by Alex Beam
Ten-year-old Mosiah Hancock later remembered how his father, Levi, led him into the room where Joseph and Hyrum were lying in state. Levi “told me to place one hand on Joseph’s breast and to raise my other arm and swear with hand uplifted that I would never make a compromise with any of the sons of hell, which vow I took with a determination to fulfill to the very letter.”
The little boy then laid his left hand on Hyrum’s chest and repeated the vow.
“Their dead bodies . . . gave me such feelings as I am not able to describe,” Allen Stout, one of Joseph’s bodyguards, wrote in his journal.
I there and then resolved in my mind that I would never let an opportunity slip unimproved of avenging their blood upon the head of the enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ . . . when I see one of the men who persuaded them to give up to be tried, I feel like cutting their throats.
And I hope to live to avenge their blood, but if I do not, I will teach my children to never cease to try to avenge their blood and then their children and children’s children to the fourth generation as long as there is one descendant of the murderers upon the earth.
The next year, President Brigham Young incorporated an “oath of vengeance” into the sacred endowment ritual administered to all faithful Mormons in the Nauvoo Temple:
You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.
The vengeance oath was to be kept secret, under penalty of death. “If any of you betray us you are traitors of course you must expect the penalties put in force [sic],” a church leader explained inside the temple. “I should not cut your throat but pray God to intervene to cut your own throat.”
The oath remained in the Mormons’ endowment ritual until 1927.
INDEED, THE GENTILE WORLD OUTSIDE WAS EXPECTING VENGEANCE from the Saints. Hancock County was trembling in anticipation of a counterstrike from the Nauvoo Legion. True, the Mormons had surrendered several hundred muskets earlier in the week, but subsequent events would prove that there was no shortage of firearms in the Mormon capital. Angry as they were, why didn’t the Saints fight back?
In principle, the Mormons were not squeamish about violence. When Missourians started attacking their farms during the Mormon War of 1838, the Saints struck back, hard. But when faced with overwhelming force, in the form of 2,500 Missouri militiamen, Joseph Smith realized that discretion was the better part of valor. Rather than see his followers annihilated, he agreed to a “peace on any terms short of battle.” The punitive cease-fire terms resulted in the seizure of most Mormons’ property—ostensibly, reparations for the Missourians’ costs in making war on the Saints—expulsion, and, for Joseph and five other Mormon leaders, six months in a nineteen-foot-square, earthen-floored jail cell.
That was the second time in his short career as a commander in chief that Joseph had prudently backed away from a fight. In 1834, he led a paramilitary troop of about two hundred Saints from Ohio into Missouri, on a mission he called “Zion’s Camp.” Joseph thought the Saints’ ragtag expeditionary force could teach the Missouri marauders a lesson, but he backed away from a battle, facing overwhelming odds. A cholera epidemic turned Zion’s Camp into an epochal disaster, but Joseph showed that he placed a high value on the lives of his Saints.
In retrospect, Willard Richards and John Taylor exercised good judgment by calming the martial passions of the Saints. Governor Ford may have thought that the Nauvoo Legion outnumbered his militias, but if so, that would not last long. In the event of a war, or even skirmishes, Thomas Sharp’s repeated calls for Mormon-killers from Iowa and Missouri to converge on Hancock County would fall on eager ears. Furthermore, there were suspicions that Joseph’s cockaded Legion preferred pageantry, like full-dress parades and stagy war games, to actual fighting. Ford feared the numbers of the Legion more than their martial arts. “All the field officers who accompanied me,” Ford commented, thought “that this legion is in no wise superior to the common militia, and that in fact they were inferior to most of the militia in the state.”
The Mormons in Nauvoo were rudderless. Joseph was the church, and Joseph was dead. Hyrum, one of his possible successors, had also died. As part of his vainglorious quest for the presidency, Joseph had sent ten of the twelve apostles across the United States to electioneer for him. The apostles’ de facto leader, Brigham Young, learned of Smith’s death only in mid-July while visiting a Mormon family in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He hurried back to Nauvoo, arriving just in time for a leadership conference three weeks later.
The Saints were experiencing an unprecedented, collective anguish. Joseph had been in tight spots before, especially with state authorities and their musket-toting enforcers. But somehow, he had always escaped. Friendly Saints would hide him in an outbuilding for a few weeks; he would find the right lawyer, or a sympathetic local judge would grant him his rights as a free American. Two Missouri governors repeatedly tried to capture him, yet he always managed to slip the noose. But this time Joseph wasn’t coming back, and many of the faithful experienced the loss as a body blow. Lucy Walker, one of Joseph’s plural wives, remembered a midnight rap on the door announcing Joseph and Hyrum’s deaths. “I seemed paralyzed with terror,” she recalled, and
. . . had no power to speak or to move. Agnes called out what is the news, receiving no answer, came rushing down to learn the awful truth. When at length we returned to our chamber and on our bended knees poured out the anguish of our souls to that God who holds the destinies of his children in his own hands, for a time it seemed utterly impossible that he would allow his prophet to be slain by his foes. . . .
The dogs howled and barked, the cattle bellowed and all creation was astir.
Perhaps the Saints were simply too lost without Joseph. Perhaps the Nauvoo Legion wasn’t ready to become a fighting force after all. There was barking and bellowing, but there was no Mormon reprisal for Joseph’s killing.
WORD TRAVELED SLOWLY IN JOHN TYLER’S AMERICA. ALTHOUGH Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph just one month before the Smiths were killed, it would not enter common use for several more years. No train lines linked Carthage, Warsaw, or Nauvoo with the outside world. So only in July did the nation learn about Joseph Smith’s death. In Salem, Massachusetts, Apostle Heber Kimball noted in his diary on July 9 that “the papers were full of News of the death of our Prophet. I was not willen to believe it, fore it was too much to bare.” Three days later, Kimball recorded that “Elder White and myself went in to our closet and offered up the Singhs [signs] and praied that we might get some definite news pertaining the death of the Prophets.” It came that day, in a letter from Kimball’s wife, Vilate. “O Lord what feelings we had,” he wrote.
On July 27, the New York Daily Tribune, still edited by Joseph’s admirer James Gordon Bennett, expressed “our horror” at the “cold-blooded, barbarous, brutal outrage” that had taken place in Illinois. Whatever the Smiths had done,
how black soever were their crimes—they were defenceless and in the hands of the laws, under a solemn pledge of their protection as well as justice, and the people of Illinois had not the slightest excuse for taking it for granted that those laws would not be enforced.
“Thus Ends Mormonism!” blared the New York Herald, which opined that “the death of the modern mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism.” Editor Horace Greeley, already well into his career as one of the century’s most famous newsmen, thought Smith’s martyrdom might spur the Saints to further greatness: “The blood of Joe Smith, spilled by murderous hands, will be like the fabled dragon’s teeth sown broadcast, that everywhere sprang up armed men.”
“Alas for human greatness!” the authoritative Baltimore-based Whig newspaper Niles’ National Register sardonically noted in its July 13 issue. “One of the nominated candidates for the next president is already
a lifeless corpse. Even the sanctity of his high profession as a prophet and a leader, could not preserve him.” The “Brief Remarker,” writing in the July 25 Hartford Courant, waxed more direct, implying that the “great deceiver” and “great imposter” Joseph Smith got what was coming to him:
Should the internal history of Nauvoo ever be laid open and the practices enacted there be brought to the knowledge of the world, we believe the scenes which have been there practiced would astonish and disgust the American public.
Back in Illinois, the players continued to play the parts assigned to them. Thomas Sharp vilified the Mormons, and Joseph and Hyrum, as if they were still alive. Cloaking himself in the mantle of a freedom-loving patriot, Sharp denounced Joseph as a “tyrant.” Invoking the “noble blood which promoted our forefathers to throw off the yoke of British oppression,” the editor claimed that the mob he so assiduously provoked was “asserting . . . liberty,” even while committing a “daring violation of law.” Sharp called the lynching a “necessity,” asking his readers, “Did they deserve death? There can be no doubt in the mind of any intelligent person acquainted with their history. . . .”
The cold-blooded attack on four men armed with a misfiring pepperbox revolver and two walking sticks emerged from Sharp’s pen as a noble feat of arms. Noting that the mob stood accused of cowardice, Sharp rebutted that assertion. “Instead of cowardice, they exhibited foolhardy courage,” he wrote,
for they must have known or thought that they would bring down on themselves the vengeance of the Mormons.
True, the act of an armed body going to the jail and killing prisoners does appear at first sight dastardly, but we look at it as though these men were the executioners of justice; and their act is no more cowardly than is the act of the hangman in stretching up a defenceless convict who is incapable of resistance. [Emphasis added.]
Sharp would never cease damning the Mormons until they had been driven from the state. He was not alone in inventing euphemisms for the grisly execution. “If the public understood our true situation,” wrote George Rockwell, the Warsaw-based anti-Mormon businessman,
I am sure that instead of calling it a “cold blooded murder” they would hold public meetings, and express their thanks to men who dared to execute justice upon two of the vilest men that ever lived. . . . That they were bad men, and deserved death I have not the least doubt. They taught their followers that the revelations of God through them were paramount to the laws of man.
The pusillanimous Thomas Ford likewise stayed in character. In a message to the people of Illinois promulgated from his safe harbor in Quincy, he bemoaned “the recent disgraceful affair at Carthage.” Naturally, he saw no need to assign blame, at least not to himself. Yes, he had guaranteed Joseph and Hyrum’s safety, and yes, the “peacably disposed” Mormons had surrendered their arms at his request. But “the pledge of security to the Smiths was not given upon my individual responsibility,” he insisted. The militias assembled in Carthage had promised him they would guard the prisoners, according to Ford. If they had any hand in the murders, Ford said, they “have done all they could do to disgrace the State and sully the public honor.”
Ford had played a double game, simultaneously trying to curry favor with the powerful Mormon electoral bloc while seeking to assuage the blood lust of the “old settlers.” He failed on both counts. The Mormons justifiably blamed him for the bloodbath at the Carthage jail. But the anti-Mormon faction also disdained him. Warsaw resident Rockwell told his parents that more than two years after the Smith killings, Ford was persona non grata in Carthage. “He called at a grog shop for a glass of whiskey, but the keeper refused to sell him any,” Rockwell wrote. “He insisted that his money was as good as anybody’s but he was told again that he could not have the whiskey at any price and his money was not wanted.” During that same trip, Ford visited Nauvoo, which the Mormons had begun to abandon in early 1846. “A committee of the ladies—‘probably Gentile ladies’—presented him with a petticoat,” Rockwell reported. “[Ford] is known as a tool of the Jacks—he is treated everywhere with contempt.”
Several years later, when composing his History of Illinois, Thomas Ford speculated that a future Church of Latter-day Saints might swell to many times the size of the tens of thousands of members it claimed in 1844, “and make the name of the martyred Joseph ring as loud, and stir the souls of men as much, as the mighty name of Christ itself.” Should that occur, Ford wrote, “the humble governor of an obscure State, who would otherwise be forgotten in a few years, stands a fair chance, like Pilate and Herod, by their official connection with the true religion, of being dragged down to posterity with an immortal name.”
Ford has indeed been forgotten by the public at large. But Mormons still remember his faithful reenactment of Pontius Pilate’s part in the execution of their Prophet and revile him for it.
JOSEPH AND HYRUM’S BODIES WOULD HAVE THEIR OWN FATEFUL history. At 5:00 p.m. on June 29, 1844, the formal viewing of the corpses ended. Now began the strange saga of the Smiths’ remains, a story that unfolded over the course of seventy years. With the public dispersed and the mansion’s doors again locked, a few trusted Saints hustled the coffins into a tiny bedroom. They removed the corpses from their outer containers, filling the pine boxes with sand and rocks. Around sundown, with considerable fanfare, Dimick Huntington drove the sand-filled coffins to the Nauvoo cemetery, with several thousand mourners following him in procession.
At the graveyard, Williams Phelps, Joseph’s favored ghostwriter—it was Phelps who drafted Joseph’s presidential campaign platform—delivered an impassioned, incendiary speech in memory of the “Prince of Light.” The “most lovely and Jesus-like” prophet had ascended to a place where he could wreak vengeance on his enemies, Phelps promised: he “is where he can use the treasury of snow and hail; he can now direct the lion from the thicket to lay the Gentile cities waste.”
“Woe to the drunkards with Ephraim and great whore of Babylon!” Phelps railed.
For their destruction is sure, and their end near . . . rejoice ye Saints, for the triumph of the wicked is short; they can kill the body, as we have in this sample, but Mormonism is a celestial medicine and must be applied as the sovereign remedy for all sin.
He particularly vilified Governor Ford:
Tom Ford is supposed to be one of those beings that believes when a child is born, that some person has died—but unfortunately, we must come to the conclusion from analogy, that when Tom Ford was born, no body died.
After the service, the Mormons stationed guards at the fake grave site, to deceive would-be grave robbers. The Saints feared that marauders might exhume Smith’s remains and take them to Missouri, where there may still have been a price on his head. There was an equally ghoulish fear that a bounty hunter might decapitate Joseph’s corpse and present the severed head in return for a reward. Rumors had already spread that his killers had tried to cut the head from his lifeless body after it tumbled from the window of the Carthage jail.
So at midnight, Huntington led a secret corps of grave diggers who carried Hyrum and Joseph’s coffins out the back door of the mansion, through the garden and across the street, to the Nauvoo House hotel, still under construction. The first-floor joists had been laid above the basement. Huntington’s crew dug the graves underneath, and scattered wood chips, stones, and random litter over the dirt to hide their work. That evening a torrential rain erased any trace of the graves’ location, which was known to only a few close family members.
This solution would prove to be temporary. Just weeks after Joseph’s death, Emma was feuding with his successor, Brigham Young. Many issues divided them: How to deal with Joseph’s debts, how to apportion Joseph’s real estate, and, most significant, whether polygamy would remain part of Latter-day Saint doctrine. Emma still hated plural marriage and its attendant humiliations. Brigham continued to marry new wives, and to introduce more Saints into the ritual, despite significant opposition. Emma feared that Brig
ham might try to seize Joseph’s corpse to legitimize his claim to be continuing Joseph’s legacy. She was right.
Joseph had left plans for a large, pyramidal limestone crypt and memorial to be constructed for his family, at the southeast corner of the Temple. It remained unfinished at the time of his death, but that was where Brigham wanted the Prophet to be buried. “We will petition Sister Emma, in the name of Israel’s God, to let us deposit the remains of Joseph according as he commanded us,” Brigham told the 1845 church conference.
If she will not consent to it, our garments are clear—Then when he awakes in the morning of the resurrection, he shall talk with them, not with me; the sin shall be upon her head, not ours.
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had enlarged their families through plural marriage, in part to increase their collective glory in the exaltation, when men and women come face-to-face with Jesus Christ. Brigham warned that Emma was jeopardizing Joseph’s eternal life. These were stark words to a believing Mormon.
Again working with the Huntingtons, father and son, Emma arranged yet another midnight burial. Her son Joseph III remembered witnessing the disinterment and watching as one of the workers snipped a curl from his father’s hair, which Emma wore in a locket for the rest of her life. The bodies were reburied across the street, near the Homestead, the two-story log cabin that Joseph and Emma occupied when they first settled in Nauvoo. Huntington and his men moved a small shed that was used as a spring house, buried the brothers in the exposed footprint, then put the shed back on top of the graves. Joseph’s deceased children would eventually be buried alongside their father, and Emma’s remains joined her husband’s when she died in 1879.
