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| “ | Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so. | „ |
| ~ Brigham Young |
Brigham Young (June 1, 1801 – August 29, 1877) was an American religious leader and politician. He was the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), from 1847 until his death in 1877.
During his time as church president, Young led his followers, the Mormon pioneers, west from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Salt Lake Valley. He founded Salt Lake City and served as the first governor of the Utah Territory. Young also worked to establish the learning institutions which would later become the University of Utah and Brigham Young University.
Biography edit
A carpenter, joiner, painter, and glazier, Young settled in 1829 at Mendon, New York, near where the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. The book soon attracted Young’s interest, and he was baptized into Joseph Smith’s new church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on April 14, 1832.
In the spring of 1834 he joined in the march to Missouri to help dispossessed Mormons regain their lands. He was named third of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. In 1838, when the Mormons were driven out of Missouri, Young, who had become senior member of the Quorum, directed the move to Nauvoo, Illinois.
In 1839 he went to England, where he established a mission that contributed many British converts to the Mormon church in America and that opened the way to winning converts on the European continent, especially in Scandinavia.
When Joseph Smith was murdered (June 1844), Young was in Boston, pressing his leader’s presidential campaign. He returned to Nauvoo and took command of the church. In the face of mob pressure, he led the Mormons westward out of Illinois in 1846. He got no farther than the Missouri River that summer, but in 1847 he conducted a pioneer company to the Rocky Mountains. After selecting the site of Salt Lake City as a gathering place for the Mormons, Young returned to Winter Quarters (Florence, Nebraska, now a part of Omaha) and in December 1847 became president of the church. He returned to Utah with the Mormon emigration of 1848 and remained there for the rest of his life.
With Salt Lake City as the base for Mormon colonizing, Young dispatched missions not only in Utah but to areas now in California, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming.
Young is generally considered to have instituted a church ban against conferring the priesthood on men of black African descent, who had generally been treated equally to white men in this respect under Smith's presidency.[1] After settling in Utah in 1848, Young announced the ban, which also forbade blacks from participating in Mormon temple rites such as the endowment or sealings.
In 1849 the Mormons established the provisional state of Deseret, with Young as governor.[2] The next year this area became the territory of Utah, again with Young as governor. During his time as governor, Young directed the establishment of settlements throughout present-day Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, California and parts of southern Colorado and northern Mexico. Under his direction, the Mormons built roads and bridges, forts, irrigation projects; established public welfare; organized a militia; issued a "selective extermination" order against male Timpanogos and after a series of wars eventually made peace with the Native Americans.[3]
The degree of Young's involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took place in Washington County in 1857, is disputed.[4] As governor, Young had promised the federal government he would protect immigrants passing through Utah Territory, but over 120 men, women and children were killed in this incident. There is no debate concerning the involvement of individual Mormons from the surrounding communities by scholars. Only children under the age of seven, who were cared for by local Mormon families, survived, and the murdered members of the wagon train were left unburied.
He was appointed to a second term in 1854, but friction between the Mormons and the federal government led to U.S. Pres. James Buchanan’s decision to replace him, at which time (1857) an army was sent to establish the primacy of federal rule in Utah. Young never again held political office, but, as president of the Mormon church, he effectively ruled the people of Utah until his death.
An eminently practical man, Young made few doctrinal contributions. He was an iron-fisted administrator who stabilized Mormon society and gave it a cohesion made possible, in part, by its comparative isolation. Young encouraged education and the theatre, always stressed self-sufficiency, and became a notably wealthy man. Having accepted the doctrine of plural marriage, he took more than 20 wives and fathered 47 children.
References edit
- ↑ Mormon church explains defunct ban on blacks in priesthood, Reuters
- ↑ The State of Deseret, Issuu
- ↑ Open Hand and Mailed Fist: Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah 1847-52, Issuu
- ↑ Reopening a Mormon Murder Mystery; New Accusations That Brigham Young Himself Ordered an 1857 Massacre of Pioneers, The New York Times