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Nauvoo

The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.

—Joseph Smith

In 1838, Joseph Smith had only six more years on earth before going to his glory. A review of events that unfolded during these final years suggests the prophet’s runaway narcissism fueled acts of heedless and fatal bravado. But a member of the church might well consider these years the most productive period in Joseph’s life. He was at the height of his prophetic force, the pinnacle of his authority, and the zenith of his productivity. By the time he was killed, a prodigious amount of theology had been left behind, some ideas that continue to excite those on the fringes of the Mormon religion. His most controversial revelations were on plural marriage and the idea that men could be gods, prophecies that led to his murder. But one of his most enduring prophecies, at least to our story, was that God divinely revealed the US Constitution. In fact, Cliven Bundy told me that it was Jesus who wrote it.

After the Battle of Crooked River, Joseph was arrested, chained, jailed, and awaiting trial. No Missourian involved in the Haun’s Mill Massacre faced any such fate—a bitter pill for the Latter-day Saints. Smith narrowly avoided a firing squad, thanks to the sympathies of Missouri general Alexander William Doniphan, who objected to an initial denial of due process. Charged with treason, murder, arson, burglary, robbery, larceny, and perjury, Smith spent a long and miserable winter in the fetid Liberty County jail awaiting trial. During his confinement, he corresponded with church leadership as well as with a property broker about acquiring roughly twenty thousand acres of land from one Dr. Isaac Galland, a con man known to be a genuine horse thief but not a genuine doctor. With this purchase and the acquisition of lands in Iowa and in Commerce, Illinois, Joseph once again envisioned Zion, this time straddling the wide Mississippi River on both the Iowa and Illinois shores.

After a six-month incarceration, Joseph and his men were allowed to escape. This in part may have been because many in Missouri were embarrassed over the whole Mormon affair and did not want further negative national attention that Smith’s trial, and potential execution, would have brought. In any case, after bribing the guards with eight hundred dollars and a bottle of whiskey, Joseph saddled up a horse and made for the new homeland, a place he called Nauvoo, on the river’s Illinois side. The name is an anglicized Hebrew word, na’ah, which means “comely” or “befitting.”

Nauvoo was actually a pestiferous swampland. During their first year, many converts died of ague, typhoid, and cholera. Those lost included Joseph’s father, his brother, and his youngest son, Don Carlos. His people were in rough shape when they arrived after their brutal experience in Missouri, and the boggy river land of this new home was not an easy place to alight. But as they settled, drained malarial swamps, built homes, gardens, and orchards, they shaped a place that held enormous promise.

Still, the Saints were poor. The state of Illinois was poor. And the country had yet to create any national legal tender. The financial panic of 1837 still rippled throughout, including, of course, among the Mormon community. In Nauvoo, residents relied on a system of barter and credit. Their detractors, however, spread gossip about their business practices, claiming that Latter-day Saints stole and counterfeited in their dealings with Gentiles as they set up business dealings in Nauvoo. Although this shady business may have happened, there is little evidence that it was as widespread as the regional rumors suggested. Still, just the allegations were enough to fan the flames of anti-Mormonism, which the Saints faced yet again.

In 1840, Smith secured the Nauvoo City charter and began to create municipal government. After years of finding no reliable advocate on either state or federal levels, Smith started to entertain his own political ambitions. He made himself mayor and filled the courts with Mormon judges, and with these appointments created more anti-Mormon sentiment among those who viewed his actions as theocratic and biased. But the prophet’s intentions were understandable. The Mormon people had been run out of Missouri with no reparations. And although Joseph had pleaded for justice throughout the years, he’d repeatedly been disappointed by elected officials and the court system. With all the lessons learned, Smith was going to make Nauvoo a permanent safe haven for his people by packing offices with his own.

Another step toward defending his church was to build a militia. Danite ethos remained a deep cultural vestige, but in the 1840s, Smith wanted something grander than a gang of vigilantes. He gained authorization from the state of Illinois to raise an army, one he called the Nauvoo Legion. At its peak, his Mormon force topped five thousand members, making it the second-largest armed force in the country next to the US Army. Although he had no military experience, the prophet gave himself the title Lieutenant General, a rank that, at the time, had not been held by any military figure since George Washington. He rode in military parades, dressed in a splendid blue coat with epaulets and crisp white pantaloons. Around his waist he wore a gold sash, and atop his head a French-style military hat adorned with eight gold stars. This was a man who saw himself growing ever more mighty—one who spoke to God, shepherded an exploding number of supporters, and now had his own army.

Joseph’s Nauvoo Legion engaged in grand acts of pageantry; both Latter-day Saints and Gentiles flocked to see the troops march and conduct military exercises. The festivities were meant to dazzle and entertain, but Smith’s legion was foremost a calculated display of military might. It warranted that the Mormons were capable of challenging the authority of the state and the nation. Zion was coming into its glory. In 1839, construction began on the Nauvoo Temple, a large white limestone structure in a Greek revivalist style with star, moon, and sun adornments. Encased in scaffolding, this new sanctum, so full of promise, sat on a bluff above a horseshoe bend in the river. The Kirtland Temple, once filled with angels, was a thing of the past. God was now with Smith and his people in the state of Illinois. Mormon missionaries met with great success on their trips throughout Europe and converts were streaming into Nauvoo and into the faith. The Nauvoo Neighbor boasted that their city was “the great emporium of the West, the center of all centers,” and had a “population of fifteen thousand souls congregated from the four quarters of the globe.” It looked like the Mormons had found their home.

Nauvoo also had a great deal of security, with a police force that rivaled those of much bigger cities. The constabularies’ primary charge was to provide the church leaders, primarily Joseph Smith and later Brigham Young, with personal protection. The prophet remained a wanted man in Missouri and he worried over bounty hunters and sheriffs who hoped, if they could lay hands on him, to trade their fugitive for a pile of cash. He was under guard at all times, night and day. Joseph continued to blame Lilburn Boggs for the horrors of Missouri. The former governor of Missouri, Boggs was the man who had issued Executive Order 44 after the Battle of Crooked River, calling for Mormons to be “exterminated or driven from the State.” Smith and the brethren were still reeling emotionally and financially, and they wanted justice for those who were killed. And maybe something more.

Many believe that the prophet tapped his fiercest Danite, Porter Rockwell, to mete out justice upon this former governor. By then, the Danite leader Sampson Avard had long since left the church, after he testified in Missouri that it was Joseph Smith who had ordered Danite violence and raiding. Danite codes of vengeance had not disappeared, but the gang had disbanded after Far West. The injustices that the Mormon people had endured had hardened Rockwell and made him indubitably loyal to both the prophet and the church. In 1842, he traveled to Independence, Missouri, to work as groom for an expensive stallion stabled down the way from the Boggs family residence. May 6 was a drizzly spring day. That night, Lilburn Boggs, a stern and handsome man with a face framed by great white sideburns, sat in his study with two young daughters at his side. It was a scene of sweet domesticity, the retired governor reading a newspaper as his older girl rocked her younger sister in a cradle. But the tranquility was shattered as buckshot cracked the window behind them, and several balls pierced Boggs’s neck, throat, and skull. The little girls were not injured, though they were badly shaken. Everyone thought this was the end of old Boggs, and news of his death drifted back to Nauvoo, a community that did not mourn over a rumor of his demise.

Yet Boggs survived, despite his grievous wounds. Rockwell was arrested for the attempted murder and held in the Independence jail for nine months. At his trial, he denied any role in the assassination attempt, rejecting the suggestion that his prophet had put him up to it. But Rockwell had been in the area, near the Boggs residence, and a storekeeper testified that he saw him handling the gun used to shoot Boggs. In fact, this weapon had been stolen soon after Rockwell inspected it in that store. But while many in Missouri (and elsewhere) believed the Mormon had tried to pluck the biggest and most painful thorn from the prophet’s side, the evidence against him was too circumstantial and he was let free. All the same, the episode earned Rockwell a nickname—the Destroying Angel of Mormondom.

When Porter Rockwell returned to Nauvoo from Missouri and stood before his prophet, he was so caked in grime from hard overland travel that he was unrecognizable. As he later told friends, when the prophet finally identified him, he revealed God’s utmost favor. Rockwell, Joseph declared, would not be felled by his enemies so long as he didn’t cut his long and shaggy hair. And so, with locks long past his shoulders and a beard to match, Rockwell took the prophet at his word, did not visit a barber, and lived to the age of sixty-four. As Joseph predicted, neither “bullet or blade” could fell Rockwell. He died, instead, from a heart attack in Salt Lake City, shortly before his sixty-fifth birthday.

Although Rockwell lived a few more decades after the assassination attempt, his beloved prophet did not. His prophecies, and his appetites, affronting to both church members and Gentiles alike, became the death of him. In 1843, he revealed to his inner circle the doctrine of plural marriage. That same year, he wed fourteen women. He’d taken eleven new wives the year before and he married three others in 1841, though he may have been practicing polygamy as early as 1831. His confidence, or his audacity, was overflowing—even beyond taking multiple companions. In 1844, his final year, he decided to run for president of the United States. But that wasn’t all. He urged his counselors to crown him King of the Earth (the minutes from this 1844 meeting are sealed and unavailable to the public), and he also pondered whether he and others were gods in the making.

During his tenure as the first Mormon prophet, Joseph offered many endowments to his brethren, bestowing the gifts of personal revelation, a God-given homeland, and his assurance that the Second Coming was imminent. To his male followers, he gave the doctrine of plural marriage and promised that, beyond this earthly veil, they could take their wives into the heavens (the most faithful would receive their own planets). He absolved his women followers of original sin, a very liberating gift for Christian women blamed in other denominations for the Fall and disparaged for centuries as shameful and devious. And the prophet gave his people agency—the ability to choose their own path and not be bound to the predestination of Calvinism.

But there was more that he would offer. Three months before Joseph died, he gave a eulogy for his friend King Follett. Follett was an early convert and with his wife, Louisa, he was baptized in Ohio in 1831. Both went on to Missouri and experienced its oppression. Follett and his family most likely had few possessions after Ohio and Missouri and must have struggled with the rest of the brethren as they settled in Nauvoo. Because of the malarial conditions, city officials encouraged residents to build deep wells to avoid disease; Follett was in the process of doing just that when a big bucket of rocks fell from fifteen feet overhead, crushing him. He lingered for eleven days after the accident, finally dying from his injuries.

The King Follett Discourse, a stirring funeral sermon dedicated to Smith’s friend, was delivered on April 7, 1844. Smith began his talk during a storm, first asking the attendees—thousands, by some accounts—to pray for the weather to settle. It did. He talked about all of the beloved dead that families so missed, addressing Louisa Follett specifically, telling her that King had gone to his “celestial glory.” And then he rolled out his most radical revelation. Heavenly Father was once only man. Additionally, there exists a multiplicity of gods and, as such, men can aspire to become gods themselves. (Sorry, ladies.) “Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you,” he told his people.

This sermon, in addition to all of his other bold acts and declarations, pushed friends and followers into a rage. They felt that Smith’s behavior was dangerously untoward, blasphemous, and self-aggrandizing. The Nauvoo Expositor, a slim, four-page journal, was published on June 7, 1844. It avowed Smith’s original teachings, but it mercilessly attacked him for his recent revelations. The authors lambasted Joseph as a fallen prophet, mocking his role as a “Plebeian, Patrician, or self-constituted Monarch,” in reference to his many ways of presenting himself, including “King of the Earth.” The newspaper went on to detail the prophet’s “open state of adultery” and called the King Follett Discourse a “false doctrine of many gods.”

Upon seeing the Expositor’s exposé, the prophet retaliated. He met with the Nauvoo city council, who agreed with him that the paper was a public nuisance, and their printing press must be destroyed. Smith called upon a group of men, including Porter Rockwell, to loot the Expositor offices and smash and burn all of their printing tools. News of the destruction spread beyond Nauvoo’s city limits and into surrounding Gentile communities. Law enforcement from Carthage and Warsaw, two townships near Nauvoo, attempted to arrest Joseph and the gang he dispatched. Given that Smith had filled the Nauvoo courts, it was unlikely any Mormon judge would hold their prophet or their brothers accountable for crimes against apostates. They didn’t.

Mobs formed, including former Mormons, as crowds gathered in the streets of nearby townships and demanded that the Saints leave their state. In desperation, Smith wrote a letter to Illinois governor Thomas Ford on June 12, asking for protection against the mob’s calls. He called the proprietors of the printing press all of the things Gentiles had accused Mormons of being: “a set of unprincipled, lawless, debauchees, counterfeiters, bogus makers, gamblers, peace disturbers.” He wrote that “the grand object of said proprietors was to destroy our constitutional rights and chartered privileges; to overthrow all good and wholesome regulations in society; to strengthen themselves against the Municipalitiy; to fortify themselves against the church of which I am a member, and destroy all our religious rights and privileges, by libels, slanders, falsehoods, perjury.” Governor Ford knew things were ready to boil over in his state and responded by asking that Joseph come to Carthage to face charges.

Did Joseph know that his own time was nigh? There is a mention in his journal, written in a strange moment of contemplation during the days leading up to his death. He started the entry, June 15, 1844, talking of recent visitors, reports of militia drills, and the arrival of several boxes of arms in the nearby Gentile town of Warsaw, Illinois. Then his entry goes from details of an impending conflict to mention of an image, Benjamin West’s painting “Death on the Pale Horse.” A beautiful and terrifying depiction of the Book of Revelation’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (famine, death, conquest, and war), West’s painting was touring the United States at the time. It’s not clear whether Smith was in possession of the actual masterpiece or a facsimile, but in his journal he wrote that a steamboat named the “Maid of Iowa come down the river about 2 or 3 o’clock While I was examining Benj Wests painting of Death on the Pale Horse which has been exhibiting in my reading room for 3 days.” West’s work is that of eschatological mayhem tied to a millenarianism that was in full bloom when it was painted in 1817—at the time, Joseph was twelve years old. The masterpiece depicts the story of Armageddon, Satan, agony, and hell, as foretold in Revelation. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And Power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with the sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.” This passage from the last book in the Bible tells of what will occur with the Second Coming of Christ, and for three days before his death, Joseph Smith gazed at its unfolding.

In his final years, Smith had explored various ways that he and his brethren could find power that he felt eluded them. Although he did not find a champion among politicians, he did believe in the virtue of the US Constitution. Joseph considered it divinely inspired—as God’s will wrought by the founding fathers’ ink and quill. He felt this document had the ability to defend his people, their freedom to practice religion as well as their entitlement to “life, liberty or property”—all of the supposed rights they’d been deprived of in Missouri. This founding document had been on his mind since his early days as prophet when in 1831, he revealed that, in the words of God, the “law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me. Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land.” In understanding the Constitution, Joseph assured followers, lies true freedom.

Joseph’s invitation to embrace the Constitution was later stretched by others, both prophets and apostates alike. There emerged an idea in the twentieth century that a Mormon might actually be better able to understand the true meaning of the Constitution than non-Mormons—this and the idea that the Latter-day Saints were responsible for its safekeeping. Smith’s embrace of the founding document made it almost as sacred as those texts that resided in the Mormon canon, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Bible, and the Pearl of Great Price. And because of this association, subsequent generations of Mormons have claimed the right to read the Constitution as divine, and at times to infuse it with subjective, and inaccurate, interpretations. Together, ideas of latter days, the sacred nature of the Constitution, and the essential role that Mormons have in its protection have embedded themselves, in Mormon circles of course but also within the American anti-government movement.

There is a revelation said to have been issued by the prophet in the year before his death, although it’s not mentioned by church leaders until a decade later. It’s likely apocryphal, but nonetheless influential, especially to the Bundys. This revelation is known as the White Horse Prophecy, in reference to the very scene (though not necessarily the actual painting) that Joseph pondered in his office for three days. The revelation states that “this Nation [America] will be on the very verge of crumbling to peices [sic] and tumbling to the ground and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin this people will be the Staff upon which the Nation shall lean and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction.” If the 1831 prophecy to make friends with the Constitution was a whisper, this one was a shriek. The White Horse Prophecy foretells a time when the Mormon people will have to come to its rescue, when that document is at stake through the tyranny of the government at the time of Armageddon.

While regarding West’s painting, so dark and unsettling, Smith’s world was devolving and his control slipping. The people of Illinois were organizing, protesting, and calling for violence. Fearing attacks, Smith declared martial law in Nauvoo. He also ordered the Legion to engage in daily training exercises in preparation for war. Standing in front of his army, the prophet rallied his troops for battle. The speech, recorded in church records, called on “all ye lovers of liberty, break the oppressor’s rod, loose the iron grasp of mobocracy, and bring to condign punishment all those who trample under foot [sic] the glorious Constitution and the people’s rights.” It wouldn’t be hard to imagine this same rallying cry at the Battle of Bunkerville.

Joseph and his brother Hyrum tried to escape from what he was now sure was his own death. In a boat commandeered by Porter Rockwell, they crossed the Mississippi onto the Iowa shore, but turned back after Joseph read a letter from Emma pleading with him to return. On June 24, 1844, Joseph, Hyrum, Porter Rockwell, and a few other church leaders rode to Carthage, where the prophet signed an order to disband the Nauvoo Legion. He also handed over hundreds of rifles and some cannons. The town was jammed with mobbers and militia members and as Smith and the others walked from their hotel to the court under heavy guard, people taunted the brothers, some shouting, “Kill the damn Mormons!” Joseph and Hyrum were found guilty of starting a riot in Nauvoo and were told they’d be held until their hearing on treason charges. Awaiting their fate in the heat of a Missouri summer, the men tried to calm themselves in the two-story Carthage jail with prayers and hymns, while mob members heckled throughout the long nights. On June 27, a gang of two hundred men, faces dirtied with wet gunpowder, rushed the jail, ran up the stairs, killed Hyrum, and as Joseph tried to escape out of a window, shot him. His last words were, “Oh Lord, my God!” as he fell down two stories before hitting the ground.

One of Joseph’s wives, Eliza R. Snow, wrote a poem summing up the passions of the Mormon people in the wake of the fallen prophet.

For never, since the Son of God was slain

Had blood so noble, flow’d from human vein

As that which now, on God for vengeance calls

From “freedom’s ground” from Carthage prison walls!

Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood

Of Prophets martyr’d for the truth of God.

Once lov’d America! what can atone

For the pure blood of innocence, thou’st sown?

The last legacy that Joseph Smith assured was the call to settle scores.