The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith

Book by Bowman Matthew

ONE

Joseph Smith and the First Mormons

To 1831

On a Monday morning in November 1835 a slender man in his middle forties, curiously dressed in a sea-green coat and pants and sporting a curling grey beard, picked his way into the muddy frontier town of Kirtland, Ohio, twenty miles northeast of Cleveland along the Chagrin River. He had come from New York City to visit Joseph Smith, Jr.: a national curiosity, twenty-nine years old, a self-declared prophet of God and leader of a people most often called the Mormons. Shortly after ten in the morning, Joseph's visitor found the prophet in his home in a row of cabins that lined a dirt road for perhaps a mile as it wound up a hillside from the river and toward an impressively large, if still incomplete, sandstone and lumber hall. The Mormons were building a temple, and the man, who rather evasively identified himself only as "Joshua the Jewish minister," must have gazed on it with awe and perhaps a little bit of envy. Joseph Smith, rarely humble, could not resist his visitor's apparent desire to discuss religion. The two spent the afternoon and evening together. Joseph told his visitor of his own visions of God, of the angel Moroni that had given him charge of golden plates that bore an ancient Christian scripture, and of his divine mandate to restore the Biblical church of Christ to the earth.

Joseph's scribe reported that the visitor seemed "highly entertained" at these stories, and well might he have been. After preaching to the prophet and some other Mormons on the impending degradation and collapse of American society, which he likened to the satanic Babylon of scripture, the man confirmed that he was in fact Robert Matthews, infamous in the press as "the Prophet Matthias." He claimed to be a true Israelite, the New Testament apostle Matthias reborn, divinely ordained to the "priestly" office that the Biblical name Joshua, with its echo of Mount Sinai and the Exodus, implied, and the embodied "spirit of truth." Three years earlier, Matthews had converted a handful of well-off New Yorkers, rearranged their marriages, squandered their money, introduced a version of Jewish dietary codes, and prophesied that his child would be the Messiah. His small urban kingdom had crashed to the ground when he was indicted for the murder of one of his followers. Though not convicted of that crime, Matthews served several months for beating his daughter and for contempt of court, as he routinely shouted and preached during his trial. When he surveyed the town of Kirtland several months after his release, friendless and destitute, Matthews no doubt envied the younger prophet. Joseph Smith had produced scripture and attracted hundreds of followers, and his temple was rising yards from his front door. The town of Kirtland had itself become a projection of his vision and his will. Matthews came as a supplicant.

Despite their differences, the two prophets sprang from similar cultures and impulses. The young American nation fostered prophets. Life in the early republic was quite different from that of the small kingdoms of the British emigrants who had settled the land a century and a half before. The Puritans had dreamed of spiritually united communities in which both church and state served the righteous desires of God's elect, a society orderly, regular, and clear-eyed in its devotions. But two centuries after the first Puritans had waded to the shores of Massachusetts, the vision had come unraveled. The surge of individualism that followed the American Revolution and the Constitution's disestablishment of religion upset the old structures of authority. Such excitement for the experiment in self-government joined with a booming market economy growing through the eighteen century to produce a peculiar democratic tide washed over the culture, society, and industry of early-nineteenth-century America. It offered Americans the opportunity to master their own lives rather than subordinate themselves to the collective. It trained them in individualism, in self-reliance, in risk-taking, and in the pursuit of opportunity. It fostered respect for refinement, for culture, for economic success. It taught that these qualities would come through rectitude, discipline, and hard work, and its way of life spread across the nation.

The prophets were children of this age. Their grand religious experiments were possible only in the chaotic freedom of the time. But each man in Kirtland that November morning longed for a cosmos ordered in ways far more permanent than the ceaseless whirl of democracy and trade seemed capable of offering, and each seemed to find such rest in marriage, family, and community. They preached salvation, the coming millennium, the great judgment of Christ on the chaos of their time, and they warned that only in their own ranks could salvation be found.

When Matthews claimed to be the product of reincarnation, Joseph Smith decided he had heard enough; he accused the older man of being possessed of a devil and cast him from Kirtland. Today, nearly two hundred years after their meeting, Robert Matthews lies buried and forgotten; even the date of his death remains uncertain.

Joseph Smith's grave, however, has become a pilgrimage site, his name recited and blessed in sermon and testimony by millions, the scripture he spoke and the rituals he taught cherished across the globe as the true and ordained way to God. His triumph sprang in part from the force and creativity of his religious imagination, his unswerving faith in his own capacities as a conduit for divine revelation, and his will to see his dreams made reality. But it grew also from the vision and dedication of those who chose to follow him: those who accepted and interpreted his ideas, who built in wood and stone the cities he saw in vision, and who, most of all, embodied in a holy community the divine experiences he craved. Men such as Joseph and the prophet Matthias were often assailed for theocracy, for rejecting democracy and establishing religious tyranny. But Mormonism was the construction of Joseph Smith's followers as much as of himself. It was a sacramental community bound together through ritual, priesthood, and ordinance, and his people became the society of which Joseph had dreamed: a firm rock in an unreliable world, a faithful community that itself became, in a way, the salvation its followers sought.

In 1816 Joseph Smith, Sr., and his wife, Lucy Mack Smith, gathered their children, including ten-year-old Joseph Jr., and left their home in Vermont to chase opportunity west. They were part of a New England exodus across the Great Lakes region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, children of the decaying utopia of Puritan New England following paths since wrenched askew from those of their ancestors. There had been Smiths in Massachusetts and Macks in Connecticut since the seventeenth century, farmers and small merchants, though by the generation of Joseph and Lucy both families seemed interested in trying something new. Joseph Sr.'s father, Asael, took his family from urban Massachusetts to eighty-three acres of raw land in Tunbridge, Vermont, in 1791, while Lucy's father, Solomon Mack, and brother Stephen found prosperity as merchants in the burgeoning towns of Vermont. When Lucy and Joseph were wed, they received its fruits: part ownership of the farm from Asael and a thousand dollars for Lucy from Stephen.

Though Vermont might once have been isolated, in the first years of the nineteenth century the arteries of trade had reached its mountains: a weekly stage line to Boston in 1801, a canal reaching Connecticut a year later. The pulse of commerce began to move back and forth, and Joseph Smith, Sr., sought to ride it. He bought a host of goods on credit from Boston and opened a small general store in Tunbridge. For a time he was successful, enough so that in 1803 he banked his career on ginseng, an herb whose popularity in China was making American merchants rich. But when the ship that carried Joseph Sr.'s investment in the East returned, word that his shipment had earned only the price of a case of tea came with it. Outraged, Stephen Mack hunted down a merchant who admitted that he had stolen Joseph's due before fleeing to Canada. Joseph Sr. was left with nothing but debt to his Boston creditors, and he and Lucy sacrificed their wedding gifts to pay it: Joseph sold his share of the farm, and Lucy surrendered the thousand dollars of her dowry.

Joseph Smith, Sr., had glimpsed the fantastic possibilities this new society offered-he, the son of a farmer, trading with such an exotic locale as China, growing wealthy because of his acumen and confidence. But through no fault of his own, save perhaps desire and ambition, he instead fell through its cracks. The Smiths sank from the respectable upwardly mobile middle class into which Joseph and Lucy were born to the desperate lives of tenant farmers. Economic insecurity and social anxiety would plague them and their children for the rest of their lives. As Lucy stiffly described the choice to pay off her husband's debt, "This was considerable of a trial to us for it deprived us at once not only of the comforts and conveiniences of life but also of a home of any discription." It was a bitter lesson that Joseph's children would have to learn vicariously, for the oldest living, Alvin, was barely five, with a younger brother, Hyrum, and an infant sister, Sophronia. The Smith child who worked hardest to overturn the systems of the world his parents struggled with, Joseph Jr., would not be born for another two years.

For a dozen years following the disaster, the Smith family drifted from farm to farm, from state to state. They lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut. Joseph Sr. worked variously as a schoolteacher, a day laborer, and a tenant farmer, cultivating land rented from other men. And they had more children: four sons, and another daughter. The oldest of these, born on December 23, 1805, was named Joseph Jr. He entered the world in a small cabin on a cold, windswept hill in Sharon, Vermont, on land r...