Posted by:
Phazer
(
)
Date: October 20, 2014 03:07PM
I also found the ordination of John Willard at 11 years old disturbing. He didn't take an active role in the priesthood body until a decade later. Young was trying to get his legacy to still have some form of control/power after BY was long gone. The atempt failed.
More details:
"Young also cultivated as leaders his three sons by Mary Ann Angell: Joseph Angell, Brigham Jr. (“ Briggy”), and John Willard. It was clear as early as 1855 that Young was thinking about their future place in the church hierarchy. That year, he ordained to the apostleship eleven-year-old John Willard, the first son born to Young after his endowments and sealing to Mary Ann. John Willard did not assume any active role as an apostle until the following decade; for the time being, his ordination remained unknown to nearly all church members."
"In 1864, Young privately ordained his two oldest sons— Joseph and Briggy—as apostles and then “set apart” his three apostolic sons as “assistant counselors ” within the church’s First Presidency, privately bestowing high ecclesiastical authority on them. Despite their ordinations, none of Young’s sons had received a place within the Quorum of the Twelve until Brigham Jr. filled an opening in 1868. It remained unclear to many church members whether seniority among the apostles rested upon ordination as an apostle, ordination into the Quorum of the Twelve, or uninterrupted service within that quorum. In any event, Young’s private ordinations of his sons— especially John Willard—seemed designed to make it likely that at least one of them would one day hold his father’s office." 25
"Of course, Young’s sons had to choose whether to embrace their given roles. By his own account, Brigham Jr. was “wild” as a young man. Despite later stories about the church president interrupting his children’s youthful courtships, Young was not a parental killjoy. “I would rather,” Young stated, “my children would spend their early life sliding down Hill, skating, riding Horses, & not go to school one day.” His own childhood had been devoid of both recreation and schooling. While he wanted his children to obtain both, he valued the former— along with practical experience— more highly. Young did not overly worry when his children engaged in adolescent antics and youthful frivolities, as Briggy had done. By his mid-twenties, Briggy had decided to walk more closely in his father’s path, and by the late 1860s all three elder sons became key business associates of their father."
"In 1873, Young formalized the inner circle of advisers he had come to trust. At the church’s semiannual conference in April, John W. and Brigham Jr. were publicly sustained as “assistant counselors” to their father, along with Lorenzo Snow, Albert Carrington, and George Q. Cannon." 26
In 1874 and 1875, Young was staggered by the deaths of several beloved family members and close advisers.
....Young received the news that his eldest son Joseph Angell had died unexpectedly of “congestive chills.” Unlike brothers Brigham Jr. and John Willard, Joseph Angell had not become a member of the Quorum of the Twelve or the First Presidency. It is possible that Joseph’s role in the railroad schemes that had produced so much financial distress caused his father to lose some confidence in him.
In 1875, Joseph’s wife Clara Stenhouse wrote her father-in-law that Joseph had recently dedicated himself to serving the church in Sevier County “as his only redemption from past follies.” Clara added that Joseph’s efforts were straining his health but that her husband desperately wanted his father’s “approbation.” When Brigham tasked him with overseeing the construction of a planned temple in Manti, Joseph felt the satisfaction of receiving his father’s approval . His sudden death cut short those efforts. 27
Young rarely showed outward grief and discouraged public displays of mourning. He had kept his tears to himself after Joseph Smith’s death, and he did not participate in deathbed vigils for his first wife Miriam or his father. When his daughter Mary Eliza Croxall (by Clarissa Ross) died in 1871 , a “shocked” and sickened Young cancelled all business and simply remained inside for a day. As the summer of 1875 drew to a close, though, Young’s emotions were unusually ragged. One month after Joseph Angell’s death, George A. Smith died. For four decades , Smith and Young had been at the center of the church’s history: the 1834 Zion’s Camp march, the 1840– 1841 mission to England, the tumultuous events of Nauvoo, and the exodus. At his friend’s funeral, Young uncharacteristically wept. 28
The Salt Lake Tribune mercilessly lampooned Young’s two remaining eldest sons, Brigham Jr. and John Willard, as unworthy beneficiaries of nepotism. Mocking him as “porcine Prince Briggy” or simply the “Fat Boy,” the Tribune reported with glee on Briggy’s girth and purported violations of the Word of Wisdom, namely an apparent fondness for Havana cigars. 29
Brigham Jr. remained a steadfastly obedient son and frequently traveled with his father, but the more magnetic and eloquent John Willard (“ Apostate Johnny,” per the Tribune) 30 preferred to operate at a distance from Utah and his father. Dapper and mustached, alternately prosperous and penniless, he frustrated his creditors and distressed his father. John Willard’s letters are filled with vows to return to Utah after settling his affairs, but the tug of business always pulled him east again. On more than one occasion, Young paid John Willard’s debts to induce him to actively assume ecclesiastical leadership and remain in Zion. “I want you here,” Young concluded a December 1875 letter to John Willard. Pleading with his son to come home from New York City, Young added a handwritten postscript: “O Jonna I pr[ a] y for you and yours continuly. If you nue [knew] how I want to see you, you would come. my dear Jonna, I due hope you will see as we see thing[ s]. I send your dear Br Brigham & Br [William] Stanes to prevale on you to come home and stay with us. m[ a] y god Bles my d[ e] ar Boy.” When John Willard returned in February, Brigham Jr. wrote in his diary that “Father & Mother welcomed their son for whom they had longed especially since the death of Jos. A.” 31
Given former assumptions about Joseph Smith’s children, Young’s earlier creation of familial tribes , and themes of kingship and priesthood royalty within Mormon theology, it was widely assumed that Young wanted either John Willard or Brigham Jr. to succeed him. Further stoking such speculation was Young’s choice of John Willard to replace George A. Smith as his First Counselor. With Brigham Jr. assisting, Young privately ordained John Willard to that position in March 1876, a decision affirmed at the church’s October conference. Many years later, the apostle Joseph F. Smith told Charles Nibley that he had suggested Brigham Jr. as a wiser choice. Smith’s bold statement prompted a predictably sharp response from Young: “I have got Brigham and I have got you and I want John W.” Perhaps sensing others might share Joseph F. Smith’s objection, on the day after the announcement of John Willard’s elevation Young preached a sermon on Jacob receiving his father’s blessing instead of his older brother Esau.
As was nearly always the case, Young got his way. John Willard seems to have expected to be his father’s successor, but he did not have the respect of other church leaders. Perhaps with that in mind, while he clearly hoped that one of them would eventually lead the church,Young did not try to engineer the immediate succession of either son.32
Sources:=============================================
25 . Todd Compton, “John Willard Young, Brigham Young, and the Development of Presidential Succession in the LDS Church,” Dialogue 35 (Winter 2002): 111– 134.
26 . “would rather” in WWJ, 1 Jan. 1861, 5: 536. On Brigham Young Jr., see Davis Bitton, The Ritualization of Mormon History and other Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), ch. 7.
29 . SLT, 3 Jan. 1877 and 13 Jan. 1878.
30 . SLT, 23 Sept. 1877.
32 . Brigham Young Jr. Journal, 14 March 1876, Box 2, Folder 7; Nibley, Reminiscences of Charles W. Nibley, 1849– 1931, privately published in 1934, copy at CHL; WWJ, 8 Oct. 1876, 7: 286.
Turner, John G. (2012-09-25). Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (pp. 382-383). Harvard University Press. Page 382 - 385