American Crucifixion (4 page)

Nor was meeting Jesus a unique occurrence in that time and place. Sixteen-year-old Elias Smith (no relation to Joseph) met “the Lamb upon Mt. Sion” in the woods near his Woodstock, Vermont, home. John Thompson, a teacher at Palmyra Academy, saw Christ descend from the sky “in a glare of brightness exceeding tenfold the brilliancy of the meridian Sun.” Pamphleteer Asa Wild of Amsterdam, New York, spoke with “the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah” and learned “that every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt,” news akin to the divine message received by Joseph Smith.

As Joseph matured into his middle and late teens, his religious curiosity melded with a collection of hobbies that became his vocation: dowsing, gold digging, treasure hunting, and “scrying.” These pursuits were related, and all semilegitimate at the time. A dowser looks for underground water aquifers, often using the tools of superstition, for example, a branch from a witch hazel tree. A talented dowser or treasure hunter might stare through a translucent rock, or peep stone, to identify underground pockets of water, or hidden Indian relics, or buried gold. Staring through the peep stone was scrying, from the word
descry,
meaning to perceive or reveal.

As a teenager, Joseph gained a reputation as someone with reliable powers of necromancy and intuition. Impressed by his talent, a local farmer hired Joseph to travel with him to Pennsylvania to search for a lost Spanish silver mine. In Harmony, Pennsylvania, Joseph and his employer boarded for a few weeks with a famous hunter named Isaac Hale. Smith and Hale never hit it off. Hale reviled the money-digging expedition, describing his lodger as “a careless young man—not very well educated and saucy and insolent.” Hale’s recollection was doubtless colored by Joseph’s abduction of his tall, attractive daughter Emma. The young couple fell in love and fled Harmony to secretly marry in New York and live with Joseph’s family.

A few months before Joseph’s eighteenth birthday, the parallel strands of his life—his religious bent and his relentless search for treasure—came together. As he later explained, an angel named Moroni, “glorious beyond description,” cloaked in “a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness,” appeared to him one night and told him where to find a book, “written upon gold plates . . . giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent [with] the fullness of the everlasting Gospel contained in it.” This was the Book of Mormon, which Joseph would have to translate using two seer stones, like peep stones, that Moroni said he would find buried with the golden tablets.

Joseph and the angel Moroni meeting in the woods.

Sure enough, Joseph found a box with the tablets and the translating device, known as the Urim and Thummim, in a trench on the hill Cumorah, just south of Palmyra. Joseph, and Joseph alone, touched the uncovered tablets and saw the “reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphs imprinted on them. He assured Emma that it would be certain death for her or other family members to see them. Nonetheless, Emma was allowed to participate, as his first scribe, or recorder. Joseph described himself as “unlearned,” and he never claimed to have translated the sacred text. The text came from God, speaking through Joseph while he stared at the hidden plates, wrapped in a tablecloth. Sometimes he read the revealed text from the Urim and Thummim, placed in a hat.

At first, Emma took dictation in their tiny home. But a prosperous local convert, Martin Harris, soon supplanted her, separated from Joseph by a blanket suspended from a string. A schoolteacher convert named Oliver Cowdery eventually joined them. Although Harris and Cowdery would swear to be original “witnesses” of the Book of Mormon, they claimed to have been shown the gold plates in an angelic vision, not by Joseph. When he had completed the translation, Joseph explained that Moroni had taken the plates back to heaven.

Joseph’s “golden bible” first came off the printing press in 1830, six hundred pages long. In prose redolent of the popular King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon related a tale omitted from the Old and New Testaments, the story of the 1,000-year conflict between two tribes of ancient Israel, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The two tribes had relocated to the American continent. The Nephites struggled to walk in the way of the Lord; the idolatrous Lamanites, less so. After centuries of near-constant warfare, a vast army of Lamanites exterminated the Nephites at the final battle of Cumorah. Tens of thousands died, but the Nephite leader, whose name was Mormon, and his son Moroni survived. Knowing he was to be killed, Mormon handed the golden plates, with the record of their righteous but doomed civilization, to Moroni, who expanded on the account, added commentary, and buried the tablets in hopes of a future discovery. When Joseph unearthed them, history was fulfilled.

The Book of Mormon caught on slowly at first. It made few claims as a literary work, with wooden and oft-repetitive prose, starting almost every other paragraph with the stock phrase, “It came to pass. . . .” If Joseph Smith had left out that one phrase, Mark Twain noted, “his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” Twain had little use for Joseph’s creation, which he called a “curiosity . . . stupid and tiresome to read. It’s smooched from the New Testament and no credit given. It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.”

But the text transported the Bible story onto the American continent, reassuring its readers that they, too lived in a Holy Land. The Lamanites lived on, Joseph preached, as American aborigines, or Native Americans. Ever hopeful of converting the ancient Lamanites and restoring them to primacy on the American continent, the Mormons generally treated the Indians with respect, far from the norm on the Mississippi frontier, or anywhere else in the country.

In the Book of Mormon, Jesus visits America after his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples in Jerusalem, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.” He repeats these words, and a great deal of other New Testament scripture, in two sermons to the Nephites at Bountiful, an ancient city somewhere in the Americas.

The Book of Mormon offered proof that God was speaking to nineteenth-century Americans through his prophet Joseph Smith. While Smith and Cowdery were taking a break from translating, the two men said they encountered John the Baptist when walking in the woods alongside the Susquehanna River in Harmony. John said he would confer the power of the Old Testament priesthood upon the two men, allowing them to baptize converts. John asked them to baptize each other, and they did. Two weeks after the Book of Mormon was published, Joseph announced to his tiny flock, primarily close friends and family members, that he had assumed the title “Seer, a Translator, a Prophet, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, and Elder of the Church through the will of God the Father, and the grace of your Lord Jesus Christ” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). On April 6, 1830, he announced the formation of the Church of Christ, which grew within a few weeks to forty members. Converts came from evangelical Methodism, and from the followers of evangelist Alexander Campbell, who, like Joseph, was preaching a primitive Christianity, calling for a restoration of Christ’s church on earth, in anticipation of the Second Coming.

In a series of revelations, Joseph began to assemble a rudimentary theology. Men could aspire to two successive levels of priesthood, or holy rank. Women could not. The church would be a lay church, administered by male members. There would be no professional clergy. Like many evangelical Christians, the Mormons believed they were living in the latter days of history, before the return of Christ. History was thought to be 6,000 years old, with each millennium corresponding to one day of the Genesis creation story. The upcoming seventh millennium, due in 1900, would be the “day of rest,” that is, the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. In 1835, Joseph offhandedly remarked that “fifty-six years should wind up the scene,” implying that Christ would return to earth in 1891. The New Testament often called Christ’s followers “saints,” and Smith quickly adopted other biblical titles for his co-religionists. His lay leaders became deacons, elders, and bishops, and he eventually appointed twelve apostles from among his most loyal followers.

In its formative years, Joseph’s church tried to distinguish itself from the roiling flotsam of wild religious euphoria sweeping the nation. Unlike many of the fiery, condemnatory evangelical creeds, his church promised near-universal salvation and taught that mortal sins are not punished forever. All persons, except a very few “sons of perdition,” could expect eternal life in one of three degrees of glory: the celestial, terrestrial, or “telestial” kingdoms. Telestial was a neologism coined for the part of heaven reserved for Gentiles and other nonbelievers.

The Saints helped the Saints; that was a core tenet of Joseph’s religion. In response to a revelation concerning Enoch, a grandson of Adam and Eve, Joseph encouraged his flock to “consecrate” all their property to the church, which in turn redistributed the collective wealth to families in need. This was pure communism, and it benefited many Mormons who followed Joseph to his first religious base in Kirtland, Ohio, having left their belongings behind them. By 1844, in Nauvoo—Joseph’s “Zion” on the banks of the Mississippi—Joseph had abandoned the law of consecration but had substituted tithing in its place. Observant Mormons agreed to donate one-tenth of their goods or services to the bishop’s storehouse for redistribution to the needy. Joseph often staked newly arrived families to (cramped) living quarters, a house plot, a larder full of supplies, or a portion of a working garden. Converts understood that their fellow Mormons would help them get on their feet, which partially explained the Saints’ missionary successes.

By 1844, at least 25,000 men and women in America and Europe had joined Joseph’s church, just fourteen years after its founding. Over 10,000 of them migrated to Nauvoo. Between 2,000 and 3,000 of them braved an Atlantic crossing and then journeyed 850 miles from New Orleans up the Mississippi to gather with their fellow Saints. Joseph’s outriders were fabulously successful in recruiting converts to the new religion, especially in the poverty-stricken industrial cities of the British Isles.

The church was very much a work in progress, and many of its core rituals and beliefs, such as the multilayered Mormon heaven, polygamy, the multiplicity of gods, and the baptism of the dead, emerged in the early 1840s. Joseph’s early followers were asked to believe that the Book of Mormon was the true word of God, and that Joseph was a true prophet. Dozens, and then hundreds, and by 1844, many thousands of men and women believed just that.

PEOPLE FOLLOWED JOSEPH SMITH PARTLY BECAUSE GOD TALKED to Joseph, but also because Joseph talked to them. He didn’t claim to be a full-time preacher; “A prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such,” he told two Saints visiting Illinois from Michigan. When off duty, as it were, he generally acted like a charming and gregarious mayor and innkeeper, just two of the many roles he played in Nauvoo, “the city of Joseph.”

When Brigham Young and his brother Joseph traveled 325 miles to meet Joseph Smith, they expected “to find him in his sanctum dispensing spiritual blessings and directions [about] how to build the Zion of God on earth,” Joseph Young reported. Instead, they found Smith in the forest, chopping wood. The men shook hands, then all of them chopped and loaded wood together.

According to another story, when Joseph first arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, he had no place to stay. So he directed his sleigh to the front door of a general store owned by two Saints, whom he knew only by name. Joseph bounded up the front steps and thrust his hand across the store counter.

“Newel K. Whitney! Thou art the man!” he shouted, as if he had known Whitney all his life.

“You have the advantage of me,” the bemused Whitney replied. “I could not call you by name, as you have me.”

“I am Joseph, the Prophet,” said the smiling stranger. “You’ve prayed me here; now what do you want of me?”