American Crucifixion (5 page)

Joseph ended up lodging with the Whitneys for several weeks, and the family remained devoted to him for the rest of their lives. They followed Joseph west to Nauvoo, where Newell became a bishop. His daughter Sarah Ann, who was six years old when Joseph came bounding up her father’s steps, would eventually become Joseph Smith’s sixteenth wife. She was “the first woman ever given in plural marriage by or with the consent of both parents,” according to her mother.

A glance at Joseph’s diary for February 20, 1843, provides a window into his variegated life. He spent some of that morning drawing, and sawing, chopping and splitting wood with “about 70 of the brethren” who were tithing their services to the Prophet. “The day was spent by them in much pleasantry, good humor, and feeling,” he reported. The snow had melted, so no one could go sledding.

Then Joseph devoted two hours to “reciting in German” before he oversaw Nauvoo court proceedings in the upstairs office of his redbrick store. Joseph was both mayor and chief justice in Nauvoo. There was a lawsuit to adjudicate, and a theft. While supervising the court, Joseph looked out the window and spotted two boys fighting with clubs in front of a nearby tavern. “The Mayor saw it and ran over immediately,” his journal records, “caught one of the boys and stopped him and then the other.” Joseph chided the bystanders for not breaking up the fight, and then walked back to his store. His final message to the two young miscreants: “No body is allowed to fight in this city but me.”

Not everyone succumbed to Joseph’s bumptious self-absorption. “His whole theme was himself,” reported Pittsburgh editor David White, who visited Joseph at the Nauvoo Mansion in 1843: “The prophet ran on, talking incessantly.” That same year, Charlotte Haven, a young Gentile woman from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attended one of Joseph’s speeches. She “had expected to be overwhelmed by his discourse” but found him to be “a great egotist and boaster . . . his language and manner were the coarsest possible.” A month later, Charlotte visited the Smiths at home. “He talked incessantly about himself, and remarked that he was ‘a giant, physically and mentally,’” Haven told her mother. “I did not change my opinion about him, but suppose that he has some good traits,” she concluded. “They say he is very kind-hearted, and always ready to give shelter and help to the needy.”

Benjamin Franklin Morris, a Congregationalist minister in nearby Warsaw, Illinois, found Joseph to be both awe-inspiring and detestable. “The power of Smith over his followers is incredible,” he wrote in a letter to his church brethren in New York.

He has unlimited influence and his declarations are as the authority and influence of the world of God itself. He is a complete despot, and does as he pleases with his people.

Some people consider him a great man; I do not. He is not possessed of a single element of greatness, except his greatness in vice and blasphemy. He is a compound of ignorance, vanity, arrogance, coarseness and stupidity and vulgarity.

Joseph had an operatic personality. He embraced and exploited strong confederates, but he could be unsentimental when it came time to discard them. Typically, his anger flared hot and faded quickly; he often welcomed reprobates back into the fold. For instance, it was a major coup when Joseph converted the urbane and erudite Campbellite preacher Sidney Rigdon to his cause, because Rigdon’s entire congregation followed him, doubling the size of Joseph’s tiny church in 1830. Joseph admired Rigdon, famed for his fiery, revivalist preaching, and often deferred to the older man on theological questions or when it came time to deliver an important speech. The two men shared a famous 1832 vision, staring into the sky for over an hour while receiving a revelation of the three-tiered stratification of heaven. But when Rigdon defied him later that summer, Joseph unhesitatingly “disfellowshipped” him as his first counselor in the First Presidency, the church leadership triumvirate. Twenty-two days later, Joseph readmitted Rigdon to the high priesthood, declaring that “he has repented like Peter of old.”

In the early years of the church, almost every one of his close confidants apostasized, usually in a dramatic falling-out with the Prophet. For instance, all three of the original Book of Mormon “witnesses” left the church. Three of the eight additional witnesses recruited by Joseph were also excommunicated. (Three others were family members.) Practically every major church leader, except for Brigham Young, broke with Joseph at one time or another, but, as with Rigdon, Joseph often welcomed them back with open arms. Apostle Orson Hyde was excommunicated in May 1839 and restored to the church in October. When Joseph made advances to Orson Pratt’s wife while his loyal apostle was proselytizing in England, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles excommunicated both Pratts for kicking up a fuss. The church reembraced them a few weeks later.

Joseph was all too human and made few pretensions to the contrary, Brigham Young insisted. “He had all the weaknesses a man could have when the vision was not upon him, when he was left to himself,” Young said. Young urged the Saints to bind themselves to Joseph’s revelatory doctrine, not necessarily to the man:

He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor’s wife every night, run horses and gamble, I do not care anything about that, for I never embrace any man in my faith. But the doctrine he has produced will save you and me and the whole world; and if you can find fault with that, find it.

IN NAUVOO, SMITH COMPLETELY REMADE HIS RELIGION. IN AN 1840 funeral sermon, he announced the new ritual of the baptism of the dead, apparently intended as a response to Paul’s line in 1 Corinthians: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all?” The baptisms started immediately, in the river. “Since this order has been preached here, the waters have been continually troubled,” Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband Heber; “Sometimes from eight to ten Elders in the river at a time baptizing.”

In May 1843, the young Gentile Charlotte Haven reported seeing two elders standing in the icy-cold Mississippi, immersing a crowd of Saints “as fast as they could come down the bank.” A bystander explained the new doctrine to her. “So these poor mortals in ice-cold water were releasing their ancestors and relatives from purgatory!” Haven remarked. “You can imagine our surprise when the name George Washington was called.” Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the deceased explorer Zebulon Pike also found new life in the turbid waters lapping up on Nauvoo. (Washington, along with Christopher Columbus and the signers of the Declaration of Independence, were later rebaptized in Utah.)

Around the time that the mass baptisms were ramping up, Joseph embraced Freemasonry, with a passion. There are plenty of reasons he would have
opposed
Masonry. Upstate New York, where he lived until age twenty-four, was a hotbed of anti-Masonry. The European fraternal order, which had established a beachhead in the New World during the eighteenth century, was widely denounced as a shadowy, atheistic cabal aimed at creating a secret world government. William Morgan, famous for publishing the Masons’ secret codes and rituals in the widely disseminated 1826 book
Illusions of Masonry,
lived in Batavia, New York, and was supposedly drowned by hostile Masons in the Niagara River. (In a curious twist of fate, his widow, Lucinda, became one of Joseph’s first plural wives.) New York even had its own anti-Masonic political party, which fielded a presidential candidate in 1831. The Book of Mormon, wholly composed in upstate New York, repeatedly condemned the “abominations” of secret societies, with “their secret signs and their secret words . . . [that] they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms” (Helaman 6:22).

On the other hand, Joseph’s father and brother Hyrum were Masons, as were several other prominent Saints. It was hard not to notice that almost everyone who was anyone in southwestern Illinois—the lawyers, judges, and leading businessmen—were also Masons. So, with considerable fanfare, Joseph became an entered apprentice mason on March 15, 1842. After obtaining a waiver from the usual twenty-eight-day waiting period, he attained two higher degrees the following day. To celebrate, 3,000 Saints joined Master Mason Joseph Smith in triumphal procession from the redbrick store to the grove at the base of the temple bluff. “Universal satisfaction manifested,” Joseph noted in his personal journal.

Joseph quickly added several hundred Mormons to the Masonic membership rolls, outnumbering and infuriating the other lodges in Illinois. But the Masonic connection left a much more significant mark on Mormonism. Just two months after undergoing the secret Masonic admission rite, Joseph introduced a new, secret “priesthood endowment” ritual that would become mandatory for all male Saints intending to become or remain church members in good standing. In the multipurpose second-floor meeting room above his redbrick store in the center of Nauvoo, Joseph endowed his brother Hyrum, his second counselor William Law, Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, Newell Whitney, Willard Richards, and three other men with the new priesthood powers. The elaborate rite closely resembled the induction ceremony for third-degree masons, which Joseph had undergone just two months previously. “We were washed and anointed,” Brigham Young recalled, “and had our garments placed upon us and received our New Name.”

Then after this we went into the large room over the store in Nauvoo. Joseph divided upon the room the best he could, hung up the veil, marked it, gave us our instructions as we passed along from one department to another, giving us signs, tokens, penalties with the key words pertaining to those signs.

The postulants donned a special white garment that bore the Masonic symbols of the square and compass on the breast, and two symbolic slashes at the abdomen and knee. The slash across the belly represented the disemboweling that would result if anyone betrayed the ritual secrets. Then the candidates witnessed an allegorical play not unlike the Old Testament drama acted out by Masons. The Masons tell the story of a noble architect, Hiram Abiff, who is murdered for refusing to disclose the order’s secret codes and passwords. The Mormons instead acted out the Creation scene from Genesis. In the maiden production for the first endowed priests, Joseph played God, Hyrum acted the part of Christ, and Joseph’s ghostwriter, the former newspaper editor W. W. Phelps, crawled around the store on his stomach, playing the evil serpent. After being expelled from the Garden of Eden, the participants put on tiny aprons, similar to the Masons’, and learned the codes and passwords, called keys and tokens, that would eventually admit them to heaven. Joseph quickly integrated other Masonic symbols, such as the all-seeing eye, into Mormon iconography.

Word soon leaked out that Joseph had adapted and perverted the centuries-old Masonic ritual for his own ends. The Illinois Masons accused him of freighting religion into the secular rite and embarked on a successful crusade to close the Mormon lodges in Nauvoo and in the Mormon settlement in Montrose, Iowa. Joseph angrily denied copying the Freemasons’ ritual and insisted that God had revealed the endowment rites to him many years previously. The Mormons’ rite antedated the Masons’ bastardized version, he insisted. “Masonry has its origin in the Priesthood” was the party line parroted by Willard Richards. “There is a similarity of priesthood in masonry,” the equally loyal Heber Kimball explained in an 1842 letter. “Brother Joseph says masonry was taken from priesthood but has become degenerated.”

Why did Joseph co-opt these Masonic rites? The answer is: secrecy. “The secret of masonry is to keep a secret,” Joseph observed, and in the last few years of his life, he had many secrets to keep. Polygamy was a secret doctrine. Barely a year after creating the priesthood endowment ritual, Joseph introduced another, more secret ritual called the Second Anointing, which guaranteed the nineteen couples who received the special blessing a “calling and election sure”—a clear path to eternal life at the time of the exaltation, or the Second Coming. The Kingdom of God, which Joseph created in the spring of 1844, was a secret plan for world government. Its formal name was “The Kingdom of God and His Laws with the Keys and powers thereof and judgement in the hands of his servants, Ahman Christ.”

If one sentence could describe the last few months of Joseph’s life it would be: Wait, there is more. In April 1844, he preached the most famous sermon of his life, what some regard as one of the most famous sermons ever preached in America. As if on a whim, Joseph turned nearly 2,000 years of Christian belief on its head at a funeral service for his loyal colleague King Follett. Joseph had laid the groundwork for a new world order, and for the foundational ritual for his entire church, but that was in secret. Now, speaking in Nauvoo’s East Grove, under a massive canopy of elm and chestnut trees, he unpacked some of the most radical Christian doctrine ever preached on the American continent. He spoke for two hours, shouting against a heavy wind. The following day, he lost his voice.

Joseph started out with his boldest statement: “We suppose that God was God from eternity,” he shouted. “I will refute that idea. God that sits enthroned is a man like one of yourselves.”