As he accepted this calmly, I added: "To be very plain with you, President Woodruff, our friends expect, and the country will insist, that the Church shall yield the practice of plural marriage."
His eyelids quivered a little, but he showed no other sign of flinching. I saw that the counsels of his advisers and the comfort that he had derived from his prayers had prepared him for an immolation that was more serious to him than any personal sacrifice that he could make. He said sadly: "I had hoped we wouldn't have to meet this trouble this way. You know what it means to our people. I had hoped that the Lord might open the minds of the people of this nation to the truth, so that they might be converted to the everlasting covenant. Our prophets have suffered like those of old, and I thought that the persecutions of Zion were enough—that they would bring some other reward than this." If I had been the bearer of a new edict of proscription, I think he could not have been more profoundly oppressed by the sense of his responsibility. "Did your father tell you," he asked, "that I had been seeking the mind of the Lord?"
I replied that he had.
He reflected silently. "I shall talk with you again about it," he said, at last. "I hope the Lord will make the way plain for his people."
I do not wish to idealize the polygamous relation—but in monogamy a man is not persecuted for his marriage, and sometimes he does not appreciate the tie. In polygamy, the men and women alike had been compelled to suffer on its account by the grim trials of the life itself and by the hatred of all civilization arrayed against it. They had grown to value their marriage system by what it had cost them. They had been driven by the contempt of the world to argue for its sanctity, to live up to their declarations, and to raise it in their esteem to what it professed to be, the celestial order that prevailed in the Heavens! I knew, as well as President Woodruff did, the wrench it would give their hearts to have to abandon, at last, what they had so long suffered for.
In the days of anxious waiting that followed, I saw Joseph F. Smith and sounded him for any hint of progress. He said: "I'm sure I don't know what can be done. Your father talked with President Woodruff and me before he went to Washington, but I'm sure I can't see how we can do anything." When my father returned home, I went to him many times—without however learning anything definite. I knew that the men in Washington would demand some tangible evidence of our good faith before Congress should reconvene; and I repeatedly urged the necessity of action.
At length he sent me word, in Ogden, that President Woodruff wished to confer with me, and he suggested that it would be permissible for me to speak my opinions freely. I hastened to Salt Lake City, to the offices of the Presidency. President Woodruff took me into a private room and read me his "manifesto."
It was the same that was issued on September 24, 1890, and ratified by a General Conference of the Mormon Church on October 6, following. It was the proclamation that freed the oppressed of Utah; for, by the subsequent "covenant"—and its acceptance by the Federal government—the nation did but confirm their freedom and accord them their constitutional rights. Here, shaking in the hand of age, was a sheet of paper by which the future of a half million people was to be directed; and that simple old man was to speak through it, to them, with the awful authority of the voice of God.
He told me he had written it himself, and it certainly appeared to me to be in his handwriting. Its authorship has since been variously attributed. Some of the present-day polygamists say that it was I who wrote it. Chas. W. Penrose and George Reynolds have claimed that they edited it. I presume that as Mormons, "in good standing," believing in the inspiration of the Prophet, they appreciate the blasphemy of their claim!
I found it disappointingly mild. It denied that the Church had been solemnizing any plural marriages of late, and advised the faithful "to refrain from contracting any marriages forbidden by the law of the land." In spite of this mildness, President Woodruff asked me whether I thought the Mormons would support the revelation—whether they would accept it.