American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  In the winter of 1879, Emma was seventy-four years old, still tall, and wore her gray hair combed in two soft waves over her temples. “Her face was thin; her nose lean, aquiline and pointed,” recalled one of the many visitors Emma received at the Nauvoo Mansion that she had shared with Joseph and his multiple wives some forty years previously. Another visitor called her “a picture of a fine woman, stranded on the lee-shore of age . . . among people who did not appreciate her intellect or her innate refinement.” After a brief period of exile in upstate Illinois, she had moved back to the mansion in 1847. On December 23 of that year—that day that would have been Joseph Smith’s forty-second birthday—she married businessman Lewis Bidamon in a Methodist ceremony. Bidamon was a drinker, a bon vivant, and an adventurer; eighteen months after their wedding, he ran off to the California gold rush. He managed to remain Emma’s somewhat loyal companion for thirty-two years. At the end of her life, Emma was keeping tavern at the mansion in an awkward ménage à trois with Bidamon and his mistress, Nancy Abercrombie, the mother of Bidamon’s illegitimate son, Charles. On her deathbed, Emma asked Nancy and Lewis to marry, to spare Charles the indignity of bastardy. They did so, and lived as man and wife until Bidamon died twelve years later.

  Rumors that Emma had abandoned her husband’s church were untrue. On the other hand, she steadfastly refused repeated overtures from the “Brighamites” to relocate to Salt Lake and confer dynastic legitimacy on their church. Emma famously remarked to one of Young’s ambassadors that “she could go to Heaven without going to the Mountains.” Despairing of Emma (“literally the most wicked woman in this earth”), Brigham trained his charm offensive on her son Joseph Smith III, who likewise spurned the siren call of the Utah polygamists. In 1860, young Joseph accepted the presidency of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which, inconveniently for Brigham, established its headquarters in Independence, Missouri, the true Zion, as revealed to Joseph the Prophet.

  In this February of 1879, a few months before Emma’s death, two of her three surviving sons, Alexander and Joseph Smith III, traveled through the deep snow from Plano, Illinois, to Nauvoo, to interview their mother. (Their thirty-five-year-old brother, David, was feeble-minded and would spend most of his adult life in a mental institution.) This was to be no ordinary colloquy. Ever since his father’s death, Joseph III found himself bedeviled by the question of polygamy. Improbably, he ascribed David’s mental torments to the latter’s misguided belief that their father had more than one wife: “I am convinced that insidiously there was inculcated into my brother’s mind the idea that his father was either a polygamist in practice or that he was the spiritual author of the Utah plural marriage philosophy.” A certain irony attends David’s supposed institutionalization for believing the truth, whereas Joseph III enjoyed a full and prosperous life while nurturing his misguided idée fixe.

  For decades, abetted by his mother’s distortions, Joseph III had refused to believe that the Prophet had taken wives other than Emma, and that he had preached the “principle” so warmly embraced in Salt Lake City. Joseph and the editors of the Saints’ Herald, the Reformed Mormons’ newspaper, felt he should set the record straight with his mother, once and for all. As Joseph later explained, he had been urged to make this trip more than once: “It had been frequently stated to us: ‘Ask your mother, she knows.’ ‘Why don’t you ask your mother; she dare not deny these things.’ ‘You do not dare to ask your mother!’”

  He did dare. In the mansion’s capacious sitting room, with his step-father looking on,* Joseph unfolded the two pages of questions he had prepared back in Plano. He eased gently into the talk.

  Who married you and Joseph? he asked. Sidney Rigdon? A Presbyterian minister?

  No, Emma answered, a local squire married us. “My folks were bitterly opposed,” she recalled.

  Did you and father quarrel? Joseph asked.

  “No,” Emma replied. “There was no necessity for any quarreling. He knew that I wished for nothing but what was right; and, as he wished for nothing else, we did not disagree.”

  Joseph then asked a series of pointed questions about the creation of the Book of Mormon. Emma was one of her husband’s scribes; she and Oliver Cowdery wrote out the entire manuscript. Was the Prophet reading from a book, or another manuscript? Joseph asked. No, his mother answered. “If he had had anything of the kind he could not have concealed it from me.”

  Joseph pressed the question: “Could not father have dictated the Book of Mormon to you, Oliver Cowdery and the others who wrote for him, after having first written it, or having first read it out of some book?”

  No, Emma insisted, “Joseph Smith could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone dictate a book like the Book of Mormon.” It was “a marvel and a wonder,” she added.

  What about the golden plates? young Joseph asked.

  “The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment,” his mother answered, “wrapped in a small linen tablecloth, which I had given him to fold them in.”

  I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one does sometimes thumb the edges of a book.

  Why didn’t you unwrap them? Joseph asked.

  “I did not attempt to handle the plates, other than I have told you, nor uncover them to look at them,” Emma answered. “I was satisfied that it was the work of God, and therefore did not feel it to be necessary to do so.”

  Bidamon jumped in: Did your husband forbid you from touching the plates?

  I don’t think so, Emma replied; I “was not specially curious about them. I moved them from place to place on the table, as it was necessary in doing my work.”

  “What of the truth of Mormonism?” Joseph asked.

  “I know Mormonism to be the truth;” Emma answered,

  and believe the Church to have been established by divine direction. I have complete faith in it. In writing for your father I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.

  These were all interesting questions, but they were not really the purpose of the trip. No Mormon, Reformed or Brighamite, questioned the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon. It was polygamy, the doctrine of many wives, that cleaved the Saints down the middle, in 1844 and in 1879.

  Q: What about the revelation on polygamy? Did Joseph Smith have anything like it? What of spiritual wifery?

  A: There was no revelation on either polygamy or spiritual wives. There were some rumors of something of the sort, of which I asked my husband. He assured me that all there was of it was, that, in a chat about plural wives, he had said, “Well, such a system might possibly be, if everybody was agreed to it, and would behave as they should; but they would not; and besides, it was contrary to the will of heaven.”

  No such thing as polygamy or spiritual wifery was taught, publicly or privately, before my husband’s death, that I have now, or ever had any knowledge of.

  Q: Did he not have other wives than yourself?

  A: He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have.

  Joseph chose not to publish this exchange in his memoirs, which he dedicated “To my mother, Emma Hale, whom my father, Joseph Smith, married on January 18, 1827, and who was his only wife.”

  ON JUNE 27, 1854, HUNDREDS OF SAINTS GATHERED IN SALT LAKE City’s low-slung, adobe-walled tabernacle, to observe the tenth anniversary of what was now called the “martyrdom.” The bullet-riddled John Taylor was among the first to call Joseph a martyr, in his famous hymn, “O Give Me Back My Prophet Dear.” Joseph himself occasionally compared his fate to that of the persecuted Jesus. In a famous letter from the Liberty, Missouri, jail, Joseph called himself a “lamb” being prepared for “slaughte
r,” a trope he resurrected in June 1844. Immediately after Joseph’s assassination, poetess Eliza Snow compared Carthage to the “Calvary scene”: “For never since the Son of God was slain / Has blood so noble flowed from human vein.”

  The audience in the tabernacle was sweltering; the high desert plain of the Saints’ new Zion was scorching hot. Brigham Young ordered the bishops in the audience to haul fifty buckets of cool water from nearby City Creek into the gabled building, and he provided ladles so the crowd could drink.

  The Saints had again founded a new Zion, one outside the borders of the formally settled United States that had so bedeviled them in Missouri and Illinois. The leading citizens of Hancock County had hoped to extinguish Mormonism by killing its founding prophet. The opposite occurred. Brigham Young proved to be more forceful, more fervent, and better organized than Joseph Smith. He arranged for over 10,000 Saints to trek from Illinois to Utah, while continuing the energetic missionary work that swelled the gathering to the new Zion. Young reigned supreme over the burgeoning theodemocracy. He briefly governed a territory called Deseret, larger than present-day France, which included Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, and portions of six other states. Since 1852, Deseret had been officially polygamous, prompting no end of denunciations from the faraway US government. Washington confiscated vast swaths of Young’s domain, but Young still ruled over about 20,000 Saints spread across the expanse of today’s Utah.

  Young opened the tenth anniversary celebration, testifying “by all the power that I am in possession of that Brother Joseph Smith was a true man of God, a true prophet of the Lord [and] a true apostle of Jesus Christ.” He reminded the Saints why so many of them loved Joseph; how “the brethren would complain of Joseph that he was rude, wild; he was not as sober, gracious, so dead long-faced, and religious as he ought to be.”

  You recollect what he used to tell the people once? “Why,” says he, “brethren and sisters if I was as pure, as holy, and sanctified as you wish me to be, I could not be in your society. The Lord would not let me stay here.”

  A most jolly and human prophet, to be sure.

  But the featured speaker, the star of the show as it were, was Apostle John Taylor, now forty-five years old. Taylor’s presence at the tabernacle was nothing short of miraculous. Just ten years before, the mobbers had riddled him with bullets and left him for dead underneath a filthy mattress in the Carthage jail. He survived two impromptu operations without anesthesia. But like Mormonism itself, Taylor had not merely survived, he had prevailed. The Canadian convert had opposed Brigham’s one-man rule, incurring Young’s wrath for his lack of fealty. Young thought Taylor was uppity, claiming that he said of the Quorum of the Twelve, “You are my niggers & you shall black my boots.” He wanted Taylor “to bow down and confess that [he was] not Brigham Young,” something Taylor refused to do.

  Brigham may not have revered Taylor, but the Saints did. On this day, he enjoyed a special status as the only survivor of the Carthage massacre; Willard Richards had died just three months previously. Joseph and Hyrum’s uncle, John Smith, who visited the four prisoners the night before their deaths, died on May 23. Taylor would live thirty-three more years and assume the church presidency upon Brigham’s death. A feisty and erudite leader, he died with a price on his head, hiding from federal deputies who were chasing down polygamists in the refractory Utah Territory. He spent his last days on a farm north of Salt Lake City, “in the DO,” as the Saints called their constantly moving underground headquarters. (The word comes from being “on the dodge.”)

  Willard Richards’s successor as church historian, George Smith, had decided to compile a formal history of the martyrdom, and Taylor’s remarks in the tabernacle would begin that process. Two years later, Taylor would retreat to Westport, Connecticut, to produce a ninety-six-page account—perhaps the definitive work—on the events of June 27, 1844. The first person to print Taylor’s dramatic tale was none other than the British explorer Sir Richard Burton, whom Porter Rockwell successfully charmed in Salt Lake City. Burton published Taylor’s martyrdom memoir as an appendix to his best-selling account of his Utah adventures, The City of the Saints, in 1862.

  At the tenth-anniversary celebration at the tabernacle, Taylor began his remarks by talking about the advent of polygamy. Returning from a mission trip to England, Taylor learned about “spiritual wifery” from Brigham Young and Heber Kimball. “It tried our minds and feelings,” Taylor recalled. “We saw it was something going to be heavy upon us. It was something that harried up our feelings.” Conflating some facts, Taylor told the story of the Nauvoo Expositor, and the City Council’s fateful decision to destroy the newspaper.

  “We knew we were right and did it,” he explained.

  Taylor described Joseph’s last journey eastward across the prairie from Nauvoo to Carthage.

  Somebody asked him as we were journeying to Carthage, says they:

  “Joseph, what will be the upshot of this matter?”

  “Well,” says he, “I do not know anything about it. Do not talk to me about matters now. I have given up my office and calling for the time being . . . I do not profess to guide this people now while I am in the hands of officers. Somebody else must do it.”

  This is the body of the meaning, the spirit of the words, if not the exact words.

  Taylor then regaled his audience with a lengthy, first-person account of the prisoners’ final nights in the jailhouse. Except for Willard Richards’s curt memorandum published in the church newspaper immediately after the killings, this was the first attempt to narrate the last days of the Smith brothers in all their agonizing detail—Governor Ford’s perfidy, Captain Robert Smith’s double-dealing, and the ghastly, final shootout: “They leaned against the door. Someone fired a gun through the keyhole. A ball came through the door and struck [Hyrum] in the face. . . .”

  “They have not hurt Joseph or Hyrum,” Taylor told the tabernacle audience, “But they have hurt themselves. They are damned and we shall see it.”

  “I know there are hundreds in this congregation who would have been glad to have been where we were,” he said. “I know Joseph and Hyrum lived and died men of God and will live for evermore.”

  * In 1903, Utah’s first Senator-elect, Reed Smoot, repeatedly denied that he had taken the Oath of Vengeance, which remained in the temple ritual until 1927.

  * Melissa Lott Wiles, young Joseph’s “Aunt Melissa” and one of the Prophet’s young plural wives, later told Joseph III that Emma was forced to deceive him in this famous interview: “You took your mother before Mr. Bidamon, a bitter enemy of our people, and then asked such questions of her as you wished . . . I have no doubt that your mother told you the truth so far as she could under the circumstances; but if you had taken her by herself . . . and asked your questions, she would probably have answered you as I have done.” Melissa shocked Joseph III by admitting that she was the Prophet’s wife “in very deed.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREPARING TO WRITE THIS BOOK I HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF meeting many of the greatest living historians of the Latter-day Saints, who provided me with valuable counsel. Richard Bushman, D. Michael Quinn, Scott Kenney, Gary Bergera, and John Turner all spent time with me. Todd Compton, Stephen LeSueur, and Lori Stromberg agreed to read portions of my manuscript and each made important suggestions. Brigham Young University historian Michael Hicks and my friend the writer Katherine Powers both read the entire final draft and provided valuable input.

  In Salt Lake City, Ronald Barney of the Mormon Historical Society provided continual encouragement and a host of valuable sources for me to pursue. Robin Jensen and Alex Smith at the Latter-day Saints’ Church History Library answered many of my questions and Bill Slaughter helped me with illustrations, as he has helped so many other writers. I would also like to thank CHL staffers Brittany Chapman and Anna Bybee. Trevor Weight at the Brigham Young University Art Gallery and Douglas Misner at the Utah State Historical Archive furnished illustrations for me, as did Carol Nie
lson at The Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum.

  Steven Lindeman, Sharon Kessinger, and Chelsea Robarge also helped me enormously in Utah. Katrina Haglund and Ron Scott shared advice and contacts with me from Boston.

  Sherry Morain, executive director of the John Whitmer Historical Association, took an early interest in this book and introduced me to many of the leading historians of the Nauvoo period. She also arranged with Lachlan Mackay, director of Historic Sites for the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints) for me to spend several nights in Nauvoo in a house once occupied by William Marks, a determined foe of polygamy. Sherry and Lachlan led me to Joseph Johnstun, an expert on 1840s Nauvoo, and to historian William Shepard, who graciously shared many of his research materials with me. Jan Marshall unlocked many an obscure John Whitmer Historical Association document for me.

  Historian and cartographer John Hamer created two attractive maps for my Frontispiece, for which much thanks.

  John Hallwas, one of the preeminent scholars of the Mormon experience in Illinois, arranged for me to visit his archive at Western Illinois University, where I was assisted by librarian Kathy Nichols. Historians Rodney Davis, Lavina F. Anderson, Roger Launius, Grant Palmer, Bryon Andreason, Adam Christing, Dan Vogel, and Vickie Cleverly Speek also provided help and counsel along the way.

  Librarians and archivists are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe, but here I acknowledge them: at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Todd Fell and Eva Wrightson helped me assemble documents. So did Cindy Brightenburg at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, Susan Forbes at the Kansas State Historical Society, and Janet Holtman, from the Hancock County Historical Society. I am grateful that W. V. Smith digitized so many nineteenth-century Mormon journals, autobiographies, and B. H. Roberts’s entire church history at the Book of Abraham Project website, www.boap.org. I made extensive use of Massachusetts’s interlibrary loans, aided by Elinor Hernon, Karen Fischer, and Paula Lawrence at the Newton Free Library. My friends and former colleagues at the Boston Globe, Lisa Tuite and Jeremiah Manion, stayed with me for the duration. Tom Wolf helped me prepare my manuscripts. Thanks to all.