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Soon William brought a complaint against a father for beating his fifteen-year-old daughter, and Joseph, suspecting William’s concern to be more amatory than humanitarian, sided with the parents. William in a towering rage resigned his apostleship and went up and down the Kirtland streets exclaiming against his brother. The Saints were mortified, and the gentiles grinned to hear him.
The fight shocked the church. The faithful shook their heads in despair that Joseph should be so cursed in his own family, and mournfully revived the gossip about another battle which had occurred earlier that same summer. Calvin Stoddard, Joseph’s brother-in-law, had accused Joseph of depriving him of some water rights. In the ensuing quarrel Stoddard had called him a “damned false prophet,” and Joseph had promptly knocked him down. Stoddard brought suit for assault, but by the time the case came to court he had mellowed sufficiently to forgive the prophet publicly, and the judge duly handed
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William finally made a public confession before the High Council and congregation and thus escaped an ecclesiastical trial. Joseph usually tried to conciliate his foes rather than bludgeon them out of his church. His only whip was the public confession, a stinging weapon in its own right, but one designed to have the opposite effect of an excommunication. The mere threat of such a confession was usually sufficient to curb delinquents. But with William the pain of confession was transient; he never ceased being a thorn.
A method for keeping members compliant.
The High Council was bent on banishing liquor more than anything else — more even than adultery. Ohio now was engulfed in the rising tide of temperance agitation. In 1834 there were five thousand temperance societies in the United States, with a membership of over a million. Ninety per cent of these lived north of the Mason-Dixon line, and the majority were concentrated in New York and Ohio. After 1836, when the American Temperance Society adopted total abstinence in its platform, there was scarcely a Protestant preacher on the Western Reserve who had not taken the pledge.
Coffee was deplored as an excitant to amorousness, and tea-drinking was thought to be as bad as toddy-guzzling.
Food fads and alcoholic cures periodically swept the nation. The popularJournal of Health, published from 1829 to 1835, held that sparing use of meat was responsible for the robustness of the Irish, and recommended a vegetarian diet. Selfdenial was nowhere more fashionable than among the minor sects.
In 1833 Joseph dictated a revelation called “The Word of Wisdom,” which today is the best known of all he ever wrote. It suggested that church members abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and hot drinks, that they use wine only at communion and meat only in winter. Joseph made it clear, however, that the revelation was given “not by commandment or constraint,” but merely as good counsel. He was only deferring to the pressure of the times, for he was too fond of earthly pleasures to become a temperance crusader.
The exact circumstances that stimulated this revelation were later described by Brigham Young. Joseph’s leading men met regularly, he said, in a room above the prophet’s kitchen. Emma complained bitterly after each gathering about having to clean so filthy a floor, for “the first thing they did was to light their pipes, and, while smoking, talk about the great things of the kingdom, and spit all over the room.” This “made the Prophet think upon the matter, and he inquired of the Lord relating to the conduct of the Elders in using tobacco, and the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom was the
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Instead of the men cleaning up after themselves (or get better at using spittoons), all the members of the Church were suggested to abstain from tobacco and other items. I'm assuming Emma still continued to clean the meeting space after this decree was created.
When the High Council took it upon itself to enforce the “Word of Wisdom,” going so far in February 1834 as to rule that disobedience was sufficient grounds for depriving a man of his office, the prophet’s cavalier behavior was a grave embarrassment. Almon Babbitt, brought to trial for drinking, defended himself by saying that he knew it was wrong but he was only following the example of President Joseph Smith.f
Rigdon, a fanatical temperance enthusiast, on December 4, 1836 forced through a vote for total abstinence;t Joseph bowed to public opinion, replaced wine with water in the communion, and let the High Council do its worst. The revelation eventually evolved into a great moral issue, the use of tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic liquors becoming to every good Mormon the badge of the heretic and the unrighteous.
As it is, today. What's in your cup reflects your worth as a person.
All the leading Mormon dignitaries attended, untroubled by the paradox that they should struggle with Hebrew grammar on weekdays and speak fluently in tongues on Sunday. The common school in Kirtland was expanded to include adult classes in mathematics, geography, and English grammar.
I like that Smith believed in education for adults, even if it was only for men. And later for boys.
This was a period of unlicensed looting of the Egyptian tombs. A good many sarcophagi had found their way to America and had aroused widespread curiosity. Almost no one knew that the hieroglyphs could be diciphered.* With the whole of Kirtland’s male population interested in the study of ancient languages, it was inevitable that Chandler’s mummies should fall into the hands of the church. Joseph told Josiah Quincy in 1844 that his mother purchased them “with her own money at a cost of six thousand dollars,” although he wrote in his journal that they had been bought by “some of the Saints” in
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After a preliminary examination the prophet pronounced one papyrus to be the writings of Abraham and another the writings of Joseph of Egypt. All Kirtland marveled at the chain of odd accidents that had brought the precious documents to their prophet, and saw in the coincidences the finger of the Lord.
Instead of proceeding with the translation by inspiration as in the past, however, Joseph set about laboriously formulating an Egyptian alphabet and grammar.
The idea of the plurality of God he had picked up from his classes in Hebrew, where he had learned thatElohim, one of the Hebrew words for God, is plural, and had therefore concluded that the Bible had been carelessly translated.!
Joseph’s new concept that the earth had been “organized” out of already existing matter rather than created out of nothing had a less obvious but no less definite root in his new scholarship. He had recently been reading Thomas Dick’sPhilosophy of a Future State, a long-winded dissertation on astronomy and metaphysics.! Dick’s elucidation of the thesis that matter is eternal and indestructible Joseph had found convincing, and he had logically concluded that God must have made the heavens and the earth out of materials He had on hand.
These concepts, which developed peculiar ramifications in Joseph’s later teachings, came directly from Dick, who had speculated that the stars were peopled by “various orders of intelligences,” and that these intelligences were“progressive beings” in various stages of evolution toward perfection.
The Book of Abraham expressed not only the germ of Joseph’s metaphysical system, but also more of his theorizing on the subject of race, which was fast becoming the most dangerous political and moral question in the Republic. As the Book of Mormon had solved the question of the origin of the red man, so the Book of Abraham dispatched the problem of the origin of the Negro. Joseph as a youth had read in his geography book the common tradition that all races of men are descended from the three sons of Noah: Ham, Shem, and Japheth.* Noah had cursed his son Ham, decreeing that Ham’s son, Canaan,
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The Book of Abraham in effect crystallized Joseph’s hitherto vacillating position on the Negro problem. Soon he published a statement in his church newspaper attacking the abolitionist position as one “calculated to lay waste the fair states of the South, and let loose upon the world a community of people, who might, peradventure, overrun our society, and violate the most sacred principles of human society, chastity and virtue.” “. . . we have no right,” he concluded, “to interfere with slaves, contrary to the mind and will of their masters.”
Joseph preached that “the effect of the Holy Ghost upon a Gentile, is to purge out the old blood, and make him actually the seed of Abraham.” f
From the standpoint of the church which survived him, the Book of Abraham was the most unfortunate thing Joseph ever wrote. By outliving the Civil War, which forever banished slavery as an issue between Mormon and gentile, its racial doctrine preserved the discrimination that is the ugliest thesis in existing Mormon theology.
Unlike the golden plates, which had been whisked back into heaven, the mummies and papyri were kept on exhibit in both Kirtland and Nauvoo. The actual papyri escaped scholarly examination for many years. After Joseph’s death they were sold by a friend of William Smith to the Wood museum and were thought to have burned in the great Chicago fire.J Such a disaster might have ended all chance of exposing Joseph’s mistake had he not • “Speech before the High Priests,” Nauvoo, April 27, 1845; printed in pamphlet form by theMillennial Star office, July 1845. See p. 27. fHistory of the Church, Vol,
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Later the half-dozen leading Egyptologists who were asked to examine the facsimiles agreed that they were ordinary funeral documents such as can be found on thousands of Egyptian graves.*
It would have been the word of a mere schoolman against the word of God.
Two auditoriums, one above the other, occupied the first and second * See F. S. Spalding,Joseph Smith Jr. as a Translator (Salt Lake City, 1912). Dr. A. H. Sayce of Oxford stated that facsimile No. 2 was an “ordinary hypocephalus," and No. 3 “a representation of the goddess Maat leading Pharaoh before Osiris behind whom stands the goddess Isis.” Arthur Mace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called Joseph’s interpretation “a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.” Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie of London University wrote: “It may safely be said that there is not a single word that is true in
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In his leisure he pored over the New Testament, searching for ceremonials used in the primitive church that he had not yet incorporated into his own. He noted that among the early Christians, as well as the Jews, footwashing, anointing with oil, and even bathing had been religious rituals. The footwashing ceremonial he had incorporated about three years before, when he had girded himself with a towel after the fashion of Jesus and had washed the feet of the members of his council.
As the time for the temple dedication drew nearer, he introduced a “sealing” ceremony, in which all the blessings called down upon his men were to be sealed in heaven.
For the first time his church was indulging in the theatricalism and delirium of the camp meeting.
Never again in Mormon history was there to be a period of spiritual transport like this. With rare insight Joseph never made an effort to recapture the magic and mystery of these days. No one who participated in the dedication ceremonies ever forgot them. For weeks afterward the Saints spent all their time going from house to house, feasting, prophesying, and pronouncing blessings on one another.
The Geauga county court had forbidden Mormon elders to perform the marriage ceremony on the ground that they were not regularly ordained ministers. Rigdon had retained the right, but only by proving in court that he was still registered as a minister of the Disciples of Christ.f
One convert, who had left a vixenish spouse in New York State, told Ezra Booth on the first trip to Missouri that Joseph had given him leave “to take a wife from among the Lamanites.”
There was Lydia Goldthwait Baily, a convert of great charm, whose husband refused either to follow her to Kirtland or to grant her a divorce. Newel Knight, now a widower, fell in love with her, and there were few men for whom Joseph had so deep an affection. Newel, a trusted friend, gentle and generous, became so despairing over the hopelessness of his lot that Joseph was sorely tempted to defy the law in his favor. Finally, on November 23, 1835, he married them in a simple ceremony in the Knight home.
But, said he, I have done it by the authority of the holy Priesthood and the Gentile law has no power to call me
to account for it. It is my religious privilege, and even the Congress of the United States has no power to make a law that would abridge the rights of my religion.”
When an anonymous article advocating polygamy as a means of ending prostitution and spinsterhood appeared on February 4,1837 in theCleveland Liberalist, a paper widely read in Kirt- land, the gossips buzzed again, and the priesthood was stirred to new action. The Quorum of the Seventies passed a resolution denying fellowship to any member guilty of polygamy, and the Elders’ Quorum brought to trial at least one member, Solomon Freeman, for “living with another woman” though he had a wife in Massachusetts. Freeman nonplused the elders by vowing he would not “cross the room” to get a writ of
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On the one extreme were the Shakers, the Harmonists, and the followers of Jemima Wilkinson, who practiced celibacy. On the other were the Perfectionist societies led by Simon Lovett and John Humphrey Noyes, which indulged in free love. Lovett began preaching the doctrine of Spiritual Wifehood in New England in 1835, the same year that heard the first whispers of polygamy among the Mormons.
Noyes, who later founded the famous free-love community at Oneida, New York, wrote to a friend in 1836: “The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be. . . . The guests of the marriage supper may each have his favorite dish, each a dish of his own procuring, and that without the jealousy of exclusiveness. I call a certain woman my wife; she is yours; she is Christ’s; and in Him she is the bride of all saints. She is dear
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the Mormon Church was soon to avow and to become notorious for this aberration, so extraordinary in the milieu of Puritan America.
Kirtland actually was in the throes of the maddest speculative craze in the nation’s history. Land prices all over the West were spiraling at a fantastic rate. Lots bought in Buffalo at $500 an acre in 1835 were in 1836 being sold and resold in parcels until they were going at $40 a foot, or $10,000 an acre.
No less than his Saints, the prophet was infected with the virus of speculation. He began buying and selling land with the extravagant abandon that infused the whole West. His grammar teacher reported that he frequently played auctioneer. “And a very good auctioneer he was. The Saints were full of enthusiasm and lots went up from a hundred dollars to three and four thousand.”
The whole church identified prosperity with the goodness of God.
Joseph’s credit was good. His imposing temple, which had cost between $60,000 and $70,000, was deemed excellent security, despite the $13,000 debt hanging over it; and a big steam mill in which he had invested thousands of dollars was expected soon to begin making money. He borrowed everywhere — in sums ranging from a $350 loan from the Painesville bank to a six-month credit for goods in Cleveland and Buffalo amounting to $30,000.$
OnJulyii,1836 Andrew Jackson issued his specie circular, forbidding agents to accept anything but gold and silver for the sale of public land. Its purpose was merely to dam the flood of depreciated bank paper that was pouring into the United States Treasury, but the deflationary trend that it started moved swiftly into the great panic of 1837.
Here sickness comes, and where does it not? The ague and fever; the chill fever, a kind of cold plague, and other diseases, prey upon emigrants till they are thoroughly seasoned to the climate. Here death puts an end to life, and so it does all over the globe. Here the poor have to labor to procure a living, and so they do anywhere else. Here the saints suffer trials and tribulations, while the wicked enjoy the world and rejoice, and so it has been since Cain built a city for the ungodly to revel in. But it is all right, and I thank God that it is so. The wicked enjoy this world and the saints
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Bewildered and bitter, they remembered that their prophet had appointed September11,1836as the date for the redemption of Zion.J
Joseph, however, was too resourceful to be stopped by a formality. On January 2 the Kirtland Safety Society Bank became the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. The already engraved bank notes were stamped with the prefixantibefore and the suffixing after the word “bank.” By this device Joseph expected to circumvent what he considered the prejudiced decision of the legislature and perhaps at the same time appeal to the fast rising anti-banking sentiment.
Actually these boxes were filled with “sand, lead, old iron, stone, and combustibles,” but each had a top layer of bright fifty-cent silver coins. Anyone suspicious of the bank’s stability was allowed to lift and count the boxes. “The effect of those boxes was like magic;” said C. G. Webb. “They created general confidence in the solidity of the bank and that beautiful paper money went like hot cakes. For about a month it was the best money in the country.” [31]
From its beginning the bank had been operating illegally. A state law fixed the penalty for such an offense at a thousand dollars and guaranteed informers a share of the fine. It was inevitable that one of the prophet’s enemies should set the law upon him, and on February 8 a writ was sworn out by Samuel D. Rounds. When the court convened on March 24, Joseph’s lawyers tried to prove that the statute had not been in force at the time of the bank’s organization, but they lost the case and Joseph was ordered to pay the thousand-dollar penalty and costs.f
Thirteen suits were brought against him between June 1837 and April 1839, to collect sums totaling nearly $25,000. The damages asked amounted to almost $35,000. He was arrested seven times in four months, and his followers managed heroically to raise the $38,428 required for bail. Of the thirteen suits only six were settled out of court — about $12,000 out of the $25,000. In the other seven the creditors either were awarded damages or won them by default.
But he returned, refreshed and invigorated, to find that the church had split in two. The faction opposing him had rallied around a young girl who claimed to be a seeress by virtue of a black stone in which she read the future. David Whitmer, Martin Harris, and Oliver Cowdery, whose faith in seer stones had not diminished when Joseph stopped using them, pledged her their loyalty, and F. G. Williams, formerly Joseph’s First Counselor, became her scribe. Patterning herself after the Shakers, the new prophetess would dance herself into a state of exhaustion before her followers, fall upon the
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