American Crucifixion Read online

  A notorious example of the Mormons’ mercurial political alliances, and one that earned them lasting enemies, occurred in mid-1843. Missouri governor Reynolds had issued a warrant for Joseph’s arrest, averring that he had escaped their Liberty jail in 1838. (In fact, he had been allowed to go free, for expediency’s sake.) Two deputies masquerading as Mormon elders hunted Joseph down and locked him in an upstairs room in a tavern in Dixon’s Ferry, Illinois, where he and Emma were visiting relatives upstate. The Missourians hoped to spirit Smith across the river without benefit of counsel, but the leather-lunged Joseph started to plead his case with the local citizenry from the pulpit of his second-story bedroom. Soon the Illinois crowd was cursing the “damned infernal pukes” and “nigger drivers” from Missouri and insisting that Joseph be allowed to consult with a lawyer.

  It so happened that Cyrus Walker, “the greatest criminal lawyer in that part of Illinois,” was litigating in the neighborhood, and he also happened to be running for Congress. He “told me that he could not find time to be my lawyer unless I could promise him my vote,” Joseph explained. Illinois had just been redistricted, and Walker knew that the votes at Joseph’s command would pick the congressman from the Hancock County area. Joseph gave his word, and Walker exulted: “I am now sure of my election,” he boasted, “as Joseph Smith has promised me his vote, and I am going to defend him.”

  Walker performed his legal magic, and soon Joseph reentered Nauvoo at the head of a half-mile-long triumphal procession, with the Legion band playing “Hail Columbia,” and his lawyer at his side. That evening, Joseph threw open the doors of his Nauvoo Mansion and laid out a huge banquet for all concerned. The perfidious Missouri sheriffs “were seated at the head of [the table] and served with the utmost kindness by Mrs. Smith in person,” a guest reported.

  At a mass meeting in the “grove,” an open public area beneath the Temple hill, Joseph lauded Walker in front of thousands of his co-religionists. “I understand the gospel and you do not,” Smith proclaimed. “You understand the quackery of law, and I do not.”

  With the August election just a few weeks away, Joseph made an unfortunate discovery. His brother Hyrum had been serving in the Illinois legislature and had promised the Mormon votes to the Democratic candidate, Joseph Hoge. Both Walker and Hoge spent the campaign’s final days electioneering in Nauvoo, and the situation turned awkward. The secular Nauvoo Neighbor suggested that the Saints vote in a unanimous bloc, further recommending that they vote for Hoge. Then God intervened. On Saturday evening, just two days before the election, Hyrum Smith rose to address the Saints in the grove and made a startling announcement: He “knew from knowledge that would not be doubted, from evidences that never fail, that Mr. Hoge was the man.” Hyrum raised both arms and brandished a yellow ballot printed on wrapping paper. “Those that vote this ticket, this flesh colored ticket, the Democratic ticket, shall be blessed,” he declared. “Those who do not shall be accursed. Thus saith the Lord.”

  William Law, one of Joseph’s two counselors in the First Presidency, questioned Hyrum’s vision. Law told the assembled Saints he was certain that Joseph wanted Walker for the congressional seat and that “the prophet was more likely to know the mind of the Lord on the subject than the patriarch.” This was a rare public feud in the top echelon of the church leadership. Law, Taylor, and Hyrum were all apostles, and also members of the secret Council of Fifty. Law was effectively third in command to Joseph, and Hyrum was the church patriarch, a nebulous leadership post previously held by the men’s father, Joseph Smith Sr. The Prophet would have to be heard from, and soon.

  The next day, on the eve of the election, Joseph allowed Apostle Parley Pratt to deliver the Sunday sermon. Then Smith approached the stand and told the Saints he would talk about the election. “I am above the kingdoms of the world, for I have no laws,” he announced. “I am not come to tell you to vote this way, that way or the other.” William Law was wrong, he said. “I never authorized him to tell my private feelings.”

  Joseph praised Cyrus Walker in a backhanded manner and told the Saints that he intended to vote for his lawyer. But “Brother Hyrum tells me this morning that he has had a testimony to the effect it would be better for the people to vote for Hoge; and I never knew Hyrum to say he ever had a revelation and it failed. Let God speak and all men hold their peace.” Joseph offered the Saints a choice, to vote for his lawyer or to follow the will of God.

  The results were foreordained. Hoge won election from Illinois’s newly created Sixth Congressional District by 474 votes. An estimated 3,000 Mormons voted for him. The Whigs were apoplectic, but the Democrats had learned a lesson, too. The Mormons would promise both sides their votes, then throw the election in the direction they chose at the eleventh hour. The anti-Mormon party was back in business, and a meeting attended by 200 old settlers in Carthage shortly after the election condemned Joseph, the “pretended prophet” and “dangerous individual . . . claiming to set aside, by his vile and blasphemous lies, all those moral and religious institutions which have been established by the Bible.” This “modern Caligula . . . [has] been able to place himself at the head of a numerous horde, either equally reckless and unprincipled as himself, or else made his pliant tools by the most absurd credulity that has astonished the world since its foundation.” The settlers resolved never to vote for a political candidate who “truckled” to the Saints, and to resist Mormon domination of Hancock’s political affairs, “forcibly, if we must.” Some of the members of the “correspondence committees” tasked with monitoring the Mormons’ behavior would soon enter the annals of Latter-day Saints history: Mark Aldrich; Colonel Levi Williams; Franklin Worrell; Captain Robert F. Smith, and the settlers’ ubiquitous mouthpiece, Thomas Sharp.

  By the fall of 1843, the Saints had almost exhausted their small reservoir of goodwill in southwestern Illinois. Just four years before, the residents of Quincy had opened their arms and their homes to the refugee Saints, fleeing the Missouri oppression. Three years earlier, the legislature’s Whigs and Democrats had unanimously approved the Nauvoo Charter, which granted the Saints quasi-independent status within Illinois borders. Now the worm had turned. “From this time forth,” Governor Thomas Ford wrote in his History of Illinois, “the Whigs generally, and a part of the Democrats, determined upon driving the Mormons out of the state.”

  In 1843, Joseph vowed that the Mormons would remain neutral in the country’s next major political confrontation, the presidential election of 1844. Then he announced his own quixotic presidential candidacy, guaranteeing that neither major party need bother wooing the Saints’ votes. It was a strategy for near-total isolation, and it succeeded all too well.

  IN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME, THE MORMONS HAD BECOME POLITICAL orphans. They were religious pariahs as well. Southwestern Illinois was not a churchy part of the world: “The minister of the gospel has had to contend with foul mouthed Atheism and rabid infidelity,” one visiting Presbyterian reported. “The church has not only been asleep, but it really seems as if they designed to keep their spiritual eyes shut forever.” Still, Christians such as they were in Hancock County viewed the Mormons as craven heretics. The “Golden Bible,” the far-fetched tales of the Plains Indians as ancient Lamanites, and the rumors of serial wifery, waxed too exotic for workaday Christians. “I presume Nauvoo is as perfect a sink of debauchery and every species of abomination as ever were Sodom and Nineveh,” the Presbyterian missionary Reverend William M. King wrote to his colleagues at the American Home Missionary Society in New York. Writing to the society from Warsaw, missionary Reverend Benjamin Franklin Morris complained, “We are surrounded by the delusion of Mormonism . . . the frogs of Egypt are literally covering the whole land.”

  “Mormonism is exerting a great and pernicious influence in this county,” he continued.

  Here is the seat of the Beast and the false prophet. Here are 15,000 souls deluded and under the absolute dominion of Joe Smith. They have unlimited belief in his prophecies; and no pro
phecy however absurd and preposterous can dissipate the dreadful delusions that cover their minds.

  The old citizens are under great excitement. We are on the eve of an outbreak and I should not be surprised to see very soon the scenes of Missouri enacted anew. What is to be the finale of this chief of all modern humbugs I know not.

  Jonathan Turner, a Presbyterian divine in Jacksonville, Illinois, published a lengthy attack in his Mormonism in All Ages in 1842, branding the Saints “the most dangerous and virulent enemies to our political and religious purity, and our social and civil peace, that now exist in the Union.”

  It’s far from clear if the Mormon-haters ever read the Book of Mormon or understood much about the Saints’ beliefs. But they knew what they didn’t like. Editor Gregg, who briefly took over Sharp’s newspaper in 1843, fretted that “the pretended prophet” Smith, using “vile and blasphemous lies,” would remove “all those moral and religious institutions which have been established by men, as the only means of maintaining those social blessings which are so indispensably necessary for our happiness.” Reporting on a well-attended “anti-Mormon convention” in Carthage in September 1843, Gregg asserted that it was time “to take a firm and decided stand against the high pretension and base designs of this latter-day would-be Mahomet.”

  One controversial element of Mormon doctrine gained notoriety in Hancock County: the Saints’ penchant for “consecrated thieving.” This murky doctrine, repeatedly denied by Joseph Smith and others, purportedly allowed Mormons to steal from Gentiles. There was a material incentive; the Mormons believed that Missouri had stripped them of almost $3 million worth of land and property during the 1839 expulsion. They were nearly destitute upon arriving in Nauvoo, and the Gentiles owed them. There was also a dubious spiritual imperative. Stolen goods were said to be “consecrated” if a certain portion—one quarter, or one-third—was donated to the Nauvoo Temple construction fund. “To take from the Gentiles [is] no sin,” Joseph told Justus Morse in 1838. Morse reported Smith’s policy, that

  the Church should “suck the milk of the Gentiles,” that we had been injured by the mob in Missouri . . . but should we get caught in this work . . . to swear to a lie, to do so, and to do it with such positiveness and assurance that no one would question our testimony.

  Any time a Hancock County farmer lost a horse, or a heifer, or a valuable farm tool, he blamed Mormon thieves. Sometimes he was right. In 1840, church leaders dissolved the entire stake in nearby Ramus, Illinois, and excommunicated the bishop, the first counselor, and a captain in the Nauvoo Legion for stealing. A few years later, these men rejoined the church, which never spoke with one voice on the question of thievery. In 1843, Joseph condemned stealing at a church conference. “I despise a thief above ground,” he preached. “He would betray me if he could get the opportunity. If I were the biggest rogue in the world, he would steal my horse when I wanted to run away.” But many Gentiles thought Joseph turned a blind eye to Saintly thieves. Apostle Orson Hyde famously remarked that he “would never institute a trial against a brother for stealing from the Gentiles.”

  Similarly, accusations of counterfeiting dogged the Saints in Nauvoo. Two members of Joseph’s secret Council of Fifty had experience in “bogus making.” Edward Bonney, a distant relation of Billy the Kid, “was not averse to passing the ‘long green’ of counterfeit bills when it suited his purpose,” according to one biographer. New York state was pursuing Fifty member Marinus Eaton on counterfeiting charges. Eaton served as a personal aide to Joseph Smith, alongside Joseph Jackson, whose “principal business” was “trying to make bogus,” according to Hyrum Smith. Jackson, a provocateur with complicated allegiances—he alternately claimed to be a Catholic priest and a Missouri spy—wrote a memoir claiming that he and Joseph Smith made bogus on the second floor of the Old Homestead, Smith’s first log cabin home in Nauvoo. Jackson wrote that Smith imported a $200 German press from St. Louis, which resulted in “an excellent specimen of base coin produced.” Jackson reported that Joseph, aided by ten of the twelve apostles, fabricated about $350,000 worth of false coin, half of which they spent in Hancock County, and half of which they sent east to finance church purchases.

  The truth is elusive. But it hardly mattered; as the years progressed, Hancock County husbandmen found plenty of reasons to dislike the Mormons, and they added thievery, often alleged, more rarely proved, to the list. Governor Thomas Ford thought the accusations sprang from prejudice. “I have investigated the charge of promiscuous stealing and find it to be greatly exaggerated,” he reported to the legislature in December 1844. “I could not ascertain that there were a greater proportion of thieves in that community than any other of the same number of inhabitants.”

  There is no denying, however, that the Mormons made powerful economic enemies in Hancock County. Partly by chance and partly by design, Joseph had chosen a remote, undeveloped corner of Illinois to build his new Zion. Neither Warsaw nor Carthage had more than five hundred inhabitants, and neither was thriving economically. By the sweat of Mormon brows, Nauvoo had transformed itself from an uninhabited malarial swamp into a city with several thousand citizens within three years. The population quickly grew to 5,000, and then to over 10,000 by 1844. With Joseph’s call for the Saints to “gather in Zion,” his town was gaining a thousand new residents a year, while the populations of Warsaw and Carthage remained stagnant. Hancock County wasn’t participating in Nauvoo’s mini-economic boom and was unlikely to benefit in the future. Warsaw enjoyed a modest business in trans-shipping goods overland for merchants chary of entrusting their goods to the roiling waters of the nearby Des Moines rapids. But the more prosperous Nauvoo was weaning Mississippi ferry traffic from Warsaw, and the Mormons were talking about building a dam, and even a railroad, that would make Nauvoo the central trans-shipment port for merchants hoping to skirt the rapids.

  Competing with the Saints was hard work. Mormons preferred to do business with other Mormons, and, like other New World sectarians, they equated material success with spiritual achievement. “We cannot talk about spiritual things without connecting with them temporal things, neither can we talk about temporal things without connecting spiritual things with them,” Brigham Young explained. “They are inseparably connected. . . . We, as Latter-day Saints, really expect, look for and we will not be satisfied with anything short of being governed and controlled by the word of the Lord in all our acts, both spiritual and temporal.” Orson Hyde, an apostle like Brigham, put the matter more succinctly: “When we descend to the matter of dollars and cents, it is also spiritual.”

  As Nauvoo’s prospects brightened and grew, Warsaw’s future was dimming. Likewise, Nauvoo’s autonomous civil government obviated the need for the county seat in Carthage. Joseph was running the Mormons’ Registry of Deeds out of his redbrick store. He told his followers that their weddings and births didn’t need to be recorded with the state, and practically all of Nauvoo’s legal business cycled through its own courts, established by the legislature’s generous charter. Unitarian missionary George Moore noted disapprovingly that the Saints sometimes conducted marriage ceremonies in the middle of the frozen Mississippi, outside of Illinois, to avoid paying fees to Carthage’s county court.

  Nauvoo ground its own flour, milled its own lumber, raised its own food in the vast farms that stretched several miles into the countryside, and imported anything it needed through its many municipally owned wharves. At one point, Joseph even owned shares in two paddle-wheeled steamers, which figured among his unsuccessful investments. Fatefully, Smith bought a part interest in a steamboat being sold by a young Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant named Robert E. Lee, who had been dredging the Mississippi rapids near Nauvoo. One of Smith’s partners in the deal was Robert F. Smith, who, along with Joseph, became the target of a federal bankruptcy claim when two pilots hired by the Mormons wrecked the boat on the upper Mississippi. A resentful Robert F. Smith would reappear in Joseph’s life, in the dual role of magistrate and militia capt
ain overseeing the Prophet’s fate in the Carthage jail.

  Egged on by local speculators, Joseph plunged the Saints into another dubious investment scheme that would have dire consequences for the Mormons. As happened several times during his stay in Illinois, Joseph befriended a lawyer who helped him out of a jam. In 1841, Calvin Warren, aided by a silver-tongued attorney named Orville H. Browning, managed to free Joseph from a Missouri arrest warrant served in Illinois. (The judge who released Joseph was a rising star in Illinois politics, Stephen Douglas. Smith befriended him, too.)

  After Warren collected his substantial $250 fee, he pitched Joseph a real estate deal: Warren’s friend Mark Aldrich, one of the four original developers of Warsaw, owned a mile-square tract of land south of the city ideal for Mormon settlement. Aldrich and Warren, working with Brigham Young and Willard Richards, arranged for 204 Mormon immigrants to settle on lots in a new town to be called Warren. Editor Sharp, normally a booster of all things Warsaw, couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a poke at Smith. His newspaper had been running a series of articles written by a former resident of Palmyra, New York, detailing Joseph’s inglorious past as a treasure hunter—a “money-digger,” Sharp called him. “We have not heard what name Joe intends to give to the new city,” the Warsaw Signal opined, “but we would call it ‘MONEY-DIGGERSVILLE’—quite a mouthful, but still symphonious.” Sharp loved to accuse the Mormons of questionable business practices and outright thievery. With wagonloads of “red-hot Mormons” closing in on Warsaw, he predicted, the price of locks for doors and windows would skyrocket.