American Crucifixion (26 page)

Jones said that he didn’t expect to hear that from the man charged with guarding Smith’s life.

“You’ll see that I can prophesy better than old Joe,” Worrell spat back. “Neither he nor his brother nor anyone who will remain with them will see the sun set today.” A Grey leveled his musket at Jones, cocked it, and said he “would love to bore a hole through old Joe.”

Overhearing this exchange from inside the jail, Joseph and Hyrum urged Jones to report the conversation to Governor Ford. The riverboat captain scurried over to the Hamilton hotel, where he found Ford simultaneously handing out orders and packing his things. Ford was leaving for Nauvoo, as announced, although he had decided to go without Joseph.

Ford insisted that he had taken measures both to guarantee Joseph’s safety in Carthage and to defuse tensions generally. He planned to send all his troops home, save for three companies. As he later explained it, the numbers were against him. Even with four separate militias under his command—Carthage, Warsaw, and the visitors from McDonough and Schuyler Counties—Ford believed he had at most 1,700 men, 1,200 muskets, three cannons, and provisions for only two days. Many of the men wanted to go home. Furthermore, the state treasury had no money to pay for their rations. The Nauvoo Legion had at least 2,000 soldiers and could probably swell its ranks to over 3,000 if necessary. If full-scale civil war broke out, Ford thought the Legion could probably muster a superior force on short notice and overwhelm the old settlers. He openly worried that his “regulators” might march on Nauvoo, stage a bloody provocation, and proceed to massacre “women, inoffensive young persons, and innocent children.” “To think of beginning a war under such circumstances was a plain absurdity,” he later wrote.

In his hotel chamber, Ford explained his thinking to Brigadier General Minor Deming and the assembled militia captains. “The governor seemed plagued by the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” John Hay commented. “He changed his mind every hour.” One of the three remaining companies would accompany him to Nauvoo that morning, on a combination reconnaissance–peacekeeping mission–show of force. There had been talk of rousting a Mormon counterfeiting cabal, which Ford suspected was just a pretext for vigilante action. Ford assigned two companies of the Carthage Greys, under Robert Smith’s command, to stay in the center of Carthage and protect the jail. The six-man guard would remain posted outside the jailhouse doors, and the rest of the Greys were to stay in their tents on the public square, about one-quarter mile away.

He chose the Greys, he explained, because “they were the elite of the militias,” and their leader, Robert Smith, “a most respectable citizen, and honorable man.” Yes, he had witnessed their mutiny just two days previously, and yes, Ford recognized that “they and their officers were the deadly enemies of the prisoners.” But in June 1844, in southwestern Illinois, Ford concluded, “It would have been difficult to find friends of the prisoners.”

Jones burst in on Ford just as he was concluding his war council and preparing to ride off to Nauvoo. He told Ford that he had proof that the prisoners’ lives were in grave danger.

“You are unnecessarily alarmed for your friends’ safety,” the governor replied. “The people are not that cruel.”

Astonished by Ford’s naïveté, Jones reminded the governor that he had guaranteed the Mormons’ safety. “They are also master Masons,” Jones added, “and as such I demand of you the protection of their lives.”

An onlooker reported that Ford, a fellow Mason, briefly turned pale.

“If you do not do this, I have one more desire,” Jones said.

“What is that, sir?”

“It is that is 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.”

As Joseph predicted, Jones would survive his stay in Carthage, and he later wrote a valuable first-person account of the Prophet’s final days.

Elder Cyrus Wheelock also found his way to Ford’s suite to importune the governor with his own warning: the Mormons “are safe as regards the law, but they are not safe from the hands of traitors, and midnight assassins who thirst for their blood and have determined to spill it.”

“Your friends shall be protected, and have a fair trial by the law,” Ford assured him. “In this pledge I am not alone; I have obtained the pledge of the whole of the army to sustain me.”

Ford busied himself to leave, and Jones tried to return to the jail. But the guards refused him entry. Chauncey Higbee emerged from the swarming crowd of ill-wishers to tell Jones that they “were determined to kill Joe and Hyrum and that I had better go away to save myself.” Willard Richards appeared at the jailhouse door and handed Jones a letter from Joseph to the renowned lawyer Orville Browning, in Quincy. In the letter, Joseph pleaded with Browning to come north and rescue him. Jones galloped out of Carthage with the letter, which the mob milling around the jail assumed was a summons from Joseph to the Nauvoo Legion. Jones reported that he fled Carthage “in the midst of a cloud of dust with bullets whistling through the air.”

Cyrus Wheelock did gain entrance to Joseph’s quarters, and the guards forgot to check his bulky raincoat when he entered. Like Fullmer the night before, he was carrying a gun, this one a small, six-shooter revolver known as a pepperbox. Unobtrusively, he slipped the gun into Joseph’s pocket. Joseph knew Wheelock planned to return to Nauvoo that evening. The county was on a war footing, and anti-Mormon militia were guarding the roads into and out of town.

Joseph said that Wheelock himself might need the gun, but Wheelock insisted that Joseph keep it.

Joseph took out Fullmer’s revolver and handed it to his brother Hyrum.

“You may have use for this.”

“I hate to use such things or to see them used,” Hyrum replied.

“So do I,” said Joseph, “but we may have to, to defend ourselves.”

Hyrum took the pistol.

THAT SAME MORNING, JOSEPH WROTE HIS LAST LETTER TO EMMA, and to the Saints in Nauvoo:

DEAR EMMA.—

The Governor continues his courtesies, and permits us to see our friends. We hear this morning that the Governor will not go down with his troops today to Nauvoo, as we anticipated last evening; but if he does come down with his troops you will be protected. . . .

There is no danger of any extermination order. Should there be a mutiny among the troops (which we do not anticipate, excitement is abating) a part will remain loyal and stand for the defense of the state and our rights. . . .

JOSEPH SMITH.

P. S. Dear Emma, 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 and all my friends, Mr. Brewer, and all who inquire after me; and as for treason, I know that I have not committed any, and they cannot prove anything of the kind, so you need not have any fears that anything can happen to us on that account. May God bless you all. Amen.

P.S. 20 min to 10–I just learn that the Governor is about to disband his troops, all but a guard to protect us and the peace,—and come himself to Nauvoo and deliver a speech to the people. This is right as I suppose.

While Wheelock was carrying Joseph’s letter to Nauvoo, Governor Ford and a detachment of Captain Dunn’s McDonough County Dragoons were on the road to Warsaw, where they had agreed to meet the local militia at a crossroads outside of town. The previous day, Ford and Deming had instructed the Warsaw commander to prepare his troops to march to Nauvoo, with two cannons. The men of the Warsaw militia, three hundred strong, thought they would be accompanying Ford into Nauvoo, and they had plunder on their mind. Thomas Sharp had issued his call for a Mormon extermination campaign only a few days before.

In Warsaw on this muggy Thursday, John Hay watched his father, a surgeon, ride out with the militia to the crossroads near some railroad shanties. The dilapidated shacks had been built to supply a contemplated Carthage-to-Warsaw railway that foundered in the Panic of 1837. “They went out in high glee, fully expecting to march to the city of the Saints,” reported Hay, who was a teenager at the time. “Every man clearly understood that Nauvoo was to be destroyed before they returned.”

When Colonel Levi Williams and his Warsaw regiment met Ford at the crossroads, they learned that their marching orders had been rescinded. Ford had gotten wind of their intentions and did not want them to march on Nauvoo after all. He pointedly confiscated their cannons, which he suspected they would put to ill use. “They were annoyed . . . at losing the fun of sacking Nauvoo,” Hay wrote.

Most of the men returned to Warsaw. But Thomas Sharp was on the scene, and both Colonel Williams and his son were Mormon-haters of some renown. Just a few days earlier, Joseph had learned of Williams père harassing Isaac Morley and the Saints in Lima, Illinois, and the father-son team had continued terrorizing Saints and Jack-Mormons in Hancock County all week. Levi Williams had just threatened to confiscate the weapons of any militia unwilling to participate in the anti-Mormon crusade and ordered the tarring and feathering of a militiaman deemed insufficiently suffused with hatred for Joseph Smith.

Two of Williams’s Warsaw captains—lawyer William Grover and businessman Mark Aldrich—also despised Mormons and tried to rally their troops to march on Carthage. Grover’s men ignored the speechifying and headed home. The majority of Williams’s men headed home as well, but about a hundred of them agreed to ignore Ford’s wishes and march back to Carthage. As if by prearrangement, a rider arrived from Carthage, announcing that the coast was clear. Ford and Dunn’s McDonough County Dragoons had left Carthage and were headed to Nauvoo.

Now only the Carthage Greys—the same men who had just staged a riot, calling for Joseph’s blood—stood between the Warsaw men and the imprisoned Smiths. But the dispatcher reported that the Greys would not oppose an assault on the jail. Williams, Grover, Aldrich, and about a hundred of their men began the fifteen-mile march to Carthage, where Joseph and his friends sat waiting in the jail.

INSIDE THE CARTHAGE JAIL, THE PRISONERS ATE THEIR LUNCHES. Joseph, Hyrum, and Willard Richards ate upstairs in Stigall’s family room, while John Taylor and Stephen Markham dined on the ground floor. After eating, Richards felt queasy, and Joseph asked Markham to fetch a pipe and some tobacco to settle his friend’s stomach. Markham left the jail, borrowed a pipe from yet another Jack-Mormon, the local sheriff, Jacob Backenstos, and bought some tobacco in a nearby store. Ominously, the store’s proprietor, John Eagle, “threw out considerable threats against the Mormons and in particular against me,” Markham later wrote.

As he strode back to the jail, another local accosted Markham.

“Old man, you have got to leave the town in five minutes!”

“I shall not do it,” Markham answered, “Neither can you drive me. You can kill me but you cannot drive me.”

But they could. A dozen Greys quickly surrounded him and started poking at him with their bayonets, urged on by Eagle. The innkeeper Artois Hamilton emerged from his hotel and told Markham he had better leave town, “as I would only get killed if I remained. ‘You can’t do the prisoners any good,’ he said.”

Hamilton offered to fetch Markham’s horse. Markham objected, but minutes later, he was in the saddle, his boots filled with blood from the constant bayonet pricks. The Greys “formed a hollow square around me,” Markham said, and accompanied him to the forest on the edge of town.

Apprised that Markham had been run out of town, the jailer Stigall sensed danger. He suggested the Mormons might be safer if he locked them into the secure prison cell on the second floor. The barred cell had two-and-one-half-foot-thick walls with thin, arrow-slit windows. “After supper we will go in,” Joseph said.

The four Mormon prisoners were alone now, “our spirits dull and heavy,” John Taylor wrote. The stone jail was oppressively hot in the late afternoon. Even with all the bedroom windows open, and stripped to their shirts and breeches, the Mormons were sweltering. The four men gave one of the guards a dollar and sent out for a bottle of wine, “to revive us.” The man quickly returned with the wine, some tobacco, and a few pipes. The four prisoners drank from the bottle and shared the remaining wine with their jailers.