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John D. Lee

Biographical Sketch of John D. Lee
on Friday April 30 2010
by The Editors

in MMM Militiamen > The Self-Confessed
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John D. Lee's background and his involvement in and statements about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

John Doyle Lee (1812-1877)

Biographical Sketch

John Doyle Lee was born in southwestern Illinois. Lee's maternal grandfather, John Doyle, of Irish descent, was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then to Davidson County, Tennessee, where Lee's mother was born. In the Revolutionary War, Doyle served under George Rogers Clark who captured Fort Vincennes from the British. The fort was a former French outpost on the middle Mississippi. Years later Doyle returned to the fort on the Mississippi, then renamed Kaskaskia, and settled there.

Regarding his paternal forebears, the Lees had been English gentry who migrated to tidewater Virginia. Many rose to prominence in colonial Virginia. But this was not true of John D. Lee's direct Lee line. Lee's grandfather lived his life in Washington County in southwest Virginia, that is, in the backcountry on the far frontier of eighteenth-century Virginia.

By the early 1800s, the Doyles along with Lee's future father, Ralph Lee, had moved to Kaskaskia, Illinois territory, on the far frontier. By 1811, Lee's mother, Sarah Elizabeth Doyle (1778-1815), was a thirty-one year old widow with one child, her husband having been killed over a disputed land claim. She married twenty-two-year-old Ralph Lee (1788-1860), a Lee from Virginia but decidedly down on his luck.

John D. Lee was born in 1812 in Randolph County, Illinois. In 1815, Lee's mother died when he was barely three. For the next four years Lee was raised by a French-speaking Negro nurse. Lee's father sank into alcoholism and insolvency. By 1819, both Lee and his older sister were in the care of his mother's sister, Charlotte Doyle Conner and her husband James Conner. Lee's years with his aunt and uncle, however, were unhappy due to his uncle's drinking and his aunt's harsh discipline.

In these years, Lee learned the male values of the predominate Scots-Irish regional culture: independence, assertiveness, defense of honor and similar traits. At age sixteen, Lee ran away and soon found work as a mail carrier. Later he returned to the Conners to manage the farm. In the off season he had three months of school. This was his only formal education but he did learn to read and write, a notable achievement on the frontier.

In 1832, at age nineteen, Lee and his uncle served in the local militia during the Black Hawk War. Following that, Lee moved upriver to St. Louis and followed various pursuits there and in eastern Missouri. He worked hard and saved, but he also fought and gambled occasionally. His brief gambling depleted his savings and ended a budding romance with a young women taken in by his uncle. So Lee pursued a romance with another young woman and in 1833, the twenty-year-old Lee married nineteen-year-old Aggatha Ann Wollsey.

In 1837, Lee and his wife Aggatha heard and accepted the message of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Reacting with enthusiasm, they joined the gathering of Mormons in northwestern Missouri. However, the large influx of Mormons into the region as well as cultural and religious differences lead to armed conflict between the original settlers and the Mormon newcomers. During the 1838 mass uprising, Lee joined in the conflict, identifying himself as a Danite.

In early 1839, following the Mormons' surrender and removal from western Missouri, Lee, his wife and his family joined the main Mormon body traveling northeast to the western frontier of Illinois. He was among the first to settle in the new Mormon settlement of Nauvoo on the banks of the Mississippi River. He went on proselyting missions to Tennessee in 1839 and 1842-43. In the expanding community, Lee served at different times as clerk, recorder, librarian and wharf master in a variety of civic and religious organizations. He also served as a peace officer and a major in the Nauvoo Legion, the local militia.

In spring 1844, to further Joseph Smith's presidential campaign, Lee traveled to Kentucky and campaigned for Mormon leader Joseph Smith in his presidential campaign bid. Following the murder of Smith, Lee transferred his full loyalty to the new Mormon leader, Brigham Young. As the practice of polygamy became more widespread, Lee entered into many plural marriages in 1845-46. Another innovative practice was "adoption" under which Lee because an adopted son of Young. Lee also served as his guard and clerk. In 1846, Lee joined the Mormon hegira into the west, traveling through the territories of Iowa and Nebraska.

Lee immigrated to Utah in 1848 and by 1851, Lee was in southern Utah as one of its original colonizers. Lee was a presiding elder in his settlement as well as a probate judge, legislator, and Indian farmer. The much-married Lee continued taking additional wives so that by the end of the 1850s he had married seventeen wives. During the 1860s he married one additional wife for a total of eighteen. Seven of these wives bore him forty-six children. In later years, as his troubles from his connection with the massacre multiplied, all but three of his wives left him.

In 1859, when federal judge John Cradlebaugh issued an arrest warrant for 38 alleged massacre participants, Lee was among the accused and went into hiding until the investigation stalled. For years after the massacre, Brigham Young took no action against Lee. However in the early 1870s, Young excommunicated Lee following which Lee moved to the Arizona frontier and operated the ferry crossing on the Colorado River.

In 1874, Lee was indicted and arrested for his role in the massacre. His first trial in 1875 ended in a hung jury. The 1876 retrial resulted in his conviction for murder. In March 1877, his legal appeals exhausted and pleas for clemency denied, Lee was taken to the Mountain Meadows and executed by a firing squad. He was buried in Panguitch.

He was survived by his three remaining wives and many dozens of children. Later in 1877, his life story was published posthumously as Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of John D. Lee. Following the publication of Juanita Brooks' The Mountain Meadows Massacre in the mid-twentieth century, Lee's membership in the Mormon Church was restored.

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