The Tarring and Feathering of Joseph Smith in Hiram, Ohio (1832)

March 24, 1832

In the predawn hours of March 24, 1832, a mob of local men stormed the farmhouse of John Johnson in Hiram, Ohio, and violently assaulted Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his associate Sidney Rigdon. The attackers beat both men, coated them in hot tar, and covered them in feathers—a brutal act of vigilante justice that foreshadowed decades of persecution against the fledgling Latter Day Saint movement. The incident remains one of the most infamous episodes of anti-Mormon violence in American history.

Joseph Smith in Hiram

By early 1832, Joseph Smith had relocated much of his young religious movement's leadership to northeastern Ohio, settling for a time at the farm of John Johnson, a recent convert, in the small township of Hiram in Portage County. Smith and his wife Emma were living in a portion of the Johnson home, having recently taken in adopted infant twins after losing their own newborn twins the previous year. Tensions had been building in the surrounding community for months. Smith's teachings on the "law of consecration," which called for communal management of property, alarmed some residents who feared the Mormons intended to seize land and wealth. Compounding the unrest, Ezra Booth and Symonds Ryder, two men who had briefly joined the church and then grown disillusioned, began publicly denouncing Smith and stirring resentment among neighbors. Ryder, in particular, felt slighted after a leadership appointment letter misspelled his name, which he took as proof that Smith's revelations were not divinely inspired. These grievances, mixing religious skepticism, economic anxiety, and personal insult, created a volatile atmosphere. By late March, a coalition of local men—reportedly including farmers, a doctor, and other Hiram residents—had resolved to confront Smith directly, setting the stage for the violence that would erupt on the night of March 24.

The Night of the Attack

Late on the night of March 24, 1832, a mob estimated at between twenty-five and fifty men surrounded the Johnson farmhouse. They broke in, dragged Joseph Smith from the bed he shared with his sick adopted son, and hauled him outside, where they choked, punched, and stripped him. Witnesses later reported that one attacker attempted to force a vial of acid, or "aqua fortis," into Smith's mouth, breaking one of his teeth in the struggle. The mob then coated his body with hot tar and covered him in feathers before leaving him bruised and battered in the cold. Sidney Rigdon, a close associate of Smith who lived nearby, suffered a similarly violent assault; he was dragged by his heels across frozen ground, an ordeal that left him with a severe head injury from which associates said he never fully recovered mentally. Church members later identified several participants, including Symonds Ryder, though most were never formally prosecuted. The attack lasted only a matter of minutes but left lasting physical and psychological scars on both men.

Aftermath and Consequences

Remarkably, Joseph Smith preached a sermon the very next morning, March 25, 1832, appearing before his congregation still marked by bruises and scraped skin, having spent hours scraping tar from his body overnight. According to church accounts, at least one man who had participated in the mob later requested baptism, apparently moved by Smith's composure. The human cost, however, extended beyond the two men directly attacked. Smith and Emma's adopted infant son, who had been exposed to the cold night air when the mob left the farmhouse door open during the assault, fell ill and died a few days later, a loss the family attributed directly to the incident. The attack accelerated Smith's decision to relocate his followers, and within months plans intensified to establish a new gathering place in Kirtland, Ohio, and eventually further west. The Hiram assault became an early, defining episode in a pattern of mob violence that would follow the Latter Day Saint movement for years, foreshadowing later conflicts in Missouri and Illinois, including Smith's eventual murder by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844.