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Spencer McBride: On June 27, 1844, in the American town of Carthage, Illinois, an armed mob stormed the county jail. There, they murdered the prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum.
“The job was done in an instant,” eyewitness Willard Richards would write not long after the smoke cleared. His letter was intended for several different recipients, including Emma Smith, the prophet’s wife. Upon Richards fell the duty to inform Emma that she was now a widow and that her children had lost their father.
The news would also inspire mourning among the thousands of men and women who, as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, followed Joseph Smith as a prophet of God. They would weep for their fallen church president.
Since that day in 1844, Latter-day Saints have commemorated the tragic event. They have memorialized Joseph and Hyrum Smith as martyrs. They refer to this moment as “the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith,” or, sometimes, simply as “the martyrdom.”
What brought about this assassination? What motivated a mob to take such illegal actions? How, in a country that celebrated itself as a bastion of freedom, did the assailants justify murdering two religious leaders? Like most historical events, the murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith is a long and complex story. It’s a story of faith and valiance, and of fear and violence. It’s a story about politics and the law, and about intolerance and mobs. It’s a historical event that we are exploring over the next eight episodes. This is Road to Carthage: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast, and I’m your host, Spencer McBride.
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Spencer McBride: Episode 1: “Mobs, Elections, and Kidnappings.”
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Spencer McBride: Here’s the thing about the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the series of events that led to it: to understand them, we have to understand what happened to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Missouri during the 1830s.
In 1833, mobs violently expelled the Saints from their land in Jackson County, Missouri. In 1836, the Saints were forced to leave Clay County, where they had temporarily lived as refugees. Then, in 1838, war broke out between vigilantes and the Saints in the state. The state’s militia sided with the mob and the state’s governor ordered the expulsion of the Saints under threat of state-sanctioned extermination. The mobs killed several Latter-day Saint men, sexually assaulted several Latter-day Saint women, and destroyed or confiscated substantial amounts of Latter-day Saint property. And all of the Saints’ appeals for help from different levels of government proved futile.
So, in late 1838 and early 1839, when the Latter-day Saints moved to Illinois, when they were once again religious refugees, the trauma of the Missouri persecutions hung over them.
Matthew Godfrey: I don’t think you can really understand the history of Nauvoo without understanding what the Saints went through in Missouri.
Spencer McBride: That’s historian Matthew Godfrey, a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers.
Matthew Godfrey: The level of violence that they experienced there, the trauma that they experienced from being forced from their homes, whether it was being expelled from Jackson County in 1833 or being not violently expelled but still asked to leave Clay County in 1836, and then all of the violence that breaks out in 1838, and Joseph Smith’s ultimate arrest and placement in Liberty Jail.
All of these things did traumatize the Saints and Joseph Smith, I think. And so, when they go into Illinois, they really want to be able to create a society where they can live in peace, where they don’t have to worry about those who are not of their faith raising mobs and trying to expel them from where they are living.
Spencer McBride: In 1839, when the Saints sought to rebuild their community in a place that they called Nauvoo, the lessons they learned from the Missouri persecutions weighed heavily on their minds and eventually informed the way they designed their city’s government and laws. It informed the way that they designed the city’s charter that they would submit to the Illinois state legislature for approval. Alex Smith, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, explains.
Alex Smith: They’re trying to approach Nauvoo in such a way that they can protect its citizens and prevent a repetition of the kind of experiences they had in Missouri. So, when they arrive in Nauvoo, almost immediately after clearing land, starting to build structures to live in, and that kind of thing, very quickly on their minds—within the first year and a half—is the idea of establishing legal protections for themselves in the form of applying for charters, especially a charter for the municipality of Nauvoo from Illinois state government. When they approached the Illinois state legislature in the fall of 1840, it’s with the intent of obtaining powers that enable them to protect the citizens of Nauvoo. And they do that by crafting what becomes considered quite a broad, open-ended, very powerful institutional charter for the city.
Spencer McBride: The charters granted the city of Nauvoo legislative powers in the form of a city council and judicial powers that included a mayor’s court and a municipal court. Those judicial powers allowed certain city officials to issue writs of habeas corpus, a legal mechanism that could be used to question the legality of an arrest warrant. The charters also gave the city the ability to form a militia. In fact, the state of Illinois encouraged cities and towns to form militia units that were part of the larger state militia. For Latter-day Saints, the idea of a unit of the state militia based in their city was attractive, especially given their tragic history with mobs.
So, just how unique were these powers in the Nauvoo charter?
Alex Smith: If you look at Nauvoo’s charter that was granted by the legislature, it incorporates a tremendous amount of power. None of the individual elements of the charter are necessarily unique to Nauvoo. But at the time that Nauvoo’s charter was passed by the legislature, Illinois had previously chartered five cities in the state: Springfield, Quincy, Alton, Galena, and Chicago. And if you look at the wording and Nauvoo’s incorporating act, they’re really just borrowing language from each of these other charters, almost copying and pasting, if you will, concepts that they want included in their charter that give them abilities to hear writs, to have their own municipal court, to have their own city council that legislates for themselves, to have city officers that serve the roles of justices of the peace, things like that.
And it’s almost that they’re taking boilerplate language from these other charters and incorporating it into their act that they want to have passed. The challenge becomes that if the individual powers of Nauvoo’s charter are not necessarily unique, the aggregate is. Nauvoo’s incorporating act becomes so powerful because of how broad it is and how extensive the combination of powers granted to the city extends far beyond what any of these previous five cities had enjoyed.
Spencer McBride: So, how did the Illinois state government react to such a unique charter when it came up for approval?
Alex Smith: The story is well-known—that it passes Illinois’s legislature with a very little adjustment, correction, or rebuttal by any of those deliberating it. Thomas Ford, Illinois’s governor, later put in his history of the state that really none were opposed—not the Whigs, not the Democrats. Both saw the Latter-day Saints as this large new potential constituency that they wanted to please, and they legitimately criticized Missouri’s actions in driving the Saints out. So, they were really trying to provide a place of refuge for these people.
Spencer McBride: Members of both political parties congratulated the man representing the church in presenting Nauvoo’s charter for approval. This included two men destined for fame in American politics—Democrat Stephen A. Douglas and Whig Abraham Lincoln.
So, in January 1841, the Saints had the legal and political system in place that they believed was necessary to build a safe haven in the fledgling city of Nauvoo. But would that legal and political system hold the next time that people sought to harm church members, including Joseph Smith? And what would happen if the other citizens of the state grew wary of the unique combination of powers that the Saints thought was essential for their protection?
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Spencer McBride: What does the establishment of Nauvoo and the adoption of measures to protect the rights and lives of the Saints have to do with the story of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith? It was the establishment and use of those measures that elicited public criticism—public criticism that contributed to violent action against the Saints.
The most significant tests of the powers of the Nauvoo city charter—the most significant test of the whether Nauvoo would be the safe haven that church leaders hoped it would be—came from Missouri. The tests came between 1840 and 1843, when Missouri tried to force Joseph Smith to return to the state, the very state in which the governor had declared that the Saints must be expelled or exterminated.
Jeffrey Mahas, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, explains.
Jeffrey Mahas: Missouri attempted to extradite Joseph Smith to their state to stand trial on three occasions. In each of these cases, Joseph Smith was liberated by a technical legal procedure known as habeas corpus, where you’re able to question the legality or justification of a detention or arrest.
Spencer McBride: Joseph Smith knew that if he went to Missouri, he would be susceptible to attack from avowed enemies of him and the church. He had good reason to believe that if he returned to Missouri, he would be killed.
So, while Joseph Smith questioned the justness of the charges that Missouri officials leveled against him, each time Missouri tried to extradite him, he used writs of habeas corpus to challenge the basis of the extradition requests and corresponding arrest warrants. And he did this all in Illinois, where he believed he could receive fairer hearings.
Jeffrey Mahas: Now, the first two extradition attempts in 1841, and then in 1842 and early 1843, were heard in local circuit courts and also in the federal court system.
Spencer McBride: In 1841, a judge named Stephen A. Douglas, who would later go on to political fame, ruled that the arrest warrant was faulty and freed Joseph Smith from custody. In January 1843, Joseph Smith once again triumphed in challenging the merits of Missouri’s claim on him, this time before a judge of the United States circuit court.
Jeffrey Mahas: Now, in mid-1843, when Joseph is arrested the third time, he and his attorneys determined that instead of going before a state or a federal court, as they had in the past, they were going to go to Nauvoo. Because Nauvoo had in its city charter, the provision that allowed them to issue writs of habeas corpus. Now, most legal jurists at the time thought that this provision only allowed Nauvoo to issue writs of habeas corpus for local cases. So, if someone commits a crime in Nauvoo and is arrested in Nauvoo by Nauvoo legal authority, they could petition for a writ of habeas corpus and have a hearing before Nauvoo city courts.
But Joseph and his attorneys come up with a much more expansive interpretation, arguing that Nauvoo has the power to issue writs of habeas corpus over state and federal jurisdictions.
Spencer McBride: In this third and final attempt by Missouri to have Joseph Smith extradited, Nauvoo city courts heard the case and ruled in Joseph Smith’s favor. To Joseph Smith and the Saints in Nauvoo, who understandably questioned Missouri’s motives and its legal reasoning for seeking to extradite the prophet, the result of all three extradition hearings between 1841 and 1843 were a major victory. Matthew Godfrey explains.
Matthew Godfrey: I think one of the things that you can see from all of these extradition attempts is that the measures that the Saints put together to try to protect Joseph Smith—to protect themselves—did work. Because you have in all three of these extradition attempts and Joseph being able to be discharged from custody because of writs of habeas corpus.
And so, if that really was the goal of the Saints—that they didn’t want Joseph Smith to be able to be taken by his enemies—then I think you can say that those safeguards worked because they did prevent Joseph Smith from ever being taken back into Missouri at the time.
Spencer McBride: Yet, while the Saints in Nauvoo interpreted this successful use of habeas corpus as proof that the safeguards they had built in Nauvoo were working—safeguards that the Illinois state legislature had granted the city in the first place—others were concerned by their actions. The concern did not grow simply out of differing interpretations of the law. The concerns were motivated, in part, by economic and political matters. The concerns were motivated by power. Many non–Latter-day Saints in western Illinois worried that the presence and organization of the Saints would mean that they could not exercise the political and economic power that they once had or that they had hoped to exercise. And this animosity toward the Saints was spread in the region’s newspapers. Brent Rogers, Managing Historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, explains.
Brent Rogers: The local Illinois newspapers played a primary role in stirring up antagonism towards the Saints and were often very critical of the Saints and very early on as well. From the early 1840s, Warsaw Signal newspaper editor Thomas Sharp was very vocal in his disdain for Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints.
Spencer McBride: The Warsaw Signal was a newspaper published in the town of Warsaw, just down the river from Nauvoo and an economic rival to the Saints’ fledgling settlement. It’s important to the story of the events that led to the martyrdom to understand just how influential newspapers were at this time and in this place.
Brent Rogers: Newspapers were absolutely vital sources of information in nineteenth-century America. They were the main source of political, economic, and civic information, and they were incredibly significant to the spread of ideas, especially when you consider how newspapers would often pick up the interesting or important stories from neighboring cities’ newspapers. And then they would reprint them in their own paper. And then maybe the next town over would read that and print it, and pretty soon it gets to one of the big cities in the East—New York City or Boston—and then it’s getting an even wider circulation. So, that networking of information would soon spread far and wide these interesting important stories about people, places, and events.
Spencer McBride: So, if a local Illinois newspaper printed negative editorials about Joseph Smith and the church, then those stories often appeared in other newspapers. Such was the power of newspaper editors. And Thomas Sharp was open about his intent to criticize Joseph Smith.
Brent Rogers: In one 1841 editorial, he got to the heart of why he disliked Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints so much. He wrote, “Whenever they, as a people, step beyond their proper sphere of a religious denomination, and become a political body, as many of our citizens are beginning to apprehend will be the case, then this press stands pledged to take a stand against them.— On religious questions it is and shall remain neutral; but it is bound to oppose the concentration of political power in a religious body, or in the hands of a few individuals.”
And so, Thomas Sharp makes really clear in this editorial and in the many others that he publishes, that he’s going to take a stand against the church and against what he perceives as the inordinate power that Joseph Smith had and that the leaders of the church had over their people, which was growing in population and size. And that had a lot of ramifications for the politics and economics of the region, and so Sharp has a vested interest in trying to combat that.
Spencer McBride: Despite his claim of neutrality on religious questions, in the pages of his paper Sharp regularly mixed mockery of and disdain for the Latter-day Saints’ religious beliefs with his criticism of their economic and political actions. Sharp could not separate his religious prejudice from his other opinions of the Latter-day Saints.
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Spencer McBride: So, let’s recap where we are in the series of events that led to the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Joseph Smith and other church leaders in Nauvoo built the city and its laws in such a way that they would be protected from a repeat of the persecution and violent abuse that they had experienced in Missouri. Yet, there was a growing number of men and women in western Illinois who were wary of the expansion of the church, who were concerned about the increasing political and economic influence of church members, who disagreed with their interpretation of the law, and who did not think that the Saints’ spiritual beliefs qualified as a real religion. This animosity was disorganized, mostly stirred up by editorials in local papers. However, an election in the summer of 1843 resulted in these critics adopting a more formal organization. That election contributed to the formation and strengthening of a political party that called itself the “Anti-Mormon Party.”
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Spencer McBride: In addition to the powers afforded civic leaders in Nauvoo in that city’s charter, the Latter-day Saints also relied on political strategies to guard against the return of persecution and mob violence. When they moved to Illinois, the state was divided nearly equally between the two major political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. This was to the advantage of the Saints. While they were a minority in the state, the near equal division of voters in the state meant that by voting together, church members could determine the outcome of many elections.
Joseph Smith spoke on this strategy on several occasions. He was clear that church leaders would not tell members how to vote. They could vote as they desired. Still, he made it clear that it was advantageous for church members to put their votes behind candidates who would support the freedom of religion, candidates who, if elected, would ensure that the Latter-day Saints were treated equally under the law. In December 1841, Joseph Smith wrote: “We care not a fig for Whig or Democrat: they are both alike to us; but we shall go for our friends, our tried friends, and the cause of human liberty which is the cause of God.” In making this statement, Smith was clear that the Saints would not permanently align with any party but would vote for the candidates who would protect their rights and freedoms.
The power of the Saints’ vote in Nauvoo was on full display in the summer of 1843. There was a congressional election in Illinois. It was a tight race and, as was often the case in the state, the Saints in Nauvoo would ultimately determine by their votes which candidate would win.
Elizabeth Kuehn: So, the two candidates are Cyrus Walker, who is the candidate for the Whig Party, and Joseph Hoge for the Democratic Party.
Spencer McBride: That’s Elizabeth Kuehn, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers.
Elizabeth Kuehn: Joseph actually had personal connections to Cyrus Walker. He was a friend, and he had served as Joseph’s attorney in two lawsuits, both dealing with extradition to Missouri, and so Joseph has this personal connection with Walker. And when he finds out that Walker has been nominated, he promises to vote for him. And so, Joseph’s vote is kind of set in stone, but the Saints had kind of been neutral and kind of left their vote open, although the Nauvoo Neighbor did encourage them to continue bloc voting. They had voted as a bloc in 1842 and had seen the strength and political power that that gave them.
Spencer McBride: It appears that Walker assumed that Joseph Smith’s promise to vote for him meant that the rest of the Saints in Nauvoo would vote for him as well. Accordingly, the Whig Party got its hopes up about winning the election.
However, the day before voters went to the polls there was a meeting in Nauvoo to discuss the upcoming vote. Joseph reiterated his intent to vote for Cyrus Walker, the Whig candidate. But Hyrum Smith expressed his opinion, based on a revelation he had received, that the Saints would be better served by the Democratic candidate, Joseph Hoge.
Elizabeth Kuehn: This gets the Whig Party’s ire up. They are enraged. Walker took most of Hancock County, with the exception of Nauvoo, and it’s the power of that vote in Nauvoo that gives Hoge the election. So, they would have won without that, and so this is a point of extreme contention, and you see Whig newspapers complaining about this supposed revelation from heaven that lost them the vote. And it really kind of rallies both the Whigs and most opponents to Joseph Smith against the Saints.
Spencer McBride: Historian Christian Heimburger of the Joseph Smith Papers described some of the ire that Whigs and others in western Illinois expressed in the wake of the election.
Christian Heimburger: The fact that most Latter-day Saints voted for Hoge greatly angered local Whigs, who publicly declared that a revelation from heaven had turned a majority against us. One Whig newspaper asserted that Latter-day Saints in the district had been explicitly instructed to vote for Hoge. The perception that the Latter-day Saints would vote en masse according to the whims of their leaders greatly disturbed and angered many Illinois residents.
Spencer McBride: Even though the Saints in Nauvoo had delivered a victory to the Democrats, some members of that party were concerned about the electoral influence that the Saints wielded from Nauvoo. So, while the Saints believed that their political strategy was a necessary part of ensuring the protection of their rights and of their lives, some who benefited from their votes were still concerned that a minority group wielded such power.
Christian Heimburger: In his 1854 book, History of Illinois, former governor Thomas Ford asserted this. He said: “From this time forth, the Whigs generally, and a part of the Democrats, determined upon driving the Mormons out of the state; and everything connected with the Mormons became political.”
Spencer McBride: One of the reasons that this election became a turning point in the story of the Latter-day Saints in Illinois and a key event in the series of events that would lead to the assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith is that the election results drove many of the church’s severest critics to organize themselves more formally.
Two years earlier, Thomas Sharp had formed a group known as the Anti-Mormon Party. At that time, Sharp and his sympathizers could not identify specific offenses committed by the Saints in Nauvoo, but they convinced themselves that such offenses were inevitable. And the Anti-Mormon Party focused its animosity on the existence and size of the Nauvoo Legion, trying to depict the Saints as a violent and lawless people. And so, in the vast network of American newspapers that reprinted the news from each other, the newspapers of Hancock County, Illinois, gave greater publicity to the criticisms of Joseph Smith and the church.
Brent Rogers explains.
Brent Rogers: The newspapers—not just Sharp’s newspaper, but other newspapers in the region in and around Hancock County—carried the messaging of the newly formed Anti-Mormon political party, giving a public voice to the negative perceptions of a growing chorus of anti-Mormon sentiment in Hancock County in the state of Illinois and soon even into the eastern United States by that network of information and network of spreading of news from newspaper to newspaper.
Spencer McBride: In the wake of the congressional election of 1843, the Anti-Mormon Party was larger than ever and met in Carthage, Illinois, for a convention. That convention drafted resolutions that dismissed the Saints as lawless and their religion as fake. Yet, this is often how Americans at this time justified discrimination against minority religious groups: they deemed the unpopular group’s beliefs as too different from the mainstream or, in some cases, as pretend altogether. In this way, they tried to convince the public that their actions did not qualify as religious persecution. In this way, they tried to convince themselves that they were not violating the tenets of religious freedom.
The Anti-Mormon Party did worry that the Saints in Nauvoo exercised too much legal, political, and economic power. But even in their written resolutions, they could not separate those concerns from their prejudice against the Saints’ religious beliefs.
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Spencer McBride: From late summer 1843 onward, the newly formed Anti-Mormon Party was watching and waiting for an opportunity to take action against the Saints. A series of dramatic events later that year gave them the moment they were hoping for. And it started with rumors.
Jeffrey Mahas: One of the rumors that continuously followed the Saints from Missouri onward was that there was a large network of Latter-day Saint thieves that were stealing property. Now, on the one hand, we know there were some Latter-day Saints who were stealing horses and other property from their neighbors. Their attitude seems to have been one of “the world took everything from me in Missouri, I’m justified in taking a few horses.”
This is wrong—it’s condemned repeatedly by Joseph, by Brigham, by Hyrum, by many other Church leaders—but it is a small element and it’s nowhere near as large as the anti-Mormon conspiracies make it seem. They’re talking about large networks of horse thieves that are roaming the county stealing any livestock that can be seen. Clearly exaggerations.
Spencer McBride: Some church members chose to ignore the repeated statements from church leaders urging them to obey the law, and it had disastrous consequences. In late 1843, two Latter-day Saints, Ebenezer Richardson and Mark Childs, were caught stealing horses in Missouri. In order to save themselves, they claimed that they could lead their captors to the men behind the rumored crime ring. They said that the men were a father and son living in western Illinois named Daniel and Philander Avery. Now, there is no evidence that the Averys were guilty of such crimes. Yet, the two captured thieves helped hatch a plot to kidnap the Avery men.
Jeffrey Mahas: Almost immediately, in mid-November 1843, Ebenezer Richardson goes to Philander Avery’s home, convinces him to visit him in Warsaw on some business, and as soon as Philander arrives in Warsaw, he’s grabbed by Missourians and taken across the river. A knife is put to his throat, and he’s told to confess to all of these thefts, otherwise he’ll be killed.
Spencer McBride: This was the type of moment that the Anti-Mormon Party had been waiting for. They saw it as a justified reason to come after the some of the Latter-day Saints. And the first person they went after was Philander’s father, Daniel.
Jeffrey Mahas: And so, in response to these allegations, Levi Williams, one of the leaders of the Anti-Mormon Party and also the colonel of the militia, leads a band of about a dozen anti-Mormons to Daniel Avery’s house, where they kidnap him at gunpoint, tie him to a horse, and ride him across the river into Missouri, where he can face what they say is justice.
This kicks off a firestorm in the region. Latter-day Saints look at this, and when they received word of these kidnappings, they think, if this can happen to Daniel and Philander Avery, it could happen to Joseph Smith, it could happen to anyone. We need to ramp up our security, we need to be prepared for a fight, the anti-Mormons are coming for us.
Spencer McBride: Adam Petty, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, shared with me his perspective on this historical episode.
Adam Petty: I think, from their point of view, this is another provocation on the part of Missouri. Yet again, here they are harassing us, they’re trying to harass Joseph. When will we get any peace? I think that’s really their mindset, and so they’re trying to provide some strong protections for Joseph and for the Latter-day Saints.
Spencer McBride: Once Joseph Smith learned of the kidnappings, he took several immediate actions. He wrote to Governor Thomas Ford to ask for his advice. He called out the Nauvoo Legion to protect the city and to guard against any more kidnappings. Lastly, in his capacity as mayor, Joseph Smith met with the Nauvoo City Council to pass new ordinances for the community’s protection.
Adam Petty: There’s a city council ordinance passed, and it has an interesting name: “An Extra Ordinance for the Extra Case of Joseph Smith and Others.” And, essentially, it enacts very strict penalties on anyone who tries to take Joseph or anyone else back to Missouri relating to charges based on the difficulties that had happened in Missouri.
Spencer McBride: Joseph Smith saw the Avery kidnappings as being related to the past attempts to extradite him to Missouri. He and his fellow city leaders in Nauvoo were tired of the ceaseless attempts and the danger that Joseph felt for his personal safety even after he had been discharged from such arrests on three different occasions. So, this “extra ordinance,” as it was called, meant that someone attempting to arrest Joseph Smith on charges stemming from Missouri could be arrested and imprisoned for life. The ordinance also maintained that after such an arrest and conviction, the guilty party could only be pardoned by the governor if Joseph Smith approved of such a pardon.
It was an extreme ordinance passed in a context in which Joseph Smith and others worried about their safety. But it was too extreme of a move for many residents of western Illinois. They saw it as cause for concern—that the Saints in Nauvoo were assuming too much legal and political power, that such acts placed them above the law.
As for members of the Anti-Mormon Party and others who were already avowed opponents of the church, they saw the new ordinance as another opportunity to turn public sentiment against Joseph Smith and the Saints.
Adam Petty: The press and the people in Hancock County basically use it as a weapon against them.
Spencer McBride: In short, the Avery kidnappings put the Saints on high alert. They responded to what they saw as extreme danger with extreme city ordinances. And those city ordinances led to heightened fears among many men and women in that part of the state.
Jeffery Mahas: The situation with the Avery kidnappings comes to a head around the middle to end of December. There’s the start of a standoff where a posse from Nauvoo is sent to arrest Levi Williams for his role in the kidnappings. Levi Williams, to resist arrest, forms a mob of several hundred men armed with rifles to resist the posse. And the posse, seeing that there’s a chance for bloodshed, turns around.
And I think it’s at this moment that Joseph Smith says, okay, things have gotten out of control. We need to cool things down, cooler heads need to prevail, we need to calm the tensions. And so, you start to see church and civic leaders in Nauvoo presenting a much more pacifistic attitude. Joseph gives a speech to the Nauvoo Legion where he says, we don’t need to try and do anything about Levi Williams or these anti-Mormons. We’re going to sit back, and we’re going to wait for the court season, and we’re going to let the state courts sort this all out. We’re going to take it to the legal system and let them worry about this. We’re going to try and calm things down. And so, you see the start of these tensions starting to melt away.
Spencer McBride: Part of the de-escalation of tensions came from measured conversations between the parties.
Jeffery Mahas: And as part of that, in January and February, concerned citizens from Carthage, who are not quite as hostile as most of the anti-Mormons, come and visit Joseph and say, look, these ordinances that you’ve passed, they’re not helpful. They’re fueling the tensions. They’re seen as proof that you’re above the law, that you’re violating the law. Joseph apologizes to them and says, that was never my intention. That’s not what they were supposed to do. And, at Joseph’s recommendation, many of the ordinances that are passed in December in response to the Avery kidnappings, including the “extra ordinance,” are repealed in February of 1844.
Spencer McBride: For many residents of western Illinois, life seemed to return to normal in February 1844. But for members of the Anti-Mormon Party, they remained as committed as ever to expelling the Saints from the state, violently if they had to.
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Spencer McBride: The future of the safe haven the Latter-day Saints had built in Nauvoo was uncertain in late 1843 and early 1844. The Saints hoped to stay in the city, but church and city leaders knew they had to explore all their options. Those options included petitions for unprecedented legislation, launching an unlikely presidential campaign, and exploring the prospect of leaving the United States altogether. The Latter-day Saints’ appeals for help, that’s what we are talking about in the next episode of Road to Carthage: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast.
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Spencer McBride: If you are interested in learning more about the history discussed in this episode or in exploring the papers of Joseph Smith, visit josephsmithpapers.org.