1838 Missouri Mormon War

The 1838 Missouri Mormon War was a violent confrontation between Latter-day Saints and their Missouri neighbors, rooted in disputes over settlement, political power, and religious authority. After years in which Joseph Smith forbade retaliation, violence in Daviess County and his call for the Saints to fight back helped turn mounting hostility into open conflict. The war ended not with a negotiated settlement but with the Saints’ surrender, the imprisonment of Joseph and other leaders, and the community’s enforced departure from Missouri.

Settlement and Rising Tension

The crisis developed against the background of a rapidly expanding Mormon presence. In 1836, the Missouri legislature designated sparsely populated Caldwell County for Mormon settlement, hoping that concentrating the Saints there would prevent bloodshed. Most Mormons in the state moved into the county, where they eventually purchased about 250,000 acres and built Far West. By 1838, roughly ten thousand Saints lived in Missouri. The apparent compromise of a designated settlement did not last: Mormons crossed into neighboring Daviess County and began establishing new communities there.

The newcomers and established residents differed in both politics and social organization. Many Mormon immigrants came from northeastern states and favored abolition, while many Missourians had southern roots and owned enslaved people. Local resentment also grew from the Saints’ close-knit life, their belief that God had chosen them, and their conviction that northwestern Missouri was their divinely appointed Zion. Church funds went toward land purchases; Mormons often traded with other Saints, voted as a bloc under Joseph Smith’s direction, and seemed poised to gain regional political influence. Their neighbors saw not simply a growing religious community, but one claiming a divine right to settle and govern the land.

Earlier violence had already shaped this atmosphere. In 1833, after civic protests failed to halt Mormon settlement in Jackson County, an armed mob attacked Saints, destroyed a printing office, and compelled leaders to promise to leave. Later that year, vigilantes drove about 1,200 Mormons from their homes. Joseph Smith deplored violence and for nearly five years forbade the Saints to retaliate, even as hostility continued. By the summer and fall of 1838, however, the growing population and repeated clashes had brought the conflict to a breaking point.

Gallatin and the Turn to Retaliation

The immediate escalation began on August 6, Election Day in Missouri, in Gallatin, the seat of Daviess County. William Peniston, a Whig candidate for the state legislature, addressed a crowd from a barrel and denounced the Mormons. Another resident argued that they should not be allowed to vote. The dispute became physical when a drunken Missourian assaulted Samuel Brown, a small Mormon shoemaker. Saints intervened, and a fight followed in which both sides used clubs, rocks, whips, and knives. Although the outnumbered Mormons drove their opponents away, leaving many injured, the result was a reprisal threat rather than a resolution.

Over the next two months, harassment and violence pushed most Mormon residents out of Daviess County. On October 14, Joseph Smith gathered several hundred followers in Far West and urged them to resist further attacks. The Saints had appealed to civil authorities without obtaining protection, and Smith’s appeal marked a decisive departure from his earlier restraint. His followers then raided non-Mormon towns, taking food, livestock, and other property, and burned about fifty homes. Missourians responded with counterattacks, including the destruction of Mormon cabins. In a skirmish eleven days after Smith’s address, three Saints and one non-Mormon were killed.

The violence was then magnified by a false report sent to Governor Lilburn Boggs, claiming that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Boggs, elected in 1836 on an anti-Mormon platform, ordered the Missouri Militia to treat Mormons as enemies and to exterminate or drive them from the state if necessary. The order transformed a local struggle into a campaign backed by state power and made the Saints’ presence in Missouri increasingly untenable.

Haun’s Mill and the Surrender

On October 30, 1838, three companies of the Missouri Militia under Colonel Thomas Jennings attacked the Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill. The residents were caught by surprise. Some fled into nearby thickets; others sought shelter in the settlement’s blacksmith shop. The troops continued firing despite an attempt by the Mormon commander to surrender. Eighteen Saints were killed in and around the shop. The massacre became a lasting part of Latter-day Saint memory, and reports of it circulated in Missouri newspapers.

Joseph Smith was not at Haun’s Mill. He was sixteen miles away, overseeing the defense of Far West, which was surrounded by about ten thousand Missouri troops. He learned of the massacre the following night and concluded that a full-scale war would likely destroy him and his followers. He sent five Mormons to negotiate. The militia general set severe terms: Joseph and six other leaders had to be delivered to face treason charges; the Saints had to compensate Missourians for property taken or destroyed, surrender their weapons, and leave Missouri.

Smith accepted the terms, presenting his surrender as a sacrifice intended to save the Church and its members. The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph, his brother Hyrum Smith, and five other leaders were taken into custody, hastily court-martialed, and found guilty of treason. General Alexander Doniphan was ordered to take them to the public square at Far West for execution the next morning. He refused, arguing that executing American civilians after a military court-martial would be murder. His defiance stopped the planned execution and spared Joseph’s life at that moment.

Expulsion and Aftermath

Doniphan’s intervention did not undo the surrender’s other conditions. Once disarmed, the Saints were vulnerable to further retaliation: their belongings were looted, cabins were dismantled or burned, livestock was shot, and men were beaten. Rapes of women and girls were reported. The community was given only until the spring of 1839 to leave the state. During the winter, the Saints endured hunger and severe cold while Joseph and other leaders remained jailed on charges including treason and murder.

The massacre and the prolonged detention of the Mormon leaders gradually became political liabilities for Missouri officials. Newspaper accounts prompted calls for an investigation, and sympathetic articles appeared across the region. Officials grew reluctant to put the accused on trial, fearing that the Saints might be acquitted. Yet the shift in public opinion did not restore the Mormons’ homes or secure their continued residence in Missouri. The war’s immediate outcome was expulsion: the Saints had been disarmed, their leaders arrested, and their settlement dismantled under threat of further violence.

The conflict exposed the competing claims that had driven it. Mormon assertions of chosen status, divinely directed settlement, and collective religious identity collided with local fears of political domination and with the state’s use of military force. Joseph Smith’s movement from forbidding retaliation to calling for resistance, and then accepting surrender after Haun’s Mill, gives the episode its central reversal. The Saints’ forced departure did not resolve the conflict between religious community and civil authority; it carried that struggle into the next stage of their history.