�鶹��ý

Most of us [the Saints] were persons of education and refinement, from the best New York and New England families, and were people of progressive ideas and strong antislavery sentiments.
—Katharine Smith Salisbury

DURING HER YOUTH IN PALMYRA, New York, Katharine had witnessed the social tensions engendered by slavery. Cultural anthropologist Mark L. Staker documented the influence of racial tensions on the Smith family during their fourteen-year stay in Palmyra. Although in 1817 the state had more slaves than Missouri, by the time Saints immigrated to Ohio in 1831, the practice was virtually nonexistent in New York. Staker notes that New York had the highest concentration of Blacks in the country during the 1820s, a situation that would have made the Smiths keenly aware of their plight, and that in their first neighborhood in Palmyra, “free blacks and runaways congregated in noticeable numbers. . . . Because the region had an open, sparsely populated border with Canada, it was attractive to slaves seeking freedom; but the sympathetic attitude of the local population also helped to make the area a magnet for runaways.”[1]

In addition, abolitionist thought infiltrated religious ideology throughout western New York, including sermons in church and camp meetings in which the Smiths participated. Methodists in New York were so outspoken against slavery that they refused to license “preachers, exhorters, or traveling preachers who were slave-owners.”[2] While Presbyterians were typically less sympathetic to the antislavery movement than Methodists, Staker noted that Presbyterians in Palmyra were an exception: “The Reverend George R. H. Shumway of Palmyra’s Western Presbyterian Church was a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad and regularly hid runaways in his church buildings.”[3] This was the same church which Katharine’s mother and her siblings affiliated in the mid-1820s and where Katharine regularly attended Sunday School during her youth. Slavery and abolitionist thought were hotly contested issues everywhere during Katharine’s formative years. Such sentiments continued once the family moved to northeastern Ohio, where many escaping slaves also passed through the area on their way to Canada by crossing Lake Erie.[4]

Those experiences appear to have had a profound impact on the Smith family. In subsequent decades, two of Katharine’s brothers, Joseph and William, bestowed the priesthood on several Saints of Black African descent. William’s liberality towards Blacks was particularly noteworthy. During his tenure as the presiding authority over the eastern branches in the years 1843–45, he ordained Black Saints Q. Walker Lewis an Elder and Joseph T. Ball a high priest in the church’s priesthood, later installing Ball as the presiding elder over a church branch in Boston, Massachusetts. Both men were radical abolitionists in Massachusetts.[5] William later resided with the Restoration’s most renowned Black couple, Elijah and Mary Ann Ables, while he was preaching in Cincinnati in the year 1850.[6]

A Slave Auction, in Edmund Ollier, Cassell’s History of the United States, 3 vols. (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1874–77), 3:199.

Broadside printed in Clay County, Missouri, 1860.

The Smith brothers’ progressiveness in extending full privileges of priesthood and leadership positions to nineteenth-century Black Saints was notable, and Katharine shared those views. When the Salisburys were driven from Missouri in the winter of 1838–39, Katharine felt that the principal reason was due to the differing political ideologies of the Saints and the Missourians, most especially regarding the issue of slavery. Her recollection was that “most of us [the Saints] were persons of education and refinement, from the best New York and New England families, and were people of progressive ideas and strong antislavery sentiments.” Katharine went so far as to describe the Saints as “New England abolitionists,” which stance, if true, obviously conflicted with her Missouri neighbors, whom Katharine described as being “mortal enemies to all persons endowed with New England ideas in regard to the iniquity of negro slavery.”[7]

For Katharine’s children, the realities of slavery became decidedly more poignant during the family’s brief stay in Alexandria, Missouri, in 1846. Solomon described how his family was living in town that fall when they happened upon a town square auction for people who were enslaved. The ten-year-old youth vividly recalled witnessing more than eighty enslaved people being sold at auction that day, describing the “heart-breaking sobs and pleadings of the mothers as their children were torn from their arms and sold to distant parts of the country.” The trauma of that scene left an indelible impression on Solomon and presumably other members of the family, something he never forgot.[8]

Political Clash

The area of Webster and Fountain Green, where the Salisburys had long resided, was first settled by Southerners. The first permanent White settlers in town were the family of Ute and Sally Perkins in the year 1826, who were born in North Carolina and joined the Saints in 1839.[9] They were soon followed by other Southern families, who ended up dominating local government in those early decades, until the time of the Saints’ influx in the 1840s. By the 1850s the number of those from the South made up only 25 percent of households, and that number had shrunk to 17 percent by the 1860s, but the convergence of those from North and South created tension within Hancock County during the time of the Civil War and continued for decades thereafter.[10]

Don Carlos Salisburys’ Civil War Service

Photograph ca. 1861 of Don Carlos Salisbury, 1841–1919. Don Carlos served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1864. Courtesy of Mary Dennis.

The Salisburys’ political ideology meant they were decidedly on the Union side. Two of Katharine’s children, Alvin and Don Carlos, enlisted for Civil War service early in 1861. Don Carlos was mustered in as part of the 16th Illinois Volunteer Infantry on May 24, 1861, at Quincy, Illinois, enlisting for a three-year commitment. Alvin had enlisted at the same time but was sent home before being sworn in, probably because he could not make the three-year commitment required of recruits at that time.[11] In a twist of fate, the commander of Don Carlos’s regiment was none other than Robert F. Smith of Carthage, Illinois. Smith was the justice of the peace during the time Joseph and Hyrum Smith were arrested in June 1844 and served as Captain of the Carthage Greys, the troop left in charge of protecting the Smith brothers on the day they were murdered in Carthage Jail.[12] Don Carlos never recorded if he was treated any differently by Captain Smith during his time as a soldier due to his being a nephew of Joseph Smith. Perhaps he kept his identity hidden from his commanding officer. The 16th Illinois Infantry apparently stood out from other regiments, the local newspaper reporting that “the men drill six hours and the officers twice each day. All are improving very fast, and with the determination to have this regiment among the best in the state.”[13]

Don Carlos enlisted in the war out of a sense of duty. During his three years of service in the states of Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia, he participated in battles at Utica, Missouri, the Battle of Island Number Ten, and battles at Shiloh, Farmington, Resaca, and Rome.[14] During his training at Quincy, Salisbury indicated that his company was in “good spirits for we think we may have a little fun with Missouri.”[15] His supposition was correct, and the highpoint of his military service was securing the railroad line that ran from Hannibal to St. Joseph, Missouri, and participating in a battle with Confederates at Utica, Missouri. During the latter battle, Don Carlos led the charge that drove out the Confederates, where he personally captured the enemies’ flag. He was promoted for his bravery to the office of corporal, and for many years thereafter the flag he captured would hang in a museum in Springfield, Illinois, with a label crediting Don Carlos with its capture. Much like the Saints in Utah, the Salisburys felt the fierce fighting in northwest Missouri was a kind of divine retribution on the state for having driven out the Saints in the 1830s.[16]

Confederate flag captured by Don Carlos Salisbury when he led the charge at Utica, Missouri, driving the Confederates from the region. Courtesy of the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Department of Military Affairs, Springfield, Illinois.

Writing in 1862 to his brother Alvin, Don Carlos expressed how much he longed to see his family. However, his sense of duty outweighed his desire to return home and gave him grit to endure the hardships of the war. “When I think of you I think of my country,” wrote the young soldier, “and the thought strikes me that I would not enjoy myself at home until peace is restored to this once happy country.” He linked his military service with his commitment to God: “I have set my heart on something higher than worldly affairs,” he wrote ardently, praising the faith that allowed him to find happiness “under all misfortunes.” Like thousands of others enmeshed in this ambiguous and bloody war, he found in his faith strength to face even death: “There is one happy thought that bear them [Christians] up and that is if they don’t meet again in this world they will meet in heaven.”[17] Don Carlos also wrote to his older cousin Mariah, instructing her to assure her mother, Sophronia, that he was “a second Lamoni [Moroni] to her.”[18] Sophronia and Mariah and been instrumental in raising Don Carlos during his late teens, which included enrolling him in a cadet school near their home, which had prepared him for success as a soldier.[19] He had not forgotten the upbringing and education they had provided for him.

Like most mothers, Katharine worried about her son during his three years of service, sending Frederick or Alvin to the post office each week to retrieve his letters and to purchase a Chicago newspaper, which the family anxiously scanned to see if Don Carlos’s name appeared on the list of soldiers killed in battle.[20] That fear was warranted, because Don Carlos fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, especially during the Battle of Shiloh. Katharine prayed intently during those years that God would spare her son’s life.[21] He fulfilled his three-year enlistment, being discharged in the month of May 1864 at Rome, Georgia, while suffering simultaneously from pneumonia, scurvy, and a case of the measles at the time of his release.[22]

Alvin’s Murder

By the decade of the 1870s, the animosity towards the Salisburys had softened some, mainly due to the improved reputation of the family, whose respect from their neighbors had been hard earned. An apparent exception was their closest neighbors, the Joshua and Martha Louisa Duff family, who had migrated from the southern states of Kentucky and Tennessee and built their home just east of Katharine’s in Fountain Green. Political differences that divided Hancock County during the Civil War became more personal as the two family’s differing ideologies collided living in such proximity. Hostility toward the Salisburys might have also had a religious undercurrent, as Joshua Duff’s mother Mary and his sister Frances had both joined the branch at Macedonia decades earlier, received their endowments in the Nauvoo Temple in 1846, and migrated with the branch to Iowa in 1847. Both Frances and Mary eventually returned from Iowa to Fountain Green, but their earlier affiliation with the Saints had created a religious split in the family and likely contributed to the animosity the Duffs held for the Salisburys.[23]

Frederick Salisbury (left), with his nephew, Newton Duke, ca. 1860s. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Carla Duke.

In the early 1870s, political and religious differences between the two families spilled into violence. The Salisburys described the Duffs as “roughs from Tennessee,” and had heard them boast on occasion that they were “half alligator and half horse.”[24] Not long after Katharine’s home was finished in Fountain Green in 1872, she and her son Frederick celebrated its completion by hosting a dance party at their residence. One of the Duff sons, probably twenty-two-year-old Thomas Duff, was so crude during the evening’s festivities that Frederick felt it necessary to have him removed from the premises. Frederick didn’t feel as though hard feelings would persist beyond that evening, but when he visited the Duff home a few weeks later, the family returned the slight. According to a later account, several of the Duff boys “attacked him [Frederick] violently, at first with their tongues, and afterwards with hammer and tongs.”[25] Frederick managed to escape the scene without significant injury but grew increasingly more vigilant about his safety when dealing with his near neighbors thereafter. Katharine and her children began referring to the stretch of road between her home and the Duff place as “Devil’s Lane.”[26] The situation was developing into something akin to the Hatfields versus the McCoys, characteristic of the animosity that persisted between Northerners and Southerners in post–Civil War America.[27]

Late one evening in the ensuing summer, Frederick, his older sister Lucy, and one of Lucy’s small children were walking down “Devil’s Lane.” As they passed by the Duff home, members of the Duff family unexpectedly began firing pistol shots from inside their home at the three. Their target was Frederick, but one bullet came so near killing Lucy that it passed through her hair, singing her scalp, while another passed through Frederick’s coat collar, grazing his neck. Lucy grabbed her child and fled for her mother’s home a few hundred yards away. After Frederick’s earlier violent exchange with the Duffs, he was prepared for just such an encounter and had armed himself for his protection. After recovering his senses, Frederick returned fire toward the Duff home. He overheard Joshua Duff, the family’s father, call for his rifle, swearing that he “could bring the d——d scoundrel down with that [gun],” causing Frederick to make a sprint for his mother’s home.[28]

While no one was materially harmed on either side in the skirmish, the incident obviously increased Katharine’s worry for her family’s safety. Though her boys were now adults, being a widow in a rural location adjacent to hostile neighbors brought additional fear for her own safety. Katharine and Frederick attempted to prosecute the Duffs over the incident, and Thomas Duff and his father Joshua were each required to pay eight hundred dollars bail. The Duffs, in turn, attempted to defend themselves by prosecuting Frederick.[29] Katharine frantically wrote to her first cousin George A. Smith and Brigham Young in the Salt Lake Valley for money to hire a lawyer to prosecute the case against the Duffs, whom she described as “men that will Swear to anything to clear themselves.”[30] Although Brigham Young and George A. Smith had paid for Katharine’s home the previous year, they declined getting involved in her legal difficulty.[31] Neither lawsuit was successful, and the case was eventually dropped, but animosity between the two families persisted.[32]

Sometime later, Frederick spotted Thomas Duff hiding behind a tree in the woods near the property line, possibly intending to ambush him. However, Frederick discovered his hiding spot before Duff saw him, sneaked up behind him, pulled out his revolver, and pointed it in his direction. This time it was Frederick’s turn to intimidate Duff. He marched him out of the woods some distance ahead of him, assuredly threatening Duff to keep his distance from Frederick’s family before eventually letting him go.[33] Frederick’s nephew Herbert Salisbury, who was only a boy during the developing feud, recounted his belief that “we could have tamed them [Duff boys]” during the 1870s, “but the damned old rebel county would not have been easy on us.”[34]

By the time he reached maturity, Katharine’s second-eldest son, Alvin (Frederick’s older brother), was tall and muscular like all his Smith uncles. Standing over six feet in height, he held in common with his Smith predecessors a love of wrestling and was described as one of the strongest men in Hancock County.[35] When Alvin’s cousin Samuel H. B. Smith visited the Salisburys during his missionary travels, Alvin’s first inclination was to test his strength against his stout cousin, who was his same age. Samuel H. B. recalled that almost immediately after he arrived at his aunt Katharine’s home in the summer of 1860, he found that Alvin was “very anxious to try his strength with me, being taller and every way stronger than myself.” The two tussled back and forth for some time, with neither man claiming victory. Samuel H. B. expressed his relief in his journal at how Alvin had somehow failed in his several attempts to throw him despite Alvin’s superior strength.[36]

Alvin was quick-tempered andbecause of his physical prowess, did not shy away from conflict. The religious and political discrimination he had experienced during his formative years had an influence on his developing temperament. Descendants speculated that growing up without a father also had an effect.[37] When all his family linked themselves with the RLDS Church in the 1870s, he remained distant for another seven years. When he eventually joined in 1879, his commitment was short-lived because he was excommunicated a few months later for “apostasy.”[38]

Alvin Salisbury, 1838–80. Photograph ca. 1870, photographer unknown. Courtesy of Carla Duke.

Because the Salisburys had been instrumental in the resurgence of the Restoration in the Fountain Green area in the early 1870s, that development increased fears for a time among some of the old settlers. “Now, don’t think the people had forgotten who we were, for they had not,” recalled Solomon of that post–Civil War era. Once he and his brothers began laboring to build up the Pilot Grove RLDS Branch in the region, Solomon recalled how “the fun commenced in earnest now. I was the first convert baptized in Pilot Grove Township since they had driven the Mormons out. Oh, horror! They could not stand for that!” Solomon was also serving as the township’s tax collector at the time and recounted how rumors swirled that he would somehow steal all their tax money. Some of his neighbors used that as an excuse not to pay their taxes.[39] Though Alvin wasn’t affiliated with the RLDS Church during the first half of the 1870s, he resented the way his brother Solomon had been treated.

Frederick married Mary J. Brewer on December 3, 1874. Alvin incredulously watched as Mary’s parents, Thomas and Sarah Brewer, disowned her for “marrying into the Smith family of Mormonism.” The antipathy directed towards the Salisburys was likely intensified due to political differences because the Brewer family hailed from South Carolina and Kentucky.[40] These resurgent experiences of religious and political prejudice, along with the repeated exchanges between his brother Frederick and the Duffs, rekindled Alvin’s animosity toward these families.

During the summer of 1880, forty-two-year-old Alvin experienced his own clash with Thomas Duff. Although the circumstances of that encounter are unknown, Thomas Duff, who was ten years younger than Alvin, had threatened Alvin with bodily harm on that occasion, something Alvin would not have received well.[41] Alvin appears to have demonstrated uncharacteristic restraint at the time, as Duff was described as being short and portly, and both men knew Duff would not stand a chance in a scuffle with Alvin.[42] Judging from previous encounters between the families, if Alvin brushed off his threat during this exchange, it probably served only to increase Duff’s wrath. Tensions were brewing between the two men.

On the late summer evening of August 20, 1880, Republicans held a political rally at Fountain Green’s Presbyterian Church in support of James A. Garfield’s run for the presidency. Alvin had only recently switched his loyalty to the Republican Party and had been involved in the festivities that evening, donning a uniform and carrying a lamp as part of the procession of the local “Garfield and Arthur Club.” The festivities brought out most of the town folk from Fountain Green and nearby Webster, Republicans and Democrats alike, and the church was filled to overflowing, with many standing in the churchyard listening to the proceedings. During one of the speeches that evening, Alvin stood just outside the front doors visiting with Jack Mull, a Democratic leader in the area, who questioned Alvin about why he turned Republican. After sharing a few thoughts with Mull, Alvin quipped, “Show me a democrat and I will show you a drunkard.” Unbeknown to Alvin, Thomas Duff was within earshot of his conversation and interjected loudly, “My old father is a democrat, and he is not a drunkard, and I don’t like to hear his party abused.” Alvin responded, “Keep your mouth shut, I am not talking to you, [and] if you don’t I’ll make you shut it.” Duff retorted, “My mouth is my own, and I will use it when I please.”[43] Duff then insulted Alvin’s deceased father, referring to Jenkins as the one who was a drunk.[44]

Presbyterian Church, Fountain Green, Illinois, ca. 1906.

That comment was the tipping point for Alvin, and from there all mayhem broke loose. While Alvin simply expected a fist fight with his belligerent neighbor, Duff had come that night prepared for something more sinister. Still smarting from the quarrel he had with Alvin weeks earlier, Duff chose that night to follow through on his earlier threat, and Alvin’s political comment was just the opening he needed.[45] Duff had previously tried to shoot Frederick over a minor disagreement, and he now similarly sought revenge against Alvin.

Alvin asked for someone to hold his lamp, but bystanders had retreated by this point. He instead threw his lamp to the ground and came at Duff. Little did Alvin know that Duff was carrying a large, double-sided bowie knife and, in the dusk of evening, apparently did not see him extract it from its sheath. Bowie knives were a common weapon in nineteenth-century America, and some were more than ten inches in length.[46] As Alvin swung, Duff slashed Alvin’s left forearm with his knife, severing all the muscles in that arm and causing it to fall limply by his side. Duff then swung his knife again, cutting Alvin’s chest, making a four-inch gash that nearly penetrated his sternum. As Alvin reeled back in pain, hunched over, Duff struck a fatal blow, sinking his knife deep into Alvin’s forehead, spinning Alvin nearly around. Alvin then “put his hand to the wound and reeled away saying ‘I am cut,’ and mistaking the edges of [his] the fractured skull for the knife blade, which he evidently thought had been broken off in the wound, asked those who were present to take it [the knife] out.” During the fray, Duff had attempted to make it look as though Alvin had been the aggressor, and even after the final stabbing kept repeating, “take that man away [from me].” After the final blow, Duff quickly mounted his horse and hurriedly rode to his home in the countryside several miles away.[47]

As evidence of Alvin’s strength, he never fell to the ground. Holding his hand over his head wound, he walked the thirty yards back to the church unassisted, where the political rally was still underway. What a sensation it created as Alvin entered the standing-room-only church, bleeding profusely from multiple wounds and calling out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Alvin remained conscious just long enough to identify his assailant as Thomas Duff, whom bystanders had also recognized. Alvin held on for several more hours, passing away under the care of local physician Leonard T. Ferris, between ten and eleven that same night.[48] If Katharine was not present at the rally, she likely arrived in time to see her son before he passed. The gruesome scene was forever etched in her memory.

In the interim, Thomas Duff rode home and picked up his father, Joshua, and the two galloped immediately to Carthage that same evening to obtain a constable. Duff recounted to the Carthage authority a version of the fight that made him look like the victim. Duff’s rendering of the incident didn’t hold much credibility once the constable arrived in Fountain Green the next morning, however, as there were dozens of witnesses to the incident, and Duff had gone into hiding. Duff was immediately located and arrested in the nearby town of La Harpe and, in another twist of irony, was held in Carthage Jail, the same location where Katharine’s brothers had been murdered decades earlier. Here Duff remained for the next six months, awaiting trial for the murder of Alvin Salisbury.[49]

1880 Sketch of Carthage Jail. Thomas Duff was held in Carthage Jail while awaiting trial for the murder of Alvin Salisbury. It is the same jail where Salisbury’s uncles Hyrum and Joseph Smith were murdered thirty-six years earlier. Thomas Gregg, History of Hancock County, Illinois (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman, 1880), 279.

During the trial in March 1881, the prosecution argued that Thomas Duff provoked the assault to commit the deed, which meant the killing was premeditated. Duff’s lawyers argued it was self-defense, contending that Alvin, a much larger man, had initiated the fight and that Duff was simply defending himself. Had Duff been convicted of the earlier shooting incident with Frederick seven years earlier, it would have strengthened the prosecution’s case. After persuasive arguments on both sides, Duff was ultimately convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter and was sentenced to only five years in the penitentiary.[50]

The verdict was obviously upsetting to the Salisburys, who felt Duff’s light sentence was due to the jury being composed of “southern sympathizers and children of the men that mobbed Joseph and Hyrum Smith.”[51] That sentiment regarding religious prejudice was possible, as anti-Mormon sentiment in Hancock County persisted among long-time residents well into the twentieth century.[52] Ten of the twelve jurors either had ties to the South or were from Carthage, Illinois, possibly contributing either to political or religious bias.[53] Not long after Thomas’s conviction and to the great relief of the Salisbury family, the Duff family moved from the area, probably due to their tarnished reputation.[54]

Alvin Salisbury gravestone, Webster Cemetery, Webster, Illinois. Photograph by Kyle R. Walker, 2021.

According to family members, Katharine was prostrate with grief from Alvin’s death.[55] Like most parents who have lost a child, it was something she never fully recovered from, especially as she tried to comprehend the unexplainable death of her son that fateful August night. His murder in the county and Duff’s incarceration in Carthage Jail while awaiting trial, brought painful reminders of the murder of her brothers Joseph and Hyrum thirty-six years earlier. Not long after his murder, Alvin’s widow, Mahala, and their four children left Illinois for Kansas, never to return, and their involvement with Katharine and the rest of the family was minimal after they relocated.[56] That must have been additionally painful for Katharine, because she felt bereft of Alvin’s entire family after his murder.

Fountain Green’s residents were sympathetic to the Salisburys’ loss. That compassion seemingly overrode former animosities regarding her connection to Joseph Smith. On Sunday, August 22, an immense crowd gathered to pay their respects to the Salisbury family, the crowd being so large that Alvin’s funeral had to be moved from the Majorville Methodist Church, where Alvin occasionally attended, to the much larger Presbyterian Church in Fountain Green. It was the same location where his murder had taken place, and after the funeral the large entourage followed the family to Webster Cemetery, some two miles away, where Alvin was interred.[57] The outpouring of support the Salisburys received from the community was especially comforting to Katharine and her surviving children. The funeral procession and packed church revealed an acceptance and support that the family had not experienced since moving to Fountain Green some thirty years earlier.

Notes

[1] Staker added, “Palmyra operated at least four stations on the Underground Railroad where slaves moved north to the border.” Mark Lyman Staker, Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting for Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2009), 120.

[2] Quoted in Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 121.

[3] Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 122.

[4] According to Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, “Geauga County was the last stop on the Underground Railroad just before runaways crossed over Lake Erie into Canada” (29–30).

[5] W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 106–9; Connell O’Donovan, “The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis: ‘An Example for His More Whiter Brethren to Follow,’” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 26 (2006): 66–71; Connell O’Donovan, “Joseph T. Ball, 1804–1861: Mormonism’s First African American High Priest,” unpublished manuscript, 2011, 6, copy in author’s possession courtesy of O’Donovan; “Religious Notices,” Prophet 1, no. 12 (October 12, 1844): 3; Kyle R. Walker, William B. Smith: In the Shadow of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 436–38. Joseph and Emma Smith also befriended Jane Manning James, an early Black convert who was invited to live and work with them at the Mansion House in Nauvoo. Joseph offered to have Jane adoptively sealed as a child into his family, an offer she refused due to misunderstanding about what the ordinance entailed. Quincy D. Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 48–50.

[6] Toward the end of his life, William shared his views on race during a time when there was ongoing debate among RLDS leaders regarding ordaining Blacks to the priesthood in the latter part of the nineteenth century. William explicated his perspective in a letter he wrote to the Saints’ Herald in 1892: “The constitution of these United States makes no distinction in the human family; all men are born free and equal.” Smith quoted the apostle Paul that “God has made of one blood all nations.” “If such are the facts founded upon a just law,” Smith argued, “by what authority have we the right to say that a colored man has no right to be ordained to all the powers of the priesthood, necessary for the building up of the Church of Christ in any part of the world, among any race of people, whether black or white.” “Extracts from Letters,” Saints’ Herald 39, no. 40 (October 1, 1892): 631. William D. Russell documented how Joseph III retreated from his initial (1860s) liberality toward Blacks and that by the 1890s he warned “against haste in ordaining Negro men,” instead advocating for “separating the races in church and establishing separate branches where practicable so that black priesthood could minister to their own race.” William D. Russell, “A Priestly Role for a Prophetic Church: The RLDS Church and Black Americans,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 39–41, 45–46. William Smith thus took a decided stance against his nephew’s position during this period.

W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21–23, 195–97, 205–6; Walker, William B. Smith, 435–42.

[7] “Reminiscences of Joseph Smith: As Told by His Sister, Catherine Smith Salisbury, to Her Grandson, Herbert S. Salsibury,” Saints’ Herald 60, no. 41 (October 8, 1913): 982–84. Herbert quotes his grandmother at length in this article.

[8] “Celebrated S. J. Salisbury’s 89th Birthday, Sunday,” Carthage Republican 71, no. 38 (September 17, 1924): 2.

[9] Ute was a Revolutionary War veteran, and he and his extended family formed the nucleus of Saints in the community that eventually expanded to approximately five hundred by the year 1842. Susan Sessions Rugh, Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indian University Press, 2001), 3; Thomas Gregg, History of Hancock County, Illinois (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman, 1880), 232.

[10] Rugh, Our Common Country, 25, 40–41.

[11] H.[erbert] S. Salisbury, “The Western Adventures of Don Carlos Salisbury,” San Rafael, CA, unpublished typescript, ca. 1945, 5, Hancock County Historical Society, Carthage, IL; Charles J. Scofield, ed., History of Hancock County Illinois (Chicago: Munsell Publishing, 1921), 1347. On Alvin’s enlistment and early discharge, see “Camp Wood,” Quincy Whig and Republican 24, no. 9 (June 1, 1861): 3; Solomon J. Salisbury, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (self-pub., ca. 1922), 9; Frederick V. Salisbury, “Teaching and Testimonies of My Mother,” Unpublished typescript, ca. 1928, 18, Hancock County Historical Society, Carthage, IL.

[12] Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill, Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 18–21, 218. For an alternative view of Robert F. Smith’s role at Carthage, see Alex D. Smith, “The Day Joseph Smith was Killed: A Carthage Woman’s Perspective,” BYU Studies Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2019): 105–12.

[13] “Camp Matters,” 24, no. 11 Quincy Whig and Republican (June 15, 1861): 3. Katharine’s older brother William also enlisted for Civil War service just seventy miles upriver at Rock Island, IL, in the year 1863. While he was too old to enlist, he misstated his age making it appear that he was ten years younger than his actual age. He served primarily in the state of Arkansas during his year and a half of service. Kyle R. Walker, William B. Smith: In the Shadow of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015), 442–57.

[14] Newton Bateman, Paul Selby, and Charles J. Scofield, eds., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Hancock County (Chicago: Munsell Publishing, 1921), 1347.

[15] Don Carlos Salisbury (Quincy, IL) to Mother, Brothers, and Sister, May 8, 1861. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.

[16] Herbert S. Salisbury, “The Western Adventures of Don Carlos Salisbury,” 1, unpublished typescript, San Rafael, CA, Hancock County Historical Society, Carthage, IL. Don Carlos was “promoted to the rank of a non-commissioned officer for gallantry at Utica.” Bateman, et al., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Hancock County, 1347. Brett D. Dowdle, “‘What Means This Carnage?’: The Civil War in Mormon Thought,” in Civil War Saints, ed. Kenneth L. Alford (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2012), 107–25.

[17] Don Carlos Salisbury (Tuscumbia, AL) to Dear Brother Alvin [Salisbury], August 28, 1862, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.

[18] D.[on] C.[arlos] Salisbury (Tuscumbia, AL) to Mariah Woolley, August 28, 1862, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. Since Lamoni was a convert-king in the Book of Mormon, it seems most likely that, in a mental slip, he confused Lamoni with “Moroni,” the latter a noted military hero in the Book of Mormon.

[19] “Don Carlos Salisbury. Died,” Carthage Republican 46, no. 16 (April 16, 1919): 1.

[20] Salisbury, “Western Adventures of Don Carlos Salisbury,” 2.

[21] Warren L. Van Dine, “Catharine Smith Salisbury,” unpublished typescript, 16, paper presented at the Smith Family Reunion, 1973, CHL.

[22] Bateman et al., Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Hancock County, 1347; Salisbury, “Western Adventures of Don Carlos Salisbury,” 1 and n5 added by Winfield W. Salisbury.

[23] Mary Duff, a widow, along with her daughter Frances joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while living near Fountain Green, IL, and received their endowments in the Nauvoo Temple on February 7, 1846. They migrated with the Macedonia Branch when the Mormons were driven out of the area and appear in the Macedonia Branch minutes in Council Bluffs, IA, in 1847. However, they returned to Hancock County, IL, by the late 1840s and did not migrate with other members of the branch to the Salt Lake valley. Macedonia Branch Record, 1839–1850, 67, CHL; Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845–1846: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 615; 1850 United States Census, Hancock County, IL, James and Frances Westfall.

[24] Herbert S. Salisbury (San Rafael, CA) to Catherine Groom, February 24, 1944, Community of Christ Library-Archives, Independence, MO.

[25] “Shooting Affair Near Fountain Green,” Carthage Gazette 8, no. 52 (June 11, 1873): 3.

[26] Herbert S. Salisbury, “History of Salisburys, Part II, Life of Don Carlos [Salisbury] after His Return to Illinois [1866], Including Herbert’s Description of His Own Life (1870 up to 1945),” unpublished typescript, ca. 1945, 4, copy in author’s possession.

[27] While the family and community structure was more expansive in the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, there are a number of parallels to the ongoing conflict between the Salisburys and the Duffs. One of the earliest clashes between the Hatfields and McCoys also occurred at a large political gathering where an argument ensued, where a knife was used in the scrap, and where Ellison Hatfield was murdered after being stabbed twenty-four times. Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 3–4.

[28] “Shooting Affair Near Fountain Green,” 3.

[29] “Shooting Affair Near Fountain Green,” 3.

[30] Katharine Salisbury (Fountain Green, IL) to George A. Smith and Brigham Young, Jule 25, 1873, George A. Smith Papers, 1834–1875, Incoming letters, R-Y, CHL.

[31] George A. Smith (Salt Lake City) to Catherine Smith Salisbury, August 6, 1873, Historian’s Office letterpress copybooks, 1854–1879, vol. 3, CHL.

[32] “Shooting Affair Near Fountain Green,” 3; “Further Particulars of the Affair,” Carthage Gazette 16, no. 13 (September 4, 1880), 3.

[33] Salisbury to Groom, February 24, 1944.

[34] Salisbury to Groom, February 24, 1944.

[35] Salisbury to Groom, February 24, 1944.

[36] Samuel H. B. Smith, Reminiscences and Diary, 1856 April–1863 July, entries for late June and early July 1860, p. 19, CHL.

[37] Van Dine, “Catharine Smith Salisbury,” 23.

[38] Pilot Grove Reorganized Branch Minutes, holograph, 60, Community of Christ Library-Archives, Independence, MO.

[39] Salisbury, Reminiscences of an Octogenerian, 10–12.

[40] Van Dine, “Catharine Smith Salisbury,” 24–25.

[41] “The Duff Trial Concluded, Verdict of the Jury,” Carthage Gazette 16, no. 42 (March 26, 1881): 3.

[42] “Terrible Tragedy,” Carthage Gazette 16, no. 12 (August 28, 1880): 3.

[43] “Terrible Tragedy,” 3; “The Duff Trial Concluded,” 3.

[44] “The Tragedy at Fountain Green Last Friday Night—Duff Held to Answer, Without Bail,” Quincy Daily Whig 29 (August 27, 1880), 2.

[45] “The Duff Trial Concluded,” 3.

[46] Robert M. Ireland, “The Problem of Concealed Weapons in Nineteenth-Century Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 91, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 370–85.

[47] “Further Particulars of the Affair,” 3.

[48] “Terrible Tragedy,” 3.

[49] “Terrible Tragedy,” 3.

[50] “The Duff Trial Concluded,” 3.

[51] Salisbury to Groom, February 24, 1944.

[52] See interviews with longtime Hancock County residents John LaCroix, Paul J. McKoon, James W. Moffitt, Estel Neff, and Louis Pilkington in Modern Perspectives on Nauvoo and the Mormons: Interviews with Long-Term Residents, comp. Larry E. Dahl and Don Norton (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2003), 121, 168, 182–87, 193, 200–201, 295–96.

[53] The twelve jurors were S. B. Dodd (born in Tennessee), Joe Kirkendoll (from Ohio, spouse from Kentucky), Nathan Dowd (born in Connecticut), James Roseberry (from Carthage), Reuben Garnett (parents born in Kentucky), Lemuel Crow (born in Missouri), Isaac Willy (from Carthage), William G. Allison (born in Virginia), James Ewing (from Carthage), Wesley Lane (from Carthage), Emile Kunz (unknown), and William McClellan (from Warsaw, spouse born in Kentucky). For the list of jurors, see, “Circuit Court,” Carthage Gazette 16, no. 41, March 19, 1881, 3.

[54] Joshua Duff, Iowa, U.S., Wills and Probate Records, 1871–1952, Probate Case Files, 1873–1926, boxes 28–30, Decatur County Courthouse, Decatur, IA; Marriage Record of Thomas B. Duff and Sophia Johnson, March 2, 1889, Custer County, NE, Marriage Records, State Library and Archives, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, NE.

[55] Warren L. Van Dine, “Statement About His Salisbury Family,” unpublished typescript, 1975, 30–34, copy in author’s possession.

[56] Salisbury to Groom, February 24, 1944; Van Dine, “Statement About His Salisbury Family,” 34.

[57] “Terrible Tragedy,” 3; Susan Sessions Rugh, Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 154.