MORMON WIVES; A NARRATIVE OF FACTS STRANGER THAN FICTION.
BYMETTA VICTORIA FULLER.
"Here is light on the sea and land, And the dream deceives nevermore."NEW YORK: DERBY & JACKSON, 119 NASSAU STREET CINCINNATI: H. W. DERBY & CO.
1856.Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by DERBY & JACKSON, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court, for the Southern District of New York. STEREOTYPED BY THOMAS B. SMITH, 82 & 84 Beekman Street. PRINTED BY GEO. RUSSELL & CO., Beekman St.
INTRODUCTION.
THE following narrative tells its own sad tale; but will its moral sink deeply in the hearts of the people of this Union who are now called upon to admit Deseret into this brotherhood of States? The people of Utah, strengthened by numbers until the population now reaches upward of 77,000 inhabitants, have prepared their Constitution, and will, ere this work reaches the hands of the reader, have presented it to Congress, asking for admission as a State. Ere that admission is granted we conjure every man who has respect for humanity and for progress, to pause over this little record of one history, and then, multiplying it by tens of thousands, say if he can find it in his heart to fellowship with such a moral monster as Deseret now is, and will continue to be under the laws and Constitution which she has prescribed for herself.
A crisis has come in our affairs which it is as painful to contemplate as the slow march of a disease which threatens to desolate all households. Men are armed page: iv-v[View Page iv-v] against men—State legislates against State—violence obtrudes into our legislative halls, once sacred to the people's representatives—men are pronounced "incendiaries," "enemies of their kind," "traitors," and the physical force of the bayonet and cannon-ball has come to quell the first outbreak of passion. Like the baffled sea, the waves for a moment recede, only to come leaping with a more terrible force to the shore, then moan, and beat, and rage, until that barrier gives way, and the fair land is given up to the frightful deluge. It becomes citizens of America to pause before that rising storm, and to see if there be not oil for the troubled waters.
Under the principles of sovereignty embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, any Territory with a republican Constitution and a sufficient number of inhabitants, can come into this Union of States. The social and internal regulations of such State are to be ordered as the people, by popular vote, shall decree. Upon its face this seems a just enactment; but, looking beneath, to its eventual operation, we see that the principle is one dangerous to the stability and progress of the country, detrimental to the individual State and to the individuals of such State. For, under its operation, Utah is entitled to enjoy unmolested her polygamy and slavery; and thus the Constitution of the United States, which regards all men free and equal, fosters two as great wrongs as now disgrace the civilized world. We ask, as Americans, are we willing that such a construction should be placed upon that Constitution?
The institution of slavery in a free government is a paradox, and gives the lie to the professions the authors of this republic made, else have we shamefully perverted their gifts—which, it is not hard to say. Territory which they pledged to be FREE has been overshadowed by the darkness of African servitude—the political influence of such an institution has grown apace with each additional State adopting negro "property" as a basis of representation in Congress—and thus has the free government of our fathers become but free in form, to protect a tyranny such as no civilized nation on the face of this earth would tolerate. The responsibility of such a perversion rests with the degenerate sons of noble sires, and the future will not fail to fasten the record where it belongs.
This we say in no spirit of enmity to the South, nor of undue reproach to the North: it is from the love we bear to that blessed Constitution, earned by the blood of our fathers, and the tears and sufferings of our mothers; and we appeal to their children to stay their tongues long enough for thought and prayer; to stay the passion which governs them, to see if they are not in the wrong, in the advocacy, page: vi-vii[View Page vi-vii] directly, or indirectly through the "squatter sovereignty" principle, of what their better sense knows to be wrong, degrading, dangerous to happiness, fatal to all true progress and true liberty.
Repulsive as slavery appears to us, we can but deem polygamy a thing more loathsome and poisonous to social and political purity. Half-civilized States have ceased its practice as dangerous to happiness, and as outraging every instinct of the better nature within every breast; and as ages rolled away they left the institution behind as one of the relics of barbarism which marked the half-developed state of man as a social being. Its last remaining shadow now rests upon the Turk, and he, profiting by the example of his sultan, is gradually casting it aside, and soon will stand forth as a monogamist. And thus it bade fair to die out, and woman and society bade fair to come forth clad in a nobility of moral purity, which should, indeed, seem like the livery of heaven. Who could have prophesied that in republican America the lie should be given to that promise, and that the atrocity, protected by the strong arm of government, should become once more a power for evil?
The American people, absorbed in their grand schemes of physical development, are apt to shut their eyes to the moral aspects of their society. This moral apathy it is which has allowed the system of slavery to grow and expand until it is now fast becoming the controling element in the government; and this apathy it is which would allow the introduction of polygamy into American institutions to become one of the elements of our society. Who shall be to blame if that instrument of barbarism becomes linked to our country, protected by its army and navy, by its Constitution, by its moral force and sympathy? Let us not be deceived longer, but open our eyes to the serpent now asking to be warmed into life by our national hearth-stone; let us arise and say, "Away leper! cleanse thyself! and then come, and we will gladly receive thee into our household—will then gladly give thee equal share in our councils—then will protect thee as our fathers protected Bunker's Hill? Away with thee, and cleanse thyself!"
Reject Deseret, and we accomplish the first step in a reform which shall restore our country to its once proud purity, and give to it a new character for moral and intellectual grandeur. Under its laws we ought to be the best, the purest, the wisest, the bravest people on earth; and this we shall be are we but true to the first principles laid down by our Revolutionary fathers—the nobility of man. Whatever degrades him—whatever corrupts and injures his moral, intellectual, and physical well-being is inimical to the well-being of society, to the State, to the whole country page: viii-ix[View Page viii-ix] try; consequently, to the spirit and intent of that Constitution which is to perpetuate the republic, and render it, in truth, the refuge for the oppressed, the home of liberty. And, as citizens of this country, we owe it as a duty, not only to the Constitution, but to humanity, that we sternly oppose slavery in all its forms—intemperance and its hideous deformities, and polygamy with its train of evils which no man can truly conceive, but which surely will end in animalizing man, in corrupting the very founts of virtue and purity, and, finally, in barbarism. Reject Deseret, we say, as the first step in this great reform—refuse to her the sympathy and equality of the old and long-tried commonwealths—compel her to cast away her overshadowing sin, and then shall we have assurance that our hearts are still right, and hopes that our country will come out of the present threatening crisis purified, strengthened, full of life, and well-fitted to accomplish our mission of initiating the true republic.
——
We may be permitted to quote from the Philadelphia "North American and United States Gazette" the following, not only as "food for thought," but as embodying suggestions which will serve as a basis for action in the present contingency:
"Among a party of nine hundred Mormons, who recently left comfortable homes in England, to surrender themselves to the sway of Brigham Young and his hopeful associates, came two girls, whose transfer to the Utah land of abominations has very much the character of kidnapping. The story of their flight, as related in the English papers, is as follows: Their father was a man in middle life, well to do and industrious. His labors had placed his family, consisting of a wife and several children, in a state of decent competence and happiness. Satan came among them in the guise of a Mormon emissary, and beguiled the eldest son, who made a pilgrimage to the land of rogues. True to their instincts, the crafty elders of Salt Lake made Mormonism so delightful to the neophyte, and advanced him so rapidly in their fraternity, that he returned to England as a preacher of the delusion. The father, whose employment took him away from his family for periods of a week at a time, returned to the house one Saturday from a business excursion, to find it deserted. His whole family had disappeared, with whatever portables they could lay hands upon; and his wife had stolen his money to no inconsiderable amount—all that she could collect or pilfer. He traced the fugitives to Liverpool, and reached that place to discover that they had embarked, under the persuasions of his Mormon son, in page: x-xi[View Page x-xi] an emigrant ship, the Enoch Train. The distracted father chartered a steam-tug, and taking with him a police officer, overtook the vessel. After an infinite deal of persuasion, aided by the master of the ship, and opposed by the Mormon leaders, he succeeded in inducing his wife to go back with him. He also, as a matter of great favor, obtained the surrender of his infant children. But his two eldest daughters refused to return with their parents, and the heart-broken father went without them. Their fate, going thus unprotected to Utah, may well cause a shudder.
"A community thus replenished is maturing measures to apply for admission as one of the States of this confederacy. We were never among those who 'calculated the value of the Union,' or who dreamed that the possibility of its being sundered was among contingencies to be considered in any case. But the possibility that our fathers may have fought to establish a shield for a community of adulterers and bigamists, and their progeny, makes us pause. That all which we hold sacred in religion, or virtuous in social and family relations, may be trampled underfoot by a State represented on equal terms with those founded by Penn and the Pilgrims, by Oglethorpe and the Cavaliers; that the Old Dominion and the land of the Puritans may be allied with a fraternity of licentious and debauched rogues—these possibilities, should they become facts, will leave no value to the Union for any body to 'calculate.' Nothing has cast so great a doubt over the future of this country as the Mormon plague spot. And if the State of Utah is to be admitted into our constellation, the sign will lose its present proud significance, and stand—as stars sometimes do, in an equivoque—the representatives of something too foul to be spoken or written.
"And all this evil, if it be consummated, will be fairly chargeable upon the absurdity of squatter sovereignty—a demagogue's figment to serve a party purpose, carried to its legitimate deductions by knaves, operating through the instrumentality of zealots, fanatics, fools, and lechers. We have no patience with the Mormons, and as little with temporisers who leave the evil to increase, until at last literal and bloody war may be forced upon us to crush what common sense and a just idea of the powers of the general government might have averted. The contact with the Mormons of such settlers of the West as have just ideas of purity and decency, will be terrible whenever the tide of emigration reaches them. And if the descendants of the wretches now wallowing in Mormonism—modern vermin perpetuating their kind in the disgusting ratio of other loathsome creatures—if, we say, these children of such paternity do not form a Pariah race in our country, it will be because this bad page: xii-25[View Page xii-25] leaven taints the whole moral mass. Extremes meet. We have enjoyed a high order of social virtue in this republican country, because no corrupt royalty and nobility have made illegitimacy tolerable, and recommended the bend sinister as a badge of honor, provided that the blood, no matter by what questionable vein it descends, be 'honorable.' But if squatter sovereignty, and liberty deteriorating into licentiousness, produce the same results, we have only substituted Fitz-Youngs and Fitz-Mormons for Fitz-Jameses and Fitz-Clarences; and certainly have not gained much by the exchange."
