A history too often minimized, forgotten, or left untold.
The history of Latter-day Saints includes faith, sacrifice, and devotion. It also includes public hostility, mob violence, legal discrimination, and forced expulsion. SAFE preserves this history because truth requires memory.
Explore the story by chapter.
The history of injustice against Latter-day Saints is not a single episode. It is a sequence. Each page below examines one part of that record carefully and in its own terms.
Timeline
A visual timeline of the key moments from early opposition through modern recognition.
02Missouri Extermination Order
When a state declared a religious people the enemy — and the long road to rescission.
03Hawn’s Mill
The massacre that still speaks: witness, loss, and the memorial of the named dead.
04Expelled from Missouri
They did not simply leave. They were driven — in winter, under threat, by state force.
05Nauvoo & the Illinois Expulsion
After Missouri, they rebuilt. Then they were driven out again.
06Exodus, Refuge & Survival
What it meant to lose home, seek refuge, and keep going.
07Legal Discrimination
When hostility moved from mobs into law: statutes, disenfranchisement, seizure.
08Caricature in Culture
A bridge from nineteenth-century cartoons to modern media simplification.
09How We Compare Carefully
Our moral discipline for speaking about historical injustice without overclaiming.
10Primary Sources Archive
The executive orders, petitions, affidavits, maps, and newspaper coverage that carry this history.
Why this history must be remembered.
This history matters because injustice does not begin with its worst moment. It begins earlier — in suspicion, caricature, rumor, social hostility, legal indifference, and the slow erosion of public sympathy.
For Latter-day Saints, that pattern is part of the historical record. Opposition emerged early, intensified over time, and was at various points accompanied by organized violence, expulsion from communities, destruction of property, and discrimination enforced both socially and politically. To remember that history is not to compete with the suffering of anyone else. It is to refuse to let serious wrongs disappear simply because they are unfamiliar to the modern public.
A history that began with ridicule and grew into violence.
From the earliest years of the Church, Latter-day Saints faced ridicule, organized opposition, and repeated public hostility. Antagonism began even before the Book of Mormon was published and intensified in the years that followed, sometimes erupting into violence. What began as dismissal and mockery did not remain there. It grew into efforts to disrupt meetings, drive Saints from their homes, and prevent them from living together in peace.
This pattern matters because it shows how persecution often develops. A people are first treated as strange. Then threatening. Then undesirable. Then undeserving of protection. By the time violence arrives, the moral groundwork has often already been laid.
Jackson County: early displacement and public fear.
One of the earliest major waves of persecution came in Jackson County, Missouri. There, differences in religion, culture, voting power, and views associated with slavery and migration heightened tensions between Latter-day Saints and other settlers. Those tensions did not remain civil. Violence, intimidation, and expulsion followed, establishing a pattern that would continue in Missouri.
The lesson of Jackson County is important: persecution does not always begin because a minority group has done some singularly outrageous thing. Often, it begins because a community becomes socially convenient to fear.
Missouri in 1838: when civil order failed.
By 1838, hostility against Latter-day Saints in Missouri had deepened into a broader collapse of civil protection. Vigilantes threatened and attacked Latter-day Saint settlers, members were expelled from their homes, and appeals for protection often went unanswered. In that environment, fear, retaliation, and lawlessness escalated.
This is one of the clearest historical reminders that injustice becomes especially dangerous when a targeted people can no longer rely on basic protection from the institutions meant to preserve order.
The Missouri Extermination Order.
On October 27, 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued Executive Order 44, often referred to as the “extermination order.” In the aftermath of escalating conflict, the order declared that Latter-day Saints must be treated as enemies and be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.
This was not mere prejudice in private conversation. It was the force of state power turned against a religious people. For that reason alone, this history deserves far more public attention than it usually receives.
Read the full pageHawn’s Mill: massacre, terror, and memory.
Three days after the extermination order, on October 30, 1838, an armed mob attacked the Latter-day Saint settlement at Hawn’s Mill. Fourteen men and three boys were killed, with many others wounded. Survivors were left to care for the injured, bury the dead in haste, and flee under threat of further violence.
Hawn’s Mill matters because it strips away any temptation to treat this history as symbolic or exaggerated. This was not rhetorical persecution. It was bloodshed. It was terror. It was the killing of fathers and sons in a moment of public hatred.
Read the full pageExpelled from Missouri.
In the winter that followed, Latter-day Saints were forced from Missouri. Families who had already suffered violence, dispossession, and instability were compelled to leave homes, land, and property behind. Saints later documented losses and petitioned for compensation and recognition of the wrongs they had suffered.
This history should be remembered not only as a story of movement, but as a story of forced removal. The Saints did not simply “move west.” Many were driven.
Nauvoo: rebuilding under pressure.
After fleeing Missouri, many Latter-day Saints gathered in Illinois and built Nauvoo. It became a place of refuge, rebuilding, and religious life, but it did not become a permanent peace. Nauvoo was the principal city of the Saints after their flight from Missouri, and also the place from which they would eventually be forced to depart amid renewed hostilities.
The significance of Nauvoo lies partly in this: even after expulsion, the Saints tried again to build, belong, and live openly. That attempt, too, came under pressure.
Departure from Nauvoo and another exodus.
Between February and September 1846, thousands of Latter-day Saints departed Nauvoo. Leaders had hoped for a large, organized spring exodus, but rising hostilities led to a truce requiring members to begin leaving during the winter instead. The result was another mass departure under pressure, not a simple or leisurely relocation.
This second exodus is part of why the history of the Saints should be told with greater seriousness. The community did not endure one isolated conflict. It endured repeated displacement.
Legal and political discrimination did not end on the frontier.
Opposition to Latter-day Saints did not disappear after the trek west. Plural marriage became the focal point of organized national opposition, leading to legal and political campaigns against the Church and its members. Anti-polygamy legislation became a major vehicle through which social hostility was expressed in law.
Whatever one’s views on that history, it remains important to recognize the broader pattern: public fear and moral panic can create an environment in which a religious minority is treated as a problem to be managed rather than a people to be protected.
This history is not about comparison. It is about recognition.
To tell this history honestly is not to claim that all persecutions are identical. It is not to minimize the suffering of Jews, Native peoples, Black Americans, or any other community that has endured grave injustice. It is simply to say that the persecution of Latter-day Saints was real, consequential, and too often neglected in the larger American memory.
Recognition matters. When a people’s suffering is forgotten, the public loses part of its moral memory. And when moral memory fades, the early warning signs of injustice become easier to ignore.
What we owe the past.
We owe the past honesty.
We owe the dead remembrance.
We owe the displaced recognition.
We owe the present greater clarity.
And we owe the future the courage to respond to misinformation before it hardens into mistreatment.
That is why this history belongs here.
Learn the story. Remember the pattern. Help protect the future.
Explore the timeline, read the primary sources, and see why the history of injustice against Latter-day Saints still matters in public life today.