General Smith's Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States

NAUVOO, ILLINOIS.
PRINTED BY JOHN TAYLOR.
1844.
The first edition, which this edition is designed to reproduce, contains a few typographical and other errors corrected in later editions (e. g. that of 1866). For clarity, several readings from later editions are used in this text; all are marked with brackets. In only one case (a tarriff being 'subversion' in the first edition and 'supervision' in others) did the changes produce a significant difference in meaning, and the context clearly supports the latter as the correct reading.
Born in a land of liberty, and breathing an air uncorrupted with the sirocco of barbarous climes, I ever feel a double anxiety for the happiness of all men, both in time and in eternity. My cogitations, like Daniel's, have for a long time troubled me, when I viewed the condition of men throughout the world, and more especially in this boasted realm, where the Declaration of Independence holds these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, but at the same time some two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours: and hundreds of our kindred for an infraction, or supposed infraction of some over wise statute, have to be incarcerated in dungeon glooms, or suffer the more moral penitentiary gravitation of mercy in a nut-shell, while the duelist, the debauchee, and the defaulter for millions, and other criminals, take the upper-most rooms at feasts, or, like the bird of passage find a more congenial clime by flight.
The wisdom which ought to characterize the freest, wisest, and most noble nation of the nineteenth century, should, like the sun in his meridian splendor, warm every object beneath its rays: and the main efforts of her officers, who are nothing more nor less than the servants of the people, ought to be directed to ameliorate the condition of all: black or white, bond or free; for the best of books says, God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth.