Review of Spencer W. McBride, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). 269 pages, $29.95 (hardcover).

Abstract: Spencer McBride’s book is the deepest look yet into Joseph Smith’s 1844 campaign for president of the United States. In smooth-paced and readable detail, McBride’s work expertly demonstrates the unique Latter-day Saint genesis for the campaign and how it fit into the wider American social-political environment. Its message regarding religious liberty is as applicable today as it was nearly two centuries ago.

[Editor’s Note: This review first appeared in The Civil War Book Review 24, no. 1 (2022). It is reprinted here with permission. Slight editorial changes have been made.]

On July 4, 1844, Americans celebrated sixty-eight years of independence with feasts, parades, and fireworks. Over three million enslaved Black people, however, were not celebrating. As Frederick Douglass would declare eight years later, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Amongst other mechanisms, the southern Slave Power continued to enthrone states’ rights as a “political strategy … to maintain a carefully constructed — and deeply unjust — economic and social hierarchy” (209).

In the North, Independence Day passed with an uneasy calm in Philadelphia. Tragically, however, the next three days saw nativist mobs reignite anti-Catholic violence begun two months earlier. One thousand miles west in Nauvoo, Illinois, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were mourning. A week earlier their prophet and presidential candidate Joseph Smith had been assassinated while in Illinois State custody. Hundreds of electioneer missionaries canvassing [Page 220]the nation for Smith were just learning of his murder and would dejectedly begin returning to Nauvoo. Sustained anti-Mormon violence would expel them from the nation only eighteen months later.

This treatment of Catholics and Latter-day Saints demonstrated that in antebellum America, religious freedom was not universal. But why? Spencer W. McBride, an associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers, argues in his book Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom1 “that the states’ rights strategy was as effective at impeding efforts to establish full citizenship rights of religious minorities as it was at blocking efforts to establish the personhood of men and women of African descent enslaved in the American South” (209). In this important work, McBride employs the causes and outcomes of Smith’s sincere but quixotic campaign as a lens to effectively evaluate antebellum religious inequality and the systems that perpetuated it.

Joseph Smith’s new religion, with its community building and its anti-slavery and pro-American-Indian beliefs, engendered staunch opposition from Missourians who feared Latter-day Saints’ growing economic and political power. When tension turned to conflict, the governor of Missouri ordered the infamous “Extermination Order.” While Smith languished in jail, militia-mobs forced his people into Illinois — victims of theft, violence, and even rape.

After gaining his freedom, Smith traveled to Washington, DC, seeking federal assistance for protection and redress. Here McBride excels, meticulously immersing Smith and the reader in the larger context of American political life and realities. When the president and Congress offer no assistance behind the guise of states’ rights and electoral politics, Smith lost confidence in the American political system and even democracy itself.

No longer politically naive,