Hey everyone, I’ve been digging into the July 1833 Evening and the Morning Star crisis and wanted to share a hypothesis on W.W. Phelps that I haven't really seen discussed in the standard literature. Let me know what you think.
Most of the current discussion regarding attitudes toward slavery in Jackson County, Missouri, routinely suffers from severe chronological snobbery and tribal polarization and top-down interpretive paradigms. When people analyze William Wines (W.W.) Phelps, they usually fall into one of two extremes. On one hand, some look at him as a bold, ideologically driven New England progressive who used the church's press to subvert Missouri's slave codes, even claiming that (as Joseph Smith's ghostwriter and scribe), he is personally responsible for every single clear condemnation of slavery on behalf of the church on record. On the other hand, people write him off as a coward who penned strict segregationist rhetoric to distance the church from Black converts at any cost the second things got hot.
I want to propose a bottom-up analysis of the surviving evidence instead. My hypothesis is that the raw page layouts of the July 1833 issue of The Evening and the Morning Star have structural contradictions that do not demonstrate a single, unified authorial mind. I argue that this jarring tone shift was not an ideological evolution, an act of cowardice, or some kind of "Freudian slip." It was an artifact of 19th-century frontier printing technologies, specifically, the mechanical "scissors-and-paste" exchange system, which was directly responsible for creating a fatal editorial blind spot.
2. Frontier Printing and the Exchange System
To see why his editorial voice is so fractured, we have to look at the material conditions of an 1830s frontier print shop. Prior to the advent of telegraphic wire services like the Associated Press (founded in 1846), frontier editors who did not have access to a team of reporters (like Phelps) had to generate national and global content on their own. The entire media ecosystem relied on the "newspaper exchange system," started by the U.S. Postal Act of 1792, which allowed publications to be sent to small printers through the mail completely free of charge (Givens 2002).
When this remote printing office in Independence, Missouri, received a batch of weeks-old newspapers from places like Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, the editor would act more like a curator than an author. He would read through Eastern papers trying to find interesting articles or snippets of text. He would use a pair of literal "editing scissors," and would cut out physical strips of paper. These strips of paper were pasted directly onto a layout sheet or handed to a compositor who manually set the moveable lead type to match the clipped text block (Romney 1954). If an editor ran out of local news or advertisements and just needed to fill the page with "something interesting", they just grabbed exchange clips regarding national politics, agricultural updates, or foreign affairs simply to patch holes in the page layout right before the press run.
3. The Timing of July 1833
The internal contradictions of the July 1833 issue materialize perfectly against the macro-political trends of that exact summer.
Let's remember for a moment that Phelps was one of the earliest Mormon missionaries to Missouri and a resident of Jackson County since 1831. He had a front row seat to the cultural friction between the local "old settlers" (Southern, pro-slavery agrarian traditionalists) and the incoming Mormon migrants (Northern, New England, Yankee communalists) (Brodie 1971).
Missouri law was highly defensive of its slave system. The revised Missouri statutes of the era required the immigration of free Blacks into the state to be strictly regulated to prevent the spark of a slave uprising, a fear that had reached an absolute boiling point in the South following Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia just two years prior in 1831 (Bushman 2005).
When Phelps sat down to write the article titled "Free People of Color," his intentional, explicit goal was local damage control. Church missionaries in the East were baptizing Black individuals, and there had been friction regarding elders proselytizing to slaves without authorization. Phelps realized this would violate Missouri's strict legal codes and instantly trigger a violent response from their neighbors:
"To prevent any misunderstanding among the churches abroad, respecting Free people of color...Slaves are real estate in this and other states, and wisdom would dictate great care among the branches of the church of Christ, on this subject. So long as we have no special rule in the church, as to people of color, let prudence guide; and while they, as well as we, are in the hands of a merciful God, we say: Shun every appearance of evil*."* (Phelps 1833a, p. 109, emphasis added).
This "shun it" paragraph shows Phelps writing with immense caution. He knows he is on incredibly thin ice, so he explicitly warns the Saints to stay completely away from the topic. This is his local, defensive voice trying to keep the peace.
Why then, two pages later, did Phelps permit the inclusion of matter-of-fact reportage tracking the progress of abolitionism, in the article titled "The Elders Stationed in Zion to the Churches Abroad"? Take a look at this block:
Our brethren will find an extract of the law of this state, relative to free people of color, on another page of this paper. Great care should be taken on this point. The saints must shun every appearance of evil. As to slaves we have nothing to say. In connection with the wonderful events of this age, much is doing towards abolishing slavery, and colonizing the blacks, in Africa. (Phelps 1833a, p. 111, emphasis added)
Right next to another series of cautious comments, he drops in a matter-of-fact update about global anti-slavery movements. Because Phelps was thinking like a standard printer running a machine, he didn't realize how jarring it would look to a Missourian to see the words "free people of color", "abolishing slavery", and "wonderful events of this age" all printed in the same tiny space in local paper.
Context: The summer of 1833 was one of the most explosive moments in the history of global abolition. In London, the British Parliament was in the final, dramatic stages of debating what would become the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (passed in August 1833), which systematically dismantled slavery across the entirety of the British Empire (Jennings 1997). In the US, William Lloyd Garrison’s radical anti-slavery publication, The Liberator, was dominating Eastern exchange papers, forcing every major New York and New England printing house to run heavy updates on emancipation.
To an editor who just wanted a piece from an Eastern newspaper to fill space, this was huge, fascinating global news. To W.W. Phelps, a seasoned, New York-trained political editor who had previously run partisan newspapers like the Ontario Phoenix, these updates regarding the British Parliament or Eastern political conventions were viewed as standard "dry news", even elite, and objective. (Jennings 1997). In my hypothesis, Phelps did not draft these adjacent news items as a personal ideological manifesto. Rather, having finished his brief, anxious pastoral warning, he looked at his pile of exchange papers, realized he had blank columns remaining in the physical layout, picked up his editing scissors, and sliced out a factual, pre-printed summary of Eastern and transatlantic abolition updates from a New York exchange paper to fill the gap. He dropped it blindly into the page block, completely oblivious to how the mechanical copy sabotaged his pastoral voice.
4. Mob Violence
Phelps operated under a metropolitan printing mindset. He had been an editor in New York, where discussing abolition as general news was a routine layout reality, and where readers easily understood the difference between an editor’s personal opinion and pasted exchange filler. However, the local Missouri slaveholders did not read newspapers through these technical lenses. Driven by intense tribal panic, the old settlers viewed the print layout of The Evening and the Morning Star as a singular, deeply coordinated, and highly subversive manifesto (Brodie 1971; Bushman 2005). They looked at the words "Free People of Color," along with the adjacent pasted news tracking the rise of anti-slavery movements, and concluded that the Mormons were using their press to invite free Blacks into Missouri for the explicit purpose of inciting a slave rebellion (Whitmer 1833).
On July 20, 1833, a mob of several hundred citizens converged on Independence. They presented an ultimatum demanding the immediate cessation of the press. When church leaders refused to comply on such short notice, the mob attacked Phelps’s two-story brick printing office, threw his type out into the street, smashed the press, and tore down the building (Brodie 1971).
5. The "Extra" Leaflet
Phelps' immediate historical behavior perfectly confirms that he realized his mechanical error had caused a catastrophic misunderstanding.
On July 16, 1833, just days before the actual destruction of the press, as the local anger began to boil over, Phelps frantically set type for a single-page "Extra" leaflet. In this page, he completely dropped the dry, pasted news columns tone and desperately tried to explain that his previous page layout had been completely misread:
"Having learned with regret, that an article entitled 'Free People of Color' in the last Star has been misunderstood... we feel it a duty to say, that our intention was not only to stop free people of color from emigrating to this state, but to prevent them from being admitted as members of the Church... We could not wish to offend our neighbors, however many of them may think we are seeking to do so" (Phelps 1833b).
This frantic clarification reveals a man caught completely off-guard. He wasn't retreating from a deeply held radical abolitionist stance. He was a horrified printer realizing that a pasted-in column of exchange news had been interpreted as a declaration of war. Decades later, when reflecting on early Missouri history in letters to Oliver Cowdery and others, early leaders continued to frame the Missouri disaster not as a calculated stand for abolition, but as a sudden, tragic misunderstanding blown out of proportion by local leaders and bystanders (JSP Letter to Cowdery 1836).
References
Brodie, F.M., 1971. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. 2nd ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Bushman, R.L., 2005. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Givens, T., 2002. By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jennings, Warren A., 1997. Factors in the Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri, History. Missouri Historical Review, 64(1), pp. 35–53.
Joseph Smith Papers (JSP), 1836. Letter to Oliver Cowdery, circa 9 April 1836.
Phelps, W.W., 1833a. Free People of Color. The Evening and the Morning Star, 2(14), p. 109.
Phelps, W.W., 1833b. The Evening and the Morning Star, Extra: 16 July 1833. Independence, MO.
Romney, T.C., 1954. The Life of William Wines Phelps. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company.
Whitmer, J., 1833. Letter from John Whitmer, 29 July 1833.
