American Crucifixion (29 page)

biting her lips she motioned me to be seated by her side. I think for three minutes the silence was only broken by smothered sobs from various parts of the room during which time the pressure of her trembling hand & the heaving of her swollen bosom spoke as it were volumes to my heart. . . .

Finally, Joseph and Hyrum’s mother erupted. “How could they kill my boys?” Lucy burst out. “How could they kill them when they were so
precious
! I am sure they would not harm anybody in the world. There was poor Hyrum—what could they kill him for? He was always
mild
.”

Six months later, Lucy Smith began work on a lengthy memoir about her son Joseph Jr. She remembered the evening of June 28, “when I entered the room, and saw my murdered sons extended both at once before my eyes,

and heard the sobs and groans of my family, and the cries of “Father! Husband! Brothers!” from the lips of their wives, children, brother and sisters. It was too much. I sank back, crying to the Lord, in the agony of my soul, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken this family!”

The two coffins were borne into the mansion’s dining room, and the residence’s doors were locked. From the front stoop, Willard Richards delivered a short eulogy and begged the Saints to remain peaceful. The official church history records that “the people with one united voice resolved to trust to the law for a remedy of such a high-handed assassination, and when that failed, to call upon God to avenge them of their wrongs.” Richards invited the faithful to return the following morning for a public viewing of their slain leaders.

In the locked dining room, Nauvoo’s coroner, Dimick Huntington, his father, and stake president William Marks prepared the bodies to be shown. The three men washed the corpses thoroughly and filled the open wounds with cotton soaked in camphor. The official inventory of Joseph’s wounds was particularly grisly: He had been “shot in the right breast, under the heart, in the lower part of his bowels and the right side, and on the back part of the right hip.” In addition, there was an exit wound at his right shoulder blade.

The cosmetic work completed, the Huntingtons dressed the bodies in plain trousers, linen shirts, clean shorts, white neckerchiefs, and white cotton socks. The two coffins lay on a table pushed up against the dining room’s western windows, looking out over the Mississippi River.

Dimick Huntington then invited the families to enter the room.

Emma Smith, pregnant for the seventh time, staggered into the dining room, supported by two friends. The moment she saw Hyrum’s body, she fainted. Her friends forced a glass of water down her throat, but she fainted again and had to leave the room. Emma entered the dining room six times, each time unable to traverse the short stretch of floor to where her dead husband lay. Eventually, she gave up and sat down outside.

Hyrum’s widow, Mary Fielding Smith, then entered the room with her four children. “She trembled at every step,” Richmond reported,

and nearly fell, but reached her husband’s body, kneeling down by him, clasped her arms around his head, turned his pale face upon her heaving bosom, and then a gushing, plaintive wail burst forth from her lips: “Oh! Hyrum, Hyrum! Have they shot you, my dear Hyrum—are you dead, my dear Hyrum!”

Her grief seemed to consume her, and she lost all power of utterance. Her two daughters and two young children clung, some around her neck and some to her body, falling prostrate upon the corpse, and shrieking in the wildness of their wordless grief.

Aided now by Dimick Huntington, Emma walked into the dining room again. She placed her hand on Hyrum’s cold brow and said, “Now I can see him; I am strong now.” She knelt down next to Joseph’s coffin and clasped her hands around his face. Groaning, sighing, and sobbing, she cried out, “Joseph, Joseph, are you dead? Have the assassins shot you?”

Later in life, Joseph’s oldest son Joseph III recalled that “no other woman bowed beside the bodies of these brothers . . . as wives to mourn and exhibit their grief . . . save my mother at my father’s side and Aunt Mary at the side of my uncle Hyrum.” But the eleven-year-old boy who devoted his adult life to proving that his father had never practiced polygamy, apparently failed to see Lucinda Morgan Harris standing at the head of Joseph’s coffin. Three years older than Emma, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Harris was also sobbing and grief-stricken. Harris had been sealed to Joseph a few years before, while she was wed to George Harris, who chaired the City Council session that ordered the destruction of the
Nauvoo Expositor
. Lucinda had lost two husbands to mob violence. She had previously married the notorious anti-Masonic agitator William Morgan, whose body was found in Lake Ontario shortly after he published a lurid exposé of the ancient fraternal order. Lucinda Harris ended her life as a nun in the Catholic nursing order, the Sisters of Charity.

The next day found Nauvoo in mourning. Stores were closed and “every business forgotten,” according to Dan Jones. On the clear, hot and sunny Saturday, starting at 8:00 a.m., 10,000 Saints found their ways to the mansion and filed past the open coffins. White cambric lined the open boxes, which were covered with black velvet, fastened by brass nails. A square of glass, hinged at the head of each coffin, allowed mourners to see the faces of Joseph and Hyrum.

The scene was not for the faint of heart. “Joseph looks very natural except being pale through loss of blood,” William Clayton wrote in his diary. “Hyrum does not look so natural.” Richmond reported that by noon, Hyrum’s body had swollen so much that he couldn’t be recognized, “the neck and face forming one bloated mass,” and

blood continued to pour out of his wounds, which had been filled with cotton; the muscles relaxed and the . . . fluid trickled down on the floor and formed in puddles across the room.

Dan Jones, too, remembered seeing “the blood of the two godly martyrs mingling in one pool in the middle of the floor.” Many of the mourners left the room with the Smiths’ blood sticking to the soles of their shoes and boots.

To allay the stink of death, Huntington set a mixture of tar, vinegar, and sugar to boil on the mansion stove. It wasn’t particularly effective. The wounds were suppurating, and the bodies rotting in the summer heat.

The dining room resounded with weeping and moaning. Joseph was the Saints’ living, breathing, wrestling, drinking, sermonizing, truth-revealing champion. No one in Nauvoo didn’t know him. Almost every resident had bought something—a pinch of tobacco, a plot of land—at his redbrick store. Joseph had greeted thousands of Saints at the riverside landing slips, many of the believers at the end of harrowing trans-Atlantic or transcontinental journeys. Every Mormon man, woman, and child had stood or sat on a bench or tree stump for hours at a time in the grove, listening to Joseph’s speeches and sermons. Every Nauvoo resident had uprooted himself or herself, and their families, either because of Joseph Smith’s preaching or because they had read the sacred Book of Mormon he composed as a young man. As he instructed, they gathered to Zion to worship in the city of their Prophet. And now, inexplicably, in the prime of his vigorous life, at thirty-nine years old, he was dead.

Commingled with feelings of sadness and despair was an understandable lust for vengeance. When Porter Rockwell burst into William Clayton’s home in the early hours of June 28 to report the murders, Clayton quickly scribbled out a prayer of vengeance “upon the murderers of thy servants that they may be rid from off the earth.” At virtually the same moment, Wilford Woodruff, a future church president, uttered a prayer calling down vengeance on “the American gentile nation, upon all the heads of the Nation and the State that have aided, abetted, or perpetrated the horrid deed.”

Ten-year-old Mosiah Hancock later remembered how his father, Levi, led him into the room where Joseph and Hyrum were lying in state. Levi “told me to place one hand on Joseph’s breast and to raise my other arm and swear with hand uplifted that I would never make a compromise with any of the sons of hell, which vow I took with a determination to fulfill to the very letter.”

The little boy then laid his left hand on Hyrum’s chest and repeated the vow.

“Their dead bodies . . . gave me such feelings as I am not able to describe,” Allen Stout, one of Joseph’s bodyguards, wrote in his journal.

I there and then resolved in my mind that I would never let an opportunity slip unimproved of avenging their blood upon the head of the enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ . . . when I see one of the men who persuaded them to give up to be tried, I feel like cutting their throats.

And I hope to live to avenge their blood, but if I do not, I will teach my children to never cease to try to avenge their blood and then their children and children’s children to the fourth generation as long as there is one descendant of the murderers upon the earth.

The next year, President Brigham Young incorporated an “oath of vengeance” into the sacred endowment ritual administered to all faithful Mormons in the Nauvoo Temple:

You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.

The vengeance oath was to be kept secret, under penalty of death. “If any of you betray us you are traitors of course you must expect the penalties put in force [
sic
],” a church leader explained inside the temple. “I should not cut your throat but pray God to intervene to cut your own throat.”

The oath remained in the Mormons’ endowment ritual until 1927.

INDEED, THE GENTILE WORLD OUTSIDE WAS EXPECTING VENGEANCE from the Saints. Hancock County was trembling in anticipation of a counterstrike from the Nauvoo Legion. True, the Mormons had surrendered several hundred muskets earlier in the week, but subsequent events would prove that there was no shortage of firearms in the Mormon capital. Angry as they were, why didn’t the Saints fight back?

In principle, the Mormons were not squeamish about violence. When Missourians started attacking their farms during the Mormon War of 1838, the Saints struck back, hard. But when faced with overwhelming force, in the form of 2,500 Missouri militiamen, Joseph Smith realized that discretion was the better part of valor. Rather than see his followers annihilated, he agreed to a “peace on any terms short of battle.” The punitive cease-fire terms resulted in the seizure of most Mormons’ property—ostensibly, reparations for the Missourians’ costs in making war on the Saints—expulsion, and, for Joseph and five other Mormon leaders, six months in a nineteen-foot-square, earthen-floored jail cell.

That was the second time in his short career as a commander in chief that Joseph had prudently backed away from a fight. In 1834, he led a paramilitary troop of about two hundred Saints from Ohio into Missouri, on a mission he called “Zion’s Camp.” Joseph thought the Saints’ ragtag expeditionary force could teach the Missouri marauders a lesson, but he backed away from a battle, facing overwhelming odds. A cholera epidemic turned Zion’s Camp into an epochal disaster, but Joseph showed that he placed a high value on the lives of his Saints.

In retrospect, Willard Richards and John Taylor exercised good judgment by calming the martial passions of the Saints. Governor Ford may have thought that the Nauvoo Legion outnumbered his militias, but if so, that would not last long. In the event of a war, or even skirmishes, Thomas Sharp’s repeated calls for Mormon-killers from Iowa and Missouri to converge on Hancock County would fall on eager ears. Furthermore, there were suspicions that Joseph’s cockaded Legion preferred pageantry, like full-dress parades and stagy war games, to actual fighting. Ford feared the numbers of the Legion more than their martial arts. “All the field officers who accompanied me,” Ford commented, thought “that this legion is in no wise superior to the common militia, and that in fact they were inferior to most of the militia in the state.”

The Mormons in Nauvoo were rudderless. Joseph was the church, and Joseph was dead. Hyrum, one of his possible successors, had also died. As part of his vainglorious quest for the presidency, Joseph had sent ten of the twelve apostles across the United States to electioneer for him. The apostles’ de facto leader, Brigham Young, learned of Smith’s death only in mid-July while visiting a Mormon family in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He hurried back to Nauvoo, arriving just in time for a leadership conference three weeks later.

The Saints were experiencing an unprecedented, collective anguish. Joseph had been in tight spots before, especially with state authorities and their musket-toting enforcers. But somehow, he had always escaped. Friendly Saints would hide him in an outbuilding for a few weeks; he would find the right lawyer, or a sympathetic local judge would grant him his rights as a free American. Two Missouri governors repeatedly tried to capture him, yet he always managed to slip the noose. But this time Joseph wasn’t coming back, and many of the faithful experienced the loss as a body blow. Lucy Walker, one of Joseph’s plural wives, remembered a midnight rap on the door announcing Joseph and Hyrum’s deaths. “I seemed paralyzed with terror,” she recalled, and