American Crucifixion (13 page)

Egged on by local speculators, Joseph plunged the Saints into another dubious investment scheme that would have dire consequences for the Mormons. As happened several times during his stay in Illinois, Joseph befriended a lawyer who helped him out of a jam. In 1841, Calvin Warren, aided by a silver-tongued attorney named Orville H. Browning, managed to free Joseph from a Missouri arrest warrant served in Illinois. (The judge who released Joseph was a rising star in Illinois politics, Stephen Douglas. Smith befriended him, too.)

After Warren collected his substantial $250 fee, he pitched Joseph a real estate deal: Warren’s friend Mark Aldrich, one of the four original developers of Warsaw, owned a mile-square tract of land south of the city ideal for Mormon settlement. Aldrich and Warren, working with Brigham Young and Willard Richards, arranged for 204 Mormon immigrants to settle on lots in a new town to be called Warren. Editor Sharp, normally a booster of all things Warsaw, couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a poke at Smith. His newspaper had been running a series of articles written by a former resident of Palmyra, New York, detailing Joseph’s inglorious past as a treasure hunter—a “money-digger,” Sharp called him. “We have not heard what name Joe intends to give to the new city,” the Warsaw
Signal
opined, “but we would call it ‘MONEY-DIGGERSVILLE’—quite a mouthful, but still symphonious.” Sharp loved to accuse the Mormons of questionable business practices and outright thievery. With wagonloads of “red-hot Mormons” closing in on Warsaw, he predicted, the price of locks for doors and windows would skyrocket.

When the British Mormon leader Joseph Fielding settled his flock in Warren, problems arose. He reported that Aldrich and Warren’s partner was price gouging the Saints on flour sales, even selling them mill sweepings at exorbitant markups. The rents were rising even as the Saints were moving in, and the Mormons were forbidden from collecting wood in the area. When Joseph heard the complaints, he immediately recalled the English Saints to Nauvoo. Not long after, Aldrich and Warren demanded an audience with the Prophet, and laid out their case. Warren said he would go broke if the Saints backed out of the deal and offered “liberal benefits” to lure the Mormons back. But Joseph responded with a tirade, damning Warsaw and its noxious citizens to hell. “I prophesied in the name of the Lord, that the first thing toward building up Warsaw was to break it down, to break down them that are there,” Joseph thundered, “and to let Sharp publish what he pleases and go to the devil, and the more lies he prints the sooner he will get through.” He predicted that Warsaw would never prosper until “capitalists from the Eastern States, say from Pennsylvania” introduced rational business practices to the downstate backwater. Perhaps his remarks were calculated to offend. Southern Illinois residents despised Yankee meddlers of all stripes and colors.

As a result of the Warren debacle, both Aldrich and attorney Warren declared bankruptcy. (Warren was a bankruptcy specialist, whom Joseph had retained in an earlier, unsuccessful effort to make his general store’s indebtedness disappear.) But both men would be heard from again, as stalwart, fanatical Joseph Smith–haters who changed the course of Mormon history.

That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another.

IN 1830, MARY ELIZABETH ROLLINS WAS A PRETTY, PRECOCIOUS twelve-year-old girl living with her aunt and uncle in Kirtland, Ohio. Her father had perished in a shipwreck on Lake Ontario when she was two years old. Mary and her mother went to live with her uncle Sidney Gilbert, an early convert to Joseph Smith’s new religion. Soon the mother and daughter became Saints, baptized in a stream near their home.

Visiting a neighbor’s house, Mary spotted a rare Book of Mormon. Only a few hundred copies had been printed, mostly reserved for the use of missionaries wending their way around the northeastern United States. Mary begged to borrow the book for an evening. In her autobiography, she reported that she and the Gilberts savored the “Golden Bible” until late at night. She woke up early and memorized the first verse of Nephi, the first book in the Mormon bible: “I, Nephi, have been born of goodly parents. . . .”

When she returned the book early the next morning, her neighbor chided her. “I guess you did not read much in it.”

“Actually, I read quite a lot,” she insisted.

“I don’t believe you can tell me one word of it,” the skeptical man replied.

“I then repeated the first verse, also the outlines of the history of Nephi,” Mary remembered.

“Child, take this book home and finish it,” her neighbor replied. “I can wait.”

Soon afterward, Joseph Smith himself settled in Kirtland and paid a call on the Gilberts. He spotted the Book of Mormon and asked who had been reading it. Everyone, the Gilberts replied, even our twelve-year-old niece.

“Where is your niece?” Joseph asked.

“I was sent for,” Mary later wrote, “and when he saw me, he looked at me so earnestly, I felt almost afraid and I thought, ‘He can read my every thought,’ and I thought how blue his eyes were. After a moment he came and put his hands on my head and gave me a great Blessing and made me a present of the Book.”

Just a few days later Mary and her mother attended an evening prayer gathering with other Saints at Joseph’s house. Mary watched the proceedings from a corner, sitting on a plank suspended between two boxes. After some prayers and hymn-singing, Smith suddenly froze.

“His countenance Shone,” Mary recalled, and seemed almost transparent.

It seems as though the solemnity of Eternity rested upon all of us. He seemed almost transfixed, he was looking ahead and his face outshone the candle which was on a shelf just behind him. He looked as though a searchlight was inside his face and shining through every pore. I could not take my eyes from his face.

“Who do you suppose has been in your midst this night?” Smith asked.

“An angel?” one of the faithful suggested.

Then Martin Harris, who financed the printing of the Book of Mormon, prostrated himself in front of Joseph, grabbing the Prophet’s leg. “I know,” Harris said. “Jesus Christ was here.”

“That is right,” Smith testified, “Brethren, our Saviour has been in Your Midst, and talked with me face to face.

He has commanded me to seal you up unto Everlasting life, and he has given you

to be with me, in his kingdom, even as he is in the Father’s kingdom. And he has commanded me to say unto you, that when you are tempted of Satan, to say get thee behind me Satan, for my salvation is secure.

“I felt he was talking to the Lord and the power rested upon us all,” Mary wrote.

Mary Rollins’s life continued to be eventful. Possessed of the gift of tongues, she sometimes interpreted Indian languages and even engaged in religious prophecy, which occasionally set her at odds with her Mormon elders. She was a talented seamstress. When she and the Gilberts followed the Saints to Missouri, the newly elected lieutenant governor, Lilburn Boggs, asked her to help tailor a formal suit for his inauguration. Impressed by Mary and her work, Boggs tried to convince her to leave the church and join his family. Four years later, Boggs would issue the Extermination Order that would send Mary and thousands of Saints fleeing for their lives across the frozen Mississippi river.

In 1839, Mary, her Gentile husband, Adam Lightner, and their two young children did indeed flee Missouri and settle not far from Nauvoo. Lightner suffered business reverses and had trouble earning a living. Mary taught art to young children, including to Joseph Smith’s adopted daughter Julia. She was living with her family in a tiny dwelling near the Nauvoo Mansion when Smith first asked her to marry him in early 1842.

Mary was twenty-three years old, married, and pregnant with her third child. Joseph was thirty-six years old, the father of four children and, unbeknownst to Mary and almost every other member of his church, was husband to eight wives, including Emma, the mother of his children.

Joseph explained to Mary, as he would to many other women, that an angel of the Lord had revealed the doctrine of plural marriage to him three times since 1834. Naturally, he had at first found the teaching shocking and repugnant. On the final visit, the angel, brandishing a sword, “said I was to obey that principle or he would slay me.”

Joseph told Mary that the two of them had already been together, that “I was created for him before the foundation of the Earth was laid.” He further explained—and he would repeat this to many women—that God had granted him eternal life. “I know that I shall be saved in the Kingdom of God,” he said. “I have the oath of God upon it and God cannot lie.” Furthermore, his wives and children would be granted salvation with him at the end of time.

Mary worshipped the Prophet, but she had doubts about this new revelation. If you saw an angel, she asked, why didn’t I? And how do you know the angel came from heaven? Perhaps Satan sent one of
his
angels? Mary said she would accept this new teaching only if an angel came to
her
. That will doubtless happen, Joseph said. And in the meantime, please don’t repeat this conversation to anyone.

I wouldn’t dream of it, Mary answered: “I shall never tell a mortal I had such a talk from a married man!”

Mary prayed as Joseph counseled her, and one night, she reported that “a Personage stood in front of the Bed looking at me.

Its clothes were whiter than anything I had ever seen, I could look at its Person, but when I saw its face so bright, and more beautiful than any Earthly Being Could be, and those eyes pearcing me through, and through, I could not endure it, it seemed as if I must die with fear, I fell back in Bed and Covered up my head.

Mary shared the bedroom with her mother and her aunt, who also saw “a figure in white robes pass from our bed to my mother’s bed and pass out of the window.”

This was the sign, Mary concluded. In February 1842, on the second floor of Smith’s redbrick general store, Brigham Young sealed Mary and Joseph as husband and wife for “time, and all Eternity.” She was told to remain married to Adam Lightner, who was out of town on business.

SECURE ATOP HIS INDEPENDENT CITY-STATE, JOSEPH SMITH WAS boldly re-creating the Mormon religion. He had introduced the doctrine of baptism of the dead, ensuring that the Saints’ forbears—and ultimately the nations of Gentiles—would be prepared to greet Jesus Christ in the glory of the Second Coming. He had refined and formalized the endowment ritual required for men and women to enter the Mormon priesthood, borrowing heavily from his new enthusiasm for Freemasonry. The King Follett sermon shook the theological foundations of his own church, announcing the doctrine of plural gods, and of the humanity of the Christian God. But the most controversial new teaching, which Smith insisted was a very old teaching, firmly rooted in the Old Testament experience, was polygamy, the doctrine of plural wives.

From the moment he received his first revelation, Joseph never wavered from his insistence that Mormonism was a
restoration
of the original church of Jesus Christ, and of the Old Testament prophets. Thus Joseph styled himself to be a prophet, aided on earth by twelve apostles. All Old and New Testament teachings, along with the Book of Mormon, were true, Joseph said. According to him, the established churches had distorted and polluted God’s messages over time. Joseph knew the Bible backward and forward and often mentioned the multiple wives of such Old Testament figures as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David. The great Hebrew king was said to have had over twenty wives and concubines, and his son Solomon had “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines,” according to 1 Kings 11:3. In the original polygamy revelation of 1831, God reminded Smith that “David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants . . . from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin.” In a separate revelation the same year, God suggested that the Mormons might convert the Native Americans, supposedly descendants of the Book of Mormon’s Lamanites, through polygamous intermarriage:

For it is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and Just, for even now their females are more virtuous than the gentiles.

Although a few Mormons did marry Native American women later in the century, the revelation—which the church never published—went unfulfilled.

Joseph received so many revelations that they inevitably conflicted. The Lord did advise him, just as he had counseled Moses in the Ten Commandments, to “love thy wife with all thy heart, and cleave unto her and none else” (Doctrine and Covenants 42:22). And it could hardly go unnoticed that the Book of Mormon, which Joseph compiled before 1831, condemned polygamy, in two passages from the Book of Jacob. The dissolute Nephites