Missouri Executive Order 44

Missouri Executive Order 44 was Governor Lilburn W. Boggs’s declaration that Mormons must leave Missouri or be “exterminated.” Issued amid mob violence and forced displacement in 1833, it turned persecution in Jackson County into an explicitly state-backed demand for the removal of an entire religious community.

Circumstances

By the summer of 1833, more than a thousand Mormons lived in Jackson County, roughly a third of its population. Their leader, Joseph Smith, had proclaimed the county holy land and directed that Independence become their City of Zion. Amid fears that the Mormons might control the fall elections, a courthouse mass meeting declared that they were no longer welcome. Violence escalated from attacks on Mormon institutions and individuals to the expulsion of families. A mob smashed the printing press and tarred and feathered a bishop. Armed riders attacked the settlement on Blue River, drove women and children from their homes, burned crops and barns, and flogged men. Three people were killed in another clash. The order arose in this already violent campaign, not in a peaceful dispute over settlement or elections.

The Order and Expulsion

On the night of November 12, a spectacular meteor shower was interpreted by many as a sign to rid the region of Mormons. More than a thousand people were forced from their homes and driven across the Missouri River into less settled territory to the north. The account describes their persecution continuing there, though with a consequential difference: the displaced Mormons fought back. Boggs, an Independence storekeeper who had become governor of Missouri, called out the militia and declared that, for the public good, all Mormons must leave the state or be “exterminated.” The declaration gave the expulsion the force of state authority. Rather than protecting those already driven from their homes, the governor’s demand made departure from Missouri the condition for avoiding further violence.

Consequences

The forced migration did not end the conflict. The displaced community faced further persecution north of the river, and the account characterizes the ensuing violence as a religious war and Missouri’s first civil war. It ended only when the Mormons left for Illinois in 1839. By the time Solomon Young and his small family arrived in 1841, these events belonged to the recent past. Yet the region remained marked by violence: in 1842, a lone assassin, described as presumably Mormon, crept to a window in Independence and shot Boggs, nearly killing him. The episode underscores the conflict’s persistence in memory and its aftermath, while the evidence does not establish that the shooting was carried out under the order or as a direct consequence of it.