Carthage Conspiracy Reconsidered: A Second Look at the Murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith

On 27 June 1844, at around four o'clock in the afternoon, a mob of some two hundred militiamen stormed the jailhouse at Carthage, Illinois and shot and killed the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. One might want to explore certain new aspects of the murders. First, one can consider some parallels between the attitude toward Mormons among many non-Mormons in Hancock County in 1844 and that of the Southerners in 1860 toward the Republicans; this will justify the use of the pre-emptive counter revolution thesis employed by James McPherson in his Battle Cry of Freedom.1 One might then identify a point of consensus that bound together a somewhat diverse group of anti-Mormons from Warsaw and Carthage. This will be followed by an identification of the ideological issues that divided Mormons and non-Mormons and then an account of the events leading up to the murder. Finally, one might treat some of the individual fears and grievances expressed by those accused of the murders, and consider why so many downstate Illinoisans, Missourians, and lowans became involved.

When in June 1844 Thomas C. Sharp reacted to the destruction by Mormon militia of the press of the Nauvoo Expositor, the publication of a splinter group in the Mormon city, one can almost feel his hysteria as he exclaimed, "war and extermination is inevitable. Citizens ARISE ONE AND ALL."2 And after the sheriff of Carthage returned from Nauvoo without having Joseph Smith in custody, since the prophet had again employed a city veto to nullify a legal process of the state, Samuel O. Williams said, "such an excitement I have never witnessed in my life," as hundreds of armed and outraged militia had already poured into Carthage ready to march on Nauvoo.3

Similarly, with an impending takeover of the government in Washington by the hated Republican Party in 1860, a Mississippian is quoted by McPherson saying, "the minds of the people are aroused to a pitch of excitement unparalleled in the history of our country."4 And Judah P. Benjamin, a Confederate leader, said no one is "able to stem the wild torrent of passion which ... [has] carried everything before it ... it is a revolution ... of the most intense character."5 McPherson termed this reaction "mass hysteria."6

One can find examples of ad horrendum thinking by the old citizens in Hancock County as they contemplated a Mormon political majority. Thomas Gregg said in 1843 that "the pretended prophet" would "by vile and blasphemous lies" remove "all those moral and religious institutions which have been established by men, as the only means of maintaining those social blessings which are so indispensably necessary for our happiness."7

And Jefferson Davis was in a similar mood in I860, saying that submission to Black Republicans would mean the "loss of liberty, property, home, country-everything that makes life worth living."8

As McPherson has argued, the South staged a "pre-emptive counterrevolution" to thwart a "revolution" they feared was impending after the Republican presidential victory in I860, primarily, it seems to me, because the Republicans were opposed to the expansion of slavery into the federal territories, and also because the Southerners believed the Republican party was dominated by abolitionists. McPherson explains that, "rather than trying to restore an old order, a pre-emptive counterrevolution strikes first to try and protect the status quo." "The South," he says, "exaggerated the Republican threat [to slavery] and urged pre-emptive action [secession] to forestall dangers they conjured up."9 Just so in Hancock County in 1844, as the anti-Mormons feared what the Mormons might do if they gained political control of the county. The anti-Mormons wanted to maintain the status quo, with the "old citizens," as they called themselves, in political control. This concern was a consensus point which bound together not only antiMormons in Hancock County but many down state as well. Thomas Sharp expressed his fears in the Warsaw Signal as early as June 1841. Should the Mormons assume political control of Hancock County, he asked,

Are you prepared to see one man control your affairs? Are you prepared to see the important offices of sheriff and County Commissioner selected by an unparalleled knave, and thus have power to select jurymen who are to sit and try your rights of life, liberty and property? If it comes to this, that Joseph Smith is in control of our county, are we not in effect, the subjects of a despot?10

The point was reemphasized later in July 1844 by S. A. Bartlett, editor of the Quincy Whig. He said that, despite the death of the prophet, who was killed on 27 June, the Mormon threat remains. He said that the "old settlers" were the "first to come and make improvements, no doubt they have prior rights to the soil." Either the old citizens must go or the Mormons must. Should the former flee the county, the Mormons would still cause trouble in the state, with their peculiar institutions and their "peculiar notions regarding their rights and privileges." With the exodus of the old citizens the Mormons would "take over the county."11