The rumors of the impending expedition reached the Mormons at the very moment they were prepared to apply to Congress for admission as a State. A Constitution had been framed by a Convention assembled without the sanction of an enabling act, and was intrusted to George A. Smith and John Taylor, two of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, for presentation to Congress. These men, both of them of more than ordinary ability, helped to present the Mormon side of the question to the country through the newspapers, during the winter of 1856-7. The essence of their vindication was, that the character of some of the Federal officers who had been sent to Utah was objectionable in the extreme; but, granting the truth of all their statements on this subject, they supplied no excuse for the utter subversion of Federal authority in the Territory. Their narrative, however, formed a most spicy chapter in the annals of official scandal. The three United States judges, Kinney, Drummond, and Stiles, were presented to the public stripped of all judicial sanctity;--Kinney, the Chief Justice, as the keeper of a grocery-store, dance-room, and boarding-house, enforcing the bills for food and lodging against his brethren of the law by expulsion from the bar in case of non-payment, and so tenacious of life, that, before departing from the Territory, he solicited and received from Brigham Young a patriarchal blessing; Drummond, as an amorous horse-jockey, who had taken to Utah, as his mistress, a drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of Joseph Smith, his disciples have never minced their language, and they expended their whole vocabulary now on such themes as have been cited, proving, to the satisfaction of everybody, that, in respect to the judiciary, they had indeed had just cause for complaint. The mission of Smith and Taylor failed, as might have been expected,--the Chairman of the Committee on Territories, Mr. Grow, of Pennsylvania, refusing even to present their Constitution to the House,--and they prepared to return to Utah.