I am asked to explain or justify the Mormon Creed:—I will have nothing to do with it. It is enough for me to say, that it does not manifest itself externally by the Pythian ravings or Eleusinian hocus pocus of new religions, nor the pageantry or mumming of those sometime established; that its communicants cultivate no mysteries or double faiths; and that I certainly think they are to be believed in their own exposition of it. They have two books, that are for sale in the shops, called The Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants, which profess to contain the entire body of their faith. The latter harmless work has its special chapters on Marriage, and on the Right of Property, Religious Toleration, and the Union of Church and State. [[I]] I am not called upon to investigate this subject, so long as any person of a jealous orthodoxy can constitute himself as good an inquisitor, by investing somewhere about one dollar and fifty cents.
Nor shall I go out of my way to discuss the question of the former character of the Mormons. What they were in Illinois, or what some of their predecessors were there, it will not be difficult for those to learn who are curious after the truth: the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, who as Presiding Judge of the Circuit in which they lived was often called upon to dismiss idle charges against them, is now at Washington, an honored member of the Senate of the United States. His personal testimony I am assured has always vindicated his judicial action.
Some good people who believe the Mormons traduced, ask me how they are to account for the great prevalence of these charges before the expulsion. Interest, and feeling founded on it, is the answer. The value of the property of which the Mormons were dispossessed in Missouri and Illinois is currently estimated at over Twenty Millions of Dollars: an adequate consideration certainly for a good deal of misrepresentation on the part of those who were endeavoring to appropriate it to themselves.
A motive sufficiently analogous explains the active circulation of new calumnies within the last half year. Instead of being broken up forever, as not more than five years ago their foes supposed with reason, their Congregation is gathering in increased numbers, and their application to be admitted as a State into the Union announces their probable restoration to power and influence, and is a cause of corresponding disquiet to the possessors of the properties in Illinois and Missouri from which they have been expelled. These are now the busiest Mormon slanderers. I speak of them with reluctance. They are, the best of them, but interested persons, who circulate calumnies at hearsay, calumnies which began with the original enemies of the Mormons, the felons, that charged with unchastity the wretched women they had ravished—with riot the men whose brothers they had murdered—with community of Property those whom themselves had robbed, whose houses and homes they fired over their heads on the lands from which they drove them. Such wretches lie with the brutal strength of Crime. And the Mormons are far away, and their few friends here are nearly all in humble life, and those public men in the West whose duty it was to do them justice, consent to render themselves parties to the guilt of their constituents by their interested silence.
At all events, was there not something about their religion made their neighbors unable to live with them?—Undoubtedly the industrious chevaliers of the Half Breed Tract, and other like precious neighbors of the Mormons, have in one sense proved this to be the case: perhaps, in the course of their wolf and lamb quarrel, they may have even said so, and before they finally devoured the offenders, complained seriously of the insulting proximity of their good roads, good schools, temperance and moral reform and musical associations, and their good laws not enacted only, but enforced. I understand this to be essentially the ground of complaint of the same marauders against the Swedish Quaker Colony, they have lately broken up in Henry County, above Nauvoo.
With other neighbors the Mormons have no trouble. We have had large numbers of them in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the East, for now nearly twenty years past, whose good citizenship is no subject of discussion with those who have daily business dealings with them. In England too, they number nearly twice as many adult members as the Baptists in Pennsylvania. Once indeed, when their religion was first preached in that country—it was at the very time their earliest trial before Lynch J., in Missouri, was pending—a charge was laid against them in a manufacturing borough there, that they had made away with an Elizabeth, or Betsey Martin, one of their new converts; and the beginning of a mob entered upon its examination. But to her British Majesty's Government, which holds the old fashioned notions of law and order, it mattered as little if it were the case of Betty Martin a Mormon, as of Betty Martin the Cyprian: a commonplace Government Magistrate decided there should be no mob, and a commonplace legal investigation decided the charge was groundless. The Mormons have therefore been free to preach and sing and pray in the United Kingdom to this hour; and I remark that Evangelic sectaries of my own persuasion there, do battle with them in print on the same terms as with Millerites, Wesleyans, or Seventh, or Every Day Baptists.
It is observed to me with a vile meaning, that I have said little about the Mormon women. I have scarcely alluded to them, because my memories of them are such that I cannot think of their character as a theme for discussion. In one word, it was eminently that which for Americans dignifies the names of mother, wife, and sister. Of the self-denying generosity which went to ennoble the whole people in my eyes, I witnessed among them the brightest illustrations. I have seen the ideal Charity of the statue gallery surpassed by the young Mormon mother, who shared with the stranger's orphan the breast of milk of her own child.
Can charges, which are so commonly and so circumstantially laid, be without any foundation at all?—I know it. Upon my return from the Prairie, I met through the settlements scandalous stories against the President of the Sect, which dated of the precise period when I myself was best acquainted with his self-denying and blameless life. I had an experience no less satisfactory with regard to other falsehoods, some of them the most extravagant and most widely believed. During the sickness I have referred to, I was nursed by a dear lady, well connected in New York and New Jersey, whom I sufficiently name to many, by stating that she was the first cousin of one of our most respected citizens, whose conduct as chief Magistrate of Philadelphia in an excited time won for him our general esteem. In her exile, she found her severest suffering in the belief that her friends in the States looked upon her as irreclaimably outcast. It was one of the first duties I performed on my return, to enlighten them as to her true position, and the character of her exemplary husband; and the knowledge of this fact arrived in time, I believe, to be of comfort to her before she sank under the privation and hardship of the march her frame was too delicate to endure.
15 July, 1850.
THOMAS L. KANE.