Joseph Smith by Richard Lyman Bushman

Author:Richard Lyman Bushman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426482
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

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The day after dictating the letter to the Church, Joseph answered a letter from his “Affectionate Wife.” Emma had written, her “hands stiffened with hard work” and “heart convulsed with intense anxiety,” concluding, “I hope there is better days to come to us yet.” In reply, Joseph promised that “if God will spare my life once more to have the privelege of takeing care of you I will ease your care and indeavour to cumfort your heart.” He spoke of the children and of his dog, “old major.” At this low point, he could promise little. “If the heveans linger it is nothing to me I must stear my bark safe which I intend to do.” He closed “yours forever,” adding a pitiful postcript: “Dear Emma do you think that my being cast into prison by the mob renders me less worthy of your friendsship?”27

By early April, the prisoners had learned that they would be transferred to Daviess County for the long-awaited trial and then to some southern county where a less prejudiced jury could be assembled for the final trial. Writing Emma, Joseph was unsure what to expect but knew “we cannot get into a worse hole then this is.” He thought of her and the children continually. “I would gladly walk from here to you barefoot, and bareheaded, and half naked, to see you.” “You should not let those little fellows, forgit me, tell them Father loves them with a perfect love.” But after these assurances of devotion, he again struck an uncertain note:

I find no fault with you, attall I know nothing but what you have done the best you could, if there is any thing it is known to yourself, you must be your own Judge. . . . if ether of us have done wrong it is wise in us to repent of it, and for God sake, do not be so foolish as to yield to the flattery of the Devel, falshoods, and vainty, in this hour of trouble, that our affections be drawn, away from the right objects.

Joseph gave no indication what was worrying him. He said only, “[M]y heart has often been exceding sorrowful when I have thaught of these thing[s].” Emma, he urged, should not be “self willed, neither harber a spirit of revevenge,” but against whom or what he did not say. Please, he begged, “never give up an old tried friend, who has waded through all manner of toil, for your sake, and throw him away becau[se] fools may tell you he has some faults.”28 He spoke as if Emma harbored resentment against him. At this point, the manuscript page is torn away.

On April 6, Joseph and the other prisoners left Liberty Jail, under a fifteen-man guard, arriving in Gallatin two days later. On April 10, a grand jury met in the front rooms of Elisha Creekmore’s house; it returned indictments for arson, riot, burglary, treason, and receiving stolen goods. Judge Thomas C. Burch agreed to a change of

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