when joseph smith led his persecuted band of followers into western Illinois from Missouri in 1839, nothing overtly portended that within a few short years he and his brother would be assassinated by a mob and his oppressed followers would soon have to flee in the face of lawless violence against them. Instead, their new neighbors expressed sympathy with these new, hardworking White settlers. They saw them as refugees, seeking the same kind of equal opportunity and independence held dear by the western settlers in Jacksonian America. How, then, did tensions between the Latter-day Saints and the other settlers in Hancock County, Illinois grow so deep? And why did those tensions explode into lawless violence that ultimately led Governor Thomas Ford to call out the militia multiple times?James Simeone’s The Saints and the State offers compelling answers to both these questions. To the first, Simeone argues that Smith and the setters at Nauvoo were not driven out specifically because of religious persecution—though, to be sure, religious bigotry was present in opposition to the Mormon settlement. Rather, Simeone suggests that the Latter-day Saints in general, and Smith in particular, soon came to be seen as a threat to the independence and self-governing capacity of the rest of Hancock County. To be clear from the outset, there are no heroes in Simeone’s telling of this story. Smith and the Saints act in understandable but provocative ways. Thomas Sharp, editor of the Warsaw Signal and a leading anti-Mormon, makes reasonable objections and bigoted generalizations in equal measure. Governor Ford is high-minded and honorable but fundamentally misjudges the circumstances.As Simeone ably reconstructs, the White settlers in Jacksonian America were united by an unspoken but powerful “story of peoplehood” that centered on their worth and rights as “independent producers” (3, 9, 192, 293). The book admirably shows how, despite the similarities and potential overlaps between the Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo and the non-Mormon setters in Hancock County, the Mormons were soon seen as violating these norms and threatening the political independence of their fellow citizens. Specifically, Simeone catalogues a number of practices that led the “old settlers” to suspect that Smith’s followers were not the kind of independent citizens the community could govern with collaboratively (8, 296). Smith was willing to negotiate favorable treatment from both parties in the Illinois party duopoly (Whig and Democrat) and deliver his city’s votes to whomever made him the best deal. While an undoubtedly clever survival strategy, to the other settlers in Hancock County this signaled both special treatment that violated norms of equality and a devaluation of their own votes that undermined their role in self-governance. The Nauvoo bloc voting called into question Mormon independence and worthiness in the settler regime.Moreover, Smith and church leaders made ample use of the special prerogatives that had been granted Nauvoo by the State Legislature through such dealings to avoid responding to substantial legal charges and to use state power to protect Smith’s interests and punish those he saw as enemies or apostates. These included the power to have habeas corpus hearings heard in local courts, which Smith—beloved religious leader and prophet—controlled. When this was not immediately available, he relied on the Nauvoo Militia—authorized by the state charter—to protect him until he could find a favorable venue or judge (one potentially influenced by the votes he could deliver). Smith was, in some instances, justified in resisting some of the legal proceedings stemming from his time in Missouri. For some time, most outside Hancock County saw him as a persecuted individual justly taking refuge in the equality of the law. However, the local citizens increasingly saw these actions as a ruse to avoid answering serious legal charges.More troubling, such maneuvering augured a willingness to place Smith and his followers above the law—an impression strengthened as relations between the two groups devolved, by ordinances passed in Nauvoo to explicitly grant Smith special protections. The implication here was that the Mormons would use state power given them to protect their leader and themselves at all costs, while non-Mormon complaints about, for example, the property crimes in which Mormons were rumored to engage liberally would not be honored by courts and officials elected by the Nauvoo voting bloc. For, as the non-Mormons were quick to note, while Smith was happy to use the cover of equal protection under the law to protect himself and the church, he frequently failed to extend reciprocity and toleration to dissenters. He viciously attacked any opponents as apostates, traitors, and damned individuals. By 1844, when Joseph Smith orchestrated the suppression of the dissenting Nauvoo Expositor—by destroying its press—and announced that he would run for the US presidency on a platform of “theodemocracy,” all trust between the two groups had hopelessly eroded. Smith and his voting bloc in Nauvoo were seen as fundamentally incompatible with the local democratic rights of the “old settlers.” It was thus a perceived failure to conform to the ideals of independent citizenship that transformed a sizable portion of the non-Mormon population of Hancock County into anti-Mormons.Of course, this breakdown of trust and growing resentment did not have to explode into extralegal violence and rampant “mobocracy” in the county. To explain why it did, Simeone traces Governor Ford’s fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the conflict. Ford was blind to the underlying assumptions about settler identity. He strove to resolve the conflict on terms of the impartial application of the rule of law to all parties. This failed to recognize the depth of the threat the anti-Mormon faction felt. In the context of the weak, decentralized frontier state—a developing democracy, as Simeone describes it—this pushed anti-Mormons to “take the responsibility” for vindicating their rights as equal, independent citizens through extralegal violence and mob terrorizing of church members (90).For Simeone, then, the story of the Mormon troubles in Illinois is ultimately a story about the concentric circles of government and the way narrative and identity structure the perception of those groups. Smith and the church came to Illinois a persecuted minority and sought special privileges and prerogatives to secure their status as equal citizens in the regime. However, in exercising those privileges and prerogatives, they acted as a local majority with a single-minded and defensive posture that their neighbors experienced as a kind of factional tyranny of the majority. There is a tragic dimension to Simeone’s story of overlapping citizenships. Each party, pursuing their own conception of justice and their own sense of equality was led into conflict with the others with catastrophic results.Simeone’s historical narrative is carefully researched and largely convincing. The Mormon troubles are compellingly read as a reminder of the power of narratives of identity and unspoken mores in American democracy. In the long tradition of American political development texts such as Rodger’s Smith’s Civic Ideals and Stories of Peoplehood (to which Simeone is explicitly indebted), Theda Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers and Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers, Simeone highlights the ascriptive tendencies that undergird the American assertions of equality and the incredibly high costs borne by those who fall outside the caste designated equal.1 To that end, his account is weakened by largely adopting a “great men” approach to history. Our three protagonists, Smith, Sharp, and Ford, do the majority of the talking. It would be fascinating to hear more from ordinary Latter-day Saints in Nauvoo or pro-Mormon or nonviolent anti-Mormon “old settlers.” Such material would greatly strengthen the claim that these settler identities were animating the lived experience of citizens on a day-to-day basis.Such an approach might also reshape the text into a more coherent and systematic argument. The narrative is presented in fits and starts, with long reflections on the theoretical and political science concerns raised. Yet these reflections do not ultimately resolve into a clear statement about political development—apart from the now commonplace observation that mores, culture, ideology, and identity matter—or about the political theory of toleration or recognition. A tremendous amount of ground is covered in these discussions. Matrices of cultural tendencies from Mary Douglas, Rodgers Smith, and J. David Greenstone are interwoven with thoughtful discussions of V. O. Key, E. E. Schattschneider, C. B. McPherson and other students of democratic institutions. There are glancing references to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Weber, Mill, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Mill, Gramsci, Bourdieu, Will Kymlicka, and others. However, there is relatively little sustained analysis of these thinkers.This is a missed opportunity, for Simeone rightly points out the power of underlying political identities and how conflicts between identity groups can lead to a breakdown of an apparently neutral democratic order. He is correct to point out that the “neutral” liberal state always assumes a background culture rooted in certain deeply held normative assumptions. The Mormon troubles are convincingly shown to be fully intelligible in these terms. In his conclusion, he gestures toward broader lessons about toleration and the need for democratic sacrifice from both sides. These suggestions, however, would be much more compelling if they were rooted, for example, in a serious examination of the way the Mormon case in Illinois fits with the normative thought of theorists of toleration such as Kymlicka or Rainer Forst.2To take another example, there is passing mention of John Stuart Mill’s evaluation of the Mormon case in his classic On Liberty. Yet Mill’s argument for toleration—and his explicit condemnation of the events in Illinois—is rooted in an assumption of robust state capacities and a highly sophisticated political culture in which universal education, formal equal protection, and adherence to certain “morals” of political discourse is widespread. Failing to meet these assumed standards justified Mill’s denial of freedom of speech and action to the entirety of England’s colonized populations, populations he helped rule over with a benevolent “despotism” as an employee of the British East India Company.3 It would be fascinating and instructive to see how Mill’s arguments fare in the context of America’s developing democracy.These deficiencies aside, The Saints and the States is an engaging and thoughtful exploration of a seminal moment in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and provides rich fodder for reflection and discussion for anyone interested in the precarious movement towards stable democracy in America. Most potently, it is a forceful reminder that the mechanisms of equal protection and due process must exist in an atmosphere of trust and reciprocity. Without that, the legitimacy of our institutions themselves is imperiled. In an America in which both parties accuse the other of being untrustworthy, in which normal procedural mechanisms such as court nominations, filibusters, and redistricting are increasingly seen as tools for partisan oppression and suppression of dissent, Simeone issues a vital warning about the necessity to attending to our civic relationships and consciously attempting to cultivate an appreciation of the equal democratic worth of those with whom we disagree.