Comments on: The Meaning of Martyrdom

By: Sam MB

Sam MB — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:02:16 +0000

JNS, I still haven’t gotten around to Quinn’s hierarchy books, but this theme is reasonably clearly supported by early evidence. Some in fact talked about taking vengeance (or encouraging God’s vengeance) on those who had persuaded Smith to turn himself in. My best guess is that he thought he would die but did not want to. Smith so despised betrayal (even theologically), that in a sense this view is still consistent with his being a martyr to his people and his God.

Kevin–interesting paper. thanks for link.

By: Kevin Barney

Kevin Barney — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:46:34 +0000

Great post, Sam. Here's a paper that addresses the side issue of whether Joseph actually killed anyone with his pepperbox and how that relates to the idea of martyrdom, if anyone is interested in that aspect of it.

By: J. Nelson-Seawright

J. Nelson-Seawright — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:48:29 +0000

I’ve always been intrigued by the fragments of historical evidence suggesting that Joseph Smith felt himself to have been instructed by the Spirit to flee Nauvoo, and that he went to his death in the belief that he was thereby defying God. The sources for this are available in D. Michael Quinn’s Mormon Hierarchy discussion of the martyrdom (and, yes, Stapley, I’ve actually looked up some of them…), and this explanation does a decent job of accounting for Smith’s behavior. He did make a sincere effort to flee, and, as we all know, only turned back when his friends — who he described as not caring whether he lived or died — asked him to stick around. He also did make various futile efforts to survive the attack, both by fighting back and by using the Masonic distress call to signal that he shouldn’t be killed. Again, these acts seem most consistent with an explanation in which Smith felt that he was supposed to survive, even though he perhaps knew that he would not.

In this interpretation, Smith remains a martyr. He is just a martyr to a different thing: not a martyr for belief in God, but rather a martyr for belief in the Mormon community.

By: DWG

DWG — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:39:11 +0000

Martyrological sensibilities are apparent very early in Mormon writings, such as missionaries mentioning that they were persecuted while preaching. But it’s not until the Missouri conflicts, to a certain degree after Jackson County but especially after 1838, that we start seeing an actual discourse of persecution being articulated in Mormon narratives. Those killed at Haun’s Mill and the Battle of Crooked River are hailed as martyrs by Joseph Smith (JS and others to Edward Partridge, 20 March 1839, Times and Seasons, June 1840, 131). By the time Joseph was martyred, there was already a means of conceptualization by which the Saints could understand his death, and the implications that death held for them as Joseph’s followers.
The Missouri and Illinois persecutions remained firmly implanted in Latter-day Saint collective memory throughout the nineteenth century, largely, I would say, to motivate resistance against pressures from the U.S. government and other outsiders to make Mormons conform. Remembering the martyrs that died for the cause steeled later Latter-day Saints to continue resisting in order to maintain their culture, not unlike Mexican American efforts to maintain memories of U.S. oppression during the Mexican American War and other conflicts, or African Americans harboring memories of slavery.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Church had decided to stop resisting, and, as Kathleen Flake argues, Missouri and Illinois ceased being sites of martyrdom and became sites of pilgrimage (Flake, The Politics of Religious Identity, 135).
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the early persecutions and Joseph Smith’s martyrdom have continued to play a significant role in our collective memory. True, we no longer hold to the memories to promote resistance to the federal government (such resistance would seem fairly strange in light of current Mormon ultrapatriotism), but we’ve ritualized the memories of the early persecutions as part of the Joseph Smith story in order to reinforce the construction that all prophets are persecuted, and eventually martyred, for the testimony of Jesus.

By: Sam MB

Sam MB — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:27:28 +0000

PS, I wanted to share this quotation from Times and Seasons (DECEMBER 15, 1844 Vol.5, No.23, p.744):

The LDS â€œfelt also to mourn over the bodies of their martyred chiefs, to hang their harps upon the willows, and in their overwhelming grief to cease for a while from the common avocations of life.â€

By: Sam MB

Sam MB — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:25:24 +0000

JS: There are sufficient truly contemporary accounts of vengeance oaths to suggest they did play an important role, though these were integrated with two other themes: the hunger for God to wreak vengeance (many Saints were praying for God to wipe out Illinois and Missouri and perhaps the wicked of the entire United States), and the belief that Smith’s martyrdom would inaugurate Armageddon, that his potent blood would finally tip the balance to force God’s hand (Smith had rather explicitly advanced Mormon martyrdom as the fulfillment of Revelation 6: 9-11, and his followers persisted in this identification). Mormons were scared that word of vengeance oaths or actual acts of vengeance might occur, and this evoked a corrective impulse which channeled vengeance into God’s operation.

By: Sam MB

Sam MB — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:08:44 +0000

I haven’t looked at art from the early period, when I would think they would have emphasized depictions of the Smith brothers. I see Mormon martyrology as having been amplified by the Smith martyrdom but taken thence into the martyrology of the greater church body, as represented very specifically by those dead on the Exodus. Young lists “thousands” of Mormon martyrs, while John Taylor was acclaimed a martyr when he died in hiding, a part of the martyrology of those imprisoned under anti-bigamy laws. A long way of saying that I think the Exodus dead reflect the martyrdom.

The other strand I think is ritual fear of the corpse, which became quite robust in the late nineteenth century, and a depiction of the Smith martyrdom would necessarily involve a bullet-riddled body, while Exodus martyr art could show merely the symbolic but sanitized gravemarker and the bereavement of the survivors. The mounting late twentieth-century cinematic obsession with a corpse seems to be an attempt to engage the corpse again while still wrestling with that potent fear of mortal remains.

(One could also wonder whether in the evangelical climate there has been a desire to back off the explicit parallelism of crucifixion and Smith’s death, though this is more speculative.)

Davis Bitton is a wonderful fellow and an erudite scholar. I recommend his books highly.

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:05:06 +0000

Great post (and excellent footnotes). I would think that some the earliest Mormon martyr images would be that of those who did not defend themselves from the Lamanites in the Book of Mormon and Abinadi.

As to Joseph’s last years, I am fascinated by the talk he gives to the RS a week before revealing the first of the Nauvoo temple ordinances:

He said as he had this opportunity, he was going to instruct the Society and point out the way for them to conduct, that they might act according to the will of Godâ€”that he did not know as he should have many opportunities of teaching themâ€”that they were going to be left to themselvesâ€”they would not long have him to instruct themâ€”that the church would not have his instruction long, and the world would not be troubled with him a great while, and would not have his teachingsâ€”He spoke of delivering the keys to this society and to the Churchâ€”that according to his prayers God had appointed him elsewhere (WoJS, pg. 116)

To be fair though, is it accurate to say that many “swore oaths of vengeance against the attackers”? I haven’t studied this beyond the Smoot hearings transcripts, but those indicate a different type of oath.

Lastly, one of the first things that came to my mind was an exchange that was recorded in Brigham Young’s office Journal:

Geo. A. Smith came in, and reported he had just heard ^that his Son Geo. A. who was sent on a mission to the Indians was Killed by a party of them.

Pres Young remarked that Martyrs would wear a bright crown; but he would rather have the reward of a long life of serving his God. (pg. 173)

By: kris

kris — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:36:36 +0000

smb — Thanks for the recommendation of Bitton’s book. It’s been sitting on my shelf for a few years and it is a pleasant introduction to this topic. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on visual art. It is interesting to me that one would never (rarely?) see an artistic interpretation of the martyrdom in a ward meetinghouse. We have a picture of pioneers burying the dead in our building’s hall, but certainly none of Joseph and Hyrum’s death. The book maintains that this is a matter of taste, or a reflection of the fact that Latter-day Saints are not “obsessed” with the martyrdom. Thoughts on this?

By: smb

smb — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 19:10:17 +0000

As some have said, you could easily suggest that his moment of accepting martyrdom was when he responded to the accusations of desertion and crossed back over his Rubicon to head to Carthage. he felt that he would be safe among the displaced Indians of the Mexican West and doubted that he would survive imprisonment in Carthage. he’d been fearing that since the Missouri debacle