I have gone over the work I assigned myself when I accepted your Committee's invitation, as fully as I could do without trespassing too largely upon your courteous patience. But I should do wrong to conclude my lecture without declaring in succinct and definite terms, the opinions I have formed and entertain of the Mormon people. The libels, of which they have been made the subject, make this a simple act of justice. Perhaps, too, my opinion, even with those who know me as you do, will better answer its end following after the narrative I have given.
I have spoken to you of a people; whose industry had made them rich, and gathered around them all the comforts, and not a few of the luxuries of refined life; expelled by lawless force into the Wilderness; seeking an untried home far away from the scenes which their previous life had endeared to them; moving onward, destitute, hunger-sickened, and sinking with disease; bearing along with them their wives and children, the aged, and the poor, and the decrepit; renewing daily on their march, the offices of devotion, the ties of family and friendship, and charity; sharing necessities, and braving dangers together, cheerful in the midst of want and trial, and persevering until they triumphed. I have told, or tried to tell you, of men, who when menaced by famine, and in the midst of pestilence, with every energy taxed by the urgency of the hour, were building roads and bridges, laying out villages, and planting cornfields, for the stranger who might come after them, their kinsman only by a common humanity, and peradventure a common suffering,—of men, who have renewed their prosperity in the homes they have founded in the desert,—and who, in their new built city, walled round by mountains like a fortress, are extending pious hospitalities to the destitute emigrants from our frontier lines,—of men who, far removed from the restraints of law, obeyed it from choice, or found in the recesses of their religion, something not inconsistent with human laws, but far more controlling; and who are now soliciting from the government of the United States, not indemnity,—for the appeal would be hopeless, and they know it—not protection, for they now have no need of it,—but that identity of political institutions and that community of laws with the rest of us, which was confessedly their birthright when they were driven beyond our borders.
I said I would give you the opinion I formed of the Mormons: you may deduce it for yourselves from these facts. But I will add that I have not yet heard the single charge against them as a Community, against their habitual purity of life, their integrity of dealing, their toleration of religious differences in opinion, their regard for the laws, or their devotion to the constitutional government under which we live, that I do not from my own observation, or the testimony of others, know to be unfounded.
THE END.
POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have been annoyed by comments this hastily written discourse has elicited. Well meaning friends have even invited me to tone down its remarks in favor of the Mormons, for the purpose of securing them a readier acceptance.—I can only make them more express. The Truth must take care of itself. I not only meant to deny that the Mormons in any wise fall below our own standard of morals, but I would be distinctly understood to ascribe to those of their number with whom I associated in the West, a general correctness of deportment, and purity of character above the average of ordinary communities.
The furthest I can go toward qualifying my testimony, will be to name the causes, to which, as a believer in Nature's compensations, I have myself credited this undue morality.
It was partly attributable perhaps to their forced abstemiousness; the diet of the most fortunate Mormons having been for long continued periods very spare, and composed almost wholly of vegetable food, with few condiments, and no intoxicating liquors. Some influence should be referred also to their custom of early and equal marriages, these not being regulated by the prudential considerations which embarrass opulent communities; something more to the supervision which was incidental to their nomadic life, and the habits it encouraged of disciplined, but grateful industry.
The chief cause, however, was probably found in this fact. The Mormons as I saw them, though a majority, were but a portion of the Church as it flourished in Illinois. When the persecution triumphed there, and no alternative remained for the steadfast in the faith but the flight out of Egypt into the Wilderness, as it was termed, all their fair weather friends forsook them. Priests and elders, scribes and preachers deserted by whole councils at a time; each talented knave, of whose craft they had been victims, finding his own pretext for abandoning them, without surrendering the money-bag of which he was the holder. One of these, for instance, bore with him so considerable a congregation that he was able to found quite a thriving community in Northern Wisconsin, which I believe he afterwards transplanted entire to an island in one of the Lakes. Other speculator-heresiarchs folded for themselves credulous sheep all through the Western Country. One Rigdon not long since had a Cure of them in our own State. Quite recently, an abandoned clergyman, who shortly before the Exod was excommunicated for his improper conduct, has presented a memorial to Congress, in which he charges the Mormons with very much more than he himself appears to have been guilty of. This abusive person, a former intimate of the Major General James Arlington Bennet, lately on trial at New York, in company with a One Eyed Mr. Thompson of that city, is also the only surviving brother of the Prophet Smith, founder of the Sect, and as such, still claims to be its sole true President, and genuine Arch High Priest.
So the Mormons have been, as it were, broken and screened by calamity. Their designing leaders have left them to seek fairer fortunes elsewhere. Those that remain of the old rock are the masses, always honest in the main and sincere even in delusion; and their guides are a few tried and trusty men, little initiated in the plotting of synagogues, and more noted for services rendered than bounties received. They are the men whom I saw on the prairie trail, sharing sorrow with the sorrowful, and poverty with the poor;—the chief of them all, a man of rare natural endowment, to whose masterly guidance they are mainly indebted for their present prosperity, driving his own ox-team and carrying his sick child in his arms. [[H]] The fact explains itself, that those only were willing to undertake their fearful pilgrimage of penance, whom a sense of conscientious duty made willing to give up the world for their religion. The Mormons I knew, were all, as far as I could judge, partakers of the sacraments, persons of prayer and faith; and their contentment, their temperance, their heroism, their strivings after the golden age of Christian brotherhood, were but the manifestations of their ever present and engrossing devotional feeling.