Missouri Militia

The Missouri Militia was the state military force whose actions made it a central instrument of Missouri's confrontation with the Latter-day Saints in 1838. Its role in the episode extended from an armed assault on a Mormon settlement to the enforcement of terms requiring the Saints to surrender weapons, leaders, property compensation, and their place in the state. The conflict exposed a struggle over who could define and enforce public order: state authorities, or a religious community asserting its own collective rights.

Political Setting

The militia's campaign followed escalating violence between Missourians and the Saints. After Joseph Smith called the Mormons to arms, Missourians retaliated by destroying several Mormon cabins. A skirmish eleven days later left three Saints and one Gentile dead. The losses were then grossly overstated in an inflammatory letter to Governor Lilburn Boggs, falsely claiming that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Boggs, elected in 1836 on an anti-Mormon platform, responded by directing the militia's top-ranked general to treat the Mormons as enemies and expel them from the state if necessary.

The sequence matters: an account that exaggerated the violence helped turn an already volatile local conflict into an official military campaign. The militia was not simply present as a neutral force maintaining order; it was placed under an order that defined the Saints collectively as enemies and made their removal a condition of public peace.

Attack on Haun's Mill

Days after Boggs issued his order, three companies of the Missouri Militia, commanded by Colonel Thomas Jennings, launched a surprise attack on the Mormon settlement known as Haun's Mill. Late in the afternoon of October 30, 1838, about twenty-five Mormon families were working in the fields when 240 troops appeared from the surrounding woods and fired on the settlement. The account emphasizes the contrast between the families' ordinary work and the sudden arrival of a force organized and armed by the state.

The attack gave the militia's campaign its most direct expression as an armed assault on a settled community. The evidence identifies the troops, their commander, their number, and the surprise nature of the attack; it does not provide a casualty count for Haun's Mill in this passage. The preceding skirmish's reported deaths should therefore not be confused with the losses from this separate attack.

Surrender and Custody

As eradication appeared imminent, Joseph Smith sent five Mormons to negotiate with the Gentiles. The Missouri Militia's general set out conditions for avoiding further destruction: Joseph and six other Mormon leaders were to be handed over to face treason charges; compensation was to be paid for property Missourians said had been plundered or destroyed; Mormon weapons were to be surrendered; and the Saints were to leave Missouri.

The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph, his brother Hyrum Smith, and five other leaders were taken into custody, hastily court-martialed, and found guilty of treason, a capital offense. Missouri general Alexander Doniphan was then ordered to take the prisoners to the public square at Far West and shoot them the following morning. The account records the order as part of the crisis; it does not describe its execution. The sequence shows how the militia's authority reached beyond battlefield action into the detention and military adjudication of the church's leadership.

Aftermath and Significance

The surrender terms demanded not only the disarmament of the Saints but their departure from the state. The episode thus joined military force to a wider contest over political and religious authority: the state asserted its power to define the community as a threat, while the Saints faced the loss of their leaders, weapons, property, and home. The militia's role was consequential precisely because it connected these demands to organized state coercion.

After the expulsion from Missouri, the Saints established Nauvoo in Illinois. In December 1840, the Illinois General Assembly granted the city an unusually expansive charter, giving it sovereign rights and powers described as exceptional in the state and the nation. The account links the political climate behind that grant to the Saints' recent expulsion and to public sympathy for them. Nauvoo's later autonomy was not an action of the Missouri Militia, but it provides a measure of the institutional consequences of the conflict in which the militia had enforced the state's demands.