NAUVOO, ILLINOIS, TODAY SITS AT A PICTURESQUE BEND IN THE Mississippi River, a tourist attraction and state historical park with visitor centers operated by competing churches at opposite ends of the restored town. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) owns the 47,000-square-foot temple, a 2002 replica of the 1846 original, and the imposing brick Heber C. Kimball house and Masonic lodge. The rival Community of Christ, formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), owns Joseph Smith’s grave and his two homes. Relations are polite. The visitor can take the LDS tour in a cart pulled by Amish-raised draft horses and admire the cornfields and soybeans, the rushing creek, and the restored shops. There is no sign of the once mosquito-infested malarial swamps, and neither church has restored any of the cramped wooden hovels in which most of the Saints actually lived during Nauvoo’s brief moment of glory.
Today as one breakfasts at Grandpa John’s Café in the backwater country town perched on the high bluff above the river, it is hard to believe that in its day—five years of growth and fame before it became a ghost town—Nauvoo rivaled Chicago. Nothing like this theocratic principality in the heart of America had been seen since Pilgrim and Puritan days. Here the prophet Joseph Smith maintained a militia of 3,000 to 4,000 men under arms, at a time when the full U.S. Army had only 8,500 soldiers. At its height the population of Nauvoo proper reached 12,000 citizens; several thousand more Saints tilled the ground in nearby Hancock County or across the river in Iowa. These were frontier days, and the white limestone temple rising one hundred sixty-five feet high on the crest of the hill was an imposing sight for miles around.
Praise for Nauvoo’s impressive achievements appeared in the newspapers of Boston, New York, and elsewhere. A steady stream of visitors came in 1843 and 1844 to admire the town, visit the strange exhibit of Egyptian mummies in its little museum, and sample Smith’s hospitality. They included Charles Francis Adams, son of former president John Quincy Adams, and Josiah Quincy Jr., son of Harvard’s president and later the mayor of Boston. Quincy was impressed with Smith’s charisma and how he “won human hearts and shaped human lives.” But Quincy also sounded a somewhat ominous cautionary note when he observed that Joseph Smith was far more than the entrepreneurial mayor of a successful, if unique, frontier town: “His influence, whether for good or for evil, is potent today, and the end is not yet.”
That influence had begun in Palmyra, New York, fifteen years earlier with the translation of the golden plates that Smith testified had been lent him by the Angel Moroni. These latter-day scriptures described the migration of Israelites to the New World—where they became ancestors of Native Americans—and the risen Christ’s ministry on American soil. Smith translated these writings into the Book of Mormon, a revelation that Mormons would place alongside the Bible. The influence continued as a band of six followers incorporated a new church and multiplied into a movement of thousands willing to follow their prophet anywhere. And it did not end when a mob left Joseph Smith’s bullet-ridden body propped against a well outside the jail at Carthage, Illinois.
The assassination of their prophet left the Saints grief-stricken and dispirited. Nevertheless, as in Quincy’s prediction that “the end is not yet,” from that bloody atrocity there emerged the most successful faith ever born on American soil, a church regarded by some today as a major emerging world religion.
In the spring of 1844 matters were spinning out of control for the prophet. He was charged as an accessory to attempted murder and faced an extradition warrant to Missouri, where a thug had pumped buckshot into the head of Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had cruelly mistreated the Saints. Amazingly, Boggs survived. It was rumored that the assailant, never caught, had operated at the behest of Smith. Despite vigorous denials by church officials, talk also abounded of something unthinkable—that the prophet and other top church officials were secretly taking multiple wives. Accusers also said Smith was profiting from land speculation over the miseries of poor Saints. Some of his closest colleagues were beginning to regard him as a fallen prophet.
Never passive, Smith responded with a frenzy of political activity. First he declared himself a candidate for president of the United States. Shortly thereafter he organized the secret Council of Fifty to plan an ambitious political future, and he had that body anoint him as “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” He petitioned Congress for authorization to raise and lead a 100,000-man army, personally loyal and answerable only to him, that would subdue the western territories from Texas to Oregon. He proposed that anyone who would “attempt to hinder or molest the said Joseph Smith” in this design was to be liable to two years’ imprisonment. Congress did not oblige.
In the midst of all this, Smith preached the most important sermon of his career. The doctrines he presented in this discourse—a multiplicity of gods, eternal progression, a heavenly Father who had a body and used to be a man, denial that God created the cosmos “out of nothing”—departed radically from Christian orthodoxy.
Joseph Smith once said, “A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.” The Saints’ readiness to sacrifice all things had already been well tested. Just five years earlier the Mormons had arrived in Illinois, fleeing east across Missouri up into Iowa and across the frozen Mississippi. Missouri’s Governor Boggs had thrown them a threat: get out or face extermination. Joseph Smith was in jail in Liberty, Missouri, that winter of 1838–39, under threat of execution for a trumped-up charge of treason. His loyal wife, Emma, trudged across the icebound river on foot with a babe in arms, several little ones clinging to her skirt, and the prophet’s papers in a bag tied to her waist. A senior apostle by the name of Brigham Young was emerging as a leader, shuttling back and forth to shepherd the refugees in the harrowing evacuation from Missouri.
The refugees, thousands of them, were welcomed into Quincy-area homes by sympathetic Illinois natives who recognized the Saints as victims of religious persecution forced to leave land and possessions behind. Illinois was still frontier country; it had been a state for only twenty years, and settlers were scattered. A few months later, possibly because the prophet had become something of an embarrassment in Missouri, Joseph Smith was allowed by guards to escape. In the late spring of 1839 Smith bought on credit property on both sides of the river fifty miles north of Quincy from the land speculator Isaac Galland. By June, late for the planting season, the town was platted in a gridiron of one-acre lots, and the prophet was already at work promoting it as the site of the gathering, the new Zion where his tribe should live. Smith called the settlement Nauvoo, inspired by a name he said came from Hebrew and meant a beautiful place of rest.
Nauvoo, then as now, is divided between an upper and lower town. Smith’s city was on the lower flats, a marshy wetland the Saints soon worked to drain—but not before malaria, typhoid fever, and dysentery were added to the Saints’ miseries. The epidemics in 1839 and 1840 were so sweeping that there were hardly enough well to care for the ill. Diaries and journals are full of tales of prayer, anointings, and miraculous healings, but the same writings also reveal constant grief over fresh graves. The prophet himself lost his father and a brother.
Astonishingly, Smith chose at this point to send eight of his apostles to England on a mission. Through the work of an earlier mission in 1837, some 1,400 English converts had already been baptized into the church. When Brigham Young left in September 1839, he parted from his wife and a ten-day-old infant and was so weak from fever that he could barely walk without help. An outside observer might have called such a mission foolhardy fanaticism, but the mission was to succeed and have an enormous impact on the church.
The English converts were mostly poor and working-class. A severe depression, the displacements of the Industrial Revolution, high food costs, and general unrest made them open to promises of a new kingdom of God on earth. Zion on the Mississippi might provide land, food, and sanctuary. London was not particularly responsive, but Liverpool, Manchester, and other places seemed to provide a steady supply of discontented Methodists ready for the Mormon gospel.
The Mormon hallmark of practical attention to detail is evident in an August 1841 edition of the Millennial Star, founded by Brigham Young, a newspaper for the English Saints. They were advised about the cost of passage and freight, how and what to pack, when to report for sailing. They were told their first shelter in Nauvoo might be tents that could be devised from thirty or forty yards of good calico. In their kingdom city they could raise their own pigs and chickens and collect wood from the nearby wilderness for cheap fuel. Elder Parley Pratt advertised to English converts that life in America would cost one-eighth as much as in England and described Nauvoo as a true promised land:
Millions on millions of acres lie before them unoccupied, with a soil as rich as Eden, and a surface as smooth, clear, and ready for the plow as the park scenery of England. Instead of a lonely swamp or dense forest filled with savages, wild beasts and serpents, large cities and villages are springing up in their midst, with schools, colleges, and temples. The mingled noises of mechanism, the bustle of trade, the song of devotion, are heard in the distance, while thousands of flocks and herds are seen grazing peacefully on the plains, and the fields and gardens smile with plenty.
By the time the prophet was murdered, almost 5,000 English Saints had emigrated to Nauvoo, most intensely loyal to Young and soon willing to move on with him to Utah. For several years after Smith’s death that emigration virtually stopped, to be resumed after the church had settled in Utah. By 1870 some 38,000 English citizens had joined the Mormon gathering in the United States; another 13,000 Europeans, mostly Scandinavians, had also come to the American Zion.
The earliest shelters in Nauvoo, tents and lean-tos, were gradually supplanted by wooden structures and finally by frame and brick houses. It is estimated that by 1844 Nauvoo, counting the upper and lower parts of town, had about 1,500 log homes and shops, 650 frame houses, 350 brick buildings (including the Masonic lodge and Seventies Hall), and about 200 masonry houses. Cut limestone curbs bordered gravel paving for many of the roads in Nauvoo. Construction was the biggest industry in town. Joseph Smith had two homes in Nauvoo: first a block log house fronting on the river, followed in 1843 by the frame Mansion House, which had a hotel wing. An ambitious masonry hotel, the Nauvoo House, was never completed.
The Saints were also encouraged to till the “soil as rich as Eden” to produce a green and fertile landscape, planting mulberries and grapevines, peach trees, and raspberry bushes. Most had flower and kitchen gardens, perhaps a cow and a few chickens in their yard. Landscapers advertised their skill in pruning trees.
Nauvoo had a surprisingly active cultural life. The press was an important institution in any American town, and the Mormons, who had published their own newspaper since their Ohio sojourn years before, began publication of a church newspaper from Nauvoo in late 1839, the Times and Seasons. There were schools, choirs, bands, and theatricals in which Young himself enjoyed taking part as an actor; debate societies and cotillion dancing; and a lending library of 200 volumes. Pastimes included corn-husking contests and quilting bees, swimming and horsemanship. Beginning in 1841 most of Nauvoo’s leading male citizens became active in the Masonic lodge. The following year the prophet organized the Relief Society for the women, recognizing their similar need for mutual aid and social interaction; he installed his wife Emma as president.
Protection for the Saints was a pressing concern for the prophet, due to the depredations in Missouri. In the fall of 1839 Smith traveled to Washington, D.C., for two interviews with President Martin Van Buren, hoping for the redress of grievances, including property losses, that the Saints had suffered. The Saints’ problems, he was advised, were properly a matter of state rather than federal governance. Congress, too, rebuffed his petitions. At this point, the prophet undoubtedly decided that the necessary power and means for protection had to reside with the Saints themselves.
In December 1840 the new city received its charter from the state legislature, which granted Nauvoo such unique powers that it very nearly created an independent city-state, or as RLDS historian Robert Bruce Flanders called it, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi. Political expediency was doubtless also part of the process, since the state was eager for development and the Mormons were a desirable bloc of settlers, disciplined and industrious. And they had a pivotal potential in early 1840s Illinois politics, since the state population was closely divided between the Democratic and Whig Parties. According to Flanders, the Illinois legislature was also distracted by severe state fiscal problems and charter applications from other budding municipalities. Nauvoo’s charter, technically modeled on the city charter of Springfield, was lobbied through by Smith’s counselor, John Cook Bennett.
Nauvoo’s charter provided for no effective separation of powers. The mayor, first Bennett and later Smith himself, was head lawmaker and judge. The mayor served on the city council and was also chief justice of the municipal court. With the oligarchic nature of Mormon church government and the installation of church officials in many government posts, civic and religious power overlapped, and the newborn city functioned effectively as an independent theocracy within Illinois. Though religious minorities were granted their freedoms, there was no separation of church and state of the sort envisioned in the U.S. Constitution. Controversy over the charter grew quickly in 1842 until the clamor led to its repeal in 1845, after Smith’s death.
Under the charter, Nauvoo was allowed to establish a militia with state-authorized commissions. The state also helped to equip the legion by providing 250 small arms and three cannons. Later it was reported that the Nauvoo Legion had several thousand small arms and thirty heavy pieces as well. (The latter figure was probably an exaggeration.) Smith and Bennett, commissioned as lieutenant general and major general, respectively, established the Legion with delight: dressed in blue-jacketed officer uniforms resplendent with gold braid, they organized troops with regular drills. Military parades with fluttering silk flags highlighted civic ceremonies, which were climaxed by the punctuation of booming cannons. Military lore and mock war games fascinated the prophet.
The charter had a unique provision on writs of habeas corpus that could free arrested persons if the municipal council chose to protect them. That made Nauvoo an island of safety for legal refugees. It may in some cases have been legitimate protection for some of the Saints, including the prophet himself, but it was also open to considerable abuse. This provision became a contentious matter with area “Gentiles”—that is, non-Mormons—who were angry that river pirates, thieves, and counterfeiters could run to Nauvoo, placing themselves beyond the reach of outside law. According to Flanders, “the habeas corpus clause of the charter and the cavalier fashion in which the Mormons used it generated much popular fear and hatred, and were the points upon which legal attacks on the whole charter finally focused.”
Land speculation was another contentious matter. Illinois largely opened up after the War of 1812 when Congress gave war veterans land grants in lieu of pay. Veterans sold their land to speculators, who in turn sold to other speculators, each time with an increase in price despite the paucity of homesteaders. The price balloon finally burst. Many parcels of land were sold for taxes; titles became increasingly cloudy. The church bought its parcels on credit and in turn sold lots to incoming Saints. The justification for the hefty city lot prices was that the profit benefited the community as a whole. It was impossible, however, to separate church business from private Smith finances, a murky situation that was replicated later in Brigham Young’s Salt Lake City.
Competition arrived in the form of upper-town development, largely in the hands of private entrepreneurs such as William Law, second counselor to Smith in the church’s three-man First Presidency. The competition was for labor as well as for land sales. Smith wanted workers to speed up construction on Nauvoo House and the temple, tithing one workday in ten. Other work was paid in scrip redeemable for goods at the church’s tithing warehouse. Law and other private developers in the bluff-top area paid workers in cash. Conflict was inevitable.
Beneath its busy, prosperous exterior, there were serious economic problems. Nauvoo had a bubble economy built on optimism, the promise of expansion, land speculation—and credit. One unfortunate fact about Nauvoo, despite some pretty brick buildings and neat gardens, was that it had very little cash. People had shaky title to their land and lived on scrip and barter and their kitchen gardens, bearing faith in their prophet, living with hope for the promised millennial future, and sharing charity with fellow believers.
To some degree, expansion meant work. Houses needed to be built; necessary service crafts and shops were kept busy. But most of the English immigrants, by 1844 one-third of the city’s population, came in poor and without cash. Absorbing them proved difficult; the Nauvoo economy could not support its population. There might be some livestock and skills for barter, but there was precious little capital. The railroad did not go through Nauvoo, and an ambitious project to build a millrace through the center of the city failed when it ran into a stratum of solid limestone. Instead, the site became a quarry for the temple. Although there were many skilled artisans in Nauvoo, only cottage industries and home shops developed, none with goods marketed far beyond Hancock County.
The prophet himself opened a small red brick general store. “The trouble with the store was the trouble with the whole Nauvoo economy,” Flanders wrote. “Business was brisk, but there was too much credit and too little cash. The steady flow of goods from the shelves and bins suggested that the enterprise was prospering, when in fact it was approaching insolvency.” Flanders thought Smith was probably more interested in supplying goods to Nauvoo citizens than in profit. There was faith that “debts were to be paid eventually out of the increment of the kingdom.” Unfortunately, what actually happened was that Mormons declared bankruptcy and repudiated their debts. Smith himself declared bankruptcy in 1842, hardly leaving Nauvoo in any shape to attract outside capital.
Doctrine and ritual matured during the Nauvoo years. Smith taught that only through the priesthood in his church, available to all male believers, could ordinances be performed that would result in the “exaltation” of the Saints, that is, the highest reward in heaven. First came vicarious baptism for the dead, in accord with an 1841 revelation by which living proxies would undergo the ordinance in place of dead loved ones, giving their forebears in the afterlife the opportunity to choose for or against the salvation that was uniquely available in the restored true church. The Mississippi River served as the first baptistry for the proxy ordinance. In November 1841 a temporary pine baptistry resting on the backs of a dozen wooden oxen was dedicated for this use in the temple-in-progress.
The lengthy temple revelation, apparently inspired by the Old Testament concept, is part of Doctrine and Covenants (hereafter D&C), which, like the Book of Mormon, has scriptural status in the LDS Church. It commanded Smith to build not only the temple for ordinances but the Nauvoo House. The hotel was to be “a delightful habitation for man, and a resting-place for the weary traveler, that he may contemplate the glory of Zion,” and the revelation specified in great detail just how the stock was to be apportioned and paid.
The next important ritual Smith introduced was the “endowment,” first performed in May of 1842 with a small group of male church leaders on the second floor of the prophet’s store, and the following year extended to women. This ceremony included washings, anointings, secret handshakes and sacred names, penalty oaths, a creation drama, and symbols with many similarities to the Masonic rituals that the prophet had just learned. The most important devotional elements were solemn covenants of obedience to God, fidelity in marriage, and consecration of worldly goods and personal talents to the Lord’s service.
Saints often met in each other’s homes for prayer and simple devotional services; once the partially completed temple had room for a temporary auditorium, members often gathered there for sermons. But from the earliest days of Nauvoo a grove of trees that formed a natural amphitheater provided the best-loved backdrop for sermons when the weather was good. On April 7, 1844, in that outdoor theater, Joseph Smith delivered his most important doctrinal oration, the “King Follett Discourse,” which opened with a eulogy for a friend of that name who had recently been killed digging a well.
Mormonism’s radical departure from traditional Christian beliefs is clear in the Follett address. Much of this had been previously pronounced and taught by Smith, including the 1843 revelation (D&C 130:22) of the startling belief that God “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” But in the Follett sermon, preached just two months before his death, Smith’s doctrines reached their final expression. The Utah-based LDS (but not the Missouri-based Community of Christ) treats the discourse with a special status and has used it as an authoritative source, carrying forth its teaching ever since it was delivered.
“God [the Father] himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” he declared to his listeners. “If you were to see him to-day, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves, in all the person, image, and very like a man in form;…I am going to tell you how God came to be God.” God the Father is therefore not the unchanging creator of traditional theology. He exists as a being in progress, with men and women progressing similarly.
Explaining the idea of heavenly exaltation, Smith proclaimed that “you have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you,—namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one,—from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.”
The exalted believer’s reward will be “to inherit the same power, the same glory, and the same exaltation until you arrive at the station of a God and ascend the throne of eternal power, the same as those who have gone before.” Smith was fascinated to learn that Elohim, a Hebrew word in the Old Testament referring to God, is plural. (Traditional scholars generally treat that usage as indicating a royal “we” or an intensifier of God’s magnitude, not plurality in number.)
Creation, Smith preached, is not the ex nihilo of orthodox Christianity and Judaism. Matter is eternal, and God, acting as head god in a council of gods, organized chaotic matter into the world we know. Intelligence is also eternal, and the “mind or the intelligence which man possesses is coequal with God himself.” Salvation of the dead is man’s greatest responsibility, along with the “sealing power” through which we can “seal our children and our dead for the fulness of the dispensation of times.”
Then came his famous valedictory: “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history, I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don’t blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself. I never did harm any man since I was born in the world. My voice is always for peace.”
Peace might have been possible if the prophet had been as gifted in politics as in oratory. He was not. Nor was he a good judge of men. His inner circle was in constant turmoil, with frequent turnover and alienation among his closest colleagues. Of the eleven official witnesses who testified that they saw the Book of Mormon’s golden plates, two had soon died (the Whitmer brothers in 1835 and 1836), and among the nine who lived on, six at one time or another quit the prophet’s church or were excommunicated, though three later returned. Only Smith’s own father and two brothers remained steadfast in their commitment.
As fear mounted among Gentiles over the growing power of the Mormon bloc vote, the meteoric rise and fall of Smith’s chosen colleague, the flamboyant scalawag John Cook Bennett, was a disaster for the Saints. Supposedly a bachelor, Bennett had actually deserted a wife and three children back in Ohio. He arrived on the scene at Nauvoo in 1841. Urbane, capable, and a physician by apprenticeship training, Bennett soon became Joseph Smith’s closest adviser, though Emma Smith never trusted the smooth talker. Besides shepherding the Nauvoo charter through the legislature, Bennett helped supervise drainage of the swamps and treated fevers with the new medicine, quinine. He soon became “assistant president” with the church’s First Presidency, the mayor of Nauvoo, chancellor of its “university,” and leader of the Nauvoo Legion.
Things deteriorated rapidly in 1842 with an unseemly exchange of immorality charges between the two men. The catalyst was their competition for nineteen-year-old Nancy Rigdon as plural wife. Pretty Nancy was not interested, and her father, First Counselor Sidney Rigdon, opposed plural marriage, at the time an inner-circle secret. Smith excommunicated Bennett.
Bennett retaliated. He wrote lurid exposés of life in Nauvoo, a series of letters that were first published at intervals in Springfield’s Sangamo Journal, picked up by newspapers around the country, then later in 1842 issued as a book called The History of the Saints: or, An Exposé; of Joe Smith and Mormonism. The sensationalist letters were filled with bawdy details of the sex life in Nauvoo and of a secret organization of men called Danites whose inner group of “Avenging Angels” were to spy on and assassinate dissenters and enemies of the church. (The Danites were never an official arm of the church; it is not clear the extent to which church leaders had unofficial knowledge or gave unofficial approval to their activities.)
Many in and out of Illinois recognized Bennett for the oily opportunist that he was. But there was just enough of a kernel of truth to arouse internal suspicion and whip up anti-Mormon sentiment elsewhere. The editorial voice of the nearby Warsaw Signal grew increasingly shrill. With the rumors of plural marriage and violence, uneasiness over the visible prowess of the Legion at drill, jealousy over the successes in Nauvoo, fear of the political powers of the Mormon bloc, irritation over the land speculation, and anger over Nauvoo’s use of habeas corpus, relations between the citizens of Nauvoo and surrounding Hancock County turned sour. Perhaps the local Gentiles also harbored a certain resentment against what they perceived as the confident self-righteousness of the Saints. As author Wallace Stegner put it, “A chosen people is probably inspiring for the chosen to live among; it is not so comfortable for outsiders to live with.”
Smith embarked on an astonishing round of political activity in early 1844. With the backing of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, he declared himself an independent candidate for the U.S. presidency on January 29, running on a progressive platform of religious rights, purchase of freedom for slaves, emptying of the jails, and overhaul of the economy in a populist mode. In February he organized the apostles and hundreds of other missionaries to fan out across the country in support of his candidacy. On March 11, the strictly secret Council of Fifty was formed as a theocratic policy-making body, a “shadow government,” as Flanders called it, that functioned sporadically in Utah into the 1870s. The Council originally had fifty-three members, including three non-Mormons, two of whom apparently were known counterfeiters.
Treating Nauvoo as a sovereign city-state, Smith and the Council sent ambassadors to England, France, Russia, and the Republic of Texas. He was exploring the possibility of planting Mormon colonies somewhere in the West—Texas, Oregon, Mexico, and California were possibilities—and attempting to tilt competing political powers toward Mormon benefit. Then came Smith’s rebuffed bid to Congress for an army of 100,000.
The next step, on April 11, was to have the Council ordain Smith as “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” According to excommunicated LDS historian D. Michael Quinn, what occurred that day was clearly different from the second anointing ordinance that elevated a man to be a “King and Priest” in heaven. Flanders noted that when Smith declared, “I am above the kingdoms of this world, for I have no laws,” he was speaking apocalyptically rather than politically. But Smith did believe by 1844 that the “government of God” must eventually replace the governments of the world, including that of the United States.
Opposition to Smith intensified inside and outside of Nauvoo. The most important inner dissident was William Law, Smith’s second counselor in the church’s First Presidency. Scholars generally agree that Law was no Bennett; a man of integrity and substance, he was respected in the Mormon community. Some of the issues between Law and Smith were economic: Law was one of the private developers who controlled the upper town and paid workers in cash, while Smith operated on scrip, credit, and tithed labor. But the deeper antagonism was religious. Law was loyal to Smith’s older conceptions of God and unalterably opposed to plural marriage. Publicly the polygamy doctrine was denied, but Smith and other high church officials were practicing it in secret. Rumors spread, and dissension spread as well.
Through 1843 the Smiths and Laws met together regularly for private prayer. Their disagreement over plural marriage became increasingly acrimonious. Smith arranged for spies to report to him on the activities of Law and Law’s close associate Robert D. Foster. On January 3, Law confronted Smith, the Nauvoo police, and a former Danite named Daniel Carn, charging that they were plotting to kill him. Carn defended the Danites and criticized Law for opposing plural marriage. Two days later Law again met with Smith and the Nauvoo police, reporting that he and three other dissidents felt they were in mortal danger. Smith denied the charge and three days later released Law as second counselor. The issue was personal as well: there is evidence that at some point Smith propositioned the wives of both Law and Foster.
Smith kept most of his plans for a new world order secret, but four days after receiving kingship he told the non-Mormon press about his dream of “theo-democracy,” whatever that might mean. Uneasy questions were spreading; on April 15, Law received an offer of reinstatement. He rejected it unless Smith would agree to “public acknowledgement and cease from his abominations.” Smith did not back down.
Three days later the Council of Fifty, supposedly a civic body, took ecclesiastical action: Law was excommunicated, along with his brother Wilson Law and colleague Robert D. Foster, an odd action for a non-ecclesiastical body, “not for a court-martial but for religious delivery to the torments of hell,” according to Quinn. A trial was supposed to be granted to Foster, but when Smith learned that Foster had more than forty witnesses, he realized that a trial might be turned into a spectacle against himself and thought better of it.
Despite Masonic-type oaths to bind secrecy, defectors from the Council of Fifty told Law about the prophet’s anointing as king, and Law and other dissenters began making plans. A new press arrived in town, and on May 10 the dissenters published a prospectus for a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor. The prospectus pledged to “exercise the freedom of speech in Nauvoo, independent of the ordinances abridging the same.” It argued for repealing the city charter and referred to Smith as a “self-constituted Monarch.” On May 12, some 300 people met to establish the “Reformed Church of Jesus Christ,” with Law as its leader.
One day later Sidney Rigdon visited Law to offer a second negotiation for reconciliation. Again Law stipulated his condition: Smith would have to apologize publicly for teaching and practicing plural marriage. Hardly likely. Four days after this meeting Smith held a public Nauvoo nominating convention to validate his candidacy for president.
The Expositor appeared in Nauvoo on June 7. In the context of the times, and for dissidents who had been denied a public forum, its writers were relatively restrained in their wording. The paper advanced a desire for a “reformation in the church,” “hazarding every earthly blessing, particularly property, and probably life itself, in striking this blow at tyranny and oppression.” It argued against polygamy, political intrigue, “false doctrines” such as the “doctrine of many Gods” preached in the Follett sermon, the habeas corpus provision of the city charter, Smith’s participation in Nauvoo land speculation, and acknowledgment of “any man as king or law-giver to the church, for Christ is our only king and law-giver.” Robert Foster and William and Jane Law included signed affidavits that they had read the text of the prophet’s secret revelation on plural marriage, and that Joseph’s brother Hyrum had introduced the revelation in secret council.
An emergency meeting of Nauvoo’s city council was called for June 10. Since polygamy was not legal in Illinois (and not publicly acknowledged by the church until 1852 from the safe vantage point of Utah), Hyrum Smith blandly reaffirmed past official denials of plural marriage, assuring the council that his brother’s 1843 revelation was not for modern times; it referred only to ancient days. Therefore, the Expositor had libeled Smith. The Expositor, of course, was a clear threat to the prophet’s control of Nauvoo. In addition to the publicly denied polygamy, some of Smith’s political activities represented a radical break from the normal parameters of Jacksonian democracy. Smith knew that someone from the Council of Fifty, despite the secrecy oaths, had betrayed him by giving information to Foster and Law. According to Quinn, “He could not allow the Expositor to publish the secret international negotiations masterminded by Mormonism’s earthly king.” But Joseph, as mayor of Nauvoo, declared action was essential because the Expositor faction would “destroy the peace of the city” and foment a “mob spirit.”
With the backing of his Council, Smith ordered that the new press be smashed and all possible copies of the press run destroyed. The spirit of the Bill of Rights may thus have been grossly violated, but technically, under Illinois law at the time and Nauvoo’s charter, the only crime committed by Smith on June 10 was a violation of property rights. The following day Law was informed that there was a murder plot against him and his associates. Aware of the prophet’s security forces and the well-armed Legion, Law and Foster fled with their families from Nauvoo.
Events escalated rapidly. Press hysteria came from nearby Warsaw, where the Signal screamed, “War and extermination is inevitable! CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!! Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! To ROB men of their property rights, without avenging them. We have no time for comment! Everyman will make his own. LET IT BE WITH POWDER AND BALL!” Mormons feared anti-Mormon retaliation. Local non-Mormons feared the Nauvoo Legion. Smith also feared for his life. On June 18, he declared martial law and mobilized the Legion. Non-Mormons pressured Governor Thomas Ford to mobilize the state militia. Everyone had good reason to be afraid; civil war was a very real possibility.
At Ford’s request, Smith ordered his Legion to disarm. The governor, promising safety to Smith and his companions, wanted the prophet to turn himself in to face charges in Carthage, the county seat. On June 22, Smith fled across the Mississippi into Iowa, accompanied by his loyal brother Hyrum in spite of the prophet’s wish that Hyrum remain behind. “I want Hyrum to live to avenge my blood, but he is determined not to leave me,” he wrote in his personal journal. That night messengers brought Joseph a letter from Emma telling her beleaguered husband that some of the Saints felt the prophet had abandoned them out of cowardice. Joseph crossed back into Illinois the next day, aware that he faced death. “I am going as a lamb to the slaughter,” he said. Since someone slipped a six-shooter into his cell that he later fired into the attacking mob, “lamb” was not an exact metaphor, but he conducted the waning days of his life with dignity and courage.
Smith surrendered on June 24 and was taken to Carthage Jail, where he was imprisoned along with Hyrum and apostles John Taylor and Willard Richards. The jailer treated the prisoners kindly, but Ford had left the anti-Mormon Carthage Grays guarding the jail. Inside, the prisoners passed the time in prayer and talk and wrote brave notes to their families. Joseph asked Taylor to sing a popular song that he liked, “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”
Late in the afternoon of June 27, a mob of men disguised with blackened faces approached the jail. The Grays fired weapons preloaded with blanks. One gang bounded up the stairs and fired through the door where Smith’s party was held. The bullet that passed through the door struck Hyrum Smith in the face, killing him instantly, but the mob kept firing. As attackers burst into the room, Joseph Smith discharged his gun all six times with three misfires and wounded three. While the assailants continued to fire away, Smith leaped or fell through the window, beginning the Masonic cry for help, “Oh, Lord, my God,” but not living to complete the words: “Is there no help for the widow’s son?” Some of the attackers pumped more bullets into Joseph’s body by the well before the crowd dispersed. Richards was uninjured; Taylor was wounded seriously but survived to become the church’s president decades later in Utah. Hyrum and Joseph Smith lay bloodied and dead.
Sixty-one years later, speaking at Brigham Young University, one of Joseph’s plural wives, Mary Elizabeth Lightner, remembered him saying, “I am tired. I have been mobbed, I have suffered so much from outsiders and from my own family. Some of the brethren think they can carry this work on better than I can, far better. I have asked the Lord to take me away. I have to seal my testimony to this generation with my blood. I have to do it, for this work will never progress until I am gone for the testimony is of no force until the testator is dead.” At the age of thirty-eight, the prophet had sealed his testimony with blood.
An uneasy peace settled on Hancock County. All sides feared violence; there was none. The Saints were grief-stricken. The bodies were transported from Carthage back to Nauvoo in an open wagon. Some reports say that as many as 20,000 filed past the bodies on June 28 as they lay in state in Nauvoo House. After a public burial, Emma Smith had the bodies disinterred and moved to a secret location for fear the graves might be desecrated. (They lay in that secret place until 1928, when the RLDS reburied the bodies next to Emma’s in a marked grave by the river.)
If the Warsaw Signal viewed the murders with satisfaction, a number of other papers, even in Illinois, recoiled at the assassination. Nationally many newspapers connected the Smith murders with the bloody anti-Catholic mob riots that had occurred in Philadelphia in May and July 1844, seeing both as expressions of religious bigotry and dangerous symptoms of mob law. A murder trial was held nearly a year later in Carthage, but there were no convictions.
For a time peace prevailed. Construction on the temple resumed at an accelerated pace. Young and others added to their homes. With uncertainty about the leadership succession, the Quorum of Twelve directed affairs for the church and Nauvoo. By the end of the summer Young was in command. That fall harassment against the Saints, encouraged by the editorial voice of Thomas Sharp in the Signal, resumed with sporadic mob burnings of barns, outbuildings, and crops in outlying areas. The state legislature repealed the Nauvoo city charter in January 1845.
The leadership knew the Saints had to go and began plans to abandon Nauvoo. Saints tried to divest themselves of their property, taking what little they could get. In the winter of 1845–46, thousands of endowment rites were carried out in the new temple. The first contingent of Saints left Nauvoo in February, just five days after a vane in the shape of an angel had been placed atop the tower on the temple. By the time summer arrived Nauvoo was largely empty. Thomas L. Kane, traveling through shortly thereafter, described the scene in his 1850 book The Mormons:
I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move; though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it. For plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the paved ways. Rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty footsteps. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty workshops, ropewalks and smithies. The spinner’s wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the tanner’s vat, and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker’s oven. The blacksmith’s shop was cold; but his coal heap and ladling pool and crooked water horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday…. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.
Once again the Saints had abandoned their homes and possessions. This time it was for a trek outside the United States. The city of Joseph Smith was dead, and Zion was no longer in Illinois. Perhaps it could be reborn in Utah.