The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts (Volume 1) - Softcover

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9781560850052: The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts (Volume 1)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560850051 ISBN 13: 9781560850052

Publisher: Signature Books, 1990

In this exciting and readable autobiography, one of the most colorful figures of the American frontier recounts his poverty-stricken childhood, his rowdy adolescence in Rocky Mountain mining camps, his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Congress, and his stormy career in one of the leading councils of the Mormon church. Polygamy, women’s suffrage, prohibition, and separation of church and state occupy center stage in the unfolding drama of Brigham Henry Roberts’s controversial life.

The story-book adventures of Roberts’s life made him a household name during his lifetime. His impassioned speeches incited riots, his reasoned writings defined and codified religious beliefs, and his candid disclosures of Utah history brought him both respect and censure. He is best remembered today as a largely self-educated intellectual. Several of his landmark published works are still in print more than fifty years after his death. His life story, told here in his own words and published for the first time, may well stand as his greatest, most enduring achievement.

For many today, B. H. Roberts is the quintessential Mormon intellectual of the twentieth century. But his theological writings came late in life and his historical views were more subjective than definitive. His autobiography, on the other hand, is a forthright account of the events and acquaintances that contributed to his unique faith and intellectual independence. Troubled by the memory of being abandoned as a child, and of the abusive care of quarrelling and intemperate foster-parents, he survived a stormy youth of poverty and neglect. He describes his nearly ten years as a missionary to the southern United States, his subsequent tenure as an outspoken member of the First Quorum of Seventy, his public opposition to women’s suffrage, and his controversial bid for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Mormon polygamist.

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About the Author:

Gary James Bergera is managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation in Salt Lake City, former managing director of Signature Books, and former managing editor ofDialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He is co-author of Brigham Young University: A House of Faith, editor of Line Upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine, The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts, Statment of the LDS First Presidency, and companion volumes of Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed, 1842-1845, and The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845-1846 (also co-editor) and On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, and a contributing author in The Prophet Puzzle: Interpretive Essays on Joseph Smith, Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience: A Mormon/Humanist Dialogue, and The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism. He is also the recipient of a Best Article Award from the Mormon History Association.

Sterling M. McMurrin was E. E. Ericksen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and History Emeritus at the University of Utah until his death in 1996. He was formerly a professor of education, academic vice president, and dean of the graduate school at the University of Utah, a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, a Ford Fellow in philosophy at Princeton, U.S. Envoy to Iran, and United States Commissioner of Education. He authoredEducation and Freedom; The Philosophical Foundations of Mormon Theology and its companion, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion; Religion, Reason and Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion; and Swiss Schools and Ours: Why Theirs Are Better; co-authored Contemporary Philosophy: A Book of Readings; A History of Philosophy; Matters of Conscience: Conversations with Sterling M. McMurrin on Philosophy, Education, and Religion; and Toward Understanding the New Testament; and contributed to The Autobiography of B. H. Roberts, Memories and Reflections: The Autobiography of E. E. Ericksen and The Truth, The Way, The Life, An Elementary Treatise on Theology: The Masterwork of B. H. Roberts.

Chapter 17

The Tennessee Massacre

President Morgan represented to the people of my home town my faith and devotion in the work and suggested the raising of means for properly returning me home, a request heartily responded to by my friends of Centerville. My first work on arriving home was a sheep-shearing job for the Ford brothers, carried on where their flocks were assembled for early summer shearing near the Marsh Basin in Idaho. Changing from preaching to sheep shearing was a radical change in work. In the fall of that year, I returned to school teaching. This was done in the town of Bountiful, Davis County, where part of my boyhood days had been spent. It was before the time of the organization of county high schools, but the trustees of the district assembled in the central schoolhouse the advanced students of grade schools, so in a way it became the forerunner of the subsequent high schools.

During the winter President John Morgan came to visit me, a returned traveling elder in Tennessee. He spoke of my confining my labors within four walls and intimated that he thought the sphere too limited, and thus he conceded in an indirect way what was really afterwards materialized—a suggestion that I return to the mission field. Elder Morgan had presided in the Southern States Mission about thirteen years and really was preparing to retire from that service and had already suggested my name as his successor. In the spring of 1884 this plan was consummated by my being appointed to succeed my late president. Owing doubtless to my extreme youth for such a responsibility, it was understood that I would labor under the direction of President Morgan and therefore was set apart only as the assistant president of the mission with instructions to report to and receive directions from President Morgan. But I was expected to occupy the position of field man in the aforesaid eleven states and would be presiding elder over eleven states of the south with more than one hundred traveling elders and a large number of members of the church, with the responsibility of conducting the occasional emigration of the Saints of that region to San Luis Valley in Colorado.

I arrived in the mission in the month of March 1884, being accompanied into the field by twenty-four new elders from Utah. Among the first activities after arriving in Chattanooga as the acting president of the mission, I paid a visit to Shady Grove District, which had been so central to my activities when president of the Tennessee conference. I crossed Duck River on a flatboat and climbed the steep bluff cutting across the lawn to the spacious log plantation home of Uncle Robert Church. The inmates of the home hailed me from the flatboat and were standing on the crown of the lawn bluff of the river with outstretched hands to welcome me, and an informal social greeting took place on the lawn. As we stood overlooking the river with our backs to the house, I felt the persistent pushing and pushing of someone to the rear of me. Turning, there was old Traveler who had come across the lawn to join the group in the greeting. It was an affectionate embrace around his neck that he received from me, as all the journeys and adventures thronged my memory. Old Traveler was an institution in the Southern States Mission and claimed his place.

Returning to Chattanooga I began my tour of the states comprising the mission by visiting the conferences in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. By this time midsummer had arrived, and I was prepared to visit the next conference in Tennessee which had been appointed in what was known as Kane Creek District in Lewis County. In the early summer I had appointed Elder John H. Gibbs and William H. Jones to a special mission to visit prominent cities and capitals of counties in east and middle Tennessee.

Here let it be explained that Tennessee like Caesar’s Gaul was divided into three parts by the Tennessee River. The Tennessee rises in the Cumberland mountains in the eastern part of Kentucky and flows thence southwesterly past Knoxville through the entire state of Tennessee, sweeping through the north end of Alabama and then almost directly northward into the Ohio, which at Cairo flows into the Mississippi. This course of the river cuts off the eastern part of Tennessee into east Tennessee. The southwestern movement of the river past Knoxville into Alabama and then northward makes the section of the state between the north-flowing Tennessee and the southwest-flowing portion known as middle Tennessee. Between the northern course of the river and the Mississippi is the section of west Tennessee. It is one of the noblest states of the south and one of the most historic states of the entire union.

In the course of their directed mission through prominent cities and capitals of counties in the state, Elder Gibbs and Jones were to distribute large quantities of congressional speeches made in the senate of the United States, chiefly by southern senators on the Rights of Religious Liberty. This was a commentary upon the constitutional legislation in congress against the marriage system of the Latter-day Saints. These men ably defended the rights of Utah territory in the exercise of the freedom of religion, and incidentally they bore splendid testimonies to the character of the “Mormon” people in Utah. These senators, chiefly from the South, were notably Senator Morgan of Alabama, Senator Call of Florida, Senator De Lamar of Mississippi, Senator Pendleton of Ohio, and Senator West of Missouri. These with others had nobly defended the rights of the people of Utah on the floor of the senate. The delegate from Utah, John T. Caine, had these speeches printed and sent large quantities of them to the headquarters of the mission at Chattanooga. With these speeches Elders Gibbs and Jones were supplied and requested to distribute them among prominent people in the parts of the states they visited.

They had completed their special mission and had gone to the branch of the church on Kane Creek to await the forthcoming conference. When I arrived in Chattanooga, I found Elder Jonathan G. Kimball in a precarious state of health. Jaundice and malaria has fastened upon him, and it was quite evident that he needed a respite from the strenuous work of correspondence, etc., at the mission headquarters. Thus I, instead of going to join the elders at Kane Creek with a passing visit to Shady Grove, concluded that Elder Kimball must have a vacation and directed him to go to the home of the Church family on Duck River, there to recuperate for a few weeks. I then undertook the secretarial work at Chattanooga. So time drifted on to the important date of August 20, 1884, reaching a climax in the south of what has become known in our church annals as the Tennessee massacre.

For a number of years there had been brewing in the South a very bitter spirit against Mormon missionary work. There had been pending before Congress numerous propositions of national legislation against the people of Utah, based largely upon their marriage system. Some bills had become law, and the Supreme Court had passed upon the constitutionality. All this gave rise to mobocracy in many instances, resulting in some whippings and driving elders from their fields of labor. In the state of Georgia some two years previously Joseph Standing and Rudger Clawson were taken by a mob and Joseph Standing brutally killed, while Rudger Clawson narrowly escaped with his life. This fatal action had prompted attempts in other localities having the same objectives.

The Sunday previous to August the 10th some baptisms had taken place in Kane Creek District under the direction of Elder John H. Gibbs. This was the baptism of two young ladies, whose parents had consented to their joining the church, and a great throng had assembled at the river’s edge to witness the ceremony, Elder Gibbs performing the ordinance. As the candidates for baptism were led into the water and turning to look at the crowd before performing the ordinance, Elder Gibbs observed that many heads were covered. Noting this, he called their attention to the sacredness of the ordinance to be performed and plainly suggested that it would be becoming for all heads to be bared on such an occasion. All heads were uncovered, and he proceeded to the baptism of the young ladies.

Meantime the opposition was strenuously at work. There had been received from anti-Mormon sources in Utah a copy of an alleged address by one Bishop West at a small town in Juab County, Utah, which was represented as hostile and defiant of the United States government. It supposedly called for the vengeance of God to fall upon it and its representatives in Utah holding a federal office and altogether was violently sensational and altogether untrue, a faked canard, for it proved that there was no Bishop West and no such speech ever delivered. However, it was held as the truth by the anti-Mormon press in Utah and was widely scattered throughout the United States, but more especially in the South. The county papers in Lewis County reproduced it, and it started a wave of baseless opposition to the work of the elders. It was numerously circulated in the Kane Creek district and began the savage wounding of one. The circumstances in outline are as follows:

A meeting had been appointed by Elder Gibbs and his associate elders, five or six in number, at the home of Condor, whose home was on the bluff above the little stream of Kane Creek that winds through the valley of that name. It was a beautifully bright day in August and the brethren seated in the main living room of the Condor home had been singing hymns, one of which was:

When shall we all meet again,
When shall we our rest obtain
When our pilgrimage be o’er
Parting sighs be known no more.

And so followed several stanzas. The singing closed at about ten o’clock, the time at which the meeting was to be called. Elder Gibbs reached across the table for his Bible, saying as he did so, “That hymn suggests a text.” He began looking through the Bible for it. At that instant there was a rush across the narrow roadway from the elevated banks of Kane Creek opposite the house of masked men in Ku Klux Klan garb. This was a white sheet drawn together in a peeked hood, the sheet covering the entire body; in the hood were cut eye holes and space for breathing. It appears that the mob of some fifteen or eighteen persons had been concealed in the underbrush of the woods which lined Kane Creek at that point, and they apparently had timed their assault about the time the meeting was to begin.

The first man who rushed over the threshold of the Condor home turned to the elders seated at the table and shot down Elder Gibbs, and apparently he was instantly killed. The person who seemed to be the leader of the mob crossed the room to the fireplace, over which a Kentucky hunting rifle quite common in that hunting section of the South hung upon deer antlers. The people who had gathered to attend the meeting had not yet assembled in their capacity as a congregation but were out in the Condor orchard, where they were pleasantly visiting with each other and partaking of the ripening fruit at the invitation of the Condors. Others were out in the front of the house. The elderly Brother Condor was passing between the roadway and the doorstep at the front of the house and was leaning over the gate. As soon as the masked mobbets rushed from the underbrush to come through the gate to the house, he shouted at the top of his voice to the two sons of the family back in the orchard to come to the rescue of the elders. These two boys were both the sons of Sister Condor, one of them (Hudson, the older) was the son of a former husband, the other the son of Mr. Condor. A night or two before this event occurred, Sister Condor had dreamed of such an attack and Saturday afternoon had related the dream to the family. She had directed the two young men to be prepared to defend the elders if possible. Accordingly they had loaded their guns. One was the aforesaid hunting rifle above the fireplace. The leader of the mob had gone direct to secure it before either of the young Condors could obtain it. Hudson’s gun was up in the left of the dwelling room, and when they heard the shouting of their father that the mob was upon them, they rushed to the rear door of the house. Hudson, the older son, climbed the open stairway into the loft to get his gun, and the younger Condor tried to secure the gun hung over the fireplace, but he met face to face the leader of the mob with the gun already in his hands. Instantly the lad seized it. He was not yet twenty and began a struggle for its possession. Apparently he must have been getting the better of the struggle, which the mob leader recognized, and he drew from his waistband a pistol and shot the lad dead.

Meantime Hudson, having secured his gun from the loft, came down the open stairway with it in hand just as the mob leader had shot his brother. He then apparently rushed to leave the house by the front doorway, whereupon Hudson drew his gun in place and shot him, and he fell dead in the doorway. At this the cry was raised outside, “Hinson has been killed,” and the mob lingering around the house immediately rushed through the doors and drove their guns through the windows and began shooting indiscriminately. One of these shots was aimed at Elder Thompson, who was making his way to the rear door. Elder Berry was standing in the middle of the floor amidst this melee. A gun from behind him was thrust in, but with both hands he pushed it aside so that the shot entered the logs at the side of the door. Elder Thompson made his escape through the door and out into the wood-covered hills behind the house. In the promiscuous shooting into the house that followed the killing of Hinson, Brother Berry was shot down. Hudson was killed as he came down the open stairway right after he had shot Hinson, and old Sister Condor was savagely wounded in the hips.

Four of the elders, namely William S. Berry, Elder Thompson, John H. Gibbs, and William H. Jones, had spent the night at the home of Mr. Tom Garrett some two miles above Kane Creek from the Condor residence. Early on that fated Sabbath morning, Elders Gibbs, Berry, and Thompson walked down the little valley to the Condor residence, while Elder Jones remained at the Garrett home to finish reading a copy of the Deseret News, which during the week had arrived in the mail. Thus he did not make his way towards the Condor residence until an hour or two after the other brethren had gone. Just below the bluff on which the Condor residence stood, Kane Creek was crossed, a stream that usually was clear and between three and four feet deep at the crossing. The elders had gone through the trees and underbrush lining the creek about 100 yards, and there a Brother Michael Garn had cut down, leaving a high stump, a large cottonwood tree and felled it across the creek about one-half way up the bluff to the Condor residence. He had then trimmed it and flattened it as a foot bridge across the creek to the Condor side of the stream. This log bridge was considered quite wonderful by the people, and its constant use had made a pathway through the underbrush and the trees along the creek. Coming to where this pat...

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