American Crucifixion (28 page)

THE GREYS WERE NOT THE ONLY ONES WITH AN ASTONISHING gift of timing. At almost the very moment that the Warsaw assassins swarmed up the jailhouse stairs to kill Joseph and Hyrum, Governor Ford was addressing several thousand residents of Nauvoo. Standing atop the frame of the half-built house at the corner of Water and Main Streets—the very spot where Joseph had unsheathed his cavalry sword in front of the Legion just nine days before—the governor was in a tut-tutting mood. He chastised the Mormons for not immediately surrendering Joseph Smith after the destruction of the
Nauvoo Expositor
. “Another cause of excitement is the fact of your having so many fire-arms,” Ford said, as if he had forgotten his own disarming of the Nauvoo Legion just four days before.

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.

Then Ford threatened the Mormons in the starkest possible terms. “If you continue to ‘misbehave,’” he said, “the city may be reduced to ashes, and extermination would inevitably follow.”

The Mormons couldn’t believe their ears. The governor of Illinois, commander in chief of the state’s many militias, responsible for protecting his citizens, was blaming
them
, and them alone, for the civil war that had erupted in Hancock County. “A severe atonement must be made,” for the Saints’ lawless behavior in the
Expositor
affair, Ford said, blissfully unaware that blood atonement was taking place just eighteen miles away at the jailhouse. He seemed unable to repress his inner schoolmarm: “I hope you will not make any more trouble, but be a law-abiding people, for if I have to come again it will be worse for you.”

At 5:30 p.m., Ford and his entourage toured the unfinished Nauvoo Temple and made caustic remarks about the twelve, life-size, carved wooden oxen that supported the massive laver, or baptismal font. At sixteen feet long and four feet deep, the immense carved pine basin was the showpiece of the Temple, now in its third year of construction. Joseph once described the oxen, painstakingly carved by “Elder Elijah Fordham, from the city of New York,” as “copied after the most beautiful five-year old steer that could be found in the country . . . the horns were formed after the most perfect horn that could be procured.”

The twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Bullock, a future church historian, saw Ford’s men snap the horns off the oxen and pocket them for souvenirs. Bullock later wrote that Ford seemed to know that the Smith brothers had already been murdered and was in a hurry to leave Nauvoo. Ford’s account differs. As he was riding back to Carthage, Ford encountered two Greys galloping furiously from Carthage to alert him about the assassination. Ford absorbed the news and ordered the riders to return home “to prevent any sudden explosion of Mormon excitement.”

Ford probably had no foreknowledge of the killings, because he later complained about their timing. “I could not believe, that any person would attack the jail, whilst we were in Nauvoo, and thereby expose my life . . . to the sudden vengeance of the Mormons,” he wrote in his
History of Illinois.

In other words, the worst possible consequence of the jailhouse lynching was that he, Thomas Ford, might have been exposed to danger.

IN CARTHAGE, THE FIRST PERSON TO MINISTER TO THE MORMONS was Dr. Thomas Barnes, the town coroner. Like almost every Gentile in the area, Barnes disliked Mormons. He participated in anti-Mormon rallies and claimed that Governor Ford was a thinly disguised Mormon sympathizer. Barnes also captained a shadowy company of rangers who patrolled the prairies “to range as spies and ride as expresses [message carriers],” he later revealed. But in the early evening of June 27, Barnes honored his Hippocratic oath. He quickly determined that Joseph Smith, whose bullet-riddled body he found dumped in the entrance hall of the jail, was dead. Hyrum Smith’s bloody carcass lay sprawled against the far wall of the second-floor room where the Mormons had tried to defend themselves. Willard Richards was alive and virtually unscathed. The hulking, three-hundred-pound “doctor”—Richards had trained as an herbalist—escorted Barnes to where John Taylor lay in agony, suffering from four bullet wounds. Taylor objected to being treated by Barnes. “I don’t know you!” he shouted, “Who am I among? I am surrounded by assassins and murderers; witness your deeds!”

Barnes and Richards swore that they meant to help. When Taylor’s resistance waned, the doctor pulled out a penknife and started cutting away the flesh between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. Barnes then brandished a carpenter’s compass, using the metal point to pry into the hand to find one of the four musket balls lodged in Taylor’s body. “After sawing for some time with a dull penknife, and prying and pulling with the compasses,” Taylor reported, “he ultimately succeeded in extracting the ball.”

Taylor had “nerves like the devil” to withstand his impromptu surgery, Barnes later said. In a letter to his daughter many years after the fact, he complained that he never collected a fee for his services.

Richards arranged to have Joseph and Hyrum’s bodies moved to the ground floor of the Hamilton hotel. A local tailor named John Ma-comber washed Joseph’s body. His lawyer, James Woods, inventoried the Prophet’s effects. Joseph had been carrying $135.50 worth of gold and silver and wearing a gold ring. In Joseph’s undisturbed pockets, Woods found a pen and pencil case, a penknife and case, tweezers, and two IOUs, one for $50 from John Greene, and one from Heber Kimball.

After kicking up a fuss, Taylor agreed to be moved to the hotel, too. Artois Hamilton was less than eager to shelter the Mormons. Like everyone, he was thinking of leaving town to avoid the inevitable Mormon counterattack on Carthage. But Richards argued that it might behoove him to pose as a friend of the Saints, especially if retribution came down on the county seat.

He showed Hamilton the note he was about to send back to Nauvoo, begging the Saints to refrain from revenge:

CARTHAGE JAIL, 8O’CLOCK 5 MIN. P.M., JUNE 27TH, 1844

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 100 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.

WILLARD RICHARDS

The man carrying Richards’s note was intercepted on the road to Nauvoo and turned back. A second messenger suffered the same fate. In the early hours of Friday, June 28, Porter Rockwell galloped through the streets of Nauvoo screaming the terrifying news at the top of his lungs, waking any and all who could hear him: “Joseph is killed! Goddamn them! They have killed him!”

* Many fabulous details attending Joseph’s death were introduced into evidence at his assassins’ trial. See Chapter 12.

Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood

Of Prophets, martyr’d for the truth of God.

Once lov’d America! what can atone

For the pure blood of innocence, thou’st sown?

Times and Seasons

AT DAWN ON JUNE 28, A FEW VISITORS ARRIVED IN CARTHAGE from Nauvoo to reclaim the corpses of the Mormon leaders. Joseph and Hyrum’s brother Samuel, who farmed in nearby Plymouth, came to the Hamilton hotel early on Friday morning. So did John Taylor’s wife, Leonora, accompanied by Dr. Samuel Bennett from Nauvoo. Carthage, which was teeming with trigger-happy militia only one day earlier, was now a ghost town. Fearing retaliation from the Mormons, the men “just frankly ran away,” according to Eudocia Baldwin, whose brothers were with the Greys. Newspaper editor George Davis noted sardonically that one of the fearsome militias “proceeded with all convenient haste for their homes in Schuyler County, conceding that
distance lent enchantment to the view
.” Only military commander Minor Deming and a handful of men were available to help the Mormons prepare the Smiths’ bodies to be taken back to Nauvoo.

For the second time in twelve hours, Taylor submitted to a gruesome operation, au naturel. Dr. Bennett noticed that Taylor’s thigh had swollen up and determined that the musket ball buried there had to come out.

“Will you be tied during the operation, Mr. Taylor?” Bennett inquired.

“Oh, no, I shall endure the cutting all right,” Taylor answered.

And he did.

“So great was the pain I endured that the cutting was rather a relief than otherwise,” Taylor later wrote. The bullet-riddled Taylor would go on to live a long, healthy, and productive life.

While Bennett carved up his patient, and Samuel Smith laid his brothers in lidless oak coffins provided by Hamilton, Leonora Taylor found an empty room on the hotel’s ground floor to pray. On her knees, she was approached by the elderly Mrs. Bedell, a stalwart in the local Methodist church. “There’s a good lady,” Bedell purred to the young Mormon whose husband had suffered four bullet wounds for his beliefs. “Pray for God to forgive your sins, pray that you may be converted, and the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

By 8:00 a.m., the arrangements in Carthage were complete. John Taylor was to remain a guest of Artois Hamilton, and of the local citizenry. Taylor later recalled seeing some of the same men that had mobbed the jail pop into his hotel room to offer condolences or to chat. One too-candid visitor told Taylor that “I ought to be killed, but it was too damned cowardly to shoot a wounded man. Thus by the chivalry of murderers I was prevented from being a second time mutilated or killed.”

Taylor, who was attended by his wife, mother, and several Mormon friends, kept two loaded pistols on his bedside table. His hosts viewed him as a hostage to fortune and feared that his removal—he ultimately stayed four days—“would be the signal for rising of the Mormons.”

Hotelkeeper Hamilton agreed to furnish two wagons to transport Joseph and Hyrum’s coffins back to Nauvoo. The day threatened to be hot. An Indian blanket covered one of the coffins, and straw and prairie brush was heaped over the second, to prevent decomposition and to ward off flies. Willard Richards rode ahead of the wagons and Samuel Smith drove one of the teams. Eight hours later, the cortege, now accompanied by a Legionnaire riding at each of the wagon’s wheels, reached the outskirts of Nauvoo, about one mile east of the still-unfinished Temple. Soon a brass band joined the procession, playing funeral dirges.

As the wagons approached Joseph’s mansion in the town center, huge crowds lined the streets. As many as 8,000 people may have witnessed Joseph and Hyrum’s mournful homecoming. “The inhabitants were all out in the streets, on the housetops and everywhere to see if they could get just a glimpse of him,” fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Rich reported. “As they drove around to the Mansion, the people were almost frantic to get one little glimpse of him, but they were driven back by the marshal.” Recent immigrants from Ireland and Wales moaned in unison, filling the air with a funereal keening rarely heard along the banks of the Mississippi. “The weeping was communicated to the crowd, and spread along the vast waves of humanity extending from the Temple to the residence of the Prophet,” journalist B. W. Richmond reported. “The groans and sobs and shrieks grew deeper and louder till the sound resembled the roar of a mighty tempest, or the slow, deep, roar of the distant tornado.”

Porter Rockwell’s alarum had woken the Smiths’ families the night before. In the Nauvoo Mansion, Joseph’s four children had been crying and screaming for hours. In a downstairs room, Richmond happened upon Joseph’s mother, the sixty-eight-year-old Lucy Mack Smith, stone-faced and tearless, staring out a window. When Sarah Kimball approached the Smith family matriarch, “she extended her trembling hand towards me which I clasped in silence,” Kimball recalled,