Official LDSThe Church's own account
Saints, the Church's current official history, names the Salt Sermon, describes Danite leader Sampson Avard forcing his way into Adam Black's cabin, and tells readers plainly that Avard was the state's star witness at Richmond and that he claimed to have acted under Joseph's orders to save himself. The Gospel Topics essay goes further and states that historians generally concur that Joseph Smith approved of the Danites, while holding that he probably was not briefed on all their plans and likely did not sanction the full range of their activities. The same essay concedes that Mormon vigilantes, many of them Danites, raided two Daviess towns, burning homes and stealing goods. On the Utah era the Church stated formally in 2010 that so-called blood atonement is not a doctrine of the Church. The institutional posture is acknowledgement of specific acts combined with a limiting claim about what Joseph knew.
Faithful / apologeticThe defenders' case
FAIR and BYU Studies argue that the Danites began as a defensive brotherhood in a community that had already been driven twice, and that Avard corrupted it into a plundering vigilante band without the presidency's knowledge — inducing them to attend a meeting and bless it while concealing what he had been teaching. Leland Gentry's account is the model: a three-stage history in which the first two stages were legitimate and the third was Avard's. On the Expositor, Craig Foster argues that press destruction was ordinary in 1830s and 1840s America, with sixteen episodes of mob violence against Illinois newspapers between 1832 and 1867, and that the council reviewed English common law and the Constitution before acting. Dallin H. Oaks's legal analysis is cited to establish that the paper could lawfully have been declared a nuisance, even if destroying the press itself went too far.
Neutral academicThe academic reconstruction
Journal of Mormon History contributors and John Turner treat 1838 as a two-sided war with a decisive asymmetry of force. Turner traces the October raids on Gallatin, Millport and Grindstone Fork as Latter-day Saint offensives that emptied Daviess County of non-Mormons, and quotes George Hinkle's testimony that the Smiths held no field command but seemed to give general directions. Scholars in this camp emphasise that Rigdon's published oration and the Danite organization did the opposite of quieting opposition, and that Crooked River — an attack on state militia — is what converted a county feud into treason. They also stress what the record does not show: the prosecutors at Richmond could not produce a single eyewitness to a Mormon setting a building alight.
Critical / secularThe critical reading
Dan Vogel and MormonThink read the same testimony as establishing top-down direction. They point to Joseph Smith's own July 1838 journal entry welcoming "a company of Danites" to put things right physically and cleanse the church of evils that teaching could not correct; to Reed Peck's testimony that Avard produced the presidency at a Danite meeting and they approved his course; and to Corrill's contemporaneous description of a covenant that the word of the presidency should be obeyed and none suffered to raise a hand or voice against it. MormonThink's response to the Gospel Topics essay disputes the claim that Joseph was not briefed, citing multiple accounts placing him and Hyrum at Danite meetings. On Nauvoo, critics see a mayor who was also prophet, judge and lieutenant general destroying a newspaper that had just printed a true affidavit about his plural marriages.
Evangelical counter-cultThe counter-cult indictment
Jerald and Sandra Tanner reproduce the Danite oath, Avard's Richmond testimony, Marsh's affidavit and the Reed Peck manuscript at length, and read them as a continuous line running from the 1838 band through the Nauvoo police to Brigham Young's Utah. They connect Heber C. Kimball's counsel to obey a leader whether the thing commanded is right or wrong to the Danite covenant to stand by one another right or wrong, and treat the Reformation blood-atonement sermons and William Hickman's confessions as the same doctrine matured. Their reproductions are valuable as a finding aid, and were for decades the only accessible copies of some of these documents; their framing is adversarial throughout and their chain of causation is precisely what the faithful and academic camps deny.
What it cost people
Real people paid for all of this in specific, recoverable ways. Agnes Coolbrith Smith waded the Grand River in October with a baby in her arms and a two-year-old beside her and walked through three inches of snow to reach shelter at eleven at night. Mary Bailey Smith was carried thirty miles in an open wagon four days after giving birth and arrived speechless and stiff with cold. Jacob Stollings, who was not a Mormon, lost his store at Gallatin. Eighteen people died at a mill on Shoal Creek and were put into an unfinished well. Two brothers were shot in Carthage Jail, and a fourteen-year-old orphan named Joseph F. Smith remembered for the rest of his life the spot where his father leaned from the saddle to kiss him goodbye.
The moral question the record poses
The record poses a question that neither camp's framing dissolves. A people twice driven from their homes with no legal redress concluded that the law would not protect them and organized to protect themselves, and in doing so produced a secret society bound by an oath to obey leaders right or wrong, and then a campaign that emptied a county. Their neighbours, believing themselves threatened by a bloc that voted together and had just published a threat of extermination, produced a governor's order to exterminate a religion and a militia that shot a child in the head. Each side's violence is intelligible from inside its own fear. Whether being wronged first alters what one may do next is the question the documents keep asking and do not answer.
What it asks of an institution — and of you
For an institution, the question is what to say about the parts of its own founding that it would not defend if a rival movement did them. The Church's 2018 narrative history and its Gospel Topics essay do name the Salt Sermon, the Danites, the raids and the burning, which is more than earlier official accounts did; they also draw a line around what Joseph Smith knew, and readers can judge whether the documents support that line. For a person, the demand is narrower and harder: to hold the Hawn's Mill well and the Gallatin store in the same hand, to notice when a persecution narrative is doing work that excuses something, and to resist the reflex — present in every camp here — of treating one's own side's dead as evidence and the other side's as noise.
Questions to carry away
- If Joseph Smith knew of the Danites and blessed them, as his own journal and Reed Peck's testimony suggest, does it matter whether he was briefed on their specific acts?
- Rigdon threatened extermination against mobs and Boggs ordered extermination of a people. Is the difference in scale, in office, or in nothing that matters?
- Was the Nauvoo Expositor destroyed because it was libellous, because it was true, or because it was dangerous — and would any of those be a sufficient reason?
- What follows from the fact that no one was ever convicted for Hawn's Mill and no one was ever convicted for Carthage?
- How should a reader weigh testimony given under threat of prosecution by a man everyone on both sides described as a liar?
