Here the original manuscript reads were. Oliver Cowdery changed the were to was in copying to the printer’s manuscript. This change seems consistent with all other usage in the text. Elsewhere there are 15 occurrences of “it was ... expedient”, but none of “it were ... expedient”. Consider this example which also involves the verb find:
There is one example of were, but it is a subjunctive were in a conditional clause with inverted word order:
In that passage the subjunctive were is what we expect. But in all the other cases, there is no conditional sense; rather, all 15 cases involve a simple past-tense form in the indicative. So the most logically consistent solution would be to accept the grammatically corrected reading in Alma 55:23, “it was not expedient”.
On the other hand, as noted nearby under Alma 53:5, there are a number of nonsubjunctive clauses in the earliest text where were occurs rather than the expected was. The critical text will restore these instances of were, including this one in Alma 55:23, despite its uniqueness as far as the phrase “it was/were ... expedient” is concerned.
Summary: Restore in Alma 55:23 the unique instance of were in the phrase “it were not expedient”, the reading of the original manuscript; all other instances of this phrase read “it was … expedient” in the earliest text.