"Has the Lord turned bankrupt?" The attempted sale of the Nauvoo Temple, 1846-1850

"The Glory of Mormonism is Gone"

With the Trustees now gone and their work accepted, one might suppose that the temple would have fallen into disuse and disrepair. Though vacant, it was found to be in good condition by the summer of 1848. "I visited the Temple and went over it from the bottom to the top," a visiting Wilford Woodruff, one of the authorities who had helped in dedicating it two years before, recorded. "[It] was in a much better state of preservation than I expected to find it."" Starting in October of that same year, the Methodist Home Mission Society was to have begun renting out the building for the sum of $400 per year, in an arrangement that unfortunately never came to pass.72

Early in the morning of 9 October, citizens of Nauvoo were alarmed to discover the temple in flames. "It was a sight too full of mournful sublimity," as one reporter described the awful scene.

The mass of material which had been gathered there by the labor of many years afforded a rare opportunity for this element to play off some of its wildest sports. Although the morning was tolerably dark, still when the flames shot upwards, the spire, the streets and the houses for nearly a mile distant were lighted up, so as to render even the smallest object discernible. The glare of the vast torch, pointing skyward indescribably contrasted with the universal gloom and darkness around it.73

Luvera Ellen Preece was living across the Mississippi River in Montrose, Iowa during time of the fire. She witnessed the burning of the temple first. She confided in her journal that the light in the sky from the fire was so great, she could see to pick a common pin from the floor in her bedroom.74

Quickly condemning it as the work of a crazed arson, the Warsaw Signal, a long-time bitter critic of the Mormons, said that it was "no doubt the work of some nefarious incendiary. This edifice was the wonder of Illinois .... As a work of art and a memorial of Mormon delusions, it should have stood for ages .... None but the most depraved heart could have applied the torch to effect its destruction."75 The Iowa Sentinel followed in the same regretful tone: "However much the religion of the Mormons may be condemned, every good citizen will condemn this act of the incendiary as one of the greatest barbarian."76 And reported the Methodists: "You have heard that the great Mormon temple is burned. The glory of Mormonism is gone."77

The man long thought to be responsible for torching the temple was Joseph B. Agnew of Pontoosuc, Illinois, who, along with Thomas C. Sharp of Carthage and Squire McCauley of Appanoose, feared that so long as the temple stood, it would, magnet-like, attract the Mormons back to Nauvoo. "The reason for our burning it," he admitted years after the fact

was that there was continual reports in circulation that the Mormons were coming back to Nauvoo and we were afraid that they might take it into their hearts to do so and as we had had all the trouble with them we wanted... we determined the destruction of their temple and by so doing they would not be able to ever again try to come back .... We pledged ourselves to destroy the temple if it cost our lives.78