American Crucifixion (31 page)

The Smiths’ first gravestones in Nauvoo, next to the Mississippi River
Credit: Community of Christ Archives

But Joseph and Hyrum would not rest in peace.

In 1928, Joseph’s grandson Frederick M. Smith fretted that the waters of Lake Cooper, formed by a new dam on the Mississippi, might flood his family’s burial plots. Frederick was animated by more than a preservationist impulse. He was the president of a breakaway sect, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and had heard rumors that Brigham Young had spirited the Prophet’s remains away to Utah. After a week of excavating, a team of engineers and surveyors found the Smiths’ corpses, exhumed them, and placed the remains in silk-lined coffins. Frederick Smith arranged for the coffins to be moved seventeen feet uphill, to their current resting place.

“The Utah cousins were not pleased,” historian Samuel Brown drolly noted. That was an understatement. Joseph Fielding Smith, Hyrum’s grandson and Frederick’s cousin, said his relative had “debased himself in the sight of all honorable men as well as in the sight of God, in this unholy and sacrilegious act. . . . These remains should not have been disturbed, and such a despicable act could only be performed by those who are lacking in all the finer feelings.” Fielding Smith, a future LDS president, briefly considered suing his Midwestern brethren.

Today, Joseph lies next to Emma and Hyrum, underneath a plain marble slab bearing the inscription:

Joseph Smith

Prophet

Born Sharon, Vermont

December 23, 1805

Died Carthage, Illinois June 27, 1844

It has always appeared to me that the persons who committed the deed ought to be made to answer for their crime.

WHO KILLED JOSEPH SMITH? THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN easy question to answer. The murderers were undoubtedly familiar to the lackadaisical guards at the Carthage jail, whom they “overwhelmed” during their attack on the building. They rushed up the jailhouse stairway in broad daylight, in plain sight of Stigall, the nominal jailer, and quickly broke through the upstairs door to pour their mortal fire on the trapped Mormons. Richards and Taylor saw everything, and survived the attack. They were near-perfect eyewitnesses, highly literate men who wrote down summaries of the Carthage events soon after they happened. Richards and the Jack-Mormon sheriff Jacob Backenstos supplied lists of men who supposedly mobbed the jailhouse, but—like the names that William Clayton recorded in his diary on June 28—these merely named the Mormons’ many enemies in Hancock County, rather than the actual participants in the massacre. For instance, both Richards and Clayton placed William Law at the scene, but he was across the river in Iowa at the time.

When the time came to indict and try the nine men held responsible for Joseph Smith’s murder, things went terribly wrong. (The defendants were charged only with Joseph’s murder. Hyrum’s killers were to be separately indicted and tried, after this first proceeding.) The case,
People v. Levi Williams, et al.
, was a farce, even by the slapdash legal standards of America’s Western frontier. The four men who probably fired the shots that killed Joseph—John Wills, William Voras, fourteen-year-old William Gallagher, and Nathan Allen—simply vanished across the river to Missouri. The defense attorneys successfully excluded Mormons from the trial jury. That hardly mattered, though, as most Mormons were too frightened to leave Nauvoo to testify. The rank and file had had their fill of Illinois justice, and many of the leaders were lying low to avoid legal summonses related to the destruction of the
Expositor
. Neither Willard Richards nor John Taylor appeared in the courtroom. “They would have murdered us,” said Taylor, who had sampled quite enough of Carthage’s blood lust: “This prosecution is got up for the purpose of destroying the innocent and clearing the murderers.” The state would have to prove that the remaining five defendants conspired to kill Smith, and it would have to make the case without their testimony. Illinois law forbade defendants in a criminal trial from taking the stand.
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That’s not to say the prosecution didn’t have a case. Three eyewitnesses came forward to provide new details of the June 27 killings at Carthage. Although their stories were colorful and richly imagined, almost every detail they offered at the trial proved to be fanciful, fictional, self-serving, a complete lie, or some combination of all four.

But, in the end, the witnesses’ harum-scarum tales didn’t decide the outcome of the trial. A bizarre, last-minute turn of events sealed the defendants’ fate, possibly buttressing the Mormons’ cynical prediction that the verdict had been reached before the judge gaveled the proceedings to order.

TO PROSECUTE THE HIGH-PROFILE CASE, GOVERNOR FORD CHOSE Josiah Lamborn, a once-brilliant and formidable former attorney general of Illinois. Lamborn was not Ford’s first choice. Canny lawyers understood that convicting Joseph Smith’s assassins would win one few friends downstate, except for the legions of Mormon voters. But the Mormons’ future in Illinois was parlous at best. On May 24, 1845, the very day that the trial opened in Carthage, Brigham Young presided over a secret ceremony marking the completion of the Nauvoo Temple. There was talk of administering Joseph’s holy endowment ritual to the many thousands of Saints, and then leaving Illinois forthwith. The Smiths’ killings had settled nothing. True, there had been a brief hiatus in anti-Mormon agitation in southwestern Illinois. But the violence, the depredations, the raids on outlying farmhouses could start again at any moment. Joseph’s successors had already begun to scout locations for a new Zion, west of the Mississippi in the Rocky Mountain Basin.

So the thirty-six-year-old Lamborn shouldered a thankless burden. His contemporaries described him as “one of the most able, untiring yet merciless prosecutors that ever lived” and “a terror to his legal opponents.” Like many successful frontier lawyers, he was known for his oratory. In one famous case, Lamborn was prosecuting an elderly hog thief. The defense lawyer seemed to have won the jury’s sympathy for the white-haired pignapper, characterizing his client as a man with one foot in the grave and the other foot teetering on the brink. Lamborn rose to reply: “Yes, gentlemen of the jury. His hair is whitening for that place that burns with liquid fire: one foot is in the grave, and the other is in his neighbor’s hog pen.”

But Lamborn had also inflicted terror on himself. In his very first year of practice, he was investigated by the Illinois Supreme Court for sharing confidential information with adversaries and was nearly disbarred. In one of his best-known cases, he was accused of suborning perjury. As a prosecutor, Lamborn somehow convinced a feeble-minded defendant to confess to a grisly murder, for which he and his brother faced the gallows. In a final coup de théâtre, the defense lawyers announced a surprise witness, and . . . the purported murder victim walked through the courthouse door. There was talk of lynching Lamborn on the spot.

The whiff of corruption perfumed every phase of his career, and he was known to be a heavy drinker. Lamborn had a crippled foot since childhood and often leaned on a friend or colleague when moving in and out of the courtroom. At a young age, the sun seemed to be setting on his storied legal career.

His opponent as chief counsel for the defense was a rival Illinois legal celebrity, Orville H. Browning. The thirty-nine-year-old trial attorney and legislator was deemed to be “perhaps the ablest speaker in the state,” a state that was home to Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Browning, who cultivated a proper demeanor in the often woolly circuit courtrooms, was intensely devout and avoided mechanical transportation, such as stagecoaches and steamboats, on the Sabbath. In contrast with Lamborn, he was a clotheshorse. On the first day of trial he was easily the best-dressed man in the courtroom, sporting a ruffled shirt, a Prince Albert coat, and a yellow pocket handkerchief.

Browning was one of Joseph Smith’s favorite lawyers. He had defended Joseph against one of Missouri’s many attempts to have him sent across the Mississippi for trial in the Lilburn Boggs shooting. Browning and Smith ended up arguing a habeas corpus motion in Monmouth, Illinois, in 1841 before Douglas, then a circuit-court judge. Browning lived downstate in Quincy, and he claimed to remember the bedraggled and tormented Mormons who threw themselves on the mercy of Quincy residents in December 1838, after the Missourians chased them from their homes to the banks of the freezing Mississippi River:

Great God! have I not seen it? Yes, my eyes have beheld the bloodstained traces of innocent women and children, in the drear winter, who had traveled hundreds of miles barefoot, through frost and snow, to seek a refuge from their savage pursuers. ’Twas a scene of horror sufficient to enlist sympathy froman adamantine heart.

“This unfortunate man,” meaning Joseph, has suffered enough, Browning pled to judge Douglas. The lawyer said he would “gladly stand alone, and proudly spend my latest breath in defense of an oppressed American citizen.” In her often entertaining memoir, Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, recalled that Browning’s opponent “vomited at the feet of the judge” during his opening statement, “which, joined to the circumstances of his advocating the case of the Missourians, who are called pukes by their countrymen . . . was a source of much amusement to the court.”

Joseph recorded in his journal that Browning’s oration moved both the spectators and Judge Douglas to tears. (“Were there onions about?” editor Sharp sneered in the Warsaw
Signal
.) Douglas dismissed the arrest warrant, and yet again Joseph appreciated the worth of a good lawyer. Joseph Smith addressed the last letter of his life to Browning, sent at 12:20 p.m. from the Carthage jail on the day that he was killed. He informed Browning that he and Hyrum would be facing treason charges on Saturday morning; “We request your professional services at that time, on our defense, without fail.” A few hours later he was dead.

Now Browning was defending the mobbers who killed him. Several lawyers insisted on helping Browning, including Calvin Warren, who had been embroiled with defendant Mark Aldrich and Joseph Smith in the failed Mormon settlement in Warren, south of Nauvoo. Aldrich was in the dock as the commander of the Warsaw Cadets and the Warsaw Rifle Company, two units that rallied at the railroad shanties near Golden’s Point on the day of the Smiths’ murder. Aldrich and about a hundred and fifty of his men had ignored Governor Ford’s order to disband and stolen into Carthage to attack the jail. Three other defendants were also Warsaw militia leaders: former state senator Jacob Davis, who had unsuccessfully courted Mormon votes in a congressional election that he lost; Captain William Grover, the self-styled governor of the “Warsaw Legislature” who liked to make sport of the Mormon “Nephites” and “his most Sublime Excellency,” Joseph Smith; and the ferocious Mormon-hater Levi Williams. Young William Hamilton correctly observed that the Smiths’ murderers were “a respectable set of men.”

Judge Richard M. Young, a former US senator, presided. Young was a veteran circuit-riding judge who had tried cases alongside the up-and-coming Thomas Ford, back when towns like Carthage held trials in taverns and schools, not in dignified, two-story courthouses. Young was an accomplished fiddler and raconteur, six feet, two inches tall and handsome, “the finest looking man in the state,” according to one contemporary. No one suggested that he favored either the Mormons or their enemies. As an Illinois senator, Young had placed Smith’s laundry list of grievances against Missouri before the Senate when the Prophet visited Washington in 1839, hoping to secure reparations from Congress and the Van Buren administration. Young even loaned his famous constituent some money to tide him over during his visit to the capital.

Young had much to recommend him, most of all his bravery. When the proceedings began, Carthage was mobbed by outsiders. A thousand men, almost all of them armed, camped out on the Carthage green, ostensibly on the qui vive for the always-rumored Mormon invasion of their hearths and homes. The second-floor courtroom held about two hundred spectators, who packed it to capacity during the Smiths’ murder trial. Muskets and sidearms were brandished in the chamber. “Everybody . . . attending court comes armed to the teeth,” a correspondent for the
Missouri Republican
reported, “as if they were attending a militia muster instead of attending a court of justice.” The wild anti-Mormon onlookers routinely stamped their feet to protest any démarche perceived to favor the Saints and felt free to shout out caustic remarks about the proceedings. Young “was in duress,” Governor Ford reported, and “did not consider his life secure any part of the time.”