indescribable conflict
of feelings, the ranked graves of the soldiers in the cemetery at
Arlington, and recollected that this very ground had been taken from
General Lee, that heroic opponent of Federal authority--and read the
tablet, "How sleep the brave who sink to rest by all their country's
wishes bless'd,"--and bowed in spirit to the nation's benediction upon
the men who had upheld its power. I was awed by a prodigious sense
of the majesty of that power. I saw with fear its immovability to the
struggles of our handful of people. And at night, walking under the
trees of Lafayette Park, with all the odors of the southern Spring
among the leaves, I looked at the lighted front of the White House and
realized that behind the curtains of those quiet windows sat the
ruler who held the almost absolute right of life and death over our
community--as if it were the palace of a Czar that I must soon enter,
with a petition for clemency, which he might refuse to entertain!

When I had been in Washington, four years before, as secretary to
Delegate John T. Caine of Utah, I had felt a younger assurance that
our resistance would slowly wear out the Federal authority and carry us
through to statehood. Four years of disaster had starved out that hope.
The proposition had been established that Congress had supreme control
over the territories; and there was no virtue either in our religious
assumption of warrant to speak for God, or in our plea of inherent
constitutional right to manage our own affairs. Thirty years earlier, my
father had been elected Senator from the proposed state of Utah, and he
had been rejected. In thirty years so little progress had been made! The
way that was yet to travel seemed very long and very dark.

Out of this mood of despondence I had to lift myself by an act of will.
There, Washington itself helped me against itself. I made a pilgrimage
of courage to its commemorations of courage, and drew an inspiration
of hope from its monuments to the achievements of its past. And
particularly I went to the house in which my father had lived when he
had had his part in the statesman life of the capital, and animated my
resolution with the thought that I must succeed in order that he might
be restored in public honor.

I narrate all this personal incident of emotion in the hope that it may
help to explain a success that might otherwise seem inexplicable.
The Mormon Church had, for years, employed every art of intr