Defending the Saints and the Retribution of History

When I took my seat at the beginning of this conference and faced the people, I asked myself the question : What will our brethren say to these people during the conference ? Then I remembered a line in one of our familiar hymns : "What more can we say than to you we have said;" and I confess that I was not able to think of anything at that time that might be regarded as of special interest to this conference, that could be discussed. The conference, however, had not proceeded very far — only a few of the brethren had addressed the meetings— when another thought occurred to me, and that was : How shall we find the time to consider all the subjects of interest that have been brought before the people and suggested by the remarks of the brethren ? I confess now, my brethren and sisters, that I think many very important and weighty matters will have to be passed with only a mere allusion to them by the speakers in this conference — subjects that it would be profitable for us to consider, if we could only devote the time to such consideration. ¶

I was especially interested in the remarks of my brother and friend, Elder Orson F. Whitney ; and while correcting misrepresentation and calling attention to those who, either wittingly or unwittingly, malign our people, is not always a pleasant task, yet occasionally it is necessary in order that the annals of the times may be correctly written ; and that there may be less opportunity for villains to falsify history. Therefore I rejoiced in his defense of our people ; and as I followed him in his defense of the people, I wished in my heart that our defense was always as well conducted, for you remember he not only spoke of those who had misrepresented the people, but he gave a meed of praise to those who had spoken truly of us, or had refrained from joining in misrepresentation of the people of God. I rejoiced in his praise of such honorable men; and to the names of Bishop Tuttle and Bishop Leonard, whom he mentioned, I want to add one other name, the name of a most honorable man. In the year 1903 a representative of the Newark (New Jersey) News, being in our midst, called upon the Right Reverend Lawrence Scanlan, the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Utah and Nevada, and in reporting what took place, the representative of the News said : ¶

"That veteran old priest, Bishop Scanlan, who has charge of all Utah and the eastern half of Nevada, for the Catholic Church, has visited every remote corner of Utah, during 30 years he has been here. He said : 'I have found the 'Mormon' people a gentle and kindly disposed people. I have never been insulted once. I have been obliged to visit places where there are no hotels, and wherever I have stopped at private houses the people have always felt offended if I offered to pay them for the keep of myself and my horse.' Have you ever felt the need of a revolver?' I asked. 'I never owned one in my life.' Pointing up to the crucifix, the Bishop said, 'That is the only weapon I have ever carried.' The Catholic Church has ten thousand communicants in Utah at the present time ; I do not see your name, Bishop, on protests and other papers that some of the ministers here are active in circulating.' 'No,' he replied, 'I never join in anything of that kind. My mission here is not to make war among the 'Mormon' people or any other people, but rather to be the bearer of the message of peace and good will toward all men. If there is any law to be enforced, I leave that for my government to do.' " ¶

It is a pleasure to speak of honorable Christian conduct wherever we find it. I am unacquainted with Bishop Scanlan, personally, although I have exchanged some letters with him and received some courtesies from him in the way of contribution of articles to our Young Men's Magazine. I am aware of the close friendship that existed between the Bishop and the late Elder Erastus Snow. That friendship should be an object lesson to all the people of our state, that it is possible, notwithstanding we hold different views from our fellow Christians, in relation to religion— it is nevertheless possible for honest and honorable men to dwell together as fellow citizens of our common country, without enmity or bitterness, one toward another. And I thought I would like to mention these matters concerning this honorable Catholic Bishop with whom, and, so far as I know, with whose congregation and people we live at peace, notwithstanding our views of religion are as opposite, perhaps, as it is possible for them to be. ¶

Following somewhat the course of Elder Whitney in the correction of misrepresentation, I read to you now a brief quotation from the Historical Magazine of July, 1906, containing an insinuation that I desire to correct. The author says : ¶

"The Saints, wherever located, have had trouble with their neighbors, being successively expelled from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. To the latter state they went in 1839, and were received with such open-armed hospitality as only a very generous and liberty-loving people can extend to those whom they honestly believe to be suffering from a wrongful oppression. The conduct of the Saints in five years turned this feeling of extraordinarily deep-seated sympathy, inducing great practical charities, into a feeling of very bitter hatred, threatening to break into mob violence." ¶

It has become quite common of late for articles to appear in the press, of this spirit, referring to the experiences of the Church in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, in justification of the warfare now waged upon the Church in this western land. In a recent article contributed to the Lewiston (Maine) Journal, reviewing some favorable comments in the Journal on the Mormon people and their religious system, the following passage occurred : ¶

"The Mormons have lived in five different states If their system is as pure morally and as patriotic as it is claimed to be, how does it happen that their sojourn in each of these states was characterized by continued and increased conflict with the established government and laws of these states and of the United States while the great Christian denominations live in peace and harmony under those same laws?" ¶

It is argued from the fact that the Latter-day Saints had difficulties in these states where the Church was formerly located, that it is evident that there was some misconduct on their part which warranted the cruelties practiced upon them, and which led to their expulsion from those states ; and that the same justification for opposition to the Church exists now as existed then. In the consideration of, and, as I hope, in the refutation of that idea, I am going to deal with a little history. I cannot, of course, cover the whole ground, and for very special reasons, which I trust will be apparent as I proceed, I am going to take the case of Missouri in her treatment of the Latter-day Saints. I am going to take the case of Missouri for the reason that the charges now made against the Church of Christ, of lawlessness, and of unAmericanism, were not then made, and could not have been made during the experiences of the Church in Missouri. It was impossible then for our opponents to make these charges, or to justify the aggressions practiced upon the Saints, under the plea of putting down a plural marriage system, or of the domination of the state by the Church; no complaints were made on either score. ¶

First, let me tell you the net results of the persecution of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri, so far as they can be told in a summary : There were killed outright of men, women and children, so far as careful estimates can be made, more than fifty souls. There were as many more wounded and beaten. How many perished by slow death, suffering untold agonies, by reason of exposure and cruelties, no one knows, nor can it be computed. More than 250 houses were burned or otherwise destroyed, and the families dwelling in them rendered homeless ; and though, in some instances, those homes were humble, it must, nevertheless, be remembered that they were all that the people had, and they were homes to them. There were between twelve and fifteen thousand people expelled from the state of Missouri, under circumstances entailing excruciating suffering, and in mid-winter they were driven across the Mississippi into the state of Illinois. These suffering people were dispossessed of land holdings of over 250,000 acres ; and the worst and most disgraceful of all, to those guilty of the deed, the chastity of women, by brutal force, was violated. This is merely a summary of that persecution. Now, what is it that is alleged as the justification of this cruelty — cruelty inflicted upon a people, be it remembered, not in a savage land, not in a remote age, but in the nineteenth century, under the guarantees of constitutional freedom to worship God, in the Great Republic of the new world? So far as may be gathered in brief, from the utterances of the mob, these people dared to believe that God had spoken from heaven, that angels had revisited the earth, that a volume of American scripture had been revealed and translated by the power of God; they dared to believe the blasphemy (and these are mob terms) that the sick could be healed by the laying on of hands ; and further, "they believed in all the wonder-working miracles of the ancient Christian religion." These phrases are not mine ; but they live in my memory, and are re-called from the confessions of the mob. The Saints were advised by General Clark at the fall of Far West, when about to be driven from the state and dispossessed of their lands, that they ought never more to gather together in communities, with Apostles and Prophets, with Bishops and High Councillors ; in other words, their belief in the ancient Christian Church organization was, in part, the rock of their offending. We may not dwell on these things, but that you may have before you the evidence that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had violated no law of the land, and was therefore not amenable to the law of the land, listen to this, from a mob document promulgated as a "secret constitution," making these complaints against our people, and seeking to justify their acts of violence toward them, expressing their intention to rid their society of our people, "peaceably if they could, forcibly if they must." It said : "The arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one, against the evils which are now inflicted upon us and seem to be increasing by said religious sect. The evil is one that no one could have foreseen and therefore is unprovided for by the laws ; and the delays incident to legislation would put the mischief beyond remedy." That is a frank, though perhaps unconscious, confession that there were no faults of our people that lay open to correction under the law. Now, let me say that I do not hold up to your view the idea that our people were without faults ; by no manner of means ; there was much of unwisdom in some of their utterances and some of their actions, much that was foolish and vain ; much that was the result of zeal without wisdom, some things, perhaps, that smack of fanaticism; I grant you that individuals were guilty of great unwisdom, but such offenses as our people were guilty of were offenses against the strict and high moral law and requirements of the Gospel, and not against the laws of the land, so that while the Saints were amenable to God, under those circumstances, they were not amenable to the state. They lived above the law of the state — in the sense that they kept the law, and therefore were not subject to the penalties of the law of man. Notwithstanding this, the foregoing cruelties— the sum of which I have mentioned— were practiced upon the Saints. ¶

Now, out of this Missouri experience I want to evolve, if I can, a lesson, both to the Latter-day Saints and, I trust also, sincerely trust, a lesson for those who oppose, in unrighteousness, and by violence, the work of the Lord. I shall draw you a parallel : The Missourians, between 1832 and 1839, complained loudly against our people, and as a reason for their unfriendship toward them and desire to be rid of them, stated that they were a people from the North, that they were of different manners and customs, and even different in the accent of their speech from the old settlers of Missouri ; but Missourians were taught to tolerate a people of different manners and customs, and learned to put up with the New England nasal twang of accent before they got through with it. The Missourians complained of the rapidity with which the Saints gathered into the state; but the Missourians learned to tolerate a greater and a more rapid influx of northern people into their state than was ever known during the sojourn of the Saints in their midst, before they were through with their experiences. The Missourians falsely charged that the coming of "Zion's camp" into their midst was practically an armed invasion of the State. "Zion's camp," let me explain, was a company of men less than 200 strong, who came with provisions and with agricultural implements, to the assistance and support of their brethren, who had been expelled from Jackson county under circumstances of great cruelty; and since the governor of the state had refused to establish a standing military force to maintain them in the possession of their homes when they should be reinstated in them by his official act, it was thought a good thing to strengthen the number of the people, that they might protect themselves, if the state would not protect them — and the state had refused to protect them. The coming then of "Zion's camp," I repeat, was called an armed invasion of the state. Well, Missouri, before she got through with it, learned what an armed invasion of the state meant. The Missouri compromise — I forget now the exact date of its occurrence — but the Missouri compromise was practically annulled — that compromise which forbade the introduction of slavery into the territory of the United States north of the southern boundary line of the state of Missouri— that compromise was practically annulled by legislation introduced into the national Congress by Stephen A. Douglass, by which the question of states being slave states or free states when admitted into the American Union, was to be left to the people when they should come to form the constitution for their states. This precipitated a struggle, as you will remember, for the possession of Kansas. New England emigration agencies and abolition parties undertook to make Kansas a free state, and hence sent great numbers of their emigrants into eastern Kansas, that faced the western counties of Missouri, where the Saints formerly made their homes. This resulted in one of the most cruel border wars (beginning about 1855) known to the history of the United States or to the history of the world. The jay-hawking parties on the one hand, the lawless ruffians who came from the north, and the bushwhacking parties on the other, overran those western counties of Missouri until anarchy prevailed and violence everywhere abounded, and that is what I mean when saying that Missouri came in contact with the men, and were compelled eventually to tolerate the men of different manners and customs and accent of language from their own. ¶

But to continue the parallel. Missouri falsely charged the Saints with being abolitionists, with tampering with their slaves, encouraging the incoming of "free people of color," ¶

which they claimed threatened their slave system of industry ; and for this reason they plotted against the Saints, and justified the outrages against them — because their institution of slave labor was menaced by the incoming of so-called abolitionists. I desire to say for the Latter-day Saints, and for the Prophet Joseph Smith especially, that they were very conservative upon the question of slavery. The Prophet Joseph approached that tremendous problem in the true spirit of statesmanship, and had the nation but had the wisdom to follow the counsel he gave it, with reference to that great issue, it is quite possible that there would have been no Civil War, with its sad history of destruction of treasure and life. More than twenty years before Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated the purchasing of the slaves of the south with the money received from the sale of the public lands, Joseph Smith was out before the people of the United States with that policy. The New England philosopher received all sorts of praise for his suggestion, and he was hailed as a great Christian philanthropist and humane statesman for the presentation of that policy to the country; but a celebrated writer, Josiah Quincy, calls attention to the attitude of the "Mormon" Prophet on this question in his book, "Figures of the Past," and in effect asks : If praise is due to the Christian philosopher for advancing this doctrine when war clouds were discernable in the sky (1855), what must be said of the "Mormon" Prophet who anticipated him by some eleven years, with the announcement of the same policy ? ¶

The exact language of Mr. Quincy is: "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 [the purchase of the slaves] would have been worthy a Christian statesman. But if the retired scholar [Emerson] was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I say of the political and religious leader [Joseph Smith] 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 discernable in the sky, was it not a statesman-like word eleven years earlier when the heavens looked tranquil and beneficent?" ¶

It was not true, I repeat, that the Saints were abolitionists, or that the Prophet Joseph was an abolitionist, in the sense of the term applied to those early New England agitators of that question. But Missouri finally found agitators of that question within her own borders and in the nation who kept up the agitation until Missouri lost 115,000 of her slaves, representing, in property to her people, upwards of forty millions of dollars. ¶

In the midst of their distress the Saints in Jackson county called upon Governor Dunklin to establish military protection for the people until it was certain that the civil law would be respected; but the governor claimed that there was no constitutional warrant which authorized him to do such a thing; but the people of western Missouri, who clamored against his doing such a thing in behalf of the "Mormons," in time found themselves under the necessity of asking for the same kind of protection against the border ruffians from Kansas ; and Governor Stewart, unlike Governor Dunklin, found his way to establish such military protection. Then something strange happened : When the Saints in Far West and at other point s took up arms in their own defense and declared that they would no longer yield without resistance to the violence of mobs, then this same mob clamored for military protection against the "Mormons," and it was given them ; and the leaders of the mob were converted into generals and colonels, and captains, and lieutenants, ad infinitum; I doubt if the race has died out yet — this race of titled officers. And thus the leaders of the mob became the commanders of the militia; and the militia was but a mob converted into the divisions and sub-divisions of an army. The Saints suffered immeasurable injustice from such an arrangement as that; because now to oppose this mob-militia was to oppose the constituted authority of the state; and their self-defense put the Saints in the attitude of resisting government. Well, western Missouri, in the course of her experience, had measured out to her a dose of that same kind of medicine ; for when the jayhawking parties of Kansas discovered that Missouri was likely to offer them successful armed resistance, they appealed to the general government ; and in response to that appeal the jay-hawking leaders were constituted generals, and colonels, and captains, and lieutenants, in the Regular Army of the United States; and their troops — the divisions and sub-divisions of their army — were those same jay-hawking parties who but a short time before had been a mob; and the people of Missouri were put in the attitude of contending against constituted authority; and that villain, General James H. Lane, and that equally great villain, General Jennison, perpetrated outrages which officers of the Regular Army of the United States, General Hallack among them, had the manhood and the courage and the humanity to denounce as the most savage kind of warfare, a disgrace to the uniform of United States soldiers ; and in this denunciation he was joined by Governor Charles Robinson, the Union governor of Kansas. ¶

Missouri falsely charged the Saints with illicit communication with the Indians, and feigned a fear that their state would be invaded by savages and their homes laid desolate. It was untrue, as the other charges against the Saints were untrue ; but Missouri learned what it was to realize the fulfilment of this false fear ; for the governor of the adjoining state, the state of Arkansas, authorized Albert Pike, during the Civil War, to enlist two regiments of Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, and with these (himself garmented as an Indian chief and painted in the war colors of the tribe, to please the Indians) Pike marched into the state of Missouri, and this force was employed at the battle of Pea Ridge. Before going into action, the Indians, it is said, were given liquor and made drunk, that to their savage nature there might be added this other adjunct of savagery; and the mutilation of the dead, the desolation and terror spread abroad by these savages brought about a realization of the false fears expressed by the people of Missouri on this subject, when falsely charging the Saints with illicit relations with the Indian tribes. ¶

Missourians, instead of enforcing the law for the protection of the Latter-day Saints in the state, gathered together in their public assemblies and expressed the fear that if the "Mormons" remained, the result must be civil war, and their homes would be laid desolate. The question was of a nature, they said, that no man could in such an event remain neutral; all must be participants on the one side or the other. They made this the ground of demanding that the Latter-day Saints remove, at least from one county into another, and always they held it out that the presence of the Saints was a menace of civil war. Well, as in the other cases of this parallel, Missouri learned what civil war was before she was through with it. You will remember that Missouri was a "cape of slavery" thrust up into free territory — that is, there were free states on the east and west, and the north of her, and she was assailed from every side throughout the Civil War. By an eight thousand majority her people determined that Missouri should not leave the Union; and she did not. But a very large number of her people — well, nearly half of them — sympathized with the South, and the struggle it was making for separation from the Union. This brought on a condition of affairs in Missouri that was most terrible. It made that state suffer more than any other state of the Union suffered; first, in this: that whereas the other states had four long years of civil war, Missouri had practically ten, when you take into account her border warfare, for she had five years of border war before the South seceded, and she had a number of years of civil war, or rather guerilla warfare within her borders, after the Civil War had closed; aye, and until the year 1881, the western counties of Missouri, where the Saints had dwelt, and from which they had been so unjustly expelled, were troubled with banditti, that made that section of Missouri a reproach to the state, and the state a reproach to the nation. During the Civil War Missouri furnished her quota of troops to the Union Army amounting in all to 109,000, including 8,000 of her former slaves. But through sympathy for the Confederacy, her people also furnished 30,000 troops for that cause, bringing up her quota of troops in the field to 139,000. The proportion of troops to population in the western and middle states amounted to 13.6 per cent of the population; in New England, to 12 per cent of the population, but Missouri sent into the field more than 14 per cent of her population — or something over 60 per cent of those in the state subject to the call for military duty. Of this number sent to the front in both armies, 27,000 perished in battle or from their wounds, or from disease. At one fell swoop forty millions of dollars in property to the people of Missouri was wiped out of existence by the emancipation of their slaves. Missouri gave seven millions of revenue to sustain her troops in the field. Four years after the war closed, some years of which were prosperous, it is disclosed by the official statistics, that the taxable property in Missouri, was $46,000,000 less than it was in 1860; and this was civil war! Pardon me, I am going to dwell a little longer on it, and I hope you will be interested. ¶

In the year 1864, Sterling Price, (the man who riveted the shackles upon the limbs of Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and Sidney Rigdon, in Richmond prison, Ray county, Missouri), at the head of twelve thousand men, entered the state of Missouri in the southeast borders of it, and cut a zigzag swath of destruction through the state, for a distance of more than fourteen hundred miles. During that time he fought 43 battles and skirmishes ; he destroyed more than ten millions of dollars in property, and chiefly among his own friends. His raid extended through the very counties formerly inhabited by the Saints, from thence he made his escape into the state of Kansas. In 1863, western Missouri having been a hot-bed of treason, rebellion, and guerilla warfare where southern sympathizers could recruit their horses and provisions, General Thomas Ewing, then in command at St. Louis, determined to break up these conditions, and hence issued his celebrated "Military Order No. 11," admitted to be one of the most drastic military orders ever issued in this or any other country, when you take into account the manner in which it was executed. It gave the people of named localities fifteen days to move from their homes, and designated the places to which they might go. The orders were most drastically executed. The scenes of suffering passed through by the Latter-day Saints in 1833 were enacted on a larger scale. Houses were burned, the furniture was stacked in the front yards and burned before the eyes of the owners ; old age was not respected ; men and women were shot down in cold blood. Everywhere desolation reigned, and the roads were thronged with the people escaping from the cruel execution of this order. It was from this incident that G. E. Bingham, the noted artist, painted from scenes enacted in Jackson county, Missouri, his celebrated painting, now in the Capitol at Washington, entitled "Civil War," which he "dedicated to the lovers of civil liberty." In that painting you may see the aged patriarch, the tender maiden, the black slave, the weeping matron, the startled children leaving the grand old mansion, of southern style, in flames, and everywhere the chimneys of neighboring houses standing as monuments of the abounding desolation. This brings to my remembrance a circumstance connected with the Prophet Joseph Smith and General Doniphan. General Doniphan was the friend of Joseph Smith; a friend who, on one occasion, nobly stood out against the execution of a mob-militia court-martial order — and some of those who took part in the court-martial, by the way, were ministers, or so-called ministers, of the Lord Jesus Christ. This courtmartial condemned the Prophet Joseph to be shot in the public square of Far West, in the presence of his people. On one occasion, when General Doniphan was in consultation with the Prophet, a Missourian came in to settle a bill with Doniphan, and offered in settlement of his bill some lands in Jackson county, and Doniphan told him he would think of it. Then the Prophet said to Doniphan : "Doniphan, I advise you not to take that Jackson county land in payment of thait debt ; God's wrath hangs over Jackson county ; God's people have been ruthlessly driven from it, and you will live to see the day when it will be visited by fire and sword; the Lord of Hosts will sweep it with the besom of destruction ; the fields and farms and houses will be destroyed, and only the chimneys will be left to mark the desolation." This was uttered in 1834. In 1863, L. M. Lawson, a man of standing in the commercial world, in the state of New York, a brother-in-law to General Doniphan, visited him. Those of you who are acquainted with Doniphan's history know that although he was a veteran soldier in the Mexican war, he took no part in the Civil War, only as a sorrowful spectator. With his brother-in-law, Mr. Lawson, he rode out into Jackson county, on the occasion of the visit above mentioned, and coming upon the crest of a hill, and seeing nothing but the chimneys of houses standing for miles around them, the monuments of once splendid homes, General Doniphan related the circumstance of the prophecy of Joseph Smith and said that he was much impressed by what the "Mormon" Prophet had told him. I dwell too long on this ; let me draw the conclusion. ¶

You who have followed me through this parallel, find in every false fear that was feigned by the Missourians, in consequence of our people living among them, you see it answered by a reality, a terrible reality, the very worst of all their false fears were realized, but not through the agency of the "Mormons." Every false charge made against the Saints of God came back home to the Missourians, the measure heaped up, pressed down, and running over. Can you doubt that there exists anything but the relation of cause and effect between these two things. This leads me to this reflection, and this is the lesson I want to bring home to you Latter-day Saints, namely: This Missouri experience gives us the assurance that God's eye is upon His people. You stand within the shadow of His all-protecting arm. You may not be assaulted without just cause, without serious consequence resulting to those guilty of the offense. The commandment is still in force: "Touch not Mine anointed ; do My prophets no harm ;" and though, in individual cases — and it is quite possible in national instances, too, sometimes— that we may not live to witness the judgment of God falling upon men or states guilty of injustice, still it is well that such judgment, swift and sure, should follow sometimes lest men should come to think that Justice sleepeth, or, what would be worse, that she does not exist at all. I accept, for one, this terrible experience of Missouri in the border wars and in the Civil War from 1855 to 1865, as her chastisement for the wrongs she inflicted upon the Saints of God. She sowed to the wind. Who will deny that she reaped the whirlwind ? I stood amid the glories of the Fair that celebrated the acquisition of the Louisiana purchase, held at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, and I saw Missouri honored, in that group of states, beyond all other states, for within her borders the Fair was held and there was gathered together the wealth and splendid achievements of our modern civilization. Day after day I walked in the midst of the "White City," and I recalled the fact that the government had appropriated forty millions of dollars to assist in this great exposition, of which Missouri was the chief beneficiary; and then I marveled why it should be so — that this state that had so stripped and wounded the people of God and sent them bleeding, literally, from her territory into exile. "Why is she so honored?" I asked myself a hundred times. It was in searching for the answer to that question that led me to the investigation of these facts in her history on which I have been dwelling; and that led me to believe that Missouri had paid, to the utmost farthing, so far as the state was concerned — what the accounting of individuals will be is not for me to say — but as a state, I believe that Missouri's chastisement cleansed her of that grave wrong-doing, and hence new-born honors begin coming to her. May she never again forfeit the favor of God, but chastened by those sad experiences, may that great commonwealth, in which stands the center place of Zion, be multiplied in blessings and peace. May she continue as she has begun, with open arms to welcome back the people she once expelled from her borders ; and if she will she shall, in the name of God, she shall, find favor and blessing, whereas before she found condemnation and chastisement. May the days of her peace continue and abide! May God bless Missouri, the center place of Zion. ¶

Now, I have pointed out to you the fact that you Latter-day Saints are beneath the protecting care of God; and O, what strength that gives! what comfort, what a consolation ! How brave it should make us ! How strong it should inspire us to be ! But it should not make us proud; rather it should make us humble ; it should make us full of mercy and gentleness and consideration for others — for the strong and the brave are ever gentle and generous — and feeling about us as we must the strength of God, these qualities of gentleness, generosity, and justice towards others should always characterize the Church of God, the Latter-day Saints. ¶

Just one more word : Let those who in their pride, bitterness of heart and wickedness of disposition, strike at this work, learn a lesson from Missouri ; for we are speaking of that which is, of the truth, and not of fallacies or chimeras; and so, in kindness, I bring to their attention this sad experience of Missouri, that it may warn them against the evil of their ways. I want to bear testimony to the truth of what my friend and brother, Elder Whitney, said the other day, that the misrepresentations that are fulminated here at our headquarters and scattered broadcast in the nation, stand in the relation of cause to effect, written in violence. I am a witness of the reality of that: I saw the mangled, bullet-torn bodies of men in Tennessee who were martyred, not so much by the hands of ignorant, dull backwoodsmen, but by those who fulminated the evil lie first published here in Salt Lake City, Utah, and which afterwards was peddled by so-called ministers of the gospel in Lewis county, Tenn., from house to house, until ignorant men in that locality were inflamed with passion, and doubtless some of them thought they were really doing God's service in murdering God's servants. I say that these poor, ignorant men who shot down our brethren in cold blood, stood in the relationship to those who fulminated the falsehood that lighted the flames of hatred in their hearts as the hand to the mind — the hand to the man in action. Nor is that the worst of it. The then governor of the territory of Utah, Eli H. Murray, must needs undertake to convert this murder into a means of accomplishing the end of the conspiracy that was then being hatched in Utah against the people of God. In a telegram to Governor Bate, since United States Senator Bate, he presumed to thank his excellency of Tennessee for offering a reward that Elder Golden Kimball, who is sitting here, and myself induced him to offer, by repeated petitions and persistence in the matter — I say the governor of Utah thanked the governor of Tennessee for trying to bring to justice those who had committed this crime, but he was extremely careful twice in his telegram to tell the governor that these men were but the "agents of organized crime," and told him also that so long as the Tennessee representatives in Congress refused their assent to legislation then pending before Congress these scenes would doubtless be repeated against the agents of "organized crime." Such acts as these in aid and abetment of crime are infamous ; and men who, by falsehood and its promulgation, enrage the ignorant and incite them to deeds of violence are the greater criminals. Individuals guilty of such acts will be held accountable for them, either now or in the world to come; and states and nations that participate in acts of injustice, as in the case of the state of Missouri in its conduct toward the Latter-day Saints, will meet some time and somewhere with just retribution. ¶

My brethren and sisters, the Gospel is true ; we have received a special dispensation of it. It is for us to be true and faithful to it, which I pray we may, in the name of Jesus. Amen. ¶