American Crucifixion (19 page)

The Illinois constitution was no help. “The printing presses shall be free to every person,” the statute read, “and no law shall ever be made to restrain the right thereof.” The field of common law torts held out hope, specifically William Blackstone’s famous four-volume
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
published in 1826. Joseph Smith, who occasionally made sport of the legal profession, loved Blackstone, and believed the
Commentaries
had a totemic effect on the lawless frontier. When Elder Erastus Snow was hoping to avoid imprisonment by a Missouri judge, Joseph advised him to “plead for justice as hard as you can, and quote Blackstone and other authors now and then, and they will take it all for law.” It worked. Blackstone was commonly cited in courtrooms across the young United States, and the renowned jurist directly addressed the question of abating nuisances:

Whatsoever unlawfully annoys or does damage to another is a nuisance; and such nuisance may be abated, that is, taken away or removed, by the party aggrieved thereby, so as he commits no riot in the doing of it. . . .

In a footnote, Blackstone conveniently explained that a newspaper could constitute a “private nuisance”: “So it seems that a libelous print or paper, affecting a private individual, may be destroyed, or, which is the safer course, taken and delivered to a magistrate.” Immediately after invoking Blackstone, Hyrum Smith opined that best way to deal with the
Expositor
would be “to smash the presses all to pieces and pie [scatter] the type.” Soon afterward, the council adopted the fateful resolution:

To the marshal: “You are hereby commanded to destroy the printing press from whence issues the Nauvoo Expositor, and pi the type of said printing establishment in the street, and burn all the Expositors and libelous handbills found in said establishment; and if resistance be offered to your execution of this order by the owner or others, demolish the house: and if anyone threatens you or the Mayor or the officers of the city, arrest those who threaten you, and fail not to execute this order without delay, and make due return thereon.”

By order of the City Council,

JOSEPH SMITH, MAYOR

Even before the council disbanded at 6:00 p.m., Chief of Police Jonathan Dunham and City Marshal John Greene, leading a force of over one hundred men armed with muskets, knives, and pistols, converged on the Laws’ two-story brick office on Mulholland Street. Chauncey Higbee and Charles Foster were present, and they put up no resistance as the mayor’s men methodically trashed the interior of the newly constructed brick building. “All was done in perfect order,” a Dr. Wake-field testified at a subsequent inquest that cleared everyone of any misdoing, “as peaceably as people move on a Sunday.”

While two companies of the Nauvoo Legion kept watch, the police posse began applying sledgehammers to the printing press. Foster recorded the “work of destruction and desperation”:

They tumbled the press and materials into the street, and set fire to them, and demolished the machinery with sledge hammer, and injured the building very materially. We made no resistance; but looked on and felt revenge, but leave it for the public to avenge this climax of insult and injury.

After destroying William Law’s $2,000 letterpress, the whooping Mormon mob tossed every combustible they could find—office furniture, type drawers, spare copies of the
Expositor
—into the street, and lit a bonfire. Nauvoo’s prospects for an independent political voice went up in smoke.

After sundown, the bumptious crowd headed through the center of town for the Nauvoo Mansion, to be congratulated by Joseph. “I gave them a short address [and] told them they had done right,” the Prophet noted. “They had executed my order required of me by the city council that I would never submit to have another libelous publication established in this city.” His speech “was loudly greeted by 3 cheers 3 times,” he recalled. Then “the posse dispersed all in good order.”

Meanwhile, Robert Foster and William Law had spent the day in Carthage, discussing the situation in Nauvoo. The locals urged Law to move his independent newspaper to Carthage, as it was sure to be destroyed in Nauvoo. “I did not believe it,” he wrote in his diary. He believed it when he rode back into Nauvoo, and his horse’s hooves passed over the fragments of lead type lying in the muddy street. “We rode over our type, and over our broken office furniture,” he recalled.

The work of Joseph’s agents had been very complete; it had been done by a mob of about 200. The building, a new, pretty brick structure, had been perfectly gutted, not a bit had been left of anything.

JOSEPH HAD OVERSTEPPED. THE ATTACK ON THE NEWSPAPER, coupled with his other startling démarches in early 1844, were costing him loyalty. Missionary Isaac Scott wrote a long letter to his wife’s parents in Sutton, Massachusetts, detailing the outlandish happenings in Nauvoo:

A plurality of gods. A plurality of

wives. . . . These with many other things are taught by Joseph, which we consider are

and doctrines of the devil.

“Joseph had a revelation last summer,” Scott continued, “purporting to be from the Lord, allowing the Saints to have ten living wives at one time.

I mean certain conspicuous characters among them. They do not content themselves with young women, but have seduced married women. I believe hundreds have been deceived. Now should I yield up your daughter to such wretches?

Scott related how Joseph had excommunicated the Law brothers and Austin Cowles and “delivered [them] over to the buffetings of Satan” without any due process whatsoever. Then,

Joseph called his Sanhedrin together, . . . tried the press and ordered the city marshal to take three hundred armed men and go burn the press, and if any offered resistance, to rip them from the guts to the gizzard. These are his own words.

The reaction outside Nauvoo was far more intense. Joseph had told the City Council that destroying the
Expositor
would “excite our enemies abroad.” He was right. Joseph had handed his enemies a mortal weapon to wield against him, and they did.

Thomas Sharp sprang into action. He threw an “extra” edition of the Warsaw
Signal
onto his presses, trumpeting Charles Foster’s on-the-scene account of the trashing of the
Expositor:

Mr. Sharp:—I hasten to inform you of the UNPARALLELED OUTRAGE, perpetrated upon our rights and interests, by the ruthless, lawless, ruffian band of MORMON MOBOCRATS, a the dictum of that UNPRINCIPLED wretch Joe Smith.

Foster provided a gripping account of the attack, and Sharp immediately unleashed his ire:

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 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 the trespass that Sharp and the Hancock County Mormon-haters had been waiting for. Inflamed citizens swarmed mass meetings in Carthage, Warsaw, and the surrounding towns. Then news arrived that Joseph Smith had yet again escaped arrest for a crime. When Francis Higbee swore out a complaint accusing Joseph of inciting a riot to destroy the
Expositor
, the Carthage court sent Constable David Bettisworth to Nauvoo to arrest Smith. Similar gambits had failed in the past, and this one did, too. A local justice of the peace simply vacated Higbee’s motion. “Court decided that Joseph Smith had acted under proper authority in destroying the establishment of the Nauvoo Expositor on the 10th inst.,” the order read; “that this was a malicious prosecution on the part of Francis M. Higbee; and that said Higbee pay the costs of suit, and that Joseph Smith be honorably discharged from the accusations and of the writ, and go hence without delay.”

The next day, Joseph himself, ruling as chief of the Nauvoo Municipal Court, acquitted the other seventeen men accused of attacking the newspaper.

When Bettisworth returned to Carthage empty-handed, the city was dumbfounded. “Joseph has tried the game too often,” one citizen grumbled. The hapless constable journeyed to Nauvoo a second time, again butted heads with Mormon justice, and lost again. Local magistrate Daniel Wells, a Jack-Mormon, or Mormon sympathizer, who owned a farm next door to Joseph’s, tossed out a second riot charge.

The Mormons continued to manufacture their own justice, and it enraged the old settlers. In Carthage, Captain Samuel Williams of the Carthage Greys said the old citizens were apoplectic with rage: “Such an excitement have never witnessed in my life.” Seven hundred irate citizens jammed the town green for an anti-Mormon rally, railing against “the mad Prophet and his demoniac coadjutors.” The word “extermination” was again ringing from the rafters.

The three hundred anti-Mormons who assembled in nearby Warsaw resolved that Smith had “violated the highest privilege in government; and to seek redress in the ordinary mode would be utterly ineffectual.” The time had come to “exterminate the wicked and abominable Mormon leaders, the authors of our troubles . . . a war of extermination should be waged to the entire destruction, if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.”

Documents adopted in both Carthage and Warsaw demanded that the Mormons of Hancock County be herded into the Nauvoo city limits and forced to turn over “the Prophet and his miscreant adherents. . . . If not surrendered, a war of extermination should be conducted.” Every man in the county should “each one arm and equip ourselves forthwith.” The second Mormon War had begun.

I have got all the truth which the Christian world possessed, and an independent revelation in the bargain, and God will bear me off triumphant.

ON SATURDAY, JUNE 15, JOSEPH SMITH DISCERNED THE FIRST stirrings of the popular revolt set off by the burning of the
Expositor
offices. “Two brethren come from Lima,” he recorded in his diary. “Said Colonel Levi Williams had demanded the Mormons’ arms. Father Morley wanted to know what to do.”

Isaac Morley was a veteran of the Missouri troubles and Joseph’s stake president in Lima, an exposed Mormon settlement thirty miles south of Nauvoo. Levi Williams was a prosperous farmer and belligerent Mormon-hater who owned a 113-acre farm south of Warsaw. Williams had legitimate military credentials. A veteran of the War of 1812, he served as a ranger in Illinois’s Black Hawk War against the local Indian tribes. He had risen to command the Fifty-ninth Regiment of the Illinois militia, headquartered in Warsaw. Williams despised the Saints, whom he viewed as unwanted interlopers in an otherwise peaceful corner of the world. In 1843, Williams led a mob that kidnapped an accused Mormon horse thief and dragged him into Missouri for trial. Joseph in turn ordered his police force to kidnap the kidnappers, an idea that foundered two miles short of Williams’s farm, which proved to be too well defended for the Saints to attack. The excitable Williams once tarred and feathered a militiaman who refused to join a vigilante raid against the Saints.

According to Morley’s letter, Williams’s outriders presented the Lima Saints with three options: “We, the Mormon people, must take up arms and proceed with them for your arrest, or take our effects and proceed immediately to Nauvoo, otherwise give up our arms, and remain quiet until the fuss is over.”

Joseph counseled Morley to “Instruct the companies to keep cool, and let all things be done decently and in order.”

If the mob shall fall upon the Saints by force of arms, defend them at every hazard unless prudence dictate the retreat of the troops to Nauvoo, in which case the mob will not disturb your women and children; and if the mob move towards Nauvoo, either come before them or in their rear and be ready to co-operate with the main body of the Legion.

Separately, Joseph learned of “considerable excitement” in Warsaw, which had just received a shipment of arms from Quincy. Joseph confided to his diary that the real excitement would probably begin next week.

Joseph then took a moment to indulge in an un-Joseph-like pursuit. He spent some time alone in his second-floor office examining Benjamin West’s famous painting “Death on the Pale Horse,” which was touring the United States. “A Gentleman is now in our city who has for exhibition West’s painting of
Death on the Pale Horse
,” the
Nauvoo Neighbor
reported. “Judging from the known celebrity of the artist, and from the number of testimonies we have seen, it must be worthy of attention.” It would be hard to explain how the masterpiece found its way to Nauvoo,
if
it found its way to Nauvoo. The painting did tour outside of Philadelphia and New York, but Joseph may have been staring at a copy.