Americans are shocked following the attempted assassination of former president and current presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. In recent days, legacy and independent media have reminded us that political assassinations are a dark and recurring part of the American story. However, someone is missing from these articles, even from the official Congressional Research Service. Despite abundant scholarship for fifty years explaining his murder, no one is discussing the first assassinated presidential candidate—Joseph Smith Jr.
That is unfortunate—not only because it is a significant historical omission but because of the lessons it holds for our current political moment. However, to understand the political lessons from Joseph Smith Jr.’s assassination, we must first understand why he was running for president in the first place.
While trying to build Zion in Missouri, stark religious, political, social (particularly the Saints’ more positive views of Blacks and American Indians), and economic differences between the Saints and Missourians led to conflict. In 1833, mobs extralegally drove the Saints out of Jackson County. Five years later, militia/mobs murdered two dozen Saints and terrorized the remainder with indiscriminate rape, theft, and destruction of property, this time with the protection of the law. The majority had spoken, depriving the minority’s rights of life, liberty, property, and freedom of worship under both the federal United States and Missouri state constitutions.
Nauvoo’s city charter and militia gave Joseph Smith and the Saints in Illinois the legal protection they sought. Their majority in Hancock County ensured that they could elect candidates favorable to them. To many outsiders, however, Nauvoo and its prophet-mayor seemed a threatening theocracy, similar to contemporary views of Catholics’ “subservience” to the Pope. Thus, religious freedom seemingly did not apply to Saints, and tensions mounted again. He was running to protect the constitutional rights of all Americans.
Smith was stepping into the most partisan era the nation had yet experienced. The Democratic and Whig parties had recently popularized politics. They organized millions, not just to vote but to attend partisan conventions, meetings, and rallies. Partisan newspapers stoked political fires daily rather than at the end of the election cycle. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, popular politics was the American religion. In the 1840s, as the Second Great Awakening ended, voter enrollment was ten times that of church enrollment. In western Illinois, that zealously partisan Whig/Democrat dynamic overlapped with an Anti-Mormon/Mormon one.
Following Joseph Smith’s campaign announcement, enemies inside and outside of the Church plotted his murder. They would not accept his legally gained influence or his right to run for president. For them, he was an existential danger to be eliminated by extralegal means. They tried to drag him away from the safety of Nauvoo using trumped-up charges issued from the county seat. Smith simply traveled in force to Carthage, made bail, and returned home. The conspirators needed something more to incite the passions of the people to destroy Smith and a way to strip him of protection.
William Law led Smith’s enemies inside the Church. He and Smith had split over plural marriage and the Church’s voting power. An ardent Whig, Law was furious that at the last hour, Smith had influenced the Saints to vote Democratic in 1843. The Nauvoo dissidents procured a printing press from a Whig politician to print the Nauvoo Expositor. The paper’s only issue made accusations against Smith using distorted truths and outright falsehoods wrapped in inflammatory language, such as:
Joseph and his accomplices [are] specimens of injustice of the most pernicious and diabolical character that ever stained the pages of the historian. …[If you vote for Joseph Smith] you are voting for an enemy to your government…. You are voting for a man who stands indicted, and is now held to bail, for the crimes of adultery and perjury…. [he] is…one of the blackest and basest scoundrels that has appeared upon the stage of human existence since the days of Nero, and Caligula.
Leading the conspiracy outside of Nauvoo was Thomas Sharp, owner of the Warsaw Signal. He spent 1841-1842 publishing his opposition to the Saints’ political power. Sharp, a Whig, ran in 1842 for state representative but lost to Democrat William Smith (Joseph Smith’s younger brother) due to the Saints’ voting majority in Hancock County. Financial setbacks also forced him to sell the Warsaw Signal. Stewing, he spent 1843 strengthening the Anti-Mormon Party he had created.
Just days after Joseph Smith announced his candidacy, Sharp regained control of the Warsaw Signal. Consequently, his attacks against the Saints intensified. He was particularly angered that Hyrum Smith was running for state representative, once again blocking his personal ambitions. Surreptitiously, Sharp and his associates did some blocking of their own. They began intercepting Nauvoo newspapers to ensure that only their newspapers reached the wider public.
Sharp knew of the Nauvoo dissidents’ plans to use the Nauvoo Expositor to destroy the Smiths. He was not afraid to admit it openly. Just a week before the Expositor’s only issue, Sharp published in the Signal,
We have seen and heard enough to convince us that Joe Smith is not safe out of Nauvoo, and we would not be surprised to hear of his death by violent means in a short time. He has deadly enemies…. The feeling of this country is now lashed to its utmost pitch and will break forth in fury upon the slightest provocation…
Mayor Joseph Smith and the city council gave the conspirators the needed provocation when they destroyed the Expositor. Four days later, Sharp called for political violence.
We have only to state, that this is sufficient! War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and ALL!!! — Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS!! to ROB men of their property and RIGHTS, without avenging them. We have no time for comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER AND BALL!!!
Eleven days later, Joseph and Hyrum Smith arrived in Carthage, under the protection of Governor Thomas Ford, to face arraignment on charges of riot. This time, when the Smiths posted bail, authorities immediately rearrested them on a charge of treason, a non-bailable offense. They had 18 separate charges ready to ensure that the Smiths could not leave Carthage. The judge, also one of the conspirators, twisted the law and the defendants’ rights to ensure their prey was “secure” in jail. During the evening of June 26th, the Carthage Anti-Mormon Committee of Safety met and finalized its plans to deliver “summary execution” on the Smiths in the name of the people.
The next morning, Governor Ford disbanded the militias (except for a small contingent to guard the jail) and left Carthage for Nauvoo. He did not take Joseph and Hyrum Smith with him as he had promised. William Law also departed Carthage, now safe with an alibi. Thomas Sharp led the disbanded Warsaw militia to the jail, where they first killed Hyrum and then Joseph. Lifeless and lying alongside the well outside Carthage Jail, Joseph Smith became the first assassinated candidate for President of the United States.
As a lawyer, Dallin H. Oaks and historian Marvin Hill wrote almost fifty years ago,
The murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at Carthage, Illinois, was not a spontaneous, impulsive act by a few personal enemies of the Mormon leaders, but a deliberate political assassination, committed or condoned by some of the leading citizens in Hancock County.
When those leading citizens stood trial for the murders, the judge and jurors ensured justice was not served.
The first assassination of a presidential candidate is a cautionary tale about our current political environment. William Law, Thomas Sharp, and the other conspirators of 1844 felt justified in twisting truth and telling falsehoods using inflammatory language through their newspapers, controlling the narrative by intercepting their opponents’ newspapers, bringing questionable lawsuits to endanger their opponents, bending the law to their own ends, inciting and leading destructive mobs intent on political intimidation, and in using the ultimate political violence—assassination.
So, let’s step back and look around today. Do the factors involved in the assassination of Joseph Smith exist today?
Twisting truth and pushing falsehoods in pursuit of political ends? Check. Two examples are particularly instructive. While one side declared, and some continue to believe, that the 2020 election was rigged, the other side, for at least two years, hid the fact that the President of the United States was in cognitive decline. Willing accomplices in the media pushed both of their agendas. No wonder the country is suffering from a crisis of political and institutional trustworthiness. Personal religion is increasingly mediated by politics.
Censuring others’ views to control the narrative? Check. The past five years have seen institutional and governmental restrictions on free speech on social media, the town square of today. Furthermore, online mobs “cancel” persons who deviate from their narrative, creating a toxic culture where citizens are afraid to express their views openly.
Stretching or abusing the law to hurt political opponents? Check. “Lawfare” against political opponents is incredibly dangerous. It started with the chants at Trump rallies in 2016 to “Lock her [Senator Hillary Clinton] up!” Now, we’ve clearly passed the Rubicon in the openly partisan civil and criminal suits against former President Trump that the majority of Americans acknowledge as political persecution. Trump has already promised revenge if elected, and the crowd at Kamala Harris’ first speech as a presidential candidate chanted, “Lock him up!”
Incited, destructive mobs for political intimidation? Check. The “mostly peaceful” riots in the summer of 2020 caused 1-2 billion dollars of damage and saw at least 25 people murdered. Donald Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, with many intent on stopping the final certification of the 2020 election. Also, see online mobs above in the previous point.
Not accepting the results of an election? Check. In 2016, Democrats pronounced Trump’s election illegitimate and hampered his presidency with investigations founded on falsehoods and half-truths. In 2020, Trump and many of his supporters declared the election was rigged, which culminated in the January 6th riot. Now, one wonders if either side will accept the results this year.
Politics as religion? Check. Research has shown that, like the 1840s and 1850s, personal religion is increasingly mediated by politics as religious identity weakens. On both sides, politics becomes the chief driver of one’s beliefs about reality. For many Americans and Latter-day Saints, their politics is their religion—the real god they worship. Zealous service to that god gives one a feeling of moral superiority, of being “the good guys.” In such an apocalyptic, good versus evil political environment, some feel that they can and even must take extralegal action, subtle or direct, to defeat the existential threat of “the bad guys.”
If our problems echo the atmosphere surrounding Smith’s assassination, what is the solution, especially as the arena is national? Others on this platform have given wise suggestions. I would only point back to what Joseph Smith wrote in his campaign pamphlet.
Unity is power, and when I reflect on the importance of it to the stability of all governments, I am astounded at the silly moves of persons and parties, to foment discord in order to ride into power on the current of popular excitement.
Smith was trying to create a non-partisan solution to extend the rights of the Constitution to himself, his people, and all Americans rather than pit them against each other. As a people, Latter-day Saints have a doctrinal directive to “befriend” the political process and a prophetic priority to “build, lift, encourage, persuade, and inspire—no matter how difficult the situation.” That will take moral courage and open minds. We, like the prophet Joseph Smith, must be willing to sacrifice in the “good cause…of maintaining the laws and Constitution of the United States…for the general good of mankind.”
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