Carthage role increased John Taylor's credibility

PROVO, Utah — The windowsill in the second-floor room at Carthage Jail is extremely wide — three feet wide — but a wounded John Taylor teetered perilously there, caught in a crossfire.

Bullets zipped through the window from below and whistled through the room from the doorway. A wounded Joseph Smith would a few moments later fall through the same window to the ground, where mobbers would finish murdering the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Taylor thought he was falling out the window when, he believed, a bullet struck him in the chest, knocking him back into the room. He believed a ball struck the watch in his coat pocket, stopping it at 5:16 p.m. and crushing some of the glass to powder.In a 2002 book, historian Glen Leonard wrote that the watch likely was damaged instead when Taylor fell against the windowsill.

Whatever caused Taylor to fall back into the room instead of out the window changed the course of history. Taylor would become the third president of the church and stand as a living witness of Carthage for 43 years.

"His close association with Joseph Smith ... and his brush with death earned him a moral authority and authenticity that not only changed his life but changed the way people looked at him both inside and outside the church," great-great grandson Mark H. Taylor said last week during a symposium at Brigham Young University celebrating the 200th anniversary of President Taylor's birth.

President Taylor's presence and survival at Carthage had three major outcomes, Mark Taylor said. One, he became the preeminent authority on what happened. Two, he gained credibility around the world, especially from a curious press. And three, he was a tangible connection to Joseph Smith and the martyrdom for 43 years.

One of the most important results for the Latter-day Saints nationally was an exchange of letters published in New York City newspapers between President Taylor and U.S. Vice President Schuyler Colfax about the "Mormon question" in 1869.

"His credibility resulting from the moral authority I feel he obtained as a legendary survivor of Carthage and his profound skill with the pen was put to good use when he engaged Vice President Colfax in a national debate," said Mark Taylor, a Creighton University accounting professor and author of the 1999 book "Witness to the Martyrdom: John Taylor's Personal Account of the Last Days of the Prophet Joseph Smith."

President Taylor's letters appeared in the New York Independent, the New York Tribune and the New York Herald. That unprecedented publicity in defense of the church was considered unusually crucial by LDS historian B.H. Roberts.