No Man Knows My History (Arkosh History)

by Fawn M. Brodie

But America was ripe for a religious leader wearing the mantle of authority and speaking God’s word as one ordained in heaven to that purpose. His mission should be to those who found religious liberty a burden, who needed determinate ideas and familiar dogmas, and who fled from the solitude of independent thinking.

Page publicly renounced the stone in the first general church conference in September 1830, and it was generally understood that the spiritual gifts shared in common by the early disciples of Jesus were now concentrated in the person of the “First Elder.” For Joseph this was a salient victory. To have given either disciple free rein would have meant quick chaos, but so to deprive them of the privileges he himself enjoyed was the first step toward authoritarianism in his church. The pattern was set.

While his sectarian rivals were preaching spiritedly, but obscurely, about the coming millennium, he began to lay concrete plans for the building of the New Jerusalem. Less than five months after the official organization of his church he said in a revelation: . . no man knoweth where the city of Zion shall be built, but it shall be given hereafter. Behold, I say unto you that it shall be on the borders by the Lamanites.” And he ordered Oliver Cowdery, who had been trying without success to sell copies of the Book of Mormon in the East, to go west to preach among the Indians and keep an eye out for a likely spot on which to build the city of God.

Here Joseph was offering the red man, not restoration, but assimilation, not the return of his continent, but the loss of his identity. The promise of a white skin to the convert did not seem a genetic absurdity to a people who were being told in sober history books that the pigment of the red man in New England who had adopted die white man’s way of life had actually become lighter than that of his savage brothers.

Three months before Pratt’s coming he had quarreled with Campbell over the question of re-establishing the ancient communism of the primitive Christian church. Clearly the most fanatical and literal-minded of the Disciples of Christ, Rigdon had so zealously espoused the principle of holding things in common that he had set up a small communistic colony in Kirtland, a thriving town next door to Cleveland. But Campbell had fought Rigdon bitterly on the subject. After an open break in the conference of August 1830, Rigdon left “chafed and chagrined” and never met with the Disciples in a- general meeting afterward.

Ohio had seenprophets before. In 1812 Abel Sargent, who talked with angels and received revelations, toured the state with his twelve women apostles pretending to raise the dead and preaching the odd doctrine that if one were sufficiently holy one could live without food. The sect suffered eclipse in Marietta, when a convert put the belief to the test, went nine days without eating, and died.

his first important revelation in Kirtland denounced the false spirits.*

Basically Joseph’s was not a revivalist sect. Although he followed some of the revivalist patterns, he appealed as much to reason as to emotion, challenging his critics to examine the evidences of his divine authority — the Book of Mormon, the lost books of Moses and Enoch, die sworn statements of his witnesses, and numerous Bible-like revelations.

The intellectual appeal of Mormon- ism, which eventually became its greatest weakness as the historical and “scientific” aspects of Mormon dogma were cruelly disemboweled by twentieth-century scholarship, was in the beginning its greatest strength.

But the authoritarian nature of Joseph’s rule was very different from the imperious dictatorship of Jemima Wilkinson, whose rule by revelation extended to the most petty details of her colony. By ordaining every male convert a member of his priesthood he used the popular and democratic sentiment that all who felt the impulse had the right to preach. Any man could proclaim the gospel provided that he subjected himself to the ultimate authority of the prophet.

Joseph’s clergy was thus entirely composed of laymen; moreover, of practically all the laymen in his church. The result was a pyramidal church structure resting on the broadest possible base and possessing astonishing strength. By giving each man a share in the priesthood Joseph quickened a sense of kinship and oneness with the church. There was a feeling of common ownership and responsibility which was immensely satisfying to men for whom religion had hitherto been a wholly passive experience.

What Joseph had created was essentially an evangelical socialism,

Nearly every man had a New Testament title — deacon, teacher, priest, elder, “seventy,” or bishop. Each title carried a certain rank, progression from lower to higher being dependent upon a man’s faith, his zeal for the church, and die good* See Doctrine and Covenants, Section 42, and Ezra Booth: “Letter No. 8,” republished in Howe: Mormonism Unvailed, p. 216. will of his superiors in the hierarchy. Each convert had not only the dignity of a title but the duties attending it. He was expected to work strenuously for the church, and he did. His only recompense, and it was ample, was a conviction that he was furthering the work of the Lord in the last days.

In no other period in American history were “the last days” felt to be so imminent as in that between 1820 and 1845.

One day he was explaining his creed and book to the Campbellite preacher Hayden. “Oh this is not the evidence I want,” Hayden said, “the evidence that I wish to have is a notable miracle ... if you perform such a one then I will believe with all my heart and soul.” “Well,” said Joseph, “what will you have done? Will you be struck blind or dumb ? Will you be paralyzed, or will you have one hand withered ? Take your choice, choose what you please, and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ it shall be done.” “That is not the kind of miracle I want,” Hayden protested. “Then sir,” said Joseph, “I can perform none; I am not going to bring trouble upon anyone else, sir, to convince you.”

Accordingto the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples of Christ “had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need.” Never in American history was this scriptural passage so influential as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Scores of communal societies sprang up over the country, religious, non-religious, celibate, and free-love. The Shakers were communists, as were the followers of Jemima Wilkinson. When Joseph Smith first rode into the Susquehanna Valley to find the silver mine for Josiah Stowel, he went into the province where Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth had planned to found Pantisocracy and where the German Harmonists, led by George Rapp, were building Economy on the banks of the Ohio.

In one respect only Owen’s venture was a notable success. He made America community-minded. The same generation which believed so fervently in the perfectibility of man, which tossed out Calvinism and embraced in its stead Unitarianism, millennialism, and total abstinence, was ripe, ideologically at least, for communism as well. In 1840 Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”

Production was kept on an individual basis. Each convert, after “consecrating” his all to the church, was given back certain property “sufficient for himself and family,” over which he acted as a foreman or “steward.” The system was thus more akin to farm tenancy than to the true communal agriculture practiced by the Shakers and New Harmonists. Upon the death or disaffection of the steward, the land reverted to the church, which permanently held the title. Whatever surplus the steward exacted from the land, or whatever profit the mechanic derived from his shop, was contributed to the church storehouse and treasury, the convert keeping only what was “needful for the support and comfort” of himself and family. The spirit of true Marxian communism — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — was implicit in the whole system.

They urbanely prescribed legal forms that a court of law could be certain to uphold should a convert apostatize, and that incidentally made it possible to threaten malcontents with the loss of their property should they want to leave the church. “He that sinneth and repenteth not,” said the Lord, “shall be cast out, and shall not receive again that which he has consecrated unto me.”

The structure of the United Order as developed in Joseph’s revelations is sketchy and ambiguous, and the details of how it was actually worked out in Kirtland are simply not recoverable. It is clear, however, that Joseph did not immediately thrust • According to John D. Lee. SeeMormonism Unveiled, including the life and confessions of the late Mormon Bishop John D. Lee (St. Louis, 1877), p. 183.

Joseph hesitated at first about Independence, for he was troubled by the fact that the mission to the Indians had been a flat failure. Pratt blamed the Indian agents and jealous sectarian priests, who had become alarmed, he said, at his and Cowdery’s initial success among the Delawares and had ordered them out of Indian territory. But Cowdery was having no more success among the whites. His letter of May 7, 1831 had concluded: “We are well, bless the Lord; and preach the Gospel we will, if earth and hell oppose our way — for we dwell in the midst of scorpions — and in Jesus we trust.”

The high point of the conference, however, was his announcement that God had restored to earth the Melchizedek or higher priesthood — the Holy Order of the Son of God. This was different from the priesthood of Aaron enjoyed by the Jews and restored to the Mormon people by John the Baptist. Throughout history only Melchizedek and Christ had been endowed with its prerogatives, but now it was to be the privilege of every true believer in the gospel.f

Now, however, the disillusionment of many elders began to show itself. Edward Partridge, who had been given control of the United Order in the new Zion, complained about the quality of the land selected for purchase. When Joseph replied with some heat that Heaven had selected the land, Partridge replied pointedly: “I wish you not to tell us any more that you know these things by the spirit when you do not; you told us that Oliver had raised up a large church here, and there is no such thing.”

Since Rigdon’s prestige was indispensable to the growth of the church, Cowdery lost out and Joseph agreed to return to Ohio. The Mormons were thus split in two, the Missouri colony becoming a haven for the disinherited and the Kirtland church retaining the prestige of the prophet’s presence.

Then he coined the word “telestial” for a third kingdom, whose glory was that of the stars, to be peopled with those who had refused the law of God.

This trinity of kingdoms comprised a very different resurrection scene from the one he had described in the Book of Mormon, where the “lake of fire and brimstone” figured prominently in the sermons of the Indian prophets. Joseph had taken a long step toward Universalism, for even the “liars, sorcerers, adulterers, and whoremongers” were guaranteed telestial glory, and only a handful of unregenerates called the Sons of Perdition were to be eternally damned.

Nancy Johnson — later Mrs. Orson Hyde — eventually became one of Joseph’s plural wives.

When Joseph returned to Ohio in May 1832, he left three hundred converts in Missouri. This number doubled in a single year. The colony was poor and provisions were scarce. “Our food,” wrote Parley Pratt in his autobiography, “consisted of beef and a little bread made of corn, which had been grated into coarse meal by rubbing the ears on a tin grater.” But such privation heightened the sense of kinship and oneness with God. “There was a spirit of peace and union and love and goodwill manifested in this little Church in the wilderness, the memory of which will be ever dear to my heart,” Pratt said.

The old settlers counted the Indian guns and listened uneasily to their lamentation and despair, but the Mormons watched the migration with a kind of ecstasy. They knew that Andrew Jackson was an unwitting tool in the hands of God, for this was the beginning of the gathering of Israel.

Confident that these “remnants of Jacob” would soon swell the ranks of the church, Phelps hailed each tribe triumphantly in theEvening and Morning Star. The world for him was blazing with signs of Christ’s coming, which he ventured to predict was less than nine years away. Revolution stirred in a dozen countries in the early thirties; South Carolina, thirty years before the Civil War, threatened to split the United States by secession; a plague of “fiery serpents” ravaged India; thirty thousand natives starved in the Cape Verde Islands; Asiatic cholera began to devastate the Atlantic seaboard; a handful of Polish Jews migrated to Palestine to prepare for the Messiah — all these events were recorded on the little press in Independence in 1832 as unmistakable signs of the times.

Nothing was so dangerous to the Order in Missouri as apostasy, for when a man left the church and was refused the return of his property he promptly went to the courts.

Andrew Jackson thundered against the rebellious state, prayed to God to prevent civil war, and called out the federal troops. News of the crisis flooded Ohio papers, and on December 25,1832 Joseph began to prophesy: Verily, thus saith the Lord, concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls; And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place. For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called, and they shall also call upon other nations, in order to defend themselves against other nations; and then war shall be poured out upon all nations. And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshalled and disciplined for war. . . . And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations. . . .

President Jackson remained ignorant of the edict of the Almighty and acted instead as if the Lord were on the side of peace. And peace continued for twenty-eight years. The prophecy was quietly abandoned and excluded from early collections of Joseph’s revelations. It was not exhumed from his private papers until nineteen years later, when Brigham Young, seeing the whirlwind hour darkening, ordered its publication. After the Civil War it became the most celebrated of all of Joseph’s predictions.

Joseph was still so young, so full of zest for living and of rich humor, that he found it difficult to maintain constantly before his friends the sober mien and dignified language expected of a holy man. One couple arriving in Kirtland found him playing with some children and forthwith turned their wagons back to New England. Others were appalled at his unashamed pride in his prowess at wrestling. But usually new converts were won by his humanness and informality.

One afternoon in November 1832 Joseph was chopping wood in the forest behind his home when his friends brought a new convert, whom they introduced as Brigham Young. A Vermonter by birth like the prophet, he had caught the same restless contagion that drove the Smith family west. He was older than Joseph and shorter, but stocky and powerful, with hands that were made to work with tools. He had been a painter and glazier, he said, and had tried a variety of jobs and a variety of religions, but there had been no purpose in his life until he read the Book of Mormon.

The gift of tongues thus acquired status in the church, and though Joseph repeatedly cautioned against its misuse, it continued as one of the most popular “gifts of the spirit” enjoyed by his people. It provided the most inarticulate convert with a spontaneous, mysterious, and immensely satisfying form of self-expression.

A revelation on August 2, 1833 commanded his people there to give a tithe of all their property to start the temple fund, the Lord promising that if this was done Zion would become “very glorious, very great, and very terrible,” with the nations of the earth honoring her. “But if she observe not,” the revelation continued, “. . . I will visit her according to all her works, with sore affliction, with pestilence, with plague, with sword, with vengeance, with devouring fire. Nevertheless, let it be read this once to her ears, that I, the Lord, have accepted of her offering; and if she sin no more none of these things shall come upon her ” *

Expulsion from Eden Few episodesin American religious history parallel the barbarism of the anti-Mormon persecutions. That the town in which these began should bear the name of Independence only accentuates the tragic irony of the case. Intermittently for thirteen years burnings and pillaging hounded the Mormons wherever they tried to settle in the Mississippi Valley, until it seemed there was something inevitable in the terrorism that bloodied their trail.

The Mormon settlers were no more tactful than most religious zealots, and their very enthusiasm was an irritation. “We are daily told,” the old settlers said, “and not by the ignorant alone, but by all classes of them, that we, (the Gentiles,) of this county are to be cut off, and our lands appropriated by them for inheritances. Whether this is to be accomplished by the hand of the destroying angel, the judgments of God, or the arm of power, they are not fully agreed among themselves.”

Worst crime of all, the Mormons were Northerners who owned no slaves. Previous to their arrival the bulk of the immigrants had come from Kentucky and Tennessee, many with a retinue of Negroes. The population of Missouri in 1830 was over one-fifth slave. Early in 1832 the old settlers accused the Mormons of “endeavoring to sow dissensions and raise seditions” among their slaves, and the church elders promised to curb the offenders.

Hundreds of brilliant meteors were shooting across the firmament, leaving in their wake long trains of light. It was one of the greatest meteoric showers in the century, and all over the States people watched it awed and frightened. But nowhere else as among these outcasts did men greet it with such rapture: “God be praised, it is a sign of the end of the world!”

In 1835, when the time came tor print this curious document in theDoctrine and Covenants, he substituted fictitious names to avoid any unpleasantness — Ahashdah for Whitney, Olihah for Cowdery, Pelagoram for Rigdon, Mahemson for Harris, and Gazelam for himself. He even used code names for the industries — Laneshine house for the printing shop and Ozondah for the store.[24] Except for a few leaders who knew better, the Mormons believed these to be the names of people living in the days of Enoch.f

Some of his men found it difficult to reconcile his enthusiasm for parade and drill with his cautious efforts to conceal his own identity. Frequently he changed his position in the party and adopted the pseudonym Captain Cook.

Joseph himself, however, added to the supernatural occurrences. Stopping near an Indian mound on the Illinois River, he excavated a skeleton from near its surface and said to his companions: “This man in mortal life was a white Lamanite, a large, thick-set man, and a man of God. His name was Zelf. He was a warrior and chieftain under the great prophet Onandagus, who was known from the eastern sea to the Rocky Mountains. The curse of the red skin was taken from him, or, at least in part.” Lifting the thigh bone, which had been broken, and pointing to an arrowhead still lodged between two ribs, he described in vivid detail the great battle in which Zelf had been killed. Brigham Young eagerly seized the arrowhead, and others carried off the leg and thigh bones for souvenirs.*

Zion’s Camp seems also to have heightened his sense of accountability toward his own people. When the terrified Heber Kimball watched his friends seized with cholera convulsions in Missouri, he vowed secretly that he would never sin again. And though Joseph’s journal contained no such ingenuous resolution, it is clear that he too was overwhelmed with anguish and humility. Houses had been burned; men had been beaten and stoned; women and men had died from exposure and disease — all in his name. Missouri hate had been spent, not against himself, but against his people and the gospel to which they clung with such selfless devotion.

When John Tanner, who had just sold two farms and 2,200 acres of timber, visited Kirtland in January 1835 and learned that the temple mortgage was about to be foreclosed, he canceled his plans to go to Missouri, loaned the temple committee $13,000, signed a note with the prophet for $30,000 worth of goods, and gave Joseph an additional personal loan of $2,000.

Nine years later Tanner handed the prophet the personal note. “What would you have me do with it?” Joseph asked him, and Tanner replied: “Brother Joseph, you are welcome to it.” * Such open-handedness Joseph loyally repaid with positions in his ever expanding hierarchy. He wrote quite frankly in his journal that George Boosinger was ordained to the high priesthood “in consequence of his having administered unto us in temporal things in our distress.” f There were no men, however, to whom he felt so indebted as the members of Zion’s Camp. These were tested Saints, deserving of rank. In the spring of 1835, when he enlarged his priesthood to include twelve apostles and a special quorum of seventy men, nine of the apostles and all of the “seventies” were members of his army.

Zion’s Camp had taught Joseph something of the mistrust of autocratic power that pervaded Yankee thinking. He had already taken care to change his own title from “First Elder” to “President of the High Priesthood.” “President” was not a New Testament word, as were all other ranks in his priesthood; but in the early bloom of this Republic it had tremendous prestige, plus a connotation of responsibility to the people.

Basically, therefore, the church organization remained autocratic; only the trappings were democratic. The membership voted on the church officers twice a year. But there was only one slate of candidates, and it was selected by the first presidency, comprised of Joseph himself and his two counselors. Approval or disapproval was indicated by a standing vote in the general conference. Dissenting votes quickly became so rare that the elections came to be called — and the irony was unconscious — the “sustaining of the authorities.”

But William, a gaunt, raw-boned, cadaverous- looking youth, possessed none of his brothers’ gracious qualities. He was lusty, hot-tempered, and always in debt.