Joseph Smith's Murder in 1844 ended the leadership of the founding prophet and was followed by Brigham Young's succession and the Saints' westward move to the Great Basin. In the book's historical account, the killing marks a change of leadership, not an end to the religious and political order Smith had built: plural marriage continued, and conflict over the practice endured for decades.

Nauvoo and the religious order

Before his death, Joseph Smith had made Nauvoo, Illinois, the center of an unusually powerful religious community. Its charter gave the city sovereign rights and powers, and Smith stood at its head. He also commanded the Nauvoo Legion, a disciplined militia, and sought authorization from Congress for a much larger force under his control. These details establish the political scale of the leadership that ended with his murder, though the account does not identify them as the immediate cause of the killing.

The movement's religious claims also drew a sharp boundary between the faithful and outsiders. The Book of Mormon described humanity as belonging to one of two churches, while Smith's teaching about the Saints' divine inheritance in Missouri reinforced their identity as God's chosen people. Such claims formed part of the wider context of conflict around the movement; the account does not connect any one of them directly to the mob's actions in Illinois.

The killing and succession

The account identifies the event briefly: a mob hostile to the Mormons murdered Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844. It does not develop the circumstances of the attack in this passage. Its emphasis falls instead on what followed. Brigham Young assumed leadership of the church and led the Saints into the Great Basin, where they established a new center of power.

The transition was consequential rather than doctrinally decisive. Under Brigham Young, the Saints continued to embrace plural marriage, described in the account as a covenant of spiritual wifery. Joseph's death therefore altered who led the church without immediately displacing a practice central to its religious life.

Aftermath and significance

The continuation of plural marriage carried the conflict into a new period. The Utah War did not remove Brigham Young from power or end the practice. Later judicial and legislative pressure culminated in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the church and transferred church property worth more than $50,000 to the federal government. In 1890, church leaders publicly announced that they had relinquished plural marriage, while the account says that some authorities secretly continued the practice and that Mormon colonies were established in Mexico and Canada.

Joseph Smith's Murder thus stands at the hinge between the church's founding period and its expansion under Brigham Young. It was followed by migration and institutional continuity, while the dispute over plural marriage grew into a prolonged confrontation with federal authority. The eventual public rejection of the practice helped the church become more acceptable to the wider American public, a transformation the book associates with a later change in ecclesiastical policy rather than with the killing itself.