A House Desolate
I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes:
and some of them ye shall kill and crucify;
and some of them shall ye scourge
and persecute them from city to city:
That upon you may come all the righteous blood
shed upon the earth.
Thou that killest the prophets,
and stonest them which are sent unto thee,
behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
Matthew 23:34-38
In December 1832 the world was in upheaval. A cholera pandemic, which had begun in India in 1829, was rapidly sweeping across the globe. In the Bengal region alone, over 100,000 people perished. By 1831, the disease had reached Moscow and spread westward with terrifying speed, ravaging Hungary and Berlin that same year. By early 1832, it reached London and soon devastated Paris, with nearly 20,000 deaths within weeks. The panic was palpable. Across Europe, desperate citizens blamed contaminated water, government conspiracies, or divine retribution.
The plague crossed the Atlantic and reached North America by June 1832. In Quebec, over 4,000 died; in New York City, the disease claimed roughly 3,500 lives that summer alone. It spread swiftly to Albany, Buffalo, Detroit, and Cincinnati. Just a few miles from Kirtland, Ohio, where Joseph Smith and many of the Latter-day Saints lived at the time, the Painesville Telegraph reported grimly on the outbreaks and the rising death tolls. The paper’s December 21st edition carried the headline Revenge and Magnanimity: A Tale of the Cholera. To the Latter-day Saints, the signs of the times must have been unmistakable. A global storm of death was raging.
The pandemic however was not their only concern. A political crisis was escalating in South Carolina, where resentment over federal tariffs had reached a breaking point. Though intended to reduce reliance on British imports and encourage American industry, the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 disproportionately benefited the industrializing North. In the South—where imported goods were essential and cotton exports fueled the local economy—they were seen as damaging and unjust.
Led intellectually by Vice President John C. Calhoun, South Carolina declared the tariffs null and void, asserting a state’s right to defy federal law. The state began mobilizing its militia for armed resistance, while President Andrew Jackson vowed that the Union must and would be preserved by force if necessary. The resulting standoff—later known as the Nullification Crisis—thrust the fragile republic to the brink.
But that conflict was kindled not only by tariffs, but by deep-seated tensions over slavery that were reaching a boiling point. In 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a violent rebellion in Virginia that resulted in the deaths of more than fifty white people. Though swiftly suppressed, the uprising sent shockwaves through the South. It exposed the fragility of the slaveholding order and stoked fears of widespread insurrection. At the same time, Northern abolitionist rhetoric was growing louder—and more militant. To many in the South, it seemed only a matter of time before the federal government, driven by the tyranny of the majority, would pass a law abolishing slavery altogether. Their way of life, built upon human bondage, felt increasingly under siege. Unsurprisingly, many clamored for secession from the Union.
In that atmosphere of contagion and fear, Joseph Smith sought the Lord for guidance and penned a prophecy that cast the fate of the nation in solemn, apocalyptic terms.
Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls…And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war. D&C 87:1;4.
The political standoff however defused a few months later by a compromise tariff proposed by Henry Clay, which guaranteed gradual reductions. South Carolina rescinded its nullification and the nation stepped back from the edge.
To many observers at the time, the crisis had been resolved. No shots were fired, the Union held, and the nation returned—uneasily—to business as usual. In that moment, Joseph’s prophecy about war, rebellion, and death and misery seemed misguided.
Nearly thirty years would pass before Charleston once again became the focus of national attention—this time as the spark that truly ignited a civil war. The conflict had been long in the making, fueled by economic upheaval, the Mexican-American War, the rise of militant abolitionism, the fracturing of national political parties, and the election of Abraham Lincoln.
By the spring of 1861, what had once seemed an improbable warning had become an undeniable reality. When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter and the nation plunged into war, many across the country took notice—not only of the rebellion itself, but of the prophecy that had long preceded it. In May of that year, the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury reprinted Joseph’s prophecy in full from a missionary pamphlet, noting that the war began in South Carolina and asking, in astonishment, have we not had a prophet among us?
As the Civil War unfolded, Latter-day Saint leaders looked not only to the prophecy’s opening verses, but also to its sobering conclusion:
And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations. That the cry of the saints, and of the blood of the saints, shall cease to come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, from the earth, to be avenged of their enemies. (D&C 87:6–7)
In 1832, such a warning may have seemed abstract. Yet in the years that followed, Church members would come to know firsthand the meaning of the blood of the saints. In Missouri they were driven from their homes by mobs, disarmed by the state militia, and subjected to rape, theft, and expulsion under the infamous 1838 Extermination Order. Dozens of Saints, including women and children, were killed at Haun’s Mill. In Illinois, despite brief peace in Nauvoo, Church leaders were harassed, falsely arrested, and ultimately murdered—Joseph and Hyrum Smith shot to death in Carthage Jail in 1844 by a mob, while under state protection.
When Joseph Smith dictated the prophecy in 1832, he could not have foreseen that the reckoning he foretold would be brought about through his own violent death.
The fallen soldier at Gettysburg is thus not merely a symbol of sectional strife or the price of emancipation. He belongs, as well, to a nation held to account for the blood of God’s anointed and the persecution of the Saints. D&C 87 does not merely anticipate rebellion and war—it frames them as part of a divine retribution for crimes yet to come.