1. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Samantha Seeley, “Beyond the American Colonization Society,” History Compass 14, no. 3 (March 2016): 93–104.

2. A transcript of the constitution is reproduced in Sampson Avard’s witness testimony in “Minutes and Testimonies, 12–29 November 1838 [State of Missouri v. Gates et al. for Treason],” p. 10, The Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/minutes-and-testimonies-12-29-november-1838-state-of-missouri-v-gates-et-al-for-treason/10.

3. General overviews of the Danites are found in Leland H. Gentry, “The Danite Band of 1838,” BYU Studies 14, no. 4 (1974): 421–50; Stephen C. LeSueur, “The Danites Reconsidered: Were They Vigilantes or Just the Mormons’ Version of the Elks Club?” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 14 (1994): 35–51; Alexander L. Baugh, “‘We Have a Company of Danites in These Times’: The Danites, Joseph Smith, and the 1838 Missouri-Mormon Conflict,” Journal of Mormon History 45, no. 3 (July 2019): 1–25.

4. For the Mormon-Missouri War, I have relied upon Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); Alexander L. Baugh, “A Call to Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri” (PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1996; Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 2000); Leland Homer Gentry and Todd M. Compton, Fire and the Sword: A History of Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri, 1836–39 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2010), 169–394.

5. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, in J. Jefferson Looney, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 3 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004–), 1:69. See also Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Knopf, 2003).

6. See Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

7. Abraham Lincoln, “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838,” in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 2012), 28–36.

8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (1835; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 236–37, 250. For violence and the experiment of democracy, see James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 633–36.

9. For the broad movements of racial removal—both Native and African American—see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016). For the racial nature of political belonging during the early republic, see Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 159–208; Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

10. For the rise of extralegal violence, see Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palsgrave Macmillan, 2003), 27–48; Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). For the racial dimensions of these forms of justice, see Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

11. For the story of the early Church in Jackson County, see Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 85–105; Mark Ashurst-McGee, “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008), 156–389; Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (New York: Random House, 2012), 32–62. For the justifications to remove the Saints, see J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 49–78.

12. For the stripping of Latter-day Saint whiteness and the relatedness between the creation of Caldwell County and Native reservations, see W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64–67.

13. See Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 322–41.

14. Thomas B. Marsh to Joseph Smith, February 15, 1838, in Mark Ashurst-McGee and others, eds., Documents, Volume 6: February 1838–August 1839, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 23–24.

15. Joseph Smith to Edward Partridge, January 7, 1838, in Brent M. Rogers and others, eds., Documents, Volume 5: October 1835–January 1836, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017), 494.

16. Far West Minutes, April 12, 1838, in Rogers and others, Documents, Volume 5, 91. The “bosom friend” referred to Oliver Cowdery.

17. “Of Governments and Laws in General,” circa 1835, in Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God (Kirtland, Ohio: F. G. Williams and Co., 1835), 253. For the evolution of church discipline during this era, see Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). For the move toward individualism and the sacralization of personal conscience, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

18. Far West Minutes, April 12, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 88–90.

19. Far West Minutes, April 12, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 88–90.

20. Far West Minutes, April 13, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 96–97, 102.

21. Joseph Smith, Revelation, April 26, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 114–15. For Smith’s early thinking on Zion as a political theology, see Ashurst-McGee, “Zion Rising”; Benjamin E. Park, “To Fill Up the World: Joseph Smith as Urban Planner,” Mormon Historical Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 1–27.

22. For Puritans practices, see Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 44–57. For New England practices of “warning out,” see Josiah Henry Benton, Warning Out in New England, 1656–1817 (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1911); Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). “Warning out” refers to a widespread practice in New England communities of pressuring or coercing “outsiders” to settle elsewhere.

23. See Fluhman, “Peculiar People,” 49–78.

24. Joseph Smith, Journal, July 4, 1838, in Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds., Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), 276; Letter to Wilford Woodruff, circa 18 June 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 156.

25. “Journal, March–September 1838,” 47, July 4, 1838, Joseph Smith Papers, accessed January 21, 2021, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-march-september-1838/33.

26. “Missouri v. Gates,” 17 (June 1838).

27. Joseph Smith, Journal, July 4, 1838, in Jessee and others, Journals, Volume 1, 278.

28. For the paradox of democratic governance, see Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy, 655–710.

29. Sidney Rigdon, Oration Delivered by Mr. S. Rigdon, on the 4th of July, 1838 (Far West: Journal Office, 1838), 12. Joseph Smith, Journal, July 4, 1838, in Jessee and others, Journals, Volume 1, 276. Joseph Smith, Sermon, August 12, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 215.

30. Motto, circa March 16 or 17, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 44–45. Rigdon, Oration Delivered, 5.

31. For contemporary accounts of the society’s creation, see Reed Peck to “Dear Friends,” Quincy, Ill., September 18, 1839, p. 73, in Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; John Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Commonly Called Mormons) (St. Louis: self-pub., 1839), 30–32.

32. See, for example, Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). For an example of framing the Danites as a form of vigilante justice, see LeSueur, “The Danites Reconsidered”; for the Danites as a military group, see Baugh, “We Have a Company of Danites in These Times.”

33. “Missouri v. Gates,” 10.

34. “Missouri v. Gates,” 10.

35. Motto, circa March 16 or 17, 1838, in Ashurst-McGee and others, Documents, Volume 6, 44–45.

36. James Monroe, “Extinguishment of Indian Title to Lands in Georgia: Communicated to the House of Representatives, April 2, 1824,” in American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1834), 2:460. Andrew Jackson, “State of the Union Address, December 6, 1830,” in The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, 3d ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016), 120.

37. First Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States (Washington, D.C.: D. Rapine, 1818), 29–30.

38. “Appendix 2: Constitution of the Society of the Daughter of Zion, circa Late June 1838,” Joseph Smith Papters, accessed February 9, 2021, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/appendix-2-constitution-of-the-society-of-the-daughter-of-zion-circa-late-june-1838/1; “History, 1838–1856, Volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834],” 349, Joseph Smith Papers, accessed January 22, 2021, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/355.

39. “Missouri v. Gates,” 11. For the creation of a second militia, this time in Daviess County, see William Swartzell, Mormonism Exposed: Being a Journal of a Residence in Missouri from the 28th of May to the 20th of August, 1838 (Pittsburgh: self-pub., 1840); Baugh, “We have a Company of Danites in These Times,” 13–14.

40. Lilburn Boggs, executive order, October 27, 1838, later labeled as Executive Order #44, Mormon War Papers, 1837–1841, Missouri State Archives, Jefferson City, Missouri.

41. Matthew J. Grow and others, eds., Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846, Joseph Smith Papers (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016). See Benjamin E. Park, “Joseph Smith’s Kingdom of God: The Council of Fifty and the Mormon Challenge to American Democracy,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 87, no. 4 (December 2018): 1029–55.

42. The broader story of the democratic crisis of Nauvoo is told in Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (New York: Liveright, 2020).

43. Carthage Committee, resolutions, “Manuscript History of the Anti-Mormon Disturbances in Illinois,” circa 1845, Thomas C. Sharp and Allied Anti-Mormon Papers, Beineke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. See also John Hardin, William Warren, Stephen A. Douglas, and James McDougall to the First President and High Council of the Church of Latter Day Saints, October 3, 1845, in Grow and others, Council of Fifty, Minutes, 488–90.