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prophet and the presidency: Mormonism and politics in Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential campaign, The
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Wood, Timothy L
No issue in Smith's platform was more inspired by the Saints' misfortunes that his insistence on the vigorous protection of constitutional liberties by the federal government. The Nauvoo mayor sought to defend Mormon political rights against the hostile local and state authorities who had so often encouraged violence against the Saints in order to crush the Mormon community. Smith believed that reason was of no use with such officials, whose lawlessness seemed to embody the old motto "talk not of law to men who wear swords."38 Smith pleaded that the electorate might see fit to "give every man his constitutional freedom and the president full power to send an army to suppress mobs, and the States authority to repeal and impugn that relic of folly which makes it necessary for the governor of a state to make the demand of the President for troops, in case of invasion or rebellion."39 Thus, Smith sought a central government strong and assertive enough to defend the rights of oppressed minorities against the "mobocracy" of unfriendly neighbors. Referring back to the Saints' bloody sojourn in Missouri, Smith even sought avenues for action in case "the governor himself may be a mobber," an explicit reference to Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had used militia troops to drive the Mormons from his state in 1838. Smith intended to use the powers of the presidency to check the illegal power exercised by officials such as Boggs.
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The final item on Smith's agenda, and perhaps the most radical plank in his platform, concerned a thoroughgoing reform of America's prison system. In his "Views," Smith exhorted America's citizens to: "petition your State Legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries, blessing them as they go, and saying to them, in the name of the Lord, Go thy way, and sin no more.
"Advise your legislators, when they make laws for ... any felony, to make the penalty applicable to work upon roads, public works, or any place where the culprit can be taught more wisdom and more virtue, and become more enlightened. Rigor and seclusion will never do as much to reform the propensities of men as reason and friendship. Murder only can claim confinement or death. Let the penitentiaries be turned into seminaries of learning, where intelligence, like the angels of heaven, would banish such fragments of barbarism.1141 Again, on this issue Smith demonstrated his faith in the potential deification of humanity. A human race unfettered by the chains of original sin need not adopt a Draconian code of law. Smith also advocated the termination of imprisonment for debt, and of punishing soldiers for desertion. Smith believed that the thought of forfeiting honor would be incentive enough to keep military men at their posts.' Society's first response to crime ought to be an attempt to reintegrate the offender back into the community. Not unexpectedly, that proposal subjected Smith to a degree of ridicule. (An unfriendly newspaper editorial reprinted in the Nauvoo Neighbor remarked that "if this humane recommendation be adopted, the 'specie basis' would soon disappear from Joe's mother bank and branches . . . which would show a 'beggarly account of empty boxes.'")43 However, that view of prison reform was consistent with Smith's concept of the local community and its religious institutions as the level at which moral authority was ultimately exercised. Thus, the federal and state governments would assume a regulatory role in defining crime and overseeing the judicial process, but the reform of the individual perpetrator must be left to the community. By sentencing such convicts to meaningful labor within the community, Smith hoped that their morality might be improved, their personal honor restored, and that they might eventually be reassimilated into society as law-abiding and productive citizens.
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