Brigham Young

Brigham Young was born in Vermont in 1801, raised in poverty in upstate New York, and worked as a carpenter, glazier and painter with almost no formal schooling. He read the Book of Mormon in 1830, joined the movement in 1832, and was ordained to the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. His reputation was made on the British mission of 1839 to 1841, which he led and which brought several thousand converts into the church.

When Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage in June 1844 the movement had no settled rule of succession, and Young's achievement was to persuade the assembled Saints at Nauvoo that the Quorum of the Twelve, not Sidney Rigdon and not any individual claimant, held the authority. He then organised the evacuation of a city of some twelve thousand people under threat of violence, the winter encampment at Winter Quarters on the Missouri, and the crossing to the Great Basin, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley with the first company on 24 July 1847. He was ordained president of the church in December 1847.

Over the following thirty years he directed the founding of several hundred settlements from Idaho to southern California, established irrigation agriculture in a desert where nobody had farmed, planned and began the Salt Lake Temple, founded the university that became the University of Utah, and governed as territorial governor of Utah from 1851. He died in 1877.

Young's reputation is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is about substance rather than emphasis. Three matters carry most of it.

The racial teaching is his. Speaking to the Utah territorial legislature in 1852 he stated that men of Black African descent could not hold the priesthood, and the restriction that followed lasted until 1978 and extended to the temple ordinances. The church's 2013 Gospel Topics essay states that it began under Young rather than under Joseph Smith, that no revelation is known to have established it, and that the church disavows the explanations later offered for it.

Plural marriage was announced publicly under him, at Salt Lake City in August 1852, and he practised it on a large scale, marrying some fifty women over his lifetime, with fifty-six children by sixteen of them. The practice defined the church's relationship with the United States for the next four decades and led to the federal legislation and prosecutions that nearly destroyed it.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre of 11 September 1857, in which Latter-day Saint militia with some Paiute participants killed about a hundred and twenty emigrants from Arkansas, occurred during his governorship and in a territory he had put on a war footing against a federal army. The fullest modern account, published by Oxford University Press in 2008 by three historians with unrestricted access to church records, concludes that local leaders planned and carried out the killing and that Young did not order it, while treating the climate he had created as part of the explanation. That conclusion is accepted by most historians and rejected by some.