Joseph Smith

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, was held in a jailer's bedroom in Carthage, Illinois, on the 27th of June 1844. That day an armed mob with blackened faces stormed the building. Smith took the attackers for his own militia, the Nauvoo Legion. He told a jailer: "Don't trouble yourself... they've come to rescue me." The hope was not absurd, because Smith had escaped custody before. This time, no rescue came.

  Fourteen years earlier, Smith had published a book. By the time of his death it had drawn tens of thousands of followers, and the movement he began now counts millions of adherents. How did one man build a movement that outlived him? What did he teach, and what did it cost the people who followed him? And why do people still disagree so sharply about who he was?

  5554505356

• 2. A Family of Seekers

  ›

  Sharon, Vermont, is where Joseph Smith Jr. was born on the 23rd of December 1805, one of eleven children of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. The family had notable roots on both sides. The colonial minister John Lothropp, who lived from 1584 to 1653, was an ancestor. Joseph's maternal grandfather, Solomon Mack, self-published a memoir about his own conversion experience.

  Hardship shaped the household. Joseph Sr.'s drunkenness embarrassed the family. When Joseph Jr. was seven, he underwent painful surgery for a leg bone infection and refused alcohol. He used crutches for three years and walked with a slight limp afterward. A ginseng swindle and years of crop failures then cost the Smiths their farm. They traveled 300 miles west to frontier Western New York and took out a mortgage on a small farm there.

  Folk magic was a relatively common practice in Western New York, and the Smiths took part. Under a seer named Luman Walters, Joseph, his father and his older brother Alvin hunted for buried treasure. Walters eventually left, saying he lacked sufficient power. Before he went, he singled out young Joseph as the one who might find it. The family kept searching with a seer stone after Walters was gone.

  The 21st of September 1823, the equinox, was a night that Joseph, his family and his acquaintances all later named as pivotal. The next day he told his father that a supernatural being had visited him in the night and revealed the location of a nearby treasure. His parents and his maternal grandfather had each reported prophetic dreams or visions, so the claim fit the family's beliefs.

  Alvin died just weeks later, at only 25. He had complained of stomach pains, and a doctor treated him with mercury salts. The substance lodged in his digestive system, and other doctors could not dislodge it. He died of mercury poisoning caused by medical error. At the funeral, the Presbyterian minister suggested Alvin had gone to hell, which further shook the trust that Joseph Sr. and Jr. placed in authorities. The family split over faith. Joseph and his father refused to join the church, while his mother and siblings joined.

  On the 29th of September 1824, Joseph Sr. published a notice in the paper saying he had briefly disinterred Alvin's body to confirm it had not been removed. Rumors had spread that the Smiths dug up Alvin for use in magical treasure-seeking. Money stayed tight, and father and son worked odd jobs and gained a reputation as treasure seers for hire.

  In 1825, Josiah Stowell hired the two Smiths to find a lost mine he believed lay on his property in Pennsylvania. Stowell's son Josiah Jr. had told him about them. While boarding in Pennsylvania, Joseph met Emma Hale, his future wife. After about a month the company disbanded, and Smith returned to Chenango, New York, to work for Stowell and for Joseph Knight Sr. He made trips to court Emma in between.

  That March, Stowell's nephew Peter Bridgeman filed a complaint alleging that Smith was taking advantage of the elder man through "glass-looking", meaning fortune-telling to find treasure. At the trial, Stowell testified that he believed Smith could find treasure with a seer stone. The precise result is unclear, but Smith went free and returned home to Palmyra.

  Smith and Emma eloped and married on the 18th of January 1827, over the objections of her father, Isaac Hale, who regarded Smith as a charlatan. Hale softened after Smith promised to abandon treasure seeking, and he offered the couple a place on his property in Harmony and help starting in business. That promise would be tested within months.

  89101213

• 3. The Golden Plates

  ›

  Josiah Stowell and Joseph Knight Sr., Smith's loyal treasure-hunting patrons, traveled to Palmyra in September 1827 to be present for an anticipated recovery. Smith had told associates that the 22nd of September would be his last chance to receive the plates. Late that night he took a horse and carriage to the hill Cumorah with Emma. She stayed behind kneeling in prayer while he walked to the burial site.

  Sometime in the early morning hours, Smith said, he retrieved the plates and hid them in a hollow log on or near Cumorah. He also said he received a pair of large spectacles whose lenses were two seer stones. A revised text of a 1831 revelation, printed in 1835, named the spectacles the Urim and Thummim, items from the high priest's breastplate in the Old Testament.

  Days later, Smith came home with a set of plates that could be hefted but not viewed. He explained that he had been commanded not to show them to anyone. His former treasure-seeking partners decided he had double crossed them and kept the treasure for himself. They ransacked places where they thought the plates might be hidden, and Smith decided to leave Palmyra.

  In October 1827, Smith and Emma moved permanently to Pennsylvania. Their neighbor Martin Harris, relatively prosperous, funded the move in exchange for a share in the coming book. Smith began dictating a text to Emma. In 1828 Harris took over as scribe. Then Smith allowed Harris to take the only copy of the first 116 manuscript pages, and the pages were lost. Smith ended the dictation, explaining that an angel had taken away the plates as punishment.

  Smith's first revelation answered the crisis. It announced that the lost material, translated from the plates of Lehi, would be replaced by a new translation from the plates of Nephi. He resumed dictating to Emma in September 1828. In April 1829, Oliver Cowdery joined him. Cowdery was a distant cousin from Vermont who had also dabbled in folk magic. The two moved into the home of Cowdery's friend Peter Whitmer and finished the manuscript there.

  Smith dictated with the same chocolate-colored seer stone he had used for treasure hunting, placed in a hat. The dictation ended about the 1st of July 1829, after between 53 and 74 working days. In public, Smith described the translation only vaguely, as the work of a miraculous gift from God.

  The book appeared in Palmyra when Smith was 24 and was first advertised for sale on the 26th of March 1830. Less than two weeks later, on the 6th of April 1830, Smith and his followers formally organized the Church of Christ. Small branches formed in Manchester, Fayette and Colesville, New York. Trouble followed quickly. Smith was arrested as a "disorderly person", as he had been in 1826, and was acquitted. He was arrested again and taken to Broome County, where a three-judge panel acquitted him as well. He and Cowdery then fled a gathering mob.

  The Book of Mormon resembles the King James Bible in its language and in its structure as a collection of smaller books, each named for a prominent figure. It tells of the rise and fall of a Judeo-Christian civilization in the Western Hemisphere, from about 600 BC to the fifth century. It presents itself as largely the work of Mormon, a Nephite prophet and military figure.

  Scholars read it in different ways. Biographer Robert V. Remini calls it "a typically American story" that "radiates the revivalist passion of the Second Great Awakening". Fawn Brodie suggested that Smith drew on available sources such as the 1823 book View of the Hebrews. Richard Bushman answers that it is not a conventional American book and that its structure is closer to the Bible. Historian Daniel Walker Howe likewise finds its themes biblical, prophetic and patriarchal rather than democratic or optimistic.

  Since 1830, three men named Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and David Whitmer had given statements supporting Smith's claims about the plates. Within a decade, that testimony would be put to the test.

  8991938829

• 4. Revelation and Authority

  ›

  Many of Smith's revelations opened with the words "Hearken O ye people which profess my name, saith the Lord your God." They were written as though God himself were speaking, and Smith began issuing them in July 1828. Historian Richard Bushman calls being guided by revelation the signal feature of Smith's life. Rather than argue his ideas logically, Smith dictated authoritative scripture-like texts and let people decide whether to believe, with what scholar Peter Coviello calls "beguiling offhandedness". His followers taught that a scribe recorded each one without revision.

  In June 1830, Smith dictated a revelation in which Moses sees "worlds without number" and speaks with God about the purpose of creation. That text began a revision of the Bible on which Smith worked sporadically until 1833. He did not retranslate from older manuscripts. He amended and added to a King James Bible, guided, he and his followers believed, by inspiration. Smith held that the Bible was missing "the most plain and precious parts of the gospel". His additions nearly tripled the length of the first five chapters of Genesis, which became the Book of Moses. According to Emma, the revision was still unfinished when Joseph died.

  In 1831, a revelation called "The Law" gave rules for organizing society in Zion, repeated the Ten Commandments and urged members to "administer to the poor and needy". Smith briefly set up a form of religious communism called the United Order. It asked Latter Day Saints to give all their property to the church, to be divided among the faithful.

  On the 16th of February 1832, while working on the Bible, Smith and his colleague Sidney Rigdon received what early members called "the Vision". It described a heaven with three degrees of glory, named the celestial, terrestrial and telestial kingdoms, where resurrected beings would go after final judgment. In 1833 came the Word of Wisdom, which counseled herbs, fruits and grains with sparing use of meat. It advised against strong alcoholic drinks, tobacco and "hot drinks", later read to mean tea and coffee. It began as a recommendation rather than a commandment, and Smith and early members did not strictly keep it.

  After the autumn of 1833, formal written revelations in God's voice grew rarer. Smith taught more through sermons, conversations and letters. Baptism for the dead and the nature of God were both introduced in sermons. One of his most famous lines, that there is "no such thing as immaterial matter", was recorded from a casual conversation with a Methodist preacher.

  The 14th of February 1835 brought a meeting at which Smith and the Three Witnesses named twelve men to the office of Apostle. Other men were ordained as Seventy. The high priesthood, introduced in 1831, drew little notice until March 1835, when Smith declared that it held authority over every other office in the church. He taught three priesthoods, the Melchizedek, the Aaronic and the Patriarchal, each linked to biblical priesthoods.

  To support that authority, Smith pointed to visits from the past. The 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants added a mention of visits from Moroni, John the Baptist, the patriarchs Joseph, Jacob, Isaac and Abraham, and the apostles Peter, James and John. In his official history, begun in 1838, Smith said John the Baptist ordained him and Cowdery on the 15th of May 1829, acting under the direction of Peter, James and John.

  The visitor of 1823 was described differently over time. Early accounts called it a spirit or a ghost. A 1829 newspaper report spoke of a visit in a dream. In an 1832 account Smith wrote that he first supposed it a dream of vision, but "I knew that it was not". By January 1835 he described lying awake when an unnamed angel appeared. By the mid-1830s the being was named Moroni. In Smith's 1838 account it was Nephi, an "angel of light" in a robe of "a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen". In the 1870s, followers concluded that Nephi had been an error, and later printings changed the name to Moroni.

  Neighbors remembered the story another way. Willard Chase recalled that the guardian of the buried treasure looked "something like a toad, which soon assumed the appearance of a man" and struck Joseph three times. Joseph Sr. told him that his son, dressed in black on a black horse, briefly held the treasure and lost it for failing to follow instructions. In the 1980s, Mark Hofmann forged the Salamander Letter, which purported to give such an account, and it was discredited along with his other forgeries.

  Another vision rose to prominence after Smith's break with Cowdery in 1838. Smith said that in 1820, while praying in a wooded area near his home, he saw two personages, God the Father and Jesus Christ. He wrote: "This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!" They told him his sins were forgiven and that all contemporary churches had "turned aside from the gospel". Smith began telling this story in 1838, just as his followers were gathering in Missouri.

  9942899394

• 5. Zion and Its Enemies

  ›

  Sidney Rigdon, a hugely popular Campbellite minister in Ohio, had long preached a restoration of the true church. When Oliver Cowdery and others reached Ohio from New York, Rigdon converted and brought more than a hundred followers with him. His conversion dramatically swelled the young organization. Rigdon then visited New York for long conversations with Smith. With opposition growing at home, Smith announced a revelation telling his followers to gather at Kirtland, Ohio, and he moved there in January 1831. By the summer of 1835, fifteen hundred to two thousand members lived in the area, and many expected Smith to lead them soon to the Millennial kingdom.

  On the 24th of March 1832, a mob dragged Smith and Rigdon from their beds, beat them badly and covered them in tar and feathers. Smith was tied to a board and stripped naked so that a doctor could castrate him, but the doctor refused. The mob then tried to force poison down his throat and chipped a tooth. The next morning Smith preached to his congregation and performed baptisms. Simonds Ryder, writing in the 1860s, argued that the attack was sparked by recent converts learning their property would be placed under church control.

  In July 1831, Smith visited Independence, in Jackson County, Missouri, and announced that the frontier hamlet was the "center place" of Zion. Older residents resented the newcomers on political and religious grounds, and they feared that rapid Mormon growth would soon give the newcomers a majority in local elections. In July 1833, non-Mormons forcibly evicted the Mormons and destroyed their property. Smith advised patience until his followers had been attacked several times, after which they could fight back. Armed bands exchanged fire, killing one Mormon and two non-Mormons, and the Mormons were driven from the county.

  Zion's Camp was a 200-man paramilitary expedition that Smith organized and led in May 1834, after petitions to the Missouri governor failed. As a military effort it failed. The men were disorganized, a cholera outbreak killed 14, and they were badly outnumbered. By the end of June, Smith had sought peace with the county's residents and disbanded the camp. Yet many future church leaders came from its ranks, and Smith drew on them to staff new governing bodies.

  A revelation held that redeeming Zion would require followers to receive an endowment in the Kirtland Temple, which they built. In March 1836, at the temple's dedication, many who received the endowment reported seeing visions of angels, prophesying and speaking in tongues. That same year Smith traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, in search of a trove of coins. He announced a revelation that God had "much treasure in this city". After a month, he and his companions came home to Kirtland empty-handed.

  Orson Hyde carried a request for a bank charter to the Ohio legislature in 1836, and Oliver Cowdery went to Philadelphia to buy printing plates for bank notes. Hyde returned empty-handed, unable to find a legislator to sponsor a bill. Smith and the other bank leaders went ahead anyway and called their organization an "anti-banking society". On the plates Cowdery had bought, the syllables "Anti" and "ing" were engraved in smaller type around the word "Bank". Smith urged followers to buy the notes and invested heavily himself. The bank failed within a month.

  Historian Robert Kent Fielding judged that the Kirtland Safety Society never had the slightest chance. The proposed capital was four million dollars, while all the banks in Ohio together held only nine and one third million. Many Kirtland Mormons suffered losses and pressure from debt collectors, and they held Smith responsible. Close advisers defected. Smith and Rigdon were charged with illegally operating a bank, found guilty and fined. In June 1837, Smith was also arrested for allegedly conspiring to have his critic Grandison Newell murdered, but he was acquitted. By 1838 Smith faced accusations from high-profile leaders that he was a fallen prophet, and he and Rigdon fled Kirtland for Far West, Missouri. Critics took control of the temple.

  Far West, Missouri, became the new Zion in 1838, and thousands of Latter Day Saints followed Smith and Rigdon there from Kirtland. Smith also encouraged settlement outside Caldwell County, founding Adam-ondi-Ahman in Daviess County. In March 1838, Martin Harris publicly denied that he had ever seen the golden plates, and in April, Whitmer and Cowdery were excommunicated for dissent. In June a secret group called the Danites formed to deal with dissenters. A letter warned the principal dissenters to leave the county or face "a more fatal calamity". It carried the signatures of eighty-three Mormons, including Smith's brother Hyrum, and the few named dissenters quickly fled. That July, Smith wrote in his diary that the Danites were a force to "put to right that which is not right".

  On the 6th of August 1838, non-Mormons in Gallatin, Missouri, tried to keep Mormons from voting, and a brawl began that started the 1838 Mormon War. Vigilantes raided and burned Mormon farms, while Danites and other Mormons pillaged non-Mormon towns. At the Battle of Crooked River, Mormons attacked the state militia, mistaking it for vigilantes. Governor Lilburn Boggs then ordered that the Mormons be "exterminated or driven from the state". On the 30th of October, Missourians surprised and killed seventeen Mormons at Haun's Mill. The next day, the Mormons surrendered to 2,500 state troops and agreed to forfeit their property and leave.

  A military court accused Smith of treason and sentenced him to be executed the next morning, but Alexander Doniphan, his former attorney and a brigadier general in the Missouri militia, refused to carry out the order. At a preliminary hearing, several former allies testified against Smith. He and five others, including Rigdon, were charged with treason and sent to the jail at Liberty, Missouri. There Smith wrote a personal defense and urged his followers to moderate their antagonism toward non-Mormons. On the 6th of April 1839, after a grand jury hearing in Daviess County, Smith and his companions escaped custody, almost certainly with the connivance of the sheriff and guards.

  3437411523

• 6. Nauvoo

  ›

  Many American newspapers criticized Missouri for the Haun's Mill massacre and the expulsion of the Mormons, and Illinois accepted the refugees. Smith bought high-priced, swampy woodland in the hamlet of Commerce, on the banks of the Mississippi River. He portrayed the Mormons as an oppressed minority and petitioned the federal government for reparations, without success.

  John C. Bennett, the Illinois quartermaster general, became Smith's most useful ally. Using his connections in the state legislature, Bennett secured an unusually liberal charter for the new city, which Smith renamed Nauvoo. The charter gave the city virtual autonomy, authorized a university and granted habeas corpus power, which let Smith fend off extradition to Missouri. It also authorized the Nauvoo Legion, a militia limited only by state and federal constitutions. Smith and Bennett became its commanders, styled Lieutenant General and Major General. Together they controlled by far the largest body of armed men in Illinois. Bennett also became Assistant President of the Church and Nauvoo's first mayor. Under Smith's later mayoralty, Nauvoo grew to be the second-largest city in Illinois.

  Smith introduced baptism for the dead in 1840, and in 1841 construction began on the Nauvoo Temple as a place for recovering lost ancient knowledge. In May 1842, he inaugurated a revised endowment, or "first anointing". It resembled the rites of Freemasonry, which Smith had observed two months earlier when he was initiated "at sight" into the Nauvoo Masonic lodge. At first only men could receive it, and they joined a special group called the Anointed Quorum. For women, Smith founded the Relief Society, a service club and sorority in which he predicted women would receive "the keys of the kingdom". His vision of Zion grew to cover all of North and South America, with Mormon settlements as "stakes" of its metaphorical tent. In the summer of 1842, he revealed a plan to establish the millennial Kingdom of God, which would eventually bring theocratic rule over the whole Earth.

  Bennett's fall began when rumors of polygamy, which Bennett called "spiritual wifery", spread beyond Smith's inner circle. Smith forced Bennett's resignation as mayor. Bennett left Nauvoo and began publishing sensational accusations against Smith and his followers. In May 1842, an unknown assailant shot and wounded former Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs. Anti-Mormons circulated rumors that Smith's bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, was the gunman. In July, the recently excommunicated Bennett published a letter claiming Smith had sent Rockwell to "fulfill prophecy" by killing Boggs. Many viewed it as revenge, and even Governor Ford later called Bennett a "debauched, unprincipled and profligate character".

  The evidence was circumstantial, yet the new governor of Missouri petitioned Illinois for Smith's extradition, and Illinois Governor Carlin issued an arrest warrant. Certain he would be killed if he returned to Missouri, Smith went into hiding twice over five months, until the U.S. Attorney for Illinois argued that extradition would be unconstitutional. A Missouri grand jury declined to indict Rockwell, and he was freed. In June 1843, Governor Thomas Ford issued a warrant to extradite Smith on the outstanding treason charge. Two law officers arrested him, but a party of Mormons intercepted them before they reached Missouri. Nauvoo's municipal court then released Smith on a writ of habeas corpus, with significant political fallout in Illinois. On the 5th of November, Smith fell ill and suspected he had been poisoned, perhaps by his wife Emma.

  In December 1843, Smith petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory with the right to call out federal troops in its defense. He wrote to the leading presidential candidates asking what they would do to protect the Mormons. The answers were noncommittal or negative. So Smith announced his own independent candidacy for president, paused regular proselytizing, and sent the Quorum of the Twelve and hundreds of other political missionaries into the field. His 1844 platform proposed gradually ending slavery, protecting the liberties of Latter Day Saints and other minorities, and reducing the size of Congress. It also called for reestablishing a national bank, reforming prisons, and annexing Texas, California and Oregon.

  In March 1844, Smith secretly organized the Council of Fifty. It was to decide which national or state laws Mormons should obey, set up its own government, and find a site beyond the control of other governments. Texas, Oregon and Mexican-controlled California were among the places considered. On the 18th of April, the council unanimously elected Smith "Prophet, Priest, and King".

  451615756

• 7. Marriage and Family

  ›

  Nine children were born to Emma Hale during her marriage to Joseph Smith, and five of them died before the age of two. The first, a son named Alvin, was born on the 15th of June 1828 and died within hours. Twins Thaddeus and Louisa, born in 1831, also died within hours. The Smiths then adopted another set of twins, Julia and Joseph Murdock, whose mother had recently died in childbirth. Joseph Murdock died of measles in 1832, and his family linked his death to exposure to cold during the tarring and feathering. Don Carlos, born in 1840, died of malaria in 1841. In 1842, Emma gave birth to a stillborn son.

  Five children lived to maturity: the adopted Julia Murdock, Joseph Smith III, David Hyrum Smith, Frederick Granger Williams Smith and Alexander Hale Smith. Emma's marriage, however, was strained by a practice that Smith kept secret from most of the church.

  Plural marriage is the practice most closely tied to Smith's reputation in the historical record. Apostles Brigham Young, Orson Pratt and Lyman E. Johnson, among other sources, said that Smith began privately teaching polygamy in 1831. That year, according to one account, he told twelve-year-old Mary Rollins that God had commanded him to take her as a wife. The church later recognized her as one of his plural wives in February 1842, when she was 23.

  Fanny Alger, a teenager who worked as a servant in the Smith home, became the center of a rift in 1837. Oliver Cowdery suspected a relationship, and Smith denied committing adultery. Historian Bushman argues he said so "presumably" because he had married Alger. In 2014, the LDS Church acknowledged that Smith and Alger had a marital relationship.

  In April 1841, Smith secretly wed Louisa Beaman. Over the next two and a half years, he secretly married or was sealed to about thirty or forty additional women. Ten of his plural wives were between fourteen and twenty years old, and others were over fifty. Ten were already married to other men, though some of those marriages were contracted with the first husbands' consent. In May 1843, Smith married Helen Mar Kimball, then fourteen, the daughter of apostle Heber C. Kimball, who had two wives himself and encouraged his daughter to accept.

  The evidence for whether Smith's plural marriages involved sex is ambiguous and varies from marriage to marriage. Some may have been solely religious unions that took effect after death. DNA testing of potential descendants from plural wives, where possible, has come back negative. During Smith's lifetime, the practice stayed secret from non-Mormons and from most church members.

  On the 12th of July 1843, Smith dictated a revelation about polygamy. Hyrum read it to the High Council on the 12th of August, which divided the leadership into polygamist and anti-polygamist factions. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich summarizes Emma's position this way: "Emma vacillated in her support for plural marriage, sometimes acquiescing to Joseph's sealings, sometimes resisting".

  After Smith's death, Emma was quickly alienated from Brigham Young and the church leadership. She feared and despised Young, who suspected her wish to keep the family's assets out of the church's holdings and disliked her open opposition to plural marriage. Young excluded her from ecclesiastical meetings and social gatherings. When most Mormons moved west, Emma stayed in Nauvoo and married a non-Mormon, Major Lewis C. Bidamon. She withdrew from religion until 1860, when she joined the church led by her son Joseph III. She kept her belief that Smith had been a prophet and never repudiated the Book of Mormon.

  1879808387

• 8. Carthage and After

  ›

  Robert D. Foster, a physician and general in the Nauvoo Legion, came home in early 1844 and found Smith with his wife Sarah. She later confessed that Smith had preached polygamy to her and tried to seduce her. Smith made similar proposals to Jane, the wife of William Law. Law threatened to expose Smith unless he went before the High Council to confess and repent. On the 8th of January 1844, Smith removed Law from the First Presidency.

  On the 9th of March, Smith preached a sermon on the plurality of gods, which the dissenters regarded as polytheistic blasphemy. On the 18th of April he excommunicated them, alleging a plot to kill him. Law and others formed the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which taught that Smith had once been a true prophet but had since fallen into sin. On the 23rd of May, Law and Foster testified before the grand jury in Carthage, which indicted Smith for "adultery, fornication, and perjury". Smith publicly denied the charges on the 26th of May.

  The Nauvoo Expositor, a four-page tract, appeared on the 7th of June 1844. Its first issue exposed Smith's secret polygamy and his intention to establish a theocracy, and it condemned his new teaching of many gods. The Nauvoo City Council argued that the paper would provoke fresh violence against the Mormons and declared it a public nuisance. Smith urged the council on and ordered the Nauvoo Legion to help police destroy the press. He did not foresee that the destruction would incite an attack more surely than any of the paper's accusations.

  Thomas C. Sharp, editor of the Warsaw Signal and a longtime critic of Smith, answered with a strident call to arms. A warrant for Smith's arrest on a charge of inciting a riot was issued on the 11th of June. On the 12th, Constable David Bettisworth arrived in Nauvoo to take Smith to Carthage, but the municipal court freed him again. Bettisworth left, promising to return. On the 18th of June, Smith mobilized the Legion and declared martial law. Carthage officials called up a small detachment of state militia, and Governor Ford threatened to raise a larger force unless Smith and the City Council surrendered. Smith first fled across the Mississippi River, then returned and gave himself up after Ford assured him of his safety.

  Smith and his brother Hyrum reached Carthage on the 25th of June to stand trial for inciting a riot. Once the brothers were in custody, the charges rose to treason, which barred bail. John Taylor, Willard Richards and Dan Jones volunteered to stay with them in Carthage Jail. John S. Fullmer and Cyrus H. Wheelock visited the prisoners and smuggled two pistols in to Joseph.

  Six men guarded the prisoners in the jailer's bedroom, whose windows had no bars, despite the death threats against Smith. When the mob rushed the stairs, the guards reportedly fired shots or blanks over the attackers' heads, and some of the Greys reportedly joined the mob. The intruders tried to push the door open so they could fire into the room, but Smith and the other prisoners pushed back. Hyrum, who was trying to secure the door, was killed instantly by a shot to the face. Smith fired three shots from a smuggled pepper-box pistol and wounded three men. Then he sprang for the window. Shot multiple times, he fell out, crying, "Oh Lord my God!" He died shortly after hitting the ground, but an improvised firing squad shot him several more times before the mob dispersed. Smith was the first U.S. presidential candidate to be assassinated.

  Non-Mormon newspapers were nearly unanimous in portraying Smith as a religious fanatic, while within the Latter Day Saint community he was seen as a martyred prophet. After a public funeral and viewing of the brothers' bodies, Emma feared hostile non-Mormons might desecrate them. She had the remains buried at night in a secret location, with substitute coffins filled with sandbags placed in the publicly known grave. The bodies were later moved and reburied under an outbuilding on the Smith property by the Mississippi. In 1928, members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, led by Smith's grandson Frederick M. Smith, located and disinterred the remains. They reburied the brothers, along with Emma, in the Smith Family Cemetery in Nauvoo.

  Smith had proposed several ways to choose a successor but never clarified his preference. The two strongest candidates were Brigham Young, senior member and president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and Rigdon, the senior remaining member of the First Presidency. At a church-wide conference on the 8th of August, most of the Latter Day Saints present elected Young. They eventually left Nauvoo and settled the Salt Lake Valley in Utah Territory. Nominal membership in Young's denomination, which became the LDS Church, passed 17 million in 2023.

  Smaller groups followed Rigdon and James J. Strang, whose claim rested on a letter of appointment ostensibly written by Smith that some scholars believe was forged. Some hundreds followed Lyman Wight to establish a community in Texas, and others followed Alpheus Cutler. In 1860, many members of these smaller groups, including most of Smith's family, coalesced under Joseph Smith III and formed the RLDS Church, now the Community of Christ, with about 250,000 members.

  A 2015 compilation of the 100 Most Significant Americans of All Time by Smithsonian ranked Smith first among religious figures. Modern biographers and scholars agree that he was one of the most influential, charismatic and innovative figures in American religious history. Yet non-Mormons in the United States generally consider him a "charlatan, scoundrel, and heretic", while outside the country he is obscure. The LDS Church ranks him as its founding prophet, on par with Moses and Elijah. The Community of Christ honors his founding role but plays down his human leadership, and Woolleyite Mormon fundamentalism has deified him within a cosmology of many gods. A granite obelisk marks his birthplace, and a fifteen-foot-tall bronze statue of Smith stands in the World Peace Dome in Pune, India.

  5563647577