Presentism and the Persecutors of the Early Saints

[_Mary]

He went overboard in describing Joseph Smith. IF Joseph Smith was as he claimed him to be, I see no hope for the early church to survive based around that character that Winchester claims that he had.

I thought that his pointing out that he was told that prophets weren't perfect (see above), and etc, was very similar actually to what is told today. People forgave and overlooked Joseph's shortcomings because they believed he was a prophet of God and that the church was more important than him. I would suspect that this is what kept things going 'in spite' of Joseph's character.

Mary

[_ktallamigo]

Now these people on the frontier were not the most educated people in the world...which would make them more intolerant than most. And they were frontier souls just like the LDS who were settling there. But I do not see other groups being persecuted by the frontier folk unless of course, we consider the Indians and the Africans people---which of course many on the frontier did not. But the Mormons were white and so being white would be considered human beings. And singled out.

There was a tremendous amount of frontier violence related to the free labor vs. slavery issue in the years leading up to the civil war. Pro-free labor people or abolitionists would have been targeted.