| Race dominated Missouri Society in the 1830s. Slavery drove the economy, and fears of a Black
rebellion or an American Indian war hung over all classes. From this racially charged atmosphere
came Governor Lilburn Boggs’s Extermination Order—wherein the state sought to fully
exterminate the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or drive them from the state, and
granted vigilante mobs the freedom to do the same. Previous scholarship on Missouri’s
Extermination Order has argued that the causes were religious or political intolerance. This thesis
reevaluates that narrative through thematic analysis of primary sources —including
contemporary newspapers, correspondence, and legislative records—alongside modern racial
scholarship, asking: How central were racial fears to the order, and how realistic were they?
Evidence shows Missourians viewed the Latter-day Saints as a direct threat to white
supremacy—too sympathetic to American Indians, too open to abolitionist ideas, too willing to
baptize Black Americans—despite the Latter-day Saints' actual moderation (disavowing slave
interference and mirroring Northern racial norms). Where previous histories have argued that the
reasons for the Extermination Order were religious or political, this paper concludes that the
Extermination Order represented an attempted genocide to preserve Missouri's racial hierarchy.
Keywords: Extermination Order, Mormon War, Attempted Genocide, Racial Anxieties, Latterday Saints |