by Alex Beam
Unless they should alter their minds and submit to the laws, and lay down their arms, in which event their lives will be spared, (excepting Joe Smith and a few of his advisers) but the City of Nauvoo will be destroyed.
They number 3 or 4000 men well armed and will probably make a desperate resistance. Joe is trying to ape Mahomet, indulges in all kinds of licentiousness and has become a formidable foe to the State.
UPRIVER, JOSEPH WAS PREPARING NAUVOO FOR WAR. THE LEGION drilled every morning at 8:00 a.m. and remained on alert until the late afternoon. “Every man almost slept on his arms and walked armed by day,” recalled Legionnaire Oliver B. Huntington, “ready at a moment’s warning to lose their lives, or lay them in jeopardy in defense of our rights.” Joseph issued instructions to the city police and to Jonathan Dunham, the major general commanding the Nauvoo Legion: guard the waterfront and station pickets along the roads leading into the city. Nauvoo’s forty-man police force was on high alert, on the lookout for spies, importuning strangers, checking bona fides. The Expositor-inspired dissidents numbered just a few hundred at most, in a population of over 10,000 Saints. Nonetheless, Joseph and Nauvoo’s leaders fretted about fifth columnists who might be helping the restive Hancock County militias. “At Nauvoo, a bayonet bristles at every assailable point!” a St. Louis newspaper reported. “Boats are not permitted to tarry, nor strangers permitted to land.”
On the following day, June 18, Joseph donned his gold-braided, buff-and-blue brigadier general’s uniform and summoned the Nauvoo Legion to a full-dress review in front of his home. Apostle William Phelps read a brief, inflammatory dispatch from the Warsaw Signal, detailing the anti-Mormons’ preparations for war. Standing atop the wooden frame of the unfinished barbershop and inn being built for Porter Rockwell, under a bright sun and a radiant blue sky, Joseph delivered one of his most magnificent orations, a ninety-minute-long self-vindication and stirring call to arms.
A stylized lithograph of Joseph’s final address to the Nauvoo Legion, with the Nauvoo Mansion in the background; by Mormon artist John Hafen in 1888
Credit: Utah State Historical Society
“We have never violated the laws of our country,” he began.
We are American citizens. We live upon a soil for the liberties of which our fathers periled their lives and spilt their blood upon the battlefield. Those rights so dearly purchased, shall not be disgracefully trodden under foot by lawless marauders without at least a noble effort on our part to sustain our liberties.
“Will you all stand by me to the death,” he shouted, “and sustain at the peril of your lives, the laws of our country, and the liberties and privileges which our fathers have transmitted unto us, sealed with their sacred blood? “AYE!” the serried soldiers, and hundreds of citizens surrounding them, shouted in reply.
“Good!” Smith thundered. “If you had not done it, I would have gone out there”—Smith pointed west, across the Mississippi river—“and would have raised up a mightier people.”
Smith pulled his four-foot-long, tempered-steel cavalry saber from its sheath and brandished the blade above his head.
“Come, all ye lovers of liberty, break the oppressor’s rod, loose the iron grasp of mobocracy, and bring to condign punishment all those who trample under foot the glorious Constitution and the people’s rights!” he shouted. “I call God and angels to witness that I have unsheathed my sword with a firm and unalterable determination that this people shall have their legal rights, and be protected from mob violence, or my blood shall be spilt upon the ground like water, and my body consigned to the silent tomb.”
Joseph again introduced the theme of mortal sacrifice. “I do not regard my own life,” he told the thousands of assembled Saints. “I am ready to be offered a sacrifice for this people; for what can our enemies do? Only kill the body, and their power is then at an end.”
The sword that Joseph unsheathed would never be sullied with a drop of blood. And he would never address the Saints again.
AMID THE RISING TENSIONS, A CARTHAGE “CITIZENS COMMITTEE” traveled to Springfield to ask Governor Ford to call out the state militia to keep the peace in Hancock County. Ford had a different idea. He would journey to Carthage and guarantee the peace himself. He established his headquarters at Artois Hamilton’s hotel, down the street from the county courthouse. The hotel had become the de facto headquarters for the men bent on forcing Joseph to face justice, not only for destroying the Expositor but also for evading the Laws’ complaints of adultery and “false swearing” filed in May. Wilson Law, Robert Foster, and the Higbees had taken refuge there, and several of Joseph’s lesser-known enemies hovered nearby. Apostle John Taylor, whom Joseph sent to negotiate with Ford, reported that Carthage “was filled with a perfect set of rabble and rowdies, who, under the influence of Bacchus, seemed to be holding a grand saturnalia, whooping, yelling and vociferation as if Bedlam had broken loose.”
Carthage was a teeming epicenter of anti-Mormon agitation. Attending a mass meeting with several hundred old citizens, Samuel O. Williams, an officer in the Carthage Greys militia, told a friend “that we all felt that the time had come when either the Mormons or the old citizens had to leave.” The wife of Thomas Gregg, an editor and occasional anti-Mormon pamphleteer, wrote to her husband from Carthage: “You have no idea what is passing here now, to see men preparing for battle to fight with blood hounds; but I hope there will be so large an army as to intimidate that ‘bandit horde’ in Nauvoo.” Within just a few days, about 1,300 militiamen and would-be regulators would gather in Carthage. “Strike, then!” Sharp urged his readers. “For the time has fully come.”
The town center had become a vast military bivouac. The three hundred elite Carthage Greys had pitched their tents on the main square and were drilling four hours a day. Militia regiments from neighboring McDonough, Brown, Adams, and Schuyler Counties soon joined them. Journalist B. W. Richmond reported that “about six acres of ground, in the open space in the centre of town, was covered with ordinary camp-meeting tents, and into these the soldiers were crammed pellmell without order or discipline.
Some were playing cards, and others drinking, or boiling potatoes in small iron pots or roasting bits of bacon impaled on sharp sticks, or baking corn-cakes. Many were pretty drunk, and let out without reserve what was going on in the camp. “Death to the prophet!” was the watchword.
In later life, Eudocia Baldwin, who was fifteen in 1844, had rosier memories of the Carthage town square. She remembered that her hometown had become “the scene of great bustle and excitement”:
We children went sometimes to see the drilling and parading—delighted with the tumult and commotion, the music of fife and drum, the waving and fluttering of the stars and stripes in the warm June breezes. The galloping hither and thither of Colonels and Aides de Camp with very rich silk sashes, and very bright swords, shouting very peremptory orders—were sights and sounds never to be forgotten by children unaccustomed to any warlike demonstrations. . . .
High above all could be heard the droning and shrieking of the bagpipes, for the ubiquitous Scotchman was there to furnish this to us novel and animating music.
Shortly after arriving, Ford addressed the restive militias, who alternately feared a Mormon attack or wanted to march on Nauvoo posthaste. Ford told the men that he intended to follow the law. The Mormons would answer for the destruction of the Expositor, but his audience would have to agree to support the governor’s “strictly legal measures.” In his own account of his speech, Ford reported that “the assembled troops seemed much pleased with the address.” When he finished, “the officers and men unanimously voted with acclamation, to sustain me in a strictly legal course, and that the prisoners should be protected from violence.”
Ford was talking about hypothetical prisoners. Conjuring up the Mormon leadership to stand trial for the destruction of the Expositor was easier said than done. Ford picked up on Smith’s earlier letter and initiated a back-and-forth exchange, entreating the
Prophet to give his side of the story. Fearing violence, Smith sent two advisers, Taylor and John Bernhisel, to Carthage to meet with Governor Ford. Simultaneously, he fired off a letter to President John Tyler in Washington, asking for “that protection which the Constitution guarantees in case of ‘insurrection and rebellion,’ [to] save the innocent and oppressed from such horrid persecution.” Smith never had much luck with US presidents, and the Mormons’ official history makes no note of a reply.
The governor listened to Smith’s emissaries and immediately summoned Joseph and other members of the City Council to Carthage to stand trial. “Your conduct in the destruction of the press was a very gross outrage upon the laws and the liberties of the people,” Ford wrote. “It may have been full of libels, but this did not authorize you to destroy it.” He plaintively added that “there are many newspapers in the state which have been wrongfully abusing me for more than a year,” but Ford insisted he would “shed the last drop of my blood to protect those presses from any illegal violence.”
“The whole country is now up in arms,” Ford wrote, “and a vast number of people are ready to take the matter into their own hands.” If Smith refused to surrender voluntarily, Ford wrote, he would authorize the militias and proto-militias gathered in Carthage to go get him. A war against the Mormons, Ford warned, “may assume a revolutionary character, and the men may disregard the authority of their officers.” In other words, it could turn into a bloodbath.
Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. “We dare not come,” he insisted—three times. “Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control the mob.” In a curious aside, Smith said, “We have been advised by legal and high-minded gentlemen from abroad, who came on the boat this evening to lay our grievances before the Federal Government.”
The “high-minded gentlemen” were two sons of the famous South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, who was running for president. Smith had many dealings, none of them very fruitful, with Calhoun, one of the prominent politicians he petitioned for reparations following the Mormons’ expulsion from Missouri. Indeed, Calhoun had yet again stiffed Joseph when the Prophet asked him to support the Saints’ interests in his presidential campaign. On a whim, Calhoun’s two young sons, “who spent money freely,” had convinced their riverboat captain to stop at Nauvoo for two hours, while they bearded the famous Mormon prophet. Patrick, the older brother, was an army officer en route to an assignment in the West. John Jr. suffered from consumption and was touring the Mississippi for his health.
Wending their way through the darkness to Joseph’s mansion, they found the sprawling structure guarded by three hundred armed men. Two trusted lieutenants, Alpheus Cutler and Reynolds Cahoon, stood at the door, ordered to admit no one. After some palaver, the men found themselves in the presence of Joseph, who interrupted a tense meeting with his closest advisers to entertain the young travelers. “At first he thought we were spies sent by the governor,” John C. Calhoun Jr. reported. Then Joseph invited the boys into his ground-floor drawing room.
“He gave us a full description of his difficulties, and also an exposition of his faith, frequently calling himself the Prophet,” Calhoun wrote. Moments after the men left him to return to their steamboat, Joseph fired off his letter to Ford and resumed his interrupted meeting.
Repairing to his upstairs study, Smith huddled with his brother Hyrum, Willard Richards, and several other church leaders. He handed Ford’s “the whole country is up in arms” letter around, for all to read.
“There is no mercy here,” he remarked.
“No,” Hyrum replied. “Just as sure as we fall into their hands, we are dead men.”
“What shall we do, Brother Hyrum?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly, Joseph had an idea. He said that all Ford and the Carthage mobbers wanted was to get hold of him and Hyrum. So they should disband the Legion and restore Nauvoo to its peaceable self. He was certain they would come to search for them, but: “Let them search. We will cross the river tonight, and go away to the West.”
Barely an hour before, Joseph had told Hyrum that he was determined to go to Washington, DC, and lay his case before President Tyler. He instructed Cahoon to put Emma and Hyrum’s family on a steamboat heading east, to Portsmouth, Ohio. Whatever the destination, Joseph was determined to leave Nauvoo. He told Porter Rockwell to ready a boat for a nighttime crossing to Iowa. Before he left, he instructed William Clayton to hide or destroy the records of the Council of Fifty. Clayton buried them, then dug them up a few weeks later.
The decision taken, Hyrum emerged from the mansion and shook Cahoon’s hand. “A company of men are seeking to kill my brother Joseph, and the Lord has warned him to flee to the Rocky Mountains to save his life,” Hyrum said. “Goodbye, Brother Cahoon, we shall see you again.”
Right behind him strode a silent, sobbing Joseph, with a handkerchief clapped to his face and tears streaming down his cheeks. His final journey had begun.
9
SURRENDER
BANK OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPPI, SUNDAY, 2 P.M.
TO: His Excellency Governor Ford:
SIR: I now offer to come to you at Carthage on the morrow, as early as shall be convenient for your posse to escort us into headquarters, provided we can have a fair trial, not be abused. . . .
—Excerpt from Joseph Smith’s letter to Thomas Ford, June 23, 1844
JOSEPH AND HYRUM’S DRAMATIC FLIGHT ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI did not take them to the Rockies, as they had speculated to some friends, nor to Washington, DC, as Joseph had confided to Emma. The hegira took them nowhere. When the exhausted pair washed up near Montrose, in the Iowa Territory, at daybreak, there was no one home at the house where they intended to stay. Joseph sent Porter Rockwell back to Nauvoo to fetch horses, telling him to prepare for a trip to the Great Basin in the Rocky Mountains the next day. He handed Rockwell a letter for Emma, urging her not to despair. “I do not know where I shall go, or what I shall do,” he wrote, “but shall endeavor to get to the city of Washington . . . may God Almighty bless you and the children and mother. My heart bleeds.”
While the four men were battling the currents and the flotsam of the wild Mississippi, word of Joseph’s flight flashed through Nauvoo. Even a benign dictatorship, lacking a dictator, grinds to a halt. With rumors swirling of an imminent invasion from Carthage, the leaderless Saints panicked. “Some were tried almost to death to think Joseph should leave them in the hour of danger,” Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband Heber. “[Joseph and Hyrum’s] giving themselves up is all that will save our city from destruction.” A fierce debate sprang up among Joseph’s intimates. In the early morning, Stephen Markham, the brigadier general whom Joseph had instructed to disband the Legion, encountered businessman Hiram Kimball and several other prominent Saints loudly discussing Joseph’s fate in the middle of the city.
“It is a bailable case and there is no danger,” Kimball assured the group, arguing that Smith could face a magistrate in Carthage without fear. Joseph’s disappearance would “lessen the value of property—also ruin a number of men,” he added, presumably including himself.
Kimball asked Markham to join a committee that would summon Joseph back to Nauvoo. “Mind your own business, brethren, and let Joseph alone,” Markham replied. “I have my orders from him.”
As Kimball and Reynolds Cahoon strode toward the Nauvoo Mansion, another Saint, Wandle Mace, overheard the two men fretting about the economic consequences of Joseph’s disappearance. He heard the pair insisting that Governor Ford was the Mormons’ friend, and he would protect Joseph if he returned to stand trial in Carthage. Mace couldn’t believe his ears. “I believed the governor to be in perfect harmony with the mob,” Mace said, “and if Joseph recrossed the river, he would be murdered. Should we, for the sake of a little property, be so selfish as to push him into the very jaws of death!”
Kimball and Cahoon entered the m
ansion to confer with the distraught Emma. That morning she had already received two messages from Ford. As usual, he was a fountain of contradictory pronunciamentos. First, he threatened to invade Nauvoo with his many militias, reimpose martial law, and search for Hyrum and Joseph, “if it took three years to do it.” Second, Joseph’s private attorney told her that Ford had guaranteed safe passage for Joseph, and a fair trial, if he surrendered himself in Carthage. Emma hashed out the dilemma with Kimball and Cahoon, then handed a letter to her nephew Lorenzo Wasson to carry to Joseph across the river.
Wasson, Kimball, Cahoon, and Rockwell were back on the Iowa shoreline by 1:00 p.m. The foursome found Joseph and Hyrum at the home of Mormon William Jordan, with their food and belongings strewn around the floor, waiting to be packed onto horses.
Wasson handed Emma’s letter to Joseph. Ford will protect you, she wrote. Please come back.
Cahoon started up again, reaffirming the points made in Emma’s letter. “You always said if the church would stick to you, you would stick to the church, now trouble comes and you are the first to run,” he charged. “When the shepherd deserts his flock, who is to keep the wolves from devouring them?” Kimball and Wasson accused Joseph of cowardice, complaining that their property would be destroyed as a result.
“If my life is of no value to my friends it is of none to myself,” Joseph said. He turned to his childhood friend Rockwell, possibly his most loyal follower, and surely his most ferocious. “What shall I do?”
“You are the oldest and ought to know best,” Rockwell answered. “As you make your bed, I will lie with you.”
