Following their success in forcing the Mormons to evacuate the village of De Witt in Carroll County, Missouri, in October 1838, anti-Mormon vigilantes applied similar pressure in Daviess County, beginning with raids on isolated Mormon homes. State militia commander Alexander Doniphan acknowledged that his troops could not be relied upon to maintain order or to protect the Latter-day Saints’ property rights. The Mormons mounted a preemptive strike in Daviess County beginning in mid-October, targeting the property of vigilantes.

Burning and plundering by both sides and the evacuation of most of Daviess County’s non-Mormon residents led to outright warfare. After a company of Ray County volunteers captured three Latter-day Saints in an area lying between Caldwell and Ray counties, JS helped mobilize a company of Mormons from Caldwell County as a rescue party. The ensuing battle at Crooked River on 25 October, at which two Mormons, their guide, and one Missourian were killed, gave rise to exaggerated reports that the Mormons had killed or captured the entire Ray County contingent and were about to attack Richmond, the seat of Ray County. In the wake of this news and word of Mormon depredations in Daviess County, in late October 1838 Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs decried Mormon “outrages” and ordered a large militia force to “exterminate” the Mormons or drive them from the state. JS and other leaders were arrested and incarcerated, and most Mormons left Missouri in early 1839, trudging eastward for more than 150 miles and crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois.3

After a grueling confinement through the winter in the jail at Liberty, Missouri, JS and his fellow Mormon prisoners were transported to Daviess County for a grand jury investigation. There they were indicted for treason, riot, arson, burglary, and receiving stolen goods but were granted a change of venue to Columbia, Missouri, for their contemplated trial. During the journey to the new location, the guards allowed their prisoners to escape.4

On 22 April 1839, six days after their escape, JS and his companions crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois. There they reunited with thousands of other Latter-day Saint refugees from Missouri, many of whom had received a sympathetic, hospitable reception from the citizens of Quincy, Illinois. That same day, JS rehired James Mulholland, who had performed clerical work for him the previous autumn. Mulholland began his record in this small journal by noting JS’s escape in Missouri and then, beginning with JS’s arrival in Quincy, kept a contemporaneous record for six months.

During the period covered by this journal, Mulholland worked closely with JS, recording JS’s history and occasionally accompanying him in his travels. Unlike the September–October 1838 journal, which Mulholland kept for JS in Missouri, the present journal benefits from JS reporting to his scribe some of the activities that took place in Mulholland’s absence. A few of the entries in these instances may have been dictated by JS, although most entries were based on Mulholland’s observation.

While keeping this journal for JS, Mulholland was also keeping his own journal, which he wrote in the back of the record he had kept for JS during autumn 1838. Mulholland’s personal journal entries, where illuminating, are used to annotate the parallel entries he wrote for JS in the present journal. When he was separated from JS, Mulholland also focused entries in JS’s journal on Mulholland’s own activities. Mulholland’s use of first-person narration to refer sometimes to himself and sometimes to JS requires careful reading to determine whose activities are being described.

The Illinois resumption of JS’s record keeping reflected the reestablishment of characteristically Mormon procedures that were suspended during the upheaval in Missouri. Record keeping lapsed during the Mormon War, the imprisonment of JS, and the expulsion of the Latter-day Saints from the state. The principle of gathering—at least in an official sense—also lapsed during the aftermath of that expulsion. Latter-day Saints realized that their practice of gathering to create religious communities, though mandated by revelation, aroused antagonism of nearby citizenry wherever they settled. In the interest of survival, should they now intersperse with others, coming together for worship but not living in tight-knit, exclusive communities? Writing from jail in Liberty in January 1839, JS acknowledged that for the present “the gathering of necessity [is] stopt.”5

Yet the gathering did not stop. Even without JS’s direction, many of the Mormons fleeing Missouri sought collective refuge in western Illinois and thereby kept the question of gathering alive. In March, before JS’s escape, a church conference at Quincy conducted by Brigham Young confronted the question of whether to “gather” or “scatter.” Young advised settling “in companies,” or at least in sufficiently close proximity to establish congregations.6

Within days of his arrival in Quincy, JS decisively arranged for a new gathering place. In the months to come, he taught that a gathered community of believers was essential for building a house of the Lord. As was true for Kirtland, Ohio, and as JS had intended for Far West, Missouri, this new gathering place was to become a city with a temple.7

After purchasing some land about fifty miles upriver, at Commerce in Hancock County, Illinois, JS moved his family and his people there. The riverfront site had poor harbors and swampy lowlands plagued with malaria-bearing mosquitoes. This journal offers glimpses of JS’s involvement in land purchases and community planning that provided a basis for a cluster of Mormon settlements on both sides of the Mississippi. The journal also records JS’s trips to Quincy, Plymouth, and Macomb, Illinois, and other nearby places to visit family, groups of Latter-day Saints, and regional political and commercial centers.

Meanwhile, JS and members of the Quorum of the Twelve clung tenaciously to another facet of the Mormon mission: widespread proselytizing. An 1838 revelation commanded the Twelve to depart from Far West, Missouri, on 26 April 1839 for a mission to Europe.8 From jail in Liberty, JS reminded the apostles of that obligation.9 Enemies declared it in advance a false revelation, as they now had the power to prevent it from being fulfilled. Nonetheless, as diary entries began in mid-April 1839, members of the Quorum of the Twelve under acting president Brigham Young had just left Quincy to return to Missouri to fulfill the injunction. Their predawn meeting on 26 April 1839 at Far West marked the symbolic beginning of their mission abroad. But with much preparation remaining, they returned to Illinois and did not actually depart for the East until late summer. In the intervening months, JS met frequently with the eight or nine available apostles to teach them and help them prepare. JS also attempted to strengthen and unify the quorum by helping to resolve the status of two apostles—Orson Hyde and William Smith—who had abandoned the Latter-day Saints during the Missouri crisis. The departure of the Twelve was marked by lengthier-than-usual journal entries reporting sermons and admonitions, indicative of the significance attached to the mission.

The resettlement of the Mormons in Commerce and vicinity and the resumption of church affairs—including the departure of the Twelve to Britain—were hampered by a malaria epidemic that ravaged the area from late June to November. When JS was preoccupied with aiding the victims of the scourge for eleven weeks in July, August, and September, journal entries were scaled back to weekly summaries. While the entries suggest the duration and centrality of JS’s focus on relieving the sick, they characteristically only skim the surface. For months, the Smith home and environs served as a hospital of sorts, with JS and Emma nursing malaria victims. The couple moved their own family into a tent to provide better care in their house for the sick. JS himself contracted the disease but soon recovered and continued to minister to the afflicted. Mulholland spent three weeks in late August and early September caring for his own wife, who was ill.10

Despite the epidemic, the Latter-day Saints remained at their new headquarters. When the disease abated somewhat, JS became increasingly involved in arrangements for a new, larger town that would soon eclipse and absorb Commerce. At a general conference of the church convened at Commerce in early October 1839, JS advocated—and the membership of the church affirmed—that this was a suitable location to be designated a stake of Zion and a gathering place for the Saints.

Even while JS built a new stake, Missouri still occupied much of his attention. In the months and years following the expulsion of his people from that state, JS sought persistently to call attention to the losses and injustices the Latter-day Saints had suffered and, if possible, to obtain government compensation. He left Commerce on 29 October 1839, two weeks after the conclusion of this journal, to visit Washington DC to seek relief and redress from the federal government. The next day, a gravely ill James Mulholland was taken to Emma Smith’s makeshift hospital, where he died on 3 November, possibly a victim of the malaria epidemic.11 It is not clear to what extent the cessation of journal entries after 15 October resulted from Mulholland’s illness or from a lack of access to JS. Daily entries did not resume until December 1841, more than two years later, when Willard Richards took up the pen a few months after his return from missionary service in England.

JS, “Minute Book. 1839 J. Smiths Journal Escape from Prison,” Journal, Apr.–Oct. 1839; handwriting of James Mulholland; fifteen pages; JS Collection, CHL. Includes redactions and archival marking.

Makeshift notebook, 10 x 4 inches (25 x 10 cm). The journal was fashioned by folding eight 10 x 8 inch (25 x 20 cm) sheets of paper in half lengthwise to form the notebook of sixteen leaves (thirty-two pages). Inscriptions that reach the end of a line and cross the gutter onto another leaf indicate that the folded pages were not sewn during their original use. Wear on the first and last pages indicates that the pages were not bound for some time. The text of the journal is inscribed on the first fifteen pages in black ink that later turned brown. The remaining seventeen pages are blank. At some point a cover for the notebook was made with a 10 x 16 inch (25 x 41 cm) sheet of blue-colored cover stock folded in half twice to create a 10 x 4 inch cover, which was then pamphlet bound with hand stitching. On the front cover, James Mulholland wrote “Minute Book. | 1839 | J. Smiths Journal | Escape from Prison” with seven decorative underlines in black ink. On the back cover, the lines “Joseph Smith’s Journal | Escape from Prison 1839” are written sideways near the top in black ink. This notation, in unidentified handwriting, appears to be early archival marking. Textual redactions and use marks made in graphite pencil were added by later scribes who used the journal to produce the multivolume manuscript history of the church.

This thin journal was probably among the miscellaneous documents collectively listed in Nauvoo and early Utah inventories of church records.1 The use of the journal in connection with the manuscript history, early inventories, and recent archival records indicate that this journal—like the other JS journals—has remained in continuous church custody.2