Conference record · 1861 April General Conference · 1861-04-06
Deseret News minutes (April 10, 1861, pp. 44-45) of the 'Thirty-First Annual Conference,' held April 6-7, 1861, the Church's 31st-anniversary conference, convened amid the secession crisis preceding the Civil War. All discourses cited in the Journal of Discourses index for this conference are filed separately as full talks: Ezra T. Benson's 'Testimony and Religion of the Saints' (JD 8:369-370), Daniel H. Wells' 'Kingdom of God and the Governments of Men' (JD 8:371-376), Heber C. Kimball's 'Spirit of Unity—Independence of Zion, &c' (JD 9:6-8) and 'Appreciation of Divine Gifts and Blessings—Return to Jackson County—Encouragement of Home Manufactures' (JD 9:24-28), John Taylor's 'Union—Human and Divine Government, Etc.' (JD 9:8-15), George A. Smith's 'Sectarian Religion—Democracy, Etc.' (JD 9:15-20), Lorenzo Snow's 'Improvement—Restoration of the Priesthood, Etc.' (JD 9:20-23), Brigham Young's 'True Testimony—Preparation for Coming Events—Corruption of the Government, Etc.' (JD 9:1-6), 'Home Manufactures' (JD 9:29-31), and 'The Gifts of God—Home Manufactures—Word of Wisdom—Happiness' (JD 9:31-40).
Official published minutes of the conference.
Digital transcript of the Deseret News minutes.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; fixed stale claims that the conference's discourses were not yet transcribed (all ten already existed as separate files) and rewrote the narrative to cross-reference each by title and JD volume/page.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: Deseret News minutes (April 10, 1861) remain the source; newspapers.lib.utah.edu returns HTTP 418 to automated fetch, a known tooling limitation, so the original scan could not be re-verified directly this pass. Independently re-verified the narrative against the raw historicalgeneralconferences.weebly.com HTML (fetched directly, not AI-summarized), confirming session order, sustaining-vote roster, and JD citations for all ten discourses filed separately for this conference. Also resolved a duplicate-file bug during this pass: found and merged two duplicate-file pairs (Wells' 'Kingdom of God and the Governments of Men' and Young's 'True Testimony—Preparation for Coming Events—Corruption of the Government, Etc.', each saved twice under slightly different filenames/titles); the weaker duplicate of each pair was deleted via git rm and this record's fidelity_notes/body updated to cite the surviving files.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.