-
1. The Missouri Context of Antebellum Mormonism and Its Legacy of Violence
- University of Missouri Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
19 1 The Missouri Context of Antebellum Mormonism and Its Legacy of Violence Kenneth H. Winn The Mormon Church’s sojourn in northwestern Missouri in the 1830s is an interesting story but not a happy one. It reflects poorly at one point or another on virtually all of the actors involved. Yet despite its troubles in Missouri,Mormonism has since becomeAmerica’s most successful indigenous religion. As of May 2007, the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claimed nearly thirteen million adherents worldwide. Its smaller sibling, the Community of Christ, which has its headquarters in Independence, Missouri, claims an additional quarter of a million. Many thousands of these church members, of course, live peacefully in the very region their nineteenth-century forebears experienced such trouble. It is a commonplace that history is written by the winners. The vanquished are described as deserving their fate, or their concerns or claims are marginalized or forgotten. Surely those who regarded Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt as heroes have had a more influential voice than those who championed Jefferson Davis and Herbert Hoover. But generally speaking, it is the losers in historic strife who have the longer memories, especially if they are “a people.” Most Americans remember that the United States saved England and Europe’s “bacon” in World War II, and then again, afterwards, with the Marshall Plan. Fewer Americans are aware that the United States sent troops to help overturn the Mexican Revolution in 1914 and the Russian Revolution between 1918 and 1920. Even fewer Americans remember that the CIA organized the coup that put the shah of Iran on the throne in 1953 or arranged for the democratically elected Guatemalan 20 Kenneth H. Winn government to be overthrown in 1954. However, the Mexicans, the Russians, the Iranians, and the Guatemalans all remember. African-Americans still carry a consciousness and personal sense of injury about slavery that mystifies some whites, even as some prideful white southerners continue to uphold the “Lost Cause,” calling the Confederate flag an emblem of heritage, not racism. In this framework, the unhappy transit of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is unusual. Mormon Church members unsurprisingly have the stronger knowledge of the history than do non-church members who live in Missouri. Every Mormon schoolchild of faithful parents knows the part the state played in the divine drama of the early church. It is hard to forget that the governor of a state ordered the banishment or extermination of your ancestors, or that the founder of your church was ordered shot by a Missouri firing squad, a sentence commuted at the last minute only to leave him to languish in jail without a trial. Dozens of church members, however, died in Missouri and nearly all lost their property.1 At the same time, the Mormons have proven the historical winners—both as a successful people and in the writing of this chapter in American history— at least mostly so. Initially church members interpreted what happened to them in Missouri as religious persecution, pure and simple. For some Mormons that remains the interpretation. But if bigotry is the answer, we need to understand why. Reducing the problem to evil’s opposition to God’s chosen people is not a satisfactory answer for historians. Beginning about forty years ago, many church scholars have attempted, often with great insight, to discuss these matters in a more sophisticated fashion. Since then a veritable army of historians have numbered the hairs on the prophet Joseph Smith’s head and performed a study on his words during the 1830s, but few have looked at the church through the eyes of those who opposed its settlement in Missouri. Non-Mormon historians largely have not taken it up as an academic problem, nor is there a constituency of non-Mormon descendants clamoring for an explanation of the governor’s “extermination order” or the massacre at the Mormon settlement known as Haun’s Mill.2 If we really want to understand why Mormons and western Missourians hated each other in the 1830s and continued to fear and distrust each other into the twentieth century, we must reach deeper into the non-Mormon culture of the era and bring a more sophisticated understanding of Mormonism into that environment. Let me offer some ideas on approaching the task. Here is Joseph Smith’s classic observation about Missourians as the Mormons encountered them in 1831: The Mormons, he said, “coming from a...