The "Manuscript Story," of Reverend Solomon Spalding; or "Manuscript Found"

"Herewith we present to the reader the notorious “Manuscript Story” [“Manuscript Found”], of the Reverend Solomon Spalding. What gives this document prominence is the fact that for the past fifty years it has been made to do duty by the opposers of the Book of Mormon as the source, the root, and the inspiration, by and from which Joseph Smith and Sydney Rigdon wrote the Book of Mormon. It has been popularly and persistently claimed that the plan, subject matter, including prominent names and localites, history of the origin of the aboriginal races of America, with their arts and sciences, civilizations and customs, were identical in this “Manuscript Found” and in the Book of Mormon. Thousands have believed this false and foolish statement, without giving its truth or falsity an hour’s fair and unprejudiced investigation, and then fought the book and the church with a readiness and a zeal almost without a parallel. And now that this veritable “Manuscript Found,” with an unbroken chain of evidence proving its identity and running back to E. D. Howe, D. P. Hurlbut, Spalding’s “old trunk,” and so back to Pittsburg, Conneaut, and to the very pen of Solomon Spalding, has by the providence of God been furnished us, and that, too, by those not of the church, we take pleasure in exhibiting in the sunlight of solid facts, this hob-goblin of the pulpit...that with which they have fooled and frightened the masses
and blinded those inquiring into the origin and character of the Book of Mormon."