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Many modern Latter-day Saints living in the United States joyfully celebrate Independence Day on the Fourth of July, reflecting on both their freedoms and their faith. Many celebrate American independence while specifically focused on the blessings of religious freedom that allow them to worship as Latter-day Saints in a nation that generally views Latter-day Saints as a curiosity ripe for comedic satire at best and as heretics and deceivers at worst. Indeed, Joseph Smith received a revelation, oft cited in patriotic revere, in which the Lord declared, “I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood” (Doctrine and Covenants 101:80).

Although early Latter-day Saints from the United States were very proud of their national heritage and saw themselves as dedicated and patriotic Americans (only a few generations removed from progenitors who fought the British to secure American independence), years of persecution eventually took their toll upon the Saints. The unrelenting governmental intransigence directed toward them as a hated religious minority frayed the patriotic bonds with which those early Saints were once tightly lashed to the country. By 1845 the Saints found themselves in a position that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. The nation they loved had rejected them and they were making painful preparations to leave to a foreign nation and an unknown future. In anger and desperation, in 1845 the Saints silently protested the most important celebration of the early American Republic, Independence Day. That event reflected the frustration and alienation of the Latter-day Saints in their last months inside the United States—and the reaction of their antagonists only confirmed to the Saints that their protest was legitimate.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the life and teachings of Joseph Smith is the resilience of his faith that governmental institutions would eventually do what was right and legally intervene to restore the Saints to lands that had been stolen from them by force in Jackson County, Missouri. Revelation had declared that this was where the New Jerusalem would be built as a city of Zion prior to the coming of Jesus Christ (Doctrine and Covenants 57). Even after years of failure to obtain any justice for the Jackson County violence and thefts, Joseph’s dedicatory prayer of the Kirtland Temple in 1836 asked of God that “those principles, which were so honorably and nobly defended, namely, the Constitution of our land, by our fathers, be established forever” (Doctrine and Covenants 109).

Indeed, on the eve of the violence that erupted in Missouri in 1838, Joseph Smith received a revelation that declared that the ceremony for the laying of the cornerstones of a revealed temple to be built in Far West would commence on Independence Day: “Therefore I command you to build an house unto me for the gathering together of my Saints that they may worship me, and let there be a begining of this work; and a foundation and a preparatory work, this following Summer; and let the begining be made on the 4th day of July next.”[1] When that Independence Day arrived, it was celebrated in a spectacular fashion with military parades coinciding with the dedication of the four cornerstones of the temple.[2] Sidney Rigdon extolled the virtue of the United States in a fiery sermon to the assembled thousands and declared, “In assembling on this occasion, our object is, not only to comply with the custom of our nation in celebrating the birth day of our liberties; but also to lay the corner stones of the edifice, about to be built in this place in honor of our God, to whom we ascribe the glory of our national freedom, as well as our eternal salvation; and whose worship we esteem of more consequence, than we do the treasures of Missouri.”[3]

Joseph Smith’s journal recorded the parallel felt between the Saints’ struggle and that of the nation in its infancy: “This day was spent in cellebrating the 4 of July in commemoration of the decleration of the Independance of the United States of America, and also to make our decleration of Independance from all mobs and persecutions which have been inflicted upon us time after time untill we could bear it no longer being driven by ruthless mobs and enimies of the truth from our homes our property confiscated our lives exposed and our all jeopardized by such conduct.”[4]

The desire for government intervention to right wrongs only increased after the devastating and murderous events of the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri. In the aftermath, petitions were directed at Congress like that of Amanda Barnes Smith, whose husband and ten-year-old son had been brutally murdered at Hawn’s Mill. She wrote, “Oh, Oh, horrible, what a sight! My husband and one son ten years old lay lifeless upon the ground and one son six years old wounded very bad, his hip all shot off and to pieces, the ground all covered with the dead and dying.” After listing off the property also stolen from her, she summarized the actual “value” of what she had lost, that her “whole damages [are] more than the State of Missouri is worth.”[5]

But neither Amanda Smith nor any of the other Latter-day Saints who had experienced such state-sanctioned violence would receive any redress or remuneration for their grievances. Nevertheless, the patriotic feeling of Latter-day Saints persisted in the face of such unrequited injustices. The celebration of the nation was repeatedly manifested in ostentatious displays of the Fourth of July in Nauvoo.

One particularly elaborate Fourth of July celebration in Nauvoo in 1841 featured several prominent Illinois politicians in attendance, such as state senator Sidney H. Little. Held on the third of July because the holiday fell that year on a Sunday, thousands of people, Latter-day Saints and visitors alike, thronged Nauvoo to celebrate national independence. The impressive Nauvoo Legion paraded and Joseph Smith, the lieutenant general of the force, spoke as patriotically as anyone could. The Nauvoo Legion records explained, “The Legion was called out to celebrate our National Independance the 4th being Sunday, and was reviewed by Lieutenant-General Joseph Smith. Who made an Eloquent and patriotic Speech to the troops and strongly testified of his regard for our national welfare and his willingness to lay down his life in defence of his country.” In rising oratory, Joseph ended his speech by declaring, “I would ask no greater boon than to lay down my life for my country.”[6]

These celebrations were calculated not only to reflect the American culture of the majority of Latter-day Saints but as a public demonstration that their adversaries’ claims of treason and a lack of patriotism were shallow and false. When the Times and Seasons described the celebration, the editor opined, “We think that the proceedings were calculated to remove any prejudice that might have been imbibed by any of our visitors, who were present on the occasion.” Despite consistently being met with apathy at best and antagonism at worst from local, state, and federal government authorities, Latter-day Saints doggedly maintained their patriotic veneration of the nation, reflected publicly in Fourth of July celebrations. The Saints believed that such displays would help allay any fears or bigotry directed toward them. Only good citizens, they reasoned, could so unabashedly celebrate the nation.

Ironically, the very size of the 1841 display was seized upon by the leading antagonist of the Saints in the state, Thomas Sharp, editor of the Warsaw Signal. One of the leaders of the Anti-Mormon Convention of Hancock County, Sharp recounted the celebration with utter contempt. With clear intent to scare his readers with the martial prowess of the Saints in Nauvoo, he described “the procession formed, and the cavalcade passed on forming a most imposing display of spears, lances and bayonets borne by ragamuffins gorgeously decorated in military attire.”[7]

Sharp was particularly incensed that Senator Little had attended the celebration. Sharp and Little both belonged to the Whig Party which had controlled the elections in that western part of the state prior to the arrival of the thousands of Saints, who seemed to almost universally vote for Democrats. In an address to the Anti-Mormon Convention, Sharp and his fellow leaders inveighed against the Saints’ religion, their numbers, and especially their politics. They saw in Joseph Smith an elaborate scheme to force the Saints to vote in whatever way he deemed necessary. “You have seen them at the ballot box in your own county, on two occasions, depositing their votes as one man. You have drawn the inference, and no doubt justly so, that the individual who, as Prophet of the Almighty, possessed supreme control over their religious matters, at the same time exercised his holy influence to direct their temporal concerns. At his nod, the fiat went forth, and his people, religiously devoted to him politically obeyed the mandate.”[8] Sharp offered no supporting evidence for his claims, but to nativist Illinoisans such arguments were taken as truth regardless.

The 1842 celebration of the Fourth of July was even more spectacular. One account claimed that there were eleven to twelve thousand people in Nauvoo for the parade of the Nauvoo Legion and the celebration, with a good number visiting who were not members of the Church. Women wore resplendent gowns and men their finest attire. The crowd was so large that Joseph delivered his oration through a “speaking trumpet” in order for his voice to carry further. William Smith, the editor of the Wasp, a Nauvoo newspaper, reveled in the sight of so many men ably marching and drilling as a demonstration of their devotion to the nation. He opined, “it would be well for more of the citizens of the United States to emulate the Mormons and show themselves worthy of the name they ought to bear throughout the world: citizen solders: Then they could say in the language of the declaration of Independence, Brother nations, ‘enemies in war, in peace friends.’” As the cannon fired to proclaim the memory of independence, William Smith could only think of John Adams’s assertion that the “fourth of July would henceforth be celebrated by the ringing of bells, bonfires and the firing of cannon.”[9]

In another article of the same issue, the Wasp responded to the likes of Thomas Sharp who sought to make such displays of patriotism a negative rather than a positive. Entitled, “Mormonism and Politics,” William Smith quoted the revelation now known as Doctrine and Covenants 98: “And now, verily I say unto you concerning the laws of the land, it is my will that my people should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them. And that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable before me. Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land and as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.” Since the criticism was that the Saints wholeheartedly followed any revelation from Joseph, William Smith believed that the revelation’s reverence for democracy and elections should allay any such fears of monarchism or despotism among the Saints. Indeed, William Smith averred, “We hope to hear no more of the Mormons’ setting themselves up over the Government. They are the only people that will eventually support the Constitution of our beloved country.”[10]

But no matter how many protestations of love for the country were poured out, no matter how large the celebrations were, antagonists like Sharp dismissed the words and ceremony as farcical. The Warsaw Signal warned its readers that Joseph Smith was now able to control the elections in the county by his whims and disparagingly labelled Joseph as a “would be modern Mahomet,” a racial and religious pejorative that was well calculated to further ensconce the “otherness” of the Latter-day Saints apart from “true” Americans.[11]

In the summer of 1843, on the last Independence Day Joseph would ever see, the progressively growing annual celebration was again greeted with excitement and cheer. Wilford Woodruff recorded in his journal, “As this is the 4th we call it a happy day for Nauvoo.” The celebration had grown so large that seating was at a premium, and “at a vary early hour people began to assemble at the grove” until nearly thirteen thousand persons were present to hear the first speech made by Orson Hyde. As the morning gave way to the afternoon, the constant stream of people had swelled the crowd to an estimated fifteen thousand. The spectacle was such that three steamboats filled with primarily non-Latter-day Saints arrived throughout the afternoon to the tune of nearly a thousand visitors. Each time a group of visitors arrived, they were escorted in a grand fashion to the festivities and were welcomed by the booming of the celebratory cannon.[12]

Joseph addressed the multitude in the afternoon, explaining the false accusations that had been made against him and enlightening the crowd that the Nauvoo Legion had been formed with him at its head in order to fulfill Illinois law regarding militia service. Then he turned to the raging criticism of the Anti-Mormon Convention about the Saints voting together in large blocs. Joseph stated emphatically, “With regard to elections some say we all vote together & vote as I say. But I never tell any man how to vote or who to vote for.” Joseph explained what could have been apparent to agitators like Sharp. Because politicians so often poured out their vitriol on the Saints in order to gain the favor of other voters by inveighing against the widely despised sect, the Saints were often left with no option but to vote for the candidate who did not overtly oppose them. The Saints indeed voted in blocs, but primarily because of their shared interests in self-preservation and the antagonistic statements of politicians only further forged electoral solidarity. Joseph provided an example to illustrate the point:

I will show you how we have been situated by bringing a comparison. Should their be a Methodist Society here & two candidates running for office: One says if you will vote for me & put me in [as] governor I will exterminate the Methodist take away their charters &c. The other candidate says if I am Govornor I will give all an equal privilege. Which would the Methodist vote for? Of course they would vote in mass for the candidate that would give them their rights; thus it has Been with us.[13]

The Saints found themselves in the same position of many minority groups. Persecuted by the majority, they voted together for the politician who was the least antagonistic toward them. But the very act of voting in their own interests, as every other American did, was taken not as evidence of their participation in the democratic process but as further proof of their alienness and the threat they posed to “real Americans.”

As 1843 wore on, however, Joseph’s faith in the American system of democracy finally started to waiver. As the 1844 presidential election neared, a myriad of politicians put themselves forward as viable candidates for the highest office. On the Democratic side, the crowded field was headed by the former president himself, Martin Van Buren. The Saints had long voted a Democratic ticket in part because Whig candidates, like William Peniston in Missouri, had so often been overtly antagonistic. But with Van Buren as the most likely nominee for the Democrats, there was no hope that the president of the United States might intervene and force Missouri to restore the Saints’ lands to them. Joseph had already pleaded his case to Van Buren in person in Washington, DC, in 1839 and had been summarily dismissed. Joseph had labeled Van Buren “a fop or a fool for he judged our cause before he knew it.” He then damningly observed, “We could find no place to put truth into him.” Joseph’s experience with Van Buren had been so negative in 1839 that he had decided to vote for the Whigs in the 1840 election, so there was no chance of Van Buren gaining Joseph’s support in the upcoming 1844 election.[14]

Pushed perhaps more by desperation than any indication he would rule on the Saints’ case differently, Joseph began to openly repudiate his previous party allegiance and told a visiting reporter that he was going to support Henry Clay, the Whig candidate for president. He reportedly said with a laugh, “I am a Whig, and I am a Clay man. I am made of Clay, and I am tending to Clay, and I am going to vote for Henry Clay; that’s the way I feel.” However, he reportedly reiterated that he would not force anyone to vote for any particular candidate: “But I won't interfere with my people, religiously, to affect their votes, though I might to elect Clay, for he ought to be President.” At least according to the reporter, Joseph laughed before he made the point very forcefully.[15]

Not content to simply assume that Clay would prove a better David against the Goliath of Missouri to champion the Saints’ case against that state’s maltreatment of the Saints, Joseph wrote the distinguished Senator a letter and specifically asked what he would do if he were elected to right so many terrible wrongs.

Hon. H. Clay—Dear Sir:—as we understand you are a candidate for the presidency at the next election; and as the Latter Day Saints, (sometimes called Mormons, who now constitute a numerous class in the school politic of this vast republic,) have been robbed of an immense amount of property, and endured nameless sufferings by the State of Missouri, and from her borders have been drive by force of arms, contrary to our national covenants; and as in vain we have sought redress by all constitutional, legal and honorable means, in her courts, her executive councils, and her legislative halls; and as we have petitioned Congress to take cognizance of our sufferings without effect; we have judged it wisdom to address you this communication, and solicit an immediate, specific and candid reply to What will be your rule of action relative to us as a people, should fortune favor your ascension to the chief magistracy?

Most respectfully, sir, your friend, and the friend of peace, good order,

And constitutional rights,

JOSEPH SMITH,

In behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.[16]

Joseph wrote to several other candidates, asking them a similar question. Democratic greats such as Lewis Cass and former vice president John C. Calhoun each wrote back that they could do nothing to help the Saints. But Clay’s negative response seems to have affected Joseph Smith much more deeply. Though Clay offered platitudes that he “sympathized” with the Saints “in their sufferings under injustice,” he also callously acted as if the Latter-day Saint claims for redress were similar to other groups lobbying for a special interest. No doubt fearful that any response he made to the Saints might become public and the toxic political poison of his willingness to help the Saints would be used to damage his campaign, Clay stated flatly, “I can enter into no engagements, make no promises, give no pledges, to any particular portion of the people of the U. States. If I ever enter into that high office, I must go into it free and unfettered.”[17]

Faced with the reality that every potential candidate, including Clay, refused even to countenance aiding the Saints if elected, Joseph made two dramatic decisions that changed the course of Latter-day Saint history. First, he declared himself a candidate for the presidency. Not only would his candidacy allow the Saints someone to vote for in good conscience, but also Joseph explained that his candidacy was an attempt to call attention not only to the plight of the Saints but to other persecuted groups. Wilford Woodruff recorded Joseph’s expression that he would not have become a candidate “if I & my friends Could have had the privilege of enjoying our religious & civel rights as American Citizen even those rights which the Constitution guarantee unto all her Citizens alike. But this we as a people have been denied from the beginning. Persecution has rooled upon our heads from time to time from portions of the United States like peels of thunder because of our religion & no portion of the government as yet has steped forward for our relief & under view of these things I feel it to be my right & privilege to obtain what influence & power I Can lawfully in the United States for the protection of injured innocence & If I loose my life in a good Cause I am willing to be sacrificed on the alter of virtue rightousness & truth, in maintaining the laws & constitution of the United States if need be for the general good of mankind.”[18]

His final postulation, that his candidacy might end in his death, proved to be sadly prophetic.

Joseph’s presidential platform was indeed a radical departure from those of his competitors. While it is common for modern Americans to assume that slavery was the primary issue in every presidential campaign leading up to the American Civil War, the reality is that during most of the first half of the nineteenth century, the subject was carefully avoided as both major political parties sought to keep the issue from becoming a major point of contention that would cost them elections. The eventual nominees of the two major parties in 1844, James Polk for the Democrats and Henry Clay for the Whigs, were both slave owners from southern states. As two historians of the era have described it, “Existence of a national party inevitably required compromise between sections, and that meant compromise with slavery.”[19]

But Joseph Smith’s platform was radical and to the point. It opened with an appeal to the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Joseph declared that he had been greatly troubled that “in this boasted realm” though that document had declared that all men were created equally and endowed by their creator with a right to liberty, “some two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.”[20] Joseph went on to advocate the United States federal government should purchase all the slaves in the nation and free them within the next five years, a radical position juxtaposed against the major parties. Such a position earned Joseph mocking derision from some newspapers that equated him with the most radical of abolitionists, a political death sentence in a national presidential race in the 1840s.[21]

But at the same time Joseph was publishing his radical presidential platform aimed in part to bring attention to the neglected rights of minority groups in the United States, he was pragmatically preparing to remove the Saints from the United States entirely. The prospect of another four years without any federal help appeared very grim indeed. The county’s short-lived Anti-Mormon Party continually harangued state leaders to deprive the Saints of the rights Nauvoo’s charter afforded and by their own admission were stirring up inhabitants of Illinois to “excitement” that could boil over into violence. Thomas Sharp, leader of the Anti-Mormon Convention, rebuked another paper that called on him to rein in his antagonistic rhetoric against the Saints by asking, “Can you blame us for opposition to this unholy clan; even if that opposition does produce excitement?”[22] Such sentiments portended violence, and Joseph had made the long-term decision that the Saints would have to abandon the United States if they ever wanted to practice their religion in peace.

Joseph’s journal records several meetings with the Quorum of the Twelve in late February 1844 with the express purpose of fitting out an expedition to find a place outside of the nation for the Saints to flee to: “I instructed the 12 to send out a delegation & investigate the Locations of Californnia &[23] oregon & find a good Location where we can remove after the Temple is completed & build a city in a day and have a governmet of our own in a hea[l]thy climate.”[24]

A few weeks later, Joseph formed a new organization, the Council of Fifty, designed to help locate and write the constitution for the kingdom of God on earth, wherever the Saints decided to settle in the lands outside the United States’ sovereign territory. The council, composed of the Quorum of the Twelve and many other prominent men, agreed in an early meeting “to look to some place where we can go and establish a Theocracy either in Texas or Oregon or somewhere in California &c. The brethren spoke very warmly on the subject, and also on the subject of forming a constitution which shall be according to the mind of God and erect it between the heavens and the earth where all nations might flow unto it. This was considered as a ‘standard’ to the people an ensign to the nations.”[25] Latter-day Saint devotion to the United States was seemingly drawing to a close and the events of the following months only exacerbated that trajectory.

There was no celebration of the Fourth of July in 1844. No formal decision was made to protest the celebration of Independence Day, but the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith shook Nauvoo Saints to their very core and the day passed in sadness and mourning, with none of the public celebrations of the preceding years.

When the Council of Fifty finally resumed their meetings and deliberations over an exodus from the United States in February 1845, Joseph’s decision to leave the nation in order to escape persecution appeared more and more sagacious. In the aftermath of the murders of the Smiths, the Illinois legislature repealed the Nauvoo Charter, thereby disincorporating the second largest city in the state of Illinois and depriving its citizens of the means to levy taxes, maintain a police force, and govern themselves. Meanwhile, antagonists continued to breathe out threats against the Latter-day Saints, emboldened in such actions by state lawmakers.

For Brigham Young, the events of the past year convinced him that freedom for the Saints could, paradoxically, be found only outside the land of liberty. He explained to William Clayton, “The nation has severed us from them in every respect, and made us a distinct nation just as much as the Lamanites, and it is my prayer that we may soon find a place where we can have a home and live in peace according to the Law of God.”[26] To the reunited Council of Fifty, Brigham was even more direct. The Council had been formed to “[explore] the Western country, Oregon, California, etc., where we could locate ourselves in a healthy country and erect the standard of liberty.” The Saints were not going to abandon Joseph Smith’s vision of leaving the United States. Indeed, Brigham waxed poetic as he declared, “We know this was one of Josephs measures and my feelings are, if we cannot have the priviledge of carrying out Josephs measures I would rather lie down and have my head cut off at once. To carry out Josephs measures is sweeter to me than the honey or the honey comb.”[27]

As far as the loyalty the Saints felt they owed to the United States, Brigham and many other members of the Church believed that such patriotic sentiments had been murdered alongside the two prophets. Bitterly, Young reflected, “The gentiles have rejected the gospel; they have killed the prophets, and those who have not taken an active part in the murder all rejoice in it and say amen to it, and that is saying that they are willing the blood of the prophets should be shed. The gentiles have rejected the gospel.”[28] Young reiterated over the course of several meetings that the Latter-day Saints needed to “get out of the jurisdiction of the United States,” and even linked leaving the nation with the safety of the Saints: “If we can get one hundred miles beyond the jurisdiction of the United States we are safe, for the present, and that is all we ask.”[29]

Indeed, so certain were the Saints that safety could only be achieved outside of the United States that although Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, had greeted with open arms the possibility of the Saints migrating en masse to the Rio Grande, the Saints immediately stopped considering it as a possible place of settlement once Texas was annexed by the United States. Houston was still welcoming, but the point was to get outside of the United States.[30]

In one of these early meetings, John Taylor emotionally expressed his disdain for the supposed justice promised by the United States. Scarred by wounds he received in Carthage Jail when the government failed in its promises to protect Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Taylor said, “In regard to the situation of the world as it now exists I don’t care a damn because they are as corrupt as the devil. We have no benifit from the laws of the land. . . . We know we have no more justice here . . . than we could get at the gates of hell. . . . We have been excluded from all our rights as other citizens.”[31] For Taylor, and many other Latter-day Saints, the idea of celebrating the rights secured to American citizens by the Declaration of Independence was laughable. While some enjoyed the pleasures of liberty, the Latter-day Saints as a despised minority could not point to the liberty and justice afforded to them by the United States. To Taylor, American democracy had failed them.

As Independence Day of 1845 approached, then, the Saints faced a reality of political abandonment, a lack of justice for crimes committed against them, and a rising threat of further mob violence against them and their settlements. Minor Deming, the non-Latter-day Saint sheriff of Hancock County, tried to intervene to protect the Saints but found the task impossible. Only days before the Fourth of July, Deming wrote to his parents, “The mob party that murdered the Smiths in jail, tried and hoped to burn out and expel the Mormon population of the county amounting to about 12 or 15000 people.” That mob group “with their friends and its political influences makes a violent, desperate and lawless faction. These men have declared they will not regard law; and so they beat, threaten, insult, & injure whom they choose with impunity.”[32]

There was nothing to celebrate for the Saints on Independence Day 1845. Rather than the parades, speeches, and firing of cannons that had occasioned the massive party in previous years, no notice was taken of the day at all. George A. Smith recorded that there was “no noise or firing of guns in the City.”[33]

It was not only the leaders of the Church that deliberately eschewed the usual celebration of liberty. Irene Haskell, a nineteen-year-old married woman living in Nauvoo, wrote her parents back in Massachusetts and highlighted the Latter-day Saints’ silent protest on the Fourth of July: “The fourth of July is just past. I suppose there were balls, teaparties and the like in east, but here there were nothing of the kind. The Mormons think the liberty and independence of the United States has been too long trampled upon to be celebrated.”[34]

John Taylor, a ball still lodged in the back of his knee from the previous year’s attempted murder in Carthage, explained the stillness and somber lack of celebration in Nauvoo in the Nauvoo Neighbor, which he edited. In an article sardonically titled, ���Ի����Ի��Գ���,” he poured out his frustrations and the cause for the silent protest the Saints had undertaken on the Fourth of July: “So many accidents having been perpetrated upon the Latter day Saints, for the past fifteen years, that ‘Independence,’ or, as it is commonly called, the fourth of July, had a very few charms as a nation’s birthday, or as a patriotic holiday. The ‘extermination from Missouri;’ the Assassination, at Carthage, of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, with impunity; and the repeal of our city charter, by might to rob us of right, gave the noise of shouting and the firing of cannon throughout the nation, the appearance of a great gun that had been fired for joy a long while ago but now its reverberations and echo were dying away among the bordering mountains, as empty air.”[35] The Saints had once celebrated the freedoms of the United States with a religious zeal, but now there was no reason to celebrate a nation that had rejected them and denied them the very freedoms and rights that the national celebration was meant to herald. Taylor’s metaphor of the celebratory cannon shot dying away in the distant mountains was apt as the Saints prepared to flee the nation to the mountains of Mexico.

Taylor and other Latter-day Saints soon learned that for despised minority groups even such silent protests against well-documented ill treatment were seen as traitorous. The same Americans who had previously expressed fear over the martial strength displayed when the Nauvoo Legion paraded on previous Independence Days now seized upon the stillness in Nauvoo as evidence that Saints were not true-hearted Americans. One St. Louis newspaper reported the account of a shocked witness of the noncelebration: “We are informed by a gentlemen who spent the birthday of American independence in that city of fanatics, that no notice was taken of it; the usual business of the place was carried on without interruption.” This observer juxtaposed the lack of celebration of the country against the fact that “a large number of persons were at work on their holy temple on that day.” The point was clear. The Latter-day Saints prized their temple, symbol of their religion, over the nation. The witness claimed to have spoken to leaders of the Saints and asked “why the day was not observed.” The response was similar to what Irene Haskell had written to her parents, that the Saints “considered this no land of freedom, but one of despotism, and besides they had no part or lot in the government.”[36]

An Illinois Whig paper, angry that the Latter-day Saints had voted to elect Democrats in previous elections, seized upon the noncelebration as proof that the Saints’ right to vote in Illinois was morally if not legally illegitimate. The incredulous editorialist opined, “How highly must the elective franchise be prized when the will of the people can be counteracted by an influence such as this?” For this writer, the Latter-day Saint vote should not be allowed to counteract that of other residents of the state. The Saints’ failure to celebrate Independence Day meant that they could not be counted among the “American people” when determining the “will of the people,” an odd argument indeed that in this case the majority should not rule because that majority was made up of Latter-day Saints, who were not to be considered real Americans.[37]

John Taylor saw these attacks as petty and hypocritical. He responded with anger and incredulity: “After having been robbed of one or two millions of dollars’ worth of property; been murdered and exterminated by executive authority from ‘the independent republic’ of Missouri; and after having had a city charter either given or taken SURREPTITIOUSLY—besides the martyrdom of two of their best men while under the plighted faith of the state,” Taylor reminded these critics that the Saints had celebrated “the fourth of July heretofore more than other people; and throughout the Union.” But all those previous celebrations and oaths of loyalty had been discarded as “chaff” by their critics. To put a finer point on it, Taylor responded to the specific criticism that no cannons or guns were fired to celebrate in Nauvoo as in other cities in the nation by reminding readers that their guns had been stolen from them in Missouri by the state militia and the “state arms, and cannon [confiscated] from us in Illinois, so that, had the ‘pimps’ of the New Era and Gazette and those in juxtaposition, their mind, we might celebrate the fourth of July with ‘pop guns.’ It was indeed ironic that people who had advocated the confiscation of Latter-day Saint weapons now pointed to lack of musket and cannon firing on Independence Day as evidence of the Saints’ disloyalty.

The reality was that the Saints were treated differently than their fellow Americans. In order to be treated equally under the law, Taylor continued, the Saints had to “vote as they said for nabobs to rule over us . . . ‘and lick the hand just raised to shed our blood’ crying freedom! freedom! O the blessings of liberty!” The very people decrying the Saints’ lack of patriotism for not celebrating the Declaration of Independence were content to deny those equal rights to minority groups they despised. Taylor railed on that hypocrisy, pulling from headlines of actual events of lawlessness and intolerance: “If you lynch men to death at Vicksburg for gambling;[38] or burn a negro alive at St. Louis; or massacre men for being Catholics and foreigners in Philadelphia—it is all in the way of ‘Independence.’[39]

Taylor’s reference to the sadistic murder of free Black man Francis McIntosh in April 1836 would have cut deeply to readers in Illinois and Missouri. McIntosh was a Pittsburgh resident working on a steamship that docked in St. Louis. As he left the ship, he allegedly offended two police officers who apparently wanted his help trying to detain another sailor who was attempting to flee from them. For this “crime” McIntosh was arrested for “disturbing the peace.” Once informed that he would likely be jailed for years for such a petty reason, McIntosh violently attempted to escape, wounding one of the officers and killing the other in the fray. Though he was taken to jail on the new charge of murder, a mob quickly assembled and demanded he be turned over to them for vigilante justice. The sheriff fled for his life with his family and the mob then spent more than an hour getting tools and deliberately breaking into the locked cell in order to get their hands on McIntosh. They then dragged him to a tree outside of town and chained him to it, deliberately gathering up combustible materials and piling them at McIntosh’s feet. As the flames began to scorch him, McIntosh begged to be shot, but the bloodthirsty crowd refused such mercy and demanded he suffer the pains of a slow death. The prominent abolitionist Lewis Tappan had specifically mentioned this lawless murder in his “Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South” published in 1843 and the Alton Telegraph had, at the time, reacted in a horrified manner to such mobocratic injustice.[40]

Taylor also referenced religious violence in Philadelphia that had occurred only the summer before. Simmering tensions between native-born Americans and the increasing number of Irish immigrants to the city erupted into open violence after a controversy over the use of Catholic or Protestant versions of the Bible in the public schools. Nativist mobs eventually destroyed a Catholic seminary and two Catholic churches in the city.

Taylor employed these examples to show the inconsistency of those who decried the Saints’ silent protest of Independence Day. Like other minorities, the Saints faced persecution by not only mobs but governments at various levels which were complicit in such violence and inequity. To finish the point, Taylor said the Saints would “show our loyalty to the customs of Caesar” in the future if the Saints could “raise cannon enough to celebrate or not raise enough to celebrate, the fourth of July, will do a little of both next year to ‘keep up appearance.’ Glory to God and freedom.”[41] The Saints’ critics comically demanded that the Saints have no weapons, but still have enough weapons for a proper Fourth of July celebration.

Seven years later, Frederick Douglass would also protest the Fourth of July because of the obvious lack of actual equality and liberty in the nation. The former slave and eloquent abolitionist was asked to deliver a Fourth of July oration to a crowd of abolitionists in Rochester, New York. He posed a question and answer similar to John Taylor’s editorial of 1845:

What, to the American slave, is your 4^th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

The depths of dehumanization and ill-treatment of Black men and women in the United States in the nineteenth century were exponentially more brutal, and affect millions more people, than the experience of the Latter-day Saints. But despite the difference in magnitude, length, and severity, Douglass’s protest and that of the Saints in Nauvoo in 1845 held a similar position: Independence Day was heralded by the Protestant white majority, celebrated as a grand achievement of equality and freedom. But persecuted minorities often saw little reason to celebrate those rights that were declared to be universal but were in fact only reserved for the elite majority.

For the Saints, the freedoms being celebrated were actively denied them. The democracy that was so reverently honored was the cause of much of the hatred and violence directed at the Saints, because the Saints were considered to have voted the wrong way and for the wrong people. Indeed, even Governor Thomas Ford, as he reflected on the murderous violence against the Saints that occurred while he was chief executive of Illinois, placed much of the blame on the Latter-day Saints’ insistence on voting in contested elections, at one point admitting, “I was most anxious that the Mormons should not vote at this election, and strongly advised them against doing so.”[42] Whig politicians deliberately whipped up antagonistic sentiment against the Saints when their disgruntled supporters were outnumbered by the Saints’ votes. The Democratic politicians who received Latter-day Saint votes, Ford admitted, “were willing and anxious for Mormon votes at elections, but they were unwilling to risk their popularity with the people, by taking a part in their favor, even when law and justice, and the Constitution were on their side.” Ford flatly stated that no politician was willing to protect and defend the Saints’ rights because of “the hatred of the common people against them.”[43]

As 1845 wore on both threats and actual scenes of violence increased rapidly. Mobs began burning Latter-day Saint settlements. Edmund Durfee, after having his home and farm destroyed by a mob in September, was murdered in November. Shot in the back as he tried to extinguish one of the fires set on the Latter-day Saints’ crops, his death was yet another in which no convictions were ever made. As one newspaper reported, the antagonists of the Saints were “determined to drive the Mormons out of the county” and had been “out burning the Mormon houses, barns, stacks, etc. In this war of extermination, they include not only the Mormons, but all who are suspected of favoring the Mormon cause or harboring Mormons about them.”[44]

By late October, John Taylor’s Nauvoo Neighbor ceased operations in preparation of the forced exodus from the nation. And Taylor did not hold back at the failure of the United States to protect its own citizens. The Saints were being “compelled by mobocracy, on account of the weakness of the law and the stupidity or hypocrisy of its executors, to quit the ‘asylum of the oppressed’” and leave the nation entirely. “We will leave a nation,” he continued, “that will not protect its own citizens from the violence of corrupt men; [and] we will flee from a liberty so terrible that it allows murder and arson to be committed with impunity by a portion of citizens because they are a mob; and we abandon the estates and tombs of our fathers because the glory of American liberty has been singed by the blaze of fools in a frolic of enthusiasm to the devil.”[45]

Taylor was frank about the prospects of the expulsion of the Saints and their view of the country they once celebrated. “We owe the United States nothing: we go out as exiles from freedom. The Government and people owe us millions for the destruction of life and property in Missouri and in Illinois. The blood of our best men stains the land, and the ashes of our property will preserve it till God comes out of his hiding place, and gives this nation a hotter portion than he did Sodom and Gomorrah.”[46]

On the eve of that expulsion, Orson Pratt echoed the sentiments of Taylor and other Saints in an editorial he published as a farewell to the United States:

The time is at hand for me to take a long and lasting farewell to these Eastern countries, being included with my family, among the tens of thousands of American citizens who have the choice of DEATH or BANISHMENT beyond the Rocky Mountains. I have preferred the latter. It is with the greatest of joy that I forsake this Republic: and all the saints have abundant reasons to rejoice that they are counted worthy to be cast out as exiles from this wicked nation; for we have received nothing but one continual scene of the most horrid and unrelenting persecutions at their hands for the last sixteen years. If our heavenly father will preserve us, and deliver us out of the hands of the blood-thirsty Christians of these United States, and not suffer any more of us to be martyred to gratify their holy piety, I for one shall be very thankful. Perhaps we may have to suffer much in the land of our exile, but our sufferings will be from another cause—there will be no Christian banditti to afflict us all the day long—no holy pious priests to murder us by scores—no editors to urge on house burning, devastation and death. If we die in the dens and caves of the Rocky Mountains, we shall die where freedom reigns triumphantly. Liberty in a solitary place, and in a desert, is far more preferable than martyrdom in these pious States.[47]

The terrible exodus to Mexico included intense suffering en route that did little to assuage the Saints’ feelings that Americans celebrated Independence Day in a hypocritical manner. Four years later in 1849, after nearly a thousand Latter-day Saints had died in Iowa and Nebraska, Wilford Woodruff found himself in Bangor, Maine, on the Fourth of July. Cannons were firing and it seemed that everyone was making “great preparations . . . to celebrate Independence.” But Woodruff took no part in the festivities, confiding in his journal, “I should feel more like fasting & praying on the 4th of July than making A display of Celebration untill the Latter Day saints And all people could Have the privilege of worshiping God according to the dictates of their own conscience without having there brains blown out for it.”[48]

While American Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century often came to prize their patriotism as a central tenet of their religious beliefs, the nineteenth-century Saints had their patriotic vigor beaten out of them by fellow citizens and by local, state, and federal governments who passively watched the violence and lawlessness perpetrated against them at best, and participated in that violence and persecution at worst. These American Saints came face-to-face with the difficulties encountered by many minority groups as they protested the unjust treatment they received from the majority. For the Latter-day Saints, no amount of public embrace of American nationalism prevented the violence and persecution heaped upon them. Paradoxically, the attempt to protest their wrongs by letting Independence Day silently pass without celebration was simply taken as further evidence of their fallen moral character and their threat to the empowered majority. Ironically, rather than recognizing silent protest as the Saints’ best means of voicing their frustrations, their antagonists further castigated them as unpatriotic traitors guilty of willful disrespect to the celebration of the birth of the nation. While the Saints in Utah would come again to celebrate Independence Day, it was often clouded by the perception and reality of American attempts to pass laws specifically targeting the Saints. Nearly a century would pass before American Latter-day Saints could again comfortably express their love of the United States and its institutions.

Notes

[1] Joseph Smith, journal, April 26, 1838, spelling as in original, MS 155, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

[2] “Celebration of the 4^th of July,” Elders’ Journal, July 4, 1838.

[3] Though Rigdon’s speech lavished praise upon the United States and its institutions, it also catalogued the wrongs perpetrated against the Saints. It was controversial, not because it attacked the government institutions but because Rigdon declared that the Saints were going to militarily defend themselves if they were attacked again: “We take God and all the holy angels to witness this day, that we warn all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come on us no more forever, for from this hour, we will bear it no more, our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man or the set of men, who attempts it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.” Oration Delivered by Mr. S. Rigdon on the 4th of July 1838 (Far West, MO: Journal Office, 1838).

[4] Joseph Smith, journal, July 4, 1838, some punctuation edited for readability.

[5] Amanda Barnes Smith, autobiography, MS 2409, Church History Library.

[6] Nauvoo Legion Records, July 3, 1841, MS 3430, Church History Library.

[7] “Great Parade at Nauvoo,” Warsaw Signal, July 7, 1841.

[8] “Address of the Convention of the Anti-Mormon citizens of Hancock County,” Warsaw Signal, July 7, 1841.

[9] “Life in Nauvoo,” Wasp,July 10, 1842.

[10] “Mormonism and Politics,” Wasp, July 10, 1842.

[11] ��ٲ����ܳٲ��ٴǰ���,” Warsaw Signal, July 9, 1842.

[12] Wilford Woodruff, journal, July 4, 1843.

[13] Wilford Woodruff, journal, July 4, 1843, spelling as in original.

[14] Joseph Smith to Hyrum Smith, December 5, 1839, MS 155, Church History Library.

[15] “The Prairies, Nauvoo, Joe Smith, the Temple, the Mormons &c,”Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, September 15, 1843.

[16] Joseph Smith to Henry Clay, November 4, 1843, published in Times and Seasons, June 1, 1844.

[17] Henry Clay to Joseph Smith, November 15, 1843, MS 155, Church History Library.

[18] Wilford Woodruff, journal, February 7, 1844, spelling as in original.

[19] John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, Contesting Slavery, The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (University of Virginia Press, 2011), 281.

[20] Joseph Smith, General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States (Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor, 1844).

[21]Green Bay Republican, February 27, 1844.

[22] “Why Oppose the Mormons,” Warsaw Signal, April 24, 1844.

[23] Here Joseph’s scribe, Willard Richards, began to write “Mexico” but crossed it out. Upper California, the most sparsely populated and sprawling territory of Mexico, covered a massive area comprising present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, most of Colorado, and parts of Wyoming and New Mexico.

[24] Joseph Smith, journal, February 20, 1844, spelling as in original, MS 155, Church History Library.

[25] Council of Fifty, record, March 11, 1844, Church History Library.

[26] William Clayton, journal, January 26, 1845, as cited in Matthew J. Grow, Ronald K. Esplin, Mark Ashurst-McGee, Gerrit J. Dirkmaat, and Jeffrey D. Mahas, eds., Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846, vol. 1 of the Administrative Records series of The Joseph Smith Papers, ed. Ronald K. Esplin, Matthew J. Grow, and Matthew C. Godfrey (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016), 258.

[27] Council of Fifty, record, March 1, 1845, CHL.

[28] Council of Fifty, record, March 1, 1845.

[29] Council of Fifty, record, March 11 and 18, 1845.

[30] For more details on this desire to escape United States sovereignty, see Gerrit Dirkmaat, “Safely ‘Beyond the Limits of the United States,’ Mormon Expulsion and US Expansion, in Inventing Destiny: Cultural Explorations of US Expansion, ed. Jimmy Bryan (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2019).

[31] Council of Fifty, record, March 1, 1845.

[32] Minor Deming to Stephen and Sarah Deming, July 1, 1845, University of Illinois Library, MS 944.

[33] George A. Smith, history, MS 1322, Church History Library.

[34] Irene Haskell to her parents, July 6, 1845, Irene Haskell Papers, Library of Congress.

[35] ���Ի����Ի��Գ���,” Nauvoo Neighbor, July 9, 1845.

[36] “Fourth of July in Nauvoo,” Nauvoo Neighbor, July 23, 1845.

[37] “Fourth of July in Nauvoo.”

[38] A dispute at an Independence Day celebration in 1835 led to the Vicksburg mobbing a few days later. An angry mob broke into the homes of five suspected gamblers and, when shots were fired from one home as the door was being smashed in, the incensed crowd took five of the suspected gamblers directly to the scaffolds and they were hanged without any trial. The Vicksburg newspaper assured its readers of the righteousness of such lawless murder, explaining, “All sympathy for the wretches was completely merged in detestation for their crime.” Floridian, July 25, 1835, quoting the Vicksburg Register, July 9, 1835.

[39] “Fourth of July in Nauvoo,” Nauvoo Neighbor, July 23, 1845.

[40] Paul Simon, Freedom’s Champion: Elijah Lovejoy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), 46–49; Lewis Tappen, Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South, on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery (New York: American and Foreign Anti-slavery Society, 1843), 27.

[41] “Fourth of July in Nauvoo.”

[42] Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1854), 362–63.

[43] Ford,History of Illinois, 364.

[44] “Mormon War,” Indiana Palladium, October 4, 1845.

[45] “To Our Patrons,” Nauvoo Neighbor, October 29, 1845.

[46] “To Our Patrons.”

[47] “Farewell Message of Orson Pratt,” Times and Seasons, December 31, 1845.

[48] Woodruff, journal, July 4, 1849, spelling as in original.