The Missouri Mormon Experience by Thomas M. Spencer (review)

“Only land,” Nathan Hatch notes in The Democratization of American Christianity (1989), “could compete with Christianity as the pulse of a new democratic society” in antebellum America (6). When American obsessions with land and religion came together, Thomas M. Spencer’s new edited volume reminds us, the results could be violent and deadly. These ten essays on the Mormon church’s conflict-filled seven-and-a-half-year sojourn in Missouri (1831–39) represent a recent trend to uncover early Mormonism’s relatively neglected “middle period.” And, in keeping with the now old “New Mormon history,” several of the essayists place their stories within the context of other histories, mainly Missouri state history or American religious history.

In the introductory essay, Spencer, a non-Mormon historian, sketches the basic contours of the Missouri-Mormon conflict from the arrival of the first millenarian Mormons in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1831 to their forced expulsion by state authorities and vigilantes in 1838 and 1839. Other essayists analyze the early Mormon millenarian mind-set, the background and motivations of the western Missourians who opposed the Mormons, Mormon attempts to build temples, the immediate and larger causes of the violence, regional variations in the response to Mormons, Mormon migrations through the state during the mid-nineteenth century, and the consequences of the Missouri experience for Mormon collective identity.

Sectarian strife abounded in antebellum America, but it rarely turned to bloodshed, so why the violence between the Missourians and the Mormons? Western Missourians “acted out of a tragically misguided sense of paternity as well as a desire for political control,” Spencer writes, summarizing his contributors’ as well as his own conclusion. Spencer cites other factors such as the Missourians’ determination to defend slavery against the Mormons’ ambiguous opposition to the spread of slavery, “some religious bigotry, and land hunger” (17).

Land also factored into the Mormon rationale for violence. Antebellum Mormons were evangelizing millenarians suspicious of “Gentiles” who did not become part of the fold. Although this exclusiveness was nothing new in antebellum America, Mormons carried a unique geopiety that named places for millennial communities of the faithful. Joseph Smith prophesied that Jackson County was the Mormon “City of Zion,” or New Jerusalem, and a “land of inheritance” for them and their posterity. Projecting a Mormon promised land onto an already settled section of Missouri had disastrous consequences. When Jackson County residents forcibly expelled their Mormon neighbors in 1833, shocked Mormons demanded justice and took psalmlike oaths of vengeance. As contributor Grant Underwood argues in an excellent essay on Mormon millennialism, “When a people feel the weight of the oppressor’s heel, it is understandable that of all the facets of the eschatological drama the one they emphasize is the destruction of the ‘wicked’” (54). The Mormon desire to fulfill Smith’s prophecies about building a New Jerusalem in Missouri in their lifetime led Mormons, as much as the actual loss of their lands, to mount a failed military expedition in 1834 and later to organize secret militias in northern Missouri to defend their community, root out apostates, and exact revenge against the “persecutors” in Jackson County. Conflict seemed inevitable, especially since, as Spencer argues, both Mormons and western Missourians “viewed violence as a proper regulatory response to remove people they considered dangerous members of society” (101). The short 1838 Mormon War in Missouri was the result, with casualties on both sides.

What, then, were the consequences of the violence? Kenneth Winn, in one of the strongest essays, claims that the Missouri Mormon experience indelibly shaped the Missourians, not simply the Mormons. The “Mormon War [of 1838] framed the thinking of an entire generation of young men in western Missouri, and helped frame it for violence,” Winn argues (24). Other authors argue that the consequences for Mormons were ironic, both tragic and a partial basis for future success as a stronger, more committed community. Mormons lost their lands and were prevented from fulfilling Smith’s...