Monday, August 30, 2021

Susa Young Gates (1856-1933) on her Father's (Brigham Young) Initial Reactions to Plural Marriage

  

Like other proud beings, we shrink from lifting the veil which enfolds the sanctity of our home life. However, when the motive prompting inquiry is one of deep interest, I can put aside the feelings of nature, and for the sake of truth and to vindicate the memory of my idolised father and mother, I am glad to set down here some facts and items. And let me speak as the daughter and not as the historian! For the things about which I am to write are the priceless memory of a carefree childhood, a happy joyous youth and a long life of deep satisfaction.

 

The principle of plural marriage was adopted by my father as it was taught him by the Prophet Joseph Smith, after great inner struggle and earnest prayer, as has been told in a former chapter. His strict puritanical training ill-fitted hm to accept such a doctrine. He foresaw—as who would not—the storm of abuse and opposition which such action would arouse. And it was as death to him.

 

He told my mother once that he brooded and sorrowed for months, unreconciled in reason, yet converted in his spirit to its truth. And when he saw a funeral procession pass his door, he cried out in the bitterness of his soul: “O, that I could exchange places with the one who lies in that quiet coffin!”

 

Finally converted to the principle, he did not doubt the future, himself, nor God. But the fact remains that the men and women who entered into that relationship in early days, did so from purely religious motives. It was a high and sacred undertaking with them, involving much suffering and sacrifice on the part of both men and women. We say this, we who ought to know; we who were born under its influence and who owe our lives to the parents who lived in practised this principle in righteousness. That all men in those days did not live it in righteousness does not alter its being held as a sacrament. Are all monogamous marriages rightly lived and wholly successful? The majority of the relatively few who practised this order of marriage did so with righteous motives. Of that fact I can bear witness.

 

Some of my father’s wives were married to him in Nauvoo, Illinois, by the Prophet himself, as I have heard him testify and as the Nauvoo records prove. After the Prophet’s death others were married to him in Winter Quarters, where the saints were resting after being driven from Nauvoo. On the arrival in the Valley, my father, after the necessary interval in log houses, built good homes for his loved wives. The “White House” sufficed for “Mother” Young and her large family. The Bee Hive House was used as his official residence from the first. There he had his private office, entertained callers, and carried on his public affairs that were not prosecuted in the Church offices which were built next to the Bee Hive House. (Susa Young Gates, The Life Story of Brigham Young [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930], 321-22)