Parley P. Pratt, History of the Late Persecution, 1839
Source Note
, History of the Late Persecution Inflicted by the State of Missouri upon the Mormons, in Which Ten Thousand American Citizens were Robbed, Plundered, and Driven from the State, and Many Others Imprisoned, Martyred, &c. for Their Religion, and All This By Military Force, By Order of the Executive; i–vi, 7–84 pp.; Detroit, MI: Dawson & Bates, 1839. The copy used for this transcription is held at CHL.
Historical Introduction
While incarcerated at , Missouri, in March 1839, JS addressed a letter to the church “at Illinois and scattered abroad and to in particular,” instructing the Saints to gather up “a knoledge of all the facts and sufferings and abuses put upon them by the people of this state.” (JS et al., Liberty, MO, to the church members and Edward Partridge, Quincy, IL, 20 Mar. 1839, in Revelations Collection, CHL [D&C 123:1, 6].) Edward Partridge responded with an account that became the three opening installments of “A History, of the Persecution, of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints in Missouri,” an eleven-part series published in the church’s Illinois newspaper, Times and Seasons, between December 1839 and October 1840. “A History, of the Persecution” receives comprehensive treatment in volume 2 of the Histories series of The Joseph Smith Papers and is available on this website.
may have intended to tell the entire story himself, but he fell ill shortly after publication of “A History, of the Persecution” began and died on 27 May 1840. Prompted by Partridge’s illness and subsequent death, the editors of the Times and Seasons, and , sought elsewhere for source materials to continue the series. It is probable that they composed the fourth installment to provide a brief transition from Partridge’s account, which ends in 1836, and the conflicts in and adjoining counties beginning in 1838. In April and June 1840, the fifth and seventh installments reprinted passages from ’s History of the Late Persecution Inflicted by the State of Missouri upon the Mormons (Detroit: Dawson and Bates 1839). The sixth and eighth through tenth installments drew upon ’s pamphlet, An Appeal to the American People. The series concluded with an eleventh installment in October 1840, featuring Missouri militia general ’s callous speech to the Saints after their surrender at , Missouri, in November 1838.
wrote History of the Late Persecution, the document featured here, during his eight-month imprisonment in jails in 1838–1839. His wife, , daringly smuggled the manuscript out of the jail. After his escape on 4 July 1839 and reunion with the Saints in , Pratt left on a mission to England with the Twelve Apostles. When he reached he paused to visit relatives and arranged for the publication of his history there, obtaining a copyright for his book on 30 September 1839. Revised versions were subsequently reprinted in in 1840 as a pamphlet under the same title and as an expanded hardback with the title Late Persecution of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints. (Crawley, Descriptive Bibliography, 89–90, 100–103.) Pratt later drew upon his history when he composed his autobiography in the 1850s.
’s History of the Late Persecution provides an autobiographical account of events in , , , and counties, Missouri, beginning in 1833. Some of the material describing events that transpired in Jackson County in 1833 was drawn from an earlier publication Pratt co-authored with and , “‘The Mormons’ So Called.” History of the Late Persecution also rehearses the conflict that engulfed Caldwell and Daviess counties, the expulsion of the Saints from Missouri, the mistreatment of Mormon prisoners by Missouri authorities, and the smuggling of Pratt’s manuscript copy of the History from jail, concluding with his narrow escape from imprisonment in Columbia, Missouri.
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the Mormons to retaliation, the issues orders, if we understand the case, for the expulsion of the Mormons from the State of . The Emperor of Russia—the Schah of Persia, or the Sultan of Turkey, could not embrace in his own person, more legislative, judicial, Executive power than is here assumed:—Legislative in the enactment and promulgation of an edict of banishment. Judicial, extra-judicial, or under judicial in sentencing them to banishment under it. Executive in summoning the force of the to put in force his own judgment upon his edict. Well done, !
We are sorry to hear of the massacre of the Mormons by the the armed mob, however, this violence being the natural promptings of infuriated men, is positively less culpable than the cool ignorance, and impudent, illegal assumptions of the of .”
From the foregoing numerous extracts, the public can see that my horrible tale of woe is not a fiction, but an awful reality. I might fill a volume with similar quotations from the public journals of every part of the , but I forbear, with the full conviction that the foregoing are sufficient to show that an impartial public, who stand entirely unconnected with our Society as religionists, bear out my narrative in its awful tale of woe and suffering, and I now submit the subject to the perusal of all people, willing to meet my statements in the foregoing, at the bar of Him who knows all secret things, and who judges righteously.
The of the foregoing narrative is now at liberty, and some account of his narrow escape from prison, and from the State of , is due to the public. On the 1st of July, the special term of the Court was held at Columbia, for our trials, but was adjourned for near three months because all our wit [p. 75]