American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  The Mormons couldn’t believe their ears. The governor of Illinois, commander in chief of the state’s many militias, responsible for protecting his citizens, was blaming them, and them alone, for the civil war that had erupted in Hancock County. “A severe atonement must be made,” for the Saints’ lawless behavior in the Expositor affair, Ford said, blissfully unaware that blood atonement was taking place just eighteen miles away at the jailhouse. He seemed unable to repress his inner schoolmarm: “I hope you will not make any more trouble, but be a law-abiding people, for if I have to come again it will be worse for you.”

  At 5:30 p.m., Ford and his entourage toured the unfinished Nauvoo Temple and made caustic remarks about the twelve, life-size, carved wooden oxen that supported the massive laver, or baptismal font. At sixteen feet long and four feet deep, the immense carved pine basin was the showpiece of the Temple, now in its third year of construction. Joseph once described the oxen, painstakingly carved by “Elder Elijah Fordham, from the city of New York,” as “copied after the most beautiful five-year old steer that could be found in the country . . . the horns were formed after the most perfect horn that could be procured.”

  The twenty-seven-year-old Thomas Bullock, a future church historian, saw Ford’s men snap the horns off the oxen and pocket them for souvenirs. Bullock later wrote that Ford seemed to know that the Smith brothers had already been murdered and was in a hurry to leave Nauvoo. Ford’s account differs. As he was riding back to Carthage, Ford encountered two Greys galloping furiously from Carthage to alert him about the assassination. Ford absorbed the news and ordered the riders to return home “to prevent any sudden explosion of Mormon excitement.”

  Ford probably had no foreknowledge of the killings, because he later complained about their timing. “I could not believe, that any person would attack the jail, whilst we were in Nauvoo, and thereby expose my life . . . to the sudden vengeance of the Mormons,” he wrote in his History of Illinois.

  In other words, the worst possible consequence of the jailhouse lynching was that he, Thomas Ford, might have been exposed to danger.

  IN CARTHAGE, THE FIRST PERSON TO MINISTER TO THE MORMONS was Dr. Thomas Barnes, the town coroner. Like almost every Gentile in the area, Barnes disliked Mormons. He participated in anti-Mormon rallies and claimed that Governor Ford was a thinly disguised Mormon sympathizer. Barnes also captained a shadowy company of rangers who patrolled the prairies “to range as spies and ride as expresses [message carriers],” he later revealed. But in the early evening of June 27, Barnes honored his Hippocratic oath. He quickly determined that Joseph Smith, whose bullet-riddled body he found dumped in the entrance hall of the jail, was dead. Hyrum Smith’s bloody carcass lay sprawled against the far wall of the second-floor room where the Mormons had tried to defend themselves. Willard Richards was alive and virtually unscathed. The hulking, three-hundred-pound “doctor”—Richards had trained as an herbalist—escorted Barnes to where John Taylor lay in agony, suffering from four bullet wounds. Taylor objected to being treated by Barnes. “I don’t know you!” he shouted, “Who am I among? I am surrounded by assassins and murderers; witness your deeds!”

  Barnes and Richards swore that they meant to help. When Taylor’s resistance waned, the doctor pulled out a penknife and started cutting away the flesh between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. Barnes then brandished a carpenter’s compass, using the metal point to pry into the hand to find one of the four musket balls lodged in Taylor’s body. “After sawing for some time with a dull penknife, and prying and pulling with the compasses,” Taylor reported, “he ultimately succeeded in extracting the ball.”

  Taylor had “nerves like the devil” to withstand his impromptu surgery, Barnes later said. In a letter to his daughter many years after the fact, he complained that he never collected a fee for his services.

  Richards arranged to have Joseph and Hyrum’s bodies moved to the ground floor of the Hamilton hotel. A local tailor named John Ma-comber washed Joseph’s body. His lawyer, James Woods, inventoried the Prophet’s effects. Joseph had been carrying $135.50 worth of gold and silver and wearing a gold ring. In Joseph’s undisturbed pockets, Woods found a pen and pencil case, a penknife and case, tweezers, and two IOUs, one for $50 from John Greene, and one from Heber Kimball.

  After kicking up a fuss, Taylor agreed to be moved to the hotel, too. Artois Hamilton was less than eager to shelter the Mormons. Like everyone, he was thinking of leaving town to avoid the inevitable Mormon counterattack on Carthage. But Richards argued that it might behoove him to pose as a friend of the Saints, especially if retribution came down on the county seat.

  He showed Hamilton the note he was about to send back to Nauvoo, begging the Saints to refrain from revenge:

  CARTHAGE JAIL, 8O’CLOCK 5 MIN. P.M., JUNE 27TH, 1844

  Joseph and Hyrum are dead. Taylor wounded, not very badly. I am well. Our guard was forced, as we believe, by a band of Missourians from 100 to 200. The job was done in an instant, and the party fled towards Nauvoo instantly. This is as I believe it. The citizens here are afraid of the “Mormons” attacking them; I promise them no.

  WILLARD RICHARDS

  The man carrying Richards’s note was intercepted on the road to Nauvoo and turned back. A second messenger suffered the same fate. In the early hours of Friday, June 28, Porter Rockwell galloped through the streets of Nauvoo screaming the terrifying news at the top of his lungs, waking any and all who could hear him: “Joseph is killed! Goddamn them! They have killed him!”

  * Many fabulous details attending Joseph’s death were introduced into evidence at his assassins’ trial. See Chapter 12.

  11

  JOSEPH’S HOMECOMING

  Oh! Illinois! thy soil has drank the blood

  Of Prophets, martyr’d for the truth of God.

  Once lov’d America! what can atone

  For the pure blood of innocence, thou’st sown?

  —Lines on the Assassination . . . of Generals Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith, by Eliza R. Snow, Times and Seasons

  AT DAWN ON JUNE 28, A FEW VISITORS ARRIVED IN CARTHAGE from Nauvoo to reclaim the corpses of the Mormon leaders. Joseph and Hyrum’s brother Samuel, who farmed in nearby Plymouth, came to the Hamilton hotel early on Friday morning. So did John Taylor’s wife, Leonora, accompanied by Dr. Samuel Bennett from Nauvoo. Carthage, which was teeming with trigger-happy militia only one day earlier, was now a ghost town. Fearing retaliation from the Mormons, the men “just frankly ran away,” according to Eudocia Baldwin, whose brothers were with the Greys. Newspaper editor George Davis noted sardonically that one of the fearsome militias “proceeded with all convenient haste for their homes in Schuyler County, conceding that distance lent enchantment to the view.” Only military commander Minor Deming and a handful of men were available to help the Mormons prepare the Smiths’ bodies to be taken back to Nauvoo.

  For the second time in twelve hours, Taylor submitted to a gruesome operation, au naturel. Dr. Bennett noticed that Taylor’s thigh had swollen up and determined that the musket ball buried there had to come out.

  “Will you be tied during the operation, Mr. Taylor?” Bennett inquired.

  “Oh, no, I shall endure the cutting all right,” Taylor answered.

  And he did.

  “So great was the pain I endured that the cutting was rather a relief than otherwise,” Taylor later wrote. The bullet-riddled Taylor would go on to live a long, healthy, and productive life.

  While Bennett carved up his patient, and Samuel Smith laid his brothers in lidless oak coffins provided by Hamilton, Leonora Taylor found an empty room on the hotel’s ground floor to pray. On her knees, she was approached by the elderly Mrs. Bedell, a stalwart in the local Methodist church. “There’s a good lady,” Bedell purred to the young Mormon whose husband had suffered four bullet wounds for his beliefs. “Pray for God to forgive your sins, pray that you may be converted, and the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  By 8:00 a.m., the arrang
ements in Carthage were complete. John Taylor was to remain a guest of Artois Hamilton, and of the local citizenry. Taylor later recalled seeing some of the same men that had mobbed the jail pop into his hotel room to offer condolences or to chat. One too-candid visitor told Taylor that “I ought to be killed, but it was too damned cowardly to shoot a wounded man. Thus by the chivalry of murderers I was prevented from being a second time mutilated or killed.”

  Taylor, who was attended by his wife, mother, and several Mormon friends, kept two loaded pistols on his bedside table. His hosts viewed him as a hostage to fortune and feared that his removal—he ultimately stayed four days—“would be the signal for rising of the Mormons.”

  Hotelkeeper Hamilton agreed to furnish two wagons to transport Joseph and Hyrum’s coffins back to Nauvoo. The day threatened to be hot. An Indian blanket covered one of the coffins, and straw and prairie brush was heaped over the second, to prevent decomposition and to ward off flies. Willard Richards rode ahead of the wagons and Samuel Smith drove one of the teams. Eight hours later, the cortege, now accompanied by a Legionnaire riding at each of the wagon’s wheels, reached the outskirts of Nauvoo, about one mile east of the still-unfinished Temple. Soon a brass band joined the procession, playing funeral dirges.

  As the wagons approached Joseph’s mansion in the town center, huge crowds lined the streets. As many as 8,000 people may have witnessed Joseph and Hyrum’s mournful homecoming. “The inhabitants were all out in the streets, on the housetops and everywhere to see if they could get just a glimpse of him,” fifteen-year-old Mary Ann Rich reported. “As they drove around to the Mansion, the people were almost frantic to get one little glimpse of him, but they were driven back by the marshal.” Recent immigrants from Ireland and Wales moaned in unison, filling the air with a funereal keening rarely heard along the banks of the Mississippi. “The weeping was communicated to the crowd, and spread along the vast waves of humanity extending from the Temple to the residence of the Prophet,” journalist B. W. Richmond reported. “The groans and sobs and shrieks grew deeper and louder till the sound resembled the roar of a mighty tempest, or the slow, deep, roar of the distant tornado.”

  Porter Rockwell’s alarum had woken the Smiths’ families the night before. In the Nauvoo Mansion, Joseph’s four children had been crying and screaming for hours. In a downstairs room, Richmond happened upon Joseph’s mother, the sixty-eight-year-old Lucy Mack Smith, stone-faced and tearless, staring out a window. When Sarah Kimball approached the Smith family matriarch, “she extended her trembling hand towards me which I clasped in silence,” Kimball recalled,

  biting her lips she motioned me to be seated by her side. I think for three minutes the silence was only broken by smothered sobs from various parts of the room during which time the pressure of her trembling hand & the heaving of her swollen bosom spoke as it were volumes to my heart. . . .

  Finally, Joseph and Hyrum’s mother erupted. “How could they kill my boys?” Lucy burst out. “How could they kill them when they were so precious! I am sure they would not harm anybody in the world. There was poor Hyrum—what could they kill him for? He was always mild.”

  Six months later, Lucy Smith began work on a lengthy memoir about her son Joseph Jr. She remembered the evening of June 28, “when I entered the room, and saw my murdered sons extended both at once before my eyes,

  and heard the sobs and groans of my family, and the cries of “Father! Husband! Brothers!” from the lips of their wives, children, brother and sisters. It was too much. I sank back, crying to the Lord, in the agony of my soul, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken this family!”

  The two coffins were borne into the mansion’s dining room, and the residence’s doors were locked. From the front stoop, Willard Richards delivered a short eulogy and begged the Saints to remain peaceful. The official church history records that “the people with one united voice resolved to trust to the law for a remedy of such a high-handed assassination, and when that failed, to call upon God to avenge them of their wrongs.” Richards invited the faithful to return the following morning for a public viewing of their slain leaders.

  In the locked dining room, Nauvoo’s coroner, Dimick Huntington, his father, and stake president William Marks prepared the bodies to be shown. The three men washed the corpses thoroughly and filled the open wounds with cotton soaked in camphor. The official inventory of Joseph’s wounds was particularly grisly: He had been “shot in the right breast, under the heart, in the lower part of his bowels and the right side, and on the back part of the right hip.” In addition, there was an exit wound at his right shoulder blade.

  The cosmetic work completed, the Huntingtons dressed the bodies in plain trousers, linen shirts, clean shorts, white neckerchiefs, and white cotton socks. The two coffins lay on a table pushed up against the dining room’s western windows, looking out over the Mississippi River.

  Dimick Huntington then invited the families to enter the room.

  Emma Smith, pregnant for the seventh time, staggered into the dining room, supported by two friends. The moment she saw Hyrum’s body, she fainted. Her friends forced a glass of water down her throat, but she fainted again and had to leave the room. Emma entered the dining room six times, each time unable to traverse the short stretch of floor to where her dead husband lay. Eventually, she gave up and sat down outside.

  Hyrum’s widow, Mary Fielding Smith, then entered the room with her four children. “She trembled at every step,” Richmond reported,

  and nearly fell, but reached her husband’s body, kneeling down by him, clasped her arms around his head, turned his pale face upon her heaving bosom, and then a gushing, plaintive wail burst forth from her lips: “Oh! Hyrum, Hyrum! Have they shot you, my dear Hyrum—are you dead, my dear Hyrum!”

  Her grief seemed to consume her, and she lost all power of utterance. Her two daughters and two young children clung, some around her neck and some to her body, falling prostrate upon the corpse, and shrieking in the wildness of their wordless grief.

  Aided now by Dimick Huntington, Emma walked into the dining room again. She placed her hand on Hyrum’s cold brow and said, “Now I can see him; I am strong now.” She knelt down next to Joseph’s coffin and clasped her hands around his face. Groaning, sighing, and sobbing, she cried out, “Joseph, Joseph, are you dead? Have the assassins shot you?”

  Later in life, Joseph’s oldest son Joseph III recalled that “no other woman bowed beside the bodies of these brothers . . . as wives to mourn and exhibit their grief . . . save my mother at my father’s side and Aunt Mary at the side of my uncle Hyrum.” But the eleven-year-old boy who devoted his adult life to proving that his father had never practiced polygamy, apparently failed to see Lucinda Morgan Harris standing at the head of Joseph’s coffin. Three years older than Emma, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Harris was also sobbing and grief-stricken. Harris had been sealed to Joseph a few years before, while she was wed to George Harris, who chaired the City Council session that ordered the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor. Lucinda had lost two husbands to mob violence. She had previously married the notorious anti-Masonic agitator William Morgan, whose body was found in Lake Ontario shortly after he published a lurid exposé of the ancient fraternal order. Lucinda Harris ended her life as a nun in the Catholic nursing order, the Sisters of Charity.

  The next day found Nauvoo in mourning. Stores were closed and “every business forgotten,” according to Dan Jones. On the clear, hot and sunny Saturday, starting at 8:00 a.m., 10,000 Saints found their ways to the mansion and filed past the open coffins. White cambric lined the open boxes, which were covered with black velvet, fastened by brass nails. A square of glass, hinged at the head of each coffin, allowed mourners to see the faces of Joseph and Hyrum.

  The scene was not for the faint of heart. “Joseph looks very natural except being pale through loss of blood,” William Clayton wrote in his diary. “Hyrum does not look so natural.” Richmond reported that by noon, Hyrum’s body had swollen so much
that he couldn’t be recognized, “the neck and face forming one bloated mass,” and

  blood continued to pour out of his wounds, which had been filled with cotton; the muscles relaxed and the . . . fluid trickled down on the floor and formed in puddles across the room.

  Dan Jones, too, remembered seeing “the blood of the two godly martyrs mingling in one pool in the middle of the floor.” Many of the mourners left the room with the Smiths’ blood sticking to the soles of their shoes and boots.

  To allay the stink of death, Huntington set a mixture of tar, vinegar, and sugar to boil on the mansion stove. It wasn’t particularly effective. The wounds were suppurating, and the bodies rotting in the summer heat.

  The dining room resounded with weeping and moaning. Joseph was the Saints’ living, breathing, wrestling, drinking, sermonizing, truth-revealing champion. No one in Nauvoo didn’t know him. Almost every resident had bought something—a pinch of tobacco, a plot of land—at his redbrick store. Joseph had greeted thousands of Saints at the riverside landing slips, many of the believers at the end of harrowing trans-Atlantic or transcontinental journeys. Every Mormon man, woman, and child had stood or sat on a bench or tree stump for hours at a time in the grove, listening to Joseph’s speeches and sermons. Every Nauvoo resident had uprooted himself or herself, and their families, either because of Joseph Smith’s preaching or because they had read the sacred Book of Mormon he composed as a young man. As he instructed, they gathered to Zion to worship in the city of their Prophet. And now, inexplicably, in the prime of his vigorous life, at thirty-nine years old, he was dead.

  Commingled with feelings of sadness and despair was an understandable lust for vengeance. When Porter Rockwell burst into William Clayton’s home in the early hours of June 28 to report the murders, Clayton quickly scribbled out a prayer of vengeance “upon the murderers of thy servants that they may be rid from off the earth.” At virtually the same moment, Wilford Woodruff, a future church president, uttered a prayer calling down vengeance on “the American gentile nation, upon all the heads of the Nation and the State that have aided, abetted, or perpetrated the horrid deed.”