1834–1860
How one death split the Restoration into a dozen churches
12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.
He created the problem. Over fourteen years he ordained or designated David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith and (his clerk recorded) his brother Samuel as potential successors, blessed his son Joseph III, built a Council of Fifty, and in March 1844 told the Twelve he was rolling the burden of the kingdom onto their shoulders. He published no order of precedence. Every claimant after him was quoting him.
He was in Massachusetts when Joseph died and reached Nauvoo on 6 August 1844. Within two days he had reframed the question from 'who is the guardian' to 'does the church want the Twelve,' and won an overwhelming show of hands. He then presided over an apostolic interregnum of three and a half years before reorganizing a First Presidency around himself in December 1847.
The last surviving member of the First Presidency and Joseph Smith's vice-presidential running mate, sent to Pittsburgh nine days before the martyrdom. He hurried back and asked the Saints to appoint him 'guardian' of the church, not its president, on the theory that the church could only ever be built up to the dead prophet. Beaten on 8 August and excommunicated on 8 September, he organized his own church in Pittsburgh and argued his case in his own newspaper for two years.
The January 1841 revelation now printed as Doctrine and Covenants 124 gave Hyrum the office of Patriarch by right of birth and the keys, priesthood and gifts once held by Oliver Cowdery, and appointed him 'a prophet, and a seer, and a revelator unto my church, as well as my servant Joseph.' On paper he was the clearest successor Joseph ever named. He died in the same room at Carthage, which removed that answer at the moment the question arose.
Pregnant and with four living children, Emma wanted the Nauvoo stake president William Marks appointed trustee-in-trust and, in effect, Joseph's successor — Marks being an opponent of plural marriage. She lost that argument, quarrelled bitterly with Brigham Young over the tangled estate, stayed in Illinois when the Saints went west, and in April 1860 travelled with her eldest son to Amboy to see him ordained.
Baptized by Joseph Smith in February 1844 and ordained an elder by Hyrum, Strang produced a letter dated 18 June 1844 appointing him successor, claimed an angelic ordination on the very day of the martyrdom, and in September 1845 unearthed engraved plates at Voree, Wisconsin. He drew in Martin Harris, three Whitmers, William Smith and Lucy Mack Smith before polygamy and a royal coronation cost him most of them. He was assassinated in 1856.
Eleven years old when his father was killed, he refused every approach for fifteen years, then in 1860 accepted the presidency of the 'New Organization' that Jason Briggs and Zenas Gurley had built on the principle of lineal succession. He led the Reorganized Church for fifty-four years, rejecting plural marriage and denying that his father had practised it.
Marks scheduled the 8 August meeting at Rigdon's request and privately favoured him; Emma Smith wanted Marks himself as trustee-in-trust. He was stripped of his stake presidency, published a notice in December 1844 renouncing Rigdon's 'pretended visions and revelations' and saying the Twelve were the proper persons to lead, then drifted through Strang's church before becoming one of the men who brought Joseph Smith III into the Reorganization.
The last surviving brother of Joseph and Hyrum. Ordained Presiding Patriarch in May 1845, he spent that summer arguing that the office carried the right to lead and that 'little Joseph' was the rightful heir, published a pamphlet in October 1845 attacking Brigham Young, and was cut off. He then attached himself to Strang, later to Lyman Wight, and his teaching of lineal priesthood fed directly into the Reorganization.
Wight had run the Black River pine operations in Wisconsin and had been called by Joseph Smith, with George Miller, to a mission to Texas. He took his pine company south in 1845 and founded Mormon villages near Austin and at Zodiac. He held that the Council of Fifty, not the Twelve, carried Joseph's authority, and that Joseph Smith III was the eventual leader. The Twelve disfellowshipped him in December 1848.
Woodruff's diary is the closest thing to a contemporaneous eyewitness record of 8 August 1844, and it records the excitement, the postponement and the business — not a miracle. His address to the British Saints published in the Millennial Star in February 1845 is the earliest printed statement that 'the mantle of Joseph had fallen upon' Brigham Young, and he told a far more vivid version publicly in 1872.
Excommunicated in 1838, McLellin launched a rival paper, The Ensign, at Buffalo in Iowa Territory in July 1844 with George M. Hinkle, then joined Sidney Rigdon's church and served as a clerk of Rigdon's April 1845 Pittsburgh conference before falling out again. In 1847 he helped organize a Church of Christ around David Whitmer, collecting testimony that Joseph had ordained Whitmer his successor in 1834.
