1844

 

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“Let it be your sacred duty to make home happy for your children.” 

Godey’s Lady’s Book, advice for women

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Godey’s Lady’s Book announces a campaign for “The Rights of Children,” and takes a stand against corporal punishment. “Nothing can be more absurd in theory and vile in practice than the attempt in common parlance ‘to break the temper’ and ‘to crush the will’…, while of all debasing, degrading influences the worst is bodily fear.” 

Seven years later, Hale printed a report by Lewis Gaylord Clark, describing schoolroom conditions. In one case, Clark wrote, “His [the schoolmaster’s] floggings were almost incessant.” One boy had his fingers feruled on the nails, “a refinement of cruelty which caused the little fellow’s nails to turn black and soon come off.” Hale argued that women should be placed in charge of primary schools, if for no other reason than that their “native feminine patience and understanding of children” would naturally incline them not to beat on their pupils. 

A teacher today might appreciate her idea of what kind of job was involved. An educator should have “the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the ‘loving spirit’ of the beloved disciple, and the energy of Paul.” 

Hale also wrote, “fathers and mothers, I beseech you, let it be your sacred duty to make home happy for your children.” 

She added, “There is no influence so powerful as that of the mother, but next in rank and efficacy is that of schoolmaster.” (113/230-231)

 

* 

“A draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.” 

June 27: The New Yorker has an excellent book review by Casey Cep, on Benjamin E. Park’s Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. It was in 1844 that the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith, announced that he would run for President of the United States, in part because none of the major political parties would promise to protect his flock. 

His “campaign” would be cut short on June 27, when a mob stormed the Carthage, Illinois jail where he was being held, and murdered him.

Joseph Smith.

 

I’ll quote Ms. Cep, for the most part. Park, she explains, traces Smith from his earliest forays into religion. He was only 21, in 1827, during the Second Great Awakening, when he dug up the golden tablets, from which the Book of Mormon comes. The angel Moroni, Smith claimed, had appeared to him several times before, finally telling him to go to the Hill Cumorah and dig for the plates. Smith had married Emma Hale by then, and she helped transcribe the words as her husband translated, from a language he called “reformed Egyptian.” 

Cep writes: 

Smith finished the transcription by 1830 and found a printer who agreed to run off five thousand copies. The result, the Book of Mormon, begins as the record of a Jewish family in Jerusalem, who, around 600 B.C., build a boat and sail to the Americas – where, six centuries later, the risen Christ preaches to their descendants. In an age when people were hungry for evidence of God’s continued involvement in the world, and in a country anxious to assert itself on the global stage, Smith’s scriptures offered appealing assurances: not only was the United States a holy land where Jesus himself had walked but God was still speaking to the men and women who lived there.

 

At first, Smith gathered a small circle of followers, usually men and women of modest means. His claims to have discovered the new word of Christ did not sit well with many of his neighbors. Mormons occasionally spoke in tongues, and they insisted that “other churches had fallen away from Christ’s true gospel.” 

On one occasion Smith was arrested as a “disorderly person.” Mormons suffered more. “Anti-Mormon mobs harassed known believers and attacked their houses; they even tarred and feathered Smith one night in 1832.” 

Cep notes the Mormon’s movements, west to Kirtland, Ohio, then, amid allegations of banking fraud, west again to Independence, Missouri, and west a third time, to Far West, Missouri. 

A growing Mormon population began to assert its voting power. Serious bloodshed soon resulted: 

In 1838, having already been evicted from one Missouri county, they went to vote in the county seat of another, where a mob attempted to stop them. There were allegations of violence in what came to be known as the Gallatin County Election Day Battle, and subsequent vigilantism left more than twenty people dead. During this period, the Missouri governor, Lilburn Boggs, declared in an executive order that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.” Three days later, seventeen Mormons were murdered by soldiers near Shoal Creek, in Caldwell County.

 

Cep notes that the next day, Smith was arrested. He spent four months in prison. Thousands of Mormons retreated to Illinois, where they were promised some protection by the governor. Smith himself escaped and fled Missouri. He and other church leaders headed for Washington D.C. with hundreds of petitions asking compensation for lost property and damages. Smith asked for $100,000. “What can I do?” President Van Buren responded. “I can do nothing for you.” 

Mormon leaders returned to Illinois, bought the town of Commerce, and renamed it Nauvoo, which Smith believed was Hebrew for “beautiful city.” Cep does an excellent job of summarizing Park’s book and highlighting key Mormon ideas. “The city of Nauvoo,” she writes, “took shape in an age when Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that every intellectual had ‘a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.’” 

Smith was doing more than building castles in the sky. His flock grew to 20,000. Nauvoo was “more populous than Chicago.” 

Cep also notes that when Gov. Boggs was shot, in 1842, “rumors circulated that Smith had placed a bounty on his head. Missouri forced Illinois into an extradition arrangement for the Mormon leader, but the municipal courts in Nauvoo thwarted it, in a scandalous act of disregard for the rule of law.” 

Unlike the Windy City, Cep explains, 

Nauvoo, operating under a permissive charter from the state of Illinois, developed a distinctly theocratic character: its independent judiciary could deny the validity of arrest warrants issued by neighboring authorities in order to shield Church members from prosecution, and its standing militia of several hundred armed men, known as the Nauvoo Legion, was empowered to protect citizens from any threat. Smith was made a Lieutenant General, a title previously held in the United States only by George Washington, and organized parades to show off the legion’s strength.

 

The Latter Day Saints also built an enormous tabernacle, twice as high as the White House; but serious troubles lay ahead. 

The story of polygamy in the church is well known, but details are debated. Here, Cep can tell the story, as she says Park has related it: 

Smith had continued to receive revelations about how the faithful were meant to serve God, so this new sanctuary housed new religious rituals. One of them called for posthumous baptism, through which Mormons could baptize a living person as a proxy for someone already deceased. Another – which would divide the Church, attract the permanent suspicion of the state, and forever taint the public perception of the faith – called for plural marriage.

 

The origins of this rite are not well known. As Park observes in Kingdom of Nauvoo, it is striking that a faith so devoted to record-keeping did not document the doctrine of polygamy. “As committed as he was to the ritual’s significance,” Park writes, of Smith, “he was similarly committed to its secrecy, knowing that its exposure would lead to Nauvoo’s downfall.” Smith publicly denied knowledge of polygamous marriages, and the few records of those unions which do exist refer to them as “sealings” – or – even more cryptically –  simply connect the names of the united with “was,” an abbreviation for “wed and sealed.” One of the only documents Smith ever recorded which attests to the practice is a blessing he wrote for the family of one of his teen-age wives, assuring her and her relatives of their salvation. Another of Smith’s plural wives – whose marriage to Smith was followed, within a few weeks, by that of her sister – later explained that these marriages were “too sacred to be talked about.” Such furtiveness makes it difficult to track the development of the doctrine, much less Smith’s theological justification for it. Some historians, including Park, believe that he took his first plural wife in April 1841, though whenever it happened, he did not tell Emma, and it was some time before she learned the truth.

 

By 1844, Park writes that Smith had taken more than thirty wives, the youngest age 14, the oldest age 56. 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: I believe this number would be disputed by current members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

Cep continues: 

Originally, only Smith had multiple wives. But he gradually revealed the practice to other Mormon leaders, inviting them, selectively, to witness his plural marriages, then encouraging them to pursue their own. Not everyone approved: Smith’s brother Hyrum initially led the opposition, condemning polygamy and calling for a moral revival in Nauvoo. Hyrum was a widower, and his hostility to the practice weakened after he learned of its supposed posthumous benefits, through which he could be united in the afterlife with both his late wife and any future ones. Other Mormons remained unenthusiastic. Emma tried to marshal resistance among women through the Church’s all-female Relief Society; in response, Smith tried to stifle the organization. Emma then threatened him with divorce, at which point he promised to take no additional wives and signed his property over to her and their children, in order to secure their financial well-being in case of rival claims.

 

       If Parks is right, duplicity was involved. Cep writes: 

It would be years before any Mormon leader formally acknowledged the practice of polygamy. Instead, somewhat shockingly, the Nauvoo city council passed a law punishing adultery with six months in jail and a fine of up to a thousand dollars. (Because the city’s municipal leadership overlapped entirely with its spiritual leadership, Smith could choose to protect colleagues from prosecution under this new law.) Even more audaciously, Smith cursed “all Adulterers & fornicators” in a speech, then excommunicated two Church leaders for attempting to expose his secret marriages. The first, John C. Bennett, had been the mayor of Nauvoo; when his own polygamy became public, he accused Smith of having sanctioned it. The second, William Law, had denounced plural marriage after Smith propositioned his wife. After being banished from the faith, Law started a breakaway movement called the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

 

A review in Time (1/23/17), of A House Full of Females, includes this line by a Mormon woman, after the birth of her son in the mid-1840s: “May he be the father of many lives/But not the Husband of many Wives.” 

It would not be until 2016, that the minutes of the Council of Fifty, which governed Nauvoo, would be unsealed for historians to review. Smith first convened it in 1844, and members set to work “drafting an alternative to the United States Constitution.” Democracy was rejected as a “failed political project,” and was to be replaced, for Mormons, by a theocratic kingdom. The Council declared Joseph Smith to be “Prophet, Priest & King.” 

 

“The glory of American liberty is on the wane.” 

As part of his presidential platform, Smith called for the annexation of Texas. He also suggested that money from the sale of public lands could be used to buy the freedom of enslaved persons. 

According to Parks, Smith had sent letters to five other presidential candidates, only three of whom responded. None expressed any real interest in protecting the Mormons if they were elected. 

Smith then declared his candidacy: 

Persecution has rolled upon our heads from time to time, from portions of the United States, like peals of thunder, because of our religion. And no portion of the Government as yet has stepped forward for our relief. And in view of these things, I feel it to be my right and privilege to obtain what influence and power I can, lawfully, in the United States, for the protection of injured innocence.

 

The Time review, mentioned above, included several examples of Smith’s political positions. “No honest man can doubt for a moment but the glory of American liberty is on the wane,” he warned, “and that calamity and confusion will sooner or later destroy the peace of the people.” 

He called for prison reform: “Petition your state legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries, blessing them as they go, and saying to them, in the name of the Lord, Go thy way, and sin no more. Imprisonment for debt is a meaner practice than the savage tolerates, with all his ferocity.” 

He also called on followers to petition Congress to end slavery by 1850. “We have had Democratic presidents, Whig presidents, a pseudo-Democratic-Whig president and now it is time to have a president of the United States; and let the people of the whole Union, like the inflexible Romans, whenever they find a promise made by a candidate that is not practiced by an officer, hurl the miserable sycophant from his exaltation, as God did Nebuchadnezzar, to crop the grass of the field with a beast’s heart among the cattle.” “…I would honor the old paths of the venerated fathers of freedom.” 

Not long after he declared for office, Smith was sent to jail (here we are back to Cep’s review as our source). Trouble developed when William Law and a group of dissenters began publishing a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, accusing Smith of polygamy and calling him a threat to democracy. 

The Council of Fifty ordered the Nauvoo Legion to destroy Law’s press; and Smith declared martial law. 

 

Murder in Carthage. 

The state of Illinois responded by threatening military retaliation against Nauvoo, and by adding a new charge to all the outstanding ones against Smith: attempting to incite a riot. Smith surrendered himself at Carthage, the county seat. Two days later, a mob of more than two hundred men stormed the jail where the Prophet was being held and shot him as he tried to escape by jumping from a second-story window. He died not long after hitting the ground, either from the fall or from the bullets the mob fired at him once he landed.

 

Only five of the vigilantes were tried for Smith’s murder, and none were convicted. 

 

The later history of the church is better known. Sidney Rigdon, Smith’s First Counselor, tried to take control. Brigham Young, a member of an advisory council called the Quorum of Twelve, suggested instead that the Quorum take charge, with Young as president. Rigdon was later excommunicated, established a rival church, and condemned polygamy. Cep describes Young, a former carpenter: 

Young was a forceful figure – “a man of much courage and superb equipment,” per the weathered stone that marks his birthplace, in Whitingham, Vermont. Ignoring the criticisms of the surrounding secular authorities, he began to “marry for eternity” more than a dozen women, seven of whom had also been “M.E.” to Smith, while also organizing the Mormon vote for county elections. The state retaliated by revoking Nauvoo’s charter, and the antagonism between the theocratic city and its surrounding democratic neighbors intensified until, finally, the Mormons were forced out of Nauvoo.

 

There was some talk in this period about establishing a “sovereign reservation” where the Mormons could practice their faith in peace, like those granted to Native Americans. The battles between religion and law continued for another sixty years, at least. “In Reynolds v. United States (1879),” Cep explains, “the Justices ruled that the free-exercise clause did not protect plural marriage, and that a federal law banning polygamy was constitutional. Congress then passed more laws punishing the Church, including one that called for the seizure of its property.” 

As is true with almost everything, the decision in Reynolds can be found online.  

It was not until 1896 that Utah was admitted to the union as a state, after the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints agreed to give up polygamy. For the first time, then, a Mormon was elected to serve in Congress. Reed Smoot, a member of the Quorum of Twelve, was chosen for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1903; but, as Cep notes, “he endured several years of congressional inquiries into whether his duties as a Mormon apostle would keep him from exercising secular authority.” 

 

Native Americans battle a grizzly bear.