Nauvoo

Nauvoo was the place where Joseph Smith’s expanding religious movement took the form of a populous city and an unusually powerful theocratic community. Built from a malarial riverside settlement into Illinois’s second-largest municipality, it offered the Saints a base for worship, political organization, and growth. The same concentration of religious and civic authority that helped the city flourish also sharpened conflict with its neighbors and made Nauvoo the setting for the crisis that preceded the Mormon exodus.

From swamp to Mormon city

A month after escaping from jail in Missouri, Joseph Smith surveyed a bend of the Mississippi River in Hancock County, Illinois, and chose it as the site for the Kingdom of God’s capital. The land was a low, wet promontory on the river’s eastern bank, difficult for people and ox teams to cross. Its advantages were practical: it was scarcely inhabited, and its owner was willing to sell acreage to the Saints on credit. They began building, and within five years more than fifteen thousand people lived in and around Nauvoo. The settlement had grown to ten times its present-day population and become the second-largest municipality in Illinois, a city that rivaled Chicago.

The speed and scale of that growth reflected both the Saints’ industriousness and the migration that Nauvoo attracted. Converts arrived in increasing numbers, including people from England and Scandinavia. For a movement that had endured expulsion from Missouri, the city seemed to provide a secure foothold from which its faith could spread. Its river setting connected a settlement begun in difficult conditions to a much wider religious and national landscape.

Civic power and religious rule

Nauvoo was more than a growing municipality. A charter passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840 granted it exceptional sovereign rights and powers. The state had sought hardworking settlers who would contribute to the economy, while sympathy for the Mormons remained strong after their expulsion from Missouri. The charter’s unintended consequence was to give Joseph Smith authority over a largely autonomous city-state.

Joseph stood at the head of the city’s theocratic order and had himself formally anointed King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth. He commanded the Nauvoo Legion, a well-armed and disciplined militia described as nearly half the size of the entire American Army at the time. He also petitioned the United States Congress to authorize a fighting force of one hundred thousand men under his personal control; Congress did not grant the request. In January 1844, Joseph announced his presidential candidacy and sent 586 missionaries, including ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, to campaign across twenty-six states and Wisconsin Territory. The bid extended his ambition beyond Nauvoo, even as the city’s unusual concentration of power remained a source of alarm.

Doctrinal change and growing tensions

Nauvoo was also where the church’s doctrines continued to develop. By the mid-1840s, Joseph had received 133 commandments considered significant enough to be recorded in The Doctrine and Covenants. The religion practiced there had changed substantially from the one organized in Palmyra. Among the most consequential developments was the revelation recorded on July 12, 1843, and canonized as Section 132 of The Doctrine and Covenants: it presented plural marriage as a new and everlasting covenant. The teaching would deepen divisions within the church and reverberate far beyond the city.

The tensions became public in June 1844, when William Law used his own printing press to publish the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. Printed in one thousand copies, the four-page newspaper attacked Joseph’s accumulation of political power, his disregard for the separation of church and state, and his financial dealings. Its central purpose was to expose the secret practice of plural marriage; its editors announced that they planned to publish affidavits in support of their claims. Most Nauvoo residents responded with anger toward the paper and its owners, rather than turning against Joseph.

Joseph, serving as mayor, called an emergency meeting of the city council and ordered the destruction of the press and copies of the newspaper. On the evening of June 10, more than two hundred armed members of the Nauvoo Legion entered the Expositor offices under orders from Joseph, their commander. Led by Hyrum Smith and John Taylor, they broke down the door, smashed the press, scattered the type, and burned the wreckage. The publishers sought redress in local courts, but Joseph controlled the courts as well as other branches of Nauvoo’s government. Those involved in destroying the press, including Joseph, were exonerated. William Law, fearing for his life, had already fled; his Reformed Mormon Church later disappeared.

From contested capital to departure

The destruction of the newspaper proved consequential beyond the city. Joseph had underestimated the reaction of non-Mormons in Hancock County. Many had initially welcomed the Saints, but growing resentment of the community’s religious entitlement and theocratic governance had made the press’s destruction a flashpoint. Joseph maintained that democratic limits did not apply to him in the ordinary way because he believed God had chosen him as a messenger. To outsiders troubled by the city’s political arrangements, that claim intensified the appearance that Nauvoo’s civic power answered to the prophet rather than to constitutional restraints.

After Joseph’s death, leadership in Nauvoo remained unsettled. Sidney Rigdon secured an appointment as guardian of the church, subject to confirmation at a gathering on August 8, 1844. Brigham Young and other apostles arrived on August 6, just as Rigdon’s supporters appeared close to securing the succession. At the gathering, Rigdon and Young each made their case before the faithful. The contest showed how deeply Nauvoo’s religious authority depended on decisions made in public and on followers’ recognition of a leader.

The city’s place as the Saints’ home ended as conflict continued. In February 1846, news of a warrant for Brigham Young’s arrest on charges of harboring counterfeiters prompted an earlier departure than planned. On February 4, the first group of emigrants boarded flatboats at the Nauvoo dock, crossed the dark, near-freezing Mississippi River, and reached the Iowa shore. Hundreds had already left the church, disillusioned by Joseph’s death and rumors of secret misconduct by leaders, but most families packed what would fit in their wagons and followed Brigham west. By May, more than six thousand Saints were making their way through spring mud toward a new homeland.

Nauvoo’s history therefore turns on a double legacy: it was a refuge built by a growing community and a theocratic center whose concentrated authority provoked opposition. The city’s institutional power enabled the movement to organize on an exceptional scale, but the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor exposed the costs of that power and helped drive events toward departure. The first emigrants left not merely a settlement, but the city Joseph had made the center of his religious and political project.