Nothing further of great importance affecting the relations of the church with the federal government occurred during the rest of Young's life. Governor Woods incurred the animosity of the Mormons by asserting his authority from time to time ("he intermeddled," Bancroft says). In 1874 he was succeeded by S. B. Axtell of California, who showed such open sympathy with the Mormon view of his office as to incur the severest censure of the non-Mormon press. Axtell was displaced in the following year by G. B. Emery of Tennessee, who held office until the early part of 1880, when he was succeeded by Eli H. Murray.*
* Governor Murray showed no disposition to yield to Mormon
authority. In his message in 1882 be referred pointedly, among other
matters, to the tithing, declaring that "the poor man who earns a dollar
by the sweat of his brow is entitled to that dollar," and that "any
exaction or undue influence to dispossess him of any part of it, in any
other manner than in payment of a legal obligation, is oppression," and
he granted a certificate of election as Delegate to Congress to Allan G.
Campbell, who received only 1350 votes to 18,568 for George Q. Cannon,
holding that the latter was not a citizen. Governor Murray's resignation
was accepted in March, 1886, and he was succeeded in the following May
by Caleb W. West, who, in turn, was supplanted in May, 1889, by A. L.
Thomas, who was territorial governor when Utah was admitted as a state.
CHAPTER XXII. — BRIGHAM YOUNG'S DEATH—HIS CHARACTER
Brigham Young died in Salt Lake City at 4 P.M. on Wednesday, August 29, 1877. He was attacked with acute cholera morbus on the evening of the 23rd, after delivering an address in the Council House, and it was followed by inflammation of the bowels. The body lay in state in the Tabernacle from Saturday, September 1, until Sunday noon, when the funeral services were held. He was buried in a little plot on one of the main streets of Salt Lake City, not far from his place of residence.
The steps by which Young reached the position of head of the Mormon church, the character of his rule, and the means by which he maintained it have been set forth in the previous chapters of this work. In the ruler we have seen a man without education, but possessed of an iron will, courage to take advantage of unusual opportunities, and a thorough knowledge of his flock gained by association with them in all their wanderings. In his people we have seen a nucleus of fanatics, including some of Joseph Smith's fellow-plotters, constantly added to by new recruits, mostly poor and ignorant foreigners, who had been made to believe in Smith's Bible and "revelations," and been further lured to a change of residence by false pictures of the country they were going to, and the business opportunities that awaited them there. Having made a prominent tenet of the church the practice of polygamy, which Young certainly knew the federal government would not approve, he had an additional bond with which to unite the interests of his flock with his own, and thus to make them believe his approval as necessary to their personal safety as they believed it to be necessary to their salvation. The command which Young exercised in these circumstances is not an illustration of any form of leadership which can be held up to admiration. It is rather an exemplification of that tyranny in church and state which the world condemns whenever an example of it is afforded.
Young was the centre of responsibility for all the rebellion, nullification, and crime carried on under the authority of the church while he was its head. He never concealed his own power. He gloried in it, and declared it openly in and out of the Tabernacle. Authority of this kind cannot be divided. Whatever credit is due to Young for securing it, is legitimately his. But those who point to its acquisition as a sign of greatness, must accept for him, with it, responsibility for the crimes that were carried on under it.
The laudators of Young have found evidence of great executive ability in his management of the migration from Nauvoo to Utah. But, in the first place, this migration was compulsory; the Mormons were obliged to move. In the second place its accomplishment was no more successful than the contemporary migrations to Oregon, and the loss of life in the camps on the Missouri River was greater than that incurred in the great rush across the plains to California; while the horrors of the hand-cart movement—a scheme of Young's own device—have never been equalled in Western travel. In Utah, circumstances greatly favored Young's success. Had not gold been discovered when it was in California, the Mormon settlement would long have been like a dot in a desert, and its ability to support the stream Of immigrants attracted from Europe would have been problematic, since, in more than one summer, those already there had narrowly escaped starvation while depending on the agricultural resources of the valley.
J. Hyde, writing in 1857, said that Young "by the native force and vigor of a strong mind" had taken from beneath the Mormon church system "the monstrous stilts of a miserable superstition, and consolidated it into a compact scheme of the sternest fanaticism."* In other words, he might have explained, instead of relying on such "revelations" as served Smith, he refused to use artificial commands of God, and substituted the commands of Young, teaching, and having his associates teach, that obedience to the head of the church was obedience to the Supreme Power. Both Hyde and Stenhouse, writing before Young's death, and as witnesses of the strength of his autocratic government, overestimated him. This is seen in the view they took of the effect of his death. Hyde declared that under any of the other contemporary leaders: Taylor, Kimball, Orson Hyde, or Pratt: "Mormonism will decline. Brigham is its tun; this is its daytime." Stenhouse asserted that, "Theocracy will die out with Brigham's flickering flame of life; and, when he is laid in the tomb, many who are silent now will curse his memory for the cruel suffering that his ambition caused them to endure." But all such prophecies remain unfulfilled. Young's death caused no more revolution or change in the Mormon church than does the death of a Pope in the Church of Rome. "Regret it who may," wrote a Salt Lake City correspondent less than three months after his burial, "the fact is visible to every intelligent person here that Mormonism has taken a new lease of life, and, instead of disintegration, there never was such unity among its people; and in the place of a rapidly dying consumptive, whose days were numbered, the body of the church is the picture of pristine health and vigor, with all the ambition and enthusiasm of a first love."** The new leadership has, grudgingly, traded polygamy for statehood; but the church power is as strong and despotic and unified to-day on the lines on which it is working as it was under Young, only exercising that power on the more civilized basis rendered necessary by closer connection with an outside civilization.
* "Mormonism," p.151.