Chapter 6
The Civil War Prophecies
As the idea may have been new to you, I’m wondering if maybe you are not yet convinced that God Himself was directing Joseph Smith in his presidential candidacy and his efforts to save the nation. Perhaps you believe, as many do, that Joseph’s bid for the presidency and his message to the nation were merely reflections of Joseph the man, not Joseph the Prophet.
Many find it odd, if not a bit presumptuous and extreme, that Joseph called his presidential bid the “last effort which is enjoined upon us by our Heavenly Father before the whole nation may be left without excuse and He can send forth the power of His mighty arm.”1 That was not all he said. The year before his candidacy, he warned Congress that if they refused to “hear our petition and grant us protection, they shall be broken up as a government.”2 One historian declared that, during this time, Joseph believed it was “his duty as a prophet of God to warn his nation, even as Isaiah of old had warned the nation of Israelites, of impending doom and destruction.”3
“Oh that I could snatch them [the people of the United States] from the vortex of misery, into which I behold them plunging themselves . . . ,” cried the prophet-candidate, “that I might be enabled by the warning voice, to be an instrument of bringing them to unfeigned repentance.”4
Was Joseph really stating, or at least implying, that if his warnings went unheeded, a punishment (like a civil war) would befall the nation? It seems to fit. Since the kingdom of God was at stake, certainly such drastic measures were justified in the Prophet’s mind.
To fully answer these inquiries, however, we must return to the Doctrine and Covenants.
In the preceding chapter, I wrote about that grand revelation on the Constitution found in Doctrine and Covenants 101. After acknowledging the divine hand over the document and the nation (verses 76–80), the Lord commanded Joseph to fix the national crisis before him. He was told to importune at the feet of the judge (verse 86), and if the judge ignored him, to importune at the feet of the governor (verse 87), and if the governor ignored him, to importune at the feet of the president (verse 88). But the Lord had one more contingency, should the president (the last hope, representing all the people) also ignore the desperate pleas. In the very next verse, things really heat up:
“And if the president heed them not, then will the Lord arise and come forth out of his hiding place, and in his fury vex the nation; and in his hot displeasure, and in his fierce anger, in his time, will cut off those wicked, unfaithful, and unjust stewards, and appoint them their portion among hypocrites, and unbelievers” (D&C 101:89–90).
Think about this in context. Joseph was told to act on behalf of the broken Constitution. He presented (in essence) the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, even running for president in order to bring about these powerful solutions. God told Joseph that if the nation rejected his efforts, then He Himself would bring to pass the solution. But His way would not be pretty, for it would be delivered in “fierce anger” and “hot displeasure.” He would “vex the nation.” Now, I don’t know what the word vex means to you, but in the dictionary it is defined as follows: “to bring trouble, distress, or agitations to; to bring physical distress to; to shake or toss about.”5
After Joseph, following God’s command, had engaged every level of government and been rejected outright by each, only one event in history fits the scriptural description of what was supposed to happen next. There has been one (and only one) furious act that vexed the nation so severely that, through the humbling effects it had upon the people, it produced Joseph Smith’s provisions. It was the Civil War.
Nobody wanted this to happen. After announcing His intention to bring the calamity, the Lord declared, “Pray ye, therefore, that their ears may be opened unto your cries, that I may be merciful unto them, that these things may not come upon them” (D&C 101:92). But what was He to do? Again, if the promised land rejects the temples of God, not allowing them to stand, what is the point of the promised land? God loves His children, and so He will go to great lengths to ensure their happiness in the gospel. He does this not only for His living children but for the dead, who were also looking with great anticipation for temples to dot the earth and who were also devastated when the temple efforts were thwarted again and again. As Elder Dallin H. Oaks has said, “God’s anger and His wrath are not a contradiction of His love but an evidence of His love.”6
Indeed, the Lord could not have been clearer about why He would deliver the national scourge. In the next verses, He explained: “What I have said unto you must needs be, that all men may be left without excuse; that wise men and rulers may hear and know that which they have never considered; that I may proceed to bring to pass my act, my strange act, and perform my work, my strange work, that men may discern between the righteous and the wicked, saith your God” (D&C 101:93–95).
The terms strange act and strange work are used by God to describe the fulness of His gospel (see Isaiah 28:21; D&C 95:4). And so now we see definitively what this was really all about. The Restoration. The gathering of Israel. This was the reason for it all. A just cause, don’t you think?
At last, Joseph’s overzealousness and extreme behavior (that is, warning the nation of destruction and running for the presidency) do not seem so overzealous or extreme after all. Joseph saw the whole picture. He knew the plan. He knew what the nation would have to endure should they continue down the path of sin. And so he fought tooth and nail, literally running himself into the ground, to get those provisions (those powerful amendments) on the national table. As he himself lamented, by denying his petitions, Americans were “plunging themselves” into “the vortex of misery.”7 Anyone who lived through the Civil War could tell you that Joseph’s description was spot-on. More than six hundred thousand dead. Pain. Loneliness. Thousands of young widows. Tens of thousands of children crying for their dead fathers, brothers, uncles, loved ones, and friends. Not a family went unaffected. Words can’t describe what Joseph saw—what those poor Americans went through. But it was the final contingency. And it worked. For, through it, God was able to bring about Joseph’s constitutional provisions (what Lincoln would describe in his Gettysburg Address as “under God . . . a new birth of freedom”), and as a result temples would begin to dot the land at long last.
Are you convinced yet that God, and His prophecies delivered through His Prophet, were behind the Civil War? If not, the fulness of Abraham Lincoln—his thoughts, words, acts, and deeds—will never be completely understood.
In case you are not yet persuaded, I have found a few additional wonders I would like to share with you. Back to the scriptures. As early as 1831, the Lord revealed that a war connected to His efforts to bring forth the gospel might be expected to hit the very American generation from which had sprung the early Church. “And when the times of the Gentiles is come in, a light shall break forth among them that sit in darkness, and it shall be the fulness of my gospel; but they receive it not; for they perceive not the light, and they turn their hearts from me because of the precepts of men. . . . And there shall be men standing in that generation, that shall not pass until they shall see an overflowing scourge; for a desolating sickness shall cover the land.” The Lord then describes this scourge in part, leaving little doubt as to what He is referring to: “ . . . and they will take up the sword, one against another, and they will kill one another” (D&C 45:28–33). Considering the time frame and description of this imminent scourge, and considering it was given in response to the general disobedience of the people, does the Civil War not fit the bill?
As the war began and raged on, Brigham Young declared: “God has come out of his hiding-place and has commenced to vex the nation that has rejected us, and he will vex it with a sore vexation.”
A few years later, he said, “[Joseph’s] prediction is being fulfilled, and we cannot help it.”8
In 1832, over thirty years before it began, the Lord revealed to the Prophet Joseph the coming of the Civil War, even revealing the very state where it would commence:
“Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls; . . . for behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States. . . . And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war. And it shall come to pass also that the remnants who are left of the land will marshal themselves, and shall become exceedingly angry, and shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation” (D&C 87:1–5).
This prophecy was fulfilled, as the first shots fired in the Civil War were at the Southern invasion of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861. The scripture also states that the “Southern States will call on . . . Great Britain” (verse 3). This part of the prophecy was certainly fulfilled when, at the beginning of the conflict, a Southern delegation was dispatched to Great Britain in hopes of obtaining recognition and aid for the new Southern Confederacy.9
The Confederacy fires on Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
It is fascinating to see that such specific prophecy was, during the years leading up to the Civil War, streaming out of that obscure little band of people called Mormons. It’s incredible! While hundreds of thousands were living and sweating out this horrific vexation in the land, others, who were shunned and ignored at the time, actually (ironically) knew the secret of why it was occurring. Notwithstanding this incredible fact, it has occurred to me that so many later generations of Mormons today do not know this secret that their pioneer forebears possessed. I fear too many do not fully grasp the magnitude of what was happening. And we must! For if we don’t, nobody will. And if nobody will, then America is likely to fall into the same destructive cycle.
Early Warnings of the Civil War
Joseph Smith was not the only one to prophesy concerning the war. Some of the first founders of America also knew. During the creation of the Constitution, one of the delegates at the convention, George Mason, warned his countrymen of what God would do if America continued to permit the sin of slavery in the land. Such national sin, he predicted, would “bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”10 Thomas Jefferson had also uttered such a prophecy a few years earlier, warning, “There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. . . . Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” He then described “a revolution” over the conflict as being “among possible events” and that such an event would be administered by “supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”11 These men understood the national covenant—and they understood the consequences should that covenant be broken by the people.
Thomas Jefferson warned of the possible conflict over slavery.
One other Civil War prophecy that helps make my point is as follows. It was uttered by Joseph Smith in 1843, just months before he announced his presidential candidacy:
I prophesy in the name of the Lord God of Israel, unless the United States redress the wrongs committed upon the Saints in the state of Missouri and punish the crimes committed by her officers that in a few years the government will be utterly overthrown and wasted, and there will not be so much as a potsherd left, for their wickedness in permitting the murder of men, women and children, and the wholesale plunder and extermination of thousands of her citizens to go unpunished, thereby perpetrating a foul and corroding blot upon the fair fame of this great republic, the very thought of which would have caused the high-minded and patriotic framers of the Constitution of the United States to hide their faces with shame.12
I have observed how many make a fuss over this prophecy—both Mormons and non-Mormons. Why? Because it is said that it was a “false prophecy.” The wrongs against the Mormons were never redressed, they say, yet Missouri remained unmolested and unchanged. Joseph’s words never came to pass. Mormons get concerned. Anti-Mormons get giddy.
“And now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them . . . ; for it is the everlasting decree of God.”
—Ether 2:9–10
My response is, How can anyone think this prophecy was not fulfilled to the letter? When Joseph’s political provision was rejected, this prophecy was in fact shortly thereafter fulfilled. The Civil War not only physically destroyed America—especially Missouri (more on that later)—but the old government was in fact “overthrown” in a way that at last made it unconstitutional for the “murder of men, women and children” and for the “wholesale plunder and extermination” of the Saints. Indeed, the advent of the Fourteenth Amendment—even that direct fruit of the Civil War—changed the government forever, leaving the old government dead and “wasted.” A new government—a clarified version of the Constitution—had been employed. And this new government at last would deliver the God-given civil rights to all the people and would empower the national government to enforce such rights in the face of wicked state governments.
This prophecy perhaps sheds further light on why Joseph Smith included in the conclusion of his presidential platform publication—offered just months later—a singular description of God. Of the many defining characteristics of God that he could have given, Joseph chose this one: “God, who once cleansed the violence of the earth with flood.”13
Brigham Young Prophesies of Judgments to Come
Brigham Young knew the time of the foretold national vexation was very close at hand. In a revelation received by Brigham on the heels of Joseph’s martyrdom, still some fifteen years before the Civil War, the Lord, after calling for the Saints’ preparation to move westward, declared: “Thy brethren have rejected you and your testimony, even the nation that has driven you out; and now cometh the day of their calamity, even the days of sorrow, like a woman that is taken in travail; and their sorrow shall be great unless they speedily repent, yea, very speedily. For they killed the prophets, and them that were sent unto them; and they have shed innocent blood, which crieth from the ground against them” (D&C 136:34–36; emphasis added).
Commenting upon this “sorrow” that was shortly to come upon the nation, Brigham declared that it would come because they “reject the servants of God; they reject the Gospel of salvation; turn away from the principles of truth and righteousness . . . [and] they are sinking in their own sins and corruptions. . . . What will be their condition when the Spirit of the Lord is withdrawn? They will whet the knife to cut each other’s throats, and . . . [will] try to make Mason and Dixon’s the dividing line; but that will not remain, for they will cross it to destroy each other, and the sword and fire will be prevalent in the land.”14
Brigham Young added his prophecy about the pending calamities.
Unfortunately, all these astonishing prophecies did not result in the national righteousness they meant to produce. Instead, the nation crossed the line. It passed the point that finally forced the Lord’s hand, compelling Him to activate the frightening prophecies. With a prophet murdered in the land, and the last temple left in ashes, that was it. Think about it! At that point, God Almighty picked up His Saints and placed them outside of the United States. Then He unleashed the prophesied hell. He would now fix the nation in order to make it the vehicle for the gospel that it was destined to become.
His first order of business, before realizing the prophecies, was to place a driver in that vehicle—one who could ensure that the vexation resulted in His divine intent. He needed a humble servant who would see the vexation for what it was—a punishment from above—and then guide the nation to adopt the necessary solutions.
Before I introduce you to the national leader God would call to fill this divine mandate, I will first tell you about a little-known connection this leader’s election had to yet another Joseph Smith prophecy. You see, it appears that Joseph initially might have had another man identified in his mind as the leader God might use to save the country and help protect the Church. Joseph once dined with this man and extended a powerful and prophetic warning to him. The man was Stephen Douglas.
On May 18, 1843, the Prophet Joseph had dinner with Illinois Supreme Court Justice Stephen A. Douglas. Joseph, turning to Douglas, prophesied to him, “Judge, you will aspire to the presidency of the United States; and if you ever turn your hand against me or the Latter-day Saints, you will feel the weight of the hand of the Almighty upon you; and you will live to see and know that I have testified the truth to you.”15 Thirteen years later, Douglas turned against the Saints, declaring in a speech delivered in June 1857 that “the knife must be applied to this pestiferous, disgusting cancer [meaning Mormonism] which is gnawing into the very vitals of the body politic.”16 Months later, the Deseret News published Joseph’s prophecy regarding Douglas and—in a most powerful reminder—addressed the column directly to Douglas.
Three years after the prophecy was published, Douglas indeed aspired to the presidency and was expected by many to win it. Notwithstanding such expectations, however, as the prophecy declared, Douglas would feel the weight of the hand of the Almighty. And he no doubt felt it when his political nemesis was chosen to be president instead. During the same year he lost his bid for the presidency, the forty-eight-year-old Stephen A. Douglas suddenly died, “a broken-hearted man.”17
Douglas proved unworthy, and the prophecy was activated. So, who was the national leader chosen instead to take the presidency in that election, which was perhaps the most important election in American history? It is my pleasure to now introduce you to the miracle that was Abraham Lincoln!
Notes
^1. In Richard Vetterli, Mormonism, Americanism and Politics (Salt Lake City: Ensign Publishing Company, 1961), 173.
^2. In Gerald N. Lund, The Coming of the Lord (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 54.
^3. Vetterli, Mormonism, Americanism and Politics, 230.
^5. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Springfield, MA; Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2005), s.v. “vex.”
^6. Dallin H. Oaks, “Love and Law,” Ensign, November 2009, 27.
^7. In Vetterli, Mormonism, Americanism and Politics, 173.
^8. In Kenneth L. Alford, ed., Civil War Saints (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 96, 116.
^9. See William J. Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006), 323, 330–32, 350.
^10. “Madison Debates, Tuesday, August 22, 1787,” in The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. Accessed online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_822.asp.
^11. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289–90. Accessed online at http://web.archive.org/web/20110221131430/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=18&division=div1.
^12. Joseph Smith Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1973), 5:394.
^13. In Richard Bushman, “Mormonism and Politics: Are They Compatible?,” speech given at the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on Religion and Public Life, May 14, 2007, accessed online at www.pewforum.org/2007/05/14/mormonism-and-politics-are-they-compatible/.
^14. Discourses of Brigham Young, John A. Widtsoe, ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954), 365.
^15. In Tad R. Callister, The Inevitable Apostasy and the Promised Restoration (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2006), 361.