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No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America

2025; Volume: 12; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.12.18

2156-8030

Amy S. Greenberg,

Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

Five years ago, students in college history courses were more likely to read about the religious foment of the early American republic in Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz's The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America, or Johnson's 1979 masterpiece Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, than in a monograph about Mormonism.1 The problem was not that instructors judged Joseph Smith less important than the prophet Matthias, or that they agreed that the Second Great Awakening could best be understood from the perspective of Rochester revivalism. The issue was the lack of a concise narrative history that contextualized early Mormonism in a manner that both instructors and students found compelling.To say that this is no longer a problem is an understatement. The first years of this decade witnessed a remarkable flowering of engaging short histories of the early years of Mormonism. Adam Jortner's No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America, winner of the Best Book Award from the Mormon History Association (MHA), joins two other books ideal for classroom use: Spencer McBride's Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom, and another winner of the MHA Best Book Award, Benjamin E. Park's Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier.2 Each of these concise volumes focuses on a key event in the early history of Mormonism to historically contextualize not only the genesis of the sect but also why it garnered such violent animosity. Park focuses on the Mormons' dramatic experience in Illinois in the 1840s, McBride analyzes Joseph Smith's 1844 presidential campaign and murder, and Jortner's volume considers their settlement and expulsion from Missouri in the 1830s. Of the three volumes, No Place for Saints provides the most fully realized religious context and the least emphasis on economic and political factors.Jortner, the Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion in Auburn University's Department of History, is one of our finest interpreters of the supernatural in the first decades of the nineteenth century. His first monograph, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier, revealed his skill at teasing out the religious dimensions of life in the early republic, as well as his ability to write for a broad audience.3 His compelling second book, Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic, further demonstrated his facility at illuminating the wide range of magical beliefs animating everyday life and religious practice in the early United States, making "sense" of them, not in twenty-first-century terms (in which they make no sense), but within their historical context.4 Jortner understands the appeal of biography and the use of a well-placed anecdote, his pacing is excellent, and his prose is brisk and engaging.As the author explains in his prologue, No Place for Saints is a book about "rumor and religion" (5). In 150 pages (not counting notes), he lays out a two-pronged argument: first, that religious context explains the emergence of Joseph Smith's Church of Christ and its appeal to converts. And second, that the formation of a vigilance committee and violent expulsion of 1,200 Saints by Missouri residents in 1833 was driven by rumors disseminated with the help of the period's communication revolution, and, despite its resemblance to other violent episodes of the period, was an exceptional event.Jortner does a superb job explaining the genesis and early growth of the church by placing the early Saints in their religious context. Given his previous books, the author's ability to illuminate the magical and supernatural context of the church's early miracles comes as little surprise. His decision to avoid qualifying language in order to recapture "the chaotic, high-stakes world of early-national religion" (5) not only energizes his prose; it enables readers to enter into a world where esoterica and magic existed alongside scripture, and treasure hunters, who were sometimes also clergymen, circulated between communities armed with divining rods and seer stones. It is no small thing to capture the extent of the miraculous in the early United States without patronizing or casting doubt on those who practiced the magical arts or testified to witnessing miracles. Jortner does this exceptionally well.Joseph Smith's message resonated with converts who, like him, were frustrated by intense sectarian competition in which old and new faiths battled for adherents. This competition had, according to British observer Frances Trollope, the "melancholy effect of exposing all religious ceremonies to contempt" (10). Although the revivals of the era have received extensive attention by historians, Jortner argues that anti-revivalism was an equally powerful force in religious choice. Using the words of an impressive number of early converts, No Place for Saints reveals the power of Smith's assertion that Mormonism solved the problem of sectarianism. The world of early Mormonism was one "brimming with possibilities—a world in which God would end schismatic division. And silence debate directly" (58). Among the diverse set of characters that Jortner uses to good effect here are a formerly enslaved Ohio convert called "Black Pete" and ordinary female converts in Kirtland, Ohio, who defied stereotypes in their religious expression.Another compelling aspect of early Mormonism was the promise that Saints could communicate directly with God. This democratic ethos presented a problem for those who wished to establish a church hierarchy. One of the original "eight witnesses" who testified of Joseph Smith's gold plates' existence, Hiram Page, experienced revelations using a seer stone. Another Book of Mormon witness, Oliver Cowdery, not only accepted Page's revelations as authentic, but challenged Smith on the wording of one of his revelations. Jortner resists the temptation to tell the story of church consolidation from Smith's perspective, restoring contingency to a history that only later became scripture.Once the Saints reach Missouri, Jortner's analysis pivots to reasons for their eventual expulsion. While his account of the growth of the sect in Missouri, their consolidation of political power, and resulting rise in violence are carefully and engagingly presented, the author faces some difficulty over the issue of exceptionalism. There is no question that Mormon scripture, community building, and political power attracted unwanted attention. It is also clear that a body of disgruntled former Saints were empowered by a print culture more than willing to spread rumor, and a Protestant culture primed to believe that "their God is the Devil" (90).But it is less clear that the violence faced by Mormons was either different or worse than that faced by other groups in the 1830s. In the Northeast, Protestants rioted against Catholics and burned down a convent, Baltimore gained the sobriquet "Mobtown," and New Yorkers declared 1834 "The Great Riot Year." Abolitionists were murdered by mobs as far west as Illinois. Black people in Missouri, both enslaved and free, were terrorized in ways White Mormons could not imagine. And all of this was occurring during the height of Indian removal. The Sauk Tribe was forcibly removed from Illinois the year before the Mormons were expelled from neighboring Missouri. Jortner notes all this and, drawing on John Bowes's Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal, acknowledges that Indian removal indicated a social willingness to expel people from their homes.5 But he does not conclude that the Mormon experience in Missouri was in large part a symptom of a larger social illness.Jortner, like all authors, deems some contexts more worthy of exploration than others. Some readers may wish this volume offered more about economic and social forces shaping the church. The author rejects analyses that assert that Smith succeeded "because of his time and place" as "reduc[ing] historical investigation to mere social theory" (20). But it is possible to explore the role of industrialization, urbanization, gender norms, economic panics, and other social change without being reductionist. Converts were certainly pulled by a message, but surely many of them were also pushed by factors beyond their control.An epilogue on faith and citizenship spells out the contemporary relevance of the Mormon expulsion from Missouri. "Then and now, when a religion gets criticized, one of the first questions that gets asked is, 'Did they bring it on themselves?'" (147). Mormon opponents claimed the problem with their new neighbors was not one of religion but of character: the Saints were lazy and arrogant, and their ability to amass political power through block voting posed an existential threat to democracy. By casting the battle as the "citizens" of Missouri versus the Mormon interlopers, anti-Mormon forces gained the upper hand. Although virtually all Mormons were US citizens, and the White Missourians who condemned them had lived in frontier Missouri less than a decade, the latter group's ability to define Mormonism as a conspiracy rather than a religion justified violence in the name of democracy. Again, the Mormon experience in Missouri may not have been exceptional.