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2. Splintered Saints and the Temple, 1844–1900
- University of Illinois Press
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2 Splintered Saints and the Temple, 1844–1900 During the winter of 1879–80, a writer for Lippincott’s Magazine, Frederic G. Mather, visited the Kirtland Temple and wrote a detailed account of the then half-century-old building. On a tour of the temple led by an RLDS member, Mather was struck by a sign prominently posted on a wall in the temple’s upper court and copied it into his notes: THE SALT LAKE MORMONS.—When Joseph Smith was killed on June 27,1844,Brigham Young assumed the leadership of the Church,telling the people in the winter of 1846 that all the God they wanted was him,and all the Bible they wanted was in his heart. He led or drove about two thousand people to Utah in 1847, starting for Upper California and landing at Salt Lake, where, in 1852, Brigham Young presented the Polygamic Revelation to the people. The True Church remained disorganized till 1860, when Joseph Smith took the leadership or Presidency of the Church at Amboy, Illinois. We (thirty thousand) have no affiliation with the Mormons whatever. They are to us an apostate people, working all manner of abomination before God and man. We are no part or parcel of them in any sense whatever. Let this be distinctly understood: we are not Mormons. Truth is truth, wherever it is found.1 Even at this early date, the Kirtland Temple served as a stage to air the differences between the new RLDS movement and their Utah cousins. RLDS members literally inscribed such differences on the temple itself. The RLDS church, though, was a relative latecomer to the Kirtland Temple. In the first two decades after 1844, the temple passed through the hands of many different Latter-day Saint groups. James Colin Brewster had a congregation in the temple, as did William McLellin’s short-lived Church of Christ in the late 1840s and early 1850s. For a time in the 1850s, 2. Splintered Saints and the Temple 39 a group loyal to Sidney Rigdon met in the temple, as did a later group loyal to Brigham Young. Kirtland resident and Book of Mormon plates witness Martin Harris joined several successive groups, with each holding conferences or meeting for services in the temple during the 1850s and 1860s. In 1857, William Smith, Joseph Smith’s last surviving brother, also attempted to organize a movement from Kirtland.2 Yet, by 1858,William Smith’s group was imploding, due in part to the revelations that William Smith had polygamously cohabited with a sixteen-year-old woman. All the other major Latter Day Saint factions based in the Midwest tottered on the verge of collapse, too, as leaders died or engaged in internecine fights that split their factions further. This left a vacuum for a new group to fill. In the 1860s,the first members of the RLDS began meeting in the Kirtland Temple.Called originally the “New Organization,”the church was composed mostly of midwestern Saints who opposed plural marriage and supported lineal succession—the notion that Joseph Smith should be succeeded by members from his family.In 1860,Joseph Smith III,the oldest son of the slain Mormon prophet, accepted leadership of the new denomination. At the time, it numbered only a few hundred,with membership mainly in Illinois and Wisconsin. Under Joseph Smith III’s leadership,the church incorporated other dissenting factions and grew to over 70,000 members by Joseph Smith III’s death in 1914.3 Although greatly outnumbered by the larger LDS church in Utah,the RLDS church proved a durable competitor to its western cousin. Factional Interactions and Kirtland Temple Interpreters, 1850–1880 Even as the RLDS church in the Midwest cobbled together a new organization in the 1850s and 1860s, it did not possess a strong membership in Kirtland. Though the temple itself was used by many different groups in this era, it mainly stood empty on any given Sunday. The infrequent use of the temple led to a belief that the building had fallen into disrepair. Joseph Smith III passed through Kirtland on his way to Washington, D.C., in 1866 and later remembered that the temple was “in a very deplorable and dilapidated condition. The curtains were all torn down, the seats and other furniture broken or gone, and the basement open for the free ingress and egress of sheep and hogs that found shelter therein.”4 A longtime resident remembered that in the 1850s “the doors...