This filled him with bitterness against the Saints, and especially against the Prophet. He at once set on foot measures that he hoped would bring him a terrible revenge. He succeeded in getting the Missourians to issue a new warrant for his arrest on the old charge of "theft, arson and murder," and a new requisition for his arrest was granted by Governor Ford, of Illinois.
The warrants were served on the Prophet in Lee County, some two hundred miles from Nauvoo. The officers who arrested him sought to drag him immediately into Missouri, but in this they failed, as Joseph through some friends obtained a writ of _habeas corpus_, and the legality of the warrant was enquired into by the municipal court of Nauvoo. The court also went behind the writ and tried the case _exparte_ on its merits, and discharged the accused for want of subsistence in the warrant on which he was arrested, as well as upon the merits of the case.
Elder Taylor in an editorial in the _Neighbor_ of July 5th 1843, thus deals with the course pursued by Missouri in these several instances of persecution against the Prophet:
"It has fallen to our lot of late years to keep an account of any remarkable circumstances that might transpire in and about this and adjoining states; as well as of distant provinces and nations. Among the many robberies, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, fires, mobs, wars, etc., which we have had to record, there is one circumstance of annual occurrence which it has always fallen to our lot to chronicle. We allude not to the yearly inundation of the Nile, nor the frequent eruptions of Vesuvius or Ætna, but to the boiling over of Tophet, _alias_ the annual overflow of the excrescence of Missouri. Not indeed, like the Nile, over-flowing its parched banks, invigorating its alluvial soil and causing vegetation to teem forth in its richest attire; but like the sulphurous flame that burns unnoticed in the bowels of a volcano; kept alive by the combustion of its own native element, until it can contain itself no longer within the limits of its crater; it bursts beyond its natural bounds; spreads its sulphurous lava all around, leaving naught but desolation in its path,--destroying alike the cot of the husbandman, and the palace of the noble, in one grand sweep; covering vegetation with its fiery lava, and turning the garden into a bed of cinders. So Missouri has her annual ebulitions, and must belch forth her sulphurous lava and seek to overwhelm others; and as it happens that we are so unfortunate as to live near the borders of this monster, we must ever and anon, be smutted with the soot that flies off from her burning crater.