Kingdom of Saint James

Summary

The Kingdom of Saint James was the theocratic monarchy proclaimed by James Jesse Strang on Beaver Island on 8 July 1850, and destroyed in July 1856 in the weeks after his assassination. It occupied the same ground and the same people as Strang’s church: he ruled the faithful as prophet and king under the Book of the Law of the Lord, and ruled everyone else through the ordinary machinery of Michigan township and county government, which the Mormon vote controlled. Its capital was the village of Saint James on Saint James Harbor; its press was the Northern Islander (1850–1856); its extent is still legible in the island’s biblical place names.

Its population is genuinely unknown. The figures in circulation — roughly 2,600 in 1854–56 — derive from a census taken under Strang’s own authority and printed in his own newspaper. The party that expelled the Mormons alleged in the same year that those returns overstated Emmet County’s population sevenfold. confidence: contested.

History

Foundation

Strang appointed a church conference at Big Beaver for early July 1850. On 8 July, in the uncompleted tabernacle, a portion of the newly revealed Book of the Law of the Lord was read; the assembly covenanted to live by it; Strang, in a robe of bright red, was escorted to a platform surrounded by the apostles and the Quorum of Seventy; George J. Adams acted as master of ceremonies; and a crown of metal with a cluster of stars in front was placed on his head. Quaife puts four hundred spectators in the building. On the same day Strang announced a revelation appointing “the Islands of the Great Lakes” as the inheritance of the Saints and giving the King power to apportion the land among them; the anniversary was to be kept annually with sacrifices and a public feast.¹

The published warrant was chapter XX of the Book of the Law of the Lord: “He hath chosen his servant James to be King … and appointed him King in Zion: by his own voice did he call him, and he sent his Angels unto him to ordain him.”² The volume’s own imprint reads “PRINTED BY COMMAND OF THE KING, AT THE ROYAL PRESS, SAINT JAMES, A. R. VI” — dated by regnal year, the sixth of the reign.³

What the kingship claimed

Strang’s follower Wingfield Watson, interviewed for the 1882 account reprinted in 1892, put the claim narrowly: “Mr. Strang did claim to be a king only to the Mormon people, and upon the same principles … upon which Moses, Melchisedec, Elijah, Elisha, Noah, Enoch, Peter, Joseph Smith, and all the great and leading prophets of God claimed that office,” and only over those who chose to receive him as such.⁴ The same account observes that Strang “carefully kept his monarchial pretensions for home consumption,” submitted to state and federal authority when required, and used the civil law where it suited him.⁴

Quaife describes the resulting dual system: church law governed the faithful among themselves, civil office governed dealings with gentiles, and the two diverged. A Saint who withdrew forfeited his real estate, since the Law of the Lord vested control of that class of property in the Prophet.⁵ Punishments unknown to state law — public whippings in particular — were inflicted under church authority; see Thomas Bedford.⁶

Government and daily order

A manuscript by Strang’s wife, quoted in the 1892 sketch, describes the domestic regime: tea, coffee, tobacco and liquor prohibited; the seventh day kept as the sabbath with compulsory attendance; a tithe of everything raised, earned or received paid into a public fund used for improvements, the poor, and state, county and township taxes, with no other tax levied; by-laws printed and a copy in every household; schools organised; and a printing office maintained “of sufficient capacity to print all the papers, books, pamphlets, tracts, etc., needed for the church.”⁴ The same source states there were “never over 20 cases of plural marriages upon the islands,” and that no man had more than three wives except Strang.⁴

Civil government ran in parallel. The Beaver Islands were erected into the township of Peaine in 1847, at the instance of the Rochester fishing interest rather than the Mormons.⁷ Emmet County was organised by act of 29 January 1853, during Strang’s first legislative session; it then contained three townships — Peaine and Galilee on the Beaver Islands, and Charlevoix Township on the mainland.⁸ Galilee is the Strang-era predecessor of the modern Township of Saint James. In Strang’s second term the Beaver, Fox and Manitou groups were detached as the new county of Manitou.⁹

The kingdom also expanded to the mainland: Strang’s people settled around Pine Lake, which the Northern Islander was calling Lake Mormon by 1855, and held a conference and built a synagogue on its “Holy Island.”¹⁰

Population — a contested number

Quaife supports his figure with a contemporary letter recording 490 exiles taken to Chicago on one boat, 300 previously on the Iowa, and the Louisville carrying “all she could stow” to Detroit.¹¹ That is a floor of roughly 800 by direct report; the rest is extrapolation. The federal decennial census cannot settle the question from this project’s holdings: county-subdivision population is available through the API only from 2000. For reference, Quaife notes the 1920 census returned 779 residents in the two townships that make up the island.¹¹

End

Strang was shot on 16 June 1856 and died on 9 July; within days of the shooting the population began to leave, and in early July an armed party from the mainland cleared the island. See Assassination of James Strang and Expulsion of the Strangites. The manifesto issued by the victors and printed on the captured press declared: “The dominion of King Strang is at an end. … The land is redeemed; a kingdom no longer exists upon the borders of one of our most populous States.”¹²

Significance

The kingdom is the reason Beaver Island’s civil geography exists in its present form: Peaine and Saint James townships, the short-lived Manitou County, the village of Saint James, and a set of biblical place names that outlived the regime that imposed them. It is also the island’s principal claim on national attention, and the ontology of this knowledge base carries a distinct bih:Kingdom class because of it.

Open questions

• The population. No independent count survives. Reconciling Strang’s 1854 census with the expelling party’s counter-claim would require the manuscript Michigan state census returns for Emmet County, which this project does not hold.
• A formal style. No document in the corpus gives the polity a formal name. “Kingdom of Saint James” appears to be Quaife’s coinage; contemporaries wrote “the dominion of King Strang.”
• Territorial extent. The kingdom’s claimed inheritance was “the Islands of the Great Lakes,” but its actual settlement extended to the Pine Lake / Lake Mormon mainland and, by 1855, into Antrim and Otsego counties. No map of the settled extent has been located.
• The crown. Quaife describes “a crown of metal with a cluster of stars in front” and elsewhere calls it a “tinsel crown.” Whether the object survives is not established here.

See also

• James Jesse Strang
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite)
• Assassination of James Strang
• Expulsion of the Strangites
• Northern Islander (1850–1856)
• Saint James
• Township of Peaine
• Township of Saint James
• Lake Geneserath
• Donegal Bay

Sources