Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  He was not the only one. James Strang was a lawyer and recent convert to Mormonism. Only thirty-one, he produced a letter, allegedly signed by Joseph, naming him successor. Strang established a Mormon outpost he called Voree in southern Wisconsin. He emulated Joseph in receiving revelations, and he even produced some ancient metal plates to support his role as a translator. Some of the Ohio apostates, including the Whitmer brothers and Joseph’s old financial backer Martin Harris, eventually joined Strang’s sect. The group would remain a minor offshoot of Mormonism.

  On August 6, 1844, Brigham Young returned to Nauvoo from Boston—he and the other Apostles had been traveling to proselytize and to promote Joseph’s candidacy for president. He quickly pushed aside Rigdon, who had unwisely criticized Joseph for his most unorthodox teachings, especially polygamy. Young based his own claim of Church leadership on his role as one of the Apostles. He told the Saints that the Twelve possessed an “organization that you have not seen.” They held “the keys of the Kingdom.”

  Young was not the visionary that Smith had been. Nor did he have Rigdon’s powers of oratory. What he had was confidence and a personal sense of authority. When he spoke, a witness said, “it seemed in the eyes of the people as though it was the very person of Joseph which stood before them.” Young later said, “I never pretended to be Joseph Smith.” He could not be the man who had produced the Book of Mormon. But the barrel-chested, forty-three-year-old Young was an excellent and practical organizer. Like Joseph, even more than Joseph, he knew how to build a church.

  Emma would never follow Brigham Young. She knew too well that he had enabled Joseph’s polygamy practices—Young would eventually marry fifty-five women himself. Nor, in spite of his strict and respectful adherence to Joseph’s principles, did Young win over Lucy or the other members of the Smith family.

  The Mormons’ relations with non-Mormons in Illinois festered for two more years. In 1846, the conflict again broke into open warfare. The Mormons abandoned Nauvoo, settling briefly in Iowa. The next April, Brigham Young led the bulk of the Saints westward on their famous trek to the valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

  Emma returned to her home in Nauvoo. The once thriving city had become nearly a ghost town. She married a non-Mormon and operated a store there. Lucy stayed with her and died ten years later at the age of eighty. Emma’s son, Joseph Smith III, went on to head the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The members of this sect, staunchly opposed to polygamy, never reconciled with the much larger body of Utah Saints. At the age of seventy-four, Emma said of her husband Joseph, “I believe he was everything he professed to be.”

  Highway

  During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the finger of God touched down with remarkable frequency in the region of western New York through which men had slashed the great ditch. “There is no country in the world,” Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, “where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”

  Visionaries along the canal’s path played a critical role in the formation of Americans’ God-hungry character. The canal was itself the product of inspiration, its construction an act of faith.

  DeWitt Clinton correctly predicted that the waterway would serve to bind the United States together. It would form a link between the Atlantic Seaboard and the vast interior. But even as the canal was fostering commerce and connection, a new split was opening.

  One of the consequences of the canal was to populate the upper Middle West—Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and beyond—with settlers from the North, many of them New England Yankees. Their influx drew a sharp line between the slave states and the free—the word southern as a political term came into use two years after the canal’s completion. Influenced by the wave of revival and reform that spread during the 1830s, northerners were less inclined to tolerate the great sin that was staining the nation’s soul. The abolitionist cry would assault American ears for another quarter century, harbinger of the cataclysm of the 1860s.

  The Erie Canal was a psychic highway, the scene of visions and religious upheavals. Charged with the preaching of men like Charles Finney and Theodore Weld, it was also a moral highway. It was in Buffalo that the first National Convention of Colored Men was held in 1843. Four years later, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave from Maryland who did so much to affirm the dignity of his people, settled in Rochester, where he published his abolitionist paper The North Star. The towns along the canal served as some of the final links for the Underground Railroad, which helped escaped slaves reach safety in Canada. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had marveled at Finney’s preaching in Rochester, helped organize a convention to advance the struggle for women’s rights. She and her colleagues gathered in Seneca Falls, the same town where the idea of a canal across the state had set fire to Jesse Hawley’s imagination in 1805.

  Martyr

  William Morgan, whose abduction had touched off the earliest of the excitements to scorch the Erie Canal region, was not soon forgotten. It is a testament to the vehemence and durability of the Anti-Masonic furor that fifty-six years after Morgan’s disappearance, two thousand people from around the United States and Canada pledged money to erect a monument to his memory.

  The organizer of the tribute was Jonathan Blanchard. As a young man in the 1830s, Blanchard had been one of those recruited as a lecturer by Theodore Weld to carry the banner of abolition. After the Civil War, Blanchard had revived the moribund Anti-Masonic Party, dedicating his efforts to fighting secret societies and to promoting temperance and Christianity.

  In September 1882, a towering granite pillar, thirty-seven feet high, was erected in the corner of the Batavia Cemetery. Its inscription said that it commemorated “a respectable citizen of Batavia, and a martyr to the freedom of writing.” Looking over the city from its pinnacle was a statue of William Morgan.

  Among the letters read aloud at the monument’s dedication was one from eighty-five-year-old Thurlow Weed, who was suffering from the illness that would kill him two months later. The revival of Morgan’s memory was a touching reminder of the Anti-Masonic movement that had helped Weed become one of the great political fixers in American history. He had guided the party away from its fanatical roots and broadened its focus. He had overseen the transition of Anti-Masonry into a powerful faction of the Whig Party, which for twenty years opposed Andrew Jackson and his Democrats. When the Whigs crashed onto the rocks of the slavery controversy in the 1850s, Weed had served as one of the midwives at the birth of a new political faction, the Republican Party.

  Old Mule

  With the arrival of the twentieth century, New Yorkers debated whether to rebuild the Erie Canal, which had not seen a major upgrade in forty years. Some said the proposed $100 million cost, more than the value of all the public schools in the state, was a waste. Voters in the cities the canal had built, especially Buffalo and New York, envisioned a waterway that would allow much larger vessels to continue the flow of grain, iron ore, limestone, lumber, and other bulky products to and from the interior. The legislature gave its approval.

  This was to be no mere enlargement. The availability of steam-powered excavation equipment and plentiful concrete meant that the canal could be entirely remade. Builders deepened the channel to twelve feet and installed high-lift locks, their doors operated by electric motors. The earlier canal was abandoned from Albany to Rome. The Mohawk River itself, canalized and fed by giant reservoirs, became the eastern canal. The river’s rapids were erased by a series of dams, with locks to allow boats to climb to each new height. At Lockport, two massive locks replaced the flight of five.

  The new canal, finished in 1918, was christened with the workaday name, “Barge Canal.” Tugboats and powered barges had already invaded the canal, and now all the vessels on the waterway would be motorized. The soft clop-clop of hooves, which had always accompanied boat
s gliding along the ditch during the nineteenth century, would be heard no more. The familiar song with the line, “I’ve got an old mule and her name is Sal,” written in 1905 and sung by generations of American schoolchildren, commemorated this change.

  The cry “Low bridge, everybody down!” faded into history. The minimum headroom under the three hundred bridges that crossed the new canal was fifteen feet. The Barge Canal sacrificed charm for efficiency, but it did not disappoint its proponents. Its vessels carried enormous amounts of cargo over the next half century and kept state commerce humming.

  During the 1950s, rail and truck transport sucked the life out of the canal as a commercial venture. The St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks and canals that gave oceangoing ships access to the Great Lakes, opened in 1959 and provided a finishing blow. Tonnage on the canal declined, then dwindled to almost nothing. Now, with the name Erie Canal restored, the waterway is almost entirely the abode of pleasure craft.

  “And you’ll always know your neighbor, And you’ll always know your pal . . .” Today, a trip along the Erie Canal’s route is an occasion for wistful nostalgia. Just as the canal lost its reason for being in the latter half of the twentieth century, so did the cities along its path. Rochester had long ago ceased to be the Flour City; Buffalo no longer handled the bulk of the nation’s grain; Syracuse’s salt industry had evaporated. For decades, the canal cities prospered as industrial towns. But the decline of American manufacturing brought them to their knees. As factories rusted, Buffalo lost half its population; Rochester fell victim to crime and decay; Syracuse was blighted with abandoned buildings; Lockport, Rome, Utica, Schenectady, all struggled to maintain their vitality.

  But the ribbon of water across the state remains. It still brings to mind the exuberance of the nineteenth century, the energy of the immigrants who worked on the colossal building project and the hopes of the settlers who populated its banks.

  Pageant

  In the 1920s, Mormons began to hold a yearly conference back in Palmyra, New York. During the event, they enjoyed acting out scenes from the Book of Mormon. They expanded the production in 1937 into a full-scale pageant, which they enacted on the side of Hill Cumorah. Every year since, except during World War II, Mormons from around the world have gathered near the original Smith homestead to mount an elaborate spectacle. More than seven hundred amateur actors, including many children, portray the journey of the ancient Israelites and their adventures in America.

  Non-Mormon guests are welcome. In the balmy darkness, under a pepper of stars, figures dressed in costumes half Biblical and half Aztec leap around the terraced stage. Lush music and recorded dialogue pour from loudspeakers as the Saints act out their miracle play. The Nephites and Lamanites cross the Atlantic in a wave-sprayed boat, fight clanking battles, dance wildly, heed and ignore prophets, and stand in awe to watch Jesus Christ descend on the New World in a pillar of light.

  When it’s over, the gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, the whole insubstantial pageant, fades to darkness. The prophets were ordinary men, the battles bloodless, the gold mere glitter. All was make-believe. Surely Joseph Smith, the cheerful prophet whose dreams knew no bounds, would smile and approve.

  Source Notes

  Prologue

  2.“ruminating over it”: Koeppel, 37.

  3.“All my private prospects”: Ibid., 7.

  3.“I will presume”: Ibid., 40.

  3.“hitherto I have”: Ibid., 48.

  4.“a burlesque”: Ibid., 54.

  4.“in a century”: Ibid., 52.

  4.“lies in the province”: Ibid., 41.

  4.“the effusions of”: Ibid., 51.

  4.“little short of”: Ibid., 64.

  Chapter 1

  7.“embarrassment of debt”: Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 19.

  7.“There is nothing”: Ibid., 20.

  8.“of the most eligible”: Koeppel, 55.

  8.“Chaquagy [Chicago] and then”: Bernstein, 151.

  8.“When the United States”: Ibid., 117.

  8.“produced such expressions”: Koeppel, 55.

  10.“some of them are”: Thwaites, 148.

  11.“My parents were neither”: Hambrick-Stowe, 4.

  11.“the idol of his pupils”: Hardman, 31.

  13.“ashamed to have a human”: Finney, Memoirs, 16.

  13.“to give my heart”: Hardman, 41.

  14.“Deacon Barney”: Ibid., 43.

  15.“hauteur of manner”: Koeppel, 68.

  15.“irreligious and profane”: Ibid., 79.

  16.“As yet, my friend”: Shaw, 22.

  16.“the swarms of flies”: Cornog, 111.

  16.“a violent rupture”: Campbell, 43.

  17.“Our ears were invaded”: Cornog, 111.

  17.“In one place”: Campbell, 106.

  17.“wood-ducks, gulls”: Cornog, 110.

  18.“from the evils”: Campbell, 189.

  18.“Mr. Geddes proposes”: Koeppel, 82.

  18.“the second wonder”: Wisbey, 132.

  18.“she Conceived the Idea”: Ibid., 10.

  18.“I was sincerely”: Ibid., 30.

  19.“Do you have faith?”: John H. Martin.

  19.“She veils herself”: Campbell, 175.

  19.“Too great a national”: Cornog, 112.

  20.“Outbreaks occur”: Tocqueville, 142.

  21.“hair-hung and breeze-shaken”: Hardman, 6.

  21.“Must a man draw”: Hatch, 55.

  22.“the people appeared”: Ibid., 173.

  23.“While I was a Deist”: Rowe, 39.

  23.“with an intensity”: Ibid., 20.

  23.“many contradictions”: Ibid., 41.

  23.“What a scene!”: Numbers, The Disappointed, 18.

  24.“moross and ill natured”: Rowe, 51.

  24.“To go out like”: Ibid., 56.

  24.“cling to that hope”: Ibid.

  24.“God by his Holy”: Ibid., 67.

  25.“To believe in”: Ibid., 73.

  25.“There never was a book”: Cross, 291.

  25.“I wondered why”: Rowe, 72.

  26.“one of the most frightful”: Stommel, 7.

  26.“Our teeth chattered”: Ibid., 30.

  26.“so desolate it would”: Bernstein, 361.

  27.“the visionary rather than”: Cross, 139.

  27.“without parallel”: Koeppel, 117.

  28.“determined to seize”: Ibid., 121.

  28.“had a delicate and difficult”: Ibid., 129.

  30.“woods of hemlock”: Ibid., 142.

  30.“swamp and swale”: Ibid.

  31.“The mystery of the level”: Ibid., 223.

  32.“The mind is lost in wonder”: Ibid., 144.

  32.“Let us conquer space”: Ibid., 158.

  32.“suddenly become wonderfully”: Ibid., 161.

  33.“big ditch would be buried”: Bernstein, 182.

  33.“too great for the state”: Koeppel. 180.

  33.“The man who will enter”: Ibid., 185.

  33.“Who is this James Geddes”: Bernstein, 259.

  36.“under no less Penalty”: Bullock, 17.

  37.“create a stir”: Brown, 15.

  38.“No subject has ever”: Goodman, 3.

  Chapter 2

  41.“Geddes will be found”: Koeppel, 204.

  41.“one of the grandest”: Ibid., 193.

  41.“each vieing with”: Sheriff, 9.

  42.“snug log house”: Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 33.

  42.“tre
es of all ages”: Kaledin, 179.

  43.“destitute of friends”: Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 33.

  43.“I am the wealthiest”: Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 203.

  44.“the soberest of men”: Ibid., 60.

  44.“with as much ease”: Persuitte, 17.

  44.“All their good feelings”: Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, 37.

  44.“to get Religion too”: Ibid.

  44.“Never did any passage”: Ibid., 38.

  44.“my toung seemed”: Ibid., 40.

  44.“A pillar of light”: Ibid., 39.

  44.“The Lord opened”: Ibid.

  45.“all their Creeds”: Smith, The Joseph Smith Papers, Extract.

  45.“they did in reality”: Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 230.

  45.“thin and weather-beaten”: Sellers, 91.

  45.“taken up by a whirlwind”: Dow, 4.

  46.“In a religious point of view”: Morone, 124.

  46.“One hath thousands”: Hatch, 132.

  47.“His manners have been”: Ibid., 255.

  48.“The object of our measures”: Ibid., 199.

  49.“practical nature is every thing”: Koeppel, 127.

  49.“native farmers, mechanics”: Way, Common Labour, 62.

  50.“a spectacle that must awaken”: Bernstein, 211.

  50.“from which the muck”: Koeppel, 254.

  52.“resembled the Welch lime”: Ibid., 240.

  52.“Baffled at first”: Ibid., 241.

  53.“The zeal of all”: Taylor, 24.

  53.“variegated sampler of all”: Hatch, 164.

  53.“diminutive stature”: The Wayne Sentinel 3, no. 35 (May 26, 1826).

  53.“red-bearded giant”: The American Baptist Magazine 1, no. 9 (May 1818).

  54.“beginning to be gathered in”: Barrus.