Six years after the Missouri Mormon War of 1838, Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated by a mob on June 27, 1844. Their murders at Carthage Jail, Illinois, were a tragic moment in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and within larger American religious history more broadly. Besieged church members living in Nauvoo and the surrounding environs lost their two most senior leaders to religious and political violence, which demonstrated the limitations of pluralism and tolerance in Jacksonian America. Their deaths also proved the need for greater religious freedom and protections for spiritual beliefs and practices in the United States.
My objective in this paper is to introduce and contextualize the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prison experience and resulting writings within the larger fields of prison literature and incarceration studies.