The Mormon puzzle, and how to solve it

by R. W. Beers

The other public buildings in Nauvoo were the Seventies’ Hall, the Masonic Temple, the Concert Hall, and the large hotel which the Prophet said was to be the “mission-house of the world,” where he would entertain emperors, kings, and queens from the Old World, who would come to him to inquire of the new faith.

This city, although peculiar, had many excellent features. There was no licensed place to sell liquors, and drunkenness was almost unknown. It was well governed. All was order and peace. There was great thrift and industry among the people. Loafers or idlers were in disrepute. If a stranger entered Nauvoo and was found to be lazy he was at once “whittled” out of the town by the deacons. This whittling process was a very ingenious thing. It was a method by which the suspected person was followed by certain officials who surrounded him or his abode, and in unison whittled at sticks carried for the purpose. At first it might seem a matter of accident; but its continuance from day to day was too much for human endurance, and the undesirable stranger departed to the satisfaction of his tormentors. Perhaps it would be a good thing if we had some similar way of ridding ourselves of idlers all over our land.

But with all these good features, there were some indications of the purpose of the Prophet to introduce polygamy, although his sons deny that he ever practised it or even believed in it; but, however that may be, intestine quarrels on the subject of polygamy and other dissensions in the Mormon ranks served to bring on a crisis in affairs at Nauvoo in 1844, which resulted in the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother, and the expulsion of the Mormons from the State.

The real causes, however, were the same ones that operated against them in Missouri. The people in the neighborhood were jealous of the rapidly-growing and flourishing city. They complained that their property disappeared mysteriously, perhaps stolen by the adventurers and robbers who had joined the Mormons just to commit such deeds under a cloak, and for whose acts the Mormons, as a people, were not to blame. But the chief reason was political. Smith began to agitate the question of a restitution of the property they had unjustly lost in Missouri. He visited Washington and had an interview with President Van Buren, who said: “Sir, your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you.”

The Mormons boasted that they had 100,000 in the faith throughout the country and that their vote was a balancing power. They voted in a body on all political questions. They even carried their arrogance so far in 1843 as to nominate Joseph Smith for President of the United States, and they have always declared that if he had lived until the next election he would have obtained that office. The Illinoisans, at any rate, believed that the Mormons determined to rule their State and intended to set all laws at defiance; and it was this belief that stirred their most bitter animosity; but internal dissensions among the Mormons gave them an opportunity to rid themselves of them in a most tragic way.

On account of troubles among dissenting Mormons, warrants were issued against Smith and other Mormon leaders; but the constable who served the warrants was driven out of Nauvoo. This act fired the smouldering hatred of the Illinoisans into terrible activity. The county authorities called out the militia to enforce the law. The Mormons hastily armed, and a civil war seemed impending, when the governor asked the Smiths to surrender and take their trial as the best means of satisfying the turbulent parties.

Now the charter of Nauvoo had been so cunningly devised that the State authorities were almost excluded from jurisdiction within its limits; and so the Smiths, feeling sure of an acquittal, obeyed the summons of the governor. They and other Mormon leaders were then conducted to Carthage and indicted for treason, and lodged in jail.

But on the 27th of June, 1844, an infuriated mob took matters in their own hands, decided to administer justice after their own fashion, and attacked the jail early in the morning. They broke down the doors of the rooms where the prisoners were confined, and horribly massacred Joseph and his brother Hyrum.

Now, those two persons were defenceless prisoners, and the Governor of the State had pledged to them safe conduct to the jail and before the court. Their murder was nothing else than a most foul assassination, the gravity of which was augmented by the fact that it was perpetrated by those who claimed to be upholders of law in contradistinction to the Mormons, who (they said) desired to set law at defiance.

But, besides being an act of lawlessness, it was the most impolitic thing that the people could have done. The martyr-like death of Smith threw a mantle of dignity over his person and a halo of consecration around his character that could in no other way have been secured; and it is reasonable to believe that, had Smith lived on, his own many weaknesses, the vulgarizing of revelation at his hands, the growing suspicions and disaffections of the faithful, and the fierce rancor and dissensions of the factions would have shivered Mormonism into pieces and sunk the fragments into depths too obscure for the searching of further history.