Soldier and Abolitionist
Phelps was born in Guilford, Vermont, the son of Judge John and Lucy (Lovell) Phelps. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy on July 1, 1832, and graduated on July 1, 1836, with the brevet rank of Second Lieutenant, and was assigned to the 4th U.S. Artillery. He was promoted to Second Lieutenant on July 28, 1836. He fought in the Creek and Seminole War in 1838, and participated in the Trail of Tears that same year.
He was promoted to First Lieutenant on July 7, 1838, and Captain on March 31, 1850. During this period he served in the Seminole Wars in Florida, the Mexican-American War, and spent 1857–1859 with the Mormon Expedition. In his diaries, he wrote about the Mormon faith with extreme disdain. "Where else than in America could such a flat and puerile invention become enshrined as an established belief. From what trunk except one of the most vigeorous of free institutions could such a fungus of absolutism arise?" In a December 1857 letter he compared Mormonism to a "snake coiled in the desert and concluded that it, like the snake, should be smitten immediately." He was a strong advocate for use of military means to suppress what he viewed as the Mormon threat to American republicanism.
He resigned from the army on November 2, 1859. At the beginning of the Civil War, he resided in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote forceful articles pointing out the danger of the constantly increasing political influence of the slave states.
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