Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  His prediction first saw print in 1832. The editor of the Vermont Telegraph, a Baptist newspaper, published a series of articles in which Miller was asked questions and explained the details of his notion. “It will start some queries if nothing else,” Miller wrote.

  A year later, the Baptist authorities saw fit to issue him a license to preach. He became Reverend Miller, but because of his age he was already being called Father Miller. He published a detailed pamphlet that laid out his argument. He called it Evidences from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ About the Year A.D. 1843 and of His Personal Reign of 1000 Years. It proved so popular that another Baptist preacher republished it in book form.

  Realizing that time was short, Miller responded to the growing urgency of the invitations. From 1835 to 1837, he preached more than two hundred times, traveling as far as Canada. In 1838, his pace quickened further. A few other ministers were taking up his theme, preparing the ground. The enthusiasm spread into western New York. Miller spoke at Troy, the thriving city opposite the mouth of the Erie Canal. In 1839 he commenced a grueling five-month tour of Massachusetts.

  The more he repeated his prediction, the surer he became that it was beyond all doubt. His own popularity proved to him that he was on to something. Some critics suggested that if his forecast failed it would hurt the cause of Christ. Miller brushed off the possibility. Every prophet back to Noah had stared into the uncertain future. What if, when the ark was finished, no rain had come? His stark answer to critics was: “Time is precious.”

  But as time ran through the hourglass, Miller failed to gain the kind of momentum he thought his message demanded. He continued to lecture in isolated churches. Too few preachers were picking up his banner. Rumors circulated that Miller was dead or, even worse, that he had made a hundred-year error in calculation. He began to suffer from dropsy, a swelling of the ankles that suggested he was developing congestive heart failure. He was closer to sixty now than to fifty, and the end of the world was only four years away.

  Preaching in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1839, Miller met a thirty-four-year-old man of God named Joshua V. Himes, pastor of a small church in Boston. Himes invited Miller to address his congregation. Miller went to Boston in December and gave his usual series of lectures. Himes’s eyes were opened. He could not deny or ignore the man’s disturbing but utterly convincing revelation. He grilled Miller after his talk: Do you believe this message? Certainly. What are you doing to spread the Word? All I can. Then why have so few heard the message?

  “No time should be lost,” Himes said, “in giving the church and the world warning, in thundertones.”

  Miller was, as usual, self-deprecating. “What can an old farmer do?” he rejoined. “I was never used to public speaking.” He confessed to Himes that the relentless, seemingly fruitless effort, the growing resistance from orthodox clergy, and his failure to spark a self-perpetuating movement were wearing him down. Most of all, he felt alone. “I have been looking for help—I want help!”

  Himes had the soul of a reformer. His Boston chapel had housed an early pacifist organization. Like many attracted to Miller’s teaching, he was an active abolitionist. He decided he would be the one who would help Father Miller. Together, they would warn the world. Himes was sure he could convert one man’s crusade into a historic mass movement.

  He was right. Before long, thousands of voices would be proclaiming the Advent message. They would be singing hymns praising the destruction of the entire earth and proclaiming that when the end came they would “smile to see the burning world.”

  Zion

  During the first week of February 1831, Joseph and Emma Smith arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, accompanied by Sidney Rigdon. Joseph strode into a mercantile store there and said to one of the proprietors, “Newel K. Whitney! Thou art the man!”

  The thirty-five-year-old Whitney was at a loss.

  “I am Joseph the Prophet,” Smith said. “You’ve prayed me here, now what do you want of me?” It was the type of dramatic gesture that made a lasting impression. Smith may have delivered his grandiose announcement with a touch of sly humor. He admitted to a “native cheery Temperament.” One of his followers who later left the Church complained of “a spirit of lightness and levity” in the young man not appropriate for a prophet. Joseph had a “habitual proneness to jesting and joking.”

  Kirtland stood between the shore of Lake Erie and the inland hills. Sparsely populated, only partly cultivated, now linked to the East by steamer and canal boat, it was rapidly attracting settlers. Most came from New England. Many, like their western New York counterparts, were religious seekers.

  The mix of fields and woods, the wheat growing amid stumps, the tiny isolated villages, all was familiar to Joseph Smith. What was different was the reception he received. Local families converted to Mormonism by Cowdery and Whitmer joined Rigdon’s followers in a community of faith. Mormons moving from Palmyra and the Colesville area arrived to fill out the ranks. Rather than animosity and threats, Joseph was met with respect and cordiality bordering on awe.

  Even in this welcoming environment, Joseph and Emma continued to endure precarious finances and a string of bad luck. For lodging, they at first depended on local followers. Then Joseph had a revelation that a new house should be provided, and convert Isaac Morley built them a one-room cabin on his farm.

  At the end of April, Emma gave birth to premature twins, Thaddeus and Louisa. Both died the same day, just as the Smiths’ first child Alvin had perished three years earlier. Married four years, Emma had buried three children. She had also suffered a break with her parents and had been uprooted from two homes. But Joseph’s mother Lucy wrote about Emma, “I have never seen a woman in my life, who would endure every species of fatigue and hardship . . . with that unflinching courage, zeal, and patience, which she has ever done.”

  The wife of another Mormon follower died in childbirth the day after Emma’s heartbreak, leaving behind twins of her own. Their father offered the babies to the Smiths, who took them in and raised them. Lucy Smith arrived soon afterward from New York, joining her husband, who had preceded her to Kirtland. The older couple moved in with Joseph and Emma and the two infants, taking again to the farming life they knew so well.

  Joseph Jr. also returned to translating. He was revising and adding to the Bible. He did not, like the seventeenth-century translators of the King James Version, refer to the original Greek and Hebrew texts. His alterations and supplements were inspired directly by God. He related how Moses, who had lived thirteen centuries before Christ, had experienced a vision of Jesus. Meeting God face-to-face, Moses pressed the Almighty to reveal the meaning of his creation. God told him the heavens “are many, & they cannot be numbered unto man.”

  Later, Smith and Sidney Rigdon recorded a joint revelation that Church members could become “gods, even the sons of God.” They could “be made equal with him.” In their exaltation, they would dwell in a “celestial kingdom.” Heaven had two other, lower realms, which they called “terrestrial” and “telestial.” The idea of a multiplicity of heavens was a strange new take on traditional theology. Mormon doctrine was spinning ever further beyond the confines of orthodox Christianity.

  Joseph was also devising a novel structure for the Church. Rather than a professional clergy, he incorporated all male members into the various offices of the church. Breaking down the division between lay and clerical was almost unknown in Christianity; only the Quakers had come close to it.

  In June 1831, he took an even more radical step, ordaining five men into the priesthood. He made the hierarchical office an essential part of his Church. Eventually, almost all Mormon men would have the chance to enter the Aaronic or the higher Melchizedek priesthood. The Mormon emphasis on priestly functions marked a distinct break with the tradition of Puritan Protestantism, which had dominated American faith since the seventeenth century. The idea
that every person could have a direct relationship with the Divine was an axiom of evangelical Christianity. Joseph returned Mormonism to an earlier concept, still enshrined in Roman Catholicism, in which priests served as intermediaries. A Mormon was initiated into the faith not by his own efforts alone but through the intercession of another. Smith based the doctrine on the ancient Hebrew priesthood. Ingeniously, he had found a way to fuse hierarchical and democratic principles to yield a Church structure that was both innovative and practical.

  Continuing to look westward, Smith sent fourteen pairs of elders to join Oliver Cowdery, who was teaching the “Lamanites” in western Missouri. A few weeks later, he followed them. The purpose of the trip was to select a site for Zion, the new Jerusalem where all Latter Day Saints would eventually gather. Revelations from God led him to Independence, a tiny village in Jackson County, on the opposite side of the state from St. Louis. The Saints already there were joined by a group who had journeyed directly from New York State. This was to be the Mormons’ sacred refuge.

  Their reception in Missouri was chillier than the Mormons’ welcome in Kirtland. Locals here were not visionary Yankees but hard-eyed southern backwoodsmen. They were not inclined to join the new religion. Nor did they welcome a group of strangers who declared their town the promised land and who appeared to be the vanguard of an invasion of fanatics.

  Joseph selected a lot where the Saints were to build their temple in “Zion.” He then returned to Kirtland to manage the larger body of Church members there.

  He must have felt an immense satisfaction to reflect on how far he had come. Less than four years had passed since he had climbed Hill Cumorah and returned with the gold plates. In that time he had translated a major new scripture, published a six-hundred-page book, started a church, revised part of the Bible, established a new and enthusiastic base in Ohio, set up the crucial community on the edge of the western frontier, and sent missionaries to gather new members from around the country. A year later he would write a history of his life, calling it “an account of his marvilous experience and of all the mighty acts which he doeth.”

  Fort Niagara

  When a loved one goes missing, hope becomes a bitter thorn. William Morgan was the most intelligent, insightful, and intriguing man that his wife Lucinda had ever met. Her love had made her overlook his age, his hollow ambitions, his heavy drinking, and his unreliable breadwinning. After September 11, 1826, each day of dwindling hope made her heart ache.

  Each day, each week. A year passed. She endured the macabre burlesque of the rotting corpse found in Lake Ontario. Wanting, yet not wanting it to be him. Wanting to end hope and know he was at rest. It was him; it was not him. The torture continued.

  Her husband had become the focus of a great excitement sweeping western New York. To the increasingly organized and avid Anti-Masonic forces, Morgan was an icon, a proof of Masonic treachery. Morgan’s blood cried from the ground. The circumstances of his death, an observer noted, were the “rallying signals of a political party; and the still small voice of reason and reflection was drowned amid the universal din.”

  Freemasons dug in their heels against the onslaught of hatred and mistrust. But the tide kept rising, and their footing washed away under them. Thousands of Masons left the order. Almost four hundred lodges in New York State closed. Many in neighboring states fell inactive as well. The number of Freemasons in the United States dropped by 60 percent in ten years. Masonic ceremonies at public events largely ceased.

  “Antimasonry is bottomed upon rank political hatred and bigoted intolerant sectarianism,” wrote the editor of the Masonic Mirror in 1831. Hatred proved a solid foundation for a suddenly potent political movement.

  The Anti-Masons saw an affront to their newly muscular religious sensibilities. A Massachusetts preacher roared that Freemasonry was the “darkest and deepest plot that ever was formed in this wicked world.” Cooler heads saw that Freemasonry, rather than being sacrilege, was an elaborate form of make-believe. Masons incorporated all kinds of hocus-pocus into their rituals in order to add mystery and “zest” to the play.

  But to opponents, Freemasonry’s secret reach made it a truly terrifying enemy. “Why are six hundred thousand men united together by mysterious ties,” a convention speaker demanded, “the nature of which are studiously concealed from their countrymen?”

  A story emerged from all the testimony, investigations, rumors, and confessions surrounding the case. It began the night before Morgan’s arrest in Batavia. Masons in Canandaigua met to discuss the imminent publication of Morgan’s book. They sent Loton Lawson, who would participate in Morgan’s actual abduction, to arrange for relays of horses and drivers along the route from Canandaigua to Lewiston, 125 miles away on the Niagara frontier.

  After the Masons hustled Morgan into a closed carriage the evening of September 12, a man named Hiram Hubbard drove him ten miles to Victor and pulled in behind a tavern kept by Dr. Thomas Beach. Beach purportedly said of Morgan, “Damn him, he ought to be drawn and quartered.”

  The men had some drinks and proceeded onward to Hanford’s Landing, a settlement on the west side of the Genesee River north of Rochester. Ezra Platt, a Royal Arch Mason, provided a new carriage from his livery stable. The abductors continued westward, stopping at various taverns to water or change horses. At every stop they “took drinks all around.” By sundown on the 13th they had reached Wright’s Corners, just north of Lockport, twenty-five miles east of Lewiston. Sheriff Eli Bruce joined them there and took charge of the prisoner.

  In Lewiston, Bruce recruited a driver, Corydon Fox, who was not a Mason. Fox watched a man being led by the arm to the carriage. Bruce told Fox to drive six miles north to Fort Niagara. Fox pulled up his horses at a graveyard a quarter mile from the fort. He observed four persons descend from the carriage and proceed arm in arm toward the disused bastion.

  Almost all the men involved in this strange trip were Masons. A few days later, Corydon Fox was inducted into the brotherhood as well, the usual fees being waived. “Morgan’s abductors,” a witness noted, “were respectable men.” Some held important offices. They were a decorous mob that felt confident in taking the law into their own hands.

  Fort Niagara had been left in the charge of Colonel Ezekiel Jewett, who lived in one of the buildings. Jewett, a Mason, entrusted the fort’s upkeep to Edward Giddins, who also ran a ferry across the river. He had not been allowed to testify in court because he was an atheist. He told those interested that he had observed Morgan “bound, hoodwinked and under guard” on the night of September 13.

  Later, Giddins said, he helped row the prisoner across the river to Canada. The Canadian Masons who were to take charge of him did not show up. The American Masons returned Morgan to the fort and imprisoned him in the magazine. Giddins supplied Morgan with food. At one point, the prisoner created a disturbance that alarmed a black woman who looked after Giddins’s daughter. Giddins distracted the nanny by telling her it was the sound of ghosts.

  At some point during the next four days, Giddins said, he joined a group of Masons who talked about what to do with Morgan. They finally agreed to take him out on the river, tie a stone to him, and sink him. But each in turn declared he could not go through with such a plan. Giddins proposed releasing the prisoner. After quarreling with others, he handed over the key to the magazine because he had to be away for a few days. He returned to find the building empty.

  The story of Morgan’s abduction could be traced in great detail up to his imprisonment in Fort Niagara. All of the characters in the drama were accounted for. But then what?

  What was to become a semiofficial Masonic version said that their plan all along was to take Morgan to Canada. There he was given a farm and five hundred dollars on the promise that he would never return to the United States and never try to publish his book. His wife and children would be allowed to join him later.

  If th
is or something like it happened, it exonerated the Masons of murder. If, as they held, Morgan agreed to the compensation from the beginning, there was no kidnapping. To explain the apparent force used in Canandaigua, they suggested that the abduction was a ruse, designed to get Morgan out of obligations to his publisher, David Miller. But Morgan’s family never saw him again, his imprisonment in the magazine does not suggest a ruse, and his book was published and widely read, all facts that argue against this innocuous explanation.

  Other stories, mostly from Freemason sources, concluded that Morgan emerged from the incident alive and well. In one, he was delivered to a member of the brotherhood who commanded a British man-of-war in Montreal, or maybe Quebec, and removed to some unknown destination. Or he was impressed into the British navy—a reprise of Morgan’s purported stint in the American army during the War of 1812.

  A persistent story set him down in Smyrna, on the west coast of Turkey. The port was a prosperous Greek outpost within the Ottoman Empire. A report in the New-York Evening Post placed Morgan there as early as 1828. Forty years after the event, a Captain Andrew Hitchcock said he saw a man there in February 1830. Although the stranger looked like a Turk, he told Hitchcock he was the missing Morgan. A year later, Joseph Bloom, a traveling scientist, met an American Mohammedan in Smyrna whom he was convinced was Morgan.

  Another detailed story had Morgan going to Canada. He took the money and land the Freemasons offered, but sold the farm to start a new life. He went to sea on the Constance and was shipwrecked in a storm off Cuba. Fishermen picked him up and took him home with them to the Cayman Islands. There he married a woman named Catherine Ann Page. They had six children beginning in 1829. Ten years later, Morgan was caught in a storm while fishing for turtles. His dismasted boat drifted for weeks. Three Americans rescued him this time and towed him to Utila Island, off Belize, where he harvested turtles and sold coconut oil. When he managed to repair his boat, he went back to the Caymans and brought his family to live on Utila. He later sent his daughter to school in Philadelphia. He died around 1864, when he would have been ninety.