Saturday, June 12, 2021

Eliza R. Snow Comforting the Saints During the Civil War

 

 

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)