Thirty-Five (1840)“kings and merchants”^66 when Christ came. The editor of Lucy Mack’s history, Martha
Jane Knowlton, commented in writings what she recalled Joseph saying in one of his
discourses given in July of 1840:
We shall build the Zion of the Lord in peace until the servants of that Lord
shall begin to lay the foundation of a great and high watch Tower and
then shall they begin to say within themselves, what need hath my Lord of
this tower seeing this is a time of peace &c. [sic] Then the Enemy shall
come as a thief in the night and scatter the servants abroad. When the seed
of these 12 Olive trees are scattered abroad they will wake up the Nations
of the whole Earth. Even this Nation will be on the very verge of
crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground and when the
constitution is upon the brink of ruin this people will be the Staff
up[on] which the Nation shall lean and they shall bear the constitution
away from the very verge of destruction.^67How Knowlton could remember words from many years before she sat down to
account for what she thought Joseph had said, speaks to the ingenuity and vanity of the
LDS mindset. The fact is, however, Joseph did give a fiery speech about the Constitution
after dealing in vain with the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States.
Everything Joseph said about the Constitution maligned it as one of the greatest
blunders created by mankind. He spoke candidly of how the Church’s own implicit
constitution, that allowed the members to have a vote equal to each of its appointed
High Councils (bodies similar to the U.S. Congress), was far superior as a more fair
representation of the people’s will than that which the U.S. Constitution allowed.
The members by a vote could override any council of the Church, from the
Deacon’s Quorum to the Twelve Apostles to the First Presidency.^68 This had
demonstrated itself at the end of 1843, when the LDS people had begged Joseph to run
for U.S. President. Joseph did not want anything to do with Sidney Rigdon at the time
and tried to distance himself from Rigdon. But the people loved Sidney and they
overruled Joseph and nominated Rigdon as his vice-presidential running mate. The LDS
people, again in their arrogance and blindness, thought that a wanted fugitive from
justice (the Missouri warrant for Joseph’s arrest was still in effect in 1844) would have a
chance at being President of the United States. But, of course, as he always did, or at
least gave it his best effort, Joseph gave the people what they wanted.
Joseph’s sermons, after being snubbed by Washington’s most powerful leaders,
were filled with venom against the United States and its legal apparatus. On the one
occasion to which Martha Knowlton wrote of above, Joseph quoted from the Book of
Mormon and then proclaimed,
Mormon warned our generation of things to come when he described the
government justly before the coming of Christ to the people. The judges and
lawyers were angry with those who stood forth and testified of Christ. But
the people were to blame. They began distinguishing themselves by ranks
and classes, according to their riches and their education. But the poor
remained unrepresented because they lacked the education to understand
their government. But this people, even the Saints of this Church, are lifted