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Comprehensive History v5 (B. Roberts)

B. H. Roberts

Copyright 1930 Deseret News Press

The events of Volume V extend through a period of twenty years, opening with 1860 and continuing to midsummer of 1880. It is a period of great stress and strife; of fierce opposition to the church, both locally and nationally; with Utah, the chief gathering place of the saints, as the local center; and Washington, the nation's capital, as the initial point of anti-"Mormon" national activity, where much special inimical legislation was enacted against the church, and much of a more mischievous kind attempted. Four presidents of the United States of the period thought the "Mormon question" of sufficient importance to make recommendations concerning it in their messages, and to urge their policies upon congress. The ingenuity of political cunning and sectarian hatred united to destroy the community life of the Latter-day Saints, which meant the destruction of the church of the New Dispensation. Misrepresentation did its worst to blacken the reputation and make impossible the right understanding of the intent of the people of God. If ever Satan cast out of his mouth a flood of vicious falsehood that the church might be carried away of it, this period of Volume V. for modern days, was the time of it.

There were not only fightings from without, during this period, but dissensions from within. It was the period of the Morrisite and the Godbeite defections. Not that these events were of so much importance in themselves, for so considered they were of small concern, but it was the use made of them by national and local enemies of the saints that featured them.

There were serious Indian uprisings during the period; chief of which was the Black Hawk War continuing through three years, which the people of Utah had to suppress notwithstanding the presence of United States troops permanently located at Camp Douglas. There were numerous vexatious law suits, the imprisonment of Brigham Young and other church leaders. There was the "invasion"-if one may so speak of it-of sectarian Christian missions, that sought the conversion of the saints to the old forms of christendom so many of them had left. Death took an unusually large toll from the Pioneers of the New Dispensation. Among these Presidents Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball were numbered.

The martyrdom of Joseph Standing in Georgia, and the Indian wars add a dash of red to the period.

In view of all these untoward circumstances, and others not mentioned here, it may be marveled at that this volume is named Expansion. And yet it is so named, and because expansion is the chief characteristic of the period this volume covers, notwithstanding the nation-wide agitation against the church, and the stern and tireless efforts of both the national congress and the Utah federal judiciary to effect its undoing.