$3+
INTRODUCTION
This book is the first work published in modern times which sets forth the concept of the government of God which was revealed through Joseph Smith and shows the significance of that concept in the westward move of the Latter-day Saints from Illinois, and the colonization of the West under Brigham Young. It is also the first work written to show that Joseph Smith actually organized the nucleus of that divine political system on earth, in the form of the General Council or, as it was nicknamed, the Council of Fifty.
During the first half of the twentieth century the knowledge of the General Council was virtually lost to the world, and it was only after the publication of A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876, in 1955, that substantial progress was made in bringing the knowledge of this political body to light in recent times. In the fall of 1955, J. Keith Melville and I were on the faculty of Ricks College, in Rexburg, Idaho, where I taught a class that academic year on the social, economic, and political thought of Joseph Smith. Melville had written his master's thesis, in 1949, on "The Political Philosophy of Brigham Young," and was then working on his doctoral dissertation (which he completed in 1956), entitled "The Political Ideas of Brigham Young." In 1952, I wrote my master's thesis on the subject "World Government as Envisioned in the Latter-day Saint 'City of Zion,'" and in the summer of 1955 I completed my doctoral dissertation entitled "Joseph Smith, Social Philosopher, Theorist and Prophet."
Until the publication of Lee's diaries, neither Melville or I realized that the government of God was more than an ideal in early Latter-day Saint thought—that there had been an actual political organ started by Joseph Smith. During the fall quarter at Ricks College, 1955, Melville called my attention to a statement in Lee's diary which indicated that the political organ of the kingdom had been a practical and functional thing. The editors of his diaries, however, apparently had little correct understanding of it. But with our background, we could see the significance of Lee's disclosures.
Beginning at that time, I started to gather and relate information on the role of the Council of Fifty among the Latter-day Saints. In the fall of 1956, I accepted a position on the faculty of the Brigham Young University where I continued my research and probed the subject further at the Church Historian's Library in Salt Lake City. I also gave lectures and conducted discussions both on and off campus on the subject of the government of God, at which faculty members from the departments of religions, history and political science were present, with interested students. As a result, there was much interest created in the subject, and from that interest further research has been done by myself and others. In the spring of 1958, this volume came from the press as the first published analysis of the government of God and its role in Latter-day Saint history in recent times, giving the results of my research on the activities of the General Council to that time.
Hyrum L. Andrus