by Alex Beam
The Missourians clapped the Mormon leaders, including Rigdon and Joseph Smith, in jail, and observed a brief cease-fire that allowed the Saints to flee across the frozen Mississippi River to Illinois. There, the residents of Quincy, a commercial port, and other Illinois towns graciously received the bedraggled refugees, whom they viewed as victims of coarse Missouri bigotry. Illinois residents were quick to believe the worst about the “pukes,” their unflattering epithet for the Missourians. “The citizens responded to the call and donated liberally,” recalled Wandle Mace, a prosperous Mormon who had relocated his family from New York. He reported that citizens filled “a large canoe with flour, pork, coffee, sugar, boots, shoes and clothing, the merchants vieing [sic]with each other as to which could be the most liberal,” and sent it across the river, to an encampment of freezing Mormon refugees.
Accepting handouts was hardly the Mormons’ style; more than provisions, they desperately needed a new home. Sensing an opportunity, the New York Land Company’s “Dr.” Isaac Galland quickly found his way to the bedraggled Saints.
Galland, who had neither medical training nor legal education—he also claimed to be a lawyer—had likewise not studied for the ministry, although he did occasionally mount the pulpit on both sides of the Mississippi. He was a charming scalawag, a convicted horse thief and counterfeiter who had abandoned three wives in different parts of the country. Newspaper editor Thomas Gregg once recalled meeting “that dark-eyed, dark-hued, inexplicable, incomprehensible, unfathomable man, Dr. Isaac Galland—whom no man could see through.” When he ran for Congress in 1834, Galland made light of his checkered reputation. “I’ve been found guilty of almost everything except hog stealing,” he said, “and I never owned a hog.”
The New York Land Company and Galland had acquired some claims on a huge block of Iowa real estate called the Half-Breed Tract. In an 1824 treaty, Congress had set aside the 186 square miles to be settled by the mixed-blood descendants of the Sauk (also known as the Sac) and Fox Indian tribes. Legitimate claimants were hard to find, and an army of swindlers and con men descended upon the open prairie, where the lots were the subject of near-constant litigation.
Galland and his employer had sufficient claim to convince Joseph Smith to negotiate a land purchase from his jail cell in, of all places, Liberty, Missouri. In 1839, Smith bought 20,000 acres of land on the Iowa shore of the Mississippi as well as 700 acres in the center of a town across the river called Commerce, Illinois. Galland was a scamp and Commerce was a swamp, with one stone house and five other structures nearby. But the site had promise. The broad limestone flat sat in the middle of a sweeping, graceful horseshoe bend in the river, giving the town waterfront access on its southern, western, and northern borders. Moving east, there was plenty of room to grow, especially toward a line of bluffs and higher ground rising to the fertile prairie beyond.
“No man of understanding can come up the Mississippi without being filled with wonder and astonishment,” the Englishman John Needham wrote to his parents in Yorkshire, in 1843.
Just where Nauvoo stands, the river turns in the shape of a horse shoe, the river going three parts around the city. From rising ground in Nauvoo we have a splendid sight of the country on the other side of the river, which is very pleasant.
Galland’s claims may have been shaky—instead of selling the Mormons property deeds, he sold them stock in landholding companies—but his terms were alluring. Joseph paid Galland $2 an acre for the vast tracts, with payments stretched out over twenty years. Galland charged no interest. Small wonder that Smith hailed Galland as “the honored instrument the Lord used to prepare a home for us” and heartily embraced the old horse thief’s brief conversion to the Church of Latter-day Saints.
Joseph had employed a Hebrew tutor in Ohio and renamed Commerce “Nauvoo,” a word with Old Testament roots that he said “signifies a beautiful situation, or place, carrying with it, also, the idea of rest.”
“The place was literally a wilderness,” Joseph commented in the church history that he dictated to a rotating group of scribes: “The land was mostly covered with trees and bushes, and much of it was so wet that it was with the utmost difficulty that a footman could get through, and totally impossible for teams.”
Joseph further noted that Commerce was “unhealthy.” In fact, it was pestilential. Malaria was not uncommon in the Mississippi Valley, and when the Mormons started to arrive in the summer and fall of 1839, the disease struck in full force. The ague, or the “spotted fever,” attacked almost every arriving family, including Joseph’s. His father died, and so did his twenty-six-year-old brother, Don Carlos, as well as one of his scribes. To ensure that they were consuming boiled water, the Mormons drank teas and coffee, a technical violation of Joseph’s Word of Wisdom, the guide to personal conduct that counseled the Saints to abjure alcohol and “hot drinks.” The mortality rate in Nauvoo was double that of Illinois, and of the United States. So many immigrants perished that the Saints arranged a mass funeral service for their dead.
While his flock waged a life-and-death struggle with the malarial lowland he had chosen, Smith and his lieutenants worked hard to build up the hoped-for Mormon sanctuary on the Mississippi. By digging a channel along the base of the higher ground, the Mormons successfully drained the swamp. Soon the lowland acreage became dry and fertile. Joseph envisaged a town at the base of the Nauvoo peninsula, and saw plenty of open space for farms to the north and east. On the high land overlooking the peninsula, Joseph planned to build a magnificent white-limestone temple, larger and grander than the landmark the Mormons had erected in Kirtland, Ohio. This was a cornerstone of Zion, Smith declared, and the Saints and all would-be Saints had an obligation to come to Nauvoo:
We may soon expect to see flocking to this place people of every land; the polished European; the degraded Hottentot, and the shivering Laplanders; persons of all languages and of every color who shall with us worship in His holy temple.
Galland was either a tremendous cynic, a bitter realist, or a combination of the two. He may have swindled the Mormons more than once. His land claims in Iowa proved to be vaporous, and when Joseph sent him east to convince Mormons there to help pay off the Nauvoo debt, Galland returned empty-handed. Galland predicted that the Mormons would stay in Nauvoo “until they again acquire a sufficient quantity of ‘honey comb’ to induce the surrounding thieves to rob them again, at which time they will no doubt have to renounce their religion, or submit to a repetition of similar acts of violence and outrage.” He would prove to be partially correct.
SOUTHWESTERN ILLINOIS WAS A WOOLLY PART OF THE WORLD. For starters, the state was flat broke. Illinois had bankrupted itself investing in public works projects such as canals, roads, and railways that were never built. Illinois’s state bank stopped redeeming currency for gold or silver in 1840, and state bonds were trading for 33 cents on the dollar. No one had money. There was no national currency, and the economies of towns such Quincy and Nauvoo subsisted on scrip, IOU’s, barter, and the occasional gold or silver coin. Counterfeiting was rife, and continually bedeviled Nauvoo.
In his History of Illinois, Governor Thomas Ford noted that the southern part of the state had attracted immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee likely to be poor because they didn’t own slaves, which were banned from Illinois’s free soil. “The wealthy immigrant from the slave States rarely came here,” Ford wrote. But that is not to say that Illinois extended its arms to black people. The legislature resolutely vowed to enforce fugitive slave laws, to ensure that Southerners’ “property” found no shelter in its borders. As in many parts of the United States, abolitionists were held in low regard. Congregationalists in Warsaw, Illinois, barely twenty miles from Nauvoo, dismissed their first minister in 1839 when they learned that he was active in the anti-slavery movement.
An Easterner by birth who lived much of his life in upstate Springfield and Peoria, Governor Ford ungenerously characterized his southern Illinois neighbors as “unambitious of wea
lth, and great lovers of ease and social enjoyment.” The Southerners in turn despised their northern counterparts, whom they called Yankees, even though they had little idea what the name meant. They thought a “genuine Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier feelings of human nature,” Ford wrote.
In downstate Illinois, to be “Yankeed” meant to be cheated. Southern Illinois legislators even opposed the Lake Michigan–to–Illinois River canal that made Chicago’s fortune, because they feared it would bring more New Englanders into their ambit. Northern Illinois residents viewed the typical downstater as “a long, lank, lean, lazy, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-clothed, idle, ignorant children.”
The settled United States ended at Illinois’s western border, and the frontier was a dangerous place. As elsewhere in Andrew Jackson’s America—Jackson was still alive, although his presidency ended in 1837—the rule of law was theoretical at best. “Each state has the unquestionable right to regulate its own internal concerns according to its own pleasure,” Jackson proclaimed in his Farewell Message to the American people. In his valedictory, just as he had during his presidency, Jackson championed the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which allowed each state to sort out their affairs more or less as it wished.* Across the land, laws became tools of popular will, of whim, or of local bigotry. The sophisticated Manhattan businessman, mayor, and diarist Philip Hone called popular sovereignty “the abominable doctrine . . . viz, that the people are to be governed by the law just so long as it pleases them.”
Rural Illinois, too, was a part of America where people made their own laws. The year before the Mormons came to Hancock County, a young Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln called mob violence the greatest threat to the young body politic. He decried “the increasing disregard of law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts. . . .” If the American experiment were to perish, he continued, it would die from within: “If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we [will] live through all time, or die by suicide.”
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, so-called banditti ruled several Illinois counties, in some cases locked in perpetual wars with citizen militias, vigilantes, or self-appointed “regulators,” who took it upon themselves to enforce the law. Property disputes over inadequately surveyed claims often ended in violence or lynchings, or both. The state’s most famous banditti were the Driscolls, a family of notorious horse thieves and murderers who terrorized Ogle County, north of Nauvoo, for most of 1841. The governor urged local citizens to bring the Driscoll gang to heel. However, the regulators’ first captain resigned when his grist mill was burned to the ground, and his horse tortured and killed. The Driscolls shot his successor after Sunday church services, in front of his wife and children. Finally, a posse of three hundred armed citizens showed up at the Driscolls’ farm and arrested the paterfamilias and two of his four outlaw sons. It was far from clear that the old man and the two sons had carried out the Sunday shooting, but the time had long passed for legal niceties. A quick, al fresco trial ensued. The county sheriff requested custody of the accused but was ignored.
One son, Pierce, walked free. Father John and his son William were condemned to hang. “We would rather be shot,” John Driscoll said. Honoring his request, the one-hundred-odd regulators present divided themselves into two massive firing squads. After shooting the father, who proclaimed his innocence, they showed William the body. “Would you like to confess now?” the mob asked. William admitted that he had murdered several men, albeit not the men he had been convicted of killing. He followed his father to the grave. The Driscolls “were fired upon by the whole company present, that there might be none who could be legal witnesses of the bloody deed,” wrote Thomas Ford, who noted that “these terrible measures put an end to the ascendancy of rogues in Ogle county.”
Eventually, the state tried a hundred men for the Driscoll murders. They were all acquitted, thanks to a clever maneuver by their defense attorney. The lawyer ensured that everyone present at the group execution was indicted for the murders. As defendants, they weren’t required to testify against themselves, and the only other eyewitnesses to the killings were dead. In his state history, Ford never mentioned that he was the complaisant judge who presided over the mass acquittal of the vigilantes.
UPON ARRIVING IN NAUVOO, THE MORMONS’ FIRST ORDER OF business was to seek a city charter from the state legislature. Partly, they wanted to protect themselves; the Saints sought to create a legally organized militia, to supplant the Danite guerilla force. To ensure the future of their nascent city-state, the Mormons wanted to legitimize their way of life in Illinois.
The result, approved by acclamation in 1840 by a legislature that included the young Lincoln (his future rival, the brash attorney Stephen Douglas, was already Illinois’s secretary of state), was the Nauvoo Charter, soon to become a controversial document. But it wasn’t controversial at the time. State senator Sidney Little, who represented neighboring McDonough County, duly noted the “extraordinary militia clause,” although he deemed it “harmless.” By the end of 1840, Nauvoo had about 2,400 new residents, and its own mini-constitution that enabled Joseph Smith to regulate Mormon life pretty much as he pleased.
The charter had three primary provisions. First, it created the Nauvoo Legion. Whereas most militias assembled their citizen soldiers from counties, or groups of counties, Nauvoo was the rare town to have its own fighting force. The charter explained that the Legion would operate independently of other militias, which reported to the governor as commander in chief. The Legion was a local police force, “at the disposal of the mayor in executing the laws and ordinances of the city corporation.” Joseph Smith was Nauvoo’s mayor from January 1842 until June 1844.
Second, the charter also created a University of Nauvoo, which never came into being. Like the notoriously over-officered Legion, however, the university did boast seventy-seven administrators, and again imitating the Legion, it reveled in ceremony. Although it never granted an actual degree, it did issue honorary degrees to two prominent newspaper editors—John Wentworth of the Chicago Democrat and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald—for printing favorable articles about the Saints. The repugnant Bennett, known as “His Satanic Majesty,” was perhaps the nation’s most powerful newspaper editor, and a Joseph Smith fan.
But the charter’s third and most controversial provision was its distinctive court system, which effectively merged the executive and judicial branches of local government. As mayor, Joseph sat on the City Council and also served as chief justice of the municipal court. The associate justices were the City Council members and four aldermen. The mayor had “exclusive jurisdiction in all cases arising under the ordinances of the corporation” and reviewed all lower court decisions rendered by magistrates or justices of the peace. With very rare exceptions, all city councilmen, justices, and aldermen were Mormons. Because the charter required the Saints to obey the constitutions of both Illinois and the United States, litigants could theoretically appeal Nauvoo decisions to the state circuit court in Carthage, about twenty miles to the east. But the church frowned on appeals to Gentile justice, which they disdained as “lawing before the world.”
Joseph’s court arrogated to itself a broad power of habeas corpus, “in all cases arising under the ordinances of the City Council.” In its common law origins, habeas corpus (“surrender the body”) protected individuals from capricious imprisonment by state or local authorities. In Nauvoo, it was enforced indiscriminately to ensure that most Mormons could never be tried by an outside court. Although often used to protect Joseph from the many writs and summonses flying about him, the law likewise meant that a lapsed Saint charged with cattle thiev
ing in neighboring Adams County could go free in Nauvoo, and generally did. After their Missouri experiences, the Saints craved safety above all, and sought legal, military, and political autarky to ensure that they alone could control their destiny in Illinois. The state granted them those rights; whether the Saints could preserve them would be another question entirely.
FROM 1839 TO 1842, NAUVOO’S POPULATION DOUBLED EACH YEAR. We were “growing like a mushroom (as it were, by magic),” bishop George Miller later wrote. By 1844, Nauvoo had swelled to over 10,000 residents. Although censuses were unreliable, some considered it to be the largest city in Illinois, bigger than the just-founded Chicago. Filling the peninsula created by the bend in the river, the town was laid out on a perpendicular grid. Each house lot was an acre, a half acre, or a quarter acre, with pockets of density on the south bank, near the first settlement, and on the cooler high ground near the temple site. House owners tended gardens and nursed orchards and farm animals in their backyards. In five years, the cluster of grim, weather-whipped log cabins had become a bona fide small city.
