Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  It was a dangerous opinion. Sabbath breakers or those who enjoyed an occasional glass of whiskey became only mildly incensed when holier-than-thou types derided their vices. To slave owners, abolition meant the loss of an enormous and essential investment. The effrontery of ignorant northern idealists out to wreck the southern economy and way of life infuriated them to the point of madness.

  And it was not just southern plantation masters. Cotton, grown in the South by slaves, was processed in northern factories. It was a critical asset of the young republic. Businessmen north and south insisted that the end of slavery would bring the nation’s commerce to its knees. Workers imagined freed slaves taking their jobs. White men’s heads came alive with panicked visions of black men molesting their women. An apocalyptic race war was a vivid fear.

  The Lane students, who now embraced the antislavery cause as their creed, dismissed all objections. They went into the community of free blacks in Cincinnati and started schools. They stayed in black homes, escorted black students to the seminary. “While I was at Lane Seminary,” Weld remembered, “my intercourse was with the Colored people at Cincinnati, I think I may say exclusively. . . . If I ate in the City it was at their tables. If I slept in the City it was at their homes.” The summer of 1834 would have an echo 130 years later, when blacks and whites united to defy Jim Crow in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

  A Cincinnati newspaper labeled Weld “a proud, arrogant, self-conceited, disorganized man” who was “a compound of folly, madness, vanity, ambition, self-complacency, and total contempt of law and public sentiment.”

  Lyman Beecher admired Theodore Weld and feared him. “Great economic and political questions,” the clergyman stated, “can’t be solved so simply.” Beecher believed that the students should leave the issue of slavery to clergymen, who viewed the matter from a broader perspective than mere individual conscience. Teaching blacks was fine. But visiting their homes, walking in the street with them—it was too provocative. America would never accept blacks socially. Colonization would leave everyone better off.

  Weld and his fellow students would have none of it. Abolition was “the cause of God.” Drunk with righteousness, the students saw themselves as the nation’s only hope. “The pulpit is overawed,” Weld declared, “the press panders to power, conscience surrenders to expediency.”

  One of their allies, a preacher in a nearby Ohio church who took up the cause, was attacked for “niggerism” and labeled a “traitor to Christ and his country.” A Lane student who went to Nashville to sell Bibles was caught with abolitionist handbills in his possession. He was tried before two clergymen and seven Presbyterian elders. Found guilty of inciting slaves, he was publicly beaten and thrown out of the city.

  The students were criticized for defying public opinion—a majority of citizens across the country tolerated slavery. Weld scoffed at the notion. Should high moral issues be decided by “which side of the question is popular: which will be huzza’d and hosanna’d? Which will tickle the multitude?”

  The Lane trustees became alarmed at the students’ defiance. “Madness rules the hour,” one commented. They asked Weld and his fellows to cease “mixing” with blacks. They fired a professor sympathetic to the cause, accused Weld of “monomania,” limited campus societies, and ordered the students to give up their abolitionist activities.

  In response, almost all the rebels walked out. A school, they insisted, should be concerned with Truth. If not, Weld said, “better the mob demolish every building.” The millennium was coming. The cause was urgent. They wanted to be treated “as men.” In fact, Weld was thirty-one, most of the others in their late twenties.

  The Lane students enrolled in the newly organized Oberlin Collegiate Institute, two hundred miles to the north in Ohio. Oberlin, the first permanent coeducational college in the world, was also among the first to freely admit black students. The Tappan brothers shifted their financial support from Lane to Oberlin.

  And who better to play a lead role in the new institution than Charles Finney? The great evangelist was at the height of his powers. He was preaching at the grand Broadway Tabernacle in New York and had just published his influential book Lectures on Revivals of Religion, which would serve as an instruction manual for generations of evangelists. But seeing a slow decline in enthusiasm for his revivals, he wanted to mobilize a new cadre of preachers trained in his methods. The west was where he had seen his great success. He agreed to leave New York and take over the Oberlin theology department. He would eventually become the college’s president as well.

  Theodore Weld was also offered a professorship at the college. He declined. The fight against slavery was “superior to every other cause.” He would abandon academia to go out and convert the nation to abolitionism. During the next two years, Weld would change the moral debate in America. Before he was done, colonization would no longer be seriously talked about. Abolition would move from an idea on the radical fringe to a pressing concern across the northern states. He effected the change by leveraging the moral energy of those caught up in the excitement of the recent revivals.

  Weld faced enormous resistance. Clergymen preached against abolition. Civil authorities actively thwarted him. Mobs threatened and attacked him. President Jackson, who had built his wealth on slavery, blocked the distribution of abolitionist literature through the mails.

  To the majority of Americans, abolition was not just an erroneous policy, it was anathema, even lunatic. They could offer proof. In Virginia a few years earlier, a slave and visionary named Nat Turner had undergone a mystical experience that promised freedom. In 1831, he preached liberty to fellow slaves. They threw off their shackles and armed themselves with knives and axes. Before the rebellion was suppressed, they had killed sixty white men, women, and children. Retaliation took the lives of many innocent blacks. The Turner uprising stalked the dreams of the entire nation.

  Weld became a leading member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison had written the organization’s manifesto. Money from Arthur and Lewis Tappan paid the bills. The goal was the “immediate emancipation of the whole colored race.” Members were further determined to free the colored man “from the oppression of public sentiment.” During the next few years, an antislavery newspaperman would be shot dead in Illinois, abolitionists would be hounded from Missouri, and a reward of $20,000 was offered for the delivery of Arthur Tappan to the levee of New Orleans for lynching.

  Known as the “thunderer of the West,” Weld embarked on a furious series of antislavery lectures. He started in Ohio and worked his way eastward along the Erie Canal. He preached to western audiences with force and colloquial clarity. “A stump is my throne,” he asserted, “my element the everydayisms of plain common life.”

  Borrowing from Finney, he ran his programs like revivals. He orated day after day—at times he gave two dozen speeches in one city. He drove home the logic, the pure rightness of his message. He played skillfully on listeners’ emotions. “If it is not FELT in the very vital tissues of the spirit,” he wrote, “all the reasoning in the world is a feather thrown against the wind.” He met resistance at first, but gradually the crowds at each lecture stop would grow. Even adamant opponents would sometimes succumb to his impassioned arguments.

  At Lockport, Weld was “almost shouted down by hostile demonstrators.” Yet he spoke for four hours, convincing hundreds to sign a constitution for the Niagara County Anti-Slavery Society. The group would soon attract 21,000 members. In Rochester, he convinced eight hundred citizens to join the local Anti-Slavery Society branch. In Utica, nineteen hundred joined the Society or signed abolitionist petitions.

  The success of his appeal drove his enemies wild. Outside his meeting places, they screamed, banged tin pans, blew bugles, and let loose barking dogs. They threw stones and eggs—at one point Weld was stunned by a brickbat to the head. He pointed to the viru
lence of the opposition as a sign of his success. He described himself as “the most mobbed man in America.”

  By the end of 1835, talk of abolition was buzzing across the northern states. The idea was daring, visionary, exciting. For a time, it seemed unstoppable. The number of abolitionist newspapers grew from three to thirty-five in a single year. Local antislavery societies proliferated—in a few months there were two hundred. Weld had helped make abolition the most celebrated cause in America.

  The Bones of God

  In December 1838, Joseph Smith, having barely escaped execution for treason, had languished in a filthy, freezing jail cell in Liberty, Missouri. A year later, he walked into the White House for a meeting with the president of the United States.

  He had made the long trip to the nation’s capital in order to plead with Martin Van Buren to redress the Mormons’ many grievances over their treatment by Missouri’s inhabitants and public officials. A Washington newspaper described the prophet as “a tall muscular man, with . . . much shrewdness of character.” He had the appearance of “a plain yeoman, intended rather for the cultivation of the soil, than the expounding of prophecy.” He was a great talker, resolute and determined. The writer estimated the number of Mormons in the country at 200,000 and “still on the increase. Persecution swells their ranks.”

  Van Buren, elected vice president as Andrew Jackson’s running mate in 1832, was known as the Little Magician because of his short stature and the political canniness with which he had maneuvered into the presidency in 1837 as Jackson’s successor. He met with Smith, but he gave the Mormons no satisfaction. The president was not about to alienate the state of Missouri. A newspaper account said that he listened a few moments to the Mormons’ tale of injured innocence, then abruptly left the room. They waited, he did not return, and they had to leave “disappointed, and chagrined.”

  Feeling insulted, Smith was reported to have said that Van Buren was not as fit “as my dog, for the chair of state.” The president had bigger worries than vigilantism on the frontier. The country was still reeling from the Panic of 1837, and he was being blamed. In the 1840 election, Whig Party candidate William Henry Harrison would drive him from office. Missouri would be one of only seven states Van Buren managed to carry.

  Smith and his entourage returned to Nauvoo. His life there for the next four years was as hectic and varied as ever. On a typical day in 1842, he noted, “I read in the Book of Mormon, transacted a variety of business in the Store and City, and spent the evening in the Office with [two elders] interpreting dreams &c.” As in Kirtland, he had started a dry goods shop in the center of Nauvoo, adding a merchant’s duties to his many responsibilities with the Church and town government.

  One day he was chopping wood. The next he would spend talking with Hyrum about the details of the priesthood. He and Emma gave huge dinner parties, hosting as many as a hundred Mormon neighbors, who ate in shifts. He purchased a surplus steamboat from the Army Corps of Engineers—the agent handling the deal was an officer named Robert E. Lee.

  In 1840, Chicago was the largest city in Illinois, with a population of 4,500. The state capital at Springfield had 2,500 citizens. The population of Nauvoo was 3,000, and it would more than triple over the next five years. Converts came by the Erie Canal and lake steamers. Riverboats from New Orleans began to bring immigrants from England by the hundreds. Across the Atlantic, Brigham Young had used his formidable proselytizing skills to spread the word of the fabulous New World revelation to the teeming masses of desperate English factory workers.

  Most new Church members were poor; some walked all the way from the East. But not all. William Law, an astute businessman, arrived from Canada with a comfortable financial cushion. Law would quickly climb the Mormon hierarchy to become a member of the First Presidency and a close counselor to Smith. Nauvoo received its city charter in 1840 with the support of an Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln. The document allowed Smith to add considerable temporal power to his religious authority.

  Following a revelation, Joseph no longer required members to “consecrate” property to the Church. Instead, they were to “tithe” a tenth of their income. But local land still had to be plotted, apportioned, sold, traded, and taxed. Ordinances had to be drawn up about everything from unruly children to the prohibition of bordellos. Church officials, guided by Smith’s revelations, planned another huge temple for ritual and worship. The cornerstones were laid on April 6, 1841, the eleventh anniversary of the founding of the Church. The edifice would be more than three years in the building.

  Lawsuits and court cases were unremitting. Joseph was legally still a fugitive from various charges in Missouri. From time to time, he had to go into hiding to avoid a sheriff or a posse. He ducked both civil and criminal cases on technicalities.

  More grave were the losses within his family. Joseph Smith Sr. died in September 1840. The next August, malaria claimed Don Carlos, the youngest of Joseph’s four remaining brothers, at twenty-five. A short time later, illness also killed Joseph and Emma’s young son, whom they had named Don Carlos after his uncle. Emma, now thirty-seven, soon lost another baby in childbirth, her fifth child to die in infancy.

  Always drawn to translation, Joseph continued to revise the Bible and to apply himself to ancient Egyptian scrolls. He oversaw the production of a new edition of the Book of Mormon. He studied Hebrew. He tried to master German.

  In a sense, Joseph Smith was a man who never grew up. Or rather, he was a man with a knack for drawing from the well of youth long into adulthood. He loved games, loved make-believe. He traveled to a nearby town in Illinois where he bested the strongest man in the village in “stick pulling,” and threw the best wrestler. He played baseball and took up fencing. Whether meeting with the president of the United States or with Indian chiefs, he made of his life a fantastic adventure.

  Through it all, he continued to push his wild new religion further and further from orthodox Christianity. “It may seem to some to be a very bold doctrine that we talk of,” Joseph admitted. Not for him the careful modifications with which Charles Finney had deflected the evangelical mainstream. One by one, Smith was bursting all limits.

  The Mormons had always believed in baptism by immersion. In 1840, Joseph declared that the dead could, indeed must, be baptized. The idea was connected with what Smith called “the powers of the Holy Priesthood.” What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven. A ritual on earth could affect the destiny of those who had passed their earthly existence. Mormon zealots baptized George and Martha Washington into the true Church. They did the same to Thomas Jefferson, in life a deist skeptic.

  “In the beginning,” the Bible began, “God created the heaven and the earth.” No, Joseph insisted, God did not make the world “out of Nothing; for it is contrary to a Rashanall mind & Reason. that a something could be Brought from a Nothing.” The “elements” were eternal; the Almighty had recycled planets to create the earth we know.

  “There is no such thing as immaterial matter,” Smith told a Methodist inquirer. “All spirit is matter.” It was a singular statement. When our bodies are purified, he assured the faithful, “we shall see that it is all matter.”

  Angels, like men, had physical bodies. To tell if a messenger from God was genuine, the prophet advised, “request him to shake hands with you. If he be an angel he will do so, and you will feel his hand.” If the figure was a devil, you would feel nothing.

  God’s substance was not essentially different from ours. “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s,” Joseph revealed. The angels “do not reside on a planet like this earth. But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire.” This sphere where God lived was “a great Urim and Thummim.” Like the magical spectacles that Moroni had given Joseph, the crystal globe allowed heavenly beings to see reality in all its glory.

  This was all passing s
trange, but no article of dogma carried Smith further from the shore of received wisdom than his notion of plural marriage. The controversy that had arisen over Fanny Alger was just the beginning.

  The Whole of America

  In April 1841, Joseph Smith Jr. instructed Joseph Noble to marry him to Noble’s sister-in-law Louisa Beaman, whom Smith had met seven years earlier when she was a teenager. Now twenty-six, Louisa attended the ceremony dressed in a man’s hat and coat. Joseph made up the words on the spot. Afterward, he told Noble, “I have placed my life in your hands.”

  Joseph knew how explosive his doctrine was. Even his younger brother Don Carlos had stated, “Any man who will teach and practice the doctrine of spiritual wifery will go to hell, I don’t care if it is my brother Joseph.”

  Smith was an expert at hairsplitting. Mormons did not practice polygamy, he said, “in the ordinary and Asiatic sense of the term.” They opposed it, along with “spiritual wifery.”

  To avoid the Biblical injunction against adultery, Smith turned his sexual adventures into complex ritual practices. He understood that many of these “plural marriages” had all the appearance of philandering and so hid them from the public—and from his wife. Eliza Snow, a friend of Emma whom Joseph would make his twelfth wife in 1842, called the doctrine “a deep intricate puzzle, a tangle of strings.”

  A tangle. Joseph devised a system of code words to maintain secrecy. Insiders knew that references to the holy order, eternal marriage, or the endowment meant more than others might imagine.

  Keeping such a radical dogma under wraps in a community where he was constantly in the public eye taxed Joseph’s abundant ingenuity. He decided to extend the doctrine to his inner circle of male followers, insisting that they not only could but must take plural wives if they were to enter the highest level of celestial glory. He said an angel had threatened to kill him if he did not take additional wives himself.