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A man is saved no faster than he gets knowledge.”
And who was to say him nay, since in the gentile world the simple pronouncement of a few timeworn phrases by any justice of peace was all that was necessary to transform fornication into blessed matrimony. The spoken word stood between him and his own guilt. And with Joseph the word was God.
Actually Bennett may have been taking spiritual wives with Joseph’s complete sanction, as were Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball early in 1842. But it is clear from the innuendoes in Joseph’s statement that Bennett looked upon the whole celestial-marriage paraphernalia as mere show and dispensed with it whenever he pleased. Unlike Joseph, he had never been troubled by the necessity of rationalizing his own impulses or of squaring himself with God.
The prophet could ill afford a new scandal following so close upon the heels of Martha Brotherton’s. Blaming Bennett for the whole imbroglio, he decided to put an end to his insolence, and on May n, 1842 he drew up a bull of excommunication.^ But he knew that Bennett could be the most deadly enemy the church had ever faced. Seeking a way to stop his mouth, he called in several women whose names had been linked with that of the celebrated doctor and questioned them sharply. Now, apparently for the first time, he learned the full measure of Bennett’s debauchery. Bennett had seduced innumerable
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authority- * See the testimony of Hyrum Smith,Wasp extra, July 27, 1842, republished inHistory of the Church,Vol. V, pp. 71-2; and the statement of Zeruiah N. Goddard, with whom Sarah Pratt boarded for several months, published inAffidavits and Certificates Disproving the Statements and Affidavits Contained in John C. Bennett's Letters(Nauvoo, August 31, 1842). There can be no doubt that Bennett was an abortionist. Sarah Pratt told W. Wyl many years later that Bennett had showed her one of his instruments and indicated that he had performed illegal operations in the city.Mormon Portraits, p.
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For a time Joseph clung to the hope that Bennett would be less dangerous in the church than out and, despite the fact that the apostles and High Council had excommunicated him on May 25, agreed to keep him in fellowship if he would make a public confession. In a dramatic session before one hundred brethren in the Masonic Hall on May 26, Bennett, weeping like a child, told a goodly portion of his misdeeds. Then to the astonishment and indignation of many present, Joseph pleaded mercy for him.
Non-Mormons were inclined to believe both Bennett’s and Joseph’s collections of affidavits. But within Nauvoo no one dared accuse Joseph of polygamy since it meant identifying him with Bennett. Rigdon was so outraged at the slander against his daughter that he published a statement calling Stephen Markham, who had linked Nancy’s name with Bennett, a notorious liar.
Bennett had fully expected the Pratts and Rigdon to follow him out of the church, but in both instances he was disappointed. Pratt, who had some time since returned from England to teach mathematics at the University of Nauvoo, wandered about Nauvoo like a man bereft of sense, proclaiming the innocence of his wife to every passer-by. When William Law called upon the Saints in a public meeting to acknowledge Joseph as a “good, moral, virtuous, peaceable and patriotic man,” Pratt stood up, pale and lonely-looking among the thousands, to register the only negative vote.f
The denials of polygamy uttered by the Mormon leaders between 1835 and 1852, when it was finally admitted, are a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics. When the brethren attacked spiritual wifism or polygamy, it was with the mental reservation that * The sworn statements were published inTimes and Seasons, Vol. Ill (October 21, 1842), pp. 939-40. Sarah Ann Whitney was married to Joseph on July 27, 1842. See Appendix C. “the patriarchal order of marriage” or “celestial order of plurality of wives” was immeasurably different.
As an intellectual companion she did not exist for him, nor did any woman. One of Joseph’s rare references to Emma in his journal is as revealing of this as it is of the prophet’s vanity. When she was serving dinner to him and Parley Pratt one day, he complained jocularly that she always loaded the table with too much good food. When Pratt suggested that he eat by himself like Napoleon, seated at a table with just the victuals he needed, Emma spoke up quickly: “But Mr. Smith is a bigger man than Bonaparte; he can never eat without his friends.” Joseph looked up at her in pleased surprise.
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She could not know that during the weeks he stayed in hiding at the farm of Edward Sayers he persuaded Mrs. Sayers to join his circle of wives.*
Since Emma had never really ceased grieving after the bright-eyed little Don Carlos, and Joseph had prayed that the new baby would still her lament, the death was doubly bitter. Of her eight children only three had lived,
Hyrum Smith, who had several wives himself and did not have his brother’s difficulties with the first, urged Joseph repeatedly to write down the revelation on celestial marriage. “I will take it and read it to Emma,” he said one day in renewing the argument, “and I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace.” Joseph replied with a wry smile: “You do not know Emma as well as I do.” Before the afternoon was spent, however, he sat down and dictated to his secretary William Clayton the last and most epoch-making revelation of his life. All that he had been thinking
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Then followed a concise statement of the new law: “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery. . . . and if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him....” [52]
Although she stormed at Hyrum, Emma was terribly shaken by the sight of the manuscript. Sorrowfully she said to William Law: “The revelation says I must submit or be destroyed. Well, I guess I’ll have to submit.”t But with the passing days she grew more courageous. However inspired the revelations of the past may have been, she felt in her heart that this was a concoction of John C. Bennett and the devil.
Joseph’s mother, who came to live with them about this time, apparently took Emma’s part. “I have never seen a woman in my life,” Lucy wrote in 1845, “who would endure every species of fatigue and hardship, from month to month, and from year to year, with that unflinching courage, zeal and patience, which she has ever done; for I know that which she has had to endure — she has been tossed upon the ocean of uncertainty — she has breasted the storms of persecution, and buffeted the rage of men and devils, which would have borne down almost any other woman.”
The burning was a purely symbolic victory. Joseph had had a copy made, which he had every intention of showing about freely to his friends. But this at least was an end to argument on his part, and to tears on hers. Never again would he humiliate her by asking her to stand witness to a ceremony of wifetaking. Nor would he even discuss plural marriage in her presence. She, on the other hand, would never acknowledge one of her husband’s wives though they reached the hundredfold suggested by the revelation. Although she could no longer hope to restore the core of a normal family relationship, at
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Gradually the church hierarchy became divided into a polygamist and anti-polygamist faction, with William Law championing the minority. Emma worked quietly against polygamy among the women. “Your husbands are going to take more wives,” she warned, “and unless you consent to it, you must put your foot down and keep it there.”
Incredible as it may seem, the bulk of the Mormon colony, which now numbered more than fifteen thousand in and about the city, knew little or nothing of polygamy. In particular the English converts, now numbering over four thousand in Nauvoo, were kept in ignorance. No one could have been insulated from the gossip about spiritual wifism, but the majority accepted the word of the church leaders that this system had disappeared with the expulsion of John C. Bennett. Charlotte Haven wrote home in girlish horror on September 8,1843 that “Apostle Adams” had returned from a mission to England with a
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And now that polygamy among the majority of the Mormons is dead, the leaders are not anxious to re-emphasize the fact that their prophet practiced it. Certainly they are eager to forget the magnificent immoderation with which he fulfilled the new marriage covenant. For once Joseph had succeeded to his own satisfaction in revolutionizing the Puritan concept of sin, there was no stopping him.
Meanwhile news of his arrest sent Nauvoo wild with apprehension. The city council declared virtual martial law, requiring every stranger entering the city to give his name, residence, and business to the local police and enforcing a strict nine o’clock curfew.f Two companies of the Legion were sent out to intercept the prophet, and Joseph’s own steamboat, theMaid of Iowa, sailed to the mouth of the Illinois River where its men could intercept every steamboat entering the Mississippi.
Before long the carriage had an escort of one hundred and forty armed men. Many had ruined their horses with running and had forced whiskey down their throats to keep them going the last few miles; men and horses alike were utterly exhausted. But they had saved their prophet, and every man was a hero.
Five days before election theNauvoo Neighbor swung completely over to Hoge and urged unanimity in the vote: “. . . it can answer no good purpose that half the citizens should disfranchise the other half, thus rendering Nauvoo powerless as far as politics are concerned.” f Then Hyrum Smith amazed the Nauvoo electorate by announcing publicly that he had received a revelation from God that Hoge was the proper candidate to receive the Mormon vote.
Joseph was now fully intoxicated with power and drunk with visions of empire and apocalyptic glory. “One man empowered from Jehovah has more influence with the children of men,” he said, “than eight hundred million led by the precepts of men.” This thesis was his strength, and he set about using it to translate into reality what soberer men would have called delusions of grandeur.
Any man with absolute dominion over a people, who brooks no advice that does not further his own daydreams and who- UNFINISHED NAUVOO HOUSE -grinds out policies solely in the grist-mill of his own ambition, sets up a kind of centrifugal force within himself that — by turning always away from the normal — may one day destroy him. “Joseph would allow no arrogance or undue liberties,” said one friend, “and criticisms, even by his associates, were rarely acceptable, and contradictions would rouse in him the lion at once, for by no one of his fellows would he be superseded.” # Herein was his
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And as if this were not enough, Joseph prepared a petition for Congress in December 1843 in which he asked that Nauvoo be made a completely independent federal territory, with the Nauvoo Legion incorporated into the United States Army and the mayor of Nauvoo given power to call out the United States troops whenever necessary. This was one of Joseph’s worst political blunders. The petition was certain to be rejected in Washington, and
Finally, in the spring of 1844, Joseph began to organize a government to rule over what he hoped would eventually be a sovereign Mormon state.
it is clear that one of their first acts was to ordain and crown Joseph as King of the Kingdom of God.t
In recent years Marcus Whitman had made Oregon a synonym for the promised land, and 1842 had seen the first big emigrant train under Elijah White breaking a road to the Pacific.
But Joseph was troubled by the fact that Oregon was peopled largely by emigrant Missourians, and for a time turned his eye to the Southwest.
Annexation of Texas was now the hottest political issue in the nation. On the one hand were the Southerners eager to increase the power of the slave bloc in Congress and the nationalists who dreamed of a continental United States. Against them was the steady pressure of the Whig Party, led by Henry Clay, and the anti-slavery Democrats backing Van Buren. These feared that annexation would precipitate a war with Mexico and wished in any case to block an accretion of Southern power.
Lyman Wight and George Miller were especially infected with Texas propaganda and urged moving the Wisconsin Black River Lumber Company to Texas as the first step in the migration of the church. Joseph had seen an article in the TexasTelegraph describing ruins of Indian temples on the Rio Puerco,- •History of the Church, Vol. VI, p. 222. and traces of ruined cities and aqueducts in the Cordilleras and on the Colorado. This set his imagination rocketing. What could be more appropriate than to build an empire on the site of the remnants of the vast civilizations described in his Book of Mormon
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What Joseph was asking for was an enormous tract comprising about three fifths of modern Texas, the eastern half of New Mexico, the Oklahoma panhandle, a bit of Kansas, a third of Colorado, and a section of south-central Wyoming. Texas was to recognize the Mormon nation, which in return would guarantee to help defend the Texans against Mexico, “standing as a go-between between the belligerent powers.” If Woodworth brought back a favorable reply, Lyman Wight and George Miller were to proceed to Texas with the Black River Lumber Company and take possession*
“Send every man in the city who is able to speak in public throughout the land to electioneer and make stump speeches,” he ordered. “Advocate the ‘Mormon’ religion, purity of elections, and call upon the people to stand by the law and put down mobocracy. ... Tell the people we have had Whig and Democratic Presidents long enough; We want a President of the United States.” Joseph suffered from no illusions about his chances of winning the supreme political post in the nation. He entered the ring not only to win publicity for himself and his church, but most of all to shock the other candidates
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Joseph did err, however, in his appraisal of his vote0getting capacity. Nauvoo now had a population of some 12,000 Mormons, and the surrounding countryside contained about a third as many more.[57] But there was so much optimistic talk about stupendous conversions in the States and in England that most of the citizens of Nauvoo talked in terms of 100,000 to 200,000 adherents to the faith. Joseph flung these figures about in his campaign speeches, estimating in a letter to Henry Clay that his people numbered 20o,ooo.f
The reactions of the Mormons to Joseph’s candidacy varied all the way from George Miller’s ingenuous certainty that if the election was successful Joseph and the Council of Fifty would “at once establish dominion in the United States,” to John D. Lee’s despairing complaint: “It was hard enough to preach the gospel without purse or scrip; but it was as nothing compared to offering the Prophet Joseph to the people as a candidate for the highest gift of the nation. I would a thousand times rather have been shut up in jail than to have taken such a trip, but I dared not refuse.”
His main theme, the natural fruit of his own experience, was that American liberty was on the wane and that calamity was about to destroy the peace of the people. “The world is governed too much,” he wrote, “and there is not a nation or a dynasty now occupying the earth which acknowledges Almighty God as their lawgiver, and as ‘crowns won by blood, by blood must be maintained,’ I go emphatically, virtuously, and humanely, for a Theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.
With his unhappy experience in Liberty jail still vivid in his memory, he advocated a drastic reform of the American penal system. Turn the jails into seminaries of learning, he said. Make work upon roads and public works the punishment for crime, and reserve rigor and seclusion only for those guilty of murder. Abolish imprisonment for debt, and pardon every convict, saying to him in the name of the Lord: “Go thy way and sin no more.”
Then in a complete reversal of his earlier stand he advocated freeing the slaves. Let the slaveholders be paid for them, he urged, out of the surplus revenue arising from the sale of public lands. “Break off the shackles from the poor black man, and- *Nauvoo Neighbor, April 17, 1844. tHistory of the Church, Voi. VI, p. 323. hire him to labor like other human beings, for ‘an hour of virtuous liberty on earth is worth a whole eternity of bondage.’ ” * Here he was echoing the sentiments of the Liberty Party, which since 1839 had been trying to create a third party out of the slavery issue.
By now Joseph’s attitude toward the Negro had become so liberal — partly as a result of his correspondence with the abolitionist C. V. Dyer — that he argued with Orson Hyde that if the roles of Negro and white were reversed the former would quickly assume the characteristics of the latter.f The demagogic Hyde was not impressed, and his conviction that the abolitionists were “trying to make void the curse of God” was never wholly erased from Mormon thinking, particularly since it could be reinforced by the unfortunate anti-Negro sentiments in Joseph’s Book of Abraham.!
* Despite the undertones of disaster that were rumbling in and about Nauvoo, he seemed to be riding securely astride the world. He was not only candidate for President, but also mayor of Nauvoo, judge of the municipal court, merchant of the leading store, hotel-keeper, official temple architect, real-estate agent, contractor, recorder of deeds, steamboat-owner, trustee-in-trust for all the finances of his church, lieutenant-general of the Nauvoo Legion, spiritual adviser and Lord’s communicant to the true church, King of the new Kingdom of God, and husband of almost fifty wives.
“Who can wonder,” wrote Josiah Quincy, “that the chair of the National Executive had its place among the visions of this self-reliant man? He had already traversed the roughest part of the way to that coveted position. Born in the lowest ranks of poverty, without book-learning and with the homeliest of all human names, he had made himself at the age of thirty-nine a power upon earth.”
But once in this spring of 1844, at the funeral of a certain King Follett, he delivered one of the most profound sermons of his whole career. For the first time he proclaimed in a unified discourse the themes that he had been inculcating in fragments and frequently in secret to his most favored Saints: the glory of knowledge, the multiplicity of gods, the eternal progression of the human soul. And when he was almost finished and the exaltation of spirit that motivates a great sermon was exhausting itself, he paused and in a wanton moment of self-searching said with a kind of wonder: “You don’t
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Actually the enmity against the Mormons was widespread and dangerous. Those who took Joseph’s campaign seriously saw him as an evil symbol of the union of church and state, and others suspected that he would eventually renounce his candidacy and declare for a popular candidate. The Masons, annoyed at rumors of corruption of the Masonic ritual in the Mormon lodges (which now numbered five, three in Nauvoo and two in Iowa) and furious at Joseph’s refusal to send the lodge records to Springfield for inspection, were determined to revoke the dispensations and declare all the Mormon lodges
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William Law had been his Second Counselor for more than two years, proving as steadfast and incorruptible as John C. Bennett had been treacherous and dissolute. Law had come from Canada a wealthy man. He had invested in real estate, construction, and steam mills, fostering more than anyone else the sorely needed industrialization of the city. In the beginning Law hid his resentment over the prophet’s monopoly of the management of real estate in and about the city, though he thought it unseemly in a man of God. He had been particularly shocked when Joseph threatened to excommunicate any wealthy
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The prophet was constantly pleading for money to build the temple and the Nauvoo House, which Law thought might well be delayed until the acute housing shortage in the city was alleviated. The temple was now the chief spectacle on the upper Mississippi, but the workmen who sweated over its great stones were living on parched corn.
In a violent session with his leader, Law called for a reformation and an end to the debauchery that was corrupting the church. Joseph argued, pleaded, and quoted the Old Testament, to no avail. Law threatened that unless Joseph went before the High Council, confessed his sins, and promised repentance, he would expose his seductions before the whole world.
This was the beginning of Law’s apostasy, but for some months an open break was avoided. Like so many other disaffected members, Law believed Joseph to be not a false but a fallen prophet, led into iniquity by the teachings of John C. Bennett and his own hot passions. He clung to Joseph’s earliest revelations — to the original purity of the gospel message which had made him a convert — and hoped that something would bring the prophet to his senses.
Foster’s trial was set for April 20, 1844. But when it was learned that he had marshaled forty-one witnesses and intended to turn the trial into an indictment of the prophet, a council met secretly in advance and excommunicated him along with William, Wilson, and Jane Law.f
The schism thus created in Nauvoo was small but dangerous. Although they were pariahs within the city, the apostates did not leave. It was not alone their business holdings that kept them there. William Law had courage, tenacity, and a strange, misguided idealism. Although he was surrounded chiefly by men who believed Joseph to be a base impostor, he clung to the hope that he could effect a reformation in the church. To this end he set up a church of his own, with himself as president, following faithfully the organization of the main body.
