Gods of the Mississippi

5 "Go Down into Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Landscape

5 “Go Down into Jordan: No, Mississippi” mormon nauvoo and the rhetoric of landscape Seth Perry About 490 miles from Minneapolis, there is a small bend in the Mississippi River. On a typical map of the United States, the bend and the space of land it defines are not uniquely prominent—the upper Mississippi makes innumerable curves and cuts. To a person on the ground at this spot, however, the scene defined by the little river bend is quite striking. On the spur of land jutting out into the river, the bluffs that characterize this stretch of the Mississippi’s banks are set back from the water, creating both an arresting view from the river and, from atop the bluffs, of the river. It has inspired poetry. [T]here was one object which was far more noble to behold, and far more majestic than any other yet presented to my sight—and that was the widespread and unrivalled father of waters, the Mississippi river, whose mirrorbedded waters lay in majestic extension before the city, and in one general curve seemed to sweep gallantly by the devoted place. . . . [T]he romantic swell of the river soon brought my mind back to days of yore, and to the bright emerald isles of the far-famed fairy land. The bold and prominent rise of the hill, fitting to the plain with an exact regularity, and the plain pushing itself into the river, forcing it to bend around its obstacle with becoming grandeur, and fondly to cling around it add to the heightened and refined lustre to this sequestered land.1 The first Euro-American settlement at the place was christened Venus, of all things. The city described above is Nauvoo, Illinois, a successor to Venus founded by Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 96 | Seth Perry on the “plain pushing itself into the river” in 1839. Today Nauvoo is a tiny village of just under 1,200, but that figure was closer to 12,000 in 1843, when the site inspired a visiting Methodist minister to send these lines to the Church’s newspaper.2 As indicated by the poetic stylings of Rev. Samuel Prior—a nonbeliever in Mormonism, the form of devotion regnant in this “devoted place”—the river-dominated landscape of Nauvoo could have significant influence on the way the city and its inhabitants were regarded. Further, the fact that the letter was published in the Mormon press demonstrates the Church leadership’s encouragement of those aesthetic impressions. The symbolic significance of the river played out in these two interrelated ways during the Nauvoo period of Mormon history: the river bend directly impressed visitors and residents, while written versions of such impressions were printed and reprinted to perpetuate an idealized vision of Nauvoo among its residents, the Saints abroad, and potential critics. In short, the river site was used to sell Mormons on Nauvoo and to sell outsiders on Mormons. The potential rhetorical power of sites like Nauvoo’s river bend was well established by the time of Reverend Prior’s visit. Scholars view the aesthetic appreciation of American landforms as a construction developed by EuroAmericans through various discourses beginning in the sixteenth century, but by the 1830s Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole could assert with little fear of protest that anyone who could “see and feel” could appreciate “the loveliness of verdant fields, the sublimity of lofty mountains, or the varied magnificence of the sky.” Moreover, like others of his day, Cole found moral meaning objectively attached to such beauty: “There is in the human mind an almost inseparable connexion between the beautiful and the good, so that if we contemplate the one the other seems present.”3 Applying the work of theorist Kenneth Burke, such associations indicate the rhetorical power of landscape, because the viewer is moved to identify with the trait suggested: the viewer “surrounds himself with a scene which, he is assured, attests to his moral quality. For he can feel that he participates in the quality which the scene itself is thought to possess.”4 For Burke, this type of promotion of identification is the essential characteristic of rhetoric.5 The beauty of Nauvoo’s river-dominated landscape featured prominently in the rhetorical construction of Mormon identity in the early 1840s: to use Cole’s terms, the contemplation of the river bend’s beauty was to make present the goodness of Mormonism. As will be shown, the rhetoric of...