BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
Grant, Jedediah Morgan. A collection of facts, relative to the course taken by Elder Sidney Rigdon, in the states of Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and Pennsylvania. By Jedediah M. Grant, one of the Quorum of Seventies. Philadelphia: Brown, Bicking & Guilbert, Printers, No. 56 North Third Street. 1844.
48 pp. 19 cm.
Immediately after his excommunication on September 8, 1844, Sidney Rigdon returned to Pennyslvania and began to gather a following. Benjamin Winchester, who had been at odds with the Twelve for almost three years, aligned himself with Rigdon, and at the end of September rented a hall in Philadelphia and began to conduct meetings in his behalf. In October a Rigdonite congregation was formally organized in Philadelphia, and during the first week in November Rigdon himself delivered a set of lectures there promoting his claim to the leadership of the Church. This struggle for succession is reflected in the record of the Philadelphia branch, which lists the excommunications of a number of branch members who had defected to the Rigdonite faction during October and November. By the end of the year these defections seem to have subsided, and by the spring of 1847 the Rigdonite church had all but disintegrated.
Jedediah M. Grant, a member of the First Quorum of Seventy since February 1835, had presided over the Philadelphia branch from June 1843 to April 1844, and had resumed this position in July. In April 1854 he would be sustained as second counselor to Brigham Young in the First Presidency of the Church, a position he would hold until his death on December 1, 1856, at age forty.
Grant obviously composed A Collection of Facts in response to the disaffections in the Philadelphia branch. The Prophet of December 28, 1844, noted that it had just received copies and had them for sale at the office for 15¢ each. The following week it reported that Rigdon had brought suit against Grant over the tract. A year later the New York–Messenger offered A Collection of Facts at 12¢.
The pamphlet opens with the claim that Rigdon possessed, “a yawning disposition after imaginary things … combined with great ambition, and over anxiety to be leader.” It asserts that he was the guiding influence behind the spirit of speculation that swept Kirtland in 1836–37, and that his 1838 Fourth of July oration “was the main auxiliary that fanned into a flame the burning wrath of the mobocratic portion of the Missourians.” And it comments on Joseph Smith’s rejection of him as his counselor in October 1843. More than third is occupied with the report of Rigdon’s trial, reprinted, with omissions, from the Times and Seasons of September 15, October 1, and 15, 1844 (see this digital collection), or from The Prophet of November 16 and 23.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]). Item 242, p. 284-85.
Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.