THE MISSOURI EXODUS: A Governor's Edict of Fire and Banishment in the Western Wilderness

From the distant transatlantic mails, lately arrived at the Continental capitals and forwarded by packet to our own Carpathian post-roads, comes intelligence of a most grievous and extraordinary character out of the American state of Missouri. Governor Lilburn Boggs, invested with the executive authority of that frontier commonwealth, hath issued a proclamation of extermination against the sect known as the Latter-Day Saints, commonly called Mormons, commanding that they depart the state forthwith or suffer the extremity of death. The edict, dated the twenty-seventh of October in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-eight, declares the brethren to be enemies of the public peace and authorizes the militia to compel their removal by force of arms.

Our correspondents in the American interior report that the consequence of this decree hath been a season of lamentable violence and forced migration. The Saints, numbering some ten thousand souls, have been driven from their settlements along the western counties, their dwellings and meeting-houses given to the torch, their flocks and household goods seized or scattered upon the roads. Many have perished of exposure in the winter passes, and the roads are said to be thronged with wagons bearing women and children toward the unknown territories beyond the Mississippi.

The affair hath provoked sharp commentary in the foreign gazettes, where men of law and divinity debate whether a magistrate may lawfully pronounce sentence of death upon an entire people without trial or indictment. Some hold the order to be a manifest violation of the ancient rights of Englishmen transplanted to the New World; others, less charitable, mutter of religious enthusiasm and the perils of frontier fanaticism. Whatever the merits, the spectacle of a governor's pen setting ten thousand pilgrims upon the winter roads is one to chill the blood of any traveller who hath himself known the mercies of a mountain pass.

Let this chronicle serve as a warning to all who journey by coach and post through lands where the law is swift and the wilderness unforgiving. The road is long, the snows are early, and the hand of authority may fall upon the innocent as upon the guilty. We shall continue to report such passages of peril as come to our desk, for the safety of the travelling public is the first duty of this journal.