Notwithstanding the various misapprehensions which Abraham Lincoln gave voice to during his speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois in January of 1838 – specifically concerning the social forces which he believed had previously bound the American republic together – the course of action which he suggested might help stem the rising tide of vigilante behavior in the contemporary United States was especially troubling in light of certain facts on the ground. To Lincoln’s thinking, the lynching, rioting, and extra-judicial killing that had become a relatively common feature of life in the American republic in the early-19th century were all the result of a series of developments whose effects on the behavior of the American people had markedly increased in the years that followed the conclusion of the War of 1812. For one thing, the settlement of the various issues that had initially spurred that same conflict helped to inaugurate an era of peaceful co-existence between the United States and the United Kingdom. Having previously been either an inveterate enemy of the American republic or a concerted rival, the resolution of certain lingering commercial and diplomatic disagreements by way of the Treaty of Ghent (1815) allowed the UK to slide into the role of cautious collaborator over the course of the 1820s and 1830s. But while this most definitely represented a positive development for American commerce and allowed subsequent American governments to significantly reduce defense spending, Lincoln believed that the loss of a common British foe boded ill for the American people more broadly. Without a shared source of fear and anxiety to keep otherwise ambitious individuals from pursuing their self-interest at the behest of their fellow countrymen, how was American society supposed to hold itself together?
And then, of course, there was the matter
of the Founders. Between the 1770s and the 1820s, the same broad set of
soldiers, scholars, lawyers, and statesmen had held most of the major political
offices in the nascent American republic at both the state and federal level.
What this meant, in essence, was that many of the same men who had signed the
Declaration of Independence also helped to draft the Constitution, and led many
of the state governments, and occupied many of the most power federal offices,
and helped guide the country into a second war with Great Britain, all over the
course of about fifty years. By the end of the 1820s, it would indeed have been
fair to observe that the United States had been principally shaped by a
relatively small group of public servants whose perspectives and principles
were accordingly treated with an outsized degree of respect and deference by
the inhabitants thereof. The American people had in large part come to think of
the Founders as profoundly inspirational figures and had modeled many of their
own behaviors and opinions on these semi-sacred personages. But while this, in
Lincoln’s opinion, was to the benefit of the American republic – being that it
served to bind the American people to a course of selflessness and public service
– it was also, ultimately, doomed to failure. Regardless of the reverence in
which the Founders were held, they were still just human beings. They grew old,
they retired, and eventually they died. And as they died, Lincoln poetically
observed, the great pillars of the temple of liberty began to crack, and
crumble, and ultimately to collapse. Without these transcendent figures to hold
their fellow citizens to account, why should the American people have given the
slightest thought to the general public good?
This, as aforementioned, is where Lincoln
offered his solution. If, as he suspected, the rise in vigilante behavior that
had taken place in the United States since roughly the turn of the 19th
century was due in large part to the loss of certain unifying forces – be they
common enemies or collective inspirations – then clearly some new manner of
binding agent was wanted. But while Lincoln’s suggestion to that end was a
simple one on its face – i.e., that every American, “Swear by the blood of the
Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws of the country,
and never to tolerate their violation by others” – it carried with it some
exceptionally problematic implications. He seemed to anticipate this to some
extent, avowing as he did that there were indeed such things as bad laws. But
his addendum to this admission showed either a profound ignorance of some of
the prevailing political issues of the day or a stunning lack of imagination as
to the morally questionable goals towards which legitimate power might
conceivably be bent. “Although bad laws,” said Lincoln, “If they exist, should
be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the
sake of example they should be religiously observed.” Without even venturing outside
the confines of Lincoln’s native Midwest, one might find a number of examples
from the same period in which he delivered his celebrated speech of the kinds
of reprehensible outcomes one might become party to by treating every law on
the books with a quality of religious observance. Consider, by way of example,
the events that were at that moment unfolding in a neighboring community.
On the far side of the Mississippi
River from Lincoln’s adopted home in Illinois – as has been established in a
previous entry in the present series – lay the state of Missouri, the governor
of which, at the time that Lincoln was addressing the Young Men’s Lyceum in
Springfield, was a man named Lilburn Boggs (1796-1860). Boggs was a Democrat,
of course, being a Southerner originally from Lexington, Kentucky, who had
climbed through the ranks of Missouri politics over the course of the 1820s as
first a state senator and then as Lieutenant Governor. Under different
circumstances, Boggs might have enjoyed a long and fruitful public career in
state or even national politics. But as it happened in fact, both his term in
office and that of his predecessor, fellow Democrat Daniel Dunklin (1790-1844),
were almost wholly defined by the arrival and activities of a community of
Christian dissenters known colloquially as the Mormons. Formally designated as
the Church of Christ, Mormonism was a religious movement that arose out of the
revivalism of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and was based on the
claimed revelations of a young Vermont native named Joseph Smith (1805-1844).
While residing with his family in upstate New York – a hotbed of evangelical
religious fervor during the early decades of the 19th century –
Smith purportedly experiences a series of visions which led him to transcribe a
kind of neo-Christian liturgy which was published in 1830 under the title “The
Book of Mormon.”
Without delving into the exact tenets
thereof, it will here suffice to say that those who accepted the veracity of
the Book and acclaimed Smith as their prophet grew swiftly in number as the
congregation began its migration westward in search of the site where it would
build its so-called “New Jerusalem.” In Colesville, Palmyra, and Fayette, New
York, the Mormons established their first small communities not long after the
Book was published. In Kirtland, Ohio in 1831, they absorbed a group of
Restorationist Christians led by a preacher named Sidney Rigdon (1793-1876) and
adopted a form of communalism known as the “United Order.” And by 1832, pursuant
to several visits by Smith himself, they had settled on the hamlet of
Independence, Missouri as the center of their prophesied city of Zion. In part,
this steady movement was representative of Smith’s ongoing revelations. That is
to say, his understanding of the Church of Christ’s mission and purpose was
subject to frequent reconsideration. But the arrival of the Mormon in the state
of Missouri was also very much the result of their having aroused the ire of
their hosts and neighbors wherever they had previously happened to settle. As the
congregation expanded during its period of residence in Ohio, for example,
Smith and his followers became embroiled in a series of internal disputes,
financial misadventures, and local disagreements, none of which did much to
polish the community’s reputation. Ohioans came to distrust the Mormon’s
communitarian social values and grew suspicious of the political power which
their growing numbers portended. Then, when Smith’s attempt to found a local
lending organization – the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company –
failed spectacularly due to over-capitalization, debt collectors came calling
and Smith was charged by state authorities with having committed bank fraud.
Having by that point abandoned Independence as the site of New Jerusalem –
mostly due to the poor reception the Mormon settlers in Jackson County had
received from the locals – Smith instead led his followers out of Ohio to the
town of Far West, Missouri. There, at long last, they would build their prophesied
city.
It was at this point, as 1837 gave way to
1838, that the first stirrings of the so-called “Missouri Mormon War” really
made themselves known. As aforementioned, the Church of Christ had previously
tried to settle in the Jackson County hamlet of Independence, the result of
which was a series of conflicts with local residents leading to the violent
expulsion of the newcomers in the autumn of 1833. When the dispossessed Mormons
then attempted to re-establish themselves in nearby Clay County, a local
legislator sought to stave off yet another cycle of inter-communal violence by
pushing a compromise through the Missouri General Assembly essentially granted
the newcomers a new county all to themselves. Caldwell County, as the
jurisdiction became known, was already the site of limited Mormon settlement,
and it seemed a fairly straightforward proposition to simply shift all future
migrations efforts towards that sparsely populated region. But while this
arrangement did succeed in tamping down on local hostilities for the better
part of two years, the departure of the main body of the Church of Christ out
of Ohio at the beginning of 1838 had the ultimate effect of shattering this
fragile peace. Not only did hundreds of Mormons departing from Kirtland flock to
their Caldwell Country headquarters at Far West, but a number of them attempted
to establish additional settlements in neighboring Daviess County and Carroll
County. Stung by what appeared to be the newcomers’ blatant disregard for the
terms of the previously established compromise, local residents began once more
agitating for the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri.
While they could hardly have been described
as being particularly charitable in their attitudes towards the incoming
members of the Church of Christ, the Missourians who sought the former’s
removal over the course of the 1830s did not do so for entirely inexplicable
reasons. The fact that the Mormons believed – pursuant to one of Smith’s
revelations – that their righteous behavior would permit them to take
possession of the property of non-believers did little to smooth over relations
between the them and their newfound neighbors. Nor did the fact that Missouri
was a slave state while most Mormons came from jurisdictions where slavery was illegal.
Nor did the fundamental Mormon belief that Native Americans were the
descendants of a lost tribe of Israelites who were accordingly to be treated as
moral and spiritual equals. And then, of course, there was the simple fact of
their numbers. For practical reasons as much as out of any sense of piety,
Mormons tended to settle together, trade together, and generally to act in
close consort and unity. Depending on the nature of the community in which they
settled, therefore, their presence might very easily come to dominate local
affairs. Without much effort, they could conceivably swing elections, take over
local political offices, and start to re-write local laws, all while taking
firm hold of the regional economy. It was not clear that the Mormons were
particularly interested in doing any of these things, of course, or that their
intentions went much beyond converting non-believers to their faith, but such
was the nature of contemporary American society. In the midst of a culture that
increasingly lionized the so-called “rugged individual” and was deeply enmeshed
with the social biases of mainstream Protestant Christianity, a community of
close-knit religious dissenters like the Church of Christ were unlikely to ever
be granted the benefit of the doubt.
This isn’t to say, mind you, that the
Mormons’ behavior was unimpeachable. By the time Smith and his followers
arrived in Far West, years of rough treatment at the hands of their fellow
Americans had arguably served to sharpen their sense of social cohesion to a keen,
cutting edge. Unwilling to be manhandled any further by those who failed to
understand the nature of their mission – and plagued, increasingly, by internal
dissent – Mormon leaders like Sampson Avard (1800-1869) and the aforementioned
Sidney Rigdon accordingly began to advocate a program of armed self-defense and
retributive justice whereby all those who either attacked the Church of Christ
from without or threatened it unity from within were to be treated as its
unreconcilable enemies. Speaking to that end on two prominent occasions in the
summer of 1838, Rigdon first compared those Church of Christ members who
questioned his or Smith’s leadership to salt that had, “Lost its savor [and] is
thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot
of men.” Then, preaching some weeks later on the subject of the Mormon’s
external adversaries, he famously declared that if such mobs as had harassed
them in Kirtland and in Jackson County persisted in their efforts to drive them
away from their homes,
It shall be between us and them a war
of extermination; for we will follow them until the last drop of their blood is
spilled; or else they will have to exterminate us, for we will carry the seat
of war to their own houses and their own families, and one party or the other
shall be utterly destroyed.
Seemingly in
response to these bloody-minded exhortations, the aforementioned Avard then
formed a secret society in June of 1838 known formally as “the Danites” and
informally as the “Destroying Angels,” the original purpose of which was to
persecute and expel dissenters. But while at first their activities were aimed
at this principal objective – to the end of which they published a manifesto
threatening those they perceived as disloyal with a “fatal calamity” if they
did not mend their ways or else depart from Caldwell County – they soon enough
became embroiled in a kind of armed vendetta with the state and people of
Missouri.
Hostilities escalated slowly but
surely. On August 6th, in response to a declaration by a candidate
for state assembly that the Mormons should not be permitted to gain a political
foothold in the state, a group of Missourians gathered in the Daviess County
seat of Gallatin on election day with the intent of blocking members of the
Church of Christ from casting their votes. When some thirty Mormons eventually
arrived, denounced the remarks of the aforesaid candidate, and declared their
intention to vote, a fight broke out during which one of the Mormons supposedly
rallied his confederates by crying out, “Oh yes, you Danites, here is a
job for us!” While this apparently shifted the battle in the Mormon’s favor for
a time, causing the Missourians to depart with a promise to return with arms in
tow, things thereafter rather quickly fizzled out. The Mormons dispersed and
returned to their homes, the Missourians followed suit, and the worst that
ultimately happened was that rumors began to fly. Smith and his inner circle
attempted to sort out the facts from the fictions by visiting various Daviess
County officials – often accompanied by armed supporters – and asking them to
swear that they had no intentions towards further violence, but this almost
certainly did more harm than good. Local attitudes towards the Church of Christ,
already farm from warm, steadily worsened as the summer wore on.
On the same day as the encounter at
Gallatin, a question was placed on the ballot in nearby Carroll County as to
whether or not a group of Mormons should have been allowed to settle in the
otherwise vacant community of Dewitt. When it unsurprisingly passed in the
majority, a committee was established for the purpose of informing the
newcomers that they were no longer welcome and seeing to their immediate
removal. The Mormons naturally refused, citing their rights as American
citizens to live wherever they wished, and the Carroll County committee
accordingly reached out to neighboring communities asking for their aid in
performing the necessary expulsion. The result, by September 20th,
was the arrival in Dewitt of a group of one hundred and fifty armed Missourians
who demanded, in no uncertain terms, that the Mormons abandon the premises
within the span of ten days. When the Mormons again refused to be bullied, the
vigilantes returned on October 1st to begin laying siege to the
settlement. Buildings were burned, livestock was slaughtered, and a call for
aid from the Mormons to Governor Boggs was met with a decidedly lukewarm
response. The conflict in question, said Boggs, was between the Church of
Christ and its neighbors and was better off settled between the two interested
parties. On October 11th, the Mormons finally agreed to depart to
Caldwell County, thus abandoning Dewitt and admitting their defeat at the hands
of the mob.
Notwithstanding this seeming victory at
Dewitt, however, certain Missourians were as yet unsatisfied that the “Mormon
Menace” had been entirely dealt with. A force was accordingly organized on the
part of certain parties in Carroll County for the purpose of marching into
Daviess County and driving the Mormons from that jurisdiction as well. When
news of this development reached Caldwell County, the reaction on the part of
the Church of Christ community was understandably far from resigned. Though
militia officials from neighboring Clay County attempted to advise the Mormons
that their own Caldwell County forces were not legally permitted to travel into
and operate within Daviess County under any circumstances – and that Mormons
travelling in the latter jurisdiction should therefore do so in small numbers
and unarmed – a local Mormon judge named Higby nevertheless called out the
militia in Far West and authorized them to defend their fellow congregants.
Joined by a contingent of Danites, the Caldwell County militia thereafter
entered Daviess County on October 18th and proceeded to burn and
pillage whatever communities they happened to come across. The county seat at
Gallatin was gutted almost completely while Millport and Grindstone Fork were
each plundered and severely burned. Some hundred Missourians were forced from
their homes to seek refuge in nearby counties while the same fate befell those
Daviess County Mormons who were subsequently attacked by their neighbors in
retribution. But while not every member of the Church of Christ held to the
justice of this outcome – to the point that two members of its leading body,
the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, actually left the organization and swore
affidavits as to the events in Daviess Country – the bulk of the congregation remained
unrepentant and steadfast.
Matters came to something of a head in the
waning days of October. The residents of Ray County, it seemed – which was
immediately south of Caldwell County – had been watching the events of the
summer unfold with mounting dread and trepidation. Not only had a group of
dissenting Mormons who settled in the community of Richmond attested to the
fact that their expulsion from the Church of Christ had been exceptionally
acrimonious and violent, but the brawl at Gallatin, the sacking of Daviess
County, and the swearing of the aforementioned affidavits had made it
substantially clear that Ray County would be far from safe in the event that
the Mormons turned their ire upon its inhabitants. The result, near the end of
October, was the summoning of a militia company to a sparsely uninhabited area
between Ray and Caldwell counties known as Buncombe’s Strip for the purpose of
acting as a buffer against further Mormon aggression. Under the command of one
Captain Samuel Bogart – who had previously participated in anti-Mormon violence
in Carroll County – this detachment initially proceeded to accost and disarm
any Mormons they found living in northern Ray County. Eventually, however –
knowingly or otherwise – they strayed into southern Caldwell County and
continued their campaign of harassment. When reports of these activities
reached Far West, the disarmament had become a hostage-taking and the danger of
execution was imminent. A rescue party was formed under David W. Patten (1799-1838),
another of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the group arrived at Bogart’s
camp on the night of October 24th.
Since memorialized as “the Battle of
Crooked River,” the encounter between Patten’s forces and Bogart’s was
practically little more than a skirmish. Bogart’s command consisted of a single
militia company – between eighty and two hundred men – Patten’s of an unknown
number. A single member of the Missouri militia was killed while the Mormons
suffered fully three such casualties themselves. Granted, one of the Church of
Christ members killed was the aforementioned David Patten, the loss of which
represented a significant blow to the congregation’s morale. And it was true
that the Missouri militia forces had been successfully driven off. But the real
effects of the engagement were more perceptual than practical. By the time news
of the skirmish reached the ears of Governor Boggs in Jefferson City, the
details made it out to be something more like a massacre. Boggs had previously
lived in Jackson County, as it happened, and had witnessed firsthand the
peculiarities of Mormon culture during the aforementioned conflict over their
presence in Independence. And while he had previously been content to allow the
county militias and the Mormons to arrive at some manner of compromise on their
own, the events at Crooked River – and quite probably certain reported accounts
of Rigdon’s speeches during the summer – finally spurred him to take final and
decisive action. To that end, on October 27, 1838, he issued Missouri Executive
Order 44.
Up to this point, it would seem more than
fair to say, almost no one involved in the Missouri Mormon War had behaved
themselves in a manner which a young Abraham Lincoln would have found to be at
all acceptable. In the absence of either a common British enemy, recall, or the
stabilizing influence of the Founders, it was his belief that the most likely
means of ensuring the continued cohesion of the American republic was for every
citizen thereof to make a scrupulous observance of the laws of the land. The
Missourians had most certainly failed to meet this standard. Not only had they
illegally hounded the Mormons out of Jackson County and Clay County and
attempted to rob them of their right to vote in Daviess County, but they’d even
gone so far as to lay siege to the Mormon community in Carroll County, all in
blatant violation of the laws and the Constitution of Missouri. And at the same
time, while the membership of the Church of Christ had certainly appeared to
migrate into the Show Me State with entirely peaceful intentions, the manner in
which they chose to react to the abuses frequently heaped upon them by their
neighbors were no less unlawful in practice. They assaulted the citizens of
Gallatin who attempted to prevent them from casting their votes on Election
Day, pillaged a number of communities in Daviess County, and then attacked an
authorized detachment of the Missouri militia at the Battle of Crooked River.
From a purely moral standpoint, the Mormons absolutely had the right to defend
themselves from harassment when their lives were under threat and their homes
were to be destroyed. But from the perspective of the law – just or unjust,
good or bad – they were in violation of the statutes of the jurisdiction in
which they had chosen to reside. By the terms of Lincoln’s declaration made the
previous January in Springfield, such behavior, under whatever circumstances,
was fundamentally unacceptable. “There is no grievance [,]” he said, “That is a
fit object of redress by mob law.”
An executive order, of course, could hardly
be said to qualify as an expression of “mob law,” so to speak. Lilburn Boggs
was not some county official acting well outside his remit or a militia officer
who had decided to take matters into his own hands. He was the Governor of Missouri,
duly elected by the people thereof and duly enjoined to act as, “Conservator of
the peace [.]” And while the Missouri Constitution had nothing specific to say
as to the nature and validity of a so-called “executive order,” it had
nevertheless become part of the common understanding of republican government
in America by the end of the 1830s that chief executives indeed possessed the
authority to issue such directives as they felt were necessary to meet the
needs of a given situation. There were limits to this power, to be sure,
between judicial review and legislative invalidation, but until such time as
they could be conclusively declared unenforceable or improper, such orders
still carried the full force of law. Missouri Executive Order 44, therefore,
while it may later have been demonstrated to be in violation of the state
constitution, in the meantime represented an institutionally legitimate
exercise of the executive authority of the office of Governor. This is a point
worth making emphatically because of what the text of the order declared. As
written by Boggs himself in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the state of
Missouri, the Mormons were stated to be, “In the attitude of an open and avowed
defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this state.” In
consequence, the Governor continued, addressing the commander the state
militia,
Your orders are […] to hasten your
operation with all possible speed. The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and
must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public
peace—their outrages are beyond all description. If you can increase your
force, you are authorized to do so to any extent you may consider necessary.
It cannot be overstated what a horrifying
abuse of power such an order represented. The Mormons who had taken up residence
in the state of Missouri over the course of the 1830s had not been convicted of
any crime under the laws of that state. They had not been arrested, or tried,
or found guilty, or sentenced to death, and nor was Governor Boggs attempting
to set such events in motion. On the contrary, he was summarily ordering that
the Mormons be “exterminated” or else driven from the state. Plainly, the
office of Governor possessed no such authority. As stated in the Missouri
Declaration of Rights,
All men have a natural and
indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their
own consciences […] No preference can ever be given by law to any sect or mode
of worship […] No private property ought to be taken or applied to public use
without just compensation [and] The accused cannot […] be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land.
But while Boggs was
undeniably guilty of ordering the state militia to violate all of these
provisions, the people of Missouri would similarly have been guilty of
violating the laws of that state by denying the validity of the order while it
still remained in force. They would have been right to do so, unquestionably,
but such actions would have also been demonstrably illegal.
This, at long last, gets to the
fundamental flaw in Abraham Lincoln’s aforementioned argument. “Although bad
laws,” he said, “If they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still,
while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be
religiously observed.” By this logic, in order to avoid further degrading the
rule of law – and in so doing prevent the United States from ceasing to exist –
the officers of the Missouri militia should have either driven every Mormon out
of the state or killed them all without trial or reprieve. The Governor, their
commander-in-chief, had ordered them to do so. And while they could have
refused, on moral grounds, to commit such heinous actions, this would
absolutely have made them guilty of insubordination. Would it have pleased Lincoln
to learn that the officers had avoided such a fate? Would he have nodded in
satisfaction when told that the men of the Missouri militia had consented to
observe a bad law because it still remained in force? One certainly hopes not,
given what such an outcome would have involved. But what did this mean, then,
for Lincoln’s purported solution to the central problem facing American republicanism?
If it meant preserving the United States from gradual disintegration, was it
acceptable that sometimes people might be forced to suffer and die unjustly?
The Mormons, for the record, were
indeed expelled from Missouri. And while bloodshed, fortunately, was kept to a
minimum, the notable exception was the so-called “Haun’s Mill Massacre.” A
group of Mormon dissenters, it seemed, having fled into Livingston County,
reported to local authorities that a Mormon raiding party was then being formed
for the purpose of essentially repeating the aforementioned depredations that
had previously taken place in Daviess County. Aiming to prevent such an occurrence,
a detachment of the Livingston County militia accordingly set off for the Mormon
settlement of Haun’s Mill in neighboring Caldwell County. When they arrived on
October 30th, the two hundred and fifty Missourians found a
community that had been almost entirely deserted save for a group of about
twenty armed men and boys who had taken shelter in the local blacksmith’s shop.
In the exchange of fire that followed – which lasted in total for between
thirty and sixty minutes – four of the attacking Missourians were injured and
seventeen Mormons were killed. One man who tried to flee the blacksmith’s and
surrender to the Missourians was cut down were he stood. Several of the dead
were children. And while it remains unclear whether or not the militiamen had
yet been informed of the terms of Boggs’ executive order – some firsthand
accounts have the Missourians claiming to be acting on the authority of the
Governor, others present no such evidence – what is certain is the degree to which
such anti-Mormon violence had come to enjoy de-facto legal acceptance. While the
victims of the Haun’s Mill Massacre were hastily buried in a shallow grave and
the survivors chased off to Far West, not one of the perpetrators was charged with
so much as a misdemeanor.
The commander of the Missouri State militia,
of course, was acutely aware of what Governor Boggs had in mind. John Bullock
Clark (1802-1885) had been its intended recipient, after all, and so it fell to
him to see that its terms were faithfully executed. This he did by authorizing
a siege of Far West, the result of which, on November 1st, was the
surrender of the community, the liquidation of its assets, and the arrest and
trial of Joseph Smith and his closest followers. Addressing the captive Mormons
upon his arrival on the scene, Clark notably referenced Boggs’ aforementioned directive.
“The order of the governor was to me,” he said,
That you should be exterminated, and
not allowed to remain in the state; and had not your leaders been given up, and
the terms of this treaty complied with, your families before this time would
have been destroyed, and your houses in ashes. There is a discretionary power
vested in my hands, which concerning your circumstances I will exercise for a
season.
It once more bears
emphasizing how abhorrent this situation truly was. As far as Clark was concerned
– and as far as the law agreed with him – he was simply fulfilling his duty as
an officer of the state militia. The Governor, his commander-in-chief, had
ordered him to either expel the Mormons or exterminate them, and so he was
intent on accomplishing one or the other. Granted, the membership of the Church
of Christ had not been slaughtered to the last man while Clark looked on impassively,
but his statement also makes it clear that he would have been prepared to order
exactly that if the individuals in question had opted not to cooperate. “There is
a discretionary power vested in my hands,” he said, and this is an absolutely
horrifying notion. The Governor had given him an ostensibly legal order and so
he was directing an ostensibly legal proceeding. But it would have been just as
legal had he killed them all himself. The Mormons were not fugitives in any technical
sense, nor criminals who had been tried and sentenced to death or to exile, but
the authority of Governor Boggs had rendered their execution permissible.
Joseph Smith eventually escaped from
imprisonment in the spring of 1839, whereupon he led the remainder of his
followers east into Illinois where they founded the city of Nauvoo. They would
be forced out of that state as well, of course, and at long last would find
their final refuge in an otherwise uninhabited stretch of desert in what used
to be northern Mexico. Many of them would die along the way to their promised
land, including Smith himself in 1844, and the resulting territory would not achieve
statehood– and thus voting representation in Congress – until almost the dawn
of the 20th century. But while Governor Boggs might be said to have
fared little better himself – between an assassination attempt in 1842,
self-imposed exile to California in 1846, and a largely unremarked death in
1860 – there remains a fundamental difference between how the two parties
fared. While Boggs’ reputation may have suffered for his treatment of the Mormons, no
one within the contemporary Missouri political establishment offered a concerted
challenged to his declaration that the Mormons should have been expelled or
exterminated. Indeed, the order in question was not formally invalidated until
1976. Boggs eventually left Missouri, it was true, and even ventured west like
the Mormons in search of more hospitable climes. But whereas he did so by
choice, in full possession of his life and property, the congregation of the Church
of Christ did so with little more in their possession than the hope that they
might someday find someplace where they would be allowed to live in peace. Was
this a just outcome? Under no circumstances. But it was, by the standards of
the time, an entirely legal one, for all the good that the likes of Abraham
Lincoln might have claimed it did for the American republic at large.
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