Nauvoo (620 alt., 966 pop.), the city built up by Joseph Smith, stands on a promontory around which the Mississippi River flows, some fifty miles north of Quincy, Illinois. Here, when Chicago was a stripling village of less than 5,000, stood the largest city in Illinois, the headquarters for the newly established Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormons.
In no sense of the word is Nauvoo a ghost town, but the bones of a greater past show starkly, here and there, in the living town of today. Scattered throughout are empty foundation pits, with elms and maples leaning over, and here and there the shell of a house, its windows boarded and its collapsed roof spilling a great crest of trumpet flowers. Occupying two levels, which residents call the Hill and the Flat, the town sprawls loosely over an area capable of housing a community twenty times its size. Extending almost to the back doors of its business establishments are vineyards and garden plots, as though a dam that once had barred country fields from the town had fissured and let the fields come seeping in.
The Flat graphically presents the fact that Nauvoo occupies the framework of a larger and older community. The checkerboard streets laid out by the Mormons are still discernible, although many of them are now delineated only by the fences of bordering farms. A scant two score of houses remain in what was once the most populous section of the city. Main Street and Parley Street have but few buildings facing them, although the former was the business street of old Nauvoo, and the latter, according to a visitor in the 1840’s, was lined solidly with houses for more than a mile back from the river.
The living city, which centers around the crest of the hill, is a quiet, stable little community almost wholly dependent upon agriculture and horticulture. A recently established aeronautical school strikes an anachronistic note; there are two Roman Catholic boarding schools, a cheese factory, and a winery, but most of Nauvoo’s citizens look to the soil for their livelihood. Grape culture, instituted by the French communists who occupied Nauvoo after the expulsion of the Mormons, remains the most important source of income. Many thousands of gallons of wine and grape juice are pressed annually; the remainder of the crop is shipped out. Most of this leaves by truck or ferry.
When the Mormons, harried out of Missouri by an irate citizenry, came to this place in the spring of 1839, there was nothing here but half a dozen buildings in what pretentiously called itself the town of Commerce. “The place,” wrote Joseph Smith, “was literally a wilderness… but believing that it might become a healthy place by the blessing of Heaven to the Saints, and no more eligible place presenting itself, I considered it wisdom to make an attempt to build up a city.” Shortly he renamed the town Nauvoo, to which many writers and others have properly added the phrase–“the beautiful.”
Smith had founded his church nine years before, at Fayette, New York, shortly after he had published the Book of Mormon, which he offered as an addendum to the Bible. The book, he claimed, was a divinely inspired translation of a set of gold plates that he had dug up, under the guidance of an angel, on a hill near Palmyra, New York.
By shrewdly bargaining their political support, the Saints obtained a highly favorable charter for Nauvoo from the legislature. Nauvoo was made virtually an autonomous state, empowered to pass any laws not in direct conflict with the State or Federal constitutions, and to maintain its own militia and city court.
While bricklayers and carpenters were fashioning a city out of the wilderness, Smith dispatched missionaries to the Fast and to Europe. In England they began publishing the Millenial Star, still in existence, and distributed thousands of copies of the Book of Mormon. Hundreds of immigrants began pouring into the new Zion, and by the fall of 1842 the new Mormon paper, Times and Seasons, estimated that Nauvoo contained “between 7,000 and 8,000 houses, with a population Of 14,000 or 15,000.” In 1841 the Saints began work on a great temple and a hotel, the Nauvoo House, as dictated in a revelation to Smith. At its peak, in 1845, the city had more than 20,000 inhabitants.
As the city spread over the promontory, opposition began to rumble among the Gentiles, as the non-Mormons were called. The Saints usually voted as a bloc and their neighbors feared political domination. Opposition grew when John C. Bennett, an opportunistic politician who had lobbied for the city charter, broke with the Saints and published in 1842 a lurid booklet, History of the Saints; or an Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism, which made the first detailed charges of polygamy against the Mormons.
Polygamy was never openly practiced at Nauvoo; not until 1852, in Utah, did Brigham Young announce the “plural wives” revelation, which he claimed Smith had received at Nauvoo on July 12, 1843. The Reorganized Church has consistently denied the authenticity of this revelation, but it is incontrovertible that rumors of polygamy at Nauvoo were rife in this region long before Smith’s death.
The Prophet reached the height of his career in 1844, when, following unsuccessful attempts to secure reparation from Missouri for the confiscation of Mormon property, he announced himself as a candidate for the presidency of the United States. Some historians have questioned the seriousness of his intentions, although hundreds of the most eloquent church leaders were sent out to preach their religion and to electioneer for him.
Then suddenly occurred a schism that rocked the church. William and Wilson Law, Dr. R. D. Foster, Sylvester Emmons, and a few of their friends unexpectedly broke with the church, and on June 7, 1844, published the first and only issue of the Expositor. “We are aware,” ran the preamble, “that we are hazarding every earthly blessing, particularly property, and probably life itself, in striking this blow at tyranny and oppression.” They attacked polygamy and the political aspirations of Smith, and called for repeal of the powerful city charter.
The city marshal, on Smith’s order, immediately destroyed the press, pied the type, and burned the remaining copies of the Expositor. The Laws fled to Carthage and procured a warrant for the arrest of Smith and other Mormon leaders. The Prophet and his brother surrendered themselves and were jailed. Mobs began to form, wild rumors circulated among both Gentiles and Mormons, and Governor Ford hurried to Carthage to quiet the unrest.
On June 27, while Ford was at Nauvoo assuring the uneasy Saints that Smith would receive justice, a mob stormed the jail at Carthage and murdered the Prophet and his brother Hyrum, the Patriarch.
The Mormon leaders preaching and campaigning in the East hurriedly returned to Nauvoo, and Brigham Young soon took command. But opposition to the Saints abated only temporarily. In January 1845, the Nauvoo charter was repealed, and armed clashes continued throughout the summer. Then, on September 24, Young announced that “as soon as grass grows,” the Saints would leave Illinois and migrate to a distant place.
Nauvoo was transformed into a gigantic wagon shop, and the town echoed continually with the sound of hammer and saw. Property was disposed of at a fraction of its value; horses and oxen were at a premium. In February, 1846, Brigham Young led the first body of Saints across the Mississippi, and by spring the number of emigrants averaged one thousand a week. But rumors persisted that many of the Saints were planning to remain, and an armed force of Gentiles attacked the town.
For several days there was open warfare, which ceased only when the remaining Mormons agreed to leave immediately. “The ferry boats were crowded,” wrote an eye-witness, “and the river bank was lined with anxious fugitives, sadly awaiting their turn to pass over and take up their solitary march to the wilderness.” Out of this epic march came the settlement of Utah and the final achievement of peace and prosperity by the Saints.
Nauvoo was left deserted. Weeds took root in the streets, and rats scurried fearlessly through the open doors of Saints’ houses. The Temple, which had been almost completed, stood mute and staring above the abandoned city. Late in 1848 it was fired by an incendiary, and only the walls were left standing.
Then, in 1849, a small band of French communists, the Icarians, came to Nauvoo from Texas, where they had made a brief and unsuccessful attempt to found a colony. At their head was Etienne Cabet, prominent French jurist, author of Voyage to Icaria, and True Christianity, in which he had advocated a communistic society based on the moral teachings of Christ.
The Icarians soon set up a community governed by a president, elected annually, and by a cabinet of directors for each division of activity. The workshops and labor gangs were supervised by foremen elected monthly by the workers. Possession of money was restricted to the director of finance; shoes and clothing were supplied from the common fund. Icarian children, who entered the colony’s school at the age of seven, were permitted to visit their parents on Sundays only, and were trained to manage the dormitories where they lived.
Fascinated by the ruins of the Temple, Cabet decided to reconstruct it. After a considerable sum of money had been spent, a terrific storm struck Nauvoo, and seeming to single out the Temple, felled the walls with a roar that was heard miles away.
Already saddled with considerable debt, the Icarians began to grumble against Cabet. Shirking became contagious, production slackened, and individualism crept into the colony. “The beast began to show itself,” wrote Emile Vallet. “Having been raised under the influence of individualism, we could not be expected to fulfill the requirements of such a mode of life.” In winter the coal that was to be equally divided among all was carried away by a few as soon as it arrived; a greedy few at the table would consume the butter intended for all.
Steadily Cabet lost his followers’ esteem, and in 1856 he was defeated for the presidency. When he organized a strike, the majority locked the dining hall door, and finally, realizing that the breach could not be healed, Cabet and his followers withdrew to St. Louis. There, unattended and brooding over the failure of his plans, the Utopian died. The majority group sold their property and joined forces with a branch colony established in 1853 at Corning, Iowa. This group, faring somewhat better, held together for about twenty years.
Thus ended the unconventional days of Nauvoo. Gradual resettlement, much of it by Germans, began in the late fifties and sixties, but not in sufficient numbers to occupy the community left by the Mormons. Most of the frame buildings fell into ruin and were torn down, and by degrees Nauvoo scaled itself down to its present size. The façade of the Temple, somber and ruined on the crest of the Hill, was at last condemned and torn down. The limestone blocks went into the construction of many a house and commercial building, thus diffusing throughout the city the Temple that Joseph Smith had planned as the spiritual center and material glory of Nauvoo.
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