American Crucifixion (25 page)

As Joseph and the Saints settled in to their first night as prisoners, Emma Smith received a brief letter from her husband:

DEAR EMMA.—I have had an interview with Governor Ford, and he treats us honorably. Myself and Hyrum have been again arrested for treason because we called out the Nauvoo Legion but when the truth comes out we have nothing to fear. We all feel calm and composed.

Joseph mentioned that Ford planned to send some militia to Nauvoo, “to protect the citizens,” and doubtless to keep an eye on the Nauvoo Legion as well. Smith expressed the wish that the Illinois troops “be kindly treated. . . . I do hope the people of Nauvoo will continue pacific and prayerful.”

One of Joseph’s voluntary cell mates was Dan Jones, a short, wiry Welsh riverboat captain who was a recent convert to Mormonism. In April 1843, Jones agreed to ferry two hundred British Saints from New Orleans on a perilous trip up to Nauvoo, where chunks of ice still clogged the Mississippi. Greeting his people on the pier, Joseph broke into tears when he learned how bad weather repeatedly threatened Jones’s pocket-sized steamer. “Bless this little man!” Joseph exclaimed upon meeting the doughty captain, who quickly agreed to be baptized, and to allow Smith to buy half ownership of the
Maid of Iowa
. Now Jones had chosen to face death with his Prophet and his colleagues, whom Jones found remarkably composed. The Mormons spent “the first night of our imprisonment in pleasant conversation about ‘the secret of godliness,’” he remembered. “I had never seen them so cheerful and so heavenly minded, nor had I before thought that Carthage jail was the gate of paradise.”

THE NEXT DAY, WEDNESDAY, BEGAN UNEVENTFULLY. AT 7:00 A.M., Stigall moved his family and relocated his guests to his own upstairs bedroom, which had a bed, mattresses for Stigall’s children, a writing desk and chairs, and curtained windows. John Taylor remembered that Stigall “and his wife, manifested a disposition to make us as comfortable as they could.” The Stigalls shared their ample meals with their Mormon guests, eating at the same table, and charging them for board.

Joseph regaled his cell mates with two of his dreams. The first one, in which he was trapped in a pit by the perfidious Laws, he had shared with the Saints the previous week. In the second dream, he saved a foundering ship “by wadeing through the foaming surf and leading her out into the open sea,” his cell mate Jones recalled. “The interpretation he gave, I believe was the stranding of the great ship ‘Uncle Sam’ owing to rejecting a safe Pilot.” Separately, Jones recalled, Joseph “gave frequent intimations that he would soon gain his liberty, and soar on high beyond the ‘rage of mobs and angry strife.’”

Jones decided to work on the bedroom door, which had no lock. Wielding a pen knife—Stigall’s searches were cursory indeed—Jones was trying to fashion a crude latch for the upstairs door, without much luck. Leaning out of the windows, Joseph, Hyrum, and several other Mormons preached scripture to the guards. The official church history, compiled many years later, reports that several Greys left their posts, convinced of the prisoners’ innocence. There were no independent reports of such converts.

Just before 10:00 a.m., Governor Ford and militia colonel Thomas Geddes arrived at the jailhouse for a forty-five-minute interview with Joseph. The governor and the Prophet restated their set positions at some length. Ford outlined the cases against Joseph, his spurious use of the Nauvoo courts to escape prosecution, and again condemned his ill-advised attack on the newspaper, “the great bulwark of American freedom.” Joseph invoked Blackstone, “one of the most eminent English barristers,” to justify his actions against the “foul, noisome, filthy sheet.” He offered to make restitution to the Law brothers for their lost investment, which drew no response from Ford.

The governor repeated that he couldn’t interfere with the administration of justice and mentioned his plans to travel to Nauvoo the next day, to assure himself that the town was safe. He promised to take Joseph with him if he did.

With Ford preparing to leave the cell, Joseph said, “Governor Ford, I shall look to you for protection.”

“And you shall have protection, General Smith,” Ford answered. “I do not, however, apprehend danger. I think you are perfectly safe either here or anywhere else.”

Geddes later said that Ford vented his frustration with the Prophet after the two men left the jail and ambled back to the center of town. “It’s all nonsense!” Ford exclaimed. “You will have to drive these Mormons out yet!”

“If we undertake that, governor, when the proper time comes, will you interfere?”

“No, I will not,” Ford said, and added after a pause: “Until you are through.”

After lunch, Captain Robert Smith summoned Joseph and Hyrum to the courthouse. The call subjected the Mormons to yet another harrowing trip through the armed mob gathered around the jail.

Leaving his cell, Joseph “walked boldly into the midst of a hollow square of the Carthage Greys. . . . Evidently expecting to be massacred in the streets before arriving at the Court House, [he] politely locked arms with the worst mobocrat he could see.” His brother and Willard Richards followed suit, and the three of them stumbled across the town square together, clinging to their tormentors for dear life. The taunts came fast and furious:

“Now Old Joe, if you are a prophet, how did you come to the jail like this?”

“Oh, if Joe were a prophet, he would soon call for a legion of angels and we would all be killed, and he would escape.”

Years later, Dan Jones saw echoes of Christ’s Passion story in Joseph’s torments: “One was forcibly reminded of the taunting and jeering of the Jews to our holy and meek Redeemer, so similar did their words and actions prove their spirits to be.”

The scene at the courthouse was brief. Joseph’s lawyers argued for a continuance, hoping to free their client in the interim. His attorney, Woods, noted that his client had been “committed to jail without any examination whatsoever.” Ominously, two of Joseph’s enemies, Chauncey Higbee and the lawyer-editor Thomas Sharp, appeared for the prosecution, arguing for a speedy trial. When Joseph left the courthouse, he thought he would return for a hearing the next day. But that night Robert Smith changed the date on what would prove to be the fateful warrant, from Thursday, June 27, to Saturday, June 29. A small detail, but one that ensured that Joseph and Hyrum Smith would remain imprisoned without a hearing for three days, instead of just one.

Just before supper, Joseph’s uncle John Smith came to visit the brothers in jail, having traveled over 150 miles from Macedonia, Illinois. The Greys guarding the jailhouse said they didn’t care who the old man was, he wasn’t coming in. Joseph argued on behalf of “so old and infirm a man,” and—after a thorough search—the Greys let him enter. When John Fullmer returned to the jail to spend the night with his friends, the surly guards rifled through the pockets of his overcoat. But they didn’t search his boots. Fullmer smuggled in a small, single-barreled pistol, which he gave to Hyrum.

That night, the five jailed men—the two Smiths, Fullmer, Richards, and Jones—went to bed late. When Joseph and Hyrum tumbled into the one bed, Richards, the official church historian, was still writing at the desk by candlelight. The men could hear disturbances from the street outside during the night: swearing, yelling, and eventually, a gunshot. The report woke Joseph up. He got out of bed and lay down on the floor between Jones and Fullmer. The three men started whispering, like campers trying not to wake others sleeping next to a campfire.

“I would like to see my family again,” Joseph said. “And I would to God that I could preach to the Saints in Nauvoo once more.” Fullmer assured him that all of them would make it home safely, and that Joseph would preach again, many times.

Richards finally joined Hyrum in the bed, and when everyone seemed to be asleep, Joseph turned his head to whisper to Jones.

“Are you afraid to die?” Joseph asked.

“Is it that time?” Jones replied. “Engaged in such a cause I do not think that death would have many terrors.”

Joseph answered, “You will yet see Wales, and fulfill the mission appointed you before you die.”

Within a year, Jones was back in Wales, preaching the Book of Mormon to potential converts. Five years later, he would escort a band of 250 Welsh men and women across the Atlantic, and then across the Great Plains to found the “Welsh settlement” in the Salt Lake Valley.

* The story of Joseph’s return from Montrose has different shadings, depending on who is telling it. After the widowed Emma refused to join Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints in Utah, the official church history blamed her for Joseph’s death: “It was the strong persuasions of Reynolds Cahoon, Lorenzo D. Wasson and Hiram Kimball, who were carrying out Emma’s instructions, that induced Joseph and Hyrum to start back to Nauvoo.”

* Mormon lore maintains that Joseph left his home without the protection of his sacred priesthood garment, worn by all Saints who receive their temple endowment. Contradictory accounts say that Emma had him remove the garment, or that Joseph hadn’t been wearing the muslin underclothing because of the summer heat. Many years later, Brigham Young claimed that Joseph told Willard Richards: “Willard, you will stand where the balls will fly around you like hail and men will fall dead by your side, and if you will never part with this garment there never shall a ball injure you.” Richards survived the assault on the Carthage jail.

* Some of the more dramatic, or quotable, episodes of Joseph’s martyrdom may have been interpolated into the official church history. In 1844, Isaac Scott wrote to his in-laws in Massachusetts: “You will likely hear a great deal about Joseph’s innocence, such as ‘I go as a lamb to the slaughter’ . . . All these statements, I believe, are false and got up for the purpose of reconciling the minds of the Church. I believe they had not the least idea that they were going to be murdered.”

Your friends shall be protected, and have a fair trial by the law. In this pledge I am not alone; I have obtained the pledge of the whole of the army to sustain me.

THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 1844, IN CARTHAGE, ILLINOIS, DAWNED rainy, humid, hot, and glum. Again, Joseph shared a dream with his cell mates. He dreamed that he was back in Kirtland, Ohio, where the Saints had gathered in 1831. He walked out to his old farm, “which I found grown up with weeds and brambles.” He ventured inside his dilapidated barn, when he was suddenly set upon by “a company of furious men [whose leader] ordered me to leave the barn and farm, stating it was none of mine, and that I must give up all hope of ever possessing it.” No, Joseph objected that the church had given him this farm. But his opponent refused to yield. “He then grew furious and began to rail upon me, and threaten me, and said it never did belong to me nor to the Church.

While he was thus engaged, pouring out his bitter words upon me, a rabble rushed in and nearly filled the barn, drew out their knives, and began to quarrel among themselves for the premises, and for a moment forgot me, at which time I took the opportunity to walk out of the barn about up to my ankles in mud.

When I was a little distance from the barn, I heard them screeching and screaming in a very distressed manner, as it appeared they had engaged in a general fight with their knives. While they were thus engaged, the dream or vision ended.

After relating his dream, Joseph asked Dan Jones to speak with the guards outside the jail, to find out what had woken him during the night. Franklin Worrell, a tall, strapping, twenty-five-year-old shopkeeper and assistant postmaster from Carthage, was commanding the six-man detachment of Greys. Worrell was gregarious and popular. Like Joseph, he had made many friends by extending credit to his customers. He was also an active anti-Mormon agitator, who, like his commander, Robert Smith, headed up a local correspondence committee that spread news of Mormon depredations, real and imagined. Worrell advised Jones not to worry about random noises in the night. “We have had too much trouble to bring Old Joe here to let him ever escape out alive,” Worrell continued, “and unless you want to die with him you better leave before sundown, and you are not a damned bit better than him for taking his part.”