BANCROFT 
 LIBRARY 
 
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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 

THE MORMON SAINTS 
 
By the Same Author 
 The Fall: A Tale of Eden 
 
 Price 35 cents 
 
 The Wine-Bills of Omar Khayyam 
 Price 25 cents 
 
 Bacon versus Shakespeare 
 Price 75 cents; paper 35 cents 
 
 THE LESSING COMPANY 
 
 Box 383 - Pittsburgh, Pa. 
 
THE 
 
 Mormon Saints 
 
 THE STORY OF JOSEPH SMITH, HIS 
 
 GOLDEN BIBLE, AND THE 
 
 CHURCH HE FOUNDED 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE SEIBEL 
 
 PITTSBURGH 
 
 THE LESSING COMPANY 
 
 1919 
 
Copyright, 1919, by 
 THE LESSING COMPANY 
 
BANCROFT 
 LIBRARY 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. AN AMERICAN ISLAM 7 
 
 II. "Jos SMITH, PROPHET" 14 
 
 III. THE BOOK OF MORMON 24 
 
 IV. BIRTH OF A NEW RELIGION 37 
 
 V. NAUVOO THE BEAUTIFUL 47 
 
 VI. To THE PROMISED LAND 53 
 
 VII. MORMON BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 60 
 
 VIII. THE MORMON WAR 70 
 
 IX. IN SOLOMON'S FOOTSTEPS 76 
 
 X. SCHEMING FOR STATEHOOD 85 
 
 XI. ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 92 
 
 XII. WHAT WILL BE THE END ? 99 
 
5 It is often and truly said, that 
 past ages were pre-eminently 
 credulous, as compared with our 
 own; yet the difference is not so 
 much in the amount of the ere- 
 dulity, as in the direction which 
 it takes. Men are always pre- 
 pared to accept, on very slight 
 evidence, what they believe to be 
 exceedingly probable. 
 
 Lecky. 
 
The Mormon Saints 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 An American Islam 
 
 THE history of the Mormon church 
 forms one of the strangest and most 
 startling chapters in the annals of 
 the Nineteenth Century. The French 
 philosopher Salverte has said that man is 
 credulous because he is naturally sincere. 
 Yet it seems almost beyond belief that such 
 a crude farrago of superstition, if not 
 fraud, as Mormonism could be brought 
 forth by the most enlightened age of the 
 world, an age in which science has worked 
 her greatest marvels and culture has been 
 diffused over all lands. Buddha, Krish- 
 na, Mithra, Apollonius, and other demi- 
 gods who founded miraculous religions, 
 belong to the remote past and to distant 
 climes. We flatter ourselves that their 
 revelations prospered because they came 
 long ago and far away. But Mormonism 
 arose almost yesterday, amid universities 
 and libraries, as if to prove that man is 
 the same in all ages as if to demonstrate 
 the truth of what Gregory Nazianzen 
 
8 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 wrote to St. Jerome: "A little jargon is 
 all that is necessary to impose on the 
 people. The less they comprehend, the 
 more they admire. " 
 
 Almost a century has passed, and the 
 followers of Mormon are still among us 
 and while missionary societies are sending 
 abroad thousands of men and millions of 
 money to bring the heathen unto Christ, a 
 terrible canker has attacked the heart of 
 Christianity at home. Mormon apostles 
 are swarming through the land, sowing 
 their doctrine broadcast. Most amazing 
 of all is the fact that they are meeting with 
 success, and while many orthodox denomi- 
 nations complain of stagnation and de- 
 cline, the church of the Latter-Day Saints 
 is forging steadily ahead, gaining ground 
 in fashion marvelous. 
 
 It will be the aim of these pages to in- 
 quire into the origin of that church a 
 hierarchy, rather; to trace the Cagliostro- 
 like career of its founder, and its rise un- 
 to power despite intelligent opposition and 
 shameful persecution; to examine its 
 "supernatural revelation' 7 by the higher 
 criticism of common sense ; finally, to con- 
 sider whether its institutions are antagon- 
 istic to those laws upon which rests the 
 well-being of the nation and of society 
 and, if they are, to suggest a remedy. 
 
 The purpose ever kept in view will be 
 
AN AMERICAN ISLAM 9 
 
 to weigh, not blindly to condemn. To 
 enumerate the sources drawn upon and the 
 authorities consulted would needlessly en- 
 cumber the account; the wonder tales of 
 Mormon writers and the rabid concoctions 
 of their foes have alike been cautiously 
 sifted. Nought is set down in malice 
 though the historian expressly reserves 
 the right to smile at human folly where 
 he finds it. 
 
 The peculiar people who colonized the 
 valley of the Great Salt Lake have many 
 admirable qualities commending them to 
 favor; the impartial historian may not 
 shut his eyes to these. Perhaps these 
 virtues are more to be feared than their 
 vices. For, if the beliefs, doctrines, and 
 practices of the Mormons are dangerous to 
 society, there is reason for the gravest ap- 
 prehension, and need of the most ener- 
 getic measures to render them harmless. 
 Truly marvelous has been the spread of 
 the Mormon faith. Joseph Smith in 1827 
 proclaimed his discovery of the golden 
 plates whereon was inscribed the Book of 
 Mormon. Three years later the first 
 church was organized with six members; 
 to-day, after less than a century, the 
 Mormon faith numbers nearly half a mil- 
 lion adherents. It is doubtful whether 
 Christianity had gained that number of 
 converts by the end of its first century. 
 
10 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 There is no parallel to the successes of 
 Mormonism except in those of Islam, 
 which it resembles in many other respects. 
 Like the religion of Mahomet, it claims to 
 supplement and supplant Christianity to 
 be a second thought of God, with the im- 
 plication that second thoughts are best. 
 Like Mahometanism, it has a special reve- 
 lation, committed to its founder by an 
 angel from heaven. Like Mahometanism, 
 it is extremely practical and not at all mys- 
 tical: it fills the flesh-pots of the faithful 
 and enjoins no strenuous asceticism. 
 Like Mahometanism, it believed in the 
 missionary potency of the sword. One 
 of the earliest writers upon the subject 
 styled Joseph Smith the American Maho- 
 met a comparison which in no way vio- 
 lates the truth of history, save that the 
 camel-driver and prophet of Mecca was 
 probably a sincere fanatic, whereas the 
 seer of Palmyra was more likely a cun- 
 ning impostor. 
 
 This excrescence of Christianity has 
 steadily grown at a rate faster than the 
 nation. The advance guard which entered 
 Utah in 1847 numbered only 148; to-day 
 Utah, excepting Salt Lake City and Ogden, 
 is overwhelmingly Mormon, and the 
 church to a great extent holds the balance 
 of political power in the adjoining states 
 Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Mon- 
 
AN AMERICAN ISLAM 11 
 
 tana, Arizona, and New Mexico. It rules 
 absolutely over a region as large as the 
 combined area of New York and Pennsyl- 
 vania, and is a potent factor in every part 
 of the great West. It sends its elders 
 missionaries in the apostolic sense, with- 
 out " purse or scrip" to Mexico, to the 
 republics of Central and South America, 
 to the islands of the Pacific, to Australia, 
 to India, to the Cape Colony and the 
 Transvaal, to Turkey, Russia, Germany, 
 Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, even to 
 England. They overrun the Southern 
 states and the Northwest, and boast that 
 they gained over sixty thousand converts 
 during one year alone more than any 
 other religious denomination in the United 
 States during the same period. The Mor- 
 mons outnumber many sects that make a 
 great deal more noise. An idea of their 
 strength may be gained from the fact that 
 they are almost as numerous as the ad- 
 herents of the great and respected Episco- 
 palian Church. 
 
 Counterfeiting humility when it served 
 their purpose, they have never failed to 
 display an overweening arrogance when in 
 power. When they attained statehood for 
 Utah, they paralyzed the arm of Federal 
 jurisdiction. Then the meek mask was 
 thrown off, and offensive usages sanction- 
 ed by the church were again openly prac- 
 
12 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 ticed and brazenly defended. Judges and 
 juries in Utah were under their thumb, 
 and even those who were not for them 
 dared not pronounce against them, or at 
 best connived at grave misdemeanors by 
 imposing trifling fines upon Saints that 
 happened to get caught. They even went 
 to the extent of electing to the United 
 States Congress a notorious and self-con- 
 fessed violator of the state law against 
 polygamy virtually saying to the nation : 
 "What are you going to do about it?" 
 And to-day, through Senator Eeed Smoot, 
 they are influential in all caucuses and 
 councils of the powerful Eepublican fac- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a tremendous truth in the 
 words which Mark Twain, that philoso- 
 pher who put on the mask of a humorist, 
 uttered through his Connecticut Yankee in 
 King Arthur's Court : "I was afraid of a 
 united church; it makes a mighty power, 
 the mightiest conceivable, and then when 
 it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it 
 is always bound to do, it means death to 
 human liberty and paralysis to human 
 thought." 
 
 There are sects which proclaim insani- 
 ties more iniquitous than the tenets of the 
 "Saints" but they lack the peculiar vi- 
 tality of Mormonism and hence are com- 
 paratively harmless. They have their 
 
AN AMERICAN ISLAM 13 
 
 day, and are forgotten, but Mormonism is 
 spreading both as a religious body and a 
 political force. To the elements of danger 
 already indicated there is joined the mili- 
 tant spirit of the theocracy. It has not 
 hesitated at violence and bloodshed to 
 maintain itself. Wherever the Mormons 
 have gone, their presence has often en- 
 gendered civil strife. They form a state 
 within the state they submit to the gov- 
 ernment, but do not acquiesce in it. What 
 manifestation of implacable hostility 
 never effaced could be plainer than the 
 flags of Salt Lake City flying at half-mast 
 on the Fourth of July, the nation's birth- 
 day? The country has had several Mor- 
 mon wars and, as one historian put it, 
 after the lapse of half a century the prob- 
 lem "has not yet yielded to the force of 
 logic or the logic of force. ' ' 
 
14 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTEE II 
 
 " Joe Smith, Prophet" 
 
 "Ye shall know them by their fruits," 
 says Scripture, and adds: "Do men gather 
 grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?" 
 Whether we judge Joseph Smith by Mor- 
 monism, or that faith by its founder, the 
 result is very much the same. But an 
 inquiry into the Prophet's antecedents and 
 character will be found instructive as a 
 commentary upon the gullibility of man- 
 kind. There have been many false pro- 
 phets, religious quacks, high-priests of 
 humbug, from Simon Magus to Teed the 
 Koresh. None has gained power over 
 his dupes so easily; none has exploited 
 their credulity for his own profit with 
 greater impudence; none has erected a 
 "religion" more transparent than that 
 system of lunacy and lechery foisted upon 
 his followers by the Scotch- Yankee Mes- 
 siah of Mormonism. 
 
 Joe Smith was born December 23, 1805, 
 at Sharon, Vermont. The threadbare 
 phrase must be reversed in his case he 
 came "of poor but disreputable parents. " 
 They removed to Palmyra, New York, in 
 
"JOE SMITH, PROPHET" 16 
 
 1815, Joseph Smith senior having in- 
 fringed upon the government monopoly of 
 "making money," and escaped punish- 
 ment only by turning state's evidence. 
 In Palmyra, the pursuits of the family 
 Joe was the fourth of nine children rang- 
 ed from the prosaic peddling of rootbeer 
 to fortune-telling and digging for buried 
 treasure. Many good people pointed the 
 finger of scorn and suspicion at them, 
 while chicken-coops and smoke-houses 
 were watched with special vigilance as a 
 result of nocturnal raids. They were an 
 illiterate, shiftless, whiskey-drinking tribe 
 and Joseph was not least among them 
 in laziness and other evil propensities. 
 But he was a "genus," as his father used 
 to say; he could with utmost solemnity 
 utter the most palpable untruths, he was 
 fertile in schemes of every kind, and was 
 an omnivorous reader of the "buckets of 
 blood" literature extant in that day. His 
 favorite books in his youth were the Life of 
 Stephen Burroughs, a religious impostor 
 whom he seems to have chosen for a pa- 
 tron saint, and the Life of Captain Kidd, 
 whose career he could not well emulate, 
 being far from the sea, but whose buried 
 treasures, dreamed of and diligently dug 
 for, may have been the germ of the 
 "Golden Bible" discovered in Mormon 
 Hill. And we further learn that poetry, 
 
16 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 as well as biography, had charms for Jo- 
 seph, his favorite stanza being 
 
 "My name was Robert Kidd, 
 
 As I sailed, as I sailed, 
 And most wickedly I did, 
 God's laws I did forbid, 
 
 As I sailed, as I sailed." 
 
 Blood-and-thunder literature was not as 
 plentiful nor as cheap then as it is now, 
 or Joe might never have opened the Bible ; 
 as it was, he later became quite familiar 
 with parts of the Old and New Testaments, 
 and the fanciful stories he invented be- 
 gan to take on a religious cast. The mor- 
 bidly superstitious nature of his mother, 
 who believed in dreams and saw visions, 
 also must have influenced him greatly. 
 
 With the aid of a curious piece of quartz, 
 found while digging a well, Joseph em- 
 barked upon fortune-telling. It may be 
 proper to add that the well had not been 
 dug by him, for he had a deep-seated an- 
 tipathy to every sort of undignified exer- 
 tion. He preferred more lucrative and 
 less arduous avocations, such as the pos- 
 session of the magic peek-stone now 
 opened to him pretending to be able by 
 its agency to recover lost or stolen prop- 
 erty and find hidden pirate hoards. Many 
 people paid him money for the exercise of 
 his clairvoyant gifts. One easygoing and 
 
"JOE SMITH, PROPHET" 17 
 
 superstitions farmer furnished a sheep for 
 a blood-offering in treasure-seeking incan- 
 tations which sheep was promptly trans- 
 formed into mutton under the auspices of 
 the budding prophet's mother. When the 
 lost property failed to turn up, or the chest 
 of gold did not materialize, Joe had ever 
 an ingenious explanation for the failure, 
 and nearly always managed to placate the 
 wrath of his disappointed dupes. Such 
 was the boyhood of Joe Smith at Fayette 
 and Manchester, whither his parents had 
 removed in 1819. 
 
 A revival broke out, opening up a new 
 field for the idle and imaginative young 
 scamp, who first became a Methodist pro- 
 bationer, but soon backslid and began to 
 see visions, like his mother. God the 
 Father and God the Son appeared to him 
 while he was at prayer in a forest, bidding 
 him to ally himself with no church extant, 
 since all were in the meshes of error. 
 Later an angel clothed in supernal glory 
 announced to him that he himself was the 
 chosen vessel of God, that his sins were 
 blotted out, and that the acceptable year 
 of the Lord had come. He was directed 
 to go to a certain hill, where he would find 
 a book of golden plates, together with the 
 instrument to interpret them. Strict in- 
 junction was put upon him not to show the 
 plates to any one, nor to use them for self- 
 
18 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 ish gain, under penalty of death. Perhaps 
 Smith disregarded this warning later 
 which would plausibly account for his un- 
 timely end though the Mormons have 
 never made use of the forcible argument 
 that could be based upon such conjecture. 
 
 Smith henceforth received revelation af- 
 ter revelation. He found the plates in the 
 spot indicated, but not being sufficiently 
 sanctified he did not remove them. At last, 
 in September, 1827, after three years' 
 growth in holiness, during which he took 
 unto himself a wife in spite of her parents' 
 opposition, which the father wished to 
 voice with a shotgun, the plates passed 
 into Joe's possession. Together with them 
 he found "two smooth three-cornered dia- 
 monds set in glass, which were connected 
 with each other in much the same way as 
 old-fashioned spectacles.' 3 These were 
 the Urim and Thummim the insignia of 
 Old Testament seers to be employed in 
 translating the golden tome. A curious 
 copper breastplate and a sword also were 
 found in the same spot. 
 
 So runs the Mormon version. A sug- 
 gestive commentary upon it is furnished 
 by the neighbors of the Smith family. One 
 of them, named Peter Ingersoll, a close 
 friend of Joe's, declared under oath that 
 "Smith told him the whole story was a 
 hoax ; that he had found no such book ; but 
 
"JOE SMITH, PROPHET" 19 
 
 that as he had got the d d fools fixed, he 
 was bound to carry out the fun. ' ' 
 
 Smith cajoled Martin Harris, a well-to- 
 do farmer, into supporting him while 
 translating the plates. Harris, a gullible 
 fanatic, had been in turn Quaker and Uni- 
 versalist, Baptist and Presbyterian, and 
 pretended to have made a trip to the moon. 
 Now he became the Prophet's secretary. 
 A blanket was hung up in a dark corner 
 to shield the golden plates from profane 
 eyes; behind this improvised curtain, 
 which smacks of the spiritualistic cabinet, 
 sat Smith, translating aloud, while Harris 
 reduced it to writing. What would have 
 been the outcome had Harris been of skep- 
 tical nature and torn down the curtain? 
 Probably no Mormon problem would ever 
 have arisen to vex the nation. But per- 
 haps Smith might have met the emergency 
 as he did in a similar contretemps. A 
 couple of cronies, after vainly urging him 
 to show them his wonderful find^ were per- 
 mitted a glimpse of its shape beneath a 
 piece of canvas. One of them, with the 
 words, "Egad, I'll see the critter, live or 
 die !" whisked off the covering, and a large 
 brick was revealed. Smith pretended he 
 had played a joke on them, and some po- 
 tations from his whiskey-flask again put 
 everybody into good humor. 
 
 Smith found another ally, even more 
 
20 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 congenial and valuable than Martin Har- 
 ris, in a stranded schoolmaster, sometime 
 a blacksmith, named Oliver Cowdery. 
 John the Baptist, appearing in a vision, 
 commanded the pair to baptize each other 
 by immersion, at the same time consecrat- 
 ing them "Priests of the Order of Aaron. " 
 As soon as the rite had been performed, 
 the Holy Ghost came upon them with the 
 gift of prophecy. By Cowdery 's aid 
 Smith could not then write legibly the 
 translation of the "Golden Bible" was 
 completed, and the pair began to preach 
 the new gospel. They gained a few con- 
 verts, but were too well known in the com- 
 munity to meet with any great measure of 
 success. Most of the converts afterward 
 backslid; it is doubtful if any was sincere 
 except Martin Harris, a dupe so simple- 
 minded that he bought Smith's wedding 
 suit for him upon the representation that 
 it was needed for missionary work. 
 
 From this time forth the life of Smith 
 runs parallel with the history of the Mor- 
 mon church. Whether he was the real 
 originator, or only the cat's-paw of Sidney 
 Rigdon, whose connection with the begin- 
 nings of the church will be touched upon 
 later, Smith from the first was the ac- 
 knowledged head and front of the scheme. 
 He possessed in a remarkable degree the 
 qualities essential to success in such an 
 
"JOE SMITH, PROPHET" 21 
 
 undertaking unscrupulous audacity, un- 
 blushing impudence, and the nimbus of 
 necromantic power. 
 
 That Joseph Smith was a deliberate 
 impostor, as the earlier critics of Mor- 
 monism asserted, is not now believed by 
 students of psychology. The dupe of his 
 own imagination, perhaps an epileptic like 
 Paul and Mahomet, he was a victim of the 
 religious crazes that swept the New York 
 lake region. Having received this im- 
 pulse and acquired this propensity, he 
 found it profitable and easy to expand his 
 first revelations into systematic deception 
 like those spiritualistic mediums who 
 supplement their "phenomena" with 
 tricks. Beginning as a mystic with hal- 
 lucinations, Joe Smith developed into a 
 professional high-priest of humbug. 
 
 Smith's pretended revelations certainly 
 appeared to be the crudest and most pal- 
 pable sort of imposture, and it is amazing 
 that they were swallowed by his dupes. 
 Soon after the Book of Mormon was print- 
 ed, and when the printer was clamoring 
 for his money, Smith had a revelation com- 
 manding Martin Harris to foot the bill: 
 "I command thee that thou shalt not covet 
 thine own property, but impart it freely 
 to the printing of the Book of Mormon, 
 which contains the truth and the word of 
 God. Pay the debt thou has contracted 
 
22 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 with the printer. " No ambiguity about 
 that oracle! Another revelation com- 
 manded the church to build a house for 
 Smith. Still another ordered that he "be 
 provided with food and raiment, and what- 
 soever things he needeth to accomplish the 
 work wherewith I have commanded him. ' ' 
 The irreverent may note the unconvention- 
 ality of the grammar, which the giant spec- 
 tacles of the Urim and Thummim seeming- 
 ly were powerless to overcome. 
 
 Despite the defects of his education and 
 his moral delinquencies, Joseph Smith was 
 one of the most remarkable men of his 
 time. His portrait, long in the possession 
 of Brigham Young, shows him to have had 
 features regular and not unintelligent. 
 Physically he was tall and well-propor- 
 tioned, with light hair, blue eyes, and cal- 
 low face. He was mild and suave in 
 manner, yet always carried his measures 
 a born leader of men. He could endure 
 privation and persecution unflinchingly to 
 gain his ends ; yet he was fond of ease and 
 luxury, and from his sensuous nature 
 doubtless proceeded the revelation enjoin- 
 ing polygamy upon the church a feature 
 of its creed that has roused more hostility 
 than all others. In this, also, he resembled 
 Mahomet, who had a special revelation 
 (Sura 33 of the Koran) when he wished to 
 
"JOE SMITH, PROPHET" 23 
 
 marry the wife of his adopted son Zaid, 
 a thing abhorrent to the Arabs . 
 
 Such was the man who founded a great 
 religion upon flimsy mummeries, and es- 
 tablished it despite ridicule and malignant 
 opposition; the man who was tarred and 
 feathered in Ohio, driven from Missouri 
 by the militia, jailed and lynched in Illi- 
 nois; the man who built three flourishing 
 cities, and had the effrontery to run for 
 the presidency of the United States; the 
 man whose spirit, though like Moses he 
 never trod the promised land, dominates 
 the state of Utah to-day and is one of the 
 mightiest factors in the ultramontane 
 region of the great West. 
 
24 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 The Book of Mormon 
 
 It will be well, before pursuing further 
 the fortunes of the infant church, to pause 
 and look into the supposedly sacred vol- 
 ume from which it sprang. The Mormons 
 derive their name from this book, which 
 they believe to have been written in the 
 fourth century by the Hebrew-American 
 hero-chief Mormon. It has been trans- 
 lated into German, French, Spanish, 
 Italian, Swedish, Danish, Welsh, Ha- 
 waiian, and a dozen other languages, and 
 scattered broadcast over the world by 
 Mormon missionaries. The volume is a 
 queer hash just such a work as might 
 have been expected of Joseph Smith a 
 mixture of Holy Writ with blood-and- 
 thunder fiction. Its plot is as follows : 
 
 After the confusion of tongues at the 
 building of the tower of Babel, God scat- 
 tered the various tribes of mankind over 
 the face of the earth. Several families, 
 descendants of Jared, came to America, 
 where they increased and multiplied. At 
 first they prospered, living righteously; 
 but later wickedness began to flourish 
 among them, until, about 600 B. c., they 
 
THE BOOK OF MORMON 26 
 
 were punished for their transgressions by 
 total annihilation. Their history was 
 written and the record hidden away by 
 their great prophet Ether. Let not the 
 irreverent therefore deem it "light as 
 air," nor suggest its affinity to laughing 
 gas. 
 
 Now about this time, while Zedekiah sat 
 on the throne of Judah, Lehi, a holy man 
 of the tribe of Joseph, divinely warned 
 of Jerusalem's impending destruction, 
 was by God's hand led to America. Lehi 
 landed on the coast of Chile, and his de- 
 scendants, spreading northward, re- 
 peopled the land, and found records of 
 the extinct Jaredites. Both of the races 
 now dwelling on the continent, the sons of 
 Nephi and the sons of Laman, waxed pros- 
 perous and mighty like their predecessors. 
 But the Lamanites lapsed into barbarism, 
 while the Nephites, specially favored by 
 the Lord, attained high civilization. They 
 lived according to the law of Moses, which 
 they had brought across the sea 5 and were 
 ruled by judges, kings, and prophets, even 
 as Israel. Visions and angels' visits were 
 vouchsafed to their patriarchs and holy 
 men, and in the fullness of time, after his 
 death on the cross and his ascension, 
 Christ came down to visit America and 
 organized the church there as he had in 
 Judea. 
 
26 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 Three or four centuries after Christ, the 
 Nephites, lapsing into sin, were delivered 
 into the hand of the savage Lamanites, 
 progenitors of the American Indians. The 
 great Nephite hero-prophet Mormon had 
 been commanded to inscribe the records of 
 his nation upon golden tables, which he 
 committed to his son Moroni, who hid 
 them in the hill Cumorah when the Laman- 
 ites destroyed his people, slaying 230,000 
 in a great battle. The Urim and Thum- 
 mim were put with the tables, so that the 
 finder might be able to interpret the writ- 
 ings. In due time these plates were dis- 
 covered by Joseph Smith. 
 
 Such is the story of the Book of Mor- 
 mon. The plates of fine gold which Smith 
 professed to have found, guided by an 
 angel, have aroused much incredulous 
 criticism. They were not shown to any 
 one until two years after Smith first an- 
 nounced their discovery. Even then they 
 were displayed only to eleven persons; 
 the remainder of the world was not holy 
 enough to be permitted a glance at these 
 writings in ' 'Beformed Egyptian," a 
 language hitherto unknown to philology. 
 To make matters worse, the book with the 
 other paraphernalia was returned to the 
 angel after Smith had done with them, 
 which of course disposes of any hope that 
 future generations of linguists may un- 
 
THE BOOK OF MORMON 27 
 
 ravel its cabalistic runes into a grammar 
 and a lexicon. 
 
 The breastplate, which only Smith's 
 mother ever saw, and a sword, never 
 shown to any one what prizes these for 
 a museum ! It seems to have been the ori- 
 ginal intention to exhibit the plates, after 
 the translation was completed, charging 
 twenty-five cents admission; but this plan 
 was never carried into execution. Either 
 the plates were mythical, or exposure was 
 feared. But what an impetus it would 
 have given the faith if the original plates 
 could have been displayed in the sanctu- 
 ary of its several Zions, or could have been 
 sent forth to confound the learning of the 
 schools! Or if the volume, surely 24 
 carats fine, had been melted down to pay 
 for printing the first edition of the ' ' trans- 
 lation," on the title-page of which, it may 
 be interesting to remember, Smith pro- 
 claimed himself the " author and proprie- 
 tor." The plates were said to be eight 
 inches long and seven in width, about the 
 thickness of tin ; three gold rings fastened 
 these plates together into a volume six 
 inches thick and weighing about sixty 
 pounds. The United States mint would 
 have returned coin enough to save Mar- 
 tin Harris from mortgaging his farm, 
 with something over to pay the debts the 
 
28 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 Smiths left behind them when they mi- 
 grated from Palmyra to Kirtland, Ohio. 
 
 The eleven persons whose testimony 
 that they saw the original plates is pre- 
 fixed to the later editions of the Book of 
 Mormon can hardly be called disinterested 
 witnesses. The first three are Oliver 
 Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin 
 Harris. Cowdery and Harris were 
 Smith's confederates in the labor of trans- 
 lation; Harris was also financially inter- 
 ested to a considerable sum; while David 
 Whitmer belonged to a family " noted for 
 credulity and a belief in witches," who of- 
 fered Smith an asylum in their home soon 
 after the story of the Golden Bible was 
 bruited about. Besides, the testimony of 
 these three witnesses contains so many 
 things of which they can not have been 
 sure, that we may well doubt their reli- 
 ability as to those points upon which they 
 should have been sure. Harris , when 
 questioned closely, used to explain that he 
 had seen the plates "with his spiritual 
 eye, ' ' and we may well believe that he saw 
 them through Smith's spiritual spectacles, 
 for it seems almost certain that the whole 
 of the testimony was drawn up by Smith 
 himself. 
 
 Cowdery and Whitmer were subsequent- 
 ly expelled from the church called 
 "murderers at heart" by Smith, and 
 
THE BOOK OP MORMON 
 
 "counterfeiters, thieves, liars, blacklegs of 
 the deepest dye," by Sidney Rigdon. 
 Harris also was expelled, having mu- 
 tinied at the shabby treatment Smith ac- 
 corded him after his money was gone, but 
 he never recanted his belief in Mormon- 
 ism. 
 
 Of the eight other witnesses, five were 
 relatives of Whitmer's and the remaining 
 three were Smith's father and two bro- 
 thers. So it appears that this testimony, 
 taken at its full value, is pretty much a 
 family affair. A simple diagram will 
 make this plain: 
 
 Joseph Smith, the Prophet 
 
 g 
 
 p 
 
 ^ 
 
 c+ 
 
 5" 
 P 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 
 
 CD 
 
 Martin Harris w^as a practical man as 
 well as a man of faith, and hoped to reap 
 a golden reward on earth as well as oc- 
 cupy a front pew in the New Jerusalem. 
 Impelled by this practical vein in his char- 
 acter, and probably instigated by his 
 
30 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 Quaker wife, who treated the whole matter 
 as "craziness," he insisted upon being 
 given a copy of the writing, which he took 
 to New York and showed to various schol- 
 ars, asking their opinion. The Mormons 
 assert that the famous Prof. Charles An- 
 thon declared the characters to be Egyp- 
 tian, Chaldean, Assyrian, and Arabic, 
 Anthon in a letter denied having given 
 any such ridiculous opinion, but suspected 
 that an attempt was being made to vic- 
 timize Harris, and accordingly warned 
 him. But Harris, it is supposed, was only 
 confirmed in his faith by any warning. 
 "God hath chosen the foolish things of the 
 world to confound the wise," was his fa- 
 vorite axiom. 
 
 Harris's wife burned a part of the man- 
 uscript secretly, thinking to put an end to 
 the scheme. This brought about a cool- 
 ness between Harris and Smith, the Pro- 
 phet suspecting the farmer of having con- 
 nived at the loss of the precious pages. 
 Smith had a convenient revelation order- 
 ing him not to retranslate the lost portion, 
 lest, if the stolen copy should be found and 
 differed from the new version, skeptics 
 might scoff at God's word. 
 
 Although Harris declared that "Bro- 
 ther Joseph drank too much liquor while 
 translating the Book of Mormon/' the 
 translation was finally completed. The 
 
THE BOOK OF MORMON 31 
 
 work was printed and given to the world 
 in 1830, Harris mortgaging his farm for 
 $3,000 to make this possible. It was a 
 book of 588 octavo pages, and was to be 
 sold at the specially revealed price of 
 $1.25. Harris was to have the exclusive 
 selling rights; but he proved a failure as 
 a colporteur, and the books were finally 
 sold, traded, or disposed of in any way 
 that would redound to the greater af- 
 fluence and comfort of the Smith family. 
 
 The meaning of the word " Mormon," 
 which is Greek for "bugaboo," has been 
 explained by Smith with a happier ety- 
 mology. "Mon" in Egyptian means 
 "good," and "mor" is a contraction of 
 "more;" hence "Mormon" means "more 
 good" or "better." Such hybrid deriva- 
 tions being contrary to the best usage, it 
 might be suggested that "mon" be treated 
 as a contraction of "money," and that the 
 full meaning is "more money." 
 
 Part of the "Golden Bible" was sealed, 
 so that it could neither be opened nor read. 
 The writing was in a " small unknown 
 character;" the facsimiles of it shown 
 rather resemble the hieroglyphics execut- 
 ed by a very small boy who has surrepti- 
 tiously secured his father's pen. There 
 are Arabic numerals, dots and dashes, cir- 
 cles and squares, Roman letters at all an- 
 gles and upside down, with queer curly- 
 
32 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 cues that look like a clumsy forgery of 
 a laundry-check. 
 
 The original mss. of the new Bible had 
 no marks of punctuation and no capital 
 letters, nor were there any paragraphs. 
 The Urim and Thummim did not pay 
 any attention to typographical details. 
 After handling a few pages of the "copy," 
 the printer who got out the first edition 
 had found that his reputation would be 
 forever lost if he printed the book "as it 
 was written. " Finally, after much expos- 
 tulation , Smith modified the command- 
 ment of the Lord forbidding any changes, 
 and gave the printer limited liberty as to 
 nonessentials. Thus it appears that the 
 new-fledged Prophet was already learned 
 in the wisdom of the Higher Critics. Not- 
 withstanding the printer's corrections, 
 the first edition of the "inspired" vol- 
 ume was full of errors in spelling and 
 grammar, capitalizing and punctuation 
 to say nothing of anachronisms, gross his- 
 torical blunders, glaring absurdities, and 
 stilted imitations of scriptural phraseol- 
 ogy six hundred pages of dull drivel. 
 
 Those hero-prophets of prehistoric 
 America were wondrously endowed, as 
 they could quote from Hamlet and the 
 King James Bible a thousand years be- 
 fore Shakespeare and King James were 
 born plain proof of inspiration! But 
 
THE BOOK OF MORMON 33 
 
 tlu work adds nothing to human know- 
 ledge except the names of two animals, 
 "cureloms and cumoms," hitherto un- 
 known to Zoology. Along with Leviathan 
 and Behemoth, these creatures would 
 prove drawing-cards for any menagerie. 
 Some inspired artist should paint these 
 beasts and resolve all doubts about them. 
 Has the curelom wings or a prehensile 
 tail? Is the cumom carnivorous or does 
 it feed upon nuts? 
 
 But what of the true origin of this 
 sacred book? One widely accepted theory 
 identifies it with an archeological romance, 
 The Manuscript Found, written by the 
 Eev. Solomon Spaulding about 1809. 
 Spaulding believed the American conti- 
 nent to have been colonized by the ancient 
 Israelites, and that the Indians are their 
 descendants. Upon this theory which 
 belongs in the same category as Shake- 
 speare-Bacon ciphers and Great Pyramid 
 inheritances the good dominie based a 
 fabulous history of the mound-builders. 
 He gave the manuscript to a Pittsburgh 
 bookseller named Patterson. Spaulding 
 died before an agreement as to terms of 
 publication could be reached, and the 
 manuscript remained in Patterson's pos- 
 session. 
 
 Now another character appears upon 
 the stage of this religious melodrama. It 
 
34 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 is Sidney Eigdon, who afterward became 
 the great apostle of Mormonism. Eig- 
 don was a sort of theological free lance 
 an eloquent speaker and a man of much 
 executive ability, but given to erratic no- 
 tions. He drifted from the Baptist fold 
 into the Disciple, and here, becoming dis- 
 gruntled at real or fancied slights put up- 
 on him by Alexander Campbell, he prob- 
 ably conceived the idea of starting a re- 
 ligion of his own. It is known that he 
 worked at the printer's case in his young- 
 er days, and it seems that he was in Pat- 
 terson's employ or loafed about the place, 
 and it is not unlikely that in some way or 
 other he got hold of the Spaulding manu- 
 script. 
 
 Learning through the papers of Smith's 
 necromantic and clairvoyant perform- 
 ances, and of his " magic peek-stone," 
 Bigdon saw in him a perhaps valuable 
 ally. Perhaps they met on one of Eig- 
 don 's tours as a Campbellite evangelist; 
 perhaps the tin-peddling theologian, Par- 
 ley Pratt, who will play a great role in 
 the future of the new religion, was the go- 
 between. An understanding was reached 
 in some way, and the result was that 
 Spaulding 's tale, greatly padded and al- 
 tered to suit the purposes of the schemers, 
 in due time made its appearance as the 
 Book of Mormon. 
 
THE BOOK OF MORMON 35 
 
 Rig-don was often away from home for 
 weeks while the translation was going on, 
 and a " mysterious stranger " made fre- 
 quent visits to the Smith homestead dur- 
 ing the same time. All this, with the ad- 
 ditional fact that Rigdon in Ohio spoke of 
 the new revelation before it was made pub- 
 lic, forms a fairly complete chain of cir- 
 cumstantial evidence. A number of per- 
 sons, including the widow, brother, busi- 
 ness partner, and neighbors of Spaulding, 
 also identified his romance as the ground- 
 work of the Book of Mormon the same 
 characters, the same plot, the same pecu- 
 liar diction and style. Spaulding ? s origi- 
 nal manuscript was reported to have been 
 found at Honolulu in 1885, and this ms. is 
 at present in the library of Oberlin Col- 
 lege, but it is generally believed to be a 
 forgery. 
 
 Such, according to the most plausible 
 theory, was the genesis of that sacred vol- 
 ume, holding which in one hand and the 
 Bible in the other, and suddenly clapping 
 them together an effective oratorical 
 trick Sidney Rigdon in his Mormon ser- 
 mons declared that the two books were 
 each incomplete without the other. 
 
 The Spaulding-Rigdon theory of the 
 Book of Mormon may be wrong indeed, 
 it is almost superfluous. The book con- 
 tains nothing which Joseph Smith might 
 
36 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 not have evolved. It is a religious dime- 
 novel written in the style of Kings and 
 Chronicles, interminable, prosaic, platitu- 
 dinous, ungrammatical. It will never be 
 attacked by any Higher Criticism : it is be- 
 neath all criticism. Yet it is believed im- 
 plicitly by hundreds of thousands. Very 
 true are the words of the great historian 
 Edward Gibbon: "The practice of super- 
 stition is so congenial to the multitude 
 that, if they are forcibly awakened, they 
 still regret the loss of their pleasing 
 vision.*** So urgent on the vulgar is the 
 necessity of believing, that the fall of any 
 system of mythology will most probably 
 be succeeded by the introduction of some 
 other mode of superstition." Very true 
 and yet how tragical ! 
 
BIRTH OP A NEW RELIGION 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Birth of a New Eeligion 
 
 It was a time of spiritual unrest. 
 Mushroom sects sprang up over night; 
 epidemic delusions swept across the land, 
 like the flagellant and dancing manias of 
 the Middle Ages. The appearance of a 
 comet would throw whole communities in- 
 to a frenzy of preparation for the day of 
 wrath. To this period belong the vaga- 
 ries of the Millerites, and the meteoric 
 career of Dylks, the Leatherwood Mes- 
 siah; this period also marked the rise of 
 the Disciples, the Winebrennerians, the 
 Free- Will Baptists. Religious excitement 
 everywhere blazed up in remarkable re- 
 vivals, which were often attended by pe- 
 culiar physical and psychical phenomena 
 shouting, grimacing, writhing, as in con- 
 vulsions. The "Barkers" would gather 
 around a tree, snarling and yapping like 
 dogs, which they called "treeing the 
 devil ; ' ' camp-meetings would be convulsed 
 with "holy laughter" that could be heard 
 a long distance off for hours and days. It 
 was an age of religious epidemics. 
 
 The cause of this unsettled state of the 
 popular mind, and of the consequent ready 
 
38 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 responsiveness to religious freaks and 
 frauds, is not hard to find. The labors 
 and privations of pioneer life were rapidly 
 being superseded by the comfort and se- 
 curity of established communities, while 
 education had not yet clarified the seeth- 
 ing brains. In the fallow soil of leisure 
 and naive ignorance Mormonism quickly 
 took root, like a score of other religious 
 crazes of the day, which had not its pecu- 
 liar elements of vitality and so perished. 
 
 The church was definitely organized at 
 Fayette, New York, in 1830, on April sixth. 
 Why not five days sooner, may be asked, 
 to conserve the eternal fitness of things? 
 The six original members were Joseph 
 Smith, senior, Hyrum Smith, Joseph 
 Smith, junior, Samuel Smith, Oliver Cow- 
 dery, and Joseph Knight. At first they 
 called themselves the "Church of Christ," 
 soon, however, they styled it the ' ' Church 
 of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" 
 now usually abridged to "Latter-Day 
 Saints." 
 
 The first conference of the new-fledged 
 church was held the same year, in the be- 
 ginning of June, with thirty members pre- 
 sent. Missionaries were sent out, and an 
 evangelistic campaign inaugurated. Elder 
 Oliver Cowdery preached the first sermon ; 
 Parley Pratt, already mentioned, whose 
 time was divided between peddling tin- 
 
BIRTH OP A NEW RELIGION 39 
 
 ware and proclaiming the gospel, also en- 
 tered the apostolate; Martin Harris har- 
 angued crowds at street corners and in 
 taverns. Sidney Eigdon soon threw off 
 his mask, and embraced the new faith. He 
 had been gradually preparing his congre- 
 gation at Kirtland, Ohio, for the change; 
 now, at the start, he made a melodramatic 
 show of opposition, to render his conver- 
 sion all the more impressive. He went 
 through a vehement public debate with 
 Pratt, yielding inch by inch, and at last 
 surrendered, professing to have received 
 the Spirit's witness to the truth of the new 
 revelation. The trump of the latter-day 
 gospel was sounded with might and main ; 
 conversions came thick and fast except 
 around Palmyra, where the Prophet and 
 his acolytes were too well known. 
 
 Of course, the "world" now began to 
 afflict the Saints. Joseph was arrested, 
 charges of fraud being brought against 
 him. Though acquitted by the district 
 court, he deemed it prudent to shake the 
 dust of the community from his feet, es- 
 pecially as threats and attempts of vio- 
 lence were several times made. In 1831 
 he and his followers removed to Kirtland, 
 where Rigdon already had done effective 
 missionary work. 
 
 There the church grew, despite vehem- 
 ent opposition. The ignorant and super- 
 
40 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 stitious were frightened into the fold by 
 prophecies such as one by Martin Harris, 
 that within fifteen years Christ would ap- 
 pear and everybody who had not accepted 
 Mormonism would be damned. Others 
 were attracted by the fascination which 
 the strange and marvelous ever exercises 
 over many minds; not a few were influ- 
 enced by motives of cupidity and a desire 
 for place and power. Such converts were 
 not susceptible to counteractives like the 
 scholarly Alexander Campbell's expose of 
 the Book of Mormon. Who knows if in 
 centuries to come Campbell's writings 
 may not be lost like those of Celsus, who 
 criticised early Christianity on the ground 
 that "weavers, tailors, fullers, and the 
 most illiterate and rustic fellows" were 
 preaching this gospel and exalting the 
 peculiar glory of ignorance! It would 
 be no greater marvel than the success of 
 the illiterate and rustic fellows preaching 
 Mormonism among people of their own 
 stamp. Still, it would be misleading to 
 assume that all the Mormon converts of 
 that day, or of more recent time, were 
 ignorant and superstitious. Among them 
 were men of piety and learning; many 
 were descended from the stern old Puri- 
 tan stock of New England. Such was 
 Lorenzo Snow whose sister Eliza later 
 became one of Smith's wives an accom- 
 
BIRTH OF A NEW RELIGION 41 
 
 plished Hebrew scholar and a graduate of 
 Presbyterian Oberlin; such was Brigham 
 Young, the Joshua of Mormonism, whose 
 grandfather was a New England Metho- 
 dist, and whose father fought in the Revo- 
 lutionary war. Lorin Farr, the first 
 mayor of Ogden, came of old New Hamp- 
 shire stock; Anson Call's grandfather 
 fought at Bunker Hill and under Wash- 
 ington; Abram Hatch also boasted of a 
 Revolutionary ancestry; Franklin D. Rich- 
 ards was a native of Massachusetts; 
 Francis M. Lyman's grandfather was a 
 cousin of Lyman Beecher Henry Ward 
 Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe were 
 his second cousins. The list might be ex- 
 tended greatly; but these names will suf- 
 fice to show that not merely the rabble was 
 captivated by the strange and novel doc- 
 trine. 
 
 A splendid temple was built at Kirtland, 
 representing a value of forty thousand 
 dollars. Apostles were sent forth to con- 
 vert the Indian tribes, the "Lamanites," 
 to whom Smith professed to be specially 
 sent. A new version of the Bible was 
 also begun with the aid of the tlrim and 
 Thummim. Ere long, however, it became 
 evident to Smith that his plans could not 
 be carried out to the full in the more set- 
 tled states. In obedience to a revelation 
 he now had revelations as regularly as 
 
42 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 his meals another colony was founded in 
 Missouri, where the foundations of "the 
 glorious city of the New Jerusalem" were 
 laid. The settlement prospered, for the 
 Mormons spread its fame far and wide 
 with an energy and eloquence that a town- 
 boomer of later days might have envied. 
 "The streets would be paved with gold. 
 The ten lost tribes of Israel had been dis- 
 covered in the vicinity of the North Pole, 
 where they had for ages been secluded 
 by immense barriers of ice, and had be- 
 come vastly rich; the ice in a few years 
 was to be melted away, when these tribes, 
 with Saint John at their head, would be 
 seen making their appearance in the new 
 city, loaded with immense quantities of 
 gold and silver." 
 
 Communism, with its alluring dream of 
 fraternity and its promise of assured sub- 
 sistence, was another factor that led many 
 to follow the apostles of Mormonism. It 
 was the time when the Shakers and the 
 Owenites. the Brook Farmers and the 
 Harmonists, formed their communities, 
 most of them upon a religious basis. 
 These doctrinaires could point to the ex- 
 ample of the early Christians, who had all 
 things in common and in a time of eco- 
 nomic stress and emotional fervor such 
 teachings found many eager listeners to 
 accept them. As the Mormons increased 
 
BIRTH OF A NEW RELIGION 43 
 
 their worldly goods, however, their early 
 communistic notions died out, leaving a 
 very effective tithing system as their sur- 
 vival in Mormon polity. 
 
 Upon the return from the first recon- 
 noitering expedition into Missouri, at- 
 tended as it was by such disagreeable ex- 
 periences as a ducking in the river and the 
 necessity of pawning their trunks to get 
 home, Smith and Kigdon set to work to 
 secure funds for building the new Zion. 
 They opened a general store at Hiram 
 near Kirtland, but were tarred and feath- 
 ered by a mob. They started a "wild- 
 cat" bank at Kirtland, and flooded the 
 region with Mormon money. Here the 
 trust principle was first enunciated, a " di- 
 vine revelation" declaring that this bank 
 "would swallow up all other banks." 
 They also started a paper, The Evening 
 and Morning Star, which soon ceased to 
 twinkle. 
 
 As the household of the faithful increas- 
 ed, Smith and his adjutants saw the nec- 
 essity of adopting some fixed church 
 polity. So they compiled the Book of 
 Doctrine and Covenants, and organized 
 the "Council" of twelve high-priests and 
 three presidents. Then a quorum of 
 "Twelve Apostles" was constituted. The 
 picturesque and poetic spirit pervading 
 the church at that early day, which must 
 
44 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 have thrown a glamour over all its claims 
 in the eyes of simple-minded and pious 
 folk, spread its wings in the sobriquets be- 
 stowed upon those "apostles." Brigham 
 Young was the Lion of the Lord; Parley 
 Pratt, the Archer of Paradise; Orson 
 Hyde, the Olive-Branch of Israel; Wil- 
 lard Eichards, the Keeper of the Eolls; 
 John Taylor, the Champion of Eight; 
 William Smith, the Patriarchal Jacob's 
 Staff; Wilford Woodruff, the Banner of 
 the Gospel; George A. Smith, the Entab- 
 lature of Truth; Orson Pratt, the Gauge 
 of Philosophy; John E. Page, the Sun- 
 Dial ; Lyman Wright, the Wild Earn of the 
 Mountains. 
 
 The collapse of the Kirtland community 
 came with the financial panic of 1837. The 
 bank that was to swallow all other banks 
 had flooded the Western Eeserve with 
 worthless scrip. An action for unlawful 
 banking was brought against Eigdon and 
 Smith; other troubles began to multiply. 
 The temple had already been mortgaged 
 not by the church, but by Smith, Eigdon, 
 et al. When the bank closed its doors, 
 Mormonism pulled up stakes, and the he- 
 gira to the Missouri Zion began, culminat- 
 ing in the Prophet's inglorious midnight 
 flight, which he justified by the saying of 
 Jesus : " When they persecute you in one 
 city, flee ye to another." 
 
BIRTH OP A NEW RELIGION 45 
 
 Meanwhile the Missouri colony, " where 
 Christ would shortly reign in person/' 
 had grown to about 1,500 souls and was 
 progressing finely; but some practices of 
 the Saints brought upon them the odium 
 of their neighbors. Resolutions were 
 passed ordering all Mormons to leave the 
 state, forbidding any others to enter it, 
 and closing with this delicious morsel of 
 irony: "That those who fail to comply 
 with these requisitions, be referred to 
 those of their brethren who have the gifts 
 of divination and of unknown tongues, to 
 inform them of the lot that awaits them." 
 Joseph, appealed to as Prophet, preached 
 resistance and predicted victory; so a 
 Mormon army, two hundred and five men 
 strong, had set out from Kirtland to smite 
 the Gentiles. Their banner was milky 
 white, with the word "Peace" printed up- 
 on it in blood-red characters. But when 
 they arrived in Missouri, and saw the Gen- 
 tile host, instead of "possessing the land" 
 they possessed themselves in patience, and 
 decided to take the inscription of the ban- 
 ner literally as their motto. 
 
 When Smith arrived in Missouri, Far 
 West was the nucleus of the Mormon col- 
 ony there. A new temple was projected, 
 "upon the very spot where the Garden of 
 Eden had once been." But trouble was 
 brewing. Cowdery and Harris were ex- 
 
46 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 communicated; Thomas B. Marsh, the 
 president of the Apostles, apostatized and 
 charged his late brethren with many mis- 
 deeds, among them counterfeiting, cattle- 
 thieving, immoral practices, and treason 
 against the state. The people of Missouri 
 rose; civil war was rife; the militia had 
 to be called out. The end of the trouble 
 was that the Mormons again had to cross 
 the Father of Waters. As a Mormon 
 hymn phrases it a genuine Mormon 
 hymn, for all its Gilbertian comic-opera 
 flavor 
 
 "Missouri, 
 
 Like a whirlwind in its fury, 
 And without a judge or jury, 
 Drove the Saints and spilled their blood/' 
 
NAUVOO THE BEAUTIFUL 47 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Nauvoo the Beautiful 
 
 In the spring of 1839 the Mormons, now 
 more sinned against than sinning, crossed 
 over into Illinois, and there, about fifty 
 miles above Quincy, on a rolling plain in 
 a curve of the majestic stream^ founded 
 Nauvoo the Beautiful. Both the name of 
 the new city and its significance were re- 
 vealed to Smith, who ruled over it as pro- 
 phet, priest, and king. Soon the desert 
 blossomed like the rose, and the erection 
 of another pretentious temple was begun, 
 a limestone of marmorean beauty and dur- 
 ability being used in the building. From 
 near and far the faithful flocked to the 
 new settlement; many converts were at- 
 tracted through sympathy aroused by the 
 Missouri persecutions; and ere long Nau- 
 voo had a population of ten thousand 
 souls. The city was well governed. 
 Saloons and drunkenness were unknown. 
 The Mormon virtues of industry and 
 thrift were abundantly in evidence. The 
 idle were "whittled" out of town sur- 
 rounded by a committee of citizens, who 
 whittled their sticks at them until they 
 left a curious Yankee mode of ostracism ! 
 
48 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 As the number of Mormons grew, Smith 
 began to dabble in politics. He con- 
 trolled the vote of Nauvoo and the county 
 almost absolutely; in one election only six 
 votes were cast in opposition to his dictum. 
 This power he used to obtain for Nauvoo 
 a charter giving the church almost unlimit- 
 ed rights and privileges. The Prophet 
 was elected Mayor. The Nauvoo Legion 
 was formed, a fine body of soldiery which 
 eventually grew to four thousand men 
 a Mormon army in the guise of state mil- 
 itia, with General Smith as commander-in- 
 chief . The Nauvoo University was insti- 
 tuted next. A fine hotel was built, in 
 obedience to a special revelation, in which 
 "my servant Joseph" was remembered as 
 always, and a suite of rooms ordered to be 
 set apart for him and his forever. Im- 
 agine a revelation from heaven decreeing 
 the building of a hotel, and giving minute 
 architectural details! Mormon apolo- 
 gists, of course, point to the tabernacle as 
 a precedent for Mormon apologists are 
 quite resourceful. 
 
 The year 1844 saw Mormonism strongly 
 intrenched in Illinois, with Smith at the 
 zenith of his glory and power. He oc- 
 cupied a place and wielded an influence 
 far beyond anything his own high-fantas- 
 tic imagination had ever painted. His 
 wealth was estimated at a million dollars; 
 
NAUVOO THE BEAUTIFUL 49 
 
 he was Pontifex Maximus of a great and 
 growing church, absolute ruler over tem- 
 poral and spiritual things; hundreds of 
 missionaries proclaimed his wisdom and 
 holiness in every quarter of the globe. By 
 his enemies he was envied and feared; by 
 the politicians of both great parties cod- 
 dled and courted. No wonder his vault- 
 ing ambition overleaped itself! 
 
 Clouds began to gather on the horizon. 
 A number of his henchmen, notably John 
 C. Bennett, were alienated, and went 
 forth breathing calumnies against the 
 church, calling Nauvoo a modern Sodom 
 and Smith a moral leper. Some of their 
 charges may have been too well founded, 
 for it is almost certain that the revelation 
 commanding polygamy had now been de- 
 livered, and that "spiritual wifehood" 
 was flourishing. At the last dress parade 
 of the Nauvoo Legion, ten of Smith's "ce- 
 lestial wives" took part, mounted on milk- 
 white chargers and arrayed in full uni- 
 form. Such things could not but rouse 
 bad blood. With all respect due to Mor- 
 mon virtues, the people of Illinois were 
 not ready, any more than those of Mis- 
 souri, to brook Mormon vices . 
 
 It seems that among the failings of the 
 early Saints was a fondness for their 
 neighbors' goods. Elders had found reve- 
 lation a very convenient path to prosper- 
 
50 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 ity; a believer in possession of a gold 
 watch or a suit of clothes could ofttimes 
 be persuaded to turn them over in obedi- 
 ence to divine injunction, but sometimes 
 complained because the revelations never 
 told the holy men to share their gold 
 watches or new suits with any one else. 
 Still more objectionable was the literal ac- 
 ceptance of the words: "Behold, it is not 
 said at any time that the Lord should not 
 take when he pleased, and pay as seemeth 
 him good ; wherefore as ye are agents, and 
 ye are on the Lord's errand," etc. a reve- 
 lation given in Missouri in 1831 to miti- 
 gate the rigors of the Eighth Command- 
 ment. 
 
 "Milking the Gentiles" a cant Mor- 
 mon phrase of obvious meaning was 
 practiced till ^the Gentiles were incensed 
 to fury. But Mormons controlled the 
 courts round about Nauvoo, and could not 
 be convicted of any crime, however strong 
 the evidence. 
 
 To fan opposition into active hate need- 
 ed only some such incident as occurred in 
 1843. * An attempt was made upon the 
 life of Gov. L. W. Boggs, of Missouri; a 
 Mormon was the would-be assassin, and 
 Smith was charged with having instigated 
 the deed. A requisition was issued for 
 the Prophet and his alleged tool, but a writ 
 of habeas corpus defeated this move. The 
 
NAUVOO THE BEAUTIFUL 51 
 
 case was finally tried in the Nauvoo court, 
 under the city's liberal and comprehensive 
 charter, and the two prisoners were tri- 
 umphantly acquitted. 
 
 The ill-feeling was intensified when 
 Smith announced himself as a candidate 
 for the Presidency in 1844 an act that 
 brought ridicule upon him and the church. 
 His address to the voters was a ludicrous 
 hodge-podge of politics and religion ; from 
 which, however, he may be regarded as the 
 father of expansion, as he advocated the 
 annexation of both Canada and Mexico. 
 
 With each day the arrogance of the 
 Mormons and the rage of their enemies 
 increased. An anti-Mormon paper was 
 started right in Nauvoo, but a decree of 
 the city council confiscated and destroyed 
 the printing outfit. Attempts to arrest 
 Smith came to naught, as he stood on the 
 impregnable rock of the Nauvoo charter. 
 At last, when a popular uprising against 
 the city was threatened, Smith surren- 
 dered, and was lodged in the jail at Car- 
 thage. On June 27, 1844, a fanatical mob 
 attacked the prison. Unlike Jesus of 
 Nazareth, who rebuked Peter for using his 
 sword, the Mormon Prophet had two six- 
 shooters, and brought down four of his as- 
 sailants. After a hot battle, both Joseph 
 and his brother Hyrum were shot and 
 killed the former as he leaped from the 
 
52 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 window attempting to escape. "0 Lord, 
 my God I" were his last words. 
 
 Thus the long comedy closed with a dark 
 and tragic denouement. The "irrepres- 
 sible conflict " had begun. The Saints 
 saw the futility of resistance, but chose to 
 exile themselves rather than yield. The 
 temple, which was to have cost a million 
 dollars, was hurriedly completed, because 
 Smith had prophesied it should be; but 
 the day after its dedication it was dis- 
 mantled and the exodus began. The 
 charter of Nauvoo was revoked by the leg- 
 islature; the city was besieged and bom- 
 barded by a mob ; the remnant of the Pro- 
 phet ? s followers was driven forth. At 
 Council Bluffs, Iowa, they caught up with 
 the advance-guard, and plodded on toward 
 the setting sun. 
 
 Beyond the borders of civilization, the 
 exiles hoped to build an empire of their 
 own, untrammeled by conventional moral- 
 ity and the envy of the orthodox denomina- 
 tions. They would claim the West "for 
 their inheritance/' Smith's tragic end 
 really gave Mormonism a greater impetus 
 than anything else could have done. Per- 
 secution always furthers the cause it at- 
 tacks; it kindles sympathy in fair-minded 
 men, stubborn resistance in the martyrs 
 and their followers. 
 
TO THE PROMISED LAND 53 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 To the Promised Land 
 
 The blood of the Smiths, in the soil of 
 Utah, then a part of Mexico, became the 
 prolific seed of a mighty church. 
 
 Upper California, as Utah was then 
 called, had already been looked toward as 
 an ultimate haven in Smith's day. The 
 Saints, overwhelmed with grief at their 
 Prophet's martyrdom, were ready to de- 
 part from the land of oppression. But 
 a city can not be moved in a day. The 
 people of Illinois disgraced themselves as 
 had those of Missouri, and the hapless 
 remnant of the Mormons was driven 
 forth in the middle of winter, their homes 
 pillaged and burned, by the savage big- 
 otry of their Gentile neighbors. 
 
 A firm hand seized the reins that fell 
 from Joseph Smith's lifeless grasp. Brig- 
 ham Young showed that he had justly 
 been styled "the Lion of the Lord." This 
 uncouth man, who did not know how to 
 spell his own name, and began it with a 
 small "y," had in him the qualities that 
 make great leaders singleness of pur- 
 pose, a clear head, and a resolute will. He 
 had the aggressive energy of Luther, the 
 
54 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 resourceful fervor of Loyola. He was the 
 man for the hour; no other could have 
 saved Mormonism from disintegration in 
 the crisis that followed its leader's fall. 
 
 Much as he has been maligned, Brigham 
 was undoubtedly sincere. He accepted 
 the Mormon revelation at par; while an 
 autocratic spirit, rising from his exuber- 
 ant vitality, led him to turn all things to 
 his own aggrandizement. Not versed in 
 the subtleties of ethical dialectics, but 
 holding that might makes right, his crude 
 conscience justified any means by the end 
 in view. With ease he wrested the scepter 
 of Mormondom from Sidney Eigdon, who 
 believed himself entitled to the succession. 
 Sidney was excommunicated, and deliv- 
 ered unto Satan for a thousand years. 
 Smith's erratic rule was succeeded by a 
 wise, far-seeing, and eminently practical 
 policy, administered with despotic inflex- 
 ibility, extending alike to things spiritual 
 and things temporal. ' ' Brickham young ' ' 
 became Pope and Czar in one person. 
 
 With wonderful energy and generalship, 
 Brigham led the Saints' hegira to the 
 region beyond the Eockies. Fanatical 
 faith buoyed up the spirits of the exiles, 
 steeling them for the wearisome journey. 
 Hardships were many, but on the far hori- 
 zon gleamed the star of hope. They plod- 
 ded across the trackless prairie a seem- 
 
TO THE PROMISED LAND 55 
 
 ingly interminable caravan. There were 
 twelve to fifteen thousand men, women and 
 children ; over three thousand ox-carts and 
 wagons; thirty thousand head of cattle, 
 horses and mules in great number, un- 
 counted droves of sheep. For nigh two 
 years this pilgrimage through the wilder- 
 ness continued; the jolting of the wagons 
 being used to churn the milk. The church 
 had no place of fixed abode; still the 
 Saints, shaken with ague and blistered 
 with fevers, had ever before their eyes the 
 vision of the new city. As they journeyed 
 on they received from the savage Indians 
 of the wilds a welcome that stood in glar- 
 ing contrast with the inhuman treatment 
 accorded them by the Christian communi- 
 ties they had left behind. "We have both 
 suffered," said a Pottawattomie chief; 
 "we must help each other, and the Great 
 Spirit will help us both. ' ' 
 
 A pioneer band of the bravest and best 
 men was sent ahead to spy out the land 
 and prepare the way. The romance of 
 Mormonism was not yet at an end. Noth- 
 ing in Greek myth is more beautiful than 
 this forlorn hope scattering seeds of the 
 sunflower along the route, so that the 
 mighty host that followed was shown the 
 way by patches of golden bloom. On the 
 twenty-second day of July, 1847, they en- 
 tered the valley where they founded the 
 
56 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 \ ' City of the Great Salt Lake. ' ' And now, 
 if romance had not fled, there also was 
 still in their midst the saving grace of hu- 
 mor, which had made the history of Mor- 
 monism seem almost a huge joke from the 
 first. In an exhortation to the Saints, the 
 Apostles commanded them to "bring their 
 gold, their silver, their copper, their zinc, 
 their tin, and brass, and iron, and choice 
 steel, and ivory, and precious stones/' to 
 adorn the new Zion. So the Saints came, 
 obedient to the command, and fell to work 
 pitching rude shelters, splitting logs, hoe- 
 ing corn, and planting potatoes. 
 
 Then the miracle of the crickets oc- 
 curred, convincing the exiles that the Lord 
 had been their guide. Clouds of fierce de- 
 vouring insects descended upon the young 
 crops. And it came to pass that white 
 gulls fell upon the crickets and devoured 
 them. This incident has grown into an 
 elaborate myth, though naturalists decline 
 to see anything supernatural in it. Those 
 gulls were always numerous about the 
 Great Salt Lake; the crops attracted the 
 crickets, and the crickets attracted the 
 birds. Naturalists are always coming 
 along with such easy explanations to spoil 
 perfectly good miracles. The real mir- 
 acle, however, was the perseverance of the 
 Saints. 
 
 Soon the " Great American Desert" put 
 
TO THE PROMISED LAND 67 
 
 on robes of fragrance. At first grain was 
 scarce, so that thistle-tops were eaten, 
 soup-stock was made by boiling the hide 
 roofs of houses, and the beef obtainable 
 was so tough that they had to grease the 
 saws to cut it, yet faith and toil won the 
 victory. In a few years abundance pre- 
 vailed, leaving leisure for the amenities 
 of life. A great university was projected 
 in 1850; a new alphabet of thirty-two 
 letters was invented ; a library was found- 
 ed, and well stocked with books from the 
 East; and a year later even a dramatic 
 association had been formed, giving cred- 
 itable stage entertainments. In 1853 the 
 corner-stone of another new temple was 
 laid, amid the blare of brass bands and the 
 rodomontade of the Apostles. 
 
 The community throve marvelously. 
 That they were governed wisely and well 
 is proved by the manner in which Brigham 
 Young stamped out the gold fever in 1849, 
 when many wanted to migrate to the Cali- 
 fornia Ophir. "If we were to go and dig 
 up chunks of gold," argued Young, "or 
 find it in our valley, it would ruin us." 
 Sound statecraft losing some of its point 
 and force by the declaration that "the true 
 use of gold is for paving streets and cover- 
 ing houses." 
 
 Fresh troubles were brewing. The 
 state of Deseret was organized which 
 
58 MORMON 
 
 means the land of the honey-bee, accord- 
 ing to the Book of Mormon. The Mexican 
 war had resulted in the cession of Cali- 
 fornia and New Mexico to the Union. Ne- 
 vada and Utah then formed part of Cali- 
 fornia, so that the Mormons again had 
 come under the jurisdiction of the United 
 States. A territorial form of government 
 was extended over the " State of Deseret," 
 and Brigham Young was appointed gov- 
 ernor. Ere long there moved into the 
 thriving community Gentiles, who would 
 not accept as final the judgments of Mor- 
 mon courts, presided over by Mormon 
 bishops. Perhaps they were justified in 
 this attitude, for Brigham Young himself, 
 in the patriarchal role of supreme judge, 
 once threatened to dismiss the whole epis- 
 copal bench, with the words: "You are 
 not fit to decide a case between two old 
 women, let alone two men. ' ' 
 
 The troubles were aggravated when 
 polygamy was openly promulgated as a 
 plank of the church platform. It was al- 
 so charged that Brigham had converted to 
 his own use moneys appropriated by Con- 
 gress for government buildings. Other 
 usurpations and abuses of various kinds 
 added fuel to the flame. To balance the 
 account, many of the judges and officials 
 smt to the territory by the government at 
 Y, r ashington were denounced by the Mor- 
 
TO THE PROMISED LAND 59 
 
 mons as incompetent and unscrupulous ad- 
 venturers, to whom these appointments 
 had fallen as crumbs from the table of po- 
 litical patronage. As if the fat graft were 
 only for the sleek saint ! Finally the re- 
 presentatives of the nation were driven 
 out of the state by the exasperated Mor- 
 mons, and Brigham solemnly declared 
 that if others like them were sent, they 
 would be slain. 
 
 Now an army was sent to Utah to put 
 down the incipient insurrection. A dra- 
 matic climax followed. Brigham pro- 
 claimed martial law, assumed the role of 
 dictator, and the Mormon militia, the re- 
 organized Nauvoo Legion, was mobilized 
 to meet the troops expected to re-establish 
 the Federal supremacy. 
 
60 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Mormon Beliefs and Practices 
 
 While the hosts of the "chosen people" 
 are preparing to repel the "mercenary 
 rabble" sent against them by President 
 Buchanan, let us examine the peculiar sys- 
 tem of government almost a theocracy 
 which held that people together, and still 
 obtains among them to-day, modified along 
 some lines, elaborated along others, but 
 essentially the same. Also let us consider 
 those virtues that have made them great, 
 those peculiarities that have brought hate 
 and obloquy upon them the same to-day 
 as at the outbreak of the Mormon War. 
 
 The church polity of Mormonism is com- 
 plex and complete. Its hierarchy includes 
 dignitaries enough almost to exhaust the 
 English tongue's store of ecclesiastical ti- 
 tles. There are two orders of priest- 
 hood, the Melchisedec and the Aaronic; 
 there are presidencies, councils, quorums, 
 seventies, and stakes; there are prophets, 
 patriarchs, apostles, bishops, elders, dea- 
 cons, teachers, ad infinitum. About a 
 fifth of the Mormon men hold some 
 churchly office. Their organization is per- 
 fect. Every block of buildings has its 
 
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 61 
 
 teacher, who is charged not only with keep- 
 ing ablaze the religious faith of those un- 
 der him, but is also their mentor in secu- 
 lar affairs in business, in politics, in do- 
 mestic life. He is father confessor and 
 father inquisitor in one, and is amenable 
 only to the ward bishop to whom he re- 
 ports. The w^ard bishops are under a pre- 
 siding bishop for the whole town. He in 
 turn derives his authority from the " First 
 Presidency," consisting of the Prophet 
 and two Counselors, who direct the af- 
 fairs of the entire church . 
 
 This network of surveillance and super- 
 intendence centering in the supreme head 
 of the church, this concatenation of power 
 radiating from the spirit of absolute and 
 unquestioning obedience that permeates 
 the whole body, moves in secular affairs 
 upon principles so empiric and crude that 
 statesmen would stand aghast at the re- 
 sults. Here are Poor Eichard's maxims 
 welded into a system of political economy. 
 "Laws," said Brigham Young, " should 
 be simple and plain, easy to be compre- 
 hended by the most unlearned, void of am- 
 biguity, and few in number." There is 
 the basis of Mormon legislation. "Pay 
 your tithes and mind your own business," 
 was and is the fundamental rule of con- 
 duct. "Produce what you consume," is 
 another bit of homely counsel for plain 
 
62 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 people; "buy no article from the stores 
 that you can do without; permit no viti- 
 ated taste to lead you into indulgence of 
 expensive luxuries." And though revela- 
 tion had exempted Joseph Smith from toil, 
 the church pronounced labor to be honor- 
 able, and a duty no less than prayer or 
 temple service. Brigham Young worked 
 at the carpenter's bench in his own mill. 
 Charity was another supreme virtue, and 
 was displayed most commendably in the 
 treatment of the broken-down Argonauts 
 of '49, who were first fleeced on their way 
 to the coast. 
 
 Eemarkable also was the attitude of the 
 church upon the questions of slavery, tem- 
 perance, and woman suffrage. The aboli- 
 tionist utterances of some Mormon leaders 
 had much to do with the rancor aroused in 
 Missouri. Among the hundred and forty- 
 three pioneers who entered Utah were sev- 
 eral negro freemen. And while Brigham 
 held slavery to be a divine institution, he 
 also believed that the time would come 
 when "the seed of Cain should be redeem- 
 ed" according to tradition the negroes 
 were the descendants of Cain, and their 
 black skin the mark set upon him by God. 
 The Mormon settlers of Utah bought In- 
 dian slave children, but only to prevent 
 their being killed by their captors. 
 
 The equal rights of woman were always 
 
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 63 
 
 recognized; the ballot belonged to inale 
 and female alike. The territory of Utah 
 affords probably "the first instance in the 
 United States where woman suffrage was 
 permitted" a privilege later withdrawn 
 before statehood could be obtained. In- 
 deed, the Mormons may also claim to have 
 originated the "new woman," as King 
 Strang, who ruled an island colony in Lake 
 Michigan, published an ukase which made 
 "bloomers" obligatory, provoking a re- 
 bellion that ended in his downfall not the 
 first sovereign to trip over woman's skirts. 
 
 Temperance and sobriety were inculcat- 
 ed from the start. At Far West and Nau- 
 voo a rigorous prohibition law was pro- 
 mulgated with a rather incongruous 
 amendment reserving to Joseph Smith the 
 sole privilege of selling liquor. And 
 among the earliest enactments at Salt 
 Lake City was one forbidding the sale or 
 use of ardent spirits. In the heart of 
 winter, and amid the horrors of the en- 
 forced hegira, it had been resolved that 
 "no corn should be made into whiskey, 
 and that if any man was preparing to dis- 
 till corn into whiskey, or alcohol, the corn 
 should be taken and given to the poor." 
 
 These homely virtues and enlightened 
 principles of public policy would have 
 made any people great; but in Mormon- 
 ism they were linked with beliefs inherent- 
 
64 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 ly so absurd and practices so unconven- 
 tional that civilization laughed at the 
 former and strove by every shift of di- 
 plomacy or force to uproot the other. As 
 a fair sample of the ludicrous may be in- 
 stanced the new astronomy which was to 
 be taught in the Deseret University, and 
 was to overturn the orthodox theories of 
 science; putting the sun, the great orb 
 Kolob, into the center of the universe, let- 
 ting it rotate once in a thousand years and 
 all the host of heaven revolve around it, 
 while the law of gravitation was entirely 
 abolished. For was it not so written 
 in the Book of Abraham? 
 
 Mormon theology is of a truth fearfully 
 and wonderfully made. It is founded up- 
 on the Book of Mormon, modified by in- 
 numerable later revelations vouchsafed 
 unto Smith, Eigdon, and Young. Accord- 
 ing to its prime tenets there is one chief 
 God, Jehovah, who has three persons ; this 
 supreme God has a wife, a female deity; 
 from them has sprung a whole pantheon 
 of minor gods and goddesses, besides 
 angels and the human race. 
 
 God the Father, according to Joe Smith, 
 "has a body of flesh and bones as tangi- 
 ble as man's," According to Brigham 
 Young, "God was Adam, and Eve was one 
 of his wives." Mormon apologists do not 
 defend this doctrine, but it was certainly 
 
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 65 
 
 promulgated by Young in a sermon 
 preached April 9, 1852, and is just as au- 
 thentic as any other revelation or tenet of 
 Smith and his successors. According to 
 later theologians, the supreme God has in- 
 deed the form of a man, but his body is 
 composed of spiritual matter that is, 
 matter of extreme fineness. He resides 
 in the center of the universe, near the 
 great star Kolob, each millennial rotation 
 of which marks a divine day. Jesus was 
 literally the son of God, but differs from 
 him only in age and authority seniority 
 presides. The Holy Spirit is matter in 
 its most rarified form, a subtle fluid, like 
 electricity, filling all space. 
 
 Heaven is partitioned into three abodes 
 the telestial and the terrestrial, for 
 those who have neither accepted nor re- 
 jected the gospel; and the celestial, for 
 those who believe and have been baptized. 
 The manner of baptism is by immersion, 
 infant baptism being rejected. Curious 
 in this connection is the doctrine of "bap- 
 tism for the dead," according to which 
 any one, believing a deceased relative to 
 be in torment, can go and be baptized as 
 his prosy, so securing his admission to 
 the realms of bliss. These, the celestial 
 heaven, would ultimately be established 
 upon earth, when the great white throne 
 would stand in Jackson county, Missouri. 
 
66 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 All who accept Joseph Smith as the Pro- 
 phet of the Lord will there reign with 
 Christ for a thousand years; apostates, 
 who are guilty of the sin against the Holy 
 Ghost, will be bound, and cast into the pit 
 with Satan and his angels. Apropos of 
 which it may be remarked that the Mor- 
 mon leaders frequently and with the ut- 
 most sang-froid consigned people to To- 
 phet for offenses far less grievous than 
 the sin against the Holy Ghost. "Zach- 
 ary Taylor is dead and in hell, and I am 
 glad of it," declared Young, because of 
 real or fancied slights put upon the Mor- 
 mons by Taylor. A Federal judge sent 
 to the territory angrily protested, when 
 the leader of the Saints coolly told him "he 
 need have no doubt about it, for he would 
 see him when he went there himself. ' ' 
 
 Upon this melange of chiliastic dreams 
 and calculating invention, communistic 
 ideas had been engrafted from the start, 
 and later toned down into a system of tith- 
 ing when they failed to arouse enthusiasm 
 among those who had and who were ex- 
 pected to impart unto those who had not. 
 The system of tithing, as rigorously en- 
 forced, is one secret of the church's great 
 power it provided unlimited sinews of 
 war, which the leaders never scrupled to 
 use in the most effective way. "When I 
 put my hand into one pocket," Brigham 
 
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 67 
 
 Young is credited with saying, "I put 
 Congress into the other." Through the 
 tithing system millions of dollars are an- 
 nually poured into the coffers of the 
 church. 
 
 Strangest among the many curious cere- 
 monies of the church is that of "endow- 
 ment" a sort of revival of heathen mys- 
 teries and medieval miracle-plays, closely 
 analogous to some lodge initiations. Af- 
 ter purification and anointing with oil, a 
 ritual of dramatic hocus-pocus, doubtless 
 impressive enough to the simple-minded, 
 is gone through; blood-curdling oaths of 
 fidelity and secrecy are imposed, grips are 
 given, and the neophyte carries home his 
 endowment robe, which he henceforth re- 
 gards as his most precious possession. It 
 is supposed to shield from disease a the- 
 ory hardly harmonizing with the fact that 
 every devout Mormon is buried in this 
 garment. It is even claimed to be bullet- 
 proof, and had not Joseph Smith neglected 
 to wear his on the day he was mobbed his 
 enemies could not have harmed him. Cer- 
 tainly this was inexcusable carelessness in 
 a Prophet, who must have known they 
 were coming ! 
 
 Two leading tenets in the practical the- 
 ology of the church have roused most of 
 the opposition it has met almost from its 
 earliest day polygamy, which will be 
 
68 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 considered in a later chapter, and the 
 atonement of blood. According to this 
 latter doctrine, there are certain sins that 
 can hope for no pardon upon this earth. 
 Among these are the shedding of guiltless 
 blood, apostasy, marital infidelity on the 
 wife's part, and revealing the inner work- 
 ings of the Endowment House. Blood 
 alone can atone for these sins and the 
 Mormons did their best to make the atone- 
 ment efficacious. Said Brigham Young in 
 a public sermon: "I could refer you to 
 plenty of instances where men have been 
 righteously slain in order to atone for 
 sins. I have seen scores and hundreds of 
 people for whom there would have been a 
 chance in the last resurrection if their 
 lives had been taken and their blood 
 spilled on the ground as a smoking incense 
 to the Almighty." Human sacrifice, for 
 by no other term could it be described, was 
 one outgrowth of this doctrine; the other 
 development was plain murder. 
 
 To carry out these teachings, worthy of 
 Thugs or Assassins, a secret society was 
 formed, sworn to support the head of the 
 church in all things. They were called 
 the "Destroying Angels," or Danites 
 "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an 
 adder in the path, that biteth the horse's 
 heels, so that his rider shall fall back- 
 ward" (Genesis 49:17). The organization 
 
BELIEFS AND PRACTICES 69 
 
 already existed while the Saints were in 
 Missouri ; to this there is ample direct tes- 
 timony, apart from the circumstantial evi- 
 dence in the attempt to assassinate the 
 Governor indeed, its germ may be found 
 at Kirtland, in 1837, when one Grandison 
 Newell charged Smith with inciting a 
 young Mormon neophyte to take his life. 
 
 Many murders were charged against 
 this Danite brotherhood, which made the 
 Mormons a terror to their neighbors. No 
 less a witness than the Prophet's own 
 brother declared under oath that before 
 leaving Nauvoo fifteen hundred of the 
 Saints "solemnly swore, in the presence 
 of Almighty God and his holy angels, that 
 they would avenge the blood of Joseph 
 Smith upon the nation, and so teach their 
 children; and that they would henceforth 
 and forever begin and carry out hostility 
 against this nation, and keep the same a 
 profound secret now and forever." This 
 dogma, born of the spirit of revenge in the 
 weak and oppressed, made their later 
 atrocities seem deeds of piety. Its tragic 
 climax, writ large in blood, will be nar- 
 rated in the next chapter. 
 
70 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Mormon War 
 
 We have seen the Mormons, weak and 
 long-suffering under persecution, dissem- 
 bling their resentment, at worst plotting 
 revenge in secret. Now we shall see them 
 powerful and vindictive, flinging down the 
 gauntlet of defiance to a great nation. 
 Their legislature, in which were now some 
 astute lawyers, went so far as to pass one 
 act that virtually abrogated the entire 
 body of the English Common Law. 
 
 Conquering the wilderness, the Mor- 
 mons came to know their own strength; 
 now they were ready to try it against the 
 mailed fist of civilization. It must be ad- 
 mitted that they showed themselves su- 
 perior, both in strategics and in diplom- 
 acy, to the trained troops and leaders sent 
 against them. The bloody drama of se- 
 cession, which a few years later was to be 
 enacted upon the national stage, had a 
 prologue upon the great plateau of the 
 West. 
 
 President Buchanan deposed Brigham 
 Young from the governorship, which was 
 conferred upon Alfred Gumming; Judge 
 Delana R, Eckels, of Indiana, was made 
 
THE MORMON WAR 71 
 
 chief justice of the territory. By June 
 of 1858 over six thousand men were in 
 Utah, or on the march, to re-establish Fed- 
 eral supremacy and maintain the author- 
 ity of the Federal courts. 
 
 "Give us ten years of peace, " Brigham 
 Young had said, "and we will ask no odds 
 of the United States." He had foreseen 
 this conflict when his people entered the 
 valley. Now the die of war had been cast, 
 and the crafty old leader prepared to re- 
 pel aggression by assuming the aggres- 
 sive. His assurance, whether genuine or 
 theatric, was marvelous. In an immense 
 convocation of his people he announced 
 that at no distant day he would himself 
 become President of the United States, or 
 would bestow the office upon whomsoever 
 he choose. His own courage inspired his 
 followers ; there was a fury of preparation 
 for the conflict; every house was turned 
 into an armory and arsenal. Fierce de- 
 termination glowed in every heart. Dur- 
 ing divine service at the tabernacle, soon 
 after the approach of the troops was an- 
 nounced, an apostle asked all to raise their 
 hands who would burn down their homes, 
 fell the trees, and lay waste the fields, if 
 the foemen entered the valley. Over four 
 thousand were in that congregation and 
 every hand was raised. There is no doubt 
 that the United States army, if it had 
 
72 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 forced the passes of the mountains and 
 marched upon Salt Lake City, would have 
 found a smouldering Moscow in a howling 
 wilderness. 
 
 The Mormons at once inaugurated ef- 
 fective guerrilla warfare. They captured 
 or destroyed the supply-trains of the in- 
 vading army, stampeded their cattle, 
 burnt every available shelter on the line 
 of advance. The army went into winter 
 quarters destitute and discouraged al- 
 most justifying the contemptuous hyper- 
 bole of an elder: "A swarm of long- 
 billed mosquitoes could eat them up at a 
 supper spell." While harmony and pa- 
 triotic self-sacrifice prevailed at Salt Lake 
 City, factions were snarling at each 
 other's heels in Washington, and unani- 
 mity was present only among the horde 
 of contractors who fleeced the government 
 by furnishing the army wretched supplies 
 at exorbitant prices, as in every war. 
 Flour, for instance, cost the trifle of $570 
 a ton. 
 
 The ending of the Mormon War was not 
 creditable to the United States. Presi- 
 dent Buchanan has been described by a 
 fair historian as "not at heart an unjust 
 man," but he "lacked the requisite back- 
 bone." His messages were filled with 
 noble phrases, but he wavered and hesi- 
 tated, and usually in the end compromised 
 
THE MORMON WAR 78 
 
 with evil. That is what he did in the 
 Mormon muddle, in which he lost interest 
 after he had set his headstrong will upon 
 putting the vicious Lecompton constitu- 
 tion through to browbeat Kansas. While 
 the Federal forces sent to Utah were still 
 hibernating near Fort Bridger, Col. 
 Thomas L. Kane, a Pennsylvanian, friend- 
 ly to the Mormons and perhaps a secret 
 agent or lobbyist of Brigham Young's, was 
 sent by the President with the olive- 
 branch of peace. Kane reached Utah by 
 way of California, and succeeded in his 
 mission of conciliation. The Mormons 
 nominally submitted, and an escort of 
 their militia conducted the new governor 
 to the state capital, where his authority 
 was acknowledged. Amnesty was grant- 
 ed the Saints, and the troops marched in- 
 to Salt Lake City, which was deserted by 
 its thirty thousand inhabitants, save for a 
 resolute little handful who were to apply 
 the torch if the military took possession. 
 Governor Gumming followed the fleeing 
 Saints, who had already decided to emi- 
 grate to Sonora, and prevailed upon them 
 to return. For several years the soldiers 
 were quartered within forty miles of the 
 town, but no further trouble arose. The 
 sport had cost the nation over fifteen mil- 
 lions of dollars, and nothing had been 
 gained. 
 
74 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 At the beginning of this "war" oc- 
 curred the horrible Mountain Meadows 
 massacre. It was the logical outcome of 
 the Blood Atonement doctrine, and there 
 is not the shadow of a doubt that it was in- 
 stigated by leading Mormons and execut- 
 ed by men of the Nauvoo Legion and In- 
 dian allies of the Saints. Parley Pratt, 
 one of the Apostles, the man who had 
 "converted" Sidney Eigdon, had been 
 killed by a man whose wife Pratt had 
 lured into his harem. "Innocent blood" 
 cried to heaven for vengeance. The op- 
 portunity soon offered itself. Pratt 's 
 slayer was from Arkansas, and now an 
 Arkansan emigrant train was crossing 
 Utah. The killing of Pratt was expiated 
 by those hapless home-seekers, of whom 
 probably none had ever heard of Pratt. 
 Mormon scouts on fleet horses sped in ad- 
 vance of the train, and warned the Saints 
 along the route not to furnish the emi- 
 grants food nor afford them shelter. The 
 company would have died of starvation in 
 the midst of abundance, had not the bul- 
 lets of the Danite avengers cut them off. 
 A hundred and twenty-seven men, women, 
 and children perished in that slaughter. 
 The bodies were left unburied, a prey 
 to the coyotes. A Mormon, moved by 
 pity, buried some of the bleached bones 
 
THE MORMON WAR 75 
 
 long after, and is said to have been ex- 
 communicated for his act. 
 
 Now comes the astounding sequel. In 
 those courts whose authority had just 
 been established by the strong hand of the 
 United States, it was impossible to secure 
 the punishment of the men who were 
 guilty of this crime. Despite evidence of 
 the strongest kind, a Mormon grand jury 
 would not find bills against any man ac- 
 cused, and was discharged by a disgusted 
 judge as "a useless appendage to a court 
 of justice. " Some suspected ones were 
 later arrested on bench-warrants, which 
 caused a general stampede of prominent 
 Mormons to the mountains strong pre- 
 sumptive evidence of uneasy consciences. 
 Eighteen years after the massacre, a 
 single one of the leaders was executed; 
 Bishop John D. Lee was made the scape- 
 goat the remainder, and the church, went 
 scot-free though direct and circumstan- 
 tial evidence of their complicity was not 
 wanting, even reaching to Young. 
 
 We have seen the Mormon war closed 
 by an armed truce. Another war a po- 
 litical struggle was to be carried for- 
 ward to a triumphant ending by the astute 
 Saints. The struggle for statehood was 
 never relaxed one moment until the goal 
 had been attained . 
 
76 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 In Solomon's Footsteps. 
 
 The institution which for years formed 
 the impassable barrier to Utah's admit- 
 tance into the sisterhood of states an in- 
 stitution that seems interwoven with the 
 very texture of the church was polygamy. 
 
 It will surprise many people to learn 
 that the Book of Mormon in the plainest 
 terms forbids polygamy. Scripture itself 
 is silent upon this point; but Joseph 
 Smith's Bible has an explicit prohibition 
 that can not be equivocated away by any 
 sophistry of exegetics. Here are the 
 words : 
 
 "And were it not that I must speak unto you concern- 
 ing a grosser crime, my heart would rejoice exceedingly. 
 * * * For behold, thus saith the Lord, This people 
 begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the 
 Scriptures. * * * David and Solomon truly had 
 many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable 
 before me, saith the Lord. * * * Wherefore, my 
 brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord; 
 for there shall not any man among you have save it 
 be one wife, and concubines he shall have none; for I, 
 the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women." 
 
 This passage shows that a multiplicity 
 
IN SOLOMON'S FOOTSTEPS 77 
 
 of wives formed no part of the Prophet's 
 original scheme. Indeed, in the early 
 days of his career he found it difficult 
 enough to support a single wife, much less 
 a harem of forty, as was charged against 
 him later. John Hyde, one of the few 
 apostates who spoke with fairness of the 
 church after seceding, said " polygamy 
 was not the result of Smith's policy, but 
 of his passions." It was the affluence and 
 the opportunities of Nauvoo days that led 
 him into the "grosser crime;" an idle and 
 luxurious mode of life, two hundred and 
 twenty pounds of "too too solid flesh" 
 these wrought the Prophet's fall from 
 grace. 
 
 There is ample evidence of immoralities 
 practiced by Smith and others at Nauvoo, 
 and perhaps earlier, which gradually 
 transpired, and made necessary the "spe- 
 cial revelation" given in 1843, sanction- 
 ing and commanding a plurality of wives. 
 For nine years that revelation was kept 
 secret, and the practice was publicly de- 
 nied partly because Illinois had laws 
 to punish bigamy, but chiefly in order that 
 proselyting might not be hampered. Not 
 until 1852, Young at Salt Lake City offi- 
 cially proclaimed the doctrine, and ever 
 since it has been a cardinal tenet of the 
 church, which simultaneously made the 
 startling discovery that "Jesus had sev- 
 
78 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 eral wives, among them Mary and Martha, 
 the sisters of Lazarus. ' ? 
 
 Simple polygamy was not broad enough 
 for these peculiar Saints, so they invented 
 that doctrine of celestial ensealment which 
 made Mormonism almost a revival of the 
 obscene cult of the Babylonian Mylitta. 
 The practical application of the doctrine 
 meant sexual promiscuity under the sanc- 
 tion of the church. A man might wed as 
 many "spiritual" wives as he could per- 
 suade to enter into that relation with him 
 while they might at the same time be the 
 temporal wives of other men. A woman 
 might have any number of "celestial" hus- 
 bands that is, she could be "sealed" to 
 some dead person, who had an earthly 
 proxy, with all marital rights, save that 
 the children born were credited to the 
 Saint in heaven. The workings of this 
 system can not be fully comprehended by 
 the Gentile world they formed part of the 
 secrets of the Endowment House, whose 
 precincts might not be entered by the pro- 
 fane. But enough is known to make it 
 clear that "any one of either sex can be 
 sealed to any number of persons of the op- 
 posite sex, whether married or single." 
 
 The Eeorganized Church, a protesting 
 sect which sprang up in repudiation of 
 Brigham Young, never countenanced poly- 
 gamy, but numbers only about 50,000 ad- 
 
IN SOLOMON'S FOOTSTEP^ 79 
 
 herents. The orthodox Saints defended 
 polygamy by an elaborate line of argu- 
 ment, the salient points of which were as 
 follows: If it is not wrong to have one 
 wife, why should the possession of two, or 
 a score, be stigmatized as a crime ? Abra- 
 ham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and 
 Solomon had many wives and concubines, 
 and it was accounted unto them for right- 
 eousness nowhere in the Bible is there a 
 word of disapproval. Besides, according 
 to Mormon theology, all space is peopled 
 with spirits awaiting incarnation; unless 
 there is plural marriage these spirits can 
 not all be supplied with human bodies to 
 join the ranks of the saints on earth, and 
 so attain to salvation. Such are the scrip- 
 tural and theological warrants for the 
 practice ; no less importance is attached to 
 the argument based upon the experience of 
 mankind and the constitution of human so- 
 ciety. Statistics will prove that there are 
 many more women than men; so, unless 
 there is plural marriage, many women 
 must perforce remain unmarried. Mono- 
 gamy, it is further claimed, makes the one 
 wife more truly the slave of her husband 
 than are the many wives of the polygam- 
 ist; it promotes licentiousness and fosters 
 prostitution ; and finally, it exists in name 
 only, for among the professedly mono- 
 gamic communities practical polygamy is 
 
80 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 just as common as among the openly 
 polygamous. 
 
 These plausible contentions may not be 
 lightly dismissed. Let us analyze them in 
 detail. 
 
 Admitted, that if it is not wrong for a 
 man to have one wife, it can not be wrong 
 for him to have a dozen. The same premi- 
 ses lead to the conclusion that if it is not 
 wrong for a woman to have one husband, 
 it can not be wrong for her to have a dozen. 
 This the polygamous oracle who is a 
 man, mark you makes haste indignantly 
 to deny. But if we admit that woman is 
 man's equal something more than a slave 
 to minister to his appetites, or a beast of 
 burden to work in his fields then she has 
 just as strong a claim upon the undivided 
 affections and attentions of her husband 
 as he has upon her love and care. 
 
 The Bible does not directly interdict 
 polygamy true. It will also be difficult 
 to find in it any "Thou shalt not" leveled 
 against arson, gambling, and many other 
 offenses against society. These have be- 
 come crimes only by the evolution of a 
 complex society. There is no inherent 
 wrong in setting fire to one's barn, provid- 
 ed it entails no injury, direct or indirect, 
 upon any one else neighbors, heirs, in- 
 surance company. There is no essential 
 wrong in carrying goods across a coun- 
 
IN SOLOMON'S FOOTSTEPS 81 
 
 try's border, provided you do not thereby 
 evade paying your fair proportion of the 
 expense of government, and so increase the 
 proportion others must pay. There could 
 be no valid objection against polygamy, 
 if it might be harmonized with the Golden 
 Rule. A man might have ten wives, pro- 
 vided he could show that he loves each with 
 his w^hole heart, as he demands that she 
 love him ; and provided he accords to each 
 the privilege of espousing ten husbands. 
 Nor does his duty end there. He must 
 show that he can fulfill all his parental ob- 
 ligations springing from each of the ten 
 unions; clothe, feed, educate the offspring 
 of all as he could that of each one. He 
 must show that his conduct does not work 
 injustice or injury to any individual nor 
 to society. But polygamy is convicted of 
 the grossest injustice at the outset it re- 
 gards the wife as a possession of the hus- 
 band, as his inferior; it is a relic of the 
 ages when women were chattels, spoil of 
 war, beasts of burden. It rears a swarm 
 of children unloved, uncared for, untaught. 
 For the home it substitutes the harem. 
 It puts the wife beneath the husband's 
 heel, not at his side. 
 
 As for the spirits awaiting incarnation, 
 it may be just as well to let them wait. In 
 the absence of reliable statistics from 
 Mormon writers as to the precise number 
 
82 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 of those spirits, there is reason to fear that 
 under Mormon practice the supply of 
 spirits might run short. A dire contin- 
 gency! In point of fact, this Buddhist 
 speculation, revamped into a Mormon dog- 
 ma, requires to be proved before it may 
 demand to be refuted. 
 
 The sociological arguments are of the 
 flimsiest texture. If women are more 
 numerous than men, the greater number 
 of births under polygamy would increase 
 the disproportion in the same ratio. 
 Whether the one wife of the monogamist 
 is his slave may be left to the sound sense 
 and conscience of any monogamist who 
 has them. To say, further, that mono- 
 gamy promotes licentiousness and fosters 
 prostitution is equivalent to asserting that 
 polygamy tends to abolish them. Does 
 it? Or does it simply cloak them under 
 legalism? If we admit that practical 
 polygamy exists in monogamic communi- 
 ties, it can not be gainsaid that it is every- 
 where regarded as an evil to be con- 
 demn^d and eradicated, rather than as an 
 ideal state of society to be desired and 
 promoted. 
 
 To sum it up polygamy may nominally 
 diminish crime by legalizing it; but it 
 practically increases it by making it safe 
 and respectable. There were reported to 
 be fifteen thousand polygamists in UtaJi 
 
IN SOLOMON'S FOOTSTEPS 83 
 
 with a population of about 300,000. Will 
 any one venture to affirm that there were 
 fifteen thousand adulterous husbands in 
 the District of Columbia, which had ap- 
 proximately the same population? 
 
 But polygamy was not all the sin of 
 Mormonism. It is a fact, a logical conse- 
 quence of the doctrine of "spiritual en- 
 sealment," that Mormonism was polyan- 
 drous as well as polygamous. It meant 
 practical promiscuity and that, even in 
 the narrower forms of polygamy or poly- 
 andry, and considered apart from the men- 
 tal, moral and physical deterioration it in- 
 evitably brings upon the race, is destruc- 
 tive of the home and the family, the bases 
 of individual character and of national 
 greatness. Islam affords an illustration 
 of this. The institution of polygamy en- 
 abled the Mahometan tribes rapidly to 
 overrun and conquer a vast stretch of ter- 
 ritory ; but within two centuries it had sap- 
 ped the vigor of those races, and the colos- 
 sal fabric of their empire slowly crumbled 
 into ruin. No polygamous nation is at 
 this day a factor in the world's progress. 
 Turkey, Persia, and China are political 
 ciphers. 
 
 A people's greatness is built upon its 
 homes, and the family is the nation in 
 miniature. Home is a kingdom where love 
 is the supreme law the love of the one 
 
84 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 man for the one woman, of the one woman 
 for the one man. From this close union 
 of interests and affections, this loss of self 
 and intermingling of two lives, spring the 
 highest, holiest ideals that human kind has 
 ever known. Only from such homes, only 
 from the nurture of such parents, only out 
 of the sunshine of such ideals, can issue 
 men and women great and strong to do 
 the work of coming time. Without such 
 men and women the Eepublic is doomed, 
 and the Capitol, like the Alhambra, will 
 be to coming ages only a melancholy relic 
 of a ruined race. 
 
SCHEMING FOR STATEHOOD 85 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Scheming for Statehood 
 
 After the collapse at Nauvoo, the 
 shrewd and far-sighted man upon whom 
 had fallen the mantle of " Prophet of the 
 Lord" realized that it was not enough for 
 Mormonism to have its city; it must have 
 a holy land all its own not merely 
 a Jerusalem, but a Canaan. So, as soon 
 as the region where they settled had be- 
 come, through the Mexican war, a part of 
 the Union, independent statehood was ever 
 kept in view by the Mormon leaders. The 
 shadowy state of Deseret was organized, 
 but Congress refused to recognize it, and 
 a territorial form of government was ex- 
 tended over the aspiring commonwealth, 
 which was called Utah. 
 
 The Mormons that were driven from 
 Illinois to Utah had no very kindly feel- 
 ings toward the United States. "There's 
 that d d flag again, " cried an elder at 
 landing in California after a trip around 
 the Horn. But persistent agitation and 
 scheming now began, to obtain the state- 
 hood that was so essential to the stability 
 and growth of the church. As long* as 
 Utah remained a territory, Mormonism 
 
86 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 and its leaders would be under Federal 
 tutelage and jurisdiction. Utah's admis- 
 sion to the sisterhood of states, with home 
 rule, with voice and vote in the councils of 
 the nation, would make the church impreg- 
 nable. So statehood must be attained at 
 whatever price. And the Mormons never 
 hesitated at any means to achieve that end. 
 When might did not avail, recourse was 
 had to meekness. Where steel proved in- 
 effective, gold was used. After braggado- 
 cio failed, systematic deception was in- 
 augurated, and the remarkable spectacle 
 presented to the world of a great commu- 
 nity playing as one man the role of the 
 hypocrite. From the first memorial to the 
 last lobby, their diplomatic battle for 
 statehood was never relaxed till victory 
 was won. 
 
 The insuperable obstacle to Utah's ad- 
 mission was the institution of polygamy. 
 States had been admitted with less popu- 
 lation but public sentiment would not 
 permit an action that would make the gov- 
 ernment practically powerless in the 
 presence of an offense against society. An 
 application for statehood in 1862 was not 
 only refused, but a stringent law against 
 polygamy in any of the territories was en- 
 acted. Nor did the intemperate utter- 
 ances of prominent Saints tend to improve 
 the status of affairs. 
 
SCHEMING FOR STATEHOOD 87 
 
 It soon became evident that different 
 tactics must be adopted ; the country must 
 be conciliated, and public feeling lulled. 
 Effusive loyalty was counterfeited; the 
 unpatriotic utterances of over-zealous 
 elders were carefully suppressed, and 
 those who made them cautioned. Even 
 this availed nothing as long as the 
 Saints upheld and practiced polygamy, no 
 political party dared open the door to 
 them; and, as Lorenzo Snow, later presi- 
 dent of the church, declared, they would 
 die a thousand deaths sooner than give 
 up this article of their creed. Movements 
 on the government's part to suppress the 
 evil were met with passionate memorials, 
 affirming that the church would obey God 
 rather than man. Judicial procedures to 
 enforce existing acts were quashed, or 
 were too spasmodic to be of any effect ; if 
 it came to a trial, this was usually a par- 
 ody upon justice. Each party was afraid 
 of the other ; the representatives of the na- 
 tion feared to provoke the Saints, while 
 these did not dare openly to defy the na- 
 tion. 
 
 In August of 1877 Brigham Young died, 
 leaving seventeen wives, fifty-six children, 
 and an estate valued at $2,000,000. John 
 Taylor, who had been in Carthage jail and 
 was wounded by the mob that killed Jos- 
 eph Smith, succeeded to the presidency of 
 
88 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 the church. Under Taylor's regime the 
 troubles of the Saints multiplied. He had 
 not the astute mastery, the intuitive knowl- 
 edge of men, which distinguished Young. 
 Whereas Young had been able to maintain 
 the "divine" institution of polygamy de- 
 spite Gentile persecution, the church was 
 now hard pressed by its foes. Still, with 
 fanatical tenacity, they held on to this re- 
 pugnant tenet. Sooner than surrender it, 
 one colony emigrated to Mexico, where 
 they founded a settlement now prosperous 
 and growing; another host invaded Cana- 
 da, and gained a firm foothold there. The 
 leaders of the hierarchy, who could not or 
 would not leave Utah, had to take to the 
 mountains, or live in concealment, until 
 the day of tribulation should be past. It 
 is told of Wilford Woodruff, the Presi- 
 dent-Prophet who succeeded Taylor, that 
 while hiding from the officers of the law 
 he cut a field of grain by moonlight with a 
 hand-sickle, beginning in the middle of the 
 field and working outward, cutting all but 
 the outer waving walls that hid him. 
 Such was the unbending spirit and un- 
 wearying energy of those men. 
 
 Persecutions thickened indeed, the na- 
 tional government stepped very close to 
 the bounds of constitutional authority in 
 its repressive measures. The Edmunds act 
 of 1882 resulted in the disfranchisement of 
 
SCHEMING FOR STATEHOOD 89 
 
 twelve thousand polygamists within two 
 years. It was even proposed to abolish 
 the legislature, and govern Utah by a com- 
 mission appointed by the President. New 
 applications for statehood were turned 
 down; appeals to the Supreme Court re- 
 sulted in nothing. Many Saints were cast 
 into prison principally on charges of il- 
 legal cohabitation, for polygamy, owing to 
 the secrecy of the marriage rites, could 
 rarely be proved; still the practice contin- 
 ued unabated, hiding from the world's eye 
 in the cloistered chambers of Temple and 
 Endowment House. 
 
 Then came the draconian Edmunds- 
 Tucker act of 1887. Vast possessions of 
 the church were escheated. Congress 
 took the right of suffrage away from wo- 
 men, who, strangely enough, through their 
 implicit obedience to the priesthood, had 
 for seventeen years formed the mightiest 
 bulwark of polygamy. Then followed a 
 proposition, which passed both houses of 
 Congress in 1890, to disfranchise all Mor- 
 mons, whether polygamists or not, as Ida- 
 ho already had done. 
 
 In this crisis the change of policy was 
 adopted which saved the church from dis- 
 integration and gained statehood for Utah. 
 Stubborn force had failed ; resort was now 
 had to hypocrisy and fraud. Prophet Wil- 
 ford Woodruff had a revelation as oppor- 
 
90 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 tune as any that ever came to Smith. In 
 a petition to the President, asking for par- 
 don and restoration of the franchise to 
 the convicted polygamists, the statement 
 was made that "in September^ 1890, the 
 present head of the church, in anguish and 
 prayer, cried to God for help for his flock, 
 and received permission to advise the 
 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of 
 Latter-Day Saints that the law command- 
 ing polygamy was henceforth suspended." 
 Suspended for how long? 
 
 The hypocritical game was played with 
 consummate cunning. Accounts were 
 published abroad of the disfavor with 
 which polygamy was now viewed, and of 
 its decline; prominent Mormons denoun- 
 ced it; a plank against it, formulated by 
 Mormons, was adopted by a territorial 
 convention; a prohibition of it was even 
 suggested as an amendment to the consti- 
 tution of the United States. 
 
 At the same time the Mormons suddenly 
 became Eepublicans and Democrats, the 
 old People's party of the church, opposed 
 to the Liberal party of the Gentiles, being 
 abandoned. It was hinted, even bluntly 
 promised, that whichever party gave Utah 
 statehood would receive its electoral vote 
 and its congressional and senatorial sup- 
 port. The ruse succeeded completely. 
 President Harrison extended amnestv to 
 
SCHEMING FOR STATEHOOD 91 
 
 polygamists, and then, under Cleveland's 
 administration, on the first day of Janu- 
 ary, 1896, Utah became a state, after hav- 
 ing been refused admittance six times. 
 The crafty apostles had caught the old 
 political parties with guile. It is evident, 
 from the events of later years, that it 
 never had been the intention to abandon 
 polygamy that it was not even suspend- 
 ed, as they professed; but that old poly- 
 gamous relations were continued, and new 
 ones clandestinely formed, as before. 
 Utah is a state, and the Mormon Senator, 
 Reed Smoot, is one of the most powerful 
 machine leaders at Washington. He is 
 one of the ablest of the old-school politi- 
 cians, and his influence at home may be 
 measured by the fact that he was able to 
 carry Utah for Taft in the election of 191 1!, 
 when Taft secured only eight electoral 
 votes out of 531 in all the states of the 
 Union . 
 
92 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Acts of the Apostles 
 
 The Mormons are the Moravians of 
 America, by their missionary zeal and he- 
 roic sacrifice. This has been the chief 
 secret of their marvelous success and of 
 the rapid spread of their doctrines. Two 
 apostles, Hyde and Kimball, were sent 
 forth as early as 1837, and within three 
 years counted over four thousand con- 
 verts in Christian England. For over 
 half a century there went forth on an av- 
 erage a hundred missionaries annually; 
 to-day more than three hundred set out 
 each year to preach the latter-day gospel, 
 and two thousand elders are busy in vari- 
 ous fields. Any priest is liable at any 
 moment to be sent anywhere by his 
 superiors. Obedience is the cardinal vir- 
 tue. The elder so commanded goes forth, 
 and must even provide his own support 
 until the contributions of his converts 
 maintain him. There are no Mormon mis- 
 sionary debts! 
 
 The absolute abnegation of self which 
 characterizes these men is well illustrated 
 by a story told of Martin Harris, in the 
 early days of the church. He pestered 
 
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 93 
 
 a man to purchase a copy of the Book of 
 Mormon, till the man angrily struck him a 
 blow in the face. Instantly Harris turned 
 the other cheek, and at the same time 
 opened the book in his hand at the page 
 where Smith's garbled version of the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount enjoins this attitude in 
 persecution. Such incidents could not 
 fail of making deep impressions. 
 
 The second reason of their success, 
 given missionary fervor and fanatical de- 
 votion, is found in the recognition of their 
 limitations. They soon realized that it 
 was almost useless to turn to the intelli- 
 gent or the well-to-do, so they strove to 
 win the ignorant and lowly. Men they 
 were after, not money; brawn, not brain; 
 if they gained these things, as they shrewd- 
 ly foresaw, the others would be added unto 
 them. In large measure it was a process 
 of "natural selection." The wealthy and 
 educated classes laughed at Mormon pre- 
 tensions and were not dazzled by Mormon 
 promises. The unlearned readily accept- 
 ed the new revelation, with its slavishly 
 literal interpretation of Scripture; swal- 
 lowed the stories of Mormon miracles, and 
 the prophecies of the world's impending 
 doom. The poor snapped greedily at the 
 bait of the Mormon paradise, where want 
 was unknown, and fabulous wealth would 
 soon abound, and the Lord rained manna 
 
94 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 down from heaven. The claim to be the 
 "chosen people" of the Lord also had its 
 unfailing fascination for religions vanity. 
 
 Others, especially in foreign lands, 
 where dissenters from state churches la- 
 bored under many disabilities, were at- 
 tracted by glowing protestations of liber- 
 alism. "The kingdom of God," declared 
 one effusion, "consists in correct princi- 
 ples, and it mattereth not what a man's 
 religious faith is whether he be a Presby- 
 terian or a Methodist, or a Baptist, or a 
 Latter Day Saint, or ' Mormon, ' or a Camp- 
 bellite, or a Catholic, or Episcopalian, or 
 Mahometan, or even Pagan, or anything 
 else. If he will bow the knee, and with his 
 tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ, 
 and will support good and wholesome laws 
 for the regulation of society, we hail him as 
 a brother, and will stand by him as he 
 stands by us in these things; for every 
 man's faith is a matter between his own 
 soul and his God alone." With such ut- 
 terances the down-trodden, the illiterate, 
 the discontented of foreign countries were 
 attracted to "the land flowing with milk 
 and honey." The Perpetual Emigration 
 Fund procured their passage across the 
 ocean, and, once at the seat of Mormon 
 power, they were speedily reconciled to 
 the peculiar doctrines of the Saints. 
 
 The Mormons saw that immigration was 
 
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 95 
 
 a blessing to be desired, not a curse to be 
 turned aside, as demagogues and deluded 
 labor leaders stigmatize it. This pre- 
 empting of immigration was one of the 
 shrewdest features of Mormon propagan- 
 da. They did not send evangelists into 
 city slums and rural settlements after the 
 strangers had imbibed the air of freedom. 
 They did not lie in wait for the immi- 
 grants at Castle Garden, like other sects. 
 They sent their preachers to foreign 
 shores, to preach Mormonism and Ameri- 
 ca, till converts by thousands soon crossed 
 the seas. Over thirty thousand had been 
 won in England alone in the first twenty 
 years of their activity. They carried 
 their gospel to Malta, to South Africa, to 
 India, to the Sandwich Islands. 
 
 The methods of the early missionaries 
 were much like those of the Salvation 
 Army to-day. Beating drums, blowing- 
 trumpets, chanting hymns for which they 
 had appropriated catchy popular tunes, 
 they gathered audiences upon the high- 
 ways and byways, and harangued them, 
 the Book of Mormon in hand. Being 
 American farmers and artisans, the apos- 
 tles were mostly fine specimens of man- 
 hood, which gave them added standing 
 among the degenerate populations of Eu- 
 rope. Jules Verne, who doubtless ad- 
 mired in Joseph Smith a kindred genius, 
 
96 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 bears witness to this in Une Ville Flot- 
 tante: " 'Who is yon tall man of haughty 
 mien?' I asked. * He is a Mormon/ was 
 the Doctor's reply. 'One of their elders, 
 a great preacher in the city of the Saints. 
 What a splendid type of manhood ! Look 
 at his proud eye, his noble countenance, 
 his dignified carriage!' That man was 
 Abram Hatch. 
 
 Here we have the whole Mormon mis- 
 sionary scheme. They are pursuing the 
 same tactics to-day, toned down to suit 
 the times. They are proceeding more 
 cautiously, but no less determinedly. 
 Though they sometimes attack the cita- 
 dels of culture Congressman Brigham H. 
 Roberts was the church's representative 
 at the World's Congress of Religions in 
 Chicago their preference is for the more 
 primitive communities of the West, the 
 Northwest, and the South. Paul's motto 
 "This one thing I do" they have ever in 
 mind. All the eloquence of fanaticism is 
 concentrated upon the task of spreading 
 their doctrine. Wily and smooth-spoken, 
 with plausible reasonings and ingenious 
 inventions, they soon put to rout the mea- 
 ger theological learning of their victims. 
 
 The astute Mormon apologist is able to 
 silence his critics by pointing to the vag- 
 aries and superstitions of others that pro- 
 fess to be more enlightened. To the 
 
ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 97 
 
 Methodist he would say, "Was not John 
 Wesley's lame horse cured by faith?" 
 The Lutheran he would ask, "Did not the 
 founder of your faith throw an ink-pot at 
 the Devil ?" Coming down to our own 
 times, he would inquire, "Did not Father 
 Ignatius and seven others see the Virgin 
 Mary on the meadow of Llanthony Abbey, 
 on September 15, 1880 ?" And does not 
 Mrs. Stetson, once leader of the Christian 
 Scientists in New York City, confidently 
 await the resurrection of Mrs. Eddy "it 
 may be to-day; it may be next week"? 
 Pointing to such phenomena, the astute 
 Mormon apologist insists that his faith 
 imposes no greater tax upon human credu- 
 lity than theirs . 
 
 Not only are the missionaries armed 
 with such edged arguments, they are often 
 proficient in other arts that win favorable 
 opinions for them along with cash for 
 their maintenance. When Elder George 
 J. Adams, who was an actor, was sent to 
 convert Philadelphia, on arriving there he 
 played Richard III for a week to raise a 
 missionary fund. He made Shakespeare 
 an advance agent for Joe Smith . 
 
 Knowing the opposition they are likely 
 to encounter, the Saints seek to establish 
 themselves in a community, and ingratiate 
 themselves at the firesides of the people, 
 before their character and mission become 
 
 BANCROFT 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
98 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 known. Not until they are sure of their 
 victims is the mask removed. Whole 
 families are gained over in this way be- 
 fore they know it is Mormonism that is 
 weaving its meshes about them. When 
 they learn it, the poison has done its work ; 
 their minds are saturated with subtle so- 
 phistries, and no reasoning can prevail. 
 
 This indefatigable activity, supplement- 
 ed by the missionary literature sent broad- 
 cast, is bound to tell in the end. The 
 church does not endeavor to displace 
 Christianity, but to supplement and com- 
 plete it. This veils suspicion; the seed of 
 doctrine once sown, no opposition can root 
 it out of simple minds, but rather tends to 
 establish and strengthen it. 
 
 If they are persecuted, the missionaries 
 bear it with resignation, and so deepen the 
 impression they have made. Every elder 
 beaten and tarred and feathered is an ar- 
 gument in favor of the church for which 
 he suffers indignity. 
 
WHAT WILL BE THE END 99 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 What Will be the End? 
 
 President Wilford Woodruff died in 
 1898, and was succeeded by Lorenzo Snow. 
 He died in 1901, and was succeeded by 
 Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the Prophet. 
 This last of the tribe died in November, 
 1918, and the present head of the Saints is 
 Heber Jedediah Grant . 
 
 The church has prospered greatly in 
 these latter days. Its four grand temples 
 cost over six million dollars to build. Its 
 Tabernacle, comfortably seating 7,000 
 people, with a remarkable organ and 
 choir, is one of the wonders of the great 
 West. To the faithful, these are signs of 
 the divine favor. God must look upon the 
 Mormons as his beloved children, or he 
 would not bless them so abundantly. 
 
 There is no doubt that the practice of 
 polygamy was clandestinely resumed, if 
 ever it had been suspended. The church 
 is active in politics, if ever it was quies- 
 cent, even going so far as to dictate which 
 of its members shall be Democrats, which 
 Republicans. Being a sovereign state, 
 Utah is governed by its own citizens ; and 
 these are overwhelmingly Mormon, while 
 
100 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 even the Gentile elements largely sympa- 
 thize with them. The church practically 
 rules the state. True, Utah was admitted 
 under the provisions of an enabling act 
 forever prohibiting plural marriages ; am- 
 nesty was extended to the polygamous 
 Saints only upon condition of their dis- 
 solving illicit relations but these provi- 
 sions were disregarded, that condition was 
 not observed. True, the constitution of 
 Utah itself forbids polygamy but laws, 
 to be effective, must be enforced. Joseph 
 F . Smith, the last president of the church, 
 left five widows when he died, and was the 
 father of 43 children. Heber J. Grant, 
 the present head, married three wives. 
 There has been no reason for any change in 
 the Mormon attitude toward polygamy ex- 
 cept political strategy. What is to be 
 done? 
 
 The question came before the people in 
 1899 in a form which demanded an im- 
 mediate answer. The people of Utah 
 elected Brigham H. Eoberts to Congress, 
 despite the storm of protest arising from 
 all parts of the country. He was a con- 
 fessed polygamist, a defender of that in- 
 stitution, and his campaign was conducted 
 upon this issue. The question was di- 
 rectly put to Utah : Will you condone and 
 approve polygamy! The answer was 
 Roberts 's election by a majority of six 
 
WHAT WILL BE THE END 101 
 
 thousand, but Congress declared his seat 
 vacant; again the Saints had reckoned 
 without their host. 
 
 The fantastic accounts of Anti-Mormon 
 Apostles, like the tales of " escaped nuns" 
 about Catholic convents, need not be taken 
 too seriously. There are people who de- 
 light in being thrilled with horror, and 
 such lecturers cater to that craving. Facts 
 open to the light of day are quite suffi- 
 cient to convince rational men that Mor- 
 monism is not an illuminating factor in 
 American life nor a purifying influence in 
 American politics. But to tar and feather 
 Mormon missionaries is a confession by 
 rival sectarians that they are feared a 
 confession neither in accordance with firm 
 faith nor Christian charity. To every 
 creed must be granted the right to be 
 heard truth is impregnable. 
 
 The Mormon propaganda can be coun- 
 teracted only by a campaign of education. 
 To spread far and wide the facts as to its 
 origin, to expose the dubious character of 
 its founders and the absurdity of its doc- 
 trines, to show its radical antagonism to 
 modern institutions this is the only 
 course that will prevail. There has been 
 too much ignorant denunciation, too much 
 aggressive malevolence in the past. 
 These have always reacted in favor of 
 Mormonism. 
 
102 MORMON SAINTS 
 
 Most important of all would be the po- 
 litical redemption of Utah. This, it would 
 seem, could be accomplished by encourag- 
 ing the influx of Gentile population by 
 guiding thither educated immigrants from 
 foreign shores and homeseekers of our 
 own land. In the course of two decades 
 the Mormon ascendancy would be de- 
 stroyed; existing laws, which are ample, 
 could be enforced; and the great octopus, 
 shorn of its political power, would be 
 obliged to assume its proper station 
 among the ranting sects that come and go 
 and are forgotten dead sea fruit of ashes, 
 which reason at last will scatter to the 
 winds. 
 
 Mormonism supplies an instructive ob- 
 ject lesson for the lay student of Compara- 
 tive Eeligion. It shows how easily a new 
 religion can be launched and new reli- 
 gions are still being launched, as witness 
 Koreshanity, the Mazdaznan, and others 
 even more popular and hardly less fantas- 
 tic. Of the human species perhaps not 
 more than five per cent, are able to think. 
 The vast majority only think they think. 
 Ninety-five per cent are sheep, following 
 some leader, bowing down to some idol, 
 greedily swallowing the predigested men- 
 tal food prepared for them by pastors, 
 politicians, professors, and the press, four 
 P's in one pod. Education does not help 
 
WHAT WILL BE THE END 103 
 
 very much, as an educated fool is wiser 
 only in his own conceit. What may be 
 called "the newspaper mind" in our day, 
 an unconscious reverence for the printed 
 word, animates the vast mob that runs 
 after every new folly ; in a few years even 
 the exertion of reading the daily journals 
 may be too much for intellects fed upon 
 moving-picture films. If that is true of 
 our age, it need not surprise any one that 
 Mormonism won its way easily a century 
 ago, nor that the pathway of the human 
 race, from the prehistoric mists through 
 all the centuries of progress, is strewn with 
 husks of fallen creeds and bleaching bones 
 of dead faiths. 
 
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