The primary source for the entire album is:

Nauvoo Expositor — Volume 1, Number 1 · Friday, June 7, 1844 · Nauvoo, Illinois

Four-page broadsheet. Single issue. Destroyed by order of Joseph Smith three days after publication.

Contents of the issue

  • Preamble — the publishers’ statement of purpose and the album’s thesis: “The remedy can never be applied, unless the disease is known.”
  • Resolutions (1–15) — public positions on theology, church governance, and the separation of church and state
  • Affidavits — sworn testimony from William Law, Jane Law, and Austin Cowles
  • “Citizens of Hancock County” — Francis M. Higbee’s letter to his neighbors
  • Editorial content — exposing specific abuses

Full text online

The full text of the Expositor is preserved at:

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Primary_sources/Nauvoo_Expositor_Full_Text

Publishers

  • William Law — Second Counselor in the First Presidency
  • Wilson Law — Brigadier General, Nauvoo Legion
  • Jane Law — William’s wife; sworn affidavit included
  • Robert D. Foster — Nauvoo surgeon and Justice of the Peace
  • Charles A. Foster — Robert’s brother
  • Francis M. Higbee — Former missionary, author of “Citizens of Hancock County”
  • Chauncey L. Higbee — Francis’s brother
  • Charles Ivins — High Priest

These were not outsiders. They were the inner circle. They knew everything.

Why this document still matters today

LDS apologists — most visibly FAIR Latter-day Saints — have published responses that frame the Expositor as unreliable, legally addressable, or doctrinally misrepresentative. Here are their strongest arguments, stated as they state them, followed by the reasons the document’s testimony still holds up 180 years later.

The apologetic case against the Expositor

  • “The destruction was lawful, or nearly so.” The Nauvoo City Council — which included non-Mormons — unanimously declared the paper a public nuisance, and under pre-Fourteenth-Amendment common law, municipal abatement of a libelous nuisance was a recognized remedy. Joseph Smith offered to pay damages.
  • “Invoking the First Amendment is anachronistic.” In 1844 the Bill of Rights constrained only the federal government; it was not incorporated against the states until after 1868.
  • “Anti-press mob violence was a real threat in Illinois.” The council’s action is framed as defensive policy in a volatile environment with roughly sixteen episodes of anti-press violence between 1832 and 1867, including the 1833 destruction of the LDS Evening and Morning Star in Missouri.
  • “The publishers were embittered apostates with personal axes to grind.” William Law’s arc from calling Joseph “honest and honourable” (1836) to “demon in human shape” (1844) is attributed to rejection of the plural-marriage revelation Hyrum showed him, land-investment disputes in Nauvoo, and grief after family deaths.
  • “The tone was inflammatory, not journalistic.” The Expositor is characterized as a polemical escalation rather than a news account; phrases like “blood thirsty and murderous demon in human shape” are cited as evidence the paper was not written in good faith.
  • “Specific accusations fail on the facts.” On the “plurality of gods” charge, FAIR notes that Joseph’s King Follett remarks “were not published until after his death,” no verbatim transcript exists, and the doctrine “is not clear, and mostly speculative.”

Why the document still matters

  • An LDS apostle has already conceded the destruction was illegal. In a 1965 Utah Law Review article, legal scholar Dallin H. Oaks — later a member of the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency — concluded that while a municipality could arguably abate printed copies of a libelous paper, the destruction of the press and type was not legally defensible under 1844 law. The single most consequential act in the chain of events — the one the Expositor exists to document — was unlawful by the analysis of a future senior church leader. Oaks, “The Suppression of the Nauvoo Expositor,” 9 Utah L. Rev. 862 (1965)

  • The Church itself now confirms the Expositor’s central factual claim about plural marriage. The 2014 Gospel Topics essay Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo acknowledges that Joseph Smith married roughly 30–40 women, including a 14-year-old (Helen Mar Kimball) and women already married to other living men. These are facts the Expositor alleged and that Joseph publicly denied. Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo — Gospel Topics Essay

  • The Church also acknowledges the public denials were deliberate. The same essay concedes leaders issued “carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated ‘celestial’ plural marriage.” That is exactly the pattern — taught secretly, and denied openly — that the Expositor identified as the core grievance.

  • Austin Cowles’s affidavit is corroborated by canonized LDS scripture. Cowles swore in May 1844 that Hyrum Smith read a revelation on plural marriage to the Nauvoo High Council. That revelation is now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 132. The Expositor was not inventing doctrine; it was previewing a text the Church still treats as scripture.

  • The theocratic charge is confirmed by documents published by the Church’s own historians. The Joseph Smith Papers published the Council of Fifty minutes in 2016. On April 11, 1844 — two months before the Expositor — the Council of Fifty voted to receive Joseph Smith “as our Prophet, Priest & King.” Resolution 12 of the Expositor (“we will not acknowledge any man as king or lawgiver to the church; for Christ is our only king and law-giver”) was not paranoid. It was reporting a recent, documented event. Joseph Smith Papers — Administrative Records, Council of Fifty Minutes

  • The “plurality of gods” charge maps onto a sermon 20,000 people had already heard. Joseph Smith delivered the King Follett Discourse at general conference on April 7, 1844 — two months before the Expositor — teaching that God was once a man and that “the head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.” The paper was reporting a public sermon, not fabricating exotic doctrine.

  • Plural marriage eventually ended — which is the dissenters’ position. The 1890 Manifesto formally halted the practice the publishers of the Expositor had objected to in 1844. In outcome, the institutional Church arrived where William Law and the others stood on the day they printed the paper. Official Declaration 1

The thesis

The Expositor’s value is not rhetorical tone. It is evidentiary. Its central factual claims — that plural marriage was being practiced and publicly denied, that a plurality-of-gods doctrine was being taught, that Joseph had been received as “Prophet, Priest & King,” that a secret council was acting beyond the civil and ecclesiastical order — have all been corroborated by primary sources the Church itself now publishes. The paper was destroyed in three days. The testimony has lasted 180 years.

“Men solace themselves by saying the facts slumber in the dark caverns of midnight. But Lo! it is sudden day, and the dark deeds of foul fiends shall be exposed from the house-tops.” — Nauvoo Expositor, June 7, 1844