Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political PriestcraftCannon, Frank J.
History
Under the Prophet in Utah; the National Menace of a Political Priestcraft
Cannon, Frank J.
Latter Day Saint churches; Latter Day Saints; Utah -- Politics and government
In the long years of misery when the Mormons of Utah were proscribed and
hunted, because they refused to abandon what was to them, at that, time,
a divine revelation and a confirmed article of faith, I sat many times
in the gallery of the Senate in Washington, and heard discussed new
measures of destruction against these victims of their own fidelity,
and felt the dome above me impending like a brazen weight of national
resentment upon all our heads. When, a few years later, I stood before
the President's desk in the Senate chamber, to take my oath of office
as the representative of the freed people of Utah in the councils of the
nation, I raised my eyes to my old seat of terror in the gallery,
and pledged myself, in that remembrance, never to vote nor speak for
anything but the largest measure of justice that my soul was big enough
to comprehend. By such engagement I write now, bound in a double debt
of obligation to the nation whose magnanimity then saved us and to the
people whom I humbly helped to save.
Frank J. Cannon.
UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH
Chapter I. In the Days of the Raid
About ten o'clock one night in the spring of 1888, I set out secretly,
from Salt Lake City, on a nine-mile drive to Bountiful, to meet my
father, who was concealed "on the underground," among friends; and that
night drive, with its haste and its apprehension, was so of a piece with
the times, that I can hardly separate it from them in my memory. We were
all being carried along in an uncontrollable sweep of tragic events. In
a sort of blindness, like the night, unable to see the nearest fork of
the road ahead of us, we were being driven to a future that held we knew
not what.
I was with my brother Abraham (soon to become an apostle of the Mormon
Church), who had himself been in prison and was still in danger of
arrest. And there is something typical of those days in the recollection
I have of him in the carriage: silent, self-contained, and--when he
talked--discussing trivialities in the most calm way in the world. The
whole district was picketed with deputy marshals; we did not know that
we were not being followed; we had always the sense of evading patrols
in an enemy's country. But this feeling was so old with us that it had
become a thing of no regard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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