Joseph Smith Drinks Wine and Shoots Back at the Mob in Carthage Jail Prior to His Death

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Painted scene inside Carthage Jail at the moment of Joseph Smith's death. In the foreground center, Smith stands in a long dark frock coat, firing a small smoking pepperbox pistol with his left hand toward a mob bursting through the open doorway, while he grips a dark glass wine bottle in his right hand. A cloud of muzzle smoke fills the doorway, where rough-clad attackers raise rifles. Behind Smith to the right, two men struggle to open a window from which to escape.

A painted dramatization of Joseph Smith firing a smuggled pepperbox revolver at the armed mob storming Carthage Jail on June 27, 1844, while clutching a bottle of wine in his other hand. His brother Hyrum has already been killed; John Taylor and Willard Richards struggle at the window behind him. Mormon tradition remembers Smith as a martyr who went 'as a lamb to the slaughter,' but contemporary diaries and the historical record show that Smith had been drinking wine and returned fire at the attackers, wounding at least three before he was killed.

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