Three weeks before Joseph Smith’s death, a group of Mormon dissenters published a newspaper in Nauvoo.
It lasted one issue.
Joseph Smith ordered its press destroyed.
That statement is historically true, but the episode is often told so badly that either Joseph becomes a cartoon dictator or the destruction is treated as an unremarkable municipal procedure.
The actual history is more revealing.
What did the Expositor publish?
The Nauvoo Expositor appeared on June 7, 1844.
Its publishers included William Law, formerly a counselor in the First Presidency, along with other dissidents.
According to the LDS Church’s own Church History Topics essay, the paper attacked:
- plural marriage;
- Joseph Smith’s recent teaching about the nature of God in the King Follett discourse;
- and his blending of religious and civic authority in Nauvoo.
The writers were not neutral journalists. They were hostile dissenters and used inflammatory language.
But some of the matters they exposed—especially plural marriage—concerned practices Joseph had publicly denied or kept from much of the wider community.
That makes the content important even if the tone was antagonistic.
Joseph was not acting only as church president
This is the heart of the problem.
Joseph Smith was:
- president of the Church;
- mayor of Nauvoo;
- lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion;
- and a dominant political figure in the city.
The Nauvoo City Council met on June 8 and June 10.
The council declared the Expositor a public nuisance. Joseph, acting as mayor, then ordered the city marshal to destroy the press, scatter the type, and burn copies of the paper.
Joseph Smith Papers preserves the order and the history of its execution.
A posse of roughly one hundred men carried it out.
This was not simply church discipline against excommunicated members.
Civil power destroyed private printing equipment.
Was it obviously illegal under the First Amendment?
No—and critics should stop saying that.
The modern incorporation of the First Amendment against state and local governments came later through the Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1844, the constitutional situation was different.
The Nauvoo council cited nuisance law, English common-law authority, and American precedent.
The LDS Church’s historical essay states that the council had reason to believe it was acting legally.
It also summarizes later scholarship more cautiously: destroying copies of the newspaper may have been within the council’s authority, while destroying the printing press itself may have exceeded it.
That is far more precise than saying:
“Joseph Smith violated the First Amendment.”
The legal case was contested in its own time and remains historically technical.
Legal uncertainty does not erase the authority problem
Even if Joseph and the council sincerely believed they had legal power, the episode remains morally and institutionally important.
A religious leader whose secret practices were being exposed also possessed municipal power over the press exposing them.
That creates an obvious conflict of interest.
The question becomes:
How should a claimed prophet use coercive civic authority when dissenters publish accusations about his own conduct?
Destroying the press did not answer the accusations.
It suppressed the instrument publishing them.
Plural marriage changes the moral context
The Expositor’s charges cannot simply be dismissed as anti-Mormon lies.
Modern LDS historical materials acknowledge that Joseph practiced plural marriage, including sealings to women already married to other men, and that Emma did not know of all of his plural marriages.
This does not mean every line in the Expositor was accurate.
It means the paper was exposing at least one major practice that later official LDS history acknowledges as real.
Therefore the event is not well described as government merely shutting down malicious fabrication.
The press mixed polemic with allegations grounded in genuine internal disputes.
The aftermath
The destruction intensified an already dangerous regional crisis.
Joseph and others were charged with riot.
Governor Thomas Ford rejected Nauvoo’s attempts to resolve the matter solely through its own municipal mechanisms and required Joseph to face proceedings in Carthage.
Joseph eventually went to Carthage.
There he was also charged with treason after further escalation and martial-law measures.
Before any trial could determine his guilt, a mob stormed the jail and murdered Joseph and Hyrum Smith.
That murder was lawless and indefensible.
Nothing about criticizing Joseph’s destruction of a press excuses his assassination.
Christian apologetics should say both things clearly.
Does the Expositor episode disprove Mormonism?
Not by itself.
Prophets in the Bible can make political mistakes. Christian rulers and bishops have committed far worse abuses. Bad judgment does not logically prove a person never received revelation.
The episode matters because LDS authority claims are unusually strong.
Joseph was not merely a fallible pastor.
He claimed to restore priesthood, receive new scripture, speak with heavenly messengers, and govern under divine direction.
When that authority becomes intertwined with secrecy, plural marriage, municipal law, armed militia power, and suppression of dissent, the credibility stakes rise.
A restoration should withstand exposure
Historic Christianity makes truth claims that can be investigated in public sources.
Mormonism similarly asks people to trust Joseph Smith’s history and revelations.
The Expositor affair raises a simple principle:
Truth should be able to survive criticism without destroying the critic’s printing press.
That does not mean every accusation deserves respect.
It means coercive suppression is especially troubling when the disputed allegations concern conduct that later proves substantially real.
Final Verdict
Joseph Smith did order the Nauvoo Expositor press destroyed. The legal setting was more complicated than a modern First Amendment slogan: the city council invoked nuisance law and operated amid genuine fears of anti-Mormon violence.
Those qualifications do not remove the central moral and prophetic problem. Joseph used concentrated civil and military power against a dissenting press exposing his plural marriages, theology, and authority—matters that official LDS history now substantially acknowledges. The action suppressed accusations not merely because they were false, but because they threatened his leadership.
The episode is not a one-step disproof of Mormonism, but it seriously weakens appeals to Joseph’s transparent prophetic character. A restoration claiming divine authority should withstand truthful scrutiny; coercive destruction of a critical press is evidence that Joseph’s prophetic, ecclesiastical, political, and personal interests had become dangerously fused.
Key Sources
- LDS Church History Topics, “Nauvoo Expositor”: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/nauvoo-expositor?lang=eng
- Joseph Smith Papers, “Order to Destroy Nauvoo Expositor Press”: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/event/order-to-destroy-nauvoo-expositor-press
- Joseph Smith Papers, “Mayor’s Order to Nauvoo City Marshal, 10 June 1844”: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/mayors-order-to-nauvoo-city-marshal-10-june-1844/1
- Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 15, introduction: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/documents-volume-15-16-may-28-june-1844
- Dallin H. Oaks, “The Suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor,” Utah Law Review 9.4 (1965), 862–903.