Missouri Extermination Order

The Missouri Extermination Order was Governor Lilburn Boggs’s 1838 directive against the Latter-day Saints, declaring them enemies who must be exterminated or driven from Missouri if necessary for public peace. In the book’s account, it transformed a violent regional conflict into an official policy of removal. Its issuance was followed within days by the Haun’s Mill Massacre; its consequences extended through the Saints’ disarmament, mistreatment, imprisonment of their leaders, and forced departure from the state.

Conflict Before the Order

The directive emerged from a rapidly escalating struggle over settlement, political power, and religious difference in northwestern Missouri. Latter-day Saints had gathered in Jackson County after Joseph Smith identified the region as a sacred gathering place and directed followers to build a New Jerusalem there. Many Mormon immigrants came from northeastern states and favored abolition, while many Missourians had southern roots and some owned enslaved people. The book also identifies local resentment at the Saints’ close-knit communal life and their conviction that they had a divine claim to the region.

The community’s growing presence sharpened those tensions. The Saints bought substantial tracts of land, favored trade with fellow believers, and voted as a bloc in accordance with Joseph Smith’s directions. A contemporary newspaper letter warned that local officials might eventually all be Mormons. These developments contributed to the perception among non-Mormon residents that the Saints could acquire political dominance, although the book also presents the religious community’s sense of entitlement and separation as part of the conflict’s background.

Violence escalated after Joseph Smith called for armed resistance if the Saints were attacked. His followers raided non-Mormon towns, taking food, livestock, and other property, and burned about fifty homes. Missourians retaliated by destroying Mormon cabins. Eleven days after Joseph Smith’s speech, a skirmish left three Saints and one non-Mormon dead. The casualty count was then falsely inflated in a letter to Boggs, which claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians.

Issuance and Immediate Escalation

Boggs had won the 1836 gubernatorial election on an anti-Mormon platform. After receiving the false report, he ordered the Missouri Militia’s senior general to treat the Mormons as enemies and to exterminate or expel them if that was necessary to preserve public peace. The order’s formulation made forced removal and extermination alternatives within the same official directive. It did not arise from the reported massacre of fifty people: that report was false, and the book places the directive within a conflict already involving attacks and counterattacks on both sides.

Days after the order, three companies of the Missouri Militia, commanded by Colonel Thomas Jennings, attacked the Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill. About 240 troops surprised families working in the fields. The Mormon commander attempted to surrender, but the attack continued. Eighteen Saints were killed in and around the settlement’s blacksmith shop. The book identifies the massacre as a defining atrocity in the Latter-day Saints’ collective memory, one spoken of with anger more than 160 years later.

Surrender, Imprisonment, and Expulsion

Joseph Smith was sixteen miles away at Far West, where Missouri troops were surrounding the settlement, when the massacre occurred. He learned of it the following night. In response, he sent five Mormons to seek peace. The Missouri general demanded that Joseph Smith and six other leaders be handed over to face treason charges, that the Saints compensate Missourians for damaged or plundered property, surrender their weapons, and leave Missouri.

The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum Smith, and five other leaders were taken into custody and found guilty of treason by court-martial. Alexander Doniphan, the Missouri general ordered to execute them, refused, arguing that the prisoners were American citizens and that the military could not lawfully summarily execute them. His refusal stopped the planned execution, but it did not reverse the other terms of surrender.

Once disarmed, the Saints were vulnerable to further reprisals. Their possessions were plundered, homes dismantled or burned, and livestock killed; Mormon men were beaten, and reports of assaults on women and girls circulated. They were told to leave the state by the spring of 1839. During that winter, Joseph Smith remained imprisoned with other Mormon leaders while the community endured cold and famine. From jail, he condemned the massacre, Boggs’s order, and the state’s conduct together. On April 16, 1839, Joseph Smith and nine fellow prisoners escaped and crossed into Illinois, where most of the Saints had already sought refuge.

Historical Significance

The order’s significance lies both in its language and in the sequence of events it authorized and accompanied. A false report helped trigger a state directive that placed extermination alongside expulsion as a means of securing public peace. The subsequent massacre, surrender, and forced removal show how quickly that official designation of a community as an enemy could be followed by military violence and the loss of its protection and home.

The book does not present the order as the sole cause of the Missouri conflict: Mormon raids and the deaths in the skirmish preceded it, while local political and religious antagonisms had been building for years. It does, however, mark the order as a decisive escalation, and Joseph Smith’s prison condemnation joined it permanently in the Saints’ account of their suffering. The directive thus became more than a gubernatorial command: it stood for the power of state authority to turn a contested settlement into a campaign of expulsion, and for a persecution memory that endured long after the Saints left Missouri.