The reactions of the Mormons to Joseph’s candidacy varied all the way from George Miller’s ingenuous certainty that if the election was successful Joseph and the Council of Fifty would “at once establish dominion in the United States,” to John D. Lee’s despairing complaint: “It was hard enough to preach the gospel without purse or scrip; but it was as nothing compared to offering the Prophet Joseph to the people as a candidate for the highest gift of the nation. I would a thousand times rather have been shut up in jail than to have taken such a trip, but I dared not refuse.”
