Although Latter-day
Saints in Utah Territory were geographically separated from the horrific
battles between North and South, they felt the war’s impact. In her Fourth of July
and other poems, Eliza expressed sorrow at the fratricide. She and other
Latter-day Saints struggled with profound disillusionment with their country.
In Missouri, Illinois, and now in Utah Territory, state and federal officials
had failed to protect Saints’ lives, rights, and property. Maintaining hope in
the nation’s founding ideals, Eliza came to see the Saints as the true
guardians of peace and liberty in a time of national bloodshed:
Fight on, if fight
you will: At length
The North and South, alike will feel,
With all their boast, in martial strength,
Protection is not made of steel.
Here, without bloodshed, is maintain’d
The freedom patriots prize most dear.
Not “might,” but Truth and Right have gain’d
In peace a “glorious triumph” here.
Against this backdrop
of war, Eliza valued the blessing of living in peace in Zion. She rallied the
Saints by reaffirming the most basic truths and reminding them of what they
stood for as a people. For the rest of her life, as she continued to proclaim
the sanctity of liberty and of the United States Constitution, she celebrated
the distinctive Mormon culture developing in the Great basin: a covenant community
with a temple at its center, led by prophets of God, interconnected by extended
family and ecclesiastical networks, and replenished by outgoing missionaries,
incoming immigrants, and multiplying wards and villages. Eliza proclaimed the
Saints, with their peculiar blend of theocracy and democracy, to be the “saving
remnant,” offering to a fractured nation the promise of “Liberty, Peace, and
Salvation.”
The peace Eliza felt
in her “home in the west” stemmed from her continuing faith in the restored
gospel of Christ and her understanding of it, as well as from her connections
to the Saints in Zion. Indeed, her devotion to the restored gospel seems interwoven
with her love for the Saints who were engaged in building Zion. Her warm
feelings for friends and family, and theirs for her, sustained her over the
years, and she often wrote of the power of such love to bless the human family.
She wrote to a friend, “I think there is no possible danger of you loving [your
baby daughter] too much . . . The idea of our loving innocent beings too much,
is, I think, a mistaken one—it belongs to sectarianism and not to pure christianity”
(Eliza R. Snow to Rhoda Ann Richards, July 29, 1863). (Karen Lynn Davidson and
Jill Mulvay Derr, Eliza: The Life and Faith of Eliza R. Snow [Salt Lake
City: Deseret Book, 2013], 101-2)
