American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  Then after this we went into the large room over the store in Nauvoo. Joseph divided upon the room the best he could, hung up the veil, marked it, gave us our instructions as we passed along from one department to another, giving us signs, tokens, penalties with the key words pertaining to those signs.

  The postulants donned a special white garment that bore the Masonic symbols of the square and compass on the breast, and two symbolic slashes at the abdomen and knee. The slash across the belly represented the disemboweling that would result if anyone betrayed the ritual secrets. Then the candidates witnessed an allegorical play not unlike the Old Testament drama acted out by Masons. The Masons tell the story of a noble architect, Hiram Abiff, who is murdered for refusing to disclose the order’s secret codes and passwords. The Mormons instead acted out the Creation scene from Genesis. In the maiden production for the first endowed priests, Joseph played God, Hyrum acted the part of Christ, and Joseph’s ghostwriter, the former newspaper editor W. W. Phelps, crawled around the store on his stomach, playing the evil serpent. After being expelled from the Garden of Eden, the participants put on tiny aprons, similar to the Masons’, and learned the codes and passwords, called keys and tokens, that would eventually admit them to heaven. Joseph quickly integrated other Masonic symbols, such as the all-seeing eye, into Mormon iconography.

  Word soon leaked out that Joseph had adapted and perverted the centuries-old Masonic ritual for his own ends. The Illinois Masons accused him of freighting religion into the secular rite and embarked on a successful crusade to close the Mormon lodges in Nauvoo and in the Mormon settlement in Montrose, Iowa. Joseph angrily denied copying the Freemasons’ ritual and insisted that God had revealed the endowment rites to him many years previously. The Mormons’ rite antedated the Masons’ bastardized version, he insisted. “Masonry has its origin in the Priesthood” was the party line parroted by Willard Richards. “There is a similarity of priesthood in masonry,” the equally loyal Heber Kimball explained in an 1842 letter. “Brother Joseph says masonry was taken from priesthood but has become degenerated.”

  Why did Joseph co-opt these Masonic rites? The answer is: secrecy. “The secret of masonry is to keep a secret,” Joseph observed, and in the last few years of his life, he had many secrets to keep. Polygamy was a secret doctrine. Barely a year after creating the priesthood endowment ritual, Joseph introduced another, more secret ritual called the Second Anointing, which guaranteed the nineteen couples who received the special blessing a “calling and election sure”—a clear path to eternal life at the time of the exaltation, or the Second Coming. The Kingdom of God, which Joseph created in the spring of 1844, was a secret plan for world government. Its formal name was “The Kingdom of God and His Laws with the Keys and powers thereof and judgement in the hands of his servants, Ahman Christ.”

  If one sentence could describe the last few months of Joseph’s life it would be: Wait, there is more. In April 1844, he preached the most famous sermon of his life, what some regard as one of the most famous sermons ever preached in America. As if on a whim, Joseph turned nearly 2,000 years of Christian belief on its head at a funeral service for his loyal colleague King Follett. Joseph had laid the groundwork for a new world order, and for the foundational ritual for his entire church, but that was in secret. Now, speaking in Nauvoo’s East Grove, under a massive canopy of elm and chestnut trees, he unpacked some of the most radical Christian doctrine ever preached on the American continent. He spoke for two hours, shouting against a heavy wind. The following day, he lost his voice.

  Joseph started out with his boldest statement: “We suppose that God was God from eternity,” he shouted. “I will refute that idea. God that sits enthroned is a man like one of yourselves.”

  It is the first principle to know. We may converse with him and that he once was a man like us. God was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh. I defy all hell and earth to refute it.

  Joseph referred to gods in the plural, because he explained that gods evolved from men and were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing. The raw material of godhead was a form of free intelligence that preexisted our creation. From intelligence, God became a man, then perfected himself to become a god. So did Jesus Christ. And so, Joseph said, can you. “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself in order to save yourself,” he proclaimed,

  —to be priests and kings as all Gods have done–by going from a small degree to another—from exaltation to exaltation—till they are able to sit in glory as with those who sit enthroned.

  This became the “doctrine of eternal progression,” the Mormons’ supremely optimistic belief in the perfectibility of men and women living on earth. Joseph freed his followers from the strictures of predestination and the inevitability of sin. This was Joseph’s final, grandiose gift of hope to his people—and yet another nail in his coffin. In one long, loud sermon, he had dynamited the entire Christian cosmology, the underpinnings of every credal prayer to have emerged in the previous 2,000 years. Joseph’s former counselor William Law immediately organized a breakaway church, condemning Joseph as a fallen prophet. Joseph was preaching “some of the most blasphemous doctrines . . . ever heard of,” Law said. Not only polygamy, but also the teaching that there are “other gods as far above our God as he is.”

  JOSEPH SMITH LED AN EVENTFUL LIFE, BUT THE SPRING OF 1844 seemed particularly crowded with historic undertakings. Most noticeably, he had decided to run for president, as the candidate of his newly created National Reform Party. Outside of Illinois, his candidacy was treated as a joke. “A New Candidate in the Field! Stand out of the way—all small fry!” Niles’ National Register smirked. Even Joseph’s first choice as vice president, who could not accept because he was born in Ireland, called the campaign a “wild goose chase.”

  Smith’s platform was an olio of Whig and Democratic ideas. His call for a national bank and a “judicious tariff” scheme came straight from the Whig playbook. Like the Democrats, he urged expanding the union by annexing Texas and Oregon. Other ideas were very much his own. Joseph wanted to eliminate slavery and compensate slave owners with the revenues from the sale of public lands. He wanted to do away with military court-martials and called for the abolition of most prisons. According to the church newspaper, Joseph would “petition your state legislature to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries: blessing them as they go, and saying to them in the name of the Lord, go thy way and sin no more.”

  In the Mormon echo chamber of Nauvoo, where the church controlled the only two newspapers, the Saints took his foray into national politics quite seriously. At a mass electoral meeting, some Saints claimed the church had 200,000 communicants in the United States—about ten times the actual number—and could control 500,000 votes. “General Smith is the greatest statesman of the 19 century,” Willard Richards opined. “Then why should not the nation secure to themselves his superior talents?” The church-controlled Nauvoo Neighbor published a poll conducted on board a steamboat, headlined, “Hurrah for the General!”

  General Joseph Smith, the acknowledged modern Prophet, has got them all in the rear; and from the common mode of testing the success of candidates for the Presidency, to wit, by steamboat elections, he (Smith) will beat all the other aspirants to that office two to one. We learn from the polls of the steamboat Osprey, on her last trip to this city, that the vote stood for General Joseph Smith, 20 gents and 5 ladies; Henry Clay, 16 gents and 4 ladies; Van Buren, 7 gents and 0 ladies.

  The Neighbor refrained from publishing a different steamboat sounding, taken aboard the paddle wheeler Die Vernon. In that survey, Joseph received six votes, to Henry Clay’s fifty-eight.

  Joseph was serious. In 1844, presidential candidates didn’t campaign. Instead, they sent surrogates around the country to promulgate their ideas. So Smith sent ten of the twelve apostles to the hinterlands to boom his candidacy, as well as over two hundred other “volunteers.” The previous year, Joseph had written letters to five of
the national candidates, presenting them with his oft-repeated political litmus test: what can you do for the Mormons? (Joseph neglected to write to John Tyler, perhaps assuming he would lose, and to James K. Polk, the eventual winner.) Specifically, he asked the same question he had posed to President Van Buren and the Illinois congressional delegation when he visited Washington, DC, in 1839: can you get us reparations for our dispossessed property in Missouri? The Saints claimed over $2 million in lost land and chattel, following the brief “Mormon War,” which resulted in their expulsion to Illinois. Two of the five candidates ignored his letter, and the other three gave Joseph the brush-off. He was incensed. When John C. Calhoun reiterated the conventional wisdom, that the Mormons would have to seek redress in Missouri, not in Washington, Smith lashed out at the two-time cabinet secretary. “The noble Senator of South Carolina says the power of the Federal government is so limited and specific that it has no jurisdiction of the case!” Joseph answered Calhoun. “What think ye of imperium in imperio [an empire within the empire]?”

  The words call attention to themselves, because Joseph had begun to think of his “theodemocracy” of Nauvoo in imperial terms. He dispatched an expedition to Texas, still in the throes of its grand territorial struggle with Mexico, to learn if the Saints could found their own country in the vast, sparsely inhabited tableland between the Nueces and the Rio Grande Rivers. Texas president Sam Houston liked the idea, but cooler heads warned Joseph that his people would find themselves smack in the middle of the shooting war between Texas and Mexico. At the same time, Joseph petitioned Congress for permission to raise a federal army of 100,000 men to guarantee the safety of settlers streaming into New Mexico, Texas, upper California, and Oregon. The same document asked Congress to arrest and imprison anyone who “shall hinder or molest the said Joseph Smith from executing his designs.” These démarches were ignored, but they fed preexisting fears of a vast, Mormon land grab beyond the western edge of the United States. New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett, a fan of Joseph’s, said he wouldn’t be “surprised if Joe Smith were made governor of a new religious territory in the west.” “One day,” he wrote, Smith might “control the whole valley of the Mississippi, from the peaks of the Alleghanies to the pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains.”

  Smith had grander plans. In March 1844, he created the secret Council of Fifty to rule over the still-secret Kingdom of God. (Joseph called the Fifty “the Lyceum” in his diary.) Its purpose was clear: to govern the entire world, irrespective of existing laws and sovereignties, after the coming of Christ. In April, the Fifty appointed Joseph Smith “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth.” As Joseph had been hinting for many years, the laws of this world were moot and no longer applied to the great Mormon endeavor. “When I speak of a government, I mean what I say,” first counselor Rigdon explained to the Mormon faithful. “I mean a government that shall rule over temporal and spiritual affairs . . . The kingdom of God does not interfere with the laws of the land, but keeps itself by its own laws.”

  The plan was for Joseph to claim the presidency, if not in 1844 then in a subsequent election, and lay the foundations for a world government to greet the returning Christ. Apostles Lyman Wight and Heber Kimball declared to Joseph: “You are bound to be the President of the United States on 4 March 1845 and that you are already president pro tem of the world.” Joseph called the Fifty the world’s “living Constitution,” in part because it confided few of its actions to paper. Its activities were secret, and its members often called it the “Ytfif” in their diaries. The Council of Fifty’s records remain closed to this day.

  The world government idea possessed a kind of manic intensity, and Joseph pursued it to the hilt. In his capacity as a putative head of state, he appointed ambassadors to England, France, and Russia. The choices were far from gratuitous. France and England were eager to meddle in Mexican affairs and were pressing their interests with both the Texan and Mexican republics. The United States and England were jointly administering Oregon for the moment, but Joseph and others realized that their fragile alliance would never survive America’s aggressive push to the Pacific. Likewise, Russia had Great Power interests from Alaska south to California.

  To the tsar, Joseph was flogging his friend Uriah Brown’s ground-breaking military invention, the flame-throwing vessel. Brown had tried, in vain, to interest Congress in his dragonlike contraption, which he claimed could “destroy an army or navy.” Now Joseph was sounding out the Russians about this curious weapon so powerful that it might usher in a new era of world peace. Joseph “thought that the Lord had designed the apparatus for some more magnificent purpose than the defense of nations.” He cryptically explained that the mission to Saint Petersburg involved “some of the most important things concerning the advancement and building up of the kingdom of God in the last days, which cannot be explained at this time.”*

  He also noted that such far-flung expeditions are “attended with much expense,” and that “all those who feel disposed to bestow according as God has blessed them shall receive the blessings of Israel’s God, and tenfold shall be added unto them.” In other words, the trip needed a sponsor.

  Joseph envisioned the Mormons expanding westward, and he wanted his voice heard in capitals other than Washington, where he had experienced painful rebuffs. His diplomatic maneuvers emanating from a tiny Illinois town—not even a county seat!—seemed absurd, at first blush. But Joseph Smith and his disciple Brigham Young correctly sensed that vast tracts of the American West were up for grabs. The Spanish and French colonial empires had either quit the continent or were retreating. Texas, which encompassed much of the Southwest, and California, which meant most of the territory along the West Coast, and Oregon, which included all of today’s Pacific Northwest, had yet to organize themselves into stable, independent republics or states. Perhaps Joseph’s reach exceeded his grasp, but less than ten years later, Brigham Young declared himself the ruler of Deseret, a Rocky Mountain empire that sprawled across the territory of five present-day states. It was no crime to dream big dreams, and in his heady last few years on earth, Joseph Smith did just that.

  * The maddeningly unreliable spy and freebooter Joseph Jackson met Uriah Brown in Nauvoo, where the inventor laid out Smith’s plan for world domination. “[Smith’s] real object” in selling the “steam fire-ship” to the tsar, Jackson explained, “was to form a league for the overthrow of the powers that be. Now this may seem too ridiculous for any man to believe possible; nevertheless, no one acquainted with the excessive vanity of Joe Smith, will doubt but that he in reality believed that he could form even so preposterous a union.”

  3

  ZION, ILLINOIS

  In Illinois we’ve found a safe retreat,

  A home, a shelter from oppressions dire;

  Where we can worship God as we think right,

  And mobbers come not to disturb our peace;

  Where we can live and hope for better days,

  Enjoy again our liberty, our rights:

  That social intercourse which freedom grants,

  And charity requires of man to man.

  —Unattributed poem published in the Mormon newspaper Times and Seasons, April 15, 1841

  THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, organized during a prayer meeting on a central New York farm in 1830, was a storm-tossed religion. Joseph Smith “gathered” his hundred or so Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, in the early 1830s, where missionary work soon swelled the Mormons’ ranks. Pursuant to a revelation, Joseph sent Saints westward to simultaneously settle in Missouri, which he believed to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, or Zion. Joseph’s Mormon beliefs often sprang full-grown from the Old Testament. The Saints were the people of Israel; Zion was their promised land, and the rest of America was Babylon, inhabited by the churchless Gentiles.

  By 1838, the Saints found themselves unwelcome in Kirtland. The nationwide financial Panic of 1837 had wiped out their oddball financial institution, the
“Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company,” impoverishing Gentile and Mormon investors alike. The decidedly unsafe Safety Society had declared itself a non-bank because Ohio refused to charter a real Mormon bank. The society ran out of money within three weeks of its founding. The self-styled prophet fled Kirtland in the dead of night, pointing his horse west to Missouri.

  The Saints fared little better in their new home. Within just a few years, the devout, industrious Mormons, almost all of them from anti-slavery New England states, had alienated their new Southern neighbors. (The Missouri Compromise of 1820 preserved its status as a slave state.) Heeding Joseph’s call, members of the rapidly growing church were gathering in Missouri, and the hordes of new immigrant voters were threatening to take over several counties from the old settlers. The Missourians pleaded with their governor to halt Mormon immigration, and vigilantes drove home the message by raiding Mormon ranches and settlements.

  When nonviolent resistance proved futile, the Saints stopped turning the other cheek. To counter the “mobocrats,” the Mormons organized the Danite guerrilla force, named for a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that “the saints shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom, for ever and ever.” Under attack from marauders and night riders, the Danites returned violence for violence, matching their tormentors burned hay rick for burned hay rick, and rustled cattle herd for rustled cattle herd. The excitable Sidney Rigdon preached a sermon on July 4, 1838, rallying the Saints to “a war of extermination” against their enemies. (In the early nineteenth century, “extermination” meant to expel, not necessarily to annihilate.) Four months later, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous Extermination Order, directed against Missouri’s Mormons. A short, bloody, three-month-long war ensued, with casualties on both sides. A ghastly atrocity—the massacre and mutilation of seventeen defenseless Mormons, including two children, trapped inside a blacksmith shop at Haun’s Mill—effectively ended the Mormon War, which the Mormons could never have hoped to win.