To give a coloring of dishonesty to the character of Pratt, Mr. Schroeder writes the following passage:
"One of the temptations inducing Pratt's departure from New York was to get a country where, as he himself expresses it, there is 'no law to sweep (away) all the hard earnings of years to pay a small debt.' The ethical status of an average country-peddler who is willing to leave his native State to avoid the payment of his 'small debts' furnishes a fertile immorality in which to plant the seeds of religious imposture."[132]
[Footnote 132: American Historical Magazine, Jan., 1907, p. 59. Ante pp. 49-50.]
Mr. Schroeder conceals the fact that the "small debt" not "debts" as put by him, was merely a remainder due to Mr. Morgan of whom Pratt had purchased the farm near Oswego, and which owing to his brother's failure to meet his share of the payments, as also bad markets for the crop of 1826, Mr. Pratt could not pay. Whereupon the farm it had taken years to clear of timber, and the crop was seized by Morgan for that debt. Is Mr. Schroeder justified in giving a sinister aspect to this matter?
We have Pratt located in Amherst, 1826. Sidney Rigdon makes his second journey from Pennsylvania and arrives at Bainbridge, Ohio, in 1826, and in capacity of "Disciple" preacher visits the surrounding towns where he becomes acquainted with Pratt. All this is granted. Mr. Schroeder in trying to fix upon the exact time and circumstance of their first meeting, resorts to a jugglery of facts, and builds on the distorted mass such conclusions as can be characterized only by the term shameful. I quote Mr. Schroeder:
"The date of their first meeting is nowhere given, but may reasonably be inferred from an address delivered by Parley P. Pratt in 1843 or '4. In this discourse Pratt tells of an occurrence which transpired on his way to his future Ohio home, which occurrence furnishes the key to his first connection with Mormonism. On his way he stopped at a humble cottage, the name of whose occupant he carefully fails to give. Here, while asleep (so he says), "a messenger of a mild and intelligent countenance suddenly stood before me (Pratt) arrayed in robes of dazzling splendor." According to Mormon theory, an angel is but an exalted man. Of course Sidney Rigdon was an exalted man; why not, then, an angel? This angel claimed to hold the keys to the mysteries of this wonderful country, and took Pratt out to exhibit those mysteries to him. Pratt then had portrayed to his mind the whole future of Mormonism; its cities, with inhabitants from all parts of the globe; its temples, with a yet unattained splendor; its present church organization was, with considerable definiteness, outlined; its political ambition to establish a temporal kingdom of God on the ruins of this government was set forth with quite as much definiteness as in the subsequent more publicly uttered, treasonable sermons. I conclude from the exact manner in which this "Angel of the Prairies" foreknew the ambitions, hopes, and future achievements of the Mormon Church and the similar admitted fore-knowledge of Rigdon and the subsequently established connection between Rigdon, Pratt, and Smith, that the "Angel of the Prairies" who outlined to Pratt his then contemplated and now executed religious fraud, was none other than Sidney Rigdon himself, and that this fact accounts for Pratt's failure to give the name of his host or the date of his first meeting with Rigdon."[133]
[Footnote 133: American Historical Magazine, Jan., 1907, p. 59. Ante p. 51.]
"THE ANGEL OF THE PRAIRIES."
The work here quoted for these supposedly historical incidents, is entitled "The Angel of the Prairies," and is a work of pure fiction, a product of the author's imagination, professedly and confessedly so.[134] It was never delivered as a public address in Nauvoo, though Mr. Schroeder in the above calls it successively an "Address delivered by Parley P. Pratt," a "discourse," and in his notes a "sermon."[135] It was merely read in the presence of Joseph Smith and "a general council," most likely the First Presidency and Mr. Pratt's associates of the Twelve Apostles, as "a curious and extraordinary composition in the similitude of a dream." Such is its author's characterization of it. "It was designed," he continues, "as a reproof of the corruptions and degeneracy of our government, in suffering mobs to murder, plunder, rob and drive their fellow citizens with impunity. It also suggested some reforms."[136] It is no more history, or even prophecy than Johnson's "Rasselas" or Sir Thomas Moore's "Utopia" is history or prophecy. Yet this fiction, and I charge that Mr. Schroeder knew it to be fiction—for he could learn the facts from its preface—must be pressed into service as solemn prose history in order to complete and sustain the vagaries of the Schroeder-Spaulding theory! At first on meeting with this shameful perversion one is inclined to an outburst of vexation. On second thought he remembers that this fragment is but a piece of the whole fabric of the Spaulding theory, and smiles.
[Footnote 134: "Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt," edition of 1874, p. 367.]