Heaven's Ditch

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by Jack Kelly


  Boys known as hoggees drove the mules, riding on their backs as they plodded the towpath. Children were being exploited in the factories, too, but here the abuse was in the open. As many as five thousand young people worked on the canal, and harsh, Dickensian conditions aroused censure. The boys, sometimes as young as six, were routinely kicked or beaten. Barefoot and clothed in cheap cotton, they worked in the rain, slept in the barns, occasionally went hungry. One who came down with cholera was abandoned by his boat’s captain to die on the towpath. Only some had a home to return to in winter when the canal closed. A Syracuse newspaper of 1843 reported many canal boys “loafing about the city, without a place to sleep, or money to purchase food or clothing.”

  They picked up bad habits. One offended citizen wrote to the Canal Board that “the Boys who Drive the horses . . . are the most profain beings that now exist on the face of this hole erth without exception.” Another observer noted that “they are only specimens of a larger budget of evil rolling thro our land & among us.”

  Women hung around groggeries or took jobs as cabin girls and gave men the knowing eye. Drivers and boatmen pilfered farmers’ fruit and eggs. Vandalism and assaults were common, rapes and murder not unknown. No passenger dared leave his belongings unattended. Within a decade, a quarter of the inmates of the prison at Auburn were men who had “followed the canal.”

  Herman Melville called the ditch “one continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life.” The Erie brought to America’s interior the crime, double-dealing, and moral license of port cities everywhere.

  “There howl your pagans,” Melville wrote.

  War

  Mormon converts kept arriving in Missouri, gathering as commanded, drawn to the new religion. They spilled over from Caldwell County into Daviess County to the north and into Carroll County to the east. Missourians watched with growing apprehension as the newcomers threatened to grab political control of the region.

  By August 6, 1838, Mormons already made up more than a third of voters in Daviess County. They went to the polls that day in Gallatin, the county seat. A local citizen announced that they had no more right to cast a ballot “than the negroes.” A brawl broke out. The Mormons defended themselves with oak staves and fought the locals to a draw.

  Sidney Rigdon’s loose talk about “extermination” a month earlier had put tensions in the region on a hair trigger. By the time word of the fight flew the twenty-five miles to Far West, it had become a frantic report of two Mormons killed and an army of Missourians gathering to clear the rest of the Saints from Daviess County.

  The Danites saddled their horses, Joseph Smith swung onto a mount, and the Mormons galloped north to protect their people. Rumors flashed around the state. Insurrection. Mob chaos. Missouri authorities issued a warrant for Smith’s arrest. Governor Lilburn Boggs called out six companies of state militia.

  On arriving in Gallatin, the Mormons discovered that it was a false alarm. They forced a sheriff to promise protection for local Church members. Hearing of the governor’s arrest order, Smith agreed to surrender. He put up bail and was ordered to appear in court in November. A tense peace settled on the state.

  But Missouri was raw frontier with minimal law enforcement. In the vigilante West, the lynch mob was an instrument of rough justice. Poorly trained militia units were often hard to distinguish from outlaws.

  Rumors of the Mormons’ nefarious plans did not stop. A nervous Governor Boggs activated several thousand men in state military units. Non-Mormons organized armed bands. On October 1, raiders besieged the Mormon outpost of DeWitt in eastern Carroll County and burned the property of farmers there. Refugees trudged to Far West.

  As October progressed and wintery weather swept the grasslands, Mormons retaliated. They marched into Daviess County in a show of force. Local non-Mormons, spooked by tales of an invasion, left their farms. The Mormons grabbed the property of gentiles. They drove their cattle, horses, and hogs back to Far West. “Lawlessness prevailed,” a Mormon observed, “and pillage was the rule.”

  The mob violence on both sides grew ugly. Men with blackened faces attacked and burned outlying Mormon farms. Houses were burned. Women were raped.

  Mormon militiamen rode out to disperse the mobs. They raided the farms of non-Mormons, burning buildings, intimidating settlers, and stealing supplies. On October 25, seventy armed Mormons encountered a company of state militia on the banks of Crooked River, mistaking them for vigilantes. A firefight broke out. The Mormons attacked with swords. Three Mormons and one militia soldier died in the skirmish.

  Outrage now galloped at full speed through the region. Killing a member of the state militia was treason. Two days after the fight at Crooked River, Governor Boggs issued an order stating that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.”

  Joseph Smith encouraged Mormons to abandon their outlying settlements. Jacob Haun, who had just finished building a gristmill eighteen miles from Far West, was loath to leave it to gentile arsonists. Local Mormon families stayed with him. On October 30, following the governor’s extermination order, two hundred gentile militiamen rode down on Haun’s Mill. Some residents fled. Many took refuge in a log-built blacksmith shop. The non-Mormons hid behind trees and aimed through the cracks between the logs. They picked off the Saints one by one.

  So toxic had feelings grown between the two sides that the militiamen fired at women running toward the woods. Having shot the occupants of the shop, they entered to finish off the wounded. They fired a bullet into the head of a nine-year-old boy. Of thirty-eight Mormon men and boys, seventeen were shot dead and fifteen wounded.

  The same day, several thousand militiamen surrounded the Mormons in the barricaded town of Far West. With only eight hundred poorly armed fighting men, Joseph Smith and Church leaders understood that the extermination that Governor Boggs had ordered had become a serious possibility. When more state troops arrived on October 31, Smith, Rigdon, and Parley Pratt walked out of the town under a flag of truce to negotiate a surrender.

  Major General Samuel D. Lucas, the state commander, was not there to talk. He arrested Smith and dictated terms. Those accused of crimes would give themselves up. The Mormons would surrender their arms. The state would confiscate the Saints’ property to pay Mormon debts. Every Mormon was to leave the state of Missouri. Period.

  That evening, Lucas court-martialed Smith and four other Mormon leaders. He ordered their execution in the Far West town square at nine the next morning. The men slept on the ground in the rain, surrounded by armed soldiers gleeful at having captured the fabled Mormon prophet. The prisoners were “about as badly scared set as I ever saw,” a Missourian noted.

  With daylight, Brigadier General Alexander W. Doniphan, who was to carry out the execution order, judged it to be “cold-blooded murder.” He flatly refused. A military court, he pointed out, had no jurisdiction over ordinary citizens. The men were criminals, not prisoners of war. Lucas backed down.

  Smith, Rigdon, and Pratt, accompanied by about fifty other Mormon prisoners, were forced to walk four days to Independence, where they would be out of range of any attempt by Mormons to free them. Threatening, curious crowds lined the roads to watch and jeer. General Moses Wilson was determined that his prisoners would not be grabbed by a lynch mob along the way.

  “I carried him into my house a prisoner in chains,” the general was recorded to have said about the prophet. “In less than two hours my wife loved him better than she did me.” If the quote is accurate, it is high testimony to Joseph Smith’s deep and alluring charm.

  At a preliminary hearing, probable cause was found to try the prophet and five others for “overt acts of treason,” an offense punishable by hanging. The men were taken in chains and shackles ten miles north to Liberty. Joseph, his brother Hyrum, and four other men were i
mprisoned in the fourteen-foot-square basement of the jail there, with a trapdoor above and straw bedding on the dirt floor. Local citizens made a habit of gawking through the narrow iron grates and abusing the prisoners with blasphemous obscenities. Sidney Rigdon became so ill that he was released on bail. He fled Missouri to avoid the mobs.

  In the cold, reeking dungeon, Joseph Smith had reached yet another low point. Although the governor had given the remaining Saints until spring to clear out, most left that winter, moving north to Iowa or across the Mississippi to Illinois. Finding refuge in the Illinois river town of Quincy, Emma wrote to her husband, “I hope there is better days to come to us yet.”

  In March, after four months in prison, Joseph wrote back, “my nerve trembles from long confinement,” but he assured her that “not one of us have flinched yet.” He allowed himself a hint of self-pity. “Dear Emma,” he wrote, “do you think that my being cast into prison by the mob renders me less worthy of your friendship?” Perhaps concerned about rumors of his infidelity, he wrote of himself, “fools may tell you he has some faults.”

  During the difficult incarceration, Joseph thought deeply about what had brought on this calamity. He was probably thinking of Sidney Rigdon when he warned in a letter against a “fanciful and flowe[r]y and heated imagination.” He could well have applied the counsel to himself.

  Mormon Missouri and Illinois

  by Joy Taylor

  As spring began to sweeten the air, state authorities in Missouri were also having second thoughts. A fair trial was impossible. Any litigation would raise the question of the many crimes committed by vigilantes during the brief war. Governor Boggs’s “extermination” order was an additional embarrassment.

  In April 1839, the men were to be transported to Columbia, in the southern part of the state, for trial. On the way they broke free—Hyrum said the sheriff accompanying them allowed the escape. Using assumed names, they traveled back roads to Illinois. Two weeks later, they reached Quincy. A Mormon diarist noted that when he arrived, Joseph “was frank open & familiar as usual.” He said, “Sister Emma was truly happy.”

  Wherever they had gathered, the Mormons had come into conflict with local residents. Many Mormons began to question whether it made sense to again congregate in a single location, especially since it seemed impossible to reach Zion. The land of promise that God had revealed to Joseph Smith eight years earlier now lay in the forbidden state of Missouri. Smith’s followers had refrained from buying land until they could consult the prophet.

  The principle of gathering made any sect distinctive. Others, including Jemima Wilkinson’s followers and Mother Ann’s Shakers, had found coherence by separating themselves from the larger society. Joseph did not hesitate. He asked the Lord and the Lord commanded: “Build up a city & call my saints to this place!”

  The place was a tiny village called Commerce, a day’s journey north of Quincy, Illinois, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Commerce sat at the upstream end of a fifteen-mile rapids in the river. Its founders thought it had potential as a port for steamboats on the upper river, but it had yet to live up to its name.

  The settlement was more wilderness than town. Surrounded by wetlands, it was “so unhealthy, very few could live there,” Smith wrote. Nevertheless, he directed the Mormons to purchase the land on twenty-year mortgages. Ever the optimist, he renamed the place Nauvoo, a transliteration of a Hebrew word for “beautiful place.”

  Here the Saints would again gather. They would suffer under the scourge of mosquitoes and endure an epidemic of malaria, but they would keep coming, by the hundreds, and then thousands. Here they would build yet another massive temple. Here, in Nauvoo, the final act in the life of America’s most creative and consequential prophet would be played out.

  Public Prosperity

  The Erie Canal’s astonishing success created problems. Former chief engineer Benjamin Wright admitted that “in the size of our canal, we have made great errors.” A forty-foot-wide, four-foot-deep channel could not cope with the burgeoning flow of barges. Boatmen waited for hours to get their craft through the single locks. Failures in the canal banks that were not repaired quickly resulted in delays lasting weeks.

  Feeder canals, which extended from the Erie to serve other parts of the state, added to the traffic. Jesse Hawley, back in 1807, had correctly predicted that the Finger Lakes region would one day be “laced with canals.” The Erie became a tree trunk with branches veering north and south. They were part of a countrywide canal-digging mania that extended from the late 1820s well into the 1830s. Many of these projects failed to yield a penny in profit, leading a modern historian to label canals “the country’s first technological bubble and bust.”

  In 1835, only ten years after the Erie Canal’s opening, state fathers decided to enlarge the channel. The plan was to expand the ditch from forty to seventy feet wide and to dig it seven feet deep rather than four. The work began in 1836 under the direction of John Jervis, a humble axman on the canal in 1817, now one of the country’s leading engineers.

  In addition to widening the channel, Jervis’s mission was to make the canal straighter to speed travel. He reduced the number of locks from eighty-three to seventy-two. Each lock was doubled so that boats could pass in both directions simultaneously, and lengthened so that two standard barges could fit inside simultaneously. He replaced the Rochester aqueduct with a wider one.

  The original canal had been completed with amazing rapidity, given the difficulties the builders faced. The enlargement dragged on far longer than anyone could have imagined. First came the Panic of 1837, then economic depression and a clouded future. Workers, less docile than their predecessors, staged strikes. For several years, beginning in 1842, a reluctant faction of the New York Democratic Party known as the Locofocos halted the project entirely. Railroads, cheaper to build and far more versatile, soaked up investment. Interest in canal-building flagged. The enlargement was not finished until 1862. Yet the Erie Canal continued to thrive, and revenues kept flowing into state coffers.

  One of those urging on the work was Jesse Hawley. By 1840, he was a successful businessman in Lockport. “No single act,” he declared, “has done so much to promote the public prosperity and produce a new era in the history of the country.”

  Thunderer

  During the summer of 1834, America experienced its first great student rebellion. The cause was the republic’s original sin: the enslavement of human beings. The uprising found its perfect leader in Theodore Dwight Weld. Converted to Christianity by Charles Finney, Weld had been a star of the Rochester revival three years earlier. He embodied the Romantic age: an unkempt bohemian dressed in what he called “John the Baptist attire.” He proudly asserted that “my bearish proportions have never been licked into City Shape.” A female admirer noted that “his appearance is just what I anticipated.” She recognized in him “a God like and expanded soul.” He had presence.

  After Rochester, Weld, with his typical energy, had toured the nation as agent of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, which was bankrolled by New York’s Tappan brothers. He traveled 4,500 miles and made more than two hundred public addresses in the cause.

  Weld identified the Lane Seminary, a training academy for young evangelists in Cincinnati, as a likely western headquarters for the rapidly accelerating reform movement. He became a leader at the school and helped transfer the manual-labor system that had governed the Oneida Academy to this recently founded institution in the west. Many Oneida students, who idolized Weld and were eager to be on the forefront of evangelical reform, transferred to Lane.

  Unable to attract Finney to head the school, Lane trustees hired Lyman Beecher. The renowned Boston minister had moved closer to his onetime nemesis, finally accepting Finney’s revival “methods.” He had vigorously promoted Christian reform, suggesting to followers that giving up booze could
spur the millennium.

  During his travels, Weld had become a thoroughgoing abolitionist. “Abolition immediate universal is my desire and prayer to God,” he wrote in an 1833 letter. “I hardly know how to contain myself.” Obsessed with the issue, he embraced the slaves’ cause as his own. “My heart aches with hope deferred,” he said.

  About the issue of slavery, Beecher was just as cautious as Finney. The topic was too controversial both inside and outside the churches. One had to consider “what was expedient” as well as what was right. Never one to rock the boat, Beecher favored the position of the American Colonization Society, a group that envisioned compensating slave owners and sending freed slaves to Africa. It was an idea that at the time was embraced by the majority of antislavery advocates. Beginning in 1820, the Society settled several thousand freed blacks in the section of West Africa that was to become Liberia.

  In February 1834, against his better judgment, Beecher allowed his students to hold a series of debates about two questions: Should slavery be immediately abolished? Should Christians support colonization?

  Weld, an experienced and persuasive talker, took the lead. The abolitionists among the students had stacked the deck. They had spent months pushing their ideas on classmates. The debates were really a barrage of antislavery sentiment aimed at converting the undecided to become full-fledged soldiers in the cause. The conclusion was foreordained: abolition, yes; colonization, no.

  For eighteen days, regular classes were suspended while the students and guest speakers discussed the questions. James Bradley, a former slave who had worked five years to buy his freedom and was now a student at the Lane Seminary, testified to the humanity of black people. Southerners who had repented of their region’s “peculiar institution” detailed its cruelties. The tactic worked. Almost to a man, the students converted to the radical, unpopular idea of immediate abolition of slavery without compensation to owners.

 

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