Ep 199 – Lawful Dissent
Naked Mormonism Podcast
Bryce Blankenagel
4.6 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2020
⏱️ 86 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, we discuss the Law family. William, his wife Jane, and his brother Wilson, converted to the church in the mid-1830s and moved to the burgeoning city of Nauvoo in 1839. From that point forward, William and Jane were elevated to high-ranking levels of Mormon and city leadership. Joseph Smith and William Law became good friends and coworkers in Nauvoo government and military duties. But, something changed. By late 1843, William began to bristle about how much political influence Joseph Smith was gaining. By January of 1844, William was dropped from the Presidency of the church (Jo's left-hand man). William, Jane, and Wilson Law eventually became looped together with the dissenter movement within the kingdom. They finally chose to act and formed their own sect of Mormonism in Nauvoo, collected affidavits of those wronged by the Nauvoo leadership and Joseph Smith, and established an adversarial printing press. The Higbees, the Fosters, and the Laws establishing this rival church and expose printing press would catalyze a sequence of events which would lead to the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith.
Links:
History of Hancock County by Thomas Gregg
https://archive.org/details/historyofhancock00greg/page/296
History of Illinois by Thomas Ford
https://archive.org/details/ahistoryillinoi00shiegoog/page/n318
William Law Biography
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/person/william-law
Wilson Law Biography
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/person/wilson-law
JS Reflections and Blessings
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/reflections-and-blessings-16-and-23-august-1842/2
An Interview with William Law
http://www.mrm.org/law-interview
William Law, Nauvoo Dissenter by Lyndon Cook
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43040880?seq=18#metadata_info_tab_contents
JS 1844 journal
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-december-1842-june-1844-book-4-1-march-22-june-1844/1#full-transcript
Show links:
Website http://nakedmormonismpodcast.com
Twitter @NakedMormonism
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Naked-Mormonism/370003839816311
Patreon http://patreon.com/nakedmormonism
Music by Jason Comeau http://aloststateofmind.com/
Show Artwork http://weirdmormonshit.com/
Legal Counsel http://patorrez.com/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I am Ryan McKnight. I'm Kara Santa Maria. I am Christopher Smith. Hi, I'm Andrew Torres. |
| 0:06.0 | This is Naked Mormonism. The Serial Mormon History Podcast. |
| 0:15.6 | The Higbies, the Fosters, and the Laws in May of 1844. Are you in the know, dear listener? Do you understand |
| 0:27.9 | the gravity of what we're talking about yet? Hopefully it'll be clear by the end of today's |
| 0:34.8 | episode. Next episode is the big number at 200, and we've got an exciting topic |
| 0:40.5 | to discuss. But first, we have to talk about our final pillar of our trio of insurrection, |
| 0:47.8 | the laws. We've discussed the Fosters and the Higbe's, the last two episodes, but the laws |
| 0:53.5 | are certainly the most |
| 0:55.2 | important of this trio to cover before next week. So I saved the best for last. We've talked |
| 1:01.6 | about William and Jane Law, as well as William's brother, Wilson, on the podcast before. |
| 1:06.4 | Back on episode 163, live and die by the law. We discussed them extensively and even got a bit into the |
| 1:11.9 | controversy that caused them to diverge from the prophet. We talked about them when we discussed |
| 1:17.0 | doctrine in accordance section 132, the polygamy revelation. We discussed when Joseph Smith called |
| 1:22.3 | William Law a Brutus or Judas among the ranks. We've discussed the laws extensively. Today, however, |
| 1:30.3 | we're really going to get into the nitty-gritty of what happened and how the laws came to be |
| 1:35.6 | the tip of the descent spear which crippled the prophet and brought an end to his reign |
| 1:42.0 | in 1844. First, a little review of the background for the |
| 1:47.3 | law family. William and Wilson Law immigrated to Pennsylvania from their homeland of Ireland |
| 1:53.2 | sometime before 1820 with their parents Richard Law and Anne Hunter Law. The law family moved to |
| 2:00.3 | today's Ontario, Canada by 1833. Here is where |
| 2:05.1 | William Law met Jane Silverthorn, and they were married in June of 1833. William was 24 years old, |
| 2:12.1 | Wilson was 27, and Wilson remained unmarried until the 1840s. William and Jane, as well as Wilson law, all converted to the church sometime around in 1837 when it was turmoil during the late Curtland era of the church. The laws, however, did not immigrate to Curtland or even to Missouri after Joe and the Corm of Apostles were |
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