Culture of Violence 3

In May 1842, Joseph Smith reassembled a cadre of bodyguards, selecting primarily those with experience as Danites in Missouri. Former Danites such as Dimick B. Huntington, Daniel Carn, and Albert P. Rockwood began serving as Nauvoo’s “Night Watch.”[i]Previously a Danite captain, Rockwood had already been serving as “commander of my [Smith’s] life guards.”[ii] The Prophet’s bodyguards included such well-known Danites as John L. Butler, Reynolds Cahoon, Elias Higbee, Vinson Knight, Orrin Porter Rockwell, and Samuel H. Smith. The other bodyguards with Missouri experience were probably lesser-known Danites.[iii] In December 1842, a bounty hunter wrote to Missouri’s governor: “All of our efforts to seize the renegade Smith, have proved fruitless. He keeps constantly around him as body guard some 12 to 14 enthusiastic fanaticks which makes a secret approach impossible.”[iv]

In January 1843, Smith told dinner guests about whipping the Protestant minister in Kirtland “till he begged.”[v]A month later, he preached publicly about whipping the Palmyra wife-beater.[vi] On 28 March, the Prophet wrote that seventies president “Josiah Butterfield came to my house and insulted me so outrageously that I kicked him out of the house, across the yard, and into the street.”[vii] This was another instance of Smith upholding his sense of male honor.

Also in March 1843, Joseph Smith told the Nauvoo city council that he was opposed to hanging: “If a man kill another[,] shoot him or cut his throat[,] spilling his blood on the ground and let the smoke thereof ascend up to God. If I ever have the privilege of making a law on this point, I will have it so.”[viii] This remark echoed statements that Sidney Rigdon had made five years earlier, while a counselor in the First Presidency, about cutting the throats of non-Mormons in Missouri.

Although Smith’s instructions about capital punishment to the city council could be viewed as a secular commentary from the city’s mayor favoring a particular mode of capital punishment, theocracy was clearly the context of his comments as Church president to the LDS general conference on 6 April 1843: “I’ll wring a thief’s neck off if I can find him, if I cannot bring him to Justice any other way.”[ix] When former Danite John L. Butler heard his Prophet preach on this occasion, he understood Smith as saying “that the time would come that the sinners would have their heads cut off to save them.” Butler said the “spirit” of God filled him as he listened to those words. Butler’saccount was likewise included in the official “Journal History.”[x]

In June, Smith instructed the Nauvoo Mormons about the next stage of violence against their enemies. He warned what would happen “if Missouri continues her warfare, and to issue her writs against me and this people unlawfully and unjustly . . . if they don’t let me alone, I will turn up the world—I will make war.”[xi]

In August, the Mormon Prophet showed that he did not hesitate to physically assault a civil officer: “[Walter] Bagby called me a liar, and picked up a stone to throw at me, which so enraged me that I followed him a few steps, and struck him two or three times.” Smith added in a sermon: “I seized him by the throat to choke him off.” He pleaded guilty to assault and battery of Bagby, who was the county tax collector, and the Nauvoo judge assessed a fine for this crime.[xii] Joseph Smith’s secretary William Clayton added that Daniel H. Wells had ended the brawl when he “stepped between them and succeeded in separating them.” The prophet had evidently wanted to do further damage to Bagby, judging from his later complaint in a sermon about “Esquire Wells interfering when he had no business.”[xiii]

Concerning Nauvoo’s Sunday meeting of 17 September 1843, Joseph’s official history stated: “I took my post as Mayor outside the assembly to keep order and set an example to the other officers.”[xiv] Some non-Mormon attendees had a different perspective about the example Smith was setting. These residents of Warsaw, Illinois,

were at Nauvoo, in attendance upon public preaching, near the Temple. Bennett [not John C.] and his companion were engaged in some conversation about the time of day, when the Prophet, who happened to be near, came blustering up, and seizing him by the collar, led him out of the crowd. After letting go, Bennett turned to speak to him, when Smith commenced beating him with his cane, declaring that, if he didn’t shut his mouth, he would cane him out of the corporation [i.e., the city-limits]. Bennett came home, and on Tuesday made complaint before Justice [George] Rockwell for assault & battery. A writ was issued, and put into the hands of Mr. [James] Charles, Constable, who on appearing before the Prophet on Wednesday, was coolly told that he was too late! He had procured an arrest, and had a trial before a Nauvoo court, and was discharged.

In other words, Smith had arranged to have himself acquitted of the assault.[xv]

Although not dated in the autobiography which recorded it, the following incident may also have occurred in 1843. Ira N. Spaulding was riding in the Prophet’s carriage when “there came a man who held a [promissory] note against Joseph. He talked kindly to the man and begged him to wait a short time for the money as he could not pay him then[,] but good words would not satisfy him. He abused him [the Prophet] shamefully, calling him every mean name he could think of.” The man should have known that this was not a wise thing for anyone to do. Smith “stepped outside the carriage and knocked him down flat as a beef, not speaking a word and come into the carriage and traveled on.”[xvi]

Even the Mormon Prophet’s well-known hobby of wrestling manifested an unpleasant willingness to take physical advantage of smaller men. While celebrating Joseph’s “athletic nature,” Alexander L. Baugh noted: “On occasion, the Prophet even challenged much smaller individuals we might consider to be the more non-athletic type to wrestle with him.” He quoted Howard Coray about one example that ended badly. The Prophet told his devout follower:

“Brother Coray, I wish you was a little larger, I would like to have some fun with you.” I replied, perhaps you can as it is, —not realizing what I was saying—Joseph a man of over 200 lbs. weight, while I [was] scarcely 130 lb., made it not a little ridiculous for me to think of engaging with him in any thing like a scuffle. However, as soon as I made this reply, he began to trip me; he took some kind of a lock on my right leg, from which I was unable to extricate it. [A]nd throwing me around, broke it some 3 inch(es) above the ankle joint.

Breaking Coray’s leg was an accident which Joseph immediately regretted.[xvii]

However, Baugh did notraise an obvious question: Why would a tall, husky man like Joseph Smith want to humiliate small, scrawny men either by easily defeating them in a wrestling match or by giving them a challenge they would lose honor by declining? It does not matter that he often wrestled larger men for sport or that he sometimes engaged in serious fights with several opponents at once.

Whenever the Prophet challenged a smaller, obviously weaker male to a physical contest, he went beyond the male code of honor and engaged in the kind of behavior that Americans described at the time as “bullying.”[xviii] This also puts another perspective on Joseph’s boasting about beating up enemies until they begged him to stop.

Despite his endorsements of decapitation in 1843, there is no evidence that the Prophet ever actuallyauthorized such punishment in Nauvoo. However, one of his housegirls wrote, apparently late that November, that Dr. Robert D. Foster, surgeon-general and brevet-brigadier-general of the Nauvoo Legion, had used a sword to decapitate a man execution-style “on the prairie 6 miles” from LDS headquarters. Foster was not a dissenter then, but would become one within four months.[xix]

In December 1843, Joseph Smith organized the “Police Force of Nauvoo,” with Jonathan Dunham and Hosea Stout, former Danites, as captain and vice-captain. Among the forty police were such other Danites from Missouri as Charles C. Rich, John D. Lee, Daniel Carn, James Emmett, Stephen H. Goddard, Abraham C. Hodge, John L. Butler, Levi W. Hancock, Abraham O. Smoot, Dwight Harding, and William H. Edwards. Several members of the police force continuedto double as Smith’s personal bodyguards.[xx]

These Mormon policemen were proud of their Danite background. According to one complaining Mormon at Nauvoo, policeman Daniel Carn “told me several times [that] Daniteism was not down . . . said it was a good system.” Carn laconically replied (in Joseph Smith’s presence): “Daniteism is to stand by each other [—] that is all I know about Daniteism.”[xxi]

As mayor, Joseph authorized his police to kill “if need be,” and then said his own life was endangered in December 1843 by a “little dough-head” and “a right-hand Brutus.” The latter remarks put the police on notice to look for Mormon dissenters as traitors. Within a week, Nauvoo’s police left Smith’s second counselor William Law and Nauvoo’s stake president William Marks under the terrifying impression that Smith had marked them for death.[xxii] Both were foes of the Prophet’s secret practice of polygamy.[xxiii]

On 11 March 1844, Joseph Smith secretly organized the theocratic Council of Fifty in fulfillment of the revelation nearly two years earlier.[xxiv] Several months later, disaffected members claimed that he “swore them all to present secrecy, under penalty of death!”[xxv] Although the 1844 minutes of the Council of Fifty are sequestered in the LDS First Presidency’s vault, the claim of a theocratic “penalty of death” in 1844 is verified by available minutes from a later date which referred to a “Penalty.”[xxvi]

BYU professor William G. Hartley has written that the Missouri “Danite oaths [were] not to betray each other, the breaking of which could bring the death penalty.”[xxvii] At least eighteen members of the Council of Fifty had already taken oaths as Danites before Smith required this new guarantee of deadly secrecy in the spring of 1844.[xxviii]

Within two weeks, Smith took the first step toward abandoning the non-violent militarism which had characterized his leadership of the Nauvoo Legion during the years since he had escaped a death sentence for Danite militarism in Missouri. On 26 March, the Council of Fifty authorized Smith to ask Congress to commission him to recruit “one hundred thousand armed volunteers in the United States and Territories.” As secretly approved by this theocratic council, Smith’s “memorial” to Congress promised that he would use this military force “to extend the arm of deliverance to Texas [then an independent nationin conflict with Mexico]; [to] protect the inhabitants of Oregon from foreign aggressions and domestic broils; to prevent the crowned nations from encircling us as a nation on our western and southern borders.” This petition also asked Congress to provide for the arrest and two-year imprisonment of anyone who “shall hinder or attempt to hinder or molest the said Joseph Smith from executing his designs.” In case Congress was unwilling to grant these powers, Smith prepared a similar petition to the U.S. president. Ostensibly representing Smith as mayor, Orson Hyde carried this memorial to the nation’s leaders after being secretly commissioned as an ambassador of the theocratic Council of Fifty during its 4 April meeting.[xxix] Two months before asking federal authority for him to lead military forces against “foreign aggressions and domestic broils,” Joseph Smith had publicly announced himself as candidate for U.S. president.[xxx]

In contrast to the previous five years, Smith was no longer content with mere saber-rattling by the armed forces he commanded. Uriah Brown was initiated into the secretive Council of Fifty because of the Prophet’s 1844 interest in this non-Mormon’s invention of “liquid fire to destroy an army or navy.”[xxxi] Thirty years earlier, Brown had unsuccessfully offered his idea “for destroying by fire the vessels of the enemy” in a proposal to the U.S. Navy.[xxxii]

The last public endorsement of violence during Joseph Smith’s life occurred at the general conference on 6 April 1844. Sidney Rigdon undoubtedly startled many Mormons by announcing: “There are men standing in your midst that you cant [sic] do anything with them but cut their throat & bury them.” The Prophet said nothingto censure his first counselor’s remarks.[xxxiii]

Ten weeks later, Joseph Smith died as a martyr to his faith in Carthage Jail. But he was neither a willing nor non-violent martyr. As the mob clamored up the stairs, he fired at them with a six-shooter pistol, wounding three.[xxxiv]

Mormon culture became increasingly violent following the murder of its founding Prophet. Claiming apostolic succession from his fallen leader, Brigham Young authorized assault and battery against Nauvoo dissidents and applauded Porter Rockwell for killing some of those identified as involved in murdering Smith and other Mormons.[xxxv] On the pioneer trail and in the Utah society he created, Young increasingly preached about “blood atonement” against sinful Mormons and about “avenging the blood of the prophets” against anti-Mormons. These themes of violence and vengeance became both normative and pervasive in LDS sermons, hymns, newspaper editorials, and patriarchal blessings for decades.[xxxvi]

However, LDS apologists claim that faithful Mormons were really non-violent pioneers who regarded as mere “rhetorical devices” or “hyperbolic rhetoric” all evidence of this wholesale endorsement of theocratic violence.[xxxvii] To the contrary, there were many examples of religiously motivated assaults and murders until the First Presidency in December 1889 publicly abandoned previous Mormon teachings about blood atonement for apostates and about the temporal Church’s theocratic prerogatives.[xxxviii]Moreover, Utah pioneer diaries, correspondence, and Church minutes indicate that ordinary Mormons believed that they had the religious obligation to “blood atone” apostates and to avenge the blood of the prophets on anti-Mormon gentiles.[xxxix] As Utah historian Melvin T. Smith has noted, “violence against `evil’ became a defensible rationale for both the Smith family and for most early Church members.”[xl]

The fact that many Utah Mormon men did not act upon the norms for violence that Brigham Young and other general authorities promoted is beside the point. Those violent norms were officially approved and published by the LDS Church in pioneer Utah. Likewise, most Mormon men did not marry polygamously, even though this was an unrelenting norm of the LDS Church until 1890.[xli]

Nevertheless, Brigham Young did not originate Mormonism’s culture of violence. It had been nurtured by Joseph Smith’s revelations, theocracy, and personal behavior before June 1844. Like all prophets before or since, Smith was influenced by his environment, which included a national culture of violence and its code of male honor. This was a volatile mix for those early Americans who became Mormons within a hostile religious environment that was increasingly dominated by crusading Evangelicals.[xlii]