A RETROSPECT—A STATE'S CRIME—TROUBLE BREWING.

Thus far I have spoken only of those prosperous events which befell the Saints at Nauvoo from the return of the Twelve from England, in July, 1841, to the nomination of the Prophet Joseph for president of the United States, February, 1843. It now becomes necessary to note some of those unfortunate events which befell them during the same period, with all of which Elder Taylor had more or less to do.

Missouri was not satisfied with robbing the Saints wholesale and expelling them from her borders, her hatred followed them to Illinois. Of course the Prophet Joseph was the chief object of their fury. In the fall of 1841 he was arrested upon a requisition from the Governor of Missouri on the old charge of "theft, arson and murder," assumed to have been committed in Caldwell and Daviess Counties, in the autumn of 1838. He obtained a writ of habeas corpus and the case came up before Judge Stephen A. Douglass, at Monmouth, who found the writ on which he was held illegal, and discharged the prisoner.

In the spring of 1842 an attempt was made to assassinate ex-Governor Boggs of Missouri, and as soon as he recovered from the injuries received, he charged Joseph Smith with being accessory before the fact to the attempted murder. Again the Prophet was arrested under a requisition from the Governor of Missouri, and again he obtained a writ of habeas corpus and went before the circuit court of the United States, Judge Pope of Springfield, Illinois, presiding. Elder Taylor and a few others accompanied him. The Prophet was anxious to have the case tried on its merits, but this Judge Pope held to be unnecessary as he was entitled to be discharged because of defects in the affidavit on which the demand for his surrender to Missouri was made.

As the state legislature at the time was in session, there were gathered in Springfield the principal men of the state; and as they were all anxious to learn something of "Mormonism," the Representatives' Hall was tendered the brethren for holding religious service, on Sunday, and Elder Taylor and Orson Hyde were appointed by the Prophet to preach, the latter in the forenoon, the former in the afternoon.

In all these vexatious prosecutions Elder Taylor stood very near the Prophet, and ably defended him through the editorial columns of the Times and Seasons and the Neighbor.

In the meantime the phenomenal growth of the Church, the prosperity of the Saints in Nauvoo, and the rapid progress of the city, while very gratifying to the founders of both Church and city, attracted to the body religious and municipal a class of men that were very undesirable. Adventurers seeking for place and power and wealth; demagogues who by fulsome flattery of the people hoped to attain through their political influence a realization of their ambitious dreams; knaves who by falsely professing conversion, thought to cover up corrupt, licentious lives, and thrive by villainy; thieves and counterfeiters who saw their opportunity to live by roguery, and steal on the credit of the Mormons, of whom the people of Illinois were too ready to believe anything that savored of evil, because prejudiced against their religion—all these characters were attracted to Nauvoo by the prosperity that reigned there; and their ungodly conduct hastened the evil day of the city's destruction.

Chief among these reckless adventurers was John C. Bennett, a man of learning and intellectual ability but a moral leper. He was guilty of the most infamous, licentious practices, and seduced several women by representing that promiscuous intercourse of the sexes was a doctrine believed in by the Latter-day Saints and that there was no harm in it. He also said that Joseph Smith and other Church leaders both sanctioned and practiced such wickedness; that Joseph only denounced such things in public so vehemently because of the prejudice of the people, and the trouble that might arise in his own house.

For this conduct he was excommunicated from the Church, compelled to resign the Mayorship of the city, expelled from the Masonic Lodge, chastised by the Legion, and his infamy published to the world and denounced.

This filled him with bitterness against the Saints, and especially against the Prophet. He at once set on foot measures that he hoped would bring him a terrible revenge. He succeeded in getting the Missourians to issue a new warrant for his arrest on the old charge of "theft, arson and murder," and a new requisition for his arrest was granted by Governor Ford, of Illinois.

The warrants were served on the Prophet in Lee County, some two hundred miles from Nauvoo. The officers who arrested him sought to drag him immediately into Missouri, but in this they failed, as Joseph through some friends obtained a writ of habeas corpus, and the legality of the warrant was enquired into by the municipal court of Nauvoo. The court also went behind the writ and tried the case exparte on its merits, and discharged the accused for want of subsistence in the warrant on which he was arrested, as well as upon the merits of the case.

Elder Taylor in an editorial in the Neighbor of July 5th 1843, thus deals with the course pursued by Missouri in these several instances of persecution against the Prophet:

"It has fallen to our lot of late years to keep an account of any remarkable circumstances that might transpire in and about this and adjoining states; as well as of distant provinces and nations. Among the many robberies, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, fires, mobs, wars, etc., which we have had to record, there is one circumstance of annual occurrence which it has always fallen to our lot to chronicle. We allude not to the yearly inundation of the Nile, nor the frequent eruptions of Vesuvius or Ætna, but to the boiling over of Tophet, alias the annual overflow of the excrescence of Missouri. Not indeed, like the Nile, over-flowing its parched banks, invigorating its alluvial soil and causing vegetation to teem forth in its richest attire; but like the sulphurous flame that burns unnoticed in the bowels of a volcano; kept alive by the combustion of its own native element, until it can contain itself no longer within the limits of its crater; it bursts beyond its natural bounds; spreads its sulphurous lava all around, leaving naught but desolation in its path,—destroying alike the cot of the husbandman, and the palace of the noble, in one grand sweep; covering vegetation with its fiery lava, and turning the garden into a bed of cinders. So Missouri has her annual ebulitions, and must belch forth her sulphurous lava and seek to overwhelm others; and as it happens that we are so unfortunate as to live near the borders of this monster, we must ever and anon, be smutted with the soot that flies off from her burning crater.

"Without entering here into the particulars of the bloody deeds, the high-handed oppression, the unconstitutional acts, the deadly and malicious hate, the numerous murders and the wholesale robberies of that people, we will proceed to notice one of the late acts of Missouri, or of the governor of that state, towards us. We allude to the late arrest of Joseph Smith."

Then follows an account of the arrests of the Prophet and the manner in which he was released from the officers as already briefly stated in this chapter; he dwells at some length on the events of the last arrest made near Dixon, detailing the cruelty and brutality of the officers. He then concludes:

"Why Governor Ford should lend his assistance in a vexatious prosecution of this kind we are at a loss to determine. He possesses a discretionary power in such cases, and has a right to use his judgment, as the chief magistrate of this state; and knowing, as he does, that the whole proceedings connected with this affair are illegal, we think that in justice he ought to have leaned to the side of the oppressed and innocent, particularly when the persecuted and prosecuted were citizens of his own state who had a right to his sympathies and to be shielded by his paternal care, as the father of this state. Does not his excellency know, and do not all the citizens of the state know, that the Mormons have been robbed, pillaged and plundered in Missouri without any redress? That the Mormons en masse were exterminated from that state without any legal pretext whatever? How, then, could they have any legal claim upon Joseph Smith or any Mormon? Have the Mormons ever obtained any redress for injuries received in Missouri? No. Is there any prospect of their receiving any remuneration for their loss, or redress for their grievances? No. When a demand was make upon the governor of Missouri, by Governor Carlin of this state for the persons who kidnapped several Mormons, were they given up by that state? No. Why then should our executive feel so tenacious in fulfilling all the nice punctillios of law, when the very state that is making these demands has robbed, murdered and exterminated by wholesale, without law, and is merely making use of it at present as a cat's paw to destroy the innocent and murder those that they have already persecuted nearly to the death.

"It is impossible that the State of Missouri should do justice with her coffers groaning with the spoils of the oppressed, and her hands yet reeking with the blood of the innocent. Shall she yet gorge her bloody maw with other victims? Shall Joseph Smith be given into her hands illegally? Never! No, never!! No, NEVER!!!"

He afterwards published in the Neighbor full details of this exparte trial with the affidavits of the several witnesses given in extenso. Those affidavits make up an indictment against the State of Missouri which brings the hot blush of shame to the cheek of every lover of his country's institutions. In their treatment of the Latter-day Saints the leading officials of Missouri were guilty not only of high-handed oppression, but of such high crimes and misdemeanors as would have hung them had they met the just penalty of their misdeeds. But as those who suffered were members of an unpopular Church, the atrocious and bloody deeds of that state were passed by and no one felt called upon to demand justice in behalf of the oppressed; and those powers that were appealed to for redress of grievances—the President and congress of the United States—claimed to have no power to interfere. Mobocracy had triumphed in Missouri, and there was no power in the government to call Missouri to an account for her wrong doing.

At the time of the Prophet's arrest at Dixon there was an exciting political campaign in progress in that part of Illinois where Nauvoo was located, for representative to congress, and also for county officers. Two parties were in the field, Whigs and Democrats; each anxious to obtain the Mormon vote. The Democrats accused the Whigs of being the instigators of this last arrest of Joseph Smith, at that particular juncture, that Governor Ford, a Democrat, might be compelled to issue a warrant for his arrest and thus influence the Saints against the Democrats; and in proof of this referred to the fact that John C. Bennett, at whose instance, doubtless, this last warrant for the arrest of the Prophet was gotten up in Missouri, was the special pet of what was called the "Whig junto" in Springfield; that a special session of the circuit court was called in Daviess County, Missouri, in order to have the warrant act at the proper juncture; that Cyrus Walker, the Whig candidate for Congress, was within six miles of Dixon when the Prophet was arrested; that he refused to act as council for him only on the condition that he pledged him his vote (that pledge Walker was pleased to consider as binding to his interest the entire Mormon vote); that on this pledge being given he cancelled all his appointments to speak in that part of the state and repaired to Nauvoo where the validity of the arrest and warrants on which it was made were investigated.

This charge the Whigs vehemently denied and in turn accused the Democrats with having made it to influence the Mormon vote in favor of themselves. Thus crimination and recrimination went on, and whichever party the people of Nauvoo voted for, they were sure to incur the wrath of the other.

The Prophet Joseph kept his pledge with Cyrus Walker and voted for him, but the Democratic ticket was overwhelmingly successful in Nauvoo, and in the county and district. As soon as the result was made known the disappointed candidates and their friends were enraged. They began plotting against the people of Nauvoo, and started an agitation that had for its object the expulsion of the Saints from the state. Public meetings were called and committees appointed to correspond with surrounding counties to ascertain how much assistance they would render in expelling the Mormons from the state.

No effort whatever was made to conceal their intentions. The banishment of the citizens of Nauvoo from the state was openly discussed and advocated in public meetings and through the press. Bitter fruit, this, to be found growing on the tree of liberty, in the land of the free—in the asylum for the oppressed of all nations!