American Crucifixion Quotes

“In front of the reviewing stand, she presented Joseph with a twenty-six-star, handcrafted silk American flag, sewn for the occasion by the ladies of Nauvoo. Then the officers, the honored guests, and the twenty members of the Legion marching band assembled for the procession to the temple site. Joseph had assigned special places on the reviewing stand to the Sauk Indian chief Keokuk and his entourage, who had crossed over from Iowa to partake in the festivities.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“Joseph also administered the new, secret rite of the Second Anointing for chosen couples upstairs at the store. He sealed polygamous marriages in the second-floor office, never revealing them to the Saints at large. Smith and Brigham Young kept coded records of these events, sometimes using pseudonyms. In his diary, Smith occasionally called himself “Baurak Ale.” To record his marriages, Young might write “saw E. Partridge,” a code which meant “[s]ealed [a]nd [w]ed Emily Partridge,” or “ME L. Beaman,” which would mean “married for eternity Louisa Beaman.” One of Joseph’s plural wives, Willard Richards’s sister Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“Joseph was hardly the first prophet of America’s Second Great Awakening—the tide of religious fervor that washed across the country at the start of the nineteenth century—to traffic in millenarian predictions, and he wasn’t the last. But he was the most successful.”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church

“Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. “We dare not come,” he insisted—three times. “Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control”
― Alex Beam, American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church