* Report of the three officers to President Fillmore, Ex. Doc.
No. 25, 1st Session, 32d Congress.
Judge Brocchus had been commissioned by the Washington Monument Association to ask the people of the territory for a block of stone for that structure, and, on signifying a desire to make known his commission, he was invited to do so at the General Conference to be held on September 7 and 8. The judge thought that, with the life of Washington as a text, he could read these people a lesson on their duty toward the government, and could correct some of the impressions under which they rested. The idea itself only showed how little he understood anything pertaining to Mormonism.
There was no newspaper in Salt Lake City in that time, and for a report of the judge's address and of Brigham Young's reply, we must rely on the report of the three federal officers to President Fillmore, on a letter from Judge Brocchus printed in the East, and on three letters on the subject addressed to the New York Herald (one of which that journal printed, and all of which the author published in a pamphlet entitled "The Truth for the Mormons",) by J. M. Grant, first mayor of Salt Lake City, major general of the Legion, and Speaker of the house in the Deseret legislature.
Judge Brocchus spoke for two hours. He began with expressions of sympathy for the sufferings of the Mormons in Missouri and Illinois, and then referred to the unfriendliness of the people toward the federal government, pointing out what he considered its injustice, and alluding pointedly to Brigham Young's remarks about President Taylor. He defended the President's memory, and told his audience that, "if they could not offer a block of marble for the Washington Monument in a feeling of full fellowship with the people of the United States, as brethren and fellow citizens, they had better not offer it at all, but leave it unquarried in the bosom of its native mountain." The officers' report to President Fillmore says that the address "was entirely free from any allusions, even the most remote, to the peculiar religion of the community, or to any of their domestic or social customs." Even if the Mormons had so construed it, the rebuke of their lack of patriotism would have aroused their resentment, and Bernhisel, in a letter to President Fillmore, characterized it as "a wanton insult."
But the judge did make, according to other reports, what was construed as an uncomplimentary reference to polygamy, and this stirred the church into a tumult of anger and indignation. According to Mormon accounts,* the judge, addressing the ladies, said: "I have a commission from the Washington Monument Association, to ask of you a block of marble, as a test of your citizenship and loyalty to the government of the United States. But in order to do it acceptably you must become virtuous, and teach your daughters to become virtuous, or your offering had better remain in the bosom of your native mountains."
* The report of what follows, including Young's address, is taken
from Grant's pamphlet...
Mild as this language may seem, no Mormon audience, since the marrying of more wives than one had been sanctioned by the church, had ever listened to anything like it. To permit even this interference with their "religious belief" was entirely foreign to Young's purpose, and he took the floor in a towering rage to reply. "Are you a judge," he asked, "and can't even talk like a lawyer or a politician?" George Washington was first in war, but he was first in peace, too, and Young could handle a sword as well as Washington. "But you [addressing the judge] standing there, white and shaking now at the howls which you have stirred up yourself—you are a coward.... Old General Taylor, what was he?* A mere soldier with regular army buttons on; no better to go at the head of brave troops than a dozen I could pick out between here and Laramie." He concluded thus:—
* In a discourse on June 19, 1853, Young said that he never heard
of his alleged expression about General Taylor until Judge Brocchus made
use of it, but he added: "When he made the statement there, I surely
bore testimony to the truth of it. But until then I do not know that it
ever came into my mind whether Taylor was in hell or not, any more
than it did that any other wicked man was there," etc.—Journal of
Discourses, Vol. 1, p. 185.
"What you have been afraid to intimate about our morals I will not stoop to notice, except to make my particular personal request to every brother and husband present not to give you back what such impudence deserves. You talk of things you have on hearsay since your coming among us. I'll talk of hearsay then—the hearsay that you are discontented, and will go home, because we cannot make it worth your while to stay. What it would satisfy you to get out of us I think it would be hard to tell; but I am sure that it is more than you'll get. If you or any one else is such a baby-calf, we must sugar your soap to coax you to wash yourself of Saturday nights. Go home to your mammy straight away, and the sooner the better."
This was the language addressed by the governor of the territory and the head of the church, to one of the Supreme Court judges appointed by the President of the United States!