All Things Move in Order in the City

The Nauvoo Diary of Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs
Edited by Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

At the time when Eliza Roxey Snow was at the peak of her effectiveness as a leader of the women of the Church in Utah, her closest associate, and eventual successor, was Zina Diantha Young. Both women were wives of Brigham Young, though of the two only Zina had borne a child by him. Both were native easterners, Zina having been born 31 January 1821 in Watertown, Ontario County, New York, seventeen years after Eliza was born in Becket, Massachusetts. Both had converted to Mormonism as young women and had come with their families, sometimes travelling together, in the hegira which concluded for them in the Great Basin. They shared the leadership of the Relief Society, almost from its rebirth as a Churchwide organization in 1867, but where the women thought of Eliza as the head, they considered Zina the heart of the association. From Eliza's death in 1887 until her own in 1901, Zina presided over the Relief Society worldwide.

Married to Henry Bailey Jacobs in Nauvoo on 7 March 1841, Zina gave birth the following year to her first son, Zebulon William (she spells it Zebulun), and on the Chariton River as they crossed Iowa en route to Winter Quarters in 1846, to a second son, whom she named Henry Chariton. Her third child, a daughter born after Zina's marriage to Brigham Young, was Zina Presendia Young Card, later matriarch of the Mormon settlements in Canada. Zina Presendia's daughter Zina married Hugh B. Brown, apostle and counselor in the First Presidency until his death in 1975. Their daughter Zina Lydia, born in Canada but now residing in California, has two daughters, to one of whom she gave the traditional name. It is with that daughter that this present account begins.

Zina Elizabeth Brown, Betty to her friends, had been using a locked trunk as a coffee table for several months before she found someone who could open it. She had been given the trunk on the death of her grandfather, Hugh B. Brown. It had belonged to his wife, Zina Card Brown, but no one in the family knew of its contents. When in early 1979 Betty finally looked into the trunk, she found, among the clothes and keepsakes of her grandmother, some letters of her uncle, Hugh Brown, who was killed in World War II, indicating that the trunk had last been opened around 1942, and two diaries of her great-great grandmother, Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs, one dating in the 1890s, the other, the Nauvoo one here printed, dating 5 June 1844 to 21 September 1845.

The Nauvoo diary was written crosswise on papers saddle-stitched as a school exercise book might have been, its pages measuring, folded, six by eight inches. The handwriting is small, the ink in some cases faded, and the edges of the pages frayed. Even so, most of the words can be made out quite clearly. The little booklet had been rolled, such that conservators at the LDS Church Archives, where Betty brought the diary to ensure its preservation, had difficulty flattening it to make it readable. It is now kept in an acid-free folder in the atmosphere-controlled environment of the Archives where it is available to scholars interested in Nauvoo, in social history, in the history of women, or, more specifically, in Zina herself.

Zina Diantha--one must often use both names to separate mothers and daughters in the six-generation chain of Zinas--saw and reported events at almost every stage in the history of the Mormon movement from Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo to settlement in the Great Basin. Her diaries, some very sketchy, some quite detailed, were preserved initially by Zina Card Brown. The larger collection was in the keeping of Mary Brown Firmage, her daughter, who recently donated them to the Church Archives for preservation there. Mrs. Firmage has done, and continues to do, extensive research into that family, her project leading towards a long biographical study of the women, particularly the Zinas. Her help with this present project is gratefully acknowledged.

Among all these family papers, this Nauvoo journal of Zina Diantha seems to demand particular attention, containing as it does so much more than just personal events in the life of its writer. Nauvoo, itself, as seen through the eyes of the bright, observant, deeply committed woman, becomes alive through details she provides. She describes the tumultuous year following the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith with an accuracy which checks out almost to the last jot with the documentary History of the Church and other diaries of the time.

The diary opens with the events which lead to the slayings at Carthage, the "ever to be remembered awful day of the 27 of June 1844", told as they were reported in Nauvoo at that time. The return of the Quorum of the Twelve which followed, their acceptance as rightful successors to the Prophet at the momentous 8 August meeting, and the subsequent trial of the accused murderers of the brothers are recounted from Zina's point of view. She notes military exercises of the Nauvoo Legion, the dedication of the Seventies Hall, the laying of the capstone on the Temple, the arrest of five Mormons from the Lima settlement, and the persecution which, by the end of her account, has mobs burning the homes of the Saints in that southern outlying colony. In the midst of the turmoil, however, she comments that "peace and prosperity reigns in the city," and at the end of her account she observes that "all things move in order in the City."

As counterpoint to the public affairs in Nauvoo are the private events in Zina's life. She notes sicknesses--her own, her husband Henry's, their son Zebulon's, and those of the many people who came to her for nursing care. Already Zina is developing skills which would lead her later to become midwife and medical practitioner. Never very settled in a home, Zina moves three times during the fifteen months of the diary, a course, one would believe, not unusual in Nauvoo. Henry Bailey Jacobs, her husband, moves in and out of her view as he leaves for and returns from various short missions, some of them with her brother Oliver as his companion.

Zina is personally very much affected by the events she relates. She is chilled by the Martyrdom, all the more intensely for her having been sealed to Joseph Smith in late 1841. She is inspired by a sermon of Brigham Young's, one not now extant, "uppon Priesthood, the Godhead, the dut[i]es of Male and Female, there exaltations, &c." She is not unmoved by the succession meeting of 8 August, though she makes no mention here of Elder Young's speaking with Joseph's voice. She finds delight in a family Christmas at Lima, horror in her first actual view of violence, sorrow in the deaths around her, and joy in the birth of David Hyrum Smith, Emma and Joseph's last child. All these responses find reflection in the psalm-like prayers with which the accounts often end.

With all that openness, there is still enough restraint to keep a careful covering around the intimate Zina. Her relationship to Henry Bailey Jacobs, the husband who stood approving as her earlier sealing to Joseph Smith was confirmed by proxy in the Nauvoo Temple and who witnessed her sealing "for time" to Brigham Young, seems not uncordial here. That first marriage, described in later biographical studies as an unhappy one, is not overtly so in these accounts. Zina shows pride in Henry's calling as seventies president; she accepts as dear friends the Saints who were kind to him on his missions; she cares for him in sickness and notes his progress on their house. There is little of the intimate view of their lives, but one cannot expect that, considering the times and the mores of Victorian America. On the whole, if she is not an enthusiastic bride, Zina does seem a contented wife.

Most important in her life are her family, extended by the marriage, after her mother's death, of father William Huntington to Edward Partridge's widow, Lydia. Eliza and Emily Partridge, near contemporaries of Zina's, are frequent visitors, and young Lydia and Caroline also come. Edward, Jr., their young brother, is mentioned.

The Huntington family itself is large, with strong bonds unbroken by distance and religion. Chauncey, the oldest son, married in 1825, did not accept the Mormon message and remained in New York when the rest converted and came west with the Saints. Dimick and his wife Fanny are in Nauvoo with their two sons, Clark and Lot, and the baby Martha. William, Jr., is married to Caroline Clark; their two children had both been born in Nauvoo, and a third would arrive shortly after Zina's diary stops. Oliver, just younger than Zina, would marry during the course of the diary, but in New York, so Zina recounts only his departure. John, the youngest Huntington, is a teenager at this time.

Zina's one surviving sister--two had died--is Presendia, eleven years her senior, who lives with her husband Norman Buell and their two children at Morley's Settlement, or Lima, a day's buggy ride south of Nauvoo. Four of Presendia's children had died, and Zina will recount the burial of the fifth in this diary.

Besides these immediate family members there are some others who come into the diary: "Father Jacobs" is Henry's father, for whom he was named; Henry's sister Lydia Jacobs and her husband Urban Stewart live in Nauvoo, a young couple nearer Zina's twenty-three years than Henry's twenty-seven. The uncle with whom the diary opens may be Dana Jacobs, later to become, with Henry, one of the presidents of seventy--he in the Sixteenth Quorum, Henry in the Fifteenth.

The relationships of families are not always certain, during these early days of plural marriage, when, as Amasa Lyman observed years later, "We obeyed the best we knew how, and, no doubt, made many crooked paths in our ignorance."1 The secretiveness necessitated by the threat from without and dissention from within the Church makes unusual in a contemporary account even as much of a note as Zina makes when referring to her brother William's having as his second wife Harriet Clark, Caroline's sister. Ann Maginn will become his third wife, but whether she is or is not at this time is not certain. The same is true for the Partridge sisters, Eliza and Caroline, both of whom will become wives to Amasa Lyman, who lies sick at Zina's house when the girls come visiting.

There are many more friends and acquaintances who come and go in these pages. It is impossible to identify with certainty who some of them are; many are already known to readers. For that reason there has been no attempt to provide footnoted guesses at their identification. Rather, correct spelling has been provided to make the known ones clearer; the others, other than family, are left to the reader's conjecture.

Editorially, in an attempt to preserve the flavor of Zina's own style, little has been done to the diary. Despite the fact that she taught school, Zina is a poor speller, often inconsistent in her own misspellings, a characteristic which adds credit more than fault to her accomplishment; there is far more to be praised in precise wording than in mere orthography, and where Zina might not know the spelling, she certainly did know the word. And it is delightful to hear Amasa Lyman's name as Zina pronounced it: Amacy Limon, or Clarissa Decker's, Claracy. Where the reader might possibly trip over a misspelled word, the correction has been provided; for the most part, though, the phonetic spelling is quite adequate.

Some words appear to be Zina's own: a lowry day, for example, or the verb lacken, or backen, or bachen, meaning to diminish or decrease, used as a transitive verb, in the active voice, as in "wilt thou lacken the power of our foes." Occasionally Zina transposes words, and sometimes her final g's and d's are interchanged. These have been left as she wrote them. The only changes which have been made silently are in punctuation, in which case periods and commas have been inserted, and capitals added, for ease of reading. All proper nouns have been capitalized, and ampersands have been replaced with and. The dating has been left as she wrote it, with just numbers counting off the days, sometimes several in a line with no entry until the last one. The months are identified on the first entry of each one.