Chapter 11
Searching for a Home
In This Chapter
Gathering the Mormons in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois
Building the first temples and performing the first ordinances
Dealing with persecution and Prophet Joseph Smith’s murder
Visiting Mormon history sites today
To understand today’s Mormon culture and mindset, you have to understand what happened during the faith’s earliest days, especially the period between Joseph Smith’s organization of the Church in 1830 and his martyrdom in 1844. The Church devotes considerable instruction time to early Latter- day Saint history, and most Mormons are quite familiar with what happened during the 1830s and 1840s. In contrast to some other religious groups today, Mormons often can not only name the Church’s earliest converts but also provide details about those early Mormons’ lives, sufferings, and contributions. For Mormons, history is theology, so they can’t take it lightly.
This chapter traces Joseph Smith’s attempts to settle his people in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois and analyzes what happened when Mormonism collided with the local populations. In addition, we look at the origins of many ins and outs of Mormonism today.
A Significant Pit Stop: Kirtland, Ohio
Just a few months after officially organizing the Church in upper New York (see Chapter 4), Joseph Smith sent missionaries to the far-off Missouri territory to teach the Indians about this restored gospel. In November 1830, led by chief Book of Mormon scribe Oliver Cowdery, the missionaries took a break from their 1,500-mile journey and preached in the area of Kirtland, Ohio, not far from Cleveland. Little did they know their efforts would be so successful that, because of persecution, Joseph Smith would soon move the fledgling Church’s headquarters there from New York.
One of the missionaries wanted to reconnect with a Kirtland-area man who he’d studied religion with a few years before discovering Mormonism. The man, a Campbellite minister named Sidney Rigdon, was actively seeking a return to New Testament Christianity — not unlike what the Mormons were trying to do. Sidney allowed the Mormons to preach to his congregation, and, impressed by the Book of Mormon, he converted. Within a month, more than a hundred others were baptized into the Mormon faith.
Soon after his conversion, Sidney visited Joseph Smith in New York, and the Prophet received a revelation to move to the Kirtland area. A powerful speaker, Sidney played a central role in Mormon leadership for more than a decade, until parting ways with the faith after Joseph was murdered in 1844.
Receiving new revelations and doctrines
During Joseph Smith’s Ohio residence of nearly seven years (February 1831 to January 1838), a whole lot happened:
The Church grew like a weed. With missionaries traveling from the Kirtland hub into Canada and England, as well as throughout the U.S., worldwide Church membership grew from 280 to more than 16,000.
People packed up and moved in. Announcing Kirtland as its official gathering place, the Church encouraged converts to move there, which many did despite severe economic hardships.
The temple went up. At great cost and sacrifice, the Church built its first temple, which boosted the people’s spirituality and helped the Church’s progress.
Joseph put his own revelations in writing. During this Ohio phase, Joseph Smith received nearly half of the total revelations contained in the Doctrine and Covenants, one of Mormonism’s four main books of scripture (for more on the D&C, as it’s commonly called, see Chapter 10). These revelations include
• The Word of Wisdom, Mormonism’s well-known health code warning against addictive, intoxicating substances (see Chapter 16).
• The three degrees of glory, Mormonism’s three-tiered heaven that symbolizes humankind’s potential eternal rewards (see Chapter 2).
• Plural marriage, which would remain confidential until years later. Joseph probably entered into his first polygamous marriage in 1835, with a young neighbor (see Chapters 13 and 15).
Joseph uncovered scriptural pearls. Several of Joseph’s Kirtland-era scriptural translations were later gathered, along with additional material, into the Pearl of Great Price, the smallest and perhaps most unusual collection of Mormon scripture (see Chapter 10). These key Kirtland writings include
• Portions of the Bible’s King James Version, which Joseph retranslated to correct errors introduced by earlier translators (see Chapter 9). In particular, Joseph received additional revelations by Moses.
• Revelations of the Old Testament prophet Abraham, which Joseph Smith translated from ancient Egyptian papyri.
The Mormons adopted a what’s-mine-is-yours philosophy. Joseph Smith introduced concepts that led to the Mormon ideals of caring for the poor, maintaining self-sufficiency, and sharing common resources. Driven by his concern for poor Church members, Smith created a community storehouse that would meet their needs by pooling the extra dough of more fortunate Saints. (Although these attempts at communal living had fizzled out by the end of the 19th century, their legacy lives on in the Church welfare program, which we discuss in Chapter 8.)
The Church figured out its org chart. Its main governors include the First Presidency, consisting of the prophet and his two counselors; the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; and other general and local priesthood offices. (For more about the Church’s priesthood organization, see Chapters 4, 6, and 8.)
Education became the new wave. Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and others pioneered the Mormon emphasis on education by teaching classes that mingled religious instruction with secular subjects such as literature, history, and philosophy. Today, Brigham Young University and other LDS schools maintain a similar balance, and the Church provides weekday religion classes all over the world to supplement the secular curriculum of Mormons in high school and college. (For more on Mormon education, see Chapter 8.)
Building the Kirtland Temple
When it came time to start putting up the first temple in 1833, Joseph Smith unveiled unique plans for its construction, which he received via revelation from God. This sacred structure featured large meeting rooms on the first and second floors, each with multilevel pulpits at either end for use by priesthood officials. Mormon women donated china and glassware to be ground up for sparkle in the temple’s exterior glaze. Because persecution was constant in the early days of Mormonism, people had to guard the temple day and night against vandals, both during construction and afterward. Take a peek at this temple yourself — see Figure 11-1.
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Figure 11-1: The Kirtland Temple, dedicated in 1836, remains a popular tourist destination. |
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Photo courtesy of Phil Smith
Joseph Smith didn’t reveal most of the key temple ceremonies to Mormons until the later Nauvoo period, so the Kirtland Temple was more of a glorified meetinghouse than a place to perform rituals and ordinances, like today’s temples (for more details on Mormon temples, see Chapter 7). However, one ordinance introduced in the Kirtland Temple was the washing and anointing of feet, similar to what Jesus did in the Bible’s New Testament. Versions of this practice continue in Mormon temples today for high-ranking Church leaders.
Empty pockets and loaded threats: Good times come to an end
Unfortunately, the temple added to the Church’s large debt burden, which in turn led to financial chaos that ultimately helped trigger Joseph Smith’s flight from Kirtland. Joseph decided to fix the situation by forming a banklike organization to issue currency notes. However, people cashed in the notes for real coins faster than the organization could handle, and a national banking panic in 1837 sealed the financial doom. People became upset both inside and outside the Church, contributing to increased persecution and hundreds of excommunications, including 4 of Joseph Smith’s handpicked 12 apostles. Clutching pistols and knives, one group of apostates (former Mormons who rebelled against the faith) even tried to take over the temple.
In January 1838, fleeing from lawsuits, arrest warrants, and assassination plots, Joseph Smith moved his family to Missouri, effectively ending Kirtland’s role as Church headquarters. With mobs ransacking and burning down their homes, hundreds of Mormons followed him.
Kirtland in the here and now
The days in Kirtland remain a controversial period in Mormon history. Some historians argue that Church leaders caused many of their own problems by participating in land speculation and using credit unwisely. Others say Joseph Smith was blameless and did the best he could, considering the new religion’s complex challenges and needs. Despite the controversy, one point is true: The Church learned valuable lessons in Kirtland, and the difficulties revealed who was faithful and who wasn’t. (Today, however, the LDS Church doesn’t go into debt to build temples or carry out its programs.)
Seeking Zion in Missouri
Many people think Utah is the promised land for Mormons, but that arid, mountainous state is just a temporary refuge — with temporary measured in centuries — until the promised return to Missouri, home of some cherished, significant geographical locations that will be critical to the faith in the future.
The early Mormons sought to establish Zion somewhere on earth, a place where they could practice their religion freely and commune with each other. Zion would be the location where the righteous took refuge when the wicked brought chaos into the world, a site identified in the Book of Mormon as the New Jerusalem. In 1831, Joseph Smith received a revelation directing him to travel from Ohio to Missouri, where God would reveal the location for a permanent Latter-day Saint homeland that would last through the Millennium (see Chapter 3 for more on Christ’s Second Coming and the Millennium).
Arriving in the rough-hewn frontier outpost of Independence in Jackson County, Joseph Smith declared that the town would become the center place of Zion and the site for the New Jerusalem, and he identified the spot where the Latter-day Saints would build a temple. (In addition, many Mormons believe that Jackson County was the original site of the Garden of Eden.) While Joseph himself didn’t move to Missouri for another seven years because God wanted him to finish his work in Ohio, many of his followers immediately started settling there to stake the Church’s claim. Unfortunately, their best shot at Zion lasted only two years.
Getting booted out of Zion
For the early Mormons, Missouri could well have been spelled misery. Although it’s the location of Mormonism’s most significant sites, Missouri was also where the early Mormons suffered some of their worst persecutions. In the Mormon mind, that equation makes perfect spiritual sense: the greater the potential good, the greater Satan’s opposition.
Persecution starts again
With about 1,200 Mormons living in Jackson County by the summer of 1833 (almost a third of the total local population), other settlers began to worry — and not without good reason — that the Mormons would soon overtake them politically, economically, and culturally. Encouraged by local government officials, a large mob formed in July 1833 to force the Mormons out of Jackson County. They destroyed the Mormon printing office, tarred and feathered leaders, and burned down homes and businesses. Even after the Mormons signed an agreement to leave within several months, daily harassment and violence continued. When appeals to the state government didn’t do a lick of good, the Missouri Mormons started arming themselves against the mob, and soon the state militia was called out.
In November 1833, after a second attack in which over 200 Mormon cabins were robbed or burned, the Mormons left Jackson County months earlier than originally agreed. Many of them lost everything they owned. Crossing the Missouri River, they found temporary winter shelter among friendlier settlers in Clay County. Church leaders took their complaints and pleas not only to the Missouri governor but also all the way to the U.S. president, Andrew Jackson. However, fearful of open warfare, the government and courts didn’t intervene. Thus, the Church lost its all-important Zion homeland — for the time being, anyway.
Trying to stay in Missouri
If the Mormons couldn’t live in Zion, at least they could put down temporary roots nearby while they kept petitioning the government to reclaim their rightful Jackson County properties. For over a year, the local settlers across the river in Clay County allowed the Mormons to live peaceably among them. New converts kept arriving, and Mormons started buying up property. Disregarding a prophetic warning from Joseph Smith, individuals openly spoke of taking over the area. By 1836, the locals again began to resent the Mormons.
Clay County locals, however, took a more civilized, diplomatic approach to ridding themselves of the Mormons than did their Jackson County counterparts, refraining from violence and negotiating comparatively reasonable agreements. When Mormon explorers found some sparsely populated land in northern Missouri, Church leaders asked the government to set aside territory for the Mormons to call their own. In December 1836 the state created Caldwell County just for the Mormons.
With a temporary homeland secured, the Mormons started building a new city called Far West and establishing other settlements in the area. Despite the promising new arrangements, however, hostilities started festering again. When some Mormons threatened violence against a handful of internal troublemakers living in Far West, these rebels fled, triggering anti-Mormon feelings in nearby communities. An underground gang known as the Danites arose, falsely claiming that Church leaders authorized them to use extreme measures — including robbery and murder — against Mormonism’s enemies.
Although the Church didn’t sanction the Danites’ activities, the words of some Mormon leaders seemed to justify such actions. On Independence Day in 1838, Sidney Rigdon delivered a no-tolerance pledge against any future persecutors. Although the Mormons had repeatedly taken the abuse without fighting back, Rigdon declared that they wouldn’t do so anymore. Unfortunately, copies of this speech circulated widely in pamphlet form.
Going to war
Tensions continued to increase between the Mormons and their non-Mormon neighbors. After a brawl broke out when residents of a nearby county tried to stop some Mormons from voting, anti-Mormon agitation swept throughout Missouri. Joseph Smith, who had recently moved to Missouri, submitted to arrest on false charges, but his action didn’t diffuse the hostility. Soon both sides began forming militias, capturing prisoners, and robbing each other. Mob militias invaded settlements, destroyed property, and tortured Mormons, many of whom fled to Far West.
Believing exaggerated reports of Mormon “outrages,” Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs signed an infamous order in October 1838 stating that the Mormons must either be killed or driven entirely from the state, an order that wasn’t officially repealed until 1976.
During the Mormon War, most of the Mormon deaths occurred at the small settlement of Haun’s Mill. On the afternoon of October 30, 1838, a mob of over 200 men attacked the settlement, shooting at Mormon men, women, and children alike. In a blacksmith shop, a concealed 7-year-old boy watched the invaders kill his father and 10-year-old brother. Later justifying the boy’s murder, the triggerman said, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have become a Mormon.”
At least 17 Mormons died in the massacre, with another 13 wounded. Only three Missourians were injured. Joseph Smith lamented that the slain Saints would’ve been spared if they’d followed his direction and fled earlier to Far West. About 20 years later, a desire to avenge Haun’s Mill was one factor that helped motivate some Mormons to commit a much worse massacre; for more on that, see Chapter 13.
At the end of October 1838, approximately 2,000 mob soldiers surrounded the barricaded Far West, outnumbering the Mormon soldiers five to one. Apostle Parley P. Pratt recorded that many in the mob disguised themselves as Indians and were making a racket like “bloodhounds let loose upon their prey.” A Mormon military commander made a secret deal to end the standoff, putting Joseph Smith and other Church leaders into the hands of the mob.
Meanwhile, the again-impoverished Latter-day Saints crossed the Mississippi River eastward into Illinois (see Figure 11-2 for a map of their journey). For many, it was their fifth forced exodus in less than a decade. When Missouri officials eventually decided they couldn’t convict Joseph on charges of murder and treason, they allowed him to escape in April 1839 and rejoin his exiled people in Illinois. Before long, they built a beautiful city that, by 1846, rivaled Chicago in population.
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Figure 11-2: Map of the Mormon migrations from New York to Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. |
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Missouri in the here and now
Mormons still believe that they’ll eventually reclaim Jackson County as the center of Zion. In the meantime, they believe that Zion exists in the hearts and minds of the righteous, as well as wherever a stake of the Church exists. (The term stake is Mormonism’s equivalent of diocese, meaning a grouping of local congregations; see Chapter 6.) As odd as it may sound to outsiders, Mormons believe they’ll someday build the New Jerusalem at Independence, Missouri, which is now a suburb of Kansas City. This long-prophesied city will serve as Jesus Christ’s headquarters during the Millennium, the 1,000-year period of paradise ushered in by his Second Coming (see Chapter 3).
Nauvoo, Illinois: A Refuge on the Mississippi
After the devastating persecutions of Missouri, the Mormons welcomed the shelter of Illinois, where they were granted their own community on the banks of the Mississippi. The Mormons named it Nauvoo, a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful, lovely, or comely.” Under the terms of their charter from the state of Illinois, the Mormons received the following:
A court system through which they could be tried by judges elected by the Nauvoo residents themselves, with juries composed of Nauvoo residents. This factor was important because it meant that no court could come up with false charges just to persecute — or, more literally, prosecute — the Mormons.
A state-authorized militia, the Nauvoo Legion, with as many as 5,000 men. After the Haun’s Mill Massacre and the violence in Missouri, the Mormons were glad for a chance to protect themselves if the need arose. (Not surprisingly, it eventually did.)
A liberal amount of land and great opportunities for economic prosperity through the profitable Mississippi River trade.
Come on over!
The Nauvoo period marked the first significant migration of Mormon converts from England and continental Europe. In 1840, Brigham Young noted that even if he and other missionaries had tried to prevent the British Latter-day Saints from emigrating, they wouldn’t have been able to stop them. Part of the appeal was certainly religious — in Nauvoo they could live among other Latter-day Saints, meet the prophet Joseph Smith, and enjoy the blessings of the temple under construction. But the reasons were economic as well; many of the European converts were poor or working class, and America offered them cheap land and much more opportunity for economic advancement.
Between 1840 and 1846, approximately 4,800 British converts made the voyage, braving the Atlantic Ocean in passenger ships and then taking steamboats up the Mississippi to Nauvoo.
Building a community
When winter turned to spring and the Mormons set about building their new community in earnest, they got some good news: Joseph Smith was freed by his Missouri jailer and permitted to join the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo. With Smith to lead them, the Mormons were confident that they could make the city flourish.
However, the reality was that they’d settled in a mosquito-infested swamp. Many of the already weakened Saints got malaria, and Joseph and Emma Smith filled every bed in their home with ill Church members, moving their own family to a tent in the yard. Eventually Joseph and other members of his family became ill as well.
Mormons are known as planners (case in point: the Franklin Planner system, which was invented by a Mormon), and the early days of the religion were no exception. Despite the hurried purchase of the land and the onset of disease when the Mormons settled there, the city was carefully planned to the last detail. Because Nauvoo was intended to be as self-sufficient as possible, individual family lots were large: each city block was 4 acres, divided into 1-acre plots. Here, the Mormons could raise livestock and enough crops to sustain themselves. As the city grew, they divided many of those 1-acre lots into quarter-acres to accommodate the newcomers.
Constructing the Nauvoo Temple
In April 1841, the Latter-day Saints laid the cornerstones for what would become the Nauvoo Temple, an enormous limestone structure that housed their most sacred rituals. With almost 50,000 square feet of interior space, it was the largest building the Saints had ever attempted — three times the size of the Kirtland Temple. Construction of the temple was an arduous five-year process, and tragically, the Prophet was killed before he could see its completion.
The temple funding came from the tithe of the Latter-day Saints — defined as 10 percent of their “increase,” whether in cash, quilts, chickens, jewelry, food, or other items. Many of Nauvoo’s men gave a tithe of their time, working every tenth day to build the temple rather than doing their usual jobs. The women of the community sewed shirts for the construction workers, and the Church asked each sister to donate a penny each week — a significant sum for the time — to purchase supplies.
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Figure 11-3: Nauvoo Temple sunstone. |
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Although the Kirtland Temple served primarily as an assembly hall or chapel and housed many different kinds of functions, the Nauvoo Temple represented a whole new order. Or rather, a whole old order, as the Latter-day Saints believed that the rituals Joseph Smith taught them in the 1840s were part of the Lord’s restoration of ancient ideas. Although Mormons used the middle floors of the temple for public meetings, they reserved the top and bottom floors for these ordinances, including baptism for the dead, endowment, and celestial marriage. (For more info on these and other temple ordinances, refer to Chapter 7.)
Trouble in Nauvoo
In 1844, anti-Mormon sentiment spilled over once again. Some of the reasons this time were familiar from the Ohio and Missouri days: The Mormons became very powerful, with a population of more than 20,000 people, making Nauvoo the largest town in Illinois at the time. They were prosperous, and people considered their doctrines strange.
But there were other reasons as well, and the Mormons weren’t entirely blameless victims of persecution. Many people in Illinois and elsewhere worried that Joseph Smith had accumulated too much power. He was mayor of the city, leader of the Church, and the lieutenant general of Illinois’s largest militia force. He also ran for President of the United States in 1844.
After several key Mormons left the Church in 1842 and 1843, they publicized the Prophet’s then-secret teaching of plural marriage, which had been the reason for their leaving. They challenged polygamy and claimed it was an insult to Christian morality (to better understand the Mormon rationale, see Chapter 13). In June 1844 the protesters printed a rival newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, in which they publicly exposed polygamy and claimed that Joseph Smith was a fraud. They demanded the repeal of the Nauvoo Charter, saying that the Mormons had violated its provisions by merging church and state too closely.
Joseph Smith, as mayor of Nauvoo, called his city council together and deliberated with them. In the end, they decided that the press was a public nuisance and that its printers were disturbers of the peace. But instead of closing it down, which would’ve been legal, Smith instructed the city marshal to “destroy the printing press, scatter the type in the street, and burn all remaining copies of the newspaper and its advertising handbills,” as one LDS historian summarized. In doing so the Prophet may have overstepped his legal bounds and verified the charges against him: that he inappropriately meshed religion and government.
Arrest and martyrdom
Joseph Smith’s mistake in handling the Expositor debacle had fatal consequences. All over the state, anti-Mormon sentiment was stirred into a frenzy, and agitators often urged citizens to take action against the Mormons. Reacting to such attitudes — and undoubtedly remembering the violent persecutions of Missouri — Smith used the Nauvoo Charter and encouraged all Mormon men to prepare to defend Nauvoo if an attack should come. He held a full-regalia militia rally during which he told the men not to initiate an attack but to defend their families if necessary.
The governor of Illinois traveled up to Carthage, the county seat, to hear evidence on both sides of the matter. He ruled that Smith and the city council had violated the protesters’ constitutional rights by unlawfully taking and destroying their property and by not heeding the law by allowing a jury trial.
The Prophet fled Nauvoo in an attempt to draw public hostility away from the city and its people. However, after hearing that the governor intended to bring him to trial and had pledged full protection for him, Smith returned to Nauvoo and surrendered. He also laid down the state-owned weapons used by the Nauvoo Legion, hoping along with the governor to avoid an armed conflict.
Accompanied by his brother Hyrum and several other men, Joseph Smith was arrested and put in a small second-floor jail in Carthage. In the early evening of June 27, 1844, a mob of about 200 armed men surrounded the building, their faces painted brown or black. Some rushed into the building and up the stairs, where the Smiths and their companions tried to hold the door and fire their own pistols at the intruders. Joseph’s beloved older brother Hyrum was killed instantly in the fray. When members of the mob glimpsed Joseph looking through a second-story window, reportedly lifting his arms in the Masonic signal of distress, they shot him. Smith fell through the window to the ground below, where the mob shot him several more times and then stabbed him with a bayonet.
The Mormons were horrified by the news that Joseph and his brother Hyrum had been killed. Contrary to the expectations of many of their Illinois neighbors, they didn’t react violently to the martyrdom. However, their troubles weren’t over; within two years, the people of Illinois were again gunning for the Mormons and made it clear that they had to leave the state or face consequences — continued violence, robbery, and maybe even death. The Mormons decided to pack up and head out; see the next chapter for more on their famous trek west to what later became Salt Lake City. They were heartbroken to leave their beautiful city and temple, but they looked forward to a place of refuge in the West.
Nauvoo in the here and now
For almost a century after the Mormons abandoned Nauvoo, the area saw little development or progress. The temple was gutted by arson not long after the Mormons left the city, and a tornado finished the destruction in 1850.
Gradually, however, the Mormon presence returned. In the 1930s, the LDS Church regained the land where the Nauvoo Temple stood before its destruction. In the 1950s, Dr. J. LeRoy Kimball — grandfather of coauthor Christopher Kimball Bigelow — acquired and started restoring the still-standing redbrick home of Dr. Kimball’s great-grandfather, Heber C. Kimball, who served as a right-hand apostle to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (another main man in Mormon history, who we discuss in Chapter 12). Dr. Kimball originally intended the home for private family use, but hundreds of people asked to tour the building. Within a few years, Dr. Kimball was spearheading the restoration of 1840s-era Mormon buildings throughout old Nauvoo, with LDS Church financing and oversight.