by Jack Kelly
Although the student declared he would have nothing to do with the clergyman, Weld’s aunt tricked him into attending a morning service at which Finney would preach. She made sure Weld sat in the middle of a crowded pew.
The evangelist turned to the young man with what Weld called “those great staring eyes of his (never was a man whose soul looked out through his face as his did).” He spoke warnings of damnation directed at Weld, who grew increasingly uncomfortable during the hour-long harangue. “He just held me up on his toasting-fork before that audience,” Weld remembered.
The next day, Weld encountered Finney at a store in town. He unleashed a retaliatory tirade against the minister. As the tongue-lashing went on, a crowd gathered. Finney took the abuse, then reminded Weld that he was the son of a minister of Christ. “Is this the way you behave?” Weld spat a final insult and fled.
But Finney’s mild retort dissolved Weld’s youthful pretensions. “I was so ashamed I could not live,” he later remembered. He went to the house where Finney was staying. The evangelist thought the young man intended to continue his abuse. “I have come for a very different purpose,” Weld said, choking with emotion. Finney threw his arms around Weld’s neck, dragged him into the parlor and both men fell to their knees, “sobbing and praying and sobbing and praying.”
It was a spasm of salvation, but the headstrong Weld was not about to fall so easily. Back at his aunt’s home, he continued to berate Finney. He paced in his room through the night. His mind was a cauldron where anger, guilt, fear, remorse, and yearning all bubbled in an agonizing stew. He blamed Finney, he blamed himself. This was the goal of a revival, to shake up the sinner, to make him or her as uncomfortable as possible. His aunt found him in the morning lying on the floor, “his heart all broken to pieces.”
Drained, unable to resist, Weld attended a revival meeting the next evening, confessed himself a sinner, let go of his selfish vanity, and embraced Jesus. His mother was delighted when she heard the news. His father may have regretted that it was Finney, not himself, who brought Theodore into the fold.
With his usual excess of zeal, Weld did not just make a decision for Christ, he signed up with Finney to carry the urgent message to others. The decision “put an end to my studying,” Weld remembered. “I was with him in his meetings, speaking and laboring all that summer.”
That June, Weld accompanied Finney to Auburn, New York, eighty miles west along the canal corridor. As dynamic and single-minded as Finney himself, he helped with the hard work of the revival. Finney had encouraged women to pray in company with men. Weld went further, allowing women to speak in meetings, something that was unheard of in orthodox Protestant churches.
Unitarians, who included the rational, liberal citizens of the town, criticized Finney as a fanatic, yet townspeople packed his revivals. During one sermon, a man stood and held up silver dollars clutched in both hands. He shouted at Finney, “These are my gods!” Silence fell on the church. Finney slowly swiveled his head and fixed his censorious gaze on the man. That one look silenced the scoffer and demolished his glib facade. He soon joined the five hundred souls from Auburn who converted.
Otherwise, I Am Fine
“It seemed to me like building castles in the air,” Webb Harwood remembered, “and I did not dream of the practicability of such a thing.” Harwood, the first permanent settler in what would become the village of Palmyra, was referring to the notion of constructing a canal through the wilderness. Yet by 1821, to his great astonishment, “I have had the pleasure of seeing a boat pass my door with 300 souls aboard, drawn by 2 horses.”
The canal was being completed and opened in sections. This strategy drew attention to problems that could be avoided in construction farther down the line. It also brought the benefits of water transportation to the finished areas and began to generate a trickle of revenues from tolls. The section from Utica to Rome (about fifteen miles) opened in the fall of 1819. A year later, the canal reached Montezuma, thirty miles west of Syracuse.
Tiny Montezuma, briefly situated at the end of navigation, experienced a sudden boom. An entrepreneur there built a sixty-seven-foot-long boat equipped with an elegant dining room. He began to provide the first passenger service along the canal. Daily packet boats began to arrive at Montezuma carrying dozens of passengers. If the travelers wished to proceed west from the terminus, they switched to stagecoaches.
When the line reached Palmyra, Webb Harwood’s wife would note that seeing a boat on the ocean was no paradox but to see vessels floating “where large timber was growing and swamps almost impassable for either man or beast, that was worthy of all our attention and very entertaining.”
Having gained experience on the easy level near Rome, the engineers and contractors now had to make the canal descend, climb, descend again, then proceed through a long wallow of swamp and marsh before beginning a steady uphill journey toward Rochester.
The economic slump that followed the Panic of 1819 worked in the commissioners’ favor. They paid less for both labor and materials, and they were able to borrow money at more favorable rates. British bankers and American investors, encouraged by early successes, snapped up canal bonds.
Thomas Eddy, a longtime advocate of the project, thought of a novel idea for funding it. Why not let poor people invest in an enterprise that was designed to bring prosperity to their state? Even before work on the canal began, Eddy had been mulling a “plan to prevent their poverty and misery by means of employment and establishing saving Banks.” In 1819, the Bank for Savings in the City of New York opened in the basement of an almshouse. It took in small deposits from porters, laborers, cooks, dustmen, and other workers, promising them a 5 percent return. Within two years it had amassed half a million dollars’ worth of canal bonds. The Bank for Savings would last, through several name changes, until 1991.
As the great construction project moved away from the Mohawk Valley into more sparsely settled regions, keeping it supplied with laborers became a problem. Farmers were eager to earn cash by working temporarily near their homes, but they were not about to become permanent wage laborers. Contractors had to import workers, often immigrants shipped up from New York City. Many of the first workers were Welsh; later, almost all came from Ireland.
Harwood described these workers as “some of the roughest creatures.” The conditions would have roughened anyone. The swamps west of Montezuma were the worst. Workers braved snakes to hack away thick stands of rushes. Hours of digging the black mud could be wiped out when a spongy side bank slumped into the ditch. The men had to wade back in, sometimes up to their waists in muck, and start over. In places, the ground was so wet that contractors had to erect planks along the edge of the excavation, anchored by stakes driven into the clay below, in order to keep the soft earth in place.
“No person without experience can be fully aware of the disadvantages of laboring in wet earth,” the canal commissioners reported. Quicksand and muck would hold on to a shovel every time it was thrust in. The workmen too “would often sink in and stick fast, so as to render it rather difficult to extract themselves.” Leeches feasted on their legs.
Swarms of mosquitoes competed with deer flies and black flies to worry and sting the workers. The men resorted to hanging tin pots filled with smoldering leaves around their necks. The smoke from these “Montezuma necklaces” was hardly enough fend off all the pests. The sun baked men’s backs. The mud sucked the shoes from their feet. Dehydration brought headache, muscle cramps, chills, and vomiting.
Disease began to take its toll. Malaria was common. Aided by dysentery and typhoid fever, it killed perhaps a thousand men just in the thirty-mile stretch west of Montezuma. Accidents were a constant threat as men swung pickaxes in close quarters. Any wound was vulnerable to tetanus.
A physician near Syracuse observed scenes of suffering and distress “beyond conception.” Illness slowed the entire project.
“Although great exertions were made to supply the place of such laborers as became diseased,” the commissioners reported, work had to be suspended for weeks. “All the principal contractors, with many of the subcontractors, became diseased.”
In 1818, a Welsh laborer wrote home that the “wages on the canal are one dollar a day and thirteen to fourteen dollars a month with food and washing and half a pint of whisky a day.” The rate varied from $10 to $23 a month, depending on the number of workers available. To many it was not worth it. One immigrant wrote back to Wales, “I beg all my old neighbors not to think of coming here.”
A laborer named Timothy Geohagan wrote to his sister in Ireland during the worst of it: “I don’t know . . . if any of us will survive, but God willing, we will live to see a better day.” He slept in a tent, which was stifling in the summer and drafty when the weather turned cold. “Six of me tentmates died this very day,” he continued, “and were stacked like cordwood until they could be taken away. Otherwise, I am fine.”
Mania
The canal project set off digging such as never had been seen in North America. The horse-drawn plows and scrapers gouged sod, loam, gravel, and clay. Men sweated with picks and shovels to disturb, expose, and remove the soil. At one point, a Palmyra newspaper reported, workmen on the canal discovered buried under the earth the blade of a large knife, a stout nail, and “several plates of brass.” The find, the paper declared, furnished “materials for speculation.”
Country people in New England had long speculated about what they might find below the earth’s surface. The practice of what was called money-digging spanned generations. As early as 1729, Benjamin Franklin had commented on the many pits dug by those “fed with a Vain Hope of growing suddenly rich.” In Maine, wild-eyed money-diggers seeking elusive riches had excavated a pit eighty feet deep.
Most often, they sought pirate treasure. Even far inland, locals imagined that Captain Kidd or some other buccaneer might have hidden a chest of gold doubloons. Others dreamed of Spanish silver mines or payroll chests secreted by Revolutionary War soldiers. A newspaper editor in Windsor, Vermont, claimed he could name five hundred men “who do in the simplicity and sincerity of their hearts believe that immense treasures lie concealed” in the Green Mountains.
Diggers sometimes uncovered the burial caches of ancient inhabitants. Native American peoples known as the Mound Builders had occupied the Great Lakes region as early as 3500 b.c., centuries before the tribes that made up the Iroquois Confederacy.
In Rome, money-diggers had torn apart Fort Stanwix, which had withstood a British siege during the Revolution. Near Cairo, in the Hudson River Valley, a ten-year-old boy named Thurlow Weed observed the digging frenzy during his boyhood. His family, like the Smiths, were “poor but credulous people.” Of his father, a farmer and cartman, Weed remembered, “Everything went wrong with him. Constant and hard labor failed to better his condition.” On the treasure hunts young Weed attended, the leader would cut the throat of a black cat and “the precise spot was indicated by the direction the blood spurted.”
A new outbreak of treasure hunting was usually sparked by the arrival of a charismatic seer known as a scryer. The expeditions might be directed by imaginative adolescents or teenage girls. African Americans were thought to have special insight into buried riches. Following the Smith family’s arrival in Palmyra, “the MANIA of money-digging soon began rapidly to diffuse itself through many parts of the country,” a newspaper editor observed.
The Smiths had high hopes during their first years in Palmyra. The conscientious son Alvin began to build a proper frame house on their land, a handsome two-story dwelling, which would accommodate the family and serve as a refuge for his parents in their old age. The family unwisely diverted some of the mortgage payment on the farm to finance the new house. Their need for cash increased.
Dreams often showed the way to wealth. A dream repeated three times was especially meaningful. The night Joseph Jr. had learned the location of the golden plates, the angel Moroni had visited him thrice.
Finding treasure usually required a tool to guide the search. A forked branch from a witch hazel or peach tree was the traditional divining rod. The seer would whisper “work to the money,” and the device would point the direction, its dipping and quivering communicating details about the cache. Another popular tool was the seer stone or peep stone. To use one, the “glass-looker” would place the stone in a hat, bury his or her face below the brim to exclude light, and stare, sometimes for hours, seeking a vision. When Joseph was fourteen, around the time of his epiphany in the forest grove, he tried to use a seer stone owned by a local girl named Sally Chase. “It proved not to be the right stone for him,” Joseph Sr. said, “but he could see some things.”
Each seer had to find his or her personal stone. One story had Joseph traveling 150 miles, almost to the shores of Lake Erie, and digging his stone out from under a tree root. In another version, he found it twenty feet below the earth while excavating a well for a neighbor. This stone was about the size of a hen’s egg, dark brown with tan stripes. It was a device, his mother wrote, “by which he could discern things invisible to the eye.” Local folks from time to time hired Joseph to find lost objects or to lead treasure expeditions.
Summer was a good time for searching. “The heat of the sun caused the chests of money to rise near the top of the ground,” Joseph Sr. said. Blood from a sheep or dog could indicate its precise location. Absolute silence while digging was a necessity. Any man who cried out, especially when he uncovered the treasure chest, would break the spell and ruin the project.
Locating the treasure was only the first step in a complicated process. Obtaining the cache required serious and chancy exertions. The gold would inevitably be guarded, Joseph Smith Jr. noted, “by some clever spirit.” This spirit sentry might create loud noises or visions to scare diggers. One group of seekers spotted a man nine feet tall sitting on the ridge of a nearby barn. Another was startled by a band of ghostly horsemen clattering by.
One of Smith’s digging partners said that after they came on a chest of money, “on account of enchantment, the trunk kept settling away from under them while digging; that notwithstanding they continued to constantly remove the dirt, yet the trunk kept about the same distance from them.” Sometimes a treasure took off and burrowed through the ground like a mole, the hunters watching the earth rise and fall in its wake.
Part of the motivation for money-digging was the pure fun of it. To country people, treasure hunts were a chance for midnight rambles and arcane rituals. Sudden frights and imagined riches appealed to them, even if they returned empty-handed. The tension, the luscious hope, and the luminary effect of raw whiskey combined to make the expeditions intense and memorable.
The important thing was to keep hope alive. If the money-digging failed to yield a treasure, a Palmyra editor noted, the “deluded beings would on a succeeding night return to their toil, not the least doubting that success would eventually attend their labors.”
The growing middle class of lawyers, physicians, and merchants rejected hoary folk beliefs and superstitions. Money-digging was childish, a sign of the laziness and gullibility of shiftless people. Respectable citizens complained that money-diggers “become insolent and saucy, neglect economy and industry.” One observer noted that reasonable men believed that divining rods could indeed detect underground water, but “if the diviner hunts for metals, he becomes distrusted by the better sort of men.”
In 1824, a Palmyra farmer named Martin Harris hired Joseph Sr. and his sons to build a fence on his farm. The father told him that “Joseph can see any thing he wishes by looking at a stone. Joseph often sees Spirits here with great kettles of money.” Soon afterward, Harris dreamed about supernatural beings, who let him count their money. He awoke with a dollar in his hand. He mentioned the dream to Joe Jr., who let him know that the spirits were grieved. Harris
threw the money away. Enchantment meant more to him than gain.
Money-diggers understood that looking was more important than finding. The idea of gold was more potent than the inert metal. Divining and the other facets of folk belief were spiritual exercises. Believers wanted assurance that they were in contact with the supernatural. Scryers like Joseph felt that God was sharing some of His power, was guiding the earthly seer.
Charlatans naturally rushed to take advantage of the credulity of the rubes. The Erie Canal provided an ideal corridor for urban sharpers to penetrate the interior and gull the locals. Where did the line fall between the mountebank, whose interest did not rise above the material, and the true believer seeking spiritual riches? Sometimes the boundary was far from clear.
Joseph’s discovery of the gold plates in the autumn of 1823 was a bright moment for a family struggling with relentless ill luck. That November, two months after the visit from Moroni, Joseph’s older brother Alvin, who had replaced his ineffectual father as the head of the family, suddenly fell ill. Doctors treated him with calomel, a mercury compound more poisonous than therapeutic. He died a few days later at the age of twenty-five. Suddenly, the family was bereft of its main breadwinner and teetered on the brink of insolvency.
The Smiths’ finances did not improve over the next two years as they struggled to keep afloat. Then a prospect of cash appeared. Josiah Stowell was, like Martin Harris, a mature, established farmer and small businessman. His home in the Susquehanna Valley lay a hundred and twenty miles southeast of Palmyra. He had heard accounts of Joseph’s reputation from his son, who lived near the Smiths. On a business trip to the area in October 1825, he called on the family and was mightily impressed that the young man could describe his house and outbuildings in South Bainbridge without having been near the place.