Review
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Title: The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 15, 16 May-28 June 1844
Editors: Brett D. Dowdle, Adam H. Perry, J. Chase Kirkham, Elizabeth A. Kuehn, David W. Grua, Matthew C. Godfrey
Publisher: The Church Historian’s Press
Genre: Documentary History
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 691
Binding: Hardbound; alk. paper
ISBN: 978-1-63993-128-6
Price: $54.95
Reviewed by Mark Tensmeyer for the Association for Mormon Letters
The auspicious Joseph Smith Papers Project comes to a bittersweet end with Volume 15 of the Documents series. When I first learned the last volume would only cover the last six weeks of Joseph Smith’s life, I expected it to be much smaller than the preceding volumes, which covered about five to six months each. It was a pleasant surprise to see that the present volume was comparable in size to its predecessors. Impressively, more than three-quarters of the documents are for the last twenty days of Joseph’s life. If the production of documents is any indication of how busy Joseph Smith was in the final weeks of his life, then he was the busiest he ever was.
Part 1 covers May 16 to June 6, 1844. Joseph was trying to continue with his business as usual while still dealing with mounting conflict with William Law and his companions. This was a relative calm before the storm. Joseph was still focusing on long-term plans, as evident in his letter to Orson Hyde in Washington about getting Congress to approve their plan for settling in Texas and Oregon (p. 29). Of note, during this period, William Law successfully convinced a grand jury to indict Joseph Smith for unlawful cohabitation with Mariah Lawerance. This prompted Joseph’s May 26, 1844 discourse in which he said, “I like Paul have been in persecutions…I should be like a fish out of water if I were out of persecution…I am not so humble as if I was not persecuted”. This is the major recurring theme in the documents in this volume. Joseph was continually making the case to church members, non-Mormon friends, government leaders, and anyone else that his present trials were undeserved persecutions levied on him by unprincipled enemies.
The conflict escalated rapidly with the release of the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor on June 7, 1844. Robert Foster coldly rejected Joseph’s attempt at reconciliation that same day (pp. 144-148). Featured in this book are the meeting minutes for the city council on June 8, 1844, and June 10, 1844, in which Joseph and Hyrum Smith enumerated the misdeeds of Laws, Higbees, Fosters, and Joseph Jackson, countered the claims made in the paper; and made the case for declaring the paper a nuisance and disposing of it (pp. 154-174, 182-205). With one negative vote, the council agreed to do so, and it was done (p. 206).
The fallout from the destruction of the Expositor was immediate and dire. The introductory comments and footnotes cite the various reports of rallying local militias and less organized mobs threatening to overthrow Nauvoo and the surrounding Mormon settlements. Joseph spent the next fifteen days trying to quell the situation first by submitting himself to tribunals outside where he felt safe and by preparing the Nauvoo Legion and other Mormons for war.
The reader gets a taste for how perilous the situation was from reading Joseph’s words. He wrote his uncle John Smith in Macedonia, “We feel to hope for the best, and determined to prepare for the worst…If a mob annoy you, defend yourself to the very last, and if they fall upon you with a superior force…retreat to Nauvoo” (p. 301). Joseph wrote a similar letter to Isaac Morley on the same day (p. 284). The final lines of Joseph’s June 10, 1844 “Proclamation” to the people of Nauvoo best illustrates how he saw himself and the situation, ” repel, by gentle means and noble exertion, every foul scheme of unprincipled men, to disgrace and dishonor the city, or state, or any of their legally constituted authorities: and finally to keep the peace, by being cool, considerate, virtuous, unoffending, manly and patriotic as the true sons of liberty ever have been, and honorably maintain the precious boon our illustrious fathers won.”
Joseph declared martial law in Nauvoo on June 18, 1844. William Clayton reported his public address, “He called upon the Citizens to defend the lives of their wives & children, fathers and mothers, brothers & sisters from being murdered by the mob. He urged them in strong terms not to shed innocent blood.— not to act in the least on the offensive but invariably in the defensive and if we die— die like men of God and secure a glorious resurrection” (p. 321).
Joseph Smith, the prophet and theologian, emerged briefly during this period as he gave his last doctrinal discourse on June 16, 1844 (pp. 265-276). This sermon is something of a sequel to the King Follet Discourse as the Prophet supported the controversial doctrines of plurality of gods and definition of man by appealing to his understanding of the Hebrew meaning of the names of God in Genesis 1, the Greek meanings of John 17, and the Book of Abraham. Contemporary Latter-day Saints will also find this sermon explains their doctrine of the Godhead.
When his efforts to quell public outrage proved fruitless, Joseph agreed to disarm the Legion and submit himself to be tried in Carthage. The last letter to Emma Smith, written on the last day of Joseph’s life, includes a postscript written in his own hand, “I am very much resigned to my lot knowing I am justified and have done the best that could be done…and as for treason, I know that I have not commited any and they cannot prove one apearance of any thing of the kind. So you need not have any fears that any harme can happen to us on that score may God bless you all Amen” (pp.499-500).
This summary is only the briefest sampling of the experience of reading this last volume of the Documents series. The unintended effect of a high concentration of documents in a short period is that this volume almost reads like a point-of-view, day-by-day narrative. The introduction notes tie the documents together well enough that this book could be read cover-to-cover. More than in the other Documents volumes, Joseph’s voice and personality was pronounced through the many letters to and from Emma, Governor Thomas Ford, militia leader Jonathon Durham, and many others. In reading this, I felt like I was walking with the Prophet through the tumultuous, desperate last days of his life. I would recommend this book to non-historian Restoration believers for this reason.
Joseph Smith is a polarizing figure, and his last days have been remembered both as the undeserved fate of a literal martyred saint or as the natural consequences of a conniver whose web of ambition finally unraveled. As a documentary history of Joseph Smith’s papers, the reader is given the story primarily from his perspective. It falls on the writers and editors to give context and cite opposing sources in the introductions and footnotes. They take a measured approach by keeping context statements basic. For instance, the conflict with William Law is said to arise primarily out of plural marriage, with no discussion on whether Joseph had proposed plural marriage to Law’s wife Jane. Likewise, the volume mentions the accusation that the Laws, the Higbees and Joseph Jackson, and others aligned with them and cites the affidavit by Merinus Eaton attesting to that fact but takes no stanch on whether there was any truth to this allegation. A good documentary history leaves these kinds of conclusions up to the reader, and the Joseph Smith Papers Project does just that.
As an academic historical work, the Joseph Smith Papers Project staff lived up to the high expectations they have garnered over the last two decades. Volume 15, 16 May-28 June 1844, stands as a testament to their painstaking hard work and dedication. It makes me sad that there are no more Joseph Smith Papers Projects to look forward to. It is my hope that future projects from the Church Historian’s Press will continue with the same quality.