Nineteenth-century Mormonism was a frontier religion with roots so entangled with the American experience as to be seen by some scholars as the most American of religions and by others as a direct critique of that experience. Yet it also was a missionary religion that through proselytizing quickly gained an international, if initially mostly Northern European, makeup. This mix brought it a roster of interesting characters: frontiersmen and hardscrabble farmers; preachers and theologians; dreamers and idealists; craftsmen and social engineers. Althoughthe Mormon elite soon took on, as elites do, a rather fixed, dynastic character, the social origins of its first-generation members were quite diverse. The Mormon Church at its beginning provided a good study in upward mobility. George D. Watt, for instance, was a self-educated convert with both unusual, for the time and place of frontier Utah, clerical skills and ambitions to improve his status. A man with intellectual pretensions, he had little formal training but a strong will, avid curiosity, and appetite for knowledge. Those traits made up for what he lacked in schooling and drew him into what served as intellectual circles among the Mormon elite and, later, on the church's disenchanted fringe. They also made him for a time essential to Brigham Young as a clerk and reporter but sent him into religious and social exile, due to a contest of wills with his employer that Watt had no chance of winning, . Reputed to have been the first of the many English converts to the LDS church, Watt's repeatedly demonstrated ability to learn quickly made him an early master of Pitman shorthand, just then coming into use. Employing this skill, he made two important contributions to Mormon literature: First, he more than anyone created, based on that shorthand, the Deseret Alphabet, which now is a curiosity but then was an innovation that, intended to create a unique Mormon orthography and pedagogy, stands well for the broad attempt to build in Utah the wholly self-sufficient culture of the Kingdom of God. Second, his efficient note taking allowed him to take down the sermons of Young and other church leaders and publish them in the Journal of Discourses, an indispensible historical record. In addition Watt learned, thought, and wrote about a variety of subjects, from horticulture to spiritualism, which helped define him as a resident Utah intellectual. He eventually left the Mormon Church, but the records of his domestic life before and after that decision provide a rich portrait of the working of polygamous households, particularly complicated ones in his case. Despite his accomplishments, because of his potential, George Watt's story is at heart a tragedy. His breach with Young resulted in social isolation, poverty, and rejection by friends and associates. He never, though, lost his sense of independence or his avid mind. Whether facing an economic affront or pressing, in writing, his own conclusions about life and God, he engaged the challenge where he found it.
The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt
First British Convert, Scribe for ZionBy Ronald G. WattUtah State University Press
Copyright © 2009 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-756-8Contents
Illustrations............................................................................viPreface..................................................................................viiIntroduction: "On the Lord's Business"...................................................11 Early Life in Britain..................................................................92 Journey to America and Nauvoo..........................................................343 Mission to Britain.....................................................................584 Across the Wide Atlantic and on to Zion................................................825 Life and Times in Utah: Politics in the Territory......................................1086 Reporter for Zion......................................................................1257 Deseret Alphabet.......................................................................1418 Family and Life in Salt Lake City......................................................1609 A Man for All Seasons: Intellectual Activities.........................................18810 Sermons of Obedience: Traveling with Brigham Young and to Britain.....................21011 Life-Changing Events: Leaving the Office, Businessman.................................22512 Spiritual Wanderings: Apostasy and Spiritualism.......................................24713 Family and Farm Life in Davis County..................................................263Index....................................................................................285
Chapter One
EARLY LIFE IN BRITAIN The dung which the farmer puts into his land, is not pleasant to work among but offensive to the smell, but not standing this, and many other troubles such as wind and rain &c. &c. he endures and gets in his seed.... It will just be so with us Bro. Geo. We go forth breaking up the falow ground at the same time sowing greacious seed some times with tears and many afflictions, but the promise is we shall return to Zion, with joy. George D. Watt to George A. Smith, December 22, 1840
On May 18, 1812, in the St. George Parish in Manchester, England, a son was born to James Watt and Mary Ann Wood Watt. More than a month later, this boy was christened George Darling Watt after his mother's oldest brother. He was born just as the Industrial Revolution was sweeping Great Britain. Manchester, located in the English Midlands, is approximately two hundred miles north of London and thirty-nine miles east of the port city of Liverpool. The Industrial Revolution changed Britain from a rural, agricultural nation to one with large cities teeming with factories.
Life in these factory towns was precarious. Factory workers put in more than twelve hours a day. Slumlords packed their tenants into quickly built row houses that lacked adequate water and proper sanitation. Twentieth-century economic historians like T. S. Ashton acknowledged that these conditions were gruesome but argued that they were temporary, that the Industrial Revolution bettered living conditions for the masses. However, when George D. Watt was born, any amelioration lay three decades or more in the future. Watt grew up breathing smoke-filled air and walking on sewage-filled streets.
Politically the welfare of slum dwellers was taking a backseat to concerns about the threat posed by Napoleon in France, a period that had begun in 1789 with the French Revolution. The British at first sympathized with the French Revolution, but later they were horrified by its excesses and stood prepared to suppress with the utmost harshness signs of a similar uprising among England's poor. Napoleon, who rose to power in 1799, channeled his nation's energy into conquering Europe. Finally, a British-led coalition of the other European countries defeated the French and exiled Napoleon in 1815; but even though the British won, the economic and social effects strongly impacted the England where baby George grew up.
The disruption of the British economy during the Napoleonic wars brought unemployment. Factory owners wanted the tariffs on wheat abolished, making bread less expensive and leading to reduced wages for the workers. One faction of the working classes, led by the Chartists, wanted representation in Parliament. Great Britain in the nineteenth century had a monarch with a Parliament consisting of a House of Lords, whose hereditary peers inherited their seats along with their estates, and a House of Commons with elected members who represented only a small part of the male population.
Religiously the country had fragmented into several Christian denominations. This process had begun during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century and continued in the mid-eighteenth century with the rise of Methodism. In 1740 John Wesley began an experiment of taking religion to the masses in the English countryside. When the Church of England parish priests locked their churches against the Wesleyan preachers, Wesley took his enthusiastic religion to the fields and streets. Wesley, however, never intended to leave the established church. After his death in 1791, his followers created a formal church. Open-air preaching and revivals gradually ended. The Methodist movement also splintered.
One of the groups, the Primitive Methodists, organized about 1811, had the greatest impact on England during this period. "Primitive" referred to their expressed desire to return to the religion of the New Testament church. The Primitive Methodists restored revivals and open-air preaching. They found their adherents in the countryside and the colliery villages. Sometimes they became so emotional that they rolled on floors with groaning sounds, which gave them their nickname of "ranters."
George D. Watt thus entered life at a time of great religious and social ferment in England. His father, James, had been born in Gatehouse of Fleet in Kirkcudbrightshire, a mountainous area best suited for pasturing cattle and sheep, in southwestern Scotland. Gatehouse faces south toward the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea some thirty miles away. Glasgow is about eighty miles north. Gatehouse, situated on the Fleet River, in 1800 could boast the small manufacturing presence of four cotton factories, a brass foundry, a wine company, a brewery, and a tannery.
James had no birth recorded in church ledgers, suggesting that his parents, Andrew Watt, a lint miller, and Margaret McBurnie Watt, did not belong to the Church of Scotland. Andrew had been born in Kirkcudbrightshire, and his three children by Margaret were all born in Girthon Parish, also in that county. Andrew owned property and was elected bailee (similar to a city councilman) in Girthon. James was their second child and first son. He had an older sister, Margaret, born about 1780, and a younger one, Jannet, born in 1792, which suggests that his own birth occurred about 1790. Andrew's wife, Margaret, died, and he married Hannah McKean. They had two children, Charles, born in 1798, and Mary (ca. 1806-8). James, the oldest son, apparently saw little future in Gatehouse and moved to the city of Manchester, about 150 miles to the southeast.
On May 3, 1811, James Watt, a "traveler" (probably traveling salesman), married Mary Ann Wood by license in...
