Joseph Smith and Lilburn Boggs

The relationship between Joseph Smith and Lilburn Boggs was an antagonism formed in the violent struggle over Mormon settlement in Missouri and sharpened by competing claims to political and religious authority. As governor, Boggs treated the Saints as a public threat and ordered their expulsion; Joseph, whose followers had been driven from the state, denounced their treatment and foretold Boggs’s death. When an armed assailant later shot Boggs, many suspected a Mormon acting to fulfill that prophecy, but the book distinguishes this belief from proof that Joseph had ordered the attack.

Political Conflict in Missouri

The confrontation developed amid a widening dispute between Mormon immigrants and established residents of Jackson County. The Saints’ growing numbers, collective political influence, land purchases, and preference for doing business within their own community intensified local suspicion. Their conviction that God had chosen them and granted them a claim to Missouri as Zion added a religious dimension to a conflict already shaped by political and economic fears. Many Mormon immigrants came from northeastern states and opposed slavery, while many Missourians had southern roots and owned enslaved people; local residents also resented the Saints’ insularity and perceived entitlement.

The conflict became armed after Joseph called for the defense of the Mormon community. His followers raided Gentile towns and took food, livestock, and other property; approximately fifty non-Mormon homes were burned. Missourians retaliated, destroying Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph’s call to arms, a skirmish killed three Saints and one Gentile. An inflammatory letter to Boggs falsely claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Boggs, who had won the governorship in 1836 on an anti-Mormon platform, responded with an order that the Mormons be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for public peace.

Expulsion and Joseph’s Prophecy

Days after the order, three companies of the Missouri Militia attacked the Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill. The book places this assault within the immediate aftermath of Boggs’s decree, making the order a defining expression of the state’s hostility toward the Saints. It does not establish that Boggs personally directed the attack. For Joseph and his followers, however, the expulsion order and the violence in Missouri reinforced a lasting sense that the government had failed to protect their religious community.

Joseph escaped jail, but criminal charges in Missouri remained pending. He was considered a fugitive, faced a bounty, and remained vulnerable to extradition. On at least two occasions, Missouri sheriffs came to Illinois with warrants for his arrest. In May 1841, a posse surprised him outside Nauvoo and arrested him; he narrowly avoided being taken across the border by securing his release through a writ of habeas corpus. The episode renewed his anger at Missouri’s efforts to prosecute him. Soon afterward, in a public speech, he predicted that Boggs, by then a retired governor and a reviled enemy of the Saints, would die by violent hands within a year.

The Shooting and Its Uncertain Meaning

On the evening of May 6, 1842, a gunman outside Boggs’s home in Independence fired through a window while Boggs was reading in his study. Boggs was struck several times and sustained severe injuries, but reports of his death proved premature: he recovered. Newspapers across the country nevertheless speculated that a Mormon had tried to carry out Joseph’s prophecy. The timing made the shooting appear to some observers as a fulfillment in progress, though Boggs survived the attack and the prediction was not literally fulfilled as stated.

Evidence surrounding the assailant strengthened suspicion of Porter Rockwell, Joseph’s devoted follower. The pistol used in the shooting had been stolen from a local store, and Rockwell had been in Independence before quietly leaving after the attack. The book describes him as almost certainly the would-be assassin, while making clear that neither Rockwell nor any other Saint was brought to justice for the deed. It also cautions that Joseph may not have instructed Rockwell to shoot Boggs. Among the faithful, however, the idea that Saints might help fulfill a prophet’s prediction was familiar; the narrative presents Rockwell as a man who did not need an explicit order to act on that understanding.

Political Legacy and Narrative Significance

The failed assassination gave the conflict a new, personal dimension without resolving its central uncertainty. Boggs survived, Joseph’s prophecy had helped shape how the public interpreted the shooting, and suspicion settled on a Mormon loyalist whose actions were never tested in court. The episode therefore joins political persecution, prophetic authority, and the possibility of violence without conclusively establishing Joseph’s responsibility for the attack.

The wider narrative sets this confrontation against Joseph’s subsequent rise in Nauvoo. After escaping from Missouri, he established the city in Illinois as a center of Mormon life, under a charter that granted unusually broad powers, and continued to contend that the Saints’ constitutional rights had been violated. The book also notes the tension between Joseph’s insistence on protection for his own religious community and his limited regard for the religious views and constitutional rights of non-Mormons. In this account, Joseph and Boggs represent more than two hostile individuals: their antagonism condenses a struggle over who could define public order, whose claims to religious liberty would be protected, and how prophetic declarations might acquire political force.