Abstract: The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor has been portrayed as an event that stands out as a unique act where Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo City Council suppressed free speech. However, rather than being an anomaly, the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor was historically and socially reflective of society in a volatile period in American history during which time several presses were destroyed and even editors attacked and killed.

On Monday evening, June 10, 1844, the Nauvoo city marshal and approximately one hundred members of the Nauvoo Legion, acting as a posse comitatus, went to the premises of the Nauvoo Expositor where they “removed the press, scattered the type, and burned the remaining copies of the newspaper.”1 This came after hours of meetings of the Nauvoo City Council on Saturday and Monday, which included intense discussion and reviewing English common law and the United States Constitution. The first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor was published on Friday, June 7, 1844. It can be reasonably described as an “opposition newspaper” accusing Joseph Smith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints of a number of “odious traits” including “false swearing, lying, stealing, robbery, defrauding, polygamy, adultery, fornication, [and] blasphemy.”2 The editors of the newspaper announced [Page 108]that their goal was “the unconditional repeal of the Nauvoo City Charter”3 and to “place Joseph Smith and his base accomplices in crime, before the world in their true character” as “gross, dark, loathsome, and cruel” people.4

This article will demonstrate how the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, rather than being an anomaly, was historically and socially reflective of American society during that volatile period of American history. Over a forty-year period of twenty years before and after the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, many presses were destroyed and editors attacked or killed. While practically unheard of in the twenty-first century, destruction of presses was much more common in the Jacksonian and Antebellum eras and in the first years of the Civil War.

Returning to that fateful Monday evening in 1844, the City Council declared the Nauvoo Expositor to be a public nuisance for “slandering the Municipality of the city” that would cause increased persecution and mobbing from Nauvoo’s anti-Mormon neighbors.5 Acting to protect the city and its residents, the City Council ordered the destruction of the press.