Mormon Authority and Identity in America
Settlers of Jackson County, Missouri imposed their will on the contiguous landscape with arbitrary survey lines. With possessive place names like Sibley and descriptive ones like Independence, they staked claims and declared values. The lines, the names, and the particular political and economic values they represented constituted the raw materials of which the County’s settlers established a Jacksonian identity. The slaves in their midst, the Native Americans to their immediate west, and, beginning in 1831, the Mormons who settled among them, gave Jackson’s settlers incentive to forge a distinctive identity, to establish their culture, to stake their claims, and to solidify the dimensions of the highly qualified democracy we call Jacksonian.
Blacks both free and slave, Native Americans, and Mormons all posed perceived threats to peculiarly Jacksonian democracy. These groups became related in the minds of Jackson County settlers, whose worst fear envisioned Mormon abolitionists descending upon them in droves to proselyte Native Americans while dictated at every turn by the undemocratic authority of direct revelation. Jackson settlers forged their identity against the anvil of these perceived threats. This process bears some resemblance to the ongoing effort of Americans today to define democracy against the perceived threats of foreign immigrants and Islam.
Missouri became increasingly democratic throughout its territorial period. The 1812 Act that created the Missouri Territory eliminated all property qualifications for voting and office holding. It gave the franchise to male settlers to elect a legislature, dropping the fifty-acre freehold requirement of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The territory elected its congressional delegate popularly, not in the legislature. Following a national trend, Congress and Missouri’s appointed officials left much local decision-making in the hands of settlers.[i]
Missouri dropped its territorial status in 1821 after a sectional contest resulted in the famous compromise that allowed slavery to continue in Missouri but forbade it elsewhere in the Louisiana Territory north of thirty-six and a half degrees north latitude. “The contest over Missouri was real and dangerous,” wrote historian William Lynch. “Location, climate, and soil had much to do with the fact that slavery was well established in Missouri before 1810, but the factors controlling the westward flow of colonists were of vital importance. . . . The population of Missouri at the time of the admission controversy over admission was, aside from the small Spanish and French elements, almost entirely from Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”[ii]
Deliberations in the Congress stalled when anxious Missourians drafted a premature constitution that empowered the legislature to enact “such laws as may be necessary to prevent free negroes and mulattoes from coming to, and settling in this state, under any pretext whatsoever.”[iii] Missouri’s pro-slavery population praised the provision. One opined, “What better security can slave holders have that their rights will be secured, and their habits respected in Missouri, than the provisions of the constitution?”[iv] But it took a committee led by Henry Clay to forge an ambiguous compromise that finally resulted in Missouri statehood. The so-called “Clay Formula” left the Missouri Constitution in tact but forbade the legislature from enacting any law that limited any citizen full constitutional rights. Since the dimensions of “citizenship” and “constitutional” rights were not well defined in the antebellum period, both sides could count the compromise a victory.
“The people of frontier Missouri had their way,” as Lynch put it. “Popular sovereignty registered a victory for slavery in Missouri in 1820.”[v] The Missouri Compromise led to the state’s existence but simultaneously ensured that its thoroughly southern sons and daughters would eventually be surrounded on three sides by free soil. Jutting dramatically north of the 36:30 line, Missouri felt like an unwanted step-child, one conditioned to willfulness and resentment by incessant attacks on its honor and the fiber of its being. Missourians felt both victorious and vulnerable.
Richard Fristoe served under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, and his brother married Jackson’s daughter. Fristoe settled in western Missouri in 1818 with his young family and six slaves, and was instrumental in getting the legislature to designate a new county, the westernmost in the state, named for Jackson.[vi] When the slave-holding, Indian-fighting folk hero Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828, the county’s settlers assumed their fortunes were rising. Of the 210 votes cast in Jackson County townships where returns are known, all but three went for the general from Tennessee.[vii] “Jackson was a faithful mirror of their values, attitudes, and goals.” Both he and they valued the wealth embedded in western land, were of the attitude that it belonged to them by manifest destiny, and shared the goal of removing the land’s earlier inhabitants.[viii] Jackson’s qualified democracy distinguished between citizens of the United States, the stakeholders of sovereignty, and subjects “with no sovereignty of their own.” These wards of the state were, Jackson thought, in the foster care of the “legislature of the union,” the same body democratically elected by citizens who demanded Indian removal.[ix]
America’s long tradition of savage-making was at work on the western frontier in the nineteenth century. When Missourians burned Indian towns or ran off tribal livestock, this was the progressive march of democracy. When Native Americans retaliated, this was savagery, clear evidence of the assertion that Indians could not, would not become civilized and deserved to be pushed further.[x] Jackson’s administration presided over the final formation of the Indian Territory west of Missouri and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. That left Jackson County on the far western edge of the United States, positioned tenuously amidst free soil and with only the thinnest imaginary line separating savagery from an aspiring, angst-ridden democracy under construction.
The confidence of county histories is striking. Pearl Wilcox wrote that Westerners considered Jackson’s military heroics as “proof not only of the superiority of the Americans but the righteousness of their cause.” Jackson’s “independence, and his relentless attitude in driving the Indians back and taking possession of Florida” served, according to Wilcox, as a perfect icon for Jackson County, Missouri.[xi] One booster said that settlers “were of the Jacksonian type, hardy, brave, undaunted. With the ax in one hand and a rifle in the other, they were at once prepared to hew or slay—they did a great deal of both, slaying wild Indians and wild animals.”[xii] Another left this idyllic image: “Of such rugged stuff were the pioneers of Jackson County, brave, hardy men, and devoted faithful women and children worked incessantly, the men reclaiming the virgin wilderness, the women spinning, weaving and making the clothing and almost everything that was used about the home, and the children helping their parents in numberless ways.”[xiii]
This same writer informs us that Jackson County’s first circuit court clerk resigned in disgust at “what he regarded as the roughness and uncultivated manners of the people,” leaving us to wonder if underneath these confident caricatures one can discern the anxieties of a new world.[xiv] Ax in one hand, rifle in the other, too afraid to set either down; the ax could transform the haunted woods into a secure cabin while the rifle, like a child’s blanket, provided assurance that open but untamed land could be turned to privately possessed Independence even “on the outer verge of civilization.”[xv]
This is the anxious, aspiring scene depicted by contemporary observers of early Jackson County. Independence, one wrote, “is a new town, containing a courthouse [under construction] built of brick, two or three merchant stores, and fifteen or twenty dwelling houses, built mostly of logs hewed on both sides; and is situated on a handsome rise of ground, about three miles south of the Missouri River, and about twelve miles east of the dividing line between the U.S. and the Indian Reserve, and is the county seat of Jackson County.”[xvi] Another thought “the town of Independence was full of promise, like most of the innumerable towns springing up in the midst of the forests in the West, many of which, though dignified by high-sounding epithets, consist of nothing but a ragged congeries of five or six rough log huts, two or three clapboard houses, two or three so-called hotels, alias grogshops; a few stores, a bank, printing office, and barn-looking church. It [Independence] lacked at the time I commemorate, the three last edifices, but was nevertheless a thriving and aspiring place, in its way.”[xvii] Everywhere there is evidence of a town under construction on a prairie ambivalent about cultivation.[xviii]
Everywhere one looked was evidence not of the “virgin wilderness” described by descendants, but one swept of its inhabitants by those who fit what can well be called the Jacksonian type. These were westward looking entrepreneurs whose sense of manifest destiny justified exploitation of others. A Centennial History of Independence captured the actual process of possessing Independence:
“Mr. Shepherd’s train of wagons arrived one evening at the public spring on the east side of Independence. . . . The spring was a famous camping place for Indians and for all travelers who ventured into the wilderness. . . . He [Shepherd] directed his negroes to fell trees and build a log house near the spring. He understood very well that he was an intruder, but time would give him the right to settle here and he would enter the land from the government as soon as a land office for the purpose should be opened. Other settlers came into the same neighborhood on the same business that brought Mr. Shepherd.”[xix]
Asked why Missouri so obstinately refused to abolish slavery, Alexis de Tocqueville based his answer on the assumption that settlers were willing to exploit slaves for short-term gains and narrow self-interests, in contrast to the caricatures of ax-wielding, hard-working pioneers of Independence, Jackson County. Said Tocqueville, “It is so convenient for new settlers to have slaves to help them cut the trees and clear the lands in a region where it is hardly possible to find free workmen, that it is understandable that the less immediate benefit of the abolition of slavery has not yet been appreciated at its true value in Missouri.”[xx]
Driven by potential fortunes, Jacksonians made their living by taking risks in new markets dependent on outsiders, un-Jacksonians who were necessary but unequal others. The Santa Fe trade brought wealth to Independence as did steamer traffic on the Missouri River. Farmers oversaw slaves who raised crops for sale to soldiers guarding the western border. And “the astute businessmen of Independence did not fail to profit by trade and traffic with the Indians.” As one admiring descendant wrote, “Independence grew rich on Indian annuities and Indian trade.”[xxi]
Tocqueville wrote home from Memphis about meeting this type. “We made the acquaintance there of a kind of man and a way of life that we had no conception of,” he announced. “This part of the United States is peopled by a single type of man only, the Virginians. They have retained the physical and moral character that belongs to them; they form a people apart, with national prejudices and a distinctive character.”[xxii] Jacksonians are a chosen people.
How did they come to be so? Whence this characteristic Virginian of whom Tocqueville speaks? Edmund Morgan described democratization as an anxiety producing process. In his landmark study American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan observed a suggestive link in the fact that Africans were introduced in Virginia in 1619, the inaugural year of Virginia’s representative assembly, the House of Burgesses. Slavery did not become entrenched in Virginia immediately. Indeed, early on Africans and white indentured servants were treated similarly during and after their servitude. The abundance of cheap land offering to return wealth by hard labor, combined with a growing number of freed white servants, led Virginians to harden slave codes in the mid 1600s, when servitude for Africans became slavery—that is perpetual. Morgan argues that easy access to land by the growing class of freemen made Virginia’s elites anxious. They did not relish the idea of democratization—of sovereignty being spread ever wider among the growing, potentially endless class of freemen. But they could hardly prohibit it.
Morgan argues persuasively that democratization became palatable in Virginia and thence America as free whites gained a stake in property and prosperity at the expense of Indian occupants and African slaves. “The answer to the problem” of a growing class of ungovernable freemen, Morgan writes, “was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.” Virginians, like their Missouri descendants, “learned their first lessons in racial hatred by putting down the Indians.” Virginia’s legislators passed increasingly strict, race-based laws as they became increasingly dependent on freedmen for their elective office. A 1682 statute, for example, made perpetual slaves of all imported non-Christian servants, meaning Indians and Africans. “The act of 1682,” Morgan wrote, “set further development of slavery on a squarely racial foundation. Indians and Negroes were henceforth lumped together in Virginia legislation, and white Virginians treated black, red, and intermediate shades of brown as interchangeable.” This process of “other fashioning,” as social scientists sometimes call it, catalyzed democratization. “As Virginians nourished an increasing contempt for blacks and Indians, they began to raise the status of lower-class whites. The two movements were complementary. The status of poor whites rose not merely in relation to blacks but also in relation to their white superiors.”[xxiii]
We must not overstate the similitude of seventeenth-century Virginia and nineteenth-century Missouri. Indeed, Mormon influence in Jackson County is an unusual ingredient in the recipe of antebellum democratization. But Morgan’s evidence and brilliant analysis highlight the way democratization seems to require victims. As sovereignty spreads and levels out among the population, there remains an economic and psychological need for the dispossessed. The new possessors of “overwhelmingly democratic” Jackson County relied on dispossessed Indians for the economic life blood that sustained their Independence.[xxiv] And perhaps even more on their slaves. Jackson County’s 2,600 settlers owned 193 slaves in 1830. A decade later the white population had nearly tripled while the slave population had grown more than seven hundred percent. One of them sold in 1836 for $887, well above what he would have fetched in a Virginia auction that year. And Lyle Dorsett found evidence to inform his conclusion that “Jackson County slave owners held tenaciously to their bondsmen because slavery was a thriving and profitable institution in that area of Missouri.”[xxv]
Into this environment came a radically counter cultural movement: Mormonism. Tocqueville was sure from the first pages of Democracy in America that “God does not Himself need to speak for us to find sure signs of His will.” Rather, “patient observation” shows the “gradual and measured advance of equality, [and] that discovery alone gives this progress the sacred character of the will of the Sovereign Master. In that case, the effort to halt democracy appears as a fight against God Himself.” Though Mormon prophet Joseph Smith valued democratic government, his revelations implicitly rejected popular sovereignty. The voice of God repeatedly declares His prerogative to make and execute the law and bring offenders to judgment. “The true beginning of American democracy,” by contrast, “is the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, a dogma logically incompatible with the acceptance of any authority, including traditional religion.” By their nature as well as their tone, Smith’s revelations assumed authority. They presented a potent alternative to the assumed self-evident wisdom of Jacksonian democracy’s manifest destiny.[xxvi]
The Book of Mormon, published in March 1830, emphasized three crucial things relative to our study of Jackson County’s development. First, in telling the story of a clan from pre-exilic Jerusalem who fled down the Arabian Peninsula and migrated by ship to the Americas, the earliest readers of the Book of Mormon were sure that Native Americans were descendants of Israel, thus spiritually akin to those who embraced the new covenant. Mormons were to take the Book of Mormon and its Christian gospel to Native Americans, its rightful heirs. Second, the Book of Mormon prophesied that “a New Jerusalem should be built up upon this land, unto the remnant of the seed of Joseph,” assumed to be the Indians (Ether 13:6). Finally, as Terryl Givens wrote, “one finds in the Book of Mormon that prayer frequently and dramatically evokes an answer that is impossible to mistake as anything other than an individualized, dialogic response to a highly particularized question. The conception of revelation as a personalized, dialogic exchange pervades the Book of Mormon—as well as the life of the Prophet Joseph Smith—like an insistent leitmotif.”[xxvii]
A series of these revelations led Mormons to identify Jackson County, Missouri the site for New Jerusalem, the heart of a culture socially, politically, and economically opposed to Jacksonian democracy. A September 1830 revelation led Mormon missionaries to Missouri’s western border to proselyte Native Americans “at the very moment . . . the United States government was gathering Native American Indian tribes for resettlement to the west of the Missouri border.”[xxviii] The missionaries arrived at Independence in January 1831 and went to work across the border with Delawares and Shawnees. Immediately the missionaries were opposed by “almost the whole country.”[xxix] Denied the necessary permits and unsuccessful in their petitions to William Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, the missionaries returned east. But they had seen the promised land.
A June 1831 revelation sent Joseph Smith and dozens of his followers to Independence, Missouri. The Book of Mormon vaguely identified America as “the place of the New Jerusalem . . . and the sanctuary of the Lord.” A July 20, 1831, revelation to Smith became specific. “Thus saith the Lord your God . . . the place which is now called Independence is the center place; and a spot for the temple is lying westward, upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse.” Mormons, therefore, were to obtain all the land they could, establish a store, publish a newspaper, and otherwise prepare Missouri for the second coming of Christ. Edward Partridge moved to Missouri to lead the cooperative economic venture and settle the steadily growing number of converts now streaming into Jackson County. He was soon joined by about twelve hundred Mormons who came from Ontario, Pennsylvania, New England, Ohio, and everywhere else the missionaries sought them. They were sure that the slave-holding Missourians were “proverbially idle or lazy, and mostly ignorant,” and the reciprocal rhetoric had Mormon immigrants as “the very dregs of . . . society . . . lazy, idle, and vicious.” They came in droves in answer to direct revelation that foretold a cooperative, covenant Zion, an alternative vision to manifest destiny backed by alternative authority to Jacksonian democracy.
William Phelps, the Mormon editor in Jackson County, wrote in 1832, “it is about one year since the work of the gathering commenced, in which time between three and four hundred have arrived here and are mostly located upon their inheritances.”[xxx] By 1833, nearly 1,200 Mormon immigrants composed a third of Jackson County’s residents.[xxxi] In the meantime Phelps penned an editorial to answer charges that Mormons wanted slaves “to become disobedient and leave, or rise in a rebellion against their masters,” or that free black Mormons were encouraged to locate in Jackson County.[xxxii] Phelps quoted the controversial Missouri statues that outlawed any free black “other than a [U.S.] citizen,” and urged, “Slaves are real estate in this and other states, and wisdom would dictate great care among the branches of the church of Christ in this subject. So long as we have no special rule in the church, as to people of color, let prudence guide.” This seemed weak to Jackson County slave holders, who thought Phelps to be not so subtly instructing free blacks how to immigrate as credentialed citizens. Indeed, elsewhere in the same issue, Phelps urged “great care” in this regard, then said “as to slaves we have nothing to say” before immediately saying that “in connection with the wonderful events of this age, much is doing towards abolishing slavery.”[xxxiii]
The ink was hardly dry on the paper before concerned Jackson citizens drafted a declaration of their resolve to rid their society of Mormons “peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.” In the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 apocalyptic insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, and ongoing anxiety about nearby Native Americans, the Jackson citizens could not tolerate Mormon ways. “Missourians,” wrote Donnie Bellamy, “became obsessed with an imaginary peril. The phobia concerning slave escapes may have been, at most, little more than a pretext for the elimination of the despised free black Missourians.”[xxxiv] And the same could be said of the Mormons. “They have been tampering with our slaves” said the Missourians’ statement of Mormons, and “inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become ‘Mormons,’ and remove and settle among us. This exhibits them in still more odious colors. It manifests a desire on the part of their society, to inflict on our society an injury that they know would be to us entirely insupportable, and one of the surest means of driving us from the country; for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to, to see that the introduction of such a caste amongst us would corrupt our blacks, and instigate them to bloodshed.”
Phelps quickly issued an extra, retreating even from his earlier statement that free blacks were not encouraged to migrate to Missouri to say that they were not even welcome in Mormonism. “To be short, we are opposed to having free people of color admitted into the state; and we say, that none will be admitted into the Church.” Rather, Phelps concluded, the Mormons desired “that protection which the sons of liberty inherit from the legacy of Washington, through the favorable auspices of a Jefferson and Jackson.”[xxxv] This haste to patronize Missourians proved a woefully significant start to the longstanding reversal of the Book of Mormon doctrine that God “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free” (2 Nephi 16:33), but inconsequential in addressing the core contention between Mormons and their Missouri neighbors, who labeled Mormons slave-tamperers and Indian allies to “convince outsiders that Mormons deserved eviction.”[xxxvi]
The fundamental issue was authority. Would Jackson County be governed by the will of citizens or “dictated by Christ?” as one editor put it. Was it Jacksonian democracy or direct revelation to a Moses-like prophet? Missouri State Archivist Kenneth Winn argues that the dispute hinged on alternate versions of republican, not religious thought. “Missourians,” he contends, “displayed a relative indifference to the actual content of Mormon theology,” but Winn mistakes pretense for substance. An otherwise unsympathetic eyewitness, Alexander Majors, said of the claim that Mormons “were bad citizens, that they stole whatever they could get their hands on and were not law abiding. This is not true with reference to their citizenship in Jackson County. . . . The cause of all this trouble was solely from the claim that they had a new revelation direct from the Almighty.” As Bushman demonstrated, “the actual basis of the settlers’ fears was . . . the Mormons’ growing political influence.” Whatever pretense they used to dispossess Mormons, Jackson County settlers understood the fundamental issue over authority perfectly well.[xxxvii]
Newel Knight wrote that “the public mind became so excited that on the 20th of July [1833] a meeting was called and largely attended by not only the rabble of the county, but also the men holding official positions.” They forbade further immigration of Mormons and demanded the removal of those already settled in their midst. Meanwhile the Mormons must close their store and stop printing the revelations of Joseph Smith and the newspaper that circulated them. “Cool deliberation” afterwards produced a rationale that explicitly connected immigration and “pretended revelations from heaven.” From a few missionaries to twelve hundred Mormons in two years, “and each successive autumn and spring pours forth its swarms among us,” the citizens worried. “It requires no gift of prophecy to tell that the day is not far distant when the civil government of the county will be in their hands; when the sheriff, the justices, and the county judges will be Mormons, or persons wishing to court their favor from motives of interest or ambition.” The implications were frightening. “What would be the fate of our lives and property, in the hands of jurors and witnesses, who do not blush to declare, and would not hesitate to swear, that they have wrought miracles, and have been the subjects of miraculous and supernatural cures, have converse with God and His angels, and possess and exercise the gifts of divination?”[xxxviii]
On July 23, 1833, gentlemen of property and standing led a mob of three hundred or more. They tore down the printing office in which William Phelps published the newspaper and Joseph Smith’s revelations. They escorted Edward Partridge from his home to courthouse square in Independence.[xxxix] “I was stripped of my hat, coat and vest and daubed with tar from head to foot,” Partridge wrote, “and then had a quantity of feathers put upon me.” By his own account, Partridge maintained a dignified and meek willingness “to suffer for the sake of Christ,” but the sworn statements of his attackers suggest they only defended themselves. Partridge assaulted them, several said, “and would then and there have beat, bruised, and ill-treated” the crowd. In self defense they “did necessarily and unavoidably a little beat, bruise, wound, and ill-treat the said Edward Partridge, and rend, tear, damage and spoil the wearing apparel, and unavoidably did besmear the said Edward Partridge with a little pitch, tar and feathers . . . doing no unnecessary damage to the said Edward Partridge.”[xl]
With their bishop beaten, bruised, and humiliated, their store closed, their press destroyed, and the printed revelations mostly burned, Mormon leaders reluctantly agreed to disagreeable terms. They would leave Jackson County by the end of 1833. As the year wore on, the violence escalated. Mormon settlements were raided, homes burned, livestock stolen, men horsewhipped. By 1834, most Jackson County Mormons found refuge on the northern side of the Missouri River in Clay County, and by 1836, the Missouri legislature set aside sparsely populated Caldwell County for Mormon occupation.
Of the three groups—Indians, Blacks, and Mormons—who coalesced in the minds of Missourians to both define and terrorize their Jacksonian identity, Mormons were the most novel and therefore puzzling. There was by 1830 a well-established color line that segregated citizens and subjects, civilized and savage, free and slave, but what to do with Mormons? They hailed mainly from northern states, but were the same color, had ancestors who fought in the same revolution and against the same Indians and ascribed to the same principles of liberty of conscience and rights to property and the pursuit of happiness. But they doggedly did not acquiesce to the doctrine of an impersonal, distant Deity. Their God gave them directions to the temple site for New Jerusalem as if He were instructing a disoriented pedestrian. Mormonism, Bushman wrote, “was repugnant because its ruling principle appeared to be undemocratic.”[xli] But how could one justify such repugnance based on democratic principles?
The Mormons gave an answer in their outspoken claims as an alternative chosen people. And if they were, how could the Jacksonians be? How could America become both New Jerusalem and achieve its manifest destiny? It simply could not. So with everything to lose if Mormonism’s counterculture continued to assert itself on the Missouri landscape, “the people of frontier Missouri had their way.” To borrow from Lynch again, “popular sovereignty registered a victory” against Mormonism in Jackson County in 1833.[xlii] Because, as one participant put it, “They of course, were clannish, traded together, worked together, and carried with them a melancholy look that one acquainted with them could tell a Mormon when he met him by the look upon his face almost as well as if he had been of a different color.”[xliii]
Notes
[i]. William E. Foley, A History of Missouri, vol. 1 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 1:191–96; Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, eds., Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 691.
[ii]. William O. Lynch, “The Westward Flow of Southern Colonists Before 1861,” The Journal of Southern History 9, no. 3 (August 1943): 312–13. Also refer to Colonel Prentiss Ingraham, ed., Seventy Years on the Frontier: Alexander Majors’ Memoirs (Columbus, OH: Long’s, 1950), 55.
[iii]. Journal of the Missouri State Convention (St. Louis, 1820), 18–19, quoted in Donnie D. Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri, 1820–1860,” Missouri Historical Review 67 (January 1973), 198. The History of Jackson County Missouri (Kansas City, MO: Union Historical Company, 1881), 31–34.
[iv]. Quoted in Harrison A. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1914), 111–112.
[v]. Lynch, “The Westward Flow of Southern Colonists Before 1861,” 312–13.
[vi]. Pearl Wilcox, Jackson County Pioneers (Independence, MO: the author, 1975), 35–36.
[vii]. Political History of Jackson County (Kansas City, MO: Marshall & Morrison, 1902), 14–15.
[viii]. Arrell Morgan Gibson, The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1980), 304. See W.L. Webb, The Centennial History of Independence, Missouri (The author: n.p. 1927), 14.
[ix] Gibson, The American Indian, 305–306.
[x]. Ibid., 311–12. For a discussion of the process of racializing the categories of savage and civilized, see Steven C. Harper, Promised Land (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2006).
[xi]. Pearl Wilcox, Jackson County Pioneers (Independence, MO: The author, 1975), 36.
[xii]. Webb, Centennial History of Independence, 14.
[xiii]. Political History of Jackson County, 20.
[xiv]. Political History of Jackson County, 14, 20.
[xv]. Webb, Centennial History of Independence, 15.
[xvi]. Ezra Booth to Rev. I. Eddy, Nelson, Ohio, November 14, 1831, in Ravenna Ohio Star, November 17, 1831.
[xvii]. Charles Joseph Latrobe, The Rambler in North America (New York: 1835), 1:35.
[xviii]. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Jackson County in Early Mormon Descriptions,” Missouri Historical Review 65 (April 1971), 270–93.
[xix]. Webb, Centennial History of Independence, 53.
[xx]. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 583.
[xxi]. Webb, Centennial History of Independence, 17.
[xxii]. Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 581.
[xxiii]. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1975), 328–29, 338.
[xxiv]. Political History of Jackson County, 27. Webb, Centennial History of Independence, Missouri, 16–19.
[xxv]. Bill of sale of the slaves of James Hambright in 1836, typescript, Box 1, Hambright MSS, Jackson County Historical Society, Independence, Missouri. Lyle Wesley Dorsett, “Slaveholding in Jackson County, Missouri,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 20, no. 1 (October 1963), 25, 27.
[xxvi]. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “Editor’s Introduction,” Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 83. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 12–13. Terryl L. Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88–89. Many of Smith’s revelations are published in The Doctrine and Covenants (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981).
[xxvii]. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 260–61. John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xvii. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 113–122. Kenneth Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 18–39. In contrast to Richard Bushman’s assertion that the Book of Mormon only superficially resembles the early republic, Winn finds it a thoroughly republican document. Bushman, “The Book of Mormon and the American Revolution,” in Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth, ed., Believing History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 47–64. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 217.
[xxviii]. Ronald E. Romig, “The Lamanite Mission,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 14 (Spring 1994): 25.
[xxix]. Oliver Cowdery to Dearly Beloved Brethren, May 7, 1831, Joseph Smith Letterbook 1:11–12, MSS 155, Bx 2, Fd 1, LDS Church Archives.
[xxx]. Evening and the Morning Star 1 (July 1832).
[xxxi]. Ether 13: 3 (Book of Mormon), Doctrine & Covenants 57:3. William W. Phelps in Ontario Phoenix, September 7, 1831, quoted in Richard L. Anderson, “Jackson County in Early Mormon Descriptions,” Missouri Historical Review 65 (April 1971): 270–93. Joseph Smith et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City, 1980): 1:375. Bushman, “Mormon Persecutions in Missouri, 1833.”
[xxxii]. “The Outrage in Jackson County, Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star (Kirtland, Ohio) 2:16 (January 1834): 122.
[xxxiii]. “The Elders Stationed in Zion to the Churches Abroad, In Love, Greeting,” The Evening and the Morning Star (Independence, Missouri) 2:14 (July 1833): 111.
[xxxiv]. Donnie D. Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri, 1820–1860,” Missouri Historical Review 67 (January 1973): 225.
[xxxv]. HC 1:378–79. Lyle Wesley Dorsett, “Slaveholding in Jackson County, Missouri,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 20:1 (October 1963): 27–28.
[xxxvi]. Quote is from Richard L. Bushman, “Mormon Persecutions in Missouri, 1833,” BYU Studies, 3 (Autumn 1960), 13. Also see Lester Bush, Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue 8 (Spring 1973): 11–68. Stephen G. Taggart, Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1970).
[xxxvii]. “Manifesto,” most accessible in Joseph Smith, Jr. et al., History of the Church, 1: 374–76; Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty, 89. For a more perceptive reading of the conflict, see Givens, Viper on the Hearth, 43–47; Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier (Columbus, Ohio, 1950), 49–50; Bushman, “Mormon Persecutions in Missouri,” 13.
[xxxviii]. Newel Knight, Journal, in Scraps of Biography (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1883), 76. “Mormonism,” in Joseph Smith, Jr. et al., History of the Church, 1:397–98.
[xxxix]. Leonard Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Smith et al., History of the Church, 1:391–92, lists Lieutenant Governor Lilburn Boggs, George Simpson, and Reverends McCoy, Kavanaugh, Hunter, Fitzhugh, Pixley, Likens, Lovelady and Ewing as participants.
[xl]. Partridge Court Record, Jonathan Shepherd’s 1st Special Plea, Jackson County Courthouse, Independence, Missouri.
[xli]. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon, 213; Bushman, “Mormonism, Catholicism, and Democracy in Antebellum America,” unpublished manuscript cited by permission.
[xlii]. William O. Lynch, “The Westward Flow of Southern Colonists Before 1861,” The Journal of Southern History 9, no. 3 (August 1943): 312–13.
[xliii]. Alexander Majors, Seventy Years on the Frontier (Denver: Rand, McNally, 1893), 25.
See LDS in USA: Mormonism and the Making of Mormon Culture (Baylor University Press, 2012) and our review of it as well as How Mormonism Shaped America,” An American Marriage: Mormons, Polygamy, and Federalism,” “Mormons in the American Imagination,” “Liberal Democracy and Mormon Culture,” and “The Transformation From Theocracy to Democracy in Utah.”
This excerpt is from Utah, Pluralism, and Democracy, Lee Trepanier, ed. (Southern Utah University Press, 2007).
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