Nightfall at Nauvoo, part 2
Brief synopsis of a book based on early LDS, Mormon, history
(Samuel W. Taylor, author)
Despite Joseph's plural wives, Emma was willing to stick with Joseph. However, things were not
going well in Nauvoo. Stealing, counterfeiting, and other lawless acts were still going on in
addition to the iniquitous secret polygamy. While the governor of Illinois, Thomas Ford, lent
more than a sympathetic ear to the cause of Mormonism, the surrounding countryside was getting
totally fed up with the Mormons.
The retaliatory action of John Bennett openly exposing the secret plural wife doctrine added only
fuel to an already burning bonfire. If anyone thought that the polygamy issue was rumor, they
now knew it to be the truth. Try as Governor Ford might to have Joseph arrested, the courts of
Nauvoo merely overruled his action, and any Mormon taken in was immediately released.
Things were getting to a point where only lawlessness could seemingly overcome lawlessness.
While there could have been many "last straws," one in particular was singled out as the final bit
of lawlessness that would come to eventually put Joseph Smith back into jail ... and his being
killed.
William Law who was yet another who worked his way up to be second only to Joseph in the
church and the city, finally splitting ways from the church over the polygamy issue. William
Law and his brother soon became such enemies to Joseph that they feared for their lives when
walking the streets of Nauvoo. Like Bennett, they wanted the truth out.
"The Laws put up $600 for a press, which arrived in May. William Law, president of the new
church, helped install the printing equipment in the basement of a brick business building he had
built on Mulholland Street.".
"Three days later citizens of Nauvoo were excitedly reading the prospectus of the new paper, to
be called the Expositor. It would be dedicated to information 'of vital importance to public
welfare," specifically, the many 'gross abuses' of the city charter."
Not only that, but the Expositor wanted the "unconditional repeal" of the Nauvoo City Charter,
and bravely attacked Joseph, decrying "gross moral imperfections" and abuses. Further, they
wanted "to ward off the iron rod which is held over the devoted heads of the citizens of Nauvoo
and the surrounding country." It referred to Joseph as a "self-constituted monarch." This
prospectus was signed by both brothers, William and Wilson Law, along with five other
signatures.
Law had hoped to bring the majority of Nauvoo to William Law's standard, and depose Joseph as
head of the church... "as for Joseph, we have called upon him to repent. That failing, we are
earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the
same abominations and whoredoms. ... Many of us have sought reformation in the church ... but
our petitions were treated with contempt by Joseph."
The Expositor article, speaking of the many females coming into the religion from foreign
countries, went on to say,
"The harmless, inoffensive, and unsuspecting creatures are so devoted to the Prophet, and the
cause of Jesus Christ, that they do not dream of the deep laid and fatal scheme which prostrates
happiness, and renders death itself desirable; but they meet him, expecting to receive through
him a blessing, ... when in the stead thereof, they are told ... that God Almighty has revealed it to
him, that she should be his (Joseph's) Spiritual wife ... She is thunderstruck, faints, recovers, and
refuses. The Prophet damns her if she rejects. She thinks of the great sacrifice, and of the many
thousand miles she has traveled over sea and land, ... and replies, God's will (will) be done...."
The article further condemned Joseph's real estate and financial activities "... a scheme for selling
real estate to new arrivals at exorbitant prices and thus the wealth that is brought into the place is
swallowed by the one great throat, from whence there is no return." Joseph was accused of
appropriating for his personal use funds collected for building the temple.
It confirmed John C. Bennett's lurid tales of polygamy. "This was what Joseph had feared above
all, treachery from within his circle of intimates."
Joseph retaliated with violence. He gathered a group of "some hundreds of brethren," and
destroyed the press. And "that was Joseph's fatal error." After the press was destroyed, Joseph
ordered that William Law be killed.
The surrounding countryside was furious at Joseph's actions and threatened the governor that if
he couldn't handle it right, they would. Governor Ford realized that if something wasn't done, the
countryside may be a battleground for civil war. The state militia was called out, not to arrest
Joseph, but to quell the growing anger of the mobs about to storm Nauvoo.
But now, Ford, finally had good reason to arrest Joseph. "Ford's legalistic mind had immediately
pounced upon the relevant point .... that while frontier mobs had smashed earlier presses with
impunity, ... the city council of Nauvoo was not a mob, nor was it mob action when the mayor
(Joseph Smith) of the city gave written orders to the chief of police and the Nauvoo Legion to
smash the Expositor press and to demolish the building."
Ford called for Joseph to give himself up and report to jail. Instead Joseph, taking his brother
Hyrum with him, abandoned his people, and secretly fled across the river that night into Ohio to
get out of Illinois jurisdiction. Joseph knew that if he was imprisoned again, it would be the last
time and the last time alive on this earth. The mobs were now undoubtedly mad enough to kill
him.
After considerable pondering to their actual situation, it was clear that they had finally come to
the end of the road. It was Hyrum that finally suggested the decision to return to Nauvoo. When
Joseph asked Hyrum as to what they should do, Hyrum said, "Let us give ourselves up and see
this thing out. ... Let us go back and put our trust in God, and we shall not be harmed."
Reluctantly, Joseph agreed. While Joseph requested a state military guard upon his surrender,
Governor Ford told him he would have to furnish his own. With Joseph a company of men
escorted Joseph to the Carthage jail. "The town was up and waiting. For five years Joseph had
played cat-and-mouse, evading due process of law with his own law-makers, his own judges, his
own courts, his own police, his own army. Now at last the Mormon army had given up its guns
and the prophet had surrendered."
Hours ticked by as Joseph, Hyrum, and others of the arrested group spent time locked up in the
jail. Only two could sleep on the two beds, the other eight slept on the cold floor. Joseph and his
brother Hyrum took the beds. Two guns were smuggled into the jail. Further, Joseph secretly
sent a note out to order the Nauvoo legion to come to his rescue. When this note was received by
the commander of the legion, it was conveniently "lost." The legion did not respond to Joseph's
request as the Nauvoo Legion commander knew the outcome --- only a worsening of a bad
situation with more death and destruction -- and no solution to the problem
Rumors of plots to kill the Mormons at Carthage caused alarm. Governor Ford decided to
disband the troops standing guard outside the Carthage jail and travel to Nauvoo to help relive
some of the tension. However, another plot was at foot .....
The Carthage jailers loaded blanks into their guns while the mob amassed outside the jail. By
pre-arrangement, the mob would overtake the jail.
One by one, several of the ten prisoners were released. By early afternoon only four men
remained in the jail... Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, John Taylor, and Willard Richards. The
account of the battle follows:
John Taylor sipped at his glass of wine. "Brother Hyrum, I do not feel like singing."
Hyrum urged him to begin, and he'd get the spirit of it. Taylor finished his glass, then arose and
sang the ballad once more. Finished, he picked up the rascal-beater which Stephen Markham had
left behind, and took a seat at the window, watching below. Joseph and Hyrum checked their
pistols.
Then from outside came a sound which the four men in the jail knew only too well - a rising
rumble, muttered curses, thump of boots, the growl of a great animal - the mob.
Looking down from the window, Willard saw a hundred men with painted faces and turned coats
running toward the jail. The guards fired into the air, then reversed their guns, breeches upward.
The mob fired a few shots into the sky. The guard stood aside from the door and the mob poured
into the lower hallway.
The four men in the upper room ran to the door and braced against it as a shower of musket balls
blasted up the stairway. Boots stormed up the stairs and the mob hit the door. The men inside
held it firm. Thinking the door locked, someone fired through the keyhole, sending flying
splinters as the bullet passed between the men inside. They leaped back as another shot came
through the door panel, striking Hyrum directly in the face. As he staggered back against a
window, a shot came from below, knocking him to the floor.
"I am a dead man."
Joseph crouched over his dead brother. "Oh, dear Hyrum," he said barrenly; and then with a
surge of rage he sprang to the door, pulled it open a crack and fired into the mob on the landing,
pulling the trigger as fast as he could. Three chambers misfired, but the other three sent bullets
into the mob.
"Shot my arm to piecesl" a painted man yelled. "But I don't care - I got Hyrum!"
The mob fell back as Joseph emptied his pistol, giving Taylor a chance to spring behind the door
and kick it shut. He braced a boot against it, but the mob surged from the other side and opened
it a crack, shooting through while Taylor clubbed the muskets down with the rascal-beater.
"That's right, Brother Taylor!" Joseph called. "Parry them off!"
Yells came from the stairway. "What's wrong up there?" "Go in and get the bastards!" Taylor
kept clubbing the muskets away at the doorway, Willard standing on the other side out of the
range of fire, with Taylor's own stick, ready to help.
As the mob forced the door open Taylor sprang to a window. Below, ringing the jail, was the
painted mob, while some sixty yards away, observing and with guns ready to help, were the
Carthage Greys detailed to protect the prisoners. As Taylor began climbing out the window a
hail of bullets came from outside. Taylor crumpled on the sill as a ball from below and another
from the doorway struck him.
For a few moments he hung on the window sill, neither in nor out, while the men below and at
the doorway fired at him. Then he dropped back onto the cell floor and with a desperate surge of
strength got to his knees and began crawling toward the fragile protection of the couch in the
corner of the room. The men at the doorway took pot shots at the crawling man, hitting him with
three more bullets, while Willard at the doorway was beating at the musket barrels. The last ball
to strike Taylor knocked him sprawling under the cot.
Then the guns at the doorway turned to Joseph. The prophet in a last gesture of defense flung his
empty pistol at the mob, then amid a hail of bullets leaped for the same window from which
Taylor had tried to escape. He, too, looked down upon the painted faces of the mob, backed up
by the bayonets of the Carthage Greys. In a desperate appeal for mercy Joseph, who had
organized the Masonic lodge at Nauvoo, gave the order's signal of distress, crying out, "Is there
no help for the widow's son?"
There was none. Two balls hit him from behind and one from below.
"Oh, Lord!" The prophet crumpled onto the sill, then toppled forward and fell from the
second-floor window. "My God!" These were his last words.
"He's leaped the window!" someone cried from the doorway, and the mob turned and poured
downstairs. Willard stood a moment, incredulous. Through all the firing he, the biggest and
slowest-moving target of the four, had been untouched.
He hurried to the window. Nobody paid attention to him now. They were crowding about the
body of the prophet, lying limply by the well curb. A barefoot man with painted face dragged
Joseph to the well and set him against the curb.
Colonel Levi Williams of the Warsaw militia pointed to four painted men. "Make sure we've
done the job!" The men took up positions, raised muskets and fired into the prophet's body.
Willard, deathly sick, turned away from the sight. He started for the doorway when Taylor called
weakly from under the cot. "Take me." With the enormous strength of a fat man, forgetting his
palsied leg and arm, Willard picked up Taylor's heavy body as if it were a child's and hurried into
the dungeon. He put Taylor on the floor and made a quick examination of the wounds. Taylor
had been wounded five times, but the bullet that might have killed him had struck his watch.
The hands showed sixteen minutes and fifty-six seconds past five o'clock.
The raid had taken about two minutes.
Willard ripped open a mattress in the cell, pulled out the straw and heaped it over Taylor. "I
want you to live to tell the story," he whispered, and he spread the empty ticking over the straw
as boots thumped along the lower hallway again and upstairs to make sure the job was finished.
"Hyrum's the only one up here!"
"Where'd the other two go?"
"Taylor's shot to pieces. He can't get far!"
"The fat one's lame; neither can he!"
"Search this place! Dig them out!"
Willard crouched in the cell behind the straw covering Taylor, the ticking over them both, as
boot heels thumped closer.
A heavy voice bawled from the lower hallway. "Clean out, men! The Mormons are coming!"
The boots fled downstairs. Conscious of the enormity of the act, the mob divided into individual
men again, each horrorstricken at what he'd done. As individuals they fled outside and to the
woods to hide.
Willard arose in the dead silence and went outside. He gently picked up the body of the prophet
and carried it upstairs, where he laid Joseph out beside Hyrum.
Brigham was tenacious in wanting to stay at Nauvoo; however, the non-Mormon neighbors
wanted no part of them staying ... especially in light of the fact that Brigham now had forty wives
and there was no apparent change in attitude for the better with the new leadership.
Things only went from bad to worse. Eventually, all were forced out of Nauvoo under the most
extreme hardships, and the wagon trains started moving west with only another dark and black
chapter beginning as the original Council of the Twelve and remaining Saints settled Salt Lake
City.
Emma Smith, Joseph's first wife, joined the Methodist Religion. Young Joseph later founded the
Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and remained back east with his followers.
Perhaps the most accurate third party evaluation of Joseph was given by Governor Thomas Ford
of Illinois:
"... the most successful imposter in modern times; a man who though ignorant and coarse, had some great natural parts, which fitted him for temporary success, but which were so obscured and counteracted by the inherent corruption and vices of his nature that he never could succeed in establishing a system of policy which looked to permanent success. . . .
It must not be supposed that the pretended prophet practiced the tricks of the common imposter;
that he was a dark and gloomy person, with a long beard, a grave and severe aspect, and a
reserved and saintly carriage of his person; on the contrary, he was full of levity, even to boyish
romping; dressed like a dandy, and at times drank like a sailor and swore like a pirate. He could,
as occasion required, be exceedingly meek in his deportment; and then again rough and
boisterous as a highway robber; being always able to satisfy his followers of the propriety of his
conduct. He always quailed before power, and was arrogant to weakness. At times he could put
on the air of a penitent, as if feeling the deepest humiliation for his sins, and suffering unutterable
anguish, and indulging in the most gloomy forebodings of eternal woe. He was full six feet high,
strongly built, and uncommonly well muscled. No doubt he was as much indebted for his influence over an ignorant people, to the superiority of his physical vigor, as to his greater cunning
and intellect."