Thomas Sharp’s Warsaw Signal: Crafting an Anti-Mormon Rhetoric Prior to the Murder of Joseph Smith Jr.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Thomas C. Sharp, editor of the Warsaw (IL) Signal from 1841–1844, was a prolific writer with a varied career in newspapers, law, and politics. His identity became intertwined with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr. in Nauvoo, Illinois. Sharp used the Signal to “stand in opposition to the encroachments of the fanatical band” and rally readers to exterminate Smith and the Mormons. In nine issues immediately preceding the June 1844 murder of Smith, Sharp isolated, concentrated, and repeated irreconcilable actions imputed to Smith to incite the assassination. The rhetorical strategy of vilification is used to illuminate how Sharp’s rhetoric—some 33,000 words in seventy-one articles on the Mormons—enraged citizens through characterizations of intentions, actions, purposes, and identities. Sharp’s inflammatory printing and formidable editorial influence is an example of the power of the nineteenth-century press. The findings serve as a warning to media consumers of the potent cogency of media manipulators and conspiracists.