What is this project?

Sudden Day: Songs from the Nauvoo Expositor is a 16-track song cycle and companion website documenting the contents of a single historical newspaper — the Nauvoo Expositor, Volume 1, Number 1, June 7, 1844. The paper was printed by William Law (then Second Counselor in the LDS First Presidency) and seven other senior insiders, destroyed by order of Joseph Smith three days later, and has been partially vindicated by the LDS Church’s own historical essays in the 21st century.

Each song grounds its lyrics in the Expositor’s exact words and in the sworn affidavits it carried. Every track page carries a lyric-to-source mapping.

Is this anti-Mormon?

This project is not about attacking individuals or their faith. It is about historical accuracy and accountability for a specific, documented inflection point in 1844.

  • We use a primary source exclusively (supplemented by LDS-published materials).
  • We cite everything.
  • We steel-man the apologetic response before showing why the source material holds up — see the source document page.
  • We agree with the modern Church on key points: that plural marriage was practiced (2014 Gospel Topics essay), that it was publicly denied while practiced (same essay), and that it should be ended (1890 Manifesto).

Documenting what the most senior possible insider said in 1844 — from a paper whose full text is hosted by FAIR Latter-day Saints itself — is not an attack on the faith. It is an attempt to restore an uncomfortable but important part of its own record.

How can I verify the sources?

The Nauvoo Expositor is in the public domain and widely available. Recommended full-text sources:

For the apologetic framing we respond to, see FAIR’s pages on the Nauvoo Expositor, William Law, and the suppression of the paper.

For the church’s own subsequent admissions, see the Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo Gospel Topics essay.

Why songs?

Because the Expositor’s words were written to be heard. The publishers were trained in the rhetoric of their era — scripture, sermon, and civic declaration — and their sentences have a natural cadence. “Forbearance has ceased to be a virtue.” “Lo! the wolf is in the fold.” “The remedy can never be applied, unless the disease is known.” These phrases do not need a melody to be memorable, but they accept one readily, and once you have heard them sung you will not be able to unremember them.

A song also forces the kind of compression that an essay can avoid. There is no room to euphemize. When a lyric says “robbed of that which nothing but death can restore,” it means what the affidavit meant.

Isn’t this just quote mining?

Quote mining means taking a speaker’s words out of context to produce a meaning they did not intend. This project does the opposite:

  1. The source is a single coherent document, not a corpus searched for damning sentences. The Expositor was published as one issue with a single editorial purpose stated in its Preamble. We work from that purpose outward.
  2. Full context is provided on every track page — the quoted passage, the surrounding section of the paper, and the historical setting.
  3. Charitable readings are addressed — the source document page summarizes FAIR’s strongest arguments for dismissing the paper and responds to each.
  4. The full text is one click away so readers can verify everything.

If reading the full Expositor and the full affidavits makes the charges look worse rather than better, that is a property of the source, not of the method.

This is the most common apologetic framing. It is also the one most clearly conceded by the Church’s own scholars. Before he became an LDS apostle, Dallin H. Oaks published a 1965 Utah Law Review article, The Suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor, in which he concluded that while a municipality could arguably abate printed copies of a libelous paper, the destruction of the press and type itself was not legally defensible under the law of the time. See Oaks, 9 Utah L. Rev. 862 (1965). We address this in more detail on the source document page.

Who created this?

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, any ex-Mormon organization, FAIR Latter-day Saints, or any other institution.

It is a sibling project to Journal of Discords, which follows the same method applied to the 26-volume Journal of Discourses (1854–1886).

Can I use this material?

The Nauvoo Expositor is in the public domain. Our original analysis and creative works are provided for educational purposes. If you use any of this material, please:

  • Verify the primary-source citations yourself.
  • Attribute this project where appropriate.
  • Hold yourself to the same accuracy bar — don’t reformulate these quotations into something they weren’t.

I found an error — what should I do?

Please tell us. We care more about being correct than about being right. Open an issue on the project’s GitHub repository with the specific claim, the source that contradicts it, and your suggested correction.

Why does this matter?

In three days in June 1844, a group of insiders printed a newspaper, the newspaper was destroyed, and the man it accused went to his death. What happened in those three days set the shape of Utah Mormonism for the next fifty years, and the shape of American Mormonism’s relationship with its own history for the next century and a half.

The Expositor was right about almost everything it reported. The Church has since acknowledged, in its own essays, most of what its publishers staked their lives to print. They were not rewarded for being early; they were erased.

This project is an attempt to put their voices back into the record — not as curiosities, but as witnesses.

“The remedy can never be applied, unless the disease is known.” — Nauvoo Expositor, June 7, 1844