Things in Heaven and Earth
Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times
of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet
Thomas G. Alexander
When Wilford Woodruff converted to the LDS church in 1833, he joined a millenarian group of a few thousand persecuted believers clustered around Kirtland, Ohio. When he died sixty-five years later in 1898, he was the leader of more than a quarter of a million followers worldwide who were on the verge of entering the mainstream of American culture.
Before attaining that status of senior church apostle at the death of John Taylor in 1886, Woodruff had been one of the fiercest opponents of United States hegemony. He spent years evading territorial marshals on the Mormon “underground,” escaping prosecution for polygamy, unable even to attend his first wife’s funeral. As church president, faced with disfranchisement and federal confiscation of Mormon property, including temples, Woodruff reached his monumental decision in 1890 to accept US law and to finally secure Utah’s long-sought goal of statehood.
As church doctrines and practices evolved, Woodruff himself changed. The author examines the secular and religious development of Woodruff’s world view from apocalyptic mystic to pragmatic conciliator. He also reveals the gentle, solitary farmer; the fisherman and horticulturalist; the family man with seven wives; the charismatic preacher of the Mormon Reformation; the astute businessman; the urbane, savvy politician who courted the favor of prominent Republicans in California and Oregon (Leland Stanford and Isaac Trumbo); and the vulnerable romantic who pursued the affections of Lydia Mountford, an international lecturer and Jewish rights advocate. He traces a faithful polygamist who ultimately embraced the Christian Home movement and settled comfortably into a monogamous relationship in an otherwise typically Victorian setting.
paperback: $26.95 | ebook: $9.99
Thomas G. Alexander is the Lemuel H. Redd Professor of Western History at Brigham Young University. His many works include Grace and Grandeur: A History of Salt Lake City and Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930. He is co-editor of Great Basin Kingdom Revisited: Contemporary Perspectives; Manchester Mormons: The Journals of William Clayton, 1840–1842; and volume five of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. He is national president of Phi Alpha Theta and past president of the Association of Utah Historians, Mormon History Association, and Utah State Historical Society.
Biography
ISBN: 978-1-56085-045-8
