most absurd credulity that has astonished the world since its foundation.” The settlers resolved never to vote for a political candidate who “truckled” to the Saints, and to resist Mormon domination of Hancock’s political affairs, “forcibly, if we must.” Some of the members of the “correspondence committees” tasked with monitoring the Mormons’ behavior would soon enter the annals of Latter-day Saints history: Mark Aldrich; Colonel Levi Williams; Franklin Worrell; Captain Robert F. Smith, and the settlers’ ubiquitous mouthpiece, Thomas Sharp.
By the fall of 1843, the Saints had almost exhausted their small reservoir of goodwill in southwestern Illinois. Just four years before, the residents of Quincy had opened their arms and their homes to the refugee Saints, fleeing the Missouri oppression. Three years earlier, the legislature’s Whigs and Democrats had unanimously approved the Nauvoo Charter, which granted the Saints quasi-independent status within Illinois borders. Now the worm had turned. “From this time forth,” Governor Thomas Ford wrote in his
History of Illinois,
“the Whigs generally, and a part of the Democrats, determined upon driving the Mormons out of the state.”
In 1843, Joseph vowed that the Mormons would remain neutral in the country’s next major political confrontation, the presidential election of 1844. Then he announced his own quixotic presidential candidacy, guaranteeing that neither major party need bother wooing the Saints’ votes. It was a strategy for near-total isolation, and it succeeded all too well.
IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME, THE
MORMONS HAD BECOME POLITICAL orphans. They were religious pariahs as well. Southwestern Illinois was not a churchy part of the world: “The minister of the gospel has had to contend with foul mouthed Atheism and rabid infidelity,” one visiting Presbyterian reported. “The church has not only been asleep, but it really seems as if they designed to keep their spiritual eyes shut forever.” Still, Christians such as they were in Hancock County viewed the Mormons as craven heretics. The “Golden Bible,” the far-fetched tales of the Plains Indians as ancient Lamanites, and the rumors of serial wifery, waxed too exotic for workaday Christians. “I presume Nauvoo is as perfect a sink of debauchery and every species of abomination as ever were Sodom and Nineveh,” the Presbyterian missionary Reverend William M. King wrote to his colleagues at the American Home Missionary Society in New York. Writing to the society from Warsaw, missionary Reverend Benjamin Franklin Morris complained, “We are surrounded by the delusion of Mormonism . . . the frogs of Egypt are literally covering the whole land.”
“Mormonism is exerting a great and pernicious influence in this county,” he continued.
Here is the seat of the Beast and the false prophet. Here are 15,000 souls deluded and under the absolute dominion of Joe Smith. They have unlimited belief in his prophecies; and no prophecy however absurd and preposterous can dissipate the dreadful delusions that cover their minds.
The old citizens are under great excitement. We are on the eve of an outbreak and I should not be surprised to see very soon the scenes of Missouri enacted anew. What is to be the finale of this chief of all modern humbugs I know not.
Jonathan Turner, a Presbyterian divine in Jacksonville, Illinois, published a lengthy attack in his
Mormonism in All Ages
in 1842, branding the Saints “the most dangerous and virulent enemies to our political and religious purity, and our social and civil peace, that now exist in the Union.”
It’s far from clear if the Mormon-haters ever read the Book of Mormon or understood much about the Saints’ beliefs. But they knew what they didn’t like. Editor Gregg, who briefly took over Sharp’s newspaper in 1843, fretted that “the pretended prophet” Smith, using “vile and blasphemous lies,” would remove “all those moral and
By the fall of 1843, the Saints had almost exhausted their small reservoir of goodwill in southwestern Illinois. Just four years before, the residents of Quincy had opened their arms and their homes to the refugee Saints, fleeing the Missouri oppression. Three years earlier, the legislature’s Whigs and Democrats had unanimously approved the Nauvoo Charter, which granted the Saints quasi-independent status within Illinois borders. Now the worm had turned. “From this time forth,” Governor Thomas Ford wrote in his
History of Illinois,
“the Whigs generally, and a part of the Democrats, determined upon driving the Mormons out of the state.”
In 1843, Joseph vowed that the Mormons would remain neutral in the country’s next major political confrontation, the presidential election of 1844. Then he announced his own quixotic presidential candidacy, guaranteeing that neither major party need bother wooing the Saints’ votes. It was a strategy for near-total isolation, and it succeeded all too well.
IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME, THE
MORMONS HAD BECOME POLITICAL orphans. They were religious pariahs as well. Southwestern Illinois was not a churchy part of the world: “The minister of the gospel has had to contend with foul mouthed Atheism and rabid infidelity,” one visiting Presbyterian reported. “The church has not only been asleep, but it really seems as if they designed to keep their spiritual eyes shut forever.” Still, Christians such as they were in Hancock County viewed the Mormons as craven heretics. The “Golden Bible,” the far-fetched tales of the Plains Indians as ancient Lamanites, and the rumors of serial wifery, waxed too exotic for workaday Christians. “I presume Nauvoo is as perfect a sink of debauchery and every species of abomination as ever were Sodom and Nineveh,” the Presbyterian missionary Reverend William M. King wrote to his colleagues at the American Home Missionary Society in New York. Writing to the society from Warsaw, missionary Reverend Benjamin Franklin Morris complained, “We are surrounded by the delusion of Mormonism . . . the frogs of Egypt are literally covering the whole land.”
“Mormonism is exerting a great and pernicious influence in this county,” he continued.
Here is the seat of the Beast and the false prophet. Here are 15,000 souls deluded and under the absolute dominion of Joe Smith. They have unlimited belief in his prophecies; and no prophecy however absurd and preposterous can dissipate the dreadful delusions that cover their minds.
The old citizens are under great excitement. We are on the eve of an outbreak and I should not be surprised to see very soon the scenes of Missouri enacted anew. What is to be the finale of this chief of all modern humbugs I know not.
Jonathan Turner, a Presbyterian divine in Jacksonville, Illinois, published a lengthy attack in his
Mormonism in All Ages
in 1842, branding the Saints “the most dangerous and virulent enemies to our political and religious purity, and our social and civil peace, that now exist in the Union.”
It’s far from clear if the Mormon-haters ever read the Book of Mormon or understood much about the Saints’ beliefs. But they knew what they didn’t like. Editor Gregg, who briefly took over Sharp’s newspaper in 1843, fretted that “the pretended prophet” Smith, using “vile and blasphemous lies,” would remove “all those moral and
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