Nauvoo Expositor

The Nauvoo Expositor was a newspaper founded by William Law and known for only one issue, published on June 7, 1844. Its attempt to expose Joseph Smith’s plural-marriage teaching and challenge his political authority became a defining confrontation over freedom of the press and the limits of power in Nauvoo. Joseph ordered the destruction of its press; the resulting escalation sharpened a conflict that had been building between the city’s Saints and their non-Mormon neighbors.

Founding and purpose

The paper emerged from Law’s break with Joseph. A longtime member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Law had served as Joseph’s trusted second counselor for more than two years. He also sympathized with Emma Smith’s distress over Joseph’s marriages to other women. In January 1844, Law pleaded with Joseph to renounce the plural-marriage doctrine. Their friendship deteriorated further after Joseph allegedly made sexual proposals to Law’s wife, Jane. In April, Law demanded that Joseph acknowledge his conduct and cease what Law regarded as wrongdoing.

Joseph had Law excommunicated. Law declared Joseph a fallen prophet and, on May 12, established the Reformed Mormon Church, which did not sanction plural marriage. Law’s project was not simply a public denunciation: he hoped to reform the church, and his position as a former counselor gave his opposition weight. His resources mattered too. Wealth enabled him to buy a printing press, providing the means to circulate criticism that had previously remained within personal and religious disputes.

The Expositor’s first and only edition appeared on June 7. Law printed one thousand copies of the four-page broadsheet. Its leading editorial attacked Joseph’s plural-marriage teaching, while the paper also challenged his disregard for the separation of church and state, his accumulation of political power, and his financial dealings. The editors promised supporting affidavits in subsequent issues. The promise made the paper not only an argument against Joseph’s conduct but also a vehicle for further public disclosures; no second issue appeared.

Suppression in Nauvoo

Most Nauvoo residents responded with anger at the paper and its owners rather than at Joseph. He nevertheless regarded the publication as a threat to his control of the church. As mayor, he called an emergency meeting of the city council, characterized the paper as a public nuisance and a danger to the city’s peace, and ordered the city marshal to destroy the printing press and burn the copies and handbills found at the establishment.

On the evening of June 10, more than two hundred armed members of the Nauvoo Legion carried out that order. Led by Hyrum Smith and John Taylor, and acting under Joseph’s command as lieutenant general, they broke into the Expositor offices with a sledgehammer, smashed the press, scattered its type, and burned the wreckage. The episode ended the paper’s circulation after a single edition and made its physical destruction a public demonstration of the power behind the mayor’s order.

The publishers sought redress in local courts, accusing Joseph and those who had helped destroy the press of crimes. But Joseph’s authority extended across Nauvoo’s branches of government, including its courts. Those involved in the destruction were exonerated, Joseph among them. Law, fearing for his safety, had already fled Nauvoo; his Reformed Mormon Church dwindled and disappeared. The paper’s suppression thus silenced the immediate publication while leaving its central dispute unresolved.

A city and its competing claims of authority

The confrontation took place in a city whose political structure made the question of authority unusually stark. Nauvoo’s charter, passed by the Illinois General Assembly in December 1840, granted it distinctive sovereign rights and powers. Joseph stood at the head of this theocratic city, held the office of mayor, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. The newspaper’s objections to his concentration of civic and religious power therefore met a system in which the leader being criticized also possessed substantial means to respond.

The Expositor’s destruction also landed amid years of increasing tension between Saints and non-Mormons in Hancock County. Joseph’s followers voted as a bloc in accordance with his instructions, giving them significant political influence. To their neighbors, the order against the paper confirmed fears that Joseph claimed exceptional authority for himself and treated constitutional limits as less binding on him than on others. The paper’s challenge to church-state entanglement and political power consequently became inseparable from a broader dispute about who governed Nauvoo and what protections its inhabitants could expect.

Non-Mormon residents near the city reacted to the destruction with fury. An editorial published in nearby Warsaw called for armed resistance, and the account describes the atmosphere across Hancock County as charged with hostility. This response reflected more than disagreement with the paper’s claims: the use of force against a press intensified existing suspicions and gave opponents a concrete grievance around which to mobilize.

Escalation and significance

On June 18, anticipating retaliation, Joseph declared martial law and mobilized the five-thousand-member Nauvoo Legion. Illinois governor Thomas Ford, who was not unsympathetic to the Saints but feared civil war, demanded that Joseph, Hyrum, John Taylor, and others implicated in the press’s destruction surrender to face charges in Carthage. Ford promised to protect Joseph if he submitted, while warning that refusal could bring militia intervention and put Nauvoo and its people at risk. Joseph feared that non-Mormon authorities would move him from court to court until an opponent found an opportunity to kill him. On June 23, he and Hyrum crossed the Mississippi River with Porter Rockwell and fled into Iowa.

The Expositor is significant not because its criticism brought down Joseph’s authority, but because its suppression made the conflict over that authority harder to contain. The book presents the newspaper as both a platform for dissent and the immediate object of a coercive civic order: its editors sought to publish allegations and promised evidence; the mayor used municipal power to destroy the means of publication; and local courts then cleared those who had carried out the destruction. The resulting chain of events shows how a dispute about plural marriage and political conduct became a struggle over press freedom, legal accountability, and competing claims to govern. The paper vanished after four pages, but the confrontation surrounding it transformed opposition in Nauvoo into an escalating regional crisis.