Descendants of Washington and Franklin! is there no hope? Must the best constitution, ever given to any uninspired nation, be made the sport of traitors and demagogues? Must the loftiest efforts at freedom and splendid nationality he crushed by a perplexing concentration of every thing humiliating to national pride and human ambition? Must the sons of venerated puritans so soon be covered with the inglorious gore of assassinations and belligerent carnage? Must thy cities be laid waste, whose lofty spires rival the mountain-tops, in courting the earliest sunbeams of the morning? Must thy daughters, the fairest workmanship of their Maker, be given to rapine and violence, when the eye of pity is turned away, and the aegis of angelic guardianship is reluctantly withdrawn? Except you bind up the broken in heart, and make restitution for robbery and rapine, and unprovoked banishment of loyal citizens, who poured out their blood as water at the voice of your governors and the mandates of your laws,—the vials of wo are in store for your unhappy country! No intercessor can stay the blast of divine indignation when the Almighty rises up to make inquisition for blood. The Most High solemnly interdicted any man to show mercy to Canaan when the cup of her iniquity was full. Jerusalem, the queen of cities! whose Temple was the pride and admiration of nations, having rejected the Saints, was made a heap of ruins under the curse of heaven.
Yet there is hope for America: let her senators teach wisdom, and her officers exact righteousness, and undo the heavy burdens, and redress the wrongs of her banished. Then the fruitful field shall not become barren, nor every man's hand be turned against his fellow; and the voice of mirth shall supersede the voice of mourning.
Land of my birth, and home of my fathers! my earliest impressions were devoted to your praise and glory. In my riper years I have never infringed your laws or quenched the spirit of your philanthropy. You have robbed me of my houses, and my farms, and martyred my dearest friends, and stripped me of reputation, and expelled me from your borders, without the shadow of impeachment, or of trial by jury. Contrary to my strongest predilections and educational attachments, you have sought to eradicate every vestige of my patriotism, and render frigid my warmest love to everything that endeared me to the friends and citizens of the country that was ever my pride and boast! My heart still yearns fondly over the land that was marked out in the council of Heaven to be the nursery of freedom, enterprise, and genius. And now, as I recede from your borders, and from the scenes of my toils and fond attachments with my desolate family, through extensive wilds to the mountains for safety and a home, my heart overflows and bursts with the sentiment—"Oh, that thou hadst known in this thy day the things that belong to thy peace!" In the meridian of life I go from the tombs of my fathers to build and plant, where the eagle of liberty soars aloft in the sunbeams of truth! My associates are called, and tried, and chosen; they are the virtuous and honourable of all the earth; the refuse of all nations, but accepted of God and escorted by his angels. Their bosoms beat high with every noble impulse of philanthropy and virtue; they are a magnanimous people, fitted to foster and garner up the scattered virtues of the human family, and open up a safe asylum to the oppressed of all nations; they have stood in the Thermopylae, and passed the Rubicon. The Roman Mutius could deliberately burn his hand to cinders as a token of the courage of his companions; so this people have proved, indisputably, that they possess all the elements of endurance and triumph. Their most arduous and perilous conflict is passed; and millions comforted, enlightened, and redeemed will reap the reward, and enter into their labours. They are worthy. They have paid the last debt which the angel informed John must be liquidated in the blood of latter-day prophets, when the just could be avenged. Judgment is given unto them, and the richest benedictions of Heaven now await in Zion the upright and noble of all nations.
With sentiments of pure benevolence, I subscribe myself
Your exiled friend and humble servant,
ORSON SPENCER.
NIGHT OF MARTYRDOM.
The following articles, on the Night of the Prophet's and Patriarch's Martyrdom, together with the suffering exit of the author's lamented wife, are inserted in this volume in order to perpetuate the memories of the "just," and render to the heavens a tribute of gratitude for their manifest interest in the tried condition of Saints on earth:
Twenty-seventh of June, 1844. Eventful period in the calendar of the 19th century! That awful night!! I remember it well—I shall never forget it! Thousands and tens of thousands will never forget it! A solemn thrill—a melancholy awe comes o'er my spirit! The memorable scene is fresh before me! It requires no art of the pencil, no retrospection of history to portray it. The impression of the Almighty Spirit on that occasion will run parallel with eternity! The scene was not portrayed by earthquake, or thunderings and lightnings, and tempest; but the majesty and sovereignty of Jehovah was felt far more impressively in the still small voice of that significant hour, than the roaring of many waters, or the artillery of many thunders, when the spirit of Joseph was driven back to the bosom of God, by an ungrateful and blood-guilty world. There was an unspeakable something, a portentous significancy in the firmament and among the inhabitants of the earth. Multitudes felt the whisperings of wo and grief, and the forebodings of tribulation and sorrow that they will never forget, though the tongue of man can never utter it. The Saints of God, whether near the scene of blood, or even a thousand miles distant, felt at the very moment the prophet lay in royal gore, that an awful deed was perpetrated. O, the repulsive chill! the melancholy vibrations of the very air, as the prince of darkness receded in hopeful triumph from the scene of slaughter! That night could not the Saints sleep, though uninformed by man of what had passed with the Seer and Patriarch, and far, far remote from the scene; yet to them sleep refused a visitation—the eyelids refused to close—the hearts of many sighed deeply in secret, and enquired why am I thus.