We do not endorse what this album documents

Let us be clear: we do not endorse the coercion, theological manipulation, financial exploitation, or extra-judicial power documented in the Nauvoo Expositor. We do not endorse the abuse of the women whose affidavits the paper carried. We document these things because they happened, because contemporaneous insiders swore to them, and because the historical record deserves to be preserved rather than quietly revised.

Nothing on this site is invented. Every claim ties to the Expositor’s own words, to contemporary sources, or to the LDS Church’s own later acknowledgments.

What the Nauvoo Expositor was

The Expositor was not a pamphlet by hostile outsiders. It was a newspaper printed by the Second Counselor in the First Presidency, together with his wife, his brother (a Brigadier General in the Nauvoo Legion), a Justice of the Peace, a High Priest, and other high-ranking members who had seen the movement from the inside. They staked their reputations and their lives on a single issue:

“We are aware, however, that we are hazarding every earthly blessing, particularly property, and probably life itself, in striking this blow at tyranny and oppression.” — Nauvoo Expositor, Preamble

Three days later, the press was destroyed. Seventeen days after that, Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage. The publishers had been correct about the cost.

The generational impact

The publishers of the Expositor did not write in the abstract. The affidavits they carried described specific women — including the publisher’s own wife — facing a theological bind that still shapes the Latter-day Saint community 180 years later:

  • Women were told that a refusal to share their husbands would place them “under condemnation before God” (Jane Law’s affidavit).
  • Young women were approached in rooms that bore the warning “Positively NO Admittance” and bound by oaths under “penalty of death” never to speak of what was revealed to them.
  • Wives already sealed were sent away “until all is well,” to return “as from a long visit,” while doctrine, guilt, and silence did their work.

When the Expositor published and was destroyed, these women’s testimony was destroyed with it — or so it was meant to be. In fact the paper survived, and the testimony it carried remains the earliest contemporaneous primary source documenting what Nauvoo polygamy looked like from the inside. The 2014 Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo Gospel Topics essay, a century and a half later, confirms the substance of what the women of the Expositor swore in 1844.

The harm done to those women was real. The harm passed down through generations of silence was real. The people who were harmed by these practices deserve to have their experience acknowledged, not footnoted out of the modern narrative.

Why we document

Today, it is difficult for a curious Latter-day Saint to find a straightforward summary of what the Expositor actually said. The paper is most often referenced in terms of the legality of its destruction, not the substance of its reporting. The publishers are most often described as “apostates” or “dissenters,” not as the most senior insiders in the movement — which is what they were.

We believe in accountability. We believe that:

  • History should not be sanitized to avoid discomfort.
  • Those who were harmed deserve to have that harm acknowledged by name, not by hint.
  • Future generations deserve to know what was actually taught and practiced before 1844, not just what was later disavowed.
  • The primary source should be accessible — and, where possible, memorable.

Songs are memorable. That is the entire reason this project is a song cycle rather than an essay collection. The Expositor’s words rhyme and scan because they were written to be heard. We only had to set them to music.

For those affected

If your family line runs through 19th-century Nauvoo; if your experience of the modern Church has been shaped by quiet half-knowledge of what happened there; if you grew up hearing that the Expositor was “just bitterness from apostates” and you now find that it largely told the truth — this site is for you too. The harm was real. The silence was real. The record matters.

Our commitment

  • Accuracy. Every quote is sourced. Every claim is documented.
  • Context. We provide historical setting and, where relevant, the modern apologetic response.
  • Honesty. We do not exaggerate. We do not quote out of context to change meaning.
  • Respect. We recognize the weight of this material for those affected.

Companion project: Journal of Discords

Sudden Day is part of a small family of projects documenting early Latter-day Saint history in song, each grounded in a different primary source and method.

🎵 Journal of Discords  ·  source on GitHub

Journal of Discords draws from the 26-volume Journal of Discourses (1854–1886) — the published sermons of Brigham Young, John Taylor, Heber C. Kimball, and other early LDS leaders, delivered from the Salt Lake Tabernacle and circulated worldwide as a semi-monthly subscription publication. Where Sudden Day captures a single inflection point — the 1844 moment when insiders first tried to blow the whistle — Journal of Discords traces the doctrinal and cultural aftermath across the following decades: race and the priesthood ban, Adam-God, blood atonement, the escalation and eventual end of polygamy.

The two projects share a single thesis: the remedy can never be applied unless the disease is known. They are meant to be read together. What the Expositor exposed in 1844, the Journal of Discourses then preached, defended, and extended for another forty years.

“The remedy can never be applied, unless the disease is known.”

This project exists so that the disease is known.