Torches at High Noon: A Fog Machine, Power Lines, An Angry Extra and Brigham Young’s Electric Boogaloo

[Kishkumen]

There are doubtless plenty of "basically good people" who are in prison today. Some of them may even be innocent of the crimes they were convicted of having perpetrated. Some, however, were rightly convicted. They have family and friends who love them. Just because some of the perpetrators of the massacre were in other respects "basically good people" does not excuse the crime itself. It does not alleviate the culpability of the men whose rhetoric stirred up these "basically good people" to commit atrocities.

[Tom]

Episode 35, "Why Not Sidney Rigdon?"

Here's the abstract of the episode:

What did Brigham’s letter to the daughter he left behind reveal about how he saw himself as a substitute “father” to the Church?

Why did the unfinished Nauvoo Temple become the sharpest dividing line between Brigham Young and Sidney Rigdon?

Our hosts discuss Brigham Young’s inner life with Church historian Brett Dowdle. Brigham left few intimate journals, but the hosts use two documents to open a window on his feelings: a letter written days after the August 1844 Grove Meeting during the succession crisis, in which he comforts a daughter he had to leave in Massachusetts and describes the Saints as “tired children without a father”; and his February 1847 dream of Joseph Smith, who told him the people must stay humble, heed the still small voice, and keep their hearts open to the Holy Ghost. Dowdle then walks through what actually happened in Nauvoo at that time. Contemporary records of the August 8 meeting are thinner than later testimonies, but enough accounts exist that historians take a spiritual manifestation seriously; Brigham himself emphasized the Spirit and the vote that sustained the Twelve. The episode closes by arguing that following the Twelve was what kept temple work alive.

In the opening segment of the episode, John Wilson reads a few lines from a letter from Brigham Young to his fourteen-year-old daughter, Vilate. Wilson says:

So Brigham had sent his daughter Vilate to study music in Massachusetts because there weren’t very many, like, established educational opportunities in Nauvoo at the time, and when Brigham went to campaign for Joseph in Boston, part of the plan was to pick her up and bring her home. But when the news of the martyrdom reached them and Brigham had to leave in a hurry to take care of all the explosions going on in the Church at home, he had to leave her there. And so you have Brigham who’s had to have leave his daughter fatherless writes this about how he viewed the Saints as he returned. First he comforts her, and he says, “We came home with perfect safety and arrived on Tuesday evening just at dusk.” But then he notes, “Our families and the brethren were overjoyed to see us come home for they were tired children without a father.” And to me I think it’s just a little beautiful tiny window into his personal heart, a sadness and maybe a yearning for the daughter that he has had to have abandoned across the United States in order to take care of this and then to see the Saints in that same light of these children who, too, have truly lost their father figure and need not just administrative help, but true emotional and spiritual support from someone who cares, and that he feels that burden.

I don't know that Brigham Young had to leave Vilate in Massachusetts. Recall that Vilate was only two years old when she lost her mother, Miriam Angeline Works Young. According to Connell O'Donovan, in 1842, Brigham Young sent Vilate to Salem, Massachusetts, to go to private school. She lived intermittently with the Nathaniel Henry Felt family and with Augusta Adams Cobb and her family while in Massachusetts. In a letter to Mary Ann Angell Young dated 18 July 1844, Brigham wrote:

left in the evening for Boston found my self in Boston on Sunday morning stayed with the Saints through the day had a good meeting. on monday I went to Lynn on monday saw Vilate on tusday She came up to Sister [Catherine] Lewis with Sister Cobb She is in good helth and sperits. she is going to school. Sister Cobbs children think much of her and due all they can to make her happy She will come home with me this seson. sister Cobb is well all things goes well with hir, as far as I can fined out. Mr [Henry] Cobb tried to get a bill of devose from hir but could not, and she is in peasable? possesion of hir famely and hir house. I stayed and visited with vilate through day, went to Salem in the evening stayd for 3 days with the Saints and returned to Boston and went to Lowel to visite the Bretherin stayed over the sabath with them. I have jenerly had a good time with the saints. But the time at present seems to be big with events it seems as though judgements hung over the people and would soon be pord out upon them, but judgement belongs to the Lord.

I won't get into the strange relationship between Brigham Young and Augusta Cobb here other than to note that they apparently "married" in November 1843 while she was legally married to Henry Cobb. (Henry and Augusta divorced in 1847.) For those are interested, O’Donovan has collected historical information about Augusta Cobb here (see page four of the PDF).

Brett Dowdle's comments about the transfiguration accounts are probably the most notable part of the episode:

John Wilson: We desperately need your expertise on a critical topic which is the post-martyrdom Nauvoo era. It’s recorded that some had this miraculous experience of the mantle, seeing the mantle passed to Brigham in that meeting and seeing Joseph or hearing Joseph. But I wanted to know what was the real impact of that experience? Did it go beyond, “Oh, that was a cool meeting,” to how did it actually unite the majority of Saints?

Brett Dowdle: That meeting is really significant and some do later say, “You know, we heard Brigham Young sound like Joseph Smith, we saw him look like Joseph Smith.” The challenge with some of those accounts is that they’re later, and that isn’t to suggest that they didn’t happen, it’s just that they didn’t do us any favors by recording it at the time. It’s a little bit hard from a historian’s perspective to get a feel for exactly what happened in that meeting in those terms. There are enough of those accounts that I think historians have to say, “We need to take this seriously. Something happens here.” But for Brigham’s part, what he describes is that he felt the Spirit of God moving him and the people sustained him.

I'm pleased to see a church historian acknowledge the problems associated with the late accounts.