American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  A bucolic view of Nauvoo, Illinois, as seen from the Mississippi River’s Iowa shoreline. The nearly competed Nauvoo Temple, lacking its steeple, is visible on the hill overlooking the town.

  Credit: Utah State Historical Society

  The town boasted two sawmills, a flour mill, a foundry, and a brewery. There was also a brick factory, a tannery, a bookbindery, a match factory, and innumerable craftsmen, for example, weavers, wagoners, cordwainers, and the like. By way of culture, Nauvoo had a zoo, a lyceum, three brass bands, and four taverns. (It was not until 1902 that alcohol consumption by observant Mormons was categorically forbidden.) Many residents, like Smith himself, had homes in the thickly settled town center and also owned farms outside the city.

  Manufacturing never took hold in Nauvoo, to the Saints’ chagrin. But there was commerce aplenty. The Mississippi steamboat era was in full swing, and the church owned two paddle wheelers, often used to ferry arriving Saints upriver from New Orleans. There were four landing slips in Nauvoo, and in the summer as many as ten boats a week stopped by, often filled with tourists and day-trippers eager to catch a glimpse of the exotic Mormons. (“We are a curiosity, ain’t we?” Brigham Young once remarked.) But profitable trade eluded the Saints, who proved to be net importers of such everyday staples as wheat, corn, pork, sugar, coffee, tea, printed cloth, coal, and other household supplies. Prices were high, as high as in large Eastern cities like New York and Boston.

  Nauvoo’s spiritual and geographic center of gravity was Joseph Smith himself. The town radiated outward from the tiny, riverside homestead he occupied in early 1839. Just across the street he built his two-story redbrick store, which was the Saints’ commercial and religious epicenter for many years. Joseph dispensed plots of land and even large cash loans from the store’s second-floor office, and for several years he ran a general store below. Under Joseph’s hand, the business quickly went bankrupt. He transferred ownership to more capable hands and tried to liquidate over $70,000 in debts using the new bankruptcy laws of 1842. As Brigham Young once joked about the Prophet’s lack of business acumen: “Joseph was a first-rate fellow with [his customers], provided he would never ask them to pay him.”

  Joseph set to work on other building projects, including a (never-completed) tourist hotel, and a sacred temple on Nauvoo’s high ground. The temple would remain under construction during Joseph’s lifetime. Only the huge baptismal font in the basement, a twenty foot by twenty foot laver supported by twelve gigantic oxen—supposedly the same design as the “molten sea” in King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem—was available to him for baptizing new Saints. Joseph first introduced followers to his new, secret temple rituals inside the store. He used canvas curtains to cordon off the second-floor meeting space into the rooms that would later become constituent parts of every Mormon temple in the world. Workmen painted a pastoral mural in the corner of one room and arranged cedar boughs, evergreens, and olive branches to resemble the Garden of Eden, the locus of Joseph’s endowment rite.

  Like many of the uninitiated, church member Ebenezer Robinson was curious about the secret rituals administered upstairs in the store. But participants could not describe them, under penalty of death. A nonplussed Robinson once spotted Apostle John Taylor standing at the top of the stairway to the second floor, with a sword in hand, wearing a turban and a white robe. Robinson correctly surmised that Taylor was acting in the sacred endowment rite, representing “the cherubims and flaming sword which was placed at the east of the Garden of Eden, to guard the tree of life.”

  Joseph also administered the new, secret rite of the Second Anointing for chosen couples upstairs at the store. He sealed polygamous marriages in the second-floor office, never revealing them to the Saints at large. Smith and Brigham Young kept coded records of these events, sometimes using pseudonyms. In his diary, Smith occasionally called himself “Baurak Ale.” To record his marriages, Young might write “saw E. Partridge,” a code which meant “[s]ealed [a]nd [w]ed Emily Partridge,” or “ME L. Beaman,” which would mean “married for eternity Louisa Beaman.” One of Joseph’s plural wives, Willard Richards’s sister Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.

  JOSEPH WORKED IN THE STORE, AND AFTER 1843 HE LIVED IN THE stately Nauvoo Mansion, a two-story L-shaped building at the intersection of Sidney (as in Rigdon) and Main Streets. The mansion had seventeen rooms, many of them rented out to tourists or transients, and boasted the largest stable in Illinois, a brick structure large enough to hold seventy-five horses. There was a cannon mounted in the front yard, and the premises were often under guard, as Joseph feared process servers or Missouri bounty hunters invading his home.

  Joseph Smith, Emma Smith, and Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, who lived with them in Nauvoo.

  Credit: Utah State Historical Society

  Joseph and Emma employed considerable live-in help: an African American washerwoman named Jane Manning and a cook, as well as serving girls to help in the dining room. (Manning, who would later join the Mormon migration to Utah, was one of about forty free blacks living in Nauvoo.) At banquets, it was not uncommon for Joseph and Emma to help serve guests themselves, aided by the young women domiciled at the Nauvoo Mansion. The mansion girls performed household chores in return for room and board. The teenage women—Sarah and Maria Lawrence, Emily and Eliza Partridge, and Lucy Walker—proved to be a temptation too great for Joseph to resist. Having covertly introduced his revelation on polygamous marriage in 1843, he ended up marrying them all, and the ensuing opéra bouffe opening and closing of bedroom doors tormented his long-suffering wife Emma.

  The mansion was Emma’s home, too, and in addition to being a hotel, it was where she raised her four children, one of them an adopted daughter. Her oldest son, Joseph, a small boy during the Nauvoo years, remembered her traveling to St. Louis to buy furniture, curtains, linen, and dishes for the newly opened mansion. “When she returned,” her son wrote, “Mother found installed in the keeping-room of the hotel . . . a fully equipped tavern bar, and Porter Rockwell in charge as tender.”

  She sent Joseph III to find his father. “Joseph,” she asked her husband. “What is the meaning of that bar in this house?”

  Joseph explained that his friend had just been freed from a Missouri jail, and planned to open up a combination bar and barber shop across the street. The mansion tavern arrangement was purely temporary, he said.

  It proved to be very temporary indeed. “How does it look for the spiritual head of a religious body to be keeping a hotel in which a room is fitted out as a liquor-selling establishment?” Emma asked. “Either that bar goes out of the house, or we will!”

  Inside both his homes, first in the rustic log cabin and then at the Nauvoo Mansion, Joseph installed hiding places to provide refuge from unwanted visitors. In his first house, there was a hinged portion of the staircase leading to the cellar. Lifting the trick stairs led to “a vaulted place . . . large enough for a couple of people to occupy, either sitting or lying down, affording a degree of comfort for a stay of long or short duration as necessary,” Joseph Smith III recalled. The mansion had a garret apartment accessible from a false-backed closet built flush to one of the chimneys. If one pulled down a rack of clothespins on the back of the closet, a small staircase leading to the attic came into view. Joseph III remembered when some “so-called officials from Missouri seeking to arrest [his father] on trumped-up charges” dropped by the family home, unannounced. “Suddenly, Father and the friend who was with him disappeared,” the son remembered, “and when the men came in they found the household quietly engaged in its customary affairs.

  Questioned, Mother said her husband had been there a little while before but was not there then. She invited them in to assure themselves of the fact. They made a thorough search but failed to find him.

  Young Joseph, who could not have been more than ten years old at the time, confessed that
he was “puzzled” by his father’s disappearance. Later, he understood that his father had melted away to the third-floor oubliette. “The suspicions of the manhunters were disarmed, and they went off about their business, leaving Father and his friend to breathe freely again.”

  WHEN HE FOUND THE TIME, JOSEPH WELCOMED VISITORS AND curiosity seekers to his “heavenly city,” often escorting them up Hyde Street—most of the boulevards bore the names of prominent Saints—to his mother’s home. Lucy Mack Smith, now in her sixties, controlled access to a collection of Egyptian mummies and scrolls renowned up and down the Mississippi and even further afield. There was a sign nailed to a board in front of Mrs. Smith’s house:

  EGYPTIAN MUMMIES EXHIBITED,

  AND ANCIENT RECORDS EXPLAINED.

  PRICE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.

  The mummies and the papyri, or “ancient records” were a highlight of any Nauvoo tour. Joseph sometimes told visitors that his mother had purchased the collection for $6,000. In fact, he had bought them himself for $2,400 from an itinerant showman who brought his artifacts to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833. The mummies, “frightfully disfigured, and, in fact, most disgusting relics of mortality,” according to the visiting Anglican minister Henry Caswall, were apparently genuine. Their identities, as the Smiths explained them, were probably spurious.

  After leading Charlotte Haven, a visitor from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “up a short, narrow stairway to a low dark room under a roof,” Mrs. Smith held her candle up to a row of yellowing corpses. Lucy introduced her desiccated charges as the Egyptian “King Onitus and his royal household:” two wives, and the daughter of a fellow king. (Joseph told visitors the king was “Pharaoh Necho.”) For Charlotte, Mrs. Smith brandished what “seemed to be a club wrapped in a dark cloth, and said ‘This is the leg of Pharaoh’s daughter, the one that saved Moses.’” To yet another visitor, the young Eudocia Baldwin, Mrs. Smith (“a trim looking old lady in black silk gown and white cap and kerchief”) introduced the mummies as “the old King Pharaoh of the Exodus himself, with wife and daughter.” “My Son Joseph Smith has recently received a revelation from the Lord in regard to these people and times,” Mrs. Smith said, “and he has told these things to me.”

  The papyri were equally problematic. Joseph claimed the hieroglyphics were handwritten by Abraham, “the father of the faithful,” and bore the signatures of Moses and his older brother, Aaron. With the aid of God and a white seer stone, Joseph translated the papyri into the Book of Abraham, which purported to be a source for the Book of Genesis. His mother said the hieroglyphic scrolls were “the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit.” Charlotte Haven pointed to a drawing of Eve being tempted by a snake standing on two legs. “But serpents don’t have legs,” the young woman remarked.

  “They did before the Fall,” Lucy shot back.

  Like the mummies, the papyri also appeared to be genuine Egyptian funerary relics. But they were not the “lost” book of Abraham, and they did not help explain the origins of the Negro race, as Joseph claimed. The scrolls cost the Mormons much future vexation, as they reinforced the prevalent racist doctrine that African Americans were descendants of the cursed Canaanites, the children of Noah’s son Ham.

  In the 1960s, a Metropolitan Museum of Art expert uncharitably characterized Joseph’s translation of the scrolls as “a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.”

  ON MAY 15, 1844, AS HE OFTEN DID, JOSEPH SPENT THE DAY WITH two eminent visitors who hopped off the steamboat to catch a glimpse of the “bourgeois Mohammed.” The day-trippers were the young Bostonians Charles Francis Adams and Josiah Quincy, one the son of former president John Quincy Adams, and the other a future mayor of Boston. They intended “to see for ourselves the result of the singular political system which had been fastened upon Christianity,” Quincy later wrote.

  Joseph was at the top of his game. He showed them the Egyptian mummies and insisted they tip his mother a quarter-dollar for the pleasure. He bragged about his extensive knowledge of ancient languages (“his miraculous gift of understanding all languages”), and of course escorted his guests to the Nauvoo Temple, “the grotesque structure on the hill,” as Quincy called it. With the Bostonians trotting behind him, Joseph roamed his domain like a feudal lord, bantering with a stonecutter at the temple, engaging in an impromptu debate with a visiting Methodist preacher, even rousting female visitors from the mansion in full view of his visitors.

  Not for one second did Joseph sound like a man facing uprisings both inside and outside his Mormon kingdom. Quite the contrary, he waxed on endlessly about national politics, and about his personal quest for the presidency. Quincy tried to ask a serious question: “Is it possible that you have too much power to be safely trusted to one man?”

  “In your hands, or that of any other person,” Joseph answered, “so much power would, no doubt, be dangerous. I am the only man in the world it would be safe to trust with it. Remember,”—Quincy noted that these last few words “were spoken in a rich, comical aside”—“I am a prophet!”

  * Joseph Smith called Jackson “the acme of American glory,” in large part because he approved of Jackson’s brutal Indian removal policies.

  4

  EVERYBODY HATES THE MORMONS

  Their manners, customs, religion and all, are more obnoxious to our citizens than those of the Indians, and they can never live among us in peace. The rifle will settle the quarrel.

  —The Missouri Commercial Appeal, editorial

  TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1841, WAS A HOLIDAY IN NAUVOO. ON A clear and balmy spring morning, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was celebrating its eleventh birthday. Businesses and city offices were closed. The wharves and river landing points were busier than usual, as Gentiles assembled from up and down the Mississippi Valley to watch the promised pageantry. The Mormons were also celebrating a milestone in their spiritual journeys from New York, Ohio, Missouri, and in many cases the British Isles: the laying of the cornerstone of the Nauvoo Temple, to be built on a hill overlooking the town center and the dark, glistening river beyond. The temple would be the crown jewel of Joseph’s new Zion. Once completed, it would provide the sacred space necessary for administering the endowments, priesthood ritual, baptisms, and marriage-sealing ceremonies central to the Saints’ spiritual lives. The church expected every resident of Nauvoo to donate time and money to constructing the temple. Joseph carefully monitored temple tithing, quick to accuse better-off Saints of stinting on their sacred obligations.

  The Saints had erected a magnificent sandstone temple in Kirtland, Ohio, the scene of many legendary events. At its dedication in 1836, Joseph Smith reported that “the sound of a rushing mighty wind” filled the building. The congregation began speaking in tongues, and Joseph “beheld the Temple was filled with angels.” Hearing the strange noises, people from the neighborhood ran to the temple and saw “a bright light like a pillar of fire” shooting up from the central spire. It was inside the Kirtland temple that Joseph reported meeting with Jesus, Moses, and the prophet Elijah, who shared revelations concerning the direction of the church.

  In the dawn hours at Nauvoo, 650 soldiers of the Nauvoo Legion formed ranks at the town’s parade grounds, just below the temple site. An estimated 8,000 onlookers, Saints and strangers, packed the streets. At 7:30 a.m., artillery fire announced the arrival of Legion generals Wilson Law and Joseph’s brother, Don Carlos Smith. Promptly at 9:30 a.m., heralded by a single cannon blast, Lieutenant General Joseph Smith rode in on his white charger. In martial mode, Smith traveled with a personal staff of fifteen Legionnaires, which included two cavalry colonels and a third officer responsible for Joseph’s personal bodyguard of twelve infantry captains. Some of the thousands of onlookers came just to see the Prophet’s storied uniform, custom designed by his personal tailor, John Bills, who advertised “all kinds of military coats made according to the latest pattern.” Joseph favored a cerulean officer’s tailcoat, dripping with weighty gold braid and epaulettes,
topped off with a black cockade chapeau that was adorned with a black ostrich feather. As accoutrements, he wore black leather riding boots, white gloves, a golden campaign sash, and a four-foot-long, leather-handled, forged cavalry saber. On the reviewing grounds, Joseph carried a tin speaking trumpet, to amplify his orders.

  “The several companies presented a beautiful and interesting spectacle,” reported onlooker Wandle Mace. “The rich and costly dresses of the officers would have become a Bonaparte or a Washington.” Norton Jacobs recalled that “many strange murmurs ran through the waving throng to see the prophet, the master spirit of the glittering scene, mount a scaffold at the south-east corner in full military costume, accompanied by many of his fellow officers and friends.”

  The ranking officers’ wives followed them onto the parade grounds, seated in an elaborate carriage. Emma Smith, sporting a black cap with a black ostrich plume, and dressed in a tight-fitting habit adorned with gold buttons, entered riding sidesaddle on her horse Charlie. In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities. “Smith had always shown great favor to these red men and encouraged them to be on friendly terms with him,” noted young William Baldwin, a visitor from Carthage, who spotted the towering, “dusky” Keokuk in Nauvoo that day. “He had constant communication with them and may have looked forward in imagination to some time when they would become valuable allies.” (“I am a son of the Great Spirit,” Keokuk once told Joseph, adding that “I have a Book of Mormon at my wigwam that you gave me many moons ago.”) Ladies and gentlemen of the local gentry marched in double file behind the honored guests. Above them waved the individual flags of each Legion company, flapping on poles topped with carved wooden eagles, as well as the Illinois flag, the American flag, and the unforgettable standard belonging to William Pitt’s brass band: a five foot by four foot banner depicting a single, huge all-seeing eye of God, observing the proceedings.