Wilford Woodruff Journal 1: He Warned an Apostate to Repent — the Man Fell Dead at His Feet (1835)

While on his mission to the Southern States in 1835, Wilford Woodruff recorded one of the most sobering accounts in his journals. He and a companion had traveled a great distance hoping to visit a man named Akeman — a member of the Church — only to discover on arrival that Akeman had apostatized and become deeply hostile to the missionaries.

Akeman not only rejected them but raised a mob against them, threatening Woodruff and his companion with tar, feathers, and worse. Woodruff recorded that a dream had forewarned him of this apostasy before they arrived, yet they continued in faith.

Woodruff later wrote that he solemnly warned Akeman to repent of his actions. The warning was not heeded. A short time after the confrontation, Akeman fell down dead at Woodruff's feet.

Wilford Woodruff then preached Akeman's funeral sermon.

This account, preserved in *Leaves from My Journal* (Chapter V), was one Woodruff cited as evidence of divine justice — that those who raised mobs against the Lord's servants and refused to repent did not go unpunished. He recorded it without embellishment, in the matter-of-fact voice of a man who had seen the hand of God at work in the world and was committed to an honest account of it.

Woodruff's early Southern States missions were filled with such encounters — moments where prophecy, warning, and sudden death intersected in ways that left him with an unshakeable conviction that God was directing the work and that those who opposed it did so at their peril.