{"id":110552,"date":"2025-06-01T21:42:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T03:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=110552"},"modified":"2025-06-01T21:42:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T03:42:10","slug":"historical-ironies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/06\/historical-ironies.html","title":{"rendered":"Historical ironies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>
Thomas Sharp, editor of the \u201cWarsaw Signal,\u201d as (very well) played by David Martinez in the 2024 Interpreter Foundation dramatic film \u201cSix Days in August\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My wife and I were back in Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois, a few weeks ago. \u00a0We were there for several days of work on the series of mini-documentaries that the Interpreter Foundation is producing under the title of Becoming Brigham<\/em>. \u00a0Every time I visit the area, I find myself thinking about the remarkable way in which the history of that part of Illinois has unfolded.<\/p>\n

Thomas Sharp and his conspirators down in Warsaw, to the south of Nauvoo, and the mob that did the deed in Carthage to the east, thought that, by murdering Joseph and Hyrum Smith, they had put an end to \u201cMormonism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, though, Thomas Sharp and his cronies are pretty much completely forgotten \u2014 except as evil footnotes in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a>. \u00a0Virtually \u00a0nobody visits Warsaw unless (as I did on a couple of occasions some years ago) it is as a side trip from the Latter-day Saint temple that has been rebuilt in Nauvoo and the visitors center and historic sites that surround it, to see the place where Sharp and his co-conspirators hatched their homicidal plot. \u00a0For many years (including my first visits), it was in ruins. \u00a0Now, though, Thomas Sharp\u2019s place has been beautifully restored: An active Latter-day Saint lady, a returned senior missionary, owns it and lives in it.<\/p>\n

\"Today's<\/a>
A bronze statue of Joseph and Hyrum Smith on the grounds of the Carthage Jail today
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And the only thing of any real interest in the dusty, sleepy, nondescript little town of Carthage \u2014 \u201cthe town that time forgot,\u201d as I\u2019m inclined to call it \u2014 is the jail in which Joseph and Hyrum were martyred. \u00a0Attractively landscaped, meticulously maintained, adorned with statues of the martyred prophet and patriarch, it\u2019s become something of a place of pilgrimage. \u00a0Every year, thousands and thousands of visitors come from across the United States and beyond to pay their respects to the two men whose lives were unjustly taken there, to contemplate yet one more time the appalling and solemn events that occurred on 27 June 1844.<\/p>\n

To their enormous discredit, some detractors of the Restoration have vainly sought to defend the perpetrators of that quasi-official frontier assassination or, at least, to minimize the guilt that they bear and, instead, to attempt to blame the victims.<\/p>\n

I quote from an item that I wrote quite a few years ago in response to some materials produced by the Southern Baptist Convention:<\/p>\n

In the view of Rev. Wright, who is an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Convention, not even the murder of Joseph Smith was undeserved. He goes further, in this regard, than did the experts at the SBC\u2019s Denominational Summit on Mormonism, which was held in North Carolina on the one hundred and fifty-third anniversary of the Prophet\u2019s death. \u201cSmith was killed while escaping jail,\u201d they said, untruthfully.\u00a0\u00a0Responding to some remarks made by President Gordon B. Hinckley, Pastor Wright notes that<\/p>\n

the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum on June 27, 1844, didn\u2019t occur until after Joseph had fired upon the so-called \u201cmob\u201d with a pistol that had been secreted to him while in jail and had killed one man and injured several others.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRage and persecution\u201d may have followed the Mormons<\/a> to Illinois, but the Saints of that day brought most of it upon themselves!<\/em><\/p>\n

Rev. Wright is wrong about Hyrum\u2019s death, which occurred immediately prior to Joseph\u2019s drawing the pistol.\u00a0\u00a0But he is almost certainly correct in his claim that Joseph\u2019s firing of the pistol took place while Joseph was still alive. His description of the events at Carthage represents an important and novel historical reconstruction, and it is vital that we understand it with precision. Apparently, Rev. Wright feels that Joseph Smith was obliged\u2014though he was unjustly imprisoned and had not yet been tried, let alone convicted of anything, much less convicted of a capital offense, to allow \u201cthe so-called \u2018mob'\u201d to butcher not only himself and his brother Hyrum but his two friends, Willard Richards and John Taylor, whose only crime was that they had come to visit the prisoners. (John Taylor was, in fact, severely wounded by \u201cthe so-called \u2018mob.'\u201d)<\/p>\n

Rev. Wright\u2019s revised version of the events in Carthage seems to run along the following lines: \u00a0The wily criminal lunatic Joseph Smith, who had remained quiet throughout his captivity, deliberately chose the very time when the peace-loving Carthage Greys\u2014fully armed and with traditional blackened faces\u2014were innocently gathered about the jail for their annual June 27th Militia Picnic. Frolicking with their weapons and calling out the death threats that customarily accompanied that grand holiday in frontier Illinois\u2014it was a simpler time, and June 27th had not yet been commercialized\u2014the proto-Gandhian Greys had merely been playing the venerable party game known among these gentle rustics as \u201cEat Hot Lead, Mormon Scum!\u201d Then, wholly without provocation, Joseph Smith opened fire on the revelers, using the \u201cpepperbox\u201d pistol that Cyrus Wheelock had smuggled into his cell. Na\u00efve historians, both Latter-day Saints and others, have always assumed that Joseph\u2019s action had something to do with the fact that his brother Hyrum had just been shot to death. (Presumably, Hyrum was killed by a stray bullet from a local hunter, or perhaps from an evil Mormon assassin.) Rev. Wright, however, cannot be taken in by such sophistries. When Joseph continued to shoot at them as they mounted the jail\u2019s interior staircase bearing a peace offering of cookies and punch, they had no choice. They killed him and his (already dead) brother in self-defense. It is true that they also shot John Taylor at least four times. But then, he had been very naughty to them with his cane, and needed to be taught a lesson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the way, I\u2019m not at all certain that Joseph Smith \u201ckilled one man and injured several others\u201d at Carthage Jail. \u00a0But it wouldn\u2019t upset me very much to learn that he did. \u00a0They weren\u2019t exactly innocent and blameless. \u00a0And there is nothing morally wrong with self-defense, to say nothing of defending one\u2019s friends and one\u2019s brother.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 My wife and I were back in Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois, a few weeks ago. \u00a0We were there for several days of work on the series of mini-documentaries that the Interpreter Foundation is producing under the title of Becoming Brigham. \u00a0Every time I visit the area, I find myself thinking about the remarkable way […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":106248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12967,11030,380,4432,36905,4597],"class_list":["post-110552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-carthage","tag-hyrum-smith","tag-joseph-smith","tag-nauvoo","tag-thomas-sharp","tag-warsaw"],"yoast_head":"\nHistorical ironies<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  My wife and I were back in Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois, a few weeks ago. \u00a0We were there for several 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