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Brigham Young: American Moses

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This book is the summing-up of Leonard Arrington's great career as the father of the New Mormon History, that renaissance of candor during the '60's and '70's. He had full access to the massive church archives in Salt Lake by virtue of his appointment as Church Historian, something no other biographer of Brigham could get. He used this access, his training as one of America's finest historians, and his own moderate yet faithful temprament to produce the definitive book on Brigham--one that could satisfy the strictest canons of his profession and also could be faithful to his religious tradition. Arrington wrote with loving yet open eyes, and this book belongs on the shelf of everyone who enjoys Western Americana.

Brigham Young was undoubtedly one of the most intriguing leaders of the 19th century. There exist many biographies on him, most of which are not worth your time. This book, however, is a notable exception. Possessing a talent for objectivity that is all too rare in biographical literature, and much less when religion or personal values are involved, Arrington presents the story of the life of Brigham Young in a real sense. He achieves what so many cannot--the ability to evaluate the man in an unbiased way and still be true to his beliefs (Arrington was a member of the Mormon church). The author does a wonderful job of presenting Young as a human being, complete with faults and failures. In so doing, however, the dignity and majesty of his character are in no way compromised. The facts and events of his life are presented as they really occurred, without the taint of bias or speculation, and should be informative and unoffensive to Mormon and non-Mormon alike. For a true in-depth look in the life of this modern Moses, this book is definitely worth your time.

This biography proves to be a very informative life account of one of the great leaders of the LDS as well as one of the prime movers of the American West. But Leonard Arrington avoids the major controversies that surrounded Brigham Young, exhorting on his virtures rather then his faults. While that does not make a bad biography, it doesn't show us the complete man. Arrington make it clear that Young was the right man for the right job at the right moment in history. Without his leadership, intelligence and gusto, the Mormon church probably won't have survived the death of Joseph Smith, its founder. Arrington revealed how talented, how skilled and how devoted Young was to his church and how he put all he had into it. But what Arrington failed to get into, was some of Young's failings which must be just as important as his accomplishments. Arrington played into the traditional Mormon defense on Mountain Meadow Massacre, doesn't question Young's devotion to plural marriages which often rallied the rest of the nation against the Mormons and Young's racist attitudes - especically toward blacks that the LDS Church didn't resolved until the 1970s. Although these are just examples, they presented long term problems that Young left behind and they should have been address by the author. But overall, its still a good biography and worth the effort in reading it and understanding the basic essence of the man.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s no one was more important in advancing the cause of Mormon history than Leonard J. Arrington. Prolific personally, and encouraging of others, he is best known for a path-breaking book "Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900" (Harvard University Press, 1958), but "Brigham Young: American Moses" is a close second. This is a work of great maturity and sophistication. On rereading it twenty years after it was first published, it remains unsurpassed as a biographical treatment of this remarkable Mormon leader. In it Arrington tells the life story of Brigham Young, an early convert to Mormonism and the leader of the largest group of Mormonism to emerge from the split that took place within the church at the time of the assassination of Joseph Smith in 1844. As president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles Young had a powerful position from which to exert influence over the churc. At first he asserted leadership only as president of the Twelve, and was only ordained to the presidency in 1847.

But it is what Young did afer the 1844 succession crisis in Mormonism that is most important. He realized that the Latter-day Saints had to depart the United States to enjoy their peculiar version of theocracy with esoteric temple rituals, plural marriage, and a millennial expectation of the destruction of all earthly governments and the establishment of a "Kingdom of God" on Earth. He led the Mormons to the Rocky Mountains, hence Arrington's characterization of him as the "American Moses," arriving in the Great Basin in 1847 and establishing Salt Lake City beside the lake from which it took its name. For a decade he aggressively expanded his Mormon kingdom in the mountains, but in 1857 he faced down a U.S. Army sent to bring the Mormons under control and he avoided all-out war only through negotiations that allowed both sides to live with the situation. Much married and with many children, Young lived another twenty years after that confrontation. He saw his church expand in numbers and influence, suffer under pressure to end the practice of plural marriage (which it would finally officially do in 1890), and to enjoy much easier transportation with the completion of the Transcontinental railroad in 1869. Young finally died in 1877.

Arrington's biography is an example of "faithful history," a genre of Mormon history that is honest but also highly enthused with the ideas and ethos of the LDS faith. It is a book that most Mormons would be quite happy with, but one that does not whitewash difficult issues. For instance, Arrington deals with the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 in which Mormons in southern Utah engaged in the killing of all of the adults in a wagon train bound for California. Some think Young was the mastermind of this horrific event, but Arrington demonstrates that he did not order\ it. He did help to cover it up, however, and Arrington acknowledges that it was "The most tragic event in Mormon history" (p. 257).

This is a most welcome work of history. It is a compelling story well told. It is also very much Arrington's Brigham Young. With unprecedented access to the archives of the Mormon Church, because of his role as Church Historian, Arrington created a portrait of a poorly-educated man of the people who was rational, even-handed, practical, diligent in his work, and faithful to the tenets of Mormonism as he understood them. There is no question but that this is the Brigham Young that Arrington would have happily followed; it is neither the unlettered tyrant and reprobate of anti-Mormon conceptions nor the saccharine depictions of simplistic devotional literature.

There is a sense of irony in this book that bears mention. "Brigham Young: American Moses" was written using the voluminous primary source materials available at the LDS Church Archives. No one has enjoyed such unfettered access and Arrington notes in this book that "they have since been closed to researchers, and it will not be possible for readers of this book to check out every source I have used" (p. 433). This grated on Arrington, for he spent his career campaigning for greater openness. He always believed that LDS members had nothing to fear from their history. Honest accounts would show people struggling to live their lives within the context of their faiths, and not always succeeding but still trying. For Arrington this struggle gave him hope that his own failings would be forgiven, and he was the first to admit them. He also believed the same would be true for others. His account of Young's life is an example of this endeavor, as Brigham Young is neither a saint nor a demon.

This is as near to a definitive work as one is ever likely to read about Brigham Young, and it will be quite a long time before it is seriously challenged as a benchmark in the historiography of Mormonism. Its insights are impressive.

The name Brigham Young conjures up many images of the unsettled West. He was one of the greatest religious colonizers of the nineteenth century. The reason is the overall fact that he was so successful. Much of the Eastern images dealt mainly with his polygamous relationships. This unfortunately overlooks his major contributions as founder of over 300 settlements in the West's Great Basin. He gathered the beleaguered Mormons, from Missouri, Illinois and the World, home to the Rocky Mountains. Leonard Arrington, late LDS Church Historian, has compiled a fairly objective account of his life. From Brigham's early conversion to Mormonism through the migration to the Salt Lake Valley to his settling the Utah range, here is a history of a very interesting man. As LDS President, Prophet , Territory Governor and Indian Agent, Brigham displayed a very practical and pragmatic philosophy. Arrington show us a man that truly was faithful to Joseph Smith. Not only did he preach and read scripture but he practiced what he preached. This was no better emphasized than on Sunday October 5, 1856 when he stood and delivery the opening address of the semiannual general conference. He said "I will now give this people the subject and the text for the Elders who may speak today and during the conference. It is this....Many of our brethren and sisters are on the Plains (Wyoming snows) with handcarts, and probably many are now seven hundred miles from this place. They must be brought here, we must send assistance to them. The text will be to get them here!..I will tell you all that your faith, religion and profession of religion will not save one soul of you in the celestial kingdom of our God unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you. Go and bring in those people on the Plains and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal..."
The effects of this speech were that during the conference 27 young men and 16 mule teams were out on the trail to start the rescue. Throughout his life Brigham emphasized that the spiritual and temporal were inclusive entities that needed daily careful maintenance.

Arrington emphasized that not all the programs that Brigham Young started were successful but that indirectly they lead to a cohesive ethnic society. He had many verbal wars with Washington over statehood, judges and the slow money to cover Indian affairs. Arrington doesn't shy away from the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Brigham's desire to settle this affair or with his confrontations with apostle Orson Pratt. The one area that I wish Arrington would have covered more was the Mormon War or Buchanan's Blunder, but overall I felt he covered Brigham Young well. Anyone interested in the settling of the West needs to include Brigham Young in that study. Well worth recommending and adding to the history shelf.

Leonard Arrington (1917-1999) was the founder of the Mormon History Association, and was the Church Historian from 1972-1982 (when the Church transferred his History Division to BYU in 1982, bringing the era of open Church Archives to a close). This book had been projected to be the first of a series of 16 volumes of "New Mormon History"; unfortunately, the Church shut this project down, and this was the only volume released. (See his book, Adventures of a Church Historian, for an account.)

He writes in the Preface to this 1986 book, "if we humans cannot achieve the absolute justice that we attribute to divine omniscience, we can try to be fair, to seek balance in our understanding, and to exert the kind of empathy that we ourselves would hope for if our own lives were being examined by someone who has not lived in our skin. This is what I have tried to do in 'Brigham Young: American Moses.'"

Here are some quotations from the book:

"(H)e was a complex person--neither a saint nor a devil. Once cannot romanticize him, as his family has tended to do." (Pg. xvi-xvii)
"Brigham was even more circumspect than his father in personal conduct, considering it his duty to control all passions, and, though he came to use tobacco, he abstained from liquor." (Pg. 23)
"Brigham Young could sometimes think that 'Joseph (Smith) was not right in his financial management.' But he dismissed the thought quickly: ...I clearly saw and understood, by the spirit of revelation manifested to me, that if I was to harbor a thought in my heart that Joseph could be wrong in anything, I would begin to lose confidence in him... until at least I would have the same lack of confidence in his being the mouthpiece for the Almighty.'" (Pg. 59)
"Although there is some evidence that Smith (and possibly Cowdery as well) married plural wives in Kirtland, he unquestionably began to introduce the principle to some associates in the spring of 1841... Quietly, hesitatingly, in private conversations with each apostle, Joseph explained that he now believed plural marriage to be a divine requirement... After a few weeks of study, conversation, and prayer, Brigham reluctantly accepted the doctrine." (Pg. 100-102)
"Did (Brigham) have an interior life of rich spirituality? The answer is probably yes, based upon two clues. He did pray--in private, in his family circle, and in council meetings and congregations. And he was a devoted participant in temple ceremonies. There Brigham, removed from the ordinary routine of life, would experience an approach to God." (Pg. 201)
"On the basis of Lee's report, which he had no reason to discredit, Brigham reported ... that this 'lamentable' occurrence (the Mountain Meadows Massacre) was 'only the natural consequence of that fatal policy which treats the Indians like the wolves or other ferocious beasts.' Only many months later, from seemingly casual conversations with trusted associates, did Brigham learn the horrible truth that the members of the Iron County Militia, Mormons all, were full participants in the massacre." (Pg. 260)
"It is clear that Brigham's dream of establishing a homogeneous cooperative community did not come to fruition. Many Saints felt that, while the United Order may have been a step in the right direction, it was unduly confining and restrictive of economic freedom." (Pg. 381)

I have read much about LDS church history and Brigham Young and have read many of his writings, but have never read a full length biography of his life. This work was highly recommended from almost all sources, so I grabbed a copy of it.

This book met my expectations. It covered a lot a material that I knew about, but also covered things about Young's life concerning which I knew little. The book was well written and kept my interest. Arrington does a good job assimilating the huge amount of information that he had into this biography. I have read some of his other works and have always been impressed with his presentation.

I really like how Brigham was presented as a human being. He had his weaknesses and strengths and they were offered in a manner that LDS would not be offended and non-LDS could see the real man.

I was also fascinated by one of the appendices that covered the settlement of Brigham Young's estate after his death. I hadn't realized how his assets were intertwined with the church's assets to avoid the punitive property ownership laws that were imposed against the church due to polygamy. It created somewhat of a mess to clean up and separate the family and church property.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn more about Brigham Young's life. What he accomplished in settling the west was phenomenal. His influence not only impacted the LDS church, but also the entire west.

This is certainly by far the best biography ever written on a very important figure in western American history. It is very well documented. Arrington does not skip the controversies, it is all layed out. I certainly came away with a greater understanding of Brigham Young. Leonard Arrington was the head of the Mormon churches hisorical department for years and had a great influence on many Mormon historians to write honest and concise history. My only criticism is sometimes Arrington overly discusses economics in Utah rather then other aspects of Brigham Youngs life. Overall though it is great!

Arrington undertakes to transform Brigham Young from caricature to flesh and blood human being and does so brilliantly. From his earliest days to the culmination of his life and power as absolute leader of the Utah Mormons, the author weaves a tapestry that gives context to events and actions that not only formed one of the great American leaders, but his church as well. Particularly interesting is the genesis of many of the doctrinal and social peculiarities of the modern Mormons. Recommended for any student of the history of the American West or of Mormonism.

This is certainly by far the best biography ever written on a very important figure in western American history. It is very well documented. Arrington does not skip the controversies, it is all layed out. I certainly came away with a greater understanding of Brigham Young. Leonard Arrington was the head of the Mormon churches hisorical department for years and had a great influence on many Mormon historians to write honest and concise history. My only criticism is sometimes Arrington overly discusses economics in Utah rather then other aspects of Brigham Youngs life. Overall though it is great!