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The Mormon War
New York Times
19 November 1857
The "Mormon question" can no longer be relegated to a secondary rank among the political difficulties of the day. The preposterous theology of the late Joseph Smith, and the ungrammatical exercitations of the living Brigham Young, have taken a positive place in the domain of fact, and demand a hearing at the muzzle of the rifle and at the point of the bayonet.
On the 15th of September, Brigham Young, claiming to represent the sovereign authority of the Union, but acting in the spirit and assuming the tone of an independent monarch, addressed a letter to the commander of a body of American troops marching under orders from the President of the United States.
In that letter he forbids the further advance of these troops into the Territory of Utah, and presumes to prescribe the conditions under which alone he will permit them to occupy a particular post within the dominions of the United States, then held by them as a temporary encampment.
These conditions are such as might have been dictated to an invading army by the Executive of the Territory invaded, involving a surrender of American arms to an officer appointed by himself, and an explicit humiliation of the General Government before a power which neither the laws nor the customs of the United States can recognize.
It would be the height of fatuous absurdity for the people or the press of this country to overlook or to ignore the gravity of this proceeding. It amounts in substance, and indeed in form, to a proclamation of rebellion, and to a declaration of war against the constituted forces of National authority.
The reply of the officer who received this extraordinary communication indicates his sense of its importance. It also implies a sense on his part of the inadequacy of his actual force to answer the defiance of the Mormon leader as it should be answered, and we are not surprised to learn that the receipt of this correspondence has provoked a great deal of anxiety at Washington, and has been followed by a Cabinet meeting summoned for consultation upon a case unprecedented indeed in our history, yet not unexpected by those who have watched attentively the growth, and have examined seriously the conditions, of the points at issue between the American nation on the one side and the Mohammed of Salt Lake on the other.
Mormonism in Utah is no longer a contemptible delusion. It has swelled from the proportions of a pitiful sect into those of an organized people, isolated from the rest of mankind by their institutions as well as by their pretensions, and formidable from their position as well as from their character. It becomes the Administration of this country to take serious thought for the future as well as for the present, of its relations with this people, and to prepare itself for something more than an eccentric assertion of its prerogatives, impugned in the most circumstantial manner by the Prophet, Priest and King of Deseret.
The phenomena of Mormonism in its earliest development were simple and intelligible enough. When Joseph Smith made his most important demonstrations on the 1st of June, 1830, he appeared merely in the light of a self-seeking impostor, appealing to recognized elements in the vulgar constitution. He touched the same chords in the common heart upon which all the mystics of modern times have played. The Fifth-Monarchy men of the English Rebellion, the Anabaptists of Germany, the Methodists of Holland and Switzerland, the Irvingites of Modern Britain, all sought their weapons where Joseph Smith found his. The vague sublimities of the Apocalypse and the declarations of hte Jewish prophets, the secular dread of a Millennial convulsion, the fierce aspirations of materialism, and the passionate theories of Socialism combined to furnish him as they have furnished so many others with arguments and, above all, with dithyrambic appeals calculated to interest, to excite and to attach the fancy and feelings of the uneducated many. Had Smith been a common man, or had he been succeeded in his primacy by a common man, the fortunes of Mormonism might never have attracted the attention of any but the students of psychology, or the annalists of fanaticism. But Smith was not a common man. His whole career from the time of his first audacious demands upon the credulity of his race, down to the day of his "martyrdom" at Nauvoo, proves that he was a much more far-sighted and enterprising leader than he has been usually supposed to be. It is impossible to read the narrative of the Mormon difficulties in the West, to trace the growth of the sect from the hour of its dispersion at Independence, in Missouri, during the Summer of 1832, to the hour of its exodus from Illinois, in the Autumn of 1846, without recognizing the presence of intelligence as well as the power of sectarian fanaticism in the progress of the "Church." Its believers grew, in these fourteen years, from hundreds to myriads, and this in the face of the hostility of both the authorities and the people of the Western States, and in spite of unremitting persecutions. Nor was Smith exempt from the dangers of rivalry. Rigdon, Maclellan, Booth, in 1833, and others throughout his life, disputed with him his supremacy. His successor, raised to power in the midst of similar obstacles, has exhibited a similar capacity for swaying the rude thousands submitted to his voice.
With a history behind them—a history of nearly thirty years of trial and suffering, cemented together by Hegiras, and by Autos da Fe, recruited by the superstituous energies of Northern Europe—the Mormons of Salt Lake are now a nation, rather than a religion. It is probable that no one people predominates among them. It is certain that they recognize no ties of allegiance, or of race, that can for a moment resist the strain of their "predestined future" upon their fanatical sympathies, and that their leader has all the instincts, fortified by all the experience, of an autocrat. By the sufferings of their prophets, by the wrongs of New-Zion, and the miseries of Nauvoo—by all their perils in the desert, and all their plans in the Great Valley—by the voices of their dead—and by the hopes of their living converts in many a foreign land, the Prophet of Utah can arouse his people to battle against their invaders. And above all, can he control them by that subtle influence of a new national pride, which, from the beginning, has been bred among them. They are the Israel of the land, and all the world beyond is a world of Gentiles, odious in the sight of Heaven. Whatever the American Constitution affirms of human equality and of religious toleration, the creed of Mormonism denies, and now this "chosen people" stand buttressed by the mountains, and flanked by the desolation of the untilled central wastes, commanding the communications between California and the North, between Mexico and the Union, in a position which invites the ambition of a chief, as unscrupulous as bold.
Brigham Young knows, what all who have studied the story of Mormonism know, that he and his have absolutely no choice, but either to acquiesce in the movement of the Union, and so become an insignificant sect among sects, or to resist the Government of the Union, and aspire to the chance of a formidable independence. He has selected the latter alternative.
What will the fruits of it to himself and his followers be?
At the first blush one would say, "Utter annihilation!" Nor do we doubt that such must be the final consummation of a positive Mormon war. But there are many things to be done and borne before this consummation can be reached. The Mormons are very strongly entrenched in their continental Palestine. Their riflemen won a reputation in the Mexican War which deserves consideration when we reflect upon their numbers. And when we consider in addition to these things the fact that from the beginning Mormonism has professed itself to the Indian to be of Indian origin, and has glorified the aboriginal races of the Continent, we may be sure that the letter of Brigham Young to Colonel Alexander, is but the beginning of the end.
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