Part 6

The chief cause, however, was probably found in this fact. The Mormons as I saw them, though a majority, were but a portion of the Church as it flourished in Illinois. When the persecution triumphed there, and no alternative remained for the steadfast in the faith but the flight out of Egypt into the Wilderness, as it was termed, all their fair weather friends forsook them. Priests and elders, scribes and preachers deserted by whole councils at a time; each talented knave, of whose craft they had been victims, finding his own pretext for abandoning them, without surrendering the money-bag of which he was the holder. One of these, for instance, bore with him so considerable a congregation that he was able to found quite a thriving community in Northern Wisconsin, which I believe he afterwards transplanted entire to an island in one of the Lakes. Other speculator-heresiarchs folded for themselves credulous sheep all through the Western Country. One Rigdon not long since had a Cure of them in our own State. Quite recently, an abandoned clergyman, who shortly before the Exod was excommunicated for his improper conduct, has presented a memorial to Congress, in which he charges the Mormons with very much more than he himself appears to have been guilty of. This abusive person, a former intimate of the Major General James Arlington Bennet, lately on trial at New York, in company with a One Eyed Mr. Thompson of that city, is also the only surviving brother of the Prophet Smith, founder of the Sect, and as such, still claims to be its sole true President, and genuine Arch High Priest.

So the Mormons have been, as it were, broken and screened by calamity. Their designing leaders have left them to seek fairer fortunes elsewhere. Those that remain of the old rock are the masses, always honest in the main and sincere even in delusion; and their guides are a few tried and trusty men, little initiated in the plotting of synagogues, and more noted for services rendered than bounties received. They are the men whom I saw on the prairie trail, sharing sorrow with the sorrowful, and poverty with the poor;--the chief of them all, a man of rare natural endowment, to whose masterly guidance they are mainly indebted for their present prosperity, driving his own ox-team and carrying his sick child in his arms. [H] The fact explains itself, that those only were willing to undertake their fearful pilgrimage of penance, whom a sense of conscientious duty made willing to give up the world for their religion. The Mormons I knew, were all, as far as I could judge, partakers of the sacraments, persons of prayer and faith; and their contentment, their temperance, their heroism, their strivings after the golden age of Christian brotherhood, were but the manifestations of their ever present and engrossing devotional feeling.

I am asked to explain or justify the Mormon Creed:--I will have nothing to do with it. It is enough for me to say, that it does not manifest itself externally by the Pythian ravings or Eleusinian hocus pocus of new religions, nor the pageantry or mumming of those sometime established; that its communicants cultivate no mysteries or double faiths; and that I certainly think they are to be believed in their own exposition of it. They have two books, that are for sale in the shops, called The Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants, which profess to contain the entire body of their faith. The latter harmless work has its special chapters on Marriage, and on the Right of Property, Religious Toleration, and the Union of Church and State. [I] I am not called upon to investigate this subject, so long as any person of a jealous orthodoxy can constitute himself as good an inquisitor, by investing somewhere about one dollar and fifty cents.

Nor shall I go out of my way to discuss the question of the former character of the Mormons. What they were in Illinois, or what some of their predecessors were there, it will not be difficult for those to learn who are curious after the truth: the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, who as Presiding Judge of the Circuit in which they lived was often called upon to dismiss idle charges against them, is now at Washington, an honored member of the Senate of the United States. His personal testimony I am assured has always vindicated his judicial action.

Some good people who believe the Mormons traduced, ask me how they are to account for the great prevalence of these charges before the expulsion. Interest, and feeling founded on it, is the answer. The value of the property of which the Mormons were dispossessed in Missouri and Illinois is currently estimated at over Twenty Millions of Dollars: an adequate consideration certainly for a good deal of misrepresentation on the part of those who were endeavoring to appropriate it to themselves.

A motive sufficiently analogous explains the active circulation of new calumnies within the last half year. Instead of being broken up forever, as not more than five years ago their foes supposed with reason, their Congregation is gathering in increased numbers, and their application to be admitted as a State into the Union announces their probable restoration to power and influence, and is a cause of corresponding disquiet to the possessors of the properties in Illinois and Missouri from which they have been expelled. These are now the busiest Mormon slanderers. I speak of them with reluctance. They are, the best of them, but interested persons, who circulate calumnies at hearsay, calumnies which began with the original enemies of the Mormons, the felons, that charged with unchastity the wretched women they had ravished--with riot the men whose brothers they had murdered--with community of Property those whom themselves had robbed, whose houses and homes they fired over their heads on the lands from which they drove them. Such wretches lie with the brutal strength of Crime. And the Mormons are far away, and their few friends here are nearly all in humble life, and those public men in the West whose duty it was to do them justice, consent to render themselves parties to the guilt of their constituents by their interested silence.

At all events, was there not something about their religion made their neighbors unable to live with them?--Undoubtedly the industrious chevaliers of the Half Breed Tract, and other like precious neighbors of the Mormons, have in one sense proved this to be the case: perhaps, in the course of their wolf and lamb quarrel, they may have even said so, and before they finally devoured the offenders, complained seriously of the insulting proximity of their good roads, good schools, temperance and moral reform and musical associations, and their good laws not enacted only, but enforced. I understand this to be essentially the ground of complaint of the same marauders against the Swedish Quaker Colony, they have lately broken up in Henry County, above Nauvoo.

With other neighbors the Mormons have no trouble. We have had large numbers of them in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the East, for now nearly twenty years past, whose good citizenship is no subject of discussion with those who have daily business dealings with them. In England too, they number nearly twice as many adult members as the Baptists in Pennsylvania. Once indeed, when their religion was first preached in that country--it was at the very time their earliest trial before Lynch J., in Missouri, was pending--a charge was laid against them in a manufacturing borough there, that they had made away with an Elizabeth, or Betsey Martin, one of their new converts; and the beginning of a mob entered upon its examination. But to her British Majesty's Government, which holds the old fashioned notions of law and order, it mattered as little if it were the case of Betty Martin a Mormon, as of Betty Martin the Cyprian: a commonplace Government Magistrate decided there should be no mob, and a commonplace legal investigation decided the charge was groundless. The Mormons have therefore been free to preach and sing and pray in the United Kingdom to this hour; and I remark that Evangelic sectaries of my own persuasion there, do battle with them in print on the same terms as with Millerites, Wesleyans, or Seventh, or Every Day Baptists.

It is observed to me with a vile meaning, that I have said little about the Mormon women. I have scarcely alluded to them, because my memories of them are such that I cannot think of their character as a theme for discussion. In one word, it was eminently that which for Americans dignifies the names of mother, wife, and sister. Of the self-denying generosity which went to ennoble the whole people in my eyes, I witnessed among them the brightest illustrations. I have seen the ideal Charity of the statue gallery surpassed by the young Mormon mother, who shared with the stranger's orphan the breast of milk of her own child.

Can charges, which are so commonly and so circumstantially laid, be without any foundation at all?--I know it. Upon my return from the Prairie, I met through the settlements scandalous stories against the President of the Sect, which dated of the precise period when I myself was best acquainted with his self-denying and blameless life. I had an experience no less satisfactory with regard to other falsehoods, some of them the most extravagant and most widely believed. During the sickness I have referred to, I was nursed by a dear lady, well connected in New York and New Jersey, whom I sufficiently name to many, by stating that she was the first cousin of one of our most respected citizens, whose conduct as chief Magistrate of Philadelphia in an excited time won for him our general esteem. In her exile, she found her severest suffering in the belief that her friends in the States looked upon her as irreclaimably outcast. It was one of the first duties I performed on my return, to enlighten them as to her true position, and the character of her exemplary husband; and the knowledge of this fact arrived in time, I believe, to be of comfort to her before she sank under the privation and hardship of the march her frame was too delicate to endure.

15 July, 1850.

THOMAS L. KANE.

Footnotes:

A: Nine children were born the first night the women camped out. "Sugar Creek," Feb. 5.

B: One of the company having a copy of Mme. Cottin's Elizabeth, it was so sought after that some read it from the wagons by moonlight. They were materially sustained, too, by the practice of psalmody, "keeping up the Songs of Zion, and passing along Doxologies from front to rear, when the breath froze on their eyelashes."

C: Rev. Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia.

D: It is certain that there is no sickness among the present inhabitants of this region comparable to that of 1846.

E: This camp was moved by the beginning of October to winter quarters on the river, where also, there was considerable sickness before the cold weather. I am furnished with something over 600 as the number of burials in the graveyard there.

F: I knew of an orphan boy, for instance, who came on by himself at this time a foot, starting with no other provision than his trowser's pocket full of biscuit, given him from a steamboat on the Mississippi.

G: Letter of the Presidency, Great Salt Lake City, Oct. 12, 1849.

H: This was BRIGHAM YOUNG, the choice of the Mormons for Governor of Deseret. As this man, together with HEBER C. KIMBALL and WILLARD RICHARDS, nominees of the same people for the offices of Lieutenant Governor and Secretary, have been singled out as the objects of libel, it is right I should state that I knew them intimately. I found Mr. Kimball a man of singular generosity and purity of character, and Dr. Richards a genial gentleman and pleasant scholar of the most varied attainments: The integrity of all three altogether above question. T. L. K.

I: It may be well, however, to quote from two of these.

SECTION CIX.--ON MARRIAGE.

Marriage should be celebrated with prayer and thanksgiving; and at the solemnization, the persons to be married standing together, the man on the right, and the woman on the left, shall be addressed by the person officiating, as he shall be directed by the Holy Spirit; and if there shall be no legal objections, he shall say, calling each by their names: You both mutually agree to be each other's companion, husband and wife; observing the legal rights belonging to this condition; that is, keeping yourself wholly for each other, and from all others, during your lives. And when they shall have answered "yes," he shall pronounce them "Husband and wife in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by virtue of the laws of the country, and authority vested in him:" saying, "May God add his blessing, and keep you to fulfil your covenants from henceforth and forever. Amen."

The clerk of every church should keep a record of all marriages solemnized in his branch.

All legal contracts of marriages made before a person is baptised into this church should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in cases of death, when either is at liberty to marry again. It is not right to persuade a woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband, neither is it lawful to influence her to leave her husband. All children are bound by law to obey their parents; and to influence them to embrace any religious faith, or be baptized, or leave their parents without their consent, is unlawful and unjust. We believe that husband, parents, and masters, who exercise control over their wives, children, and servants, and prevent them from embracing the truth, will have to answer for that sin.

SECTION CX.--ON GOVERNMENTS AND LAWS IN GENERAL.

We believe that governments were instituted of God, for the benefit of man, and that he holds men accountable for their acts in relation to them, either in making laws or administering them for the good and safety of Society. We believe that no government can exist in peace, except such laws are framed, and held inviolate, as will secure to each individual the FREE exercise of CONSCIENCE, the RIGHT and control of PROPERTY, and the protection of life.

We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government; whereby one religious society is fostered, and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members as citizens denied. We do not believe that any religious society has authority to try men on the right of property or life, to take from them this world's goods, or put them in jeopardy either of life or limb, neither to inflict any physical punishment upon them: they can only excommunicate them from their society, and withdraw from their fellowship.

We believe that religion is instituted of God, and that men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others. We do not believe that human law has a right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion. We believe that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the liberty of the soul.

THE BOOK OF DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS.--Edition printed by John Taylor, at Nauvoo, Illinois, 1844; pp. 440--443.