Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  In July 1833 an armed mob of five hundred Missourians tarred and feathered two Latter-day Saints and destroyed a printing office because an LDS newspaper had published an article deemed overly sympathetic to the antislavery viewpoint. Three days later the same mob rounded up nine Mormon leaders and, under the threat of death, forced them to sign an oath promising to leave Jackson County within a year. That autumn, thugs razed ten homes, killed one Saint, and stoned numerous others.

  Then, one cold November night, vigilantes systematically terrorized every Mormon settlement in the region. After savagely beating the men, they drove twelve hundred Saints from their homes, forcing them to run for their lives into the frigid darkness. Most of them fled north across the Missouri River, never to return to Jackson County.

  Joseph deplored violence, and for the better part of five years he forbade the Mormons to retaliate, even though the attacks against them continued. But by the summer and fall of 1838, the tension between Gentiles and the ten thousand Saints who were by then in Missouri reached critical mass.

  In 1836 the Missouri legislature, hoping to relocate the Saints in an out-of-the-way place that would forestall bloodshed, had designated sparsely populated Caldwell County as a zone of Mormon settlement, prompting most of the Saints in Missouri to move there from adjacent, less-welcoming counties. By 1838 the Mormons had purchased some 250,000 acres in Caldwell County from the federal government and built a thriving town they christened Far West.

  At first the exodus to Caldwell County seemed to defuse the tension between Mormons and Gentiles. But in the summer of 1838 trouble erupted in neighboring Daviess County, where Mormons had spilled over the county line and begun establishing large new settlements. August 6 was Election Day in Missouri. That morning after the polls opened in Gallatin, the Daviess county seat, a Whig candidate for the state legislature, William Peniston, climbed on top of a barrel and bellowed to the rabble that Mormons were “horse thieves, liars, counterfeiters, and dupes.” Hoping to prevent the thirty or so Mormons present from casting their ballots, another Missourian then loudly opined that Mormons should no more have the right to vote “than the niggers.”

  The incendiary rhetoric provoked a drunk Missourian to beat up a diminutive Mormon shoemaker named Samuel Brown. When other Mormons came to Brown's aid, a vicious brawl broke out. Wielding clubs, rocks, whips, and knives, the badly outnumbered Saints managed to overcome the Missourians and drive them off, leaving dozens of their foes severely wounded. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The enraged citizens of Gallatin vowed to pay the Mormons back in kind.

  Over the next two months, Missourians launched a campaign of harassment and violence against the Mormon residents of Daviess County, forcing most of them from their homes. Finally, on October 14 in Far West, Joseph assembled several hundred of his followers in the town square and urged them to fight back. Seething, the prophet declared:

  We are an injured people. From county to county we have been driven by unscrupulous mobs eager to seize the land we have cleared and improved with such love and toil. We have appealed to magistrates, judges, the Governor, and even the President of the United States, but there has been no redress for us. . . .

  If the people will let us alone, we will preach the gospel in peace. But if they come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was “the Alcoran [Qur'an] or the Sword.” So shall it eventually be with us—“Joseph Smith or the Sword!”*

  It was an impassioned speech, and the Mormons responded. Venting years of pent-up anger, they began raiding Gentile towns and plundering food, livestock, and valuables, burning approximately fifty non-Mormon homes in the process.

  Outraged, Missourians retaliated with counterattacks, destroying several Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph's forceful call to arms, a skirmish resulted in the death of three Saints and one Gentile. Making matters even worse, the carnage from this fight was wildly exaggerated in an inflammatory letter to Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, wherein it was falsely reported that the Saints had slaughtered fifty Missourians. Upon reading this, Boggs—who had won the 1836 gubernatorial election on an anti-Mormon platform—issued a now-infamous order to the top-ranked general of the Missouri Militia: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state, if necessary for the public peace. Their outrages are beyond all description.”

  Days later, three companies of the Missouri Militia, commanded by Colonel Thomas Jennings, launched a surprise attack on a Mormon settlement known as Haun's Mill. Late in the afternoon of October 30, 1838, as the sun “hung low and red in a beautiful Indian summer sky,” some twenty-five Mormon families working in the fields were surprised to see 240 troops appear suddenly from the surrounding woods, aim their muskets, and fire in unison at the Saints.

  The commander of the Mormons, realizing that his lightly armed community had no chance against such an overwhelming force, immediately waved his hat and yelled out his desire to surrender. The Missourians ignored his pleas for mercy and kept shooting, inciting panic among the Saints. Many of the Mormons scattered into nearby thickets, but three boys and fifteen men sought refuge inside the settlement's blacksmith shop. There were wide, unchinked gaps between the logs that formed the walls, and shooting the Mormons through these gaps was no more difficult for the Missourians than plinking hogs in a pen. As more and more Saints were killed, the Missourians walked right up to the shop, poked the barrels of their guns between the logs, and fired at the heap of groaning bodies from point-blank range.

  When the Missourians detected no further movement inside, they entered and found a ten-year-old boy, Sardius Smith, cowering under the bellows. The youth begged for his life, but a Missourian named William Reynolds put a gun to the boy's head. Sardius's younger brother, who was shot through the hip but survived by feigning death beneath the corpses, later reported that one of the Gentiles begged Reynolds not to shoot Sardius, on account of his youth, at which point Reynolds responded by explaining that Mormon children needed to be exterminated because “nits will make lice.” And then he dispassionately blasted the top of the boy's skull off.

  All told, eighteen Saints were slaughtered in and around the blacksmith shop. The event became known as the Haun's Mill Massacre, and was stamped into the Latter-day Saints' collective memory. More than 160 years later, Mormons still speak of it with indignation and undiminished rage.

  Joseph Smith was sixteen miles away when the carnage occurred at Haun's Mill, supervising the defense of Far West, which was being surrounded by ten thousand Missouri troops. He learned of the calamity the night after it happened, and sank into a black depression. Over the months since the discord had escalated into increasingly bloody clashes, Joseph had waffled between aggressively fighting back and seeking a peaceful end to the conflict through compromise. After the massacre at Haun's Mill, the prophet seemed to suddenly recognize that if he engaged in a full-blown war with the Gentiles, he and his followers would be annihilated.

  Immediately upon having this epiphany, Joseph dispatched five Mormons to meet with the Gentiles and “beg like a dog for peace.” The general of the Missouri Militia informed them that there was only one way for the Saints to avert imminent eradication: without delay, they would have to deliver Joseph and six other Mormon leaders to face charges of treason; provide monetary compensation to the Missourians for property that had been plundered and destroyed; surrender all Mormon weapons; and then abandon the state of Missouri altogether.

  The conditions were unreasonably harsh, yet Joseph had no real choice but to accept them. Addressing the faithful in Far West, he put on a brave face and announced, “I shall offer myself up as a sacrifice to save your lives and save the Church. Be of good cheer, my brethren. Pray earnestly to the Lord to deliver your leaders from their enemies. I bless you
all in the name of Christ.”

  The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph, his brother Hyrum, and five other Mormon leaders were taken into custody by the Missourians, hastily court-martialed, and found guilty of treason—a capital crime. Missouri general Alexander Doniphan was ordered, “Sir: You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square of Far West, and shoot them at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning.”

  But Doniphan was an uncommonly principled man, and he balked at carrying out the order. Joseph and his cohorts were American citizens, and Doniphan knew it was illegal for the military to court-martial and summarily execute civilians. Indicating that he refused to participate in such a travesty of justice, General Doniphan wrote a note to his commanding officer that read, “It is cold-blooded murder. I will not obey your order . . . ; and if you execute those men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!”

  Thanks to Doniphan's brave refusal, the execution of the Mormons was called off, and Joseph's life was spared for the time being. The Saints, however, were forced to accede to all the other conditions of their surrender, and once they had been disarmed they became easy prey for Missourians bent on revenge. Their possessions were plundered, their cabins torn down and burned for firewood, their livestock shot for amusement. Mormon men were indiscriminately beaten; rapes of women and girls were reported. And on top of everything else, they were told that they had just a few months—until the spring of 1839—to leave the state.

  It proved to be a difficult winter for the Saints. As the faithful endured famine and crippling cold, anticipating their forced departure from Missouri, Joseph remained locked up along with nine other Mormon leaders indicted for treason and murder. The prophet, unrepentant, penned an angry screed from jail, warning, “The murders at Haun's Mill, the exterminating order of Governor Boggs, and the one-sided rascally proceedings of the Legislature, have damned the State of Missouri to all eternity.”

  As the winter wore on, the tide of public opinion began to turn in the Saints' favor. Details of the Haun's Mill Massacre were reported in various Missouri newspapers, prompting calls for an investigation. Articles sympathetic to the Mormons were published throughout the region. The ongoing incarceration of Joseph and his brethren became a growing embarrassment to Governor Boggs, the legislature, and local officials, who were increasingly reluctant to bring the accused to trial lest the Saints win an acquittal.

  To save face, the sheriff responsible for guarding the jailed Mormons was encouraged by those in power to accept an $800 bribe, get drunk, and conveniently fall asleep, thereby allowing the prisoners to escape. On April 16, 1839, Joseph and his nine cell mates slipped away into the night and fled cross-country to rejoin their fellow Saints, most of whom had by then completed their exodus from Missouri and were safely across the Illinois state line.

  TEN

  NAUVOO

  If our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of great-souled persons wrestling with their fate, then the verdict would be much more favorable.

  WILLIAM JAMES,

  THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

  Laid out across a limestone flat beside the mud-brown flow of the Mississippi River, Nauvoo is a small, tidy town with little on its surface to distinguish it from hundreds of other small, tidy towns that freckle the American heartland. A month after breaking out of jail in Missouri, however, Joseph Smith surveyed the shore along this majestic bend in the river and resolved that the Kingdom of God's capital city would be erected precisely here, in Hancock County, Illinois.

  A low-lying promontory on the river's east bank, the site was a patch of malarial swamp “so wet,” as Joseph himself described it, “that it was with the utmost difficulty that a footman could get through, and totally impossible for [ox] teams.” But the place had a couple of mitigating attributes: it was all but uninhabited, and the owner was willing to sell acreage to the Saints on credit. A deal was struck, construction commenced with characteristic Mormon industriousness, and within five years more than fifteen thousand of the Lord's Elect were living in and around Nauvoo—ten times its current population—making it the second-largest municipality in Illinois. From nothing, the Saints created a city that rivaled Chicago.

  Unlike Chicago, moreover, Nauvoo was no mere city; it was a theocratic principality, with Joseph at its head, possessing sovereign rights and powers unique not only in Illinois but in the entire nation. These special rights were granted in a highly unusual charter passed without fanfare by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840—a time when the state was eager to attract hardworking settlers who would contribute to the economy and sympathy for the Mormons was running high because of their expulsion from Missouri.

  As an unintended consequence, Illinois set Joseph up as de facto emperor of his own autonomous city-state. He had himself officially anointed “King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” He commanded a well-armed and rigorously disciplined militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which boasted nearly half as many men as the entire American Army at the time, and then, eager for still more military power, he petitioned the U.S. Congress for authorization to establish a one-hundred-thousand-man fighting force under his personal control.

  Congress thought better of granting this latter request, but Joseph was on a roll nevertheless. Which probably came as no surprise to the prophet, because he believed that his was the Lord's One True Church and he was being guided by the hand of God. Secure in this knowledge, and eager to extend his influence to the whole country, in January 1844 Joseph announced his candidacy for president of the United States.*

  Although historians are in unanimous agreement that Joseph “had a snowball's chance in hell” of winning the November election, as the Jacksonian scholar Robert Remini phrased it, it is not clear whether Joseph himself shared this view. Already, after all, he'd accomplished much more than anyone could have imagined when he'd incorporated his peculiar new church in Palmyra fourteen years earlier. Joseph took the presidential campaign quite seriously, in any case, dispatching 586 of his most capable and persuasive missionaries—including ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—to all twenty-six states and Wisconsin Territory in order to drum up support for his run at the nation's highest office.

  An argument can be made that Joseph ran for president because he had come to believe that it was the only way his Saints were ever going to gain state protection from the terrible persecutions they had been subjected to wherever they had attempted to live. Having tried repeatedly, and failed on each occasion, to persuade elected officials that the government had both a moral and a legal obligation to protect the Mormons from the violent mobs that wanted to eradicate them, Joseph may have decided that his only recourse was to occupy the White House himself.

  Joseph venerated the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document. For years he had complained that political leaders were disregarding their sworn duty to safeguard the Mormons' constitutionally guaranteed freedom to worship without being subjected to harassment, and worse, at the hands of the religious majority. Yet in both word and deed, Joseph repeatedly demonstrated that he himself had little respect for the religious views of non-Mormons, and was unlikely to respect the constitutional rights of other faiths if he somehow won the presidency and were running the show.

  The Mormons did not transform Nauvoo into a bustling hub of enterprise and godliness without first enduring serious setbacks. In 1839 and 1840, before the swamps were drained, epidemics of malaria and cholera swept through the settlement, killing hundreds of Saints, including the prophet's
own father and one of his brothers. And the Missouri hostilities continued to plague Joseph and his followers long after they had been driven from that state.

  Although Joseph had managed to escape from jail, criminal charges against him were still pending in Missouri. Considered a fugitive from justice, he was under constant threat of being extradited to stand trial. There was a bounty on his head. Sheriffs from Missouri came to Illinois on at least two occasions bearing writs for Joseph's arrest. In May 1841 a sheriff's posse managed to surprise the prophet outside of Nauvoo, arrested him, and had almost hauled him across the border into Missouri before Joseph managed to finagle his release with a writ of habeas corpus. It was a very close scrape, and the harassment provoked Joseph's ire. During a public speech soon after his 1841 arrest, he vented his anger by prophesying that retired governor of Missouri Lilburn Boggs—the Saints' despised nemesis—would “die by violent hands within one year.”

  On the evening of May 6, 1842, Boggs was reading a newspaper in the study of his Independence home when a gunman lurking outside shot him four times through a window. Two balls hit Boggs in the neck; the other two pierced his skull and lodged in the left lobe of his brain. Everyone assumed that he would die, and Boggs's demise was reported in newspapers across the country. Most of these papers speculated that the assassin had been a Mormon bent on fulfilling Joseph Smith's prophecy.

  The handgun used to shoot the ex-governor was discovered outside Boggs's study, where it had been tossed into a puddle. An investigation quickly determined that the pistol had recently been stolen from a local store. The storekeeper told the sheriff, “I thought the niggers had taken it, but that hired man of Ward's—the one who used to work with the stallion—he came in to look at it just before it turned up missing!” The “hired man of Ward's” was an accomplished horseman from Nauvoo named Orrin Porter Rockwell. He had arrived in Independence a couple of months earlier, then quietly slipped out of town immediately after Boggs was shot.