American Crucifixion Read online

  Whatsoever unlawfully annoys or does damage to another is a nuisance; and such nuisance may be abated, that is, taken away or removed, by the party aggrieved thereby, so as he commits no riot in the doing of it. . . .

  In a footnote, Blackstone conveniently explained that a newspaper could constitute a “private nuisance”: “So it seems that a libelous print or paper, affecting a private individual, may be destroyed, or, which is the safer course, taken and delivered to a magistrate.” Immediately after invoking Blackstone, Hyrum Smith opined that best way to deal with the Expositor would be “to smash the presses all to pieces and pie [scatter] the type.” Soon afterward, the council adopted the fateful resolution:

  To the marshal: “You are hereby commanded to destroy the printing press from whence issues the Nauvoo Expositor, and pi the type of said printing establishment in the street, and burn all the Expositors and libelous handbills found in said establishment; and if resistance be offered to your execution of this order by the owner or others, demolish the house: and if anyone threatens you or the Mayor or the officers of the city, arrest those who threaten you, and fail not to execute this order without delay, and make due return thereon.”

  By order of the City Council,

  JOSEPH SMITH, MAYOR

  Even before the council disbanded at 6:00 p.m., Chief of Police Jonathan Dunham and City Marshal John Greene, leading a force of over one hundred men armed with muskets, knives, and pistols, converged on the Laws’ two-story brick office on Mulholland Street. Chauncey Higbee and Charles Foster were present, and they put up no resistance as the mayor’s men methodically trashed the interior of the newly constructed brick building. “All was done in perfect order,” a Dr. Wake-field testified at a subsequent inquest that cleared everyone of any misdoing, “as peaceably as people move on a Sunday.”

  While two companies of the Nauvoo Legion kept watch, the police posse began applying sledgehammers to the printing press. Foster recorded the “work of destruction and desperation”:

  They tumbled the press and materials into the street, and set fire to them, and demolished the machinery with sledge hammer, and injured the building very materially. We made no resistance; but looked on and felt revenge, but leave it for the public to avenge this climax of insult and injury.

  After destroying William Law’s $2,000 letterpress, the whooping Mormon mob tossed every combustible they could find—office furniture, type drawers, spare copies of the Expositor—into the street, and lit a bonfire. Nauvoo’s prospects for an independent political voice went up in smoke.

  After sundown, the bumptious crowd headed through the center of town for the Nauvoo Mansion, to be congratulated by Joseph. “I gave them a short address [and] told them they had done right,” the Prophet noted. “They had executed my order required of me by the city council that I would never submit to have another libelous publication established in this city.” His speech “was loudly greeted by 3 cheers 3 times,” he recalled. Then “the posse dispersed all in good order.”

  Meanwhile, Robert Foster and William Law had spent the day in Carthage, discussing the situation in Nauvoo. The locals urged Law to move his independent newspaper to Carthage, as it was sure to be destroyed in Nauvoo. “I did not believe it,” he wrote in his diary. He believed it when he rode back into Nauvoo, and his horse’s hooves passed over the fragments of lead type lying in the muddy street. “We rode over our type, and over our broken office furniture,” he recalled.

  The work of Joseph’s agents had been very complete; it had been done by a mob of about 200. The building, a new, pretty brick structure, had been perfectly gutted, not a bit had been left of anything.

  JOSEPH HAD OVERSTEPPED. THE ATTACK ON THE NEWSPAPER, coupled with his other startling démarches in early 1844, were costing him loyalty. Missionary Isaac Scott wrote a long letter to his wife’s parents in Sutton, Massachusetts, detailing the outlandish happenings in Nauvoo:

  A plurality of gods. A plurality of living wives. . . . These with many other things are taught by Joseph, which we consider are odious and doctrines of the devil.

  “Joseph had a revelation last summer,” Scott continued, “purporting to be from the Lord, allowing the Saints to have ten living wives at one time.

  I mean certain conspicuous characters among them. They do not content themselves with young women, but have seduced married women. I believe hundreds have been deceived. Now should I yield up your daughter to such wretches?

  Scott related how Joseph had excommunicated the Law brothers and Austin Cowles and “delivered [them] over to the buffetings of Satan” without any due process whatsoever. Then,

  Joseph called his Sanhedrin together, . . . tried the press and ordered the city marshal to take three hundred armed men and go burn the press, and if any offered resistance, to rip them from the guts to the gizzard. These are his own words.

  The reaction outside Nauvoo was far more intense. Joseph had told the City Council that destroying the Expositor would “excite our enemies abroad.” He was right. Joseph had handed his enemies a mortal weapon to wield against him, and they did.

  Thomas Sharp sprang into action. He threw an “extra” edition of the Warsaw Signal onto his presses, trumpeting Charles Foster’s on-the-scene account of the trashing of the Expositor:

  Mr. Sharp:—I hasten to inform you of the UNPARALLELED OUTRAGE, perpetrated upon our rights and interests, by the ruthless, lawless, ruffian band of MORMON MOBOCRATS, a the dictum of that UNPRINCIPLED wretch Joe Smith.

  Foster provided a gripping account of the attack, and Sharp immediately unleashed his ire:

  War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and ALL!!!—Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS!! to ROB men of their property and RIGHTS, without avenging them. We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER AND BALL!!!

  This was the trespass that Sharp and the Hancock County Mormon-haters had been waiting for. Inflamed citizens swarmed mass meetings in Carthage, Warsaw, and the surrounding towns. Then news arrived that Joseph Smith had yet again escaped arrest for a crime. When Francis Higbee swore out a complaint accusing Joseph of inciting a riot to destroy the Expositor, the Carthage court sent Constable David Bettisworth to Nauvoo to arrest Smith. Similar gambits had failed in the past, and this one did, too. A local justice of the peace simply vacated Higbee’s motion. “Court decided that Joseph Smith had acted under proper authority in destroying the establishment of the Nauvoo Expositor on the 10th inst.,” the order read; “that this was a malicious prosecution on the part of Francis M. Higbee; and that said Higbee pay the costs of suit, and that Joseph Smith be honorably discharged from the accusations and of the writ, and go hence without delay.”

  The next day, Joseph himself, ruling as chief of the Nauvoo Municipal Court, acquitted the other seventeen men accused of attacking the newspaper.

  When Bettisworth returned to Carthage empty-handed, the city was dumbfounded. “Joseph has tried the game too often,” one citizen grumbled. The hapless constable journeyed to Nauvoo a second time, again butted heads with Mormon justice, and lost again. Local magistrate Daniel Wells, a Jack-Mormon, or Mormon sympathizer, who owned a farm next door to Joseph’s, tossed out a second riot charge.

  The Mormons continued to manufacture their own justice, and it enraged the old settlers. In Carthage, Captain Samuel Williams of the Carthage Greys said the old citizens were apoplectic with rage: “Such an excitement have never witnessed in my life.” Seven hundred irate citizens jammed the town green for an anti-Mormon rally, railing against “the mad Prophet and his demoniac coadjutors.” The word “extermination” was again ringing from the rafters.

  The three hundred anti-Mormons who assembled in nearby Warsaw resolved that Smith had “violated the highest privilege in government; and to seek redress in the ordinary mode would be utterly ineffectual.” The time had come to “exterminate the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles . . . a war of ex
termination should be waged to the entire destruction, if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.”

  Documents adopted in both Carthage and Warsaw demanded that the Mormons of Hancock County be herded into the Nauvoo city limits and forced to turn over “the Prophet and his miscreant adherents. . . . If not surrendered, a war of extermination should be conducted.” Every man in the county should “each one arm and equip ourselves forthwith.” The second Mormon War had begun.

  7

  “CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM!”

  I have got all the truth which the Christian world possessed, and an independent revelation in the bargain, and God will bear me off triumphant.

  —Joseph Smith’s final sermon, June 16, 1844

  ON SATURDAY, JUNE 15, JOSEPH SMITH DISCERNED THE FIRST stirrings of the popular revolt set off by the burning of the Expositor offices. “Two brethren come from Lima,” he recorded in his diary. “Said Colonel Levi Williams had demanded the Mormons’ arms. Father Morley wanted to know what to do.”

  Isaac Morley was a veteran of the Missouri troubles and Joseph’s stake president in Lima, an exposed Mormon settlement thirty miles south of Nauvoo. Levi Williams was a prosperous farmer and belligerent Mormon-hater who owned a 113-acre farm south of Warsaw. Williams had legitimate military credentials. A veteran of the War of 1812, he served as a ranger in Illinois’s Black Hawk War against the local Indian tribes. He had risen to command the Fifty-ninth Regiment of the Illinois militia, headquartered in Warsaw. Williams despised the Saints, whom he viewed as unwanted interlopers in an otherwise peaceful corner of the world. In 1843, Williams led a mob that kidnapped an accused Mormon horse thief and dragged him into Missouri for trial. Joseph in turn ordered his police force to kidnap the kidnappers, an idea that foundered two miles short of Williams’s farm, which proved to be too well defended for the Saints to attack. The excitable Williams once tarred and feathered a militiaman who refused to join a vigilante raid against the Saints.

  According to Morley’s letter, Williams’s outriders presented the Lima Saints with three options: “We, the Mormon people, must take up arms and proceed with them for your arrest, or take our effects and proceed immediately to Nauvoo, otherwise give up our arms, and remain quiet until the fuss is over.”

  Joseph counseled Morley to “Instruct the companies to keep cool, and let all things be done decently and in order.”

  If the mob shall fall upon the Saints by force of arms, defend them at every hazard unless prudence dictate the retreat of the troops to Nauvoo, in which case the mob will not disturb your women and children; and if the mob move towards Nauvoo, either come before them or in their rear and be ready to co-operate with the main body of the Legion.

  Separately, Joseph learned of “considerable excitement” in Warsaw, which had just received a shipment of arms from Quincy. Joseph confided to his diary that the real excitement would probably begin next week.

  Joseph then took a moment to indulge in an un-Joseph-like pursuit. He spent some time alone in his second-floor office examining Benjamin West’s famous painting “Death on the Pale Horse,” which was touring the United States. “A Gentleman is now in our city who has for exhibition West’s painting of Death on the Pale Horse,” the Nauvoo Neighbor reported. “Judging from the known celebrity of the artist, and from the number of testimonies we have seen, it must be worthy of attention.” It would be hard to explain how the masterpiece found its way to Nauvoo, if it found its way to Nauvoo. The painting did tour outside of Philadelphia and New York, but Joseph may have been staring at a copy.

  Benjamin West’s 1796 painting “Death on the Pale Horse.” Credit: Detroit Institute of Arts

  West was a Pennsylvania-born artist who had achieved phenomenal success in Europe. Twice elected president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts, he was also a court painter for King George III. The king had commissioned “Death,” but then rejected the painting as “a Bedlamite scene.” The tableau disturbed other audiences as well. Skeletal Death, mounted on the pale charger, has arrived on earth to slaughter its inhabitants. To his right and left ride the biblical killers of the Book of Revelation, one mounted on a white horse (“Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown”), the other on a red mount (“Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth”), together wreaking havoc among the mortals. Black, menacing storm clouds hover in the background.

  Contemplating Benjamin West’s painting alone in his upstairs study, Joseph, who could recite long portions of the Bible from memory, could easily call to mind the famous verse from Revelation 6 that West had chosen to illustrate: “And I looked, and behold, a Pale Horse, and his name that sat on him was Death.”

  Was Joseph experiencing a premonition of his own fate? It’s possible. The Expositor had violated the sanctity of his interlocking directorate of secret committees. The Laws and their confederates had betrayed him, exposing his secret Kingdom of God and multiple marriages for all the world to see. If Smith was despondent, he showed little hint of it, and his characteristic energy and optimism would re-surface again and again during the final days of his life.

  THE PREVIOUS THURSDAY NIGHT, JOSEPH HAD SHARED A CURIOUS dream with the Saints:

  I thought I was riding out in my carriage, and my guardian angel was along with me. We went past the Temple and had not gone much further before we espied two large snakes so fast locked together that neither of them had any power. I inquired of my guide what I was to understand by that. He answered, “Those snakes represent Dr. Foster and Chauncey L. Higbee. They are your enemies and desire to destroy you; but you see they are so fast locked together that they have no power of themselves to hurt you.”

  In the dream, the Laws capture Joseph, bind him, and throw him into a “deep, dry pit,” not unlike Joseph the dreamer in Genesis, whose brothers heave him into a dry pit, expecting that animals will devour him.

  Suddenly, in the dream, the tables are turned and the Laws need Joseph’s help:

  I looked out of the pit and saw Wilson Law at a little distance attacked by ferocious wild beasts, and heard him cry out, “Oh! Brother Joseph, come and save me!” I replied, “I cannot, for you have put me into this deep pit.”

  On looking out another way, I saw William Law with outstretched tongue, blue in the face, and the green poison forced out of his mouth, caused by the coiling of a large snake around his body. It had also grabbed him by the arm, a little above the elbow, ready to devour him. He cried out in the intensity of his agony, “Oh, Brother Joseph, Brother Joseph, come and save me, or I die!” I also replied to him, “I cannot, William; I would willingly, but you have tied me and put me in this pit, and I am powerless to help you or liberate myself.”

  In a short time after my guide came and said aloud, “Joseph, Joseph, what are you doing there?” I replied, “My enemies fell upon me, bound me and threw me in.” He then took me by the hand, drew me out of the pit, set me free, and we went away rejoicing.

  RAIN WAS THREATENING THE NEXT DAY WHEN JOSEPH APPEARED before several thousand Saints assembled in the Temple-side “grove,” sometimes called the Bowery. Weather be damned. “If it does rain, I’ll preach this doctrine, for the truth shall be preached,” Joseph insisted to the audience arrayed in the gently sloping glen in front of him, many of them perched on the stumps of harvested jack oaks. Bishop Newel Whitney offered a prayer, and the choir sang a Baptist hymn, “Mortals Awake!” which had been collected into the Mormon hymnal.

  Joseph returned to the Book of Revelation as the inspiration for what would prove to be his fiery, final sermon to the faithful Saints. He began by reading Revelation 3, in which Christ, speaking through John of Patmos, chides three churches that have fallen away from orthodox Christianity. One of the retrograde churches “has a name of being alive, but you are dead . . . If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief” and “blot your name out of the book of life.” Another church is rich, prosperous, arrogant, and smug. “You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind
and naked,” Christ tells the church, hurling his famous imprecation: “I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

  The message was clear: Nauvoo, Joseph’s latter-day Zion, had strayed from Christ’s message, just like the wayward churches of John’s time. The Expositor had hammered away at his doctrine of the plurality of gods, accusing Joseph of “holding forth a doctrine which is effectually calculated to sap the very foundation of our faith.” The arrow had struck home. “You know that of late some malicious and corrupt men have sprung up and apostatized from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Joseph proclaimed, “and they declare that the Prophet believes in a plurality of Gods, and, lo and behold! we have discovered a very great secret, they cry—‘The Prophet says there are many Gods, and this proves that he has fallen.’”

  Joseph was recapitulating the famous argument of the King Follett sermon, that just as God was the father of Jesus Christ, “you may suppose that He had a Father also.”

  Where was there ever a son without a father? And where was there ever a father without first being a son? Whenever did a tree or anything spring into existence without a progenitor? And everything comes in this way. . . . I despise the idea of being scared to death at such a doctrine, for the Bible is full of it.

  He then cited biblical examples of the plurality of gods, claiming, for instance, that “Paul says there are Gods many and Lords many.”* Smith also applied his modest knowledge of Hebrew, pointing out that “Elohim,” the Old Testament word for “god,” is a plural form, and is almost always used plurally when God, or Elohim, creates the world. It was a stretch to argue that the Old Testament Israelites were polytheists, although Joseph did just that. “In the very beginning the Bible shows there is a plurality of Gods beyond the power of refutation,” he declared. “The word Elohim ought to be in the plural all the way through—Gods. The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us; and when you take [that] view of the subject, it sets one free to see all the beauty, holiness and perfection of the Gods.” Biblical scholars have called Elohim an example of the “plural of excellence,” akin to the “plural of majesty,” better known as the “royal we.”