8 Interval before Rebellion

Returning to Salt Lake City in mid-November 1868, Godbe and Harrison began to gather opposition to church rule. By his own account, Godbe alone talked with “hundreds” of people, usually through casual contact. When he could find an ear, he spoke of Mormonism’s change—how the system had moved from “spirituality and freedom to selfishness and despotism.”1 When speaking to men and women on the street, Godbe did not talk about his recent New York revelations, and he mentioned nothing about organized opposition to church rule. Godbe was simply stoking the fires of discontent.

In addition to these passing conversations, there were others that were more serious. During the past several years, Godbe and Harrison had gathered around them several people who shared their feeling about Brigham Young and his Zion. Fanny and Thomas Stenhouse were two of these dissenters. Edward Tullidge was a third. Returning from his recent enthusiastic LDS mission to the East, the unstable Tullidge took stock of his faith and once more found it wanting. Or perhaps his behavior was less about faith than about friendship and being enrolled in a cause. Joining with Godbe and Harrison allowed Tullidge to renew his long association with Harrison; it also gave him the excitement of participating in a reform movement.

At Harrison’s invitation, Tullidge had joined the Utah Magazine staff; and when Harrison went east with Godbe in 1868, Tullidge edited the periodical. Despite his recent protestations of belief made to President Young, Tullidge soon returned to the irresistible themes he had discussed in the Peep O’Day. While outwardly supporting Young’s cooperation policy, Tullidge’s editorials at the same time complained of Zion’s supposed chauvinist tendencies. In addition he reintroduced his “universalian” philosophy. “I am not fairly orthodox” on this point, he wrote. “I know it. I cannot in conscience deny this even to myself.”2 Harrison, returning to Salt Lake City, tried to downplay his friend’s lapses. He assured the magazine’s readers that Tullidge was actually “unorthodoxically orthodox” and happily suggested, with perhaps some hidden prescience, the postponing of Tullidge’s roasting as “a heretic to a more convenient season.”3 At this point, neither Harrison nor Godbe wished to reveal their plans.

Eli B. Kelsey was another associate. Born 27 October 1819 at Portsmouth, Scioto County, Ohio, Kelsey moved to Kentucky, where he apparently was introduced to Mormonism. He was baptized in July 1843 and was in Nauvoo when Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed. He took special interest in the Smiths, because at the time of their deaths he was conducting the school their children attended. A year or two later, he experienced a severe personal trial: ten months before the church’s migration across the Mississippi River, a sickness caused him to become blind. He credited a Mormon priesthood blessing for restoring his sight.4

Perhaps this healing gave him a special ardor. Whatever the cause, he performed his two or three missions to Great Britain so enthusiastically that he became an early Mormon missionary legend. He helped edit the Millennial Star and contributed numerous articles to the journal, many of which were unsigned. But it was the power of his teaching that people most remembered. He was like a tempest sweeping over the English countryside—converts, miracles, and stories of his preaching power following in his wake. He presided successively over the Glasgow, Warwickshire, and London Conferences. During the latter assignment, he baptized hundreds, organized tract societies, established congregations, and brought the London Conference to its early preeminence in the British Mission. When Elder Orson Pratt left Great Britain in 1850, he recognized Elder Kelsey’s success by appointing him temporary mission president.5

In Deseret, Kelsey followed the pattern set by other intellectual dissenters. At first he seemed stalwart: he took plural wives, preached as a “home missionary,” defended the Saints’ health code, and preached from the Temple Square pulpit. Many remembered him as a “mild-mannered, kind-hearted” man, eager to do his duty and fervent in the cause.6 And like Godbe, Harrison, Tullidge, and Stenhouse, Kelsey became one of the city’s leading cultural “lights.” His historical discourses as a Seventies lecturer were especially popular.

Then his faith began to weaken. If Tullidge was Harrison’s friend, Kelsey was Godbe’s. The two men, like the continuing Godbe-Harrison collaboration, sought to reconcile reason with faith, and, when unable to do so, Kelsey experienced “mental travail.” The process left Kelsey with a reputation as an iconoclast, “the sternest and the strongest” of the Godbe-Harrison group.7 As Kelsey would later say, “The agitation of thought was the beginning of wisdom.” And he was willing to agitate to the point of tearing down “every creed and barrier in the way of his investigations.”8

The result was another repudiation of Brigham Young and his ideal society. In theory, Kelsey believed that the Mormon church was the most democratic church in the world. Its abstract principles and faith were the “grandest” he had ever seen. Yet these theories and standards were not Zion’s actual practice, Kelsey claimed, and this fault he traced to the Mormon leader. “All that was grand and lifegiving in the system had been crushed out of it, and it had been degraded into an unmitigated priestly despotism.”9 With his speculations and negative view of Young, he came close to voicing Tullidge’s “universalianism”: Kelsey abandoned the dogma that God had ever chosen an “individual, a family, a race or a sect, to hold [exclusively] the Oracles, or the Keys of salvation.” This position, of course, was a clear renunciation of church authority and church mission as Mormons defined them. His views, rejected by the Saints, lost him his audience, and he became “almost utterly ignored as a teacher in Israel.”10 The wonder is that Kelsey seemed surprised and upset by this response.

The fifth member of the inner circle forming around Godbe and Harrison was William H. Shearman, who had encountered Mormonism on his way to California in 1849. Apostle Amasa Lyman, Shearman’s companion on part of the journey, charmed Shearman with the religion’s broad claims to all truth—its willingness to accept truth wherever it might be found. A stop in Salt Lake City further intrigued Shearman, but it was Brigham Young’s personal challenge that eventually led him to be baptized. Responding to a letter that Shearman had written to him from California, Young asked him to taste the gospel’s fruit. “The light of the Holy Ghost will bring you into the knowledge of truth and of our Heavenly Father, and His son, whom to know is life eternal,” Young wrote.11 Shearman responded. Setting aside his itinerant Methodist preaching and various business dealings, he left Sacramento for Salt Lake City. A half-dozen years had passed since his first discussions with Lyman.12

Utahns liked Shearman. Slender, with stooping shoulders, he tended to melancholia, but managed it partly by serving others. People recalled him as unusually generous, a man who would relieve another’s distress without hesitation. Instances of his charity were “almost without number,” the Deseret Evening News later eulogized.13 He was also inquisitive and independent-minded and therefore naturally drawn to the territory’s small band of intellectuals. Similar to Godbe, Shearman was a director of the Seventies’ Library and Reading Room, and he occasionally lectured at the Seventies’ Hall. His 1862 discourse dealt with the “great and vital question” of educating Zion’s youth, a cause that increasingly drew his attention.14

In 1862, Shearman went to his native England as a missionary.15 His first assignment was in the Liverpool Conference, where his superiors credited him with diligence and energy.16 His several letters to the British Mission headquarters, later printed in the Millennial Star, revealed his interests and attitudes. After visiting the “ancient and renowned city of Chester” and touring its famous cathedral, he reflected on what he saw as the superstition of traditional religion. Another British town reminded him of the streets of Valetta, Malta, where he had walked many years before. But he saved his most extensive comments for the local Saints, whom he found to be a hard lot. Their spiritual torpor had prevented many of them from going to Zion, where they might have learned more fully the “ways of God and the principles of [correct] government.”17

Shearman soon became president of the Liverpool Conference and once more wrote disapprovingly about his flock—perhaps his natural pessimism led him to focus on the shortcomings of others. The Liverpool Saints had “a great deal of that nasty, contemptible gentile pride” that generally plagued the world, he said. Since Shearman wanted to “root out” wrongdoing, tension inevitably grew between the members and their leader. Facing the “frowns” of “evildoers,” Shearman took comfort in President Young’s earlier warning to him that the faithful exercise of gospel duty usually brought obloquy. While Shearman at first had been puzzled by the statement, now, after hearing what the Liverpool members were saying about him, he understood Young’s words.

Shearman’s mission lasted three years and seemed filled with good works. His well-written letters from the Liverpool Conference apparently caught the attention of mission leaders, who soon asked him to serve on the staff of the Millennial Star. Later he again presided among the Saints, this time as the pastor of the Birmingham District, which embraced the Birmingham, Warwickshire, and Staffordshire Conferences. Before his mission release, he returned to Liverpool, where he was given another assignment at the mission headquarters. And when, at last, in 1865 he sailed on the Belle Wood for home, he served as president of the 636-member emigrating company.18

Shearman admitted that during his mission he had experienced depression, especially during a time when “the power of darkness” nearly overcame him. During such moments of difficulty, he yearned for President Young’s blessing. “[I] could have given all I possessed in the world to have for one moment your hand on my head with the promises of victory,” Shearman later wrote his leader. “I knew your words would be fulfilled; and I had no sustaining faith in any other being on Earth.”19

Back in Utah, this missionary enthusiasm sustained him at first. Within weeks of returning, he was thinking of conducting a business and preaching tour through the territory’s settlements.20 And, in other ways, he continued active in the cause. He occasionally spoke to the Temple Square congregation and was especially active in the Sunday school movement, a cause that sometimes found him, in his enthusiasm, even ahead of the plans of church leaders at headquarters. Responding to one of Shearman’s initiatives, Young praised the suggestion but said, somewhat off balance, “I am not sufficiently acquainted with what you propose to give a definite answer,” and referred the matter to a subordinate for consideration.21

Settling in Logan, Shearman “fathered” the Sunday school movement in Cache County. Recognizing his “unceasing interest,” a general vote of the citizens named him as their superintendent, and this selection seemed to energize him still further. After one tour of the schools in Paradise, Hyrum, Millville, Providence, Logan, Smithfield, and Richmond, he noted the want of order and complained of the lack of “books,” a deficiency that some teachers tried to meet by staging the money-raising drama The Gold Farmer and the farce The New Footman. Yet he remained optimistic. Generally the Sunday school children, he reported, were growing in their knowledge of gospel fact and principle.22

As well as being an educator, Shearman was a merchant. He had conducted business in Salt Lake City before his move to Logan. In Logan, he built a large and “handsome” rock building store, which the Deseret Evening News described as a “highly creditable piece of work both in design and workmanship.” The building in fact reflected Shearman’s ability: people throughout the territory credited him as a “shrewd all round business man.” As further proof of his talent, for a time Shearman associated with the talented and up-and-coming Moses Thatcher, who was a decade away from ordination to the Quorum of Twelve.23

In this, as in so many things, Shearman was like William Godbe, whose path he often crossed. Since the early 1860s, Shearman had periodically loaned Godbe money. While in England, Shearman corresponded with Godbe; paid courtesy calls on Godbe’s mother, sister, and brother; and received Godbe’s gifts on behalf of the emigrating poor. Godbe and Shearman took that perilous 1865 wagon ride across Colorado plains and hills, narrowly averting Indian ambuscade. Also, Shearman had written a favorable Deseret News review of the Hampton-Godbe way station at the Bear River, and Godbe had periodically acted as Shearman’s business agent. When establishing his business in Logan, Shearman had purchased Godbe’s branch store.24

In addition, there must have been shared misgivings about Young’s Zion. As the 1860s progressed, Shearman seemed increasingly irritated with church leaders and church procedure, and this probably influenced his reaction to Young’s rising criticism of merchants. For one thing, there had been an altercation with church clerk Bernard H. Schettler. Shearman claimed that funds were owing him, and eventually he appealed the controversy to Young. “Bro Schet[t]ler does not seem disposed to give the matter . . . careful attention, nor to treat me with that courtesy that I think I merit.”25 How Young responded to the matter is unclear.

By the late 1860s, Shearman was questioning the acts of several church leaders, including Young himself. When Salt Lake authorities suggested a united program of “laying up grain,” perhaps for the Utah Produce Company, Shearman publicly opposed the scheme. He took the Third Ward pulpit in Logan and so railed against the proposal that, according to the Cache County presiding bishop, Peter Maughan, the angry congregation could scarcely remain in their seats. Maughan further reported that Shearman questioned Young’s decision to use church laborers to help construct the Union Pacific railroad. If the decision was calculated to build the Kingdom, he would sustain it, Shearman was quoted as saying. But if the policy was only for Young’s aggrandizement, he “should oppose it for all he could.”26

Some of the difficulty may have been an ongoing battle between Shearman and Maughan. The latter seemed willing to pass rumors about Shearman to authorities in Salt Lake City, including one account that said Shearman had tried to donate as tithing a blind mule of uncertain age. Rumors also came to headquarters that Shearman had “bitterly opposed” Young’s fencing in of a portion of the Cache County church reserve for his own purposes and that in response to Young’s act, Shearman, in a fit of temper, had said that Young “ought to be shot.” Upon learning of the incident, Young demanded an explanation from his convert.27

Shearman replied with a letter full of denials and a plaintive outpouring of soul. Never, Shearman insisted, had he entertained a “thought of evil” against Young. Indeed, many were the times when he had felt a willingness to place himself between his leader and danger. These assurances aside, Shearman’s letter contained an important passage that confirmed that Shearman was not at peace. The passage defined an issue that probably lay at the heart of his growing estrangement from the church and the busybody rumors that seemed to be multiplying around him.

“I am so constituted,” he tried to explain to Young, “that I cannot always receive a principle or idea on another’s simple authority.” In order to cooperate with a program, Shearman said that he had to understand it. “I may be wrong,” he continued, “but if an Angel, whom I knew to be from God, were to reveal a truth to me, I am afraid I should not be satisfied unless he made it plain to my understanding.” The letter ended with Shearman’s pledge to remain in the church and implement Young’s policies.28

The bottom of the sheet contains Young’s reaction to Shearman’s letter, apparently written in his own hand for a clerk’s later transcription to Shearman: “You need not give yourself any concern nor think of it again.” Young of course wrote to forgive Shearman for the unpleasant remark Shearman had apparently made in Logan. It is less clear that Young, in his magnanimity, understood that Shearman had written not only to apologize but to express an intellectual’s concern about Young’s authoritarian rule.

Despite this undercurrent of emotion, in 1869 Shearman joined the Logan Cooperative Mercantile Institution, Cache Valley’s church-sponsored mercantile cooperative, apparently exchanging his business for stock in the new concern, and for several brief months served as one of the new company’s directors.29 It was in this position that the New Movement would find him.

Henry Lawrence was yet another citizen of Utah who was carefully weighing events and leaning toward dissent. Lawrence, born 18 July 1835, was British only in the sense that he was born in British-controlled Canada, at Pickering, Ontario. Joseph Smith and John Taylor, traveling in the region in the 1830s, had preached the Restoration message to Lawrence’s parents and converted them. By 1838 the Lawrence family lived in Nauvoo, where five years later Henry’s older sisters Maria and Sarah were sealed as plural wives to the founding prophet.30

Young Henry made the trek to Utah in the early 1850s. Only glimpses remain of these first years. With Godbe and perhaps a dozen others, Lawrence enrolled himself in a pioneer debating society. His church commitment was recognized when leaders called him as a seventy, though his congregational worship, like that of most Utahns of the time, was sporadic. He earned money by clerking in the store of his brother-in-law, Hiram Kimball, whose niece he would later marry. In 1859, when Lawrence was twenty-four, Kimball made him his partner. Lawrence quickly proved himself. Within a decade, he was, along with Godbe, one of the city’s three or four leading LDS merchants. Among the city’s businessmen, Lawrence’s $15,387 in tithes (paid during the pioneer period up to the year 1870) stood only behind those of William Jennings ($43,794) and Godbe ($17,006). Lawrence earned $8,700 each year from 1862 to 1872, when a typical Utah worker might receive $600 per annum.31

Lawrence was a clear-eyed, steady, handsome man, whom even opponents credited with staunch integrity, trustworthiness, and a quiet and expansive charity.32 President Young clearly saw him as a man of promise. During the Utah War, Young occasionally had the twenty-three-year-old at his side, perhaps as an informal aide-de-camp. Three years later Young recommended him to Washington authorities as territorial marshal. In 1866, Young approved Lawrence for the city council and oversaw his election, and by the end of the decade, Lawrence held the trappings of an active, committed Mormon man. He was a polygamist, and he assisted with the ordinances adminsitered in the two-story Temple Square Endowment House. In his neighborhood he served as a counselor in the Eighth Ward bishopric.33

These, then, were the eight dissenters who became the inner group that provided the coming New Movement with its core leadership. Godbe, Harrison, Thomas and Fanny Stenhouse, Tullidge, Kelsey, Shearman, and Lawrence shared many characteristics. By the late 1860s, most were all in their middle or late thirties. Excepting Kelsey and Lawrence, they were all British converts who had not known Joseph Smith nor his Zion teachings firsthand; nor had most of them traveled the unifying Mormon hegira from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois to the Great Basin. All eight, including Fanny Stenhouse, had at some stage of their careers been merchants. While Harrison, Kelsey, and Tullidge had not much more than dabbled at business, Godbe, Lawrence, and perhaps Shearman had secured success.

Their church experience had also been similar. Godbe, Harrison, Tullidge, and Shearman each described early spiritual experiences that had brought them into their new faith. With the exception of Lawrence, all of them had either served in the British Mission or had experienced its spirit. Three had presided over the London Conference. Only Kelsey was ever charged with moral transgression, an act that apparently involved taking a plural wife without permission during his British Mission. In Utah, most had held the evangelizing and culturalizing office of seventy. Godbe, Shearman, and Stenhouse had also helped to found the Juvenile Instructor, later to become the voice of the Mormon Sunday schools.34

As the dissent progressed, these talented churchmen were joined by more than a half-dozen others. While most did not immediately play an active role in the dissent, their sympathies were in that direction; all would later enroll in the New Movement and some would later become key participants. These sympathizers on the periphery included (1) John Tullidge, brother of Edward, musician, pioneer craftsman, wood grainer, and artist; (2) Frederick T. Perris, photographer, artist, surveyor, and commission merchant, whose alienation Godbe had discovered several years before in private discussions in New York City; (3) Orson Pratt Jr., organist and composer, son of Mormonism’s scholarly apostle; (4) Joseph Salisbury, labor activist and writer; (5) Daniel Camomile, newspaper and book dealer; (6) George Watt, Young’s former clerk and the former church recorder; and (7) Amasa Lyman, a former LDS Apostle, already disfellowshiped for denying belief in the Christian atonement.

How much did the friends of Godbe and Harrison know of the New York revelation and the plans for a religious revolt? Stenhouse’s version was generally accurate: “This little band [of associates] did not number altogether a dozen persons, and what they knew, or thought they knew, of the purpose of others, and the design among themselves, were matters secretly kept within their own bosoms.”35 In short, from the moment of their return to Utah until their excommunication a year later, Godbe and Harrison revealed their “secrets” slowly, confidentially, and probably never fully, even to their closest colleagues. And while Godbe and Harrison undoubtedly told some of their closest associates of their reform ideas, they were less open about the New York City experience. Could their friends accept séances, a medium like Foster, and spirit visitors from the world of Summertime beyond?

Even as Godbe and Harrison encouraged the percolation of their ideas and quietly fostered dissent, the men outwardly carried on as before. For Godbe this meant taking a fourth wife. In taking this step, Godbe did not simply choose one of many available women of the Salt Lake City community. He chose Charlotte Ives Cobb, Brigham Young’s adopted daughter, who by virtue of her heritage, admirable profile, and talent was Zion’s closest approximation to high birth or aristocracy. Charlotte was the daughter of Augusta Adams Cobb, a Boston convert who had become attracted to Mormonism after hearing Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith preach in the middle 1830s. It had been an impressive occasion. The two men had reportedly walked many miles on their itinerant journey and their feet bled through their moccasins. Augusta took pity on them and offered to outfit them with new clothes and shoes. But what most affected her was the brothers’ preaching. “These men spoke as never men spoke before,” she later testified. Converted but required by her “austere” husband not to practice her faith, Augusta silently bore her religious conviction until formally converting to Mormonism in 1843. Then, with Brigham Young helping, Augusta left not only her New England affluence but her husband and five of her children in order to gather to Nauvoo. Two children went with her, Charlotte, a child of seven, and an infant who died en route and was buried in a tin coffin.36

Augusta’s circumstances to this day remain uncertain. Some said that she descended from the bluest of Boston’s blue blood, the Adams family of presidents, politicians, and great minds. Others accorded her lineage to the Quincys, who were almost as lofty.37 Whether an Adams or Quincy, or perhaps both, Augusta had married the “handsome, dashing, and [later] impecunious” James Cobb. One member of the Cobb family said the marriage broke up because of Cobb’s long-standing interest in another woman, who became his wife after Augusta’s departure.38 At the time, however, public opinion placed the blame on Brigham Young and the Mormons. The sensational divorce trial of Augusta and James created “more than ordinary bad effect” in the East, it was said. The court’s decision, which denied Augusta the custody of her other children, reflected the tide of prevailing opinion.39

On 2 November 1843, four years before her divorce, Augusta was “sealed” to Young at Nauvoo. It was, according to the expansive LDS marriage practices of the time, a marriage “for eternity only,” that is, a promise of a future but not present conjugal relationship.40 The ordinance apparently was done to ensure that she and Charlotte would be provided for; from the Mormon view, nothing sexual was implied by the arrangement.

Once in Utah, Augusta and her daughter Charlotte had a way of setting themselves apart. It was not only their Boston blood and their family relationship to Young. It was the way they carried themselves, royally.41 Charlotte had lustrous hazel eyes and brown hair. She was a tall (at least for the times), five feet seven inches. A picture at midlife portrays her as plumpish, with a full face and square-cut jaws, but she looked very different when young. Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, international travelers who came through Utah in the late 1850s, described her as “one of the loveliest persons it has ever been our fortune to see.” Others called her “the belle of Salt Lake City,” while Benjamin Ferris, a territorial secretary who ordinarily refused the Mormons any compliment, described her as “handsome in face” and “accomplished in the peculiar graces which belong to female Mormondom.”42

It may have been the latter that so many found appealing. Young sometimes had Charlotte, an accomplished pianist, entertain his guests.43 She could also be clever in conversation, cultured, literate, and witty. In addition to these virtues, she had an abundance of self-confidence.44 Yet, despite her charms, she remained unmarried into her thirties. Perhaps she waited to meet her match.

Just when Godbe began to court Charlotte, and other details concerning their relationship, are unclear. But it is a matter of record that the two were married at the Salt Lake Endowment House on 7 April 1869. Brigham Young, acting in his official capacity but also as a friend to Godbe and as the “father of the bride,” officiated.45

In later years Godbe wished the interlude forgotten. When asked about it, he used circumlocution. “I would not care about mentioning the exact date of the last marriage for certain reasons I have,” he told a researcher for historian Hubert H. Bancroft, when asked about his marriage. It had been a “very foolish thing,” he admitted.46

Perhaps Godbe was reticent because he was embarrassed by the timing of the marriage and its obvious implications for his dealings with Young. The “sealing” occurred after Godbe had already decided on his anti-Brigham course, and it implied a lack of sensitivity if not deception. Beneath the hardy handshakes and expressions of good feeling at the plural marriage ceremony, which at the time allied families as well as couples, lay his pending rebellion. The conscience of many men might not be pricked, but this was Godbe, whose integrity and ideas of rightdoing were integral to his person. Throughout the episode and later, the inconsistency of his acts and his hidden thoughts must have troubled him.

Godbe may also have regretted the intensity of his passion for Charlotte, which became an indiscretion; by all indications this was a love match. The relationship brought unexplored emotions—romance and excitement—whose depth he probably had never felt before. Moreover, Charlotte brought an intellectual intimacy that he had never achieved with Annie, Mary, or Rosina—issues, ideas, and feelings could be discussed and warmly debated, or sometimes deeply felt, though unexpressed. Godbe’s boyish enthusiasm for his new wife was enough to send tremors through his earlier marriages. Annie, always uncertain of herself, was especially tried. Family lore speaks of her threats and tantrums. Some said she demanded a divorce; others spoke of an attempted suicide.47 In domestic matters, her husband had sown the wind and now reaped the whirlwind.

These last events likely remained behind closed doors. Publicly, Godbe continued to maintain the facade of business-as-usual. Throughout 1868 and during much of the following year, he seemed to conform to the demands of Zion—and to the instructions given to him by the New York spirits to retain his Mormon membership as long as possible. This policy seemed to work to the reformers’ advantage. As the transcontinental railroad and increased contact with the East came closer and closer, Young enacted stronger and more restrictive countermeasures, and his language reached a still higher pitch. “It had been resolved,” Tullidge conceded, “that Brigham should be allowed to work up the movement against himself in the public mind.”48 He seemed to be doing so.

Never since the coming of the federal army in 1857–58 had the Mormons felt so besieged. With eastern politicians and newspapermen openly speaking about the need to destroy the Mormon commonwealth, Young responded by exercising the full power of his office. He began by reemphasizing the political theocracy. Some church members, voting in a city election, had scratched from the official ballot the name of attorney LeGrand Young in favor of Edwin Woolley—both committed Mormons. While their disobedience failed to elect Woolley, it did bring Young’s severe castigation of those responsible for such a “division at the polls.” A week later, at a public meeting of the School of the Prophets, the episode elicited the humble remorse of several leading churchmen, including George Q. Cannon and Young’s counselor Daniel H. Wells for not being sufficiently “energetic and alive” in controlling the election. With confessions made and accepted, Young then continued with the meeting, which the minutes reported as having a “heavenly” spirit. Young had a way of mixing rebuke with spiritual uplift.49

As the important October general conference approached, most of the president’s attention focused on merchants and merchant policy. At a meeting of the city’s bishops a week before the start of the meetings, President Young declared his program: “We will be kind to our outside merchants by renting them our houses, selling them our grain at good round prices, for cash only, let our young men clerk for them, but we will not suffer the Latter day Saints to enter their stores and buy their goods.” Further, he promised that agents would soon be placed in each of the city’s wards to organize hay sales to outsiders; individual sellers risked disfellowship. The church president was insisting that the Saints accept Enoch’s example. “A line will be drawn and a division made between those who are willing to enter into a oneness and those who are not.” Two days later at another meeting of the School of the Prophets, he again spoke explicitly: Saints entering non-Mormon stores to buy goods would be cut off.50

When the conference began, for the first time in memory all members of the Quorum of the Twelve were present. The fact underscored the importance of the several-day proceeding as well as Young’s careful planning. When the church leaders rose to deliver their discourses, their voices carried a unified refrain. Elder George A. Smith reportedly scored the “vast sums” of money made by the gentile merchants, who had no sympathy for the church. In the future, no one “strengthening the power of evil” or unwilling to “sustain the Zion of God” would retain fellowship, Smith promised. The scholarly Orson Pratt, often abstract and mild-mannered, was precise and heavily sarcastic during his sermon. Had the non-Mormon merchants appeared friendly while in Salt Lake City? “O, yes, you would have thought they were the most friendly and polite people imaginable. Why the Latter-day Saints never saw such manifestations of politeness, gentility and friendliness. . . . But when they have made fortunes out of the Latter-day Saints and gulled them all they could they have gone and tried to destroy them.”51

Young’s own sermons during the conference emphasized Zion—the teaching that he had inherited from Joseph Smith and a key to much of his own ministry. “According to the traditions of our fathers the salvation of the body and the salvation of the soul have no connection the one with the other,” Young began. “This is not in accordance with the doctrine which has been revealed to us in this our day.” Young spoke of a literal kingdom—“a temporal kingdom and a spiritual kingdom”—in which the righteous might gather and improve themselves—a kingdom to which Mormon enemies would, as always, offer their opposition.52 Here was a concept so important to Young that he was willing to defend it with all his energy.

Before the conference was concluded, Young laid his policy of not trading with the gentile merchants before the Saints. “That is a pretty good vote,” he said, satisfied with the sea of raised right hands. Young’s speech and the vote of the assembled Saints—the Mormon procedure for approving official policy—raised the economic boycott to a new level. In the future, the ban on trading with the non-Mormon merchants would be enforced at the cost of an offender’s membership.53

The conference, however, closed without the presentation of a plan for cooperative merchandising.54 On 9 October, following the close of the conference, Young began a series of “council” meetings with church and business leaders in which he challenged the Mormon merchants to design their own program. “Go to work and do it,” he responded when the group asked for directions. The assembled men, many of whom were present because of Young’s pressure, and anxious to minimize their involvement, again asked what was expected of them. Once more, Young challenged them to draw their own blueprint.55

In the meantime, Young took the idea of cooperative merchandising to the people. He scheduled meetings for all Salt Lake City congregations and assigned to them the community’s most prominent speakers, including members of the Quorum of Twelve. Later these men fanned out throughout the territory with the same message. Although details of the cooperative scheme were still yet to be worked out, one staff writer for the Deseret Evening News expressed his opinion about leadership: “President Young should dictate.”56 He already had.

Tullidge’s analysis was correct: “It must be confessed, that of themselves the merchants never would have re-constructed themselves upon a co-operative plan.”57 For several days, the businessmen tried to delay. They recited the same litany of obstacles that they had used in the past to forestall action. A satisfactory plan seemed beyond them; at least they failed to produce one. But this time, Young would not be put off. Publicly and apparently privately, he relentlessly prodded.

Finally a plan for Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) was announced. It was essentially Young’s 1863 proposal of joint purchases and communitywide wholesaling. The Mormon merchants could buy stock in the institution by investing cash or by transferring to the new concern their old firm’s inventories and capital assets. In strict terms, the wholesaling business was not a cooperative venture at all, but a joint-stock company that allowed investment and shared profits generated at much lower margins. As important as the lower prices, the church through its quasi-official ZCMI would gain control over the territory’s commercial dealing. Young was designated as president of the new firm, with prominent church leaders and merchants serving as directors.

There was a retail aspect to the plan, too. Young hoped that the wholesaling entity might eventually sponsor several stores on Main Street through which most of the Mormon trade would be channeled. He also envisioned auxiliary “co-op” stores, financed and run by the local Saints, in each congregation or community in the territory. During these early conversations, it was enough for the merchants to declare their support for the plan and invest in the ZCMI wholesale enterprise. By doing so, they qualified themselves to use the ZCMI imprimatur, which included the right to display on their building facades an “All-Seeing Eye,” with the accompanying phrase “Holiness to the Lord.” Young explained that the latter heralded the day when, “as the prophets have foretold, even the pots, and the bells of the horses shall bear this inscription of acknowledgement of Holiness to the Lord.”58

By the first of the new year, it was apparent that Young was pushing a very heavy boulder up a mountain. Despite all the Salt Lake City merchants’ statements of unanimous support of the cooperative plan and their willingness to display the signs and trappings of cooperation, they were in fact doing very little to support the new organization. Impatient with the lack of progress in Salt Lake City, where the plan’s overall success or failure would be determined, in January 1869 Young threatened to make a group of more amenable Provo merchants his wholesaling agent for the entire territory. Faced by Young’s threat, Salt Lake City’s merchants finally fell into line.59

The businessmen were not the only recalcitrant ones. The bishops had been assigned to start and manage the local cooperative stores but had shown little heart for the matter. Their inattention drew Young’s verbal shafts. In a private meeting, he called on the bishops to “repent” and turn to God and the Holy Ghost, from whom they would learn that “this great Cooperation movement was from God.” Young wanted the people united, although others, presumably some bishops, were “alienating” their hearts.60

Comments like these were too much for Bishop Woolley. When President Young suggested that the women of the Thirteenth Ward could foster cooperation in the ward (apparently in sharp contrast with Woolley’s efforts), Woolley believed his leadership was being questioned. He had led the ward for fifteen years, he replied with heavy sarcasm, and clearly he knew nothing at all. He had always understood that the ward Relief Society was supposed to assist with the aged, poor, and helpless, and help to attend to the needs of the sick. What was this about women standing behind a business counter in a ward cooperative store?61

According to the minutes of the occasion, Woolley then made some “very cutting remarks on cooperation” and even attacked another of Young’s pet projects, the idea that Utah could successfully produce wool. But the president’s antibusiness language provoked the bishop’s greatest ire. Woolley thought it “high time” to cease the “constant tirade against the merchants.” If it were not stopped soon and the people governed by more “common sense” and less enthusiasm, Woolley predicted “we would have the greatest babel in our midst, than had ever been seen before.”62

Woolley’s remarks were intemperate and unusual for Deseret; they showed the tension that was building below the surface. Yet at the end of the meeting, when Edward Hunter, the Presiding Bishop, asked if the men intended to carry out President Young’s cooperative plans, every hand in the small assembly rose, including Woolley’s. The Thirteenth Ward bishop said things that other, more cautious men would not say, but he was always ready to do his duty, even when he thought it misguided.63

Woolley’s fiery outburst and prediction of a schism in the community probably reflected others’ thoughts as Young continued to apply pressure. Every agency of the church strained to demand compliance with the cooperative plans. There were sermons from almost every Mormon pulpit, editorials in the Deseret Evening News, and home instruction by the church’s “teachers,” whose duty required monthly visits to each Saint in the territory.64 At one meeting of the Salt Lake City School of the Prophets, every bishop in the community was publicly quizzed, one by one, on his acceptance of the boycott. Under such questioning, Phineas H. Young admitted to buying one sack of sugar at the gentile-owned “Elephant Store.” In response, Phineas and the other recalcitrant members were ordered to deposit their “tickets” of membership and told to leave the assembly. No doubt Phineas suffered added embarrassment because he was Brigham’s brother.65

Few times in Utah’s brief history had President Young responded so forcefully. At another meeting of the School, it was announced that John Pack, a respected schoolteacher in the community, had sent a private letter to his son-in-law in Cache Valley that burlesqued cooperation. Despite the breach of Pack’s private correspondence, George Q. Cannon made “pungent” remarks about Pack’s criticisms, while Daniel H. Wells followed with a commentary on the ease of destroying instead of building up. Three weeks later, Pack attended the School and made a full confession, which apparently, after considerable discussion, was “finally accepted.”66 George D. Watt’s case was similar. Watt, Mormonism’s first baptized convert in Great Britain and President Young’s former secretary, also stood before the School of the Prophets and apologized for deprecating ZCMI and for using “injudicious” words. Young responded mildly. “So long as a man’s intentions were good,” said the president, “we could afford to overlook his indiscretion.”67 Similar dramas were acted out throughout Utah, many at the outlying Schools of Prophets.68

When enforcing the edicts of Zion, Young wanted a kindly approach. On one occasion he urged his followers to avoid speaking “harshly” of their fellow Saints and even apologized for his own sometimes strongly worded views. His language could be “unbecoming,” he admitted, though “the principles he advanced” were correct.69 Young, however, had trouble taking his own advice, so strong was his feeling. Speaking to the presidents and bishops gathered at Nephi, Utah, he urged that recalcitrant Saints trading with Gentiles be cut from the church. “I wish the wicked would leave this church and go away, but they will stay with us more or less,” he complained. He even had an unfortunate remark about some of the local Jewish merchants, which deviated from his usual tolerance. “There are Jews here,” he said, “they are not our friends. Do not trade with them. They do not Believe in Jesus Christ.”70

When the church’s next semiannual general conference was held in April 1869, President Young admitted the opposition he had met. He had heard more complaints in the past several weeks about cooperative merchandising, he said, than he had ever heard about the acquisitive practices of the profit-minded merchants. “Among this people, called Latter-day Saints, when the devil has got the crowns, sovereigns, . . . and the twenty dollar pieces, it has been all right; but let the Lord get a sixpence and there is an eternal grunt about it.” As for the Mormon traders, he had little sympathy. Some, he knew, were feeling “very bad and sore”: “They say ‘you are taking the breath out of our mouths.’” He meant to do just that, he admitted, for “they have made themselves rich.”71

This movement toward cooperation was not an isolated moment or tangential enterprise, Young later told another audience. “I have been striving for it ever since I have been in these valleys, and during the whole of the time have labored, toiled, preached, guided and counselled for its accomplishment.” It was movement against “monopoly.”72

By the middle of 1869, it was clear that Young would have his way. At his insistence, the ZCMI retail business had been organized, and several wholesale outlets opened their doors in the city’s growing commercial center. Furthermore, most of the bishops had opened retail cooperative stores in their neighborhoods.73

It had been a remarkable achievement. Through the force of Young’s personality and the willing compliance of a majority of the Saints, the Salt Lake City business community had been “revolutionized”—just as had been repeatedly promised. For the moment, “cooperation” had neutralized the power of the anti-LDS and Mormon merchants. As important, the prices of commodities on Main Street were reduced—aided, of course, by the lower transportation costs of the recently completed railroad. Too, the social and economic unity of the people had been preserved. Despite the “great railroad crisis,” Zion had maintained her borders and defended her ramparts.

Yet, as with all revolutions, there were costs. Young’s vigorous acts had left some Saints uncertain about their old faith and its leader. In a few cases his measures had violated what the modern world would call civil liberties—those protections that, under law, preserve personal rights. Other Saints, consumers, felt that by making the gentile embargo a test of church fellowship, Young had crossed the line of reasonable and acceptable behavior. They could no longer shop where they pleased. It was, however, the merchants of the community whose patience had been most severely tested; their interests had been directly attacked. President Wells, Young’s own counselor, acknowledged the controversy that Young had stirred. Many in and out of the church were criticizing Young, Wells confessed, and said that he tyrannized the people. In contrast, Wells considered Young a “great benefactor of the poor.” He had brought them from the deprivation of the old country to the prosperity of the new.74

Of course a society can do both; it can curb personal liberty while at the same time improving the economic and social status of the people. Throughout history, two kinds of social organization have endlessly competed. One is given to individualism and a hands-off, laissez-faire government that hopes self-interest will promote the improvement of the entire community. The post–Civil War United States chose this option. Brigham Young’s Zion pursued the other. It was a highly organized society of managed control, corporate and not personal in its spirit, heavenly and not secular in its goals. In the process of defending this last vision, Brigham Young had created a remarkable institution of cooperative merchandizing. But he had also given William Godbe and Elias Harrison, along with a dozen of their friends, both a complaint and an opportunity.