Joseph Smith For President

By the election year of 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers. Nearly half of them lived in the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith was not only their religious leader but also the mayor and the commander-in-chief of a militia of some 2,500 men. In less than twenty years, Smith had helped transform the American religious landscape and grown his own political power substantially. Yet the standing of the Mormon people in American society remained unstable. Unable to garner federal protection, and having failed to win the support of former president Martin Van Buren or any of the other candidates in the race, Smith decided to take matters into his own hands, launching his own bid for the presidency. While many scoffed at the notion that Smith could come anywhere close to the White House, others regarded his runand his religionas a threat to the stability of the young nation. Hounded by mobs throughout the campaign, Smith was ultimately killed by onethe first presidential candidate to be assassinated. Though Joseph Smith's run for president is now best rememberedwhen it is remembered at allfor its gruesome end, the renegade campaign was revolutionary. Smith called for the total abolition of slavery, the closure of the country's penitentiaries, and the reestablishment of a national bank to stabilize the economy. But Smith's most important proposal was for an expansion of protections for religious minorities. At a time when the Bill of Rights did not apply to individual states, Smith sought to empower the federal government to protect minorities when states failed to do so. Spencer W. McBride tells the story of Joseph Smith's quixotic but consequential run for the White House and shows how his calls for religious freedom helped to shape the American political system we know today.

"In 1844, Joseph Smith, the controversial founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had amassed a national following of some 25,000 believers-and a militia of some 2,500 men. In this year, his priority was protecting the lives and civil rights of his people. Having failed to win the support of any of the presidential contenders for these efforts, Smith launched his own renegade campaign for the White House, one that would end with his assassination at the hands of an angry mob. Smith ran on a platform that called for the total abolition of slavery, the closure of the country's penitentiaries, the reestablishment of a national bank to stabilize the economy, and most importantly an expansion of protections for religious minorities. Spencer W. McBride tells the story of Smith's quixotic but consequential run for the White House and shows how his calls for religious freedom helped to shape the American political system we know today"--

Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.

This book uncovers the significant but previously unknown contributions of the electioneers of Joseph Smith's 1844 presidential campaign. The focus is the cadre of over six-hundred political missionaries-who they were before the campaign, their activities and experiences as electioneers, and who they became following the campaign's untimely collapse. It narrates the important and even crucial contributions they made in the succession crisis, the exodus from the United States, and the building of Zion in the Great Basin. Importantly, it describes how their campaigning with the Quorum of Twelve Apostles using theodemocratic themes, coupled with the shock of Joseph Smith's assassination, steeled and subsequently spurred many of them into effective religious, political, social, and economic leaders-leaders who shaped Latter-day Saint history.

Carthage Conspiracy deals with the general problem of Mormon/non-Mormon conflict, as well as with the dramatic story of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and their alleged assassins. It places the infamous event at the Carthage jail (1846) and the subsequent murder-conspiracy trial in the context of Mormon and American legal history, and deals with the question of achieving justice when crimes are politically motivated and popularly supported.

Discusses eleven Mormons who ran for president--including Joseph Smith, George Romney, Morris "Mo" Udall, Orrin Hatch, and Mitt Romney, and Jon Huntsman Jr.

Joseph Smith's campaign for president of the United States is one of the most fascinating, yet least understood, events in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints. The author brings the Prophet's presidential run to life with timely insights into questions that have heretofore received little attention.