Joseph Smith or the Sword!

“Joseph Smith or the Sword!” names the stark alternative Joseph Smith presented to his followers in Far West on October 14, 1838: leave the Saints in peace and they would preach peacefully; molest them and they would defend their religion by force. The phrase condensed a grievance over repeated displacement into a public threat, and the speech was followed by Mormon raids, retaliatory violence, and a sharp escalation of the conflict with Missouri authorities.

The Speech in Far West

Joseph Smith addressed several hundred followers in the Far West town square after months of harassment and violence against Mormons in Daviess County had driven many from their homes. He described the Saints as injured people who had appealed to local magistrates, judges, the governor, and the president without obtaining redress. His account connected their grievances across counties: they had cleared and improved land, he said, only to be driven away by hostile mobs.

The speech presented violence as conditional rather than as the opening position. If the Mormons were left alone, Joseph said, they would preach in peace; if attacked, they would establish their religion by the sword. He compared the choice to the formula he associated with Mohammed and made his own name the rallying point: “Joseph Smith or the Sword!” That final phrase turned a general defense of the community into a personal, binary declaration of allegiance and resistance.

Rhetorical Force and Immediate Consequences

The speech drew its force from the collision of appeal and threat. Joseph invoked failed recourse to law and the accumulated losses of a persecuted community, then answered that history with a promise of armed resistance. Its conditional form presented violence as a response to further molestation, even as its language threatened a sweeping campaign against opponents. The move from the language of injury to the language of the sword made the address both a defense of the Saints and a warning to their enemies.

The audience responded with action. Mormons began raiding Gentile towns, taking food, livestock, and valuables, and burning about fifty non-Mormon homes. Missourians retaliated by destroying Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph’s call to arms, a skirmish left three Saints and one Gentile dead. The expression thus belongs to a sequence in which a public appeal to resistance was followed by attacks and counterattacks, not to a speech whose consequences remained merely rhetorical.

Escalation and the State’s Response

The skirmish’s consequences were magnified by a false report that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. The exaggerated account reached Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had won election on an anti-Mormon platform. He issued an order directing the Missouri Militia to treat the Mormons as enemies and exterminate or drive them from the state if necessary for public peace. The resulting order extended the conflict from local retaliatory violence to state policy.

The phrase’s immediate significance lies in this escalation, but the speech does not erase the context that preceded it: the expulsion of Mormon residents from their homes and their unsuccessful appeals for protection. Nor does that context make the raids and destruction that followed inconsequential. The episode presents the conversion of grievance into militant collective action, and the rapid return of violence in a form that further endangered the community Joseph had claimed to defend.

Later Contrasts in the Book

Later episodes in the book place this speech beside other claims that religious authority could justify coercion or violence, without suggesting that they were direct repetitions of Joseph’s words. In the account of Ruby Jessop, a fourteen-year-old in Colorado City was forced into a marriage after a church ceremony, and her sister’s efforts to obtain outside protection met with an inadequate response. The contrast is not between identical events, but between different forms of power: Joseph’s public call to armed resistance amid a conflict with hostile outsiders, and a closed community in which a young person’s options and access to help were controlled by religious authorities.

The Lafferty case supplies another distinct contrast. Bernard Brady believed that lives were in danger after Ron and Dan Lafferty’s claimed removal revelation, but filed his affidavit in a desk drawer rather than alerting police. Later, the Tenth Circuit set aside Ron’s 1985 convictions because it found that the trial court had applied a faulty standard in judging his competence. These episodes extend the book’s concern with the boundary between religious belief, violence, and civil authority; they do not establish a continuing use of the 1838 expression. Its enduring force in the narrative is instead as a concentrated instance of how a leader’s language can turn collective grievance into a demand for allegiance and resistance.