The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
"Ah!" he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm. "You differ
greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft
began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward
from the crime of their brothers' blood."
"I do indeed."
"Still, they are excellent men. Brother Heber Kimball and myself are
every week invited to address a train of them down at Emigrant Square.
They are honest, peaceful people. You call them 'Copperheads,' I
believe. But they are real, true, good men. We find them very
truth-seeking, remarkably open to conviction. Many of them have stayed
with us. Thus the Lord makes the wrath of man to praise Him. The
Abolitionists--the same people who interfered with our institutions, and
drove us out into the wilderness--interfered with the Southern
institutions till they broke up the Union. But it's all coming out
right,--a great deal better than we could have arranged it for
ourselves. The men who flee from Abolitionist oppression come out here
to our ark of refuge, and people the asylum of God's chosen. You'll all
be out here before long. Your Union's gone forever. Fighting only makes
matters worse. When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints
whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a
home."
There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and
prosperous people abandoning, through abject terror of a desperate set
of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues
of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an
inaccessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham Young's face glowing with
what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest.
Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all
the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that
the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants
Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years,--the
more sanguine said, "next summer."
At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the
orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts? My
gentlemen-readers will feel highly nattered by a solution of this
problem which I received from no leaser light of the Latter-Day Church
than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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