decades following his death at the hands of Native Americans at Fountain Green. My curiosity here is not just about the family's good name, it is genuinely about this emphasis on obedience, that seems to have gone hand in hand with a perilous frontier life as a Mormon.

On another note, it would be interesting to track the emphasis on obedience in the two largest Restoration sects: LDS and CoC. Why is it that one sect maintains such a strong emphasis on obedience, while the other seems to have softened to the degree that obedience to priesthood leaders really isn't central to the faith. I am sure it is a complicated problem, but one worth exploring for those interested. One attractive hypothesis is that the CoC did not spend decades in a marginal society that was a near theocracy living in the harsh desert. Of course, as you say, that is unlikely to be the only factor. The two groups continued to evolve in response to different environments and many different internal factors.