On the 10th of October, 1880, a First Presidency of the Church was accepted, consisting of John Taylor, president, and George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith, his counselors.
On the death of President Taylor, which occurred July 25, 1887, the Twelve Apostles, with Wilford Woodruff as president, became the presiding council in the Church. On April 7, 1889, another First Presidency was accepted, with Wilford Woodruff as president and George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith as his counselors.
On the 14th of March, 1882, incited by most abominable lies and slanders, Congress passed the unconstitutional and infamous Edmunds bill, destroying the liberties of the people of the Territory and putting all registration and election and many appointive matters in the hands of an oligarchal commission or returning board, consisting of five irresponsible appointees of the President, at a cost to the country of much more annually than the appropriation for the Territorial legislature biennially.
On the 19th of April of the same year, the House of Representatives refused to permit the legally elected delegate from Utah to take his seat, and declared the same vacant.
On the 5th of August following, in consequence of representations made by the three federal judges of the Territory, Congress passed a law authorizing the Governor to appoint men to fill vacancies resulting from the failure of the August election, which fell through because of the passage of the Edmunds bill. The actual vacancies under this law were very few, yet Governor Murray, with his characteristic unscrupulousness, resolved to wrest the law so as to make a fell swoop of nearly all the offices in the Territory, and thus wrench them out of the hands of the people and their lawfully elected officers and representatives, and give them into the hands of his own partisans, the bitter enemies of the people. Consequently, he arbitrarily interpreted the new law to vacate nearly all the offices of the twenty-four counties in the Territory, said offices numbering between two and three hundred, besides some other local and some Territorial offices, and proceeded, by and with the advice and consent of nobody, probably, but his own prejudiced and wicked self, to make appointments to fill these offices, thus despotically assuming to exercise a far greater stretch of power than is exercised by the President of the United States, and correspondingly despoiling the people of their constitutional, organic, lawful, and vested right to official representation.
This same Governor Murray, in direct violation and open defiance of the law, had previously refused to count eighteen thousand lawful votes for the people's candidate for delegate to Congress, in order that he might illegally give the certificate of election to one of his own partisans, who received less than fourteen hundred votes, and thus corruptly and ruthlessly deprive the eighteen thousand citizens of their right of suffrage. Congress refused to sanction this outrageous tampering with the ballot box, this wholesale spoliation, and rejected the bogus certificate. Yet the unprincipled Governor, who attempted this iniquitous tampering and spoliation and gave the certificate to the man who was not elected, but refused to give one to the man who was elected by an overwhelming majority, was sustained in his partiality, presumption and wickedness by no less than three several presidents of these United States, and consequently the longsuffering people of the Territory had to endure the incubus of his unwelcome and pernicious presence and the aggravated infliction of his usurpative and demoralizing gubernatorial rule.
In the second full week in September of the same year, the five federal commissioners had a registration of voters throughout the Territory, expurging from the old lists the names of all those who did not appear and be re-registered, and of others who did appear. Many Latter-day Saints, men and women of excellent character, peaceable, industrious, order-loving, and law-abiding citizens, some of them three or four score years old, and who had been accustomed to vote unchallenged from their youth up, were not allowed to be re-registered, though eligible under the law, and not liable to any legal punishment in any court in the country, because no crime of any kind could be lawfully charged against them. On the other hand, adulterers and libertines, well known and acknowledged to be such, married men who confessed to living with other women, and notorious public prostitutes were freely registered.
The same week a number of rabid anti-Mormons conspired to overthrow the right of women to be registered and to vote. Such an obnoxious character had Governor Murray obtained among the people, that he was almost universally believed to be one of the chief of the conspirators and instigators in this ungallant, unmanly, and ineffably mean spirited attempt to abolish woman suffrage in Utah. But the judges in all the district courts in the Territory decided that the woman suffrage law was valid.
In March, 1886, Governor Murray, for his unreasonable and obstructive conduct, was virtually removed from office by President Cleveland, or, in other words, was invited to resign. During his whole gubernatorial term he had persistently shown his prejudice against and enmity towards the Latter-day Saints, and had sought to deprive them of their liberties, rob them of their rights, and create a conflict between them and the federal government, which last the people had sufficient good sense to prevent, notwithstanding the many aggravating provocations. He was succeeded by Caleb W. West, not much of an improvement on his predecessor.
Governor West commenced by offering amnesty to all the prisoners in the penitentiary, under the infamous Edmunds law, who would "promise to obey the law as interpreted by the courts," an insulting and degrading offer that was respectfully declined, as they could not bind themselves to accept all the partisan and persecutive vagaries of the courts.