:—Your reply to my letter of last November, concerning your rule of action towards the , if elected President, is at hand; and, that you and your friends of the same opinion, relative to the matter in question, may not be disappointed as to me, or my mind, upon so grave a subject, permit me, as a law-abiding man; as a well wisher to the perpetuity of constitutional rights and liberty, and as a friend to the free worship of Almighty God. by all, according to the dictates of every persons’ conscience, to say I am surprised, that a man, or men, in the highest stations of public life, should have made up such a fragile ‘view, of a case, than which there is not one on the face of the globe fraught with so much consequence to the happiness of men in this world, or the world to come. To be sure, the first paragraph of your letter appears very complacent, and fair on a white sheet of paper, and who, that is ambitious for greatness and power, would not have said the same thing? Your oath would bind you to support the constitution and laws, and as all creeds and religions are alike tolerated, they must, of course, all be justified or condemned, according to merit or demerit—but why, tell me why, are all the principle men, held up for public stations, so cautiously careful not to publish to the world, that they will judge a righteous judgment—law or no law: for laws and opinions, like the vanes of steeples, change with the wind. One congress passes a law, and another repeals it, and one statesman says that the constitution means this, and another that; and who does not know that all may be wrong? The opinion and pledge, therefore, in the first paragraph of your reply to my question, like the forced steam from the engine of a steam boat, makes the show of a bright cloud at first, but when it comes in contact with a purer atmosphere, dissolves to common air again.

Your second paragraph leaves you naked before yourself, like a likeness in a mirror, when you say that ‘according to your view, the federal government is one of limited and specific powers,’ and has no jurisdiction in the case of the Mormons. So then, a state can at any time, expel any portion of her citizens with impunity, and in the language of , frosted over with your gracious ‘views of the case,’ ‘though the cause is ever so just, government can do nothing for them, because it has no power.[’]

Go on, then, , after another set of inhabitants, (as the Latter Day Saints did) have entered some two or three hundred thousand dollars worth of land, and made extensive improvements thereon: go on, then I say, banish the occupants or owners, or kill them, as the mobbers did many of the Latter Day Saints, and take their lands and property as a spoil: and let the legislature, as in the case of the Mormons, appropriate a couple of hundred thousand dollars to pay the mob for doing the job; for the renowned senator from , Mr. , says the powers of the federal Government are so specific and limited that it has no jurisdiction of the case! Oh ye people who groan under the oppression of tyrants, ye exiled Poles, who have felt the iron hand of Russian grasp; ye poor and unfortunate among all nations, come to the ‘asylum of the oppressed;’ buy ye lands of the general government, pay in your money to the treasury to strengthen the army and the navy; worship God according to the dictates of your own consciences; pay in your taxes to support the great heads of a glorious nation; but remember a ‘sovereign state!’ is so much more powerful than the , the parent government, that it can exile you at pleasure, mob you with impunity; confiscate your lands and property; have the legislature sanction it: yea, even murder you, as an edict of an Emperor, and it does no wrong, for the noble of , says the power of the federal government is so limited and specific that it has no jurisdiction of the case! What think ye of Imperium in imperio.

Ye spirits of the blessed of all ages, hark! Ye shades of departed statesmen, listen! Abraham, Moses, Homer, Socrates, Solon, Solomon, and all that ever thought of right and wrong, look down from your exaltations, if you have any, for it is said in the midst of counsellors there is safety, and when you have learned that fifteen thousand innocent citizens after having purchased their lands of the , and paid for them, were expelled from a ‘sovereign state’ by order of the , at the point of the bayonet; their arms taken from them by the same authority: and their right of migration into said , denied under pain of imprisonment, whipping, robbing, mobbing, and even death, and no justice or recompence allewed; and from the legislature, with the at the head, down to the , with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, and a bowie knife in the other, hear them all declare that there is no justice for a Mormon in that , and judge ye a righteous judgment, and tell me when the virtue of the states was stolen; where the honor of the general government lies hid; and what clothes a senator with wisdom? Oh nullifying !— Oh little tempestuous ! would it not be well for the great men of the nation to read the fable of the partial judge, and when part of the free citizens of a had been expelled contrary to the constitution, mobbed, robbed, plundered and many murdered, instead of searching into the course taken with Joanna, Southcott, Ann Lee, the French prophets, the Quakers of New England, and rebellions niggers, in the slave states, to hear both sides and then judge, rather than have the mortification to say, ‘oh it is my bull that has killed your ox, that alters the case! I must enquire into it, and if, and if?’

If the general government has no power to reinstate expelled citizens to their rights, there is a monstrous hypocrite fed and fostered from the hard earnings of the people! A real ‘bullbeggar’ upheld by sycophants; and, although you may wink to the priests to stigmatize;— wheedle the drunkards to swear, and raise the hue and cry of imposter false prophet, God damn old Joe Smith, yet remember, if the Latter Day Saints are not restored to all their rights, and paid for all their losses, according to the known rules of justice and judgment, reciprocation and common honesty among men, that God will come out of his hiding place and vex this nation with a sore vexation—yea, the consuming wrath of an offended God shall smoke through the nation, with as much distress and woe, as independence has blazed through with pleasure and delight. Where is the strength of government? Where is the patriotism of a Washington, a Warren, and Adams? and where is a spark from the watch fire of ’76, by which one candle might be lit, that would glimmer upon the confines of democracy? Well may it be said that one man is not a state; nor one state the nation. In the days of General [Andrew] Jackson, when refused the first instalment for spoliations, there was power, force, and honor enough to resent injustice and insult, and the money came: and shall , filled with negro drivers, and white men steal ers, go ‘unwhipped of justice,’ for ten fold greater sins than ? No! verily no!— While I have powers of body and mind; while water runs and grass grows; while virtue is lovely, and vice hateful; and while a stone points out a sacred spot where a fragment of American liberty once was; I or my posterity will plead the cause of injured innocence, until makes atonement for all her sins—or sinks disgraced, degraded and damned to hell—‘where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.[’]

Why Sir, the power not delegated to the , and the states, belongs to the people, and congress sent to do the people’s business, have all power—and shall fifteen thousand citizens groan in exile? Oh vain men, will ye not, if ye do not, restore them to their rights and $2,000,000 worth of property relinquish to them, (the Latter Day Saints) as a body, their portion of power that belongs to them according to the constitution? Power has its convenience, as well as inconvenience.— ‘The world was not made for Caesar alone, but Titus too.’

I will give you a parable, A certain lord had a vineyard in a goodly land, which men labored in at their pleasure; a few meek men also went and purchased with money from some of these chief men that labored at pleasure, a portion of land in the vineyard, at a very remote part of it, and began to improve it, and to eat and drink the fruit thereof; when some vile persons, who regarded not man, neither feared the lord of the vineyard, rose up suddenly and robbed these meek men, and drove them from their possessions, killing many. This barbarous act made no small stir among the men in the vineyard, and all that portion who were attached to that part of the vineyard where the men were robbed, rose up in grand council, with their chief [p. [2]]