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Nauvoo to Assist the Community to Purchase the Temple Property

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Nauvoo to Assist the Community to Purchase the Temple Property There was a contribution given by the people of Nauvoo to assist the community to purchase the Temple property – testimony of Bartholomy Serreau [Nauvoo] The original detailed historical MANUSCRIPT DEPOSITIONS SIGNED by Icarians and their attorney, in the lawsuit which secured the Nauvoo Temple lot and related properties to the Icarian Society, enabling the continuation of this famous communitarian movement well beyond the 1856 death of their founder, Etienne Cabet. "Mayors Office of the City of Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois," August 3 – September 30, 1858. Approx. 32 X 21 cm. and other sizes. Approximately 27 pages of manuscript, as follow: — 6 substantial MANUSCRIPT LEGAL DEPOSITIONS in the hand of the Justice of the Peace, signed by the deponents. 20½ tall pages on 12 leaves. :: preceded by :: — the Icarians' attorneys' SIGNED MANUSCRIPT NOTICE of the proceedings (on a shorter leaf of blue paper, 1 page); :: the whole followed by :: — the deposing justice's SIGNED, MANUSCRIPT HISTORY of when and how these depositions were taken (1½ tall pages on one leaf, including fees); 2 :: together with :: — 2 somewhat shorter leaves written front and back as MANUSCRIPT EXHIBITS A AND B (total of 3 pages of writing, on 2 leaves), :: and :: — 2 PARTLY-PRINTED WITNESS SUMMONS SLIPS fully accomplished in manuscript front and back, for a total of nine witnesses desired to be summoned (not all of whom were actually deposed, including one whose name is lined out in pencil). Medium wear, but in generally very good, stable condition. the collection: $12,500 ETAILS PRESERVED HERE regarding the temple lot and other Icarian real estate Dand property are surely unknown to most historians. Much of what is preserved here in such depth could hardly be available anywhere else. These deposed testimonies were taken down by a justice of the peace, and then signed by each witness. At this crucial turning point of Icarian history, the Icarians' attorneys ("Morrill & Hooker") were seeking evidence here that, although the late Etienne Cabet had originally purchased the Icarian properties in his own name (before the Illinois legislature had incorporated the Icarian Society), this had been done using community funds and not Cabet's own money - and that furthermore, it was always understood and agreed that the properties belonged to the entire community, and never to Cabet personally. Still present with these papers is those attorney's handwritten notice to the family heirs of Etienne Cabet, affixed to the first page of depositions and SIGNED IN RECEIPT of a copy thereof, on its verso, by the Cabet heirs' attorney. In the lower left margin of the notice is a note written horizontally: "opened by leave of court & filed Oct 19. 1858, S R Davis clk." BACKGROUND: Etienne CABET (1788–1856) was an important and widely influential French utopian socialist or pre-Marxian "communiste." . He was elected to the chamber of deputies in 1831, but his bitter attacks on the government resulted in his conviction for treason. He escaped prison by exiling himself to Great Britain (1834–39), where he developed a theory of communism influenced by Robert Owen. Cabet's Voyage en Icarie (1840) depicted an ideal society in which an elected government controlled all economic activity and 3 supervised social affairs, the family remaining the only other independent unit. The book was extremely popular, and Cabet gained many followers. A group of them attempted unsuccessfully (1848) to found an Icarian community on the Red River in Texas. The next year Cabet established a temporary colony at the old Mormon town of Nauvoo, Ill., but serious dissension arose in 1856, and he was not reelected president. He died soon after in St. Louis. Most of the Icarians moved to lands they had purchased near Corning, Iowa, where branch communities survived until 1898. Other works by Cabet include Histoire populaire de la Révolution française (4 vol., 1839–40), Colonie icarienne aux États-Unis d'Amérique (1856), and Le vrai Christianisme suivant Jésus Christ (1846). [ http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Cabet,+Etienne accessed November 27, 2010] "In 1833," adds The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979), writing from a decidedly Marxist perspective, he became the publisher of the journal Le Populaire. Because of repression he emigrated to Belgium. In 1834, Cabet went to live in Great Britain, where he became acquainted with R. Owen. In [18]40 he wrote the book How I Became a Communist and the novel Voyage to Icaria (Russian translation, vols. 1-2, 1935). In the novel, Cabet depicted communism as an association founded on social equality, brotherhood, unity, and democracy in accordance with the principles of reason and the demands of nature. Cabet’s Utopia had petit bourgeois features, such as the equalization of consump- tion, the preservation of privately owned agricultural enterprises, and the preservation under communism of a pantheistic kind of religion. He believed that communism could be achieved through persuasion and peaceful reforms. As a whole his Utopia has much in common with the views of 18th-century Utopian communists. In comparison with the teachings of the most important socialist thinkers of the first half of the 19th century, Cabet’s Utopia represented a step backward. However, because of the undeveloped class consciousness of the proletariat at that time, his Icarian Communism was widely accepted by French artisans and workers. K. Marx characterized him as being France’s “most popular, although the most superficial, representative of communism” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 2, p. 146). In 1843, Cabet began publishing The Icarian Almanac… [ibid.] For a Mormon-based historical overview, we can turn from the USSR to Salt Lake City where Glen M. Leonard's Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise was published by Deseret Book Company in 2002, with a substantial summary of the Nauvoo Icarian period, pp. 627-630. Leonard explains that after an abortive attempt to establish their colony in Texas, some 300 Icarians moved with Cabet to Nauvoo in 1849, where they "purchased abandoned houses for back taxes, rented eight hundred acres of farmland in Illinois, and later bought three thousand acres near Corning, Iowa." (p. 628) "The Icarians," he continues, 4 acquired the temple in March 1849 for the minimum established by the trustees, two thousand dollars. Before they could realize their plans to restore the gutted structure as a meeting hall, dining hall, and school, . [o]n the afternoon of June 27, 1850, a fierce windstorm toppled two walls of the temple and left a third unstable. To save their investment, the Icarians salvaged the shaped temple stones for use in a communal dining hall, a boarding school, and other buildings. [p. 629] While Leonard reports that the Illinois "legislature rejected the Icarians' request for a city charter in February 1851," (p. 629), the manuscript testimony here makes it clear that the legislature did at least grant incorporation to what became known legally as the "Icarian Society." Life was by no means easy, of course, but the members were devoted to their "communist" ideals, and they were highly industrious . These temporary setbacks did not deter the Icarians from pursuing their dream. Residents and visitors alike complimented them on their orderly, industrious, virtuous approach to life. At Nauvoo, they operated a sawmill, a large flour mill, a brewery, a distillery, two weekly newspapers (one in French), and a communal vegetable garden and orchard. They exported local products to St. Louis. They preached against smoking, dressed uniformly and simply, ate in a common dining hall, emphasized education, and resolved community issues through deliberation and arbitration. [Leonard, 630] Then, rather suddenly, general economic challenges were compounded by equally serious administrative disputes. In 1856 the community divided, and Etienne Cabet with his closest adherents left Nauvoo to regroup in Missouri - angrily taking with them the deeds to the Nauvoo lands which were still in Cabet's personal name. It is in regard to the remaining Society's presumed (but now threatened) holdings that the present papers relate. Earlier, Cabet had needed to go back to France in 1851 to defend himself from charges pending against him there. After he cleared his name and returned to Nauvoo, he seems to have exerted such dictatorial powers over the community that they voted him out of his office of President of the Society. In the fall of 1856, therefore, with a third of the community, Cabet moved to the St. Louis area –where he then promptly died. This would prove most inconvenient to the other Icarians, who still viewed themselves as the true Society, but who now wanted to liquidate their Nauvoo properties and move to their more extensive and promising lands already developing in western Iowa: The majority group of 250 members . remained in Nauvoo for a short period after Cabet and his followers had left taking with them the account books and other legal documents of the commune as a "means of punishment." The economic situation deteriorated further, but contrary to expectations no 5 ideological revision followed the unreasonable steps of the aged leader; in spite of the struggle and schism the Nauvoo commune members regarded themselves as loyal Icarians. They were led by two ideologists, Gerard and Marchand, who had both been among the founders of the Icarian movement in France. The limitations of economic development in Nauvoo prompted the commune to speed up the transfer to their lands in Iowa, where a group of 18 members were clearing the land. They had to prove their ownership and, lacking the purchase deeds which Cabet had removed, they were faced with a prolonged lawsuit which they finally won. The land was theirs but the commune was heavily in debt.
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