The Mormon Passage of George D. Watt

Utah State University Press

Contents

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

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 Manchester Cathedral. Mary Ann's mother, Mary Ann Kennan, had married Joshua, her father, in Rochdale, England, on February 8, 1787, where their first two children were born. Then the family moved to Manchester, where the remaining four children were born, all christened in their parish church or in Manchester Cathedral. Joshua was neither a rich factory owner nor an impoverished factory worker. As a small businessman, he kept long hours so that his shop would be open before and after the working day as customers dropped off shoes to repair. Wood showed great pride in his ability to make and repair shoes.

Since Mary Ann's brother, George Darling Wood, had no family, the Watt family shared his home in Manchester. The St. George parish records note George Watt's christening on June 21, 1812, followed by that of daughter Margaret five years later on October 17, 1817. According to family tradition, James Watt and George Darling Wood sailed for America, seeking the fountain of youth, and died in New Orleans, but this is not true. Since this fanciful notion was actually more popular three centuries earlier, it is more likely that James's motivation was simply economic betterment. The two must have left shortly after Margaret's birth. The brothers-in-law sailed to Bahia (present-day Salvadore), Brazil's main port and capital, where George D. Wood died on June 16, 1825. James Watt had his tombstone engraved, "Even his Failings lean'd to virtue's side." It is not known when James left South America. He went to Australia sometime after that continent's settlement. Possibly he traveled there because of the gold discovery in 1851. There he died in 1858. James's absence naturally meant that George D. Watt's mother played an even greater role than usual in his life.

It is not clear when Mary Ann abandoned hope that James would return. She thought that he had died in New Orleans. The Church of England required a divorce decree, the knowledge of the spouse's death, or the passage of seven years without news (presumption of death) before it allowed remarriage. Watt may have been seven or eight years old when his father and uncle sailed away. Years later in a letter to his sister in the 1860s, he wrote that their paths diverged "when we were children being fatherless and motherless too in all but name. We did not have a parents' home to comfort and bless us, a father to educate and form our early impressions." Watt was allowed to roam the streets of Manchester during Mary Ann's working hours.

He described himself as small for his age, and he often came home bruised and battered from encounters with bullies. He was of an age to work in a factory, and certainly the added income would have been welcome, but for some unknown reason, Mary Ann did not take that step.

It is not known how long James had been gone before Mary Ann decided to marry again. However, on March 4, 1825, she married Joseph Brown, a widower and policeman, in Manchester Cathedral when Watt was almost fourteen. Brown was from Rochdale, a city about ten miles north of Manchester.

The new marriage brought problems. Brown, a widower who already had a large family, had no room in his house for Watt and his sister. Besides, he did not want the children. Mary Ann placed Margaret with her sister, Bridget, and her brother-in-law, William Howard. No one wanted Watt. Joseph Brown wanted nothing to do with this wild boy and kicked him out of his house. Now Watt was completely alone and permanently on the streets of the gigantic city of Manchester, where crime was rampant and other boys who were homeless were organized into gangs. He told his sister, "Our mother's second marriage did not improve our condition so far as home comforts.... I was cast out, driven forth in a heartless manner upon the cold bosom of a wicked and ungenerous world." Years later in 1867 in a serialized autobiographical essay he wrote for the children in Mormondom and entitled the "Little George" stories, he said-referring to himself in the third person-"Sometimes bad boys would beat him, and they were not afraid to do so, for he had no father to tell and no brothers to take his part." At times strangers gave him food and a place to stay the night. Usually he would "crawl into an out-house and cuddle up in a corner all alone, and then he would cry himself to sleep." Because of his deep-seated faith in God, he never turned to crime. He would "pray to God in his trouble, for his mother taught him, when he was a very little boy to pray, and to believe that whatever he asked for would be given him." Then "he would pray that God would forgive these bad boys, and then he would feel better and go to his play again."

He must have been homeless from the time of the marriage until late fall of 1825, when Mary Ann found him and placed him in a poorhouse/ workhouse. Poor laws established during Queen Elizabeth's reign provided care for the "worthy poor" who were unable to take care of themselves. In the early nineteenth century, poorhouses were usually workhouses where the county allowed a factory to use the residents for production purposes. Years later in the "Little George" stories, Watt said that a "kind lady found him," and after obtaining a writ of admittance from a magistrate to a poorhouse, she handed him over to the gatekeeper. "Little George screamed with terror," crying aloud to the kind lady "for help, but she had hastened away."

The poorhouse was an education for Watt. He made friends, was beaten by an old nurse, and was befriended by a teacher, also a poorhouse inmate, who taught him to read and write. Because of the kindness of this teacher, "he was willing to do anything that this kind-hearted old gentleman told him to do." The rigid regimen was difficult for a boy who had basically lived with no schedule. The residents rose at 5:00 a.m., ate their breakfast, and had twelve hours of labor with short breaks for lunch and evening meals. Although probably the meals were skimpy for a growing adolescent, Watt recalled in 1867 that he had had more than he had had as a waif on the streets. He said, "He liked well enough to eat his breakfast and his dinner and his supper, when they were ready." In the letter to his sister, Watt commented that the "poorhouse saved me from starvation or worse infamy."

The governess of the establishment befriended him, and after several weeks, she arranged for Watt to visit his mother. To his dismay, he found another family living at his old home. Mary Ann had, apparently without telling Watt her plans or her new address, moved into Joseph Brown's house in Rochdale, just north of Manchester. One can imagine his disappointment. He detoured to look at the shop windows and street life of Manchester's fashionable district. The contrast to his own life was stark: the velvet-cushioned carriages of the rich, the silk skirts of the ladies, and the fine pantaloons and boots of the gentlemen must have made him feel that they were creatures from another world. He was a little boy, unnoticed in the crowd. He sensed that "though he was only a little drop in the stream of human life that seemed to be rushing headlong without pain or purpose, in this way he would sometimes dam up the channel for a moment and check the onward progress of the mighty stream."

The highlight of Watt's rare outing came when he joined with other children in watching a man with a long box. The man set up his box, which appeared to be seven feet high. It was a Punch and Judy show, the first Watt had seen. The show delighted him. Before he arrived back at the poorhouse, he met some boys who yanked at his shirt. He "lost his temper and then with his fist he hit one of them a good blow to the face, knocked him down and ran." They pelted him with rocks and mud. The gatekeeper quickly opened the gate in response to his knocking, probably saving him from a beating.

After a little more than a year in the poorhouse, Watt's grandfather, Joshua Wood, must have convinced a fellow cobbler to take him as his apprentice, probably as an indenture that lasted only a year or two. His new master and mistress took him into their home, which also served as their shop. Watt slept in the upstairs room, sharing it with the master's twenty-one-year-old son, who befriended him. He learned all the aspects of making and repairing shoes.

On Sundays his master's son took him to a Primitive Methodist Sunday school. Watt called it the "ranters' church" "because they shout and scream until they are out of breath and fall down on the floor," and in praying "they all shout and pray together, making a ranting noise." On Sundays the Primitive Methodists had a series of meetings throughout the day. The children went to Sunday school, where they learned not only Christian principles but also the rudiments of reading, writing, and mathematics. About midday class meetings were held in homes and shops. George's master sponsored such a class meeting. At the end of the meeting, everyone paid the leader two pennies. An evening meeting followed at a chapel. This meeting was followed by another prayer meeting, attended only by the most faithful.

Because of the other children's abusive actions toward him, Watt's kindly mistress took him to services at a Wesleyan Methodist Church. He spent about two years with this couple. The poorhouse and his apprenticeship with the cobbler were Watt's preparation for life. He learned order and the importance of conforming to social expectations. He mastered a trade and also learned to read and write-a lasting and important acquisition in his young life.

Probably in the late 1820s, when he would have been in his middle teens, Watt went to live with Andrew Watt, his grandfather, and Hannah, his stepgrandmother, in Skyreburn, Scotland, near Gatehouse. People of this county continued their traditional occupations of sheep herding and fishing. Andrew spent time at the Bay of Skyreburn, probably involved with a small fishing fleet. Watt refers to the sea in his writings in terms that communicate a fascination with boats and the water. (Continues...)

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