Joseph Smith Was Running for U.S. President When a Mob Killed Him in an Illinois Jail

Joseph Smith Jr. founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830 at the age of 24, publishing the Book of Mormon — which he described as a translation, by divine instrument, of writing on golden plates buried near his upstate New York home and revealed to him by an angel in 1823. The text covered the religious history of pre-Columbian American peoples descended from Israelite migrants. The publication of the book gathered, fairly quickly, several thousand converts in New York, Ohio, and Missouri.

The community moved several times under pressure from neighbors. Smith founded the city of Nauvoo on a bend of the Mississippi in Illinois in 1839; under his mayoralty it grew to roughly 12,000 people, briefly the second-largest city in the state. Inside the marriage practices of the inner circle, Smith was secretly entering plural marriages — about thirty to forty additional women across the early 1840s, ten of whom were between 14 and 20. The doctrine was not publicly acknowledged until after his death.

In 1844, Smith launched a campaign for U.S. president. The same year, the dissident Nauvoo Expositor published an exposé of the polygamy. Smith, as mayor, had its printing press destroyed. The destruction of the press triggered legal charges. He surrendered to authorities at Carthage, Illinois. On the afternoon of June 27, 1844, an armed mob of about 200 men with blackened faces stormed Carthage Jail. Smith fired three shots from a smuggled "pepper-box" pistol, wounding three attackers, before being shot multiple times and falling out of an upstairs window. He died at 38. His brother Hyrum was killed in the same attack. Smith remains the first U.S. presidential candidate to have been assassinated.