American Crucifixion (11 page)

Joseph overreacted, immediately firing off this brief note to “Sharp, Editor of the Warsaw
Signal
”:

Nauvoo, Ill., May 26, 1841

SIR—

You will discontinue my paper—its contents are calculated to pollute me, and to patronize the filthy sheet—that tissue of lies—that sink of iniquity—is disgraceful to any moral man.

Yours, with utter contempt.

JOSEPH SMITH

P.S. Please publish the above in your contemptible paper.

Of course, Sharp did publish the note, under the headline

HIGHLY IMPORTANT!

A New Revelation from Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet

Smith had unwisely picked the proverbial fight with a man who bought printer’s ink by the barrel. Sharp never stinted on sarcasm and mockery where Joseph was concerned, inevitably referring to Smith as “His Holiness” and characterizing every communication from Nauvoo as a “revelation.” As one of his many pranks, Sharp pulled Smith’s old subscription request form from the
Western World
’s files. According to Sharp, the Prophet still owed the paper $3.00 in unpaid fees:

Come, Josey, fork over and for mercy’s sake don’t get a revelation that it is not to be paid. For if thou dost, we will send a prophet after thee mightier than thou.

Sharp quickly revisited the events of April 6, after the
Times and Seasons
accused him of repaying the Saints’ “hospitality and kindness” with “baseness.” “It does make us feel right bad,” Sharp shot back, “that we have been so ungrateful to the Mormon brotherhood.

Just think, reader!—after having been invited to Nauvoo on the 6 of April, by the Mayor of the city. . . . After having ridden to the Temple on that great day, in presence of assembled thousands, by the side of the Holy prophet—after supping with the Prophet, and eating heartily of his stall-fed turkey. . . .

Sharp introduced a theme that would dominate his anti-Mormon rhetoric for several years: the Saints’ militarism, so blatantly on display at the Legion parade: “How
military
these people are becoming,” Sharp wrote:

Every thing they say or do seems to breathe the spirit of military tactics. Their

appears on all great occasions in his splendid regimental dress, signs his name Lieutenant General, and more titles are to be found in the Nauvoo Legion than any one book on military tactics can produce. . . .

Reporting the Legion’s weekly maneuvers in the center of Nauvoo, Sharp concluded: “Truly
fighting
must be a part of the creed of these Saints!”

What motivated Sharp to hector the Mormons so relentlessly for six long years, until he and his confederates succeeded in driving the Saints out of Illinois? The Mormons’ ostentatious militarism probably shocked him, as he wrote. He repeatedly assailed the notion that a religion should have its own army. Furthermore, Sharp was one of the first to realize that the Saints’ rapid immigration into Nauvoo had created a powerful voting bloc, capable of ruling the county. “If Joe Smith is to control the majority of votes in our county, are we not, in effect, the subject of a despot?” Sharp wrote. “Might we not as well be serfs to the Autocrat of Russia?” “We ask the independent citizens of this county and this state
to wake up from their slumber
. . . to put down this foul and unholy attempt to
enslave
them.” He called Mormonism “a power in league with the Prince of Darkness, not inferior to the Spanish Inquisition in its capacity for secrecy and intrigue.”

Never underestimate the craven opportunism of the newspaper owner. “Mormon Joe and his Danite seraglio” provided great copy, and plenty of it. When Sharp wasn’t busy reporting, and often distorting, the goings-on in Nauvoo, he printed long swaths of text drawn from the anti-Mormon well. Several newspapers in New York and Pennsylvania were serializing wild tales of Joe Smith’s necromancy and plural wifery, retailed by money-hungry apostates, and Sharp delightedly reprinted any anti-Mormon trumpery, real or imagined. His readers lapped it up. Like journalists before and after him, Sharp knew how to milk a good story. When the Warsaw
Signal
finally ceased publication in 1846, Sharp admitted that “our cause against the Mormons has kept us in business.”

With Sharp riding high, Joseph’s younger brother William entered the fray. William was bad seed, needlessly combative and possessed of exceedingly poor judgment. (William once said his older brother Joseph “ought to have been hung up by the neck years ago.”) He saw that Sharp was landing some haymakers and influencing public opinion well beyond the confines of tiny Warsaw and Hancock County. William believed that his brother Don Carlos’s
Times and Seasons
lacked the stomach to fight toe-to-toe with Sharp, so he launched a newspaper with the express purpose of parrying the thrusts of the downstate newspaper tyro.

On April 16, 1842, William published the first issue of the Nauvoo
Wasp
, to combat “the shafts of slander . . . foul calumnies, and base misrepresentations” appearing in journals like the
Signal
. The
Wasp
vowed “to convey correct information to the world and thereby disabuse the public mind as to the many slanders that are constantly perpetrated against us.” In the very first issue, William published a brief item headlined “Nose-ology,” about one “Thom-ASS C. Sharp:”

the length of his snout is said to be in the exact proportion of seven to one compared with his intellectual faculties, having upon its convex surface well developed bumps.

According to William, Sharp’s nose deformations betrayed many dark traits, including “Anti-Mormonitiveness.”

But William was wielding a knife at a gun fight. “We have received the first number of a new six by nine, recently started at Nauvoo, yclept ‘
The Wasp
,’” Sharp informed his readers:

Of the “varmint” itself we have nothing to say, further than that the title is perfect

. If it had been called

, its name would then have corresponded perfectly with the character of its contents. It is needless to inform our readers that we don’t fight with such animals—nature having given them a decided advantage.

Joseph quickly realized that William needed adult supervision, and cut short his brother’s tenure at the
Wasp
. The Mormon leadership disavowed the “stinging” nature of William’s commentary and announced a new, irenic moniker for the weekly tabloid: “The Dove of the West.” The dove never flew. Instead, it became the
Nauvoo Neighbor
, a somewhat folksier version of the
Times and Seasons
, and Joseph appointed the sobersided Apostle John Taylor as the new editor.

UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE SAINTS, SHARP DIDN’T LIMIT HIS involvement with the Mormons to sarcastic spitballing. In July 1841, he queried his readers: “I ask you candidly, fellow citizens, if there is not need of an anti-Mormon Party in this county?” It was not a rhetorical question. Sharp was the driving force behind a countywide anti-Mormon convention that met in Warsaw, where Hancock’s “old settlers” tried to woo political candidates who would agree not to kowtow to the ever-increasing Mormon vote. “Old settlers,” or “old citizens,” as they called themselves, was a relative term. Carthage, the county seat, was established in 1833, and the town of Warsaw was laid out in 1834. Illinois had been a state for barely twenty-five years. Almost to a man, the Mormons’ opponents were new settlers, like Sharp himself, who was born in New Jersey. Businessman Mark Aldrich, who would become a prominent anti-Mormon agitator, built the second house erected in Warsaw, just eight years before the Mormons arrived. William Grover, who declared himself to be the “governor” of the “Warsaw Legislature,” an ersatz anti-Mormon civic organization, was born in New York, and so on.

The anti-Mormon party never really became a political organization, because Illinois already had two vigorous political parties, the Democrats and the Whigs. The post–Andrew Jackson Illinois Democrats represented the radical populist wing of the party, branded “locofocos” for their supposed impulsiveness (a locofoco was a sulfur match), and shared the votes in Hancock County and the surrounding areas with the more staid Whigs. The Democrats held the balance of power statewide, but the Whigs generally won Hancock County elections. The populist Democrats were pro-immigration free traders, anti–federal government and opposed to ambitious, federally funded public works. The Democrats favored states’ rights and America’s rapid westward expansion. The Whigs were the ideological heirs of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, favoring a national bank and a strong national currency. They waxed more cautious about widening the borders of the ever-growing union. In the large East Coast cities, interparty animus was real and sometimes spilled over into violence. In Illinois party politics, though, cooler heads generally prevailed.

Joseph Smith liked to say that he had no politics: “We care not a fig for
Whig
or
Democrat
, they are both alike to us,” he declared at the end of 1841. “We shall go for our
friends
, our TRIED FRIENDS, and the cause of
human liberty
, which is the cause of God.” Smith favored whichever party seemed most likely to help the Mormons strengthen their hand in Nauvoo, or advance their case for reparations from Missouri. It was assumed that he hated Democrats; after all, it was the Democratic governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, who signed the 1838 anti-Mormon Extermination Order. When Joseph traveled to Washington in 1840 to ask Democratic president Martin Van Buren to make good the Mormons’ enormous property losses in Missouri, Van Buren brushed him off, twice. “He is not as fit as my dog for the chair of state,” was Joseph’s famous assessment of Van Buren, “for my dog will make an effort to protect his abused and insulted master, while the present chief magistrate will not so much as lift his finger” to help citizens of the United States. Furthermore, it was Governor Boggs’s Democrat successor, Thomas Reynolds, who kept sending lawmen across the Mississippi to extradite Joseph Smith, for crimes he may or may not have committed. In 1840, the Nauvoo Saints voted Whig and helped swing Hancock County to William Henry Harrison, who became the ninth president of the United States.

But party lines meant little to Smith. He liked his friends more. Illinois state senator Stephen Douglas once helped Joseph out of a legal jam, and Joseph swung toward Douglas’s Democrats in the state elections of 1842. As Joseph voted, so voted the 2,000 or so eligible Saints who accepted his word as gospel. Eager to attract new residents, Illinois had liberal alien suffrage laws, which allowed white males to vote almost immediately after arriving in the state.

A notorious example of the Mormons’ mercurial political alliances, and one that earned them lasting enemies, occurred in mid-1843. Missouri governor Reynolds had issued a warrant for Joseph’s arrest, averring that he had escaped their Liberty jail in 1838. (In fact, he had been allowed to go free, for expediency’s sake.) Two deputies masquerading as Mormon elders hunted Joseph down and locked him in an upstairs room in a tavern in Dixon’s Ferry, Illinois, where he and Emma were visiting relatives upstate. The Missourians hoped to spirit Smith across the river without benefit of counsel, but the leather-lunged Joseph started to plead his case with the local citizenry from the pulpit of his second-story bedroom. Soon the Illinois crowd was cursing the “damned infernal pukes” and “nigger drivers” from Missouri and insisting that Joseph be allowed to consult with a lawyer.

It so happened that Cyrus Walker, “the greatest criminal lawyer in that part of Illinois,” was litigating in the neighborhood, and he also happened to be running for Congress. He “told me that he could not find time to be my lawyer unless I could promise him my vote,” Joseph explained. Illinois had just been redistricted, and Walker knew that the votes at Joseph’s command would pick the congressman from the Hancock County area. Joseph gave his word, and Walker exulted: “I am now sure of my election,” he boasted, “as Joseph Smith has promised me his vote, and I am going to defend him.”

Walker performed his legal magic, and soon Joseph reentered Nauvoo at the head of a half-mile-long triumphal procession, with the Legion band playing “Hail Columbia,” and his lawyer at his side. That evening, Joseph threw open the doors of his Nauvoo Mansion and laid out a huge banquet for all concerned. The perfidious Missouri sheriffs “were seated at the head of [the table] and served with the utmost kindness by Mrs. Smith in person,” a guest reported.

At a mass meeting in the “grove,” an open public area beneath the Temple hill, Joseph lauded Walker in front of thousands of his co-religionists. “I understand the gospel and you do not,” Smith proclaimed. “You understand the quackery of law, and I do not.”

With the August election just a few weeks away, Joseph made an unfortunate discovery. His brother Hyrum had been serving in the Illinois legislature and had promised the Mormon votes to the Democratic candidate, Joseph Hoge. Both Walker and Hoge spent the campaign’s final days electioneering in Nauvoo, and the situation turned awkward. The secular
Nauvoo Neighbor
suggested that the Saints vote in a unanimous bloc, further recommending that they vote for Hoge. Then God intervened. On Saturday evening, just two days before the election, Hyrum Smith rose to address the Saints in the grove and made a startling announcement: He “knew from knowledge that would not be doubted, from evidences that never fail, that Mr. Hoge was the man.” Hyrum raised both arms and brandished a yellow ballot printed on wrapping paper. “Those that vote this ticket, this flesh colored ticket, the Democratic ticket, shall be blessed,” he declared. “Those who do not shall be accursed. Thus saith the Lord.”