Richard Anderson called Nauvoo a deliberate last will and testament of Joseph Smith, and I think he's right.

Coming up next: Joseph Smith and the beginnings of Nauvoo.

KJZZ Television, in cooperation with the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of The Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

In this episode of The Joseph Smith Papers, we'll look at some of those early events that led to the founding of the City Beautiful, Nauvoo.

We begin in the winter of 1839, with Joseph Smith still in Liberty Jail and his people, the Mormons, being driven out of the state and scattered all up and down the Mississippi River, trying to survive.

It was, for them, a difficult and a disheartening time.

As the Saints were leaving Missouri in the expulsion of 1838 and ’39, that winter and early spring, they had a lot of questions in their mind.

Of course, the first was, will we ever get back on the lands that we've left?

And secondly, where are we going to go?

Where should we go? Where would the Prophet have us go?

And the message that they had was: Go where you can for now.

So they spread out along the riverfront, 10 or 11 counties,

and ultimately across from the peninsula, where Nauvoo was built, into Iowa in a couple of counties there.

Some of them went down the Missouri River and made it all the way to St. Louis and stayed there. There were jobs there.

They were so devastated after the disaster of Missouri that they could not do anything more than simply regroup and survive.

There’s not a revelation a month later saying, “Build a temple.”

There’s not a revelation a year later saying, “Build a temple.” And it really took that long to regroup and get enough resources to even think of once again trying to build a temple after the Missouri disaster.

As the Mormons left Missouri,

General John B. Clark of the militia ordered them not to gather again but to disperse.

Well, unfortunately, as some of the Mormons looked back over their experience in Ohio

and Independence and now, lastly, Far West,

they took that counsel to heart.

There was a meeting held in Quincy among the church leaders who were there,

and the discussion raised this question: “Should we gather in large numbers again? It seems to us that, when we did that last time in Independence, the city of Zion, and in Far West

(the second capital), and several places in between,

the neighbors there just didn't get along with us.

They didn’t want us there.”

Even old-time faithful members like Edward Partridge said,

“Enough is enough. Every time we gather, we get clobbered.

Why don’t we just go out on our farms and quietly do our business? And we’ll read the Book of Mormon and we’ll know Joseph is a prophet. But I don’t know if I want to gather again,” and Sidney Rigdon led that charge.

When that meeting was over—

and of course, Joseph Smith wasn’t there—

the voice of the assembled Saints came that they didn’t want to gather again. Notwithstanding, a beautiful place was being made available to them.

They had an opportunity to buy some land on the peninsula where Nauvoo was built. Isaac Galland was a landowner.

He owned a small parcel there and also thousands of acres across the river in Iowa. But here on the peninsula was a land. He said he was interested in helping the church,

but they decided not to.

They could not unanimously agree that they should.

Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve stepped forward and said, “No. We have to gather. The entire plan depends on it.

We cannot scatter. We must hold these people together, and when Joseph comes, he will tell us what to do.”

They communicated with Joseph Smith, who was still in Liberty Jail.

The important response that they got from the Prophet was in a letter in March 1839.

“It still seems to bear heavily in our minds that the Church would do well to secure themselves the contract of the land which is proposed to them by Mr. Isaac Galland.”

“It seems to be deeply impressed upon our minds”—

in other words, the Spirit is whispering to us—“that the Saints ought to lay hold of every door that shall seem to be opened unto them.” Well,

after the Prophet was released from Liberty early in, well, just a few weeks later,

he was designated by this local committee to be one of those who traveled northward to

the peninsula, where Galland’s property existed.

Joseph's experiences in Missouri as a whole sharpened his priorities and taught him. Clearly, he understood that the gathering of the Saints around the temple was not just a social nicety. It was a commandment.

In an earlier segment of this program,

Gordon Madsen and Alex Baugh both talked about how profound

the experience of Liberty Jail was for Joseph Smith and that it changed him in many ways.

It was important in many ways,

but for our purposes right now it was important in two more ways.

One was he had the forced luxury, if you will,

of five and a half months imprisonment,

including Liberty Jail, to ponder what had gone right, what had got wrong and how we do it different and better next time

because there has to be a next time.

And by the time he comes out, he's got a very clear idea of what the priorities are,

what his personal responsibility is, what’s left

that’s his to do, his alone, and a pretty good plan, I would gather, of how to go about it.

The other thing he learns in Liberty Jail is that he doesn't have a long time to do this.

Now, clear back in New York, one of the revelations foreshadowed the possibility of death at some point— as Christ himself was killed, so might you.

But now he learns that it's not just a possibility,

it’s a probability. Now, he expressed this a number of times in Nauvoo in various ways.

One of the most interesting is in 1842 in April 28th to the Relief Society, where he says to the sisters,

“Isn’t it great for us to be together

and for me to have the opportunity to teach you?

And it’s great partly because we won't have this opportunity very often.

For according to my prayers, the Lord has appointed me elsewhere.”

Another occasion: “Some have supposed

that Brother Joseph could not die, but this is a mistake.

It is true, there have been times when I’ve had the promise of my life to accomplish such and such things,

but having accomplished those things,

I have not at present any lease of my life, and I’m as liable to die as other men.”

His closest associates had some sense of that,

although none of them really expected and all of them hoped it was a false prophecy.

They didn't want to see him go.

But upon his death, one of his friends, Joseph Fielding,

wrote in his diary, still in the midst of his grief at the passing of Joseph Smith.

“Now we see why the Lord pushed things ahead prematurely

on account of the shortness of Joseph’s time.”

In hindsight, then, we see that in order to comprehend Joseph’s actions in Nauvoo,

we have to try to understand him as he left Liberty Jail.

Now the question becomes then, when Joseph left the jail,

what in fact did he see as his priorities and what was his business to accomplish in Nauvoo?

Clearly, the temple center city was the heart of it all.

He also had a sense that Nauvoo was not a permanent place.

It was a place to regroup, to survive, a place of refuge,

but it wasn’t even the place of refuge

because Joseph Smith did understand—how, we don’t know, he’s never written this down—

that there was a place of refuge preparing far away in the west,

a place in the Rocky Mountains.

So he understood that Nauvoo was somewhat temporary,

but it had a tremendous responsibility, as did he, to be a temple city for the gathered Saints and a place of refuge where they could rebuild.

Now none of the, most of the Saints did not understand this.

The prophecies about the West weren't widely known.

The expectations that Joseph was not going to be around very long certainly were not known.

With that sense of urgency, then, Joseph was no sooner released from prison than he traveled to the area of Commerce, which was near the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi River, to make the first purchases of land

for the gathering of the Saints.

After the Prophet’s committee completed their purchases in the Commerce area, they returned to Quincy.

This is early May, and about six weeks later, in late June,

an agent for the Church visited the area again.

Vinson Knight was sent to purchase the land in Iowa.

Isaac Galland had 13,000 acres there,

and he was asking $39,000 for the property. It included the city of Nashville, which was another paper town with a few residents.

And also in that area, there was an old, abandoned military fort. And that was available because the barracks could be useful.

So on both sides of the river, those who came first were able to find sheds and abandoned houses

and occupy them while they were building their own houses and finding better quarters.

And often there was more than one family living in these dwellings, just to get a start.

Though there were a few settlers,

the land around Nauvoo was largely undeveloped.

The federal government had made available that land, and speculators had bought up large tracts.

Isaac Galland was one of those. He and others now made that land available to the Latter-day Saints.

There were approximately 100 people living in the promontory area at the time of the arrival of our people in 1839.

And they were comprised of a number of families. And so Nauvoo, of course, over the years from 1839 to 1846, of course, became a Mormon city, if you will.

But nonetheless, there were a number of nonmember folk who fitted into the community very well and

were part of the community.

There were three men who had gone in together and purchased around 5,000 acres at the north end of the peninsula, up where the quarry was developed later for the temple. And it was north of the area where Commerce City and Commerce town were located.

So this was a large tract. It was available, it was pretty good land, but it was not as good as the lower land.

There were 5,000 acres there,

and church leaders authorized the purchase of that land on a 20-year contract. The cost was $50,000,

but with the interest over that 20 years,

the total commitment added up to $144,500.

And this included Commerce City, that parcel, that paper town

in a little corner of Commerce.

Both of those paper towns were later annexed into Nauvoo.

So this purchase on August 12th left the Church with a parcel at the south end and a parcel at the north end, with a little piece in between.

And this was another one of the Whites’.

William White had some land there, about 80 acres, and a house,

a log home. And he sold that to the church for $3,500

about a week after the Hotchkiss purchase was concluded.

Now that log home on the William White property is the home where Emma and Joseph lived.

We know it is the Homestead. They added on to it, and there were other extensions later.

So with these purchases, then,

the Church ended up owning all but about 125 acres of the peninsula on the Illinois side. Joseph was among the first to move in,

and he began in earnest to lay out a city for the Saints.

Joseph was

the great orchestrator of the development and layout and planning of Nauvoo—the type of structures, the layout, the orchards, gardens, fields, and things were certainly part of Joseph’s design and perspective of

a religious community, or a community of the Saints,

with the temple as the focal point, with the farmland for the most part in the outer perimeters beyond the city itself.

Joseph’s philosophy was if you came as a wealthy merchant and you set up business and you could afford to pay more for a lot, you’d pay more. If you were a widow with very little to go on,

you were given a very modest price or even perhaps a free lot.

Later, by the spring of 1840,

the Hancock County, Illinois, peninsula was renamed Nauvoo.

Joseph called Nauvoo the City Beautiful,

a deserving name for any who have been there.

The word “Nauvoo” is Sephardic Hebrew, suggests a beautiful

location, a place of comfort and peace.

And Nauvoo really was handsomely situated.

The rolling hills, bluffs, wooded along the Mississippi River gave way to

a flattish, prairie-like promontory that jutted west. And the Mississippi River came and bent

west around it, actually encircling the promontory

on three sides, and river about a half, three-quarters of a mile wide. The distance from the temple to the river north and south, also west was approximately a mile in each direction, so you can get some idea that it kind of expanded.

There were lots and lots of commodities moving up and down the river. There were approximately,

oh, on an average, maybe 16 boats docking at Nauvoo each day.

When compared with the names of the day,

the name Nauvoo is somewhat unusual.

In 1841, the First Presidency issued a proclamation in which they explained how the name was chosen and what it meant.

This proclamation says, “The name of our city (Nauvoo) is of Hebrew origin,

and it signifies a beautiful situation,

or place, carrying with it, also the idea of rest;

and it is truly descriptive of this most delightful situation.”

Well, Nauvoo is a verb. How beautiful are? Beautiful are

the feet of him who bringeth good tidings, and this idea of beauty can also be translated “delightful.”

It has a sense of place or situation, and it is, and it is, and it has a sacred meaning. It will be a temple city.

Indeed, it was a beautiful place, but it was beauty with a price.

A great deal of toil and suffering was required of the Saints before it became that beautiful temple city.

The climate of Nauvoo is very interesting.

It's, of course, like the rest of the Upper Mississippi River Valley,

where beautiful spring and autumn days and often then summer,

but often very oppressive heat and humidity. And in winter,

bleak and dreary and windblown and cold and forbidding almost, and yet beautiful winter days as well. The settlement of the Latter-day Saints on the promontory

was with mixed blessings because it was, it was low in places and wettish and swampish,

and they were plagued with fevers and malaria in the early times.

But as the workforces jumped onto Nauvoo and dug drainage systems on the springs

and streams that would flow off of the bluffs, down into the flat, and form wet areas and dug those on out into the river so that they could, these low, wet areas could drain, Nauvoo became a more healthy place.

And Nauvoo was a pretty place.

Many of the log structures were whitewashed, according to a source,

and suggest that in that afternoon and setting sun, the sun glistened off of those structures and made quite a pretty sight.

Nauvoo needed a system to govern the people.

It needed a civil government,

and it also needed a master plan whereby the Church could grow. Accordingly,

In the October 1839 general conference of the Church,

the matter was taken up.

There was a post office and a justice of the peace with the Commerce name on them serving the Saints, but that was technically not applied to Nauvoo.

And so, with Nauvoo already designated as a separate parcel

but without any civil government,

the creation of a stake— temporarily, for about 16 months—served both purposes.

And so it was appointed a stake and a place of gathering and then officers were appointed, including William Marks as the president,

Bishop Whitney and three other bishops for the four quarters of the ward, four quarters of the city, four wards. These were used as voting districts and they were also used as the four wards. That’s how that name came into Church use. The political wards became spiritual wards, bishop's wards, if you will. And then it was voted that a stake of the church be established on the west side of the river, Iowa territory,

over which Elder John Smith was appointed president.

This is the prophet's uncle, John Smith. And so you have two stakes.

One was called the Nauvoo Stake,

the other was called initially the Iowa Stake.

One year later, October 1840,

another conference was held in which it was proposed to build a city temple and also another proposal:

a municipal innovation called

a city charter championed by none other than a newcomer to Mormonism, John C. Bennett.

This time, the conference accomplishes two new purposes, two very important purposes.

Number one, they take action that leads to the issuance of a charter for a city, and secondly, they approve a proposal to build the temple.

The charter issue comes forward this way:

Joseph Smith stands before the General Conference and proposes that a

a petition be formed to ask the state legislature to issue a charter. It was approved in December,

signed by Governor Thomas Carlin,

and it became effective in February 1841.

And in the

pursuing, the receiving of a charter for the city,

Joseph certainly was very actively involved

and initially felt blessed to have the efforts of John C. Bennett.

John C. Bennett was certainly a bright and capable person.

He had some horrendous flaws,

but because of John C. Bennett's role in working with the state legislature and seeing to the reception of the charter,

the Saints joyfully voted him in as their first mayor.

Several other Illinois cities were governed by provisions of a city charter, but there were features of Nauvoo’s charter that were unique to the Mormon city.

It differed in this respect:

Not only did the charter authorize the creation of a city with all of its offices,

a mayor and aldermen and council.

But it also authorized a municipal court whose members would be members of

the city council, aldermen and councillors.

And it allowed the city to create its own university

and its own militia.

And then, when the First Presidency celebrated the passage of the Nauvoo charter,

they called it one of the most liberal charters with the most plenary powers ever conferred by a legislative assembly on free citizens for the city of Nauvoo, the Nauvoo Legion, and the University of the City of Nauvoo.

The city of Nauvoo, of course,

was a guarantee that Latter-day Saints, with their friends who were not members in the city, would control that city.

They would, they would police, they would pass laws that were suitable to them,

and they would govern themselves.

I’ll say a few words about the university. It was an unusual thing. There weren’t very many

schools of higher learning in Illinois yet.

A few colleges,

but this was a unique organization in that it created a city university. When the First Presidency issued their proclamation in early 1841,

they said this about the university:

“The University of the City of Nauvoo will enable us to teach our children wisdom, to instruct them in all the knowledge and learning in the arts, sciences, and learned professions.

We hope to make this institution one of the great lights of the world, and by and through it, to diffuse that kind of knowledge which will be of practicable utility, and for the public good,

and also for private and individual happiness.”

A common description of what you might say at that time.

So that concept became a Church motive to sponsor and encourage education for its people.

And it began, of course, in Kirtland with the School of the Prophets and the school there for adults. And here is the second iteration of that.

Also, similar to other government units in the state of Illinois,

Nauvoo formed a city militia. At one time, There were nearly 5,000 men mustered into its ranks between the ages of 18 and 45. This time, unlike Missouri,

Joseph Smith was the commander in chief.

The Nauvoo Legion was also welcomed by the First Presidency.

Of the legion, they said,

“The Nauvoo Legion embraces all our military power,

and will enable us to perform our military duty by ourselves,

not be dependent on others to defend ourselves,

and thus afford us the power and privilege of avoiding one of the most fruitful sources of strife,

oppression and collision with the world.”

The early years of Nauvoo did not forget Missouri.

In fact, it responded to Missouri's experiences and built upon them and set in place protections.

One of them was the charter for the city.

The other was the charter for the Nauvoo Legion.

Now, of course, central to the plan for the city of Nauvoo was the temple.

Joseph called for ideas to be proposed for the temple.

The architect whose plan was accepted was William Weeks.

“The proposal here is as follows,”

quoting from the minutes of that general conference, October 3rd, 1840. “The president then spoke of the necessity of building a house of the Lord in this place.”

That’s what they called the Kirtland Temple;

it was the Lord’s house,

“Whereupon it was resolved that the Saints build a house for the worship of God, and that Reynolds Cahoon,

Elias Higbee, and Alpheus Cutler,” who had been involved in the Kirtland Temple, “be appointed a committee to build the same.”

The site selected for the temple was right at the center of Nauvoo, if you will.

It is a mile inland from the farthest point out into the river. It’s a mile south of the northern point of the river and a mile north of the southern part of the river.

So it’s a mile in each of those three directions, and, of course, behind you you’ve got the prairie.

The land belonged to Daniel H. Wells.

He was a merchant down in Commerce, and he later had a mercantile business up on Mulholland Street,

which is the street on which the temple was built.

So that’s where the land was made available on the brow of the hill overlooking the Mississippi and overlooking

the flats, the lower part of Nauvoo.

With the temple as its spiritual and geographical center,

the city of Nauvoo grew until it became one of the largest cities in Illinois, second only to Chicago.

But while the city prospered and became beautiful,

the Saints’ losses in Missouri continued to weigh on Joseph,

and he sought help, only to be told, “Your cause is just,

but I can do nothing for you.” Next week:

Joseph Smith goes to Washington.

I’m Glenn Rawson. Thanks for joining us.