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Show Page 200 issued from Orson's desk. In March, he forwarded three thousand copies of the periodical to Sarah to supply the calls in Utah, with instructions to pay one-tenth of them as tithing. Sarah put the magazine on sale from her front door, charging a dollar "per annum in advance." Washington was not disposed to discuss polygamy, however; a rancorous national debate over "popular sovereignty" and abolitionism held Congress virtually paralyzed while the Whig party collapsed in ruins. Though it cast a cold glance at the Mormon "peculiar institution," Congress was obsessed with other, more sanguinary, questions. Even among the Saints, subscriptions were less and less often renewed, and by April 1854, The Seer was losing money. Orson finished out the July and August numbers that year and called it quits, after twenty issues and 320 pages, almost exclusively his own writings. He had indulged most of his intellectual hobbies in its pages, with articles on the formation of the universe, the nature of preexistent intelligences, speculations about the "Millennial map" of the earth. But its importance lay in the magazine's systematic theology-rationale favoring polygamy - not only as a religious principle to be left unhindered by constitutional law, but also as a practice which, if adopted, would prove salutary to the human race. Behind his desk in Washington, Orson had enough time to interest himself in his own family background. Spurred on by his belief in Mormon doctrines concerning salvation for the dead, he began putting out feelers to learn more about his own lineage. The job of reconstruction would not be easy. Both his parents were now dead - Charity had succumbed to cholera in 1849 on her way to Utah, along with Orson's oldest brother Anson - and his aurviving brothers, he knew, would have little more information than he already had. But he decided to get off a letter to Parley to see what could be found out, along with a list of their "fathers" as far as he could ascertain it. |