by Alex Beam
Joseph and the angel Moroni meeting in the woods.
Credit: LDS Church History Library
Sure enough, Joseph found a box with the tablets and the translating device, known as the Urim and Thummim, in a trench on the hill Cumorah, just south of Palmyra. Joseph, and Joseph alone, touched the uncovered tablets and saw the “reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphs imprinted on them. He assured Emma that it would be certain death for her or other family members to see them. Nonetheless, Emma was allowed to participate, as his first scribe, or recorder. Joseph described himself as “unlearned,” and he never claimed to have translated the sacred text. The text came from God, speaking through Joseph while he stared at the hidden plates, wrapped in a tablecloth. Sometimes he read the revealed text from the Urim and Thummim, placed in a hat.
At first, Emma took dictation in their tiny home. But a prosperous local convert, Martin Harris, soon supplanted her, separated from Joseph by a blanket suspended from a string. A schoolteacher convert named Oliver Cowdery eventually joined them. Although Harris and Cowdery would swear to be original “witnesses” of the Book of Mormon, they claimed to have been shown the gold plates in an angelic vision, not by Joseph. When he had completed the translation, Joseph explained that Moroni had taken the plates back to heaven.
Joseph’s “golden bible” first came off the printing press in 1830, six hundred pages long. In prose redolent of the popular King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon related a tale omitted from the Old and New Testaments, the story of the 1,000-year conflict between two tribes of ancient Israel, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The two tribes had relocated to the American continent. The Nephites struggled to walk in the way of the Lord; the idolatrous Lamanites, less so. After centuries of near-constant warfare, a vast army of Lamanites exterminated the Nephites at the final battle of Cumorah. Tens of thousands died, but the Nephite leader, whose name was Mormon, and his son Moroni survived. Knowing he was to be killed, Mormon handed the golden plates, with the record of their righteous but doomed civilization, to Moroni, who expanded on the account, added commentary, and buried the tablets in hopes of a future discovery. When Joseph unearthed them, history was fulfilled.
The Book of Mormon caught on slowly at first. It made few claims as a literary work, with wooden and oft-repetitive prose, starting almost every other paragraph with the stock phrase, “It came to pass. . . .” If Joseph Smith had left out that one phrase, Mark Twain noted, “his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” Twain had little use for Joseph’s creation, which he called a “curiosity . . . stupid and tiresome to read. It’s smooched from the New Testament and no credit given. It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.”
But the text transported the Bible story onto the American continent, reassuring its readers that they, too lived in a Holy Land. The Lamanites lived on, Joseph preached, as American aborigines, or Native Americans. Ever hopeful of converting the ancient Lamanites and restoring them to primacy on the American continent, the Mormons generally treated the Indians with respect, far from the norm on the Mississippi frontier, or anywhere else in the country.
In the Book of Mormon, Jesus visits America after his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples in Jerusalem, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.” He repeats these words, and a great deal of other New Testament scripture, in two sermons to the Nephites at Bountiful, an ancient city somewhere in the Americas.
The Book of Mormon offered proof that God was speaking to nineteenth-century Americans through his prophet Joseph Smith. While Smith and Cowdery were taking a break from translating, the two men said they encountered John the Baptist when walking in the woods alongside the Susquehanna River in Harmony. John said he would confer the power of the Old Testament priesthood upon the two men, allowing them to baptize converts. John asked them to baptize each other, and they did. Two weeks after the Book of Mormon was published, Joseph announced to his tiny flock, primarily close friends and family members, that he had assumed the title “Seer, a Translator, a Prophet, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, and Elder of the Church through the will of God the Father, and the grace of your Lord Jesus Christ” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). On April 6, 1830, he announced the formation of the Church of Christ, which grew within a few weeks to forty members. Converts came from evangelical Methodism, and from the followers of evangelist Alexander Campbell, who, like Joseph, was preaching a primitive Christianity, calling for a restoration of Christ’s church on earth, in anticipation of the Second Coming.
In a series of revelations, Joseph began to assemble a rudimentary theology. Men could aspire to two successive levels of priesthood, or holy rank. Women could not. The church would be a lay church, administered by male members. There would be no professional clergy. Like many evangelical Christians, the Mormons believed they were living in the latter days of history, before the return of Christ. History was thought to be 6,000 years old, with each millennium corresponding to one day of the Genesis creation story. The upcoming seventh millennium, due in 1900, would be the “day of rest,” that is, the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. In 1835, Joseph offhandedly remarked that “fifty-six years should wind up the scene,” implying that Christ would return to earth in 1891. The New Testament often called Christ’s followers “saints,” and Smith quickly adopted other biblical titles for his co-religionists. His lay leaders became deacons, elders, and bishops, and he eventually appointed twelve apostles from among his most loyal followers.
In its formative years, Joseph’s church tried to distinguish itself from the roiling flotsam of wild religious euphoria sweeping the nation. Unlike many of the fiery, condemnatory evangelical creeds, his church promised near-universal salvation and taught that mortal sins are not punished forever. All persons, except a very few “sons of perdition,” could expect eternal life in one of three degrees of glory: the celestial, terrestrial, or “telestial” kingdoms. Telestial was a neologism coined for the part of heaven reserved for Gentiles and other nonbelievers.
The Saints helped the Saints; that was a core tenet of Joseph’s religion. In response to a revelation concerning Enoch, a grandson of Adam and Eve, Joseph encouraged his flock to “consecrate” all their property to the church, which in turn redistributed the collective wealth to families in need. This was pure communism, and it benefited many Mormons who followed Joseph to his first religious base in Kirtland, Ohio, having left their belongings behind them. By 1844, in Nauvoo—Joseph’s “Zion” on the banks of the Mississippi—Joseph had abandoned the law of consecration but had substituted tithing in its place. Observant Mormons agreed to donate one-tenth of their goods or services to the bishop’s storehouse for redistribution to the needy. Joseph often staked newly arrived families to (cramped) living quarters, a house plot, a larder full of supplies, or a portion of a working garden. Converts understood that their fellow Mormons would help them get on their feet, which partially explained the Saints’ missionary successes.
By 1844, at least 25,000 men and women in America and Europe had joined Joseph’s church, just fourteen years after its founding. Over 10,000 of them migrated to Nauvoo. Between 2,000 and 3,000 of them braved an Atlantic crossing and then journeyed 850 miles from New Orleans up the Mississippi to gather with their fellow Saints. Joseph’s outriders were fabulously successful in recruiting converts to the new religion, especially in the poverty-stricken industrial cities of the British Isles.
The church was very much a work in progress, and many of its core rituals and beliefs, such as the multilayered Mormon heaven, polygamy, the multiplicity of gods, and the baptism of the dead, emerged in the early 1840s. Joseph’s early followers were asked to believe that the Book of Mormon was the true word of God, and that Joseph was a true prophet. Dozens, and then hundreds, and by 1844, many thousands of men and women believed just that.
PEOPLE FOLLOWED JOSEPH SMITH PARTLY BECAUSE GOD TALKED to Jos
eph, but also because Joseph talked to them. He didn’t claim to be a full-time preacher; “A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such,” he told two Saints visiting Illinois from Michigan. When off duty, as it were, he generally acted like a charming and gregarious mayor and innkeeper, just two of the many roles he played in Nauvoo, “the city of Joseph.”
When Brigham Young and his brother Joseph traveled 325 miles to meet Joseph Smith, they expected “to find him in his sanctum dispensing spiritual blessings and directions [about] how to build the Zion of God on earth,” Joseph Young reported. Instead, they found Smith in the forest, chopping wood. The men shook hands, then all of them chopped and loaded wood together.
According to another story, when Joseph first arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, he had no place to stay. So he directed his sleigh to the front door of a general store owned by two Saints, whom he knew only by name. Joseph bounded up the front steps and thrust his hand across the store counter.
“Newel K. Whitney! Thou art the man!” he shouted, as if he had known Whitney all his life.
“You have the advantage of me,” the bemused Whitney replied. “I could not call you by name, as you have me.”
“I am Joseph, the Prophet,” said the smiling stranger. “You’ve prayed me here; now what do you want of me?”
Joseph ended up lodging with the Whitneys for several weeks, and the family remained devoted to him for the rest of their lives. They followed Joseph west to Nauvoo, where Newell became a bishop. His daughter Sarah Ann, who was six years old when Joseph came bounding up her father’s steps, would eventually become Joseph Smith’s sixteenth wife. She was “the first woman ever given in plural marriage by or with the consent of both parents,” according to her mother.
A glance at Joseph’s diary for February 20, 1843, provides a window into his variegated life. He spent some of that morning drawing, and sawing, chopping and splitting wood with “about 70 of the brethren” who were tithing their services to the Prophet. “The day was spent by them in much pleasantry, good humor, and feeling,” he reported. The snow had melted, so no one could go sledding.
Then Joseph devoted two hours to “reciting in German” before he oversaw Nauvoo court proceedings in the upstairs office of his redbrick store. Joseph was both mayor and chief justice in Nauvoo. There was a lawsuit to adjudicate, and a theft. While supervising the court, Joseph looked out the window and spotted two boys fighting with clubs in front of a nearby tavern. “The Mayor saw it and ran over immediately,” his journal records, “caught one of the boys and stopped him and then the other.” Joseph chided the bystanders for not breaking up the fight, and then walked back to his store. His final message to the two young miscreants: “No body is allowed to fight in this city but me.”
Not everyone succumbed to Joseph’s bumptious self-absorption. “His whole theme was himself,” reported Pittsburgh editor David White, who visited Joseph at the Nauvoo Mansion in 1843: “The prophet ran on, talking incessantly.” That same year, Charlotte Haven, a young Gentile woman from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attended one of Joseph’s speeches. She “had expected to be overwhelmed by his discourse” but found him to be “a great egotist and boaster . . . his language and manner were the coarsest possible.” A month later, Charlotte visited the Smiths at home. “He talked incessantly about himself, and remarked that he was ‘a giant, physically and mentally,’” Haven told her mother. “I did not change my opinion about him, but suppose that he has some good traits,” she concluded. “They say he is very kind-hearted, and always ready to give shelter and help to the needy.”
Benjamin Franklin Morris, a Congregationalist minister in nearby Warsaw, Illinois, found Joseph to be both awe-inspiring and detestable. “The power of Smith over his followers is incredible,” he wrote in a letter to his church brethren in New York.
He has unlimited influence and his declarations are as the authority and influence of the world of God itself. He is a complete despot, and does as he pleases with his people.
Some people consider him a great man; I do not. He is not possessed of a single element of greatness, except his greatness in vice and blasphemy. He is a compound of ignorance, vanity, arrogance, coarseness and stupidity and vulgarity.
Joseph had an operatic personality. He embraced and exploited strong confederates, but he could be unsentimental when it came time to discard them. Typically, his anger flared hot and faded quickly; he often welcomed reprobates back into the fold. For instance, it was a major coup when Joseph converted the urbane and erudite Campbellite preacher Sidney Rigdon to his cause, because Rigdon’s entire congregation followed him, doubling the size of Joseph’s tiny church in 1830. Joseph admired Rigdon, famed for his fiery, revivalist preaching, and often deferred to the older man on theological questions or when it came time to deliver an important speech. The two men shared a famous 1832 vision, staring into the sky for over an hour while receiving a revelation of the three-tiered stratification of heaven. But when Rigdon defied him later that summer, Joseph unhesitatingly “disfellowshipped” him as his first counselor in the First Presidency, the church leadership triumvirate. Twenty-two days later, Joseph readmitted Rigdon to the high priesthood, declaring that “he has repented like Peter of old.”
In the early years of the church, almost every one of his close confidants apostasized, usually in a dramatic falling-out with the Prophet. For instance, all three of the original Book of Mormon “witnesses” left the church. Three of the eight additional witnesses recruited by Joseph were also excommunicated. (Three others were family members.) Practically every major church leader, except for Brigham Young, broke with Joseph at one time or another, but, as with Rigdon, Joseph often welcomed them back with open arms. Apostle Orson Hyde was excommunicated in May 1839 and restored to the church in October. When Joseph made advances to Orson Pratt’s wife while his loyal apostle was proselytizing in England, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles excommunicated both Pratts for kicking up a fuss. The church reembraced them a few weeks later.
Joseph was all too human and made few pretensions to the contrary, Brigham Young insisted. “He had all the weaknesses a man could have when the vision was not upon him, when he was left to himself,” Young said. Young urged the Saints to bind themselves to Joseph’s revelatory doctrine, not necessarily to the man:
He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor’s wife every night, run horses and gamble, I do not care anything about that, for I never embrace any man in my faith. But the doctrine he has produced will save you and me and the whole world; and if you can find fault with that, find it.
IN NAUVOO, SMITH COMPLETELY REMADE HIS RELIGION. IN AN 1840 funeral sermon, he announced the new ritual of the baptism of the dead, apparently intended as a response to Paul’s line in 1 Corinthians: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?” The baptisms started immediately, in the river. “Since this order has been preached here, the waters have been continually troubled,” Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband Heber; “Sometimes from eight to ten Elders in the river at a time baptizing.”
In May 1843, the young Gentile Charlotte Haven reported seeing two elders standing in the icy-cold Mississippi, immersing a crowd of Saints “as fast as they could come down the bank.” A bystander explained the new doctrine to her. “So these poor mortals in ice-cold water were releasing their ancestors and relatives from purgatory!” Haven remarked. “You can imagine our surprise when the name George Washington was called.” Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the deceased explorer Zebulon Pike also found new life in the turbid waters lapping up on Nauvoo. (Washington, along with Christopher Columbus and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, were later rebaptized in Utah.)
Around the time that the mass baptisms were ramping up, Joseph embraced Freemasonry, with a passion. There are plenty of reasons he would have opposed Masonry. Upstate New York, where he lived until age twenty-four, was a
hotbed of anti-Masonry. The European fraternal order, which had established a beachhead in the New World during the eighteenth century, was widely denounced as a shadowy, atheistic cabal aimed at creating a secret world government. William Morgan, famous for publishing the Masons’ secret codes and rituals in the widely disseminated 1826 book Illusions of Masonry, lived in Batavia, New York, and was supposedly drowned by hostile Masons in the Niagara River. (In a curious twist of fate, his widow, Lucinda, became one of Joseph’s first plural wives.) New York even had its own anti-Masonic political party, which fielded a presidential candidate in 1831. The Book of Mormon, wholly composed in upstate New York, repeatedly condemned the “abominations” of secret societies, with “their secret signs and their secret words . . . [that] they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms” (Helaman 6:22).
On the other hand, Joseph’s father and brother Hyrum were Masons, as were several other prominent Saints. It was hard not to notice that almost everyone who was anyone in southwestern Illinois—the lawyers, judges, and leading businessmen—were also Masons. So, with considerable fanfare, Joseph became an entered apprentice mason on March 15, 1842. After obtaining a waiver from the usual twenty-eight-day waiting period, he attained two higher degrees the following day. To celebrate, 3,000 Saints joined Master Mason Joseph Smith in triumphal procession from the redbrick store to the grove at the base of the temple bluff. “Universal satisfaction manifested,” Joseph noted in his personal journal.
Joseph quickly added several hundred Mormons to the Masonic membership rolls, outnumbering and infuriating the other lodges in Illinois. But the Masonic connection left a much more significant mark on Mormonism. Just two months after undergoing the secret Masonic admission rite, Joseph introduced a new, secret “priesthood endowment” ritual that would become mandatory for all male Saints intending to become or remain church members in good standing. In the multipurpose second-floor meeting room above his redbrick store in the center of Nauvoo, Joseph endowed his brother Hyrum, his second counselor William Law, Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, Newell Whitney, Willard Richards, and three other men with the new priesthood powers. The elaborate rite closely resembled the induction ceremony for third-degree masons, which Joseph had undergone just two months previously. “We were washed and anointed,” Brigham Young recalled, “and had our garments placed upon us and received our New Name.”