Surprisingly, no scholar has yet explored the overarching nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prison experience. Granted, historians have written on individual jail experiences, including what transpired separately within the walls of Liberty Jail, Richmond Jail, Columbia Jail and Carthage Jail during the 1830s and 1840s. Moreover, scholars have documented the happenings at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary in the Sugarhouse neighborhood of Salt Lake City during the 1870s and 1880s. But no historian has hitherto studied the personal writings of these Latter-day Saint inmates to document and analyze what it meant to these men and women to be “prisoners for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake,” as many noted in their personal writings. Studying the prison literature of the Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century opens up a fresh window into their spiritual self-identity as American outsiders, reveals their sense of religious persecution as a fledgling minority, and exposes their evolving views on concepts like theodicy, civil disobedience, and martyrdom.
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.
Joseph Smith and his religious claims had been challenged by others since he first declared to have experienced a theophany or “First Vision” as a fourteen-year-old young man in upstate New York in 1820. Within a quarter of century, Smith and his growing number of followers relocated from New York to communities in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. In each location the Latter-day Saints gathered but were then driven out by anti-Mormon mobs and forced to find religious refuge elsewhere. It seemed that the larger and stronger the church and its adherents became, the greater the persecution that followed. By 1844, religious and political tensions between the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo and their non-Mormon neighbors in surrounding Illinois and Missouri were at a breaking point.
Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, known as the prophet and patriarch of the church respectively, were charged with treasonous conduct and insurrection and were arrested in Nauvoo and taken to nearby Carthage, where they were imprisoned in the county jail. Notwithstanding promises of protection from Illinois Governor Thomas Ford and the state’s military, a large anti-Mormon mob stormed Carthage Jail and shot both brothers to death while they attempted to defend themselves and two other church leaders, John Taylor and Willard Richards, who were also in the prison. Following this attack, the mob fled, expecting retribution from the Smiths’ followers in nearby Nauvoo.
The Latter-day Saints were traumatized and devastated when they learned of their prophet and patriarch’s murders in the Carthage Jail. But they did not seek immediate revenge on the members of the mob. Peace prevailed in Nauvoo, despite the overwhelming sense of grief and despair among the Latter-day Saints, who had just lost their spiritual mentors to mob violence. They struggled to understand how their righteous leaders had been gunned down by wicked men, according to their personal writings. Rather than dissolving the faith and community, however, this event galvanized church members to continue to participate in the religious movement they had sacrificed so much for under Joseph Smith’s leadership.
As documented by their post–Carthage Jail writings, grieving Latter-day Saints came to believe that the recent mob assassinations of their prophet and patriarch were required righteous sacrifices, which sealed their testimonies of the gospel with their blood, like ancient prophets and apostles before them. They described the murdered Smith brothers in biblical language, drawing parallels to the atonement and crucifixion of Jesus Christ two millennia before. These modern religious leaders had died for their faith and became martyrs at Carthage Jail in June 1844. Senior apostle Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve succeeded Joseph Smith as the church’s leadership core.
Church members would never forget—or forgive—the unlawful murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith by an anti-Mormon mob in the Carthage Jail. “They were innocent of any crimes, as they had often been proved before, and were only confined in jail by the conspiracy of traitors and wicked men,” is how the Latter-day Saints memorialized the murders of the imprisoned Smith brothers in print, which would later be canonized in the Doctrine and Covenants. According to witnesses present in the Carthage Jail, the Smith brothers’ “innocent blood on the floor of Carthage jail” and “on the escutcheon of the State of Illinois, . . . is a witness to the truth of the everlasting gospel, that all the world cannot impeach.” That horrific event became known simply as “the martyrdom” in Latter-day Saint circles.
My paper will analyze the events leading up to the assassination of the church’s founding leaders in Carthage Jail, Illinois. It begins with the two final letters from Joseph Smith to his wife Emma in the days before his martyrdom on June 27, 1844. Three men—Willard Richards, Dan Jones, and John Taylor—who accompanied the Smith brothers to Carthage Jail wrote first-person accounts of what they witnessed while incarcerated, ranging from a short newspaper article to a lengthy account that was featured as an appendix to a national bestseller by adventurer Sir Richard Burton years after the event. The church’s canonized tribute to the slain brothers is also included in my paper. Two lamentations of the martyrdom by John Taylor were also published as poetry in church newspapers and are showcased in my remarks.
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.
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.