Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon
Krakauer, 2003, Excerpts
A month after breaking out of jail in Missouri, Joseph Smith
surveyed the shore along this majestic bend in the Mississippi River and
resolved that the Kingdom of God’s capital city would be erected precisely
here, in Hancock County, Illinois. Nauvoo is a small, tidy town with little on
its surface to distinguish it from hundreds of other small, tidy towns that
freckle the American landscape. Within five years more than fifteen hundred
thousand of the Lord’s Elect were living in and around Nauvoo making it the
second-largest municipality in Illinois. From nothing, the Saints created a
city that rivaled Chicago.
As an unintended consequence, Illinois set Joseph up as de
facto emperor of his own autonomous city-state. He had himself officially
anointed “King, Priest, and Ruler over Israel on Earth.” He commanded a
well-armed and rigorously disciplined militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which boasted
nearly half as many men as the entire American Army at the time, and then,
eager for still for military power, he petitioned the U.S. Congress for
authorization to establish a one-hundred-thousand-man fighting force under his
personal control. Congress thought better of granting this latter request, but
Joseph was on a roll nevertheless.
In January 1844 Joseph announced his candidacy for president
of the United States. An argument can be made that Joseph ran for president
because he had come to believe that it was the only way his Saints were ever
going to gain state protection from the terrible persecutions they had been
subjected to wherever they had attempted to live.
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