Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is the senior governing body below the First Presidency in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the account presented here, it is both a durable structure of church government and a force in moments when leadership is contested: its members carried the church’s message across the United States, helped determine who would succeed Joseph Smith, and upheld plural marriage after his death. Its authority rests not only on formal position but on the claim that the church is led through continuing revelation.

Place in the Church

The church’s hierarchy concentrates authority in fifteen men. At its summit stands the President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, who is regarded as God’s direct mouthpiece on earth. Two apostles selected by the president serve as his first and second counselors; together with him, they form the First Presidency. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles sits immediately below that presidency. The fifteen men in these two bodies govern the institution and its membership, serve for life, and hold authority from which women are excluded.

Succession follows a defined institutional rule: when the president dies, the Quorum appoints as the new president the apostle who has served longest. The rule gives seniority a decisive role in transferring power and helps explain why church presidents are often advanced in age. It also makes the Quorum more than an advisory body. Its members form the pool from which the next president is chosen, and its internal continuity is central to the church’s transfer of leadership.

Revelation and Institutional Authority

The Quorum’s place in the hierarchy developed against a persistent tension between personal revelation and centralized control. Joseph Smith initially encouraged church members to seek direct impressions from God and use them to guide their lives. That invitation made individual access to revelation one of the appealing features of the new faith, but it also raised a problem for a prophet claiming authority over the whole church: members might receive revelations that contradicted his own.

In 1830, the year the church was incorporated, Joseph Smith announced a revelation restricting the receipt of church commandments and revelations to himself. The limit did not end private revelation. Members continued to heed what they understood as God’s communications, including on doctrinal matters, even when these conflicted with institutional instruction. The account connects this unresolved contest over who could speak for God to the repeated emergence of schismatic Mormon groups. The Quorum belongs to the institutional structure that channels church authority, while competing claims of revelation expose the limits of that structure’s control.

Mission and the Succession Crisis

The apostles’ work could extend beyond church governance into public politics. During Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential campaign, he sent 586 missionaries to all twenty-six states and Wisconsin Territory, including ten members of the Quorum. Their assignment was to build support for his candidacy. Their absence later became consequential: when Joseph was killed, ten members of the Quorum, including its president Brigham Young, were away from Nauvoo. Young was in Massachusetts and learned of the killing nineteen days after it occurred; once the apostles received the news, they hurried back.

Joseph Smith had left no clear mechanism for choosing a successor. His death therefore opened a leadership struggle in which the Quorum’s absence created an immediate opportunity for other claimants. The competing positions were also divided over plural marriage. Some church members opposed the practice and hoped a new leader would repeal it; Brigham Young, John Taylor, Willard Richards, and their allies wanted a successor who would preserve it. Most Mormons did not know that Joseph had secretly practiced plural marriage and taught it as a religious principle.

Before the apostles returned, opponents of plural marriage sought to install a leader from their own faction. Joseph’s eleven-year-old son, Joseph Smith III, had a possible claim but was too young to lead. His younger brother Samuel H. Smith became the anti-polygamists’ preferred candidate, then died abruptly on July 30. The account describes circumstantial evidence suggesting that Hosea Stout, who was loyal to Brigham Young’s faction, poisoned him; it does not present that allegation as a proven finding. Sidney Rigdon then secured appointment as guardian of the church, pending confirmation at a gathering scheduled for August 8. Brigham Young and the returning apostles arrived on August 6 and disrupted that plan.

At the August 8 meeting, Rigdon argued his case for ninety minutes before Young addressed the congregation. Witnesses later described Young as resembling Joseph Smith in voice and appearance, and some said they saw Joseph’s mantle fall upon him. The reported transformation persuaded many present that Young should lead. In the book’s account, the outcome established him as the church’s second president and showed how the Quorum’s return, and the support of its president, could decide a succession struggle.

Plural Marriage and Institutional Action

The Quorum’s influence was tied to the continuation of plural marriage. Its leading members in the succession dispute had taken plural wives and feared that a successor opposed to the practice would repudiate it. After the defendants accused of murdering Joseph and Hyrum Smith were acquitted in 1845, Brigham Young declared that God and his people were responsible for avenging the blood of the church’s slain leaders. Church authorities then made an Oath of Vengeance part of the temple endowment ceremony. The oath remained in the ritual until 1927, when it was removed after the press disclosed it and politicians and non-Mormons condemned it as treasonous. The episode illustrates how church leadership could turn a response to political violence into a recurring institutional rite.

A later account of a state raid also places the Quorum in the relationship between church authority and government action. Governor Pyle said that officials had cleared every move with the Council of Twelve and described that body as wholly cooperative. The passage does not detail the Quorum’s specific deliberations, but the governor’s statement presents its cooperation as integral to the operation. Together with its role in succession and the temple oath, this example shows the Quorum operating not only as a body that selects leaders but as a powerful institutional actor whose reach could extend into public affairs.