No Man Knows My History (Arkosh History)

by Fawn M. Brodie

Shortly after, when word came that Grandison Newell had secured a warrant for his arrest on a charge of banking fraud, Joseph knew that this was the finish and fled in the night with Rigdon, his horse turned toward Zion. After their prophet’s disappearance the dissenters seized the temple, and within the walls that had so recently resounded with hymns to his glory they passed resolutions proclaiming his depravity.

Distrust of clergymen who stepped outside their profession was one of the most deeply rooted mores of the Republic. Tocqueville had marveled at the pride that Americans took in their uncompromising separation of church and state and had noted that most ministers made it a point of honor to abstain from politics. The constitutions of almost every state in the Mississippi Valley expressly interdicted clergymen from taking any office of profit or trust as a gift of the people.

Kirtland’s collapse might have shocked him into awareness of the social pressure he was opposing. But Joseph, like all true adventurers, could not see himself as part of the world; he was always astride it.

By the time he had covered the eight hundred miles to upper Missouri, much of his old buoyancy had returned. And his reception in Far West banished all traces of his gloom. The whole town turned out to meet him, singing and cheering. His oldest converts, who had been in Missouri since 1831, looked upon his flight from Kirtland as an answer to prayer. The bank failure, they said, was simply God’s device for bringing the prophet to Zion to stay. It had been a net “to cull the Saints out from that region to the blessed and consecrated land.”

Far West had enjoyed an extraordinary growth. Without goods and almost without money, the exiles in a single year had built a city out of naked energy and millennial hope. There were fifteen hundred Saints in the new Mormon county. Far West had been laid out on the plan of Joseph’s ideal city, divided neatly into squares separated by streets wide enough for half a dozen wagons to pass abreast. A section of the prairie had been sold at auction for five thousand dollars, the proceeds going into a fund for building schools, and one schoolhouse had * As said by Lyman Wight according to William Swartzell. See hisMormonism Exposed, being a journal of a residence in Missouri from 28th of May to 20th of August 1838 (Pekin, Ohio, 1840), p. 17. t Lucinda Harris was later listed by Mormon historians as one of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. See Appendix C. already been erected.

The departure of this group reduced Kirtland to the sleepy village it had been when Joseph arrived in 1831. Near-by Cleveland eventually became a vast metropolis, its suburbs reaching out across the hills almost to the temple doors, but the Mormon city, bereft of the virile spirit of its leader, withered into a museum piece.

The Saints had long believed that Independence, in Jackson County, was the original site of the Garden of Eden. Now Joseph told them that Adam-ondi-Ahman was the land where Adam dwelt after his expulsion from Eden, and that Far West was probably the exact spot where Cain killed Abel.*

In addition to the testimonies of Hyde, Marsh, and Phelps, see the statements of Sampson Avard, John Corrill, John Cleminson, Reed Peck, and John Sapp, all of whom turned state’s evidence. John Whitmer, John Corrill, and Reed Peck all wrote histories of this period which included details of the Danite organization. Whitmer's account has never been published, having been omitted from his “History of the Church” when it was published by the Reorganized Church in theJournal of History, Vol. I. The complete manuscript is in the church library at Independence.

But the most significant account came from the pen of the prophet himself, who described Avard’s secret instructions to his captains in part as follows: Know ye not, brethren, that it will soon be your privilege to take your respective companies and go out on a scout on the borders of the settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles? for it is written, the riches of the Gentiles shall be consecrated to my people, the house of Israel; and thus you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property; and in this way we will build up the kingdom of God, and roll forth the little stone that Daniel saw cut out of the mountain without hands, and roll forth until it filled the whole earth. For this is the very way that God destines to build up His kingdom in the last days. If any of us should be recognized, who can harm us? for we will stand by each other and defend one another in all things. ... I would swear a lie to clear any of you; and if this would not do, I would put them or him under the sand as Moses did the Egyptian; and in this way we will consecrate much unto the Lord. . . . And if one of this Danite society reveals any of these things, I will put him where the dogscannot bite him.* Joseph wrote in his history that he repudiated Avard and had him excommunicated as soon as he discovered these machinations.

he himself organized a military body made up of companies of tens and fifties which was completely distinct from Avard’s. But it is clear that these were more of the prophet’s characteristic efforts to write his own history as he wished it had been lived and not as it really happened. For Avard actually was not excommunicated until March 17, 1839, four months after he had turned traitor and left the church.f Between June and November 1838 he ruled the Danites with a free hand and was one of the most powerful men in the church.

Avard was shrewd enough to make heresy against the presidency the most heinous crime in the church. This won him complete freedom of action and blinded the prophet to the more barbarous implications of his scheming. Avard told his men that they “should support the presidency in all their designs, right or wrong.” He did not mince words. “If I meet one damning and cursing the presidency, I can curse them too, and if he will drink I can get him a bowl of brandy and after a while take him by the arm, and get him one side in the brush when I will into his guts in a minute and put him under the sod.” §

“I wish to control my own property,” Whitmer argued. “I want to be governed by the laws of the land and not the law of the church.” “Now you wish to pinme down to the law,” Joseph replied, and abruptly terminated the discussion.^

Shortlyafter the expulsion of the dissenters the prophet announced the revival, in modified form, of the old United Order. On July 8,1838 he read to the Saints in Far West several revelations calling upon them to deed all their property to the church and promising in return that every man would receive a tract of land for his “everlasting inheritance,” the number of acres being determined by the size of his family. The “surplus property” was to remain in the hands of the bishop, to be used for building the temple, supporting the church presidency, and “laying the foundation of Zion.” Once the inheritances had been settled upon, every Saint was expected to give one tenth of his annual interest to the church.* Rigdon followed the prophet’s exposition with a heated warning that all who failed to consecrate their property to the Lord would eventually lose it to gentile marauders. Those who refused to comply were to be delivered over to the brothers of Gideon. With this threat ringing in their ears, and the fate of the dissenters a reminder that Rigdon’s warnings could not be lightly dismissed, the Saints voted unanimously to consecrate their property to the Lord.

And it quickly became clear that the Saints had voted to please the priesthood, and then acted to suit themselves.

I aim to have my rights as a free-born citizen, even if I have to fight for them. As for my religion, that’s a matter between my God and me, and no man’s business but my own. This day I’m going to have my vote, and I’ll die fighting before I’m driven from these polls without it.” The little knot of Mormons, still gripping their oak hearts, proceeded to the polls unmolested, and every man voted.*

If they try to attack us we will play hell with their applecarts. Before now, men, you’ve fought like devils. But now I want you to fight like angels, for angels can whip devils. And for every one we lack in number to match the mob, the Lord will send an angel to fight alongside.!

Parley Pratt was lying next to the prophet late one night when these stories became so foul that he could not close his ears to them. Suddenly, he said, Joseph rose and spoke in a voice of thunder: “Silence, ye fiends of the infernal pit! In the name of Jesus Christ I rebuke you, and command you to be still; I will not live another minute and hear such language. Cease such talk, or you or I die this instant!” The guards turned away abashed and half-scared. Pratt was overwhelmed. “I have seen ministers of justice,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “clothed in magisterial robes, and criminals arraigned before them while life was suspended on a breath . . . but dignity and majesty have I seen but once, as it stood in chains at midnight in a dungeon in an obscure village in Missouri.”

Meanwhilethe torpid Missouri conscience was beginning to stir. When a liberal St. Louis newspaper, theMissouri Republican Daily,published details of the Haun’s Mill massacre, shocked legislators from that area clamored for an investigation. Letters appeared in theRepublican demanding an appropriation for the Mormons’ rehabilitation as their desperate plight finally won publicity. TheRepublican exposed also the shameful story of the Daviess County land sales. With the evacuation of Adam-ondi- Ahman, the old settlers had organized a public auction. The town was real loot, for it had an admirable site, and everywhere half-built cabins and granaries bespoke once high hopes and incredible industry. The whole Mormon acreage, with fences, buildings, and improvements, had sold for $1.25 per acre. It would seem, said the editor flatly, that the Mormon oppressors “got up this crusade in order to obtain possession of the houses and lands of their victims.” *

Most of the Mormons stopped at Quincy, across the Mississippi River in Illinois, where the citizens extended charity and sympathy. There was a chronic border friction between Missouri and Illinois, and the “Suckers” welcomed the chance to demonstrate a nobility of character foreign to the despised “Pukes.” More important, a presidential election was in the offing, and the Democratic Association, which controlled the votes in the Quincy area, was eager to make friends with this huge new voting bloc.

Moreover, suffering had made these people kin.

Posing now as a sympathizer and probable convert, Galland wrote to the prophet in Liberty jail. Impressed, as always, by a facile tongue, Joseph replied with enthusiasm to Galland’s commiseration and unctuous praise, and expressed his interest in the tract.J Thus it came about that in the first weeks of their arrival *History of Lee Co., Iowa (1879), pp. 164-5. t Thomas Ford:History of Illinois (Chicago, 1854), p. 406. t See his letter to Galland,Times and Seasons, Vol. I (1840), p. 52. in Illinois the Mormons began not only to be entangled in a net of fraudulent land deals but also to be sucked into the maelstrom of local politics.

After some weeks the prisoners made a second attempt to win their freedom, this time by loosening the stones and timber in the prison wall. They used smuggled augers for tools, but the timber was tough and the auger handles gave way before the last stone was pried loose. When Rockwell tried to supply them with new tools, the guards became suspicious and discovered the hole. “It was a fine breach,” Joseph wrote afterward with satisfaction, “and cost the county a round sum.”

the prophet was disquieted by thoughts of what Rigdon would do with the Saints in Illinois, and took immediate steps to curb his authority. Beware of “a fanciful and flowery and heated imagination,” he wrote to his brethren, and ordered that the affairs of the church be transacted by a general conference rather than a single man.

But this time, he decided, there should be no casting of pearls before swine. Only those men who had proved their loyalty in the crucible of suffering should be privileged to hear the great mysteries of the kingdom. This would be particularly true of his new “patriarchal order of marriage,” vulgarly referred to by his enemies as a “community of wives.”

“How long can rolling water remain impure?” he wrote. “What power shall stay the heavens ? As well might man stretch forth his puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven, upon the heads of the Latter-day-Saints. What is Boggs or his murderous party, but wimbling willows upon the shore to catch the flood-wood ?

Hell may pour forth its rage like the burning lava of Mount Vesuvius, or of Etna, or of the most terrible of the burning mountains; and yet shall ‘Mormonism’ stand. Water, fire, truth and God are all realities. Truth is ‘Mormonism.’ God is the author of it.”

*History of the Church, Vol. Ill, p. 313. “Adder in the path” is part of the Biblical passage from which the name “Danites" evolved.

• Professor Louis C. Zucker of the University of Utah has carefully documented Joseph Smith’s indebtedness to his Hebrew teacher, Joshua Seixas. See his unpublished “Mormon and Jew; a Meeting on the American Frontier.”

Joseph and Emma gave up their house to the sick and lived in a tent. Emma, who had considerable fame as an herb doctor, went among the stricken administering Sap- pington’s pills, Dover’s powders, and various of her own medicines, although she had not yet fully recovered from the birth of a new son, Don Carlos.

Joseph described no healings in his journal. For every success there were too many failures, and he could not reproach his people with lack of faith. Eventually the pestilence spent itself, and with the passing of years the stories of Joseph’s healings multiplied. It was said that when he was worn out with praying for the sick, he gave his handkerchief to Wilford Woodruff and told him to wipe the faces of the stricken children, who were thereby saved in scores.

Before another year had passed, sickness made its first inroads upon the Smith family. First Joseph’s father died, then his younger brother Don Carlos, and finally his newest son, who had been named Don Carlos after his uncle. Despite these sorrows Joseph was planning with undiminished vigor. There was an urgency in his exhortations which had a deeper cause than mere release from the stifling inactivity of Liberty jail. Joseph had come too close to death ever again to live in easy security. He knew now that persecution was as inevitable as the sunrise, and that to it the only answer was power. He intended to make of his church a political force that would command deference and a military force that would maintain peace.

he pushed the missionary campaign with a strenuousness that dismayed the sick and poverty-ridden. The twelve apostles had been ordered off to Europe in the summer of 1839, though their cabins were unfinished and several were ill with ague. Brigham Young, gaunt and suffering, had taken leave of his destitute family and started off without strength or money. No one but Joseph could have persuaded him to leave under such wretched circumstances.

Although Brigham Young was born to command men, he had not tasted the sweetness of such power before and was loath to relinquish it.

Noting the success of this publicity, the editor of theChicago Democrat wrote sagely: “We will not go so far as to call the Mormons martyr-mongers, but we believe they are men of sufficient sagacity to profit by anything in the shape of persecution. . . . The Mormons have greatly profited by their persecution in Missouri. ... let Illinois repeat the bloody tragedies of Missouri and one or two other states follow, and the Mormon religion will not only be known throughout our land, but will be very extensively embraced.”

In Washington he ran headlong into the most delicate and dangerous of all problems perplexing the American government, the issue of states’ rights, which eventually he came to call “a stink in the nostrils of the Almighty.” The Southern states were pathologically jealous of their sovereignty, and the balance between slave state and free hung by so fragile a thread that the boldest statesman dared not tamper with it.

Isaac Gallandhad set out to milk the Mormons dry. After getting properly baptized he wormed his way into Joseph’s confidence and became his chief land agent. Joseph had already purchased from him $18,000 worth of land in and about Nauvoo, giving him Mormon-owned Missouri land in payment. He had also exchanged Missouri land for $80,000 worth of Galland’s Half-Breed lands in Iowa.* Galland’s title to the Nauvoo tract was genuine, but his deeds to the Iowa territory were all forged.

Joseph was in absolute control of all land sales to his people. The High Council voted him treasurer of the church, and then bestowed the title of “Trustee-in-Trust” with power “to receive, acquire, manage, or convey property, real, personal, or mixed, for the sole use and benefit of said Church.” Eventually he also became registrar of deeds, from which position he could lay his thumb on any clandestine sales.f

To pay for the vast acreages he had contracted to buy, the prophet devised an ingenious system of land exchange. New converts in the East were advised to turn over their property to the church through his agents, Isaac Galland and William Smith (who had once more been forgiven and reinstated as an apostle). These agents in return gave orders on land in and about Nauvoo. The Eastern property was then either sold outright or transferred to the Hotchkiss syndicate in payment on the $53,000 debt. The system had a bad defect in the high interest rate on the loans, which on the Hotchkiss purchase amounted to $6,000 in two years. To meet the interest Joseph had to make considerable profit on the land he sold to his own people.

Joseph continually urged the industrialization of his city. Newcomers from the East and from England were told to put their capital into mills instead of land, and Joseph set up the Nauvoo Agricultural and Manufacturing Association, with a capital stock of f 100,000, to co-ordinate all Mormon economic activity. Within two years the city had two big steam sawmills, a steam flour mill, a tool factory, and a foundry. Plans were laid for a chinaware factory, to be manned by English converts from the Staffordshire potteries.

Joseph’s autarchic control was not, however, taken completely for granted. A city ordinance forbidding anyone to set up a business in Nauvoo without a license from the city council — which the prophet dominated — aroused so much resentment that it was repealed in May 1842. But Joseph himself felt that in matters of business as well as the spirit he was answerable to no one.

The revelation then went on guilelessly to grant Joseph a suite of rooms in the hotel for himself and his posterity “from generation to generation, for ever and ever.” Joseph had somehow succeeded in welding two antithetical principles — he had come to identify the goodness of God with the making of money — and had succeeded in making the union palatable to his Saints.

Brigham Young was convinced that emigration was the only solution for Europe’s “overpopulation” and made this the theme of many of his sermons. Soon the missionaries were publishing in Liverpool a little journal called theMillennial Star, which frequently had the ring of a real-estate agency propaganda pamphlet:

Before long the apostles were converting Englishmen in thousands. Their success loosed a deluge of anti-Mormon pamphlets. Even the sophisticated LondonAthenceum took note of the new sect. “Mormonism is making rapid progress,” it pointed out on April 3, 1841, “particularly in the manufacturing districts, and it is also spreading in Wales. Furthermore, its converts are not made from the lowest ranks; those sought and obtained by the Mormonite apostles are mechanics and trades* Times and Seasons, Vol. I (November 15, 1840), p. 223. t Millennial Star, February 1, 1842. men who have saved a little money, who are remarkable for their moral character, but who are exposed to the delusion from having, as Archbishop Sharpe expressed it, ‘studied the Bible with an ill-balanced mind.’ ”

Few apostles remained in Britain more than a year. But before they left their work in the hands of lesser men, they had organized an emigration system which became so well known for its honesty and efficiency that it was cited in the House of Commons as a model for other companies to follow. The Mormons set up an office, chartered their own ships, organized the emigrants so that there would be ample food and water, and charged less than four pounds for the journey all the way to New Orleans.

Much of the credit for the success of the emigration system was due Brigham Young, whose business head was one of the soundest in the church. He had been one of the first apostles to return to Nauvoo, and it was from there that he directed the missionary enterprise. And within a month after his return he had persuaded the prophet to shift all the business affairs of the church from the High Council over to the apostles. Joseph, however, still retained the ultimate authority in financial matters.

Itwas an evil day in the summer of 1840, some months after his return from Washington, that Joseph baptized into the church Dr. John Cook Bennett. He had been an instructor in “midwifery” in an obscure Ohio college, and was now secretary of the Illinois Medical Society and quartermaster general of the Illinois militia. He was thirty-five — the same age as the prophet

The Mormons at the moment were in a strategic position for bargaining for legislative favor. Soured on the Democratic Party by Van Buren’s indifference, they had voted the straight Whig ticket in the election of November 1840, except for one candidate. In order to give their votes to a Democrat, James H. Ralston, who had done the prophet some favors, they scratched the name which happened to be last on the Whig list. The spurned candidate was an obscure young politician named Abraham Lincoln.*

Despite this demonstration of Whig preference, Joseph Smith made it clear that his people would join neither party, but would hold themselves free to vote according to services rendered. As a result, the legislative session of 1840-1 saw each party stumbling over the other in its frantic efforts to win the Mormon vote, which by now counted heavily in the balance of Illinois politics.

Even Lincoln, he said, “had the magnanimity to vote for our act, and came forward, after the final vote to the bar of the house, and cordially congratulated me on its passage.” *

The winning of the Nauvoo charters was Joseph’s first great political victory, and it made him feel immeasurably obligated to Bennett. It is therefore not surprising that when ugly rumors of the man’s debauchery and profligacy caught up with him in Nauvoo Joseph hastily dismissed them. When Hyrum learned on a trip east that Bennett had deserted a wife and two children and had been expelled from the Masonic lodge for unprincipled conduct, he wrote of it to Joseph,! but the prophet filed the letter in his drawer.