American Crucifixion (3 page)

Smith was a gregarious, articulate man, six feet tall and solidly built, with a long nose, a slightly receding hairline, and riveting blue eyes. He had a chipped front tooth, and sometimes a slight whistle crept into his speech. Like the barely noticeable verbal fluting, Joseph also had a hard-to-detect limp, the vestige of a grisly childhood leg operation. An innovative surgeon removed nine infected bone fragments from the seven-year-old Joseph’s lower leg, without benefit of anesthesia. The normal treatment for serious bone abscesses was amputation, which Joseph refused.

Essentially unlettered, he was a charismatic speaker capable of exerting extraordinary suasion on his audiences. Brigham Young proclaimed himself mesmerized when he first heard Joseph preach. “He took heaven, figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth” was Young’s famous observation. Joseph taught that a restoration of Bible times was happening
now
, in nineteenth-century North America, and that his adherents were saints, as Luke and Paul called Jesus’s followers in the New Testament.

Joseph hadn’t limited himself to transcribing the wondrous Book of Mormon. He likewise undertook to retranslate the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, adding or expunging passages that he deemed to have been mistranslated or suppressed by corrupt church fathers. (He deleted the Song of Solomon, dismissing the sensuous text as “not Inspired Writing.”) Most notably, Smith added fourteen chapters to the Book of Genesis, and wrote himself into the narrative:

A seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins . . . bringing them to a knowledge of their fathers in the latter days; and also to the knowledge of my covenants, saith the Lord.

And that seer will I bless, and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded . . . and his name shall be called Joseph.

If Smith indulged in megalomania, he came by it honestly. From his humble beginnings as a diviner and scryer—a person who sees miraculous occurrences through translucent “seer” stones—in upstate New York, he had accomplished the work of several lifetimes. There were plenty of millenarian preachers with apocalyptic scenarios spinning their tales in northern New York’s “burned-over district” when Smith launched his career. Charles Grandison Finney, who became one of Smith’s detractors, claimed to have entertained Jesus Christ in his law office. The Campbellites, the Millerites, the Rappites; by 1844, they were mostly forgotten. “I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam,” Smith bragged to his followers just a month before this parlous river crossing. “A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.”

Increasingly alienated from the US government, Smith now envisioned himself as the spiritual monarch of his putative Kingdom of God. “I am above the kingdoms of the world, I have no laws,” he said. A devoted follower of Jesus Christ, Smith had been comparing himself to Mohammed, the warrior-prophet of Islam. To the world, Smith’s recently announced campaign for the US presidency seemed quixotic at best. But not to Joseph. “When I look into the Eastern papers and see how popular I am, I am afraid I shall be President,” he proclaimed.

FOR THE SEVENTH TIME IN HIS SHORT LIFE, SMITH WAS FLEEING justice. He had been tarred and feathered, tried, jailed, and exiled. A furious mob in Hiram, Ohio, once ordered Dr. Dennison, a local doctor, to castrate him. But Dennison, who by coincidence had attended baby Joseph’s delivery into the world in Vermont, couldn’t bring himself to do it. A virulent Mormon-hater, Dennison did try to force a vial of deadly nitric acid down Joseph’s throat. That explained the broken tooth, sheared off in Dennison’s botched murder attempt. Joseph was once condemned to death and saved by a militia commander who refused to carry out the spurious execution order.

Joseph and his people were no strangers to biblical flights. They escaped their first settlement in Ohio just ahead of furious citizens who had lost money in a dubious Mormon banking venture. Reestablished in Missouri, the Mormons were chased eastward across the Mississippi in the winter of 1838, into Illinois. Just four years later, Joseph was on the run again from Missouri lawmen, hiding on the Mississippi shoreline and spending many nights in leaky skiffs much like the one he was now riding through the summer storm.

After each setback, Smith successfully led his flock to a new town, to a new state, to new strengths and to greater prosperity. The Mormons’ theology, which places Smith’s revelations on an equal footing with the Bible, was controversial, but their social ethic was not. Firmly committed to their co-religionists and to their families, the Mormons embraced hard work. One of their symbols, borrowed from Freemasonry, was the beehive. They endured unimaginable hardships and thrived wherever they put down roots.

Compared with his previous legal scrapes, the most recent charges against Smith must have seemed innocuous. Three weeks before this flight to Iowa, a Carthage magistrate accused the Smith brothers of inciting a riot, and of breaching the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Smith had indeed demanded the destruction of Nauvoo’s sole opposition newspaper, the
Expositor,
at a public meeting, calling the broadsheet “a greater nuisance than a dead carcass.” As mayor, he ordered the city marshal to destroy the paper’s printing press, and as Lieutenant General Smith, he instructed the Nauvoo Legion to help. Illinois governor Thomas Ford, who fancied himself a skillful intermediary between the politically powerful Mormons and their many enemies in the state, had promised Smith safe passage to Carthage. But Joseph feared the shadowy, marauding Illinois militiamen who despised the Mormon religion, hated the Saints’ anti-slavery politics, reviled them as Indian lovers, and equated polygamy with orgiastic excess.

Just a few days earlier, Smith’s mortal enemy, the firebrand newspaper editor Thomas Sharp, wrote that “we would not be surprised to hear of [Smith’s] death by violent means in a short time. He has deadly enemies—men whose wrongs have maddened them—and who are prepared at all times to avenge themselves.”

Pitching to and fro on the stormy waves, peering westward to discern the far bank, Joseph believed that he was fleeing for his life. He was right.

PART ONE

This Joe Smith must be set down as an extraordinary character, a prophet-hero, as Carlyle might call him. It is no small thing, in the blaze of this nineteenth century, to give to men a new revelation, found a new religion, establish new forms of worship, to build a city, and make proselytes in two hemispheres. Yet all this has been done by Joe Smith, and that against every sort of opposition, ridicule and persecution.

JOSEPH SMITH IN 1844 WAS A MAN AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS powers. He was a national celebrity, perhaps more notorious than famous, but a figure of renown nonetheless. Ten years earlier, Ohio newspaper editor Eber Howe dredged up rumors, innuendos, wild stories, and half truths—a half truth is half true, remember—about Joseph’s early years as a prophet in upstate New York and published them in
Mormonism Unvailed.
The book, which found a wide audience, portrayed Joseph as a cynical and unscrupulous treasure hunter who had plagiarized the Book of Mormon from a rival divine and published it in 1830. Damningly, Howe included an affidavit from Joseph’s father-in-law, who “considered the whole of it,” meaning the Book of Mormon, “a delusion, and advised them to abandon it.”

In 1842, Smith’s former first counselor and apostate extraordinaire, John C. Bennett, published
The History of the Saints: or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism
, filled with lurid tales of plural wifery, killing, and blasphemy, all of it laid at the feet of “Holy Joe, and his Danite band of murderers.” But Smith was a hard man to bring down. By the spring of 1844, Bennett was back at work on the poultry essays that would gain him some culinary fame—he was a determined champion of the Plymouth Rock hen—and Joseph was ruling a city of 10,000 people and corresponding with the rulers of France, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States.

Joseph Smith had been tested, and he had prevailed. In the spring of 1844, he delivered a sermon at an outdoor stand before an audience of several thousand Saints. He called out his detractors: “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 ever any man had.”

JOSEPH SMITH WAS BORN INTO A HUMBLE FARMING FAMILY IN Sharon, Vermont, in 1805. Crop failures and business reverses plunged the Smiths into debt, and Joseph Smith Sr. took his wife and four children westward to Palmyra, New York, to make a new start. Life was better there. Everyone in the family worked, either clearing land, sewing small baskets for sale, planting corn, or baking cakes to sell to travelers navigating the nearby Erie Canal. Several hostile memoirists berate young Joseph as an idler, but it is hard to imagine that anyone could have been idle in a family now numbering eight, struggling to survive on newly cleared land purchased with loans the Smiths could barely afford.

Joseph embarked on his unusual religious inquiries when he was barely an adolescent. Although the details of his meetings with angels and heavenly spirits changed considerably over the years, the core story remained the same. As a young boy, he said, he had noticed the multiplicity of churches. In tiny Palmyra alone, there were four denominations—Presbyterian, Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist. Joseph said he asked in private prayer,
Which religion is true?
The answer came when he was fourteen. Jesus Christ and his Heavenly Father appeared to him in a vision and promised to explain the tenets of true belief.

Encounters with the godhead were not rare in early nineteenth-century America, and they were not so uncommon in western New York. America was experiencing the Second Great Awakening, a breakout period of radical, passionate rethinking of traditional Christian worship. The twenty-four United States had reinvented the Old World, and American ministers and prophets were revivifying the old religions. The energy and novelty of the New World prompted many to dream of a radical new world order, highlighted by the Second Coming of Christ. New doctrine was everywhere. Ann Lee’s Shakers had established a Lake Ontario beachhead just thirty miles from the Smiths’ Palmyra home. The Shakers danced feverishly, practiced celibacy, and worshipped Lee as the reincarnation of Christ. Just twenty-five miles to the south, another striking woman, Jemima Wilkinson, claimed to be the risen Christ. Although she could neither read nor write, Wilkinson recited the Bible by heart, occasionally aided by her sidekick, Elijah. The Baptist farmer William Miller had plenty of followers in northwestern New York, which became known as the “burned-over district” because the hot fires of religious revivalism swept through so often. (“A mad mix of doctrines and preachers,” critic Harold Bloom has called it.) Miller predicted that Jesus would return to America in 1843, then revamped his prediction to 1844, and so on.