by Alex Beam
Or perhaps Lamborn simply wasn’t up to the job. He died less than two years later, shaking his life away in an attack of delirium tremens after abandoning his wife and child.
Lamborn’s equivocal commitment to punishing Joseph Smith’s murderers surfaced when it came time to schedule the separate trial of Hyrum Smith’s killers. Fresh from their decisive acquittals, the defendants demanded a speedy follow-up to Lamborn’s courtroom debacle. Judge Young set a courtroom date for Tuesday, June 24.
Lamborn went through the motions of preparing his case. He subpoenaed ninety-three prosecution witnesses and assembled commitments from men and women who should have participated in the first trial, for example, jailer George Stigall and his wife, one of the guards under Worrell’s command, and several members of the Carthage Greys.
Judge Young traveled to Carthage on June 24 to gavel the trial of Hyrum’s murderers into session. Astonishingly, Lamborn never showed up. Young freed the defendants “for want of prosecution.”
Governor Ford, who had appointed Lamborn and promised the Mormons justice in the courtroom, threw up his hands. “No one would be convicted of any crime in Hancock,” he wrote. “Government was at an end there, and the whole community were delivered up to the dominion of a frightful anarchy.”
* The Upper Mississipian newspaper of Rock Island, Illinois, reported that a sheriff tried to execute a Nauvoo arrest warrant in Burlington, Iowa, for the Law brothers, the Fosters, and one of the Higbees, accusing them of complicity in the Smiths’ deaths. According to the report, William Law and the Foster brothers were briefly detained, challenged the validity of the warrant, and then disappeared. None of the men faced charges in Nauvoo, or elsewhere.
* A second account of a miraculous light surfaced in the journal of Mary Rollins Lightner, one of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Lightner reported meeting several militiamen returning from Carthage the day after the Smiths’ murder: “They told us that the Smiths were killed and that a great light appeared at their death. I said that should prove Joseph a true Prophet of God. O no, said one, it would only prove that God was well pleased with those that killed him.”
PART THREE
“Let us go to the far western shore / Where the blood-thirsty ‘christians’ will hunt us no more.”
13
AFTERMATH
The death of the modern Mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism. They cannot get another Joe Smith. The holy city must tumble into ruins, and the “latter-day saints” have indeed come to the latter day.
—New York Herald, after Joseph’s death
THE COLD-BLOODED MURDERS OF JOSEPH AND HYRUM SMITH shocked both Mormons and Gentiles. For several months after the killings, an uneasy calm prevailed in Hancock County. Perhaps the anti-Mormon settlers experienced shame; whatever the case, it took almost a full year for hostilities to resume between the Mormons and their implacable Illinois enemies. But in the summer of 1844, the Saints faced a more pressing problem than the simmering hatred in Hancock County: Who would lead the church?
Joseph had built the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a formidable enterprise. For a short time in 1844, Nauvoo was the largest city in Illinois, with more than 10,000 residents. At least as many Saints again lived elsewhere in the United States, and in the ever-expanding British church. All of them looked to Nauvoo, and to Joseph, for leadership and religious revelation.
Replacing the Prophet would be no easy task. Joseph had often mentioned Hyrum, the church’s patriarch, as his logical successor, but Hyrum was dead. Within just days of the brothers’ assassination, it became clear that Joseph had mentioned many others, too—relatives, associates, apostates, and even his unborn son—as possible successors. In the early 1830s, Joseph had said that Oliver Cowdery, one of his first scribes, or David Whitmer, an original witness to the translation of the golden plates, would be fit to take over the church. He had also named Sidney Rigdon, the fiery preacher with whom Joseph experienced several joint revelations, as a likely successor. In his own family, he had blessed his teenage son Joseph III in January 1844, and had suggested his brother Samuel and even David Hyrum, born five months after Joseph’s death, as worthy prophets or revelators of the church. In fact, Joseph had delivered so many contradictory pronouncements that he had even included a zero option, prophesying in 1837 that the “keys” of the new dispensation could not be passed on until Jesus Christ returned to earth (Doctrine and Covenants 112:15).
To complicate matters, Joseph had dispatched almost all church leaders, including ten of the twelve apostles, across the United States to campaign for his presidential candidacy. The most powerful figures remaining in Nauvoo were Willard Richards, the badly wounded John Taylor, and stake president William Marks, the city’s senior religious leader. Marks was also president of the church’s High Council and a senior member of Joseph’s secret Council of Fifty. But the most powerful person in post-assassination Nauvoo was arguably a woman: Joseph’s widow, Emma Smith.
Emma enjoyed a special status in Nauvoo, partly stemming from her ceremonial role as the first lady of Mormonism and partly attributable to her benevolent intelligence and forceful personality. Emma functioned as the queen of the Mormons, attending public events attired in regal finery, riding sidesaddle on her favorite mare, or waving from a well-appointed carriage. She presided over the vast Nauvoo Mansion, the town’s social and political epicenter, where Joseph conducted much of his business. Emma had organized the women of Nauvoo into a Female Relief Society, over which she presided. Originally intended to raise funds to build the Nauvoo Temple, the Relief Society took on much broader obligations, such as monitoring morality in the fast-growing city. More than once, Emma launched investigations into reports of adultery or polygamy among her peers. Inevitably, the women concerned denied the shocking accusations, which were usually true. Most of the leading figures in the Relief Society, unbeknownst to Emma, had already sealed themselves to Joseph in secret matrimony.
Paradoxically, to pursue his many furtive marriages and assignations, Joseph Smith needed Emma and the cover story of a loving, monogamous marriage to validate the conservative morality of his Old Testament religion. Even though Emma had been informed of the polygamy revelation, and briefly acquiesced to some of Joseph’s secret sealings with young women, the public face of Mormonism espoused only monogamy. Thus, Joseph often declared that he had only one wife, the faithful, loving Emma. Polygamy remained a secret practice, heatedly denied in public forums. Moreover, Joseph transferred much of his wealth, most of it land owned on behalf of the church, to Emma. When he died, she immediately became one of Nauvoo’s wealthiest and most influential citizens, and also extremely protective of her fortune, and of her children’s legacy.
Emma hated polygamy. She hated the secrecy and of course resented the sexual humiliation visited on the first wives of all the Mormon leaders. “Secret things cost Joseph and Hyrum their lives,” she told her husband’s confederate William Clayton, adding, “I prophecy [sic] that it will cost you and the Twelve your lives as it has done them.” For the first month and a half after Joseph’s death, her loathing of plural marriage determined her preferences for a successor. Nauvoo immediately split into two rival political camps. On one side, Emma, William Marks, and Joseph’s erratic brother William Smith were lobbying for a church dominated by Joseph’s relatives, free from the doctrinal baggage of the past few years: the secret councils, the secret rituals, but most of all, the secret marriages. Marks opposed polygamy when the doctrine was first introduced to the City Council in 1843, and later claimed, unconvincingly, that Joseph intended to abolish plural wifery shortly before his death.
Arrayed against Marks, Emma, and William Smith were Richards, Taylor, and William Phelps, Joseph’s ghostwriter. These three were stalling for time, trying to delay key meetings and conferences until the influential apostles and their forceful president, Brigham Young, could return to Nauvoo from the campaign trail and make the case for a continuation of Joseph’s po
licies and theology.
Stake president Marks was widely respected, but uninterested in leading the Saints. That left Joseph’s two younger brothers—the ailing Samuel and the mercurial William, admittedly a fragile repository for his family’s succession claims. Tall, gaunt, of almost sepulchral appearance, William had worked hard to alienate his more successful older brother. “Lusty, hot tempered and always in debt,” William was among those who condemned Joseph as a “false prophet” while he was cooling his heels for six months in a Missouri jail. William opined that Joseph might do well to end his days there: “If I had the disposing of my brother, I would have hung him years ago.” On another occasion, William assaulted his brother after a particularly fierce debate. Joseph wrote of the “wickedness of his brother, who Cain-like had tried to kill him.” Joseph once instructed Brigham Young to excommunicate William, then thought better of it. (William would later be excommunicated by two separate Mormon churches in two years.) It was William who briefly edited the Wasp, the scandalous Nauvoo newspaper that accused Joseph’s enemies of “buggery,” and worse.
When William finally returned to Nauvoo from a mission trip to the East Coast, “He seemed determined to live up to his privilege and stand in his place,” reported James Monroe, a young tutor living in Nauvoo. William claimed to be of “royal blood” and purported to preach “the gospel according to St. William.” No wonder Brigham Young ridiculed him as an “aspiring man.” Both Emma and the Smiths’ sixty-nine-year-old grandmother, Lucy Mack Smith, the keeper of the desiccated mummies, endorsed William, or his brother Samuel, as possible regents for the thirteen-year-old Joseph Smith III. Emma spoke up forcefully in the leadership councils. She warned Richards and Phelps “not to trample on her” and separately threatened to “do the church all the injury she could” unless William Marks or someone else “she approves of” was appointed president of the Saints.
On July 30, a month after the Carthage killings, the succession struggle took a deadly turn. Thirty-six-year-old Samuel Smith, Joseph’s brother, died under mysterious circumstances. William suspected that Willard Richards had arranged for Samuel’s poisoning, to ensure that no successor could be chosen before Brigham and the apostles returned to Nauvoo. Although he was nominally a victim of a “bilious fever,” Samuel Smith’s death has gone down in Mormon history as an ambiguous event or an unsolved crime. Samuel was an alcoholic, it was whispered. Supposedly, he suffered some grievous physical injuries in Carthage on the day his brothers were killed. But his daughter Mary confided to a cousin, “My father was undoubtedly poisoned.” She recounted that her father and uncle were taking the same medication, prescribed by Nauvoo doctors. Her uncle threw the medicine in the fire, but “Father continued taking it until the last dose—he spit out and said he was poisoned. But it was too late—he died.” When approached by official church historians in 1914 to describe her father’s death, Mary did not repeat her allegations of foul play.
BY EARLY AUGUST, SERIOUS CLAIMANTS TO JOSEPH’S MANTLE WERE closing in on Nauvoo. Brigham Young was rushing back from Boston, but in 1844, even speedy travel took days, not hours. He took a train from Boston to Albany on July 24. On July 26, he boarded a steamboat in Buffalo, bound for Detroit. Brigham sent a message to the Saints from Chicago on August 1. On August 4, he sent word that he was in Galena, Illinois, a lead-mining center north of Nauvoo on the Mississippi, only a day or two away by boat.
But Sidney Rigdon, arriving from Pittsburgh, beat Brigham to the punch. With William Law discredited and Joseph dead, Rigdon was now the only surviving member of the First Presidency. A successful revivalist preacher, Rigdon converted to Mormonism in 1830, the year the Book of Mormon was published, and often preached alongside Joseph Smith. He was erudite, book-smart, and a tad unstable. Joseph and Rigdon had feuded ferociously over the years, although Smith generally acknowledged the older man’s superior intellect and preaching abilities. Rigdon’s stock had been falling during the final years of Joseph’s reign, primarily because of the older man’s lack of enthusiasm for polygamy. Joseph had improbably accused Rigdon of conspiring with the Missouri authorities to kidnap the Prophet and tried to arrange his expulsion from the church. William Marks and other church leaders supported Rigdon and defied Joseph, who then washed his hands of his former counselor. “I have thrown him off my shoulders,” Joseph declared in 1843, “and you have put him on me; you may carry him, but I will not.” Joseph’s ire was temporary, and soon afterward he admitted Rigdon to the secret Council of Fifty and approved his counselor’s nomination for vice president on his 1844 presidential ticket.
Rigdon was excitable, and not always in a good way. It was he who urged the “war of extermination” against the Saints’ enemies in Missouri—a suggestion the Missourians quickly embraced as their own—and odd reports surfaced concerning his 1844 induction into the Council of Fifty. Fellow member Jedediah Grant said Rigdon “leaped for joy, and walked the room as sprightly as a boy in his gayest frolics” in the upstairs room of Joseph Smith’s store. “Joseph! Joseph! Thou servant of the most High God, I will never leave or forsake thee!” Rigdon exclaimed. Orson Hyde reported that Rigdon “began to speak, then to shout, then to dance, and threw his feet so high that he lost his balance and came well nigh falling over backwards upon the stove” at the same ceremony. “He was so extravagant in his shouting,” Hyde reported, “that most of the members hung their heads.”
Rigdon and his family had moved to Pittsburgh in the spring of 1844, purportedly because his vice-presidential nomination required him to live outside of Illinois; the nominees for president and vice president couldn’t hail from the same state. At the same time, it was whispered that Rigdon wanted to put 1,000 miles between his attractive twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy and the priapic Nauvoo polygamists.
Rigdon’s arrival in Nauvoo immediately changed the terms of the succession debate. Addressing the Saints’ Sunday service in the leafy grove on the Temple hill, Rigdon recounted a vision he experienced on June 27, the day Joseph died. Rigdon saw Joseph Smith in heaven, “on the right hand of the Son of God . . . clothed with all the power, glory, might and majesty and dominion of the celestial kingdoms.” Joseph still held “the keys of the kingdom,” Rigdon testified, and “would continue to hold them to all eternity . . . no man could ever take his place.”
The revelation stated that there must be a guardian appointed “to build the church up to Joseph, as he had begun it.” And the guardian should be me, Rigdon said: I am “the identical man that the ancient prophets had sung about, wrote and rejoiced over.” Then Rigdon started to slip off the rails, preaching on one of his favorite themes, Armageddon (“one hundred tons of metal per second thrown at the enemies of God”), and reiterating a curious threat he had previously directed against Queen Victoria of England:
I am going to fight a real bloody battle with sword and with gun . . . I will also cross the Atlantic to encounter the queen’s forces, and overcome them—plant the American standard on English ground and then march to the palace of her majesty, and demand a portion of her riches and dominions, which if she refuse, I will take the little madam by the nose and lead her out, and she shall have no power to help herself.
The Nauvoo stalwarts scorned Rigdon’s high-flown rhetoric and visionary claims. Returning Apostle Parley Pratt later scoffed that Rigdon was “the identical man the prophets never sang nor wrote a word about.” Future church president Wilford Woodruff mocked Rigdon’s “second class vision.”
BRIGHAM YOUNG ARRIVED JUST TWO DAYS AFTER RIGDON AND quickly attacked the older preacher’s bona fides. Just as Rigdon’s stock had been gradually falling among the Saints, Brigham’s had been rising. A medium-sized fireplug of a man with distinctive red hair, Young was an uneducated, areligious frontier husbandman who devoted his life to Joseph Smith from the moment the two men met. They were born not far from each other in Vermont, and both men grew up in northwestern New York. When Young and his brother traveled from New York to Ohio in 1832 to meet the
Prophet Joseph, “I expected I should find him in his sanctum dispensing spiritual blessing and directions [about] how to build the Zion of God on earth,” Brigham’s brother recalled. Instead, they found Joseph, the most earthy of earthly prophets, chopping wood in the forest. The Young brothers grabbed axes and set to work. Brigham was enchanted by the Prophet who “took heaven . . . and brought it down to earth.”
Brigham Young and Joseph Smith worked side by side for the next twelve years. Young, who lacked Joseph’s charismatic appeal, possessed an organizational flair that his mentor lacked. When several thousand Saints had to cross the frozen Mississippi River in the wake of their expulsion from Missouri, Brigham asked Bishop Edward Partridge to provide aid for poor families making the grisly trek. “The poor may take care of themselves, and I will take care of myself,” Partridge told him. “If you will not help them out, I will,” answered Young, who assisted in organizing the initial Mormon encampment in Quincy, Illinois.
Joseph entrusted Young and the apostles with an 1840 mission trip to England. The first Mormon missionaries had set foot in Great Britain three years earlier, but it was the 1840 mission, an astonishing religious and logistical success, that sent steamboats packed with eager Saints west across the Atlantic. An estimated 3,000 converts sailed across the ocean and then up the Mississippi to Nauvoo. The doggedly loyal Young supported Joseph in his adoption of the Masonic rites and in his self-coronation as king of the Kingdom of God. He also followed the Prophet into polygamy, a doctrine Young initially abhorred. Joseph assigned the delicate task of excommunicating William and Wilson Law, and the other Expositor dissidents, to a secret court presided over by Brigham Young.
