Smith sent off the Twelve Apostles to Great Britain to serve as missionaries for the new faith. All left families in desperate circumstances struggling to establish themselves in Iowa or Illinois. While Smith had been imprisoned, Brigham Young, the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had brought the believers out of Missouri, and the Saints "had obeyed him implicitly."Brodie, 258. But with Young and the others in Europe, Smith recovered his earlier prestige and authority. Meanwhile, the missionaries found many willing converts in Great Britain, often poor factory workers.Bushman (2005), 409; Brodie, 258, 264-65. Many converts came from dissatisfied members of English sects "along the margins of conventional church life." On the previous religious beliefs of these Mormon converts, see Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993). The Mormon missionaries were shocked by the poverty they witnessed, and as Fawn Brodie has written, they "began to preach the glory of America along with the glory of the gospel." The Mormon Millennial Star published in Liverpool "frequently had the ring of a real estate pamphlet." Brodie, 264. These first trickled, then flooded, into Nauvoo, raising Smith's spirits.Bushman (2005), 410.
