In 1844 Josiah Quincy visited the Prophet Joseph Smith at Nauvoo. They conversed upon questions of government and the Prophet offered a solution of the slavery question which Josiah Quincy, in 1882, declared the history of our country justified.
It is by no means impossible that some future textbook, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the 19th century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destiny of his countrymen? It is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. And the reply, absurd as it doubtless seems to most men now living, may be an obvious commonplace to their descendants. History deals in surprises and paradoxes quite as startling as this. A man who established a religion in this age of free debate, who was, and is to-day, accepted by hundreds of thousands as a direct emissary from the Most High, such a human being is not to be disposed of by pelting his memory with unsavory epithets. Fanatic, impostor, charlatan, he may have been; but those hard names furnish no solution to the problem he presents to us. Fanatics and impostors are living and dying every day, and their memory is buried with them; but the wonderful influence which this founder of religion exerted and still exerts, throws him into relief before us, not as a rogue to be criminated, but as a phenomenon to be explained. The vital questions Americans are asking each other to-day have to do with this man and with what he has left us. Is there any remedy heroic enough to meet the case, yet in accordance with our national doctrines of liberty and toleration, which can be applied to the doctrine now advanced by the sect which he created? The possibilities of the Mormon system are unfathomable. (Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past.)
In 1855, when men's minds had been moved to their depths on the question of slavery, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that it should be met with in accordance "with the interests of the South and the settled conscience of the North. It is really not a great task, a great fight for this country to accomplish, to buy that property of the planter—the United States will be brought to give every inch of their public lands for a purpose like this."
We who can look back upon the terrible cost of the fratricidal war which put an end to slavery, now say that such a solution of the difficulty would have been very worthy of a Christian Statesman. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I think of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation to the same course in 1844? If the atmosphere of men's opinions was stirred by such a proposition when war clouds were discernible in the sky, was it not a statesmanlike word eleven years earlier when the heavens looked tranquil and beneficent? (Josiah Quincy, F. of P.)
The Prophet also saw that war would devastate this land and prophesied that "we shall soon have war and bloodshed;" that men shall hunt the lives of their own sons; brothers kill brothers; mothers shall be against daughters. He prophesied that this war should begin with the rebellion of South Carolina, and that it should cause the death of many souls; that the Southern States should be divided against the Northern States, and that the Southern States should call upon other nations, even Great Britain, to help them; that slaves should rise against their masters and that they should be "marshaled and disciplined for war." As late as 1882 Josiah Quincy marveled at the literal fulfilment of this prophecy. He remarked the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed the same solution of the slave question, in 1855, that the Prophet had proposed eleven years earlier, in 1844. This prophecy on war was made in 1832 by the Prophet and published to the world many years before his conversation with Josiah Quincy. (Comment.)
Give every man his constitutional freedom and the President full power to send an army to suppress mobs, and the States authority to repeal and impugn that relic of folly which makes it necessary for the Governor of the State to make the demand of the President for troops, in case of invasion or rebellion.
Joseph Smith.
Josiah Quincy, Commenting on this Statement Said:
It is needless to remark how later events showed the executive weakness that Mr. Smith pointed out—the weakness that cost thousands of valuable lives and millions of treasure.
Born in the lowest ranks of poverty, without book-learning, and with the homeliest of all human names, he had made himself at the age of thirty-nine a power upon the earth. Of the multitudinous family of Smith, none had so won human hearts and shaped human lives as this Joseph. His influence, whether for good or evil, is potent to-day, and the end is not yet. If the reader does not know what to make of Joseph Smith, I cannot help him out of the difficulty; I myself stand helpless before the puzzle. (Josiah Quincy, F. of the P.)