This article is a case study of the lives and contributions of four women who joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Centreville, Delaware, in the early 1840s and remained faithful until their deaths or migration to Utah.
Having grown up on a diet of Joseph Fielding Smith’s Essentials in Church History, B. H. Roberts’s Comprehensive History of the Church, and the six-volume History of the Church, which for me and so many others was once the gold standard … Continued
The history of the Latter-day Saint experience in Nauvoo, Illinois, still has a great deal to teach us. It is not just the simplistic story of religious persecution and expulsion that is often rehearsed. In seven dense chapters, James Simeone, … Continued
Almost fifty years ago, my wife, Patricia, and I had the distinct privilege to work for incoming Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington in combing through the archives of the Church History Library in Salt Lake City for source materials long … Continued
Nauvoo today is a city of ghosts. On serene river-bottom flatlands and atop the gentle bluffs, restored and re-created homes and shops and halls intermix with historical markers and a temple replica to tell visitors that here once stood a … Continued
Although it is little known today, the Nauvoo Music and Concert Hall was an important part of Nauvoo’s cultural history. Joseph Smith designated a spot for it near the temple, the spiritual landmark of the city. The Saints completed the building after Joseph Smith’s death, with funds raised by the Nauvoo Music Association. Many musical concerts were given to packed crowds, and the building was used for meetings of the Apostles, the Seventies, and women’s groups. That the Saints living on the American frontier would care to build a large hall that was acoustically designed for music performance is evidence of the value they placed in cultural refinement. The Saints had to abandon Nauvoo, but the events in that hall affirmed the Saints’ love of music that continues today.
Few of Missouri governor Thomas Reynolds’ papers have survived, but among these is a series of letters from two Iowa postmasters in May and July 1842 informing him about the circumstances surrounding the assassination of former governor Lilburn W. Boggs. These give some impression of the influences operating upon Reynolds—and thus some insight into the forces shaping the decision-making process of all public officials. They also disclose some of the personal motives of two prominent anti-Mormon agitators. Many statements in the letters are likely rumor, but they do indicate something of the extent of malevolence and prejudice that the Mormons faced in the areas surrounding Nauvoo.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century a one time Carthage, Illinois, physician, Thomas Langley Barnes, wrote two letters to his daughter which have recently come to light and which present some new, firsthand information about the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.
Barnes (1812–1901, son of Michael and Elizabeth West Barnes), one of the earliest settlers of Hancock County, lived at Carthage, the county seat, and married a young widow (Laurinda Burbank) there. He practiced medicine in the Carthage area (although he did not receive his M.D. from the University of Missouri until 1851), and had a good-sized practice, extending across the Mississippi to the Iowa shore. He served for a time (at least during 1845) also as a Justice of the Peace. Sometime later he moved to Ukiah, California, where he practiced medicine until he died. He was living in Carthage in 1839 and 1840 when the Saints were driven from Missouri.
He was both attending physician and probably the coroner after the mob attacked the Carthage jail and murdered Joseph and Hyrum. He remembered vividly this act of violence all his life, and most of what he writes about in his letters relates to this incident. He was most anxious to explain to his daughter Miranda that he had had nothing to do with the violence of that time and that he deplored it.
There was no one reason for the Mormon-Gentile difficulties in Illinois. In order to adequately determine each pretense relating to the perplexities of the situation, every individual would have to be interviewed in depth regarding his motives. However, enough newspaper accounts were written, sufficient diaries and journals preserved, ample letters inscribed and official documents retained that some fairly accurate conclusions can be postulated. That Mormons and non-Mormons were unable to dwell in peace is due to a combination of many factors which, when clearly delineated, reveal that conflict was probably unavoidable, and perhaps inevitable. Those factors which brought about the arrest of Joseph Smith and his confinement in the jail at Carthage, two years later culminated in the expulsion of the Saints from Illinois and their migration to the Great Basin. Thus it will become apparent that even though geographically Carthage was east of Nauvoo the road to Carthage, at least for the Mormons, led west.
This book is based on a doctoral dissertation written for the University of Wisconsin. At present, the author is an associate professor of history at the Reorganized Latter Day Saints Church’s Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa.
Professor Robert Flanders has attempted to search deeply and give insight into the temporal life of Joseph Smith and the Mormons in Nauvoo. Joseph Smith is considered not primarily as a religious leader, but as an economist, promoter, architect, politician and man of affairs. Without fully considering the religious forces, the author has attempted to analyze the social, political, military and economic facets concerning the Mormon kingdom. He has done what most secular historians would accuse church historians of doing—that is, of writing church history in a vacuum.
