I was asked to give a talk about the ways that the Constitution aided the Restoration. With only the addition of more quotes to flesh out events and ideas discussed, this is otherwise the talk that I delivered.
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Brothers and Sisters, as happy and honored as I am to be speaking before you today, I must admit that I do it with some difficulty. The topic given to me – to speak on how the Constitution aided the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ – is a difficult one. Perhaps because I am a student of history, my solution to determining how influential the Constitution has been on the Restoration is to study our history from 1830 to 1890 (when the church began to end plural marriage) and see where the influence of the Constitution has been most felt and what exactly that influence has been.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in Fayette, New York on April 6th, 1830. Less than a year later the membership of the church was forced to flee for their lives, selling their property for almost nothing if not abandoning it altogether, escaping to Kirtland, Ohio in 1831. To illustrate just how dire this situation was, remember that the Prophet and his pregnant wife Emma arrived in Kirtland homeless in the winter with nothing but the few personal possessions they could fit on a sleigh and were only saved from living on the streets by the kindness of Newel K. and Elizabeth Whitney, who allowed the prophet and his family to live with them. As devastating as this was though, it didn’t even hold a candle to what would soon happen in Missouri.
In 1833, just two years after being forced from New York, members in Missouri were driven from their homes and businesses in Jackson County. And not by an armed mob, as it is often described, but by an armed and organized company of Missourians who acted purposefully and methodically to destroy Latter-day Saint homes and businesses, threatening to murder them if they stayed. The Missourians did not like that the Saints lived and worked together, that the Saints testified of modern revelation, or that the Saints were Northerners and they (and their scriptures) dared to say that slavery was wrong in a slave state. The first wave of refugee Saints after the expulsion from Jackson County settled in Clay County, Missouri. Then the Missouri government formed Caldwell County as a kind of “Mormon reservation.” (pgs. 113-114) While they could leave the county for travel, no group of Saints was allowed to live anywhere else in Missouri except Caldwell County.
When the Saints dared to exercise their natural rights to buy and sell property wherever they chose, to live peacefully on property they owned, the organized militias of Missouri began to attack the Saints all over the state, more brutally and vicious than ever before. On September 22, 1838, the Saints living in DeWitt, Missouri sent a petition to Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs, begging for his protection because the Missourians there had ordered the Saints to leave in ten days or the Missourians would “exterminate [the Saints], without regard to age or sex.” In other words, they would murder men, women, and children, even babies, indiscriminately. (Page 101) And how did the Governor respond? A month later, on Oct. 27, he issued the infamous Extermination Order, commanding the militias of Missouri to treat the Saints “as enemies,” and ordering that we “must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”
Yes, the governor responded to a threat of mass murder by ordering genocide be carried out against the victims. And exterminate the Missourians did. Men were murdered, children slaughtered (pgs. 116-132) women gang raped as their homes burned. Hyrum Smith later wrote about his imprisonment:
The same men sat as a jury in the daytime and were placed over us as a guard in the nighttime. They tantalized us and boasted of their great achievements at Haun’s Mill and at other places, telling us how many houses they had burned, and how many sheep, cattle, and hogs they had driven off belonging to the ‘Mormons,’ and how many rapes they had committed, and what kicking and squealing there was . . . , saying that they lashed one woman upon one of the d–d ‘Mormon’ meeting benches, tying her hands and her feet fast, and sixteen of them abused her as much as they had a mind to, and then left her bound and exposed in that distressed condition. These fiends of the lower regions boasted of these acts of barbarity and tantalized our feelings with them for ten days. We had heard of these acts of cruelty previous to this time, but we were slow to believe that such acts had been perpetrated. The lady who was the subject of this brutality did not recover her health to be able to help herself for more than three months afterwards.
History of Joseph Smith by his Mother, pg. 245 original, pg. 258 PDF edition
On this topic, Parley P. Pratt, an Apostle imprisoned with Joseph and Hyrum in Missouri wrote:
They [the Missourians keeping watch over him in prison] related the circumstance in detail of having, the previous day, disarmed a certain man in his own house, and took him prisoner, and afterwards beat out his brains with his own gun, in presence of their officers. They told of other individuals lying here and there in the brush, whom they had shot down without resistance, and who were lying unburied for the hogs to feed upon.
They also named one or two individual females of our society, whom they had forcibly bound, and twenty or thirty of them, one after another, committed rape upon them. One of these females was a daughter of a respectable family with whom I have been long acquainted, and with whom I have since conversed and learned that it was truly the case. Delicacy at present forbids my mentioning the names.
Parley P. Pratt Sworn Affidavit
Later, in a personal letter, Pratt elaborated on his experience:
On one of those tedious nights we had lain as if in sleep, till the hour of midnight has passed, and our ears and hearts had been pained, while we had listened for hours to the obscene jests, the horrid oaths, the dreadful blasphemies, and filthy language of our guards, Col. Price at their head, as they recounted to each other their deeds of rapine, murder, robbery, etc., which they had committed among the “Mormons,” while at Far West, and vicinity. They even boasted of defiling by force, wives, daughters, and virgins, and of shooting or dashing out the brains of men, women, and children.
Parley P. Pratt Letter
It seems likely that Eliza R. Snow, perhaps the greatest Latter-day Saint woman of her generation, was gang raped so violently that it rendered her infertile.
In the face of such brutality, such evil, such damning deviltry, once more the Saints had to flee for survival. This time to Illinois where it would ultimately be no better. There, the Saints petitioned US President Martin Van Buren of the Democrats and former President and then Congressman John Quincy Adams for aid from the Federal government in obtaining justice for the monstrosities done to the Saints. As Adam noted in his journal, he doubted Congress had the constitutional authority to intervene and Van Buren likely thought the same for the Presidency when he told the Prophet, “What can I do? I can do nothing for you.”
We had but a mere few years in Illinois before apostates like William Law were forming secret organizations dedicated to the, “the destruction of Joseph Smith and his party,” (pg. 255) and men like Thomas Sharpe, editor of the Warsaw Signal newspaper, were demanding the slaughter of the Saints once more. On June 11, 1844, Sharpe wrote:
War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and ALL! …We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER AND BALL!!!
On June 27, 1844, while in police custody under a false accusation of treason, the Patriarch Hyrum was shot in the throat at near point-blank range by a .69 claimer musket round. The bullet travelled into his skull. To those of you who understand firearms and bullet calibers, I leave to your informed imaginations the thought of what this would’ve done to his body. His last words were, “I am a dead man!” And so, he was. The Prophet Joseph was shot in the back. After he went through the second story window of the room he was in, landing headfirst on the ground, he was dragged against a nearby well and shot again at point blank range. His last words as he fell were, “O’ Lord, my God!” One eyewitness account of the murder suggests that the murderers were preparing to cut off his head before they fled at the shout of, “The Mormons are coming!” John Taylor, wounded multiple time in the events, only survived by the immediate aid of Willard Richards.
Every single person indicted for the assassination of the Prophet and Patriarch was found not guilty. (pgs. 185-186)
Though Illinois Governor Thomas Ford had never issued an extermination order, he nevertheless tacitly approved of everything that happened on that horrific June day and everything that came after. Ford, had promised Joseph protection for him and his brother in prison. Then he left them alone in the hands of the Carthage Grays, the very militia that had vowed to murder them. He didn’t protect the innocent in his charge. Like Pilate, Ford delivered them up to the very people who wanted their blood. When militiamen began attacking and burning down Latter-day Saint homes outside of Nauvoo, Ford refused to do his job and protect the Saints. This refusal enabled the bigots to drive us out once more. Again the Saints had to flee, this time in 1847 and to the frozen wastes of Winter Quarters in Iowa. Not as the “pioneer vanguard of the nation,” but as refugees trying to escape mass murder and genocide carried out with the tacit allowance (and in some cases approval) of the government itself. Disease and starvation ravaged the Saints as many of them were forced to live in nothing more than holes in the ground with worn blankets hanging in the door to keep out the bitter cold.
Once we had worked and starved and nearly died to found and build Salt Lake City, you might think we would be left alone. But you would be wrong. Driving us from the nation hadn’t been enough. Trapping us in the illegal and unconstitutional territory system so that the Federal government could exercise more direct control over us hadn’t been enough. In 1857, President James Buchanan sent an army to invade Utah and to use force to put down the much rumored but completely nonexistent “Mormon rebellion.” Pushed against the wall, Brigham had over 30,000 Saints in northern Utah flee to southern Utah and was ready to burn Salt Lake City to the ground if need be. He remembered what Missouri and Illinois had been like and he was not going to subject the Saints to such Hell again. If the invaders wanted to take our property for a fifth time, then all they would get would be charred ruins and empty desert. This was when Brigham buried the entire foundation for the Salt Lake Temple as shown in the 1993 LDS movie Mountain of the Lord.
Blessedly, these events ended in something of a tense peace as the army moved through Salt Lake City and settled in Camp Floyd down south of Provo. This was a disappointment to Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding officer of the American army sent to occupy Utah, who remarked that he would have gave “his plantation for a chance to bombard [Salt Lake City] for fifteen minutes.” (pg. 122) His second, Lt. Col. Charles Ferguson Smith stated that “he did not care a damn who heard him, he would like to see every damned Mormon hung by the neck.” (MacKinnon) You see, these people really wanted to kill us and though we got a slight reprieve from their hatred during the Civil War and Reocnstruction, it did not go away. The Republican Party, was founded in 1856 with the stated intention of eliminating the “twin relics of barbarism–Polygamy, and Slavery.” In other words, to eliminate the Latter-day Saints. And once Union armies had conquered and occupied the South the Republicans in charge turned their attention to trying to destroy us.
The first anti-Mormon, anti-polygamy bill was the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act of 1862. The law made polygamy a federal crime and restricted church ownership of property in the territories to $50,000 as a way to legally prevent its growth. This proved extremely difficult to enforce because LDS women defended polygamy as both a religious right and a social and legal good for them. To the shock of most Americans who thought LDS women nothing more than slaves to the Mormon patriarchy, Latter-day Saint women refused to give evidence or testify against their husbands and even went to jail in defiance of the court rather than help imprison their husbands.
In 1875, George Reynolds, then secretary to the First Presidency, agreed to be the test case for the Morrill Act, to see if the Supreme Court would uphold the law or strike it down as being unconstitutional for violating the First Amendment. In its decision, the court entirely discounted the Constitution, warped the language of Thomas Jefferson, equated polygamy to human sacrifice, and used outright racist logic (polygamy was something Africans and “Asiatics” did, not good White Christian people) to justify upholding the Morrill Act, casting Reynolds into prison, and completely abrogating Reynolds’ natural right to his nonviolent religious practices. It also asserted that the Federal government has a general power to regulate marriage despite no such authority being in the Constitution simply because that’s supposedly what governments do.
This combined with the continued defiance of the law by the Saints resulted in even stricter crackdowns. First was the Edmunds Act of 1882 which made it illegal for men and women to merely live in the same house together, eliminating the need to get testimonies from unwilling wives, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1890, which stripped women of the right to vote, disincorporated the church, began actively seizing church properties, replaced local judges with Federal judges, began requiring civil marriage licenses which hadn’t been used before, and punished those found guilty with a fine of up to $800 (the equivalent of a $24,810.18 fine today), and five years in prison.
Thousands of church leaders went to prison in the decades long civil disobedience campaign the church waged between 1862 and 1890. One of my favorite pictures of this era is of Apostle George Q. Cannon, First Counselor in the First Presidency, in prison surrounded by other prisoners holding a bouquet of flowers given to him by visitors. He kept practicing plural marriage even though it was illegal. President John Taylor died in hiding, on the run from Federal agents because he would neither renounce nor stop practicing something commanded by God. He followed the direction given by Jesus Christ in D&C 98:4 which commanded that men follow the laws of God first and foremost and then obey the laws that are constitutional. And, as President Taylor had taught in 1884, the people were only bound to obey truly constitutional laws. All else were null and void because they broke the contract between the people and the government. For President Taylor, it was, in his own words, “The Kingdom of God or nothing!” And he proved it with his last breath.
After the recounting of all this history of our people, the history of the restoration, I have but a single question to ask.
When so many of us were hunted, imprisoned, and killed, when the local, state, and federal governments did their best to destroy the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ, when every human right the Saints possessed was being violated, where then was the Constitution ?
Our history tells us.
Either it could do nothing for us, or it actually empowered and protected those who hated us in their unceasing efforts to annihilate us. Some of this was because of how the Constitution was intentionally designed. In an era before the Fourteenth Amendment, both Adams and Van Buren were absolutely correct when they doubted their authority to help the Saints. The Constitution restricted the Federal government, not the States. But the problem is deeper than that. As I survey our history, it seems to me that every time the Constitution could’ve come to our aid, should’ve come to our aid, it did not.
The presence of the Constitution did not protect the rights of the Saints to religious freedom. The presence of the Constitution did not prevent the murder of the Prophet, his brother Hyrum, or countless other Saints for their faith. The presence of the Constitution did not save our people from being driven into the wilderness to die. Think of where I am speaking from and why I am speaking from here. The church did not move to Utah just because Brigham Young thought the change of scenery would be nice. And once here, the Constitution did not prevent the Federal government form trying to crush us. From the evidence of our history, I find it an inevitable conclusion that the Constitution did nothing to aid the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, in every instance of our history, the Constitution either enabled those who terrorized and brutalized us to do or it actively created and empowered the government agencies oppressing us to be able to do so.
I used to say that one of the proofs that the United States Constitution had aided in the Restoration was that if Joseph Smith had been born just a few centuries before in Europe he would’ve been burned at the stake. That he was not in America, I argued, was proof of the power of the Constitution to protect religious freedoms. But I can no longer make this argument. It is true that the Prophet was not burned at the stake as was Abinadi, but only because burning people at the stake has never been popular in America. That doesn’t mean that the Prophet wasn’t martyred, murdered, for daring to challenge the religious and social status quo. Because he was. He was killed in the United States for religious heresy as surely as he would have been in Medieval Europe. We often miss it because we think of people being burned at the stake for heresy while the Prophet was killed for heresy in the most American way of all. He and his brother Hyrum were shot to death.
Does this mean that there is no value in the Constitution? Not in the least! The US Constitution is a step forward on the path of liberty from the monarchies of Eld Europa, the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century, and the social discord and discontent of today. But, just because it would be a step upwards from the problems of yesterday and today does not mean that its value isn’t extremely limited. Ultimately, our own history, and the oppressions we faced at every turn, proves the truth of the words of the great 19th century abolitionist Lysander Spooner:
Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
NO TREASON. No. VI. The Constitution of No Authority. pg. 59
The failures of the Constitution to aid the Restoration in any significant manner doesn’t mean that there weren’t cultural factors in early America that made the Restoration more possible there than in other places. It is in those factors that I think the greatest aid to the Restoration lie. But I wasn’t asked to give a talk on Jeffersonianism, or Lockean social contract theory, or Classical Liberalism and the Restoration. Or even the ways in which the Constitution was inspired. I was asked to give a talk on the ways that the Constitution aided the Restoration.
On that subject, our history proves that without a culture that understands the fundamental obligation of liberty for all people, the importance of toleration for even those we despise, the necessity of limited government, and a recognition of the eternal value of the individual, then it doesn’t matter what words you write on a piece of paper. They will only ever be words on paper unless the ideas from which those words spring matter to the individuals that make up “the people.”
Indeed, I am convinced that when we talk about the Constitution aiding the Restoration we get the cause and effect chain reversed. Politics is downstream of culture and until you have a culture that values individual human liberty it won’t matter what you write or say. Liberty will always be under threat by what people do and those who are the weakest, as we were, as we are, will always be in the most danger. Therefore, if you want to prove there was something about early America that made it more possible for the Restoration to occur here than anywhere else, you must start with the culture that produced the Constitution as a byproduct of what the people within the culture already valued.
With my closing words, I want to focus us in on the Savior. How is it that the powers of Earth and Hell were arraigned against us, and we survived? How is it that wicked people in high places ruled over us with blood and horror and we managed to prosper? How is it that we, most hated by so many, are not merely still alive and kicking but growing and becoming? In short:
How.
Are.
We.
Still.
Here?
It is not because of any law. It is because of the Savior. As Elisha’s servant learned long ago when his eyes were opened, they that be with us will always be more than they that be with them. As Isaiah learned from Jehovah, “No weapon that is formed against us shall prosper,” and everyone who speaks against us shall find condemnation from God. (Isaiah 54:17) In these latter-days the Savior has said, “Fear not to do good, my sons [and I would add daughters], for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap; therefore, if ye sow good ye shall also reap good for your reward.” (D&C 6:34) And modern Apostles, such as Elder Dallin H. Oaks and Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, have promised us that when we trust in God then He shall fight our battles and protect us with His power. As the Lord Jesus Christ told Abram over 3,000 years ago, “I am thy shield.” (Genesis 15:1)
They could not stop us then and cannot stop us now because God is on our side and will preserve and prosper us when we do His work. They who keep His commandments shall prosper in the land while those do not will wither away under the heat of His judgements. As the Prophet Joseph taught in 1842:
The Standard of Truth has been erected.
No unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing.
Persecutions may rage.
Mobs may combine.
Armies may assemble.
Calumny may defame.
But the Truth of God will go forth
Boldly,
Nobly
and
Independent.
Till it has penetrated every continent
Visited every clime
Swept every country
And sounded in every ear.
Till the purposes of God shall be accomplished
And the Great Jehovah shall say,
“The work is done.”
That is why we are still here, Brothers and Sisters. Because we are on the Lord’s errand and doing the Lord’s work. The Great Jehovah has given us a great work to do. And there is still so much of it to be done. Let us go then forth boldly, knowing that when God is with us, then none can stand against us. Their hatred and their evil will never be able to stop this work because we have the God of Creation as our buckler and shield. “As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from,” accomplish His work through us, His Saints. (D&C 121:33) To this our history of survival and prosperity against all odds testifies.
And to this I also testify in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.