Oath of Vengeance

The Oath of Vengeance was a collective religious vow that turned the anger following Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith’s murders into a recurring temple obligation. Issued under Brigham Young after the accused men were acquitted, it called on Latter-day Saints to seek divine vengeance against the nation and to transmit that commitment across generations. Its significance lay not only in its words, but in its placement within one of the church’s most sacred rituals and its endurance there until 1927.

Origins in the Acquittal

In May 1845, nine men were indicted for the murders of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith. The trial took place in Carthage despite the danger surrounding it: the apostles John Taylor and Willard Richards, witnesses to the killings, refused to appear because they feared they would be killed. On May 30, the defendants were found not guilty. The verdict was anticipated, but it still enraged the Latter-day Saints, who saw the earthly court as having failed to deliver justice.

A Nauvoo newspaper editorial answered the acquittal by invoking judgment beyond human tribunals. A month later, on the first anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young publicly denounced the verdict and declared that vengeance for the murdered leaders belonged to God and his people. He directed church authorities to issue a formal oath. The sequence gave the vow a specific political and emotional origin: it followed a failed prosecution and was presented as a sacred response to what church members regarded as unpunished murder.

A Vow Made Ritual

The oath required participants to pray continually for heaven to avenge the blood of the prophets on the nation and to teach the same commitment to their children and later descendants, extending the obligation through the third and fourth generations. It did not simply preserve a grievance as a matter of memory. Its language made remembrance an ongoing duty, renewing the demand through prayer and family instruction.

Church authorities made the oath part of the temple endowment ceremony, one of the church’s most sacred rituals. This setting gave the pledge institutional force and placed it within a repeated religious practice rather than leaving it as a response confined to the immediate aftermath of the trial. The promise to pass it down also carried the grievance beyond those who had lived through Joseph Smith’s murder and into succeeding generations of Latter-day Saints.

Vengeance and Competing Authority

The oath took shape amid continued conflict between Latter-day Saints and their non-Mormon neighbors. After the acquittal, anti-Mormon vigilantes led by Levi Williams burned Mormon homes and farms; by September 15, 1845, forty-four residences had been destroyed. The vow thus entered a landscape of actual retaliation and communal insecurity, although its stated demand was for prayer and the teaching of the oath, not an instruction in the text to carry out a particular killing.

Its institutional context also included a sharp assertion of religious authority against outside power. In Deseret, Brigham Young maintained that divine law took precedence over human law, while the Mormon-dominated territorial legislature expanded local probate courts whose judges and juries were closely tied to the church. Against that background, the oath’s appeal to heaven over the verdict of an earthly court expressed more than grief: it placed the community’s account of justice within a sacred order that could reject the judgment of civil authorities.

Removal and Public Exposure

The oath remained in the standard temple endowment ceremony until 1927. Its removal followed a leak to the non-Mormon press, which provoked an outcry among politicians and the Gentile public, including charges that the pledge was treasonous. The controversy revealed how differently the same practice could be understood: within the temple it had been transmitted as a solemn religious obligation; outside the church, its call for vengeance against the nation appeared to threaten political loyalty.

The oath’s history therefore joins ritual, memory, and authority. A failed murder trial became the occasion for a vow; the vow became part of sacred ceremony; and the ceremony preserved its political meaning across generations until public exposure forced its removal. The book places that history against later conflicts in which religious claims and civil law compete, but the oath itself remains a distinct, historically bounded response to the deaths of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith and the acquittal that followed.