We can take persecution because we know the purpose behind it. The purpose is to glorify God.

—Billy Graham

Their church renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of the band settled in Caldwell County, Missouri, and established the town of Far West, the “City of Zion.” Disputes erupted between the Mormons and their Missouri neighbors when the Mormons gained political power and began to settle in the surrounding counties.1 “Few episodes in American religious history parallel the barbarism of the anti-Mormon persecutions” in Missouri, wrote Fawn McKay Brodie.²

The church's growing problems may have been due to the fact that the Mormons were going against the American grain. Politically, Joseph Smith would build a large following and announce his intention to run for president, a threat to the established political order. Religiously, the Mormon upstarts claimed to be the one true religion and had a corner on God's own truth. Morally, they would face extreme censure for polygamy.

The church's website has a different explanation: it blames Joseph's persecution on the belief that he did have a corner on the truth.³

A series of escalating conflicts followed the Mormons wherever they went. The governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, called out 2,500 state militiamen to put down what he alleged to be a “Mormon rebellion.” Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, a document known to Mormons as the “Extermination Order.” This order was issued on October 27, 1838, and decreed that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description.”⁴ A number of Mormons died at the hands of Missouri mobs, including eighteen at the Haun's Mill Massacre in Missouri in 1838. Joseph was imprisoned, charged with treason, and sentenced to death for exhorting his followers to fight. He and his brother Hyrum eventually bribed a sheriff with a jug of honeyed wine and $800 and escaped.5

During Joseph's months in prison, Brigham Young, then president of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, rose to prominence among the Mormon faithful when he organized the move of about fourteen thousand Saints to Illinois and eastern Iowa.⁶ Many of the Mormons in Missouri were forced to sign over their property in Far West in Caldwell County to pay for the militia muster. They were then ordered to leave the state.

Around June 1838, a recent Mormon convert named Sampson Avard formed a covert organization called the Danites or Destroying Angels to intimidate Mormon dissenters and oppose Missouri's anti-Mormon militia. In his book Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman writes that the Danites were a secret society, several hundred strong. “Some historians depict the Danites as Joseph's private army, dispatched at his command to expunge enemies of the Church.” Bushman goes on to say that many Mormons, even today, blame Avard for the excesses of Danite revenge.⁷ The role and extent of this protective vigilance society is still debated, although a number of murders of Mormon enemies are attributed to its members. One of the most prominent of the Danites was Orrin Porter Rockwell, who served as a personal bodyguard both to Joseph and his successor, Brigham Young.

In 1842, as the hated Lilburn Boggs read a newspaper in his home, someone (probably Rockwell) fired through his window and put four balls of buckshot into him, including one to the head. He miraculously survived, but Rockwell was arrested and spent a year in jail under accusations of the attempted assassination of Governor Boggs. Rockwell was released for lack of evidence.⁸

Though it is unclear how much Joseph knew of the Danites’ activities, Joseph clearly approved of those of which he did know. After Sidney Rigdon delivered a sermon that implied dissenters had no place in the Mormon community, the Danites forcibly expelled them.⁹

The seeds of martyrdom and being misunderstood were planted especially deep in Missouri, and they would be nurtured to serve the purposes of the church into the twenty-first century.