Lilburn W. Boggs

Lilburn W. Boggs was an Independence storekeeper who became governor of Missouri during the expulsion of Latter-day Saints from Jackson County. By calling out the militia and demanding that the Saints leave the state, he turned a local conflict into a state-backed campaign of removal; a year after the displaced settlers departed for Illinois, he was nearly killed in an attempted assassination.

Governor During the Expulsion

The confrontation grew amid rising tension in Jackson County, where the Latter-day Saints had become a substantial part of the population. By the summer of 1833, more than a thousand lived there, and opponents feared they might control the fall elections. Violence drove families from their homes and prompted more than a thousand people to cross the Missouri River into less settled territory. Boggs, then governor and formerly an Independence storekeeper, called out the militia and declared that the Saints must leave Missouri or face extermination.

A Conflict That Continued Beyond Jackson County

The expulsion did not end the violence. The displaced Saints faced further persecution in the territory to the north, where they also fought back. The account presents the conflict as Missouri’s first civil war, ending only when the Saints left for Illinois in 1839. Boggs’s intervention thus belongs to a wider sequence of displacement and continuing conflict, rather than a single act of local enforcement.

Attempted Assassination

In 1842, after the expulsion had become past history for the small family of Solomon Young, a lone assailant—presumably a Mormon—approached a window in Independence and shot Boggs. He nearly died. The attack made the earlier conflict’s continuing consequences visible in the life of the governor who had called for the Saints’ removal, while the account leaves the assailant’s identity uncertain.