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History and Religion
“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”

Last updated on: May 12, 2026 at 4:15 pm by Dan Peterson

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“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” 2026-05-12T16:15:26-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Liverpool waterfront as it appears today (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We walked around the area of Liverpool’s Albert Docks this morning in cold and blustery weather. (Fortunately, the rain was light and short-lived.) This was the port through which passed most of the Latter-day Saint converts from England and from continental Europe. My Norwegian Lutheran grandmother also sailed to North America from Liverpool. She was alone and just eighteen, and I’m astonished at her courage.

An iconic anti-slavery medallion created by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We also visited World of Wedgwood, in Staffordshire, the relevance of which to the early Latter-day Saint missions to England will become apparent in a couple of days. Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), of course, was an English potter, entrepreneur, and abolitionist (a friend and associate of William Wilberforce), as well as the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

This 2001 bronze statue by Mark De Graffenried, titled “The Emigrants,” stands on the Albert Docks in Liverpool. Given to the people of the city by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 2007, it commemorates migration from Liverpool to the New World. It pays tribute to the many families from all over Europe who embarked from Liverpool for a new life in America. (Wikimedia Commons photograph by Humphrey Bolton)

For my own invariably nefarious reasons, I was reading a bit in Mark Twain’s 1872 travel memoir Roughing It just prior to our departure for England. I think that I’ll share a little bit from it with which you’re probably already familiar. First, though, some minimal background:

Orion Clemens (1825-1897) was the first and only Secretary of the Nevada Territory. By at least 1860, he had come to the conclusion that slavery was morally wrong, and he therefore worked for the election of the Republican presidential nominee, Abraham Lincoln.

Following Lincoln’s election as president, Clemens was appointed Secretary to the new government of the Territory of Nevada, where he would sometimes function as acting governor in the absence of James W. Nye. His younger brother Sam — aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain — accompanied him out to Nevada in the summer of 1861. That journey is the subject of the semi-autobiographical book Roughing It, from which I quote:

We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables—a great variety and as great abundance. We walked about the streets some, afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes—a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and shoulders—for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary concentric rings of its home circle. . . .

Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim dwellings, built of “frame” and sunburned brick—a great thriving orchard and garden behind every one of them, apparently—branches from the street stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees—and a grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and about and over the whole. And everywhere were workshops, factories, and all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked; and in one’s ears was the ceaseless clink of hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-wheels.

The armorial crest of my own State [of Missouri, presumably] consisted of two dissolute bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the pertinent remark, “UNITED, WE STAND—(hic!)—DIVIDED, WE FALL.” It was always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with the bees all at work! . . .

Salt Lake City was healthy—an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having “no visible means of support.”

In 1889, nearly thirty years after his visit to Utah, Twain would go on to publish his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. So I noticed the phrasing of his description of Heber C. Kimball (d. 22 June 1868), the close friend of Brigham Young and Brigham’s longtime counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whose role in the establishment of the Church here in England is of monumental importance. Twain says that he and his brother

visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and talked long with that shrewd Connecticut Yankee, Heber C. Kimball (since deceased), a saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce.

Heber C. Kimball (1801-1868) was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles from 1835 until 1847, and served thereafter in the First Presidency from 1847 until his death in 1868. He led the first Latter-day Saint mission to England, in 1837. (Image from LDS Media Library)

I intend to use yet another passage from Roughing It in an article for Meridian Magazine in the near future, so I’ll content myself here with the following:

Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.

I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

Posted from Stratford-upon-Avon, England

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