In August 1831 Joseph Smith announced that Independence, Missouri, would be the center place of the City of Zion, where his followers were to gather before the millennium. Church leaders bought land there, and by 1833 the Latter-day Saints in Jackson County numbered more than a thousand, perhaps a third of the county or more.
The article
Most of them came from New England and the Ohio Valley, and unlike their neighbors from the slave states, most opposed slavery. In July 1833 the church's newspaper in Independence, The Evening and the Morning Star, printed an article titled "Free People of Color," with an extract from Missouri's laws. The church said it was meant to discourage Black converts from moving to Missouri, not to invite them.
On July 20, 1833, Jackson County residents met in Independence. Their address counted twelve hundred newcomers, called them barely above "the condition of our blacks," complained of their "corrupting influence on our slaves," and read the article as "an indirect invitation to the free brethren of color in Illinois, to come up, like the rest, to the land of Zion." It demanded that the Star close and the Latter-day Saints pledge to leave. When the editor, William W. Phelps, Bishop Edward Partridge and the keeper of the church storehouse asked for time, the meeting voted to raze the printing office, and did it that afternoon. One of the committee was Samuel D. Lucas, who would command militia against them five years later.
Across the river
Raids on outlying settlements went on into the fall. On November 4 a fight near the Blue River left casualties on both sides. The Latter-day Saints were disarmed, and in the historian Richard Lloyd Anderson's words, mounted squads went out with threats and enough beatings and destruction of homes to force flight. Most fled across the Missouri to Clay County. The lieutenant governor, Lilburn Boggs, a Jackson County man, sided with the vigilantes.
In 1836 Alexander Doniphan, a Liberty lawyer who had tried and failed to win their land back in court, helped make Caldwell County for them, and they built Far West there. When the 1838 war broke out over Daviess County, Boggs was governor, and his order of October 27 led to the surrender at Far West and the church's expulsion from the state. Missouri rescinded the order on June 25, 1976.
Liberty Jail
Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum and four others, Sidney Rigdon, Lyman Wight, Caleb Baldwin and Alexander McRae, were committed to the Clay County jail at Liberty around November 30, 1838, to await trial for treason and other charges. They spent the winter in its lower room. In March 1839 Smith dictated a letter there, parts of which became church scripture. Rigdon was let go that winter. In April the rest were taken to Gallatin for a Daviess County grand jury, and on the way to a change of venue in Boone County they escaped. The jail site on North Main Street in Liberty is a visitor center run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with a cutaway reconstruction of the jail.