Joseph Smith was working in his
on 18
March 1843 when he arranged a stack of law books on his writing
table as a pillow and lay down. He instructed his scribe to “write &
tell the world I accknowlidge myself a very great lawyer. I am going
to study law & this is the way I study.” Richards recorded that
Smith “fell asleep. & went to snoring.” Although Smith humorously
acknowledged his lack of formal legal training, his lifelong
involvement with the American legal system compelled him to learn
the law to an unusual degree for a nonattorney. During his lifetime,
he participated as a plaintiff (or complainant), defendant, or
witness in dozens of civil and criminal cases in , , ,
, , and . In addition, when he became mayor of , Illinois, in
May 1842, he served as judge of two city courts, presiding over
numerous cases.
The Legal Records Series of the Joseph Smith Papers is an online-only
series featuring extant case files from one hundred and fifty legal
cases heard during Smith’s lifetime. An additional
forty-three cases for which no papers have survived are
reconstructed from other sources in three finding aids—Joseph
Smith and Civil Litigation, Joseph
Smith and the Criminal Justice System, and Joseph
Smith as a Judge. The series also features documents from
the 1845 trial of Smith’s accused assassins, as well as the records
of his estate and twelve cases brought against the estate. The Legal
Records Series represents decades of dedicated research by
attorneys, archivists, and historians who have scoured courthouses,
repositories, and private manuscript collections to tell the stories
of Smith’s legal cases.
The Legal Records Series organizes Smith’s cases by
state or territory, then by judgment date of the case’s final
jurisdiction. Cases with extant
records are published in their entirety—from initiation through
judgment and any subsequent appeals—even if Smith was involved in
only a portion of the proceedings. Within each case, documents are
listed chronologically by jurisdiction. Brief historical
introductions place cases in historical and legal context. A calendar of documents for each legal
case lists all known documents, whether extant or not, and footnotes
may identify versions created for purposes outside of formal court
proceedings.
Joseph Smith and the Law in Early
America
Like other Americans born during the years following the American
Revolution, Joseph Smith came of age during an
era of patriotism and optimism. On 9 July 1843, he
recounted that his grandfathers “diffused into [his] soul” a love of
“civil and religious liberty” while they “dandld [him] on their
knees.” Smith’s early revelations affirmed a
commonly held belief among early Americans that the Constitution
was of divine origin, and he included “obeying, honoring, and
sustaining the law” among the church’s core beliefs.
The was still young
when Joseph Smith organized the in 1830, and its legal system was still
maturing. Although long-established counties had stately courthouses
that symbolized the rule of law, in some frontier counties—including
those in northwestern where Smith lived in
1838—court was held in schools, taverns, homes, or outdoor areas.
convened
court in their homes, offices, and other ad hoc locations. Aspiring lawyers did not go to law schools,
which would not become common until the 1870s. Instead, novices
apprenticed with established attorneys, reading “lawyer’s
law”—treatises such as William Blackstone’s Commentaries on
the Laws of England, American court decisions, and
statutes—until they were ready to seek admittance to the bar. It was not a given that
judges, even on state supreme courts and county courts, would be
trained lawyers, and most justices of the peace had little knowledge
of the law prior to obtaining their commissions.
Many Americans preferred “common sense jurisprudence”
over “lawyer’s law,” seeing the role of attorneys and judges as
seeking fairness between neighbors rather than strict conformity to
established law. Suspicious of legal
complexities, they often employed anti-attorney and anti-litigation
rhetoric.
Smith was no different. He condemned
lawyers for being among the first to persecute the Saints. He referred disparagingly to
“vexatious lawsuits” and the lawyers who instigated them. He presumably agreed with , who argued in March 1844 that attorneys
should “tell what the Law is. and then let the people go and act
upon—it.” Justices of the peace, Young said, should “inquir[e] into
the cause [of disputes] and till them how to settle.—and thus put
down Law suits” and “cure lawing.” Of necessity, however, Smith
employed lawyers to represent his interests in court and sought
their counsel in lawsuits that would become a constant in his life
by the mid-1830s.
Civil Litigation
The Legal Records Series features case files for
seventy-six civil suits, which constitute more than one-third of
Joseph Smith’s total case count.
The majority of his civil suits stemmed from unpaid financial
obligations. Revelations dictated by Joseph Smith called for
ambitious projects requiring substantial capital, including the
building of . While church leaders sought to finance
these projects through and , they realized they would need to seek additional
sources of capital. This meant they needed to assume substantial
debt, as few individuals or groups in nineteenth-century America
were capable of raising funds on such a scale. In the 1830s, Smith
and other church leaders incurred large debts from merchants in the
eastern in hopes of
developing the economy around , Ohio, and thereby funding construction of the
.
However, the nationwide economic downturn of 1837 “created an untold
volume of litigation” as creditors turned to the courts to collect
on unpaid promissory notes, and Smith was named as a
defendant in thirty-four lawsuits stemming from unfulfilled
financial obligations incurred during the 1830s. Between February
1837 and January 1838, he was arrested at least nine times in
debt-collection suits.
Another ambitious financial project that led to
subsequent litigation occurred in September 1840, when Smith and other church leaders
purchased a steamboat from the federal government for $4,866.38
using a . They intended to use
the boat to ferry church members as well as transport goods for a
fee on the . Soon after the
purchase, the steamboat crashed on a sandbar. The loss of the boat
resulted in multiple lawsuits in the 1840s, as Smith and the other
signatories attempted to recoup their losses and in turn were sued
for unfulfilled obligations. In 1842, the
cumulative weight of the church debts incurred in his name, or
subsequently assumed by him, led Smith to avail himself of a
recently passed federal bankruptcy bill. In
response, federal officials in 1842 sued him and the other
signatories on the 1840 note to collect payment for the steamboat,
resulting in a judgment against the defendants.
Additional civil suits resulted from confrontations
between Joseph Smith and his critics in
late 1843 and early 1844. Although these antagonists had grown
critical of Smith’s religious leadership, the suits targeted him in
his capacity as mayor and as a judge in . At the May
1844 term of the , Illinois,
circuit court, Smith’s opponents sought to overwhelm him with
litigation, bringing six civil suits against him. Most of these
cases were still pending at his death.
Criminal Cases
The Legal Records Series features case files for thirty-eight
criminal cases—about one-fifth of Joseph Smith’s total
case count. The majority of these criminal cases resulted from
conflicts with antagonists who viewed him and the church he founded
with distrust. Smith’s first criminal case occurred in in 1826 when he was charged with violating the
disorderly persons statute for using seer stones to locate lost and
hidden items while in the employ of . The outcome of this case is uncertain due
to the lack of contemporaneous legal records. In ,
Smith’s antagonist
accused him in 1835 of assault and battery and in 1837 of
threatening Newell’s life. In both cases, Ohio judges acquitted
Smith.
Many of Smith’s criminal cases resulted
from the 1838 conflict between the Latter-day Saints and their
adversaries in . When vigilantes expelled Latter-day
Saints from their homes and state officials declined to intervene,
armed Latter-day Saints strategically targeted mob havens by burning
buildings and confiscating goods. Approximately forty Latter-day
Saints and three individuals who were not members of the church were
killed. Missouri governor
ordered that the Saints needed to be “exterminated or driven from
the state if necessary.” The purported “ring leaders of this
rebellion,” including Joseph Smith, were arrested and charged with
treason and other crimes. Missouri officials made no effort to
prosecute non–Latter-day Saint vigilantes who had committed crimes.
After Smith spent winter 1838–1839 incarcerated in the
in , Missouri, his guards allowed him to escape and
relocate to with the other Saints. In the 1840s, Missouri
state officials attempted to have Smith from Illinois three times, twice to answer
charges stemming from the 1838 conflict and once for his alleged
complicity in the 1842 attempted assassination of former governor
Boggs. Each time, Smith was discharged after appearing before courts
in Illinois on writs of .
Smith was also charged with crimes
allegedly committed in . In September 1843,
he insisted that a local justice of the peace fine him for striking
an antagonist, , the only time Smith was
unambiguously convicted of a criminal offense. In June 1844,
Smith was charged with for his role in
the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper
that was critical of him and the church. He was also charged with
, evidently for calling out the and declaring martial law to protect the
city from vigilantes. While he was
confined on the latter charge in the , Illinois,
jail on 27 June 1844, an armed mob assassinated him.
Joseph Smith as a Judge
As a judge in the
mayor’s court and municipal court, Joseph Smith presided over
seventy-seven known cases, representing more than one-third of his
total case count. The Legal Records Series features case files from
twenty-five cases in the mayor’s court, with the remaining case
files apparently not extant but mentioned in other sources. In the
mayor’s court—which was usually held in the room above his —Smith served as a justice of the peace, with
limited jurisdiction over state statutes and civil matters. He also
had full jurisdiction over city ordinances. Most of the cases Smith
heard in the mayor’s court were criminal in nature, ranging from
such as to various minor
offenses tried under the city’s disorderly persons ordinance. In
addition, he heard seventeen civil suits, including Dana v. Brink, a complicated
medical malpractice case.
The Municipal
Court was composed of Smith as chief
justice and Nauvoo city sitting as associate
justices. The court had jurisdiction over appeals from the mayor’s
and aldermen’s courts, as well as authority to issue writs of habeas
corpus in some cases. Smith presided over three appeals and nine
habeas corpus proceedings to review the legality of detentions of
individuals in Nauvoo.
The Trial of the Accused Assassins
and the Estate of Joseph Smith
The Legal Records Series also features documents for cases heard
after Joseph Smith’s death. In May 1845,
the Circuit Court
held the trial of five men accused of participating in his
murder—, , , , and William Grover. As
many in the Latter-day Saint community did not believe that justice
would be served, church leaders decided not to cooperate with the
prosecution. The jury determined the men were not guilty.
In addition, the Legal Records Series reproduces documents pertaining
to the administration of Joseph Smith’s
estate. Like most nineteenth-century Americans, Smith died
intestate, meaning he left no will. Administering
his estate was a complex process that extended nearly two decades
following his death; involved probate courts in , , and , as well as
the District Court
in ,
Illinois; and required five to
settle.
The administrators in and were creditors who were not
particularly interested in overseeing Smith’s estate in those
jurisdictions, but instead in gaining control of specific
properties. , the administrator of Smith’s
estate in Iowa Territory in the mid-1840s, desired the steamboat Maid of Iowa, although he was unsuccessful in
his pursuit.
served as administrator in Ohio. At the
direction of —grandfather of
Holcomb’s wife and longtime opponent of Smith—Holcomb obtained and
then sold the
on 12 April 1862.
Administration of Smith’s estate in was complicated by the disposition of his
property at the time of his death, some of which was held in his
name and the remainder of which was held in his capacity as
trustee-in-trust of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
served as administratrix
from 17 July through 18 September 1844. Acting in accordance with
legal counsel, Emma Smith engaged in a struggle over control of the
property held by her husband as church trustee. However, her tenure
as administratrix was cut short when the Probate Court
removed her on the grounds that her initial $2,000 bond was
insufficient to cover the estate’s debts. Latter-day Saint
replaced Emma Smith as administrator on 19 September 1844. Coolidge
worked with the probate court to sell Joseph Smith’s personal and
real property and address claims from creditors.
In April 1848, the probate court replaced with John M. Ferris, who was not a
Latter-day Saint. Ferris worked with the court to review claims
against the estate, which totaled more than $19,000 by 1850. district
attorney hindered the
settlement of the estate when he sued Ferris, and Lewis Bidamon, the Smith heirs, and
dozens of individuals who had received land from Smith during his lifetime. The
suit, heard in the United States District Court, sought to collect
on the 1842 default judgment relating to the 1840 steamboat
purchase. The judge held that Smith’s estate owed the United States
$6,545.55, which the court recovered by seizing land conveyed by
Smith and by Coolidge. After the court awarded Emma Smith Bidamon
$1,809.41 as her dower rights, the judgment was satisfied. The suit
effectively exhausted Joseph Smith’s estate, leaving many of the
debts filed against it unpaid.
Conclusion
Despite Joseph Smith’s ambivalence toward
lawyers and the American legal system, the case files featured in
the Legal Records Series demonstrate that he was constrained to
become proficient to some degree in the law to protect himself and
his people.
, who served as a
justice of the peace and as an associate justice with Smith on the
Municipal
Court, recalled that Smith “shewed great wisdom not only in
religious matters, but in matters of law, and other subjects and
branches of knowledge.” Less
than a month prior to his death, Joseph Smith summed up his approach
to the law: “I understand some law and more justice, and know as
much about the rights of American citizens as any men.”