Assassination of James Strang

Summary

James Jesse Strang was shot from behind on the dock at Saint James, Beaver Island, at about seven o’clock on the evening of Monday 16 June 1856, by Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth, two of his own former followers. He had been summoned aboard the United States steamer Michigan, then lying at the Johnson and McCulloch dock, by a messenger sent from the ship. He was struck by three shots and beaten about the head with a pistol butt. The assassins ran aboard the Michigan and were given protection; her commander refused to surrender them to the county sheriff and carried them to Mackinac, where they were released almost immediately and never tried. Strang was taken to Voree, Wisconsin, on 28 June and died there on 9 July 1856.

History

The shooting

The Daily Northern Islander of Friday 20 June 1856 — the last issue the paper ever published — carried the account under the headline “Murderous Assault”:

On Monday last the U. S. steamer Michigan entered this harbour at about 1 o’clock, P. M., and was visited by the inhabitants promiscuously during the afternoon. At about 7 o’clock Capt. McBlair sent a messenger (San Barnard, the Pilot) to Mr. Strang, requesting him to visit him on board. Mr. Strang immediately accompanied the messenger, and just as they were stepping on the bridge leading to the pier in front of F. Johnson & Co’s store, two assassins approached in the rear, unobserved by either of them, and fired upon Mr. Strang with pistols.¹

The same account describes the wounds: the first shot, from a horse pistol, entering the left side of the head a little behind the top of the ear and rebounding out near the top of the head; a second below the temple on the right side of the face, lodging in the cheek bone; a third on the left side of the spine near the tenth rib. It names the assassins as “Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth. Wentworth had a revolver, and Bedford a horse pistol, with which he struck him over the head and face, while lying on the ground.” The assailants “immediately fled on board the U. S. steamer, with pistols in hand, claiming her protection,” in view of officers and crew and of Dr. H. D. McCulloch and Franklin Johnson, “and no effort made to stop it.”¹

The date is independently fixed by the telegraph. The New-York Daily Tribune of 21 June 1856 printed a despatch datelined Detroit, Thursday 19 June: “James J. Strang, the Mormon leader, was shot at Beaver Island on the 16th by two of his former followers.”² confidence: established — but note that at least one paper carrying the same despatch printed “on the 17th,” and that a modern local-history account also gives 17 June.³ The Islander’s “Monday last,” in a Friday 20 June issue, agrees with the 16th.

Custody and impunity

Strang was carried to the house of the Prindle brothers, where the steamer’s surgeon examined the wounds “and declared recovery hopeless.” Process was taken out and the sheriff of the county demanded the prisoners; Captain McBlair refused, saying he would take them to Mackinac and deliver them to the civil authorities of the State there. The steamer left the next day, “carrying off all the persons supposed to be implicated in the affair, thus affording military protection to murderers and overthrowing the sovereignty of civil law.”¹

Quaife notes that this had no legal justification: the crime was committed in the county seat of Emmet County, whose sheriff — Miller — was the proper custodian, but he had neither the power nor the authority to compel an armed federal war vessel.⁴ At Mackinac, Bedford and Wentworth were turned over to Sheriff Granger, who held them “about five minutes,” after which they were set at liberty and treated as heroes by the townsmen.⁴ Elizabeth Whitney Williams, recording the story from the gentile side, says they were jailed on Mackinac Island about a week and then quietly released at night; either way, “nothing was ever done in the way of giving these men a trial.”⁵

Death

Contrary to the surgeon’s verdict Strang lingered. The Detroit Free Press, quoted in Washington on 3 July, reported him “alive on Tuesday, and there was a fair prospect of his recovery. His lower limbs are entirely paralyzed by the shot in the back.”⁶ Fearing for his safety after a second visit by the Michigan about ten days after the shooting, his followers put him aboard the propeller Louisville on 28 June and sent him to Voree.⁷ He died there on the morning of 9 July 1856, with two of his polygamous wives, Apostles Hickey and Chidester, and Sheriff George Miller present.⁸ The telegraph carried it from Buffalo on 14 July: “Strang, of Beaver Island, died at his former residence, Racine County, on Wednesday last.”⁹

Competing accounts

A second, fuller account reached the national press a week later, apparently from someone aboard the Michigan. It appeared as “Assassination at Beaver Island” in the Daily National Intelligencer and the New York Herald of 24 June 1856 and was reprinted for weeks afterwards. It places the two men “behind the wood-piles, with which both sides of the dock are lined, there being only a passage way between the wood,” has them make “no attempt to escape” but surrender to the captain, and reports that the ship’s surgeon could trace neither the ball in the head nor that in the loins.¹⁰

The sources disagree on nearly every detail except the shooters, the place and the outcome.

Williams also states that Dr. H. D. McCulloch dressed Strang’s wounds and arranged his removal to Wisconsin. Quaife, by contrast, calls McCulloch “the real assassin of Strang,” the man whose “vengeful brain … conceived the plot.”¹¹ Williams further relates that Strang begged to be taken home to Mary, his first wife; Quaife dismisses this as “a bit of amiable fiction” refuted by contemporary evidence.¹² These are not reconcilable, and both authors are partisan — Williams for the fishermen, Quaife against Strang but in possession of the Strang manuscripts.

A Strangite tract of 1920 reprinting the Islander account frames the affair as federal complicity: the captain of the U.S. steamer “gave refuge to the dastardly murderers of the Prophet James,” and “in the case of the Prophet James there was never even the least formality of trial.”¹³

Significance

The assassination ended the Kingdom of Saint James within three weeks and triggered the Expulsion of the Strangites. Because Strang named no successor, it also broke the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite) as a gathered body. The refusal of a United States naval officer to surrender the killers to state process, and their release without trial, is the single most consequential legal fact in the island’s nineteenth-century history and has never been satisfactorily explained.

Open questions

• Whose idea was the summons? Whether Captain McBlair’s message was an invitation (the Islander), a summons to consult (Williams), or an arrest (St. Barnard) is unresolved, and the difference bears directly on whether the navy was complicit. Quaife raises the possibility and declines to decide it, saying “One hesitates … to charge a responsible official with prostituting an agency of the United States government to the furtherance of a private plot.”
• The date. 16 June 1856 is established by the Islander and the Detroit despatch, but 17 June circulates in both contemporary and modern accounts.
• Elapsed time to death. 16 June to 9 July is twenty-three days. Williams says eleven; the 1920 Strangite tract says nineteen. Neither has been reconciled.
• The ship’s log. The Michigan’s deck log and Captain McBlair’s report, if they survive in Navy records, would settle the summons question. This project holds neither.
• Whether any inquest was held. No coroner’s or justice’s record from Emmet or Mackinac county has been located here.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Thomas Bedford
• Expulsion of the Strangites
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Northern Islander (1850–1856)
• Saint James Harbor
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams

Sources