In May 1834, 200 makeshift soldiers began a torrid, slow 900-mile march from Ohio to Missouri. They journeyed in support of their brethren in the west under attack from settlers on the frontier. Miracles heralded the imminent success of these pious converts: angels appeared in the sky, snakes slithered away from their feet, and the bones contained within a Native American burial mound were revealed, by prophecy, to have belonged to a pious warrior. ‘His name was Zelph,’ revealed their commander, who explained that Zelph had been ‘a chieftain under the great prophet Onandagus, who was known from the Eastern Sea to the Rocky Mountains. The curse of the Red Skin was taken from him‘. Discovering that Zelph had been a ‘Lamanite’ was of great delight to the soldiers, who recognised such terms from scripture.

By the time a fortnight had passed, however, knowledge of Zelph’s purity was of little comfort to the embittered soldiers who made up ‘Zion’s Camp’. High mud sank wagons and horses, and the men – almost all of whom had no experience as soldiers – were crippled with pain from the march. The money that they had raised in Ohio to fund the mission had already disappeared from the hands of their spendthrift commander, who was reduced to bargaining with passing townspeople for rotten meat to feed his troops. His savage bulldog threatened to attack anyone who approached. ‘If that dog bites me,’ one of the more pugnacious soldiers attested. ‘I’ll kill him!’ ‘If you do,’ his commander replied. ‘I’ll whip you in the name of the Lord! And if you continue in the same spirit and don’t repent, that dog will eat the flesh off your bones – and you shall not have the power to resist!’

It silenced the man, for he was not foolish enough to ignore the warning. His commander, after all, was the living Prophet of God. The soldier fell back in line.

Joseph Smith had commanded men in morality, in history and in religion, but never before in war. He loved pageantry and military history, but had no appetite for or experience of battle, and little strategic insight and knowledge of tactics. As his men travelled west, frightened gentiles sent warning to the frontiersmen that a great Mormon army was marching on Missouri to slaughter them. By the time Smith arrived, his opponents were ready for battle. Refusing to call down the angels he assured his followers would come to their rescue, Joseph instead meekly turned his men around and headed home. A cholera outbreak emerged, and 14 men died. Back in Ohio, his followers were contemptuous of the prophet that they had expected, like Moses, would lead his people out of persecution.

Four years later, Smith attempted once again to come to the defence of his followers in Missouri, who were again under attack from belligerent frontiersmen. The Mormons’ communistic efforts of economic organisation, remarkable heresies, supposed sympathy to the enslaved black population, increasing share of the voter block, and taunting of the gentiles had raised a feverish hostility in their neighbours, who were determined to drive them out of the state. Smith, aware of the asymmetric quality to any conflict between his Mormon farmers and the hardened frontiersmen, quietly trained a body of men bound to secrecy unto pain of death. In later years, Smith would deny all knowledge of them – but for now, they operated with his approval, protecting the prophet as bodyguards, spying and informing on internal Mormon critics as a secret police, and launching vigilante attacks on aggressive gentiles.

Smith had installed an especially rough and cruel member of his church, Sampson Avard, to lead the unit. ‘Know ye not, brethren, that it will soon be your privilege to take your respective companies and go out on a scout on the borders of the settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles,’ the leader of the ‘Danites’ told his men. ‘For it is written, the riches of the gentiles shall be consecrated to my people, the house of Israel; and this you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property; and in this way we will build up the kingdom of God […] And if one of these Danite society reveals any of these things, I will put him where the dogs cannot bite him.’

Missourians who had already sought to confiscate or damage Mormon property and intimidate and hurt the devout now believed their hostility to be further vindicated by this violent party of men who had been encouraged to ‘bathe our swords in the vital blood of the Missourians or die in the attempt.’ Missouri mills refused to grind Mormon flour, and the converts were reduced to eating grated corn instead of bread. Armed bands of established settlers stole horses and cattle from the Mormon camps at night, set fire to their buildings, and whipped any unprotected men they came across. Smith, knowing his camp was outnumbered and outgunned, attempted to keep the peace. He expanded the army, which – officially, at least – remained explicitly and solely a defensive force. At night, he snuck into his most beleaguered camp and discovered the townsfolk half-starved and beaten bloody. They looked to their prophet with a hope that began to wane as he, once again, failed to call down angels from heaven to avenge his brethren in battle. Smith sent out an offer of a truce, and asked the camp to leave all their property and fall back.

The weakness was tactically devastating. Negotiations that Smith had worked hard to maintain broke down immediately, even in neighbouring counties that had not been hostile. If the Mormons had been made to leave one county, why could they not be made to leave the rest? Rather than alleviating the suffering of his people, efforts against them intensified. Frontiersmen were calling for the entirety of the Mormon church to be driven out of the state or slaughtered where they stood. Land agents sent cruel offers to buy back the cultivated Mormon property for a pittance. Men hollered and jeered at them over their impending destruction. Frightened into uncharacteristic silence at the impending annihilation of his people, Smith took some time to regain his thoughts. When he emerged, he did so with a forceful revelation.

‘We are an injured people,’ Joseph told his followers on 14 October. ‘From county to county we have been driven by unscrupulous mobs eager to seize the land we have cleared and improved with such love and toil. We have appealed to magistrates, judges, the Governor, and even to the President of the United States, but there has been no redress for us. The latest reply of [Governor] Boggs to our petitions is to tell us to fight our own battles. And that, brethren, is exactly what we intend to do.’

Smith had much to lose. Miracles had not yet saved his people, who were retreating miserably from a land they believed to be consecrated. Smith had already been driven from Ohio by angry apostates, and many revelations had determined that Missouri was divinely designated as the site for the ‘City of Zion’, where the Church would gather in anticipation of the Second Coming. In Daviess County, a beautiful valley that Smith had stumbled upon had been revealed to him as ‘Adam-ondi-Ahman’, the home of Adam and Eve after they had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. To lose such a bounty – so soon after losing his grand designs in Ohio – would be humiliating. He had to start trimming his church of those who did not have the stomach for war.

‘Some of the brethren aren’t here today,’ he noted sombrely. ‘Some of those that Brother Sidney likes to call “Oh, don’t!” men. In time of war we have no need for such. A man must declare himself friend or enemy. I move a resolution that the property of all “Oh, don’t!” men be taken over to maintain the war.’

At this, ‘Brother’ Sidney Rigdon, a fervent early convert – who had previously been a Christian preacher before being convinced of the veracity of the Book of Mormon and becoming Smith’s right-hand man – moved that the blood of these men ‘be spilled in the streets’. At this point, some in the congregation began to look at one another nervously. A few slipped away. ‘No,’ said Joseph, ‘I move a better resolution. We’ll take them along with us to Daviess County, and if it comes to a battle, we’ll sit them on their horses with bayonets and pitchforks and make them ride in front!’ The congregation’s nerves were salved.

He went on to tell a parable of an army captain stationed with a regiment on the point of starvation. ‘The captain found a Dutchman with a rich harvest of potatoes, but the man refused to sell. Explaining the matter to his men, the captain thrice warned them not to let him catch them touching the potatoes. But the next morning there was not a potato in the whole patch.’

‘If the people will let us alone’, he began to shout, ‘we will preach the gospel in peace. But if they come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was “the Alcoran or the Sword”. So shall it eventually be with us – Joseph Smith or the Sword!’

Rigdon then turned on lukewarm Mormons. ‘The last man has run away from Far West that is going to’, he announced. ‘I move a resolution that if any man attempts to move out of this county or even packs his things for that purpose, then any man in this house who sees it shall, without saying anything to any other person, kill him and haul him aside.’ The Mormons were preparing for battle. This time, they would not only refuse to meekly turn back: they would slaughter any one of their party who suggested it. ‘Now Father,’ wrote one young Mormon, ‘come to Zion and fight for the religion of Jesus. Many a hoary head is engaged here, the Prophet goes out to battle as in days of old. He has the sword that Nephi took from Laban. Is not this marvellous?’

By late October all of the peripheral Mormon settlements had been evacuated and consolidated – with the sole exception of a flour mill built by a man who refused to allow it to enter the hands of the gentiles. Smith had attempted to change his mind, but the miller was foolish and stubborn. Soon after, 250 Missourian settlers had descended upon the mill and chased women and children, screaming, into the woods, shooting after them. The men of the 30 or 40 Mormon families remaining retreated into a nearby log cabin with great gaps between the logs. From there, the settlers had shot at the Mormon men, like fish in a barrel. It was a massacre. When later checking for survivors, militiamen dragged a ten-year-old child from his hiding place. His younger brother, playing dead, witnessed the aftermath. ‘Don’t shoot!’ one settler said, taking stock of the child, ‘he’s just a boy.’ ‘Nits will make lice’ came the response from another, who shot the child in the head.

Smith, whose people were half-mad with starvation and had been laid to waste by their neighbours, found the headquarters that housed the surviving Mormons under attack from the state militia. He took a few of his most respectable men aside, and instructed them to leave the camp at once and ‘beg like a dog’ for peace.

The capitulation that followed was humiliating. Mormon leaders were arrested and slept on open ground, taunted with news of their impending execution. Defeated and bereft of their leaders, the Mormons were prey. Brigham Young later recounted that the victorious Missourians ‘commenced their ravages by plundering the citizens of their bedding, clothing, money, wearing apparel, and every thing of value they could lay their hands upon, and also attempting to violate the chastity of the women in sight of their husbands and friends, under the pretence of hunting for prisoners and arms. The soldiers shot down our oxen, cows, hogs and fowls, at our own doors, taking part away and leaving the rest to rot in the streets’.

Smith and the leadership of the church were spared summary execution by a general who considered it murder. Stealing away to Illinois, Smith stewed on the cruelty of the gentiles. Mormons reported scenes of their women and girls bound and brutalised by a succession of men. Men had been hacked apart with corn- cutters while attempting to surrender. In becoming ‘a second Mohammad’, Smith had opened up the possibility of becoming a warlord prophet – an action that felt increasingly necessary in the face of such persecution. The 200 men who had made up ‘Zion’s Camp’ were no real soldiers, and had seen no fighting. The thousands of Mormons in Missouri who had been provoked into an unsuccessful war were themselves just farmers and blacksmiths. The church, Smith realised, needed their own army.

Strenuous missionary campaigns abroad yielded fervent and able-bodied converts to replenish the church, and Smith established the flourishing new city of Nauvoo. Politicians in Illinois – keen to show clemency where their hated Missouri neighbours had not – courted the Mormons in an almost sycophantic manner. John Cook Bennett, a local physician and quartermaster general of the Illinois militia, brought cannons and guns to Smith, who baptised him and brought him into the church hierarchy. In turn, Bennett helped craft a charter, giving Smith and the town he was building great power in the state. Bennett, living with Smith, became Assistant President of the Church, mayor of the city, chancellor of the university, and General of the Nauvoo Legion. A preening Bennett organised and gave instruction to the nascent army, and began drilling his two thousand men. Smith, pushing his luck, drew on the Governor of Illinois’ desire to claim Mormon votes successfully requested the commission of lieutenant-general and spoke triumphantly about his outranking every other military officer in the United States. He began to answer to the title ‘General’ more so than ‘Prophet’, and developed a beautiful uniform to mark his status as the head of his Legion. Locals who had originally looked on the Mormon refugees fondly and had indulgently granted them some military power became increasingly concerned with the vigour of the Legion. They were aware that the army was no mere decorative tool – Missouri still had an order of extradition against the prophet – and much of the state’s politics were dedicated to the precise manner in which Smith should be arrested, extradited, and hanged. Though the head of the Danites had betrayed Smith and turned informant to the state of Missouri, many of the thuggish men who had made up this secret group remained close to him. One slipped away from Nauvoo, and a few days later the hated Governor of Missouri was shot in the head through the window of his home. He survived, and the Legion tightened security around the Prophet. ‘It was my duty to do as I was ordered’, one bodyguard recalled, ‘and not ask questions.’ Sometimes this meant political violence. Sometimes it meant keeping quiet when Smith visited the home of one of the many wives he had begun to take in secret.

Bennett, writing under the pseudonym ‘Joab, General in Israel’, was clear that the Mormon Church was preparing to avenge its humiliation at the hands of the gentiles: ‘The blood of murdered Mormons cries aloud for help, and the restoration of the inheritances of the saints; and God has heard the cry […] he who answers by fire will cause sword and flame to do their office, and again make the Constitution and Laws paramount to every other consideration – and I swear by the Lord God of Israel, that the sword shall not depart from my thigh, nor the buckler from my arm, until the trust is consummated and the hydra-headed, fiery dragon slain.’

‘If [Smith] would take friendly advice’, the editor of one non-Mormon newspaper wrote, ‘we would say, let some Joshua, the son of Nun, lead the armies, and let him stick to interpretation and prophecy – for we do assure him upon an honest belief, that his situation in Illinois is far more dangerous than ever it was in Missouri if he undertakes to take Mahomet’s part.’

An anonymous US artillery officer visiting Nauvoo wrote that he had witnessed their legion parading with ‘a very noble and imposing appearance’, that would ‘do honour to any body of armed militia in any of the states, and approximates very closely to our regular forces […] Before many years this legion will be twenty, and perhaps fifty thousand strong, and still augmenting […] These Mormons are accumulating like a snowball rolling down an inclined plane, which in the end becomes an avalanche.’

‘I confess’, he wrote, that what he had witnessed of this ‘warlike people’ had ‘astonished and filled me with fears for future consequences. The Mormons, it is true, are now peaceable, but the lion is asleep. Take care, and don’t rouse him.’

By 1844, the Legion was a well-drilled, well-exercised body with a good stock of arms and 4,000 men at its disposal. Newspapers as far away as New York were now joining in on raising concerns of a huge Mormon army that would put any who denied them to the sword. Local politicians were concerned by the growing strength and rhetoric of the Mormons, and Missouri was incensed by what they saw as a state within a state. In March 1844, Smith wrote to Congress, asking to be appointed an officer of the United States army with power to raise 100,000 men. Smith, now scornful of the two major parties in Illinois, decided to run for president of the United States on a theocratic ticket.

He had overreached. Smith was a convincing Prophet, but no military commander. He had been out of his depth on the long, agonising march to Missouri all those years ago, at his best when prophesying over Native burial mounds and regaling men with tales from his Book of Mormon, but quickly overwhelmed with the mundane and brutal qualities of military leadership. He froze when confronted with a superior enemy, and the warlike character he assumed in response to his people’s suffering was largely impotent. Unable to convince the gentiles to join him through peaceful measures, his attempts to put them to the sword were instead small, covert campaigns that resulted in further alienation of the townsfolk and occasional moments of brash action that raised fears and recriminations against his own people. He could not even assassinate a governor. Smith enjoyed sitting atop a stallion at the head of a powerful-looking army, intimidating politicians, and extracting as much as he could out of his own people and those who had not yet credited his prophecy. His success in manipulation gave him an enormous confidence in his own abilities – which were indeed vast, but impossible to translate into battle.

Joseph had taken his church from three astonished, gullible men to a powerful moral and political force that threatened to upend American norms. He had transformed his people from communistic and self-denying to warlike, polygamous, and profitable. He had translated Egyptian hieroglyphs into a sacred text that revealed that God was once a mere man and that all men were to become gods. With each step the conviction of his followers only grew. But it was military command in which the gap between appearance and competence remained unbridgeable. In alienating the non-believers from the banks of New York City to the gamblers of the Wild West, Joseph ensured that he had nowhere left to turn.

It was ego that would bring down Smith. When rumours of his polygamous lifestyle made their way to the unsuspecting husbands of women that Smith had attempted to seduce, some left and set up a critical newspaper detailing his sexual indiscretions, theocratic aspirations and ideas on man’s ability to attain godhood. Smith’s madness in destroying that printing press incensed gentiles, who saw it as a literal attack on free speech made by a man at the head of an army that fulfilled his most unconstitutional and base desires. Issued with a warrant for inciting a riot, Smith put Nauvoo under martial law and mobilised his Legion. Once again, Smith found himself at a key point: this time he had not 200 men, nor 2,000 men and women, but four thousand trained, quasi-professional soldiers – and still he buckled. Giving himself up without a fight, he went to jail, where he was attacked by a vigilante mob. ‘Don’t trouble yourself’, he told the guards, believing them to be his Legion, ‘they’ve come to rescue me.’ Rather, they stormed the jail and executed him. Military command had once again failed Joseph Smith.