Brigham Young Quotes
It is generally believed that after several decades of protecting Lee, Brigham Young and the Mormon Church which had ordered Lee to carry out the Massacre, used Lee as a sacrificial lamb. They were under incredible pressure and the church was about to be outlawed. They gave Lee up, and no one else was ever implicated after Lee’s death.
The Mormons wanted Utah to be a United States territory or a state with an extreme state’s rights mentality whereby their religious doctrine in the Book of Mormon could be state law and at the time the Constitution had not yet been amended to require the state governments to adhere to the Bill of Rights or other Federal laws. In effect they wanted a democratic type of theocracy. See {619869}. The Mormons would not agree that Federal law should govern their community or people, and war with the Federal government was imminent. In an ironic twist, Johnson, a Texan, rebelled against the nation himself several years later when he became a Confederate General. He was the highest ranking Confederate Officer killed in Battle—at Shiloh.
We count on Mormon assemblages to
The use of “despotic” did not imply cruelty or even poor management of the society. The term was used to indicate that Brigham Young, the then Mormon Leader, had the powers and authority of a dictator. At the time most Americans in the East knew little about the Mormons. Ludlow was one of the early observers of Mormon society in Utah who wrote about the Mormons in popular—albeit intellectual—magazines. Ludlow regarded Mormonism as it was then practiced as incompatible with, and dangerous for, America, not because of the plural marriage, but the conflicts with the concepts of democracy and self-government. The authority that Brigham Young and the church then exercised over civil life was what distressed him and many other Americans.
Referring to the prophet Jared and his family in search of the Promised Land.
