American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  So much for them, indeed. Why wouldn’t the Saints hope that God would square accounts with their oppressors? No one else would. Missouri simply expelled them by the thousands, killing dozens of Saints and confiscating hundreds of farms and homes without even a gesture of restitution. When Joseph Smith and his followers sought succor from the federal government, the leading politicians of the time told him, orotundly, to go to hell. The charade in the Carthage courthouse proved yet again that justice would elude the Saints in this world. So they hoped that God would act where man had failed them.

  Apostle Heber Kimball wrote in his diary that “ever since Joseph’s death,” he and “seven to twelve persons . . . had met together every day to pray . . . and will never rest . . . until those men who killed Joseph & Hyrum have been wiped out of the earth.” In the feverish final months at the Nauvoo Temple, the more than 5,000 Saints who received the sacred endowment ritual also pledged Brigham Young’s oath of vengeance. “We are now conducted into another secret room,” one communicant wrote of the ceremony,

  in the centre of which is an altar with three books on it—the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants (Joseph’s Revelations). We are required to kneel at this altar, where we have an oath administered to us to this effect; that we will avenge the blood of Joseph Smith on this nation, and teach our children the same. They tell us that the nation has winked at the abuse and persecution of the Mormons, and the murder of the Prophet in particular; Therefor the Lord is displeased with the nation, and means to destroy it.*

  Eliza Snow, the Mormons’ leading occasional poet, who was a plural wife of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, wrote a poem in 1862 explaining that the raging Civil War was God’s revenge on the United States. Writing from Salt Lake City, she intended to rebuke William Cullen Bryant’s widely circulated, pro-Union call to arms, “Our Country’s Call,” with her lines:

  Its fate is fixed—its destiny

  Is sealed—its end is sure to come;

  Why use the wealth of poesy

  To urge a nation to its doom?

  . . . It must be so, to avenge the blood

  That stains the walls of the Carthage jail.

  “Salt Lake is to be and remain the single cheering oasis amid the universal National desolation in the years to come,” was the New York Times’s sardonic comment on Snow’s verses.

  Snow would have been aware of Joseph Smith’s remarkable “Civil War prophecy,” delivered on Christmas Day, 1832, during the Nullification Crisis, a furious dispute between South Carolina and Andrew Jackson’s federal government:

  1 Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls;

  2 And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place.

  3 For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called. . . .

  In 1843, Joseph made another prediction that came true. He prophesied that his friend Stephen Douglas would later aspire to the presidency, adding: “If you ever turn your hand against me or the Latter-day Saints, you will feel the weight of the hand of Almighty God upon you.” In 1857, Senator Douglas did turn his hand against the Saints, now openly practicing polygamy in the Utah Territory. Douglas called Mormonism “a disgusting cancer” that “should be cut out by the roots.” Douglas lost the presidency to Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and died the following year.

  There was no statute of limitations for a crime against heaven—the killing of a prophet who claimed to converse with God, with the Savior, and with the seers of the Old Testament. In 1901, fifty-seven years after Joseph’s death, a small newspaper in the Mormon enclave of Lamoni, Iowa, reprinted a brief obituary from Petaluma, California, and then added its own commentary. The original item reported that “Robert Lomax, the man who led the Illinois raiders in 1844, when Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet was killed is dead.” (Lomax’s name appears in none of the lists of mobbers assembled after the killings.) The California paper reported that Smith died after “a hard fight,” conveniently forgetting that he and his brother were murdered in cold blood.

  The events were fresher in the mind of the Lamoni Chronicle writer, who correctly recalled that “there was no assembly of the Mormons in [Carthage] and no fight there.” The Iowa newspaper concluded:

  If Mr. Lomax was there and a leader of that band engaged in the unlawful and unholy work, the reckoning of justice for him and his work lies with the courts on the other side.

  IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES, POWERFUL legends sprang up concerning God’s vengeance on the mobbers who killed Joseph and Hyrum. In 1952, church archivist N. B. Lundwall gathered the many legends into an entertaining book, Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith, which for many years enjoyed the status of most-stolen book in the Salt Lake City public library system. Numerous diarists recorded instances of “the Mormon curse,” a rotting of the flesh that struck down the men who had lifted their hands against the Prophet. (Perhaps the curse fulfilled Joseph’s recorded prophecy five days before his death that his tormentors “will be smitten with the scab &.”) The Indians reported that a man named Jack Reed, who supposedly helped kill Joseph, was so deformed that no white woman could look at him:

  He was literally eaten alive by worms. His eye balls had fallen out, the flesh on his cheeks and neck had fallen off, and though he could breathe he could take nourishment only through an opening in his throat.

  Pieces of flesh as large as two hands had reputedly fallen from different parts of his body.

  Of Corporal James Belton, who bragged of taking a shot at Joseph Smith during the events of June 27, it was reported that “he died from a cancer in his eye, and when his meals were brought to him, the pus from his eye would drop in his plate.”

  Like Lomax, the names of neither Belton nor Reed appear on the lists of the alleged mobbers compiled by Willard Richards, Jacob Backenstos, and William Clayton.

  A crippled, elderly mobber who boasted that “I saw the last bullet shot into the old boy,” that is, Joseph, was said to be sharing a cabin with his abusive son in Coalville, Utah. The son used his father as a pack horse to carry sacks filled with coal and flayed him with a belt when the old man tarried in his work. Eventually, their cabin burned down with the father inside. Somehow, the elderly, charred parent didn’t die; local well-wishers put together a collection for some medicine, sending the son into Park City to fetch the healing lotion. Instead, the son drank the money away in a dingy saloon, and his unrepentant father-mobber succumbed in his absence.

  Much wishful thinking likewise attended the fates of the principals in People v. Levi Williams, et al. But in the main, the “respectable set of men” who murdered Joseph and Hyrum thrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mark Aldrich moved to Tucson and served as president of the Arizona territorial legislature. Jacob Davis, a state senator in 1844, later became a congressman. William Grover was appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Missouri. Nauvoo Expositor collaborator Chauncey Higbee lived a long life in Pittsfield, Illinois, where he worked as a judge, a banker, and a state senator. He had a high school named after him in 1908. Robert F. Smith, the Carthage Greys captain who sealed Joseph Smith’s fate, became a colonel in the Illinois militia and served with distinction in the Civil War. He rose to the rank of brigadier general and became military governor of conquered Savannah, Georgia.

  William Law and his family moved first to northern Illinois, and then to Shullsburg, Wisconsin, where he practiced medicine until his death in 1892 at age eighty-three. His wife, Jane, and his brother, Wilson, who farmed in the area, died in 1883 and 1877, respectively. Five years before his death, the elderly, white-haired doctor spoke at length about Joseph Smith and the Saints with German journalist Wilhelm Wyl. “The greatest mi
stake of my life was my having anything to do with Mormonism,” Law told his visitor. “I feel it to be a very deep disgrace and never speak of it when I can avoid it.” Jane had long ago set fire to their only copy of the Book of Mormon, and the family had abandoned the faith. “It never was a church of Christ, but a most wicked blasphemous humbug, gotten up for the purpose of making money,” Law said. “I have no doubt thousands of honest, virtuous people joined the Church not knowing anything of the wicked workings of the leaders, and thousands (probably in ignorance) still cling to the delusion.”

  His wizened hands trembling, Law heaped abused on Joseph Smith: “He was naturally base, corrupt and cruel . . . a raveling wolf. . . . He claimed to be a god, whereas he was only a servant of the Devil, and as such met his fate.” Law cared just as little for Emma, whom he called “a full accomplice of Joseph’s crimes. She was a large, coarse woman, as deep a woman as there was, always full of schemes and smooth as oil. They were worthy of each other, she was not a particle better than he.”

  After Joseph Smith’s death, the fortunes of the hate-mongering Thomas Sharp soared. He won three terms as mayor of Warsaw, and four terms as an elected judge. Lionized at the 1870 meeting of the Hancock County Pioneer Association, Sharp offered some judicious, albeit unapologetic, comments on the “troublous times” of 1844. “I know there are members of this association who view the occurrences from a different standpoint from what I do,” he told the pioneers, “and it is not my desire to say anything that may wound the feelings of any here present.

  In those days the blood of the people who were so unfortunate to have their homes here, was hot with excitement. Some things were undoubtedly done by the Old Settlers, and approved by them, that had better not have been done; but it must be remembered, that great excitements are always the result of great provocations, and that . . . angelic propriety of conduct is not always to be expected.

  “Everybody loved Judge Sharp,” according to an “In Memoriam” note published upon his death in 1890. “His heart was always warm, cheerful, and bright, as it were in the enjoyment of the spring time of life, his clear, loud and hearty laugh was heard even in his affliction, and sounded as sweet and joyful as the song of the birds at early dawn.”

  The astute Orville Browning, who ably defended the Smiths’ assassins, went on to help found the Republican Party with his friend Abraham Lincoln. Browning remained close to President Lincoln while he was in the White House and Browning was serving out a Senate term vacated by the death of Stephen Douglas. Browning became President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of the interior, then returned to Quincy, Illinois, to amass a fortune as a railroad lawyer. He invested his considerable gains in fraudulent mining schemes promoted by his son-in-law. Both Browning and his widow died penniless.

  Trial judge Richard M. Young also had an unfortunate end. The former senator lived out his days at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, where he died in 1861.

  Mormons have taken a morbid delight in chronicling the desultory fate of Governor Thomas Ford. In 1850, just four years after retiring as governor, he was penniless, with five children to support. His law practice had failed. Dying of alcoholism or tuberculosis, or both, he hoped to enrich his family by publishing his History of Illinois. That didn’t work. Ford and his wife died within two weeks of each other in 1850, leaving their five orphans a legacy of $100 each. The children “were taken by different philanthropic citizens of Peoria,” according to chronicler John F. Snyder, “and properly raised and educated.” Two of the daughters led more or less normal lives. The third, Mrs. Davies, died at age seventy-two after living for several years as a “county charge” in a Peoria hospital. She was “a desolate, heart-broken woman, whose past was a sealed book of bitter memories and disappointments,” according to Snyder, who noted that her predeceased husband was “a brilliant man, but like too many others he looked too often upon the wine when it was red.” One of Thomas Ford’s sons lost an arm fighting in the Civil War. His brother was hung as a horse thief in Kansas after the war, possibly the victim of mistaken identity.

  Ford was initially consigned to a pauper’s grave, but the Illinois legislature appropriated $500 to build an eighteen-foot-tall marble obelisk above his final resting place in 1853. A windstorm blew it down in 1858. One Mormon historian took especial glee in reporting that “weeds, tall grass and brush have luxuriated thick and rank” over Ford’s untended grave in Peoria. “Occasionally there has been talk of raising a subscription for the purpose from the citizens of Peoria, but nobody has taken the initiative.” As recently as 1994, Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley repeated the grim details of Ford’s “troubled destiny” at a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Carthage slayings. Ford suffered a life “of unrelieved poverty and defeat,” Hinckley told his audience. “Such is the sad story of the man who violated his pledge to Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Such is the sad story of his family after him.”

  God works in mysterious ways, sometimes aided by human hands. When anti-Mormon agitation started up in Hancock County a few months after the assassins’ trial in 1845, the Mormon-elected sheriff, Jacob Backenstos, became a target of the old settlers’ wrath. Backenstos tried to defend the outlying Mormon settlements from Levi Williams and like-minded marauders. Franklin Worrell, who “guarded” the Carthage jail, professed to be infuriated by Backenstos’s election. “I am Mad, Mad,” Worrell wrote to the Upper Mississippian newspaper, “yes mad as the devil—Damn Such a Set of Miscreants as we have in this county.”

  Threatened with violence at his Carthage home, Backenstos resolved to move his family to Nauvoo. In mid-September, the sheriff left town in a buggy and noticed that a small band of armed men was following him. After overnighting in Warsaw, heading north on the Nauvoo road, he saw Worrell and seven other armed men pursuing him on horseback, with a rifle-filled wagon trailing behind. Near Golden’s Point, Backenstos happened upon two Mormons, Return Jackson Redden and Orrin Porter Rockwell, who were helping a family of burned-out Saints move back into Nauvoo. With his pursuers just 150 yards behind him, Backenstos cried out for help. Rockwell galloped to his aid, and Backenstos ordered his pursuers to stop. They continued to ride toward him. The sheriff ordered Rockwell to fire, and Joseph Smith’s childhood friend raised his rifle and shot Worrell squarely in the torso, catapulting him four feet off his saddle onto the ground.

  At the sound of the shots, Jacob Baum, a Mormon farmer, ran up to find out what was happening on his property.

  “I got him,” Rockwell said.

  “Got who?”

  “Worrell. I was afraid my rifle wouldn’t reach him, but it did, thank God.”

  The terrified mobbers reined in, loaded Worrell’s corpse into their wagon, and rode back to Carthage. Worrell died on the way.

  The Saints’ prayers had been answered.

  Backenstos and Rockwell were both indicted for the Worrell killing, which took place in broad daylight. Both were acquitted.

  Rockwell himself lived for another thirty-three years, traveling with the Saints to Utah, where he became a notorious enforcer and bodyguard for church president Brigham Young. He married four times, but never polygamously; Joseph’s “principle” was not for him. Toward the end of both of their lives—Young would die in 1877, Rockwell in 1878—Young apparently tired of Rockwell’s hard-drinking ways and exiled him to Fish Lake in central Utah to “colonize the straggling bands of natives in the vicinity [and] teach them honesty, industry, morality and religion.”

  The hardened mountain man who had shared a bottle of moonshine with the British explorer Sir Richard Burton in a remote Utah canyon quickly tired of missionary work. He returned to Salt Lake City, where he collapsed of heart failure after an early-hours visit to a local saloon. Rockwell died while under federal indictment for a murder he may well have committed; we will never know. The Salt Lake Tribune—the city had become large and diverse enough to sustain a non-Mormon newspaper—knew he was guilty and exulted in Rockw
ell’s death: “Thus the gallows was cheated of one of the fittest candidates that ever cut a throat or plundered a traveler.” “A fanatical devotee of the Prophet,” the paper continued,

  He killed fellow Saints who held secrets that menaced the safety of their fellow criminals in the priesthood. He killed Apostates who dared to wag their tongues about the wrongs they had endured. And he killed mere sojourners in Zion merely to keep his hand in.

  “The recollection of his evil deeds haunted him,” the Tribune insisted, and

  to gain escape from this fiery torment he sought the intoxicating bowl, and whenever he appeared in the streets of Salt Lake, it was generally in the character of a vociferating maniac.

  A thousand Saints jammed the Fourteenth Ward assembly rooms in Salt Lake for Rockwell’s funeral. Eulogist Joseph F. Smith, Hyrum’s son and a future church president, allowed that the deceased “had his little faults, but Porter’s life on earth, taken altogether, was one worthy of example, and reflected honor upon the Church.”

  A “fitting tribute of one outlaw to the memory of another,” the Tribune sneered.

  Rockwell’s name lived on in more than one cowboy ballad, including this one:

  Have you heard of Porter Rockwell, the Mormon Triggerite, They say he hunts down outlaws when the moon is shining bright. So if you rustle cattle, I’ll tell you what to do, Get the drop on Porter Rockwell, or he’ll get the drop on you.

  THE TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD EMMA HALE, WHO FIRST MET JOSEPH Smith when he came to dig for money on her father’s Pennsylvania farm, was deemed to be quite a catch: five feet, nine inches tall, vivacious, with distinctive hazel eyes set off by her olive complexion. Most of her life she wore her hair long, brushing it to a dark sheen, with her tresses gathered in twin braids at the nape of her neck.