American Crucifixion (6 page)

It is the first principle to know. We may converse with him and that he once was a man like us. God was once as one of us and was on a planet as Jesus was in the flesh. I defy all hell and earth to refute it.

Joseph referred to gods in the plural, because he explained that gods evolved from men and were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing. The raw material of godhead was a form of free intelligence that preexisted our creation. From intelligence, God became a man, then perfected himself to become a god. So did Jesus Christ. And so, Joseph said, can you. “You have got to learn how to be a god yourself in order to save yourself,” he proclaimed,

—to be priests and kings as all Gods have done–by going from a small degree to another—from exaltation to exaltation—till they are able to sit in glory as with those who sit enthroned.

This became the “doctrine of eternal progression,” the Mormons’ supremely optimistic belief in the perfectibility of men and women living on earth. Joseph freed his followers from the strictures of predestination and the inevitability of sin. This was Joseph’s final, grandiose gift of hope to his people—and yet another nail in his coffin. In one long, loud sermon, he had dynamited the entire Christian cosmology, the underpinnings of every credal prayer to have emerged in the previous 2,000 years. Joseph’s former counselor William Law immediately organized a breakaway church, condemning Joseph as a fallen prophet. Joseph was preaching “some of the most blasphemous doctrines . . . ever heard of,” Law said. Not only polygamy, but also the teaching that there are “other gods as far above our God as he is.”

JOSEPH SMITH LED AN EVENTFUL LIFE, BUT THE SPRING OF 1844 seemed particularly crowded with historic undertakings. Most noticeably, he had decided to run for president, as the candidate of his newly created National Reform Party. Outside of Illinois, his candidacy was treated as a joke. “A New Candidate in the Field! Stand out of the way—all small fry!”
Niles’ National Register
smirked. Even Joseph’s first choice as vice president, who could not accept because he was born in Ireland, called the campaign a “wild goose chase.”

Smith’s platform was an olio of Whig and Democratic ideas. His call for a national bank and a “judicious tariff” scheme came straight from the Whig playbook. Like the Democrats, he urged expanding the union by annexing Texas and Oregon. Other ideas were very much his own. Joseph wanted to eliminate slavery and compensate slave owners with the revenues from the sale of public lands. He wanted to do away with military court-martials and called for the abolition of most prisons. According to the church newspaper, Joseph would “petition your state legislature to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries: blessing them as they go, and saying to them in the name of the Lord,
go thy way and sin no more.
”

In the Mormon echo chamber of Nauvoo, where the church controlled the only two newspapers, the Saints took his foray into national politics quite seriously. At a mass electoral meeting, some Saints claimed the church had 200,000 communicants in the United States—about ten times the actual number—and could control 500,000 votes. “General Smith is the greatest statesman of the 19 century,” Willard Richards opined. “Then why should not the nation secure to themselves his superior talents?” The church-controlled
Nauvoo Neighbor
published a poll conducted on board a steamboat, headlined, “Hurrah for the General!”

General Joseph Smith, the acknowledged modern Prophet, has got them all in the rear; and from the common mode of testing the success of candidates for the Presidency, to wit, by steamboat elections, he (Smith) will beat all the other aspirants to that office two to one. We learn from the polls of the steamboat Osprey, on her last trip to this city, that the vote stood for General Joseph Smith, 20 gents and 5 ladies; Henry Clay, 16 gents and 4 ladies; Van Buren, 7 gents and 0 ladies.

The
Neighbor
refrained from publishing a different steamboat sounding, taken aboard the paddle wheeler
Die Vernon.
In that survey, Joseph received six votes, to Henry Clay’s fifty-eight.

Joseph was serious. In 1844, presidential candidates didn’t campaign. Instead, they sent surrogates around the country to promulgate their ideas. So Smith sent ten of the twelve apostles to the hinterlands to boom his candidacy, as well as over two hundred other “volunteers.” The previous year, Joseph had written letters to five of the national candidates, presenting them with his oft-repeated political litmus test: what can you do for the Mormons? (Joseph neglected to write to John Tyler, perhaps assuming he would lose, and to James K. Polk, the eventual winner.) Specifically, he asked the same question he had posed to President Van Buren and the Illinois congressional delegation when he visited Washington, DC, in 1839: can you get us reparations for our dispossessed property in Missouri? The Saints claimed over $2 million in lost land and chattel, following the brief “Mormon War,” which resulted in their expulsion to Illinois. Two of the five candidates ignored his letter, and the other three gave Joseph the brush-off. He was incensed. When John C. Calhoun reiterated the conventional wisdom, that the Mormons would have to seek redress in Missouri, not in Washington, Smith lashed out at the two-time cabinet secretary. “The noble Senator of South Carolina says the power of the Federal government is
so limited and specific that it has no jurisdiction of the case!
” Joseph answered Calhoun. “What think ye of
imperium in imperio
[an empire within the empire]?”

The words call attention to themselves, because Joseph had begun to think of his “theodemocracy” of Nauvoo in imperial terms. He dispatched an expedition to Texas, still in the throes of its grand territorial struggle with Mexico, to learn if the Saints could found their own country in the vast, sparsely inhabited tableland between the Nueces and the Rio Grande Rivers. Texas president Sam Houston liked the idea, but cooler heads warned Joseph that his people would find themselves smack in the middle of the shooting war between Texas and Mexico. At the same time, Joseph petitioned Congress for permission to raise a federal army of 100,000 men to guarantee the safety of settlers streaming into New Mexico, Texas, upper California, and Oregon. The same document asked Congress to arrest and imprison anyone who “shall hinder or molest the said Joseph Smith from executing his designs.” These démarches were ignored, but they fed preexisting fears of a vast, Mormon land grab beyond the western edge of the United States.
New York Herald
editor James Gordon Bennett, a fan of Joseph’s, said he wouldn’t be “surprised if Joe Smith were made governor of a new religious territory in the west.” “One day,” he wrote, Smith might “control the whole valley of the Mississippi, from the peaks of the Alleghanies to the pinnacles of the Rocky Mountains.”

Smith had grander plans. In March 1844, he created the secret Council of Fifty to rule over the still-secret Kingdom of God. (Joseph called the Fifty “the Lyceum” in his diary.) Its purpose was clear: to govern the entire world, irrespective of existing laws and sovereignties, after the coming of Christ. In April, the Fifty appointed Joseph Smith “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth.” As Joseph had been hinting for many years, the laws of this world were moot and no longer applied to the great Mormon endeavor. “When I speak of a government, I mean what I say,” first counselor Rigdon explained to the Mormon faithful. “I mean a government that shall rule over temporal and spiritual affairs . . . The kingdom of God does not interfere with the laws of the land, but keeps itself by its own laws.”

The plan was for Joseph to claim the presidency, if not in 1844 then in a subsequent election, and lay the foundations for a world government to greet the returning Christ. Apostles Lyman Wight and Heber Kimball declared to Joseph: “You are bound to be the President of the United States on 4 March 1845 and that you are already president pro tem of the world.” Joseph called the Fifty the world’s “living Constitution,” in part because it confided few of its actions to paper. Its activities were secret, and its members often called it the “Ytfif” in their diaries. The Council of Fifty’s records remain closed to this day.

The world government idea possessed a kind of manic intensity, and Joseph pursued it to the hilt. In his capacity as a putative head of state, he appointed ambassadors to England, France, and Russia. The choices were far from gratuitous. France and England were eager to meddle in Mexican affairs and were pressing their interests with both the Texan and Mexican republics. The United States and England were jointly administering Oregon for the moment, but Joseph and others realized that their fragile alliance would never survive America’s aggressive push to the Pacific. Likewise, Russia had Great Power interests from Alaska south to California.

To the tsar, Joseph was flogging his friend Uriah Brown’s ground-breaking military invention, the flame-throwing vessel. Brown had tried, in vain, to interest Congress in his dragonlike contraption, which he claimed could “destroy an army or navy.” Now Joseph was sounding out the Russians about this curious weapon so powerful that it might usher in a new era of world peace. Joseph “thought that the Lord had designed the apparatus for some more magnificent purpose than the defense of nations.” He cryptically explained that the mission to Saint Petersburg involved “some of the most important things concerning the advancement and building up of the kingdom of God in the last days, which cannot be explained at this time.”
^*

He also noted that such far-flung expeditions are “attended with much expense,” and that “all those who feel disposed to bestow according as God has blessed them shall receive the blessings of Israel’s God, and tenfold shall be added unto them.” In other words, the trip needed a sponsor.

Joseph envisioned the Mormons expanding westward, and he wanted his voice heard in capitals other than Washington, where he had experienced painful rebuffs. His diplomatic maneuvers emanating from a tiny Illinois town—not even a county seat!—seemed absurd, at first blush. But Joseph Smith and his disciple Brigham Young correctly sensed that vast tracts of the American West were up for grabs. The Spanish and French colonial empires had either quit the continent or were retreating. Texas, which encompassed much of the Southwest, and California, which meant most of the territory along the West Coast, and Oregon, which included all of today’s Pacific Northwest, had yet to organize themselves into stable, independent republics or states. Perhaps Joseph’s reach exceeded his grasp, but less than ten years later, Brigham Young declared himself the ruler of Deseret, a Rocky Mountain empire that sprawled across the territory of five present-day states. It was no crime to dream big dreams, and in his heady last few years on earth, Joseph Smith did just that.

* The maddeningly unreliable spy and freebooter Joseph Jackson met Uriah Brown in Nauvoo, where the inventor laid out Smith’s plan for world domination. “[Smith’s] real object” in selling the “steam fire-ship” to the tsar, Jackson explained, “was to form a league for the overthrow of the powers that be. Now this may seem too ridiculous for any man to believe possible; nevertheless, no one acquainted with the excessive vanity of Joe Smith, will doubt but that he in reality believed that he could form even so preposterous a union.”