John B. Floyd, Secretary of War in Buchanan's cabinet, was from Virginia, and favored the southern cause, as indeed the whole administration and the party that elected it did; so that Elder Taylor's charge respecting the scattering of United States forces, rests upon the ground of strong probability. Relative to the charge that under pretence of subjugating Utah the President intended to coerce the people of Kansas to an acceptance of his views, it is true that part of the army for Utah left Fort Leavenworth before the last of July; but Brigadier-General Harney, to whom the command of the expedition had been given, remained with several squadrons of the second dragoons in Kansas, until after the elections in that Territory in October; and President Buchanan was involved in an intrigue to defeat the popular will in Kansas. There is, however, another consideration which I doubt not influenced the action of the administration in sending an army to Utah. The party that supported the administration was anxious to give proof to the country that it was no more favorable to the unpopular Mormons than the Republican party was; and seized upon the false reports of Judge Drummond as a golden opportunity to out-herod Herod, hoping by that movement to throw off the odium its opponents had fastened upon it in charging that its doctrines of popular sovereignty would permit the people of Utah to establish polygamy as well as slavery if they so elected. It was in May, 1857, that Elder Taylor left New York for the west. Judge William I. Appleby and T. B. H. Stenhouse were left in charge of _The Mormon_, and continued its publication until September 19th, when it was discontinued, principally on account of the threatened "Mormon War." Footnotes 1. It may be of interest to note in passing that once in conversation with Senator Douglas, early in the forties--the Senator then being a judge in one of the judicial districts of Illinois--the Prophet Joseph said to him in substance: "Judge Douglas, you will yet aspire to the Presidency of the United States; but if you ever turn against me or my people, you will fail." When Senator Douglas forgot the warning of the Prophet and advocated cutting "the loathsome ulcer out of the body politic," he sounded the death knell to his ambitious hopes. CHAPTER XXXI. "THE MORMON" COMMENDED BY BRIGHAM YOUNG--TRYING TIMES--COURAGE--ELDER TAYLOR IN THE FRONT--"LET THE TRIAL COME"--SPEECH ON THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE IN THE TERRITORIES. Elder Taylor arrived in Salt Lake City from his mission to the eastern states on the 7th of August, 1857. Two days later, in the bowery on the Temple square, he preached a powerful discourse, in which he represented what the spirit of the people of the east was in respect to Mormonism, and dwelt at some length on the grandeur of the mission in which the Saints had engaged.