Oliver Cowdery initially wrote “to wars & to bloodsheds” here in the printer’s manuscript; then with slightly heavier ink flow, he crossed out the ampersand and supralinearly inserted the negative conjunction nor. It’s quite possible that Oliver’s correction followed the reading of the original manuscript. He could have made this correction when he proofed 𝓟 against 𝓞. It’s also possible that Oliver caught his error virtually immediately after writing down the ampersand, with him redipping his quill and then correcting the ampersand to nor.
On the other hand, there is some evidence that Oliver Cowdery’s correction of and to nor could have been the result of editing. In 4 Nephi 1:2, scribe 2 of the printer’s manuscript copied the text there as “there was no contentions & disputations among them”. The 1830 edition also reads and, so most likely there was an and (written as an ampersand) in the original manuscript for 4 Nephi 1:2. (For that part of the text, both the 1830 edition and 𝓟 are firsthand copies of 𝓞.) When Oliver was proofreading 4 Nephi 1:2, he initially crossed out the & and wrote nor supralinearly. But he then restored the original and by crossing out the supralinear nor and writing an ampersand before the now crossed-out nor. Thus Oliver seems to have had a tendency in negative sentences to emend and to nor in conjuncts. Yet he was also able to resist this tendency, at least in 4 Nephi 1:2, where he ended up restoring the actual reading of his copytext, the original manuscript.
Here in Helaman 6:17, one could argue that Oliver Cowdery expected the and in the clause “they had not been stirred up to anger / to wars and to bloodsheds”. Elsewhere in the text, there are seven instances of “war(s) and bloodshed(s)” but no instances of “war(s) or bloodshed(s)” or of “war(s) nor bloodshed(s)”. In fact, if one were to emend this passage in Helaman 6:17, perhaps some kind of conjunctive element between to anger and to wars should be supplied, such as neither or nor. And for each of these possible emendations, we can find an example elsewhere in the text that supports that kind of conjunctive negation:
not ... neither ... nor
not ... nor ... nor
These possible emendations for Helaman 6:17 presuppose the loss of either neither or nor in the early transmission of the text. Yet elsewhere in the textual history, there are no examples of the loss of neither or nor as single words, even momentarily, which suggests that the original text here in Helaman 6:17 actually read as corrected in 𝓟, “they had not been stirred up to anger / to wars nor to bloodsheds”.
There is some minimal evidence in the Book of Mormon text that nor can be lacking in a negative sequence of conjuncts, but the only example is in a biblical citation where the negative conjunction is lacking before thy manservant (marked below with an arrow):
The King James text also lacks the nor in that one place, and that is because the original Hebrew lacks a connecting waw ‘and’ before thy manservant (but only there for any of the nouns that are conjoined with thou). We note that the phrase “thy manservant nor thy maidservant” works as a unit, which may justify the omission of the waw. Similarly, “to wars nor to bloodsheds” works as a unit, thus justifying the missing preceding negative conjunction before to wars.
This independent evidence, although minor, supports the current reading in Helaman 6:17.
For that reason, the critical text will maintain the corrected reading in 𝓟. This difficult reading in 𝓟 was probably the reading in 𝓞 since Oliver made sure that it was copied correctly into 𝓟. There still remains the possibility that the original text had a negative conjunction between to anger and to wars, perhaps neither or nor, that was lost during the dictation of the text.
Nonetheless, it should be pointed out that nor does occur before his manservant later on in Mosiah 13 as Abinadi continues to quote from the Ten Commandments:
And in this second case, the nor also appears before his manservant in the corresponding passage in the King James Bible as well as in the Hebrew original. Thus the evidence for omitting the nor before a semantically related pair of conjuncts is fairly weak.
Summary: Accept in Helaman 6:17 Oliver Cowdery’s correction in 𝓟 of and to nor (giving “they had not been stirred up to anger / to wars nor to bloodsheds”); Oliver’s correction in 𝓟 probably followed the reading in 𝓞; there is some minor evidence for this difficult reading from Mosiah 13:18, a biblical quote, but there is also some possibility that the original text had neither or nor immediately preceding to wars.