by Alex Beam
Joseph then turned to Hyrum, and asked, “Brother Hyrum, you are the oldest, what shall we do?”
Apparently swayed by Emma’s letter and by the pleadings of the terrified Saints, Hyrum suggested returning to Nauvoo. “Let us go back and give ourselves up, and see the thing out. Let us go back and put our trust in God, and we shall not be harmed. The Lord is in it. If we live or have to die, we will be reconciled to our fate.”
Joseph thought for a moment, then answered. “If you go back I will go with you. But we shall be butchered.”*
FROM THE IOWA SHORE, JOSEPH DASHED OFF A LETTER TO FORD: My co-defendants and I are coming to Carthage, as you asked. Joseph proposed to meet Ford’s posse the following day, Monday, June 24, at the Mound, a promontory six miles east of Nauvoo. Joseph likewise alerted his lawyers that he would be facing charges in Carthage the next day. Ambling back to the river, he commented to Rockwell, “It is of no use to hurry, for we are going back to be slaughtered.” He commented that he would like to address the Saints one last time, that evening.
“We can send out word, and have them hear you by starlight,” Rockwell said.
Events quickly overtook this idea.
Instead, Joseph spent the night at the mansion, with Emma and his four children: the thirteen-year-old adopted Julia; Frederick, the blond eight-year-old; six-year-old Alexander; and his oldest son, Joseph Smith III, age eleven. As a grownup, young Joseph recalled that his father called him into one of the mansion’s large reception rooms, then blessed him in front of the family: “If anything should happen to me, you will know who is to be my successor. This, my son, has been blessed and set apart, and will in time succeed me.”
The next morning, Joseph told his family, “I go as a lamb to the slaughter, but if my death will atone for any faults I have committed during my lifetime I am willing to die.” At 6:30, he exited the mansion and kissed each of his children good-bye. Several hundred Saints, including his weeping, aged mother, Lucy, had gathered outside the mansion to see him off.
With his infant children hanging off his frame, Joseph asked: “Emma, can you train my sons to walk in their father’s footsteps?”
“Oh, Joseph, you’re coming back!” his wife cried. Smith posed the question twice more, and each time Emma gave the same answer, with tears filling her eyes. “Oh, Joseph, you are coming back.” *
Thus Joseph began his journey along his Via Dolorosa. As promised, he and all his seventeen co-defendants in the Expositor affair mounted their horses and started the half-day’s journey to Carthage. The assemblage was a Who’s Who of the Latter-day Saints: patriarch Hyrum; Rockwell; Dunham, the brigadier general of the Legion; John Greene, the police chief; Nauvoo’s constable and coroner, Dimick Huntington; the former newspaper editor and Joseph’s chief ghostwriter, William Phelps. Friends who hadn’t been named in the indictment, such as Willard Richards, the Maid of Iowa riverboat captain, Dan Jones, and Joseph’s lawyer, James Woods, rode out with them. As the riders moved up the high ground leading to the unfinished Temple, Joseph gazed backward at the neatly platted city nestled alongside the mammoth, glistening Mississippi. “This is the loveliest place and the best people under the heavens,” he remarked. “Little do they know the trials that await them.”
Riding eastward, the group encountered a mounted company of sixty well-disciplined McDonough county Union Dragoons on their way to Nauvoo. Their commander, Captain James Dunn, halted Joseph, and explained that Governor Ford had ordered him to reclaim the state-owned weapons in the hands of the Nauvoo Legion: three cannon and about two hundred and fifty muskets. The newly minted apostate Wilson Law, former Legion major general, had told Ford exactly how many guns to ask for. He probably knew that the Saints had many more weapons of their own, but those weren’t subject to government seizure. Joseph acquiesced, and he and Dunn agreed that the handover might go more smoothly if the Prophet himself were present. Smith sent James Woods and a friend, Abram Hodge, ahead to Carthage to explain his change of plans, and to garner intelligence.
Back in Nauvoo, Joseph bade farewell to his family a second time, repeatedly comparing himself to “a lamb going to the slaughter.” Joseph told friends that he didn’t expect to see them again. “I am calm as a summer’s morning,” he said to his friend Henry Sherwood. “I have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward all men. If they take my life I shall die an innocent man, and my blood shall cry from the ground for vengeance, and it shall be said of me ‘He was murdered in cold blood!’” *
Chicago journalist B. W. Richmond had traveled to Nauvoo to interview Lucinda Morgan, the famous widow of anti-Freemason author Captain William Morgan. Instead, he found himself reporting a much larger story. A non-Mormon, Richmond’s dispatches were unclouded by church affiliation, so he saw a very different, characteristically relaxed Joseph Smith lounging in the mansion prior to his second departure for Carthage. “I saw a large, well dressed individual seated on a trunk at the further end of the hall, quietly smoking a cigar, who was pointed out to me as Joseph Smith.” Richmond wrote. “He was easy in his manners and seemed sure of an acquittal if he could get a fair hearing.”
Richmond and Smith rode on horseback to Nauvoo’s Masonic Hall, where the Saints were loading their muskets and cannon onto wagons for Major Dunn.
Emma asked Joseph for a blessing before his departure, but he claimed not to have time to compose one. Instead, he suggested that “she write out the best blessing she could think of,” and he would sign it when he returned. Emma wrote out a prayer, hoping that she would lead a righteous life and find favor with God. In the final paragraph of the blessing, she wrote:
I desire with all my heart to honor and respect my husband as my head, ever to live in his confidence and by acting in unison with him retain the place which God has given me by his side.
For almost her entire life, Emma viewed herself as married to one man, who was solely married to her. Within just a few years, her idée fixe became a grand delusion. She would convince herself and at least one of her sons that polygamy had never existed, and that Joseph had remained true to his original marriage vows.
Around sundown, Smith and his military escort rode out a second time toward Carthage. This time they encountered Hodge on the wooded outskirts of Nauvoo, riding back from the county seat. In Carthage, the innkeeper Artois Hamilton had pointed to the Carthage Grey militiamen camped on the town square and remarked, “Hodge, there are the boys that will settle you Mormons.”
“We can take as many men as there are there out of the Nauvoo Legion, and they would not be missed,” Hodge replied.
In his hasty horseback conversation with the Smiths on the Nauvoo-Carthage road, Hodge offered nothing but foreboding. “If it was my duty to counsel you,” he said to Hyrum, “I would say, do not go another foot, for they say they will kill you, if you go to Carthage.”
Smith and his friends continued their journey.
If Dunn and the Mormons thought they could sneak into Carthage at midnight, they were mistaken. The Carthage Greys caught sight of the mounted entourage and immediately started whooping and jeering.
“Where is the damned prophet?”
“Stand away, you McDonough boys,” they yelled at Dunn’s dragoons, “and let us shoot the damned Mormons.”
“God damn you, old Joe, we’ve got you now.”
“Clear the way and let us have a view of Joe Smith, the prophet of God, He has seen the last of Nauvoo. We’ll use him up now, and kill all the damned Mormons.”
If anyone doubted that they meant business, many of the Greys launched their muskets into the air and watched them parabola back to earth, their bayonets impaled into the soft ground.
The hullabaloo interrupted Governor Ford’s slumber inside the Hamilton House. The woozy governor stuck his head out of his bedroom window. “I know your great anxiety to see Mr. Smith, which is natural enough, but it is quite too late tonight for you to have the opportunity,” he said. “I assure you, gentlemen, you shall have th
at privilege tomorrow morning, as I will cause him to pass before the troops upon the square, and I now wish you, with this assurance, quietly and peaceably to return to your quarters.”
This would prove to be yet another of Thomas Ford’s bad ideas.
CARTHAGE WAS ON EDGE. OVER 1,000 CITIZEN SOLDIERS WERE milling around town with nothing to do. They were either spoiling for a fight or eager to go home and tend their farms. Inactivity was itself frightening; suppose the Nauvoo Legion attacked them? Trigger fingers were tense, noted Alton, Illinois, newspaper editor George T. M. Davis, who had come to cover the big story. “No one could close his ears against the murmurs that ran throughout the entire community,” Davis wrote.
Little squads could be seen at the taverns, at the tents of the soldiers, and in every part of the town . . . expressions falling from the lips [of the men] could leave no other impression upon any sane mind, than that they were determined that the Smiths should not escape summary punishment.
To complicate matters, the motley militias milling around Carthage answered to no overall commander. According to the Illinois Constitution, Ford was their commander in chief. But he commanded no one on the ground. In theory, Brigadier General Minor Deming of the Southwestern Illinois Militia’s Fourth Division oversaw the “many” county militias. But Deming, a well-educated, liberally inclined Yankee who tended a rural farm far from the anti-Mormon hotbeds of Carthage and Warsaw, was deemed to be an unreliable Jack-Mormon with secret, pro-Saint leanings. A decade earlier, when Illinoisans tried to fight the Black Hawk War, military discipline had been chaotic, wracked by company mutinies and mass desertions. It hadn’t improved. The militia men answered to their colonels and captains, usually prominent merchants or farmers who shared their men’s concerns—and their loathing of the Hancock County Mormons.
Keeping his promise of the previous evening, Ford summoned the Carthage Greys and the McDonough county militia to gather in front of the Carthage courthouse the next morning to “meet” Joseph and Hyrum Smith. It’s doubtful that the troops had any curiosity about meeting the Prophet and his brother. More likely, they hoped to see their faces so they could pick them out of a crowd, if a battle, melee, or mob lynching ensued. Ford led the Smith brothers out of the Hamilton House, introducing them as “generals,” the titles they claimed as leaders of the Nauvoo Legion. This didn’t sit well with the militias, who considered the titles fraudulent. Joseph had walked on a game leg since his harrowing childhood operation and could never serve in a regular army or militia unit. Even if he were completely healthy, his religious status would have exempted him from service. His appearance triggered a near-mutiny among the excitable Greys. The militia surrounded Joseph and his tiny entourage, tossing their hats and brandishing their swords. They cursed “the damned Mormons” again and again.
“The Greys commenced hissing and smarming and making all kinds of hellish sounds,” lieutenant Samuel Williams reported. “I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. I had no more command over them than I would have had over a pack of wild Indians.”
“There were at least a hundred men loaded to shoot Joe Smith,” his lawyer Woods recalled, “but I was on his right and he was on Captain Dunn’s right. I was between Smith and the militia.”
“At this demonstration of feeling on the part of the Greys, Jo actually fainted,” Williams recalled. Perhaps Smith’s knees buckled, or he felt faint; this account is Williams’s alone.
Woods had been lawyering and circuit-riding in the area for six years. “I knew almost every man in the crowd,” he said. “They told me afterwards that but for me, Joe would have never passed through the lines alive; they did not want to hurt me.”
Deming, the nominal military commander, threatened to place several of the most aggressive Greys under arrest. Suddenly, their commander, Robert F. Smith, leaped up on a wagon and asked his men if they would submit to Deming’s order.
“No!” they cried.
“Then load with ball cartridges!”
The Greys were so “wrought up . . . that the least notion to execute the order would in all probability have closed the career of the two prisoners,” the Warsaw Signal reported.
Deming quickly countermanded his own order of arrest. On the first day of the Smiths’ arrival in Carthage, he had lost control of his troops. Ford’s personal guarantee of the Mormons’ safety was moot.
Having sampled the hostility of the mobbing militias, Joseph and Hyrum would now get a taste of Carthage justice. In the afternoon, the Smiths and their seventeen co-defendants charged with destroying the Nauvoo Expositor met the man who would decide their fate: Robert F. Smith, justice of the peace and captain of the restive Greys—the same man who had led the Greys’ mutiny on the town green! Smith was a bona fide Mormon-hater and a founding member of a “correspondence committee” formed the previous year to rid Hancock County of Mormons, by force if necessary. This was the same Robert Smith who had signed a bank note guaranteeing a portion of Joseph’s ill-fated steamboat purchase, which landed them both in bankruptcy court.
Not surprisingly, Justice Smith started playing fast and loose with the law. He agreed to free all the defendants on bail, which he set at an extremely high $500 apiece. John Fullmer, an officer with the Nauvoo Legion who had followed the Smiths into Carthage, noted that the bail was more than twice the fine for the offense, had the defendants been convicted. “It was evident that the magistrate intended to outreach the pile of the brethren, so as to imprison those on trial for want of bail,” he noted. But Fullmer and many of the other Mormons present offered their property as surety, and all the defendants were released.
With two exceptions. Earlier in the day, two of Smith’s enemies, the Mormon apostates Augustine Spencer and Henry Norton, had filed pleas accusing Joseph and Hyrum of treason for placing Nauvoo under martial law. The captain of the Greys said it was too late in the day to argue the charges. Joseph’s lawyer, Woods, insisted that Smith needed a mittimus warrant, signed by a justice of the peace, to send his clients to jail. I just happen to have one, replied Smith, who was also a justice of the peace. He pulled the document from his pocket.
Joseph objected to “such bare-faced, illegal, and tyrannical proceedings,” to no avail.
Back at the Hamilton House, Woods and Justice Robert Smith both appealed to Governor Ford, a former Illinois supreme court justice, for guidance. To the Mormons, Ford argued that the governor had no judicial authority in Carthage or anywhere else in Illinois and could not prevent the Prophet from going to jail. To Justice Smith, he said, You have the Greys at your disposal. Enforce your order.
The judicial and extrajudicial maneuverings consumed several hours, during which Joseph Smith entertained visitors and curiosity seekers at the bustling hotel. His friend Cyrus Wheelock recalled that Smith even greeted some of the Greys inside his room:
General Smith asked them if there was anything in his appearance that indicated he was the desperate character his enemies represented him to be; and he asked them to give him their honest opinion on the subject.
The reply was, “No, sir, your appearance would indicate the very contrary, General Smith; but we cannot see what is in your heart, neither can we tell what are your intentions.”
According to Wheelock, Joseph answered:
Very true, gentlemen, you cannot see what is in my heart, and you are therefore unable to judge me or my intentions; but I can see what is in your hearts, and will tell you what I see. I can see that you thirst for blood, and nothing but my blood will satisfy you.
For the second time in just two days, the visiting journalist B. W. Richmond happened upon Joseph Smith, this time in the Hamilton House while the Prophet was waiting on his fate. Richmond had taken the pulse of the Carthage militias and was certain that Smith was facing mortal danger. In a half-hour conversation in a foyer on the hotel’s second floor, Richmond “told him plainly his danger, which seemed in no way to disturb him. He appeared straightforward in the expression of his feelings and opinions
,” Richmond reported,
and evinced much acquaintance with the world; together with a complete knowledge of the fickleness of human nature. As I parted with him he presented his hand and said, “Stranger, if I fall by the hands of assassins, tell the truth about my boys”—a name by which he called his friends.
As this conversation ended, Joseph Smith ceased to be a free man. Constable David Bettisworth, who had been trying to arrest Joseph for almost two weeks, showed up at Joseph’s room to escort him to jail. Now Smith was no longer visiting Carthage on his own recognizance, sojourning at Hamilton’s hotel. Now he and his brother were in jail for treason.
Unlike the previous charges laid against Smith, treason was not a bailable offense. Thus the two brothers had to walk the two and half blocks to the Carthage jail, through the drunken, armed mob, and amid the ranks of the jumped-up Greys. Justice Smith assigned Captain Dunn and his McDonough militia to escort Joseph and his entourage to the jail. Eight comrades, including Lorenzo Wasson, John Greene, Willard Richards, and John Taylor, formed a cordon around Joseph and accompanied him to the two-story brick jailhouse. Stephen Markham carried a large hickory cane he called a “rascal beater” and flailed it more than once, as drunken Mormon-haters penetrated the shield of guards and threw themselves through the darkness at Joseph.
Some time after 9:00 p.m., the Mormons met George Stigall, the Carthage jailer. Their stay would prove to be a most unusual one. The Mormons, and Stigall’s wife and children, were the sole occupants of the two-story, four-room building. (The Stigalls’ housekeeper was Lucy Clayton, daughter of William Clayton, one of Joseph’s personal scribes.) Jailhouse security was sporadic. Occasionally, Stigall would demand that visitors produce passes, but sometimes not. Some visitors were frisked for contraband, some not. When the group first arrived, Stigall placed them in an iron-barred, second-floor criminal cell. Within a few hours, he moved them downstairs to the more spacious, but less secure, debtors’ quarters.