American Crucifixion (37 page)

Let my saints gather up with all consistent speed and move westward. . . .

In a letter to the British church, Hyde assured the Saints that tales of Strang’s mass conversions were much exaggerated. “I do not know of ten persons in Nauvoo that have joined Mr. Strang,” Hyde insisted. “There are none who join him except a few Rigdonites . . . Strangism is but a second and revised edition of Rigdonism.”

Hyde’s fellow apostle, Heber Kimball, scoffed that “Strangism was not worth investigating—it was not worth the skin of a fart.”

Even though Brigham threatened to sanction any Saint caught reading a Strangite publication or listening to one of the Wisconsin missionaries, several prominent Saints rallied to Strangism, for a time. William Marks, Emma Smith, and William Smith briefly considered themselves Strangites, as did Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, Apostle George Adams, and Martin Harris, an original witness to the creation of the Book of Mormon. Strang knew that the support of the Smith family would validate his shaky succession claim. In one exchange, Strang offered to appoint William Smith to be patriarch of his new church,
if
William relocated to Wisconsin with his mother, and with the Egyptian mummies and the famous papyrus scrolls. Strang also asked William to bring along the cadavers of his dead brothers, Joseph and Hyrum. William did travel to Voree, but no living or dead family members, and no funerary paraphernalia, accompanied him. William was one of about a thousand or so Saints who answered James Strang’s call, gathering first at Voree, and then going to Beaver Island, Strang’s remote fastness in the middle of Lake Michigan.

With each passing month, however, Strang revealed more of his personal eccentricities. He knew that Joseph Smith had created secret conclaves for chosen Saints, so he quickly introduced a secret organization called the Halcyon Order of the Illuminati. Strang, the order’s “Imperial Primate,” ordained a few dozen of his followers as chevaliers, marshals, earls, and cardinals. In the initiation rite, he escorted new members to a dark room, where he anointed them with a mysterious, luminous oil that created a halo effect above their heads. William Smith discovered that the oily mixture contained phosphorus and could set a man’s hair on fire. Strang pooh-poohed the risk, likening his initiation to the miracles of Christ.

On July 8, 1850, Strang summoned his followers to an odd event inside his partly finished tabernacle on Beaver Island. Attended by seventy dignitaries wearing scarlet robes, Strang presented himself to his followers seated on a throne, wearing a long red-and-white gown. In accordance with the teaching of the Book of the Law of the Lord, the Lake Michigan prophet declared himself to be the king of Beaver Island, and beyond. A follower lowered a paper crown studded with stars onto Strang’s head, while an apostle brought forth a “royal diadem” and placed it in Strang’s hands. The congregation testified that “the Kingdom of God is set up on the Earth no more to be thrown down.”

This was the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prediction that the Saints would establish the Kingdom of God on earth in preparation for the Second Coming. Joseph had already secretly crowned
himself
king of the Kingdom of God, although not in public. Joseph correctly guessed that the United States wouldn’t tolerate any monarch, no matter how vaporous his realm. As the leader of perhaps 20,000 not very popular Mormons adrift in an ocean of Gentiles, Joseph hid his kingship under a bushel. Strang had no such inhibitions, apparently unaware of the farcical effect of his claims. He aped Joseph in yet another sphere, baptizing dead celebrities in the chilly White River that flowed just north of Voree. Lord Byron, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams all became Strangite Saints in their respective afterlives.

Soon it became clear that Strang intended to copy yet another of Joseph’s doctrines; he was a secret polygamist. William Marks and the Smith family rallied to Strang mainly because he publicly abjured polygamy. But Strang’s private life proved to be complex indeed. For seven months starting in 1849, Strang traveled the country with his young nephew, Charley Douglass, who served as his assistant and secretary. “Douglass” was in fact a comely nineteen-year-old Mormon girl named Elvira Field, whom Strang had secretly married in the summer of 1849. At the time he was thirty-six years old, and already married to a wife who had borne him two children. Strang, who had campaigned so militantly against spiritual wifery, said the plates made him do it, specifically, the Plates of Laban, with their secret Law of the Lord. “Strang translated the plates that he claimed were genuine,” a follower explained

and found in them the principle of polygamy; and after the translation he published it, and then he indorsed the doctrine of polygamy after he was commanded to do so. . . .

“Charley Douglass’s” secret wouldn’t last long. One Saint raised the question of Charley’s “physiological peculiarities” with Strang, who quickly answered that Charley had a look-alike sister on Beaver Island.
^*
Around the time that Elvira delivered her first child, Strang’s first wife, Mary, fled Beaver Island, for reasons one can only surmise. Strang was soon openly espousing plural wifery, and eventually had five wives. Just as the Hancock County Gentiles deemed polygamy to be sinful and perverse, so did the fishermen and lumberjacks who were Strang’s neighbors along the Lake Michigan shoreline. They didn’t like the Mormons casting their votes en bloc, either, and they didn’t like Strang’s autarkic economic policies, which made lake traders unwelcome in Mormon settlements. In 1856, the man who claimed to be the next Joseph Smith died just as Joseph did, cut down by vigilante assassins who enjoyed the protection of the powers that be. Strang was killed with the connivance of the US Navy, which quickly spirited his killers away from Beaver Island, and away from prosecution. The difference between Strang and Smith was that Joseph’s church continued to thrive and grow for 170 years after his death, while Strangism devolved into a comical footnote to the history of religion.

FOR BRIGHAM YOUNG, INTENT ON CONSOLIDATING HIS POWER in Nauvoo, Strangism was an annoyance and not much more. Discrediting Sidney Rigdon, an ordained “seer and revelator” and a comrade who spent three months with Joseph Smith fighting off rats in a fetid Missouri jail, took a higher priority. In a six-hour public trial just one month after the Young-Rigdon showdown, the Quorum of the Twelve excommunicated their former colleague, in absentia. “His late revelations are of the devil,” William Phelps testified. “Brother Joseph said he would carry him no more,” Apostle Heber Kimball chimed in. Brigham Young called Rigdon “a black hearted wretch,” and the former first counselor’s fate was sealed. Except for a few dissenting votes, including that of William Marks, the assembled Saints washed their hands of Joseph Smith’s longtime colleague.

“President Young arose and delivered Sidney Rigdon over to the buffetings of Satan in the name of the Lord,” the official church history recorded, “and all the people said, ‘Amen.’”

Rigdon quickly moved back East to end his life in poverty and humiliation. In his dotage, Rigdon’s mania became more acute. His family eventually forbade him to preach. “He seemed sane upon every other subject except religion,” his son Wyckliffe Rigdon wrote. “When he got on that subject, he seemed to lose himself and his family would not permit him to talk in that subject, especially with strangers.”

Joseph Smith’s family was a separate problem. Emma and Brigham were at loggerheads. The two feuded over money. For public consumption, Joseph had affected ecclesiastic poverty. He once claimed to own a horse, two pet deer, “two old turkeys and four young ones . . . an old cow . . . a dog, his wife, children, and a little household furniture.” In fact he had placed much of his property, and some church properties, in Emma’s name, and Emma feared that the apostles would confiscate the Nauvoo Mansion and other assets from her, leaving her destitute. Joseph’s estate was deeply in debt. His 1842 bankruptcy petition had failed, and creditors were still demanding yearly payments on his questionable property claims in Nauvoo and across the river. “There is considerable danger if the family begin to dispute about the property, that Joseph’s creditors will come forward and use up all the property there is,” his confidant William Clayton noted in a July 2, 1844, diary entry. “If they will keep still there is property enough to pay the debts and plenty left for other uses.”

Emma and Brigham were likewise irreconcilable on polygamy, which Emma started to deny had ever existed. Brigham voiced astonishing accusations against Emma: “Twice she undertook to kill him,” he charged, suggesting that she tried to poison her husband, and that she delivered him to certain death by allowing him to return to Nauvoo from his abortive flight to Montrose, Iowa. Brigham craved the legitimacy of the Smith family’s approval, reacting angrily when it eluded him.

The sulfurous William became a proxy in the war between Emma and the Twelve. On the first anniversary of Joseph’s death, the boys’ mother, Lucy Mack Smith, promulgated a dream in which God told her that “the Presidency of the Church belongs to William, according to his lineage, he having inherited it from the family before the foundation of the world.” The Twelve grudgingly appointed William to be church patriarch, a largely ceremonial position, then quickly realized their mistake. William claimed that the patriarch ruled over the Twelve, which prompted an immediate, vituperative response from Brigham and the apostles. On a day when he decided to address the Saints in the grove, William arrived to find the seats and benches smeared with feces. His challenge to the Twelve ended with his excommunication, and a long period of self-imposed exile from mainstream Mormonism. William famously observed that the Twelve “were mean enough to steal if they could get the chance even Christ’s supper off his plate, or seduce the Virgin Mary, or Rob an orphan child of 25 cents. So damnable are their acts & conduct that old Judas would be a perfect gentleman to these men.” After Brigham’s death, William joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, led by the Prophet’s oldest son, Joseph Smith III.

BRIGHAM HAD CONSOLIDATED HIS GRIP ON THE NAUVOO SAINTS. But while he was shrugging off leadership challenges from Rigdon, Strang, and William Smith, the same forces that had marshaled to kill Joseph were gathering strength again. This time the “old settlers,” still led by Thomas Sharp and the marauder Levi Williams, were agitating for a final solution: the expulsion of the Mormons from Illinois. Sharp, who offered “THREE CHEERS FOR THE BRAVE COMPANY WHO SHOT [Joseph Smith] TO PIECES” shortly after the murders, had never stopped waving the bloody shirt. “It is impossible that the two communities can long live together,” the
Signal
editorialized shortly after Joseph’s death. “They can
never
assimilate. We repeat our firm conviction that one or the other
must
leave.”

Even the pusillanimous Governor Ford realized that civil society was doomed in Hancock County. In April 1845, he confided to Brigham Young that the Mormons would always be “enemies and outcasts” in Illinois, privately suggesting that Young take the Saints elsewhere:

Your religion is new and it surprises the people as any great novelty in religion generally does. However truly and sincerely your own people may believe in it, the impression on the public mind everywhere is that your leading men are impostors and rogues and that the others are dupes and fools. . . .

If you can get off by yourselves, you may enjoy peace; but, surrounded by such neighbors, I confess that I do not see the time when you will be permitted to enjoy quiet.

The artificial peace that followed the killings at the Carthage jail effectively ended with the trial, and its summary acquittals. The message was clear: No anti-Mormon depredation would ever be punished in Illinois. The old settlers were free to act as they pleased.

In the early fall of 1845, Levi Williams and his Warsaw vigilantes began to systematically attack Mormon farms and settlements outside Nauvoo. The attacks began in Morley’s Settlement, twenty-five miles south of Nauvoo. “The mob is upon us,” two Mormons reported. “They have burned six buildings already. . . . They are in number about two hundred. They shoot at every brother they see.” Over the course of several weeks, Williams and his “regulators” attacked Mormon enclaves in Lima, Bear Creek, Camp Creek, and La Harpe, destroying about two hundred homes and farms and torching innumerable mills and hay ricks. By September 16, Brigham had had enough. For the fourth time in recent Mormon history, their leader backed away from a shooting war with the Gentiles, saving untold lives in the process. Young issued a “Proclamation to Col. Levi Williams and Mob Party,” informing his enemies that “it is our intention to leave Nauvoo and the country next spring.” The Mormons soon hammered out an understanding with a committee of distinguished Illinoisans, including Joseph’s friend Stephen Douglas, that they would plant no new crops in Nauvoo and depart the area “as soon as the grass is green and the water runs.” That implied that they would leave around March, when the Mississippi ice floes would start breaking up, and their teams of horse and oxen could graze on the Iowa plains during their journey westward.