The Mormon (newspaper)

The Mormon was the New York newspaper through which John Taylor publicly defended the Latter-day Saints, as recounted in B.H. Roberts’s The Life of John Taylor. Roberts singles it out as the vehicle for Taylor’s most conspicuous work as “a defender of the faith and character of the Saints”: Taylor “leaped into the public arena, threw down his gage of battle and dared the traducers of the Saints of God to take it up.” Notably, Taylor took the very name “Mormon” — a slur made “the synonym for all that was absurd in religion, impure in social life, or disloyal to government” — and made it the title of his paper, writing it “in bold letters” surrounded by “the symbols of liberty, intelligence and truth.”

The highlights position the paper as an apologetic engine: through it Taylor argued the Saints “were not religious enthusiasts—fanatics—rebels” but “patriots demanding their rights,” casting them as heirs to “their Revolutionary Fathers” under the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The paper is one of the threads through which Roberts’s biography examines the apologetic-versus-truth-seeking tension in the Mormon historiographical tradition.

Context: The Mormon was a weekly newspaper published in New York City beginning in 1855, edited by John Taylor (later the third president of the LDS Church) to counter anti-Mormon press coverage in the eastern United States.

Where this appears

• The Life of John Taylor — Roberts presents The Mormon as Taylor’s principal public-defense vehicle and an emblem of his apologetic boldness, reclaiming the derided name “Mormon” as the paper’s masthead.