Doggetto.com

In August of 1844 the Church was reeling. Joseph Smith had been murdered at the Carthage jail months before and there was a serious power vacuum in Nauvoo. To make matters worse, Anti-Mormon sentiment in Illinois had not died down and seemed to be continuing to rise. The Church needed direction and leadership, but Joseph had not instructed the general membership of the Church as to what would happen to the Church after his death and had only privately left instructions for some people (like the Twelve). Joseph’s death had been sudden and unexpected and questions abounded: What of the Nauvoo Temple, still to be completed? What to do to lessen the lingering anti-Mormon feelings in Illinois? Should Nauvoo be fortified against attack or should they prepare to leave? Where would they go? If they left how would they sell their homes and their land; what would their creditors think? How should the Church deal with the massive debt it was in?

All of those questions centered, however, upon one all-encompassing question: Who’s in charge?

There were many different people who could have filled the void left behind by Joseph Smith. Most members of the Church had heard Joseph publicly say that, if Joseph ever died, his brother Hyrum would lead the Church. Hyrum had died with Joseph at Carthage. Some others had insisted that Joseph’s oldest son, Joseph Smith III, had been given a patriarchal blessing which announced he would be the next Prophet. James Jesse Strang, a recent convert, had been called by Joseph to establish a Stake of Zion in Wisconsin and announced that this call, combined with an angelic visitation directly after Joseph’s death, was his calling to lead the Church to their new home in Wisconsin. Sidney Ridgon returned from Pennsylvania (where he had been called to go by Joseph Smith) and claimed leadership based on his membership in the First Presidency. Some of the Apostles felt that the Council of Fifty, a religious/political organization organized by Joseph Smith, was the highest governing body of the Church and should lead the Church until a new President could be called. Other Apostles felt that the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles should fit that role.

Brigham Young returned to Nauvoo on August 6 from a mission and immediately took charge. On August 8 an outdoor conference was assembled at which Sidney Rigdon was invited to speak. At this conference, Brigham Young addressed the crowd that was gathered and spoke strongly for the leadership of the Quorum of the Twelve. So strong was his speaking that of a group of hundreds only twenty raised their hands to sustain President Rigdon as the leader of the Church.

Most Church members in the crowd that day did not write their feelings or experiences. Of the few that later did, some reported that they had received a spiritual witness that Brigham Young and the rest of the Twelve were divinely appointed to lead the Church.

A few months later we have the first journal accounts of what that witness might have been for some present.

On 15 November 1844, Henry and Catharine Brooke wrote from Nauvoo that Brigham Young “favours Br Joseph, both in person, & manner of speaking more than any person ever you saw, looks like another.” (D. Michael Quinn, “Succession Crisis”, BYU Studies 16, no. 2 (1976) p 18)

Over the next few months the list of accounts grows and, once the Saints had arrived in Utah, exploded. Over 120 people recorded that they had either seen or heard (or both) Brigham Young transfigured to look and/or sound like Joseph Smith while speaking.

For early Utah Mormons these accounts provided an impressive divine proof of Brigham Young’s prophetic mantle. However, the lack of a single contemporary account (i.e., anything written within a few weeks of the August 8th meeting) has caused some people to question whether the transfiguration of Brigham Young was seen by many people (a few antagonistic historians would even question whether the event happened at all and simply represents a “fish tale” that grew with each retelling).

As Kevin Barney writes in a FARMS review of a book detailing the witnesses of the account:

“Does it really matter whether numerous Saints saw something of Joseph in Brigham that day? What truly matters is that the keys were passed from Joseph to Brigham, not whether Brigham was perceived as Joseph.”

I recall that, at the MHA [Mormon History Association] meetings in Kirtland a few years ago, in a session on Joseph Smith biography, this topic of the passing of the mantle of the Prophet from Joseph to Brigham came up, and the discussion that ensued was a sort of microcosm of the different approaches taken to this issue. Someone in the audience mentioned that the Saints all perceived Joseph in Brigham that day. This is probably a common, if simplistic, view of the event. The assumption is that everyone had this experience and that we must have good contemporaneous evidence of that fact. Then someone raised his hand and challenged the original comment, with the perspective that there is no evidence that the event occurred at all, that it is a sort of Mormon urban legend. Finally, a number of people, referencing the Jorgensen article from BYU Studies, gave a more realistic recounting of the experience. Most people present at that event did not make a written record of the day’s events at all, and the accounts of the transformation of Brigham that we do have are later recollections, not contemporaneous accounts. But, with those limitations understood, we actually do have a substantial number of accounts by individuals who did in some way perceive Joseph in Brigham. The more cautious approach to the event suggested by the documentation collected by Jorgensen takes us on a course between the naive simplicity of youthful assumptions and the nihilistic cynicism of one who has been burned by such expectations one too many times.” (Kevin Barney, “Review of Opening the Heavens”, The FARMS Review 18/2 (2006) p. 186-187.)

The middle road is that we should be cautious whenever we use the account of Brigham’s transfiguration. Even Brigham Young himself was uncertain whether it happened: “Brother Carrington’s testimony proves to you that men’s eyes are liable to be deceived. It may appear strange to some that he could not tell me from Joseph Smith, when I was speaking in the stand in Nauvoo during the October Conference [President Young is probably mistaken on the date of this conference; it took place in August, nearly thirteen years before] of 1844. Somebody came along and passed a finger over his eyes and he could not see any one but Joseph speaking, until I got through addressing the congregation.” (19 July 1857, J.D. vol. 5, p. 57-58)

While most probably saw nothing of the sort, at least some people had a spiritual manifestation of Brigham’s call and saw Brigham Young as Joseph Smith; what an experience and a witness that must have been!