by James W. Ure
Joseph said that as punishment for losing the manuscript the angel took away the plates and revoked his ability to translate. However, miraculously, Joseph announced that the angel returned the plates to him on September 22, 1828, and he resumed dictation in April 1829, with a man named Oliver Cowdery, who replaced Harris as his scribe. The pace of the work picked up, and the 275,000-word book, which Mark Twain called “chloroform in print,” was finished on April 7, 1829. The book is difficult reading. The phrase “and it came to pass” is used more than two thousand times.14
Still, it is the work of an inspired and creative mind.
There were eleven witnesses who initially claimed to have seen the golden plates.15 According to Joseph, the angel Moroni took back the plates once he finished his translating. A Palmyra lawyer asked Martin Harris, “Did you see the plates and the engravings upon them with your bodily eyes?” Harris replied, “I did not see them as I do that pencil case, yet I saw them with the eye of faith.”16 The completed Book of Mormon was published in Palmyra on March 26, 1830, paid for by Martin Harris, who had to mortgage his farm to meet the costs. On April 6, 1830, Joseph and his followers formally organized the Church of Christ. The Book of Mormon brought Smith a kind of fame as well as opposition from those who remembered his money digging and the 1826 Chenango County trial. He was again arrested and brought to trial as a disorderly person. He was acquitted, but both he and Cowdery had to flee to escape a mob.17
The Mormons were in conflict with traditional Christianity, and Mormonism claimed exclusivity as the only true church. For some, this exclusiveness was attractive, and they embraced it with fervor. The church grew.
Joseph moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. Here religious fervor was in the form of fits, trances, speaking in tongues, and rolling on the ground.18 It was fertile territory for his new religion. Converts poured in.
In 1832 an angry group of Ohio Mormons (led by the Johnson brothers), fearing his growing power, tarred and feathered Joseph and Sidney Rigdon, his devoted counselor and partner. Joseph was left for dead. It would take Rigdon weeks to recover.19
The worst was still to come. Wherever the Mormons went there seemed to be trouble, and with the blindness of sanctimony they blamed their problems on others, “outsiders,” on “them.”20
Joseph adopted communalism, called the United Order, a collectivist program in which members of the church held all things in common.21 Undeterred by criticism, he built a temple in Kirtland, Ohio, created a bank, and may have had an affair with a serving girl, Fanny Alger. The bank went broke within a month, leaving many Mormons in poverty. He survived accusations of an affair.
After a warrant for banking fraud was issued for his arrest in January 1838, Joseph prudently fled Ohio for Missouri.22
We can take persecution because we know the purpose behind it. The purpose is to glorify God.
—Billy Graham
Their church renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of the band settled in Caldwell County, Missouri, and established the town of Far West, the “City of Zion.” Disputes erupted between the Mormons and their Missouri neighbors when the Mormons gained political power and began to settle in the surrounding counties.1 “Few episodes in American religious history parallel the barbarism of the anti-Mormon persecutions” in Missouri, wrote Fawn McKay Brodie.2
The church's growing problems may have been due to the fact that the Mormons were going against the American grain. Politically, Joseph Smith would build a large following and announce his intention to run for president, a threat to the established political order. Religiously, the Mormon upstarts claimed to be the one true religion and had a corner on God's own truth. Morally, they would face extreme censure for polygamy.
The church's website has a different explanation: it blames Joseph's persecution on the belief that he did have a corner on the truth.3
A series of escalating conflicts followed the Mormons wherever they went. The governor of Missouri, Lilburn Boggs, called out 2,500 state militiamen to put down what he alleged to be a “Mormon rebellion.” Boggs issued Missouri Executive Order 44, a document known to Mormons as the “Extermination Order.” This order was issued on October 27, 1838, and decreed that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description.”4 A number of Mormons died at the hands of Missouri mobs, including eighteen at the Haun's Mill Massacre in Missouri in 1838. Joseph was imprisoned, charged with treason, and sentenced to death for exhorting his followers to fight. He and his brother Hyrum eventually bribed a sheriff with a jug of honeyed wine and $800 and escaped.5
During Joseph's months in prison, Brigham Young, then president of the church's Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, rose to prominence among the Mormon faithful when he organized the move of about fourteen thousand Saints to Illinois and eastern Iowa.6 Many of the Mormons in Missouri were forced to sign over their property in Far West in Caldwell County to pay for the militia muster. They were then ordered to leave the state.
Around June 1838, a recent Mormon convert named Sampson Avard formed a covert organization called the Danites or Destroying Angels to intimidate Mormon dissenters and oppose Missouri's anti-Mormon militia. In his book Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman writes that the Danites were a secret society, several hundred strong. “Some historians depict the Danites as Joseph's private army, dispatched at his command to expunge enemies of the Church.” Bushman goes on to say that many Mormons, even today, blame Avard for the excesses of Danite revenge.7 The role and extent of this protective vigilance society is still debated, although a number of murders of Mormon enemies are attributed to its members. One of the most prominent of the Danites was Orrin Porter Rockwell, who served as a personal bodyguard both to Joseph and his successor, Brigham Young.
In 1842, as the hated Lilburn Boggs read a newspaper in his home, someone (probably Rockwell) fired through his window and put four balls of buckshot into him, including one to the head. He miraculously survived, but Rockwell was arrested and spent a year in jail under accusations of the attempted assassination of Governor Boggs. Rockwell was released for lack of evidence.8
Though it is unclear how much Joseph knew of the Danites’ activities, Joseph clearly approved of those of which he did know. After Sidney Rigdon delivered a sermon that implied dissenters had no place in the Mormon community, the Danites forcibly expelled them.9
The seeds of martyrdom and being misunderstood were planted especially deep in Missouri, and they would be nurtured to serve the purposes of the church into the twenty-first century.
In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.
—Thomas King
The golden plates from which the Book of Mormon had been translated now reentered the picture.
Joseph's assertion that the golden plates were written in “Reformed Egyptian” haunt Mormonism to the present day. Reformed Egyptian became problematic in 1835 when a traveling exhibit of Egyptian mummies came to Kirtland. Since Joseph claimed to have translated Reformed Egyptian to produce the Book of Mormon, and claimed to be a seer who could translate all ancient records, he was approached to translate a few characters from the papyri that accompanied the mummies. Joseph set to work.
“That is the handwriting of Abraham, Father of the Faithful,” Joseph wrote.1
But trouble lay ahead.
The Rosetta Stone, the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics, had been discovered in 1799, and by 1837 it had been fully deciphered by Champollion.2
In 1858, the Philomathean Society of Philadelphia printed the first translation of texts from the Rosetta Stone.3 Fourteen Egyptologists examined Joseph's “Abraham” papyri. Their conclusions all lead to one answer: Joseph Smith was ignorant of the Egyptian script.
In 1967 eleven fragments of Joseph's papyri made their way to the Metropolitan
Museum in New York City. They were again examined, and scholars confirmed the earliest appraisals: these were simple funerary documents found in thousands of Egyptian graves.4
Egyptologists identified them as documents from the Book of the Dead, hence the reason the papyri were found in coffins. The papyri are dated about 1,500 years after Abraham's time. However, Joseph's translation of the “Abraham Roll” continues to be published as the “Book of Abraham” in one of the church's sacred canons, the Pearl of Great Price.5
In 2014, an online essay by the LDS Church obfuscates the issue. It claimed that since most of the papyri had long ago vanished and are presumed destroyed, it is impossible to prove or disprove whether it is a translation from the Book of Abraham, as claimed by Joseph Smith.6
Bushman, in Rough Stone Rolling, wrote of Joseph, “The signal feature of his life was his sense of being guided by revelation. Only a Mormon reader would say bluntly, ‘God revealed a heaven with three degrees of glory,’ without any disclaimer. Out of respect for the varied opinions of readers, it would seem judicious to compromise with ‘Joseph Smith purportedly received a revelation about a heaven with three degrees of glory.’”7
So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy, the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew.
—Scott Anderson
The Mormons were driven from various communities in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, often with bloodshed. Opposition was regarded as proof of their righteousness. With the excesses of the Missouri government and the Haun's Mill Massacre of Mormons in 1838, many American newspapers were sympathetic to the Mormons.1
Joseph moved his flock to Commerce, Illinois, in 1839. The church purchased land and renamed the city Nauvoo (from the Hebrew “beautiful plantation”).2 From Nauvoo, Brigham Young and other Mormons were sent to Europe where they found fertile fields in proselytizing among the poor.3
By 1844 Nauvoo had a population of twelve thousand, about the same as Chicago.4
Meanwhile, a wealthy and influential convert, Illinois quartermaster general John C. Bennett, used his connections in the Illinois legislature to obtain an unusually liberal charter for the new city. The charter granted the city virtual autonomy. Joseph made Bennett assistant president of the church, and Bennett was elected Nauvoo's first mayor.5
The charter also authorized the Nauvoo Legion, an autonomous Mormon militia whose actions were limited only by state and federal constitutions. “Lieutenant General” Smith and “Major General” Bennett became its commanders, thus controlling by far the largest body of armed men in Illinois.6
In 1841, Joseph began revealing the doctrine of plural marriage to a few of his closest male associates, including Bennett, who used it as an excuse to seduce numerous women. When embarrassing rumors of “spiritual wifery” got out, Joseph forced Bennett's resignation as mayor. In retaliation, Bennett wrote lurid exposés of life in Nauvoo.7
During this period Joseph married at least thirty-three women, including Helen Mar Kimball, a girl of fourteen. He lied to his wife Emma about it, but rumors persisted and contributed to her unhappiness, although she stood by him until his death.8
Joseph manifested a number of new doctrines during his busy first years in Nauvoo, including baptism for the dead, an indispensable requirement for the departed to enter the Kingdom of God. Among the first to be baptized in this way were the signers of the Declaration of Independence.9 (Adolf Hitler was baptized by proxy on December 10, 1993, and sealed to his parents, Alois Hitler and Klara Poelzl, on March 12, 1994.)10
Joseph flexed his political muscle while in Nauvoo. He petitioned Congress to make the city an independent territory with the right to call out federal troops in its defense. When unsatisfied with answers from politicians regarding defending the Mormons, he announced his own third-party candidacy for president. He wanted a theocracy, which he called a “Theodemocracy, where God and people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.”11
His presidential platform included freeing the slaves, turning prisons into institutions of higher learning, and, instead of jail sentences, putting scofflaws to work building roads and on public works. He advocated diminishing the size of Congress while reducing their pay to that of a farmer.12
In the spring of 1844 Joseph appeared to be riding high. His candidacy for president seemed to lift him above the church's internal conflicts and politics.13
Hidden in the faith-promoting work of many Mormon scholars is the fact that dissidents within his ranks were dealt with harshly by Joseph. Sensitive to criticism, Joseph excommunicated all the counselors in the First Presidency, the faith's highest-ranking leaders, except for his brother, Hyrum. The message was clear: don't cross the boss. As Will Bagley has written, frontier Mormonism feared dissent as much as it valued unity. There are estimates that nearly one-half of all those converting to Mormonism in the early days were apostates who turned elsewhere for spiritual succor.14
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Danger awaited, and Joseph had fed its flames. The doctrine of plural marriage was about to bring the house of Nauvoo down.
William Law was Joseph's first counselor and was “as steadfast and incorruptible as John C. Bennett had been treacherous and dissolute,” according to Fawn McKay Brodie.1 Law had come from Canada and had money. He poured it into construction and steam mills, doing more than anyone to help build the city. For a time he swallowed his resentment over Joseph's monopoly of managing Nauvoo real estate. Law thought it unseemly for a man alleging to be a prophet of God to threaten excommunication for any who would purchase land without his consent. Law became convinced Joseph was using church funds to buy more land, which he then sold to converts at inflated prices. Law came to mistrust Joseph's business sense and refused to invest in Joseph's plan to publish a revised version of the Bible.2
An economic rift became a theocratic one. He watched with alarm as Joseph increased his number of wives. The final fracture may have been when Joseph approached Law's wife, Jane, to join him in spiritual marriage. Law called for reformation of the church and threatened to quit unless Joseph went before the High Council and confessed his sins and promised repentance.
“I'll be damned before I do,” Law quoted Joseph's response.3
Law was told privately that the Danites, the Destroying Angels, were going to get him.4
There were other disgruntled Mormons, especially those whose wives had been approached by Joseph and proposed to for marriage. Law joined this group, perhaps in part to insure his own safety. The schism grew. The dissidents began meeting (Joseph inserted his spies among them). Lawsuits flew and so did the mud. Joseph had weathered storms of internal dissent before, and he was certain this one would pass, too.5
But Law and Dr. Robert Foster had bought a printing press. In an effort to reform the church, they created a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor. On June 7, 1844, they published their one and only issue.6
Its main story was that of an English girl who had converted to Mormonism and who had then been indoctrinated into polygamy by Joseph. The newspaper attacked on other fronts. It opposed Joseph's attempt to unite the church and state, was against his grasping for political power, and was against his financial maneuverings. Finally, the Expositor alleged Joseph had approached Law's wife and some teenage girls.7 Nauvoo held its breath.
Joseph ordered that the newspaper be taken to trial. This was not a trial by jury. Joseph's city council supporters stood up one after another and accused the publishers of seduction, pandering, counterfeiting, and thievery. The council declared that the press be destroyed.8
A portion of the Nauvoo Legion marched to the Expositor, wrecked the press, and burned the remaining issues of the paper.9
It would not be the only time a leader of the church called for burning of printed material that did not keep with the prophet's beliefs. Brigham Young called on church members to burn copies
of Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, and his Progenitors, written by Joseph's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and published in 1853.10
The fires burning in the offices of the Expositor set off conflagrations of political fury among the Illinois anti-Mormons, who had been waiting for just such a breach of the First Amendment.11
The dissident Mormon publishers, fearing for their lives, fled to Warsaw and Carthage, Illinois. One of them gave a detailed story of the destruction of the press to Thomas Sharp, editor of the virulently anti-Mormon Warsaw Signal, adding to it the sensational news that Orrin Porter Rockwell had been the shooter of Governor Boggs in Missouri and that there had been the seduction of many young Mormon women done by the Mormon hierarchy in the name of God.12
Sharp's headlines on June 12 stated, “War and Extermination Inevitable. CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!! Can you stand by and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! to rob men of their property and Rights, without avenging them? We have no time for comments; every man will make his own. LET it be made with POWDER AND BALLS!!!”13
Couriers brought word from Warsaw and Carthage that angry crowds were gathering.
Joseph assembled thousands of loyal Mormons, whom he asked, “Will you stand by me to the death?”
“Aye,” came the answer in unison.14
As would happen so often in years to come, including into the twenty-first century, the church leaders failed to see the implications that would follow their acts of suppression.
Or did they?
In fact, some sociologists have suggested that the church thrives because it perceives itself to be embattled. Without conflict, tension, and threat, Mormonism would lose its identity and purpose.15
When Thomas Ford, the Illinois governor, decided to investigate the burning of the Expositor, he found that outside militias had already gathered under local constables and were preparing to attack Nauvoo. Ford demanded that Joseph and everyone else involved in the destruction of the paper be taken by a constable and placed in the Carthage jail to await trial.16