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If one were unscrupulously selective in choosing details, one could make him out to be not only a prophet, but also a political menace — a dictator complete with army, propaganda ministry, and secret police who created an authoritarian dominion on the American frontier. It is easy to match his unscientific racial theories, his autocratic organization, and his boundless ambition with the theories, organizations, and ambitions of modern dictators. But to be content with drawing such parallels is to reject history for yellow journalism.
But it is also true that he was purely a Yankee product and that a great deal that was good in American folklore and thinking found its way into his writings and into his church.
The cornerstone of his metaphysics was that virile concept which pervaded the whole American spirit and which was indeed the noblest ideal of Jesus and Buddha, that man is capable of eternal progress toward perfection.
And after a hundred years the myths he created are still an energizing force in the lives of a million followers. The moving power of Mormonism was a fable —one that few converts stopped to question, for its meaning seemed profound and its inspiration was contagious.
Finally in 1816, the historic year without a summer, he was rooted out.
Emigration in this year, called in Vermont folklore “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death,” reached its peak for all time.
Nowhere was lapse from the old codes more evident than in the churches, which were racked with schisms. The Methodists split four ways between 1814 and 1830. The Baptists split into Reformed Baptists, Hard-Shell Baptists, Free-Will Baptists, Seventh-Day Baptists, Footwashers, and other sects. Unfettered religious liberty began spawning a host of new religions.
There was Ann Lee, mother of the Shakers, who called herself the reincarnated Christ and who with her celibate communists had fled New England’s wrath. In the religiosely fecund atmosphere of New York State her sect flourished and spread.
Such was not true of the entourage of another female subdivinity ruling in Jerusalem, twenty-five miles from Joseph Smith’s home. This was Jemima Wilkinson, the “Universal Friend,” who thought herself to be the Christ. Unperturbed by the Palmyra newspaper which unsympathetically prefixed an “anti” and called her a consummate impostor, she governed her colony by revelations from heaven and swore that she would never die.
Palmyra was the center of what the circuit riders later called the “burnt over” district. One revival after another was sweeping through the area, leaving behind a people scattered and peeled, for religious enthusiasm was literally being burnt out of them.
The revivals by their very excesses deadened a normal antipathy toward religious eccentricity. And these pentecostal years, which coincided with Joseph Smith’s adolescence and early manhood, were the most fertile in America’s history for the sprouting of prophets. In the same decade that young Joseph announced his mission, William Miller proclaimed that Jesus would visit the earth in March 1843 and usher in the millennium. Thousands flocked to his ranks, auctioned off their property, and bought ascension robes. John Humphrey Noyes was converted to the theory that the millennium had already
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Jemima Wilkinson was forgotten with the division of her property; the Noyes Oneida community degenerated from a social and religious experiment into a business enterprise; and Dylks was ridden out of the Leatherwood country astride a rail.
William Miller, although his Adventists are still an aggressive minority sect, never regained face after 1845, when after two recalculations Jesus still failed to come. But Joseph Smith, a century after his death, had a million followers who held his name sacred and his mission divine.
The evidence, however, leaves no doubt that, whatever Joseph’s inner feelings, his reputation before he organized his church was not that of an adolescent mystic brooding over visions, but of a likable ne’er-do-well who was notorious for tall tales and necromantic arts and who spent his leisure leading a band of idlers in digging for buried treasure.
Actually he was a gregarious, cheerful, imaginative youth, born to leadership, but hampered by meager education and grinding poverty.
Crystal-gazing is an old profession and has been an honored one. Egyptians stared into a pool of ink, the Greeks into a mirror, the Aztecs into a quartz crystal, and Europeans into a sword blade or glass of sherry — any translucent surface that made the eyes blur with long gazing.
When Joseph Smith first began to use his seer or “peep” stone, he employed the folklore familiar to rural America. The details of his rituals and incantations are unimportant because they were commonplace, and Joseph gave up money-digging when he was twenty-one for a profession far more exciting.
Lesser visions than this were common in the folklore of the area. Elias Smith, Vermont’s famous dissenting preacher, at the age of sixteen had had a strikingly similar experience in the woods near Woodstock, when he saw “the Lamb upon Mt. Sion,” and a bright glory in the forest.
Asa Wild of Amsterdam, New York, had talked with “the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah,” and had learned “that every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt,” that two thirds of the world’s inhabitants were about to be destroyed and the remainder ushered into the millennium.
But he insisted on February 28: “It is well known that Joe Smith never pretended to have any communion with angels until a long period after thepretended finding of his book.”f
But there are two manuscript versions of the vision between 1831 and the published account in Orson Pratt’sRemarkable Visions in 1840 which indicate that it underwent a remarkable evolution in detail. In the earlier, which Joseph dictated in 1831 or 1832, he stated that “in the 16th year of my age ... the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord.” By 1835 this had changed to a vision of two “personages” in “a pillar of fire” above his head, and “many angels.” In the published version the personages had become God the Father and His son Jesus Christ, and the angels had vanished.
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Afewdiscerning citizens in Joseph’s neighborhood were more amused at his followers than alarmed at the moral implications of his money-digging. One native, in writing his impressions of the boy in later years, recognized certain positive talents: “Joseph had a little ambition, and some very laudable aspirations; the mother’s intellect shone out in him feebly, especially when he used to help us solve some portentous questions of moral or political ethics in our juvenile debating club, which we moved down to the old red schoolhouse on Durfee street, to get rid of the critics that used to drop in
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Joseph Smith, for all his enthusiasm for necromancy, was not immune to the religious excitement that periodically swept through Palmyra.
“I can take my Bible, and go into the woods and learn more in two hours than you can learn at meeting in two years, if you should go all the time.”
But whether Joseph’s ebullient spirits could ever have been canalized by any discipline is an open question. He had only limited formal schooling after leaving New England. And since he never gained a true perspective of his own gifts, he probably was inclined to regard them as more abnormal — or supernatural — than they actually were. What was really an extraordinary capacity for fantasy, which with proper training might even have turned him to novel-writing, was looked upon by himself and his followers as genuine second sight and by the more pious townspeople as outrageous lying.
There was universal admiration for the palisaded, geometrical forts, the ruins of which were silhouetted against the sky atop the conelike drumlins that dotted the landscape. Since the pottery and copper ornaments buried in the mounds were frequently beautiful in design and skillfully wrought, few believed they were the handiwork of the despised red man.
The theory persisted for half a century that the Moundbuild- ers were a race of peaceful farmers and metalworkers who had been invaded and utterly exterminated by a bloodthirsty race that was ancestor to the modern Indian. William Henry Harrison, shortly before his election to the Presidency, wrote that the last great battle took place on the banks of the Ohio, where “a feeble band was collected, remnant of mighty battles fought in vain, to make a last effort for the country of their birth, the ashes of their ancestors and the altars of their gods.”
The plan of Joseph’s book was to come directly out of popular theory concerning the Moundbuilders. His “Book of Mormon” was basically the history of two warring races, one “a fair and delightsome people,” farmers, stock-raisers, temple- builders, and workers in copper, iron, and steel; the other a “wild and ferocious, and a bloodthirsty people; full of idolatry and filthiness; feeding upon beasts of prey, dwelling in tents, and wandering about in the wilderness, with a short skin girded about their loins, and their heads shaven; and their skill . . . in the bow, and the cimeter and the axe.”
Actually the Moundbuilders had been not a lost race, but the direct ancestors of certain of the upper Mississippi Indian tribes. But at that time only a few antiquarians knew that the Indians had made a practice of exhuming, collecting together, and reburying in mounds all the bones of the recently dead. Even after the coming of the white man this ceremony, known as the Festival of the Dead, had been celebrated in the Mississippi Valley. The Indian forts, on the other hand, were the fairly recent handiwork of the Iroquois.f
Three times that night the spirit appeared, as angels are wont to do, for, to be authentic, celestial truth must be thrice repeated.
Hee.
Joseph may have found a copper breastplate, for such objects were frequently discovered in the mounds. The Ohio State Museum has an impressive collection.
Lucy never saw the golden plates, for Joseph warned his family that it meant instant death to look at them and frequently changed their hiding-place; but she lived in a constant state of alarm lest they he stolen,
But Emma was not so credulous that she could refrain from wondering about plates that were too sacred to be seen but not to be stolen.
Emma was Joseph’s first scribe. She never saw the plates, although they often lay on the table wrapped in a small linen tablecloth. Despite her skepticism and bewilderment Joseph ap* Unpublished affidavit o£ Lorenzo Saunders made in Reading, Michigan, September 20, 1884, now in the library of the Reorganized Church, t For Hale’s complete statement see Appendix A. parently had so frightened her about the consequences of examining them that she dared finger them under their covering only when she moved them to dust the table. “They seemed to be pliable like thick paper,” she later said, “and
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Mystified by his ability to translate the characters without even unwrapping the plates, merely by staring into his stone —or stones (for she said later that he used the Urim and Thummim for the first 116 pages and the little dark seer stone for the remainder t) — she began to take down his dictation.
The first prophet, Nephi, was a young Hebrew who had left Jerusalem 600b.c.and had sailed to America with his father, Lehi, and a few followers to avoid the destruction of the city. Lehi actually was an obscure Biblical name, but Emma probably knew it better as the name of a river, the Lehigh, which ran not far south of Harmony.
Like Joseph himself, Nephi had two elder brothers, Laman and Lemuel, and three younger, Sam, Jacob, and Joseph. Laman and Lemuel were evil-tempered, sinful youths who so incurred the wrath of God that He cursed them and all their descendants with a red skin.§
Lemuel is a Biblical name, but it happened also to be that of a neighbor, Lemuel Durfee, who signed an affidavit in 1833 charging Joseph Smith with an immoral character and vicious habits. See Howe:Mormonism Unvailed, pp. 261-2.
The two races fought intermittently for a thousand years. To defend themselves against the Lamanites, the Nephites finally erected “small forts, or places of resort; throwing up banks of earth round about” with “timbers built up to the height of a man, round about the cities ... a frame of pickets built upon the timbers.” This kind of description must have sounded familiar to Emma, for western New York was famous for its palisaded Indian forts, one chain running fifty miles from Cat- taragus Creek to the Pennsylvania border.
After each battle the dead were “heaped up upon the face of the earth, and they were covered with a shallow covering.” This, it was to be obvious to everyone who read the book, was the explanation of the Indian mounds, the biggest mounds of all marking the site of the last great battle, which had wiped out the white Nephite race.*
But he was satisfied to know that they were descendants of the Hebrews, for of all the theories then current the most popular among clergymen in Europe as well as America was that the red men were a remnant of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel.
America’s most distinguished preachers — William Penn, Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards —had all espoused the theory.
Edwards had even written a tract pointing out what he thought were likenesses between the Muhhekaneew Indian tongue and Hebrew.
Fantastic parallels were drawn between Hebraic and Indian customs, such as feasts of first fruits, sacrifices of the first-born in the flock, cities of refuge, ceremonies of purification, and division into tribes. The Indian “language” (which actually consisted of countless distinct languages derived from numerous linguistic stocks) was said to be chiefly Hebrew. The Indian belief in the Great Spirit (which originally had been implanted by French and Spanish missionaries) was said to be derived in a direct line from Jewish monotheism. One writer even held that syphilis, the Indian’s gift to
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millennium.View of the Hebrews made much of the legend that the “stick of Joseph” and the “stick of Ephraim” — symbolizing the Jews and the lost tribes — would one day be united; and Joseph Smith’s first advertising circulars blazoned the Book of Mormon as “the stick of Joseph taken from the hand of Ephraim.”
This can be seen particularly in the story of Quetzalcoatl, whom Ethan Smith described as “the most mysterious being of the whole Mexican mythology,” the white, bearded Aztec god who taught his people their prized peaceful arts and for whose return the Aztecs were hoping when Cortes appeared. Ethan Smith described Quetzalcoatl as “a type of Christ,” but Joseph saw in the legend evidence that Christ Himself had come to the New World[12]
The occasional crucifixes found in the mounds gave further weight to this theory, since it was not until years later that scholars proved them to be French and Spanish in origin.
Thus, whereView of the Hebrews was just bad scholarship, the Book of Mormon was highly original and imaginative fiction.
Thirty-five years after the Book of Mormon was published, an old antiquarian in Ohio who had spent years in trying to prove that the Indians were descended from the Hebrews pretended to have discovered in a mound several stone plates with the Ten Commandments inscribed in Hebrew. After his death investigators discovered that he had laboriously chipped the stone himself, copying the characters from a Hebrew Bible which he had neglected to destroy *
At this time the Egyptian language was popularly believed to be indecipherable, for it was not until 1837 that the grammar worked out from the Rosetta stone by the French scholar Champollion was first published in England. Joseph was not likely, therefore, to be held accountable by any scholar for the accuracy of his Egyptian characters, particularly since they were “reformed.”
