American Crucifixion (10 page)

Their manners, customs, religion and all, are more obnoxious to our citizens than those of the Indians, and they can never live among us in peace. The rifle will settle the quarrel.

TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1841, WAS A HOLIDAY IN NAUVOO. ON A clear and balmy spring morning, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was celebrating its eleventh birthday. Businesses and city offices were closed. The wharves and river landing points were busier than usual, as Gentiles assembled from up and down the Mississippi Valley to watch the promised pageantry. The Mormons were also celebrating a milestone in their spiritual journeys from New York, Ohio, Missouri, and in many cases the British Isles: the laying of the cornerstone of the Nauvoo Temple, to be built on a hill overlooking the town center and the dark, glistening river beyond. The temple would be the crown jewel of Joseph’s new Zion. Once completed, it would provide the sacred space necessary for administering the endowments, priesthood ritual, baptisms, and marriage-sealing ceremonies central to the Saints’ spiritual lives. The church expected every resident of Nauvoo to donate time and money to constructing the temple. Joseph carefully monitored temple tithing, quick to accuse better-off Saints of stinting on their sacred obligations.

The Saints had erected a magnificent sandstone temple in Kirtland, Ohio, the scene of many legendary events. At its dedication in 1836, Joseph Smith reported that “the sound of a rushing mighty wind” filled the building. The congregation began speaking in tongues, and Joseph “beheld the Temple was filled with angels.” Hearing the strange noises, people from the neighborhood ran to the temple and saw “a bright light like a pillar of fire” shooting up from the central spire. It was inside the Kirtland temple that Joseph reported meeting with Jesus, Moses, and the prophet Elijah, who shared revelations concerning the direction of the church.

In the dawn hours at Nauvoo, 650 soldiers of the Nauvoo Legion formed ranks at the town’s parade grounds, just below the temple site. An estimated 8,000 onlookers, Saints and strangers, packed the streets. At 7:30 a.m., artillery fire announced the arrival of Legion generals Wilson Law and Joseph’s brother, Don Carlos Smith. Promptly at 9:30 a.m., heralded by a single cannon blast, Lieutenant General Joseph Smith rode in on his white charger. In martial mode, Smith traveled with a personal staff of fifteen Legionnaires, which included two cavalry colonels and a third officer responsible for Joseph’s personal bodyguard of twelve infantry captains. Some of the thousands of onlookers came just to see the Prophet’s storied uniform, custom designed by his personal tailor, John Bills, who advertised “all kinds of military coats made according to the latest pattern.” Joseph favored a cerulean officer’s tailcoat, dripping with weighty gold braid and epaulettes, topped off with a black cockade chapeau that was adorned with a black ostrich feather. As accoutrements, he wore black leather riding boots, white gloves, a golden campaign sash, and a four-foot-long, leather-handled, forged cavalry saber. On the reviewing grounds, Joseph carried a tin speaking trumpet, to amplify his orders.

“The several companies presented a beautiful and interesting spectacle,” reported onlooker Wandle Mace. “The rich and costly dresses of the officers would have become a Bonaparte or a Washington.” Norton Jacobs recalled that “many strange murmurs ran through the waving throng to see the prophet, the master spirit of the glittering scene, mount a scaffold at the south-east corner in full military costume, accompanied by many of his fellow officers and friends.”

The ranking officers’ wives followed them onto the parade grounds, seated in an elaborate carriage. Emma Smith, sporting a black cap with a black ostrich plume, and dressed in a tight-fitting habit adorned with gold buttons, entered riding sidesaddle on her horse Charlie. In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities. “Smith had always shown great favor to these red men and encouraged them to be on friendly terms with him,” noted young William Baldwin, a visitor from Carthage, who spotted the towering, “dusky” Keokuk in Nauvoo that day. “He had constant communication with them and may have looked forward in imagination to some time when they would become valuable allies.” (“I am a son of the Great Spirit,” Keokuk once told Joseph, adding that “I have a Book of Mormon at my wigwam that you gave me many moons ago.”) Ladies and gentlemen of the local gentry marched in double file behind the honored guests. Above them waved the individual flags of each Legion company, flapping on poles topped with carved wooden eagles, as well as the Illinois flag, the American flag, and the unforgettable standard belonging to William Pitt’s brass band: a five foot by four foot banner depicting a single, huge all-seeing eye of God, observing the proceedings.

At the temple site, construction workers lowered each of the four cornerstones into place separately, accompanied by a special blessing from a church leader. Like most public events in Nauvoo, the ceremony occasioned a poem, this one springing from the pen of Hosea Stout, a particularly militant member of Joseph’s bodyguard:

’Tis now the sixth of April in Eighteen Forty-One,

Eleven years exactly since the Church of Christ begun;

And then all men did hate us, our numbers being few,

But now we’ve honor, power, we’ve a Legion of Nauvoo . . .

Our “Legion” is all powerful, t’is warlike, brave and grand,

E’re long t’will prove a terror to Boggs and all his clan,

T’is peaceable and harmless to all who come to view

Or have a mind to settle in the City of Nauvoo . . .

Our Legion is commanded by men of great renown,

Our foes, in vain may threaten, in vain may on us frown,

Our chief commander’s Joseph, he well knows what to do,

Because he is a prophet in the Legion of Nauvoo.

The Mormon newspaper
Times and Seasons
, edited by Joseph’s brother Don Carlos Smith, hailed the day as a mammoth success:

We never witnessed a more imposing spectacle than was presented on this occasion. . . . Such an almost countless multitude of people, moving in harmony, in friendship, in dignity, told with a voice not easily misunderstood, that they were a people of intelligence and virtue, and order; in short, that they were saints.

And they behaved like saints, too. The editor made special mention of his “happiness . . . that we heard no obscene or profane language; neither saw we any one intoxicated. Can the same be said of a similar assemblage in any other city in the Union?” he asked.

Thank God, that the intoxicating beverage, that bane of humanity in these last days, that—what shall we call it? Devil? is becoming a stranger in Nauvoo.

ONE OF CHIEF KEOKUK’S FELLOW DIGNITARIES WAS THE STRIPLING owner of the only newspaper in Hancock County not under Mormon control—Thomas Sharp, the twenty-two-year-old editor of the Warsaw
Signal
. Sharp, a recent arrival in Illinois, had purchased the
Western World
, renamed it, and set off to make a name for himself in the public affairs of the day. His only competition, the Saints’ official organ, the
Times and Seasons
, trafficked in upbeat news about the Mormons’ social and economic progress, and in grim reports of tidal waves, earthquakes, and floods that augured the approaching End Times.

The son of a well-to-do Methodist minister, Sharp grew up in Pennsylvania and studied law at Dickinson College. He came west to make his fortune at the bar. He practiced briefly in Quincy, but a chronic hearing problem limited his effectiveness in the courtroom. In September 1840, he traveled north to Warsaw, a small (population 500) Mississippi river town located just south of the Des Moines rapids. Warsaw had about ten stores, two taverns, two steam mills, one doctor, a printing plant, and one lawyer already in business. The town did have enviable commercial prospects. Just to its north, the Des Moines River linked Illinois with the interior of the vast Iowa Territory and the largely uncharted West. On the Illinois side of the river, a railway line could theoretically connect Warsaw to a town above the Des Moines rapids and open up transport to northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Tiny Warsaw—previously named Fort Edwards, and then Spunky Point—was undergoing an image upgrade, much to the consternation of its most famous son, John Hay, the former Warsaw
Signal
delivery boy, who would grow up to become Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and later, secretary of state. “I lived at Spunky Point on the Mississippi river,” Hay later wrote,

so named because some Indian rode by Fort Edwards on a spunky horse. This is a graphic and characteristic title of geographical significance, but some idiots just before I was born, who had read Miss Porter’s novel “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” thought Warsaw would be more genteel, so we are Nicodemussed [reduced by timidity] into nothingness for the rest of time.

I hope every man who is engaged in this outrage is called Smith in heaven.

The novice newspaper owner Sharp declared his ambition “to please ourselves, pursuing an independent and unyielding course; on the one hand battling with tyranny in all its forms . . . and on the other upholding the high and lofty principles of republicanism and equal rights.” Like many prominent Illinois citizens, including Abraham Lincoln, Sharp was active in his local Washingtonian Society, which inveighed against alcohol and all “intoxicating drinks.”

Like the Signal’s previous owner, Sharp had no strong opinions about the Mormons, who were flooding into Nauvoo, just eighteen miles north of Warsaw. He noted the legislature’s passage of the liberal Nauvoo Charter with equanimity. Just a few days later, Sharp editorialized on Joseph’s call to the world’s Mormons to “gather” in Nauvoo. “Whatever may be thought of the tenets of this sect,” Sharp wrote in a January, 20, 1840, editorial, “it is certainly an imposing spectacle to witness the moral power which in so short a period they have exerted. . . . Already in obedience to this call, thousands have left their homes in Europe, and thousands are now preparing to leave and take up residence in a far distant land.” He called the Mormons “that persecuted people” and even mentioned that he had been accused of partiality to the Saints.

Sharp and Joseph Smith had never met, but Joseph certainly appreciated the power of a favorable press. He invited Sharp to the April 6 celebration, saving him a seat on the reviewing platform, and assigned him a groom to care for his horse. The groom, Norton Jacobs, later regretted waiting on “the mean hypocritical human.” Like Keokuk and many others, Sharp enjoyed a turkey dinner that Joseph laid on for his special guests at the Nauvoo Mansion.

Perhaps it was something he ate. “I believe [Sharp] here imbibed that spirit of rancor which since has been so freely manifested against the Saints,” Jacobs wrote, “for he envied that majesty and magnanimity which he had not the honesty and courage to emulate.” Whatever the case, by the late spring of 1841, after seeing the serried ranks of Joseph’s military might on the Nauvoo parade ground, Sharp turned against the Saints, with a vengeance.

The young Thomas Sharp would prove to be a formidable enemy. He was intelligent, eloquent, and seemingly tireless in his efforts to blacken the name of Joseph Smith and his followers. He carefully monitored the Saints’ newspapers and apparently had some informants in Nauvoo. Within just a few months, he became a determined, professional Mormon-hater. “He was more dreaded and hated by the whole Mormon tribe than any other anti-Mormon in the county,” Sharp’s contemporary, editor Thomas Gregg recalled.

The editorials of the

were extensively copied into other papers throughout the country, and from their pugnacious and violent character, people at a distance were led to believe that “Old Tom Sharp” was a perfect walking arsenal, his person bristling with Bowie knives and pistols. Who would rather fight than eat.

In reality, Gregg insisted that Sharp was a “mild-mannered, good natured and rather conservative individual.”

Sharp first criticized the Mormons, gently, in a lengthy dispatch one month after the Saints’ parade. He reported, perhaps correctly, that “great dissatisfaction exists at Nauvoo amongst those who have lately arrived from England.” Then Sharp offered a broader critique of the Saints’ political ambitions in Illinois. The Mormons, he opined, had stepped “beyond the proper sphere of religious denomination and become a political body.” Sharp insisted that he honored the Saints’ religious beliefs but was “bound to oppose the concentration of political power in a religious body, or in the hands of a few individuals.”