by Alex Beam
Law’s son Richard claims that his father threw his arms around Joseph’s neck, begging him to recant the new theology. “My father
pleaded for this with Joseph with tears streaming from his eyes. The Prophet was also in tears, but he informed [William] that he could not withdraw the doctrine, for God had commanded him to teach it, and condemnation would come upon him if he was not obedient to the commandment.
When Law returned home to describe this encounter to Jane, she said: “That was what I fully expected.” She then suggested that her husband sell his substantial property and business holdings and flee Nauvoo. But Law had decided that he wanted to stay and fight. “I wanted to tread upon the viper,” he said.
He was not alone.
POLYGAMY WAS RAPIDLY BECOMING THE WORST-KEPT SECRET IN Nauvoo.* The young Gentile Charlotte Haven reported on a missionary who returned from England with a wife and child, “and I am told that his first wife is reconciled to this certainly at first unwelcome guest to her home, for her husband and some others have reasoned with her that plurality of wives is taught in the Bible.” “Poor, weak woman!” Haven concluded; “I cannot believe that Joseph will ever sanction such a doctrine, and should the Mormons in any way engraft such an article on the religion, the sect would surely fall to pieces, for what community or State could harbor such outrageous immorality?”
Opponents of polygamy began to seek each other out. Like William Law, Dr. Robert Foster was also developing real estate in Nauvoo. Foster was a licensed physician from Northampton County, England. Also like Law, he was a longtime Joseph Smith loyalist who held positions of authority in Nauvoo. He was the surgeon general of the Nauvoo Legion, and regent designate of the factitious University of Nauvoo. Joseph had chosen Foster to be toastmaster for the dedication of the Prophet’s seventeen-room Nauvoo Mansion in the fall of 1843. “Whether we view Joseph as a prophet, a general, a mayor, or chairman of the City Council,” Foster proclaimed, “if he has equals, he has no superiors.”
Foster and Law were buying lumber shipped down the Mississippi from Mormon-controlled woodlots in Wisconsin and building homes for sale. Joseph objected to the lumber being used to enrich Law and Foster. He felt the building materials should properly go to the Temple construction project, and to his contemplated Nauvoo House, a hotel-headquarters to replace the Nauvoo Mansion. In 1841, Joseph received a revelation that chastised Law and Foster by name and urged them to become stockholders in the Nauvoo House, “a delightful habitation for man, and a resting-place for the weary traveler.” It especially galled Smith that Foster had constructed the new Mammoth Hotel on the high ground, stealing a march on the contemplated Nauvoo House. At an 1843 gathering, he lashed out at “Dr. Foster’s mammoth skeleton, monuments of Dr. Foster rising all over town . . .
Does that coat fit you, Dr. Foster? Pretty well! Put it on then. This is the way people swell like the ox or the toad.
Siting the hotel on the plateau behind the future temple site was a jab at Joseph. The Law brothers owned vast tracts of farmland near the temple, and many building lots on the high ground. On behalf of the church, Joseph owned many unsold lots on the “flat,” which had only recently been drained, and was still hot and insect infested. Joseph needed to sell his downtown lots to stay current on payments to the men who sold him the city back in 1839. “The upper part of the two has no right to rival those on the river,” Smith said. “We have been the making of the upper part of the town; we began here first.” But Foster and Law pursued their business ventures, and they had no problem wooing workers to their projects. They paid wages in gold, silver, or convertible cash. Joseph liked to settle all his debts in scrip—often coupons redeemable at his general store—or in IOUs that had become a de facto, albeit devalued, currency in Nauvoo.
Smith was competing with the Law brothers and with Robert Foster. But their differences were not limited to the marketplace. While Law was struggling with Joseph over polygamy, Foster arrived home one evening to find the Prophet dining, à deux, with Foster’s wife, Sarah. After Smith left, the hot-tempered doctor drew a pistol and threatened to shoot Sarah if she didn’t explain Smith’s visit. She held her peace, so Foster grabbed a second pistol, thrust it into her hand, and yelled, “If you don’t tell me, either you or I will shoot!” Sarah fainted.
When the vapors parted, Sarah admitted that Smith had been explaining his “spiritual wife” doctrine to her and had tried to seduce her. Around the same time, according to Smith’s diary, Foster confronted Willard Richards with a similar accusation:
“You,” shaking his fists in his face, “are another Damned black hearted villain. You tried to seduce my wife on the boat when she was going to New York and I can prove it. And the oath is out against you.”
Smith ordered Foster to stand trial, then thought better of it when he learned that the doctor planned to call forty witnesses and mount an aggressive defense. Nonetheless, Smith waged a vigorous smear campaign against Foster in the church newspaper, the Times and Seasons. “I have seen him steal a number of times,” Joseph said in an affidavit reprinted in the paper. “When riding in the stage, I have seen him put his hand in a woman’s bosom, and he also lifted up her clothes. I know that [the Foster brothers] are wicked, malicious, adulterous, bad characters; I say it under oath; I can tell all the particulars from first to last.”
Indeed, Foster’s brother Charles was also on Smith’s blacklist. The Prophet publicly accused him of writing a letter to the New York Tribune, alleging impropriety in the temple’s finances. Not long after, Robert Foster pulled a pistol on Smith, saying he “would be God damned if he didn’t shoot the Mayor.”
The Fosters and the Laws found plenty of allies in their opposition to Joseph. Attorney Francis Higbee had sued Smith, unsuccessfully, for his attempted seduction of Nancy Rigdon. Higbee himself had been courting the young woman. Smith held nothing back when it came to smearing Francis Higbee’s reputation. Characteristically, Smith also hurled mud at Rigdon, whom he indeed had tried to seduce. One of his apostles called Sidney Rigdon’s young daughter “notorious in this city . . . regarded, generally, little, if any better, than a public prostitute.” The Times and Seasons newspaper censored part of Joseph’s testimony about the Higbee brothers, “which is too indelicate for the public eye or ear . . . so revolting, corrupt, and disgusting has been the conduct of most of this clique, that we feel to dread having any thing to do with the publication of their trials.” Having washed its hands, so to speak, the newspaper did report—twice—that Francis Higbee “had got a bad disorder with the French Girl,” an itinerant, unnamed prostitute.
Higbee’s brother Chauncey had been severed from the church for conduct remarkably akin to Joseph Smith’s. When three women told the High Council that Chauncey had seduced them, he invoked the polygamy defense. “It was right to have free intercourse with women if it was kept secret,” Higbee said. “Joseph Smith authorized him to practice these things.” The campaign against the Higbees mesmerized the Saints, because their father, Elias Higbee, had been a High Council member and a close friend of Joseph Smith. That didn’t prevent the Mormon hierarchy from launching an extraordinary tirade against Chauncey Higbee, accusing him of the “unspeakable crime” of sodomy. William Smith, Hyrum Smith, and Brigham Young at different times charged Chauncey with “leading young men into difficulty,” at the behest of John C. Bennett, a former first counselor of the church, turned rabid apostate.
Two years after taking his first plural wife, Joseph was actively prosecuting polygamists in the Nauvoo courts. In the ecclesiastical High Council, Joseph accused Harrison Sagers of seducing his sister-in-law, Phoebe Madison, and of “using my name in a blasphemous manner, by saying that I tolerated such things.” This was merely a show trial, as the pseudonymous reporter for the Warsaw Signal correctly reported. “Had the accused been dealt with according to his crime,” wrote “The Traveler,” “he would have been divested of his office and cut off from the church. . . . Instead the said Sagers was disc
harged by the Prophet.” A month later, Joseph allowed Sagers to marry Phoebe, and three other wives besides.
Smith’s hypocrisy concerning polygamy was breathtaking. Immediately before marrying Fanny Young, he wrote in his journal that he had “walked up and down the streets with my scribe.
Gave instructions to try those persons who were preaching, teaching, or practicing the doctrine of plurality of wives. . . . I have constantly said no man shall have but one wife at a time, unless the Lord directs otherwise.
Just a few months later, the Times and Seasons announced that yet another rank-and-file Saint had been tried for polygamy:
NOTICE.
As we have lately been credibly informed, that an Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter-day Saints, by the name of Hyram Brown, has been preaching polygamy, and other false and corrupt doctrines, in the county of Lapeer, state of Michigan.
This is to notify him and the Church in general, that he has been cut off from the church, for his iniquity; and he is further notified to appear at the Special Conference, on the 6th of April next, to make answer to these charges.
JOSEPH SMITH.
HYRUM SMITH.
In April 1844, Smith arranged for Robert Foster, William and Wilson Law, and Jane Law to be excommunicated from the church, with the Higbees soon to follow. Law told Joseph that he couldn’t be excommunicated in absentia, according to church law, because he had been appointed to the First Presidency by divine revelation. His plea fell on deaf ears. But Joseph’s enemies—“one or two disaffected individuals,” Smith called them—were more powerful than he realized. Just a few days after his excommunication, William Law organized the True Church of Latter-day Saints, which began meeting at his house. By early May, their meetings were attracting three hundred worshippers and had to be held outdoors. Law insisted that he remained faithful to original Mormon teachings and refused to call himself a prophet. Joseph had once had the ear of the Lord, Law proclaimed, but now he had fallen.
Nauvoo was a company town, and Joseph had little trouble infiltrating the dissidents’ ranks. He inserted two young men, Robert Scott and Dennison Harris, into the meetings of the True Church. Before the third meeting, held at William Law’s newly built brick house a block away from the riverbank, Joseph warned the pair that they might be in jeopardy. “Be sure that you make no covenant, nor enter into any obligations whatever with them,” he said. This proved to be timely advice. At this gathering, attended by two hundred men and three mysterious, veiled women who claimed that Joseph and Hyrum Smith had tried to seduce them, Francis Higbee decided to administer a loyalty oath to would-be opponents of Joseph’s church: “Do you solemnly swear, before God and all holy angels, that you will give your life, liberty, your influence, your all, for the destruction of Joseph Smith and his party, so help you God?”
The two boys “resolutely and manfully refused” to take the oath, Harris later recounted to a friend, “stating that Joseph Smith had done them no harm and they were too young to understand these things.” The dissenters, “these fiends of the bottomless pit,” supposedly threatened to kill the boys, then reconsidered when they realized the ensuing investigation would inevitably expose the plotters. Joseph received a full account; “To the Prophet these two boys told their harrowing story.”
Law had his own undercover agents. “I kept a detective or two among those who were in the confidence of the Smiths,” he told an interviewer. Law’s detectives apparently told him of Joseph’s occasional plans to “put him aside,” or “use him up”—that is, kill him—using poison or violence.
Joseph’s emboldened detractors were suddenly attacking on all fronts. Wilson Law and Francis Higbee collaborated on two vitriolic poetic satires, “Buckeye’s Lamentation for Want of More Wives,” and “The Buckeye’s First Epistle to Jo,” the latter gleefully published in Thomas Sharp’s Warsaw Signal on April 25, 1844. (Higbee was born in Ohio, hence “Buckeye.”) The “Lamentation” announced the less-than-shocking news that Joseph and the apostles had been taking plural wives, in a style indebted to Alexander Pope:
But Joe at snaring beats them all,
And at the rest does laugh;
For widows poor, and orphan girls,
He can ensnare with chaff,
He sets his snares around for all,
—And very seldom fails
To catch some thoughtless Partridges,
Snow-birds or Knight-ingales!
The poem none-too-subtly referred to Joseph’s wives Emily and Eliza Partridge, Eliza Snow, and to Martha Knight, the Prophet’s seventeenth wife.
Attacks of a very different kind quickly followed. In late May 1844, William and Wilson Law charged Joseph with adultery in the Hancock County court at Carthage. They accused the Prophet of living “in an open state of adultery” with Maria Lawrence, between October 1843 and May 1844. William Law not only accused Joseph of fornicating with the young girl, but he also suspected the Prophet had misappropriated the young girl’s substantial, $7,750 inheritance, for which Law was a co-guarantor.
The Laws filed their claim in Carthage to sidestep Nauvoo’s hermetic judicial system. At the same time, William Law sent $2,000 to a publisher in Quincy, Illinois, to purchase a “5 d press with a 25” x 38” platen,” and printing supplies. The Laws and their confederates were going into the newspaper business.
*Scholars disagree on the number of wives Joseph had. Todd Compton estimates thirty-three; George D. Smith says thirty-eight; Fawn Brodie lists forty-eight; D. Michael Quinn counts forty-six.
* For decades, some Mormon apologists denied polygamy’s existence, arguing: why were there no children born of plural marriage? In 1880, Elder Ebenezer Robinson quoted Hyrum Smith as saying that if a plural wife “should have an off spring, give out word that she had a husband who had gone on a foreign mission.” Robinson further recollected that “there was a place, a few miles out of Nauvoo, in Illinois, where females were sent” to bear children away from the scrutiny of their friends and neighbors. In 1905, Mary Rollins told a Salt Lake City audience that three of Joseph’s children reached adulthood, their identities concealed by “different names.”
PART TWO
“Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood / Of Prophets martyr’d for the truth of God.”
6
“THE PERVERSION OF SACRED THINGS”
This day the Nauvoo Expositor goes forth to the world, rich with facts, such expositions as make the guilty tremble and rage. . . .
—William Law’s diary, Friday, June 7, 1844
IN THIS HIGH-STAKES POKER GAME, NONE OF THE PLAYERS WERE bothering to hide their hands. Not only had the Fosters and Laws filed separate complaints, one for adultery and the other for “false swearing,” against Joseph in state court at Carthage, they also announced their plans to publish a new, independent newspaper outside the ambit of Smith’s benevolent dictatorship. The city’s two existing newspapers, the Nauvoo Neighbor and the Times and Seasons, were organs of the ruling theocracy, both edited by Apostle John Taylor. The new entrant would be something else entirely. “The paper I think we will call the Nauvoo Expositor,” dissident Francis Higbee explained to the newspaper editor, Thomas Gregg,
for it will be fraught with Joe’s peculiar and particular mode of Legislation; and a dissertation upon his delectable plan of Government; and above all, it shall be the organ through which we will herald his Mormon ribaldry. It shall also contain a full and complete exposé of his Mormon seraglio, or Nauvoo Harem, and his unparalleled and unheard of attempts of seduction.
The editorial team assembling the Expositor inside the Laws’ printing office on Mulholland Street, just a few hundred feet from the Nauvoo Temple site, was a motley crew. William Law supplied the capital. He, the Higbees, and the Fosters supplied the vitriol. The nominal editor, the Gentile lawyer Sylvester Emmons, later admitted that “none of us knew anything about journalism. I had written a few letters that were published in the New York Herald, so in organizing the forces, I w
as elected as editor.” Emmons claimed to be a member of a Nauvoo clique, “a Gentile club, smarting under grievances unendurable, [that] sympathized with the seceders.” Publishing the Expositor was “a hazardous enterprise,” he judiciously noted, “and the result might have been seen, if the seceders had exercised a fair share of caution.”
But theirs was not a cautious enterprise. A couple of weeks before their first issue, the Expositor’s owners distributed a flyer detailing what exactly they intended to expose. Nominally devoted to “the general diffusion of useful knowledge,” the newspaper’s prospectus struck directly at the heart of Nauvoo’s one-man rule. The Laws and their colleagues demanded the repeal of the Nauvoo Charter, which arrogated so many powers to the man they now regarded as a fallen prophet. They vowed to print the “FACTS AS THEY REALLY EXIST IN THE CITY OF NAUVOO fearless of whose particular case the facts may apply.” The dissidents also advocated “unmitigated DISOBEDIENCE TO POLITICAL REVELATION” made by the city’s “SELF-CONSTITUTED MONARCH.”
Smith had faced worse, much worse, in the pages of far more august newspapers than a putative journal edited by a tiny claque of disaffected Saints. The paper’s prospectus didn’t overtly mention polygamy, although its promise to censure “gross moral imperfections” hinted at things to come. Joseph could still allow himself to hope that the prurient details of his inner circle’s plural marriages would remain secret. But the allusion to a “self-constituted monarch” gave pause. Was it possible that the Laws and Fosters planned to expose the Council of Fifty, whose members had been sworn to strictest secrecy? How would the world react to discovering that a presidential candidate had appointed himself “King of the Kingdom of God and His Laws with the Keys and powers thereof”?
Even without seeing the paper, Joseph sued for peace. He sent his trusted aide Dimick Huntington to treat with Robert Foster. But the refractory doctor sent Huntington packing, with a fiery response to Smith: “You have trampled upon everything we held dear and sacred . . . we set hell at defiance, and all her agents.” Uncowed, Joseph then dispatched his first counselor, Sidney Rigdon, to William Law’s house, offering terms: If the Laws and the Fosters would stand down, the Council of Fifty would reinstate them into the church and restore their ecclesiastical status. William Law would be second counselor, number three in the hierarchy again, and his wife could also rejoin the Saints. Law offered a counterproposal. We won’t publish our paper, he said, if Joseph would publicly apologize for teaching and practicing “the doctrine of the plurality of wives.” Law also wanted Joseph to acknowledge that the whole polygamy scheme was “from Hell.”