by Sally Denton
Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830. It not only became a best seller, it also created an entirely new and exciting theology. With himself at the helm as “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” Smith immediately assembled a church with six followers. A month later the ranks would swell to forty, and more than a thousand would be converted within a year. Denouncing the “false spirits” common to the post–Revolutionary War revivalism of the day, Smith spoke of ongoing, regular contact between God and men, and the seductive notion that humans could be creators of their own worlds. He contended that his divine revelations evidenced his infallibility, his entire religion having been based upon miracles that defied secular challenge. Neither Luther nor the Pope had spoken directly to God, Smith said in countering his critics, while he professed to have had more than a hundred personal conversations with God.
Founding his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he created an evangelical socialism ruled by an autocratic cadre of “worthy males” and based on a theology of the fast-approaching end-time as prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. “In no other period in American history were ‘the last days’ felt to be so imminent,” Smith biographer Fawn Brodie puts it, “as in that between 1820 and 1845.” The earth was thought to be nearing six thousand years old, according to scientific calculations then current, and since biblical references suggested that a thousand years was a single day to God, many of the world’s religious leaders put the earth’s impending seventh day—the “day of rest and peace” when Christ would descend—at some point in the mid-1800s. “The literalist Mormon timetable counts forward from the first six ‘days’ of Genesis,” writes James Coates, “and the seventh day of a thousand years when God rested after Adam and Eve began their time in Eden.” Smith’s apocalyptic vision included the fall of all churches and governments, which would leave his own theocracy as the ruling government of the world.
Early Mormonism held a number of fundamental beliefs, controversial among mainstream Christians at the time, that would find expression in the swelling New Age spiritual movement that began late in the twentieth century. The divine power of crystals, personal transformation, channeling, divination, astrology, holistic health, and the allegiance to a new world order all had credence in Joseph Smith’s religion. “Mormonism is an eclectic religious philosophy, drawn from Brahmin mysticism in the dependence of God, the Platonic and Gnostic notion of Eons, . . . Mahomedan sensualism, and the fanaticism of the sects of the early church . . . with the convenient idea of the transmigration of souls, from the Persian,” concluded a firsthand observer of the new phenomenon.
Smith’s homegrown American gospel that denied original sin and provided a road to godhood for the individual was a religious version of the American dream that defied the Calvinist vision of a vengeful God. In a culture in which parents and teachers told their boys they could grow up to be president, Smith held out to his flock the promise that they could become gods. Unlike any other creed in the United States, Mormonism, neither Judaic nor traditional Christian, maintained a strong cerebral appeal throughout its early years. “Joseph had convincing answers to the thorniest existential questions,” wrote Jon Krakauer in 2003—answers that were both explicit and comforting. “He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil.”
It would not be until twentieth-century science and scholarship debunked many of Smith’s claims that the theology itself would be widely ridiculed. Even its more controversial doctrine of polygamy found sanction in the Old Testament. By 1832 Smith had sent missionaries to evangelize throughout the eastern states. They preached “the Kingdom is come, glory hallelujah,” and met with unparalleled success. Smith began searching for a locale to build the “Kingdom of God upon Earth.”
As the numbers of converts grew, Smith moved his new church from New York State to Kirtland, Ohio, where his disciples converted and baptized the entire community. The once-humble Smith transformed himself into a powerful prophet and dictator, coming into increasing conflict with many of his neighbors and followers. Americans passionate about their new democracy found Smith’s theocracy outlandish if not threatening. Nearly all of his high-ranking churchmen fell out with him over his authoritarian rule, and his inner circle began to fade away. Smith said he then received a revelation from God that in order to save his church he must pursue converts in Great Britain who had been cradled with kings.
His most charismatic apostles were chosen for this foreign mission, including one named Brigham Young, who performed nine missions between 1832 and 1837. Throughout England, Scotland, and Wales, they converted hundreds and then thousands, and they organized what would become a massive emigration system. The missionaries’ teachings centered upon a mixture of Bible texts on “the earth’s final days,” prophesies about the millennium, the return of the Jews to Palestine, the resurrection of the dead, and, especially, the rise of the new prophet Joseph Smith. “There is a strange power with them that fascinates the people and draws them into their meshes in spite of themselves,” wrote a British woman who fell sway to the missionaries during this time. The missionaries found the English manufacturing towns a fertile field, populated as they were with poor, ignorant, and superstitious laborers susceptible to hopeful stories of miracles.
In London, the missionaries appealed to a wealthy educated class that had been swept up by the religious skepticism of the earlier Age of Reason as epitomized by England’s own Thomas Paine (who emigrated to America in 1774). The erudite, like Jean Rio Baker, saw the establishment Church of England as an obstacle to social change and eagerly welcomed an American reform religion in its place. Seen as the gospel of Christianity restored, early Mormonism captivated the minds of some of the more religiously inclined. The doctrines that would later be so contested and seen as so loathsome by the more cerebral converts—polygamy, “blood atonement” (the killing of sinners), priestly theocracy—were not mentioned by these early missionaries. Instead, the missionaries focused on the “good news” of the everlasting Gospel—repentance, baptism, and faith—and made the new religion sound fresh and progressive.
CHAPTER THREE
These Latter Days
WHILE PROSELYTIZING EFFORTS abroad were overwhelmingly successful, the Latter-day Saints, as Smith had christened his flock, were met with increasing scorn and derision in the United States. Mormonism had become America’s most controversial, clannish, imperialistic religion. Setting his followers apart, calling all non-Mormons “Gentiles,” claiming to be the leader of God’s chosen people, espousing a collectivism that was anathema to the rollicking capitalism of the day, Smith seemed to encourage and thrive on the condemnation and persecution that greeted his sect. Mormonism’s unabashed devotion to material wealth stood in stark contrast to the asceticism of other denominations, and what seemed to many a too-naked prosperity-as-godliness mentality offended neighbors who belonged to traditional Christian denominations—the Presbyterians and Methodists. Conflicts in Ohio between Mormons and local “Gentiles” erupted into violence, and when the church-owned bank went broke a warrant was issued for Smith’s arrest on charges of fraud. Before Smith could face those allegations, God, he said, revealed to him that the new Zion was not in Ohio after all, but in Far West, Missouri—the site, said Smith, of the original Garden of Eden. Fleeing in the middle of the night, Smith rode his horse eight hundred miles west to the newly designated Promised Land.
It would not be long before the Mormons alienated Missourians as well, with tensions increasing as thousands of new converts poured into the community and especially as vague rumors of polygamy evolved into hard evidence of ubiquitous plural marriages. The clashes would culminate in what would become known as the “extermination order,” in which Missouri’s governor, Lillburn W. Boggs, claimed that “Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.” They would move on to yet another so-called Zion in Nauvoo, Illinois.
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br /> Arriving in 1839 at the picturesque town on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the thirty-three-year-old Smith set out with a grandiose vision to build the country’s wealthiest and most powerful separatist city-state, which he said was ordained by God, a model theocracy to rival Washington. By this time the Mormon militia—Smith’s “Army of God,” with Smith as commander in chief—was nearly one-quarter the size of the U.S. Army. Less than a decade after founding his church, Smith had lured thousands of Europeans to make perilous Atlantic crossings and arduous journeys across one-third of the American continent to Illinois, while also attracting adherents in his own country. Marked by disillusionment with the old faiths and profound yearning for both the temporal security and the eternal salvation offered by Mormonism, poor Americans also were enamored with the promise. Though Smith said there had been earlier divine revelations ordaining polygamy, it would be here, in Nauvoo, where the “Law of Jacob,” as the doctrine of multiple marriage was called, was officially added to the Mormons’ distinctive practices. That principle, more than all else, would irrevocably alienate the Mormons from their Protestant neighbors.
Advocating theocratic rule for the entire nation, Smith announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency in 1844. Prophesying the impending overthrow of the national government, he began acting with increasing recklessness, inspiring even more hostility toward him and what was now seen by many as his peculiar cult. Covertly married to nearly fifty wives, Smith faced rampant defections from his ranks on the issue of polygamy. In the summer of 1844 he declared martial law in his independent city-state, as well-armed anti-Mormon mobs gathered near Nauvoo. Smith would be arrested for destroying the offices of a newspaper that had published exposés on polygamy, and on the morning of June 27, 1844, he would be shot to death in a Carthage, Illinois, jail by vigilantes. Smith was the first American religious leader ever to be assassinated, and to his followers, his martyrdom was on a par with that of Jesus Christ.
A chaotic succession crisis ensued, as more than a dozen cabals sought to take over Smith’s reign. Internal struggles briefly threatened the stability of the church. But by August 8, 1844, the blustering apostle Brigham Young had unofficially but unmistakably seized control. “Young arose and roared like a young lion,” recalled a devoted “Saint” (as followers now called themselves), who said Young not only imitated the style and voice of Smith but was enveloped in Smith’s unique illuminated aura as well. For the next thirty-three years Young would lead his growing congregation with a discipline and rigor of historic proportions.
Born June 1, 1801, Young was raised in the same milieu as Smith—the period of religious revival sweeping the eastern states. The son of impoverished dirt farmers, Young learned the carpenter’s trade as an adolescent and crafted primitive furniture that he sold door to door. He noticed that many of his neighbors and relatives were influenced by the Book of Mormon, and by 1832 he had abandoned carpentry to begin proselytizing for Joseph Smith’s new church. Wholly uneducated but swift of mind, Young rose quickly in Smith’s capricious hierarchy as he threw himself into the missionary enterprise. A passionate convert from the start, Young had set out—“without purse or scrip,” as the missionaries were expected to do— with a zealous commitment to the doctrine of spiritual and physical gathering of Saints to Zion. “Every sentiment and feeling should be to cleanse the earth from wickedness, purify the people, sanctify the nations, gather the nations of Israel home, redeem and build up Zion, redeem Jerusalem and gather the Jews there, and establish the reign and kingdom of God on earth,” Young said of his calling as a Mormon evangelist.
By the time of Smith’s death, Young had served ten missions, including stints in Canada, the eastern states, and Great Britain. He had reported seeing angels in 1835 and was acknowledged as a “Prophet and Seer” in 1836; he would not proclaim himself a “Revelator” until a few years later, when he claimed to have received a divine revelation that he should lead his people out of Nauvoo to the Great Salt Lake Valley.
Independent, outspoken, stubborn, arrogant, vengeful, and hot-tempered, the unabashed polygamist antagonized his “Gentile” neighbors as thoroughly and dangerously as had Smith. Marrying forty times, in violation of Illinois law, he was forced into hiding by 1845 to avoid numerous legal writs. Young established “a police state in Nauvoo,” according to one of his biographers, Stanley P. Hirshson; he “strapped on a pair of six-shooters and vowed he would kill any man who handed him another summons or grabbed hold of him.”
Young knew that the survival of his sect depended upon finding a homeland west of the Rocky Mountains and outside the boundaries of the United States. He began studying the reports and maps of explorers John C. Frémont and Lansford W. Hastings, and he decided on land in the Great Basin that then belonged to Mexico as a site for the new Zion. Arid and desolate, this section of the Great American Desert was thought to be incapable of sustaining a large population. But Young was attracted to its harshness, its frigid winters, its scorching summers, and its brief growing season as an environment too unfriendly and challenging for his enemies to crowd him. Here, finally, the Latter-day Saints could build their “Kingdom of God upon Earth,” a theocracy outside the purview of the judgmental and menacing Americans, isolated by the indomitable Rocky Mountains to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the west.
Called “the Lion of God” for his zeal in moving the Saints out of Illinois and into the new Zion, Young accomplished what has been hailed as the emigration feat of the age. His hegira ended in July 1847 in a place the Mormons would name Deseret. With great force and drive, Young ushered his tired and persecuted Saints to their homeland. “The prophet, through the sheer force of his personality, led, goaded, threatened, fought, pummeled, cajoled, and otherwise drove the thousands of Mormon men, women, and children through the wilderness to an American Canaan called Utah on the shores of an inland Dead Sea called the Great Salt Lake,” writes James Coates, drawing an unmistakable parallel to Moses.
It would be Young who turned the Mormons into the most resourceful and disciplined pioneers in American history. Alongside Manifest Destiny and the California gold rush, the evangelical energy of the mid-nineteenth century, of which Mormonism was representative, was significant in colonizing the American frontier. Brilliant and resourceful, Young realized that the rugged, snow-capped mountains encircling Deseret could provide a bounteous supply of water. Under Young’s direction, the Saints diverted the spring runoff into ditches and canals that lured the water into the desert. Creating a complex and ambitious irrigation system never before seen in the West, they soon had the previously barren desert floor covered with productive fields. “In the New World,” writes Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, “Indians had dabbled with irrigation, and the Spanish had improved their techniques, but the Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted its dreadful indifference, moralized it— until they had made a Mesopotamia in America.”
His utopia-building under way, Young launched the most ambitious communal socialist society in the history of the country. He divided the nascent city into individual lots for homes, one for each family, and planned to have farms ranging in size from five to eighty acres on the outskirts of town assigned to the male Saints in accordance with the size of their families. Young decreed that there would be no private ownership of land, since it belonged to God. The harvest would be placed in communal storage for distribution according to individual need.
By 1849, when the land ceded to the United States at the end of the Mexican War had been transferred in accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Young brashly claimed for his own free and independent empire this second-largest land acquisition in American history, a staggering mass comprising the future states of Utah and Nevada, as well as much of what would become Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and New Mexico—an act that would not go unchallenged. For years to come, Young would wage a struggle of sovereignty with the federal government in his attempts to fulfill h
is dream of a nation-state.
To populate this colossal domain, he turned his sights yet again to Great Britain, dispatching his ablest men to cross the Atlantic in search of fresh converts.
What, if anything, Jean Rio Baker knew of this tumultuous history is unclear. While most missionaries were mature, married American men, it was an Englishman by the name of John Taylor who approached the Baker family. The former Anglican had been influenced by a Scottish Presbyterian minister in London named Edward Irving, who had attracted a large following with his eloquent sermons on apocalyptic millenarianism. This group of Irvingites consisted of upper-class intellectuals, and when Taylor abandoned the sect for Mormonism he sought followers in the same social stratum, focusing upon those already steeped in religious questing. Brigham Young was brilliant at matching his missionaries to their converts— sending farmers to recruit Scandinavians, laborers to recruit factory workers—and he dispatched his more cerebral missionaries to cultivate the Irvingites. Raised in England’s most inspiring landscape—the Lake District, which gave inspiration to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Taylor rebelled against what he saw as a staid and traditional mainstream religion. The Anglican doctrine of “sin and unworthiness,” writes one of his biographers, “didn’t fit his surging and optimistic vitality.”
Drawn by the notion that regardless of “unworthiness” all mortals could evolve into higher beings, Taylor would be one of the earliest British converts to Mormonism. He emigrated to Missouri shortly after his 1836 baptism. Appointed an apostle by Joseph Smith, he would accompany Smith to the Carthage jail, where he survived being shot several times in the melee that left the prophet dead. Taylor returned to his native England to proselytize. A polygamist, he publicly disavowed polygamy, dismissing questions about the practice as evilly inspired gossip. By 1848, at the time he converted the Baker family, he was the secret husband to some twelve women in Nauvoo.