Alexander William Doniphan (July 9, 1808 – August 8, 1887[2]) was a 19th-century American attorney, soldier and politician from Missouri who is best known today as the man who prevented the summary execution of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, at the close of the 1838 Mormon War in that state.
He also achieved renown as a leader of American troops during the Mexican–American War, as the author of a legal code that still forms the basis of New Mexico's Bill of Rights, and as a successful defense attorney in the Missouri towns of Liberty, Richmond and Independence.
[4] Doniphan's friend and partner, David Rice Atchison, was a member of the Liberty Blues, a volunteer militia company.
As the Liberty Blues moved toward the Missouri border, Stephen Watts Kearny, then a lieutenant colonel, joined them from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
[5] Starting in 1831, Jackson County, Missouri, had become home to several members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,[6] a religious organization founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York a year earlier.
Denunciations of abolitionism in the church press did nothing to allay their neighbors' fears, and matters came to a head in late 1833, when the Mormons were forcibly expelled from the county.
Ultimately, the church leaders were permitted to escape from custody, and they subsequently made their way to the new Mormon settlement in Hancock County, Illinois, where Joseph Smith was killed in 1844.
[9] In 1843, Porter Rockwell, a controversial Mormon figure later known as "the destroying angel of Mormondom", was arrested in St. Louis and accused of carrying out a failed assassination attempt on (now former) governor Boggs.
[10][11] Forty years after the events of 1838, an aged Doniphan visited Salt Lake City, Utah Territory, which had become the nucleus for the largest body of Mormons following the death of Joseph Smith.
They were to link up with Brigadier General John E. Wool, who was moving southwest from San Antonio, Texas toward Guerrero and Monclova, Coahuila, to attack Monterrey, Nuevo León from the west.
After Price arrived with his force, Kearny, near the present-day border of Arizona and New Mexico, learned that the Navajos had attacked some sheepherders, killed them, and stolen their herd of 2,000 sheep.
Doniphan signed a peace treaty with the Utes, and then took three companies and headed west (toward present day Gallup) in pursuit of the Navajos.
Kearny now called for all citizens of the territory to take up arms and aid the cavalry in finding the Navajos, retrieving the stolen property, and to "make reprisals and obtain redress for the many insults they received from them".
Doniphan was a moderate in the events leading up to the American Civil War, opposing secession and favoring neutrality for Missouri.
This was in response to proposals of the Republican Party to make emancipation immediate, without compensation to the slaveowners or any preparation of the slaves for life as free men.
John Thornton Doniphan died from accidental poisoning: while visiting his uncle James Baldwin, he sought relief for a toothache in the middle of the night but mistakenly took corrosive sublimate (mercury chloride), thinking that it was Epsom salts.