Читать книгу American Zion - Betsy Gaines Quammen - Страница 13

A Militia Theology

It was then the rule that all enemies of the Prophet Joseph should be killed, and I knew of many a man who was quietly put out of the way by the orders of Joseph and his apostles while the church was there.

—John Doyle Lee

Jackson County was abandoned shortly after Zion’s Camp returned to Ohio. Church members packed up what they could and fled into Clay County, Missouri, but after only two years, they again were told by locals to get out. Ohio adherents, on the other hand, seemed to be faring better. Nephi Johnson would later write that among his earliest memories was one of watching his father cut wood for the first Mormon temple, a big white cathedral with large gothic arched windows, dedicated on March 27, 1836. This was a new religion, awash in spiritual frenzy. Fresh converts fell into paroxysms, experiencing visions inspired by a contagious passion and shared yearning for God. Spectators at the 1836 Kirtland Temple’s dedication recalled celestial winds blowing through the assembly room and angels hovering above church pews, phenomena suggested by their charismatic leader. Joseph Smith later wrote that he “beheld the Temple was filled with angels, which fact I declared to the congregation. The people of the neighborhood came running together (hearing an unusual sound within and seeing a bright light like a pillar of fire resting upon the Temple) and were astonished at what was taking place.” It all sounds like a page torn from the wild revivals of the Burned-over District. The temple’s opening ceremony, and the many stories that were told afterward about the heavenly visitations, gave the community bright reassurance, of both God’s favor and their prophet’s ability to court the supernatural.

But Joseph’s allure came with a downside, and in some ways the church was the victim of his renown. Many new converts crowded into Kirtland, seeking religious direction as well as escape from a crushing poverty. According to Smith’s Law of Consecration, the decree to share wealth, more-affluent church members were expected to support poorer ones. But there were just too many mouths to feed and families to house and the church was falling into debt. Joseph cast about looking for ways to relieve his situation. He even pursued another treasure hunt to Salem, Massachusetts, in an attempt to track down riches rumored to be hidden in the attic of a house; but just as was the case in his early days, he was left empty-handed.

During the 1830s, the banking industry was expanding nationally, in speculative and unsustainable directions. Church leaders, including Joseph, thought a bank could be just the thing they needed to take care of their congregation and continue to acquire property through loans. Though it lacked hard currency, the church did own real estate. A joint-stock enterprise, Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, though never actually licensed by the Ohio legislature, opened in January of 1837. It was very short-lived. By November of that year, the bank, or rather anti-bank, had collapsed due to a national financial panic, mismanagement, and an anti-Mormon campaign that encouraged a run on the institution. Smith faced seventeen lawsuits from creditors for over one hundred thousand dollars of debt.

The bank wasn’t the only thing that was short-lived. So was all that glowy confidence the Saints had in the prophet after the temple dedication. Many blamed Smith for the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society and their own financial straits. And the pitchforks came out. While Joseph was traveling on a missionizing expedition, two church leaders—one a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the other involved in the Kirtland Society banking debacle—led an armed takeover of the temple. Though their efforts were thwarted, the church became badly fractured among those who maintained faith in Joseph’s abilities and those who scorned him. The loyal were targeted by former church members who felt bamboozled and fleeced. Between 1837 and 1838, up to three hundred people, or 15 percent of church membership, abandoned Smith. In January 1838, Joseph Smith fled Kirtland after hearing of a plot to kill him, and rode to Missouri, trailed by Sidney Rigdon.

Church leaders had secured property on Shoal Creek in Caldwell County, in a place known as Far West, Missouri. By 1838, it was regarded as the Mormon headquarters. Defiance against the prophet was in full swing in Missouri as well, but once there, he dug in. His detractors were scattered throughout his own congregation as well as among the Gentiles, and the internal rebellion needed to be quelled in order to create a united front against a new wave of Missouri mobbism. So Smith and his inner circle devised a plan to shame and threaten those disloyal to the church to shore things up. This marks a big pivot—Mormon culture embraced a belligerence that would become a hallmark of the early church.

The first fusillade was verbal: Sidney Rigdon’s warning in June of 1838, when he delivered what is known as the Salt Sermon. In the homily that warned disloyal Saints about what awaited them in their treachery, he quoted Matthew 5:13. “If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” The salt, in this case, was the unfaithful Mormon. Rigdon was telling those insurgents that they would face retaliation if they continued. A boot to the head or worse.

Rigdon’s threats were to be backed up with a newly formed gang of Mormon men, who came to be known as the Danites. Though their legend is far more formidable than their actual record, both lore and history are central to the Mormon story of theocratic militarism. This was no Zion’s Camp—the Danites were taken seriously and they were feared. Although the Saints had until this point purportedly been pacifists, there was apparently a contingency plan. The year after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Smith issued a prophecy that not only allowed for force but encouraged vendettas. This decree held that any nations or people who went against the Mormons should at first be approached peacefully. But if that posture didn’t work—a first, a second, or even a third time—then “I, the Lord, would fight their battles, and their children’s battles, and their children’s children’s, until they had avenged themselves on all their enemies, to the third and fourth generation.” Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn contends that Smith, during his tenure as prophet, built a theological justification for violence and “unlike other American religious denominations, ‘the church militant’ was a literal fact in Mormonism, not just a symbolic slogan.” In Smith’s reveals, if crossed, Mormons, and God for that matter, acted to take violent action against any perceived oppressor, generation after generation.

During this time of strife both within and outside of the church, Rigdon, John Doyle Lee, Sampson Avard, and Porter Rockwell became initiates of this secret gang, whose mission was to quell treachery, dish out retribution, and deal with the Gentile threat. First they called themselves the Brothers of Gideon. Then they played with the name Daughters of Zion, an appellation plucked from the biblical verse in Micah that reads, “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion: for I will make thine horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass: and thou shalt beat in pieces many people.…” Although the sentiment was clearly bellicose, apparently “daughters” didn’t set the right tone. Finally they settled on a name from a passage in the Book of Daniel, recounting Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream about a stone “cut out without hands,” which was the instrument sent from God to crush all false kingdoms. So from Daniel they became Danites, a Mormon gang pledged to serve as this tool, swung to smash the enemies of their prophet.

Porter Rockwell had grown up listening to Joseph Smith and loving him. He’d come with his family to Missouri because of their longstanding friendship and his lifelong devotion to the prophet. He’d watched the violence play out against Missouri Mormons, including the destruction of his own home. He’d seen Gentile hatred aimed at his brothers and sisters, which drew him into an increasingly devoted relationship to both his faith and Joseph. Over the years, Rockwell grew inclined to do whatever was asked of him, legal or illegal, to protect both the prophet and the church. And that made him a fine Danite.

Also well-suited was Danite ringleader Sampson Avard, a Mormon convert who moved from Kirtland to Far West, where he encouraged all sorts of retributions against their enemies, bidding his men in typical church parlance to “go scout on the border settlements to take yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles.” This idea of appropriating property from people outside the church found some footing in Mormon culture, well beyond the Danites. Stealing from Gentiles (which includes the government) became viewed, by some, as not only acceptable but merited. When Zion found its final home in the American West, Saints, inspired by the Danite code, continued to steal the possessions bundled on wagon trains belonging to non-Mormon families. During the early decades of the church, animosity calcified (again, among some but not all members) into a hard conviction: Mormon people were different from other Americans and beholden only to other Mormons. Transgressions against Gentiles did not count.

John Lee was among those, like Porter Rockwell, who later brought aspects of the Danite ethos westward. He had come to embrace the church completely in a moment of deep sorrow when his second child, Elizabeth Adoline, succumbed to scarlet fever. In his grief, he stayed up all night reading the Book of Mormon and feeling the power of its truth. (Sidney Rigdon had a similar conversion experience when reading Joseph’s bible.) Of his years handing out vigilante justice, Lee wrote in his memoir that the Danites carried out “the most sacred obligations,” supporting one another and “the Church under any and all circumstances unto death,” so that “to divulge the name of a Danite to an outsider or to make public any of the secrets of the Danites, was to be punished by death.” The clandestine and sacred bond among Danites offered them the heady thrill of being holy thugs. Some members even became convinced of their own infallibility, which led to a dangerous and unsustainable bravado. In spite of their secret rituals and symbols, in time, they would find out that they were still just men.

On July 4, 1838, a month after Rigdon delivered the Salt Sermon, he went even further, warning Gentiles that the Mormon people were done with being denied their rights and “trampled on with impunity.” Henceforth, Rigdon declared, “that mob that comes on us to disturb us” shall spark “between us and them a war of extermination; for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.” Though he claimed that the Mormon people “will never be the aggressors,” his words launched a war.

On Election Day in August of 1838, in Gallatin, Missouri, John Lee got his first taste of vigilante justice. A group of bullies accosted an LDS man while he attempted to cast his vote. Suddenly the Danites in the crowd flashed one another their secret sign of attack—right hand to right temple, thumb to ear—and fell upon the Gentiles. Lee would later express exhilaration at meeting enemy flesh with the end of an oaken club, declaring, “Like Samson, when leaning into a pillar, I felt the power of God nerve my arm for the fray. It helps a man a great deal in a fight to know that God is on his side.” Nine men left the brawl with broken skulls, Lee reported. But “all the Mormons voted.”

By the fall of 1838, the region had fallen into open warfare between Mormons and Missourians. On October 25, during what is known as Missouri’s Battle of Crooked River, the Saints saw their beloved leader David W. Patten wounded. Their reaction was one of shocking barbarity. Patten, nicknamed “Captain Fearnaught,” had believed, like many other Mormon militants, that he was impervious to Gentile bullets. Sadly for him, this was not the case. Gut shot, Patten died a slow and agonizing death in front of the rattled Danites and other Mormon soldiers, who must have realized that they too were as penetrable to slugs as any mortal. In reaction to their friend’s death, some retaliated by disfiguring an injured Missourian. According to one account, they mutilated “the unconscious [Samuel] Tarwater with their swords, striking him lengthwise in the mouth, cutting off his under teeth, and breaking his lower jaw; cutting off his cheeks … and leaving him [for] dead.” It’s not hard to understand why the Mormons were so incensed, after the brutal years spent trying to establish Zion in the face of venomous antipathy, thrashings, and property destruction. But the Danite ethos made a volatile atmosphere even worse.

Following the battle, rumors flew among Saints and Gentiles. Chaos and fury bred stories both exaggerated and inaccurate. Dozens of Mormons butchered and left unburied! Fifty Missouri militia members slain! Savage Danites are thirsting for blood! Two days after the fight at Crooked River, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs signed Missouri Executive Order 44, ordering the Saints to leave the state or risk extermination. Because of “open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this State,” the order stated, “the Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description.”

On October 30, a Missouri mob attacked several Mormon families in east Cardwell County. The small town where the incident occurred, Haun’s Mill, was named after Jacob Haun, and home to about thirty Mormon families, a blacksmith shop, and the namesake mill. According to assistant church historian Andrew Jenson’s 1888 account, survivors recalled that the massacre happened on a glorious, warm autumn day. In flowery prose, Jenson presents a scene in which children’s laughter, the smell of corn ripening, and a recently signed peace treaty with one Missouri mob just two days before, had lulled the little village into a sense of false security. That afternoon, a group of men from another militia surrounded Haun’s Mill and launched a savage attack. The assault lasted somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour as the mob set about killing seventeen people. One man was hacked up with a corn knife. Three boys, ages seven, nine, and ten, tried to take cover in a blacksmith shop but were found and executed at close range. Mobber William Reynolds placed a musket barrel to ten-year-old Sardius Smith’s temple and blew the boy’s brains out, explaining to his comrades, “Nits will make lice, and if he had [lived] he would have become a Mormon.” When those who escaped the Haun’s Mill attack returned to the site of the carnage, they placed their murdered loved ones at the bottom of an unfinished well, laying the boys’ bodies next to the bullet-ridden corpses of their neighbors. Then they covered the dead with straw and left, on to the next Zion.