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Preface of Tell It All! The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Danielle Cartwright. Tell It All! The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism.
By Fanny Stenhouse. This contains a Publisher's Notice, a Preface by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a Preface by Fanny Stenhouse. Publisher's Notice. By the merest accident a few months ago in New York City, the publishers became personally acquainted with Mr. T.B.H. Stenhouse of Salt Lake City, the husband of the author of the present volume, and before they separated, preliminary steps were taken for its publication.
Almost a year before that time, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the talented author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, had addressed a kind note to Mrs. Stenhouse, congratulating her upon the appeal which she had made on behalf of the women of Utah in a little work which she had then just published. Some correspondence subsequently ensued between the two ladies who had so successfully attacked the twin relics of barbarism, polygamy, and slavery. They afterwards became personally acquainted, and when Mrs. Stenhouse requested Mrs. Stowe to write the preface for her new work, that gifted author unhesitatingly replied,
Preface by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. In these pages a woman, a wife, and mother speaks the sorrows and depressions of which she has been the witness and the victim. It is because her sorrows and her oppressions are those of thousands who suffering like her cannot or dare not speak for themselves that she thus gives this history to the public. It is no sensational story but a plain, unvarnished tale of truth, stranger and sadder than fiction. Our day has seen a glorious breaking of fetters. The slave pens of the South have become a nightmare of the past.
The auction block and whipping post have given place to the church and the schoolhouse, and the songs of emancipated millions are heard through our land. Shall we not then hope that the hour is come to loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters? A slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the family? Let every happy wife and mother who reads these lines give her sympathy, prayers, and efforts to free her sisters from this degrading bondage. Let all the womanhood of the country stand united for them.
There is a power in combined enlightened sentiment and sympathy before which every form of injustice and cruelty must finally go down. May he who came to break every yoke hasten this deliverance. Harriet Beecher Stowe Author's Preface In the fall of the year 1869, a few earnest thinking men, members of the Mormon Church and living in Salt Lake City, inaugurated what was regarded at the time as a grand schism. Those who had watched with anxiety the progress of Mormonism hailed the new movement as the harbinger of the work of disintegration so long anticipated by thoughtful-minded saints,
and believed that the opposition to theocracy then begun would continue until the extraordinary assumptions of the Mormon priesthood were exploded, and Mormonism itself should lose its political status and find its place only among the singular sects of the day. It was freely predicted that woman, in her turn, would accept her part in the work of reformation, take up the marriage question among the saints, and make an end of polygamy. Little did I imagine that at that period that any such mission as that which I have since realized as mine was in the providence of time awaiting me, or that I should ever have the boldness, either with tongue or pen, to plead the cause of the women of Utah.
But impelled by those unseen influences which shape our destinies, I took my stand with the heretics, and as it happened my own was the first woman's name enrolled in their cause. The circumstances which wrought a change in my own life produced a corresponding revolution in the life of my husband. In withdrawing from the Mormon Church, we laid ourselves, our associations, and the labors of over twenty years upon the altar, and took up the burden of life anew. We had sacrificed everything in obedience to the counsel of Brigham Young, and my husband, to give a new direction to his mind,
and also to form some plan for our future life, thought it advisable that he should visit New York. He did so, and shortly after employed himself in writing a history of the Mormon Church, which has since been published. In the course of time, the burden of providing for a large family, and the anxiety and care of conducting successfully a business among a people who make it a religious duty to sternly set their faces against those who dissent from their faith, exhausted my physical and mental strength. Considering therefore that change might be beneficial to me, and my own personal affairs urgently calling me to New York City, I followed my husband, Thither.
On my way east, I met a highly valued friend of my family, who in the course of our journey together over the Pacific Railroad, enthusiastically urged me to tell the story of my life, and to give to the world what I knew about polygamy. I had been repeatedly advised to do so by friends at home, but up to that time no plan had been arranged for me carrying out the suggestion. I had hardly arrived in New York before the electric messenger announced that a severe snowstorm was raging on the vast plains between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River, and for several weeks all traffic over the Union Pacific Railroad was interrupted, and I could not return to my home in the distant west.
That unlooked-for snow blockade became seriously annoying, for not only was I most anxious to return to my children, but also, never having known an idle hour, I could not live without something to do. At that moment of unsettled feeling, a lady friend with whom I was visiting suggested again the book, and she would not permit me to leave her house until she had extracted from me a promise that it should be written. Next morning I began my task in earnest. I faithfully kept my room and labored unremittingly, and in three weeks the manuscript of my little work on polygamy in Utah was completed. It was issued in pamphlet form and was very kindly welcomed by the press, both secular and religious, and for this I was sincerely grateful. I had not up to that time thought of much else than its effect upon the people of Utah, but the voluminous notices which that little book received showed the deep interest which the people of the United States had taken in the Mormon question, and how ardently they desired to see the extinction of the polygamic institution among the saints.
In Salt Lake City I was so situated that I was daily, I might almost say hourly, brought in contact with the visitors to the modern Zion, for during the summer thousands of travelers pass over the Pacific Railroad. Not a few of these called to see me, and I received from ladies and gentlemen whose kind interest in my welfare I felt very deeply, many personal attentions, many words of sympathy and encouragement, and many intelligent and useful suggestions in respect to my future life. Indeed I saw myself quite unexpectedly, and, I may truthfully say, without my own desire, become an object of interest. By the earnest suggestions of friends and strangers, and by the widely published opinions of the press, I was made to feel that I had but begun my work, that I had but partly drawn aside the veil that covered the worst oppression and degradation of woman ever known in a civilized country. Nearly all who spoke to me expressed their surprise that intelligent men and women should be found in communion with the Mormon Church, in which it was so clearly evident that the teachings of Christianity had been supplanted by an attempt to imitate the barbarism of Oriental nations in a long past age, and the sweet influences of the religion of Jesus were superseded by the most objectionable practices of the ancient Jews.
How persons of education and refinement could ever have embraced a faith that prostrated them at the feet of the Mormon prophet and his successor Brigham Young was to the inquiring mind a perfect mystery. The numerous questions which I had to answer, and the explanations which I had to give, shooed me that my little book had only whetted the appetite of the intelligent investigator, and that there was a general call for a woman's book on Mormonism, a book that should reveal the inner life of the saints, exhibit the influences which had contributed to draw Christian people away from Christian churches to the standard of the American prophet, the Christian church. There were persons who had resided for a longer or shorter period in the territory, and more than one at least was published under the name of women who claimed to be members of the Mormon Church. How untrustworthy the accounts of visitors and Gentiles are, and the reason why such should be the case, I shall hereafter in the course of this volume have occasion to explain. And that the autobiographies of supposed Mormon women were equally unreliable, the following facts will clearly demonstrate.
A French lady, a countess and a woman of the world, Madame Olympé Odoi, came to see me in Salt Lake City. She was a woman of intelligence and quick perception, with whom to spend an hour was a perfect pleasure. After her return to France, she of course wrote a book entitled Le Far West. And in that book, page 335, she said, Some of my readers may perhaps have forgotten their French lessons. I therefore translate.
There are two principal journals in Salt Lake City, the New Deseret and the New Telegraph. Mr. Stenhouse is the editor-in-chief of the first. He is a well-taught man of German origin and speaks the French language with greatest purity. His wife, a French lady, is a woman of the world, good-looking, charming, well-educated, a good musician, and the mother of 13 fine children. She is an ex-sister of charity and the only French Catholic who has joined the Mormon Church.
Now here is an example in type. Let us judge of its truthfulness. In the first place, there never was such a paper as the New Deseret or the New Telegraph. The Deseret News has been in existence for some years. My husband assisted on its staff, but he was never editor-in-chief. The Daily Telegraph was my husband's own paper, but it never appeared under any other name.
Little items may seem of small importance, but in a case where truthfulness is called in question, they are worth mentioning. Mr. Stenhouse is a Scotchman by birth and I am an Englishwoman. His acquaintance with the French tongue is, of course, limited, while I for my part never was or will be, either a Roman Catholic or a sister of charity. Ten and not thirteen fine children are all who call me mother, and at the time when Madame Elimpe wrote, there were only eight. Here I state the whole case briefly. Let the reader judge of the truthfulness of traveller stories.
That comprehensive and truthful works on this subject have appeared, I readily admit, but most of them are mere sketches. Such, for example, as that by Secretary Ferris, a Gentile, but a fair and impartial author. Or else were published as that, for instance, by John Hyde, a good man and a vigorous writer, so many years ago that they are now, to a great extent, out of date. Mrs. Waite is the best Gentile lady-writer, but for obvious reasons, although she was a woman of intelligence and penetration, her knowledge of the inner life of Mormonism was necessarily circumscribed. Two books appeared, each claiming to be written by genuine Mormon women.
They were, however, originally published fifteen or twenty years ago, and although they are still on sale, they are, as a matter of course, silent concerning recent events. The first of these two volumes was really written by a gentleman, who was himself neither a Mormon nor had any intimate acquaintance with the system and doctrines of that people. He obtained, from the lady, the supposed author, all the information which she was capable of imparting, and then worked it up in a startling and sensational manner, mingling facts and fiction in such a way that the Mormons have always declared that the whole volume was a scandalous libel. The other volume was first published nearly twenty years ago. It was professedly written by the wife of a Mormon elder, but it was really the production of an old lady in New Jersey, who had never even been out to Utah, and who drew entirely upon her own imagination for all that she could not adapt from other sensational writers on Mormonism.
This book was first published by a New York firm, and being supposed by the innocent public to be genuine, it had an extraordinary circulation, forty or fifty thousand being sold. The publishers, however, failed, and the stereotype plates passed into other hands. Subsequently, the work, having come under the notice of a subscription firm at Hartford, they negotiated for the use of the plates. One word of the heading of each page was cut out. A new title was selected.
Some old illustrations and a few new ones were added. And an ancient steel plate portrait, which had once done duty in some book of poetry, or illustrated volume of fashionable beauties of years ago, was vamped up, and the supposed signature of the fictitious author was engraved beneath it. This book, now rechristened and apparently a new volume, was launched upon the market. It is at the present moment advertised in many local newspapers, and the confiding public cheerfully buy it under the impression that it is the genuine production of a Mormon woman. Such is the history of some of the so-called autobiographies which have appeared.
I mention these facts to show that the demand for a true history by a real Mormon woman has never yet been supplied. It is this knowledge which induced me to publish my former little work, and encourages me to hope that the present volume may meet with acceptance. A few months after the publication of my first book, I was invited to lecture upon polygamy in Utah. And wherever I spoke, I observed the same spirit of enquiry, and met with a renewed demand for more of circumstance and narrative, which I had from a sense of personal delicacy, withheld in my former work. I saw no way of satisfying myself and others than by accepting the rather spiteful invitation of a certain Mormon paper to tell it all, and this in a narrative of my own personal experience, which I now present to the reader I have endeavoured to do.
Myself, not in any sense a literary woman, or making any pretensions as a writer, I hope to escape severe criticism from the public and the press. I had a simple story to tell, the story of my life, and of the wrongs of women in Utah. Startling and terrible facts have fallen under my observation. These also I have related. But my constant effort has been to tell my story in the plainest, simplest way, and to avoid exaggeration, but never shrink from a straightforward statement of facts. I have disguised nothing and palliated nothing, and I feel assured that those who from their actual and intimate acquaintance with Mormonism in Utah, as it really is, are capable of passing a just and impartial judgment upon my story, will pronounce without hesitation that I have told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
End of prefaces
