Saints (68 page)

Dinah sat alone at her writing table. It was well after midnight, but she did not think of sleep. Her journal lay before her. She flipped through a hundred leaves covered with her smooth handwriting and wrote “June 29th” at the top of the first blank page.

They called me the Prophetess tonight, she remembered. Even the other wives, who should have known I was just a woman in the same hidden agony as they. But she was not unhappy that they did not know her. Dinah, as she really was, was no wiser than any other woman—she could not have comforted these women, for she had no comfort even for herself. Yet the Sister Dinah they called the Prophetess had power to heal broken hearts and make the darkest of futures bright, for they believed in her, which would make her promises come true. So she would be Joseph’s helpmate, and speak for him out of the grave.

She set to work. She knew what was needed. No bloody anthems calling for revenge. Only elegy, lament, and above all vows that the martyr did not die in vain. Before the Saints can lose heart, I will tell them that they will not lose heart; before they begin to abandon Zion, I will tell them that they are too faithful ever to give up. I will tell them they are willing to die as Joseph did, and they will read it and believe it and so it will be true.

She wrote seventeen poems that night, and recorded them all in her journal when they were finished. All would be published in the
Times and Seasons
during the next week, under six different names. Some of them were among the worst poems she ever wrote. But three of them were among her best, and two of these, set to music, would become beloved hymns of the Church.

She finished at first light, but still she did not sleep. Instead, after copying the poems into her journal, she carried them to the
Times and Seasons
office. The staff was already there, preparing that day’s edition. The editor didn’t even read them, just took the top six from the stack. “Which of these do you want under your own name?”

She chose one.

He handed the other five to the typesetter. “Make up names for these,” he said. Then he carefully printed Dinah’s name under the one that she had chosen. Mrs. Handy, he wrote. But he knew better. “God bless you, Sister Smith,” he said, and held her hand a moment before letting her go back out into the morning.

The sun came up as she walked home, the light blinding her so she could hardly see her own house for all the brightness. It was the glory of the resurrection and he stood by her door, clothed in glory. Have you come for me? she asked him silently. He did not answer. When she reached the door, he was gone, and the sun no longer dazzled her eyes. He would not come for her yet. Not for days, not for weeks, not for years. Time without him would be long. The hours with him were so few that she could remember them all; standing there at her door she remembered every moment of him in a single instant, held the sight of him all at once in her eyes, the sound of his voice frightened and loving and angry all at once, and all at once against her body, his hands, his lips. He touched her, not in the past, but in the present and forever.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, that clear sense of him was gone. She could not hide, then, from what she had lost. She stumbled into the house, curled herself upon the bed and wept for the first time, and the last time, until sleep took her.

The men who planned Joseph Smith’s death no doubt expected that with the Prophet gone the Mormons would all give up and go home. They believed their own image of the Mormons as puppets under his satanic control; with the strings cut, there would be nothing to keep the Mormons together. They didn’t realize what Joseph Smith had found out all too often: if the Saints were sheep, they were the most stubborn, self-willed, cantankerous herd a shepherd ever had to deal with. Any Saint who got to Nauvoo had already passed through such a gauntlet of pressure and abuse from unconverted family and friends, had already sacrificed so much money and time and effort, that he or she was not about to give in just because the world had martyred another prophet. Indeed, that was all the more reason to continue God’s work: Joseph had sealed his testimony with his blood.

Besides, precious few of them had any home left to go back to.

Joseph and Hyrum were dead at the jail. John Taylor hovered near death from his wounds, but gradually recovered. Willard Richards escaped with only a nick in his ear. He was pinned behind the door for just a few seconds, but that was long enough to save him from the fusillade. The citizens of Carthage, fearing vengeance from the Mormons—after all, they had heard so much about how monstrous the Mormon people were—fled their city, and frightened people in all the nearby towns huddled, waiting for the Mormon counterstroke. It never came. There were those among the Saints who wanted to give the blow, but John Taylor sent word from the prison that the Saints were to fire not a single weapon in vengeance. Taylor, whose blood had been mingled with that of the martyrs, was obeyed. Western Illinois did not suffer the bloodbath that had been so feared. And the non-Mormons settled back to watch the Church dissolve.

Brigham Young heard the news of Joseph’s death in Boston, where he was on a mission to promote Joseph’s candidacy for President of the United States. He wept, for no man loved Joseph more than Brigham did. Then he packed up and headed for Nauvoo. The campaign was over, and the Lord would want him with the Saints.

Sidney Rigdon, Joseph’s First Counselor in the presidency of the Church, heard the news in Pittsburgh. He had gone to the unlikely place after a long series of quarrels with Joseph, after which the Prophet had stripped him of almost all his authority; but now that Joseph was dead, Sidney felt the burden of the Church descend upon him.

Even John C. Bennett had sudden stirrings of long-dormant faith. He wrote to offer his services as President of the Church—hadn’t Joseph once made him second in the kingdom? Wisely, however, Bennett did not actually enter the city of Nauvoo, and thus extended his life by many years.

Within the weeks following the martyrdom, a battle for the succession quickly developed. Three main parties emerged, each with a strong legalistic claim. Joseph had several times promised that his son, Joseph Smith III, would succeed him, a fact well known to many of the Saints. However, it had long been Church practice that in the absence of the President, the First Counselor presided—in this case, Sidney Rigdon. The third claim was the most tenuous: in an 1835 revelation, Joseph Smith had declared that the Twelve Apostles, acting as a quorum, were equal in authority to the presidency of the Church, and presided over the Church in their absence. Sidney Rigdon argued that because he was a member of the presidency, the presidency was not absent; Brigham Young, as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, held that the Presidency of the Church was dissolved when Joseph died and did not exist, and the Twelve now presided. It gets very, very intricate.

And the truth is that while the three parties were arguing legal points, the Saints would make their decision on completely different grounds. No one could seriously deny that Joseph wanted his son to succeed him—but the boy was still a child, and the Saints were not interested in being governed by Joseph’s obnoxious brother William, or by the boy’s mother, Emma. It was not until many years later, when Joseph III was grown, that he was set up as head of an alternative church.

The choice between Sidney and Brigham was harder. Sidney was a master orator, and he had been one of the leaders of the Church almost from the start. He had had a falling out with Joseph, his health was weak and his leadership uncertain, but the Saints still had great affection for him. Brigham Young, on the other hand, was known to be a strong and effective leader. Of all the highest men in the Church, only Brigham Young and Heber Kimball had never failed in their perfect loyalty to the Prophet. There were more than a few who disliked Brigham Young, but none who thought him incapable or suspected him of not wanting to carry forward Joseph’s work.

In the confusion following the martyrdom, Dinah’s decision was quick, and her reasons clear. Sidney Rigdon had rejected the Principle. Emma would certainly get rid of it as quickly as she could, if her son became titular head of the Church. Only Brigham Young was committed to preserving it, and therefore, for those who had accepted the difficult commandment, there could be only one choice. To support anyone else for the leadership of the Church would be to deny the very Principle which, to a large degree, had cost Joseph his life.

So Dinah resolved to do all she could to help Brigham Young get control of the Church. There was a dangerous period after Sidney Rigdon arrived and before Brigham got there, during which Sidney did his best to get himself in an unassailable position. Dinah worked among the plural wives, and the plural wives pressured their husbands—delay, delay until Brigham comes. Most of the Saints still had no idea the Principle was really being lived, but the highest leaders of the Church knew the law and were, by and large, living it. Dinah’s influence no doubt helped, for Sidney was held back until Brigham Young arrived, and after that Brigham was at least a match for Sidney, ploy for ploy.

The climax of the struggle came at a great outdoor meeting of the Saints. It looked like such a meeting would play into Sidney’s hands—he was the orator, and Brigham was not. But Sidney was not well; Brigham stage-managed the event to advantage; and, in the end, God was on Brigham’s side.

Or so the story goes. In the mythology of Mormonism, while Brigham Young was speaking to the Saints, the people saw him change before their eyes. Instead of Brigham, it was Joseph Smith talking to them; then the vision faded, and it was Brigham Young again. The Lord’s intent had been made plain. The mantle of the Prophet had fallen upon Brigham Young. He was the chosen leader, and the Saints voted overwhelmingly to follow him. Sidney Rigdon faded into obscurity, as far as the Mormon Church was concerned, and Brigham Young became one of the great figures of American history—or American legend, at least.

The problem with this story is that no one seems to have seen this vision at the time. All the accounts of the miracle were written down as remembrances, years later. The contemporary journals say nothing about it. One would think a mass vision of that sort would at least get mentioned; there would at least be some record of people talking about it. And yet the story does not seem to be a fabrication, either. The people who wrote about it in later years were honest men and women, and few of them had any reason to lie.

It was in Dinah’s journal that I found a possible answer for such a contradiction:

To me this is at least an adequate explanation of the myth. No one is lying. Many of the Saints listened to Brigham Young with the idea already planted that when he spoke, it was Joseph Smith talking to them. They were not confused—they knew it was a figure of speech. Yet as they talked about the experience to others, they used the ready-made language that Dinah and Heber had given them. The figure of speech became cliché the cliché began to be taken as literal truth; and as memories grew faded, the figure of speech took the place of memory and the one certain thing that witnesses could say was that, whatever else was said and done that day, when they watched Brigham Young, it was Joseph Smith they saw.

I made a mistake when I found this in Dinah’s journal. All excited, as we amateur historians invariably are, I mentioned the discovery to a few dozen people working there in the Church Archives. The next day, Dinah’s journal was unavailable for my use. It was being “microfilmed.” Neither the book nor the microfilm ever appeared.

At first I was angry. How dare they suppress truth, I thought. But in the months since then I have come to understand that there are different kinds of truth.

To me, the truth is What Actually Happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.

To the guardians of the myth who pulled Dinah’s journal from public access, the only truth that matters is the survival and continuation of the Church. For the Saints to have the kind of trust in their leaders that binds and has always bound them together into one of the most unified communities in the world, they must believe that their leaders are chosen by God. The kind of political struggle that went on after Joseph Smith’s death seems to call that into question. Even the legalistic view of the Twelve as successor to the President is not enough to balance that. The direct intervention of God is the only view of that time that promotes the faith of today. And to those whose responsibility is the preservation and growth of Mormonism, the myth of the Mantle of the Prophet is far truer than the version I believe in.

I’m not even sure I believe in my version, anyway. History is never anything more than an imaginative reconstruction of the past. Some of it is better than the rest. But how do you decide which is good history, and which bad? I’m pretty sure I know what Dinah Kirkham’s answer would have been. If she had heard me babbling a theory that undermined the mythic view of the succession of Brigham Young, and if she thought my theory might be believed because of her diary, she would have walked to the shelves herself and burned the offending book, even though it was the only tool I had to reconstruct her life in these pages. For she never regarded the facts of her life as being important at all. Only the Church mattered. Only the future was true. I think perhaps I love my ancient aunt too much now—I would like her to approve of what I’ve done.

—O. Kirkham, Salt Lake City, 1981