Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  He would not live to see the election.

  THE FINAL UNRAVELING began with an internal schism. Though Illinois towns full of Gentiles that stood not far from Nauvoo, including Warsaw and Carthage, were growing increasingly hostile to the Saints, the trouble came from a man named William Law, whom in happier times Smith had appointed to the august post of Second Counselor, one of his highest-placed advisors. A rich Canadian, Law soon grew dismayed by the Prophet’s demand that his followers pour their savings into a pair of ambitious construction projects—including a temple in which the sacred ordinances every Saint must undertake ought to be performed.

  The final breach came, however, when Smith decided to take Law’s wife, Jane, as one of his own plural wives. Jane was not interested, even after Smith allegedly spent two months trying to woo her. Fed up, Law threatened to expose the “debauchery” of the Mormon church to the whole world. In return, on April 20, 1844, Smith excommunicated both William and Jane.

  Rather than leave Nauvoo, as most of the Saints whom Joseph expelled from the church did, the Laws lingered on, joining ranks with a number of other prominent but disaffected Mormons. It was not only polygamy that disturbed these Saints, but Smith’s despotic absolutism, as if he had conjoined the role of Prophet to that of a king. Meeting in secret, these schismatics decided to buy a printing press to publish their own newspaper.

  The first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor appeared on June 7, 1844. The most damning of the paper’s assertions was contained in three affidavits signed by William and Jane Law and another man, each swearing that he or she had seen the written revelation about polygamy. (It will be remembered that Smith committed that revelation to print in 1843 only to silence Emma’s objections to the practice. Despite the growing multitude of “plural” or “celestial” wives Smith had taken by early 1844, the revelation and the practice remained a secret shared only by the hierarchy.)

  As Brodie dramatizes the events of June 7, “When the prophet read the Expositor through, he knew that he was facing the gravest crisis of his life. The paper had put him on trial before his whole people.”

  The retaliation Smith wreaked on the upstart newspaper, however, bespeaks a leader at once so grandiose and so paranoid that he seems to have been starting to lose control. He called a meeting of the city council, then steered it toward his preordained verdict: the Expositor was libelous and must be destroyed. Not simply the copies of the June 7 issue: the printing press itself.

  On June 10, with Smith himself at the head, a legion of Nauvoo citizens marched to the offices of the offending newspaper. Its publishers refused to surrender the key. Harold Schindler, Porter Rockwell’s biographer, describes what happened next:

  At a signal from the prophet, Rockwell kicked the door from its hinges and the posse entered. Seven men pulled the press into the street and smashed its bed beyond repair. The type was pied and battered, the chases were dumped on the remains of the press, and the entire pile of metal was soaked in coal oil and set aflame.

  In addition, the “posse” seized and burned every copy of the June 7 edition it could find.

  This violent episode did not take place in a vacuum. The citizens of nearby Warsaw and Carthage were well aware of the Expositor’s destruction. For them, it was the last straw. They held meetings, drafted resolutions calling for the citizens of Hancock County to “put an immediate stop to the career of the mad prophet,” and sent a deputation to Springfield to petition Governor Thomas Ford to intercede. The Warsaw Signal editorialized for a more militant and immediate response: “War and extermination is inevitable! CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!!…We have no time for comments; every man will make his own. LET it be made with POWDER AND BALLS!!!”

  Governor Ford, whose role in trying to defuse this explosive clash of frontier cultures seems to have been admirably fair-minded, rode at once to Carthage, only fifteen miles southeast of Nauvoo. Prepared to send the militia to the Mormon stronghold to demand the surrender of the press-smashers, he was alarmed to find that very militia on the verge of turning into a lynch mob. Instead, he wrote Smith a letter asking him to turn himself in. He did not mince words: if Smith refused, Ford warned, “I have great fears that your city will be destroyed, and your people many of them exterminated.”

  Smith made at least a token offer of surrender, under the condition that the Nauvoo legion ride with him to Carthage as an armed guard. Ford declined, apprehensive lest the confrontation of Mormons and Gentiles unleash all-out bloodshed. Instead, Smith prepared to flee once more.

  The details of the Prophet’s last two weeks alive are intimately documented by the friends and colleagues who were with him during that calamitous time. Their written accounts were later published in the compendious History of the Church, edited by B. H. Roberts. Vivid though these testimonies are, they give only the Mormon side of the story, and like so many other LDS narratives, they are encrusted with myth and legend.

  In any event, we know that Porter Rockwell rowed Smith, his brother Hyrum, and one of the Twelve Apostles, Willard Richards, across the Mississippi River into Iowa Territory, starting at midnight on June 23. Smith is supposed to have announced to Rockwell and other close confidants that his plan was to abandon Nauvoo and “strike out for the Rocky Mountains.” (Was this the germ of the Saints’ later exodus to Utah? Or had Smith long toyed with the idea of such a removal beyond the reach of the United States government?) The skiff in which the four men rode was so leaky, the river so swollen with rainwater, that it took all the rest of the night to reach the far shore.

  Smith was in tears as he had parted from Emma, but they may have been tears of guilt as well as sorrow. He knew that he was turning his back on his people. And Iowa was no safe refuge: its territorial governor (Iowa would not be made a state until two years later) had in fact let it be known that he might well comply with the original Missouri extradition order. The Rocky Mountains were far away, and Smith had escaped with little more than the clothes on his back.

  Conscience, the hard logistics of the Iowa wilderness, a letter of appeal from Emma delivered by a messenger, and his ever-latent fatalism conspired to change the Prophet’s mind. Only a day and a half after he had fled, Smith recrossed the Mississippi and surrendered to Governor Ford’s forces. It was not, however, an easy decision. The retrospective account recorded in the History of the Church has an ambivalent Prophet pleading, there in the woods on the west bank of the river, for advice from Rockwell and from Hyrum. Rockwell demurred, but Hyrum spoke out: “Let us go back and give ourselves up, and hear the thing out.”

  Smith was silent for a long time before answering, “If you go back I will go with you, but we shall be butchered.”

  “No, no,” insisted Hyrum, “let us go back and put our trust in God, and we shall not be harmed. The Lord is in it.”

  On June 24, with the eleven other men charged with destroying the press, Smith started toward Carthage under the protection of a militia recruited not from Hancock County, but from the presumably less rabid McDonough County, adjoining Hancock on the east. To this escort (again, according to the Mormon record), Smith uttered a Christ-like premonitory lamentation:

  I am going like a lamb to the slaughter, but I am calm as a summer’s morning. 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!”

  The journey was uneventful, but as the entourage entered Carthage shortly before midnight, rabble-rousers shouted out, “Goddamn you, old Joe, we’ve got you now”; and, “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!”

  The story of Joseph’s last three days on earth has been so mythologized that by now it is almost impossible to disentangle truth from Mormon fiction. The most careful recent study of what took place in Carthage from June 25 t
o June 27, 1844, appears in the pages of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. According to Krakauer, ten of the arrested men posted bail and were set free, while Smith and Hyrum, charged with treason on top of the destruction of the press, were locked inside the Carthage jail.

  This building, which still stands today (it was restored by the LDS church in 1938), was a two-story, six-room edifice built of locally quarried red limestone. The jailer, his wife, and seven children occupied four of the rooms; the other two were holding cells. Joseph and Hyrum were initially lodged in a downstairs room normally reserved for debtors. In Krakauer’s assessment, “The jailer, George Stigall, was not Mormon, but he was a decent man, and he worried that his downstairs cell, with its large, ground-level windows, might provide insufficient protection from the enraged men outside who wished to harm his prisoners.” So Stigall gave Joseph and Hyrum his own upstairs bedroom. He also allowed a stream of Mormon friends to visit the brothers, some of whom managed to smuggle a pair of lightweight pistols into the makeshift cell.

  At this point, Governor Ford made a fatal miscalculation. He had ordered the hot-tempered Warsaw Dragoons (a volunteer militia) to leave Carthage. They had obeyed, but proceeded only a short way beyond the town limits. There, on the afternoon of June 27, 125 of these militiamen rubbed gunpowder on their faces in a token effort at disguise and marched back into Carthage. Guarding the jail was an inadequate force of only seven Carthage Greys.

  According to Krakauer, even these guards were in cahoots with the attackers. They fired their muskets, loaded beforehand with blanks, at the attacking mob, in a charade of defending the prisoners.

  At the moment, Apostles Willard Richards and John Taylor were visiting Hyrum and Joseph. The Dragoons stormed through the front door and up the stairs, their guns blazing. Taylor and Richards, armed only with walking sticks, stood on either side of the doorway, ready to lash out at the invaders, while Hyrum and Joseph lifted their puny pistols. The Dragoons shot straight through the door. One bullet struck Hyrum in the neck, killing him instantly.

  In a matter of minutes, the mob forced the door open. Taylor—who would later play a crucial role in the handcart emigration of 1856—tried to jump out the window, but bullets struck him in the leg and chest and felled him. He started to crawl under a bed, but two more balls struck him in the pelvis and the forearm. Richards had the luck to be standing on the hinge side of the doorway, so that throughout the attack, he went unnoticed, hidden behind the flung-open door. He escaped the slaughter with only a grazed throat and earlobe.

  Like Taylor, Joseph Smith attempted to jump out the window, but as he hovered above the sill, he was struck from behind by three bullets. As he fell out the window, he cried out his last words: “Oh Lord, my God!” He fell twenty feet to the yard, where he lay unmoving on his left side. At once he was shot several times by Dragoons outside the building.

  Taylor’s life had been spared by a freak happenstance: the bullet that struck him in the chest hit a watch he was carrying in his pocket. The watch stopped, he later noted, at precisely sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds after five o’clock on June 27. Writes Krakauer, “Mormons the world over have committed this time and date to memory, marking the death of their great and beloved prophet. Joseph Smith was thirty-eight years old.”

  THE MEN WHO had murdered Joseph and Hyrum Smith were speedily tried and acquitted. John Hay, the future secretary of state, sardonically commented that it took three days to find twelve men ignorant enough to form a jury.

  Brigham Young’s biographer Stanley Hirshson makes the intriguing point that Joseph Smith was the first, and until Malcolm X’s murder in 1965, the only American religious leader to be assassinated. From the distance of more than 160 years after the Carthage debacle, one might well wonder what it was about the Mormons that so inflamed the hatred of their neighbors—not only in Illinois, but in Missouri, Ohio, and New York state before that. Fawn Brodie ponders this question with her usual perspicacity. She concludes that it was not Mormon doctrine (not even polygamy) that aroused that hatred. It was instead, in her view, the “self-righteousness” of the Saints, their “unwillingness to mingle with the world,” combined, in Nauvoo, with the wild expansion of their numbers, that actually frightened the settlers in towns such as Warsaw and Carthage. Further fueling the Gentile antagonism was the influx, starting in 1840, of thousands of British converts. Poor farmers and factory workers those emigrants may have been, but in American eyes, they were still monarchists. In 1844, only sixty-one years had passed since the Revolution that had won our freedom from the despot George III, only thirty-two years since the War of 1812. Of the Mormons’ neighbors in western Illinois, Brodie writes, “To them the Nauvoo theocracy was a malignant tyranny that was spreading as swiftly and dangerously as a Mississippi flood and that might eventually engulf the very government of the United States.”

  At the time of the Prophet’s martyrdom, most of the Apostles were scattered about the Eastern states. Brigham Young, who had risen to the rank of president of the Twelve, was in Massachusetts. Ironically, on July 1, four days after Smith’s death, he and two other Mormon elders spoke at the Boston Melodeon, vigorously advancing the Prophet’s candidacy for president of the United States. The speakers were drowned out by the jeers of their audience. Young did not learn of the murder in Carthage for another fifteen days. When he did, he immediately set out to return to Illinois, but it would not be until August 6 that he arrived in Nauvoo.

  Sidney Rigdon was in Pittsburgh when he got the news. He, too, rushed at once to Nauvoo, arriving there three days before Young. Although Rigdon had had serious differences with Smith during the two years before the Prophet’s death, he was still perhaps the logical candidate to succeed him. Rigdon had been with the church almost since the beginning; it was he who had inspired the move to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831.

  Meanwhile, Nauvoo was in chaos. Had the anti-Mormon forces around Warsaw and Carthage decided to attack, they might have wiped out the community, sending the faithful fleeing into the wilderness. But with the brutal murders of Smith and Hyrum, their vigilante zeal had been temporarily expended.

  Pundits all over America predicted the collapse of the Mormon theocracy. On July 8, the New York Herald editorialized, “The death of the modern Mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism. They cannot get another Joe Smith. The holy city must tumble into ruins, and the ‘latter day saints’ have indeed come to the latter day.”

  It was not until August 8 that the whole of Nauvoo assembled in a grove overlooking the Mississippi River to decide the future leadership of the beleaguered church. One of the most cherished of Mormon myths would attach itself to this gathering. According to this tradition, after other pretenders to the vacant throne of the Prophet had advanced their candidacies, Rigdon addressed the throng as the last speaker. By now he was fifty-one years old, decidedly portly, with an unimpressive bearing. But his smooth and tempered oration seemed to win the day, and the crowd was on the verge of conferring the leadership on Rigdon by unanimous acclamation.

  But then, according to the myth, a cry rang out. A steamboat was approaching on the Mississippi River, with Brigham Young aboard. There would be one last speaker.

  One historian calls Young’s oration that August day the most famous speech in Mormon history. The mythologizing tradition has transformed it into a miracle. As Orson Hyde, a future Apostle, would recall it decades later:

  Well, he spoke, and his words went through me like electricity. “Am I mistaken,” said I, “or is it really the voice of Joseph Smith?” This is my testimony; it was not only the voice of Joseph, but there were the features, the gestures and even the stature of Joseph before us in the person of Brigham…. Every one in the congregation…felt it. They knew it. They realized it…. When President Young began to speak, one of them said, “It is the voice of Joseph! It is Joseph Smith!”

  (No mean feat, this transformation, for Young was not only four or five inches shorter than the handsome patriarch w
ith the piercing gaze, but already, at forty-three, he had a jowly face, a double chin, and a thickset, stocky build.)

  We know that there was no last-minute arrival by steamboat: by the time the open-air meeting was held, Young had been in Nauvoo for two days. Whether or not the man was functionally illiterate, we have many a later testimony to his eloquence as a preacher and orator. On August 8, however, it may not have been eloquence so much as strategy that won the day. (Indeed, a bishop who listened to the speech would later complain about Young’s “long and loud harangue…. For the life of me I could not see any point in the course of his remarks.”)

  Desperate to be anointed, Rigdon had shamelessly announced that on the day of Smith’s death, the Prophet had visited him in a vision and entrusted him with governing the church in a proper manner. Young, who did in fact speak last, took a clever tack. He began by scolding the congregation for convening a meeting to decide Smith’s successor, rather than mourning his death. He feigned disinterest: “I do not care who leads this church…. You cannot fill the office of a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator: God must do this. You are like children without a father.”

  Not once did Young advance himself as a candidate. Instead, he subtly brought the congregation around to a black-and-white choice. It was a question, as he framed it, of sustaining the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, or of voting for Rigdon. Next he called for a show of hands: how many would vote to sustain the Twelve? Nearly every hand shot up. How many would not? Only a few dared raise their arms. Rigdon was trounced before his candidacy could even come to a vote. As biographer Morris Werner puts it, “The meeting then adjourned until the Church conference of the following October, and the church was in the hands of the Twelve, who were in the hands of Brigham Young.”

  Like Stalin deposing Trotsky, the supremely Machiavellian Brigham Young at once set about discrediting his rival. On September 8, he managed to bring Rigdon to trial on charges ranging from illegally ordaining priests to promulgating false revelations. Whether or not the gossip was true, Young maintained that he had gotten wind of a plot in which Rigdon was secretly organizing a schism, with plans to lead the Saints to his own reformed LDS church near Pittsburgh. The upshot was that Rigdon was not only excommunicated by the Twelve, but sent packing as the congregation unanimously “delivered [him] over to the buffetings of Satan.”