In the spring of 1820, God the Father and his Son Jesus Christ appeared
in vision to Joseph Smith, at Manchester, {443} Ontario County, New
York, while he was praying for wisdom. During several years following
he enjoyed the ministration of angels, and received from them much
instruction in the things of God.
On the 22d of September, 1827, an angel of the Lord delivered into his
hands the metal plates which contained the ancient record known as the
Book of Mormon, engraved in reformed Egyptian characters, and hid in
the earth by divine direction about fourteen hundred years ago. In 1829
the plates were shown by an angel to three witnesses. Afterward eight
witnesses saw them, and handled some of them. The testimony of these
eleven witnesses is published with the Book of Mormon. With the plates
was found a Urim and Thummim, consisting of two transparent stones set
in the rim of a bow fastened to a breastplate, by means of which Joseph
Smith translated the record into English by the gift and power of God.
On the 15th of May, 1829, John the Baptist appeared to Joseph Smith
and Oliver Cowdery, laid his hands upon them, and ordained them to
the Aaronic Priesthood, in the following words: "Upon you, my fellow
servants, in the name of Messiah, I confer the Priesthood of Aaron,
which holds the keys of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of
repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; and
this shall never be taken again from the earth, until the sons of Levi
do offer an offering unto the Lord in righteousness."
The same year the ancient apostles, Peter, James and John appeared to
them and ordained them to the apostleship of the Melchisedek Priesthood.
On the 6th of April, 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints was organized, with six members, at Fayette, Seneca County, New
York, by Joseph Smith, then twenty-four years old, who was instructed
and empowered to that purpose by revelation from God. The Book of
Mormon was printed at Palmyra, New York, and published the same year.
The Church rapidly increased in numbers and many located at Kirtland,
Ohio.
In 1831, a settlement was made at Independence, Jackson County,
Missouri, and in a few years in several other counties in that State.
On February 14, 1835, the first council of the Twelve Apostles was
chosen. On the 28th of the same month the first council of Seventies
was selected.
After being mobocratically driven from county to county, {444} the
Latter-day Saints were finally expelled from Missouri in 1838.
Many of them soon after found a refuge at Commerce, (afterward
named Nauvoo) and vicinity, in Illinois, which speedily became a
comparatively large and prosperous city. But persecution of the
Latter-day Saints was shortly recommenced, and on the 27th of June,
1844, when under the express pledge of Thos. Ford, Governor of the
State, for their safe keeping, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were
shot and killed, and John Taylor was severely wounded, at Carthage, by
a mob with faces blackened. At the time of his death Joseph Smith was
President of the Church, and Hyrum Smith was Patriarch.
On the death of Joseph Smith, the council of the Twelve Apostles, with
Brigham Young as their president, became the presiding council in the
Church.
In consequence of continued mobocratic outrages and threats, the Church
determined to leave Nauvoo and go west to some far distant place where
they hoped to be permitted to live in peace. Brigham Young and one
thousand families left Nauvoo in February and the early spring of
1846, arriving at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in July of that year, where
the Mormon Battalion of five hundred men was called for by the Federal
Government, and raised to aid in the war against Mexico.
In September following, the Latter-day Saints remaining in Nauvoo,
including the aged, infirm, poor, and sick, were attacked by an armed
mob, despoiled of most of their property, driven across the river, and
otherwise outrageously and inhumanly abused.
In the spring of 1847, Brigham Young and a company of pioneers (one
hundred and forty-three men, three women and two children) started
across the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. They arrived in Salt
Lake Valley July 24th, of the same year, and immediately founded
Great Salt Lake City, now Salt Lake City, subsequently making other
settlements and building cities all over the Territory of Utah and
extending into the Territories and States adjoining.
The pioneers were followed by seven hundred wagons in the fall of the
same year, and by many emigrants of Latter-day Saints every year since.
On the 27th of December, 1847, a First Presidency was accepted,
consisting of Brigham Young, president, with Heber C. Kimball and
Willard Richards, counselors.
In 1857, in consequence of false and malicious reports, President
Buchanan sent an army to Utah to operate inimically {445} to the
inhabitants. But the army was unable to enter Salt Lake Valley that
year.
In the spring of 1858, the people of Salt Lake City and the country
adjacent left their homes, with the view of burning them, and traveled
southward. But amicable arrangements were soon made, most of the people
returned to their homes, and the army found itself with nothing to
do, until the secession of the Southern States, when its commander
and other officers took the side of the south, and the rank and file
were sent to fight on the side of the north. The army came to Utah to
despoil and destroy, but God overruled things and caused it to greatly
aid the people, materially and financially, to build up and develop the
Territory, and they have prospered ever since, although some federal
officials and other unprincipled characters have many times endeavored
to oppress them and accomplish their overthrow.
On the 29th of August, 1877, Brigham Young died, and the direction of
the Church fell upon the council of the Twelve Apostles, with John
Taylor presiding.
On the 10th of October, 1880, a First Presidency of the Church was
accepted, consisting of John Taylor, president, and George Q. Cannon
and Joseph F. Smith, his counselors.
On the death of President Taylor, which occurred July 25, 1887, the
Twelve Apostles, with Wilford Woodruff as president, became the
presiding council in the Church. On April 7, 1889, another First
Presidency was accepted, with Wilford Woodruff as president and George
Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith as his counselors.
On the 14th of March, 1882, incited by most abominable lies and
slanders, Congress passed the unconstitutional and infamous Edmunds
bill, destroying the liberties of the people of the Territory and
putting all registration and election and many appointive matters in
the hands of an oligarchal commission or returning board, consisting
of five irresponsible appointees of the President, at a cost to
the country of much more annually than the appropriation for the
Territorial legislature biennially.
On the 19th of April of the same year, the House of Representatives
refused to permit the legally elected delegate from Utah to take his
seat, and declared the same vacant.
On the 5th of August following, in consequence of representations made
by the three federal judges of the Territory, Congress passed a law
authorizing the Governor to appoint men to fill vacancies resulting
from the failure of the August election, which fell through because
of the passage of the {446} Edmunds bill. The actual vacancies under
this law were very few, yet Governor Murray, with his characteristic
unscrupulousness, resolved to wrest the law so as to make a fell swoop
of nearly all the offices in the Territory, and thus wrench them out
of the hands of the people and their lawfully elected officers and
representatives, and give them into the hands of his own partisans, the
bitter enemies of the people. Consequently, he arbitrarily interpreted
the new law to vacate nearly all the offices of the twenty-four
counties in the Territory, said offices numbering between two and three
hundred, besides some other local and some Territorial offices, and
proceeded, by and with the advice and consent of nobody, probably, but
his own prejudiced and wicked self, to make appointments to fill these
offices, thus despotically assuming to exercise a far greater stretch
of power than is exercised by the President of the United States, and
correspondingly despoiling the people of their constitutional, organic,
lawful, and vested right to official representation.
This same Governor Murray, in direct violation and open defiance of the
law, had previously refused to count eighteen thousand lawful votes
for the people's candidate for delegate to Congress, in order that he
might illegally give the certificate of election to one of his own
partisans, who received less than fourteen hundred votes, and thus
corruptly and ruthlessly deprive the eighteen thousand citizens of
their right of suffrage. Congress refused to sanction this outrageous
tampering with the ballot box, this wholesale spoliation, and rejected
the bogus certificate. Yet the unprincipled Governor, who attempted
this iniquitous tampering and spoliation and gave the certificate
to the man who was not elected, but refused to give one to the man
who was elected by an overwhelming majority, was sustained in his
partiality, presumption and wickedness by no less than three several
presidents of these United States, and consequently the longsuffering
people of the Territory had to endure the incubus of his unwelcome and
pernicious presence and the aggravated infliction of his usurpative and
demoralizing gubernatorial rule.
In the second full week in September of the same year, the five federal
commissioners had a registration of voters throughout the Territory,
expurging from the old lists the names of all those who did not appear
and be re-registered, and of others who did appear. Many Latter-day
Saints, men and women of excellent character, peaceable, industrious,
order-loving, and law-abiding citizens, some of them three or four
score years {447} old, and who had been accustomed to vote unchallenged
from their youth up, were not allowed to be re-registered, though
eligible under the law, and not liable to any legal punishment in any
court in the country, because no crime of any kind could be lawfully
charged against them. On the other hand, adulterers and libertines,
well known and acknowledged to be such, married men who confessed to
living with other women, and notorious public prostitutes were freely
registered.
The same week a number of rabid anti-Mormons conspired to overthrow
the right of women to be registered and to vote. Such an obnoxious
character had Governor Murray obtained among the people, that he was
almost universally believed to be one of the chief of the conspirators
and instigators in this ungallant, unmanly, and ineffably mean spirited
attempt to abolish woman suffrage in Utah. But the judges in all the
district courts in the Territory decided that the woman suffrage law
was valid.
In March, 1886, Governor Murray, for his unreasonable and obstructive
conduct, was virtually removed from office by President Cleveland, or,
in other words, was invited to resign. During his whole gubernatorial
term he had persistently shown his prejudice against and enmity
towards the Latter-day Saints, and had sought to deprive them of their
liberties, rob them of their rights, and create a conflict between them
and the federal government, which last the people had sufficient good
sense to prevent, notwithstanding the many aggravating provocations.
He was succeeded by Caleb W. West, not much of an improvement on his
predecessor.
Governor West commenced by offering amnesty to all the prisoners in the
penitentiary, under the infamous Edmunds law, who would "promise to
obey the law as interpreted by the courts," an insulting and degrading
offer that was respectfully declined, as they could not bind themselves
to accept all the partisan and persecutive vagaries of the courts.
Governor West was succeeded in 1889 by A. L. Thomas, who soon announced
himself as decidedly in favor of still further restricting government
of the people, by the people, for the people, by recommending that more
local officers should be appointed "by some federal agency," instead of
continuing to be elected by the people.
The last eight, and especially the last six, years have been chiefly
notorious for the outrageous and desperate attempts of the anti-Mormon
party, through congressional legislation and the courts, to crush and
destroy the church, and persecute, {448} distress, and despoil the
members thereof. The details are too profuse to be related here, and
therefore must be referred to but briefly and mostly in a general way.
It seems to have been a settled leading idea of most, yet not quite
all, of the federal officers appointed and sent to Utah, that the
almost sole purpose of their appointment was to destroy the church as a
religious body, and especially the political power of the members, and
to despoil them in every possible way, preferably under some sort of
color of law. A strange thing in a free country, in this much vaunted
land of liberty and equal rights par excellence.
In regard to federal officials, or to officials appointed by "some
federal agency," the usual course is to select and appoint those who
are prejudiced and who cherish animosity against the Latter-day Saints,
and who antagonize them on all possible occasions. If by any fortunate
accident a fair-minded man is appointed, he is either so badgered
and worried by the anti-Mormon element as to cause him to resign in
disgust, or every effort is made to effect his early removal from
office, so that the courts and all offices under federal or anti-Mormon
influence become mere partisan machinery for oppressing and despoiling
the Latter-day Saints.
The Utah Commission, that costly superfluity, which probably causes
the country an expenditure of $50,000 per annum to enable the
commission to supersede local self-government so far as it can, makes
its annual report to the federal government in which one thing is
surely manifest--the attempt to increase its own powers and to secure
further legislation restrictive of the privileges, powers, rights, and
liberties of the people. Under such circumstances the commission is
entitled to no more respect than the law demands. There really never
has been any more use for such a commission than for the fifth wheel
to a wagon; not so much, for an extra wheel would come in useful if
one of the four was broken, but the Utah Commission has been from the
beginning absolutely of no necessity nor utility whatever. It has been
an extravagant and criminal waste of the people's money, an excrescence
on the body politic, a libel on popular government, a disgrace to
American liberty. Some of the unrighteous decisions of the commission
have been virtually reversed by the Supreme Court of the United States,
though even that august tribunal can not be said to be forward in doing
even and exact justice towards the Latter-day Saints. Indeed in all
the courts under federal jurisdiction, or under anti-Mormon influence,
the justice that is done to the Latter-day Saints is such as can {449}
hardly be avoided under the law, and even the law is frequently so
one-sidedly construed and technically twisted and distorted as to
become a mere mockery of justice, which, on the contrary, should be the
foundation, spirit, substance, object, and end of all law.
Utah and Idaho are disgraced with religious test oaths, through federal
and anti-Mormon agency. Arizona had such a law, but to her credit be
it said that she repealed it, though some Mormon-eaters want another
enacted. Nevada made a law disfranchising the Latter-day Saints, but
the Supreme Court decided that it was unconstitutional. In Idaho a
Latter-day Saint is debarred, because of his religion, from voting
or holding office, and the new state constitution prohibits him from
sitting on juries. In Utah the federally appointed judges have decided
that an alien Latter-day Saint cannot be naturalized, solely on account
of his religion. The appointment of the chief justice who concurred in
that decision, was afterwards confirmed by the United States Senate,
the Senate thus sanctioning persecution for religious and conscience'
sake. The attempt is also made to prohibit even native-born Latter-day
Saints from taking up land, and threats are freely made that disability
to hold real estate will follow. Then perhaps the right to live will be
denied, as in the case of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
The law known as the Poland bill gave federal and local agency equal
power in arranging the jury list, but that show of justice is now gone,
and all jurors are chosen by federal agency, resulting in jury lists
and juries from which Latter-day Saints are excluded, so that they
are tried, not by juries of their peers, but by juries of prejudiced,
political and religious partisans and open and avowed enemies. What
confidence can any man have in getting justice from a court where judge
and juries and prosecuting and executive officers are well known to be
unscrupulous partisans and bitter enemies of the accused?
Among the judicial infamies perpetrated against the Latter-day Saints
was the diabolical Dickson-Zane doctrine of segregation, by which a man
charged with a misdemeanor could be kept in prison all his life. This
doctrine, as well as its near akin doctrine that the same misdemeanor
could be divided into two or more offenses, with two or more different
sentences of punishment, was overthrown by the Supreme Court of the
United States.
In the administration of recent federal law, the courts in 1887 took
possession of the Latter-day Saints' Perpetual Emigrating {450} Fund,
a charitable institution for the assistance of worthy emigrants, and
seized real and personal estate belonging, or supposed to belong, to
the Church, and estimated to be worth about a million dollars. Some
of its own property was then rented to the Church, the federal agency
requiring and receiving the rent. Now, if the federal government sets
the demoralizing example of robbing the people of their property, what
else can be expected than that the people will follow the example of
the government and freely rob one another, until this will become
a nation of sixty or a hundred million people, mostly thieves? If
the Latter-day Saints are to be robbed, then why not the Catholics,
Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, or any other
religious society? If any religious society, why not any civil society,
until theft becomes common business throughout the land? For, do it
under cover of law, or call it confiscation, or by any other name, it
will smell as bad, it will still be theft in every essential element.
Much more might be said of the endless persecutive enormities
perpetrated through federal agency toward the Latter-day Saints. But
the subject grows with the handling, and time and space would fail for
an adequate portrayal of the facts, the disfranchisement of all women,
and of those men who had more than one wife; the numerous day and night
raids of peaceable towns and settlements; the vexatious arrests; the
frivolous and spiteful charges preferred; the outrageous bonds required
in cases of misdemeanor, running from $1,000 to $10,000, and even to
nearly $50,000; the multitude of convictions, numbering between one and
two thousand, some without any and many with very slight evidence; the
high penalties inflicted in most cases, with regrets at the inability
of the court to inflict still higher; the dragging of delicate women
into court and compelling them to testify against their husbands, and
sending them to prison for refusal; deputy marshals with impunity
shooting at and even killing men only charged with misdemeanor;
straining the law so that a man could safely live in the same house
with a whore, but not with his reputed wife, nor could hardly look over
the fence at her house or her garden, or sit on the fence while she
passed by; refusing to prosecute lewd and lascivious anti-Mormons, but
imprisoning Latter-day Saints who informed on them; the voluntary exile
for years of many who had no confidence in the justice of the courts;
the enormous expense, amounting to millions of dollars, incurred, in
one way or another, in these persecutive proceedings, all wrung {451}
from a sober, industrious, God-fearing, but abused, slandered, and
persecuted community, and wholly, solely and entirely on account of
their religion.
For a time the plea was put forth by their persecutors that plurality
of wives was the only cause of the enmity against the Latter-day
Saints. Now that plea is being withdrawn, and it is shamelessly
declared that nothing short of the destruction of the church and the
abandonment of their religion by the persecuted, will satisfy the
ungodly and tyrannical demands of their oppressors.
It is shocking to have such a tale to tell in this everywhere and all
the time boasted land of liberty, in this last quarter and almost
last decade of the nineteenth century. But the worst thing is yet to
be said, and that is, that the tale is true, every word of it. It is
a sad, a discouraging commentary on the much be-lauded civilization
of this latest age, which has been the hope, but which promises to
be the disappointment, of all the ages. When justice fails, and
fails so grievously, the heavens mourn. For all this has not been
happening in Dahomey, or Timbuctoo, or Persia, or Turkey, or Russia,
or in any country in the old and effete eastern hemisphere, but, let
it be reiterated, in these United States of America, in this new and
progressive world, in this free and happy land, at this late date in
the world's history. Sackcloth and ashes ought to be in brisk demand,
for a long time to come, in this highly favored nation. That is the
fitting garb, and should be the only wear, in memory of strangled
Liberty.
During the last twenty-eight years, about four thousand missionaries,
and previously, since the organization of the church, probably about
one thousand five hundred more, have been sent to the various nations
to preach the Gospel, besides hundreds of native Elders, traveling
and preaching more locally in the several missions thus established.
Missionary Elders went to Canada as early as 1833; England in 1837;
Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man, Ireland, Australia and East Indies
in 1840; Palestine in 184l, Elder Orson Hyde passing through the
Netherlands, Bavaria, Austria, Turkey and Egypt, on his way; Society
Islands in 1844; the Channel Islands and France in 1849; Denmark,
Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and the Sandwich Islands in 1850; Norway,
Iceland, Germany and Chili in 1851; Malta, the Cape of Good Hope,
Burmah and the Crimea in 1852; Gibraltar, Prussia, China, Ceylon and
the West Indies in 1853; Siam and Turkey in 1854; Brazil in 1855;
the Netherlands in 1861; Austria in 1864; Mexico in 1877; the Samoan
Islands in 1888.
{452} Previous to the settling of the Church in Salt Lake Valley, about
five thousand Latter-day Saints had emigrated from Europe to America,
mostly to Nauvoo. Since that time the emigration of Latter-day Saints
from Europe has amounted to nearly eighty thousand souls, making an
average of nearly two thousand annually, most of them coming to Utah.
The Book of Mormon was published in England in 1841; in Danish in 1851;
in Welsh, French, German and Italian in 1852; in Hawaiian in 1855; in
Swedish in 1878. Several years ago it was translated into Hindostanee
and into Dutch. In 1875 portions of it were published in Spanish,
and the whole of it in 1886. Last year it was published in the Maori
language.
The Book of Doctrine and Covenants of the Church, in addition to
numerous editions in English, in America and England, was published in
Welsh in 1851, Danish in 1852, German in 1876 and Swedish in 1888. Many
regular periodicals, advocating the doctrines of the Church, have been
published in America, England, Wales, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany,
Switzerland, Australia and India. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions, of other books and tracts have been published by the Elders
in various languages in the different quarters of the globe.
The following temples to the Lord have been built by the Latter-day
Saints:
Kirtland, Ohio, 80 by 60 feet; corner stones laid July 23, 1833;
dedicated March 27, 1836.
Nauvoo, Illinois, 128 by 88 feet; corner stones laid April 6, 1841;
dedicated October 5 and November 30, 1845, and February 8 and April 30
and May 1, 1846; burned by an incendiary November 19, 1848.
St. George, Washington County, Utah, 142 by 96 feet; corner stones laid
March 10, 1873; dedicated January 1, 1877.
Logan, Cache County, 171 by 95 feet, with an annex to the north 88 by
36 feet; corner stones laid September 17, 1877; dedicated May 17, 1884.
Manti, Sanpete County, 172 by 95 feet, with an annex to the north 85 by
40 feet; corner stones laid April 14, 1879; dedicated May 21, 1888.
The temple at Salt Lake City, 186 by 99 feet, is unfinished; corner
stones laid April 6, 1853.
The site for a temple was dedicated at Independence, Jackson County,
Missouri, August 3, 1831.
The corner stones of a temple, 110 by 80 feet, were laid at Far West,
Caldwell County, Missouri, July 4, 1838.
{453}