A non-commercial history and commentary project examining what happened after Joseph Smith Jr.’s 1844 death, Brigham Young’s documented record as leader of the Utah church, and why a separate body of Latter Day Saints -- the Reorganization, now Community of Christ -- took a different path.
When Joseph Smith Jr. was killed in June 1844, no successor had been publicly and unambiguously named, and several leaders claimed the right to lead the movement he founded. Brigham Young, senior member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, won leadership of the largest group at a Nauvoo conference that August and led most of that body west to Utah beginning in 1846 -- the body that became The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A separate group -- concentrated in the Midwest and including Joseph Smith’s widow, Emma Smith -- rejected Young’s claim and stayed behind. In 1860 they organized around Joseph Smith III, the founder’s eldest son, on the premise that leadership belonged to the Smith family line. That body became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, renamed Community of Christ in 2001.
Joseph Smith had introduced plural marriage privately. Brigham Young institutionalized it as public church practice and expanded it dramatically -- historians document Young himself as having roughly 55 wives. The church did not formally disavow new plural marriages until the 1890 Manifesto, issued by Wilford Woodruff more than a decade after Young’s 1877 death, under mounting pressure from federal anti-polygamy legislation (the Morrill, Edmunds, and Edmunds-Tucker Acts).
Widely documented in mainstream historical scholarship on 19th-century Mormonism and in the church's own published histories.Joseph Smith ordained at least one Black man, Elijah Abel, an elder, in 1836. Under Brigham Young, Black men were barred from priesthood ordination and Black members were denied full temple participation, a restriction Young articulated publicly during his tenure. It continued for 126 years, until 1978. In 2013 the LDS Church published its "Race and the Priesthood" Gospel Topics essay, formally disavowing the theories once used to justify the restriction.
See: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Race and the Priesthood," Gospel Topics essay, 2013.A church formally disavowing its own past teaching, in its own words, in 2013 is worth sitting with: it means the restriction wasn't a peripheral cultural artifact, it was doctrine, taught and defended for over a century, and it took until living memory to undo. Elijah Abel's ordination was never treated as void by the Reorganization; he affiliated with that church in 1872 after the Utah church had already excluded men like him.
On September 11, 1857, a Utah militia led by local church leader John D. Lee massacred roughly 120 emigrants of the Baker-Fancher wagon train in southern Utah. Brigham Young was Utah's territorial governor at the time. The most rigorous study of the event, a 2008 book co-authored by historians working with LDS Church archives, concludes Young did not order the massacre and in fact sent word to let the emigrants pass in peace -- a message that arrived two days too late. His administration then obstructed the federal investigation for close to two decades; only Lee was ever prosecuted, and he was executed at the massacre site in 1877. In 2007, on the 150th anniversary, the LDS Church formally acknowledged local church leaders' role and expressed "profound regret."
See: Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glenn M. Leonard, "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" (Oxford University Press, 2008); LDS Church statement, September 2007.We include the exculpatory finding -- that Young probably didn't order it -- because leaving it out would misrepresent the historical consensus. What remains true either way: it happened under his governorship, in a climate of inflamed rhetoric his administration had helped produce, and his government spent nearly twenty years making sure almost no one but a scapegoat was held responsible. Acknowledging complexity is not the same as absolution.
Young governed Utah Territory with church and civil authority tightly fused for decades. Federal concern over that arrangement, and reports of defiance of U.S. authority, led President Buchanan to send federal troops to Utah in 1857-58 (the "Utah War"), a crisis defused mostly through negotiation.
Standard account in U.S. territorial and Mormon history scholarship.A near-armed conflict with the federal government, arising directly from one man holding both the pulpit and the governor's office, is a useful data point when weighing how much unchecked authority concentrated in Young specifically -- as opposed to the Restoration movement generally.
The sections above are historical record -- events with dates, documents, and, in several cases, the LDS Church's own acknowledgment. What follows is different in kind: it is Community of Christ's own theological and historical argument for why it holds that lawful succession to Joseph Smith Jr. passed to his son, not to Brigham Young -- a religious claim, not a court-verifiable fact, presented here as the case the tradition has made since 1860.
Community of Christ tradition holds that in early 1844, months before his death, Joseph Smith Jr. blessed his eldest son, Joseph Smith III -- then eleven years old -- to eventually succeed him as prophet, seer, and revelator, in the presence of witnesses including his mother, Emma Smith. This blessing was later affirmed by multiple participants' testimony and became the doctrinal basis on which the 1860 Reorganization organized around Joseph Smith III specifically, rather than around any other claimant.
Community of Christ's own historical and doctrinal tradition; the event and its interpretation are disputed by LDS historians, who generally read it as a blessing of promise rather than a formal ordination to office.This is the crux of the whole succession argument, and it's worth being honest about its nature: no side disputes that some blessing took place, but "was this an ordination to the presidency, or a father's hope for his son's future" is a matter of interpretation, not forensics. Community of Christ has staked its founding legitimacy on the first reading. That's a claim of faith, and we present it as one.
The Quorum of Twelve Apostles, as Joseph Smith Jr. organized it, was chartered as a traveling, missionary-facing body operating under the direction of the First Presidency -- not as a body designed to inherit supreme presiding authority over the whole church. Brigham Young's claim to leadership rested on his seniority within that quorum and a vote of the Nauvoo membership in August 1844, not on any personal blessing, ordination, or anointing from Joseph Smith Jr. to lead the church. Community of Christ's founding argument holds that a quorum built for missionary administration was not the constitutionally correct body to produce a prophet.
Standard Reorganization/Community of Christ succession argument, articulated at length by Joseph Smith III and RLDS church leaders from 1860 onward.Whether you find this persuasive depends heavily on how you read Joseph Smith's own revelations about priesthood structure -- a genuinely contested question of scriptural interpretation. What isn't contested is the underlying fact pattern: Young's mandate came from an organizational vote among the Twelve and the Nauvoo membership present that August, not from a personal designation by Joseph Smith Jr. himself.
Within a decade of taking leadership, Young introduced or expanded teachings Community of Christ regards as clear departures from what Joseph Smith Jr. taught: dramatically expanded, publicly institutionalized plural marriage; the "Adam-God" doctrine, which Young preached from 1852 into the 1870s and which the LDS Church itself would later quietly abandon and effectively repudiate; and inflammatory "blood atonement" rhetoric during the 1856-57 Reformation period, holding that certain sins could only be atoned for by the sinner's own execution. To Community of Christ, a church introducing teachings this far outside its founder's own doctrine is strong evidence that continuing revelation had been misdirected, not faithfully continued.
Adam-God doctrine and blood atonement rhetoric are both well documented in Young's own recorded sermons (Journal of Discourses) and in mainstream historical scholarship; the LDS Church does not teach either today.This argument doesn't require taking Community of Christ's succession theology on faith to have force: Adam-God and blood atonement are teachings the LDS Church itself no longer defends. A tradition can be right that a specific doctrinal turn was a mistake without that agreement settling who should have been in charge when the mistake was made. We think it's fair to call the doctrinal record a real strike against Young's claim to be faithfully carrying forward Joseph Smith's prophetic mantle -- even if it can't, by itself, prove Joseph Smith III's blessing was a formal ordination rather than a father's hope.
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The gap matters: what began as a closely guarded practice under one man became, under the next, an open institutional pillar the church would not relinquish until the U.S. government made continuing it legally and politically untenable. That's a leadership choice, not an inevitability -- the Reorganization, given the same starting material, chose the opposite path from day one (see below).