American Crucifixion (7 page)

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, organized during a prayer meeting on a central New York farm in 1830, was a storm-tossed religion. Joseph Smith “gathered” his hundred or so Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, in the early 1830s, where missionary work soon swelled the Mormons’ ranks. Pursuant to a revelation, Joseph sent Saints westward to simultaneously settle in Missouri, which he believed to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, or Zion. Joseph’s Mormon beliefs often sprang full-grown from the Old Testament. The Saints were the people of Israel; Zion was their promised land, and the rest of America was Babylon, inhabited by the churchless Gentiles.

By 1838, the Saints found themselves unwelcome in Kirtland. The nationwide financial Panic of 1837 had wiped out their oddball financial institution, the “Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company,” impoverishing Gentile and Mormon investors alike. The decidedly unsafe Safety Society had declared itself a non-bank because Ohio refused to charter a real Mormon bank. The society ran out of money within three weeks of its founding. The self-styled prophet fled Kirtland in the dead of night, pointing his horse west to Missouri.

The Saints fared little better in their new home. Within just a few years, the devout, industrious Mormons, almost all of them from anti-slavery New England states, had alienated their new Southern neighbors. (The Missouri Compromise of 1820 preserved its status as a slave state.) Heeding Joseph’s call, members of the rapidly growing church were gathering in Missouri, and the hordes of new immigrant voters were threatening to take over several counties from the old settlers. The Missourians pleaded with their governor to halt Mormon immigration, and vigilantes drove home the message by raiding Mormon ranches and settlements.

When nonviolent resistance proved futile, the Saints stopped turning the other cheek. To counter the “mobocrats,” the Mormons organized the Danite guerrilla force, named for a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that “the saints shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom, for ever and ever.” Under attack from marauders and night riders, the Danites returned violence for violence, matching their tormentors burned hay rick for burned hay rick, and rustled cattle herd for rustled cattle herd. The excitable Sidney Rigdon preached a sermon on July 4, 1838, rallying the Saints to “a war of extermination” against their enemies. (In the early nineteenth century, “extermination” meant to expel, not necessarily to annihilate.) Four months later, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous Extermination Order, directed against Missouri’s Mormons. A short, bloody, three-month-long war ensued, with casualties on both sides. A ghastly atrocity—the massacre and mutilation of seventeen defenseless Mormons, including two children, trapped inside a blacksmith shop at Haun’s Mill—effectively ended the Mormon War, which the Mormons could never have hoped to win.

The Missourians clapped the Mormon leaders, including Rigdon and Joseph Smith, in jail, and observed a brief cease-fire that allowed the Saints to flee across the frozen Mississippi River to Illinois. There, the residents of Quincy, a commercial port, and other Illinois towns graciously received the bedraggled refugees, whom they viewed as victims of coarse Missouri bigotry. Illinois residents were quick to believe the worst about the “pukes,” their unflattering epithet for the Missourians. “The citizens responded to the call and donated liberally,” recalled Wandle Mace, a prosperous Mormon who had relocated his family from New York. He reported that citizens filled “a large canoe with flour, pork, coffee, sugar, boots, shoes and clothing, the merchants vieing [
sic
]with each other as to which could be the most liberal,” and sent it across the river, to an encampment of freezing Mormon refugees.

Accepting handouts was hardly the Mormons’ style; more than provisions, they desperately needed a new home. Sensing an opportunity, the New York Land Company’s “Dr.” Isaac Galland quickly found his way to the bedraggled Saints.

Galland, who had neither medical training nor legal education—he also claimed to be a lawyer—had likewise not studied for the ministry, although he did occasionally mount the pulpit on both sides of the Mississippi. He was a charming scalawag, a convicted horse thief and counterfeiter who had abandoned three wives in different parts of the country. Newspaper editor Thomas Gregg once recalled meeting “that dark-eyed, dark-hued, inexplicable, incomprehensible, unfathomable man, Dr. Isaac Galland—whom no man could see through.” When he ran for Congress in 1834, Galland made light of his checkered reputation. “I’ve been found guilty of almost everything except hog stealing,” he said, “and I never owned a hog.”

The New York Land Company and Galland had acquired some claims on a huge block of Iowa real estate called the Half-Breed Tract. In an 1824 treaty, Congress had set aside the 186 square miles to be settled by the mixed-blood descendants of the Sauk (also known as the Sac) and Fox Indian tribes. Legitimate claimants were hard to find, and an army of swindlers and con men descended upon the open prairie, where the lots were the subject of near-constant litigation.

Galland and his employer had sufficient claim to convince Joseph Smith to negotiate a land purchase from his jail cell in, of all places, Liberty, Missouri. In 1839, Smith bought 20,000 acres of land on the Iowa shore of the Mississippi as well as 700 acres in the center of a town across the river called Commerce, Illinois. Galland was a scamp and Commerce was a swamp, with one stone house and five other structures nearby. But the site had promise. The broad limestone flat sat in the middle of a sweeping, graceful horseshoe bend in the river, giving the town waterfront access on its southern, western, and northern borders. Moving east, there was plenty of room to grow, especially toward a line of bluffs and higher ground rising to the fertile prairie beyond.

“No man of understanding can come up the Mississippi without being filled with wonder and astonishment,” the Englishman John Needham wrote to his parents in Yorkshire, in 1843.

Just where Nauvoo stands, the river turns in the shape of a horse shoe, the river going three parts around the city. From rising ground in Nauvoo we have a splendid sight of the country on the other side of the river, which is very pleasant.

Galland’s claims may have been shaky—instead of selling the Mormons property deeds, he sold them stock in landholding companies—but his terms were alluring. Joseph paid Galland $2 an acre for the vast tracts, with payments stretched out over twenty years. Galland charged no interest. Small wonder that Smith hailed Galland as “the honored instrument the Lord used to prepare a home for us” and heartily embraced the old horse thief’s brief conversion to the Church of Latter-day Saints.

Joseph had employed a Hebrew tutor in Ohio and renamed Commerce “Nauvoo,” a word with Old Testament roots that he said “signifies a beautiful situation, or place, carrying with it, also, the idea of
rest
.”

“The place was literally a wilderness,” Joseph commented in the church history that he dictated to a rotating group of scribes: “The land was mostly covered with trees and bushes, and much of it was so wet that it was with the utmost difficulty that a footman could get through, and totally impossible for teams.”

Joseph further noted that Commerce was “unhealthy.” In fact, it was pestilential. Malaria was not uncommon in the Mississippi Valley, and when the Mormons started to arrive in the summer and fall of 1839, the disease struck in full force. The ague, or the “spotted fever,” attacked almost every arriving family, including Joseph’s. His father died, and so did his twenty-six-year-old brother, Don Carlos, as well as one of his scribes. To ensure that they were consuming boiled water, the Mormons drank teas and coffee, a technical violation of Joseph’s Word of Wisdom, the guide to personal conduct that counseled the Saints to abjure alcohol and “hot drinks.” The mortality rate in Nauvoo was double that of Illinois, and of the United States. So many immigrants perished that the Saints arranged a mass funeral service for their dead.

While his flock waged a life-and-death struggle with the malarial lowland he had chosen, Smith and his lieutenants worked hard to build up the hoped-for Mormon sanctuary on the Mississippi. By digging a channel along the base of the higher ground, the Mormons successfully drained the swamp. Soon the lowland acreage became dry and fertile. Joseph envisaged a town at the base of the Nauvoo peninsula, and saw plenty of open space for farms to the north and east. On the high land overlooking the peninsula, Joseph planned to build a magnificent white-limestone temple, larger and grander than the landmark the Mormons had erected in Kirtland, Ohio. This was a cornerstone of Zion, Smith declared, and the Saints and all would-be Saints had an obligation to come to Nauvoo:

We may soon expect to see flocking to this place people of every land; the polished European; the degraded Hottentot, and the shivering Laplanders; persons of all languages and of every color who shall with us worship in His holy temple.

Galland was either a tremendous cynic, a bitter realist, or a combination of the two. He may have swindled the Mormons more than once. His land claims in Iowa proved to be vaporous, and when Joseph sent him east to convince Mormons there to help pay off the Nauvoo debt, Galland returned empty-handed. Galland predicted that the Mormons would stay in Nauvoo “until they again acquire a sufficient quantity of ‘honey comb’ to induce the surrounding thieves to rob them again, at which time they will no doubt have to renounce their religion, or submit to a repetition of similar acts of violence and outrage.” He would prove to be partially correct.

SOUTHWESTERN ILLINOIS WAS A WOOLLY PART OF THE WORLD. For starters, the state was flat broke. Illinois had bankrupted itself investing in public works projects such as canals, roads, and railways that were never built. Illinois’s state bank stopped redeeming currency for gold or silver in 1840, and state bonds were trading for 33 cents on the dollar. No one had money. There was no national currency, and the economies of towns such Quincy and Nauvoo subsisted on scrip, IOU’s, barter, and the occasional gold or silver coin. Counterfeiting was rife, and continually bedeviled Nauvoo.

In his
History of Illinois,
Governor Thomas Ford noted that the southern part of the state had attracted immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee likely to be poor because they didn’t own slaves, which were banned from Illinois’s free soil. “The wealthy immigrant from the slave States rarely came here,” Ford wrote. But that is not to say that Illinois extended its arms to black people. The legislature resolutely vowed to enforce fugitive slave laws, to ensure that Southerners’ “property” found no shelter in its borders. As in many parts of the United States, abolitionists were held in low regard. Congregationalists in Warsaw, Illinois, barely twenty miles from Nauvoo, dismissed their first minister in 1839 when they learned that he was active in the anti-slavery movement.

An Easterner by birth who lived much of his life in upstate Springfield and Peoria, Governor Ford ungenerously characterized his southern Illinois neighbors as “unambitious of wealth, and great lovers of ease and social enjoyment.” The Southerners in turn despised their northern counterparts, whom they called Yankees, even though they had little idea what the name meant. They thought a “genuine Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature,” Ford wrote.

In downstate Illinois, to be “Yankeed” meant to be cheated. Southern Illinois legislators even opposed the Lake Michigan–to–Illinois River canal that made Chicago’s fortune, because they feared it would bring more New Englanders into their ambit. Northern Illinois residents viewed the typical downstater as “a long, lank, lean, lazy, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”

The settled United States ended at Illinois’s western border, and the frontier was a dangerous place. As elsewhere in Andrew Jackson’s America—Jackson was still alive, although his presidency ended in 1837—the rule of law was theoretical at best. “Each state has the unquestionable right to regulate its own internal concerns according to its own pleasure,” Jackson proclaimed in his Farewell Message to the American people. In his valedictory, just as he had during his presidency, Jackson championed the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which allowed each state to sort out their affairs more or less as it wished.
^*
Across the land, laws became tools of popular will, of whim, or of local bigotry. The sophisticated Manhattan businessman, mayor, and diarist Philip Hone called popular sovereignty “the abominable doctrine . . . viz, that the people are to be governed by the law just so long as it pleases them.”

Rural Illinois, too, was a part of America where people made their own laws. The year before the Mormons came to Hancock County, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln called mob violence the greatest threat to the young body politic. He decried “the increasing disregard of law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts. . . .” If the American experiment were to perish, he continued, it would die from within: “If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we [will] live through all time, or die by suicide.”