Under the Banner of Heaven (15 page)

All told, eighteen Saints were slaughtered in and around the blacksmith shop. The event became known as the Haun’s Mill Massacre, and was stamped into the Latter-day Saints’ collective memory. More than 160 years later, Mormons still speak of it with indignation and undiminished rage.

Joseph Smith was sixteen miles away when the carnage occurred at Haun’s Mill, supervising the defense of Far West, which was being surrounded by ten thousand Missouri troops. He learned of the calamity the night after it happened, and sank into a black depression. Over the months since the discord had escalated into increasingly bloody clashes, Joseph had waffled between aggressively fighting back and seeking a peaceful end to the conflict through compromise. After the massacre at Haun’s Mill, the prophet seemed to suddenly recognize that if he engaged in a full-blown war with the Gentiles, he and his followers would be annihilated.

Immediately upon having this epiphany, Joseph dispatched five Mormons to meet with the Gentiles and “beg like a dog for peace.” The general of the Missouri Militia informed them that there was only one way for the Saints to avert imminent eradication: without delay, they would have to deliver Joseph and six other Mormon leaders to face charges of treason; provide monetary compensation to the Missourians for property that had been plundered and destroyed; surrender all Mormon weapons; and then abandon the state of Missouri altogether.

The conditions were unreasonably harsh, yet Joseph had no real choice but to accept them. Addressing the faithful in Far West, he put on a brave face and announced, “I shall offer myself up as a sacrifice to save your lives and save the Church. Be of good cheer, my brethren. Pray earnestly to the Lord to deliver your leaders from their enemies. I bless you all in the name of Christ.”

The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph, his brother Hyrum, and five other Mormon leaders were taken into custody by the Missourians, hastily court-martialed, and found guilty of treason—a capital crime. Missouri general Alexander Doniphan was ordered, “Sir: You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square of Far West, and shoot them at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.”

But Doniphan was an uncommonly principled man, and he balked at carrying out the order. Joseph and his cohorts were American citizens, and Doniphan knew it was illegal for the military to court-martial and summarily execute civilians. Indicating that he refused to participate in such a travesty of justice, General Doniphan wrote a note to his commanding officer that read, “It is cold-blooded murder. I will not obey your order… ; and if you execute those men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!”

Thanks to Doniphan’s brave refusal, the execution of the Mormons was called off, and Joseph’s life was spared for the time being. The Saints, however, were forced to accede to all the other conditions of their surrender, and once they had been disarmed they became easy prey for Missourians bent on revenge. Their possessions were plundered, their cabins torn down and burned for firewood, their livestock shot for amusement. Mormon men were indiscriminately beaten; rapes of women and girls were reported. And on top of everything else, they were told that they had just a few months—until the spring of 1839—to leave the state.

It proved to be a difficult winter for the Saints. As the faithful endured famine and crippling cold, anticipating their forced departure from Missouri, Joseph remained locked up along with nine other Mormon leaders indicted for treason and murder. The prophet, unrepentant, penned an angry screed from jail, warning, “The murders at Haun’s Mill, the exterminating order of Governor Boggs, and the one-sided rascally proceedings of the Legislature, have damned the State of Missouri to all eternity.”

As the winter wore on, the tide of public opinion began to turn in the Saints’ favor. Details of the Haun’s Mill Massacre were reported in various Missouri newspapers, prompting calls for an investigation. Articles sympathetic to the Mormons were published throughout the region. The ongoing incarceration of Joseph and his brethren became a growing embarrassment to Governor Boggs, the legislature, and local officials, who were increasingly reluctant to bring the accused to trial lest the Saints win an acquittal.

To save face, the sheriff responsible for guarding the jailed Mormons was encouraged by those in power to accept an $800 bribe, get drunk, and conveniently fall asleep, thereby allowing the prisoners to escape. On April 16, 1839, Joseph and his nine cell mates slipped away into the night and fled cross-country to rejoin their fellow Saints, most of whom had by then completed their exodus from Missouri and were safely across the Illinois state line.

TEN

NAUVOO

If our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Laid out across a limestone flat beside the mud-brown flow of the Mississippi River, Nauvoo is a small, tidy town with little on its surface to distinguish it from hundreds of other small, tidy towns that freckle the American heartland. A month after breaking out of jail in Missouri, however, Joseph Smith surveyed the shore along this majestic bend in the river and resolved that the Kingdom of God’s capital city would be erected precisely here, in Hancock County, Illinois.

A low-lying promontory on the river’s east bank, the site was a patch of malarial swamp “so wet,” as Joseph himself described it, “that it was with the utmost difficulty that a footman could get through, and totally impossible for [ox] teams.” But the place had a couple of mitigating attributes: it was all but uninhabited, and the owner was willing to sell acreage to the Saints on credit. A deal was struck, construction commenced with characteristic Mormon industriousness, and within five years more than fifteen thousand of the Lord’s Elect were living in and around Nauvoo—ten times its current population—making it the second-largest municipality in Illinois. From nothing, the Saints created a city that rivaled Chicago.

Unlike Chicago, moreover, Nauvoo was no mere city; it was a theocratic principality, with Joseph at its head, possessing sovereign rights and powers unique not only in Illinois but in the entire nation. These special rights were granted in a highly unusual charter passed without fanfare by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840—a time when the state was eager to attract hardworking settlers who would contribute to the economy and sympathy for the Mormons was running high because of their expulsion from Missouri.

As an unintended consequence, Illinois set Joseph up as de facto emperor of his own autonomous city-state. He had himself officially anointed “King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” He commanded a well-armed and rigorously disciplined militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which boasted nearly half as many men as the entire American Army at the time, and then, eager for still more military power, he petitioned the U.S. Congress for authorization to establish a one-hundred-thousand-man fighting force under his personal control.

Congress thought better of granting this latter request, but Joseph was on a roll nevertheless. Which probably came as no surprise to the prophet, because he believed that his was the Lord’s One True Church and he was being guided by the hand of God. Secure in this knowledge, and eager to extend his influence to the whole country, in January 1844 Joseph announced his candidacy for president of the United States.*

* Joseph’s opponents were the Whig candidate Henry Clay, Democrat James K. Polk, and James G. Birney of the Liberty party. In an extremely close election, Polk emerged as the winner with a 48.1 percent plurality, defeating Clay by a scant 38,367 votes.

Although historians are in unanimous agreement that Joseph “had a snowball’s chance in hell” of winning the November election, as the Jacksonian scholar Robert Remini phrased it, it is not clear whether Joseph himself shared this view. Already, after all, he’d accomplished much more than anyone could have imagined when he’d incorporated his peculiar new church in Palmyra fourteen years earlier. Joseph took the presidential campaign quite seriously, in any case, dispatching 586 of his most capable and persuasive missionaries—including ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—to all twenty-six states and Wisconsin Territory in order to drum up support for his run at the nation’s highest office.

An argument can be made that Joseph ran for president because he had come to believe that it was the only way his Saints were ever going to gain state protection from the terrible persecutions they had been subjected to wherever they had attempted to live. Having tried repeatedly, and failed on each occasion, to persuade elected officials that the government had both a moral and a legal obligation to protect the Mormons from the violent mobs that wanted to eradicate them, Joseph may have decided that his only recourse was to occupy the White House himself.

Joseph venerated the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document. For years he had complained that political leaders were disregarding their sworn duty to safeguard the Mormons’ constitutionally guaranteed freedom to worship without being subjected to harassment, and worse, at the hands of the religious majority. Yet in both word and deed, Joseph repeatedly demonstrated that he himself had little respect for the religious views of non-Mormons, and was unlikely to respect the constitutional rights of other faiths if he somehow won the presidency and were running the show.

The Mormons did not transform Nauvoo into a bustling hub of enterprise and godliness without first enduring serious setbacks. In 1839 and 1840, before the swamps were drained, epidemics of malaria and cholera swept through the settlement, killing hundreds of Saints, including the prophet’s own father and one of his brothers. And the Missouri hostilities continued to plague Joseph and his followers long after they had been driven from that state.

Although Joseph had managed to escape from jail, criminal charges against him were still pending in Missouri. Considered a fugitive from justice, he was under constant threat of being extradited to stand trial. There was a bounty on his head. Sheriffs from Missouri came to Illinois on at least two occasions bearing writs for Joseph’s arrest. In May 1841 a sheriff’s posse managed to surprise the prophet outside of Nauvoo, arrested him, and had almost hauled him across the border into Missouri before Joseph managed to finagle his release with a writ of habeas corpus. It was a very close scrape, and the harassment provoked Joseph’s ire. During a public speech soon after his 1841 arrest, he vented his anger by prophesying that retired governor of Missouri Lilburn Boggs—the Saints’ despised nemesis—would “die by violent hands within one year.”

On the evening of May 6, 1842, Boggs was reading a newspaper in the study of his Independence home when a gunman lurking outside shot him four times through a window. Two balls hit Boggs in the neck; the other two pierced his skull and lodged in the left lobe of his brain. Everyone assumed that he would die, and Boggs’s demise was reported in newspapers across the country. Most of these papers speculated that the assassin had been a Mormon bent on fulfilling Joseph Smith’s prophecy.

The handgun used to shoot the ex-governor was discovered outside Boggs’s study, where it had been tossed into a puddle. An investigation quickly determined that the pistol had recently been stolen from a local store. The storekeeper told the sheriff, “I thought the niggers had taken it, but that hired man of Ward’s—the one who used to work with the stallion—he came in to look at it just before it turned up missing!” The “hired man of Ward’s” was an accomplished horseman from Nauvoo named Orrin Porter Rockwell. He had arrived in Independence a couple of months earlier, then quietly slipped out of town immediately after Boggs was shot.

As it turned out, the reports of Boggs’s death were premature. Somehow he recovered from his severe brain injuries. The papers were right about the would-be killer, though: Rockwell was almost certainly the would-be assassin, and he was a Mormon. Afraid of nothing, and fiercely devoted to the prophet, Rockwell was already becoming legendary for his willingness to spill the blood of those who had wronged the church, thereby giving them an opportunity to atone for their sins—a career that would become his life’s work and inspire admiring Mormons to christen him the “Destroying Angel” and the “Mormon Samson.”

Although Joseph may not have ordered Rockwell to shoot Boggs, it was commonly understood by the faithful that it was a Saint’s sacred duty to assist in the fulfilling of prophecies when the opportunity arose. Once Boggs’s death had been foretold by the prophet, nobody needed to tell Porter Rockwell what to do. Few inhabitants of Missouri (and perhaps even fewer Saints up the river in Nauvoo) doubted that the attempted assassination was the work of Mormondom’s Destroying Angel, but Rockwell had no difficulty eluding arrest. Neither he nor any other Saint was ever brought to justice for the deed.

Life in Nauvoo, meanwhile, continued apace. The city of the Saints was booming. There on the banks of the great American river, the Mormons seemed to have at last found a secure foothold from which to spread Joseph’s religion far and wide. He and his followers had come an impressively long way in the seventeen years since Moroni had entrusted Joseph with the gold plates. And new converts to the Mormon Church were arriving in Nauvoo in ever greater throngs, many now coming from as far afield as England and Scandinavia.

The Second Great Awakening had been crawling with impassioned, silver-tongued prophets who roamed the land hawking upstart creeds. Almost all of these novel faiths provided reassuring answers to the mysteries of life and death, and promised converts that they would be rewarded for their devotion by spending the hereafter on easy street. But almost none of the new churches managed to establish an enduring body of followers. Most are now long forgotten. So why did Joseph’s new religion triumph when so many of his competitors vanished with scarcely a trace? To be sure, there were numerous reasons why so many people found Mormonism so appealing. Probably none, however, was more salient than the colossal force of Joseph’s personality.