Monday, December 11, 2023

Joseph Holbrook’s Commentary on, and Dream Concerning, D&C 87

  

CIVIL WAR

 

At the close of this year, a rebellion broke out in the United States between the North and South, commencing at Charlestown, South Carolina, agreeable to the fulfilment of Joseph Smith’s prophecy given at Kirtland, December 25, 1832, which I often heard him speak of afterwards should take place, which I bear record was literally fulfilled every whit according to his word. (Joseph Holbrook, Mormon Pioneer, a Journal, ed. Pamela Call Johnson, 2 vols. [rev ed.; 2019], 2:52)

 

Dream

City of Bountiful

January 18, 1861

 

While I had been mediating on the exact fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prophecy, twenty-eight years before, it transpired and how God does fulfil all His words by His prophets, I had the following dream:

 

I thought that I was suddenly taken to the city of Washington, the Capitol of the United States, by the power of God to the Representative Hall. There being a joint session at the time, I took the speaker’s stand. There was a death like silence in the house, every member seemed chained to his seat.

 

I said that all in the house were strangers to me, save one, and that one would come to my side if I should call him, and that was William N. Hooper. I told them that I stood there by the power of God, and that I asked no odds of any of them, and that I could go out of this hell as I came in, without your doors or any other passage, and that they were the representatives of the people of the greatest Nation on the earth, and that they were a pack of fools.

 

That I was not in favor of slavery or yet opposed to it. That it was in the hands of God. That they were blind in the North as well as in the South and did not know what to do to save the nation’s ruin, or the causes of the clouds of darkness that overwhelmed our heads, and that they were under the curse of God’s wrath for their wickedness for He was coming out of His hiding place to vex the nations for slaying the prophets, Joseph Smith, and his brother, Hyrum, which was sent to this generation, and would have saved this Nation, if they would have received him and carried out his policy of Government.

 

But you gave assent to his death, and cast his followers out from among you, and caused many of them to suffer death, and sought their destructions by your means, and your armies.

 

There sits Judge Douglas, who knew the prophet, Joseph Smith in his life time, who has aspired to the chair of the Chief magistrate of our nation, who recommended to cut out the loathsome ulcer of the people in Utah.

 

But God had put an ulcer in your breast that you cannot cut and you are cursed with a more cursing. I told them that there was but one way for their redemption and to save the nation from their utter destruction, and if Congress would proclaim a fast throughout the land from the least to the greatest, and repent before the God of Joseph Smith, and seek with all might, mind, and strength, to restore back to the Latter-Day-Saints what you have robbed them of as a nation, and bring them in judgment that have killed our prophets and punish them for their crimes; then will I tell you of a man if you will follow his council, that will save the constitution of our once beloved but now downtrodden country and that man is Brigham Young.

 

I visited President Buchanan and his cabinet and told him he could find a plenty of means and an army to destroy the Saints, but could not have power or spirit in him to deal with those under his own nose and that God has put hooks in his jaws to weaken and disgrace him.

 

Therefore, let the President and his cabinet and the governors and their counsellors with all their people proclaim a fast and repent as did the people of Ninevah in sackcloth and ashes, if they would be saved and restore to the Saints their constitutional rights and I awake and found it was a dream. (Ibid., 53-54)

 

Further Reading:

 

Resources on Joseph Smith's Prophecies