BECAUSE MORMONS IN FLIGHT ABANDONED THEIR TEMPLES IN OHIO AND Illinois, the oldest temple now in use by the Latter-day Saints is in Utah, a graceful sandstone structure in St. George that was completed in 1877 during pioneer days. The church’s one hundredth temple to be ordered, by a 1999 decree of President Gordon B. Hinckley, was erected at the place where it all began, the western New York hamlet of Palmyra.
Just before Mormonism emerged in the nineteenth century, Palmyra and the surrounding region were pioneer territory. Settlers had begun to migrate to the Mohawk River Valley in significant numbers in the 1790s, and a boom area of some sophistication had developed to the west by 1817, when construction began on the Erie Canal. In Palmyra and other small towns there were schools, lending libraries, newspapers, debating societies, and cheap printing presses. The newcomers had to work hard to clear the land and fell trees, but the soil was more fertile than the unyielding, boulder-filled acreage of New England.
That same tract of upstate New York was fertile ground for religious excitement, so much so that it became known as the “Burned-Over District,” subject to repeated fires of revival. Itinerant preachers working there included the likes of wild-eyed Lorenzo Dow (sort of a Methodist), whose asthmatic eccentricities earned him the nickname of “Crazy Dow” as he traveled up and down the East coast during the first several decades of the century. Odder yet was Isaac Bullard, a believer in free love and communism who wore only a bearskin and taught that it was a sin to wash. Bullard planted himself in Vermont, but his disciples went forth into New York and Ohio. The more respectable Charles G. Finney, a revivalist in a style similar to that of Billy Graham in the twentieth century, began his preaching career in upstate New York in 1824 and 1825, later becoming an abolitionist crusader as well.
In the early phase of the Republic, the old denominations—Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopal—had to struggle to spread their coastal hegemony into the frontier. There was no shortage of new sects and communitarian experiments during the period when the Mormons created their kingdom on earth. Mother Ann Lee, the foundress of the Shakers and preacher of celibacy and spiritual perfectionism, landed in Watervliet, New York, in the late eighteenth century. Her followers came to regard her as a female Second Coming of Jesus Christ. By 1825 one of the spreading Shaker communities had been established thirty miles from Palmyra. John Humphrey Noyes advocated a “biblical communism” as well as “complex marriage” (a sanctified free love), announced that the kingdom of God had come, and established the Oneida Community in upstate New York by 1848. Religions of every stripe seemed to flourish, from spiritualism to liberal rationalism to socialist utopianism to Swedenborgianism, with its concepts of eternal marriage and a three-tiered heaven.
Millennial expectations and the restoration of a pure, primitive form of New Testament Christianity were two major strains in the nineteenth-century religious flux. In this period of economic, social, and religious uprootings, people fastened their attention on the end times. “The first generation of United States citizens may have lived in the shadow of Christ’s second coming more intensely than any generation since,” wrote historian Nathan O. Hatch. Revivalists and social reformers preached that people should prepare their hearts, their lives, and their society for the Second Coming. Best of all, God’s chosen people might build his kingdom, the New Jerusalem, right at home on American soil.
William Miller, an upstate New York farmer, determined after studying the scriptures that the Lord would return in 1843; later he changed the date to 1844. His movement enlisted a following of 30,000 to 100,000, and one contemporary estimate put it as high as a million—at a time when the nation’s population was only 17.3 million. But the Lord did not meet the timetable in 1844, and many believers filtered away. The Prophet Ellen G. White redefined 1844 as an event in heaven, preached that Christ’s earthly return was imminent, and rallied Millerites into what became the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which today rivals the Mormon Church in worldwide expansion. Despite its innovations, Seventh-day Adventism perpetuated traditional, core Christian theology.
The desire to restore the purity of early Christianity was equally powerful for many Americans. Alexander Campbell, a Scotch-Irish immigrant of Presbyterian background and some university education, succeeded in turning that mood into a movement between 1811 and 1832. A good public debater, he co-founded the era’s “Restoration Movement” with his father Thomas. The movement, progenitor of today’s Disciples of Christ, independent Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ, rejected creeds but did not devise novel doctrines. The Campbellites concentrated in the frontier country of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and West Virginia but had nationwide influence, numbering 22,000 by 1832 and 118,000 by 1850.
Stir into this restless stew a bit of folk religion, including a few pinches of magic and the occult, and personal visions, and one has the mixture that was simmering in upstate New York just as the Erie Canal opened up in 1825, providing a highway from Albany to Buffalo and the western frontier.
What most of these new popular religious movements shared was “a passion for expansion, a hostility to orthodox belief and style, [and] a zeal for religious reconstruction,” according to Hatch in The Democratization of American Christianity. Moreover, “they all offered common people, especially the poor, compelling visions of individual self-respect and collective self-confidence.” As sociologist Thomas F. O’Dea observed in his classic study The Mormons, because the older Calvinist churches were associated with the rising business class and the university-educated professional elite of the day, including the clergy, disadvantaged groups had been left by the wayside.
The family of Joseph Smith Jr. was counted among the disadvantaged class when they moved to western New York in 1816. Like two-thirds of the new arrivals, the Smiths were poor farmers leaving behind, they hoped, the rocky soil and depression economy of western New England. The future prophet was eleven years old then, one of eight children.
Joseph Smith Sr. had a bad run of luck. At the start of his married life in 1796, his father had given him part ownership of a farm, and his bride Lucy brought a substantial $1,000 cash wedding gift to the marriage. Some investments turned sour, and by 1803 Smith had to sell his land to pay debts. After that he earned his living as a tenant farmer, teaching school in the winter to make ends meet. Between 1803 and 1816 the family moved seven times around Vermont and New Hampshire, then finally into New York. After two years working at odd jobs ranging from masonry to tapping for maple sugar, he was able to make a down payment on a parcel of land. Unfortunately, he bought the land at the height of a price speculation bubble.
Like so many Americans of the time, Smith was suspicious of institutional religion and remained aloof. Palmyra had Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist, and Methodist churches, but he never joined any of them. For a time Lucy and two of the sons became Presbyterian. Joseph Jr. seemed interested in Methodism but was confused by the churches’ competing claims. The Smiths were a deeply religious family; all of them prayed and studied the Bible.
The Smiths could not afford tuition, so none of the children had much formal education; their father probably taught them at home. Lucy later wrote that Joseph Jr. was not as bookish as his brothers, but his description of his boyhood “First Vision” clearly shows that he was steeped in the Bible and biblical language. Joseph was also obviously a highly imaginative and intelligent young boy, interested in the Indian culture hinted at by the burial mounds in the area. Some said the mounds contained evidence of a lost race.
Lucy, in her Biographical Sketches of 1853, described Joseph Jr.’s youthful fascination with Indians after Moroni’s first appearance and prior to his translation of the Book of Mormon: “During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them.”
In the religious excitements of the Burned-Over District, many people were susceptible to mystical experiences and visions; Joseph Sr. was among them. Lucy wrote about seven of these dream-visions of a person on a quest seeking salvation, relating all of them in biblical style and five in first-person language.
Joseph Jr.’s First Vision occurred when he was fourteen. In the church’s canonized version of it, written in 1838, two embodied personages appeared in a bright pillar of light in the “Sacred Grove,” now owned by the church in Palmyra. One of the figures, God the Father, pointed to the other and said, “This is my beloved Son. Hear Him!”
The boy asked guidance on what church to join, and the all-important answer became enshrined in the LDS scriptures. “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt.”
Smith’s Second Vision came three years later, when the Angel Moroni visited, identifying himself as a member of an ancient race and a messenger sent by God to tell the seventeen-year-old boy that there “was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the sources from whence they sprang.” This book, said Moroni, had the “fullness of the everlasting Gospel.” Deposited with these plates were the Urim and Thummim, transparent stones in silver bows fastened to a breastplate, which were to be used to help translate the book.
Joseph told his father about the vision, then went to find the plates in a stone box buried in the nearby Hill Cumorah, just as the angel had said. But the angel warned him that he was not spiritually mature enough to take custody of the plates. He instructed Joseph to make annual return visits to the spot on that date. On September 27, 1827, he was allowed to have temporary custody of the plates and the spectacles to translate the Book of Mormon. Moroni’s plates were said to be thin golden sheets about eight inches square, bound with three large rings, a “gold Bible” that soon became the object of widespread rumors around Palmyra.
Joseph had been busy in the years between the visions. He was a part-time but active participant in folk magic, using divining rods and “seer stones,” or “peep-stones,” to find buried treasure. Both father and son, from about 1819, were active in such treasure-digging and achieved something of a mysterious local reputation in the profession—mysterious because there is no record that they ever found anything despite the readiness of some local residents to pay for their efforts. Joseph Jr. had several seer stones; after placing them in a hat, he would gaze at them, rather like looking at crystal balls to guide in seeking treasure. Such activity was illegal, and in 1826 young Smith was hauled into a Bainbridge, New York, court and found guilty of disorderly conduct for his money-digging.
In his own scriptural history, Smith was less than forthright, depicting himself as a day laborer hired to locate an old mine, and stating that this gave rise to the “prevalent story” of magic treasure-digging. But historian D. Michael Quinn carefully detailed Smith family activities in ritual magic and ownership of various occult objects and talismans, documenting the influence of this folk religion in early Mormonism.
The evidence is too well documented to deny. One devout Mormon, Columbia University historian Richard L. Bushman, wrote, “There has always been evidence of it in hostile affidavits from the Smiths’ neighbors, evidence which Mormons dismissed as hopelessly biased. But when I got into the sources, I found evidence from friendly contemporaries as well, Martin Harris, Joseph Knight, Oliver Cowdery, and Lucy Mack Smith. All of these witnesses persuaded me treasure-seeking and vernacular magic were part of the Smith family tradition, and that the hostile witnesses, including the 1826 trial record, had to be taken seriously.”
In early 1827 Joseph Jr. had to elope with Emma Hale because the bride’s father, Isaac Hale, objected strenuously to his future son-in-law’s disreputable occupation of looking for treasure with magic stones rather than working the land like a respectable farmer. Smith’s work with seer-stone magic and treasure-seeking soon shifted to translation of the Book of Mormon. And in spite of Isaac Hale’s objections to Smith’s seer-stone activities, he allowed the newlyweds to return for a time and live in his home in Harmony, Pennsylvania, where Smith began his translation of the plates.
A blanket was hung to divide the room. On one side of the blanket, Smith would work with the Urim and Thummim as a kind of magic spectacles, his favorite seer stone, the golden plates, and the hat, while the scribe worked on the other. Smith would bury his face with the seer stone in the hat and then dictate words to the scribe. Serving as scribes in the early days were both Emma and Martin Harris, a prosperous farmer from the Palmyra area who, excited by the prospects of Smith’s golden Bible, had followed him to Harmony.
Somewhat to Emma’s distress, Joseph never allowed her to see the naked plates. Eventually eleven witnesses testified that they had actually seen the plates. Three—Harris, David Whitmer, and a Whitmer in-law, the new local schoolteacher Oliver Cowdery—said that an angel appeared and showed them the engraved golden plates. Later eight others—including four more Whitmers, another Whitmer in-law, and the prophet’s father and two brothers—testified that they had “seen and hefted” the plates. The two testimonies are printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon. Smith’s scriptural account said that when the translation was done, “according to arrangement” he returned them to the custody of the angel.
Harris was willing to subsidize publication of the amazing book, but he wanted scholarly validation first. Smith transcribed some characters from the plates in a language he called “reformed Egyptian,” and in early 1828 Harris took the facsimile to Professor Charles Anthon, a famous classicist at Columbia University. Harris said that Anthon verified the authenticity of the document; Anthon later wrote a letter denying that he had said the document was genuine and declaring it a hoax.
Whatever happened, Harris’s faith was confirmed by the experience, but he wanted his wife to see the production of several months’ labor, the literary work for which he was willing to mortgage their farm. Lucy Harris was skeptical. Smith lent Harris the first 116 manuscript pages in June 1828 to take back to Palmyra to show his wife. The manuscript became a popular neighborhood exhibit, but one day the pages disappeared. The distraught Smith could not be completely sure the pages would ever surface, and it would be impossible to rewrite another verbatim copy. He received a timely revelation, however, instructing him to proceed without retranslating the lost pages. The lost portion of the story, he was told, was also embedded elsewhere in abbreviated form; Smith could pick up that version when he arrived at that section of the plates.
So the work proceeded. Eventually Oliver Cowdery assumed the scribal chores, and the job was completed at a furious pace. Back in Palmyra, arrangements were made with E. B. Grandin’s print shop to produce 5,000 copies of the Book of Mormon. The completed book was copyrighted in June 1829, and the printed copies were bound and ready for sale in March 1830. The devoted Martin Harris had to sell his farm to raise money for the $3,000 printer’s bill. He would lose his unhappy wife as well as his farm.
The book was highly controversial from the beginning. Mormons, of course, believe the book has a divine origin, and LDS apologetics from the beginning stressed that an uneducated farm boy could not have produced such a complex book. Non-Mormons generally assume that Joseph Smith wrote it, though few writers today accuse him of having been a blatant and consciously calculating fraud. Various theories have been floated on the contemporary sources that Smith might have used.
O’Dea, a Catholic scholar, saw a commonsense, naturalistic explanation: “Joseph Smith was a normal person living in an atmosphere of religious excitement” that, “through a unique concomitance of circumstances, influences, and pressures, led him from necromancy into revelation, from revelation to prophecy, and from prophecy to leadership of an important religious movement and to involvement in the bitter and fatal intergroup conflicts that his innovations and success had called forth.” Non-Mormon scholars as diverse as Harold Bloom and Rodney Stark have regarded Smith as a man with a creative and inspirational genius in religion. All scholars generally agree that Smith became a remarkable, charismatic religious leader, and that the Book of Mormon as it flowed from his pen has taken its place among the world’s most influential religious books.
The original edition was 588 pages long, with diction resembling King James English. To the average non-Mormon, many passages seem tedious, and Mark Twain had fun with the fact that the phrase “and it came to pass” recurs some 2,000 times. Extensive portions of the Bible appear verbatim, or nearly so, and there are almost 300 biblical-sounding names. The story is a complex one, LDS defenders point out, involving migrations, family feuds, battles, good versus evil. The tantalizing aspect of the book is its planting of sacred history right in the heart of the New World. Smith’s startling doctrinal innovations, such as the multiplicity of gods, were to come later.
The Book of Mormon tells of two ancient seaborne migrations from the Holy Land to the Americas, by Hebrew peoples who are assumed to be ancestors of Native Americans. The older migration, by the Jaredites, occurred after the Tower of Babel incident around 2200 b.c., and the later one around 600 b.c., just before the Babylonian captivity of the Israelites. In the second, more detailed narrative, Lehi, a descendant of the biblical patriarch Joseph, builds a ship. Guided by a compass, he sails by way of the Indian and Pacific Oceans to the Americas, landing possibly in Central America. Two of Lehi’s sons become wicked and rebellious, so God curses them with a dark skin. Many American Indians, traditionally called “Lamanites,” are supposed to have descended from them. Nephites are the descendants of Lehi’s faithful son.
Nephite history develops the story with faithful prophets, persecutions of the righteous, the construction of cities and temples, Lamanite wars, two Almas as hero priests, and revivalist preachers. The most crucial episode occurs in III and IV Nephi. After his resurrection in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ comes to preach his message to Lamanites and Nephites and to establish his true church in the Western Hemisphere. A united Christian commonwealth flourishes in peace and prosperity for several centuries. Then come sin and apostasy and a great division between the Lamanites and Nephites climaxing with a great battle. That battle, in which the Nephite forces number 230,000, takes place at Hill Cumorah in a.d. 400. Moroni, the last survivor and son of the great Nephite general Mormon, stores the golden plates that will be revealed to a latter-day prophet fifteen centuries later.
For the Mormon, the Book is evidence of God’s revelation, too complex a production for an ill-educated, unsophisticated young man. Critics point to it as a product of nineteenth-century religious excitement. Speculation about the Hebrew origin of the Indians was a commonplace of the time. One book Joseph Smith likely knew was Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, published in Vermont in 1825 and containing considerable material on the subject, as well as a description of ancient Central American Indian ruins.
Smith’s new church took its first step on May 15, 1829, when he and Cowdery said that John the Baptist appeared and instructed them to baptize and ordain each other into what he called the Aaronic priesthood. Shortly thereafter they reported that Peter, James, and John appeared to initiate them into the Melchizedek priesthood and to instruct them on organizing a new church. The Church of Christ (later renamed twice) was officially incorporated on April 6, 1830, in the Whitmer log home at Fayette, New York. About thirty believers were present, with six of them serving as legally required organizers.
From the beginning leaders taught that every member was a missionary. Groups of believers began to develop in several towns. The question of religious authority had to be settled at the outset when Hiram Page claimed that he, too, received revelations through seer stones. Joseph Smith issued a divine revelation to make it very clear that he alone held “the keys of the mysteries” and that only his utterances carried authority for the church (D&C 28). So the concept of continuing revelation through the prophet as a source of authentic authority in doctrine and governance reached back to the beginnings. Soon Joseph directed Emma to compile a hymnbook and made plans to collect his post-Book of Mormon revelations in the Book of Commandments, subsequently called the Doctrine and Covenants. He also launched his own version of the King James Bible, rewriting passages to make it conform more closely to his own teachings.
In the fall of 1830, following a revelation to Smith, four missionaries set off to convert Indians. Two of them, Cowdery and the former Campbellite Parley Pratt, visited the fiery Campbellite preacher Sidney Rigdon in the village of Kirtland, near Cleveland. Rigdon converted to Mormonism, bringing his 127-member congregation with him. Soon the branch grew to 1,000 believers, and in 1831 Joseph Smith received a revelation to move the church headquarters from New York to a more hospitable Ohio.
Missouri entered the picture in 1831 when a band of Latter-day Saints left Ohio to migrate farther to evangelize the Indians on the frontier and establish a new gathering place for the kingdom of God in Jackson County, Missouri, a much rougher place than either western New York or northeastern Ohio. If upstate New York is the locus of the first latter-day revelations, western Missouri is forever enshrined in Mormon scripture as the arena of God’s future dealings with mankind. When Smith visited in 1831, he proclaimed Jackson County the “land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion,” with the town of Independence the “center place” (D&C 57). Smith also taught that this was the site of the biblical Garden of Eden.
This site was to be the focus of the Lord’s millennial promises and Christ’s Second Coming, and in accordance with God’s instructions, Smith laid a cornerstone on the exact location for the temple where Jesus will one day reign. Then there is Adam-ondi-Ahman, seventy miles to the north in Daviess County, the place where Adam went after God expelled him from Eden. Adam is a hero in Mormon theology, and this gently undulating prairie valley, otherwise an unremarkable piece of American midwestern real estate, is the place where Adam will return to prepare for Christ’s Second Coming (D&C 116).
Smith’s attention for the next several years was split between Ohio and Missouri, but he lived in Kirtland until financial debacle hastened his departure for points west. As ever, life had its jarring moments for the Saints in Ohio, climaxing on March 24, 1832, when a bunch of hoodlums led by a fallen-away Mormon tarred and feathered Smith. Emma cleaned him up, and he managed to preach the next day. The next several years in Ohio were relatively peaceful, though it was a poor community; many newcomers had sold their farms to join the prophet or had few assets at the outset. In an idealistic attempt to resolve the problem, Smith established the “Law of Consecration,” also called the “United Order of Enoch,” as a sort of communistic redistribution. The idea was to dedicate material goods and property to the church, working the land in stewardship, with the surplus given to the bishop for redistribution to the poor. This plan apparently caused dissension and did not work very well.
The Kirtland Saints worked and sacrificed from 1833 to 1836 to build a big stone temple, somewhat resembling an enlarged New England chapel with a steeple. It was designed with two floors, one for worship and the other for a school. Laborers were to donate one workday in seven to the construction. When dedicated, it was the site of outpourings of speaking in unknown tongues, trances, and visions—charismatic activities of religious excitement not typical of Mormonism afterward, though these expressions of religious excitement were taken up by Pentecostal Protestant sects at the turn of the century. The Kirtland temple today is owned by the rival Community of Christ denomination, which claims to be Joseph Smith’s true heir.
From 1831 on, as Saints arrived in Kirtland by its eastern door, others continually exited to Missouri by its western door. The population reached one or two thousand, many living in temporary log dwellings before departing westward. But Kirtland had a surprisingly active cultural life, with its fledgling School of the Prophets (adult higher education) and a variety of publications spilling from the press, including a newspaper, a journal, and books for the church. Dozens of Saints, including the prophet, studied the Hebrew language for a time.
It was in Kirtland in 1835 that Smith bought some papyri and four Egyptian mummies from the traveling showman Michael Chandler. Smith enjoyed displaying the mummies. The papyri were to become the basis for another part of his work of spiritual translation, the Book of Abraham, which was later recognized by the Utah church as part of a third added book of LDS scripture, the Pearl of Great Price. The Book of Abraham was to become in the mid-twentieth century one of the most difficult challenges for Mormon apologetics, in terms of both its historical authenticity and its use as a justification for the church policy of making blacks ineligible for the priesthood until 1978.
Economic problems spelled the end of Kirtland. Smith left his financially troubled church for Salem, Massachusetts, at summer’s end in 1836, hoping one last time that the use of his seer stone might produce treasure that he had been told lay under a house (D&C 111). The seer stone failed again, and his money-digging was no more successful than before.
The Kirtland bank he tried to establish fared no better. One way of getting lots of money is to print it, and Smith tried that. Since he did not have the capital to establish a licensed bank, he took the pile of notes on which he had already had printed “the Kirtland Safety Society Bank” and instructed the printer to add the prefix anti- and the suffix -ing to the word Bank on each note. For a brief while in early 1837 everyone seemed to have lots of money, but it soon became clear that the notes were worthless paper, and merchants in places like Cleveland were not amused. Failed land speculation and failed banks elsewhere in the nation added to the general economic malaise. Since Smith’s society could not redeem the notes with coin, and land values had collapsed so that real estate also failed to secure the notes, a predictable string of lawsuits followed. There was even an unseemly brawl in the temple itself. When a warrant was issued on January 12, 1838, on a charge of banking fraud, Smith and First Counselor Rigdon fled on horseback in the middle of the night, one step ahead of the law. Their horses were pointed toward Missouri.
But trouble lay ahead. Missouri may have been specially sanctified as the kingdom of God, but non-Mormon neighbors could not have appreciated such revelations of entitlement as “ye shall assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land of Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies” (D&C 52:42, proclaimed in June 1831). A more ominous note was sounded three months later: “And the rebellious shall be cut off out of the land of Zion, and shall be sent away, and shall not inherit the land” (D&C 64:35, 36b).
By 1833 the prophet was citing a parable to recommend attack if necessary to possess the land. The Saints were to “redeem my vineyard; for it is mine;…break down the walls of mine enemies; throw down their tower, and scatter their watchmen. And inasmuch as they gather together against you, avenge me of mine enemies” (D&C 101:56–58). By February 1834 the revelations spoke of revenge: “And my presence shall be with you even in avenging me of my enemies, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. Let no man be afraid to lay down his life for my sake; for whoso layeth down his life for my sake shall find it again. And whoso is not willing to lay down his life for my sake is not my disciple” (D&C 103:25–28).
What was happening in Jackson County at this time?
Converts began to arrive by the dozens and then hundreds; at first they tried to live communally by the “Law of Consecration.” A town was laid out similar to the plat Smith had drawn in Kirtland, and a cornerstone laid for the millennial temple. Converts arrived from missionary activity all over the United States and from overseas as well. This was to be Zion, the gathering place for the Saints to build the kingdom of God.
The Saints’ theology of entitlement was not the only irritant. Many residents were suspicious of the Mormons for having never held slaves and for being friendly to the Indians. Their group solidarity and communal land holdings represented a threat to the political balance of power between the Whig and Democratic Parties. By 1833 there were 1,200 Saints in Jackson County, and their number was increasing so rapidly that it appeared that soon they would be the majority.
Organized opposition led to confrontation, then mob action. A church printing office was destroyed in retaliation for a pro-abolitionist newspaper article, and two church leaders were tarred and feathered in July of 1833. Three days later another mob appeared, armed with handguns, clubs, and whips, and forced church leaders to sign an agreement to leave Jackson County. Church leaders told their men it was time to arm themselves for protection; before the Saints left Jackson in November ten homes had been destroyed by vigilantes in a confrontation that resulted in the deaths of one Mormon and two assailants.
Most of the Saints moved on into Clay County in November, temporarily living in anything from tents to huts to abandoned slaves’ cabins. The following May, in 1834, the prophet dispatched from Kirtland a militia of 205 men carrying both arms and a banner emblazoned with the single word Peace. Called “Zion’s Camp,” the militia lasted for two months while Mormons tried to negotiate Jackson County property problems. The soldiers began to succumb to cholera, and when the threat of serious armed conflict mounted, Smith recalled the militia to Ohio. One of Smith’s military colleagues on the Zion’s camp trek was the newly converted Brigham Young.
Clay County was a two-year resting place for the Saints before some of the same resentments that had developed in Jackson County began to reappear. Two new counties were carved out of the sparsely settled northern Missouri frontier, Caldwell and Daviess, with the unwritten understanding that the Mormons could settle there. The most important settlements were Caldwell County’s Far West, which had nearly 5,000 Saints in the vicinity by 1838, and Daviess County’s Adam-ondi-Ahman, which had about 1,500 the same year as Joseph’s relocation from Ohio.
Trouble began to simmer again, inside and outside the church. Some Saints, able to sell their Jackson County properties, were regarded as treasonous by other believers who held on to their titles. The sellers included some important church leaders, such as Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer, who were excommunicated. Around this time the soon-to-be-legendary Danites were formed by Sampson Avard. Also called the “Avenging Angels,” this group was a highly secret society bound by penalty oaths; originally formed for retribution against internal dissenters, it later shifted its mission to include retaliation against anti-Mormon mobs. The group was pledged to plunder, lie, and even kill if deemed necessary. It is not clear to what extent the church leadership bestowed its backing or was aware of Danite activities.
The fiery Rigdon sparked a tinderbox in a July 4 speech when he thundered, “And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination; for they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.”
The “Mormon War” of August to October 1838 was the inevitable result of the incendiary challenge. Mob violence went back and forth. Some Mormon homes were burned; reports, probably exaggerated, of Danite activities reached Governor Lilburn Boggs, who echoed Rigdon’s words with his famous order of October 27 that the Mormons “must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.”
The brutal result of Boggs’s order came three days later with the bloody massacre at Haun’s Mill on October 30, 1838. About 200 armed militiamen marched into the Haun’s Mill settlement on a fine day with children at play while their fathers worked at crops or guarded the mill. Joseph Young, older brother of Brigham, watched as the militia approached and people scattered, some seeking safety in the blacksmith shop, others running to hide in the nearby thickets. The horror was over quickly, and when the mob was gone, there were seventeen dead, including several in the blacksmith shop and ranging from an old man hacked to death to a ten-year-old boy mortally shot. Several others died within days. Most of the bodies were buried by tossing them down a new and dry twelve-foot-deep well. Artemisia S. Myers Foote, a nineteen-year-old girl, never forgot the horror of each body sliding down the plank into the well: “Every time they brought one, and slid him in I screamed and cried, it was such an awful sight to see them piled in the bottom in all shapes.”
The Haun’s Mill Massacre to this day retains a special place in the Mormon catalog of persecutions. At the time, it was painfully clear that the Mormons would once again have to evacuate and place their Zion, their kingdom plans, in another location. Also at the time, their beloved prophet was incarcerated in Liberty, Missouri, on a fabricated murder charge, and in that winter of 1838–39 he was unable to lead the evacuation of the Saints to Illinois.
Why were the Mormons so hated? Was it pure religious bias? D. Michael Quinn wrote that “religious belief, as non-Mormons understood it, had little to do with anti-Mormonism.” But by the mid-1830s Mormons had embraced a religion that claimed priority in all aspects of life. Conflict was inevitable. “Fear of being overwhelmed politically, socially, culturally, economically by Mormon immigration was what fueled anti-Mormonism wherever the Latter-day Saints settled during Joseph Smith’s lifetime.”
Similarly, as the LDS historians Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton pointed out, the Mormons’ worldview and lifestyle were far more encompassing than those of their contemporaries. They included not only theology and morality but “also an eschatology, an economic philosophy, and a goal of community-building that inevitably meant political and economic tension with their neighbors.” LDS assumptions and goals were “inconsistent with American pluralism” in some fundamental ways. With the Mormon determination to gather into a cohesive community, there were only three solutions: protection by the government to set up an independent theocracy, extermination, or expulsion. In the end nineteenth-century Mormons had the western frontier as a safety valve. In Utah they were to be the majority, the “old settlers.”
The persecutions, as Arrington and Bitton noted, did not involve mass murders. The total Mormon loss of life from Missouri vigilante murders was about forty, far fewer than the number killed in the Philadelphia anti-Catholic riots of 1844. Any lynching or vigilante murder is one too many, of course. But suffering came more often from noise, threats, and property damage than from actual violence, “a far cry from unrestrained massacres.” The Arrington-Bitton analysis continued:
Usually the targets were selective: the houses of the leading men, printing establishments, or stores. When outlying settlements were hit, it was with a view to forcing the Mormons to pull back and reverse their outward expansion. Women and children were usually allowed to flee for their lives. Men were humiliated by beatings but not—except at Haun’s Mill—indiscriminately slaughtered. The fatalities, with few exceptions, occurred when Mormon defensive units were functioning as troops in the field.
All of this, of course, should not minimize the suffering. No one wants to live with his family in an atmosphere of insecurity and fear. That atmosphere of defensiveness, as well as the call to a geographic gathering place, helped forge the Mormon identity, the consciousness of their own peoplehood. It fostered such characteristics as communal cooperation, loyalty, discipline, and a certain wary paranoia.
Mormons like to call themselves a “peculiar people,” taking the term from verses in both testaments: “For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth” (Deuteronomy 14:2). “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (I Peter 2:9).
In the twentieth century being a “peculiar” people has become a matter of meeting the distinctive demands of a highly disciplined LDS lifestyle rigorously centered in the church, since “Zion” is no longer interpreted as a geographic gathering place. But in the rude experiences of the 1830s and 1840s the Mormons developed their sense of being a chosen people through persecutions, communal solidarity, millennial expectations, and commitment to building the kingdom of God on earth for the faithful. That tribal identity forged in the holy experiments of Missouri and Nauvoo was carried with the Saints as they embarked on a remarkable hegira into the wilderness of Utah.