Mob storms Carthage jail; Joseph Smith is shot and killed despite governor's pledge of safe custody

By the summer of 1844, Joseph Smith was simultaneously a presidential candidate, the commander of a private militia, and a man under arrest for treason — the accumulated weight of two decades of conflict with his neighbors finally closing in. On June 27, a mob of 150 to 200 men, faces painted black with wet gunpowder, stormed the Carthage, Illinois jail where Smith and his brother Hyrum were being held under a governor's promise of safe custody. Hyrum was shot in the face and died first; Joseph fired a smuggled pepper-box pistol, wounding three attackers, before being shot multiple times and falling from the second-story window. He was the first presidential candidate in American history to be assassinated…