American Crucifixion (35 page)

When William finally returned to Nauvoo from a mission trip to the East Coast, “He seemed determined to live up to his privilege and stand in his place,” reported James Monroe, a young tutor living in Nauvoo. William claimed to be of “royal blood” and purported to preach “the gospel according to St. William.” No wonder Brigham Young ridiculed him as an “aspiring man.” Both Emma and the Smiths’ sixty-nine-year-old grandmother, Lucy Mack Smith, the keeper of the desiccated mummies, endorsed William, or his brother Samuel, as possible regents for the thirteen-year-old Joseph Smith III. Emma spoke up forcefully in the leadership councils. She warned Richards and Phelps “not to trample on her” and separately threatened to “do the church all the injury she could” unless William Marks or someone else “she approves of” was appointed president of the Saints.

On July 30, a month after the Carthage killings, the succession struggle took a deadly turn. Thirty-six-year-old Samuel Smith, Joseph’s brother, died under mysterious circumstances. William suspected that Willard Richards had arranged for Samuel’s poisoning, to ensure that no successor could be chosen before Brigham and the apostles returned to Nauvoo. Although he was nominally a victim of a “bilious fever,” Samuel Smith’s death has gone down in Mormon history as an ambiguous event or an unsolved crime. Samuel was an alcoholic, it was whispered. Supposedly, he suffered some grievous physical injuries in Carthage on the day his brothers were killed. But his daughter Mary confided to a cousin, “My father was undoubtedly poisoned.” She recounted that her father and uncle were taking the same medication, prescribed by Nauvoo doctors. Her uncle threw the medicine in the fire, but “Father continued taking it until the last dose—he spit out and said he was poisoned. But it was too late—he died.” When approached by official church historians in 1914 to describe her father’s death, Mary did not repeat her allegations of foul play.

BY EARLY AUGUST, SERIOUS CLAIMANTS TO JOSEPH’S MANTLE WERE closing in on Nauvoo. Brigham Young was rushing back from Boston, but in 1844, even speedy travel took days, not hours. He took a train from Boston to Albany on July 24. On July 26, he boarded a steamboat in Buffalo, bound for Detroit. Brigham sent a message to the Saints from Chicago on August 1. On August 4, he sent word that he was in Galena, Illinois, a lead-mining center north of Nauvoo on the Mississippi, only a day or two away by boat.

But Sidney Rigdon, arriving from Pittsburgh, beat Brigham to the punch. With William Law discredited and Joseph dead, Rigdon was now the only surviving member of the First Presidency. A successful revivalist preacher, Rigdon converted to Mormonism in 1830, the year the Book of Mormon was published, and often preached alongside Joseph Smith. He was erudite, book-smart, and a tad unstable. Joseph and Rigdon had feuded ferociously over the years, although Smith generally acknowledged the older man’s superior intellect and preaching abilities. Rigdon’s stock had been falling during the final years of Joseph’s reign, primarily because of the older man’s lack of enthusiasm for polygamy. Joseph had improbably accused Rigdon of conspiring with the Missouri authorities to kidnap the Prophet and tried to arrange his expulsion from the church. William Marks and other church leaders supported Rigdon and defied Joseph, who then washed his hands of his former counselor. “I have thrown him off my shoulders,” Joseph declared in 1843, “and you have put him on me; you may carry him, but I will not.” Joseph’s ire was temporary, and soon afterward he admitted Rigdon to the secret Council of Fifty and approved his counselor’s nomination for vice president on his 1844 presidential ticket.

Rigdon was excitable, and not always in a good way. It was he who urged the “war of extermination” against the Saints’ enemies in Missouri—a suggestion the Missourians quickly embraced as their own—and odd reports surfaced concerning his 1844 induction into the Council of Fifty. Fellow member Jedediah Grant said Rigdon “leaped for joy, and walked the room as sprightly as a boy in his gayest frolics” in the upstairs room of Joseph Smith’s store. “Joseph! Joseph! Thou servant of the most High God, I will never leave or forsake thee!” Rigdon exclaimed. Orson Hyde reported that Rigdon “began to speak, then to shout, then to dance, and threw his feet so high that he lost his balance and came well nigh falling over backwards upon the stove” at the same ceremony. “He was so extravagant in his shouting,” Hyde reported, “that most of the members hung their heads.”

Rigdon and his family had moved to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1844, purportedly because his vice-presidential nomination required him to live outside of Illinois; the nominees for president and vice president couldn’t hail from the same state. At the same time, it was whispered that Rigdon wanted to put 1,000 miles between his attractive twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy and the priapic Nauvoo polygamists.

Rigdon’s arrival in Nauvoo immediately changed the terms of the succession debate. Addressing the Saints’ Sunday service in the leafy grove on the Temple hill, Rigdon recounted a vision he experienced on June 27, the day Joseph died. Rigdon saw Joseph Smith in heaven, “on the right hand of the Son of God . . . clothed with all the power, glory, might and majesty and dominion of the celestial kingdoms.” Joseph still held “the keys of the kingdom,” Rigdon testified, and “would continue to hold them to all eternity . . . no man could ever take his place.”

The revelation stated that there must be a guardian appointed “to build the church up to Joseph, as he had begun it.” And the guardian should be me, Rigdon said: I am “the identical man that the ancient prophets had sung about, wrote and rejoiced over.” Then Rigdon started to slip off the rails, preaching on one of his favorite themes, Armageddon (“one hundred tons of metal per second thrown at the enemies of God”), and reiterating a curious threat he had previously directed against Queen Victoria of England:

I am going to fight a real bloody battle with sword and with gun . . . I will also cross the Atlantic to encounter the queen’s forces, and overcome them—plant the American standard on English ground and then march to the palace of her majesty, and demand a portion of her riches and dominions, which if she refuse, I will take the little madam by the nose and lead her out, and she shall have no power to help herself.

The Nauvoo stalwarts scorned Rigdon’s high-flown rhetoric and visionary claims. Returning Apostle Parley Pratt later scoffed that Rigdon was “the identical man the prophets never sang nor wrote a word about.” Future church president Wilford Woodruff mocked Rigdon’s “second class vision.”

BRIGHAM YOUNG ARRIVED JUST TWO DAYS AFTER RIGDON AND quickly attacked the older preacher’s bona fides. Just as Rigdon’s stock had been gradually falling among the Saints, Brigham’s had been rising. A medium-sized fireplug of a man with distinctive red hair, Young was an uneducated, areligious frontier husbandman who devoted his life to Joseph Smith from the moment the two men met. They were born not far from each other in Vermont, and both men grew up in northwestern New York. When Young and his brother traveled from New York to Ohio in 1832 to meet the Prophet Joseph, “I expected I should find him in his sanctum dispensing spiritual blessing and directions [about] how to build the Zion of God on earth,” Brigham’s brother recalled. Instead, they found Joseph, the most earthy of earthly prophets, chopping wood in the forest. The Young brothers grabbed axes and set to work. Brigham was enchanted by the Prophet who “took heaven . . . and brought it down to earth.”

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith worked side by side for the next twelve years. Young, who lacked Joseph’s charismatic appeal, possessed an organizational flair that his mentor lacked. When several thousand Saints had to cross the frozen Mississippi River in the wake of their expulsion from Missouri, Brigham asked Bishop Edward Partridge to provide aid for poor families making the grisly trek. “The poor may take care of themselves, and I will take care of myself,” Partridge told him. “If you will not help them out, I will,” answered Young, who assisted in organizing the initial Mormon encampment in Quincy, Illinois.

Joseph entrusted Young and the apostles with an 1840 mission trip to England. The first Mormon missionaries had set foot in Great Britain three years earlier, but it was the 1840 mission, an astonishing religious and logistical success, that sent steamboats packed with eager Saints west across the Atlantic. An estimated 3,000 converts sailed across the ocean and then up the Mississippi to Nauvoo. The doggedly loyal Young supported Joseph in his adoption of the Masonic rites and in his self-coronation as king of the Kingdom of God. He also followed the Prophet into polygamy, a doctrine Young initially abhorred. Joseph assigned the delicate task of excommunicating William and Wilson Law, and the other
Expositor
dissidents, to a secret court presided over by Brigham Young.

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.”
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