American Crucifixion Read online

  That was not a deal Rigdon could make. Soon afterward, the first thousand copies of the Expositor rolled off the printing press.

  Editor Emmons was away from Nauvoo on publication day, June 6, 1844; he had business in Springfield. He later claimed that “I had prepared some manuscript—a salutatory and some other articles—in which the case was drawn rather mild.” The paper that hit the streets in his absence contained considerably more ginger. “During my absence,” Emmons said, “Charley Foster and some others took the privilege of inserting articles that reflected rather severely upon the character and Christian conduct of the prophet. . . . Charges of a heinous nature were preferred against him, and to have such charges published was a fearful ordeal for him.”

  The front page masthead of the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor

  The four-page, six-column broadsheet bore the trappings of any midcentury, small-town American newspaper. The front page featured a simple poem (“The Last Man”), and a short, sentimental story. The Expositor had a wedding announcement, a few humorous snippets, and ads—one for a penmanship course, another placed by the Law brothers themselves, offering to mill grain “toll free” for Saints too poor to pay their fees. (This was quite politic of them, given that Joseph had publicly denounced their real estate profiteering.) The paper reprinted brief overseas dispatches from Russia and the “papal dominions,” as well as an account of Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic riots.

  A woman named Lucinda Sagers placed this notice:

  WHEREAS my husband, the Rt. Rev. W. H. Harrison Sagers, Esq., has left my bed and board without cause or provocation, this is to notify the public not to harbor or trust him on my account, as I will pay no debts of his contracting. More anon.

  This questionable character was the aforementioned Harrison Sagers, whom Joseph had allowed to secretly marry his young sister-in-law, Phoebe Madison.

  But no one bought the Expositor for its account of Jewish persecutions in Saint Petersburg, or its article about nativist riots back East. The Laws and the Fosters appreciated the ferocious power of a well-edited newspaper, and they devoted most of the column space to attacking Joseph Smith and his comrades.

  To do that, they needed to lay a little groundwork. First and foremost, the editors insisted that they were faithful Mormons: “We all verily believe, and many of us know of a surety, that the religion of the Latter Day Saints, as original taught by Joseph Smith . . . is verily true, and that the pure principles set forth in those books, are the immutable and eternal principles of Heaven.” One hears an echo of the Declaration of Independence in their claim to be “striking this blow at tyranny and oppression . . . though our lives be the forfeiture.”

  The editors’ first concern was polygamy, “the perversion of sacred things.” By way of condemning “the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms,” the dissidents printed a long, baroque, fictionalized account of the attempted seduction of an unnamed young immigrant girl from England. The innocent girl arrives in Nauvoo, where Joseph’s panders promptly pounce on her. They inform her that “God has great mysteries in store for those who love the lord, and cling to brother Joseph.” Next, the girl is

  requested to meet brother Joseph, or some of the Twelve, at some insulated point . . . or at some room, which bears upon its front—Positively NO Admittance. The harmless, inoffensive and unsuspecting creatures are so devoted to the Prophet and the cause of Jesus Christ that they do not dream of the deep laid and fatal scheme which prostrates happiness, and renders death itself desirable.

  What follows is predetermined; the girl learns that “she should be his (Joseph’s) Spiritual wife; for it was right anciently, and God will tolerate it again.” There is the hint that Joseph has impregnated the girl, who is “sent away for a time, until all is well.” She returns, “as from a long visit.” Her spirit has broken, “but no one knows the cause, except the foul fiend who perpetrated the diabolical deed.”

  Many of the paper’s readers would have recognized the actual story of Martha Brotherton, an English girl who said she had been targeted for seduction by the Prophets’ outriders. The real-life Brotherton was an eighteen-year-old from Manchester, England, who arrived in Nauvoo with her parents and siblings. In a letter widely reprinted during the summer of 1842, she described her attempted seduction almost exactly as the Expositor had it: Two apostles, Brigham Young and Heber Kimball, began making cryptic comments to her, for example, “Sister Martha, are you willing to do all that the Prophet requires you to do?” Would she like to learn “the mysteries of the kingdom”? And so on. They then led her to the second floor of Joseph’s famous redbrick store, to a locked room marked “Positively no admittance.” Soon the Prophet entered the room. Suddenly, Smith and Kimball walked out, leaving her alone with Young. According to Brotherton’s account, Young stood up, locked the door, slid the second-story window shut and drew the curtain across it. Swearing her to secrecy, Young made his pass. “Have not you an affection for me,” he inquired, “that, were it lawful and right, you could accept of me for your husband and companion?” Brotherton resisted, and Young explained the new order of marriage: “Brother Joseph has had a revelation from God that it is lawful and right for a man to have two wives; for as it was in the days of Abraham, so it shall be in these last days.”

  Martha was still unconvinced, so Young kissed her and left the room. He pocketed the key, and promised to return with Joseph, who would explain the new doctrine. A few minutes later Joseph came in, and assured Brotherton, as he assured so many other young women, that Young’s proposal was “lawful and right before God.” Brotherton continued to resist. She pleaded for time to think, which the men granted her, provided “you will never mention it to anyone.” “I do promise it,” she replied, although that is a promise that she did not keep. Her story, gleefully exploited by anti-Mormons in Illinois and Missouri, appeared in at least four regional newspapers, including the St. Louis Bulletin. She and her parents fled Nauvoo. Her brother and two sisters, who remained faithful to the church, swore an affidavit denouncing Martha as “a willful inventor of lies.”

  Brigham Young finally had his way with the attractive young girl from Manchester. Six years after her death, Young sealed himself to her for eternity in a proxy marriage in 1870. Martha’s sister Elizabeth, a plural wife of the apostle Parley Pratt, stood in for the deceased.

  Another life story, this one without the thin veil of fiction, also appeared in the maiden issue of the Expositor. The Laws’ fellow dissident and former church first counselor Austin Cowles signed an affidavit declaring the doctrine of plural wifery to be heretical. Cowles explained that Hyrum Smith read the polygamy revelation to the Nauvoo High Council in 1843, and that Cowles resigned immediately afterward. Cowles didn’t explain that Joseph had taken his daughter Elvira as a plural wife while the girl was living in the Smith household. In the Byzantine kinship calculus of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo, Cowles was rebelling against his own son-in-law.

  The Expositor editors also assailed Joseph’s temporal ambitions, citing his “attempt at Political power and influence, which we verily believe to be preposterous and absurd . . . WE do not believe that God ever raised up a prophet to christianize a world by political schemes and intrigue.” They especially mocked his ongoing presidential campaign as a “flourish of Quixotial chivalry, to take, by storm, the presidential chair.” They also spread rumors of Smith’s financial skullduggery, which had been reported as far away as New York. They accused him of selling “property at most exorbitant prices” and of “humbug practiced upon the saints by Joseph and others . . . to gull the saints the better on their arrival at Nauvoo, by buying the lands in the vicinity and selling again to them at tenfold advance.” The astute reader knew that the Law brothers were in the property business themselves, competing with Smith and the church.

  Finally, they accused Smith of blasphemy and “false doctrine.” How could the Prophet blaspheme? By contending
“that there are innumerable gods as much above the God that presides over this universe, as he is above us;

  And if he varies from the law unto which he is subjected, he, with all his creatures, will be cast down as was Lucifer: thus holding forth a doctrine which is effectually calculated to sap the very foundation of our faith. . . .

  Here the dissidents were calling out Joseph’s startling new theology unveiled in the King Follett sermon, his contention that God was once a man who lived on earth, and advanced spiritually under the tutelage of a preceding god. This was indeed blasphemy against the established Christian church, but could a prophet guided by heavenly revelation blaspheme his own theology? Joseph had already rewritten both the Old and New Testaments and created holy rituals, all of them inspired by his direct communications with God.

  Copies of the Expositor flew out the doors of the Laws’ print shop. “Every one who could raise five cents bought a copy,” said one local resident. The editors optimistically announced that the Expositor, “worthy of the patronage of a discerning and an enlightened public,” would appear on every succeeding Friday, inviting readers to spend $2 for an annual subscription. William Law expressed confidence that future issues “will set forth deeds of the most dark, cruel and damning ever perpetrated by any people under the name of religion since the world began.”

  THERE WOULD BE NO SECOND ISSUE THE NEXT FRIDAY, NOR ANY Friday after that. Joseph Smith quickly decided that Nauvoo didn’t need an independent newspaper. By 10:00 a.m. the next day, Saturday, Mayor Joseph Smith had convened the Nauvoo City Council and was railing against the whole Expositor crowd—editor Emmons, the Laws, the Higbees, the Fosters, and Cowles.

  The City Council, established by Nauvoo’s generous City Charter, was little more than a cat’s paw for the Prophet-mayor. The council kept an eye on public safety, monitored off-leash dogs, and repeatedly tried to regulate grog shops, which sprang up like wildflowers in the sometimes boisterous riverside town. In 1843, the eager-to-please council awarded the town’s liquor monopoly to . . . Joseph’s Nauvoo Mansion. “A hotel that is a temperance house cannot support itself,” was Joseph’s rationale, speaking as an innkeeper and not as the revealer of the Word of Wisdom, “and if anybody needs those profits, I do.” On a more serious note, the council passed several special ordinances strengthening Nauvoo’s power of habeas corpus, meaning that the local court could free virtually any Mormon indicted by an out-of-town sheriff or marshal. The council even enacted a “Special Ordinance in the Prophet’s Case vs. Missouri” stipulating that anyone crossing the Mississippi to arrest Joseph Smith for alleged crimes in Missouri could be arrested and committed to “the city prison for life.”

  The council didn’t pretend to be an independent deliberative body, and it certainly didn’t act like one when Joseph and Hyrum Smith started inveighing against their enemies. In its first session after the Expositor’s publication, the council promptly stripped Emmons of his duties as a city councillor. (“Who was Judge Emmons?” Hyrum asked. “When he came here he had scarce 2 shirts!”) Curiously, the council took no similar action against City Councillor William Law, nor against his brother Wilson, the president of the City Council—although both men were vigorously tarred, in absentia. The Laws were denounced as rapacious capitalists, enriching themselves at the expense of the poor. Joseph complained that William hounded him for a $40 debt when Smith was imprisoned in Missouri, adding that Law was an adulterer and a despoiler of virgins to boot. Joseph called Jane Law, the woman who rebuffed his sexual advances, “a whore from Canada.” A witness named Peter Haws spun a particularly lurid tale about Wilson Law, who purportedly seduced a teenage English orphan entrusted to Haws’s care. Joseph chimed in that “certain women came to complain to his wife [Emma] that they had caught Wilson Law on the floor at Mr. Haws in the night.”

  Brother Hyrum raged against the Fosters and the Higbees (“What good have they ever done?”) and accused their shadowy accomplice Joseph Jackson—the same Joseph Jackson who served as an aide-de-camp to the Prophet, and claimed to “make bogus” in the Smith homestead—of lusting after Hyrum’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Lovina. Hyrum casually asserted that Jackson’s main line of work was counterfeiting, and he let slip that Francis Higbee had “the pox,” that is, syphilis. While much of the fulminating had only a tenuous basis in fact, many of the charges leveled at Jackson seemed to be true. He was an itinerant freebooter with a powerful sense of personal intrigue; he once called at the Nauvoo Mansion when Joseph was absent. “You tell the Prophet that the wickedest man on earth called to see him,” Jackson said to Emma. Acting as an agent for Missouri sheriffs hoping to kidnap Smith, Jackson had attempted to ingratiate himself with the Prophet. In a raucously unreliable memoir, Jackson claimed he had sought favor with the young Lovina to learn more about Joseph’s personal life. For good measure, Jackson accused Smith of attempting to seduce his own sister, a sister-in-law, and a niece—the young Lovina.

  Joseph waxed purple on the subject of Austin Cowles’s affidavit concerning the secret revelation on polygamy. Plural wifery had “nothing to do with the present time,” Joseph insisted. “The Mayor said he had never preached the revelation in private as he had in public—had not taught it to the anointed in the Church, in private, which many confirmed.” The members of the High Council would have known this was poppycock, as several of them had already taken plural wives, with Joseph’s secret blessing.

  What was to be done? Noxious printing presses were nothing new on the frontier, and tradition dictated: destroy them. The Mormons had experienced the furor of an aggrieved readership back in 1833 when the church-owned newspaper in Independence, Missouri, the Evening and Morning Star, published an ill-advised opinion on slavery. The opinion was ill-advised because the Star did not wholeheartedly endorse Negro bondage. The paper’s editor, William Phelps, wanted to extend an olive branch to some free blacks who had converted to Mormonism. In an article titled “Free People of Color,” the paper casually celebrated the fact that “much is being done toward abolishing slavery.”

  In Independence, where Joseph believed Adam and Eve had disported themselves in the Garden of Eden, those were fighting words. The “old settlers,” mainly transplants from Southern states, already disapproved of Mormon missions to the Indians, whom Smith had declared to be the original inhabitants of Eden. Now the whiff of abolitionism seared their nostrils. Although Phelps immediately published a mendacious climbdown in an extra edition, recanting any warm feeling about blacks (“Our intention was not only to stop free people of color from emigrating to this state, but to prevent them from being admitted as members of the Church”), it was too late. A mob destroyed the press, razed its office building, and tarred and feathered two editors imprudent enough not to flee.

  In more recent memory, down the river in Alton, Illinois, an angry mob killed the abolitionist editor Reverend Elijah Lovejoy and drowned his Alton Observer printing press in the Mississippi. Lovejoy had been warned. Mobs had tossed his two previous presses into the river. When the citizens arrived to burn his premises on the night of November 7, 1837, the Presbyterian minister managed to push one of their ladders off his roof and brandished his gun. He quickly perished in a hail of gunfire.

  Joseph was no pro-slavery firebrand. Quite the opposite; his presidential platform encouraged the gradual freeing of America’s African population. But he did take a page from the anti-abolitionist playbook when dealing with the Expositor. In a second, daylong City Council meeting, he asked out loud how the town could rid itself of the paper, “a greater nuisance than a dead carcass . . . . What the opposition party wanted was to rise a mob on us and take the spoil of us as they did in Missouri. . . . The Mayor said the Constitution did not authorize the press to publish Libels—and proposed the council make some provision for putting down the Nauvoo Expositor.”

  Joseph Smith had created a vast and arcane theology, replete with theories governing salvation, the end of times, and the stratification of everlastin
g life. He was an accomplished and creative intellectual freelancer, so it came as no surprise that he cobbled together a legal rationale for closing down the Expositor. His first instinct, invoking the US Constitution, to which he often professed fealty, was a nonstarter. The words “libel” and “nuisance” appear nowhere in that document. There are ten words in the Constitution’s First Amendment governing freedom of speech and the press, the most important one being “freedom.” So with the help of Nauvoo’s city attorney, George P. Styles, Joseph started rummaging around the law books, looking for a pretext to destroy the noisome newspaper.

  The Illinois constitution was no help. “The printing presses shall be free to every person,” the statute read, “and no law shall ever be made to restrain the right thereof.” The field of common law torts held out hope, specifically William Blackstone’s famous four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1826. Joseph Smith, who occasionally made sport of the legal profession, loved Blackstone, and believed the Commentaries had a totemic effect on the lawless frontier. When Elder Erastus Snow was hoping to avoid imprisonment by a Missouri judge, Joseph advised him to “plead for justice as hard as you can, and quote Blackstone and other authors now and then, and they will take it all for law.” It worked. Blackstone was commonly cited in courtrooms across the young United States, and the renowned jurist directly addressed the question of abating nuisances: