Joseph Smith Captured was an event in Springfield, Illinois following activities of the day before in Nauvoo:

I had received notice of an LDS group planning to attend through our local chapter of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society but was undecided about going. A week or so later, Carla and I attended a fireside chat where the speakers were Joe and Marilyn Bentley. Joe was a year ahead of me at the University of Chicago law school. Without too much effort, he persuaded us that we should go. I’m glad he did. Anyway, Judy asked me to blog it, so here it is: . . .

Last Sunday morning, Carla and I caught a Delta flight from Los Angeles along with seven other Southern California Latter-Day Saints. The others were Joe, Earl Carter and his son-in-law Christian Schank, Frank and Debbie Adams, and Joseph Welch and his wife. All of the men were lawyers. Here we are later in Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s neighborhood:

Scheduled to meet another group of Latter-Day Saints from Utah at the airport in St. Louis, Missouri that afternoon, we flew first to Minneapolis, Minnesota; changed planes; and flew onto St. Louis. We waited an hour or so at the airport there until we connected with the Utah group and then all boarded two tour buses that were to take us to our lodgings for the next two nights – the Comfort Inn in Fort Madison, Iowa.

These were our buses, two days later at Carthage:

On the way to Fort Madison, we made a stop arranged by the organizers of our trip Gordon and Carol Madsen of Salt Lake City for dinner at Gingham’s Homestyle Restaurant in St. Charles, Missouri. The size of our group limited our menu items to three: country-fried steak, pot roast, and chicken Cordon Bleu. I got the breaded, deep-fried steak, which I liked; and Carla got the chicken, which she did not like.

Carla and I were surprised to see our former ward members Jack and Jeannie Welch who joined up with our groups separately at the restaurant. Jack teaches at the BYU Law School; and it was Jack who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon.

From there that night, as we approached Fort Madison, we could briefly see the Nauvoo Temple lighted up across the Mississippi River. Coming around the River’s bend, the temple must have been an impressive sight for riverboaters.

At the motel in Fort Madison we enjoyed a short night’s sleep. Carla slept in a little while, but I arose early to attend the 8:00 a.m. session at the Nauvoo Temple across a swing bridge over the Mississippi. When barges come through, traffic on the bridge is halted. (That night at the Nauvoo Temple Visitor’s Center, I sat next to an RLDS member who grew up in Nauvoo and now lives in Fort Madison due to the Mormons driving up real estate prices in Nauvoo. Anyway, she said that the locals say, “I got barged”, or “I got double barged” when they don’t make it through before the bridge swings open for a barge or two.) The bus ride from Fort Madison to Nauvoo took about 45 minutes and we wanted to be at the temple by about 7:00 a.m., so I got the motel’s continental breakfast at 6:00 a.m.

I enjoyed the temple session, and the temple was beautiful inside with just a bit of frontier feel to it. The temple ceremony there does move between rooms, as in Los Angeles, and there were lovely murals in those rooms. Here it is from the outside overlooking the Mississippi, down Wells Street from the local Catholic church:

After the temple session, I waited for Carla’s group to arrive on their bus. In doing so, I evidently missed a tour of the temple from the bottom to the top of the tower conducted by the temple president Spencer Condie. That tour had not been announced, so I was unaware that he had planned it for the rest of our group that had gone through the session. Carla and I finally met here at the Smith brothers statute:

But upon Carla’s arrival, she and I were able to spend time at the Temple Visitors Center and exploring the Nauvoo Restoration area. Also unbeknownst to us ahead of time, some of the people in the Utah group were Church historians who, along with others including members of the Reorganized Church, were scheduled to give 10-to-15-minute presentations at several of the buildings in the Restoration Project. The buildings are not close together, so they had horse-drawn wagons transporting people from one site to another. There were two Percherons for one wagon and these Belgians for the other:

We were also unaware of that at the beginning, so we initially walked from one place to another and lost some time so that we could not visit all of the lectures. But we did manage to take in five of them. The first was Jack Welch’s lecture at the Social Hall next to the bakery. We also heard lectures:
– behind Brigham Young’s house by Ron Esplin of our Utah group on Joseph Smith’s campaign for President of United States;
– above the store by Gordon Madsen concerning Joseph Smith’s habeas corpus proceedings;
– in the Seventies Hall by Susan Easton Black – she’s serving a mission there – on the Nauvoo Legion; and
– another back at the statute of the Smith brothers outside the temple, by Judge Tom Griffiths, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, about the reasons the early Mormons had troubles in Missouri and Illinois. Here’s that last:

We discovered during the course of the day that there was no food or drink available at the Restoration project. So, except for a couple of ginger-snap cookies provided by the restored bakery, we didn’t have lunch that day.

That was okay, because a good buffet was provided as part of the tour at the Hotel Nauvoo Inn that evening, preceding a talk by Elder Dallin Oaks of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles at the Nauvoo Temple Visitors Center. After a bus ride from Nauvoo back to Fort Madison to change clothes and then another ride back to Nauvoo, we enjoyed the buffet dinner at the Inn. It included hand-sliced ham, prime rib, and turkey, along with fried chicken and fish, salads, vegetables, and desserts. While there and just as Elder Oaks walked into the buffet, I was able to briefly introduce him to Carla. He had been one of Joe Bentley’s and my professors at the University of Chicago School of Law in the late 1960s and a counselor in the local stake presidency at the time. At the Inn, the Nauvoo mayor welcomed all and there was a short talk by former Illinois Governor James Thompson. Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert was also present, along with former Utah Governor Mike Leavitt.

In the large auditorium at the Visitor’s Center, Elder Oaks spoke about the attempts to extradite Joseph Smith from Illinois to Missouri, tensions between the Saints in Missouri and their neighbors, and the then-current attitudes toward law and constitutional rights in that part of the United States. Here is a link to his talk.

The next morning our buses took us from Fort Madison in Iowa to Springfield, Illinois – the state capital. On the way, we stopped in Carthage to tour the jail where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed by the mob in 1844.

We passed the Illinois River on the way from there to Springfield:

In Springfield, we got out at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. This is an excellent museum for all family members and worth the trip to Springfield. Here’s young Abe looking on his future. Can you spot John Wilkes Booth?

We enjoyed the displays and presentations there and the tour guide who took us through them. We had a late lunch there at the in-house Subway, where Carla and I shared a foot-long Black Forest-ham sandwich.

After touring the Museum, our buses took us to the Statehouse Inn in Springfield, where we were to sleep that night. It’s within view of the newer Capitol building:

We quickly changed clothes there and then headed back to the Museum and Library for a presentation prepared by the Illinois Supreme Court. It was a reenactment of Joseph’s three habeas corpus hearings in Illinois, followed by a discussion by a panel of Illinois judges and lawyers on the use of habeas corpus from Joseph Smith’s time to the present day; the panelists were U.S. District Court Judge Sue Myerscough of the Central District of Illinois; Michael Scodro, Illinois State solicitor general; Jeffrey Colman, partner at Jenner & Block in Chicago, who has worked on behalf of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; and Jeffrey N. Walker, an editor with the legal series of the Joseph Smith Papers Project sponsored by the Church History Department.

The presentation was excellent. The “reenactment” was by four actors who were graduates of the Theater School at Depaul University in Chicago. An assistant dean of that school collaborated with Jeffrey Walker of the Church history department in writing the script. It included a dramatic background for the legal proceedings as well as an attempt to briefly describe what might have been said in those proceedings.

A reception at the Lincoln Library followed the presentation. After picking up some hors d’oeuvres, Carla and I sat at a table next to Josh Potts, a young man who works for the Illinois Comptroller. His wife works for the Library and had a role in the preparation of the evening’s activities. After we got back home, Josh friended me on Facebook. At the reception, I had started talking to him about the BYU-Utah football game that weekend because I mistook him for someone in our LDS group. But apparently he saw the game on TV and was concerned about the injury to our BYU running back. Anyway, we had a nice conversation about Utah football and life in Springfield, Illinois.

After the reception, we spent the night at the hotel, had its continental breakfast in the morning, and checked out. Our California group then separated out from the Utah folk and went to the Springfield home of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. Here’s their home:

The National Park Service has re-created the neighborhood around the home and restored houses there to what they were when the Lincolns lived there. So we toured the Lincoln home and the neighborhood.

Leaving there, we next toured the old State Capitol were Lincoln sat as a member of the legislature and voted to approve the Nauvoo City charter.

After going through the old Capitol, Carla and I had some good soup and dessert for lunch at The Feed Store. Along with Joe Bentley, Earl Carter, and Christian Schank, we then toured what is advertised as the Lincoln-Herndon Law office and the courtroom where one of Joseph Smith’s habeas corpus proceedings took place before Judge Nathan Pope. Actually, all they know about these rooms is that they were in this building, part of which had since been demolished; but they don’t know exactly where or what they looked like.

We do know, however, that during the proceedings, Judge Pope had sitting next to him on the stand his daughter, the daughter of Joseph Smith’s lawyer, and Mary Todd Lincoln. Whether Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln ever met, no one now seems to know; but it seems likely that they at some point crossed paths before Lincoln became President. Here are the Lincolns just outside Abe’s law office:

After meeting up with our bus, those of us in the California group traveled to St. Louis to catch our flight to Minnesota and, from thence, to Los Angeles. Cleo picked up Carla and I there and delivered us safely to our home in Pasadena. Thanks Cleo.