Description

"In Junius and Joseph Robert Wicks and Fred Foister argue that Joseph Smith's nearly forgotten 1844 presidential bid had a direct connection to his assassination on June 27, 1844. They look closely at the political environment of 1840s Mormonism, especially the involvement of Mormon Church leaders and their entwined relationships with other prominent political players in Illinois. Smith's presidential candidacy roused concerns in the Whig party and elsewhere over how Mormon bloc voting in key states might shift the outcome of the election. The authors present evidence that 'Joseph Smith's murder, rather than being the deadly outcome of a spontaneous mob uprising, was in fact a carefully planned military-style execution'; identify many of the individuals who planned the assassination as well as those who carried it out; and contend that the effort to remove the Mormon leader included prominent Whig politicians as well as the Democratic governor of Illinois. In unraveling this web of intrigue as well as the tangled aftermath of the murder, Wicks and Foister offer the closest examination yet of both the events of June 27 and the politics of Mormonism in the 1840s. They demonstrate again that the history of the Mormon Church is best understood 'in the context of events taking place in American society as a whole.' " (From back cover.)

Table of Contents

Introduction: Assassination of a Candidate

1. New World Eden: The Promise of America in Late Jacksonian Politics
2. "Clear the Way for Henry Clay"
3. "To Save the District for the Whigs"
4. "Nauvoo is no place for rational people"
5. The Third Party
6. "Missourians seem determined not to let us alone"
7. The Candidate
8. Thy Kingdom Come...in Texas
9. Two Conventions
10. What Will Be the End of Things?
11. Retributive Justice
12. Gentlemen of Undoubted Veracity
13. Carthage
14. Distance Lent Enchantment to the View
15. The Kingdom Delayed
16. "Bound by common guilt and danger to commit almost any act to save them from infamy"
17. Wolf Hunts
18. The Campaign Continues
19. "To avenge the blood that stains the walls of Carthage jail"
20. How Wide the Conspiracy?

Epilogue: Two Endings
Biographical Profiles