A STATE'S SHAME.

This brings me to the close of the story of the Missouri Persecutions. We have seen a people start out under the direction of the Lord to build up the City of Zion to his holy name; but because of their disobedience and failure to observe strictly those conditions upon which the Lord had promised them success in accomplishing so great a work, they were driven entirely from that county and state where that city is to be founded.

We have seen a proud, sovereign state of the great American Union, with a constitution that guaranteed the largest possible religious and civil liberty to its citizens, ignore both the spirit and letter of that constitution. We have seen its officers shamefully violate the laws passed in pursuance of it; and from the chief executive down enter into plots to destroy the saints of God, or drive them from the State; in accomplishing which, they were guilty of the most cruel barbarity. It is no palliation of their offense to say that the saints had not strictly kept the commandments of God. Their offenses were against the laws of God rather than the laws of man; delinquencies that fell not under the power of the State to correct. So far as the State of Missouri was concerned, she was not justified in trampling on her own constitution and laws, and permitting not only her people but the officers of the State to commit outrages against an innocent people that would put savages to the blush of shame.

I impeach the State of Missouri before the Bar of Nineteenth Century Civilization; and affirm that in the five years between 1833 and 1838, she permitted and became a party to acts of robbery, violence and blood which are a disgrace to the age and its boasted spirit of progress and toleration. I charge that Missouri was guilty of crimes the perpetration of which forbids the claim that in the United States of America, and in this enlightened century, there has been an abandonment of the barbarities of past ages.

Before the great Bar of History, I impeach the State of Missouri. In the years from 1833 to 1838 there were committed within her borders and against an unoffending, and law-abiding people, acts of shameful robbery, arson, mob-violence; willful, wanton slaughter of men, women and children; worst of all, rape upon virtuous wives and maidens; and, at the last, illegal banishment of some twelve thousand people from the State. For these crimes, repeatedly committed and numerous, no offender was ever brought to punishment by the State. On the contrary the machinery of its government was employed and its officers exerted themselves to further oppress the innocent sufferers; so that instead of being a means for their protection, the government was made an engine for their oppression; and its legislature turning a deaf ear to the story of their wrongs, made liberal appropriations from the State treasury to defray the expenses of those who committed the outrages against them and drove them from the State.

I impeach the State of Missouri before the Bar of American Constitutions and Institutions; and charge that in the crimes permitted and by her officers perpetrated against the Latter-day Saints in the five years between 1833 and 1838, she both deserted and violated the principles of government upon which the State is founded. By failing—nay, worse, by refusing at first to protect by the majesty and righteous execution of her laws, and next by becoming an assailant and robber of the unoffending Latter-day Saints, she denied to them and deprived them of the right to property, the right to pursue happiness, the right to be free the right to worship God after the dictates of their own consciences. And by denying to them and depriving them of these rights, Missouri violated the fundamental principles of American government, and outraged American institutions.

Lastly, I charge Missouri's historians, both those who have written the history of the counties in which the outrages I have detailed occurred, as well as the historians of the State at large, with having glazed over these deeds of infamy. They have either withheld or misrepresented the facts, and have descended so low as to become apologists for the State and the officers that could perpetrate and become a party to such acts of injustice, rapine and murder.

The statements of fact in these pages are irrefutable and easy of verification. They can neither be successfully denied, gainsaid, nor explained away; nor can the impeachment of the State of Missouri before the Bar of History, Civilization or of American Institutions. The otherwise grand State of Missouri is stained with dishonor; because of her treatment of the Latter-day Saints on her escutcheon is to be seen the blotch of innocent blood unavenged.

In undertaking the task of writing this history, the one thought above all others in my mind has been the desire to present to the youth of the Latter-day Saints, many of whose fathers passed through these trying scenes, with a circumstantial account of them that they might know how much was endured by their fathers for the truth's sake; that they might learn to prize it, not only for what it is in itself, but also to prize it to some degree for what it cost the fathers. But at the close of my task I find myself convinced that it is equally important that the people of Missouri and of the United States should have the plain facts presented to them, that they may not unwittingly, as the general tendency now is, become in a manner parties to the crime by approving what was done in that period, and thus fall under the displeasure of God, whose words are equally strong against those who shed the blood of the saints and the prophets, and those who applaud such crimes.