Spencer McBride: By May 1844 the population of western Illinois was more polarized than ever. The Latter-day Saints were determined to protect themselves and their rights. But the means the Saints used to secure this protection caused sincere worry within other communities, including concern that the Saints had placed themselves above the law. And for some of the church’s severest critics and avowed enemies, they were determined to drive them out of the state, using violent force if necessary, no matter what.
However, at this same time, a group of Nauvoo residents who were publicly opposed to Joseph Smith—a group often referred to by historians as “the dissenters”—set in motion a series of events that would tip the standoff in the favor of the church’s avowed enemies. It was a series of events that would lead Joseph and Hyrum Smith out of Nauvoo and to the county jail in Carthage, Illinois.
That dissent and the series of events it started is what we are talking about in this episode of Road to Carthage: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast. I’m your host, Spencer McBride.
…
Spencer McBride: Episode 3, “Leaving Nauvoo.”
…
Spencer McBride: The rise of dissent in Nauvoo and the corresponding rise of publicly displayed animosity toward Joseph Smith in the city was largely led by a few sets of brothers.
David Grua, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers, described to me the first set of brothers.
David Grua: Most prominent among the dissenters were William and Wilson Law, two brothers who had joined the church in Canada and they migrated to Nauvoo. William was called as a member of the First Presidency in 1841, and Wilson was a high-ranking officer in the Nauvoo Legion. Both men had been seen as trusted advisors, counselors of the prophet Joseph. But in late 1843, William and Joseph became estranged over the issue of plural marriage. We don’t really comprehend all of the details surrounding this. There were accusations on both sides. But ultimately William was released from his position in the First Presidency and ultimately excommunicated. Wilson followed his brother out of the church.
Spencer McBride: Plural marriage was a religious practice that Joseph Smith introduced to a relatively small group of men and women in the church. Church leaders did not publicize the practice in or out of Nauvoo. The church’s official policy on marriage was still monogamy. But several critics of the church, such as John C. Bennett, had gone on lecture circuits in the United States or published newspaper articles about plural marriage, often without all the details of the practice and adding false information about it, all in order to stir up opposition to Joseph Smith and the church. As David Grua mentioned, the practice of plural marriage contributed to the fallout between Joseph Smith and William Law.
Now, the Law brothers were joined in their opposition to Joseph Smith and the church by another set of brothers.
David Grua: Also prominent among the dissenters was another set of brothers, Chauncey and Francis Higbee. These men were sons of a prominent Latter-Day Saint, Elias Higbee. But after their father’s death, both of them became estranged from the church. Both Chauncey and Frances had been followers of John C. Bennett. They had been caught up in his scandal in 1842, and Chauncey was excommunicated in 1842. His brother Francis was able to maintain his membership, but he ended up leaving the city for a few months and then came back in late 1843 and was somewhat estranged from the prophet Joseph. Both of the Higbee brothers became lawyers. They had offices up near the temple, and their legal training led them to become critical of the prophet Joseph and to challenge him on some of his interpretations of his powers as mayor of the city.
Spencer McBride: Joining the Law and Higbee brothers as prominent dissenters in Nauvoo was one final set of brothers, Robert and Charles Foster.
David Grua: Finally, Robert D. Foster. He had joined the church in New York, and he was a physician. After moving to Nauvoo, he was elected as a justice of the peace. He also wanted to develop the city. He had plans to build a hotel up near the temple, which Joseph saw as competition to the Nauvoo House. Robert’s brother Charles, he was not a member of the church, but he had followed Robert and settled in Nauvoo. And in early 1844 an anonymous individual began writing letters from Nauvoo to New York newspapers criticizing Joseph Smith, and we’re not entirely sure why, but Joseph concluded that Charles Foster was the author of these letters, and he confronted Charles publicly over these issues. And this offended Robert. Robert had seen himself previously as a loyal follower of Joseph Smith, and he didn’t understand why the prophet was attacking his brother. So, this led Robert D. Foster to leave the church in 1844, and he began associating with the dissenters as well.
Spencer McBride: As historians, we read in surviving records a varied set of reasons for this dissent in Nauvoo. There were business and economic factors at play. For example, following the directions of a revelation, Joseph Smith and other church leaders were working hard to construct the Nauvoo House, a building that would serve the church as a hotel or boarding house. And Joseph Smith operated his own home in Nauvoo as a hotel as well. Well, one of the primary dissenters in Nauvoo, Robert D. Foster, was building a hotel of his own near the site of the Nauvoo Temple. This meant that he was competing with the church for scarce construction resources and was positioned to be a business competitor with Joseph Smith when his hotel opened.
Other dissenters disagreed with the number of civic offices Joseph Smith held in the city and had opposed him in the 1842 mayoral election. And they disagreed with his use of Nauvoo’s municipal courts. This is all to say that sources make it difficult for historians to single out one reason for the dissent among some in Nauvoo. It was a mix of reasons. It was a mix of business rivalries, economic concerns, legal disagreements, personal disputes, and doctrinal differences. And each type of conflict informed how the dissenting men reacted to the other conflicts.
Alex Smith, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers project, explains just how personal to Joseph Smith much of the dissenters’ criticism felt.
Alex Smith: A lot of it is personal, and I think that the dissent in Nauvoo is particularly challenging for Joseph Smith because of not only how heartfelt the criticisms are but also the personal nature of the attacks. Often these are coming from men and women that he is closely associated with and known for years and has put in positions of trust and responsibility. And I think that that’s deeply felt by Joseph Smith and I think a personal challenge.
Spencer McBride: And the personal nature of much of this dissent contributed to the ultimate formation of a rival church.
Alex Smith: William Law becomes the appointed head of a reformed Mormon Church, as they titled it, on April 28, 1844, with Austin Cowells and his own brother Wilson Law as counselors, and with a couple of apostles and bishops. When that church is organized, the dissenters are emphasizing two points of opposition to Joseph in his leadership of the church. One is the concept of gathering and the importance of immediately and fully gathering to Illinois rather than building up strong units of the church throughout the country and the world. And the second, and maybe much more prominent, is their opposition to his kind of openly—not public—teachings about plural marriage or at least practice of plural marriage. So, the doctrine of plural marriage and the doctrine of gathering are the lynchpins of the William Law’s new opposition church.
Spencer McBride: But establishing a new rival church would not be enough for the dissenters in Nauvoo. In March 1844, Joseph Smith learned of credible threats of violence against him and his family, threats that originated from several of these dissenters. In one encounter, Charles Foster even pulled out a gun and pointed it at Joseph. For the prophet, this dissent had moved beyond disagreement. Joseph Smith had long worried about his safety outside of Nauvoo. Now he worried about his personal safety—and that of his family—inside the city.
Yet the dissenters did not back down. As a group, they felt strongly that they needed to oppose Joseph Smith on all fronts. They felt that they needed to oppose him until he was fully removed from positions of leadership in Nauvoo, civil and ecclesiastic.
So, as they established their rival church, the dissenters planned to use the legal system as one of their weapons in their public fight against the prophet.
David Grua: In May, the dissenters sought to overwhelm Joseph Smith with litigation at the May 1844 term of the Hancock County Circuit Court. The dissenters did this in two ways. First, William Law went to the grand jury and said, I have evidence that Joseph Smith has committed a crime, and the crime was fornication and adultery. So, William Law had incomplete information about plural marriage and how it was functioning, and based on that incomplete information, he convinced the grand jury to indict Joseph Smith for fornication and adultery. Second, there was a criminal indictment for perjury, and this was brought by Alexander Simpson, a non–Latter-day Saint who lived in Nauvoo, who felt that he had been falsely accused of assaulting a family in Hancock County and that Joseph Smith had mismanaged the prosecution of Alexander Simpson for this. And so, Alexander Simpson testified before the grand jury, which ultimately indicted Joseph Smith for perjury.
Spencer McBride: If you are keeping track, that is two different criminal indictments brought against Joseph Smith based on the claims of dissenters in Nauvoo. But they did not stop there.
David Grua: Then the dissenters also brought six civil lawsuits against Joseph Smith during this May term. Each of these suits has its own story and they’re each complicated, but the theme that united them is that they were all arguing that Joseph Smith had abused his authority as mayor of the city.
For the most part, Joseph stayed in Nauvoo while this was happening. He allowed his attorney, Almon Babbitt, to handle much of the paperwork to try to respond to these lawsuits. Criminal and civil lawsuits are very complicated and they take time, lots of paperwork, and so none of these cases came to trial in May. But Joseph was hoping at the end of the month to answer these charges.
Spencer McBride: Answering those charges meant leaving Nauvoo and traveling to the county seat, the town of Carthage, Illinois. Members of the Anti-Mormon Party who had expressed a willingness to use violence against the church and its president knew that they could not get to Joseph Smith when he was in the city of Nauvoo. They recognized that their only chance to attack the prophet was when he left the city. So, when Joseph Smith traveled to Carthage to answer the criminal charges and civil suits brought against him by dissenters in Nauvoo, some of his enemies outside the city saw it as their long-awaited opportunity.
While Joseph Smith was staying in a hotel in Carthage with his traveling party, Charles Foster spent time with the group despite his recent opposition to the prophet. And Foster warned Joseph that there was a man in town who was plotting to kill him before he could return to the safety of Nauvoo. With this warning, Joseph Smith was able to evade the plot on his life in Carthage, attend to his business in the city, and return to Nauvoo unscathed. But Joseph now worried—with good reason—that he may not be so fortunate on subsequent trips to the town of Carthage.
…
Spencer McBride: In this difficult, contentious environment, a group of dissenters in Nauvoo raised the stakes in their public opposition to Joseph Smith and the church. They expanded their strategy to flood Joseph Smith with litigation to include attacks on him in the press.
On June 7, 1844, a group of men in Nauvoo published a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor. The founders of the newspaper included many of the city’s most prominent dissenters, including some who had threatened violence against Joseph Smith and his family. The editor of the newspaper was a man named Sylvester Emmons, who was also a member of the Nauvoo City Council.
David Grua: So, the Expositor was started by the dissenters—the Laws, the Higbees, the Fosters. There were a few other people involved, but they were the main drivers. The Expositor was envisioned as a newspaper that would be something—I mean it’s in the name; it would be an exposé—that they would use the paper to put in written form all of their grievances against Joseph Smith, and their hope was that this paper would be read by the Saints in Nauvoo and that it would convince them that there was too much corruption and that Joseph Smith should not be their leader. But that people outside of Nauvoo, those who were antagonistic already towards the church, that they would read the newspaper, and it would provide ammunition for bringing Joseph Smith down, for lack of a better phrase.
So, the Laws, the Higbees, and the Fosters started this newspaper. As a printed newspaper, they hoped that it would be able to travel in ways that just them talking would not. This becomes another way of attacking Joseph. Earlier they had used the legal system in May; now they’re using the press to attack Joseph Smith.
Spencer McBride: What was so inflammatory about the articles in the Nauvoo Expositor?
David Grua: The Expositor included articles and editorials. It also reproduced articles from other newspapers that articulated many of the critiques that the dissenters had towards Joseph. It talked about plural marriage. They talked about what they viewed as his abuse of power as mayor of the city. They also talked a little bit about his use of church finances, which again, they felt like he was acting in ways that most religious leaders were not in Illinois. Most of the articles weren’t making things up whole cloth. They were piecing together information that they had gathered—a lot of it garbled, but it was rooted in kernels of truth—and they were presenting it in the most negative light possible. You have to remember that some of these individuals, the Laws and Robert D. Foster in particular, they had been loyal followers of the prophet Joseph previously. They had defended Joseph Smith. So, when they were in the church, when they were believers in Joseph Smith, they were willing to look at this information and defend it. But once they had crossed out of the church, they now looked at the same information but in a very critical light. So, while most of the information there was rooted in some factual information, it was presented in a way to make Joseph Smith look terrible.
Spencer McBride: The paper concerned many of the residents of Nauvoo and the city’s leaders, but not necessarily because of its contents. Surviving records indicate that residents and city leaders alike were concerned that the paper would inspire violence against their community. They worried that it would lead to a repeat of the mob attacks that they had endured in Missouri.
On June 8, the day after the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor was published, the Nauvoo City Council met to discuss what to do about the inflammatory newspaper. As mayor, Joseph Smith argued that the newspaper was a nuisance, invoking that word as a legal term. Joseph Smith clearly worried that the paper would instigate violence against the city and people of Nauvoo.
The discussion on what to do about the Nauvoo Expositor carried over to the city council’s next meeting on June 10. The council debated the subject for hours. They considered if there was legal basis for ordering the destruction of the newspaper.
David Grua: You can tell from the minutes that this was a very raw meeting—very emotional—as they started to imagine what could be the potential effects of this paper as it spreads. So, they discuss two options for dealing with it. First, they passed a city ordinance that defined a libel, and they authorized Nauvoo courts to prosecute individuals for that crime. They based their city ordinance on a Illinois state statute that defined a libel as something that is in written form that harms the reputation of an individual. And so that was the first option on the table: to prosecute the proprietors of the Expositor for libel.
The second option was to declare the paper a nuisance. Now “nuisance” was an action that had its roots in the English common law. William Blackstone, in his famous commentaries on the common law, discussed nuisances and how they could legally be abated or removed. The members of the city council were aware and they discussed Blackstone’s commentaries on this subject.
They also pointed to an addendum in the city charter which gave the city council the authority to designate things as nuisances and to determine how “to prevent and remove the same.” Now, the city council, as far back as 1841, had been using this authority. In 1841, there was a “grog shop,” a building that sold illicit alcohol, and the city council found out about it. They declared it to be a nuisance. The legion went and destroyed the building, and there was no outcry over the city council’s use of that authority.
Spencer McBride: To better understand the Nauvoo City Council’s deliberations on the Nauvoo Expositor, I spoke with historian Richard E. Turley Jr. He told me that to fully understand these proceedings, we first need to understand the prevailing legal culture of the United States at that time.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: Contrary to popular belief, the law’s not congruent with the concepts of fairness, because concepts of fairness are inherently subjective, and what might seem fair to one group might not seem fair to another group. So, the law is about compromising in such a way that you try to create the greatest amount of freedom for the greatest number of people.
So, in this particular case, the Saints’ worry is that in Missouri, they were subject to intense violence, and one of the results of this idea of power being in the people. And that is a weakness of democratic government, which Alexis de Tocqueville first coined as the “tyranny of the majority.” When the majority in any given place decides to enforce its will, that will can feel very unfair to those who are in a minority group, and all you have to do to understand that is to look back on American history and how minorities have often suffered at the hands of the majority. And related to that is what I call the “majority double standard.” Often throughout American history, whenever the majority has been in control in any given time and place, they have often operated under a double standard.
Spencer McBride: Early American history is filled with examples of this double standard in the application of the law. For example, in the American South, a Black man who was accused of saying something even mildly offensive to a white woman was often subject to violence or even death without the due process of law. Members of the racial majority would often just take matters into their own hands, acting illegally and outside the designated legal channels and processes. But, in the same community, a white man could sexually assault a Black woman and often he would experience no consequences at all for his actions. It’s a double standard.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: So, this idea of a double standard very much applied to minorities in the United States, including racial minorities, including religious minorities, and often political minorities as well, and the Latter-day Saints were a religious minority who suffered from this double standard in Missouri.
Spencer McBride: I asked Rick Turley how this “majority double standard” in the legal system of nineteenth-century America informed the deliberations of the city council about what to do in response to the Nauvoo Expositor. While historians today debate what points of criticism in that newspaper caused city leaders the most concern, the most pressing concern had to do with the intent of the newspaper and the way it presented information.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: You have to keep all of that in mind when you recognize that the city council is now considering this new newspaper, and they were looking at the contents of it. Now, many interpreters have looked at the contents and have said, aha! There were two things in the contents that were very inflammatory. One of those things was polygamy—plural marriage, as we often call it—and the other was Joseph Smith’s views on God. And they often interpret what happened to the Expositor by saying Joseph Smith and other church leaders were trying to suppress information about these two topics. But if you look back at the history of the previous year or two, you recognize that that’s not one hundred percent the case. Yes, both of those topics are sensitive topics, but when John C. Bennett left Nauvoo, he immediately begins to publish very scurrilous things about plural marriage in the Sangamo Journal and in other places. He also publishes a book on the topic. So, the subject of plural marriage and what it supposedly is and how it’s functioning in Nauvoo is already an open public topic. So, it’s not as though this topic has not been broached before. And then, of course, the idea of Joseph Smith’s belief on the nature of God. He had made that the subject of his general conference talk on April the seventh of that same year.
So, there was nothing really new or inflammatory in that sense. Yes, it was a sensitive topic, as was plural marriage, but having that be repeated in the Nauvoo Expositor after it had already been stated, not only in that April conference talk—today we call the “King Follett Sermon” or “King Follett Discourse”—but at other times and places did not mean that this was a new topic that would suddenly come out because of the Expositor. So, the decision to suppress the Expositor cannot be explained wholly on the basis of those two topics of plural marriage and Joseph Smith’s views on deity.
Spencer McBride: From this perspective, the suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor was principally about preventing violence.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: In Missouri, Latter-day Saints were murdered, women were sexually abused, the Latter-day Saint property in general was taken by others, all without any Missourian being punished at all for these very large crimes. And it was with that memory that they looked at the Nauvoo Expositor and said, what is the purpose of this paper? And I think it became very clear to them that the purpose of the paper was not just to bring out information about plural marriage and views of deity. The Nauvoo Expositor not only wanted to bring that information up but it also specifically advocated repealing the Nauvoo charter and having the Latter-day Saints, who were gradually coming into their own in Hancock County, as a majority population and suppressing them. And so, this was more, I think, about avoiding violence than it was about the other topics that were there.
I think the members of the city council and Joseph Smith, when they met over two days that spanned a weekend, I think they were looking at it and saying, how can we avoid a repetition of what we experienced in Missouri? How can we avoid a repetition of massive violence brought on by mobs who are incited by what is contained in this paper?
Spencer McBride: The city council turned to a law book called Blackstone’s Commentaries, the source mentioned by David Grua earlier in this episode, for the legal justification for ordering the destruction of the Expositor.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: Blackstone’s Commentaries were a very prominent set of eighteenth-century statements about law put together by an English legal expert. And in America during this time period, there weren’t vast legal libraries that people consulted for information. Obviously, there was no internet, so people often fell back on simple sources that were readily available, and Blackstone’s Commentaries were extremely influential in American law.
And Blackstone’s Commentaries had a provision defining nuisance that the city council felt could apply very much to the Nauvoo Expositor. So, on the legal basis of what Blackstone’s Commentaries said, they declared it a nuisance and then they ordered that it be shut down.
Spencer McBride: After a vigorous debate over two days of city council meetings in which Joseph Smith had eventually argued to have the Nauvoo Expositor deemed a nuisance and suppressed, the city council voted in agreement with that position. In his capacity as mayor, Joseph Smith ordered the city marshal, John P. Greene, to destroy the Nauvoo Expositor with assistance from members of the Nauvoo Legion.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: And in order to destroy it, a group went to the Nauvoo Expositor building. They did not damage the building, but they took the materials out of the building, and they essentially created a fire out of the press, and they took the very sheets of the paper and they burned them, and they took the type, which was hand set, and they basically shook it from the frames—what we call “pying the type”—so it was lying all over the road. It was done, according to witnesses, without violence, without a lot of excess drama. It was simply a police enforcement of a directive that had come from the city council.
Spencer McBride: However, the owners of the Expositor did not view the destruction of their paper as an orderly act.
In the United States during the nineteenth-century, the freedom of the press was celebrated, but it was unevenly protected by local, state, and federal jurisdictions. We’ll talk more about that in a later episode. But there was more for civic leaders in Nauvoo to consider than just the legal justifications of their action. They also had to grapple with the prudence of the act. How would the public respond?
While Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo City Council had taken great pains to deliberate about the legal boundaries of the actions that they took in destroying the newspaper, and even though the men who carried out the order tried to carry out the task in as orderly a fashion as possible, the act itself was destined to generate backlash against city leaders—and against Joseph Smith in particular.
…
Spencer McBride: As you can imagine, the response to the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor came swiftly.
Brett Dowdle: Critics responded immediately to the destruction of the Expositor.
Spencer McBride: That’s Brett Dowdle, a historian with the Joseph Smith Papers Project.
Brett Dowdle: The following day, Francis Higbee, who was one of the proprietors of the Nauvoo Expositor, went to Carthage and filed a complaint before a justice of the peace that resulted in a warrant in Joseph Smith’s subsequent arrest and all of these challenges. But Francis Higbee wasn’t the only one. Within that twenty-four to forty-eight hours, all of those who were supporting the Expositor had left the city, and William Clayton says that there was “considerable excitement.” I think that’s a little bit of a downplaying of how problematic it was, but people immediately had challenges with it. And there had even been some intimation that this would be the case before the Expositor was destroyed. Francis Higbee had reportedly said that if they destroyed the paper, then they could date their downfall from that very hour, and it would not be ten days until there was not a Latter-Day Saint left in Nauvoo. So, these threats were out there, and the publishers of the Expositor leave immediately. It also created outcry throughout Hancock County.
Spencer McBride: Historian Elizabeth Kuehn of the Joseph Smith Papers described some of that outcry.
Elizabeth Kuehn: Critics in and outside of Nauvoo respond very strongly to the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor press. They feel it represents Joseph Smith acting above or outside the law, using the law to his own benefit, and to be this brutal dictator who quells anyone who will speak against him. And in fact, John Taylor would later discuss this with Governor Thomas Ford, and Ford reminded Taylor that the best way to handle such instances was to make them extralegal—to have a mob do it rather than, say, the Nauvoo City Council, because then the city council would be spared from blame and could then turn that blame on the mob and say, oh, you shouldn’t have done that.
Spencer McBride: But the Saints had not wanted to use extralegal mob violence against the Expositor newspaper, as Governor Ford suggested that they should have done. In Missouri in 1833, a mob had destroyed the Saints’ print and printing press. So, in 1844, Nauvoo city leaders wanted their proceedings to be lawful and aboveboard.
Of course, the dissenters who operated the Nauvoo Expositor did not agree with the city council’s decision. And the Anti-Mormon Party, which was particularly strong in the towns of Warsaw and Carthage, had long been ready to stir people up to action against the Saints in such moments. And that is precisely what they did.
Brett Dowdle: Within days of the destruction of the Expositor, there are mass meetings held in both Carthage and Warsaw. There are emissaries sent out to the various communities with the hopes of raising public outrage against Joseph Smith and against those who had facilitated the destruction of the Expositor. So, there is quite a bit of anger both inside and outside of Nauvoo almost immediately.
Spencer McBride: On June 12, one of the leaders of the Anti-Mormon Party, Thomas Sharp, published an unambiguous call for violence in the Warsaw Signal. His editorial was filled with words printed in all caps and with multiple exclamation marks. It read:
“CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!!—Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! to ROB men of their property and RIGHTS, without avenging them. We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE with POWDER AND BALL!!!”
This was not a call for calm. It was not a call for people to let the legal system and government officials work through the scenario to arrive at justice. Thomas Sharp made a brazen call for mob violence. It was a call for murder.
And, from a strictly legal perspective, what Nauvoo city officials should actually have been facing in the courts was far less severe than what Sharp and company thought that Joseph Smith and the Saints deserved. Rick Turley explains.
Richard E. Turley Jr.: From a legal standpoint, the legal case against them would have been not a criminal charge, but a civil suit against them for the value of the press that was destroyed. And Joseph Smith said, if we’ve done wrong in that regard, we’re happy to pay for it, which would have been the natural penalty for doing that type of thing at the time. They would have been assessed the value of that as damages, and they would have paid for those damages.
But Joseph was worried that the real purpose of this, again, was not about freedom of the press. It was not about getting a newspaper up and operating. It was more about providing an excuse for people who were looking to commit violence by vigilante action, and they just needed an excuse to do that. As I said, under the double standard that was often applied by a majority during this period of American history, all it took was a small wrong on the part of someone in a minority for those in the majority to impose a very harsh penalty for what happened there.
So, if you look back on it and say to yourself, what damage was done with the suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor press? From a legal standpoint, the main damage that was done was that there was a physical object that was destroyed that had a certain monetary value, and the proper response to that—the proper remedy for that—would have been to get payment for that and then take the newspaper and bring it up and operating again. But that wasn’t really what they wanted.
Spencer McBride: And so, officials issued an arrest warrant on the charge of inciting a riot.
Brett Dowdle: On June 12, Joseph Smith is served this warrant. He’s arrested; he immediately applies for a writ of habeas corpus from the Nauvoo Municipal Court and receives that and is discharged from that arrest by the court. And the following day, several others, including Hyrum Smith and members of the Nauvoo City Council and others, were also arrested. And they did the same thing that Joseph did and applied for a writ of habeas corpus, and they were discharged from arrest by the Nauvoo Municipal Court. This didn’t do anything to satisfy those who were angry in Hancock County. In fact, it made things worse. One of their big complaints was that there was no justice for Latter-Day Saints who committed crimes because of the power of the Nauvoo Municipal Court. So this served to reinforce that in their minds. So, there were continuing calls for arrests and for trial, and that trial had to be had at Carthage in the minds of those who opposed Joseph Smith.
Spencer McBride: Matthew Godfrey, a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers, explained how Joseph Smith responded to this rising hostility.
Matthew Godfrey: There’s mass meetings that are held throughout Hancock County. There’s resolutions that are passed at these meetings stating that there needed to be a war of extermination against the Saints if Joseph Smith wasn’t delivered into the hands of the proper legal authorities. So, Joseph is trying to quell this opposition that is developing. He gets some legal advice that he believes that if he goes before a justice of the peace that isn’t a member of the church and gets a writ of habeas corpus from them, that this will help quell some of the discontent. So, he goes before Daniel H. Wells, who was not a member of the church, and Wells again releases him on habeas corpus. But this doesn’t do anything to quell the discontent. People are still very angry. They believe Joseph has to go to Carthage to answer for the riot chart. You can’t just stay in Nauvoo because people believe nobody is going to convict him in Nauvoo because they’re all followers of Joseph Smith.
Spencer McBride: Brett Dowdle explained to me where Joseph Smith was willing to stand trial.
Brett Dowdle: Joseph is willing to stand trial outside of Nauvoo, but he is unwilling to stand trial at Carthage, and the reason for this is that on May 29, Joseph had been at Carthage for a number of legal matters and he had learned of a plot to assassinate him. And so, he was concerned to go to Carthage again. He writes to Illinois governor Thomas Ford on June 14 and says that he was willing to stand trial at Springfield in front of the Illinois State Supreme Court. He was willing to stand trial before the United States Circuit Court for the District of Illinois. He was basically willing to stand trial anywhere but in Carthage because he felt that his life was legitimately threatened at Carthage.
Spencer McBride: Yet, Governor Ford denied Joseph Smith’s request. He insisted that Joseph stand trial in the town of Carthage. To Ford, Carthage was the proper jurisdictional venue for the hearing since it was the county seat and the place where the legal complaints over the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor were first made. The two sides of the conflict seemed to be at a stalemate on the question of where Joseph and his fellow city leaders would get their chance to defend themselves before a judge.
Matthew Godfrey: Given the level of opposition that Joseph and the Saints are facing, and also hearing reports that mobs are planning attacks on the city, Joseph writes to Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois. He asked Governor Ford to call up the state militia to protect the city. But by June 17, he hasn’t heard anything from Ford about this. And so Joseph decides then that he needs to muster the Nauvoo Legion to protect the city. So, he calls up the Nauvoo Legion for protection against the city. He also puts the city of Nauvoo under martial law on June 18, and as part of that declaration of martial law, he tells the marshal, John P. Green, to not allow people and property to leave the city without a pass.
Spencer McBride: A lot was happening all at once in and around Nauvoo. Let’s take a moment to recap. Mobs were preparing to mobilize against the Saints at Nauvoo. So were units of the Illinois State Militia.
Joseph Smith had called out the Nauvoo Legion to protect the city. And the Nauvoo Legion was itself part of the Illinois State Militia.
Amid the rapidly rising tension, Governor Thomas Ford traveled to the county to meet with both sides of the conflict. Joseph Smith hoped that they could preserve peace, but the rumors he was hearing inspired him to send out one last appeal for help, this time to the president of the United States. Brent Rogers, managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, explains.
Brent Rogers: To me, the most interesting appeal that Joseph Smith made to political leaders in June 1844 was the letter that he wrote to United States president John Tyler on June 20, 1844. Joseph Smith had heard reports and seen signed affidavits that guns and other weapons were being trafficked from Missouri and Iowa into Illinois to assist in the violent actions that were taking place and that were being planned against Smith and the Latter-day Saints. And these reports and affidavits also indicated that a large number of armed men were traveling across state boundaries to participate in this vigilante activity.
Spencer McBride: So, Joseph Smith wrote a letter to the president.
Brent Rogers: He requested that the president act to “render [the] protection which the Constitution guarantees in cases of insurrection and rebellion and [to] save the innocent and oppressed.” And I think Joseph is hoping that the president would use his power—the president of the United States is a powerful office—and that he could use that power to immediately send federal troops to quell the impending crisis in western Illinois.
Spencer McBride: Yet it would take weeks for that letter to arrive in Washington DC. And it would take weeks for a response to arrive, if President Tyler chose to respond at all. With each day that passed, the tensions in the state of Illinois rose.
In two letters from Governor Ford to Joseph Smith on June 21 and June 22, the governor made it clear that he would call out the state militia if Joseph Smith did not go to Carthage. Joseph Smith was in a tough place. If he went to Carthage, he would likely die. If he stayed in Nauvoo, it appeared increasingly likely that mobs and the militia would attack the people of the city.
As Elizabeth Kuehn explained, in the early morning hours of June 23, Joseph made an unexpected decision.
Elizabeth Kuehn: Joseph and a small group left Nauvoo the night of the twenty-second in the early hours of the morning and went across the Mississippi River to Iowa and stayed at the home of Latter-day Saint William Jordan. And this seems to be not only an effort to avoid the governor’s orders but to find a place of temporary safety and refuge and take a moment to regroup and figure out what to do next.
Spencer McBride: As the sun rose on June 23, Joseph Smith was safely out of Nauvoo. His brother Hyrum was with him. There was a precedent for his decision to leave Nauvoo. In 1842, when officials from Missouri were seeking to have him extradited from Illinois, Joseph had found that leaving the city for a time had spared the citizens of Nauvoo from harassment and danger. It seems that he hoped that by leaving the city again, he could prevent an attack on the Latter-day Saints. But for the time being, Joseph’s wife, Emma, and their children remained in Nauvoo.
Elizabeth Kuehn: Joseph wrote Emma a letter, and he admits that he’s not sure where he’s going to go, what he’s going to do. He considers going to Washington DC to try and get help from federal government figures, but he’s also contemplating staying in Iowa, going into hiding to avoid arrest, something he had done before.
Spencer McBride: However, messengers arrived from Nauvoo that morning with news that the governor planned to order the militia to occupy the city until Joseph and Hyrum turned themselves in. If Joseph had hoped that leaving the city would remove the Saints from danger, this report changed his mind.
Porter Rockwell soon returned to Joseph with a letter from Emma Smith. Governor Ford had promised protection for Joseph Smith if he went to Carthage. Joseph Smith was skeptical that the governor could provide sufficient protection, but apparently Emma Smith believed that Ford could provide the safety he had promised. She urged Joseph to come back.
Ultimately, the documentary record of Joseph Smith’s decision to return to Nauvoo is sparse. We need to be careful about the conclusions we come to about who persuaded Joseph to return and how they persuaded him.
Apparently, part of the deliberations in Iowa centered on whether Hyrum would return to Nauvoo and go to Carthage with Joseph. According to reminiscent accounts, Joseph turned to Hyrum as his older brother for advice. Hyrum responded, “Let us go back and give ourselves up, and see the thing out.” Joseph reminded him of the danger they would face. To that Hyrum responded, “If we live or have to die, we will be reconciled to our fate.”
Joseph, Hyrum, and their traveling companions crossed the Mississippi River and returned to the city of Nauvoo. The Smith brothers would bid farewell to their families and then go to Carthage.
Jenny Reeder: On Sunday, Joseph arrived in Nauvoo around 5:30.
Spencer McBride: That’s Jenny Reeder, a historian with the Church History Department.
Jenny Reeder: He came to the Mansion House and his family just surrounded him. You can imagine that tearful greeting, and he stayed all night. He had planned on preaching to the Saints by starlight, but he couldn’t leave his family.
Spencer McBride: But when the sun rose the next morning, it was time to leave.
Jenny Reeder: One account says that at 6:30 AM in the morning, about sunrise, Joseph, Emma, and the children walked out into the fresh air from the Mansion House, and Joseph kissed each child goodbye, then turned his wife and said, “Emma, can you train my sons to walk in their father’s footsteps?” And she said, “Oh, Joseph, you’re coming back.” Joseph repeated the question, and Emma gave the same answer, almost as though her saying it would make it so. The third time he asked, Emma’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Joseph,” she said, “You are coming back.”
Spencer McBride: Joseph and Hyrum Smith set out on horseback with thirteen other men accused of riot in the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor. But they had not made it far when they encountered members of the state militia headed to Nauvoo. The militia was traveling on orders from Governor Ford to collect weapons from the city.
Brett Dowdle: One of the things that had happened over the years as the Nauvoo Legion had been organized in Nauvoo, they had received a number of weapons and arms, rifles, and apparently a couple of canons from the Illinois State Armory. There were real concerns by Joseph Smith’s opponents throughout the county that the Nauvoo Legion would pose trouble if Joseph was arrested, and they had expressed those concerns to Ford. Ford seemed to share some of those feelings that that was a concern. On the morning of June 24, he issued an order to Captain James Dunn to go to Nauvoo and collect all of the weapons belonging to the state of Illinois. Sometimes we have presented this as Dunn was ordered to go to Nauvoo and collect all of the weapons whatsoever. That’s not accurate. They collected Illinois state property. They did not collect weapons that were private possession.
Spencer McBride: Joseph and Hyrum Smith worried that the Saints might resist Captain Dunn’s attempt to collect the state’s weapons from Nauvoo. The prophet worried the request might result in violence. So, the entire party of men destined for Carthage agreed to accompany Captain Dunn and his men back to Nauvoo to ensure that peace prevailed.
The detour proved a major delay, but a chance to see their families and their beloved city of Nauvoo one last time.
…
Spencer McBride: Around midnight, the traveling party arrived in Carthage, Illinois. They rented rooms in the Carthage Hotel, also known as Hamilton’s Carthage Hotel, where they would rest before going to the courthouse in the morning. In the best-case scenario, they would enter a plea on the riot charge, post bail, and return to Nauvoo. But law officers in Carthage had something else in store for Joseph and Hyrum Smith. And that is where we will pick up the story in the next episode of Road to Carthage: A Joseph Smith Papers Podcast.
…
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.