Culture of Violence 1

 The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism–Part I

By D. Michael Quinn

D. Michael Quinn is an independent scholar in Rancho Cucamonga, Southern California. His first ancestral Mormon mother, Lydia Bilyeu Workman, died in Nauvoo on 30 September 1845, just days after she was burned out of her farmhouse by mobs. Her five youngest children were aged six to eighteen.
C.C.A. Christensen: Detail from “Haun’s Mill”

It is extremely difficult for most of us today to comprehend the violence that was pervasive, often normative,[i] in early American culture.[ii] Much of this normative violence had its roots in the national culture while regions (such as the South and West) had their own traditions of sanctioned violence in daily life.[iii] In other instances, the rowdyism and violence were normative only for a subculture that was defined primarily by social class or ethnicity.[iv] Early Americans had perspectives about violence that were very different even from those of modern Americans who have served in the military or lived in war-torn societies, because it is normal for modern Americans to grow up in a peaceful environment where violence is considered a violation of social norms.

Some of America’s culture of violence is rooted in England. Robert Shoemaker has observed of England’s traditions of male honor before 1800 that “violence for men was part of accepted codes of masculine behavior, and offered them a means of affirming their gender identity, and gentlemen a means of confirming their superior social position.” Nevertheless, Shoemaker’s statistical analysis shows that urban Englishmen of all classes were becoming less violent during the decades before 1800.[v] Part of the reason for this decline of violence was the growing success of English common law’s “duty to retreat.” As Richard Maxwell Brown explains, a centuries-old “society of civility” in Britain that called for “obedienceto the duty to retreat—really a duty to flee from the scene altogether or, failing that, to retreat to the wall at one’s back—meant that in the vast majority of disputes no fatal outcome could occur.”

Beginning with an 1806 decision by a Massachusetts court, gradually the United States “as a whole repudiated the English common-law tradition in favor of the American theme of no duty to retreat: that one was legally justified in standing one’s ground to kill in self-defense.” This shiftresulted in America’s “proud new tolerance for killing in situations where it might have been avoided by obeying a legal duty to retreat.”[vi]

During this same period, American norms were changing concerning violence by boys and teenagers. E. Anthony Rotundo observes: “Early in the 1800s, men and women had seen youthful brawls as a badge of evil and a sign that manly self-control was not yet developed.” However, during a decades-long transition, “bourgeois Northerners did more than endorse interpersonal violence: they now believed that fighting helped to build youthful character.”[vii]

A few examples may be helpful in recognizing this early American culture of violence, which extended from the elite to the lower classes, from the cities to the villages, from North to South, from the Eastern Establishment to the western frontier. Although dueling (usually with pistols) was permitted by the laws of various states and was regarded as honorable by most Americans of the time,[viii] Thomas Jefferson in 1798 persuaded ambassador (and future president) James Monroe against trying to kill U.S. president John Adams in a duel.[ix] Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the Republic and secretary of the U.S. Treasury, died in an 1804 duel.[x] The history of dueling in the nation’s capital also included “an affair of honor” between Secretary of State Henry Clay and Senator John Randolph.[xi] Known for dueling while he was justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court in the early 1800s, Andrew Jackson killed one opponent in 1806, engaged in a hotel brawl as army general with Thomas Hart Benton in 1813, massacred countless Creek Indian women and children (including hundreds on a single day), executed six Tennessee militiamen in 1814 for leaving camp when they thought their enlistments had expired, illegally invaded the Spanish territory of Florida in 1818, and hanged two British men there for befriending the Seminole Indians—yet Jackson was elected U.S. president in 1828.[xii]As governor of Illinois Territory, William Henry Harrison declared “a war of extirpation” against the Kickapoo Indians who opposed white settlement on their ancestral lands, and he successfully used this violent campaign to get elected as U.S. president in 1840.[xiii] In 1842, Abraham Lincoln nearly engaged in a sword duel with the Illinois state auditor.[xiv]

Violence in the classroom was also common in early America. In 1802, students at Princeton University burned down the library; before 1830 had arrived, they had engaged in five other “major campus rebellions.” Student rioting and violence also plagued the University of Virginia during the 1830s and 1840s. The problem was even worse at public schools where the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and common laborers were educated. In 1837 alone, 400 schools had to be closed in Massachusetts because of violence and disciplinary problems.[xv] From colonial times to the mid-1840s, it was a tradition in Philadelphia on Sundays for young men to commit both “organized and spontaneous mayhem.”[xvi]

The pervasiveness of violence in early American culture, particularly by men, leads to an obvious question. Did every early American man, or even the vast majority, commit assault and battery? Existing evidence indicates that the answer is “no” for a large portion of American males during that era.

Why did many early American males avoid violence, even though it was socially sanctioned? Opinion polls did not exist, relatively few American males wrote diaries or letters about their personal feelings, and even fewer commented about their responses to violence (aside from service in the military). Therefore, the answer can be only tentative, but many early American males apparently declined to participate in their country’s culture of violence because of some combination of the following factors: non-aggressiveness in their personalities, their adherence to the Christian commandment to “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39), family indoctrination against violence, or their perception that there was never sufficient cause for them to resort to violence in their daily lives.

Because many American males (and nearly all females) avoided violence, we might question whether there really was a “culture of violence” in early America. To answer that question, we need more than arrest records, or anecdotal references to violent incidents, or even estimates of those who did not engage in violent acts. Rather, we need to ask a more fundamental question: What were the norms of the society regarding violence?

In terms of the previously cited examples of legally and socially sanctioned violence in daily life and of the election of national leaders with violent reputations, it should be obvious why historians regard early America as a violent culture. Though the incidents of violence are certainly important, both individually and statistically, the crucial question is whether the violent incidents occurred in concert with the society’s norms or in opposition to them.

It may be difficult for the majority of those who follow the Restoration message that began with the 1830 Book of Mormon to conceive of early Mormon culture as being violent.[xvii] After all, the Book of Mormon’s narratives endorsed self-defensive wars (Alma 43: 26, 47) but also expressed discomfort or condemnation of violence in daily life (1 Nephi 4:7–18; Mosiah 29:14; Alma 35:15; 48:11). Members of the Community of Christ, headquartered in Independence, Missouri, can point to a tradition of gentle co-existence with their neighbors which extends to that movement’s founding in the 1850s.[xviii] Members of the LDS Church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, can point to a similar tradition throughout their own lifetime and that of their parents, grandparents, sometimes great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents.[xix]

However, the Utah church’s peaceful norms extend back only to the 1890s,[xx] and the Community of Christ’s norms do not define the Mormonism which existed before the Reorganization of the 1850s. To avoid the “presentist bias” of trying to make the past conform to our own experience and world views,[xxi] we need to explore the personalities, norms, and behaviors of early Mormonism concerning violence.

In the above sentence, I mentioned “personalities” first because prior to the existence of Mormonism’s norms, its founder Joseph Smith Jr. had developed personality traits which interacted with the norms of the Church he led from 1830 to his death in 1844. As biographer Richard Lyman Bushman has recently observed, “Joseph’s reaction to insults was learned behavior, shared with his society. His anger was both his own and an expression of a cultural practice—what honorable men were taught to do. . . . The culture of honor moved him to contend with the offending parties to protect his easily bruised pride, even though all the while he wanted peace.”[xxii]

On the one hand, for example,in 1836 a Kirtland resident called Joseph Smith “a pugnacious Prophet.”[xxiii] This described a repeatedly manifestedaspect of Smith’s personality—he physically assaulted those who offended him, and he spoke with pride about these violent incidents. His followers might justify such personal behaviors with religious prooftexts about Jesus using a whip on money-changers in the temple at Jerusalem (John 2:15),[xxiv] but the Mormon Prophet’s resorting to assault and battery also reflected early America’s culture of violence and its code of male honor.[xxv]

On the other hand, as God’s living Prophet and mouthpiece on earth, Smith also claimed that Mormons had the religious right to take vengeance on their enemies and had the theocratic right to form private armies. Joseph Smith’s personality and his theocratic teachings were the joint basis for early Mormonism’s norms for violent behavior. This resulted in a violent religious subculture within a violent national culture.

“When I was a boy” in Palmyra, New York—probably in the 1820s—Smith confronted a wife-beater: “I whipped him till he said he had enough.”[xxvi] He also told Mormon friends another “anecdote. While [Joseph was] young, his father had a fine large watch dog which bit off an ear from David Stafford’s hog, which Stafford had turned into Smith[‘s] corn field. Stafford shot the dog and with six other fellows pitched upon him [Joseph] unawares. Joseph whipped the whole of them and escaped unhurt [—] which they swore to as recorded in Hurlburt’s or Howe’s Book.”[xxvii] Not surprisingly, the official History of the Church, published in Salt Lake City, deleted this latter passage from the Prophet’s personal journal, in part, perhaps, because it actually endorsed the accuracy of affidavits collected from Smith’s Palmyra neighbors and published in the first anti-Mormon book, Mormonism Unvailed.[xxviii]

However, despite these violent incidents in his early life (one expressing his code of male honor and onerepresenting self-defense), the first few years of Joseph’s leadership of the Church were remarkably non-violent. His pacifism was most extraordinary when, in March 1832, a mob broke into the homes of Smith, then church president and his counselor Sidney Rigdon in Hiram, Ohio. The mob dragged the two from their beds, attempted to poison Smith, nearly castrated him, beat both men unconscious, then tarred-and-feathered them. Worse, the Prophet’s adopted child died from exposure to the cold as the mob ransacked his house. Nevertheless, Joseph preached the next day to a congregation which included several of his attackers, and he sought no retribution. Among this mob was a former friend, apostate Symonds Rider.[xxix]

I find it difficult to explain in satisfactorily human terms how Joseph Smith could manifest such Quaker-like pacifism[xxx] in his personal responses to this physical attack on himself and family in 1832, yet could lash out with vehemence at far lesser provocations during the last ten years of his life. This contrast seems beyond Richard Bushman’s biographical assessments.

To explain the Prophet’s pacifist behavior in 1832, I think Joseph believed that Mormonism required him to live a higher standard. However, that changed—and Joseph became “pugnacious” for reasons that are neither explained nor self-evident.

Perhaps hackneyed phrases such as “straw that broke the camel’s back” or “dam bursting” apply to the cumulative effect of the years of religious ridicule and personal insults that he experienced. Both certainly provoked the Prophet’s conventionally American code of honor. At any rate, it is easier to explain the theocratic basis for violent aspects in his religious leadership after 1832.

Because Joseph Smith’s 1832 response to the 1832 mob attack was the most important guide his followers had concerning how they should respond to violent attacks, Mormons behaved as pacifists when Missourians attacked them in Jackson County during July 1833. Mobs destroyed the Mormon newspaper, the home of editor William W. Phelps, and burned nearly all copies of the newly printed Book of Commandments, the first collection of Smith’s revelations. Then the mob tarred-and-feathered Bishop Edward Partridge and other Mormon men for not agreeing to leave the county immediately. The Missouri Mormons gave no resistance to these attacks, brandished no weapons, and did not speak of revenge.[xxxi]

As resident John Corrill wrote, “up to this time the Mormons had not so much as lifted a finger, even in their own defense, so tenacious were they for the precepts of the gospel—’turn the other cheek.’”[xxxii] That changed after Smith made the first revelatory pronouncement that Mormon theocracy was a here-and-now reality, not some distant event connected with the millennial return of Jesus.[xxxiii]

In August 1833, Smith announced the words of God: “And now verily I say unto you, concerning the laws of the land, it is my will that my people should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them . . . “ The document required Mormons to obey divine rule, not secular authority, concerning war and militarism: “And again, this is the law I gave unto mine ancients, that they should not go out unto battle against any nation, kindred, tongue, or people, save I, the Lord, commanded them” (D&C 98:4–11, 33).[xxxiv] The revelation implied that God would reveal such commands through the LDS Prophet. That became explicit within months, when Joseph Smith became the theocratic commander-in-chief of the “armies of Israel.”

Having previously endured an anti-Mormon attack without retribution, the Mormon community in Missouri responded to this document’s instructions to endure a total of three attacks and “bear it patiently.” However, upon the fourth attack, “thine enemy is in thine hands and thou art justified.” This theocratic justification extended to vengeance against “all their enemies, to the third and fourth generation” (D&C 98:23, 25–26, 31, 37).

In October 1833, Missourians raided isolated Mormon homes, which was the second major attack of “your enemy,” after the attack in July. On 1 November, mobs destroyed the Church’s gristmill in Independence and attacked Mormon homes there. This was the third attack, and, in compliance with the August revelation, the Mormon community in Missouri again chose to “bear it patiently.” The next night, the Missourians raided Mormon settlements in the Blue River Valley. This time—the fourth attack—the Mormons surprised their enemy by fighting back. Skirmishes increased until the “Battle of Blue River” on 4 November, when Book of Mormon witness David Whitmer led the Mormons in killing two Missourians and severely wounding others. In response, Jackson County’s leaders called out the militia, who compelled the Mormons to surrender their weapons and begin leaving their homes.[xxxv]

It is possible that the 1833 Missouri mobbings caused the Prophet to enlist some of his followers as bodyguards, but the practice would have been understandable after his being tarred-and-feathered in 1832. In any event, a non-Mormon in Ohio wrote in January 1834 that “Smith has four or five armed men to gard [sic] him every night.”[xxxvi]

A month later, Joseph dictated a revelation concerning “the redemption of your brethren who have been scattered on the land of Zion” and “in avenging me of mine enemies.” To accomplish these ends, the revelation commanded Smith to organize at least “a hundred of the strength of my house, to go up with you unto the land of Zion,” adding the instruction, “And whoso is not willing to lay down his life for my sake, is not my disciple” (D&C 103:1, 26, 28, 34). This was the beginning of the Mormon military expedition called “Zion’s Camp.”[xxxvii]

Perhaps the most significant dimension of this “commandment” (v. 1) was its provision that “ye shall avenge me of mine enemies . . . unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (vv. 25–26). This new statement verified that the conditions laid down in the 1833 revelation had been fulfilled and that the Latter-day Saints were now free to take “vengeance” at will against any perceived enemy. This February 1834 revelation was the equivalent of a standing order from God—you may fire when ready.

Zion’s Camp did not succeed in redeeming Zion, but it transformed Mormon leadership and culture. In February 1834, the high council in Kirtland, Ohio, elected Joseph Smith as “commander-in-chief of the armies of Israel.”[xxxviii] This was one of the first acts of the newly organized high council, which thereby acknowledged Smith’s religious right to give God’s command to “go out unto battle against any nation, kindred, tongue, or people” (D&C 98:4–11, 33).

Zion’s Camp was the first organization established for the external security of Mormonism. In June 1834, Joseph Smith created the second by reorganizing his private bodyguards into an organization led by a captain, his brother Hyrum, who presided over twenty of “my life guards.”[xxxix]

Six months later, the military experience of Zion’s Camp (rather than any ecclesiastical service) was the basis upon which Joseph Smith said he was selecting men for the newly organized Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy.[xl] Unlike other American religious denominations, “the church militant” was a literal fact in Mormonism, not just a symbolic slogan.[xli]

During this same period, Joseph Smith was involved in two outbursts of personal violence in Kirtland. Sometime between April 1834 and April 1835, the following incident occurred, as described by Smith himself. After a Baptist minister threatened him with a cane, the Prophet said, “I whipped him till he begged. He threatened to prosecute me. I sent Luke Johnson[,] the constable[,] after him and he run him out of the County into Mentor,” Ohio.[xlii] Johnson explained that this act of violence occurred because the minister, after receiving the hospitality of the Prophet’s home, then “called Joseph a hypocrite, a liar, an imposter and a false prophet, and called upon him to repent.” Therefore, “Joseph boxed his ears with both hands, and, turning his face towards the door, kicked him into the street.”[xliii] The American code of honor triumphed.

In April 1835, Joseph’s brother-in-law Calvin W. Stoddard accused him of assault and battery. At a preliminary hearing, the judge ruled that “it is considered that the charge is sustained,” and the Prophet was bound over for trial at the Court of Common Pleas. However, because Stoddard failed to appear at the May trial, Smith was acquitted, and the plaintiff had to pay court costs.[xliv]

Despite this charge of battering his brother-in-law in a dispute during the spring, the Prophet showed remarkable restraint in the fall with his brother William, who had an equally pugnacious reputation.[xlv] Because Joseph would not allow their mother to testify at a high council trial, William Smith “became enraged. I finally ordered him to set [sic] down. He said he would not unless I knocked him down.” Although furious at his brother, Joseph did not respond to this challenge with violence. Concerning a subsequent argument, Joseph wrote that William “used violence upon my person.”[xlvi]

However, this fraternal conflict of 1835 had a final outcome which the Prophet’s diary and official LDS history did not mention. Joseph Smith’s devoted friend Benjamin F. Johnson, a Kirtland resident, reportedthat “for insolence to him, he (Joseph) soundly thrashed his brother William who boasted himself as invincible.”[xlvii]

Less than four years later, Smith’s former secretary Warren Parrish referred in print to these incidents. He condemned “the Prophet[‘]s fighting four pitched battles at fisticuff, without [sic within] four years, one with his own natural brother, one with his brotherinlaw [sic], one with Ezra Thair [Thayer], and one with a Baptist priest.” Parrish’s statement was endorsed by two disaffected apostles (including Constable Luke Johnson) and two disaffected Presidents of the Seventy.[xlviii]

By contrast, rather than becoming disaffected because of the Prophet’s personal violence, some faithful Mormons cited these incidents as justification for their own aggressive behavior. Following his ordination in Kirtland to the LDS offices of elder and seventy,[xlix] Elijah Abel served a proselytizing mission. After this African-American elder threatened “to knock down elder Christopher Merkley on their passage up Lake Ontario, he publickly [sic] declared that the elders in Kirtland make nothing of knocking down one another.” Jedediah M. Grant and Zenas H. Gurley disapproved of Abel’s preaching this, and they formally accused him of misconduct.[l]

Read Part II