In the nineteenth century, the Mormons were a minority religious group living on the fringes of the United States in both a geographic and social sense. Yet, in the twenty-first century, historians are increasingly realizing that the history of this marginal religious “other” sheds a great deal of light on the American past broadly conceived. This essay briefly describes an important moment in early Mormon history that illuminates our developing understanding of religious liberty in the early American republic, and the political obstacles Americans outside mainstream protestant Christianity faced in their efforts to obtain equal treatment under the law as American citizens.
In 1839, Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, travelled from western Illinois to Washington, D.C. to plead with President Martin Van Buren and Congress on behalf of his followers. He petitioned the federal government for two million dollars in reparations for land confiscated from the Mormons in Missouri, and he did so with a certain degree of optimism. He believed that the injustices they faced at the hands of the state of Missouri had been so egregious and so thoroughly documented that Van Buren and Congress would have no choice but to grant the Mormons the redress and reparations for which they petitioned. Smith ended up sorely disappointed.
But Smith's optimism and disappointment are instructive. Smith's failed appeal to the federal government revealed to him and subsequent Mormon leaders that issues of religious doctrine and ritual mattered little for the full realization of universal religious liberty in nineteenth-century America. When Joseph Smith met Martin Van Buren and subsequently presented his case to Congress, he learned that electoral politics and the states' rights strategy were formidable obstacles that prevented the federal government from protecting the rights of religious minorities to life, liberty, and property—obstacles that consequently made the federal government complicit in fostering a culture of religious intolerance throughout the country.
During the 1830s, thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints immigrated to Missouri, spurred by the church's teachings that God had appointed that land for the establishment of the “New Jerusalem” prophesied in the book of Revelation.Footnote 32 This group initially centered its community in Jackson County, and by 1833 numbered over 1,000 people. This rapid influx of a religious “other” made the county's non-Mormon residents anxious. In addition to objections to some Mormon doctrine, such as the belief that God spoke to church leaders and members alike through spiritual revelations as well as the belief in the healing of the sick by the laying on of hands, many non-Mormons feared that their new neighbors would vote as a bloc and thereby wield too much political power in the frontier county.Footnote 33 These concerns were exacerbated by accusations circulating in print that the Mormons aimed to unite with free blacks to undermine the influence of Missouri's slaveholders or that they were in league with Native Americans to overthrow the established government.Footnote 34 Rather than wait to see how the demographic shift would unfold, hundreds of the county's non-Mormons resorted to vigilantism to drive out the Mormon threat before it loomed any larger. The non-Mormon vigilantes stole property, burned houses, and physically abused several men and women until the Mormons fled Jackson County to what they hoped would be more accommodating counties in the northwest region of the state.Footnote 35
The Mormons' reprieve, however, was short lived. The long and complex story of what happened to this religious community in northwestern Missouri has been retold many times.Footnote 36 In order to understand Smith's appeals to Van Buren and Congress, a quick summary will suffice. As the Mormon population in Missouri continued to swell, the tension between Smith's followers and their neighbors increased. At a Gallatin, Missouri polling place in August 1838, William Peniston, a Whig candidate for the state legislature who had been unsuccessful in courting the Mormon vote, allegedly declared that Mormons “were not allowed to vote . . . no more than the damned Negroes.”Footnote 37 A brawl ensued and, over the weeks that followed, the conflict between these two feuding groups escalated. The Mormons formed a militia and took up arms to defend themselves and their property from their vigilante neighbors, a group they collectively—and impersonally—termed “the Mob.” Shots were fired. Men on both sides fell dead. Members of each group destroyed property belonging to the other. According to Mormon reports, non-Mormon vigilantes raped several Mormon women.Footnote 38 The Governor sent the state militia to stand between the two armed bodies, but because many of the militiamen's sympathies lay with the vigilantes, the presence of the militia brought the Mormons little comfort. Hearing reports of Mormons burning the homes of their non-Mormon neighbors and viewing them as the instigators of the violence, Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued an executive order that deemed the Mormons “enemies of the state” and instructed the militia that this religious minority “must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”Footnote 39 With the state's chief executive behind them, the emboldened vigilantes and the militia marched on the Mormon settlements with orders that the Mormons must leave their homes. At the onset of a brutally cold winter, they fled to Illinois and Iowa Territory while the victorious vigilantes and militiamen remained in Missouri to partake in the spoils of the Mormon lands and possessions left behind.Footnote 40
Even as the Mormons were being driven from Missouri by their former neighbors, church leaders formulated plans to appeal to the federal government for assistance. At the end of October 1839, a three person Mormon delegation set off for Washington, D.C.: Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Elias Higbee.Footnote 41 On November 29, Representative John Reynolds of Illinois introduced Smith and Higbee to Van Buren at the President's Mansion. It is unclear what assistance the Mormons hoped Van Buren would provide. There is no surviving evidence that the Mormons requested him to issue an executive order that would result in Mormon redress. However, there is evidence that they hoped he would speak out on their behalf in his upcoming annual address to Congress.Footnote 42
The details of the 1839 encounter between Smith and Van Buren differ based on the account one is reading, but in all records of the meeting Van Buren's reaction remains essentially the same.Footnote 43 Smith first described the meeting as follows: “As soon as [Van Buren] read one of [our letters of introduction], he looked upon us with a kind of half frown and said, what can I do? I can do nothing for you,—if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole state of Missouri.”Footnote 44 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression “come in contact with” carried a nineteenth-century idiomatic meaning of “contradicting” or “disagreeing.”Footnote 45 Van Buren was stating, in effect, that supporting the Mormons would automatically lose him support in Missouri, one of the few states that he could depend on in his re-election bid later that year. His refusal in this instance to promote religious liberty in the form of equal citizenship and property rights regardless of a person or group's religious affiliation appears to have arisen from political calculus surrounding the Electoral College. Electoral politics, and not constitutional principles or democratic ideology, are what led Van Buren to do nothing, and in the process he condoned the extermination order of Missouri's governor and the violent actions of some of Missouri's citizens.
In this meeting with Van Buren, we also catch a glimpse of what some might call Smith's political naiveté. A key accusation made by Missourians against the Mormons—that their power as a voting bloc was directed by church leaders—was in fact real. Yet, at this point in time Smith frequently denied such accusations. If ever there was a time to own up to their voting practices, it would have been during this meeting with Van Buren. When Van Buren declined to help the Mormons because he feared losing the vote in Missouri, Smith could have countered with a declaration that refusing to support the Mormons would cost the president the vote in Illinois, which was, coincidentally, a swing state in the election of 1840. But he did not. Instead, Smith wrote privately to his brother that they did not “say that the Saints shall not vote for him, but we do say boldly, (though it need not be published in the streets of Nauvoo, neither among the daughters of the Gentiles,) that we do not intend he shall have our votes.”Footnote 46 Indeed, the Mormons did vote overwhelmingly for William Henry Harrison that fall, but Van Buren still eked out victory in Illinois by fewer than 2,000 votes.Footnote 47
More importantly, Smith's reluctance to boast about the power of the Mormon vote is indicative of the way he viewed American political culture at that time. He believed it to consist of a government that operated on the ideals enshrined in the country's founding documents; that his case would be judged on its merits alone. For all his concerns of anti-Mormon prejudice influencing elected officials, he seems to have given little concern for the partisan workings of the federal government.Footnote 48 Smith refused to play political hardball when political hardball was precisely what the men empowered to grant his petition were accustomed to playing.
Smith left the President's Mansion and turned his attention entirely to Congress. The Illinois delegation offered Smith and his companions their full cooperation and helped the Mormon leaders draft a twenty-seven-page memorial outlining the events that led to the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri and the confiscation of their land thereafter. They simultaneously prepared to attach to this memorial hundreds of affidavits sworn by church members in which the total loss of life, land, and other property was itemized and valued. The surviving affidavits in the National Archives and in the Church History Library in Salt Lake City estimate the total value of property damaged or lost at just above $1.5 million.Footnote 49 The memorial, however, asked for $2 million in reparations.Footnote 50
The memorial was awash in language that celebrated the idea of America as a land of civic and religious liberty, and that condemned Missourians and their elected officials for their failure to make that idea a reality. It declared that the Mormons had moved to Missouri believing “that a citizen born in one State in this great Republic, might remove to another and enjoy all the rights and immunities gurante[e]d to the citizens of the State of his adoption; that wherever waved the American flag, beneath its Stars and Stripes, an American citizen might look for protection and justice—liberty in person, and in conscience.” It argued that the violence perpetrated against them was unprovoked and that their “only offense” consisted of “a difference in religious sentiment; and that they had sometimes; but rarely, resorted to the laws of self-defense.” The memorial revealed that several attempts had been made to obtain redress and reparations within Missouri Courts and through the Missouri legislature, but that the courts included judges and jurors who had helped instigate and carry out the persecutions in the first place and that the legislature spoke of investigating the Mormons' case, but had taken no action. Because the governor had ordered them to leave Missouri or face extermination, the Mormons felt that they could not return to the state, even to bring their case to the federal courts in that place. For these reasons, the memorial stated that the Mormons “seek no redress, unless it be awarded by the Congress of the United States” and that they appealed to that body “as American citizens—as Christians—and as men.” They claimed, in effect, that all avenues for redress in Missouri had been closed to them and that the federal government was their only remaining option.Footnote 51
As compelling as the language of the Mormon memorial may have appeared, it was submitted to Congress with a certain amount of naiveté and, similar to what transpired with Van Buren, a seeming misunderstanding or poor evaluation of American political culture as it existed in the 1830s and 1840s. The Mormons, in their private correspondence, remained confident that they were in the right and that Congress would simply hold their situation up against the ideals celebrated in the country’s founding documents and decide in their favor.Footnote 52 Again, they seem to have given very little, if any, consideration to factors such as the internal politics of Congress and the ever-looming but often unpredictable invocation of the state's rights strategy. This essay contends that state's rights was as much a strategy as it was a principled position, a philosophy of federalism that a politician could invoke or ignore whenever it served his own interests or those of his constituents, all the while maintaining the appearance of a public servant who based his actions on principle alone. This is a common understanding of state's rights in the debates over slavery in antebellum America.Footnote 53 However, there is much that needs to be said of how this strategy impacted other areas of American life, particularly religious inequality in a country celebrated as a land of religious freedom by many members comfortably situated in the faith communities of the mainstream protestant majority.
Missouri Senators Thomas Hart Benton (D) and Lewis Linn (D) naturally opposed the memorial when it was presented to the Senate, but it was eventually sent to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary.Footnote 54 The committee heard testimony from both sides of the conflict over three days; Elias Higbee represented the Mormons while Senator Linn and Representative John Jameson (D) defended their home state. In the end, the Senate committee decided that while the Mormons made a compelling case, the federal government could not intervene in the internal affairs of the state of Missouri claiming “that the case presented for their investigation is not such a one as will justify or authorize any interposition by this Government . . . the petitioners must seek relief in the courts . . . of the State of Missouri, or of the United States.” The committee further encouraged the Mormons, however, “to apply to the justice and magnanimity of the State of Missouri—an appeal which the committee feel justified in believing will never be made in vain by the injured or oppressed,” and that “it can never be presumed that a State either wants the power, or lacks the disposition, to redress the wrongs of its own citizens committed within her own territories, whether they proceeded from the lawless acts of her officers, or any other persons.”Footnote 55
Of course, the Mormons were gravely disappointed. When the Senate Judiciary Committee's decision was read at a general conference of the church in April 1840, church leaders declared that they were insulted at the notion that the leaders of Missouri's government, the very men who ordered their extermination if they refused to leave the state, would deal with their case justly.Footnote 56 Furthermore, they did not see the federal government as unable to intervene. In their view it was simply unwilling. While in Washington, for instance, they had witnessed Democrats in the House of Representatives willfully intervene in contested elections in New Jersey in order to ensure that their party maintained control of the House while the Whigs had vigorously maintained that the federal government had no business intervening in the affairs of that state.Footnote 57 And they believed that several leaders in Congress, particularly Henry Clay, were willing to argue for federal intervention on behalf of the Mormons if only the petition had made it out of committee and on to the Senate floor for debate.Footnote 58
Could Congress have intervened in the conflict between Missouri and the Mormons if it had wanted to? This question might provoke as much disagreement among twenty-first-century historians as it would have among nineteenth-century Americans. Justifying the legality of federal intervention in Missouri would have been an uphill battle, as Smith and his supporters in Congress would have had to overcome the explicit clauses in the Constitution that served as a check on federal power. They also would have had to focus on a justification other than those based on the first amendment's protection of religious liberty, as the Supreme Court decision Barron v. Baltimore (1833) had recently decided that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the individual states. Five years later, in Permoli v. New Orleans (1845), the Supreme Court would similarly declare that the federal government could not ensure religious liberty in individual states. Interestingly, while these Supreme Court decisions could have worked against the 1840 Mormon memorial (and several others that they submitted to Congress in subsequent years), their existence also demonstrates that in the 1840s Smith was not alone in asking whether the federal government ought to do more to enforce the Bill of Rights and religious freedom in individual states. But even with such obstacles in place, if the church's delegation could have mustered enough Congressional support for their cause, Congress likely could have found justification to act. Deciding to act in a constitutional gray area is not an uncommon occurrence in congressional history; accordingly, the 26th Congress would not have been a major exception therein. Ultimately, it appears that Congress could have acted on the Mormons' behalf if the Mormons had recruited enough senators and congressmen behind their cause, but from a legal standpoint Congress would have been behind the metaphorical eight-ball.
However, it is not the intent of this essay to view this question from a purely legal standpoint. The subject requires examination that goes beyond matters of precedents and the strict letter of the law. The interests of this essay lie in the perceptions of political leaders, and the religious minorities that petitioned them, of the power and willingness of the federal government to enforce religious liberty in individual states. These perceptions tell us a lot about the status and transformation of American political culture in the nineteenth century. They place strictly legal examinations of the state of religious liberty in nineteenth-century America in a much broader, and essential, cultural context. Joseph Smith and the Mormons thought that Congress could have and should have intervened. And whether or not they were legally correct in this thinking, that fact alone is indicative of a meaningful development within popular interpretation of the United States Constitution.
When Joseph Smith left Washington to return to western Illinois, he did so under a cloud of frustration and disillusionment. Though Congress was just as unresponsive to his appeal as Van Buren had been, he seemed to have placed the majority of the blame on the president. He openly campaigned against Van Buren in the ensuing months and promoted Harrison's candidacy, declaring that Van Buren “was not as fit . . . as my dog, for the chair of state; for my dog will make an effort to protect his abused and insulted master, while the present chief magistrate will not so much as lift his finger to relieve an oppressed and persecuted community of free-men, whose glory it has been that they were citizens of the United States.”Footnote 59 In another sermon shortly after returning to Illinois, Smith recounted that when meeting with Van Buren in the parlor of the White House, “a member of Congress waited upon him, and in conversation, among other things, told the President that he was getting fat . . . The President replied that he was aware of the fact; that he had to go every few days to the tailor's to get his clothes let out, or purchase a new coat.” Smith allegedly added at the top of his voice that he “hoped [Van Buren] would continue to grow fat, and swell, and before the next election, burst!”Footnote 60 For nineteenth-century Mormons, the eighth president stood as a symbol of what they believed was the political malpractice that fostered an environment of religious intolerance and inequality.
