Under the Banner of Heaven (18 page)

After Joseph had finished dictating the revelation to his secretary, Hyrum delivered the ten-page document to Emma.* Unfortunately for Joseph, it did not have the desired effect. When Emma read it, she became apoplectic. Hyrum reported that “he had never received a more severe talking to in his life,” and “that Emma was very bitter and full of resentment and anger.” She proclaimed that she “did not believe a word” of the revelation and remained steadfast in her refusal to accept Joseph’s marriages to other women. Which didn’t deter the prophet from taking more wives; but he made no further effort to win Emma’s consent.

* William Clayton, Joseph’s loyal personal secretary, declared in a letter twenty-eight years later, “I did write the revelation on Celestial marriage given through the Prophet Joseph Smith on the 12th day of July 1843. When the revelation was written there was no one present except the prophet Joseph, his brother Hyrum and myself. It was written in the small office upstairs in the rear of the brick store which stood on the banks of the Mississippi River. It took some three hours to write it. Joseph dictated sentence by sentence and I wrote it as he dictated. After the whole was written Joseph requested me to read it slowly and carefully which I did, and he then pronounced it correct.”

Emma sought solace from her friend William Law, who, although also a close friend of Joseph’s, was sympathetic to Emma’s plight. A longtime member of the church, Law possessed incorruptible integrity and had served as the prophet’s trusted second counselor for more than two years. In January 1844 Law encountered Joseph on the streets of Nauvoo and begged him to renounce the detestable polygamy revelation. According to Law’s son Richard, his father put his arms around the neck of the prophet and “was pleading with him to withdraw the doctrine of plural marriage… with tears streaming from his eyes. The prophet was also in tears, but he informed [Law} that he could not withdraw the doctrine, for God had commanded him to teach it, and condemnation would come upon him if he was not obedient to the commandment.”

Law’s abhorrence of polygamy, to say nothing of the emotional support he provided Emma, severely strained his relationship with Joseph. Their friendship was finally severed altogether when Joseph “endeavored to seduce” Law’s wife, Jane, by making “the most indecent and wicked proposals” to her. Incensed and disgusted, in April 1844 William Law demanded that the prophet publicly acknowledge his wicked behavior and “cease from his abominations.”

Joseph responded by having Law excommunicated; Law’s reaction to this insult was to declare that Joseph was a “fallen prophet” and then, on May 12, to establish an institution he called the Reformed Mormon Church, which did not sanction polygamy. According to Fawn Brodie,

Law had courage, tenacity, and a strange, misguided idealism. Although he was surrounded chiefly by men who believed Joseph to be a base imposter, he clung to the hope that that he could effect a reformation in the church. To this end he set up a church of his own, with himself as president, following faithfully the organization of the main body.

This in itself would not have been serious, for Joseph had seen rival prophets spring out of the grass at his feet before and they had come to naught. Usually they tried to imitate him, giving out revelations that sounded stale and flat beside his own. But Law was cut to a different pattern. Actually he was on the road to complete and ugly disillusionment, but he was walking backward away from the church, looking eagerly for something in the landscape to which he could cling, grasping at every tree and hedgerow.

His desperate desire to reform the church made him far more formidable than if he had set out to damn the prophet and all his works.

Law was also made formidable by dint of being rich, which allowed him to buy his own printing press. On June 7, 1844, the first and only edition of a newspaper called the
Nauvoo Expositor
emerged from the new press. Law printed one thousand copies. The lead editorial exclaimed, “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principle of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms.” The four-page broadsheet railed against Joseph’s disdain for the separation of church and state, his usurpation of political power, and his shady financial dealings, but the paper’s primary objective was to expose the secret doctrine of polygamy. The editors promised that in the coming days, “several affidavits will be published, to substantiate the facts alleged.”

Most of Nauvoo’s residents reacted to the publication with anger— directed not at Joseph, to whom they remained devoted, but at the paper and its owners. The prophet was nevertheless worried that the
Expositor
put his control of the church in dire peril, so he called an emergency meeting of the Nauvoo city council. Warning that the paper threatened to “destroy the peace of the city” and was a “public nuisance,” Joseph, acting in his capacity as mayor, ordered the city marshal to “destroy the printing press from whence issues the
Nauvoo Expositor…
and burn all the
Expositors
and libelous handbills found in said establishment.”

On the evening of June 10, more than two hundred armed members of the Nauvoo Legion—led by Hyrum Smith and Apostle John Taylor, under orders from the legion’s commander, Lieutenant General Joseph Smith—broke down the front door of the
Expositor
offices with a sledgehammer, smashed the press, scattered the type, and then burned the wreckage “to ashes, while the multitude made the air ring with their hideous yells.” The publishers of the
Expositor
sought redress from the local courts, charging the prophet and his henchmen with a variety of crimes. The problem was, Joseph controlled the courts, along with every other branch of government in Nauvoo. To nobody’s surprise, all those involved in the destruction of the press were completely exonerated, including the prophet. William Law, fearing for his life, had by this time fled Nauvoo. His Reformed Mormon Church withered and ultimately disappeared.

Joseph, it seemed, had prevailed yet again over his adversaries. He’d badly miscalculated how non-Mormons in Hancock County would react to these shenanigans, however. Relatively few people outside of Nauvoo knew much at that point about Joseph’s doctrine of polygamy, but bad blood between the Saints and the Gentiles who lived around them had been building for at least two years. Although Joseph and his followers had been welcomed by the citizens of Illinois when they’d first arrived, the same attitude of divine entitlement that had turned Missourians against the Mormons gradually antagonized the residents of Hancock County as well.

The county was named after John Hancock, the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence, a committed populist with pronounced contempt for those in positions of authority who abused their power. In the spirit of their county’s namesake, non-Mormons were especially alarmed by Joseph’s penchant for theocratic governance, as well as his apparent disregard for every article of the United States Constitution except those that assured Mormons the freedom to worship as they saw fit.

Joseph often asserted his belief in the ideal of democracy and in the essential value of the protections codified in the Constitution. But he also believed that democracy and constitutional restraint were rendered moot in his own case, because he had been singled out by the Lord to be His messenger. God spoke through him. Upon Joseph’s divine installation as ruler of the world, there would be no further need for democracy because God, for all intents and purposes, would be in charge. Surely, Joseph believed, the American people would understand this once they were given an opportunity to hear his message—the righteousness and undeniable truth of the Mormon faith.

But Joseph’s avowed intent to replace the elected government of the United States with a “government of God” was poorly received by the Gentile residents of Hancock County, who didn’t fancy becoming subjects of King Joseph Smith. Joseph’s non-Mormon neighbors were distressed by the way the Saints voted as a uniform bloc in lockstep with the prophet’s instructions, using that leverage to exert inordinate influence in the state government. Freedom of the press, moreover, was taken no less seriously in Hancock County than in the rest of Jacksonian America. When Joseph ordered the destruction of the
Nauvoo Expositor,
it confirmed a growing fear among non-Mormons that he was a megalo-maniacal tyrant who posed a clear and present danger to the peace and stability of the region.

The obliteration of the
Expositor
had the county’s Gentile residents literally up in arms. An editorial published in the nearby town of Warsaw howled, “War and extermination is inevitable! CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!! Can you
stand
by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! To ROB men of their property rights, without avenging them? We have no time for comment! Everyman will make his own. LET IT BE WITH POWDER AND BALL!”

The air over Hancock County crackled with hostility. Anticipating imminent retaliation from the Gentiles, on June 18 Joseph declared martial law and mobilized his Mormon army—the five-thousand-man Nauvoo Legion. Fearing the outbreak of civil war, Illinois’s governor, Thomas Ford—a fair-minded leader who was not unsympathetic to the Mormons—responded by demanding that Joseph and Hyrum Smith, John Taylor, and others responsible for destroying the press surrender to face charges in Carthage, the Hancock County seat. Governor Ford promised that if the prophet turned himself in, he would personally guarantee Joseph’s safety. But, Ford cautioned, “If you, by refusing to submit, make it necessary to call out the militia, I have great fears that your city will be destroyed, and your people many of them exterminated. You know the excitement of the public mind. Do not tempt it too far.”

Joseph replied to Ford, saying he worried that if he and his cohorts were to turn themselves over to non-Mormon authorities, they would be taken “from place to place, from court to court, across creeks and prairies, till some bloodthirsty villain could find his opportunity to shoot us.” Instead of surrendering, in the middle of the night on June 23, Joseph and his brother Hyrum were rowed across the Mississippi by their fearsome bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, where they fled into the wilds of Iowa, intending to make a break for the Rocky Mountains.

A day later, though, while Joseph and Hyrum waited for the delivery of horses to carry them west, Joseph received an impassioned letter from Emma urging him to return to Nauvoo. The messenger who delivered the letter told the prophet that many of the Saints believed he had abandoned them out of cowardice: “You always said if the church would stick to you, you would stick to the church; now trouble comes and you are the first to run.”

Shamed, Joseph returned to Illinois to face prosecution, fearing the worst. “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter,” he warned those who rowed him back across the river.

Joseph and eleven others who were charged with destroying the press surrendered on June 24. As they traveled the twenty-five miles from Nauvoo to Carthage, the roads were lined with Illinois militiamen and other Gentiles who heckled the prophet lustily: “God damn you, Old Joe, we’ve got you now!”

“Clear the way and let us see old Joe, the prophet of God. He’s seen the last of Nauvoo. We’ll use him up and kill all the damn Mormons!”

In Carthage, the streets were jammed with armed, inebriated, poorly disciplined members of numerous local militias, all screaming for the prophet’s head. Governor Ford, determined to protect Joseph and give him a fair trial, ordered all the militiamen in town to disband except for a single company of Carthage Greys, who were assigned to guard the jail and safeguard the prisoners.

Ten of the Mormons in custody posted bail and were allowed to go free, but Joseph and Hyrum, who had been charged with treason in addition to the less serious crimes charged to the other defendants, were incarcerated in the Carthage jail, a two-story structure with yard-thick walls built from red limestone cut from a local quarry. There were just six rooms in the entire building: two locked cells for holding prisoners, plus four rooms (one of which was a cramped attic garret) that served as living quarters for the jailer, his wife, and their seven children.

Initially the prophet and his brother were held in the downstairs debtors’ cell, which was well lit and reasonably comfortable. The jailer, George Stigall, was not Mormon, but he was a decent man, and he worried that this downstairs cell, with its large, ground-level windows, might provide insufficient protection from the enraged men outside who wished to harm his prisoners. So the jailer permitted them to bide their time upstairs in his own bedroom, and friendly visitors were given unrestricted access to the Smith brothers. By this means, two guns were smuggled in to them—a six-shot pepperbox revolver and a single-shot pistol.

Late on the afternoon of June 27, while Joseph and Hyrum were being visited in their quarters by Apostles John Taylor and Willard Richards, approximately 125 militiamen from the virulently anti-Mormon town of Warsaw assembled outside the jail in the damp summer heat. Earlier, in deference to the governor’s orders, these Warsaw Dragoons had left Carthage, but they hadn’t gone far. They disguised themselves by rubbing gunpowder on their faces and at day’s end came storming back into town.

Just seven members of the Carthage Greys were on guard when the Dragoons appeared outside the jail and charged the front entrance. The Greys fired their muskets directly into the mob, but as part of a prearranged plan the guards had loaded their weapons with blanks, so none of the Dragoons was harmed. After discharging their ersatz fusillade, the guards stepped aside, allowing the hate-crazed mob to burst through the front door, firing their guns indiscriminately as they entered; two of their balls came within inches of hitting the jailer’s wife.

The militiamen swarmed upstairs and tried to force their way into the bedroom where the prisoners were quartered. Joseph and Hyrum brandished their smuggled weapons while Taylor and Richards each grabbed a walking stick, positioned themselves on either side of the doorway, and began whacking furiously at the mob’s muskets as the barrels were poked through the partially opened door.