Backenstos, Jacob Benjamin.  Proclamation No. 2. To the citizens of Hancock County, Ill., and the surrounding country.  J. B. Backenstos, Sheriff, Hancock County, Ill. Sept. 16th, A.D. 1845, half past 2 o’clock P.M. [Nauvoo, 1845]
Broadside 41 x 28.5 cm.

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Jacob Backenstos, a “Jack Mormon,” had ties to the Saints through his brother William, who was married to a niece of Emma Smith.  Born in Pennsylvania in 1811, Backenstos served as clerk of the Hancock circuit court in 1843 and in August 1844 was elected by the Mormon bloc to the Illinois legislature, where he argued against the repeal of the Nauvoo charter.  The following year he was elected sheriff of Hancock County and was immediately confronted with the violence that ultimately drove the Saints from Illinois.  Fifteen days after Congress declared war with Mexico, he was commissioned a captain of mounted riflemen, and at the battle of Chapultepec he was brevetted a lieutenant–colonel for gallantry and meritorious service.  In 1849 he marched with the mounted riflemen to Oregon, settled with his family in the Willamette Valley, and there resigned his commission in 1851.  On September 25, 1857, he drowned himself in the Willamette River near Portland.

In his capacity as sheriff of Hancock, Backenstos issued five proclamations over a period of twelve days.  All of these were undoubtedly printed by the Times and Seasons print shop, and thus they are included here, even though they are technically not Mormon pieces.

From the moment violence broke out in the Morley settlement, the anti–Mormons continually threatened the life of Jacob Backenstos, and on September 15, he learned that an armed force was after him.  The next day, as he was traveling along the Warsaw–Carthage road, four men on horseback began to pursue him, one of them, Franklin A. Worrell, the commander of the guard at Carthage Jail at the time Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered.  Backenstos whipped his horse and soon came upon Orrin Porter Rockwell and two other Mormons.  Jumping out of his buggy with pistol in hand, he ordered the Mormons to assist him and commanded the four in pursuit of him to stop.  When one of them leveled a musket at him, he told Porter Rockwell to shoot.  Rockwell took aim at Worrell’s belt buckle and shot him off his horse.  The pursuers retreated and then returned with a wagon to carry the fatally wounded Worrell back to Warsaw.  Backenstos headed for Nauvoo, where he issued his second proclamation that afternoon.

Most of this proclamation is an account of the events leading up to the shooting of Worrell.  At the end Backenstos again commands the house burners to stop and return to their homes.  He calls on all the able–bodied men in the county to resist the rioters, and he directs the posse comitatus to go to the nearest points of conflict and defend the Mormons.  In a postscript he remarks that the Saints have acted with “more than ordinary forbearance.”

At the time he issued Proclamation No. 2, Backenstos apparently did not know the identity of the man that Rockwell had shot or that he had been fatally wounded.  Proclamation No. 3 identifies the man as Worrell and states that he had died.  Backenstos was tried for the shooting, on a change of venue, in Peoria that December and acquitted.  Rockwell was tried in Galena in August 1846 and acquitted when Backenstos testified that he had acted on his orders.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church.  Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]).  Item 276, p. 317-18.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University.