The Council of Fifty — What the Minutes Actually Say

For 172 years the record was closed and the critics filled the silence. In 2016 the minutes were published in full. They are the best thing that ever happened to this argument — and it was not the critics who published them.

The Charge, Stated at Full Strength

Joseph Smith organized a secret council in Nauvoo in 1844 to build a political kingdom. One month later that council voted to receive him as Prophet, Priest and King. It planned a government outside the reach of the United States, and it bound its members by oath against the nation that had failed them. That is the accusation, and the middle sentence is the one that matters. It is also TRUE.

So why lead with the critic’s best fact instead of burying it in paragraph nine? Because it survives being read. Let us start there, and not somewhere safer.

11 April 1844 — The Motion

Council of Fifty Minutes, 11 April 1844

“Receive from this time henceforth and forever, Joseph Smith, as our Prophet, Priest & King.”

Erastus Snow made the motion. It carried unanimously. No apologist gains anything by hiding that sentence, and the men who published it were the Church’s own historians.

Now the questions the critic never asks. Was there a coronation? No. Was there a crown, a throne, a proclamation to the city, a change in who governed Nauvoo the following morning? None of it. Rumors of a crowning circulated in 1844 and the minutes record no such thing. The vote carried no immediate political consequence whatever, and the historians who edited the volume say so plainly.

Then what was it? RELIGIOUS language, and it came straight out of the temple. Joseph had been administering the endowment in Nauvoo for two years, and its promise was that the faithful become “kings and priests unto God” (Revelation 1:6; see also Revelation 5:10). John says every saint receives that title. If a council of fifty men, most of them already endowed, applies the same biblical phrase to their prophet, the critic has to explain why the words mean ordination to a throne here and mean nothing anywhere else in Christendom.

What they were preparing for was the millennial reign of Christ. That is the whole content of the vote.

The Same Meeting, an Hour Earlier

Here is what does not travel with the king motion when critics quote it. The very same day, chairing the very same council, Joseph explained why he had admitted three men who were not Latter-day Saints — some of whom professed no creed at all.

Joseph Smith, Council of Fifty Minutes, 11 April 1844

“In the organization of this kingdom men are not consulted as to their religious opinions or notions in any shape or form whatever, and that we act upon the broad and liberal principal that all men have equal rights, and ought to be respected, and that every man has a privilege in this organization of choosing for himself voluntarily his God, and what he pleases for his religion.”

Read that against the charge. A man building a religious tyranny does not seat unbelievers in the founding body and then put on the record that faith is NO qualification for membership. Sidney Rigdon told the same council, “You need not fear that we design to trample on the rights of any man or set of men, only to seek the enjoyment of our own rights.” The theocracy charge is answered on the same page of the same minute book that supplies it.

Theodemocracy Was Published, Not Whispered

Four days after the vote, Joseph printed his political theory in the Times and Seasons for anyone in Illinois to read. He called it theodemocracy: “God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.” Not the voice of the people as the voice of God — the voice of the people assenting to the voice of God. Consent is load-bearing in that sentence. Remove it and the system he described collapses.

A secret plot does not get an editorial.

Two Charges That Collapse on Contact

“They discussed nullifying U.S. law in Utah territory.” Utah Territory did not exist in 1844. Congress created it in 1850, six years after the council was organized and six years after Joseph was dead. What the 1844 council actually examined was Texas, then an independent republic; Oregon, then under joint occupation; and California and the Great Basin, then Mexican soil. Every one of those lay outside United States jurisdiction. So nullify what, exactly? A law that does not run where you are standing is not a law you can defy.

“It included an oath of vengeance against the United States.” This one is a category error, and it is worth naming precisely because the critic has fused two separate things. The oath of vengeance was a temple matter. It was NEVER a Council of Fifty practice, it appears in no council minute, and its Nauvoo form dates to after the martyrdom — after the council’s founder had been shot in a jail cell while in state custody. Whatever the critic wants to argue about it belongs to the history of the endowment, not to a political council whose founder was already dead before that oath existed.

Two of the four charges are not weak. They are about a different subject entirely.

The Oath Itself — Since We Are Here

Hedging a documented fact costs more than stating it, so state it. A prayer of retribution was part of the endowment, and the surviving wording is a petition, not a plan: that we shall ask God to avenge the blood of Joseph Smith upon this nation. ASK God. Not raise a militia, not withhold taxes, not resist an officer. Where is the sedition in a prayer? The oldest antecedent runs back to Kirtland in 1836, when the Saints were being driven out of Jackson County and no court in Missouri would hear them. That is a psalm of imprecation in Nauvoo dress, and if the reader wants to call it unchristian, they will need to explain Psalm 94:1–2 and the martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6:9–10 first.

It is also gone, by a dated instruction, in writing. President Heber J. Grant appointed a committee in 1919 to review the ordinances. On 15 February 1927 Elder George F. Richards instructed the operating temples to “omit from the ordinances and lecture all reference to retribution.” The temple is administered by living authority, and living authority adjusted it. A church that governs its ordinances by present revelation is exactly what the Restoration claims to be.

Why a Council at All

Governor Lilburn Boggs, 27 October 1838: the Mormons “must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.” A sitting governor ordered the state militia to treat thousands of its own citizens as a hostile army. They were driven out that winter. The Saints petitioned Congress, petitioned the President, and got nothing.

So what is a people supposed to do next? Joseph diagnosed the failure exactly: “The constitution provides the things which we want but lacks the power to carry the laws into effect.” That is not a revolutionary talking. That is a man saying the document is right and the enforcement is missing. The council’s work followed from it — drafting a constitution, petitioning the federal government, scouting western settlement, opening relations with American Indian nations, running a presidential campaign.

Read the list again. Petitions, exploration, diplomacy, an election. Which one of those is the coup?

What the Same Man Ran On

This does not by itself answer the charge about a private body, and it is not offered as if it did. It answers a different question: what did the alleged theocrat want the United States to become?

General Smith’s Views, February 1844

  • Abolition of slavery — by compensated emancipation, funded from the sale of public lands
  • Prison reform — empty the penitentiaries and treat convicts as men to be reclaimed
  • A smaller Congress — reduce the House and cut members’ pay
  • Federal power to protect minorities — authority to suppress mobs where states would not
  • Expansion by consent — westward settlement contingent on the agreement of the American Indian nations

Emancipation nineteen years before the Emancipation Proclamation, purchased rather than seized. He said he would not have accepted the nomination at all “if I and my friends could have had the privilege of enjoying our religious and civil rights as American citizens.” That is the platform of a man who wanted the Constitution enforced, not replaced.

And Then It Did Nothing for Forty Years

The council did not dissolve at Carthage. Brigham Young reconvened it in February 1845, it supervised the exodus, and in Utah it met only sporadically from the late 1840s into the 1860s. John Taylor reorganized it in March 1880. Meetings ceased before that decade was out.

Forty years of opportunity, in a territory the Saints substantially controlled, and the shadow government produced NOTHING. If the Council of Fifty was the machinery for overthrowing American law, somebody should have told the Council of Fifty.

Who Opened the Books

William Clayton kept the minutes in three small books, and on 22 June 1844 he buried them in his garden. They came back out after the martyrdom. They sat in the custody of the First Presidency for well over a century, moved to the Church History Department in 2010, and were published complete in 2016 as the first volume of the Administrative Records series of the Joseph Smith Papers. Every word. NO redactions.

And who put them in print? The Church did. Not an archive raid, not a leak, not an ex-member with a scanner — the Church Historian’s Press, with a full critical apparatus, footnoting the king vote itself.

The king vote is in there. So is everything above it and under it. A church running a conspiracy does not print the conspiracy’s minute book, footnote it, and sell it at Deseret Book.

The Verdict

The Council of Fifty was real, the king vote happened, and neither one is what the charge needs them to be. The vote was religious language from the temple, carrying no political effect, cast by a body that seated unbelievers by design. The nullification charge names a territory that would not exist for six more years. The oath of vengeance was never a council matter at all, and it has been out of the temple by written instruction since 1927.

The doctrine underneath has never moved. The Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches that governments were “instituted of God for the benefit of man” (D&C 134:1), that “he that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land” (D&C 58:21), that constitutional law “belongs to all mankind” (D&C 98:5), and that we are “subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates” (Articles of Faith 1:12). Christ Himself will reign as King. Until He does, His covenant people obey the law and honor the magistrate.

Every claim above can be checked against the minutes, because the minutes are in print. That is the answer, and the critic is welcome to the volume.

Sources

Primary and Scholarly Sources

Related: The Nauvoo Expositor — the dissenters resolved that they would “not acknowledge any man as king or law-giver to the church,” which is this same charge in its 1844 form. Also Joseph Smith’s Legal Troubles and The Reformation Failed as Reform.