Liberty Jail: The Prison Where a Prophet Wrote Scripture
Near Kansas City, Missouri
In the winter of eighteen thirty-eight, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found himself in a dungeon in Liberty, Missouri, not sure he would ever get out.
The autumn of eighteen thirty-eight had been catastrophic for the Mormon community in Missouri. Tensions between church members and their neighbors had boiled over into what contemporaries called the Mormon War, a series of armed skirmishes across western Missouri. Governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous Extermination Order, declaring that Mormons must leave the state or be destroyed. Joseph Smith and four other church leaders were arrested on charges of treason, murder, and conspiracy, and locked in the Clay County jail in Liberty, Missouri, in late November.
The jail was built for cruelty. The walls were layered stone and oak several feet thick. The only access to the lower cell was through a trap door in the ceiling. The prisoners slept on damp stone floors on filthy straw. The ceiling of the lower room was so low that a tall man could not stand upright. They spent roughly five months inside, from December of eighteen thirty-eight through April of eighteen thirty-nine.
From that stone cell, Joseph Smith wrote a series of letters to his followers. They were letters of anguish and of defiance. In one passage he cried out to God asking how long the suffering would continue. In another, he declared that no power on earth would ultimately prevail against his church. Portions of those letters were later canonized as Sections one twenty-one, one twenty-two, and one twenty-three of the Doctrine and Covenants, foundational scripture for the faith's more than seventeen million members today.
In April eighteen thirty-nine, guards escorting the prisoners to a new hearing allowed them to escape into the night. Smith made his way to Illinois and never returned to Missouri. The jail building was eventually demolished, but a replica now stands on the original site, operated as a visitors' center by the Church. Latter-day Saints regard Liberty Jail as sacred ground, a place where suffering produced revelation.
