American Crucifixion (2 page)

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

Why?

That is the story of this book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I told you, you didn’t know Emma as well as I did,” was the Prophet’s quiet rejoinder after learning of the eruption.

Alongside Hyrum sat Willard Richards, a longtime church loyalist, also bailing frantically while Rockwell wrestled with the oars. Richards was huge and ungainly, weighing three hundred pounds. He was about to turn forty years old, but his fleshy face had already collapsed into jowls, and his neck was a roll of fat. He was called “Dr. Richards” because he studied and practiced herbal medicine in Massachusetts before moving west. Like Rockwell and Hyrum Smith, Richards was an intimate acquaintance of Joseph’s. As the target of many lawsuits filed by a panoply of detractors, Joseph kept a meticulous record of all his daily activities; Richards was his chief scribe and recorder. Richards was also Joseph’s brother-in-law. His older sister Rhoda was one of Joseph Smith’s dozens of polygamous wives.

In Nauvoo, Illinois, the tightly controlled theocratic city-state that Joseph founded and ruled with a velvet fist, many other ties linked Richards with Joseph and Hyrum Smith. For instance, all three were officers in the 2,000-man Nauvoo Legion, a Mormon militia formed to defend the Saints against their enemies. Joseph, who had no military experience, was the Legion’s commander in chief and assigned himself the title of lieutenant general. Smith liked to tell visitors that he was the only lieutenant general in the United States, which was true. George Washington had been the last one, and Ulysses S. Grant would be the next. Lately, Smith had taken to parading around Nauvoo in his dark blue general’s uniform, with accompanying ostrich-plumed headgear.

Willard Richards and the Smiths were also members of the secret Quorum of the Anointed, one of Joseph’s many overlapping councils that ruled over the 10,000 or so Saints gathered in Nauvoo. The three men had received the secret Second Anointing, a religious ritual that Joseph said would confer eternal life. All four men in the skiff were members of the Mormons’ secret Council of Fifty. Joseph appointed the Fifty, whose membership was unknown to Nauvoo’s citizens at large, to be the core of the world’s government when Christ returned to earth. “The whole of America is Zion itself from north to south,” Joseph thundered at a speech in April. At a secret Fifty meeting, Smith “suffered himself to be ordained a king, to reign over the House of Israel forever.” The Council of Fifty explored the possibility of annexing Texas, restive under Spanish rule, and also Oregon, jointly administered with the queen of England, into a putative Mormon empire. To this end, Smith and the Fifty asked the US Congress for permission to raise a filibustering army of 100,000 men. That request was politely ignored.

Richards and the Smith brothers shared another secret in Zion, albeit a poorly kept one: They all had multiple wives. Richards had sealed himself to four different women. Hyrum Smith, who violently opposed the doctrine of “plural marriage” when Joseph first described it to him in 1843, later took three wives. Smith himself had between thirty-three and forty-eight wives, depending on who was counting.

The fourth man bobbing on the waves of the swollen river was thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Smith—prophet, seer, and revelator, the president of the High Priesthood, candidate for the presidency of the United States, king of the Kingdom of God, commander in chief of the armies of Israel, judge, mayor, architect, recorder of deeds, postmaster, hotel operator, steamboat owner, and husband, many times over. Born in Vermont, Smith was a far cry from the stereotypical New England man of God. “People coming to Nauvoo expected to find a kind of John the Baptist, but they found a very jolly prophet,” a convert remembered. “He used to laugh from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, it shook every bit of flesh in him.”

He was no hair-shirted prophet. Joseph, reared on subsistence farms, scorned the pious pharisees of the preaching profession. “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm and [is attentive to] administering to the poor and dividing his substance, than the long smoothed faced hypocrites,” he told the Saints in 1843. Perhaps Mormons were supposed to shun alcohol, as prescribed by the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom, but Joseph didn’t. When he heard that some of the “brethren” had been drinking whiskey, “I investigated the case,” he reported. “Satisfied that no evil had been done,” Joseph “gave them a couple of dollars with directions to replenish the bottle to stimulate them in the fatigues of their sleepless journey.”

A very jolly prophet, to be sure.