American Crucifixion (23 page)

Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. “We dare not come,” he insisted—three times. “Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control the mob.” In a curious aside, Smith said, “We have been advised by legal and high-minded gentlemen from abroad, who came on the boat this evening to lay our grievances before the Federal Government.”

The “high-minded gentlemen” were two sons of the famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, who was running for president. Smith had many dealings, none of them very fruitful, with Calhoun, one of the prominent politicians he petitioned for reparations following the Mormons’ expulsion from Missouri. Indeed, Calhoun had yet again stiffed Joseph when the Prophet asked him to support the Saints’ interests in his presidential campaign. On a whim, Calhoun’s two young sons, “who spent money freely,” had convinced their riverboat captain to stop at Nauvoo for two hours, while they bearded the famous Mormon prophet. Patrick, the older brother, was an army officer en route to an assignment in the West. John Jr. suffered from consumption and was touring the Mississippi for his health.

Wending their way through the darkness to Joseph’s mansion, they found the sprawling structure guarded by three hundred armed men. Two trusted lieutenants, Alpheus Cutler and Reynolds Cahoon, stood at the door, ordered to admit no one. After some palaver, the men found themselves in the presence of Joseph, who interrupted a tense meeting with his closest advisers to entertain the young travelers. “At first he thought we were spies sent by the governor,” John C. Calhoun Jr. reported. Then Joseph invited the boys into his ground-floor drawing room.

“He gave us a full description of his difficulties, and also an exposition of his faith, frequently calling himself the Prophet,” Calhoun wrote. Moments after the men left him to return to their steamboat, Joseph fired off his letter to Ford and resumed his interrupted meeting.

Repairing to his upstairs study, Smith huddled with his brother Hyrum, Willard Richards, and several other church leaders. He handed Ford’s “the whole country is up in arms” letter around, for all to read.

“There is no mercy here,” he remarked.

“No,” Hyrum replied. “Just as sure as we fall into their hands, we are dead men.”

“What shall we do, Brother Hyrum?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly, Joseph had an idea. He said that all Ford and the Carthage mobbers wanted was to get hold of him and Hyrum. So they should disband the Legion and restore Nauvoo to its peaceable self. He was certain they would come to search for them, but: “Let them search. We will cross the river tonight, and go away to the West.”

Barely an hour before, Joseph had told Hyrum that he was determined to go to Washington, DC, and lay his case before President Tyler. He instructed Cahoon to put Emma and Hyrum’s family on a steamboat heading east, to Portsmouth, Ohio. Whatever the destination, Joseph was determined to leave Nauvoo. He told Porter Rockwell to ready a boat for a nighttime crossing to Iowa. Before he left, he instructed William Clayton to hide or destroy the records of the Council of Fifty. Clayton buried them, then dug them up a few weeks later.

The decision taken, Hyrum emerged from the mansion and shook Cahoon’s hand. “A company of men are seeking to kill my brother Joseph, and the Lord has warned him to flee to the Rocky Mountains to save his life,” Hyrum said. “Goodbye, Brother Cahoon, we shall see you again.”

Right behind him strode a silent, sobbing Joseph, with a handkerchief clapped to his face and tears streaming down his cheeks. His final journey had begun.

BANK OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPPI, SUNDAY, 2 P.M.

TO: His Excellency Governor Ford:

SIR: I now offer to come to you at Carthage on the morrow, as early as shall be convenient for your posse to escort us into headquarters, provided we can have a fair trial, not be abused. . . .

JOSEPH AND HYRUM’S DRAMATIC FLIGHT ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI did not take them to the Rockies, as they had speculated to some friends, nor to Washington, DC, as Joseph had confided to Emma. The hegira took them nowhere. When the exhausted pair washed up near Montrose, in the Iowa Territory, at daybreak, there was no one home at the house where they intended to stay. Joseph sent Porter Rockwell back to Nauvoo to fetch horses, telling him to prepare for a trip to the Great Basin in the Rocky Mountains the next day. He handed Rockwell a letter for Emma, urging her not to despair. “I do not know where I shall go, or what I shall do,” he wrote, “but shall endeavor to get to the city of Washington . . . may God Almighty bless you and the children and mother. My heart bleeds.”

While the four men were battling the currents and the flotsam of the wild Mississippi, word of Joseph’s flight flashed through Nauvoo. Even a benign dictatorship, lacking a dictator, grinds to a halt. With rumors swirling of an imminent invasion from Carthage, the leaderless Saints panicked. “Some were tried almost to death to think Joseph should leave them in the hour of danger,” Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband Heber. “[Joseph and Hyrum’s] giving themselves up is all that will save our city from destruction.” A fierce debate sprang up among Joseph’s intimates. In the early morning, Stephen Markham, the brigadier general whom Joseph had instructed to disband the Legion, encountered businessman Hiram Kimball and several other prominent Saints loudly discussing Joseph’s fate in the middle of the city.

“It is a bailable case and there is no danger,” Kimball assured the group, arguing that Smith could face a magistrate in Carthage without fear. Joseph’s disappearance would “lessen the value of property—also ruin a number of men,” he added, presumably including himself.

Kimball asked Markham to join a committee that would summon Joseph back to Nauvoo. “Mind your own business, brethren, and let Joseph alone,” Markham replied. “I have my orders from him.”

As Kimball and Reynolds Cahoon strode toward the Nauvoo Mansion, another Saint, Wandle Mace, overheard the two men fretting about the economic consequences of Joseph’s disappearance. He heard the pair insisting that Governor Ford was the Mormons’ friend, and he would protect Joseph if he returned to stand trial in Carthage. Mace couldn’t believe his ears. “I believed the governor to be in perfect harmony with the mob,” Mace said, “and if Joseph recrossed the river, he would be murdered. Should we, for the sake of a little property, be so selfish as to push him into the very jaws of death!”

Kimball and Cahoon entered the mansion to confer with the distraught Emma. That morning she had already received two messages from Ford. As usual, he was a fountain of contradictory pronunciamentos. First, he threatened to invade Nauvoo with his many militias, reimpose martial law, and search for Hyrum and Joseph, “if it took three years to do it.” Second, Joseph’s private attorney told her that Ford had guaranteed safe passage for Joseph, and a fair trial, if he surrendered himself in Carthage. Emma hashed out the dilemma with Kimball and Cahoon, then handed a letter to her nephew Lorenzo Wasson to carry to Joseph across the river.

Wasson, Kimball, Cahoon, and Rockwell were back on the Iowa shoreline by 1:00 p.m. The foursome found Joseph and Hyrum at the home of Mormon William Jordan, with their food and belongings strewn around the floor, waiting to be packed onto horses.

Wasson handed Emma’s letter to Joseph. Ford will protect you, she wrote. Please come back.

Cahoon started up again, reaffirming the points made in Emma’s letter. “You always said if the church would stick to you, you would stick to the church, now trouble comes and you are the first to run,” he charged. “When the shepherd deserts his flock, who is to keep the wolves from devouring them?” Kimball and Wasson accused Joseph of cowardice, complaining that their property would be destroyed as a result.

“If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself,” Joseph said. He turned to his childhood friend Rockwell, possibly his most loyal follower, and surely his most ferocious. “What shall I do?”

“You are the oldest and ought to know best,” Rockwell answered. “As you make your bed, I will lie with you.”

Joseph then turned to Hyrum, and asked, “Brother Hyrum, you are the oldest, what shall we do?”

Apparently swayed by Emma’s letter and by the pleadings of the terrified Saints, Hyrum suggested returning to Nauvoo. “Let us go back and give ourselves up, and see the thing out. Let us go back and put our trust in God, and we shall not be harmed. The Lord is in it. If we live or have to die, we will be reconciled to our fate.”

Joseph thought for a moment, then answered. “If you go back I will go with you. But we shall be butchered.”
^*

FROM THE IOWA SHORE, JOSEPH DASHED OFF A LETTER TO FORD: My co-defendants and I are coming to Carthage, as you asked. Joseph proposed to meet Ford’s posse the following day, Monday, June 24, at the Mound, a promontory six miles east of Nauvoo. Joseph likewise alerted his lawyers that he would be facing charges in Carthage the next day. Ambling back to the river, he commented to Rockwell, “It is of no use to hurry, for we are going back to be slaughtered.” He commented that he would like to address the Saints one last time, that evening.

“We can send out word, and have them hear you by starlight,” Rockwell said.

Events quickly overtook this idea.

Instead, Joseph spent the night at the mansion, with Emma and his four children: the thirteen-year-old adopted Julia; Frederick, the blond eight-year-old; six-year-old Alexander; and his oldest son, Joseph Smith III, age eleven. As a grownup, young Joseph recalled that his father called him into one of the mansion’s large reception rooms, then blessed him in front of the family: “If anything should happen to me, you will know who is to be my successor. This, my son, has been blessed and set apart, and will in time succeed me.”

The next morning, Joseph told his family, “I go as a lamb to the slaughter, but if my death will atone for any faults I have committed during my lifetime I am willing to die.” At 6:30, he exited the mansion and kissed each of his children good-bye. Several hundred Saints, including his weeping, aged mother, Lucy, had gathered outside the mansion to see him off.

With his infant children hanging off his frame, Joseph asked: “Emma, can you train my sons to walk in their father’s footsteps?”

“Oh, Joseph, you’re coming back!” his wife cried. Smith posed the question twice more, and each time Emma gave the same answer, with tears filling her eyes. “Oh, Joseph, you are coming back.”
^*

Thus Joseph began his journey along his Via Dolorosa. As promised, he and all his seventeen co-defendants in the
Expositor
affair mounted their horses and started the half-day’s journey to Carthage. The assemblage was a Who’s Who of the Latter-day Saints: patriarch Hyrum; Rockwell; Dunham, the brigadier general of the Legion; John Greene, the police chief; Nauvoo’s constable and coroner, Dimick Huntington; the former newspaper editor and Joseph’s chief ghostwriter, William Phelps. Friends who hadn’t been named in the indictment, such as Willard Richards, the
Maid of Iowa
riverboat captain, Dan Jones, and Joseph’s lawyer, James Woods, rode out with them. As the riders moved up the high ground leading to the unfinished Temple, Joseph gazed backward at the neatly platted city nestled alongside the mammoth, glistening Mississippi. “This is the loveliest place and the best people under the heavens,” he remarked. “Little do they know the trials that await them.”

Riding eastward, the group encountered a mounted company of sixty well-disciplined McDonough county Union Dragoons on their way to Nauvoo. Their commander, Captain James Dunn, halted Joseph, and explained that Governor Ford had ordered him to reclaim the state-owned weapons in the hands of the Nauvoo Legion: three cannon and about two hundred and fifty muskets. The newly minted apostate Wilson Law, former Legion major general, had told Ford exactly how many guns to ask for. He probably knew that the Saints had many more weapons of their own, but those weren’t subject to government seizure. Joseph acquiesced, and he and Dunn agreed that the handover might go more smoothly if the Prophet himself were present. Smith sent James Woods and a friend, Abram Hodge, ahead to Carthage to explain his change of plans, and to garner intelligence.

Back in Nauvoo, Joseph bade farewell to his family a second time, repeatedly comparing himself to “a lamb going to the slaughter.” Joseph told friends that he didn’t expect to see them again. “I am calm as a summer’s morning,” he said to his friend Henry Sherwood. “I have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward all men. If they take my life I shall die an innocent man, and my blood shall cry from the ground for vengeance, and it shall be said of me ‘He was murdered in cold blood!’”
^*

Chicago journalist B. W. Richmond had traveled to Nauvoo to interview Lucinda Morgan, the famous widow of anti-Freemason author Captain William Morgan. Instead, he found himself reporting a much larger story. A non-Mormon, Richmond’s dispatches were unclouded by church affiliation, so he saw a very different, characteristically relaxed Joseph Smith lounging in the mansion prior to his second departure for Carthage. “I saw a large, well dressed individual seated on a trunk at the further end of the hall, quietly smoking a cigar, who was pointed out to me as Joseph Smith.” Richmond wrote. “He was easy in his manners and seemed sure of an acquittal if he could get a fair hearing.”