American Crucifixion (21 page)

THOMAS FORD WAS THE ACCIDENTAL GOVERNOR OF ILLINOIS. A short man with a high forehead and a sallow complexion, he was a modestly distinguished jurist who had twice been elected as a state judge. Ford was sitting on the state supreme court when the Democrats nominated him for the governorship in 1841. Adam Snyder, the party’s first choice, had died unexpectedly. Ford claimed he never aspired to higher office, and he may have been telling the truth.

Illinois divided its votes between the Democrats, the party of the popular former president Andrew Jackson, and the insurgent, modernizing Whigs. The Mormons, who voted en bloc for the party that best suited their needs at the time, had been leaning Democratic, partly because Smith had become infatuated with the ambitious young legislator Stephen Douglas. As a young state supreme court justice, Douglas had helped Joseph out of a jam, voiding a warrant for his arrest issued by a Missouri court. Joseph didn’t forget his friends, and Douglas didn’t forget that Mormons accounted for several thousand votes in Hancock County. Douglas took the time to visit Nauvoo, praising the Mormons for their energy and enterprise in transforming the swamp into one of Illinois’s largest cities. Smith pretended to remain neutral in Illinois factional feuds, but he clearly had a soft spot for the feisty, five-foot-four “Little Giant” who would soon vie for the presidency against his fellow Illinois legislator, Abraham Lincoln. “DOUGLAS is a
master spirit
, and
his friends are our friends
,” Smith proclaimed.

Thomas Ford was no Stephen Douglas. He was a tortured soul. Though only forty-one years old when elected governor, “he appeared like a man weary of human nature and of life,” one contemporary reported. The Illinois governorship, Ford thought, “was feeble and clothed with but little authority.” In his posthumously published
History of Illinois,
Ford derided the state’s successful pols, said to carry “a gourd of possum fat” with which to grease colleagues and constituents. Ford ridiculed 1830 gubernatorial candidate William Kinney, who “went forth electioneering with a Bible in one pocket and a bottle of whiskey in the other; and thus armed with ‘the sword of the Lord and the spirit’ he could preach to one set of men and drink with another, and thus make himself agreeable to all.” Kinney’s glad hand did not meet Thomas Ford’s approval. “Thank God such scenes are no more to be witnessed in Illinois,” he wrote, disdainfully. (Kinney lost the election.)

By contrast, Ford saw himself in the company of John Tyler and James Polk, two other politicians catapulted into office by happenstance. President Tyler, he noted, “was accidentally made vice-president by the Whigs, and accidentally became president, by the death of Gen. Harrison.” Tyler, derided by contemporaries as “his accidency,” exerted “no moral force,” Ford wrote, doubtless thinking of the many accusations of pusillanimity hurled at him. Ford, like Tyler, was a Democrat-turned-Whig, and somewhat indifferent to party politics. “Neither Tyler nor Polk had much distinguished themselves in their respective parties,” Ford said, and “so it was with the humble person who was now to be elected governor of Illinois.”

This was not exactly a ringing self-endorsement.

Ford’s many detractors suggested that he had the short man’s inferiority complex. He stood only five feet, five inches tall, making him the butt of the unflattering Mormon rhyme: “Governor Ford he was so small / He had no room for a Soul at all.” (In a dream, Brigham Young once saw “Tom Ford about 2 1/2 feet high.”) Worse yet, he spoke in a squeaky voice, and his sharp nose canted slightly to one side. Ford was “so wholly wanting in self-confidence and practical business sense that he was an utter failure as a lawyer,” memoirist John F. Snyder reported. Ford experienced a near-breakdown at his own inauguration ceremony, in front of the Illinois General Assembly: “He read but a small way when his voice failed, and he sunk down on the seat or table on which he was standing.” Another man picked up his notes and finished the speech. This and other embarrassing shortfalls were ascribed to his fondness for drink. Snyder said Ford consumed “artificial courage to fortify his feeble animation. . . . He had recourse to stimulants, which grew to a confirmed and ruinous habit.”

A competent writer who hoped to enrich his family with his prolix
History
, Ford occasionally demonstrated sound judgment. When the Prairie Pirates, the notorious Illinois banditti of the 1820s threatened his Ogle County home, Ford supported the vigilante “regulators” who brought the outlaws to justice, usually at the end of a rope. Ford presided over the mass trial of the hundred vigilantes who executed John Driscoll and his son in cold blood. The good citizens, many of them Ford’s prosperous neighbors, were acquitted, with nary an objection from the bench.

Before and after the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Ford correctly perceived that there would be no peace in southwestern Illinois until the Mormons departed. Yet he could be maddeningly obtuse. He wrote that Joseph Smith had been accused of “sanctioning a polygamy by some kind of spiritual wife system, which I never could well understand.” With hundreds of rowdy militiamen crowding the streets of Carthage and Warsaw, Ford often chose to believe the old settlers’ protestations of innocent intentions vis-à-vis the Mormons—bristling muskets notwithstanding.

In fairness, Ford assumed a heavy burden when he defeated the fire-breathing Mormon-hater Joseph Duncan for the governorship. (Joseph Smith named his horse “Joe Duncan,” and took great pleasure in whipping it.) The state was $313,000 in debt. Its warrants were selling at a 50 percent discount, “and there was no money in the treasury whatever; not even to pay postage on letters.” There was worse news, Ford wrote:

The treasury was bankrupt; the revenues were insufficient; the people were unwilling and unable to pay high taxes; and the State had borrowed itself out of all credit. A debt of near fourteen millions of dollars had been contracted for the canal, railroads and other purposes. The currency of the state had been annihilated.

In June 1844, Ford was facing what looked like a civil war in Hancock County, with hourly reports of old settlers forming militias bent on marching into Nauvoo. Like everyone, he knew that the well-outfitted Nauvoo Legion drilled constantly and seemed ready and eager to meet any threat with powder and cannon fire. Ford decided to insert himself into the festering chaos. For seven days in June, he moved the governor’s office to Carthage, at the epicenter of Hancock County’s anti-Mormon fervor.

Ford fancied himself to be an honest broker to the warring factions. He did have a tenuous claim to objectivity; in the governor’s race, Ford hadn’t courted Mormon votes. He once suggested that Joseph Smith was “a water witch,” referring to the old dowsing days in upstate New York, and on the campaign trail he urged revision or repeal of Nauvoo’s overgenerous charter. The Saints voted for him anyway, Duncan’s anti-Mormon theatrics being more than they could bear. Ford won the governorship by a comfortable margin, and, unlike the Stephen Douglases of the world, felt no need to kowtow to the Saints.

At the same time, the Pecksniffian Ford had disdained the Hancock natives, whom he well remembered from his days of judicial circuit-riding, trying cases downstate. “The early settlers,” he wrote, “were, in popular language, ‘hard cases.’” Ford was a snob who had no use for the crude, bigoted, violence-prone “mobocrats” who persecuted the Saints, it sometimes seemed, just because they were there.

For the Mormons, however, Ford proved to be the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Trying to avert a civil war, he displayed an unerring instinct for doing the wrong thing, and for misreading evidence right under his nose. He wasn’t particularly decisive, and almost every decision he made in June 1844 proved to be the wrong one.

CARTHAGE, ILLINOIS, WAS THE SEAT OF HANCOCK COUNTY. ITS founders hailed from Carthage, Tennessee, and named the nascent village for their hometown. Carthage had been surveyed just a year or two before Nauvoo, but was tiny by comparison. The immigrating Saints had swollen Nauvoo’s population to about 10,000. In the summer of 1844, it was the same size as the infant Chicago, which would quickly become one of the largest cities in the country. Carthage, located smack in the center of the county, had fewer than a thousand residents and not much to show for itself: a few stores, a handful of saloons, and the clapboarded, two-story-tall Hamilton House hotel, operated by Artois Hamilton and his family. The scalawag Isaac Galland, who sold the Mormons their dubiously titled Nauvoo real estate, briefly published the
Carthagenian
newspaper, which failed within a year. An 1837 gazetteer reported that Carthage had small congregations of Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists: “What is perhaps worthy of remark, they all hold meetings in the same house.”

Since 1839, Carthage had one feature to boast about—its new courthouse, erected in the middle of the village green. The circuit court met for one week in May and one week in October, and the circuit-riding attorneys, their clients, and hangers-on guaranteed full occupancy at Hamilton’s hotel. The courthouse had seen one trial of note:
People v. William Fraim
. Fraim, a twenty-one-year-old Irish deckhand, had killed a man in a drunken brawl in neighboring Schuyler County. In 1839, the thirty-year-old novice lawyer Abraham Lincoln was prospecting for work outside his base in the state capital, Springfield, when he happened upon Fraim’s case. The one-day trial ended badly for Lincoln, and for Fraim. A judge sentenced the young Irishman to hang, ignoring Lincoln’s subsequent motion to set aside the verdict.

Fraim’s execution was a huge event in tiny Carthage. The citizens erected a gallows in a field about a mile outside of town, so the maximum number of spectators could attend. Schools let out for the day, and families gathered at the hanging with food and picnic blankets. In the three weeks since his trial, Fraim had become a local celebrity. Because Carthage had no jail, he was imprisoned in the second-floor jury room of the town’s new courthouse. His windows faced the schoolyard, and Fraim made many friends among the young children frolicking during recess. By all accounts, they were sorry to lose him.

Although no murders had come to trial in the intervening years, Carthage did remedy its lack of a jail. By June 1844, the town had built a compact, two-story prison, with split-level quarters for a jailer and his family, as well as locked dungeon cells.

After the destruction of the
Expositor
, Carthage was rapidly becoming an armed camp. Joseph Smith’s prediction that anti-Mormon “excitement” would come to Hancock County was borne out by his journal: “2 Brothers arrived from Carthage this eve and said about 300 mobbers were collected in Carthage to come upon Nauvoo”; “Brother from Bear Creek come and made affidavit before Recorder that 150 Missourians were to cross to Warsaw next morning on way to Carthage”; “It was reported the Mob was still gathering at Carthage and that William and Wilson Law had laid a plan to burn the printing office of Nauvoo
Neighbor
this night and strong police were on duty.”

In neighboring Warsaw, Joseph’s fiery enemy Thomas Sharp was filling his newspaper with equally disturbing reports. Sharp insisted that Hyrum Smith had threatened his life and that he planned to march on Warsaw and sack the
Signal
the way the Saints had trashed the
Expositor
. “A rumor is afloat that the Mormons have melted the type of the Expositor office and converted them into bullets”; “We have just learned that Joe has ordered all his followers into Nauvoo. The settlements around are with all despatch obeying the order.”

To our friends at a distance we say come! We are too weak in the county without aid to effect our object. Come! You will be doing your God and your country service, in aiding us to rid earth of a most Heaven daring wretch.

Just as he had spies inside William Law’s insurgent group, Joseph also had a spy in Carthage. He sent a young Mormon named Gilbert Belnap to attend an anti-Mormon rally, probably because Belnap had just arrived in Nauvoo and was a stranger in Hancock County. But the Carthaginians were watching the Nauvoo road like hawks, and three men interrogated Belnap on the outskirts of town, asking him his business. The young man claimed he needed to visit the recorder’s office, and the thugs followed him there. Inside, a “low-bred backwoodsman from Missouri” started boasting about the Mormon men he had killed and women whom he had forced into prostitution. A knife emerged, a scuffle ensued. Eventually, Belnap was allowed to attend the anti-Mormon rally, revealing his true mission when he galloped out of town just moments after it ended. A small mob of pursuers failed to catch him, and Belnap rode hell for leather until his horse collapsed in the mud near the Nauvoo Temple. Breathless and filthy, he ran to the Nauvoo Mansion to report directly to Joseph.

In his newspaper, Sharp gleefully related that soldiers from Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa were answering his call, all of them bent on finishing off the Mormons. “Captain [William] Grover last week obtained from Quincy 59 muskets,” according to the June 19 edition of the
Signal
. “D.W. Mathews, who was sent last Saturday to St. Louis, has just returned by the Die Vernon [steamboat],” the paper added. “He has succeeded in procuring cannon, and has brought up a good supply of ammunition. . . . We expect a six pounder tomorrow night from Quincy.” Warsaw, just twenty miles southwest of Carthage, had mobilized its three-hundred-man militia, under Colonel Levi Williams.