American Crucifixion (34 page)

Browning’s assessment of the state’s case? “You would not hang a dog on such evidence.”

The next morning, Judge Young instructed the jury, and they returned a not guilty verdict immediately after lunch.

The leaders of the mob that killed Joseph Smith strode boldly out of the courtroom, free to resume their normal lives.

“AS WE ANTICIPATED,” BRIGHAM YOUNG NOTED IN HIS JOURNAL. “It would be a new thing under the sun for Satan’s Kingdom to bring to justice a man who has murdered a prophet of God.” The Saints’ official newspaper, the
Nauvoo Neighbor
, had barely covered the trial and “referred the case to God for a righteous judgment.” John Hay felt that “there was not a man on the jury, in the court, in the county, that did not know the defendants had done the murder. But it was not proven, and the verdict of not guilty was right in law.”

Had Lamborn thrown the case? Repudiating vast blocs of prosecution testimony seems unheard of, but judicial standards on the frontier circuit were often lax. Abraham Lincoln, an accomplished Illinois litigator, admitted he often placed witnesses on the stand with little idea as to what they might say. Perhaps the Carthage trial just wasn’t worthy of Lamborn’s best efforts, for a $100 fee and the possible risk of his life. As mentioned, Lamborn’s name was never free from the whiff of corruption. A contemporary, Usher Linder, said Lamborn was “wholly destitute of principle and shamelessly took bribes” when he was Illinois’s attorney general. “I know myself of his having dismissed forty or fifty indictments in the Shelbyville Court, and openly displayed the money he had received from defendants.”

Or perhaps Lamborn simply wasn’t up to the job. He died less than two years later, shaking his life away in an attack of delirium tremens after abandoning his wife and child.

Lamborn’s equivocal commitment to punishing Joseph Smith’s murderers surfaced when it came time to schedule the separate trial of Hyrum Smith’s killers. Fresh from their decisive acquittals, the defendants demanded a speedy follow-up to Lamborn’s courtroom debacle. Judge Young set a courtroom date for Tuesday, June 24.

Lamborn went through the motions of preparing his case. He subpoenaed ninety-three prosecution witnesses and assembled commitments from men and women who should have participated in the first trial, for example, jailer George Stigall and his wife, one of the guards under Worrell’s command, and several members of the Carthage Greys.

Judge Young traveled to Carthage on June 24 to gavel the trial of Hyrum’s murderers into session. Astonishingly, Lamborn never showed up. Young freed the defendants “for want of prosecution.”

Governor Ford, who had appointed Lamborn and promised the Mormons justice in the courtroom, threw up his hands. “No one would be convicted of any crime in Hancock,” he wrote. “Government was at an end there, and the whole community were delivered up to the dominion of a frightful anarchy.”

* The
Upper Mississipian
newspaper of Rock Island, Illinois, reported that a sheriff tried to execute a Nauvoo arrest warrant in Burlington, Iowa, for the Law brothers, the Fosters, and one of the Higbees, accusing them of complicity in the Smiths’ deaths. According to the report, William Law and the Foster brothers were briefly detained, challenged the validity of the warrant, and then disappeared. None of the men faced charges in Nauvoo, or elsewhere.

* A second account of a miraculous light surfaced in the journal of Mary Rollins Lightner, one of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Lightner reported meeting several militiamen returning from Carthage the day after the Smiths’ murder: “They told us that the Smiths were killed and that a great light appeared at their death. I said that should prove Joseph a true Prophet of God. O no, said one, it would only prove that God was well pleased with those that killed him.”

PART THREE

The death of the modern Mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism. They cannot get another Joe Smith. The holy city must tumble into ruins, and the “latter-day saints” have indeed come to the latter day.

—New York Herald,

THE COLD-BLOODED MURDERS OF JOSEPH AND HYRUM SMITH shocked both Mormons and Gentiles. For several months after the killings, an uneasy calm prevailed in Hancock County. Perhaps the anti-Mormon settlers experienced shame; whatever the case, it took almost a full year for hostilities to resume between the Mormons and their implacable Illinois enemies. But in the summer of 1844, the Saints faced a more pressing problem than the simmering hatred in Hancock County: Who would lead the church?

Joseph had built the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a formidable enterprise. For a short time in 1844, Nauvoo was the largest city in Illinois, with more than 10,000 residents. At least as many Saints again lived elsewhere in the United States, and in the ever-expanding British church. All of them looked to Nauvoo, and to Joseph, for leadership and religious revelation.

Replacing the Prophet would be no easy task. Joseph had often mentioned Hyrum, the church’s patriarch, as his logical successor, but Hyrum was dead. Within just days of the brothers’ assassination, it became clear that Joseph had mentioned many others, too—relatives, associates, apostates, and even his unborn son—as possible successors. In the early 1830s, Joseph had said that Oliver Cowdery, one of his first scribes, or David Whitmer, an original witness to the translation of the golden plates, would be fit to take over the church. He had also named Sidney Rigdon, the fiery preacher with whom Joseph experienced several joint revelations, as a likely successor. In his own family, he had blessed his teenage son Joseph III in January 1844, and had suggested his brother Samuel and even David Hyrum, born five months after Joseph’s death, as worthy prophets or revelators of the church. In fact, Joseph had delivered so many contradictory pronouncements that he had even included a zero option, prophesying in 1837 that the “keys” of the new dispensation could not be passed on until Jesus Christ returned to earth (Doctrine and Covenants 112:15).

To complicate matters, Joseph had dispatched almost all church leaders, including ten of the twelve apostles, across the United States to campaign for his presidential candidacy. The most powerful figures remaining in Nauvoo were Willard Richards, the badly wounded John Taylor, and stake president William Marks, the city’s senior religious leader. Marks was also president of the church’s High Council and a senior member of Joseph’s secret Council of Fifty. But the most powerful person in post-assassination Nauvoo was arguably a woman: Joseph’s widow, Emma Smith.

Emma enjoyed a special status in Nauvoo, partly stemming from her ceremonial role as the first lady of Mormonism and partly attributable to her benevolent intelligence and forceful personality. Emma functioned as the queen of the Mormons, attending public events attired in regal finery, riding sidesaddle on her favorite mare, or waving from a well-appointed carriage. She presided over the vast Nauvoo Mansion, the town’s social and political epicenter, where Joseph conducted much of his business. Emma had organized the women of Nauvoo into a Female Relief Society, over which she presided. Originally intended to raise funds to build the Nauvoo Temple, the Relief Society took on much broader obligations, such as monitoring morality in the fast-growing city. More than once, Emma launched investigations into reports of adultery or polygamy among her peers. Inevitably, the women concerned denied the shocking accusations, which were usually true. Most of the leading figures in the Relief Society, unbeknownst to Emma, had already sealed themselves to Joseph in secret matrimony.

Paradoxically, to pursue his many furtive marriages and assignations, Joseph Smith needed Emma and the cover story of a loving, monogamous marriage to validate the conservative morality of his Old Testament religion. Even though Emma had been informed of the polygamy revelation, and briefly acquiesced to some of Joseph’s secret sealings with young women, the public face of Mormonism espoused only monogamy. Thus, Joseph often declared that he had only one wife, the faithful, loving Emma. Polygamy remained a secret practice, heatedly denied in public forums. Moreover, Joseph transferred much of his wealth, most of it land owned on behalf of the church, to Emma. When he died, she immediately became one of Nauvoo’s wealthiest and most influential citizens, and also extremely protective of her fortune, and of her children’s legacy.

Emma hated polygamy. She hated the secrecy and of course resented the sexual humiliation visited on the first wives of all the Mormon leaders. “Secret things cost Joseph and Hyrum their lives,” she told her husband’s confederate William Clayton, adding, “I prophecy [
sic
] that it will cost you and the Twelve your lives as it has done them.” For the first month and a half after Joseph’s death, her loathing of plural marriage determined her preferences for a successor. Nauvoo immediately split into two rival political camps. On one side, Emma, William Marks, and Joseph’s erratic brother William Smith were lobbying for a church dominated by Joseph’s relatives, free from the doctrinal baggage of the past few years: the secret councils, the secret rituals, but most of all, the secret marriages. Marks opposed polygamy when the doctrine was first introduced to the City Council in 1843, and later claimed, unconvincingly, that Joseph intended to abolish plural wifery shortly before his death.

Arrayed against Marks, Emma, and William Smith were Richards, Taylor, and William Phelps, Joseph’s ghostwriter. These three were stalling for time, trying to delay key meetings and conferences until the influential apostles and their forceful president, Brigham Young, could return to Nauvoo from the campaign trail and make the case for a continuation of Joseph’s policies and theology.

Stake president Marks was widely respected, but uninterested in leading the Saints. That left Joseph’s two younger brothers—the ailing Samuel and the mercurial William, admittedly a fragile repository for his family’s succession claims. Tall, gaunt, of almost sepulchral appearance, William had worked hard to alienate his more successful older brother. “Lusty, hot tempered and always in debt,” William was among those who condemned Joseph as a “false prophet” while he was cooling his heels for six months in a Missouri jail. William opined that Joseph might do well to end his days there: “If I had the disposing of my brother, I would have hung him years ago.” On another occasion, William assaulted his brother after a particularly fierce debate. Joseph wrote of the “wickedness of his brother, who Cain-like had tried to kill him.” Joseph once instructed Brigham Young to excommunicate William, then thought better of it. (William would later be excommunicated by two separate Mormon churches in two years.) It was William who briefly edited the
Wasp
, the scandalous Nauvoo newspaper that accused Joseph’s enemies of “buggery,” and worse.