Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  No, some said, he escaped his Masonic captors and made his way west. He joined a band of Apache Indians in Texas, married an Indian maiden, became a chief. No, he was forced into the British navy, all right, but he jumped ship in Australia and started a newspaper called The Advertiser. He married a beautiful woman and became rich. No, he traveled to northern Maine where he lived as a hermit, quite content in his wilderness hut.

  In other stories, his fate was grim. Some said that Masons had sliced open his throat, cut out his tongue, and buried him in sand at the edge of Lake Ontario, fulfilling the penalty for breaking his oath. Others were sure that his abductors did not stop until they reached a remote region of southwest Alabama, where they killed Morgan and buried his body. A rumor spread that, having taken him to Canada, the Masonic brothers handed him over to Captain John Brant, son of the Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, a feared warrior during the Revolutionary War. The Mohawks were said to have subjected Morgan to baroque native vengeance. Brant himself denied that he had ever heard of the man.

  A number of men came forth in later years who claimed to have participated in Morgan’s murder. In 1848, Doctor John L. Emery of Racine, Wisconsin, said that a remorseful Canadian Mason named Henry L. Valance had confessed to him. Valance said that a Masonic council had resolved that Morgan must die. A group of Masons drew lots to see who would serve as Morgan’s executioners. Valance was required to go to the Fort Niagara magazine and tell the prisoner of his fate. The other brothers bound and gagged the victim, attached weights to him and rowed him to the middle of the river. The night was dark as pitch. They set Morgan on the boat’s gunwale. Valance pushed him overboard. Another Canadian Mason named Samuel Chubbuck told a similar but conflicting story years later, suggesting that Morgan had been killed on land, his wrapped body tossed into the Niagara River.

  Thurlow Weed chimed in with yet another confession. John Whitney, who was known to have participated in the abduction, told Weed that the Masons had intended to settle their recalcitrant brother in Canada, but that the Canadian Masons refused to take charge of him. Five enthusiastic Masons from the Lewiston Royal Arch decided to bind Morgan with chains, weight him with a stone, and drown him in the river. Whitney himself had been dead for six years before Weed first recounted this version of the crime fifty years after the event.

  Even today, nearly two centuries after Morgan’s disappearance, Freemasons take umbrage at the unproven accusation that their long-ago brothers murdered a man for writing a book. Certainly it’s possible that Morgan, desperate for money and seeing little prospect in his publishing venture, had decided to abide by his oath, accept a bribe, and forsake his family. It’s also possible that the Freemasons of western New York did in fact murder him.

  None of the stories or rumors could bring anything but sorrow to Lucinda Morgan. She apparently saw little of the profits from William’s book, in spite of the brisk sales. One who helped her financially was George Washington Harris, the silversmith who kept a shop below her apartment in Batavia. Harris had been a Freemason for twenty years before being expelled from the Lodge in August 1826, a month before Morgan’s abduction. His friendship with the Morgans might have been the cause.

  In 1828, Harris’s wife Margaret died. The next year he began to court Lucinda. They were married in November 1830. Harris was fifty then. Morgan had been fifty-two when he disappeared. Lucinda had just turned thirty.

  The wedding disappointed the Anti-Masons. Lucinda lost much of her value as the aggrieved symbol of their cause. Shortly after they became man and wife, the couple left Batavia and moved to Terre Haute, Indiana. Some years later they encountered a roving missionary named Orson Pratt. He was the younger brother of Parley Pratt, who had introduced Sidney Rigdon to Mormonism. Orson preached the doctrines of Joseph Smith to the Harrises. They were convinced. He baptized them into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the autumn of 1834.

  Salvation

  “The waters of salvation had risen so high,” Charles Finney wrote about the aftermath of his Rochester revival, “that men were afraid to oppose them.” The sudden efflorescence of religion—a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand citizens had joined churches—was unprecedented. It must, many thought, mean that the millennium was at hand. Finney thought so. The thousand-year reign of Christianity, heaven on earth, could be imminent. “In 1831,” one observer noted, “the whole orthodox church was in a state of ebullition in regard to the Millennium.”

  But if Christians were to bring about the millennium, they needed to do more than bask in their own conversions. Preachers were the catalyst, but every Christian, Finney held, “is either gathering for Christ, or scattering abroad.”

  During this period of high enthusiasm, evangelical Christianity took a fateful turn. Christians, reveling in what a modern writer has called “the ecstasy of sanctimony,” became soldiers in one of the earliest American culture wars. Charles Finney reinforced both the moral courage and the prying meddlesomeness of American religion.

  Sin was sin. He would lead his flock in a war against the evening sip of wine and against the sexual degradation of women. They would march to eliminate the Sunday afternoon canal boat ride and to abolish the cruel enslavement of human beings. Finney condemned every self-indulgence, from coffee and pastries to the ribbons on women’s dresses. He directed his censure at the “secular novel,” and lumped Byron, Scott, and Shakespeare with “triflers and blasphemers of God.”

  Theodore Weld had shown the way with his absolutist and highly successful temperance campaign. Evangelicals worked to enforce observance of the Sabbath. They condemned all theatergoing. Christians bought one Rochester theater and turned it into a livery stable. A circus building was transformed into a soap factory.

  The Rochester Christians recruited by Finney from the elite classes directed their benevolent gaze at the poor. They started a savings bank to encourage thrift. They set up schools for needy children. They established the Boatmen’s Friend Society, which tried to bring the men and boys who worked the canal into the Christian community. They set up Bethel churches along the canal route to welcome transients.

  But the soft glove of concern covered an iron fist of coercion, ready to strike those who persisted in sin. Soon, jobs advertised in Rochester came with the proviso, “none need apply except those of moral habits.” A Rochester maker of fire engines demanded that his workers never touch the bottle, at home or at work, on penalty of dismissal. Workers were strongly urged to attend revivals and join a church. One clerk forced to sit through a revival said, “I don’t give a d—n. I get five dollars more in a month than before I got religion.”

  Entrepreneurs dared not cross the forces of evangelism. One printer seen joking and drinking with salesmen in a Rochester hotel was excommunicated. A few months later his newspaper was taken over by pious owners and he was ruined. A silversmith who over-imbibed before witnesses was suspended from his church and lost his business.

  Finney’s reforms attacked the time-wasting leisure activities of the working class. Sunday was a workman’s only day off, whiskey his cheap escape. Theater, circuses, prostitution, all brought relief from the grind that commercial culture made of men’s lives.

  It seemed all too convenient that the moneyed mill owners, who profited from an orderly work force, were eager to promote religious dogma that imposed just the kind of discipline they wanted. The new world of factories and wage labor needed new social norms. The religion that Finney helped integrate into American culture facilitated moral compulsion and a bourgeois discipline that benefitted one class over another.

  The great evangelist wound up his Rochester revival in late February 1831 with a “protracted meeting,” a four-day prayer fest in which Finney and other preachers hammered home their message in all churches from dawn to midnight. Most businesses in the city closed. All stops were let out in a mighty effort to save those souls who had not yet falle
n to the revival’s prolonged pressure.

  By the end of it, Finney was sick. Six months of unrelenting proselytizing had left him exhausted. Worse, a doctor diagnosed consumption and gave him only a few months to live.

  He brushed off the warning and set off in a stagecoach over mud-clogged spring roads to continue stirring excitement along the canal. “Once get that region thoroughly soaked,” Theodore Weld urged, “and all hell can’t wring it dry.” The doctor’s diagnosis proved wrong, Finney’s health rebounded.

  He next set his sights on New England. Four years earlier, Lyman Beecher had threatened to call out the artillery to keep him from Boston. Now, Beecher could not help being impressed by the young clergyman’s miraculous successes. But he and his colleagues still did not want the western barbarian barging into their territory and giving the skeptical Universalists a perfect excuse to mock Christian fanaticism.

  Finney could not be stopped; his celebrity trumped opposition. He arrived in Boston in late August 1831 and stayed for eight months, preaching in every orthodox church. He found that the reserved Bostonians lacked a certain “strength of faith.” He urged them to make a decision for Christ, but they remained cold. Attendance at revival meetings, which usually increased, dropped off. “This was something new to me,” Finney admitted.

  In Beecher’s own church, Finney exhorted the congregants “to renounce themselves and their all, and give themselves and all they possessed to Christ.” Beecher jumped up and assured them they need not fear giving their all to Christ, for “he will give it right back to you.” Finney believed this was “the direct opposite of the truth,” but politely refrained from contradicting his host.

  Finney’s next stop was New York City, where he was embraced by two business magnates, the successful silk importers Arthur and Lewis Tappan. The taciturn Arthur and congenial Lewis were both committed to philanthropy and reform. They supported the Anti-Masonic cause and were veterans of the Sabbatarian movement. Temperance fanatics, they had been mocked for importing alcohol-free Burgundy wine and pushing churchmen to substitute it in communion services. Their zeal for saving prostitutes through their Magdalen Society led them to label New York a city of “ten thousand harlots.” Lower-class New Yorkers, the objects of the accusation, threatened to mob their home.

  Arthur in particular was becoming an avid proponent of the abolition of slavery. In June 1831, the brothers organized a convention of “People of Color,” planned a national antislavery society, and started an abolitionist newspaper called the Emancipator. The Tappans argued to Finney that his great influence would be wasted in the more sparsely populated west. Influential men from all over the country now regularly visited New York. “Measures adopted here thrill the nation,” Lewis noted.

  Finney was acutely aware of his own power, of the power of the Holy Spirit working through him. He could not resist the metropolis. He and Lydia arrived in the city in May 1832. The brothers ensconced the preacher in the Chatham Street Chapel, a 2,500-seat converted theater located near the notorious Five Points slum. Lydia was delighted to have a permanent home after eight years roaming the country. They slept on the floor while they waited for their furniture to be delivered. Finney’s upstate friends worried that New York City would dull the evangelist’s edge.

  That autumn, cholera hit the city. It was an epidemic that would spread with particular virulence along the Erie Canal, accommodated by transients and primitive sanitation. The disease was known as the destroyer: victims could show signs of illness in the morning and be dead before the sun set. The Five Points, teeming with immigrants, was hard-hit. Carriages loaded with coffins could be seen on the streets. “The City is in great consternation,” Lydia wrote her parents, “and multitudes are fleeing in every direction.” She and her husband considered joining the refugees but decided it was their duty to remain. In September, Finney was “seized by the cholera,” and spent weeks in bed.

  His association with the Tappan brothers made it impossible to dodge the question of slavery. Finney opposed human bondage, but did not want to “divert the attention of the people from the work of converting souls.” He allowed blacks to attend his church, but required them to sit in a special section.

  In October 1833, Arthur and Lewis Tappan established the New York City Anti-Slavery Society. A newspaper called the rising abolition movement a “most dangerous species of fanaticism.” A mob of 1,500 attacked a society gathering. The organizers switched the meeting to Finney’s Chapel, which already had a reputation in the press as a “common focus of pollution.” Rioters burst in and stampeded through the building. The Tappans barely managed to escape out the back door.

  Finney’s revivals had planted seeds among the nation’s Christians, the seeds had produced trees, the trees were now bearing fruit. But the path away from sin was not yielding the era of peace and holiness that Finney had envisioned. Instead, the campaign against slavery was touching off a storm of unprecedented contention. No one in the 1830s could know that the great event slouching toward them was neither Finney’s golden age nor William Miller’s dreamlike fulfillment of prophecy. It was instead a very real apocalypse of blood.

  Deep Prejudice

  Joseph Smith Jr. never met Charles Finney, but the men had two close encounters. While Finney was lighting his revival fires in Rochester early in 1831, Smith was fifty miles down the canal in Fayette, organizing his Church for the move to Ohio. A year and a half later, with his Latter Day Saints established in Kirtland, Smith decided to make a trip to New York City. He traveled with Newel Whitney, the Kirtland store owner, who had business in the East.

  The two men stayed at a hotel on Pearl Street, not far from the Five Points district where Finney was preaching at his Chapel. Finney, in spite of his rural upbringing, had taken to urban life. Smith did not. He wrote to Emma that the city’s buildings were “truly great and wonderful.” But he found the crowds hard to endure. He observed “something in every countinance that is disagreable.” After a brief sightseeing tour, he rushed back to his room “to meditate and calm my mind and behold the thaughts of home.” He soon returned to Ohio, arriving just in time for the birth of his son Joseph III on November 6, 1832.

  Smith’s home was not a peaceful place. Church membership had topped a thousand and was growing daily, but not everyone was content with Joseph’s leadership. Joseph, Emma, and their children had been living with a follower named John Johnson in Hiram, a town thirty miles south of Kirtland. In March 1832, a mob had broken into the Johnson home and dragged Smith out. They stripped him naked, beat him, and broke his tooth trying to force a vial of poison between his lips. They brought a doctor along with the intention of castrating the prophet, but the medical man lost his nerve. They settled for cracking Joseph’s ribs and pouring hot tar and feathers on him. They found Sidney Rigdon in a nearby house, roughed him up, and left him unconscious.

  The presence in the house of seventeen-year-old Marinda Johnson, along with the castration threat, led to a persistent rumor, probably untrue, that the incident was a consequence of Smith’s having made advances on the girl. It’s more likely that the attackers were dissident Mormons concerned about Smith’s efforts to acquire the property of his followers through a process known as “consecration,” a command to give over all possessions to the stewardship of the Church.

  Rumors would later circulate that as early as 1831 Joseph had spoken of polygamy as a correct principle. The prophet emphasized that “the time had not yet come to teach and practice it.” That same year, Joseph told convert Mary Elizabeth Rollins, twelve years old, that, as she later recorded, “I was the first woman God commanded him to take as a plural wife.” He would indeed “marry” her eleven years later. And although Marinda Johnson denied any sexual affair with Smith in the 1830s, she too became his “wife” in 1842.

  After the attack, Joseph and Emma moved into rooms in Newel Whitney’s store in Kirtland. In 1833, Joseph ta
ught a class there that he called the School of Prophets. He was preparing missionaries to return east and to travel to England. Following the fashion of the day, the men smoked and chewed tobacco during these sessions, spitting liberally on the floor. Emma, who had to clean the mess, complained. Joseph received a revelation from God that “tobacco is not for the body neither for the belly and is not good for man.” The lord of the universe also condemned alcohol. For added measure, He included “hot drinks,” tea and coffee, a rule that, some said, was meant as a dig at women who enjoyed these tamer vices. The proscriptions were in line with the growing temperance movement and the dietary fads of other religious groups. Mormons have observed them ever since.

  More serious issues weighed on Smith in 1834. The Mormon settlement in Independence, Missouri, which Joseph had blessed as the new Zion, was facing growing opposition from local settlers. To the Missourians, Mormons were fanatics intent on grabbing political power and “tampering with our slaves.” They had already tarred and feathered Bishop Edward Partridge and destroyed the Mormons’ printing press. Vigilante mobs now attacked Mormon farmers and townspeople, burning their homes and ransacking their stores. Most Saints fled from Jackson County to the more remote Clay County on the north side of the Missouri River.

  Alarmed by the news and guided as always by revelations from God, Smith formed an armed band in Kirtland and planned a march to “redeem Zion.” He called the expedition Zion’s Camp. Numbering about a hundred volunteers, the group left Kirtland in May 1834. They walked across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In Missouri they met a similar contingent, which Hyrum Smith had recruited among Michigan Mormons.

  Joseph quickly saw that recovering Mormon land in Jackson County by force was hopeless. Legal remedies also failed. In spite of his rhetoric, in which God commanded him to “break down the walls of mine enemies; throw down their tower, and scatter their watchmen,” his military force was really just a play army. Its only effect was to spook Missourians, who armed themselves and burned even more Mormon homes. In late June, realizing he was unprepared for real violence, Smith disbanded the camp. The Missouri Mormons would eventually settle even farther north in Caldwell County, where they created the town of Far West as their new headquarters.