Free American Crucifixion by Alex Beam

Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.

    JOSEPH WORKED IN THE STORE, AND AFTER 1843 HE LIVED IN THE stately Nauvoo Mansion, a two-story L-shaped building at the intersection of Sidney (as in Rigdon) and Main Streets. The mansion had seventeen rooms, many of them rented out to tourists or transients, and boasted the largest stable in Illinois, a brick structure large enough to hold seventy-five horses. There was a cannon mounted in the front yard, and the premises were often under guard, as Joseph feared process servers or Missouri bounty hunters invading his home.

    Joseph Smith, Emma Smith, and Joseph’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, who lived with them in Nauvoo.
    Credit: Utah State Historical Society
    Joseph and Emma employed considerable live-in help: an African American washerwoman named Jane Manning and a cook, as well as serving girls to help in the dining room. (Manning, who would later join the Mormon migration to Utah, was one of about forty free blacks living in Nauvoo.) At banquets, it was not uncommon for Joseph and Emma to help serve guests themselves, aided by the young women domiciled at the Nauvoo Mansion. The mansion girls performed household chores in return for room and board. The teenage women—Sarah and Maria Lawrence, Emily and Eliza Partridge, and Lucy Walker—proved to be a temptation too great for Joseph to resist. Having covertly introduced his revelation on polygamous marriage in 1843, he ended up marrying them all, and the ensuing opéra bouffe opening and closing of bedroom doors tormented his long-suffering wife Emma.
    The mansion was Emma’s home, too, and in addition to being a hotel, it was where she raised her four children, one of them an adopted daughter. Her oldest son, Joseph, a small boy during the Nauvoo years, remembered her traveling to St. Louis to buy furniture, curtains, linen, and dishes for the newly opened mansion. “When she returned,” her son wrote, “Mother found installed in the keeping-room of the hotel . . . a fully equipped tavern bar, and Porter Rockwell in charge as tender.”
    She sent Joseph III to find his father. “Joseph,” she asked her husband. “What is the meaning of that bar in this house?”
    Joseph explained that his friend had just been freed from a Missouri jail, and planned to open up a combination bar and barber shop across the street. The mansion tavern arrangement was purely temporary, he said.
    It proved to be very temporary indeed. “How does it look for the spiritual head of a religious body to be keeping a hotel in which a room is fitted out as a liquor-selling establishment?” Emma asked. “Either that bar goes out of the house, or we will!”
    Inside both his homes, first in the rustic log cabin and then at the Nauvoo Mansion, Joseph installed hiding places to provide refuge from unwanted visitors. In his first house, there was a hinged portion of the staircase leading to the cellar. Lifting the trick stairs led to “a vaulted place . . . large enough for a couple of people to occupy, either sitting or lying down, affording a degree of comfort for a stay of long or short duration as necessary,” Joseph Smith III recalled. The mansion had a garret apartment accessible from a false-backed closet built flush to one of the chimneys. If one pulled down a rack of clothespins on the back of the closet, a small staircase leading to the attic came into view. Joseph III remembered when some “so-called officials from Missouri seeking to arrest [his father] on trumped-up charges” dropped by the family home, unannounced. “Suddenly, Father and the friend who was with him disappeared,” the son remembered, “and when the men came in they found the household quietly engaged in its customary affairs.
    Questioned, Mother said her husband had been there a little while before but was not there then. She invited them in to assure themselves