Under the Banner of Heaven (14 page)

PART II

The earnest cadres of bureaucrats who today direct the Mormon Church’s growth across the world… are the spiritual descendants of those deeply disciplined Mormon pioneers. The Mormon Church, then and now, is founded upon complete obedience to hierarchical Church authority, and to the surety of revelation from above…

The doctrine of obedience sounds inimical to American individualism and alien to Protestantism generally, and it is. Yet the American frontier where Mormonism grew up has always been riven by contradictory attitudes toward individualism. It could be deadly in a place where cooperation, and indeed absolute obedience of the kind Mormons then and now understand, might offer the only means to survive. Survival was often collective or not at all, a lesson not lost on Mormons of later generations. Though the contemporary image of Mormons may be one of conservative rectitude, hopelessly middle-class and lower-middle-brow, tinged with both the Church’s nineteenth-century polygamous past and its refusal until the 1970s to give up official racism, the institutional preoccupation of the Church from its moment of inception has been with sheer survival.

Kenneth Anderson

“The Magic of the Great Salt Lake.”

Times Literary Supplement, March 24, 1995

NINE

HAUN’S MILL

Bearing persecution became the distinctive badge of membership in the church; it was the test of faith and of one’s chosenness. By the end of their stay in Missouri, Mormons had accumulated a long list of trials to commemorate…

Opposition gives value to struggle and inculcates self-confidence… It is difficult to imagine a successful Mormon Church without suffering, without the encouragement of it, without the memory of it. Persecution arguably was the only possible force that would have allowed the infant church to prosper.

R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans

When Mormonism made its debut, Joseph Smith’s embryonic religion was not welcomed with open arms by everyone. The very first review of
The Book of Mormon,
published in the Rochester
Daily Advertiser
on April 2, 1830—four days before Joseph’s church was even legally incorporated—typified reaction to the new faith among many in western New York. The review began,
“The Book of Mormon
has been placed in our hands. A viler imposition was never practiced. It is an evidence of fraud, blasphemy, and credulity, shocking both to Christians and moralists.”

Joseph’s widespread reputation as a charlatan, along with a rash of malicious rumors about his “gold Bible,” had fueled animosity throughout the Palmyra region. In December 1830 Joseph received a revelation in which God, noting the hostility in the New York air, commanded him to move his flock to Ohio. So the Latter-day Saints packed up and resettled just east of present-day Cleveland, in a town called Kirtland.

In Ohio the Mormons found their neighbors to be relatively hospitable, but in the summer of 1831 the Lord revealed to Joseph that Kirtland was merely a way station, and that the Missouri frontier was in fact “the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the Saints.” God explained that northwestern Missouri was among the earth’s holiest places: the Garden of Eden had not been located in the Middle East, as many believed, but rather in Jackson County, Missouri, near what, by the nineteenth century, had become the city of Independence. And it was here, too, that Christ would make His triumphant return before the century was out. Heeding the Lord’s words, Joseph instructed his followers to assemble in Jackson County and start building a New Jerusalem there. Saints began pouring into northwestern Missouri, and continued arriving in ever-greater numbers through 1838.

The people who already lived in Jackson County were not happy about the monumental influx. The Mormon immigrants for the most part hailed from the northeastern states and favored the abolition of slavery; Missourians tended to have southern roots—many of them actually owned slaves—and were deeply suspicious of the Mormons’ abolitionist leanings. But what alienated the residents of Jackson County most was the impenetrable clannishness of the Mormons and their arrogant sense of entitlement: the Saints insisted they were God’s chosen people and had been granted a divine right to claim northwestern Missouri as their Zion.

Everything the Mormons did seemed to heighten the Missourians’ apprehension. The Saints used church funds to purchase large tracts of land in Jackson County. They engaged in commerce exclusively with other Saints whenever possible, undermining local businesses. They voted in a uniform bloc, in strict accordance with Joseph’s directives, and as their numbers increased they threatened to dominate regional politics. Reflecting a common fear among Missourians, a letter published in 1833 in a Fayette newspaper warned, “The day is not far distant… when the sheriff, the justices, and the county judges will be Mormons.”

Mormons were eager to embrace any Gentiles who cared to convert, but the Saints had little interest in associating with Missourians who remained too ignorant or obstinate to grasp God’s plan for mankind. Joseph preached something he called “free agency”; everyone was free to choose whether to be on the side of the Lord or the side of wickedness; it was an entirely personal decision—but woe to those who decided wrong. If you knowingly chose to shun the God of Joseph and the Saints, you were utterly undeserving of sympathy or mercy.

This polarizing mind-set—“If you’re not with us, you’re against us”—was underscored by a revelation Joseph received in 1831, in which God commanded the Saints to “assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land of Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies.” When Missourians became aware of this commandment, they regarded it as an open declaration of war—an impression that seemed to be confirmed by an article published in a Mormon newspaper promising that the Saints would “literally tread upon the ashes of the wicked after they are destroyed from off the face of the earth.”

In the 1830s northwestern Missouri was still untamed country inhabited by rough, strong-willed characters. Jackson County residents initially responded to the perceived Mormon threat by holding town meetings, passing anti-Mormon resolutions, and demanding that civil authorities take some kind of action. When such gestures failed to stem the tide of Saints, however, the citizens of Independence took matters into their own hands.

In July 1833 an armed mob of five hundred Missourians tarred and feathered two Latter-day Saints and destroyed a printing office because an LDS newspaper had published an article deemed overly sympathetic to the antislavery viewpoint. Three days later the same mob rounded up nine Mormon leaders and, under the threat of death, forced them to sign an oath promising to leave Jackson County within a year. That autumn, thugs razed ten homes, killed one Saint, and stoned numerous others.

Then, one cold November night, vigilantes systematically terrorized every Mormon settlement in the region. After savagely beating the men, they drove twelve hundred Saints from their homes, forcing them to run for their lives into the frigid darkness. Most of them fled north across the Missouri River, never to return to Jackson County.

Joseph deplored violence, and for the better part of five years he forbade the Mormons to retaliate, even though the attacks against them continued. But by the summer and fall of 1838, the tension between Gentiles and the ten thousand Saints who were by then in Missouri reached critical mass.

In 1836 the Missouri legislature, hoping to relocate the Saints in an out-of-the-way place that would forestall bloodshed, had designated sparsely populated Caldwell County as a zone of Mormon settlement, prompting most of the Saints in Missouri to move there from adjacent, less-welcoming counties. By 1838 the Mormons had purchased some 250,000 acres in Caldwell County from the federal government and built a thriving town they christened Far West.

At first the exodus to Caldwell County seemed to defuse the tension between Mormons and Gentiles. But in the summer of 1838 trouble erupted in neighboring Daviess County, where Mormons had spilled over the county line and begun establishing large new settlements. August 6 was Election Day in Missouri. That morning after the polls opened in Gallatin, the Daviess county seat, a Whig candidate for the state legislature, William Peniston, climbed on top of a barrel and bellowed to the rabble that Mormons were “horse thieves, liars, counterfeiters, and dupes.” Hoping to prevent the thirty or so Mormons present from casting their ballots, another Missourian then loudly opined that Mormons should no more have the right to vote “than the niggers.”

The incendiary rhetoric provoked a drunk Missourian to beat up a diminutive Mormon shoemaker named Samuel Brown. When other Mormons came to Brown’s aid, a vicious brawl broke out. Wielding clubs, rocks, whips, and knives, the badly outnumbered Saints managed to overcome the Missourians and drive them off, leaving dozens of their foes severely wounded. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The enraged citizens of Gallatin vowed to pay the Mormons back in kind.

Over the next two months, Missourians launched a campaign of harassment and violence against the Mormon residents of Daviess County, forcing most of them from their homes. Finally, on October 14 in Far West, Joseph assembled several hundred of his followers in the town square and urged them to fight back. Seething, the prophet declared:

We are an injured people. From county to county we have been driven by unscrupulous mobs eager to seize the land we have cleared and improved with such love and toil. We have appealed to magistrates, judges, the Governor, and even the President of the United States, but there has been no redress for us…

If the people will let us alone, we will preach the gospel in peace. But if they come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was “the Alcoran [Qur’an] or the Sword.” So shall it eventually be with us—“Joseph Smith or the Sword!”*

*Joseph was not the only person to draw parallels between the founding prophets of Mormonism and Islam. Most such comparisons were made by Gentile critics intending to denigrate the Saints and their faith, but certain undeniable similarities were also noted by those sympathetic to Joseph’s church. Among these admirers was Sir Richard F. Burton, the famous nineteenth-century libertine and adventurer who had extensive firsthand knowledge of Islamic cultures. Upon visiting Salt Lake City soon after the Mormons arrived there, Burton observed that Mormonism, “like El Islam,” claimed to be “a restoration by revelation of the pure and primeval religion of the world.” In 1904 the esteemed German scholar Eduard Meyer spent a year in Utah studying the Saints, which moved him to predict, “As Arabia was to be the inheritance of the Muslims, so was America to become the inheritance of the Mormons.” And in 1932, after acknowledging in a book called
Revelation in Mormonism
that “similarities between Islam and Mormonism have been misunderstood and exaggerated,” George Arbaugh nevertheless went on to assert, “Mormonism is one of the most boldly innovating developments in the history of religions. Its aggressive theocratic claims, political aspirations, and use offeree, make it akin to Islam.”

It was an impassioned speech, and the Mormons responded. Venting years of pent-up anger, they began raiding Gentile towns and plundering food, livestock, and valuables, burning approximately fifty non-Mormon homes in the process.

Outraged, Missourians retaliated with counterattacks, destroying several Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph’s forceful call to arms, a skirmish resulted in the death of three Saints and one Gentile. Making matters even worse, the carnage from this fight was wildly exaggerated in an inflammatory letter to Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, wherein it was falsely reported that the Saints had slaughtered fifty Missourians. Upon reading this, Boggs—who had won the 1836 gubernatorial election on an anti-Mormon platform—issued a now-infamous order to the top-ranked general of the Missouri Militia: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated, or driven from the state, if necessary for the public peace. Their outrages are beyond all description.”

Days later, three companies of the Missouri Militia, commanded by Colonel Thomas Jennings, launched a surprise attack on a Mormon settlement known as Haun’s Mill. Late in the afternoon of October 30, 1838, as the sun “hung low and red in a beautiful Indian summer sky,” some twenty-five Mormon families working in the fields were surprised to see 240 troops appear suddenly from the surrounding woods, aim their muskets, and fire in unison at the Saints.

The commander of the Mormons, realizing that his lightly armed community had no chance against such an overwhelming force, immediately waved his hat and yelled out his desire to surrender. The Missourians ignored his pleas for mercy and kept shooting, inciting panic among the Saints. Many of the Mormons scattered into nearby thickets, but three boys and fifteen men sought refuge inside the settlement’s blacksmith shop. There were wide, unchinked gaps between the logs that formed the walls, and shooting the Mormons through these gaps was no more difficult for the Missourians than plinking hogs in a pen. As more and more Saints were killed, the Missourians walked right up to the shop, poked the barrels of their guns between the logs, and fired at the heap of groaning bodies from point-blank range.

When the Missourians directed no further movement inside, they entered and found a ten-year-old boy, Sardius Smith, cowering under the bellows. The youth begged for his life, but a Missourian named William Reynolds put a gun to the boy’s head. Sardius’s younger brother, who was shot through the hip but survived by feigning death beneath the corpses, later reported that one of the Gentiles begged Reynolds not to shoot Sardius, on account of his youth, at which point Reynolds responded by explaining that Mormon children needed to be exterminated because “nits will make lice.” And then he dispassionately blasted the top of the boy’s skull off.