A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints
Section Introduction: Letters
Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert, editors
I would write to you from time to time and
give you information in relation to many subjects. --Joseph
Smith, Doctrine and Covenants 128:1
[1] To the modern
Mormon, as to his non-Mormon contemporaries, letter writing has
become, virtually, a lost art. Even the Mormon missionary, long a
source of vital and vivid Mormon epistles, is turning more and more to
recording on tape his weekly letter to his loved ones at home. In
Mormondom, as elsewhere, the reading of letters is left to the
historian.
[2] Such was not
always the case. Joseph Smith, as the History of the Church
attests, was a prolific letter writer who employed numerous scribes to
record his ideas, his instructions to the Saints in outlying branches
of the Church, his legal and doctrinal debates with enemies of the
Church, and his mundane instructions to his associates in the Church
and in municipal and national government. His letters, though
understandably objective because of his use of scribes, demonstrate
his love for his people and for his wife and family as well as his
compassion for the sinner and his deep and sincere faith in God and in
his own prophetic calling.
[3] Similarly, Brigham
Young's letters demonstrate a steadfast devotion to Joseph Smith and
the Church. Indeed, in President Young's letters, as in Joseph
Smith's, we see a pattern' a combination of the practical and the
pragmatic with the ideal and the spiritual; the product comes near to
defining that Yankee transcendental American Christianity which lies
at the heart of Mormonism. Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young found
in the combination the key to the hearts of their people, and their
letters are strong indicators of the charisma which the Mormon people
enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, in the lives of their leaders.
[4] The letters of
other Mormons from the rank and file tell us, in often rough but
poignant and telling prose, just how it was to walk through the busy
and destined streets of Nauvoo;how it was to prepare. in the chaotic
impermanence of Winter Quarters, for the uncertainties of the trek to
the West; how it was to set up housekeeping in a wilderness and,
finally, how it was, amidst all of these hardships, to wish and pray
for one's comfortable family to catch the vision of Mormonism and flee
from Babylon to Zion-and to all of the hardships which accompany such
a flight.
[5] In Ellen Spencer
Clawson's writing we see one more hardship required by the new
faith-that a loving wife share her husband with other loving wives.
Still, in her letter, typical of many, she demonstrates the
pattern-the Latter-day Saint willingness to keep-Joseph-and
Brigham-like-her eye of faith bright and clear, while her flesh might
show a nagging human reticence to submit to the realities of the
vision.
[6] Mormon letters,
generally uncollected and unread, provide treasures, rich insights,
and marvelous stories of great and minor defeats and great and minor
triumphs; and they demonstrate, to us who live in a softer age when
the pattern is more blurred, the power of faith to move men and women
far beyond accepted limits of human endurance. Mormon letters go far
toward explaining the mystique which has attracted so many to
Mormonism, regardless of the cost.
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