I was just reading through old things I saved from my church history class at BYU my last quarter there and found the article that was supposedly the cause of a Mob of "between four and five hundres persons" that demolished The Evening and Morning Star press in the home of W. W. Phelps (reference, Letter to the Governor of the State of Missouri, Daniel Dunklin, Dec 1833, i think that is the year though it is not completely clear cannot on the copy I have).

The article that supposedly caused this uproar insinuated that "fanatics, or knaves" were infiltrating the church even in holding positions of leadership and pretending to "hold personal communion and converse face to face with the most high God." (I guess this is something that a good spy/knave would have done to fit in at the time...) They also accused them of "tampering with (their) slaves, and endevering to sow dissentions and raise seditions amongst them."

They say (the documentwas written collectively, by hundreds of members) that "leaders of the sect" published in the Star an article "inviting free negros and mulattoes from other States to become mormons and remove and settle among us, this exhibits them (the fanatics) in still more odious colors. It manifests a desire on the part of their society, to inflict on our society an injury that they know would be to us entirely insupportable, and one of the surest means of driving us from the county; for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to, to see that the introduction of such a cast among us, would corrupt our blacks and instigate them to bloodsheds."

It's a little funny to me that the article they were angry enough to publish suggested that if they were friendly to blacks they would be persecuted, when their published racism allegedly caused a pretty major persecution itself. Wowza!

Miscommunication? Misunderstandings?

I'm not at all for violence which sometimes happened due to religious persecution. I'm not really for hate crimes. But all this strikes me as pretty out-there, perhaps paranoid or exaggerated? I also would not be surprised if the accounts were pretty accurate--perhaps there was no way to win with the slavery issue. One would probably need to research attitudes toward slavery in Independence, MO at the time to really put it into context.

Tell me what you think.. If you stumbled upon this my email is ruth and allison also @ the gmail dot . freakin' com. Just remove every other word from that, I am trying to be a little incognito.

(All other quotations taken from Evening and Morning Star published July 18, 1933)