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Show BRIGHAM YOUNG. 14T confidence, esteem, and veneration, and held an unrivalled place in their hearts. Upon the establishment of the provisional government, he had been unanimously chosen as their highest civil magistrate, and even before his appointment by the President, he combined in his own person the triple character of confidential adviser, temporal ruler, and prophet of God. Intimately acquainted with their character, capacities, wants, and weaknesses; identified now with their prosperity, as he had formerly shared to the full in their adversity and sorrows; honoured, trusted, the whole wealth of the community placed in his hands, for the advancement both of the spiritual and temporal interests of the infant settlement, he was, surely, of all others, the man best fitted to preside, under the auspices of the General Government, over a colony of which he may justly be said to have been the founder. No other man could have so entirely secured the confidence of the people; and this selection by the Executive of the man of their choice, besides being highly gratifying to them, is recognised as an assurance that they shall hereafter receive at the hands of the General Government that justice and consideration to which they are entitled. Their confident hope now is that, no longer fugitives and outlaws, but dwelling beneath the broad shadow of the national aegis, they will be subject no more to the violence and outrage which drove them to seek a secure habitation in this far distant wilderness. As to the imputations that have been made against the personal character of the governor, I feel confident they are without foundation. Whatever opinion may be entertained of his pretensions to the character of an inspired prophet, or of his views and practice on the subject of polygamy, his personal reputation I believe to be above reproach. Certain it is that the most entire confidence is felt in his integrity, personal, official, and pecuniary, on the part of those to whom a long and intimate association, and in the most trying emergencies, have afforded every possible opportunity of forming a just and accurate judgment of his true character. From all I saw and heard, I am firmly of opinion that the appointment of any other man to the office of governor would have been regarded by the whole people, not only as a sanction, but as in some sort a renewal, on the part of the General Government, of that series of persecutions to which they had already been subjected, and would have operated to create distrust and suspicion in minds prepared to hail with joy the admission of the new Territory to the protection of the supreme government. |