George J. Adams

Summary

George J. Adams was, for roughly four years, “next to the Prophet himself, the most conspicuous figure” in James Jesse Strang’s organization — a touring actor turned Latter Day Saint elder who co-presided the church with Strang, served as master of ceremonies at Strang’s 8 July 1850 coronation as king, and acted as intermediary in Strang’s first plural marriage. Within months of the coronation Strang disciplined him for bigamy, and Adams defected to the “gentile” opposition at Mackinac, becoming a prosecution witness against Strang and one of his most damaging public accusers. confidence: contested — Adams’s own testimony is central to the hostile case against Strang, and Quaife, whose narrative is the main source here, explicitly doubts Strang’s version of why Adams was disciplined.

History

Actor, Mormon missionary, Strang’s co-president

Quaife found “but little information” on Adams’s early history or the date of his conversion to Mormonism. His letters “reveal him as an uncultured, turbulent man, boastful, passionate, and crude,” and he “was an actor by profession, and an orator of no mean ability.”¹ By 1841 he had joined Orson Hyde on a mission that dedicated the Mount of Olives at Jerusalem for the gathering of Israel, though Hyde’s own account of performing the dedication states he did so alone.² In 1843 (or 1844, by another account) Adams and Hyde were appointed to a further foreign mission, to Russia, which “seems not to have materialized.” Adams was excommunicated by the Nauvoo church and was living in Cincinnati when he wrote to Strang in March 1846 asking for his old “place, standing, and appointments.”³

Adams became one of two councilors in Strang’s First Presidency (with John C. Bennett), and for four years was Strang’s most prominent lieutenant, chiefly occupied with proselytizing in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.⁴ The Gospel Herald, Strang’s own newspaper, corroborates his standing contemporaneously: conference minutes through 1849 are signed jointly “JAMES J. STRANG, GEORGE J. ADAMS, Presidents,” and he is recorded preaching, baptizing for the dead, and casting out evil spirits at church conferences on Beaver Island.⁵ He also served as the secret go-between in 1849 when Strang arranged his first plural marriage to Elvira Field — Quaife calls him her “lecherous Prime Minister” in this role.⁶

Master of ceremonies at the coronation

On 8 July 1850, in the still-uncompleted tabernacle at Saint James, Adams “acted as master of ceremonies” at Strang’s self-coronation, the culmination of which was “placing on the brow of Strang a crown of metal with a cluster of stars in front.”⁷ See Coronation of James Strang. In the tense weeks before the ceremony, with the Saints fearing a gentile mob attack, Strang and Adams were both “outspoken in their defiance,” Strang vowing to execute mobbers with his own hand, and Adams “call[ing] not merely for their defeat, but for a generous letting of gentile blood.”⁸

Quarrel and defection

“Hardly had the fishermen been routed and the coronation festivities concluded… when the Prophet became involved in a dispute of far-reaching consequences with his own Prime Minister, George J. Adams.”⁹ Strang’s own explanation, as Quaife relates it, was that Adams had returned from a Boston preaching tour with a woman he introduced as a wealthy widow and passed off as his wife, while his actual wife was still living, abandoned, in New Jersey; for “this offense against decency and humanity,” Strang stripped him of his First Presidency office.¹⁰ Quaife records this as “Strang’s version of the affair” and states his own reservation plainly: “I am constrained to doubt whether Adams’ immoral conduct was anything more than a convenient pretext for the Prophet’s action in degrading him.”¹¹

“Enraged over his humiliation,” Adams went to Mackinac and joined the gentile faction he had, three months earlier, been calling for blood against. On 20 October 1850 he returned to Beaver Island with the Sheriff of Mackinac County, armed with a warrant for Strang’s arrest on a charge of threatening the life of the woman Adams had presented as his wife.¹² Strang’s own 1854 history gives his side of the resulting prosecution, naming “George J. Adams, a somewhat distinguished preacher among the Mormons, but more widely known as a player of great parts in various companies,” as its instigator.¹³ Quaife records that by the summer of 1851 Adams was in Detroit, publicly lecturing on “the iniquities of the Saints” and appearing as a witness for the prosecution at Strang’s federal trial — “the apostasy of Adams wrought serious injury to the Kingdom. His sensational charges were spread by the press throughout a wide region.”¹⁴ The 1892 Michigan Pioneer sketch corroborates the outline independently: Adams “failed in an attempt to organize a revolt and joined the Gentiles: he made several futile attempts to break up the new settlement, but finally gave up the contest.”¹⁵ Samuel Graham succeeded to Adams’s place in Strang’s inner council.¹⁶

Significance

Adams is the clearest case in this project’s sources of a founding insider of the Kingdom of Saint James who became one of its most effective outside accusers. His public break with Strang — occurring within months of the coronation that he himself had staged — provided the anti-Strang press and prosecution with a witness who could speak to the movement’s inner workings, and his case is a textbook instance of why the Strang literature must be read as partisan on both sides: Strang’s own account frames Adams’s discipline as a matter of sexual morality, while Quaife, working from Strang’s own papers seventy years later, suspects a pretext.

Open questions

• Why was Adams really disciplined? Strang’s stated reason (bigamy) versus Quaife’s suspicion of a “convenient pretext” is not resolved from sources held here.
• Birth and death dates, and life after 1851. Nothing is established from sources held here about Adams’s origins or his life once he leaves the Beaver Island record in the early 1850s. (Adams is known from wider Latter Day Saint historiography to have later led a colonization venture to Jaffa, Palestine, in the 1860s, but no source describing that episode is held for this project, and it is not asserted here.)
• The Russia mission. Quaife states it “seems not to have materialized” but does not resolve whether Adams ever set out.
• His first wife’s fate, and the true identity of the woman he brought back in her place, are given only in Strang’s own account and are not independently corroborated here.

See also

• Coronation of James Strang
• James Jesse Strang
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Gospel Herald (Voree, 1847-1850)

Sources