John D. Lee
John D. Lee's background and his involvement in and statements about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Life
Name: John Doyle Lee
Lived: 1812-1877
Biographical Sketch
John Doyle Lee was born in southwestern Illinois. Lee's maternal grandfather, John Doyle, of Irish descent, was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to Davidson County, Tennessee, where Lee's mother was born. In the Revolutionary War, Doyle served under George Rogers Clark who captured Fort Vincennes from the British. The fort was a former French outpost on the middle Mississippi. Years later Doyle returned to the fort on the Mississippi, then renamed Kaskaskia, and settled there.
Regarding his paternal forebears, the Lees had been English gentry who migrated to tidewater Virginia. Many rose to prominence in colonial Virginia. But this was not true of John D. Lee's direct Lee line. Lee's grandfather lived his life in Washington County in southwest Virginia, that is, in the backcountry on the far frontier of eighteenth-century Virginia.
By the early 1800s, the Doyles along with Lee's future father, Ralph Lee, had moved to Kaskaskia, Illinois territory, on the far frontier. By 1811, Lee's mother, Sarah Elizabeth Doyle (1778-1815), was a thirty-one year old widow with one child, her husband having been killed over a disputed land claim. She married twenty-two-year-old Ralph Lee (1788-1860), a Lee from Virginia but decidedly down on his luck.
John D. Lee was born in 1812 in Randolph County, Illinois. In 1815, Lee's mother died when he was barely three. For the next four years Lee was raised by a French-speaking Negro nurse. Lee's father sank into alcoholism and insolvency. By 1819, both Lee and his older sister were in the care of his mother's sister, Charlotte Doyle Conner and her husband James Conner. Lee's years with his aunt and uncle, however, were unhappy due to his uncle's drinking and his aunt's harsh discipline.
In these years, Lee learned the male values of the predominate Scots-Irish regional culture: independence, assertiveness, defense of honor and similar traits. At age sixteen, Lee ran away and soon found work as a mail carrier. Later he returned to the Conners to manage the farm. In the off season he had three months of school. This was his only formal education but he did learn to read and write, a notable achievement on the frontier.
In 1832, at age nineteen, Lee and his uncle served in the local militia during the Black Hawk War. Following that, Lee moved upriver to St. Louis and followed various pursuits there and in eastern Missouri. He worked hard and saved, but he also fought and gambled occasionally. His brief gambling depleted his savings and ended a budding romance with a young women taken in by his uncle. So Lee pursued a romance with another young woman and in 1833, the twenty-year-old Lee married nineteen-year-old Aggatha Ann Wollsey.
In 1837, Lee and his wife Aggatha heard and accepted the message of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Reacting with enthusiasm, they joined the gathering of Mormons in northwestern Missouri. However, the large influx of Mormons into the region as well as cultural and religious differences lead to armed conflict between the original settlers and the Mormon newcomers. During the 1838 mass uprising, Lee joined in the conflict, identifying himself as a Danite.
In early 1839, following the Mormons' surrender and removal from western Missouri, Lee, his wife and his family joined the main Mormon body traveling northeast to the western frontier of Illinois. He was among the first to settle in the new Mormon settlement of Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi River. He went on proselyting missions to Tennessee in 1839 and 1842-43. In the expanding community, Lee served at different times as clerk, recorder, librarian and wharf master in a variety of civic and religious organizations. He also served as a peace officer and a major in the Nauvoo Legion, the local militia.
In spring 1844, to further Joseph Smith's presidential campaign, Lee traveled to Kentucky and campaigned for Mormon leader Joseph Smith in his presidential campaign bid. Following the murder of Smith, Lee transferred his full loyalty to the new Mormon leader, Brigham Young. As the practice of polygamy became more widespread, Lee entered into many plural marriages in 1845-46. Another innovative practice was "adoption" under which Lee because an adopted son of Young. Lee also served as his guard and clerk. In 1846, Lee joined the Mormon hegira into the west, traveling through the territories of Iowa and Nebraska.
Lee immigrated to Utah in 1848 and by 1851, Lee was in southern Utah as one of its original colonizers. Lee was a presiding elder in his settlement as well as a probate judge, legislator, and Indian farmer. The much-married Lee continued taking additional wives so that by the end of the 1850s he had married seventeen wives. During the 1860s he married one additional wife for a total of eighteen. Seven of these wives bore him forty-six children. In later years, as his troubles from his connection with the massacre multiplied, all but three of his wives left him.
In 1859, when federal judge John Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warrant for 38 alleged massacre participants, Lee was among the accused and went into hiding until the investigation stalled. For years after the massacre, Brigham Young took no action against Lee. However in the early 1870s, Young excommunicated Lee following which Lee moved to the Arizona frontier and operated the ferry crossing on the Colorado River.
In 1874, Lee was indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre. His first trial in 1875 ended in a hung jury. The 1876 retrial resulted in his conviction for murder. In March 1877, his legal appeals exhausted and pleas for clemency denied, Lee was taken to the Mountain Meadows and executed by a firing squad. He was buried in Panguitch.
He was survived by his three remaining wives and many dozens of children. Later in 1877, his life story was published posthumously as Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of John D. Lee. Following the publication of Juanita Brooks' The Mountain Meadows Massacre in the mid-twentieth century, Lee's membership in the Mormon Church was restored.
John D. Lee, Major, 4th Battalion, New Harmony
His Role and Statements Relative to the Massacre
In June 1857, John D. Lee, 45, was a captain in the militia but was then promoted to major over the 4th Battalion in the 10th Regiment, also known as the Iron Military District. In September 1857, by his own admission, Lee met with Isaac C. Haight around Thursday the 3rd to plan an attack on the Arkansas train. On Friday the 4th, Lee relayed orders to his son-in-law Carl Shirts to incite local Indians to attack the train.
On Monday the 7th, the day of the first attack on the emigrant train, Lee was present at Mountain Meadows. That afternoon, he headed south to find the militiamen from the southern settlements. He met them that evening between 10 and 16 miles south of Mountain Meadows. He and the militia detachments from Santa Clara and Washington arrived at Mountain Meadows at mid-day on Tuesday the 8th. Lee remained there all during the week.
On Thursday evening, September 12, he attended the militia council with John Higbee, Philip Klingensmith and other. It was there that they hatched the final plan of attack. In Mormonism Unveiled, Lee maintains that he was the only one at the council who opposed the plan to kill the emigrants but the evidence suggests otherwise. On the day of the main massacre, Friday the 11th, he delivered deceptive terms of surrender to the emigrants and he was at the head of the column of march with Samuel McMurdie and Samuel Knight. The evidence suggests that Lee was among those who killed the wounded traveling in the wagons at the head of the column. The day after the final massacre, Col. William Dame and Major Isaac Haight having arrived at the Meadows, Lee briefed them on the massacre.
Lee gave a variety of statements about the massacre. In 1859, federal officials interviewed Lee and they left relatively brief summaries of his statements. Based on information from anonymous militiamen, federal judge John Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warranty naming 38 Iron County militiamen, including Lee.
Around 1872, Lee gave an interview to correspondent John Hanson Beadle which Beadle published in 1873 in The Undeveloped West, or Five Years in the Territories. In 1874, Lee was indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre.
In 1875, with fellow defendants Isaac Haight, John Higbee and William Stewart in hiding, federal prosecutors were prepared to take Lee to trial. Both sides negotiated over a possible plea bargain. In that context, Lee prepared another statement of the massacre. Dissatisfied with the extent of the statement, the prosecutors withdrew the offer of a plea and elected to take Lee to trial. They granted immunity to former Mormon bishop Philip Klingensmith who testified against Lee as did other present and former Iron County militiamen. The 1875 trial ended in a hung jury. But in his retrial in 1876, Lee was convicted of murder by an all-Mormon jury and sentenced by federal judge Jacob Boreman to death.
While under sentence of death, Lee wrote his life story including his so-called "Confessions," yet another account concerning the massacre. In hopes of leniency, Lee showed his "Confessions" to federal prosecutor Sumner Howard. But the prosecutor disabused Lee of the hope that his sentence would be commuted. Lee then prepared a final statement of the massacre which he delivered to the prosecutor. This is the so-called Lee-Howard Statement.
In March 1877, Lee was taken to Mountain Meadows where he was executed by a firing squad. Some months later, his life story was published posthumously as Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of John D. Lee. His final statement, the Lee-Howard statement, also received wide circulation after his death.
There are inconsistencies among his statements and Lee was not entirely forthcoming. Yet collectively these statements constitute the longest and most detailed account of the massacre, providing particulars not mentioned elsewhere.
References
1871 affidavit of Philip Klingensmith; Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre; Brooks, John D. Lee: Zealot, Pioneer Builder, Scapegoat; Cleland & Brooks, A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876; FamilySearch.org; Fielding, ed., The Tribune Reports of the Trials of John D. Lee; Lee, Mormonism Unveiled; Lee Trial transcripts; Walker, et al, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Appendix C.
External Links
John D. Lee's statements regarding the massacre in Mormonism Unveiled: http://www.mtn-meadows-assoc.com/jdlconfession.htm
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