Governor Boggs's Extermination Order

Governor Boggs's Extermination Order was an 1838 directive that made the expulsion of the Latter-day Saints from Missouri an official policy option. Issued after a distorted account of a skirmish reached Lilburn Boggs, it supplied state authority for treating the Saints as enemies; the violence at Haun's Mill and the forced exodus that followed made the order a defining expression of the conflict between the Missouri government and the Mormon community.

Background and Issuance

The order came amid escalating violence. After Joseph Smith called for armed resistance, Latter-day Saints raided nearby non-Mormon towns, taking food, livestock, and other goods, and burned about fifty homes. Missourians retaliated by destroying Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph's call to arms, a skirmish left three Saints and one non-Mormon dead. An inflammatory letter to Boggs falsely claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians, magnifying the bloodshed and hardening an already hostile political climate.

Boggs, who had won the 1836 gubernatorial election on an anti-Mormon platform, ordered the commander of the Missouri Militia to treat the Saints as enemies and to exterminate them or drive them from the state if required for public peace. The directive thus joined two outcomes—elimination and expulsion—in a single state command. Its stated rationale was public order, but its terms made an entire religious community the target of military action.

Haun's Mill and the Order's Consequences

Days after the order, three companies of the Missouri Militia attacked the Mormon settlement at Haun's Mill. On October 30, 1838, about 240 troops surprised roughly twenty-five Mormon families. The community's commander sought to surrender, but the troops continued firing. Some residents fled into nearby thickets; others took refuge in the settlement's blacksmith shop, where they were killed. The attack demonstrated how quickly an order directed at a whole population could become violence against a local settlement, including people with little ability to defend themselves.

The Saints were disarmed and subjected to further losses: property was plundered, cabins were burned, livestock was shot, and residents were beaten; reports of sexual assaults also circulated. They were told they had until the spring of 1839 to leave Missouri. During the difficult winter that followed, famine and severe cold compounded the insecurity of a community awaiting expulsion. Joseph Smith and nine other Mormon leaders remained imprisoned on treason and murder charges. From jail, Joseph condemned the killings at Haun's Mill and the governor's order, presenting them as part of a broader injustice by Missouri's government.

Escape, Expulsion, and Historical Meaning

Public opinion began to shift as Missouri newspapers reported on the Haun's Mill killings and calls for an investigation grew. Officials increasingly feared that a trial might end in acquittal. In April 1839, the sheriff guarding Joseph and the other prisoners accepted an $800 bribe, became drunk, and fell asleep; the prisoners escaped on April 16 and crossed into Illinois, where many Saints had already gone. The escape ended Joseph's immediate imprisonment, but it did not undo the forced departure of the Mormon community from Missouri.

A month after leaving jail, Joseph surveyed a site beside the Mississippi River and resolved to establish a new center for the community at Nauvoo. Within several years, the town had grown into a major Mormon settlement, governed under an unusually broad charter that gave it substantial autonomy. The order did not alone determine what followed, but the sequence—from state-directed expulsion to the creation of a new religious center—shows how the crisis reshaped the community's political as well as geographical position.

The book presents the order as both a product of escalating conflict and a stark example of government power directed against a religious minority. It also places that history within a longer contest over competing authorities: the Missouri government asserted its power to expel the Saints, while later Mormon leaders claimed that religious law could supersede civil law. The order's historical force lies in this collision, and in the way the threat of expulsion became inseparable from the community's experience of persecution.