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Show Page 262 advantage of the Saints, for, with all the publicity accorded Newman, HIS fall could be exceedingly great. To bring it about, Brigham would employ his secret weapon - Orson Pratt. If Orson, better equipped than anyone else in the art of argumentation, could make any points at all against Newman, the image of the Church would immediately improve. On the other hand, if Orson were to come up bested, Brigham could stand aloof and treat the debate as mere contumely between two intellectualizing hotheads. Accordingly, Brigham suggested through the Deseret News that the "discreditable and ungentlemanly" Newman take up his argument with Orson Pratt, 53 "whose name (was suggested) in the article." And so Orson went up against the chaplain of the Radical Republicans to defend Joseph Smith's patriarchal order. The disputants, curiously, had much more in common than an interest in marital practices. Newman to some extent shared Orson's backwoods New York upbringing; despite his exalted position, the chaplain "started as a rustic." Like Orson, he had experienced conversion in his adolescence, and devoted his life thereafter to preaching. He had studied Methodist divinity at Cazenovia, New York, when Orson was tramping that very region on one of his early missions, and had only recently received a largely honorary degree from Rochester University, Celebrated for his imaginative homiletics, he had gone on to pack churches in Albany and Washington Square, New York, before taking a mission to conquered New Orleans where he built up nine congregations for free coloreds. A trip to Palestine resulted in an exhortatory book entitled From Dan to Beersheba,which made him famous and brought him to Washington with the incoming Grant Administration. Newman's brilliance thenceforth provided one of the most corrupt political machines in U.S. history with weekly harangues on the uprightness of American institutions, to the gratification of his high-placed listeners: |