Chapter 126. The American Prophet: Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon and the Latter-day Saint Kingdom

Willis lists the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among the movements that began as “cults” in nineteenth-century America and became an established denomination [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Its history is also, from the start, a political history: a prophet who was also mayor and militia general, a theocratic territory, a federal army, a massacre, and a doctrine of marriage that the United States made the price of statehood. This chapter follows the founding story as believers tell it and as critics retell it, keeping the two kinds of account apart.

Vision, plates and a new scripture

FLDS schooling, as Rebecca Musser recalls it, kept the core LDS narrative: “the United States was the Promised Land as foretold in the Book of Mormon, and… in 1820, God and Christ visited fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith in a sacred grove of trees” [Musser & Cook, The Witness Wore Red, #66381, ch. 4]. Willis gives the same sequence from the outside. Smith, confused by the revivals of the Erie Canal country around Palmyra, asked “Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together?” He then met the angel Moroni on Hill Cumorah, who showed him golden plates in “Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics” and “translating spectacles”. The church was organised at Fayette, New York, on 6 April 1830 [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Into the Universe: Latter-day Saints and the Colonization of the Cosmos”].

The book’s own title page, reproduced by Van Voorst, calls it “an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites—Written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel”, intended for “the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD”, and it adds: “if there are faults they are the mistakes of men” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, “Book of Mormon, original title page”]. In 3 Nephi 11, the multitude at the temple in the land Bountiful sees “a Man descending out of heaven… clothed in a white robe”, who says: “Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world” [Van Voorst, #63227, “The Coming of Jesus Christ in 34 C.E. to the New World”]. The narrative begins with Lehi sailing from Jerusalem “some 600 years before the birth of Christ” [Willis, #63203]. It ends with the Nephites destroyed by the Lamanites in 385 CE and Moroni burying the plates near present-day Palmyra [Van Voorst, #63227, “Destruction of the Nephites”].

Hostile readers take the same text very differently. The Romanian police expert Traian Tandin calls the Book of Mormon “a distortion of the Bible in the sense of covering the aspirations to easy living and unearned gains” of its followers [Tandin, Secte criminale, #23557]. Alexander Campbell argued as early as 1832 that the book answered “just about every error and truth discussed in New York for the last ten years” [Willis, #63203]. Issitt and Main note that the book’s swords, chariots, cattle, goats and sheep in pre-Columbian America are “not supported” by archaeology [Main & Issitt, Hidden Religion, #66220]. Edward Simon places the event in comparative perspective: “Not since the Prophet Muhammad acted as Gabriel’s scribe in recording the Qur’an has so influential a scriptural work seemed to arrive as if by lightning”. Part of Smith’s reputation “as being an ‘American Muhammad'” came from his prophetic claims and from polygamy [Simon, Elysium, #70742].

Freemasonry and the endowment

Peter Levenda sets the plates in a Masonic landscape. William Morgan, who threatened to expose Royal Arch secrets, was kidnapped on 11 September 1826 “only a few miles away from Palmyra, New York and the Hill Cumorah”. The scandal produced the Anti-Masonic Party (1828), which ran William Wirt for president in 1832 and later merged into the Whigs [Levenda, The Secret Temple, #64792, ch. 8 “Magic and Mormonism”]. Levenda reads Helaman 6:22, on “secret signs… and secret words” by which “a brother who had entered into the covenant” was recognised, and the “Gadianton robbers” and their “secret murder”, as possible allusions to the Morgan affair. He adds that Morgan’s widow Lucinda later married the Mason George Harris, joined the church, and was taken by Smith “in a plural marriage ceremony” while remaining with her legal husband [Levenda, #64792].

According to Levenda, Smith was initiated an Entered Apprentice at Nauvoo on 15 March 1842 and raised a Master Mason the next evening. Hundreds of Mormons followed, until Nauvoo had more Masons “than there were in all the lodges in the rest of the state of Illinois combined”, and the Grand Lodge was asked to investigate a “Masonic diploma mill”. On 4 May 1842 Smith gave the first Nauvoo endowment, to men who “were themselves all Freemasons”, Brigham Young among them. The rite involved washing and anointing, a white garment, a new name as password, a dramatised Adam and Eve, “secret gestures” and oaths, which Levenda finds parallel to Royal Arch work. He concludes that Mormonism is in a sense “an unrecognized Masonic Lodge that went its own way”. He adds that Smith died making “the Masonic signal of distress” [Levenda, #64792]. These are Levenda’s interpretations. He notes that Mormon apologists explain the similarities as universal symbolism rather than borrowing [Levenda, #64792].

Kirtland, Missouri, Nauvoo: a kingdom at war

From the beginning Smith and his followers “sought to assemble together in a theocratic community under Smith’s leadership, or ‘Zion'”, first in Kirtland, Ohio, then in Independence, Missouri. A mob destroyed their press there in 1833 [Wikipedia: Nauvoo Expositor]. Krakauer describes the Missouri war ending at Far West, where Smith told the Saints, “I shall offer myself up as a sacrifice to save your lives and save the Church” [Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, #68073, Part II]. At Nauvoo Smith was mayor and lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion. In June 1844 dissidents printed the Nauvoo Expositor, which exposed secret polygamy and the teaching that men may become gods. The city council ordered the press destroyed, and Smith declared martial law. Jailed at Carthage on a treason charge, he and Hyrum were killed by a mob on 27 June 1844 [Wikipedia: Nauvoo Expositor]. Krakauer describes the exodus that followed: more than six hundred Saints died in the first winter after leaving Nauvoo, and “Brigham proved to be a masterful manager of men” [Krakauer, #68073, Part III].

Deseret, the Utah War and Mountain Meadows

In Utah, Krakauer writes, Brigham Young built “a legal system of their own singular design” that ensured God’s law prevailed. The Mormon legislature expanded the powers of probate courts, mostly run by bishops, “thereby usurping the jurisdiction of the federal government” [Krakauer, #68073, Part III]. Krakauer, following Will Bagley, presents President Buchanan’s decision as partly a political diversion from slavery, citing Robert Tyler’s advice to “supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade”. “Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched” a replacement governor escorted by “twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers” [Krakauer, #68073, Part III]. Young’s response was to stockpile arms, drill the Nauvoo Legion and, in Bagley’s words, try “to rally Utah’s Indians to the Mormon cause”, in the belief that the Lamanites would join the Saints “to vanquish the Gentiles” as the Book of Mormon foretold [Krakauer, #68073, Part III].

Into this atmosphere came the Baker–Fancher wagon train from Arkansas, about 140 people. It was attacked at Mountain Meadow on 7 September 1857 by Paiutes and by “Mormons from nearby settlements who had simply painted their faces to look like Indians”, commanded by John D. Lee. On 11 September Lee offered a false truce under a white flag. Once the emigrants were disarmed, Major Higbee ordered “Halt!… Do your duty!” and each guard shot his captive. “The slaughter was over in a matter of minutes, leaving an estimated 120 emigrants dead”; only seventeen children aged five or under were spared [Krakauer, #68073, Part III, chs. 18–19]. Krakauer records the dispute over responsibility as the participants themselves voiced it. Haight told Colonel Dame, “You ordered it done”. Lee later wrote, “I was guided in all that I did which is called criminal, by the orders of the leaders” of the church. Young eventually stopped blaming the Indians and offered “his adopted son as a scapegoat”. Lee was tried before an all-Mormon jury screened by the First Presidency and was shot on the meadow on 23 March 1877, declaring, “A victim must be had, and I am the victim” [Krakauer, #68073, Part III]. Tandin, writing from Romania, simply repeats Lee’s claim that the Mormons acted “on the order of Brigham Young” [Tandin, Secte criminale, #23557]. Krakauer also notes that modern forgers targeted this history: Mark Hofmann, an atheist ex-missionary, produced forgeries “intended to discredit Joseph Smith”, and more than four hundred of them were bought by the LDS church [Krakauer, #68073].

Plural marriage: from secret to doctrine to Manifesto

Krakauer’s account of the private beginnings centres on Fanny Alger. She entered the Smith household in Kirtland as a servant “by the winter of 1833, when Fanny was sixteen”, until Emma “discovered Joseph and Fanny flagrante delicto” and expelled her in 1835 [Krakauer, #68073, Part II]. The revelation on celestial marriage was dated 12 July 1843 and shown to a small inner circle, and Emma was “foremost among those who objected” [Krakauer, #68073]. Loue gives the formal history: “In 1852, Brigham Young announced that plural marriage would be the official doctrine of the Church”. She quotes Young that God introduced it “for the express purpose of raising up to His name a royal Priesthood, a peculiar people”, and “if any of you will deny the plurality of wives… you will be damned” [Loue, Sexual Partnering, #32580, ch. 2].

The sources disagree on the numbers:

Federal pressure ended open polygamy. Krakauer reports John Taylor’s 1880 defiance: “I defy the United States; I will obey God”. Then came the Edmunds Act (1882), with some one thousand Saints jailed in “cohab hunts”, the Edmunds–Tucker Act (1887), and the 1890 Supreme Court ruling that allowed church property to be seized. Wilford Woodruff, after a night in which he “struggled all night with the Lord”, issued the Manifesto of 6 October 1890: “my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land” [Krakauer, #68073, Part III ch. 20]. Parson calls it the price of “a quest for statehood”, which Utah achieved in 1896 [Parson, Polygamy, Women, and Higher Education, #74491, ch. 2]. Loue adds that Utah wrote a ban into its constitution “in exchange for Utah’s statehood”. Because secret plural marriages continued, Congress in 1904 refused Senator Reed Smoot his seat until a Second Manifesto was issued [Loue, #32580].

Cosmology and modern political weight

LDS cosmology differs sharply from Nicene Christianity. Musser describes the expectation that the faithful “become joint heirs of God with Jesus Christ, being able to rule and reign in their own worlds as gods and goddesses” [Musser & Cook, #66381]. Issitt and Main describe couples who “continue to have ‘spirit children’ after death while residing in one of the three cosmic kingdoms of the Mormon afterlife”, and say plural marriage was promoted “as a way of building their numbers” [Main & Issitt, Hidden Religion, #66220]. Willis cites the church’s reply to Broadway satire, that “the expectation of exaltation is more figurative and ambiguous than boiling it down to living on one planet” [Willis, #63203]. On race, Krakauer notes that Young made Utah a slave territory and that Black men were barred from the priesthood until Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation [Krakauer, #68073]. Issitt and Main see “the Mormon focus on family values” as the bridge to “other conservative Christian sects” [Main & Issitt, #66220]. Willis records both views: evangelical critics who call the church “a dangerous cult”, and Palmyra townspeople “unanimous in their praise” of Mormon visitors [Willis, #63203].

Key points

• The LDS story runs from the 1820 First Vision through Moroni and the plates to the church’s founding in 1830. The Book of Mormon tells of Israelite migrants, Christ’s appearance in the New World and the Nephites’ destruction [Willis, #63203; Van Voorst, #63227; Musser, #66381].
• Critics from Campbell to Tandin read the book as a reworking of the Bible and of contemporary ideas, and Issitt and Main note the archaeological problems [Willis, #63203; Tandin, #23557; Main & Issitt, #66220].
• Levenda links Smith’s 1842 Masonic initiation and the Royal Arch parallels in the endowment to the 1826 Morgan affair and the Anti-Masonic Party [Levenda, #64792].
• Mormonism was a political kingdom from the start: Zion, the Nauvoo Legion, the Expositor affair, Smith’s murder in 1844, and Deseret’s bishop-run courts [Wikipedia: Nauvoo Expositor; Krakauer, #68073].
• The 1857 Utah War and the Mountain Meadows massacre (about 120 dead) raise the question of the hierarchy’s responsibility, which Krakauer presses and Lee’s last words dramatise [Krakauer, #68073].
• Plural marriage began privately and became public doctrine in 1852. Counts of Smith’s wives range from about 30 to 50 depending on the source [Krakauer, #68073; Loue, #32580; Tandin, #23557; Wikipedia].
• The 1890 Manifesto and 1896 statehood were a negotiated political settlement, and the Smoot hearings exposed continued secret practice [Krakauer, #68073; Loue, #32580; Parson, #74491].