Mormon founder Joseph Smith was killed by a mob in Illinois
On this day · 27 June 1844
An armed mob with gunpowder-blackened faces stormed an Illinois jail and shot the Latter-day Saint movement's founder and his brother.
On June 27, 1844, an armed mob of roughly 150 to 200 men, their faces blackened with wet gunpowder, stormed the jail in Carthage, Illinois, and killed Joseph Smith, the 38-year-old founder of the Latter-day Saint movement, along with his brother Hyrum.
The brothers were being held on charges of treason. The crisis had escalated weeks earlier, after Smith and the Nauvoo city council ordered the destruction of a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, that had attacked him over practices including plural marriage. Outrage at the press’s suppression hardened opposition across the region.
Hyrum was shot through the bedroom door; Joseph was hit as he reached a window and fell to the yard below.
The killings made Smith a martyr to his followers and triggered a leadership struggle. Within a few years, Brigham Young would lead the largest body of believers on the long migration west to the Great Salt Lake valley.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
