Jekyll2023-05-07T10:01:37-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/feed.xmlNaked Mormonism Show NotesSkepticize EverythingBryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 10 - The New Reign2020-09-09T20:00:00-07:002020-09-09T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/09/09/road-to-carthage-10-the-new-reign<p>Road to Carthage 10 - The New Reign</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine the consequences of Joseph Smith’s death.</p>
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<p>The bodies had been prepared. The death masks had been cast. The people
had learned the truth, the prophet and patriarch had been shot to death
by anti-Mormons.</p>
<p>The bodies were placed in coffins “which were covered with black velvet,
fastened with brass nails.” They placed a glass lid over the face of
each body to protect it, and the coffin was “lined with white cambric.”
Then, Emma and Mary, Jo’s and Hyrum’s first wives, were allowed into the
mansion room to see their husbands. The children came along too.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Emma (who was at the time pregnant) was then permitted to view the
bodies. On first seeing the corpse of her husband she screamed and
fell, but was supported by Dimick B. Huntington. She then fell upon
his face and kissed him, calling him by name, and begged of him to
speak to her once: the scene was too affecting almost to be borne.</p>
<p>Mary (Hyrum’s wife) was also admitted, and manifested calmness and
composure throughout the trying scene. The children of the martyred
Prophet and Patriarch were then admitted to see the bodies, when the
scene beggared description, being perfectly heartrending.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The next morning at 8 a.m., the bodies were placed in the main living
area of the Nauvoo Mansion and the doors were opened to receive the
mourning procession. Estimates claim about 8-10,000 Mormon filed through
the mansion on June 29th 1844 to view the bodies.</p>
<p>People took these deaths in many ways. We’re lucky enough that some of
them took the time to sit down and express their thoughts in writing, so
let’s spend some time with some of these folks.</p>
<p><strong>Accounts:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Emma Hale Smith and Mary Fielding Smith</strong></p>
<p>Emma was the first wife of Joseph. Mary was Hyrum’s first wife. Neither
of these women wrote any of their thoughts at the time so the best we
can do is read accounts from those who observed them on that distressing
day. You’ll recognize a little bit from the History of the Church I read
from earlier but there’s a fair amount more information here to help us
visualize the scene. Mormon Enigma P. 196-7</p>
<blockquote>
<p>B. W. Richmond said Emma tried several times to walk across the room
but each time she fainted. Finally a friend helped her form the room.
Then Mary Fielding Smith entered with her four children. “She trembled
at every step, and nearly fell, but reached her husband’s body, and
kneeled down by him, clasped her arm around his head, turned his pale
face upon her heaving bosom, and then a gushing ,plaintive wail burst
from her lips: ‘O! Hyrum, Hyrum! Have they shot you, my dear Hyrum?
Are you dead? O! Speak to me, my dear husband. I cannot think you are
dead, my dear Hyrum.’” Richmond said, “Her grief seemed to consume
her, and she lost all power of utterance. Her two daughters, and the
two young children, clung some to her body, falling prostrate upon the
corpse and shrieking in the wildness of their wordless grief.”</p>
<p>A few minutes later Dimick Huntington and another man assisted Emma
back into the room. Dimick held his hat up to shield her view of
Joseph. The two led her over to where Hyrum lay and Richmond took her
hand and placed it on Hyrum’s forehead. Emma stood for a minute, then
said, “Now I can see him; I am strong now.” Unassisted, she walked to
Joseph where she “kneeled down, clasped him around his face, and sank
upon his body. Suddenly her grief found vent, and sighs and groans and
words and lamentations filled the room. ‘JOseph, Joseph,’ she said,
‘are you dead? Have the assassins shot you?’ Her children, four in
number, gathered around their weeping mother, and the dead body of a
murdered father, and grief that words cannot embody seemed to
overwhelm the whole group.” Richmond said Emma spoke softly to Joseph
and the only words he heard were the ones he recorded. Young Joseph
remembered her saying, “Oh, Joseph, Joseph! My husband, my husband!
Have they taken you from me at last!” Twenty-four years later Dimick
Huntington claimed he heard Emma ask Joseph to forgive her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Lucy Mack Smith</strong></p>
<p>Lucy needs no introduction, she was mother of Joseph and Hyrum. She
dictated this to Martha Corey after she had withstood the pain of
burying 5 of her 6 sons as well as her husband and she was quite late in
years.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This shall <will> be my testimony in the day of God Almighty and if
it be true what will Gov Lilbourn W. Boggs, Thomas Carlin Martin Van
Buren and Gov. Ford answer me in day when I shall appear where the
prayers of the saints and the complaints of the widow and orphan come
up before a just and righteous judge who will be is not only our judge
but the judge of the whole Earth. [A lined-through passage begins
here] will not the Lord then say unto those who have thus suffered us
to be thus abused that have not bound up that which was broken neither
brought again that which was driven away neither have ye saught that
which was lost but with force and cruelty have ye ruled my
people<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20109"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->109<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
... I am now 70 years of and a Native of the united states and
although My Father and my brothers Fought hard and struggled manfully
for to establish a government of liberty and eaqual rights upon this
the home of my birth...</p>
<p>Oh, for a lodge in some vast Wilderness some boundless contiguity of
shade where rumor of oppression and deceit might never reach me
more<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20111"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->111<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
let me leave the tombs of bones of my fathers and brothers ... and the
bones of my Martyrd children and go to a land where never man dwelt
fare well my country. Thou that killest the prophets and hath exiled
them that were sent unto thee once thou wert
fair<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20112"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->112<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
once thou werte lovely <fair ye pure> wert pure and lovely. When thy
legislators were Just men and law-givers saught to make <the good>
the people <like unto themselves> was righteous and good men but now
thou art fallen the life to which wisdom and justice and guilt
debachery and […] reigns thy tables are filled with smut and
filthiness and the hearts of people with rottenness and deceit but
oh! if there is <yet> one in the midst of this sink of polution
<corruption> in whose breast flows one feeling that warmed the heart
of Washington come forth I pray you from <flee> Turn yourselves men
did spurn or spot which so polution that nothing can cleanse it but
judgements of H <him> who is a consuming fire …</p>
<p>I will not dwell upon the awful scene which succeeded. My heart is
thrilled<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20113"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->113<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
with grief and indignation, and my blood curdles in my veins whenever
I speak of it…</p>
<p>After the corpses were washed, and dressed in their burial clothes, we
were allowed to see them. I had for a long time braced every nerve,
roused every energy of my
soul,<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20118"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->118<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
and called upon God to strengthen me; but when I [p.749]entered the
room, and saw my murdered sons extended both at once before my eyes,
and heard the sobs and groans of my family, and the cries of “Father!
Husband! Brothers!” from the lips of their wives, children, brother,
and
sisters,<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20119"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->119<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
it was too much, I sank back, crying to the Lord, in the agony of my
soul, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken this family!” A voice
replied, “I have taken them to myself, that they might have
rest.”<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20120"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->120<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
Emma was carried back to her room almost in a state of insensibility.
Her oldest son approached the corpse, and dropped upon his knees, and
laying his cheek against his father’s, and kissing him, exclaimed,
“Oh, my father, my father!” As for myself, I was swallowed up in
the
depth<a href="http://signaturebookslibrary.org/lucys-book-06/#Nauvoo%20121"><!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted -->121<!-- raw HTML omitted --><!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
of my afflictions; and though my soul was filled with horror past
imagination, yet I was dumb, until I arose again to contemplate the
spectacle before me. Oh! at that moment how my mind flew through
every scene of sorrow and distress which we had passed together, in
which they had shown the innocence and sympathy which filled their
guileless hearts. As I looked upon their peaceful, smiling
countenances, I seemed almost to hear them say,—“Mother, weep not for
us, we have overcome the world by love; we carried to them the Gospel,
that their souls might be saved; they slew us for our testimony, and
thus placed us beyond their power; their ascendancy is for a moment,
ours is an eternal triumph.”</p>
<p>I then thought upon the promise which I had received in Missouri, that
in five years Joseph should have power over all his enemies. The time
had elapsed, and the promise was fulfilled.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>William Clayton</strong></p>
<p>Personal secretary of Joseph Smith, keeper of the Council of Fifty
Minutes and Jo’s personal journal. He was very close to the prophet and
was instrumental in building the Nauvoo kingdom.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And now O God wilt thou not come out of thy hiding place and avenge
the blood of thy servants.--that blood which thou hast so long watched
over with a fatherly care--that blood so noble--so generous--so
dignified, so heavenly you O Lord will thou not avenge it speedily and
bring down vengeance upon the murderers of thy servants that they may
be rid from off the earth and that the earth may be cleansed from
these scenes, even so O Lord thy will be done. We look to thee for
justice. Hear thy people O God of Jacob even so Amen”</p>
<p>“Few expressions were heard save the mourns for the loss of our
friends. All seem to hang on the merch of God and wait further events.
Some few can scarce refrain from expressing aloud their indignation at
the Governor and a few words would raise the City in arms & massacre
the Cities of Carthage & Warsaw & lay them in ashes but it is wisdom
to be quiet. After the bodies were laid out I went to see them. Joseph
looks very natural except being pale through loss of blood. Hyrum does
not look so natural. Their aged mother is distracted with grief & it
will be almost more than she can bear.”</p>
<p>“The blood of those men, and the prayers of the widows and orphans and
a suffering community will rise up to the Lord of Sabaoth for
vengeance upon those murderers.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Eliza R. Snow</strong></p>
<p>A powerful poet and personal secretary of Emma in the Nauvoo Relief
Society. She frequently wrote poems to specific people for reasons of
mourning, encouragement, or threatening. She was also a dearly beloved
plural wife of Jo, creating plenty of conflict in her life as she was
marrying age but off limits to be courted by any other men. She became
the most powerful woman in Utah.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>143 The Assassination</p>
<p>of Gen’s Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith</p>
<p>First Presidents of the Church of Latter-day Saints; Who Were
Massacred by a Mob, in Carthage,</p>
<p>Hancock County, Ill., on the 27th June, 1844</p>
<p>— Rev. 6:9–11.</p>
<p>Ye heav’ns attend! Let all the earth give ear!</p>
<p>Let Gods and seraphs, men and angels hear—</p>
<p>The worlds on high—the universe shall know</p>
<p>What awful scenes are acted here below!</p>
<p>Had nature’s self a heart, her heart would bleed 5</p>
<p>At the recital of that horrid deed;</p>
<p>For never, since the Son of God was slain</p>
<p>Has blood so noble, flow’d from human vein</p>
<p>As that which now, on God for vengeance calls</p>
<p>From “freedom’s ground”—from Carthage prison walls. 10</p>
<p>Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood</p>
<p>Of Prophets martyr’d for the truth of God.</p>
<p>Once lov’d America! what can atone</p>
<p>For the pure blood of innocence, thou’st sown?</p>
<p>Were all thy streams in teary torrents shed 15</p>
<p>To mourn the fate of those illustrious dead;</p>
<p>How vain the tribute, for the noblest worth</p>
<p>That grac’d thy surface, O degraded Earth!</p>
<p>Oh wretched murd’rers! fierce for human blood!</p>
<p>You’ve slain the prophets of the living God, 20</p>
<p>Who’ve borne oppression from their early youth,</p>
<p>To plant on earth, the principles of truth.</p>
<p>Shades of our patriotic fathers! Can it be,</p>
<p>Beneath your blood-stain’d flag of liberty;</p>
<p>The firm supporters of our country’s cause, 25</p>
<p>Are butcher’d while submissive to her laws?</p>
<p>Yes, blameless men, defam’d by hellish lies</p>
<p>Have thus been offer’d as a sacrifice</p>
<p>T’appease the ragings of a brutish clan,</p>
<p>That has defied the laws of God and man! 30</p>
<p>’Twas not for crime or guilt of theirs, they fell—</p>
<p>Against the laws they never did rebel.</p>
<p>True to their country, yet her plighted faith</p>
<p>Has prov’d an instrument of cruel death!</p>
<p>Where are thy far-fam’d laws—Columbia! Where 35</p>
<p>Thy boasted freedom—thy protecting care?</p>
<p>Is this a land of rights? Stern-FACTS shall say</p>
<p>If legal justice here maintains its sway,</p>
<p>The official pow’rs of State are sheer pretence</p>
<p>When they’re exerted in the Saints’ defence. 40</p>
<p>Great men have fall’n and mighty men have died—</p>
<p>Nations have mourn’d their fav’rites and their pride;</p>
<p>But TWO, so wise, so virtuous, great and good,</p>
<p>Before on earth, at once, have never stood</p>
<p>Since the creation—men whom God ordain’d 45</p>
<p>To publish truth where error long had reigned;</p>
<p>Of whom the world, itself unworthy prov’d:</p>
<p>It KNEW THEM NOT; but men with hatred mov’d</p>
<p>And with infernal spirits have combin’d</p>
<p>Against the best, the noblest of mankind! 50</p>
<p>Oh, persecution! shall thy purple hand</p>
<p>Spread utter destruction through the land?</p>
<p>Shall freedom’s banner be no more unfurled?</p>
<p>Has peace indeed, been taken from the world?</p>
<p>Thou God of Jacob, in this trying hour 55</p>
<p>Help us to trust in thy almighty pow’r;</p>
<p>Support thy Saints beneath this awful stroke—</p>
<p>Make bare thine arm to break oppression’s yoke.</p>
<p>We mourn thy Prophet, from whose lips have flow’d</p>
<p>The words of life, thy spirit has bestow’d— 60</p>
<p>A depth of thought, no human art could reach</p>
<p>From time to time, roll’d in sublimest speech,</p>
<p>From the celestial fountain, through his mind,</p>
<p>To purify and elevate mankind:</p>
<p>The rich intelligence by him brought forth, 65</p>
<p>Is like the sun-beam, spreading o’er the earth.</p>
<p>Now Zion mourns—she mourns an earthly head:</p>
<p>The Prophet and the Patriarch are dead!</p>
<p>The blackest deed that men or devils know</p>
<p>Since Calv’ry’s scene, has laid the brothers low! 70</p>
<p>One in their life, and one in death—they prov’d</p>
<p>How strong their friendship—how they truly lov’d:</p>
<p>True to their mission, until death, they stood,</p>
<p>Then seal’d their testimony with their blood.</p>
<p>All hearts with sorrow bleed, and ev’ry eye 75</p>
<p>Is bath’d in tears—each bosom heaves a sigh—</p>
<p>Heart broken widows’ agonizing groans</p>
<p>Are mingled with the helpless orphans’ moans!</p>
<p>Ye Saints! be still, and know that God is just—</p>
<p>With steadfast purpose in his promise trust: 80</p>
<p>Girded with sackcloth, own his mighty hand,</p>
<p>And wait his judgments on this guilty land!</p>
<p>The noble martyrs now have gone to move</p>
<p>The cause of Zion in the courts above.</p>
<p>published in Times and Seasons, 1 July 1844</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>B.W. Richmond</strong></p>
<p>This is an account written by a non-Mormon who witnessed the funeral
procession, which describes what he saw with Lucinda Pendleton Morgan
Harris Smith, Jo’s first official plural wife and the widow of the famed
William Morgan who disappeared after publishing an expose on
FreeMasonry.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While the two wives were bewailing their loss, and prostrate on the
floor with their eight children, I noticed a lady standing at the head
of Joseph Smith’s body, her face covered, and her whole frame
convulsed with weeping. She was the widow of William Morgan, of
Masonic memory, and twenty years before had stood over the body of her
husband, found at the mouth of Oak Orchard Creek, on Lake Ontario. She
was now the wife of a Mr. Harris, whom she married in Batavia, and who
was a saint in the Mormon church, and a high Mason. She is a short
person, with light hair and very bright blue eyes, and pleasing
countenance. I had called on her a few days previous to this occasion,
and while conversing with her, put my hand on a gilt-edged volumen
laying on the stand. It was ‘Stearns on Masonry,’ and contained the
likeness of William Morgan. She said she had taken it out, and thought
if the mob did come, and she was obliged to flee, or jump into the
Mississippi, she would take it with her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball</strong></p>
<p>Young and Kimball were traveling through the eastern states holding
meetings with powerful individuals for Jo’s presidential campaign. They
both record when they first heard the rumors that Jo had been murdered
as well as when they received actual confirmation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>--9-- I heard today, for the first time, the rumors concerning the
death of Joseph and Hyrum [Smith].</p>
<p>--16-- While at Brother Bement's house in Peterboro', I heard a
letter read which Brother Livingston had received from Mr. Joseph
Powers, of Nauvoo, giving particulars of the murder of Joseph and
Hyrum. The first thing which I thought of was, whether Joseph had
taken the keys of the kingdom with him from the earth; Brother Orson
Pratt sat on my left; we were both leaning back on our chairs.
Bringing my hand down on my knee, I said the keys of the kingdom are
right here with the Church.</p>
<p>Received a letter from Brother Woodruff confirming the news of the
death of the Prophets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>**Kimball:<br />
**Heber C. Kimball was a close friend of Brigham Young before they both
joined the church in the early 1830s. His wife, Vilate, and he shared
many letters back and forth. Heber himself was uneducated and his
writing reflects it but he was a relatively faithful journal keeper.
Heber and Vilate’s daughter, Helen, was given to the prophet as a wife
at the age of 14.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>9 Tuesday… The papers were full of News of the death of our Prophet. I
was not willen to believe it, fore it was to much to bare. The first
news I got of his death was on Tuesday morning in Salum of the 9. It
struck me at the heart…</p>
<p>12 Friday… Toords night one of the Brethren went to the office and got
one leter from my wife up the the 24 which day he gave Him Self up in
company with Hiyrum, Richards, and J. Tailor three days before they
ware killed. This leter satisfide us that the Brethren ware dead. O
Lord what feelings we had.</p>
<p>14 Sunday morning went to meting. Red the news to the saints. Great
sorrow prevailed and agreed to dress in mourning. O Lord How can we
part with our dear Br., O Lord save the Twelve.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Dan Jones</strong></p>
<p>Dan Jones was Jo’s little birdie of Nauvoo. Jones always had intel that
was valuable to the prophet about people in and out of the city. Because
of his ability to gather intel, he became captain of the steamer owned
by the prophet, The Maid of Iowa, where he saw most people who entered
and exited the city. He was very close to Joseph Smith and was one of
the last of Jo’s trusted acolytes that was chased out of Carthage by the
Carthage Greys the day the assassinations happened.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>About midnight a steamboat came down the river, and I went on board
toward Quincy (forty miles from there) and before daylight the boat
called at Warsaw on its way, and great was the tumult which was
there! It was announced with great delight to the passengers on the
boat that "Joe and his brother, Hyrum, had been killed at Carthage
Jail." Oh, how sweet was this news to their chops! That old "Sharp"
again had already published an extra with great haste accusing the
Mormons of having gone to Carthage to save the prisoners and that the
guards in carrying out their duty had shot J. and H. Smith lest they
escape, when in fact, I was the last Mormon to have been in Carthage
and had been driven out as if at bayonet point! Yes, when in fact it
was that very man, Sharp, who was leading those who killed the
prisoners, boasting "that he had put one bullet through old Joe." And
when his fingers were still dripping with innocent blood he proclaimed
to the world that it was the Saints who had done it and invited all
from everywhere to gather to defend Warsaw, that the Mormons had
burned Carthage to ashes and killed its inhabitants, Governor Ford and
all, and that they expected them to burn Warsaw at any minute! Yes,
he published this in his paper and sent messengers to the other
countries to call the militia to defend them when in fact he knew that
he was in no danger whatsoever from the Saints.</p>
<p>And when I was there I heard his party admit and praise the
cunningness of Sharp's trick to get people there; and that their
objective was to "attack the city of Nauvoo and kill or expel the
'd-m-d Mormons.'" This false story about the massacre of J. and H.
Smith flew across the world, and we do not think that the truth had
even yet been determined. An example in that of all the publications
of that man, Sharp, and his party against the Saints. I was so
impulsive as to contradict them on the bank from what I knew, and had
the boat not been alongside to jump onto they would have killed me for
what I said. After reaching Quincy I saw that the messengers of Sharp
had arrived and had stirred up the entire city to the point that they
were expecting the Mormons to come there and kill them too, and the
militia was hurriedly preparing to go to save Warsaw, as they
supposed.</p>
<p>When I got the opportunity with the people together, I opposed those
lying messengers to their faces, and then the people saw that they
were not in danger and that not one of the Mormons had even lifted his
hand against any one of them and had no such intention. Then everyone
returned to his business, and I went with the other steamboat toward
Nauvoo, where I arrived by eight o'clock the next morning.</p>
<p>Oh, the sorrowful scene to be seen in Nauvoo that day! There has
never been nor will there ever be anything like it; everyone sad along
the street, all the shops closed and every business forgotten. Onward
I quickened my pace until I reached the house of the late Joseph
Smith. I pushed my way through the sorrowful crowd until I reached the
room where his body and that of his brother had been placed (for they
had been brought from Carthage the previous day). There they lay in
their coffins side by side, majestic men as they suffered side by side
from prison for years, and they labored together, shoulder to
shoulder, to build the kingdom of Immanuel; eternal love bound them
steadfastly to each other and to their God until death; and now, my
eyes beheld the blood of the two godly martyrs mingling in one pool in
the middle of the floor, their elderly mother, godly and sorrowful, on
her knees in the midst of the blood between the two, a hand on each
one of her sons who lay in gore, her heart nearly broken by the
excruciating agony and the indescribable grief. At the head of the
deceased sat the dear wife of each one and around their father stood
four of Joseph's little children and six of Hyrum's children crying
out intermittently, "My dear father." "And my dear father, too,"
another would say, with no reply except the echo from the walls, "Oh,
my father." And from the hearts of the mothers, "My husband killed,"
and the grey-haired mother groaning pitifully, "Oh, my sons, my sons."</p>
<p>Each in his turn, the thousands made their way forward, sad and
desirous of having the last look at their dear brethren whose solemn
counsels and heavenly teachings had been music in their ears, lighting
their paths and bringing joy to their hearts on numerous occasions. On
the streets around it was almost the stillness of the grave which
reigned, but all, the noble as well as the humble, with crystal tears
streaming down their cheeks. Even the sun and the elements had stilled
as if in surprise, and all nature looked at the unended madness of man
toward some of the best on the earth in any age or part of it. I shall
ever remember my feelings at the time. Now I saw the two wisest and
most virtuous men on the earth without any doubt, whom I had seen just
awhile before preaching tenderly from between the iron bars of their
jail the gospel of peace to those who wanted to kill them; the two
stood like two reeds in the midst of the storm as witnesses of Jesus,
despite the jealous fury of the press, of the pulpits, and of the mobs
of the age; and just like the reed they straightened up their heads
after every breeze and scorned worldly profit and fame; steadfast they
clung to their objective until they had finished their work; and like
their elder brother and their Leader before them they did not love
their lives unto death, nor did they refuse to face knowingly the
slaughter; rather they leaped onto the bloody altar which they saw
waiting for them in Carthage" so they could have a better
resurrection." But what pen can describe that scene and the feelings
of thousands of mourners? The only comfort that kept them from sinking
under the oppression and the loss was knowing that a day of swift
reckoning would come also before long and that he who has the correct
scales in his hand perceives the whole and will . . . But I restrain
myself. It is easier for the reader to imagine this scene than it is
for me to portray it and its results.</p>
<p>The two were buried secretly by one another's side, for there was a
reward of several thousand dollars already offered by their enemies
for their heads!</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Jane Elizabeth Manning James, Early Member of the Church, 1813–1908</strong></p>
<p>Jane Manning James, a young black woman who moved into the Smith home
and who was, in my opinion, Joseph’s only African-American wife. She
lived and worked in the Nauvoo Mansion like all of Jo’s other teenage
wives.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I [knew] the Prophet Joseph. That lovely hand! He used to put it
out to me. Never passed me without shaking hands with me wherever he
was. Oh, he was the finest man I ever saw on earth. . . . When he was
killed . . . I could have died, just laid down and died." (In Heidi S.
Swinton, American Prophet: The Story of Joseph Smith (1999), 14.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>William Daniels, <em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845 issues).</strong></p>
<p>Daniels is a relatively unknown character in Nauvoo history but he
clearly writes from a Mormon perspective as well as that of an
eyewitness to the actual gunfight in Carthage. His account was given in
a affidavit and then embellished by a Mormon writer in May of 1845. He
claims a few fantastic details, but there are other details he provides
which are contextual and helpful to understand the general events of the
day.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The storm had passed away. The cowardly demons had fled, and I stood a
spectator, gazing on the scene. There lay Joseph Smith, the martyred
leader of thousands who revered him. The man who had passed like a
magic spirit through society, and in a career of a few years, had lit
up the world with wonder, astonishment and admiration, was left dead
upon the ground! He lay full low; yet, in my contemplations, I
regarded him as the triumphant conqueror left master of the bloody
field. Eighty-four men, (fiends,) armed with United States’ muskets
and other weapons, had the unparalleled heroism to murder him while a
prisoner; (!!) while he had the nerve and presence of mind to
contend with such unequal force, and with a pocket pistol kill and
wound as many as they. In him was the spirit of dauntless bravery
exemplified.</p>
<p>But a few days before his noble figure rode at the head of a mighty
legion, numbering five thousand brave hearts and ten thousand strong
arms. His presence gave them courage, his words animated their hearts
and nerved their limbs; and the large heart that beat within his manly
breast, entwined around it their love and affection, by the generosity
and nobility of its principles.</p>
<p>In this situation he had the power to defend himself. How
insignificant was the power of this contemptible mob, in comparison
with this force, that could have borne him off triumphant, in defiance
of all their resistance! From this position of power he
descended—threw down the sword that could have protected him from
the menace of mobs—and trusted himself to the honor and fidelity of
men and the boasted majesty of American jurisprudence!</p>
<p>O, man! How worthless are your promises! How perfidious are your
ways! He that would have died for the maintenance of his honor, fell
a sacrifice to the broken faith of other men!</p>
<p>The murder took place at fifteen minutes past five o’clock, p. m.,
June 27, 1844.</p>
<p>…People talk about “Mormon” thieves, when they have eighty-four
beings, fiends in human shape, running at large in their community,
who were actually engaged in murder! The people of Illinois talk
about “Mormon” usurpation, and treasonable designs in their leaders,
and their senate chamber echoing with the denunciation of a fiend yet
dripping with the warm blood of innocence! The legislature and
governor repeal the Nauvoo City charter, for some pretended stretch of
municipal power, and they welcome to their councils a being with an
indictment hanging over his head for the highest crime known to the
laws! They talk about the “Mormon” abuse of habeas corpus, while they
pass special decrees that no member shall be subject to any process,
whether civil or criminal, during the session of the senate, for the
special benefit of a murderer, thereby releasing him from the custody
of the sheriff, and screening him from justice! They prate about
“Mormon” disloyalty, while the plighted faith of the State is
broken, and her honor trampled in the dust!</p>
<p>Gentle reader, I have given as faithful a narrative as I possibly
could. I have related scenes through which I have passed myself—scenes
of danger, excitement and wickedness. My life has been hunted by day
and by night; the quietude of my family has been broken up, and the
villains are still determined to take my life. I have thus far eluded
them; but I know not when my life may be taken as a sacrifice to atone
for telling the truth in a free country. But I am at the defiance of
devils and emissaries of hell, and will not shrink from duty, or cower
under their menaces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How does one describe grief? We see a consistency among these accounts
that the sorrow and mourning the Mormons experienced was ineffable.
Joseph Smith was their supreme leader and when thousands of people are
left directionless by the death of their visionary master the grief is
compounded beyond anything we can understand. Further complicating
matters, there was no plan of succession and the people knew it. These
deaths meant more to the thousands of people of Nauvoo that day of June
29th than anybody else across the world. It immediately cast them into a
world of uncertainty and instability, making them exceptionally
vulnerable to a tyrant at heart to come along and step into the power
vacuum. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.</p>
<p>There was still a bounty on the head of Joseph Smith. After the public
viewing, the doors to the Nauvoo Mansion were closed and the bodies were
removed from their coffins and replaced by sandbags where they were
buried in a public graveside service. The actual bodies were buried that
night by 9 FreeMasons during a heavy rainstorm in two unmarked plots at
the northwest corner of the unfinished Nauvoo House. They covered the
plot with some brush and rubble; the rainstorm further concealed the
plots and by morning there was no evidence of where Jo and Hyrum were
buried.</p>
<p>Not even the pallbearers knew they were burying sandbags. Here, Emma
exhibits her prowess and understanding of power dynamics. Whoever
controlled the bodies had a strong claim to the throne and she was sure
to keep them well-concealed. A few days later it was feared the
whereabouts of the bodies had been discovered so Emma coordinated their
removal to a new location.</p>
<p>Once again, around midnight, 4 FreeMasons dug up and moved the bodies to
the Nauvoo Homestead, the home the Smiths lived in until the Nauvoo
Mansion was completed in early 1843. Here they were buried under the
cover of night and marked by a beehive which was placed over them. This
location was discovered soon after and Emma, with increasing desperation
to keep control of the bodies, had them moved to a secret location on
the property of Davidson Hibbard in a small grove of trees. Here the
bodies remained for years and it became a favorite place of Jo and
Emma’s youngest son, David Hyrum Smith, to visit as a child. People
knew this as “David’s Chamber,” not thinking anymore of the place than
just where young David liked to go thinking or playing in the woods.</p>
<p>This, however, was also a temporary burial location. After a couple
decades, as Emma was becoming very late in years, she had the bodies
exhumed again and moved to a location in Nauvoo that has been lost. She
was also buried there. It wasn’t until 1928 that grandson of Emma and
Jo, Frederick M. Smith, as prophet of the RLDS church, located the
bodies, exhumed them a final time, and placed them in a sacred permanent
place of honor where the bodies remain today. When they were exhumed in
1928, Fred M. also allowed the remains to be photographed and examined;
those records are in the Community of Christ archives to this day.</p>
<p>Emma recognized that whoever controlled the bodies controlled the
church, so she was a good Mason and kept the bodies secret and under her
control. If she hadn’t retained control of the bodies as well as most of
Jo’s property in Nauvoo, the RLDS church may have never been founded
under her oldest son, Joseph III, in 1860 when he rose to the mantle of
prophet following in the patrilineal steps of his father who was
assassinated 16 years prior. Of course, the progression of all these
events are stories for another time.</p>
<p>An event of the magnitude of a national public figure and POTUS
candidate being assassinated inevitably caught fire across the nation.
From Boston to South Carolina, papers had been covering the newest
intelligence of the Mormon insurrection since the Nauvoo Expositor was
published and disseminated across the nation, with the prophet dead, the
nation’s eyes turned to the Mormon kingdom on the Mississippi.</p>
<p>First to print was the Muscatine Journal out of Bloomington, Iowa on
July 5th, which printed the public declaration from Governor Ford we’ll
read in a minute. The Alton Telegraph and Democratic Review out of
Alton, Illinois published on July 6th the article from the Warsaw Signal
we read last episode. The Holly Springs Gazette from Holly Springs,
Mississippi, published another account in addition to the Warsaw Signal
article on the same day along with The Times-Picayune out of New Orleans
further down the Mississippi river. Then intelligence hit New York and
The Buffalo Commercial, The Evening Post, The New York Tribune, The
Daily Madisonian out of D.C., the Public Ledger out of Philadelphia,
Bangor Daily Whig and Courier out of Bangor, Maine, all published
articles based on the Warsaw Signal article in the days of July 8-10th,
which then carried word across the nation and within 3 weeks word hit
Worcestershire, England in the Berrow’s Worcester Journal of August 1st.</p>
<p>With the bodies buried, the Mormons tossed into chaos and uncertainty,
and the nation’s focus in a heated election year on the battleground
state of Illinois with a Democrat Governor, all that could be done was
assess the situation and move forward. There was also the anti-Mormon
perspective as well as the government’s perspective to consider in all
of this. Let’s have a look at the guy who started the anti-Mormon
political party and was the most vocal critic of the Mormons for all of
Nauvoo history.</p>
<p><strong>Thomas Sharp/Warsaw Signal</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"The St. Louis 'Gazette' says that the men that killed the Smiths were
a pack of cowards. Now our view of the matter is, that instead of
cowardice they exhibited foolhardy courage, for they must have known
or thought that they would bring down on themselves the vengeance of
the Mormons. True, the act of an armed body going to the jail and
killing prisoners does appear at first sight dastardly, but we look at
it as though these men were the executioners of justice; and their act
is no more cowardly than is the act of the hangman in stretching up a
defenceless convict who is incapable of resistance. If any other mode
could have been devised, or any other time selected, it would have
been better; but as we have heard others say, we are satisfied that it
is done, and care not to philosophize on the modus operandi."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is representative of the anti-Mormon perspective. They felt
justified in the act, but had trouble justifying it in public discourse.
Vigilante justice is hard to rationalize after the fact, yet Thomas
Sharp tried. Let’s discuss the morals of this entire situation in a
little while. Next, let’s hear from the guy who was resoundingly blamed
by the Mormons for the assassinations, and blamed by the anti-Mormons
for letting Mormon lawlessness get out of hand in the first place,
Governor Thomas Ford. This was his public declaration immediately after
the Carthage gunfight while he was stationed in Quincy, trying to keep
his state from spiraling into civil war just 4 months before the
November election.</p>
<p><strong>Thomas Ford,</strong> “To the People of the State of Illinois,” <em>Times &
Seasons</em>
<a href="http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>TO THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.</p>
<p>I desire to make a brief but true statement of the recent disgraceful
affair at Carthage, in regard to the Smiths, so far as circumstances
have come to my knowledge. The Smiths, Joseph and Hyrum, have been
assassinated in jail, by whom it is not known, but will be
ascertained. I pledged myself for their safety, and upon the assurance
of that pledge, they surrendered as prisoners. The Mormons surrendered
the public arms in their possession, and the Nauvoo Legion submitted
to the command of Capt. Singleton, of Brown county, deputed for that
purpose by me. All these things were required to satisfy the old
citizens of Hancock that the Mormons were peaceably disposed; and to
allay jealousy and excitement in their minds. It appears however that
the compliance of the Mormons with every requisition made upon them
failed of that purpose. The pledge of security to the Smiths, was not
given upon my individual responsibility. Before I gave it, I obtained
a pledge of honor by a unanimous vote from the officers and men under
my command, to sustain me in performing it. If the assassination of
the Smiths was committed by any portion of these, they have added
treachery to murder, and have done all they could to disgrace the
state, and sully public honor.</p>
<p>On the morning of the day the deed was committed, we had proposed to
march the army under my command into Nauvoo. I had however discovered
on the evening before, that nothing but utter destruction of the city
would satisfy a portion of the troops; and that if we marched into the
city, pretexes[ pretexts] would not be wanting for commencing
hostilities. The Mormons had done every thing required, or which ought
to have been required of them. Offensive operations on our part would
have been as unjust and disgraceful, as they would have been
impolitic, in the present critical season of the year, the harvest and
the crops. For these reasons I decided in a council of officers, to
disband the army, except three companies, two of which were reserved
as guards for the jail.-With the other company I marched into Nauvoo,
to address the inhabitants there, and tell them what they might expect
in case they designedly or imprudently provoked a war. I performed
this duty as I think plainly and emphatically, and then set out to
return to Carthage.-When I had marched about three miles, a messenger
informed me of the occurrences at Carthage. I hastened on to that
place. The guard it is said did their duty but were overpowered. Many
of the inhabitants of Carthage had fled with their families. Others
were preparing to go. I apprehended danger in the settlements from the
sudden fury and passion of the Mormons and sanctioned their movements
in this respect.</p>
<p>General Damming [Deming] volunteered to remain with a few troops to
observe the progress of events, to defend property against small
numbers, and with orders to retreat if menaced by a superior force. I
decided to proceed immediately to Quincy, to prepare a force
sufficient to suppress disorders, in case it should ensue from the
foregoing transactions or from any other cause. I have hopes that the
Mormons will make no further difficulties. In this I may be mistaken.
The other parby [party] may not be satisfied. They may recommend
aggression. I am determined to preserve the peace against all breakers
of the same, at all hazards. I think present circumstances warrant the
precaution, of having competent force at my disposal, in readiness to
march at a moments warning. My position at Quincy will enable me to
get the earliest intelligence, and to communicate orders with the
greatest clarity.</p>
<p>I have decided to issue the following general orders:</p>
<p>HEAD QUARTERS}</p>
<p>Quincy, June, 29, 1844. }</p>
<p>It is ordered that the commandants of regiments in the counties of
Adams, Marquette, Pike, Brown, Schuyler, Morgan, Scott, Cass, Fulton
and McDonough, and the regiments composing Gen. Stapp's brigade, will
call their respective regiments and battalions together immediately
upon the receipt of this order, and proceed by voluntary enlistment to
enrol [enroll] as many men as can be armed in their respective
regiments. They will make arrangements for a campaign of twelve days,
and provide themselves with arms, ammunition, and provisions
accordingly, and hold themselves in readiness immediately to march
upon the receipt of further orders.</p>
<p>The independent companies of riflemen, infantry, cavalry, and
artillery in the above named counties, and in the county of Sangamon
will hold themselves in readiness in like manner.</p>
<p>THOMAS FORD,</p>
<p>Governor, and commander-in-chief.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hyrum and Joseph Smith were dead and buried, but that didn’t mean
everything that led to their deaths was suddenly over. The anti-Mormons
and old citizens of Hancock county still wanted the Mormons out of
Illinois. The Mormons wanted to continue flaunting laws in their
self-declared sovereign theocracy. Those interests are mutually opposed
and can’t be reconciled. Governor Ford had been the victim of mutiny by
multiple state militias. In spite of Jo and Hyrum biting the assassin’s
bullets, Governor Ford had largely gained the trust of the Mormons.
Willard Richards assumed a primary leadership role in the church with
the aid of William Clayton while waiting for the Quorum of Apostles to
return from the eastern states. White-out Willard was a prudent pro tem
leader who advocated for peace and helped the Mormon settlement from
spiraling into madness through retaliation. It was late June, the rest
of the leadership wouldn’t get the news of the gunfight until the second
week of July, after which it took them the rest of July and into early
August to make the journey back to Nauvoo. A conference was held in the
first week of August where the people largely chose to follow Bloody
Brigham Young or a newly-discovered charismatic James Strang who carried
a forged letter of succession from the prophet. Hingepin Sidney Rigdon
claimed to be the guardian of the church and commanded the people to
move to Pittsburgh; the people rejected him. Rigdon was washed up and
relied on old systems of public oratory to sway the masses, which failed
in comparison to the appealing stability of a council of men who
deliberated and exhibited a solid front for the church leadership.
Thousands of the converts then living in Nauvoo had been converted as a
result of the Quorum of Apostles’ mission in England and therefore
followed the group of men who converted them and coordinated their
immigration to America.</p>
<p>It was fairly well-understood that the leadership of the church would
remain in the Smith family. Should Jo be removed from the office of
prophet, his older brother Hyrum would inherit the mantle until Jo’s
oldest son, Joseph III, was of leadership age. Hyrum died when Jo died
so that wouldn’t work. The last two remaining Smith brothers after the
Carthage gunfight were Samuel and William. Samuel was a strong
contender, but William was generally regarded as a scoundrel and was
absolutely hated by most of the Mormon leadership. He posed less of a
threat to the Quorum of Apostles than did Samuel. Mother Lucy Mack Smith
argued that “Samuel [should] move into Nauvoo and take the Patriarchs
office and says the church ought to support him”. With the support of
Mother Lucy Mack Smith, Samuel would gain the support of the Mormon
population. Samuel argued in a July 10th meeting that he was “Joseph’s
designee as president if Joseph and Hyrum both died.” Willard Richards
pushed back and successfully argued that any discussions of succession
should be postponed until the Apostles returned. A week after this
meeting, Samuel came down with an illness. Hosea Stout, a Bloody Brigham
loyalist like Willard Richards, attended Samuel during the illness.
Stout did this under the direction of White-out Willard Richards; the
Apostles were still abroad and making their way back to Nauvoo. On July
30th, Samuel Smith died and a Joseph loyalist named John M. Bernhisel
wrote a letter to William Smith, the last remaining Smith brother, that
his brother had been poisoned. Samuel’s widow wrote another letter to
William Smith that Hosea Stout “had administered a white powder to him
daily.” Samuel’s brother in law, Arthur Millikin, was receiving a
similar treatment from Hosea Stout with this white powder and was
becoming more and more ill until his wife, Lucy Millikin, Sam’s younger
sister, threw the powder into the fire and Arthur recovered soon after.
Willard Richards tried to remove every Smith threat after Jo’s and
Hyrum’s deaths.</p>
<p>William Smith, who was in Boston as all this happened, returned to
Nauvoo to three dead brothers instead of just two, as well as a
nearly-dead brother in law. While Jo and Hyrum were assassinated by
anti-Mormons, Samuel was assassinated by Willard Richards to pave the
way for his cousin, Bloody Brigham Young, to ascend to president of the
church. White-out Willard must have known that old adage, “when life
gives you lemons, make lemonade, mix in some arsenic, and give it to
your enemies”. William Smith eventually became the target of Bloody
Brigham and was publicly squeezed out of leadership in the church.
William went on to write an expose of Brigham but it fell flat as the
people had already largely decided Brigham was the rightful successor
and plans were in the works to move west. William would also join the
movement of James Strang before publicly apostatizing from Strang’s
church and writing another expose which included Strang’s endowment
ceremony. Crazy Willey Smith, indeed. That was two paragraphs covering
like 7 years of history so obviously there’s much more to it, but those
are stories for another time.</p>
<p>Let’s turn back to the issues at hand because there was still the mess
of the actual gunfight to clean up. Ford was able to keep a lid on his
state for another almost year while also revoking the Nauvoo City
Charter, which disincorporated the city and officially disbanded the
Nauvoo Legion, never to regain official state sanction again. May of
1845 saw the trail of 5 men involved in the assassination. Nine were
officially indicted, but 4 of them, John Allen, William Vorhees, John
Wills, and William Gallaher, fled Illinois before they could be arrested
and brought to court. A witness claimed that Wills, Gallaher, and
Vorhees were first men who pushed through the door to the apartment and
that Gallaher was the man who shot Jo in the back as he mounted the
window sill to jump or fall out the window. Apparently 3 of these 4 men
were the victims of Jo’s blind-firing pepperbox pistol. The 5 who did
stand trial were Colonel Levi Williams, who was the commanding officer
of the men who attacked the jail, Mark Aldrich, who was second in
command to Levi Williams, Jacob C. Davis, who was an outspoken political
opponent of the Mormons and had repeatedly spoken out about their
removal from Illinois, William Grover, a lawyer and militiaman under the
command of Levi Williams, and finally, Thomas C. Sharp, editor of the
Warsaw Signal and the most outspoken opponent of the Mormons for the
past 4 years of Nauvoo history through his newspaper.</p>
<p>Indicting the witnesses was a mess in and of itself. The election of
August 1844 caused a stir between the Mormons and non-Mormons of Hancock
county and Colonel Deming was elected by the Mormons as the new sheriff
of Hancock county with the promise he’d vigorously prosecute those
responsible for the Carthage murders. This is the same Colonel Deming
who fled Carthage as Levi’s men descended on the town because Governor
Ford had instructed him to “flee if menaced by a superior force.”
Immediately after the election, Levi Williams and Thomas Sharp fled
across the Mississippi to Missouri, and only returned after Governor
Ford made modest concessions to secure their safety from Mormon
vigilantes and promised reasonable bail. Governor Ford made these
negotiations with the force of 450 militiamen under his command in
Quincy and the threat of an extradition agreement from Governor Reynolds
of Missouri.</p>
<p>Governor Ford personally oversaw the court proceedings by employing the
lawyers to get the indictments, gain testimonies, and prosecute those
who’d committed the crime. The Mormon lawyers sought to fill the jury
with Mormons and Mormon sympathizers, but they were in a hostile land
with a hostile court. On jury selection day, without state sanction, a
thousand men surrounded the courthouse with their guns and barred
Mormons from entering the building. Only the men who were selected by
this armed anti-Mormon mob were allowed to be on the jury. They “swore
that they had never formed or expressed any opinion as to the guilt or
innocence of the accused,” however, understandably all the men on the
jury planned on acquitting the accused before the jury even heard
opening arguments. The Mormons were allowed a single witness, William
Daniels. Daniels had been at Carthage that day, but because the Mormon
leadership wanted to fill the press with their propaganda, Daniels’
account of the Carthage gunfight had been so corrupted by unbelievable
events that it ended up being a detriment to the prosecution. The Mormon
leadership made the mistake of printing Daniels’ account with complete
falsehoods as a pamphlet in the months before the trial, which forced
Daniels to stick to the story in the pamphlet when he was called as a
witness, completely crippling the prosecution’s case against the 5 men.
From Governor Ford:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But before the trial came on, they had induced [Daniels] to become a
Mormon; and being much more anxious for the glorification of the
prophet than to avenge his death, the leading Mormons made him publish
a pamphlet giving an account of the murder; in which he professed to
have seen a bright and shining light descend upon the head of Joe
Smith, to strike some of the conspirators with blindness, and that he
heard supernatural voices in the air confirming his mission as a
prophet! Having published this in a book, he was compelled to swear
to it in court, which of course destroyed the credit of his evidence.
This witness was afterwards expelled from the Mormons, but no doubt
they will cling to his evidence in favor of the divine mission of the
prophet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They way he reports it, that Daniels joined the Mormons, gave his
account, then left the Mormons, almost seems like the leadership under
Bloody Brigham bought the guy’s testimony, which wouldn’t be a surprise.
There is more possible evidence for this as Daniels didn’t live in
Nauvoo until like 7 weeks before the trial and his pamphlet was
published, but he was never counted a Mormon after the trial. He was
basically a tool of the Mormons; maybe some listeners can empathize with
that. Regardless, Ford was right, because the folklore of the kid trying
to cut off Jo’s head and being scared off by a flash of light is still a
legend known by most Mormons today; even though that legend was a
complete fabrication that destroyed the prosecution’s case against the
assassins. The church even includes this propaganda today in their essay
about the Carthage martyrdom, even though the story served to be the
greatest weakness to the state’s prosecution of those who committed the
crime. Regardless, a number of witnesses were called in to determine the
facts, but the verdict was already decided before the people stepped
foot in the courthouse.</p>
<p>Some interesting information did emerge during the trial and we won’t go
through the entire thing here. As Governor Ford observed, “Many other
witnesses were examined, who knew the facts, but, under the influence of
the demoralization of faction, denied all knowledge of them.” Every
witness and indicted suspect took the stand and denied they had anything
to do with the assassinations or anything leading up to them, often
times even contradicting their own statements. They testified that they
had no knowledge of the other suspects being there, that there was no
collusion, that they had no idea what was going to happen that day when
they got to Carthage. They all just lied because everybody was under the
control of the far-superior anti-Mormon faction in the area. Governor
Ford observes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>During the progress of these trials, the judge was compelled to permit
the court-house to be filled and surrounded by armed bands, who
attended court to browbeat and overawe the administration of justice.
The judge himself was in duress, and informed me that he did not
consider his life secure any part of the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was clearly a charged case. The anti-Mormons successfully got every
Mormon thrown off the jury, intimidated the judge, and filled the
courthouse with cheers and boos depending on what each witness said and
what bearing that information had on incriminating the suspects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The consequence was, that the crowd had everything their own way; the
lawyers for the defense defended their clients by a long and elaborate
attack on the governor; the armed mob stamped with their feet and
yelled their approbation at every sarcastic and smart thing that was
said; and the judge was not only forced to hear it, but to lend it a
kind of approval.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The jury deliberated for 2 hours and delivered a verdict of not guilty.
All 5 men were acquitted and the outstanding warrants for arrest for the
other 4 men were stricken. How do you charge a mob with murder? You
don’t. At least, not in this case. Notably, a few months later, there
was a separate hearing to determine the criminality of the Mormon
leaders for destroying the Nauvoo Expositor printing press and they were
also acquitted by the same methods. The Mormons filled the jury and
intimidated the witnesses and judge and they were all acquitted. Justice
wasn’t served on the Mormons or the anti-Mormons because this was mob
law and an era of American jurisprudence which didn’t have enough weight
prosecuting systemic crimes like this. It wasn’t until the casino-owning
mafias in Vegas were prosecuted in the 1950 and 60s that we formulated
the conspiracy charges necessary to eradicate hierarchical crime as seen
in Nauvoo and the anti-Mormons fighting Nauvoo criminality.</p>
<p>Let’s go through some of the court record, which was taken in Pittman
shorthand by George D. Watt, an incredible resource for Bloody Brigham
Young in Utah. If only Jo had recognized how useful George D. Watt was
before he died, we might have a lot more of Jo’s actual words to work
with today. I digress.</p>
<p>The prosecution, Josiah Lamborn, opened up with the charges.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You are here called upon to Judge a truly extraordinary case; it is
extraordinary on account of the peculiar celebraty of the person
killed, and on account of the peculiar circumstances, attending the
killing of this man, and that has attended the whole account
throughout this County and the adjoining Country, the Case is one of
peculiar interest, and vast importanse to the whole Country, to it
public attention is directed from every part, the eyes of the whole
country is upon us, it has not only excited a feeling of considerable
interest among the people of the united stated, but throughout the
civilized world...</p>
<p>A citizen of your County was confined in Jail under the protection of
the Law, and plighted faith of the Governor, of the State, as to how
far his offences, are two, or far they are false, he may have been
guilty of the basest crimes, or he may have been innocent of the
charges alleged against him, about these things I know nothing, but he
has suffered an awful atonement, for any offence he might have
committed and is gone to answer for it before his God.</p>
<p>He being confined in Jail a wreckless mob, came here, on these
peacable prairies, and took that man from Jail and murdered him, but
the Laws of Mobocracy, not having the laws of God and man, in their
favour,</p>
<p>We alledge that these men arraigned before you at the Bar, are the men
who new the movers, and instigators, of that mob who committed the
crime, and shed blood, upon the soil of your town, they were the cause
of the spilling of that blood in consequence of which murder, rests
upon their hands, and hearts of these five men here arraigned,</p>
<p>It is not necessary to prove that these men, entered the Jail, or shot
the Gun, or any of these instruments, by which his death was
accomplished, in order, to convict them, but that the mob, got its
spirit, impulse, movements, and blood thirstiness, from the minds, and
dispositions of these men, and that they were the instigators of that
mob, gave countenance to it and that they did stir up others, to
commit the murder we shall be able fully and sbstantially to prove,...</p>
<p>There are hundreds here I have no doubt are ready to applaud you, and
rejoice with you, if you should return a verdict of not guilty against
these men, but as you respect your honour, your Country, and your God,
I call upon you to do justice to this case, for this state of things
cannot exist much longer, the law must prevail, mobs, may triumph for
a short time, but the law, will ultimately prevail and triumph,</p>
<p><strong>The guilt of this crime, hangs over you, as a blight, and curse,
which is destroying your character, and gnawing at the root of your
prosperity, it is a blood stain upon your character, and a foul blot,
which cannot be erased, but with vengeance, and rigour, to deal out
the law, as the law is, As you respect, and fear your God, as you
respect, and fear God, and not man, do your duty, for it is better
that truth and righteousness prevail, and that even handed Justice, be
dealt out to the full, than to suffer the guilty to go free, and
escape the merited punishment due to their deeds...</strong></p>
<p><strong>Where, are your Laws, here in this country, where the protection,
that ought to be thrown, around your persons if such violations, are
to be committed, as they have been, you are not sure, but that
yourselves, may be the next victim, you are now interested in the
welfare of your County, the laws of your Country, demands such an
interest, and you are not, the only ones, that feels this interest,
but as far as the name, of Liberty, Religion, the rights of
conscience, and the power of the divine providence is extended their
will be interests manifested in the examination of this case,
therefore it is for you to know and consider well your duty and make
your decision according, to the dictates of truth, and a pure
conscience, remember that these oaths you have made is registered in
[illegible], and you will be called upon to answer the manner in
which you have determined this case, between the state, and these
individuals, for taking the blood of that man against the Laws of God
and against your own human laws, that govern the Laws in which you
live.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The defense responded with their opening statement:</p>
<!-- raw HTML omitted -->
<p>What followed these opening statements was a farce. Each witness
testified that each defendant wasn’t there or they didn’t see any of the
defendants in the chaos of the day. All of these men lied to protect
each other and ensure mob law and vigilante justice carried the day.</p>
<p>Jonas Hobart:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Did you see anybody there besides yourself</p>
<p>I saw a great crowd of people there.</p>
<p>Did you see any that you knew.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these defendants there.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How many people were there.</p>
<p>I suppose about one hundred and fifty.</p>
<p>Did you see any in disguise there.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Are you acquainted with any of these men on trial.</p>
<p>I am.</p>
<p>Did you see any of them at the Jail.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John Paton:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Was Sharp there, when you was discharged.</p>
<p>I don’t think he was.</p>
<p>How far from Warsaw when you was discharged.</p>
<p>We was five or six miles.</p>
<p>Was David, Oldridge, and Williams, there, when the company was
discharged.</p>
<p>I think they were.</p>
<p>Was Grover there.</p>
<p>He was somewhere there a [illegible]</p>
<p>Sharp also.</p>
<p>I did not see him there.</p>
<p>What time of the day was you discharged.</p>
<p>Near twelve O clock.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of these men address the people upon anything.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Who addressed the people.</p>
<p>I think Sharp made a small speech.</p>
<p>Do you watch any of the speech.</p>
<p>I recollect some portion of it.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>(the witness waited some considerable time before he answered)</p>
<p>I think he said that Joe Smith, was now in custody, and the Mormons
would elect the officers of the County, and by that means, Joe would
select his own, Jury and get free.</p>
<p>Was anything said, about killing, Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he was what should be done with him.</p>
<p>No.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another interesting detail emerges from a few of the testimonies and it
points to possible complicity by Governor Ford:</p>
<p>John Paton:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What was the words Sharp used.</p>
<p>He said the Mormons, had the power to elect the officers, of the
County, and that Joe, would select his own Jurors, and be set free.</p>
<p>Did he say anything more.</p>
<p>Yes, but I don’t recollect all his speech.</p>
<p>He said Joe, would select the Officers of the County, did he.</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing more that you remember.</p>
<p>He said, the Governor had said whatever they did, to do it quickly</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever you do, do it quickly. Spoken under oath from the stand by
somebody who testimony contained plenty of problems like most of the
other witnesses, but it is still notable. Whether or not Governor Ford
said such a thing, or anything alluding to vigilante justice, is
troubling and possible, but can’t be concluded simply from this
statement. Never forget, there are no heroes in this story.</p>
<p>Another testimony from a Mr. Backman</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How long was it before the firing that you saw Mr. Williams.</p>
<p>I saw Williams going in the line of march up to the Jail.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams after they returned from the Jail.</p>
<p>No. I was called on as a Juryman, immediately after,</p>
<p>Did you see Williams immediately after with Wilson speaking about the
killing.</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp there that evening after the killing.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover there that evening after the killing.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did you see Davis here that evening.</p>
<p>No,</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You get the idea. Each of these guys lied and lied to protect each
other. No honor among assassins and the rule of law had long been
dispensed with before this trial was even called.</p>
<p>One exchange from the hearing I want to highlight comes from the
testimony of Frank Worrel. He was the teenage guard at the jail who
colluded with Levi Williams to fire blank rounds at the attacking
militia to give Frank and his fellow guards plausible deniability. This
is a bit of a long read but it’s important to hear how it all transpired
to understand the consequences that followed the trial.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mr. Worrel Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Did you see Smith where he was killed.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these five men there.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>How many men were there at the time Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I could not say, but I suppose from one to two hundred.</p>
<p>How long did they stay.</p>
<p>I suppose three or four minutes.</p>
<p>What did they do, when they first, came.</p>
<p>The first motion was to come up in front of the Jail and when they had
got formed there, they made a rush for the door.</p>
<p>Did many go up stairs.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Was smith shot in a number of places.</p>
<p>I can not say I never examined the body.</p>
<p>Did you see any body there, you knew, after the deed was done.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Was there a good deal of confusion.</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Did you hear anything said.</p>
<p>I cannot say, the pieces were going off, all the time, so that I could
not either see, nor hear, anything said.</p>
<p>Where was you, when they made a rush to the door.</p>
<p>I was at the door.</p>
<p>Then you stood in the door.</p>
<p>No I was sitting on the door, step, when the men came up.</p>
<p>Did you change your position.</p>
<p>I was pushed, and [illegible], away about fifty feet in the crowd.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith when he died.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>How long did he live after he fell.</p>
<p>Not to exceed a minute after he struck the ground.</p>
<p>Did you see him hanging in the window.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>You saw him die.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>What time in the evening was it.</p>
<p>Between five and six O. clock.</p>
<p>Did you see [Levi] Williams there.</p>
<p>I do not recollect, I am satisfied I did not see him there.</p>
<p>Was he in town.</p>
<p>He was.</p>
<p>Was, Grover here.</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>Was Davis here.</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>You saw Williams and Oldridge, both here that evening.</p>
<p>I think I did.</p>
<p>You are acquainted with almost every body in the County.</p>
<p>I suppose , I am acquainted with about one third.</p>
<p>And there was between one hundred to one hundred and fifty people
there and you did not know a single one.</p>
<p>No there was such a hurry I could not tell who was there.</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p>Franklin Worrel Captain of the Gaurd, that was at the Jail, when the
Mob, came up, was again called into the witness box by [illegible,
looks like ‘Squire’] Lamburn to ask him questions that were before
omitted, Mr. Browning for the defence, stood up in opposition to his
asking him any further questions, which cause an investigation of the
Law upon the subject which lasted some time, but [illegible] was
finally decided by the Court that Mr. Lamburn have the privilege with
strict injunctions, upon the witness not to answer any questions that
would implicate himself.</p>
<p>Mr. Worrel, Do you know if the Carthage [illegible, looks like
‘Greys’] that evening loaded their guns, with blank catridge,</p>
<p>at this question Mr. Browning and Mr. Richardson spoke out to the
witness saying you need not answer that question.</p>
<p>I know nothing about the Carthage [illegible, looks like ‘Greys’],
only the six men that I had to do with.</p>
<p>Well do those six men, load their guns, with black cartridge that
evening.</p>
<p>I will not answer it.</p>
<p>Let it go to the County there in that way, that he would not answer
the question for fear of implicating himself.</p>
<p>-Retired-</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Franklin Worrel, the 19-year-old with a stutter, denied that any of the
defendants were in the mob, couldn’t remember a single face in the
crowd, saw Jo die but didn’t see him hanging out the window, and then
claimed he knows 1/3rd of the people in the county but not a single
person in the mob struck him as familiar. But that final bit is really
important, he refused to answer the direct question of whether or not he
loaded his guns with blank cartridges to make a show of defending the
jail against Levi Williams’s men. The attorney for the defense objected
to him even being asked the question, and after the court decided the
prosecution could ask him, he still refused to implicate himself by
answering the blank cartridge question. This was the largest scandal of
the entire hearing and Frank Worrel was held accountable; not by the
law, but by the Destroying Angel of Mormonism, Orrin Pistol Packin’
Porter Rockwell. Porter Rockwell had the name of Frank Worrel etched
into his mind when he met George D. Grant who gave Port the news of Jo’s
death, telling Port that Frank was responsible. He never let that name
escape his mind.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This jolly, good-natured Worrell was himself murdered by Mormon
assassins not long after. He was riding with a friend. A shot was
heard from a thicket. "That was a rifle!" said the friend. "Yes, and
I 've got it," said Worrell, coolly. He fell from his horse and died.
I have seen, as a child, his grave at Warsaw. A rude wooden
head-board, bearing this legend, "He who is without enemies is
unworthy of friends," — not very orthodox, but perhaps as true as most
epitaphs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the end of 1845 when Port murdered Frank Worrel out of retribution,
the Nauvoo Charter was revoked, the Mormon settlement of Yelrom was
burned to the ground, the mob would march into Nauvoo and remove the few
remaining Mormons in September of 1846, only mob law ruled in the area.
The Legion may have been officially disbanded, but that didn’t stop
Bloody Brigham from mustering the men when occasion required, armed with
some repeated rifles from Jonathan Browning, yes that Browning, the same
Browning that made my shotgun, Jonathan Browning started gunsmithing in
Nauvoo and some of the earliest rifles he made are bear a plaque reading
“Holiness to the Lord” which is also on every temple. I want one of
those Nauvoo Legion Browning guns more than I want a turbo kit for my
Miatia, which is to say more than my next meal or a heartfelt letter
from my parents telling me they realize they’re wrong about everything.
I can dare to dream. I’m doing fine! Stop asking!</p>
<p>That aside, Governor Ford recognized the increased lawlessness with both
the Mormons and anti-Mormons after both these trials. It was only going
to spiral further out of control.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No one would be convicted of any crime in Hancock [county]; and this
put an end to the administration of the criminal law in that
distracted county. Government was at an end there, and the whole
community were delivered up to the dominion of a frightful anarchy...
the people were neither capable of governing themselves nor of being
governed by others. And truly there can be no government in a free
country where the people do not voluntarily obey the laws.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now to some broader observations from Governor Ford on the Mormon
movement. It’s a long read from a guy that’s been dead over a century
and a half but his understanding of the situation is very Twain-esque
and absolutely timeless; as well as oddly prophetic.</p>
<p><strong>Governor Ford p. 357</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The world now indulged in various conjectures as to the further
progress of the Mormon religion. By some persons it was believed that
it would perish and die away with its founder. But upon the principle
that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church,” there was now
really more cause than ever to predict its success. The murder of the
Smiths, instead of putting an end to the delusion of the Mormons and
dispersing them, as many bleieved it would, only bound them together
closer than ever, gave them new confidence in their fatih and an
increased fanaticism. The Mormon church had been organized with a
first presidency, composed of Joe and Hiram Smith and Sidney Rigdon,
and twelve apostles of the prophet, representing the apostles of Jesus
Christ. The twelve apostles were now absent, and until they could be
called together the minds of the “saints” were unsettled, as to the
future government of the church. Revelations were published that the
prophet, in imitation of the Saviour, was to rise again from the dead.
Many were looking in gaping wonderment for the fulfilment of this
revelation, and some reported that they had already seen him, attended
by a celestial army coursing the air on a great white horse. Rigdon,
as the only remaining member of the first presidency, claimed the
government of the church, as being successor to the prophet. When the
twelve apostles returned from foreign parts, a fierce struggle for
power ensued between them and Rigdon. Rigdon fortified his pretensions
by alleging the will of the prophet in his favor, and pretending to
have several new revelations from heaven, amongst which was one of a
very impolitic nature. This was to the effect, that all the wealthy
Mormons were to break up their residence at Nauvoo, and follow him to
Pittsburg. This revelation put both the rich and the poor against him.
The rich, because they did not want to leave their property; and the
poor, because they would not be deserted by the wealthy. This was
fatal to the ambition of Rigdon; and the Mormons tired[,] of the
despotism of a one-man government, were now willing to decide in favor
of the apostles. Rigdon was expelled from the church as being a false
prophet, and left the field with a few followers, to establish a
little delusion of his own, near Pittsburg; leaving the government of
the main church in the hands of the apostles, with Brigham young, a
cunning but vulgar man, at their head, occupying the place of Peter in
the Christian hierarchy.</p>
<p>Missionaries were despatched to all parts to preach in the name of the
“martyred Joseph;” and the Mormon religion thrived more than ever. For
awhile it was doubtful whether the reign of the military saints in
Nauvoo would not in course of time supplant the meek and lowly system
of Christ. There were many things to favor their success. The
different Christian sects had lost much of the fiery energy by which
at first they were animated. They had attained to a more subdued,
sober, learned, and intellectual religion. But there is at all times a
large class of mankind who will never be satisfied with anything in
devotion, short of a heated and wild fanaticism. The Mormons were the
greatest zealots, the most confident in their faith, and filled with a
wilder, fiercer, and more enterprising enthusiasm, than any sect on
the continent of America; their religion gave promise of more temporal
and spiritual advantages for less labor, and with less personal
sacrifice of passion, lust, prejudice, malice, hatred, and ill-will,
than any other perhaps in the whole world. Their missionaries abroad,
to the number of two or three thousand, were more earnest and
indefatigable in their efforts to make converts; compassing sea and
land to make one proselyte. When abroad, they first preached doctrines
somewhat like those of the Campbellites; Sidney Rigdon, the inventor
of the system, having once been a Campbellite preacher; and when they
had made a favorable impression, they began in far-off allusions to
open up their mysteries, and to reveal to their disciples that a
perfect “fulness of the gospel” must be expected. This “fulness of the
gospel” was looked for by the dreamy and wondering disciple, as an
indefinite something not yet to be comprehended, but which was
essential to complete happiness and salvation. He was then told that
God required him to remove to the place of gathering, where alone this
sublime “fulness of the gospel” could be fully revealed, and
completely enjoyed. When he arrived at the place of gathering, he was
fortified in the new faith by being withdrawn from all other
influence; and by seeing and hearing nothing but Mormons and
Mormonism; and by association with those only who never doubted any of
the Mormon dogmas. Now the “fulness of the gospel” could be safely
made known. If it required him to submit to the most intolerable
depostism; if it tolerated and encouraged the lusts of the flesh and a
p[l]urality of wives; if it claimed all the world for the saints;
universal dominion for the Mormon leaders; if it sanctioned murder,
robbery, perjury, and larceny, at the command of their preists, no one
could now doubt but that this was the “fulness of the gospel,” the
liberty of the saints, with which Christ had made them free.</p>
<p>The Christian world, which has hitherto regarded Mormonism with silent
contempt, unhappily may yet have cause to fear its rapid increase.
Modern society is full of material for such a religion. At the death
of the prophet, fourteen years after the first Mormon Church was
organized, the Mormonis in all the world numbered about two hundred
thousand souls (one half million according to their statistics); a
number equal, perhaps, to the number of Christians, when the Christian
Church was of the same age. It is to be feared that, in course of a
century, some gifted man like Paul, some splendid orator, who will be
able by his eloquence to attract crowds of the thousands who are ever
ready to hear, and be carried away by, the sounding brass and tinkling
cymbal of sparkling oratory, may command a hearing, may succeed in
breathing a new life into this modern Mahometism, and make the name of
the martyred Joseph ring as loud, and stir the souls of men as much,
as the mighty name of Christ itself. Sharon, Palmyra, Manchester,
Kirtland, Far West, Adamon Diahmon, Ramus, Nauvoo, and the Carthage
Jail, may become holy and venerable names, places of classic interest,
in another age; like Jerusalem, the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of
Olives, and Mount Calvary to the Christian, and Mecca and Medina to
the Turk. And in the event, the author of this history feels degraded
by the reflection, that the humble governor of an obscure State, who
would otherwise be forgotten in a few years, stands a fair chance,
like Pilate and Herod, by their official connection with the true
religion, of being dragged down to posterity with an immortal name,
hitched on to the memory of a miserable imposter. There may be those
whose ambition would lead them to desire an immortal name in history,
even in those humbling terms. I am not one of that number…</p>
<p>From my own personal knowledge of this people, I can say with truth,
that I have never known much of any of their leaders who was not
addicted to profane swearing. No other kind of discourses than these
were heard in the city. Curses upon their enemies, upon the country,
upon government, upon all public officers, were now the lessons taught
by the elders, to inflame their people with the highest degree of
spite and malice against all who were not of the Mormons church, or
its obsequious tools. The reader can readily imagine how a city of
fifteen thousand inhabitants could be wrought up and kept in a
continual rage by the inflammatory haragues of its leaders.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Timeless observations. Bravo, sir Thomas Ford.</p>
<p><strong>Thanks:</strong></p>
<p>Alright, listeners. I appreciate all of you sticking around for this
really long episode. I’ve prepared a conclusion, not just of this
10-part Road to Carthage series, but also some of my takeaways from the
historical timeline. But first, some acknowledgements and announcements.</p>
<p>First, some announcements. As most of you know, I’m going away for a
while. I’ll still be on Glass Box Podcast every 2 weeks because it feels
like a mistake to have a platform in 2020 and not discuss current
events, but this show is going on hiatus. Here’s what that means for the
wonderful people who support the show on patreon.com/nakedmormonism. I’m
not going to charge you during the hiatus but you can expect periodic
updates on that exclusive feed. It’s 2020 and I know money is a tough
issue for a lot of people right now so I’m not taking your money until
we’re officially off hiatus. So, if you want to join the patreon feed to
get all the extra content, extra episodes, NaMo Home Evenings, early
Mormon audiobooks, extended editions of most episodes, and just tons of
goodies, hiatus is a great time to get all that extra content for free.
Patreon.com/nakedmormonism. Speaking of Glass Box Podcast, if you want
some merch, that’s a great way to support the show. We have mugs,
t-shirts, stickers, all kinds of cool stuff in the shop section of
glassboxpodcast.com.</p>
<p>Next announcement, and this comes in the form of a massive thank you to
listener and friend of the show, Jeff Anderson. Jeff and I have been
working together for the past couple months to get all the show notes
from the entire backlog posted on the website. Simply go to
scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com where you can view all the scripts,
listen to each episode, and add any comments or corrections you have.
There’s also a search function. Once again, without the help of Jeff
Anderson, this never would have happened and he’s also a long-time
supporter of the show. Thank you Jeff. That’s
scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com; you’ll find a link in the show notes
and a special post of it on the patreon feed.</p>
<p>Next announcement, we’re doing a final live Q&A this upcoming 200th
anniversary of first-vision day, that’s September 21, 2020 at 6 p.m.
pacific time. If you have comments, thoughts, or questions from the
historical timeline or the Road to Carthage series specifically, post up
a question on the patreon page or tag Naked Mormonism on your social
medias of choice and I’ll answer questions or respond on that YouTube
live broadcast. This will be the final NaMo Home Evening Q&A to kick
off the hiatus.</p>
<p>Final announcement, I re-recorded the first episode of the show to
reflect the research and writing style I’ve developed since the last
time it was recorded as well as provide a general directory to the
backlog. With this 10-part Road to Carthage Series and episode 1
rereleased, there’s never been a better time to recommend the podcast to
a friend, The more y’all do that, the less marketing stuff I have to do
which is great cuz I’m really bad at it.</p>
<p>With all that said, I don’t know how long the hiatus will be. One more
unashamed plug, patrons at patreon.com/nakedmormonism will get periodic
updates and anybody who signs up during hiatus gets all that extra
content for free.</p>
<p>This podcast would never have become what it is today if not for an army
of amazing folks who helped me every step of the journey. In no
particular order, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to all of the
following people, and yes, it’s a pretty long list cuz I’m a hefty boy
and it takes a lot of shoulders to carry me around.</p>
<p>Preston, Hal Prentice, Jay Mumford, Julie Briscoe, Noah, Eli, Heath,
Lucinda, Tom and Cecil, Andrew Torrez, David Michael, Marie Kent,
Matthew Giltner, Cash, Racheal Nannon Brown, Professor Stephen, Judy
Cottrell, Kurt, Philip Saulnier, Eric Johnson, Cody Noconi, Brian
Kassenbrock, Doug Hofeling, Mark Hofeling, Dan Beecher, Lynn, Howard,
Jared Rowley, Dan Wees, Lane, Andrew Lindeman, Joe Mrak, Tim Heaton,
Heather and Brandon King, James R Wharton, Jim Dobler, Darren Bennett,
Aaron Gleason, James Redekop, Doubting Dogma, Amy Larsen, Jeanie,
Marsgirl, Jonathan Tindell, Abe Gardner, Roy Cazier, Rob Rigby, Mary and
Shelley, Josh Kim, Joel Kuhn, Rebecca Fakkema, Katie Langston, Tim Birt,
Perry Potter, Will M, Eric Herman, Levi Claussen, Tanner Barker, Jeff
Peterson, Sara Ward, George Nash, Dennis Anderson, Darren Schaefer,
Dread Pirate, Jessica Oudbier, Dave & Shay, Shannon Grover, Mike Hunt,
Josh Wood, Chris and Kristy, Greg Gibson, Shane Toone, Frank Frost,
George Green, Tim and Clara Keyt, DarthMandyPants, Bevin Flynn, Chuck
Simons, Misty Dawn, NA Johnson, Ryan Kolanz, Blake Wright, Tanner
Gililand, Samantha Shelley, John Dehlin, John Larsen, Colleen Dietz,
Ryan McKnight, Ethan Dodge, Seth Andrews, Lesley Butterfield, Joseph
Geisner, Sherry and Bill Morain, Rachel Killebrew, Cheryle Grinter, Jill
Brim, Barbara Brown, Robert Beckstead, Michael Winkelman, Don Bradley,
Vickie Speek, Braden Hamm, Lindsay Park, Cristina Rosetti, Brian
Ziegenhagen, Brent and Erin Metcalfe, Alice Ashton, Callie Wright,
Charone Frankel, Billy Eason, Jenica Crail, Mike Marquardt, Dan Vogel,
Cheryl Bruno, Matt Harris, Trace Rogers, Jason Cameou, David Fitzgerald,
Cara Santa Maria, Kaitlyn McKenna, Shawn Jolley, Shawn McCraney, Adam
Gonnerman, Esther Palmer, John Hamer, Seth Bryant, Diane and Bill
Shepherd, Roy Jeffs, Heretic Woman Deb McTaggart, Sam Young, Lydia
Finch, Kimberly Anderson, Kate Kelly, Benjamin Schaffer, Marissa McCool,
David Salisbury, Jeanne Aldrich, Tyson Kidder, Tom Kimball, Tim Coray,
Jimmy Snow, Godless Engineer, Shirlee Draper, Miles Germer, Greg Rattey,
Randy Todd Lamonda, Ishmael Brown, Dario Alvarez, Jill Brim, Julie
Thomas, Jason Smith, Mark Elwood, Bryan Buchanan, Jonathan Streeter,
Jana Riess, Grace Pool, Thomas Smith, Wayne Hepworth, Stacy Rebrul, Beth
Hambridge, Zach Law, Morgan Stringer, Glenn Ostlund, Deb Diener, Alan
Piper, Bonny Reckner, Rick Hansen, Will Bagley, Christine Marie, D.
Michael Quinn, Jeremy Runnels, Phil Ferguson, Natalie Newell, Raven,
Lilith Starr, Clair Barrus, Johnny Stephenson, Michael Marshall, Andy
Wilson, Josue Majia, Gazalem, Joseph Johnstun, Gaylon Vorwaller, Curtis
Evans, The Atlanta Atheist, Mark Doucet, Georgi Ivanov, Pup Dahlia,
Jason Kendall, Jennifer Cantrell, Steven Deam, Kris Barton, Daniel
Spencer, Jim Van Heel, Duke of Earl Grey, Devery Anderson, Kimberlee
Galaxyy, Joey Scoma, Jessica and Andrew Sproge, Daniel Stone, Amy Kuhel,
Jake Farr-Wharton, Sylia Gray, David Conley Nelson, Dayne Dawson, Andrea
L. Rice, Randy and Jana Woodward, John Peden, Zena Gresham, Gene
Elliott, Tyler Measom, Craig Criddle, Brian Keith Dalton, Bobby Cary and
Miss Ashley, The Prophet Jeremiah, Bill Reel, and the longer I think,
the longer the list gets so I’ll cap it there. That list is far from
exhaustive and I know there are so many people I missed, so if I didn’t
call out your name just know that I appreciate you as well.</p>
<p>Each of these people have been instrumental somehow in my journey the
past 6 years of doing the podcast. I want to take special note of
Christopher C. Smith. He’s the historian I hired to help put together
this final Road to Carthage series and he’s been an immense help in many
ways beyond these final 10 episodes. Thank you, Chris. I’m also
uploading the 213 pages of Carthage Jail sources Chris compiled for this
series to the scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com website.</p>
<p>I also want to thank my wonderful partner, Annie Ross. We met and
started dating while I was mulling around the idea of starting the
podcast and she even listened to the first episodes and gave the
necessary feedback of “this is terrible”. From that point forward I knew
I had a winner and I’m so lucky to now be her lifelong partner. Annie
has been so supportive and instrumental to this journey and she’s taught
me more about life than any other person. Thank you.</p>
<p>And finally, hundreds of hours of broadcast, thousands of pages of
script, nearly 3 million downloads, and you amazing listeners have been
there every step of the way. My biggest thanks goes out to each and
every one of you who hit the download button every week.</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion:</strong></p>
<p>Alright, listeners. Let’s bring this to a wrap with a conclusion. I have
some thoughts about what happened in Carthage as well as some general
thoughts overall so let’s start with the death of Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>How does somebody deal with a person like Joseph Smith? A figure like
Joseph Smith never simply goes away, nor do the systems he created. If
the Mormons faced another exile under his leadership, it would merely
push off the Mormon theocracy problem a few more years and they’d take
all the lessons they’d learned in Missouri and Illinois and make their
next settlement all the more powerful and untouchable. And that’s a
powerful word, untouchable.</p>
<p>Joseph Smith, legally speaking, had constructed his fiefdom such that he
was untouchable by the legal system. How does a legal system rein in
such flagrant abuses? When Jo had escaped that legal system so many
times, what could it do? What could the people acting out of goodwill in
the legal system do to touch somebody who was untouchable?</p>
<p>When I take a look at Jo’s plans, his ability to navigate the legal
system, and everything he intended to do to the world in his Mormon
revolution, all the damage and human cost attendant with revolutions,
the freedoms stolen by a theocracy, the devastation he planned on
wreaking upon an ever-expanding scope of victims of his criminal empire;
when I take all these trends into account, I can only view Joseph Smith
with complete and utter contempt, disgust, and reprehension. Deplorable,
abominable, vile, and absolutely loathsome tyrant of heinous and
revolting proportions.</p>
<p>By the legal standards of the day, Joseph Smith should have been
executed via court martial in 1838 after he’d surrendered at the end of
the Missouri-Mormon War. He acted in open defiance to the government of
Missouri, acted out of pure contempt for federal government authority,
sat atop a criminal empire which committed robbery and murder at a
systemic level, and he used that empire with his own militia to wage war
against the government. He committed treason. If a military officer in
any era of American history ever did what Jo did, they’d be killed on
the spot after an unceremonious court martial. By every legal standard,
whether civilian or military, Joseph Smith rightfully faced the gallows
or firing squad.</p>
<p>The legality of the situation is separate, however, from the moral
judgment. Jo presents a very complicated rendition of a trolly problem.
The problem was solved for us by Levi Williams and his men on June
27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1844. But the moment before that decision was made for
history, what consequences could we tease out of the situation had he
not died that day?</p>
<p>This forces us to stare down the barrel of alternative history, which
isn’t something historians engage in often because infinite variables
could easily change any possible outcome in unforeseeable ways.</p>
<p>If he didn’t die on June 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, how much more suffering and
death would he have caused? If he was able to carry out his grand
designs to any extent, how many people would have died in his warpath
during the Mormon revolution of America and the rest of the world? How
many people would have been forced into slavery of all kinds because no
empire has ever been constructed without the subsistence of slave labor?
Undoubtedly, Jo’s new empire in the west, once Nauvoo became untenable,
would have been a far more dangerous and criminal theocratic regime. If
the suffering of the Mormons in Missouri and Nauvoo is a pattern we
could carry on to this hypothetical 4<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> Josephite Mormon
settlement, tens of thousands of people would have suffered from abuse
and illness; crime would have run completely out of control,
counterfeiting operations would have been significantly expanded, the
Mormons themselves would be driven to the brink of collapse and wounded
animals are always the most dangerous. Think of how polygamy would have
expanded as well. If the most salacious exposes of how women were
treated in the sex-work ring at Nauvoo, thousands of women would have
been caught up in this oppressed and subjugated state, living off
crumbs, tools for servicing rampant male sexual gratification, abused,
broken, traumatized, ultimately to be discarded for younger generations
of sex workers in an endless cycle of abuse and sex slavery.</p>
<p>Under a Mormon theocratic government, religious compliance would be
required, apostates would disappear, shipped off by train cars to gulags
and camps. The 50/50 population split of men and women would force a
significant percentage of young men to be castrated so as to allow the
religious government officials enough wives. The Lost Boys we see from
fundamentalist Mormon communities today would be an entire social caste.
Property of the Gentiles across the world would be plundered and
absorbed into the church-run bishop’s storehouses as modern Labans and
Nephis would see the aggressor as the hero in these conflicts. Anybody
who dared to call themselves an atheist or stand up to this religious
tyranny in any way would be labeled a Korihor, after which their tongues
would be ripped out, they’d be cast from civilization, and then they’d
meet their untimely end by citizens trampling them to death. Anybody
seeking a change of government from the Mormon theocracy would be
labeled a kingman, and following the example of General Moroni, the Book
of Mormon’s most dangerous fascist, those dissenters would be placed in
prison camps and ultimately burned alive to set an example to anybody
entertaining tendencies of dissent. The Book of Mormon truly is a
horrific book. All that horrific shit is in there and Mormons are
encouraged to apply scripture to their everyday lives.</p>
<p>This draconian system of religious thought-policing would be enforced
via bishops’ interviews at regular intervals. Punishments would be given
for anybody without the most steadfast testimony. Folks in the community
would disappear and nobody would dare question where they went or if
those people would ever be seen again. Were they sent to labor camps
until their testimony was strong enough? Were they sent to fight foreign
wars? Were they outright blood atoned for committing the crime of
apostasy? You better not ask or you’re questioning the ways of god and
could be next. The idea of a Mormon theocracy plagues my nightmares.</p>
<p>What I’m really driving at here is a question I’ve wrestled with for
years now. Was it a good thing for Joseph Smith to die?</p>
<p>I want us all to sit with that question for a long time while
acknowledging our biases. There isn’t an objective conclusion to this
question because there are millions of people across the globe who
consider the death of Joseph Smith to be the worst event in human
history. I, however, have spent years highlighting the absolutely worst
aspects of this man, sparing no page of script to bleed his legacy by a
thousand cuts until all that remains is a hollow shell; a scarecrow held
together by lies. And I want you all to understand that the question of
whether it was a good thing for Joseph to die is something which has
plagued my daily walk and sucked my dreams into oblivion for years now.</p>
<p>I think the question breaks down into two components which are equally
perplexing for me. Did he deserve to die and was it the best outcome for
him to die? One of those questions is retrospective while the other is
prospective.</p>
<p>I’m not letting myself or any of you out of this one easy. We don’t get
to say it’s always wrong for somebody to be murdered and do away with
this question because that’s rarely an option especially when faced with
such a complicated trolly problem that is Joseph Smith. We also don’t
get to say, Joseph Smith was a monster who murdered people, stole
everything people had, caused untold pain, anguish, sickness, and death
of his followers, committed treason while a military leader, he made his
living solely from lying to people every moment of every day of his
professional life, he raped children! He absolutely deserved to die,
and the question is dealt with because where does that line of thought
begin and end. I see people posting that George Floyd deserved to die
because he was a criminal. These are not equal but the result of capital
punishment for crimes from this line of thinking comes from the same
place. That thought process creates systems of law that gives the death
penalty to atheists and adulterers and commits genocide against people
with a different skin color or god. Remember, it was against German law
to oppose the Third Reich.</p>
<p>Did Jo deserve to die? Legally for the time and legally in most states
and countries today, yes. Many countries have outlawed the death
penalty. Can society really consider itself free while state-sanctioned
murder is the status quo? Whether that murder be through the court
system murdering people who commit heinous crimes with a deranged mind,
or that murder be abrogated to an 18-year-old with a machinegun
murdering people our government has labeled terrorists, can society
progress while governments kill citizens of its own country or other
countries? What are reasonable criteria for governments to murder
people? Once the criteria are established, can we be certain that the
murders our government commits are all 100% justified and reasonable, or
is there a margin of error we tolerate? If 98% of felons are sent to
death row on incontrovertible evidence, are those other 2% of innocent
people we murder negligible? Something which can’t be disentangled from
state-sanctioned murder is the mythology which fuels it. When we kill
somebody on death row, we basically say “you’ve committed such a
horrible crime that any punishment we could foist on you isn’t good
enough. We have to send you to god and he’ll give you the punishment you
deserve.” Can we tolerate this mythological undertone in a secular
nation?</p>
<p>All of this says nothing about vigilante justice and lynchings which is
really at issue in the case of Joseph Smith. What does it say about our
society and government when people take capital punishment into their
own hands without government sanction? This says “you are such a pariah
of our society, we don’t care what the law says, we’re going to kill you
anyway.” This nation has a long and truly abhorrent history of racially
motivated lynchings. They still happen today. But, is there ever a case
where somebody like Joseph Smith demonstrates himself completely
untouchable by law who continues to commit acts deserving the death
penalty, where vigilante justice is warranted? Not only warranted, but
<em>the only</em> solution in his case specifically.</p>
<p>Did Jo deserve to die? I’m going to say he didn’t deserve to die.
Whether by vigilante justice or state-sanctioned murder, I don’t think
he deserved death. I think any time we give government license to kill
its own citizens, we quickly find ourselves in dangerous power dynamics.</p>
<p>Let’s deal with the second component of this question, was it the best
outcome for him to die? This is a bit more complex. Mormonism had
reached critical mass long before Carthage and Jo’s movement doesn’t die
with him, so we can put that aspect of the question to the side. Had Jo
been able to carry out his greatest designs, world history would be very
different. He would have caused an indescribable amount of death,
suffering, and harm to billions of people for generations to come. If we
could harness the energy from the suffering he would have caused if he
remained alive and free, we could power the rotation of the galaxy
itself for time and eternity.</p>
<p>If we could somehow quantify the suffering he would have caused if
allowed to live, was it the most moral outcome for him to die on June
27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1844? Yes. Yes, it was. But not for the reasons you
might think.</p>
<p>Suffering in jail for the rest of his life would cause him incredible
suffering, the law would catch up with him eventually. This isn’t a
judgement on Jo, it’s a judgement about our justice system that’s based
on retributive justice, not rehabilitative justice. He would have
languished for years and suffered and that’s acceptable to a lot of
people, but it would have done nothing to make him a better human being.
It only would have fueled the fire burning inside him and caused his
followers to further cling to the persecution complex. This would only
accelerate his grand designs, especially if he ever escaped from prison
as he’d done before. For the suffering he caused, the wrongs he
committed, and the suffering he would have experienced with a life in
prison, it was best for him to die that day in my opinion.</p>
<p>But, that’s my opinion. What do you think? Should he have been murdered
that day? If your answer is yes, would you have pulled the trigger that
day? Would you have been a spectator? Would you have been a Levi
Williams who put the assassination into motion but didn’t actually fire
a gun?</p>
<p>There isn’t an objective conclusion to these questions because they tap
into difficult aspects of human morality. Justice, retribution, freedom,
the worth of human lives. There aren’t simple answers. It’s never simple
because we’re dealing with the most precious of possessions that
humanity has, humanity itself. When we see injustices by a person like
Joseph Smith, we want simple answers; we yearn for simple answers, then
wonder what it is about the concept of eternal paradise and punishment
from daddy who knows everything we’ve done is so appealing to billions
of people. Why is religion so appealing and effective? Because humanity
is ugly and we’re creatures who want simple answers.</p>
<p>Besides, the worst thing about Joseph Smith isn’t anything he personally
did. It’s not the murder, it’s not the serial rape, it isn’t the
habitual lying for self-serving motives, it’s not the treason or intent
of a theocratic revolution, it’s not all the brazen crime and raising
militias and shadow assassin squads, it’s not all the white supremacy
and visions of racial cleansing for white purity; all of these things
done in the name of the voice in his head, his god, Elohim. Those are
reprehensible, but they aren’t the worst things he did. The worst thing
Joseph Smith did wasn’t anything specific, but rather, what he started.
Truly, the worst thing about this human is his successors.</p>
<p>No treatment of Joseph Smith’s beliefs, sense of morality, or daily
conduct can be complete without examining the system he created and the
people who followed his footsteps. Joseph Smith was a horrible person,
but Brigham Young was simply on a different level. Everything Jo dreamed
of doing, Brigham actually executed. Jo’s most malevolent plans for
America were carried out by Brigham Young in the nation of Deseret. Jo’s
racial supremacy doctrines were carried out by Brigham Young who
committed genocide and created the largest isolated eugenics experiment
in American history.</p>
<p>You know that Mormon theocratic dystopia of alternate history I was
talking about earlier? You may think that would never happen, but
everything I described happened to some extent in Utah under the
tyrannical reign of Bloody Brigham fucking Young, which presents a
larger point: intellectual contagion.</p>
<p>Look, Joseph Smith didn’t make Mormonism in the larger sense. The
culture he grew up in made him and he took bits and pieces of that
culture, beliefs, ideals, concepts, the philosophies of men, if you
will, and simply plagiarized and reskinned them to be his own flavor.
Nothing he did was original, his path through life is perfectly
consistent with countless demagogues before and after him. The culture
made the man who made the religion that was then weaponized by somebody
much smarter than him. For any successful religion to grow beyond a few
families, you need an ideas guy followed by a business guy… yes guy. I
mean that. It’s an indictment, not an endorsement. Intellectual
contagion, the force of populism, outlives the person who spawns their
specific flavor of it.</p>
<p>We see these same patterns around us every day. We can’t stop them but
we can’t afford to not fight them. Ideas are more resilient than the
fragile human skulls which carry them. It doesn’t matter what populist
movement you examine, it doesn’t arise from a vacuum.</p>
<p>Jo wasn’t the most successful imposter the world has ever seen, he yet
another among a swampland of monsters. He was ignorant of almost
everything around him. He was coarse and brazen, corrupt, beholden to
all manner of vice, his lust for power, wealth, and control dragged him
to his grave kicking and screaming. Everything was instant gratification
and convenience; he never considered the consequences of his actions if
they happened more than 5 minutes from the present. He could never
choose the good in the future when there was an evil close at hand. He
was no better or worse than a common trickster, he just had more people
who paid attention to him. He wasn’t a sage old man with a strong drink
at the end of the bar, he was a child in a man’s body who drank like a
miner and was arrogant to destruction. He hated authority and fought it
every step of his path to supplant any systems of power with his own
words of “thus saith the lord”. He was a chameleon who bounced from
piety to levity, purity to lust, magnanimity to wrath dependent on who
was there to perceive his conduct. He was physically strong, mentally
cunning, and morally perverse, a dangerous combination.</p>
<p>But truly what makes him the most corrupt is what those who followed him
accomplished. The people who followed Joseph Smith were leaders and the
led. Any system of belief will present an irresistible pile of excrement
to amoral flies wandering the wilderness. The ranks of Mormon leadership
were filled with unprincipled, defiled, and morally bankrupt monsters,
the exact people with which Jo got along so well. These vicious leaders
co opt the credulity of the wandering followers who know very little of
human nature and who give every possession, minute, and desire to the
leaders. These are the victims of a monstrous self-feeding system of the
ignominious leading the honest and simple. Religion remains the most
powerful human tool for the strong to control the weak. A cloak of
safety given to the sheep by the wolves with comforting words and
promises of eternal riches. Hollow assurances to satisfy the hungry with
the smell of food, cure the dying with spit and mud, uplift the
depressed with derision for daring to not be filled with joy. A person
sacrifices their autonomy and sentience to this force and they become a
sacrificial pawn to the game lord, gluttonous for power, wealth, and
control. Don’t read that, it makes god angry. Don’t like that person, it
makes god angry. Don’t listen to them, they make god angry. But the real
power lies on the flipside of that coin. Do this, steal that, kill them,
you wouldn’t want to make god angry, would you?</p>
<p>The greatest aspiration of Mormonism is no secret; it will not die until
it rules the world. From Joseph Smith to the current nonagenarian
running the company with a skull full of slushie mix, each prophet has
worked tirelessly to make this cult the most powerful cult in the world.
Hundreds of billions of dollars, millions of acres of land, politicians
calling and asking what they can do for the church, meeting with
presidents and foreign dignitaries under the guise of spreading the
gospel, a sales force, tens of thousands strong, giving their own
hard-earned money to have the privilege of selling the church for 2
years. At its heart, this is what kingdom-building looks like in our
modern world.</p>
<p>Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.</p>
<p>Zion the New Jerusalem will be built on the American continent</p>
<p>The field is white all ready to harvest</p>
<p>Consecrate the property of the gentiles</p>
<p>They will vex the gentiles with a sore vexation</p>
<p>Mormons are so nice. They’re programmed to be everything they are. Make
no mistake, all it takes is one modern Bloody Brigham Young for
Mormonism to quickly become the greatest domestic threat in American
history. It’s too wealthy, too powerful, too dangerous to ignore. Joseph
Smith created a doomsday cult with murderous oaths of fealty and
secrecy. We have yet to see this religion live up to its full potential;
and that’s a force of nature worth fighting.</p>
<p>Thank you listeners. For the sake of nostalgia, one last time, let’s
drift away from safe harbor together. I’ll see you on the battlefield.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 10 - The New ReignRoad to Carthage 9 - Carthage Jail Gunfight (sources)2020-09-03T20:00:01-07:002020-09-03T20:00:01-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/09/03/road-to-carthage-9-carthage-jail-gunfight-sources<p><strong>Sources from University of Chicago library that apparently are not
available anywhere online:</strong></p>
<p>Samuel O. Williams to John A. Prickett, 10 July 1844</p>
<p>James Gregg to Thomas Gregg, 20 June 1844</p>
<p><strong>Sources available online in holograph, but no transcription:</strong></p>
<p>Cyrus H. Wheelock letter, London, England, to George A. Smith, 1854
December 29,
<a href="https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets?id=b5604059-61fa-48db-925a-1905f781adc3&crate=0&index=0"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets?id=b5604059-61fa-48db-925a-1905f781adc3&crate=0&index=0<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>.</p>
<p><strong>Other sources:</strong></p>
<p>From James B. Allen, <em>Trials of Discipleship, The Story of William
Clayton</em> (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1987).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Early the next morning Orrin P. Rockwell woke him up with the stunning
news that Joseph and Hyrum had been shot to death. His diary entry for
that day is one of the longest he ever wrote, and it contains within
it all the sorrow, solemnity, and dismay that any disciple could feel.
“I went out & met brother Cutler & several others,” he wrote, “and the
news soon became general. Sorrow & gloom was pictured in every
countenance and one universal scene of lamentation pervaded the city.
The agony of the widows & orphan children [i.e., the wives and
children of Joseph and Hyrum] was inexpressible and utterly beyond
description.” He went on with a lengthy description of what had
happened at Carthage, as he understood it (which turned out to be a
fairly accurate account), emphasizing what he considered to be the
culpability of the governor for not providing better protection for
the prophet. He then wrote a prayer, that, though vengeful in its
tone, is a perfect reflection of the anger and frustration felt by
many at the sudden tragedy:</p>
<p>“And now O God wilt thou not come out of thy hiding place and avenge
the blood of thy servants.--that blood which thou hast so long watched
over with a fatherly care--that blood so noble--so generous--so
dignified, so heavenly you O Lord will thou not avenge it speedily and
bring down vengeance upon the murderers of thy servants that they may
be rid from off the earth and that the earth may be cleansed from
these scenes, even so O Lord thy will be done. We look to thee for
justice. Hear thy people O God of Jacob even so Amen”</p>
<p>Clayton saw the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum arrive in Nauvoo about 2
P.M. and was part of the large procession of mourners that collected
on the hill and followed them to the Mansion House. There they heard
exhortations to be peaceful and calm and not to utter threats. He
concluded his diary entry for the day:</p>
<p>“Few expressions were heard save the mourns for the loss of our
friends. All seem to hang on the merch of God and wait further events.
Some few can scarce refrain from expressing aloud their indignation at
the Governor and a few words would raise the City in arms & massacre
the Cities of Carthage & Warsaw & lay them in ashes but it is wisdom
to be quiet. After the bodies were laid out I went to see them. Joseph
looks very natural except being pale through loss of blood. Hyrum does
not look so natural. Their aged mother is distracted with grief & it
will be almost more than she can bear.”</p>
<p>“The blood of those men,” he wrote in that long entry of June 28, “and
the prayers of the widows and orphans and a suffering community will
rise up to the Lord of Sabaoth for vengeance upon those murderers.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.
<a href="https://archive.org/stream/fateofpersecutor00lund/fateofpersecutor00lund_djvu.txt"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://archive.org/stream/fateofpersecutor00lund/fateofpersecutor00lund_djvu.txt<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The under sheriff and jailer lived in the jail. The jail was a two
story stone house. The lower story and part of the upper story was
occupied by the jailor and his family. The jail proper was in the
north end of the building up stairs, divided off into cells. The front
room up stairs was a kind of a family room. At the head of the stairs
there was two doors, one entering into the family room and the other
entering into the jail proper.</p>
<p>I have tried to be a little particular in discribing the house so as
to give you an idea of the way the mob got to their victims. I said
this new company or mob as they realy were had some understanding of
some of the citizens of our town. I want you to know and believe, my
daughter, that I had nothing (to) do with the murder of the Smiths, or
any other person and during all the excitement I never did any thing
to any one that I would not under like circumstances they should do to
me.</p>
<p>I said I thought some of our citizens — citizens of Carthage I mean —
was privy to the hole matter. One of them, a prominent man and a man
of influence, came to me just befor the cowardly murder was committed
and asked me to go out on the road toward Nauvoo and see what was
going on out that way. I went and John Wilson an old citizen and
Doctor Morrison a prominent Physician went with me. We went about
three miles from Carth- age, on the Nauvoo road, where we had a fine
view of the country all around, the country being pararie all around,
we could see very plain where the Carthage and Warsaw road was. We saw
going on that road quite a company going hurriedly in the direction
(of) Carthage. It was not long till we could see quite a number on the
same road going toward Warsaw. We then went back to Carthage to report
and what did we find. Such a sight as I hope never to see again.</p>
<p>When we saw that company going to and from Carthage my suspicions was
arroused that all was not right. Afterwards my suspicions was
strengthened from the fact that a guard of the "Carthage Greys" a part
of a Millitary company had been left in charge of the accused to
protect and kepe them safe, whose sworn duty it was to protect their
prisoner as well as it was to keep him from running off. They were
there I don't know just how many. I think from six to ten men on guard
when the mob came rushing on them, they fired blank cartridges over
the heads of the mob as I afterwards learned from some one of the
guard. My impresion is that they were equal guilty as any one of the
mob. Excuse me for calling the murders of the Smith a mob. I think
that is the right name to call them, though I believe I do not know if
that you had an uncle in the affair. Well after the brave guards had
fired their blank carheridge on the mob as I was taken prisoners, the
mob rushed up stairs to where the Smiths Taylor and Richards were
enjoying themselves. Some said they were sipping their wine whether
that is true or not I do not know. At any rate they were comfortably
situated, and they had a right to suppose safely protected by the laws
of the great state of Illinois.</p>
<p>When the false guard had made their hypocritical assault on the other
part of the mob (I look upon them as being equally guilty as those
that came from Warsaw.) They the attacking party rushed up stairs with
murder in their hearts to where the accused were tryed to break open
the door which it appears was held shut by all four of the men when
the mob commenced firing heir loaded arms through the door. It appears
that one of the balls in the commencement of the attac pased through a
panel of the door and hit Hyrum in his neck which probably broke his
neck he fell back and died, as I was informed instantly. When I went
into the room shortly afterwards his head was laying against the wall
on the other sid from the door.</p>
<p>It is supposed when Hyrum fell the door was partially opened by the
attacking party, so much so at any rate that I was informed that Jo
Smith had what was common then what was and probable is now called one
of Steves peper boxes. It is said and there is no dout but what it is
true that he sliped his hand through the opening of the door and hit a
young man from Warsaw about his neck or sholder which made it
conveinent for the young man to remain for a while in Missouri. The
attacing party forced the door open and commenced firing at Smith it
is said they must have hit him an probably disabled him, as he
stagered across the floor to the oposite side of the room where there
was a window. It is said that there he gave the hailing sign of the
distress of a Mason but that did him no good. In the room behind him
was armed men, furious men, with murder in their hearts. Before him
arround the well under the window there was a croud of desperate men,
as he was receiving shots from behind which he could not stand, in
despersation he leaped or rather fell out of the window near the well
where he breathed his last. When I found him soon afterwards he was
laying in the hall at the foot of the stairs where his blood had as I
believe left indelible stain on the floor.</p>
<p>I suppose by this time you are anxious to know what became of Taylor
and Richards; was they also killed, no they were not. Taylor was
severely wounded Richards was not hurt. Shall I try to describe the
wounds that Taylor received and got over them. Well let me tell you
where we found him, I cannot impress your mind of his appearance as he
appered to us when we wer called to him by the jailor. We found him in
a pile of straw. It appeared that a straw bed had been emtied in the
cell where he was when we found him. He was very much frightened as
well as severly wounded. It took strong persuading of the jailor as
well as our positive assuriance that we ment him no harm but Was
desirous of doing him some good. He finally consented to come out of
his cell. When we examined him we found that he had been hit by four
balls. One ball had hit him in his fore arm and pased down and lodged
in the hand betwen the phalanges of his third and fourth fingers.
Another hit on the left side of the pelvis cuttin through the skin and
pasin leaving a superficial wound that you could lay your hand in. A
third ball passed through his thigh lodging in his notus. A fourth
ball hit his watch which he had in the fob in his pantaloons, which I
suppose the Mormons have today, to show the precise time that their
great leader was killed. The wounds had bled quite freely, the blood
had had time to coagulate which it had done, and where the clothes and
straw came in contact they all adhered together so that Mr. Taylor
came out his self sought cell he was a pitable looking sight. We took
the best care of him we could till he left us. He got well but never</p>
<p>paid us for skill or good wishes.</p>
<p>You want to know what has become of Richards. He was not hurt. You
will ask how did it happen that his comrads (were) so badly treated
and he came off without receiving any damage whatever. It was in this
way, as I suppose I think he told me so. The four braced themselves
against the door to keep the mob out. He stood next to the hinges of
the door so when the door opened it would turn back against the wall
that divided the room that they were in from the prison room. So when
they crowded the door open it shut him up against the wall and he
stood there and did not move till the affair was all over, so they did
not see him.</p>
<p>After we were through with Taylor I went to Richards and said to him
Richards what does all this mean who done it. Said he, doctor I do not
know, but I belive it was some Missourians that came over and have
killed brothers Josef and Hyrum and wounded bro Taylor. Said I to him
do you believe that, he said I do. Says I, will you write that down
and send it to Nauvoo. He said he would if he could get any person to
take it. I told him if he would write it I would send it. He wrote the
note, I found the man that took it to Nauvoo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John S. Fullmer, Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, 1855,
<a href="https://archive.org/details/assassinationofj01full"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://archive.org/details/assassinationofj01full<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thus you see that even his Excellency was trampling under foot the
privileges of the City Charter, the legislative power of the City
Council, the Judiciary, Habeas Corpus, and all powers and privileges
granted by the General Assembly, and ratified by his predecessor. It
was at this stage of the game, that he was heard to say (as it was
told us by good authority), that " he would have Joe, or lay the city
in ashes."</p>
<p>It was now reduced to a demonstration that our enemies were determined
that the law should not benefit us, and that nothing could be hoped
for from the Governor. They had for a long time sought the life of the
Prophet, and now it seemed as if they were determined to have it.
There was but one alternative left, and that was to make his escape.
He meditated doing so for a time and had crossed over the river that
he might deliberate on the course to pursue, whether to go away for a
season or offer himself for his people. When. he thought of going
away, the certainty of the destruction of the city, together with the
people whom he loved, and whom he had been the means of collecting
from the four winds, would rise in his imagination before him, and
reproach him with the calamity that his absence would bring upon them.
Thus he mused within himself and with his brother Hyrum, and at length
they both determined to return, and stand between the brethren and the
rage of the mob. They now prepared to go to Carthage, and, on leaving,
Joseph returned the second and third time, and at each time took an
affectionate leave of his family. On his way out, he said, to the few
of his friends who accompanied him, these remarkable words-</p>
<p>"I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer's
morning: I have a conscience void of offense towards God and towards
all men. I shall die innocent, and it shall yet be said of me, He was
murdered in cold blood."</p>
<p>Immediately after this, and while these voluntary martyrs were on
their way, an order from the governor, who knew of their approach, met
them, demanding all the State arms belonging to the Nauvoo Legion. It
appears his Excellency feared that the Legion, although disbanded,
might avenge any outrage that might be committed on the persons of
their leaders, and so thought he had better disarm them, as he had
already disbanded them This order was also promptly obeyed, although
the mob were suffered to retain their arms, even when within a half
day's march of us, and in a threatening and hostile attitude; while
the Legion had not evinced any disposition whatever, except to defend
their city in case it should be invaded, and had not set a foot
without the limits of the corporation. This last demand was so
manifestly void of all good feeling, and so unjust withal, that it was
thought advisable, by these devoted heroes, for Joseph Smith to return
in person to Nauvoo, lest the officers and men, in their great
indignation, should treat such an arbitrary demand with contempt, and,
perhaps, disobey it. He accordingly returned, and having accomplished
the delivery of the public arms, he again set out, accompanied by his
brother Hyrum, who never forsook him, for the head quarters of
mobocracy--Carthage, where they arrived late the same night, having
travailed nearly the whole distance from Nauvoo to Carthage three
times that day.</p>
<p>On the following morning the Governor's mobocratic troops were all
paraded and formed in line for review. This done, his Excellency
passed along their front, accompanied by Generals Joseph and Hyrum
Smith, whom he introduced to the troops as military officers, calling
them General Joseph and General Hyrum Smith. Whether he did this out
of respect to his distinguished prisoners, or whether he did it to
gratify the mob with a sight of their intended victims, can be pretty
correctly inferred from the proceedings already related. But some of
the troops doubtless misconstrued his Excellency's object, and thought
he was doing these men, whom they regarded as criminals, too much
honour, and therefore mutinied, and became exceedingly boisterous, and
for a time it was feared that nothing could stay their hands from
violence and bloodshed. The Governor, however, succeeded in pacifying
them by making to them a speech, in which he promised them full
satisfaction. But as this was made in public, he of course had to
promise it through a lawful channel. These mutineers, I wish it
distinctly remembered, were the "Carthage Greys. " The prisoners, for
so they were considered, delivered themselves into the hands of the
constable, and they were brought before the magistrate for examination
on the charge of riot. And after every effort was made on the part of
the prosecution to prevent it, they, with some of the City Council and
a number of policemen, who had also obeyed the warrant, succeeded in
giving the required bail to answer to the charges preferred, before
the next Circuit Court. It is worthy here to notice, that in case the
charges could have been sustained at court, the prisoners could have
been fined only at most in the sum of two hundred dollars; yet this
military esquire absolutely demanded the sum of five hundred dollars
for each man's recognizance, which was two-and-a-half times as much as
the penalty of actual guilt. The prisoners being fifteen in number,
the court hoped that the required sum could not be vouched for by
those present, and that they must consequently be committed to jail.
But there was strength enough at hand, and a sufficiency of
unquestionable bail, notwithstanding the unparalleled amount, was
instantly forthcoming, and the prisoners were once more free men. But
liberty was not for them, for in less than half-an-hour, there was a
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_warrant"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mittimus <!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>served
on Joseph and Hyrum Smith, against whom the spite of the mob was
always directed. In this Mittimus, the constable was ordered to
confine them in jail.</p>
<p>But I am a little before my story. I should have said that on the
morning of the arrival of the Smiths in Carthage, to answer for a
charge of riot, they were both apprehended on the charge of Treason.
But the case on the charge of riot came on first, and terminated as
stated above; and the prisoners had not, as yet, been brought before
the justice, in the case of treason, for examination. He could not,
therefore, legally imprison them; but he was captain of the mutinous
"Carthage Greys, " as well as justice of the peace, and of course
things had to go according to his liking. So notwithstanding the
protests of Mr. Smith's counsel, of illegality, he had them dragged to
jail by a company of armed men, detailed for the purpose; and although
the Governor had previously pledged his honour, and the honour of the
State, in case the Smiths should drive themselves up; that they should
be protected from illegal violence, and that the law only was sought
to be enforced. This pledge he frequently repeated; yet when they had
confided in the strong assurances of his Excellency, and had submitted
to, and were willing to abide, the law of the land, and while being
illegally ordered to be imprisoned by this military magistrate, they
appealed in vain, again and again, to the Governor himself, reminding
him of his pledges, to arrest that order from being executed. His
Excellency pleaded that he had no authority to stay civil process, or
the due course of law; that the prisoners were in the hands of the
civil authorities, and that he could not interrupt a civil officer in
the discharge of his duty. But what are the facts? A justice of the
peace, acting as a military officer also, by virtue of his commission
as such, orders his command to appear under arms and to safely
incarcerate the prisoners, whom he had just before ordered the
constable to commit to jail by Mittimus ere they had been brought
before him for examination; and the Governor, having been himself, at
one time, a judge upon the bench, knew and well understood the
illegality of the above proceedings; he also well knew that military
power and authority were used; and yet he, acting at that time as
Commander-in-Chief, in a military point of view, which gave him all
the supervision over all his officers, and, in fact, made him
responsible for all their acts and movements, refused to interfere, or
to countermand the order-the illegal, oppressive, and unofficer-like
order, of one of his captains. But again, having taken the oath of
office, he was, by virtue of that oath, bound to see the laws
faithfully executed, and not violated and trodden under foot, and that
right in his presence, and at a time too, when he had the bone and
sinew of the State, over which he then presided, collected together
for the express purpose, professedly, at least, of enforcing the law,
magnifying it, and making it honourable. I would here stop to inquire,
whether his Excellency did not render himself liable to be
court-martialed and cashiered for unofficer-like conduct; and also to
impeachment, for a neglect and violation of his oath of office, as the
chief magistrate of a great State? I give the affirmative as my
deliberate opinion in both specifications.</p>
<p>But the prisoners being committed, and as the Mittimus recited, "
until discharged by due course of law," the magistrate had no further
jurisdiction over them. They ought, therefore, to have remained there
until the session of the next Court, or have been brought out by
Habeas Corpus. On the next day, however, the esquire ordered the
constable to bring them before him into the Courthouse for
examination. The legal objections were now made by them and their
counsel, and they refused to go; but there was a way to make them. He
had a curious and convenient coat or badge of office, which, by a
sudden transition, assumed the military or civil form at will-now
civil, now military, and in this last, he ordered his " b'hoys," the "
Greys," to assist the constable and bring them This done, the
prisoners required time to procure the necessary witnesses, and
prepare for the examination. This was with great difficulty obtained.
The day was already far spent, say five o'clock, p.m., and time was
only given till twelve the next day, in which to write out some thirty
or more subpoenas, and then to send them, say twenty miles, to Nauvoo
and other places, and serve them on that number of scattered
witnesses, and have them in court. And now the defendants were
remanded to prison. (This is only one instance of a constant scene of
oppression to which these men have ever been exposed.)</p>
<p>It was not until during this imprisonment that the Governor redeemed
his oft-repeated promise to give General Smith a personal interview.
He accordingly made his appearance with a friend of his on the first
day of their incarceration, when the General, like Paul, had the
privilege of answering for himself. He adverted to all the leading
causes which gave rise to the difficulties under consideration, in a
brief, but lucid, energetic, and impressive manner. The Governor felt
that what was said was true. General Smith read copies of all the
orders and proceedings of the City Council of Nauvoo concerning the
destruction of the Expositor, and of the correspondence forwarded to
his Excellency in relation thereto; and also informed him concerning
the call of the Legion, and the position they occupied of absolute
necessity-not to make war upon or invade the rights of any portion of
the State, but as the last resort, and only defence, in the absence of
executive protection, against a large organized military and
mobocratic foe. The General reminded his Excellency that the question
in dispute was a civil matter, and to settle which, needed no resort
to arms; and that he was ready at any time, and had always been to
answer to any charge in the premises, that might be preferred against
him, either as Mayor of the city, or as a private individual, in any
court of justice, unintimidated by a mob or military array; and make
all the satisfaction that the law required, if any, etc. The Governor
said he had not called out this force, but found it assembled in
military order, on his arrival at that place; and that the law must be
enforced, but that the prisoners must and should be protected; and
that he again Pledged his word, and the faith and honour of the State,
that they should be. He also stated that he intended to march his
troops (that is, those who had assembled for mobocratic purposes, and
whom he had mustered into service) into Nauvoo, to gratify them, and
that the prisoners should accompany them, and then return again to
attend the trial before the said magistrate, which he said had been
postponed for the purpose of making this visit.</p>
<p>Afterwards, however, his Excellency called a council, of war, I
suppose, where it was determined to change the order of the day. The
troops were now all to be disbanded, excepting two companies. At the
head of the one which was from M'Donnough County, he marched into
Nauvoo; while he had detailed the other, the mutinous "Carthage Greys,
" to guard and protect the prisoners whom he left in the jail, in
direct violation of the pledges he had made to them on the previous
day. All the other troops were disbanded and ordered home, while there
yet retained also a body of several hundred men, eight or ten miles
out, apparently under the control of no one, except Col. Williams, a
sworn enemy, who, it is well known, had on more occasions than one,
not only threatened Nauvoo with destruction, but the Prophet with
death. This was the condition of things on the morning of the 27th
June, the day on which was acted the most unheard of and unprecedented
tragedy that, in my opinion, can be found on record. JOSEPH and HYRUM,
the Prophet and Patriarch, were that day slain by wicked hands, WHILE
IMMURED, IN PRISON. And thus was shed, on that memorable day, the best
blood, and the noblest too, of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p>Great God! what a sudden stroke in thy Providence was that? Was there
no way in thine Omnipotence to avert it? Or was it requisite for these
thy faithful servants, who loved their brethren as they did
themselves, even unto death, to lay down their lives and seal their
testimony with their blood? Victims they indeed were to rage, but wo
to the man who participated therein.</p>
<p>In reviewing the proceedings and movements of this chieftain, his
Excellency Governor Thomas Ford, as impartially as the nature of the
case will admit of, it is difficult to conjecture how he could have
played a card better to suit the mob than he did. He said he had
received an expression of all the troops and a promise that they would
stand by him to see the laws faithfully executed. But what of all
that? They were still a mob, and now without a head resolved into its
very worst form-that of disorganization.</p>
<p>It cannot be pleaded, in extenuation, that his Excellency ordered the
troops to return to their homes, because the only way to have
accomplished this was to have marched them home, under the command of
their respective officers, before they were disbanded. And this he did
not do; on the contrary, he disbanded companies of men from various
counties, all at the same time and in the same place, over whom, from
that very circumstance, he could have no further control, even if he
had desired it, for they had, by his act become free men, and, as
citizens of Illinois, had a right to remain or go home at pleasure,
his wishes or orders to the contrary notwithstanding. But not only so,
for if he had found it necessary, in case of some emergency, to call a
posse to his aid, he could not have commanded their services without
first making call upon some of their colonels or other officers in
their respective military districts.</p>
<p>But again, instead of remaining upon the ground to see that his orders
were complied with, he forthwith put himself at the head of a company,
I suppose as a body guard, and took up a line of march for Nauvoo,
where he took occasion, after calling the multitude together, to
insult them in a speech of some twenty minutes, in a most gross and
ignominious manner, unbecoming any public functionary, charging them
with movements, acts, and inconsistencies, which were utterly untrue,
and never existed, only in the foul throats of our most inveterate
traducers, who had the adroitness to ingratiate themselves into his
good graces, and prejudice him against us. While these things were
going on, much to his satisfaction, the prisoners in jail were left to
be guarded ostensibly, by the before mentioned "Carthage Greys," who,
only two days before, came near committing murder, as well as mutiny,
right in his presence; and of those, only eight men were detailed to
stand guard at a time, at the jail, while the rest remained in camp on
the public square, one quarter of a mile off. Thus were these intended
victims, instead of being protected, left at that momentous crisis,
with but two of their friends with them, to wit: Elders Willard
Richards and John Taylor, of the Quorum of the Twelve. The writer of
this was permitted to enter the prison with them as a friend, and
remained with them until he was sent to Nauvoo, only several hours
previous to the fatal catastrophe, to aid in forwarding witnesses. And
Colonel Markham, who had also remained with them, was run out of town
the same day, before the bayonets of a promiscuous crowd, who
threatened his life, while making a few little purchases for the
prisoners. And, as might have been expected, a little after five
o'clock in the evening, at the very time that his Excellency was
insulting the peaceable citizens of Nauvoo, a body of about one
hundred and fifty armed men, with painted faces, appeared before the
jail, unobserved by the inmates, and without opposition from any
quarter. The guard at the door, it is said, elevated their firelocks
at the approach of these men in disguise, and, boisterously
threatening them, discharged them over their heads. The crowd by this
time had encircled the building: some shoved the guard from their
post; rushed up the flight of stairs to the prisoners' apartment,
which for that day was in an upper open room; broke open the door, and
began the work of death, while others fired in through the open
windows. Dr. Richards, with Colonel Markham's heavy walking stick,
defended the door, knocking down, and to one side, the muzzles of the
assailants' guns, as they fired into the room; and, strange to say,
notwithstanding his exposed condition, he remained entirely unhurt.
The first shot, however, that was made, was through the door, before
it was opened, at their first approach; this was the fatal ball that
killed Hyrum. It pierced his face a little below the eye. As he fell
he exclaimed, "I am a dead man, " These were his only and last words.
He was afterwards, while down, pierced with a number of other balls in
various parts of his body. Joseph had taken position on one side of
the door, and, with his left hand, discharged three rounds from a
revolving six-shooting pocket pistol (which had been handed him by
Elder C. H. Wheelock, but who was also sent away on business by them),
and at each fire wounded his man; the other three caps did not go off.
Elder Taylor was by this time also thought to have been killed, as he
lay bleeding from many wounds. The Prophet, now finding himself
without any means of defence, his brother being dead, and himself the
only survivor whose life was sought for, attempted to make his escape
through the nearest window. A number of balls penetrated his body,
however, while making this attempt; and in his last moments he did not
forget Him whose servant he was, and for whose cause he was about to
lay down his life. How very like were his last words to the dying
words of the Saviour- "My God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?"
Joseph had only time to exclaim, " O Lord, my God!" and fell out of
the building into the hands of his MURDERERS.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Times & Seasons, “Awful Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith!”
<a href="http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Awful assassination of JOSEPH AND HYRUM SMITH!-The pledged faith of
the state of Illinois stained with innocent blood by a Mob!</p>
<p>On Monday the 24th inst., after Gov. Ford had sent word, that those
eighteen persons demanded on a warrant, among whom were Joseph Smith
and Hyrum Smith should be protected, by the militia of the State, they
in company with some ten or twelve others, started for Carthage. Four
miles from that place, they were met by Capt. Dunn, with a company of
cavalry, who had an order from the Governor for the "State Arms." Gen.
Smith endorsed his acceptance of the same, and both parties returned
to Nauvoo to obtain said arms. After the arms were obtained, both
parties took up the line of march for Carthage, where they arrived
about five minutes before twelve o'clock at night. Capt. Dunn nobly
acquitting himself, landed us safely at Hamilton's hotel</p>
<p>In the morning we saw the governor, and he pledged the faith of the
State, that we should be protected. Gen. Smith and his brother Hyrum
were arrested by a warrant founded upon the oaths of H. O. Norton and
Agustine Spencer for treason. Knowing the threats from several
persons, that the two Smiths should never leave Carthage alive, we all
began to be alarmed for their personal safety. The Gov. and Gen.
Deming conducted them before the McDonough troops and introduced them
as Gen. Joseph Smith and Gen. Hyrum Smith.-This manœuvre [maneuver]
came near raising a mutiny among the "Carthage Greys," but the
governor quelled it.</p>
<p>In the afternoon, after great exertions on the part of our counsel, we
dispensed with an investigation, and voluntarily gave bail for our
appearance to the Circuit Court, to answer in the case of abating the
Nauvoo Expositor, as a nuisance.</p>
<p>At evening the Justice made out a mittimus, without an investigation,
and committed the two Gen. Smiths to prison until discharged by due
course of law, and they were safely guarded to jail. In the morning
the Governor went to the jail and had an interview with these men, and
to every appearance all things were explained on both sides.</p>
<p>The constable then went to take these men from the jail, before the
Justice for examination, but the jailer refused to let them go, as
they were under his direction "till discharged by due course of law;"
but the governor's troops, to the amount of one or two hundred, took
them to the Court House, when the hearing was continued till Saturday
the 29th, and they were remanded to jail. Several of our citizens had
permits from the Governor to lodge with them, and visit them in jail.
It now began to be rumored by several men, whose names will be
forthcoming in time, that there was nothing against these men, the law
could not reach them, but powder and ball would! The Governor was
made acquainted with these facts, but on the morning of the 27th, he
disbanded the McDonough troops, and sent them home; took Captain
Dunn's company of cavalry and proceeded to Nauvoo, leaving these two
men and three or four friends, to be guarded by eight men at the jail;
and a company in town of 60 men, 80 or 100 rods from the jail, as a
corps in reserve.</p>
<p>About six o'clock in the afternoon the guard was surprised by an armed
mob from 150 to 250, painted red, black and yellow, which surrounded
the jail, forced in-poured a shower of bullets into the room where
these unfortunate men were held, "in durance vile," to answer the laws
of Illinois; under the solemn pledge of the faith of the State, by
Gov. Ford, that they should be protected! but the mob ruled!! They
fell as martyrs amid this tornado of lead, each receiving four
bullets! John Taylor was wounded by four bullets in his limbs but not
seriously. Thus perishes the great hope of law; thus vanishes the
plighted faith of the State; thus the blood of innocence stains the
constituted authorities of the United States, and thus have two among
the most noble martyrs since the slaughter of Abel, sealed the truth
of their divine mission, by being shot by a Mob for their religion!</p>
<p>Messengers were dispatched to Nauvoo, but did not reach there till
morning. The following was one of the letters:</p>
<p>12 o'clock at night, 27th June, }</p>
<p>Carthage, Hamilton's Tavern. }</p>
<p>TO MRS. EMMA SMITH,</p>
<p>AND MAJ. GEN. DUNHAM, &c-</p>
<p>The Governor has just arrived; says all things shall be inquired into,
and all right measures taken.</p>
<p>I say to all the citizens of Nauvoo, my brethren, be still, and know
that God reigns. Don't rush out of the city-don't rush to Carthage;
stay at home, and be prepared for an attack from Missouri mobbers. The
governor will render every assistance possible-has sent out orders for
troops-Joseph and Hyrum are dead, but not by the Carthage people-the
guards were true as I believe.</p>
<p>We will prepare to move the bodies as soon as possible.</p>
<p>The people of the county are greatly excited, and fear the Mormons
will come out and take vengeance-I have pledged my word the Mormons
will stay at home as soon as they can be informed, and no violence
will be on their part, and say to my brethren in Nauvoo, in the name
of the Lord-be still-be patient-only let such friends as choose come
here to see the bodies- Mr. Taylor's wounds are dressed & not
serious-I am sound.</p>
<p>WILLARD RICHARDS,</p>
<p>JOHN TAYLOR,</p>
<p>SAMUEL H. SMITH.</p>
<p>Defend yourselves until protection can be furnished necessary, June
27th, 1844.</p>
<p>THOMAS FORD, Governor</p>
<p>and Commander in Chief.</p>
<p>Mr. Orson Spencer,</p>
<p>Dear sir:-Please deliberate on this matter; prudence may obviate
material destruction. I was at my residence when this horrible crime
was committed. It will be condemned by three fourths of the citizens
of the county-be quiet or you will be attacked from Missouri.</p>
<p>M. R. DEMMING.</p>
<p>The Governor, as well as the citizens of Carthage, was thunder
struck! and fled.</p>
<p>The Legion in Nauvoo, was called out at 10 A. M. and addressed by
Judge Phelps, Col. Buckmaster, of Alton, the Governors aid, and
others, and all excitement and fury allayed and preparations were made
to receive the bodies of the Noble Martyrs. About 3 o'clock they were
met by a great assemblage of people east of the Temple on Mulholland
street, under the direction of the city Marshal, followed by Samuel H.
Smith, the brother of the deceased, Dr. Richards and Mr. Hamilton, of
Carthage. The wagons were guarded by 8 men. The procession that
followed in Nauvoo, was the City Council, the Lieut. General's Staff,
the Major General and staff, the Brigadier General and staff,
commanders and officers of the Legion and citizens generally, which
numbered several thousands, amid the most solemn lamentations and
wailings that ever ascended into the ears of the Lord of Hosts to be
avenged of our enemies!</p>
<p>When the procession arrived the bodies were both taken into the
'Nauvoo Mansion;' the scene at the Mansion cannot be described: the
audience was addressed by Dr. Richards, Judge Phelps, Woods and Reed
Esqs. of Iowa, and Col. Markham. It was a vast assemblage of some 8 or
10,000 persons, and with one united voice resolved to trust to the law
for a remedy of such a high handed assassination, and when that failed
to call upon God to avenge us of our wrongs! Oh! widows and
orphans:-Oh! Americans weep for the glory of freedom has departed!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>H. T. Reid, Statement of Facts, <em>Times & Seasons</em>,
<a href="http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>STATEMENT OF FACTS!</p>
<p>At the request of many persons who wish that the truth may go forth to
the world in relation to the late murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, by
a band of lawless assassins, I have consented to make a statement of
the facts so far as they have come to my knowledge, in an authentic
shape, as one of the attorneys employed to defend the said Smiths
against the charges brought against them; and other persons at
Carthage in the State of Illinois.</p>
<p>On Monday the 24th inst., at the request of Gen. Smith I left Fort
Madison in the Territory of Iowa and arrived at Carthage where I
expected to meet the General, his brother Hyrum and the other persons
implicated with them; they arrived at Carthage late at night and next
morning voluntarily surrendered themselves to the constable, Mr.
Bettersworth, who held the writ against them on a charge of riot for
destroying the press, type and fixtures of the Nauvoo Expositor, the
property of William and Wilson Law, and other dissenters, charged to
have been destroyed on the 10th inst.</p>
<p>Great excitement prevailed in the county of Hancock, and had extended
to many of the surrounding counties. A large number of the militia of
several counties were under arms at Carthage the Head Quarters of the
commanding Gen. Deming; and many other troops were under arms at
Warsaw and other places in the neighborhood. The Governor was at Head
Quarters in person, for the purpose [of] seeing that the laws of the
land were executed and had pledged his own faith and the faith of the
State of Illinois that the Smiths and the other persons concerned with
them should be protected from personal violence, if they would
surrender themselves to be dealt with according to law. During the two
succeeding says his Excellency repeatedly expressed to the legal
counselors of the Smiths his determination to protect the prisoners
and to see that they have a fair and impartial examination [as] far
as depended on the Executive of the State. On Tuesday morning soon
after the surrender of the prisoners on the charge of riot, Gen.
Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were both arrested on a charge of
treason against the State of Illinois. The affidavits upon which the
writs [were] issued were made by Hyrum Norton and Augustine Spencer.</p>
<p>On Tuesday afternoon the two Smiths and other persons, on the charge
of riot, appeared before R. F. Smith, a justice of the peace residing
at Carthage, and by advice of counsel, in order to prevent if
possible, any increase of excitement, voluntarily entered into
recognizance in the sum of five hundred dollars each with
unexceptionable security for their appearance at the next term of the
Circuit Court for said county. The whole number of persons recognized
is fifteen, most if not all of them leading men in the Mormon church.</p>
<p>Making out the bonds and justifying bail necessary consumed
considerable time, and when this was done it was near night, and the
Justice adjourned his court over without calling on the Smiths to
answer to the charge of treason or even intimating to their counsel of
the prisoners that they were expected to enter into the examination
that night. In less than an hour after the adjournment of the court,
constable Bettersworth who had arrested the prisoners in the morning,
appeared at Hamilton's Hotel, at the lodgings of the prisoners and
their counsel and insisted that the Smiths should go to jail. Mr.
Woods of Burlington, Iowa, and myself, as counsel for the prisoners;
insisted that they were entitled to be brought before the justice for
examination before they should be sent to jail. The constable to our
surprise, there-upon exhibited a mittimus from said justice as
follows:</p>
<p>State of Illinois, Hancock County.</p>
<p>The people of the State of Illinois to the keeper of the jail of the
said county, greeting:</p>
<p>Whereas Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith of the county aforesaid have been
arrested upon the oath of Augustine Spencer and Henry O. Norton, for
the crime of treason, and have been brought before me as a Justice of
the Peace in and for said county, for trial at the seat of Justice
there of, which trial has been necessarily postponed by reason of the
absence of material witnesses, to wit Francis M. Higbee and others;
therefore I command you in the name of the people to receive the said
Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith into your custody in the jail of the
county aforesaid, there to remain until discharged by due course of
law.</p>
<p>Given under my hand and seal this 25th day of June, A. D. 1844.</p>
<p>(Signed.)</p>
<p>R. P. SMITH, J. P. {L. S.}</p>
<p>His Excellency did not think it within the sphere of his duty to
interfere, and the prisoners were removed from their lodgings to jail.
The recitals of the mittimus before the justice for trial, and it
there appearing that the necessary witnesses of the prosecution were
absent, is wholly untrue, unless the prisoners could have appeared
before the justice without being present in person or by counsel; nor
is there any law of Illinois within my knowledge which permits a
justice to commit persons charged with crimes, to jail without
examination as to the probability of their guilt.</p>
<p>On Wednesday forenoon the Governor in company with one of his friends
visited the prisoners at the jail, and again assured them that they
should be protected from violence, and told them if the troops marched
the next morning to Nauvoo as his Excellency then expected they should
be taken along, in order to insure their personal safety.</p>
<p>On the same morning, some one or more of the counsel for the
prosecution, expressed their wish to me, that the prisoners should be
brought out of jail for examination; they were answered that the
prisoners had already been examined, and that the justice and
constable had no further control of the prisoners and that if the
prosecutors wished the prisoners brought out of jail, they should
bring them out on a writ of Habeas Corpus or some other due course of
law. The constable after this conversation went to the jail with the
following order to the jailer:</p>
<p>State of Illinois, Hancock County. ss.</p>
<p>To David Bettersworth, constable of said county:</p>
<p>You are commanded to bring the bodies of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith
from the jail of said county, forthwith before me at my office for an
examination on the charge of treason, they having been committed for
safe keeping until trial could be had on such examination and the
state now being ready for such examination.</p>
<p>Given under my hand and seal this 26th day of June 1844.</p>
<p>(Signed.)</p>
<p>R. P. SMITH, J. P. {L. S.}</p>
<p>And demanded the prisoners, but as the jailer could find no law
authorizing a justice of the peace, to demand prisoners committed to
his charge, he refused to give them up, until discharged from his
custody by due course of law. Upon the refusal to give up the
prisoners the company of Carthage Greys marched to the jail, by whose
orders I know not, and compelled the jailer against his will and
conviction of duty, to deliver the prisoners to the constable, who,
forthwith, took them before Justice Smith, the Captain of the Carthage
Greys. The counsel for prisoners then appeared, and asked for
subpoenas for witnesses on the part of the prisoners, and expressed
their wish to go into the examination soon, as witnesses could be
brought from Nauvoo to Carthage; the justice thereupon fixed the
examination for 12 o'clock, on Thursday the 27th inst.; whereupon, the
prisoners were remanded to prison. Soon after a council of the
military officers was called by the Governor, and was determined to
march the next morning, the 27th inst. to Nauvoo, with all the troops,
except one company which was to be selected by the Governor from the
troops whose fidelity was more to be relied on to guard the prisoners,
whom it was determined should be left at Carthage. On Thursday
morning, another consultation of officers took place, and the former
orders for marching to Nauvoo with the whole army, were countermanded.
One company were ordered to accompany the Governor, to Nauvoo, the
Carthage Greys, who had but two days before, been under arrest for
insulting the commanding General, and whose conduct had been more
hostile to the prisoners, and the other troops including those
rendezvoused at Golden's Point from Warsaw, and who had been promised
that they should be marched to Nauvoo were disbanded. A guard of only
eight men were stationed at the jail, whilst the rest of the Greys
were in camp at a quarter of a mile's distance, and whilst his
excellency was haranguing the peaceable citizens of Nauvoo, and asking
them to give up all their own arms, the assassins were murdering the
prisoners in jail, whom the Governor had pledged himself and the State
to protect.</p>
<p>H. T. REID.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>James W. Woods, statement, <em>Times & Seasons</em>,
<a href="http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>At the request of the friends of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, I have
consented to give a statement of such matters as I had a knowledge of
in relation to their murder at Carthage, and what occurred under my
observation. I arrived in Nauvoo from Burlington, Iowa, on Friday,
June 21, about 9 o'clock, P. M., found all things quiet, had an
interview on Saturday morning the 22d, with Joseph and Hyrum Smith,
who was in consultation with some of their friends in relation to a
communication from Gov. Ford: during the interview heard Gen. Joseph
Smith give orders to disband the Legion and withdraw the guards and
sentinels, who were cooperating with the police to preserve the peace
of the city, as he said by order of Gov. Ford; that I went from Nauvoo
to Carthage on the evening of the 22d, when I had an interview with
Gov. Ford, assuring him as to the quiet of Nauvoo, and that Smith and
his friends were ready to obey the laws. I was told that the constable
with a posse had that evening gone to Nauvoo with a writ for Smith and
others, and that nothing short of an unconditional surrender to the
laws could allay excitement. I was then informed by Gov. Ford he was
pledged to protect all such persons as might be arrested, and that
they should have an impartial examination, and that if the Smiths and
the rest against whom warrants had been issued, would come to Carthage
by Monday the 24th inst., (June,) it would be a compliance on their
part, and on Sunday morning the 23d, Gov. Ford pledged his word that
if Gen. Smith would come to Carthage, he should by him be protected,
with such of his friends as might accompany him, and that I as his
counsel should have protection, in defending Smith; that I returned to
Nauvoo on Sunday evening the 23d, and I found Gen. Joseph and Hyrum
Smith making preparations to go to Carthage on Monday; and on Monday
morning the 24th, I left the city of Nauvoo in company with the two
Smiths, and some fifteen other persons, parties and witnesses, for
Carthage. We were met by a company of about 60 men under Capt. Dunn;
that at the request of Gen. Joseph Smith, I advanced and communicated
with the commander of the company, and was informed he was on his way
to Nauvoo, with an order from Gov. Ford for the State Arms at that
place, that it was agreed by myself on behalf of Gen. Smith, that the
order for the arms should be endorsed by Gen. Smith; and that he
should place himself under the protection of Capt. Dunn, to return to
Nauvoo and see the Governor's order promptly obeyed and return with
Capt. Dunn to Carthage; Capt. Dunn pledging his word as a military
man, that Smith and his friends should be protected, that the order
was endorsed by Gen. Smith, which was communicated by Capt. Dunn, to
Gov. Ford, with a letter from Gen. Smith, informing the Governor that
he would accompany Capt. Dunn to Carthage.</p>
<p>I left the company and proceeded to Carthage; that about 12 o'clock at
night of the 24th, Captain Dunn returned with the State Arms from
Nauvoo; accompanied by Joseph and Hyrum, and some 13 others, who were
charged with a riot in destroying the printing press of the Nauvoo
Expositor; that on the morning of the 25th, Joseph and Hyrum Smith,
with the others charged, surrendered themselves to the constable, and
at the same time that Joseph and Hyrum Smith were arrested on a charge
of treason against the State of Illinois; that about 3 o'clock P. M.
on the 25th, the justice proceeded to the examination in relation to
the riot and after a good deal of resistance on the part of the
prosecution, we were permitted to enter into a recognizance to answer
at the next term of the Circuit Court, that we were engaged until dark
in making out and giving our recognizances, that in consequence of the
rumors as to the excitement in Warsaw and other points, and to allay
the fears of the citizens of Nauvoo, I requested Gov. Ford to detail a
company to Nauvoo, to protect the city, which request was promptly
complied with, and that night Capt. Singleton, with a company of men
from McDonough county marched to Nauvoo and took possession of the
city and remained until the evening of the 27th when they took up
their line of march for Carthage.</p>
<p>After the matter of the riot was disposed of the justice left, without
saying anything in relation to the examination for treason, and in
about the hour the constable returned with a mittimus, a copy of which
accompanies the statement of my colleague, H. T. Reid, a copy of which
was demanded and refused; that I requested the officer to wait until I
could see Gov. Ford, and I was told he would wait five minutes, and as
I went to the door I met Capt. Dunn with some twenty men to guard the
prisoners to jail; that I accompanied Gov. Ford to the justice, R. F.
Smith, who gave us a cause for issuing the warrant of committal, that
the prisoners were not personally safe at the hotel.</p>
<p>I then requested the Governor to have a company detailed to guard the
jail, which was done, and they arrived at the jail about the same time
as the prisoners. On the morning of the 26th, the Governor visited the
jail in company with a friend, at which interview the Governor again
pledged himself for their personal safety, and said if the troops went
to Nauvoo, as was then contemplated that they should go along to
ensure their protection, that after the interview at the jail, the
counsel for the prosecution wanted the prisoners brought before the
justice for an examination, to which the counsel for the prisoners
replied, that they were committed until they were discharged by due
course of law, and that we could do nothing until the prisoners were
legally before the court, where we would appear and defend; that the
justice R. F. Smith gave the constable an order (a copy of which
accompanies the statement of H. T. Reid Esq.,) for the jailor
[jailer] to deliver up the prisoners, which the jailor [jailer]
refused to do;-that the constable then repaired to the jail with a
company called the "Carthage Greys," of whom the justice, R. F. Smith,
was the captain, but not then in command; and by intimidation and
threats, forced the jailor [jailer] to give up the prisoners to the
constable, who took them before the justice, R. F. Smith, at the Court
House, that on the motion for the counsel for the prisoners, the
examination was postponed until the 27th, 12 o'clock, and subpœnas
issued for witnesses on the defence [defense]. The two Smiths were
then remanded to jail and orders were issued for a consultation of the
officers, with the commander-in-chief, and it was determined that the
troops should take up a line of march at 8 o'clock, on the morning of
the 27th, for Nauvoo, and after the consultation, the justice, who was
one of the officers in command, altered the return of the subpœnas
until the 29th, and continued the hearing until that time, without
consulting either the prisoners or the counsel; that on the morning of
the 27th, the order for marching to Nauvoo, was countermanded, and all
the troops disbanded but the company under Capt. Singleton at Nauvoo,
Capt. Dunn's company of horse, and the Carthage Greys, that the
governor determined to visit Nauvoo, escorted by Capt. Dunn's company;
and the Carthage Greys were left as a guard for the prisoners at the
jail, that after the troops were disbanded, I requested Gov. Ford to
detail some men to guard the rout to Warsaw, as I apprehended much
danger from that place, but I do not know whether it was done or not,
as I left Carthage about 11 o'clock, A. M., and came to Nauvoo; that
Gov. Ford and his aide, Col. Buckmaster, escorted by Capt Dunn's
company, arrived in Nauvoo about 5 o'clock, P. M., where he addressed
the citizens, and promised them protection, and a just execution of
the laws, and immediately left the city for Carthage.</p>
<p>JAMES W. WOODS,</p>
<p>Attorney at Law, of Burlington, Iowa.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thomas Ford, “To the People of the State of Illinois,” <em>Times & Seasons</em>
<a href="http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v5n12.htm<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>TO THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.</p>
<p>I desire to make a brief but true statement of the recent disgraceful
affair at Carthage, in regard to the Smiths, so far as circumstances
have come to my knowledge. The Smiths, Joseph and Hyrum, have been
assassinated in jail, by whom it is not known, but will be
ascertained. I pledged myself for their safety, and upon the assurance
of that pledge, they surrendered as prisoners. The Mormons surrendered
the public arms in their possession, and the Nauvoo Legion submitted
to the command of Capt. Singleton, of Brown county, deputed for that
purpose by me. All these things were required to satisfy the old
citizens of Hancock that the Mormons were peaceably disposed; and to
allay jealousy and excitement in their minds. It appears however that
the compliance of the Mormons with every requisition made upon them
failed of that purpose. The pledge of security to the Smiths, was not
given upon my individual responsibility. Before I gave it, I obtained
a pledge of honor by a unanimous vote from the officers and men under
my command, to sustain me in performing it. If the assassination of
the Smiths was committed by any portion of these, they have added
treachery to murder, and have done all they could to disgrace the
state, and sully public honor.</p>
<p>On the morning of the day the deed was committed, we had proposed to
march the army under my command into Nauvoo. I had however discovered
on the evening before, that nothing but utter destruction of the city
would satisfy a portion of the troops; and that if we marched into the
city, pretexes[ pretexts] would not be wanting for commencing
hostilities. The Mormons had done every thing required, or which ought
to have been required of them. Offensive operations on our part would
have been as unjust and disgraceful, as they would have been
impolitic, in the present critical season of the year, the harvest and
the crops. For these reasons I decided in a council of officers, to
disband the army, except three companies, two of which were reserved
as guards for the jail.-With the other company I marched into Nauvoo,
to address the inhabitants there, and tell them what they might expect
in case they designedly or imprudently provoked a war. I performed
this duty as I think plainly and emphatically, and then set out to
return to Carthage.-When I had marched about three miles, a messenger
informed me of the occurrences at Carthage. I hastened on to that
place. The guard it is said did their duty but were overpowered. Many
of the inhabitants of Carthage had fled with their families. Others
were preparing to go. I apprehended danger in the settlements from the
sudden fury and passion of the Mormons and sanctioned their movements
in this respect.</p>
<p>General Damming volunteered to remain with a few troops to observe the
progress of events, to defend property against small numbers, and with
orders to retreat if menaced by a superior force. I decided to proceed
immediately to Quincy, to prepare a force sufficient to suppress
disorders, in case it should ensue from the foregoing transactions or
from any other cause. I have hopes that the Mormons will make no
further difficulties. In this I may be mistaken. The other parby
[party] may not be satisfied. They may recommend aggression. I am
determined to preserve the peace against all breakers of the same, at
all hazards. I think present circumstances warrant the precaution, of
having competent force at my disposal, in readiness to march at a
moments warning. My position at Quincy will enable me to get the
earliest intelligence, and to communicate orders with the greatest
clarity.</p>
<p>I have decided to issue the following general orders:</p>
<p>HEAD QUARTERS}</p>
<p>Quincy, June, 29, 1844. }</p>
<p>It is ordered that the commandants of regiments in the counties of
Adams, Marquette, Pike, Brown, Schuyler, Morgan, Scott, Cass, Fulton
and McDonough, and the regiments composing Gen. Stapp's brigade, will
call their respective regiments and battalions together immediately
upon the receipt of this order, and proceed by voluntary enlistment to
enrol [enroll] as many men as can be armed in their respective
regiments. They will make arrangements for a campaign of twelve days,
and provide themselves with arms, ammunition, and provisions
accordingly, and hold themselves in readiness immediately to march
upon the receipt of further orders.</p>
<p>The independent companies of riflemen, infantry, cavalry, and
artillery in the above named counties, and in the county of Sangamon
will hold themselves in readiness in like manner.</p>
<p>THOMAS FORD,</p>
<p>Governor, and commander-in-chief.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Willard Richards, Minutes, ca. 1844, Joseph Smith history documents,
1840–60, Church History Library; punctuation as in original. Jason R.
Luce recalled the conversation between a man named Powers and a Mr.
Davis when a group met on June 11, 1844, to discuss the men returning
over the river and going to Carthage:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Powers said they would attempt to kill Joseph— Mr. Davis replied No I
think not,—Yes say Powers they will by God & you know it by—God.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jonathan Calkins Wright, Affidavit, January 13, 1855, Joseph Smith
history documents, 1840–60. (Recollection of a conversation between him
and Colonel Enoch C. March between the Mansion House and Richard
Brersier’s Ferry Landing on Water Street in Nauvoo on June 26, 1844, at
about 5 p.m., after he met with George T. M. Davis, editor of the Alton
Telegraph, when March’s soldiers had come looking for Joseph and were
unable to find him. Wright bore witness to March that he had a testimony
of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, and this is March’s reply.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Col. March Replied. Mr. Wright— you are mistaken—& I know it—you do
not know what I know. I tell you—they will kill Jo Smith before he
leaves Carthage & I know it—& you never will see him alive again—said
I Enoch, I do not believe it. he is in the hands of God—& God will
deliver him—says he I know better—when you hear of him again—you will
hear he is dead & I know it—& I will tell you why I know it—The people
at Carthage wanted permission from the Gov. to kill you all—& burn up
your city—& Ford (the Gov.) asked me if I thought it was best to
suffer it—I replied—No no—for Gods sake Ford—don’t suffer it—that will
never do—no never—Just see for a moment Ford what that would do—it
would be the means of murdering 1000s of Innocent men women &
children—& destroying, Thousands of Dollars worth of property—& that
never would do. it would not be sanctioned—it would disgrace the
nation—you have now got the Principal men—here under your control—they
are all you want, What more do you want When they are out of the way,
the thing is settled & the people will be satisfied & that is the
easiest way you can dispose of it & Gov Ford thought upon the whole
that was the best policy & I know it will be done.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Matthew Caldwell, Autobiographical sketch, holograph, Church History
Library. See also Matthew Caldwell, Testimony of Matthew Caldwell,
January 15, 1908, holograph, Church History Library; punctuation
standardized for clarity</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the evening of June 26, 1844, the old Mob leader, Col. Levi
Williams, with Tom Sharp, the editor of the Warsaw Sentinel, had a few
new wagons rolled out from under a shed and placed a two inch plank on
the box of one of the wagons. Col. Williams then climbed on the box
and gave orders for the captains of the militia to form their
companies facing the wagon. “As soon as the orders were obeyed, Col.
Levi Williams said, ‘Boys, the governor is not going to do anything
for us. All that is in favor of going to Carthage in the morning step
out three paces in front. Those contrary stand fast.’ At the word,
‘March,’ all but six men stepped out. The names of the six were:
Matthew Caldwell, George Walker, William Guymon, Platt Fairbanks,
Eldred Hailey, and an old English gentlemen by the name of Zilburn.
[Caldwell later talked his two brothers out of participating in the
action.]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mrs. Robert F. Smith, “A Short Sketch of the Trials of Mrs. R. F. Smith
at the Killing of the Smiths, The Mormans Profphet,” holograph, SC 1434,
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois.
(Misspellings in title and numerous transpositions of letters and
misspellings in narrative retained as in original.) Robert F. Smith,
captain of the Carthage Greys, was also the local judge and was so busy
during this period that he did not have time to sleep during the night
leading up to the martyrdom. His wife left the following account of that
last day.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That day [June 27, 1844] I was unusually depressed and out of sorts.
[I] had been living in almost constant dred terror of the Mormans
for years and never knwen from day to day and hardly from one hour to
another, what dreadfull catastrophe would happen and when the rumor
reached me about half past two P.M. that a mob had collected on the
prairie some a few miles out and were on the road to Carthage. Some
thought they were Mormans comeing to liberate the Smiths from jail and
and [sic] would destroy the town and every thing in it. My neighbors
began to make preperations to leave their homes with their families
and the part of town where I lived was soon entirely deserted but
myself. . . . [My husband] had not been home a single night for two
weeks. He with his men had been keeping gard of the town day and night
all that time. . . . [She dressed and sent her six children to
friends’ houses one block away and about an hour later she heard
gunfire.] [I] was powerless to move for a minute or so. When I
became conscious there was a Morman girl, who lived in the
neighborhood, standing in the door. I was holding on to the bench of
my chair and she was ringing her hands and saying ‘Oh my God! Mrs.
Smith they are shooting the men down at the jail and throwing them out
of the window. . . . All brought word of what terrible revenge the
Mormans were going to take on the Carthage people for killing the
Smiths. They were frightened and beleaved all the stories they heard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dan Jones, <em>The Martyrdom of Joseph Smith and His Brother Hyrum</em>,
translated by Ronald D. Dennis,
<a href="https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/martyrdom-joseph-smith-and-his-brother-hyrum-dan-jones"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/martyrdom-joseph-smith-and-his-brother-hyrum-dan-jones<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>And even though J. Smith could have saved himself from their clutches
in many ways; yes, even though hundreds gathered around him begging
him with tears on their cheeks, out of fondness for him, not to go to
the slaughter--for almost everyone including himself believed that
would not come back alive--he went. And I shall never forget that
scene when he stood in the middle, and looking around him, then at the
city its inhabitants who were so dear to him, he said, "if I do not go
there, the result will be the destruction of this city and its
inhabitants; and I cannot think of my dear brothers and sisters and
their children suffering the scenes of Missouri again in Nauvoo; it is
better for your brother, Joseph, to die for his brothers and sisters,
for I am willing to die for them. My work is finished; the Lord has
heard my prayers and has promised that we shall have rest from such
cruelties before long, and so do not prevent me with your tears from
going to bliss." And after embracing his little children who were
clinging to his clothes and after bidding a tender farewell to his
wife whom he loved greatly, also in tears, and after giving the last
comfort to his aged, saintly mother, he addressed the entire crowd
with great effect, exhorting them to be faithful in the way and with
the religion which he had taught them. And in that way he could greet
them before long out of reach of mobs and every oppression, and he was
sealing his testimony to that with his blood; and if he had a thousand
lives it would be worth them all.</p>
<p>After this wondrous and heartrending scene which tongue cannot tell
nor can pen record, we left his house on horses, but totally disarmed
except for a few of us who had pistol in our pockets. When we were on
higher ground where the temple was and a host was following to catch
the last glimpse of him, he stood and looked back on the city for a
moment in great solemnity, and then he said. "Oh, city, once the most
blessed, but now the most pitiful in sadness. This is the kindest and
most godly people and most beloved by Heaven of all the world. Oh, if
only they knew what awaits them." But he restrained himself and after
looking over it again, we proceeded on toward Carthage.</p>
<p>On the way we met some of the messengers who had gone there Saturday
night, and some who had been released from prison that morning. They
described the rioters in an unruly and bloodthirsty state. When within
four miles of Carthage, we met a large company of armed men alongside
us totally unexpectedly. And when they saw us, they formed to attack.
At that, Joseph Smith halted his horse in the middle of the road, and
he addressed us cheerfully and fearlessly, exhorting us, "Dear
Brethren, you cannot come with me any further; retreat for your lives
and let them pour out all their vengeance upon my head; I shall suffer
it, for I am going like a lamb to the slaughter with a conscience void
of offense toward God and men."</p>
<p>And at this he was surrounded by the soldiers (as we understood them
to be) with their swords bared, and the Captain ordered him to
surrender. Then his soldiers, as if they had won the battle of
Waterloo, shouted three cheers for their victory. J. Smith addressed
them briefly and succinctly, and he showed to them that he had never
been an enemy to them, nor had he ever disobeyed any of the laws, and
as proof of their wrong idea about him he was now on his way
voluntarily, unobliged, into the midst of them who thirsted after his
blood. And he said, "I would ask one favor from you if you are
Americans; do not deny me! If you have any humanity in you and honor
or human feelings, do not deny this my last request! This big favor
is that you defend my life so that I shall have a fair trial before
the court of my country. I do not fear the consequence, be it even the
most horrible death, as much as I fear dying with a blemish on my
character, or for the world to disgrace the religion which I profess.
Will you promise this?" he asked publicly.</p>
<p>Their Captain answered immediately (i.e., Dunn; he and his army had
come from MacDonough County and were totally ignorant before this of
Joseph Smith), "If this is the Joe Smith whose evils we have heard so
much about, I am completely disappointed. We have heard all lies,
boys, and I know that this is a good man no matter who he is, and I
(said he with a great oath) an determined to defend him until he has a
fair trial though it should cost me my own life." And his whole army
agreed to the same thing through "three cheers for Joe Smith," even
louder than before! After this, Dunn showed a latter from Governor
Ford ordering the people of Nauvoo to give up all their arms to him;
and though it was a cruel and foolish request, yet the Saints obeyed
and gave up quietly the only defense which they had for their lives in
answer to the request of the governor, who at the request of the
rioters had facilitated their murderous intentions. It is strange that
the governor would do this without disarming the attackers if he was
not of the same heart and mind as they!</p>
<p>We turned back to Nauvoo; all the arms and cannons were gathered
together. And in the afternoon we set off again toward Carthage where
we arrived alive by midnight, even though the mobbers had tried to
kill Joseph Smith in spite of the soldiers. We took lodging at the
Hamilton Hotel, and the next morning we met with Governor Ford. He
promised protection and justice to the prisoners. At the wish of the
armies, Captain Deming went with J. and H. Smith before them; for
there were hardly any of them who had ever seen them before, nor did
they know anything about them except for the stories of the rioters.
Because they considered that too much respect for the prisoners, it
caused a great tumult amidst the army of the Carthage Grays. Their
leader was Captain Smith (i.e., the judge who had issued the warrant,
and he along with his army were the chief rioters). At last, through
being threatened with imprisonment by the rest of the armies, the
Carthage Grays calmed down.</p>
<p>In the afternoon an inquiry was held in the Hamilton Hotel, for it was
too dangerous for the prisoners to appear in the courthouse. Because
of the rage of the rioters, they chose to post bail for their
appearance in the quarter session rather than go to the inquiry. Bail
was posted and the City Council was allowed to return home; but the
blood thirsty traitors had prepared another jail for J. and H. Smith
by putting two of their number, by the names of H.O. Norton and A.
Spencer (because of the latter there was the aforementioned tumult at
the courthouse), to swear a warrant against them for treason against
the state. At this the sheriff wished to transfer them to prison
immediately, without an inquiry or anything; but the tumult along the
streets was such that they refused to go without an escort to defend
them.</p>
<p>And after dark the Carthage Gray came to the hotel and defended them
as far as the jail in the midst of threats, oaths and swearing. The
prisoners asked some of us to follow them to the jail "in order have
our company," they said; but we knew before then that it was so that
we could be proven witnesses of their words, their comportment and
their character. To death we would follow them, and I am grateful for
having such an honor. Woe unto us except we surely make the proper use
of it.</p>
<p>We were all locked together in a dungeon which was about ten feet
square; and there we spent the first night of our imprisonment in
pleasant conversation about "the secret of godliness"; and such
happiness possessed them when they foretold that both of them were
about to finish their race and go to their joy. I had never seen them
so cheerful and so heavenly minded, nor had I ever before thought that
Carthage Jail was the gate of paradise.</p>
<p>The next morning we were all moved to an upstairs room of the jailer's
house, to which the stairs led from the front door; this upper room
had a very poor door without a lock or even a latch that would shut;
it also had three large windows through which whoever wanted could
shoot to every corner of the room through one or the other of them. We
understood that the excitement among the mobs was because they had
thrown the men into without any kind of inquiry, even though the judge
had committed perjury by signing on their mittimus that there would
be; and so they could not get out of jail whenever they wanted without
the permission of the jailer. The latter, on seeing that they were
eager to kill the prisoners and that many were hiding in the hummocks
with their rifles ready to shoot as soon as they came out of the door,
denied them permission.</p>
<p>Again and again the sheriff came to request them under the guise of
going to the courthouse for trial, and the jailer refused to let them
out unless one or two of the leaders of the mob could be obtained to
walk arm in arm with the prisoners, for he considered that a stronger
escort than the Carthage Grays and the lot; and like this they went
about half a mile to the courthouse amidst such shouts and threats of
the drunks, and curses of some who thirsted after their blood, until
we imagined that it was not unlike that cruel scene on Calvary, and we
heard words quite similar to those which were tauntingly said there,
such as, "Now, old Joe (some said in his face), if you are a prophet,
how did you come to the jail like this?" Another answered, "Oh, if Joe
were a prophet, he would soon call for a legion of angels, and we
would all be killed, and he would escape." Yes, some foolish
observations like these filled his ears along the way to the
courthouse where their professed enemy was again sitting in judgment
on them, and his hostile partners were witnesses and lawyers against
them. Only by earnest pleading by the prisoners' lawyers, i.e., Mr.
Reid from Fort Madison and Mr. Woods from Burlington, was a
postponement of the trial for the next day obtained, so that the
witnesses who lived twenty miles away could be brought there. At last
this was granted and the prisoners were taken back to the jail.</p>
<p>The magistrate refrained from signing the subpoenas to examine the
witnesses for the defense, although he knew that no one else there
could do that, until he thought that is was too late. the jail was
watched by eight or ten of Captain Dunn's escort, and these were the
least prejudiced of any; and due to the efforts of the prisoners and
the rest of us in preaching to them, they believed our testimony to
the point of confessing that the accusations made by the mobbers were
lies for the purpose of getting revenge on J. Smith. Not infrequently
they were heard persuading this one and that one to return to their
homes and not to join with the mobs to persecute any further. After
that, other guards came to whom we would preach the same way.
Occasionally, some of them would be so vengeful they would not allow
Joseph Smith to speak, while at the same time they would listen to the
others.</p>
<p>About twelve o'clock that night we lay down in the following way to
sleep: Hyrum Smith and Dr. Willard Richards in the bed; Joseph Smith
on one side of me and John Taylor on the other; Colonel Markham and
another brother next to him were lying on the mattresses on the floor;
and that is all there were of us. We expected nothing less than an
attack on us nearly every hour; in spite of that the only defense that
we could make was to put a chair against the door in such a way that
it would fall if the door were opened. I had not fallen into a deep
sleep when I heard the sound of heavy footsteps of an army coming
toward us. I got up and spied through the window where by the light of
the stars I saw soldiery at the door! I observed what they said; but
they were whispering so secretively that I could understand hardly
anything but this: "How many shall go in?" When I heard that, I awoke
by brethren; but there was no need to tell them why, for the sound of
the feet rushing up to our door signified that it was time to beware.
We stood by the door to attack the first to open it, and we clearly
heard them breathing on the other side. There was tomblike silence for
a minute or two, awaiting a shower of bullets perhaps in our midst;
and then J. Smith asked bravely and loudly who was there and what did
they want? He invited them in as we were ready to receive them, and it
made no difference to him whether he died at that time or at daylight,
etc. At that they stole down quietly; and from then to daylight they
consulted near our windows what they would do. At times they decided
to rush in on us, but before reaching the door, perhaps the other
party would hold them back; and thus they continued until the
assassin's terror, the morning light, scattered all of them except for
about eight of the Carthage Grays who stayed there as guards.</p>
<p>In the morning I went at the request of J. Smith to the lower door to
inquire what was the purpose of the confusion in the sergeant of the
guards, who answered me with horrible curses, saying that the
prisoners would never come our alive, that I would see before night
that he was a better prophet than Joe Smith, and that I was not a bit
better than, nor was anyone else who supported him. At this, I
reminded the gentleman who and what he was, that Governor Ford under
the oath of the state had promised protection to the prisoners and had
put their lives in his hands, and that I would inform the governor of
his threats, all of which infuriated him greatly. I went to the
Hamilton Hotel and revealed the whole thing before Governor Ford; I
reminded him of his promise to defend the prisoners and requested that
he put some others to guard them in place of the Carthage Gray, who
were thirsting after their blood. But all was in vain; he suggested
that there was no danger at all. After that, I went into the midst of
the large crowd of mobbers and heard their publicly proclaimed
decision to make a sham discharge until Governor Ford left, after
which they would return. They were determined to kill "Joe Smith" even
if they had to tear down the jail.</p>
<p>After hearing such a verdict being sealed on the innocent with three
cheers from the crowd, I returned and related everything to Governor
Ford; but yet he did not consider it worth his attention! I went
hurriedly to inform the prisoners things, but the guard did not let me
back in. The prisoners earnestly beseeched them to let me in, saying
that the governor had granted permission for that (which he had
promised when he visited the jail the day before); but all was in
vain. For the third time I returned to the governor describing their
danger and requested a pass from him to re-enter; he refused this
also, even though I followed after him until he was on his horse to
start with the escort toward Nauvoo; but he did order Captain Deming
to give me a pass for Willard Richards as a scribe to the prisoners
and to no one else.</p>
<p>The governor went away at about eleven o'clock, leaving eight of the
Carthage Grays to guard the jail and about sixty others in the town to
guard the area with them. And after that their purposes become clear;
the people would come back to the town in hosts booing and
threatening, and not only threatening but preparing for the bloody
slaughter. I was the only Mormon in their midst and great were their
threats toward me; they gathered around me in crowds, and they would
frequently throw a rock at me because I dared to defend the prisoners
and dared them to allow them to have a trial next day by the law of
their country according to the right of every man; and I reproached
them that the prisoners had surrendered to them on promise of that,
and they were now in their possession, and if they could prove them
guilty I would agree with their verdict with all my heart, etc.</p>
<p>While I was pleading like this, one of their chief leaders admitted
they could not be proven guilty and the law of the land could not
reach them, "but power and balls will." At that, one of the guards
came to inform me that Joe Smith was asking for me. Even though the
guards did not allow me to go into the jail nor for J. Smith to come
out, yet they permitted Willard Richards to come, to whom I informed
everything which I understood of the designs of the mobs to kill them
before nightfall. He told me that I was in more danger outside, and he
placed a letter in my hand with the request of Joseph Smith that I
take it to Quincy (about sixty miles away) and return as soon as I
could.</p>
<p>News of the letter went throughout the mob like the wings of the
breeze, and some claimed that it was orders for the Nauvoo Legion to
come there to save the prisoners, and others claimed some other
things. When I was requesting my horse to be readied, some swore that
I would not go from there alive if I did not give the letter to them;
but they could not agree about this, which was just as well for me,
for I was determined to die rather than release it from my hand. Then
they divided into two or three groups: one group wanted to chase me
from there immediately, letter and all; another group threatened that
I would not reach Nauvoo alive, and at that I saw several of them with
rifles in their hands run across the fields to the nearby woods
through which the road to Nauvoo passed. Although I understood their
purpose, yet I did not see how I could be delivered; but some way
would come, I doubted not a bit.</p>
<p>While they were quarrelling amongst themselves, my horse was readied
nearby, and I saw my chance. And it was no time after I reached the
saddle before the horse and I were out of their sight in the midst of
a cloud of dust with bullets whistling through the air everywhere
except where they were aiming. Before I had time to think about the
road before me, with which I was almost totally unacquainted, I found
myself in the prairie galloping toward Warsaw instead of on the road
to Nauvoo. I understood my mistake after having a look at the
countryside around me, and I crossed the prairies to the right road.
After that I understood that by the horse's mistake my life had been
saved from those who were watching for me in the woods; and also on
the other side I understood that I had been between two fires, for if
I had gone a mile further without turning from the Warsaw road I would
have no doubt been killed by about three hundred of the most cruel of
all the mobocrats who were coming along the road to Carthage and who
killed the prisoners no more than two hours after that!</p>
<p>But I proceeded forth, passing Governor Ford and his escort, and I
reached Nauvoo before the setting of the sun. There I waited for a
steamboat to go toward Quincy. While I was waiting at Nauvoo, the
governor arrived, and I heard his address to a large crowd of people.
Its contents were not directed to or worthy of anyone except the
rioters. He told with relish the baseless tales of the mobs, as if he
believed them to be true, and then he said within hearing of the
wives, children, and dear friends of those godly men, who were being
assassinated at that very moment, and he threatened aloud, "A severe
atonement must be made." The officials of the governor were heard
urging him to hasten from there, assuring him that the deed (that is,
the assassination) was sure of having been accomplished by then, and
that is the reason he and his soldiers hurried from Nauvoo as soon as
they could instead of staying until the next day as he had promised to
do. It is unlikely that there was so much sadness in any city in the
world as there was reigning over Nauvoo at that time. Any messenger
who might come was awaited eagerly, and yet dreaded lest they hear
that which they feared so much: but no messenger at all returned that
night from Carthage.</p>
<p>About midnight at a steamboat came down the river, and I went on board
toward Quincy (forty miles from there) and before daylight the boat
called at Warsaw on its way, and great was the tumult which was
there! It was announced with great delight to the passengers on the
boat that "Joe and his brother, Hyrum, had been killed at Carthage
Jail." Oh, how sweet was this news to their chops! That old "Sharp"
again had already published an extra with great haste accusing the
Mormons of having gone to Carthage to save the prisoners and that the
guards in carrying out their duty had shot J. and H. Smith lest they
escape, when in fact, I was the last Mormon to have been in Carthage
and had been driven out as if at bayonet point! Yes, when in fact it
was that very man, Sharp, who was leading those who killed the
prisoners, boasting "that he had put one bullet through old Joe." And
when his fingers were still dripping with innocent blood he proclaimed
to the world that it was the Saints who had done it and invited all
from everywhere to gather to defend Warsaw, that the Mormons had
burned Carthage to ashes and killed its inhabitants, Governor Ford and
all, and that they expected them to burn Warsaw at any minute! Yes,
he published this in his paper and sent messengers to the other
countries to call the militia to defend them when in fact he knew that
he was in no danger whatsoever from the Saints.</p>
<p>And when I was there I heard his party admit and praise the
cunningness of Sharp's trick to get people there; and that their
objective was to "attack the city of Nauvoo and kill or expel the
'd-m-d Mormons.'" This false story about the massacre of J. and H.
Smith flew across the world, and we do not think that the truth had
even yet been determined. An example in that of all the publications
of that man, Sharp, and his party against the Saints. I was so
impulsive as to contradict them on the bank from what I knew, and had
the boat not been alongside to jump onto they would have killed me for
what I said. After reaching Quincy I saw that the messengers of Sharp
had arrived and had stirred up the entire city to the point that they
were expecting the Mormons to come there and kill them too, and the
militia was hurriedly preparing to go to save Warsaw, as they
supposed.</p>
<p>When I got the opportunity with the people together, I opposed those
lying messengers to their faces, and then the people saw that they
were not in danger and that not one of the Mormons had even lifted his
hand against any one of them and had no such intention. Then everyone
returned to his business, and I went with the other steamboat toward
Nauvoo, where I arrived by eight o'clock the next morning.</p>
<p>Oh, the sorrowful scene to be seen in Nauvoo that day! There has
never been nor will there ever be anything like it; everyone sad along
the street, all the shops closed and every business forgotten. Onward
I quickened my pace until I reached the house of the late Joseph
Smith. I pushed my way through the sorrowful crowd until I reached the
room where his body and that of his brother had been placed (for they
had been brought from Carthage the previous day). There they lay in
their coffins side by side, majestic men as they suffered side by side
from prison for years, and they labored together, shoulder to
shoulder, to build the kingdom of Immanuel; eternal love bound them
steadfastly to each other and to their God until death; and now, my
eyes beheld the blood of the two godly martyrs mingling in one pool in
the middle of the floor, their elderly mother, godly and sorrowful, on
her knees in the midst of the blood between the two, a hand on each
one of her sons who lay in gore, her heart nearly broken by the
excruciating agony and the indescribable grief. At the head of the
deceased sat the dear wife of each one and around their father stood
four of Joseph's little children and six of Hyrum's children crying
out intermittently, "My dear father." "And my dear father, too,"
another would say, with no reply except the echo from the walls, "Oh,
my father." And from the hearts of the mothers, "My husband killed,"
and the grey-haired mother groaning pitifully, "Oh, my sons, my sons."</p>
<p>Each in his turn, the thousands made their way forward, sad and
desirous of having the last look at their dear brethren whose solemn
counsels and heavenly teachings had been music in their ears, lighting
their paths and bringing joy to their hearts on numerous occasions. On
the streets around it was almost the stillness of the grave which
reigned, but all, the noble as well as the humble, with crystal tears
streaming down their cheeks. Even the sun and the elements had stilled
as if in surprise, and all nature looked at the unended madness of man
toward some of the best on the earth in any age or part of it. I shall
ever remember my feelings at the time. Now I saw the two wisest and
most virtuous men on the earth without any doubt, whom I had seen just
awhile before preaching tenderly from between the iron bars of their
jail the gospel of peace to those who wanted to kill them; the two
stood like two reeds in the midst of the storm as witnesses of Jesus,
despite the jealous fury of the press, of the pulpits, and of the mobs
of the age; and just like the reed they straightened up their heads
after every breeze and scorned worldly profit and fame; steadfast they
clung to their objective until they had finished their work; and like
their elder brother and their Leader before them they did not love
their lives unto death, nor did they refuse to face knowingly the
slaughter; rather they leaped onto the bloody altar which they saw
waiting for them in Carthage" so they could have a better
resurrection." But what pen can describe that scene and the feelings
of thousands of mourners? The only comfort that kept them from sinking
under the oppression and the loss was knowing that a day of swift
reckoning would come also before long and that he who has the correct
scales in his hand perceives the whole and will . . . But I restrain
myself. It is easier for the reader to imagine this scene than it is
for me to portray it and its results.</p>
<p>The two were buried secretly by one another's side, for there was a
reward of several thousand dollars already offered by their enemies
for their heads!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dan Jones to Thomas Bullock, 20 January 1855.
<a href="https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/martyrdom-joseph-smith-and-his-brother-hyrum-dan-jones"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/martyrdom-joseph-smith-and-his-brother-hyrum-dan-jones<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Monday 24th--Eventfull day! found hundreds gathered before the
Mansion House early in the morning:--in their midst with head erect
towering above the rest the Prophet stood gazing alternately on the
devoted City and its much loved citizens; in suspense he listened to
the entreaties of the throng, not to give himself up or he would be
murdered; a few, tho' enough, brave hearted men proposed to escort him
where he would find the protection denied him by the "Christians"
among the red "pagans" of the West:--others, up north would have him
go, while a fearless Tar, inured to other climes, whose heart was a
Malstrom of fury, proffered him a safe passage on a Steam Boat, then
ready by, to whither he would; a smile of approbation lit up the
Seer's countenance,--his lively boys hanging on to his skirts urged on
the suite and cryed "Father, O Father don't go to Carthage they will
kill you."--a volley of arguments more powerfull yet from the
streaming eyes of her he loved best, and whose embrace was hard to
sever; nor least impressive were the pleadings of his doting Mother
whose grey ringlets honored a head weather-beaten by the persecutions
of near twice ten years, "My Son, my Son, can you leave me without
promising to return? Some forty times before have I seen you from me
dragged, but never before without saying you would return; what say
you now my Son? He stood erect like a beacon among roaring
breakers--his gigantic mind grasping still higher; the fire flashed in
his eye; with hand uplifted on high he spoke "My friends, nay dearer
still my brethren, I love you, I love the City of Nauvoo too well to
save my life at your expense,--if I go not to them they will come and
act out the horrid Missouri scenes in Nauvoo;--I may prevent it, I
fear not death, my work is well nigh done, keep the faith and I will
die for Nauvoo. So said the Prophet as he mounted his steed, and
together with his brother Hyrum and some 30 or 40 more who chose to
follow, they ascended the hill; when near the sacred spot--the Temple,
he paused, he looked with admiration first on that, then on the City
ere it receded from view in the flats below and remarked, this is the
loveliest place and the best people under the heavens, little do they
know the trials that await them. While on the prairie we met some
messengers previously sent to Carthage who had but just been liberated
from prison. When within 4 miles of Carthage we met a company of
horseman commanded by Captain Dunn; when they hove in sight Mr. Smith
halted his "major" (steed) in the midst of the road and said "brethren
you have come far enough; do notfurther expose your lives, stand
aloof, let all their vengeance be wreaked upon my head, I am going
like a lamb to the slaughter with a conscience void of offence. At
this time Mr. Wood, his Counsell, rode in front of the Company to know
their intentions and soon returned with an order from the Governor for
all the State arms which were Nauvoo. When signal of acceptance was
given they advanced and Mr. Smith addressed them after endorsing the
order, declaring his innocence of the charges preferred against him
and demanded of them as an American Citizen to defend his life until
he should have an investigation, to which Capt. Dunn reply'd that he
would protect him at the risk of his own life, then turning to his men
asked "What say you, boys, will you stand by me to see Mr. Smith have
justice?" The response was by three cheers; and we all returned to
Nauvoo, got all the arms, and in the evening the Company returned and
arrived at Carthage late at night failing to get a horse I remained in
the City.</p>
<p>25th-Documents of importance for the trial being in Mrs. Smith's
possession, by request I took them out to Carthage and arrived during
the trial of Mr. Smith and the City Council and in time to give in my
evidence, which was admitted to be not the least important in their
favour. There I heard Wilson Law, in endeavoring to get a warrant
against Mr. Smith for Treason, declare that in preaching from Daniel
II, 44, Smith had said that the kingdom referred to therein was
already set up, and that he (Mr. Smith) was the King over it! Wonder
if Daniel himself was not most treasonable for predicting it? The
defendants having given bail to appear at the quarter sessions were
released and returned to Nauvoo; but before Mr. Smith could leave I
went down stairs in Hamiltons Hotel where I overheard the leaders of
the mob say that they did not expect to prove anything against him,
but that they had eighteen accusations against him, and that as one
failed they would try another to detail him there. One of them, by the
name of Jackson, reply'd when I told them to desist from their cruel
persecutions that they had worked too hard to get old Joe to Carthage
to let him get out of it alive, and pointing to his pistols said, "The
balls are in there that will decide his case." I repaired upstairs and
informed Mr. Smith what threats I had heard, when he informed me "They
are going to take me to prison without a guard; you will not leave me
will you?" to which I reply'd that I had come to die with him the
rather. He took me aside into the front room and asked "Have you
anything with you?" One little bulldog I reply'd, and this switch,
pointing to a black hickory club in my hand, the which parryed the
rifles of the assassins in prison by Mr. Taylor. Let me have the first
said he, which was no sooner said than safely deposited where I wished
a dozen more to be. Now the rush of heavy treads up the stairs drew
out attention and the stentorian voice of an officer demanding the
prisoners, when Dr. Willard Richards met him in the door which was
actually too narrow for any but himself to pass. Mr. Reid, their
Counsell, also Mr. Taylor, Hyrum Smith, Judge Phelps, Col. Markam and
all remonstrated against such an unnecessary exposition of the
defendant lives until they desisted. It was then that Justice Smith
made out a mittimus, and the "Carthage Grays" escorted them to prison.
Being dark, Mr. Smith asked me to get inside somehow, and Col. Markam
on one side, with a hickory club, while I was on the other, outside
the guard, I parry'd off the guns and bayonets of the drunken rabble
who tried to break the ranks to stab them; the prison doors being open
before a light was produced I rushed between the guard and the door
and forced my way into the farthest cells unhindered, followed by the
defendants and the above named, except Judge Phelps, who remained (I
think) at Hamiltons; Mr. Reid also, but some few other bretheren were
with us with whom I was not personally acquainted until then; but it
will be a long time ere I forget</p>
<p>The first night in Carthage cells with the Prophet and the Patriarch!</p>
<p>Amusing conversation on various interesting topics engaged us till
late; after prayer, which made Carthage prison into the gate of heaven
for awhile, we lay promiscuously on the floor, the last words spoken
were, by the Prophet,--"For the most intelligent dream tonight
bretheren;" and the first words spoken next morning were by him also
enquiring for the same. None, save one were told which was listened to
by all as follows--"Portrayed before my mind was Gov. Ford and troops
on their way across the prairie to Nauvoo, the prisoners had plead in
vain to return with him, although promised by him to go; with a letter
of importance I saw myself driven from Carthage, galloping through the
masses of medley soldiers, half Indians and semi barbarians, I hurried
across the prairie, had gone downon a boat from Nauvoo towards Quincy,
but landed at Warsaw awoke, in midst of powder, smoke, death, and
carnage." The Prophet reply'd it was ominous of future events not did
he believe the Governor would ever take him to Nauvoo alive.</p>
<p>After breakfast we were removed to an upstairs room the entrance to
which was up a flight of stairs from the front prison door, which was
guarded by soldiers, by alternate four hours; the door was of pine,
common batton, without bolts, lock, or even a latch that would shut;
on the south side were two large windows, and one on the East, a tier
of cells lead from the North, while the entrance was at the N. West
corner. Its furniture consisted of a bedstead, chair or two, and some
mattresses.</p>
<p>During the forenoon we were visited by Judge Phelps, J.P .Green, J.S.
Fullmore, and C. H. Wheelock, the last I think brought a revolver in
his boot, and left it with the prisoners when he retired; most of my
forenoon's work consisted in hewing, with my penknife, a wharped door
to get it on the latch, and in preparing to fortify against a night
attack, in which Col. Markam was also industrious. The Prophet
appeared extremely anxious by his injunction to the messengers who
left for Nauvoo, among whom were Dr. Brenhisel, I think, to send out
testimonies to exonerate his brother Hyrum. A portion of us were
alternately preaching to the guards, at which the Prophet, Patriarch
and all took turns and several were relieved before their time was out
because they admitted they were proselyted to the belief of the
innocency of the prisoners, which rendered them incompetent of
guarding! Frequently they admitted they had been imposed upon by the
tales of the mobs, and more than once was it heard "Let us go home
boys for I will not fight against these men." Hyrum showed an ardent
devotion to the Prophet, every way encourageing him to believe that
the Lord for His Church's sake would release him to their service,
while Joseph reply'd, "Could my brother Hyrum be but liberated it
would not matter so much about me; poor Rigdon, I am glad he has gone
to Pittsburgh out of the way, were he to preside, in less than five
years he would lead the Church to destruction." He entertained us much
by the recital of two dreams the which he had received not long
before, one in which he saw himself pitched into a dry well by Wm. and
Wilson Law who had previously tied his hands behind him; while
struggling to get up and near the top he discovered Wilson tackled by
a ferocious wild beast in an adjoining wood, crying for his help while
nearer to him still was William with outstretched tongue; blue in the
face, and the green poison forced out of his mouth by the coiling of a
huge serpent around his body, relaxing its embrace occasionally and
thereby enabling him to cry aloud "Oh brother Joseph come and save me
or I die." To which he reply'd as he had done to a similiar request
from his brother Wilson, "I cannot, for you have tied my hands behind
me." Ere long however his guide finding him there released and
comforted the Prophet while the others met the just retribution of
their demerit.</p>
<p>Another time he had seen himself on a lee shore in a heavy storm
saving a ship from wrecking by wadeing through the foaming surf and
leading her out to the open sea; again the reckless mariners on board
rushed into dangerous breakers in despite of his commands from on
shore to them to beat off to sea. Again he stemmed the raging seas,
now and anon overwhelmed in the foam, with a mighty effort he sprang
to the surface, the raging elements hushed at his command, and as on a
sea of glass he marched with the patriarch by his side until in the
offing he recognized his brother Samuel, light as a fairy, skipping
o'er the main;--but the sequel forgotten by me may be remembered by
others; the interpretation he gave, I believe, was the stranding of
the great ship "Uncle Sam" owing to rejecting a safe Pilot. Their
walking on the tranquil ocean donated their triumphs beyond the vail,
Samuel's sudden exit after his bretheren solves the only mystery which
the Prophet did not unravel, but sure it is that he gave frequent
intimations that he would soon gain his liberty, and soar on high
beyond the "rage of mobs and angry strife."</p>
<p>Governor Ford and the prisoners Counsell visited them, and at the
close of a lengthy appeal from the Prophet, in which he denied the
charges preferred against him, and plead for the protection of his
life from mob violence until he could prove himself so, which appeared
to make but little impression upon His Excellency beyond a verbal
promise that he should have justice, and that his friends present,
agreeably to his request should visit him, His Excellency promised to
take them with him to Nauvoo, which promise he afterwards recalled
through fear of the mobs. Dr. Richards was busily engaged writing as
dictated by the Prophet. Elder Taylor amused him by singing &c.</p>
<p>About the middle of the afternoon the Sheriff came to take the
prisoners to the Courthouse to be tried, Followed by drunken mobs
armed and threatening; an altercation ensued between him and the
Prison Keeper, because, as was proved by the mittimus to the latter
that the prisoners having been placed with him for "safe keeping,"
were not under the jurisdiction of the former; whereupon the former
rushed upstairs and threatened to enforce obedience had not the latter
ordered him off his premises until he produced authority to enter. The
bretheren named remonstrated with the parties to await the decision of
the Counsel who were not present but sent for. In the meantime Mr.
Smith seeing the mob gathering and assuming a threatening aspect
concluded it best to go with them then, and putting on his hat,
followed by allowed by all of us, walked boldly into their midst,
politely locked arms with the worst mobocrat he could see, whereas
Hyrum paterned after him by clenching the next worse one, followed by
Elders Richards and Taylor escorted by a guard, but the mobocrats side
was the best protection from the levelled rifles of the surrounding
bush hiders, Col. Markam on one side, myself on the other, with our
"switchers" parry'd off the crowding rabble, and after ascending no
the Court House much exertion was made by the mob to proceed forthwith
with trial without letting the defendant have their witnesses, and as
soon as they were overruled, and the trial postponed until next day,
the only Justice in the place, the Smith before spoken of, who could
grant subpeonas for witnesses, absconded until a late hour, as it
purposely to prevent the appearing of the defendants witnesses, and in
keeping with the conviction expressed by them the previous day "That
the law cannot touch him, but that powder and ball will." In the
evening they were again escorted to the prison amidst the whooping,
hallooing and denunciations of enfuriated thousands; while some
tauntingly upbraided him for not calling a legion of angels to release
him, and to destroy his enemies, inasmuch as he pretended to have a
miraculous power; others asked him to prophesy when and what manner of
death awaited him, professing themselves to know all about it; in fact
one was forcibly reminded of the taunting and jeering of the Jews to
our holy and meek Redeemer, so similar did their words and actions
prove their spirits to be.</p>
<p>During the evening the Patriarch read and commented upon copious
extracts from the Book of Mormon, the imprisonments and deliverance of
the servants of God for the Gospels sake; Joseph bore a powerful
testimony to the guards of the divine authenticity of the Book of
Mormon--the restoration of the Gospel, the administration of angels,
and that the Kingdom of God was again upon the Earth, for the sake of
which he was at that time incarcerated in that prison, and not because
he had violated any law of God or of man.</p>
<p>Late, we retired to rest, Joseph and Hyrum on the only bedstead while
4 or 5 lay side by side on mattresses on the floor, Dr. Richards
sitting up writing until his last candle left him in the dark; the
report of a gun, fired close by, caused Joseph whose head was by a
window, to arise, leave the bed and lay himself by my side in close
embrace; soon after Dr. Richards retired to the bed and while I
thought all but myself and heaven asleep, Joseph asked in a whisper of
I was afraid to die. "Has that time come think you? Engaged in such a
cause I do not think that death would have many terrors," I replied.
"You will see Wales and fulfill the mission appointed you ere you die"
he said. I believed his word and relied upon it through trying scenes
which followed. All the conversation evinced a presentiment of an
approaching crisis. At midnight I was awoke by heavy treads as of
soldiery close by, and I heard a whispering "Who, and how many shall
go in?" under our window; upon arising I saw a large number of men in
front of the prison, and gave the alarm as they rushed up stairs to
our room door; we had taken the precaution to fortify ourselves by
placing a chair, the only defence, against the door, which one of the
brethren seized for a weapon, and we stood by the door awaiting their
entrance; hearing us they hesitated; when the Prophet with a "Prophets
voice" called out" Come on ye assassins we are ready for you, and
would as willing die now as at daylight." Hearing this they retired
again, and consulted, advanced and retreated alternately, evidently
failing to agree, until the assassins terror--the morning light,
chased the murderers with their kindred fiends and the darkness to the
abodes where the reveller in crime was the hero of the day.</p>
<p>Early in the morning of the 27th June, eventful day! A day ever to be
remembered! The Prophet requested me to descend and interrogate the
guard as to the cause of the intrusion upon us in the night, in doing
which I was replied by the sergeant, whose name was Worrell, I think,
of the Carthage Grays, in a very better spirit that "We have had too
much trouble to bring old Joe here to let him ever escape out alive,
and unless you want to die with him you better leave before sundown,
and you are not a d-n bit better than him for taking his part." I
endeavored to cool him down and to recall those threats which so ill
became those who were entrusted with the lives of men, but he insisted
the more "You'll see that I can prophesy better than old Joe that
neither he nor his brother nor anyone who will remain with them will
see the sun set today." With such threats did the Sergeant, in
presence of his men, declaim against the prisoners: and one of them
levelled and cocked his rifle at me, swearing with an awfull
imprecation how he "would love to bore a hole through old Joe." Joseph
and Hyrum were all this time listening unobservedly at the head of the
stairs to all that was said, and on my return desired me to go and
inform Governor Ford of all that I had heard.</p>
<p>While going to his Excellency's quarters I saw an assemblage of people
and met Col. Markham who was out of the gaol before me; I listened to
what they had to say and beheld one of the mobocrats addressing the
crowd saying hat they would make a sham discharge in obedience to
orders, but that the Gov. and MacDonough troops would leave for Nauvoo
in the forenoon, "Then we will return to town boys and tear that
prison down and have those two men's lives before sundown," which
declaration was not uttered in a whisper nor in a corner, but at the
top of his voice, which echoed in the walls of the Town Hall and
public square, and which was responded to by the loud three cheers of
the crowd as eagerly as [crease has worn away the words] another
barrel of whiskey was called into their midst to the eternal disgrace
of the name of sectarianism be it remarked. Accompanied by, whether
Col. Markam, J.P. Green or J.S. Fullmore or who I do not remember, I
went to His Excellency's apartment in Hamilton's Hotel, where I found
several Officers with him in conversation; in their presence I
informed him of the threats made against the lives of the prisoners,
offering to produce further proof if necessary; to which he at length
reply'd "You are unnecessarily alarmed for your friends safety Sir,
the people are not that cruel." Irritated by such a remark I urged the
necessity of placing better men than professed assassins to guard
them; that they were American Citizens surrendered to his "pledged
honour"; that they were also Master Masons, and as such I demanded the
protection of their lives; when this appeal failed to reach his
adamantine heart, whose face appeared to be pale with fright or
horror, I remarked that I had then but one request to make if he left
their lives in the hands of those men to be sacrificed. "What is that
sir?" he asked in a hurried tone. "It is that the Almighty will
preserve my life to a proper time and place to testify that you have
been timely warned of their danger." All this produced no other
visible effect than to turn him round and stroll to the other end of
the room. I returned to the prison, and sought to enter, but would not
be let in by the guard. I again returned to the Hotel when his
Excellency was standing in front of the Mac Donough troops in line,
ready to escort him to Nauvoo, the disbanded mob, retiring to their
rear at the time, shouted loud in his hearing that they were going
only a short distance out of town and would return and hang old Joe
and Hyrum as soon as the Governor would be gone out of the way. I
begged to call his attention there and then to their own threats which
he could hardly fail to hear as well as myself [creased and worn
line] for myself and friends to be in prison according to his promise
to the prisoners when he declined giving any, but told Col. Demming to
give me one to take to Dr. Richards the secretary, by obtaining which
I was near being massacred, and was told by Chauncey Higbee on the
street that they "were determined to kill Joe and Hyrum and that I had
better go away to save myself." I was then alone in the midst of the
turbulent mob with whom I contended for the innocency of the
prisoners, and for their right of trial, until enraged, they attempted
to seize me, but I eluded their grasp. Meeting Mr. A.W. Babbit in the
street I informed him that Mr. Smith wished to see him, whither he
went with me; he was admitted as Counsel. I tried to get in by means
of Dr. Richards' pass, in my hand, but in vain; Joseph, Hyrum,--all
endeavoured to get me in but failed; I however informed Dr. Richards
who was allowed to come outside, of the threats of the mobs, who
reply'd that they deemed my life in imminent danger in the midst of
the mob. I was handed a letter from Mr. Smith, with a request to take
it to Mr. Browning of Quincy forthwith; the guard aware of the letter
informed the mob "that Joe had sent orders to raise the Nauvoo Legion
to rescue him," drew the mob around me, and they demanded the letter,
which I utterly refused to give up to them; when some would take it by
force others objected; the mob disagreed among themselves while some
said I should not leave the place alive, others swore that I should
not stay longer there; at this the former party said if I left then I
should not reach Nauvoo alive, and about a dozen started off with in
hand to waylay me where the road runs through the woods. Having
previously ordered my horse which was already in the street, I took
advantage of their disagreement and no sooner in the saddle than both
spurs were to work, and a racehorse and rider were enveloped in a
cloud of dust with balls whistling nor saw the second scene until
beyond the point of timber stretching into the prairie half a mile; to
my right I discovered the road to Nauvoo, and the Gov. and escort
about 4 miles off having dined there; proving that I was on the
Carthage road, my horse having like myself, lost the waylaid road
leading through the woods, and thereby escaped those awaiting me
there. I turned across the plain to the order road, and passed the
Governor, whereas, as was ascertained afterwards, had I advanced half
a mile farther on the Carthage road, I should have come upon a gang of
about 300 painted assassins who were then beyond a prairie ridge on
that road waiting the disappearing of His Excellency in order to march
upon the prison and execute the horrid threats. Thus I was
providentially led as if between two fires unharmed. While tediously
traversing the sea of grass which separated Nauvoo from Carthage, tho'
under all the pressure my craft could carry, my dream in the prison
came fresh to view, and this for the fulfillment of it;--the letter
actually in my possession,--the troops in full view, myself going to
Quincy filled my soul with ominous forebodings of the sequel, so that
having left the troops far behind, arriving in the edge of the City I
entreated of the crowds who had assembled to meet His Excellency to
haste to Carthage and save the Prophet's life--the only alternative.
But wiser ones, perhaps, had otherwise decreed, and I with thousands
more had the mortification of seeing, formally, greeted within the
mourning "City of Joseph" the "Pilate" that should have changed places
and doom; had the untold disgrace I say of listening to a man stuck up
in front of the Prophet's house, and harrangueing an innocent and
inoffensive people with the insinuations applicable only to his own
party; anything less than the superhuman endurance of those saints
would have been tantalized to retaliate, when in presence of the
wives, children, and friends of his victims he declared that "a great
crime had been done by placing the City under Martial Law, [which was
done only so far as self preservation from the mobs was demanding,]
and a sever atonement must be made; so prepare your minds for the
emergency." So awful a threat proceeding from the lips of the highest
functionary of a State, while the victims had surrendered themselves
as pledges of his "honour", drew from bursting hearts of many
bystanders a half stifled shriek of horror as it echoed in the walls
of the Prophet's house and drew louder shrieks from his wife and
mother who later sank into her chair crying "My sons O my sons' lives
are means to make the atonement." Even the obdurate spirit of the
speaker felt the shock; and appeared to quiver from the effects of his
own denunciations, from which he could not recoil. But I forbear to
advert to that memorable oration! After which he and his escort were
entertained at the Mansion House, and while sitting at the Prophet's
table the hands of the assassins were dripping with his blood, and His
Excellency might have said "A severe atonement has been made," as
doubtless the Prophet and Patriarch were weltering in their own
atoneing blood while their doom was being proclaimed to their families
and friends.</p>
<p>Late that night I boarded a steamer bound to St. Louis, and landed at
Warsaw after midnight, seeing a great excitement on the landing I
stepped among them when I heard a mobocrat stating that "Joe and Hyrum
were both shot while trying to escape from prison,"--He said that they
had sent messengers to Quincy and the lower Counties to raise the
Militia to defend Warsaw against an attack from the Mormons: but that
"their real object was, when they got them there, to take the beauty
and booty of Nauvoo." One, in order to stimulate the others, said, "I
know where a chest full of gold is hid in old Joe's cellar." The
general feeling manifested there was of rejoicing at the crime
committed, and of exulting in the horrid act shedding innocent blood,
which reminded me of the sequel of my dream; altho' I hoped against
hope that they boasted of their desires, rather than of overt acts.
Then I got hold of a "Warsaw signal Extra," a slit of paper a little
larger than my hand, was just issued, containing nothing but the news
of the massacre; commencing by putting the letter J for Joe upside
down; it stated "that the Mormons attacked the prison;--that the
guards were compelled to shoot the prisoners in defense of their own
lives, and to prevent their escape;--that three of the Citizens of
Hancock were shot by Joe;-- the Mormons have killed Governor Ford--and
suite, burned Carthage; and we look for them to attack Warsaw every
hour; will not the inhabitants of the surrounding Country rush to our
defence before we, our wives and children will be massacreed." In
order to dupe the public to believe this tissue of falsehood, without
even a shadow of truth in one statement of it, to my positive
knowledge, they had sent a number of women and children in their night
clothes on a previous down Steamer to Quincy, merely to raise their
sympathy in their favour, even when the mob acknowledged the whole as
got up purposely to create alarm, and even boasted of "Tom Sharps"
long headed shrewdness in the scheme, and exulted in the prospect of
heralding forth that first impression on the public mind so as to
justify the horrid deed; and singular as it may appear to a sane mind
that the above account of the tragedy took the lead through all
Newspapers through the States East, West, North & the Canadas, South &
Texas, and then through Europe it went, thence around the world; and
even to this day we find Clergy, Priests and Editors who either know
no better, or knowing, willfully reiterate these glaring falsehoods to
the ends of the Earth.</p>
<p>While on this passage down to Quincy 60 miles distant, I met a steamer
crowded with soldiers and other passengers being the Militia first
sent for by the mob to Warsaw,--the Boats neared and stopped; and to
the disgrace of civilization, when the Captain of our boat reply'd to
the enquiry for the news from above, "Nothing only old Joe and Hyrum
are killed: "it was responded to by hearty cheers and swinging of hats
by all that Boatfull of--what? As our passengers and crew had hats off
to return the salute, I shouted at the top of my voice although
inadvertently--"Shame Gentlemen, shame on such cruelty, will you by
cheering approbate the blackest crime recognized by the law of even
barbarous nations--will you as civilized men tolerate the cold-blooded
murder of American Citizens, and that while laying in prison untried,
while the honour of the State was pledged to protect them? Gentlemen
desist, or whose lives will be safe if Republicanism is swallowed up
by such a blood thirsty spirit as that? All this was spoken in much
less time than writing and with other power than mine which carried
shame to their faces, and paralized the arms that still clenched the
hats tho' drooping by their sides, and sent them sneaking out of
sight. On our arrival we saw the Carthage families in a crowd on the
banks of the Mississippi as monuments of the sincerity of the blood
stained crew, whose actions were admissable of the inefficiency of
their testimonies to sustain their foul cause. Quincy was all in an
uproar,--a crowd of Militia waiting for a steamer to take them to the
scene of supposed action--the Warsaw mobs' emissaries inflaming the
populace and distributing that infernal Budget of Tom Sharp the
"Extra" already noticed. A meeting of the Citizens was convened in the
City to which I repaired, and after listening to the death almost, to
the exciting lies of the mob emmissaries of Warsaw--I jumped up and
demanded a hearing--that I could prove all the statements made to be
known falsehoods purposely to excite false alarm; a fuss followed
"Down with him" Order, Order."--"Hear the stranger;" the "Hear"
carried and on I spun my tale; as if with a voice of fearless little
thunder, characteristic of truth alone; I denied that the Mormon had
attacked the prison, that I was the last Mormon but one from Carthage
yesterday evening--left all the Mormons peacably at Nauvoo about
midnight that Gov. Ford not any of his suit were neither killed nor
wounded when they left Nauvoo early in the morning--that it was
palpably false about Carthage being burnt;--that the Mormons had no
intention of attacking Warsaw and that neither Militia nor any other
need not trouble themselves about Warsaw or go there; unless they
wished to attack Nauvoo, that was the only object mob had in calling
them there; and I also told them what I had heard at Warsaw--carried a
strong influence, and the Chair decided "No cause of alarm, all go
about your business." Soon after this a Steamer came up the river
having a company of Militia on board; again my antagonist mounted the
wheelhouse and preached his infuriating sermon, who, before he could
put it in the amen, found another alongside of him tearing his Bwcibw
by piece meals, as he had done in the Court House, to his irremediable
chagrin, and swayed a similar proselyting influence, so that instead
of embarking more Militia on board, those already there landed and
remained there. My noble friends (the mobocrats) just alluded to,
forseeing the end of their campaigne in that field, concluded to leave
on that Boat for Warsaw threatening veangeance on my head. Having
accomplished my mission thereto, I was about going also had not the
Captain of the Boat, who was an intimate friend of mine informed me
that I had better wait for another Steamer, as the mobocrats had
concocted a plan to take my life if I went up with them, to revenge on
me for defeating their object. I accordingly waited till evening when
I started up on another Boat. While on the passage, the hostile spirit
of mobocracy was rife among the passengers, which caused much dispute
because I would defend the innocency of Joseph and Hyrum; only
occasionally I found a truth seeking person amongst them. Before we
reached Warsaw the Captain and Clerk of the Boat, who were old friends
of mine Boating together, informed me that some of the mob on board
intend to inform at Warsaw that I was on board, and that "the mob
there will take you ashore and hang you without Judge or Jury"--I
remonstrated against going on shore, because if landed on the Illinois
side I must travel up through the heart of a mob country who would
hunt me out like hunting a wolf; whereas if I landed on the Missouri
side it would be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire."--I
could not escape them. They said that the fury of the mob was such
that they would fire their cannons into the Boat, as they had done on
other Boats bound for Nauvoo but they would do what they could. I told
them I would risk the result with God if they would act up to my
instructions which they promised to do; to the credit of Capt.
Atchinson of the "Ohio" and generous Officers they did; for while the
mob rushed on board as she landed crying "Where is Capt. Jones; where
is he; bring him out; out with the d-d Mormon;" and while I could hear
a general hallooing on shore "Bring him out, hang him up" &c., and I
had crawled under a mattress alongside of which many more laid on the
Cabin floor owing to the crowded state of the passengers, the Captain
and Officers stood like lions in the Cabin floor keeping a drove of
wolves from a pet lamb, declaring that they had landed me below the
town. Turned off thus the mob returned on shore and back again only to
be repelled the second time, while the mate was busily landing what
freight they had for the place, the Engineer being ready to start by
the sound of the bell for which I listened with breathless silence,
nor dared to breath freely until the signal bell rang, and the Boat
pushed off; nor did I regret to hear the mob plunge into the river
splash, --splash after each other making for the shore without their
prey, to the great disappointment of hundreds of blood thirsty mobs on
shore, who had prepared a gallows on a tree on the bank and eagerly
anticipated seeing the morning sun shine on a Mormon suspended by it.
Fairly afloat--the God of my Salvation received the tribute of a
grateful heart. I particularize on these scenes to illustrate the
spirit prevalent amongst the mobocrats generally which seemed to
sanction by their toleration the sacrifice of the lives of the Martyrs
for the Gospel's sake; and altho' alone in this scene, surely I will
be an incompromising witness against them.</p>
<p>In the forenoon I landed at the welcome shore of Nauvoo, but Oh what a
scene! Never to be pictured or painted by the pencil of art! Sad as
the tombs, cheerless groups mourning wend their way by closed stores
and windows of former busy life towards the place where lay the
bloody[cor[p]ses of the martyrs! Old, young, male and female
together bewail the day--their much loved Prophet and Patriarch from
their embraces by ruthless assassins were untimely torn--how can they
be comforted? The Sun and the Moon of the City's moral hemisphere are
untimely set behind a cheerless bank of storm clouds. The wonted
buoyant atmosphere seemed impregnated with death by suffocation--nor
could heaven maintain its usual smiles; its face it vailed, and
commiserating wept a shower of tears to comingle with those of the
Saints below. Heart rending as was the scene beggar description until
within the dining room of the Mansion House, statue like I stood, and
saw in their coffins on tables laid the Prophet and Patriarch! Ah
yes, fond hope no longer found a place to doubt, they are they--the
lips from whence flowed the words of life like rivers that quenched
the thirsting souls of thousands are closed in death--those eyes, the
heaven lit torches, are dim and motionless, the spirit has fled. At
the head of the one, bathed in tears, was seen the wife of the Prophet
with her little boys and adopted Julia--at the other no less so was
the Patriarch's wife surrounded by six little children who alternately
with the grey haired Mother while kneeling in a pool of the comingling
dripping gore of the Martyrs on the floor, with her streaming eyes
first on one, then on the other cry "My husband, my husband too." "My
father in blood". "And my father is dead too," and "My son, my sons"
were the pitiful murmurings of the anguished widows and orphans that
echoed in the walls which as but yesterday danced at the music of the
Prophet's voice. On, on in solid columns the moving throng moved
steadily to and off the solemn scene to take the last long look on
those they loved most dearly--like the inexhaustible current of the
mighty "Father of waters" as it for ages flows to the ocean appeared
the passing current of mourning friends. The holes of the bullets, the
bleeding gashes of the fatal bayonet need not the finger to point them
out; nor need the assembled millions[as[k] Who are they? When their
"Elder Brother" from them will be distinguished by the prints of the
nails in his hands and feet. But why linger o'er the horrid scene of
humane fiendish conduct they are free, the Prophet and Patriarch have
soared on high beyond the rage of mobs, their testimony sealed with
their hearts blood when they could have escaped if they would, but
heroic like demi-gods they firmly trod the road to death and glory;
they boldly leaped on the scaffold with eyes open and souls
unsullied--forever honoured be their memories.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869): 669-78. (The author’s dad, Charles Hay, was a physician for the
militia, as mentioned in the article.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the morning of the 27th June, the regiment of Colonel Levi Williams
started from Warsaw, in obedience to the call of the governor to
rendezvous at Golden's Point, a settlement in the vicinity of Nauvoo.
They went out in high glee, fully expecting to march to the city of
the Saints, and not doubting that before they left it some occasion
would arise which would make it necessary to remove this standing
scandal from the face of the earth. There were none but words of law
and order on their lips; but every man clearly understood that Nauvoo
was to be destroyed before they returned. A public meeting in Warsaw
had unanimously "Resolved, that we will forthwith proceed to Nauvoo
and exterminate the city and its people"; a manifesto which seemed too
peppery even for the palate of Mr. Sharp, editor of the "Signal," who,
when he published it, added the saving clause, "if necessary." "Of
course it will be necessary," said these law-abiding militia-men as
they marched out of Warsaw on the Nauvoo road.</p>
<p>Order reigned in Warsaw — for the men were all gone. The whole male
adult population, with trifling exceptions, were in Williams's
regiment. Among the captains were William N. Grover, afterwards a
distinguished lawyer of St. Louis, and United States Attorney for
Missouri, — an eminently respectable and conservative man; Thomas C.
Sharp, editor of the "Signal," who also on this day sowed the last of
his wild oats, and was afterwards principal of the public school, and
greatly esteemed as county judge; Jacob C. Davis, then State senator,
afterwards member of Congress from that district.</p>
<p>They arrived near noon at some deserted shanties, about seven miles
from Warsaw, that had been built and abandoned in that flurry and
collapse of internal improvements that passed over the State in 1838.
There they were met by Mr. David Matthews, a well-known citizen of
Warsaw, who had ridden rapidly from Carthage with an order from the
governor, disbanding the regiment. The governor, fearing he could not
control the inflammable material he had gathered together, had
determined to scatter it again.</p>
<p>Colonel Williams read the governor's order. Some of the anti-Mormon
warriors, blessed with robust Western appetites, looked at the sun,
and concluded they could get home by dinnertime, and under the
influence of this inspiring idea started off at quick step. Captain
Grover soon found himself without a company. Captain Aldrich essayed a
speech calling for volunteers for Carthage. "He did not make a fair
start," says the chronicle, "and Sharp came up and took it off his
hands." Sharp, being a spirited and impressive talker, soon had a
respectable squad about him. Captain Davis, on the contrary, was
sorely perplexed. It was heavy weather for him. He was a professional
politician, and clearly loved both Mormon and anti-Mormon votes. He
was so backward in coming forward that his company left him in
disgust, and followed the fiery Grover, whose company had gone home to
dinner. Davis still could not make up his mind to go home, but "got
into Calvin Cole's wagon and followed the boys at a distance"; so that
he had at last the luck to be in at the closing scene, and the honor
to be indicted with the rest. The speeches of Grover and Sharp were
rather vague; the purpose of murder does not seem to have been hinted.
They protested against "being made the tools and puppets of Tommy
Ford." They were going to Carthage to see the boys, and talk things
over. Some of the cooler heads, such as Dr. Hay, surgeon of the
regiment, denounced the proceeding and went at once back to Warsaw.</p>
<p>While they were waiting at the shanties, a courier came in from the
Carthage Grays. It is impossible at this day to declare exactly the
purport of his message. It is usually reported and believed that he
brought an assurance from the officers of this company that they would
be found on guard at the jail where the Smiths were confined; that
they would make no real resistance, — merely enough to save
appearances.</p>
<p>This message was not communicated to the men. They followed their
leaders off on the road to Carthage, with rather vague intentions.
They were annoyed at the prospect of their picnic coming so readily to
a close, at losing the fun of sacking Nauvoo, at having to go home
without material for a single romance. Nearly one hundred and fifty
started with their captains, but they gradually dwindled in number to
seventy-five. These trudged along under the fierce summer sun of the
prairies towards the town where the cause of all the trouble and
confusion of the last few years awaited them. They sang on the way a
rude parody of a camp-meeting hymn called in the West the "Hebrew
Children":—</p>
<p>"Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Safe in the Carthage Jail!"</p>
<p>The farther they walked the more the idea impressed itself upon them
that now was the time to finish the matter totally. The unavowed
design of the leaders communicated itself magnetically to the men,
until the entire. company became fused into one mass of bloodthirsty
energy. By an excess of precaution, they did not go directly, into the
town, but made a long detour, so as to come in by the road leading
from Nauvoo.</p>
<p>The jail where the Smiths were confined is situated at the extreme
northwestern edge of the dismal village, at the end of a long,
ill-kept street whose middle is a dusty road and whose sides are gay
with stramonium and dog-fennel. As the avengers came in sight of the
mean-looking building that held their prey, the sleeping tiger that
lurks in every human heart sprang up in theirs, and they quickened
their pace to a run. There was no need of orders, — no possibility of
checking them now. The guards were hustled away from the door,
good-naturedly resisting until they were carefully disarmed. Their
commander, Lieutenant Frank Worrell, afterwards gave this testimony on
the trial, which we copy for its curious and cynical bonhomie:—</p>
<p>"I was one of the guards at the jail. Saw Smith when he was killed.
Saw none of the defendants at the jail. Suppose there were one or two
hundred there. They stayed three or four minutes. They formed in front
of the jail and made a rush. Knew none that came up..... Heard nothing
that was said..... Saw Smith die, — was within ten feet of him.....
Perhaps a minute after he fell I saw him die..... I was pushed and
shoved some fifty feet..... Did not see Sharp, Grover, or Davis. It
was so crowded I could not see much. I know about one third of the men
in the county, but none at the jail. I might have been some scared."</p>
<p>It would be difficult to imagine anything cooler than this quiet
perjury to screen a murder. Yet the strangest part of this strange
story is that Frank Worrell was a generous young fellow, and the men
with whom he carried out the ghastly comedy of attack and resistance
at the door of the prison — Sharp and Grover — were good citizens,
educated and irreproachable, who still live to enjoy the respect and
esteem of all who know them. There is but one force mighty enough in
the world to twist such minds and consciences so fearfully awry; and
that is the wild suspicion bred of civil strife. A few months of this
miniature war in Hancock County had sufficed to possess many of the
prominent actors with the spirit of demons; and in the mind of any
anti-Mormon there was nothing more criminal in the shooting of Smith
than in the slaying of a wolf or panther.</p>
<p>This jolly, good-natured Worrell was himself murdered by Mormon
assassins not long after. He was riding with a friend. A shot was
heard from a thicket. "That was a rifle!" said the friend. "Yes, and
I 've got it," said Worrell, coolly. He fell from his horse and died.
I have seen, as a child, his grave at Warsaw. A rude wooden
head-board, bearing this legend, "He who is without enemies is
unworthy of friends," — not very orthodox, but perhaps as true as most
epitaphs.</p>
<p>While Worrell, little thinking of his tombstone, was struggling with
his friendly assailants, as many as the narrow entry would hold had
rushed into the open door and up the cramped little stairs. Smith and
his brother had been that day removed from their cells and given
comparative liberty in a large airy room on the first floor above.
This afternoon they were receiving the visits of two Mormon brethren,
Richards and Taylor. They heard the row at the door and the rush on
the stairs, and instinctively barred their door by pressing their
weight against it. The mob fired at the door. Hiram Smith fell,
exclaiming, "I'm a dead man." Taylor crawled under the bed, with a
bullet in the calf of his leg. Richards hid himself behind the opening
door, in mortal terror. He afterwards lied terribly about the affair,
saying he stood calmly in the centre of the room, warding off the
bullets with a consecrated wand.</p>
<p>Joe Smith died bravely. He stood by the jamb of the door and fired
four shots, bringing his man down every time. He shot an Irishman
named Wills, who was in the affair from his congenital love of a
brawl, in the arm; Gallagher, a Southerner from the Mississippi
Bottom, in the face; Voorhees, a half-grown hobbledehoy from Bear
Creek, in the shoulder; and another gentleman, whose name I will not
mention, as he is prepared to prove an alibi, and besides stands six
feet two in his moccasins.</p>
<p>Smith had two loaded six-barrelled revolvers in his room. How a man on
trial for capital offences came to be supplied with such luxuries is a
mystery that perhaps only one man could fully have solved; and as
General Deming, the Jack-Mormon sheriff, died soon after, and left no
explanation of the matter, investigation is effectually baffled. But
the four shots which I have chronicled, and two which had no billet,
exhausted one pistol, and the enemy gave Smith no time to use the
other. Severely wounded as he was, he ran to the window, which was
open to receive the fresh June air, and half leaped, half fell, into
the jail yard below. With his last dying energies he gathered himself
up, and leaned in a sitting posture against the rude stone well-curb.
His stricken condition, his vague wandering glances, excited no pity
in the mob thirsting for his life. They had not seen the handsome
fight he had made in the jail; there was no appeal to the border
chivalry (there is chivalry on the borders, as in all semi-barbarous
regions). A squad of Missourians who were standing by the fence
levelled their pieces at him, and, before they could see him again for
the smoke they made, Joe Smith was dead.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Carthage Grays were approaching. They had been called
out half an hour before, and formed on the Court-House Square, by
Captain Robert Smith, with great precision and a deliberation that
gives rise, under the circumstances, to somewhat wide conjecture.
Captain Smith had not previously been regarded as a martinet, but this
afternoon he could have given points to a Potsdam corporal. He stopped
his company half a dozen times, to remonstrate against defects in
their alignment; and it is owing to his extreme conscientiousness
about discipline that they arrived at the jail when all was over. Let
me add that Captain Smith (for it seemed fated that everybody
connected with this affair should have greatness thrust upon him)
became in the great war General Robert F. Smith, and marched his
troops from Hancock County to the Atlantic with more speed, if less
science, than he displayed in leading his squad that day from the
Court-House to the jail.</p>
<p>The moment the work was done, the calmness of horror succeeded the
fever of fanatical rage. The assassins hurried away from the jail, and
took the road to Warsaw in silence and haste. They went home at a
killing pace over the wide dusty prairie. Warsaw is eighteen miles
from Carthage; the Smiths were killed at half past five: at a quarter
before eight the returning crowd began to drag their weary limbs
through the main street of Warsaw, — at such an astounding rate of
speed had the lash of their own thoughts driven them.</p>
<p>The town was instantly put in such attitude of defence as its limited
means permitted. The women and children were ferried across the river
to a village on the Missouri shore. The men kept guard night and day
in the hazel thickets around the town. Everybody expected sudden and
exemplary vengeance from the Mormons.</p>
<p>Nothing of the kind took place. The appalling disaster that had fallen
upon the church gave rise to no spirit of revenge. It was long before
the Mormons recovered from the stupor of their terror and despair. A
delegation went to Carthage to receive their dead. They brought them
home and buried, them with honors becoming the generals of the legion.
The seceders, panic-stricken, fled from Nauvoo and never returned.</p>
<p>The reaction now began. At the August elections, the Jack-Mormon
ticket, as it was called, bearing candidates favorable to the Mormons,
was chosen by an unexampled majority. The press of the State was
unanimous in its condemnation of the Warsaw men, with a few
exceptions, when special correspondents had visited the county. These
were almost invariably apologists of the killing. It is curious to
note the sudden change of the anti-Mormon journals from the fierce and
aggressive tone which they held the week before, to the sullen
attitude of self-defence they assumed the week after the Carthage
tragedy. Here is an extract from an article by Sharp in the "Signal,"
which may show how much easier it is to kill a man than to justify the
killing:—</p>
<p>"The St. Louis 'Gazette' says that the men that killed the Smiths were
a pack of cowards. Now our view of the matter is, that instead of
cowardice they exhibited foolhardy courage, for they must have known
or thought that they would bring down on themselves the vengeance of
the Mormons. True, the act of an armed body going to the jail and
killing prisoners does appear at first sight dastardly, but we look at
it as though these men were the executioners of justice; and their act
is no more cowardly than is the act of the hangman in stretching up a
defenceless convict who is incapable of resistance. If any other mode
could have been devised, or any other time selected, it would have
been better; but as we have heard others say, we are satisfied that it
is done, and care not to philosophize on the modus operandi."</p>
<p>It was impossible that the matter should be allowed to pass entirely
unnoticed by the law. Besides, Governor Ford, who considered the
murder a personal disrespect to himself, was really anxious to bring
the perpetrators to justice. Bills of indictment were found at the
October term of court against Levi Williams, Mark Aldrich, Jacob C.
Davis, William N. Grover, Thomas C. Sharp, John Willis, William
Voorhees, William Gallagher, and one Allen. They were based on the
testimony of two idle youths, named Brackenbury and Daniels, who had
accompanied the expedition from Warsaw to Carthage on the 27th of
June, and had seen the whole affair. Having a natural disinclination
to work, they lived as long as they could by exploiting this rare
experience. Their evidence being worse than useless in Warsaw, they
went to Nauvoo, professed Mormonism, and had their board paid by the
faithful, to secure their attendance at the trial. Brackenbury formed
an alliance with a sign-painter, who executed in the highest style of
Nauvoo art a panorama of the prophet's Death and Ascension, which they
exhibited to the great edification of the Mormons and to such profit
that the artist soon died of the trembling madness, and Brackenbury
fell heir to the canvas and the fees. Daniels collaborated with a
scribbler named Littlefield a most remarkable pamphlet on the same
subject, stuffed full of miracles, and inventions more stupid than the
truth.</p>
<p>Murray McConnell, who appeared in behalf of the governor to prosecute
(and who was himself mysteriously assassinated twenty-four years
later, as if a taint of blood were on all connected with this drama),
made an arrangement with the defendants' counsel, by which the
defendants agreed to appear voluntarily at the next May term, the
State not being ready with its evidence. But towards the end of
November, the vote of Davis becoming inconvenient to the leaders of
the Senate, this convention was violated, and orders made for writs
instanter against Davis and the rest. They were treated with contempt.
Davis kept his seat in the Senate, and when the sheriff came to Warsaw
he was received with that jocose discourtesy which so often in the
West indicates a most sinister state of public feeling. He could find
no trace of the men he was looking for. Nobody had seen or heard of
them for weeks. In every shop he entered, he saw a loaded rifle, or a
man oiling a gun lock or moulding bullets. In the morning, when he
mounted his horse to ride away, he found his mane and tail shaved bare
as the head of a dervish. Hurrying out of the hostile neighborhood, he
passed a crowd of grinning loungers.</p>
<p>"My horse was in bad company last night," he said, with a wretched
attempt at good-natured indifference.</p>
<p>"Most generally is, I reckon," was the unfeeling retort; and the chief
executive officer of the county left the mutinous town to itself.</p>
<p>The next May, all the defendants appeared, according to agreement, to
stand their trial. They began by filing their affidavit that the
county commissioners who selected the array of jurors for the week
were prejudiced against them; that the sheriff and his deputies were
unfitted by prejudice to select the talesmen that might be required.
They therefore entered a motion to quash the array of jurors, to set
aside the sheriff and his deputies, and to appoint elisors to select a
jury for the case. After argument, this was done. The elisors
presented ninety-six men, before twelve were found ignorant enough and
indifferent enough to act as jurors.</p>
<p>A large number of witnesses were examined, but nothing was elicited
against the accused from any except Brackenbury, Daniels, and a girl
named Eliza Jane Graham. The two first had been lying so constantly
for some months professionally, the one in his pamphlet, the other in
his raree-show, that they had utterly forgotten where they started
from, and so embroidered their original facts with more recent
fictions, that their evidence went for nothing. Besides, the showman
Brackenbury thought that the pamphleteer Daniels had received more
attention than himself from the polite world of Nauvoo, and was
consequently stung by jealousy to contradict in his evidence all that
Daniels had sworn to. The evidence of Miss Graham, delivered with the
impetuosity of her sex, was all that could be desired — and more too.
She had assisted in feeding the hungry mob at the Warsaw House as they
came straggling in from Carthage, and she could remember where every
man sat, and what he said, and how he said it. Unfortunately she
remembered too much. No one accused her of wilful perjury. But her
nervous and sensitive character had been powerfully impressed by the
influence of Smith, and, brooding constantly upon his death, she came
at last to regard her own fancies and suspicions as positive
occurrences. A few alibis so discredited her evidence, that it was
held to prove nothing more than her own honest and half-insane zeal.</p>
<p>The case was closed. There was not the a man on the jury, in the
court, in the county, that did not know the defendants had done the
murder. But it was not proven, and the verdict of NOT GUILTY was right
in law.</p>
<p>And you cannot find in this generation an original inhabitant of
Hancock County who will not stoutly sustain that verdict.</p>
<p>There was very little excitement about the matter. The Mormons were
not vigorous in the prosecution. Their leaders were already involved
in the squabbles and intrigues of the succession. The prophet's
brother, William Smith, was an aspirant. But he was a weak, indolent,
good-natured sensualist, and was readily bought off and sup pressed.
He carried on for some time a flourishing trade in " patriarchal
blessings." He had probably never heard of Tetzel, and yet the old
Dominican himself could scarcely have systematized his traffic better.
He advertises in the "Neighbor": " Common blessings, 50 cents ;
Extraordinary blessings, $1.00; Children, half price ; women, gratis."
Rigdon made a desperate stand for the prophet's mantle. But he was
defeated also, and, being recalcitrant, was sol emnly "given over to
be buffeted of the Evil One for a thousand years." The coolest and
most unbelieving of them all succeeded to the autocracy- Brigham
Young, whether guided by in stinct or reason I do not know, avoided
the fatal mistake of Smith, who turned back from Missouri to Illinois,
and the crazy fantasy of Rigdon, who would have gone from Illinois to
Pennsylvania. Tribes and religions cannot travel against the sun.
Young, during the troubled year that followed, exerted himself to
gather all the reins of gov ernment into his own hands ; and there was
not in all the slavish East a despot more absolute than he when at
last he started, with his wives and his servants and his cattle, to
lead his people into the vast tolerant wilderness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William R. Hamilton served in the Carthage Greys in 1844. His letter to
Foster Walker, describing the Smiths' murders in Carthage, was published
in Foster Walker's "The Mormons in Hancock County," <em>Dallas City Review</em>
(January 29, 1903, p.2).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Carthage, Ill., Dee. 24, 1902</p>
<p>FOSTER WALKER, -</p>
<p>It would be a long and, I presume, an uninteresting story to relate
all I saw of the Mormons and know of their actions and that of the
Antis; therefore I shall confine myself to what I know transpired on
the day of the killing of the Prophet and Patriarch- that is Joseph
and Hyrum Smith- by the mob, without entering into any kind of
statements as to causes which had incited the mob to take their
lives-which was done at the jail in Carthage at about 4:40 o'clock
P.M. on June 27, 1844.</p>
<p>There had been about 1200 troops- state militia- summoned as a "posse
comitatus" by a civil officer to assist in arresting them. Charges,
writs and legal proceedings are matters of record in the courts.
Governor Thomas Ford was here in command. The Smiths had surrendered
two days before, and had been kept at my father's hotel until that
morning. The governor, presuming all danger of trouble over, ordered
the troops to return home and disband except two companies, which he
retained- the Carthage Greys and the Augusta Dragoons. The cavalry
company he took as an escort and went to Nauvoo, leaving the Carthage
Greys to Guard the Smiths. This company was commanded by Captain
Robert F. Smith, who in the war of the Rebellion was colonel of the
16th Ill. Inft. I was the youngest member of that company and had not
as vet fully learned the lesson of red tape and complete obedience to
all orders. Still, in the company I had the name of doing quite well
for a boy.</p>
<p>A little after 7:00 A.M. the troops broke camp and left for home. The
Governor, with his escort started for Nauvoo, and the Smiths were
taken to the jail- there kept under guard by a detail of six men from
the company, with an officer in command; the company remaining in camp
at the public square. About 11 o'clock A.M., myself and another young
man were ordered by the captain to go on top of the court house and
keep a sharp lookout for and see if a body of men were approaching the
town from any direction; and, if any were seen, to immediately report
to the captain personally, at his quarters. We had a large field glass
and could clearly see in every direction save due north for several
miles. We were especially ordered to keep a strict outlook over the
prairies towards Nauvoo. Nothing suspicious was discovered until about
4 P.M. when we saw a body of armed men in wagons and on horses
approaching the low timber, a little north of west from the jail, and
about two miles distant. This was at once reported to the captain,
when we were ordered to keep a strict watch and at once report if they
came through the timber. In about a half hour after, a body of armed
men- about 125- came out of the woods on foot and started in a single
file, behind an old rail fence, in the direction of the jail. They
were then about three-fourths of a mile distant. This we at once
attempted to report, but could not find the captain; and (not being
"muzzled," as soldiers of late date) told another officer, who after
considerable delay found the captain who ordered the company to fall
into line. By this time the mob had reached the jail and had commenced
shooting. I there forgot all about orders to put on accoutrements and
fall into line; but immediately started on double quick for the jail.</p>
<p>To digress: For one of the best drilled and equipped companies in the
state at that time- on that occasion we would have taken the prize for
the best exhibition of an awkward squad in existence. I have always
thought the officers and some privates were working for delay. The
company finally reached the jail, but not until after the mob had
completed their work and left in the direction from which they came.
When about fifty yards away I saw Joseph Smith come to the window and
fall out. One of the men went to him and partially straightened his
body out beside the well curb. Just at this time I got up amongst the
men and heard him say, "he's dead," when all the mob immediately left.
I went to where Smith was lying and found that he was dead without
doubt. I then went up to the room where they had been quartered, where
I found Hyrum Smith lying upon the floor on his back, dead. No person
was in the room, or came while I was there. He was stretched out on
the floor, just as he had fallen after being shot.</p>
<p>The shot that killed him was fired through the door panel by one of
the mob, while in the hall, and struck him in the left breast, he
falling backward. There were in the room at that time four persons-
the two Smiths and Elders Taylor and Richards. Taylor was wounded,
being hit several times- all flesh wounds- and was the same night
taken to my father's house, where he was cared for until able to be
taken to Nauvoo. Richards was not hurt and immediately after the mob
left the hall, carried Taylor into the cell department of the jail,
which was done just before I went upstairs. The room in which they
were is about 16 x 16 feet and had one window in the east side, two in
the front or south end, and the door opening from the hall, just at
the top of the stairs almost directly opposite the east side window
out of which Smith fell. There was a bedstead in the southeast corner
of the room, under which Taylor was after the shooting was over. The
door opened in such a manner that when forced open it formed a recess
in the corner, so that a person there was hid from sight. Richard's
position bought [sic] him into the corner. There was no lock, bolt
or even latch upon the door, and when the mob started upstairs, those
in the room shut the door and attempted to hold it. After those in the
hall had tried several times to push it open, Smith having shot at
them by putting the muzzle of his old English pepperbox revolver
through the opening at the side of the door (made by their efforts)
and firing four shots into the hall, one of the men placed the muzzle
of his rifle against the door and fired, which shot killed Hyrum
Smith, he being behind the panel in a position to do most of the work
in keeping the door shut, he falling backward, leaving the door which
flew open and hid Richards in the corner. At the same time others in
the hall fired into the room, wounding Taylor, who rolled under the
bed. Smith, in attempting to escape out of the window was shot from
the outside falling outward.</p>
<p>The approach of the mob was made from the rear or north, dividing part
to the east and west, meeting at the front, thus completely
surrounding the jail. The guards were quietly sitting in front and in
the hall below, all of whom were captured without much trouble or
danger. Just a little suspicion might be attached to the officer in
command. Yet it might be presumed he thought his only duty was to keep
the Smiths from coming downstairs. After I had satisfied my curiosity,
seen and been among the mob, seen the prophet shot, and seen the dead
men, it occurred to me I ought to go home and tell the news. When
about 200 yards from the jail I met the company coming ready for
business. Nothing was to be done but to "about face," return to camp
and be disbanded; which was promptly done in good order, as their
prisoners were dead and not likely to run away.</p>
<p>The bodies of the Smiths, after the coroner's inquest, were taken by
my father, Artois Hamilton, to his hotel. He had boxes (not coffins)
made out of pine boards, in which they were taken to Nauvoo the next
day. The news of their death having been sent to Nauvoo, early the
next morning two of their brothers, with two other men, came after
their bodies in a wagon. The body of Joseph was placed in theirs and
that of Hyrum in father's wagon, who with two of my brothers went with
them.</p>
<p>This is a true statement of what occurred on that day, so far as the
doings of the troops and killing of the Smiths. There are many facts
and names of persons connected with that tragedy, which are now lost
to the world-where it seems best to let them remain.</p>
<p>Wm R. Hamilton</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William Daniels, <em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845 issues). (The
account below contains several embellishments or fantasies that are
contradicted by other witnesses. For example, Daniels has Joseph Smith
surviving his fall from the second story jail and then being shot by
four men under the orders of Levi Williams. After the murder of Smith,
Daniels describes a scene in which a "ruffian" draws a bowie knife and
is ready to sever the head of Smith when suddenly a pillar of light
"bursts from the heavens upon the bloody scene" and frightens the
killers away.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ACCOUNT OF THE MASSACRE BY ONE WHO WAS AMONG THE MOB—PROBABLE FATE OF
THIS INFORMER—HOW HE HAPPENED TO BE WITH THE MOB PARTY—DETAILS OF THE
MASSACRE—REFLECTIONS ON THE HORRIBLE DEED—RETURN TO HIS HOME—A
DREAM—DETERMINATION TO DO WHAT HE COULD TO BRING THE MURDERERS TO
JUSTICE—VISIT TO NAUVOO AND QUINCY—HUSH-MONEY OFFERED HIM—HE JOINS THE
CHURCH—EFFORTS TO PUT HIM OUT OF THE WAY—BEFORE THE GRAND JURY AS A
WITNESS—NINE PERSONS INDICTED—MURDERERS ALLOWED TO GO FREE.</p>
<p>Many of the facts connected with the murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith
have now been related. But the questions arise: Who committed the
deed? In what manner was it accomplished?</p>
<p>To fully present this phase of the cruel butchery, the following
statements of an eye-witness are introduced. It is an account given by
Wm. M. Daniels, which was written out carefully by the author of this
volume and printed in a pamphlet, at Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Mr. Daniels, for some time after the murder, resided in Nauvoo, where
he joined the Church. In justice to him it should be here stated that
he evinced the fullest sincerity while relating the incidents of his
narrative. As regards the flash of light described by him, which is
illustrated in our engraving, he averred most emphatically that it
occurred as related. Even before the court, when the murderers were
arraigned for examination as to their complicity in the bloody deed,
he was confronted by the lawyers for the mob party, and there stated
that all he had told was the truth.</p>
<p>As to the correctness of this strange exhibition of light, the author
knows nothing personally; but it is given as Daniels’ testimony, among
the other incidents, and he leaves the reader to draw such conclusions
as may seem reasonable.</p>
<p>The whereabouts of Mr. Daniels has been unknown to the writer since
1846. It is not at all unlikely that some of the parties implicated in
the tragedy at Carthage assassinated him for exposing them. They swore
they would do so, and were hunting for him previous to the exodus of
the Saints from Nauvoo. On the steamboat Ocean Wave a party of them
tried to get some information, as to where Daniels might be found,
from, and also laid a cunning plan to entrap, the writer when the boat
should land at Warsaw, for the part he took in the publication—but
they failed.</p>
<p>The following is the statement of Daniels:</p>
<p>I resided in Augusta, Hancock County, Ill., eighteen miles from
Carthage. On the 16th day of June, I left my home with the intention
of going to St. Louis. When I arrived at Bear Creek, I found the
country in a great state of excitement, in relation to the “Mormons.”
I was told it would be dangerous for me to proceed farther on my way
to Warsaw, as the intermediate country was mostly settled by
“Mormons,” who would, in all probability, intercept me by
violence. I knew nothing of the character and disposition of the
“Mormon” people, never having been personally acquainted with them
as a community. The tales of villainy that were related concerning
them, were so horrid and shocking that I yielded to the entreaties of
my advisers, and abandoned, for that day, at least, my intention of
proceeding farther on my journey. I lodged that night with a Mr.
Scott.</p>
<p>The next morning a company of men were going from that place to
Carthage, for the purpose, as they said, of assisting the militia to
drive the “Mormons” out of the country. Out of curiosity, as I had no
particular way to spend my time, and the creeks having been rendered
impassable that night by heavy rain, I went in company with them to
Carthage. On our way there, they were discussing the best means to be
adopted for the expulsion of the “Mormon” population. Some were for
marching to Nauvoo, and laying the city in ashes, and driving the
inhabitants from the limits of the State, at the point of the bayonet;
others were for murdering Joseph and Hyrum Smith, while others were in
favor of accomplishing both of these barbarous objects.</p>
<p>I noticed minutely their conversation, and it was not hard for me to
discover that all their animosity and hatred of their neighbors, arose
from a spirit of envy. I heard no person declaring that the “Mormons”
had ever personally injured him; but they swore that “Old Joe” was
getting too much power and influence in the world, and he ought to be
put out of the way. His career ought to be stopped. They looked upon
him as no less than a second Mahomet, who would soon spring into
power, usurp the reins of government, and establish his religion by
the sword. To prevent such a calamity from befalling the world, they
argued that it would be doing God service to take his life, supposing
that would also totally annihilate the religion called “Mormonism.”</p>
<p>From that hour I looked upon them as demons, not men, and determined
to do all in my power to prevent so bloody and awful an occurrence. I
was not attached to any religious society whatever, and was willing
that all mankind should worship Almighty God according to the dictates
of their own consciences. I knew that the laws of my country, which I
had been taught to honor and revere, granted all men that right and
privilege, while they were the subjects of its government. I hoped
that her institutions might be untarnished and her dignity unsullied
and free from so disgraceful an event as was then in contemplation.</p>
<p>We arrived in Carthage, and found the Carthage Greys, and several
other companies, on parade. I was told their object was to drive the
“Mormons.” I would remark that a certain preacher, professing to be
a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, was engaged in
playing a drum at the head of this company.</p>
<p>These companies were commanded by Captains Smith, Green and others,
who were greatly excited, and said they were determined to kill the
“Mormons.” On hearing that the governor was on his way to Carthage,
they were very much alarmed; whereupon Joseph H. Jackson, in company
with Dr. Foster, F.M. Higbee, and others, declared that if the
Governor, “Tom” Ford, came, and gave the Smiths–Joseph and Hyrum–a
fair trial, they would be acquitted, and we will be hung as sure as
there is a God in heaven. Further he observed, “I do not see why the
d—-d little governor could not stay at home, and send us word, and
we would do the business up in a hurry, and drive the ‘Mormons’ out of
the country.”</p>
<p>I returned to Bear Creek that night, with the intention of leaving for
St. Louis the next morning. However, on the morning of the 20th,
hearing that the Governor had arrived at Carthage, and being somewhat
acquainted with him, I concluded to return and see him, which I did.</p>
<p>When I arrived at Carthage, he was addressing the people at the Court
House, in relation to the “Mormon” difficulties. He said he came there
to see that the law was fully carried out. When he was done, Mr.
Roosevelt, of Warsaw, went upon the public square, mounted a box, and
made an inflammatory speech to the people who had collected, wherein
he stated that the law was not sufficient to carry out their measures.
Stretching out his arms at full length, he said, with all the energy
in his power: “We have the willing minds, and God Almighty has given
us strength, and we will wield the sabre and make our own laws!!” He
then said he presumed that the governor meant well enough, but was too
easy in his remarks to them, in saying that he wished a compliance
with the laws.</p>
<p>Mr. Roosevelt soon gave way for Mr. Skinner, a “young limb of the
law,” a tool for mobocracy, and, at the time, a candidate for the
Legislature, who made a short speech, wherein he stated he was one of
the delegates appointed by the people of Carthage to go to Springfield
and lay before the governor their grievances. He was not so severe
upon the governor as Mr. Roosevelt had been. He presumed the governor
would do what was right, but his ultimate course proved him to be the
most hypocritical.</p>
<p>The governor gave orders, which were read by Capt. Dunn, that all the
people who had been promiscuously assembled in Carthage, should be
consolidated in the militia, under his command, to co-operative in
maintaining the supremacy of the law.</p>
<p>I returned to Bear Creek that evening. In the morning, I proceeded to
Warsaw. On my arrival there, a force of about three hundred men was
mustered upon the parade ground under the command of Captains Aldrich
Grover, Elliott, and Col. Williams of Green Plains. I wished to know
what their intentions were, and was informed that they were determined
to drive the d—-d Mormons out of the County. I remained there five
days; during which time Williams, Roosevelt, Sharp, and others, were
continually beating up for volunteers, by making inflammatory
speeches, exciting the populace and making false publications to the
world. Col. Williams announced that he was empowered by the governor,
to stop and search steamboats, at the wharf, at Warsaw. Accordingly,
he stopped the steam packet Osprey. On Capt. Anderson’s refusal to let
him search the boat, he ordered his men to fire upon her. The cannon
was leveled upon the boat. As they were in the act of firing, a
gentlemen who was standing by, being sober (for most of them were
badly intoxicated) placed his hand between the match and powder, which
prevented ignition. They, however, searched the boat; but did not
succeed in finding but eight or nine kegs of powder, which they
permitted to remain on board. That evening they fired upon two more
steamboats, with their muskets, which they compelled to stop. Col.
Williams informed the Captains, that he had orders to search their
boats for ammunition, arms, provisions, etc. The captains consented,
and search was instituted, but nothing was found which was considered
contraband, and the boats resumed their course.</p>
<p>Relative to the governor’s giving the peopled of Warsaw orders to stop
and search steamboats, I would remark that Gov. Ford informed me at
Quincy, that he had not given them orders to stop any boats, with the
exception of the Maid of Iowa, a boat then owned by the “Mormons,”
which the people supposed might convey away Gen. Smith. Here we see a
willful and arbitrary infraction of law and order, on the part of this
military Nero, Col. Williams, and the mobbers of Warsaw.</p>
<p>All was commotion and turmoil through Warsaw and its vicinity. The
scenery had become insipid and irksome to me, and I longed for relief
and to be where my mind could be at rest. Passing through such
continual bustle, watching the movements of the rabble who, like a
horde of impetuous barbarians, seemed impelled on, by the blind
infatuation of priests and shallow zealots, in hopes of booty,
disgusted and sickened me and fired me with contempt. My mind reverted
to the time when the dark and bloody Attila led on the ignorant Huns
to conquest, plunder and extermination, applying the torch of
conflagration to pleasant villages and sequestered homes.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, I started for Quincy. As I pursued my journey from Warsaw,
my mind was uneasy and restless. When I had traveled near eight miles
I enquired my way, and, through accident or design, I was placed upon
a road that led me directly back to Warsaw. My mind was composed and
tranquil as I came in sight of the place. My attention was attracted
by a group of men, apparently in earnest conversation. I drew near and
learned that the Carthage Greys had made them the proposition to come
to Carthage, on the following day, and assist them in murdering Joseph
and Hyrum Smith, during the absence of the governor, at Golden’s
Point, where he contemplated marching with the troops. As soon as they
discovered that I had learned the purpose of their conference, they
became suspicious of me, fearing exposure, no doubt, and put me under
guard. I was held in custody until the following morning when a
company of volunteers was raised, to march to Golden’s Point, to unite
with the governor. I desired to make the governor acquainted with what
was contemplated against the lives of the prisoners. To effect this
object, I volunteered, and drew a musket. The company was paraded in
single file; roll was called and Capt. Jacob Davis, (the murderer, who
was afterward screened from justice by the Senate of Illinois,) and
Capt. Grover, selected ten men each from their respective companies,
who were to march to Carthage, in compliance with the request of the
Carthage Greys to co-operative with them in committing the murder.
These twenty men were marched a short distance to one side, where they
received their instructions from Col. Williams, Mark Aldrich, Capt.
Jacob Davis, and Capt. Grover, and they were sent off. I do not
recollect the names of any of these twenty, with the exception of two
brothers—coopers in Warsaw, by the name of Stevens. One of them is
about six feet three inches high, well proportioned and athletic. The
other is near five feet nine inches high, with dark complexion and
dark hair. When the officers were interrogated as to the object of
these twenty men beings sent in advance of the troops, they evaded the
truth by replying that they had been detailed for a picket guard.</p>
<p>The troops were marched. We arrived at the crossing of the railroad at
12 o’clock. We were there met by Sharp and others, bearing dispatches
from the governor, disbanding the troops. This unexpected order threw
the troops into a perfect panic. They cursed the governor for not
permitting them to march through to Nauvoo. Their object in wishing to
go—and this was understood with all the militia—was to burn the city
and exterminate the inhabitants. These designs were baffled by the
disbanding of the troops. In justice to the character of Governor
Ford, I would remark that this object in disbanding the troops, was to
prevent such an awful calamity.</p>
<p>The disbanding orders were read by Col. Levi Williams. Captains Davis,
Grover and Elliott, immediately called their companies together.</p>
<p>Thomas C. Sharp mounted his “big bay horse,” and made an inflammatory
speech to the companies, characteristic of his corrupt heart. The
following is a short extract, as near as my memory will serve me:</p>
<p>“FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS! The crisis has arrived when it becomes
our duty to rise, as freemen, and assert our rights. The law is
insufficient for us; the governor will not enforce it; we must take it
into our hands; we know what wrongs we suffer, and we are the best
calculated to redress them. Now is the time to put a period to the mad
career of the Prophet; sustained as he is by a band of fanatical
military saints! We have borne his usurpations until it would be
cowardice to bear them longer! My Fellow citizens! Improve the
opportunity that offers; lest the opportunity pass, and the despotic
Prophet will never again be in your power. All things are understood,
we must hasten to Carthage and murder the Smiths, while the governor
is absent at Nauvoo. Beard the lions in their den. The news will reach
Nauvoo before the governor leaves. This will so enrage the “Mormons,”
that they will fall upon and murder Tom Ford, and we shall then be rid
of the d—-d little governor and the ‘Mormons’ too.” (Cheers.)</p>
<p>This speech was likely to fail of having the desired effect. None
seemed willing to be the first to start. At last Capt. Grover started,
and declared he would go alone, if no person would follow him. Soon
one person followed, then another, until a company of eighty-four was
made up. All the troops that had not volunteered in this company were
told to go home. The twenty men, who had been sent forward to commit
the murder, were sent for and they formed a part of the eighty-four.</p>
<p>Here I felt that the purpose, for which I volunteered, had been
baffled. I expected to have met with the governor at Golden’s Point,
and could I have done so, I entertained no doubt; I could have
succeeded in putting a stop to the murder. But instead of marching to
Golden’s Point as we anticipated, he marched to Nauvoo. Under these
circumstances I was at a loss to know what to do. I had not time to go
to Nauvoo, and raise a posse to surround the jail as a guard before
this company would arrive there. I was on foot, and would have ten or
twelve miles farther to travel than they. As I could do nothing
better, I was determined to follow on with the company and see what
they would do. Several others like myself, followed out of curiosity,
without being armed. Carthage lay directly on my route home.</p>
<p>After we had arrived within nearly six miles of Carthage, they made a
halt. Col. Williams rode three or four times backwards and forwards
from the company to the Carthage Greys. He said he would have the
Carthage Greys come and meet them. They marched within four miles of
Carthage, when they were met by one of the Greys, bringing a note to
the following import:</p>
<p>“Now is a delightful time to murder the Smiths. The governor has gone
to Nauvoo with all the troops. The Carthage Greys are left to guard
the prisoners. Five of our men will be stationed at the jail; the rest
will be upon the public square. To keep up appearances, you will
attack the men at the jail—a sham scuffle will ensue—their guns will
be loaded with blank cartridges—they will fire in the air.”</p>
<p>They were also instructed by the person bearing this dispatch, to fire
three guns as they advanced along the fence that led from the woods to
the jail. This was to serve as a signal to the Carthage Greys that
they were in readiness.</p>
<p>After they had received their instructions, the company followed along
up the hollow that struck into the point of timber.</p>
<p>Here I left them, and pursued my way to the jail, where I arrived ten
or fifteen minutes first. How gladly would I have informed the
defenseless prisoners of the plot that was shortly to be executed
against them. Had the Carthage Greys been loyal members of the militia
of the country, I could have affected their escape; but it was
impossible.</p>
<p>Soon the mob made their appearance. They advanced in single file along
the fence, as they had been instructed. When they had gained about
half the distance of the fence, the signal guns were fired.</p>
<p>Soon the jail was surrounded by the mob. They had blacked themselves
with wet powder, while they were in the woods, which gave them the
horrible appearance of demons. The most of them had on blue hunting
shirts, with fringe around the edges.</p>
<p>The Carthage Greys advanced within about eight rods of the jail where
they halted, in plain view of the whole transaction, until the deed
was executed. They occupied a place in an eastern direction from the
jail. When they halted, their commander, Capt. Smith matched in front
of the mob, said “How do you do, gentlemen?” and passed through their
ranks, taking a station in their rear.</p>
<p>Col. Williams shouted out, “Rush in!—there’s no danger boys—all is
right!”</p>
<p>A sham encounter ensued between them and the guard. They clinched each
other, and the mob threw some of them upon the ground. A few guns were
fired in the air.</p>
<p>A rush was made in the door, at the south part of the building. This
let them into a hall, or entry, from which they ascended a flight of
stairs, at the head of which, turning to the right; they reached the
door that led into the prisoners’ room.</p>
<p>To give a relation of some of the particular circumstances that
transpired in the jail, I am compelled to depend, principally, upon
the statements of others. My sources of information, upon these
points, however, are of such a nature that the reader can regard them
as strictly correct.</p>
<p>The spirits of the prisoners had been rather depressed all the
afternoon. Why it was so they knew not. They knew the faith of the
governor, and the State of Illinois, was pledged for their protection.
Elder John Taylor had been singing a hymn, found on the 254th page of
the English edition of the Latter-day Saints’ Hymn Book, entitled, “A
Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”</p>
<p>This seemed rather applicable to their situation; it had a solemnity
in it that tranquilized their minds, and at the request of Hyrum
Smith, it was sung over again.</p>
<p>From this pleasant communion, they were aroused by curses, threats,
and the heavy and fierce rush of the mob up the stairs.</p>
<p>Hyrum stood near the center of the room, in front of the door. The mob
fired a ball through the panel of the door, which entered Hyrum’s
head, at the left side of his nose. He fell upon his back with his
head one or two feet from the north east corner of the room,
exclaiming, as he fell, “I am a dead man!” In all, four balls entered
his body. One ball (it must have been fired through the window from
the outside) passed through his body with such force—entering his
back—that it completely broke to pieces a watch which he wore in his
vest pocket.</p>
<p>His death was sudden and without pain. Thus fell Hyrum Smith, the
Patriarch of the Church of God, a martyr for his holy religion! In
that brief moment was the Church of Jesus Christ deprived of the
services of as good a man as ever had a name in its history.</p>
<p>A shower of balls were poured through all parts of the room, many of
which lodged in the ceiling, just above the head of the fallen man.</p>
<p>A few hours previous to this, a friend to General Joseph Smith, put in
his possession a revolving pistol with</p>
<p>six chambers, usually called a “pepper-box.” With this in his hand, he
took a position by the wall at the left of the door.</p>
<p>Joseph reached his pistol through the door, which was pushed a little
ajar, and fired three of the barrels; the rest missed fire. He wounded
three of the assailants—two mortally—one of whom, as he rushed down
out of the door, was asked if he was badly hurt. He replied, “Yes; my
arm is shot all to pieces by Old Joe; but I don’t care, I’ve got
revenge; I shot Hyrum!”</p>
<p>Elder Taylor took a position beside the door, with Elder Richards, and
parried off their muskets with walking sticks as they were firing.</p>
<p>What must have been the feelings of General Smith, at this critical
juncture! He had fired all of the barrels of his pistol that would
discharge; he had therefore no further means of defense. His brother,
whose life he had been so anxious to preserve, lay a corpse before
him, and his assailants were filling the door with muskets and firing
showers of lead into the room.</p>
<p>Elder Taylor continued parrying their guns, until they had got them
about half the length into the room, when he found resistance vain and
attempted to jump out of the window. Just then a ball from within
struck him on the left thigh; hitting the bone, it glanced through to
within half an inch of the other side. He fell on the window-sill and
expected he would fall out, when a ball from without stuck his watch,
which he carried in his vest pocket, and threw him back into the room.
He was hit by two more balls; one injuring his left wrist
considerably, and the other entering at the side of the bone, just
below the left knee. He fell into the room, and rolled under a bed
that stood at the right of the window, in the south-east corner of the
room. While under the bed, he was fired at several times and was
struck by one ball which tore the flesh on his left hip in a shocking
manner, throwing large quantities of blood upon the wall and floor.
These wounds proved very severe and painful, but he suffered without a
murmur, rejoicing that he had the satisfaction to mingle his blood
with that of the Prophets, and be with them in the last moments of
their earthly existence. His blood, with theirs, can cry to heaven for
vengeance on those who have shed the blood of innocence and slain the
servants of the living God in all ages of the world. This seemed a
source of high gratification and he endured his severe sufferings
without a single complaint, being perfectly resigned to the providence
of God.</p>
<p>Elder Richards was still contending with the assailants, at the door,
when General Smith, seeing there was no safety in the room, and
probably thinking it might save the lives of others if he could escape
from the room, turned calmly from the door, dropped his pistol upon
the floor, saying, “There, defend yourselves as well as you can.”</p>
<p>He sprang into the window; but just as he was preparing to descend, he
saw such an array of bayonets below that he caught by the window
casing, where he hung by his hands and feet, with his head to the
north, feet to the south, and his body swinging downwards. He hung in
that position three or four minutes, during which time he exclaimed,
two or three times, “O, LORD, MY GOD!!!” and fell to the ground.
While he was hanging in that position, Col. Williams hallooed, “Shoot
him! G-d d—n him! Shoot the dam’d rascal!” However, none fired at
him.</p>
<p>He seemed to fall easy. He struck partly on his right shoulder and
back, his neck and head reaching the ground a little before his feet.</p>
<p>He rolled instantly on his face. From this position he was taken by a
young man, who sprang to him from the other side of the fence, who
held a pewter fife in his hand, was barefoot and bare-headed, having
on no coat, with his pants rolled above his knees, and shirt-sleeves
above his elbows. He set President Smith against the south side of the
well-curb that was situated a few feet from the jail. While doing
this, the savage muttered aloud, “This is Old Jo; I know him. I know
you, Old Jo. Damn you: you are the man that had my daddy shot.” The
object he had in talking in this way, I supposed to be this: He wished
to have President Smith and the people in general, believe he was the
son of Governor Boggs, which would lead to the opinion that it was the
Missourians who had come over and committed the murder. This was the
report that they soon caused to be circulated; but this was too
palpable an absurdity to be credited.</p>
<p>After President Smith had fallen, I saw Elder Willard Richards come to
the window and look out upon the horrid scene that spread itself below
him.</p>
<p>I could not help noticing the striking contrast in the countenance of
President Smith and the horrid, demon-like appearance of his
murderers. The former was calm and tranquil, while the mob were filled
with excitement and agitation.</p>
<p>President Smith’s exit from the room had the tendency to cause those
who were firing into the room to abandon it and rush to the outside.
This gave an opportunity for Elder Richards to convey Elder Taylor
into the cell, which he did, and covered him with a bed, thinking he
might there be secure if the mob should make another rush into the
jail. While they were in the cell, some of the mob again entered the
room; but finding it deserted by all but Hyrum Smith, they left the
jail.</p>
<p>When President Smith had been set against the curb, and began to
recover, from the effects of the fall, Col. Williams ordered four men
to shoot him. Accordingly, four men took an eastern direction, about
eight feet from the curb, Col. Williams stranding partly at their
rear, and made ready to execute the order. While they were making
preparations, and the muskets were raised to their faces, President
Smith’s eyes rested upon them with a calm and quiet resignation. He
betrayed no agitated feelings and the expression upon his countenance
seemed to betoken his inly prayer to be: “O, Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.”</p>
<p>The fire was simultaneous. A slight cringe of the body was all the
indication of pain that he betrayed when the balls struck him. He fell
upon his face. One ball then entered the back part of his body. This
is the ball that many people have supposed struck him about the time
he was in the window. But this is a mistake. I was close by him, and I
know he was not hit with a ball, until after he was seated by the
well-curb.</p>
<p>His death was instantaneous and tranquil. He betrayed no appearance of
pain. His noble form exhibited all its powers of manly strength and
healthful agility, yet not a muscle seemed to move with pain, and
there was no distortion of his features. His death was peaceful as the
falling to sleep of an infant—no cloud of contending passion gathered
upon his brown, and no malediction trembled on his lip. The reward of
a righteous man seemed hovering over him, and his breath ceased with
as much ease and gentleness, as if eternity was exerting an influence
in his behalf and taking his spirit home to a world of “liberty, light
and life.”</p>
<p>The ruffian, of whom I have spoken, who set him against the well-curb,
now secured a bowie knife for the purpose of severing his head from
his body. He raised the knife and was in the attitude of striking,
when a light, so sudden and powerful, burst from the heavens upon the
bloody scene, (passing its vivid chain between Joseph and his
murderers,) that they were struck with terrified awe and filled with
consternation. This light, in its appearance and potency, baffles all
powers of description. The arm of the ruffian, that held the knife,
fell powerless; the muskets of the four, who fired, fell to the
ground, and they all stood like marble statues, not having power to
move a single limb of their bodies.</p>
<p>By this time most of the men had fled in great disorder. I never saw
so frightened a set of men before. Col. Williams saw the light and was
also badly frightened; but he did not entirely lose the use of his
limbs or speech. Seeing the condition of these men, he hallooed to
some who had just commenced to retreat, for God’s sake to come and
carry off these men. They came back and carried them by the main
strength towards the baggage wagons. They seemed as helpless as if
they were dead.</p>
<p>The storm had passed away. The cowardly demons had fled, and I stood a
spectator, gazing on the scene. There lay Joseph Smith, the martyred
leader of thousands who revered him. The man who had passed like a
magic spirit through society, and in a career of a few years, ad lit
up the world with wonder, astonishment and admiration, was left dead
upon the ground! He lay full low; yet, in my contemplations, I
regarded him as the triumphant conqueror left master of the bloody
field. Eighty-four men, (fiends,) armed with United States’ muskets
and other weapons, had the unparalleled heroism to murder him while a
prisoner; (!!) while he had the nerve and presence of mind to
contend with such unequal force, and with a pocket pistol kill and
wound as many as they. In him was the spirit of dauntless bravery
exemplified.</p>
<p>But a few days before his noble figure rode at the head of a mighty
legion, numbering five thousand brave hearts and ten thousand strong
arms. His presence gave them courage, his words animated their hearts
and nerved their limbs; and the large heart that beat within his manly
breast, entwined around it their love and affection, by the generosity
and nobility of its principles.</p>
<p>In this situation he had the power to defend himself. How
insignificant was the power of this contemptible mob, in comparison
with this force, that could have borne him off triumphant, in defiance
of all their resistance! From this position of power he
descended—threw down the sword that could have protected him from
the menace of mobs—and trusted himself to the honor and fidelity of
men and the boasted majesty of American jurisprudence!</p>
<p>O, man! How worthless are your promises! How perfidious are your
ways! He that would have died for the maintenance of his honor, fell
a sacrifice to the broken faith of other men!</p>
<p>The murder took place at fifteen minutes past five o’clock, p. m.,
June 27, 1844.</p>
<p>…People talk about “Mormon” thieves, when they have eighty-four
beings, fiends in human shape, running at large in their community,
who were actually engaged in murder! The people of Illinois talk
about “Mormon” usurpation, and treasonable designs in their leaders,
and their senate chamber echoing with the denunciation of a fiend yet
dripping with the warm blood of innocence! The legislature and
governor repeal the Nauvoo City charter, for some pretended stretch of
municipal power, and they welcome to their councils a being with an
indictment hanging over his head for the highest crime known to the
laws! They talk about the “Mormon” abuse of habeas corpus, while they
pass special decrees that no member shall be subject to any process,
whether civil or criminal, during the session of the senate, for the
special benefit of a murderer, thereby releasing him from the custody
of the sheriff, and screening him from justice! They prate about
“Mormon” disloyalty, while the plighted faith of the State is
broken, and her honor trampled in the dust!</p>
<p>Gentle reader, I have given as faithful a narrative as I possibly
could. I have related scenes through which I have passed myself—scenes
of danger, excitement and wickedness. My life has been hunted by day
and by night; the quietude of my family has been broken up, and the
villains are still determined to take my life. I have thus far eluded
them; but I know not when my life may be taken as a sacrifice to atone
for telling the truth in a free country. But I am at the defiance of
devils and emissaries of hell, and will not shrink from duty, or cower
under their menaces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Carthage trial transcript</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Mr. Josiah Lamborn’s opening speech to the Jury:</strong></p>
<p>You are here called upon to Judge a truly extraordinary case; it is
extraordinary on account of the peculiar celebraty of the person
killed, and on account of the peculiar circumstances, attending the
killing of this man, and that has attended the whole account
throughout this County and the adjoining Country, the Case is one of
peculiar interest, and vast importanse to the whole Country, to it
public attention is directed from every part, the eyes of the whole
country is upon us, it has not only excited a feeling of considerable
interest among the people of the united stated, but throughout the
civilized world.</p>
<p>I came here under the direction of the Governor, on the part of the
Government to assist the state’s attorney, but I have to stand alone,
I do not come here as the Champion of any party, or interest, neither
do I wish to meddle, with you as parties, either in politics, or
religion, or to entangle myself in any of the prejudices, troubles,
and animosities, which effect this community, and render you a
discontented and unhappy people,</p>
<p>I am not here, to court the favour, or smiles, of any men or party of
men, but I intend to act, with becoming decision and firmness, in
spite of the consequences, and vindicate the supremacy, and majesty,
of the law, I have an array of learned Counsellors against one, I was
commanded to seek assistance, but it cannot be had, I therefore stand
alone, in this trial and in this community, unaided by council, to
vindicate the Law of Man, but I will do my duty, and do it fearlessly,
with becoming respect for the Laws of our Country, and not for the
Local prejudices and applause of this community, but for the applause
of my own conscience, and for the applause of heaven. A citizen of
your County was confined in Jail under the protection of the Law, and
plighted faith of the Governor, of the State, as to how far his
offences, are two, or far they are false, he may have been guilty of
the basest crimes, or he may have been innocent of the charges alleged
against him, about these things I know nothing, but he has suffered an
awful atonement, for any offence he might have committed and is gone
to answer for it before his God.</p>
<p>He being confined in Jail a wreckless mob, came here, on these
peacable prairies, and took that man from Jail and murdered him, but
the Laws of Mobocracy, not having the laws of God and man, in their
favour,</p>
<p>We alledge that these men arraigned before you at the Bar, are the men
who new the movers, and instigators, of that mob who committed the
crime, and shed blood, upon the soil of your town, they were the cause
of the spilling of that blood in consequence of which murder, rests
upon their hands, and hearts of these five men here arraigned,</p>
<p>It is not necessary to prove that these men, entered the Jail, or shot
the Gun, or any of these instruments, by which his death was
accomplished, in order, to convict them, but that the mob, got its
spirit, impulse, movements, and blood thirstiness, from the minds, and
dispositions of these men, and that they were the instigators of that
mob, gave countenance to it and that they did stir up others, to
commit the murder we shall be able fully and sbstantially to prove,
And it is frequently the case, when crime is committed, for the
instigator of the crime to pass away, and let the blood be spilt, or
the crime perpetrated by the underlings, they did direct the arm that
did strike the fatal blow to the heart of the unfortunate victims</p>
<p>There are hundreds here I have no doubt are ready to applaud you, and
rejoice with you, if you should return a verdict of not guilty against
these men, but as you respect your honour, your Country, and your God,
I call upon you to do justice to this case, for this state of things
cannot exist much longer, the law must prevail, mobs, may triumph for
a short time, but the law, will ultimately prevail and triumph,</p>
<p><strong>The guilt of this crime, hangs over you, as a blight, and curse,
which is destroying your character, and gnawing at the root of your
prosperity, it is a blood stain upon your character, and a foul blot,
which cannot be erased, but with vengeance, and rigour, to deal out
the law, as the law is, As you respect, and fear your God, as you
respect, and fear God, and not man, do your duty, for it is better
that truth and righteousness prevail, and that even handed Justice, be
dealt out to the full, thanto suffer the guilty to go free, and escape
the merited punishment due to their deeds.</strong></p>
<p><strong>We have come here, to test, the power, and majesty of the law, and
we ask Justice, Justice we ask, and by man shall his blood be shed,
here is, the law of God, and the law of God, is higher than the law of
man, the style is between the spirit of Mobocracy, and the spirit of
the law, for their can be no liberty, no equal rights, no-patriotism
in an agriculteral county like this, where such things are permitted
to exist, it is not at all surprising that Mobs rise upon your
Community, when a crime like this should exist, and the people
altogether justify the perpetration of such a deed but while you
justify will not heaven frown, and man will frown, if he possess the
feeling of a man, upon abase, violation of the rights and liberties of
others, and under the Just contempt, of the brave and the free, you
institutions, will become, a stigma and will sink to rise no more,</strong></p>
<p><strong>Where, are your Laws, here in this country, where the protection,
that ought to be thrown, around your persons if such violations, are
to be committed, as they have been, you are not sure, but that
yourselves, may be the next victim, you are now interested in the
welfare of your County, the laws of your Country, demands such an
interest, and you are not, the only ones, that feels this interest,
but as far as the name, of Liberty, Religion, the rights of
conscience, and the power of the divine providence is extended their
will be interests manifested in the examination of this case,
therefore it is for you to know and consider well your duty and make
your decision according, to the dictates of truth, and apure
conscience, remember that these oaths you have made is registered in
[illegible], and you will be called upon to answer the manner in
which you have determined this case, between the state, and these
individuals, for taking the blood of that man against the Laws of God
and against your own human laws, that govern the Laws in which you
live.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Opening Statement for the Defense by Colonel William A. Richardson
in the Carthage Conspiracy Trial</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<!-- raw HTML omitted -->
<blockquote>
<p>Mr. Jonas Hobbart Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Hobbart do you live in this town.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Did you live in town on the day that Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Will you state to the Jury, what you know, about that transaction,
What day of the month, did it occur</p>
<p>It occurred on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of June 1844,</p>
<p>Was you there at the time, the transaction took place;</p>
<p>I did not see the men killed.</p>
<p>Was you there the time they were killed.</p>
<p>No, but I saw him after he was killed.</p>
<p>In what situation did you see him</p>
<p>At the time the men was killed I was not at the Jail, among the crowd
of people; I heard the Guns fired,</p>
<p>Where was you when you heard the Guns fired.</p>
<p>I was at home about one hundred yards from the Jail.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith fall out of the Window.</p>
<p>I was not in a position to see.</p>
<p>In what position was you.</p>
<p>I was at the South side of the Jail and he fell from the East side.</p>
<p>Did you examine his wounds.</p>
<p>I did he was shot in the right breast, and on the left shoulder.</p>
<p>Where did the ball enter his heart.</p>
<p>Below the right pass.</p>
<p>Was he entirely dead when you came to him.</p>
<p>Yes when I went to take hold of him.</p>
<p>You say he was shot through the right breast.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where did the ball go out.</p>
<p>I could not tell.</p>
<p>Was it a large ball.</p>
<p>I could not tell, whether it was, a large ball or not.</p>
<p>Did you see anybody there besides yourself</p>
<p>I saw a great crowd of people there.</p>
<p>Did you see any that you knew.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these defendants there.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How many people were there.</p>
<p>I suppose about one hundred and fifty.</p>
<p>Did you see any in disguise there.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Are you acquainted with any of these men on trial.</p>
<p>I am.</p>
<p>Did you see any of them at the Jail.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>When did the crowds leave the Jail.</p>
<p>A short time afterwards.</p>
<p>Did you hear any talking, about the matter, in the immediate vicinity
where you was.</p>
<p>I heard nothing only some one told them to stand back.</p>
<p>Was anybody killed but Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>I could not tell there was so much noise.</p>
<p>Were you acquainted with Joseph Smith before that occurrence.</p>
<p>I knew him by sight.</p>
<p>You knew there was some person killed.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long was it from the time you went there till, the crowd retired.</p>
<p>As near as I could judge, about two minutes.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of them, say, anything about killing him, as they
retired.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see any of them examine him after he was dead.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>How long was he dead before you saw him, was the blood still fresh and
warm.</p>
<p>O. Yes.</p>
<p>Did the mob retreat pretty fast in going away.</p>
<p>As fast as they could walk.</p>
<p>Did you not see any of them run.</p>
<p>I don’t think they ran.</p>
<p>Did the most of them seem to be armed.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What sort of weapons had they.</p>
<p>Muskets.</p>
<p>Had they any rifels.</p>
<p>Yes. Rifels of a peculiar kind with [illegible]</p>
<p>Had they any knives.</p>
<p>I think I saw a knife in the hands of one man.</p>
<p>Did anybody seem to be giving and command to the mob.</p>
<p>I did not hear any orders given.</p>
<p>Was there much noise upon the ground.</p>
<p>Yes there was much noise.</p>
<p>How many guns fired together.</p>
<p>About thirty, as fas as I could judge,</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p>[Direct examination by Josiah Lamborn]</p>
<p>John Paton Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Paton where was you on the day that Joseph Smith was Killed.</p>
<p>I was part of the day at home in the country.</p>
<p>Did you see Mr. Sharp that day.</p>
<p>I did</p>
<p>Did you see any other of these men that day.</p>
<p>Yes I saw them all.</p>
<p>Where did you see them.</p>
<p>I saw some of them in Warsaw, and some between here and Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did you see Davis, Oldridge, Sharp, Williams and Grover, in Warsaw
early that morning.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect, of seeing all of them, then that day.</p>
<p>You saw some of them there that day did you.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What were they doing when you saw them.</p>
<p>[illegible] was taking up the line of march to go to golden point.</p>
<p>Did you go to golden point.</p>
<p>[illegible] that part of the way, and was discharged.</p>
<p>Who discharged you.</p>
<p>[illegible] met Colonel Williams, and was discharged.</p>
<p>Was Sharp there, when you was discharged.</p>
<p>I don’t think he was.</p>
<p>How far from Warsaw when you was discharged.</p>
<p>We was five or six miles.</p>
<p>Was David, Oldridge, and Williams, there, when the company was
discharged.</p>
<p>I think they were.</p>
<p>Was Grover there.</p>
<p>He was somewhere there a [illegible]</p>
<p>Sharp also.</p>
<p>I did not see him there.</p>
<p>What time of the day was you discharged.</p>
<p>Near twelve O clock.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of these men address the people upon anything.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Who addressed the people.</p>
<p>I think Sharp made a small speech.</p>
<p>Do you watch any of the speech.</p>
<p>I recollect some portion of it.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>(the witness waited some considerable time before he answered)</p>
<p>I think he said that Joe Smith, was now in custody, and the Mormons
would elect the officers of the County, and by that means, Joe would
select his own, Jury and get free.</p>
<p>Was anything said, about killing, Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he was what should be done with him.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there anything said, about their coming in here, with the troops.</p>
<p>Some of the Officers, I think Oldridge said something about it.</p>
<p>[illegible] it was Oldridge that was in favor of going to Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t know that it was Oldridge, or some other of them, there was
something said in the crowd, of going to Carthage I think.</p>
<p>What did the people there, [illegible] the [illegible], in common
with these men, say they were going to Carthage for,</p>
<p>I could not tell, what their intention was, they did not say.</p>
<p>How many miles was that from Carthage.</p>
<p>Ten or fifteen miles.</p>
<p>What time of the day was it.</p>
<p>It was about twelve O. Clock of the day.</p>
<p>Did you see them, start for Carthage.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these five men among them.</p>
<p>I saw Williams among them.</p>
<p>Did you see any other of these men among them.</p>
<p>I saw [illegible] Sharp and Grover, and Davis, turned back to
Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did you see David after that, any more that day.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did Davis say anything to the troops.</p>
<p>He did not make any speech he was [illegible] among the troops, I
did not know what he said, I asked him, if he was going back, he said
he was.</p>
<p>How many started to come to Carthage.</p>
<p>It is more than I can tell.</p>
<p>Did a hundred start this way.</p>
<p>I think there was.</p>
<p>What time of the day did they start for Carthage.</p>
<p>About twelve O. clock.</p>
<p>Was there any on foot</p>
<p>Some few.</p>
<p>Was Williams, Oldridge, Sharp, and Grover on horseback.</p>
<p>Grover was not on horseback, the other three was.</p>
<p>Who took the command.</p>
<p>I could not tell.</p>
<p>And Mr. Davis refused to go as Captain.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Then I suppose Colonel Williams was over the whole concern.</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>How far, did you come, with them.</p>
<p>I turned off to the left.</p>
<p>Did you here any more speeches made.</p>
<p>Oldridge said something.</p>
<p>With regard to what.</p>
<p>He spoke of the grievances of the people, and that the Mormons, had
the power themselves, and they must do something to stop it, that was
about the substance of what he said.</p>
<p>What was the words Sharp used.</p>
<p>He said the Mormons, had the power to elect the officers, of the
County, and that Joe, would select his own Jurors, and be set free.</p>
<p>Did he say anything more.</p>
<p>Yes, but I don’t recollect all his speech.</p>
<p>He said Joe, would select the Officers of the County, did he.</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing more that you remember.</p>
<p>He said, the Governor had said whatever they did, to do it quickly</p>
<p>How long did he speak.</p>
<p>A few moments.</p>
<p>What were the grievances Oldridge spoke about.</p>
<p>He said that Joe violated the Laws, and trampled upon your rights.</p>
<p>Did Sharp speak before Oldridge.</p>
<p>No. Aldridge did not make a very fair start at it and Mr. Sharp arose
up, and made the speech.</p>
<p>Was Williams, and Grover there at that time.</p>
<p>Williams rode up about the time Sharp was closing his speech.</p>
<p>And Sharp said the Governor said what you do, do quickly.</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>After they had got through speaking, what then.</p>
<p>Some went to Carthage, and some went home.</p>
<p>Was those who came to Carthage, going towards home.</p>
<p>Some of them some lived South, some South West.</p>
<p>Then they were mostly going from home.</p>
<p>They were.</p>
<p>Did Grover, Sharp, Oldridge, and Williams go with them.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>You say Davis went back, what did he say, he was going back for.</p>
<p>He said he was going home.</p>
<p>Had he no excuse, for going back.</p>
<p>I suppose he was going back to attend to his business.</p>
<p>Did Colonel Williams say anything as they started for Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect of hearing Williams say one word.</p>
<p>What sort of a horse did Williams ride.</p>
<p>He did not ride a black one or a white one.</p>
<p>You don’t recollect the colour.</p>
<p>I suppose.</p>
<p>It was neither black nor white you say.</p>
<p>Neither.</p>
<p>Was it a sorrel.</p>
<p>It might have been a Sorrel.</p>
<p>How many baggage Waggons were there.</p>
<p>It is more than I can tell.</p>
<p>How many came this way.</p>
<p>I saw one, start this way.</p>
<p>Do you know who was driving it.</p>
<p>I think it was Mr. [illegible].</p>
<p>Whose team was it.</p>
<p>It was his own team.</p>
<p>Were there any others coming this way.</p>
<p>There might have been two or three.</p>
<p>Did they [illegible] their arms in the Waggons.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Were they all armed.</p>
<p>We had our arms.</p>
<p>You don’t know that they put their arms into the baggage Waggons or
not.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Oldridge team there.</p>
<p>I don’t know that he had a team he was riding if I recollect right. He
might have a Waggon there and you not know it.</p>
<p>I don’t know whether he had or not.</p>
<p>Do you recollect the day of the month Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I think it was 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> June 1844.</p>
<p>Was it not a little after [illegible] they started for Carthage.</p>
<p>It was about twelve.</p>
<p>Was that near the Railroad shanties.</p>
<p>It was night at that place.</p>
<p>Which direction did Williams leave from that.</p>
<p>A Southern direction from that.</p>
<p>Retired-.</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->George Walker Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr Walker, I’ll get you to the Jury, if you saw any of these five men,
on June 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> 1844, the day that Joseph Smith was murdered.</p>
<p>I am not positive that I saw all of them, that day, though I think I
saw some of those gentlemen. that day,</p>
<p>Who of them did you see that day.</p>
<p>I think I saw Davis, Grover, and Williams,</p>
<p>Where did you see them.</p>
<p>I saw them at different places, I saw them at Warsaw, and at the
Railroad shanties,</p>
<p>Do you recollect of seeing Sharp that day.</p>
<p>I cant say.</p>
<p>Do you recollect of seeing Oldridge that day.</p>
<p>I cant say.</p>
<p>Did you hear Davis, Williams, and Grover, say anything about, coming
to Carthage.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>What did Williams say about it;</p>
<p>It would be impossible for me to identify the [illegible] he made.</p>
<p>Well as near as you can.</p>
<p>He stated that Governor Ford, had done all he could do, and gone as
far as the law authorized him to go in the then existing
circumstances.</p>
<p>Did he say anything of coming to Carthage.</p>
<p>He said something about it,</p>
<p>Was there anything said about volunteers.</p>
<p>Yes. there was a call made for volunteers.</p>
<p>Do you recollect who made that call.</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Do you recollect if any of these men were present when it was made.</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>Did Colonel Williams say anything about the Mormons,</p>
<p>Not to my recollection</p>
<p>Did he speak of coming to Carthage.</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>Did you hear Davis say anything of coming that day.</p>
<p>I heard him say something of not coming.</p>
<p>What did he say about not coming.</p>
<p>He said he would be damned if he would go to kill a man, that was
confined inprison.</p>
<p>Who was he talking to.</p>
<p>to myself and others.</p>
<p>Who was present beside yourself.</p>
<p>I am not positive</p>
<p>Did you hear Grover say anything, about coming.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see these men start.</p>
<p>I cannot say I did.</p>
<p>Was there anything said, publickly that day in the crowd beside what
you heard Davis say, about the killing of the Smiths,</p>
<p>probably I heard something said by some individuals at this time.</p>
<p>Did they talk publickly about coming to kill Smith.</p>
<p>I did not say I heard any body.</p>
<p>What were they going to Carthage for.</p>
<p>That is beyond the extent of my knowledge.</p>
<p>You was discharged, and went home about your buissness I suppose.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>And Davis swore, he would not, go to Carthage, and kill a man in Jail.</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>What colour of a horse did Williams ride.</p>
<p>He was riding abay mare.</p>
<p>Do you know anything, about the baggage Waggons.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>How many were there.</p>
<p>Eight or Sic at least.</p>
<p>Did you see a man of the name of Brackenberry driving one of the
waggons.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Had Oldridge any Waggons, there.</p>
<p>Not to my knowledge.</p>
<p>Do you know a man of the name of Fuller having a baggage Waggon there.</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Then retired.</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mr. Worrel Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Worrel, was you one of the gaurd, at the Jail, the say that Smith
was killed.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was you in town all that day.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was you near the Jail.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith where he was killed.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these five men there.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>How many men were there at the time Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I could not say, but I suppose from one to two hundred.</p>
<p>How long did they stay.</p>
<p>I suppose three or four minutes.</p>
<p>What did they do, when they first, came.</p>
<p>The first motion was to come up in front of the Jail and when they had
got formed there, they made a rush for the door.</p>
<p>Did many go up stairs.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Was smith shot in a number of places.</p>
<p>I can not say I never examined the body.</p>
<p>Did you see any body there, you knew, after the deed was done.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Was there a good deal of confusion.</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Was any of them disguised.</p>
<p>Some looked as if they had wet there hands, and put powder on their
faces.</p>
<p>How many were disguised.</p>
<p>In my opinion about thirty or forty.</p>
<p>The thing was done in great hurry and confusion I suppose.</p>
<p>It was.</p>
<p>Did you hear anything said.</p>
<p>I cannot say, the pieces were going off, all the time, so that I could
not either see, nor hear, anything said.</p>
<p>Where was you, when they made a rush to the door.</p>
<p>I was at the door.</p>
<p>Then you stood in the door.</p>
<p>No I was sitting on the door, step, when the men came up.</p>
<p>Did you change your position.</p>
<p>I was pushed, and [illegible], away about fifty feet in the crowd.</p>
<p>Did any go into the yard.</p>
<p>[illegible, looks like ‘These’ or ‘There’] did.</p>
<p>How far is the fence, from the door.</p>
<p>It is about fifteen feet from the door.</p>
<p>Smith was killed inside of the yard.</p>
<p>I suppose. He was.</p>
<p>How many of the mob, was inside of the fence.</p>
<p>The larger portion of them was inside of the fence, but there was some
out and some in.</p>
<p>Did any stop to examine his body.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith when he died.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>How long did he live after he fell.</p>
<p>Not to exceed a minute after he struck the ground.</p>
<p>Did you see him hanging in the window.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>You saw him die.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Which way did the Mob, come.</p>
<p>From the direction of Nauvoo a north western [illegible] down the
fence.</p>
<p>Is not that the [illegible] direction to Warsaw down that fence.</p>
<p>No it is direct from Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Which direction does the fence run.</p>
<p>It runs directly west, the Warsaw road is a little South.</p>
<p>What is the direction from here to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>It is north of west.</p>
<p>Could they not go to Warsaw and go that way.</p>
<p>They can go to Warsaw by [illegible, looks like ‘quitting’] the
road.</p>
<p>In what direction is the Railroad shanties.</p>
<p>They are in a direct line to Warsaw, a little south of west.</p>
<p>Were their any on horseback.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect of seeing any on horseback at the time.</p>
<p>Did the men in town come up, after the Mob had retired.</p>
<p>There were men, who had been in on duty from the country and some of
the citizens, came up.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these five men come up with them.</p>
<p>I think I saw Mr. Oldridge come up with them.</p>
<p>How long after Smith was killed was it that you saw Mr. Oldridge
there.</p>
<p>About fifteen minutes after the event.</p>
<p>What time in the evening was it.</p>
<p>Between five and six O. clock.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams there.</p>
<p>I do not recollect, I am satisfied I did not see him there.</p>
<p>Was he in town.</p>
<p>He was.</p>
<p>How far is the Railroad shanties from Carthage.</p>
<p>Twelve miles.</p>
<p>Was, Grover here.</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>Was Davis here.</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>You saw Williams and Oldridge, both here that evening.</p>
<p>I think I did.</p>
<p>You are acquainted with almost every body in the County.</p>
<p>I suppose , I am acquainted with about one third.</p>
<p>And there was between one hundred to one hundred and fifty people
there and you did not know a single one.</p>
<p>No there was such a hurry I could not tell who was there.</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p>Franklin Worrel Captain of the Gaurd, that was at the Jail, when the
Mob, came up, was again called into the witness box by [illegible,
looks like ‘Squire’] Lamburn to ask him questions that were before
omitted, Mr. Browning for the defence, stood up in opposition to his
asking him any further questions, which cause an investigation of the
Law upon the subject which lasted some time, but [illegible] was
finally decided by the Court that Mr. Lamburn have the privilege with
strict injunctions, upon the witness not to answer any questions that
would implicate himself.</p>
<p>Mr. Worrel, Do you know if the Carthage [illegible, looks like
‘Greys’] that evening loaded their guns, with blank catridge,</p>
<p>at this question Mr. Browning and Mr. Richardson spoke out to the
witness saying you need not answer that question.</p>
<p>I know nothing about the Carthage [illegible, looks like ‘Greys’],
only the six men that I had to do with.</p>
<p>Well do those six men, load their guns, with black cartridge that
evening.</p>
<p>I will not answer it.</p>
<p>Let it go to the County there in that way, that he would not answer
the question for fear of implicating himself.</p>
<p>-Retired-</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->(Mr. Lamborn called upon Worrel again to answer a few more
questions, it was opposed by the Defendants counsel, Mr. Lamborn
complained of the manner he had [illegible, looks like
‘disapointed’] in the [illegible, looks like ‘geting’] of his
wittenesses, it was desided he should examin Worrel again.)<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Worrell I would ask you if during that [illegible] you saw
Williams before the mob came [illegible]?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you hear him say anything in reference to the killing?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these other men before the mob came up?</p>
<p>I [illegible, looks like ‘do’ has been written over ‘did’] not
recollect but I think I saw Mr. Sharp.</p>
<p>Where was Williams that afternoon?</p>
<p>In the street.</p>
<p>Did you speak to him yourself?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did you know of any Carthage [illegible, looks like ‘Gray’] sent out
that day?</p>
<p>No I do not think any [illegible, looks like ‘Gray’] went out that
day.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Browning.</p>
<p>What time in the morning did you see Sharp?</p>
<p>About 8 oclock the time the orders where given to disband the troops.</p>
<p>Do you know wether he had staid in town the night before?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>He retire</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mr. Baldwin Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Baldwin, was you in town the day that Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was you at the Jail,</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was you there afterwards,</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Where was you when they were killed</p>
<p>I was between the Court house, and the Jail,</p>
<p>Did you see any of these five men in town that evening.</p>
<p>I saw Williams and Sharp, and it appears to me, I saw Oldridge and
Sharp together</p>
<p>Did you see Davis and Grover.</p>
<p>I think not,</p>
<p>What time did you see Sharp and Williams.</p>
<p>Sometime in the afternoon, I cannot tell exactly what time.</p>
<p>Did you see them before, or after the killing.</p>
<p>I saw them before,</p>
<p>How long before the killing took place.</p>
<p>some two or, three hours, I am not sure how long.</p>
<p>What was Williams doing before the killing took place,</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams making any arrangements with the Carthage Greys,</p>
<p>I did not. I was not very well, and did not stir about much till after
the disturbance.</p>
<p>What time did you see Sharp, with Williams, was he here at the same
time you saw Oldridge,</p>
<p>I am not positive, I think he was,</p>
<p>Was Oldridge, Williams, and Sharp all here, before the Mob, came up.</p>
<p>I think they were.</p>
<p>You are sure of Sharp and Williams, and they, are all you are sure of.</p>
<p>Yes</p>
<p>When the Mob came to the Jail immediately after Colonel Williams, went
down with the Greys. Did you go down too.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you hear, an alarm Gun fire.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you hear any Gun fire at the Jail or at the edge of the timber.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Was you in town.</p>
<p>I was in, and out, several times.</p>
<p>Were the Smiths killed, when the Greys arrived at the Jail.</p>
<p>Before the Greys got there the men were dead.</p>
<p>Was Colonel Williams with the Greys,</p>
<p>He was,</p>
<p>He went with them to shoot the Mob, I suppose.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Did the Greys go very fast to the Jail.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>I suppose they were prepared to fight, very bravely,</p>
<p>Yes,</p>
<p>How far were the Greys from the Jail.</p>
<p>About one Hundred and fifty yards.</p>
<p>Did they follow in after the Mob.</p>
<p>Yes and found Smith killed.</p>
<p>Were the Greys left here to gaurd the Jail.</p>
<p>They were.</p>
<p>How many were appointed to gaurd the Jail at a time.</p>
<p>Seven men.</p>
<p>Was Williams and Sharp in town, with the Greys,</p>
<p>I saw Williams, and Sharp in the Street.</p>
<p>Did Sharp go over with the Greys, to the Jail,</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>I suppose the Greys started for the Jail pretty quick, after the
firing commenced.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>Did it surprise them much, when they saw, that Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was Williams on horseback.</p>
<p>I did not see him on horseback.</p>
<p>Was he in a Buggy or any sort of a vehicle.</p>
<p>I beleive not.</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Lawyer Backman Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Backman. Did you see any of these men in town, the day that Smith
was killed.</p>
<p>I did. I saw Colonel Williams and Oldridge.</p>
<p>What time did you see them first.</p>
<p>I saw them before the firing.</p>
<p>How long before.</p>
<p>I saw Oldridge a few minutes before, some fifteen, or Twenty, he came
down to get his dinner.</p>
<p>How long was it before the firing that you saw Mr. Williams.</p>
<p>I saw Williams going in the line of march up to the Jail.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams after they returned from the Jail.</p>
<p>No. I was called on as a Juryman, immediately after,</p>
<p>Did you see Williams immediately after with Wilson speaking about the
killing.</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp there that evening after the killing.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover there that evening after the killing.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did you see Davis here that evening.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Do you belong to the Carthage Grays.</p>
<p>No I belong to the Riflemen</p>
<p>Who was commander.</p>
<p>Wesley Williams had command.</p>
<p>How many companies were left as a gaurd to gaurd the Jail.</p>
<p>Two companies were left here.</p>
<p>Did you hear Oldridge, or Williams, say any thing about the matter,
that evening.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did they stay in town that evening.</p>
<p>Few persons stayed in town that evening, for the Governor told us, all
to leave here, the same night</p>
<p>Was you in Warsaw that night.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where was you.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you exactly.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mr. Camfield Hamilton Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Hamilton. do you live in Warsaw.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Did you keep a tavern in Warsaw at the time this affair took place.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Was you at home that night.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Did a good many people, that night, call at you tavern for Supper.</p>
<p>There was a good many there for Supper.</p>
<p>How late at night,</p>
<p>About dark.</p>
<p>Did some come late at night say about Eleven of Twelve O’clock that
night.</p>
<p>Not that night.</p>
<p>Do you recollect of a large number getting a supper at Fleming ‘s
Tavern that night.</p>
<p>It might have been and I not know it.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp, in Warsaw that night.</p>
<p>I beleive I did.</p>
<p>What time.</p>
<p>About Seven, or Eight, O’clock.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these other men in Warsaw that night.</p>
<p>I beleive I saw them all in Warsaw that night.</p>
<p>What time did you see them.</p>
<p>I saw Grover, and Davis, about Eight o’clock</p>
<p>Did you see Oldridge there that evening.</p>
<p>I think he was.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams there;</p>
<p>I don’t know that I did.</p>
<p>Were they saying anything, about Smith being killed in Carthage,</p>
<p>the news was all over the town about Joseph and Hyrum, being killed,</p>
<p>Was every body talking about it that lived in town.</p>
<p>It was generally talked of.</p>
<p>You say you saw Oldridge about Seven, or Eight O’clock. I think it was
about Nine.</p>
<p>And it was known all over town, that the Smiths, were killed.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Did you hear Sharp, and Grover, say anything about it.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you come to Carthage yourself that say.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see them on the road.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>How did you travel down to Carthage.</p>
<p>In a Carriage.</p>
<p>Was any one with you.</p>
<p>Yes, there was two or three men with me;</p>
<p>Was Oldridge in town here, when you came in.</p>
<p>I beleive not.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams, in town here.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you ever hear Williams say, he knew all about it.</p>
<p>Not that I know of</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p>Court adjourned until one o.clock p.m.</p>
<p>Eli H. Wilson Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Wilson do you live in town.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Was you in town on the day that Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was you up at the Jail.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>What time was you at the Jail.</p>
<p>A few minutes after Smith was killed.</p>
<p>Had the crowd left.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did any of the companies know what was to transacted at Carthage Jail.</p>
<p>No body knew.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these men, on that day.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Who did you see.</p>
<p>I saw Williams, Oldridge, and Sharp,</p>
<p>Did you see Grover, or Davis,</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>What time did you see them.</p>
<p>I saw Williams, and Oldridge, three or four minutes before the firing.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp, about that time.</p>
<p>I am not sure, whiter it was at time, or before it, I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Where did you see Oldridge</p>
<p>I saw him at the street corner of the public square.</p>
<p>Where did you see Williams.</p>
<p>In the direction of the Jail.</p>
<p>When the company started for the Jail, Where was Williams,</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was he not in Davis’s.</p>
<p>I did not see him there.</p>
<p>What did Williams, and Oldridge say, when the firing commenced.</p>
<p>I did not hear them say anything.</p>
<p>Was there anything said about it when the firing commenced.</p>
<p>There was something said about it in the Camp.</p>
<p>Was any of these men in the Camp,</p>
<p>I think not, but I saw Mr. Oldridge, pass along the square going east,
just before that time.</p>
<p>Did you hear him say anything about the firing.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>How near did the Greys, come to the Jail.</p>
<p>They came up to the Jail.</p>
<p>Was Williams, along with you, or in advance of you.</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>Was it understood that Smith was to be killed that evening.</p>
<p>There was no such understanding</p>
<p>Did not Williams, and Oldridge say something about it.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did not the Carthage Greys halt, a short time, before they went up to
the Jail,</p>
<p>I don’t recollect, some were scared.</p>
<p>How long was you from the time the first Gun, was fired till you got
to the Jail,</p>
<p>A short time.</p>
<p>Was it Ten minutes.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was it five minutes,</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Were you all ready to go.</p>
<p>We got ready pretty quick.</p>
<p>How far away were the men that killed Smith when you got there were
they out of sight.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How many yards were they off,</p>
<p>about three hundred Yards, and perhaps , a little more.</p>
<p>How far from this corner of the Jail, where you stood,</p>
<p>About four or five hundred Yards.</p>
<p>Do you think it is three hundred Yards from the public square to the
Jail.</p>
<p>I think it is.</p>
<p>You say you saw Williams, and Oldridge there before the firing
commenced,</p>
<p>I saw Oldridge pass along the North West corner, of the Square,</p>
<p>Did you hear an alarm Gun,</p>
<p>I don’t recollect any only the firing I heard,</p>
<p>When the Company was called out who called out the Company.</p>
<p>I did I am the Sergeant of the Company.</p>
<p>Did you see any body on the Court House giving signals.</p>
<p>I beleive I saw some person on the Court house.</p>
<p>Did you see that person on the court house, when the firing commenced,</p>
<p>I don’t recollect,</p>
<p>Who did you see, on the court house.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>How many did you see on the court house.</p>
<p>I could not say,</p>
<p>Was there more than one on the Court house.</p>
<p>I think there was,</p>
<p>Where was the person on the Court house. Was he upon the cuple,</p>
<p>He was.</p>
<p>How long was it from the time you heard the first Gun, to the time you
left the square was it as long as would take a person to get on top of
the courthouse.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>You recollect you saw a person upon the Court house, before you heard
the Guns fire at all.</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>What was Williams doing, when you saw him about the town,</p>
<p>I saw him stand in the Square, before William Morrison’s door.</p>
<p>Was he talking to anybody.</p>
<p>There was some person standing there.</p>
<p>Had he said anything to you.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did you command the Carthage Greys, when they went out.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Who did.</p>
<p>Captain Smith.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith after he was killed.</p>
<p>I saw them, carry him into the house.</p>
<p>Did you see him fall, from the Window,</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Where was you when he fell.</p>
<p>Near the corner of the lane.</p>
<p>How far from the Jail.</p>
<p>Not very near, for we could see, from the Square to the Jail.</p>
<p>Which way, did Williams, go to the Jail.</p>
<p>I did not see him, start at all.</p>
<p>When you got to the Jail, the Mob, was three hundred Yards , off you
say.</p>
<p>I think so.</p>
<p>Did you make any pursuit after them at all.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>How long, did the Mob stay after they killed Smith.</p>
<p>I could not say how ling.</p>
<p>You can say something near, how long did they stay two, or three,
minutes after Smith fell.</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Was there firing, after Smith fell.</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams that evening after the occerence.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Did you hear him say anything about it since.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Have you heard, any of these other, men say, anything about it since.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>How long had Colonel Williams been in town that evening, before you
saw him.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Do you recollect of seeing him any time before that.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Do you know anything more about this matter than what you have stated
either directly or indirectly.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see anybody at the Jail that you knew.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did you see anybody on horseback.</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Did you got out on the way that these Murderers went,</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Where did the company go to did they go to their encampment.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was you in Warsaw that night.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>[Direct examination by Josiah Lamborn]</p>
<p>William M. Daniels Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Daniels stand up and tell the Jury, what you know about these five
men, Williams, Sharp, Oldridge, Grover and David, Where was you on the
day of that occurence.</p>
<p>I was in Warsaw and Carthage.</p>
<p>On the morning before the murder was there a meeting at Warsaw.</p>
<p>It was understood, that we should march that day, to Nauvoo, I
understood so from the Governor, address, I saw Williams there Captain
Davis, and Grover, and Oldrige (pointing to each man as he named them)</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp.</p>
<p>I saw him that day but not that morning.</p>
<p>What time did the Company start.</p>
<p>In the morning, I cannot tell what time.</p>
<p>What did they go to.</p>
<p>To the railroad shanties.</p>
<p>What was done there.</p>
<p>Disbanding the troops by Colonel Williams.</p>
<p>What was done after that.</p>
<p>Sharp made a speech to them.</p>
<p>Did any body else make a speech.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect of anybody else, making any speeches.</p>
<p>Don’t you recollect of any other of these men, making a speech besides
Sharp.</p>
<p>No. Only Williams, read the disbanding orders.</p>
<p>Then you don’t recollect of any other making speeches, but Sharp.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>What did Sharp say.</p>
<p>It is impossible for me to recollect all the speech but I will tell,
as much as I recollect, He said that it was necessary to get rid of
the Mormons.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about the Smiths, and if he did, what did he say.</p>
<p>He pointed out the [illegible] killed Smith to get rid of these
Mormons and he wanted them to march through to Carthage, He wanted
Captain Davis to go with his Company.</p>
<p>What did Captain Davis say to that.</p>
<p>He would not do it, and told them, if they wanted him to go to Nauvoo,
he would go with them but to go to Carthage he would not do it.</p>
<p>Did Davis say he would meet them here, or he would come round, another
way.</p>
<p>No, Davis said he would go home, and called them damned cowards, and
said they would never, elect him Captain again.</p>
<p>Did you hear Colonel Williams say anything about coming to Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Did you hear Oldridge say anything about coming to Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect that I did.</p>
<p>Did you hear Grover say anything about coming to Carthage.</p>
<p>Grover, said he would go alone if nobody else went.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of these men say what they were going for.</p>
<p>It is impossible for me, to recollect, the words they said.</p>
<p>Did you come with them to Carthage.</p>
<p>I came with them within four miles of Carthage.</p>
<p>Was there a call made at the railroad shanties for volunteers.</p>
<p>There was, and Davis said he would not go and his Company</p>
<p>Did they say what they were going to Carthage for.</p>
<p>I cannot tell the exact words they said.</p>
<p>Well tell as near as you can.</p>
<p>Their object in going was to kill Smith.</p>
<p>How far were they from Carthage at that time, were they ten or twelve
miles.</p>
<p>I don’t know how far.</p>
<p>How long was you coming from there till you left them.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>What time of the day was it, when you was, at the railroad shanties.</p>
<p>About noon.</p>
<p>Did the men carry their arms.</p>
<p>Some carried them, and some put them, in the Baggage wagons.</p>
<p>Were they on foot or on horseback</p>
<p>They were mostly on foot.</p>
<p>Who did you see on horseback.</p>
<p>I saw Mark Oldridge on horseback.</p>
<p>Was Colonel Williams on foot.</p>
<p>I cannot say, Sharp, was on horseback. Grover was on foot.</p>
<p>How many do you think started this way.</p>
<p>I should think between sixty and one hundred.</p>
<p>How many baggage waggons was there.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Was there more than one.</p>
<p>I should think there was two or three.</p>
<p>Where did you leave the company.</p>
<p>About four miles from Carthage I should judge.</p>
<p>Were they altogether, when you left them.</p>
<p>They were scattering along.</p>
<p>Did they come to a halt four miles from Carthage.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>Did these men come into Town in advance of the body.</p>
<p>Oldridge left and came in first.</p>
<p>Did he leave alone.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Did Colonel Williams come with the troops.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect of seeing him after we left the railroad shanties.</p>
<p>Did Oldridge remain with you till within four miles of Carthage before
he left you.</p>
<p>I believe he did.</p>
<p>Was Sharp along with the company.</p>
<p>I never saw him after we left the railroad shanties.</p>
<p>Was Grover along with you.</p>
<p>I did not see Grover untill we came, within, four miles of Carthage.</p>
<p>Was there any division, of the companies, at the four mile point.</p>
<p>The wagons, kept straight on the road and the men turned up a hollow.</p>
<p>Do you know whether Davis, came to the baggage wagons again.</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>How far does that hollow reach.</p>
<p>From the timber to where they turned off on the prairies.</p>
<p>Is there timber between here and where they turned off.</p>
<p>There is.</p>
<p>Well explain it to us.</p>
<p>They took that hollow to the left of the road, and that hollow led to
the timber and I came up the road.</p>
<p>And what became of you then.</p>
<p>I came into Carthage.</p>
<p>How did you travel.</p>
<p>On foot.</p>
<p>Had you any gun or anything with you.</p>
<p>I gave it up, when I was disbanded.</p>
<p>Did you get here before these men.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>How long before them.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these men, before the main company, got here.</p>
<p>I think I did not.</p>
<p>When you came to Town, did you come to the Square.</p>
<p>I went to the Jail in the first place.</p>
<p>Who did you see at the Jail.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you speak to anybody at the Jail.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did you go to the Jail for in the first place.</p>
<p>To see what they were going to do.</p>
<p>Did you see anybody at the Jail.</p>
<p>I saw the gaurd.</p>
<p>Did they speak to you.</p>
<p>No. They were marching round.</p>
<p>Why did not you speak to them, and tell them, the mob were coming up.</p>
<p>Because they knew about it, as well as anybody else.</p>
<p>Did you hear before you got up, that the gaurd was to have their guns
loaded with blank cartridge.</p>
<p>I understood so.</p>
<p>How long do you say it was from the time you came to the Jail till the
time the mob came.</p>
<p>It was from five to fifteen minutes.</p>
<p>Was there a signal gun fired before the Mob came up.</p>
<p>There was guns fired.</p>
<p>How many.</p>
<p>Two or Three.</p>
<p>How far were the troops from the Jail when the guns was fired.</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Were the men that came up disguised.</p>
<p>Some of their faces were blackened with powder, some were black, and
some were not.</p>
<p>How many were blackened.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Where did you stand.</p>
<p>Probably fifteen, or Twenty feet, off the Jail, outside of the yard.</p>
<p>Did any of them, say anything, to you when they came up.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did they do after, they came up their.</p>
<p>Killed the Smiths.</p>
<p>Tell us how they approached the house.</p>
<p>They came up, with a single file, in front of the Jail.</p>
<p>Did they surround the Jail.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>In what direction did they come.</p>
<p>They came up the fence, that was from the Jail to the timber.</p>
<p>How many got over the fence.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>How did they carry their guns.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith fall from the Window.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>How far was you from him.</p>
<p>I was out on the road East of the Jail, the crowd was between me and
him.</p>
<p>Was he shot, before he fell, or not [illegible]</p>
<p>He was not.</p>
<p>How long, was it, after he fell before they left him.</p>
<p>It was a short time.</p>
<p>How many guns were fired after he fell.</p>
<p>I could not tell how many.</p>
<p>Was their one fired.</p>
<p>Yes there was more than two, Three, or four, and may be more, there
was a considerable firing.</p>
<p>Did you see Oldridge there at the Jail.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp at the Jail.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see Davis there.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover there.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Where was he, and what was he doing.</p>
<p>He was running towards the door of the Jail.</p>
<p>Before or after the death of Smith.</p>
<p>Before.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams at the Jail, that evening.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see him when you first went there.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Which way, did Williams, approach the Jail, when you first saw him.</p>
<p>I cannot say which way he came, he was right there, in the middle of
the road with one, of the Carthage Greys on the east side of the Jail.</p>
<p>At what time did you first see Williams.</p>
<p>I saw him before the firing.</p>
<p>Had they gone, into the Jail, before you saw him.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had they first surrounded the Jail before you saw him.</p>
<p>They had come up to the Jail before I saw him.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover after, during the conflict,</p>
<p>I saw him, about the Jail.</p>
<p>Was he armed.</p>
<p>He has a double barrel shot gun.</p>
<p>Did you hear Grover say any thing.</p>
<p>I don’t know that I did.</p>
<p>You did not see Oldridge, Sharp and Davis at the Jail that day.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear Williams say anything.</p>
<p>Yes. he said rush on boys, their is no danger.</p>
<p>Did you hear him say any thing else during the conflict.</p>
<p>Yes. he hallo’ d for them to come round to that side of the Window.</p>
<p>And what was done when they came round.</p>
<p>He told them to shoot the damned scoundrel.</p>
<p>Did you see him after that.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect seeing him after.</p>
<p>Where did you go that night.</p>
<p>To [illegible] Bear Creek.</p>
<p>Who went with you.</p>
<p>a couple of men whose names I do not know.</p>
<p>Was you on foot, or in a wagon.</p>
<p>On foot.</p>
<p>Were these two men in Carthage.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Smith after he was dead.</p>
<p>I saw him after he was shot.</p>
<p>You supposed he was dead.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Had the Mob retreated then.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long after, you supposed that Smith was entirely dead, the whole
of them left.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Did they retreat in a great deal of confusion.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>Did you see any drinking that day.</p>
<p>They had some liquor with them.</p>
<p>Did you drink any of that liquor.</p>
<p>I did not. but they drank, and acted, as if they were drunk.</p>
<p>Are you they author of that book, entitled, a correct account, of the
Murder of Generals Joseph, and Hyrum Smith, at Carthage on the
24<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> day of June 1844, by William M. Daniels, an eye
Witness.</p>
<p>I did not write it Sir.</p>
<p>Who did.</p>
<p>Mr. L. O. Littlefield.</p>
<p>Did he write it from what you told him.</p>
<p>Yes I told him the statements, several times after it occured.</p>
<p>Did you see the manuscript before it was printed.</p>
<p>I saw it sometime before it was printed.</p>
<p>There is something said, in the book, about some light well tell us
about it.</p>
<p>I suppose it will astonish you, to tell you that, I saw a light.</p>
<p>Well explain it to us.</p>
<p>It is represented in the book rather different than what it was.</p>
<p>But it is true that you saw light.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>might it not have been the reflection of a musket.</p>
<p>I don’t say what it might have been.</p>
<p>Was the light seen by any that was standing by except yourself.</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Upon the whole is the composition of that book true did you state the
circumstance to Littlefield as you now relate them.</p>
<p>I think I did.</p>
<p>Was you alarmed at the time you saw the light.</p>
<p>Yes I was considerably excited.</p>
<p>Did you believe in the Mormon Church at that time.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Do you now.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Do you live in Nauvoo.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>What is your buisness.</p>
<p>I am a Cooper by trade.</p>
<p>Do you follow, that business now, for a living.</p>
<p>Yes I do.</p>
<p>In what State was you raised.</p>
<p>In the state of New York.</p>
<p>What is your age.</p>
<p>I am Twenty four years of age.</p>
<p>How long have you been in the state of Illinois.</p>
<p>Seven or Eight years.</p>
<p>Did you ever live up in Cane County.</p>
<p>My father and mother did.</p>
<p>Was Williams position between the Greys, and the Jail.</p>
<p>It was.</p>
<p>He was not very near the Jail.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You say, you don’t know, which way he came when he came there.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long was it, after Smith was killed, before the Carthage Grays
came to the Jail.</p>
<p>Not a great while.</p>
<p>How far has the Mob got away before the Greys came.</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Did you leave town immediately after this occurence.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Lawyer Browning for the defence:</p>
<p>Mr. Daniels where were you living at the time the Smiths was killed.</p>
<p>About three Miles from Augusta.</p>
<p>How long did you live there before the murder.</p>
<p>About one year before.</p>
<p>Do you reside in Nauvoo now.</p>
<p>I have lived there for the last six or Eight Weeks.</p>
<p>When did you go to Warsaw.</p>
<p>Before this occurence two or three days.</p>
<p>Had you been there all the time for two, or three days prior to the
killing of the Smiths.</p>
<p>I think I had.</p>
<p>What was you doing there.</p>
<p>I was not doing anything.</p>
<p>For what purpose was you there.</p>
<p>I was there in order to take a boat for St. Louis.</p>
<p>But I suppose you got disappointed and declined going.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Have you and particular reason for abandoning your trip to St. Louis.</p>
<p>I had.</p>
<p>What was that reason.</p>
<p>The person, I expected to go in company with, one did not go, and I
stayed there.</p>
<p>Did you belong to any of the Military companies.</p>
<p>Not untill, the morning before the murder, on that morning I joined
the company.</p>
<p>Who was the Captain of that company.</p>
<p>Captain Davis.</p>
<p>Did he furnish you, with a gun and Baynet.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>At the time you joined the Company, did you report yourself to the
Captain.</p>
<p>I did not know, who was the Captain.</p>
<p>Did you know Captain Davis.</p>
<p>I had seen him.</p>
<p>Was it him you went when you joined the Company.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect who it was.</p>
<p>Who furnished you with a gun.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>At the time, you joined that Company, and before you joined it did you
know of any intention to Murder the Smiths.</p>
<p>I know of their intentions, to murder the Smiths, before that I
joined, the Company.</p>
<p>When was you [illegible, could be ‘possessed’] of the knowledge of
such an intention.</p>
<p>The night before I joined the Company.</p>
<p>In what way was you [illegible, could be ‘possessed’] of that
knowledge.</p>
<p>From hearing the Officers the Officers converse.</p>
<p>Who did you hear converse.</p>
<p>I heard Grover, Oldridge, Davis, and Williams, I am not certain of
anyone else.</p>
<p>Who of them was speaking.</p>
<p>They all said something.</p>
<p>Can you tell us the substance of what they said.</p>
<p>They talked of sending thirty men to Carthage to Murder, the Smiths.</p>
<p>Did they agree upon it.</p>
<p>They did.</p>
<p>Where were they talking.</p>
<p>On the parade ground.</p>
<p>Were their any other persons present, besides themselves.</p>
<p>I think there were.</p>
<p>Who was there beside them.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>How many were present together, Officers and men.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you.</p>
<p>Do you think there was, a dozen.</p>
<p>I don’t think there was.</p>
<p>Was their half a dozen.</p>
<p>I think there was.</p>
<p>And they were in close, confident, secret talk.</p>
<p>They were.</p>
<p>Where were you.</p>
<p>I was there.</p>
<p>Were all their backs towards you.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You was behind some, and facing others.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When you came up did they quit talking.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Were you personally acquainted with any of them.</p>
<p>I had seen them before.</p>
<p>What time of the evening was it when you heard this.</p>
<p>Before dark.</p>
<p>They were standing out, on an open piece of ground, were they.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>There was no bushes about them, they made no secret of it.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>They did not care if every body should hear.</p>
<p>They were by themselves.</p>
<p>Out of what Companies were the [illegible] men appointed.</p>
<p>They appointed them out of Davis, and Grover’s companies.</p>
<p>Was Davis and Grover, present.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>In what way, did they, appoint them.</p>
<p>They called them out, some went, and some refused, to go.</p>
<p>Was you called up.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>At the time you joined Davis company did you do it with A veiw to go
and kill the Smiths.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did you do it for.</p>
<p>That I might find out there purposes, and inform the Govener.</p>
<p>Could you belong to any of the companys without any body knowing it.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did any body try to prevent you from going to Warsaw.</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>After you first went to Warsaw you had started to go to Quincy has you
not?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did any body stop you then.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>When you came to Warsaw what did you do.</p>
<p>I was put under guard.</p>
<p>Where did they put you.</p>
<p>I was put into a tent.</p>
<p>Who was guarding you.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you know what they had arrested you for.</p>
<p>To keep me there.</p>
<p>Was this after the conversation.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Then when they had got through they turned round and talked with you.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did Grover, Alridge Williams or Davis talk with you.</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Did any one of these men speak to you upon the subject of the murder.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long was it after that before they had you arrested.</p>
<p>Night off.</p>
<p>Was there any body els put under guard.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>How many men was there.</p>
<p>Could not tell.</p>
<p>Was there fifty +</p>
<p>Did not count. I suppose the whole company would have watched me, they
kept men up all night at the door of the tent.</p>
<p>You say this Pamphlet contains substantially the scercumstanses as
they occured.</p>
<p>I said they where written by L. O. Littlefield.</p>
<p>You have read it have you not.</p>
<p>I think I have.</p>
<p>Is the account generally A true one. There is A good many facts in it.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Is the account given here of you march from Warsaw as you gave it to
Littlefield.</p>
<p>I think so.</p>
<p>Did you ever take it to A printing Office to have it published.</p>
<p>Littlefield did.</p>
<p>Did you go with him.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Is that the same account you took to get published.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>That one was lost.</p>
<p>Then this is A different one.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You made A new one – is there any difference between the two.</p>
<p>I have not compared them.</p>
<p>Is the facts of the same purport.</p>
<p>I think they are.</p>
<p>I see an advertisement with you name signed to it. Did you make it.</p>
<p>I did, but did not see it till it appeared in the paper.</p>
<p>A Daniel’s come for judgment. Pamphlets for sale as A true Narrative
of the facts conected with the Murder of the Smiths. You advertised
this.</p>
<p>I told Mr. Felps, and he put it in the paper in the form.</p>
<p>When you came to the Rail Road the troops where disbanded by Williams.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>After the troops were disbanded volenteres where called upon to go to
Carthage.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>For the purpose of killing the Smiths.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time did you set out that morning.</p>
<p>About noon.</p>
<p>How far is the railroad from Warsaw.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>How far do you think it is.</p>
<p>I have no idea.</p>
<p>What time in the morning was it that these 20 men started to go to
Carthage to murder the Smiths.</p>
<p>Early in the morning.</p>
<p>How long was it before you all left Warsaw together.</p>
<p>it was early when we left Warsaw.</p>
<p>Those 20 men started before you did.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>After they had got to the Railroad, as they had sent on twenty men,
why did they beat up for volenteres to do the same thing.</p>
<p>They had sent after them to stop.</p>
<p>Did you see any white horses.</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>When did the 20 Men sent to Carthage come there.</p>
<p>We met them at the crossing of the Railroad.</p>
<p>You all waited there until these twenty men returned.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long did you wait.</p>
<p>I cannot tell how long.</p>
<p>Did you see any among them riding a whit horse when they came back.</p>
<p>I don’t remmember.</p>
<p>When these 20 men returned did they make any report of what they had
done.</p>
<p>I did not hear them say what they had been doing.</p>
<p>Did they not talk the mater all over when they came along.</p>
<p>The greater part of them was talking.</p>
<p>What time of the day did you join Davises company.</p>
<p>It was in the morning.</p>
<p>Before the march.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was you under gaurd.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did they permit you to leave the tent.</p>
<p>Yes and kept A file of men round me.</p>
<p>So you where A prisoner when you joined the company.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You stated while going that Alridge and Sharp where on horse back.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You stated also you saw no more of them till you saw them here in
Carthage.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You stated you did not see Williams till you saw him at the Jail.</p>
<p>I don’t recollect seeing him till them.</p>
<p>Where there no speeches made.</p>
<p>There was one made.</p>
<p>By who.</p>
<p>Sharp.</p>
<p>Did any other speak.</p>
<p>I did not hear any body.</p>
<p>Was Mr. Sharp standing or sitting.</p>
<p>He was sitting on his horse.</p>
<p>You cannot recollect any part of that speach.</p>
<p>Some parts of it.</p>
<p>Repeat those parts you remember.</p>
<p>The purpose of his speach was upon the necessity of killing the Smiths
and get rid of the Mormons.</p>
<p>Was it not to get rid of the Smiths.</p>
<p>I mean to say that he said kill the Smiths.</p>
<p>[illegible] this the speach as repeated at length.</p>
<p>I do not know I did not write that speach.</p>
<p>(Refering to the speach in Daniels Book) Is this the spech Sharp made.</p>
<p>I told Littlefield the scercumstance and he put in the filling.</p>
<p>Was any thing said about the Govener.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Tell it.</p>
<p>He said the Governer while at Nauvoo would get the news that the
Smiths where killed, and the Mormons would rise and kill him.</p>
<p>Repeat now again what Sharp said about the Governor.</p>
<p>He said, that if they killed the Smiths the Mormons would rise and
kill Ford.</p>
<p>Do you remember that Sharpe in making that speach swore or used oaths.</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>This speach concludes in these words (read the Pamphlet) “And we shall
then be rid of the damned little Governor, and the Mormons
too.-(cheers)” When the speach was concluded they cheered him.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>They seemed pleased I supose.</p>
<p>Some did and some did not all the troops cheered him.</p>
<p>There was likly to be A failour in getting in getting up volunteres.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did any body seem willing to start first.</p>
<p>Grover said he would go alone if no one els would go.</p>
<p>How meny where there who did voluntere and went, 70 o r80.</p>
<p>I don’t know exactly the number.</p>
<p>Did you count them.</p>
<p>I ran them over when the came up to the jail there was about 84.</p>
<p>After the troops where disbanded where you still under guard.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You staid with the companys till they arrived within 4 miles of
Carthage.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When did Mr. Olridg have to go on.</p>
<p>4 miles from Carthage.</p>
<p>Did any body leave with him.</p>
<p>I don’t know. I did not see him when he left that place at all.</p>
<p>So you did not see him when he left how do you know he left you came
on to Carthage.</p>
<p>There was the last I saw of him.</p>
<p>You did not see him leave.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see him start in the direction of Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t know I did not see him any more after, for he did not go with
us.</p>
<p>When did he leave the company.</p>
<p>I do not know when he went.</p>
<p>You did not see Williams after he left the railroad till you saw him
here.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>At this 4 miles place did not conection take place between the
Carthage Grays and Mr. Alridge.</p>
<p>Yes A note was brought by one of the grays which was read by Olridg.</p>
<p>Did Mr. Olridg read this note aloud.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You heard him tell what it was.</p>
<p>He read it off.</p>
<p>Did it read as it reads in this Book.</p>
<p>I don’t know how it reads there.</p>
<p>(read the Pamphlet) Is it the same.</p>
<p>[illegible] this nigh the same.</p>
<p>[illegible] was delivered to Alridge.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When you came to Carthage did you come alone.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Who came in with you to Carthage.</p>
<p>I don’t know them.</p>
<p>Would you know them if you should see there faces.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>As you came did you and them have any conversation about this matter.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>And the troops permited you quietly to step out without puting you
under guard.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had you A gun when you left the Railroad.</p>
<p>No I put it in the wagon.</p>
<p>Did any one of them know you was opposed to the murder of Smiths.</p>
<p>I do not no wether they did or not.</p>
<p>Did you say any thing to disswade them from it.</p>
<p>No but if the Agusta troops had been their it would not have been so.</p>
<p>Why did you not send in to Carthage to give them warning.</p>
<p>I told you before, they knew about it as well as any body els.</p>
<p>When you got to Carthage you went directly to the Jail.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you go within the enclosure out side of the Jail.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How far was you from the fence.</p>
<p>I was about the midle of the road.</p>
<p>in what direction from the Jail. In what position did you stand to the
Jail when you first wen there.</p>
<p>In the front or south of the Jail.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing of great account there.</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>What did you see.</p>
<p>I saw the Mob.</p>
<p>Where in side or out side the enclosure.</p>
<p>Inside.</p>
<p>How long was it after the troops came their, before they left again.</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Was it as much as ten minites.</p>
<p>I have no Idea.</p>
<p>Have you not some little Idea.</p>
<p>It might have been 15 minites I could not say.</p>
<p>Was there any strugle with the gaurd.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Tell us about that.</p>
<p>They had A scuffle.</p>
<p>Did the guard fire at all.</p>
<p>I believe they did.</p>
<p>You kept your possition in front of the jail from the time you went up
in front of the window.</p>
<p>I was in front of the Jail.</p>
<p>Did you go inside of the enclosure at all.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Could A person get into the jail without first going through the
enclosure.</p>
<p>I believe not.</p>
<p>About how far to the best of your knowledge is it from the front of
the Jail to the fence.</p>
<p>About ten feet.</p>
<p>How far out side of the fence to where you was standing.</p>
<p>I was standing in the midle of the road.</p>
<p>Where you as far from the fence on the out side as the jail is on the
other.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You stood not far from the jail door in the midle of the road.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see any wounded men on the steps.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How meny.</p>
<p>[illegible]</p>
<p>Did you see more than tow.</p>
<p>I saw three.</p>
<p>Did you see more than three.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you know any of them.</p>
<p>Yes one of them.</p>
<p>Who was it.</p>
<p>Wells.</p>
<p>You did not know the other two.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear these men say any thing about being shot.</p>
<p>Once said his arm was shot all to pieces.</p>
<p>This was Wells.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where any of these men mortaly wounded.</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Did you see the blood run out of his arm.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see the wounds of the other two.</p>
<p>No I did not examin them.</p>
<p>How did you know the other two where wounded.</p>
<p>I saw the blood one of them was hurt in the leg.</p>
<p>Was it before or after these men came down stairs they went to the
window.</p>
<p>After.</p>
<p>When the call was mad to go round to the windows you ran round.</p>
<p>I walked up.</p>
<p>Where did the wounded men go to.</p>
<p>One of them went round to that side of the Jail.</p>
<p>Where did you see the other two.</p>
<p>I saw them there.</p>
<p>Do you know how they got away from there.</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Where they the ones shot Smith.</p>
<p>I think one was.</p>
<p>Which one.</p>
<p>The one that was shot in the arm I saw him shoot Smith.</p>
<p>Did he hold the gun in both hands.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You saw the blood run out of the wound.</p>
<p>Yes but I did not examine it.</p>
<p>You saw Smith fall out of the window.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Tell us the manner he fell out what was the possion when you first saw
him in the window.</p>
<p>He held with his hands on one side and his feet on the other his body
hanging out.</p>
<p>How long did he hang there.</p>
<p>I do not know how long or short A time he hung.</p>
<p>Was his head to the North or to the South.</p>
<p>His head was to the North and his feet to the South and the troops
where South and East of him.</p>
<p>Did any person shoot at him while he hung in the window.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there any thing said while he hung there.</p>
<p>Col. Williams told them to shoot him.</p>
<p>When he fell did he lie motionless.</p>
<p>He did not attempt to rise.</p>
<p>You think at the time he fell he was not hurt.</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>When he fell was there a rush to the place.</p>
<p>Yes A Young man rushed up to him, and said while he picked him up
“this is old Jo I know him” and set him up against the well curb.</p>
<p>Did he hold him up.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was he alive then.</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>I supose he had fainted in consequence of the fall.</p>
<p>Did Smith say anything as he hung in the window.</p>
<p>Yes he said “O Lord my God”.</p>
<p>Was there A great deal of noise in the confusion.</p>
<p>While he hung in the window all was still.</p>
<p>After this man had set him up what hapened then.</p>
<p>Men was appointed to shoot him.</p>
<p>Did the man who set him up continue to hold him up while they shot
him.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>He took him and set him by the well and went off.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Which side of the well did he set him.</p>
<p>On the south side.</p>
<p>Did the man who shot him stand in front of him or on one side?</p>
<p>They stood in A South Easterly direction.</p>
<p>Where they facing him?</p>
<p>No exactly.</p>
<p>How meny men shot him?</p>
<p>4 shot at him.</p>
<p>How far where they from Smith?</p>
<p>They stood at the fence 10 or 12 feet from him.</p>
<p>Did they all fire at the same time?</p>
<p>Pretty much at the same time.</p>
<p>Had Smith his open?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did he show any sign of pain when he was shot?</p>
<p>I did not see him give any sign of pain.</p>
<p>In this Book we have the following statement: “When Pres<!-- raw HTML omitted -->t<!-- raw HTML omitted -->
Smith has been set up against the curb, and began to recover Col.
Williams ordered 4 men to shoot him, accordingly 4 men took an Eastern
direction about 8 feet from the curb Col. Williams standing partly at
their rear, and made ready to execut the order. While they where
making preparation, and the muskets raised to their faces,
Pres<!-- raw HTML omitted -->t<!-- raw HTML omitted --> Smiths eyes rested upon them with A calm and quit
resignation”. Is this true or fauls?</p>
<p>It is partly true and partly not I do not know if his eyes where shut
or open I did not tell Mr. Littlefield as it is written in the Book.</p>
<p>Then the statment is faulse?</p>
<p>I did not tell him so.</p>
<p>Once of the men you say that shot shot at him was wounded.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>At what time did you see this marvolous light?</p>
<p>I saw it at the place after the shooting.</p>
<p>How long after?</p>
<p>A short time after.</p>
<p>Well tell us about that light?</p>
<p>It was like A flash of lightening there at the moment.</p>
<p>It was not like A streek then?</p>
<p>It was like A flash.</p>
<p>Was it about where his body lay?</p>
<p>It past right by his body at one side.</p>
<p>When he was shot did any person go up to him?</p>
<p>Yes A young man atempted to get to him.</p>
<p>Had he any thing in his hand?</p>
<p>That light.</p>
<p>How did it affect him?</p>
<p>He did not go any further.</p>
<p>Did he look frightened?</p>
<p>I don’t know I was very much frightened my self.</p>
<p>Then you did not see him stand like a marble statute?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>(The Lawier read from the 15<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> page of Daniels Book) “The
ruffian of whom I have spoken who set him against the well curb, now
gathered bowie knife, for the purpose of severing his head from his
body. He raised the knife and was in the attitude of striking when A
light, so sudden and powerful, burst from the heavens upon the bloody
scene (passing its vivid chain between Joseph and his murderers) that
they where struck with terrified awe and filled with consternation.
This light in its apearance and potency baffles all powers of
description. The arm of the ruffian, that held the knife fell
powerless, the muskets of the four, who fired fell to the ground, and
they all stood like marble statues not having the power to move A
single limb of their bodys.</p>
<p>I did not write that neither did I autherise it to be written.</p>
<p>Mr. Daniels you say you did not write this or autherise it to be
written, did you ever correct these statements in you Book?</p>
<p>I told Mr. Littlefield it was not correct.</p>
<p>It is stated “The arm of the ruffian fell powerless, the muskets of
the 4 who fired fell to the ground &c Did they stand there?</p>
<p>They stood there and Williams called out to the men (who were
retreating) for Gods sake to carry of there men.</p>
<p>They still did not move?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did they return and carry off the 4 men that shot Smith?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there more than one man to carry one man?</p>
<p>I could not tell.</p>
<p>Where did you go that night?</p>
<p>I went to Mr. Scots.</p>
<p>Had you ever been at Scots before?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What is Mr. Scot’s first name?</p>
<p>I don’t know his first name.</p>
<p>The night you staid there had you any conversation about the murder of
Smith?</p>
<p>I told Scot about it.</p>
<p>Did you tell Scot you had asissted in killing Smith?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where did you go the next day?</p>
<p>To Agusta.</p>
<p>Did any other person stay at Scots that night but yourself?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you sleep with any body?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was Derick Fouler there?</p>
<p>I don’t know him.</p>
<p>Did you tell any person there or any where els that you asissted in
killing the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell any body that you assisted in holding the guard
while the Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>At Scots you went to bed and went to sleep, and did not know what
happened after you went to sleep?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where did stay next night?</p>
<p>I stayed at home.</p>
<p>While at Scots did you hear any other person in conversation about
this matter with Mr. Scot himself?</p>
<p>Not that I know if.</p>
<p>There is some account given in this Book about A vision you had Did
you receive this vision at Scots or at home</p>
<p>(Objections where made by the atorney of the state to such questions
as they were forign to the case)</p>
<p>Well I will just ask you wether after this occurrence you saw Joseph
Smith.- Tell the jury about it, how he appeard to you and handed you A
cup of water. There is A scene of that kind spoken of in this book.</p>
<p>I dreamed so Sir.</p>
<p>How long did you remain in the neighberhood of Agusta before you went
to Quincy?</p>
<p>I got to Quincy about the 6<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July.</p>
<p>How long did you continue to reside in Quincy?</p>
<p>Within six or 8 weeks past.</p>
<p>Did you ever state to any person about the speculation you could make
by swearing to some persons for killing the Smiths</p>
<p>(The states attorney objected to such questions being put)</p>
<p>I made no such statement to any perticular person.</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with Thomas Norise of Quincy?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where you ever hunting with him in the bottom near Quincy.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>As you where going home did you not tell Mr. [considerable space
left] that you where to mak A speculation by swaring against these
men?</p>
<p>I told him I expected for attending to it to get 500 Dollars.</p>
<p>Did you not tell him you where to get 500 Dollars?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not tell him that 500 Dollars had offered you to sware against
these men?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>In your discourse did you say who it was that murdered Smith?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you an offer made to at all?</p>
<p>Yes A man came in to my house, and told me I was A fool for
[illegible] my affidavit, as I might have made money out of it he
offered me 450 Dollars for my chance.</p>
<p>Who was it?</p>
<p>It was A Mr. Southwick.</p>
<p>Are you acquainted with him?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where does he stay?</p>
<p>In one of the hotels.</p>
<p>What hotel?</p>
<p>The city hotel.</p>
<p>Does he live there now?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>You don’t know where he went?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he ever renew the proposition?</p>
<p>He offered me 500 Dollars to clear out.</p>
<p>You don’t know who he was making these propositions fo?</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>He told me it would be better for me to leave the country for he
thought they would kill me.</p>
<p>Who did he say would kill you?</p>
<p>The Mob.</p>
<p>You say positivly you never told [considerable space left] that you
where offered $500 appearing against these men?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had you ever any thing offered you to appear against the Smiths?</p>
<p>No I said I expected so much for attending to it.</p>
<p>Do you know George McLean?</p>
<p>I think I do.</p>
<p>Do you know George Seabold?</p>
<p>I think I do.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell them that you where to get any thing for swearing in
this case?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with them or eather of them about
this transaction?</p>
<p>I presume I have.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell them or either of them you did not know who killed
the Smiths?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>Have you ever been offered $2500 not to appear against these men?</p>
<p>Yes Sir.</p>
<p>When was that offer made to you?</p>
<p>When I lived in Quincy.</p>
<p>By who?</p>
<p>Men I do not know.</p>
<p>Did you then at the time?</p>
<p>No I do not know that I ever saw them before.</p>
<p>Have you ever seen them since?</p>
<p>Not that I know of.</p>
<p>What time do you say this was?</p>
<p>While I was living in Quincy.</p>
<p>Before the last term of Court here?</p>
<p>I think it was.</p>
<p>By two men you don’t know?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where was it in Quincy they came to you?</p>
<p>It was third street on Jersy Street.</p>
<p>They met you in the street.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What did they say when they first spoke to you?</p>
<p>The asked who I was.</p>
<p>Did you tell them?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What aged men where they?</p>
<p>They where young men, but I could not say how old they are.</p>
<p>What size where they?</p>
<p>Between 5 and 6 feet.</p>
<p>Where they of the same size?</p>
<p>I did not take notice.</p>
<p>How long where you in conversation?</p>
<p>A short time.</p>
<p>What was the first thing said to you after asking your name.</p>
<p>They told there business they asked me who I was and told me what I
would do if I would not appear in this Court.</p>
<p>Did they name any man?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did you say?</p>
<p>I turned away from them imeadiatly.</p>
<p>What time of the day was it, was it in the afternoon?</p>
<p>I am not positive I cannot say what time it was.</p>
<p>Did not their offer make A serious impression upon your mind?</p>
<p>It did not worrie me much.</p>
<p>Just tell us wether you thought it A usual occurence or not?</p>
<p>I thought it an unusual occurence.</p>
<p>But you paid so little attention to it that you turned away?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time of the day was it?</p>
<p>I do not know wether it was noon or after noon.</p>
<p>How where they dressed?</p>
<p>I did not take notice of their dress.</p>
<p>Was it cold or warm wether?</p>
<p>It was not cold wether before Court.</p>
<p>Had they on hats or caps?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>And you made them no reply?</p>
<p>No I [illegible] round and went off.</p>
<p>They met you in the street?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And you stopt and talked with them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Then you did not stop at all then?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You did not stop after you had past them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Then they held you?</p>
<p>Yes before I past them.</p>
<p>After you moved forward did they call to you again?</p>
<p>Yes and held out money to me.</p>
<p>What kind of money?</p>
<p>It looked like silver.</p>
<p>What pocket did they take it from?</p>
<p>I do not know what pocet.</p>
<p>What did you say to him then?</p>
<p>I did not say any thing but went off.</p>
<p>Where was you house from where you stood?</p>
<p>It stood on the corner of third and Jersey streets.</p>
<p>Where were you going when they met you?</p>
<p>I was coming from Marrins Cooper shop.</p>
<p>Had they been at you house to inquir after you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And they met you in the Street. Where did you mention this occuranse
after it happened?</p>
<p>I told it to our folks.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell it to any other person?</p>
<p>I don’t know but I did.</p>
<p>Did you tell other person on the same day?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Did you not ask these men where they came from?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you ask them who they where?</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>You do not remember wether you asked their names or not?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you notice to see which was they went after they left you?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long was it after the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>Do not know.</p>
<p>Was it before you joined the Mormon Church?</p>
<p>I forget I joined them not long before the last Court.</p>
<p>Did you ever see that gentleman before Mr. Mellin (pointing to A man
sitting in the Court)</p>
<p>I think I have.</p>
<p>Did you ever say it was Mellen?</p>
<p>I might have said that he was like Mellin or about his size.</p>
<p>Did you not say you thought it was Mellin?</p>
<p>I do not think I ever did I might have described him saying about the
size of Mellin.</p>
<p>Did you ever state to Thomas that you had written A book and got A
considerable sum of money?</p>
<p>I don’t know if I did or not.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell him, McLean or Seabold, that you would make A great
speculation in Nauvoo?</p>
<p>I do not know that I did.</p>
<p>This light was it like fire?</p>
<p>It was like lightening.</p>
<p>What time in the after noon was it?</p>
<p>It was in the evening.</p>
<p>Was it in the east side of the house of in the shade of the house?</p>
<p>In the shade.</p>
<p>There was no sunshine falling in that place?</p>
<p>No,</p>
<p>Have you been following your trade since you went to Nauvoo?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did you follow there?</p>
<p>I have not been doing anything.</p>
<p>Have you A painting or engraving there representing the Deth of the
Smiths?</p>
<p>There is one there.</p>
<p>Have you been exhibiting it?</p>
<p>It was hanging in the room and the people wished me to tell them about
it.</p>
<p>They wanted to know of this light I suppose.</p>
<p>Yes some thing.</p>
<p>And after it was pointed you exibited it?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you give instructions to the painters?</p>
<p>No body told them about it I told them when exhibiting it that light
was wrong.</p>
<p>Mr. Lamburn. You say you did not have anything to do with the painting
of it.</p>
<p>I had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>It was done by other people?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>The court adjourned till Monday Morning 7 Oclock</p>
<p>Monday Morning May 26<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1845</p>
<p>Mr. John Willson of Carthage sworn.</p>
<p>Mr. Lamburn: Mr. Wilson where was you on the day Smith was killed?</p>
<p>I was in Town till after dinner and was sent out on the prariary
[sic, prairie].</p>
<p>Which way?</p>
<p>On the road to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>What was you object in going on the nauvoo road?</p>
<p>To look to out for the Mormons. Cap. Barns called upon me. After
dinner was over. I went up to Armon Willsons Store, and lay upon the
counter for one hour, I set out of the store into the street and
Morrison called upon me by my name and told me to get upon his horse
and go in his place, I asked him where to, said he Cap. Barns will
tell you; I said to him, I don’t care where I went nor what I done; I
went and got on his horse, and we started Docter John W. Morrison and
Docter Thomas L. Barnes went with us.</p>
<p>You called him Cap. what company is he cap. of?</p>
<p>He is Cap. of the ranging company.</p>
<p>Where is Cap. Barns now?</p>
<p>There he is (pointing to A man in the Court)</p>
<p>How far did you go out on the prariary [sic, prairie]?</p>
<p>4 miles.</p>
<p>What did you see when you went out 4 miles?</p>
<p>We did not see any persons.</p>
<p>In what direction was you from the Nauvoo road?</p>
<p>We was North of the nauvoo road.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing of A company that came here to kill Jo Smith?</p>
<p>We did not.</p>
<p>Did any of the company with you leave you to go to another place?</p>
<p>No I went with them all the way and came back with them.</p>
<p>How long was you gone?</p>
<p>We was gone from three to four hours.</p>
<p>Did you get back before the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see any of the men that killed the Smiths?</p>
<p>I saw men coming from Warsaw when I was upon the mound.</p>
<p>Tell us about seeing these men from Warsaw?</p>
<p>I saw men on the direct rout from Warsaw to this place. (Carthage)</p>
<p>How meny where there?</p>
<p>I cannot tell I was three or four miles from them.</p>
<p>Was there 50 or 100 men?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Was there any thing said among any of you upon the subject of going
out there?</p>
<p>They said it was to see if there was any suspecious carracters round,
as A rumer was in existence that the Mormons was driving away stock.</p>
<p>Did you see them pass up towards this place?</p>
<p>It was in the direction of this place when I saw them.</p>
<p>Was there any on horseback?</p>
<p>I saw some on horse back, and probably one carriag.</p>
<p>Did Barns and Morrison know any thing about what that ment?</p>
<p>They thought it was A company to exterminate the Mormons.</p>
<p>Did you want the Mormons exterminated?</p>
<p>I did Sir for they are Hell hounds.</p>
<p>Was there any said in your company about the Death of the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where did you stand?</p>
<p>Not far from the Nauvoo road.</p>
<p>You was standing as sentinals to watch the Town I supose?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You did not know what you was doing at all; how fare from Town was
you?</p>
<p>Four miles.</p>
<p>Did the Mormons come up to the edge of the town to drive off stock?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>You three went out to see if the Mormons where off cattle to Nauvoo?</p>
<p>I understood that was the object of Barnses company.</p>
<p>Did you know any thing of A conspiracy exsisting to kill these
Mormons?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you heard any body say any thing about it since?</p>
<p>No and if any man had told me any thing I would not have heard it.</p>
<p>On the morning the Smiths was killed you was in town till dinner?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>What was going on in town in the morning?</p>
<p>I did not see any thing more than usual.</p>
<p>And you staid on the mound 3 or 4 miles from here till the killing of
the Smiths took place?</p>
<p>I did not know that was in the wind.</p>
<p>What time did you start back?</p>
<p>Imeadiatly after we saw those men.</p>
<p>Did you meet any one on the road?</p>
<p>Yes we met A man going towards Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Did you stop him?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What took place then?</p>
<p>Docter Morrison and Barns road close up to him.</p>
<p>Did you hear them convers about any thing?</p>
<p>I was a little piece ahead and did not hear there [illegible]
conversation very little of it till he commenced trieing to get Docter
Morrison to go with him to Nauvoo because he was frightened to go
alone I then spoke to him and said he was A young man and the I had no
disposition to supose anything would happened him as the Govenor was
there.</p>
<p>Have you seen that man since?</p>
<p>I have not seen him either before or after the killing of Jo Smith.</p>
<p>Did you ever hear Olridg say any thing about A conspiracy to kill
Smith?</p>
<p>I never had A word with him in my life.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any talk with Williams?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>With Davis?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>With Grover?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>With Sharp?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Might you not have had conversation with some of these individuals,
and you might have forgot it?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see that company returning when they went back?</p>
<p>I think I saw some men before I got home.</p>
<p>How meny?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was there as meny as 20?</p>
<p>I think there was.</p>
<p>And you thought it was no new thing at all?</p>
<p>I paid not atention to it. I did not know but they was coming to pay
us A visit.</p>
<p>And in A short time you saw them go back and it was nothing to arouse
your attention?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>It was not any thing new for 50 men to come and take dinner here?</p>
<p>No for I had been at Scot County and I made a speach at every hollow
and I had been and I expect to go again.</p>
<p>What do you expect to go again for?</p>
<p>It is none of your biusness</p>
<p>I should like to know if there is going to be any more mobs here?</p>
<p>I am determined to stick with the people and not be united with
robers.</p>
<p>Did it astonish you when you heard that old Jo Smith was killed?</p>
<p>I was astonished at the time but it did not last long.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these men after the Smiths where killed the same
evening?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I did.</p>
<p>Was there thing said the day before about killing the smiths?</p>
<p>I did not hear any thing to my knowledge I heard it said among the
croud that they would kill them.</p>
<p>And they where headed and orgonized by these men did you not know that
fact?</p>
<p>I did not know it.</p>
<p>You think the credit of killing the Smiths belongs to Warsaw and not
to the other Countys?</p>
<p>I did not say so.</p>
<p>Well these men where [sic, were] not of any county from the other
counties?</p>
<p>No for they are not much better than the Mormons themselves no good
neither to king nor country.</p>
<p>Did you know any of the gaurd that was round the jail?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had they there guns loaded with blank cathrages [sic, cartridges]?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>You are shure the only object you had in going out these was what you
say it was?</p>
<p>That is all I know about it.</p>
<p>I suppose you will do any thing these person will tell you?</p>
<p>I should just as well as go one place as another, and I am willing to
go blend.</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
<p>Thomas Barnes Sworn, and examined by Lamburn.</p>
<p>You was Cap. of the rangers at the time the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was it A regular company?</p>
<p>No. what was the number of men at you command.</p>
<p>I do not now recolect I think 20 or thirty.</p>
<p>What was the name of the company?</p>
<p>The Rangers.</p>
<p>What was the object of that company?</p>
<p>The object of the company as I understoot [sic, understood] it was
to go over the peraires [sic, prairies] and carry expresses from one
point to another.</p>
<p>Was you in Town the morning of the day the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp that morning?</p>
<p>I do not recolect.</p>
<p>Do you recolect of any arrangments being made on that morning between
the Carthage Gras [sic, Grays] and the Mob?</p>
<p>I recolect of no such arrangments.</p>
<p>What time did you leave hear?</p>
<p>I think about three o clock in the after noon.</p>
<p>Had Sharp got in town before you left?</p>
<p>I think he was.</p>
<p>Was Alridg</p>
<p>I think he was.</p>
<p>Was Williams?</p>
<p>He was.</p>
<p>Was Grover?</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>It was three oclock when you left town?</p>
<p>I think it was about that time.</p>
<p>You saw Williams scertain and these other two men?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did they say any thing to you about going there to keep gaurd?</p>
<p>Not A word.</p>
<p>What was your object in going out on the prerairy [sic, prairie]?</p>
<p>It was intimated to me to watch that point of timber lest the Mormons
should come and rescue the Smiths, we went to see if there was any
strangers in the point of timber.</p>
<p>You did not leave town you are shure till after Williams came in town.</p>
<p>I am shure I saw them before we went from town.</p>
<p>Who sent you out there?</p>
<p>I sent out upon my own responsibility.</p>
<p>Did you not send in expresses to those me nen [sic, men] you left
behind in town?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>After they came to town you went out?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had there not been pledges given round among the captains to enter
into A conspiracy to kill the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>(Lawer Browning stood up and objected to such A course of examination)</p>
<p>When you went into the perairy [sic, prairie] you saw these men
Willson saw coming from Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes I saw them.</p>
<p>You knew at that time Smith was in Jail?</p>
<p>I knew he was in custudoy I knew not that he was in Jail.</p>
<p>Do you know wether these men or any of them pledged themselves to the
Govener or to the people that Smith should be protected while in
custudy?</p>
<p>I do not know that either of these men made pledges, but I know
pledges where made.</p>
<p>Your object in going out to the perairy [sic, prairie] was to see if
there was any suspicious carracters in that neighborhood?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You saw three groops of men coming from Warsaw?</p>
<p>I beleive. Yes.</p>
<p>How long did you stay on the periary [sic, prairie] after you saw
them?</p>
<p>I beleive we where [sic, were] letting our horses graze, I think
pretty soon after. I do not know how long time we get on to our horses
and made our way towards Carthage.</p>
<p>Where they coming in the direction of that timber?</p>
<p>I suposed they where [sic, were] on the Warsaw road.</p>
<p>How far apart where these companys traveling?</p>
<p>They apeared to be about A mile apart.</p>
<p>They looked like distinct?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How far where these men from you when you last saw them?</p>
<p>I only could see them A few minits.</p>
<p>When you saw them at that time how far where they from town?</p>
<p>about an equal distance with ourselves.</p>
<p>They where mostly on foot?</p>
<p>I should judge they where [sic, were].</p>
<p>You where [sic, were] on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Could they have come here and kill Smith, before you could have got
here?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How far had they got off the straight distance?</p>
<p>About half an hour.</p>
<p>Where did you meet the information that the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>We got it first from the Constable.</p>
<p>How far from the town</p>
<p>probably two miles and A half.</p>
<p>Did you ride any faster after you obtained the tidings that the Smiths
where killed?</p>
<p>No we road along very slow all three of us.</p>
<p>Did you know of these companys coming up before you left town?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>You had no knowledge that there was A conspiracy on foot to kill the
Smiths that evening?</p>
<p>I have told you all I know about it I had suposed scertain things, but
my supose so is not going to hang these men.</p>
<p>Had you any information of that sort before you left town?</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>Have you told all you know about that transaction</p>
<p>Until the killing of the Smiths I beleive I have.</p>
<p>Have you heard any of these five men since the killing of the Smiths
say they had no part in the conspiracy?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these men here when you came back?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>When you left you saw Williams and Sharp?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who was Williams with when you saw him?</p>
<p>I am not able to answer I think he was in the North west corner of the
squar.</p>
<p>Who was he talking with?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you not see him talking with Morrison?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you talk any with him yourself?</p>
<p>I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>Did he talk any to the Cap. of the guard?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Was he talking to any body at all?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Was the Carthage Grays pledged to protect Smith from Violense.</p>
<p>(Mr. Browning arose and said it was an improper question to ask the
wittness)</p>
<p>Mr. Browning for the Defence.</p>
<p>I will ask you wether it was not A usual thing for the rangers to go
out every day?</p>
<p>It was usual for them to be out every day.</p>
<p>What time did they go out there?</p>
<p>Some times in the morning and some times in the afternoon.</p>
<p>Mr. Lamburn for the people</p>
<p>I would ask you wether it was or not usual for groops and companys of
men to come from Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes almost hourly.</p>
<p>As large groops as that coming from Warsaw that do?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How large A groop have you seen come in here?</p>
<p>I have seen three hundred, and daly groops of 8, 10, and 100.</p>
<p>Did you know what they where coming for?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Eli Walker Sworn:</p>
<p>I will get you to tell the jury what you know about this transaction;
where was you the day the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>I was in Warsaw and I was at the railroad and I was at home.</p>
<p>What time was you at Warsaw?</p>
<p>In the morning</p>
<p>Did you leave Warsaw with the companys?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where did you understand you was going when you left Warsaw?</p>
<p>Goldens point.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these persons there, Williams Alridg Sharp Grover
or Davis that morning?</p>
<p>I think probably I saw part of them there.</p>
<p>You came out with them?</p>
<p>I came out with one of the companys to the railroad shanties.</p>
<p>Was this on the same day the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>I think it was I was informed they where [sic, were] killed that
day.</p>
<p>What was done at the railroad Shanties?</p>
<p>The troops where dispensed.</p>
<p>Who disbanded them.</p>
<p>I think Col. Williams read the order if I recolect.</p>
<p>After the troops where disbanded did you hear any of these men say any
thing about volenteers to come to Carthage here or did you hear any of
them make any speaches</p>
<p>It would be impossable for me to tell what I did hear that day for I
do not recolect.</p>
<p>Did Mark Alridge mak[e] a speach that day?</p>
<p>I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>Was there A call made for volenteers to come to Carthage?</p>
<p>I think there was.</p>
<p>Who called?</p>
<p>I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover there that day?</p>
<p>I am not scertain.</p>
<p>Was Davis?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was Sharp there?</p>
<p>Yes, I think he was.</p>
<p>Did you hear Sharp Make A speech on horse back?</p>
<p>If I did I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>You saw him there?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you know that the company started from there to come to this
place, that is the volenteer company?</p>
<p>I cannot say I knew it.</p>
<p>Did you see them start this way</p>
<p>I might have seen some persons start this way.</p>
<p>What was stated to be the object for calling volenteers?</p>
<p>I have not any recolection of hearing any person say.</p>
<p>Did you hear any thing said about coming to Carthage?</p>
<p>I heard some person say that day they thought of going to Carthage.</p>
<p>Was it generally spoknen of among the croud that the intention was to
go to Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes it was spoken of.</p>
<p>Did you hear any dispute among them about who would go and who would
not?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Tell what they said?</p>
<p>I cannot.</p>
<p>Did Davis say any thing wether he would go or not?</p>
<p>I heard him say that all those that where [sic, were] in favour of
going to Warsaw and taking dinner at the Tavern would accompany him.</p>
<p>He was in favour of the Warsaw dinner?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you recolect any thing of the substance of the disput[e] about
who should come to Carthage and who should not.</p>
<p>The cause of the dispute I could not give you; some was in favour of
going to Carthage and some where [sic, were] not.</p>
<p>Was it not said in the croud what they where [sic, were] going fore?</p>
<p>It was not understood distintly some for one thing and some for
another.</p>
<p>Did they not put the Smiths in conection with it?</p>
<p>I think there was something said about it but what it was I do not
know.</p>
<p>Did they say what they would do with the Smiths?</p>
<p>There was something said about blowing the jail to Hell.</p>
<p>Who said it?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>What was the reason some oposed coming to Carthage?</p>
<p>The only reason I had was because lawful authority had ceased and I
wanted to go home.</p>
<p>Did you hear the others say the they would not ingage in it?</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>Do you recolect who it was that was engaged in geting the volenteers
what was Williams doing did you see him or hear him say anything about
it at all?</p>
<p>I think I did but what it was I cannot say.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing in favour of the volenteers or was he against it?</p>
<p>I do not recolect.</p>
<p>You heard him speak about it who was he speaking with?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you hear Alridge say anything about it?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you hear Sharp say anything?</p>
<p>Not that I recolect.</p>
<p>What was Sharp doing?</p>
<p>I could not tell you I think I saw him on horse back.</p>
<p>What time of the day was that?</p>
<p>As to the time of day I do not know probably between 10 and 12 o
clock.</p>
<p>It was some plase in the middle of the day?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was Williams on horsback also?</p>
<p>I think I saw him on horse back.</p>
<p>Was Alridge?</p>
<p>I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>You only recolect Sharp Williams and Davis?</p>
<p>They are all I recolect.</p>
<p>Where was the last plase you saw Davis on horse back?</p>
<p>The last plase I saw him he was alone in the perairy [sic, prairie]
I was going home and he was going to Warsaw.</p>
<p>What sort of A horse was Williams riding?</p>
<p>I don’t recolect.</p>
<p>Was this volenteering buisness to come to Carthage spoken of so
generally that every body in the croud must have known of it?</p>
<p>I beleive it was spoken of publicly.</p>
<p>You heard Williams say something about the volenteering but you don’t
remember what it was?</p>
<p>I recolect some thing that Williams said about it, But I wont mak[e]
any statements only what I recolect sensibly.</p>
<p>You recolect hearing him say something but you don’t know what it was
he said cannot you give us something he said?</p>
<p>I was sworn to act faithfully in this case.</p>
<p>(Well I beleive you are an honest man.)</p>
<p>I want to state to the best of my recollection and beleif.</p>
<p>Do you think you cannot remember something he said?</p>
<p>I am not willing to say that I cannot and yet I do not recolect
distintly to tell it to you.</p>
<p>You can give the substanse of what he said cannot you?</p>
<p>Well sire I wont say it was him, it was either him or the captain of
the company.</p>
<p>Those who would go to Carthage did they advance in front?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What els was there said</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Do you recolect if Williams was in favour or against going to
Carthage?</p>
<p>(Mr. Lambourn was opposed again from the defendants part)</p>
<p>Was Williams on horse back?</p>
<p>I think he was,.</p>
<p>When they called for Volenteers did they advance?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Which side did Col. advanse?</p>
<p>No side.</p>
<p>When they was called upon did they go round those who would not go to
Carthage?</p>
<p>They advanced in frunt places.</p>
<p>Where was Williams then?</p>
<p>Some distance as much as from 10 to A 100 feet from the company.</p>
<p>Who was with him off there?</p>
<p>I could not tell not then.</p>
<p>Where was he when the division marched?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Where was the captain that gave the word of command after the
volenteers had stept out from those who went with Davis?</p>
<p>I think he was in front.</p>
<p>Was Williams in frunt also?</p>
<p>I think he was.</p>
<p>You don’t know wether the Cap. or Williams gave he word of command?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You say they where [sic, were] both in frunt?</p>
<p>I think they where [sic, were].</p>
<p>When the word of command was given all the volenteers advanced for
Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What was the others doing?</p>
<p>They where [sic, were] arguing upon it.</p>
<p>How meny was there in the company who where [sic, were] to advance?</p>
<p>Between 40 and 200.</p>
<p>Was there more than one company there?</p>
<p>There was two companys.</p>
<p>Before the order was given how did they stand did they stand in double
or single file or where they arranged round?</p>
<p>I think they where[sic, were].</p>
<p>Was Williams A supereiour officer?</p>
<p>He read the order to disband.</p>
<p>Who was the supereiour officer?</p>
<p>I cannot so wether he or general Nocks.</p>
<p>You think Williams read the disbanding order?</p>
<p>Yes I think so.</p>
<p>Did you see these men after they had stept out what kind of an
orgonisation they made?</p>
<p>I heard an observation made by A scertain individual that those who
should go should follow the music.</p>
<p>Where was Williams when the music march along?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did those who would not go to Carthage go home?</p>
<p>I was one of the first who started off home.</p>
<p>You did not stay till the company started to Carthage?</p>
<p>I recolect being on the hill,</p>
<p>And they where [sic, were] standing at the bottom on the creek and I
think shooting at A mark.</p>
<p>Who was it said they where [sic, were] going to blow the jail to
hell?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of them say they where [sic, were] going to kill
the Smiths?</p>
<p>I could not tell.</p>
<p>Was there any cursing of the Mormons going on?</p>
<p>There was considerable of it done.</p>
<p>Who was it that gave the command to advance was it an officer do you
think?</p>
<p>I think it was.</p>
<p>But wether it was Williams or the Cap. of the company you cannot
recolect?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear Williams raise any opposition to coming up here?</p>
<p>No sire I did not.</p>
<p>Do you think Sharp was on horse back at the time this advance was
made?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see him more than once that day on the ground?</p>
<p>I could not say.</p>
<p>When you did see him you think he was on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How meny Volenteered following the fife and drum round there?</p>
<p>I am not able to tell you what number there was.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Thomas Dickson sworn:</p>
<p>Was you in town on the day the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was you in all day?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What time did you come to town?</p>
<p>Between 10 and 11 o clock A.M.</p>
<p>Do you recolect of seeing any of these men hear on that day?</p>
<p>there is but few of them I am aquainted with except Grover.</p>
<p>What ones did you see that day?</p>
<p>I saw Williams and Sharp.</p>
<p>What time of the day.</p>
<p>I don’t recolect, - In the forenoon about 11 o clock I saw Sharp on
the west side of the Street on the squair.</p>
<p>Did you hear him say any thing about the arrangements they where
[sic, were] going into?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Was you up at the Jail at the time that Smith was killed?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>How close was you at the jail when he was killed?</p>
<p>Between ten and 20 feet on the South east corner of the jail.</p>
<p>Where was you when you first heard the fire?</p>
<p>At the jail.</p>
<p>Was you there before?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What attracted your attention before the firing?</p>
<p>As I was going home I saw some men coming away out west towards this
place</p>
<p>Which way do you live?</p>
<p>I live north.</p>
<p>When you got out of town you saw some men coming and you turned back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How near where you to them</p>
<p>About a mile and a half perhaps more I saw the glistening of A gun.</p>
<p>That turned you back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How came you to go to the jail?</p>
<p>When I got back I saw some men close up to the jail I left my horse at
the tavern and ran up to the jail.</p>
<p>Did no body tell you what was going to happen?</p>
<p>I met some men and they said the Mormons where coming to rescue the
prisoners.</p>
<p>You got there before they did?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What did you see take place any firing?</p>
<p>There was A considerable scuffle.</p>
<p>Was there any shooting in in the scuffle?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How many of the guards fired?</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Was there any of the enemy killed?</p>
<p>I did not see any killed or wounded.</p>
<p>What sort of A scuffle is it you speak of?</p>
<p>I saw them scuffling down on the ground and they lay there.</p>
<p>How long did the scuffle continue?</p>
<p>Some considerable time.</p>
<p>Was there any body hurt on either side?</p>
<p>I cannot tell; I see one man shot in the arm.</p>
<p>Was not that one of thermen that went in and Jo Smith shot him the
door it was after it was all over you saw the mans arm bloody?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who was the man?</p>
<p>I don’t know</p>
<p>At the time of that scuffling did you see any hurt then?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Did you see the mob enter the house?</p>
<p>I saw some persons go in.</p>
<p>Had they guns?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How meny went in?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Did you know any that went in?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Was there half a dozen went in?</p>
<p>Perhaps there might be half a dozen.</p>
<p>How long have you been in this county?</p>
<p>10 or 11 years.</p>
<p>Then you will know every body about?</p>
<p>I know A great meny</p>
<p>Did you see the Carthage Grays approaching?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long was you there before the Grays approached?</p>
<p>I was there some time they did not approach till after all was over.</p>
<p>Was you there 5 minites before the Grays made there approach?</p>
<p>I was there 5 or 10 minites.</p>
<p>Did not the Grays halt before they came to the jail?</p>
<p>The had made an halt when I discovered them.</p>
<p>How far was the mob gone then?</p>
<p>About 100 yards.</p>
<p>When you first saw them how far was you from the town?</p>
<p>About a mile and A half.</p>
<p>You came back hitched you horse at Miltons Tavern and got there before
they did?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long was you there before them, was it 15 minites?</p>
<p>I don’t know if it was that much for I came pretty quick back.</p>
<p>You got there before the killing took place, and the Grays did not get
there till after it was all over, and the men all gone?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you say any thing about it to any body?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams that day?</p>
<p>I did?</p>
<p>Where did you see him?</p>
<p>I saw him north west of the Court house?</p>
<p>Who with?</p>
<p>Not any person.</p>
<p>Was he along with the Grays?</p>
<p>He was A little North of the Grays.</p>
<p>You saw Williams in the squar North of the Grays, and then went
imeadiatly to the jail and you got there before the killing took
place, and stood there till it was all over?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long did it last?</p>
<p>I cannot tell you.</p>
<p>Did you see any of these other men there?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did you speak to Williams when you saw him?</p>
<p>I shook hands with him.</p>
<p>Did you mention to him what you had seen in the perairy [sic,
prairie]?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not see any person at the Jail that you knew?</p>
<p>There was not till after the Death of the Smiths.</p>
<p>Was there any on the Ground you reconized them?</p>
<p>Not any except the guard.</p>
<p>Do you recolect seeing any with their faces blackened?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How meny do you think there was at the Jail all together?</p>
<p>I think there was 20 or 30.</p>
<p>Was there not more than 50?</p>
<p>No there was not.</p>
<p>Did you see any standing out on the perairy [sic, prairie]?</p>
<p>Yes I saw some out on the perairy [sic, prairie] at some distance
from the jail.</p>
<p>Which way went they, when they left the Jail?</p>
<p>They went right west from the jail.</p>
<p>They did not go through that lane you came through when you returned
to town?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>And they left imeadietly after the deed was done?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Don’t you recolect if the Carthage Grays halted beside the fence till
the killing was over?</p>
<p>I saw them marching up.</p>
<p>How long did they stay there till they returned?</p>
<p>I returned before they did.</p>
<p>Did they come back to town?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Cross examined for the defence by Lawier Browning:</p>
<p>Did you see Smith fall out the Window?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had he been shot before he fell out of the window?</p>
<p>He was shot or hurt some little for when he first came into the window
there was blood on his pantaloons.</p>
<p>Did you see him set up against the well curb?</p>
<p>I saw him raise up himself against the Well curb and die imeadiatly.</p>
<p>Did you see 4 men shoot him?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing about A marvelous light?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see 4 men parallized?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you occupy A position from which you could see him plainly?</p>
<p>He was about 10 steps from me I stood on the South east corner of the
Jail.</p>
<p>How long did he hang before he fell?</p>
<p>He hung but A short time.</p>
<p>What was his position in the window?</p>
<p>His head was out, right arm, and one leg.</p>
<p>You say Cap. Smith did not march his company to the jail till after
all was over?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>If he had been there you would have seen them would you not?</p>
<p>I think so.</p>
<p>If there had been any miraculous light that moment by Smiths body
don’t you think you would have seen it?</p>
<p>I think I would for I watched him take till the last breath was out of
him.</p>
<p>If there had been 4 men parralized you think you would have seen it?</p>
<p>I think I would</p>
<p>And you are very confident no such thing occured?</p>
<p>I am pretty confident.</p>
<p>Mr. Lamburn:</p>
<p>Did you not know that day before the killing took place of A
conspiracy to kill the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>When you saw these men in the perairy [sic, prairie] did you not
know they where [sic, were] coming to kill the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you no idea nor knowledge of their object?</p>
<p>I had heard it talked about that A mob was going to rescue them.</p>
<p>When you saw these men did you think they where the Mormons coming?</p>
<p>I did not think but I suposed they where the Mormons.</p>
<p>Was you not afraid to stay at the Jail when they came up?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you any weapons yourself?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>On what part of his body did Smith fall?</p>
<p>He fell on his left side.</p>
<p>Do you think you saw every body and every movement that occurred
there?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there not A good meny people went with you from the squar.</p>
<p>I did not see any rush from town till after all was over.</p>
<p>Did they all understand it perfectly well?</p>
<p>I don’t know but they did.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Court adjourned till 2 o clock p.m.</p>
<p>Eliza Grame [Graham] Sworn:</p>
<p>Where was you the night Smith was killed?</p>
<p>I was at the Warsaw tavern.</p>
<p>The Warsaw hous, Mr. Fleming’s?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was Mr. Fleming at home?</p>
<p>No he was in Boston.</p>
<p>Where was Mrs. Fleming?</p>
<p>At home.</p>
<p>Tell the jury if Mr. Sharp came to Flemings house that night?</p>
<p>Mr. Sharp came in and said he was very dry for he had come from
Carthage in less than an hour; he was asked how they came on in
Carthage, he answered we have finished the head leading men of the
Mormon Church.</p>
<p>Was this before or after dark?</p>
<p>It was about dark.</p>
<p>Did he seem to be fategued?</p>
<p>Yes Sir.</p>
<p>Did he come in A carraige?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he say they they had finished the leading men or the leading man?</p>
<p>He said the leading man.</p>
<p>How long did he say they had been in coming from Carthage?</p>
<p>Less than an hour.</p>
<p>Did he ask for A drink of water?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>That was all he said?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What took place that night?</p>
<p>About twelve A clock at night Davis and Grover came in together Mr.
Key came after them and called for supper for about 30 men.</p>
<p>What took place then did you get supper?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long was it before the men came to eat it?</p>
<p>A few minits.</p>
<p>Was there A call made for super for any more men?</p>
<p>Yes about 15 minits after for 20 more men.</p>
<p>And you and others where cooking for them?</p>
<p>Yes myself and Mrs. Fleming got supper for them.</p>
<p>How meny got super there?</p>
<p>About 50.</p>
<p>Did you see any wounded men there?</p>
<p>Yes I saw two one of them was wounded in the arm, and the other
slightly wounded in the cheek.</p>
<p>Did you see what they did with them?</p>
<p>He asked if he could have A seat by the kitchen stove We said he
could.</p>
<p>Who sat by the stove?</p>
<p>The man that was wounded in the arm.</p>
<p>How meny had you to super?</p>
<p>From 40 to 60 men I think about 60.</p>
<p>Had they any thing to drink?</p>
<p>I did not see them drink anything at all.</p>
<p>Did you see Alridge there?</p>
<p>I don’t know him.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp there after supper?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams there?</p>
<p>I do not know him.</p>
<p>All that you saw there where the three you named Davis, Grover, and
Sharp?</p>
<p>They are all I knew; I did not see Sharp any more after he road up for
A drink of water.</p>
<p>Do you know A good meny people about Warsaw?</p>
<p>I knew A good meny of them about Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did you hear the men talking about anything while at supper?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>What where they talking about?</p>
<p>Some said they had killed old Jo, another would make answer that he
had Grover said he had killed old Jo.</p>
<p>Then they made no secret of it at all?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you understand from Davis that he had not been to Carthage?</p>
<p>That is what he said.</p>
<p>When they said Old Jo did you know who they were talking about?</p>
<p>Yes they men Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>Did they say it it out in full?</p>
<p>Yes they said old Jo Smith with an oath.</p>
<p>Had they any arms with them?</p>
<p>I did not see any.</p>
<p>Where did the men go after they had got through supper?</p>
<p>Part stood gaurd, and part went up stairs to bed.</p>
<p>What time did they get up next morning and left the house?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Was they there at Breakfast next morning?</p>
<p>There was not near so meny at Breakfast as was at supper.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover and Davis there the next morning?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did they board at Flemings house.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was Sharp there to breakfast the next morning?</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>Had the family gone to bed that night or where they all up?</p>
<p>They where all up.</p>
<p>You say Grover and Davis boarded there?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had they been about the house before they came to supper?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was Grover and Davis there at regular supper time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did Grover and Davis come A little before Mr. Key called for supper?</p>
<p>They where at the door About the same time.</p>
<p>What did Mr. Grover say about these wounded men?</p>
<p>He went and asked the one wounded in the arm if he could sit by the
stove? He said he could.</p>
<p>How long did he sit there?</p>
<p>I don’t supose he sat there more than one hour.</p>
<p>Did any one come to talk with him while he was there?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you know the wounded man?</p>
<p>Yes it was William Boarus.</p>
<p>You had seen him before?</p>
<p>Yes Sir.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of them say how Boarus got wound?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there any thing said next morning about this matter?</p>
<p>I did not hear any thing said.</p>
<p>How many was there on gaurd that night?</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Was there any alarm during the night?</p>
<p>I did not hear any alarm that night.</p>
<p>What time did the family get to bed that night?</p>
<p>About 2 o clock in the morning.</p>
<p>How meny in that crowd did you hear talking about killing Jo Smith?</p>
<p>It was the generrall talk.</p>
<p>The general [illegible] of their talk was what they had been doing
that evening?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When did you next see Sharp?</p>
<p>Next day about breakfast time.</p>
<p>Repeat that which Sharp said when he brought the information to
Warsaw.</p>
<p>It was not quit dark when he came, and wanted A drink of water, Mrs.
Fleming asked him how they had come on at Carthage, he said we have
finished the head leading men of the Mormon Church.</p>
<p>Do you know what became of Boarus after that night?</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Did you hear Davis say that night or after at any time that they had
killed Smith?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>They all seemed to rejoice over it?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you hear them say anything more about Mormons?</p>
<p>I did not hear them say any thing els about them at all.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Browning:</p>
<p>You saw Mr. Sharp drive up?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there any one in the carriage with him?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you know who it was?</p>
<p>Yes, it was James Grame.</p>
<p>Was it A two horsed caraige or a common bugie?</p>
<p>It was A two horsed carraige.</p>
<p>Was there any one in the carriage with him besides James Grame?</p>
<p>No on that I saw.</p>
<p>How meny seats had it?</p>
<p>It had two seats.</p>
<p>This was before dark?</p>
<p>It was just about dark.</p>
<p>Mr. Sharp did not board at Flemings you say.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long did Sharp remain in the house?</p>
<p>A very short time.</p>
<p>What part of the Town does Flemings house stand?</p>
<p>On the hill.</p>
<p>Where abouts in Warsaw is Sharps house?</p>
<p>It is across the street from Flemings.</p>
<p>Is it nearer the River?</p>
<p>No it is further from the river.</p>
<p>He came on to Flemings and passed his own house?</p>
<p>Yes. at the time Sharp came had you heard any news from Carthage?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>It was in the hall you saw him I supose?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was you and Mrs. Fleming in the hall?</p>
<p>I went to the dining room door.</p>
<p>Did he see you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he speak to you?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was that all that past between him and Mrs. Fleming asking for A drink
of water? And he had come from Carthage in less than one hour and they
had finished the head leading men of the Mormon Church?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What did you understand from what he said?</p>
<p>I suposed that Joseph and Hiram Smith was killed.</p>
<p>Had you head them make threats to kill the Smiths.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you heard Sharp make any threats?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you and Mrs. Fleming have any conversation on the matter, after he
left?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you talk about it to any other person in the house upon the
subject?</p>
<p>Yes I spoke to Mrs. Booses upon the subject.</p>
<p>Where was it you heard Mr. Sharp make threats?</p>
<p>A great meny times I heard him day he would kill the Smiths, and drive
the Mormons that day he went to Goldens point.</p>
<p>Who was he talking with that morning before left?</p>
<p>I could not name any one.</p>
<p>What time in the morning was it you heard him make these threats.</p>
<p>I heard him make those threats early in the morning soon after
breakfast.</p>
<p>Did you see him when he started for Carthage that day?</p>
<p>Yes I say him when he started for Godens point.</p>
<p>Was he on horse back or in a carraige? He was in a carraige?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Whose carraige was that?</p>
<p>I don’t know but I have seen it A great meny times in Warsaw.</p>
<p>How meny miles is it from Warsaw to Carthage?</p>
<p>About 18 miles.</p>
<p>What at that time was the condition of the roads between here?</p>
<p>I cannot tell you.</p>
<p>Had there been much rain about that time.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You saw Sharp start in the morning to Golden point?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>The same evening he returned in the same carraige?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Before that came in the night had you heard any thing more about the
killing of the Smiths that what Sharp had said?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You say that Davis and Grover where regular boarders at Flemings at
that time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had you seen Grover before, that day?</p>
<p>Yes I saw him in the morning.</p>
<p>What time in the morning?</p>
<p>At Breakfast.</p>
<p>On the morning of the day the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see him after till he returned at night?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Had you seen Davis before on that day?</p>
<p>I saw at Breakfast.</p>
<p>After breakfast you did not see him till mid night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Will you repeat to me again what Davis said about this afair?</p>
<p>When he came in he said we have killed the man.</p>
<p>Repeat what Grover said if you please?</p>
<p>He said he had killed Old Jo.</p>
<p>Was there any other person talking of the same subject at that time?</p>
<p>They where all passing backward and forward through the dining room at
the time.</p>
<p>You had not gone to bed when they came?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was it A generall thing for you to sit up till mid night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>No person had gone to bed about the house?</p>
<p>Some of the children might have gone to bed.</p>
<p>What time did you get to bed that night?</p>
<p>About 4 in the morning.</p>
<p>There was no preperation made for supper for them before they came?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>After they came did they go at once into the dinning room?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Could you state who came into the dining room?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did Grover and Davis come into the dining room?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did key remaine there till supper was ready?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where you in the dining room all the time they stayed there?</p>
<p>No I was backwards and forwards getting supper.</p>
<p>How was the kitchen situated?</p>
<p>It was joining the dining room.</p>
<p>You think there was about 20 men came with Davis and Grover?</p>
<p>I cannot say how meny.</p>
<p>Afterwards supper was called for 20 more?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Most of the persons who took supper there that night where from the
Warsaw inhabitents besides Grover and Davis?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Name one of them.</p>
<p>I don’t think I can.</p>
<p>Did Grover bring a wounded man into the kitchen?</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>Did you know his name?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What was his name?</p>
<p>William Boarus.</p>
<p>The company was generally talking about the murder of the Smiths?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there any other persons talking about it besides Grover and Davis?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You where most of the time in the kitchen?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Who was cooking supper?</p>
<p>I set the table and my haunt cooked supper.</p>
<p>What was it that directed your atention so much of the time to Grover
and Davis?</p>
<p>I had no such an Idea that they would have done such A deed I was
astonished at them.</p>
<p>Who was in the house with the family besides yourself?</p>
<p>A young man by the name of Moses Black.</p>
<p>Was they there at the time Davis and Grover came in, and remained
there?</p>
<p>No. he went out to stand gaurd.</p>
<p>He was not in the house when they came?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Which arm was that man wounded in?</p>
<p>I cannot tell my mind was otherwise ingaged then to see which arm he
wounded in or that he was wounded at all.</p>
<p>How did you know that he was wounded then?</p>
<p>I heard Mr. Grover say so.</p>
<p>Did he lament in his arm A great deal?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there any Phisician in to see him?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he stay at the house that night?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Did the wounded men eat any?</p>
<p>I did not see him eat any.</p>
<p>Can you state what of the arm he was wounded in?</p>
<p>He was wounded in the shoulder I heard them say so I heard Mr. Grover
say so for Mrs. Fleming asked where he was wounded and Grover made
answer and said in the shoulder.</p>
<p>Did Mrs. Fleming ask who the wounded man was?</p>
<p>She did not.</p>
<p>Did she ask whether he was shot?</p>
<p>Yes and Mr. Grover said he was shot in the arm.</p>
<p>Did he say by whome?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You are scertain Grover breakfasted there that morning?</p>
<p>Yes I am scertain.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover and Davis the night before the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>Yes Sir.</p>
<p>Where did you see them?</p>
<p>I saw them at supper.</p>
<p>Did they stay there the night before the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was the troops encamped in the neighbourhood of the house the night
before the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>Some of them where.</p>
<p>Did Did not Mr. Grover command the troops?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Might he not have staid all night in the camp the night before the
Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>No Sir he staid at home.</p>
<p>Was it not A habit of Grovers to take his meals at the tent too?</p>
<p>No sir he took them regular at home.</p>
<p>Are you scertain he breakfasted there that morning?</p>
<p>Yes Sir I am scertain.</p>
<p>Can you say wether Davis and Grover staid there the night the Smiths
where killed all night?</p>
<p>They stood guard that night sir.</p>
<p>You say the most of the persons who took supper there that night where
speaking about killing the Smiths one would say I killed old Jo
another would say no you not I did?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You cannot remember any person who was talking so but Davis and
Grover?</p>
<p>I did not hear Davis say Grover is the only person I heard saying so.</p>
<p>Where these persons armed?</p>
<p>I did not see any arms.</p>
<p>Did they come on foot or on horse back or in wagons?</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Where there meny persons at supper that evening at supper time?</p>
<p>Not meny there was but A few.</p>
<p>Did you take supper before dark?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When supper was over Sharp came?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You are scertain Davis was not there at supper time?</p>
<p>Yes Sir I am scertain.</p>
<p>Did Davis say I have killed the men or we have killed the men or they
have killed the men?</p>
<p>He said we have finished the men.</p>
<p>You Don’t know who he was addressing himself to at that time?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not hear Davis say he had not been to Carthage at all that
day?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you not make any inquiry of any of these persons if the Smiths
where dead or not?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you know at that time the Smiths where dead.</p>
<p>I knew nothing only what I had heard them say.</p>
<p>Did they say there was any body els besides?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What made you suppose they where the only ones killed?</p>
<p>I heard them say they had killed old Jo, and that they had finished
the leading men of the Mormon Church.</p>
<p>Who where the leading men of that Church?</p>
<p>Joseph and Hirham Smith.</p>
<p>How meny leading men have they?</p>
<p>There is three that form the first council of the church.</p>
<p>They where part of the council?</p>
<p>I suppose so Sir.</p>
<p>Was there any but two leading men at that tim?</p>
<p>Yes there was more.</p>
<p>Who was the third leading man?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was there any light in the hall when Davis and Grover first came in?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was it A moon light or A dark night.</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>Where was the young man wounded?</p>
<p>Some where on the cheek.</p>
<p>Do you know which cheek.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there any blood upon the wound?</p>
<p>There was A plaster on his cheek.</p>
<p>How did you know he had been wounded at Carthage?</p>
<p>I heard him say so myself.</p>
<p>Who did he say wounded him?</p>
<p>I did not hear him say.</p>
<p>Did he say what with?</p>
<p>No, he said I have been wounded in the cheek.</p>
<p>And you looked there upon and saw the patch?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see any signs of Blood?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear any one say wether there was any troops from Adams County
that night?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Did you see Cap. Fallard and his company there?</p>
<p>I did not that I knew of. Was there not some alarm given that night at
Fleming house?</p>
<p>Not that I know of.</p>
<p>Do you recolect runing into the yard calling upon some person to
protect you all?</p>
<p>I neither called upon one one man or another to protect me. On that
night, there was on friday evening an alarm given the stage driver
have said the Mormons where all ready to come into Warsaw.</p>
<p>Where you alarmed?</p>
<p>No but there was a great meny that where expecting the Mormons but
they were mistaken, I had not ocasion to be alarmed. I had told haunt
that she need not bee afraid for the Mormons where not coming. I had
said I wished to be at home in Nauvoo but to say I was afraid I was
not.</p>
<p>Moses Fleming went to quincy?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time?</p>
<p>They where killed on thursday and we went on friday night.</p>
<p>How long did you remain in Quincy?</p>
<p>Till tuesday following.</p>
<p>You say you cannot remember wether it was a moons light or a dark
night or whether there was a light in the Hall or not?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where did you first see them as they came in?</p>
<p>I saw them going into the dining room door?</p>
<p>When you left Warsaw and went to Quincy do you know wether the Quincy
troops had left that place for Warsaw?</p>
<p>They came up on Friday.</p>
<p>On what boat did they come up?</p>
<p>On the Boarus.</p>
<p>Where not the Boarus and [illegible] both up that day?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Whilst at Quincy where did you board?</p>
<p>At Moses Dicksons.</p>
<p>Did you not say there to come persons that you did not know any thing
about the killings of the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you never state A long time after you did not know any thing about
it?</p>
<p>Yes I did so to great meny people.</p>
<p>How long after the occurence?</p>
<p>About 2 weeks after it. The question was never asked till after I left
Quincy for it I owned it I feared to be called up as A witness and I
did not want to appear.</p>
<p>Did you not deny to Moses Fleming you knew any thing about it?</p>
<p>Yes I did.</p>
<p>Did you not say in the presence of Mr. Ronalds and Warren at Quincy
you did not know any thing about it?</p>
<p>No Sir I did not.</p>
<p>Do you know Mr. Ronalds?</p>
<p>I know him</p>
<p>Was he boarding at Dixsons with Warren?</p>
<p>Yes he was.</p>
<p>You never talked in their presense?</p>
<p>No I never did.</p>
<p>Who did you tell it to in Warsaw?</p>
<p>To my Father.</p>
<p>Did you tell it to any other person?</p>
<p>No I did not to any person at all.</p>
<p>Did you always deny it after you left Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes but I was not afraid when I was at home for I was independent.</p>
<p>Did not the reason exist for denying it after you went to Nauvoo or
before?</p>
<p>Yes for I denyed it for fear of being called upon as A witteness.</p>
<p>Have you denyed it since you went to Nauvoo?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you never at any time after you went to Nauvoo deny it?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You change your statements!</p>
<p>There is no change in my statements at all for the question was never
asked me in Warsaw I had therefore no ocasion to deny it.</p>
<p>You said you had told it to A great meny persons.</p>
<p>Yes I told it to A great meny but I did not mention any names.</p>
<p>Did Grover and Davis know you where present when they where talking
about it and that you belonged to the Mormon Church?</p>
<p>Yes they knew all about it before.</p>
<p>Had they heard that you had heard them talk among the other men that
evening?</p>
<p>My father was down A few weeks after and I told him, father knew what
I had heard them say and no one els except my friend. I never told
them I supose my freind had told them.</p>
<p>Was there any fire in the kitchen that night?</p>
<p>There was fire in the stove but it was not hot.</p>
<p>How long was you in getting supper ready for 60 men?</p>
<p>About one hour.</p>
<p>At that time how long had you been living at Mr. Flemings?</p>
<p>I cannot exactly say.</p>
<p>After that you went to Nauvoo?</p>
<p>Yes about 6 weeks afterwards.</p>
<p>You still reside at Nauvoo?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Have you lived there ever since?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Are you A member of the Mormon Church?</p>
<p>Yes I am.</p>
<p>Are you not afraid you will be murdered?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long is it since you joined the church?</p>
<p>5 years.</p>
<p>Have you been A member all the time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you know what kind of horse and carriage Sharp came home in?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did James Grame come into the house?</p>
<p>No not that I saw of I saw him in the carraige.</p>
<p>Where did you first learn you would first be called as A witness in
this case?</p>
<p>Last Wensday.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with any person whatever on being A
wittness in this case.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you had any conversation with any persons since last wensday what
you where to sware to in this case?</p>
<p>Yes that Gentleman pointing to Mr. Lamburn.</p>
<p>Tell what that was?</p>
<p>He told me to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.</p>
<p>Before that time you have never had A conversation with any person
whatever have you been examined on this case?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you had meny conversations upon this subject at all?</p>
<p>Not a great meny.</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with Mr. Daniels?</p>
<p>I never saw him I never saw him till I saw him hear in Carthage court.</p>
<p>I supose your father resides in Nauvoo?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you live with his family?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>As it ever been an object of conversation with you fathers family?</p>
<p>No not A great deal.</p>
<p>When you spoke to your father in Warsaw, did you charge him not to
tell it?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did your friend tell it?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>When did you first tell her?</p>
<p>About 6 weeks ago.</p>
<p>And up to within the last 6 weeks you never mentioned to any person in
any case except your father what you heard Grover and Davis say?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did they ask you any questions?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there any great talk about it in Nauvoo?</p>
<p>No Sir it was not a great deal talked about.</p>
<p>Do you know one Mr. Joning?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you and him ever have any conversation about this matter?</p>
<p>No Sir not any.</p>
<p>Did you and him ever talk about what Grover and Davis said?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How did happen you did not talk about it to Moses Fleming?</p>
<p>He knew I did not hear any thing about the matter at all.</p>
<p>You was afraid to be summoned as A witteness I suppose?</p>
<p>I did not want to hear any thing at all about it, and I did not care
any thing about it.</p>
<p>You say you sat up two hours after supper?</p>
<p>Yes we had the things to move away before we could go to bed after
suppers was over.</p>
<p>Where there any other persons went to Quincy on the same boast besides
yourself from Warsaw.</p>
<p>I don’t think there was.</p>
<p>When Sharp drove up that evening was his horses sweating very much?</p>
<p>I did not notice.</p>
<p>How long before day was it you said you went to bed?</p>
<p>I said we went to bed about 4 oclock.</p>
<p>Do you know what time you got up the next morning?</p>
<p>It was day light Sir.</p>
<p>How long had you been in bed?</p>
<p>I went to bed at 4 o clock and got up when it was day light.</p>
<p>Was you in bed 2 hours?</p>
<p>I supose we where prahaps more.</p>
<p>It was the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of June?</p>
<p>Yes sire it was.</p>
<p>Did you sleep any after you went to bed</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You can then form A pretty good Idea how long you was in bed?</p>
<p>I said 2 hours and it might be more.</p>
<p>Do you know Mr. Fellps of Nauvoo?</p>
<p>No Sir I do not.</p>
<p>Do you know Taylor?</p>
<p>I know him by sight.</p>
<p>Do you know Brigham Young?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had you every any conversation with him.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Do you know Mr. Littlefield?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Do you know Orson Pratt?</p>
<p>I know him by sight.</p>
<p>Are you aquainted personally with any of the Twelve?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Do you know any one of them?</p>
<p>I know them when I see them.</p>
<p>And you are not aquainted with any of them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Do you know either of the Misses Smiths?</p>
<p>I know them by sight.</p>
<p>You are not aquainted with them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Reti</p>
<p>Benjeman Brackenberry Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Lamburn. Where was you on the day the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>I was on the road between this and Carthage.</p>
<p>Was you in Warsaw that morning?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time did you leave Warsaw that morning?</p>
<p>About nine oclock.</p>
<p>Did you leave in A company with the troops?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where were they going to?</p>
<p>When they left there I understood they where going to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>In what capasity was you?</p>
<p>I drove a Baggage Waggon.</p>
<p>Whose waggon did you drive?</p>
<p>It was Mr. Fullers waggon?</p>
<p>Where did you live then</p>
<p>I lived in Warsaw.</p>
<p>Whose company was the waggon attached too.</p>
<p>I believe Davises Company.</p>
<p>How meny companys where there along?</p>
<p>Two or three.</p>
<p>Who was the cap. of them.</p>
<p>Davis and Grover I do not know the other mans name.</p>
<p>And you was driving A baggage Waggon?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time was it when you got to the railroad shanties?</p>
<p>About 12 o’clock.</p>
<p>What was done there?</p>
<p>We halted there and took dinner.</p>
<p>Did you know Williams?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was he along with you from Warsaw to the railroad?</p>
<p>I do not know wether he was or not I saw him there.</p>
<p>Do you know Alridge?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was he there?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp there.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And Grover was there I supose with his company?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there any thing said about the Governor disbanding the troops?</p>
<p>Williams read an Order to disband the troops.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of these 5 men make A speash that day.</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>Was William on horse back or on foot?</p>
<p>He was on horse back.</p>
<p>What sort of A horse did he ride.</p>
<p>He rode a surrel mare.</p>
<p>Was Sharp on horse back or on foot?</p>
<p>He was on horse back.</p>
<p>Do you know what sort of A horse Sharpe rode?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was Alridge on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was Davis and Grover on horse back.</p>
<p>No they was on foot.</p>
<p>You say you heard no speaches made.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear any call made for volenteers?</p>
<p>Yes Grover made A call for volenteers to go to Carthage to see what
the Governor had disbanded the men for.</p>
<p>So you concluded to come on?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>I was in Mr. Fullers employment.</p>
<p>Did he direct you to drive on to Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there nothing said about Jo or Hiram Smith?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear Williams, Alridge or Sharp say any thing about going to
Carthage or did they make any division in the company.</p>
<p>Yes some went back and some went on to Carthage.</p>
<p>How long after they made this division before they started?</p>
<p>They did not stay more than half an hour.</p>
<p>How meny of these 5 men came along to Carthage?</p>
<p>I do not remember seeing any except Mr. Grover till we got half way
hear.</p>
<p>Who did you see when you got half way hear?</p>
<p>I saw Alridg Williams and Sharp.</p>
<p>Did you not see Davis?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see him any more that day?</p>
<p>Yes about A quarter of A mile off the Jail Davis came on in A waggon
in company with some others.</p>
<p>What sort of A waggon was it that Davis and others came in?</p>
<p>It belonged to A Mr. Coal.</p>
<p>Was there A place out here where A division was made?</p>
<p>Yes Sir 3 or 4 miles out on the Warsaw road.</p>
<p>Was any of these men there then?</p>
<p>I saw Grover Sharp and Williams there.</p>
<p>Do you know of them who left that point to come to town in advance of
the company.</p>
<p>I don’t know where they went.</p>
<p>Did you see any more of the troops after the baggage waggons left.</p>
<p>Yes I saw them come out of the timber that is near Carthage.</p>
<p>Which way did you come?</p>
<p>I came down the Warsaw road.</p>
<p>Did you come into town?</p>
<p>No Sir I staid About A quarter of A mile from the Jail.</p>
<p>Who directed you to go back?</p>
<p>The company came up some and some got in the waggon.</p>
<p>Was there any other baggage Waggons there besides the one you drove?</p>
<p>Yes another one that belonged to Fuller.</p>
<p>While you was there Did Davis overtake you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How many was there in the waggon when Davis came up?</p>
<p>4 or 5.</p>
<p>Where they armed?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>What did these men say?</p>
<p>They said they had killed Smith</p>
<p>Did you see Grover come back?</p>
<p>Yes</p>
<p>Was Grover on foot?</p>
<p>Yes, he road with me part of the way.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about killing Smith?</p>
<p>Yes. He said they had killed Smith, and said he was A damned
[illegible] man he said Smith struck him in the face.</p>
<p>Did he say he was one that rushed by the guard</p>
<p>I heard him say he was the first man in the house.</p>
<p>You did not see any other of these men on their return with the
company.</p>
<p>I don’t remember seeing them.</p>
<p>Did you see them before you got home?</p>
<p>Yes I saw Sharp Alridge and Williams ride by on horse back they over
took us.</p>
<p>Did they say any thing as they went by?</p>
<p>I forget.</p>
<p>Was there A carraige along that day?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Was there any body els in the waggon when Grover was talking about it?</p>
<p>Yes. did you know A man by the name of Brarus?</p>
<p>Yes he was wounded in the shoulder. And Wells was wounded in the arm,
and there was a boy wounded in the face.</p>
<p>When they started to come up here did you hear any person say what was
their object?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not hear Grover say what their object was?</p>
<p>He said it was to see what the Governor had disbanded them for, I knew
of no other purpose till one of the Carthage Grays brought A letter.</p>
<p>Who did he give it to?</p>
<p>He gave it to Alridge.</p>
<p>Did he read it?</p>
<p>Yes and after that told us what our movements where to be.</p>
<p>Had you any orders given that you should approach the town?</p>
<p>Yes Alridge told us when we should go into town to get A little apart.</p>
<p>Did they obey the orders and come stringing in in that way?</p>
<p>Yes some stopt and let their horses eat some grass.</p>
<p>When the troops returned from the jail did they return in A hurry?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was they running?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How far did you go back that night with you waggon?</p>
<p>I went to Warsaw.</p>
<p>Where did you got to at Warsaw?</p>
<p>I went to Fullers.</p>
<p>What time did you get back to Warsaw that night?</p>
<p>It was 12 o clock at night.</p>
<p>Where where the rest of the men about that time when you got to
Warsaw?</p>
<p>Some where in Warsaw and some where coming.</p>
<p>Did Grover come to Warsaw with you?</p>
<p>He got out of the waggon before he got to Warsaw?</p>
<p>How did he got then?</p>
<p>He went on foot.</p>
<p>What buisness does Fuller follow?</p>
<p>He keeps teems.</p>
<p>Do you know where the men went that night to get supper?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you go by the Warsaw house that night when you went into Warsaw?</p>
<p>No I did not drive by I drove up and unhitched my horses from the
waggon and let me horses stand.</p>
<p>Did you see any person in the Warsaw house?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How meny.</p>
<p>20 or 30.</p>
<p>Did you go in the house?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Davis and Grover after you got back?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was Williams or any of these men there that night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You never saw them after they past you in the road?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>That was A short distance from Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you know A man by the name of Kay?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you know a man by the name of Greg?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where does he live?</p>
<p>He lived in Warsaw then.</p>
<p>Where does he live now?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Did you see him that day in this place?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where did you see him?</p>
<p>I saw him along with the rest of the men, he was the first that
brought the news to me of the Smiths being killed?</p>
<p>Did he tell you they where both killed?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he tell of any body els being killed or hurt?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you hear any of these five men say to any body that the Carthage
Grays where in the conspirasy?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You did not hear any other speak of their intention for coming hear
except Grover?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>And he said the reason was to see the Governor?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When the companys left the waggons A few miles from Carthage which way
did they go?</p>
<p>They turned to the left.</p>
<p>Did they approach that timber?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see them enter the timber?</p>
<p>I could not see that far. I was them when they came out of the timber
going to the jail.</p>
<p>Did you know their intention at that time?</p>
<p>No, I thought they where going to take him to Missourie and hang him.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Mr. Browning.:</p>
<p>You heard no speach made at the crossing of the railroad?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Williams, Sharp and Alridg you say where all on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You say Williams rode A surral Mare?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And that was before any person came to Carthage?</p>
<p>I was before I came.</p>
<p>Those three men pased you when you where on you way back to Warsaw
after you left Carthage all on horse back and there riding the same
horses?</p>
<p>I do not know wether they where on the same horses or not but they
where riding.</p>
<p>Are you scertain that Williams Alridge and Sharp passed you at all?</p>
<p>I think they did all together.</p>
<p>Did they ride altogether in A breast?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>If they where not altogether how far did they ride apart?</p>
<p>2 or 3 yards.</p>
<p>Which one of them was far most?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Was they conversing with eash other as they past?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Was Grover in your waggon at that time?</p>
<p>He was.</p>
<p>Did any of these three men speak to Grover as the passed?</p>
<p>I forget wether they did or not.</p>
<p>How far from Carthage was it that they passed you?</p>
<p>I think between half and three quarters of A mile.</p>
<p>At the railroad you say you heard Grover call volenteers to go to
Carthage to see the Governor?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>That was the only reason you heard assigned for coming to Carthage
until you met the Carthage Gray.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was there any thing said about killing the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>When this person as you took to be the Carthage Gray came up with A
note Alridge took and read it?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he read it loud?</p>
<p>He read it that I could hear.</p>
<p>How far did he stand off you?</p>
<p>About 50 yards.</p>
<p>You Did not hear what was in that note?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did the Carthage Gray deliver the note to Alridge as soon as he came
up?</p>
<p>I did not see him come up.</p>
<p>Try to recolect if you did not state before the Grand jury, that the
Carthage Gray took Mr. Williams to one side, and said if you want to
do anything now is your time?</p>
<p>I heard him say there was no person in Carthage but what they could
rely upon.</p>
<p>Who was he talking too when he said that?</p>
<p>He was talking to the men there with him.</p>
<p>You were 50 yards distanse from him?</p>
<p>Yes about that.</p>
<p>You say you could not hear any thing Alridge said?</p>
<p>No not that I recollect.</p>
<p>Did any person make any reply?</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>And that was all you heard said at that time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who was that Carthage Gray?</p>
<p>I do not know him.</p>
<p>What size of A man was he?</p>
<p>He was A middling sized man.</p>
<p>Was he A stout round fased men was he stouter than you are?</p>
<p>Yes Sir.</p>
<p>About what age might he be?</p>
<p>I should think about 30 years of age.</p>
<p>Do you think you would know him if you should see him?</p>
<p>No I never saw him before nor since?</p>
<p>How can you describe him then?</p>
<p>I recollect him so that I can describe him.</p>
<p>Had he A hat or A cap on his head?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>What king of A coat had he on?</p>
<p>He had A gray coat on.</p>
<p>Was it A short coat or A long one?</p>
<p>It was A short one.</p>
<p>Had it short skirts or was it A round about?</p>
<p>I had skirts upon it.</p>
<p>What kind of pantaloons had he on?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>How did you know this was A Carthage Gray?</p>
<p>I was told he was.</p>
<p>Was he talking in A loud voice?</p>
<p>Not very loud.</p>
<p>Was he talking as loud as I am not?</p>
<p>About as loud.</p>
<p>What els did he say?</p>
<p>I did not hear it.</p>
<p>What did you hear him say?</p>
<p>He said there was no body in Carthage but what we can depend upon, now
is the time for you to rush on.</p>
<p>Was you halted or driving on?</p>
<p>I was standing still at that time.</p>
<p>Did this happen in the front or rear of the companys?</p>
<p>It took place about the middle.</p>
<p>Who told you he was A Carthage Gray?</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover talking with him?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect wether he was talking to him or the rest of them.</p>
<p>Where did that Gray go to?</p>
<p>He came in this way.</p>
<p>Where did he come from when he came to the company?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Was he on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes. What kind of A horse was he riding?</p>
<p>I forget.</p>
<p>Did you ever state that he was riding up an Iron gray horse?</p>
<p>I think it was an iron gray or A [illegible], and if it was not that
coulor it was some other coulor.</p>
<p>Had you any thing to drink that day?</p>
<p>Yes Sire I had taken enough so that I felt pretty well.</p>
<p>You felt pretty nice?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How nise was you?</p>
<p>I don’t know how nice I was but I felt nice.</p>
<p>You saw all at the plase where the division took plase except Davis?</p>
<p>I think I did.</p>
<p>Did all the companys leave the road?</p>
<p>Yes the most of them.</p>
<p>Who was with you?</p>
<p>Mr. Hotten was riding in my waggon part of the time.</p>
<p>You saw no more of the troops till you got near Carthage.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where did you first see them after they first seperated?</p>
<p>I saw them in the timber.</p>
<p>Was you driving forward.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How far do you say you halted from the jail?</p>
<p>About A quarter of A mile.</p>
<p>They where as near to you when at the jail as at any other time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you was you saw Grover going to the jail?</p>
<p>I said he left the company about 4 miles from Carthage and came from
the jail when he came back.</p>
<p>Did you see Davis at the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Alridge at the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp at the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Williams there?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not state to the Grand jury that you saw Williams at the jail
sitting on his horse all the time the men where there!</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>Did you not state before the grand jury that Williams came riding up
from the jail to where your waggon was standing and passed right by
you?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>You stated that A Mr. Cregg came riding up to your waggon and told of
the killing of the Smiths? Did you not state before the grand jury
that his name was James Greg?/</p>
<p>I don’t know wether I did or not.</p>
<p>Was Greg on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he pass right on towards Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing more of him that evening?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How long was it after Greg passed before Williams and Alridge and
Sharp passed by you on horse back?</p>
<p>I do not know how long, prahaps half an hour or three quarters.</p>
<p>As Sharp passed you did he say any thing to any person in your waggon?</p>
<p>Not that I can remember.</p>
<p>Did you not state before the grand jury that Sharp came up to your
wagon and said the Smiths where both dead for he had hold of them
before he left the jail.</p>
<p>I don’t recolect saying so but somebody said so that night.</p>
<p>Did you not state before the Grand jury that you could not be mistaken
about seeing Williams at the jail?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>How was Grover dressed that day?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect his clothing only his cap and feathers.</p>
<p>How meny feathers he in his cap?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect prahaps three or four.</p>
<p>Where they all in the same place in his cap?</p>
<p>They where all in the same place I believe.</p>
<p>Did he ware them in the front or on one side or behind?</p>
<p>In the front beleive.</p>
<p>What coulour was those feathers.</p>
<p>Black.</p>
<p>All Black?</p>
<p>Yes they where all black.</p>
<p>Had any others feathers in their caps or hats?</p>
<p>Alridge was about all that had them.</p>
<p>What coulour was Allridge’s feathers?</p>
<p>Black I beleive.</p>
<p>Did he ware these feathers on to Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had he them in when you met the Carthage gray?</p>
<p>Yes I beleive he had.</p>
<p>Had you turned your wagon round to go back to Warsaw when Cap. Grover
came up to you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who was the first to get into your waggon after the Smiths where
killed?</p>
<p>I forget.</p>
<p>Was it Grover?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Who was the first who came to tell you to turn and go back?</p>
<p>I was Mr. Chatendun and some others.</p>
<p>Did they get into your waggon?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was it before or after Grover came up?</p>
<p>I don’t know. Wells Glew and Boarus got into my waggon.</p>
<p>When was it you first saw Boarus and Glew?</p>
<p>I saw them on the road going to Warsaw.</p>
<p>How meny got into your Waggon?</p>
<p>5 or 6.</p>
<p>Did they state who they where?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not state before the grand jury that A number of persons came
from the jail and got into your waggons among them was Chatendun Wells
and Grover?</p>
<p>I don’t remember.</p>
<p>Where was it in Warsaw you saw Glew?</p>
<p>I saw him in main street that night.</p>
<p>When Grover got into your waggon was he conversing about the killing
of the Smiths?</p>
<p>He was talking to Wells about it.</p>
<p>And Grover said he went into the jail?</p>
<p>Yes Sir hes said he was the first man in the jail, and Jo Smith seiged
him and struck him twise in the fase.</p>
<p>Did he say he saw Hiram Smith in the jail?</p>
<p>I did not hear him say wether he saw him or not.</p>
<p>He spoke only of Jo?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about Jo being armed?</p>
<p>I think he said he had a pistol.</p>
<p>Did he say why Jo did not shoot him instead of strike him with his
fist?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did he say Smith did with his pistol?</p>
<p>I did not hear him say.</p>
<p>What was it you did hear him say about the pistol?</p>
<p>I forget now what it was I heard him say some thing about him being
armed.</p>
<p>You did not hear him say any thing about A pistol then?</p>
<p>The first thing that I heard him say was that he was armed.</p>
<p>You where mistaken then when you stated he said that Jo had A pistol?</p>
<p>U am not sure what he said but I beleive he said pistol and arms both.</p>
<p>Had Grover A sword on that day?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>Had not all the officers swords?</p>
<p>I forget wether they had or not.</p>
<p>What you recollect is not very distinckt about the events of that day?</p>
<p>Not very.</p>
<p>You remember that you felt very nice yourself?</p>
<p>Yes I should have remembered things better if I had not felt so, I
think likly.</p>
<p>Did you not state before the grand jury, that Grover said that Jo
struck him twice in the face but he got revenge upon him for he
through him out of the window?</p>
<p>I do not remember.</p>
<p>Did you hear Grover say anything about throwing him out of the window?</p>
<p>Not that I recollect.</p>
<p>In what direction where you from the jail?</p>
<p>South west A little more west than south.</p>
<p>From the possition you occupied could you see the window Smith fell
from?</p>
<p>I could not.</p>
<p>What time of the day was it when you started back to Warsaw?</p>
<p>Between 4 and 5 o’clock in the evening.</p>
<p>Where you driving an ox or A horse teem?</p>
<p>I was driving A horse teem.</p>
<p>How meny horses was in the teem?</p>
<p>2.</p>
<p>It was a common horse waggon?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How far is it from here to Warsaw?</p>
<p>I think about 18 miles.</p>
<p>After you had stopt your waggon from A quarter to A half miles from
the jail you say Davis came past?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was he on foot?</p>
<p>No he was riding in A waggon.</p>
<p>What kind of A waggon was he riding in?</p>
<p>I do not know.</p>
<p>How meny persons where in that wagon?</p>
<p>5 or 6.</p>
<p>Who was driving that Waggon?</p>
<p>I forget.</p>
<p>Did you know any other person in that Waggon besides Davis?</p>
<p>I forget but I beleive there was one of the name of Jo. Johnson, but
who els I cannot say I am not shure he was in the waggon but I think
he was.</p>
<p>Had any of those in that waggon been with the troops when you left the
rail road crossing?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did they stop when they came up to your waggon?</p>
<p>They past by two or three rods South of us.</p>
<p>Did they make any enquirys as they past?</p>
<p>I don’t know wether they did or not.</p>
<p>Did they go to the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had there been any firing at the time this waggon past?</p>
<p>I beleive there was firing at the time they past.</p>
<p>You think the firing had comenced at the jail at the time they past?</p>
<p>I beleive it had.</p>
<p>About how many persons came out of the town and went to the jail?</p>
<p>About 50.</p>
<p>Did you hear any firing before you heard that at the jail?</p>
<p>The first I saw was at the jail.</p>
<p>Did you see the troops as they came up the fence?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You heard no firing at all then when they came up the fence?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>By what means did you asertain they where firing when Davis past you?</p>
<p>I saw the smoke of guns.</p>
<p>Was the smok on the out side of the jail or on inside?</p>
<p>It was on the out side.</p>
<p>Did you see any flash?</p>
<p>I saw the smoke rise at the knock of the gun.</p>
<p>What side of the jail where the men that was firing?</p>
<p>At the south end.</p>
<p>Where they just firing at the jail?</p>
<p>I do not know what they where firing at.</p>
<p>Did Grover say how he got loose from Smith?</p>
<p>NO.</p>
<p>Where abouts was Glewer wounded in the face?</p>
<p>In the check like as if A ball had taken the skin off.</p>
<p>What age was Glewer?</p>
<p>He was A boy between 14 and 18 I should think.</p>
<p>How far from Warsaw was it where Grover got out of your waggon?</p>
<p>It was two or three miles from hear.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing more of him that night?</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>Who was in your waggon when you got to Warsaw?</p>
<p>One or two men.</p>
<p>Did Wells ride all the way?</p>
<p>No; and the Chatendens did not ride more than half a mile.</p>
<p>You went most of the way then with an empty waggon except two or three
men?</p>
<p>I had not more than 5 I beleive.</p>
<p>Where do you reside?</p>
<p>A Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Are you a member of the Mormon church?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you A family?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Who do you live with in Nauvoo?</p>
<p>I live with David Durkie my step father.</p>
<p>Is he a member of the church?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Is your mother?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What buisness do you follow?</p>
<p>[illegible]</p>
<p>How long have you followed that buisness?</p>
<p>Most of this winter.</p>
<p>How long have you lived in Nauvoo?</p>
<p>Six years this spring.</p>
<p>And you comenced the profession of loafering just after the last term
of court?</p>
<p>I had followed it a good deal before that time.</p>
<p>Did you know that William H. Daniels?</p>
<p>I have seen him.</p>
<p>Is he of the same trade as yourself?</p>
<p>I don’t know what he follows.</p>
<p>Have you and him ever had any conversation upon this case?</p>
<p>I have had A little with him.</p>
<p>You where conected with each other to talk over knew about this matter
or you have conected together what each of you knew about this matter?</p>
<p>Yes but not quit all.</p>
<p>When did Daniels first tell you about seeing this marvolous light?</p>
<p>Before the last term of court.</p>
<p>How did he discribe that light to you?</p>
<p>He said it was like lightening .</p>
<p>Your and him have talked about what your would be upon this case?</p>
<p>A little he told me what he saw and I told him what I saw.</p>
<p>And you aquainted with Miss Eliza Grame?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You never saw her while she lived in Warsaw?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you and her ever had any conversation about this case?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Who pays you for your attendance at court hear?</p>
<p>I have no pay.</p>
<p>Did you get any thing for attending last term?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Who pays your boards hear in Carthage?</p>
<p>I don’t know who.</p>
<p>Who paid you board the last term?</p>
<p>I don’t know that it is paid yet.</p>
<p>I supose you have you often conversed about his matter?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When did you first tell what you heard Grover say About this matter?</p>
<p>It was in the latter part of last summer.</p>
<p>Before that time you had never told what you heard Grover say about
this matter?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I did.</p>
<p>Who applied to you to know what Grover said upon the subject?</p>
<p>Squir Wood.</p>
<p>Where did he call upon you at?</p>
<p>At the Nauvoo Mansion.</p>
<p>Who was with him?</p>
<p>No body.</p>
<p>Was you ever applied to by any other person?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not make an affidavit at Nauvoo as to what you knew about the
killing of the Smtihs?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you not say in your affidavid that Col. Williams came all the way
from the railroad crossing to Carthage with you?</p>
<p>I never told any [illegible] at Nauvoo upon the case at all.</p>
<p>Did you not stake then that Williams came all the way with the troops?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Whad day of the mounth was it that this scercumstanse took plase?</p>
<p>It was the 27 of May.</p>
<p>Was it A clear day?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was the moon shining that night?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Did you not swear as at Nauvoo there where only 4 or 5 guns fired?</p>
<p>I think I did swear to 5 guns.</p>
<p>Where there any men at the jail before before those men came out of
the woods?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect that there was.</p>
<p>It was at the front of the jail at the south end you saw the firing?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you ever say that Williams gave the command for the firing at the
jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you ever stated that if they did not feed you and cloth you
better at Nauvoo you would quit them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you not complained A little?</p>
<p>I suposed they did not use me as well as they did Daniels.</p>
<p>How old are you?</p>
<p>18 years.</p>
<p>When Boarus got out of you waggon did he walk?</p>
<p>I beleive he did.</p>
<p>You say Wells was shot in the arm?</p>
<p>yes.</p>
<p>Had he his arm in A sling?</p>
<p>I forget if his arm was in A sling but I think he had A handkerchief
tied round it Boarus was on foot when I saw him.</p>
<p>He had not been riding in your waggon at all?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Mr. Lamborn: you said the Smiths where killed on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->
of May Did you mean June?</p>
<p>I meant June.</p>
<p>Was you ever offered any thing or paid any thing for swaring?</p>
<p>No I was never offered or paid any thing for swearing at all.</p>
<p>You do not not wether your board was paid for attending the court here
last fall?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Mr. Browning: Have you had any money since the last term of Court?</p>
<p>I have had A little now and then.</p>
<p>How did you come by it?</p>
<p>For driving A teem.</p>
<p>Court Ajourned till 7 o'clock Tuesday morning</p>
<p>Second Version of Testimony:</p>
<p>“Minutes record proceedings at the trial of the murderers of Joseph
Smith. Included are witnesses’ testimonies, indictment, jurors, and
arguments of the prosecution and defense, probably recorded by the
counsel for the defense. Copy made by Wilford C. Wood from original
notes.”</p>
<p>Benjamin Brackenbury:</p>
<p>on the day Jo Smith was killed I was on the road between Warsaw &
Carthage I was in [illegible] that [page torn] about 9 o’ clock
they left [page torn] I drove a baggage Waggon [page torn] this
[illegible] was attached to [page torn] [illegible]. Came along
D. G & the others from Golden Plains we got to RRS- between 11&12
[illegible] and eat dinner- I know Col W saw him at RR- I know A and
saw him at RR- G & D were there- W read an order to disband the troops
after dinner- I heard none of Defts make a speach- W was on horse back
[illegible] - S was [illegible] don’t recollect what kind of hors
A on horsback – D & G on foot G called for volunteers to go to
Carthage to [illegible] what he [illegible] the men for
[illegible] arms in their hands for - Did not hear any thing said
about killing the Smiths- Did not hear W or A or S call for
[illegible] I saw none of Defts here [illegible] untill we got
half way here- then I saw A & S don’t know whether I saw W or not I
saw D about [illegible] from Jail [illegible] then overtook them
about 4 miles from here I saw A G W & S- they then left did not see
them any more untill we turned back- I was about ¼ mile from Jail when
Smiths were killed after I had stopped D came up I don’t recollect who
they were they saw nothing [illegible]- Grover saw Smith was a
[illegible] him [illegible] cough him G and struck him twice in
the face- G said he was the first man in the house ½ [illegible]
from [illegible] W S & A caught up with us- I heard none of the
Defts but G say anything about it.- [illegible] was in the wagon at
home G spoke of it [illegible] was wounded in the arm [illegible]
in the shoulder and [illegible] in the face I did not know that they
had any other object in [illegible] untill one of the Carthage
[illegible] brought us a [illegible] and then [illegible] told
him they were going to take the Smiths to [illegible] and hand
[illegible] – when the troops from Jail met us they were an
[illegible]. two of the [illegible] turned the baggage Wagg back I
went to Warsaw that night got there about 12 when I [illegible]
there some of the men had got in and some were coming- there were a
good many persons about Warsaw House some 20 or 30 I did not go in did
not see either of Defts afterwards. Do not know [illegible] do know
[illegible] I saw him coming out & he was the first that brought the
[illegible] to me [page torn] hear either Defts say any [page
torn] [illegible] knowing all [page torn] RR I was near [page
torn] [illegible] Did not hear [page torn] who wanted go to
Carthage [page torn] – when the men 4 miles from here left they went
to the left towards the paint of lumber. never heard either of the
Defts say that they were going to kill Smith-</p>
<p>Cross Examination</p>
<p>I heard no speach [illegible] mad W S A were on horseback this was
before I came to Carthage. the same [illegible] me on my way back
and they were there on horseback – I am not right sure that they were
together but but they were in sight of each other Grover was in my way
[illegible] they [illegible] I cannot recollect that either of
them spoke to G [illegible] time Grover stated that he wished to
come to Carthage to see the Govner about the pubblick [illegible]
and sayd that he had given him and [illegible] for [illegible] and
was responsible for them when the [illegible] came up with I did not
state before the Grand Jury that Col W was at the Jail all the time
the men were there I did not state that Col W [illegible] from the
Jail past my wagon I don’t think that I stated before the Grand Jury
that [illegible] name was [illegible]. it was half an hour after
[illegible] before A & S & W [illegible] it [illegible]</p>
<p>Rebuting testimony.</p>
<p>Examined by Mr. Browning</p>
<p>William Smith sworn:</p>
<p>I will get you to inform the jury wether you where [sic, were] in
the Grand jury when the indictment was found against these defendants.</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was there a witness by the name of Benjeman Brackenbury examined
before you that day?</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Have you ever seen him since?</p>
<p>Not till yesterday.</p>
<p>Was it the same man examined before you on the finding of this
indictment last term?</p>
<p>I think it was.</p>
<p>Will you relate what he said on that occasion in relation to Williams
being present at the jail at the killing of the Smiths.</p>
<p>He stated that Williams was at the jail, that he rode on a dark bay or
surral horse he rather thought a surral.</p>
<p>Just state as near as you can the substance of his evidence on that
occasion as relates to these 5 individuals.</p>
<p>He stated that he was riding with a man by the name of Fuller and they
came up within a quarter or half a mile from the jail and that he saw
Williams on horse back at the jail. He was asked by some of the jury
if he was aquainted with Williams and knew it to be him upon which he
said he could not be mistaken I think he said also that Williams rode
out from the jail towards Carthage; I don’t know that I recollect any
other scircumstance.</p>
<p>Do you recollect wether or not Brackenberry made any statement as to
what Sharp said about the Smiths being dead?</p>
<p>I think he stated on his return to Warsaw that Mr. Sharp overtook him
and stated that Jo and Hiram where [sic, were] dead for he had had
hold of them since the men left the jail.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamburn:</p>
<p>Do you state what occurred before the grand jury from recollection or
from a memorandum?</p>
<p>From both.</p>
<p>Have you got a memorandum?</p>
<p>There was some little memorandum kept by James Renolds (sic).</p>
<p>Was there a copy of the evidence taken down at the time?</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Who took it down?</p>
<p>John J. Hitcock that would show the correct state of the matters as
they where [sic, were] then.</p>
<p>Did you hear it read after it was written?</p>
<p>It was read once or twise [sic, twice].</p>
<p>You think that that document contained a true statement of the
evidence given?</p>
<p>Yes it did then.</p>
<p>If you was to see that paper would you know if it was correct now?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I am well enough aquainted with the hand writing of
Hitcock.</p>
<p>Do you recollect all that Brackenberry said on that day?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I do.</p>
<p>Did you hear him state that he was at the railroad shanties?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Do you recollect what he said occured (sic) there?</p>
<p>I do not recollect all.</p>
<p>Did you hear his statements yesterday of what occured (sic) there?</p>
<p>I heard part of it.</p>
<p>Did that curespond [sic, correspond] with what he said before the
grand jury?</p>
<p>Part of it.</p>
<p>What part of it differed?</p>
<p>I don’t know that it was different.</p>
<p>Did he state before the grand jury as he stated yesterday that he came
along with them driving A baggage waggon?</p>
<p>He did.</p>
<p>Did he state that he drove Fullers waggon?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he state any thing about Eliot?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about Eliot being in the company?</p>
<p>Not that I recollect.</p>
<p>You don’t recollect wether he said any thing about Eliot or not?</p>
<p>I have rather an impression he did not but I am not scertain my memory
is rather weak.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about meeting a man by the name of Smith?</p>
<p>He said he saw a man by that name.</p>
<p>He said he saw a man by the name of Smith as they came up?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he say they separated the waggons going one way and the company
another?</p>
<p>I think he did.</p>
<p>At What point did he say those men left the company to come into town?</p>
<p>He said somthing [sic, something] about being met by a Carthage Gray
and his testimony went to show that Alridge and Williams where [sic,
were] with them at the time the Carthage Gray came up soon after that
Williams and Alridge left but how I think he did not state.</p>
<p>Was his evidence the same yesterday about the Carthage Gray?</p>
<p>I think he stated that the man came out that was said to be the
Carthage Gray not from a knowledg[e] he had for himself but was told
by some other person I think he stated that he saw Williams and
Steavens conversing with the man.</p>
<p>Do you recollect that he said before the Grand jury that these men
past him on his way back in his waggon on horse back?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>What sort of a horse do you say he said Williams was riding?</p>
<p>I think a bay or surrel but I rather think a surrel.</p>
<p>Did he say he had seen Williams or a bay or surrel that day before the
killing of the Smiths?</p>
<p>I don’t think he did.</p>
<p>Was not this the way he stated about Williams riding that horse that
evening; that he had seen him riding a bay or a surral at the shanties
and that he saw him coming back that evening riding the same horse;
Don’t you think he stated that it was his opinion?</p>
<p>I did not understand him to.</p>
<p>You think he stated positivly he was there on horse back?</p>
<p>Yes he said so according to my best recollection (sic).</p>
<p>He did not state it inferentially any thing seen before or after?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How far did he say Williams was from the jail when the killing took
place?</p>
<p>I think he said about half a mile he was then interogated by some of
the jury how he knew about the transaction going on at the jail at so
great a distance he then stated it was then about a quarter to half a
mile.</p>
<p>Who did he say before the grand jury brought on the first intelligence
that Smith was killed?</p>
<p>I think that he stated that some of the men from the jail came out and
got into his waggon, I think he said Grover was one of them and Wells
and I think Boarus was one and Gallier.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about a man of the name of Greg before the Grand
jury?</p>
<p>I think he said some thing about that man.</p>
<p>Did he say Greg past him on horse back and told him the smiths where
killed?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Did he say a man by the name of Chatenders told him to turn the
waggons and go back?</p>
<p>I think he said that some individual told him to put out some of the
baggag[e] and return back.</p>
<p>This memorandum from which you refresh your memory was it made when
the witteness was before the Grand jury?</p>
<p>We made it from the best recollection we had of the case, and hearing
the evidence again.</p>
<p>Was not his evidance was the same as was before?</p>
<p>Generally; I think the evidance was the same in substance.</p>
<p>When was it this evidance was given before the Grand jury?</p>
<p>Last fall.</p>
<p>Mr. Browning:</p>
<p>Did you hear him say on yesterday how meny got into his waggon?</p>
<p>I think he stated there was 5.</p>
<p>Do you recollect that he said Boarus and Gallier got into his waggon?</p>
<p>I think he stated that Boarus and Gallier did not get in his wagon.</p>
<p>Did this differ from his evidence before the Grand jury?</p>
<p>I think to the best of my recollection he said Boarus and Gallier got
into his waggon but being loaded to heavy some one got out.</p>
<p>Did he state his name that got out?</p>
<p>He stated his name was James Greg.</p>
<p>Do you recollect or did you hear what he said on yesterday about the
Gray when he came up?</p>
<p>I don’t know that I did.</p>
<p>You recollect that he sated [sic, stated] before the Grand jury that
the Carthage Gray held conversation with Williams and Steavens?</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>What became of the written evedance that was taken last term of Court
before the Grand jury?</p>
<p>It was said to be taken away by Mr. McNeal.</p>
<p>Do you or not know if Mr. Lamborn has seen that written evidence?</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Had you no conversation with him?</p>
<p>I have had some conversation with him.</p>
<p>Do you know if that written testimony was sent for by him through the
mail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he say what he heard the Gray say in conversation with these men?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Was there a Miss Eliza Grame called and examined before the Grand
jury?</p>
<p>There was not.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>James Reynolds Sworn.:</p>
<p>Mr. Reynolds I will get you to inform the jury wether you where [sic,
were] not in the Grand jury?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>Was there A witteness examined before the Grand jury by the name of
Benjamin Brackenberry?</p>
<p>There was.</p>
<p>Will you state what Brackenberry said on that occasion as to William’s
presense [sic, presence] at the jail at the time of the killing of
the Smiths?</p>
<p>He said he saw him at the jail at the time of the transaction setting
on A horse.</p>
<p>What did he state before the Grand jury in relation to A Carthage Gray
who met them some 4 miles from hear (sic)?</p>
<p>He said there was A person met them who appeard to him to be A
Carthage Gray and from what he saw of him he was in conversation with
Williams and Steavens on one side.</p>
<p>Did he state he heard anything the Gray said to Williams and Steavens?</p>
<p>He said he heard the Gray say “Now is the time for any thing you want
to do in town” or words to that import.</p>
<p>What account did he give of the horse the Carthage Gray was riding?</p>
<p>(The witteness here drew from his pocket A memorandom of the
proceedings of the Grand jury and said) I made this memorandum the day
after the evidence was taken.</p>
<p>Have you read the testimoney [sic, testimony] or memorandom as it
was taken from the mouth of the witteness?</p>
<p>No Mr. McNeal took it away.</p>
<p>So imeadietly on going home you wrote this memorandom from
recollection?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Mr. Lamborn.:</p>
<p>Who wrote out the memorandom McNeal took away?</p>
<p>I think it was written by Mr. Hitcock the clerk of the Grand jury.</p>
<p>Would you know it again if you saw it?</p>
<p>I think I should for I wrote part of it my self.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Larkin Scot Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Scot where do you reside?</p>
<p>I live 8 ½ miles from this on the Quincy road.</p>
<p>Do you know A man by the name of Daniels?</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with him or hear him make any
statements with regard to the killing of the Smiths?</p>
<p>The nights after the report came to us he came to my house about dark
or A little after dark there was A considerable quantity of people
there for some time afterwards among the company was John Pike and
Derock Fullar After A short time I said I thought that it was possible
they where tired and told the Gentlemen to go up stairs and got to
bed; about two oclock in the morning there was A considerable quantity
of people gathering in the neighbourd as I termed to obey the orders
of the Governor before they has got them. I went up stairs about two
oclock on hearing Daniels say that he was tired and wanted to go home
to his family, and as Mr. Henderson had not gone he thought he had
better get up and go with them he accordingly got up and we went down
to hendersons but they had not got up. I suposed they where gone but
have understood since they did not go till next day. In conversing
with them that rose that morning upon this matter the Generall
feelling was that the Missorians had murdered these men. I asked
Daniels if they where all Missorians the reply was they where not
Missorians he then stated that he knew all about it “for I was in the
company” he also stated in the conversation that Francklin Worrel was
hard to manage for it took two or three to hold him down that he waved
his sword very much and made strong efforts then he said “I am the man
who took the sword from him and threw it over the fence” I then
replied to Daniels in these words how did you feel in seeing this man
shot down his reply was that he did not regret it that it did not moov
him for they justly diserved it. He then comenced to tell me some
names but I said stop it keep that to yourself Mr. Daniels and the
conversation upon that subject was at an end.</p>
<p>Did he tell you any thing about A light?</p>
<p>Not any thing.</p>
<p>Did he tell you about seeing 4 men shoot Smith after he fell out of
the window?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect any conversation of that kind with Daniels.</p>
<p>Did he tell you that these 4 men where so parrallized they had to
carry them off the ground?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Mr. Lamborn.:</p>
<p>He did not tell you the perticulars of the scercumstance at all?</p>
<p>He told me just what I have stated to you.</p>
<p>What you told is just what he told you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>He said the officer of the Gaurd was hard to hold down?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When he comenced naming names who did he name?</p>
<p>He spoke of Jacob Davis that he as a man was a back out and then
called him A coward and said he turned back to Warsaw and used his
influence to get others to turn. He names another man by the name of
Bedell and damned him for going back.</p>
<p>Why did you stop him from telling the names of those engaged in
killing the Smiths?</p>
<p>Because I did not want to know the men that did it.</p>
<p>Why did you not want to know the men that did it?</p>
<p>Because I felt that I did not want to know any thing more about.</p>
<p>You stopt him before he mentioned any others?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And he termed Davis A coward?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Derrick Fullar Sworn:</p>
<p>Mr. Fullar where do you reside?</p>
<p>In the dirrection of Quincy.</p>
<p>Do you know A man by the name of Daniels?</p>
<p>I have seen him.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with him about the killing of the
Smiths?</p>
<p>I have had some.</p>
<p>Where did you see him?</p>
<p>He overtook me on the road.</p>
<p>Will you inform the jury when you met him and where and what was said,
tell it in your own way?</p>
<p>The night the Smiths was killed I was on my way home he told me the
Smiths where killed I don’t know that I can tell the conversation.</p>
<p>Well tell us as near as you can what he said of the manner of the
killing and how he knew so.</p>
<p>He told me there was A company of men came up to the jail, the guard
fired on them as they came up the guard clinched in the struggle he
said he took Worrels sword from him that two or three men had hold of
him he said he came up and struck him on the hand and took the sword
and through it over the fence into the Garding he requested me than
that if I saw Worrel before he did to tell him where the sword lay.</p>
<p>Did Mr. Daniels tell you on this occasion any thing about A marvolous
light?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he tell you about some man taking Smith after he fell through the
window and setting him up for 4 other men to shoot him?</p>
<p>He told me about setting him up against the well curb but I do not
recollect him saying any thing about 4 others shooting him I am not
scertain but he said they placed him up against the wall of the house.</p>
<p>Did he tell you about 4 men who where so much terrified that they
where parrallized and had to be carried away?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Mr. Lamborn.:</p>
<p>Had you been in town that day?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was you at the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was you in town at the time the Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>I was out of town about a quarter of a mile.</p>
<p>Did you know when you heard the guns firing what they where firing
for?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you heard any thing about what was the intention of the people
with regard to the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you seen any of these men that day?</p>
<p>I saw Williams Sharp I did not know.</p>
<p>Was he on foot or on horse back?</p>
<p>he was on foot.</p>
<p>Was Daniels on foot?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you hear Daniels statements before this court?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did his statements told hear the other day correspond with what he
told you?</p>
<p>I think they did.</p>
<p>Did he say Worrel carried anything but his sword?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about what the rest of the Gaurd was doing Did he
say the gaurd was shooting at the crowd?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he say that any of them was hurt?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about Mr. Browings Marvolous light and parraletic
strok?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he tell you was there at the killing?</p>
<p>I think he named Williams</p>
<p>Did he say anything about it being planed between the gaurd and and
the mob how they should accomplish the killing of the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did he say occurred from the time they where disbanded till they
came up there to the jail?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Your recollection is not very perfect I think?</p>
<p>I recollect what I have stated.</p>
<p>You only recollect about the sword buisness and the light You are
shure he said there was no lightening?</p>
<p>He did not say any thing about it.</p>
<p>You think the balance of his statements here is about what he stated
to you.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he tell you wether he turned from the road with the mob or came on
by himself?</p>
<p>I cannot recollect.</p>
<p>I suppose the tenor of his statements was that he was with them?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about his being up on guard?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he tell you about Smith hanging out of the window?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you understand from him in that conversation wether he was in the
inside of the jail?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>John Pike sworn.:</p>
<p>Mr. Pike are you aquainted with a man by the name of William Daniels?</p>
<p>I know him when I see him.</p>
<p>Have you had any conversation with him about the killing of the
Smiths?</p>
<p>I have</p>
<p>I will get you to state to the jury when and where that conversation
took place.</p>
<p>I know but little about it but what little I do know I got from the
mans own mouth. On the evening the Smiths was willed just before they
were killed I was leaving Carthage for home, and Mr. Daniels ketched
up with me and Mr. Fullar. We had got up near Widow Hallys field a
little round the corner Mr. Daniels got up with me and Mr. Fullar when
he got up to us he seemed to be in a considerable bluster and
complained of being tired I asked him what had tired him he said he
was among the first section of men that jumped the fence and attacked
the gaurd and said he had a scuffle with Worrel saing [sic, saying]
what a stout man Worrel was “for it took four of them to hold him down
and then he got up and drew his sword but I catched the sword with one
of my hands and struck his rist with my other hand and he let the
sword go I then threw the sword over the fence into the garden in the
northwest corner of the garden across the street” he told me and Mr.
Fullar to tell him where the sword lay if any of us should see him
before he did I cannot tell you all that he said at that time I
beleive he stated something about Davis taking back his company to
Warsaw and said (I beleive) that he would ride home on a rail because
he would not come to Carthage, He did not say anything as I recollect
about any of the rest of the men.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn:</p>
<p>Did he say anything about A marvelous flash light?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What did he tell you about it?</p>
<p>He said there was a flash of lightening came down there at the time.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about there (sic) setting him up against the well
curb?</p>
<p>Not that I recollect.</p>
<p>You say he did saw something about a flash of light?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was he scared when Jo was killed?</p>
<p>Yes he appeared very much scared.</p>
<p>You as (sic, was) not at the jail yourself?</p>
<p>No but I saw the smoke of the guns.</p>
<p>Did you ever see Worrel after to tell him about his sword?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>John Carlisle sworn.:</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with William M. Daniels?</p>
<p>I have seen him.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with him about the killing of the
Smiths?</p>
<p>I have.</p>
<p>When and where?</p>
<p>at Mr. Scots.</p>
<p>When?</p>
<p>It was the night of the same day the Smiths was killed</p>
<p>Did Daniels sleep at the Scots that night?</p>
<p>He was there part of the night I don’t know if he slept there.</p>
<p>Was he in bed there?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who with?</p>
<p>With myself.</p>
<p>Tell the jury what he said to you upon the subject of killing the
Smiths Did he state any thing about wether he had any thing to do with
it?</p>
<p>He said he was not satisfied that they where [sic, were] killed and
he only came there to be A spectator.</p>
<p>Did he state wether he was present when they were killed?</p>
<p>He did not state to me that he was all that he said to me was that he
was not satisfied they where [sic, were] killed.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamburn.</p>
<p>What time did he say they were killed?</p>
<p>He did not tell me.</p>
<p>What time of night was when you had this conversation?</p>
<p>It was late bed time.</p>
<p>He did not say what time it was when they where [sic, were] killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he tell who killed them?</p>
<p>He said they were shot.</p>
<p>Did he say anything about the guards?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was you at the railroad shanties that day?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was you along with the companys that day?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Where was you that day?</p>
<p>I was in Carthage in the morning.</p>
<p>What was you going in Carthage that morning?</p>
<p>I was here on particular buisness.</p>
<p>What time did you leave to go home?</p>
<p>In the forenoon.</p>
<p>Was Smith killed when you left?</p>
<p>I supose not.</p>
<p>Did you hear any thing that they were about to be killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What time did Daniels get to the house that you staid in that night?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>How meny did Daniels say came up from the Shanties?</p>
<p>He did not tell me. I only asked him one question.</p>
<p>What was that?</p>
<p>I asked him what his name was, and he told me that he heard at the
shanties the Smiths where [sic, were] to be killed and he came up to
see to satisfie [sic, satisfy] himself.</p>
<p>Had you heard the Smiths were dead before he told you?</p>
<p>I had.</p>
<p>This was at Larkin Scots?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who was present when he told you?</p>
<p>Not any person</p>
<p>Was any thing stated as to you being A witteness in this case?</p>
<p>I did not know I should have to be A witteness till last saterday
week.</p>
<p>Have you told any body about it since then?</p>
<p>Yes I told Thomas Dall</p>
<p>Who called on you for a witteness?</p>
<p>Thomas Dall.</p>
<p>You were called upon to prove I supose that Daniels heard that the
Smiths were dead and came to town to see if it was so?</p>
<p>Daniels told me that he was at the princes shanties when the Smiths
were murdered and he went to see if the report was true.</p>
<p>How long is it since you told Dalls of what Daniels said to you?</p>
<p>About a week.</p>
<p>That was before you was called upon to be a witeness?</p>
<p>I do not recollect.</p>
<p>How long ago is it since you told him?</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>How meny weeks ago?</p>
<p>I cannot tell you.</p>
<p>Is it two months ago?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you tell any body els about it before?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was he asking you what you knew about it?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>How came he to ask you to be a witteness.</p>
<p>I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Did he not come to you and ask you what you knew about it?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Browning.</p>
<p>Was it not in the same conversation that he told you to be a
witteness?</p>
<p>Yes it was in the same conversation it all came in conversation
together.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Coalman Garrat sworn:</p>
<p>Where do you reside?</p>
<p>I live in Taylor County.</p>
<p>Do you know A man by the name of Daniels?</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Did you ever hear him say anything upon the subject of his being A
witteness on this case against these men?</p>
<p>I have.</p>
<p>Tell the jury.</p>
<p>He stated he was getting pretty well paid, I asked him what he was
doing at that time he said he had quit coopering and never expected to
do any more hard work he said he could make money easier than with
coopering I think it was either 5 or 6 hundred dollars the Mormons had
to give him and at that time he had got some for I got 50 cents of it
myself for some butter.</p>
<p>Did he say what they where [sic, were] to give him this money for?</p>
<p>Yes it was for giving his evedence against these men.</p>
<p>Where was this conversation?</p>
<p>In Quincy last winter.</p>
<p>Had you known Daniels before that time?</p>
<p>I have known him about two years.</p>
<p>You were at Quincy marketing?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he purchas[e] any thing of you?</p>
<p>No not at that time.</p>
<p>You say you once got money from him and he said he got it from him and
he said he got it from the Mormons?</p>
<p>He did not tell me at that time but he told me afterward it was some
of the money he had got from the Mormons.</p>
<p>He bought some butter from you and told you that was some money he had
got from the Mormons as he paid you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>When Daniels was talking with you about this 500 dollars Did he say
the Mormons was paying him that to come hear (sic) and swear A lie?</p>
<p>He did not say “a lie” but to come hear (sic) and swear against these
men.</p>
<p>Did Daniels say any thing about the Mormons getting anybody else?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he not say they where [sic, were] going to hire of who are not
Mormons to tell the truth?</p>
<p>No. He told me the Governor was to pay him three hundred dollars. I
thought he was just roamancing then and did not beleive the Governor
or the Mormons either had paid him A cent.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Lamborn:</p>
<p>Was you here at the time the Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>No I was in Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Did you know any thing about this matter before it happened?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you know anything about the having their guns loaded with blanck
[sic, blank] caterage [sic, cartridges]?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>At the time you was speaking to Daniels was he A Mormon?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he not tell you he had contemplated to go away for the state paid
him for his time?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>He said Governor Ford was to give him three hundred dollars and the
Twelve at Nauvoo 500?</p>
<p>He said 5 or 6 hundred.</p>
<p>Court adjourned till half past 1 p.m.</p>
<p>Court met pursuant to adjournment</p>
<p>James L. Gill sworn.:</p>
<p>Where do you reside?</p>
<p>In Quincy.</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with A man by the name of Daniels?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where did you become aquainted with him?</p>
<p>In Quincy.</p>
<p>Have you ever had any conversation with him about his being a
witteness?</p>
<p>Yes about three times.</p>
<p>I will get you to state to the jury what Daniels said in relation to
his being A witteness.</p>
<p>The first time he came to Quincy he said he came from Agusta I asked
him if he had heard the reports of the killing of the Smiths he said
he [k]new nothing about it and wished all the Mormons in this state
were driven out after that I had not a great deal of talk with him
till after he came from Nauvoo for after he had stoped (sic) there a
while he came back and told me he had made A great speculation in
writting A book I asked him what what (sic) kind of A book he told me
he was going to write a book upon the proceedings as they happened in
Carthage I said you told me you knew nothing about it but said he say
nothing about it as soon as I can make speculation of some dollars I
will make it I asked him if he had got any money he said no but he had
got 100 dollars in trade I told him I thought he had not generall
knowledge enough to write A Book he asked me why I thought that I said
I know he was not A man of A very great figure for I had tried him he
told me then that he had freinds to aid him he said he did not want to
work hard and if he could get along without working he meant to do so.
I showed him my hands and said I expected to work hard for my living.
After that some time I proposed to go a hunting with him it was in the
latter end of October or the first of November we went to hunt and on
our travel he told me that he was to get 500 dollars if he could make
out to swear against some people he also told me that there was A man
in the city hotels that offered him 500 dollars.</p>
<p>Did he say who he was to swear against?</p>
<p>No. He said he did not know if he would take the money or not he said
if he could raise it he would pocket the money and go away he said if
he could receive it he did not care about any side he would put it in
his pocket and leave them all. I told him he was getting into A
curious buisness he said he did not know much about it now but he
could get to know after a while. With this our conversation ended.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn.</p>
<p>When was it he told you about getting the 100 dollars?</p>
<p>It was after he came down from Nauvoo.</p>
<p>In what Mounth.</p>
<p>I think it was in the mounth of August.</p>
<p>What was he to get it for?</p>
<p>For writing A book.</p>
<p>Do you know when that Book of Daniel was written?</p>
<p>I never saw it.</p>
<p>He told you he had got the 100 dollars?</p>
<p>He did not say.</p>
<p>Did you not hear him say something about it here in this court the
other day?</p>
<p>I did not notice.</p>
<p>Did he say he was to get 500 dollars for being A witteness?</p>
<p>He said he was going to get 500 dollars if he could swear against the
Smiths.</p>
<p>Did he say if he could raise it he would not do it?</p>
<p>He said if he could raise the 500 dollars he would go to [N]ew York
he would go there for he was born there.</p>
<p>Well did he get the money?</p>
<p>I don’t know you will have to ask himself I am not ajent [sic,
agent] to him.</p>
<p>Did you speak to any one about it?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you ever tell it to any body?</p>
<p>I may have talked about it.</p>
<p>How came you to be hear as A witteness if you never talked about it to
any body?</p>
<p>I wrote to Mr. Sharp in Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did Sharp give you 500 dollars for coming here?</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>When did you write to Sharp about it?</p>
<p>About one mounth ago.</p>
<p>Had you not been consulted about it before you wrote to Sharp?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What did you write to Sharp?</p>
<p>I could not recollect.</p>
<p>I suppose you wrote you would come up and swear for him?</p>
<p>I did not say I would come up and swear I said I would come and
testefy.</p>
<p>Did no body talk to you about what you would swear for here?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You thought it was your duty to write to Sharp?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How did you come to know that Daniels was to be A witteness at all?</p>
<p>I knew he was indicted.</p>
<p>And you get nothing for coming here?</p>
<p>Not A cent Sir.</p>
<p>Who pays your expenses?</p>
<p>No one but myself.</p>
<p>I suppose you thought it right to kill Jo Smith?</p>
<p>I don’t think it right to kill any man.</p>
<p>What mad[e] you so peculiar ancious [sic, anxious] in volenteering
your services [sic, services]?</p>
<p>I thought I was in duty bound to do so.</p>
<p>Daniels said he was not here in Carthage at at (sic) all?</p>
<p>Yes Sir he told me he had come from Augusta.</p>
<p>Did he say he was not at Carthage at the time the Smiths was killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did he tell you he had been at Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did he tell you he was there on the morning of the day the Smiths was
killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You say he did not say he was not at Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long have you been in Quincy?</p>
<p>Better than two years.</p>
<p>Where did you live before you went to Quincy?</p>
<p>In Alton.</p>
<p>What part of Alton?</p>
<p>I lived in the upper town.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>George Seabole sworn.:</p>
<p>Will you tell the jury where you live?</p>
<p>I live in Quincy.</p>
<p>What trade do you follow?</p>
<p>I follow coopering.</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with Daniels?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where did you get aquainted with him?</p>
<p>In Quincy.</p>
<p>Did he work in the same shop with you?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>In What shop?</p>
<p>In Chatmans.</p>
<p>Is it opposite the city hotel?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with him upon the subject of his
being a witteness in this case?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>I will get you to tell the jury what Daniels said?</p>
<p>He told one he could make 500 dollars in the way of speculation I
asked him what the speculation was but he did not tell me at that time
he told me again afterwards when he said it was A thing he did not
wish to undertake that there was A man in the city hotel that had
offered it to him.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn</p>
<p>He said he had a scertain way of making A speculation Did he say what
this man would give him the 500 dollars for?</p>
<p>Yes, he said it was for the prosecution of these men.</p>
<p>What men did he name?</p>
<p>He did not mention names he said for the prosecution of the men that
where [sic, were] said to be the murderers of the Smiths.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Charles Andrews sworn:</p>
<p>Are you aquainted with Daniels?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How long have you known him?</p>
<p>For the last two years.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with him about his being a
witteness in the case against the men supposed to be the murderes
(sic) of the Smiths?</p>
<p>He has said some things to me about it.</p>
<p>State to the jury what he said.</p>
<p>He came to my house on the 5<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> or 6<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July
and told me he was just from Nauvoo I then asked him what had been
going on he said he had seen Joseph and Hiram Smith both of them
killed. He also told me he had got some money from Emit to bear his
expenses he then took out A handful from his pocket. I beleive there
was nothing more said at that time. Some time afterwards he told me he
was offered 500 dollars to go away He asked me what I thought of it, I
answered him that if I was him I would Devilish quick go, I asked him
who offered it to him the answer was it was offered to me by Mr.
Bedell of Warsaw, he offered him 500 Dollars to go away but if he
should stay he could 1000 dollars from the state, well says I suppose
they kill you you (sic) which I am afraid they will some one; said he
if they do my wife will get the money and that is just as well.</p>
<p>Did you have any other conversation with him</p>
<p>not that I can remember.</p>
<p>Is Mr. Daniels family conected with yours?</p>
<p>My wife and his wife are sisters.</p>
<p>Do you know Eliza Grame?</p>
<p>I do not know her but her countenance is very famialiar (sic) to me I
think I have Daniels speak of her.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn.</p>
<p>What did Daniels come down from Nauvoo to Quincy for?</p>
<p>He came down to see his Mother in law as she was with him at that
time.</p>
<p>Was the Governor there at that time?</p>
<p>Not that I know of.</p>
<p>Did you not know that he came down there to see the Governor to give
the information on this matter?</p>
<p>I do not remember</p>
<p>Don’t you recollect that [F]ord was there then?</p>
<p>I don’t think he was there.</p>
<p>Did you never hear Daniels speak of having intercourse with the
Governor?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect I remember him saying that he was A perticular
freind of the Governor’s.</p>
<p>Did he say that Ernie Smith gave him any money?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>How much did he say she gave him?</p>
<p>10 dollars he said he had had many offers he said that Bedell offered
him 500.</p>
<p>And the state 1000?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you not look upon it in the light of being mere roamanse (sic,
romance)?</p>
<p>I supposed it was.</p>
<p>You thought it was not A fact of his being offered this amount?</p>
<p>I did not place much confidence in it.</p>
<p>You told him you was afraid he would be killed by some one?</p>
<p>I told him so.</p>
<p>Why did you think so.</p>
<p>Because if he came out against those murders they would kill him.</p>
<p>You thought if they had killed the other men they would kill him too?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>George McLean sworn.:</p>
<p>Mr. McLean tell the jury where you live?</p>
<p>I live in Quincy.</p>
<p>What is your trade?</p>
<p>I am a cooper.</p>
<p>Do you know A man by the name of Daniels?</p>
<p>I am A little aquainted with him.</p>
<p>Did you ever work in the same shop with him?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you ever have any conversation with Daniels up the subject of his
being A witteness against the men who is supposed to have killed the
Smiths.</p>
<p>I can say that I did in the conversation I had with him; he came where
I was at work on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July last and that was the
first time I had ever seen him, I asked him if he was not A son of the
old man Daniels and he said he was. We had considerable talk about the
Smiths I asked him if he knew any thing about it how the Death occured
[illegible]. He said he did not and told me he was in Agusta the
night it occurred (sic) and had remained there until the
27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July he then came to Quincy I think he told me in
company with the Governor but I thought the governor came on before
him; After that I suppose some mounths I think two mounths after we
got in conversation again he wanted to know the reason why I worked so
hard said he there is no use of A man working when he could make
plenty of money without working he said he had a good prospect in view
but he did not tell me what it was he said he could make money plenty
without working and he had received some money A day or two before
that, that is about all he ever told me, I think he told me he had
received 20 dollars in a letter.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn</p>
<p>Did you never know him before he went to Quincy?</p>
<p>No never before.</p>
<p>When you first saw him you asked him if he was the son of the old man
Daniels?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>He told you he came with the Governor on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July?</p>
<p>He came the night before and I saw him on the next day the
27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July.</p>
<p>He said he was in Agusta the night of the murder?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>And he did not know any any thing at all about it on the
27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of July you are shure?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you keep a memorandom of it?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You recollect that he said so?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You thought he had not been in town meny days before that?</p>
<p>His Brotherinlaw told me he came on the night before.</p>
<p>After he spoke to you of the speculation did he not tell you what it
was?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>He spoke of making 4 or 500 dollars and did not specefie [sic,
specify] any number?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>And he had got 20 dollars of it already? Did you see the money?</p>
<p>No I only had his word for it.</p>
<p>Who did he say he got it from?</p>
<p>He did not say only he received it in A letter through the post
office.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Abraham Chatenden sworn:</p>
<p>Do you remember the day in which the Smiths where killed in Carthage?</p>
<p>I recollect the day it was said they where [sic, were] killed.</p>
<p>I will tell you to inform the jury what time of that day you saw Mr.
Grover?</p>
<p>I saw him on the morning the Smiths where [sic, were] killed.</p>
<p>Where?</p>
<p>I saw him at my house near Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did he breakfast at your house that morning?</p>
<p>He Breakfasted in my sons room.</p>
<p>He did not eat breakfast at the tavern unless he eat two breakfastes
[sic, breakfasts]?</p>
<p>I was not at the tavern.</p>
<p>Did you see James Gregg the night the Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>I saw him go on past my house and spoke to him.</p>
<p>In what way was he riding?</p>
<p>On horse back.</p>
<p>Did he ride by your house?</p>
<p>Yes. I think it was A light Gray stud.</p>
<p>He was just from Carthage?</p>
<p>I believe so.</p>
<p>Was there any person in company with him?</p>
<p>If there was I do not recollect now.</p>
<p>You are scertain he was not riding A two horse bugie [sic, buggy] in
company with Mr. Sharp?</p>
<p>I know he was not.</p>
<p>How far was it to your house to where Fleming then kept tavern?</p>
<p>It is supposed to be half a mile from my house to the river and near
half a mile to Fleming’s tavern.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn.</p>
<p>Was Mr. Grover ever at your house since that morning the troops were
in camp?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did you ever hear Mr. Grover say any thing about it since?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was he absent that day?</p>
<p>He was not at home.</p>
<p>What did James Gregg say when you spoke to him?</p>
<p>He told me the Smiths where dead and the Governor has not nipt us yet
for we have killed the Smiths.</p>
<p>Where is Gregg now?</p>
<p>I think he is in Warsaw.</p>
<p>How long was it before night when this conversation took place?</p>
<p>I should think it was about half an hour before night.</p>
<p>Did you see Gregg any more that evening?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>Was you down in town that night?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>What time did you see Sharp that night?</p>
<p>After candle lighting.</p>
<p>Where did you see him?</p>
<p>I saw him near the post Masters.</p>
<p>Did he say any thing about the Smiths being killed?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Alridge that night?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did?</p>
<p>Did you see the Williams in town that night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did you see Grover?</p>
<p>I don’t think I did.</p>
<p>Did you see A lot of men come into town the night the Smiths was
killed?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Did you hear any thing of them?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Mr. Bedell sworn.:</p>
<p>Where do you reside?</p>
<p>In Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did you live there at the time the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Where you there on the night the Smiths where killed?</p>
<p>Yes I was there on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of June 1845.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp there that day?</p>
<p>I saw him come into town in the evening a little before Sun set.</p>
<p>Who was in company with him?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect seeing any one in company with him.</p>
<p>How was he traveling?</p>
<p>On horse back.</p>
<p>You are scertain he did not come into town in a two horse Bugy [sic,
Buggy]?</p>
<p>I saw him come into town riding upon a cream collard [sic, colored]
horse.</p>
<p>Where did Sharp stop when he came in?</p>
<p>A little above his own dwelling in the same dwelling.</p>
<p>He dismounted there?</p>
<p>I think he did.</p>
<p>How far was that from Fleming’s taveron [sic, tavern]?</p>
<p>About 40 yards.</p>
<p>Will you tell us about that 500 dollars you offered to Daniels?</p>
<p>I did not offer it to him, or any thing els.</p>
<p>Cross escamined [sic, examined] by Mr. Lamborn.</p>
<p>Did you know there was an express sent out that night from Warsaw to
Quincy?</p>
<p>I know a great meny persons went to Quincy in the Boarus.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp or Gregg in the place about dark?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>I[t] was a little before sun down you saw Sharp come into Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You do not pretend to say that Sharp and Gregg was not in a buggy an
hour or two after that?</p>
<p>No Sir.</p>
<p>Where [sic, were] you at the shanties that day?</p>
<p>I was not.</p>
<p>Was you in any place beating up for Volenteers to come to Carthage?</p>
<p>I was not.</p>
<p>Was Grover or any of these men about in Warsaw on the forenoon the
Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>I did not see them.</p>
<p>Where Did you see Davis that day?</p>
<p>5 or 6 miles from Warsaw.</p>
<p>Did he start back with you?</p>
<p>Yes, He asked me to get off my hores [sic, horses] and let him have
it. but I refused to let him go suposing he wanted him to go to
Carthage but I did let him go as he (Davis) was going to see some
freinds; He asked me for him a second time but I refused to let go if
he was going to Carthage with him and he told me to go and tell them
not to go to Carthage.</p>
<p>What time did you get into Warsaw?</p>
<p>Early in the afternoon.</p>
<p>Did you see Davis after that?</p>
<p>I am not positive that I saw him after that.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Browning.</p>
<p>How was Davis traveling?</p>
<p>There was a waggon in the company but when I saw him he was on foot.</p>
<p>Whose waggon was it?</p>
<p>I don’t know</p>
<p>Court adjourned till 7 o’clock next morning.</p>
<p>Court opened pursuant to adjournment on the 28<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> day of May
in the year 1845</p>
<p>John W. Williams sworn:</p>
<p>Will you state to the jury wether you where [sic, were] in Carthage
on the morning of the day the Smiths were killed?</p>
<p>I was in Carthage on the 27<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of June last in the morning.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp here that morning?</p>
<p>Yes imeadiatly after breakfast.</p>
<p>Who was he in company with</p>
<p>he was in company with Governor Ford.</p>
<p>Where were they at?</p>
<p>They where [sic, were] in the Governors room where I first saw them,
and Sharp envited the Governor out into another room and they went
out, this was in Hamiltons tavern.</p>
<p>About what time in the morning was that?</p>
<p>I think it was before 8 o’clock in the morning, it was previous to the
Governors convening in councel [sic, counsel] with the officers to
consider wether he would countermand the order given to March to
Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Mr. Lamborn.</p>
<p>Was Sharp present when that council convened and was held?</p>
<p>I don’t know I saw him present imeadietly before.</p>
<p>What was the result of the dilberations [sic, deliberations] of that
council?</p>
<p>The Governor was to take one company to Nauvoo and the rest where
[sic, were] to be disbanded excpt [sic, except] the Grays who
staid hear in town.</p>
<p>What did they stay here for?</p>
<p>To Gaurd the jail.</p>
<p>Was Jo in custudy then</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Had there been a great excitement [sic, excitement]?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was the excitement [sic, excitement] about the Mormons great about
Warsaw?</p>
<p>I cannot say.</p>
<p>There was a great deal of bitterness manifested by the “old cityzens”
against the Mormons at that time?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see a man going out of town that day on a dun pony?</p>
<p>I saw a man going out but do not remember the couler of the horse.</p>
<p>Do you know the man that went out?</p>
<p>Yes I saw Mr. Barns go out.</p>
<p>Was it Docker Barns.</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What was Sharp doing doing (sic) that morning what was he saying to
the Governor?</p>
<p>He was trying to persuade the Governor?</p>
<p>He was trying to persuade the Governor not to disband the troops but
proceed imeadietly to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>What did he say was his object for that?</p>
<p>I don’t remember that he had any particular object in view.</p>
<p>How meny troops where there in Carthage at that time?</p>
<p>About 600 exclusive of those which were at Warsaw.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Captain Gold sworn:</p>
<p>Where [sic, were] you in Warsaw on the evening and night of the day
the Smiths where killed last summer?</p>
<p>I was there.</p>
<p>Did you or did you not see Sharp when he came into town that evening?</p>
<p>I saw him.</p>
<p>How was he traveling?</p>
<p>He was riding A dark bay horse it might have been a surral but I think
it was A bay I think the horse belonged to Mr. Deadman of Missorie
[sic, Missouri].</p>
<p>Was any person in company with him?</p>
<p>When I first saw him I think James Gregg was in company with him.</p>
<p>Where did Sharp stop when he came into town?</p>
<p>He stopt at his own house.</p>
<p>How far frome [sic, from] Fleming’s Tavern is that?</p>
<p>About 40 yards this side on the oppisit side of the street</p>
<p>He did not go into Flemings and stop there?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>He was not traveling in A two horse buggy.</p>
<p>No, for I took his horse myself he stops before the road close to the
door I think I took it myself and itched [sic, hitched] it. I know I
stood by the horse when he jumped off.</p>
<p>What time was it in the evening?</p>
<p>I think it was about sun down but I am not scertain if the sun was
quit down yet.</p>
<p>Where did Gregg and Sharp seperate and which way did Gregg go?</p>
<p>About 50 yards from Sharps house Gregg turned to the right to go to
the stables or to his own house they separated about 100 yards from
Flemings.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing more of them between that time and dark?</p>
<p>I saw him from his window after he went into his own house I saw him
no more that night.</p>
<p>Where [sic, were] you about Flemings Tavern about dark that evening?</p>
<p>Yes I was there near all the evening.</p>
<p>Do you know if Sharp and Gregg rode up in a two horsed buggy?</p>
<p>They did not.</p>
<p>Don’t you think you would have seen them if they had rode up?</p>
<p>Yes I know I should have seen them if they had arrived before dark but
if they had arrived after dark I might not have seen them.</p>
<p>How was your house situated in relation to Flemings tavern?</p>
<p>Imeadietly oppisit, there is nothing between the two houses.</p>
<p>Where [sic, were] you keeping store in the house opisit Fleming’s?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>How was your store doors oppened (sic)?</p>
<p>They opened with two larg[e] doors in frunt of the street and they
where [sic, were] kept open all day in warm wether [sic, weather],
so that there was nothing to obstruct my seeing. The doors where
[sic, were] opened all the day.</p>
<p>Till what time that night did you remain about Flemings tavern?</p>
<p>I think it was about 11 o’clock when I left the house after that I was
called out on gaurd I went from there for I boarded at Flemings.</p>
<p>Did some men arrive there some time in the night for whome (sic)
supper was prepared?</p>
<p>Yes the extra supper was prepared and over before I left.</p>
<p>This was some time in the night?</p>
<p>Yes in the after part of the night.</p>
<p>When you speak of the evening you mean from dark till mid night?</p>
<p>Yes I think the time of supper was nine o’clock which continued till
11 o’clock before they had done eating it might have been later but I
think not.</p>
<p>You was there when the men comenced (sic) arriving and remained while
they were all done eating and supper was all over?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You waited upon the table did you not?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>Did you see any thing of Grover there?</p>
<p>No I did not see Grover that night?</p>
<p>No I did not see Grover that night I do not recollect of seeing him
that day.</p>
<p>Where [sic, were] you at that time well aquainted with Grover?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you think Grover could have been with the company when they arrived
that night without you seeing him?</p>
<p>I think he could not have eaten supper there without my seeing him.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Lamborn.</p>
<p>You think it was before sun down when Sharp arrived?</p>
<p>Yes I think it was.</p>
<p>Had you been in Warsaw all that day?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You say Sharp stopt and you took his horse?</p>
<p>I think I took his horse.</p>
<p>What did you say to him?</p>
<p>Some one hollowed [sic, hollered] out “what’s the news[”] the
answer was “Jo and Hiram are no more,[”] this was the first time I
heard of their death.</p>
<p>What did you do after you took away his horse?</p>
<p>I went back into the ranks.</p>
<p>Where was the ranks?</p>
<p>Right in frunt of Sharps house.</p>
<p>You was in the ranks there that evening?</p>
<p>I was.</p>
<p>How meny was there in company</p>
<p>I think about 12.</p>
<p>Do you recollect of seeing Gregg any more that evening?</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Do you know if there was a two horse buggy got up that evening to send
an express?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>How long did you stay in the ranks?</p>
<p>About 10 minits.</p>
<p>Where did you go there?</p>
<p>We went where we had a mind to we was part of the time in the store
and part of the time in the street.</p>
<p>Do you know how meny carriages where out that day?</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Was there meny people in town that day?</p>
<p>There was not meny till evening.</p>
<p>Where was you at dark?</p>
<p>I cannot say exactly I was either in the store or the tavern I think I
was in the street between the store and the tavern.</p>
<p>Do you know wether you was in this place all the time?</p>
<p>I don’t know but I know I was in one of these three places.</p>
<p>Did you see that company come in the night?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where was you then?</p>
<p>I was out on my own stop or at the tavern door or in the street.</p>
<p>Did you not see Grover in some of those companys?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Where was you when Key called for supper?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Where is that man Key?</p>
<p>I have not seen him for A few days.</p>
<p>Dose [sic, does] he live at Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>You say you was not present when Key called for supper?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>How meny were there at supper?</p>
<p>I guess there was 45 prahaps [sic, perhaps] 50 or 60 as near as I
could guess.</p>
<p>Did you see any wounded men there?</p>
<p>I saw one in the street but I saw none in the house to the best of my
recollections.</p>
<p>Did you see Captain Davis along with the company?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Were there others waiting on the table besides you?</p>
<p>Key and myself did the principle part of the waiting.</p>
<p>Was there not some in the bar room part of the time.</p>
<p>I presume there was I don’t recollect being in the bar room.</p>
<p>Could not Davis or Grover have been in the barr (sic) room and you not
see him?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>They might have been in the dining room and you not see them?</p>
<p>They might have been there and I not see them.</p>
<p>What was said among the men while at supper or after?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>You was not in the kitchen when the wounded man sat but the fire?</p>
<p>I was in the kitchen but did not see him he might have been there and
I not see him.</p>
<p>You don’t pretend to say that Grover did not take him in there?</p>
<p>I do not.</p>
<p>Did you see Miss Grame there?</p>
<p>I did.</p>
<p>She was about in the house was she?</p>
<p>Yes she and two other ladys was in poring [sic, pouring] the coffy
[sic, coffee].</p>
<p>Where was you when the men first went into the house?</p>
<p>I don’t know if I went in with them or not.</p>
<p>You was all walking about before supper was ready?</p>
<p>Yes I was not in the house before the supper was ready.</p>
<p>And then you waited on the table?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you hear them say anything about having come from Carthage that
evening in a hurry?</p>
<p>I knew they had come from Carthage but I did not hear them say
anything about it.</p>
<p>Do you know the wounded men you said you saw out of doors?</p>
<p>I think it was Wells.</p>
<p>Where was he wounded</p>
<p>he said he was wounded in the rist I did not see the wound.</p>
<p>Did Wells say anything about who wounded him?</p>
<p>I don’t think he did.</p>
<p>You was there at the usual supper time did you see Davis and Grover
then?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Have you any recollection of seeing either of them during the course
of the day or night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Browning.</p>
<p>Did the table at which the coffy [sic, coffee] was poured out stand
in the kitchen or dining room?</p>
<p>I think the dining room.</p>
<p>Did you breakfast at Flemings that morning?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did Grover and Davis breakfast there that morning?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Where did Grover lodge generally?</p>
<p>I am not scertain I think he lodged at his office I never knew him
lodge at the tavern.</p>
<p>Was there any alarm in Warsaw that night?</p>
<p>There was during the latter part of that night.</p>
<p>What followed the alarm?</p>
<p>There was some consternation</p>
<p>Was there any in the house among the women?</p>
<p>I don’t know.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Lamborn.</p>
<p>Was there any alarm that night?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Browning.</p>
<p>Was there not A an alarme (sic) the next night that the Mormons coming
down to Warsaw?</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Did Grame and Fleming go in A steam boat?</p>
<p>I did not see them go but I knew they were gone in the morning.</p>
<p>Retired.</p>
<p>Thomas L. Inglish</p>
<p>I reside in Quincy.- I am acquainted with William M Daniels & have
been since last July became acquainted with him in Quincy.- I have had
two or three conversations with him about his being a Witness vs.
Defts.- The first time I saw him at Quincy he said he came from
[illegible] he told me he knew nothing at all about the killing of
the Smiths said he wished all the Mormons in Ill were driven out that
he was sorry they ever came. – he afterwards went to Nauvoo and after
he came back he told me he had [illegible] he had made a great
speculation by [illegible, looks like ‘riting’] a book about the
proceedings in Carthage why says I you told me you know nothing
[illegible] about it Will says he as long as I can make a
speculation I will and do you say nothing about it he told me he had
got one hundred dollars [illegible] which suited him as
[illegible] as money.- why says I you are not Intelligent enough to
write a book ok says he I will tell you being a [illegible, looks
like ‘brother’] [illegible] I will tell you I have [crossed out
a]friends to help me he said it suited him [illegible, crossed out]
well to enter [crossed out, into] such a [illegible].</p>
<p>he told me some time afterwards when we went a hunting that he was to
get 500$ to sware against some person for killing the Smiths he
mentioned no names.- he said he was not sure he would take it but he
[illegible, looks like ‘likened’] he would take the money put it in
his pocket and go off to the East and have them all he did not care
about either party I mad the remark to him [illegible, crossed out]
[illegible, looks like ‘that’] he was [illegible] into a
[illegible] if he did not know anything about it to take money to
swear he said that if [illegible] not know he could</p>
<p>Cross Examination</p>
<p>It was after the later part of August of 1<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of September
that he [illegible, crossed out] got $100 [crossed out that] for
writing a book.</p>
<p>Mrs. Fleming Sworn:</p>
<p>Mrs. Fleming will you state if you please wether you recollect the day
on which the Smiths where killed in Carthage?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where were you residing at that time?</p>
<p>In Warsaw.</p>
<p>Was your husband keeping tavern in Warsaw at that time?</p>
<p>Yes,</p>
<p>You where at home all that evening and night?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Where were you when you first received the news of the death of the
Smiths?</p>
<p>I was in my room.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp and Gregg ride up to your door about dark that
evening!</p>
<p>Not that I remember.</p>
<p>Had you any conversation that evening about the murder of the Smiths?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had you any conversation that evening of any kind with Mr. Sharp?</p>
<p>None at all.</p>
<p>Have you any recollection of him and Gregg coming into the Hall and
calling on you for a drink of water?</p>
<p>They did not do so.</p>
<p>Do you remember the scercumstanse of a number of men coming there
after night and taking supper?</p>
<p>I remember it.</p>
<p>Where you at that time well aquainted with Grover?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Did you see him among the number who came there and eat supper that
night?</p>
<p>I did not see him.</p>
<p>Did Grover bring A wounded man to the kitchen that night and ask your
permition to let him sit by the fire?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Was there a wounded man sitting by the fire that night?</p>
<p>Yes sir.</p>
<p>Do you know who he was?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>You are shure Grover did not bring him there and ask and ask your
permission to let him sit by the fire that night?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Cross Examined by Lamborn.:</p>
<p>Did you see the wounded man when he first came there?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you know who went into the kitchen with him?</p>
<p>I might have known then but I don’t recollect now who it was.</p>
<p>Might it not have been Grover and you have forgotten it?</p>
<p>It was not grover.</p>
<p>Might not Davis and Grover have been there that night and you have
forgotten?</p>
<p>They might.</p>
<p>How many took supper there that night?</p>
<p>More than 40 or 50.</p>
<p>Did you hear them say anything about what they had been doing?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did they not talk about their being at Carthage?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Did they say thing about the Mormons or the Smiths or any thing else?</p>
<p>No. they did not say any thing in my hearing.</p>
<p>Did you see Sharp any time that after noon?</p>
<p>Not that I recollect.</p>
<p>It has been near A year ago might it not have been what you have
forgoten.</p>
<p>I think not.</p>
<p>Who told you about the Death of the Smiths?</p>
<p>I beleive it was one of my own Brothers.</p>
<p>What time that evening was you told of the Death of the Smiths?</p>
<p>About sun down I am not shure who told me but I am shure it was not
Sharp that told me.</p>
<p>Did you see Gregg that evening!</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Was there A good meny passing about that evening!</p>
<p>There was A good meny there late in the evening.</p>
<p>Was there not A great meny about there before dark?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>What time of night did they come for supper?</p>
<p>According to the best of my recollection it was about nine o’clock.</p>
<p>What time was it before they got through?</p>
<p>It was as much as 2 o’clock in the morning.</p>
<p>You did not hear Sharp say anything about the murder that evening you
are scertain?</p>
<p>I did not.</p>
<p>Cross examined by Browning.:</p>
<p>Do you recollect any thing about an alarm that night?</p>
<p>There was not any perticular alarm there was a little.</p>
<p>Lamborn.:</p>
<p>Was it that night the Smiths where killed the alarm was?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What time was that alarm?</p>
<p>Near day light.</p>
<p>When did you go to Quincy?</p>
<p>On thursday night.</p>
<p>What time of night did you go?</p>
<p>I do not remember.</p>
<p>Did you know any body at all that was there that night?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect meny of them.</p>
<p>Do you recollect of seeing key there?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Do you remember who the wounded man was?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>Had he a blanket upon him.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who put that upon him?</p>
<p>If I knew then I don’t recollect now.</p>
<p>Was it cold that night?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Was he there all that evening when they comenced supper and till they
got through?</p>
<p>I don’t recollect.</p>
<p>Who was in the house besids you?</p>
<p>Eliza Grame and my motherinlaw and another lady.</p>
<p>Was there not A woman there by the name of Gerrat? Yes.</p>
<p>Is Key living in Warsaw?</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Dose Gregg live there.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>Who called for supper that night?</p>
<p>Key.</p>
<p>Who did he ask for supper!</p>
<p>Me.</p>
<p>Retired. This closes the evedences of the witteness on both sides.</p>
<p>Court adjourned till two o’closk P.M.</p>
<p>The Court is asked to instruct the jury for the Defendants that unless
the circumstances and facts proven in this case satisfy them as fully
and completely of the guilt of the Defendants as they would have been
satisfied by the positive evidence of eye witnesses, they will fins
the Defendants not guilty.</p>
<p>That if all the facts and circumstances which evidence in this case
tends to prove may be true, and still the murder have been committed
by other persons than the Defts, and without the agency of the
Defendants, that then it will be the duty of the jury to find the
Defendants not guilty.</p>
<p>That unless the evidence is of such a character as to establish
[illegible] guilt of the Defendants, and to show that the murder
must have been committed by them, and to satisfy the mind of the jury
beyond all reasonable doubt that the murder could not have been
committed by other persons than the Defendants, and without the agency
of the Defendants, that then they will find the Defendants not guilty</p>
<p>That where the evidence is circumstantial, admitting all to be proven
which the evidence tends to prove, if then the jury can make any
supposition consistent with the facts, by which the murder might have
been committed without the agency of the Defendants it will be their
duty to make that supposition, and to find the Defendants not guilty</p>
<p>Thet before they can find the Defendants guilty they must be satisfied
to the conclusion of every reasonable doubt that the murder was
committed by the Defendants, and not by others without the agency of
the Defendants and that if they entertain any reasonable doubt of the
murder having been committed by the Defendants, that then it will be
their duty to find the Defendants not guilty</p>
<p>That in order to a verdict of acquittal it is not necessary that the
jury should be able to say who committed the murder. That if they are
in doubt as to who the persons are who actually committed the murder,
and if it is possible, consistently with the facts proved that the
murder may have been committed by other persons than the Defendants
and without their consent that then they must find a verdict of not
guilty</p>
<p>That it is not necessary for the Defendants to prove [illegible]
innocent that unless the prosecution has proven them to be guilty
beyond all reasonable doubt, that then they must find the Defendants
not guilty</p>
<p>That in making up their verdict in this case they will exclude from
their consideration all that was said by Daniels, Brackenbury and Miss
Graham.</p>
<p>We the Jury find the defendants Not Guilty as charged in the
indictments</p>
<p>Jabez A Beebee Foreman</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Eudocia Baldwin Marsh, Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, “Mormons
in Hancock County: A Reminiscence,” <em>Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Societ</em>y 64, No. 1 (Spring, 1971): 22-65.
<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40190837.pdf"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40190837.pdf<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Governor finally insisted upon the surrender of the chiefs - and
accordingly the original document had tow Smiths and two members of
the City Council voluntarily surrendered and entered into recognizance
to appear at Court. Neither party being prepared for the examination
on the charge of treason, the ac- cused were ordered to be placed in
the County jail for safe keeping - - The charge of treason was based
on the alleged fact of levying war against the State and of declaring
martial law in the City, and ordering out the Legion to resist the ex-
ecution of the laws*." [*Prophet of Palmyra - P. 273] At the time
of the Gov- ernors arrival, there were about 1700 men encamped /35/ in
and around Carthage, and the little town was the scene of great bustle
and excitement- - We children went sometimes to see the drilling and
parading - delighted with the tumult and commotion, the music of fife
and drum, the waving and fluttering of the stars and stripes in the
warm June breezes. The galloping hither and thither of Colonels and
Aids de Camp with very red silk sashes, and very bright swords,
shouting very peremptory orders - were sights and sounds never to be
forgotten by children unaccustomed to any warlike demonstrations.
There were other sounds too, for beside the music of fife and drum;
high above all could be heard l he droning and shrieking of the
bagpipes, for the ubiquitous Scotchman was there to furnish this to us
novel and animating music. Sometimes the Piper would be dressed in
full Highland costume when the kilt, plaids and bonnet added a lustre
and glory to the Pibroch. So soon as the drill was over, Sandie would
be sur- rounded by a great crowd of people, listening to the Highland
marches and "lamentation" which he played remarkably well, and to
which I for one never wearied of listening - - One of my brothers had
a faculty of imitating this instrument in a ludicrous manner which
never /<£>/ failed to cause laughter and applause from the home
circle - He would put a cushion under one arm and with his flute used
as a "chanter" go through the motions of filling up the pipes with
wind - puffing out his cheeks, shrieking and groaning up and down the
gamut as if in search of the tune which when found he would pounce
upon with the greatest vigor in a most wonderful and rediculous
imitation of the real thing - I remember one large man with a very red
face who was considered to be the "crack fifer" of the County - he was
always on hand at a training and we could be sure a Hancock contingent
was approaching by a certain tune [Pencil note: Jefferson & Liberty]
he always played when near to a large crowd - a tune well calculated
to make a man "keep step" whether he had any idea of time or no -
After the prisoners arrival at Garthage - some of the men among the
militia from adjoining Counties - expressed a wish to see the Smiths--
and the Governor hear- ing of this, decided to give them all an
opportunity of gratifying this desire - Without making his intention
known to them however, The general commanding Singleton[1] ordered
all the troops out as if for parade - among them was a well drilled
and uniformed company called the Carthage Greys both men and officers
being citizens of Carthages and well acquainted with the character and
reputation of the prisoners - some of the troops (including the Greys)
were encamped /yi/ on the South side of the square - being drawn up in
front of their tents expecting evry moment to see the Governor & his
Staff appear for the review - After wait- ing some time they saw
coming from the direction of Hamiltons Hotel - the Sheriff, Mr.
Demming,[2] with the two Smiths - Joseph upon one arm and Hyrum upon
the other. They walked quietly to the extreme right of the troops -
when the Sheriff began introducing them right and left - Gentlemen
this is General Joseph Smith - Mr. Hyrum Smith gentleman - All along
the crowded line they passed bowing and smiling - until they reached
the vicinity of the Greys who had been interested spectators of these
proceedings - the significance of which was gradually dawning upon
them - Here were two men, prisoners, under arrest for the crime of
treason and many others being escorted by the Sheriff - the Gov- ernor
and Staff looking on with complaisancy as if they were persons of
distinc- tion - This was too much for the patience of the boys in Grey
who began crying out no no - no introductions for us - and as they
came nearer, groans and hisses and cries of down with all impostors
came from the men. The Sheriffs face turned red - but Smiths was the
color of ashes as /30*/ he said "let us get back to the Hotel!" and
turning they walked rapidly away in that direction. The people at the
Hotel said afterwards that Smith was so exhausted from fright - they
were obliged to give him a stimulent to prevent his fainting - and
that he and his com- panions were quite willing to be placed in jail,
where after dinner they were taken - The Governor was much chagrined
at this turn of affairs and as he con- sidered the Greys to have been
guilty of rank mutiny promptly ordered them under arrest - The company
however declared they were there under arms for the purpose of
assisting in bringing the Smiths to lawful punishment and not for
their aggrandizement, and furthermore would never submit to arrest for
re- fusing to be introduced to them. - - To emphasize this declaration
they immediately proceeded to load their guns with ball cartrages -
marched at double quick time to the Court House and standing with
backs to the brick wall - looked the very embodiment of the defiance
they felt. At this juncture the Governor feeling himself no doubt to
be "between the devil and the deep sea" sent a deputation to confer
with them and to /30,/ invite a number of their officers to a
conference with him in the Court House - after which the matter was
compromised in some way, and the Greys returned to their former Status</p>
<ul>
<li>Mr. Gregg says - "The Gov- ernor now decided to march his whole
force to Nauvoo - but does not seem to have had any clearly defined
reason for so doing - - The morning of the 27th was fixed upon for the
march, and on the 26th the order was given and a message sent to the
troops at Warsaw to meet him and the main force at Goldens Point,
about seven miles from Nauvoo - but on the morning of the day fixed
for the march - he wavered in his intention of taking a force into the
city, and called a council of his officers for consultation. A small
majority voted in favor of going - but the Governor took the
responsibility - countermanded his orders and disbanded the troops,
except three companies,* [*I think there was but one com- pany left
at Carthage, there being no soldiers in sight that afternoon except
the Greys - ] two to remain at Carthage, and one to accompany himself
and a few friends into Nauvoo. An order to this effect was accordingly
forwarded to the companies at Warsaw who were already on the march,
and they were met on the prairie by the disbanding officer before
reaching Goldens Point. /40/ After being disbanded, portions of these
returned to their homes while others changed their course eastward
towards the County seat* - [*Prophet of Palmyra - P. 275] Mr.
Greggs temperate recital of these events give but a faint idea of the
under- current of excitement - I might truthfully say of rage and
disgust the order to disband set in motion. For several days the order
to march to Nauvoo had been expected - and as a large body of men must
be furnished with subsistance the women of Carthage and other towns
proposed to supply what would be necessary in addition to rations
furnished by the State - which owing to want of time and system were
quite inadequate. - - So when on the morning of the 27th that
unexpected order to disband and disperse was received - the
disappointment and chagrin was universal. Strong hopes had been
entertained that this demonstra- tion of strength with a show of
determination to make use of it to secure law and order and the
punishment of criminals in the County; would be effectual in lessning
crime and possibly in banishing offenders. But the the people of Car-
thage after all those sounding manifestoes of the Governor, with
promises of aid and comfort, were left in a state of despair and
almost total collapse - The /41/ quantity of food cooked and left to
waste was an aggrivation and the very sight of it an offence. The
Governor rode away very soon after the promulgation of his order to
Nauvoo escorted by a company of dragoons from Augusta his expressed
intention being to search for counterfeit money - but on reaching the
city con- cluded instead to call the people together and make them a
speech, in which he claimed he rated them severely and exacted a
promise from them, that they would in future keep the laws of the
land! - - My two older brothers were members of the Company of Greys
and constantly on duty at this time[3] - After the other troops had
been disbanded this company moved their tents to the south west corner
of the square - Squads of six being sent from time to time to relieve
the guard at the jail - The boys had sent us word of the order to
disband, and that no further efforts on our part would be necessary
for the furnishing of com- missary supplies. Being in a state of
uncertainty as to the cause, and wondering much at such an ending to
all our hopes - My Mother, little sister and I walked to the town
after dinner - going to the home of one of my married sisters who
lived in a house on the West side of the square - from which /42/ we
had a full view of the tents occupied by the Greys.[4] After a short
visit I left the others there and went with a young friend to call
upon a lady living but a few blocks away - Between four and five
oclock we left the house, when looking down the street or road leading
to Warsaw we saw three gentleman from that place riding into town on
horse back - I knew them very well and was surprised to see them
there, knowing they were members of a military company which had been
drilling for days and was expecting to meet the Governor and his
troops that day on the march to Nauvoo. We walked leisurely back to my
Sisters where my friend left me going on to her home alone. - I had
scarcely time to remove my hat - before my brother-in law came
hurriedly into the room and said "A party of men are coming to take
Joe Smith from jail and to hang him on the public square" - His face
was very pale as he took down his sword which hung against the wall -
buckled it on his belt and rushed out the door in the direction of the
encamp- ment - for he too was a member of the Company of the Greys and
an officer. Our feelings of horror and consternation can better be
imagined than described - for bad as /43/ we believed the man to be
this was something too terrible to be thought of - We went to the
front door opening upon the street and looked out - the news that
something unusual was about to occur was evidently abroud - for men
were running about and gathering in groups - some with scared looking
faces - We stood in the door looking no doubt the questions we dared
not or could not ask - when a group of passing men stopped - and one
of them said - "It is a party of Mormons coming to rescue the Smiths
and take them to Nauvoo and we fear the guard will all be killed -
they are so few." My mother turned away without speaking and went into
the inner room- She knew as we all did that my oldest brother was at
the Jail on duty - We had seen him two or three hours before marching
by with the others to relieve guard. It did not occur to any of us at
this time that this last report might not be true - we must have taken
it for granted that my brotherinlaw had been grievously mistaken - I
do not re- member to have thought of the three men I saw riding into
town late that after- noon in connection with the news my brotherinlaw
imparted to us so abruptly - those other events occurring so soon
after put the matter entirely /^/ out of my mind - and I have never
had from any of those concerned, or present in Carthage that day, any
information whatever in regard to the matter - one may imagine them to
have been reticent on the subject - but after all these years it has
come into my mind - and I now believe that those persons, who were
hon- orable men and good citizens - brought the news of what was
intended by the mob to the officers of the Greys- (my brotherinlaw
being one of them) but only to the officers, not a man in the ranks
knew any more than other citizens. Fail- ing to influence the mob to
disperse - or prevent thier visit to the Jail - they had probably
spurred into town bringing word to those who could prevent useless
spill- ing of blood. There was no time to do anything in the way of
prevention, as in less than half an hour after I saw after I saw them
riding into town, the Smiths were lying cold in death. In the meantime
the street in front of the house became a scene of the greatest
excitement and confusion - men were running about and shouting - "the
"Mormons are coming the guard will be killed" - others said "the
Danites are coming to take him home" - but none of them went in the
direc- tion of the Jail. The company of Greys /45/ drawn up in front
of their tents seemed to be in confusion - The officers expecially the
Capt.[5] a man over six feet high was apparently trying to get the
men into line - some of the latter had been asleep in thier tents and
having been hastily aroused were in a half dazed state looking for
uniforms arms &.c. - My brother Tom[6] was there and very much awake</li>
<li>I saw an officer take him by the arm several times and shove him
roughly into the ranks - I heard him shout "Come on you cowards damn
you, come on, those boys will all be killed" - and I must confess he
swore terribly - something I had never heard him do before. Finally I
saw him break away from those trying to hold him, and with gun on
shoulder run with all his might past us to- wards the Jail, which was
but three or four blocks away. Just then a group of men passed me
going the other way, and fearing for the safety of my brothers I said
to them "arent you going to the Jail to help those boys?" They all
with one exception shook thier heads in a mournful way and passed on -
The exception was a Jack Mormon* [*These Jacks as they were called</li>
<li>were thought little of by either party - being what is sometimes
termed on the fence - This man was of rather a timid nature and no
doubt feared the bullits of both parties alike.] and his reply was "I
dare not." Well I said "my brother was right you are all cowards" and
turning /^6/ - away I started after Tom feeling pretty sure he would
need help, although I had great faith in his prowess - Running swiftly
for some distance, as I turned a corner I suddenly met my mother
coming towards me - I was astonished, for I had supposed her to be in
the inner room of my sisters house - but apparently more concerned for
the welfare of her son than for her own. safety - she had passed out
of the house, and through the back gate towards the Jail, which she
had almost reached when the mob appeared - Sup- posing them to be
Mormons coming to release thier Prophet - she kept on nothing daunted
hoping to be of service in saving the boys on guard; before she
reached the gate through which part of the disguised men were crowding
the foremost ones had cleared the fence siezed the guard and thrown
them upon the ground - while others streamed up the stairs which were
plainly visible from the street. In another moment my /tf/ mother saw
Joseph Smith come to the window lean far out - then suddenly throw up
his hands and with a loud cry pitch head- long to the ground. [Pencil
note: the bullits striking] Then and not until then, did she know
that these men were not Mormons Turning away in horror, and heart sick
at such a sight - she met me and took me back to my sisters, telling
us what she had witnessed, and expressing her conviction that our
troubles were by no means over - as thier Prophets death would
doubtless be terribly avenged by his people. - It was known afterwards
that on hearing the rumor that a large body of men were approaching
the town the Jailor had gone to the prisoners, informed them of the
fact and begged them to allow him to lock them in the cells - (the
Sheriff had allowed them the use of a large front room) but they
refused to be locked up - Joe Smith saying gaily - "I think they must
be friends - it will be all right Jailor - dont worry" - It was also
known afterwards that after the demonstration made against him by the
Carthage Greys Smith had written to his Lieutenant in command of the
Legion at Nauvoo to come to Carthage at once with a sufiecient number
of men to release and take him home This being the reason of his
sanguin belief /^S/ that the men seen approaching the town were his
friends - The Greys were finally brought into marching order by thier
officers and reached the Jail in time to see the rear portion of the
mob disappear- ing in the distance. - - I will give in this connection
a few extracts from a article contributed to a New York paper by a
gentleman who was a citizen of Carthage at that time - a well known
lawyer of high standing in the County[7] - "The Governor
indiscreetly had Joseph and his brother taken round and formally
presented to the soldiery. The latter were incensed that so much
respect should be shown a criminal and suspected that he would be let
off upon his submission, without any adequate punishment; whereas they
had answered the Governors call in the expectation of sterner dealing.</li>
<li>
<ul>
<li>On the morning of June 27th Governor Ford dischargeding all his
forces except a cavelry company and the Carthage Greys, and leaving
the Jail, with Smith and his friends in the Parlor chamber in charge
of reliefs of guards from the Greys - He went with the cavalry to
Nauvoo to inspect the city - to give good advice to the Mormons, and
require a surrender of the State arms in thier possession. . . ,[8]
Late in the /40,/ after- noon, a large body of men was seen coming
rapidly from the west - - Who about a mile from town turned off north
to a line of woods coming down back of the Jail - soon they emerged
from the woods and came up to the Jail upon the double quick. As they
came round to the front, the guard standing on the steps fired down
from an elevation of three or four feet into the midst of them when
not twenty feet distant. The writer saw six flashes streaming toward
the crowd but nobody fell. The assailants having thier faces blackened
with powder rushed forward and seized the guards and threw them upon
ground. Most of them were easy to handle, but one who did not know
that ball cartridges had been replaced with blanks in thier guns, at
the last relief - who was not in the secret at all - but thought he
had fired to kill and was all in earnest throughout - ' a tall
athletic stammering boy of nineteen years made it rough for those who
held him. He floundered and pounded, vociferating "Y-y-y-y-you! -
"Lie still you fool we are not going to hurt you!" D-d-d - continued
Frank kicking and struggling /50/ to break loose and trying franticly
to break the third command- ment though his impediment of speech saved
him from the actual sin - As many as could now rushed up the stairway,
at the head of which was the room where the prisoner and his friends
were. They tried in vain to burst in the door, for the Smiths and two
"Bishops" - all heavy men - bore against it from the other side. Then
turning their muzzles of thier guns against the thin paneled door,
several of them fired killing Hyrum and wounding Joseph and Bishop
Taylor, - when all inside retreated, except Richards who, shielded in
a corner behind the now opened door, escaped unhurt A window opposite
the door was open, and Joseph sprang upon its broad sill as if to get
out; but balls struck him from behind and with a loud cry he pitched
headlong to the ground. Balls from the outside met his falling body.
It seemed to me - twenty rods distant, but in full sight - that he for
a moment partly raised himself to a sitting posture against a well
curb beside which he fell; but it is not true as was sometimes
reported, that his assailants leaned his body up against the curb and
/51/ made of it a target. A panic spread, and within two hours the
town was deserted with the exception of the Hamilton Hotel, where the
killed and wounded were taken and a few gathered for service and a
harbor for safty in the expected storm - Men Women and children fled
in wagons, on horseback and afoot while Delenda est Carthago seemed
sounding in their ears." From J.H.S. in Ithaca N. Y. Journal, April
1886- - It is very true a panic soon spread through the town, many
families began making immediately preparations for leaving for the
country or towns east of the County Seat - My brothers and
brotherinlaw soon came into the room where we were all gathered,
frightened and dismayed, a rather help- less set of women and
children. They said the Mormons will be down upon us so soon as they
hear of this- We think the best plan will be for you all to leave town
immediately. 'We must remain and do the best we can for defense of the
town' Our home being so far away they thought, must be abandoned - We
knew very well that this handful of young Soldiers would be unable to
cope with the Squadrons from the Legion which evry one supposed would
be in Carthage before morning- /yi/ So it was decided that my younger
brothers should drive us to Agusta that night. Accordingly my mother
and I went home to make preparations for our flight - - Placing a
mattrass and pillows with some blankets in the bottom of the wagon for
the benefit of the little ones - taking the slender stock of silver
and other valuables - and a goodly supply of the cooked food which had
been so lavishly prepared for the troops - we got into the wagon to
which my young brothers had put the two best horses and left our home</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>think- ing it quite likely to be in ashes before our return. We
drove into town for my Sisters and the little ones; it was nearly dark
when we bade good bye to my brothers which was a sad task indeed, for
we had terrible fears of what might befall them - and we left the town
in tears and the deepest dejection. As we passed the Hotel where the
dead and wounded had been taken, we saw lights being carried from room
to room, and groups of men around who were talking in low tones - and
I thought with shuddering horror of what must be lying in one of those
rooms. About eleven oclock we reached the house of Mr. Kendal 9 miles
from Carthage who kept a sort of rural Hotel, and feeling worn out
with excitement and fatigue - the little /*&/ children crying to be
put to bed we de- cided to stop until morning. We were given a room
with two beds, the boys furnished with a lounge or pallet somewhere -
and only partly undressing we laid ourselves down to rest - the
children and I were soon fast asleep, but soon after one oclock we
were awakened by an alarming noise and commotion in the yard outside -
bugle calls loud and startling to us sleepers, the shouting of men,
the neighing and trampling of horses came upon us like a thunderbolt.
We looked at one another with blanched faces and bated breath for a
time, but my mother who was always fearless - after a few moments of
uncertainty went out and inquired the cause of the disturbance. She
was told that Governor Ford with his company of cavelry had arrived on
their way to Quincy, and were only stopping to feed their horses. Oh
dear! how relieved we felt to find they were only common evry day men
and soldiers, instead of those Danite's we had feared might be on our
track. We learned afterwards that the Governor on his way back from
Nauvoo had met a messenger a few miles out of the city with the news
of the murder - greatly incensed he had pushed on to Carthage taking
the /^/ messenger (who by the way was my brother Tom) back with him -
He only remained long enough to denounce the people of that place for
thier folly? and rode on to Agusta with his dragoons leaving them to
their fate. They remained at the Kendals only long enough to feed and
water thier horses. The Governor storming scolding and impatient to be
off - Learning of our little party from Carthage having stopped for
the night - he ordered us all to get up at once and go on to Agusta -
declaring his belief that the Mormon avengers would be there before
daylight and that he would not allow us to remain there to be
murdered. Get up and start on we must he said - and we did my mother
thinking the Gov-» ernor must know best what ought to be done. So in
the darkness of the early morning soon after three oclock - cold
sleepy and thoroughly miserable we gathered up the bundles and babies</li>
<li>the latter protesting in the usual manner of babies against being
rudely disturbed and awakened from asleep, and getting into the wagon
drove on to Agusta reaching the town soon after five oclock in very
poor spirits. Inquiring our way to the house of an old friend of the
family - (the Doctor who had piloted us from Rushville to Carthage
upon our firs coming to the County,) we learned he had recently /55/
lost his wife - and was now living with a son, whose better half had
never known us or any of our brethren; and I thought as we drove up to
their door she looked coldly and with some distrust upon this wagon
load of rather disreputable looking refugees, who were evi- dently
expecting hospitality - The old Doctor however came gallantly to the
rescue - "Why bless my soul Mrs. Brown[9] how be you," he said
cheerfully - running away from the Mormons did you say, hey?" - he was
rather deaf - "Why do tell - who did you say killed Joe Smith?" - - I
began to be somewhat fearfull he would think we had done the deed and
were running away from the Consequences - but after mother had labored
for sometime in a loud voice to explain the situation - we were
invited into the house and had breakfast - one of the dishes I
remember being heaped with beautiful red currants. Our spirits rose
wonderfully after this very nice breakfast and soon after we went out
to see if a furnished room or two could be had for a time but did not
succeed - as no one seemed to have any not in daily use - We wer
therefor distributed among two or three families who were exceedingly
/$6/ kind and hospitable for the few days we remained. My brother
sending us word there was no present danger to be feared, we returned
to our homes thankful to find them unharmed and the brothers alive and
well to welcome us. - We learned afterwards, the people of Warsaw
after being informed of the way and manner of the murder of the Smiths
fled from thier homes also Capt. Malin of the Packet Line very kindly
holding his steamer at the wharf until the women and children were
aboard and trans- porting them safely to Alexandria on the Missouri
side of the river - where they were hospitably received by the people,
escorted to a large warehouse, the upper room of which was made
comfortable to receive many of them - and where they remained several
days and nights. disposed of I do not remember to have heard what
became of the male citizens of the town. The men of Carthage deserted
by the Governor and his troop - and following his example perhaps,
prudently retreated to such a distance as to be invisable to a Mormon
host should any such appear. In other words they just frankly ran
away, and seemed to care little who knew it. /57/ Being merely mortal
men and women, unable to see beyond thier own locality - the people of
each of the three towns could know nothing of the others, until
several days later. To be properly appreciated one should have had a
birds eye view of the whole scene that night. Those old Greeks, with
thier wonderful system of fabulous heathen deities, might have thought
it a "sight for the gods." - One could imagine that had jolly old
Jubitor and his friends been looking down from Mount Olympus that
night to observe the behaviour of men, and caught sight of this
particular locality thier laughter would have shaken the earth - for
the situation was ludicrous indeed even to mortals - that is to say in
retrospect - the actual experience was sufficiently tragical. Here
were the people of two towns eighteen miles apart and the same
distance from Nauvoo fleeing in opposite direc- tions from the
supposed wrath of an avenging Legion - at the same time the latter
disordered and dispersed fled before an imaginary host of sanguinary
and implacable demons. - while in reality very few of them all had a
thought for anything but their own safety, which was sought through
difficulties, dangers, and discomforts to which one at least of those
fugitives - can testify. /*fi/ A gentleman of Warsaw, whose wife was
a relative of our family, had been acting as quartermaster for the
troops assembled there - and on the morning of that 24th of June
(which was destined to be the last day on earth for the Smiths) had
accompanied them on thier way to Goldens Point in the discharge of his
official duties. Before they reached the place of rendezvous it will
be remembered, they were met by the disbanding officer with the
Governors order to disperse and go immediately to thier homes - an
order gladly obeyed by most of the men - whose ready response to the
call to arms, had been made at the expense of home duties to farm
crops, and harvest &.c. There were others however who with grim
determination and relentless purpose - refused to go peacefully to
thier homes - but secretly proposed and contrived the raid which ended
in murder and sudden death - - Mr. C was driving a good team of horses
and instead of turning immediately home as many did, decided to drive
to a farm belonging to him, lying some miles off the direct road - He
was detained there until near sundown . . .[10] On the way home, a
few miles from town, he overtook a straggling com- pany of men, who
seemed desirous /50,/ of escaping his notice. He recognized one or two
by thier teams, and sang out to them to know what they were up to -
but they shook their heads in silence. He could see by the twilight
they were somewhat disguised thier coats turned wrong side out - thier
faces blacked or covered with handkerchiefs through which holes had
been made for the eyes &c. - - He drove on past them some distance
but before he reached town, one of the number whome he had recognized
had spurred on, overtaken him, and riding his horse close to his
carriage informed him of the tradegy which had taken place - advising
him at the same time to get his family and more valuable household
goods out of the town at once. These men were of course a small
remnant of the mob - the others having melted away in different
directions. Some he learned afterwards, pushing on by other roads -
had reached and crossed the river - thus disappearing forever from the
knowledge of the authorities.[11] As he drove through the town he
was met on all sides by the woeful tidings - the assurance that there
would soon be a fight on hand - and that the women and children should
immediately be taken away from town. /60/ After reaching home he went
directly to his wife, who was expecting very soon the birth of her
second child - told her what had occurred and insisted upon her making
immedi- ate preperations for flight. She protested strongly, declaring
her inability to leave her home - but when assured that all her
friends and acquaintances were going away - finally consented -
providing Charlotte her maid would accompany her. Now this maid was a
devout Mormon girl - but a Latter day Saint, not in name only, but
really and truly one - A serving maid it is true, but one of such
excellent moral qualities as to merit the respect and esteem of all
who knew her. Good tempered, kind hearted and of spotless virtue -
ever ready to do her utmost for the credit or comfort of those she
served - Soon after coming to Nauvoo with her family, (converts from
Wilmington Deleware) [Pencil note: Pennsylvania] She had been
prostrated with fever, and lay for many weeks with little hope of
recovery. Some of the elders hearing of her case, proposed taking her
to the Temple to be baptized in the great Font - Charlotte eagerly
assented - but being too weak to be dressed she was taken on a cot and
immersed /61/ bed, bedding and all in the cold water. Strange to say,
from that time the fever was broken, she recovered her health, and was
ever after a firm and faithful believer in all Joseph Smiths claims.
When told that her beloved Prophet was dead - that he had been
murdered by a mob of cruel men - She wept sore, refusing comfort. She
would go to the door looking towards Nauvoo, moaning and wringing her
hands. Her mistress felt and expressed the utmost sympathy - and tried
to com- fort her - weeping too. Charlotte saw this, and fearing such
excitement for her - dried her tears and chiding herself for giving
way to her own feelings - set herself in turn to soothe and quiet her
mistress. During the morning she had washed the little layette, and
the tiny garments in snowy whiteness were still hanging upon the line;
When she was told that they were expecting to flee across the river
for fear the Mormons would come upon them with fire and sword - she
said "Oh no, they would never hurt the innocent!" but when she saw
them making preperation to leave - she went out into the yard,
gathered the little garments into /62/ a basket and coming into the
house said to her mistress - "If you are obliged to leave home I will
go with you - and we must take this basket with us. Thus they were
taken in a carriage to the wharf - went on board Capt Malm's steamer,
and with the other women and children of the town crossed the river to
Missouri. They had taken blankets and pillows with them and she made
her mistress as comfortable as was possible in the upper room of the
Ware- house. The next morning, Charlotte went out and borrowing
ironing board and flatirons from some kindly sympathizer, set to work
to finish the laundring of the little wardrobe, which was accomplished
in the most satisfactory manner. Two years later, when it was decided
that the Mormons must leave the state, Charlotte, still with undaunted
faith, was married to one of the Elders, and started with him for the
Great Salt Lake. - The poor girl however sickened on the plains - and
after a few weeks of suffering died and was buried there. I do not
know whether her lonely grave was made under the friendly shade of
some cottonwood tree, or if perchance, it is where the schorching sun
of summer may beat down /6$/ upon it - or the icy blasts of winter
sweep over it without hindrance - but I hope and believe that though
no mortal man could find that poor sepulchre the Lord will remember
it, and "when He maketh up His jewels" Charlotte will be of the
number.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois,
http://www.salamandersociety.com/library/a_history_of_illinois-governor_thomas_ford.pdf</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was asserted that Joe Smith, the founder and head of the Mormon
church, had caused himself to be crowned and anointed king of the
Mormons; that he had embodied a band of his followers called Danites,
who were sworn to obey him as God, and to do his commands, murder and
treason not excepted; that he had instituted an order in the church
whereby those who composed it were pretended to be sealed up to
eternal life against all crimes save the shedding of innocent blood or
consenting thereto. That this order was instructed that no blood was
innocent blood, except that of the members of the church; and that
these two orders were made the ministers of his vengeance and the
instruments of an intolerable tyranny which he had established over
his people, and which he was about to extend over the neighboring
country. The people affected to believe that with this power in the
hands of an unscrupulous leader there was no safety for the lives or
property of any one who should oppose him. They affected likewise to
believe that Smith inculcated the legality of perjury or any other
crime in defence, or to advance, the interests of true believers; and
that he himself had set them the example by swearing to a false
accusation against a certain person for the crime of murder. It was
likewise asserted to be a fundamental article of the Mormon faith that
God had given the world and all it contained to them as his saints;
that they secretly believed in their right to all the goodly lands,
farms, and property in the country; that at present they were kept out
of their rightful inheritance by force; that consequently there was no
moral offence in anticipating God's good time to put them in
possession by stealing, if opportunity offered; that in fact the whole
church was a community of murderers, thieves, robbers, and outlaws;
that Joseph Smith had established a bogus factory in Nauvoo for the
manufacture of counterfeit money; and that he maintained about his
person a tribe of swindlers, blacklegs, and counterfeiters to make it
and put it into circulation. It was also believed that he had
announced a revelation from heaven sanctioning polygamy, by a kind of
spiritual wife system whereby a man was allowed one wife in pursuance
of the laws of the country and an indefinite number of others to be
enjoyed in some mystical and spiritual mode; and that he himself and
many of his followers had practiced upon the precepts of this
revelation by seducing a large number of women. It was also asserted
that he was in alliance with the Indians of the western territories,
and had obtained over them such a control that in case of a war he
could command their assistance to murder his enemies. Upon the whole,
if one-half of these reports had been true the Mormon community must
have been the most intolerable collection of rogues ever assembled;
or, if one-half of them were false, they were the most maligned and
abused. Fortunately for the purposes of those who were active in
creating excitement there were many known truths which gave
countenance to some of these accusations. It was sufficiently proved
in a proceeding at Carthage whilst I was there that Joe Smith had sent
a band of his followers to Missouri to kidnap two men who were
witnesses against a member of his church then in jail and about to be
tried on a charge of larceny. It was also a notorious fact that he had
assaulted and severely beaten an officer of the county for an alleged
non-performance of his duty, at a time when that officer was just
recovering from severe illness. It is a fact also that he stood
indicted for the crime of perjury, as was alleged, in swearing to an
accusation for murder in order to drive a man out of Nauvoo who had
been engaged in buying and selling lots and land, and thus interfering
with the monopoly of the prophet as a speculator. It is a fact also
that his municipal court, of which he was chief justice, by writ of
habeas corpus had frequently discharged individuals accused of high
crimes and offences against the laws of the State; and on one occasion
had discharged a person accused of swindling the government of the
United States, and who had been arrested by process of the federal
courts; thereby giving countenance to the report that he obstructed
the administration of justice, and had set up a government at Nauvoo
independent of the laws and government of the State. This idea was
further corroborated in the minds of the people by the fact that the
people of Nauvoo had petitioned Congress for a territorial government
to be established there, and to be independent of the State
government. It was a fact also that some larcenies and robberies had
been committed and that Mormons had been convicted of the crimes, and
that other larcenies had been committed by persons unknown, but
suspected to be Mormons. Justice, however, requires me here to say
that upon such investigation as I then could make the charge of
promiscuous stealing appeared to be exaggerated. Another cause of
excitement was a report industriously circulated and generally
believed that Hyrum Smith, another leader of the Mormon church, had
offered a reward for the destruction of the press of the Warsaw
Signal, a newspaper published in the county, and the organ of the
opposition to the Mormons. It was also asserted that the Mormons
scattered through the settlements of the county had threatened all
persons who turned out to assist the constables with the destruction
of their property and the murder of their families, in the absence of
their fathers, brothers, and husbands. A Mormon woman in McDonough
county was imprisoned for threatening to poison the wells of the
people who turned out in the posse; and a Mormon in Warsaw publicly
avowed that he was bound by his religion to obey all orders of the
prophet, even to commit murder if so commanded. But the great cause of
popular fury was that the Mormons at several preceding elections had
cast their vote as a unit; thereby making the fact apparent that no
one could aspire to the honors or offices of the country within the
sphere of their influence without their approbation and votes. It
appears to be one of the principles by which they insist upon being
governed as a community to act as a unit in all matters of government
and religion. They express themselves to be fearful that if division
should be encouraged in politics it would soon extend to their
religion and rend their church with schism and into sects. This seems
to me to be an unfortunate view of the subject, and more unfortunate
in practice, as I am well satisfied that it must be the fruitful
source of excitement, violence, and mobocracy whilst it is persisted
in. It is indeed unfortunate for their peace that they do not divide
in elections according to their individual preferences or political
principles, like other people. This one principle and practice of
theirs arrayed against them in deadly hostility all aspirants for
office who were not sure of their support, all who had been
unsuccessful in elections, and all who were too proud to court their
influence, with all their friends and connections. These also were the
active men in blowing up the fury of the people in hopes that a
popular movement might be set on foot which would result in the
expulsion or extermination of the Mormon voters. For this purpose
public meetings had been called; inflammatory speeches had been made;
exaggerated reports had been extensively circulated; committees had
been appointed who rode night and day to spread the reports and
solicit the aid of neighboring counties. And at a public meeting at
Warsaw resolutions were passed to expel or exterminate the Mormon
population. This was not, however, a movement which was unanimously
concurred in. The county contained a goodly number of inhabitants in
favor of peace, or who at least desired to be neutral in such a
contest. These were stigmatized by the name of Jack Mormons and there
were not a few of the more furious exciters of the people who openly
expressed their intention to involve them in the common expulsion or
extermination. A system of excitement and agitation was artfully
planned and executed with tact. It consisted in spreading reports and
rumors of the most fearful character. As examples: On the morning
before my arrival at Carthage I was awakened at an early hour by the
frightful report, which was asserted with confidence and apparent
consternation, that the Mormons had already commenced the work of
burning arms was instantly wanted at Carthage for the protection of
the country. We lost no time in starting; but when we arrived at
Carthage we could hear no more concerning this story. Again: during
the few days that the militia were encamped at Carthage frequent
applications were made to me to send a force here and a force there
and a force all about the country to prevent murders, robberies, and
larcenies which, it was said, were threatened by the Mormons. No such
forces were sent; nor were any such offences committed at that time
except the stealing of some provisions, and there was never the least
proof that this was done by a Mormon. Again: on my late visit to
Hancock county I was informed by some of their violent enemies that
the larcenies of the Mormons had become unusually numerous and
insufferable. They indeed admitted that but little had been done in
this way in their immediate vicinity. But they insisted that sixteen
horses had been stolen by the Mormons in one night near Lima, in the
county of Adams. At the close of the expedition I called at this same
town of Lima and upon inquiry was told that no horses had been stolen
in that neighborhood, but that sixteen horses had been stolen in one
night in Hancock county. This last informant being told of the Hancock
story, again changed the venue to another distant settlement in the
northern edge of Adams. As my object in visiting Hancock was expressly
to assist in the execution of the laws, and not to violate them or to
witness or permit their violation, as I was convinced that the Mormon
leaders had committed a crime in the destruction of the press and had
resisted the execution of process, I determined to exert the whole
force of the State. if necessary, to bring them to justice. But seeing
the great excitement in the public mind and the manifest tendency of
this excitement to run into mobocracy, I was of opinion that before I
acted I ought to obtain a pledge from the officers and men to support
me in strictly legal measures, and to protect the prisoners in case
they surrendered. For I was determined, if possible, that the forms of
law should not be made the catspaw of a mob to seduce these people to
a quiet surrender, as the convenient victims of popular fury. I
therefore called together the whole force then assembled at Carthage
and made an address, explaining to them what I could, and what I could
not, legally do; and also adducing to them various reasons why they as
well as the Mormons should submit to the laws; and why, if they had
resolved upon revolutionary proceedings, their purpose should be
abandoned. The assembled troops seemed much pleased with the address;
and upon its conclusion the officers and men unanimously voted, with
acclamation, to sustain me in a strictly legal course, and that the
prisoners should be protected from violence. Upon the arrival of
additional forces from Warsaw, McDonough, and Schuyler similar
addresses were made, with the same result. It seemed to me that these
votes fully authorized me to promise the accused Mormons the
protection of the law in case they surrendered. They were accordingly
duly informed that if they surrendered they would be protected, and if
they did not the whole force of the State would be called out, if
necessary, to compel their submission. A force of ten men was
despatched with the constable to make the arrests and to guard the
prisoners to headquarters. In the meantime Joe Smith, as
Lieut.-General of the Nauvoo Legion, had declared martial law in the
city; the Legion was assembled and ordered under arms; the members of
it residing in the country were ordered into town. The Mormon
settlements obeyed the summons of their leader and marched to his
assistance. Nauvoo was one great military camp, strictly guarded and
watched; and no ingress or egress was allowed except upon the
strictest examination. In one instance which came to my knowledge a
citizen of McDonough, who happened to be in the city was denied the
privilege of returning until he made oath that he did not belong to
the party at Carthage, that he would return home without calling at
Carthage, and that he would give no information of the movements of
the Mormons. However, upon the arrival of the constable and guard the
mayor and common council at once signified their willingness to
surrender and stated their readiness to proceed to Carthage next
morning at eight o'clock. Martial law had previously been abolished.
The hour of eight o'clock came and the accused failed to make their
appearance. The constable and his escort returned. The constable made
no effort to arrest any of them, nor would he or the guard delay their
departure one minute beyond the time, to see whether an arrest could
be made. Upon their return they reported that they had been informed
that the accused had fled and could not be found.</p>
<p>I immediately proposed to a council of officers to march into Nauvoo
with the small force then under my command, but the officers were of
opinion that it was too small and many of them insisted upon a further
call of the militia. Upon reflection, I was of opinion that the
officers were right in the estimate of our force, and the project for
immediate action was abandoned. I was soon informed, however, of the
conduct of the constable and guard, and then I was perfectly satisfied
that a most base fraud had been attempted; that, in fact, it was
feared that the Mormons would submit and thereby entitle themselves to
the protection of the law. It was very apparent that many of the
bustling, active spirits were afraid that there would be no occasion
for calling out an overwhelming militia force for marching it into
Nauvoo, for probable mutiny when there, and for the extermination of
the Mormon race. It appeared that the constable and the escort were
fully in the secret, and acted well their part to promote the
conspiracy. Seeing this to be the state of the case, I delayed any
further call of the militia to give the accused another opportunity to
surrender; for indeed I was most anxious to avoid a general call for
the militia at that critical season of the year. The whole spring
season preceding had been unusually wet. No ploughing of corn had been
done, and but very little planting. The season had just changed to be
suitable for ploughing. The crops which had been planted were
universally suffering; and the loss of two weeks, or even of one, at
that time was likely to produce a general famine all over the country.
The wheat harvest was also approaching; and if we got into a war there
was no foreseeing when it would end, or when the militia could safely
be discharged. In addition to these considerations, all the grist
mills in all that section of the country had been swept away or
disabled by the high waters, leaving the inhabitants almost without
meal or flour and making it impossible then to procure provisions, by
impressment or otherwise, for the sustenance of any considerable
force. This was the time of the high waters; of astonishing floods in
all the rivers and creeks in the western country. The Mississippi
river at St. Louis was several feet higher than it was ever known
before; it was up into the second stories of the warehouses on Water
street; the steamboats ran up to these warehouses, and could scarcely
receive their passengers from the second stories; the whole American
Bottom was overflowed from eight to twenty feet deep, and steamboats
freely crossed the Bottom along the road from St. Louis to the
opposite bluffs in Illinois; houses and fences and stock of all kinds
were swept away, the fields near the river, after the water subsided,
being covered with sand from a foot to three feet deep; which was
generally thrown into ridges and washed into gullies, so as to spoil
the land for cultivation. Families had great difficulty in making
their escape. Through the active exertions of Mr. Pratt. the mayor of
St. Louis, steamboats were sent in every direction to their relief.
The boats found many of the families on the tops of their houses just
ready to be floated away. The inhabitants of the Bottom lost nearly
all their personal property. A large number of them were taken to St.
Louis in a state of entire destitution, and their necessities were
supplied by the contributions of the charitable of that city. A larger
number were forced out on to the Illinois bluffs, where they encamped
and were supplied with provisions by the neighboring inhabitants. This
freshet nearly ruined the ancient village of Kaskaskia. The
inhabitants were driven away and scattered, many of them never to
return. For many years before this flood there had been a flourishing
institution at Kaskaskia, under the direction of an order of nuns of
the Catholic Church. They had erected an extensive building, which was
surrounded and filled by the waters to the second story. But they were
all safely taken away, pupils and all, by a steamboat which was sent
to their relief and which ran directly up to the building and received
its inmates from the second story. This school was now transferred to
St. Louis, where it yet remains. All the rivers and streams in
Illinois were as high, and did as much damage in proportion to their
length and the extent of their bottoms, as the Mississippi. This great
flood destroyed the last hope of getting provisions at home; and I was
totally without funds belonging to the State with which to purchase at
more distant markets, and there was a certainty that such purchases
could not have been made on credit abroad. For these reasons I was
desirous of avoiding a war if it could be avoided. In the meantime I
made a requisition upon the officers of the Nauvoo legion for the
State arms in their possession. It appears that there was no evidence
in the quartermaster-general's office of the number and description of
arms with which the legion had been furnished. Dr. Bennett, after he
had been appointed quartermaster general, had joined the Mormons and
had disposed of the public arms as he pleased without keeping or
giving any account of them. On this subject I applied to Gen. Wilson
Law for information. He had lately been the major-general of the
legion. He had seceded from the Mormon party; was one of the owners of
the proscribed press; had left the city, as he said, in fear of his
life; and was one of the party asking for justice against its
constituted authorities. He was interested to exaggerate the number of
arms rather than to place it at too low an estimate. From his
information I learned that the legion had received three pieces of
cannon and about two hundred and fifty stand of small arms and their
accoutrements. Of these, the three pieces of cannon and two hundred
and twenty stand of small arms were surrendered. These arms were
demanded because the legion was illegally used in the destruction of
the press and in enforcing martial law in the city in open resistance
to legal process and the posse comitatus. I demanded the surrender
also on account of the great prejudice and excitement which the
possession of these arms by the Mormons had always kindled in the
minds of the people. A large portion of the people, by pure
misrepresentation, had been made to believe that the legion had
received of the State as many as thirty pieces of artillery and five
or six thousand stand of small arms, which in all probability would
soon be wielded for the conquest of the country; and for their
subjection to Mormon domination. I was of opinion that the removal of
these arms would tend much to allay this excitement and prejudice; and
in point of fact, although wearing a severe aspect, would be an act of
real kindness to the Mormons themselves. On the 23d or 24th day of
June Joe Smith, the mayor of Nauvoo, together with his brother Hyrum
and all the members of the council and all others demanded, came into
Carthage and surrendered themselves prisoners to the constable, on the
charge of riot. They all voluntarily entered into a recognizance
before the justice of the peace for their appearance at court to
answer the charge. And all of them were discharged from custody except
Joe and Hyrum Smith, against whom the magistrate had issued a new writ
on a complaint of treason. They were immediately arrested by the
constable on this charge and retained in his custody to answer it.</p>
<p>The overt act of treason charged against them consisted in the alleged
levying of war against the State by declaring martial law in Nauvoo,
and in ordering out the legion to resist the posse comitatus. Their
actual guiltiness of the charge would depend upon circumstances. If
their opponents had been seeking to put the law in force in good
faith, and nothing more, then an array of a military force in open
resistance to the posse comitatus and the militia of the State most
probably would have amounted to treason. But if those opponents merely
intended to use the process of the law, the militia of the State, and
the posse comitatus as cats-paws to compass the possession of their
persons for the purpose of murdering them afterwards, as the sequel
demonstrated the fact to be, it might well be doubted whether they
were guilty of treason. Soon after the surrender of the Smiths, at
their request I despatched Captain Singleton with his company from
Brown county to Nauvoo to guard the town; and I authorized him to take
command of the legion. He reported to me afterwards that he called out
the legion for inspection; and that upon two hours' notice two
thousand of them assembled, all of them armed; and this after the
public arms had been taken away from them. So it appears that they had
a sufficiency of private arms for any reasonable purpose. After the
Smiths had been arrested on the new charge of treason the justice of
the peace postponed the examination because neither of the parties was
prepared with his witnesses for trial. In the meantime he committed
them to the jail of the county for greater security. In all this
matter the justice of the peace and constable, though humble in
office, were acting in a high and independent capacity, far beyond any
legal power in me to control. I considered that the executive power
could only be called in to assist, and not to dictate or control their
action; that in the humble sphere of their duties they were as
independent, and clothed with as high authority by the law, as the
executive department; and that my province was simply to aid them with
the force of the State. It is true that so far as I could prevail on
them by advice I endeavored to do so. The prisoners were not in
military custody, or prisoners of war; and I could no more legally
control these officers than I could the superior courts of justice.
Some persons have supposed that I ought to have had them sent to some
distant and friendly part of the State for confinement and trial; and
that I ought to have searched them for concealed arms; but these
surmises and suppositions are readily disposed of by the fact that
they were not my prisoners; but were the prisoners of the constable
and jailer, under the direction of the justice of the peace. And also
by the fact that by law they could be tried in no other county than
Hancock. The jail in which they were confined is a considerable stone
building; containing a residence for the jailer, cells for the close
and secure confinement of prisoners, and one larger room not so
strong, but more airy and comfortable than the cells. They were put
into the cells by the jailer; but upon their remonstrance and request.
and by my advice, they were transferred to the larger room; and there
they remained until the final catastrophe. Neither they nor I
seriously apprehended an attack on the jail through the guard
stationed to protect it. Nor did I apprehend the least danger on their
part of an attempt to escape. For I was very sure that any such an
attempt would have been the signal of their immediate death. Indeed,
if they had escaped it would have been fortunate for the purposes of
those who were anxious for the expulsion of the Mormon population. For
the great body of that people would most assuredly have followed their
prophet and principal leaders, as they did in their flight from
Missouri* *I learned afterwards that the leaders of the anti-Mormons
did much to stimulate their followers to the murder of the Smiths in
jail, by alleging that the governor intended to favor their escape. If
this had been true, and could have been well carried out, It would
have been the best way of getting rid of the Mormons. These leaders of
the Mormons would never have dared to return, and they would have been
followed In their flight by all their church. I had such a plan in my
mind, but I had never breathed it to a living soul, and was thus
thwarted in ridding the State of the Mormons two years before they
actually left by the insane frenzy of the anti-Mormons. Joe Smith,
when he escaped from Missouri, had no difficulty in again collecting
his sect about him at Nauvoo; and so the twelve apostles, after they
had been at the head of affairs long enough to establish their
authority and influence as leaders, had no difficulty in getting
nearly the whole body of Mormons to follow them into the wilderness
two years after the death of their pretended prophet. The force
assembled at Carthage amounted to about twelve or thirteen hundred
men, and it was calculated that four or five hundred more were
assembled at Warsaw. Nearly all that portion resident in Hancock were
anxious to be marched into Nauvoo. This measure was supposed to be
necessary to search for counterfeit money and the apparatus to make
it, and also to strike a salutary terror into the Mormon people by an
exhibition of the force of the State, and thereby prevent future
outrages, murders, robberies, burnings, and the like, apprehended as
the effect of Mormon vengeance on those who had taken a part against
them. On my part, at one time this arrangement was agreed to. The
morning of the 27th day of June was appointed for the march; and
Golden's Point near the Mississippi river and about equidistant from
Nauvoo and Warsaw, was selected as the place of rendezvous. I had
determined to prevail on the justice to bring out his prisoners and
take them along. A council of officers, however, determined that this
would be highly inexpedient and dangerous, and offered such
substantial reasons for their opinions as induced me to change my
resolution. Two or three days' preparations had been made for this
expedition. I observed that some of the people became more and more
excited and inflammatory the further the preparations were advanced.
Occasional threats came to my ears of destroying the city and
murdering or expelling the inhabitants. I had no objection to ease the
terrors of the people by such a display of force, and was most anxious
also to search for the alleged apparatus for making counterfeit money;
and, in fact, to inquire into all the charges against that people, if
I could have been assured of my command against mutiny and
insubordination. But I gradually learned to my entire satisfaction
that there was a plan to get the troops into Nauvoo and there to begin
the war, probably by some of our own party or some of the seceding
Mormons taking advantage of the night to fire on our own force, and
then laying it on the Mormons. I was satisfied that there were those
amongst us fully capable of such an act, hoping that in the alarm,
bustle, and confusion of a militia camp the truth could not be
discovered, and that it might lead to the desired collision. I had
many objections to be made the dupe of any such or similar artifice. I
was openly and boldly opposed to any attack on the city unless it
should become necessary to arrest prisoners legally charged and
demanded. Indeed, if any one will reflect upon the number of women,
inoffensive and young persons, and innocent children which must be
contained in such a city of twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants it
would seem to me his heart would relent and rebel against such violent
resolutions. Nothing but the most blinded and obdurate fury could
incite a person, even if he had the power, to the willingness of
driving such persons bare and houseless on to the prairies to starve,
suffer, and even steal, as they must have done, for subsistence. No
one who has children of his own would think of it for a moment.
Besides this, if we had been ever so much disposed to commit such an
act of wickedness, we evidently had not the power to do it. I was well
assured that the Mormons at a short notice could muster as many as two
or three thousand well-armed men. We had not more than seventeen
hundred, with three pieces of cannon and about twelve hundred stand of
small arms. We had provisions for two days only, and would be
compelled to disband at the end of that time. To think of beginning a
war under such circumstances was a plain absurdity. If the Mormons had
succeeded in repulsing our attack, as most likely would have been the
case, the country must necessarily be given up to their ravages until
a new force could be assembled and provision made for its subsistence.
Or if we should have succeeded in driving them from their city, they
would have scattered; and being justly incensed at our barbarity, and
suffering with privation and hunger, would have spread desolation all
over the country without any possibility on our part, with the force
we then had, of preventing it. Again: they would have had the
advantage of being able to subsist their force in the field by
plundering their enemies. All these considerations were duly urged by
me upon the attention of a council of officers convened on the morning
of the 27th of June. I also urged upon the council that such wanton
and unprovoked barbarity on their part would turn the sympathy of the
people in the surrounding counties in favor of the Mormons, and
therefore it would be impossible to raise a volunteer militia force to
protect such a people against them. Many of the officers admitted that
there might be danger of collision. But such was the blind fury
prevailing at the time, though not showing itself by much visible
excitement, that a small majority of the council adhered to the first
resolution of marching into Nauvoo; most of the officers of the
Schuyler and McDonough militia voting against it, and most of those of
the county of Hancock voting in its favor. A very responsible duty now
devolved upon me to determine whether I would, as commander-in-chief,
be governed by the advice of this majority. I had no hesitation in
deciding that I would not; but on the contrary I ordered the troops to
be disbanded, both at Carthage and Warsaw, with the exception of three
companies, two of which were retained as a guard to the jail and the
other was retained to accompany me to Nauvoo. The officers insisted
much in council upon the necessity of marching to that place to search
for apparatus to make counterfeit money, and more particularly to
terrify the Mormons from attempting any open or secret measures of
vengeance against the citizens of the county who had taken a part
against them or their leaders. To ease their tenors on this head I
proposed to them that I would myself proceed to the city, accompanied
by a small force, make the proposed search and deliver an address to
the Mormons, and tell them plainly what degree of excitement and
hatred prevailed against them in the minds of the whole people, and
that if any open or secret violence should be committed on the persons
or property of those who had taken part against them that no one would
doubt but that it had been perpetrated by them, and that it would be
the sure and certain means of the destruction of their city and the
extermination of their people. I ordered two companies under the
command of Capt. R. F. Smith of the Carthage Grays to guard the jail.
In selecting these companies and particularly the company of the
Carthage Grays for this service I have been subjected to some censure.
It has been said that this company had already been guilty of mutiny
and had been ordered to be arrested whilst in the encampment at
Carthage; and that they and their officers were the deadly enemies of
the prisoners. Indeed, it would have been difficult to find friends of
the prisoners under my command unless I had called in the Mormons as a
guard; and this I was satisfied would have led to the immediate war,
and the sure death of the prisoners. It is true that this company had
behaved badly towards the brigadier-general in command on the occasion
when the prisoners were shown along the line of the McDonough militia.
This company had been ordered as a guard. They were under the belief
that the prisoners, who were arrested for a capital offence, were
shown to the troops in a kind of triumph; and that they had been
called on as a triumphal escort to grace the procession. They also
entertained a very bad feeling towards the brigadier general who
commanded their service on the occasion. The truth is, however, that
this company was never ordered to be arrested; that the Smiths were
not shown to the McDonough troops as a mark of honor and triumph, but
were shown to them at the urgent request of the troops themselves to
gratify their curiosity in beholding persons who had made themselves
so notorious in the country. When the Carthage Grays ascertained what
was the true motive in showing the prisoners to the troops they were
perfectly satisfied. All due atonement was made on their part for
their conduct to the brigadier-general and they cheerfully returned to
their duty. Although I knew that this company were the enemies of the
Smiths, yet I had confidence in their loyalty and integrity; because
their captain was universally spoken of as a most respectable citizen
and honorable man. The company itself was an old independent company,
well armed, uniformed, and drilled; and the members of it were the
elite of the militia of the county. I relied upon this company
especially because it was an independent company, for a long time
instructed and practiced in military discipline and subordination. I
also had their word and honor, officers and men, to do their duty
according to law. Besides all this the officers and most of the men
resided in Carthage; in the near vicinity of Nauvoo; and, as I
thought, must know that they would make themselves and their property
convenient and conspicuous marks of Mormon vengeance in case they were
guilty of treachery. I had at first intended to select a guard from
the county of McDonough, but the militia of that county were very much
dissatisfied to remain; their crops were suffering at home; they were
in a perfect fever to be discharged; and I was destitute of provisions
to supply them for more than a few days. They were far from home,
where they could not supply themselves. Whilst the Carthage company
could board at their own houses, and would be put to little
inconvenience in comparison. What gave me greater confidence in the
selection of this company as a prudent measure was that the selection
was first suggested and urged by the brigadier-general in command, who
was well known to be utterly hostile to all mobocracy and violence
towards the prisoners and who was openly charged by the violent party
with being on the side of the Mormons. At any rate I knew that the
jail would have to be guarded as long as the prisoners were confined;
that an imprisonment for treason might last the whole summer and the
greater part of the autumn before a trial could be had in the circuit
court; that it would be utterly impossible in the circumstances of the
country to keep a force there from a foreign county for so long a
time; and that a time must surely come when the duty of guarding the
jail would necessarily devolve on the citizens of the county. It is
true also that at this time I had not believed or suspected that any
attack was to be made upon the prisoners in jail. It is true that I
was aware that a great deal of hatred existed against them, and that
there were those who would do them an injury if they could. I had
heard of some threats being made, but none of an attack upon the
prisoners whilst in jail. These threats seemed to be made by
individuals not acting in concert. They were no more than the bluster
which might have been expected, and furnished no indication of numbers
combining for this or any other purpose. I must here be permitted to
say also that frequent appeals had been made to me to make a clean and
thorough work of the matter by exterminating the Mormons or expelling
them from the State. All opinion seemed generally to prevail that the
sanction of executive authority would legalize the act and all persons
of any influence, authority or note who conversed with me on the
subject frequently and repeatedly stated their total unwillingness to
act without my direction, or in any mode except according to law. This
was a circumstance well calculated to conceal from me the secret
machinations on foot. I had constantly contended against violent
measures and so had the brigadier-general in command; and I am
convinced that unusual pains were taken to conceal from both of us the
secret measures resolved upon. It has been said, however, that some
person named Williams in a public speech at Carthage called for
volunteers to murder the Smiths; and that I ought to have had him
arrested. Whether such a speech was really made or not is yet unknown
to me. Having ordered the guard and left General Deming in command in
Carthage and discharged the residue of the militia, I immediately
departed for Nauvoo, eighteen miles distant, accompanied by Col.
Buckmaster, Quartermaster-General, and Capt. Dunn's company of
dragoons. After we had proceeded four miles Colonel Buckmaster
intimated to me a suspicion that an attack would be made upon the
jail. He stated the matter as a mere suspicion, arising from having
seen two persons converse together at Carthage with some air of
mystery. I myself entertained no suspicion of such an attack; at any
rate, none before the next day in the afternoon; because it was
notorious that we had departed from Carthage with the declared
intention of being absent at least two days. I could not believe that
any person would attack the jail whilst we were in Nauvoo and thereby
expose my life and the lives of my companions to the sudden vengeance
of the Mormons upon hearing of the death of their leaders.
Nevertheless, acting upon the principle of providing against mere
possibilities, I sent back one of the company with a special order to
Capt. Smith to guard the jail strictly and at the peril of his life
until my return. We proceeded on our journey four miles farther. By
this time I had convinced myself that no attack would be made on the
jail that day or night. I supposed that a regard for my safety and the
safety of my companions would prevent an attack until those to be
engaged in it could be assured of our departure from Nauvoo. I still
think that this ought to have appeared to me to be a reasonable
supposition. I therefore determined at this point to omit making the
search for counterfeit money at Nauvoo and defer an examination of all
the other abominations charged on that people in order to return to
Carthage that same night, that I might be on the ground in person In
time to prevent an attack upon the jail, if any had been meditated. To
this end we called a halt; the baggage wagons were ordered to remain
where they were until towards evening, and then return to Carthage.
Having made these arrangements we proceeded on our march and arrived
at Nauvoo about four o'clock of the afternoon of the 27th day of June.
As soon as notice could be given a crowd of the citizens assembled to
hear an address which I proposed to deliver to them. The number
present has been variously estimated from one to five thousand. In
this address I stated to them how, and in what, their functionaries
had violated the laws. Also, the many scandalous reports in
circulation against them, and that these reports, whether true or
false, were generally believed by the people. I distinctly stated to
them the amount of hatred and prejudice which prevailed everywhere
against them, and the causes of it, at length. I also told them
plainly and emphatically that if any vengeance should be attempted
openly or secretly against the persons or property of the citizens who
had taken part against their leaders that the public hatred and
excitement was such that thousands would assemble for the total
destruction of their city and the extermination of their people; and
that no power in the State would be able to prevent it. During this
address some impatience and resentment were manifested by the Mormons
at the recital of the various reports enumerated concerning them;
which they strenuously and indignantly denied to be true. They claimed
to be a law-abiding people and insisted that as they looked to the law
alone for their protection, so were they careful themselves to observe
its provisions. Upon the conclusion of this address I proposed to take
a vote on the question whether they would strictly observe the laws,
even in opposition to their prophet and leaders. The vote was
unanimous in favor of this proposition. The anti-Mormons contended
that such a vote from the Mormons signified nothing; and truly the
subsequent history of that people showed clearly that they were
loudest in their professions of attachment to the law whenever they
were guilty of the greatest extravagances; and in fact that they were
so ignorant and stupid about matters of law that they had no means of
judging of the legality of their conduct, only as they were instructed
by their spiritual leaders.</p>
<p>A short time before sundown we departed on our return to Carthage.
When we had proceeded two miles we met two individuals, one of them a
Mormon, who informed us that the Smiths had been assassinated in jail,
about five or six o'clock of that day. The intelligence seemed to
strike every one with a kind of dumbness. As to myself, it was
perfectly astounding; and I anticipated the very worst consequences
from it. The Mormons had been represented to me as a lawless,
infatuated, and fanatical people, not governed by the ordinary motives
which influence the rest of mankind. If so, most likely an
exterminating war would ensue and the whole land would be covered with
desolation. Acting upon this supposition, it was my duty to provide as
well as I could for the event. I therefore ordered the two messengers
into custody and to be returned with us to Carthage. This was done to
get time to make such arrangements as could be made, and to prevent
any sudden explosion of Mormon excitement before they could be written
to by their friends at Carthage. I also despatched messengers to
Warsaw to advise the citizens of the event. But the people there knew
all about the matter before my messengers arrived. They, like myself,
anticipated a general attack all over the country. The women and
children were removed across the river; and a committee was despatched
that night to Quincy for assistance. The next morning by daylight the
ringing of the bells in the city of Quincy announced a public meeting.
The people assembled in great numbers at an early hour. The Warsaw
committee stated to the meeting that a party of Mormons had attempted
to rescue the Smiths out of jail; that a party of Missourians and
others had killed the prisoners to prevent their escape; that the
governor and his party were at Nauvoo at the time when intelligence of
the fact was brought there; that they had been attacked by the Nauvoo
legion and had retreated to a house, where they were then closely
besieged. That the governor had sent out word that he could maintain
his position for two days, and would be certain to be massacred if
assistance did not arrive by the end of that time. It is unnecessary
to say that this entire story was a fabrication. It was of a piece
with the other reports put into circulation by the anti-Mormon party
to influence the public mind and call the people to their assistance.
The effect of it, however, was that by ten o'clock on the 28th of June
between two and three hundred men from Quincy under the command of
Major Flood embarked on board a steamboat for Nauvoo to assist in
raising the siege, as they honestly believed. As for myself, I was
well convinced that those, whoever they were, who assassinated the
Smiths, meditated in turn my assassination by the Mormons. The very
circumstances of the case fully corroborated the information which I
afterwards received that upon consultation of the assassins it was
agreed amongst them that the murder must be committed whilst the
governor was at Nauvoo; that the Mormons would naturally suppose that
he had planned it; and that in the first outpouring of their
indignation they would assassinate him by way of retaliation. And that
thus they would get clear of the Smiths and the governor all at once.
They also supposed that if they could so contrive the matter as to
have the governor of the State assassinated by the Mormons the public
excitement would be greatly increased against that people and would
result in their expulsion from the State at least. Upon hearing of the
assassination of the Smiths I was sensible that my command was at an
end; that my destruction was meditated as well as that of the Mormons;
and that I could not reasonably confide longer in the one party or in
the other.</p>
<p>The question then arose what would be proper to be done. A war was
expected by everybody. I was desirous of preserving the peace. I could
not put myself at the head of the Mormon force with any kind of
propriety, and without exciting greater odium against them than
already existed. I could not put myself at the head of the anti-Mormon
party because they had justly forfeited my confidence and my command
over them was put an end to by mutiny and treachery. I could not put
myself at the head of either of these forces because both of them in
turn had violated the law; and, as I then believed, meditated further
aggression. It appeared to me that if a war ensued I ought to have a
force in which I could confide, and that I ought to establish my
headquarters at a place where I could learn the truth as to what was
going on. For these reasons I determined to proceed to Quincy, a place
favorably situated for receiving the earliest intelligence, for
issuing orders to raise an army if necessary, and for providing
supplies for its subsistence. But first I determined to return back to
Carthage and make such arrangements as could be made for the
pacification and defence of the country. When I arrived there about
ten o'clock at night I found that great consternation prevailed. Many
of the citizens had departed with their families and others were
preparing to go. As the country was utterly defenceless this seemed to
me to be a proper precaution. One company of the guard stationed by me
to guard the jail had disbanded and gone home before the jail was
attacked; and many of the Carthage Grays departed soon afterwards.
Gen. Deming, who was absent in the country during the murder, had
returned; he volunteered to remain in command of a few men, with
orders to guard the town, observe the progress of events, and to
retreat if menaced by a superior force. Here also I found Dr. Richards
and John Taylor, two of the principal Mormon leaders, who had been in
the jail at the time of the attack and who voluntarily addressed a
most pacific exhortation to their fellow-citizens, which was the first
intelligence of the murder which was received at Nauvoo. I think it
very probable that the subsequent good conduct of the Mormons is
attributable to the arrest of the messengers and to the influence of
this letter. Having made these arrangements, I departed for Quincy. On
my road thither I heard of a body of militia marching from Schuyler
and another from Brown. It appears that orders had been sent out in my
name, but without my knowledge, for the militia of Schuyler county. I
immediately countermanded their march and they returned to their
homes. When I arrived at Columbus I found that Capt. Jonas had raised
a company of one hundred men, who were just ready to march. By my
advice they postponed their march to await further orders. I arrived
at Quincy on the morning of the 29th of June about eight o'clock, and
immediately issued orders, provisionally, for raising an imposing
force when it should seem to be necessary. I remained at Quincy for
about one month, during which time a committee from Warsaw waited on
me with a written request that I would expel the Mormons from the
State. It seemed that it never occurred to these gentlemen that I had
no power to exile a citizen; but they insisted that if this were not
done their party would abandon the State. This requisition was refused
of course. During this time also, with the view of saving expense,
keeping the peace, and having a force which would be removed from the
prejudices in the country, I made application to the United States for
five hundred men of the regular army to be stationed for a time in
Hancock county, which was subsequently refused. During this time also
I had secret agents amongst all parties, observing their movements;
and was accurately informed of everything which was meditated on both
sides. It appeared that the anti- Mormon party had not relinquished
their hostility to the Mormons, nor their determination to expel them,
but had deferred further operations until the fall season, after they
had finished their summer's work on their farms. When I first went to
Carthage. and during all this difficult business, no public officer
ever acted from purer or more patriotic intentions than I did. I was
perfectly conscious of the utmost integrity in all my actions and felt
lifted up far above all mere party considerations. But I had scarcely
arrived at the scene of action before the whig press commenced the
most violent abuse and attributed to me the basest motives. It was
alleged in the Sangarnon Journal and repeated in the other whig
newspapers that the governor had merely gone over to cement an
alliance with the Mormons; that the leaders would not be brought to
punishment, but that a full privilege would be accorded to them to
commit crimes of every hue and grade in return for their support of
the democratic party. I mention this not by way of complaint, for it
is only the privilege of the minority to complain, but for its
influence upon the people. I observed that I was narrowly watched in
all my proceedings by my whig fellow citizens, and was suspected of an
intention to favor the Mormons. I felt that I did not possess the
confidence of the men I commanded, and that they had been induced to
withhold it by the promulgation of the most abominable falsehoods. I
felt the necessity of possessing their confidence in order to give
vigor to my action; and exerted myself in every way to obtain it, so
that I could control the excited multitude who were under my command.
I succeeded better for a time than could have been expected; but who
can control the action of a mob without possessing their entire
confidence? It is true also that some unprincipled democrats all the
time appeared to be very busy on the side of the Mormons. and this
circumstance was well calculated to increase suspicion of every one
who had the name of democrat.</p>
<p>It was many days after the assassination of the Smiths before the
circumstances of the murder fully became known. It then appeared that,
agreeably to previous orders, the posse at Warsaw had marched on the
morning of the 27th of June in the direction of Golden's Point, with a
view to join the force from Carthage, the whole body then to be
marched into Nauvoo. But by the time they had gone eight miles, they
were met by the order to disband; and learning at the same time that
the governor was absent at Nauvoo, about two hundred of these men,
many of them being disguised by blacking their faces with powder and
mud, hastened immediately to Carthage. There they encamped, at some
distance from the village, and soon learned that one of the companies
left as a guard had disbanded and returned to their homes; the other
company, the Carthage Greys, was stationed by the captain in the
public square, a hundred and fifty yards from the jail. Whilst eight
men were detailed by him, under the command of Sergeant Franklin A.
Worrell, to guard the prisoners. A communication was soon established
between the conspirators and the company; and it was arranged that the
guard should have their guns charged with blank cartridges, and fire
at the assailants when they attempted to enter the jail. Gen. Deming,
who was left in command, being deserted by some of his troops, and
perceiving the arrangement with the others, and having no force upon
which he could rely, for fear of his life retired from the village.
The conspirators came up, jumped the slight fence around the jail,
were fired upon by the guard, which, according to arrangement, was
overpowered immediately, and the assailants entered the prison, to the
door of the room where the two prisoners were confined, with two of
their friends, who voluntarily bore them company. An attempt was made
to break open the door; but Joe Smith being armed with a six-barrelled
pistol, furnished by his friends, fired several times as the door was
bursted open, and wounded three of the assailants. At the same time
several shots were fired into the room, by some of which John Taylor
received four wounds, and Hyrum Smith was instantly killed. Joe Smith
now attempted to escape by jumping out of the second-story window, but
the fall so stunned him that he was unable to rise; and being placed
in a sitting posture by the conspirators below, they dispatched him
with four balls shot through his body. Thus fell Joe Smith, the most
successful impostor in modern times.; a man who, though ignorant and
coarse, had some great natural parts, which fitted him for temporary
success, but which were so obscured and counteracted by the inherent
corruption and vices of his nature, that he never could succeed in
establishing a system of policy which looked to permanent success in
the future. His lusts, his love of money and power, always set him to
studying present gratification and convenience, rather than the remote
consequences of his plans. It seems that no power of intellect can
save a corrupt man from this error. The strong cravings of the animal
nature will never give fair play to a fine understanding, the judgment
is never allowed to choose that good which is far away, in preference
to enticing evil near at hand. And this may be considered a wise
ordinance of Providence, by which the counsels of talented but corrupt
men, are defeated in the very act which promised success. It must not
be supposed that the pretended Prophet practiced the tricks of a
common impostor; that he was a dark and gloomy person, with a long
beard, a grave and severe aspect, and a reserved and saintly carriage
of his person; on the contrary, he was full of levity, even to boyish
romping; dressed like a dandy, and at times drank like a sailor and
swore like a pirate. He could, as occasion required, be exceedingly
meek in his deportment; and then again rough and boisterous as a
highway robber; being always able to satisfy his followers of the
propriety of his conduct. He always quailed before power, and was
arrogant to weakness. At times he could put on the air of a penitent,
as if feeling the deepest humiliation for his sins, and suffering
unutterable anguish, and indulging in the most gloomy forebodings of
eternal woe. At such times he would call for the prayers of the
brethren in his behalf, with a wild and fearful energy and
earnestness. He was full six feet high, strongly built , and
uncommonly well muscled. No doubt he was as much indebted for his
influence over an ignorant people, to the superiority of his physical
vigor, as to his greater cunning and intellect. His followers were
divided into the leaders and the led; the first division embraced a
numerous class of broken down, unprincipled men of talents, to be
found in every country, who, bankrupt in character and fortune, had
nothing to lose by deserting the known religions, and carving out a
new one of their own. They were mostly infidels, who holding all
religions in derision, believed that they had as good a right as
Christ or Mahomet, or any of the founders of former systems, to create
one for themselves; and if they could impose it upon mankind, to live
upon the labor of their dupes. Those of the second division, were the
credulous wondering part of men, whose easy belief and admiring
natures, are always the victims of novelty, in whatever shape it may
come, who have a capacity to believe any strange and wonderful matter,
if it only be new, whilst the wonders of former ages command neither
faith nor reverence; they were men of feeble purposes, readily
subjected to the will of the strong, giving themselves up entirely to
the direction of their leaders; and this accounts for the very great
influence of those leaders in controlling them. In other respects some
of the Mormons were abandoned rogues, who had taken shelter in Nauvoo,
as a convenient place for the head-quarters of their villainy; and
others were good, honest, industrious people, who were the sincere
victims of an artful delusion. Such as these were more the proper
objects of pity than persecution. With them, their religious belief
was a kind of insanity; and certainly no greater calamity can befall a
human being, than to have a mind so constituted as to be made the
sincere dupe of a religious impostor. The more polished portion of the
Mormons were a merry set of fellows, fond of music and dancing, dress
and gay assemblies. They had their regular dancing parties of
gentlemen and ladies, and were by no means exclusive in admitting any
one to them on the score of character. It is a notorious fact, that a
desperado by the name of Rockwell, having attracted the affections of
a pretty woman, the wife of a Mormon merchant, took her from her
husband by force of arms, to live with him in adultery. But whilst she
was so living notoriously in adultery with a Mormon bully, in the same
city with her husband, she was freely admitted to the best society in
the place, to all the gay assemblies, where she and her husband
frequently met in the same dance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Transcript of George D. Watt’s Pitman Shorthand Recording of John
Taylor’s Sermon, June 27, 1854 Tabernacle afternoon June 27th 1854.
<a href="https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/john-taylors-june-27-1854-account-martyrdom"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://byustudies.byu.edu/content/john-taylors-june-27-1854-account-martyrdom<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>As President Young said, they were men and they were perhaps the best
men that lived. They might have some little weaknesses and foibles
like other men, but if they had been better than that they would not
[have] been fit to associate with people.20 But they were men of God
and lived and died in faith of that gospel. They preached and did it
sincerely with honest hearts before God and men. And, therefore, I
feel pleasure in testifying of these things. . . . The governor by and
by made his appearance at Carthage, and he sent a deputation down to
Joseph Smith requesting him to send out a deputation to him to wait
upon him in Carthage to acquaint him with [the] state of affairs in
Nauvoo. Joseph Smith appointed Doctor Bernhisel,58 who is now in
Washington, and myself to go with the deputies of the governor and
meet him in Carthage and to take with us the papers. We had the
documents, affidavits, testimonies, etc., that had been presented
before Joseph Smith of acts of violence that had been sworn to by
different individual[s] as they came and made their cases known to
him. I believe Squire Wells took a good many of them. We went to the
governor and found everything there in [the] greatest state of
excitement. All the blacklegs, murderers (though some of them I was
acquainted with and believe them to be such from our testimony),
apostates, and greatest enemies that Joseph Smith and Mormonism had in
the country were there; and as it is said about Brutus having his
right hand men, many of them seemed to me to be the right hand men of
the governor. We did not obtain an interview with him immediately, but
perhaps it might be well here to relate a little incident occurred
about the time we arrived there about 11 at night. We went right to
the hotel the governor stayed at and took up our quarters there. We
had not been in there ten minutes when there was a soldier came in and
he knew that one of our brethren, Brother Carns59 of German descent,
as good [a] man [as] anywhere, 60 he had been committing some
great misdemeanor, he [the soldier] said. And naturally that it was
necessary he [Carns] should be imprisoned. But they felt bowels61 of
compassion towards him, being [the] man held, and they wanted one of
us to go and give bail for them. It struck me to be [a] rather
curious kind of night to take up prisoners to give bail, and we knew
our documents to be laid before the governor. I said, “I don’t believe
your statement about Carns, but if bail is necessary, tomorrow morning
62 [will] go and see him and it will all be right.” We passed along
and went to our lodging, and as we were going into our room we passed
through another room and we saw laying in that room a man by the name
of Jackson,63 a repeat murderer. Our bed was placed beside64 his, just
two board posts between. We had with us arms. I had a good six
shooter. I did not sleep any that night. Thought I would be on the
alert as nobody else was. So we had just got into bed when [a] rap
came to to [the] door and Chauncey Higbee came [in]. Many of you
know him, a notorious scamp, as black [an] apostate and full of
[the] devil as anybody. He came there and knocked at our door and of
course he thought it would be of no use speaking to me after what has
taken place now. Doctrine “Doctor, it is a pity Carns should be in.65
Believe him to be a good sort of fellow. Sorry to see him lying in
jail. Would it not be better to go and liberate him?” Talked with the
doctor and he thought he would go. Chauncey went out of [the] room
until he got his clothes on. Says I, “You may better stay where you
are. Don’t you know, we have papers and documents? [Their] very
purpose [is to] part us to destroy us either one of us.” We stayed
together that night. Towards the next night we had an interview with
the governor he when we went into the room he was surrounded with just
such characters [as] I had mentioned. And if it had not been
[that] I was going on public business, if I had been on private
instead of public, I should have turned around and said, “Governor
Ford, if you choose to [be] with such characters as these, I shall
withdraw.” But it was necessary we should do our business in [a]
public capacity. I said we had been sent by General Smith, that we had
with us documents to inform him of [the] position of the country and
all what was going on generally. He took our documents and commenced
reading them, but while he was reading another one [would] say,
“That is a lie,” another, “That is a damned lie,” another, “That is
a God damned lie.” But his Excellency did not hear it. Perhaps he
thought it very polite. It passed off comfortably with him. The result
of it was he told us he would prepare a letter for us. He did so
sometime late on in the evening. We got a letter and went back to
Nauvoo with it. When Joseph Smith read the letter, he believed there
was mischief intended by the governor and the parties. And we talked
over the matter for [a] length of time in the Nauvoo Mansion. And
finally there was some gentlemen came in, some relation of the late
president, and wished to see Joseph Smith and have some little
conversation with him.66 As it was very late, and we had been up for
one or two nights before, I went out off and left him that that
evening. In the morning I heard Hyrum and Joseph [and] one or two
others crossed the river and thought it [the] best thing to go. I
crossed but did not see him until sometime [the] next day when I got
word from him. Brother Elias Smith went to search [for] Joseph
[and] brought me word that Joseph and Hyrum had concluded to go to
Carthage and requested me to come and go along. I had peculiar
feelings at the time. I had not seen them, but I had been arranging my
business to leave in half an hour. I should have been started east
except if I did not find them over the river I should meet them by
there. There was peculiar feelings among many of the brethren in
relation to it.67 I was not there during the whole of those
deliberations. As I said, I was preparing to arrange my business for
the east. Hyrum extended a strong wish to return and stated his
feelings precisely, and Joseph gave way to his brother’s feelings.
Joseph had told them in [a] public speech before, says he, “brethren
I will stand by you to the death.” Some of <’em>68 went and asked
him if he was going to leave them now, so I heard. I do not know the
particulars of course. Then he turned around and said, “Die? Yes, I am
a man of honor and integrity. I stand up to my post if the devil stand
in the way.” There was nothing of cowardice in him. Rest Lots of
brethren others here say no one69 sought to destroy the brethren. He
went out with <100>70 men to meet in the prairie to meet 2500—no,
nothing of cowardice. But he thought it would be better to ward off
the blow a little while and trust to pardon to regulate things when
the storm should be [a] little abated. These, I believe, were his
feelings in going over the river. We had been . . . . I believe . . .
Before that, I must mention a circumstance here. That the city charter
of Nauvoo possessed the right of a writ of habeas corpus, which gave
the parties the privilege of being taken from before an officer, if
they considered there was injustice going to be done them, and receive
a trial in another place. Before this mob came—before [the] governor
came—Brother Joseph, Brother Hyrum, and all of the city council
appeared before Squire Wells, who was then one of the magistrate[s]
to answer to this charge brought them against them. The municipal
[court] issued a writ of habeas corpus, and the city marshal took us
out of [the] hands of [an] officer sent from Carthage, and we was
brought before Squire Wells. Why? Because he was not in the Church at
that time and they could not have any reasonable objections for us to
be tried before him in order to conciliate the people.71 We were
acquitted, but we72 were not satisfied. Now I return to where I left
off. We agreed to go to Carthage. Joseph said very little when we
went, but he did talk [of] feelings on leaving home. I remember a
remark that President Young made down at North Ogden [one] day a
while ago in speaking about Brother Joseph. He said at that time, he
believed the spirit of God was withdrawn from it at the time and he
was left to grapple with the powers of darkness. I believe it. I
believe it from the statement he made. Somebody asked him as we were
journeying to Carthage, says they: “Joseph what will be the upshot of
this matter?” “Well,” says he, “I do not know anything about it. Do
not talk to me about matters now. I have given up my office and
calling for the time being.” Made some remark like that. “I do not
profess to guide this people now while I am in [the] hands of
officers. Somebody else must do it.” This is [the] body of meaning,
[the] spirit of [the] words, if not the exact words.</p>
<p>He went to Carthage, and it was not Joseph and Hyrum alone [that
were] implicated in that matter but all the city council. I was one
of them. we went to Our brother the governor sent for Joseph Smith. He
pledged to us his honor and the honor of the state that these men
should be protected and should not be injured. He gave it to us as
delegates that had been sent out by Joseph to convey this message to
him. We spoke about the position of [the] country. We told him we
were abundantly able to defend ourselves. We neither asked his help
nor any other. We had at that time 5000 men in arms, and we could have
taken one fourth of it and whipped out the governor’s posse and his
mobocrats. Consequently, it was not because we could not defend
ourselves but to be subject to the law of the land and conciliate the
feelings of people. “Shall we go forward and bring posse?” “No,” says
the governor, “don’t bring any.” “What shall be the situation of
Joseph and Hyrum and those with them?” “I pledge my honor and honor of
[the] state they shall be protected and no harm shall come to them.”
I deviate [a] little in detail—perhaps because [of] things that
occur to me which I have passed over. When we got there we had a
hearing in the hotel. We stayed at the same place the governor stayed
in. [The] man’s name that kept it was Hamilton.73 However, as there
was so much excitement at that time abroad, it was thought best we
should go early [and] have our appearance another time. That was
thought the best course to pursue by the lawyers and all parties
concerned. And as that was legal, we thought we would give our bail,
have [an] appearance another time, and go at another time not in
that excitement. We went bail for one another and that thing was
cleared for the time being. In speaking of this bail, I must refer
back to the bail that was required of me and Brother Bernhisel in
relation to Carns. It is a little disconnected, but I wish to put the
thing in as it was and show you why I came to such opinions about
their proceeding. Next morning we went and waited [upon] Squire
Smith.74 When we waited upon him, we spoke about this case of Carns
and told him we had come to give bail for him. Says he, “I do not know
whether I should be authorized to receive bail from any inhabitants
from [the] City of Nauvoo, seeing things [are] in such a
troublesome state.” Before either one of us would have done it. This
time both were there. He did not think they he would be justified. “We
have both got property in the county,” says I. “Search the records.”
“Well, says he, “I do not think, finally, [it is] best for me to
take bail. But it would have done if one night before.” Now I go back
to where I left. We gave bail to for one another and it was not
opposed and could not be rejected. The next thing was there was two
ruthless characters. I don’t suppose anybody would have trusted them
in death. I shall not mention any names about these. One of them I
have forgot. The other matter [is] of little moment, let it pass.
Suffice it to say they were men in whom could be placed no confidence.
They went and made affidavit to the same Smith. All referred to that
Joseph Smith and Hyrum were guilty of treason against the United
States. They had been put up to this by one of the lawyers. They did
this because treason was not a bailable case and they thought they
would get them into prison where they could accomplish their designs
upon them. As soon as I heard of this, a constable, a ruffian came
into the room and was for bearing them off first. After75 I told him
to hold on and asked him what he was after, Brother Phelps and others
was present, I went to the governor’s room [and] says, “Governor
Ford, are you aware that [a] writ has been issued against Joseph and
Hyrum Smith accusing them of treason and [there is a] constable now
wishing to put them into prison? I call upon you to use your official
authority and liberate them.” “I am sorry,” says he, “that the thing
should occur. But,” says he, “it is a thing [that] belongs to the
judiciary, and the executive [has] nothing to do with it.” Says I,
“Did not you pledge me your word of honor and faith of [the] state
[that] you [would] see these men protected”? “So I will,” says he.
“Are you going [to] allow them to be thrust into prison at the
insistence of felons like these?” “It is a thing [that] belongs to
the judiciary; it would not hurt them for one night. Gentlemen, I
expect different things from you.” I went. Outran and saw some of our
party readying to them back.76 To a soldier I say, “Will you go and
tell your captain I wish to see him immediately, and if not see him
bring the first captain”? He came and brought me his captain. “I
believe there is a design to murder these men, and here is a ruffian
wanting to 77 them among the people. I wish you [to] bring your
company to protect them.” “I will do so,” says he. And just as quick
as the constable got them to the door, the company arrived to escort
them to the jail. Everything was excited at time. Another circumstance
about this I mention. I do not know who he was. I suppose he was in
the militia—perhaps a friend to the Mormons. He came and whispered to
my ear. Says he, “Remember me.” But I never saw him from that time to
this. I should like to come across him. He did all he could to save
them. A whole lot of us went with Joseph, most of [the] city council
and one or two strange gentlemen that went into prison at [the] same
time. They considered abuse and outrage. There was a room full of us
that night. In inquiring into the matter it was found they had 78
acted illegally in this matter. The officers had . . . They had
committed them to prison under what is called a mittimus, as though
they had been before them tried and proven guilty and they committed
them to prison without a hearing. After having commenced [and]
committed them to prison, the officer had no right to take them out of
it unless they came to [a] county court and [were] brought out by
right of habeas corpus. This was about the position of things. Well,
they refused to go out. They appeared to before a court called the
next day [by] this same officer Smith. He was captain of [a]
company. He went to the governor. Says he, “Joseph and Hyrum refused
to go out of prison.” “Have you not got a posse?” says he. “Do not you
know what to do?” He could not interfere before in any capacity
whatever to protect them, but he could tell the officer what he could
do to take them out by force on the principle of mobbing <—>79 he
spoke about before. Consequently, they were brought out as [a]
company of men came and we all went out. There was no charges against
any but Joseph and Hyrum. As witnesses could not be brought, they were
remanded back to prison for two days until witnesses could be gathered
and [a] proper hearing had. The next day the governor, Governor
Ford, went to Nauvoo and he took away all of the military, I believe,
with the exception of a company which was under the command of Captain
Smith. This same Smith, captain of Carthage Grays, the most blood
thirsty men [that] could be found anywhere, and these were the
guards of Governor Ford, as he said, to protect the lives of Joseph
and Hyrum Smith when we were in jail remanded a second time. There was
only one or two allowed to go into jail besides myself and Brother
Willard Richards. We obtained liberty from the governor, Richards
being Joseph’s private secretary and myself as his friend. There was
one or two others [who] were permitted to go in, and different
people came to see us. And we were left alone pretty much with the
exception of two or three individual that came now and again. One was
Captain Jones,80 as he is called, from Wales. Another was Brother
Wheelock,81 Brother Markham,82 and some two 3 others.83 There was a
strong feeling manifested by individuals of the brethren who would
have been glad to have been with Joseph.*84 [Editor’s note: The
surviving portion of George D. Watt’s shorthand recording of the
Taylor sermon ends here, and the remainder is filled in with Thomas
Bullock’s recording, with italics indicating where Pitman was used, as
noted above.] We ad [had]85 various conversations on the curious
spirit there. The mob had prevented all to come. The last one was sent
out for a little wine. He was not allowed to come back. Bro Wd
[Willard] says, bro Jos[eph] if there is any scuffing to be done
let me [get it] done and let you go and I sd. [said] if you will
let me go[.]86 in a few hours I will have enough men to liberate you
even if we tear down the prison. He objected preferring peace. I
rem[em]ber bro Hy[rum] requested me to sing a poor wa[y] faring
man of grief which I done. He requested it the 2nd time. I then saw a
crowd of men87 with disfigured faces and came up to the door up
stairs. I made a rush to the door. bro H[yrum] and bro R[ichards]
got there first. They leaned agsn. [against] the door. some one
fired a gun thro the key hole. He then walked a little distance. a
ball came thro the door and struck him in his face. another thro the
windows fired by the Carthage Greys. He fell on his back and sd
[said] I am a dd [dead] man. Josh [Joseph] came and sd [said]
Oh my poor bro Hy.[rum.] Bro Wheelock gave the pistol to bro
Jos[eph] [—]88 He pulled the pistol deliberately 6 times. 3 times
whent [sic] of[f] and 3 didn’t. I seized a thick hickory stick and
bro Jos[eph] [was] behind me. I parried off the guns firing and
the last I heard bro Jos[eph] sa[y] parry them of[f] as well as
you can. In a few moments the door was full of bayonets. The window
was open. I made an attempt to jump out of the windo. I fell on the
windo sill and fell inside. I recovered my feeling and crawled under
the bed. I had given Dr. Richards my watch and money.89 my watch was
all broken up. the wa[y] I fell in was a par[ty] outside shot me
as I was falling and the force of the gun threw me back. I was shot
once or twice under the bed. The next I noticed was bro R[ichards]
going from the windo to the door towards some cells. I sd. [said]
Dr. come and take me along. He opened the door and dragged me along
the two balls in90 I was in excruciating pain. He put me in a cell and
threw me under the mattress. He they ma[y] kill me91 sd.[said] is
it possible Josh is dd [dead] pray you may live and tell the story.
they retd [returned] and found no one in the room and they
absconded. the coroner’s jury was called in the room. I bel[ieve]
Hy[rum] never moved. I heard Frank92 Higby at martd. [martyrdom] I
sd. [said] Cap Smith I want you to have F H arrested for I swear my
life agst [against] him. And he left and another of men wanted me to
go to the tavern. but I wo [would] not. the Dr . was attending to
the bodies. I sd. [said] this jail ma[y] protect me. . . .93 I cod
[could] not believe them. In ½ an hour the whole place was left.
when Dr . R[ichards] came along I consented and went. these r
[are] the outlines and mor[e] as I know them at the present time.
I la[y] in the tavern till the next, mor[n]]. when my wounds were
dressed. we cod [could] only whisper no. I went to Nauvoo. we rd 94
our P. O I suppose but was and I suppose they r [are] better off and
can act in that position and I expect we shall meet them and strike
hands. it was a barbarous thing and a real stain upon them and they
can’t get rid of it in time and etr . [eternity] and they will be
dd95 and they are dd and we shall see it. they have not hurt
Jos[eph] or Hy[um] but they have hurt themselves. There r [are]
100s in this congr [congregation] who would have been glad to have
been where we were. I know they lived and dd [died] men of God and
will live for evermore and many of my bren [brethren] round about
here if they r [are] gone there is others in their places. I
rem[em]ber Xerxes96 had a Co [company] called the Immortals. if
any were killed another twenty stept into his place and it was always
kept full. it is a regular place and as soon as one steps out another
steps in and that man that don’t fill it have not the sp[irit] of
God. as those were men of God so r [are] thos who r [are] with us.
from97 it is all rit [right] in t[ime] and in et.[ernity] God
bless you all ever and ever Amen</p>
</blockquote>
<ol>
<li>
<p>James W. Singleton of Mt. Sterling was brigadier general of the
Illinois Militia in 1844, and in command of the force at Carthage.
See Howard F. Dyson, ed., History of Schuyler County in Newton
Bateman and Paul Selby, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois
and History of Schuyler County (Chicago: Munsell Publishing Company,
1908), p. 481.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Minor R. Deming actually was not elected Hancock County sheriff
until August. In June he was the commander of the Hancock County
militia. A new interest in Deming has been kindled by Professor
Robert M. Sutton of the University of Illinois, particularly
subsequent to his reading of a paper on Deming before the Mormon
History Association at Chicago on April 29, 1967</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The author's two older brothers were William, already cited, and
Edwin Baldwin (1825-?). Their membership in the Greys is also
indicated in Scofield, p. 918.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Helen Baldwin Williams Wilson Hunt (1 821-1887) was the sister of
the author. Her first husband was Samuel Otho Williams, a second
lieutenant in the Greys who died Nov. 28, 1844, not long after the
Smith murders. The younger sister was Mary J. Baldwin, who died
short of her seventeenth birthday in 1853. See Carthage Gazette,
Dec. 16, 1887, p. 1; Scofield, p. 918.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is almost certainly Capt. Robert F. Smith, who was not only an
important figure in the Greys but also the justice of the peace who
had ordered, by means of a dubious legal instrument, the jailing of
the Smiths.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Mrs. Marsh had no brother named Tom. The brother whose name is
disguised here is apparently Edwin. See note 20.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This is J. H. Sherman, about whom the editors have been able to
discover very little. It is interesting to note, however, that
Gregg, in whose book Mrs. Marsh un- doubtedly found this account,
Scofield, and Mrs. Marsh all give only Sherman's initials, whereas
Sherman, who published a series of ten articles on the Mormons in
the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal in 1886, was willing to sign his name. We
reprint his account because it appears to be a genuine eyewitness
account that is virtually unremarked in the liter- ature of the
assassination. See also Thomas Gregg, The Prophet of Palmyra . . .
(New Vork: John B. Alden, Publisher, 1890), pp. 278-80; Scofield,
pp. 846-47.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Periods in original MS.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>While Mrs. Marsh is here again attempting to disguise her own
identity, it should be noted that her mother's maiden name was
Brown, according to family Bible entries.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Periods in original MS.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What Mrs. Marsh is attempting to imply, rather slyly and indirectly
through Mr. C, is that the often-heard reports that there were
Missourians in the mob at Carthage were true.</p>
</li>
</ol>Bryce BlankenagelSources from University of Chicago library that apparently are not available anywhere online:Road to Carthage 9 - Carthage Jail Gunfight2020-09-03T20:00:00-07:002020-09-03T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/09/03/road-to-carthage-9-carthage-jail-gunfight<p>Road to Carthage 9 - Carthage Jail Gunfight</p>
<p>On this episode, we discuss the assassinations of Hiram and Joseph Smith
in Carthage Jail.</p>
<p>Show links:<br />
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<p>The evening of June 27th, 1844 in Carthage, Illinois was a fateful one.
This is a story many of us have heard a dozen times in church, it’s a
faith-promoting tale of martyrdom, sacrifice, and the beginning of the
last dispensation, sealed by the anointed blood of a messianic figure.
Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, died a martyr for what he believed. Long shall his
blood which was shed by assassins, stain Illinois while the earth lauds
his fame. Almost any Mormon can tell you the story of Carthage Jail
while simultaneously knowing almost nothing about it. Even historians
who extensively study Nauvoo history will often lay the blame of the
assassination on religious intolerance.</p>
<p>This is pure propaganda to push a religious agenda. What happened to
Joseph and Hyrum Smith that day was a symptom of ills we see around us
everyday. The lack of ability for the legal system to curtail flagrant
and unapologetic despotism, coupled with lynch mob rule executing
vigilante justice when they perceived no other remedy in the adolescent
legal system of American democracy. The trappings of mob rule and
vigilante justice are foundational aspects of majority-rule Americanism
and the victims are diverse and often subjugated peoples. Rarely is the
victim of a lynch mob one of the most powerful men in the country, but
the story of Joseph Smith’s death presents many irregularities for us to
contend with today.</p>
<p>This is also a story I’ve wanted to tell for years. Most episodes of
this podcast focus on one or two consequential sources to discuss
individual stories in Mormon history and their relevance to the greater
timeline; each of those stories has led to this point, where there are
dozens of sources to pull from. There are some discrepancies in some of
these sources but I’ve done my best to harmonize those where they can be
reconciled and I’ll discuss discrepancies where the sources can’t be
reconciled. Let’s begin.</p>
<p>The sun sank closer to the horizon west of Carthage; the shadows became
longer, the blue sky turned hues of yellow, red, and orange, tensions
remained high among the citizens of the city. Brigadier-General Deming,
called a jack-Mormon by the Carthage Grey militia, was personally
appointed by Governor Thomas Ford to oversee the guard duties of the
prisoners in Carthage Jail, Joseph, Hyrum, John Taylor, and Willard
Richards. General Deming gave a task to a young boy named William
Hamilton to sit on the roof of the city’s courthouse, the tallest
building, and use a looking glass to keep a lookout for anybody entering
the city, whether individual riders or entire groups of people. William
Hamilton grew up in Carthage, his dad ran the city tavern, Hamilton’s
Hotel, and young William could see for several miles in all directions
from this vantage point.</p>
<p>Around 4 p.m., he spotted what looked to be a large group of men coming
from the North. They were about 2 miles off and they were moving toward
Carthage on the road that leads from Nauvoo. William Hamilton was
ordered to immediately report anything like this to Brigadier-General
Deming, which he did. As soon as he told General Deming that a military
force was on the North edge of town coming from the road to Nauvoo, a
number of questions inevitably entered Deming’s mind. Were they Mormons
coming to break the prophet out of the jail? Were they vigilantes? Or,
were they dispatched by Governor Ford after his arrival to Nauvoo for
some other purpose? There was no way to know until Deming could
establish contact with the unidentified group of men.</p>
<p>We don’t know the details of what happened or what information was
exchanged, but General Deming, who’s sole task was to guard the prison,
fled. He left town and headed to the countryside miles from Carthage.
According to Governor Thomas Ford, Deming had “orders to guard the town,
observe the progress of events, and to retreat if menaced by a superior
force”. The number of Carthage Greys Deming had under his command was
about 60 men. This unidentified force coming into Carthage from the road
to Nauvoo outnumbered Deming’s men by 3-to-1. Deming had also seen that
the new jail guard, who’d taken over at the 4 p.m. changeover, were more
hostile to the prisoners than the previous guard. With these puzzle
pieces coming together, Deming now understood the reality of the
situation. He told young William Hamilton to go back up the courthouse
tower to continue observation and immediately report to him any
developments of the descending mob, which he did. Once that order was
issued, General Deming followed his orders from Governor Ford to retreat
in the face of the superior force. Whatever would transpire upon the
unknown force’s arrival was out of Deming’s hands and he had no way of
stopping it. The one guy Governor Ford counted on successfully guarding
the jail was running from Carthage like it was already on fire.</p>
<p>Franklin Worrel, a man in his early 20s, was head of the new set of
guards for the city jail. Levi Williams, the leader of the unidentified
mob, and Frank Worrel established communication. Levi Williams and his
buddy, Thomas Sharp, coordinated their ruse. Three shots fired in the
air would signal to Frank Worrel the beginning of the assault by the mob
from the outskirts of town. Thomas Sharp, good friend and neighbor of
Levi Williams as well as editor of the vociferously anti-Mormon paper
the Warsaw Signal, took a moment to rally the troops, or maybe he was
still in Warsaw at this moment, the record isn’t totally clear. A
disputed account details Thomas Sharp’s war cry to the men before they
marched into Carthage.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS! The crisis has arrived when it becomes
our duty to rise, as freemen, and assert our rights. The law is
insufficient for us; the governor will not enforce it; we must take it
into our hands; we know what wrongs we suffer, and we are the best
calculated to redress them. Now is the time to put a period to the mad
career of the Prophet; sustained as he is by a band of fanatical
military saints! We have borne his usurpations until it would be
cowardice to bear them longer! My Fellow citizens! Improve the
opportunity that offers; lest the opportunity pass, and the despotic
Prophet will never again be in your power. All things are understood,
we must hasten to Carthage and murder the Smiths, while the governor
is absent at Nauvoo. Beard the lions in their den. The news will reach
Nauvoo before the governor leaves. This will so enrage the “Mormons,”
that they will fall upon and murder Tom Ford, and we shall then be rid
of the d—-d little governor and the ‘Mormons’ too.” (Cheers.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The clock ticked to 5 p.m. A disputed account claims Frank Worrel, the
jail guard, sent a message to Colonel Levi Williams:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Now is a delightful time to murder the Smiths. The governor has gone
to Nauvoo with all the troops. The Carthage Greys are left to guard
the prisoners. Five of our men will be stationed at the jail; the rest
will be upon the public square. To keep up appearances, you will
attack the men at the jail—a sham scuffle will ensue—their guns will
be loaded with blank cartridges—they will fire in the air.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William Hamilton watched atop the city courthouse through his looking
glass and saw “a body of armed men- about 125- came out of the woods on
foot and started in a single file, behind an old rail fence, in the
direction of the jail. They were then about three-fourths of a mile
distant.” Following order, Hamilton tried to report this development to
Brigadier-General Deming, but… Deming was nowhere to be found. Young
William Hamilton wouldn’t make it back to the jailhouse until after the
shooting had already started.</p>
<p>As this still unidentified mob descended on the jail, the Carthage Greys
were stationed about a quarter mile west of the jailhouse. Frank Worrel
and his boys were the Greys guarding the jail, but they were only 5-8 in
number. The remainder of the Greys wouldn’t join the fray until they saw
Levi Williams’s 125 men assaulting the jail. Almost everything we’re
discussing today was already finished before any of the Carthage Greys
even had time to get to the jail.</p>
<p>These 125 men under the command of Levi Williams were mostly citizens of
Warsaw, the twin anti-Mormon city to Carthage 18 miles to its west. The
men would be easily recognized in Carthage by any witnesses and
therefore took measures to conceal their identity before emerging from
the woods north of town. About 1/3rd of them blackened their faces with
soot or painted their faces with red mud; if the assailants were lucky
the assault would be blamed on freed slaves or displaced Native
Americans.</p>
<p>Three shots were fired in the air, signalling the beginning of the plan.
Levi’s men marched toward the jail. “Col. Williams shouted out, “Rush
in!—there’s no danger boys—all is right!””</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The jail where the Smiths were confined is situated at the extreme
northwestern edge of the dismal village, at the end of a long,
ill-kept street whose middle is a dusty road and whose sides are gay
with stramonium and dog-fennel. As the avengers came in sight of the
mean-looking building that held their prey, the sleeping tiger that
lurks in every human heart sprang up in theirs, and they quickened
their pace to a run. There was no need of orders, — no possibility of
checking them now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Frank Worrel and his 7 compatriots guarding the jail feigned a defense
according to plan with Levi Williams. The jailor, George Stigall, was up
in the apartment with the prisoners and when he heard “a little rustling
at the door” he ran down the stairs to the entrance to see what the
commotion was about. Levi’s men were already descending on the jail and
they cried out for the guards to surrender. Frank Worrel and his boys
fired their guns at the attackers. But the guns were loaded with blank
cartridges and would do no more than leave a powder-burn mark on
clothing. Frank Worrel, who was 19 at this time, supposedly continued to
struggle against the attackers, presumably to make it more believable
that he was trying to actually defend the jail. He also had a stutter
and an eyewitness account could be interpreted to conclude that Worrel
actually wasn’t a conspirator in the act, but other evidence seems to
betray that conclusion. “He floundered and pounded, vociferating
"Y-y-y-y-you! - "Lie still you fool we are not going to hurt you!"
D-d-d - continued Frank kicking and struggling to break loose and trying
franticly to break the third commandment though his impediment of speech
saved him from the actual sin”</p>
<p>The Jailor, George Stigall, quickly understood what was going on. The
mob outside his jail was too large and he knew he could do nothing for
the prisoners. He either cowered in a corner or fled out the other exit
of the jail; he simply can’t be placed for the next 5 minutes of
history. Franklin Worrel did his job as agreed with Levi Williams and he
was pushed to the side of the doorway. It was claimed later that he held
the door open for the mob to flow into the jail unhindered, but I’m
pretty sure a mob of guys can hold their own door without Frank Worrel’s
help.</p>
<p>With so much commotion outside, Willard Richards “glanced an eye by the
curtain--saw a 100 ar[m]ed men arou[n]d the door.” Richards told the
other prisoners what he saw and the reality sank in for Richards, John
Taylor, and Hyrum and Joseph Smith. We can’t possibly imagine what went
through their minds, maybe I’m about to die. This is the end of the
line. I won’t ever see my family or my wives ever again. None of us know
what we’ll think about when our lives flash before our eyes but this was
that moment for these 4 men.</p>
<p>The jail itself is an interesting building and we need a brief
description to visualize the events of the next 3 minutes. The building
standing today is the same building as was built in 1839 and housed the
prisoners; it isn’t a recreation. It was purchased by the Mormon church
in 1903 and was restored in the late 1990s to become a tourist location
staffed by missionaries who tell the Carthage story to tens of visitors
every year. I’ve been twice and can see the building in my mind’s eye
better than my own childhood home. It’s an experience you don’t forget.
The building itself is relatively small. You walk in through the kitchen
area on the north side of the building, after which you enter the main
living area. This is where the jailor, George Stigall, lived. Then you
turn to the right and you see the landing area with a staircase. To the
right of this landing area is a jail cell with an iron bar door and
barred windows. Walk down the short corridor and you come to another
building entrance and the stairway. The stairway is very narrow, barely
wide enough to fit two people if they scrunch their shoulders together.
At the top of the stairs is a small doorway which leads into the upper
story jail cells. This has a wooden door with an iron bar door behind
it. When you walk into that room, there are individual holding cells
with more iron bars and metal locks and the wooden and iron bar door
also have locks. The windows are very narrow to the point that maybe a
letter could be passed through the slit but no person or even a cat
could fit through the jail windows. The missionaries call this the
dungeon. These are the secure holding cells the prisoners planned on
going into once they had finished supper that evening, but never got the
opportunity. Had they been in here, the mob wouldn’t have been able to
get line of sight to shoot the prisoners unless they somehow broke
through the two doors or the jailor gave them the key to get in, which
it doesn’t seem like George Stigall would have done. Once you’re at the
top of the stairs, you turn right and the hallway extends to a window on
the other side of the stairway rail, but immediately in front of you is
a wooden door with a broken latch which opens into the room ahead. When
you walk through that door, you enter a room that is about 15 x 15 feet
with white plaster walls, a small hearth and fireplace, a window on the
far wall and two windows on the south wall. There’s also a bed against
the southwest wall that was actually on the southeast wall at the time.
Today there are benches for people to sit during the missionary tour of
the jail, but of course back then there was probably a desk and chair in
the otherwise open space of the room.</p>
<p>That’s the general layout of the jail itself and it remains in that
basic form today for tourists to learn the Carthage jail story from
Mormon missionaries. However, and this is important, they leave out a
few details and only talk about those details if you ask the question
directly. Questions like, did Joseph Smith have wine and tobacco, or a
pistol that day? They know the facts, but they only divulge if you ask
directly. Lying by omission for the lord, I suppose.</p>
<p>Levi Williams’s men pushed through Frank Worrel’s guard, into the ground
floor of the jail, shoving the jailor, George Stigall out of the
picture, and ran up the stairs. It seems the men weren’t exactly sure
where the prisoners were and as they ascended the stairs they fired “A
shower of musket balls… thrown up the stairway against the door of the
prison in the second story”. The number of shots at this door is unknown
but was probably less than a dozen before the men realized the prisoners
weren’t in the jail cells of that room and were instead in the debtors
apartment to their right. Levi’s men continued to clamor up the steps
and fill the hallway above the staircase facing the door to the room
holding the prisoners, trying to push their way through the door.</p>
<p>The time dilation becomes a reality we must deal with here. All of the
events described from Frank Worrel’s feigned defense of the jail to the
men rushing up the stairs would have transpired in less than 30 seconds.
In fact, everything we’ll spend most of the episode on today took place
in the space of about 6 minutes. It was a chaotic time with hundreds of
individual actors and only one resolution to the sequence of events.
We’ll spend 12 times the amount of time talking about the events as it
took for them to transpire. As these men were rushing up the steps and
firing into the jail cell door at the top of the steps, the prisoners,
Jo, Hyrum Sidekick-Abiff Smith, John Taylor, and White-out Willard
Richards, all understood that this was their final stand. They quickly
braced themselves against the door. That wooden plank was literally the
only thing between them and the mob of 60-70 men who’d rushed into the
jail to shoot the prisoners like the rats in a cage they were. That door
was the final bulwark protecting their lives and they knew it, but the
attacking men also knew it. This is an unstoppable force meeting an
immovable object.</p>
<p>The attackers tried to push on the door, but Richards, and Taylor
immediately braced themselves against the door. Jo and Hyrum both
grabbed their pistols, Hyrum with his single-shooter and Jo with his
six-shooter pepperbox pistol, and braced against the door helping Taylor
and Richards. Hyrum was closest to the latch while Richards was closest
to the hinges of the door by the northwest corner of the room.</p>
<p>As the mob filled the upper story and the stairwell, the prisoners
continued to push hard against the mob’s advances. The mob, however,
thought the locking mechanism on the door was holding it shut, not the 4
men on the other side. A shot blew through the metal latch of the door,
shattering the workings of an already broken door latch. When a hot lead
ball shot from a pistol collides with the cold steel of a door latch,
the bullet does anything but act predictably. It broke through the
latching mechanism, but it didn’t emerge on the other side of the door
with any lethal effect. What it did was scare the prisoners because they
now understood that the attackers were willing to use gunshots to get
through the door against which they were braced.</p>
<p>By the time the prisoners realized this, it was too late. Hyrum pulled
his single-shot pistol out of his pocket and attempted to shoot it
through the door at the assailants. Whether or not this shot hit true or
simply embedded into the door is unknown. After firing, Hyrum dropped
the pistol and braced himself against the door. It didn’t much matter,
because as soon as he pushed his weight against the door, a second ball
blasted through the door a few inches above the door latch. This proved
to be an infamous and effective shot. With 4 men bracing one door,
bullets smashing through that door were bound to hit somebody. Now, when
you picture somebody bracing themselves against a door to keep people
out or in, you can see how they’re postured against it. One shoulder is
lower with full shoulder and arm contact on the door, one foot hard
against the floor and door jamb, one leg extended far behind them to
provide a triangle figure with the floor for the best structural
support, and the other hand above their head pushing against the door as
well for added support. This is the posture Hyrum Smith was in while
yelling to his younger brother to hold the door, shoot at the men
through it, or do something to help. The second shot that pierced
through the door above the latch struck true. Hyrum’s head was pressed
against the door or very close to it, looking downward slightly at the
floor while using every bit of his strength. This ball hit him in the
face on the left of his nose, traveling through his skull and exiting
below his jawbone, possibly entering his neck again before passing out
the other side. This bullet could have severed his brain stem, which
would have caused him to go instantly limp.</p>
<p>I want to use this as a jumpoff point to talk about this whole Carthage
jail incident in the abstract for a few minutes. This isn’t to be overly
morbid, this digression is merely to discuss the deep and sinister
reality of what happened that fateful day. Besides, nothing I’m about to
describe is any more disturbing than what you see on primetime tv.
Still, listeners beware and abandon hope all ye who enter here.</p>
<p>As humans, we have a lot of traditions. Rituals, holy days, languages,
family dynamics, ways to look at the complexities of the world. All of
these traditions evolve from older traditions and sometimes we get
better at them in some way as those practices evolve. However, one of
the oldest human traditions, older than language, religion, using fire
to cook our food, older than any system of thought, is killing one
another. Us humans, we’re spectacularly good at killing each other.</p>
<p>We’re so good at killing each other that we got bored with rocks and
sticks so we attached rocks to sticks and broke the rocks to make them
sharper and thereby more effective at the job of killing. When that
wasn’t enough we put rocks on sticks and learned how to shoot them at
each other from a distance. Then we found out that some rocks are better
than other rocks. Then we wanted to make rocks shaped in a certain way
so the entire stick can be a rock so we heated up the rocks and turned
them into metal sticks with sharp edges. During all of this we also
figured out some plants can kill each other, burning each other, pouring
burning oils on each other, and plenty of morbid and lethal ways to deal
with each other. Beyond that, however, we also figured out all sorts of
unique and novel ways to hurt each other without actually killing each
other, which is a fascinating phenomena in and of itself. I doubt any
other species of animal engages in torture the way us humans do to
specifically cause harm without quite killing the victim; a remarkable
practice that distinguishes us below any other animals in the kingdom.</p>
<p>Millions of years have passed and we’ve never stopped innovating on
murdering each other. Now, in the last 1000 years, the technology of
death has seen a figurative and literal explosion in the form of
chemical reactions. Fire is super deadly, but what if we could throw it
100 meters through the air at our enemies? What if we put fire in a
little metal ball that exploded and sent the metal and fire flying in
all directions? Gunpowder alone has done more to advance the technology
of murder than arguably any other human invention. A little potassium
nitrate, some charcoal, and sulfur, all sorts of fun inventions can
center around this simple chemical reaction which is stable until heat
is added. Over a thousand years ago, a Chinese inventor used gunpowder
to shoot spears from a bamboo tube. When bamboo became too fragile for
larger explosions, metal tubes were forged and the gun was invented a
few hundred years later. It wasn’t long before this incredible invention
spread across the planet and became a mainstay of well-funded militias
who could absolutely dominate other forces who didn’t have the
innovation known as the gun. The tactical advantage afforded by a gun is
incredible, why get up close and personal with swords, that guy might
kill me, instead I’ll shoot him from a distance where he can’t possibly
kill me with his sword or spear then I’ll reload and kill all his
friends while never in real danger myself. If there are enough of those
guys, you can take them all out with one gun if it’s big enough. A big
enough explosion and you can eventually turn entire civilizations into
glass surrounded by inhabitable radioactive waste. Modern problems
require modern solutions. Look how far we’ve come.</p>
<p>As all of this murder innovation was rapidly expanding, technologies for
exploring and colonizing unknown lands was also aggressively
accelerating. Trans-oceanic trade and circumnavigation transitioned from
a rarity by explorers to an everyday occurrence by traders and settlers.
These people traversed oceans in the matter of weeks or months carrying
guns and cannons; they became the superior force to which the rest of
the world was forced to bow. Some gun-toting miscreants here in North
America told the vastly superior British empire to get off their lawn
and won a war to declare their will the final word that would carry this
landmass into the next few centuries. Those same people kicked off a
multi-generational campaign of colonization so brutal it resulted in the
near complete eradication of most of the people already living here.
Thousands of cultures and languages, millions died by guns, germs, and
steel when their own innovations of murder simply couldn’t keep pace.
There is simply no denying the power of the gun in all of this.</p>
<p>The oldest human tradition of killing one another is never more simple
and effective than the gun. A human with unnecessary holes in them
doesn’t live for very long. The entire science of ballistics
transitioned from calculating the distance and accuracy of trebuchets
and catapults to figuring out how a gun can best be designed to make a
bullet go exactly where the shooter wants. Rifled barrels, cartridge
rounds, repeating actions, machine guns, larger calibers and heavier
powder loads, vehicles to carry these guns, artillery that fires rounds
over miles instead of yards, bombs dropped from the air or fired from
underwater; each of these innovations increased the murdering power of
the humans wielding their portable death machines. Today you can buy a
portable death machine for less than an average grocery store run and
there’s something like 3 of for every citizen of this country; it’s a
baffling world to me.</p>
<p>When a bullet makes contact with human flesh, some truly incredible
things happen. This is the science of terminal ballistics. This isn’t
gratuitous, this is foundational information to bring into focus the
reality of what we’re discussing today. When a bullet hits flesh, it
does some really crazy stuff. That bullet is carrying a ton of kinetic
energy. With relatively little mass accelerated with so much energy,
these hot pieces of lead travel extremely quickly, with many modern
bullets breaking the speed of sound, that’s over 750 mph or 343 meters
per second. If designed correctly, all that kinetic energy transfers to
human flesh upon impact. The primary cavity is where the bullet enters
the flesh and it’s usually the size of the bullet caliber, but that’s
only where the carnage begins.</p>
<p>The majority of the bullet’s energy is transferred as soon as it
punctures through the flesh. The temporary cavity created immediately
after entering the skin can expand the tissue up to 40 times the size of
the bullet. Most bullets are less than a half-inch in diameter, but the
cavity it makes can become twice the size of a baseball. Tissue is
mostly liquid and doesn’t compress, meaning all of it expands into the
surrounding flesh. It does that by compressing organs, ripping and
tearing tissue, and causing incredible amounts of chaos and damage as
the bullet transfers its energy by creating that temporary cavity. As
the flesh absorbs all that energy it creates what’s known as an impact
crater, where the flesh is destroyed behind the initial impact cavity.
Once that energy is absorbed, the flesh will attempt to return to its
form prior to the bullet entering it. The rebounding of the flesh to try
and seal up this temporary cavity can be nearly as destructive as the
bullet itself creating the cavity.</p>
<p>Different bullets act differently and in the case of today’s subject
matter they’re all spherical lead balls that can do all sorts of crazy
things. Full metal jacket bullets, as used by militaries across the
globe, are designed to pass through bodies and leave very little tissue
damage but incapacitate the victim. Hollow-points that cops use are
designed to stop inside the victim; this is the stopping power of the
bullet. When a hollow point bullet hits the target, it immediately
expands into a mushroom-like form, transferring all its energy
immediately and stopping somewhere inside the body; which also ensures
the safety of anybody who may be behind the victim.</p>
<p>Now, if you’re the victim of a gunshot, the best possible outcome is for
the bullet to pass straight through because some of its energy isn’t
transferred to the flesh. Much worse scenarios, however, result when the
bullet is able to transfer all the energy and it can do that in a few
ways. If the chunk of flesh is thick enough, like center mass on the
target, a person’s torso, the person’s organs will absorb all the energy
and the bullet will remain inside their body. But, much worse things can
also happen and that’s when bones get involved. Bones can handle a lot
of stress and torque, but high-velocity low-mass impact is not what
bones evolved to withstand. When the bullet strikes a bone, the transfer
of energy to the bone will often cause it to disintegrate, shooting bone
fragments into the surrounding tissue causing even more damage.
Basically, a bullet striking a bone can turn that bone into a grenade
inside the victim’s body. This will also cause the bullet to ricochet to
other areas of the body. When fired into a skull, a bullet can enter the
brain, ricochet off the back of the skull, and travel the opposite
direction back through the brain, causing even more damage as it
continues to expend all its energy. Bullets can also tumble after
entering, which causes irregular and multi-directional permanent
cavities. The permanent cavity is what’s left behind from the path of
the bullet itself. Once that initial cavity is opened up immediately
after impact and the tissue closes around the expanded flesh in the
temporary cavity, there’s still the path of the actual bullet which
forms a channel of ripped and destroyed tissue. If you’ve ever seen
videos of ballistics gel or some episodes of mythbusters, you know how
everything I just described looks; it’s some horrifying stuff to think
that’s a pretty accurate representation of human flesh being shot.
That’s what’s known as the permanent cavity.</p>
<p>That’s the nitty gritty of how bullets interact with flesh, but when a
human is shot, rarely is it immediately fatal. We’ve all seen action
movies where the hero wastes entire armies of baddies with a single
bullet to each enemy as they blast through the baddie lair and then
they’re captured by the ultimate baddie who gives a long speech before
the hero is rescued by the sidekick. Hi-ya! Unexpected variable!
That’s fun, but it’s not how humans actually act when they’re shot. A
bullet to the head or through the heart are about the only way to cause
a person to go immediately limp or unconscious, even then they will
often survive for a few minutes even if immobilized. For an absolutely
instantaneous death, you have to sever the brain stem. Prisoners of
death camps and political dissidents in gulags will often catch a bullet
to the back of the head and that’s because when the bullet is fired
right at the base of their skull, the brain stem is destroyed and
there’s basically no suffering, no noise, no protestation, nothing;
just lights out and that’s the end of it. Anything other than a brain
stem severance, the person will live for a certain amount of time before
bleeding out or organ failure. Center mass shots, hits to the torso,
will often leave a person alive for minutes or hours before death, or if
the bleeding is stopped they can recover slowly, often dying to
complications of the shot sometime later.</p>
<p>I also want to note that hitting nerve centers or tendons can cause
immediate loss of control. A person shot in the leg or arm will have
instant nerve damage and they’re often unable to use the muscles damaged
by the shot, sometimes never again. A shot or seven to the back is
exceptionally dangerous as the fragmentation of hitting bone coupled
with the nervous system running through the spine will inevitably cause
loss of control, loss of feeling, and usually paralysis to some extent
if the person survives. I’ve only seen a few movies which accurately
depict gunshot wounds and the one that comes to mind is Public Enemies,
the Johnny Depp and Christian Bale movie about the Great Depression bank
robbers. It stuns me how accurate that movie portrays people being shot.
It’s also an oddly apt movie to bring into today’s episode.</p>
<p>This second shot through the apartment door that hit Hyrum in the face
did the fatal damage necessary to render him useless to the other 3 men
in the room. Legend says that Hyrum yelled “I am a dead man” as he fell
backward, but if his brain stem was actually severed, which the evidence
indicates this likely happened, he wouldn’t have spoken a word, he would
have just gone limp while the muscles in his body pushed him away from
the door and he fell backwards, hitting his head on the hardwood floor
as the body slumped lifelessly. If the brain stem wasn’t severed, the
wound to his neck would cause him to bleed out within a matter of
minutes while he remained largely conscious of what happened around him,
unable to speak or cry out for help as his lungs and esophagus filled
with his own blood and his life drained out. He would have watched
everything we’re about to discuss, powerless to change the situation. I
tend to believe his brain stem was severed and he had two large holes in
his neck for reasons we’ll discuss in a bit.</p>
<p>When Hyrum collapsed on the floor, the other prisoners, fueled purely by
adrenaline, understood they were next. Before he was chased out of
Carthage earlier that day, Stephen Markham had left his cane, called a
rascal beater because of the textured knob at the top, in the jail.
Markham had expected to return to the jail and didn’t mean to leave it
there, but the Carthage Greys had other plans for him. However, this did
provide John Taylor and Willard Richards with a second cane to use as a
weapon. As the mob clamored up the stairs, Taylor and Richards armed
themselves with Markham’s rascal beater and another cane that was in the
room. These canes would prove invaluable in preserving their lives.</p>
<p>Seeing his brother fall and blood beginning to pool underneath Hyrum, Jo
pulled his 6-shooter Allen and Thurber pepperbox pistol from his pocket.
Without Hyrum helping to keep the door pushed closed, Richards and
Taylor began to struggle under the force of the mob trying to push the
door open. It nudged opened slightly, just a few inches, and the
attackers tried to push the barrels of their state-issued rifles through
the door into the room. Taylor and Richards at this point used their
canes to hit the barrels of the guns sticking through the door. Jo saw
an opportunity and shoved the muzzle of his pepperbox pistol through the
small opening, squeezing the trigger as fast as his finger could pull.
This situation is the exact intent for the design of a pepperbox pistol.
They’re useless at hitting a target even on the other side of a room,
but when fired point-blank range into a crowd of people, every ball will
strike flesh. However, pepperbox pistols are also notoriously unreliable
even if you are able to keep the powder dry. Of the six charged barrels,
only three actually fired, some traditions say 4 of the 6 fired; we can
be certain of at least 3. John Hay, an eyewitness counts 4 and even
details how each bullet struck true on each victim.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He shot an Irishman named Wills, who was in the affair from his
congenital love of a brawl, in the arm; Gallagher, a Southerner from
the Mississippi Bottom, in the face; Voorhees, a half-grown
hobbledehoy from Bear Creek, in the shoulder; and another gentleman,
whose name I will not mention, as he is prepared to prove an alibi,
and besides stands six feet two in his moccasins.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>None of these shots were fatal, even Gallagher who was shot in the face.
To be clear, Jo was trying to hold the door from being pushed further
open and just stuck his left arm around the side of the door into the
opening when he fired. He didn’t take the time to aim at anybody
specifically, he was just shooting a smoothbore pepperbox pistol into a
mass of dozens of men; he was bound to hit every shot. Richards and
Taylor later claimed that 2 of these men died from being shot by Jo, but
there’s no evidence to substantiate the claim and those two men simply
wouldn’t have any way of knowing that information.</p>
<p>Once these 3 or 4 shots were fired by Jo from his smuggled pistol, the
men at the door briefly recoiled. They would have been struck with
second thoughts because the prisoners weren’t supposed to be armed. They
were shot at by one of the prisoners, but what if all of them had
pistols? They also wouldn’t have known that the bullet through the door
had just killed Hyrum so they probably considered these shots from Jo to
be aggression, not retaliation. What started as an attempt to
assassinate two men now had become a gunfight and the attackers didn’t
know if another mistake might lead to more of them getting shot. They
needed to make quick work of this matter.</p>
<p>Outside the jail, the Carthage Greys were responding to the commotion
from their encampment about a quarter mile away. The report of gunfire
coming from the jail could mean only a few things, either the Mormons
were trying to break the prophet out of jail, or another militia was
there to kill the prophet. Either way, they were needed and the roughly
60 Carthage Greys who remained by special appointment from Governor
Ford, under the command of Robert F. Smith, began to run with their
rifles toward the jail. It’s possible some of them were aware of the
plan by Levi Williams to storm the jail, but it’s most likely that
almost all those men didn’t know what kind of situation they would
encounter once reaching the jail. A quarter mile can be covered by an
armed soldier in the space of about 2.5-3 minutes at full
adrenaline-fueled sprint.</p>
<p>Back in the jail, the attackers redoubled their onslaught after taking
shots from the prophet. They pushed even harder on the door. With Hyrum
dead and unable to help hold the door, John Taylor and Joseph Smith
realized they were outnumbered, outgunned, and didn’t have any way to
prevent the continued attack. They tried as best they could to hold it
while Willard Richards and John Taylor continued to try and hold the
door closed with one arm while hitting the gun barrels sticking through
the door with Stephen Markham’s rascal beater cane.</p>
<p>Inevitably, the mob gained the upper hand and pushed even harder on the
door. This door opens into the apartment and when fully opened creates a
space in the corner of the room which covers anything in that space.
Another shot rang through the door and grazed Willard Richards on the
ear. As all these gunshots were going off, Levi’s men in the courtyard
surrounding the jail heard all the gunshots inside the jail and began
firing their rifles into the window from outside. None of these men
could get a line of sight to fire on anybody in the room so their
bullets smashed through the window and embedded into the ceiling above
the window. These are all single-shot rifles and undoubtedly some of the
soldiers carried their own pistols as secondary weapons, but the
Quartermaster of state militias usually didn’t issue pistols of any sort
to soldiers like this. They were armed with the state issue rifles and
swords, any other guns they privately owned were brought of their own
volition for this special task. Each of these rifles required reloading
before they could be fired again. A skilled soldier could get off three
rounds per minute, which means about 15-20 seconds to reload a rifle
with powder, ball, and wad. Cartridge rifles and repeating actions
wouldn’t be widely used until a few decades later in the Civil War as
those inventions were just a little too young to be widely circulated by
the mid-1840s.</p>
<p>What all that means is the assailants probably fired in volleys. A salvo
of rifle shots would go off, then there’d be a short delay before the
soldiers were ready to fire again. Those at the front of the mob could,
however, increase their rate of fire if they were handed loaded guns
from other assailants further back in the crowd. To what extent
reloading verses passing already loaded guns took place in this instance
can never be known. We do know, however, that the men in the hallway
began pushing into the jail cell while the men in the courtyard fired
rounds into the window, partially in hopes that a bullet might get lucky
and strike one of the victims, but more so to dissuade any attempt to
jump out the window to escape.</p>
<p>Jo yelled to the other 2 surviving men, “That’s right, Brother Taylor,
parry them off as well as you can.” while Richards and Taylor continued
to use their canes to deflect the rifle barrels that were sneaking into
the room. Taylor remembered “It certainly was far from pleasant to be so
near the muzzles of those firearms as they belched forth their liquid
flames and deadly balls.” As more rifle muzzles were pushed through the
small opening of the door, more men continued to push up the narrow
stairway and against the door. 3 men holding the door can only withstand
so much of this pressure before the mob outside the door gains the
advantage. Hyrum’s corpse bleeding out was certainly a morale crusher as
well; a harbinger of their coming deaths.</p>
<p>Jo and Taylor realized the futility and peeled away from the door,
simultaneously, and made a run for the window, leaving Richards to be
pinned behind the door in the corner of the room as the mob pushed their
way in. At this point, the two running men became completely exposed to
gunfire while Hyrum bled out at the feet of the assailants. While
running, John Taylor was the first to be struck.</p>
<p>While he ran, this first bullet hit John Taylor’s leg. The bullet
entered into the back of his upper thigh, glanced off his bone
flattening the ball, and continued it’s deflected path, lodging in the
front of his leg a half inch underneath the skin. While Taylor was lucky
with this shot as it didn’t directly hit his leg bone and cause the bone
to disintegrate, the ball lodged barely underneath the skin at the front
of his thigh, meaning it was able to transfer all its kinetic energy
into his flesh; it immediately severed nerves and Taylor fell forward on
his way to the window. He “lost entirely and instantaneously all power
of action or locomotion” and hit the window sill in a falling kneeling
type of position. His torso collided with the window sill, breaking his
pocket watch with the hands at precisely 5:16:21 p.m., freezing in time
the infamous moment when this gunfight occurred. He yelled out “I am
shot!”. As Taylor stumbled into the window sill, he briefly thought “we
might have some friends outside, and that there might be some chance of
escape,” but what he saw out the window was about 100 men with their
guns pointed at the window, which now framed his face looking down at
the assailants.</p>
<p>In a situation like this, people don’t have time to think, they just
act. When Taylor saw a hundred guys out the window with rifles pointed
at him, he pushed himself back from the window sill and they fired
another volley of bullets into the ceiling above his head. Taylor later
attributed this physical movement to divine intervention. It’s not like
he had time to run the calculations in his mind that there were probably
less men in the room than out in the courtyard, thus increasing his
chances of survival if he stayed instead of dove out the second-story
window; he just acted based on the greatest threat in front of his face.
He pushed himself back from the window, unknowingly securing his
survival, and laid on the ground, then realized that the men were
pushing into the room from the doorway. He was unable to stand, but he
could roll, which he did to the only place where there was any cover,
under the bed in the southeast corner of the room by the window. As he
tried to roll he was entirely exposed and the men pushing into the room
continued to shoot John Taylor. He was prone with his feet toward the
men pushing into the room, which explains the nature of the rest of his
wounds. The second shot hit him in the left knee, which traveled up his
thigh and embedded near his groin. He claimed in 1854 that this bullet
was never extracted. He was covering his head with his arms like a boxer
as he tried to roll and the third bullet entered his left arm near the
elbow. This bullet ripped through muscle and tendon all the way up his
arm, crushed through his wrist joint, and came to a halt “a little above
the upper joint of my little finger.” Had his arms not been up
protecting his head, this third bullet likely would have struck his
torso or head; I think most people would take a bullet ripping through
their arm instead of their organs or skull any day of the week.</p>
<p>The fourth and final bullet was the most gruesome. His left flank took
all these shots so he must have been nearly under the bed as all three
of these bullets hit him simultaneously. The fourth ball entered the
flesh of his left hip. While this was the nastiest wound of them all, it
was also the least damaging. This ball essentially grazed his hip, but
the ball passed straight through, meaning it didn’t transfer all its
energy into his body. The temporary cavity a bullet creates can expand
the flesh up to 40 times the diameter of the bullet. When this bullet
entered his hip, that expansion basically caused his hip flesh to
explode where that temporary cavity was made, exposing bone and flesh,
causing massive amounts of bleeding. According to Taylor, the bullet
“tore away the flesh as large as my hand, dashing the mangled
fragments of flesh and blood against the wall.” This massive chunk of
flesh missing meant the ball didn’t lodge in his body; it carried the
rest of its energy with the pieces of flesh and hip bone onto the wall
above his head as he finished rolling under the bed.</p>
<p>As John Taylor absorbed these shots, the men pushing into the room
probably thought they’d successfully killed Taylor after seeing the
blood and bone splatter on the wall, but he wasn’t their primary target.
Their target was running to the same window Taylor had fallen against
before rolling under the bed. Joseph and Hyrum Smith were the men the
militia were there to kill that day. Hyrum was motionless on the floor,
and Jo was dashing for the window.</p>
<p>The mob took aim at the fleeing Joseph and fired. He immediately took a
shot to center mass; the bullet entered somewhere in his back above his
right hip and lodged somewhere in his torso, which buckled him over and
hampered his ability to run. He got to the window and did the only thing
he could think of, he lifted both arms to the square at either side of
his head and shouted “O Lord, my god, is there no help for the widows
son?” the Masonic distress call. Many of the men in the mob were
Freemasons as were most of the leading politicians like Governor Ford.
When Mormon loyalist Dan Jones told Governor Ford that Jo and Hyrum were
Master Masons and required his protection before Jones himself was
chased out of Carthage that morning, Jones was invoking the distress of
the brotherhood in hopes Ford would take more seriously the threats to
the lives of his fellow Master Masons. It was a threat. Jo did the same
while dangling out the window and accounts differ as to what happened
immediately after. Most accounts say he was fatally shot and fell
lifeless out of the window, others say he jumped from the window and was
executed, yet another account that’s disputed claims he was in the
window for 3 to 4 minutes essentially bargaining with the men in the
courtyard while the men in the room continued to keep their guns aimed
at him.</p>
<p>Here’s the sequence of events as best as I can piece them together.
After taking the first bullet, Jo went to the window and made the
Masonic distress call. There was a momentary pause in the shooting as
this was a very powerful invocation. The Masons in the mob now knew they
were about to assassinate a fellow Mason and the non-Masons in the crowd
knew they were about to take the life of a Master Mason, which might
carry deadly consequences for them if they went through with it. The
oaths of fealty sworn to by Masons are taken very seriously, especially
at this time in frontier America. This brief pause forced everybody to
think for a minute, all while Jo was bleeding from the gunshot wound to
his back, possibly having some organ failure and tunnel-vision.</p>
<p>Levi Williams was in the crowd surrounded by his men in the courtyard
while his men were in the room with their guns trained on the prophet
sitting on the window sill crying out for mercy. He yelled “Shoot him!
G-d d—n him! Shoot the dam’d rascal!” and his men inside the room
responded appropriately. They fired again and another bullet struck true
in Jo’s right side, causing him to recoil and fall out the window. This
was a fall of 2 stories onto hard dirt. He fell head-first and hit the
ground with his left shoulder and head making first contact and his feet
hitting soon after. This fall likely broke his neck and caused brain
damage, but it wasn’t actually fatal. The prophet lay face down in the
dirt of the Carthage Jail courtyard, struggling for consciousness, one
or two bullets lodged in his body. He tried to push himself up but was
too crippled from the gunshots and fall to be able to move himself. Levi
Williams, or some unidentified kid, dragged Joseph Smith, bleeding,
dying, in excruciating pain, a few feet across the dirt to the center of
the courtyard where they propped him up leaning against the bricks of a
well.</p>
<p>As he was being dragged through the dust, the men who chased him out of
the window to begin with quickly evacuated the jail in order to witness
the lynching they were all taking part in. The jail emptied of the men
who’d pushed through the door and as they ran down the stairs and into
the courtyard, the 50-60 men of the Carthage Greys finally arrived at
the jail, having run the quarter mile from their encampment, to find out
what all the commotion was.</p>
<p>Levi Williams, and some men including Jacob Davis, and William Grover,
gathered around the broken and dying Jo. At this point, I can only
assume Jo was begging for his life as I doubt that at any time during
the previous 3 minutes he’d accepted his fate. A group of men gathered
around him and at least two of them pointed their rifles at his chest,
pulled their triggers, and murdered him by sending two to four more
bullets smashing through his torso and vital organs. “The fire was
simultaneous. A slight cringe of the body was all the indication of pain
that he betrayed when the balls struck him. He fell upon his face.”
Given all his injuries from the previous few minutes, this was an act of
mercy.</p>
<p>Kinda poetic, isn’t it? Joseph Smith started his magical journey by
finding his famed brown seer stone while digging a well, he gave his
most impactful and famed speech at the funeral of a man who died digging
a well, and a well was the last conscious sensation he felt pressing
against his back as he was gunned down by these men.</p>
<p>The upper apartment had been abandoned by the assailants who immediately
clamored down the stairs to witness the lynching firsthand. As they
emptied the room, Willard Richards ran to the window Jo fell out of and
looked at the scene below him long enough to witness the men dragging Jo
to the well for his execution. He assessed the situation and tried to
find an escape, but no exit of the jail was unobserved by the enemies
around the jail. Richards would be unable to escape, even though he was
unharmed. He saw the motionless body of Hyrum with a puddle of blood
beneath his head and neck, seeping through the floorboards to the
kitchen below. He saw the splattered blood and bone fragments on the
wall from John Taylor and probably assumed he was dead. He turned to
leave the room in an attempt to find a hiding place, somewhere,
anywhere. But, as he was about to step out of the door, he heard a weak
cry from under the bed, “Stop, Doctor, and take me along”. Whether this
voice was reassuring to hear, or distressing, we can’t imagine what was
going through the mind of Willard Richards. Or the mind of the man who
said those words, for that matter.</p>
<p>He turned around and looked under the bed. John Taylor was a mess. He
was absolutely covered in blood, his left leg was bleeding profusely,
his arm was unusable, the shattered bones of his left hip joint
completely exposed to open air. Taylor didn’t see out the window what
Richards had just witnessed, the execution of their supreme leader. He
exclaimed to John Taylor, “Oh! Brother Taylor, is it possible that they
have killed both Brother Hyrum and Joseph? It cannot surely be, and yet
I saw them shoot them;”. He was an absolute wreck and he apparently said
a little prayer “elevating his hands two or three times,... [saying]
‘Oh Lord, my God, spare Thy servants!’”.</p>
<p>Willard Richards was a Thomsonian herbal physician, not a surgeon. He’d
never seen this level of carnage and pain his entire life, but he did
what he could with what he had. John Taylor wasn’t in control of
himself, he was probably in shock at this time with that characteristic
thousand-yard stare, so it was all on Willard Richards to get both men
to safety. Richards took an extreme risk in helping John Taylor. He
said, “Brother Taylor, this is a terrible event[!]” while pulling him
from underneath the bed. Richards was a big guy of over 300 pounds while
Taylor was relatively small. Richards picked Taylor up and brought him
to the adjacent room with the jail cells. Richards put Taylor in one of
the cells, filled the wounds with straw while saying, “I am sorry I can
not do better for you;” after which Richards grabbed a dirty old straw
mattress and put it on top of John Taylor to hopefully conceal him from
anybody entering the jail cells looking for the rest of the Mormons.
Richards told John Taylor while concealing him, “That may hide you, and
you may yet live to tell the tale, but I expect they will kill me in a
few moments!” Taylor recounts, “While lying in this position, I
suffered the most excruciating pain.”</p>
<p>After concealing John Taylor, Willard Richards ran back into the
apartment and looked out the window again “to see if there were any
signs of life, regardless of my own, determined to see the end of him I
loved”. There was no sign of life, Joseph Smith was a corpse. He
understood the reality of the situation and resigned himself to his
likely fate of a similar execution. He returned to the jail cell where
he concealed John Taylor and awaited the arrival of the mob back up the
stairs.</p>
<p>Jo was dead and the mob knew that Hyrum had been hit, but they weren’t
sure of it. They ran back up the stairs, surely causing Willard Richards
to go into a panic, and they found Hyrum lying motionless on the floor
with a bullet hole in his face and exit wound on the back of his neck.
There was a pool of blood under his head and his right shoulder also had
a considerable amount of blood. The men ran into the room and shot him 3
more times to ensure he was actually dead. These bullets entered his
back, an arm, a leg, and his torso to the left of his naval. The shot
which entered his back passed completely through his body and smashed
his pocketwatch, completely destroying it. What is curious about these
shots is Hyrum didn’t seem to bleed out of them at all. The shot which
passed through his skull, out his jaw, into and out of his neck, it left
a massive blood stain on his shirt that day, so much so that somebody
cut a large chunk of the fabric out, possibly because it was so
gruesome, possibly out of a sense of preserving the material which had
the most amount of blood and flesh material on it. However, all these
other holes in his clothes don’t contain any bloodstains nor any
evidence that blood was ever washed from the areas. This can really only
mean that Hyrum had completely bled out from his head and neck wound
before these shots, which would mean he was dead for a few minutes
before the men returned to the upper room and put these other bullets in
him. This means Jo was in the windowsill and the courtyard for as long
as 5-7 minutes before he was executed and the mob returned to Hyrum to
make sure he was dead.</p>
<p>After these gratuitous bullets ripped through Hyrum’s corpse, a cry was
heard outside from an unknown person “The Mormons are coming!” and the
men immediately flew down the stairs and scattered in all directions
from Carthage jail. Maybe it was Willard Richards who yelled it from the
other room. In the space of about 5-7 minutes, from Frank Worrel
shooting his blank rounds at Levi’s men to those men fleeing all
directions from the jail out of fear of the Nauvoo Legion, the deed was
done. A disputed account claims a young man attempted to decapitate Jo
but a pillar of light scared him off, but the account is full of plenty
of other details too ridiculous to believe and actually served to hinder
the prosecution against the assailants the following year. That same
account claims Willard Richards stood in the middle of the room and
blocked the bullets with a magic wand like a Jedi; it’s pretty humorous.
Jo’s body lay a broken shell with multiple bullet holes, possibly broken
bones including his neck, slumped against the well in the courtyard of
the jail. John Taylor’s wounds were beginning to coagulate as he lay in
excruciating pain under the dirty old straw mattress; Willard Richards
waited in the jail cell near the dying John Taylor; “I expected to be
shot the next moment, and stood before the door awaiting the onset.”
But, the men never came. The Nauvoo Legion never came. Brigadier-General
Deming, who was personally appointed by Governor Ford to guard the jail,
never came. Levi Williams who put this bloodbath into motion never came.
Dan Jones, Stephen Markham, John Fullmer, Cyrus Wheelock, any Mormon
loyalists never came. Willard Richards was all alone in that building
with two dead friends and a third on his way in and out of
consciousness.</p>
<p>All told, 35 bullets were found lodged in the plaster of the walls and
ceiling of the room, Jo had at least 4 bullets in him, Hyrum had at
least 4 bullets in him, a fifth if he used his single-shot pistol on
himself which is entirely possible, John Taylor had 4, a gun went off in
the kitchen as the men were pushing past George Stigall, the jailor, Jo
fired 3 or 4 rounds from his pepperbox pistol smuggled in by Cyrus
Wheelock, Hyrum discharged his bullet from his single shot pistol
smuggled in by John S. Fullmer, an unknown number of bullets were fired
up the stairway toward the jail door before the assailants realized the
men were in the apartment instead of the jail, Frank Worrel and his boys
in their feigned defense of the jail fired 4 blank rounds at the
attackers, and then an unknown number of balls bounced off the stone of
the building outside, leaving small dents. Best estimates place the
number of shots fired in that short period between 75-100 rounds,
although those estimates are understandably squishy.</p>
<p>As the mob fled, the citizens of Carthage only heard the report of
gunfire at the jail and didn’t know what had happened. The Carthage
Greys were packing up camp, Levi Williams’s men were scattering quickly;
until the citizens came upon the jail there’s no telling what had
happened. Understandably, many thought the Mormons had attacked to break
their prophet out of jail, but when they got to the jail, that notion
was quickly corrected. As the mob scattered they undoubtedly hollered
out the prophet is dead, the damned rascal is shot, and all sorts of
triumphant cries to anybody in earshot range.</p>
<p>This only meant one thing, and it’s exactly what everybody including
Governor Thomas Ford believed when he departed for Nauvoo that morning,
the Mormons may not be here in Carthage right now, but as soon as word
made it to Nauvoo, they would be. The wrath of 3,500 religious zealots
with nothing more to lose would descend on Carthage before daybreak; the
city would be burned to the ground and the Mormons would salt the earth
in their wake before moving on to Warsaw and doing the same. After 5
years of construction, the Mormon war machine was literally built for an
occasion just like this, but could it run without a pilot fueled only by
the pure rage of vengeance and retribution?</p>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The moment the work was done, the calmness of horror succeeded the
fever of fanatical rage. The assassins hurried away from the jail, and
took the road to Warsaw in silence and haste. They went home at a
killing pace over the wide dusty prairie. Warsaw is eighteen miles
from Carthage; the Smiths were killed at half past five: at a quarter
before eight the returning crowd began to drag their weary limbs
through the main street of Warsaw, — at such an astounding rate of
speed had the lash of their own thoughts driven them.</p>
<p>The town was instantly put in such attitude of defence as its limited
means permitted. The women and children were ferried across the river
to a village on the Missouri shore. The men kept guard night and day
in the hazel thickets around the town. Everybody expected sudden and
exemplary vengeance from the Mormons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The wife of the captain of the Carthage Greys remembers the weeks
leading up to and the instant terror after gunfire was heard throughout
the town. Her husband, Robert F. Smith, was captain of the Greys who
were tasked with guarding the city by Governor Ford. Deming oversaw the
jail guard specifically, Robert F. Smith was captain of the Greys
guarding the city. He was also the justice of the peace overseeing the
legal hearings during this whole affair so he was understandably busy
and possibly not the best guy to be captain over the Greys.</p>
<p>Mrs. Robert F. Smith, “A Short Sketch of the Trials of Mrs. R. F. Smith
at the Killing of the Smiths, The Mormans Profphet,” holograph, SC 1434,
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois.
(Misspellings in title and numerous transpositions of letters and
misspellings in narrative retained as in original.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That day [June 27, 1844] I was unusually depressed and out of sorts.
[I] had been living in almost constant dred terror of the Mormans
for years and never knwen from day to day and hardly from one hour to
another, what dreadfull catastrophe would happen and when the rumor
reached me about half past two P.M. that a mob had collected on the
prairie some a few miles out and were on the road to Carthage. Some
thought they were Mormans comeing to liberate the Smiths from jail and
and [sic] would destroy the town and every thing in it. My neighbors
began to make preperations to leave their homes with their families
and the part of town where I lived was soon entirely deserted but
myself. . . . [My husband] had not been home a single night for two
weeks. He with his men had been keeping gard of the town day and night
all that time. . . . [She dressed and sent her six children to
friends’ houses one block away and about an hour later she heard
gunfire.] [I] was powerless to move for a minute or so. When I
became conscious there was a Morman girl, who lived in the
neighborhood, standing in the door. I was holding on to the bench of
my chair and she was ringing her hands and saying ‘Oh my God! Mrs.
Smith they are shooting the men down at the jail and throwing them out
of the window. . . . All brought word of what terrible revenge the
Mormans were going to take on the Carthage people for killing the
Smiths. They were frightened and beleaved all the stories they heard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Word of what happened immediately hit every ear in Carthage and every
citizen began packing up and heading to Warsaw within the hour. Thomas
L. Barnes was the coroner of Carthage and he immediately went to the
jail to make his examination of the crime scene. He sent 2 letters to
his daughter remembering the scene 50 years from when it happened. He
describes the shootout and the situation in which he found each of the
victims.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The attacing party forced the door open and commenced firing at Smith
it is said they must have hit him an probably disabled him, as he
stagered across the floor to the oposite side of the room where there
was a window. It is said that there he gave the hailing sign of the
distress of a Mason but that did him no good. In the room behind him
was armed men, furious men, with murder in their hearts. Before him
arround the well under the window there was a croud of desperate men,
as he was receiving shots from behind which he could not stand, in
despersation he leaped or rather fell out of the window near the well
where he breathed his last. When I found him soon afterwards he was
laying in the hall at the foot of the stairs where his blood had as I
believe left indelible stain on the floor.</p>
<p>… Taylor was severely wounded Richards was not hurt. Shall I try to
describe the wounds that Taylor received and got over them. Well let
me tell you where we found him, I cannot impress your mind of his
appearance as he appered to us when we wer called to him by the
jailor. We found him in a pile of straw. It appeared that a straw bed
had been emtied in the cell where he was when we found him. He was
very much frightened as well as severly wounded. It took strong
persuading of the jailor as well as our positive assuriance that we
ment him no harm but Was desirous of doing him some good. He finally
consented to come out of his cell… The wounds had bled quite freely,
the blood had had time to coagulate which it had done, and where the
clothes and straw came in contact they all adhered together so that
Mr. Taylor came out his self sought cell he was a pitable looking
sight. We took the best care of him we could till he left us. He got
well but never paid us for skill or good wishes...</p>
<p>After we were through with Taylor I went to Richards and said to him
Richards what does all this mean who done it. Said he, doctor I do not
know, but I belive it was some Missourians that came over and have
killed brothers Josef and Hyrum and wounded bro Taylor. Said I to him
do you believe that, he said I do. Says I, will you write that down
and send it to Nauvoo. He said he would if he could get any person to
take it. I told him if he would write it I would send it. He wrote the
note, I found the man that took it to Nauvoo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With the help of Coroner Barnes, the Jailor, George Stigall, and the
town’s hotel owner, Artois Hamilton, Willard Richards conveyed the Smith
bodies and the bleeding John Taylor to Hamilton hotel just a few blocks
away from the jail. Here they provided their examination and stopped
John Taylor’s bleeding. It was important to get a message to Nauvoo. It
was only a matter of time before word reached Nauvoo that Jo and Hyrum
were dead, John Taylor probably dead as well and the whereabouts of
Willard Richards being unknown. How the Mormons would respond was a
question mark for everybody, even the Mormons themselves. If Richards
could get word to the Mormon leadership before any other messenger, he
may be able to prevent the counties from devolving into immediate civil
war, which many dreamed about but nobody actually wanted. Complicating
matters further, the leadership of the church was scattered all over the
nation. The centralized hierarchy of Mormonism was separated by hundreds
or thousands of miles and could do nothing to coordinate and handle the
situation with any sense of deliberation or restraint. The people in
Nauvoo who were high-ranking Mormon leaders, the men the Mormons would
listen to, was scarce and the men of the Nauvoo Legion would be thirsty
for blood of the men who killed their prophet and patriarch.</p>
<p>For all these reasons and so many terrifying unknowns, Carthage became a
ghost town. Beyond that, Governor Ford was just wrapping up his public
speech in Nauvoo telling the Mormons that if anything happens that would
interfere with the prosecution of their leaders, the blame would be on
their heads. A little more misbehavior and the whole state would burn
Nauvoo to ash. For unknown reasons, while Governor Ford was giving his
speech, a tension, a feeling of unease, plagued the Mormon community.
Samuel Smith, Jo’s youngest surviving brother, rode out from Nauvoo
headed for Carthage just a little ahead of Governor Ford and his detail.
After nearly 3 hours of moving the bodies, examining them, and
stabilizing John Taylor, Willard Richards sat down to pen this note
addressed to Governor Ford, Gen. Johnathan Dunham head of the Nauvoo
Legion, Col. Stephen Markham who’d been chased out of Carthage that
morning, and Emma Smith, Jo’s first wife.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joseph and Hyrum are dead. Taylor wounded, not very badly. I am well.
Our guard was forced, as we believe, by a band of Missourians from 1
to 200. The job was done in an instant, and the party fled towards
Nauvoo instantly. This is as I believe it. The citizens here are
afraid of the mormons attacking them; I promise them No!</p>
<p>W. RICHARDS</p>
<p>N.B. The citizens promise us protection; alarm guns have been fired.</p>
<p>JOHN TAYLOR</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This letter was handed to the coroner, Thomas Barnes, who gave it to his
brothers, William and John, who were understandably afraid to go to
Nauvoo bearing such news, believing the Mormons would kill the
messengers and return to murder their families in Carthage. Those guys
instead took the letter to an Arza Adams a few miles north of Carthage
who agreed to carry it with the help of a Benjamin Leyland, who knew the
roads and could avoid any troops on the road between Nauvoo and
Carthage, be they Mormons or mobocrats.</p>
<p>They set out for Nauvoo around 9 p.m., but 2 men carrying the news
without Willard Richards’s warning to not attack Carthage were already
on their way to Nauvoo to spread the word. Governor Ford had left Nauvoo
around 6 p.m. and was headed with his detail toward Carthage, suspecting
an attack might be made. He left one of his boys, a Captain Singleton,
in Nauvoo to control the Nauvoo Legion. He met these two messengers on
the road headed to Nauvoo, George D. Grant, a Mormon, and David
Bettisworth, the Carthage constable who had the arrest warrants for Jo
and the 17 other men who burned the Expositor printing press which led
to this whole affair to begin with. These messengers bearing the bad
news were only a couple miles outside Nauvoo when they were intercepted
by Governor Ford and his men.</p>
<p>Ford:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A short time before sundown we departed on our return to Carthage.
When we had proceeded two miles we met two individuals, one of them a
Mormon, who informed us that the Smiths had been assassinated in jail,
about five or six o’clock of that day. The intelligence seemed to
strike every one with a kind of dumbness. As to myself, it was
perfectly astounding; and I anticipated the very worst consequences
from it. The Mormons had been represented to me as a lawless,
infatuated, and fanatical people, not governed by the ordinary motives
which influence the rest of mankind. If so, most likely an
exterminating war would ensue, and the whole land would be covered
with desolation.</p>
<p>Acting upon this supposition, it was my duty to provide as well as I
could for the event. I therefore ordered the two messengers into
custody, and to be returned with us to Carthage. This was done to get
time to make such arragements[sic] as could be made, and to prevent
any sudden explosion of Mormon excitement before they could be written
to by their friends at Carthage. I also despatched messengers to
Warsaw, to advise the citizens of the event. But the people there knew
all about the matter before my messengers arrived. They, like myself,
anticipated a general attack all over the country. The women and
children were removed across the river; and a committee was despatched
that night to Quincy for assistance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Governor Ford was now in complete damage control mode. For the moment,
Hancock County was a contained oil fire, now he just needed to keep it
from spreading for the fires to actually catch and send the whole state
into war. Ford took the messengers into custody to bring them back to
Carthage with him; the longer he could keep the news from the Mormons
the more time he had to evacuate Carthage and take control of the
situation to suffocate the flames. Governor Ford and his men immediately
went to Hamilton’s hotel where the bodies and John Taylor lay under the
care of Coroner Barnes and Willard Richards.</p>
<p>They arrived around 10 p.m., where Governor Ford was able to get the
story straight from the Coroner and Willard Richards himself. Jo’s
younger brother, Samuel Smith, had arrived at the hotel to see his dead
older brothers just ahead of the Governor and his men. Ford asked
Richards and Samuel Smith to pen an addendum to the message Richards
sent earlier with Arza Adams and Benjamin Leyland, in hopes the second
message would reassure the Mormons that an attack on Carthage was a
terrible idea.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To Mrs. Emma Smith, and Maj. Gen. Dunham &c.:--</p>
<p>The Governor has just arrived; says all things shall be inquired into,
and all right measures taken.</p>
<p>I say to all the citizens of Nauvoo, my brethren, be still; and know
that <em>God reigns</em>. <em>Don’t rush out of the city</em>--don’t rush to
Carthage; stay at home, and be prepared for an attack from Missouri
mobbers. The Governor will render every assistance possible--has sent
out order for troops. Joseph and Hyrum are dead, <strong>but not by the
Carthage people--the guards were true as I believe</strong>. We will prepare
to move the bodies as soon as possible.</p>
<p>The people of the country are greatly excited, and fear the Mormons
will come out and take vengeance. I have pledged my word the Mormons
will stay at home as soon as they can be informed, and no violence
will be on their part, and say to my brethren in Nauvoo, in the name
of the Lord--be still--be patient; only let such friends as choose
come here to see the bodies. Mr. Taylor’s wounds are dressed, and not
serious. I am sound.</p>
<p>WILLARD RICHARDS,</p>
<p>JOHN TAYLOR,</p>
<p>SAMUEL H. SMITH</p>
<p>Defend yourselves until protection can be furnished necessary. June
27th, 1844.</p>
<p>THOMAS FORD</p>
<p>Governor and Commander-in-Chief.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Governor Ford now had the unenviable task of keeping the peace, learning
the facts, and commanding militias all over the state who’d already
committed mutiny or held only the words of their dead supreme leader as
the law. Governor Ford credits this letter we just read as being the
only thing that kept the Mormons from marching out and destroying
Carthage and Warsaw that very night.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here also I found Dr. Richards and John Taylor, two of the principal
Mormon leaders, who had been in the jail at the time of the attack,
and who voluntarily addressed a most pacific exhortation to their
fellow-citizens, which was the first intelligence of the murder which
was received at Nauvoo. I think it very probable that the subsequent
good conduct of the Mormons is attributable to the arrest of the
messengers, and to the influence of this letter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Governor Ford released the messengers he’d taken into custody a few
miles outside Nauvoo and Mormon George D. Grant immediately departed
Carthage at a gallop carrying this letter Ford credits with keeping a
lid on the state from exploding into civil war. He came within 2 miles
of Nauvoo at the same time another person in Nauvoo was acting on
suspicions of foul play. Orrin Pistol Packin’ Porter Rockwell had been
uneasy about Governor Ford’s speech that evening and was unable to
sleep. He decided to go to Carthage that night, set to arrive sometime
before daybreak of June 28th. However, as Porter was about a mile and a
half outside of Nauvoo on the road to Carthage, he ran into George D.
Grant, carrying the message penned by Richards, Samuel Smith, Taylor,
and Governor Ford. George Grant told Pistol Packin’ Port what he knew,
that Porter’s childhood friends from Palmyra and men he’d sworn absolute
fealty to protect, were dead. “Who was in charge of the troops?” Porter
asked Grant. “Worrell. Frank Worrell” Grant replied breathlessly.</p>
<p>The name of Frank Worrel would forever be burned into the mind of Porter
Rockwell. After the conversation, Pistol Packin’ Porter wheeled his
horse around and sprinted for Nauvoo. George Grant’s horse was exhausted
from the gallop from Carthage, Porter’s horse was still fresh. It was
about 3 to 4 in the morning and Porter reached the outskirts of Nauvoo,
shouting at the top of his lungs. “Joseph is killed--they have killed
him! Goddamn them! They have killed him!” Still a few hours before
daybreak, Mormons slowly roused at the panicked shrieks from Port and
the thunderous pound of hooves as he canvassed every street in town to
raise the alarm. This is Porter Rockwell’s famous ride through Nauvoo,
waking thousands of people from their slumber at 3 in the morning with
the cry that they’ve killed the prophet, the name Frank Worrel etched
into the folds of his consciousness.</p>
<p>Governor Ford had done enough to gain the trust of the Mormons through
this whole affair. With the letter telling the Mormons to rest easy and
let the Governor handle it cosigned by the Governor himself, Jo’s
younger brother Samuel, and the two survivors of the attack, the
intelligence spread through the Mormon community, causing a sense of
uneasiness coupled with the turmoil and despair of losing Jo and Hyrum.
Many simply didn’t believe it, others thought Governor Ford was
responsible, others were gearing up for an assault on Carthage in spite
of the orders. Nauvoo was utter chaos. Governor Ford understood the mob
made the attack exactly when he was in Nauvoo with the hopes the Mormons
would blame him and kill him on the spot.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As for myself, I was well convinced that those, whoever they were, who
assassinated the Smiths, meditated in turn my assassination by the
Mormons. The very circumstances of the case fully corroborated the
information which I afterwards received, that upon consultation of the
assassins it was agreed amongst them that the murder must be committed
whilst the governor was at Nauvoo; that the Mormons would naturally
supposed that he had planned it; and that in the first outpouring of
their indignation, they would assassinate him, by way of retaliation.
And that thus they would get clear of the Smiths and the governor, all
at once. They also supposed, that if they could so contrive the matter
as to have the governor of the State assassinated by the Mormons, the
public excitement would be greatly increased against that people, and
would result in their expulsion from the State at least.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was the plan all along. Murder Jo and Hyrum while Governor Ford was
in Carthage, send a messenger to Nauvoo before Ford left with knowledge
of the murders, the Mormons would retaliate by murdering Governor Ford
like they’d done with Governor Boggs, and then the anti-Mormons would
point to Ford’s assassination and use it as a rally cry against the
Mormons to drive them out of Illinois. The Mormons existed in a state of
confusion and mourning, but the anti-Mormons in Carthage and Warsaw
sought to capitalize on the public confusion by weaving their own
narrative. Notably, within 5 hours of the gunfight in the jail, Carthage
was almost completely a ghost town and all the people fled to Warsaw or
were ferried across the Mississippi from Warsaw to Missouri, as Missouri
would provide complete and absolute protection against the Mormons.</p>
<p>Thomas Sharp, who may have been part of the attack or may not have been,
the evidence is inconclusive, printed his version of the events in an
extra of the Warsaw Signal the night of the gunfight, which was
immediately circulated beginning around 9-10 that same night. The
anti-Mormons began controlling the narrative using propaganda within
hours of the event happening, claiming it started by a Mormon trying to
break the prisoners out. Remember, it was the Warsaw Signal and Thomas
Sharp’s own words which had initially called on the citizens to
exterminate the Mormons; that was the endgame here. The Governor of
Illinois was merely a sacrificial pawn in this game if all went
according to the plan of Thomas Sharp and Levi Williams.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>EXTRA</p>
<p>Joe and Hiram Smith are dead -- shot this afternoon. An attack from
the Mormons is expected every hour. Will not the surrounding counties
rush instantly to our rescue?</p>
<p>Warsaw, June 27, 1844.</p>
<p>It seems that the circumstances attending the killing of the Mormon
Prophet and his brother Hiram are as follows: On yesterday, Gov. Ford
left Carthage with about one hundred and twenty soldiers, for the
purpose of taking possession of the "Nauvoo Legion," and their arms.
They arrived at Nauvoo about noon, and called for the assembling of
the Legion and their arms. -- They arrived at Nauvoo about noon and
called for the assembling of the Legion. About 2000 men with arms
immediately responded to the call. These troops were put under command
of Col. Singleton of the Brown county, who accompanied Gov. Ford to
Nauvoo.</p>
<p>The Governor finding all quiet left Nauvoo about 5 o'clock P. M., with
a company of 60 men for the purpose of encamping about seven miles
from the city.</p>
<p>At about the same time that Gov. Ford left Nauvoo, the Prophet and his
brother were killed at Carthage, under the following circumstances, as
near as we can ascertain them: --</p>
<p>Joe and Hiram are both confined in the debtors room of the Carthage
jail, awaiting their trial on a charge of treason. The jail was
strongly guarded by soldiers and anti-Mormons who had been placed
there by the Governor.</p>
<p>A Mormon attempted to rush by the guards for the purpose of forcing
his way in the jail. He was opposed by the guard, and fired a pistol
at one of the guards, giving him a slight wound.</p>
<p>A general confusion ensued in the crowd around the jail. Joe and his
fellow Mormon prisoners, it seems, had provided themselves with
pistols, and commenced firing upon the guards within. He then
attempted to escape by the window, when a hundred balls entered his
body, and he fell [a] lifeless corpse.</p>
<p>His brother Hiram shared the same fate. Richards, a leading Mormon,
was badly wounded. There our intelligence ends -- what took place
after this, God only knows. Mormons immediately left for Nauvoo, to
carry news of the death of the Prophet. It is feared that the Mormons
at Nauvoo will be so exasperated as to exterminate the Governor and
his small force.</p>
<p>The Boreas brought down most of the women and children from Warsaw
[Carthage] . It is feared their town is in ashes before this.</p>
<p>Our citizens were aroused this morning by the ringing of bells and a
call to arms. Our three independent companies are already in marching
order. Maj. Flood has ordered out the militia of the regiment, and the
steamer Boreas is waiting to convey them to the scene of action.</p>
<p>There is no knowing where this dreadful affair will end. Many have
expressed fears that our city is in danger, because most of the Warsaw
[Carthage] families have taken refuge here -- but we believe there
is no danger, we are too far from the scene of action.</p>
<p>Messengers have just left for Hannibal and the towns below for the
purpose of arousing the Missourians. The excitement in our city is
intense and the anxiety to hear the fate of Gov. Ford and his men are
very great.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And just like that, the beginning of the propaganda was kicked into
motion. It became the cry of the anti-Mormons that Mormons stormed the
jail to break out the prisoners and the prisoners were killed to prevent
their escape. There is absolutely no evidence for this and the person
writing the article, Thomas Sharp, knew it was a lie when he printed it.
Governor Ford reflects on this time with a great deal of wisdom and
calculation as he attempted to balance mutually opposed interests of the
Mormons and anti-Mormons.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[The citizens of Warsaw], like myself, anticipated a general attack
all over the country. The women and children were removed across the
river; and a committee was despatched that night to Quincy for
assistance. The next morning by daylight the ringing of the bells in
the city of Quincy, announced a public meeting. The people assembled
in great numbers at an early hour. The Warsaw committee stated to the
meeting that a party of Mormons had attempted to rescue the Smiths out
of jail; that a party of Missourians and others, had killed the
prisoners to prevent their escape; that the governor and his party
were at Nauvoo at the time when intelligence of the fact was brought
there; that they had been attacked by the Nauvoo legion, and had
retreated to a house where they were then closely besieged. That the
governor had sent out word that he could maintain his position for two
days, and would be certain to be massacred if assistance did not
arrive by the end of that time. It is unnecessary to say that this
entire story was a fabrication. It was of a piece with the other
reports put into circulation by the anti-Mormon party, to influence
the public mind and call the people to their assistance. The effect of
it, however, was that by ten o’clock on the 28th of June, between two
and three hundred men from Quincy, under the command of Major Flood,
embarked on board of a steamboat for Nauvoo, to assist in raising the
siege, as they honestly believed…</p>
<p>Upon hearing of the assassination of the Smiths, I was sensible that
my command was at an end; that my destruction was meditated as well as
that of the Mormons; and that I could not reasonably confide longer in
the one party or in the other.</p>
<p>The question then arose, what would be proper to be done. A war was
expected by everybody. I was desirous of preserving the peace. I could
not put myself at the head of the Mormon force with any kind of
propriety, and without exciting greater odium against them than
already existed. I could not put myself at the head of the anti-Mormon
party, because they had justly forfeited my confidence, and my command
over them was put an end to by mutiny and treachery. I could not put
myself at the head of either of these forces, because both of them in
turn had violated the law; and, as I then believed, meditated further
aggression. It appeared to me that if a war ensued, I ought to have a
force in which I could confide, and that I ought to establish my
head-quarters at a place where I could learn the truth as to what was
going on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Governor Ford resolved Quincy would be the location he’d post up to try
and keep the tensions from exploding from that point. He arrived in
Quincy the morning of the 29th of June, the day which was on the docket
book to hold the hearing for the Smith brothers on charges of riot and
treason. Ford also notes that even though the Smith brothers were dead
“It appeared that the anti-Mormon party had not relinquished their
hostility to the Mormons, nor their determination to expel them,” but he
also notes that the time of year bought him a little bit of time to get
things in order. “But [the anti-Mormons] had deferred further
operations until the fall season, after they had finished their summer’s
work on their farms.”</p>
<p>As Governor Ford was organizing his men for the trip to Quincy, Willard
Richards commissioned Artois Hamilton, the owner of the hotel where the
bodies had been taken and Richards was helping Taylor recover, to build
2 pine boxes for the bodies. They were completed by 7 the morning of
June 28th. It was a sleepless night for everybody involved except
probably John Taylor who Doctor Richards undoubtedly gave something to
put him to sleep. With the help of Artois Hamilton and the younger Smith
brother, Samuel, Willard Richards placed the bodies of Hyrum and Joseph
in the pine boxes, placed them in two wagons, and left Carthage for
Nauvoo “about 8 a.m.”. General Deming, who’d been tasked by the Governor
to oversee the jail guard operations and fled when Levi Williams’s
troops entered the city, gave the men a detachment of 8 armed soldiers
to escort the bodies to Nauvoo, which they covered with tree branches to
protect them from the sun.</p>
<p>The Nauvoo city marshal, John P. Greene, organized the procession to
receive the bodies. The wagons and escort arrived in Nauvoo about 3 p.m.
where, “several thousands of the citizens were there, amid the most
solemn lamentations and wailings that ever ascended into the ears of the
Lord of Hosts, to be avenged of their enemies.”</p>
<p>As the thousands of people received the procession, “Dr. Richards
admonished the people to keep the peace, stating that he had pledged his
honor and his life for their good conduct, when the people with one
united voice resolved to trust to the law for a remedy of such a
high-handed assassination, and when that failed, to call upon God to
avenge them of their wrongs.</p>
<p>O! Americans, weep, for the glory of freedom has departed.”</p>
<p>The bodies were taken to the Nauvoo Mansion, where Dimick B. Huntington,
William Brutus Marks, and William D. Huntington, washed and examined the
bodies. They noted “Joseph was shot in the right breast, also under the
heart, in the lower part of his bowels on the right side, and on the big
wrinkle on the back part of his right hip. One ball had come out at the
right shoulder-blade.” During this time, George Cannon made a plaster
cast of the faces of Hyrum and Jo, from which he would make two copies
of their death masks. The bullet wound to Hyrum’s face above his left
nostril can be seen as a blemish on his death mask today in the church
history museum.</p>
<p>The Governor does spend a bit of time commenting on the immense
pressures surrounding his handling of the situation, pressures which
extended far beyond the Mormon and anti-Mormons into the national
political sphere.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had scarcely arrived at the scene of action before the whig press
commenced the most violent abuse, and attributed to me the basest
motives. It was alleged in the Sangamon Journal, and repeated in the
other whig newspapers, that the governor had merely gone over to
cement an alliance with the Mormons; that the leaders would not be
brought to punishment, but that a full privilege would be accorded to
them to commit crimes of every hue and grade, in return for their
support of the democratic party. I mention this, not by way of
complaint, for it is only the privilege of the minority to complain,
but for its influence upon the people.</p>
<p>I observed that I was narrowly watched in all my proceedings by my
whig fellow-citizens, and was suspected of an intention to favor the
Mormons. I felt that I did not possess the confidence of the men I
commanded, and that they had been induced to withhold it by the
promulgation of the most abominable falsehoods. I felt the necessity
of possessing their confidence, in order to give vigor to my action;
and exerted myself in every way to obtain it, so that I could control
the excited multitude who were under my command. I succeeded better
for a time than could have been expected; but who can control the
action of a mob without possessing their entire confidence? It is
true, also, that some unprincipled democrats all the time appeared to
be very busy on the side of the Mormons, and this circumstance was
well calculated to increase suspicious of every one who had the name
of democrat.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There were so many motives, political and otherwise, that Governor Ford
had to balance here, and his group of trusted militia commanders
constantly shrunk around him as the situation escalated. He bore the
blame in the mind of every Mormon for the deaths of Jo and Hyrum when I
can barely see an error in his decision-making. He bore the blame from
the non-Mormons for being too cozy with the Mormons. He was blamed by
his whig political opponents for trying to curry votes and blamed by the
democrats for sullying their name… They were the slaveholders at the
time and they were like, hey, Tommy Ford, you’re giving us a bad rap.
Maybe he shouldn’t have left Carthage for Nauvoo that morning, but he
needed to meet with the Mormons and convey to them the seriousness of
the situation, which he couldn’t do with the force of his own voice
through emissaries. He catches the blame for both his actions and for
perceived inactions and I don’t think it’s fair.</p>
<p>Similarly, Thomas Sharp catches a lot of blame for what the fire he
constantly spewed through the Warsaw Signal. I don’t think that’s
totally fair either because his articles about the Mormons were
reactionary, not proactive. He published in response to what was done by
the Mormons or intel he received that the Mormons didn’t want the rest
of the world to know. And to be even more fair to Sharp, Jo constantly
attacked him and the Warsaw Signal as lies and fake news through the
Mormon propaganda outlets. The best Sharp could do was retaliate with
more print about the Mormons. Maybe that fueled the Mormon persecution
complex because he was basically platforming them, but would it have
been better for him to completely ignore the dangerous ideas and
motivations of the Mormon theocracy? That’s a prescient discussion which
transcends any individual examples of despotism or populism. The
Federalist Papers discussed populism extensively because it's far from a
modern phenomena.</p>
<p>Some want to blame the Missourians because the public mind about the
Mormons was so deeply shaped and warped by what happened there that many
believe it was the same mobocratic spirit that carried from Missouri
into Illinois that spurned all the anti-Mormon rhetoric and publications
that eventually led to the Carthage gunfight. That’s a fair point to
make in the abstract but it’s rendered meaningless when viewed in the
larger context. The reason the anti-Mormon sentiment was similar in
Missouri and Illinois is because the Mormons were doing the same lawless
and theocratic stuff in both states, which brings me to the final focus
here; Joseph Smith.</p>
<p>Most of the people who learn the story of Carthage see Jo as the victim;
a persecuted religious leader attempting to bring the light and
knowledge of the one true gospel to the world, who was removed at the
time the lord saw fit for his greater plan of restoring the ancient
church to the world which was lost through the great apostasy. Yeah
religious persecution is certainly a component to what happened, but it
was such an ancillary issue when compared with everything else Joseph
Smith did to absolutely and unequivocally deserve the public
castigation. The real tragedy here is that he brought thousands of
people along that journey of persecution, pain, anguish, turmoil, abuse,
disease, and bloodshed. His followers were his victims, but such is the
plight of those who attach their identity to an unapologetic monster, a
populist tyrant like Joseph Smith. He was a wolf in wolves clothing that
caused the suffering of thousands of people for the sole purpose of
personal aggrandizement.</p>
<p>People want to blame ThomASS Sharp, Governor Ford, Levi Williams, Frank
Worrel, or Governor Lilburn Boggs for what happened in Carthage, but
every person trying to do so is wrong. They’re not just wrong, they’re
deluded to believe they’re right and nothing will change that belief.
Religion poisons everything and if Jo wasn’t a religious leader he’d
live in infamy as a militant demagogue, a tyrant who was assassinated
while running for President of the United States. But, because he’s not
just a tyrant, but the first prophet of this dispensation, who
translated unknown texts into scripture, revealed plain and precious
doctrines of the nature of god and the universe, created the one true
religion, nay, the last religion this world will ever need before the
second coming of the savior, he gets a free pass on theft, plaigiarism,
murder, adultery, violating his own commandments, forming assassin
squads or secret combinations if you will, committing treason, murder,
burning entire villages to the ground during campaigns of pillaging, and
raping children. He’s not guilty of any of those crimes, he simply
operates by the law of the lord, not the law of the land. He’s the worst
kind of tyrant, the religious kind. But, I suppose, rarely are tyrants
completely absent a religious component.</p>
<p>The simple fact is, if Jo’s legacy were attached to somebody who wasn’t
a religious leader, he’d be overwhelmingly condemned by any human being
with a modicum of humanistic morality. While we’re casting blame around
the room for Jo’s death, how about we put it where it belongs, on the
man himself. He was clearly the problem. He was the agitator. He was the
reason for all the perceived persecution; all the pain and suffering
experienced by thousands of people, now tens of millions; all of that
happened because of his own actions and desires. The great Mormon war
machine he’d built for nearly a decade and a half was suddenly left
without a pilot. Thousands of people were left directionless and at the
mercy of a tiny cabal of self-righteous professed holy men to use as
trading cards for the next Mormon exodus. It’s all a game, it was from
the beginning as much as it is today, and we all got played just like
the Nauvoo Mormons.</p>
<p>A final point to deal with. A lot of people want to put the blame for
this on Bloody Brigham Young. Let’s deal with this pervasive little coup
d'etat conspiracy theory quickly. No. He was 1,200 miles away holding a
conference. For him to have any hand in what happened, he’d have to be
responsible to some extent for the Nauvoo Expositor, for the city
council meeting which resolved to destroy the expositor, the riots that
followed, the arrest warrants filed by the circuit judge in Carthage,
and everything that followed it. He’d also need to have instantaneous
communication with Governor Ford, Colonel Levi Williams, Thomas Sharp,
Stephen Markham, and Frank Worrel, which wouldn’t exist for a couple
more decades. Coordinating messages that far took weeks; the dude didn’t
even know the Expositor was published when he received the news Jo and
Hyrum were dead 2 weeks after it happened. That’s how long it took for
news to spread across the nation. Oh, maybe he wasn’t actually in Boston
and that was all a rouse! He was meeting people out there and was
organizing a general conference to be held in early July. There are
journal entries from the people with whom he was meeting, other members
of the Quorum of Apostles. Look, it’s not impossible like the Book of
Mormon or Abraham being what Jo claimed them to be, but it’s
exceptionally unlikely so let’s cut that crap out. There’s plenty about
Bloody Brigham worth hating without him being responsible for Jo’s
death. He doesn’t have his nickname because your host Bryce Blankenagel
likes alliteration.</p>
<p>The question then remains, how does this resolve? How do you prosecute a
vigilante mob for issuing the death penalty to a person who deserved it,
when that execution was affected without the sanction of a court? Who
bears responsibility? What is the punishment for vigilantism? A more
foundational question precedes those; how do we bring a tyrant to
justice when he’s proven himself legally untouchable? How do you break
the iron grip of populism when all it does is cause harm to unwitting
victims who work tirelessly to advance it? Once a movement reaches
critical mass, how do you fracture the bad ideas which underpin it?</p>
<p>By virtue of my existence and millions of former Mormons since the
church began, those questions obviously remain unanswered, but they’re
dire and perfectly timeless questions to ponder… or skepticize, if you
will.</p>
<p>Every major biography of Joseph Smith ends here. The bodies are brought
back to Nauvoo, the assailants were all acquitted, and the concluding
chapter brings to a close the life and legacy of the inimitable Joseph
Smith by waxing poetic about how awesome the gospel is interjecting or
pithy lines about how horrible a guy he was. Yes, Jo is now dead in our
nearly 6-year historical timeline, and good riddance, fuck that guy cuz
he fucked everybody. But, I can’t help but have complicated thoughts on
this. Buuuuut, that’ll have to wait until next week because we have to
talk about all the vast and multi-faceted consequences of what happened
the day Jo and Hyrum died. For the past 2 months I’ve also been
collecting accounts from a number of people connected with all of it
because it’s important to see how those people felt and reacted to this
event. Needless to say, it’s incredibly disappointing to learn how
complicated the story really is and compare it to the 15-minute tour you
get when going through the jail, or the family home evening lesson on
the martyrdom. There are real lessons to take from all of this that make
us question society and the way we humans deal with marginalized people,
lawlessness and tyranny, oppression and persecution, policing and
warfare, law and disorder. That’s all for next week when we bury Jo and
prosecute those responsible. I hope to talk at ya next time, here on the
NMPC.</p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong></p>
<p><strong>Jail description</strong></p>
<p>Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett, Ukiah, California,
November 1-9, 1897</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The under sheriff and jailer lived in the jail. The jail was a two
story stone house. The lower story and part of the upper story was
occupied by the jailor and his family. The jail proper was in the
north end of the building up stairs, divided off into cells. The front
room up stairs was a kind of a family room. At the head of the stairs
there was two doors, one entering into the family room and the other
entering into the jail proper.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William R. Hamilton served in the Carthage Greys in 1844. His letter to
Foster Walker, describing the Smiths' murders in Carthage, was published
in Foster Walker's "The Mormons in Hancock County," <em>Dallas City Review</em>
(January 29, 1903, p.2).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The room in which they were is about 16 x 16 feet and had one window
in the east side, two in the front or south end, and the door opening
from the hall, just at the top of the stairs almost directly opposite
the east side window out of which Smith fell. There was a bedstead in
the southeast corner of the room, under which Taylor was after the
shooting was over. The door opened in such a manner that when forced
open it formed a recess in the corner, so that a person there was hid
from sight. Richard's position bought [sic] him into the corner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Franklin Worrel guarding jail</strong></p>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While Worrell, little thinking of his tombstone, was struggling with
his friendly assailants, as many as the narrow entry would hold had
rushed into the open door and up the cramped little stairs. Smith and
his brother had been that day removed from their cells and given
comparative liberty in a large airy room on the first floor above...</p>
<p>This jolly, good-natured Worrell was himself murdered by Mormon
assassins not long after. He was riding with a friend. A shot was
heard from a thicket. "That was a rifle!" said the friend. "Yes, and
I 've got it," said Worrell, coolly. He fell from his horse and died.
I have seen, as a child, his grave at Warsaw. A rude wooden
head-board, bearing this legend, "He who is without enemies is
unworthy of friends," — not very orthodox, but perhaps as true as most
epitaphs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Thomas Sharp, Levi Williams, and company join with Carthage Greys</strong></p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->William Daniels,<!-- raw HTML omitted --> <em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845
issues).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thomas C. Sharp mounted his “big bay horse,” and made an inflammatory
speech to the companies, characteristic of his corrupt heart. The
following is a short extract, as near as my memory will serve me:</p>
<p>“FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS! The crisis has arrived when it becomes
our duty to rise, as freemen, and assert our rights. The law is
insufficient for us; the governor will not enforce it; we must take it
into our hands; we know what wrongs we suffer, and we are the best
calculated to redress them. Now is the time to put a period to the mad
career of the Prophet; sustained as he is by a band of fanatical
military saints! We have borne his usurpations until it would be
cowardice to bear them longer! My Fellow citizens! Improve the
opportunity that offers; lest the opportunity pass, and the despotic
Prophet will never again be in your power. All things are understood,
we must hasten to Carthage and murder the Smiths, while the governor
is absent at Nauvoo. Beard the lions in their den. The news will reach
Nauvoo before the governor leaves. This will so enrage the “Mormons,”
that they will fall upon and murder Tom Ford, and we shall then be rid
of the d—-d little governor and the ‘Mormons’ too.” (Cheers.)</p>
<p>After we had arrived within nearly six miles of Carthage, they made a
halt. Col. Williams rode three or four times backwards and forwards
from the company to the Carthage Greys. He said he would have the
Carthage Greys come and meet them. They marched within four miles of
Carthage, when they were met by one of the Greys, bringing a note to
the following import:</p>
<p>“Now is a delightful time to murder the Smiths. The governor has gone
to Nauvoo with all the troops. The Carthage Greys are left to guard
the prisoners. Five of our men will be stationed at the jail; the rest
will be upon the public square. To keep up appearances, you will
attack the men at the jail—a sham scuffle will ensue—their guns will
be loaded with blank cartridges—they will fire in the air.”</p>
<p>They were also instructed by the person bearing this dispatch, to fire
three guns as they advanced along the fence that led from the woods to
the jail. This was to serve as a signal to the Carthage Greys that
they were in readiness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett, Ukiah, California,
November 1-9, 1897</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We saw going on that road quite a company going hurriedly in the
direction (of) Carthage. It was not long till we could see quite a
number on the same road going toward Warsaw. We then went back to
Carthage to report and what did we find. Such a sight as I hope never
to see again.</p>
<p>When we saw that company going to and from Carthage my suspicions was
arroused that all was not right.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William R. Hamilton served in the Carthage Greys in 1844. His letter to
Foster Walker, describing the Smiths' murders in Carthage, was published
in Foster Walker's "The Mormons in Hancock County," <em>Dallas City Review</em>
(January 29, 1903, p.2).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>About 11 o'clock A.M., myself and another young man were ordered by
the captain to go on top of the court house and keep a sharp lookout
for and see if a body of men were approaching the town from any
direction; and, if any were seen, to immediately report to the captain
personally, at his quarters. We had a large field glass and could
clearly see in every direction save due north for several miles. We
were especially ordered to keep a strict outlook over the prairies
towards Nauvoo. Nothing suspicious was discovered until about 4 P.M.
when we saw a body of armed men in wagons and on horses approaching
the low timber, a little north of west from the jail, and about two
miles distant. This was at once reported to the captain, when we were
ordered to keep a strict watch and at once report if they came through
the timber. In about a half hour after, a body of armed men- about
125- came out of the woods on foot and started in a single file,
behind an old rail fence, in the direction of the jail. They were then
about three-fourths of a mile distant. This we at once attempted to
report, but could not find the captain; and (not being "muzzled," as
soldiers of late date) told another officer, who after considerable
delay found the captain who ordered the company to fall into line. By
this time the mob had reached the jail and had commenced shooting. I
there forgot all about orders to put on accoutrements and fall into
line; but immediately started on double quick for the jail.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Feigned attack on jail</strong></p>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And, as might have been expected, a little after five o'clock in the
evening, at the very time that his Excellency was insulting the
peaceable citizens of Nauvoo, a body of about one hundred and fifty
armed men, with painted faces, appeared before the jail, unobserved by
the inmates, and without opposition from any quarter. The guard at the
door, it is said, elevated their firelocks at the approach of these
men in disguise, and, boisterously threatening them, discharged them
over their heads.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The jail where the Smiths were confined is situated at the extreme
northwestern edge of the dismal village, at the end of a long,
ill-kept street whose middle is a dusty road and whose sides are gay
with stramonium and dog-fennel. As the avengers came in sight of the
mean-looking building that held their prey, the sleeping tiger that
lurks in every human heart sprang up in theirs, and they quickened
their pace to a run. There was no need of orders, — no possibility of
checking them now. The guards were hustled away from the door,
good-naturedly resisting until they were carefully disarmed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William Daniels, <em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845 issues).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Col. Williams shouted out, “Rush in!—there’s no danger boys—all is
right!”</p>
<p>A sham encounter ensued between them and the guard. They clinched each
other, and the mob threw some of them upon the ground. A few guns were
fired in the air.</p>
<p>A rush was made in the door, at the south part of the building. This
let them into a hall, or entry, from which they ascended a flight of
stairs, at the head of which, turning to the right; they reached the
door that led into the prisoners’ room.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Gunshots</strong></p>
<p><strong>Mob storms jail</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well after the brave guards had fired their blank carheridge on the
mob as I was taken prisoners, the mob rushed up stairs to where the
Smiths Taylor and Richards were enjoying themselves. Some said they
were sipping their wine whether that is true or not I do not know. At
any rate they were comfortably situated, and they had a right to
suppose safely protected by the laws of the great state of Illinois.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The crowd by this time had encircled the building: some shoved the
guard from their post; rushed up the flight of stairs to the
prisoners' apartment, which for that day was in an upper open room;
broke open the door, and began the work of death, while others fired
in through the open windows.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>First shot through lock</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the false guard had made their hypocritical assault on the other
part of the mob (I look upon them as being equally guilty as those
that came from Warsaw.) They the attacking party rushed up stairs with
murder in their hearts to where the accused were tryed to break open
the door which it appears was held shut by all four of the men when
the mob commenced firing heir loaded arms through the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Second shot hits Hyrum in face</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It appears that one of the balls in the commencement of the attac
pased through a panel of the door and hit Hyrum in his neck which
probably broke his neck he fell back and died, as I was informed
instantly. When I went into the room shortly afterwards his head was
laying against the wall on the other sid from the door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first shot, however, that was made, was through the door, before
it was opened, at their first approach; this was the fatal ball that
killed Hyrum. It pierced his face a little below the eye. As he fell
he exclaimed, "I am a dead man, " These were his only and last words.
He was afterwards, while down, pierced with a number of other balls in
various parts of his body.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->William Daniels, <!-- raw HTML omitted --><em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845
issues).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hyrum stood near the center of the room, in front of the door. The mob
fired a ball through the panel of the door, which entered Hyrum’s
head, at the left side of his nose. He fell upon his back with his
head one or two feet from the north east corner of the room,
exclaiming, as he fell, “I am a dead man!” In all, four balls entered
his body. One ball (it must have been fired through the window from
the outside) passed through his body with such force—entering his
back—that it completely broke to pieces a watch which he wore in his
vest pocket.</p>
<p>His death was sudden and without pain. Thus fell Hyrum Smith, the
Patriarch of the Church of God, a martyr for his holy religion! In
that brief moment was the Church of Jesus Christ deprived of the
services of as good a man as ever had a name in its history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Taylor makes dash for window</strong></p>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Elder Taylor was by this time also thought to have been killed, as he
lay bleeding from many wounds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->William Daniels,<!-- raw HTML omitted --> <em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845
issues).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Elder Taylor continued parrying their guns, until they had got them
about half the length into the room, when he found resistance vain and
attempted to jump out of the window. Just then a ball from within
struck him on the left thigh; hitting the bone, it glanced through to
within half an inch of the other side. He fell on the window-sill and
expected he would fall out, when a ball from without stuck his watch,
which he carried in his vest pocket, and threw him back into the room.
He was hit by two more balls; one injuring his left wrist
considerably, and the other entering at the side of the bone, just
below the left knee. He fell into the room, and rolled under a bed
that stood at the right of the window, in the south-east corner of the
room. While under the bed, he was fired at several times and was
struck by one ball which tore the flesh on his left hip in a shocking
manner, throwing large quantities of blood upon the wall and floor.
These wounds proved very severe and painful, but he suffered without a
murmur, rejoicing that he had the satisfaction to mingle his blood
with that of the Prophets, and be with them in the last moments of
their earthly existence. His blood, with theirs, can cry to heaven for
vengeance on those who have shed the blood of innocence and slain the
servants of the living God in all ages of the world. This seemed a
source of high gratification and he endured his severe sufferings
without a single complaint, being perfectly resigned to the providence
of God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Richards hitting gun barrels with “rascal beater”</strong></p>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dr. Richards, with Colonel Markham's heavy walking stick, defended the
door, knocking down, and to one side, the muzzles of the assailants'
guns, as they fired into the room; and, strange to say,
notwithstanding his exposed condition, he remained entirely unhurt.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>JS fires pepperbox pistol</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is supposed when Hyrum fell the door was partially opened by the
attacking party, so much so at any rate that I was informed that Jo
Smith had what was common then what was and probable is now called one
of Steves peper boxes. It is said and there is no dout but what it is
true that he sliped his hand through the opening of the door and hit a
young man from Warsaw about his neck or sholder which made it
conveinent for the young man to remain for a while in Missouri.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joseph had taken position on one side of the door, and, with his left
hand, discharged three rounds from a revolving six-shooting pocket
pistol (which had been handed him by Elder C. H. Wheelock, but who was
also sent away on business by them), and at each fire wounded his man;
the other three caps did not go off.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joe Smith died bravely. He stood by the jamb of the door and fired
four shots, bringing his man down every time. He shot an Irishman
named Wills, who was in the affair from his congenital love of a
brawl, in the arm; Gallagher, a Southerner from the Mississippi
Bottom, in the face; Voorhees, a half-grown hobbledehoy from Bear
Creek, in the shoulder; and another gentleman, whose name I will not
mention, as he is prepared to prove an alibi, and besides stands six
feet two in his moccasins.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Richards pinned between door and wall</strong></p>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Richards hid himself behind the opening door, in mortal terror. He
afterwards lied terribly about the affair, saying he stood calmly in
the centre of the room, warding off the bullets with a consecrated
wand.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>JS runs to window and hangs out for minutes</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The attacing party forced the door open and commenced firing at Smith
it is said they must have hit him an probably disabled him, as he
stagered across the floor to the oposite side of the room where there
was a window. It is said that there he gave the hailing sign of the
distress of a Mason but that did him no good.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>JS falls out window and executed</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the room behind him was armed men, furious men, with murder in
their hearts. Before him arround the well under the window there was a
croud of desperate men, as he was receiving shots from behind which he
could not stand, in despersation he leaped or rather fell out of the
window near the well where he breathed his last. When I found him soon
afterwards he was laying in the hall at the foot of the stairs where
his blood had as I believe left indelible stain on the floor.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John S. Fullmer</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Prophet, now finding himself without any means of defence, his
brother being dead, and himself the only survivor whose life was
sought for, attempted to make his escape through the nearest window. A
number of balls penetrated his body, however, while making this
attempt; and in his last moments he did not forget Him whose servant
he was, and for whose cause he was about to lay down his life. How
very like were his last words to the dying words of the Saviour- "My
God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" Joseph had only time to
exclaim, " O Lord, my God!" and fell out of the building into the
hands of his MURDERERS.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Severely wounded as he was, he ran to the window, which was open to
receive the fresh June air, and half leaped, half fell, into the jail
yard below. With his last dying energies he gathered himself up, and
leaned in a sitting posture against the rude stone well-curb. His
stricken condition, his vague wandering glances, excited no pity in
the mob thirsting for his life. They had not seen the handsome fight
he had made in the jail; there was no appeal to the border chivalry
(there is chivalry on the borders, as in all semi-barbarous regions).
A squad of Missourians who were standing by the fence levelled their
pieces at him, and, before they could see him again for the smoke they
made, Joe Smith was dead.</p>
<p>Elder Richards was still contending with the assailants, at the door,
when General Smith, seeing there was no safety in the room, and
probably thinking it might save the lives of others if he could escape
from the room, turned calmly from the door, dropped his pistol upon
the floor, saying, “There, defend yourselves as well as you can.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->William Daniels, <!-- raw HTML omitted --><em>Nauvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845
issues).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He sprang into the window; but just as he was preparing to descend, he
saw such an array of bayonets below that he caught by the window
casing, where he hung by his hands and feet, with his head to the
north, feet to the south, and his body swinging downwards. He hung in
that position three or four minutes, during which time he exclaimed,
two or three times, “O, LORD, MY GOD!!!” and fell to the ground.
While he was hanging in that position, Col. Williams hallooed, “Shoot
him! G-d d—n him! Shoot the dam’d rascal!” However, none fired at
him.</p>
<p>He seemed to fall easy. He struck partly on his right shoulder and
back, his neck and head reaching the ground a little before his feet.</p>
<p>He rolled instantly on his face. From this position he was taken by a
young man, who sprang to him from the other side of the fence, who
held a pewter fife in his hand, was barefoot and bare-headed, having
on no coat, with his pants rolled above his knees, and shirt-sleeves
above his elbows. He set President Smith against the south side of the
well-curb that was situated a few feet from the jail. While doing
this, the savage muttered aloud, “This is Old Jo; I know him. I know
you, Old Jo. Damn you: you are the man that had my daddy shot.” The
object he had in talking in this way, I supposed to be this: He wished
to have President Smith and the people in general, believe he was the
son of Governor Boggs, which would lead to the opinion that it was the
Missourians who had come over and committed the murder. This was the
report that they soon caused to be circulated; but this was too
palpable an absurdity to be credited.</p>
<p>After President Smith had fallen, I saw Elder Willard Richards come to
the window and look out upon the horrid scene that spread itself below
him.</p>
<p>I could not help noticing the striking contrast in the countenance of
President Smith and the horrid, demon-like appearance of his
murderers. The former was calm and tranquil, while the mob were filled
with excitement and agitation.</p>
<p>President Smith’s exit from the room had the tendency to cause those
who were firing into the room to abandon it and rush to the outside.
This gave an opportunity for Elder Richards to convey Elder Taylor
into the cell, which he did, and covered him with a bed, thinking he
might there be secure if the mob should make another rush into the
jail. While they were in the cell, some of the mob again entered the
room; but finding it deserted by all but Hyrum Smith, they left the
jail.</p>
<p>When President Smith had been set against the curb, and began to
recover, from the effects of the fall, Col. Williams ordered four men
to shoot him. Accordingly, four men took an eastern direction, about
eight feet from the curb, Col. Williams stranding partly at their
rear, and made ready to execute the order. While they were making
preparations, and the muskets were raised to their faces, President
Smith’s eyes rested upon them with a calm and quiet resignation. He
betrayed no agitated feelings and the expression upon his countenance
seemed to betoken his inly prayer to be: “O, Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.”</p>
<p>The fire was simultaneous. A slight cringe of the body was all the
indication of pain that he betrayed when the balls struck him. He fell
upon his face. One ball then entered the back part of his body. This
is the ball that many people have supposed struck him about the time
he was in the window. But this is a mistake. I was close by him, and I
know he was not hit with a ball, until after he was seated by the
well-curb.</p>
<p>His death was instantaneous and tranquil. He betrayed no appearance of
pain. His noble form exhibited all its powers of manly strength and
healthful agility, yet not a muscle seemed to move with pain, and
there was no distortion of his features. His death was peaceful as the
falling to sleep of an infant—no cloud of contending passion gathered
upon his brown, and no malediction trembled on his lip. The reward of
a righteous man seemed hovering over him, and his breath ceased with
as much ease and gentleness, as if eternity was exerting an influence
in his behalf and taking his spirit home to a world of “liberty, light
and life.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Attempt to decapitate JS</strong></p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->William Daniels, <!-- raw HTML omitted --><em><!-- raw HTML omitted -->N<!-- raw HTML omitted -->auvoo Neighbor</em> (May 7 and May 14, 1845
issues). (The account below contains several embellishments or fantasies
that are contradicted by other witnesses. For example, Daniels has
Joseph Smith surviving his fall from the second story jail and then
being shot by four men under the orders of Levi Williams. After the
murder of Smith, Daniels describes a scene in which a "ruffian" draws a
bowie knife and is ready to sever the head of Smith when suddenly a
pillar of light "bursts from the heavens upon the bloody scene" and
frightens the killers away.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ruffian, of whom I have spoken, who set him against the well-curb,
now secured a bowie knife for the purpose of severing his head from
his body. He raised the knife and was in the attitude of striking,
when a light, so sudden and powerful, burst from the heavens upon the
bloody scene, (passing its vivid chain between Joseph and his
murderers,) that they were struck with terrified awe and filled with
consternation. This light, in its appearance and potency, baffles all
powers of description. The arm of the ruffian, that held the knife,
fell powerless; the muskets of the four, who fired, fell to the
ground, and they all stood like marble statues, not having power to
move a single limb of their bodies.</p>
<p>By this time most of the men had fled in great disorder. I never saw
so frightened a set of men before. Col. Williams saw the light and was
also badly frightened; but he did not entirely lose the use of his
limbs or speech. Seeing the condition of these men, he hallooed to
some who had just commenced to retreat, for God’s sake to come and
carry off these men. They came back and carried them by the main
strength towards the baggage wagons. They seemed as helpless as if
they were dead.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>“The Mormons are coming!”</strong></p>
<p><strong>Richards takes Taylor to jail and covers him with straw</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You want to know what has become of Richards. He was not hurt. You
will ask how did it happen that his comrads (were) so badly treated
and he came off without receiving any damage whatever. It was in this
way, as I suppose I think he told me so. The four braced themselves
against the door to keep the mob out. He stood next to the hinges of
the door so when the door opened it would turn back against the wall
that divided the room that they were in from the prison room. So when
they crowded the door open it shut him up against the wall and he
stood there and did not move till the affair was all over, so they did
not see him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>John Taylor</strong></p>
<p>[Carthage coroner] Thomas L. Barnes, letters to Miranda Haskett,
Ukiah, California, November 1-9, 1897.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Shall I try to describe the wounds that Taylor received and got over
them. Well let me tell you where we found him, I cannot impress your
mind of his appearance as he appered to us when we wer called to him
by the jailor. We found him in a pile of straw. It appeared that a
straw bed had been emtied in the cell where he was when we found him.
He was very much frightened as well as severly wounded. It took strong
persuading of the jailor as well as our positive assuriance that we
ment him no harm but Was desirous of doing him some good. He finally
consented to come out of his cell. When we examined him we found that
he had been hit by four balls. One ball had hit him in his fore arm
and pased down and lodged in the hand betwen the phalanges of his
third and fourth fingers. Another hit on the left side of the pelvis
cuttin through the skin and pasin leaving a superficial wound that you
could lay your hand in. A third ball passed through his thigh lodging
in his notus. A fourth ball hit his watch which he had in the fob in
his pantaloons, which I suppose the Mormons have today, to show the
precise time that their great leader was killed. The wounds had bled
quite freely, the blood had had time to coagulate which it had done,
and where the clothes and straw came in contact they all adhered
together so that Mr. Taylor came out his self sought cell he was a
pitable looking sight. We took the best care of him we could till he
left us. He got well but never</p>
<p>paid us for skill or good wishes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Willard Richards</strong></p>
<p><strong>Carthage citizens immediately flee for Warsaw</strong></p>
<p>John Hay, “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> (December
1869):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The moment the work was done, the calmness of horror succeeded the
fever of fanatical rage. The assassins hurried away from the jail, and
took the road to Warsaw in silence and haste. They went home at a
killing pace over the wide dusty prairie. Warsaw is eighteen miles
from Carthage; the Smiths were killed at half past five: at a quarter
before eight the returning crowd began to drag their weary limbs
through the main street of Warsaw, — at such an astounding rate of
speed had the lash of their own thoughts driven them.</p>
<p>The town was instantly put in such attitude of defence as its limited
means permitted. The women and children were ferried across the river
to a village on the Missouri shore. The men kept guard night and day
in the hazel thickets around the town. Everybody expected sudden and
exemplary vengeance from the Mormons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Willard Richards and John Taylor in Hamilton Hotel; Samuel Smith shows
up</strong></p>
<p>Times & Seasons</p>
<blockquote>
<p>12 o'clock at night, 27th June, }</p>
<p>Carthage, Hamilton's Tavern. }</p>
<p>TO MRS. EMMA SMITH,</p>
<p>AND MAJ. GEN. DUNHAM, &c-</p>
<p>The Governor has just arrived; says all things shall be inquired into,
and all right measures taken.</p>
<p>I say to all the citizens of Nauvoo, my brethren, be still, and know
that God reigns. Don't rush out of the city-don't rush to Carthage;
stay at home, and be prepared for an attack from Missouri mobbers. The
governor will render every assistance possible-has sent out orders for
troops-Joseph and Hyrum are dead, but not by the Carthage people-the
guards were true as I believe.</p>
<p>We will prepare to move the bodies as soon as possible.</p>
<p>The people of the county are greatly excited, and fear the Mormons
will come out and take vengeance-I have pledged my word the Mormons
will stay at home as soon as they can be informed, and no violence
will be on their part, and say to my brethren in Nauvoo, in the name
of the Lord-be still-be patient-only let such friends as choose come
here to see the bodies- Mr. Taylor's wounds are dressed & not
serious-I am sound.</p>
<p>WILLARD RICHARDS,</p>
<p>JOHN TAYLOR,</p>
<p>SAMUEL H. SMITH.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Deming fled when attack began</strong></p>
<p>Times & Seasons</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mr. Orson Spencer,</p>
<p>Dear sir:-Please deliberate on this matter; prudence may obviate
material destruction. I was at my residence when this horrible crime
was committed. It will be condemned by three fourths of the citizens
of the county-be quiet or you will be attacked from Missouri.</p>
<p>M. R. DEMMING.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>Examination, fact finding, Bodies brought back to Nauvoo</strong></p>
<blockquote>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Mr. Jonas Hobbart Sworn:<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>Mr. Hobbart do you live in this town.</p>
<p>I do.</p>
<p>Did you live in town on the day that Smith was killed.</p>
<p>I did...</p>
<p>Did the most of them [mob] seem to be armed.</p>
<p>Yes.</p>
<p>What sort of weapons had they.</p>
<p>Muskets.</p>
<p>Had they any rifels.</p>
<p>Yes. Rifels of a peculiar kind with [illegible]</p>
<p>Had they any knives.</p>
<p>I think I saw a knife in the hands of one man.</p>
<p>Did anybody seem to be giving and command to the mob.</p>
<p>I did not hear any orders given.</p>
<p>Was there much noise upon the ground.</p>
<p>Yes there was much noise.</p>
<p>How many guns fired together.</p>
<p>About thirty, as fas as I could judge,</p>
<p>He retired.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Times & Seasons</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Legion in Nauvoo, was called out at 10 A. M. and addressed by
Judge Phelps, Col. Buckmaster, of Alton, the Governors aid, and
others, and all excitement and fury allayed and preparations were made
to receive the bodies of the Noble Martyrs. About 3 o'clock they were
met by a great assemblage of people east of the Temple on Mulholland
street, under the direction of the city Marshal, followed by Samuel H.
Smith, the brother of the deceased, Dr. Richards and Mr. Hamilton, of
Carthage. The wagons were guarded by 8 men. The procession that
followed in Nauvoo, was the City Council, the Lieut. General's Staff,
the Major General and staff, the Brigadier General and staff,
commanders and officers of the Legion and citizens generally, which
numbered several thousands, amid the most solemn lamentations and
wailings that ever ascended into the ears of the Lord of Hosts to be
avenged of our enemies!</p>
<p>When the procession arrived the bodies were both taken into the
'Nauvoo Mansion;' the scene at the Mansion cannot be described: the
audience was addressed by Dr. Richards, Judge Phelps, Woods and Reed
Esqs. of Iowa, and Col. Markham. It was a vast assemblage of some 8 or
10,000 persons, and with one united voice resolved to trust to the law
for a remedy of such a high handed assassination, and when that failed
to call upon God to avenge us of our wrongs! Oh! widows and
orphans:-Oh! Americans weep for the glory of freedom has departed!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>William R. Hamilton served in the Carthage Greys in 1844. His letter to
Foster Walker, describing the Smiths' murders in Carthage, was published
in Foster Walker's "The Mormons in Hancock County," <em>Dallas City Review</em>
(January 29, 1903, p.2).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The bodies of the Smiths, after the coroner's inquest, were taken by
my father, Artois Hamilton, to his hotel. He had boxes (not coffins)
made out of pine boards, in which they were taken to Nauvoo the next
day. The news of their death having been sent to Nauvoo, early the
next morning two of their brothers, with two other men, came after
their bodies in a wagon. The body of Joseph was placed in theirs and
that of Hyrum in father's wagon, who with two of my brothers went with
them.</p>
</blockquote>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 9 - Carthage Jail GunfightRoad to Carthage 8 - The Final Hour2020-08-27T20:00:00-07:002020-08-27T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/08/27/road-to-carthage-8-the-final-hour<p>Road to Carthage 8 - The Final Hour</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine the events of June 27th, 1844 leading up to
the assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in Carthage jail.</p>
<p>Show links:<br />
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Music by Jason Comeau
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Show Artwork
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<p>It’s the morning of June 27, 1844. Emma awoke to the sound of kids
running through the house and doing children things. She’s 5 months
pregnant and needs her rest, but it was a night of tossing and turning.
There are too many unknowns. Her husband and brother-in-law are interred
in Carthage Jail. Intelligence is constantly working its way into Nauvoo
about the nearby cities gearing up for war. The Nauvoo Legion has been
disbanded and disarmed, but that’s officially. Unofficially, they’re
ready to go at a moment’s notice, whether to defend the city, break
their supreme leader out of jail, or loot and pillage local non-Mormon
villages.</p>
<p>Joseph had wanted Emma to leave town with the kids. He wanted them to
either head to Washington D.C. where Emma would meet with President John
Tyler and tell him the plight of her husband and the Mormons at large,
or begin the journey west where the saints would follow close behind.
Emma knew she was a target as Jo’s publicly-known wife and being
pregnant only complicated matters further. Plans were rushing in and out
of her mind. If everything blew up, she’d need an escape plan to keep
her and the kids safe while her husband worked out his escape plan. It
had happened in Missouri, it happened in Dixon, Illinois last year, and
the time seemed to be approaching that Emma would have to handle her
family and the church in her husband’s absence until he could extricate
himself from the present troubles. Her words to the prophet ring deep
and provide a window into Emma’s mind at this troubling time during yet
another hard pregnancy.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I desire prudence that I may not through ambition abuse my body and
cause it to become prematurely old and care-worn, but that I may wear
a cheerful countenance, live to perform all the work that I covenanted
to perform in the spirit-world and be a blessing to all who may in any
wise need aught at my hands.</p>
<p>I desire with all my heart to honor and respect my husband as my head,
ever to live in his confidence and by acting in unison with him retain
the place which God has given me by his side, and I ask my Heavenly
Father that through humility, I may be enabled to overcome that curse
which was pronounced upon the daughters of Eve. I desire to see that I
may rejoice with them in the blessings which God has in store for all
who are willing to be obedient to his requirements. Finally, I desire
that whatever may be my lot through life I may be enabled to
acknowledge the hand of God in all things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There were too many unknowns. All Emma could do was resign herself to a
power she thought to be in control of everything. In her mind, whatever
happened in that jail would be the plan and will of god. She could only
operate with whatever information she had, which was scarce and delayed.</p>
<p>In Carthage, Joseph Smith woke up with John S. Fullmer’s head on his
right arm, and Dan Jones’s head on his left arm. He probably used a coat
for his own pillow on the hard, wooden floor. John Taylor, Willard
Richards, Stephen Markham and Hyrum Smith awoke from the bed as the sun
broke through the window. It was to be a very busy day. The men in the
jail briefly spoke with Double-Dub Phelps and Nauvoo’s city marshal,
John P. Greene, who’d executed the mayor’s orders to burn the Nauvoo
Expositor printing press. We don’t know what information was exchanged
as these men passed presumably from Yelrom to Nauvoo and stopped in
Carthage for a few minutes at 5 a.m.</p>
<p>The prisoners then took breakfast at 7 with a Mr. Crane, whose identity
is unknown. Apparently he had a question for the prophet: “Mr crane at
[breakfast] with us wanted to know if Joseph fainted 3 times on
tuesday rev[ie]wing the Troops.--currently reported--”. Did Jo faint 3
times while Governor Ford was showing him to the militias in Carthage?
Quite an odd artifact to find in White-out Willard Richards’s
contemporary journal and that’s the only place I find it mentioned.
Maybe he was intimidated, overwhelmed, underslept, overstressed, strung
out from whatever the Doctor was giving him, and underfed.</p>
<p>Jo had had a conversation with Governor Thomas Ford the previous day.
Ford was leaving for Nauvoo this morning and Jo would accompany him to
the Mormon stronghold so Ford could better understand the situation from
the perspective of the citizens there. When a state is teetering on the
edge of civil war, there are many angles to consider; Ford wanted to
balance what he was hearing from the anti-Mormons with some interviews
of Mormon citizens in Nauvoo. How can the executive of the State make
good decisions when he’s being fed sporadic and unverifiable information
by people who just want to kill every Mormon they see? He didn’t know
who he could trust. Governor Ford knew that whatever happened in Nauvoo
would be reflected in the other Mormon settlements nearby as the people
would follow their prophet no matter what. If Ford could get the prophet
and Mormons on his side, or even warn them of the danger they were in,
he could negotiate the tensions from a place of advantage.</p>
<p>One of the Mormon settlements outside Nauvoo that had come under intense
pressure was Yelrom. The morning of June 27th, 1844 for Leonora Snow was
a stressful one. Some men claiming to be operating under the color of
militia law had approached the Mormons there and given them a 24-hour
ultimatum, help us arrest your prophet or give up your guns. But, Jo had
sent a letter telling the Yelrom Mormons to keep him informed on what
was going on and that they needed to remain there as a strategic
advantage. Once the militias closed in on Nauvoo, the Mormons in Yelrom,
Ramus, Macedonia, and other satellite settlements presented the best
opportunity to provide an assault on the flanks of the besieging
Illinois armies.</p>
<p>All things considered, tensions were high in Yelrom and Leonora Snow,
and her husband Isaac Morley, along with the hundreds others living
there would feel these tensions the morning of June 27th when they awoke
at daybreak. Leonora didn’t know if the militia men, Mr.s Banks and
Baker, would return and force the citizens out of their homes to
consolidate the Mormons in Nauvoo. She didn’t know the whereabouts of
her sister, Eliza R. Snow, nor when her brother, Lorenzo, would return
from his mission in Ohio. Eliza R. Snow had been living with her sister,
Leonora, and brother-in-law, Isaac Morley, in Yelrom until April 1844,
when she moved in with Hannah and Stephen Markham in Nauvoo. Eliza left
her sister, Leonora, to live with Isaac and Leonora’s sister-wives
understanding Isaac was a good man who dearly cared for all his wives.
Eliza was happy to live back in Nauvoo close to her husband, Joseph.
Leonora and Eliza, the sisters Snow, were separated by the hotbeds of
anti-Mormonism, Warsaw, where Thomas Sharp’s Warsaw Signal was
published, and Carthage, where the prophet was in jail and Governor Ford
was encamped. The sisters would have had very different pressures
stemming from the same tension upon waking up. Leonora, of course, would
have wondered when the state militia would march into Yelrom and remove
the Mormons from their homes. Eliza would have wondered what would
happen once Nauvoo was surrounded by the state militia, as all signals
seemed to indicate this maneuver was imminent.</p>
<p>Governor Thomas Ford was well aware of this. He was hearing voices
crying from all over the state telling him to simply exterminate the
Mormons as Governor Lilburn Boggs had done in Missouri. As he organized
his posse to travel to Nauvoo on the morning of June 27th, he weighed in
the balance how effective his companies of militias would be with
guarding the jail in Carthage. He’d disbanded all the state militias,
that was over 1,300 men, which had gathered in Carthage and Warsaw with
the understanding that it would illustrate to the citizens that the
situation was under control. He resolved to take a guard with him to
Nauvoo and leave the Carthage Greys in their own city to board at their
own homes while guarding the Mormon leadership in the jail. Governor
Ford writes in retrospect in his HIstory of Illinois circa 1852.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What gave me greater confidence in the selection of this [Carthage]
company as a prudent measure was, that the selection was first
suggested and urged by the brigadier-general in command [, Deming],
who was well known to be utterly hostile to all mobocracy and violence
towards the prisoners, and who was openly charged by the violent party
with being on the side of the Mormons. At any rate I knew that the
jail would have to be guarded as long as the prisoners were confined;
that an imprisonment for treason might last the whole summer and the
greater part of the autumn before a trial could be had in the circuit
court; that it would be utterly impossible in the circumstances of the
country to keep a force there from a foreign county for so long a
time; and that a time must surely come when the duty of guarding the
jail would necessarily devolve on the citizens of the county.</p>
<p>It is true, also, that at this time I had not believed or suspected
that any attack was to be made upon the prisoners in the jail. It is
true that I was aware that a great deal of hatred existed against
them, and that there were those who would do them an injury if they
could. I had heard of some threats being made, but none of an attack
upon the prisoners whilst in jail. These threats seemed to be made by
individuals not acting in concert. They were no more than the bluster
which might have been expected, and furnished no indication of numbers
combining for this or any other purpose.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ll talk about that point in a moment because a lot of people were
warning Governor Ford that an assassination attempt was in the works,
but they were all sycophants of the Prophet who Ford generally
distrusted for good reasons to begin with. He also distrusted a lot of
the citizens who hated the Mormons. He was a smart guy and inherently
skeptical.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I must here be permitted to say, also, that frequent appeals had been
made to me to make a clean and thorough work of the matter, by
exterminating the Mormons, or expelling them from the State. An
opinion seemed generally to prevail, that the sanction of executive
authority would legalize the act; and all persons of any influence,
authority, or note, who conversed with me on the subject, frequently
and repeatedly stated their total unwillingness to act without my
direction, or in any mode except according to law.</p>
<p>This was a circumstance well calculated to conceal from me the secret
machinations on foot. I had constantly contended against violent
measures, and so had the brigadier-general in command; and I am
convinced that unusual pains were taken to conceal from both of us the
secret measures resolved upon. It has been said, however, that some
person named [Levi] Williams, in a public speech at Carthage, called
for volunteers to murder the Smiths; and that I ought to have had him
arrested. Whether such a speech was really made or not, is yet unknown
to me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ford had some leverage calculated in leaving Brigadier-general Deming in
charge of the Greys who were guarding the jail. Ford knew how high the
tensions were and that Deming had his head on straight. Any non-Mormon
militia officer who was being charged by the other men as a friend of
the Mormons was a good pick to oversee the guard operations in town. But
there was more to this calculation because if any attack happened on the
prisoners in Carthage while Governor Ford was in Nauvoo, his life would
be in danger. He feared the immediate Mormon retaliation should anything
happen to the prophet; which he considered his own life being in danger
enough insurance against any attack on the Mormon leadership in the
jail. If Jo was hurt, the Mormons would wreak vengeance on the entire
county beginning with the Governor himself. He thought that nobody would
be so cavalier and stupid as to make such an attack with so many lives
held in the balance. The prophet dying in Carthage, guarded by the
Carthage militia, would ensure the Mormon vengeance campaign would begin
with the citizens of that city; they would never be so stupid as to put
their property, lives, and families in danger by allowing harm to come
upon the prophet while in their care under Deming’s supervision.</p>
<p>Governor Ford had told Jo the previous day that he would accompany the
governor and his dragoons for their trip to Nauvoo. However, Ford
decided that it was an ill-advised decision as he’d be unable to ensure
the prophet’s return to Carthage as soon as he entered his kingdom and
Ford’s men became subject to the whims of the now-disbanded Nauvoo
Legion following the word of their supreme leader. Jo wrote a letter to
his wife, Emma, telling her of the situation, assuring her all was well,
and instructing her to receive the Governor and his men once Jo had been
told what was going on. Understandably, with tensions so high and a
platoon led by the Governor marching into Nauvoo would be treated with
hostility by the Mormons; Jo wanted to make sure Emma knew their arrival
was no cause for alarm. The body of the letter is written by White-out
Willard Richards, with a small post script written by the prophet
himself. It was also drafted early in the morning in preparation for
sending out with that afternoon’s mails, but it was revised as the
prisoners received more information.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#18119343078754457350"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Emma<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a><;></p>
<p>The
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#1157004552016284211"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Gov.<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
continues his courtesies, and permits us to see our friends. We hear
this morning that the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#4259776747782938460"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Governor<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
will not go down with his troops to day <(to
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#6829490131866638880"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Nauvoo<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
)> as was anticipated last Evening, but, if he does come down with
his troops to day you will be protected,— & I want you to tell <a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#10831513204822805300"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Bro
[Jonathan]
Dunham<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
to instruct the people to stay at home and attend to their own
business<,> and let there be no groups or gathering together
unless by permission of the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#1945862766385877655"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Gov<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>—
they are called together to receive communications from the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#10823261673591883569"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Gov<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>—
which would please our people. but let the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#17662077119427418178"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Gov.<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
direct.— <a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#369284859986466940"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Bro
Dunham<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
of course, will obey the orders of the government officers, and render
them the assistance they require. There is no dangers of any
“exterminating order” “Should there be a meeting among the troops,
(which we do not anticipate, excitment is abating,) a part will remain
Loyal, and stand for the defence of the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#14554184327550851341"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->State<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
& our rights; There is one principle which is Eternal, it is the duty
of all men to protect their lives... and the lives if their household
whenever ... <necessity> requires, and no power has a right to
forbidid it.<,> ... should the last extreme arrive,— <!-- raw HTML omitted -->but I
anticipate no such extreme<!-- raw HTML omitted -->,— but caution is the parent of safety.—</p>
<p>Joseph Smith</p>
<p>P. S. Dear
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#15010616669017828000"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Emma<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>,</p>
<p>I am very much resigned to my lot, knowing I am justified and have
done the best that could be done. Give my love to the children [p.
1] and all my Friends, Mr Brower and all who ... inquire after me;
and as for treason I know that I have not commited any, and they
cannot prove one apearance of any thing of the kind, So you need not
have any fears that any harme can happen to us on that score. may God
bless you all. Amen.</p>
<p>Joseph Smith</p>
<p>P. S. 20 mi to 10— I Just learn that the
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#4984339090570957876"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Governor<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
is about to disband his troops,— all but a guard to protect us and the
peace,— and come himself to
<a href="https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-emma-smith-27-june-1844/1#4635588429490575245"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->Nauvoo<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>
and deliver a speech to the people. This is right as I suppose. [p.
[2]]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When that final P.S. was added at 20 minutes to 10 a.m., a messenger
named Joel S. Miles put the letter in his pocket and set out for Nauvoo
ahead of the Governor’s posse to deliver the crucial message to Emma
before they arrived. If he was unable to reach Nauvoo before the
Governor and dragoons, who knows how the Mormon leadership there would
react to the Governor and his troops riding into the theocratic kingdom.</p>
<p>There’s a point worth mentioning here; Jo and the other men locked in
Carthage Jail weren’t your regular prisoners. Prisoners locked in jail
on horse theft charges, disorderly conduct or breaching the peace,
counterfeit, other lower-level crimes, would be locked in jail without
any access to people from the outside. They may be allowed to see legal
counsel or send and receive letters, but their liberty was completely
restricted. However, for high-level white collar, political, or military
crimes, those same restrictions rarely take place. Jo and his buddies
were allowed messengers by special permission from Governor Ford. These
messengers could enter and exit the jail apartments at will. The jail
itself wasn’t what we usually understand a jail to be either; the men
spent a short amount of time in an actual cell with bars on the windows
and door, but that was only for a few hours. The majority of the time
they spent was in the upstairs apartment with windows that could open
wide enough to fit a man through, and messengers could carry letters in
and out of that apartment as they pleased. The men allowed special
permissions were Stephen Markham, the same family Eliza R. Snow was
living with at the time in Nauvoo, Dan Jones, the Mississippi ferry
owner and a Danite who had lots of little birds all over the county and
funneled information to the prophet, Joel S. Miles, a Nauvoo Legionnaire
who served as a courier, John S. Fullmer, another Nauvoo Legionnaire and
personal Danite bodyguard of the prophet, Hugh T. Reid and James Woods,
non-Mormon attorneys for the prophet, and finally Cyrus Wheelock,
another messenger. As long as Governor Ford was in town, the jailor,
George Stigall would honor the passes of these men to enter and exit the
Carthage apartment jail as necessary. There was an air of gentlemanly
trust among these people that anything brought to, or removed from, the
jail wasn’t anything that would alter the circumstances. The letters
sent and received don’t seem to have been screened and the men weren’t
really searched for contraband, or if they were it wasn’t very thorough.
That’s because it wasn’t the bars on the windows or even the jailor,
George Stigall, who was keeping them there and stopping them from trying
to break out, it was the entire militia outside and the risk assessment
for attempting to escape. How would they escape? What was the plan once
they were outside the jail? What would stop the militia from shooting
them as soon as they stepped foot outside the building? Everybody valued
their own lives too much to attempt anything so stupid and nothing that
entered or left the jail was expected to change that risk assessment.</p>
<p>As Governor Ford was getting ready to leave for Nauvoo, John S. Fullmer
planned on taking an initial round of communications with him to Nauvoo.
According to Fullmer himself in a letter to George A. Smith while
working on the History of the Church project in 1854, Fullmer “left for
Nauvoo with instructions from Joseph and Hiram to aid in hunting up and
forwarding witnesses to Carthage.” As the men were expecting their trial
in 2 days, on June 29th, they wanted to prepare a slate of witnesses
with a solid and cohesive story to defend the prophet and get him
released on the charges of riot and treason… also to probably destroy or
move the counterfeit press that was operating in the city; although the
evidence for that is really tough to nail down. Sometime in the 3-hour
period between waking up on Jo’s right arm, and leaving around 8,
Fullmer removed a single-shot pistol from his frock and handed it to
Joseph Smith. What was the plan with this gun? He didn’t seem to provide
any extra powder or balls and the gun was good for one shot if the
powder remained dry. Would Jo fight off the entire Carthage Grey militia
with one shot from one pistol? Or maybe it was for himself should the
situation turn really sour. We can’t know; all we do know is Fullmer
passed this single-shot pistol to Joseph Smith, who accepted it and hid
it in his coat. He may have told the other prisoners about the gun, or
he may have kept it to himself. John S. Fullmer left with his
instructions to gather witnesses about an hour ahead of Governor Ford’s
posse of dragoons.</p>
<p>As Ford gathered his men for the trip to Nauvoo, Dan Jones, who’d woken
up on the left arm of the prophet, left the jail cell to procure a
private pass for Willard Richards and himself to come and go from
Carthage as they pleased that day. The experience of Dan Jones is quite
interesting. Jones had heard of the conspiracy afoot in Carthage to
murder the prisoners as he was headed to meet the Governor. This
exchange is reported in the History of the Church:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While [Dan] Jones was going to Governor Ford’s quarters, he saw an
assemblage of men, and heard one of them who was apparently a leader,
making a speech, saying that “our troops will be discharged this
morning in obedience to orders, and for a sham we will leave the town;
but when the Governor and the McDonough troops have left for Nauvoo
this afternoon, we will return and kill those men, if we have to tear
the jail down.” This sentiment was applauded by three cheers from the
crowd.</p>
<p>Capt. Jones went to the Governor, told him what had occurred in the
night, what the officer of the guard had said, and what he had heard
while coming to see him, and earnestly solicited him to avert the
danger.</p>
<p>His Excellency replied, “You are unnecessarily alarmed for the safety
of your friends, sir; the people are not that cruel.”</p>
<p>Irritated by such a remark, Jones urged the necessity of placing
better men to guard them than professed assassins, and said, “The
Messrs. Smith are American citizens, and have surrendered themselves
to your Excellency upon your pledging your honor for their safety;
they are also Master Masons, and as such Idemand of you protection of
their lives.”</p>
<p>Governor Ford’s face turned pale, and Jones remarked, “If you do not
do this, I have but one more desire, and that is, if you leave their
lives in the hands of those men to be sacrificed-----------.”</p>
<p>“What is that, sir?” he asked in a hurried tone.</p>
<p>“It is,” said Jones, “That the Almighty will preserve my life to a
proper time and place that I may testify that you have been timely
warned of their danger.”<br />
Jones then returned to the prison, but the guard would not let him
enter. He again returned to the hotel, and found Governor Ford
standing in front of the McDonough troops, who were in line ready to
escort him to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>The disbanded mob retired to the rear, shouting loudly that they were
only going a short distance out of town, when they would return and
kill Old Joe and Hyrum as soon as the Governor was far enough out of
town.</p>
<p>Jones called the attention of the Governor to the threats then made,
but he took no notice of them, although it was impossible for him to
avoid hearing them....</p>
<p>While obtaining this [jail pass], Jones’ life was threatened, and
Chauncey L. Higbee said to him in the street, “We are determined to
kill Joe and Hyrum, and you had better go away and save yourself.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few points to mention. This was written after the fact so conversation
could be fabricated or falsely remembered to tell any narrative the
historians wanted. This casts the entire account into question, but I
believe the core point is accurate, Dan Jones was one voice which warned
the Governor that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the men as soon
as he left town. Dan Jones was a pretty unremarkable dude and not
well-known outside Nauvoo; he could have eavesdropped any number of
conversations and public speeches and gathered all sorts of intel. That
was his specialty, gathering information from his little birds around
town, which made him the best ferry captain in town. He was privy to all
sorts of conversations other people weren’t and he funneled that intel
back to the prophet. However, if the conspirators were this vocal about
assassinating the prophet in the presence of Governor Ford, Ford never
would have left town. The absolute last place he would want to be when
the prophet was murdered was Nauvoo because they’d instantly retaliate.
If he really believed they’d be murdered as soon as he left, Nauvoo is
the last place he’d go. More on that in a few minutes.</p>
<p>Dan Jones returned to the jail with a pass for White-out Willard
Richards, but was denied his own pass. The pass for Doctor Richards read
“[you are to] permit Doct Richards the private secretary of Joseph
Smith to be with him if he disires it and to pass and repass the guard.”
Willard Richards wasn’t charged with the crimes, he was in Carthage with
Hyrum, Jo, and John Taylor of his own volition. He now had a pass to
enter and exit the jail freely. Dan Jones, however, would not be granted
the same access again after having spent the previous night in the jail.
He remained in Carthage to serve as another message courier.</p>
<p>As Jones was leaving the jail, another man entered the jail with a
private pass to see the prisoners. This man was named Cyrus Wheelock; he
stopped in to take some verbal messages from the prophet and possibly
convey verbal messages from Nauvoo to the prophet and patriarch. Cyrus
Wheelock had in his boot a small pistol as well. This pistol wasn’t a
single-shot like Fullmer had given to Joseph, this was what was known as
a pepperbox pistol. Revolvers had yet to become very popular at the time
as they were such a recent invention; what preceded the revolver were
pepperbox pistols. Notoriously unreliable and nearly impossible to aim,
these pistols have individual barrels for each shot, as opposed to a
cylinder that revolves the charges and fires each through the same
barrel. This pistol was a six-shooter, having 6 individual barrels each
loaded with a charge and cap. Each time a person pulls the trigger it
cycles each barrel, allowing the user to fire 6 individual shots. A
patent was filed in 1837 by an inventor named Ethan Allen, which kicked
off the popularity of these guns. Eventually, the Allen and Thurber
pepperbox pistol, manufactured in Connecticut, became a mainstay and
popular pistol, often selling for around $10 at the time. Allen &
Thurber never marketed to the military, these were strictly civilian
personal defense guns with no sights and smooth bore barrels. Often,
especially the early versions of pepperbox pistols, when the cap would
detonate from the hammer, the spark would jump from one barrel to
another and discharge multiple shots with one pull of the trigger with a
delay of a few milliseconds, only adding to the difficulty of aiming.
They are useless for attempting to shoot a target further than 5-feet
away, but in a crowded area or point-blank range they’re incredibly
effective; it’s what gamers and jarheads alike call spray-and-pray.
These gave shooters the ability to fire six shots instead of
single-shots like most pistols that dominated the market prior to the
late 1830s.</p>
<p>Cyrus Wheelock removed this pepperbox pistol from his boot and handed it
to Joseph. At this point, Jo tried to give it back to Cyrus saying he
needed it for personal protection. Wheelock declined and Jo went over to
his coat where he’d stashed the single-shot pistol given him by John S.
Fullmer. He pulled this single shot pistol out and handed it to his
brother, Hyrum sidekick-Abiff Smith, saying “You may have use for this.”
Hyrum’s reply? “I hate to use such things, or to see them used.” “So do
I,’ said Joseph, ‘but we may have to, to defend ourselves;’”. Hyrum took
the single-shot pistol from his younger brother and placed it in his
pants pocket. Jo did the same with Wheelock’s pepperbox pistol.</p>
<p>A little anecdote you may find amusing. The last time I visited Nauvoo,
I was lucky enough to get a tour of Carthage and Nauvoo from an
incredible researcher who tends to be very reclusive, but knows more
about Nauvoo than entire teams employed by the church. With this guide,
a number of historian friends and I attended the Carthage tour provided
by missionaries who know tell the story by what they memorized from the
church’s pamphlet. As the elderly missionary told the story, these
historians essentially used the missionary’s talking points as queues to
discuss the history behind the story the missionary told. As they
talked, the missionary became quieter and quieter, eventually realizing
there was nothing he would tell any of us that we didn’t know much more
about than him. The tour finished and we walked back down the stairs
from the upstairs apartment where the shootout occurred and into the
small courtyard beneath the window. We discussed the various accounts of
what happened after the shootout and I was vigorously taking notes as
these historians discussed the accounts and how reliable they are. Then,
the independent researcher tour guide turned to all of us and asked if
we wanted to see something special he brought along for the tour. Of
course, we replied in chorus. He reached into the pocket of his
pantaloons and removed a small pepperbox pistol. He wasn’t cosplaying, I
just like the word pantaloons. It was a very small pistol, about the
size of my hand from bottom of the handle to the end of the barrels. The
metal action and trigger guard had some small engravings that were
nearly worn down, nothing special, just some swirls and flourishes. It
didn’t have a serial number, just a couple stamps with the patent date
of 1837 and the Allen & Thurber name. It was cold and heavier than
expected for how much metal is contained in the little package. This was
an actual period gun, not a replica or something; it could be fired with
a few caps, powder, ball, and wadding. If memory serves it was a .32
caliber, the most common bore for these pistols. I held it, cycled the
action a few times without letting the hammer hit the cap nipple; I
didn’t want to damage it. Each turn of the barrels made a satisfying
little clink as the next barrel cycled to the hammer. This may sound odd
to hear, but it was oddly peaceful. To be standing in the courtyard
where Joseph Smith was assassinated, having heard the story from a
missionary and further expounded by historians who know more about the
story than any missionary who ever staffs the Carthage Jail tourist
center, and to be holding the same gun Jo probably used in that very
place, a deep sense of wonder and peace came over me. I don’t know what
it was… I couldn’t help but get lost in thought. Maybe I was pondering
the fragility of life, how such a monstrous tyrant bleeds just like you
and me, how none of us are invincible and all of our time will be up one
day. I can’t tell you what that feeling was, but it was contemplative
and peaceful to be holding that gun in that place at that time,
surrounded by those people who were so kind and generous to me as the
Mormon history apprentice of the group. Thank you, Joseph Johnstun.</p>
<p>Jo and Hyrum were now both armed. Hyrum could get off one shot, Jo six
if the gun functioned perfectly, maybe that would be enough to frighten
off any attempt to cause them harm. Why arm themselves? I doubt they
considered that question in the abstract. If they were to attempt an
escape, 7 balls couldn’t do anything against companies of the Carthage
Greys. Maybe it was just a matter of having the pistols in their
possession that provided a false sense of security and that reason alone
is enough. No matter what the situation, having guns only made the
situation worse for the prisoners, regardless of whether or not the guns
were used. These were real human beings, not action movie heroes or
video game characters. In no situation would those guns be helpful to
them. But, being armed while surrounded by hundreds of armed people who
want you dead can provide that sense of security which was lacking for
the men in the cell.</p>
<p>Soon after Cyrus Wheelock armed Joseph with the pepperbox pistol, he
left the jail cell with a message for Governor Ford, telling him not to
hold any military parade in Nauvoo upon his arrival for fear it would
excite the citizens into violence.</p>
<p>Before Wheelock left, Jo and Hyrum had some verbal messages for Cyrus to
carry back to Nauvoo with him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wheelock was intrusted with a verbal request to the Commanders of the
legion to avoid all military display, or any other movement calculated
to produce excitement during the Governor’s visit. He was especially
charged to use all the influence he possessed to have the brethren and
friends of JOseph remain perfectly calm and quiet, inasmuch as they
respected the feelings and well-being of their Prophet and Patriarch…</p>
<p>Wheelock took a list of witnesses’ names that were wanted for the
expected trail on Saturday. When the list was read over a number of
names were stricken out among whom were Alpheus Cutler and Reynolds
Cahoon, it being deemed by brother Hyrum unnecessary for them to
attend. Bro. Joseph asked the reason why they should not come. Hyrum
answered, “They may be very good men, but they don’t know enough to
answer a question properly.” Bro. Joseph remakred, “That is
sufficient.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like any good mafia, Hyrum knew who could keep the story straight; who
was enough “in the know” to give the court the “truthful” account of
what transpired. Jo implicitly trusted him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The prisoners also sent many verbal messages to their families; they
were so numerous that Dr. Richards proposed writing them all down,
fearing Wheelock might forget; but brother Hyrum fastened his eyes
upon him, and with a look of penetration said, “Brother Wheelock will
remember all that we tell him, and he will never forget the
occurrences of this day.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The man who armed the prophet with his famed pepperbox pistol departed
Carthage for Nauvoo around 11 a.m. carrying a list of witnesses for
Saturday’s trial and a litany of verbal communications which were never
recorded and will forever be lost to history.</p>
<p>Around 11:30 in the morning, another messenger arrived carrying a
curious letter. The messenger was Almon Babbit and the letter, which I
teased back on episode 211. I said “we must wait before we’re able to
discuss [this] message specifically” because it’s a passage from
White-out Willard’s journal of the day that I’m still trying to figure
out. Here’s the passage: “11-30 Almon Babbit arrivd read a letter from O
Cowdery.” And that’s it. Oliver Cowdery, Cowdung Allover, has been
almost completely absent from our timeline since he was excommunicated
in early 1838 and here, on the day of the prophet’s death, Cowdery sent
a letter to Jo and friends. The last time Ollie had shared
correspondence with the Nauvoo leadership was back in December 1843. Jo
told White-out Willard to “Write to Oliver Cowdery ask him if he has eat
husks long enough. if he is not most ready to return & be clothed in
robes of righteousness & go up to Jerusalem. Orson Hyde need of him…”.
Jo wanted Ollie back in the fold and the way he did it was degrading;
Hey Ollie, you sick of eating like a pig yet? You ready to come back to
where you belong? But there could be more to it, as Jo had married
Orson’s wife, Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde, while Orson was on a
mission. Maybe Ollie’s wife, Elizabeth Ann Whitmer, sister of Peter,
David, and John Whitmer, was Jo’s next possible target.</p>
<p>The letter Richards wrote with the help of Bloody Brigham is less
condescending than Jo put it, but still quite fascinating.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We thought perhaps our old, long esteemed friend might by this time
have felt his lonely solitary situation; might feel that he was a
stranger in a strange land, & had wondered long enough from his
Fathers house, & that he might have a disposition to return. If this
is the case, all that we have got to say, is, you brethren are
read[y] to receive you, we are not your enemies, but your brethren.
Your dwelling place ought to be in Zion--Your labor might be needed in
Jerusalem, & you ought to be the servant of the living God.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That letter was written on April 19, 1843, but wasn’t sent until
December 10th for unknown reasons. Here’s Ollie’s reply a few days after
receiving the letter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A friendly letter requires a like answer: and you are to understand in
the outset, that I entertain no unkindly feelings toward you, or
either of you. See that you have immagined with regard to my “lonely,
solitary situation--a stranger in a strange land--” is true, strictly
true. It has been a long time--nearly six years--the winds and waves,
floods and storms, have been arrayed to oppose me; and I need hardly
say to you, that the Lord alone has upheld me, till I have fought up,
labored up, and struggled up, to a fair reputation and a fair business
in my present profession…</p>
<p>The circumstances under which I left Far West in June, 1838, are
familiarly known to you all, no doubt--those circumstances, connected
with myself and family, are always painful to reflect on; but you will
be reminded again, that I do not charge, or believe that either of
you, contributed any thing to render my situation or circumstances,
then, or afterwards, in the least afflicting; and for this reason I
speak more freely. I could not, nor will I concede, that men, who once
took me by the hand, under the sanction of the Holy Spirit, when they
received a high and holy calling, would be induced, under any
consideration, to even wish me harm. This is another reason why I read
and look upon your epistle in the light I do--this is one reason why I
feel like answering it promptly and fairly. In fact, why I answer it
at all.</p>
<p>There is another circumstance to which I must now adrest, in which you
as members and principals in a great and increasing society, are
interested; and in which also, whether in or out of that society, I
feel, and must continue to feel sensibly and keenly. It is a certain
publication, appended to which are many names who are, [or] were at
the time, members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, charging myself
with being connected with outlaws. I cannot speak definitely of this
instrument, as I know nothing of it except what has been related by
those who say they have seen it. Now, what I have to say concerning
all the difficulty between myself and your Church, together with those
charges last refer[r]ed to, is simply this: I believed at the time,
and still believe, that ambitious and wicked men, envying the harmony
existing between myself and the first elders of the Church, and hoping
to get into some other men’s birth right, by falsehoods the most foul
and wicked, caused all this difficulty from beginning to end. They
succeeded in getting myself out of the Church; but since they
themselves have gone to perdition, ought not old friends--long tried
in the furnase of affliction, to be friends still, even laying out of
view any and all religious consideration?</p>
<p>Accept assurance of my esteem, with all the kindness, friendship and
fellowship, expressed in yours to me.</p>
<p>Oliver Cowdery</p>
<p>P.S. This letter is designed as, and will be held by you, strictly
private--under no consideration is it to be exhibited to the public
eye.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oliver Cowdery, from being Jo’s scribe for the Book of Mormon, to
becoming the second elder of the church, to running the stake in Zion
and being chased out of Jackson County, Missouri by mobs, to settling
Far West with the first faction of saints to resettle there from
Independence, to attending the Kirtland Temple dedication ceremony, to
charging the prophet with having a “dirty, nasty, filthy affair” with
Fanny Alger, to being excommunicated from the church and targeted by
Jo’s shadow hit squad, the Danites, by name in the Danite Manifesto,
which gave him 48 hours to leave Far West or “vengeance… will overtake
you at an hour when you do not expect, and at a day when you do not look
for it; and for you there shall be no escape; for there is but one
decree for you, which is depart, depart, or a more fatal calamity shall
befall you.” Ollie complied with the Danite manifesto and remained in
Missouri for a brief time, “a stranger in a strange land,” while the
Mormons were forcibly removed from the state and resettled in Illinois,
eventually building Nauvoo, Jo’s theocracy. During that interim period
of 1839-43, when this letter was sent, Cowdery moved back to Ohio where
he practiced law and politics. Now, in December 1843, his letter
articulated his problems with the church, that the leaders were all
good, but that there were some “ambitious and wicked men… hoping to get
some other men’s birth right” who “caused all this difficulty from
beginning to end.” It was those evil and designing men who “succeeded in
getting myself out of the Church”. It’s hard to know who he’s alluding
to, possibly Doctor Sampson Avard or Thomas B. Marsh, maybe it was the
Whitmer brothers, Peter, David, and John, maybe it was Hingepin Sidney
Rigdon. We don’t know who he’s talking about here. But, because “they
themselves have gone to perdition” he believes “old friends… to be
friends still”. He also concluded with a post-script that this letter
should never be exhibited publicly, a burn notice basically, which is
quite remarkable. The great saga of Oliver Cowdery seems to conclude
with him wanting to come back to the church in Nauvoo and set aside “any
and all religious consideration” which may have caused the trouble with
those in perdition who succeeded in removing him from the church. But,
and this is important, Ollie didn’t come back. He never made the trip to
Nauvoo to officially be refellowshipped into Jo’s church. Now, on this
day, June 27th, 1844, with Jo and Hyrum facing death before nightfall,
Oliver Cowdery sent one final letter to the prophet which was read to
him just six hours before dying. This final communication between Oliver
Cowdery and Joseph Smith said: “....” I don’t know. The letter was never
recorded anywhere and it’s never been located. The final data point in
the story of Oliver Cowdery is nothing more than a question mark. Was he
trying to coordinate his return? Was he castigating the leadership for
their overtly treasonous activities? Was he asking for details about
joining Orson Hyde on another journey to Jerusalem and asking about the
safety of his wife, Elizabeth, should he choose to go? Was he relaying
information about the church in Kirtland, just a few days’ journey from
where he lived in Tiffin? Simply put, we’ll probably never know because
the letter is lost to history.</p>
<p>As the day wore into afternoon, Governor Ford left for Nauvoo after
disbanding the militias there and leaving a small cohort of Carthage
Greys to guard the jail. The journey to Nauvoo was about 4 hours on
horseback. One of his advisors voiced what they were all thinking during
the trip to Nauvoo.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Having ordered the guard, and left General Deming in command in
Carthage, and discharged the residue of the militia, I immediately
departed for Nauvoo, eighteen miles distant, accompanied by Col.
Buckmaster, Quartermaster-General, and Capt. Dunn’s company of
dragoons.</p>
<p>After we had proceeded four miles, Colonel Buckmaster intimated to me
a suspicion that an attack would be made upon the jail. He stated the
matter as a mere suspicion, arising from having seen two persons
converse together at Carthage with some air of mystery.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Colonel Buckmaster, as a personal assistant to Governor Ford, had his
eyes peeled for any activity like this. They’d obviously heard a lot of
rumblings about taking vigilante justice on the prisoners which is
precisely why Governor Ford disbanded the militias to begin with, but
this presented a dangerous situation because the foxes were guarding the
hen house and daddy was no longer in town to keep the situation under
control. Ford, however, viewed the situation differently, but still took
the advice of Colonel Buckmaster very seriously. He also had the voices
of Stephen Markham, Dan Jones, Cyrus Wheelock, and other Mormon men
echoing through his mind that there was a conspiracy waiting for him to
leave Carthage so they could make the attack.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I myself entertained no suspicion of such an attack; at any rate, none
before the next day in the afternoon; because it was notorious that we
had departed from Carthage with the declared intention of being absent
at least two days. I could not believe that any person would attack
the jail whilst we were in Nauvoo, and thereby expose my life and the
life of my companions to the sudden vengeance of the Mormons, upon
hearing of the death of their leaders. Nevertheless, I sent back one
company with a special order to Capt. Smith to guard the jail
strictly, and at the peril of his life, until my return.</p>
<p>We proceeded on our journey four miles further. By this time I had
convinced myself that no attack would be made on the jail that day or
night. I supposed that a regard for my safety and the safety of my
companions would prevent an attack until those to be engaged in it
could be assured of our departure from Nauvoo. I still think that this
ought to have appeared to me to be a reasonable supposition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It may have appeared a reasonable supposition, but it’s clear that Ford
harbored some apprehensions about the safety of the prisoners. He
decided to make his visit to Nauvoo shorter than 2 days as originally
planned and determined to simply make a public speech to the Mormons
about what was going on, and resolve to search for the counterfeit
machine at a later time when tensions weren’t so high.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I therefore determined at this point to omit making the search for
counterfeit money at Nauvoo, and defer an examination of all the other
abominations charged on that people, in order to return to Carthage
that same night, that I might be on the ground in person, in time to
prevent an attack upon the ajil, if any had been mediated. To this end
we called a halt; the baggage wagons were ordered to remain where they
were until toward evening, and then return to Carthage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ford had ambitious plans upon his arrival to Nauvoo. Originally he’d
planned to find the counterfeit machine, investigate the charges of
polygamy and sex-trafficking, interview folks about the night the
Expositor press was destroyed to find out what actually happened and how
big the riot was, release any prisoners still in the city jail from that
night or who’d been committed to the city jail when the city was under
martial law, and generally figure out the sentiment of the Mormons
against their non-Mormon neighbors. These plans, however, would have to
be put on hold until a later time because Ford also believed an attack
on the jail to be possible and imminent. He needed to be in two places
at once to keep the peace. Luckily for him, messengers had already
arrived in Nauvoo to make sure the Legion didn’t muster or show any
aggression whatsoever to Ford’s posse upon their arrival.</p>
<p>While this was transpiring, a militia force from Warsaw, the twin-city
to Carthage of the anti-Mormon political party, was marching toward
Nauvoo to join Governor Ford’s McDonough posse. They’d yet to receive
Governor Ford’s orders to disband and were making their way to Carthage
to join forces with the Carthage Greys in defence of the city should the
Mormons march to Carthage and attempt to remove their supreme leader by
force. The journey from Warsaw to Carthage is just over 20 miles,
slightly less than one day’s journey on horseback. They’d left Warsaw
early that morning and when they reached about the halfway point between
Warsaw and Carthage, a messenger approached them and conveyed Governor
Ford’s orders to disband. However, this messenger also told them that
Governor Ford was not at Carthage, but in Nauvoo. This Warsaw contingent
was led by a man named Colonel Levi Williams. Williams has made a few
appearances in our timeline, mostly connected with the horse-thief
Daniel Avery when he was arrested and taken across the Mississippi into
Missouri to answer old charges from the Missouri-Mormon war. Levi
Williams is a prominent figure in the anti-Mormon movement. He was good
friends with his neighbor, Thomas Sharp, who’s paper, the Warsaw Signal,
was the chief paper of anti-Mormonism. Levi Williams and Thomas Sharp
were two founding members of the anti-Mormon political party. He was a
vocal critic who wanted to murder the prophet and any other Mormon who
came across his path, but civil law kept him from being able to act out
his violent fantasies. Governor Ford even provides some insight into
Colonel Levi Williams and his role this day of June 27th.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This was a circumstance well calculated to conceal from me the secret
machinations on foot. I had constantly contended against violent
measures, and so had the brigadier-general in command [Deming]; and
I am convinced that unusual pains were taken to conceal from both of
us the secret measures resolved upon. It has been said, however, that
some person named [Levi] Williams, in a public speech at Carthage,
called for volunteers to murder the Smiths; and that I ought to have
had him arrested. Whether such a speech was really made or not, is yet
unknown to me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whether Levi Williams made such a speech is still unknown, but he had
enough people looking to him to orchestrate the events of that night. In
a reminiscince from 1908, a Mormon named Matthew Caldwell spoke of this
speech, likely passed to him through oral tradition.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the evening of June 26, 1844, the old Mob leader, Col. Levi
Williams, with Tom Sharp, the editor of the Warsaw Sentinel, had a few
new wagons rolled out from under a shed and placed a two inch plank on
the box of one of the wagons. Col. Williams then climbed on the box
and gave orders for the captains of the militia to form their
companies facing the wagon. “As soon as the orders were obeyed, Col.
Levi Williams said, ‘Boys, the governor is not going to do anything
for us. All that is in favor of going to Carthage in the morning step
out three paces in front. Those contrary stand fast.’ At the word,
‘March,’ all but six men stepped out.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Levi Williams and his band were actually headed to Nauvoo with the
intent of burning it to the ground and exterminating the citizens.
However, because information traveled slowly, they didn’t receive the
orders to disband until they were already half-way through their journey
to Nauvoo.</p>
<p>When this messenger told Colonel Levi Williams and his men that Ford had
ordered the militias to disband, but was at the time in Nauvoo, Williams
got an exciting idea. Most of his men turned around and went back home
to Warsaw. Levi Williams, however, took his volunteer vigilante militia
and continued their journey to Carthage, instead of Nauvoo, for the
remainder of the morning into the afternoon.</p>
<p>A man named John Hay wrote about his eyewitness experience at this time
while he was in Carthage in 1869, which I find more reliable than that
previous quote of oral tradition recorded in 1908 by a Mormon who wasn’t
even alive when it happened.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Colonel Williams read the governor's order. Some of the anti-Mormon
warriors, blessed with robust Western appetites, looked at the sun,
and concluded they could get home by dinnertime, and under the
influence of this inspiring idea started off at quick step. Captain
Grover soon found himself without a company. Captain Aldrich essayed a
speech calling for volunteers for Carthage. "He did not make a fair
start," says the chronicle, "and Sharp came up and took it off his
hands." Sharp, being a spirited and impressive talker, soon had a
respectable squad about him. Captain Davis, on the contrary, was
sorely perplexed. It was heavy weather for him. He was a professional
politician, and clearly loved both Mormon and anti-Mormon votes. He
was so backward in coming forward that his company left him in
disgust, and followed the fiery Grover, whose company had gone home to
dinner. Davis still could not make up his mind to go home, but "got
into Calvin Cole's wagon and followed the boys at a distance"; so that
he had at last the luck to be in at the closing scene, and the honor
to be indicted with the rest. The speeches of Grover and Sharp were
rather vague; the purpose of murder does not seem to have been hinted.
They protested against "being made the tools and puppets of Tommy
Ford." They were going to Carthage to see the boys, and talk things
over. Some of the cooler heads, such as Dr. Hay, surgeon of the
regiment, denounced the proceeding and went at once back to Warsaw.</p>
<p>While they were waiting at the shanties, a courier came in from the
Carthage Grays. It is impossible at this day to declare exactly the
purport of his message. It is usually reported and believed that he
brought an assurance from the officers of this company that they would
be found on guard at the jail where the Smiths were confined; that
they would make no real resistance, — merely enough to save
appearances.</p>
<p>This message was not communicated to the men. They followed their
leaders off on the road to Carthage, with rather vague intentions.
They were annoyed at the prospect of their picnic coming so readily to
a close, at losing the fun of sacking Nauvoo, at having to go home
without material for a single romance. Nearly one hundred and fifty
started with their captains, but they gradually dwindled in number to
seventy-five. These trudged along under the fierce summer sun of the
prairies towards the town where the cause of all the trouble and
confusion of the last few years awaited them. They sang on the way a
rude parody of a camp-meeting hymn called in the West the "Hebrew
Children":—</p>
<p>"Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Where now is the Prophet Joseph?</p>
<p>Safe in the Carthage Jail!"</p>
<p>The farther they walked the more the idea impressed itself upon them
that now was the time to finish the matter totally. The unavowed
design of the leaders communicated itself magnetically to the men,
until the entire. company became fused into one mass of bloodthirsty
energy. By an excess of precaution, they did not go directly, into the
town, but made a long detour, so as to come in by the road leading
from Nauvoo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This same John Hay offers some interesting insight into the mindset of
the conspirators.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It would be difficult to imagine anything cooler than this quiet
perjury to screen a murder. Yet the strangest part of this strange
story is that Frank Worrell was a generous young fellow, and the men
with whom he carried out the ghastly comedy of attack and resistance
at the door of the prison — Sharp and Grover — were good citizens,
educated and irreproachable, who still live to enjoy the respect and
esteem of all who know them. There is but one force mighty enough in
the world to twist such minds and consciences so fearfully awry; and
that is the wild suspicion bred of civil strife. A few months of this
miniature war in Hancock County had sufficed to possess many of the
prominent actors with the spirit of demons; and in the mind of any
anti-Mormon there was nothing more criminal in the shooting of Smith
than in the slaying of a wolf or panther.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With the dehumanization total and complete, assassinating the Smiths
that day was merely pest removal, the way we’d exterminate a rat
infestation. People who were otherwise good and honest people,
completely succumbed to base instincts and tribalism. Levi Williams made
the decision to take his small group of men into Carthage via a
circuitous route to appear to be coming from Nauvoo, and the plans were
formed and put into play. Continuing in Governor Ford’s account:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A communication was soon established between the conspirators and the
company; and it was arranged that the guard should have their guns
charged with blank cartridges, and fire at the assailants when they
attempted to enter the jail.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to plan, when the time was right, Levi Williams’s men would be
the attacking militia in a conspiracy with the company of Carthage Greys
stationed to guard the jail. When the men from Williams’s mob attacked,
the Greys would fire blank rounds at them as if they were attempting to
defend the prisoners, thus providing a shield of plausible deniability.
The plan was put in place; all Colonel Williams needed was for the
change in guard that evening to get his co-conspirators to be the actual
jail guards. Once Colonel Deming, who Ford put in place to oversee the
prison watch duties, realized a mutiny was afoot, he’d quickly flee
because his men were no longer loyal to Governor Ford and himself. The
conspirator who was guarding the jail at the time was a man named Frank
Worrel; he would aid the mob in getting into the jail after their
feigned an attack on him and his men. The plan was put into motion, the
wheels of vigilante justice were rolling, and Colonel Levi Williams,
would arrive in Carthage with his mutinous gang close to 5 that evening.</p>
<p>A point I want to discuss emerges from those previous accounts, and that
is ThomASS Sharp, the editor of the Warsaw Signal. He’s centered in our
Nauvoo timeline as the most prominent and vocal critic of the Mormon
empire and the prophet himself. I’ve looked for a long time to determine
whether or not Thomas Sharp was part of Levi Williams’s mob that
assaulted the jail. Unfortunately there isn’t a solid answer here. He
was obviously guilty of stoking the flames that led to this event by
calling for extermination of the Mormons following the destruction of
the Expositor press. Hyrum Smith even threatened to burn down the Warsaw
Signal, Sharp’s paper, for what Sharp was printing in the furor burning
through the area. Levi Williams and Thomas Sharp were friends and
neighbors in Warsaw, but Sharp wasn’t an officer in the Warsaw militia,
so he had no reason to be marching with Williams’s boys to begin with,
unless storming the jail was premeditated the previous evening as that
1908 account claimed. A few later accounts place Thomas Sharp in
Carthage that night and he eventually stood trial for the murders, but
another account that’s earlier than the accounts which put him there
states explicitly “I was pushed and shoved some fifty feet..... Did not
see Sharp, Grover, or Davis.” However, just because he didn’t see Sharp
in the crowd doesn’t mean Thomas Sharp wasn’t there. It’s one of those
data points that remains a mystery and the data point is actually pretty
consequential. His account of the jail storm is an oddly accurate report
of the events and it was published immediately after the deaths, as in
just a few hours after they occurred. Which means he himself
participated and immediately fled the 18 miles to Warsaw and began
writing and printing the paper for that night, which would be quite a
feat with slim margins of time. Or, he remained in Warsaw and as soon as
the first participant of the mob arrived back in Warsaw and conveyed the
account to Sharp he started printing the extra. I will point out, in his
account, Sharp claims a Mormon attempted to rush the jail to break out
the prisoners as the inciting incident, but there’s no evidence for this
and all evidence indicates the contrary. It was characteristic, however,
of Sharp to accuse the Mormons as the aggressors in any conflict he
reported in the Warsaw Signal. Sharp’s article, however, prints
information unknown to any Carthaginians that he must have received by
express messenger reporting the movement of Governor Ford in Nauvoo.
Sharp also messes up the sequence of events by a few hours here and
there, which leads me to believe he wasn’t in Carthage, but reporting on
intel messengers and reporters were bringing to him in Warsaw while
preparing his extra for that evening. He also falsely says the Richards
almost died from it, when it was actually John Taylor who nearly died;
Richards got a scratch on the ear. His article reads to me like he was
reporting events from what people told him, not from a first-person
witness account. Simply put, Thomas Sharp may have been part of the mob
that night, but he also might not have been. His account reads
second-hand and contains numerous inaccuracies and the accounts which
place him there are almost all late, second or third hand, and almost
exclusively provided by Mormons who viewed Sharp as their public enemy
#1. History often leaves us with ambiguities like this. So, whenever
I’m talking about Levi Williams and his boys storming the jail, just
know that ThomASS Sharp may have been part of the crowd, but he also may
not have been.</p>
<p>As Levi Williams’s troops shifted their destination from Nauvoo to
Carthage, the prisoners took lunch at 1:15. Jo, Hyrum, and White-out
Willard ate lunch in the upper apartment while Stephen Markham and John
Taylor ate their lunch in the lower apartment adjacent to the kitchen.
It was generally agreed that the second story was safer than the ground
floor of the jail as assailants would have a much harder time firing
into a window of the second story as opposed to just firing straight
into the window like Pistol Packin’ Porter did to Governor Lilburn
Boggs. After dinner, Stephen Markham left the jail to acquire a pipe and
some smoking tobacco and bring it back to the prisoners to enjoy after
their meal. At this time, Dan Jones was about to depart Carthage to
carry a letter to Orville Browning in Quincy. Browning had served as
Jo’s legal counsel back in 1841 when he was arrested by constables on
order from Missouri. Jo wanted to retain Orville Browning to help in the
coming trial on June 29th. Dan Jones tells of his experience in Carthage
acting as courier in an incredibly hostile environment.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even though the guards did not allow me to go into the jail nor for J.
Smith to come out, yet they permitted Willard Richards to come, to
whom I informed everything which I understood of the designs of the
mobs to kill them before nightfall. He told me that I was in more
danger outside, and he placed a letter in my hand with the request of
Joseph Smith that I take it to Quincy (about sixty miles away) and
return as soon as I could.</p>
<p>News of the letter went throughout the mob like the wings of the
breeze, and some claimed that it was orders for the Nauvoo Legion to
come there to save the prisoners, and others claimed some other
things. When I was requesting my horse to be readied, some swore that
I would not go from there alive if I did not give the letter to them;
but they could not agree about this, which was just as well for me,
for I was determined to die rather than release it from my hand. Then
they divided into two or three groups: one group wanted to chase me
from there immediately, letter and all; another group threatened that
I would not reach Nauvoo alive, and at that I saw several of them with
rifles in their hands run across the fields to the nearby woods
through which the road to Nauvoo passed. Although I understood their
purpose, yet I did not see how I could be delivered; but some way
would come, I doubted not a bit.</p>
<p>While they were quarrelling amongst themselves, my horse was readied
nearby, and I saw my chance. And it was no time after I reached the
saddle before the horse and I were out of their sight in the midst of
a cloud of dust with bullets whistling through the air everywhere
except where they were aiming. Before I had time to think about the
road before me, with which I was almost totally unacquainted, I found
myself in the prairie galloping toward Warsaw instead of on the road
to Nauvoo. I understood my mistake after having a look at the
countryside around me, and I crossed the prairies to the right road.
After that I understood that by the horse's mistake my life had been
saved from those who were watching for me in the woods; and also on
the other side I understood that I had been between two fires, for if
I had gone a mile further without turning from the Warsaw road I would
have no doubt been killed by about three hundred of the most cruel of
all the mobocrats who were coming along the road to Carthage and who
killed the prisoners no more than two hours after that!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He’s right. If Dan Jones had continued down that same road towards
Warsaw, within an hour he would have run into Levi Williams and his
rogue militia on the warpath toward Carthage. Luckily he recognized the
error of his ways and diverted his path north toward Nauvoo, passing
Governor Ford on the way.</p>
<p>Dan Jones and Governor Ford continued their respective journeys toward
Nauvoo, though with vastly different missions. Notably, gunshots weren’t
reported by Willard Richards or anybody else upon the departure of Dan
Jones. That means they probably didn’t shoot at him while he rode out of
town; those are just fun details he added to make himself more of a hero
in the midst of a circumstance where there were no heroes.</p>
<p>Events in Carthage began to signal that all was not well and the
warnings Dan Jones gave to White-out Willard were justified. There were
8 men guarding the jail specifically and about 60 Carthage Greys were
stationed as guards throughout the town, cycling who was on active guard
duty at the jail itself. White-out Willard recorded in his journal that
tensions were beginning to excite.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>3.15--P.M. The guard have been more severe in their
ope[r]ations--threatning among themselves or telling what they would
do when the war <was> over--one would sell his farm and move out of
the state if Smith staid.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the militia became more excited and combative in Carthage, Governor
Ford arrived in Nauvoo. His arrival was preceded by the letter from Jo
to Emma and other communications to church and city leaders to not make
any show of force or demonstration that would seem threatening to the
Governor. Everybody recognized this as their opportunity to gain Ford’s
favor in the conflict and they were all on their best behavior. Ford
first went to the Nauvoo Mansion and held a meeting with his advisors
and some men of the Nauvoo government. An occurrence happened here
before Ford gave his speech and the details of it are tough to deal
with. Pistol Packin’ Porter gave an affidavit in April 1856 in Utah that
paints a disturbing and ominous picture of the situation and I need to
give voice to this perspective. Porter had attended a meeting earlier in
the day in the same room Governor Ford held this meeting. But, he forgot
his hat. He returned to the room to retrieve the hat, and here’s what he
reports happened 12 years after the fact when Governor Ford was seen as
responsible for the deaths that happened that evening.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the said Rockwell, had of necessity to enter said upper room for
his hat, and as he entered the door, all were sitting silent except
one man, who was standing behind a chair making a speech, and while in
the act of dropping his right hand from an uplifted position, said,
“THE DEED IS DONE BEFORE THIS TIME,” which were the only words I
heard while in the room, for on seeing me they all hushed in silence.
At the time I could not comprehend the meaning of the words, but in a
few hours after I understood them referring to the murder of Joseph
and Hyrum Smith in Carthage jail.</p>
<p>ORRIN P. ROCKWELL</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like I said earlier, this affidavit was given 12 years after the
incident during the early Mormon reformation era which was marked by
militant anti-government culture by the Utah church. Almost immediately
after the events of Carthage, Governor Ford was blamed by the Mormons
for the assassinations; that rhetoric continued for over a decade and
Porter Rockwell, a murderer at heart and Jo’s personal destroying angel,
man of god son of thunder, put on record that he witnessed this
conversation happen. His affidavit and dozens of speeches given by
church leaders have played into the narrative that Ford orchestrated the
assassinations and left Carthage for Nauvoo that day for that very
purpose. According to this narrative, Governor Ford had a secret
alliance with Colonel Levi Williams, Thomas Sharp, and the Carthage
Greys to attack while he was in Nauvoo, and then he’d leave Nauvoo
before a messenger could arrive to tell the Mormons what had happened,
thus eliminating their ability to retaliate while he was there. My
response to that argument, it’s plausible but there’s really no
contemporary evidence of it. What evidence do we have to contradict this
conspiracy narrative? Ford’s own words and actions, but to the person
making the argument they aren’t inclined to believe Ford to begin with
so why does it matter?</p>
<p>We can look at it a few different ways. Ford was absolutely fed up with
the Mormons and the general lawlessness of the Mormon leadership. It may
be the case that the only way he saw to keep from his state devolving
into civil war was for the chief aggressor to simply not exist anymore.
To counter that idea though, with how high tensions were between the
Mormons in Nauvoo and the anti-Mormons in Carthage and Warsaw, the death
of Joseph Smith almost ensured civil war would break out with
retribution being the final catalyst. Joseph Smith being assassinated
wouldn’t calm tensions, it would only escalate them. If Ford had
orchestrated the death of Jo during his absence, the last place he would
want to be was Nauvoo. He stated for himself that he thought the
vigilantes wouldn’t attack while he was in Nauvoo as it would surely
result in the Mormons killing him, which he thought was enough insurance
to make the trip to begin with. However, we can also conclude that he
disbanded the various militias to make a vigilante attack safer for the
vigilantes. He would want the militias to be disbanded as it would be
less likely that the remaining people in town would uphold the law over
upholding the designs of the vigilantes. That argument can also be
flipped on its head; if Ford believed an assassination was more likely
with more men in Carthage, disbanding the militias was the smartest
thing he could have done.</p>
<p>The way I see it, there is no bedrock on whether or not Ford conspired
to have Jo assassinated and reasonable people can disagree about to what
extent Ford bears the blame for the deaths. What can’t be disputed,
however, is that Joseph Smith himself was responsible for his own death.
Sure, he didn’t call together the militia and tell them to assassinate
him, but he inflamed the non-Mormons around Nauvoo for over half a
decade and brought an entire state to the precipice of civil war. If not
in Carthage, Jo would have been assassinated at some point because he’d
so thoroughly demonstrated his ability to flaunt the law to the point
that only vigilante law could hold him accountable. So many times in his
life, he escaped death by the edge of unlikely circumstances and
high-profile lawyers helping him evade the law; his luck would run out
eventually. If not in Carthage than somewhere else down the line.</p>
<p>Regardless of responsibility, when Governor Ford made his way into
Nauvoo and held this little meeting Porter apparently barged in on to
grab his hat, thousands of Mormons came out to attend his public speech
and he mustered the disbanded Nauvoo Legion. He remembers a few details
of his speech in his History of Illinois. It’s also reported in the
History of the Church in much briefer form, so let’s start there and
then see what Ford himself remembered of the speech.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… the Governor was making to the Saints in Nauvoo, one of the most
infamous and insulting speeches that ever fell from the lips of an
executive; among other things he said, “a great crime has been done by
destroying the <em>Expositor</em> press and placing the city under martial
law, and a <em>severe atonement must be made</em>, SO PREPARE YOUR MINDS FOR
THE EMERGENCY. Another cause of excitement is the fact of your having
so many firearms; the public are afraid that you are going to use them
against government. I know there is a great prejudice against you on
account of your peculiar religion, but you ought to be praying Saints,
not military Saints. Depend upon it, a little more misbehavior from
the citizens, and the torch which is now already lighted will be
applied, the city may be reduced to ashes, and extermination would
inevitably follow; and it gave me great pain to think that there was
danger of so many innocent women and children being exterminated. If
anything of a serious character should befall the lives or property of
the persons who are prosecuting your leaders, you will be held
responsible.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was viewed as unfair treatment, persecution, and downright
prejudice by the Governor, but I fail to see any point in it where he’s
actually wrong. Yes, a great crime was committed by destroying the
Nauvoo Expositor, yes somebody had to pay the legal price for it, yes
the non-Mormon neighbors of the Mormons were incredibly intimidated by
the Mormons having so many guns and a militia larger than any other
state in the country, yes the Mormons had used their guns and militia
against the government before so the people nearby were afraid what
happened in Missouri would happen in Illinois, yes they ought to be
praying saints instead of military saints because that would be much
less intimidating and probably would cause the non-Mormon neighbors to
be more friendly, yes a little more misbehavior from the Mormons would
absolutely result in civil war and the government and vigilante militias
would eventually overwhelm the Mormon forces and burn Nauvoo to ashes
and another extermination order would quickly follow, yes if anything
bad happened to anybody who was trying to hold the leadership legally
accountable then the Mormons would be blamed. Taken in the context of
everything which transpired, this account of his speech doesn’t reveal
to me anything where Governor Ford was mistaken. He knew the situation
and he knew who the aggressors were. He knew about all the prejudice in
the neighboring cities and he also understood from where that prejudice
sprang. Believe it or not, the people of the day didn’t hate the Mormons
because they worshipped a false god, it’s because they were a criminal
empire with a supreme leader who flaunted the laws. Ford’s speech is
reported in such a way as to prejudice the reader against any government
official which is far more troubling to me than anything Ford actually
said. So let’s read what he remembered of his speech.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Having made these arrangements we proceeded on our march and arrived
at Nauvoo about four o’clock of the afternoon of the 27th day of June.
As soon as notice could be given, a crowd of citizens assembled to
hear an address which I proposed to deliver to them. The number
present has been variously estimated from one to five thousand.</p>
<p>In this address I stated to them how, and in what, their functionaries
had violated the laws. Also, the many scandalous reports in
circulation against them, and that these reports, whether true or
false, were generally believed by the people. I distinctly stated to
them the amount of hatred and prejudice which prevailed everywhere
against them, and the causes of it, at length.</p>
<p>I also told them plainly and emphatically, that if any vengeance
should be attempted openly or secretly against the persons or property
of the citizens who had taken part against their leaders, that the
public hatred and excitement was such, that thousands would assemble
for the total destruction of their city and the extermination of their
people; and that no power in the State would be able to prevent it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thanks to the preaching of Jo and other church leaders, the Mormons
viewed themselves as persecuted and unfairly treated by the system of
law. Jo had so successfully poisoned the well that even the Governor of
Illinois paying the Mormons a personal visit to tell them what’s going
on was treated with hostility and viewed as further evidence of the
persecution complex.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>During this address some impatience and resentment were manifested by
the Mormons, at the recital of the various reports enumerated
concerning them; which they strenuously and indignantly denied to be
true. They claimed to be a law-abiding people, and insisted that as
they looked to the law alone for their protection, so were they
careful themselves to observe its provisions. Upon the conclusion of
this address, I proposed to take a vote on the question, whether they
would strictly observe the laws, even in opposition to their prophet
and leaders. The vote was unanimous in favor of this proposition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ford was able to calm the tensions and get the people to vote to uphold
the laws, even if the verdict reached was against their supreme leader.
However, Ford has some other thoughts about the visit.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The anti-Mormons contended that such a vote from the Mormons signified
nothing; and truly the subsequent history of that people showed
clearly that they were loudest in their professions of attachment to
the law whenever they were guilty of the greatest extravagances; and
in fact, that they were so ignorant and stupid about matters of law,
that they had no means of judging the legality of their conduct, only
as they were instructed by their spiritual leaders.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo so deeply and thoroughly controlled the Mormons’ view of reality that
they trusted him to a fault. They trusted him to the point that
committing treason against the country was viewed by them as religious
discrimination. Anybody with as much power as Joseph Smith inevitably
creates situations like this where laws are seen as the infractions
against liberty, media is the enemy of the people, and any investigation
into the conduct of a demagogue like Jo is just a witch-hunt conducted
by unprincipled people with an agenda. It’s like, if you didn’t break
laws then there wouldn’t be any investigations, Jo.</p>
<p>Ford gave this speech then took supper at the Nauvoo Mansion, where Emma
prepared a meal for the men and the other patrons staying that night at
the Mansion. As they were taking supper in Nauvoo, they likely chatted
with Emma for some time. No record of any conversation they may have
shared survives today. I find it likely that Emma and Ford were on
first-name basis as Emma had been with the previous Governor Carlin, but
the extent of their acquaintanceship prior to this meal is unknown.</p>
<p>Ford remained in Nauvoo for the space of about 3 hours, having arrived
between 3 and 4, and departing around 6 or 7 that evening as the sun
sank lower into the hot and muggy June night. Meanwhile, Colonel Levi
Williams’s men were approaching ever-nearer to Carthage, having made an
alliance with the small contingent of Carthage Greys who remained on
guard. Brigadier-General Deming was stationed in or near the Carthage
jail to oversee the guards and supervise the change of guards cycling
out every 4-6 hours throughout the day. Franklin Worrel was the primary
guard on duty for the last cycle of duty that day. George Stigall, the
jailor, was engaging in conversation with the prisoners throughout the
day, he didn’t seem to hold much personal animus against the prisoners
in spite of being a Carthage resident. Jo chatted with Stigall about the
dissenters who printed the Expositor, William and Wilson Law, as well as
Joseph H. Jackson who Jo thought was responsible for so many of his
problems.</p>
<p>The men thought it weird. Stephen Markham had left the jail over an hour
ago to fetch a pipe and smoking tobacco but had yet to return. George
Stigall told Jo what happened. Markham had acquired the pipe and
tobacco, but as he was returning to the jail he was surrounded by a
small group of Carthage Greys and chased out of town. By this point in
the afternoon, the number of Jo loyalists in town was dwindling; Cyrus
Wheelock was out of town, Dan Jones had just been chased out and was
headed to Nauvoo after refusing to give up the letter he was taking to
Orville Browning, John S. Fullmer left for Nauvoo that morning carrying
verbal messages to the leadership prior to Governor Ford’s arrival, Joel
S. Miles also left that morning with the letter to Emma. Stephen Markham
was the last Jo loyalist in Carthage and the Greys wanted to rectify
that problem. According to Markham, “a man by the Name of Stewart”
approached him and told him to leave town, stating he had 5 minutes to
comply with the order. Markham refused to comply and attempted to make
his way toward the jail, at which point this Stewart guy charged Markham
with his bayonet. A scuffle ensued and a group of Greys rallied behind
their friend and surrounded Stephen Markham, Piggy-bank Steve, with
their bayonet-equipped rifles. They told Markham that if he didn’t leave
town they’d kill him on the spot. They got Markham’s horse and forced
him out of town at gunpoint.</p>
<p>The jailor, George Stigall, conveyed this information to Jo. Now, the
only Jo loyalists in Carthage were Hyrum Sidekick-Abiff Smith, White-out
Willard Richards, John Taylor, and Jo himself. All these men were in the
jail itself and only White-out Willard had a pass to come and go as he
pleased. The walls of the jail were already suffocating, but the walls
of the village of Carthage were closing in on the prophet.</p>
<p>They could all sense that the situation wasn’t right. It was getting
more tense in town. The guards who changed over at 4 were more
confrontational and seemed hostile. Governor Ford wasn’t expected to
return until the next day and they knew if he was in town they were
safe, but right now he was 18 miles away; his promises of safety were
now just hollow words. The men attempted to pass the time and comfort
each other. The jailor, George Stigall could sense that something was
wrong as well. He suggested they stay the night in the jail of the upper
floor, which had a locking gate on the door. “Suggested that th[e]y
would be safer in the jail”. Jo didn’t like jail cells and he’d been in
them on previous occasions, but he agreed with Stigall, “Joseph said
after supper we will go in”. The door to the jail also had a functioning
latch. The upper story apartment was broken and Fullmer and Markham had
fiddled with the latch with their penknife to make it work, but they
weren’t very successful and the latch didn’t work very well.</p>
<p>As the reality of the situation set in, Jo turned to White-out Willard
Richards and asked him a hard question.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we go in the jail will you go in with us.-- Dr answe[re]d Bro
Joseph you did not ask me to cross the river with you--you did not ask
me to come to ca[r]thage.--you did not ask me to come to Jail with
you--and do you think I would forsake you now.--But I will tell you
what I will do--if you are condemned to be hung for treason I will be
hung. In your stead & you shall go freee. Joseph [“]you
cannot[“].-- Dr said [“]I will[“].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Remember, White-out Willard wasn’t charged with any crimes and had a
pass to leave the jail at any time, which would render the same
treatment as Stephen Markham and Dan Jones of being chased out of town
at gunpoint, but at least he’d be able to make it back to Nauvoo. It was
his decision to be in the jail that evening as the situation became more
intense all around them. White-out Willard was nothing if not loyal to
his superiors; whether that be Jo or his cousin, Bloody Brigham Young as
his counselor in the nation of Deseret.</p>
<p>The 4 men were powerless to change their circumstances. All they could
do was pass the time and hope they’d be safe. After supper, instead of
going to the jail, they remained in the upper apartment of the jail,
protected only by a thin wooden door with a broken latch. Hyrum picked
up his 1830 copy of The Works of Flavius Josephus and read from it for a
while.</p>
<p>Some have claimed that Hyrum also thumbed through the Book of Mormon at
this time and read some passages, possibly even doggy-earing one page.
That’s not true, at least there’s no contemporary record of him reading
anything this day other than Josephus.</p>
<p>To help pass the time and comfort the mens’ nerves, John Taylor sang a
hymn derived from an 1826 poem titled “The Stranger and His Friend”.
He’d learned it while on his mission in England back in 1841 and it’s
since been adapted by Protestant churches as a hymn titled “A Poor
Wayfaring Man of Grief.”</p>
<p>After John Taylor concluded singing, it left the men contemplative and
at peace. Hyrum requested he sing it again, to which Taylor complied.
The jailor’s son brought some water to the men, and they requested to
see the jailor himself, George Stigall. As Stephen Markham had been
chased out of Carthage before he could deliver the pipe and smoking
tobacco, they were still wanting to satisfy their palettes. Jo asked
Stigall if he could bring them “a bottle of wine. pipe & 2 small papers
off tobacco”. Jo gave Stigall 2 and a half dollars, but Stigall refused
and said a dollar was enough. He returned in a few moments with the
materials that would get all 4 men excommunicated from the church today
and they partook to help calm their nerves. The guard had changed over;
Franklin Worrel was the guard on duty with a devious plan conceived by
him and Colonel Levi Williams. White-out Willard Richards scratched his
final entry in his journal for that day “4. o clock changed guard.--
4.15--”.</p>
<p>Governor Ford was having a friendly chat with Emma as she fed him supper
while 4 months pregnant with little David Hyrum Smith; the rest of the
Smith children, Julia, Joseph III, Frederick, and Alexander, scampered
about the house, not knowing why everybody was so anxious and an odd
feeling pervaded the Mormon community. They only knew daddy and uncle
Hyrum were gone and mom and Aunt Mary were more stressed than usual with
all these strange men visiting the house. Eliza Snow sat anxiously in
the Stephen Markham home as Stephen returned home, having left his
walking cane behind in his haste to flee Carthage at gunpoint;
Piggy-bank Steve undoubtedly regaled Eliza with what happened in
Carthage that morning. Leonora Snow took supper with her husband Isaac
Morley and sister-wife, Lucy, in the little Mormon settlement of Yelrom
south of Carthage; they hadn’t received word for quite some time about
what was going on in Nauvoo or nearby Carthage and they couldn’t rely on
any information they did get as it had to pass through Carthage before
reaching Yelrom. Maybe they’d be forced to give up their guns and flee
to the motherland of Nauvoo before all this was over, maybe they’d be
allowed to exist happily in their communistic village. Brigadier-General
Deming, who was loyal to Governor Ford and tasked with overseeing the
guard duties of the jail, could sense a mutiny was afoot as the newest
guards under Frank Worrel were confrontational and more abusive to the
prisoners than the previous; Deming went on high-alert. As all these
people took their supper, Colonel Levi Williams with his best friend,
ThomASS Sharp, and his troops of roughly 150 men could see Carthage on
the horizon as the sun lazily sunk to their right, casting long shadows
to the left of the riders on their southward journey. The plan was in
place, the actors in their places on stage for the jail attack to be a
success.</p>
<p>Jo’s closest confidants, the Quorum of Apostles, were scattered all over
the nation preaching and holding important meetings for Jo’s
presidential campaign. Amasa Lyman was in Cincinnati, George A. Smith,
who we have to thank for the History of the Church, was in Jacksonburg,
Michigan, John E. Page was in Pittsburgh working on publishing a
propaganda pamphlet and he’d soon be joined by Hingepin Rigdon who was
passing on a steamer through St. Louis on his way to Pittsburgh to
electioneer as well. Rigdon got out before the real heat turned up, just
a couple days before Jo and Hyrum surrendered. Rigdon’s leadership was
the contingency plan if everything went south for Jo and Hyrum. Orson
Hyde was in D.C. holding high-level meetings with fellow Masons trying
to sell Jo as a viable POTUS candidate, Jo’s brother Crazy Willey Smith
was somewhere in the east, possibly Boston or New York City, Heber the
Creeper Kimball was hanging out with Lyman Wight, the Wild Ram of the
Mountain, in Philadelphia heading to a conference that would be held in
Boston, presided over by Bloody Brigham and Willey Goat Wilford Woodruff
who were already there preparing for the conference. Of all these church
leaders, only Rigdon had the latest intel and had any idea of what was
going on in Nauvoo; the others weren’t even aware the Nauvoo Expositor
had been published, much less that the press was destroyed, Nauvoo had
been placed under martial law and the Legion was disbanded, and Jo and
Hyrum were in jail while Governor Ford was there handling matters
personally.</p>
<p>Oh Joseph and Hyrum, I regret to tell you, your die is cast, your doom
is fixed, you are sentenced to be shot. This is the moment we’ve all
been waiting for.</p>
<p>Hey patrons. We haven’t talked for a while. You’ve been with me for this
entire journey. I wanted to show my gratitude with something special
today. Next week we begin the end of an era for this podcast. After
that, I’m going away for a while because I owe y’all a book or two and
your old researcher, producer, host, editor, and marketer needs a break
for a bit. But, I’ve got a few plans to finish out this series and what
lies ahead so be sure to keep email notifications for this podcast
active so you can keep up with what’s going on during the coming hiatus.
For today, I wanted to give y’all a little something special. It’s
something I’ve never done on the podcast and it’s certainly not going to
be everybody’s cup of tea, but I hope you’ll briefly indulge me. Before
that, a little story.</p>
<p>When you go through the Carthage jail tour, the guide takes you through
each room of the jail. You start in the kitchen and then check out the
downstairs apartment and jail cells. Then you go up the stairs and see
the jail cells up there, after which the guide takes you into the
debtors apartment where the gunfight happened. Of course, the guide is
telling you the white-washed story each step of the way. When you’re in
this historic room, it’s filled with benches for tourist seating. You
take a seat and the tour guide continues to tell the story, after which
they play a tape. The audio is basically John Taylor’s recounting of the
assassination with a few liberties and some foley work of the angry mob
and gunshots, stuff like that. However, for a portion of the tape, the
narrator hands it off to another vocalist who sings A Poor Wayfaring Man
of Grief acapella. It’s a pretty weird experience if you’re not there to
build your testimony. After the tape plays the missionary bears their
testimony and the tour is completed, leaving everybody to depart in
either an awkward or a ponderous state of mind.</p>
<p>I had a similar experience at the Independence, Missouri visitor’s
center. My tour guides were two sister missionaries who concluded the
our tour by calling over two other sisters who then sang a song acapella
to the tour group. It probably would have been much less weird if that
tour group consisted of more people than just me. But, they were
prepared for the expected outcome because before they sang to me they
made it a point to ostentatiously hand me a box of tissues.</p>
<p>I’ve read poetry on the show before because I believe music and poetry
are capable of conveying a message narration simply can’t. So, if this
isn’t too weird, I give you, A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief… The Bryce
Blankenagel rendition.</p>
<p>A poor wayfaring man of grief</p>
<ol>
<li>
<blockquote>
<p>1. A poor wayfaring Man of grief<br />
Hath often crossed me on my way,<br />
Who sued so humbly for relief<br />
That I could never answer nay.<br />
I had not pow’r to ask his name,<br />
Whereto he went, or whence he came;<br />
Yet there was something in his eye<br />
That won my love; I knew not why.</p>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>
<blockquote>
<p>2. Once, when my scanty meal was spread,<br />
He entered; not a word he spake,<br />
Just perishing for want of bread.<br />
I gave him all; he blessed it, brake,<br />
And ate, but gave me part again.<br />
Mine was an angel’s portion then,<br />
For while I fed with eager haste,<br />
The crust was manna to my taste.</p>
</blockquote>
</li>
<li>
<blockquote>
<p>3. I spied him where a fountain burst<br />
Clear from the rock; his strength was gone.<br />
The heedless water mocked his thirst;<br />
He heard it, saw it hurrying on.<br />
I ran and raised the suff’rer up;<br />
Thrice from the stream he drained my cup,<br />
Dipped and returned it running o’er;<br />
I drank and never thirsted more.</p>
</blockquote>
</li>
</ol>
<p>A poor wayfaring Man of grief</p>
<p>Who answered the call to endless sleep</p>
<p>He sued so often for deceit</p>
<p>That I could never wash his feet</p>
<p>I have not pow’r to call him good</p>
<p>For theft, deception, nor shining wood</p>
<p>Yet there’s a story compelling me</p>
<p>To study and learn, for why; conceit.</p>
<p>Once magic and theft and polygamy</p>
<p>Stole my sleep and filled my feed</p>
<p>Twice reinvented in search of me</p>
<p>And wanting, hoping to be freed</p>
<p>Thrice broken, lost, flesh from the bone</p>
<p>I find myself wand’ring new, alone.</p>
<p>And now acacia holds the key</p>
<p>No longer I see hypocrisy</p>
<p>Egypt, Eleusis, Greek Pantheon</p>
<p>Each carry a part but grasp for straws</p>
<p>Atilla, Muhamed, Napoleon</p>
<p>Culling vermin; shock and awe</p>
<p>But to break the cycle is my plea</p>
<p>Never enough but always too late</p>
<p>To murder a tyrant is the game</p>
<p>And fracture undue felonious fame</p>
<p>Thank you, patrons.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 8 - The Final HourRoad to Carthage 7 – Pride2020-08-20T20:00:00-07:002020-08-20T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/08/20/road-to-carthage-7-pride<p>Road to Carthage 7 - Pride</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine the pride and arrogance of Joseph Smith,
founder of Mormonism.</p>
<p>Show links:<br />
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<p>I’m proud to be an American!</p>
<p>Why? Why is being born in a certain time in a certain place something to
take pride in? Is it the indoctrination of nationalism that invades our
culture and everyday conversations, slowly degrading the foundations of
societies across the world? There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in
what we do; what we achieve, what we accomplish, what we create. We take
pride in these because we worked for them. Pride, however, carries a
stigma. So much so, that there are entire lesson manuals in the church
about the pride cycle.</p>
<p>The pride cycle from the Book of Mormon goes like this. The chosen
people of god are super righteous and god blesses them with wealth and
prosperity. Then, they become prideful and forget that god is
responsible for giving them all their worldly possessions. They fall
away from god, and god curses them, thus destroying everything that gave
them pride to begin with, killing their friends and families, and often
burning their cities to the ground. This causes the chosen people to be
humbled by the curses of god. They become righteous because of this
humbling and change in skin color to whiteness and delightsomeness and
then god begins to bless them. The cycle then repeats and thus we have
what’s known to Mormons as The Pride Cycle. It exists in the macro with
various cities and groups of people in the Book of Mormon but it’s also
a pattern that emerges when considering the entire narrative of the Book
of Mormon’s 3000 year story. Just like any work of literature, the Book
of Mormon contains lessons we can take from its pages that are never
printed in any church-printed manual for actual instruction. We can’t
have the masses pondering their existence and morality beyond what we
tell them, can we? Nobody will give you the knowledge you need to
overthrow them.</p>
<p>Whether it’s the noble unwilling leader rising to greatness in a time of
calamity, 3 magi wandering time and space teaching mortals the mysteries
of existence, an promising underdog who overcomes great trials and
receives recognition from a member of high society, initiates learning
their strengths and weaknesses, the cycle of life, death, and the
rebirth of people and nations, the dichotomies of peace and war, light
and dark, good and evil, wealth and poverty, the Book of Mormon actually
contains some story-telling elements of chaos and Hermetic philosophy
that are worth exploration in the abstract, ignoring the claims of
divinity. It’s because of these deeper lessons, all replete throughout
what we consider the great classic literature, that nuanced believers
can consider the Book of Mormon as divinely inspired while not being
accurate history. Those people see divinely inspired lessons in every
work of art, literature, and philosophy regardless of whether or not the
work claims to be scripture. I see these lessons too without any appeal
to divine origin. They’re stories that have existed for thousands of
years and underpin nearly every element of philosophical exploration. We
take the lessons, repackage them, change the names of the protagonist
and antagonist, and retell a different story with the same lesson
underneath it all. Every story has been told, every word has been
spoken. The more of these stories we consume, the more we see the
connective threads; the more the strings that tug on reality come into
focus. Only then can we spread our wings to fly far away and teach these
lessons to the next generation. Somehow, someday, I hope you’ll
understand.</p>
<p>Samantha Payne, a schoolmate of Joseph Smith in Manchester, New York,
said in 1880 that “he was regarded as … a braggadocio,” among other
things. Confidence is an attractive feature. But confidence, like every
other character trait, is a tool that can be wielded for good and evil
alike. Confidence has a few ugly twins, arrogance, narcissism, audacity,
and taken to extremes confidence can morph into a god complex.</p>
<p>Jo’s arrogance is clearly rooted in his childhood, like every other
narcissist who preceded and followed him. According to a New York
neighbor named Daniel Hendrix, Lucy Mack Smith was “a great admirer of
her son, despite his shiftless and provoking ways. She always declared
that he was born with a genius, and did not have to work.” According to
Hendrix, she once remarked that “the boy will be able some of these days
to buy the whole of Palmyra and all the folks in it. You don’t know what
a brain my boy has under that old hat” (EMD 3:212). Neighbor Wallace
Miner, on whose land Joe dug out a 20-foot cave, claimed that Mother
Lucy “was told in a dream she would give birth to a son who would be a
great leader” (EMD 3:255). Orsamus Turner, a local historian, wrote in
1851 that “The incipient hints, the first givings out that a Prophet was
to spring from her humble household, came from her” (EMD 3:48).</p>
<p>In a large family with scarce resources, arrogance became a survival
mechanism to get more attention, and therefore resources, than his
siblings. This evolved beyond the Smith family dynamics and became a
success formula in Jo’s teenage years. Ep 10, 11, 12.</p>
<p>Joe carefully crafted a reputation as a powerful seer and conjuror
during his treasure-digging days, but in the Book of Mormon he took the
myth of Joseph Smith to the next level. In the autobiographical first
portion of the Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi Chapter 3, the prophet Lehi is on
his deathbed, speaking to his son Nephi. Lehi says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>4 For behold, thou art the fruit of my loins; and I am a descendant of
Joseph who was carried captive into Egypt. . . . 6 For Joseph truly
testified, saying: A seer shall the Lord my God raise up, who shall be
a choice seer unto the fruit of my loins. 7 Yea, Joseph truly said:
Thus saith the Lord unto me: A choice seer will I raise up out of the
fruit of thy loins; and he shall be esteemed highly among the fruit of
thy loins. And unto him will I give commandment that he shall do a
work for the fruit of thy loins, his brethren, which shall be of great
worth unto them, even to the bringing of them to the knowledge of the
covenants which I have made with thy fathers. 8 And I will give unto
him a commandment that he shall do none other work, save the work
which I shall command him. And I will make him great in mine eyes; for
he shall do my work. 9 And he shall be great like unto Moses, whom I
have said I would raise up unto you, to deliver my people, O house of
Israel. . . 13 And out of weakness he shall be made strong, in that
day when my work shall commence among all my people, unto the
restoring thee, O house of Israel, saith the Lord. 14 And thus
prophesied Joseph, saying: Behold, that seer will the Lord bless; and
they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded; for this promise,
which I have obtained of the Lord, of the fruit of my loins, shall be
fulfilled. Behold, I am sure of the fulfilling of this promise; 15 And
his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of
his father. And he shall be like unto me; for the thing, which the
Lord shall bring forth by his hand, by the power of the Lord shall
bring my people unto salvation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mormons are taught in Sunday school that this is the Book of Mormon
prophecy of Joseph Smith. But if we view the Book of Mormon not as an
ancient history, but a product of Jo’s own mind, Joe produced this
ancient book of scripture, and into it he writes a prophecy about
himself: a future “choice seer” named Joseph, the son of Joseph,
descended from the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi and the biblical prophet
Joseph of Egypt. He will be great like Moses, and he’ll save the entire
world, and anyone who dares to oppose him will be crushed by the power
of God. And oh, my favorite part: God commands him to do no work except
the work of God. Remember a few episodes ago when we went through 30
pages of script about Jo’s idleness and his desire to avoid physical
labor at all costs? That revelation about him not having any strength in
temporal labors also makes its way into the Book of Mormon. All things
considered, if writing a new book of scripture as a sequel to the Bible
weren’t audacious enough, writing a prophecy about himself into that
book of scripture says a lot about Jo’s character and opinion of
himself. Ep 17.</p>
<p>Joe didn’t stop at writing himself into the Book of Mormon. That wasn’t
enough for him, so he also created his own inspired revision of the
BIBLE. And he “restored” a lot of “plain and precious parts” that he
claimed had been removed from the Bible by the eeeevil Catholics,
including a version of that same “choice seer” prophecy that appears in
the Book of Mormon. Genesis chapter 50 has eleven-and-a-half brand new
verses, all about the future coming of Joseph, son of Joseph. I won’t
read them to you, because they’re basically cut-and-pasted right out of
the Book of Mormon passage I already read. So many Christians consider
Joseph Smith or Mormonism to be anti-Christ or heretical; the charge is
understandable when we consider the sanctity of the Bible itself and
Jo’s audacity in writing his own version to complement all his other
scriptures and revelations.</p>
<p>The very act of writing new scripture is arrogant to begin with, but I
want to examine an aspect of Jo’s scriptures that bear strict scrutiny,
white supremacy, the most caustic, divisive, deadly, and hereditary of
all versions of arrogance. People will often claim that Joseph was
progressive considering he ordained a black man, Elijah Able, into the
priesthood. Well, Elijah Able was a rather white and delightsome
African-American, and it’s unclear whether Joe even knew he had African
ancestry or maybe Jo ordained Able as an example of how a black man can
become righteous enough that his skin will turn white and delightsome.
It was Brigham Young who applied the curse of Cain to black people and
barred them from getting the priesthood, but he built that priesthood
ban policy on teachings from the scriptures that Joe wrote. Jo’s own
priesthood discrimination is far more conjectural and less defined than
Bloody Brigham’s.</p>
<p>In Joe’s translation of Genesis, he makes some changes to the Bible
story in which Noah gets drunk and his son Ham makes fun of him. In the
original Bible story, after Noah sobers up, he curses Ham’s son Canaan
to be a servant to his brothers. In Joe’s version of the story, Noah’s
cursing of Canaan includes not only servitude, but also black skin. And
I quote, “there was a blackness come upon all the Children of Canaan
that they were dispised among all people . . . Noah awoke from his wine
and k[n]ew what his younger son had done unto him, and he said cursed
be Canaan a Servent of servents shall he be unto his breatheren and he
said blessed be the Lord God of Shem and Canaan shall be his servent and
a vail of darkness shall cover him that he shall be known among all
men.” Jo provided a religious explanation for keeping black people in
slavery, just like every other anti-abolitionist Christian of his time.
His explanation, however, didn’t involve interpretation of Biblical
verses so much as rewriting them to say what he wanted them to say.</p>
<p>The Book of Mormon, JS translation of the Bible, Book of Moses, Book of
Abraham, and Doctrine and Covenants, all include multiple passages of
white supremacy and manifest destiny. We don’t have to discuss the
damage caused to humanity by these elitist concepts because we’ve
discussed them ad nauseum on this show. Eps 165, 170, 189, 214.</p>
<p>As Jo’s ministry matured, he continued to elevate himself above all
else. Whether it was dissenters in the ranks, rival religious groups, or
religious instruction concerning the mysteries of gods kingdom, Jo
always needed to be the epicenter of expertise and attention in his
religious group. A cult of personality centered around the religious
dicta of one man is just a religious cult. Jo hoarded the limelight and
attention of any group of people, a polarizing character trait that
served to build him up and tear him down at different points in his
life. In Kirtland we see a dramatic example of this when we examine the
Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Abraham.</p>
<p>In August 1835, Oliver Cowdery… Cowdung Allover… because nicknames are
hard… you know what, screw it, I’m proud of it as one of my earliest
creations even if it wasn’t my best work. COWDUNG ALLOVER presented the
Doctrine and Covenants to the Church leadership, and a bunch of guys got
up and testified that it was true, and then they all voted to accept it
as scripture. Now, here’s the weird part about this. Most of these
revelations had already been published a few years earlier, in the 1833
Book of Commandments, which had a limited printing because the Missouri
mob burned down the printing press in the middle of production, making
the surviving copies super rare. If you have a Book of Commandments,
give me a call, I’m sure we can work something out and my dignity is
dirt cheap. Now the Church republished them in the Doctrine and
Covenants in 1835 with the Lectures on Faith as part of the production.
But, Jo and a committee of other Church leaders heavily edited the
revelations in between these two publications with only 2 years
separating them. There are thousands and thousands of differences. And
yet these are supposed to be revelations from God! That same god that
said I’m the same yesterday, today, and forever… just changed his mind.
If I’m God and I give my words to a prophet, and within two years that
miscreant makes radical changes to the words I gave him, I’d be pretty
pissed… Maybe I’d even curse the dude for changing my unchangeable
words. These words in the D&C are immutable truths meant to be passed
down through generations of believers in me, and they have the arrogance
to change the words that came out of my mouth through my mouthpiece who
I went through the trouble of appearing in the woods to just 10 years
earlier?! How dare you, Joseph Smith?! How dare you think you know the
mind of god better than god himself?! Either God messed up or Jo had to
retcon god’s words to fit an evolving narrative. This is maddening
because people often talk about the thousands of edits in the Book of
Mormon like that’s a problem to the narrative; it is, but what about the
tens of thousands of changes in the Doctrine and Covenants. Maybe Jo
made an error in translating the gold plates, but there’s absolutely no
excuse for changing the direct revelations from god after the
revelations are initially dictated. Friend of the show, Joel Kuhn,
Indiana, made an awesome tool for comparing the different versions of
the D&C at comparedandc.com. Look it up, see for yourself just how much
god changes his mind about consequential and important stuff in early
Mormonism. Or, just listen to My Book of Mormon podcast and you’ll hear
about all the differences in historical context.</p>
<p>The D&C are one thing, but let’s talk about the Book of Abraham, we
need to discuss a man named Antonio Lebolo. Antonio Lebolo was the
superintendent over a huge archaeological dig site in Egypt between 1818
and 1822. He was tasked with coordinating the discovered and stolen
artifacts. Lebolo amassed a large collection of Egyptian Papyri and
mummies to be shipped to a collector in New York, where Michael Chandler
was able to purchase a bunch of these for resale. Chandler paraded these
mummies and Papyri around the east coast from 1833 to 1835, selling some
of them, and charging people to view them. Chandler made a pretty good
living on the road with these artifacts, but his biggest score was
awaiting him in Kirtland, Ohio. While Chandler was charging 25 cents for
adults to view the artifacts, he would soon be given $2400 for the
purchase of all the remaining artifacts in his possession -- that’s
about $62,000 today. Ep 33.</p>
<p>On July 3<!-- raw HTML omitted -->rd<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1835, he found his way to Kirtland. He may have
heard about Joe’s miraculous translating abilities. Joe looked at the
papyrus scrolls and pronounced them to be the records of the biblical
patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Well, not a single person in America at
the time could read Egyptian hieroglyphics, so there was no one to
gainsay Joe. Being the astute artifact dealer he was, Chandler supported
Joe’s claim of their origins as a sales tactic. He gave Joe a signed
certificate that said, “from the information that I could ever learn, or
meet with [about the meaning of these papyri], I find that of Mr.
Joseph Smith, Jun., to correspond in the most minute matter.”</p>
<p>According to the History of the Church, “Soon after this, some of the
Saints at Kirtland purchased the mummies and papyrus, a description of
which will appear hereafter, and with WW. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery as
scribes, I commenced the translation of some of the characters or
hieroglyphics.” Joe wasn’t as interested in the mummies as he was in the
papyri, but Chandler refused to sell one without the other, and he
charged Joe $2400 for the lot and left Kirtland with a smile on his face
and pockets full of coin. Apologists will point to Chandler’s signed
statement as proof that the Book of Abraham is what Jo claimed it to be,
but why would Chandler contradict the almighty prophet of the almighty
god when he could sell the artifacts for an order of magnitude more than
he would have sold them anywhere else? Michael Chandler being a good
salesman is a greater indictment of Jo’s knowledge and expertise than
Chandler’s.</p>
<p>Joe immediately began translating, but he only got a couple chapters of
the Book of Abraham and a booklet called the Egyptian Alphabet and
Grammar done before he back-burnered the project for 7 years. The fact
that the translations weren’t yet complete didn’t stop the prophet from
leveraging the papyri and mummies in the meantime. The 4 mummies out of
their respective sarcophagi and the papyri were exhibited in Kirtland in
the uppermost floor of the temple once completed in early 1836. Joe was
way more interested in having real-life antiquities to show off than he
was in translating whatever the papyri actually said. One was a money
maker, the other required actual effort and creative writing.</p>
<p>Finally, in March of 1842, nearly 7 years after acquisition of the
Egyptian collection, he authored a few more chapters of the Book of
Abraham and published them in the Church periodical “The Times and
Seasons.” along with 3 illustrations copied from the papyri. Joseph’s
interpretations of these documents obviously don’t line up with what
Egyptologists say they mean. These are common Egyptian funeral documents
that were buried with a corpse in order to guide the dead person into
the afterlife. They contain magic spells and invocations to various
Egyptian gods. But Jo turned the whole thing into an autobiographical
account written by the biblical patriarch Abraham, who supposedly lived
about 1000 BCE, “by his own hand upon papyrus.” Eps 103, 104.</p>
<p>The Book of Abraham contains plenty more white supremacy and serves as
the explicit scriptural basis for the priesthood ban. In Joe’s
translation of the illustration known as Facsimile 3, he interprets the
black-skinned god Anubis as a slave. And in Chapter 1, verses 26 and 27
of the Book of Abraham, we read this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Pharaoh, being a righteous man, established his kingdom and judged his
people wisely and justly all his days, seeking earnestly to imitate
that order established by the fathers in the first generations, in the
days of the first patriarchal reign, even in the reign of Adam, and
also of Noah, his father, who blessed him with the blessings of the
earth, and with the blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining
to the Priesthood. Now, Pharaoh being of that lineage by which he
could not have the right of Priesthood, notwithstanding the Pharaohs
would fain claim it from Noah, through Ham, therefore my father was
led away by their idolatry.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Remember, the lineage of Ham was the one that Joe claimed Noah cursed
with dark skin and slavery. Now Joe is saying that Ham’s lineage is also
“cursed as pertaining to the priesthood.” So Brigham Young may have been
the one who made it official Church policy that black men couldn’t be
ordained, but Joe’s the one who made up the whole white supremacist myth
that policy is based on and wrote it into Mormon scripture from all
eternity to all eternity. That’s why anything short of decanonization of
this wretched little book won’t suffice. Burn it. Burn all the Books of
Abraham. They’re pure 19th-century white supremacy masquerading as the
words of the almighty god. The least the church today could do is put a
disclaimer at the front of their scriptures talking about them being a
product of their time. Warner Brothers does it with their cartoons from
the 1950s and when a Christian media company that produced such gems as
“sunday go to meetin’ time, Confederate Honey, coal black and de
sebben dwarfs, Goldilocks and the jivin’ bears, Tokio Jokio, and Bugs
Bunny nips the nips” has the upper hand on Mormonism when it comes to
race issues there’s something deeply and cynically wrong. I’m sure
Warner Brothers made lots of money off that racism when those cartoons
were popular so those disclaimers in front of them nowadays don’t hurt
the royalty checks anymore. I digress...</p>
<p>Chapter 3 of the Book of Abraham is where things get really interesting.
While he worked on the Book of Abraham, Joe was studying Hebrew, reading
the Jewish historian Josephus, and also reading a book by Thomas Dick on
philosophy and astronomy. Jo just couldn’t resist the opportunity to
show off all his worldly knowledge in the Book of Abraham. Check this
out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And I, Abraham, had the Urim and Thummim, which the Lord my God had
given unto me, in Ur of the Chaldees; and I saw the stars also that
they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne
of God; and there were many great ones, which were near unto it; and
the Lord said unto me, these are the governing ones; and the name of
the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me: for I am the Lord
thy God, I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the
same order of that upon which thou standest. And the Lord said unto
me, by the Urim and Thummim, that Kolob was after the manner of the
Lord, according to its times and seasons in the Revolutions thereof,
that one revolution was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of
reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed
unto that whereon thou standest; this is the reckoning of the Lord’s
time, according to the reckoning of Kolob.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few things to discuss here. Abraham looks into his peep stone and sees
that God lives on a planet near a star named Kolob, and that planet
revolves around its sun so slowly that it takes a thousand Earth years
to make a single revolution, although to God this apparently only feels
like one day.</p>
<p>Astronomy wasn’t actually Joe’s strong suit, but he knew just enough to
feel supremely confident in writing scriptures about it. There’s a lot
of gobbledegook in the Book of Abraham, so I won’t read you the whole
thing, but the gist of it is that there’s a hierarchy of celestial
bodies in the universe, and as you move up the hierarchy, the celestial
bodies become more luminous and time slows down. Time is slower on the
moon than it is on the earth, and slower on the sun than it is on the
moon, and so forth up the hierarchy of celestial bodies until you come
to Kolob, which has the slowest time of all and governs the entire
visible universe that we can see when we look up at the stars at night.
This should make Kolob pretty easy to identify by modern astronomers,
one would think.</p>
<p>Kolob has two companion stars that together basically comprise a
celestial first presidency, then there are twelve moving stars like a
celestial Quorum of Twelve Apostles, and twelve fixed stars like a
celestial high council. The whole universe is structured like the
priesthood of the Church, and the primacy of Kolob over the universe is
cosmic evidence of the primacy of Joseph Smith over the Church. Not only
did this egomaniac write himself into the Bible, but he also wrote
himself into the literal stars through his scriptures.</p>
<p>But, another thing that absolutely cannot escape our skeptical eye is
the term Kolob itself. From where did Jo get this unique and odd term?
He probably picked it up during his first round of Hebrew studies after
the Egyptian papyri were purchased. Hebrew is an efficient language of
consonants, meaning translators are responsible for putting in the
vowels they best estimate to match the meaning of the original author.
That means Kolob in Hebrew would just be KLB, which translates to dog.
This has led Mormons to speculate that Kolob is actually sirius, or
Alpha Canis Majoris, also called “the Dog Star”, as it’s the brightest
star in the night sky. You can see it in the night sky by tracing the
three stars of Orion’s Belt that form a line to the nose of Canis
Majoris, which is the Dog Star. From that passage in the Book of Abraham
claiming Kolob is the brightest star was just Jo using the Hebrew word
for Canis Majoris and saying “God lives there” while pointing at the
brightest star in the sky. However, where I find this to be interesting
is where the term klb or “Dog” comes up in the Bible. In the Bible, dogs
are always defiled and dirty creatures. In Deuteronomy ch 23:18 we find
where dogs are held in regard as low as prostitutes. KJV</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into
the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these are
abomination unto the LORD thy God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Basically, if you’re making a money offering to god as tithing, you
better not make your money by being a sex worker, or give him the price
a dog costs? That doesn’t seem right. Well, let’s look at the NIV
translation of the same verse to see if klb can take on a different
meaning.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male
prostitute into the house of the LORD your God to pay any vow, because
the LORD your God detests them both.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the Book of Abraham was published and the passage we read earlier
was actually fleshed out, polygamy was being practiced among the closest
acolytes of the prophet; he’d soon write the revelation that the only
men who ascend to become gods are those with multiple wives. Yes… Joseph
Smith said that god grew up on a planet nearest the star… gigolo. Not
only does god have probably millions of wives that we don’t talk about
because we may or may not have the same heavenly mother from one dude,
but god grew up on a planet ruled by the star male sex worker.</p>
<p>Did… did Jo just get us all? Was that deliberate? The word Kolob had to
come from somewhere in his brain… Like… did he just send a signal to
everybody in the future who’d study him? Was that one of the mysteries
to his kingdom that only those with spiritual eyes could see? If so,
that’s boldfaced egotism if ever I did see it in all my days studying
this hubris-filled narcissist.</p>
<p>After moving to Missouri, one project Joe worked on there in 1838 was an
official history of his life. Moses had the Book of Moses, Abraham had
the Book of Abraham, Nephi had the Book of Nephi. This was Joe Smith’s
Book of Joe Smith. He used it to construct an epic legend of his life
and to smooth over some rough spots in his personal autobiography. And
when I say smooth over some rough spots, I mean he totally revised and
fabricated facts about his life and apologists have been shouldered with
the unenviable task of harmonizing the plot holes ever since.</p>
<p>I can think of no greater example of historical revisionism than Joseph
Smith’s first-vision account. From his first iteration in 1832 to this
official 1839 version that’s canonized as Mormon scripture in the Pearl
of Great Price, dozens of important foundational claims are wildly
different and the first vision serves to be a catalyst for many people
losing their Mormon faith. Eps 19, 24, 32, 33.</p>
<p>Joe had written his first account of the First Vision in 1832. According
to this account, he felt convicted of his sins, and he couldn’t find a
church that matched the one he had read about in the New Testament, so
he prayed and “the Lord” appeared and forgave him of his sins. This 1832
story was already an evolution from the first dictated account written
by Ollie which became Book of Commandments Ch 24, or modern D&C section
20.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For, after it truly was manifested unto this first elder [Joseph
Smith], that he had received a remission of his sins, he was
entangled again in the vanities of the world;</p>
<p>But after truly repenting, God ministered unto him by an holy angel,
whose countenance was as lightning, and whose garments were pure and
white above all whiteness, and gave unto him commandments which
inspired him from on high, and gave unto him power, by the means which
were before prepared, that he should translate a book;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s absolutely nothing in there about God or Jesus appearing, just
god ministering to Jo through a supremely white angel who’s unnamed and
doesn’t determine whether it was a resurrected being or a spirit. Jo
wouldn’t come up with the handshake litmus test for true or familiar
spirits for another few years. This is actually the first dictated
version of the first vision, but it wasn’t published until 1833, making
his own 1832 account generally agreed to be the first first vision
account. But even from his 1830 dictation of his revelation to the 1832
version he wrote by his own hand we see legendary evolution to serve a
false narrative of divine sanction when no such thing ever actually
happened.</p>
<p>He wrote his second account in 1835. In this version it wasn’t his sins
that bothered him; it was that he couldn’t decide which church was true.
So he went to the woods and prayed about it, but he encountered some
kind of demonic opposition that swelled his tongue in his mouth so he
couldn’t speak, and he heard footsteps approaching from behind him.
Cotton mouth is an annoying side effect some of us are all too familiar
with. On his third attempt to pray, he finally broke free of the demonic
influence and called out in mighty prayer. A pillar of fire appeared,
and a “personage” told him his sins were forgiven and Jesus is the son
of God. He also saw many angels. The 1832 account hadn’t mentioned the
demonic attack, the pillar of fire, or the angels.</p>
<p>And finally, in 1838, he gave the version in his official history. This
version starts the same way as the 1835 account: he was trying to figure
out which church is true, so he prayed in the woods, and his tongue
swelled in his mouth. But instead of hearing footsteps behind him, in
this version he saw darkness all around him. He had his breakthrough
moment and saw a pillar of light, but in this version there were two
personages in the light rather than just one, and “One of them spake
unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—<em>This is My
Beloved Son. Hear Him!</em>” Joe asked the personages which of the churches
is true, and</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong;
and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an
abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt;
that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far
from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a
form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boy, God and Jesus sure have a lot to say in this version that Joe
apparently neglected to mention in 1832 and 1835. And, wait… God <em>and</em>
Jesus? Why do we suddenly have two personages when in the previous
versions it was just one? Jesus was there with his dad, and you just
forgot to mention that? And where did the pantheon of angels go?</p>
<p>With these few conflicting details about the nature of god, I’m barely
even scratching the surface of the historical revisionism that Joe does
in his official history. The details of his vision of Moroni change,
too. In some versions, <em>he gives the angel’s name as Nephi, not
Moroni</em>! JOE! The angel told you his name, and you can’t keep it
straight? Was it Nephi or Moroni??? In the span of 7 years in New York
and Kirtland, Jo not only changed the very words of god in the Book of
Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Bible, but he even changed the very
nature of god from a single personage in the sky, to legions of angels,
to god again, to god and Jesus in corporeal form, and forgot the name of
the angel who appeared to him who happened to be an integral character
in the Book of Mormon narrative and how the plates got buried in New
York for Jo to translate to begin with. You think George R.R. Martin
ever mixes up Ned Stark with Jon Snow in his interviews? It was never
Joseph Smith himself who made the mistake, it was the author of the
Evening and the Morning Star article… okay… That’s Ollie; You think
George R.R. Martin’s writing assistant ever mixes up Ned Stark and Jon
Snow?</p>
<p>All of these inconsistencies wouldn’t be a problem if Jo’s latest story
wasn’t canonized scripture because scripture is supposed to be God's
word and therefore perfect. But it is and now we have M. Russell Ballard
standing up in General Conference offering low-rent pseudo-apologetics
about his great great uncle by claiming we’re blessed to have at least 4
different accounts of the first vision. Replete throughout this era of
the History of the Church we find Jo and his closest acolytes preaching
about his history and how the Book of Mormon came to be. The propaganda
campaign started early and the very survival of the church relied on
people believing Jo’s lie. You lie for long enough to enough people and
they’ll call it their sincerely-held religious belief. To fabricate a
story, alter it to serve selfish ends, then canonize it as scripture,
meaning the holy word of god, then convince legions of foot-soldiers to
spread those lies, is an act of narcissistic self-importance that would
cause Eli Bosnick to blush, and he’s utterly shameless. Sure, you were a
9/11 truther at one point, but has anybody actually verified that story?
Has anybody compared his different tellings of when he first met Noah?
It just beggars belief.</p>
<p>Moving on! We’ve already talked quite a bit about Joe’s midnight flight
from Kirtland, Ohio to Far West, Missouri in December 1837, and his role
in starting a war against the Missourians throughout 1838. So if you’ve
listened to the rest of this series or episodes 39-50, then you already
know that the Mormons had made an agreement to stay in Caldwell County,
but when Joe showed up, he decided that God wanted the Saints to expand
into Daviess County and establish the settlement of Adam-ondi-Ahman
there. This would become a twin city Mormon headquarters to complement
Far West in Caldwell County, thus expanding the tactical advantages in
the coming war.</p>
<p>What I haven’t talked about yet is where the name Adam-ondi-Ahman comes
from. On May 19, 1838, Joe visited the area where he wanted to put a
settlement. Lyman Wight had already built a house there. According to
the History of the Church,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We pursued our course up the river, mostly through timber, for about
eighteen miles, when we arrived at Colonel Lyman Wight's home. He
lives at the foot of Tower Hill (a name I gave the place in
consequence of the remains of an old Nephite altar or tower that stood
the[r]e), where we camped for the Sabbath. In the afternoon I went
up the river about half a mile to Wight's Ferry, accompanied by
President Rigdon, and my clerk, George W. Robinson, for the purpose of
selecting and laying claim to a city plat near said ferry in Daviess
County, township 60, ranges 27 and 28, and sections 25, 36, 31, and
30, which the brethren called "Spring Hill," but by the mouth of the
Lord it was named Adam-ondi-Ahman, because, said He, it is the place
where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days
shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the Prophet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That bit about this being the place where Adam will come to sit in
judgment in the last days is canonized in LDS scripture as D&C 116. But
there’s more. Not only was this a Book of Mormon location with an old
Nephite altar, not only was it the place where Adam would return in the
last days, but it was also the place where Adam and Eve offered
sacrifices after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. According
to Heber C. Kimball on pages 209-210 of <em>The Life of Heber C. Kimball</em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Prophet Joseph called upon Brother Brigham, myself and others,
saying, “Brethren, come, go along with me, and I will show you
something,” He led us a short distance to a place where were the ruins
of three altars built of stone, one above the other, and one standing
a little back of the other, like unto the pulpits in the Kirtland
Temple, representing the order of three grades of Priesthood; “There,”
said Joseph, “is the place where Adam offered up sacrifice after he
was cast out of the garden.” The altar stood at the highest point of
the bluff. I went and examined the place several times while I
remained there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Listen. Joe wanted to put a settlement here, but he knew that his people
had made an agreement not to. So he had to give them <em>really good
reasons</em> to feel like this land belonged to them, no matter what they
had agreed to with the Missourians. So he came up with stories about
Nephites and Adam and Eve having lived here. Once again, You’re making
stuff up again, Joseph. He did this all the time, on the spot, to serve
short-sighted ends and those lies have forced over a century and a half
of apologists to try to harmonize and figure out exactly how the Garden
of Eden was in Jackson County, Missouri, while all the descendants of
Adam and Eve were Israelites in the middle east. Some say everything in
the bible before the flood actually happened in America and Noah’s ark
was built here, only to convey Noah to Mount Ararat when the flood was
over and the reset button was hit for all life on earth. Or maybe once
they left the Garden of Eden they wandered across the Atlantic Ocean all
the way to modern-day Jerusalem before they had Cain and Abel. Maybe the
spaceship that brought Jehovah, Peter, James, and John here just picked
up Adam and Eve and plopped them down in northern Africa as a courtesy.
I suppose pesky little facts like the Bible narrative itself don’t much
matter when you’re making your own militant Christian cult.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is, Joe didn’t think he had to abide by any
agreements with the Missourians, because he thought he was invincible.
Here’s an excerpt from a sermon he gave during the Missouri Mormon War
that resulted from his decision to expand into Daviess County. This is
from the <em>History of Reed Peck</em>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have yielded to the mob in Dewitt and now they are preparing to
strike a blow in Daviess, but I am determined that we will not give
another foot and I care not how many come against us, 10 or 10000 God
will send his angels to our deliverance and we can conquer 10000 as
easily as 10[!]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe clearly had delusions of single-handedly fighting off entire armies
with nothing but his god-power-infused fisticuffs. Obviously no angels
showed up, though, and Joe got a wake-up call when thousands of state
militiamen surrounded Far West ready to exterminate every single Mormon.
Fortunately for Joe’s followers, he came to his senses and realized that
he couldn’t win this fight through sheer force of ego. He ordered his
troops to lay down their arms and surrendered the town, immediately
sending a messenger to Adam-Ondi-Ahman instructing the leadership there
to do the same. A military leader worth his salt doesn’t buckle before a
shot is fired in the actual battle. Jo was a poser and his entire public
persona required he never break that prideful facade.</p>
<p>In Illinois Joe had a couple encounters that reminded him of Michael
Chandler showing up in Kirtland with the Egyptian papyri and mummies,
and he tried to duplicate his earlier success with the Book of Abraham.
Unfortunately for Joe, both of these encounters were hoaxes designed to
expose him for the fraud he was, and in his arrogance he fell for both
of them.</p>
<p>In the first case, a contemporary critic of Joseph Smith named Henry
Caswell picked up a copy of the March 1842 <em>Times and Seasons</em>, in which
was printed the Book of Abraham and the facsimiles from which the Book
of Abraham was supposedly translated. Caswell, a professor and reverend,
donned regular street clothes and embarked upon a journey to Nauvoo.
Caswell had on his person a copy of a Greek Psalter-- in other words, a
manuscript of the book of Psalms from the Bible, written in Greek. The
one Caswell had with him he estimated to be from about the 1200s C.E.</p>
<p>The day he arrived he toured the city. At Newell K. Whitney’s store he
“mentioned that I had been informed that Mr. Smith possessed some
remarkable Egyptian curiosities, which I wished to see. I added that, if
Mr. Smith could be induced to show me his treasures, I would show him in
return a very wonderful book which had lately come into my possession.”
He showed the worm-eaten book to the storekeeper and a group of
spectators, one of whom “declared that he knew it to be a revelation
from the Lord, and that probably it was one of the lost books of the
Bible providentially recovered. Looking at me with a patronizing air, he
assured me that I had brought it to the right place to get it
interpreted, for that none on earth but the Lord's Prophet could explain
it, or unfold its real antiquity and value.” The storekeeper agreed to
set up a meeting between Caswell and Joe.</p>
<p>When Caswell went to meet Joe, a crowd gathered, clamoring to see the
book.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I met Joseph Smith at a short distance from his dwelling, and was
regularly introduced to him by the storekeeper. . . . On entering the
house, chairs were provided for the prophet and myself, while the
curious and gaping spectators remained standing. I handed the book to
the prophet, and begged him to explain its contents. He asked me if I
had any idea of its meaning. I replied, that I believed it to be a
Greek Psalter; but that I should like to hear his opinion. "No he
said; "it ain't Greek at all, except, perhaps, a few words. What ain't
Greek, is Egyptian; and what ain't Egyptian, is Greek. This book is
very valuable. It is a dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics." Pointing
to the capital letters at the commencement of each verse, he said:
Them figures is Egyptian hieroglyphics; and them which follows, is the
interpretation of the hieroglyphics, written in the reformed Egyptian.
Them characters is like the letters that was engraved on the golden
plates."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe offered to buy the book, which was worth nothing to Caswell, since
he couldn’t read it. Caswell declined and said the book was worth many
hundred dollars. He also declined to lend the book to Joe. Caswell then
wrapped up the book and asked Joe to show him the Egyptian papyrus.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He [Joe] produced the glass frames which I had seen on the previous
day; but he did not appear very forward to explain the figures. I
pointed to a particular hieroglyphic, and requested him to expound its
meaning. No answer being returned, I looked up, and behold! the
prophet had disappeared. The Mormons told me that he had just stepped
out, and would probably soon return. I waited some time, but in vain:
and at length descended to the street in front of the store. Here I
heard the noise of wheels, and presently I saw the prophet in a light
waggon, flourishing his whip and driving away as fast as two fine
horses could draw him. As he disappeared from view, enveloped in a
cloud of dust, I felt that I had turned over another page in the great
book of human nature.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think we all get that sense occasionally when we study the life of
Joseph Smith. After Caswell’s interaction with Jo and Jo quickly fleeing
the scene of his own stupidity, Caswell approached Willard Richards
about the scenario, to which White-out Willard said, “sometimes Mr.
Smith speaks as a prophet, and sometimes as a mere man.” This story
highlights Jo’s arrogance and the ability of his friends to cover for
his lies. It didn’t matter the subject, Jo always had to be the most
knowledgeable in the room about it. Then, when he clearly lied, people
like White-out Willard were there to equivocate and excuse the behavior.
Millions have fallen into line behind these lies to protect the precious
name of a conceited man whose only abilities where he excelled were
habitually lying.</p>
<p>The second hoax happened the following year, in 1843. It was perpetrated
by a man named Wilbur Fugate and his two friends, Robert Wiley and
Bridge Whitton. These guys were 3 jolly gents living in a town near
Nauvoo called Kinderhook, Illinois, right near Quincy where the saints
first settled after the Missouri exodus. Similar to Caswell, these guys
devised a plan to lure Jo into a trap to make him look a fool. However,
these three weren’t satisfied with presenting a simple Greek Psalter to
the self-proclaimed prophet and seeing what happened, they took it to
the next level. Wilbur Fugate had some level of metallurgical expertise.
He, along with Wiley and Whitton made a set of six plates and used some
chemicals to etch them, making them appear ancient to untrained eyes. On
April 16, 1843, they put their plan into play. They claimed to have
found the plates in an Indian burial mound near Kinderhook, along with
the skeleton of a nine-foot-tall giant. Then they took them to Nauvoo to
show them to the almighty prophet who could translate unknown languages.</p>
<p>In his journal for May 7, 1843, Joe recorded, “In the forenoon I was
visited by several gentlemen, concerning the plates which were dug out
[of] a mound near Kinderhook. Sent by W[illia]m Smith to the office
for Hebrew Bible and Lexicon.” An anonymous letter published in the <em>New
York Herald</em> says, “The plates are evidently brass, and are covered on
both sides with hyerogliphics. He compared them in my presence with his
Egyptian alphabet, which he took from the plates from which the Book of
Mormon was translated, and they are evidently the same characters. He
therefore will be able to decipher them.” And the <em>Times and Seasons</em>
reported, “President Joseph has translated a portion, and says they
contain the history of the person with whom they were found; and he was
a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and
that he received his kingdom through the ruler of heaven and earth.”</p>
<p>It was all a trap and Joe got suckered by this hoax and offered a
preliminary interpretation of the plates. Now, the apologists will point
out that he apparently used a Hebrew Lexicon and the Egyptian Alphabet
and Grammar, so he was translating by secular means rather than by
divine revelation. But that just pushes the problem back a step, because
where did the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar come from? Supposedly by
revelation in 1835 when the papyri were first acquired. The reality is
that either Jo could translate unknown languages or he couldn’t. He said
he could do it and he was wrong. At best he perceived himself with
delusions of grandeur, at worst it was yet another lie to keep his
people interested and invested in the cult with living and expanding
doctrine and theology.</p>
<p>What I find even more fascinating about this story is that the hoaxers
didn’t reveal the fraud, because they were waiting for Joe to produce a
translation, and he never got around to it before he died. If the
Mormons had pushed him to actually produce the translation, there’s no
telling what might be contained in the resulting scripture just like the
Book of Abraham. In 1879, Wilbur Fugate finally appeared back on the
scene with an affidavit that he had colluded with the two other guys to
fabricate the plates, and explained how they did it. The great thing
about this is that the apologists <em>didn’t believe him</em>. They attacked
his character and continued to insist that the plates were authentic as
late as 1980. A chemical analysis was finally done, and the <em>Ensign</em>
magazine admitted the plates were a forgery in 1981. So much for Joe’s
gift of translation, and so much for the credibility of Mormon
apologetic “thinkers” like Hugh Nibley and his cabal of sophists. Ep
143.</p>
<p>Despite his flirtation with the Greek Psalter and the Kinderhoax Plates,
in Illinois Joe wrote fewer scriptures than he had earlier in his life.
Instead, he mostly couched new doctrines in his sermons and temple
rituals to smaller and smaller groups of people he knew he could trust.</p>
<p>At the October 1841 General Conference, Joe delivered a sermon in which
he introduced the doctrine of baptism for the dead. Joe considered
Mormon baptism to be a requirement for exaltation, so that raised the
problem of what happens to loved ones who have died without the
opportunity for Mormon baptism like Jo’s older brother, Alvin. Baptism
for the dead solved the problem by allowing a living person to be
baptized for, and in behalf of, a deceased person. The person who stands
proxy becomes a savior for their dead loved ones. Here are some quotes
from the record of this sermon in the History of the Church:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He presented baptism for the dead as the only way that men can appear
as saviors on Mount Zion. . . . There is a way to release the spirit
of the dead; that is by the power and authority of the Priesthood—by
binding and loosing on earth. This doctrine appears glorious, inasmuch
as it exhibits the greatness of divine compassion and benevolence in
the extent of the plan of human salvation. . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This gives you an idea of the direction that Joe’s theology is going.
Humans can be saviors. We have the power by the authority of the
priesthood to make decrees here on earth that God is obligated to follow
in heaven. This is a very human-centered theology. I forget, why do
other Christians consider Mormons to be anti-Christ? There was, however,
a catch after Jo had introduced the doctrine because he recognized it
could be leveraged as a tool to make the Mormons work harder on his own
pet projects.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>President Joseph Smith then announced, “There shall be no more
baptisms for the dead, until the ordinance can be attended to in the
font of the Lord’s House; and the Church shall not hold another
general conference, until they can meet in said house. <em>For thus saith
the Lord!</em>”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His parting words are crucial to understanding why baptisms for the dead
was used as leverage. He said we MUST perform baptisms for the dead to
get our own salvation and to provide proxy salvation, but those
baptisms, which had been done in the Mississippi River prior to this
point, could now only be performed in the House of the Lord, the Temple.
No more Necromancy for the Mormons until they finish building the
temple. No more salvation for the Mormons and no more General
Conferences until a great and spacious building is constructed. And then
he capped off this coercive screed with a “thus saith the Lord” to
really drive the point home that he wasn’t speaking as a man when he was
leveraging the salvation of the Mormons. This is how Joe motivated
people to do what he wanted: by holding their dead relatives and their
own celestial progression hostage. But no, Joseph Smith was prophet of
the restoration because it was what the lord wanted for his people in
this dispensation, it’s all part of his plan; it had absolutely nothing
to do with Jo’s own ego.</p>
<p>In Nauvoo Joe also introduced his temple rituals. But before we get to
that, we need to discuss Mormonism and Freemasonry, because Freemasonry
is essential context for understanding Joe’s temple rituals. Ep 100.</p>
<p>Freemasonry is a fraternal secret society, basically a club for dudes
that involves various myths and rituals, and oaths of loyalty and
secrecy. It was first created in about the 14th century, although it
claims to date all the way back to the time of the biblical king Solomon
and the construction of his temple. The first official American Masonic
lodge was formed in 1731 in Pennsylvania. Many of the founding fathers
were Masons as were a number of the enlightenment philosophers from whom
the founding fathers drew their inspiration. Many politicians since the
foundation of the country have been Masons or have had friends who were
Masons. Masonic lodges are a great place to meet people and share ideas
and viewpoints a person otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to. It’s also a
place to pass around the mysteries of the universe in its many forms.
Masonry is the school while fields of esoteric knowledge are the
curricula.</p>
<p>Joseph Smith’s father and 2 of his uncles were universalists and Masons.
With uncles Asael Smith, John Smith, and father Joseph Smith Sr. being
so wrapped up in Masonry, Universalism, and the occult, Joseph was
literally surrounded by Masons during his most formative years as a
child and teenager. Even Hyrum, Jo’s older brother, became a Mason in
New York in the 1820s and spelled his name HIRAM instead of HYRUM until
pretty late in his life, which is an homage to the central figure of the
Masonic passion narrative. That’s why we call him Hyrum Sidekick-Abiff
Smith. Then, something extremely prominent and public occurred in
Joseph’s own backyard. A guy named William Morgan wrote an expose of
Freemasonry, in which he shared some of the organization’s secrets. Some
Masons allegedly kidnapped him and probably murdered him in retaliation.
There was a huge wave of anti-Masonic sentiment in Joe’s neighborhood,
and even the formation of an anti-Masonic political party that enjoyed
some success in the next few elections. Lots of Masonic lodges shut
down, and the conspiracy theories that spread about Masonry still
reverberate in our popular culture to this day. Jo ended up marrying
William Morgan’s widow in 1838, Lucinda Pendleton Morgan, who, herself,
was a public figure in the anti-Masonry movement and enjoyed some public
notoriety for her speeches.</p>
<p>The Book of Mormon and Book of Moses contain language that has been
interpreted as anti-Masonic. For instance, the Book of Mormon condemns
“secret combinations,” which was a favorite phrase of the anti-Masonic
movement. And the Book of Moses describes an ancient conspiracy between
Cain and Satan in which they covenanted to “commit murder and get gain.”
Cain took the title “Master Mahan,” which evoked the Masonic title of
“Master Mason,” because Jo was the O.G. Mormon who was so good with
nicknames. However, for the rest of his career, Joe was very positive
towards Masonry. So it’s tough to reconcile the Book of Mormon’s
anti-Masonry with Joe’s interest in Masonry. D. Michael Quinn
straight-up denies that the Book of Mormon is anti-Masonic, but his is a
bit of a fringe view. Other historians think Joe was part of a reformist
movement within Masonry that affirmed true Masonry while condemning what
the reformers called “spurious Masonry.”</p>
<p>Whatever his reasons for writing anti-Masonry rhetoric into the Book of
Mormon, Joe later used a lot of Masonic language and symbolism in
Kirtland and Missouri and even became a Master Freemason himself in
Nauvoo. For instance, Joe’s Danite organization in Missouri seems to
have had Masonic parallels. Historian Todd Compton writes in the book
<em>Fire and Sword</em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Descriptions of Danite signs and countersigns often employed Masonic
terminology. The Masonic ideal was that a Mason in danger would make a
Masonic sign or speak a Masonic word or phrase; then fellow Masons
would recognize this signal and come to his aid. The Danite signs and
passwords served exactly the same functions and were used in this way
during the election “knock-down” at Gallatin. . . . Given Smith’s
extensive interest in Masonry at Nauvoo, it is possible that Masonic
aspects of Danitism are a pre-Nauvoo example of Smith’s interest in
the Masonic ritual. . . . It should be remembered that Lucinda
Pendleton Morgan Harris (wife of George W. Harris, a prominent member
of the Far West High Council), was the widow of Masonic “martyr”
William Morgan, who had published the first exposé of the Masonic
rite. The Joseph Smith family stayed with the Harrises when they first
arrived in Far West.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Illinois, Joe became close friends with John C. Bennett and Lucius
Scovil, both Freemasons. In 1841, Scovil tried to get a lodge in Quincy,
Illinois to sponsor the creation of a lodge in Nauvoo. The Quincy lodge
refused. Normally you wouldn’t be able to open a lodge without
sponsorship, but the following year on March 15, 1842, Illinois Grand
Master Abraham Jonas waived the rule and granted Nauvoo a "special
dispensation" to organize. He also made Joseph Smith and his counselor,
Sidney Rigdon, "Masons at sight." He probably did this on the promise
that the Mormons would vote for him for public office. He raised Joe
directly to third or “sublime” degree of Master Mason and appointed him
“Grand Chaplain” of the lodge. Eventually about 1500 men joined the
Nauvoo lodge, compared to about 150 per lodge in the rest of Illinois.
Everything about the Nauvoo lodge was irregular, and it infuriated
Masons all over the rest of Illinois. By 1844, the number of Master
Masons in Nauvoo outnumbered the Masons in the rest of the state of
Illinois. The obvious endgame with making so many Mormon men Masons was
for political gains and elevating Nauvoo to national notoriety among
other Masons throughout the nation. With the Nauvoo Lodge so large, Jo
became one of the most powerful Masons in the nation, and he must have
absolutely delighted in that fact.</p>
<p>About 7 weeks after Joe received the Masonic mysteries, he introduced
the Nauvoo endowment ceremony. Historian Fawn Brodie argued on page 279
of her book <em>No Man Knows My History</em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Mormon Temple endowment ceremony is without a doubt taken from the
Masonic ceremonies Joseph Smith participated in just weeks before he
introduced the temple endowment. The grips, tokens, covenants, secret
words, keys, etc. were word for word the same when first introduced.
Members who were Masons previous to Joseph joining the fraternal order
unashamedly referred to the Mormon endowment as "celestial masonry."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A contemporary account lends some insight into the Joseph’s mentality
behind appropriating the Masonic rituals for the temple endowment
ceremony. In a letter from Heber the Creeper Kimball to P-cubed Parley
Parker Pratt, he said the following: “Bro Joseph Ses[says] Masonary
was taken from preasthood but has become degen[e]rated. But menny
things are perfect.”</p>
<p>I won’t get into all the similarities, but here are just a few examples.
The main symbols of Masonry are the compass and the square. A compass
and square are also cut into the Mormon temple garment. The handshakes
are almost exactly the same as are the five points of fellowship.
Masonic initiates are given a new name, and so are Mormon initiates. The
Masonic ceremony included an oath of secrecy and a penalty sign where
you drew your thumb across your throat to indicate what would happen to
you if you spilled the fraternity’s secrets, and the Mormon endowment
used a very similar oath and penalty sign. I could go on, but the oath
and penalty are maybe the most important part, because this is the piece
of Masonry that Joe cared most about. He once declared that “the secret
of Masonry is to keep a secret.” He was trying to teach his followers to
keep his secrets, especially polygamy and world domination.</p>
<p>On 4 May 1842, Jo as the Highest of Priests and Master of Ceremonies,
along with his brother Hyrum, likely as the Senior Grand Warden or some
other similarly named position, gathered 9 fellow master Masons; James
Adams, Heber the Creeper Kimball, William Law, William Marks, George
Miller, White-out Willard Richards, Father Newel K. Whitney, and Bloody
Brigham Young and performed the first temple passion play. These 9 men
Jo and Hyrum initiated in the first week of May 1842 would come to be
known as The Anointed Quorum, the Holy Order, or the Holy Order of the
Anointed. This quorum was the most secretive and esoteric group Jo had
ever created in his entire ministry.</p>
<p>The endowment ritual involved passing through several degrees. In the
first and second degrees, the initiates were washed and anointed with
oil infused with plants and given garments to wear. In the third and
fourth degrees there was a reenactment of the Creation of the world and
the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The fifth degree
portrayed a Protestant minister conspiring with the devil to destroy
Mormonism. The sixth degree included the oaths and penalties. And in the
seventh degree, the initiates symbolically entered a room which
represented the celestial kingdom, where they’re crowned king and queen,
and taught Mormonism’s deepest mysteries such as the doctrine of
polygamy. Joe wins them over with the flattery of crowning them kings
and queens, a little sugar to make the medicine go down. Eps 108, 110,
111.</p>
<p>A year after he created the Holy Order and introduced the endowment
ritual, Joe also introduced another ritual called the Second Anointing.
The Second Anointing gives you guaranteed salvation. Those with the
second anointing will go to the highest level of the celestial kingdom
and get their own planet unless they shed innocent blood, that’s the
only disqualifier. Killing an innocent person was and is the only thing
which would bar these called and elected saints from the celestial
kingdom, and luckily the Church leadership designates who is and is not
innocent.</p>
<p>A brief note on secrecy in general. When a person like Joseph Smith with
as much social clout as he carried creates exclusive groups, it
encourages competition among his followers to prove their worth to the
prophet, and thereby gain access to the exclusive groups. There’s an
inherent coercion that takes place here and it also self-selects for
only the most loyal people to surround the prophet at any given time.
With enough years of these exclusive and secretive groups and Jo is
surrounded exclusively with people who will do whatever he says no
matter how insane or immoral. People wonder how Jo was able to get
people to coerce young girls into celestial marriage, assassinate
people, keep secret the designs of the impending Mormon revolution of
America, and so many other illegal, immoral, and outright vile
practices; the only people who were given this knowledge aspired to be
granted that information after exhibiting unyielding loyalty to the
prophet for years. In many ways, for a person like Jo, this was always
his dream; to have a group of close followers who hung on his every word
as if it came from god himself. It takes a dangerous combination of
charisma and conceit to create this human phenomena. Jo was far from the
first or last to accomplish it, but he is a spectacular example of how
these psychological mechanisms play out. Exclusivity centered around a
cult of personality, especially a religious personality, exalts the
person who leads the group to be far greater than human to the point
that he can do no wrong and anything he desires is not only the most
important thing in the world, but the very will of god. A thousand
hit-pieces could be written about him and nothing would shake the
loyalty of these dedicated brainwashed followers. #Jo2020, amiright?</p>
<p>All of this temple stuff ultimately culminated in the doctrine of
exaltation, so let’s go ahead and discuss that even though we’re getting
a little ahead of ourselves in our timeline, but it fits thematically.
In 1844 Joe gave a famous sermon called the King Follett Discourse in
which he laid this doctrine out. Eps 193, 194, 195. It’s called the King
Follett Discourse because it was delivered at the funeral of a guy named
King Follett. After a lengthy and nonsensical introduction… listeners of
this show have no idea what that’s like..., Joe jumps right into it by
introducing the idea that before the world was created, a plan was laid
“in the midst of the Council of the Eternal God of all other gods.”
Obviously the idea that there’s more than one god was pretty heretical
to Protestant Christians, but this had been brewing in Joe’s head for a
while. During his Hebrew studies he had picked up on the fact that the
creation story in the Bible uses the plural form of the word “God.” His
Jewish Hebrew teacher had told him this was like the royal “we,” but Joe
wasn’t buying it. He thought the creation story was teaching polytheism.
Eventually he would adopt the term Elohim to refer to god, which is the
pluralized version of the Hebrew “El,” meaning god. The Mormon god is
literally just a pluralized form of a generic term used in Hebrew to
refer to many different gods. And yes, YahWeh isn’t the only god in the
Bible. He’s just a jealous war god the Isrealites really liked because
they were bloodthirsty monsters who frequently committed genocide at
YahWeh’s command.</p>
<p>Next Joe asks a rhetorical question: “what kind of a being is God?” He
basically says this is the most important question religion can answer,
and I’m going to answer it for you. If I fail, then it’s my duty to
renounce all pretensions to being a prophet. But if I succeed, “let
every man and woman henceforth put their hand on their mouth and never
say any thing against the man of God again.” In other words, if you find
my teachings inspirational then you should shut up and never complain
about any of the crimes I commit or the fact that I’m raping your
daughters. Then Joe lays out his key idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First, God himself, who sits enthroned in yonder heavens, is a man
like unto one of yourselves, that is the great secret. If the vail was
rent to-day, and the great God, who holds this world in its orbit, and
upholds all things by his power; if you were to see him to-day, you
would see him in all the person, image and very form as a man; for
Adam was created in the very fashion and image of God; Adam received
instruction, walked, talked and conversed with him, as one man talks
and communes with another.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Why do other Christians consider Mormonism anti-Christ again? Maybe it’s
stuff like this about their precious eternal incorporeal modulistic
trifecta thingy who birthed himself only to kill himself to save his
creation from himself.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>. . . I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined
that God was God from all eternity. These are incomprehensible ideas
to some, but they are the simple and first principles of the gospel,
to know for a certainty the character of God, that we may converse
with him as one man with another, and that God himself; the Father of
us all dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself did, and I
will show it from the Bible.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So God has a human body because he was once just a mortal man who lived
on an earth like ours, nearest the star gigolo I might add, and at some
point he <em>became</em> God. And that’s not all, because you can be a god too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You have got to learn how to be Gods yourselves; to be kings and
priests to God, the same as all Gods have done; by going from a small
degree to another, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation,
until you are able to sit in glory as doth those who sit enthroned in
everlasting power. . . . [The Bible says] they shall be heirs of God
and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. What is it? to inherit the same
glory, the same power and the same exaltation, until you ascend the
throne of eternal power the same as those who are gone before. What
did Jesus do? why I do the things I saw my Father do when worlds came
rolling into existence. I saw my Father work out his kingdom with fear
and trembling, and I must do the same; and when I get my kingdom I
shall present it to my Father, so that he obtains kingdom upon
kingdom, and it will exalt his glory, so that Jesus treads in his
tracks to inherit what God did before; it is plain beyond disputation,
and you thus learn some of the first principles of the gospel, about
which so much hath been said.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So we are God’s heirs, and we will inherit the same glory and power that
he has. Now, Joe was not the first person to teach something like this.
This idea of becoming gods goes way back in Jewish and Christian
theology. In fact, Joe may have learned about some of this from his
Jewish friend Alexander Neibaur. Ep 155. It wasn’t a very popular idea
in nineteenth-century America, though. Most Protestants had a theology
of humility, which minimized human power in order to exalt God’s power.
Joe goes the opposite direction and minimizes God’s power in order to
exalt human power. Joe goes on in this sermon to lay out a bunch more
ideas that exalt the human, including the idea that our spirits are
self-existent, immortal, uncreated, and co-equal with God. Our spirits
have existed for all eternity, and God merely “organized” them through
celestial procreation with his harem of wives. An astronomer says we’re
all stardust, a Mormon says we’re all god ejaculate. There’s one more
quote we need to read from this sermon, from Joe’s concluding paragraph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have intended my remarks to all; both rich and poor, bond and free,
great and small. I have no enmity against any man. I love you all. I
am your best friend, and if persons miss their mark, it is their own
fault. If I reprove a man and he hates me, he is a fool, for I love
all men, especially these my brethren and sisters. I rejoice in
bearing the testimony of my aged friends. You never knew my heart; no
man knows my history; I cannot tell it. I shall never undertake it; if
I had not experienced what I have, I should not have known it myself.
I never did harm any man since I have been born in the world. My voice
is always for peace, I cannot lie down until all my work is finished.
I never think any evil, nor any thing to the harm of my fellow man.—
When I am called at the trump of the ark-angel, and weighed in the
balance you will all know me then… God bless you all. Amen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I, Joseph Smith, am perfect and wouldn’t harm a fly; I’m full of love
and never think any evil, and my history is too vast and great to be
encompassed in words. Well, last week’s episode was all about Joe’s
wrath against his enemies, so you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t buy
into Joe’s boasting and outright lies here about what a great and
peaceful and loving guy he was. Just a few weeks before this he
published a letter in the Times and Seasons titled “A Friendly Hint to
Missouri,” threatening them as the first place the great Mormon militia
would begin its military campaign to burn across the nation and
overthrow the government. Ep 185. Jo even sent a letter to a private
revolutionary war militia known as the Green Mountain Boys asking for
help with this campaign. Ep 181. How he wrapped the King Follett
Discourse taps into something we’ll get into at the end of today’s
episode, the question of why he is such a fascinating and enigmatic
figure to study. No man knows his history, but yet millions are taught
it and thousands try to truly understand it. Why? More on that later.</p>
<p>Joe boasted a lot during the Nauvoo years. For instance, on July 29,
1842, after once again successfully evading state authorities’ attempts
to arrest him, Joe got up on the stand and preached a sermon. Here’s his
account of the sermon in History of the Church 5:136:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I arose and congratulated the brethren and sisters on the victory I
had once more gained over the Missourians. I had told them formerly
about fighting the Missourians, and about fighting alone. I had not
fought them with the sword, or by carnal weapons; I had done it by
stratagem, by outwitting them, and there had been no lives lost, and
there would be no lives lost if they would hearken to my counsel.
[(yeah, that worked so well for the Mormons in Missouri!)] Up to
this day God had given me wisdom to save the people who took counsel.
None had ever been killed who abode by my counsel. At Hauns’ Mill the
brethren went contrary to my counsel, if they had not, their lives
would have been spared. I had been in Nauvoo all the while, and
outwitted Bennett’s associates, and attended to my own business in the
city all the time. We want to whip the world mentally and they will
whip themselves physically. . . . Orson Pratt has attempted to destroy
himself and caused all the city almost to go in search of him. . . .
O. Pratt and others of the same class caused trouble by telling
stories to people who would betray me, and they must believe those
stories because his Wife told him so! [(RIP Sarah Pratt; you never
deserved this)] I will live to trample on their ashes with the soles
of my feet. . . . If oppression comes I will then show them that there
is a Moses and a Joshua amongst us; and I will fight them, if they
don’t take off oppression from me. I will do as I have done this
time, I will run into the woods, I will fight them in my own way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I mean, the idea that he had outwitted the Missourians during the 1838
Mormon War was pretty delusional, but the propaganda was so deeply
ingrained in the collective Mormon mindset that they probably cheered
when he said it. The claim that no lives were lost except for the people
at Haun’s Mill was inaccurate. The boasting about being a “Joshua” when
he had escaped arrest by hiding in the woods was just hilarious; yeah,
Jo bravely fled into a corn patch. And the part where he makes fun of
Apostle Orson Pratt for having been driven to a suicide attempt by Joe’s
bad behavior? Seriously? By the way, Orson Pratt was sitting on the
stand when Joe said all of this. The whole crowd was looking at Pratt as
Joe made fun of his thoughts of suicide and called him a Judas and said
he would trample on his ashes. Frankly, it seems like Joe <em>wanted</em> Orson
Pratt to commit suicide, and he was trying to drive him to it. Maybe
that would finally drive Sarah to the desperate ends of joining Jo’s
harem. Eps 134, 138. The people in the crowd fed off this propaganda;
these lies. Anybody sickened by how dishonest this had long since left
the church. For everybody who remained, this was red meat to a
bloodthirsty hoard of rabid animals ready to goose step behind their
revolutionary supreme leader.</p>
<p>Here’s another “fun” one. On December 29, 1842, Joe was on his way to
Springfield, Illinois. He tried to stop for the night at a tavern in the
town of Paris, but the tavern-owner said the people of Paris had heard
the Mormons were bad people, and had made a compact not to shelter them.
Joe brags in History of the Church 5:211 about how he bullied the tavern
keeper into letting him stay:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I said to him, [“]we will stay, but no thanks to you. I have men
enough to take the town, and if we must freeze, we will freeze by the
burning of these houses.[“] The taverns were then opened, and we
were accommodated, and received many apologies in the morning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only was the prophet the kind of person who would threaten to burn
down your house to keep himself warm, but he was also the kind of person
who thought it was cool to brag about it in his history after the
Mormons had done that very thing not 5 years earlier.</p>
<p>Here’s another one. In 1843 when Joe sent his henchman Joseph H. Jackson
to murder Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs and to break Porter
Rockwell out of prison after Port botched the assassination; Jackson
returned having failed in both missions. Eps 144, 147. He went to Joe’s
house and made his excuses, and Joe prophesied that Pistol Packin’
Porter would come home safely eventually. Then they had the following
homoerotic conversation, as reported by Jackson:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Silence ensued for a few minutes, when Joe suddenly looked me full in
the eye, and after gazing steadily for a few moments said. "Jackson
you are the first man that I have ever met that I could not look
down." Said I, "do you like a bold eye?" He replied that he did and
then commenced a panegyric on himself. He said that he was a good and
godly man, and that he had never known wrong in his life, for in all
his acts, he was guided and protected by the power of the Holy Ghost
-- that the Missourians had tried to kill him, but rifle balls could
have no effect on him, for he had been shot at thirteen times in
Missouri, and the balls bounded back as hail from the side of a house;
and for this reason he knew the Holy Ghost was with him, and that he
truly was the greatest man on the earth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to Jackson, Jo considered himself literally invincible, able
to take every ball the Missourians could shoot at him without flinching.
In due time, we’ll put that claim to the test.</p>
<p>In the conversation, Jo did some more bragging after his enforcers known
as the “Destroying Angels” freed him from the custody of Sheriff Harmon
T. Wilson and Joseph Reynolds, who arrested him in June 1843 in Dixon,
Illinois.The Destroying Angels took the sheriffs into custody, and then
added insult to injury by having them formally arrested for kidnapping
by a Hancock County sheriff and forcing them to give up their guns. Then
Joe made a triumphal entry into Nauvoo in his full regalia, like some
kind of bargain bin warlord. Eps 144, 145. A Nauvoo court held a habeas
corpus hearing for Joe, in which Joe’s lawyer made some completely
asinine arguments, including the claim that the warrant was for a Joseph
Smith Jr., but Joe had a son by the same name and thus went by Joseph
Smith Sr., and therefore couldn’t be the same Joseph Smith named in the
warrant. Ep 146, 147. That was actually one of his arguments. Joe went
by Joseph Smith Jr. his whole life, and now he decides he wants to be
called Joseph Smith Sr. when it was legally advantageous? The court
remanded Joe into the custody of Nauvoo marshal Henry G. Sherwood, and
Sherwood let him go. After this victory, Joe gave a sermon to brag about
it with a bit more homoeroticism mixed into his scatterbrained rant.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am well—I am hearty. I hardly know how to express my feelings—I feel
strong as a giant. . . . I pulled sticks with the men coming along,
and I pulled up with one hand the strongest man that could be found:
then two men tried, but they could not pull me up, and I continued to
pull mentally until I pulled Missouri to Nauvoo. But I will pass from
that subject. . . . Relative to our city charter, courts, right of
habeas corpus, . . . I wish you to know and publish that we have all
power; and if any man from this time forth says anything to the
contrary, cast it into his teeth[!] . . . I have dragged these men
here by my hand, and will do it again; but I swear I will not deal so
mildly with them again; for the time has come when <em>forbearance is no
longer a virtue</em>: and if you or I are again taken unlawfully, you are
at liberty to give loose to blood and thunder. . . . But before I will
bear this unhallowed persecution any longer—before I will be dragged
away again, among my enemies, for trial, <em>I will spill the last drop
of blood in my veins, and will see all my enemies</em> IN HELL!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Joe basically says, “I am the tug of war champion of the world, and I
have beaten the whole state of Missouri at tug-of-war, and we are all
powerful!” Huzzah! “And the next time I beat them in tug-of-war will
be the last, because we’ll kill the bastards!” Huzzah! Classic Joe
Smith. I can’t wait to test that prophecy at the end.</p>
<p>One of Joe’s better boasts was on May 26, 1844, when he knew the
publication of the <em>Nauvoo Expositor</em> was about to ignite a blaze
throughout the city; this screed was aimed right at the Fosters,
Higbees, Laws, and Joseph H. Jackson. If you log into the Utah
Lighthouse Ministries website, this quote is featured on the front page
to… I guess… prove how anti-Christ Joseph Smith was and own the Morms. I
think it’s funny but this stuff is really important to religious folk
and people who call themselves “true Christians”. I will, however, agree
with those folks when they say the modern church is everything contrary
to the values in the Book of Mormon and Jesus’ teachings. Jesus was a
socialist and Mormonism is the wealthiest religion in the world. Great
and spacious buildings are unequivocally evil but Mormonism has
140-something temples, thousands of chapels, and owns all the largest
buildings in Utah. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple but
Mormons buy garments in their great and spacious temples. Jesus hung out
with people who get excommunicated from the church. Charity never
faileth yet the modern church gives less than 1/10th of 1% of their
income to humanitarian aid. Don’t pray in your closet, pray before every
meal, public gathering, with your family before bed and after waking up,
and before every church function and scout or young women’s camp like
some kind of nervous tick. Don’t argue with the Pharisees, invite them
to a nice dinner after they arrive on your private jet and ask them to
pass a bill or tax cut for you. They have enough money to solve world
hunger during a global pandemic but the rainy-day fund keeps growing as
the government keeps shoveling money out to religions and corporations,
leaving tens of millions unemployed without savings to fend for
themselves. My overall point, claim whatever you want to be your
scriptures, but at least follow them to the extent laws allow. You can’t
call the menu at Fat Shack your scriptures and then lobby government to
pass laws forcing everybody to be vegetarian. You can’t be a virgin Kama
Sutra expert. You can’t teach the pride cycle to millions of people
while so clearly teetering on the edge before the fall. You don’t get to
preach racial tolerance and harmony while your god says dark skin is a
curse on the lazy and unrighteous fencesitters to make them less
appealing to his righteous white-skinned chosen people. What does it say
about a person or institution that so quickly discards its claimed words
of god when they can make a dollar doing so? Point made, let’s get to
some of Jo’s final words from late May 1844, barely a month before he
died in the Carthage gunfight.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I,… have been in perils, and oftener than anyone in this generation;
as Paul boasted, I have suffered more than Paul did. I should be like
a fish out of water if I were out of persecution; perhaps my brethren
think it requires all this to keep me humble. The Lord has constituted
me so curiously that I glory in persecution; I am not near so humble
as if I was not persecuted. If oppression will make a wise man mad,
much more a fool. If they want a beardless boy to whip all the world,
I will get on the top of a mountain and crow like a rooster; I shall
always beat them… Come on ye prosecutors, ye false swearers; all hell
boil over; ye burning mountains roll down your lava; for I will come
out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had;
I am the only man that ever has been able to keep a whole church
together since the days of Adam; a large majority of the whole have
stood by me: neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast
that no man ever did such a work as me; the followers of Jesus ran
away from him; the Latter Day Saints never ran away from me yet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Joe considered himself a greater man than Jesus Christ, and how can
you argue with that? After all, Jesus wasn’t able to keep a church
together, whereas Joe had kept a Church together for fourteen years...
with just, I don’t know, maybe a major schism every two years or so
where some portion of the Latter Day Saints did, indeed, run away from
him or chase him out of town at the point of a bayonet and pitchfork.</p>
<p>But Joe’s braggadocio isn’t really the greatest sign of his arrogance.
Boasting about perceived accomplishments is one thing, but the greatest
sign of his arrogance surrounds his greatest ambitions. He basically
made plans to overthrow all national governments and take over the world
with himself at the head of his new world Mormon government. Ep 214.
Here’s how Joseph H. Jackson explains Jo’s plans while Jo was running
for President in 1844:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was a Mr. Brown, formerly of Rushville, with whom I became
acquainted in Nauvoo, soon after my arrival there. This man has a
wonderful genius for invention, and has planned a sub-marine battery
and steam fire ship, which, to all appearance, is capable of great
execution. He stated to me, that he had been operating for 21 years,
in perfecting this work, but had not the means to bring the matter
before the nation, and that Joe made him a propusition, which had
caused him to remove to Nauvoo. This proposition was, to furnish the
means to take him, together with G. A. Adams and Orson Hyde, to
Russia, where the invention would be laid before the Emperor; and as
Joe had great faith in its success, he expected a large sum for the
secret, Which Brown and Joe were to divide. This was palmed off on
Brown, but was far from being Joe's real object. His real object, as
he disclosed it to me, was this: He would first run for President, and
thus be able to prove to the Emperor of Russia his strength in the
Union. He would then send G. A. Adams, Orson Hyde, and Brown to
Russia, and after the utility of the invention had been fairly proved
to the Emperor, Joe's proposition to him was to be submitted: which
was to form a league for the overthrow of the powers that be. Now this
may seem too ridiculous for any man to imagine possible; nevertheless,
no one acquainted with the excessive vanity of Joe Smith, will doubt
but that he in reality believed that he could form even so
preposterous a union.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What is it with narcissistic presidential candidates looking for help
from Russia? Anyway, Jackson’s account of Joe’s intentions is basically
confirmed by the Minutes of the Council of Fifty, which the LDS Church
recently released as part of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. The
Council of Fifty was to be the government of the kingdom of God, under
Joseph Smith as king and president. The minute book itself is titled
“Record of the Council of Fifty or Kingdom of God.” The official,
revealed name of the Council of Fifty is “The Kingdom of God and His
Laws with the Keys and Power[s] thereof, and Judgment in the Hands of
His Servants, Ahman Christ.” Eps 168, 169, 170.</p>
<p>Jo always wanted to be king of a world that looked to him as sole
governmental and religious authority. He aspired to become a Moses, a
Mohammed, a religious prophet warlord that subjugated the American
people under his arm of power only to then extend his campaign to the
rest of the world. The Council of Fifty is how he planned on doing it. I
can’t stress enough how important the Council of Fifty is. William
Clayton, who kept the Council of Fifty’s minute book, believed the
council replicated “the Grand Council amongst the Gods when the
organization of this world was contemplated.” Lyman Wight called it
“Grand Council of God,” and “Grand Council of Heaven,” and John D. Lee
called it “councils of the Gods,” which was fitting with Mormon theology
because all these dudes believed they were actually on the path toward
godhood and why wait for death for such a noble position? It was also
sometimes called the “Living Constitution,” because the authority of the
“living” men who comprised the council trumped the authority of any
“dead” document such as the US Constitution. From its infancy,
Mormonism has been a revolutionary religion; that isn’t a badge of
honor, it’s a declaration of misanthropy and elitist lawlessness. Ep
214.</p>
<p>Before the first meeting of the Council of Fifty got under way on March
11, 1844, Elder Lucian Woodworth moved that “every member of it to be
bound to eternal secrecy as to what passed here, not to have the
privilege of telling anything which might be talked of to any person
even to our wives, and the man who broke the rule ‘should lose his
cursed head.’” The motion passed unanimously. Then Joe laid out an
agenda for the council, which included rewriting the US Constitution,
forming alliances with the Indians, and forming an alliance with Sam
Houston in New Mexico. The agenda also included searching for a place
out West for the Mormons to settle. “All seemed agreed to look to some
place where we can go and establish a Theocracy either in Texas or
Oregon or somewhere in California &c.” And that was just the first
meeting. Eps 185, 189.</p>
<p>A week later, on March 19, 1844, Hyrum Smith made a speech in the
council in which he said “that the time was at hand when the prophecies
should be fulfilled, when the nations were ready to embrace the gospel
and when the ensign should be lift up and the standard to the people and
he believed if we will set up the standard and raise the ensign the
honest in heart of all nations will immediately begin to flock to the
standard of our God.” John Taylor got up next and “referred especially
to the United States[,] England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Poland,
Switzerland, Germany &c… concerning the situation of the different
nations of the earth showing that they were ripe to receive the truth.”
At this meeting the council “Resolved that a “communication be made
immediately to the General Government through our representative, Mr
[John] Wentworth, specifying that General Joseph Smith will protect
the Texas and Oregon from all foreign invasion if the General Government
will authorise him to raise volunteers in the United States for that
purpose.” Yes, I’m sure their intentions in wanting to raise an army
were purely for the defense of the US. At a later meeting, on April 11,
1844, “President Joseph was voted our P[rophet] P[riest] and
K[ing] with loud Hosannas.” Two days after that, Joe “prophecied the
entire overthrow of this nation in a few years.” Where do apostates and
non-believers exist in this Mormon theocracy? I’m reminded of the 1000
years of probation after the second coming which will be the era where
Jesus reigns supreme and every knee shall bow and every tongue confess
the gospel is the way, the truth, and the light. How will billions of
people be taught the gospel? Reeducation prison camps of course; those
who don’t convert are given to the buffetings of Satan; they are the
salt who hath lost its savor, to be cast out and trodden under foot. You
think a Mormon theocracy would be tolerant of any other religions or
non-religious folk like yours truly? Or would we be the Labans of the
world?</p>
<p>There were three non-Mormon members on the Council of Fifty, all of them
really interesting. Marinus G. Eaton and Edward Bonney were both
counterfeiters, as we discussed earlier in this series. Eaton
specifically was a family friend of the Smiths from the New York era.
The third was Uriah Brown. He was the inventor described by Joseph H.
Jackson, the guy who Jackson said had invented a submarine. Jackson
undersold it. Uriah Brown didn’t just have plans to build a submarine,
but also an “invention of liquid fire to destroy an army or navy.”
Clearly Joe wanted these flamethrowing submarines badly enough to let
their non-Mormon inventor sit on this highly-secretive and revolutionary
council.</p>
<p>The Council of Fifty Minutes recorded by Quilliam Claypen were
plutonium, and Joe knew it. When he gave himself up for arrest and was
taken to Carthage prior to the shootout, he whispered to Quilliam and
“told me either to put the r[ecords] of K[ingdom] into the hands
of some faithful man and send them away, or burn them, or bury them. I
concluded to bury them, which I did immediately on my return home.” 7
days after Joe was killed, Quilliam dug them up. They had been damaged
by water, but he reconstructed them, which is why we can benefit from
reading them today. Oddly enough, the church historians redact documents
that relate to temple work and sealings, but this overtly anti-American
anti-human document is completely unredacted and transcribed for anybody
to read at their pleasure. I encourage you to do so or listen to any
episodes where we discuss the Council of Fifty. Eps 159, 163, 168, 169,
170, 189, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204, 213, 214.</p>
<p>Before Joe went to his death, he couldn’t resist one last defiant boast
against his enemies. With Nauvoo under martial law and the Nauvoo Legion
mustered in full regalia to defend the city, Joseph made his last public
address as first prophet of the Mormons, which is recorded in the
History of the Church and captured in a painting from the 1880s we’ve
discussed a few times. He began by warning the Saints that their enemies
didn’t want just his blood; they wanted the blood of all Mormons. The
enemies are at the gates, only complete and total cohesion behind your
prophet will save you. Then he laid out the case for Mormon innocence
he’d attempt to make in letter form to Governor Ford who dismantled
each argument in totality:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I call God, angels and all men to witness that we are innocent of the
charges which are heralded forth through the public prints against us
by our enemies; and while they assemble together in unlawful mobs to
take away our rights and destroy our lives, they think to shield
themselves under the refuge of lies which they have thus wickedly
fabricated.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He then called upon his followers to fight alongside him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Will you all stand by me to the death, and sustain at the peril of
your lives the laws of our country, and the liberties and privileges
which our fathers have transmitted unto us, sealed with their sacred
blood? ([“]Aye,[“] shouted thousands.) He then said “it is well,
if you had not done it I would have gone out there (pointing to the
west) and would have raised up a mightier people.[“] . . . (Drawing
his sword and presenting it to heaven he said)—I call God and angels
to witness, that I have unsheathed my sword with a firm and
unalterable determination that this people shall have their legal
rights, and be protected from mob violence, or my blood shall be spilt
upon the ground like water, and my body consigned to the silent tomb.
While I live I will never tamely submit to the dominion of cursed
mobocracy; I would welcome death rather than submit to this
oppression, and it would be sweet—oh, sweet to rest in the grave
rather than submit to this oppression, agitation, annoyance,
confusion, and alarm upon alarm any longer. . . . I do not regard my
own life; I am ready to be offered a sacrifice for this people, for
what can our enemies do? Only kill the body and their power is then at
an end. Stand firm, my friends; never flinch; Do not seek to save your
lives; for he that is afraid to die for the truth will lose eternal
life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Why do we study Joseph Smith? What makes his legacy and story so
enigmatic and appealing? What makes a charismatic figure just that, a
charismatic figure? I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and I
don’t think I’ll ever figure it out. Jo refused to be a footprint in the
sand. He took great pains to ensure he’d be spoken of for good and evil
for generations to come. There’s something raw and human about his story
that compels us to pay attention. Love him or hate him, we can’t look
away from the prophet.</p>
<p>We’re attracted to people who are confident, especially to a fault. A
person like this with absolutely no altruistic, or even redeeming,
qualities can overcome any amount of negativity, internal or external,
with enough hubris. A thousand hit pieces can be written about a public
figure like this and their many exploits of inhumanity. People called
him a modern Mahomet in a derogatory way, yet he took pride in it.
People called him a heaven-daring wretch and he went on to fabricate
theology other Christians consider absolute heresy. He flaunted the law
and when people attempted to make him accountable he exclaimed they were
denying his rights as an American citizen. We see figures so filled with
brazen and unashamed confidence like Jo and we think… they must be doing
something right to be so successful. We see survival benefits to these
figures and attach ourselves to them in hopes that we’ll enjoy some
fraction of the prosperity they have.</p>
<p>To bring this to a sharper point and capture the overall thesis of
today’s show; Joseph Smith did a lot. He had a lot of accomplishments
for which he was proud. Many of those accomplishments required flaunting
laws, acquiring property and wealth from his followers, incurring debt
he never intended on repaying, theft, secret combinations with death
oaths for revealing those secrets, assassination squads, committing
treason against the nation which granted him the liberties to form his
own religion, commodifying women and sexuality to an even greater extent
than the culture in which he lived; all of that is to say he was a bad
guy, but he was an ambitious and successful bad guy. He was a bad guy
who accomplished so much and bragged every step of the way. That
arrogance, that conceit, and his inability to ever admit fault, is many
ways is a key to the guy’s charisma and appeal. We love to hate people
we don’t understand, especially when they revel in the fact that we can
never know their history.</p>
<p>Just because a person is proud of their achievements or boasts about
what they’ve accomplished, doesn’t say much about who they are or their
character. It’s what those achievements and accomplishments are to begin
with that says much more about who that person is. Jo boasted of his
ability to lead a cult with no remorse and the least amount of real work
necessary. He boasted about flaunting laws and never being held
accountable. He boasted about raising armies and committing treason. He
boasted about knowing unknown languages in the face of being repeatedly
proven wrong. He boasted about the thousands of people who risked life
and limb to follow him and all the suffering he forced upon them. He
boasted about hiding his teenage consorts from his first wife, Emma.
It’s not the boasting itself, but what the boasting is about that’s at
issue.</p>
<p>To quote a conversation Jackson had with Jo:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He continued to talk about his wife until my anger got the better of
my prudence, and I then told him, he must stop such conversation to
me, and that I would not hear him rail out on so worthy a woman as I
believed Emma to be, and threatened to knock him down if he did not
cease. I told him he was a d--d rascal, and he thought every other man
as black-hearted as himself. At the same time I accused him of living
in fornication with other women, and that he especially should hold
his peace in regard to Emma. To these aspersions he made no angry
retort, but would not at that time own that he lived in fornication
with other women, and said he was a godly man in every act, but that
Emma was jealous of him. He then asked me if I had ever known him to
do anything wrong with the women. I replied that I had not, but that
in my opinion any man that was base enough to concoct schemes for
pillage and murder as he had done, would lie with his mother if she
would permit him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m proud of the six years of serialized podcasting it’s taken us to get
here. I hope you’re ready listeners, the time is nigh at hand to finally
bury this motherfucker.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 7 - PrideRoad to Carthage 6 - Fury2020-08-13T20:00:00-07:002020-08-13T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/08/13/road-to-carthage-6-fury<p>Road to Carthage 6 - Fury</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine fury as a motivating factor in early
Mormonism.</p>
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<p>We all get angry sometimes. Some of us more than others, some of us are
lucky enough to almost never feel anger.</p>
<p>I have a small car I drive across the country for Mormon history
conferences. For those in the know, it’s a first generation Miata, for
everybody else; picture the smallest car you’ve seen and that’s a
fitting comparison. It’s great. It’s a convertible, making it the
perfect Seattle summer cruiser and a pretty good road tripper car if
only the trunk space was a little bigger to fit more books. During one
of our first cruises in the Miata, Annie and I were enjoying the
sunshine and blasting some music, not a care in the world. Then, a
person in a massive SUV with a commanding view of the road simply didn’t
see us and pulled out in front of us. Queue slamming on the brakes,
honking, and loud cursings at the carelessness of the ignorant driver
who continued down the road unaware of our existence. After that, my
fiance Annie, well… by the time you’re hearing this, my wife Annie, said
we’re getting a rollbar to make it so we’re less certainly dead the next
time that happens.</p>
<p>We felt anger. We were mad because that person did something that
literally threatened our lives. We weren’t just inconvenienced by them,
we were in actual danger, which evoked an immediate response we had
little control over. The danger was averted, we calmed down, and we took
actions to prevent that threat from becoming mortal danger in the
future.</p>
<p>With only rare exceptions, we all feel angry. The stimuli are different
for each of us, but the feeling inside is the same. We all act
differently once that anger boils up. With that said, anger has an evil
twin, wrath. Anger is in response to something that happens to us, a
fleeting emotion that can be mitigated and compensated for. Wrath is
deeper. Wrath drives us from feeling mad to seeking vengeance. Wrath is
what remains when the anger evaporates and we want retribution.</p>
<p>Millennia of myths and folklore revolve around the spirits of those who
die in anger; the wrath of those spirits will haunt us to the third and
fourth generations as their blood cries out from the ground upon which
they were slain. Anger makes us want to hurt somebody for a wrong
committed against us or our loved ones; wrath makes us plot their death.</p>
<p>It’s an ugly side of the human condition but to deny it exists is to
ignore a monster living within each and every one of us. Empires are
built by dictators with a penchant for retribution against any person
who harmed them or threatens their lust for power. Even the perfect
Jesus violently threw the money changers out of the temple, cursed a
tree for not being in the season thereof, and said “I came not to bring
peace [on the earth], but a sword.” Joseph Smith died in a gunfight,
and long shall his blood which was shed by assassins stain Illinois
while the earth lauds his fame.</p>
<p>For a young man growing up in a home with scarce resources, sometimes
anger; tantrums, outrage, would get him what he needed to survive.
However, the young boy Joseph Smith also had a great deal of violence
inflicted upon him at a tender and impressionable age.</p>
<p>From 1811 to 1814 there was a horrible typhoid epidemic. All seven
children in the Smith family caught the disease, but Joe and his sister
Sophronia were the worst afflicted. Sophronia was catatonic for nearly 3
months and Joe developed horrible, painful abscesses in his shoulder and
his left leg. The abscess in his leg became infected, and a group of
doctors from Dartmouth Medical College suggested the leg be amputated to
save his life. The Smiths didn’t want to amputate, so one of the
doctors, a surgeon named Nathan Smith, suggested an experimental
procedure to remove the infected portion of the bone. To this, the Smith
family agreed.</p>
<p>According to Joe’s mother, seven-year-old Joe refused to drink alcohol
as a sedative. Instead he asked his father to hold him down during the
surgery, and his mother to leave the room. Nathan Smith was an
outstanding surgeon, in fact probably the only person in America who
could have saved Joseph’s life at the time, and the surgery was
successful. Dr. Smith removed nine pieces of bone, and fourteen more
worked their way out of Joe’s leg before it fully healed.</p>
<p>In his book <em>The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith and the Dissociated Mind</em>,
surgeon Bill Morain argues that this extremely traumatic, extremely
painful surgery during Joe’s childhood may have been the source of a lot
of his later violent fantasies. To quote Dr. Morain,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most of all, Joseph would have feared the amputation knife, that
foot-long, sword-like instrument whose design had not appreciably
changed in the hundreds of years since the primitive barber-surgeons.
Most surgical instrument kits carried two or even three. That
“sword”—its pain and its ultimate purpose—had haunted his dreams
and daytime fantasies since it has been first (and for a second time)
plunged into his leg. The sword would not cease occupying those
fantasies, ever.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dr. Morain also notes that it’s almost impossible for Joseph to have
been as calm as Lucy describes, except on one very specific condition.
This sort of calm “is typical of children who suffer repeated bouts of
terrible trauma that they may enter a kind of trance or ‘self-hypnosis’
that protects against the emotional experience of the horror.” This
self-induced trance is called “dissociation,” and it’s the same sort of
trance that shamans and mediums enter in order to commune with the
spirit world. If Joseph’s childhood trauma taught him this skill of
putting himself in a trance, then he could have used the skill later in
life for a kind of lucid dreaming to produce visions and revelations.
Such a mental protectionism can also cause memory loss for the child who
experiences the trauma such that they’re unable to actively recall the
event, but other events may trigger the memories unpredictably.</p>
<p>After the traumatic leg surgery, Jo went to live for a while with his
uncle Jesse in Salem, Massachusetts to recuperate by the sea. According
to Dr. Morain,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was probably in his exile at the seashore that the fantasies began,
projected from within by an unspeakable horror he could not recall. As
will be seen, these included huge, violent fantasies. Fantasies of
wars. Fantasies of people in chaos who escape to the seashore.
Fantasies of magic swords that dismember heads and arms. Fantasies of
sons overthrowing fathers, princes killing kings, righteous killing
unrighteous. Fantasies of towers, trees, serpents, flaming swords,
pillars, cigar-shaped boats, sickles, and “stiff-necked” people.
Fantasies of evil men brought to humiliation by young heroes.
Fantasies of good fathers and evil fathers, of faithful women and
whores. Fantasies of good armies and bad armies pushing one another
to-and-fro like battles of ants. Fantasies of betrayal. Fantasies of
darkness, of magic stones that light up the darkness. Fantasies of
good white people and evil black people, of good white people becoming
evil black people. Fantasies of princes being “bound with cords,” of
“blood on garments,” of maggots eating flesh. Fantasies of
destroying angels with drawn swords. The fantasies would flood out of
his unconscious in hundreds of repetitive dreams and nightmares, in
daydreams, in random sequences, in play, in speech, and in silence.
They took over the inner life of Joseph Smith, Jr. as automatic pilot
takes over an aircraft. In this state he limped into his future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Simply put, a young boy going through a traumatic experience like this
would forever have his mind shaped by the experience, even if he was
unable to remember what took place. The survival mind created by this
and other traumatic childhood experiences would emerge periodically
throughout Jo’s life and ministry. Ep 68.</p>
<p>Fast-forward now to 1827 and Joe supposedly got the golden Book of
Mormon plates. After Joe pulled the plates out of the ground, he claimed
to have stashed them in a tree or a log. 10 days later, rumor around the
neighborhood said that somebody had found and taken possession of Joe's
plates. As soon as Emma told Joe about these rumors, he drank some tea
and ran into the woods, got the plates from the log, wrapped them up in
his jacket, and started walking home with the plates under his arm.</p>
<p>Now remember, these plates were made of gold. If you run the numbers on
their reported dimensions, they would weigh about 230 pounds. Joe later
allowed several people to lift the plates while they were wrapped in
cloth or sitting inside a wooden box used for shipping glass (a glass
box), and these witnesses reported that the plates were more like 40 to
60 pounds. That means that our best guess says Joe had a prop made out
of sheet metal like tin, or something. That would explain how he could
carry them home under an arm and others could lift and move them. I
don’t know how much lifting weights you’ve done, dear listener, but
it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between 60 pounds and 230
pounds. With that said, however, the next part is tough to believe.</p>
<p>According to Joe, as he was walking home, he was attacked by three guys
in the woods. The first one sprung out from behind a tree and hit Joe on
the back of his head with the butt of a gun. Walking through the woods
and somebody unexpectedly hitting the back of your skull with a hard
object are ingredients for a concussion and brain damage. But, Joe
stayed on his feet, turned to face his attacker, and knocked the
attacker down with a one-armed, god-power-infused megapunch! At that
point, Joe began to run home at top speed. Then a second man attacked
him, but Joe knocked this guy out with another one-armed megapunch,
presumably while still running at top speed with the 230-lb plates under
his arm. As Joe neared his house, a third attacker appeared from behind
him. This person hit Joe on the back of the head with the butt of a gun
again, but again Joe was unfazed, and turned around and issued yet
another god-infused megapunch of doom for the night. He knocked this
dude down like the others, but this time Joe dislocated his thumb, which
he asked Big Daddy Cheese to reset for him once he got home. Ep 9.</p>
<p>This helps to contextualize what Dr. Morain meant with that passage
about Joe having violent fantasies for the rest of his life. Maybe some
form of altercation took place in the woods that night but we can
clearly see how such an altercation turned into a legend in Jo’s mind
almost immediately. He was his own hero.</p>
<p>Now that Joe had the plates he probably manufactured and sequestered in
the forest for a brief time, he started to author the Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon is a pretty violent book, and we could spend all day
talking about the violent stories contained in the pages. Whether it’s
Ammon cutting off the arms of the Lamanites who’re having a little fun,
the Nephites killing enough Lamanites to build a bridge, Moroni
imprisoning and murdering thousands of political dissidents, Helaman
grinding through army after army of Lamanites while not losing a single
of his own soldiers, entire cities being buried by mountains or sinking
into the ocean like Atlantis when Jesus was crucified, millions of
soldiers murdering each other down to the last dozen men, human
sacrifice as burnt offerings, there’s absolutely no shortage of
deplorable atrocities within its pages.</p>
<p>But I want to focus on one story that’s unequivocally autobiographical
and reveals the inner-workings of Jo’s mind better than any other story
therein; the story of Nephi and Laban.</p>
<p>Nephi is sort of the main character of the first part of the Book of
Mormon. He and his family sail from Vermont to New York… my mistake…
from Israel to America, where Nephi becomes a king and a prophet. But
before they leave, Nephi’s dad has a vision that God wants the family to
steal a set of brass plates engraved with a copy of the Torah from a
rich guy in town named Laban. So in keeping with this vision, Nephi
creeps up to Laban’s house in the night. As he comes near the house, he
sees a drunk guy lying on the ground, and he recognizes him as Laban.
Laban has a sword sheathed at his hip, with a gold hilt and a steel
blade. The Holy Spirit whispers to Nephi that he should draw the sword
and cut off Laban’s head. Nephi hesitates, because he’s never killed
anyone before and a passed-out drunk guy doesn’t really pose any kind of
threat, but the Spirit says, he’s a bad guy, and the book is rightfully
yours, and it’s for the greater good. So, Nephi draws the sword and
chops of Laban’s head.</p>
<p>Here the story kind of falls apart, because if Nephi has cut off this
guy’s head, then his clothes would be drenched in blood, and probably
vomit from being passed-out drunk. But Nephi takes the clothes, puts
them on, and somehow successfully impersonates Laban in order to get the
brass plates from Laban’s servant named Zoram. Not only would his
disguise be drenched in fluids, but his voice and face wouldn’t match
Laban’s either, so I’m not sure how this part of the story makes any
sense. Maybe it’s supposed to be a miracle, the gift of tongues and
faces or something, or maybe it’s just childish writing by a 24 year-old
who knows nothing about how the world works. But anyway, you see what
Dr. Morain is getting at when he talks about Joe having violent
fantasies about swords. This story also gives us some insight into Joe’s
sense of morality: if someone has something you want and God gives you
permission, then you can kill them even if they’re helpless and drunk.
Oddly enough, the story of Laban is often taught in church, especially
to little kids, that no matter what god commands, you must carry out his
will. For any of you with believing family members, the story of Laban
can present lots of fun exercises about human morality and how far a
person is willing to go with their convictions. Ask them, “hey, if a
voice in your head told you Sonia Johnson and Sam Young were enemies of
the gospel, would you kill them?” You may have to massage the scenario a
little bit. “If the prophet showed up with god at your doorstep telling
you Mike Norton has revealed the secrets of the temple and therefore
broken his covenant, would you blood-atone this evil man?” Or, maybe
leave it up to them to dictate the parameters, “what would it take for
you to murder somebody because god told you to?” Or just find some
deseret nationalists on twitter and see what fantasies they’re furiously
masturbating over.</p>
<p>Once we get into the Kirtland era of the church, we get to see how Joe
dealt with real life enemies who posed actual threats in some way,
instead of his fantasies of fighting off 3 grown men in the forest while
running with 230 pounds of gold. Jo made his way to the city in early
1831 where the congregations of Hingepin Rigdon had converted to his
church thanks to the first missionaries who passed through in autumn of
1830. Eps 14, 15, 24, 25. An existential threat to the prophet presented
itself in September 1831 in the form of Jo’s second-in-command. Hingepin
Sidney Rigdon was preaching in Kirtland one day and announced to the
congregation that “the keys of the kingdom were taken from us.” This is
according to the autobiography of Philo Dibble. On hearing that the keys
had been taken away, “many of his hearers wept, and when some one
undertook to dismiss the meeting by prayer he said praying would do them
no good, and the meeting broke up in confusion.”</p>
<p>Well, Hyrum told Joe what Sidney had said, and Joe gathered all the
Saints in a barn and announced, “I can contend with wicked men and
devils--yes with angels. No power can pluck those keys from me, except
the power that gave them to me; that was Peter, James and John. But for
what Sidney [Rigdon] has done, the devil shall handle him as one man
handles another.”</p>
<p>The meaning of Joe’s threat to have the devil handle Rigdon became clear
about three weeks later, when Rigdon was lying in bed alone. “An unseen
power lifted him from his bed, threw him across the room, and tossed him
from one side of the room to the other. The noise being heard in the
adjoining room, his family went in to see what was the matter, and found
him going from one side of the room to the other, from the effects of
which Sidney was laid up for five or six weeks.” To trace the sequence
of events, Hingepin Rigdon, Jo’s second in command, preached the keys
were taken, Jo said no they aren’t and the devil will deal with Sidney,
then Rigdon gets beat within an inch of his life and he publicly
repented after publicly attributing the beating to an invisible force.
By the way, Jo had a long reputation for fighting as a kid and he was in
his mid-20s here. Rigdon has no such history, instead spending more of
his time with books than people, and he was nearing his 40s. Eps 25, 26</p>
<p>A little over half a year later, at the Sunday meeting on July 8, 1832,
Joe demanded that Rigdon surrender his priesthood license because Rigdon
had once again claimed that the keys of the kingdom were lost, and that
he alone retained them. It’s almost like the keys were real, physical
objects that could be given and taken away instead of some ethereal
concept. Apparently, three weeks after this little tissy fit, Rigdon was
reinstated into the church presidency, without a horrible beating as a
rite of passage, like had been the case in late 1831. This time Joe was
a little smarter with his response. Instead of reacting with violence,
he secured his claim on the priesthood keys by dictating to a scribe the
first-ever written account of his first vision, in which God appeared to
him at age 16 and told him the world had turned away from God and the
end was near. Ep 28.</p>
<p>While these power plays were underway in Kirtland, the Missouri church
was dealing with some troubles of their own. The conflict between the
Mormons and Missourians started in July 1833; the Missourians banded
together and gave the Saints an ultimatum that they needed to clear out
of Jackson County. There were several reasons for this. For one thing,
about 1200 Mormons had moved into the county, and they were on the verge
of being able to take political control of the government. For another
thing, the Mormons were mostly anti-slavery Yankees, and the Missourians
were afraid that the Mormons would bring free blacks into the state and
stir up the Missourians’ slaves to rebellion. Having a bunch of
abolitionists in Missouri government would only exacerbate these
tensions. The Book of Mormon also prophesied that the natives would wipe
out the white people in a bloody apocalypse, and the Missourians worried
that the Mormons might try to make this prophecy come true, which was
reasonable because the whole reason the Mormons made their way to
Missouri in the first place was to preach to the nearby Native
reservations. The Missourians formed a mob, burned the Church’s printing
office and a bunch of haystacks and grain fields, and told the Mormons
to get out or there’d be even worse treatment. The situation escalated
in October and November, and a few men were killed or wounded in an
exchange of gunfire. Missouri’s governor intervened and negotiated a
truce between the two sides, giving the Mormons ten days to clear out.
Not all the Missourians abided by the truce, and the Mormon refugees
were routed by armed gangs as they evacuated the settlement.</p>
<p>This expulsion from Jackson County was awful, and it posed a huge
problem for the Church. You see, Jackson County had been chosen by God
as the site of the New Jerusalem and the latter-day temple. That was by
revelation, God couldn’t get such a dire matter wrong, could he? The
Missourians knew this, the Mormons knew this, and there wasn’t really an
out for Jo here. It would look pretty bad for Joe to just choose some
other site or say that god got it wrong in the first place. Instead Joe
decided on a military strategy, establishing a pattern which would serve
and enslave him for the rest of his ministry. At a meeting of the
Kirtland high council on February 24, 1834,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Brother Joseph then arose, and said that he was going to Zion, to
assist in redeeming it. He called for the voice of the Council to
sanction his going, which was given without a dissenting voice. He
then called for volunteers to go with him, when some thirty or forty
volunteered to go, who were present at the Council. It was a question
whether the company should go by water or by land, and after a short
investigation it was decided unanimously that they go by land. Joseph
was nominated to be the commander-in-chief of the armies of Israel,
and the leader of those who volunteered to go and assist in the
redemption of Zion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the time they left, Joe had gathered about a hundred young men and a
bunch of baggage wagons. Because the wagons were full of supplies, the
soldiers mostly traveled on foot. This caused some complaining on the
part of the men. They would later be joined by another contingent,
bringing their total numbers to just over 200 people including 10 women
and a child. This is the story of the ill-fated Zion’s Camp. Eps 30, 31.</p>
<p>One man that seemed to be a dissenting voice throughout the entire
military campaign was named Sylvester Smith. Whether he was the only
dissenting voice, or was just the most vocal out of the bunch doesn't
matter, because he became the poster-boy for murmuring against the
prophet. One example given includes Sylvester complaining about the
disgusting food they had to eat, while Jo enjoyed the best food. Joe
responded that an evil spirit has come over the camp. The next day,
every horse of every single man that was murmuring “was so badly
foundered that we could scarcely lead them a few rods to water.” Once
everybody stopped their murmuring, the horses healed up by noon that
day, except for Sylvester Smith's horse, which died the next day. Yeah,
Jo was petty enough to kill a horse out of spite even though there isn’t
any direct evidence of it. Quick sidenote, this is also when Zelph, the
white Lamanite warlord, was unearthed and Jo gave a revelation declaring
his identity.</p>
<p>As the camp proceeded, the murmuring increased and Joe prophesied that
the camp would be scourged by God unless they repented. This was,
however, written looking back on the events after they happened so Jo
could make any version of it look like he delivered on a prophecy. On
June 4th-5<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, as they crossed the Mississippi River, Joe's
dog either growled at or bit Sylvester Smith, which only exacerbated the
tensions and served as a microcosm of Jo’s terrible leadership.
According to Heber C. Kimball’s journal, Joe heard about this, and
declared that if a dog had growled at him, he would have just shown the
dog who the master was. (The implication was that Sylvester was a dog
who had growled at Joe, and Joe intended to discipline him.) Sylvester
replied, “If that dog bites me, I'll kill him.” Joe retorted, “'If you
kill that dog, I'll whip you.” And then he preached to the whole camp
about how wicked Sylvester’s behavior was. It says something about Jo
that he values his own dog more than the soldiers marching in lockstep
behind his military leadership.</p>
<p>As the Mormons finished their river crossing, Luke Johnson rode up and
warned that the Missourians had 400 men ready to ride out and meet the
army of the Saints. This emboldened them, and they did some drilling and
military exercises. On June 16 the citizens of Jackson County proposed a
peaceful settlement, but the Mormons refused. The march resulted in
rumors and falsely inflated numbers. Newspaper articles and word of
mouth claimed that a thousand Mormon men, armed and ready for battle,
were descending on Jackson County which amped up the pressure of peace
arrangements between the Mormons who’d been removed from Jackson county
and the anti-Mormon Missourians.</p>
<p>However, the whole time that Joe was marching to Missouri with an army,
Double-Dub Phelps, Algernon Sidney Gilbert, and Party-boy Partridge were
in constant contact with Governor Dunklin of Missouri and other
officials to resolve everything peaceably. Governor Dunklin appointed
John F. Ryland to oversee the negotiations. Ryland tried to get the
Mormons to sell their land, and move to the adjacent Clay County, to the
little town of Liberty. Double-Dub Phelps and Asid Gilbert continually
refused this compromise claiming that it was unfair to the people that
had been chased out of their homes that previous November.</p>
<p>One of the primary sticking points wasn't so much the land, but the guns
and goods. In running the Mormons out of their homes, the mob disarmed
them and stole all their stuff, especially their guns. Of course, today
we can go pick up a gun for a couple hundred bucks, maybe cheaper if
bought from a guy selling them out of the back of his van, but in the
frontier days, a man's gun was an investment and his livlihood. The mob
had taken 52 guns and 1 pistol, which the Mormons were… let’s just say
perturbed about, possibly even moreso than their other possessions being
stolen or destroyed.</p>
<p>That shouldn’t minimize the importance of the land though. The guns were
a problem, but they could also be replaced by reparations or returned.
The land itself, though, was Zion. It was holy land the Mormons valued
more than other land and saw more value in than their non-Mormon
neighbors. Jo would end up weaponizing the Zion land and would
excommunicate people like W.W. Phelps for selling their Zion land, after
which Jo would turn around and do the same thing to help finance the
settlement in Illinois after the Missouri-Mormon War.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, things started to look worse for the Zion’s Camp expedition.
Just as several hundred Missourians threatened to meet the Mormons in
battle, some members of the camp started to come down with cholera. 14
men ended up dying of the disease. Joe knew he couldn’t fight the
Missourians with an army stricken by cholera, so he received his
convenient Fishing River revelation: “Therefore, in consequence of the
transgressions of my people, it is expedient in me that mine Elders
should wait for a little season for the redemption of Zion.”</p>
<p>On July 8<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, after losing 14 people to cholera, never firing
a shot at an enemy, starving and thirsting nearly to death many times,
scaring a lot of people that thought there would be a huge shootout, and
making things much worse than they were before the march, Joseph and the
majority of the elders left Missouri, without actually resolving
anything. Notably as well, one of the people who was negotiating the
resettlement with the Missourians also owned a store in Independence
which also served as the bishop’s storehouse. As he was negotiating with
the Missourians, Zion’s camp decided to stay on his property while the
leadership decided what to do and dealt with the cholera outbreak. This
man came down with cholera brought by the soldiers and died. Algernon
Sidney Gilbert became one of the first Mormons to actually die for the
cause due solely to incompetence on Jo’s part.</p>
<p>Upon their return to Kirtland, Sylvester Smith accused Joe of criminal
actions, the details of which don’t seem to exist. In reaction, a
disciplinary council was held for Sylvester, who was persuaded to
publish a confession admitting fault. 3 weeks later Sylvester published
a statement rescinding his confession. 3 days after that, another
council was called, and Sylvester signed another confession out of fear
of punishment. Even in utter humiliation and defeat, Joe managed to
control the narrative, blame Sylvester for the cholera, and crush
Sylvester’s dissent. Ep 32. Never underestimate the power of a
narcissistic tyrant with a god complex.</p>
<p>In 1835 and 1836, Joe got into some fights with members of his family
that are worth discussing briefly. The first was with his brother-in-law
Calvin Stoddard in June 1835. According to the <em>Painesville Telegraph</em>
on June 22, the prophet was put in jail on a charge of assaulting
Stoddard, but Stoddard initially couldn’t be obtained as a witness
because, good Mormon that he was, he had been “suddenly induced to leave
the State.” Eventually the court got ahold of Stoddard and made him
testify. According to testimony from Stoddard and from Joe’s mother Lucy
Mack Smith, Stoddard and Joe had gotten into an argument over whether
there was water under a certain lot. Stoddard says there was, while Joe
said there wasn’t. Stoddard called Joe a “damned false prophet,” which
was a statement Joe could never tolerate and he “came up and struck him
in the forehead with his flat hand -- the blow knocked him down, when
Smith repeated the blow four or five times, very hard -- made him blind
-- that Smith afterwards came to him and asked his forgiveness -- was
satisfied -- had forgiven him -- would forgive any man who would injure
him and ask his forgiveness.”</p>
<p>Joe and Calvin got into an argument about who was the better water
witch, and it ended with Joe repeatedly bashing Calvin’s head against
the ground so hard that Calvin temporarily went blind. It’s all good,
though, you guys, because Joe asked for forgiveness and Calvin forgave
him. God is so good to forgive his prophet of any trespasses against his
children. Who needs criminal charges and legal punishment when god says
it’s all good?</p>
<p>Joe also fought with his brother, William Smith. Let’s just be clear
here, Crazy Willey was one of the quorum of the twelve, an apostle of
the church. Willey’s induction into the Quorum of Apostles was a topic
of heated debate as Bloody Brigham and NSSM Harris considered him too
unpredictable and unworthy to be an apostle. In October of 1835, Joe and
Willey had a fight that nearly ended in fisticuffs. The issue apparently
wasn’t resolved because on December 16<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> 1835, Joe and Crazy
Willey got into it again. Here’s Joe describing it in the History of the
Church:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This evening, according to adjournment, I went to Brother William
Smith’s to take part in the debate that was commenced Saturday evening
last. After the debate was concluded, and a decision given in favor of
the affirmative of the question, some altercation took place upon the
propriety of continuing the debate fearing that it would not result in
good. Brother William Smith opposed these measures, and insisted on
having another question proposed, and at length became much enraged,
particularly at me, and used violence upon my person, and also upon
Elder Jared Carter, and some others, for which I am grieved beyond
measure, and can only pray God to forgive him, inasmuch as he repents
of his wickedness, and humbles himself before the Lord.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s even been claimed that the physical damage Crazy Willey inflicted
on Joe that day was enough that Joe suffered from the effects until the
day he died. The next day in the History of the Church starts out with
“At home, quite unwell.” Crazy Willey apparently packed quite a punch,
probably learned from his and Jo’s shared childhood in the impoverished
Smith home. It wasn’t until the 29<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of December, 2 weeks
later, that Joe finally brought up formal charges against Crazy Willey
which are as follows.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To the Honorable Presidency of the Church of Christ of Latter-day
Saints, against Elder William Smith: 1<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted -->: Unchristianlike
conduct in speaking disrespectfully of President Joseph Smith, Jun.,
and the revelations and commandments given through him.
2<!-- raw HTML omitted -->nd<!-- raw HTML omitted -->: For attempting to inflict personal violence on
President Joseph Smith, Jun.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This little “altercation” led to Crazy Willey being disfellowshipped
from the church, imagine that. Willie and Joe reconciled on January 2,
1836, after asking each other’s forgiveness, and then Crazy Willey
returned to fellowship. At the end of the day, Joe and Crazy Willey’s
biggest problem was probably that they were just too much alike. Jo had
a habit of finding those types of men and using them until they were no
longer a benefit then attacking them in one way or another. Whether,
Oliver Cowdery, Hingepin Sidney Rigdon, Crazy Willey Smith, Frederick G.
Williams, Doctor Sampson Avard, John C. Wreck-it Bennett, or any other
names of close acolytes who were later pushed out of the movement, this
pattern comes into focus.</p>
<p>Let’s fast-forward to about 1836, the year Charles Darwin completed his
5-year journey aboard the HMS Beagle. 1836 is a year when Joe’s fury
took a darker and more violent turn. Jo had just returned from his
treasure-digging trip in Massachusetts and the quorum of Apostles were
devising an assassination plot against him. If not for Bloody Brigham
riding out of Kirtland to meet Jo upon his return they may have been
successful. Ep 37. Around this time that Jo established the Kirtland
Bank, he also established an organization that was the precursor to the
later Danites, the Mormon shadow enforcement squad. It was called the
“Brother of Gideon society”. It’s existence is not very well
documented and its actions are even more mysterious. In fact, virtually
the only source on the Brother of Gideon society is witness of the gold
plates and official Church historian John Goebbels Whitmer. He writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After Smith's return to Kirtland, Ohio [from Salem, Massachusetts],
and after his ordering the first elders of the Church to go to Ohio,
there to receive their endowments from on high, he hastened the
finishing of the house at Kirtland which was commenced before he had
gone to Zion to redeem her. He from this time began to be lifted up in
the pride of his eyes, and began to seek riches and the glory of the
world; also sought to establish the ancient order of things, as he and
his counsellors, Rigdon and Hyrum Smith, pleased to call it.
Therefore, they began to form themselves into a secret society which
they termed the brother of Gideon, in the which society they took
oaths that they would support a brother right or wrong, even to the
shedding of blood. Thus those who belonged to this society were bound
to keep it a profound secret, never to reveal, but ever to conceal
these abominations from all and every person except those who were of
the same craft. But these things could not be kept a secret, in
consequence of betrayers who fell from their faith and revealed their
secrets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This era surrounding the Kirtland Safety Society bank marks a hard shift
in Jo’s ministry. He transitions from partyboy with a following based
around his cult of personality to an overt crime lord. Jo had shown an
aversion toward laws his entire life, but once the KSS and the Brother
of Gideon Society were formed, his actions trend far more towards
secretive, clandestine, and revolutionary. He isn’t travelling halfway
across the civilized country to hunt for treasure anymore, he’s forming
secret alliances with blood oaths. He isn’t getting into scrapes with
people that offend him anymore, he’s ordering Pistol Packing Porter to
pay them a visit and do his bidding. He isn’t the self-appointed prophet
of a charming fringe religious cult anymore, he’s the head of a crime
syndicate with a street gang of thugs. Notably as well, most historians
point to 1842 as the time in Jo’s life when he emulated Masonry with his
endowment ceremony and sparked up these more clandestine groups.
However, this Brother of Gideon society is clearly of Masonic origins
and shows just how much Masonry had seeped into his religious praxis.
Understandably though because the secretive nature of Masonry is very
appealing to a person with such criminal tendencies as Joseph Smith. Ep
36.</p>
<p>This secret combination was more than just a boys club with special
handshakes and death oaths of secrecy. In 1837, Joe was tried for
attempted homicide against a guy named Grandison Newell. Ep 39. Newell
had filed nearly a dozen lawsuits against the prophet by this time, so
Joe had plenty of reason to be annoyed with him. That shouldn’t surprise
anybody because Jo had run himself and his church into over a million
dollars of 2020 money in debt. But trying to have one of his creditors
assassinated was a new level for Joe. His transition from religious
leader to a demagogue with purely corporate interests hit an important
milestone in 1836-7.</p>
<p>Previous court hearings against Jo usually fell along the lines of him
hoodwinking somebody on a business deal, or maybe calling a church
leader into question for apostasy, or whatever the case may have been;
but Grandison Newell charged that Jo tried to have him killed by
commanding it done by two men, Marvel Davis and Solomon Denton. This
situation sets itself apart as a defining moment in Mormon history and
Jo’s leadership.</p>
<p>According to Denton’s testimony at trial, Joe told them that he had had
a revelation that Newell should be killed and that God would justify the
deed. Fortunately the assassins couldn’t bring themselves to go through
with it, so Newell survived. Apostle Orson Hyde also testified that he
had heard Joe make threatening comments about Newell. The court
ultimately acquitted Joe because there wasn’t enough evidence, but as
was the case in his previous trials in 1826 and 1830, the witness
testimony is far more damning than the verdict of the court.</p>
<p>This was another of the many tensions which created sharp divisions
among the Kirtland leadership. Eventually, the Parrishites marched into
the Kirtland temple during a sermon and held the congregation up at
gunpoint in a forceful bid to take over the leadership. A brawl ensued
and legal complaints were filed all around. Ep 40. This, coupled with
the Fanny Alger incident, Ep 33, the collapse of the KSS, Ep 38, NSSM
testifying he never saw the plates with his natural eyes, Ep 40, brazen
and self-serving power grabs by divine revelation, Ep 41, and massive
debts incurred from terrible business practices and purchasing the
mummies and other Egyptian artifacts, Ep 33, all these factors caused
the Kirtland church to implode. Rival factions were formed known as the
Parrishites, Brewsterites, and The Church of Christ run by Coe,
Smalling, and Harris. These groups formally declared Jo to be a fallen
prophet and the groups excommunicated each other. Jo, Rigdon, and the
majority of the Quorum of Apostles lost the battle in the court of
public opinion and were forced to flee Kirtland for Missouri, leaving
the Temple and other church property in the hands of creditors and these
rival factions.</p>
<p>Upon their arrival in Missouri, tensions only continued to escalate.
These tensions had been boiling since the Mormons began settling in
Missouri in 1831. The Missourians and Mormons had essentially reached a
place of peaceful coexistence and nothing overtly combative happened
from 1835-8. However, when Jo and Rigdon arrived, the peace was quickly
broken for multiple reasons we’re about to discuss. <strong>First,</strong> the
Mormons in Missouri had agreed to not have any more Mormon immigrate to
Missouri. Those loyal to Jo followed him from Kirtland, bringing an
influx of hundreds of Mormons to the Mormon settlements in Missouri,
violating the treaty. <strong>Second</strong>, the Mormon leaders of the Missouri
church posed a threat to Jo’s leadership and he excommunicated them.
However, those were the men who’d negotiated peace with the Missourians.
Their removal meant removal of the peacekeepers from the leadership and
the Missourians bristled against this move. <strong>Third</strong>, the Mormons had
agreed to remain in Caldwell county, which was formed for their
settlement. When Jo and his revolutionary buddies arrived the Mormons
immediately began expanding to Davies, Carrol, Boone, Lafayette, and Ray
counties, thus violating more provisions of the treaty. And finally,
<strong>fourth</strong>, the warlike rhetoric spewed by Jo and Rigdon quickly
escalated for various reasons, not least of which was because the
Mormons needed a common enemy to rally against and the Missourians had
been long-time enemies of the Mormons there even though peace had been
brokered for the 3 years before Jo and Rigdon came riding into town.
Let’s break each of these elements down.</p>
<p>Up to this point, the Mormons had had a truce with the Missourians under
which the Mormons were allowed to have Caldwell County all to
themselves, and in return they promised not to expand into neighboring
counties. In April 1838, Joe and Rigdon violated this truce by sending
settlers into neighboring Daviess County to establish the town of
Adam-ondi-Ahman, a second headquarters to serve as a twin to Far West in
Caldwell county. In July 1837, W. W. Phelps notified the Saints in
Kirtland that “public notice” had been given “by the mob in Davis county
. . . for the Mormons to leave that county by the first of August and go
into Caldwell.”</p>
<p>Joe and Rigdon knew that sending Mormons to settle the nearby counties
was a provocative act. According to a deposition gathered in preparation
for Joe and Rigdon’s trial for treason later that year,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>as early as April [1838], at a meeting, in Far West, of 8 or 12
persons, Mr. Rigdon, arose and made an address to them in which he
spoke of having bo<u>rne persecutions & lawsuits & other privations,
and did not intend to bear them any longer. That they meant to resist
the law, and if a sheriff came after them with writs they would kill
<him>. and if any body opposed them they would take off their heads.
Geo W Harris who was present observed, you menat the head of their
influence I suppose<?> Rigdon answered, he meant, that lump of flesh
& bones called the skull or scalp.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to Robert Snodgrass, Joe preached</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That the time had now come that the Saints should <rise &> take the
kingdom, <and they should> do it by the <sword of the > Spirit,
and if not, by the sword of power</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Mormon War didn’t actually start until August after the Gallatin
election, so if Joe and Rigdon were agitating for cutting off people’s
heads in April, then that was long before any mobs came against them.
This militant language that began as rhetoric was soon realized for the
remainder of 1838. One wonders, was the rhetoric calculated to galvanize
the Mormons, or did it come from a genuine place of tribalism? That’s a
tough question because the results were the same but the motivation and
intent is worth examination. The result may be the same, but the endgame
was clearly different. That’s a complicated way to look at this and it
takes into account three aspects of the Missouri-Mormon war, intention,
result, and goals. If the goal was simply survival in the state, then
warlike rhetoric was the worst thing the Mormon leadership could do as
it ensured their removal. If, however, the goal was to take over the
nation starting with Missouri, the intent is completely different and
therefore the goal is revolutionary and far more dangerous than just
survival and coexistence. This abstract consideration takes into account
value judgments made by the Mormon leadership, Jo and Rigdon. Did they
view the Mormons as their people that they’d go to incredible lengths to
foster growth and wellbeing, or were the Mormons merely pawns in their
overall goals of taking over the country? There’s no way we can know for
sure what was in their minds as the Mormons waxed militant, but that
question is important. What was the actual endgame for Jo and Rigdon?
What was their real intention with escalating the relationship between
the Mormons and the Gentile Missourians? The events of the
Missouri-Mormon war could be construed to arrive at many different
conclusions but what I see is a set of events which would be echoed in
the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo; eventually leading to the state of
Illinois arriving on the precipice of civil war. More on this line of
thought in a while once we’ve discussed the war itself.</p>
<p>A primary aggressor in these tensions was none other than Hingepin
Rigdon himself. In fact, it was Rigdon, not Governor Boggs, who first
called for a “war of extermination.” In his famous 4th of July Oration,
he declared,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We take God and all the holy angels to witness this day, that we warn
all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come on us no more forever.
For from this hour, we will bear it no more, our rights shall no more
be trampled on with impunity. The man or the set of men, who attempts
it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on
us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of
extermination; for we will follow them till the last drop of their
blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we
will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own
families, and one party or the other shall be utterly
destroyed.—Remember it then all MEN.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After Rigdon finished preaching, Joseph Smith got up and praised
Rigdon’s speech as a “Decleration of Independance from all mobs and
persecutions” which had been inflicted upon the Saints “time after time
<un>til we could bear it no longer.” Remember, Boggs’s famous
extermination order wasn’t issued until late October, nearly four months
after Rigdon preached this sermon. Several Mormons later recognized
Rigdon’s sermon as the main cause of the war between the Mormons and
Missourians. It should also be noted that this famous… rather, infamous
July 4th oration was printed from the Mormon press in Far West. If it
was meant to be only an internal speech heard by the Mormons themselves,
it would have remained as only an oral delivery. However, because it was
printed and distributed among Mormons and non-Mormons, the Missourians
understood the dire situation Rigdon and Jo were creating in the Mormon
settlements. It was, indeed, Jo and Rigdon who fired the first
oratorical shots in this war. Only after this was given and tensions
continued escalating that Governor Lilburn Boggs adopted Rigdon’s
language in his infamous Mormon Extermination Order that forced the
Mormons out of the state at the point of a bayonet. This single datum is
all you need to refute the claim that it was legal to murder Mormons in
the state of Missouri until the 1970s; Jo and Rigdon themselves were
responsible for the language used by the Governor to forcibly remove
them.</p>
<p>Here’s a quote from Leland Gentry’s book, <em>Fire and Sword: A History of
Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri</em> which illustrates my point:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ebenezer Robinson insists that . . . it “exerted a powerful influence
in arousing the people of the whole upper Missouri country.” . . .
Said Brigham Young in 1844: “Elder Rigdon was the prime cause of our
troubles in Missouri by his fourth of July oration.” Also in 1844,
Jedediah M. Grant called Rigdon’s talk “the main auxiliary that fanned
into a flame the burning wrath of the mobocratic portion of the
Missourians.” This point of view seems particularly credible in light
of Rigdon’s speaking of a “war of extermination” between the Saints
and their enemies, the very words Governor Lilburn H. Boggs used in
executive orders for the Mormons to leave the state.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Meanwhile, Smith and Rigdon were also setting up the secret organization
known as the Daughters of Zion or the Danites. Originally, the purpose
of the Danites was to punish Mormon dissenters like the ones who had
driven Joe and Hingepin out of Kirtland. Some of the dissenters-- W. W.
Phelps, John Whitmer, and Lyman E. Johnson-- had followed Joe and Rigdon
west to set up a dissenter church in Missouri. Joe and Rigdon were not
having this from men they previously considered confidants and
co-conspirators. On June 17 Rigdon gave a sermon called the Salt Sermon,
not to be confused with the July 4th oration although it commonly is,
based on a verse from the biblical book of Matthew: “If the salt have
lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for
nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” The
July 4th oration was aimed at enemies of the church from the outside
world, the Missourians. The Salt Sermon, however, was aimed squarely at
dissenters from within the ranks. The dissenters were the salt in this
metaphor, and the Danites were the ones doing the trodding underfoot.
Here’s another quote from Leland Gentry’s book, <em>Fire and Sword</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some of the anti-Mormons have maintained that [Rigdon] told his
listeners that the real saints should literally trample on the
dissenters until their bowels gushed out. . . . How much of this
represents the words of Rigdon one cannot say, . . . but this much is
certain: Sidney’s ‘Salt Sermon’ was inflammatory and threatening.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it’s not like Rigdon was way off the reservation here. His sermon
echoed D&C 104:5, which said, “For I, the Lord, have decreed in my
heart, that inasmuch as any man belonging to the order shall be found a
transgressor, or, in other words, shall break the covenant with which ye
are bound, he shall be cursed in his life and shall be trodden down by
whom I will.” After Rigdon finished preaching, Joe apparently got up and
endorsed what he had said. Jo had an opportunity to calm people down and
cut off the escalation from that point forward but chose not to; because
of that decision, over a hundred died and thousands suffered. I should
note here, in our historical timeline Rigdon has taken a back seat.
That’s because he was deliberately pushed to the sidelines after the
Missouri-Mormon war by Jo himself. Prior to 1839, Rigdon’s power and
influence over the church cannot be overstated. He was Jo’s
second-in-command but their actual relationship would be better
characterized as Rigdon had ideas and Jo often went along with them as
the likeable charismatic who could help sway the masses in favor of
Rigdon’s ideas. Rigdon became washed up during the Nauvoo era when Jo
had lots of other friends who were just as revolutionary as him. Rigdon
learned lessons during the Missouri-Mormon war that you can only push
the system so far before it retaliates. Jo learned that you can only
push the system so far before it completely breaks.</p>
<p>After Rigdon’s sermon, in response the Danites wrote up a resolution
signed by 84 Mormon men that told the dissenters to leave town. Known as
the Danite Manifesto, it said, “vengeance sleepeth not, neither does it
slumber; and unless you heed us this time, and attend to our request, it
will overtake you at an hour when you do not expect, and at a day when
you do not look for it; and for you there shall be no escape; for there
is but one decree for you, which is depart, depart, or a more fatal
calamity shall befall you.” The first signature on this document was the
name of Sampson Avard, whom Smith and Rigdon had made the nominal head
of the Danite organization. When Danite violence later got exposed to
the public, Avard became the fall guy that Smith and Rigdon blamed. This
didn’t fly because he became the star witness for the prosecution in the
November Court of Inquiry after defecting from the church; he became a
hero among anti-Mormon Missourians. As a result of the Danite Manifesto,
the dissenters were terrified, and they fled town to avoid being killed.
Ep 43.</p>
<p>Throughout the summer of 1838, tensions continued to rise. Mormons
continued settling in counties in violation of the treaty brokered among
the Missouri church leadership, Ollie Cowdery, D-Day David Whitmer, John
Goebbels Whitmer, and the Missourians. They’d been excommunicated and
removed from the Mormon settlement by the Danite Manifesto meaning the
Missourians had no reason to believe the Mormons would continue to honor
any aspect of the treaty. The warlike rhetoric continued to escalate as
well and the Mormons tried their best to exercise their constitutional
right of democracy, which ruffled Missourian feathers even more.
Eventually, the powder kegs the Mormons and Missourians were filling
underneath their own homes were destined to ignite. This escalated to
war on August 6, 1838, when Daviess County held its county election at
Gallatin. The Missourian citizens of Daviess County feared that the
Mormons would vote as a bloc and gain control of county politics, so
some of them gathered at the polling place in the city of Gallatin to
try to prevent the Mormons from voting. Ep 44. According to Leland
Gentry,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>John D. Lee stated that a brawl began shortly thereafter when a
“drunken brute by the name of Richard Weldon” (or Welding)
approached an old man by the name of Samuel Brown[.] . . . Weldon
announced: “You are a damned liar Joseph Smith is a damned imposter,”
then attacked the elderly Brown and “beat him severely.” A Latter-day
Saint named Hyrum Nelson tried to separate the two but was hit on the
head, shoulders, and face by “half a dozen men.” Riley Stewart, a
Mormon, then picked up a piece of oak lumber and hit Weldon,
reportedly breaking it on his skull. . . . Lee states that he and a
few other Church members were lying on the grass near the polls when
the uproar began. Lee saw John L. Butler, a stranger to him at that
point, give the “Danite sign of distress.” Lee, accompanied by his
friends, immediately joined the fight. . . . Several persons were
seriously hurt in the melee, but none was killed. John D. Lee states
that “nine men had their skulls broken, and many others were seriously
injured in other ways.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Historian Stephen LeSueur reconstructs it with some other vivid details
including allusions to the Danite oath of vengeance and defending a
brother in trouble, even at the cost of one’s own life.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Weldon then began striking Brown. When other Mormons attempted to
restrain Weldon, five or six Missourians jumped into the fray. John L.
Butler, a large and powerful Mormon, rankled at the abuse heaped upon
his people. “The first thing that came to my mind was the covenants
entered into by the Danties to the effect that they were to protect
each other, etc.,” Butler recalled, “and I hollowed out to the top of
my voice saying ‘O yes, you Danites, here is a job for us.’” When
Butler gave the Danite signal of distress, about ten more Latter-day
Saints ran to the defense of their brethren. Seeing this, forty or
fifty Missourians stepped in to battle the Mormons.</p>
<p>“I had witnessed many knock-downs in my time, but none on so grand a
scale,” wrote Joseph McGee, a non-Mormon observer of the fight. The
participants used no guns, but struck at one another with whips,
clubs, rocks, and knives. The Mormons rallied behind Butler, who
wielded a large wooden club he found in a nearby pile of wood. “When I
called out for the Danites a power rested upon me such as one as I
never felt before,” Butler later wrote. “... I never struck a man the
second time, and while knocking them down, I really felt that they
would soon embrace the gospel.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Everybody retreated from the battle before any life-threatening
injuries. Missourians and Mormons alike had bloodied and fractured
skulls, some broken bones, and a Mormon even fled with a knife sticking
out of his back between his shoulder blades. The effects of this brawl
extended far beyond the physical harm incurred by the participants as
this was the spark that ignited the existing tensions into actual war.</p>
<p>A troubling aspect of the human condition now bears brief mention here.
Where does this end? Jo, Rigdon, and the Mormon leadership had been
cultivating the Mormons for years with rhetoric about enemies of the
kingdom of god, the adversary trying to eradicate the gospel and bring
about another great apostasy, the end of days is nigh at hand,
persecution of god’s righteous people; for the Mormons, they’d been
programmed for years to understand that a war was coming. This
election-day fight was exactly the final sign they were looking for. For
them, Jesus was returning any minute and they needed to sell their
clothes for a sword and consecrate their property to the church as the
evil of the world would soon be destroyed and the chosen would be
exalted to reign at the right hand of the savior in Zion. This
apocalyptic narrative pervades the church to this day, fasten your
seatbelt, hang on through the bumps, and do what’s right. Your reward
will be eternal. Enough of this programming and rhetoric and violence is
the inevitable result. Vilification of one’s enemies, elitist complex of
one’s own beliefs, and a warped view of the depravity of humanity lost
to the adversary can only result in this unmitigated horror from
misplaced superiority and holy wars. In my opinion, this kind of speech
is far more dangerous than much of what we understand free speech laws
to outlaw today. You tell a group of people to kill a specific person,
like the leader of the wealthiest religion in America, that’s inciting
violence and you’re liable. However, if you tell a group of people over
generations that their enemy is at the gates trying to lead you astray
or kill you; that the world is ending and your allegiance to the cause
will be tested; that you must resist all appearance of evil and that
you’ll agree to have yourself murdered if you reveal the secrets they
tell you, and then people are murdered as a result of that rhetoric,
it’s merely religious liberty being exercised. It’s a dangerous
concept; it happens every day and there is no legal remedy for it that
doesn’t involve “muh religious freedom” as a seemingly bulletproof
defense. Rigdon and Jo had riled up the Mormons for years and people
died because of it. The same thing happened in Utah under Bloody
Brigham; he programmed them for over a decade that the end of the world
was coming and the enemies were at the gates and when an unassuming
caravan of immigrants passed through Utah on their way to California
they were all murdered in cold blood. This escalation kills people. It
could have been avoided, but instead of relaxing the tensions, it
benefitted Jo and Rigdon to escalate and force more energy into the
feedback loop and people died because of it. The blood of those people
was on the hands of the prophet but he never suffered for the pain,
anguish, and human cost for which he was responsible. HE LANGUISHED IN
PRISON FOR 5 MONTHS!!! Well he should have been there the rest of his
life or hung for committing treason and murder. I’ll have more to say on
that at the end because it really is the fundamental moral question of
today’s show.</p>
<p>This happens every day in fundamentalist Mormon groups. We’re reading
Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist on GBP.</p>
<p>Back to the story.</p>
<p>Once the Gallatin election day brawl occurred, the Mormons took the
offensive in the form of ceremonious preventative measures that resulted
in intimidation. They gathered their forces and went to the homes of
some of the prominent anti-Mormon leaders and elected officials,
threatening them and their families and forcing them to sign statements
that they would support the Mormons in the coming conflict. Let me just
highlight how terrifying this would be if we saw it today. The Mormons
gathered an armed militia and surrounded the homes of their enemies and
forced them to sign documents under duress. Those enemies were elected
government officials. Imagine BLM or an NRA group surrounding the home
of their senator with guns in hand and forcing them to sign a manifesto
that gave deference to that group over all other political and religious
groups. Imagine a Muslim group doing that! How fast would the
Department of Homeland Security show up with tear gas, tanks, and
unmarked vans to make all of those people disappear? Notably as well,
the Mormon cities didn’t allow any journalists or outsiders in the city
limits for fear of giving their anti-Mormon neighbors the upper hand.
Knowing the history of the Mormons in Missouri, it stuns me that any
Mormon today opposes the protests we see happening in every major U.S.
city for the past 2.5 months. Just two years ago Jo was secretly calling
for the assassination of a guy he owed money to; he came a long way in
that short time.</p>
<p>To make matters worse, neighboring Ray County sent a team of
investigators, who urged the Saints to follow the law. The Saints told
the investigators they were done with the law. A posse from Richmond
tried to arrest Joseph Smith and Lyman Wight, but the Mormons mobilized
their own posse to protect their leaders. Governor Boggs ordered the
state militia to the area to keep the peace. This panicked Joe and
Rigdon, who turned themselves in and were acquitted at a mock trial in
September.</p>
<p>For a few days it seemed like the conflict might have been peacefully
resolved, but then some of the Missourians’ houses were burned down. The
Missourians said the Mormons did it, while the Mormons claimed it was a
false flag operation in which the Missourians had burned their own
houses down. It’s hard to determine facts in this conflict because
neither are beyond possible and both are believable, although it’s hard
to imagine a scenario where people burn down their own homes to… what...
own the Morms? In response, Ray County sent a shipment of guns and ammo
to the Missourians in Daviess County, and the Mormons intercepted it and
armed their own militia with the guns. Yeah, the Mormons raided a state
militia gun-supply caravan which also included a cannon. The state
militia ordered both sides to stand down, but it was too late to calm
the boiling tensions between the groups. Ep 45.</p>
<p>In late September, an agreement was briefly made between the Missourians
and Mormons living in Daviess county. On September 26<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, they
had a meeting to appraise the value of the non-Mormons land and come to
an agreement that the Mormons would buy out all the non-Mormon citizens
living in Daviess county, essentially concentrating their numbers and
opening up a bunch of property for the endless stream of refugees
arriving from Ohio and Canada. Among them were Sarah and Marie Lawrence
along with William and Jane Law. This agreement was perceived as a
godsend by the Mormons as it would create a temporary holdout in the
adjacent county to Caldwell. Most non-Mormons had run from Daviess
county already, but the few remaining hold-outs weren’t so jovial about
the agreement. And, of course, because so many people were selling
property at the same time, it drove prices down to a fraction of what
they should have been worth, so the non-Mormons drew the short straw in
a conflict not concerning them. Not only were the Missourians selling
their property at 1/4th the price it should be worth, Jo and Rigdon were
buying it up on credit with church funds and selling it to Mormon
refugees that were moving in at an inflated cost above what they’d
purchased it for. Because that makes them super-duper good guys.
Creating a refugee crisis and making money from the people who suffer
from it. Jo and Rigdon were pretty much the proto Blackwater. Why did Jo
wait until 1844 to run for president?!</p>
<p>However, this also created a downwind problem because it set a
precedent. The Mormons agreed to buy the non-Mormons out of their
property, thus making Daviess county an exclusive Mormon stronghold.
Flip that equation around and now the Mormons are essentially obligated
to agree to be bought out of their lands in counties where they DON’T
hold the majority population. Separate but equal treatment for separate
but equal people in different counties. That’s exactly what happened in
DeWitt, Carroll county. By the end of September there were about 200
Mormons living in Dewitt who’d constructed a jerry-rigged town of wagons
and tents with a few small permanent buildings. The Missourians who’d
been living in Dewitt, long before the Mormons began pouring in, became
increasingly frustrated and hateful of the Mormons there, especially
given all the surrounding circumstances contributing to Missouri
teetering on the edge of civil war. By September 20<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, the
Missourians were performing daily military drills in full view of the
Mormons to posture their prowess. October 1<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted --> marked the
first day of the actual siege of Dewitt. Within a few days, the
Missourians gathered 500 armed men to siege the town. Then, a huge
mistake happened. Jo and Rigdon with a massive battery of reinforcements
showed up in DeWitt to try and administrate and dispel the tensions.
This only invigorated the excitement of the anti-Mormons to chase them
out of DeWitt to a critical tipping point.</p>
<p>By 10 October 1838, just two weeks after Victoria Woodhull, the first
woman presidential candidate and civil rights activist, was born, the
standing militias outside DeWitt posed an unstoppable force against the
Mormon’s solidarity to defend DeWitt or die as an immovable object.
George Hinkle, the Mormon defense commander in DeWitt realized the
situation couldn’t be resolved favorably for the Mormons without massive
bloodshed. A decision was made among Rigdon, Jo, and Hinkle that the
surrender of DeWitt was the only possible option or the siege would
starve the town until the anti-Mormon militias were merely waging battle
upon walking corpses. The Mormons forfeited their weapons and property,
and evacuated DeWitt. Understandably, this caused outcry among the
Mormons who viewed this all as religious persecution because that’s what
Rigdon and Jo were telling them, without recognizing they were merely
being forced to uphold the precedent they’d set when buying the
Missourians out of Davies county.</p>
<p>On returning to Far West at the head of all these refugees, Joe’s
rhetoric in his sermons waxed militant and dire. He fell into simplistic
language and vilification of the enemies of the Mormons with a buzzword
calculated to shut down the complexity of the issue. The Mobocrats were
the antifa of the day for Jo. According to George Walter, Joe declared
that “it was a time of war, and . . . the militia was nothing but a mob,
<that> the state of Missouri was a mob. & that the governor himself
was a mob character… it <is> time to lay religion aside and take up
<our> guns.” Thomas B. Marsh reported Joe saying, “he would yet tread
down his enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; and if he was not let
alone, he would be a second Mohammed to this generation, and that it
would be one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic
Ocean; that like Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was, 'the
Alcoran or the Sword,' so should it be eventually with us, ‘Joseph Smith
or the Sword.’”</p>
<p>The Danite meetings started to get really scary, too. Here’s a quote
from the Reed Peck manuscript:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The blood of my best friend must flow by my own hands if I would be a
faithful Danite should the prophet command it,’ said A[lexander]
McRae in my hearing. “If Joseph should tell me to kill Vanburen in his
presidential chain I would immediately start and do my [work] to
assassinate him[,] let the consequences be what they would[”]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Danite commander Sampson Avard organized the Danites into companies and
gave them this order:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Know ye not brethren that it soon will be your privilege to take your
respective companies and go out on a Scout on the borders of the
settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the ungodly Gentiles,
for it is written [in the Doctrine and Covenants] “The riches of the
Gentiles shall be consecrated to my people, the House of Israel;” thus
waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their
property and in this way we will build up the Kingdom of God and roll
forth the little stone that Daniel saw cut out of the Mountain without
hands, until it shall fill the whole earth. For this is the very way
that God designs to build up His Kingdom in the last days.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s the scriptural justification from Jo’s own revelation which Jo
and Avard used to justify what they would do next; to pillage and burn
the homes and businesses of non-Mormons in Daviess county. Joe heard
rumors that the mob had burned some Mormons’ houses in Daviess County,
so he marched 100-150 armed men from Far West in Caldwell County to
Adam-ondi-Ahman in Daviess County. About the time they arrived, there
was a big snow storm. According to Joe’s history, he found the city full
of refugees, including “Women and children, some in the most delicate
condition. . . . My feelings were such as I cannot describe when I saw
them flock into the village, almost entirely destitute of clothes, and
only escaping with their lives.”</p>
<p>Jo put them there. They were in this situation because of him but I’d be
willing to bet that that thought never crossed his mind. He was a
solutions guy, not an abstract self-reflective guy! Somehow Joe had to
feed and clothe all these people. His solution was to dispatch Apostle
David Patten, known as Captain Fearnaught, because Mormons are so good
with nicknames. Fearnaught with a bunch of troops rode to Gallatin, and
the wild ram of the mountains, Lyman Wight, took off with a bunch of
troops to Millport. The mission of these ragtag Mormon militiamen? Loot
the non-Mormon towns. The citizens of Gallatin fled when Patten’s troops
arrived, and Wight’s troops apparently found Millport already abandoned
by the time they got there. They chased out the few remaining citizens,
and then carried off all the possessions they could carry and burned
Gallatin and Millport to the ground. The troops returned to
Adam-ondi-Ahman with hogs, cattle, and piles of stolen furniture. Ep 46.</p>
<p>Looting solved the Mormons’ starvation problem in the short-term, but it
created a different problem. General David R. Atchison of the Missouri
militia had been mostly on the Mormons’ side up to this point, but on
October 22 he sent a letter to Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs
reporting that the Mormons had apparently lost their minds. This letter
points out the failings when an insufficient information network
transmits orders and military commands with little ability to
immediately verify the veracity of such information.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Almost every hour I receive information of outrage and violence; of
burning, and plundering in the county of Daviess; it seems that the
Mormons have become desperate and act like mad-men, they have burned a
store in Gallatin, they have burnt Millport, they have[,] it is
said[,] plundered several houses and have taken away the arms from
Diverse Citizens of that county. A cannon that was employed in the
siege of De Witt in Carroll County, and taken for a like purpose to
Daviess County, has fallen into the hands of the Mormons, it is also
reported that the anti[-]Mormons have[,] when opportunity
offered[,] disarmed the Mormons, and burnt several of their houses.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Atchison was one of the few who had his head on straight in the conflict
and he declined to send his troops into Daviess County, because he felt
it would just escalate the situation, and he didn’t think the optics
would look great if the state militia were to drive the Mormons from the
state. He and Alexander Doniphan were working constantly of behalf of
the Mormons to deescalate when the Mormons themselves were doing nothing
to help their own situation. Unfortunately for everybody, Governor
Lilburn Boggs was done. Up till now, Governor Boggs had just been trying
to keep the peace. But now he decided that it was finally time to clear
out the rebel Mormon settlements. He removed General Atchison from
command and ordered the other generals to raise hundreds more soldiers
to overwhelm the Mormons.</p>
<p>A brief point worth mentioning; Governor Lilburn Boggs didn’t come to
handle matters personally. In spite of multiple petitions from the
Mormons and his own generals, Boggs remained in Richmond throughout this
whole conflict and merely issued decrees based on the limited
information he was receiving from his own men. This was Boggs’s blunder
throughout the affair; he received information, some of it merely
rumors, and acted on that information, opening the door for any of his
underlings who were trying to make a name for themselves to escalate the
conflict and take matters into their own hands.</p>
<p>On October 24, a unit under command of Captain Samuel Bogart captured a
couple of Mormon spies, as the Mormons had done with Missouri
militiamen. Believing that Bogart might execute the prisoners, Apostle
David Patten led a group of Mormons in a raid to Crooked River where the
militia was encamped to try to rescue them. Patten’s men set up an
ambush and aggressively attacked Captain Bogart’s camp at 3 AM and
routed them. These were the first actual shots fired in the conflict.
The Mormons sustained losses. Three Mormons, including Apostle David W.
Patten, Captain Fearnaught himself, were killed. At least one of the
Missouri militiamen were also killed, many were wounded in the melee
once all the firearms were discharged. This is known as the Battle of
Crooked River.</p>
<p>This was an altogether unexpected attack for Bogart’s men. They
scattered in all directions in the darkness, carrying with them stories
of a Mormon massacre to any nearby village. While the actual numbers
were minimal, the rumors claimed only a few of Bogart’s men survived.
All these rumors found their way back to Governor Boggs who now
considered the Mormons in open defiance and waging civil war on the
citizens of his state.</p>
<p>To add complexity, Boggs was also receiving intel about the Mormon
depredations across Davies and Carrol counties. At the same time, Thomas
B. Marsh and Doctor Sampson Avard, two Danites and confidants of the
inner circle of Mormon leadership, defected and filed affidavits about
the existence of the Danites and the Mormon looting and burning
throughout the state. Avard also retained a copy of the Danite
Manifesto, the death threat against dissenters.</p>
<p>All these factors became the final straw for Boggs. On October 27, he
put an anti-Mormon general named John B. Clark commander of the state
militia, and he issued his famous Executive Order No. 44, also known as
the “Mormon Extermination Order.” It says in part,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[This morning] I have received . . . information of the most
appalling character, which entirely changes the face of things, and
places the Mormons in the attitude of an open and avowed defiance of
the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this state. Your
orders are, therefore, to hasten your operation with all possible
speed. The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be
exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public
peace--their outrages are beyond all description. Ep 47</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Three days after this order was issued, some Missouri militia troops
committed the gruesome massacre at Haun’s Mill. Ep 48. Just a few days
after that, with Far West surrounded by Missouri militia, Joseph Smith
surrendered the town, and the Missourians took many of the Mormon
leaders, including Joe and Sidney Rigdon, into custody to be tried for
high treason against the state. The rest of the Saints were forced to
flee from Missouri to Illinois, a third mass-exodus which occurred
throughout the winter and into spring of 1838-39.</p>
<p>In November 1838, Missouri held a 17-day court of inquiry to collect
evidence on the treason charges against Joe and the other Mormon
leaders. This trial was exclusively for the purpose of indictment, not
an actual jury trial on the facts. The judge only held this to determine
if there was enough available evidence to move forward with a
prosecution and jury trial. However, because no defense witnesses were
called due to the function of the court of inquiry, it was claimed from
that time forward in the Mormon persecution narrative that Missouri
never let the Mormons call their own witnesses. They weren’t able to
call witnesses because it wasn’t an actual jury trial, but that fact
didn’t stop Jo from using the experience as a rally cry for the Mormons
for the remainder of his life. The trial opened up with its star
witness, Sampson Avard, who turned states’ evidence to avoid prosecution
himself. Avard’s decision to flip on Joe may have been motivated by a
belief that the Mormons’ surrender meant Joe was a false prophet. Among
other things, Avard testified that “We were advised all the time to
fight valiantly, and that the angels of the Lord would appear in our
defense and fight our battles.” Also testifying against Joe were
Apostles Thomas B. Marsh and Orson Hyde. Suffice to say, the testimony
was damning, and Joe would have been easily convicted if he hadn’t
bribed his way out of Liberty Jail and fled to Illinois. Missouri had
him dead to rights and that’s why he never step foot back in the state
from that time until his death. It’s also why so many different sheriffs
and constables tried to extradite him to Missouri to answer for the
charges. Jo was a slippery guy. Ep 50, 51.</p>
<p>Before we get into the Illinois era, I want to spend a bit of time on
the trajectory of this conflict as it’ll help inform our discussion of
Nauvoo. What was the intention and endgame plan for Jo and Rigdon? They
were co-conspirators in waging open warfare against the state of
Missouri and the Governor of the State had to handle the matters
personally to keep his state from devolving into a years’ long conflict.
There were clearly a lot of factors at play which caused this
militaristic bend in the church. Starving refugees migrating to Missouri
after planting season had already passed puts a lot of pressure on the
leadership to keep those people fed during the coming winter. Stealing
provisions and burning towns to the ground in their wake, the Mormons
planned to loot their way through the coming winter but that obviously
came at a cost. A divine revelation commanded that theft to be god’s
will and the Mormons executed that will at the point of a gun and
bayonet. The question really is, were Jo and Rigdon reacting to events
around them, or was there a calculated plan to bring the state to the
edge of war for other purposes? The Mormons had a long and troubled past
with Missouri for half a decade before Jo and Rigdon got out there and
formed the Danites and started preaching fire and brimstone, but was it
all calculated to galvanize the Mormons against a common enemy and
solidify that cult personality? Any group needs a common enemy to remain
cohesive and Missouri mobocrats became that common enemy. Intent matters
because it’s the difference between premeditated murder and
manslaughter.</p>
<p>We understand the result, regardless of the intent, but where the intent
comes back into focus is when we consider what the endgame was.
Mormonism, from its inception, was a revolutionary sect. It sought to
overthrow the powers that be and instate a religious empire to rule the
world, preempting the second coming of Jesus and laying the governmental
lattice upon which Jesus would build his kingdom of god on earth. These
ideas are very much at the center of the church today, even though the
language is cryptic and stated in less-defined and more ethereal ways.
The intent of today’s prophets is just as at questions as the intent of
Rigdon and Jo in early 1838. Were they preaching this apocalyptic and
warlike rhetoric with the intent of preserving the wellbeing of their
people, or were the Mormons merely pawns in a much larger game of world
revolution? One is focused on the good of the people, the other is
focused on aggrandizement of the leadership and the motivation matters.
Jesus said love thy neighbor, not love thy big ass buildings and bank
account. Were these Missouri Mormons viewed as people by the leadership,
or soldiers? Are Mormons today viewed as people by the leadership, or
walking checkbooks? Intent matters.</p>
<p>Let’s keep this question of intent in our minds as we navigate the final
and most revolutionary era of Mormonism, Nauvoo. Ep 53, 54, 55, 56.</p>
<p>Once Jo bust out of jail and got settled in Illinois, he petitioned
Congress for over a million dollars of reparations for the persecution
that the Mormons had suffered in Missouri. He asked US President Martin
Van Buren for help in getting this through Congress, but Van Buren told
him, “Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you.” Ep 58, 61.</p>
<p>Understandably, this infuriated the prophet. He was banking on that
bailout money to pay for all the land contracts he’d signed to resettle
the Mormons. Being denied the government teat, he’d be left to his own
devices to build and expand the fledgling Mormon empire on the
Mississippi. The Quincy Whig newspaper reported Jo’s reaction to
President Van Buren’s denial: “He is not as fit[,] said he, as my dog,
for the chair of state; for my dog will make an effort to protect his
abused and insulted master, while the present chief magistrate will not
so much as lift a finger to relieve an oppressed and persecuted
community of freemen, whose glory it has been that they were citizens of
the United States.” This rage certainly contributed to his later
decision to run for president himself, like when another president
roasted a TV personality in good fun who then decided to run for POTUS
against everything the previous president stood for just to prove to all
the libs what a good president looks like. Ep 71.</p>
<p>At this point in our timeline we need to introduce Thomas Coke Sharp. Ep
77. A Methodist minister’s son from Pennsylvania, Sharp graduated law
school but didn’t make a very good lawyer because he was partially deaf.
So instead he turned to the publishing business and started a newspaper
called <em>The Warsaw Signal</em>, based in Warsaw, Illinois not far from
Nauvoo. According to its masthead, the paper was “Devoted to politics,
agriculture, literature, commerce, and general intelligence.”</p>
<p>This was the single closest paper to the new Mormon HQ of Nauvoo that
wasn’t published by the Mormons themselves. If somebody in the nation
wanted to know what those deluded religious fanatics were up to lately,
they could go to the Times and Seasons, but that was a Mormon propaganda
rag. They could use another large newspaper outlet, but most of those
just reprinted articles from this one little source out of Hancock
County written by Thomas Sharp. Eventually Sharp drew the ire of Jo’s
younger brother, Crazy Willey, in his newspaper, the Wasp, when it would
respond to Thomas Sharp’s articles in it’s column titled “The Stinger”
wherein it would call Sharp, ThomASS, with the ASS capitalized.</p>
<p>On April 7, 1841, Sharp reported on the dedication of a new temple site
in Nauvoo, Illinois the previous day. According to Sharp, “The number
assembled is variously estimated; we should think however about 7000 or
8000, some say as high as 12,000. The Nauvoo Legion consisting of 650
men, was in attendance, and, considering the short time they have had to
prepare, made a very respectable appearance. . . . Gen. [John C.]
Bennett commanded the legion, under the direction of the Prophet, and
acquitted himself in a truly officer-like manner.”</p>
<p>This article gained national media attention. Just imagine if you’d
heard about the Mormons committing their militant acts of treason,
raiding and burning non-Mormon settlements and military supply trains,
which got them kicked out of Missouri and you read in a newspaper one
day that they cost the state of Missouri $150,000, adjusted for
inflation that’s just a hair under $4mn, then you see an article saying
they have another army and just laid the cornerstone for their temple in
Illinois, just as they had done in Missouri 2 years prior. What goes
through your mind? Here’s how a Selma, Alabama newspaper interpreted
this: “They [the Mormons] do not intend to be driven out of Illinois,
as they were from Missouri.” Which was exactly right. Joe was building a
fortress of civil and military power around himself in Nauvoo, and it
took years for his enemies to crack it, though eventually they managed
to, but doing so required murdering the guys responsible for the
criminal behavior. Ep 66.</p>
<p>Joe’s great accomplice in building up this edifice of power was John C.
Wreck-it Bennett, a fellow narcissist who had political and military
experience that Joe lacked. Bennett converted in 1840 and helped Joe
write the Nauvoo City charter soon after he arrived in the city. Joe
made Bennett the mayor of Nauvoo and his second-in-command of the Nauvoo
Legion. For a couple years, they were absolute best buds. Bennett even
owned and operated a Nauvoo brothel with Joe’s tacit approval in
addition to running the city’s abortion clinic to deal with temporal
consequences of celestial marriage. Ep 67, 141, Bennett Meltdown
120-134.</p>
<p>But then Bennett got caught seducing women too openly and telling them
that Joe had taught him that adultery wasn’t sinful. Joe went into
damage control mode. He knew he needed to distance himself from Bennett
and make an example of him. On May 14, 1842, Bennett’s last act as mayor
was to sign an order for the destruction of all brothels in Nauvoo.
Remember, Bennett <em>owned</em> one of Nauvoo’s brothels, so this order was
specifically directed at <em>his</em> personal sex trafficking business. Ep
119. I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that city council
meeting to figure out exactly what went down. 5 days later, Bennett
resigned from the office of Mayor and membership in the church.</p>
<p>So it seems like Bennett initially participated in the damage control
and cover-up to protect Joe’s reputation from the fallout from Bennett’s
actions. In private, Joe talked about Bennett like they were still good
friends and had parted on really good terms. But Bennett felt like Joe
had thrown him under the bus and was growing too powerful, and within a
month their relationship took a hard turn for the worse. Bennett went
public with the sordid details of Joe’s “spiritual wife doctrine” in a
series of letters published in the <em>Sangamo Journal</em>, and Joe had the
Danites follow him to Carthage and threaten to murder him. Eventually
all his letters were compiled with extensive other data and sold as a
book titled History of the Saints. Listeners on the patreon-exclusive
feed can listen to the entire book with my commentary.</p>
<p>Jo’s younger brother, Crazy Willey Smith, had started his own newspaper
outlet called <em>The Wasp</em>, which took on anybody writing articles in
opposition to the Mormons, and Thomas Coke Sharp of the <em>Warsaw Signal</em>
was a frequent target of Crazy Willey’s <em>Wasp</em> propaganda. On June 25,
1842, the Wasp published this threat against Bennett: “Unless he
[Bennett] is determined to bring SUDDEN DESTRUCTION upon himself FROM
THE HAND OF THE ALMIGHTY, he will be <em>silent.</em>” Four days later, a group
of Danites sneaked up on Bennett’s house in the night to try to kill
him. But Bennett had been forewarned and armed himself to the teeth, and
he scared the assassins off. Obviously working by direction of the
prophet, assassins like this would have a few other notable failed
attempts on the life of William Marks, the Laws, and other public
defectors from the faith.</p>
<p>Joe built up the Nauvoo Legion to give Mormon military power a legal
legitimacy that the Danites had lacked in Missouri. However, he also
kept a few Danite henchmen around to conduct operations off the books.
One of these was a childhood friend of Joseph. This man was short,
stout, and liked his whiskey. His eyes were portals into black oblivion,
and his receding hairline only revealed more of the demonic features
comprising his face as the years wore on. He may have been 8 years
Joseph’s junior, but he and Jo were rough and tumble scrappy young lads
causing trouble in Palmyra since their friendship was forged. If you
messed with Jo, you’d have to keep an eye on your back for his best
friend and closest personal bodyguard, Orrin Pistol Packin’ Porter
Rockwell. Ep 142.</p>
<p>Porter Rockwell had been the leader of the “Destroying Angel” company of
the Danites throughout the 1838 Missouri-Mormon conflict. He’d
participated in looting and burning the non-Mormon towns around the
Mormon settlement and he never left Jo’s side as the standoff continued
to heat up between the Missouri militia and the Mormon mob, ending in
Jo’s arrest.</p>
<p>How does a pious prophet of the Lord deal with his sharpest critics?
Thomas Sharp, editor of the Warsaw Signal, was met with public derision
by the Mormon machine. Jo and his propaganda outlets constantly
criticized Sharp for articles he wrote in the Signal. But there were a
few people, like Grandison Newell and John C. Bennett, who posed enough
of a threat for Joe to try to assassinate them. Another of those was
ex-Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs, public enemy #1 in the eyes of
the Mormons. The man who’d been pinned for the treatment of the Mormons
during the Missouri-Mormon war, instead of the blame resting with Jo and
Rigdon where it rightfully belonged. The vengeful arm of the lord would
be swift and deadly.</p>
<p>Orrin Pistol Packin Porter Rockwell’s wife, Luana Rockwell, was 8 months
pregnant with their fourth child. Port and Luana wanted to have the baby
with Luana’s parents, then living in Independence, Missouri and in late
February, Port packed up a wagon with a few provisions, sent the other 3
kids to live with some family friends for a few weeks, and they departed
Nauvoo. On the evening of May 6<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1842, Pistol Packin Porter
tucked his wife away in bed as she nursed the new baby.</p>
<p>Port loved horses and carriages; he was an expert rider. He’d just got a
new job in Independence taking care of a valuable stallion in order to
financially support his family for the brief time they would be staying
in Missouri until the baby was old enough to travel back to Nauvoo. Port
saddled up and rode the couple miles under the cover of nightfall to the
home of former Governor Lilburn Boggs. He loaded the pistol with a hot
load, lots of extra powder and buckshot to make sure when Boggs was hit
there would be no chance of his survival.</p>
<p>The Destroying Angel of Mormonism, the great Son of Thunder, crouched
outside the office of Boggs’ home, peering in the window, eyeing his
prey. Port saw the back of Boggs’ head lined up in the sight beads of
his pistol loaded with buckshot. The hammer crashed into the cap,
igniting the heavy load in the pistol’s chamber. The buckshot hit true
to its target. Two small lead balls entered Boggs’ head, one implanting
in his skull, the other breaking his jaw, and two more balls entered his
throat, one entering his esophagus which he swallowed as he gasped in
surprise at the gunshot and crashing window noises. A spell of
incredible pain and trauma suddenly overtook his body, rendering him
immediately unconscious. The shot was so powerful that the gun kicked
out of Port’s hand and into a puddle beneath the broken window. He fled
the scene without picking it up.</p>
<p>When the sheriff later discovered the gun, he showed it to a storekeeper
named Uhlinger who recognized the weapon as one stolen from his shop.
Uhlinger later said, “I thought the niggers had taken it, but that hired
man of Ward’s—the one who used to work with the stallion—he came in to
look at it just before it turned up missing!” That hired man of Ward’s
was Pistol Packin Porter who’d hired on to take care of the valuable
horse. The investigators had their first lead to who the assassin might
be.</p>
<p>A mere 2 weeks later Pistol Packin Porter arrived back in Nauvoo off a
Mississippi steamer having permanently left his wife with their new
child back in Missouri. He was never seen by any of the locals in
Missouri after the assassination attempt and he made the 300-mile
journey back to Nauvoo in less than 2 weeks, arriving in Nauvoo 2 days
before news of the assassination reached Nauvoo. Porter actually
travelled from Missouri to Nauvoo faster than the news did, which was
quite a feat. The next day, Joe announced Boggs’s death on the stand--
like Port, he wrongly assumed the assassination had been successful. Ep
109.</p>
<p>It wasn’t long before rumors started to fly about who was responsible.
Thomas Coke Sharp heard from John C. Bennett, who had recently defected
from the Church, that “[O.P. Rockwell] started suddenly from Nauvoo
about two weeks before Boggs’s assassination; that he(Bennett) asked Joe
where Rock[well] had gone, and that Joe replied that he had gone to
Missouri to fulfil prophecies! He saysfurther that Rock[well]
returned to Nauvoo on the very day that the news of Governor Bogg’s
assassination arrived. Since that, the Prophet has presented said
Rock[well] with a carriage and horse, or horses, and he had suddenly
become very flush of money, and lives in style.”</p>
<p>The primary enemy of the Mormons gets shot, nearly dies from it as the
shot should have been fatal, then the primary suspect is rolling around
in a new carriage with plenty of whiskey money. If you did good for the
prophet, he had your back. If you carried out his vengeful prophecies,
you’d be handsomely rewarded.</p>
<p>Underscoring just how powerful and malevolent the Mormon kingdom on the
Mississippi had become, a reprint of Sharp’s article in the <em>Brooklyn
Evening Star</em> included this addendum:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The Kaskaskian Republican contains a long account of a murder
committed on the 2d of June, upon John Stephenson—a Mormon—and
supposed to have been committed by Mormons who had called upon him for
contributions to build the temple at Nauvoo, and been refused.” Jo’s
Danites in full force to carry out his will by any means necessary.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then there’s another addendum which discusses the hurdles to making him
answer for the crimes as the Nauvoo Legion had been armed by
state-provided weapons… and lots of them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have late information from Nauvoo. Joe Smith anticipates a
requisition upon Gov. Carlin from Gov, Reynolds of Missouri, for his
person; and is determined not to be given up. He has all the state
arms,--some twenty or thirty cannon[s]—a large number of muskets,
yagers, pistols and cutlasses—all belonging to the state, which he is
prepared to use against the state authorities if they shall attempt to
deliver him to Gov. Reynolds. Joe reiterates that he will not be given
up—and the Mormons say that the Prophet shall not be taken while any
of them are left to defend him.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Crazy Willey Smith’s newspaper <em>The Wasp</em> was quite gleeful to see Boggs
suffer at the end of an unknown assassin’s gunbarrel with articles like
this, tacitly implicating Jo in the assassination plot. Willey quoted
the <em>Quincy Whig</em> saying that “Smith too, the Mormon Prophet, as we
understand, prophesied a year or so ago, his [Boggs’] death by violent
means. Hence, there is plenty of foundation for rumor.” Jo did give that
prophecy, also that Governor Carlin of Illinois would find himself in a
ditch, which never did happen, but <em>The Wasp</em> denied he ever stated such
things about either Governor. Here’s Joe’s response to the <em>Quincy Whig</em>
article in <em>The Wasp</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In your paper,… you have done me manifest injustice in ascribing to me
a prediction of the demise of Lilburn W. Boggs,… by violent hands.
Boggs was a candidate for the State Senate, and I presume fell by the
hand of a political opponent, with “his hands and face yet dripping
with the blood of murder;” but he died not through my instrumentality.
My hands are clean and my heart pure, from the blood of all men. I am
tired of the misrepresentations, calumny and detraction, heaped upon
me by wicked men; and desire and claim, only those principles
guaranteed to all men by the constitution and laws of the United
States, and of Illinois.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, Boggs was a public figure. He did have political enemies, but he
wasn’t a controversial figure in any other regard beyond the Mormon
issue; in fact he was pretty popular in Missouri. A letter to the editor
of the Hawk Eye out of Missouri stated “Boggs, although so strongly
accused by these renegades (Mormons), was one of the most inoffensive
men I ever knew. I knew him well and for years, and I did not know with
the exception of the Mormons, that he had a personal enemy on earth.”
The fact of the matter is that <em>The Wasp’s</em> response was pure
propaganda. By my understanding of the evidence, this was all Port and
Jo’s work, no question about it. Historians today disagree, but largely
based on belief of Jo’s statements against the overwhelming evidence
pointing to him and Port as the responsible parties.</p>
<p>John C. Bennett composed a series of sensational letters for publication
in the <em>Sangamo Journal</em> exposing Joseph Smith and telling what he knew
of the Boggs affair. Bennett said Rockwell had been sent to kill Boggs
on Joseph’s orders. “In the spring of the year Smith offered a reward of
five hundred dollars to any man who would secretly assassinate Governor
Boggs.” And after the attempt was made, Bennett related, “Smith said to
me, speaking of Governor Boggs, ‘The <em>Destroying Angel</em> has done the
work, as I predicted, but Rockwell was not the man who shot; the Angel
did it.’” Port later showed up at Bennett’s house to threaten him for
making these allegations. What Port took issue with wasn’t the claim
that he had shot Boggs. It was the part about getting paid for it that
he didn’t like. Porter said that if Bennett made such a claim again,
he’d be back. That carried all the implications Bennett needed to be
on high-alert that the Danites were working to make him disappear.</p>
<p>Port and Joe briefly got arrested for the Boggs assassination in 1842,
but they escaped when the arresting officers left them temporarily in
custody of a Mormon sheriff, and he, of course, let them go. When the
Adams County officers returned to extradite the prisoners to Missouri
for the crimes, Joe and Port were nowhere to be found. The sheriff tried
tailing Emma to Joe’s hiding place, but Emma was a smart cookie who was
really good at cleaning up her husband’s messes, and she gave the cops
the slip.</p>
<p>Port later got arrested again in March 1843 when bounty hunters caught
up with him in Philadelphia as he was headed back to Nauvoo to come out
of hiding. They took two pistols and a bowie knife off him when they
arrested him; then carried him back to St. Louis, where he was arraigned
and then transported to jail in Jefferson City. He was confined to the
Independence jail for quite a while as the state decided exactly what to
do with him.</p>
<p>The fact of the matter is, the state wanted to charge him with assault
with intent to kill, but they simply didn’t have evidence to prove it
was Pistol Packin’ Port who pulled the trigger on Boggs. They also
wanted to get him on the old charges with the Mormon depredations back
in 1838 but they had even less evidence for that. They kept him locked
up for a couple months, and then he tried to escape. He sawed through
his chains, jumped his jailer, and made a run for it, but he was out of
shape from his long confinement and couldn’t keep running. The sheriff
recaptured him, and an angry mob gathered around wanting to lynch him.
The sheriff clapped him in heavier chains and put him in solitary
confinement for nearly a month with his wrists chained to his ankles.
Finally, in late May, Port was brought to court. A grand jury failed to
indict him on the assassination charge, but indicted him for trying to
escape. He spent most of the rest of 1843 in chains before his eventual
release and triumphant return near Christmas 1843 when Jo mistook Port
for a Missourian causing trouble in his downstairs bar. Eps 142, 164.</p>
<p>While all this was going on in Missouri, back in Nauvoo Joe made the
acquaintance of one Joseph H. Jackson. Jackson claims he was
infiltrating the Mormons in order to expose Joe, but he represented
himself to Joe as a desperado and potential criminal accomplice. He
mentioned to Joe that he thought he could help Porter Rockwell escape.
“Well,” said Joe, “if you will release Porter, and kill old Boggs, I
will give you three thousand dollars.” According to Jackson,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joe and I took a ride of some five miles on the prairie. All the way
out and back, he pressed me to kill Boggs; and said that he would pay
me well for it. Finally, I gave him a strong hint that I was in for
the business -- knowing as I did, that if I hesitated he would suspect
me of treachery, and thus, all my plans in relation to him would be
frustrated. I therefore carried on my game by showing a bold front.
All the while, he was urging the killing of Boggs, he insisted that it
was the will of God, and in God's name he offered me a reward for his
blood. This was all done with an air of sanctimonious gravity, and
with a look of innocence, that would make one almost believe that the
Prophet really thought, that he was acting under the command of
Heaven. I was utterly astonished to see this man concoct the most
hellish plans for murder and revenge, and yet, with pertinacity insist
that it was right in the sight of God.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jackson did go to Missouri at Joe’s behest, but he couldn’t get in to
see Rockwell, and Boggs was out of town, so he couldn’t have carried out
Joe’s plan even if he wanted to. His real plan, or so he claimed, had
been to get in to see Rockwell and try to elicit a confession. Ep 144.</p>
<p>In June 1843, Joe was arrested again while visiting Emma’s sister in
Dixon, Illinois. However, Joe’s bodyguard Stephen Markham was present
when Missouri sheriff Joseph Reynolds and Illinois sheriff Harmon T.
Wilson took Joe into custody. Markham alerted the Mormon troops back at
Nauvoo, a mix of Danites and Nauvoo Legionnaires, who intercepted the
sheriffs and liberated Joe by force. Eps 144-7. Joe had escaped
accountability once again, but this latest arrest raised a question: how
had the sheriffs known that he would be in Dixon?</p>
<p>As Joe headed into the last two years of his life, he faced a rising
tide of dissent from within the Mormon community. With a growing number
of Church leaders opposed to polygamy, Joe grew increasingly paranoid
that someone might sell him out. In particular Joe focused on Hingepin
Sidney Rigdon, who had been on the outs with Joe ever since his daughter
Nancy rejected a polygamous marriage proposal from Joe in early 1842. Ep
117.</p>
<p>On August 13, 1842, Joe announced from the stand that “There is a
certain man in this city who has made a covenant to betray and give me
up and that too before the Gove[rnor] Carlin commenced his
persecution. This testimony I have from gentlemen from a broad and I do
not wish to give their names.” If Joe really did receive intelligence
about a traitor in Church leadership who had entered a covenant to
betray him, it almost certainly referred to Joseph H. Jackson. Jackson
had made an agreement with Sheriff Harmon T. Wilson to help expose Joe
and bring him to justice. This also fits because Jackson was nearly
assassinated a couple months after this while riding a supply wagon
while trying to infiltrate the Mormon leadership.</p>
<p>However, Joe apparently believed the traitor was Rigdon. Joe also had
repeatedly accused Rigdon, Nauvoo’s postmaster, of withholding his mail
or giving his mail to spies and enemies within the church. Also, Joe
claimed that Rigdon isn’t really pulling his weight around here and I’m
sick of carrying around this deadbeat. And so, he declared from the
stand that he wanted Rigdon removed as a counselor in the First
Presidency and disfellowshipped from the Church.</p>
<p>Historian Richard Van Wagoner, in his biography of Sidney Rigdon,
suggests that Joe had an ulterior motive in making these accusations,
money. A constant flow of money from a government contract was a
delicious little treat Jo couldn’t stand watching somebody else consume:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From the earliest Nauvoo settlement years, Smith was envious that
George W. Robinson then Sidney Rigdon held the financially lucrative
position of postmaster. In the midst of the Bennett controversy Smith
initiated a campaign to attain the postmastership for himself. He may
have also wanted to monitor mail from such apostates as John C.
Bennett, Francis Higbee, and George W. Robinson. Because postal
matters and the Rigdon family were outside of his control, Smith
attempted to slander the Rigdons by asserting that the mails were
regularly plundered and mishandled.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rigdon was allowed to respond to the allegations, and he denied all of
it. He provided explanations for some specific cases when mail had been
delayed, and then he</p>
<blockquote>
<p>closed with a moving appeal to President Joseph Smith, concerning
their former friendship, associations and sufferings; and expressed
his willingness to resign his place, though with sorrowful and
indescribable feelings. During this address, the sympathies of the
congregation were highly excited.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The rest of the meeting included Almon W. Babbit, Hyrum Smith, and
William Law all testifying on Rigdon's behalf. Jo stood up and made a
final statement, saying he was satisfied now that Rigdon wasn’t a
traitor and was willing to keep him in his post, but only if Rigdon
promised to do better from now on.</p>
<p>A newspaper says that “‘Sidney Rigdon was brought up by the Prophet, and
abused without measure,’ and that he had ‘cried for mercy like a whipped
puppy.’” That may be an exaggeration, but Rigdon’s oration was
convincing to Joe, who suddenly became very friendly to Rigdon. However,
that still left him with the question: who was the traitor in Church
leadership who had leaked information about Joe’s whereabouts to Sheriff
Harmon T. Wilson?</p>
<p>One candidate he came up with was Emma Smith, his very own first wife.
On November 5, 1843, Joe recorded in his journal that he “was taken
suddenly sick at the dinner table. went to the door & vomited. <all
dinner> jaws dislocated,— & raised fresh blood.—— eve[r]y symptom of
pois[o]n[.]” Since Emma was the one who had served him dinner, Joe
jumped to the conclusion that she was the culprit who had tried to
poison him. According to Bloody Brigham Young in 1866, when he was
amidst a constant multiple decades’-long character assassination
campaign against Emma,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not six months before the death of Joseph, he called his wife Emma
into a secret council, and there he told her the truth, and called
upon her to deny it if she could. He told her that the judgments of
God would come upon her forthwith if she did not repent. He told her
of the time she undertook to poison him, and he told her that she was
a child of hell, and literally the most wicked woman on this earth,
that there was not one more wicked than she. He told her where she got
the poison, and how she put it in a cup of coffee; said he, “You got
that poison so and so, and I drank it, but you could not kill me.”
When it entered his stomach he went to the door and threw it off. He
spoke to her in that council in a very severe manner, and she never
said one word in reply.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, it seems pretty unlikely that Emma actually tried to kill him, and
it also doesn’t seem like Joe stayed mad at her for very long. Bloody
Brigham reports Joe saying she was the most wicked woman on earth, but
Joe told several other people that she was the most virtuous woman on
earth, and that he would do anything to save her. Historian Linda King
Newell argues that Joe had frequent bouts of bloody vomiting, and that
he probably had ulcers, and that in fact it was Emma who nursed him
through many of these episodes of vomiting. She thinks that Emma
probably managed to convince Joe that she wasn’t guilty. With that said,
it’s not impossible Emma tried to poison him. She’d threatened divorce a
few times and Jo had employed “harsh measures” to get those notions out
of her head. She couldn’t charge him with adultery and survive it. If he
died, sure she’d be sad but everything in her life that was causing her
trouble would immediately be gone. There isn’t a bedrock on this
poisoning issue and reasonable historians disagree. Ep 164.</p>
<p>Joe’s next two candidates to be the traitor were William Marks and
William Law. Eps 178, 179.</p>
<p>William Law began as a run of the mill merchant and physician, but in
Nauvoo he became a member of the Nauvoo City Council, and aide-de-camp
to the Lieutenant-General of the Nauvoo Legion, meaning he was one of
Jo’s personal military advisors in addition to being second counselor
in the First Presidency to replace Frederick G. Williams after his
death. Ep 135. In 1842, Joe considered William Law to be one of his
warmest friends who met him in his time of need when Jo was hiding from
the law. William Law had led the troop of Nauvoo Legionnaires who found
Jo when he was in custody of sheriffs Wilson and Reynolds following his
arrest in Dixon. Ep 144. But by late 1843, when A Christmas Carol was
published by Charles Dickens, Jo and Law’s relationship was shifting.
When Joe got up and told the Mormons to vote for the Whig candidate
Cyrus Walker, William Law got up and publicly disagreed. Ep 162. And
when Joe taught Law the doctrine of polygamy, Law rejected it instantly.
Eps 148, 149.</p>
<p>According to Joseph H. Jackson, Law had always dismissed the rumors
about polygamy as Gentile slanders. “When, however, this new revelation
was made known to him, his eyes were opened, and at once, he indignantly
rejected the doctrines as not of God, but of the Devil.”</p>
<p>Nauvoo stake president William Marks had a similar experience. Hyrum
Sidekick-Abiff Smith created more dissenters on August 12, 1843, when he
read Joe’s celestial marriage revelation, now D&C 132, to the Nauvoo
high council. Marks, who was present at the meeting and heard Hyrum read
the revelation, “felt that it was not true.”</p>
<p>Joseph H. Jackson also claimed that Joe had tried to seduce both William
Law’s wife Jane and William Marks’s 15-year-old daughter Sophia and had
been rejected by both. William Law later denied that Joe had made an
attempt on Jane, but he may have just been protecting Jane’s honor in
Victorian-era America. There is corroboration for the claim about
Sophia. Eliza Jane Churchill Webb wrote in a letter in 1876, “William
Marks an influential man in the church, left because Joseph was
determined to have his daughter Sophia Marks sealed to him.” (Credit
John Dinger:
<a href="https://rationalfaiths.com/joseph-smiths-indictment-for-adultery-and-fornication/?fbclid=IwAR2vEM7SKv6izmkyetXN7Yb9e1tIOyTANq-EfXErU_jfTFsAaU8p_WHDLQM"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://rationalfaiths.com/joseph-smiths-indictment-for-adultery-and-fornication/?fbclid=IwAR2vEM7SKv6izmkyetXN7Yb9e1tIOyTANq-EfXErU_jfTFsAaU8p_WHDLQM<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>)</p>
<p>So vehement were Law and Marks in rejecting the doctrine of polygamy
that Joe started making plans to kill them. Jackson says Joe expressed
“his determination to put Law out of the way, for he had become
dangerous to the church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints, and that
it was the will of God that he should be removed. He, however, wished to
proceed in such a manner that he would be able to get Law's wife.” Joe
also expressed a desire to kill William Marks. This is a dangerous
pattern I’ve worked to highlight all episode; when somebody couldn’t be
bought or silenced, they needed to be removed and Jo had an army of
people behind him to complete such an act in different ways. Whether it
was his captains in polygamy who’d get on a man’s good graces and mix a
white powder with his drink, or Pistol Packin’ Porter on an escapade
across state lines to shoot a man reading in his study, a little cabal
of Mormons were willing to move mountains to carry out the will of the
Lord’s prophet.</p>
<p>Joe explained how he intended to do the deed of removing William while
acquiring Jane as yet another wife. He always had to escalate the danger
and taboo nature of his pursuits. At his direction, the city council had
given Jo power to raise a police force of 40 men, all of whom were
Danites. These men swore an oath to protect Joe and his household “in
every measure that I may deem lawful in the sight of God . . . Murder
and Treason not excepted, so help you God.” This dedicated police force
was the perfect weapon. Danites in uniform. Police captain Jonathan
Dunham would select five men to do the work. Law and Marks would go
missing, “and then I'll make a great noise about it, and call it
persecutions. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘ain’t this a d--d good plan to get rid of
traitors?’” Jackson knew he couldn’t just stand by and listen passively
to this plot to kill a friend of his, so he spoke up in Law and Marks’s
favor. According to Jackson, “Joe accused me of tying his hands, and
said that he could do nothing if opposed.”</p>
<p>We know for a fact that this isn’t just a story Jackson made up, because
the Church’s own records corroborate it. According to the History of the
Church 6:149–52, seventeen days after he created the Nauvoo police
force, Joe gave a speech to them in which he revealed that he intended
to have the police kill traitors:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Police] Captain [Jonathan] Dunham is the man to send after a
thief. He will not come back, after following him a mile, to ask if he
may shoot him, if he resists. Some men have strange ears and
changeable hearts: they become transformed from their original purity
and integrity, and become altogether different from what they were. .
. . My life is more in danger from some little dough-head of a fool in
this city than from all my numerous and inveterate enemies abroad. I
am exposed to far greater danger from traitors among ourselves than
from enemies without, . . . and if I can escape from the ungrateful
treachery of assassins, I can live as Caesar might have lived, were it
not for a right-hand Brutus. . . . [W]e have a Judas in our midst.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few days later, William Law told Hyrum Smith that one of the Danite
policemen had warned him that the police were watching him and might
kill him if they saw any sign of disloyalty. Hyrum was aghast, because
of course he was and Hyrum could do no wrong; he went to Jo, who said
that the police must have misunderstood his instructions. The next day
Joe held a city council meeting, at which Law testified that policeman
Eli Norton had told him under a Masonic oath that Joseph had sworn
another policeman, Daniel Carn, to kill Law within three months. Norton
was called to the stand and waffled a little bit, saying that he had
only an intimation of all this, not any specific knowledge. Then Carn
was called up, and he denied having taken any private oath. Joe denied
all of it too, and declared that “the Danite system never had any
existence.” However, he also chastised the police for their failure to
keep a secret. Ep 178.</p>
<p>Two days after this city council meeting, the issue arose again when
William Marks complained to Hyrum Smith that he, too, had received
multiple warnings that the police might try to kill him. According to
William Law, Joseph “became very angry that any should have any fears or
suspect that he would encourage such a thing, and said that he had a
good mind to put them (the police) on us anyhow, we were such fools, or
words to that effect.” This comment infuriated Wilson Law, William’s
brother, so much that he drew his pistol and had to be restrained from
blowing Joe away right then and there. Another city council meeting was
held, in which several witnesses testified that Joe considered Marks a
traitor and that policemen had been heard threatening to kill him. Joe
denied that he intended to kill Marks, but he also made clear that he
considered Marks to be a Satanic traitor, and he again chastised the
witnesses for failing to keep a secret. Soon after this, Joe disbanded
the police. Of course, these events all preceded the formation of
William Law’s church which called Jo a fallen prophet and published the
Nauvoo Expositor, the destruction of which killed the prophet and his
brother. These events are tightly connected.</p>
<p>According to William Law later in his life, the conspiracy with the
police wasn’t the only way Joe tried to kill him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They tried to get rid of me in different ways. One was by <em>poisoning.</em>
I was already out of the church when Hyrum called one day and invited
me for the next day to a <em>reconciliation dinner</em> as he called it, to
his house. He said Joseph would come, too. He invited me and my wife.
He was very urgent about the matter, but I declined the invitation.
Now I must tell you that I, in those dangerous days, did not neglect
to look out somewhat for the safety of my person and that I kept a
detective or two among those who were in the confidence of the Smiths.
That very same evening of the day on which Hyrum had been to my house
inviting me, my detective told me that they had conceived the plan to
poison me at the reconciliation dinner. Their object was a double one.
My going to the dinner would have shown to the people that I was
reconciled and my death would have freed them of an enemy. You may
imagine that I didn’t regret having declined that amiable invitation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Law believed that six or seven other people who died at Nauvoo were
poisoned by Joe. Ep 199. If we believe Jackson’s account, it was damned
easy for one of Jo’s wives to poison those men with some white powder
during their conjugal encounter. Ep 161.</p>
<p>As we head into the year 1844, things started to get pretty hot for Joe.
One human only has so much ire to give before devolving into complete
tyrannical madness. William and Wilson Law started to oppose Joe more
and more openly. Charles A. Foster and Robert D. Foster had the Law
brothers’ back, and so did Chauncey and Francis Higbee, who suspected
that Joe had murdered their father two years earlier.</p>
<p>The Foster brothers had emigrated from England in 1831 and joined the
Mormon church in Illinois in 1839. Robert Foster quickly entered Joe’s
inner circle and served as his personal scribe when Joe went to
Washington, D.C. to petition Congress. In D&C 124, the God-voice in
Joe’s head commanded Robert Foster to build Joe a house.</p>
<p>Foster built him the Mansion House, but it became a sore spot because
Joe constantly complained that he wasn’t building it fast enough. Joe
also suspected Foster of passing information to John C. Bennett after
Bennett left the Church and started publishing his serial exposes in the
Sangamo Journal. Foster remained pretty loyal through 1843, partly
because he made a lot of money buying and selling stock in the Nauvoo
House Association. But the Foster brothers didn’t like the idea of
polygamy, and by early 1844 they began to align themselves with the
leadership who knew it was being practiced but opposed it. Apparently
Willard Richards also tried to seduce Robert Foster’s wife, which may
have sealed the breach. Ep 197.</p>
<p>The Higbee brothers, Francis and Chauncey, joined the LDS Church with
their family in 1832 at ages 11 and 12. They moved to Missouri in 1833
and suffered through the expulsion from Jackson County, and in 1838
Francis fought in the Missouri Mormon War as a Danite. In Nauvoo, both
Francis and Chauncey were appointed aides-de-camp in the Nauvoo Legion,
which made them high-ranking assistants to Major General John C.
Bennett.</p>
<p>When the sex scandal that brought down Bennett broke, Chauncey Higbee
was implicated and excommunicated along with him. Francis Higbee was
Nancy Rigdon’s boyfriend, and was not happy about Joe propositioning
her, or sexually assaulting her to put it more accurately. So both the
Higbee boys ended up siding with Bennett in his controversial departure
form the Church and helping him collect affidavits to expose Joseph
Smith. Joe was not happy and sent the Mormon propaganda mill into full
spin mode to destroy the Higbees’ credibility. In a letter he wrote to
Joe, Francis Higbee gives a sample of the sorts of things Joe had been
saying about him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is said I seek the hours of the midnight assassin to seize my
victim, when no one is near to bear witness of the crime or attest the
unhallowed deed, that I sympathized with the afflicted and oppressed,
that I may devour their vitals, that I seek the mantle of religion to
envelop my scorpion body, that I may better practeice my nefarious
designs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo tried to stir up a mob against the Higbees by declaring them to be
Satanic murderers, scorpions in human form. Projection much, Jo?</p>
<p>By March 24, 1844, Joe claimed to have received specific intelligence
that this entire group of dissenters planned to assassinate him. He
declared, “The names of the persons revealed at the head of the
conspiracy are as follows:--Cha[u]ncey L. Higbee, Dr. Robert D.
Foster, Mr. Joseph H. Jackson, [and] William and Wilson Law.” On April
18, 1844, Joe excommunicated the Laws and the Fosters in absentia, thus
setting into motion the sequence of events that landed him in Carthage
Jail. Ep 196.</p>
<p>Then one day near the end of April, Apostle Orson Spencer got into a
fight with his brother Augustine Spencer. John P. Greene, the city
marshal, ran up to the Foster brothers and Chauncey Higbee and said,
you’re officers of the Nauvoo Legion and I’m deputizing you to help me
arrest Augustine Spencer for assault. The Fosters refused because the
battle lines had been drawn and anybody working on official church or
city business was no friend of these men. Joe walked up behind them and
ordered them to help, but they refused again. The argument became
heated, and Charles drew his pistol and aimed it at Joe’s chest. Joe’s
bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, grabbed the gun and disarmed Charles, saving
Joseph’s life. Charles shouted that if Porter hadn’t stopped him, he
would have killed Joe and felt like a hero for ridding the world of a
tyrant. That time would come, but not yet, Ol’ Chucky boy.</p>
<p>In a contentious court hearing over this incident, the Fosters and
Higbee were convicted of disturbing the peace and fined $100. After the
trial, Joe basically told Robert Foster that if he didn’t shut his
mouth, his blood would be spilled. And in a private meeting of the
Council of Fifty, Joe declared “that Foster and the Higbees were . . .
all given to the buffetings of Satan.” He cashiered Robert from the
Nauvoo Legion and nullified all land contracts with his name on them
putting pressure on the Fosters to simply cut their losses and leave the
city. They didn’t.</p>
<p>These dissenters weren’t going to take this lying down. On May 7, 1844,
Joe recorded a momentous event in his journal: “An opposition printing
press arrived at Dr [Robert D.] Fosters fr[o]m Columbus ohio.” This
was the printing press for the <em>Nauvoo Expositor</em>, a newspaper that the
dissenters founded in order to expose Joseph Smith and publish his
crimes to the world. The <em>Nauvoo Expositor</em> published only one issue,
dated June 7, 1844. It revealed some details of Joe’s secret practice of
polygamy, and it also denounced Joe’s interference in politics and his
tyrannical style of Church governance. It also served as a charter for a
new church they founded, called the True Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints, to both compete with Jo’s church and to provide a
safe haven and outlet for fellow Mormon dissenters.</p>
<p>Notably, the Council of Fifty had their final meeting before Jo and
Hyrum’s deaths on May 31<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted -->, 1844 while the Nauvoo Expositor
was published on June 7th. Page after page in the Council of Fifty
minute book, kept by Quilliam Claypen, are filled with treasonous
screeds about the overthrow of the government. One of the stated
purposes of the Nauvoo Expositor was to show the world how much power
Joseph Smith had gained and how dangerous he really was. No single
document detailed his power and his ultimate goals more than the Council
of Fifty minutes. These are the minutes Jo would instruct Quilliam
Claypen to burn or bury as he was being taken to Carthage.</p>
<p>The day the Nauvoo Expositor was published and disseminated the City
Council was in almost constant meetings about how to handle the
situation. At this meeting, Joe and Hyrum Smith leveled a bunch of
accusations against William Law, including that he was a counterfeiter,
that he maliciously forced Joe to pay a $40 debt he owed him, that he
had brought a whore from Canada, that he had confessed to adultery, that
he offered to pay Joseph Jackson $500 to assassinate Joe, and that he
had betrayed Joe to a band of Missourians. They also claimed that
Francis Higbee had a sexually transmitted disease, and that Joseph
Jackson was always trying to borrow money, had stolen some jewelry, and
had tried to recruit people into the counterfeiting business. Most of
these allegations were straight-up lies, but there are enough
half-truths here that it’s really hard to distinguish the fact from the
fiction. The intention behind all of it, of course, was to justify the
decision they’d already made, which was to silence the dissenters’ right
to free speech by fascist and tyrannical decree.</p>
<p>Finally, Joe suggested that the city council pass an ordinance to
prevent libelous publication and conspiracy against the peace of the
city. Two days later, the council passed such a law and declared the
<em>Expositor</em> a public nuisance and ordered the printing press destroyed.
One thing Joseph Smith said during this meeting that proved to be pretty
prophetic was this: he “would rather die to morrow and have the thing
smashed,--than live & have it go on.” I’ve never seen a prophecy from
Joseph Smith come true so spectacularly and accurately as this. Equally
prophetic was a warning from Francis Higbee: “the Inhaba[n]tes of ths
city is done the minut a hand is laid on this press.” The council
ignored this warning, and Joe immediately dispatched an order to City
Marshal John P. Greene to destroy the press. Joe also called out Major
General Jonathan Dunham with the entire Nauvoo Legion to quell any
unrest. That very evening, dozens or even hundreds of men stormed the
Expositor office and destroyed and burned the press and probably stole
some property while they were at it. Ep 202.</p>
<p>Resentment against the Mormons had been brewing in nearby non-Mormon
towns for years by this point. In January 1844 there had been a brawl in
the non-Mormon town of Carthage when Nauvoo constables showed up there
to arrest a guy named Milton Cook on a bastardy charge. A lot of
non-Mormons who believed that the Nauvoo legal system was corrupt had
turned out to prevent the Nauvoo constables from arresting Cook. A
couple days later, the citizens of Carthage held a public meeting,
presided over by an Illinois militia colonel named Levi Williams, in
which they resolved to organize themselves into companies of minutemen
to defend Carthage from any aggression by Mormon forces from Nauvoo. In
the newspaper of nearby Warsaw, Illinois, there ensued a lively debate
between various editorialists about whether some kind of compromise with
the Mormons might be desirable, or whether they should just be driven
from the state as had happened in Missouri just 6 years prior.</p>
<p>That resentment finally spilled over after the destruction of the Nauvoo
Expositor press. The <em>Warsaw Signal</em> by Thomas Coke Sharp issued
numerous daily extras covering every piece of intel they received about
the city council meetings and the destruction of the press under
headlines like “unparallelled outrage at Nauvoo.” Sharp was outraged,
but his articles merely captured the prevailing outrage ruling the
non-Mormon settlements bordering Nauvoo. Here’s Sharp’s commentary on
this event: “We have only to state, that this is sufficient! 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!!!”</p>
<p>Joe and Hyrum Smith responded to this issue of Thomas Sharp’s paper by
offering a reward for the destruction of his printing press of the
<em>Warsaw Signal</em>, which was apparently no idle threat and certainly
didn’t do anything to settle down the situation. The anti-Mormons were
now invigorated by the same fire that put the Expositor to destruction.
This was an outrage which couldn’t be tolerated and Thomas Sharp was
calling for open warfare with the Mormon settlement. The anti-Mormon
party, of which Thomas Sharp was one of the founders, met the evening
after the Expositor was burned to deliberate about how to handle this
issue. The meeting resolved, among other things, “That the time, in our
opinion has arrived, when the adherents of Smith, as a body, should be
driven from the surrounding settlements, into Nauvoo, That the Prophet
and his miscreant adherents should then be demanded at their hands, and
if not surrendered, A WAR OF EXTERMINATION SHOULD BE WAGED, to the
entire destruction, if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.”
The committee resolved to send this resolution to governor Thomas Ford.
The logic was to consolidate all the Mormons in nearby settlements to
Nauvoo, after which the Illinois militia forces would lay siege to the
city until surrender could be affected and the Mormons removed from
Illinois wholesale.</p>
<p>There are dark echoes of Missouri here. The people of Illinois had
initially welcomed the Mormons with open arms and felt sympathy for the
persecution they had suffered in Missouri. But now, just a few months
shy of six year later, the Illinoisans were fed up with the Mormons and
were ready to hit the replay button on the whole Mormon War all over
again.</p>
<p>Back in Nauvoo, Joe was up to his usual machinations to get off the
hook. He agreed to be arrested by a city officer from Carthage, David
Bettisworth. But, of course, he used his right of habeas corpus to have
the case heard by a Mormon court in Nauvoo. Constable Bettisworth wasn’t
happy about this, but he complied with the order, and the Nauvoo court’s
proceedings and verdict were exactly what you would expect, Jo was
completely exonerated.</p>
<p>This time, though, Jo’s legal hijinks weren’t going to be enough. He was
a slippery guy when it came to the law, but that luck and prowess was
bound to run out eventually. The anti-Mormons were ready to flip over
the game board with this latest outrage. People can only tolerate so
many scandals before they completely revolt and say enough is enough.
The Mormons and the anti-Mormons both sent a flurry of letters to
Illinois governor Thomas Ford. But the anti-Mormons weren’t going to
wait for approval from the governor to act. The citizens of Carthage
held a bunch of training exercises for their militia while gathering
forces, and the citizens of Warsaw shipped in crates of armaments. 30
miles south of Nauvoo was the Morley settlement, also known as Yelrom.
The anti-Mormons delivered an ultimatum to the settlement’s citizens
that they could either enlist to help take Joe into custody, or give up
their armaments and evacuate the settlement. They gave them 24 hours to
decide.</p>
<p>Joe was many things; stupid wasn’t one of them. He knew this was
trouble. But he also knew he was in a strong position. He had 3,500
armed men at his disposal. He ordered out the Nauvoo Legion and put the
city under martial law, and he sent letters asking for reinforcements
from other Mormon communities including Yelrom. Joe knew things were
getting too hot, so he tried to put Hyrum and family on a steamboat to
Cincinnati so that Hyrum could meet with the president seeking help and
eventually live to avenge Jo’s blood if he were killed. Hyrum refused to
go. Joe also sent away Hingepin Sidney Rigdon to provide for continuity
of leadership. Rigdon was Joe’s presumptive successor, although of
course Brigham Young would later usurp that role in a dramatic public
display outside the scope of this podcast.</p>
<p>What was Governor Thomas Ford to do? Obviously his first priority was to
keep the peace among the citizens of his state. He also knew that the
Nauvoo Legion had more men, guns, and supplies than the Illinois state
militia did, so an all-out war would likely be a losing proposition.
Besides, the Mormons could subsist through a prolonged war by raiding
and pillaging local non-Mormon settlements as they’d done in Missouri.
Not only did Jo and the Mormons learn a lot from their Missouri
experience, but Governor Ford did as well. He decided to go to Carthage
to see for himself what was going on, and to see if he could defuse the
situation. He wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of Governor Boggs and end up
bedridden the rest of his life from an assassin’s gunshot. He needed to
handle matters personally. His plan was to try Joe before a
court-martial of the state militia for unofficerly conduct. The charge
was designed to sound non-threatening, but the reality is that a
court-martial technically had the authority to execute Joe on the spot
if it found him guilty of treason. In case anybody is wondering, yes, Jo
was absolutely guilty of treason by sedition. Had he stood trial he
would have been executed, but a vigilante mob took control of the
situation before such a verdict could be made.</p>
<p>Governor Ford’s arrival in Carthage on the 21<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted --> of June was
widely celebrated by the anti-Mormons expecting the law would finally be
enforced for a change. Ford exchanged letters with Jo and set up his
officers in tents around the city. Ford realized the immediacy and
danger of the situation once he spent time talking to citizens in
Carthage and receiving intel from all around Hancock and Adams Counties
about what was going on. He stationed militia units at Carthage and
Warsaw.</p>
<p>Joe hit the governor with a barrage of propaganda, including letters
laying out the Mormons’ case and accompanying affidavits about acts of
violence committed by the anti-Mormons. In addition to proving his own
innocence and the deceit of his enemies, he also hoped to show the
governor that it would be too dangerous for Jo to come to Carthage for a
court martial. Carthage had been dealing with Mormon lawlessness in
general for half a decade so Jo was right to be suspect of Ford’s
ability to keep him safe in any capacity, court martial or otherwise.</p>
<p>Governor Ford replied to Joe. He laid out the facts of the case as he
understood them, and expressed his “opinion that your conduct in the
destruction of the press was a very gross outrage upon the laws and the
liberties of the people. It may have been full of libels, but this did
not authorize you to destroy it.” In addition to violating the
Constitutional right and free speech and the protection against
unreasonable search and seizure, Joe had also abused the concept of
habeas corpus. “In the particular case now under consideration, I
require any and all of you who are or shall be accused, to submit
yourselves to be arrested by the same constable, by virtue of the same
warrant, and be tried before the same magistrate whose authority has
heretofore been resisted. Nothing short of this can vindicate the
dignity of violated law, and allay the just excitement of the people.”
Anything short of that might lead to civil war, and Ford refused to
order the state militia to defend the Saints if they remained in
defiance of the law. Notably as well, this letter nullified Jo’s Nauvoo
Municipal Court hearing that exonerated him of the initial charges. Ford
chose his battlefield and simply ignoring Jo’s corruption in addition to
the alleged crimes was clearly the easiest path to simply get Jo into
state custody in Carthage.</p>
<p>Joe replied with a letter that tried to refute Ford’s letter point by
point. He pointed to legal precedents for the destruction of printing
presses, and he refused to come to Carthage for trial “the appearance of
the mob forbids our coming; we dare not do it.”</p>
<p>In the History of the Church, Joe recorded Governor Ford’s reaction to
this letter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He treated our delegates very rudely; my communications that were read
to him were read in the presence of a large number of our worst
enemies, who interrupted the reader at almost every line with “that’s
a damned lie,” and “that’s a God damned lie.” He never accorded to
them the privilege of saying one word to him only in the midst of such
interruptions as “you lie like hell” from a crowd of persons present;
these facts show conclusively that he is under the influence of the
mob spirit, and is designedly intending to place us in the hands of
murderous assassins, and is conniving at our destruction; or else that
he is so ignorant and stupid that he does not understand the corrupt
and diabolical spirits that are around him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the governor refused to accept Joe’s arguments, which made him either
evil or stupid in Joe’s opinion. For his part, the governor believed Joe
was a damned liar, and… well... he wasn’t wrong.</p>
<p>Jo surrendered days after the deadline Ford directed and he was interred
in Carthage Jail on charges of riot and treason. This was his home for
the short remainder of his life. He will leave this earth a legend, the
only way to never die.</p>
<p>What we do with anger says a lot about us as individuals. We lash out,
react in the moment; we cry, yell, hit, scream, kick, we inflict harm to
answer the perceived harm we suffered. Some of us, however, don’t react
in the moment. Or, maybe we do, but we just put a little of that anger
in a reserve tank for when we need it later. When everything in the
world is God’s design, each slight against you is the work of the
adversary. A person accumulates enough of these difficulties and every
person who opposes them is satan incarnate. A god complex is soon to
follow. To my enemies, you stand for everything I live to cleanse, I’ll
see you on the battlefield. RIP Mitch Lucker.</p>
<p>What our anger causes us to do teaches us about ourselves. The actions
which result from our wrath teaches us even more. We can channel that
deep emotion to accomplish all sorts of things, but what fruit comes
from the tree of wrath? This brings us to our central question when we
examine Jo’s anger and wrath, his intent and endgame.</p>
<p>Everything we discussed today hinges on the question of intent. From its
inception, Mormonism sought to be the final religious revolution the
world would need before the second coming. That intent would result in
the purification of all heretics from corporeal existence, which is just
a pleasant way to say genocide of those who chose unbelief in the
totalitarian system. Those not drenched in the cleansing blood of the
savior shall be marked infidels and die. A conviction of religious
identity and superiority drove this, but luckily for Joseph Smith, his
wrath could be expressed as the divine and holy will of the almighty
god, never to be questioned, only to be complied with or fall to the
overwhelming power of the wrathful arm of the divine. We spend so much
time talking about Joseph Smith and his buddies digging for buried
treasure in the forests of Palmyra or Harmony, but completely ignore the
path upon which he placed himself in that process. Joseph Smith didn’t
see himself as just a revolutionary, but the final revolutionary that
would bring the whole goddamn world to its knees. He regarded himself a
Mohammaed, a Bonaparte, and finally, a savior unto himself.</p>
<p>Episode 170 of this podcast envisioned a dystopian future of Mormon
theocracy where the prophet accomplished his greatest designs.
Compliance with his designs was the only acceptable option, the
alternative resulted in warfare, bloodshed, and assassinations. Jo was a
bloodthirsty and wrathful tyrant with misanthropic and elitist motives.</p>
<p>When the idea for this podcast was gestating 6 years ago, wrath was a
powerful motivating force in my life. I was wronged by Mormonism. It
gave me a life I never signed up for. It robbed me of my humanity. It
repressed my deepest human tendencies and only a scorched earth would
absolve the religion of its guilt.</p>
<p>The catharsis I’ve experienced resulted from having a productive outlet
for that wrath. People who don’t have the tools available to them to
process their grief and anger devolve into a vicious cycle of dread and
loathing for what makes us human. We embrace our humanity and we become
the best versions of ourselves. Joseph Smith never had a healthy or
productive outlet for his wrath; as a result, everything he did was an
expression of that caustic and ugly side of his humanity.</p>
<p>Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a worldwide religion to bring to its
knees. Time to burn it the fuck down with truth.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 6 - FuryRoad to Carthage 5 - Polygamy2020-08-06T20:00:00-07:002020-08-06T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/08/06/road-to-carthage-5-polygamy<p>Road to Carthage 5 - Polygamy</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine many facets of polygamy throughout early
Mormon history.</p>
<p>Show links:<br />
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Music by Jason Comeau
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Show Artwork
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Legal Counsel <a href="http://patorrez.com/"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://patorrez.com/<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
<p>What makes somebody a serial criminal? I’m not talking about John Harvey
Kellog who invented pressed corn flakes everybody eats for breakfast and
also convinced generations of Christians to mutilate the penises of
their babies for generations, I’m talking about a different kind of
serial criminal.</p>
<p>Serial criminals operate patternistically. If a serial thief, they hit
similar places in similar ways, a serial murderer usually targets
specific people and has a specific method of killing their victims.
Serial criminals commit their crimes in a series by developing a system
with which they’re comfortable to continue to commit those crimes for as
long as possible.</p>
<p>Career criminals can be serial criminals, but not all serial criminals
are career criminals. The subject of our focus was both. Whether
treasure digging in New York, stealing people’s business and printing
money in Kirtland, waging war against the state of Missouri, or inciting
insurrection in Illinois, Joseph Smith was a career criminal. He was
also a serial criminal.</p>
<p>From an early age he was able to identify marks and exploit them through
deliberate fraud. It happened in a serial fashion and it enabled him to
do some incredibly illegal and abusive things. It enabled him to grow a
following of 6 people to 16,000 people, bleed them dry of every resource
they had even to the point of giving up their lives for the cause, and
become an exalted figure, a god among humans. He wielded complete and
total control over these people because he was a serial predator; and
yes, his serial predatory behavior is nowhere better revealed than when
we talk about polygamy.</p>
<p>Polygamy and the attendant sexual dynamics are complicated topics,
especially when we consider the public image and morality of a man who
claimed to speak for god; a god which evolved from the puritanical roots
of Western Christian protestantism. This isn’t an easy topic to navigate
and I’m going to do my best to allow the people to speak for themselves
as we tell their stories. Yes, you see the right timestamp, there’s no
error. We have 42 pages of script to get through today and I’m not even
making you wait 9 months for each episode that’s 3 hours long like some
other history podcasters. We’re going to get into some controversial
material today. We’ll be talking about coercive and destructive
practices, sexual abuse, grooming, and child rape, sex trafficking, as
well as some of the complexities that came along with the social
structures of clandestine polygamy. Fair warning, this may not be
everybody’s favorite episode and there may be material you don’t want to
hear, but I’ll warn before getting into the more disturbing content.
That said, not every story today is an abusive fiend we’ll dredge from
the pits of historical infamy because we’ll also discuss some success
stories and people who probably enjoyed and certainly socially benefited
from the practice. Not all these stories are alike.</p>
<p>Let’s get started at the beginning, when Joseph Smith began to enter the
public consciousness in the early 1820s.</p>
<p>In 1823 the angel Moroni first appeared to Joseph Smith and told him
about a set of gold plates buried in a nearby hill. This much you
probably know from Joe’s official history. But you probably don’t know
the details of his failed attempt to get the plates the following day
unless you’ve listened to this show from the beginning or read a few of
the best books on the subject.</p>
<p>According to several different accounts, from both Mormon and non-Mormon
sources, the story went something like this. When Moroni appeared to him
in a vision on the night of September 21, 1823, he told Joe “not to lay
the plates down, or put them for a moment out of his hands, until he got
into the house and deposited them in a chest or trunk, having a good
lock and key.” Unfortunately, Joe didn’t follow this instruction. He
went to the hill in the early hours of the morning on September 22 and
dug up the plates. He lifted them out of the stone box they had been
buried in, and then he set them down on the ground and turned around to
see if there was anything else in the box. When he turned back to the
plates, they were gone.</p>
<p>Turning back to the box, Joe found that the plates had teleported back
inside. Also in the box was the angel in the form of a toad. Joe tried
to pull the plates out of the box again, but the angel prevented it.
According to Joseph Knight, Joe found the plates immovable. Lucy Mack
Smith says the angel knocked him down with a wave of invisible force.
Oliver Cowdery says the angel shocked him three times. Willard Chase
says the toad struck him on the head and knocked him down multiple
times. Orlando Saunders says the toad transformed into a giant “flaming
monster with glittering eyes, until it seemed to fill the heavens, and
with a blow like lightning it swept [him] from the mountain into the
valley beneath.”</p>
<p>At this point, Joe asked the angel “why can I not get these plates?” The
angel, which by this point had transformed back into human shape from
it’s magic amphibian origins, explained that he couldn’t have them
right now because he hadn’t followed the instruction not to set the
plates down. Joe asked, “when <em>can</em> I have it?” And the angel answered,
“come one year from this day, and bring with you your oldest brother,
and you shall have them.”</p>
<p>Obviously Joe told a lot of different stories about this attempt to get
the plates, which isn’t surprising because Joe never bothered very much
with trying to be consistent about these visionary experiences in the
woods. But the different versions of the story share some common
elements, and the instruction to bring Alvin to the hill the following
year is mentioned by both a Mormon source, Joseph Knight, and a
non-Mormon source, Willard Chase. The instruction to bring Alvin to the
hill became a problem, because less than a month later, Alvin
unexpectedly died in his mid-twenties. Here the story takes a dark turn,
because it kind of seems like Joe may have dug up his brother’s body, or
some portion of it, in order to take him to the hill. On September 25,
1824, Joseph Smith Sr. published an article to refute rumors that
someone had stolen Alvin’s body. It seems way too coincidental that this
was published just a few days after Joe was supposed to take Alvin to
the hill. There’s plenty of mystery surrounding what exactly happened
here and reasonable historians disagree but Jo exhuming Alvin for this
magic ritual is how I tend to interpret the evidence.</p>
<p>For the next couple years, Joe continued to insist that in order to get
the plates, he needed to take “the right person” to the hill. For a
little while he thought it might be treasure seer Samuel T. Lawrence,
but he changed his mind about that pretty quickly as Lawrence possibly
wanted a larger cut of the gold plates loot than Jo was willing to part
with. This disagreement infected the entire treasure-digging group as Jo
eventually cut all of them out. Sally Chase and Luman Walters attempted
to steal the plates after Jo had made the set without success.</p>
<p>And by this point you’re probably asking yourself, I thought we were
going to talk polygamy this episode. What does this story have to do
with anything, especially considering that we’ve already discussed all
of it earlier in the series? Well, I implore you, dear listener, to be
patient. It’s about to take a turn toward sexual elements, because in
fall 1825 Joe met a desirable woman named Emma Hale when he boarded for
a few months in her father’s home in Harmony, Pennsylvania during the
Stowell treasure dig. When he returned to New York, he couldn’t stop
thinking about her. And so, as Joe was wont to do, he searched his
toolbox of manipulation to find the exact implement to accomplish his
heart’s desires.</p>
<p>Step 1. According to Lucy Mack Smith, Joe took his parents aside one day
and said he’d been lonely since Alvin died, and he wanted to get
married, and he thought Emma Hale was the woman who would make him
happy. His parents were delighted and invited Joe to bring Emma home to
live with them.</p>
<p>Step 2. In fall 1826, the same year of the first U.S. patent for an
internal-combustion engine, Joe told fellow treasure seer Samuel T.
Lawrence that he had discovered a rich vein of silver in Pennsylvania,
and he wanted Lawrence to take him there. Lawrence didn’t believe him,
but Joe pinky swore and told Lawrence that if there was no treasure, “I
will bind myself to be your servant for three years.” So Lawrence
agreed, and he not only provided transportation but also covered all
expenses of the trip, because Joe was broke. On the way, Joe insisted
they stop at the Hale home, and he successfully badgered Lawrence into
vouching for Jo to the Hales, claiming Jo was a good guy and fit to
marry their daughter. Lawrence begrudgingly did so. When they finally
went onward to look for the silver mine, of course they found nothing
and went home.</p>
<p>Step 3. Joe went to live and work with Joseph Knight in Colesville, New
York so that he could be closer to Emma. He periodically visited her,
and eventually asked her father for her hand in marriage. Her father,
Isaac Hale, refused because Jo followed a lifestyle unfit for his
daughter.</p>
<p>Step 4. Joe’s former employer Josiah Stowell arranged for Emma to visit
his house so that Joe could clandestinely meet with her away from the
scornful eyes of Isaac. Emma later told her son, “I had no intention of
marrying when I left home; but during my visit at Mr. Stowell’s, your
father visited me there. My folks were bitterly opposed to him; and
being importuned by your father, aided by Mr. Stowell, who urged me to
marry him, and preferring to marry him to any other man I knew, I
consented.” In other words, Joe enlisted the help of an adult she
trusted, and then ambushed her with a marriage proposal, and the two men
badgered her until she said yes. Emma settled on Joseph Smith and one
can’t help but wonder how she regarded that memory later in her life. To
wonder what was and what could have been had things been different, I
can only imagine her mind carried these thoughts from time to time.</p>
<p>Step 5. Joe showed up on January 17, 1827 while Isaac was at church and
absconded with Emma to South Bainbridge, where they were married on
January 18. To escape the withering castigation of Isaac, Jo and Emma
eloped.</p>
<p>There’s a detail in this courtship which escapes examination. When Joe
had that meeting with Emma at Josiah Stowell’s house, part of his
argument to her was apparently that the angel had told him she was the
new “right person” to come to the hill with him to get the plates.
According to Joe’s neighbor Lorenzo Saunders,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joseph’s wife was a pretty woman; as pretty a woman as I ever saw.
When she came to the Smiths she was ~~very much~~ disappointed and
used to come to our house and sit down and cry. Said she was deceived
and got into a hard place. Joe said in our house to my mother, the
angel said he must get ~~married~~ him a wife and take her and go and
and get the plates. (EMD 2:132)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mormon Joseph Knight and non-Mormon Henry Harris also confirm that Joe
told them the angel required him to marry Emma and bring her to the hill
(EMD 2:76, 4:14). This helps explain why both Samuel Lawrence and Josiah
Stowell may have been willing to recommend Joe to Emma; because they
were invested in Joe getting the plates, and he told them this was a
necessary step. Emma’s opinion in the matter seemed to be an obstacle to
overcome instead of a human being’s feelings necessary to take into
consideration and to respect.</p>
<p>Right here in Joe’s very first marriage proposal, he laid the groundwork
for all the toxic tactics he would use in his later marriage proposals:
he insisted that an angel required the woman to marry him, and he
recruited friends to help him convince the woman to go along with it.
That story about how Emma always came over to the Saunders’ house to cry
and complain that she was deceived is a harbinger which foreshadowed
patterns which would emerge in Mormon polygyny over a decade and a half
later.</p>
<p>At this point the story takes an interesting turn. On September 21,
1827, Joe loaded Emma into a wagon with a blanket, and he took her to
the hill at night to get the plates. The angel also had other magical
requirements for the trip. Joe had to wear all black, and he had to ride
a black horse. We don’t really have any detailed accounts of what
happened up there that night, except that Joe left Emma in the wagon
about 40 rods away while he went and got the plates and hid them in a
hollow oak tree. What we do know is that Joe took his hot young bride up
the hill in a wagon with a blanket, and they were gone all night, and
Emma delivered her firstborn son exactly 268 days later. That’s an
interesting period of time because it’s precisely the average gestation
period of a human. Sexual consummation isn’t an uncommon sealing or
binding method in magic practices and the newlyweds rarely had any time
alone in the crowded Smith home. A malformed Alvin was born and lived
for a few hours just nine months after that night. Yes, acquisition of
the plates very likely included a performative sexual act between Jo and
Emma on the hill that night. The Angel Moroni must have been a peeping
Tom.</p>
<p>After the plates were supposedly acquired, Jo’s definitions of sexuality
and divinely-sanctioned relationship seems to have expanded. Historians
spend a lot of time bickering over Fanny Alger and what probably
happened between her and Jo sometime from 1832-36. Jo’s sexual
experimentation predates Fanny by half a decade.</p>
<p>The first evidence we have of this is Jo’s attempted seduction of a girl
named Eliza Winters during the translation of the Book of Mormon in
Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1828. Harmony resident Levi Lewis said he was
acquainted with both Joe and Martin Harris during this period, and “has
heard them both say, adultery was no crime. Harris said he did not blame
Smith for his (Smith’s) attempt to seduce Eliza Winters &c.” Rumors and
public charges of adultery plagued Mormonism even while the Book of
Mormon itself was being authored 2 years before the church was started.</p>
<p>We don’t know very much about this incident, but Rhamanthus M. Stocker
confirms that Eliza Winters spent a lot of time at the Smith household
during this period, and at age 70 Eliza gave a short interview to the
<em>Broome Republican</em> newspaper in which she said that confirmed that she
had lived in the neighborhood. We also have a court document in which
Eliza Winters sued Martin Harris for defamation for saying she’d had a
bastard child. Apparently she asked for $1000 in damages. Now, it could
totally be the case that Eliza had Joe’s bastard child, but I’m not
really thinking that. Levi Lewis refers to Joe’s “attempt” to seduce
her, which suggests that Joe didn’t actually <em>succeed</em> in seducing her.
We know from later events that Joe’s modus operandi when women rejected
him was to smear them and destroy their reputations, so I have to assume
that that’s what he did to Eliza Winters. I doubt she’d have risked
taking him to court if the allegation were actually true.</p>
<p>However, women he was able to convince he usually remained silent about
unless specific events required his public statements to assassinate
their characters. We don’t have any statement from Jo concerning Eliza
Winters. It’s very complicated and a subject with a lot of speculation.</p>
<p>The other incident from the New York era that we need to talk about
comes from Joe’s 1830 trials for glass-looking. 1830 is also the year
the city plat for Chicago was drawn up. This is from Joe’s own <em>History
of the Church</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After a few more such attempts, the court was detained for a time, in
order that two young women, daughters of Mr. Stoal, with whom I had at
times kept company, might be sent for, in order, if possible, to
elicit something from them which might be made a pretext against me.
The young ladies arrived, and were severally examined touching my
character and conduct in general, but particularly as to my behavior
towards them, both in public and private; when they both bore such
testimony in my favor as left my enemies without a pretext on their
account.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Somebody apparently suspected Joe of being sexually involved with
Stowell’s daughters during the time he lived with Stowell, but they were
called as witnesses and they denied everything. Of course they’re going
to deny everything, because their reputations were on the line as much
as Jo’s. I acknowledge there’s nothing provable here, but honestly even
just the rumor that something was going on is enough for me. Where
there’s smoke, there’s fire, especially where Jo’s sexual conduct is
concerned. Ep 21</p>
<p>I want to take a minute to talk about this in the abstract. Puritanical
social structures during this Victorian era meant sometimes dire
consequences for those who stepped outside the boundaries of cis-hetero
monogamous relationships. As is the case today, the rules applied
differently to the proletariat as opposed to those individuals in the
upper crust. Speaking broadly, it wasn’t uncommon for wealthy men,
especially if they were well-connected and socially powerful, to have
plenty of sex outside their marriage while their wives were expected to
remain faithful to their unfaithful husbands. For those men not in the
wealthy and powerful elite class, the tendencies to step outside of
monogamy were just as present, but were far more likely to be prosecuted
for adultery. When I say prosecuted, I mean actually prosecuted. As of
2020, adultery is still illegal in 19 of 50 states. In Florida, it was
technically illegal for unmarried folks to live together until 2016.
Adultery laws being on the books doesn’t mean much because it’s almost
never prosecuted today. But, in the 19th-century, adultery was a
surprisingly common and resulted in imprisonment, fines, castration, and
on rare occasions, capital punishment; although I will point out that
those more extreme forms of punishment really only happened in Colonial
America before the revolution and for a short time thereafter and
usually only in extreme cases, which isn’t excusing the conduct, simply
contextualizing it. Laws only apply to those upon whom they’re enforced,
meaning laws are almost always weaponized against the most poor and
marginalized in society. So, let’s talk about adultery laws and women
because by far the majority of people prosecuted for adultery in
American history were women. The value of women, societally speaking,
has largely centered around their sexuality. It’s a system of purity
that largely impacts only women, even to this day. Because female sex is
viewed largely through commodification, as soon as a woman is “seduced,”
which is a loaded term, she’s no longer valuable to the man she’s
supposed to marry. In adultery cases, it benefits every person accused
to lie about what happened. This trend is even more insidious when we
consider assault and rape, and please take this as a content warning for
the rest of today’s show, we’re going to navigate some pretty dark
waters for the next 25 pages of show notes here. Broadly speaking, when
someone is raped, it’s culturally viewed as if the perpetrator somehow
defiled that person’s purity, thereby nullifying the person’s value in
society. With female sex commodified, the man who takes that purity away
has devalued the victim. When the survivor chooses to press charges or
even try to speak up, far more often their credibility is brought into
question and the attack dogs are unleashed. This man is a standup member
of polite society, he would never do such a thing! What were you
wearing, you must have been asking for it! Why were you in that
situation? Why did you allow yourself to get so drunk? The cycle of a
survivor becoming the victim of character assassination continues;
society never evolves. When it’s a matter of he said, she said, society
says we believe him and she’s a liar trying to tarnish this good man’s
reputation. What we see today is merely the modern iteration of social
structures which have existed for millennia. Adultery laws in America
have largely served to protect wealthy men and oppress women; they’ve
also been heavily weaponized against racial and ethnic minorities,
especially when a white woman is involved in the situation. Think what
you will about the metoo movement and the various evolutions of feminism
working to change these societal constructs, but to ignore that these
ills exist is to be wilfully ignorant. And we wonder why sexual assault
and rape is almost never reported and exceptionally rare to reach any
criminal convictions.</p>
<p>Understanding the commodification of female sexuality, purity doctrine,
women being the gatekeepers of sex, men having uncontrollable sexual
appetites being a self-fulfilling prophecy, and women’s reputations
being tied to their sexual worth are concepts we have to juggle as we
consider Mormon polygamy. To complicate matters further, any system
seeking to upset or overthrow these cultural ills can be a very
appealing social movement. There are ways to see a conceptual polygamist
society as progressive and egalitarian, making the proposition very
appealing to people who reject societal constructs of strict monogamy
and punishments for stepping outside those boundaries. As an idea,
Joseph Smith’s polygamy was an appealing option to people who were ready
to move beyond the confines of Puritanical relationship and gender
structures. Let’s keep that thought in a mental compartment for a moment
while we discuss the way the actual practice played out. Polygamy as an
ideal is far from real-world practices and consequences. The fact is,
polygamy in practice ended up becoming a viciously patriarchal system
that created a wake of heartbreak, abuse, rape, and death in its path.
With the top-down, exclusively male structure of Mormon leadership, the
abusive system that resulted was inevitable and the prophet himself
often preyed on orphan children or convinced their parents that godhood
awaited should they give their teenage daughter to him. In order for us
to understand polygamy and all of its complexities, we need to
understand that while simultaneously keeping in our mind the fact that
it was appealing for a lot of people as an ideal who wanted to push
against or even overthrow the structures of puritanical sexuality. How
do we deal with the fact that Jo raped teenage girls while understanding
that some of his older wives were the ones responsible for convincing
those children that the abusive encounter was not only acceptable in the
eyes of god, but necessary for everybody’s exaltation? Those concepts
are very difficult for us to juggle in our minds, especially if we try
to fit Mormon polygamy into convenient little mental boxes, but it’s
absolutely necessary in order to understand some of the nuances of
today’s discussion. Oh, and anybody concluding most of these
“marriages” didn’t include sex, or that libido wasn’t a factor in the
practice and hatching of the polygamy revelation, is a hack and they
should work to extricate their heads from their own anuses before they
work on researching this subject.</p>
<p>After moving to Kirtland in 1831, Joe met one of his future polygamous
wives, a girl named Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. She was 12 years
old at the time. She remembers her magnetic attraction to him on their
first meeting, and the way he stared at her. This is from Todd Compton’s
book In Sacred Loneliness, page 207:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mary wrote, ‘I was sent for; when he saw me, he looked at me so
earnestly, I felt almost afraid [and I thought, ‘He can read my every
thought,’ and I thought how blue his eyes were.] after a moment, or
too he came and put his hands on my head and gave me a great Blessing,
(the first I ever received) and made me a present of the Book.’ . . .
‘And his countenance Shone, and seemed almost transparent—it seems
as though the solemnity of Eternity rested upon all of us…[He]
seemed almost transfixed, he was looking ahead and his face outshone
the candle which was on a shelf just behind him. I thought I could
almost see the cheek bones, he looked as though a searchlight was
inside his face and shining through every pore. I could not take my
eyes from his face…’ . . . She regarded this as the first time she was
“sealed” to the Mormon Prophet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What Mary Elizabeth Rollins’s accounts do for historians is document a
trend in Joseph’s sexual practices. The guy carried clout wherever he
went because his reputation preceded him for both good and evil.
Wherever he went, people expected to meet a man pious and worthy of the
office he claimed, the mouthpiece of god. This has an incredible ability
to break down barriers and create expectations in the person’s mind;
it’s a master manipulation tactic and Mary Rollins was yet another
victim of Jo’s predation.</p>
<p>From the time they first met, Mary held a certain reverence and affinity
for the prophet and it seems he was drawn to her in her early pubescent
phase. As she matured into womanhood, Joseph would seem to never take
his eyes off her, which is how predators operate. Joseph would later
tell Mary that he was commanded in 1834 when she was 15 years old to
take her as his wife, but he couldn’t as she was living in Missouri a
thousand miles from Kirtland after obeying Jo’s revelation for the
Mormons to settle there. She soon married a young man named Adam
Lightner, a non-Mormon from Pennsylvania. Mary continued to keep the
idea of being married to the prophet in her mind, and finally in early
1842, he would propose to take her as his polygamous wife, which she
agreed to while living with her non-Mormon husband who apparently
thought highly of Jo but couldn’t believe in the church. A unique
situation indeed.</p>
<p>The Church started to experience its first major apostasy in late 1831
with the defections of Ezra Booth and Symonds Ryder, among other people.
Booth wrote an expose of Mormonism in the form of a series of newspaper
articles, and Symonds Ryder participated in a mob that covered Joe and
Sidney Rigdon in tar and feathers in 1832. Should it be of interest, you
can listen to the Ezra Booth letters on the patreon exclusive feed when
we read through Mormonism Unvailed with commentary.</p>
<p>The tar and feather incident is interesting because the mob’s motives
aren’t totally clear. Apparently Symonds Ryder believed that Joe and
Rigdon were attempting a land grab in the Kirtland area, and he stirred
up the mob partly on that basis. But according to a Church of Christ
member named Clark Braden who interviewed a bunch of people in the
1880s, the mob also had another motivation. Braden says, “The mob was
led by Eli Johnson, who blamed Smith for being too intimate with his
sister Marinda, who afterwards married Orson Hyde. Brigham Young, in
after years, twitted Hyde with this fact, and Hyde, on learning its
truth, put away his wife, although they had several children.”</p>
<p>Now, there are definite problems with this account. It’s a pretty late
source, and we don’t know who Braden got this information from. Also,
Eli Johnson was Marinda’s uncle, not her brother. However, there are a
couple pieces of circumstantial evidence that support it. For one thing,
Marinda was living in the same house as Joe at the time. We know Jo’s
patterns of predation often involved women with whom he lived. For
another thing, we know Joe was interested in Marinda, because he later
married her as a plural wife in Nauvoo; she was 15 or 16 at this time.
And finally, we know from an account written by Apostle Luke Johnson
that the mob tried to castrate Joe and even brought a doctor to perform
the deed who ended up losing his nerve before completing the act. Why
would they to castrate him unless their motivation had something to do
with sex? And, of course, at the time, Emma and Jo had just lost their
twins and had adopted the Murdock twins who were less than a year old at
this point.</p>
<p>1832 also happens to be the year that Orson Pratt pointed to as the time
when Smith told certain individuals that “the principle of taking more
wives than one is a true principle, but the time had not yet come for it
to be practiced.” Mosiah Hancock dates the doctrine to 1832 as well. He
says Joe approached his father Levi Hancock in spring 1832 and said,
“Brother Levi, the Lord has revealed to me that it is his will that
righteous men shall take Righteous women even a plurality of Wives that
a Righteous race may be sent forth uppon the Earth.”</p>
<p>The very few documents which exist about this are late and come from
members of the SLC church, but what historians generally believe is that
these statements are in reference to the Native American missions. A
righteous race of Mormons with multiple native wives to raise up a white
and delightsome race.</p>
<p>Rumors about something like Mormon polygamy apparently circulated in
1831 and 1832. The Evangelical Magazine and Gospel Advocate reported in
their February 5, 1831 issue: “They [the Mormons] have all things in
common, and dispense with the marriage covenant.” Henry Carroll, who was
in the Kirtland area in 1832, recalled in 1885: “It was claimed all
things were common, even to free love, among the Mormons at Kirtland.”</p>
<p>Let’s put this on hold for a moment to discuss the concept of free love
groups. The Cochranites predated Mormonism and were into some form of
free love. The Oneida group would follow the next decade of being openly
polyamorous, all members are married to each other. It was an appealing
concept, albeit very controversial. A lot of people wanted to explore
what love looked like outside the strict confines of heteromonogamous
marriage. With so many accusations of polygamy invading early Mormonism,
surely some converted just to learn about how true the rumors were or to
have the possibility of open relationships. This early Kirtland church
was an era of experimentation. However, that experimentation can only go
so far before some hard lessons are learned and the church evolved into
what it needed to become in order to be competitive. Those other
free-love sects never had more than a few hundred adherents because the
beliefs were so counterculture and fringe. If you want your religion to
grow in a puritanical world, you have to remain on the very edge of
controversy to be distinct, but not so controversial as to be relegated
to the fringe. Jo recognized that an openly free-love religion would be
too hard for a lot of people to swallow and would never have the numbers
necessary for his Mormon revolution of the world. You can either be a
free love sect on the fringes, or a more mainstream sect with thousands
of followers, you can’t have both. What Kirtland reveals to us is a few
signals that Jo wanted to take the early church towards free love but
once he realized he wanted to continue to expand the religion and keep
it out of the fringes, an openly polygamist sect wasn’t possible. But
then, that doesn’t work really well for Jo cuz he wants to have his cake
and eat it too so the only possible way to satiate his sex drive was to
create inner circles of leadership who could practice polygamy, while
keeping the doctrine from the lay membership. This created a tension.
How does Jo make sure to keep the practice as nothing more than shadows
and rumors about the elite while leveraging those rumors to bring
initiates into the fold? How does he ensure compliance and silence to
keep from his church becoming a fringe free-love sect? Many of Jo’s
hierarchical evolutions can be explained by his greed, be that greed for
wealth or for possessing more women.</p>
<p>Continuing on, W. W. Phelps first heard about polygamy about 1834, when
he asked Joe about a revelation that Joe had received three years
earlier, in 1831. The actual text of this revelation didn’t survive, but
we know from several descriptions of it roughly what it said. The
occasion was that the US government had expelled the Church’s first
missionaries to the Native Americans in Indian Territory and had denied
them missionary permits to preach there. The revelation authorized the
missionaries to marry Indian women so that they could enter Indian
Territory with the 19th century equivalent of a spousal visa. According
to W. W. Phelps, “About three years after this was given, I asked
brother Joseph [Smith, Jr.] privately, how ‘we,’ that were mentioned
in the revelation could take wives from the ‘natives’—as we were all
married men? He replied instantly ‘In th[e] same manner that Abraham
took Hagar and Katurah [Keturah]; and Jacob took Rachel Bilhah and
Zilpah: by revelation—the saints of the Lord are always directed by
revelation.’” This marks the first time Joe cited examples of biblical
polygamy as justification for taking multiple wives.</p>
<p>Benjamin Johnson says he heard about plural marriage by 1835. Here’s an
excerpt from his autobiography:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 1835, at Kirtland, I learned from my sister's husband, Lyman R.
Sherman, who was close to the Prophet, and received it from him, “that
the ancient order of Plural Marriage was again to be practiced by the
Church.” . . . After this, there was some trouble with Jared Carter,
and through Brother Sherman I learned that “as he had built himself a
new house, he now wanted another wife,” which Joseph would not permit.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then, the following year, Joe got into his most famous sexual
scandal: the Fanny Alger affair. Born in 1816 in Massachusetts to Samuel
Alger and Clarissa Hancock, Fanny Alger moved into the Smith home in
1832 as a domestic servant. According to Ann Eliza Webb Young, Emma was
very fond of Fanny and treated her like an adopted daughter, so “it was
with a shocked surprise that the people heard that sister Emma had
turned Fanny out of the house” in spring 1836. “By degrees it became
whispered about that Joseph’s love for his adopted daughter was by no
means a paternal affection, and his wife, discovering the fact, at once
took measures to place the girl beyond his reach.”</p>
<p>According to Apostle William McLellin, Professor Bill as we called him
many moons ago, Emma later explained to him how she found out. Noticing
that Joe and Fanny were missing, she went looking for them. “She went to
the barn and saw him and Fanny in the barn together alone. She looked
through a crack and saw the transaction!!! She told me this story too
was verily true.” Emma’s comments confirmed what McLellin had earlier
heard from Oliver Cowdery.</p>
<p>Now, some scholars think Joe and Fanny began the affair as early as
1832, but there’s no way to prove it, as is the case with most of these
relationships. Most historians think it started about 1835, when
Benjamin Johnson says he heard the first rumors that Joe loved Fanny.
Obviously Emma learned about it in spring 1836, when she caught them
into the barn together and kicked Fanny out. Fanny ended up being kicked
not only out of the Smith home, but completely out of town.</p>
<p>Ann Eliza Webb Young says Emma was so mad at Joe that Joe called upon
Oliver Cowdery to mediate between them. Ollie was livid about the
affair, and it eventually caused him to apostatize from the Church.
Ollie spread rumors about the affair to some other people, and Joe
called him a liar had him brought up on disciplinary charges. On January
21, 1838, Ollie wrote a letter to his brother Warren A. Cowdery to
clarify that “I never confessed[,] intimated[,] or admitted/ that I
ever willfully lied about him [Joseph Smith]. When he was here we had
some conversation in which in every instance, I did not fail to affirm
that what I had said was strictly true[.] A dirty, nasty, filthy
affair of his and Fanny Algers was talked over in which I strictly
declared that I had never deviated from the truth on the matter, and as
I supposed was admitted by himself.”</p>
<p>Ollie obviously viewed this whole thing as an extramarital affair, but
there’s some debate about whether it was an extramarital affair or an
early plural marriage. In the book Persistence of Polygamy, friend of
the show Don Bradley argues pretty persuasively that there was, in fact,
a marriage ceremony. Mosiah Hancock claims that Joe came to his father,
Levi Hancock, and said,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[“]Brother Levi I want to make a bargain with you—If you will get
Fanny Alger for me for a wife you may have Clarissa Reed. I love
Fanny” “I will” Said Father. “Go brother Levi and the Lord will
prosper you” Said Joseph—Father goes to the father Samuel
Alger—Father’s Brother in Law and [said] “Samuel[,] the
Prophet Joseph loves your Daughter Fanny and wishes her for a
wife[,] what say you[?]”—Uncle Sam Says—“Go and talk to the Old
woman about it[,] twill be as She says” Father goes to his Sister
and said “Clarrissy, Brother Joseph the Prophet of the most high God
loves Fanny and wishes her for a wife what say you” Said She “go and
talk to Fanny it will be all right with me”—Father goes to Fanny and
said “Fanny[,] Brother Joseph the Prophet loves you and wishes you
for a wife will you be his wife?” “I will Levi” Said She—Father takes
Fanny to Joseph and said “Brother Joseph I have been successful in my
mission”—Father gave her to Joseph repeating the Ceremony as Joseph
repeated to him.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This account is definitely consistent with how Joe usually went about
proposing to women by using male intermediaries. But some historians
reject this account, because it’s a very late, secondhand source from
somebody connected with the Brighamite polygamous church. That said, I
don’t really think it matters that much whether there was a marriage
ceremony or not, because regardless, Joe lied about it to Emma. This
relationship was concealed from Emma and everybody else and its
discovery catalyzed a major rift in the Kirtland and Missouri churches,
causing numerous excommunications and eventually the prophet’s own exile
from Ohio. The incident of discovering the affair was instructive to Jo,
his people would reject anything smacking of non-monogamy. Just a year
before the church had voted to canonize what later became D&C 101,
which was removed in the late 1870s because it openly denies polygamy
was happening, claims all the rumors about it are false, and says
Mormonism is a strictly monogamous religion. Even if he himself was to
practice polygamy, Jo learned that he’d need to be very guarded about
who would be admitted into the holiest of holy marriage doctrines.</p>
<p>According to the rest of Mosiah Hancock’s account, some dissenters
locked Fanny in an upper room of the temple, intending to trot her out
to testify to the high council about Joe’s adultery. Joe went to Fanny’s
father Samuel Alger and asked him to do so something to prevent this.
Alger climbed up to a second-story window and helped his daughter down,
and then the Alger family rode away to Indiana, where Fanny married a
guy named Solomon Custer two months later, perhaps to provide cover for
a pregnancy. Having people skip town in order to avoid having to testify
against him was pretty common for Jo, especially when he controlled the
Nauvoo court system. If Fanny was pregnant, then unfortunately we don’t
know what happened to the baby, because there’s almost no documentation
of her life after 1837. Ep 33.</p>
<p>Another allegation against Joe from the Kirtland period concerns Nancy
Rigdon. Joe famously later proposed to Nancy in Nauvoo, when she was 19
years old and gave her what’s known as the Happiness Letter, which we’ll
discuss in a little while. But a few sources date Joe’s first interest
in Nancy to the tail end of the Kirtland period, when she was 15 or 16.
William C. Smith, who went to school with Nancy’s sister Athalia in
Kirtland, thought he remembered some talk at school about Joe and Sidney
Rigdon fighting because Joe wanted to marry Nancy, but he wasn’t
positive that he remembered this correctly. Clark Braden, who
interviewed some old residents of Kirtland in the 1880s, reported the
same thing but didn’t name his source. The best piece of evidence for
this, however, is a September 1837 letter published by Ollie Cowdung’s
brother Warren Cowdery. Warren had heard that rumors were afloat in
nearby towns which claimed that Joe and Sidney Rigdon had a falling-out.
Warren doesn’t say specifically what the rumors related to, but he
refutes them by saying that the “females'' of Rigdon’s family are
“young[,] innocent, unsuspecting, without reproach[,] and for
ought we know, above suspicion.” The rumors were afloat in 1837, but
what those rumors actually were is a subject of speculation. We also
know that Jo targeted a number of teenage girls during the Kirtland era
who he’d later convince to give in to his desires in Nauvoo and Nancy
fits those patterns perfectly.</p>
<p>Eventually the Kirtland Safety Society was started and murmurings blew
completely out of control. I know I mention this Mormon bank a lot but
it was really important because it marks a turning point in church
practices from ecclesiastical to overtly corporate. After its collapse
and the dissenting groups forming in Kirtland, Jo and the Quorum of
Apostles fled to Missouri. This resulted in the Missouri-Mormon war of
1838 as Jo waxed militant. Eps 39-49. The Mormons surrendered and Jo was
taken with his buddies to Liberty Jail. Ep 50.</p>
<p>While he was there, the Mormon exodus to Illinois commenced and he
attempted to retain control over his followers from the prison cell via
messengers carrying personal letters. Many of these were about affairs
concerning the church and directing minutia of the exodus. However, some
personal letter from the prophet also made their way to various people.</p>
<p>The first one was a letter to Emma. He wrote it in reply to a beautiful
letter she had sent him, in which she expressed her love for him and her
absolute anguish for what he was going through. He wrote back,
expressing sympathy for her troubles as well, and promising that “if God
will spare my life once more to have the privelege of takeing care of
you I will ease your care and indeavour to cumfort your heart.” He went
on to say, “my Dear Emma do you think that my being cast into prison by
the mob of renders me less worthy of your friendsship no I do not think
so.”</p>
<p>Now, wait a second. What’s this about “friendship”? Maybe I’m reading
too much into this, but it took two weeks for Joe to reply to Emma’s
heartfelt letter, and instead of love he expresses his “friendship”?
Meanwhile, during that two week period he sat on Emma’s letter…
apparently he was too busy sitting in a jail cell to get around to it,
he also wrote a letter to Norman Buell’s wife Presendia Huntington
Buell. The Buells had visited him in prison, and Joe wrote this letter
to thank them for the visit. “I want him and you to know that I am your
true friend[.] I was glad to see you[;] no tongue can tell what
inexpressible Joy it gives a man to see the face of one who has been a
friend after having been inclosed in the walls of a prison for five
months it seems to me that my heart will always be more tender after
this than ever it was before.”</p>
<p>Okay, he calls her a friend too, so no big deal, right? Sure, except
that her husband was reading this letter too, so obviously he had to be
discreet. Presendia would become one of Jo’s wives in December of 1841.
Keep in mind: as we discussed last episode, Joe had just recently taken
his very first polyandrous plural wife, Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris,
in Missouri in 1838. “Polyandrous” meaning that she already had a
husband when he married her. So when Joe wrote this letter to Presendia,
he was already in the mindset that a prior husband wasn’t necessarily a
dealbreaker. Notably, Lucinda, the widow of William Morgan who wrote the
expose on Masonry and disappeared, was one of Jo’s wives who took his
death particularly hard, but that will have to wait until the end of
this series.</p>
<p>The bros escaped from prison and made their way to the Mormon refugee
settlement in Quincy. Soon after, they began settling Commerce, which
was eventually incorporated to become Nauvoo once the charter was
passed. Ep 66.</p>
<p>Each era of Mormonism preceding Nauvoo relies on speculation and
fragmentary evidence when it comes to polygamy. From the New York era we
have a legal complaint, a couple court hearings, and some later
interviews which allude to some sexual experimentation. In Kirtland the
evidence expands a bit but really we only have one solid name, Fanny
Alger. In Missouri the evidence surrounding Lucinda Pendleton Morgan
Harris is pretty significant and trustable, but she’s really the only
name we have for the Missouri era. Nauvoo is a completely different
ballgame. The evidence for polygamy grows from a few fragmentary claims
to mountains of journals, affidavits, structural changes in the church,
documented sealings, the polygamy revelation itself, and so much more.
Anybody claiming Jo didn’t practice polygamy, or even more asinine,
claims he fought polygamy, is wilfully ignorant. Ep 190.</p>
<p>I’ll also point out another stunning claim from the recently-published
anthology of Mormon historians titled Writing Mormon History, edited by
friend of the show, Joseph Geisner. A Mormon apologist named Brian Hales
wrote his chapter and I want to deal with a passage from it on page 109
where Brian is recounting his time doing the research for his volumes
Joseph Smith’s Polygamy. He hired Don Bradley to help do some research
and they had a conversation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don had given me some information regarding Fanny Alger, whom Joseph
Smith had reportedly married in the mid-1830s in Ohio, and I asked him
whether anyone had accused Smith of polygamy prior to John C. Bennett
in 1842. (Bennett had left the church in 1842 and before the end of
the year had written a book attacking Smith and the Latter-day
Saints.) Writers such as Fawn Brodie and Jerald and Sandra Tanner had
asserted that throughout the 1830s Smith was deflecting polygamy
allegations. [Don and I] both paused and pondered for a few seconds.
We then realized that our research didn’t support this. It seemed that
no one had accused Smith using that specific word (or anything similar
implying plurality of wives) throughout that decade or in connection
with Alger. I asked Don to search for any contemporaneous charges of
polygamy, which both he and I were never able to find in the
historical record.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nobody charged Jo with polygamy until Wreck-it Bennett in 1842? Brian
Hales is a careful apologist and he would never write something easily
proved wrong, would he? Why don’t we take a look at Doctrine & Covenants
section 101 printed in 1835, the same year the Fanny Alger affair was
happening.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>4… Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the
crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that
one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except
in the case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only had numerous newspaper articles been written and Ezra Booth had
claimed polygamy was going on in his 1831 letters, but the rumors and
charges were so rampant that an entire section of the D&C was dedicated
to responding to the charges. Simply put, I can’t imagine any amount of
tortured language, semantic arguments of polygamy, vs spiritual wifery,
vs adultery, vs fornication, or any other words associated with it,
where Brian’s assertion is true. But, unfortunately for him and other
apologists who study polygamy, they have to fit the practice into a
comfortable little box that makes Joseph Smith a wonderful man who never
harmed a fly. They create false distinctions between spiritual wifery
and celestial marriage, which was a distinction invented by Jo to
assassinate John C. Wreck-it Bennett when the practices looked exactly
the same. The apologist claims there’s a difference between time, time
and eternity, and eternity only sealings, with sex being the contingent
factor; and argument made by the church’s own gospel topics essay about
polygamy. The apologist sees Jo as a holy man who would never commit
adultery unless god commanded him to practice the new and everlasting
covenant. They’re placing their own value judgments on a maniacal serial
criminal from 185 years ago and it’s sophistry. It’s factoring out
evidence that conflicts with our modern sense of Mormon sexual purity
and it’s a matter of torturing the evidence to be what you want instead
of simply going wherever the evidence leads. I hate intellectual
dishonesty, especially when the apologist is this brazen and
unapologetic. Religion poisons everything.</p>
<p>That leads us into a discussion of a controversial figure in Nauvoo
history. In August 1840 Joe received a letter from John C. Wreck-it
Bennett, informing him that Bennett had “come to the conclusion to join
your people immediately and take up my abode with you.” A brigadier
general of the Illinois militia, Bennett laced his letter with militant
language: “[Let us] adopt the means to the end and the victory is
ours—The winged warrior of the air will not cease to be our proud
emblem of liberty, and the dogs of war will be forever chained.” Bennett
showed up the next month and was baptized into the Church. Joe quickly
recognized Bennett as a talented kindred scoundrel, Ep 115, and put him
to work drafting the Nauvoo charter. Bennett soon became a key leader of
the Church, the Nauvoo Legion, and the city government as mayor of
Nauvoo. John C. Bennett was a grade-A, all-American bastard, which is
why he and Joe got along so well.</p>
<p>Two months after his baptism, Bennett gave his very first sermon to the
Church at General Conference. Among other things, he “remarked that it
was necessary for the brethren to stand by each other, and resist every
unlawful attempt at persecution.” Bennett was an opportunist and he knew
what needed to be said to gain the sympathies and support of his
audience. Bennett also “said that many persons had been accused of
crime, and been looked upon as guilty, when on investigation it has been
ascertained that nothing could be adduced against them. Whereupon, on
motion, it was resolved, that no person be considered guilty of crime,
unless proved so by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” Obviously
he sold this to the Church under the pretense of preventing persecution,
but the real effect was to lay the groundwork for polygamy. Now nobody
could come after Joe in a church court for adultery unless two or three
witnesses had seen him do the deed. Now, anybody caught in the act of
adultery would need to have a friend or two when they happened upon the
situation in order for the evidence to be considered valid. As we’ll
discuss soon, it became a common refrain that if nobody knows it but the
two engaging in polygamy or spiritual wifery then there is no crime in
it. If you don’t tell anybody about me raping you then we won’t have any
problems.</p>
<p>In April 1841, the same month the first European-American wagon train
left Missouri to settle California, we have the first indisputable
documentation of Joe taking his first Nauvoo polygamous wife, Louisa
Beaman. Louisa was the daughter of one of Joe’s old treasure digging
buddies, Alva Beaman. She was 26 when she married him, and he was 35.
According to page 59 of Todd Compton’s book <em>In Sacred Loneliness</em>, Joe
approached Louisa’s brother-in-law Joseph Bates Noble in fall 1840 and,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>taught him “the principle of celestial or plural marriage, or a
plurality of wives,” saying that an angel had given him a revelation
on the subject and that “the angel of the Lord had commanded him
(Smith) to move forward in the said order of marriage.” Smith then
asked Noble to officiate in marrying Louisa to himself. The prophet
said, “In revealing this to you, I have placed my life in your hands,
therefore do not in an evil hour betray me to my enemies.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A quick way to gain a person’s confidence is to be vulnerable and this
was Jo’s M.O. in nearly every plural marriage like this. We don’t know
how Noble’s conversation with Louisa went, but according to a family
tradition, she prayed about the proposal and received a spiritual
witness, and was married to Joe on April 5, 1841 with Noble performing
the ceremony. Noble believed this was “the first sealing ceremony in
this Dispensation.” which certainly functions as a great answer to
modern apologists claiming the sealing power existed all the way back in
Kirtland before the Fanny Alger scrape. It was performed “under an Elm
tree in Nauvoo. The Bride disguised in a coat and hat.” Most other
Nauvoo plural marriages were performed in the Red Brick Store, but that
was still under construction when Joe married Louisa; thus the need for
a disguise to maintain the secrecy of this outdoor wedding away from
prying eyes within any of the few overcrowded buildings in the
burgeoning city.</p>
<p>According to testimony that Noble gave in court after the marriage
ceremony, Joe and Louisa went right across the river after the ceremony
to Noble’s house, where they slept together and consummated their
relationship. Noble saw them in bed together, and Joe afterward told him
that the couple had consummated the marriage. But no, of course,
polygamy was never about sex, it was about god ushering in the new
dispensation and participants, especially the pious prophet himself,
only begrudgingly acceded to the practice after being chastised by
angels with flaming swords.</p>
<p>Not long after his marriage to Louisa Beaman, Joe also married Zina
Diantha Huntington in summer 1841. Originally from New York, Zina had
converted to Mormonism at age 14 in 1835 and eventually became a bit of
a celebrity in Utah Mormonism. She frequently sang in tongues and
exercised the gifts of healing and prophecy. (Her mother, Zina Baker
Huntington, even briefly raised someone from the dead!) Zina was a
compassionate and wonderful person, traits which would elevate her to
elite status in Utah and usher her into the position of third President
of General Relief Society. When she met Joe at age 15 (he was 30), she
found his features striking. “He was 6 feet light auburn hair [and a
heavy nose] blue eyes the [eye]balls ful & round rather long.”</p>
<p>In 1839 Zina’s mother died, and the Huntington teenagers moved in with
the Smiths. As he often did with wards who lived in his house, Joe took
the opportunity to start courting Zina as a potential plural wife. As
usual, he used a male intermediary: her brother, Dimick B. Huntington.
Dimick taught his sister about polygamy. And then, according to a
biography by one of Zina’s grandkids, “Joseph pressed Zina for an answer
to his marriage proposal on at least three occasions in 1840, but she
avoided answering him.”</p>
<p>Instead she married a young man named Henry Jacobs on March 7, 1841.
Zina and Henry asked Joe to perform their marriage ceremony, but he
didn’t show up. In O. A. Cannon’s biography of Zina, we read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the couple arrived the Prophet was not there. After a wait, they
decided to ask the clerk, John C. Bennett, if he would perform the
marriage, which he did. When the couple later met the Prophet, Zina
asked him why he hadn’t come as he had promised. He told her it had
been made known to him that she was to be his Celestial Wife and he
could not give to another one who had been given to him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If there was ever something for Jo to be petty about, you know it has to
be a woman he wanted but refused his advances 3 times. This jealous
reaction caused Zina to reconsider her rejection of Smith’s proposals.
By her own account, she searched the scriptures prayerfully and obtained
a testimony of the doctrine of plural marriage. Henry Jacobs accepted
the doctrine as well, although it reportedly broke his heart. On October
27, about six months pregnant with her first child, twenty-year-old Zina
became Joe’s polyandrous wife with Henry’s full approval. Zina later
wrote, “I mad[e] a greater sacrifice than to give my li[f]e for I
never anticipated again to be looked uppon as an honerable woman by
those I dearly loved.”</p>
<p>According to George D. Smith’s book <em>Nauvoo Polygamy</em>, “Henry and Zina’s
first child, Zebulon, was born on January 2, 1842. Two weeks later,
Smith sent Jacobs on a mission to Chicago, from which he returned the
following March.” So not only did Joe marry Henry’s pregnant wife, but
then he also sent Henry off on a mission even though he had a newborn
son. I’m sure Zina, as a 20-year-old new mother, was well cared for
during her husband’s mission. I’m sure her life was great. Over the next
few years Henry served two more missions, as well. After Joe’s death,
Bloody Brigham Young married Zina as a plural wife and Henry obediently
married someone else in 1846. Why did Zina and Henry agree to this
arrangement? Why did any of these people agree to be manipulated like
this? Religions, especially religious cults, poison everything.</p>
<p>In late 1841 and early 1842, Joe targeted several more women. First
let’s cover Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, the girl whom Joe had
first noticed when she was 12 years old in Kirtland to whom he gifted a
Book of Mormon. According to Mary’s own account, Joe proposed to her in
early February 1842. After introducing the idea of plural marriage, he
told her that God had instructed him to marry her in 1834, but he had
been in Kirtland and she in Missouri. He had been frightened of the
idea, but an angel had appeared to him three times in eight years “and
said I was to obey that principle or he would [s]lay me.” He also told
her that she “was created for him before the foundation of the Earth was
laid,” and that God had authorized him to guarantee salvation for all
his wives. That alone reveals the trouble with Jo’s system. Look, I’m
all for everybody loving and playing with anybody they want as long as
they’re consenting adults with an equal power dynamic. These targets
believed that Jo was the mouthpiece of god; anything he said was divine
law. In basically every case of polygamy, Jo leveraged that power,
stemming from people’s credulity, to accomplish rape. When somebody
tells you that god commands you to submit to whatever they’re going to
do to you, you’re being manipulated to serve selfish desires.</p>
<p>The proposal was a shock to Mary and at first she didn’t agree to the
marriage, and asked him if it might not have been a devil rather than an
angel that had appeared to him. That’s a reasonable first instinct. For
a young girl growing up in a puritanical Christian society and
practicing a religion that’s unquestionably monogamous to be approached
by the prophet of god with such a proposal understandably caused some
conflicts in her mind. He assured her that it was an angel and told her
to pray about it and she would receive a witness. At the end of the
conversation, he asked her if she would turn traitor and speak of this
to anyone. She replied, “I shall never tell a mortal I had such a talk
from a married man!” Mary did pray about this, and a few nights later
an angel appeared to her in her bedroom. Her aunt awoke and saw “a
figure in white robes” go out the window, so apparently the angel was an
actor, not a hallucination. After this vision, Mary agreed to marry Joe
and he finally collected his prize at the end of February 1842. Even
calling these situations “marriages” is a troublesome concept when we
consider the many factors which played into each of them, but I digress.</p>
<p>Next let’s talk Martha Brotherton, because her story illustrates how
much polygamy permeated the top echelons of Mormon leadership. Brigham
Young and Heber Kimball were some of Joseph’s greatest allies and
wingmen when it came to acquiring more wives. And Joseph was happy to
return the favor, as he did for Brigham Young with Martha Brotherton.
Brigham had converted the Brotherton family during his mission in
Europe, and they had immigrated to Nauvoo. Their 17-year-old daughter,
Martha, caught Brigham’s eye. Here’s how they ambushed her, from H.
Michael Marquardt’s book <em>Rise of Mormonism</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Going upstairs with Heber C. Kimball to the second floor of the Red
Brick Store she [Martha] found Brigham Young and Joseph Smith alone.
Martha was introduced to the Prophet Joseph Smith by Brigham Young.
Joseph offered Martha his seat after which Smith and Heber Kimball
left the room leaving Martha alone with Apostle Young. Brigham Young
arose, locked the door, closed the window, and drew the curtain. He
then came and sat before Martha Brotherton.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Brigham then explained to her the doctrine of polygamy, that if she were
“willing to take up the cross” of being married to him as a plural wife
that very day, then he could take her “straight to the celestial
kingdom.” Lucky her, amiright? She explained that she wasn’t of legal
age, and she didn’t want to be married without her parents’ permission.
He urged her to make her own decision without consulting her parents,
“for I know it to be right before God, and if there is any sin in it,
I will answer for it.” She told him she wanted time to think about it.
At this point he kissed her and Joe came back into the room.</p>
<p>Joe said to her, “Well, Martha, it is lawful and right before God. I
know it is. Look here, don’t you believe in me? Well Martha, just go
ahead and do as Brigham wants you to, he is the best man in the world
except me. . . . Yes, and I know that this is lawful and right before
God; and if there is any sin in it I will answer for it before God.”
Martha said again that she wanted some time to think about it. Joe and
Bloody Brigham weren’t taking that for an answer, and they continued to
pressure her. Every time she asked for time to think, they got more and
more defensive. Finally, Joe told her she could have some time if she
would promise not to tell anyone, which she did. Ultimately she refused
the proposal. When she went public with her story, the Church smeared
her as a prostitute, and her own sisters published letters accusing her
of being a liar. Luckily, she did have an advocate in the form of John
C. Wreck-it Bennett who was collecting data for his forthcoming expose
of Jo Smith and the church, who printed her story in his book published
near the end of 1842. Supporters of the show can listen to that entire
audiobook with my commentary on the patreon exclusive feed.</p>
<p>Next, let’s talk about Nancy Rigdon. As I already mentioned, a few
rumors connect Joe with Nancy all the way back to the Kirtland period.
That makes her another girl that he sexually groomed from childhood,
just like Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. When he proposed to her in
Nauvoo in early 1842, she was 19, and he was nearly twice her age at 36.
He would have first met Nancy when she was only 8 years old. Jessie
Rigdon Secord said she was “more than good looking, she was as beautiful
as a Greek statue.”</p>
<p>Rather than approach Nancy directly, he offered John C. Bennett either
$500 or the best lot on Main Street if he succeeded in getting Nancy to
marry Smith. Bennett declined because he and Hingepin Sidney Rigdon were
friends and out of concern for Nancy’s innocence. Joseph retorted that
her innocence would remain intact, because God had authorized it.
Bennett still declined.</p>
<p>So instead, Joe sent Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde. Marinda was Orson
Hyde’s wife, but as we discussed on the last episode, Joe had married
her in December 1841, while Hyde was away on a mission to Israel.
According to Ebenezer Robinson, John C. Bennett, and Sidney Rigdon,
Marinda also had a sexual relationship with White-out Willard Richards.
She and Richards moved into the printing office together after her
sealing to Joe.</p>
<p>Joe had given Marinda a revelation commanding her to hearken unto his
counsel in all things, and that’s what she did. Among other things, she
helped him recruit new plural wives, including Nancy Rigdon. She
approached Nancy <em><strong>at a funeral</strong></em> and invited her to come meet
privately with Joe in the printing office. Prior to the meeting, she
mentioned the strange request to her boyfriend Francis Higbee, who
mentioned it to John C. Bennett, who warned Higbee what Joe intended.
Nancy went to the meeting, but she went forewarned by her boyfriend and
her guard was up. According to Bennett, Joe locked the door, swore Nancy
to secrecy, and then told her that he loved her and that she had been
the “idol of his affections” for several years, and proposed marriage.</p>
<p>Nancy was not amused. She said that “if she ever got married she would
marry a single man or none at all,” and she threatened to scream and
alert the neighbors unless Joe immediately opened the door and let her
out, which he did. Joe and Marinda tried to reason with her a bit more,
but she stormed away. Ep 117.</p>
<p>In an attempt to salvage the situation, Joe dictated a letter to Nancy
known as the “letter on happiness.” colloquially referred to as “the
happiness letter” today. Willard Richards delivered the letter and told
her to burn it after reading.</p>
<p>We need to spend some time on this letter. Friends of the show Jonathan
Streeter, Christopher Smith, and Bill Reel did a 2.5 hour broadcast on
the letter on the Thinker of Thoughts YouTube channel so I’ll recommend
that as a resource and we’ll do our best to navigate the letter briefly
here. The Happiness Letter is a masterclass of religious coercion, moral
relativism, and alternations between the words of god as commandments
and permissions.</p>
<p>It begins:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Happiness is the object and design of our existence, and will be the
end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it; and this path is
virtue, uprightness, faithfulness, holiness, and keeping <em>all the
commandments of God</em>; but we cannot keep ALL the commandments without
first <em>knowing</em> them, and we cannot expect to KNOW ALL, or more than
we <em>now know</em>, unless we <em>comply with</em> or <em>keep those</em> we have ALREADY
RECEIVED!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The manipulation is established in the first paragraph here; Jo knows
the only way to true salvation, and thereby happiness. But, we can’t
keep all the commandments if we don’t know them so Jo is simply trying
to help Nancy achieve happiness by proposing this new commandment of
polygamy. He’s doing it for her sake and she should consider herself
lucky to be a candidate for true happiness that Jo is about to teach
her. It continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That which is <em>wrong</em> under one circumstance, may be, and often is,
<em>right</em> under another. God said, Thou shalt <em>not kill</em>; at another
time he said, Thou shalt <em>utterly destroy</em>. This is the principle on
which the government of Heaven is conducted, by REVELATION adapted to
the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here, Jo jumps into the viewpoint of whatever god commands is good, even
if we feel it isn’t right. The implication is if God commands us to do
something we don’t feel right about, it’s a failing on our part because
we don’t fully understand the circumstance which makes it permissible or
an explicit commandment. This is a dodge of the old Euthyphro paradox.
Is murder wrong because god doesn’t like it, or does god not like murder
because it’s wrong? It’s an argument from moral relativism by divine
decree and it so happens that whatever god commands must be transmitted
through his prophet who is the one offering this polygamous marriage
proposal to begin with. God merely wants his people to be happy. If that
happiness happens to involve the prophet raping teenagers then god knows
the fulness of the circumstances which makes that right, even if it
feels wrong to the person victimized by the act. Good thing the true
kingdom of god operates by these means of revelation that completely
nullify our inherent human morality evolved over millions of years. One
guy in the 19th-century completely overthrows millions of years of
evolution by a simple “thus saith the lord”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Whatever God requires is right</em>, NO MATTER WHAT IT IS, although we
may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire.
If we seek first the kingdom of God, <em>all good things</em> will be added.
So with <em>Solomon</em>; first he asked <em>wisdom</em>, and God gave it him, and
with it EVERY DESIRE OF HIS HEART; even things which might be
considered ABOMINABLE to all who understand the order of Heaven ONLY
IN PART, but which, <em>in reality</em>, were <em>right,</em> because God <em>gave and
sanctioned</em> BY SPECIAL REVELATION.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given the basis of the argument, I can’t find a flaw in Jo’s logic. For
the sake of understanding his argument, we have to grant the existence
of the God of the Bible, which provided a safehaven for stoning unruly
children, purchasing and beating slaves, stealing the wives and
daughters of civilizations the Israelites plundered and enslaving them,
drowning the entire planet because of a hissy fit, burning cities to the
ground, human sacrifice as burnt offerings, committing genocide of
people who simply live on land god gave to his people or for simply
believing in the wrong god; countless other atrocities are not only seen
as morally good, but as commanded by god. People are punished for not
committing these atrocities in the Bible because they didn't follow
god’s commands. With that line of logic, Jo’s arguments are absolutely
sound. What can’t be accomplished when your god commands you to do
whatever you want? He then leans really hard into this moral relativism
with a relatable story.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A parent may whip a child, and justly too, because he stole an apple;
whereas, if the child had asked for the apple, and the parent had
given it, the child would have eaten it with a better appetite; there
would have been no stripes; all the <em>pleasures</em> of the apple would
have been secured, all the <em>misery</em> of stealing lost.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wonder what the apple thinks about the situation?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This principle will justly apply to <em>all</em> of God’s dealings with his
children. Every thing that God gives us is <em>lawful and right</em>, and it
is proper that we should ENJOY <em>his gifts and blessings</em>, WHENEVER AND
WHEREVER he is disposed to bestow; but if we should seize upon those
same blessings and enjoyments without <em>law,</em> without REVELATION,
without COMMANDMENT, those <em>blessings and enjoyments</em> would prove
cursings and vexations in the end, and we should have to lie down in
sorrow and wailings of everlasting regret.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once again, moral relativism is at play. We can do stuff that’s sinful
if god commands it. If we do it without gods command then it’s sin, but
if god commands we do that sin and we disobey then that’s a sin which
will be a cursing and vexation. Who tells us what god commands? The guy
who’s making the proposal to begin with.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our Heavenly Father is more <em>liberal</em> in his views, and <em>boundless</em> in
his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive,
and, at the same time, is more terrible to the workers of iniquity,
more awful in the executions of his punishments, and more ready to
detect every <em>false way</em> than we are apt to suppose him to be; he will
be <em>inquired of</em> by his children; he says, <em>Ask</em> and ye SHALL RECEIVE,
<em>seek</em> and ye SHALL FIND; but, if ye will take that which is not your
own, or which I have not given you, you shall be rewarded according to
your deeds;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo switches into mouthpiece of god mode for this section, marking a
shift from pontificating on god’s ways and will to articulating it for
himself. This is dangerous no matter what the subject is, and this
subject so happens to be about Jo justifying raping a teenager. Any
person wielding this amount of power over anybody never leads to more
good for more people.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But <em>no good thing will I withhold from them who walk uprightly before
me,</em> and do my will in <em>all</em> things; who will listen to my voice and
<em>to the voice of</em> MY SERVANT WHOM I HAVE SENT; for I delight in those
who seek diligently to know my precepts, and <em>abide</em> by the <em>laws of
my kingdom;</em> for ALL THINGS SHALL BE MADE KNOWN UNTO THEM IN MINE OWN
DUE TIME, <em>and in the end</em> THEY SHALL HAVE JOY.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s overt coercion taking place in the form of commanding by the
voice of god to do what Jo says, but there’s also the subtle and covert
coercion that if you don’t follow these commands by Jo then you won’t
have joy in the end. If you’re feeling anxious, depressed, or somehow
devalued as a person it’s because you simply aren’t following god’s
words. Those bad feelings are your own fault so you better follow god’s
commands and submit to the advances of the lord’s servant and thereby
abide in the laws of god’s kingdom. If you do, you shall have joy and
all things shall be made known to you in god’s own due time. This
provides a window into Jo’s manipulation tactics and his overall
charisma. It’s yet another aspect of his leadership which self-selects
those who will follow. Whoever doesn’t believe this load of hot,
coercive garbage simply doesn’t believe it. Those who do become marks of
the conman and he holds their lives in his hands. The argument didn’t
convince Nancy, probably because the thought of being Joe’s side piece
<em>didn’t</em> give her happiness. Or, maybe she didn’t believe he was the
mouthpiece of god because she’d watched firsthand the evolution of Jo
from prophet of god to revolutionary madman and didn’t want any part of
it.</p>
<p>Nancy told her parents, and her parents told other people. Joe
complained to a friend that “she had to go and blab it.” Hingepin Rigdon
confronted Jo about it in the Rigdon home and, of course, Jo denied the
whole thing to her parents’ faces. Nancy overheard this and stormed from
the next room, declaring, “Joseph Smith[,] you are telling that which
is not true[.] you did make such a proposition to me and you know it.”
Next Joe admitted that the proposal had happened, but said he had done
it in order to test Nancy’s virtue because every conman worth his salt
always knows where to find the nearest exit. Sidney Rigdon wasn’t fooled
and he and Joe never fully repaired their relationship again after this.
Joe told the Rigdons to keep their mouths shut, and he worked to
discredit Nancy by spreading rumors that she was a whore. Eliza Snow,
another Joe’s wives, wrote a nasty poem about Nancy called “the
tattler,” which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a poetic
call for women to shut the up about polygamy and keep Joe’s secrets.
Eliza had become Jo’s wife just a couple months before this
confrontation so she was an insider who proved an invaluable resource to
insure compliance during the Utah era. We’ll discuss Eliza R. Snow in a
few minutes.</p>
<p>What I do want to highlight here is a trend we’ll see come through as we
continue to go through these proposals into later and later Nauvoo
history. This trend existed in every aspect of Jo’s life, not just
polygamy, but it bears mentioning because it’s most easily understood
with respect to polygamy. The trend is escalation. Jo got bored easily
and he always wanted to chase after the next forbidden fruit. What
started as an affair with the maid turned into a massive and
far-reaching system of dozens of wives with theological justifications
that extend from eternity to eternity. Fanny Alger was a teenage
housemaid in 1835 when the affair likely occurred, but by 1844 Jo had
assaulted over half a dozen teenagers, had a dozen wives with living
husbands, and probably even pursued his niece and his own sister. No
matter how far he went, it was never far enough to be satisfied. He
would burn every bridge, he would ruin every friendship, he would send
men on missions to spread the gospel, and he might have even had people
killed to get more, more, MORE! What may have started as a liberal
free-love ideal evolved into a vicious, structured, and deliberate
system of consolidating power, acquisition of women as property, and
serial rape. He devised an entire female organization with the help of
his wives to cull through the women who’d agree to the system and
maintain their silence. It was always a matter of how far he could push
boundaries before somebody would make him pay. He could never be
satisfied; just like his religion he was young, scrappy, and hungry and
he would not throw away his plot for more power, wealth, and control.
Keep this concept of escalation in mind as we progress through more of
these stories.</p>
<p>Next let’s talk Sarah Pratt. As with Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde, Joe
approached Sarah Pratt while her husband Orson Pratt was away on a
mission to England. According to John C. Bennett, Joe had had his eye on
Sarah for at least two years before he approached her in mid-1842.
Bennett and Smith went together to the home where Sarah was staying
during her husband’s absence. According to Bennett, Smith said to her,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Sister Pratt, the Lord has given you to me as one of my spiritual
wives. I have the blessings of Jacob granted me, as he granted holy
men of old, and I have long looked upon you with favor, and hope you
will not deny me.” She replied: “I care not for the blessings of
Jacob, and I believe in no such revelations, neither will I consent
under any circumstances. I have one good husband, and that is enough
for me.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe went off to take out his sexual frustration on Louisa Beaman instead
as she lived nearby, but he subsequently returned three more times to
try his luck at convincing Sarah, and each time she rejected him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>she at last told him: “Joseph, if you ever attempt any thing of the
kind with me again, I will tell Mr. Pratt on his return home. I will
certainly do it.” Joe replied, “Sister Pratt, I hope you will not
expose me; if I am to suffer, all suffer; so do not expose me. Will
you agree not to do so?” “If,” said she, “you will never insult me
again, I will not expose you unless strong circumstances require it.”
“Well, sister Pratt,” says Joe, “as you have refused me; it becomes
sin, unless sacrifice is offered;” and turning to me he said,
“General, if you are my friend I wish you to procure a lamb, and
have it slain, and sprinkle the door posts and the gate with its
blood, and take the kidneys and entrails and offer them upon an altar
of twelve stones that have not been touched with a hammer, as a burnt
offering, and it will save me and my priesthood. Will you do it?” I
will, I replied. So I procured the lamb from Captain John T. Barnett,
and it was slain by Lieutenant Stephen H. Goddard, and I offered the
kidneys and entrails in sacrifice for Joe as he desired; and Joe said,
“all is now safe—the destroying angel will pass over, without harming
any of us.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unfortunately for Joe, he just couldn’t take “no” for an answer. He’d
won the encounter by virtue of getting Sarah to agree not to tell
anybody, but that wasn’t good enough for him because he still wanted
her.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Time passed on in apparent friendship until Joe grossly insulted Mrs.
Pratt again, after her husband had returned home, by approaching and
kissing her. This highly offended her, and she told Mr. Pratt, who was
much enraged and went and told Joe never to offer an insult of the
like again.–Joe replied, “I did not desire to kiss her, Bennett made
me do it!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Consider the manipulation at play in that story. In order to defend
himself, Joe smeared both Sarah Pratt and John C. Bennett by this one
little act. He weaponized this kiss and Orson Pratt’s jealousy and
effectively destroyed multiple relationships by using this as the
opportunity to begin a character assassination campaign against Sarah
which lasts to this day. He did so by claiming that he had found Pratt
and Bennett in bed together. To go a step further and gain more
credibility in the public eye, he also recruited Stephen Goddard’s wife
to back up the allegation. Mrs. Goddard claimed that she witnessed
Bennet touching Sarah’s breasts. Mrs. Goddard also asserted that “Mrs.
Pratt stated to me that Dr. Bennett told her, that he could cause
abortion with perfect safety to the mother, at any stage of pregnancy,
and that he had frequently destroyed and removed infants before their
time to prevent exposure of the parties, and that he had instruments for
that purpose, &c.”</p>
<p>Sarah Pratt herself backed up Bennett’s version of events. She confirmed
Mrs. Goddard’s claim that Bennett performed abortions, but in her
version, Bennett was doing it on Joe’s behalf rather than his own.
published in 1886 by Wilhelm Wymetal, adds a new salacious detail: that
Joe had Bennett performing abortions for him! She says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I observed that he held something in the left sleeve of his coat.
Bennett smiled and said: ‘Oh, a little job for Joseph; one of his
women is in trouble.’ Saying this, he took the thing out of his left
sleeve. It was a pretty long instrument of a kind I had never seen
before. It seemed to be of steel and was crooked at one end. I heard
afterwards that the operation had been performed; that the woman was
very sick, and that Joseph was very much afraid that she might die,
but she recovered… You hear often that Joseph had no polygamous
offspring. The reason of this is very simple. Abortion was practiced
on a large scale in Nauvoo. Dr. John C. Bennett, the evil genius of
Joseph, brought this abomination into a scientific system. He showed
to my husband and me the instruments with which he used to “operate
for Joseph.” There was a house in Nauvoo, “right across the flat,”
about a mile and a-half from the town, a kind of hospital. They sent
the women there, when they showed signs of celestial consequences.
Abortion was practiced regularly in this house.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucinda Morgan Pendleton Harris added this detail in the same
conversation with Wilhelm Wymetal. “Many little bodies of new-born
children floated down the Mississippi.” Lucinda and Sarah were good
friends. When Jo first propositioned Sarah, she went to Lucinda to talk
about it. Lucinda’s reply “To my utter astonishment, she said, laughing
heartily: “How foolish you are! I don’t see anything so horrible in it.
Why, I AM HIS MISTRESS SINCE FOUR YEARS!” Lucinda’s reaction is yet
another complication to the narrative of polygamy and I’ll do my best to
deal with that near the end of today’s episode.</p>
<p>Lucy Walker Smith Kimball, another of Joe’s plural wives, once wrote
that Joseph’s sons “seem surprised that there was no issue from asserted
plural marriages with their father. Could they but realize the hazardous
life he lived, after that revelation was given, they would comprehend
the reason. He was harassed and hounded and lived in constant fear of
being betrayed by those who ought to have been true to him.” She may
have simply been saying that Joseph didn’t have much opportunity for sex
with his wives. On the other hand, she may have been implying that he
took medical measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies with the help of
Wreck-it Bennett.</p>
<p>Sarah Pratt, by the way, went to Utah with her husband Orson, but she
remained an unbeliever in Mormonism for the rest of her life, and she
quietly taught her children not to believe in it either. She eventually
left her “grey-headed” husband Orson in 1868 after he married a
sixteen-year-old girl in what Sarah considered to be a “mockery of
marriage.” Because of her lack of faith in the church, her unvarnished
view of the situation, and her claims about abortion to conceal the
doctrine, faithful historians today completely write her off and tend to
believe everything she said was just salacious rumors and therefore
untrustworthy. They’re all using motivated reasoning and there’s simply
no good reason to discount anything Sarah Pratt ever said even in her
later life. People who disbelieve Sarah are intellectual hacks who write
off any evidence that contradicts their pet narratives.</p>
<p>As for John C. Bennett, he only lasted in the Church for a couple years
before he and several other men got excommunicated in May 1842 for
“illicit intercourse” with various women. The trial record is
fascinating, because the several men involved in this practice weren’t
doing polygamy; they were just having extramarital sex and giving
religious justifications for it which they attributed to Joseph Smith.
For instance, they told women that the prohibition against adultery “did
not mean Single women, but Married women,” and that Joseph Smith had
privately taught them that extramarital sex wasn’t a sin, particularly
if they kept the secret to themselves. Several of these men gave money
or food in exchange for sex, effectively treating the women as
prostitutes. Bennett’s and Jackson’s exposes reveal how horrible the
living conditions for these women actually were and I believe Nauvoo
prostitution to be the origin of what was called “widow’s row,”
essentially a line of small log cabins in the downtown district used as
rent-by-the-hour boarding rooms. Eps 67, 141.</p>
<p>The trial record also gives additional support to Sarah’s claim that
John C. Bennett performed abortions. Catherine Fuller says that when
Bennett sexually propositioned her, “If I should become pregnant he said
he would attend to that. I understood that he would give medicine to
prevent it.” Sarah Miller says that when Chauncey Higbee propositioned
her, he told her that Bennett “would come & take it away if there was
[a pregnancy].” She also added that Bennett wanted to carry her off
and he gave her medicine which she could administer to her husband that
would cause him to die.</p>
<p>Once it became public that Bennett was propositioning so many women to
have affairs, it required Jo and the other elites to distance themselves
so as not to be looped in with the Saintly Scoundrel, as he’s been
labeled by believing Mormon historians since he broke off from the
Church. Thus, the term spiritual wifery was used as a derogatory label
against Wreck-it Bennett, William Smith, and any other Mormon elite who
was exposed, while the terms “celestial marriage” and “new and
everlasting covenant” were manufactured to label just those celestial
polygamous marriages which were sanctioned by Jo. The line historians
use to delineate between spiritual wifery and celestial marriage was
born out of necessity of assassinating Bennett’s character and casting
his sexual exploits into the category of sin. This was post-hoc labeling
as those lines didn’t exist until Bennett defected and exposed all the
salacious practices existing in the underbelly of Nauvoo.</p>
<p>Prior to spring of 1842, Jo and Bennett were best buds with similar
goals in mind. We can’t escape that fact. But their relationship started
to fall apart for complicated reasons, and by May 1842 Joe was paranoid
that Bennett was trying to kill him, which very well may have happened.
We can’t be sure of the reasons for their alienation, except that Joe
had let Bennett accumulate way too much power and was starting to see
him as a threat. Eps 115, 119, 120.</p>
<p>So when Bennett’s adultery ring exploded, Jo was ready to be rid of him.
Bennett had been too open and brazen with his spiritual wifery system,
which threatened the fragile system of secrecy Jo had been constructing
for the past 6 years which was known as celestial marriage. Honestly,
considering the women Jo had propositioned leading up to spring of 1842,
he’d been cultivating relationships and grooming most of these women for
years. Bennett had been there for about 2 years and was suddenly hitting
up women all over town to sleep with him. Bennett was a threat to
everything Jo had been working on for over a decade. Add in to the mix
the fact that Bennett was running a brothel in Nauvoo to connect any of
the elites or any visiting wealthy men with quick satisfaction of their
lusts, Bennett was completely rogue and could no longer be trusted.
Eventually he was removed over infighting and disagreements ranging from
politics to polygamy to Pistol Packin’ Porter Rockwell pulling the
trigger on Lilburn Boggs. Bennett meltdown eps 119-134, Porter Rockwell
and Boggs Ep 109.</p>
<p>Sarah Pratt discusses a Mrs. White who worked as a madame, probably in
Bennett’s brothel.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have told you that the prophet Joseph used to frequent houses of
ill-fame. Mrs. White, a very pretty and attractive woman, once
confessed to me that she made a business of it to be hospitable to
captains of the Mississippi steamboats. She told me that Joseph had
made her acquaintance very soon after his arrival in Nauvoo, and that
he had visited her dozens of times. My husband (Orson Pratt) could not
be induced to believe such things of his prophet. Seeing his obstinate
incredulity, Mrs. White proposed to Mr. Pratt and myself to put us in
a position where we could observe what was going on between herself
and Joseph the prophet. We, however, declined this proposition… Next
door to my house was a house of bad reputation. One single woman lived
there, not very attractive. She used to be visited by people from
Carthage whenever they came to Nauvoo. Joseph used to come on
horseback, ride up to the house and tie his horse to a tree, many of
which stood before the house. Then he would enter the house of the
woman from the back. I have seen him do this repeatedly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hmmmmm… soooo weird that faithful Mormon historians don’t trust Sarah
Pratt. It’s like she left behind abundant information that makes them
feel yucky inside so they choose to completely disregard anything she
ever said. Just because somebody says something with which you disagree
doesn’t mean they’re wrong; it could mean that you’re wrong and you
don’t like what they say because it doesn’t mesh with what you
understand the world to be. This statement reveals a troubling and
rarely-discussed aspect of Nauvoo polygamy. We have solid documentation
on over 30 wives of Joseph Smith, but that says absolutely nothing about
the number of sexual partners he actually had when he could go to any of
the brothels in Nauvoo to satisfy his urges without going through the
whole rigamarole of courting women in the elite class of the city. So,
if he could satisfy his sexual urges, then why go after the wives and
daughters of his friends? Prostitutes were play things to him, the women
he actually knew were games. Somebody you give money to for a night of
fun doesn’t include the thrill of pursuit. It’s slimy, but it isn’t
taboo the same way any of the women we have documentation for were.
Apologists will claim that polygamy wasn’t motivated by sex, but by a
divine mandate to which Joseph Smith and others in Nauvoo begrudgingly
complied. I would agree that polygamy wasn’t motivated by sex… alone… It
wasn’t just about sex, it was about power. It was a game. It was the
thrill of chasing the forbidden fruit and seeing how far he could push
boundaries. If it were only about sex then Jo would have taken care of
his urges in any of the brothels around town and we wouldn’t have much
to discuss on today’s episode. So, when the conversation comes up about
how much sex was involved in polygamy, the question doesn’t matter much
in my mind because the conversation should be about power and control.
Nauvoo was a kingdom of sex. A KINGdom of sex. But, in a few rare
instances, it was also a Queendom of sex. We’ll talk about that with
Eliza R. Snow in a second.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, on May 3, 1842 Joe introduced the Mormon Temple endowment
ceremony. According to an 1846 expose by a woman named Maria Van Dusen,
at the beginning of the ceremony, Maria and her husband were separated
and directed down two separate hallways. At the end of the hall, a
female conductor met Maria and divested her of her outer clothing, all
but her undergarments and stockings. Then she proceeded to another small
room, where she met another female conductor, who required her to strip
off the rest of her clothing, leaving her “in a perfect state of
nakedness.” According to Maria, the conductor “next takes this nude
female into a bath of water, and washes her all over, from head to foot,
with a similar ceremony to what follows:--I wash you for purposes thus
and so.” Then the officiator dumped a cow’s horn of perfumed oil over
her head, and rubbed it by hand all over her body. Then she was seated,
“ordained to be a queen from this time forth and forever,” and
presented with a new undergarment that had Masonic symbols cut into it.</p>
<p>At this point, the man and wife are reintroduced to each other, and
there’s a dramatic re-enactment of the story of Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden, with the President of the Church in the role of God. In
Maria’s ceremony, Brigham Young played God and Orson Hyde played the
devil. In 1842 it would have been Joseph Smith as God and W. W. Phelps
who played the devil. At the point in the ceremony where Adam and Eve
realized they’re naked, the initiates were given small white aprons with
green silk fig leaves pasted on the front.</p>
<p>After this dramatic portion of the endowment, there was some instruction
by the Church president. Among other things, he told the woman that her
husband would rule over her and explained the meanings of the marks cut
into her garment. The initiates took oaths of secrecy, under penalty of
death should they break the oath. Then the husband and wife were
symbolically ushered into the celestial kingdom, crowned a king and
queen, and instructed in the doctrine of plural marriage. Eps 100, 110,
111.</p>
<p>Under Brigham Young, thousands of Mormons rushed through this ceremony
in the Nauvoo Temple before heading West to Utah. But under Joseph
Smith, it was only a small handful of elites, the inner-circle members
of the “Holy Order” or “Quorum of the Anointed.” These were vetted
members of the Church who could be trusted, and he used the endowment
ceremony to bind them to secrecy before ritually introducing them to the
mystery of plural marriage among other things. I’ll take this moment to
say that the temple ceremony has gone through multiple evolutions with
elements added, removed, or changed throughout the decades as societal
pressures have dictated. Most recently the language was altered to be
far less sexist and we’re currently waiting on seeing how COVID-19 will
affect the temple ordinances once the temples reopen. It’s a living
ceremony in that it changes as situations necessitate. With that said,
the original endowment introduced by Jo has been lost to history. The
reason for this is the people who went through were all vetted members
who could be trusted and they kept tight lips. Once the Nauvoo Temple
was completed under Bloody Brigham’s direction the secrets couldn’t be
kept among the thousands of people who were processed through the
ceremony and we know almost exactly what it looked like from
contemporary exposes. Jo’s ceremony, however, can only be reconstructed
to about 80-90% accuracy with the few documents we have that describe
it. We’ll discuss a few details of the temple ceremony near the end of
today’s episode because it reveals some troubling details ripe for
speculation.</p>
<p>In June of 1842, the same month John Freemont left for his first
expedition of the Oregon Trail, Joe married Eliza R. Snow, who was
living as a boarder in the Smith home and working as Emma’s secretary.
Eliza was 38 years old at the time, so actually one of his more
age-appropriate wives. She was also single, so no troublesome husband to
deal with. We don’t know the details of Joe’s proposal to her, but Eliza
did write about her reaction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When first plural marriage was suggested to me, … I would not listen
to the matter. The idea was repugnant, abhorrent. I was like any other
young woman who had beaux and suitors for her hand. I wanted to share
a husband with no woman. But I was told it was God’s command, and I
went to God and asked God to enlighten me, and he did. I saw and felt
that plural marriage was not only right, but that it was the only true
manner of living up to the gospels, and I quenched my womanly emotions
and entered the order.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to Eliza, “As I increased in knowledge concerning the
principle and design of Plural Marriage, I grew in love with it.” Her
marriage to Joseph Smith was “one of the most important circumstances of
my life,” and one “ I have never had cause to regret.”</p>
<p>Alright, let’s unbox Eliza and some lesser-discussed aspects of Mormon
polygamy. I’ve made no qualms about the fact that Eliza R. Snow is my
historical crush, but needless to say our relationship is complicated
and she’s not one I’m writing home to momma about. For some women,
polygamy was an opportunity to break away from the incredibly repressive
and abusive system of monogamy; an idealized version without patriarchal
power structures still is to this day. Eliza R. Snow was somebody who
flourished in polygamy. Her success story provides a unique window into
trends polygamy created, and still creates today in fundamentalist
sects. Mormonism is a high-demand and viciously competitive cult. This
is felt equally by both accepted genders in the confines of the
theology. For men it forces holier than thou competition to rise through
leadership ranks. For women it forces competition with the women around
them to be most active in the church, have the most kids, attend the
most meetings, bake the most cakes, visit the most fellow sisters in the
Relief Society, and wear the nicest clothes. Any metric of cultural
competition is exacerbated by the Mormon hierarchical structure.</p>
<p>For women like Eliza R. Snow, and independent and progressive thinker
who’s also power hungry, polygamy presents an alternative to a life of
subservience to her husband of doing chores and raising kids. Eliza,
especially because she didn’t have any children of her own, was allowed
to use her time to write, organize, preach, coordinate, and evolve the
society of Utah, tendencies which were developed and fostered in Nauvoo
polygamy. When women aren’t forced to stay home every day raising kids,
they get stuff done, often much to the chagrin of the men who hold
dominion over them. For women who don’t like their husband very much
because they were forced into a marriage, every night he spends with
another of his wives is a night she doesn’t have to tolerate a man she
doesn’t love or maybe even doesn’t like. Maybe she was given to this man
by her father as a business deal. Maybe he was the best option and she
settled like Emma did with Jo. Maybe she’s not all that attracted to men
to begin with. Maybe he’s abusive. Or maybe, her intelligence is better
utilized in organizing society, offering services of midwifery, making
herbal remedies, teaching school, or anything else women were allowed to
do at this time. If her sister-wives are helping raise the kids,
suddenly a couple days every week open up for her to engage in these
other pursuits where she finds more fulfillment instead of just cooking,
cleaning, and raising kids. With enough women who have free time, they
can organize support networks, build hospitals and orphanages, construct
curricula for schools where they teach, write their own periodicals
focused on women’s issues, and do lots of other stuff that they
otherwise couldn’t do without polygamy. It was in this societal
structure where people like Eliza R. Snow, Zina Diantha Huntington,
Emmeline Wells, and many other women flourished and eventually
contributed to the larger women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the
20th century.</p>
<p>None of what I’m saying here should be construed to ignore the abuses
and disturbing misogyny of polygamy; that’s been the entire focus of the
episode, most of our polygamy episodes, and is the focus of most books
discussing the history of polygamy from a critical lens. I’m merely
discussing this now to further contextualize some of the many
complexities polygamy provides. In addition to this, polygamy in Utah
was different than polygamy in Nauvoo but to some extent women had say
in who their sister-wife would be. Husbands were to consult with and
gain the approval of their first wife before they took another. There
was always the Law of Sarah dodge where if she didn’t approve she would
be damned, but the actual practice, especially in Utah, contained a
great deal of variability with respect to the letter of the law and how
it was actually implemented and practiced. This is to say that the many
societal benefits gained through progressive and egalitarian polyamory
today were also captured to some degree in Mormon polygamy. I’m
skeptical that the criteria of informed, consenting adults can ever be
truly achieved in a religious polygynous system because the theology
requires a man to lord over his wives. By its very design it’s incapable
of achieving the criteria. The issue is very complicated and we
shouldn’t discount or ignore the experiences of women who not only
preferred the system of polygamy, but flourished within in like Eliza R.
Snow.</p>
<p>I’ll probably say more about this at the end of the episode today but I
wanted to spend a little time on that tangent here. The following month,
in July 1842, Joe married Bishop Newel K. Whitney’s 17-year-old daughter
Sarah Ann Whitney, with Newel performing the ceremony. Joe had first met
Sarah in 1831, when Sarah was five years old. As usual, Joe brought his
marriage proposal to Newel rather than directly to Sarah. According to
Helen Mar Kimball,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Bishop, with his wife, who had for years been called Mother
Whitney, retired together and unitedly besought the Lord for a
testimony whether or not this principle was from Him; and they ever
after bore testimony that they received a manifestation and that it
was so powerful they could not mistake it. The Bishop never afterwards
doubted, and they willingly gave to him their daughter, which was the
strongest proof that they could possibly give their faith and
confidence in him as a true Prophet of God. . . . Sarah Ann took this
step of her own free will, but had to do it unbeknown to her brother
[Horace Whitney], which grieved her most, and also her mother, that
they could not open their hearts to him. But Joseph feared to disclose
it, believing that the Higbee boys would embitter Horace against him,
as they had already caused serious trouble, and for this reason he
favored his going East, which Horace was not slow to accept.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe thought Sarah’s brother was going to be a problem, so he sent him on
a mission. Sarah eventually did tell Horace about the marriage when he
returned from this mission, and he accepted the doctrine as well instead
of aligning with the Higbee brothers who published the Nauvoo Expositor
as was feared.</p>
<p>This presents another painful question worth exploration. What kind of
parents give their seventeen-year-old daughter away to be the secret
mistress of a middle-aged man? Sarah Ann’s mother Elizabeth Whitney
later explained in the <em>Women’s Exponent</em> magazine how they came to
their decision:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We pondered upon the matter continually, and our prayers were
unceasing that the Lord would grant us some special manifestation
concerning this new and strange doctrine. The Lord was very merciful
to us; He revealed unto us His power and glory. We were seemingly
wrapt in a heavenly vision, a halo of light encircled us, and we were
convinced in our own bosoms that God heard and approved our prayers
and intercedings before him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wonder if they’d had dinner at the prophet’s house before this
hallucination… The Whitneys were certainly not the only parents who gave
their daughter to the prophet. Helen Mar Kimball, who we’ll talk about
in a minute, said about her parent’s agreeing to Jo’s proposition when
she was 14 years old “My father had but one Ewe lamb, but willingly laid
her upon the alter”. The thing is, Jo drove a hard bargain. You have
eternal salvation if you just give your teenage daughter to me and keep
your mouth shut. Yeah, I know it hurts right now knowing your daughter
is going to be traumatized, hate you her entire life, and not even have
the language to understand what’s happening to her, but all that
discomfort you two will have to live with will all be but a moment of
suffering for an eternity of bliss. What does Helen think about it? Why
would we care, this is a transaction between adults and she’s only a
commodity with which to purchase your exaltation. The Kimballs really
believed this, the Whitneys really believed this, every parent couple
who gave their daughter to the prophet, every man who gave his wife to
the prophet, they all believed that they were choosing short-term
discomfort and suffering in exchange for an eternity of godhood.</p>
<p>A brief anecdote to drive this home. Super duper content warning here
because I’m about to share some Warren Jeffs stuff, the modern Joseph
Smith. During my first visit to Short Creek I was allowed to tour the
former home of Warren Jeffs, the currently-incarcerated leader of the
FLDS. His home was something like 27 bedrooms, 2 massive kitchens,
multiple huge living spaces, 3 stories; altogether it’s something like
35,000 square feet. The person giving us the tour took us into the entry
way and pointed to a room just off the entry way which served as Jeffs’
personal office. Parents would bring their daughter to this home, wait
in the entryway, and Jeffs would go about describing the daughter’s sins
and proceed to tear down her physical appearance. After that he’d take
her across the hall into his personal bedroom where the tour guide
pointed out to us the heavily padded carpet for the purposes of
sound-deadening. This would all happen while the parents sat in the
entryway of the home, 23 feet from the bedroom door. Now, I don’t share
that story to be gratuitous, I share that because it is simply the harsh
reality of what this actually looks like in practice and to illustrate
that what happened in Nauvoo in the 19th-century isn’t some foreign land
or distant memory. That stuff happens to this day in fundamentalist
sects. And, because polygamy is a criminal charge, banned by most state
constitutions, the people who suffer these abuses believe they have
nowhere to go and nobody to turn to. Not all prophets are like this, but
every prophet has the capacity to become this. It slides under the radar
of the justice system because religions enjoy incredible exemptions from
basically any laws ever while never paying taxes. Everything that Joseph
Smith did in Nauvoo is happening every day in the shadows of the
monolith that is religion. The episode doesn’t get much more pleasant
from here.</p>
<p>A month after the ceremony with the teenaged Sarah Ann Whitney, Joseph
Smith found himself hiding in Carlos Granger’s basement after some law
officers from Missouri came looking for him to bring him back to trial
for treason, arson, and murder. That’s a sentence you’ll never hear in
church. While Joe was in hiding, Emma worked to keep the church running
in Jo’s absence, wrote a letter to the state governor on his behalf,
took care of the kids, and clandestinely kept him apprised of the
situation. Despite Emma’s champion efforts on his behalf, Joe apparently
used the downtime to meet with his new plural wife behind Emma’s back.
Joe wrote a letter to the Whitney family to set up the encounter. The
letter, one of the few we have in Jo’s actual handwriting, explained
where he was hiding, and then assured the Whitneys,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have a room intirely by myself, the whole matter can be attended to
with most perfect saf[e]ty, I <know> it is the will of God that
you should comfort <me> now in this time of affliction . . . the
only thing to be careful of; is to find out when Emma comes then you
cannot be safe, but when she is not here, there is the most perfect
safty . . . I think Emma wont come to night[;] if she dont[,]
[then] dont fail to come to night[.]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maybe Jo was just really lonely and wanted some good long-time friends
as company while in hiding. But, if this is just a letter about Jo
wanting the company of the three Whitneys, why did he ask them to avoid
Emma? Why does he stress the fact that he has a private room? Jo and
Emma’s first friends upon their arrival in Kirtland was the Whitney
family, why would he want to keep the visit from her?</p>
<p>According to the book <em>Mormon Enigma</em>, “The evening after Joseph wrote
the letter he went home under cover of darkness and spent the night with
Emma, returning to his hiding place after conducting some business the
next day.” So he spent the evening with Sarah Ann and then spent the
night with Emma as if nothing happened. What does it say about Joseph
Smith that he could molest a teenager and still go home to Emma and look
her in the eye? By the way, have I mentioned that Emma was pregnant at
this point?</p>
<p>Emma continued doing a lot of business for Joe throughout the rest of
her pregnancy, although in October she fell severely ill, probably from
malaria or something to do with the pregnancy. On December 26, 1842,
amidst the throes of a fever, she delivered yet another stillborn child,
her fourth failed delivery. We… we can’t imagine what this was like.
Maybe some of you can empathize with what it’s like to lose a child in
birth but considering everything else going on, we can never put our
minds where Emma’s must have been during the end of 1842. Fortunately
for Emma, she had some boarders living in her home who helped her out
during her recovery, including Sarah and Maria Lawrence, Lucy and
William Walker, Emily and Eliza Partridge, Eliza R. Snow, and Jane
Manning James. <em>Un</em>fortunately for Emma, Joe had married Eliza R. Snow
in June 1842 and was busily grooming all the rest of the girls to become
his wives as well.</p>
<p>By the end of 1842 Joe had married over a dozen women, including Agnes
Moulton Coolbrith, his widow sister-in-law, Sylvia Porter Session Lyon,
Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, Patty Bartlett Sessions, Marinda Nancy
Johnson, Elizabeth Davis Brackenbury Durfee, Sally Ann Fuller, Sarah
Maryetta Kingsley Howe Cleveland, Delcena Johnson, Eliza R. Snow, Sarah
Ann Whitney, Martha McBride, and Sarah Bapson. Once again, these are the
women we have good documentation for, it says nothing about any of his
stops at the city brothels.</p>
<p>About February 1843, an altercation is supposed to have happened between
Emma Smith and Eliza Snow. The details of this altercation are shrouded
in mystery and clouded by oral history folklore. This is one of those
stories in Mormon history that historians have been wrestling with for
over a century to figure out exactly what happened. The gist of the
story is that Eliza was noticeably pregnant, and Emma witnessed Joe
kissing her and that was a breaking point in the somewhat peaceful
tension in the home. In a fit of rage and jealousy, Emma either pushed
Eliza down the stairs, or beat her with a broomstick, or both, and as a
result of this violence, Eliza miscarried and lost her unborn child and
was kicked out of the Smith home.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the accounts of this incident are all third-hand or
fourth-hand and written long after the fact, and they also contradict
each other in some of the details. There’s also nothing in Eliza’s
journal to corroborate the story, and in fact the journal leaves little
room for Eliza to have ever been pregnant. Probably neither the
stair-pushing nor the miscarriage actually happened. The part about Emma
catching Joe and Eliza together, however, seems to have been true, and
Emma kicked Eliza out of the house just as she had done with Fanny Alger
six years earlier. Ep 137.</p>
<p>Over the next few months, Joe and Emma fought a lot about polygamy, and
eventually they came to a couple compromises. First, as we discussed
last episode, Emma agreed to let Joe mess around as long as she could
mess around too. Joe eventually rescinded this part of the deal when he
received D&C 132. Second, Emma also agreed that Joe could marry younger
women, as long as Emma got to vet them first. In the Bible, Abraham’s
wife Sarah had chosen her maidservant Hagar to be Abraham’s concubine.
Emma wanted the same veto power over her husband’s partners as Sarah
had. This came to be known as the law of Sarah. The first wives that
Emma approved under the new compromise were the Partridge sisters and
the Lawrence sisters, all of whom lived in Joe and Emma’s home where
Emma could keep an eye on things. What Emma didn’t know when she and Joe
hammered out this agreement in May 1843 was that Joe had already married
the Partridge sisters two months earlier.</p>
<p>According to Emily Partridge, Joe had first approached her in 1842 and
asked her if she promise to burn a private letter after reading it if he
wrote one to her? She initially agreed to do so, but then she had second
thoughts and asked him not to send her any private letters. For the time
being, he agreed not to.</p>
<p>Later, in February 1843 after the Partridge sisters had seen Emma kick
Eliza Snow out of the house for being Joe’s plural wife, Emily received
a visit from Elizabeth Durfee. Durfee was one of Joe’s plural wives and
knew all about polygamy, but Emily didn’t know that. Durfee played dumb
and pretended to have heard rumors about polygamy, and asked Emily if
she had any information. Emily successfully passed Durfee’s test by
keeping Joe’s secrets.</p>
<p>Mrs. Durfee then set up a meeting between Emily and Joe at Heber the
Creeper Kimball’s house. When she showed up for the meeting, Heber made
a show of turning her away from the front door, but then he caught up
with her and quietly took her around back to meet up with Joe. Joe told
her “the Lord had commanded [me] to enter into plural marriage and had
given me to him and although I had got badly frightened he knew I would
yet have him.” She agreed to the marriage, and “I was married there and
then. Joseph went home his way and I going my way alone. A strange way
of getting married wasen’t it?” The date was March 4, 1843. Four days
later Joe married Emily’s sister Eliza Partridge as well. Mrs. Durfee
filled the role of Mother in Israel, an adult woman liaison to teach the
doctrine and help Jo acquire younger wives.</p>
<p>Then, two months later, Joe and Emma reached their compromise that
allowed Emma to choose Joe’s plural wives, and she chose the Partridge
sisters. Joe didn’t dare tell her that he’d already married them, so
according to Emily, “to save family trouble Brother Joseph thought it
best to have another ceremony performed… [Emma] had her feelings, and
so we thought there was no use in saying anything about it so long as
she had chosen us herself.” Emily also remembered that Emma “helped
explain the principles to us.”</p>
<p>Joe wasn’t satisfied with just the Partridge sisters, so Emma also
selected the Lawrence sisters for him. Originally from Canada, Sarah and
Maria Lawrence had moved to Missouri and then to Nauvoo with their
father, Edward, who died about March 1840, when Maria and Sarah were
seventeen and fourteen years old. Joseph Smith became their legal
guardian in June 1841, because their mother wasn’t legally eligible to
manage Edward’s estate unless she was married. She eventually married
Josiah Butterfield, who petitioned to become the girls’ guardian and
take over management of the estate, but Joe refused to even meet with
him and even threw him out of the Nauvoo Mansion by kicking his
backside. We don’t know exactly what happened to the girls’ inheritance
money, but it kind of seems like Joe stole it. At the very least, he
seems to have wanted the girls to continue living in his home to be
sexually groomed. He finally married both his wards in spring 1843, when
Maria was nineteen and Sarah seventeen. Unfortunately we don’t know any
other details about this marriage. Ep 213. What we do know is at age 23,
“Maria Lawrence died of consumption or one might more truthfully put it
of a broken heart.” likely due to depression from the PTSD she
experienced from her encounters with the prophet.</p>
<p>Back to Newell and Avery’s biography of Emma Smith, <em>Mormon Enigma</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Emma’s capitulation [to these marriages], however, was only
momentary. Emily wrote that “Emma seemed to feel well until the
ceremony was over, when almost before she could draw a second breath,
she turned, and was more bitter in her feelings than ever before, if
possible, and before the day was over she turned around or repented
what she had done and kept Joseph up till very late in the night
talking to him.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over the next months, Emma watched the girls’ rooms in an attempt to
prevent Joe from sleeping with them. From <em>Mormon Enigma</em> again,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Emily remembered that Emma “kept close watch on us. If we were missing
for a few minutes and Joseph was not at home the house was searched
from top to bottom and from one end to the other and if we were not
found the neighborhood was searched until we were found.” Emma was not
successful in keeping Joseph from meeting with his wives. Emily
Partridge would one day testify under oath that she “roomed” with
Joseph on the night of her second marriage to him while Emma, she
believed, was in the house at the time. She also testified that she
had “slept with him” between her first marriage and the second
ceremony.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In July 1843, Joe dictated the plural marriage revelation, Doctrine &
Covenants Section 132. This is Joe’s single most controversial
revelation. It lays out the doctrine of sealing and what it terms as
“The New and Everlasting Covenant.” It also lays out the path Mormons
take in order to literally become gods of their own planets after death,
which was further solidified by the King Follett Discourse. Eps 148,
149, 158, 193-95.</p>
<p>During the Nauvoo period, Joe received very few written revelations. He
was obsessed with secrecy, so he couched his new doctrines in things
like the secret temple endowment or the Council of Fifty. D&C 132 was
delivered, but it wasn’t a public revelation. Only a few Mormon elites
in Nauvoo were privy to the content of 132. The revelation wasn’t
actually publicly printed until 8 years after Jo’s death in 1852 in Utah
by Orson Pratt under Bloody Brigham Young’s direction when Utah became
an openly polygamist territory. And it wasn’t officially voted to be
canonized as church scripture until the October 1880 general conference
in Utah, 3 years after Bloody Brigham’s death when polygamy was under
heavy fire from the United States Government.</p>
<p>The revelation is directed to Emma Smith. By July 1843, Jo had about 2
dozen wives, which had put tremendous strain on his relationship with
Emma. In the 1870s, William Clayton swore out an affidavit that
explained the circumstances of Joseph receiving this revelation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the morning of the 12 of July, 1843, Joseph and Hyrum Smith, came
into the office, in the upper story of the red brick store, on the
bank of the Mississippi river. They were talking on the subject of
plural marriage. Hyrum said to Joseph, “if you will write the
revelation on Celestial marriage, I will take, and read it to Emma,
and I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter
have its truth, and you will hereafter have peace.” Joseph smiled and
remarked, “you do not know Emma as well as I do.” Hyrum repeated his
opinion and further remarked, “the doctrine is so plain I can convince
any reasonable man or woman of its truth, purity and heavenly origin,”
or words to their effect. Joseph then said, “well, I will write the
revelation, and we will see.” He then requested me to get paper and
prepare to write. Hyrum very urgently requested Joseph to write the
revelation by means of the Urim and Thummim, but Joseph, in reply,
said he did not need to, for he knew the revelation perfectly from
beginning to end… Hyrum then took the revelation, to read to Emma.
Joseph remained with me in the office until Hyrum returned. When he
came back, Joseph asked him how he succeeded. Hyrum replied that he
had never received a more severe talking to in his life, that Emma was
very bitter and full of resentment and anger. Joseph quietly remarked,
“I told you, you did not know Emma as well as I did.” Joseph then put
the Revelation in his pocket and they both left the office.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So infuriated was Emma with this revelation that she actually burned the
original copy. But that’s okay, because Jo could recreate it any time
necessary and we know it was recreated and given to Joseph Kingsbury and
Newell Whitney, from which D&C 132 was printed.</p>
<p>The revelation begins by saying that Joe has “inquired of my hand to
know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants, as
touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and
concubines.” God promises to answer the question, “For behold, I reveal
unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that
covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be
permitted to enter into my glory.” The phrase New and Everlasting
Covenant had been around for a while. In Kirtland, it had simply meant
the gospel of Mormonism. But D&C 132 reinterpreted the phrase, which
now came to mean the system of eternal plural marriage.</p>
<p>The revelation goes on to explain that only one person on earth-- the
president of the Church-- has the power to perform eternal sealings. All
baptismal and marriage covenants not authorized by Joseph Smith end at
death. Those who aren’t married for eternity can’t become gods; at best
they can become angels, bound to eternal servitude. This is because
godhood requires the power of eternal reproduction; the gods’ “glory
shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever.”
What the prophet binds on earth is bound in heaven, all else is lost.</p>
<p>After a long discussion of adultery which basically says that sleeping
with more than one person isn’t adultery if God has authorized it, the
revelation finally gets to the part addressed to Emma:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>52 And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been
given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me;
. . . 54 And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave
unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide
this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the
Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law. . . .
64 And again, verily, verily, I say unto you, if any man have a wife,
who holds the keys of this power, and he teaches unto her the law of
my priesthood, as pertaining to these things, then shall she believe
and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord
your God; for I will destroy her; for I will magnify my name upon all
those who receive and abide in my law.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emma was commanded to believe in plural marriage, accept Joe’s plural
wives, and be faithful to Joe, or God would destroy her. The revelation
also threatened that unless Emma behaved herself, the “Law of Sarah”
would no longer apply. Jo’s revelations always included some kind of
stopgap like this and of course the polygamy revelation would be no
different. People either abide by every aspect of his laws or their die
is cast, their lot is sewn, and they shall have their reward.</p>
<p>Next we’ve got to talk about Helen Mar Kimball, famous for being Joe’s
youngest plural wife at age 14. Helen was born to Heber and Vilate
Kimball in New York in 1828, and she was just 3 years old when they
converted to the Mormon faith in 1832. As a child in Kirtland, Ohio, she
attended school in a wing of Joe and Emma’s home. In 1839 she moved with
her family to Nauvoo. Helen didn’t have many interactions with Joe
during these years, although she saw him preach quite a bit, and he came
to the Kimball home to administer healing blessings when the family got
malaria. Although, it could be argued, this was young enough that most
of her memories from this period were lost by the time she was older
recounting the events in Utah.</p>
<p>A brief interaction occurred when Jo came over to the Kimball home
sometime in 1842, when Helen was about 13. He was talking to Heber and
Vilate about some matter or another when he picked up a little doll that
Heber had sent to Helen from Europe during his mission there a year and
a half prior. He squeezed the doll too hard and the head fell off while
it was in Joe’s hands. Joe remarked: “As that has fallen, so shall the
heathen gods fall.” Helen’s reaction is priceless: “I stood there a
silent observer, unable to understand or appreciate the prophetic words,
but thought them a rather weak apology for breaking my doll’s head off.”
Because of course that’s what she’d think, she was THIRTEEN!</p>
<p>Joe married Helen the following year, in May 1843, as the church itself
puts it “several months before her 15th birthday”. According to Helen,
her father came to her one day and “taught me the principle of Celestial
marriage, & having a great desire to be connected with the Prophet,
Joseph, he offered me to him; this I afterwards learned from the
Prophet’s own mouth.” I’m deeply skeptical of the claim that it was
Heber and not Joe who came up with this idea, especially since it was
Joe who told her so. Maybe it was because Jo asked Heber for Vilate and
Heber instead struck a deal to give up Helen instead. But anyway,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Father] left me to reflect upon it for the next twenty-four hours…
I was sceptical—one minute believed, then doubted. I thought of the
love and tenderness that he felt for his only daughter, and I knew
that he would not cast her off, and this was the only convincing proof
that I had of its being right. I knew that he loved me too well to
teach me anything that was not strictly pure, virtuous and exalting in
its tendencies; and no one else could have influenced me at that time
or brought me to accept of a doctrine so utterly repugnant and so
contrary to all of our former ideas and traditions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The next morning, Joe came to the house</p>
<blockquote>
<p>& with my parents I heard him teach & explain the principle of
Celestial marrage-after which he said to me, “If you will take this
step, it will ensure your eternal salvation and exaltation & that of
your father’s household & all of your kindred.[”] This promise was
so great that I will-ingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a
reward. None but God & his angels could see my mother’s bleeding
heart—when Joseph asked her if she was willing, she replied “If
Helen is willing I have nothing more to say.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whew.... that’s a heavy quote. What could Vilate say? The decision had
been made between Jo and Heber, nothing either of them could say would
change that fact. Helen agreed, but what choice did she really have? Her
parents had decided her fate. She also may not have realized that the
marriage would include sex. Catherine Lewis later remembered Helen
telling her, “I would never have been sealed to Joseph had I known it
was anything more than ceremony. I was young, and they deceived me, by
saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.”</p>
<p>Helen was married to Joe in May, and in the following months she had
lots of reason to regret that decision when her parents treated her like
a caged bird. Apparently the Prophet instructed Heber and Vilate not to
let Helen go to any dances or associate with young men her own age. She
hated being so locked up, because she loved dancing. She eventually got
over it and became a full believer in polygamy, but she was quite bitter
at the time. Fortunately her captivity didn’t last too long, because Joe
was soon killed. Good riddance, sentient skidmark.</p>
<p>In late 1843, Emma Smith felt more and more like a prisoner too. Joe was
shutting her out of the Church’s business because of her vascilation
about polygamy, and many of her old friends were keeping secret from her
that they had become Joe’s plural wives. Emma filled too many roles of
running Jo’s business affairs, keeping a lid on the secrets of polygamy
and the rumor mill that was the Relief Society, raising the kids through
sickness and health, fending off constables trying to arrest the
prophet, and dozens of other tasks never to be known or recorded. One
wonders why Eliza was pushed down the stairs instead of Jo. Finally, in
August, Emma played her strongest card: she threatened divorce, which
spelled disaster for the power couple of Mormonism. Think of the
optics! According to William Clayton, Joe “had to tell her he would
relinquish all for her sake”-- in other words, that he would stop
practicing polygamy and give up all his plural wives. But he confided to
Clayton that he didn’t intend to keep his word.</p>
<p>Here’s <em>Mormon Enigma</em> again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Five days after Joseph agreed to “relinquish all” Emma found two
letters in his pocket from Eliza [R.] Snow, who was still at the
Morley settlement [after her quick removal from the homestead]. . .
. Emma had said some “harsh words.” . . . Still smarting from finding
Eliza’s letters to Joseph the previous day, Emma went for a short
carriage ride with her husband on August 22. She called on the Lucian
Woodworth family while Joseph attended to some businsess at the
temple. Emma apparently did not know that the Woodworths’
sixteen-year-old daughter Flora had been Joseph’s plural wife since
spring. What probably began as a casual social visit resulted in a
confrontation between Emma and Flora when Emma discovered that Joseph
had given Flora a gold watch. She would have recognized the
implications of such a gift, since he had also given one to Eliza
Snow. Joseph returned just as Emma “was demanding the gold watch” from
Flora, and he reprimanded her. Once in the carriage, however, Emma
vented her own frustrations. Joseph told Clayton she continued “her
abuse” after they arrived home, and said he finally had to employ
“harsh measures” to stop her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What those “harsh measures” were, we’ll never know. Apparently by the
end of the summer, Emma’s opposition to polygamy weakened. Allen J.
Stout overheard a conversation between Joe and Emma and reported that
Emma ping-ponged between “moments of passionate denunciation” and
“tearful repentance.” Maria Jan Johnston told a similar story:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Emma “was crying and in trouble about something.” . . . Emma invited
the young woman to sit down on the bed. Emma “looked very sad and cast
down,” but remarked, “The principle of plural Marriage is right, it is
from our Father in Heaven.” Maria Jane reported, “Then she again spoke
of her jealousy… ‘What I said I have got [to] repent of. The
principle is right but I am jealous hearted. Now never tell anybody
that you heard me find fault with that principle we have got to humble
ourselves and repent of it.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo……... had finally worn Emma down. In late 1843 and early 1844, her
behavior became more and more erratic. Finally Emma said “Joseph should
give us up or blood would flow.” It’s unclear who she was threatening to
kill; maybe she meant that she would commit suicide, but this was also
concomitant with Jo’s stomach ulcers where he thought Emma had poisoned
him. Or, maybe she did poison him, we don’t know but I wouldn’t really
blame her for everything Jo put her through. Regardless, this threat
seems to have given her the upper hand again in her fights with Joe.</p>
<p>At last, Emma convinced Joe to end his marriage to the Patridge sisters,
and she turned all of the female boarders out of the Smith’s family’s
Mansion House. According to Emily Partridge, Joe became surprisingly
submissive during all of this. John Taylor records that Emma said Joe
had admitted to her that the plural marriage revelation was false. Emma
told a non-Mormon visitor that the doctrine of polygamy came straight
from hell. In the end, Emma took a strong stand against polygamy, and
Joe allowed her to because he probably didn’t have any other options.
After his death, the message of anti-polygamy became her legacy when she
led her children and several Mormon factions away from Joseph’s
teachings on marriage and toward coalescing into the RLDS Church. She
denied, even on her deathbed, that polygamy ever occured in the church.
She remarried 3 years after Jo’s death… on his birthday. Yes, I’m sure
that was deliberate.</p>
<p>I know, dear listener, I’ve kept you for a long time today. 42 pages of
script doesn’t really fly by even if you listen at 1.5x speed. I know
this was a grind to get through and there was some really ugly subjects
we trudged through to get here. But please, allow a brief conclusion in
an attempt to tie these threads together.</p>
<p>There’s a reason this has been our longest episode in this Road to
Carthage series and that’s because Mormon polygamy is just a complicated
topic. The information we discussed today has been systematically
suppressed since before Jo even died. “Polygamy was only practiced
because so many men died on the trek west and the women needed to be
cared for.” “Joseph never practiced polygamy.” “I’ve read my scriptures
and I don’t remember reading anything about polygamy.” These are
generational lies that live to this day. I see posts nearly every day
from people who are amazed at the fact that Emma wasn’t Joseph’s only
wife; all I can think is… just you wait, young grasshopper. Be careful,
there be monsters in this here rabbit hole.</p>
<p>With that said, I can’t help but recognize the dogma on both sides of
this issue. I experienced the manifestation of that dogma firsthand this
previous weekend during Sunstone when a heated debate ensued among some
history junkies about the morality of polygamy. It’s a heated topic
among historians and hobbyists alike and the fact is that nobody can
actually understand it in its completeness. On one hand we have Brian
Hales making up presentist interpretations of evidence that time means
sex and eternity means no sex, and on the other hand we have people
posting in all caps Jo-bro raped a teenage girl and they can’t name any
of those survivors or have any idea what any of them did after his
death; many of them went on to be the most vocal proponents of polygamy
in Utah.</p>
<p>So let’s peel back the dogma and look at the Naked Mormonism polygamy.
It’s really complicated. It started as a progressive system to buck the
trend of puritanical family dynamics. I can appreciate the hell out of
that. As the practice expanded and included more people, controls needed
to be put into place and power had to be consolidated in the prophet. He
was the only one who could approve the people who knew about it and
practiced it. Once that happened, women, much like Jo’s revelations in
New York and Kirtland, became a commodity, as if they weren’t perceived
as such to begin with.</p>
<p>The endowment as introduced by Joseph Smith isn’t fully understood by
historians today. It involved people getting naked and drenched in oil
with some plants infused into it, a passion narrative of the creation,
an ascendency ritual, and a holding chamber for the initiates to enjoy
in privacy after the ceremony was complete. The majority of people he
brought through the endowment were practicing polygamy or were being
groomed to practice it. Suffice it to say, the Nauvoo Temple, had it
been completed before Jo’s death, would have become a rape castle. Once
Bloody Brigham took over and ran thousands of people through in the
space of a few months before heading west, it served only ritualistic
purposes and we have no evidence any sexual encounters actually occurred
there. But, this was also Victorian Puritanical America so I don’t know
what evidence we ever would expect to find. The women may have confided
in one another about their abuses, but they never wrote any of it down
without coding their language. The few extant exposes we have of the
Brigham endowment are troubling at best, but people didn’t speak up
about this because the Danites were an ever-present threat. They’d
notice if anybody sent a letter to Warsaw or Carthage that told about
what was going on inside the theocracy of Nauvoo and they’d come
knocking.</p>
<p>The need for secrecy is one of the many factors which went into the
formation of the Relief Society. Bennett’s expose discusses a hierarchy
within the Relief Society of women ascending based on criteria like how
attractive they were, how well they could keep a secret, how open they
were to being sealed to other men and engage in an open marriage, and
some other criteria. They were first, The Cyprian Saints, then The
Chambered Sisters of Charity, then finally “the highest degree in the
Harem,” were The Consecratees of the Cloister, or Cloistered Saints.</p>
<p>According to Bennett, “The members of the Female Relief Society, who are
ever upon the watch for victims, have the power, when they know, or even
suspect, that any Mormon female has,... lapsed from the straight path of
virtue without the sanction of the Prophet, of bringing her at once
before the Inquisition. This body is solemnly organized in secret and
select council, and by its members, the poor, terrified female is
questioned and threatened, until she confesses the crime she has
committed, or perhaps, in her confusion and terror, accuses herself of
what she was never guilty of.” This pattern of grooming, mind control,
and abuse eventually results in the young Cyprian Saint’s spirit being
broken, her autonomy abused out of her, she is terrified and alone,
castigated by women she considers friends and family and she has nowhere
else to turn. If she’s shows enough tenacity and fortitude to withstand
this abusive onslaught, she ascends to The Chambered Sisters of Charity.</p>
<p>“This order comprises that class of females who indulge their sensual
propensities, without restraint, whether married or single, by the
express permission of the Prophet.” This group of women, when approached
by a man they seem to like, the couple goes to Jo and he gives his
approval and they’re clandestinely married. Understandably, some women
enjoyed the liberties afforded by polygamy and they would fall into this
category, but there was the highest degree in the Relief Society, the
Cloistered Saints.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This degree is composed of females,... who, by an express grant and
gift of God,... are set apart and consecrated to the use and benefit
of particular individuals as <em>secret, spiritual wives</em>. They are the
<em>Saints of the Black Veil</em>, and are accounted the special favorites of
heaven,... Their spiritual husbands are altogether from the most
eminent members of the Mormon Church, and participate in the holiness
of their consecrated wives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Relief Society was formed to create a hierarchy, a structure of
control; checks and balances within the massive system of polygamy.
These Cloistered Saints were often just as criminal as Jo himself, they
were the older and more trustworthy women who convinced younger women
that polygamy was commanded by god and they should submit to being
raped. These were the women who, according to a conversation Jo had with
Jackson were, “great captains, in his service to carry his design, and
remarked that through them he could get any stranger’s money. I asked
him how he would work the matter; to which he replied, that he had only
to tell certain of his spiritual wives, that such a mand had been in the
Missouri war, and that he should be put out of the way, and his property
and money consecrated to the use, of the church; then said he, it is
damned easy for them to g[e]t on his good graces, and to mix a white
powder with his victuals, and put him out of the way.”</p>
<p>These women had a lot of power to help build the kingdom of god; they
were granted that power by showing special favors to the prophet and his
best friends. They flourished in a system of overt and brazen
criminality. They all became victims of that system, and still were able
to flourish.</p>
<p>Jo was a serial rapist and serial criminal. He constructed entire
theologies and ritualism for that purpose and everybody who participated
in it was victim to his religious abuse. He was a cult leader and cult
leaders can accomplish incredibly dangerous and abusive things under the
guise of religion. He promised exaltation and eternal rewards for
submitting to this system. If you bring even one soul to this gospel of
polygamy, great shall be your glory, and many people flourished from
that inherently abusive power dynamic.</p>
<p>Which is also to say, there was a tremendous amount of variability; some
didn’t see anything wrong or maybe even enjoyed the sexual liberty
afforded by polygamy. It’s a very complicated matter and why we took 42
pages to get through it today.</p>
<p>There are so many more stories I could tell you about polygamy, but I
was notified by a tweet from another polygamous cult leader, Russel M.
Nelson.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Dear friends, the road ahead may be bumpy, but our destination is
serene and secure. So, fasten your seatbelt, hang on through the
bumps, and do what’s right. Your reward will be eternal.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He’s the mouthpiece of god and we’re lucky to have a modern-day pious
fraud to tell us what’s right. I’ve talked at ya for long enough, Imma
go plan my wedding.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 5 - PolygamyRoad to Carthage 4 - Jealousy2020-07-31T01:38:51-07:002020-07-31T01:38:51-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/07/31/road-to-carthage-4-jealousy<p>Road to Carthage 4 - Jealousy</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine envy as a driving force behind the formation
of Mormonism.</p>
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<p>If you understand the words coming out of my mouth right now, chances
are pretty high that you’re human. We all share aspects of humanity
which are universal with only some rare exceptions. I’m going to speak
generally for this introduction without any intention of leaving out
anybody who doesn’t experience the focus of today’s episode.</p>
<p>What are those aspects of humanity I’m talking about? I’m talking about
emotions that fall into two broad categories. Love and hate. Happiness
and sadness. Stress and relaxation. Good and bad feelings, broadly
speaking, are universally experienced by everybody, even if the stimuli
which excite them are unique.</p>
<p>We all laugh, whether internally or audibly, as an expression of an
emotion. What that emotion is, is much harder to define, but the stimuli
may be similar for many of us. A funny joke, a shared memory with a
loved one, insider references for only those who know what we’re
thinking; all of these excite humor and help us to feel whatever it is
that makes us laugh. Queue endorphins, smiling, and shared
vulnerability.</p>
<p>Emotions teach us about ourselves. Rarely are our emotional responses to
stimuli something we control. We can control our actions following the
emotion, but the emotion often happens before we understand why it
happened or what caused it. Happy feelings, whether humor, love, that
sense of family and belonging, we can do things or place ourselves in
certain situations where those emotions are expected. We go to a comedy
club, go on a date, or attend a family gathering; if all goes according
to plan, we feel those good emotions and we thrive as human beings.</p>
<p>What about the bad? We feel stress, anger, powerlessness as a response
to stimuli. Rarely do we willing place ourselves in situations where we
expect those emotions, but when they happen, our body is trying to teach
us something about ourselves. Brains are complicated but they’ve evolved
over billions of years to keep us alive. If we respond correctly to
those bad emotions, we’re probably going to survive better or longer
than those who don’t. If two people are walking through the forest and a
bush shakes; how they each respond to the resulting fear and anxiety may
determine which of those two people lives, and which one dies.</p>
<p>That’s an antiquated way to look at human emotion, but the fundamental
holds true. Boil it down far enough and every human emotion has
evolutionary benefits. When we feel pride in something, we’re seeking
adoration from our fellow humans. When we feel anger about something,
we’re righting a perceived wrong. When we feel attracted to someone
we’re attempting to procreate. When we’re curious about something we
might learn something new or discover a new viable place to settle with
untapped resources. And, to touch on the focus of today’s episode, when
we’re jealous of something or someone, we want some survival benefit
they have that we don’t.</p>
<p>Whether it’s a beautiful home, a shiny new BMW, a promotion at work, an
attractive partner, it’s human nature to want what we see others have.
It’s born out of a scarcity principle and manifests depending on what we
as a society deem to be valuable. I may covet my neighbor’s new car but
I don’t covet when a homeless person is able to exchange their old tent
for a newer tent with less holes in it. Some people have things we want,
and many of us will stop at nothing to get those things for ourselves.</p>
<p>Envy can result from tangible items we desire to possess, or from more
intangible forms. We can covet a person’s social status, education, or
job title. If we’re driven by attention from the public, another person
garnering that attention from their accomplishments or possessions can
cause that envy of traits which are hard to quantify but no less real
than the beautiful home, new BMW, promotion at work, or attractive
partner. Envy can drive us toward aspiration, but far more often leads
to feelings of inadequacy and imposter syndrome.</p>
<p>The founding man of Mormonism exhibited covetousness in nearly every
aspect of his life. Whether he wanted a larger following, envied other
religious leaders for their success, or simply wanted the beautiful wife
or daughter of one of his followers, Joseph Smith saw something he
wanted and would stop at nothing to have it for himself. The Smith home
was a competitive place for a person to grow up; teaching through a
series of hard knocks the principle of scarcity. Homes with 11 kids tend
to foster competition among them to get resources, be those resources
enough food to survive or just some attention from mom and dad. This
competitive upbringing created a young man who saw a world of
opportunities, as long as he was able to acquire those opportunities
before somebody else. This scarcity is only peripherally mentioned by
Lucy Mack Smith in her Biographical Sketches of Jo’s very early life.
She reveals the tumultuous time when typhoid ran its way through the
family and resulted in Jo’s leg surgery. This coming after the eldest
Smith daughter, Sophronia, lay catatonic for nearly 3 months with the
illness, the whole family thinking her dead at some time; when she
recovered, Lucy “pressed her to my breast, and continued to walk the
floor. She sobbed again, then looked up into my face, and commenced
breathing quite freely. My soul was satisfied, but my strength was gone.
I laid my daughter on the bed, and sunk by her side, completely
overpowered by the intensity of my feelings.” This is only one small
snapshot of Lucy being overwhelmed with the duties of motherhood. Once
young Joey came down with the typhus fever, his shoulder swelled then
discharged fluid and the infection migrated to his leg. Lucy continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>His leg soon began to swell, and he continued to suffer the greatest
agony for the space of two weeks longer. During this period I carried
him much of the time in my arms, in order to mitigate his suffering as
much as possible, in consequence of which I was taken very ill myself.
The anxiety of mind that I experienced, together with physical
over-exertion, was too much for my constitution, and my nature sunk
under it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As is often the case in large families, older children begin to take on
the role of parenting while the parents’ time is more occupied with the
younger children. Accordingly,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hyrum, who was rather remarkable for his tenderness and sympathy, now
desired that he might take my place. As he was a good, trusty boy, we
let him do so; and, in order to make the task easy for him as
possible, we laid JOseph upon a low bed, and Hyrum sat beside him,
almost day and night, for some considerable length of time, holding
the affected part of his leg in his hands, and pressing it between
them, so that his afflicted brother might be enabled to endure the
pain, which was so excruciating that he was scarcely able to bear it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The older Smith children helping to raise each other would be cold
comfort to the younger children seeking approval of, and attention from,
the Smith parents. We all have limited bandwidth and energy we can
devote to any specific thing or person. Parents know this; but you don’t
have to be a parent to understand that we all have limits. It’s clear
Lucy found her limits while typhoid raged through the family and she was
trying to keep all her kids alive.</p>
<p>Once Jo’s life extended beyond these childhood lessons of scarcity, his
early public life was marked by more jealousy of those more successful
than him. This trend becomes abundantly clear when we examine Joe’s
treasure hunting career. A couple episodes ago we discussed how Joe
borrowed his neighbor Willard Chase’s brown, egg-shaped seer stone,
which he used to translate the Book of Mormon. Chase asked for the stone
back, and Joe refused to return it. What that means is Mormonism’s
vaunted “Urim and Thummim” was a rock that Joe stole from his neighbor.</p>
<p>Let’s talk about Willard Chase’s sister, Sally Chase. Another of the
Chase siblings, Abel Chase, told an interviewer that Sally also had a
seer stone. According to Richard Bushman in Joseph Smith and the
Beginnings of Mormonism, “A nearby physician, John Stafford, reported
that ‘the neighbors used to claim Sally Chase could look at a stone she
had, and see money. Willard used to dig when she found where the money
was.’ After Joseph obtained the plates, Willard Chase led the group that
attempted to find them in the Smiths’ house, guided by Sally Chase and a
‘green glass, through which she could see many very wonderful things.’”</p>
<p>In the early 1820s, Sally apparently led the Smiths on at least one
treasure dig. According to Willard Chase’s brother-in-law Lorenzo
Saunders,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well I will tell you they did dig; Willard Chase & Alvin, the one that
died; they dug before Alvin died [in 1823]. Willard Chase told me
about a place; He said he & Alvin Smith went there to dig & there was
a chest there; and he said it was so long, & so wide (measuring with a
cane). It was an iron chest. And he said they dug down & it only lay a
little under the ground. Willard Chase claimed his Sister Sally had a
peep stone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe watched what Sally was doing, and he liked what he saw and thought,
“I could do that.” According to notes taken during Joe’s 1826 trial
for “glass-looking” by W. D. Purple, Joe testified during the trial
that...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when he was a lad, he heard of a neighboring girl [Sally Chase] some
three miles from him, who could look into a glass and see anything
however hidden from others; that he was seized with a strong desire to
see her and her glass; that after much effort he induced his parents
to let him visit her. He did so, and was permitted to look in the
glass, which was placed in a hat to exclude the light. He was greatly
surprised to see but one thing, which was a small stone, a great way
off. It soon became luminous, and dazzeled his eyes, and after a short
time it became as intense as the mid-day sun. He said that the stone
was under the roots of a tree or shrub as large as his arm.… He
borrowed an old ax and a hoe, and repaired to the tree. With some
labor and exertion he found the stone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Where or when Jo heard about Sally can’t be known, but it seems as if he
heard of her abilities as a town seer and felt this strong desire to be
like her. He coveted her abilities of seeing and her stature as a town
seer who people would pay to help find hidden or buried treasure.. He
went and looked into her glass, and he saw where a seer stone was
buried. He went and dug up the stone, and it became his very first seer
stone. He sought her out and Sally let Joe look into her stone, and it
showed him where to find his own better stone. Jo basically copied
Sally’s business model and set himself up as a competitor. By 1827,
his story of finding a gold Bible had made him the more famous seer, and
Sally became the one who envied <em>him</em>.</p>
<p>According to Mother Lucy Mack Smith, Joe’s refusal to share the golden
plates of the Book of Mormon with the neighborhood treasure-diggers
caused a rift among them. The treasure hunters made several attempts to
get the plates from Joe. On one occasion, Sally looked into her stone
and saw that the plates were buried under the Smiths’ cooper shop. She
led the treasure hunters to the spot, and they tore up the floorboards.
Under the floorboards they found a box, which they smashed.
Unfortunately, the box was empty. Joe later explained that he had buried
the empty box as a misdirection; the plates themselves he had hidden in
the flax in the loft. Ep 10.</p>
<p>There was another seer that Joe imitated: a man by the name of Luman
Walters. According to D. Michael Quinn’s book Early Mormonism and the
Magic World View, the sources variously describe Walters as “a
clairvoyant,” “a fortune-teller, a necromancer, an astrologer, a
soothsayer,” “a drunken vagabond,” and “a physician . . . [who] had
learned in Europe the secret of Mesmerism or animal magnetism” (in other
words, a hypnotist). Abner Cole, editor of the <em>Palmyra Reflector</em>
newspaper, referred to him as “Walters the Magician.” In a February 28,
1831 article, Cole wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is well known that Jo Smith never pretended to have any communion
with angels, until a long period after the pretended finding of his
book, and that the juggling of himself or father, went no further than
the pretended faculty of seeing wonders in a "peep stone," and the
occasional interview with the spirit, supposed to have the custody of
hidden treasures; and it is also equally well known, that a vagabond
fortune-teller by the name of Walters, who then resided in the town of
Sodus, and was once committed to the jail of this county for juggling,
was the constant companion and bosom friend of these money digging
impostors. There remains but little doubt, in the minds of those at
all acquainted with these transactions, that Walters, who was
sometimes called the conjurer, and was paid three dollars per day for
his services by the money diggers in this neighborhood, first
suggested to Smith the idea of finding a book. Walters, the better to
carry on his own deception with those ignorant & deluded people who
employed him, had procured an old copy of Cicero's Orations, in the
latin language, out of which he read long and loud to his credulous
hearers, uttering at the same time an unintelligible jargon, which he
would afterwards pretend to interpret, and explain, as a record of the
former inhabitants of America, and a particular account of the
numerous situations where they had deposited their treasures previous
to their final extirpation. So far did this impostor carry this
diabolical farce, that not long previous to the pretended discovery of
the "Book of Mormon," Walters assembled his nightly band of money
diggers in the town of Manchester, at a point designated in his
magical book, and drawing a circle around the laborers, with the point
of an old rusty sword, and using sundry other incantations, for the
purpose of propitiating the spirit, absolutely sacrificed a fowl,
(“Rooster,”) in the presence of his awe-stricken companions, to the
foul spirit, whom ignorance had created, the guardian of hidden
wealth; and after digging until day-light, his deluded employers
retired to their several habitations, fatigued and disappointed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If we’re doing our best to trace mentors of Jo’s magic and occult
practices, we can point to Sally and Jo imitating her with his use of
seer stones. However, as his worldview and studies in the occult
expanded, he imitated Walters in his use of magic, animal sacrifices,
and arcane languages in order to bind the treasure guardian spirits. He
also may have gotten the idea of finding an ancient book from Walters,
because Walter used an old Latin book in his magical performances.
Apparently Walters claimed that the book “contained an account of the
anti-deluvians” meaning the giants who lived before Noah’s Flood. So
it’s interesting that Joe’s book also contained an account of the
ante-diluvians, the giants whom he called the Jaredites.</p>
<p>In 1818 Walters got arrested and then escaped custody, fleeing the
Palmyra area and leaving Joe to sort of take over where he left off.
Later, when Sally and the other treasure hunters were trying to get the
plates from Joe, they hired Walters to help them and he made several
trips to Palmyra. Apparently he told them that only Joe could get the
plates. There’s even some evidence that he accepted baptism and briefly
joined Joe’s church if we believe Bloody Brigham Young in the Journal of
Discourses.</p>
<p>Walters presents a rather interesting case study in Palmyra-era Smith
family conduct. The same Abner Cole who published the article in 1831 we
just read from worked out of the Grandin printing press while the Book
of Mormon was being published. In his newspaper he published extracts
from the Book of Mormon before the printing was completed. Hyrum
Sidekick-Abiff Smith paid Cole a little visit and in response Cole
stopped publishing parts of the Book of Mormon and took the route of
satire, publishing under the pseudonym Obadiah Dogberry The Book of
Pukei, where he discussed Walters’ influence on young Jo. It opens up
with Chapter 1 as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And it came to pass in the latter days, that wickedness did much
abound in the land, and the “Idle and slothful” said to one another,
let us send for Walters the Magician, who has strange books, and deals
with familiar spirits; peradventure he will inform us where the
Nephites hid their treasure, so be it, that we and our vagabond van,
do no perish for lack of sustenance.</p>
<p>Now Walters, the Magician, was a man unseemly to look upon, and to
profound ignorance added the most consummate impudence,--he obeyed the
summons off the idle and slothful…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Upon this introduction of Luman Walters into the treasure digging group,
his occult directions and mandates were apparently followed by the group
and they toiled for weeks under his direction “with a zeal deserving a
better cause,” until they were fed up with the lack of results, running
them all into danger of Walters draining them of all their resources.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And it came to pass that when the Idle and Slothful became weary of
their nightly labors, they said one to another, lo! this imp of the
Devil, hath deceived us, let us no more of him, or peradventure,
ourselves, our wives, and our little ones, will become chargeable on
the town.</p>
<p>Now when Walters the Magician heard these things, he was sorely
grieved, and said unto himself, lo! mine occupation is gone, even
these ignorant vagabonds, the idle and slothful detect mine
impostures. I will away and hide myself, lest the strong arm of the
law should bring me to justice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After that, Walters departed the group of treasure diggers taking his
“rusty sword,... magic stone,... stuffed Toad, and all his implements
of witchcraft and retired to the mountains.” The crucial piece comes
directly after that verse in the Book of Pukei where it describes Jo
filling the vacuum left behind by Walters.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now the rest of the acts of the magician, how his mantle fell upon the
prophet Jo. Smith Jun. and how Jo. made a league with the spirit, who
afterwards turned out to be an angel, and how he obtained the “Gold
Bible,” Spectacles, and breast plate--will they not be faithfully
recorded in the book of Pukei?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever the arrangement between the Smith treasure digging troop and
Luman Walters, no historian in their right mind would dispute that
Walters had an influence on Jo. As I said before, if we’re tracing Jo’s
contacts to speculate on who transferred specific knowledge to him,
Sally Chase may have introduced him to peep stones while Walters likely
expanded that basis of knowledge to include other aspects of occult
traditions involving animal magnetism, use of ceremonial daggers like
the sword of Laban, spirit conjuration, etc. Notably as well, once
Walters was out of the picture and running his medical tincture shop, or
apothecary, Jo took the reins as magician of the group. Whether or not
Jo envied Walters’ knowledge and wisdom, it seems likely he envied
Walters’ social status as a revered magician and sought to emulate those
practices, possibly in hopes of being equally elevated among
magic-minded folks.</p>
<p>Before we move from New York to Kirtland, let’s discuss one other group
of people that may have excited Joe’s jealousy: the revival preachers
who swept through Palmyra in the 1820s. According to historian Robert N.
Hullinger, “From 1817 on revivals were a common feature of life in
Palmyra.” In his history, Joe described a revival that occurred in 1824.
Here’s his description:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester, there
was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject
of religion. It commenced with the Methodists, but soon became general
among all the sects in that region of country. Indeed, the whole
district of country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united
themselves to the different religious parties, which created no small
stir and division amongst the people, some crying, “Lo, here!” and
others, “Lo, there!” Some were contending for the Methodist faith,
some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist. For,
notwithstanding the great love which the converts to these different
faiths expressed at the time of their conversion, and the great zeal
manifested by the respective clergy, who were active in getting up and
promoting this extraordinary scene of religious feeling, in order to
have everybody converted, as they were pleased to call it, let them
join what sect they pleased; yet when the converts began to file off,
some to one party and some to another, it was seen that the seemingly
good feelings of both the priests and the converts were more pretended
than real; for a scene of great confusion and bad feeling
ensued—priest contending against priest, and convert against
convert; so that all their good feelings one for another, if they ever
had any, were entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about
opinions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe makes it sound like he was disgusted by all this, but I suspect that
he was actually really interested. What this revival, or series of
revivals, illustrated to Jo was a competitive market with saturation.
All these folks contending about different interpretations of the Bible,
what if there was a new scripture of Christ visiting the American
continent to minister to lost tribes of Israel which would prove the
authoritative final word one what divided all these different priests?
Well-known preachers were the celebrities of the day and reputations
often preceded their arrival to small towns like Palmyra. A young man
who’d learned the key to survival in a crowded and impoverished family
was doing whatever necessary to stand out would have seen the public
adulation given these preachers and wondered what he had to do to get it
for himself.</p>
<p>Driving home my point, here’s an excerpt from historian Robert N.
Hullinger’s book <em>Joseph Smith’s Response to Skepticism</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>During the 1820s the Palmyra newspapers printed reports of revivals
throughout the state and elsewhere. Camp meeting notices, especially
those of the Palmyra Methodist church, were another indication of
revival activity. In 1829 Methodist evangelist Lorenzo Dow preached to
3,000 people in the field next to the Methodist church, and in 1831
Charles Finney himself visited the community. The Methodists sponsored
a revival in June 1826 a mile from Palmyra. People came from as far as
100 miles away, so many that more than 100 tents were needed. Between
8:00 a.m. and nightfall, five sermons were preached. The service at
5:00 p.m. featured a sermon that “contemplated the whole process of
personal salvation, from its incipiency to its consummation in the
world of light.” The address electrified the crowd. Afterwards,
according to one account, “the Rev. Goodwin Stoddard exhorted, and
invited seekers within the circle of prayer in front of the stand.
Hundreds came forward; some said nearly every unconverted person on
the ground.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That part about Charles Finney coming to Palmyra is especially
interesting, because Joe’s First Vision is extremely similar to a vision
that Finney had in 1821, and Finney also complained a lot about how
revivals cause strife between the different churches.</p>
<p>Have a listen for yourself from Finney’s 1868 autobiography when he
describes his spiritual experience after having prayed in the woods and
being struck dumb. He reveals some aspects of how altered states of
consciousness can be achieved when a person’s mind is stressed and
they’re constantly overwhelmed by existential crises.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>North of the village, and over a hill, lay a piece of woods, in which
I was in the almost daily habit of walking, more or less, when it was
pleasant weather. It was now October, and the time was past for my
frequent walks there. Nevertheless, instead of going to the office, I
turned and bent my course toward the woods, feeling that I must be
alone, and away from all human eyes and ears, so that I could pour out
my prayer to God.</p>
<p>But still my pride must show itself. As I went over the hill, it
occurred to me that someone might see me and suppose that I was going
away to pray. Yet probably there was not a person on earth that would
have suspected such a thing, had he seen me going... I then penetrated
into the woods, I should think, a quarter of a mile, went over on the
other side of the hill, and found a place where some large trees had
fallen across each other, leaving an open place between. There I saw I
could make a kind of closet. I crept into this place and knelt down
for prayer. As I turned to go up into the woods, I recollect to have
said, "I will give my heart to God, or I never will come down from
there." I recollect repeating this as I went up: ;"I will give my
heart to God before I ever come down again."</p>
<p>But when I attempted to pray I found that my heart would not pray. I
had supposed that if I could only be where I could speak aloud,
without being overheard, I could pray freely. But lo! when I came to
try, I was dumb; that is, I had nothing to say to God; or at least I
could say but a few words, and those without heart...</p>
<p>Finally I found myself verging fast to despair. I said to myself, "I
cannot pray. My heart is dead to God, and will not pray." I then
reproached myself for having promised to give my heart to God before I
left the woods...</p>
<p>The thought was pressing me of the rashness of my promise, that I
would give my heart to God that day or die in the attempt. It seemed
to me as if that was binding upon my soul; and yet I was going to
break my vow. A great sinking and discouragement came over me, and I
felt almost too weak to stand upon my knees.</p>
<p>Just at this moment I again thought I heard someone approach me, and I
opened my eyes to see whether it were so. But right there the
revelation of my pride of heart, as the great difficulty that stood in
the way, was distinctly shown to me. An overwhelming sense of my
wickedness in being ashamed to have a human being see me on my knees
before God, took such powerful possession of me, that I cried at the
top of my voice, and exclaimed that I would not leave that place if
all the men on earth and all the devils in hell surrounded me.
"What!" I said, "such a degraded sinner I am, on my knees confessing
my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have any human
being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees endeavoring to
make my peace with my offended God!" The sin appeared awful,
infinite. It broke me down before the Lord… I cried to Him, "Lord, I
take Thee at Thy word. Now Thou knowest that I do search for Thee with
all my heart, and that I have come here to pray to Thee; and Thou hast
promised to hear me."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finney returned to his office as a paralegal and waited for everybody to
leave that evening before he returned to his prayers in hopes of a
miraculous conversion in this stressed and open-minded mental state.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By evening we got the books and furniture adjusted; and I made up, in
an open fireplace, a good fire, hoping to spend the evening alone.
Just at dark Squire W, seeing that everything was adjusted, bade me
goodnight and went to his home. I had accompanied him to the door; and
as I closed the door and turned around, my heart seemed to be liquid
within me. All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the
utterance of my heart was, "I want to pour my whole soul out to God."
The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the room back of
the front office, to pray.</p>
<p>There was no fire, and no light, in the room; nevertheless it appeared
to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and shut the door
after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face. It
did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterward, that it
was wholly a mental state. On the contrary it seemed to me that I saw
Him as I would see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in
such a manner as to break me right down at his feet. I have always
since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed
to me a reality, that He stood before me, and I fell down at his feet
and poured out my soul to Him. I wept aloud like a child, and made
such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me
that I bathed His feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct
impression that I touched Him, that I recollect.</p>
<p>I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was
too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I
said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off
from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the
fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I
turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty
baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever
having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me,
without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by
any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner
that seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the
impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me.
Indeed it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love, for I
could not express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath
of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like
immense wings.</p>
<p>No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my
heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should
say, I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.
These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the
other, until I recollect I cried out, "I shall die if these waves
continue to pass over me." I said, "Lord, I cannot bear any more;" yet
I had no fear of death.</p>
<p>How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing to
roll over me and go through me, I do not know.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Visionary and mystical conversion events like this are a dime a dozen in
the burned-over district in which Jo’s theology and market scouting were
formed. From that point forward, Charles Finney became a popular circuit
rider preacher, debating Universalists, and holding very intense
revivals which included basically hot seats for anybody who was
teetering on the edge of conversion.</p>
<p>Notably as well, that conversion story from Finney was recorded in 1868,
47 years after it supposedly happened, but he’d obviously shared his
conversion story in multiple public fora before writing it in his
autobiography. It’s likely that during one of his revivals in Palmyra,
where the young man Jo was attending, Finney shared his miraculous
conversion story, details of which could have been lifted by Jo after he
saw how successful of a preacher Finney was. Finney had the following
and public clout Jo wanted.</p>
<p>Despite Joe’s claim to have been disgusted by the revivals, there’s
evidence that he participated in them at the time. Newspaper publisher
Orsamus Turner, who knew Joe as a teenager, wrote that Joe caught a
“spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on
the Vienna Road,” and that “he was a very passable exhorter in evening
meetings.” And Joe’s neighbor Peter Ingersoll told his niece Sara that</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the year 1822 or 23 Smith began preaching[.] He would hold
meetings in the district school-house and draw large crowds to hear
him. He would preach for a while and then go into a trance and seem to
be perfectly conscious during this trance, and he would repeat some
Jargon in an unknown tongue, then he would interpret the unknown
sounds and assure those present they were the pure “Adamic
language[,] the language in which Adam courted Eve in the garden of
Eden[.]” Strange as it may seem he began to have believers for at
first it was done in a spirit of mischief and fun[.] After holding
these meetings “Joe” as he was called would come to uncle Peter’s
house-- if uncle Peter was not with him-- and tell him of the success
he had had, how many converts he made, and laugh till he would drop on
the floor with mirth[.]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now, this is a super late and secondhand source, so who knows how
reliable it is. But it definitely suggests that Joe saw the power that
revival preachers had over people and thought, “I want some of that.” We
see many elements Jo incorporated into his church existing all around
him which were exhibited as enviable traits by those he likely admired
or for which he probably harbored jealousy. Whether it was Sally Chase
and her seer stone Jo used to find his own better-than-hers seer stone,
or mumbling incoherent words and magic incantations he picked up from
Luman Walters, or even the first vision conversion story itself, all of
these elements became integral ingredients to Jo’s own story and church.
Jo was an observant guy and he could recognize what made people tick;
what made people move and shake; more importantly, what made people give
their hard-earned resources to somebody else.</p>
<p>Let’s move into the Kirtland period once Jo’s church had officially
started. A couple episodes ago we discussed Joe’s lust for power, and
all the ways that he shut down other people when they gained too much
power in the Church. We discussed how Oliver Cowdery and Hyrum Page both
received revelations in Fayette, New York in 1830, and Joe ordered
Page’s seer stone destroyed and his revelations burned. What bears
repetition about these events is that Joe then sent Cowdery on a mission
to the Natives west of Missouri while Joe remained behind and
consolidated his leadership of the Church. It could be argued that there
was causality in these contemporary events.</p>
<p>When Cowdery and his mission companions headed to Missouri in 1830, they
stopped in Kirtland, Ohio and converted a large Baptist commune, along
with its minister Sidney Rigdon. Rigdon was a bit of a straight-laced,
good-guy preacher, that had a tendency to fall in and out of revelatory
trances, possibly a product of a head injury as a young boy. Joe had the
ability to engage people one-on-one, and was very persuasive in doing
so, whereas Rigdon was a fantastic public speaker, and the masses
unequivocally loved him. So the two men had very complementary skills.
Joe needed a go-getter, and Rigdon fit the bill. Eps 14, 15, 16, 24,
Sunstone presentation on YouTube titled Sidney Rigdon: Forgotten Hero of
Mormonism.</p>
<p>There are two theories about Rigdon.</p>
<p>One is that he had never heard of Joe or the Book of Mormon before.
That’s the standard story, and the one that most historians today
accept. He came into the Mormon church by a happy accident of fate.</p>
<p>The other is that Joe and Rigdon had met earlier in the 1820s, and
Rigdon had collaborated with Joe in the Book of Mormon fraud. The theory
goes that sometime between 1818 to 1823, Rigdon stole a manuscript novel
by a guy named Solomon Spaulding from a printing press in Pittsburgh. He
edited the manuscript and kept the work secret while working as a
circuit preacher making a name for himself after he had a falling out
with his mentor, Alexander Campbell. In 1823 he met Joe while preaching
at a revival in Rochester New York, a mere 33 miles, or one and a half
day's journey from Joe's hometown, Palmyra. They get to know each other
through various correspondence, and devise a plan to start a new zionist
religion. Rigdon shares the manuscript novel he’s been editing, and Joe
uses it as the basis for the Book of Mormon. Meanwhile, Rigdon goes back
to Ohio and builds up a congregation that will be primed to accept the
new book. In 1830, after the book is published, Rigdon sends Parley P.
Pratt to New York to meet Joseph Smith and lead some missionaries back
to Kirtland to convert Rigdon’s church.</p>
<p>This theory is a little convoluted, but there are some eyewitness
accounts from people who claim to have seen Rigdon and Joe together in
New York in the 1820s, and there are also strong similarities between
the Book of Mormon and a draft version of Spalding’s novel historian
located in the 1880s. I’m personally ambivalent about this theory, but
it was one of the earliest explanations for how the Book of Mormon came
to be, and there’s no denying that it had a huge impact on how the
American public perceived the Church and on Church leaders’ decisions.
I’m happy to be swayed either way on the Spalding-Rigdon Book of
Mormon authorship theory and the simple fact remains that if the
evidence establishing the theory existed around literally any other book
than the foundational book of Mormon scripture, most historians and
objective students of history would easily conclude the Book of Mormon
was plagiarized from Spalding’s work. That’s to say, if any other
19th-century book had as many accusations of plagiarism as the Book of
Mormon, we’d all agree it was plagiarized, but such a conclusion is
inaccessible to the majority of people studying it because, to them, the
Book of Mormon is the word of god. With the number of sworn affidavits
who claim such, the witness statements placing Jo and Rigdon in the same
place prior to 1830, the similarities between the discovered manuscript
and the Book of Mormon, how the leadership dealt with the accusations
via draconian excommunication, various legal battles, Jo’s constant
history of plagiarism, and a number of other elements; it leads many to
study the Spalding theory and come to conclusions counter to historical
consensus; being the sole-authorship theory. Most historians today claim
the Spalding theory is dead; I tend to disagree. This consensus has
created a social stigma in the Mormon history community around anybody
who believes in the Spalding theory and I think that stigma is
unwarranted.</p>
<p>Anyway, while Cowdery and the other missionaries continued their mission
journey to Independence, Jackson Co., MO., Hingepin Sidney Rigdon, with
his friend Edward Party-boy Partridge, decided to make a trip to
Fayette, where Joe was residing, to meet with him; Jo and Rigdon
clicked. Here, we have a very monumental shift in Mormon history. It was
like a match made in heaven. From this moment on, Hingepin Sidney Rigdon
would become Joe's new favorite right hand man, taking a special place
in Joe's heart. Ep 24.</p>
<p>Rigdon brought with him to New York another Kirtland resident, Edward
Partridge. By this time Joe had pretty much bled his first big
bankroller, Not So Smarty Marty Harris, completely dry. Marty had
mortgaged his farm to pay for printing the Book of Mormon, and due to
poor sales of the book, he was now headed toward bankruptcy. His wife
had also divorced him and taken some of his assets in the divorce
settlement. Joe needed a new mark, and Edward Partridge would be his
first target. Rigdon brought the target right to Jo’s doorstep.</p>
<p>Partridge was the grandson of Massachusetts Congressman Oliver
Partridge. Back then anybody that was in the government tended to be a
member of the upper crust, so Edward came from a rich family. Not only
that, but he also owned a hat-making factory in Painesville, which was
quite successful, and made Edward one of the more affluent people in
town. Edward also happened to have two daughters named Emily and Eliza
who were 7 and 10 years old when they first met their to-be husband
Joseph when he was in his late 20s. Well, the people of Painesville, no
doubt spurred by Rigdon as well, asked Edward Partridge to go with
Rigdon to investigate Joe and the Book of Mormon, and he became
convinced. In fact, Joe received a revelation for Patridge, which
doesn’t say much except to flatter him a little and tell him his sins
are forgiven and he’s called to preach the gospel and commit himself to
Mormonism. It was a good sales tactic, and it laid the groundwork for
Joe to later move in on Partridge’s wealth… and daughters... The first
thing a confidence man has to do is gain the mark’s confidence, and
that’s what this was. Once that confidence is established, the mark
can be coerced into all sorts of things, especially when they’re given
an important role in the structure of the church.</p>
<p>We see a hint of Joe’s intentions in his revelation, later canonized in
Book of Commandments 39, which ordered him to move the New York church
over to Kirtland in the first of many Mormon exoduses:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And now I give unto the church in these parts, a commandment, that
certain men among them shall be appointed. . . . to look to the poor
and needy, and . . . to govern the affairs of the property of this
church. . . . And if ye seek the riches which it is the will of the
Father to give unto you, ye shall be the richest of all people, for ye
shall have the riches of eternity: And it must needs be that the
riches of the earth is mine to give.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Look at that, Joe came up with revelations that told people that they
would essentially have to give support to the poor and needy. That
sounds pretty great, doesn't it? Guess who was poor and needy at this
time? None other than the prophet himself. But then it takes a little
turn when it says that these people will be appointed to govern the
property of the church, and that will be their work. So basically Joe is
laying the groundwork for a religio-communist economic system 3 years
before the United Order was officially formed. And then it says that the
people that follow this church will have their earthly riches taken away
from them, and will be given riches of eternity instead. And that final
verse is the most chilling of all. "It must needs be that the riches of
the earth is mine to give." So, Joe will be the one responsible for
distributing the riches of the earth, because those riches are his to
give. How this was implemented was a little more complicated than Jo
controlling all the assets of the Mormons, but the impetus and
motivation behind it is very simple. Jo sees a bunch of prospective
marks in Kirtland and he tells them, as the MOUTHPIECE OF ALMIGHTY GOD,
to give all their property to him and they did it. The coercive nature
of this revelation is remarkable and patternistic for Jo’s entire
ministry. The property the people have isn’t actually theirs, but god’s
and god was nice enough to bless them with it for a time. Now, give that
property back to god and he’ll bless you in eternity for it. People ask
if Joseph Smith actually believed what he said and I think revelations
like this illustrate he knew exactly what he was doing regardless of
whether or not he really believed himself to be the mouthpiece of gods.</p>
<p>Joe travels to Kirtland with Hingepin Rigdon and Edward Partridge, and
when he arrives there he’s welcomed into the house of Newell K. Whitney.
Here, we have Joe's second affluent target for exploitation in Kirtland.
While Eddy Party-Boy Partridge was a good guy to have around, he kind of
abandoned his wealth, and liquidated his assets, in order to become the
first bishop of the church in Kirtland. Joe needed an active business to
leech off of, in order to stay alive. While those one-time donations are
nice to run on for a little while, they just aren't sustainable in the
way recurring smaller donations are. Patreon.com/nakedmormonism. So, Joe
decided to parasitically latch on to the Whitney family, and move into
the upstairs apartment above Newell Whitney's merchandise shop. N. K.
Whitney & Co., would soon become the very first bishop's storehouse for
the church, and the place where Joe and Emma would live for over 2
years.</p>
<p>Joe was basically made king of Kirtland upon his arrival. Eventually,
all the town’s commodities were transferred over to him to decide who
would receive what, the missionary force for the church was running
smoothly with new people headed to new places across the country
constantly. The people in the town liked Joe for the most part, and the
ones that didn't were effectively ostracized from their community. Three
days after arriving in Kirtland, he received this incredible revelation,
which became Book of Commandments 43:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He that receiveth my law and doeth it the same is my disciple. And he
that saith he receiveth it and doeth it not, the same is not my
disciple, and shall be cast out from among you. For it is not meet
that the things which belong to the children of the kingdom, should be
given to them that are not worthy, or to dogs, or the pearls to be
cast before swine. And again, it is meet that my servant Joseph should
have a house built, in which to live and translate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Basically, after this town had essentially given everything it had to
Joseph Smith, he came out with this revelation saying that anybody that
follows him is a disciple of Jesus, and anybody that doesn't is a muddy
dog who shall be cast out from among you, the true believers. And then,
he tops it all off with a commandment for everybody to build him a
house, because the apartment above the bishops storehouse just wasn't
good enough for him to live with. The thing about Joe is, he always
wants more, and he’s never satisfied to have anybody else be richer or
more powerful than him. He couldn’t just let a rich man be rich; he had
to socialize the rich man’s wealth and then dole some of that wealth
back to the rich man as a show of generosity by God's one true servant.
What can’t be accomplished when god is on your side? This structure has
a way of self-selecting only the most credulous to give their time and
wealth to the church. Those who’re not deluded enough don’t give up
their stuff; those who are deluded enough, give up their stuff and time
only for requirements of the church to be increasingly heaped upon their
shoulders. It’s a pattern from Jo’s early church that perpetuates in the
modern iterations as well.</p>
<p>When Joe got to Kirtland, he found that a prophetess named Laura Hubble
had been producing revelations in the Kirtland church. I told this story
a couple episodes ago, but it bears examination from a different vantage
point today. Jo was very jealous of his tenuous grasp on power,
especially in the early Kirtland era when that grasp was far less secure
than it was in Missouri or Nauvoo. Any person who presented a possible
threat to his leadership structure needed to be immediately neutralized,
lest they arise to power by wrestling it from Jo’s envious fist. Hubble
presented a crucial case of jealousy for power because how dare a woman
say that she has powers that are reserved only for the priesthood, and
the prophet himself? Well, let's see how Joe handled it. Unfortunately,
we don't have the revelations that Mrs. Hubble was giving, as far as my
research told me, no copy of these prophecies is extant, but we can
always read the revelation that Joe gave in response to her revelation,
and try to tease out what her revelations were about. This is from the
Book of Commandments Chapter 45:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For behold, verily, verily I say unto you, that ye have received a
commandment for a law unto my church, through him whom I have
appointed unto you, to receive commandments and revelations from my
hand. And this ye shall know assuredly, that there is none other
appointed unto you to receive commandments and revelations until he be
taken, if he abide in me. But verily, verily I say unto you, that none
else shall be appointed unto this gift except it be through him, for
if it be taken from him he shall not have power, except to appoint
another in his stead; And this shall be a law unto you, that ye
receive not the teachings of any that shall come before you as
revelations or commandments; And this I give unto you, that you may
not be deceived ; that you may know they are not of me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So that was 6 verses worth of Joe screaming at everybody to listen to
him, and ignore anybody that claims to be giving divine revelation from
god, because he's the only one ever that can do that ever EVER!! And
anybody else that claims to have those powers is obviously lying, or
deceived by Satan. There’s also an interesting power play in that
passage; only Jo can give revelations and if he fails in his office of
prophet, only he can name a successor. Sooooo… what if the people
believe he’s a fallen prophet? He’ll be the one to tell them if they’re
right. Who’s responsible for replacing him after he’s fallen? Jo, of
course. This would be like a president who habitually flaunts the laws
using the department of justice as his own system to cover up for his
own crimes. Imagine what kind of a world that would leave! Imagine the
corruption! Jealousy is an ugly look, especially when it’s jealousy of
one’s own power. Eps 25, 28.</p>
<p>The revelation then goes on to say what the church should do with Ms.
Hubble, and what it should do with Joe:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Purge ye out the iniquity which is among you; sanctify yourselves
before me and if ye desire the glories of the kingdom, appoint ye my
servant Joseph and uphold him before me by the prayer of faith. And
again, I say unto you, that if ye desire the mysteries of the kingdom,
provide for him food and raiment and whatsoever thing he needeth to
accomplish the work, wherewith I have commanded him.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yeah, Jo just gave commandments to his followers to build a home for
him, and to support him with donations whether they be money, or actual
commodities, all while he made a power play to make sure everybody
followed him and only him as prophet. And he couldn’t tolerate any hint
that someone else might be able to access the mysteries of God, because
it threatened his privileged position and his comfy parasitic life. Joe
occasionally tried to let other people have some power so they could do
the work of leadership and he could relax, but in the end his envy
always kicked in and he put them in their place, be they Ms. Hubble,
Hiram Page, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Emma Smith, William Law,
Thomas B. Marsh, Sidney Rigdon, or anybody else who posed a threat or
became a little too ambitious for Jo to control.</p>
<p>Since we’re talking about Joe’s smackdown of Laura Hubble, this might be
a good place to talk about how Joe never let any women have any
significant power in the Church. I want to read you a passage from
historian Susan Staker’s chapter in the recent book Writing Mormon
History, an anthology edited by friend of the show, Joseph Geisner. She
says that Joe’s scriptures were...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A profoundly homosocial economy with seers, angels, and gods all men.
Joseph’s textual economy rarely attends to personalized female
characters. Within the Book of Mormon, women are members of groups--
mothers, daughters, sisters, murderers. . . . Joseph’s revelations
rarely mention women-- mostly with children in relation to ordinances
of baptism or sacrament. . . . Only one of the revelations printed in
the Doctrine and Covenants is addressed to a woman, the ‘elect lady’
revelation to Emma Hale, Joseph’s own first wife. Women finally
capture Joseph’s attention within the 1835 Egyptian project. . . .
‘Zip Zi’ is one of the terms in Joseph’s initial Egyptian Alphabet
document from July 1835: [he translates it as] ‘woman married or
unmarried, <or daughter>.’ Within the bound Egyptian Grammar and
Alphabet, this term elaborated along its degrees is associated with
‘all women’ and with ‘the first woman, who was Eve.’ ‘Woman’ signals
‘under or beneath, second in right or in authority or Government.’
With a focus on the fecundity of women, this term can also be used to
note increasing or decreasing degrees of importance and a ‘fruitful
place or fruitful vine.’ With this term, women are underscored as
wives and mothers and second in relation to their men. . . . [In
Nauvoo, Joseph dictates D&C 132, the revelation on plural marriage.]
The revelation dictated by Joseph at Hyrum’s request never directly
addresses Emma. Rather she is a subject of conversation between the
God voice and Joseph.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there, but the bottom line is that Susan
is saying Joe’s revelations hardly ever mention women, and when they do
mention women, it’s always as the subordinates of men or done so to
ensure compliance and subservience to the men. Women are treated more as
property than as human beings who can make choices and exercise
authority in the Church. This comes into incredibly sharp focus when we
consider the polygamy revelation, but that’ll have to wait for now. Eps
148, 149. In a footnote, Susan goes so far as to say that “Joseph comes
to gather other men, his friends and the friends of God, under the sign
of the seer.” Mormon salvation is for men, not for women. In fact, as
we’ll find out soon, part of how Mormon men achieve salvation is by
collecting women like pogs. Ep 158.</p>
<p>But I’m getting way ahead of myself here, so let’s come back to
Kirtland. On August 23, 1834, a guy named Sylvester Smith brought
charges against Joe in the high council. We don’t know exactly what the
charges were, but they had to do with the Zion’s Camp march to Missouri,
an absolute fiasco which we’ll discuss in an upcoming episode. Eps 30,
31, 32. The high council investigated the charges and concluded in the
meeting minutes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>that we are satisfied with his [Joe’s] conduct, having learned from
the clearest evidence, that he has acted in every respect worthy of
his high and responsible station in the Church, and has prudently and
cautiously preserved the good of this society at large, and is worthy
of our esteem and fellowship, and that those reports could have
originated in the minds of none except such as either from a natural
misunderstanding, or natural jealousy, are easily led to conceive of
evils where none exist.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m not jealous, you are! They totally exonerated Joe, and chalked the
allegation up to jealousy. By the time this hearing was conducted, Jo’s
inner circle of church leadership was staffed so exclusively with
cronies who would never contradict the prophet of god that they could do
nothing but find no wrongdoing or illegal acts on his part. But Joe
wouldn't take these allegations from Sylvester Smith lying down, and had
to react in a familiar fashion. Five days later, “the High Council
assembled according to the direction of Bishop Whitney, to try Brother
Sylvester Smith, charged with a misdemeanor.” The misdemeanor was that
he had continued to badmouth Joe even after Joe had been exonerated by
the council. I mean, did we expect Joe to act any other way? As soon as
Joe was charged for doing something unbecoming of a prophet of God, he
would manufacture allegations against the person that charged him in the
first place. This was an early manifestation of a strong pattern that
developed of Jo’s coordinated character assassination campaigns against
enemies or anybody who would say anything negative about him. It's a
classic case of misdirection, and it worked because the leadership of
the church obviously sided with the infallible and pious supreme leader,
even the one and only true mouthpiece and servant of our heavenly
father, Joseph Smith, Jun. It’s corruption and protectionism at its
worst, the religious kind. Eps 39, 49, 51, 54, 58, 76, 77, 91, 94, 98,
109, 116, 117, Bennet Meltdown 120-134, 140, 146, 156, 171, 178, 179,
197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, and 213.</p>
<p>Now let’s skip ahead to another, much larger revolt against Joe’s
leadership in 1837 and 1838. We’ve discussed Joe’s scheme to establish a
Mormon bank a lot on this show, it’s kind of an important time in Mormon
history. The bank of course blew up and a lot of people involved in it
lost their savings. But even before the bank failed, there started to be
pushback.</p>
<p>According to Wilford Woodruff’s journal, on January 17, 1837, just
eleven days after the bank put its first money into circulation, David
Whitmer lectured to the Seventies and “warned us to humble ourselves
before God lest his hand rest upon us in anger for our pride and many
sins, that we were running into in our days of prosperity as the ancient
Nephites did.” The canary was beginning to wobble on its perch.</p>
<p>A month later, after Joe had been out of town for a couple weeks, he
returned to find that “Many were stirred up in their hearts and some
were against him as the Israelites were against Moses, but when he arose
in the power of God in their midst, as Moses did anciently, they were
put to silence for the complainers saw that he stood in the power of a
Prophet. O how weak is man.”</p>
<p>It’s surprising he hearkened to Moses instead of Moroni, Helaman, Nephi,
Nephi, Alma, or Nephi, but I digress. For the moment Joe had things
under control. And as we discussed last episode, Kirtland Mormonism hit
a high-point of euphoria with a drunken and possibly hallucinogenic
party in honor of the anniversary of the Kirtland Temple dedication on
March 23, 1837. But the mood shifted fast after that, because right
around that same time, Andrew Jackson kicked off the Panic of 1837 by
cracking down on private banks. There was a run on banks all over the
country, and Kirtland was no exception. Ep 38. More than half the banks
across the country folded and specie in the form of gold and silver
became a precious commodity.</p>
<p>By early April Woodruff wrote in his journal that Smith lectured to the
elder’s quorum that if the elders would just obey him for once,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Kirtland should speedily be redeemed and become a stronghold not to be
thrown down. Joseph presented us in some degree the plot of the City
of Kirtland (which is the stronghold of the daughter of Zion) as it
was given him by vision; it was great, marvelous and glorious. The
city extended to the east, west, north, and south; steam boats will
come puffing into the City. Our goods will be conveyed upon railroads
from Kirtland to many places and probably to Zion. Houses of worship
would be reared unto the most high; beautiful streets were to be made
for the Saints to walk in. Kings of the earth would come to behold the
glory thereof and many glorious things not now to be named would be
bestowed upon the Saints, but all these things are better imagined
than spoken by the children of Jacob.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Did that quote seem at all desperate? Jo was up on the stand showing
everybody plans he’d drawn out for Kirtland and how great it’ll be, if
only they have faith in the KSS company and bring more people to the
church, or just their money, the people don’t even need to come. Jo had
a penchant for grand plans that were laughably ambitious and frankly
impossible. He thought Kirtland would become a major industrial center
and make him very wealthy. He thought the same for Missouri and all the
plans fell through after the Mormons were forcibly removed. Only in
Nauvoo did his grand plans nearly come to fruition but every project was
so ill-fated and poorly managed to begin with that it would never become
what he dreamed it could. Jo had visited New York city, Boston,
Washington D.C., and plenty other large cities; it’s very clear he
wanted to be king of his own metropolitan American city. Had he survived
through 1844, who knows if that dream may have been realized.</p>
<p>By May 1837, there was so much discontent among the leaders of the
Church that two apostles, Orson and Parley Pratt, filed charges against
Joe in the high council “for lying & misrepresentation – also for
extortion – and for speaking disrespectfully against his brethren behind
their backs.” Apostle Luke Johnson also filed charges against Joe “for
closing the doors of the house of the Lord against the high council.”
The same day, Joe’s scribe Warren Parrish filed charges against Sidney
Rigdon “for expressing an unbelief in the revelations of God, both old
and new, also an unbelief in the agency of man and his accountability to
God, or that there is Such a principle existing as Sin. –and also for
lying & declaring that God required it at his hands.” Also among the
dissenters were Apostles Lyman Johnson and John F. Boynton.</p>
<p>A few points worth consideration here. This tension among the leadership
was a result of many factors. The Fanny Alger incident had cast Jo’s
piety deeply into question as it was publicly discussed and widely
known. The overwhelming debt the church had incurred which resulted in
the formation of the KSS company remained unpaid. Creditors were beating
down the doors of nearly every member of the Mormon leadership but Jo
had tied up all their wealth in the KSS company and the money simply
dried up, leaving everybody unable to pay their personal debts. The
treasure-seeking trip to Massachusetts was a total failure. Dissent was
openly contended in public church meetings, not just of the leadership
but of the broader membership. Nobody likes a display of dirty laundry
but when all the laundry is dirty it’s kind of hard to turn a blind eye.
NSSM Harris had just declared in a meeting that he saw the gold plates
with the spiritual instead of the natural eyes, casting all of Jo’s
claims of divinity and the history of the Book of Mormon into question.
The Spalding theory, resulting from multiple exposes and scathing
newspaper articles, was gaining a lot of traction and missionaries
across the nation were being confronted with questions they couldn’t
answer.</p>
<p>By September 4, the Kirtland Safety Society had completely failed. But
Joe also by this time rallied enough of the Church’s leadership around
himself to have the dissenters’ apostleship revoked. In March the
following year he also excommunicated Ollie Cowdery, D-Day David
Whitmer, John Goebbels Whitmer, and William Wines (double-dub) Phelps,
who by this time had all joined the dissenters. The charges brought
against them in the excommunication trial were mostly fabricated, so
much so that Oliver Cowdery later spent years negotiating with Brigham
Young to have the false charges expunged from his record before he would
return to the church. Cowdery died an untimely death before joining the
Utah settlement. Joe even accused the dissenters of continuing to pass
worthless Kirtland Safety Society bills on people, as if they were the
ones who had been behind the predatory bank all along.</p>
<p><strong>Missouri</strong></p>
<p>Joe may have won the bureaucratic fight for control of the Church, but
the dissenters won the legal and physical fight for control of the town.
Apparently things got so hot that at one point Warren Parrish burst into
the Temple and held the Church’s leadership at gunpoint, and on another
occasion, Bloody Brigham Young warned Joe that there was a plot to
assassinate him brewing in the Quorum of the Twelve. Joe ended up
fleeing Kirtland in the middle of the night and going to Missouri. Eps
39, 40, 41.</p>
<p>When Joe arrived in Missouri on March 14, 1838, “many of the brethren
came out to meet us, who also with open arms welcomed us to their
bosoms. We were immediately received under the hospitable roof of
Brother George W. Harris, who treated us with all possible kindness, and
we refreshed ourselves with much satisfaction, after our long and
tedious journey.” Pro-tip for anyone who might be thinking about letting
Joseph Smith stay in your house: just don’t. Or, if you do, hide your
wife and daughters. According to several sources, George W. Harris’s
wife Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris became Joseph Smith’s first
polyandrous plural wife. “Polyandrous” meaning that she was married to
more than one husband at the same time.</p>
<p>We’ll take a deep dive into polygamy on an upcoming episode, but you
can’t talk about Joe’s aspirations for wealth of commodities without
discussing the fact that he secretly married about a dozen women who
were already married to other men. I don’t know how to understand this
except as a product of Joe’s jealousy of his bros’ hot wives. Of course,
apologists will try to tell you that maybe Joe never had sex with any of
these women, and maybe his true goal was to create dynastic ties with
their husbands or some other nonsense. Right. If Joe had wanted to be
sealed to the husbands, he could have invented celestial gay marriage.
Can we just be honest and admit that Jo’s libido was a driving factor in
his revelations? If Joe were using plural marriage to forge closer ties
with the women’s husbands, then maybe he should have waited until Orson
Hyde returned from his mission instead of marrying his wife while he was
away, am I right? We’ll get to Hyde’s story later, but first let’s deal
with Lucinda Harris.</p>
<p>Lucinda was the widow of the infamous William Morgan who’d published his
expose of Masonry in 1826 and went missing soon afterwards in the
custody of Masons. This very public William Morgan disappearing issue
happened right in Jo’s backyard in New York. Lucinda became a Mormon and
remarried to George W. Harris. During the two months Jo and Emma lived
with the Harrises, Jo courted Lucinda and took her as a plural wife.
Even in a dire time when his life was threatened and the church was
collapsing around him, Jo found time to court a new wife in the same
household as he, Emma, and the kids were living in. The historical
record can’t prove whether or not Emma was aware of this relationship.
Biographers claim she was completely oblivious to the majority of Jo’s
wives and there’s no way to unequivocally prove otherwise. Her knowledge
and participation in polygamy is a heated subject of debate and
speculation in the Mormon history community.</p>
<p>Unfortunately we don’t know many details of this marriage. This is from
Todd Compton’s book In Sacred Loneliness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no firm date for Smith’s marriage to Lucinda, but these two
months [while the Smiths were living in the Harris home] are a good
possibility. He often married women while he was living in the same
house with them, and the Sarah Pratt statement correlates with the
year 1838, as well. Smith was thirty-two at the time and Lucinda was
thirty-six, so he was the first of her husbands who was not an older
man. George Harris may have given permission for the marriage, since
he was a close friend of Smith and a church leader. He later stood
proxy for Smith in the Nauvoo temple as his wife was sealed to the
dead prophet for eternity. Despite the prophet’s connection to
Lucinda, she would not stop living with George, as was customary in
Smith’s polyandrous marriages.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whatever the exact circumstances of the marriage, it set a precedent for
celestial polyandry, allowing Jo to acquire a lot of his friends’ wives
after moving to Nauvoo. As much as women were commodities in this
Victorian era, Jo couldn’t see a possession somebody else had without
wanting it for himself. Good thing society has evolved past that…
amiright?!</p>
<p>In the aftermath of the Missouri-Mormon war of 1838, the Mormons lost
the War and surrendered to the Missourians in November 1838, Joe was
interred in Liberty Jail with his brother Hyrum Smith and several other
Church leaders: Caleb Baldwin, Alexander McRae, Lyman Wight. Meanwhile,
most of the Mormons were expelled from Missouri and moved as refugees
north to Quincy, Illinois. Joe’s absence threatened his power, his most
precious and jealously-guarded possession. He was afraid of what Rigdon
would do as soon as he got to Quincy without Jo there to naysay him or
keep him reined in. Rigdon was released from Liberty Jail 2 months
before the prophet and he had no way of ensuring Hingepin Rigdon
wouldn’t step into the power vacuum.</p>
<p>But, fortunately for Joe, senior apostle Bloody Brigham Young stepped up
to operate as president in Joe’s absence, which is good because he was
very loyal and an awesome businessman who could coordinate the
resettlement of thousands of destitute refugees. This time during the
early organization of the Illinois settlements was when Rigdon developed
a healthy new respect and fear of who Bloody Brigham was starting to
become. Bloody Brigham purged the leadership and put his own guy,
Wilford Woodruff, into the quorum, the same Woodruff who would become
the 4<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> prophet of the Brighamite church. In addition, he
kept a tight set of reins on the other members of the leadership, making
sure that Jo would be happy with his work upon his return. At the March
1839 General Conference,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>it was unanimously voted that the following persons be excommunicated
from the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, vis.: George M.
Hinkle, Sampson Avard, John Corrill, Reed Peck, Wm. W. Phelps,
Frederick G. Williams, Thomas B. Marsh, Burr Riggs, and several
others. (History of the Church 3:259)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bloody Brigham took this conference as an opportunity to excommunicate
nearly every person who testified against the leadership during the
November 1838 court of inquiry into Mormon treason during the
Missouri-Mormon War. If a mafia family is filled with rats, time to go
on extermination patrol and that’s exactly what Bloody Brigham did. Joe
had no idea this happened until after he busted out of the joint by
bribing his guards with whiskey and a healthy chunk of change. Rigdon
wasn’t even present at this conference. Joe had told them explicitly to
not hold any conferences until he could get there, which is an absurd
thing to say because of course they will need to hold a conference to
figure out just what the hell they’re going to do with 10,000 refugees
moving into a dinky little swampland on the Illinois banks of the
Mississippi. Jo legitimately feared for his position as head of the
Mormon movement while he didn’t know how long he would remain caught up
in the cogs of the Missouri legal machine. Bloody Brigham took charge
and handled business as it needed to be handled. Eventually Joe bribed
his way out of jail and escaped to Illinois, where he took over the
reins of the Church beginning in spring of 1839.</p>
<p><strong>Illinois</strong></p>
<p>Nauvoo was a clean slate for the Mormons and Jo. We’ve spent the last 3
years on this podcast talking about how he manipulated Illinois politics
in order to increase his own power and influence and create a religious
theocracy free from any legal oversight. Here, Jo’s greatest fantasies
and dreams could become reality and I think it’s important to recognize
something about his time in Nauvoo because I feel like we can learn a
lot from this exercise. What powerful historical figures did Joe envy?
Whose power did he want to emulate? Who did he view as men who’d
accomplished more than him that he wanted to mimic?</p>
<p>Well, while Joe was sitting in Liberty Jail, the state of Missouri was
out collecting evidence to be used against him in his jury trial for
treason. One of the pieces of evidence they collected was an affidavit
from Apostle Thomas B. Marsh, the milk-strippings guy and prodigal son
of the Utah kingdom, who said this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have heard the prophet say that he should yet tread down his
enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; that if he was not let alone
he would be a second Mahomet to this generation, & that he would make
it one gore of blood from the Rocky mountains to the Atlantic ocean.
That like Mahomet, whose motto, in treating for peace was the Alcoran,
or the sword, so should it eventually be with us, Jo Smith or the
sword.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Muhammed was a warlord. Like, he probably killed thousands of people.
Joe wanted to be a great man like Mohammed, and if that meant killing
every non-Mormon in America to build Zion, the Mormon Mecca, then that’s
what he was willing to do. Interestingly enough, many newspapers would
call him the Mormon Mohamet when reporting about his military
expeditions in Missouri and the raising of his Nauvoo Legion. He almost
seems to have worn that label as a badge of honor.</p>
<p>After escaping jail and going to Illinois, Joe compared himself to
another brutal military leader on July 3, 1841. According to Thomas
Sharp, a newspaper editor who founded the “Anti-Mormon Party” to oppose
Mormon control of politics in Illinois, Joe gave a speech in which he
warned the Anti-Mormons “that if they did not stop their blab about him,
he would be President of the United States, (God would give him the
office if he wanted it,) and then he would show them what a Bonaparte
could do.” Napoleon Bonaparte, of course, was the French emperor who had
embroiled Europe in a series of brutal wars and established the First
French Empire.</p>
<p>Bonaparte was another badge of honor for Jo. During a dinner meeting,
from Mormon Enigma,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Joseph remarked to William Phelps that he had a kind, provident wife
who would load the table with good things to eat until the sight
destroyed his appetite when all he had asked her for was a little
bread and milk. Emma came into the room in time to hear William Phelps
say, “You must do as Buonaparte did,--have a little table just large
enough for the victuals you want yourself.”</p>
<p>With tact born of experience, Emma replied, “Mr. Smith is a bigger man
than Buonaparte; he can never eat without his friends.”</p>
<p>“That is the wisest thing I ever heard you say,” Joseph commented.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here’s another real gem whom Joe envied. Bonaparte famously boasted to
the Austrian statesman, Metternich, “You cannot stop me: I spend 30,000
lives a month.” So the people Joe aspired to imitate were military
tyrants who conquered and subjugated massive swaths of the world. This
is who we sing praise to every Sunday? This is the humble man god chose
to be his mouthpiece?</p>
<p>Let’s discuss one polygamy story because I think it highlights the
covetous theme of this episode quite well.</p>
<p>Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde first met Joe while he was living in her
parents’ home in 1831. Quite a pattern when it came to Jo’s later wives
but this is where that pattern began. She was 16 at the time. That’s
probably when she first caught his eye. Ep 26. Three years later, in
1834, Marinda married Orson Hyde, who would become one of Joseph’s
twelve apostles. Now fast forward to Nauvoo. In April 1840, Joe sent
Orson on a mission to England and Israel, which would keep him away for
two years. That gave Joe plenty of time to work on Marinda. On December
2, 1841, Joe asked Ebenezer and Angeline Robinson to house Marinda and
her kids until Orson returned. On that same day, Joseph received a
revelation commanding Marinda to obey “the counsel of my servant Joseph
in all things.” A note in his diary indicates that he married her four
months later. According to George D. Smith’s book <em>Nauvoo Polygamy</em>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A year following Smith’s “hearken to Joseph in all things” revelation
to Marinda, Orson Hyde returned from his two-and-a-half-year mission
to Jerusalem, Europe, and Asia. His return was noted in Smith’s diary
on December 7, 1842, when Smith had dinner with the Hydes. Soon Joseph
told Orson about plural marriage. Since Hyde was reportedly
“furious”—perhaps accentuated by Joseph’s attention to Marinda,
now their mutual wife—his reaction to this new doctrine would have
been anything but certain. However, he eventually responded with
enthusiasm and took two plural wives of his own in 1843.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Joe was amazing at disguising his jealousy for other men’s wives as
piety, and making them feel like they were the ones who were jealous and
in eternal error for refusing his advances. This is one example of Jo’s
gaslighting masterclass. Ep 134.</p>
<p>Earlier in this episode I described how Joe’s revelations treated women
like objects and pretty much always put them in subjugation to men. One
of the apologist counterarguments against that is his creation of the
Relief Society in 1842. Joe said some pretty empowering things to the
Relief Society. For instance, according to the Book of the Law of the
Lord, on April 8, 1842 Joe “gave a lecture on the pries[t]hood shewing
[sic] how the Sisters would come in possession of the privileges &
blessings & gifts of the priesthood. & that the signs should follow
them. such as healing the sick casting out devils.”</p>
<p>According to the Relief Society Minutes, he created a female presidency
to preside over the society, “just as the Presidency, preside over the
church.” He told the sisters that “the Society should move according to
the ancient Priesthood” and that he was “going to make of this Society a
kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day— as in Paul’s day.” He also said
“the keys of the kingdom are about to be given to them that they may
be able to detect everything false, as well as to the Elders.” Ep 101,
102.</p>
<p>Anyway, you get the idea. Joseph and early Mormon leaders can be quote
mined all day to substantiate the claim that women were given the
priesthood. But when you really dig into what Joe thought and what he
was doing with the Relief Society, he doesn’t look quite so feminist.
Avery and Newell write of the purposes of the Relief Society in Mormon
Enigma p. 108: “Emma and Joseph together outlined the purposes of the
society, which were “to provoke the brethren to good works . . . to save
the elder the trouble of rebuking . . . to look after the wants of the
poor . . . [to] do good . . . [to] deal frankly with each other,”
and to “correct the morals of the community.” All of that is fine, but
the part I’m interested in is the part that says, “to save the elder the
trouble of rebuking.” In other words, Joe is hoping the women will
police themselves, so that he won’t have to police them. So at least
part of the purpose of this organization is to control them. This, in my
opinion, all points to the real reason for forming the Relief Society,
to cut down on rumors of polygamy and create a system of tests to filter
through the women who’d be most likely to accept of it. In many ways,
the Relief Society was a testing ground for which women would be good
masons by not revealing secrets revealed to them.</p>
<p>In a lecture to the Relief Society called “try the spirits,” Joe
criticized a woman named Johanna Southcott who had started her own
church a few decades before he did. Ep 108.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Johanna Southcott professed to be a prophetess, and wrote a book of
prophecies in 1804, she became the founder of a people that are now
extant. She was to bring forth, in a place appointed, a son, that was
to be the Messiah, which thing has failed. Independent of this,
however, where do we read of a woman that was the founder of a church,
in the word of God? Paul told the women in his day, “to keep silence
in the Church, and that if they wished to know anything to ask their
husbands at home”; he would not suffer a woman “to rule, or to usurp
authority in the Church”; but here we find a woman the founder of a
church, the revelator and guide, the Alpha and Omega, contrary to all
acknowledged rule, principle and order.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Using Biblical teachings from the New Testament, Jo told the Relief
Society women to shut up, sit down, and submit to men, because the
divine order doesn’t allow a woman to have any authority in the Church.
He attacks Johanna Southcott, and in the same sermon he goes on to
attack a couple other cults led by women, too, including the Catholic
Apostolic Church, founded by Edward Irving in England. What was wrong
with this church? Joe explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1<!-- raw HTML omitted -->st<!-- raw HTML omitted -->. The church was organized by women, and “God placed in
the Church, <em>first apostles, secondarily prophets</em>”; and <em>not first
women</em>’ but Mr. Irving placed in his church first women, <em>secondarily
apostles</em>; and the church was founded and organized by them. A woman
has no right to found or organize a church: God never sent them to do
it.</p>
<p>2<!-- raw HTML omitted -->nd<!-- raw HTML omitted -->. Those women would speak in the midst of a meeting, and
rebuke Mr. Irving or any of the church. Now the Scripture positively
says, “thou shalt not rebuke an Elder, but intreat him as a father”;
not only this, but they frequently <em>accused</em> the brethren, thus
placing themselves in the seat of Satan, who is emphatically called
“the <em>accuser</em> of the brethren.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And remember, he’s giving this lecture <em>to the Relief Society women</em>
just a week after it was founded. This was a power move, a priesthood
flex to make sure the women still knew who was actually in control of
the situation. Jo was very jealous of his manufactured power so maybe he
gave them some form of priesthood, but he denied them the power thereof.</p>
<p>After delivering this screed, Joe left the meeting. But then Emma took
the pulpit and spoke of some scandalous rumors being circulated by a
woman named Clarissa Marvel. It seems as if Clarissa Marvel’s rumors may
have concerned the polygamous marriage between Joe and Agnes Coolbrith,
or maybe she herself had been propositioned; the historical record is a
bit too ambiguous. Here again is an excerpt from Mormon Enigma, p. 108:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Emma reported that a young woman, Clarissa Marvel, “was accused of
[telling] scandalous falsehoods on the character of Prest. Joseph
Smith without the least provocation,” and asked that “they would in
wisdom, adopt some plan to bring her to repentance.” She continued, “I
presume that most of [you] know more about Clarissa Marvel than I.”
Agnes Coolbrith Smith, Don Carlos’s widow, came to the accused girl’s
defense, apparently unaware that gossip linked her own name to
Joseph’s. “Clarissa Marvel lived with me nearly a year and I saw
nothing amiss of her,” she reported.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Avery and Newell take some liberties here in drawing the connection of
Agnes coming to Clarissa’s defense and that being because the rumors
involved Agnes’s and Jo’s marriage; but that speculation could be
completely accurate. Like I said, the record’s ambiguous enough to read
it in a few ways. But this issue was only just beginning. It wouldn’t be
for another few weeks until it was wrapped up, during which it was made
abundantly clear that the Relief Society isn’t just a 2-hour gossip
session every week, but had much loftier goal, like silencing those who
would spread such scandalous fake news about the one true prophet and
his harem of concubines. At the Relief Society meeting in mid-April,
Emma took the pulpit again and read another epistle from Jo trying to
stifle such rumors.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have been informed that some unprincipled men . . . have been
guilty of such crimes—We do not mention their names, not knowing but
what there may be some among you who are not sufficiently skill’d in
Masonry as to keep a secret . . . Let this epistle be had as a private
matter in your Society, and then we shall learn whether you are good
masons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo modeled the Nauvoo Relief Society on Freemasonry. And you know what
Joe once said about Freemasonry? “The secret of Masonry is to keep a
secret.” So it really seems like he designed the Nauvoo Relief Society
as a way of slowing down the rumor mill and teaching women how to keep
the secrets of polygamy. Was he really interested in giving women the
priesthood? Or was he just interested in making women feel like they had
been initiated into a secret order of priestesses and they needed to
keep its secrets? Historians have read this as a general rebuke of John
C. Wreck-it Bennett as he’d apostatized from the church soon after the
foundation of the Relief Society, but I called Jo and Bennett kindred
scoundrels for a reason. The perceived “crimes” here are largely
semantic, only being distinguished by who is or isn’t approved to
practice polygamy. Ep 107, 108, 110, 111, 115.</p>
<p>Let’s dig into one more interesting story about Joe’s jealousy with
respect to polygamy. According to William Clayton, by May 1843, Joe’s
first wife Emma Smith was in an absolute fury over Joe’s polygamy. She
had tried to accommodate it, but she had finally lost her patience.
According to Clayton’s diary,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[May 29, 1843.] This A.M. President Joseph told me that he felt as
though I was not treating him exactly right and asked if I had used
any familiarity with E[mma]. I told him by no means and explained to
his satisfaction. . . . [June 23, 1843.] This A.M. President Joseph
took me and conversed considerable concerning some delicate matters.
Said [Emma] wanted to lay a snare for me. He told me last night of
this and said he had felt troubled. He said [Emma] had treated him
coldly and badly since I came…and he knew she was disposed to be
revenged on him for some things. She thought that if he would indulge
himself she would too. He cautioned me very kindly for which I felt
thankful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If only we had the entirety of Quilliam Claypen’s Nauvoo journal
released to the public like the church promised 4 years ago instead of
it remaining suppressed in church vaults; maybe we’d be able to
understand a bit more context of what really happened here. Speculation
it is, then. From the available text, it seems Jo believed that Emma was
looking to take revenge on Jo by sleeping with William Clayton! It
wasn’t just William Law who Emma thought was a sweet little man, but
Quilliam Claypen as well and these allegations are coming from a far
more trustworthy source. Or maybe Joseph Jackson, who talked about Emma
wanting William Law, simply mixed the two guys up.</p>
<p>But, of course, Jo can sleep with and rape all the women he wants, but
if Emma wants to enjoy the blessings of an open relationship... No, no,
no, multiple partners is the blessing of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not
Sarah, Ruth, and Esther. This situation apparently escalated to the
point where, according to William Law, “Joseph offered to furnish his
wife Emma with a substitute for him, by way of compensation for his
neglect of her, on condition that she would forever stop her opposition
to polygamy and permit him to enjoy his young wives in peace and keep
some of them in his house and to be well treated etc.” So it seems that
eventually Joe caved in to Emma’s wrath and agreed to allow Emma a…
concubine? Whatever the male equivalent of mistress is. Mister, I guess.</p>
<p>Apparently Joe couldn’t bring himself to actually go through with this
plan, however, because the following month Joe received D&C 132, the
infamous revelation on plural marriage. Check out verse 51:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Verily, I say unto you: A commandment I give unto mine handmaid, Emma
Smith, your wife, whom I have given unto you, that she stay herself
and partake not of that which I commanded you to offer unto her; for I
did it, saith the Lord, to prove you all, as I did Abraham, and that I
might require an offering at your hand, by covenant and sacrifice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Joe apparently had given in and allowed Emma to have a relationship
with other men, but then he called celestial “takesies backsies” with a
thus saith the lord in D&C 132 and commanded Emma to “stay herself and
partake not of that which I commanded you to offer unto her.” According
to the voice in Joe’s head, the whole thing had been an Abrahamic test!
Remember that story in the Bible where God commands Abraham to sacrifice
his son Isaac? And then, just as old Abe is about the plunge the knife
into Isaac’s chest, an angel says, “just kidding, this was a test,
sacrifice this ram instead”? Well, letting Emma sleep with other people
was going to be Joe’s test, but conveniently God declared at the last
second that the whole thing was just a big joke, “ha ha ha, I would
never <em>actually</em> make you jealous like that, Joe.” That would be too
horrible to contemplate, just like Abraham killing his son. It’s amazing
how Jo was able to use the bible to come to whatever conclusion was most
convenient and beneficial to him alone; when the Bible didn’t suffice
he’d just come up with new scripture to get his way. He, of course,
just a few verse later in D&C 132 said that any woman who refuses to
allow her husband to have another wife is herself damned. The Law of
Sarah is such a wonderful bit of the polygamy revelation, isn’t it? Real
great stuff in that horrible little book. Eps 148, 149.</p>
<p>No matter what it was, women, businesses, property, money, social
status, follows and retweets, newspaper headlines, any quantifiable
commodity, Jo couldn’t stand being deprived of it. His avaricious nature
with respect to all aspects of worldly wealth could never be satisfied.
It was all short-sighted gratification and as soon as he partook of
whatever it was he was pursuing at any given moment, he always wanted
more. This drive; this animalistic and rabid greed for more, moRE, MORE,
didn’t come from nothing, it was the result of a pattern of deprivation
owing to destitution and desiring what others have that he didn’t.
Growing up, Jo saw people with more than he had and he couldn’t stand it
so he developed a set of tools to selfishly get what they had. Most of
the time, that tool was “I prophecy in the name of the Lord that if you
don’t give me that thing or do a thing for me, then you’ll suffer the
wrath of the almighty for depriving his servant of that which he needs
to build the kingdom of god.” His mind was ruled by a viciously
competitive scarcity; if he was to have a piece of the pie he needed to
take somebody else’s piece instead making his own damn pie.</p>
<p>Now look, there are traits people generally agree are laudable. We tend
to gravitate towards individuals who exhibit honorable traits like
altruism, ambition, charisma, respect, industriousness, compassion; the
list can extend for pages. On the flipside of that coin, there are
plenty of human traits which tend to make us averse towards a person.
Selfishness, narcissism,... well charisma, ambition, and industriousness
can fall into that negative category as well now that I think about it.
You know what I’m saying though. Certain people we generally respect for
certain reasons. Others don’t deserve our respect for what comprises
their character.</p>
<p>When a person exhibits certain character traits, it makes us feel
certain ways. They can instill a sense of trust or distrust, honor or
dishonor, love or hate. Those emotions existed long before we had the
vocabulary to describe them and that’s because they instill some
evolutionary advantage; those emotions teach us about ourselves, the
situation around us, or the people with whom we associate.</p>
<p>The thing is, I spend a lot of time studying early Mormon history and
the life of its founding prophet and I can’t help but feel disgusted,
repulsed, and generally reviled by what I see. That’s hard to deal with
because it reveals to me the fact that two people can look at the same
person or character trait and see it differently. A believer and a
non-believer can come away with completely opposite value judgments of
Joseph Smith’s character. Long-time listeners of the show will remember
how much I’ve talked in the backlog about the cardboard cutout prophet I
was taught to worship as a kid. You know that Joseph Smith, right?
Handsome, muscular with blue eyes and blond hair, reading from the gold
plates on a table while Oliver Cowdery studiously scratched every word
the prophet spoke as it came to him by the gift and power of god. The
man who was a theologian who always had a clever quip to any naysayer or
skeptic. The man who never hurt a fly and the only people who didn’t
like him were led astray by the adversary. I was indoctrinated into the
belief that a portrait of an incredibly complex figure was worthy of
adoration and respect. I sang praise to him because he communed with
Jehovah and that was my favorite hymn.</p>
<p>That cardboard cutout, that portrait of a man larger than life hanging
in every Mormon chapel… is a lie. It’s all tainted history correlated
and crafted over nearly 2 centuries to sell a religion. If Mormons want
to be more transparent about their history, don’t hang a portrait of a
dark-skinned Jesus or a Joseph Smith with his head stuffed in a hat,
hang the real portrait of the real Joseph. You know the one I’m talking
about; we talked about it back on episode 206, it’s titled The Last
Public Address of Lieutenant General Joseph Smith. In case you haven’t
seen it, I’ll do my best to paint the picture in your mind. In the far
background you can see the Nauvoo Temple near completion on the hill
overlooking the flats below an overcast sky. In the midground of the
painting are some wooden shacks, possibly widow’s row, and a large
2-story building. The mid-foreground features hundreds of people. Every
square inch of dead space of the painting is somebody’s face. Rows and
rows of Nauvoo Legionnaires run the length of the painting and people
are flooding out of the 2-story building and crowding around the
centerpiece in the foreground of the painting, which is a makeshift
wooden platform with 3 men standing and one sitting on it. A red-coat
man stands behind and to the side of two men in blue shirts, while the
sitting man is wearing a black shirt holding his tophat in his hands.
There, at the front of the stage, with thousands of people staring in
awe and wonder is a rotund Lieutenant-General Joseph Smith, dressed in
white pants, long black boots, blue military uniform, and gold-fringe
shouldercaps. His sword is unsheathed and pointed to the sky, the
American flag with a golden eagle cap stands behind him, almost in his
shadow as if an afterthought or maybe deliberate placement by the
artist. The crowd of Nauvoo citizens surrounding the rows of
Legionnaires with their rifles is comprised of people wearing black,
many shady-looking and pale faced figures, one baby holds a trumpet.
Among the onlookers are three men dressed in black military uniforms on
horses, clearly disrupting the citizens who’re listening to the last
public address of their supreme leader.</p>
<p>The painting is fascinating, but far more fascinating is the historical
context it depicts. The Nauvoo Legion is there because Nauvoo was under
a declaration of martial law Jo had declared to keep himself safe from
the state militia sent there by the Governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford.
The 3 men dressed in black military uniforms are there to arrest Joseph
Smith for inciting riot, manufacturing counterfeit money, and committing
treason by declaring martial law. He’d spent the previous 4 years
fueling tensions with the non-Mormon settlements surrounding Nauvoo, as
any good criminal kingpin does, and the whole region was on the
precipice of civil war to the point that the Governor of Illinois had
traveled over 120 miles on horseback to handle matters personally and
keep his state from spiralling out of control as had happened with
Governor Lilburn Boggs in Missouri during the Mormon war of 1838. Joseph
Smith’s personal military numbered over 3,300 men and over 1,300 state
militiamen surrounded the Mormon settlement awaiting thousands of
reinforcements from Missouri and the Governor’s order to lay siege to
the city.</p>
<p>Sadly, though, that portrait will never usurp the fictional portraits of
the prophet studying his gold plates as he and Oliver Cowdery translate
the Book of Mormon. That’s because the church isn’t just hiding it’s
history, it’s hiding <em>from</em> its history, which is far more insidious.</p>
<p>The propagandized prophet started with the man himself and his legions
of sycophants have been generationally pushing the lies ever since.
People talk about problems in Mormon history like the historicity of the
Books of Abraham or Mormon, polygamy, plagiarism from Adam Clarke’s
Biblical commentary, the Kinderhook Plates as if those are indictments
of Jo’s claims to divinity. To contend over these issues is fighting on
the battlefield laid out by the correlated narrative of lies and half
truths. I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in fighting on a
battlefield with a tactical disadvantage where the bodies of skeptics
lie slain by grand battles since the inception of the religion. I will
fight there but I’m far more interested in a battlefield where I can sit
at a tactical advantage; and luckily for us, the soft social science of
history lays out that strategically advantageous battlefield for us; all
we have to do is recognize it exists and drag our opponent kicking and
screaming away from their home field advantage.</p>
<p>How do we fight on a level playing field? A simple question. Tell me one
quality of Joseph Smith that makes him a good person. The apologist
doesn’t have to even prove that Jo had visitations with angels,
literally translated a historical record of gold plates written in
reformed Egyptian by ancient Native American Jews; just give me one
quality of Jo’s character that’s worthy of calling him a good person. At
this stage of the battle, the apologist doesn’t even have to prove the
existence of god, that god communicates with humans, that those humans
are prophets, that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that he didn’t stray
toward becoming a fallen prophet at any point in his life, those are
conversations that can happen once the first salvo is fired and that
first salvo is proving a single act in Jo’s life that was done out of
pure altruism. They may say that he did the most important thing in
American history, he restored the one true gospel, that’s the most moral
thing a person could do, but that’s an unacceptable answer when we view
the man through a naturalistic lens. Why? Because starting a religion in
nearly every case of human history has led to more suffering than
welfare of humans. Religions are started for the sole benefit of the guy
who says I speak for god and anybody who doesn’t believe me is a
heretic, an infidel, less than human and we can therefore justify
torturing, enslaving, and killing them. Therefore, starting a religion
is one of the most immoral and malevolent things a person can do. An
apologist who makes this argument is already starting the battle by
firing the first volley at themselves.</p>
<p>Without getting lost in the argument of whether or not there’s such a
thing as a purely selfless act, there’s absolutely nothing in Jo’s life
which exhibits altruism, compassion, kindness, genuine love, charity, or
any other trait worthy of respect. His life was marked by one selfish
act to the next with no regard for the cost or damage caused by his
relentless pursuit of wealth, power, and control, and his insatiable
envy for what lay beyond his reach.</p>
<p>I’ve often wondered why it is that historians spend so much time on Jo’s
life pre-Book of Mormon; pre-religion, pre-public persona of a prophet,
seer, and revelator. That drive lies in establishing patterns of
deception, fraud, and pathological lying for short-term
self-aggrandizement that carried him into his public ministry. If we can
prove Jo lied before 1830, then what reason do we have to believe he
wasn’t lying after 1830 as a prophet of god? That’s a reasonable
justification for studying so thoroughly his early life but at the end
of the day if it's done with the agenda to prove he didn’t actually talk
to god it’s completely unnecessary. That’s because we can look at his
life after he published the Book of Mormon and founded the Church of
Christ which reveals those same patterns of deception, fraud, and
pathological lying for short-term self-aggrandizement. No matter how
many times we shatter every mirror of this propagandized version of the
prophet, he reappears with a crooked smile and weathered face to steal
away the livelihood, passions, and very lives of ourselves and our loved
ones who return to church every week and continue to sing praise to the
man who lied about everything. Once Mormons have given everything to the
church and the legacy of this man, they devolve to a childlike status of
dependence on the parasite that extracted their autonomy from them to
begin with.</p>
<p>To capture today’s episode, let’s close with a quote from William Law,
second counselor in the First Presidency who left the Church in 1844
after he learned about polygamy and published the Nauvoo Expositor.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One trait was [Joseph’s] jealousy of his friends, lest any of them
should be esteemed before him in the eyes of the Church or of the
public. He would destroy his best friend for the sake of a few hundred
dollars. It was his policy to get away with a man's money, first,
because he wanted it, and second, because he believed that in getting
a man's money he deprived him of power and position, and left him in a
measure helpless and dependent. He was a tyrant; self-exaltation and
gratification of his grosser passions with an entire disregard of
others rights. [sic] And of all morality, led to his destruction at
last.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are so many more stories in early Mormonism I want to share with
you.</p>
<p>There are thousands of podcasts out there better than this so I’ll
release you until next week while I try to figure out exactly how they
do it.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 4 - JealousyRoad to Carthage 3 - Voracity2020-07-23T20:00:00-07:002020-07-23T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/07/23/road-to-carthage-3-voracity<p>Road to Carthage 3 - Voracity</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine debauchery and psychedelics in early
Mormonism.</p>
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<p>Try explaining the Mormon health code to skeptical non-Mormons; I dare
you. This last weekend I had the opportunity to go camping with our
quarantine buddies who’re fellow atheists but didn’t grow up in
Mormonism. As we drank our mild drinks of barley and consumed some herbs
in the season thereof, for a bit of entertainment we played the Book of
Mormon musical soundtrack. After the first song they had dozens of
questions about Mormon culture, praxis, and theology. We spent the rest
of the evening doing this much to everybody’s amusement, especially
yours truly. I always get a kick out of explaining deep Mormon stuff to
people who know almost nothing about it.</p>
<p>Of course, at some point in the night, the conversation shifted to the
Mormon health code, known as the Word of Wisdom. According to the Word
of Wisdom, Mormons can’t drink hot drinks, which applies to coffee and
tea because they have addictive caffeine, but not hot coco; they can’t
drink cold coffee or cold tea because they’re brewed and have caffeine,
but cold sugary soda with caffeine is acceptable because it isn’t
brewed, even though it has caffeine. In the Word of Wisdom, mild drinks
of barley are permitted, but beer is absolutely forbidden in Mormon
culture. Wine of your own make is also permitted according to the text,
but completely forbidden in Mormon culture. A largely vegetarian diet is
encouraged and meat is only permitted sparingly when plant foods are out
of season but most Mormons today are overweight with colons full of red
meat. Also, tobacco is forbidden except for use on cattle and for
rubbing on wounds, and this is one of the few things in Mormon culture
that’s actually consistent with the text, but consuming herbs in the
season thereof only refers to the seasonings you use on your steak and
has nothing to do with herbal teas, medicinal plants, or therapeutic use
of plants unless they’re in pill form from a doctor.</p>
<p>How do we explain these major inconsistencies from the word of wisdom’s
text to modern practice? “We follow the guidance of modern prophets and
the Word of Wisdom isn’t a commandment, it’s just wisdom.” This
explanation only seems to confuse the uninitiated when they try to wrap
their mind around it. Frankly, there are many teachings and practices in
the modern church which don’t trace their roots to Mormon scripture, or
if they do it’s often been changed so much so as to be nearly
unrecognizable from the text. According to the text, Mormonism is
socialistic, the Telestial kingdom is hell, great and spacious buildings
are the very quintessence of evil, god is a singular eternal entity,
black people can only go to heaven as slaves because of the curse, only
the prophet has the powers of sealing, and guys need ten virgin wives to
reach the highest level of the celestial kingdom. However, in modern
Mormon culture, the Church is viciously capitalistic and probably the
wealthiest religion in the world certainly in America, the Telestial
kingdom is so good a person would kill themselves to get there, you can
only get to heaven by doing special handshakes in one of the
church-owned great and spacious buildings and the largest buildings in
Utah are owned by the church, god isn’t so much the singular entity, but
a member of the council of gods we can eventually join, black people can
now go to heaven but they’re still cursed with dark skin, temple workers
have the powers of sealing, and a guy gets excommunicated for practicing
polygamy and excommunication means damnation. Truly, in order to learn
about Mormonism, you’ll learn almost nothing about the modern practice
by reading the standard scriptures. You have to be a member and attend
for years before all the quirks and features of Mormon culture begin to
come into focus.</p>
<p>And yes, it takes years. Mormons don’t cast their pearls before swine or
teach the meat before the milk. New members can become very
uncomfortable trying to learn these mannerisms and cultural
interpretations of scripture because they’re playing bocce ball when
everything in Mormonism is insider baseball. This insider knowledge
trend is really highlighted when it comes to the history of the church.
Information you learn in 7 hours of googling and reading or watching
YouTube videos will teach you more Mormon history than decades in the
church. An astute googler will have the upper hand on most lifelong
members of the church in one afternoon.</p>
<p>With that in mind, today we’re going to focus on an aspect of Mormon
history which gets relatively little attention. We hear in gospel
doctrine class, seminary, and even in primary, the story of Joseph Smith
refusing alcohol as a sedative for his leg surgery. This story is used
as an example of how important it is to adhere to the Word of Wisdom’s
prohibition on alcohol. Even Joseph Smith, before he was visited by the
savior and heavenly father, knew how bad alcohol was, and then we talk
about how the WoW came about and Emma’s disgust in cleaning up tobacco
spit being the catalyst for the Word of Wisdom’s creation.</p>
<p>As is always the case when we learn little snippets of Mormon history in
church, there’s always more to the story which renders these lessons
completely untrue and reveals them to be the white-washed cult
propaganda they really are.</p>
<p>As soon as we dig one layer beneath the surface of these stories, we
find a long history of debauchery and intemperance by the prophet. I’ve
also postulated on this podcast and with my co-authors on multiple
papers that this intemperance became a structural and active ingredient
in early Mormon spiritual practices.</p>
<p>We’ll start in the New York period of Joseph Smith’s life, and for this
period I am going to work my way through all five volumes of historian
Dan Vogel’s series of books called <em>Early Mormon Documents</em>. A huge
thanks to long-time listener and supporter, Jay Mumford, for sending me
this set early in my research career! All I’ve done is gone to the
index of each volume and looked at the pages listed in the index for
Joseph Smith’s use of alcohol. There are a <em>lot</em> of page numbers, and
there are probably more than are actually listed in the index, because
indexers miss things sometimes. But we’ll just work from the index, and
that’s a place to get us started.</p>
<p>We could spend the entire episode talking just about Jo Sr.’s
alcoholism. We already touched on this a few episodes ago so instead
this is all about Jo and his church. Just keep in mind that alcohol
abuse ran in the family. Joseph Smith Sr. was enough of a drunk that
when he gave his son Hyrum a patriarchal blessing, it included the line,
“Thou hast always stood by thy father, and reached forth the helping
hand to lift him up when he was in affliction; and though he has been
out of the way through wine, thou hast never forsaken him nor laughed
him to scorn” (EMD 1:470). As Patriarch of the church and Patriarch of
the Smith family, it’s clear Jo Sr. felt a certain guilt about his
vices.</p>
<p>If we read deeper into the language there, the eldest brother Hyrum was
the responsible adult of the household who picked up the slack for his
alcoholic dad. By the way, it’s also interesting that the blessing
implies that wine was his drink of choice, but I think this was just
stylized biblical language. Most of the documentary evidence points to
the Smiths drinking whiskey, cider, and beer. As we discussed a couple
episodes ago, soon after the Smiths moved to New York, they started a
pushcart business selling cake, cider, and beer. As a reporter described
the family business after interviewing a bunch of Manchester residents
in 1893, “On special days, at general musters, elections and political
meetings, he turned out with the whole Smith family. They put their
cheap merchandise on sale, with cakes, beer, hard cider and boiled
eggs.” This same source goes on to say that Joe Jr. “was the chief
vagabond of this New England gypsy family. Horses, whiskey, craft and
story telling characterized his worldly career” (EMD 3:204).</p>
<p>This cake and beer sales business is only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s
take a look at general statements by Smiths’ neighbors about them being
drinkers, and then we can move to specifics for this period. One 1833
statement signed by 11 Manchester, New York neighbors says the Smiths
“were not only a lazy, indolent set of men, but also intemperate” (EMD
2:19). In the lingo of the day, intemperate means they drank
excessively, as opposed to the temperance movements working to abolish
alcohol which wouldn’t be successful for another century after these
statements were made. The term “intemperance” will come up a lot today.
Another 1833 statement, signed by 51 residents of Palmyra New York, said
the Smiths, and Joe in particular, “were destitute of moral character,
and addicted to vicious habits” (EMD 2:49). The “vicious habits” they
were referring to could mean an assortment of conduct but certainly
included drinking. Joseph Rogers, who lived about 10 miles from Joe in
Phelpstown but knew Joe and frequently visited Palmyra, said he “knew at
least one hundred farmers in the twins of Phelps, Manchester, and
Palmyra, N.Y., who would make oath that Jo Smith the Mormon prophet was
a liar, intemperate, and a base imposter” (EMD 2:205).</p>
<p>In 1881, William Kelley interviewed Manchester, New York neighbor Mary
Bryant, who “Says Smith was a drun[k]ard,” but she only knew this by
neighborhood rumor; she never saw him drunk (EMD 2:83). In 1880, the
Reverend Chester C. Thorne interviewed Manchester neighbor William
Bryant, who had known Joe “to some extent” and said he “was a lazy
drinking fellow, loose in his habits in everway” (EMD 2:169). Palmyra’s
Presbyterian pastor Jesse Townsend, in an 1833 letter, said he had known
Joe for ten years and considered him “a person of questionable
character, of intemperate habits” (EMD 3:21, 25). A Dr. Williams, who
moved to Palmyra in 1825 and whose reminiscences about the Smith are
recorded in an 1854 book called <em>The Californian Crusoe</em>. He says that
at age 20, Joe was notorious in the neighborhood “as a drunken, lying,
and dissipated young profligate” (EMD 3:56).</p>
<p>For more specifics of Joe’s drunkenness, I’ll start with Orsamus Turner,
who lived in Palmyra during his apprenticeship in the printing business
in 1818 and 1819. His personal recollection of Joe was that “He used to
come into the village with little jags of wood, from his backwoods home;
sometimes patronizing a village grocery too freely.” Then Joe would
sometimes come into the printing office and lounge around like an
“inquisitive meddler.” They occasionally blackened his face with ink
when he got in the way of their working the press (EMD 3:49).</p>
<p>In the 19th century, by the way, “groceries” were establishments that
sold alcohol. So Turner is saying he remembers that Joe came to town,
bought alcohol, and then lounged around in the newspaper office,
meddling and asking questions. Then when he’d get too drunk, just like
every college party, the printers would paint stuff on his face and
probably had a howling good time doing it.</p>
<p>Notably as well, one of Jo’s chief sources of fun during this pre-Book
of Mormon era was telling fortunes. If you’re a village fortune teller
looking for information, hanging out in the local newspaper office and
asking questions was the perfect place to get all the latest gossip for
fortune telling.</p>
<p>Pomeroy Tucker, another printer who apprenticed in Palmyra starting in
1820 and lived there for the next 30 years, similarly said that Joseph
Sr. used to bring loads of wood to town to trade for whiskey, and that
the Smith boys “were frequently seen lounging about the stores and shops
in the village.” During this period, the Smiths “were popularly regarded
as an illiterate, whiskey-drinking, shiftless, irreligious race of
people,” with young Joe the worst of the lot (EMD 3:67-69, 132).</p>
<p>Anna Ruth Eaton, who never met Joe but lived in the neighborhood later
and knew many of his neighbors, wrote in her 1881 book <em>The Origin of
Mormonism</em> that as a young man, “Joe never worked save at chopping bees
and raisings, and then whisk[e]y was the impetus and the reward” (EMD
3:147).</p>
<p>Local historian Thomas L. Cook, in an 1830 book, tells an amusing story
which he apparently heard from Lemuel Durfee, who owned the Smith
family’s cabin and leased it to them in 1825 and 1826. As part of the
Smiths’ payment for their lease, Joe worked for Durfee during the
harvest. Cook writes of a humorous example of Jo’s intemperance getting
the best of him.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In those days it was customary to have whiskey, especially through
harvest. When the country was new, fever and ague was quite prevalent
among the new settlers, and to ward off this malady, nearly every
family had a preparation they called No. 6 that was made of red
peppers and other things that were powerful. Early one morning, while
yet in bed, Joseph contemplated the coming day was going to be hot,
and was fearful they might have fish for dinner as he had always heard
that fish would make a man dry. With all this flittering before his
imagination, and to ward off the coming danger of a sun stroke, he got
out of bed, crept softly down stairs and across the old kitchen into
the pantry, but unfortunately he tapped the wrong bottle and instead
of getting whiskey, he took a good big swig out of No. 6, which nearly
strangled him, and upon finding out his mistake, he rushed outdoors to
the well and down went the bucket for water. Mr. Durfee, hearing the
rumpus, got out of bed to find the cause of this tumult, and upon
looking out of the window, saw the sainted Joseph strangling and black
in the face, trying to drink water out of the old ‘oaken bucket that
hung in the well’” (EMD 3:245).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alcohol as a vector for herbal medicine is a subject we’ll be discussing
extensively in a moment.</p>
<p>Dr. Alexander McIntyre, the Smith family’s favorite physician, said in a
now-lost affidavit that we only have paraphrases of, that “Joe got
drunk, stole sugar, got beaten for it, and told the doctor who dressed
his bruises that he had a fight with the devil” (EMD 3:172). This
probably happened sometime in the mid-1820s when the Smith family was
known for farming maple sugar and making molasses. There’s a good chance
that Joe stole the sugar for the purpose of mixing it with his booze,
because as our next source shows, sugared cider was one of his drinks of
choice.</p>
<p>Manchester, New York neighbor Barton Stafford said in an 1833 affidavit,
“Joseph Smith, Sen. was a noted drunkard and most of the family followed
his example, and Joseph Jr. especially, who was very much addicted to
intemperance.” Sometime in 1827, Joe “one day while at work in my
father’s field, got quite drunk on a composition of cider, molasses,
and water. Finding his legs to refuse their office he leaned upon the
fence and hung for sometime; at length recovering again, he fell to
scuffling with one of the workmen, who tore his shirt nearly off from
him. His wife who was at our house on a visit, appeared very much
grieved at his conduct, and to protect his back from the rays of the
sun, and conceal his nakedness, threw her shawl over his shoulders and
in that plight escorted the Prophet home” (EMD 2:22-23).</p>
<p>So not only did Joe get so falling-down drunk that he started a fight
and ended up half naked, but he had to be covered and escorted home by
his new wife, Emma, thus establishing a long-running pattern of Emma
cleaning up for Jo’s messes.</p>
<p>John Stafford told this same story to William Kelley in an interview in
1881. He said it was</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Common then for any body to have drink in [the] field those
days[.] one time Joe while working for some one one after he was
married They had boiled cider[.] Joe came in with his shirt
torn--his wife felt bad about it & when they went home She put shawl
on him--had not been fighting--he was a little contentious but never
saw him fight--known him to scuffle (EMD 2:87, 121).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So John Stafford wants us to know that Joe didn’t rip his shirt in a
“fight,” just a drunken “scuffle.”</p>
<p>Several other members of the Stafford family told similar stories.
Christopher Stafford said in an 1885 affidavit, my favorite year of all
time because that year saw the first Benz Motorwagen internal combustion
automobile, “Jo got drunk while we were haying for my uncle, Wm.
Stafford; also at a husking at our house, and stayed overnight. I have
often seen him drunk” (EMD 2:194). Cornelius R. Stafford said, “I have
seen Jo in drunken fights; father and son were frequently drunk” (EMD
2:197).</p>
<p>Joshua Stafford told a story, which we quoted last episode, about Joe
trying to borrow a horse so he could go dig up some treasure. Joe
promised that he would let Stafford take his life if he didn’t return
the horse. Stafford says Joe was “nearly intoxicated” during the
conversation (EMD 2:28).</p>
<p>David Stafford said in an 1833 affidavit that Joseph Sr. was a notorious
drunk and gambler, and that Joe Jr.,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>very aptly followed his father’s example, and in some respects was
worse. When intoxicated he was very quarrelsome. While at work one
time, a dispute arose between us (he having drinked a little too
freely) and some hard words passed between us, and as usual with him
at such times, was for fighting. He got the advantage of me in the
scuffle, and a gentleman by the name of Ford interfered, when Joe
turned to fighting him. We both entered a complaint against him and he
was fined for the breach of the Peace (EMD 2:56-57).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In fairness to Joe, we should also tell his side of this story. He said
in 1842 that the Staffords had set their hog into the Smiths’ corn
field, and Smiths’ dog protected the corn by biting off the hog’s ear.
David Stafford and six other men shot the dog, and Joe attacked them and
single-handedly beat up all six of them. Yeah… okay Jo… I’m sure that’s
exactly what happened.</p>
<p>Around the same time he talked to John Stafford, researcher William
Kelley also interviewed Hiram Jackway, who said that “Joe and his father
got drunk once. . . . It was in the hay field; Joe and his father
wrestled, and Joe threw the old man down, and he cried. . . . They drank
cider. . . . They could walk, but they cut up and acted funny.” That was
the only time Jackway remembered seeing them drunk (EMD 2:86, 114).
Jackway later corrected himself in a statement given to John H. Gilbert,
saying he recalled that the Smiths got drunk not on cider, but on
whiskey (EMD 2:532).</p>
<p>Another family, the Saunders brothers, gave Kelley mixed reviews of the
Smiths’ drinking. Orlando Saunders, who liked the Smiths and vehemently
defended them, said that “everybody drank a little in those days, and
the Smiths with the rest; they never got drunk to my knowledge” (EMD
2:103). His brother Benjamin Saunders agreed. “It was rulable for people
to drink in those times[.] The Smiths were no worse than others, and
not as bad as some, but they would take a drink. also in haying and
harvest.” However, Benjamin said he never saw them drunk (EMD 2:137).
The third brother, Lorenzo Saunders, said that “Them days people drank
liquor everybody drank whiskey & the Smiths with the rest,” and he
recalled a specific incident when Joseph Sr. was drunk in a tavern (EMD
2:157, 164).</p>
<p>If we simply rely on the correlated narrative that Jo refused alcohol at
age 7 for his leg surgery, then skip over everything else by jumping to
the Word of Wisdom in 1833, we could be under the impression that Jo was
a temperate fellow. Coincidentally, 1833 is the year Prudence Crandall,
a white woman, was arrested for conducting an educational academy for
black women in Connecticut. History is fun. Yet, when Mormons learn that
Jo ordered tobacco and wine a few hours before the shootout at Carthage,
they’re amazed, especially considering the modern Mormon prohibitions on
alcohol. Well, if we consider the statements of all these neighbors of
the Smiths, both friends and enemies, the reality comes into focus. If
there was just one statement as an outlier that Jo and the Smiths got
drunk, we’d have little reason to believe it. But, because account after
account demonstrates Jo’s love for the drink with remarkable consistency
over decades, even showing different perspectives of the same story
given by different people decades apart, no historian in their right
mind could conclude Jo didn’t drink.</p>
<p>We have so many consistent statements. Why don’t we discuss that
debauchery at the next level. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw
a massive shift in medicine administration methods. Plant medicines
which are ingested by pills or injected into the bloodstream today were
mostly infused in topical ointments and alcohol or teas in the centuries
before. Yes, today we’re talking psychedelics in early Mormonism as I
believe any proper treatment of Joseph Smith and early Mormonism
requires. Jo’s overconsumption of alcohol requires an examination of
what may have been in that alcohol, particularly when it explains all
the angels and cool stuff gods the guy claimed to have seen.</p>
<p>This is a theory of Mormon origins that I’ve helped pioneer in a paper I
co-authored with Robert Beckstead, Cody Noconi, and Michael Winkelman in
the <em>Journal of Psychedelic Studies</em>. Long-time listeners of the podcast
already know about this, but if you’re new to the podcast and you’ve
never heard of this before, it’s my pleasure to introduce the
Smith-entheogen theory to you. In the most simple terms, the
Smith-entheogen theory is the idea that Joe’s and his followers’
visions, revelations, and religious experiences may have been the result
of psychedelics.</p>
<p>First let’s define the term entheogen. It was initially coined by
psychedelics researchers in the 1970s to describe any plant which
facilitates a specific type of altered state of consciousness. Now it’s
used to refer more to a <em>process</em> of using psychedelics rather than to
the plant medicines themselves. Psychedelics can be used in
non-entheogenic contexts, during which they’re often referred to as
party drugs. Doing mushrooms with friends and watching a funny movie is
taking psychedelics. Doing mushrooms after a period of fasting and
meditation with a babysitter, face mask to block the light, relaxing
music, and a debrief session afterwards is an entheogenic session, in
which you’re using plant medicines to have a spiritual or mystical
experience.</p>
<p>The clinical research on entheogens indicates they’re able to produce
genuine mystical experiences that are indistinguishable from mystical
experiences that occur spontaneously or within a religious context.
Users may experience not only visions, but also a sense of union with
God, transcendence of time and space, and connection with sacredness,
complete dissolution of ego, a total breakdown of barriers delineating
self from reality. In fact, entheogens have been used in spiritual
rituals across the globe for thousands of years.</p>
<p>Now, there are two parts to the Smith-entheogen thesis. First, Joe using
entheogens himself. The dude came up with some crazy stories and saw
some cool stuff in the woods; if he were tripping we can not only
explain, but replicate his experiences. Second, he may have been dosing
people in order to get them to have spiritual experiences too. This is a
long-time practice of shamans across cultures and centuries. Simply put,
Joseph Smith founded a religion whose major selling point was the power
of the Holy Spirit and personal revelation. Ask a Mormon today what’s
unique about their Church, and they’ll say “modern revelation.” In early
Mormonism, converts experienced dreams, visions, tongues, miracles, and
spiritual raptures which are nearly absent from the church today. The
power of psychedelics is a missing puzzle piece worth examination that’s
been overlooked by Mormon history academics for as long as the field has
existed and that’s largely because Mormons don’t do drugs and Mormons
are also the majority of people who study Mormon history.</p>
<p>The evidence for chemical assistance points all the way back to 1823,
when Jo saw his first angel. This is from Lu B. Cake, a historian who
interviewed a lot of people from the South Bainbridge, New York area,
where Joe lived for a while when he was employed by Josiah Stowell.
Unfortunately we don’t know who told Mr. Cake this information, so I
can’t confirm this story. Honestly, this may just be based on a
creative misreading of Joe’s own official history. But Cake claims that
on September 21, 1823-- the day that Moroni first appeared to Joe and
told him about the golden plates-- “Joe got swore, lied and swindled,
contrary to revelation. . . . Joe claims that while in bed this drunken
September 21st, an angel came to him . . . Whether it was the angel, or
alcohol, that gave Joe the inspiration, is the question; for although
drunk on September 21st, yet on September 22d he claims that he found
the plates in the place to which he was directed” (EMD 4:192-93).</p>
<p>I love that line: “Whether it was the angel, or alcohol, that gave Joe
the inspiration, is the question.” Indeed it is the question, and this
is a weighty question which stands at the center of the Smith-entheogen
theory; I’m just glad a contemporary said it too. My point is, we can’t
measure “God”. We can’t take one unit of God and put it in a vial to
determine its effect on a thing. Any history which posits the variable
of “God” into the hypothesis, or even carves out a place for God to be a
possibility, isn’t history, it’s theology. Since ethical historians
don’t have access to God when formulating models, naturalistic
explanations must be found. You can put 10 milligrams of psilocin,
lysergic acid, dimethyltryptamine, THC, or any other entheogen in a vial
and measure its effects on a thing. You also get similar results among
study participants with these variables when other variables are
properly controlled for. Jo sees angels and gods, how does that happen?
We can’t replicate his exact experience, but we can replicate the
altered state of consciousness which causes people to hallucinate. Since
first publishing and presenting on this topic at Sunstone in 2017, you’d
be amazed how many people have walked up to me at subsequent conferences
and said they’ve had their own sacred grove experiences with
psychedelics. I know some of you are even listening to this right now,
to you few wonderful folks I say don’t let the ground gnomes steal your
treasure. I digress, back to Jo’s early life.</p>
<p>The role of psychedelics in magic and occult traditions is a deep and
treasured artifact of post-enlightenment history. Usage of these plant
medicines dates back thousands of years to the Greek Classical era but
the enlightenment brought about the advent of the printing press and
libraries began to fill with books on the occult.</p>
<p>Many occult philosophy books carried guidance and instructions for the
usage of psychedelics as entheogens, as well as noting other more
nefarious purposes for which plant concoctions could be utilized.
Henrich Cornelius Agrippa’s <em>Three Books of Occult Philosophy</em> deals
extensively with plant medicines. Throughout his work, Agrippa notes the
power “an herb...with which magicians, drinking of, can prophesy.”
Additionally, in Chapter 43 titled “Of Perfumes or Suffumigations; their
Manner and Power,” Agrippa notes symptomology consistent with
entheogenic sessions after suffumigating (smoking) certain herbs. They
are cited as providing the user with the ability to prophecy, conjure
various spirits with both auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as
cause experiences of divine inspiration, all of which are listed
“celestial gifts”. For example, Agrippa says,</p>
<p>“suffumigations...that are proper to the Stars, are of great force for
the opportune receiving of celestial gifts under the rays of the
Stars...[S]uffumigations are wont to be used by them that are about to
soothsay or predict for to affect their fancy or conception; which
suffumigations, indeed, being duly appropriated to any certain deities,
do fit us to receive divine inspiration. So they say that fumes… doth
make one to foresee things to come and doth conduce to prophesying… by
certain vapors,... airy spirits are presently raised, as also
thunderings and lightnings, and such things… So, they say, that if…
henbane, and hemlock, be made a fume, that spirits will presently come
together; hence they are called spirits’ herbs… the juice of hemlock and
henbane,... makes spirits and strange shapes appear;”</p>
<p>The intoxication provided by these plant based preparations were
obviously recognized as a powerful aid in magical operations and were
clearly utilized as such by the average cunning-folk of antebellum
America. Whether for conjuration of spirits as symptomatic of
hallucination, or the general open minded effects conducing to
“prophecy,” plant medicines were a functional variable of magical
praxis.</p>
<p>By 1827, Jo was becoming steadily more steeped in these esoteric arts
and traditions. If Joseph Sr. didn’t pass the relevant
plant-manipulation knowledge to his son, Jo magic mentors like Luman
Walters who made their living by selling medicinal potions. After Joe
found or manufactured the plates, his drinking didn’t stop just because
he got the plates and felt called as a prophet. Earlier I quoted Joe’s
employer Barton Stafford about Joe getting into a drunken fight in the
hayfield sometime after getting the plates. At the end of that account,
Stafford goes on to say this: “As an evidence of his piety and devotion,
when intoxicated, he [Joe] frequently made his religion the topic of
conversation” (EMD 2:22-23). Quite a striking quote. Jo not only drank a
bunch, but probably infused psychedelics into his whiskey, then he would
expound on the mysteries of his personal god and the religion he was
gestating at this time. This pattern would carry him comfortably into
Kirtland, Ohio.</p>
<p>In December 1827 Joe moved to Harmony, Pennsylvania to work on the Book
of Mormon translation there with Martin Harris as his scribe. In 1880,
reporter Frederick G. Mather interviewed some Harmony, Pennsylvania
residents about this period of Joseph’s life. According to the area’s
residents, “Joe was in the habit of drinking liquor too freely for the
founder of a religion, and perhaps he often mistook a hilarious
condition for a very spiritual condition, and undertook to perform on a
grand scale very much as other drunken men do without realizing the
magnitude of his task and his own utter inability to perform it.” (EMD
4:154). This quote specifically describes a fascinating aspect of
psychedelic use. The user has profound experiences but the sober
observer only sees the person acting sporadic or speaking incoherently.
It can become quite hilarious for the observer while simultaneously
being the most mystically intense experience for the user complete with
hallucinations perceived as angelic visitations.</p>
<p>Joe didn’t limit his drunkenness to when he was off the clock. Martin
Harris, NSSM, one of the three witnesses and Joseph Smith’s scribe for
this portion of the Book of Mormon translation, was once tried before a
church court in Kirtland, Ohio for telling A. C. Russell that “Joseph
drank too much liquor when he was translating the Book of Mormon and
that he wrestled with many men and threw them &c.” Harris defended
himself by saying that “he did not tell Esqr Russell that bro. Joseph
drank too much liquor while translating the Book of Mormon, but this
thing took place before the Book of Mormon was translated” (EMD
2:282-83). The high council let him off with a chastisement. We hear
stories how Joseph Smith could wrestle any man and throw them, turns out
he was wasted during a bunch of those fights.</p>
<p>Although Harris walked back his claim about Joe drinking during
translation, the story is confirmed by Harmony, Pennsylvania constable
Levi Lewis. He says “that he saw him (Smith) intoxicated at three
different times while he was composing the Book of Mormon” (EMD 4:297).
In fact, Martin’s retraction doesn’t say Joe wasn’t <em>drunk</em> during
translation. It just says Joe didn’t <em>drink</em> during translation. The
drinking happened beforehand. And Martin’s statement about Joe drinking
“before the Book of Mormon was translated” is ambiguous. You could
take it to mean that the drinking happened at an earlier stage of Joe’s
life. Or, more likely, you could take it to mean that drinking happened
right before some of their translation sessions. We know from Lemuel
Durfee’s account which I read earlier in this episode that on at least
one occasion, Joe drank whiskey first thing in the morning before a long
day of work in the field. So why not before a long day of translation
work? Lots of artists use plant medicines… or… you know… a bit of
grandpappy’s ol’ cough medicine to put them in the creative state of
mind.</p>
<p>Joe continued to drink recreationally, as well. John H. Gilbert, the
Book of Mormon’s printer, remembered that during the printing, 23-year
old Joe “was a lazy, good-for-nothing lout, chiefly noted for his
capacity to hang around a corner grocery and punish poor whisky” (EMD
2:520). “Poor whiskey” here could refer to whiskey of one’s own make or
extremely low quality whiskey made from “doctored alcohol” which means
it was sometimes made with strychnine, tobacco juice, red pepper, other
psychoactive plants, and tons of other nasty stuff, often downright
poisonous. European settlers sold this stuff to Native Americans at
insanely inflated prices who called it ishkodewaaboo which translates to
firewater.</p>
<p>In 1830 we get our first evidence of Jo providing his early converts
with a proper shamanic initiation in the form of the church’s first
miracle. In his 1839 history, Jo describes how in early August 1830,
Joseph Knight and his wife visited Joe and Emma’s home in Harmony,
Pennsylvania so that Joe could confirm them. Confirmation is the LDS
ritual which is supposed to convey the gift of the Holy Spirit, with all
of its revelatory and miraculous power. This was a great opportunity for
Jo to provide the mysteries of the ancients to a skeptical prospective
convert. Importantly, Joe decided that before the confirmation ceremony,
they should all sit down to take the sacrament together. So he went out
to buy some wine.</p>
<p>But as Joe was on his way to buy the wine, an angel appeared to him and
delivered a revelation which is now Section 27 of the Doctrine and
Covenants. The revelation says in part, “it mattereth not what ye shall
eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament . . .
Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, that you shall not purchase
wine neither strong drink of your enemies; . .. Wherefore, you shall
partake of none except it is made new among you; yea, in this my
Father’s kingdom which shall be built up on the earth.”</p>
<p>Jo returned to the house and, “Agreeable to this revelation we prepared
some wine of our own make” (EMD 1:130). Now, several things to notice
here. A lot of modern-day Mormons don’t realize that the Church’s
current practice of water in plastic sippy cups for the sacrament isn’t
the way things were always done. Nineteenth-century Christians drank
actual wine during communion, and sometimes they drank a pretty good
amount. Section 27 is part of the basis for using water, because it says
it doesn’t matter what you eat or drink. But what the revelation
actually suggests isn’t that you use water; it’s that you use “wine of
your own make.”</p>
<p>It’s interesting that Joe somehow came up with some “wine of their own
make” on such short notice. As far as I know, there’s no other evidence
that Joe or his family made their own wine. But they did make their own
homebrew of boiled cider, molasses, and water, as we heard earlier from
Barton Stafford. When Joe says, “we prepared some wine of our own make,”
what he actually means is, we used my own home-brew. And who knows what
was actually in that bottle? Evidence we’ll discuss in a second makes
such an accusation of dosed alcohol explicit.</p>
<p>During this visit to the Knight family Jo… you know what… I’ll just let
the church tell the story for themselves from an Ensign article in
January 1989.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“While there, [Joseph] challenged Newel Knight to pray vocally. In
the attempt, Newel was attacked by an evil spirit that lifted him from
the floor “and tossed him about most fearfully.” Neighbors gathered
and then saw the Prophet command the devil in the name of Jesus Christ
to depart. Newel felt great relief and gladly accepted baptism. (This
exorcism was the first miracle performed in the restored church)”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1989/01/the-knight-family-ever-faithful-to-the-prophet?lang=eng"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1989/01/the-knight-family-ever-faithful-to-the-prophet?lang=eng<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s a little deeper than that as Jo actually reported it. “I went and
found him suffering very much in his mind… and his body acted upon in a
most strange manner. His visage and limbs [were] distorted and twisted
into every possible shape and appearances, and finally he was caught up
off the floor of the apartment and tossed about most fearfully… Knight
was unable to speak during his convulsions.” Newel testified about the
occurrence during one of the trials in 1830 when Jo was arrested in
Colesville, “I felt myself attracted upward and remained for some time
enwrapped in contemplation insomuch that I know not what was going on in
the room. By and by I felt some weight pressing upon my shoulder and the
side of my head; which served to recall me to a sense of my situation,
and I found that the Spirit of the Lord had actually caught me up off
the floor, and that my shoulder and head were pressing against the
beams.”</p>
<p>Each of these are common descriptions of anticholinergic symptomatology.
You take too much datura and this is what happens. You take more than
this amount and you very well could die. The stuff about him levitating
is what mystics have experienced for millennia in what we call today
astral projection, the sense of leaving one’s body which can easily be
induced via psychedelics and is also sometimes experienced during
near-death experiences. Later testimonies from Newel, his father Joseph
Knight Sr., and Martin Harris said they saw the devil come out of Newel
once exorcised. Josiah Stowell at a later date said “he saw a devil as
large as a woodchuck leave the man and run across the floor” while
Newel’s dad at a later time said “he saw the devil leave the possessed
and run off like a yellow dog.” I attribute these to either shared
hallucinations not uncommon in mass dosings as we’ll see during the
Kirtland Temple Dedication ceremony, or later misrememberings of the
event. Regardless, Newel had a profound mystical experience perfectly
explained by Jo providing him with a strong dosage. Before this
experience he was skeptical, after his shamanistic experience with the
prophet of god, he joined the church and remained a life-long member. Jo
was in the process of developing a formula he would implement at larger
and larger scales until restricted access to entheogens became a
necessity.</p>
<p><strong>Let’s talk about Kirtland, the entheogenic empire of early Mormonism</strong></p>
<p>A crucial piece of evidence for Mormons being dosed with drugs comes
from Kirtland in December 1830 or January 1831. Super interesting
factoid, 1831 is the same year Michael Faraday publicly demonstrated the
electric transformer and generator. As a little background here, Joe had
sent some missionaries West in 1830; that was Oliver Cowdery, P-Cubed
Parley Parker Pratt, John Whitmer, and Zyba Petersen. These guys
converted Hingepin Sidney Rigdon’s congregation of Baptists in Kirtland.
As soon as they arrived, a bunch of charismatic stuff started happening,
including people acting like Natives under the influence of the Holy
Spirit. For instance, they acted out sailing in canoes and scalping
people. During these prayer meetings, participants experienced visions,
and people spoke in tongues, and received revelations, and so forth.
This all started just a few months before Jo himself got to Kirtland. I
speculate that this small group of hand-picked missionaries were trusted
with the keys of the priesthood and were dosing participants during such
meetings.</p>
<p>There was a guy named Jesse Jasper Moss who attended one of these prayer
meetings, and he gives us a strong piece of evidence for people being
dosed. Soon after the missionaries arrived and converted the Kirtland
church,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They began to have visitations of angels among them. I was suspicious
of these angels from the first. When they partook of the sacrament
they always did so at night. In preparation for this they would
exclude everybody from the room but the leaders and would then hang up
blankets and quilts at the windows. When all was ready they would open
the doors and let the people in. I determined to stay through one of
their services of the sacrament, so a friend and I went to meeting
with that intention. He went to sleep just before the time to exclude
the people, and I became possessed of a deaf-and-dumb devil and they
could not make me understand anything. After a time they decided to
leave us alone and go on with their ceremony. My companion awakened
and we saw the whole performance. I became satisfied that their power
was in the wine, so I tried to steal a bottle, and would have
succeeded if I had been wearing the cloak I usually wore.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moss explains that he “was fully satisfied that the wine was medicated,”
and the miracles ceased once he started talking about his suspicions and
told people how close he had come to stealing the wine.</p>
<p>A couple years after moving to Kirtland, Joe received an important
revelation on February 27, 1833. It’s called the Word of Wisdom, and it
gives guidance on things like diet and substance use. It’s currently
canonized as Mormon scripture in Doctrine and Covenants Section 89, and
in fact, the Word of Wisdom is so important today that your Bishop asks
you every year about how well you’re following it, and if they’re not
satisfied with your level of observance, then they don’t let you into
the temple. That, however, is the modern interpretation of the WoW, with
many departures from the actual text itself.</p>
<p>It should be noted that the WoW didn't just come out of thin air. A lot
of people at this time were coming up with ideas on diet restrictions,
cleanliness, and overall good living. Sanitariums were just now starting
to trend in the burned over district and elsewhere, and Ellen G White,
Alexander Campbell, William Miller, and a lot of other people pushing
good living, or diet restriction that were just on the verge of becoming
popular. Dietary advice was a common topic of discussion in the time the
Word of Wisdom was born out of. In many ways these health and diet codes
were also quite revolutionary because the hygiene and diet of Americans
in the 19th century was appalling. Meals of pure meat and carbs washed
down with beer, whiskey, or coffee, never drinking water, and bathing
once a month or less, 5 people sharing a bed and getting terrible rest
every night; we’ve come a long way from our smelly and unhealthy past.</p>
<p>But there was also another pressure: Joe’s wife, Emma. according to
Bloody Brigham Young in the Journal of Discourses, volume 12,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When they assembled together in this room after breakfast, the first
they did was to light their pipes, and, while smoking, talk about the
great things of the kingdom, and spit all over the room, and as soon
as the pipe was out of their mouths a large chew of tobacco would then
be taken. Often when the Prophet entered the room to give the school
instructions he would find himself in a cloud of tobacco smoke. This,
and the complaints of his wife at having to clean so filthy a floor,
made the prophet think upon the matter, and he inquired of the Lord
relating to the conduct of the Elders in using tobacco, and the
revelation known as the Word of Wisdom was the result of his inquiry.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emma was mad at her husband because she had to clean up the floor of the
School of the Prophets that was covered in nasty ol' tobacco spit,
reeking of spitoons and pipe smoke. It took the wisdom and persistence
of his wife to make Joe ask God about how bad tobacco is for you.</p>
<p>Let’s read through some of this revelation. It begins,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A Word of Wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests,
assembled in Kirtland, and the church, and also the saints in Zion. To
be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation
and the word of wisdom, showing forth the order and will of God in the
temporal salvation of all saints in the last days. Given for a
principle with promise, adapted to the capacity of the weak and the
weakest of all saints, who are or can be called saints.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a really important point. Joe appeased Emma by receiving this
revelation, but he still left himself plenty of wiggle room to use
whatever substances he wanted. The revelation very explicitly says, this
is just a recommendation, not a commandment. It’s so weird that the
Church today not only treats this as a commandment, but in fact treats
it as one of the most important commandments!</p>
<p>On the subjects of alcohol and tobacco, the revelation says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you,
behold it is not good, neither meet in the sight of your Father, only
in assembling yourselves together to offer up your sacraments before
him. And, behold, this should be wine, yea, pure wine of the grape of
the vine, of your own make. And, again, strong drinks are not for the
belly, but for the washing of your bodies. And again, tobacco is not
for the body, neither for the belly, and is not good for man, but is
an herb for bruises and all sick cattle, to be used with judgment and
skill.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the revelation recommends against wine, strong drink, and tobacco. It
also goes on to say hot drinks aren’t good for you and that you should
eat meat sparingly, except in winter. However, wine “of your own make”
is allowed for the purpose of taking the sacrament. The revelation also
goes on to commend “all wholesome herbs”-- next time you’re at a party
and somebody busts out a baggy of really dank bud, tell them that’s some
wholesome herb you got there -- and all grains, including grain-based
“mild drinks” like beer. Weird that Mormons today consider beer to be
against the Word of Wisdom, when the revelation explicitly states beer
is cool. You also won’t find modern Mormons taking the part about meat
very seriously. Even the leadership of the church themselves are
“cafeteria Mormons” selecting only the morsels they want to follow for
completely arbitrary reasons.</p>
<p>A notable convert in Kirtland, one of the earliest, bears consideration
here. When the first group of missionaries passed through Kirtland on
their way to Missouri to preach on Native reservations, one of their
first converts was a guy named Frederick G. Williams, or Freddy Willey
as we call him. Eps 25, 135, 188.</p>
<p>Frequent use of entheogens requires a steady supplier of plant
materials. When membership numbers were relatively small and spread out
(1830-32), supplies could have been coordinated by Joseph Smith
personally with little difficulty. However, as membership grew in
Kirtland and Jo’s daily activities increased in number and complexity, a
rising need for a steady supply of plant materials would have increased
in correlation with membership numbers.</p>
<p>A number of the early church heirarchy (including the Smiths, Cowdery,
and Whitmer families in particular), were deeply invested in the study
of pharmaceutical medicine, folk herbcraft and the utilization of
so-called ‘spirituous liquors.’ (Brooke, John (1994) The Refiner’s Fire:
The making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844. Cambridge University Press.
Quinn, D. Michael. (1998) Early Mormonism and the Magical World View.”
Salt Lake City, Utah. Signature Books.) Frederick G. Williams was a
Thomsonian herbal physician practitioner. Born in Oct 1787, Williams
took up the practice of medicine around 1816 after the death of his
sister-in-law during childbirth. Williams gravitated towards Thomsonian
medicine, and was frequently referred to as an ‘herbal’ or ‘vegetable’
doctor. Upon his induction into the religion, Williams was appointed to
the office of Second Counselor to the Prophet, having been practicing
herbal medicine for over a decade and a half.</p>
<p>In 1834, that’s the same year Dmitri Mendeleev, the guy who created the
periodic table of elements was born, the first “anti-Mormon” book was
published under the title Mormonism Unvailed [sic] by Eber D. Howe.
(Listeners can hear the entire audiobook with commentary on the patreon
feed). Howe attributed the WoW exemption carved out for “herb[s] in
the season thereof” to Frederick G. Williams’ influence on Jo. Howe even
obliquely referenced Freddy G. Willey’s herbarium on either side of his
Kirtland home while disparaging his “communion with spirits from other
worlds”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We are next told that every wholesome herb, God ordained for the use
of man!! and we should infer that the writer or the recording angel
had been inducted into the modern use of herbs, by the celebrated
Doct. F. G. Williams... in Kirtland. F. G. Williams is a revised
quack, well known in this vicinity, by his herbarium on either side of
his ho[u]se; but whether he claims protection by right of
letters[,] patent from the General Government[,] or by communion
with spirits from other worlds, we are not authorized to
determine...(Howe, Eber. (1842) The History of the Saints; Or an
Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. [With a Portrait of the Author.]
Leland & Whiting.)”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another aspect of Williams’ involvement in early Mormonism was his
mission journey to proselyte to the Native Americans from late 1830-31.
The same missionary troop who converted Williams and Rigdon’s Kirtland
church were told to commence their missionary efforts and preach “on the
borders by the Lamanites [Native Americans]” (Book of Commandments,
1833) and scout the location for a satellite arm or “stake” to be built
in Missouri. During this journey the missionaries met Williams and he
joined the group to meet with, and proselyte to, the Natives in modern
Kansas City, Missouri, in a Native settlement known as Kaw township,
Missouri. For a botanically-centric physician, an opportunity to meet
with the so-called ‘Lamanites’ and intermingle knowledge of herbcraft
and mysticism with the people who had been using American plants for
millennia would have been an exciting prospect. Dr. Williams’ medical
practice would later reflect this newfound knowledge of “Indian
medicine” from this missionary trip.</p>
<p>During Williams’ mission trip to the Native Americans, the Smith family
took control of his farm as their primary source of income. Freddy kept
track of expenditures and rent under Joseph Smith’s name. By 1834, Jo
had run up a gluttonous bill of $4,613 owed to Williams for land and
farming implement use among other things. (Williams, 2013) The exact
items which ran such a high bill are not listed. Reasonably, $2,000
would have been in rent for the property, but we can be certain that a
bill over $4,600 has plenty of room to include plant medicines which
were frequently being used by Smith in the early Mormon religious
practices. The debt was forgiven when a revelation was given, but never
recorded, that all Mormons should “forgive all debts,” a commandment to
which Williams apparently complied willingly.</p>
<p>In the medical ledgers of Dr. Williams, specific ailments and the
prescribed cures are not listed. However, the number of visits and total
billings are listed alongside the names of the respective patients. Jo
and Hingepin Sidney Rigdon have the highest bills for medicine purchased
from Williams, they were his most lucrative clients. (Williams, 2013)</p>
<p>An 1835 Kirtland-area newspaper ran an advertisement for Williams’
medical practice listing various ailments and frequent Thomsonian cures
for said ailments. Portions are reproduced as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>VEGETABLE</p>
<p>Medicine,</p>
<p>F. G. Williams,</p>
<p>(BOTANIC PHYSICIAN.)</p>
<p>DR. WILLIAMS respectfully informs his old patrons and the public
generally—that he keeps constantly on hand</p>
<p>DR. SAMUEL THOMPSON’S VEGETABLE</p>
<p>M E D I C I N E,</p>
<p>In all its variety, and will furnish to those who may favor him with
their attention, at his residence, unless otherwise employed…</p>
<p>N E R V E P O W D E R.</p>
<p>One of the most useful remedies for cramps of the stomach, and
debility of the nerves; it is also good in hysterical, and
hypochondriacal affections, and convulsions: it may be taken in all
cases with perfect safety, without producing the least unpleasant
sensation, or any deleterious effects upon the system. [emphasis
added] (Times, 1835)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Williams had been a practicing ‘vegetable’ or ‘botanic’ physician for
nearly two decades by this point. A botanic physician with Williams’
level of expertise would know how to produce such nerve powders without
“unpleasant sensations or any deleterious effects,” however, the
inverse is also true. Williams would have been well-acquainted with how
to produce medicine <em>with</em> said intoxicating effects as well.</p>
<p>Of particular note concerning Williams’ practice and involvement in
Mormonism is his essential role at various times the Mormons were in
desperate need of medical attention. After the Mormon exodus to Illinois
in the wake of the Missouri-Mormon war of 1838, Williams established his
medical practice in Quincy, IL and published over two dozen ads
announcing some details of his practice.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>F. G. WILLIAMS—Indian and German</p>
<p>ROOT DOCTOR.</p>
<p>Who distinguishes disease by an examination of the urine... he will
always apply vegetable medicine which are perfectly free from all
those deleterious effects which are always the result from the use of
mineral medicines.(Quincy Whig, 1839 in Williams, 2013)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The overwhelming logistical constraints of supplying scores or hundreds
of Mormons on multiple occasions with proper and safe psychedelics would
have been satisfied with an experienced Thomsonian Botanical physician
like Frederick G. Williams with his own herbal gardens on property
adjacent to the Kirtland Temple. This may serve to explain motives
behind his promotion to the third-highest office in the Church.
Additionally, as evidence of their close fraternity, Joseph Smith named
his own child after Frederick G. Williams.</p>
<p>There were those that clearly felt threatened by Freddy’s quick and
steady rise to Mormon prominence. Some of the medicines he was
administering were declared anathema by Lyman Wight, a high-ranking and
militant confidant of Jo. Another high-ranking Mormon, John Corrill,
entered a complaint against Wight for the declaration, Jo stepped in.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>John Corrill entered a complaint against Lyman Wight, for teaching
that “all disease in this church is of the devil, and that medicine
administered to the sick is of the devil; for the sick of the church
ought to live by faith.”... The president decided that it was not
lawful to teach the church, that all disease is of the devil,... and
if there are any who believe that roots and herbs, administered to the
sick, and all wholesome vegetables which God has ordained for the use
of man; ...if there are any among you that teach that these things are
of Satan, such teaching is not of God. (Vogel, 2015)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wight must have understood the side-effects of some roots and herbs to
make a declaration that “that medicine… is of the devil”. While the vast
majority of the entheogenic sessions were beneficial and positive,
Mormons had plenty of difficult experiences as well (otherwise
‘bad-trips’) resulting in myriad terrifying exhibitions. Eps 59, 60.</p>
<p>With increased membership and diversity of attendees in Mormon spiritual
experiences, the need for a steady supply of psychedelics also
increased. Freddy G. Willey, and his knowledge of how to harvest,
cultivate, and extract these crucial plant medicines, provides the most
rational supplier for the steady increase in demand with growing
membership numbers. Williams continued to be a prominent member of the
Church and a Thomsonian botanical physician until his death in 1842 at
the age of 54. His son, Ezra G. Williams, continued the practice of
medicine in the absence of his deceased father from that time forward.
(Williams, 2013)</p>
<p>The completion of the Kirtland Temple in January 1836, the same year the
Alamo fell, provided the perfect culmination of all Jo’s mystical and
esoteric pursuits up to that point. The temple had taken about 3 years
and about $40,000 to build, which is about 1.1 million in 2020 money.
Its completion was a big deal, and Joe was ecstatic. On January 23, he
held a meeting in the temple to ordain his father, Big Daddy Cheese, as
patriarch of the church. Being ordained into this office required a
blessing ritual, during which all the men of the presidency gathered
around BDC and anointed his head with oil, and blessed him. After all
the presidency did this, BDC stood up, and returned blessings to all of
them, including Joe.</p>
<p>Big Daddy Cheese and the other members of the First Presidency all laid
their hands on Joe’s head and pronounced blessings upon him. And then,
according to Joe in his History of the Church (2:380-81), he had a
vision. “The heavens were opened upon us, and I beheld the celestial
kingdom of God, and the glory thereof, whether in the body or out I
cannot tell.” Among other things, he saw the gate of heaven, the flaming
throne of God, the biblical patriarchs, and his dead brother Alvin. He
also saw his apostles doing missionary work in distant lands, including
William McLellin in the South and Brigham Young in a Southwestern
desert. Brigham was standing “upon a rock in the midst of about a dozen
men of color, who appeared hostile. He was preaching to them in their
own tongue, and the angel of God standing above his head, with a drawn
sword in his hand, protecting him, but he did not see it.”</p>
<p>I’m sure Bloody Brigham was happy to hear Jo’s vision that he would be
protected in his raging bigotry by an angel with a drawn sword .</p>
<p>Now, this could just be Jo lying as he frequently did, saying he had an
experience that he didn’t really have. But, if we consider the influence
of psychedelics, the picture comes into greater focus because Joe wasn’t
the only one who saw things that day. Here are some more lines from the
next few pages of the History of the Church. Let’s see if we can’t tease
out a pattern.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many of the brethren who received the ordinance with me saw glorious
visions also. Angels ministered unto them as well as to myself. . . .
My scribe also received his anointing with us, and saw, in a vision,
the armies of heaven protecting the Saints in their return to Zion,
and many things which I saw. . . .The Bishop of Kirtland with his
Counselors, and the Bishop of Zion with his Counselors, were present
with us, and received their anointing’s under the hands of Father
Smith, and this was confirmed by the Presidency, and the glories of
heaven were unfolded to them also. . . . Hyrum Smith anointed the head
of the President of the Councilors in Kirtland, and President David
Whitmer the head of the President of the Councilors of Zion. The
President of each quorum then anointed the heads of his colleagues,
each in his turn, beginning at the oldest. The visions of heaven were
opened to them also. Some of them saw the face of the Savior, and
others were ministered unto by holy angels, and the spirit of prophecy
and revelation was poured out in mighty power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So these guys were each anointed in turn, and after being anointed, and
they each had visions, at least according to Joe. And then the next day
it happened again, with even more people in the room. Listen to this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the evening we met at the same place, with the Council of the
Twelve, and the Presidency of the Seventy, who were to receive this
ordinance [of anointing and blessing]. . . After calling to order
and organizing, the Presidency proceeded to consecrate the oil. We
then laid our hands upon Elder Thomas B. Marsh, who is President of
the Twelve, and ordained him to the authority of anointing his
brethren. I then poured the consecrated oil upon his head, in the name
of Jesus Christ, and sealed such blessings upon him as the Lord put
into my heart. . . He then anointed and blessed his brethren from the
oldest to youngest. . . The heavens were opened, and angels ministered
unto us. The Twelve then proceeded to anoint and bless the Presidency
of the Seventy, and seal upon their heads power and authority to
anoint their brethren. The Heavens were opened unto Elder Sylvester
Smith, and he, leaping up, exclaimed: “The horsemen of Israel and the
chariots thereof.” The gift of tongues fell upon us in mighty power,
angels mingled their voices with ours, while their presence was in our
midst, and unceasing praises swelled our bosoms for the space of
half-an-hour.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The term “consecrated oil” I believe is a codeword for oil which
contained the keys to the kingdom of gods, psychedelics. These guys are
getting anointed, and then they’re seeing heaven, and angels, and
chariots, and speaking in foreign languages they’ve never learned. In
all, there are 14 references to anointing with oil, and 26 references to
visions or seeing things in just these few pages of the History of the
Church, all in just a 2-day period. Historian Alex Baugh has compiled
over 70 such instances in just the first 7 years of the church’s
existence. This is a striking pattern. Almost every time Joe was
anointed with this “consecrated oil” on his head, the heavens opened up,
and he had visions and heard god speaking. Almost every time somebody
else was anointed in the same way, and had this same oil put on their
head just like Joe, they saw visions, and angels, and heaven opened up
to them. Topical oils are fantastic vehicles for psychoactive plant
medicines, especially when poured over the head.</p>
<p>One thing we need to keep in mind is that the public perception of drugs
that we have today is wildly different than how drugs were perceived
back in the early 19<!-- raw HTML omitted -->th<!-- raw HTML omitted --> century. Drugs didn’t carry the taboos
and stigmas of today. For many users, they were just god’s gift to bring
you enlightenment. Agrippa’s standard-bearing <em>Three Books of Occult
Philosophy</em> circa 1533 states, “God himself, who being unchangeable,
distributes to every one as he pleaseth… All virtues, therefore, are
infused by God”. A person would go walking through the forest and pick
up some psilocybin, or cut the tops off cactus and refine them into a
powder, or infuse them into alcohol or some oil, and imbibe to speak
with God, or see angels, prophecy, or connect with the holy spirit.
Simple as that. It wasn’t a schedule one drug that the person would go
to jail for having, it was just one of god’s many gifts that help us get
closer to him or understand his mind. It may sound degrading to Joe and
friends to think that they were just tripping whenever they came up with
revelations, but that’s only because of the negative stigma that drugs
carry today. When we consider all aspects and possibilities of Joe using
entheogens to come up with revelations, suddenly we have naturalistic
explanations for this particularly visionary era of early Mormonism.</p>
<p>Also, it’s not like Joe didn’t have access to drugs like this. He wasn’t
snorting Columbian cocaine that he used church funds to buy a kilo of
off his guy, this oil was likely from a plant found locally in the
forests of New York and Ohio or cultivated in Freddy G. Willey’s
herbarium. I’m up in Seattle and it’s fungus country up here. Anybody
can go walking through the forest, especially in September, and find a
couple caps of magic mushrooms, they’re everywhere. Joe, likely, had
ready access to a psychedelic oil, whether by his own findings, or from
a local salesperson that was making the oil to sell. Jo spent a lot of
time playing in the woods near his homes growing up in New England,
where mushrooms and all sorts of psychedelic plants grow. When I was in
Palmyra presenting on the Smith-entheogen theory at JWHA last September
I found a ton of different mushrooms and even a belladonna plant, a
member of the nightshade family and powerfully psychedelic, in the
sacred grove. Some of the mushrooms were even guarded by a toad, he was
a friendly little treasure guardian who didn’t mind being patted on the
head. Ep 176.</p>
<p>There were even more of these sorts of visions a few months later, at
the dedication of the finished Temple on March 27, 1836. The dedication
service for the Kirtland temple was held in the main chapel area of the
temple. It was 8 hours long, and there are stories floating around of
angels and spirits flying through the building during the service, and
all kinds of miraculous events. In the morning, anywhere from 250 to one
thousand people gathered in the temple. Joe had encouraged everybody to
fast the night before.</p>
<p>According to Joe’s own account of this event in History of the Church
2:428,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Brother George A. Smith arose and began to prophesy, when a noise was
heard like the sound of a rushing mighty wind, which filled the
Temple, and all the congregation simultaneously arose, being moved
upon by an invisible power; many began to speak in tongues and
prophesy; others saw glorious visions; and I beheld the Temple was
filled with angels, which fact I declared to the congregation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to Oliver Cowdery’s Kirtland, Ohio sketch book,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Spirit was poured out--I saw the glory of God, like a great cloud,
come down and rest upon the house, and fill the same like a mighty
rushing wind. I also saw cloven tongues, like as of fire rest upon
many, (for there were 316 present,) while they spake with other
tongues and prophesied.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No one else’s account of the event was quite as sensational as Smith’s
or Cowdery’s, but people did apparently speak in tongues and see
visions. George A. Smith claimed in Journal of Discourses 11:10 that
David Whitmer saw three angels walk up the aisle, although Whitmer
himself described the ceremony as a “grand fizzle” and said there was no
visitation that day. George A. Smith had a habit of making things up, so
maybe he’s not credible on this. More credible is Truman Angell’s
autobiography, which says Frederick G. Williams “rose and testified that
midway during the prayer an holy angel came and seated himself in the
stand.” Joseph Smith then explained that the angel was none other than
the resurrected apostle Peter, “come to accept the dedication.” Also,
according to Benjamin Brown in his article "Testimony for the Truth,"
“hundreds of Elders spoke in tongues.”</p>
<p>I have to ask, was this so epic because the Spirit of God was coursing
through the halls of the temple, or was it because another spirit was
coursing through everybody’s veins? The wine of Jo’s own make being
consecrated with the keys seems to explain a few other accounts and here
are just some of them that didn’t make it into the Church’s official
histories. According to William Harris, when the attendees broke their
fast by eating bread and drinking wine, Joe</p>
<blockquote>
<p>encouraged the brethren to drink freely, telling them that the wine
was consecrated, and would not make them drunk. . . . they began to
prophecy, pronounce blessings upon their friends, and curses on their
enemies. If I should be so unhappy as to go to the regions of the
damned, I would never expect to hear language more awful, or more
becoming the infernal pit, than was uttered that night.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alfred Morley said he had heard many Mormon attendees</p>
<blockquote>
<p>say that very many became drunk....The Mormon leaders would stand up
to prophesy and were so drunk they said they could not get it out and
would call for another drink. Over a barrel of liquor was used at the
service.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Isaac Aldrich said his brother, Seventies’ president Hazen Aldrich,
described the dedication as a “drunken pow-wow.” Stephen H. Hart said a
Mormon named Mr. McWhithey told him</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Lord's Supper was celebrated and they passed the wine in pails
several times to the audience, and each person drank as much as he
chose from a cup. He said it was mixed liquor and he believed the
Mormon leaders intended to get the audience under the influence of the
mixed liquor, so they would believe it was the Lord's doings. . . .
When the liquor was repassed, Mr McWhithey told them he had endowment
enough, and said he wanted to get out of the Temple, which was densely
crowded.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Remember, everyone had fasted before this ceremony. And we all know what
happens when you drink mixed liquor or consecrated sacramental alcohol
on an empty stomach. It is also notable that in occult and religious
traditions prior to these visionary manifestations that fasting is an
integral piece. Shamans who lead people through psychedelic journeys
today will often encourage attendees to fast before taking the journey.
William McLellin pointed this out in a July 1872 letter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>some partook so freely, on their empty stomachs, that they became
drunk! I took care of S[amuel] H. Smith in one of the stands so
deeply intoxicated that he could not nor did sense anything. I kept
him hid from the crowd in the stand, but he vomited the spit-box five
times full, and his dear brother [Don] Carlos would empty it out of
the window.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a couple other letters McLellin reiterated this story, and emphasized
that the “endowment of power” the Saints had expected to receive turned
out to be “a farce.” “No display of power from God was given. A[l]l
the power given was the power of man.” If we read this through an
entheogenic lens, this is McLellin, Professor Bill in our timeline,
stating outright that whatever the attendees experienced that day had a
naturalistic explanation.</p>
<p>The dedication ceremony of the Kirtland Temple truly was a remarkable
occurrence in early Mormonism. Held up as faith-promoting manifestations
of angels and god by believers today, rationalized in different ways by
historians as group hallucinations and shifty record-keeping, yet I
think it’s the perfect example staring us right in the face where
psychedelics were clearly present in the early church. Sometimes the
easiest answers are hiding in plain sight.</p>
<p>According to the Smith-entheogen theory, Jo liked his psychedelics to
help with prophecy and conjuration of spirits, but he also didn’t mind a
bit of rudimentary partying that alcohol provides.</p>
<p>Even though Joe explicitly said in the Word of Wisdom that it wasn’t a
commandment, the Church voted to take a covenant to follow it, which
<em>functionally</em> made it one. Joe, however, wasn’t really on board with
the covenant the Church made, and he continued to drink recreationally.
This caused some problems in the Church. For instance, on August 19,
1835, the Kirtland high council held a disciplinary hearing for Almon W.
Babbitt on charges that included "not keeping the Word of Wisdom."
Babbitt defended himself by saying "that he had taken the liberty to
break the Word of Wisdom, from the example of President Joseph Smith,
Jun., and others, but acknowledged that it was wrong." That’s according
to the History of the Church (2:252).</p>
<p>Just how intense was Joe’s recreational binge-drinking during this
period? Well, this is from an affidavit by a guy named G. B. Frost,
published in John C. Bennett’s 1842 expose of Mormonism, which patrons
can hear the whole thing with my commentary:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On or about the middle of June, 1837, I rode with Joseph Smith, Jr.
from Fairport, Ohio, to Kirtland. When we left Fairport, we had been
drinking pretty freely; I drank brandy, he brandy and cider, both
together; and when we arrived at Painesville, we drank again; and when
we arrived at Kirtland, we were very drunk. . . . About the last of
August, 1837, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and others, were drunk at
Joseph Smith Jr.’s house, all together; and a man, by the name of
Vinson Knight, supplied them with rum, brandy, gin, and port wine,
from the cash store; and I worked in the loft, over head. He, Joseph,
told Knight not to sell any of the rum, brandy, gin, or port wine, for
he wanted it for his own use. They were drunk, and drinking, for more
than a week.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Essentially, Jo considered his own word of wisdom revelation to be more
like guidelines than actual rules. Welcome aboard the red carbuncle,
dear listener, with captain Jo Bar Bossman at the helm.</p>
<p>I don’t have a ton of information about Joe’s use of intoxicants in
Missouri in 1838, because he wasn’t there for very long. But we do know
that although the Mormon government had banned the sale of alcohol in
Caldwell County, Smith opened a hotel and tavern in Far West, a business
he would revive in Nauvoo. In June 1838, the same year John Wilkes Booth
was born, the Far West high council had to remind Smith's family that
there was a ban on the sale and consumption of "ardent spirits in the
place.” According to the council’s minute book, Joe complied with the
request to stop selling liquor, at least above the table.</p>
<p>Joe had similar kinds of problems in Nauvoo, Illinois. In February 1841,
just a month after Hong Kong was ceded to the British commonwealth,
Joe’s left-hand man John C. Wreck-It Bennett took his office as mayor.
Bennett was a teetotaler, and in a speech to the city council, he urged
the council in no uncertain terms to “prohibit and suppress” all
businesses that sold alcohol in the city. The city council took his
advice, and in the History of the Church (4:293) we can read the
ordinance they passed, “that all persons and establishments whatever, in
this city, are prohibited from vending whisky in a less quantity than a
gallon, or other spirituous liquors in a less quantity than a quart, to
any person whatever, excepting on the recommendation of a physician.”
Breach of the ordinance was punishable by up to a $25 fine.</p>
<p>Nauvoo Mormonism experienced an influx of temperance advocates, chief of
which was John C. Bennett, who became fast friends with the prophet. The
Mormons were already known to be a temperate sect and the majority
didn’t oppose a temperance bill proposed in 1840 by Bennett.
Deliberating over the bill during a Church Conference, Jo carved out an
important exception.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the discussion of the foregoing bill, I spoke at great length on
the use of liquors, and showed that it was unnecessary, and operates
as a poison in the stomach, and that roots and herbs can be found to
effect all necessary purposes. (History of the Church vol 4:299; read
History of Joseph Smith & The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints vol 4:293, Vogel, Dan, Smith-Petit Foundation, 2015)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Publicly, liquor in Nauvoo was tightly controlled by the city
government. Medicinal liquor infused with bitters or herbs, however,
enjoyed an exemption from abolition. The disparity between public
abolition of liquor and private usage among Mormon elites was
occasionally noted by those unaware of the approval of medicinal liquor,
vs. public opposition to recreational usage of the same spirituous
beverages.</p>
<p>During a mission trip in 1839, Brigham Young and George A. Smith
travelled the countryside and boarded with fellow brethren in the
covenant. During a particular stay, both Smith and Young were suffering
from illness and carried with them medicinal liquor infused with bitters
which didn’t escape comment from a Mormon named ‘Father Draper’.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we went into the house, Brother George A. Smith dropped on to the
hearth a bottle containing some tonic bitters, which the brethren had
prepared for us because of our sickness. At this Father Draper was
very much astonished, and said "You are a pretty set of Apostles, to
be carrying a bottle of whiskey with you." We explained to him what it
was; this appeased his righteous soul, so that he consented to have us
stay over the night. (emphasis added
<a href="http://boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/MSHBY.html"><!-- raw HTML omitted -->http://boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/MSHBY.html<!-- raw HTML omitted --></a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The brethren ‘preparing their own tonic bitters’ must not have been out
of the ordinary for Bloody Brigham.The exercise of divine healing
throughout Mormon history may not be attributable to the supernatural
for historians, but to the bitters infused in medicinal tonics and
consecrated topical oils employed throughout its entire 19th-century
history.</p>
<p>For drinkers like Joe who lived in Nauvoo, this prohibition ordinance
wasn’t too onerous. They could always just go across the river to
Montrose to buy their booze. Token anti-Mormon ThomASS Sharp noted in
his paper, The Warsaw Signal, on July 14, 1841 that Joe was known to go
on benders:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even the Prophet himself, although a seeming devotee of the temperance
cause, is a better friend to Bacchus than to any other God; except,
perhaps, Plutus [(The god of wealth)]. We have heard of three sprees
of his in the last ten months. In the first he appeared amongst his
followers, and offered to prove the truth of his mission by a
miracle—which was to clime a hickory pole sixty feet high, with the
bark off, heels upward. The second was on board the steamer Nauvoo, in
her excursion to Bloomington last fall. On this occasion his holiness
drank whiskey until he found himself on his back, feeling upwards for
the ground. So says our informant. The third, was last week. On this
occasion it does not appear that Jo. was exactly drunk: but it seemed
strange to see the Prophet of the Lord, at the head of a champaigne
party, crying lustily, “take away the empty bottles, and bring on the
full ones.” verily our modern Prophet is the very beau ideal of a
pious Christian! How abstemious! How self-denying! But this is none
of our business—we will not turn preacher, however much the occasion
may require it.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In another article on July 21, Sharp noted that Bennett and Smith had
visited Warsaw, and inside their carriage was a decanter containing some
kind of alcohol. According to Sharp, “half a mile from town, the Prophet
and suit halted, and took a regular swig—doubtless by way of
inspiration.”</p>
<p>It’s not clear if Joe was buying his booze in Montrose or getting it
some other way, but here’s one possible way he might have gotten it. In
enforcing the city ordinance, the Nauvoo Legion busted up several Nauvoo
grog shops. As both lieutenant general of the Legion and chairman of the
city council’s for regulating “spiritous liquors,” Joe was in a position
to decide what was done with the alcohol seized from these shops. Not
long after this, Jo would have his own bar in the Nauvoo Mansion.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Joe also started working to roll back the Church’s covenant
to treat the Word of Wisdom as a commandment. In November 1841, he
preached a sermon at the Nauvoo Temple Lot in which he said that “what
many people called sin was not sin,” and he specifically used the
example of Noah getting drunk in the Bible and his son Ham laughing at
him. In this story Noah is the drunkard and Ham is the temperance
advocate, but God takes Noah’s side, not Ham’s. Ham and all his
descendants get cursed. Implicitly, anyone who criticizes Joe for
getting drunk is going to be cursed like a modern-day Ham. Plenty of
bible passages can be mined for anybody looking for a debauchery-filled
lifestyle.</p>
<p>After this sermon, the High Priests Quorum and Quorum of the Twelve met
together and agreed that “a forced abstinence was not making us free,”
but rather had placed the Church “under bondage with a yoke upon our
necks.” And just like that, the Word of Wisdom officially stopped being
a commandment for the Church. It wouldn’t be until the Prohibition era
in the early 20th century that the Word of Wisdom became heavily
enforced.</p>
<p>Later in the Nauvoo period, Joe often recorded himself drinking in his
journals or in the History of the Church. For instance, on May 3, 1843
he “drank a glass of wine with Sister Janetta Richards, made by her
mother in England.” On January 29, 1844, “Capt[ain] White of Quincy
was at the Mansion last night and this morning drank a toast.” On June
1, 1844, Joe “Drank a glass of beer at Mooessers.” On June 27, 1844,
“Dr. Richards uncorked the bottle, and presented a glass to Joseph,
who tasted.”</p>
<p>After he replaced Bennett as mayor, Joe also loosened up the city’s
regulation of the sale of alcohol. On March 10, 1843, “Joseph decided
that he had no objection to having a brewery put up by Theodore Turley.”
Joe also had a bar in his own house, as recorded in History of the
Church 6:111: “Be it ordained by the City Council of Nauvoo, that the
Mayor [Joseph Smith] of the city is hereby authorized to sell or give
spirits of any quantity as he in his wisdom shall judge to be for the
health and comfort, or convenience of such travelers or other persons as
shall visit his house from time to time.” It seems like Joe finally took
the reins and took back control of both the Church’s and the city’s
alcohol policy from the teetotaler wing of the Church.</p>
<p>Wreck-it Bennett, however, requires a deeper examination here beyond
just the alcohol prohibitions he pushed through the Nauvoo city council.
He, just like Freddy G. Willey, was an herbal physician who had some
training in obstetrics. Many allegations float around Nauvoo about
Bennett performing abortions to keep polygamy secret. Bennett also ran a
brothel in Nauvoo and if you run a brothel without birth control your
business practices are pretty short-sighted. These rumors are so
salacious that you hope they aren’t true, but so prevalent that you
can’t help but think they might be true. We’ve discussed them on the
show ep 141. But facets of polygamy is another aspect of herbal medicine
which bears discussion here.</p>
<p>Of specific note during the Nauvoo era of Mormonism was the increased
practice of polygamy. A tenet previously reserved for Jo exclusively
while the Mormons occupied Ohio and Missouri, Nauvoo provided a safe
haven for Mormon elites to begin taking additional wives as well. When
the Mormon aristocracy finally controlled the government and city
courts, illegal and nefarious conduct became the norm. A great deal of
conflict arose as a result of rumors of adultery gripping the new Mormon
settlement. Jo took anywhere from 33-48 wives before his death,
dependent upon what sources and historians are given more credibility as
well as what criteria are used to determine marriage sealings. We’ll
discuss polygamy more in a coming episode of this series but we’ll round
out today’s episode with a brief discussion of herbal medicines
associated with polygamy. This is going to get pretty dark but it’s an
aspect of coercion and abuse that deserves the light of day.</p>
<p>A wholly undiscussed aspect of Mormon polygamy revolves around the
possible use of so called love philters to acquire wives and
abortifacients to conceal the results.</p>
<p>First, let’s talk about the love philters. As occult historian Thomas
Hatsis observed, “Otherwise known as a love philter, a poculum amatorai
(literally ‘love cup’) was both a stupefacient and an exciter that
‘impair[ed] the senses and stirs within...apparitions and frenzied
loves.’”(Hatsis, Thomas. p14) These love philters are an often addressed
topic in the same occult source material that was used by the Smith
family for their money digging operations, and the combined ingredients
of such potions often illicit mind-altering effects similar to that of
MDMA or Ecstacy. The clandestine application of these love philters
would have produced pliable and willing participants to polygamous
unions, who had otherwise proven to be objectionable and opposed to such
practices. Additionally, evidence for these entheogenic applications, as
well as the often necessary abortifacients which were then used to
effectively cover-up the inevitable side effects of the love philters is
a subject unexplored by any Mormon historians.</p>
<p>Joseph Smith in particular was noted for sometimes forcibly coercing his
more obstinate prospective wives with threats of vengeful angels
wielding swords, should the unions not proceed as decreed by Jo. One of
these women, “Zina D….told of Bro. Joseph's remark in relation to the
revelation on celestial marriage. How an angel came to him with a drawn
sword, and said if he did not obey this law he would lost his
priesthood; and in the keeping of it he, Joseph, did not know but it
would cost him his life.” (Hales, Brian C. Joseph Smith's Polygamy:
History 2:190. Originally quoted in "The Prophet's Birthday," Deseret
News, January 12, 1881, 2.) Not only would this story provide a
horrendously effective set and setting for later proposals, but provided
the addition of love philters, such pre-programmed hallucinations would
have undoubtedly assured these women eventually relenting to Smith's
advances. Of his 33-48 polygamous wives, many were already married to
other church officials (in one case Zina B. Huntington was even seven
months pregnant) (Clark, Kim. Sword-Wielding Angels & Stolen Innocence.
2014), and at least seven were teenagers at the time their ‘celestial
marriage’ to Joseph Smith. To reiterate, Jo could tell a young woman he
wanted to marry that an angel appeared to him with a drawn sword and
commanded them to be sealed, dose them with a love philter, and the
programming he provided would manifest as an apparition of sorts to the
young woman.</p>
<p>As a case study, I offer the words of Lucy Walker, a teenage victim of
Joseph Smith. She details how Jo began to target her, then teach her
about the concept of celestial marriage, she denied him, then Jo blessed
her that she would receive the confirmation of the spirit that celestial
marriage was of god and Jo was indeed a prophet of that same god. Lucy
apparently received this confirmation late at night with a very
incredible experience which could have easily been the result of a love
philter or psychedelic. During the time she describes here, Lucy’s
mother had recently died and her father was in the eastern states on a
mission for Jo. I’ll let Lucy speak for herself from 1888, the same year
Kodak was founded and California got its first seismograph.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the year 1842, President Joseph Smith sought an interview with me,
and said: “I have a message for you. I have been commanded of God to
take another wife, and you are the woman.” My astonishment knew no
bounds. This announcement was indeed a thunderbolt to me. He asked me
if I believed him to be a prophet of God. “Most assuredly I do,” I
replied. He fully explained to me the principle of plural or celestial
marriage. He said this principle was again to be restored for the
benefit of the human family, that it would prove an everlasting
blessing to my father’s house, and form a chain that could never be
broken, worlds without end. “What have you to say?” he asked.
“Nothing.” How could I speak, or what could I say? He said, “If you
will pray sincerely for light and understanding in relation thereto,
you shall receive a testimony of the correctness of this principle. I
thought I prayed sincerely, but was so unwilling to consider the
matter favorably that I fear I did not ask in faith for light. Gross
darkness instead of light took possession of my mind. I was tempted
and tortured beyond endurance until life was not desirable. Oh that
the grave would kindly receive me, that I might find rest on the bosom
of my dear mother. Why should I be chosen from among thy daughters,
Father, I am only a child in years and experience, no mother to
counsel [she died in January, 1842]; no father near to tell me what
to do in this trying hour [he was on a mission to a warmer climate to
help his health]. Oh, let this bitter cup pass. And thus I prayed in
the agony of my soul.</p>
<p>The Prophet discerned my sorrow. He saw how unhappy I was, and sought
an opportunity of again speaking to me on this subject, and said:
“Although I cannot, under existing circumstances, acknowledge you as
my wife, the time is near when we will go beyond the Rocky Mountains
and then you will be acknowledged and honored as my wife.”</p>
<p><!-- raw HTML omitted -->5<!-- raw HTML omitted --></p>
<p>He also said, “This principle will yet be believed in and practiced by
the righteous. I have no flattering words to offer. It is a command of
God to you. I will give you until tomorrow to decide this matter. If
you reject this message the gate will be closed forever against you.”</p>
<p>This aroused every drop of Scotch in my veins. For a few moments I
stood fearless before him, and looked him in the eye. I felt at this
moment that I was called to place myself upon the altar a living
sacrifice–perhaps to brook the world in disgrace and incur the
displeasure and contempt of my youthful companions; all my dreams of
happiness blown to the four winds. This was too much, for as yet no
shadow had crossed my path, aside from the death of my dear mother.
The future to me had been one bright, cloudless day. I had been
speechless, but at last found utterance and said: “Although you are a
prophet of God you could not induce me to take a step of so great
importance, unless I knew that God approved my course. I would rather
die. I have tried to pray but received no comfort, no light,” and
emphatically forbid him speaking again to me on this subject. Every
feeling of my soul revolted against it. Said I, “The same God who has
sent this message is the Being I have worshipped from my early
childhood and He must manifest His will to me.” He walked across the
room, returned and stood before me with the most beautiful expression
of countenance, and said: “God Almighty bless you. You shall have a
manifestation of the will of God concerning you; a testimony that you
can never deny. I will tell you what it shall be. It shall be that joy
and peace that you never knew.”</p>
<p>Oh, how earnestly I prayed for these words to be fulfilled. It was
near dawn after another sleepless night when my room was lighted up by
a heavenly influence. To me it was, in comparison, like the brilliant
sun bursting through the darkest cloud. The words of the Prophet were
indeed fulfilled. My soul was filled with a calm, sweet peace that “I
never knew.” Supreme happiness took possession of me, and I received a
powerful and irresistible testimony of the truth of plural marriage,
which has been like an anchor to the soul through all the trials of
life. I felt that I must go out into the morning air and give vent to
the joy and gratitude that filled my soul. As I descended the stairs,
President Smith opened the door below, took me by the hand and said:
“Thank God, you have the testimony. I too have prayed.” He led me to
a chair, placed his hands upon my head, and blessed me with every
blessing my heart could possibly desire.</p>
<p>The first day of May, 1843, I consented to become the Prophet’s wife,
and was sealed to him for time and all eternity, at his own house by
Elder William Clayton.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucy added a few notable details in another account which was reported
secondhand. In this version she adds an angel to the mix, the fact that
she was living in the Smith home, and that she had this angelic
manifestation after eating dinner, providing a window for her to have
been surreptitiously drugged by the prophet.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I went to live with Joseph Smith’s family as a maid and after I had
grown up, Joseph asked me if I would marry him. I felt highly insulted
and he said that if I wanted to know whether the principle was true, I
could go to God and find out. One night after supper I went out into
the orchard and I kneeled down and prayed to God for information.
After praying I arose and walked around the orchard and kneeled again
and repeated this during the night. FInally as I was praying the last
time, an angel of the Lord appeared to me and told me that the
principle was of God and for me to accept it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucy was 17 when this happened, Jo was 38. Notably, Jo’s personal herbal
physician, second counselor in the presidency, and namesake of one of
Jo’s sons, Frederick G. Williams, included in his medical ledger book
charges for men in Nauvoo for one of his remedies called “bachelor’s
delight”. According to Freddy G. Willey’s biographer, a descendant by
the same name, “Although the reference is veiled in a euphemistic
phrase, Doctor Williams, it would seem, treated some patient (or
patients) for venereal disease, which he listed as “Bachelor Delight” in
his medical ledger, page 33. There are a total of twenty-five separate
billings, totaling $41,87, which was paid off on August 1, 1839, with
the notation “Sundries to balance.”” The biography then goes on to list
Thomsonian medical cures for venereal diseases including syphilis, but
he doesn’t describe exactly how he made the jump from Williams’ ledger
book calling a cure “Bachelor Delight” to it being a cure for venereal
disease, it is merely his assumption. I postulate that love philters,
certain plant medicines acting as stupefacients, or excitors would fit
the bill just as easily with the same amount of speculation. Prior to
his death in 1842, Freddy Willey could have provided Jo with the
necessary plant medicines to function as date rape drugs or visionary
psychedelics which would provide the sought-for spiritual confirmations
of angels commanding plural marriage like Lucy Walker and others like
her experienced.</p>
<p>Now let’s talk about the role of plant medicines used as abortifacients.
Jo had over 30 wives with whom he probably had many sexual experiences,
but no verifiable descendants came from these women. Allegations arose
from multiple sources that John C. Wreck-it Bennett was performing
abortions in order to keep the polygamy concealed. When conflict
eventually arose between Jo and Wreck-it Bennett, Bennett published an
exposé of Joseph Smith and the Mormons, making accusations concerning
polygamy and what was called “spiritual wifery”. Patreon exclusive feed
and eps 120-134. After much deliberation, affidavits were taken in
Nauvoo claiming Smith to be a pious and pure religious leader, while
Bennett was hypocritically derided for his unchristian-like conduct with
women. The line between spiritual wifery and celestial marriage was born
out of the necessity of differentiating between Jo’s god-sanctioned
polygamy and Bennett’s sexual exploits, although the systems were
functionally the same. Jo’s brother, and patriarch over the Church,
Hyrum sidekick-Abiff Smith, provides interesting logistical details into
how polygamy was kept secret with the help of Bennett.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… several females who testified that John C. Bennett endeavored to
seduce them, and accomplished his designs by saying it was right; that
it was one of the mysteries of God...that it was perfectly right to
have illicit intercourse with females, providing no one knew it but
themselves...also stating that he would be responsible for their sins,
if there were any, and that he would give them medicine to produce
abortions, provided they should become pregnant. (History of the
Church vol 5:71; read History of Joseph Smith & The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints vol 4:293, Vogel, Dan, Smith-Petit
Foundation, 2015)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bennett’s familiarity with medicine wasn’t limited to healing or
obstetrics.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of these witnesses, a married woman that he attended upon in his
professional capacity whilst she was sick, stated that he made
proposals to her of a similar [adulterous] nature; he told her that
he wished her husband was dead, and that if he was dead, he would
marry her and clear out with her; he also begged her permission to
give him [her husband] medicine to that effect; he did try to give
him medicine, but he would not take it. (ibid, p. 71)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bennett and other herbal physicians close to Jo had the knowledge base
necessary to provide chemical and surgical abortions, poison men they
wanted “put out of the way,” and treat expected venereal diseases
attendant with the amount of sex was going on in Nauvoo. If Wreck-it
Bennett didn’t have expertise in these fields, he’d be a terrible
brothel owner. Another contemporary expose from Joseph H. Jackson,
details how Jo “had only to tell certain of his spiritual wives, that
such a man had been in the Missouri war, and that he should be put out
of the way, and his property and money consecrated to the use, of the
church; then said he, it is damned easy for them to got into his good
graces, and to mix a white powder with his victuals, and put him out of
the way.” Ep. 161.</p>
<p>The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, published Primitive Physick Or an
Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases in 1761, complete with
numerous powerful herbal recipes, 7 decades before Thomsonian ‘vegetable
medicine’ entered the medical lexicon and people became Thomsonian
physicians like White-out Willard Richards, Freddy G. Willey, and others
close to Jo. Obviously considered of great importance due to the recipe
being the first listed after the introduction was “daily a Decoction of
Lignum Guaiacum” (Primitive Physick, Wesley, John, p. 29, 9th ed. 1761,
Strahan, London and Westminster) which was to be administered in order
to induce abortions. Additionally, the popular and widely accessible
Culpepper's Herbal cites a number of contemporarily popular
abortifacients such as the pennyroyal, tansy, and rue, stating in the
case of tansy that, “when served in wine, tansy would ‘procure woman’s
courses.’” ( Brodie, Janet Farrell. Contraception and Abortion in
Nineteenth-Century America. Cornell University Press, 1997. p43.)
Ebenezer Sibly, the same author of Occult Sciences which was used as
source material for the Smith family money digging toolkit, also worked
as a botanical illustrator, providing the picture plates for
contemporary editions of Culpepper’s Herbal. Sibly even kindly provided
sections of the herbal as an appendix to his book on the occult. Clearly
equipped with ample means and knowhow, family planning has interesting
and well established roots in Victorian and Antebellum Mormon history.
Ep 141.</p>
<p>In whatever capacity love philters and abortifacients may or may not
have been employed in Nauvoo Mormonism, the knowledge and expertise
existed. Whether Jo himself was familiar with and utilizing this
controversial part of coercive and discrete herbal medicine, or one of
the other herbal physicians in leadership roles better fits the
position, the evidence available today exhibits that usage of these
plants was not only commonplace, but possibly a necessary component of
Nauvoo polygamy. If I’m not stating myself clearly enough, I posit that
Jo used date-rape drugs and psychedelics to coerce women into sexual
relations with him, who he’d then force to have chemical and surgical
abortions in order to keep polygamy secretive.</p>
<p>Like I said, we had to take a step into that darker side of plant
medicines because that’s where it fits into this series and it’s a
subject that deserves study, exploration, and expansion, because it’s
uncomfortable and very disturbing. If we don’t confront history that
challenges our ideas and convictions, we fall into telling the same
stories the same way and nobody learns anything new.</p>
<p>Now, to a larger point to round out this third episode of our Road to
Carthage series. Because he made his life about religion and expounding
on theology, the nature of god, and expanding Christianity to include
many proprietary elements, Joseph Smith is often a person regarded as
larger than life. He was a flawed man but still the prophet of god. His
sins were because he was a man, but the gospel he restored itself is
perfect. Because of the position in which he placed himself, the stories
we find of his conduct viewed as sins through our presentist lens
require explanation or justification within the Mormon world view. To
what extent his sins influenced his revelations seems to be a prickly
subject. Did Jo’s libido factor into his revelation about polygamy? Did
Jo’s penchant for land and business speculation factor into his
revelations about the United Order and the Mormons forgiving debts? Did
his white supremacy factor into the racist elements in the Books of
Mormon, Moses, and Abraham? These are foundational questions which
challenge the very concept of god and god’s influence on Joseph Smith’s
claimed scriptures. If we can’t disentangle the man from the revelations
he claimed came from god, why do we have any reason to believe the
revelations actually DID come from god? Thus, we’re left with pathetic
and thought-stopping platitudes like the man was flawed but the gospel
is perfect.</p>
<p>This is inherently flawed logic for a couple of reasons. First, it views
Jo’s conduct through a presentist lens and places value judgments based
on our current systems of morality and religious tenets. Modern
Mormonism forbids all alcohol consumption but Jo’s entire legacy is
marked from binge to binge and he was drunk during the gunfight that
killed him. People viewed alcohol differently in the 19th century than
we do today and to impose our system of beliefs or morality on them is a
broken way to study history. Second, the element of divine influence can
never be demonstrated. Any historical theory which claims the
intervention or influence of God is theology, not history; leaving us
with a flawed man and a gospel which isn’t perfect so much as
proprietary. Third, the proposition of forming a religion is, at best,
an amoral proposition. When a believer looks at Joseph Smith’s legacy,
they must weigh his perceived sins in the balance of the moral good of
restoring the perfect gospel to the earth, the most righteous and moral
act any person could do with consequences extending from eternity to
eternity, hinging on that pivotal first vision experience in 1820. For a
non-believer, or a skeptic like yours truly, forming a religion is
almost always an immoral and self-serving act; meaning we don’t weigh
Jo’s perceived sins on a balance scale with restoring the one true
gospel so much as we see it within the larger context of religious
leaders forming their religions for self-aggrandizement and narcissism.</p>
<p>The crucial flaw in this logic is belief in the untestable, unprovable,
and unverifiable. When we strip away the belief component, what we’re
left with is materialism… naturalism, skepticism without any access to
the divine. A postmodern view of a dude who told everybody he speaks for
god who would stop at nothing to build the strongest and most vast and
sweeping religious empire the world has ever seen.</p>
<p>With a skeptical approach to the proposition of god or the divine, we
need naturalistic models to understand and inform Mormon history as well
as the life and times of a man who’s seen as nearest perfection as
humans can get for millions of people across the globe. Simply put,
artifacts within Mormon history that have most often been attributed to
god require explanation within the natural world. When Jo said he saw
angels and deity, and dozens of his contemporaries claim the same, we
need historical models to explain it. When we know Jo had like 3 dozen
wives, we need historical models which account for sex to explain why he
doesn’t have any living descendants from those nonconsensual encounters.
When we see that Jo kept a cabal of esoteric-minded herbal physicians
within arms reach at all times, we need to consider if there might be a
historical reason for that beyond the simple idea that they were devoted
and loyal converts. When we see a pattern of debauchery and concomitant
visionary experiences with Jo and his early church, we must search for
historical models which incorporate these many variables into a larger
umbrella theory.</p>
<p>For those, and many other reasons, I believe a powerful missing key to
the kingdom of Mormon history is psychedelics and plant medicines
broadly. How did Jo experience theophany in the sacred grove? Plants.
How did so many early Mormons see god and angels? Plants. How did Jo
come up with such expansive and fascinating theology? Plants. How could
Jo produce seemingly on-demand visions and revelations for his closest
followers who believed until the day they died? Plants. How did Jo
convince dozens of women to have sex with him? Plants… and a bit of
charisma… that’s the case with all of these but that’s because every
good shaman is charismatic. How did Jo keep his sex empire from actually
multiplying and replenishing the earth? Plants. How did Jo put his
enemies out of the way without raising suspicion? Plants again. How did
Jo produce seemingly miraculous healings with nothing more than a prayer
and some consecrated oil? Plants in that oil.</p>
<p>And, to draw an even finer point on everything we’ve discussed today.
Why has this theory never been explored in depth at the academic level
before? Because Mormons don’t do drugs. As of now, there’s a single book
from the 1970s, written by a general authority at the time, about Jo’s
drinking habits, which never even explored the possibility of
psychedelics as part of that debauchery. Hearts Made Glad; it’s a
wonderful little book, less than 300 pages and it has various poetry
peppered throughout the pages, making the endnotes a complete nightmare,
but it’s important foundational work for the drinking habits of Joseph
Smith. It wasn’t until 2007 that somebody with medical training actually
wrote an academic paper on psychedelics in early Mormonism, titled
Restoration and the Sacred Mushroom by Robert Beckstead. Then, in 2017,
Cody Noconi and I built on Beckstead’s work and presented Revelation
Through Hallucination; A Treatise on the Smith-Entheogen Theory at
Sunstone, resurrecting a theory that lay dormant for a decade. Then,
Cody Noconi, Robert Beckstead, Michael Winkelman, and myself, compiled
our collective research and published it in the Journal of Psychedelics
Studies on June 1, 2019. Eps 186-188. With setting apart enough time,
the mindset of perseverance, and probably a large dose of luck, I’ll be
compiling all this information into a book that will help to unlock a
complicated aspect of the Mormon history kingdom.</p>
<p>I want to share so many more stories, but I’ve already drained enough
glasses writing these 33 pages of script so let’s call it a night.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 3 - VoracityRoad to Carthage 2 - Idleness2020-07-16T20:00:00-07:002020-07-16T20:00:00-07:00https://scripts.nakedmormonismpodcast.com/2020/07/16/road-to-carthage-2-idleness<p>Road to Carthage 2 - Idleness</p>
<p>On this episode, we examine early Mormonism formed as a cult for
temporal gratification.</p>
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<p>Why is it that somebody chooses to start a religion? Our world is often
measured by the religion of any collective population. Somebody who
comes from America is probably a Christian, from Saudi Arabia a Muslim,
from India a Hindu, from Utah a Mormon. Nearly infinite historical
factors play into why this is the case but the root of those factors so
often is one guy, yes guy, who says I’m going to start a religion. Most
world religions are so disconnected from their founders by time and lack
of documentation so Mormonism presents a fascinating case study in this
regard. Not only is the founder of Mormonism well-studied, but we have
thousands of documents which shed light on his decision-making
processes. We have newspapers and books from the time and place where
this religious leader grew up and we can watch how societal elements
factored into Jo’s burgeoning religion. We have affidavits and
interviews with his neighbors, both friends and enemies, we have
membership records of certain people joining the church at certain times
who influenced the direction of Jo’s religion in one way or another. We
have birth, marriage, and death dates of thousands of Jo’s early
followers. We have a reminiscence from Jo’s own mother written soon
after his death providing a unique and unvarnished account of the Smith
family dynamics. We have thousands of letters written by the hands of
these early saints, along with hundreds of journals, giving historians a
window into the past unmatched by basically any other world religion. A
lot of people wonder if Christianity would be a thing today if we had
modern court documents and newspaper clippings about the cult of Jesus
detailing just how weird and abusive it was, not to mention just how
much Jesus would be castigated by most modern Christians for being pinko
hippie commie scum; I think the existence of Mormonism is a perfect
example to say Christianity definitely would exist because cults crop up
every day and the leaders who start them are a dime a dozen.</p>
<p>Some are more successful than others. Some cult leaders never count more
than a handful of devoted followers their entire life and ministry;
others are elected president. There are nearly infinite variables which
contribute to starting, growing, and maintaining a cult. The variables
are extensive and often invisible, but the algorithms are largely the
same. A smart young boy, and yes I say boy because that’s a core shared
trait of this phenomenon. Female and non-binary cult leaders aren’t
unheard of, but so far outshadowed by male cult leaders. In Jo’s time
Ellen G. White, Joanna Southcott, the Universal Friend, they’re outliers
which only highlight the trend in this male-dominated phenomenon. So, a
smart young boy grows up in a house, usually with lots of siblings
making the competition for mom’s and dad’s attention fierce. They never
get enough resources to thrive and flourish from the family, forcing
them to seek fulfillment from the outside world. Some combination of
their biology and sociology makes these people particularly observant of
the world around them and eventually they learn their most valuable
skill set which serves them for the rest of their lives; manipulation.</p>
<p>The lessons are hard, but plentiful, and manipulation tactics become a
primary tool used by these people, manipulation is a hammer and every
problem can be a nail. They learn that if they say something one way, it
will cause people to hate or fear them, but if they simply say it a
different way then it will cause people to do whatever the person says.
Once this tool is utilized and the wielder of said tool becomes a master
at using it, the world becomes a sandbox in which these people can build
whatever their hearts desire.</p>
<p>Manipulation is, at its core, one of the greatest demonstrations of
human laziness. Using language, in the case of cult leaders often
language which claims to come from god, to coerce people into doing
things they otherwise wouldn’t is lazy. Now, don’t get me wrong,
coercing people to do things that are good for others is what society,
government, and social contracts in general are about; not all coercion
or manipulation is bad. What I’m saying is one person manipulating
others for their own self-serving interests is absolutely integral to
starting a cult and it is indolence in its most basic form. A basic
motivation of every cult leader is laziness. Populism requires an
exalted weathervane who moves and turns with the tides and forces of
society.</p>
<p>There’s a larger point nested in this conversation worth examining here.
Society deems knowledge valuable. In today’s society, big data drives
everything and it’s a multi-billion dollar per year industry. The Mormon
church today is a big data company, funding millions of labor-hours into
collecting genealogy, history, and population data. Knowledge is how
society moves, whether progressive or regressive is often a subject of
heated debate. We pay people to think, especially when they tell us
stuff we like to hear. But, there’s a subtle and important distinction
between a principled philosopher, a scientist, and a cult leader. One we
support as a society because their knowledge is valuable, the other we
support as a society because we’re manipulated into doing so; they’re a
vestigial trait of humanity.</p>
<p>One is a person saying, this is what I think about the world and let’s
have a dialogue. The other is a person saying this is how the world
works because my god told me so; if you dare correct me then you’re my
enemy.</p>
<p>You see the difference? Philosophy is a noble endeavor requiring a
lifetime of devotion and study. A cult leader is the very antithesis of
philosophy. They exist to tell us Truth with a capital “T”. A
philosopher exists to ask questions and probe the phenomenon of human
consciousness. Philosophy is an inherently tenacious practice and often
leads to more questions than answers. Cult leaders exist by virtue of
shutting down questions with profundities as non-answers; questioning
which often leads to adverse consequences for the questioner; a delicate
beliefs system balancing on the pillars of manipulation, groupthink, and
untestable claims. Cults are inherently lazy. Cult leaders are the
pinnacle of human mental lethargy; so what does that say about their
followers? Why think about my existence and ethics when somebody will
simply tell me all the answers? A lazy existence built on a system of
lazy morals.</p>
<p>Remarkably, cults can define generations of populations. People can be
industrious and hard-working within a system of lazy morals because
their work contributes to building the kingdom of lies. Those same
people, however, are lazy. They refuse to let their morals, ethics, or
beliefs be questioned because they know for a fact that they already
have all the right answers. Probing into their own sense of morals too
often conflicts with those given them by their manipulative leaders so
it’s far easier to just put those questions on the shelf and ignore
them. I’ll get the answers to those tough questions after I die.</p>
<p>I myself have spent enough time with both cult followers and leaders to
know this intellectual indolence first hand. It is a scourge,
intellectual cancer, harnessed to shut down human inquisitiveness,
ceding ground to that thought-damning phrase “because that’s the way it
is”. These people are as friendly as can be until you introduce a
question which shakes their convictions and reveals how inert their
beliefs truly are; then their entire countenance shifts, they become
defensive because that question wasn’t just targeting what they believe,
but a core piece of their identity. Cult leaders thrive on identity.
They weaponize identity, regressing their followers into tribalistic
behavior and a false victimhood mentality, fabricating a persecution
complex often out of thin air. They do this because the system of
beliefs simply can’t stand up to inquiry or skepticism; evolving the
beliefs would require effort and harmonizing but the cult leaders and
followers have worked tirelessly to secure the belief system as
lethargic and monolithic. It’s a bit of a paradox. Empires built on lies
require work to grow and maintain while simultaneously capturing the
worst of human tendencies of torpidity. I’m so certain I’m right that I
will spend every waking moment working to build the kingdom of god.
Anybody who questions this is an enemy attacking my identity and
deserving of ignoring at best and violence at worst.</p>
<p>This intellectual laziness is, unfortunately, infectious and hereditary.
A person who devotes their life to building up the cult may work 18 hour
days 365 days of the year, they wouldn’t typically be classified as
lazy, certainly not by their fellow cult members. But that devotion is
deeply rooted in laziness; an unwillingness to confront unknown unknowns
and form a personal moral compass. A philosopher may spend weeks at a
time in their home reading and writing, never lifting a finger for any
manual labor as their energy is far more valuable when expended on
thought than physical action; the philosopher may be seen as lazy for
spending so little time in “work” as we often call physically-demanding
activities not for pleasure. But in reality, the scientist or
philosopher is expending vast mental resources to attack different
angles of what it is to be human or what we observe in our universe.
These are not lazy people and far more often they leave behind a legacy
worth veneration, admiration, and further study. The difference is in
how these people view the world and what forms the basis of their
morality. A philosopher will deal with the trolly problem in complex
ways while the cult leader or follower will simply declare god’s will in
the matter, an inherently untestable assertion.</p>
<p>This paradoxical nature of philosophical verses declaratory morality
places the focus of our study at the crux of this paradox. If we view
the life and legacy of Joseph Smith, laziness isn’t typically an
attribute we would use. He built cities, wrote books, was editor of
multiple newspapers, formed his own armies, ran hundreds of businesses
throughout his life, seldom had any time to help raise his children
because each day was occupied with building his own empire. These are
not activities people would often ascribe to laziness but I do when I
consider the underpinnings of these actions, the root cause, if you
will. As much as Jo’s legacy is marked by these accomplishments, far
more of his day-to-day actions were governed by delegating tasks to
people who believed his outlandish and untestable claims. When the
impetus behind what he delegated was ever questioned, the answer was
always the same; because I said so in the name of the lord. Thus saith
the lord, give me your farm. Thus saith the lord, build me a city. Thus
saith the lord, kill that person because they’re a mobocrat. Thus saith
the lord, and fill in the blank. This is intellectual lethargy. Why is
something the way it is? Because god said so; I know because I talk to
him all the time. I don’t believe that you talk to god. Burn the
heretic! Why do we burn the heretic? Because god said so.
Self-selection in the body of followers and their often violent
opposition to anybody who questions, the very threat of intellectual
work, drags entire populations toward collective stupidity. This
laziness is infectious and hereditary; given long enough to mature and
grow, entire populations of people are known by their intellectual
laziness. That means the work of destroying sacred cows is a long and
labor-intensive process; but, more dangerously, it’s often seen as
attacking entire populations of people when the attacks aren’t aimed at
the individuals so much as the ideology with which they identify.
Attacking beliefs versus attacking believers is a subtle but important
line cults thrive on blurring. Identity of members becomes so tightly
intertwined with their beliefs that they’re unable to see the difference
when presented with information that forces them out of their
intellectual laziness. It’s not anti-Mormons, it’s anti-Mormonism that’s
an arduous work worthy of investment and determination.</p>
<p>Before there was a gold bible written by ancient Native American Jews in
Reformed Egyptian, before angels administered to Joseph Smith in his
room late at night, before he had a scribe to write his claimed words of
god, Jo dug for buried treasure. For a young man with a healing leg and
an intemperate father as a role model, any way to get money for himself
and the Smith family was explored, especially when it didn’t involve
physical labor. Understandably, when the cake and beer shop, odd jobs
for local farmers, and other menial jobs presented too much work,
digging for buried treasure provided an easier way to make money.</p>
<p>Historian Ronald Walker, who by the way was a faithful Mormon, wrote a
really good article about Joe’s magical treasure hunting, putting it in
the context of a larger treasure hunting culture. It’s called “The
Persisting Idea of American Treasure Hunting.” Walker says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From colonial times to at least the Age of Jackson, Americans dug for
magical treasure. There were hundreds and probably thousands of these
‘money diggers,’ all seeking troves of fabled coins, mines, jewels,
and other valued prizes. . . . Yet, for all this prodigious toil,
their ‘finds’ were as rare as Merlin’s transmuted gold. . . . Relying
on an immemorial but now forgotten world view, the money diggers
placed faith in conjuring, elemental spirits, thrice-spoken dreams,
seeric gifts, and enchanted treasure that could slip and rumble
through the earth as easily as a fish moving through the deep. . . .
But getting the treasure was always difficult and harrowing. If not
recovered quickly, the trove sank into the earth’s depths until its
next far-in-the-future ‘blooming.’ Further, the digger might have to
outwit the man-like elemental spirits [who guarded the treasure].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The guardians were often devils,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>who moved treasures about maliciously to prevent their discovery and
created distracting spectres to impede digging. . . . If such things
did not scare the seeker from his booty, they invariably caused him to
break the taboo of silence, which ended any chance of success. Faced
with these odds, the European treasure seeker tried to narrow the
odds. To facilitate his search, he listened carefully to the treasure
dreams of a pure or innocent youth, who it was believed had special
powers to discern and recover the subterranean bounty. ‘Earth
mirrors,’ seer stones, or divining rods crafted from hazel or
mistletoe were also thought to be useful searching tools.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To prevent the treasure from slipping away through the earth,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Clever diggers might construct a trench outside and below the chest
and approach it from underneath. Such a plan, however, ran the risk of
injuring the digger if the peripatetic chest moved downward and fell
upon him. Other hunters used magic circles to break the treasure’s
charm. From antiquity, men had used circles in their devotions, and
magicians particularly came to regard circles as ‘certain fortresses’
against demons. Money diggers agreed. They encircled their pits to
‘keep the devil out’ and to protect themselves from the treasure
guardian’s machination. . . . Swords, sacrifices, and the Bible were
also used. The common European pattern placed the adept at the center
of the treasure circle, sword or wand in hand, where he observed
planetary positions and propitiated the treasure demons with Old
Testament sacrifices [especially of dogs or sheep].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Walker gives a bunch of examples of just how old these treasure stories
are. We find them in ancient Egypt, in Greek epic poetry, and in the
Dead Sea Scrolls of ancient Judea. According to Walker, “the ideas of
hidden but guarded treasure, with their secondary motifs of ancient
texts, animals, bozes, devils, caves, gold, incantations, mountains, and
even the ratifying number three” were “a part of the central beliefs of
Indo-European folk culture.” They thrived in Europe for millennia.
“Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Walter Scott, Edvard Grieg, Henrik
Ibsen, and especially the Germans Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann used
treasure images in their works.” Understandably, these beliefs crossed
the Atlantic to America, where they influenced Joe Smith. Episodes 1,
152 and 155.</p>
<p>These stories may have been old, but they were also always looked down
upon by “polite society”. There is no evidence that they actually found
any treasure, making it pretty obvious, at least to educated people,
that this whole thing was at worst a con, and at best a totally
unproductive hobby. Notably as well, although there isn’t any solid
evidence of this occurring with the Smith treasure diggers, buried
treasure was a great way to launder counterfeit money. An habitually
destitute person walks into the local shop with a bag of gold coins,
people are going to be skeptical as to where it came from. Found it
while digging in the woods is a satisfying explanation for a while and
it may even motivate more folks to join the group and fund treasure digs
of their own. When those digs came up dry, the conjuration was performed
incorrectly and the dupe walks away with their pockets lighter and the
Smiths have a few meals paid for.</p>
<p>Hard-working people who take the slow, hard way to wealth have always
looked at people who chase get-rich-quick schemes as lazy. This is the
paradox discussed earlier. It can be hard work to be a sucker who
believes in ghost stories and magic. Have you ever spent an entire night
digging trenches nine feet deep in order to try to approach a slippery
treasure chest from underneath after acquiring the ingredients and
chanting the appropriate words for the spell to bind the chest to its
location? While the act requires a lot of work, the pursuit itself is an
effort to get rich quick and regarded as idleness by folks who actually
work or study for their paycheck.</p>
<p>It’s within this context we should consider what Jo’s neighbors said
about him; some of it is coming from a place of prejudice against
treasure-digging and magical pursuits. But there’s another layer as well
because it’s hard to tell whether Joe did much actual digging, the
working part of the lazy endeavor. Lorenzo Saunders says in a November
1884 affidavit that when the Smiths dug for treasure, Jo himself didn’t
actually dig. He was the orchestrator, the specialist performing
sacrifices or doing magic to ward away evil spirits, and he left the
hard work to the grunts. As the treasure-digging company’s seer, Jo
would have spent more of his time locating the buried treasure than
actually digging for it, often doing so from a remote location.</p>
<p>With that said, let’s dig into the accounts (you see what I did there…
dig into the accounts… (One of these jokes has to land eventually) from
some of Joe’s neighbors that described him as lazy. In spite of what
apologists may claim, the accounts are plentiful and far from one-offs
of neighbors mentioning it in passing. They come from all over the
19th-century, many contemporary, some later reminiscences, and some are
even sworn and notarized affidavits, which historians absolutely love to
have.</p>
<p>Let’s start with a New York neighbor of the Smiths, Parley Chase, who
said in a sworn affidavit dated December 13, 1833 “that not one of the
male members of the Smith family were entitled to any credit,
whatsoever. They were lazy, intemperate and worthless men, very much
addicted to lying. In this they frequently boasted of their skill.
Digging for money was their principal employment.” A March 20, 1834
affidavit signed by 11 New York neighbors similarly said that the Smiths
“were not only a lazy, indolent set of men, but also intemperate; and
their word was not to be depended upon; and that we are truly glad to
dispense with their society.” Henry Harris’s affidavit, signed December
9, 1833, said the Smiths “were regarded by the community in which they
lived, as a lying and indolent set of men and no confidence could be
placed in them.” Indolent, by the way, is a great indie-prog album by
the band slothful. Likewise, William Riley Hine said in an affidavit in
the 1880s that he “heard a man say who was a neighbor to the Mormon
Smith family, in Palmyra, N.Y., that they were thieves, indolent, the
lowest and meanest family he ever saw or heard of.”</p>
<p>A mail carrier who regularly passed through Palmyra on his way back and
forth from Canada to Kansas said in article published in the June 7,
1855 <em>Texas Ranger</em>, “[I] well remember of hearing frequently of the
pranks of ‘Lazy Joe.’” Even Lorenzo Saunders, who liked Joe and defended
him and said the Smiths were great sugar makers, also said in a November
12, 1884 interview that “Joseph Smith never did work. They claim there
in that book that Jo. Smith was a great worker. he was a lazy dog, I
tell you the truth.”</p>
<p>Not exactly a resounding endorsement for the Smith family’s work ethic.
Most of those statements are pretty vague and general, they could mean a
lot of different forms of laziness. There are, however, plenty of
statements available which detail this indolence to a greater extent.
Joshua Stafford was another neighbor of the Smiths in New York. He said
in an affidavit signed November 15, 1833 that when the Smiths first
arrived in the Palmyra, New York area, they were poor, but “were
laboring people.” But, he adds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A short time after this, they commenced digging for hidden treasures,
and soon after they became indolent [or lazy], and told marvellous
stories about ghosts, hob-goblins, caverns, and various other
mysterious matters. Joseph once showed me a piece of wood which he
said he took from a box of money, and the reason he gave for not
obtaining the box, was, that it moved. At another time, he, (Joseph,
Jr.) at a husking, called on me to become security for a horse, and
said he would reward me handsomely, for he had found a box of watches,
and they were as large as his fist, and he put one of them to his ear,
and he could hear it "tick forty rods." Since he could not dispose of
them profitably at Canandaigua or Palmyra, he wished to go east with
them. He said if he did not return with the horse, I might take his
life. I replied, that he knew I would not do that. Well, said he, I
did not suppose you would, yet I would be willing that you should. He
was nearly intoxicated at the time of the above conversation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stafford’s view of Joe as lazy apparently stemmed partly from the fact
that Joe manipulated people into giving him things rather than earning
them, and partly from the fact that Joe was a drunkard, which we’ll
discuss in a coming episode of this series. That’s a pretty good
manipulation tactic, right? You sound really sincere if you swear on
your life and give someone permission to kill you if you don’t come
through. Jo knew this was an impotent promise with no real consequences
because Stafford wasn’t a murderer. We can see from these statements
that Jo was developing a toolbox of manipulation tactics he’d utilize
and expand throughout the remainder of his life, especially when it came
to his ministry. His concealment of the claimed gold plates rings true
to this, when he claimed to multiple people, including Martin Harris,
that if they saw the plates uncovered the penalty would be death on the
spot. Let’s face it, the greatest fear an imposter carries is being
discovered. For that reason Jo had to invent greater and greater lies
which would insulate those lower-level lies from being discovered. A
habitual liar is the laziest person in the room.</p>
<p>These manipulations would manifest by similar tactics when it came to Jo
developing higher ranks of church leadership where participants would
gain access to greater mysteries if they would only give their property
or wives to the prophet. If you can’t acquire these goods by your own
merits or labor, just convince those who have them to give them up by
manipulation and threats with life and death, or even eternal,
consequences. If the person offering you salvation is also the person
threatening you with punishment, it isn’t salvation it’s self-serving
extortion. See Council of Fifty episodes 168-170, polygamy eps 161,
148-49, 116, Masonry and endowment 110-11, 108, 100, 57, Mormon
theocracy ep 85-6, 72, 66, Evolving hierarchy ep 25, 23, 22.</p>
<p>Another Stafford neighbor of the Smiths, David Stafford, expressed
similar concerns in an affidavit dated December 5, 1833:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have been acquainted with the family of Joseph Smith Sen. for
several years, and I know him to be a drunkard and a liar, and to be
much in the habit of gambling. He and his boys were truly a lazy set
of fellows, and more particularly Joseph, who, very aptly followed his
father's example, and in some respects was worse. . . It is well
known, that the general employment of the Smith family was money
digging and fortune-telling. They kept around them constantly, a gang
of worthless fellows who dug for money nights, and were idle in the
day time. It was a mystery to their neighbors how they got their
living. I will mention some circumstances and the public may judge for
themselves. At different times I have seen them come from the woods
early in the morning, bringing meat which looked like mutton. I went
into the woods one morning very early, shooting patridges and found
Joseph Smith Sen. in company with two other men, with hoes, shovels
and meat that looked like mutton. On seeing me they run like wild men
to get out of sight. -- Seeing the old man a few day afterwards, I
asked him why he run so the other day in the woods, ah, said he, you
know that circumstances alter cases; it will not do to be seen at all
time[s].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Smiths were drunkards, gamblers, and secretive with their magical
practices, funding their lifestyles by unknown means. Gambling and
speculation also fits with the general theme of get-rich-quick schemes
and these tendencies would manifest in Jo’s ministry through constant
land speculation in Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo. The Smiths dug for
buried treasure at night but were idle during the day, which may help
account for why people viewed them as lazy. If you only work while other
people are sleeping, they’ll never see you working, but that’s only if
we qualify chasing buried treasure guarded by magical spirits as work.
The get-rich-quick idea underpinning the buried treasure hunts was, at
the end of the day, a lazy endeavor, but that’s indolence built on
indolence as the very act of never questioning the mindset which
produces the beliefs in magic and the occult also reveals a level of
intellectual laziness discussed at the beginning of the episode.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say, the Smiths also didn’t seem to have any honest way of
making money, and Stafford had reasons to suspect that Joseph Smith Sr.
might have a bunch of stolen mutton stashed in the woods. From where the
mutton came, we can only speculate but the multiple accounts of the
Smiths sacrificing lambs to the treasure guardian spirits will suffice.</p>
<p>An anonymous letter in the October 26, 1883 Cincinnati Enquirer by
someone who had interviewed some Harmony Pennsylvania residents says,
“From all accounts he [Joseph Jr.] was a lazy, idle, shrewd,
plausible, schemer and pretender.” The letter goes on to tell the story
of Jo’s involvement in a treasure dig for William Hale and Oliver Harper
in Harmony, Pennsylvania, where he met his to-be wife, Emma Hale.
Apparently Joe, in his early twenties by now, pointed out a spot where
the treasure was buried.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After digging the depth indicated by Smith no trace of the treasure
was discovered, whereupon Mr. Harper became discouraged. Smith, who
was as tricky as a snake, then pretended that there was an enchantment
about the place that was removing the treasure further and further
away, and said that Harper must get a perfectly white dog and sprinkle
its blood over the ground, and that would dispel the obnoxious charm.
Work was suspended and a search for a perfectly white dog was begun.
None perfectly white could be found in the neighborhood. Smith said
perhaps a perfectly white sheep would answer. One was procured,
killed, and its blood sprinkled over the ground and the work of
excavation was resumed. No trace of the treasure was found, though six
holes, one of them fifty feet in diameter and twenty feet deep, were
dug. After expending over $2,000 in this fruitless labor, Mr. Harper
refused to put in any more money and the digging ceased. Smith said
that God Almighty was angry at them for attempting to palm off a white
sheep on Him for that of a white dog, and so had allowed the
enchantment to remove the treasure which was there when they began
operations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The content of this letter, although late and anonymous, reveals many
aspects of how treasure digging was developed and conducted as a con
from the very beginning. If this were the only account historians have,
it would be anti-Mormon and rightfully regarded as ridiculous but given
the plethora of similar accounts ranging from contemporary to decades
after, along with the remarkable consistency in the methods and
practices used in the treasure digs, the accusations that these are
anti-Mormon lies falls under the crushing weight of all these statements
taken together. It also reveals the pattern of a habitual liar when
faced with no resolution other than admitting it was all made up, turn
to deflection and finally say daddy was too mad for us to be successful.
There was no bottom to these lies. There was always a position for
retreat when the treasure digs were unsuccessful, which was a pattern
revealed in Jo’s ministry as well. If something went wrong or somebody
called Jo out in a lie, an excuse, some form of retreat always existed.
Any master manipulator always knows the locations of all exits in the
room.</p>
<p>This treasure dig in Harmony, Pennsylvania is important, because while
Joe was working for William Hale and Oliver Harper, he stayed at the
home of Isaac Hale and got to know Isaac’s daughter, Emma Hale. Emma and
Joe eventually eloped, against her parents’ wishes, and in August 1827,
Joe’s Palmyra neighbor Peter Ingersoll accompanied Joe to the Hale home
in Harmony, Pennsylvania to pick up Emma’s belongings and furniture to
transport them back to Palmyra. When they arrived, according to
Ingersoll’s affidavit,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>His father-in-law (Mr. Hale) addressed Joseph, in a flood of tears:
"You have stolen my daughter and married her. I had much rather have
followed her to her grave. You spend your time in digging for money --
pretend to see in a stone, and thus try to deceive people." Joseph
wept, and acknowledged he could not see in a stone now, nor never
could; and that his former pretensions in that respect, were all
false. He then promised to give up his old habits of digging for money
and looking into stones. Mr. Hale told Joseph, if he would move to
Pennsylvania and work for a living, he would assist him in getting
into business. Joseph acceded to this proposition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Isaac Hale and Emma’s brother Alva also reported this incident.
According to Isaac’s affidavit dated March 20, 1834, “Smith stated to
me, that he had given up what he called ‘glass-looking,’ and that he
expected to work hard for a living, and was willing to do so.” And
according to Alva, Jo admitted that “peeping [in seer stones for
treasure] was all d---d nonsense. He (Smith) was deceived himself but
did not intend to deceive others; --that he intended to quit the
business, (of peeping) and labor for his livelihood.” When Jo and Emma
were first married, he had a chance to alter his ways. He could have
abandoned his indolent past, he could have reformed and made the right
decision. Instead, however, laziness transcends the wishes of a
disapproving father-in-law and public condemnation. If only Jo had kept
this promise, American history might look very different. I also want to
tease apart what Alvah claimed Jo said, that he was deceived but didn’t
intend to deceive others. For a brief moment, the curtain is torn from
the charlatan and the wizard pulling the levers is revealed. Evidence
like this leads Dan Vogel, among other historians, to stick with the
‘pious fraud’ theory of Joseph Smith, that he was a fraud to begin
with and used piety and religion as his cover to sell the fraud. I tend
to agree. Being cognizant of one’s own deception rules out many
cognitive functions which would tend to posit Jo was personally deceived
or sincerely believed in what he said throughout his life. He absolutely
knew it was all a fraud all along. Preserving that fraud found him in
more intense and dire situations as his ministry evolved and all of that
was predicated on his inherent dishonesty and laziness to deal with his
affinity for dishonesty.</p>
<p>Jo’s involvement in magical money-digging got him in trouble with the
law in 1826, the same year the American Temperance Society was formed in
Boston, when he was working as a treasure seer for Josiah Stowell in
South Bainbridge, New York. Josiah Stowell was a full believer in Joe’s
magical powers, but Josiah’s nephew Peter G. Bridgeman could see Joseph
Smith for the listless and lazy liar he was at heart. Bridgeman brought
charges against Joseph Smith under a New York statute from 1811. Here’s
the relevant portion of the statute under which Jo was charged:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>all persons who not having wherewith to maintain themselves, live idle
without employment, and also all persons who go about from door to
door, or place themselves in the streets, highways or passages, to beg
in the cities or towns where they respectively dwell, and all
jugglers, and all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy,
palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or
to discover where lost goods may be found; … shall be deemed and
adjudged disorderly persons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By virtue of this 1811 law existing, people like Joseph Smith were
common and seen as a blight on enlightened society. At its core, this
was a vagrancy law that was loaded with other definitions to dragnet a
lot of unpleasant people together under the same criminal statute. The
term “crafty science” refers explicitly to the practices of magic and
occult employed by the Smiths for locating and extracting the
non-existent treasure Jo would see underground with his peeping stone.
It was an art practiced by the lowest in society, aimed at the credulous
middle-class to extract their money through minimal effort. It’s no
different from fortune tellers and astrologers in LA making celebrities
their chief clientele today, but at the time there were laws against it
which were enforced. But if we just let the market regulate itself all
this pseudo science will die off! Unfortunately people are too stupid
to self-regulate without draining their pockets with buffalo excrement
at best or killing themselves at worst. Jo was charged with a
misdemeanor as a “disorderly person” because he lived idle with no
employment except for pretending to discover where lost goods were found
and taking money for his services which were clearly utilized as a con.
This was crafty science and I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why
that phrase is no longer in our modern lexicon or stare decisis.</p>
<p>Bossman Josiah Stowell testified at the trial in Joe’s defense. Stowell
confirmed that he had hired Joe to search for several treasures, but he
denied that Joe was only pretending. Stowell said “that he positively
knew that the prisoner could tell, and did possess the art of seeing
those valuable treasures through the medium of said stone.”</p>
<p>Stowell went on to give a couple examples of how he knew Joe really had
magical powers. On one occasion, the “prisoner had looked through said
stone for Deacon Attleton for a mine, did not exactly find it, but got a
p[iece] of ore which resembled gold, he thinks.” Joe promised gold,
and although they didn’t find any gold, they did find iron pyrite, also
known as fool’s gold. Easy mistake to make, but it proved that Jo really
could see things in his stone to the credulous Josiah Stowell.</p>
<p>On another occasion, the “prisoner had told by means of this stone where
a Mr. Bacon had buried money; that he and prisoner had been in search of
it; that prisoner had said it was in a certain root of a stump five feet
from surface of the earth, and with it would be found a tail feather;
that said Stowel and prisoner thereupon commenced digging, found a tail
feather, but money was gone; that he supposed the money moved down.” Joe
planted a feather, and that was enough to prove to Bossman Josiah
Stowell beyond a shadow of a doubt that Joe had magic powers. These
schemes were clearly premeditated to acquire money through the smallest
amount of work possible. That leaves a question standing as the elephant
in the room; these treasure digging practices all occurred during the
period Jo claimed he was communing with angels after his theophany, soon
before he would author the Book of Mormon. When exactly during the 1820s
did Jo change his ways? When did his treasure digging change from a way
to make an easy dollar to being divinely sanctioned scripture writing
and religion building? When did Jo stop being a loafing deceiver and
become a prophet of god? Maybe… and I know this is pretty far out there,
but maybe it never stopped.</p>
<p>The witnesses for the prosecution, Arad Stowell, a Mr. McMaster, and
Jonathan Thompson, gave a few more examples. Arad Stowell and McMaster
testified that to try to prove his abilities to them, Joe had “laid a
book upon a white cloth, and proposed looking through another stone
which was white and transparent, hold the stone to the candle, turn his
head to book, and read. The deception appeared so palpable that witness
went off disgusted.” It’s a little unclear here whether Joe had
memorized passages from the book in advance, or whether he was tilting
his head to peek at the pages while he read, but anyway, these two guys
weren’t fooled. Jo’s ability to locate and read a mark, a prospective
person to be conned, became one of his greatest skills which would serve
him the rest of his life. It’s likely his deceptions aimed at Josiah
Stowell were no more believable than that book-reading example, but
Bossman Jo’s credulity made him an easy mark for Jo. The first skill a
successful con man learns is identifying easy marks. How far he goes
with that mark or how much a conman takes that mark for a ride is far
more up to the mark than the conman himself.</p>
<p>Jonathan Thompson tells about a different incident, when the</p>
<blockquote>
<p>prisoner was requested to look for chest of money; did look, and
pretended to know there it was; and that prisoner, Thompson, and
Yeomans went in search of it; that Smith arrived at spot first; was at
night; that Smith looked in hat while there, and when very dark, told
how the chest was situated. After digging several feet, struck upon
something sounding like a board or plank. Prisoner would not look
again, pretending that he was alarmed on account of the circumstances
relating to the trunk being buried, [which] came all fresh to his
mind. That the last time he looked he discovered distinctly the two
Indians who buried the trunk, that a quarrel ensued between them, and
that one of said Indians was killed by the other, and thrown into the
hole beside the trunk, to guard it, as he supposed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When it comes to these magic practices used as cons, there always needs
to be an out. Something in the spell was said wrong, the participants
were in the wrong mindset, the wrong planets are governing the season,
the dog was spotted instead of pure white, one of the diggers has
indigestion, whatever the excuse the person orchestrating the con has to
be able to blame something when it doesn’t work as proposed. For Jo and
the treasure diggers, the chest kept sinking. Thompson continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thompson says that he believes in the prisoner's professed skill; that
the board which he struck his spade upon was probably the chest, but
on account of an enchantment the trunk kept settling away from under
them when digging, that notwithstanding they continued constantly
removing the dirt, yet the trunk kept about the same distance from
them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The pursuit of worldly treasures by utilizing the power of magic like
this never really pans out. The pursuit of worldly treasures by
utilizing the power of god is the next logical step because it rarely
fails. Oddly enough, Thompson was called a witness for the prosecution,
but he actually ended up saying he believed Joe could see things in his
stone, so I guess his testimony sort of also supported the defense?
There is some consistency to the various witness statements, that they
believed Jo could actually see what he claimed, but that they were
merely unsuccessful in the digs. These testimonies foreshadowed what
would be a common theme in Jo’s ministry; people believed what he said
even when evidence right in front of their faces would indicate the
contrary. Jo refused to make his money from honest hard work so his
charisma was his tool of choice to get people to give him <em>their</em> money.</p>
<p>The infamous 1826 trial record ends by saying, “And therefore the Court
find the Defendant guilty.” In some ways this looks like <em>legal proof</em>
that Jo was a disorderly idle person with no employment except for
pretending to look for lost objects and buried treasure. The truth is a
little more complicated and allows apologists to carve out
interpretations of the evidence which don’t cast Joseph Smith into such
a negative light. This was just a pre-trial hearing, so the guilty
verdict was only an indictment, not a conviction. William D. Purple,
Abraham W. Benton, and Joel K. Noble all said that Jo was either
released or allowed to escape on “leg bail” without a trial, either
because he was a minor or because the court didn’t want to impugn Josiah
Stowell’s reputation with an embarrassing trial. People will say he was
never convicted in that trial as exonerating evidence that Jo was
actually an honest young man, but that summary of the evidence is easily
belied by reading the witness’s statements which describe his conduct as
run-of-the-mill con artistry and “crafty sciences”.</p>
<p>Four years later, in 1830, Joe was re-arrested to finally be put to
trial on this charge of disorderly person, but this time he was
acquitted because of the statute of limitations-- too long a time had
passed since the crime. The 1830 trial produced some more amusing
testimony, however.</p>
<p>At this trial, Josiah Stowell testified about a horse that Jo had
borrowed and never returned. Stowell remained certain that Jo would
eventually pay the debt. “I hold his note for the price of the horse,
which I consider as good as the pay-- for I am well acquainted with
Joseph Smith Jr., and know him to be an honest man; and if he wishes I
am ready to let him have another horse on the same terms.” Jo combined
tactics of mind control had a complete hold on Bossman Josiah Stowell.
He was clearly working on honing his skills of cult mind control before
the Gold Bible story was widely circulated as evidenced by the 1826
trial. The development of his skills is revealed in the differences
between what Stowell said in the 1826 trial verses the 1830 trial.
Stowell and other wealthy men became the marks of Joseph Smith and he
bled them dry while utilizing cult mind control tactics to the point
they implicitly trusted him with anything and everything he needed, all
while the majority of other people connected with the Smith family
regarded them as lazy and intemperate hucksters.</p>
<p>Whether Josiah Stowell, Martin Harris (NSSM), Newel K. Whitney, John
Johnson, or any other well-off mark targeted by Jo, the sunk-cost
fallacy will cause otherwise reasonable people to do the dumbest things
and sacrifice their livelihood. Abram W. Benton also recorded this
fantastic exchange between Stowell and the prosecution’s lawyer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Q: “Did Smith ever tell you there was money hid in a certain place
which he mentioned?”</p>
<p>A: “Yes.” …</p>
<p>Q: “Did you dig?”</p>
<p>A: “Yes.”</p>
<p>Q: “Did you find any money?”</p>
<p>A: “No.”</p>
<p>Q: “Did he not lie to you then, and deceive you?”</p>
<p>A: “No! The money was there, but we did not get quite to it!”</p>
<p>Q: “How do you know it was there?”</p>
<p>A: “Smith said it was!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What could I possibly say about this interaction that it doesn’t say for
itself? That exchange needs no commentary. Jo was many things, but a
master-manipulator of credulous minds may truly be his crowning
character trait. But for our purposes, the money quote from the 1830
trial comes from the testimony of Addison Austin. According to Austin,
during the time period when Joe was leading treasure hunts for Stowell,
Austin got Joe alone “and asked him to tell honestly whether he could
see this money or not.” Austin said that “Smith hesitated for some time,
but finally replied, ‘to be candid, between you and me, I cannot, any
more than you or any body else; but any way to get a living.’” Any way
to get a living which doesn’t involve swinging an axe, tilling a field,
keeping a ledger book, hammering metal, milking a cow, studying books,
or building a cabinet anyway. Jo’s lethargy for real work is a notable
pattern emerging from the earliest accounts about his life including
these court records. One other detail worth noting in this hearing,
Bossman Josiah Stowell’s daughters were called to testify against Joseph
Smith about him being… let’s just say “improper” towards them. But,
that’s a story for a different time. Eps 11, 12, and 21.</p>
<p>All of this was happening during the gestation period of the Book of
Mormon, Jo’s greatest undertaking ruled by indolence. After Joseph Smith
claimed he’d gotten the golden plates from Moroni in 1827, he started
writing the Book of Mormon with Martin Harris in the spring. By the way,
Marty was a farmer, and spring is a really important season for farmers.
If you don’t get your crops in the ground in the spring, the entire
season is lost. Marty, instead, spent all spring as a scribe for Jo
because, let’s face it, writing words is hard work and why write them
when you can just speak them to somebody else who’ll write them for you?
Apropos of nothing, thanks again Chris Smith for helping me write this
series.</p>
<p>The consequences of this are borne out in Lucy Mack Smith's personal
memoir on page 132, where she claimed that two-thirds of Marty's crop
was lost. Plus, Joe and Emma were living off Marty's dime during the
entire time Marty worked as his scribe, which adds up after a while,
especially after just losing a season. This began the long and painful
process of Joseph Smith bleeding Martin Harris completely dry over
years.</p>
<p>Tradition says they translated about 116 pages-- although it may have
actually been more than that-- and then Martin Harris asked to borrow
the manuscript to take it home to show his skeptical wife. Somehow the
manuscript disappeared from Martin’s desk drawer. The most popular
theory is that his wife, Lucy, burned it, although that’s hotly disputed
among historians and only emerges as the story much later than the
actual event. It may have also been a test by Marty as he’d tested Jo’s
abilities multiple times. Eps 3 and 4. Joe was devastated, and he took a
long break from translation. When he started translating again, he
picked up from where he had left off rather than starting over from the
beginning. Only when he got to the end of the book did he go back and
replace the lost pages, mostly as an autobiography.</p>
<p>The lost manuscript pages posed a problem, because Joe couldn’t
perfectly reproduce what he’d originally written, and for all he knew,
the manuscript was still out there. If he just tried to rewrite the same
thing, then somebody could produce the original manuscript and point out
discrepancies between the replacement pages and the original. At least,
that was his way of dealing with this trouble. Fortunately for Joe, God
had a plan to solve this problem. According to Jo, he had previously
translated from the “large plates of Lehi,” but there was another set of
plates called the “small plates of Nephi” which told the same story in
abbreviated form from the perspective of Nephi instead of his dad, Lehi.
So he could just translate that. This is the part in the South Park
episode on Joseph Smith where Stan bursts out, “Wait: Mormons actually
know this story, and they still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet?” On
a personal note, that was my first shelf-item at the impressionable age
of 14. Historians Christopher Smith and Dan Vogel did a 2-part
deconstruction of everything South Park got right and wrong, you can
find it on YouTube.</p>
<p>The replacement pages for the lost 116 pages serve as an interesting
case-study for Jo’s authorship methodology. The replacement was an
abridged or shorter version of events already described in the lost
pages, but he uses a ton of “filler” material and a considerable amount
is autobiographical with names of characters only slightly changed.
Isaac Hale became Ishmael and Nephi sounds like his father’s name Lehi
like Jo sr. and Jo jr., Nephi has 2 older brothers with a younger
brother named Samuel just like Jo. It’s remarkable. But it isn’t just
the autobiographical tendencies; in the replacement pages, he copies
chapter after chapter of Isaiah verbatim from the King James Version of
the Bible. And then at some point he runs out of steam and breezes over
hundreds of years of Nephite history in the short books of Enos, Jarom,
Omni, and Words of Mormon, each of which is only one chapter long. These
are the minor prophets of the BoM and each chapter essentially describes
the plates being transferred from one prophet-historian to the next with
very little other material. Jerald and Sandra Tanner, two of the great
critics of the LDS Church, call this the “black hole” in the Book of
Mormon. And basically this “black hole” exists because Martin lost the
original manuscript and Jo’s replacement was under a time crunch and
hopelessly simplistic and lazy. Ep 17.</p>
<p>After the publication of the Book of Mormon, in April 1830 Joe founded
the Church of Christ. That’s the same year the fountain pen was
patented. Throughout this whole period, Jo was dictating (dictating, not
writing for himself) revelations from God that eventually were compiled
to be the Book of Commandments, later republished as the Doctrine and
Covenants with some extra theological material known as the lectures on
faith. Each of these revelations are self-serving; some more than
others. As David Michael and I went through the revelations on My Book
of Mormon podcast before Marie took over for David, we figured out
pretty quickly that Jo essentially established revelations as a
currency. When he wanted somebody to do something for him or the church,
they’d get a revelation, some of which were identical copy-paste
revelations given to different people. One of those revelations that I
find extremely revealing of Joe’s mentality as he established this new
religion of his is D&C 24, dated July 1830, so three to four months
after Joe founded the church. The revelation is addressed directly to
Joe, and it says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For thou shalt devote all thy service in Zion. . . . [But] in
temporal labors thou shalt not have strength, for this is not thy
calling. Attend to thy calling and thou shalt have wherewith to
magnify thine office, and to expound all scriptures.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>God told Joe temporal work is not your strong suit, so instead you
should devote yourself entirely to the hard spiritual work of explaining
scripture. From watching circuit rider preachers collecting money during
revivals to authoring his own revelation that his time should be devoted
to the church and only the church, the cycle continues through another
conman.</p>
<p>It’s not hard to see what he’s doing here. When you take on a project
like starting a church, or, for example, creating, editing and producing
a podcast on the history of said church, it's a lot easier to focus on
that one thing when you don't have a day-job. Joe was able to swear off
all physical labor for money, and tell everybody that his church was to
be his one and only focus. He, however, did so by claimed divine command
instead of starting a gofundme for a history book he has yet to deliver
on… Uhhh… that was a little too real. Chris, did you write that? MOVING
ON!</p>
<p>Another passage within that same section of the D&C hearkens to Jo’s
previous troubles with the law while simultaneously reinforcing his
reliance on the tithes of the church for support.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And whosoever shall go to law with thee shall be cursed by the law.</p>
<p>And thou shalt take no purse nor scrip, neither staves, neither two
coats, for the church shall give unto thee in the very hour what thou
needest for food and for raiment, and for shoes and for money, and for
scrip.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hey Jo, can you help me lift this thing? Come on, Ollie, you know what
the big man upstairs thinks about me lifting a thing. By the way, we
need more tithing cuz Joey needs a new wardrobe! Mormons often consider
the phrase “Oh my god!” is taking the lord’s name in vain, but when a
guy tells his hundreds of followers that god said he doesn’t have to
work for money, I can’t think of a greater example of taking the Lord’s
name in vain. It’s a stark contrast from the claims church leaders make
today that the church is run by a lay clergy while they take living
stipends Jo would have salivated over and sit on a veritable dragon’s
hoard of wealth of over $100 billion. It’s vanity, hypocrisy, and it’s
all rooted in an indescribable loathing of manual labor and honest work.</p>
<p>Once Jo arrived in Kirtland after commanding his church to relocate to
Ohio and Missouri, this trend of god giving Jo the cakewalk through life
accelerated. In June 1831, that’s the same year Clement Studebaker
(Studebaker cars) was born. I WANT AN AVANTI SO BAD. I WAAAANT ONE!!!
The 63 R3 model, only 1,200 made with the supercharged 304 4-speed. It
could do 180 mph in the early 60s, are you frickin kidding me?! If you
have one, call me. I digress. In June 1831, Joseph Smith was in
Kirtland, but he had been prophesying that the “New Jerusalem” or “Zion”
would be located in Missouri. This was basically the Mormon promised
land, but Joe hadn’t actually been there yet; he’d only described it in
letters. Unfortunately, his powers of remote viewing with a seer stone
didn’t cut it so in June 1831 he decided it was time that he went and
saw it for himself to properly declare it Zion. He received a revelation
that commanded twenty-eight elders to travel to Missouri. One of those
elders was Ezra Booth. This experience ended up being so disillusioning
for Booth that he left the Church and wrote the first insider’s expose
of the church. See the exclusive feed on patreon.com/nakedmormonism
where we read through the Ezra Booth letters in Mormonism Unvailed for
our NaMo book club.</p>
<p>According to Booth, Joe’s revelation told the elders to go to Missouri
on foot. Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Martin Harris, and Edward
Partridge, however, were told to go by carriage and steamboat, funded
largely by NSSMarty. The leaders traveled in comfort, while the laymen
begged their way to Missouri like hobos. Hey, at least that survived to
the modern church.</p>
<p>When Joe got to the holy land, he was extremely disappointed. He found
about 20 log cabins, mostly occupied by drunks. Only a handful of people
had converted to Mormonism. According to Booth, “We expected to find a
large Church, which Smith said, was revealed to him in a vision, Oliver
had raised up there. This large Church was found to consist of three or
four females.” Priorities, right Ezra?</p>
<p>To Ezra Booth’s great disappointment, the whole trip ended up being
pointless. Joe laid the foundation of the temple, which was fine, but it
wasn’t worth walking all the way to Missouri to see. And then Joe was
done with this backwater, and he returned to Kirtland, Ohio. According
to Booth, “Before they went to Missouri, [Joseph Smith’s] language
was, ‘we shall winter in Ohio but one winter more.’” But once they got
to Missouri, Joseph changed his tune and declared that “’it will be many
years before we come here," for there is a great work to be done first.
Eps 25, 26.</p>
<p>Booth’s explanation of why Joe returned to Kirtland and left building up
Zion to other people was that “it is much easier, and better suited to
their dispositions, to write commandments [in Kirtland], than to gain
a livelihood by the sweat of their brow [in Missouri]; and indeed,
Smith has commanded himself not to labor, and by his mandate, has
enjoined it upon the Church to support him. [Bishop Edward Partridge],
when we were in Missouri, intimated, that [Smith] and others were too
much inclined to [laziness]. [Smith] replied, ‘I am commanded not to
labor.’” A few quotes from Jo throughout this series really encapsulate
his entire life in so few words like this one. Last week it was the
quote about building the Nauvoo House hotel so that the rich people will
pour their gold and silver into the community until the Mormons are sick
of receiving them. This quote, however, summarizes his work ethic, his
manipulation tactics, his lethargy towards honest labor, and his taking
god’s name in vain for little crap like this throughout his entire
ministry. It’s a remarkable quote and it’s amazing to make a
tongue-in-cheek example about god commanding Jo not to do a thing and
then to have a contemporary who left the church say that exact thing
happened. It shows us today that Jo not only used God’s name to tell him
not to work, but would also quote that revelation to people when he was
in a situation that required him to actually work. His job was talking
to god and anybody who didn’t like it wasn’t faithful to the work and
therefore didn’t believe Jo actually spoke for god. It becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy because anybody regarding these statements with
skepticism, like Ezra Booth, simply leave and the only people left are
the sycophants who’d never question the prophet of god or anything the
prophet claimed god said.</p>
<p>While Joe lived at Kirtland, the Church in Missouri had a series of
troubles with their non-Mormon Missourian neighbors. We’ll discuss this
in coming episodes at length but for now we need to understand that one
of the major sources of tension was the fact that the Missourians were
mostly from the South, whereas the Mormons were mostly from the North,
so they had different attitudes toward the enslavement of black people.
The Book of Mormon is anti-slavery. The Nephites outlawed slavery,
whereas the “ferocious and wicked” Lamanites practiced slavery. In 1832
Joe received his famous civil war revelation, which predicted that a
civil war would begin in South Carolina, and slaves would rise against
their masters. This revelation was not disclosed to the public, because
it was too explosive and the reaction from non-Mormons would not have
been good. It does, however, illustrate to us that Jo kept his eye on
current events for anything he could wrap into his theology or could
demonstrate his feigned powers of prophecy.</p>
<p>In 1833, W. W. Phelps published a newspaper article in which he advised
against free people of color emigrating to Missouri as members of the
Church, because they’d be considered property there. Unfortunately the
Missourians misinterpreted the article as an invitation to free people
of color to emigrate, and the reaction was violent. The racist citizens
of Jackson County, Missouri expelled the Mormons from the county in
1833.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this bad reaction from the Missourians sent Joe into PR
damage control mode, and he showed zero moral backbone by changing his
stance on slavery. The Church issued an official declaration in August
1835 that said the North had no “right to interfere with bond-servants,
nor baptize them contrary to the will and wish of their masters” nor
cause “them to be dissatisfied with their situations in this life.” And
in April 1836, just a year later, coincidentally the same year Samuel
Colt patented the revolving cylinder pistol, Joe published an
anti-abolitionist sermon that warned that abolitionism might lead to
“racial miscegenation and possible race war.” He also said it was the
“decree of Jehovah” that blacks be slaves. GBP Eps 48, 49. Put a pin
in Jo’s stance on slavery because we’ll discuss it in a minute.</p>
<p>Richard Bushman summarized Jo’s general work ethic quite well in his
biography, <em>Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling</em>. Bushman is a believing
Mormon, but to his credit he actually admits to Joseph Smith’s flaws and
remains in good-standing with the church after publishing about
controversial aspects of Jo’s life in this book. Speaking about the
Kirtland years, he says, “How the Smiths paid the bills in these years
is a mystery. Joseph’s journal shows no evidence of working for money.
In 1834, he had been granted the stewardship of a farm near the temple
site, but he recorded no income or benefit. He never mentioned doing
farm work or supervising anyone’s labors. Later he opened a store in
Kirtland, but the store was not profitable. Joseph’s followers helped by
bringing food—half a fattened hog from John Tanner, a quarter beef from
Shadrach Roundy. Others gave Joseph money or forgave borrowed sums.”</p>
<p>Jo’s financial profile in Kirtland is troubled at best. I know we talk
about his finances a lot on the show but it’s kind of a recurring theme
when so many of his actions were motivated by money. He ran his church
on credit and did so while constructing the largest building in the
city, the Kirtland Temple. By the time it completed construction, Jo had
no way to pay off the $40-60k in debt he incurred. He’d absorbed by
divine fiat all the businesses of wealthy members by declaring the
church a socialist system run through Bishops’ storehouses and land
speculation was a common pastime. Jo could issue a revelation commanding
the Mormons to forgive him of his debts, but that solution didn’t
exactly hold water like a tight dish for people who didn’t believe he
was a prophet, which were the majority of people to which the dude owed
money.</p>
<p>When you run out of money and creditors are beating down your door, what
do you do? Start your own bank and print your own money. Who needs to
labor extensively and pay down debts through hard labor and ethical
business practices when you can simply make money and sell stocks in the
Kirtland Safety Society anti-bank-ing company? This worked for a while,
but the inert bank notes eventually caught up and lawsuits were filed,
judgments declared church property into the hands of creditors, and Jo
and the leadership fled to the Missouri church under the cover of night.
Jo running from his problems was a common tactic when life became too
hard to work through them.</p>
<p>When Jo got to Missouri, he wasn’t there for very long, and things were
pretty intense for most of the time he was there.</p>
<p>Here’s a good time to talk about one of the primary tensions between the
Mormons and the Missourians which had been brewing for over half a
decade. Let’s pull that pin out of Jo’s stance on slavery now. The
Mormons came from largely Northern states, which meant most of them were
either abolitionist or generally not pro-slavery. Missouri has always
been a controversial state when it comes to race relations. To this day,
it’s one of the most racially-charged states in America owing to it
being the northernmost slave state above the Mason-Dixon line which
delineated between slave states of the south and non-slave states of the
north. The most infamous supreme court ruling in American history, the
Dred Scott decision, centered around whether or not the Scotts were
considered citizens, having lived in northern states where slavery was
illegal and then moved to Missouri. This 1857 case is a blight on
American jurisprudence and in many ways served as one of the primary
catalysts that resulted in the civil war half a decade later. This all
occurred while Mormon Utah was a slave-holding theocracy, but I digress.
Needless to say, tensions about the slave issue plagued Mormon and
Missourian relations and when the Mormons published from their Jackson
County-based The Evening and the Morning Star that they’d teach freed
slaves how to read by offering them fellowship and Book of Mormon study
classes, the slave holders in Missouri lost their minds. This was in
addition to a number of controversial revelations given by Jo which
caused these tensions to increase. These revelations claimed the
gentile’s property, meaning that of the non-Mormons in Missouri, was
to be consecrated to the bishop’s storehouse, which is a nice way to
package the concept of theft. Also, Jackson County was to be the central
location of the Mormon millennium, meaning the number of Mormons living
there would only increase. More Mormons resulted in them having greater
political power, which, once again, could threaten the way of life of
the slave-holders. Missourians didn’t want their government filled with
a bunch of abolitionist yankees who were trying to teach freed slaves
how to read, possibly leading to an uprising.</p>
<p>All of that is to say that slavery was an issue Jo repeatedly changed
his stance on throughout his ministry. It can be easily demonstrated
that his statements about states’ rights vs. slavery were influenced by
current events and what happened to the Mormons in Missouri. First of
these stances was indifference. Passages from Alma 27 and Mosiah 2 are
inherently anti-slavery, however, as the Mormons settled in greater
numbers in Missouri, Jo remained silent on these passages and the entire
subject of slavery. It wasn’t until W. W. Phelps published a pamphlet
titled “Free people of color” in Missouri that the leadership made a
statement about slavery. It extensivley quoted Missouri law in stating
“no free negro or mulatto… shall come into or settle in this state
under any pretext whatever…” and further made the official stance of the
church that “Slaves are real estate in this and other states, and wisdom
would dictate great care among the branches of the Church of Christ on
this subject. So long as we have no special rule in the Church, as to
people of color, let prudence guide… Shun every appearance of evil.”
Phelps said we’re pro state’s rights until we have a special rule in the
church, leaving the door open for Jo to issue a revelation claiming
slavery is evil, but Jo didn’t. He never claimed god said anything
negative about slavery during his actual ministry. In fact, he took the
opposite stance in his 1836 letter we put the pin in before that we’ll
read from in a minute. His anti-slavery stance was purely political and
never carried the weight of “thus saith the Lord” like most of his
revelations.</p>
<p>The appearance of this 1833 article from Double-dub Phelps caused fire
and fury as it was coupled with rumors of the revelation which later
became D&C 87, which stated “war will be poured out upon all nations
beginning at [South Carolina]... slaves shall rise up against their
masters… the remnants [Native Americans]... will marshal themselves,
and… shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation.” Missourians construed
the Free People of Color statement with the rumors of this revelation as
exactly what they needed to consider the Mormons their enemies. Phelps
published a clarifying statement in the next issue of the Star; an
attempt to allay the excitement.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Having learned with extreme regret, that an article entitled, "Free
People of Color," in the last number of the Star, has been
misunderstood, we feel in duty bound to stare, in this Extra, that 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...We often lament the situation of our sister states in the
south, and we fear, lest, as has been the case, the blacks should rise
and spill innocent blood, for they are ignorant, and a little may lead
them to disturb the peace of society. To be short, we are opposed to
having free people of color admitted into the state; and we say, that
none will be admitted into the Church;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was the racism of the day. The leadership of the church, especially
Joseph Smith, had an opportunity to stick to their Book of Mormon and
oppose slavery and invite African-Americans to join their church; they
could have been on the right side of history and taken the moral stance
on the hottest moral and political issue of the day. Instead, they
prohibited blacks from joining the church to appease slave-holders. Even
with this tacit approval of slavery and prohibition of freed slaves from
joining the church, the Missourian public sentiment against the church
had been adjudicated in the court of public opinion and the Mormons had
to go.</p>
<p>One may be tempted to say that these were the public statements of W.W.
Phelps as editor of the church’s periodical and therefore don’t reflect
Jo’s personal beliefs on the question of slavery and racism. Well, let’s
talk about Jo’s 1836 letter. An abolitionist visited Kirtland in 1836
and Jo’s lethargy toward the slave question would no longer suffice. He
sent a letter to the editor of the Kirtland-based Messenger and
Advocate, who was Oliver Cowdery at the time. Jo’s letter details that
the abolitionist preaching in Kirtland was mostly ignored and “attended
to their own avocations and left the gentleman to hold forth his own
arguments to nearly naked walls.” Mormons ignoring the pressing social
issues of their day, or being on the wrong side of them, is a long
tradition that apparently started back in Kirtland. Jo goes on to lament
how much members bichor over the question of slavery and attempt to
withdraw fellowship from those who join the church but hold slaves. He’s
saddened that people will join the cry of abolition and “set loose, upon
the world a community of people [slaves] who might peradventure,
overrun our country and violate the most sacred principles of human
society,”. You can’t trust slaves to free themselves or they might
overrun the entire nation and violate society as we know it. Wouldn’t
that just be a shame for white society to endure in the 1830s.</p>
<p>Jo deals the killing blow with this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It may, no doubt, with propriety be said, that many who hold slaves
live without the fear of God before their eyes, and, the same may be
said of many in the free states. Then who is to be the judge in this
matter?... [speaking of abolitionists] why not cease their clamor,
and no further urge the slave to acts of murder, and the master to
vigorous discipline, rendering both miserable… I do not believe that
the people of the North have any more right to say that the South
<em>shall not</em> hold slaves, than the South have to say the North
<em>shall</em>.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo was pro states’ rights during the burgeoning abolitionist movement.
This is being pro-fascism or pro-eugenics in the 1930s, like President
Heber J. Grant giving a talk in Frankfurt with the Nazi Flag behind him
in 1937. This is a clear example of Jo simply being on the wrong side of
history and human morality; releasing this statement was an act of
pacification to not infuriate the Missourians against the growing number
of Mormons in the state. This is so infuriating to yours truly. Joseph
Smith was supposed to be the paragon of morality. He had god on speed
dial and claimed he could see the future but when it came to one of the
most basic questions of human morality, nay human <em>decency</em>, he
abdicated his place as the moral high point of humanity and sided with
the people who own other people as property. What the hell good is a
prophet of god if he tells us to violate the very essence of what makes
us human, autonomy and freedom of choice? On the slave question, Jo was
an anchor holding the boat of human morality under water during a
hurricane at high tide.</p>
<p>But, Jo didn’t stop there; if he did it would be absolutely barbaric and
openly opportunist, but he had plenty more to say. He went on to recite
the same Bible passages used by pro-slavery advocates quoting Genesis
and Paul. He then trots out the white-supremacy of the curse of Cain so
eloquently captured in his own books of Mormon, Moses, and soon to be
written Abraham.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What could have been the design of the Almighty in this wonderful
(?!) occurrence is not for me to say; but I can say, that the curse
is not yet taken off the sons of Canaan, neither will be until it is
affected by as great power as caused it to come; and the people who
interfere the least with the decrees and purposes of God in this
matter, will come under the least condemnation before him; and those
who are determined to pursue a course which shows an opposition…
against the designs of the Lord will learn,... that God can do his own
work without the aid of those who are not dictated by his counsel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those who interfere with slavery are going against God’s will and are
under condemnation before him. The Curse of Cain will not be lifted
until some calamitous event that removes the curse of dark skin equal
with the same power which gave them dark skin to begin with. Joseph
Smith was a white supremacist. I recently gave a presentation to the
U.K. group Skeptics in the Pub about Mormonism and white supremacy and
cited all Jo’s relevant revelations on the subject. Joseph Smith wasn’t
just a racist, he was a white supremacist. May that statement never fall
on deaf ears. Any claim to the contrary is factually wrong. Joseph Smith
saw white skin as pure and delightsome while dark skin was the curse of
Cain. He spoke officially as the prophet of God, quoted extensively from
the Bible to justify slavery, and said anybody opposing slavery is under
condemnation from God. Joseph Smith wasn’t just a racist, he was a white
supremacist. He wasn’t even a progressive of his day on the issue of
slavery, he was a weathervane going with the political wind of the day.
This guy speaks for god and his god is incontrovertably a white
supremacist. If you believe Jo was a prophet, why is the god he
supposedly received direction from worthy of worship? The curse Jo
claimed has never been lifted in Mormon theology. Black men can have the
priesthood as of 1978 but the curse is still very much alive and well in
white supremacist Mormon scripture.</p>
<p>Now, people will quote Jo’s presidential pamphlet which advocated for
the release of slaves and a government bailout for slave holders and say
that is evidence of Jo being on the right side of the issue. They’re
disgustingly wrong. As a prophet of God he used the Bible to claim
slavery was the way god created the world, as a POTUS candidate he
didn’t use the Bible to justify abolition, in spite of the many
Christian abolitionists who did as his contemporaries. He was pro
abolition as a POTUS candidate because his political enemies were
Southern Democrats after the Missouri-Mormon War. He had many chances,
over a decade of chances, to issue a new revelation that slavery was
evil. He could have taken the actual moral stance on the greatest social
justice issue of his day, but he didn’t. He only switched to
abolitionism because it was politically advantageous, which is the
absolute laziest and morally bankrupt system by which to determine one’s
morals. If your morals are determined based on what will get you
elected, you’re a spineless coward and lazy. Jo was the worst kind of
white supremacist, the lazy religious kind, which, if I’m being honest,
is the majority of white supremacists. Ep 165.</p>
<p>I want to dwell on this point for a minute longer at risk of belaboring
the point, but it’s so incredibly crucial and possibly the most
important takeaway from today’s episode. The Mormons were largely
northerners, who were either opposed to or indifferent towards slavery.
Jo’s 1836 letter to the editor illustrates an aspect of Jo’s inert
mentality toward social ills of his day. In slave-holding America, not
having an opinion on the issue of slavery was the same as having an
opinion on it. Jo took the state’s rights side of the issue. He was not
only on the wrong side of history by taking this pro-slavery stance, he
was on the wrong side of humanity. What was it that garnered this letter
being written in the first place? Political pressure from pro-slavery
Missouri. Jo didn’t want to inflame tensions with slaveholders any more
than the Mormons had in the previous 5 years so he published this rant
about how awesome and divinely-ordained slavery is because he was afraid
of what the Missourians might do to the Mormons. This isn’t just lazy,
it’s deplorable. Believers will often claim that Jo was an abolitionist
citing his 1844 Presidential Campaign Pamphlet as evidence but that only
underscores the point that he flip-flopped on the question of slavery
only when it was politically advantageous. Joseph Smith used the same
biblical passages slaveowners used to justify owning those slaves to say
that slavery was commanded by god. He adopted the political stance of
the Confederacy nearly 20 years before it existed. If there was a single
issue where Jo could prophecy of the future and take the right side of a
moral issue, slavery was that issue. To be a state’s rights person in
the 1830s was the same side as separate but equal prior to the end of
segregation. He was on the wrong side while simultaneously claiming to
be the mouthpiece of god. This example alone casts into question the
stance of the church on every social justice issue during its existence.
Bloody Brigham Young fought for Utah to be a slave territory barely a
decade before the civil war. Today’s leaders are viciously opposed to
LGBTQ+ rights, keeping with this same trend of lethargy towards the
often unpopular but moral stance on social issues. Granted, abolishing
slavery and legal gay marriage are far from the same thing, but
opposition to them comes from the same religiously bigoted place and Jo
was no moral stalwart of his day in spite of the near deification his
legacy enjoys in the church today. He was as slothful as any politician
seeking popular approval; garnering support by playing into, instead of
against, people’s basest fears and prejudices. Not only was Jo’s work
ethic lazy, but his own morality was lazy. This single data point really
highlights the way I opened this episode. A person operating from a
moral compass given to them by divine decree will always be morally
inferior to somebody who puts the work into shaping their own moral
compass from consequential ethicism and other categories of
philosophical morality. The cult leader and follower may be the most
active and industrious person you meet, but at the end of the day their
minds have atrophied from lack of use and critical examination of the
world around them. Any way you examine Jo, from his moral ethics, to his
business practices, to his general work ethic, he was the epitome of
indolence.</p>
<p>I had to get that off my chest and I could spend the entire episode on
just this but we must soldier forth. In spite of being pro-slavery when
Jo fled Kirtland for Missouri, tensions eventually climaxed between the
Mormons and anti-Mormon Missourians throughout the year of 1838.</p>
<p>One of the big things that kicked off the Missouri Mormon War was Sidney
Rigdon’s militant preaching. Mormons always talk about the
“extermination order” that the governor of Missouri issued, but
actually it was Sidney Rigdon who first used the word “extermination” in
Missouri. On the 4th of July in 1838, he gave a sermon which has become
infamous in Mormon history. I called this the Red Sermon on Episode 43
because, in many ways, it was a catalyst for the impending
Missouri-Mormon War.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us
and them a war of extermination; for we will follow them till the last
drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate
us: for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their
own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only threatening people, but threatening their homes and families.
Why didn’t the Missourians like the Mormons again? If Joe really had the
insight of a prophet, he could have stood up after Rigdon’s sermon and
said something to calm the crowd and correct what Rigdon had just said.
Instead, Joe got up and endorsed Hingepin Rigdon’s message. His failure
to rein Rigdon in was at best incompetent. When his people were on the
precipice of civil war, he let his second-in-command take control of the
church and influence his decisions which caused the Haun’s Mill Massacre
and the suffering of thousands of Mormons during the expulsion from the
state. He could have stepped in at any time. He could have denounced the
more radical members of his leadership like the Wild Ram of the
Mountains, Lyman Wight, or Captain Fearnaught David W. Patten, or
Hingepin Sidney Rigdon. Instead Jo let his people spiral out of control
through inaction and incompetence, but all of that is true only if we
believe the apologist narrative of the Missouri-Mormon War. I, on the
other hand, tend to believe Jo was among the radicals and fed into the
fire and fury which caused that spiraling out of control which led to so
much suffering.</p>
<p>On a similar note, there was a Mormon paramilitary organization called
“the Danites” that bullied members into conformity, harassed elected
officials and forced them to sign documents under duress, and even
murdered dissenters of the faith. Joe later blamed the Danites on
Sampson Avard and claimed that he himself had no idea of all the nasty
things the Danites were up to. This, however, was only after Sampson
Avard defected during the height of the Missouri-Mormon war and filed
affidavits about the existence of the Danites which led to the Mormon
extermination order by Governor Boggs. Well, I don’t buy Jo’s
deflections and casting blame for a second. Eps 44, 45, 46</p>
<p>Even if we look at the massacre at Haun’s Mill itself, Jo’s incompetence
and inaction, coupled with his fire and brimstone speeches throughout
1838, led to the deaths of 18 Mormons. There was a small Mormon
community around a mill owned by a guy named Jacob Haun. The community
was attacked by a group of rogue Missouri militia soldiers, and the
soldiers massacred the Mormons, including women and children, and
mutilated some of the bodies. In perhaps the worst moment of the
massacre, as described by historian Stephen LeSueur, “the Missourians
found ten-year-old Sardius Smith hiding under the [blacksmith’s]
bellows. Young Smith, whose father lay mortally wounded on the floor,
begged for his life, but William Reynolds of Livingston County put a gun
to the boy’s head and blew off the top. ‘Nits will make lice, and if he
had lived he would have become a Mormon,’ Reynolds reportedly said in
justification of his act.” It was a heinous crime and a brutal human
tragedy; it all happened because of Jo’s actions or lack thereof.</p>
<p>Simply put, this would have been a good time for Joseph to use his
prophetic abilities to know the situation before it occurred. Joseph did
warn the people of Haun’s Mill that they might be in danger, as they
were the furthest Mormon settlement away from the twin city headquarters
of Far West and Adam-ondi-Ahmen, but instead of calling for them to
flee, he told them to use their own judgment and do whatever they
thought best. Thus we see the failing of prophecy, prophets seem to know
everything concerning god’s will and how to best fulfill it, but when it
comes to useful knowledge, like how to save the lives of 18 of his
parishioners, God simply forgot to mention it to Joseph, and Joe failed
to do enough to take a stand, warn, and protect his followers. Episode
48-- but you better be emotionally prepared because it’s some graphic
content.</p>
<p>After the Missouri-Mormon war and the leadership surrendered Eps 49, 50.
The Mormons left the state of Missouri and sought refuge in Illinois.
This move was largely organized by Uncle John Smith and the Quorum of
Apostles under the direction of Bloody Brigham Young. Jo languished in
prison for months while the mess he created was sorted out by his
closest advisors. Eps 51, 52, 53</p>
<p>In order to build Nauvoo, Joe had had to become enterprising and amassed
a lot of responsibility for himself, although none of his
responsibilities involved intensive physical labor. Most of his time was
devoted to riding around areas to scope out land to purchase and signing
his name on contracts.</p>
<p>Jo incurred somewhere in the ballpark of $200k in personal debt signing
all these contracts. That’s over $6 mn in 2020 money. He turned around
and attempted to sell the land to the destitute refugee Mormons at
exorbitant rates or simply gave away choice lots as gifts when people
followed his commands. It takes a special kind of monster to force
thousands of people into destitution by committing treason and then
attempt to make profit off their misery.</p>
<p>However, because the Mormons were so destitute, once the bills started
coming due Jo couldn’t even afford to pay the interest. Drastic measures
were needed to settle the Mormon cash flow problem as it would be years
before they could build the manufacturing infrastructure to benefit from
their location on the Mississippi, the largest shipping river in America
at the time. Instead of committing to hard work, balancing budgets, and
sustainably building Nauvoo, Joe went to Washington, D.C. with hand
extended for a government bailout. Now, I should say here that I am not
opposed to reparations, and in fact I think the government’s failure to
do something to help the Mormons here was a moral failure. My problem is
more with the extremely one-sided picture that Joe painted of what
happened in Missouri, and the enormous $1.2 million sum he asked for,
including $100,000 for himself and another $100k for Hyrum. In total, he
asked for over $41 mn in 2020 money from the federal government. The
request for reparations was mostly designed to pay the enormous debts he
had racked up speculating on real estate in Iowa and Illinois, and I’m
sorry to say that if the federal government had actually paid the
reparations, I’m not sure the actual victims of the Mormon War would
seen very much of that enormous sum of money. There’s a good chance Joe
would have arranged for most of this money to enrich himself and the
Church. Episodes 58 and 61.</p>
<p>This wasn’t the last time that Joe cravenly exploited the suffering of
his followers in Missouri in an attempt to get outside help. He also
called upon the Green Mountain Boys militia of Vermont to join the
Nauvoo Legion to both put down anti-Mormon violence in Illinois and also
help him make Missouri pay for its persecution of the Mormons. Remember,
Jo was dead to rights in Missouri. The state government had him on
arson, robbery, high treason, and murder so he couldn’t step foot in the
state without his own militia or he’d be arrested and hung. He thought
that if he could just burn the whole state to the ground, he wouldn’t
have to deal with the Missouri problem any more. The Nauvoo Legion
wasn’t big enough yet to wage a war without sustaining heavy
casualties, but he thought if the Green Mountain Boys agreed to join
forces to raze the state, he’d lose a lot less of his own militia.</p>
<p>In his letter to the Green Mountain Boys, Joe pulls all the strings of
emotional manipulation, and he’s blatantly dishonest about what happened
in Missouri. He begins by telling them he’s a Vermonter himself, and a
faithful American citizen. Then he launches into his tale of persecution
in Missouri, including the blatant lie that “twelve or fifteen thousand
innocent inhabitants [were] murdered, and hundreds expelled, the
residue, at the point of the bayonet, without law, contrary to the
express language of the Constitution of the United States, and every
State in the Union; and contrary to the custom and usage of civilized
nations; and especially one holding up the motto: ‘The asylum of the
oppressed.’” I mean, okay. Hundreds expelled at the point of a bayonet,
sure. But “twelve or fifteen thousand innocent inhabitants murdered?”
The actual casualty count was about 21 people on the Mormon side and a
small handful of Missourians.</p>
<p>I honestly wonder if this is an example of Joe’s “Yankee wit,” where
he’d say something that’s technically true, but deliberately designed
to be misunderstood; lying resides in the intent even if the statement
may be true. For example, Joe’s New York neighbor, Peter Ingersoll, says
that Joe once told a toll collector that he didn’t have money to pay the
toll, so he’d hand him double on the way back. The toll collector agreed
to this deal, and on the way back, Joe did hand him double. The toll
collector didn’t recognize Joe, and he gave him half the amount as
change. Afterward, Peter Ingersoll asked Joe, didn’t you promise to pay
double on the way back? And Joe said, no, I promised to <em>hand</em> him
double. This was technically true but the intent was to mislead; the
intent was a lie.</p>
<p>Now apply the same logic to this letter to the Green Mountain Boys. Joe
says twelve or fifteen thousand people were murdered in Missouri. It
sounds like he’s saying that between 12,000 people and 15,000 people
were murdered in Missouri. But you could also interpret this statement
as saying that between 12 people and 15,000 people were murdered in
Missouri. Joe <em>loved</em> these kinds of word games, so it would not at all
surprise me if that was what went through his mind when he wrote this
outrageous claim.</p>
<p>He goes on to the objective of the proposed expedition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With all these facts before me, and a pure desire to ameliorate the
condition of the poor and unfortunate among men, and, if possible, to
entice all men from evil to good, and with firm reliance that God will
reward the just, I have been stimulated to call upon my native State,
for a "union of all honest men;" and to appeal to the valor of the
"Green Mountain Boys" by all honorable methods & means to assist me in
obtaining justice from Missouri: not only for the property she has
stolen and confiscated, the murders she has committed among my
friends, and for our expulsion from the State, but also to humble and
chastise, or abase her for the disgrace she has brought upon
constitutional liberty, until she atones for her sins.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jo wanted revenge. This also played into his larger plans to unify freed
slaves and oppressed Natives into his Nauvoo Legion to overthrow the
United States Government and instate his Mormon theocracy. However, if
he could get these Green Mountain Boys to start the fight for him and
take the brunt of the opening casualties, that was obviously preferable
to the American Muhammed.</p>
<p>He goes on to manipulate the Green Mountain Boys with a gish gallop of
noble-sounding lies. He claims that his father served in several battles
of the American Revolution (when he was five years old?) and had to
watch his comrades in arms shot dead in Missouri. He claims his brother
Don Carlos died of exposure and fatigue, when in fact he died because he
was working in a dark and mildew-filled basement churning out propaganda
as editor of the Times & Seasons, not because of anything he suffered
during the exodus to Illinois. He claims his mother has permanent
problems from the trauma, which is fair because all the Mormons had
experienced the traumatic events resulting from Jo’s decisions, and he
also claims his Missouri jailers tried to feed him human flesh, which
there’s also no evidence of. But, the whole point of this letter is to
weave a persecution narrative and we can’t let pesky facts get in the
way of good propaganda. Facts weren’t in the cards because Jo was a
parasite. He could only survive by attaching to others and sucking them
dry like a leech. Episode 181.</p>
<p>An aspect of Jo’s character that bears examination is his dictatorial
proclivities. Rarely did he write anything, instead he dictated it.
Rarely did he fix problems himself, he delegated problems to be solved
by others. He rarely wrote his own propaganda for the church, he had a
team of propaganda specialists tasked with spewing constant twisted
truths from the Nauvoo printer’s mill. He didn’t even write his own
presidential campaign pamphlet, something he should have been the
foremost expert on, he instead had it ghost-written by W.W. Phelps. If a
task needed to be completed, Jo dictated it to somebody who considered
him the prophet of god. Notably as well, when problems cropped up, he
was far more likely to run away than confront. He was not only a coward,
but a lazy coward. These are traits of a good CEO that deserves respect
for what they build, but Jo didn’t build anything himself and therefore
doesn’t deserve respect. The force of his will wasn’t “do this thing
because it’s what the company needs,” Jo’s MO was “do this thing because
god commands you to do it. You wouldn’t question the mind and will of
the Lord on this, would you?” That isn’t respectable, it’s pathetic.</p>
<p>As a microcosm of these character traits, I offer the Nauvoo Expositor
issue as a prime example. William Law formed his own church in the city
of Nauvoo, called the leadership to repentance, called for reformation
in the church, and then published the scathing expose known as the
Nauvoo Expositor with 6 co-printers and an editor. Jo claimed the paper
was full of slander and libel. The right thing to do would be to sue the
printers and get an injunction against them printing more issues until
the case was settled or a verdict was reached. However, suing the
printers would require discovering the extent to which its claims were
slanderous or actually true. Because the printers were very careful
about what they published, Jo knew it was full of truths and he would
lose the slander case. Truth is an absolute defense in slander cases and
Jo wouldn’t survive an impartial hearing. His church would be tossed
into chaos as the popular media ran stories about the hearings and
statements from witnesses which proved polygamy was going on and that
the Mormon empire was amassing too much political wealth, thereby
infringing on the separation of church and state.</p>
<p>Instead of going through all the time and effort of these legal troubles
and waging multiple campaigns of character assassination against the
printers, Jo took the easy way out and ordered the press destroyed which
led to his eventual arrest and vigilante execution. Episode 200. The
Church the Expositor printers formed posed an existential threat to Jo’s
church; in a jealous bid for power he instead took a scorched-earth
approach to their dissent, audaciously thinking himself untouchable in
such a criminal act. His gluttony for women was something he had to lie
about and silence any threat of public exposure, which proved to be his
ultimate downfall.</p>
<p>Indolent and work-shy for any task which couldn’t be delegated to a
lackey, shiftless and inert in his own morals stating whatever was
merely popular and would gain him followers and retweets, torpid when
his people needed him the most as refugees sick and dying in the
swampland on the banks of the Mississippi, loafing about and asking for
government handouts instead of working to pay his debts and learn how to
balance a budget, utterly apathetic to establish a hardline stance on
basic issues of morality like whether or not it’s alright to own humans
as property, careless and neglectful about the suffering of his
followers and indifferent about the plight of those oppressed by a
slave-holding society, privileged and resting on the laurels of a
white-supremacist nation, he held absolute contempt for the rule of law
by which society abides in lieu of simply doing whatever he wanted;
Joseph Smith was a lazy man.</p>
<p>He built cities, wrote books, was editor of multiple newspapers, formed
his own armies, ran hundreds of businesses throughout his life, seldom
had any time to help raise his children because each day was occupied
with founding a religion; he fought a war, started a university, wrote
multiple books of scripture, was a father and husband and husband and
husband and husband and husband and husband, fought dissenters; are
these the attributes of a lazy man? YES! The entire premise of this
episode has been that people can be physically industrious and busy
every waking moment of every day but remain the laziest parasites of
society. Simultaneously, a person who thinks about the world in which
they live, deals with the hardest questions that face our shared human
existence; what’s the purpose of life, what’s the most moral outcome of
the given situation, how do I reduce suffering in the world, how does
one person make the world a better place for the most people, the person
who ponders these questions spending their life consuming information,
never hammering a nail, milking a cow, plumbing a house, or doing any
housework can be the most ambitious and energetic human alive. A Cult
leader or follower are the most active lazy people around; a philosopher
is the least active hard worker society can offer. The efforts of one
contribute only to the maintenance and expansion of an exclusive group,
the efforts of the other contribute to the betterment of humanity.</p>
<p>A cult leader like Joseph Smith thrives on lies being accepted without
critical examination, spread through intellectual contagion to those
without an intellectual immune system equipped to evaluate those lies. A
skeptic, a critical thinker, a scientist, a philosopher, this person
thrives on gathering more information and never ceasing that quest. A
cult leader’s job is complete when a person gives their life to the
cult, a philosopher’s job is complete when they realize their job is
never complete. When the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done.
When a scientist speaks, the thinking is perpetuated. When the cult
leader is wrong about something, the adversary’s grasp on the world is
more realized; when a philosopher is wrong about something, they realize
the issue is more complex than they initially thought and their thoughts
grow and adapt to understand that information in a broader context. For
the cult leader, the world is always what they know; for the scientist,
the world is comprised of unknown unknowns. The cult leader is moved by
arrogance and limited information, the philosopher by humility and
expanding information. One can only exist by virtue of people’s
intellectual idleness, the other’s existence is solely devoted to
tirelessly ridding people of their intellectual idleness.</p>
<p>From treasure digging to petitioning the government for a bailout, Jo’s
entire life was marked by the easiest path. He walked the trail blazed
by cult leaders for millennia before him and once he was believed to be
a prophet of god he lived a life of luxury from the sacrifices of his
devotees.</p>
<p>There are always more stories from early Mormonism to learn from, but 30
pages of script for today is enough. I’m exhausted. I’mma go take a nap.</p>Bryce BlankenagelRoad to Carthage 2 - Idleness