Praying with One Eye Open: Mormons and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Appalachian Georgia Engel Mary Ella
In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was dead,…
Specifikacia Praying with One Eye Open: Mormons and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Appalachian Georgia Engel Mary Ella
In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was dead, murdered by a group of twelve men. The church refused to bury the missionary in Georgia soil; instead, he was laid to rest in Salt Lake City beneath a monument that declared, "There is no law in Georgia for the Mormons." Most accounts of this event have linked Standing's murder to the virulent nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism that also took the life of prophet Joseph Smith and to an enduring southern tradition of extralegal violence. In these writings, the stories of the men who took Standing's life are largely ignored, and they are treated as significant only as vigilantes who escaped justice.Historian Mary Ella Engel adopts a different approach, arguing that the mob violence against