No Man Knows My History (Arkosh History)

by Fawn M. Brodie

But Law was cut to a different pattern. Actually he was on the road to complete and ugly disillusionment, but he was walking backwards away from the church, looking eagerly for something in the landscape to which he could cling, grasping at every tree and hedgerow. His desperate desire to reform the church made him far more formidable than if he had set out to damn the prophet and all his works. Unlike John C. Bennett, he was willing to glove his mailed fist. And more important, he and Foster had enough money to buy a printing press. The reform church was to have a mouthpiece six weeks after it was born, in a newspaper styled theNauvoo Expositor.

Joseph was not afraid of what the Laws might swear against him in a Carthage court, for he knew they would be hard pressed to prove him guilty. For three years his clerks had accompanied him everywhere, writing down everything he had said and done. Every day was accounted for. And all references to plural marriage had been so adroitly disguised that only the initiated would understand their true significance. Of this he had made sure.f

Those who believed staunchly in his denials of polygamy were bewildered by the prodigious perjury of the apostates, and sensitive Mormons who knew something of the truth about polygamy remembered with pain the injunction of Jesus: “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”

But he was blind to his own danger and in a public sermon on May 26 pressed his savage attack against the apostates with an irresponsible gasconade: “The Lord has constituted me so curiously that I glory in persecution. ... If oppression will make a wise man mad, much more a fool. If they want a beardless boy to whip all the world, I will get on the top of a mountain and crow like a rooster: I shall always beat them. When facts are proved, truth and innocence will prevail at last. . . . Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than any man ever had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. ... I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. . . . How I do love to hear the wolves howl! “God knows, then,” he concluded, “that the charges against me are false. . . . What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can find only one. I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago; and I can prove them all perjurers.” *

HadJohn C. Bennett been editor of theNauvoo Expositorinstead of William Law and Sylvester Emmons, it would have been a lurid sheet. But Law was no cheap scandalmonger and had a profound pity for the plural wives in Nauvoo. He vowed that nothing “carnal” should creep into theExpositor, and the first issue, which appeared on June 7, 1844, was therefore — considering the facts at the editor’s disposal — an extraordinarily restrained document.

“We do not believe that God ever raised up a Prophet to christianize a world by political schemes and intrigue. It is not the way God captivates the heart of the unbeliever; but on the contrary, by preaching truth in its own native simplicity.” “We will not,” it said further in an unmistakable allusion to Joseph’s kingship, “acknowledge any man as king or lawgiver to the church: for Christ is our only king and law-giver.”

TheExpositor spread consternation throughout the city. Those who were practicing polygamy feared a massacre by the anti-Mormons; those who had been kept in ignorance were overwhelmed by the realization that all the surreptitious gossip might after all be true.[64] These waited in mixed anger and dismay for the prophet’s answer.

“This doctrine of polygamy, or spiritual wife-system, that has been taught and practiced among us, will prove our destruction and overthrow. I have been deceived; it is a curse to mankind, and we shall have to leave the United States soon, unless it can be put down, and its practice stopped in the Church.” The older man was ready to weep with gratitude. This was what he had been hoping to hear ever since he had seen the cursed revelation on polygamy almost a year before.

Then he went on to add one more to his list of denials of polygamy by declaring that the revelation on polygamy referred to in theExpositor“was in answer to a question concerning things which transpired in former days,and had no reference to the present time.” * The city council now declared that the press was libelous and must be destroyed. Joseph issued a proclamation declaring it a civic nuisance; a portion of the Legion marched to the office, wrecked the press, pied the type, and burned every issue of the hated paper that could be found.

Joseph too late saw that he had loosed an avalanche. He wrote a long defensive letter to Governor Ford justifying the destruction of the press on legal grounds, and dispatched orders to the twelve apostles to return home at once, with powder, lead, and a rifle packed discreetly in their luggage.* Then he went to instruct the Legion in the defense of the city.

Was there something intrinsically alien in Mormonism that continually invited barbarity even in the land of the free? It could not have been the theology, which, however challenging, was really a potpourri of American religious thinking spiced with the fundamental ideal of inevitable progress. Nor could it have been the economy, which had shifted from communism to free enterprise and then to autarchy. Wherever the Mormons went, the citizens resented their self-righteousness, their unwillingness to mingle with the world, their intense consciousness of superior destiny. But these were negligible factors in creating the ferocious antagonisms of Missouri and Illinois.

Actually each migration had risen out of a special set of circumstances. The move to Kirtland from New York had been opportunistic; the flight from Kirtland had been largely the result of apostate rather than non-Mormon persecution. The various Missouri expulsions had been rooted deep in the slavery and Indian issues, which did not figure at all in Illinois. In the latter state, to a far greater extent than in Missouri, the political exploitation of Mormon numbers, made doubly repugnant by the presence of immigrant converts from monarchist England, was perhaps the most volatile fuel feeding the antiMormon fires. Those who lived closest to the Mormon mass were desperately afraid of being crushed. They hated Joseph Smith because thousands followed him blindly and slavishly.

Anti-Mormonism in Illinois was much more dangerous than it had been in Missouri, because it had a rock-bound moral foundation in the American fear of despotism. This, and not repugnance for polygamy — which, unlike the glorification of theocracy, was not yet preached openly —was the primary source of the venom in the now swiftly mobilizing opposition.

Until now the question of a successor had never seriously troubled him. He had taken it for granted that his mantle would descend, in true dynastic fashion, upon his eldest son, Joseph, now a bright, eager twelve-year-old and a favorite in the church. Shortly after he had escaped to Nauvoo from Liberty jail, Joseph had blessed the boy and promised him the succession; but few of the Saints had knowledge of the incident. In the winter of 1843, however, during a sermon to his people in the grove, he had called his son to the stand beside him and said with emphasis : “I have often been asked who would succeed me as the prophet to the church. My son Joseph will be your next prophet.” [65] At that time trouble had seemed very remote. But now Joseph feared that an assassin would cut short his days before he saw the age of forty. On April 4,1844, when he met with the apostles in one of their last meetings before they left on a campaign tour, he rushed through instructions which Orson Hyde described as “every ordinance of the holy priesthood.” Then he said: “Now if they kill me you have got all the keys, and all the ordinances and you can confer them upon others, and the hosts of Satan will not be able to tear down the kingdom as fast as you will be able to build it up.” * After Joseph’s death Brigham Young, who was president of the apostles, looked back to this meeting and concluded that the prophet had placed the authority of die church and all rights of succession directly in hi...

Carthage jail was a stout two-story stone building with a spacious cell on the upper floor. Joseph was permitted the use of several rooms, and his friends had easy access to his presence. They kept him informed of all the rumors of conspiracy against him that were circulating throughout the town.

As Jones left, the guard whispered to him: “We had too much trouble to bring Old Joe here to let him ever escape alive, and unless you want to die with him you had better leave before sundown; and you are not a damned bit better for taking his part, and you’ll see that I can prophesy better than Old Joe, for neither he nor his brother, nor anyone who will remain with them will see the sun set today.”

Before the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum were interred, twenty thousand Saints filed silently past the velvet-covered coffins in a last gesture of homage. Throngs filled the cemetery to watch the pine boxes lowered into the melancholy graves, boxes from which the bodies had been secretly removed and replaced with bags of sand. Fearing desecration of the graves, ten men buried the corpses at midnight in the basement of the Nauvoo House and heaped broken stone and rubbish over the spot.

Even in death the prophet was permitted no rest. Months later, at Emma’s request, the bodies were exhumed and reburied under the summer cottage, where, despite all legend to the contrary, they remain to this day. Five months after the murder Joseph’s youngest son, David Hyrum, was born.

But after two days’ reflection James Gordon Bennett amended this judgment, writing on July io: “Instead of sealing the fate of Mormonism, we are now rather inclined to believe that this revolting transaction may give only additional and increased strength to that sect. Joe and his brother will be regarded as martyrs to their faith, and but little knowledge of human nature and the history of the past is necessary to inform us of the fact that violence, oppression, and bloodshed strengthen instead of subduing fanaticism.”

And it was the legend of Joseph Smith, from which all evidences of deception, ambition, and financial and marital excesses were gradually obliterated, that became the great cohesive force within the church.

Polygamy, however, she always denied. “There was no revelation on either polygamy or spiritual wives,” she said stubbornly. “He had no other wife but me. ... He did not have improper relations with any woman that ever came to my knowledge.” And this was her revenge and solace for all her heartache and humiliation. This was her slap at all the sly young girls in the Mansion House who had looked first so worshipfully and then so knowingly at Joseph. She had given them the lie. Whatever formal ceremony he might have gone through, Joseph had never acknowledged one of them before the world. This was her great triumph and she made the most of it. Her four sons clung grimly to their mother’s word, despite the sworn testimony of women whom Joseph had loved and of the guards who had shadowed him when he paid nocturnal visits to their homes.

The legend grew among this faction that polygamy had been a monstrous fraud, conceived by John C. Bennett and developed by Brigham Young and perhaps Hyrum Smith, without Joseph’s knowledge or consent. Eventually, after trying his hand at storekeeping, railroading, farming, and law, Young Joseph took over the leadership of what was called with more exactness than poetry the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After a time he gave forth several revelations on church government and social behavior, modest revelations lacking all the majesty and sweep of his father’s. Eventually this church went back to Independence, where Young Joseph and later his son Frederick did their best to recapture the magic spirit of the gathering to Zion, fighting a bland gentile incredulity that the center of the universe should be an old-fashioned suburb of Kansas City.

The Mormons who followed Brigham Young continued to be temple-builders, their spires and pillars rising in Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Canada, and Hawaii. No other portion of Joseph Smith’s religion showed the same unbroken continuity as the temple rituals, which are even now performed, with only minor changes, as they were in the Nauvoo Masonic Hall.

Fifty years later the Mormon hierarchy in its passion for respectability had so turned against the principle as well as the practice that it heaped upon a tiny dissenting “fundamentalist” sect that revived polygamy all the self-righteous fury and abhorrence that the gentiles had spent upon the Mormons a generation before.

Whether knowingly or not, they had come to reject the theocratic principle of their prophet for the American tradition of democracy.

Most of the human qualities that endeared him to those who knew him — his jollity, kindliness, love of sport and good living, his athletic grace, and his prodigious personal charm — have been forgotten.

there remains his story, beginning with the great vision of the Father and the Son and ending with his martyrdom, a legend without parallel in American religious history.

This has grown into a vast pyramidal organization, in which the workers finance the church, advertise it, and do everything but govern it.

Mormon people are still bent on building the Kingdom of God, and everyone from the twelve-year-old deacon to the eighty-year-old high priest is made to feel that upon him depends the realization of that ideal.

Every Mormon, if he thinks about it at all, believes himself to be on the road to godhood.

But within the dogma of the church there is no new Sermon on the Mount, no new saga of redemption, nothing for which Joseph himself might stand. His martyrdom was a chance event, wholly incidental to the creed that he created.

on the contrary, he grew up in a family with a prodigious appetite for the marvelous.

Often he had a curtain separating himself from his secretary, but with Cowdery he seems to have abandoned it, for the latter confesses to some mystification at watching Joseph Smith translate freely when the plates were not in sight at all.*

I recommend now an important but slightly known study by the late Wesley M. Jones,A Critical Study of Boo\ of Mormon Sources, privately printed in Detroit in 1964, for an expertly detailed analysis of the extent to which he borrowed from both the Old and New Testament.

One can see in Lehi and his six sons an extraordinary resemblance to Joseph Smith, Sr., and his six sons.f Two brothers even share the same names, Joseph and Samuel.

Actually, the Smith family had seven sons, but Ephraim apparently died young. Lucy Smith mentions only his birth in herBiographical Sketches,

The white heroes, Nephi and Mormon, with whom Joseph Smith clearly identifies, have each engraved their sacred history, and their plates are buried in the Hill Cumorah, to be rescued eventually by Joseph Smith.

The Book of Mormon repudiates polygamy. The good brother, Jacob, denounces it: “Hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none . . . In Joseph Smith’s youth the impulse was condemned, though it exploded later into the remarkable plural marriage system, a system that was to serve for three generations as the identifying badge of his religious system.

The basic inner conflict in Joseph Smith’s life was not, I believe, a conflict between his telling the truth or not telling the truth, but rather between what he really was and what he most desperately wanted to be.

The eminent Dr. Phyllis Greenacre, for example, titer examining the histories of several celebrated “impostors,” concludes that they were not ordinary liars but men of extraordinary conflicts.

Great impostors, she holds, rely on “omnipotent fantasy,” to “the exclusion of reality testing.” They are invariably good showmen and absolutely dependent on having an audience. “The imposture,” she writes, “cannot be sustained unless there is emotional support from someone who especially believes in and nourishes it

My considerable discussion of this problem with several psychoanalysts has served to underline for me the difficulties of clinical diagnosis of a man long since dead, especially one who was supported by an audience with an insatiable appetite for the supernatural, an audience that included most importantly his own parents.J

The fact that Joseph Smith at the height of his power set up a Council of Fifty to rule over his new theocracy and had himself secretly crowned King of the Kingdom of God, which he said would one day revolutionize the whole world, today seems an act of megalomania.§

Aaron Burr, who hoped to set himself up as Emperor of Mexico and most of the West.

“Hell,” he continued, “may pour forth its rage like the burning lava of Mount Vesuvius, or of Etna, or of the most terrible of the burning mountains; and yet shall ‘Mormonism’ stand. Water, fire, truth and God are all realities. Truth is ‘Mormonism.’ God is the author of it.”

most of all, a constructor of continuing fantasy. William Law attacked this fantasy with his simple, almost gentle exposition of reality. A man called Law had called him to account, as his parents never had, and he reacted with lawlessness.

His fantasies and myths lived on, and live on today as realities for many Mormons,

Every generation brings several new William Laws, a new group of inquiring young intellectuals, a new phalanx of doubting scholars. But the Mormon Church continues to survive their heresy, as it has survived the growth of the science of anthropology, with scholars in every university save that named after Brigham Young holding the Book of Mormon to be a fantasy.

The controversy over the papyri was further heightened in 1968 by the acquisition and publication by Jerald Tanner of a filmed copy of Joseph Smith’s “Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” formerly unknown save to Mormon archivists, which proved to be at least as damaging to Joseph Smith’s claims as a translator as the translations of the papyri by the Egyptologists.

From this “scriptural precedent” the Mormon Church over the years developed an elaborate Jim Crow system in regard to black converts. Though all white and Oriental males were granted the right to “hold the priesthood,” this right was denied to all blacks. Nor were Negroes permitted to participate in the sacred temple ceremonies. Even a small fraction of Negro blood, if discovered, was considered grounds for taking away priesthood privileges.