The Mormon King Never Seceded: UsefulCharts Missed the More Dangerous Truth
In 1850, an American religious leader crowned himself king on an island in Lake Michigan. Six years later, two men shot him beside a government vessel, his followers were driven from their homes, and the authorities never brought his killers to trial.
It is an extraordinary American story. But the version presented by UsefulCharts gets a crucial distinction wrong.
In Best Fan-made Charts of 2024, published January 10, 2025, Matt Baker describes James Jesse Strang, a rival claimant to the leadership of the Mormon movement, as a man who declared Beaver Island an independent kingdom.
The trouble is that Strang's religious kingship did not amount to a formal declaration of territorial independence from the United States.
That distinction matters because the documented history is considerably more revealing. Strang combined religious authority with American electoral politics, claimed legitimacy through a document historians suspect was forged, accumulated power over his followers, and presided over a community that ultimately suffered violent destruction.
Baker's account turns these events into an eccentric royal succession story. The evidence exposes something more consequential: the ease with which religious authority can become political power, and the failure of ordinary legal protections when a community becomes the target of organized retaliation.
1. The King Who Never Left the United States
On July 8, 1850, Strang was crowned in an unfinished tabernacle at Saint James, his settlement on Beaver Island.
The ceremony was real. His claim to religious kingship was real. So was the substantial power he exercised over the community.
But calling his settlement an independent kingdom creates a misleading impression of what he actually established.
The historical record distinguishes between Strang's claim to rule the Kingdom of God and a declaration that Beaver Island had ceased to belong to Michigan or the United States.
Brigham Young University’s archival description explicitly states that Strang did not claim to be king of Beaver Island itself. Michigan Public's historical reporting reaches a similar conclusion: his apparent claim to sovereignty was religious, even though his practical authority extended beyond his followers.
There is an important complication. Historian Roger Van Noord describes Strang's kingdom as an institution designed to operate independently of state and national authority. Its internal government exercised real power, and Strang's religious revelations included territorial claims.
That makes his political ambitions more serious, not his supposed declaration of national independence more accurate.
The strongest contradiction emerges from Strang's own public career.
The supposed monarch of an independent kingdom was also an elected Michigan legislator.
Strang won election to the Michigan House of Representatives in 1852 and again in 1854. He used the legislature to advance measures affecting the political organization of the territory surrounding his settlement.
He was not merely pretending to be an American citizen while exercising religious power. He was operating through the institutions of the American state itself.
Van Noord describes this contradiction directly: Strang sought an independent religious order while skillfully using Michigan's political system to strengthen his position.
A genuine sovereign would not ordinarily need a neighboring legislature to reorganize the counties under his control.
Strang did.
His significance lies in that contradiction. He pursued extraordinary personal authority while simultaneously exploiting ordinary democratic institutions.
That is a more troubling story than a man declaring independence on an island.
2. The Letter That May Have Manufactured a Prophet
The entire enterprise began with a disputed document.
Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, was murdered on June 27, 1844.
Strang had joined the movement only months earlier.
Nevertheless, he claimed that Smith had designated him as his successor in a letter dated June 18, nine days before the killing.
The document purported to transfer extraordinary religious authority to a comparatively recent convert.
Baker briefly acknowledges that the claim appeared suspicious. But that understates the documentary objections historians have identified.
The original letter survives in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Historian Lawrence Foster, writing in Church History in 1981, examined the evidence assembled by researcher Dale Morgan and independently inspected the document.
Morgan identified three particularly damaging problems.
First, the letter was hand-printed, unlike other surviving letters written or dictated by Joseph Smith.
Second, its signature bore little resemblance to Smith's distinctive signature.
Third, its language was unusually similar to a passage in Strang's own diary from March 20, 1833.
Morgan concluded that Strang probably forged the letter. Foster agreed with that judgment after inspecting the original.
A letter purportedly identifying a prophet's successor becomes considerably less persuasive when its handwriting and literary style point away from the prophet.
But the accusation of forgery must still be distinguished from proof of who physically created the document.
The letter had a Nauvoo postmark, and its authenticity remained contested. Historian David Walker, who examined the original at Yale, noted that scholars generally regarded it as fraudulent while emphasizing that the document's precise origins and Strang's personal motivations remained disputed.
A postmark establishes something about a document's mailing history. It does not establish who composed every word inside it.
The defensible conclusion is serious enough without embellishment: Strang built his claim to religious leadership on a document that substantial historical scholarship considers probably forged.
We cannot establish beyond dispute that Strang personally manufactured it.
We can establish that the letter served his interests spectacularly.
It gave a recent convert a purportedly direct mandate from the movement's murdered founder.
And it gave him a basis for challenging men with far greater seniority.
3. When a Disputed Letter Was Not Enough, There Were Ancient Plates
Strang's campaign for legitimacy did not end with the succession letter.
He also claimed supernatural authority.
According to the historical account examined by James B. Allen in his review of Van Noord's biography, Strang reported receiving angelic assistance and discovering buried brass plates.
He brought witnesses to observe the excavation.
Strang subsequently translated the plates, which supposedly contained an ancient account anticipating Joseph Smith's death and the arrival of another great prophet.
That prophet was Strang himself.
He later produced additional purportedly revealed scripture, including The Book of the Law of the Lord.
Consider the structure of this claim.
A disputed letter supplied Strang with succession rights.
An alleged supernatural encounter supplied him with divine authorization.
Ancient records supposedly confirmed his prophetic importance.
Each claim reinforced the others. Yet the central assertions depended on accepting Strang's interpretation of documents and revelations that other people could not independently establish as authentic.
The relevant question is not whether a religious person may believe in revelation. Religious belief cannot be disproved merely because it involves supernatural claims.
The problem arises when those claims become the basis for compelling obedience, administering property, and exercising political authority.
Strang did not simply ask people to believe that he was a prophet.
He eventually expected them to live under his government.
4. The Kingdom Collected More Than Devotion
The economics of Strang's kingdom deserve considerably more attention than its crown.
His followers were expected to pledge allegiance to him and contribute one-tenth of their possessions through a system of consecrations.
The requirements applied to established members and newcomers.
Strang also accumulated influence through landownership, local government, and the administration of property.
Historical accounts describe his acquisition of property through auctions of land seized from non-Strangite residents for unpaid taxes.
This was not simply a congregation supporting a minister.
It was a community in which the same individual exercised religious authority, possessed substantial economic influence, and participated directly in the machinery of government.
Strang was also involved in an extraordinary reversal involving plural marriage.
He publicly opposed polygamy before privately entering a plural marriage with Elvira Field in 1849.
Field sometimes traveled disguised as a man, using the identity Charles J. Douglas.
Strang eventually embraced plural marriage as a religious practice and had five wives.
The contrast is difficult to dismiss.
A leader who condemned a practice later declared it acceptable after adopting it himself.
Foster's historical analysis found that Strang's later religious arguments for polygamy appeared to justify an arrangement already established, rather than arising straightforwardly from his original doctrine.
That does not prove every religious decision was fraudulent.
It does demonstrate why claims of divine authority become particularly dangerous when the person issuing them also benefits from their revision.
Strang's power was not unlimited, however.
He faced federal prosecution and was acquitted in July 1851. Other indictments were subsequently dropped.
Those facts matter. Hostile accusations against the island settlement cannot simply be converted into established criminal convictions.
The documentary picture is more specific: an ambitious religious ruler accumulated influence through both religious discipline and ordinary institutions, while maintaining a deeply contentious relationship with neighboring communities.
The threat was not an imaginary foreign monarchy.
It was concentrated authority operating inside an American political system.
5. Two Gunmen, an American Vessel, and No Murder Trial
The destruction of Strang's kingdom exposes a second abuse of power.
On June 16, 1856, Strang was summoned toward the United States steamer Michigan, which was anchored at Beaver Island.
As he approached the dock, Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth attacked him with pistols.
Strang was seriously wounded.
The two attackers escaped aboard the government vessel.
The final issue of Strang's newspaper, the Daily Northern Islander, published June 20, described the assault and the protection the attackers received.
A contemporary report in the New-York Daily Tribune independently confirmed that Strang had been shot by two former followers.
The surviving accounts disagree about several details, including the circumstances of the summons and the attackers' precise movements.
But the central facts are well established: Strang was shot, the attackers boarded the government vessel, and neither ultimately faced a murder trial.
The steamer's commander refused to hand the men over to the local sheriff and transported them to Mackinac.
They were subsequently released.
That conduct raises a substantial question about the protection provided by federal personnel to men accused of a violent crime.
The available evidence does not establish that Washington ordered Strang's assassination or that the vessel's officers organized it.
Those accusations would require evidence not established by the contemporary accounts examined here.
But there is no need to invent a federal conspiracy to recognize the seriousness of what happened.
Two men shot a controversial religious leader, obtained protection aboard a United States government vessel, and escaped prosecution.
The failure to deliver a murder trial was real.
So were the consequences.
6. The Real Victims Were Driven From Their Homes
Strang survived the initial shooting but died on July 9, 1856.
His followers did not receive the opportunity to reorganize their community peacefully.
Within weeks, armed opponents from the mainland took control of Beaver Island.
Some Strangites departed voluntarily after the shooting. Others were ordered to leave under threats that their homes would be burned.
Families were crowded aboard steamships and transported away from the island.
Historian Milo Quaife estimated that approximately 2,600 people were expelled, although that figure depends on an earlier population count and remains uncertain.
Contemporary accounts differ over the extent of property confiscation and the conditions under which individual families departed.
They nevertheless establish a mass displacement following Strang's shooting.
The personal details are especially disturbing.
One account describes Wingfield Watson being forced to leave while his wife had recently given birth.
The family was transported away without its livestock and other possessions.
Other reports describe displaced Mormons arriving in mainland cities in destitute circumstances.
Not every account agrees. Some participants in the expulsion later portrayed the departures as more orderly and voluntary.
Those competing descriptions should be evaluated as the testimony of people with opposing interests, not flattened into one convenient narrative.
But even the more sympathetic accounts describe families leaving their community in grief.
A religious government had collapsed.
Its ordinary members paid much of the price.
Here is the distinction that historical storytelling must preserve: Strang's conduct does not justify his murder, and his followers' religious allegiance does not justify their forced removal.
The legal failure was not confined to Strang's personal protection.
It extended to the destruction of an entire settlement.
7. The Larger Failure of the UsefulCharts Account
UsefulCharts did not publish a documentary about James Strang.
It published a year-end review of fan-made charts, and Baker devoted only a small portion of the episode to this particular genealogy.
That limits what can reasonably be demanded of him.
He was not obliged to reconstruct every disputed nineteenth-century religious document or investigate every allegation against the Kingdom of Saint James.
But brevity does not excuse an avoidable factual distinction.
Calling Strang's settlement an independent kingdom obscures the more important relationship between religious power and American political institutions.
Describing his assassination without the subsequent expulsion leaves out the fate of the people who depended on his government.
And treating his succession claim as merely suspicious misses the unusually specific historical evidence challenging its authenticity.
There is also a broader danger in reducing contested history to genealogical lines.
A family tree can accurately display rival claimants without explaining why their claims deserve acceptance or skepticism.
It can show the survival of religious denominations without explaining the political, financial, or coercive relationships that shaped their development.
Those omissions are especially consequential when a diagram's clarity makes uncertain historical relationships appear settled.
Strang's career cannot be understood through succession alone.
It involved documentary legitimacy, contested revelations, financial obligations, plural marriage, electoral politics, federal authority, murder, and mass displacement.
These were not incidental details surrounding an eccentric king.
They were the machinery and consequences of his rule.
Verdict: The Crown Was the Least Important Part
James Jesse Strang did not need to establish a sovereign country to become dangerous.
He claimed authority through a disputed succession letter, reinforced it with purported revelations, exercised substantial control over a religious community, and used American political institutions to strengthen his position.
Historical scholarship provides substantial grounds for doubting the authenticity of his foundational document.
His documented reversal on polygamy raises further questions about the relationship between personal advantage and prophetic authority.
Yet Strang's opponents ultimately demonstrated another form of contempt for legitimate government.
His attackers escaped a murder trial, and armed men drove his followers from their homes.
Both sides of that history deserve scrutiny.
The weakness in Baker's account is not that he failed to condemn Strang loudly enough.
It is that he reduced a conflict over religious legitimacy and political power to a story about a curious independent kingdom.
The most important question was never whether James Strang deserved a crown. It was how one man's claim to divine authority became political power—and how violently that power was finally destroyed.
That is the history worth telling.
References
1. Best Fan-made Charts of 2024 | End of Year Review. UsefulCharts, January 10, 2025.
The original video presents Strang's succession claim, his Beaver Island kingdom, and his assassination during a review of fan-made Mormon genealogies.
2. James J. Strang: The Prophet Who Failed. Lawrence Foster, Church History, June 1981, pp. 182–192. Cambridge University Press.
Foster's scholarly examination identifies the handwriting, signature, and literary discrepancies supporting the conclusion that Strang's succession letter was probably forged; the full article requires access, although its notes and extract are available.
3. James Strang's Letter of Appointment. David Walker, Social Science Research Council's Frequencies, November 21, 2011.
Walker's discussion of the original Yale document distinguishes the contested question of forgery from the religious and institutional consequences of the letter.
4. King of Beaver Island: The Life and Assassination of James Jesse Strang. James B. Allen, BYU Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1991.
Allen's review of Roger Van Noord's biography documents Strang's purported revelations, plural marriages, financial demands, political influence, and federal acquittal; it is a review of the biography rather than the complete underlying research.
5. Assassination of a Michigan King: The Life of James Jesse Strang. Roger Van Noord, University of Michigan Press, 1997 edition.
The publisher's description identifies the central contradiction between Strang's ambition for independent religious government and his successful participation in Michigan politics.
6. How a Mormon King Shaped a Sleepy Island in Lake Michigan. Michigan Public, November 4, 2015.
This historical report distinguishes Strang's religious kingship from territorial sovereignty while documenting his practical authority and conflicts with other island residents.
7. Coronation of James Strang. Beaver Island Archive, historical event reconstruction, accessed October 2026.
The archive compares historical testimony concerning the July 1850 coronation, the creation of Strang's governing institutions, and the territorial ambitions attached to his religious office; its reconstruction remains marked as draft.
8. Assassination of James Strang. Beaver Island Archive, historical event reconstruction, accessed October 2026.
Drawing on contemporary newspapers and later historical scholarship, this reconstruction establishes the shooting, identifies conflicting testimony, and documents the attackers' escape from prosecution.
9. Expulsion of the Strangites. Beaver Island Archive, historical event reconstruction, accessed October 2026.
The archive compares contemporary accounts and historical estimates of the forced removal of Strang's followers, including disagreements over population figures, property losses, and conditions of departure.