The Life of John Taylor / Third President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

by B. H. Roberts

As the state legislature at the time was in session, there were gathered in Springfield the principal men of the state; and as they were all anxious to learn something of "Mormonism," the Representatives' Hall was tendered the brethren for holding religious service, on Sunday, and Elder Taylor and Orson Hyde were appointed by the Prophet to preach, the latter in the forenoon, the former in the afternoon.

In all these vexatious prosecutions Elder Taylor stood very near the Prophet, and ably defended him through the editorial columns of the Times and Seasons and the Neighbor.

In the meantime the phenomenal growth of the Church, the prosperity of the Saints in Nauvoo, and the rapid progress of the city, while very gratifying to the founders of both Church and city, attracted to the body religious and municipal a class of men that were very undesirable. Adventurers seeking for place and power and wealth; demagogues who by fulsome flattery of the people hoped to attain through their political influence a realization of their ambitious dreams; knaves who by falsely professing conversion, thought to cover up corrupt, licentious lives, and thrive by villainy; thieves and counterfeiters who saw their opportunity to live by roguery, and steal on the credit of the Mormons, of whom the people of Illinois were too ready to believe anything that savored of evil, because prejudiced against their religion—all these characters were attracted to Nauvoo by the prosperity that reigned there; and their ungodly conduct hastened the evil day of the city's destruction.

Chief among these reckless adventurers was John C. Bennett, a man of learning and intellectual ability but a moral leper. He was guilty of the most infamous, licentious practices, and seduced several women by representing that promiscuous intercourse of the sexes was a doctrine believed in by the Latter-day Saints and that there was no harm in it. He also said that Joseph Smith and other Church leaders both sanctioned and practiced such wickedness; that Joseph only denounced such things in public so vehemently because of the prejudice of the people, and the trouble that might arise in his own house.

For this conduct he was excommunicated from the Church, compelled to resign the Mayorship of the city, expelled from the Masonic Lodge, chastised by the Legion, and his infamy published to the world and denounced.

This filled him with bitterness against the Saints, and especially against the Prophet. He at once set on foot measures that he hoped would bring him a terrible revenge. He succeeded in getting the Missourians to issue a new warrant for his arrest on the old charge of "theft, arson and murder," and a new requisition for his arrest was granted by Governor Ford, of Illinois.

The warrants were served on the Prophet in Lee County, some two hundred miles from Nauvoo. The officers who arrested him sought to drag him immediately into Missouri, but in this they failed, as Joseph through some friends obtained a writ of habeas corpus, and the legality of the warrant was enquired into by the municipal court of Nauvoo. The court also went behind the writ and tried the case exparte on its merits, and discharged the accused for want of subsistence in the warrant on which he was arrested, as well as upon the merits of the case.

Elder Taylor in an editorial in the Neighbor of July 5th 1843, thus deals with the course pursued by Missouri in these several instances of persecution against the Prophet:

"It has fallen to our lot of late years to keep an account of any remarkable circumstances that might transpire in and about this and adjoining states; as well as of distant provinces and nations. Among the many robberies, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, fires, mobs, wars, etc., which we have had to record, there is one circumstance of annual occurrence which it has always fallen to our lot to chronicle. We allude not to the yearly inundation of the Nile, nor the frequent eruptions of Vesuvius or Ætna, but to the boiling over of Tophet, alias the annual overflow of the excrescence of Missouri. Not indeed, like the Nile, over-flowing its parched banks, invigorating its alluvial soil and causing vegetation to teem forth in its richest attire; but like the sulphurous flame that burns unnoticed in the bowels of a volcano; kept alive by the combustion of its own native element, until it can contain itself no longer within the limits of its crater; it bursts beyond its natural bounds; spreads its sulphurous lava all around, leaving naught but desolation in its path,—destroying alike the cot of the husbandman, and the palace of the noble, in one grand sweep; covering vegetation with its fiery lava, and turning the garden into a bed of cinders. So Missouri has her annual ebulitions, and must belch forth her sulphurous lava and seek to overwhelm others; and as it happens that we are so unfortunate as to live near the borders of this monster, we must ever and anon, be smutted with the soot that flies off from her burning crater.

"Without entering here into the particulars of the bloody deeds, the high-handed oppression, the unconstitutional acts, the deadly and malicious hate, the numerous murders and the wholesale robberies of that people, we will proceed to notice one of the late acts of Missouri, or of the governor of that state, towards us. We allude to the late arrest of Joseph Smith."