American Crucifixion Read online

  American Crucifixion

  Also by Alex Beam:

  Fellow Travelers

  The Americans Are Coming!

  Gracefully Insane:

  Life and Death Inside America’s

  Premier Mental Institution

  A Great Idea at the Time

  Copyright © 2014 by Alex Beam.

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus

  Books Group

  All rights reserved.

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  Book design by Linda Mark

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beam, Alex.

  American crucifixion : the murder of Joseph Smith and the fate of the Mormon church / Alex

  Beam.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61039-314-0 (ebook) 1. Smith, Joseph, Jr.,

  1805–1844—Assassination. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—History. 3. Mormon

  Church—History. I. Title.

  BX8695.S6B385 2014

  289.3092—dc23

  [B]

  2014004063

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mother, beyond the veil

  If you can imagine yourselves how the apostles and saints felt when the Savior was crucified, you can give something of a guess of how the Saints felt here when they [heard] that their Prophet and Patriarch were both Dead and murdered by a lawless mob. Never has there been such a horrible crime committed since the day Christ was Crucified . . .

  —SALLY RANDALL, writing to Mormon friends from Nauvoo, Illinois, July 1, 1844

  CONTENTS

  Cast of Characters

  Place Names

  Introduction

  1.Flight

  PART ONE

  “In Illinois we’ve found a safe retreat . . . ”

  2.King Joseph

  3.Zion, Illinois

  4.Everybody Hates the Mormons

  5.Polygamy and Its Discontents

  PART TWO

  “Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood / Of Prophets martyr’d for the truth of God.”

  6.“The Perversion of Sacred Things”

  7.“Crucify Him! Crucify Him!”

  8.Enter Pontius Pilate

  9.Surrender

  10.“The People Are Not That Cruel”

  11.Joseph’s Homecoming

  12.Trial by Jury

  PART THREE

  “Let us go to the far western shore / Where the blood-thirsty ‘christians’ will hunt us no more.”

  13.Aftermath

  14.This World and the Next

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Notes

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Index

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  JOSEPH SMITH JR.: thirty-eight years old, founder of the Mormon Church

  EMMA HALE SMITH: thirty-nine, Joseph’s first wife

  LUCY MACK SMITH: Joseph’s mother

  HYRUM SMITH: forty-four, Joseph’s older brother

  WILLIAM SMITH AND SAMUEL SMITH: younger brothers

  JOSEPH SMITH III: Joseph and Emma’s oldest son

  BRIGHAM YOUNG: head of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Joseph Smith’s successor as head of the church

  SIDNEY RIGDON: early convert to Mormonism, orator and theologian

  ORRIN PORTER ROCKWELL: aide and friend to Joseph, a frontiersman and killer, one of the church’s “Avenging Angels”

  WILLARD RICHARDS: Mormon church leader and Joseph’s personal historian

  JOHN TAYLOR: apostle, future church president

  WILLIAM MARKS: Nauvoo stake (ecclesiastical district) president

  HIRAM KIMBALL: wealthy Nauvoo merchant who later converted to Mormonism

  HEBER KIMBALL: one of the original twelve apostles

  WILLIAM LAW: prominent church member and businessman, backer of dissident newspaper Nauvoo Expositor

  JANE LAW: William’s wife

  WILSON LAW: William’s brother, Nauvoo Legion general, City Council chairman

  CHARLES AND WILLIAM FOSTER: prominent Mormon dissidents, co-publishers of the Nauvoo Expositor

  CHAUNCEY AND FRANCIS HIGBEE: dissident sons of a prominent church leader

  THOMAS SHARP: influential anti-Mormon newspaper editor in nearby Warsaw, Illinois

  GOVERNOR THOMAS FORD: “accidental governor” of Illinois who tried to mediate between the Mormons and their enemies

  GOVERNOR LILBURN BOGGS: governor of Missouri, Mormon-hater, author of the 1838 anti-Mormon Extermination Order

  STEPHEN DOUGLAS: influential Illinois legislator, initially pro-Mormon

  “DR.” ISAAC GALLAND: scalawag who sold government lands he didn’t own to the Mormons

  JAMES GORDON BENNETT: pro-Mormon editor of the New York Herald

  JOHN C. BENNETT: former Nauvoo mayor, turned Mormon-hater

  JAMES STRANG: Mormon prophet who attempted to take over the church after Joseph’s death

  PLACE NAMES

  Babylon: The un-Zion, where all non-Mormons, or Gentiles, live

  Caldwell County, Missouri: Scene of the 1838 anti-Mormon War

  Carthage, Illinois: Hancock County seat, site of Joseph Smith’s death

  Montrose, Iowa: Mormon settlement on the Mississippi’s west bank, in the Half-Breed Tract

  Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois: Mormon city founded in 1839, razed by Mormon-haters in 1846

  Utah Territory, the Great Salt Lake: Destination of the 1847 Mormon Trek, the religion’s eventual home

  Warsaw, Hancock County, Illinois: Tiny town eclipsed by more populous Nauvoo; hotbed of anti-Mormon hatred

  Zion: Gathering place of the righteous, i.e., the Mormons; initially Far West, Missouri, then Nauvoo, and ultimately Salt Lake City, Utah

  Hancock County, Illinois, 1844.

  INTRODUCTION

  JOSEPH SMITH THOUGHT HE WAS GIVING AMERICA TWO GREAT gifts. First, he created a new Bible, the Book of Mormon, which recounted Jesus’s appearance on the North American continent. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the New World merged into one seamless, divine narrative, handed down by Joseph. Second, he brought news of the Second Coming and a restoration of God’s rule on earth. Joseph preached that a theocratic Kingdom of God would appear on American soil, possibly within his own lifetime. He had already chosen the men to administer the new, universal government.

  America scorned Joseph’s proffered gifts. “The whole [Book of Mormon] was a delusion,” Smith’s father-in-law said in an 1834 affidavit gleefully reproduced around the country. As Joseph’s fame grew, his early neighbors broadcast their reminiscences of Smith and his family as a “lazy, indolent set of men.” The “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth”—a title Smith assumed in 1844—was continuously rejected by his kingdom. Smith fled the first Mormon colony in Kirtland, Ohio, under a cloud and moved his followers to Missouri.

  Their new home proved even less hospitable. Within just a few years, a shooting war erupted between the Mormons and their Gentile neighbo
rs, who chased the Latter-day Saints across the Mississippi River into Illinois. Just six years after they settled in Illinois, the Mormons were refugees once again, this time trekking west across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to their new home in Utah.

  Joseph didn’t live to see his people prosper in the Salt Lake Valley. He was murdered in the dusty village of Carthage, Illinois, best known then and now for its tragic role in Mormon history.

  What happened? Joseph was hardly the first prophet of America’s Second Great Awakening—the tide of religious fervor that washed across the country at the start of the nineteenth century—to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn’t the last. But he was the most successful. Converts followed him across the vast American continent, in conditions of unimaginable privation. Rich men, inspired by Joseph’s biblical visions, surrendered their wealth to his fledgling church. Thousands of impoverished men and women from the British Isles crammed themselves into steamships to cross the Atlantic and half of the United States to join Joseph’s flock in the American Midwest. Yet within just a few years of their arrival, their leader was dead.

  Latter-day Saint historians and their Gentile colleagues have pored over many signal events in Mormon history, such as Joseph’s First Vision of God, his purported discovery of the Book of Mormon, and the Saints’ grueling trek to Utah. But most historians have ignored Joseph’s death, known to the faithful as the “martyrdom.” The church’s sacred record of Doctrine and Covenants (135:1–6) reports Joseph was killed “by an armed mob—painted black—of from 150 to 200 persons,” a phrase that appears in almost every high school history textbook in America. But the “mob” included a prominent newspaper editor, a state senator, a justice of the peace, two regimental military commanders, and men who just a few months before were faithful members of Joseph’s church. They were a “respectable set of men,” as one Carthage resident explained.

  The leading citizens of southwestern Illinois could have imprisoned Joseph Smith. They could have chased him back across the Mississippi and delivered him to his old enemies in Missouri. Instead, they killed him.

  Why?

  That is the story of this book.

  JOSEPH SMITH’S DEATH WAS SUPPOSED TO “SEAL THE FATE OF Mormonism,” according to the New York Herald, which reported that “the Latter-day Saints have seen the latter day.” Quite the contrary. Joseph’s death ended only the first chapter in the long chronicle of one of America’s most ambitious and successful religions. Never forgetting their “prophet dear,” several thousand Mormons braved the 1,300-mile overland journey to the Utah Territory. There they founded an independent republic the size of France, lived in open rebellion against the federal government for the better part of a half century, and only gradually realigned themselves with the country they held responsible for the death of their leader.

  The assassination of Joseph Smith marked the beginning of the triumphal Mormon progress that continues to this day. Joseph’s death did not paralyze the Mormons. Instead, it galvanized the Saints, strengthened them in their beliefs, and propelled them westward to a new, final, thriving “Zion.” “The blood of the martyrs [was] indeed the seed of the church,” as Joseph’s nephew, church president Joseph Fielding Smith, gruesomely observed in the Juvenile Instructor, a Mormon children’s magazine. The Saints—“perhaps the most work-addicted culture in American history,” according to historian David Brion Davis—labored, they proselytized, they fought, prayed, and struggled, to erect an international Christian movement with 14 million members. That imposing edifice stands atop the modest gravestone of a thirty-eight-year-old preacher gunned down in cold blood on America’s Mississippi border.

  1

  FLIGHT

  Nauvoo, Illinois

  June 23, 1844

  JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, FOUR MEN CAST A SHALLOW-BOTTOMED skiff into the roiled waters of the raging Mississippi. It had been raining for weeks. No one could remember the river this swollen, or this angry. In St. Louis, two hundred miles to the south, steamboats were boarding passengers from the second stories of flooded warehouses on Water Street. “Mississippi river very high,” Joseph Smith wrote in his diary on April 25. “Higher than known by the oldest inhabitants about.” Up and down the shoreline, grist mills for grinding flour had washed away; in some areas there wasn’t enough to eat. In Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, bottomland farmhouses washed into the swell, tangling their beams, joists, and window casements with uprooted trees. Flotsam smashed against the sides of the skiff, sloshing water over the gunwales.

  The four Mormons from Illinois were rowing to the tiny town of Montrose a mile and a half across the river in the Iowa Territory. The US Army, homesteaders, and finally some Mormon settlers had staked out Montrose, which sat on the edge of a vast tract of real estate known as the Half-Breed Lands. Two of the passengers, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, were wanted men, fleeing from writs issued by a hostile court in Carthage, the county seat of Hancock County, Illinois. They were likewise fleeing from a ragtag assemblage of town militias and freebooting vigilantes gathered in Carthage, eager to bring the brothers to “justice,” preferably at the end of a rope.

  Orrin Porter Rockwell, a powerful, stumpish frontiersman, strained at the oars. A contemporary described him as “a shaggy and dangerous watchdog [with] the face of a mastiff and the strength of a bear.” Still, Rockwell had some oddly feminine characteristics. Women noticed his “magnetic blue eyes” and delicate hands. He wore his long hair in double braids and strained not to lose his temper. When he became angry, which was often enough, his voice rose to an adolescent falsetto.

  Rockwell had known Joseph since they were both young men hunting for buried treasure in rural New York. He was a celebrity on the Mississippi frontier, where he was known as the Destroying Angel of Mormon. (Joseph called him “an innocent and noble boy.”) He was one of the first of the Danites, a secret Mormon vigilante force formed to protect the church from its enemies when it was headquartered in Missouri. By 1844, the Danites supposedly no longer existed, but Rockwell still had a reputation as a ferocious scrapper. He had been arrested and acquitted for the attempted assassination of Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, who issued the famous anti-Mormon Extermination Order of 1838. Rockwell, alternately laconic and loquacious, both confessed to the crime and denied his involvement at different periods of his life. Of the Boggs shooting, he once boasted, “[I] never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot! He’s still alive, ain’t he?”

  For many years, Rockwell served as bodyguard, barber, bootblack, and factotum to Joseph, founder of the Mormon faith, known to his followers as “the Prophet.” Rockwell accompanied Joseph on his visit to Washington, DC, where Smith sought reparations for the Mormons’ expulsion from Missouri from an indifferent President Martin Van Buren. In 1838, when Smith and some comrades languished for five months in a Missouri jail, Rockwell smuggled in augers to help them burrow through a wall to freedom. The walls were too thick. Joseph and his friends were later allowed to escape, probably to spare Missouri the expense and embarrassment of an acquittal at trial.

  In the early 1860s, the famous British explorer Sir Richard Burton found Rockwell herding cattle outside of Salt Lake City. “His tastes are apparently rural,” the British nobleman reported, “his enemies declare that his life would not be safe in the City of the Saints.” Rockwell, “tall and strong with ample leather leggings overhanging his huge spurs,” carried two six-guns and treated Burton to some local firewater, or aguacaliente. Burton was traveling from Utah to California, and Rockwell offered some helpful tips: “Carry a double-barreled gun loaded with buck-shot . . . and never to trust to appearances in an Indian country, where the red varmint will follow a man for weeks, perhaps peering through a wisp of grass on a hill-top till the time arrives for striking the blow.” “Finally, he comforted me with an assurance,” Burton recalled, “that either the Indians would not attempt to attack us and our stock—ever a sore temptation to them—or that they would assault u
s in force and ‘wipe us out.’”

  Rockwell was once the subject of a famous Joseph Smith prophecy. After being released from a Missouri jail, Rockwell showed up at Smith’s Nauvoo, Illinois, mansion unannounced, bedraggled, with wild, uncut hair, on Christmas Eve. Smith failed to recognize him. Finally discerning his friend, Smith declared, “I prophesy, in the name of the Lord, that you—Orrin Porter Rockwell—so long as ye shall remain loyal and true to thy faith, need fear no enemy. Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee.” Unlike some of Smith’s predictions, this one came true. After a long career as a frontier scout, Indian killer, and mountain man, the shaggy-maned Rockwell died peacefully in Salt Lake City in 1878.

  Next to Rockwell, bailing furiously with his boot, sat Hyrum Smith, taller and thinner than his famous younger brother Joseph. Except for Joseph’s wife, Emma, Hyrum was his brother’s most trusted family member. A member of the ruling Quorum of Twelve Apostles and patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Hyrum also claimed to have witnessed Joseph’s miraculous transcription of the Book of Mormon from golden plates found near Palmyra, New York. Hyrum and several other men who later parted company with Joseph swore that his brother “had shewn unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon.”

  Joseph had recently entrusted Hyrum with the delicate task of explaining his revelation concerning polygamy—the necessity of marrying multiple wives—to Emma, his faithful wife of seventeen years.

  “If you will write the revelation, I will take and read it to Emma,” Hyrum assured his brother. “I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace.”

  A bemused Joseph answered that Hyrum did “not know Emma as well as I do.”

  The even-tempered Hyrum failed to pull off what would have been a masterstroke of diplomacy. In fact, Emma broke into a fit of rage and abused him. “Emma was very bitter and full of resentment and anger,” Hyrum reported, adding that “he had never received a more severe talking to in his life.”