by Alex Beam
At the temple site, construction workers lowered each of the four cornerstones into place separately, accompanied by a special blessing from a church leader. Like most public events in Nauvoo, the ceremony occasioned a poem, this one springing from the pen of Hosea Stout, a particularly militant member of Joseph’s bodyguard:
’Tis now the sixth of April in Eighteen Forty-One,
Eleven years exactly since the Church of Christ begun;
And then all men did hate us, our numbers being few,
But now we’ve honor, power, we’ve a Legion of Nauvoo . . .
Our “Legion” is all powerful, t’is warlike, brave and grand,
E’re long t’will prove a terror to Boggs and all his clan,
T’is peaceable and harmless to all who come to view
Or have a mind to settle in the City of Nauvoo . . .
Our Legion is commanded by men of great renown,
Our foes, in vain may threaten, in vain may on us frown,
Our chief commander’s Joseph, he well knows what to do,
Because he is a prophet in the Legion of Nauvoo.
The Mormon newspaper Times and Seasons, edited by Joseph’s brother Don Carlos Smith, hailed the day as a mammoth success:
We never witnessed a more imposing spectacle than was presented on this occasion. . . . Such an almost countless multitude of people, moving in harmony, in friendship, in dignity, told with a voice not easily misunderstood, that they were a people of intelligence and virtue, and order; in short, that they were saints.
And they behaved like saints, too. The editor made special mention of his “happiness . . . that we heard no obscene or profane language; neither saw we any one intoxicated. Can the same be said of a similar assemblage in any other city in the Union?” he asked.
Thank God, that the intoxicating beverage, that bane of humanity in these last days, that—what shall we call it? Devil? is becoming a stranger in Nauvoo.
ONE OF CHIEF KEOKUK’S FELLOW DIGNITARIES WAS THE STRIPLING owner of the only newspaper in Hancock County not under Mormon control—Thomas Sharp, the twenty-two-year-old editor of the Warsaw Signal. Sharp, a recent arrival in Illinois, had purchased the Western World, renamed it, and set off to make a name for himself in the public affairs of the day. His only competition, the Saints’ official organ, the Times and Seasons, trafficked in upbeat news about the Mormons’ social and economic progress, and in grim reports of tidal waves, earthquakes, and floods that augured the approaching End Times.
The son of a well-to-do Methodist minister, Sharp grew up in Pennsylvania and studied law at Dickinson College. He came west to make his fortune at the bar. He practiced briefly in Quincy, but a chronic hearing problem limited his effectiveness in the courtroom. In September 1840, he traveled north to Warsaw, a small (population 500) Mississippi river town located just south of the Des Moines rapids. Warsaw had about ten stores, two taverns, two steam mills, one doctor, a printing plant, and one lawyer already in business. The town did have enviable commercial prospects. Just to its north, the Des Moines River linked Illinois with the interior of the vast Iowa Territory and the largely uncharted West. On the Illinois side of the river, a railway line could theoretically connect Warsaw to a town above the Des Moines rapids and open up transport to northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Tiny Warsaw—previously named Fort Edwards, and then Spunky Point—was undergoing an image upgrade, much to the consternation of its most famous son, John Hay, the former Warsaw Signal delivery boy, who would grow up to become Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary and later, secretary of state. “I lived at Spunky Point on the Mississippi river,” Hay later wrote,
so named because some Indian rode by Fort Edwards on a spunky horse. This is a graphic and characteristic title of geographical significance, but some idiots just before I was born, who had read Miss Porter’s novel “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” thought Warsaw would be more genteel, so we are Nicodemussed [reduced by timidity] into nothingness for the rest of time.
I hope every man who is engaged in this outrage is called Smith in heaven.
The novice newspaper owner Sharp declared his ambition “to please ourselves, pursuing an independent and unyielding course; on the one hand battling with tyranny in all its forms . . . and on the other upholding the high and lofty principles of republicanism and equal rights.” Like many prominent Illinois citizens, including Abraham Lincoln, Sharp was active in his local Washingtonian Society, which inveighed against alcohol and all “intoxicating drinks.”
Like the Signal’s previous owner, Sharp had no strong opinions about the Mormons, who were flooding into Nauvoo, just eighteen miles north of Warsaw. He noted the legislature’s passage of the liberal Nauvoo Charter with equanimity. Just a few days later, Sharp editorialized on Joseph’s call to the world’s Mormons to “gather” in Nauvoo. “Whatever may be thought of the tenets of this sect,” Sharp wrote in a January, 20, 1840, editorial, “it is certainly an imposing spectacle to witness the moral power which in so short a period they have exerted. . . . Already in obedience to this call, thousands have left their homes in Europe, and thousands are now preparing to leave and take up residence in a far distant land.” He called the Mormons “that persecuted people” and even mentioned that he had been accused of partiality to the Saints.
Sharp and Joseph Smith had never met, but Joseph certainly appreciated the power of a favorable press. He invited Sharp to the April 6 celebration, saving him a seat on the reviewing platform, and assigned him a groom to care for his horse. The groom, Norton Jacobs, later regretted waiting on “the mean hypocritical human.” Like Keokuk and many others, Sharp enjoyed a turkey dinner that Joseph laid on for his special guests at the Nauvoo Mansion.
Perhaps it was something he ate. “I believe [Sharp] here imbibed that spirit of rancor which since has been so freely manifested against the Saints,” Jacobs wrote, “for he envied that majesty and magnanimity which he had not the honesty and courage to emulate.” Whatever the case, by the late spring of 1841, after seeing the serried ranks of Joseph’s military might on the Nauvoo parade ground, Sharp turned against the Saints, with a vengeance.
The young Thomas Sharp would prove to be a formidable enemy. He was intelligent, eloquent, and seemingly tireless in his efforts to blacken the name of Joseph Smith and his followers. He carefully monitored the Saints’ newspapers and apparently had some informants in Nauvoo. Within just a few months, he became a determined, professional Mormon-hater. “He was more dreaded and hated by the whole Mormon tribe than any other anti-Mormon in the county,” Sharp’s contemporary, editor Thomas Gregg recalled.
The editorials of the Signal were extensively copied into other papers throughout the country, and from their pugnacious and violent character, people at a distance were led to believe that “Old Tom Sharp” was a perfect walking arsenal, his person bristling with Bowie knives and pistols. Who would rather fight than eat.
In reality, Gregg insisted that Sharp was a “mild-mannered, good natured and rather conservative individual.”
Sharp first criticized the Mormons, gently, in a lengthy dispatch one month after the Saints’ parade. He reported, perhaps correctly, that “great dissatisfaction exists at Nauvoo amongst those who have lately arrived from England.” Then Sharp offered a broader critique of the Saints’ political ambitions in Illinois. The Mormons, he opined, had stepped “beyond the proper sphere of religious denomination and become a political body.” Sharp insisted that he honored the Saints’ religious beliefs but was “bound to oppose the concentration of political power in a religious body, or in the hands of a few individuals.”
Joseph overreacted, immediately firing off this brief note to “Sharp, Editor of the Warsaw Signal”:
Nauvoo, Ill., May 26, 1841
SIR—
You will discontinue my paper—its contents are calculated to pollute me, and to patronize the filthy sheet—that tissue of lies—that sink of iniquity—is disgraceful to any moral man.
Yours, with
utter contempt.
JOSEPH SMITH
P.S. Please publish the above in your contemptible paper.
Of course, Sharp did publish the note, under the headline
HIGHLY IMPORTANT!
A New Revelation from Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet
Smith had unwisely picked the proverbial fight with a man who bought printer’s ink by the barrel. Sharp never stinted on sarcasm and mockery where Joseph was concerned, inevitably referring to Smith as “His Holiness” and characterizing every communication from Nauvoo as a “revelation.” As one of his many pranks, Sharp pulled Smith’s old subscription request form from the Western World’s files. According to Sharp, the Prophet still owed the paper $3.00 in unpaid fees:
Come, Josey, fork over and for mercy’s sake don’t get a revelation that it is not to be paid. For if thou dost, we will send a prophet after thee mightier than thou.
Sharp quickly revisited the events of April 6, after the Times and Seasons accused him of repaying the Saints’ “hospitality and kindness” with “baseness.” “It does make us feel right bad,” Sharp shot back, “that we have been so ungrateful to the Mormon brotherhood.
Just think, reader!—after having been invited to Nauvoo on the 6 of April, by the Mayor of the city. . . . After having ridden to the Temple on that great day, in presence of assembled thousands, by the side of the Holy prophet—after supping with the Prophet, and eating heartily of his stall-fed turkey. . . .
Sharp introduced a theme that would dominate his anti-Mormon rhetoric for several years: the Saints’ militarism, so blatantly on display at the Legion parade: “How military these people are becoming,” Sharp wrote:
Every thing they say or do seems to breathe the spirit of military tactics. Their prophet appears on all great occasions in his splendid regimental dress, signs his name Lieutenant General, and more titles are to be found in the Nauvoo Legion than any one book on military tactics can produce. . . .
Reporting the Legion’s weekly maneuvers in the center of Nauvoo, Sharp concluded: “Truly fighting must be a part of the creed of these Saints!”
What motivated Sharp to hector the Mormons so relentlessly for six long years, until he and his confederates succeeded in driving the Saints out of Illinois? The Mormons’ ostentatious militarism probably shocked him, as he wrote. He repeatedly assailed the notion that a religion should have its own army. Furthermore, Sharp was one of the first to realize that the Saints’ rapid immigration into Nauvoo had created a powerful voting bloc, capable of ruling the county. “If Joe Smith is to control the majority of votes in our county, are we not, in effect, the subject of a despot?” Sharp wrote. “Might we not as well be serfs to the Autocrat of Russia?” “We ask the independent citizens of this county and this state to wake up from their slumber . . . to put down this foul and unholy attempt to enslave them.” He called Mormonism “a power in league with the Prince of Darkness, not inferior to the Spanish Inquisition in its capacity for secrecy and intrigue.”
Never underestimate the craven opportunism of the newspaper owner. “Mormon Joe and his Danite seraglio” provided great copy, and plenty of it. When Sharp wasn’t busy reporting, and often distorting, the goings-on in Nauvoo, he printed long swaths of text drawn from the anti-Mormon well. Several newspapers in New York and Pennsylvania were serializing wild tales of Joe Smith’s necromancy and plural wifery, retailed by money-hungry apostates, and Sharp delightedly reprinted any anti-Mormon trumpery, real or imagined. His readers lapped it up. Like journalists before and after him, Sharp knew how to milk a good story. When the Warsaw Signal finally ceased publication in 1846, Sharp admitted that “our cause against the Mormons has kept us in business.”
With Sharp riding high, Joseph’s younger brother William entered the fray. William was bad seed, needlessly combative and possessed of exceedingly poor judgment. (William once said his older brother Joseph “ought to have been hung up by the neck years ago.”) He saw that Sharp was landing some haymakers and influencing public opinion well beyond the confines of tiny Warsaw and Hancock County. William believed that his brother Don Carlos’s Times and Seasons lacked the stomach to fight toe-to-toe with Sharp, so he launched a newspaper with the express purpose of parrying the thrusts of the downstate newspaper tyro.
On April 16, 1842, William published the first issue of the Nauvoo Wasp, to combat “the shafts of slander . . . foul calumnies, and base misrepresentations” appearing in journals like the Signal. The Wasp vowed “to convey correct information to the world and thereby disabuse the public mind as to the many slanders that are constantly perpetrated against us.” In the very first issue, William published a brief item headlined “Nose-ology,” about one “Thom-ASS C. Sharp:”
the length of his snout is said to be in the exact proportion of seven to one compared with his intellectual faculties, having upon its convex surface well developed bumps.
According to William, Sharp’s nose deformations betrayed many dark traits, including “Anti-Mormonitiveness.”
But William was wielding a knife at a gun fight. “We have received the first number of a new six by nine, recently started at Nauvoo, yclept ‘The Wasp,’” Sharp informed his readers:
Of the “varmint” itself we have nothing to say, further than that the title is perfect misnomer. If it had been called Pole Cat, its name would then have corresponded perfectly with the character of its contents. It is needless to inform our readers that we don’t fight with such animals—nature having given them a decided advantage.
Joseph quickly realized that William needed adult supervision, and cut short his brother’s tenure at the Wasp. The Mormon leadership disavowed the “stinging” nature of William’s commentary and announced a new, irenic moniker for the weekly tabloid: “The Dove of the West.” The dove never flew. Instead, it became the Nauvoo Neighbor, a somewhat folksier version of the Times and Seasons, and Joseph appointed the sobersided Apostle John Taylor as the new editor.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE SAINTS, SHARP DIDN’T LIMIT HIS involvement with the Mormons to sarcastic spitballing. In July 1841, he queried his readers: “I ask you candidly, fellow citizens, if there is not need of an anti-Mormon Party in this county?” It was not a rhetorical question. Sharp was the driving force behind a countywide anti-Mormon convention that met in Warsaw, where Hancock’s “old settlers” tried to woo political candidates who would agree not to kowtow to the ever-increasing Mormon vote. “Old settlers,” or “old citizens,” as they called themselves, was a relative term. Carthage, the county seat, was established in 1833, and the town of Warsaw was laid out in 1834. Illinois had been a state for barely twenty-five years. Almost to a man, the Mormons’ opponents were new settlers, like Sharp himself, who was born in New Jersey. Businessman Mark Aldrich, who would become a prominent anti-Mormon agitator, built the second house erected in Warsaw, just eight years before the Mormons arrived. William Grover, who declared himself to be the “governor” of the “Warsaw Legislature,” an ersatz anti-Mormon civic organization, was born in New York, and so on.
The anti-Mormon party never really became a political organization, because Illinois already had two vigorous political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. The post–Andrew Jackson Illinois Democrats represented the radical populist wing of the party, branded “locofocos” for their supposed impulsiveness (a locofoco was a sulfur match), and shared the votes in Hancock County and the surrounding areas with the more staid Whigs. The Democrats held the balance of power statewide, but the Whigs generally won Hancock County elections. The populist Democrats were pro-immigration free traders, anti–federal government and opposed to ambitious, federally funded public works. The Democrats favored states’ rights and America’s rapid westward expansion. The Whigs were the ideological heirs of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, favoring a national bank and a strong national currency. They waxed more cautious about widening the borders of the ever-growing union. In the large East Coast cities, interparty animus was real and sometimes spilled
over into violence. In Illinois party politics, though, cooler heads generally prevailed.
Joseph Smith liked to say that he had no politics: “We care not a fig for Whig or Democrat, they are both alike to us,” he declared at the end of 1841. “We shall go for our friends, our TRIED FRIENDS, and the cause of human liberty, which is the cause of God.” Smith favored whichever party seemed most likely to help the Mormons strengthen their hand in Nauvoo, or advance their case for reparations from Missouri. It was assumed that he hated Democrats; after all, it was the Democratic governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, who signed the 1838 anti-Mormon Extermination Order. When Joseph traveled to Washington in 1840 to ask Democratic president Martin Van Buren to make good the Mormons’ enormous property losses in Missouri, Van Buren brushed him off, twice. “He is not as fit as my dog for the chair of state,” was Joseph’s famous assessment of Van Buren, “for my dog will make an effort to protect his abused and insulted master, while the present chief magistrate will not so much as lift his finger” to help citizens of the United States. Furthermore, it was Governor Boggs’s Democrat successor, Thomas Reynolds, who kept sending lawmen across the Mississippi to extradite Joseph Smith, for crimes he may or may not have committed. In 1840, the Nauvoo Saints voted Whig and helped swing Hancock County to William Henry Harrison, who became the ninth president of the United States.
But party lines meant little to Smith. He liked his friends more. Illinois state senator Stephen Douglas once helped Joseph out of a legal jam, and Joseph swung toward Douglas’s Democrats in the state elections of 1842. As Joseph voted, so voted the 2,000 or so eligible Saints who accepted his word as gospel. Eager to attract new residents, Illinois had liberal alien suffrage laws, which allowed white males to vote almost immediately after arriving in the state.