Chapter 13
Brigham, Lincoln, and the Dispatch
As Brigham Young led the exodus out of America and into the western frontier, he knew what was going to happen to his dear land. He had walked with Joseph and knew the prophecies. He even issued some of his own:
Thy brethren have rejected you and your testimony, even the nation that has driven you out; and now cometh the day of their calamity, even the days of sorrow, like a woman that is taken in travail; and their sorrow shall be great unless they speedily repent, yea, very speedily. For they killed the prophets, and them that were sent unto them; and they have shed innocent blood, which crieth from the ground against them. (D&C 136:34–36, emphasis added)
It certainly is not the fault of God’s prophets that the nation refused to listen. They did all in their power to warn their countrymen. The people of the nation simply closed their eyes, ears, and hearts. The day of their calamity and sorrow then followed. It had to.
Brigham Young was no fan of Abraham Lincoln in the beginning. Why should he be? Though as an Illinois legislator Lincoln did assist the Saints in getting their city charter for Nauvoo, and though he was kinder to the Saints than most politicians in the state were, and though he did admit once that “Joseph Smith is an admirer of mine,”1 in the end, Lincoln failed the Saints like everyone else did. He did not stand up for them in their darkest hours.
As a result, when Lincoln took his presidential post in early 1861, Brigham made a few stinging comments about him, fully expecting that he would, like his predecessors, persecute the Latter-day Saints. And why would he not? Lincoln’s Republican Party, after all, was almost as antipolygamy as it was antislavery. Indeed, before Lincoln became converted to God’s purposes, there was little reason to believe he would be any different from the other political leaders the Saints had dealt with.
Looking back, Brigham Young and the Saints saw the whole picture. As the war crashed down upon America, the Saints were mostly neutral at first. Of course they were! For they knew the secret the rest of America did not know—that this war was a punishment upon North and South. How many prophecies about the bloody national scene did those early Mormons possess? I’ve documented many of them throughout this book, and there are still more I have not included. When news of the war hit Salt Lake, it was reported that Brigham “seem[ed] pleased.” Speaking about the Civil War, he declared that God’s purpose in “vex[ing] the nations” was to “break down the barriers that have prevented His Elders from searching out the honest among all peoples.”2 As we have seen, that is what happened.
With the war raging in the East, Brigham simply declared, “Joseph’s prediction is being fulfilled, and we cannot help it.”3 Yes, the Saints were neutral; Brigham said in early 1861: “The Curse of God will be upon the Nation. . . . They have persecuted the Saints of God and the Rulers would do nothing for us but all they Could against us and they will now get their pay for it.”4 Therefore, Brigham admitted during the first year of war that he “earnestly prayed for the success of both North & South,” desiring that “both parties might be used up” unto the purging of sin.5 He understood it all immediately!
“Never be anxious for the Lord to pour out his judgments upon the nation; many of you will see the distress and evils poured out upon this nation till you will weep like children.”
—Joseph Smith6
But as the nation changed (and this is the important part!), so did the Saints. Within weeks of Abraham’s entering his “process of crystallization,” indeed, within weeks of his ordering up a copy of the Book of Mormon, we see the Saints break from their neutrality. On October 18, 1861, Brigham Young sent a telegram to the eastern states drawing a line in the sand and choosing sides once and for all: “Utah has not seceded,” he proudly declared, “but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country.”7
Fleeing to the Mountains
As the Saints were commencing their exodus out of main America in 1847, Brigham Young revealed his knowledge about what would happen next: “The whisperings of the Spirit to us have invariably been of the same import, to depart, to go hence, to flee into the mountains, to retire to our strongholds that we may be secure in the visitation of the judgments that must pass upon this land, that is crimsoned with the blood of Martyrs; and that we may be hid, as it were, in the clefts of the rocks, and in the hollows of the land of the Great Jehova[h], while the guilty land of our fathers is purifying by the overwhelming scourge.”9
The Saints found safety in the refuge of the mountain wilderness.
Once the North began to climb on board the train of righteousness, Brigham saluted them and supported them. For, just as he knew the war would purge the entire nation, he also knew that it would eventually redeem it. And he knew it fell upon the newly converted North to lead that charge. By 1862, nobody could claim the Saints were neutral. During Independence Day of that year, the Salt Lake mayor, Abraham O. Smoot, proposed toasts to Lincoln’s health and to the Union’s success. In 1863, the Saints celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union battlefield victories, while Brigham Young stated that such Union victories would ultimately “give freedom to millions that are bound.”8 After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the citizens of Salt Lake celebrated with a mile-long parade and many toasts to and prayers for the president’s health. When Lincoln was killed a year later, something happened in Zion that had perhaps never happened before in the history of latter-day Israel: the Saints mourned their national leader. Upon hearing the news of their president’s death, Brigham Young declared a day of mourning. Businesses closed, the city was draped in crepe, and the Church held a memorial service for Lincoln in the old Tabernacle. Wilford Woodruff and other Apostles eulogized the fallen president.10
Since his death, Lincoln has been quoted in general conference more than two hundred times. Elder Hyrum M. Smith declared, “I believe Abraham Lincoln was raised up to do God’s will.” President Heber J. Grant declared: “Perhaps no other people in all the world look upon Abraham Lincoln as an inspired servant of God, a man raised up by God to occupy the presidential chair, as much as do the Latter-day Saints.” And during the nation’s bicentennial year, the First Presidency went so far as to ask members of the Church to read and ponder Lincoln’s words regarding God’s hand in the affairs of men.11
But of all the Mormon manifestations of support and love for Lincoln, I am most touched by the willingness of the Latter-day Saints to put their own skin in the game. The Mormons responded quickly to a request from Lincoln to guard, in the name of the Union, the western transcontinental telegraph and western transportation routes. The Saints also responded immediately to a request from Congress that the Utah Territory supply $26,982 annually toward the war effort—no small sacrifice for the struggling Saints. And finally, in the only direct military effort rendered by the Saints, President Young responded to Lincoln’s request in the spring of 1862 for a cavalry unit to be organized and dispatched to secure western routes. (Interestingly, at the time he received this request, President Young was no longer governor of the territory, and was acting only in his higher calling as a prophet of God. Perhaps it is telling that Lincoln skipped the territorial governor and instead directed his request to the prophet.) Immediately, President Young organized a 120-man unit and sent them off to war. Brigham said he sent the Mormon soldiers “to prove our loyalty to the Constitution and not to their infernal meanness . . . to fight the battles of a free country to give it power and influence, and to extend our happy institutions in other parts of this widely extended republic.”12
Brigham Young became a supporter of the Union’s cause.
The turning point of the Lincoln-Mormon relationship truly did revolve around Lincoln’s conversion to the truth of what this war was really all about. And no event manifested the improved relationship more than the dispatch Lincoln sent to Brigham Young. I recently came across a New York Times piece that was written a few years ago by Ted Widmer, an author and speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I thought his perspective on this event as a non-Mormon American historian made it quite valuable. I want to share with you an excerpt from his article, which he titled, “Lincoln and the Mormons.” He was discussing how Lincoln’s Republican Party was hammering on the Mormons because of polygamy. (And they were!) They even got a bill passed (the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act) that made polygamy illegal. They were targeting the Mormons, and it was Lincoln’s job, as chief executive, to fire away at them. What would he do?
According to that New York Times article, “Instead of ordering an invasion, Lincoln ordered information. Specifically, he asked the Library of Congress to send him . . . ‘The Book of Mormon’ in its original 1830 edition. . . . Fortified by his reading, Lincoln came to a great decision. And that decision was to do nothing.”13
Lincoln wanted Brigham to know. So he sent a message to the Mormon prophet through an emissary, T. B. H. Stenhouse of the Deseret News. “Stenhouse,” Lincoln began, “when I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that . . . I will let him alone.”15
“I always had a liking for Abe Lincoln, and if he had come out here and known us, he would have understood us and liked us.”
—Brigham Young14
And Lincoln backed this promise with action. In June 1863, Lincoln fired the territorial governor of Utah, Stephen Harding, after learning that he was hard on the Church and had participated in persecuting Joseph Smith, even during Joseph’s early days as a very young prophet in Palmyra. Lincoln promptly replaced Harding with James Doty, someone Lincoln knew to be a “very discreet gentleman” who would support Lincoln’s policy of leaving the Saints alone.16
President Lincoln’s tolerance toward the Mormon people (something they had rarely enjoyed from their government) allowed them to divert attention from politics, diplomacy, and conflict, and to finally redouble their missionary efforts. Not insignificantly, one of the great missionary surges in Church history occurred during the tenure of President Lincoln. Between 1861 and 1868, more than 16,000 souls joined the Saints in Utah and assisted greatly in the building of the kingdom.17
This was one happy chapter in an otherwise sad story of war.
Notes
^1. In Michael K. Winder, Presidents and Prophets (American Fork, UT: Covenant Communications, 2007), 106.
^2. In Kenneth Alford, ed., Civil War Saints (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 118.
^11. Winder, Presidents and Prophets, 111–12.
^12. In Alford, ed., Civil War Saints, 138.
^13. Ted Widmer, “Lincoln and the Mormons,” New York Times, November 17, 2011, accessed online at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/lincoln-and-the-mormons/?_r=0; emphasis added.
^14. In “Lincoln frequently worked with LDS faithful,” Deseret News, September 19, 2008.
^15. In Church History in the Fulness of Times, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2000), 383.