by Jack Kelly
In rare cases, believers did go to extremes. But most spent their last days in continual prayer meetings that involved “deep searching.” In Rochester, on the eve of the end, believers gathered at Cobb’s Hill, a traditional site of Easter morning services.
Mobs of scoffers had been harassing Millerites in recent weeks, smashing windows of their meeting halls, setting off Roman candles to panic the nervous believers. In some cities, the police had barred formal Adventist gatherings. A New York newspaper reported that Millerites “formed themselves into small parties at their several houses, to comfort and bear each other company in their anticipated trip.”
They faced a tomorrow that even the wildest imagination could barely comprehend. William Miller, back home in Low Hampton, reported, “We held meetings all day and our place of worship was crowded to overflowing with anxious souls.”
Many who had accepted the Adventist message were people unhinged by the modern world, by the acceleration of time, the shortening of distance, the sudden changes in daily life. They could not take it, did not want it, were ready to say good-bye to the earth.
Now, on this last night, they waited for the “Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot.” They waited with a unique sensation of terror and hope, trepidation and relief. “Some were exceedingly frightened with awful forebodings.” None entertained a doubt that the pending cataclysm was real. Gerrit Smith, a prominent upstate New York abolitionist and Millerite, wrote that “we have just had family worship—perhaps for the last time.”
As the sun went down for the final time and darkness seeped into the sky, Adventists everywhere waited, gripped by a penetrating idea of the marvelous, and by faith in the imminent, miraculous appearance of Jesus Christ.
O Lord, My God
On Tuesday, June 18, 1844, eight days after the destruction of the Expositor press, Joseph Smith donned a fancy gold-braid uniform that “would have become a Bonaparte or a Washington.” The man who hoped to be elected president of the United States buckled on his sword and stood atop the framework of a house under construction. The Nauvoo Legion assembled before him, several thousand strong. With mobs in nearby Warsaw, Illinois, calling for the Mormons’ extermination, Joseph was placing the city under martial law. He told his soldiers to mount pickets around the city. They should secure their gunpowder and ammunition. Mormons on outlying farms should prepare to come into the city for refuge.
Governor Thomas Ford arrived in Carthage, the inland county seat that formed a triangle with Nauvoo and Warsaw along the river. The militia of three counties accompanied him. Joseph wrote him another letter proclaiming his innocence. Three tense days passed.
Joseph’s impulse was to flee. That Saturday, June 22, he and Hyrum crossed the Mississippi to Iowa. One plan was to make their way to Washington for yet another appeal to federal authorities. Maybe Joseph could persuade President John Tyler to give the beleaguered Mormons justice. Alternatively, the brothers could light out for Oregon or Texas or the Rocky Mountains.
He sent a message to Emma. “Do not despair,” he told her. “If god ever opens a door that is possible for me I will see you again.” He also wrote to his “wives,” Sarah and Maria Lawrence, telling them to get out of Nauvoo. “I want for you to tarry in Cincinnati until you hear from me.”
After he left the city, terror spread through the Nauvoo citizenry. The people feared that a posse or state militia force would tear up the town searching for Joseph. Heber Kimball’s wife Vilate wrote that people were “tryed almost to death to think Joseph should leve them in the hour of danger.”
“Let us go back and give ourselves up,” Hyrum suggested, “and see the thing out.” Joseph listened to his older brother. The next day they climbed into boats and rowed back across the Mississippi.
On Monday, June 24, Joseph and Hyrum, along with the sixteen others who had been named in the Expositor plot, headed for Carthage. They encountered a state militia company led by Captain James Dunn. He rode with the Mormons back to Nauvoo. The Legion members handed their muskets, which were state property, over to Dunn and his men. It was part of Ford’s plan to defuse the powder keg. The accused Mormons, accompanied by the militiamen, reached Carthage just before midnight.
The town was swarming with loud, rough rustics, who hooted at the arrival of the prophet. What prophet? He was an ordinary looking man. Joseph swung down from his horse. He still walked with a slight limp, a reminder of the illness and awful surgical ordeal of his boyhood. The Mormons checked into the Hamilton House hotel. The night was mild, thick with summer.
The next day, the defendants appeared before a judge. With two lawyers at his side, Smith felt he had a good case. Nauvoo’s city charter gave him the same right to close down a lying newspaper as it did to remove the carcass of a dead horse. The judge, perhaps eyeing the crowds peering through the courtroom windows, decided to release the defendants charged with rioting on bail of five hundred dollars each. But Joseph and Hyrum were accused of treason for declaring martial law and for calling out the Legion against the state militia. Treason was not a bailable offense. They were arrested and led to the county lockup a few blocks away.
The two-story Carthage jail had been constructed from thick blocks of ochre-colored limestone. The Smiths occupied a ground-floor cell the first night, but were allowed to stay in an upstairs bedroom the second. Eight members of the state militia unit known as the Carthage Greys stood guard. They were there as much to bar the rabble, who milled in the jail’s yard, as to keep the prisoners from escaping. Other members of their unit were camped in the town square, several blocks from the jail.
Two of the Twelve Apostles stayed in the jail with their leader. John Taylor was editor of two Mormon newspapers in Nauvoo; Willard Richards, a physician, was the prophet’s personal secretary.
On Wednesday, June 26, the case was delayed until Saturday. In jail, the men received a stream of visitors, including lawyers, Joseph’s uncle John Smith, and Mormon officials. One of them, Cyrus Wheelock, slipped Joseph a pepperbox pistol, an early form of revolver. Another man armed Hyrum with a single-shot handgun.
On the morning of Thursday, June 27, the guards stopped allowing the aides who left the jail to return. The broiling day grew tense. Joseph sent a clerk with a message to his lawyers about potential witnesses. The man rode away quickly to avoid the rough characters surrounding the jail. Suspicious, they fired on him. He escaped and a rumor spread through town that he was riding to summon the Nauvoo Legion.
Joseph wrote a letter to Emma that “there is no danger of any exterminating order.” He wanted to reassure the Saints in Nauvoo. If they kept quiet, they could avoid violence. “I am very much resigned to my lot,” he wrote to his wife. “Give my love to the children.”
The close midsummer day became stifling. Local people milled around town, repeating rumors they had heard and nervously discussing what to do. Guns were being loaded all over the county.
Governor Ford rode to Nauvoo with Captain Dunn’s company of militia. He had ordered all other militia units to disband. Only the Greys should remain to keep order in Carthage. Those nervous militiamen were certain that an attack was imminent.
They were wrong. The armed men approaching Carthage were members of the Warsaw Regulators. These militiamen had set out to join the governor, but a messenger had met them on the prairie with the order to disband. Some did turn around. Some, disappointed that their “Nauvoo picnic” had been canceled, headed for Carthage instead.
Governor Ford arrived in Nauvoo and found the city peaceful, the people apprehensive. He took time to shave before climbing atop the same building frame from which Joseph Smith had addressed his soldiers. He advised citizens to put down their arms and to respect the property of the dissenters. If not, thousands would assemble for the total destruction of their city. He could not protect them from the mobs. Would they keep the peace? Although suspicious of
gentile promises, they all raised their hands.
In Carthage, the four Mormons who occupied the unlocked upstairs bedroom were sweating in the oppressive afternoon heat. They removed their coats and opened the window to catch a breeze. They felt “unusually dull and languid.” Hyrum read from a history of the Jews. The ever-talkative Joseph chatted with the guards. John Taylor sang a Mormon hymn. The pudgy, forty-year-old Willard Richards told Joseph that, if he could, he would allow himself to be hanged in place of the prophet. The jailer’s son brought water from the well just below their window.
Four o’clock came. Cicadas droned, then suddenly fell silent. The sun pressed its sweaty palm onto the flat prairie, which stretched out to the limits of the sky. Members of the Warsaw Regulators arrived at the outskirts of town, dismounted, and began to cut through the jimsonweed and horse nettle. Well fortified by whiskey, they stopped to mix damp clay with gunpowder. They blackened their faces. A housewife in the village caught sight of them. Assuming them to be Mormons, she raised the alarm. Someone cried: “The Danites are coming for the Smiths!” Panic began to sprint through the streets.
At the jail, Richards gave the jailer’s son a dollar to buy wine. The prisoners drank to revive their spirits. They passed the bottle to a guard to share with his men. Everyone was suffering from the heat.
Shouts echoed from downstairs, a commotion. Taylor looked out the window and saw a hundred armed men jostling each other in the yard. More shouts. A heavy tread of feet up the stairs. Joseph and Hyrum drew the guns from their coats. The men braced themselves against the closed door.
Suddenly, an enormous blast shattered the quiet. The keyhole splintered. Another shot sent a ball through the door panel. This one struck Hyrum in the face. He spun. Another bullet tore into his back. He fell dead to the floor.
For the remaining men, events took on a visionary, slow-motion, adrenaline-fueled lucidity. “I remember feeling,” Taylor later wrote, “as though my time had come.” Joseph opened the door a few inches, reached through and pulled the trigger of his pistol again and again. Bullets struck three men on the landing.
“Streams of fire as thick as my arm passed by me,” Taylor said. The attackers thrust muskets and bayonets through the opening. Taylor batted at them with a heavy walking stick. Then he rushed across to the window, hoping to jump out and alert friends in the town. A bullet stabbed through his thigh. He stumbled against the window frame. Outside, he saw only the devilish, blackened faces of the militiamen. He teetered on the edge and fell backward into the room. Three more shots hit him as he crawled under a bed, wounded but alive.
Joseph shared Taylor’s instinct to rush to the window. He too made it as far as the sill. Two shots from the door hit him in the back. He paused. He called out: “O Lord, my God.” One of the militiamen below shot him in the chest.
Joseph fell heavily to the ground outside. A stranger dragged his body to the curb of the well. Four men raised their muskets and fired bullets into his body. The Mormon prophet, six months shy of his thirty-ninth birthday, was dead.
Epilogue
Today
“Still in the cold world!” a Millerite lecturer sighed after what was called the Great Disappointment. An Adventist leader acknowledged that “our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted.” As midnight came and went on October 22, 1844, he said, “We wept and wept till the day dawned.” In the morning, “all were silent except to inquire, ‘Where are we?’ and ‘What next?’”
The Millerites would not bounce back as they had after the failure of previous prophecies. Some plunged into a crisis of faith. “If this had proved a failure,” one asked, “what was the rest of my Christian experience worth?”
William Miller was shaken but undaunted. “My hope in the coming of Christ is as strong as ever,” he said. Joshua Himes organized relief efforts to provide sustenance for those who had given up everything in expectation of the end of time.
Many skeptics and scoffers had secretly dreaded that Miller might be correct. Now they turned on the fanatical, self-righteous Millerites with a vengeance. “It seemed as though all the demons from the bottomless pit were let loose on us,” an Adventist remembered. In Scottsville, in Rochester, in the small towns along the canal where the millennial fire had burned so bright, mobs wrecked and burned Adventist meeting places. Men in blackface attacked Millerites with clubs and knives and with tar and feathers.
The truest believers continued their obsession with the end. Christ would surely come in April 1845. In July. On Passover or Pentecost. Maybe in 1846. At each date, the glory eluded them. But no matter. Tomorrow, surely. It was all “visionary nonsense,” Joshua Himes declared. He was done with setting dates.
Himes, Miller, and some other Adventist leaders held the enfeebled movement together for a few more years. But without a date to sustain their enthusiasm, most Millerites dispersed, some returning to the churches from which they had “come out.”
In Maine, Ellen G. Harmon, a seventeen-year-old convert to Miller’s doctrine, was dismayed by the Disappointment but held tight to her belief. Two months later, in December 1844, she saw herself “rising higher and higher, far above the dark world.” She returned from the clouds believing that the October date had been momentous in heaven, if not on earth. She married an itinerant Millerite preacher named James White. They saw that the seventh day of the week, the true Sabbath, held mystical significance for the interpretation of prophecy.
Ellen White became one of America’s most influential prophets in her own right. Her visions and revelations, which focused on Christ’s coming and the millennium that would follow, guided the Sabbatarian Adventist movement. She published pamphlets, documents, and books to spread her message. Her ideas were especially well received in western New York; she and her husband lived for a time in Oswego and Rochester. The Sabbatarians adopted strict vegetarianism, rejecting alcohol and coffee. One of their later converts, John Harvey Kellogg, invented corn flakes. His brother Will turned breakfast food into an industry.
In 1863, the Sabbatarians formed the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Although William Miller would not have approved of the members’ “fanaticism,” these believers represented the last major remnant of his own movement.
Before Joshua Himes died in 1895, at the age of ninety, he asked to be buried in a particular cemetery near his home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, because “he wanted to be on the top of a hill when Gabriel blows his trumpet.”
William Miller lived for five years after his predicted apocalypse. “I have fixed my mind upon another time,” he declared, “and here I mean to stand until God gives me more light.” With the wisdom of disappointment, he came to see the real time of Christ’s returning. “And that is Today, TODAY, and TODAY, until He comes.”
Everything
Emma Smith loved to sing. Her beautiful voice and her book of hymns had added music to the Mormon vision. In Nauvoo at summer dusk, she sometimes heard the four plaintive notes of a Chuck-will’s-widow, an elusive, twilight-loving bird.
Before the dawn sun skimmed the earth on June 28, 1844, her anxious ears caught the hollow staccato of horses’ hooves. A hard-riding messenger was hurrying toward Nauvoo. Emma’s heart rose to her throat. Across town a rooster crowed.
The dreaded word arrived. Joseph was dead. A friend tried to comfort Emma. Her sorrow would be the crown of her life, he told her. “My husband,” she replied, “was my crown.”
How could this have happened? She could not help thinking of a handsome stranger walking into her father’s house in Harmony in 1825, or of that Palmyra evening when she and Joseph rode into the darkness to fetch the golden treasure. Her seventeen years with him had passed in a blink.
Later that same day, Emma’s sensitive ears picked up the distant sound of brass horns from the prairie. The town band was playing a dirge. Two sorrowful wagons were drawing relentlessly closer.
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At first, Emma, who was pregnant with Joseph’s last child, was not allowed to see her husband’s remains. Nor was Hyrum’s wife Mary allowed to see his. Not until the corpses had been washed and dressed in fine clothes.
Emma entered the room but could not look on her husband. Could not face the sight of Joseph, who had radiated such an abundance of life, now lying still. She fainted away twice. Elders helped her from the room. Mary went next. She “trembled at every step,” but reached the bier. Her two children, a son six and a daughter three, clung to her “shrieking in the wildness of their wordless grief.”
Two men assisted Emma back into the room. One held his hat to shield her from the sight of her husband’s corpse. She gathered herself. “Now I can see him,” she said. “I am strong now.” She looked. She bent and took his face in her hands. She sank onto his body. “Joseph,” she moaned. “Joseph.”
Finally it was Lucy’s turn. At sixty-nine, she was a veteran of heartbreak. She had lost her eldest and favorite, Alvin. She had lost her youngest, Don Carlos. She had lost two farms. She had lost her dear husband. Now two more of her sons, beautiful grown men, lay dead before her. Her soul “filled with horror past imagination.” She sat down between them and put a hand on the cold flesh of each.
“Now Joseph is gon,” Brigham Young later wrote, “it seamd as though menny wanted to draw off a party and be leders.” Hyrum would have been the natural heir. Samuel, one of two surviving Smith brothers and a high Church official, seemed to many a likely successor. But the fevers still common in Nauvoo claimed his life only a month after Joseph’s murder. The last brother, William, was an unstable character and never a serious contender for Church leadership.
The erratic Sidney Rigdon had clashed with Joseph but later regained his favor. He had established a branch of the Church in western Pennsylvania. At the time of the assassination, he had been campaigning as Joseph’s vice-presidential candidate. He returned to Nauvoo and tried to take over.
