The Skeptic Who Stood on the Bench: Lewis Barney's Answer to the Mob (1840)

Lewis Barney was born September 8, 1808, in Cayuga County, New York, and reared on the Ohio and Illinois frontiers. A militia captain and a veteran of the Black Hawk War, he settled 280 farmed acres in Illinois, then sold out for Iowa land in 1838 — just as the Missouri persecutions filled the country with reports about the "Mormons." "I in common with the rest of the people supposed they were the most outrageous and hardened set of criminals that ever graced the earth," he later wrote. The competing sects that tried to convert him only soured him further: "I came to the conclusion that religion of every kind was a hoax, and that none was right. And that all preachers of religion were hypocrites. And were preaching for money and popularity."

Then two Mormon elders came down his Iowa road, travel bags in hand, and the skeptic went to hear them out of curiosity. He searched the scriptures and investigated carefully for a year and a half. Finding the Saints to be "honest, industrious people and wickedly misrepresented," he asked for baptism — and in May 1840 was baptized in the Mississippi River by Alva Tippits and confirmed a member of the Church under the hands of the Prophet Joseph Smith himself. Within a short time his father's whole family and some thirty neighbors formed a branch sixty miles from Nauvoo.

One evening a mob gathered at the house where the little branch was holding a meeting, intent on breaking it up. Lewis sprang onto a bench and met them — a soldier's son appealing to soldier's rights: he had volunteered to clear Iowa for settlement; his father had served in the War of 1812; his grandfather had commanded a fleet in the Revolution. "We as American citizens are enjoying the fruits of their sufferings… We wish you to enjoy the privilege of living on your farms unmolested. We have not come here out of any evil motive. We believe the Bible. We believe in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost… Now I ask you kindly if you have any objections to our having a little prayer meeting this evening?" The mob had no answer to; the Saints held their meeting in peace and returned to their homes — and Lewis recorded that the Mormons never disturbed their neighbors in the enjoyment of theirs.

He gathered to Nauvoo, warned those who would listen that if Joseph Smith ever went to Carthage he would never come away alive — a warning fulfilled at the martyrdom — and when the mobs burned the outlying settlements he abandoned a hundred-tree orchard and thirty-five fenced acres to the fire. In the exodus he let the destitute have his grain and hauled the poorest Saints west with his own two wagons. Chosen for the first pioneer company in 1847, he rode as one of its best hunters, and on the return trip east — feeding the teams from his rifle — he gave the Lord the credit for bringing them safely back. "The Lord blessed him," his family wrote after a lifetime of hard frontier starts from Provo to Sanpete to Arizona, "and means came into his hands from many sources, so that many times he was astonished." He died November 5, 1894, at Mancos, Colorado, at eighty-six.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

We had a branch of the church organized at my house, and we were holding a meeting one evening when a mob gathered around the house, intending to break up our meeting. I stepped out of the door and got upon a bench and addressed them. I told them that I was an American citizen, and that my father had fought in the war of 1812, and my grandfather had commanded a fleet in the Revolutionary war, and that we were enjoying the fruits of their labors, and that we had a right to worship God according to the dictates of our own consciences. I told them that we were not there for any evil purpose, but that we believed in the Bible, and in God the Father, and in his Son Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost, and that we were trying to live according to the teachings of the Savior. I asked them if they had any objections to our having a prayer meeting. They had nothing to say, and they went away and left us in peace.