"We have been driven time after time, and that without cause; and smitten again and again, and that without provocation; until we have proved the world with kindness, and the world has proved us, that we have no designs against any man or set of men, that we injure no man, that we are peaceable with all men, minding our own business, and our business only. We have suffered our rights and our liberties to be taken from us; we have not avenged ourselves of those wrongs; we have appealed to magistrates, to sheriffs, to judges, to government and to the President of the United States, all in vain; yet we have yielded peaceably to all these things. We have not complained at the great God, we murmured not, but peaceably left all, and retired into the back country, in the broad and wild prairies, in the barren and desolate plains, and there commenced anew; we made the desolate places to bud and blossom as the rose; and now the fiend-like race is disposed to give us no rest. Their father the devil, is hourly calling upon them to be up and doing, and they, like willing and obedient children, need not the second admonition; but in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, we will endure it no longer, if the great God will arm us with courage, with strength and with power, to resist them in their persecutions. We will not act on the offensive, but always on the defensive; our rights and our liberties shall not be taken from us, and we peaceably submit to it as we have done heretofore, but we will avenge ourselves of our enemies, inasmuch as they will not let us alone."
No one can marvel at the conclusion here arrived at if he will but pay attention to and give due weight to the enumerated wrongs which precede it. It would be asking the Saints to be more than human if we say they ought not to have indulged, much less to have expressed, such feelings of resentment.
Meantime, however, we may not close our eyes to the fact that there was unwisdom manifested on the part of a few of the Saints, which gave advantage to their enemies, by affording pretexts for some of their accusations. That unwisdom, as we have seen, consisted of boasting as to what the Lord would do in the immediate future in giving them possession of western Missouri as an inheritance; perhaps some unwise allusions to the supposed part the Lamanites would take in the establishment and redemption of Zion; and the vehement threats of retaliation in the event of their being further assailed. These unwise utterances, however, were made, for the most part, by the overzealous and ignorant. Men who had no grasp of the real genius of the great work whose foundations were then being laid; men who, in common with men of like nature in all ages and in all great movements, have been trouble-breeders; who, in their contemplation of ultimate results to be achieved, overleaped the intervening space through which the movement must pass, the difficulties it must encounter and overcome, the experiences its adherents must gain, the great and varied labors they must perform. They seem not to understand that great movements require time for the achievement of their ends; that time with God is one thing, with man quite another thing; that the thing which is "nigh at hand" with the Lord may be to men afar off; and overlooking these important facts leads such men into many errors of thought and action. It was wholly reprehensible, unwarranted, and cowardly, however, on the part of the Missourians to take advantage of the unwise utterances of such characters and charge their sentiments and folly to the whole body religious, that never entertained such sentiments nor contemplated the actions such sentiments suggest. And this is to be said even of those who were unwise enough to give the advantage here noted to the enemies of the Saints, they at no time or place were ever guilty of attempting in any manner to carry into effect by any action of their own the unwise and unwarranted opinions they entertained and expressed. Their boastings and vain speculations were in relation to what the Lord was going to do, not what they themselves purposed doing. These utterances were merely the effervescence of overwrought minds, of overzealous, foolish, but well meaning and harmless people. Unhappily, however, what they said gave the enemy an advantage that he was not slow to avail himself of, and the unwisdom of some of the Saints is a factor that must be reckoned with in dealing with the causes of the persecutions of the Saints in Missouri.
The Real Cause of the Missouri Persecutions.
Having considered those facts and circumstances which may be regarded as the minor causes and pretexts of the Missouri persecutions, let us now come to the heart of the matter, to the real cause of the persecution of the Saints.
It was against the Saints as a religious sect that the Missourians first complained. It was "in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people" that had settled, and was still settling in their country, "styling themselves Mormons," that led the Missourians of Jackson county to pretend to believe that an important crisis regarding their civil society was at hand. "It is more than two years," they said, "since the first of these fanatics, or knaves (for one or other they undoubtedly are), made their first appearance amongst us, and pretended as they did, and do now, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the Most High; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder-working miracles wrought by the inspired apostles and prophets of old. We believed them deluded fanatics, or weak and designing knaves, and that they and their pretensions would soon pass away; but in this we were deceived. * * * They openly blaspheme the Most High God, and cast contempt on His holy religion, by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues by direct inspiration, and by divers pretenses derogatory to God and religion, and to the utter subversion of human reason."[[37]]
The foregoing is quoted from the first "Manifesto," or "Secret Constitution" of the mob. Somewhat later, in a second manifesto issued to the public in justification of their contemplated acts of violence against the Saints, they say: "What would be the fate of our lives and property, in the hands of jurors and witnesses, who do not blush to declare, and would not upon occasion hesitate to swear, that they have wrought miracles, and have been the subjects of miraculous and supernatural cures, have conversed with God and His angels, and possess and exercise the gifts of divination and of unknown tongues, and fired with the prospect of obtaining inheritances without money and without price—may be better imagined than described. * * * Of their pretended revelations from heaven—their personal intercourse with God and His angels—the maladies they pretend to heal by the laying on of hands—and the contemptible gibberish with which they habitually profane the Sabbath, and which they dignify with the appellation of unknown tongues, we have nothing to say: vengeance belongs to God alone."[[38]]
Yet it was because the Saints entertained these religious beliefs that the mob of Jackson county issuing this "manifesto," proceeded to take "vengeance" into their own hands, and wreak it upon the Saints. All their other accusations against them,—namely, idleness, ignorance, inviting "free negroes" into the state, inciting the slaves to insubordination to their masters, claiming Jackson county as their inheritance to be obtained by force if not bloodshed, and poverty—all these charges, except, perhaps the last (for some of the Saints were very poor, though I have yet to learn that that is a crime), were absolutely untrue. The Saints, however, did claim the existence of spiritual power in their religion; that the channel of communication between God and men by means of revelation, the visitation of angels, and the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, had been opened anew; that gifts of the Gospel—tongues, interpretations, visions, inspired dreams, healings—that all the spiritual powers and graces of the Gospel, in fact, were manifested in the religion they had accepted. By this religion, also, they were admonished to righteousness of life; to the strict observance of the Sabbath; to respect for the name of Deity; to temperance; to industry; to true speaking and true acting; to patience—in a word, to godliness; all of which but to live was to place themselves in marked contrast to those about them, and their righteous lives were a great rebuke to the general dissolute conduct of the Missourians. It was this effort at a godly walk and conversation, and the religion which commanded it, that was offensive in the eyes of the Missourians, and which led them to form their strong determination to be rid of a people and a religion which made their own lives a reproach.
That this was regarded as the chief, if not the sole cause of their persecution, appears in the subsequent discussion of the Jackson county difficulties, both pro et con. All other questions, all the minor causes and pretexts were lost sight of in that discussion. Governor Dunklin, in a communication to Colonel J. Thornton, in answer to a letter written by that gentleman proposing a compromise between the Saints and their enemies in Jackson county, recognizes what he calls "the eccentricity of the religious opinions of the Mormons" as being the cause of their persecution. "I am fully persuaded," he remarks, "that the eccentricity of the religious opinions and practices of the Mormons is at the bottom of the outrages committed against them."
In this important communication he no where considers anything else as the cause of their persecution, but argues at length in favor of their right to the entertainment of their religious views, eccentric howsoever they might be, so long as they did not interfere with the rights of others. "They have the right constitutionally guaranteed to them," he remarks, "and it is indefeasible, to worship Joe Smith as a man, an angel, or even as the only true and living God, and to call their habitation Zion, the Holy Land, or even heaven itself. Indeed, there is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that they have not a right to adopt as their religion, so that in its exercise they do not interfere with the rights of others."[[39]]