1833–1857
Missouri, the Danites, and the Nauvoo Expositor, 1833–1844
34 events, 7 of them flagged as hinges. Filter below, or open the master timeline across every topic.
A citizens' meeting at Independence demanded that Latter-day Saint printing, storekeeping and mechanical work in the county cease. When the Saints refused, the mob threw down the house of W. W. Phelps that held the printing establishment and destroyed papers and type. Bishop Edward Partridge and Charles Allen were tarred and feathered on the public square.
After weeks of house-burnings and beatings, roughly twelve hundred Latter-day Saints were driven out of Jackson County, most crossing the Missouri River into Clay County. Phelps reported the following spring that the mob had burned nearly all Mormon-owned buildings in the county. Attempts at criminal prosecution collapsed.
Joseph Smith led an armed expedition of about two hundred men west to restore the Jackson County exiles to their lands. It disbanded without fighting after cholera struck the camp. The militia Smith organized on that march was also called the Armies of Israel, a name later confused with the 1838 Danites.
After the Saints were pressed out of Clay County in 1836, the legislature carved a county out of thinly settled land in the north for them to occupy. Far West became the church's headquarters. Non-Mormon Missourians later insisted the Saints had promised to confine themselves to Caldwell; Latter-day Saints denied any such binding pledge.
Fleeing the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society and its aftermath, the First Presidency relocated to Missouri. Thousands of converts followed through the spring and summer, and the Saints began expanding beyond Caldwell into Daviess and Carroll Counties.
Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated on 12 April; David Whitmer and Lyman Johnson were cut off, and John Whitmer and W. W. Phelps had been excommunicated a month earlier. The men remained living in Caldwell County with substantial property, and were known thereafter as the dissenters.
A society first called the Daughter of Zion, later the Danites, was formed under Sampson Avard, organized in companies of tens, fifties and hundreds with officers of military rank. Members swore an oath never to reveal the society's purposes on pain of death and covenanted to stand by one another whether right or wrong. Avard later testified that its first object was to drive the dissenters out of Caldwell County.
Preaching on salt that has lost its savour and is fit only to be cast out and trodden underfoot, Sidney Rigdon attacked the dissenters without naming them. John Corrill wrote that it was plainly understood whom he meant. Reed Peck testified at Richmond that Rigdon said in the same sermon that he would assist to erect a gallows on the square and hang them all.
A long letter, presumably written by Rigdon and signed by eighty-three men, was delivered to Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, John Whitmer, W. W. Phelps and Lyman Johnson the day after the Salt Sermon. It accused them of joining "a band of counterfeiters, thieves, liars, and blacklegs of the deepest dye" and closed: "We will put you from the county of Caldwell, so help us God." The families left, and their property was attached.
At a celebration that laid the temple cornerstones and paraded the Caldwell militia and a company of Danites, Rigdon declared that if a mob came against the Saints "it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us." The oration was printed as a pamphlet on the Far West press and reprinted in Missouri papers.
Joseph Smith's editorial in the August 1838 Elders' Journal commended Rigdon's speech and recommended that church members obtain a copy of the pamphlet. Bushman notes Smith underscored the passage saying the Saints would not be mobbed any more without taking vengeance.
At the Daviess County polls, the Whig candidate William Peniston mounted a whiskey barrel and harangued the crowd against letting the Mormons vote, using a racial slur to say they had no more right to vote than Black men. A brawl followed; John L. Butler struck back after a Latter-day Saint was hit, and by one account a Danite distress signal brought others into the fight. No one died, but reports of murdered Mormons and of Mormon retaliation raced across northern Missouri.
An armed force held the Latter-day Saint settlement at DeWitt in Carroll County under siege for days. Joseph Smith reported burying members who died of privation during the evacuation. The refugees fell back on Far West, and state officials declined to intervene.
Companies under David Patten, Lyman Wight and Seymour Brunson struck three Daviess County settlements, emptying Jacob Stollings's store at Gallatin, driving off stock and burning buildings. Goods were carried to the bishop's storehouse at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Judge Austin King reported to Boggs that there was not a citizen left in Daviess except Mormons.
Thomas B. Marsh, president of the Twelve, and Orson Hyde left the church the day after Gallatin burned. On 24 October Marsh swore an affidavit at Richmond describing the Danites, a 'destroying company,' the burning of Gallatin, and Smith's alleged intention to take the state and ultimately the world. Hyde attested it.
Believing a mob had seized three Latter-day Saint prisoners, about sixty men under David Patten rode into Ray County and attacked what proved to be a detachment of state militia under Samuel Bogart. One Missourian and three Mormons died, Patten among them. Rumour carried the news to Jefferson City as a massacre of fifty or sixty Missourians.
Acting on reports of Crooked River and on Marsh's affidavit, Governor Boggs ordered General John B. Clark to hasten to Richmond: "The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State, if necessary, for the publick good. Their outrages are beyond all description." Doniphan and other officers treated the extermination clause as illegal and disregarded it.
Two days after agreeing to a truce with a local militia captain, the settlement on Shoal Creek was attacked by several companies of Missouri militia. Men and boys who took shelter in the blacksmith's shop were shot through the gaps in the logs. Thomas McBride was cut down after surrendering his gun; ten-year-old Sardius Smith was killed at point-blank range. Seventeen or eighteen died and the bodies were put into an unfinished well.
Colonel George M. Hinkle brought Joseph Smith and other leaders into the militia camp, where they were taken prisoner. A militia court-martial sentenced them to be shot the next morning; General Doniphan refused to carry out the order, calling the proceeding illegal. Far West surrendered its arms and the inhabitants signed away property to cover the cost of the campaign.
Judge Austin A. King heard evidence for more than two weeks against some sixty defendants. Sampson Avard, captured and threatened with prosecution, was the state's chief witness; he called Joseph Smith "the prime mover and organizer of this Danite band" and produced a Danite constitution. King found probable cause against thirty-four men. Smith, his brother Hyrum, Rigdon, Wight, McRae and Baldwin were held for treason.
Six prisoners were confined in a two-level limestone jail measuring about fourteen feet square, mostly in the cold lower room lit by two grated openings. They petitioned unsuccessfully for habeas corpus; only Rigdon was released. Meanwhile the body of the church left Missouri for Illinois through the winter.
Smith dictated a long letter to the church at Quincy, written on twenty-nine sheets, addressed to the Saints "taken and held by the power of mobocracy, under the exterminating reign of his excelancy the Governer Lilburn W. Boggs." Portions of it were canonized in 1876 as Doctrine and Covenants 121–123.
The Illinois legislature incorporated Nauvoo with unusually broad powers, including a municipal court that could issue writs of habeas corpus and an independent militia. The Legion was organized in two cohorts, and Joseph Smith received a commission as lieutenant general — outranking, as he liked to note, any officer in the United States Army.
A secret council recorded by William Clayton as the "Council of Fifty or Kingdom of God" met to consider western settlement, Smith's presidential campaign and petitions to government. Its members later included non-Mormons. Smith was ordained king, priest and ruler over the council; whether the ordination carried any political claim is disputed.
William Law, his brother Wilson, Charles Ivins, the Higbee brothers and the Foster brothers issued a four-page paper carrying a preamble, fifteen resolutions and sworn affidavits. It called for "the UNCONDITIONAL REPEAL OF THE NAUVOO CITY CHARTER," advocated "unmitigated disobedience to Political Revelations," resolved that "we will not acknowledge any man as king or law-giver to the church," and printed Law's affidavit that Hyrum Smith had read him a revelation authorizing plural marriage.
The council sat for hours across two days. Joseph Smith said that if he had a council who felt as he did the establishment would be a nuisance before night, and called it a greater nuisance than a dead carcass; Hyrum Smith said the best way was to smash the press and pi the type. The council passed a libel ordinance and ordered the nuisance abated. About eight o'clock the marshal reported that he had removed the press, type and printed papers into the street and burned them.
Justice of the peace Thomas Morrison wrote out an arrest warrant charging Joseph Smith and others with "unlawfully & with force" destroying the Expositor, treated as the publishers' property. Charles A. Foster, writing aboard a steamer on 12 June, gave the New York Herald the proprietors' account of two or three hundred Legionnaires breaking the office door with a sledgehammer.
The Nauvoo municipal court released Smith on habeas corpus, finding the riot charge unsubstantiated because the abatement had been orderly; the next day Smith, sitting as judge, discharged the others. On 17 June the defendants submitted to a hearing before justice of the peace Daniel H. Wells, who also discharged them. To Hancock County non-Mormons this looked like a man judging his own case.
Citing newspaper threats and reports from the surrounding country, Smith as mayor declared the city under martial law and ordered the Legion and police to let no person or property pass in or out without orders. The proclamation was later cited as evidence of the treason charge.
Joseph and Hyrum Smith and fifteen others surrendered on Governor Ford's guarantee of safety and were arraigned before justice of the peace Robert F. Smith, who was also captain of the Carthage Greys. The riot case was continued and bail posted; Joseph and Hyrum were then served with writs charging treason, a non-bailable offence, and taken to Carthage Jail without a hearing on that charge.
Ford discharged the Warsaw militia that morning, left two companies of the Carthage Greys guarding the jail and rode to Nauvoo. In the late afternoon the discharged Warsaw men returned and stormed the jail. Willard Richards's journal records the cry to surrender, three or four shots, and a hundred armed men around the door. Hyrum was shot first; Joseph was hit at the window. John Taylor was severely wounded and Richards unhurt.
A Hancock County grand jury indicted nine men in October 1844 for the murders; four fled and were never arrested. Five went to trial in 1845, including Levi Williams, colonel of the 59th Illinois militia regiment, and the Warsaw Signal editor Thomas Sharp. All were acquitted.
During a preaching campaign to rouse the Utah Saints, Brigham Young said there were transgressors who, if they understood their condition, "would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering." Jedediah M. Grant went further, urging that a place be designated where such blood could be shed. Wilford Woodruff wrote that Young's preaching made the hearts of many tremble.
Governor Christopher S. Bond formally rescinded Boggs's order, stating that it had contravened rights to life, liberty and property. No Missouri prosecution had ever been brought for Hawn's Mill, and no Illinois conviction was ever obtained for Carthage.
