The Church of Jesus Christ (Strangite)

When the Latter Day Saint movement's founder, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in Illinois in June 1844, the resulting succession crisis produced several rival claimants to lead the church he had founded. James Jesse Strang, a recent convert who had joined the movement only months before Smith's death, put himself forward as one of the major contenders by producing a letter, purportedly written and signed by Smith shortly before his death, that named Strang as his chosen successor, and by reporting that he had separately received a vision appointing him seer, revelator, and prophet of the church. Critics have long pointed to the letter's postmark and internal dating, which situate its writing in the days immediately before Smith's death, as grounds for suspecting a forgery, while Strang and his followers maintained its authenticity throughout his lifetime; the dispute has never been conclusively settled by handwriting analysis alone and remains a live question among historians of the movement. Strang's claim nonetheless drew a genuine following, and the movement organized around him took the name the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, insisting on its own status as the sole legitimate continuation of the church Smith had founded in 1830, in direct competition with the much larger body that reorganized under Brigham Young's leadership and relocated to the Salt Lake Valley.

Facing internal dissension at an earlier settlement, Strang relocated his followers in 1847 to Beaver Island, in northern Lake Michigan, where the community established the town of St. James on the island's northern coast by 1849. In July 1850 Strang had himself formally crowned king of the colony, taking the title King James I, an act that made the settlement a genuine, if short-lived, self-declared monarchy on American soil, a claim virtually unique among American religious movements of the period.

Strang's later decree that colony women wear a loose bloomer costume rather than conventional dresses, and his order to have the husbands of two women who refused it publicly whipped, directly provoked his own death: on June 16, 1856, the two disciplined husbands, Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth, ambushed and shot him from behind near the island dock, and Strang died of his wounds three weeks later. The colony grew substantially, drawing several thousand adherents at its height, before the assassination effectively ended the Beaver Island kingdom, and hostile non-Mormon neighbors expelled the remaining Strangite settlers from the island within days.

A small remnant of Strangite believers nonetheless persisted elsewhere, and organized Strangite congregations, numbering only a few hundred adherents, continued to identify Strang as Joseph Smith's true and legitimate successor for well over a century after his death.