Joseph Smith: Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints Part I

Joseph Smith Jr. (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader and the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Publishing the Book of Mormon at the age of 24, Smith attracted tens of thousands of followers by the time of his death fourteen years later. The religion he founded is followed to the present day by millions of global adherents and several churches, the largest of which is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).

Born in Sharon, Vermont, Smith moved with his family to the western region of New York State, following a series of crop failures in 1816. Living in an area of intense religious revivalism during the Second Great Awakening, Smith reported experiencing a series of visions. The first of these was in 1820 when he saw "two personages" (whom he eventually described as God the Father and Jesus Christ). In 1823, he said he was visited by an angel who directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization. In 1830, Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he described as an English translation of those plates. The same year he organized the Church of Christ, calling it a restoration of the early Christian Church. Members of the church were later called "Latter Day Saints" or "Mormons".

In 1831, Smith and his followers moved west, planning to build a communal Zion in the American heartland. They first gathered in Kirtland, Ohio, and established an outpost in Independence, Missouri, which was intended to be Zion's "center place". During the 1830s, Smith sent out missionaries, published revelations, and supervised the construction of the Kirtland Temple. Because of the collapse of the church-sponsored Kirtland Safety Society, violent skirmishes with non-Mormon Missourians, and the Mormon extermination order, Smith and his followers established a new settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois, of which he was the spiritual and political leader. In 1844, when the Nauvoo Expositor criticized Smith's power and his practice of polygamy, Smith and the Nauvoo City Council ordered the destruction of its printing press, inflaming anti-Mormon sentiment. Fearing an invasion of Nauvoo, Smith rode to Carthage, Illinois, to stand trial, but was shot and killed by a mob that stormed the jailhouse.

During his ministry, Smith published numerous documents and texts, many of which he attributed to divine inspiration and revelation from God. He dictated the majority of these in the first-person, saying they were the writings of ancient prophets or expressed the voice of God. His followers accepted his teachings as prophetic and revelatory, and several of these texts were canonized by denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement, which continue to treat them as scripture. Smith's teachings discuss God's nature, cosmology, family structures, political organization, and religious community and authority. Mormons generally regard Smith as a prophet comparable to Moses and Elijah. Several religious denominations identify as the continuation of the church that he organized, including the LDS Church and the Community of Christ.

Life

Early years (1805–1827)

Joseph Smith was born on December 23, 1805, in Vermont, on the border between the villages of South Royalton and Sharon, to Lucy Mack Smith and her husband Joseph Smith Sr., a merchant and farmer. He was one of eleven children. At the age of seven, Smith suffered a crippling bone infection and, after receiving surgery, used crutches for three years. After an ill-fated business venture and three successive years of crop failures culminating in the 1816 Year Without a Summer, the Smith family left Vermont and moved to the western region of New York State, and took out a mortgage on a 100-acre (40 ha) farm in the townships of Palmyra and Manchester.

The region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm during the Second Great Awakening. Between 1817 and 1825, there were several camp meetings and revivals in the Palmyra area. Smith's parents disagreed about religion, but the family was caught up in this excitement. Smith later recounted that he had become interested in religion by age 12, and as a teenager, may have been sympathetic to Methodism. With other family members, he also engaged in religious folk magic, a relatively common practice in that time and place. Both his parents and his maternal grandfather reported having visions or dreams that they believed communicated messages from God. Smith said that, although he had become concerned about the welfare of his soul, he was confused by the claims of competing religious denominations.

Years later, Smith wrote that he had received a vision that resolved his religious confusion. He said that in 1820, while he had been praying in a wooded area near his home, God the Father and Jesus Christ together appeared to him, told him his sins were forgiven, and said that all contemporary churches had "turned aside from the gospel." Smith said he recounted the experience to a Methodist minister, who dismissed the story "with great contempt". According to historian Steven C. Harper, "There is no evidence in the historical record that Joseph Smith told anyone but the minister of his vision for at least a decade", and Smith might have kept it private because of how uncomfortable that first dismissal was. During the 1830s, Smith orally described the vision to some of his followers, though it was not widely published among Mormons until the 1840s. This vision later grew in importance to Smith's followers, who eventually regarded it as the first event in the restoration of Christ's church to Earth. Smith himself may have originally considered the vision to be a personal conversion.

According to Smith's later accounts, while praying one night in 1823, he was visited by an angel named Moroni. Smith claimed this angel revealed the location of a buried book made of golden plates, as well as other artifacts including a breastplate and a set of interpreters composed of two seer stones set in a frame, which had been hidden in a hill near his home. Smith said he attempted to remove the plates the next morning but was unsuccessful because Moroni returned and prevented him. He reported that during the next four years, he made annual visits to the hill, but, until the fourth and final visit, each time he returned without the plates.

Meanwhile, Smith's family faced financial hardship, due in part to the death of his oldest brother Alvin. Family members supplemented their meager farm income by hiring out for odd jobs and working as treasure seekers, a type of magical supernaturalism common during the period. Smith was said to have the ability to locate lost items by looking into a seer stone, which he also used in treasure hunting, including, beginning in 1825, several unsuccessful attempts to find buried treasure sponsored by Josiah Stowell, a wealthy farmer in Chenango County. In 1826, Smith was brought before a Chenango County court for "glass-looking", or pretending to find lost treasure; Stowell's relatives accused Smith of tricking Stowell and faking an ability to perceive hidden treasure, though Stowell attested that he believed Smith had such abilities. The result of the proceeding remains unclear because primary sources report conflicting outcomes.

While boarding at the Hale house, located in the township of Harmony (now Oakland) in Pennsylvania, Smith met and courted Emma Hale. When he proposed marriage, her father, Isaac Hale, objected; he believed Smith had no means to support his daughter. Hale also considered Smith a stranger who appeared "careless" and "not very well educated." Smith and Emma eloped and married on January 18, 1827, after which the couple began boarding with Smith's parents in Manchester. Later that year, when Smith promised to abandon treasure-seeking, his father-in-law offered to let the couple live on his property in Harmony and help Smith get started in business.

Smith made his last visit to the hill shortly after midnight on September 22, 1827, taking Emma with him. This time, he said he successfully retrieved the plates. Smith said Moroni commanded him not to show the plates to anyone else, but to translate them and publish their translation. He also said the plates were a religious record of Middle-Eastern indigenous Americans and were engraved in an unknown language, called reformed Egyptian. He told associates that he was capable of reading and translating them.

Although Smith had abandoned treasure hunting, former associates believed he had double-crossed them and had taken the golden plates for himself; property they believed should be jointly shared. After they ransacked places where they believed the plates might have been hidden, Smith decided to leave Palmyra.

Founding a church (1827–1830)

In October 1827, Smith and Emma permanently moved to Harmony, aided by a relatively prosperous neighbor, Martin Harris, who began serving as Smith's scribe in April 1828. Although he and his wife, Lucy, were early supporters of Smith, by June 1828 they began to have doubts about the existence of the golden plates. Harris persuaded Smith to let him take 116 pages of the manuscript to Palmyra to show a few family members, including his wife. While Harris had the manuscript in his possession—of which there was no other copy—it was lost. Smith was devastated by this loss, especially since it came at the same time as the death of his first son, who died shortly after birth. Smith said that as punishment for his having lost the manuscript, Moroni returned, took away the plates, and revoked his ability to translate. During this period, Smith briefly attended Methodist meetings with his wife, until a cousin of hers objected to the inclusion of a "practicing necromancer" on the Methodist class roll.

Smith said that Moroni returned the plates to him in September 1828, and he then dictated some of the books to his wife Emma. In April 1829 he met Oliver Cowdery, who had also dabbled in folk magic; and with Cowdery as scribe, Smith began a period of "rapid-fire translation". Between April and early June 1829, the two worked full-time on the manuscript and then moved to Fayette, New York, where they continued the work at the home of Cowdery's friend, Peter Whitmer. When the narrative described an institutional church and a requirement for baptism, Smith and Cowdery baptized each other. Dictation was completed on July 1, 1829. According to Smith, Moroni took back the plates once Smith finished using them.

The completed work, titled the Book of Mormon, was published in Palmyra by printer Egbert Bratt Grandin and was first advertised for sale on March 26, 1830. Less than two weeks later, on April 6, 1830, Smith and his followers formally organized the Church of Christ, and small branches were established in Manchester, Fayette, and Colesville, New York. The Book of Mormon brought Smith regional notoriety and renewed the hostility of those who remembered the 1826 Chenango County trial. After Cowdery baptized several new church members, Smith's followers were threatened with mob violence. Before Smith could confirm the newly baptized, he was arrested and charged with being a "disorderly person." Although he was acquitted, both he and Cowdery fled to Colesville to escape a gathering mob. Smith later claimed that, probably around this time, Peter, James, and John had appeared to him and had ordained him and Cowdery to a higher priesthood.

Smith's authority was undermined when Cowdery, Hiram Page, and other church members also claimed to receive revelations. In response, Smith dictated a revelation that clarified his office as a prophet and an apostle, stating that only he could declare doctrine and scripture for the church. Smith then dispatched Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, and others on a mission to proselytize Native Americans. Cowdery was also assigned the task of locating the site of the New Jerusalem, which was to be "on the borders" of the United States with what was then Indian territory.

On their way to Missouri, Cowdery's party passed through northeastern Ohio, where Sidney Rigdon and over a hundred followers of his variety of Campbellite Restorationism converted to the Church of Christ, swelling the ranks of the new organization dramatically. After Rigdon visited New York, he soon became Smith's primary assistant. With growing opposition in New York, Smith announced a revelation that his followers should gather in Kirtland, Ohio, establish themselves as a people, and await word from Cowdery's mission.

Life in Ohio (1831–1838)

When Smith moved to Kirtland in January 1831, he encountered a religious culture that included enthusiastic demonstrations of spiritual gifts, including fits and trances, rolling on the ground, and speaking in tongues. Rigdon's followers were practicing a form of communalism. Smith brought the Kirtland congregation under his authority and tamed ecstatic outbursts. He had promised church elders that in Kirtland they would receive an endowment of heavenly power, and at the June 1831 general conference, he introduced the greater authority of a High ("Melchizedek") Priesthood to the church hierarchy.

Converts poured into Kirtland. By the summer of 1835, there were fifteen hundred to two thousand Latter Day Saints in the vicinity, many expecting Smith to lead them shortly to the Millennial kingdom. Though his mission to the Native Americans had been a failure, Cowdery and the other missionaries with him were charged with finding a site for "a holy city". They found Jackson County, Missouri. After Smith visited in July 1831, he pronounced the frontier hamlet of Independence the "center place" of Zion.

For most of the 1830s, the church was effectively based in Ohio. Smith lived there, though he visited Missouri again in early 1832 to prevent a rebellion of prominent church members who believed the church in Missouri was being neglected. Smith's trip was hastened by a mob of Ohio residents who were incensed over the church's presence and Smith's political power. The mob beat Smith and Rigdon unconscious, tarred and feathered them, and left them for dead.

In Jackson County, existing Missouri residents resented the Latter-Day Saint newcomers for both political and religious reasons. Additionally, their rapid growth aroused fears that they would soon constitute a majority in local elections, and thus "rule the county." Tension increased until July 1833, when non-Mormons forcibly evicted the Mormons and destroyed their property. Smith advised his followers to bear the violence patiently until after they had been attacked multiple times, after which they could fight back. Armed bands exchanged fire, killing one Mormon and two non-Mormons, until the old settlers forcibly expelled the Latter-Day Saints from the county.

In response, Smith first petitioned Missouri Governor Daniel Dunklin for redress; these efforts were unsuccessful. Smith then organized and led a small paramilitary expedition, called Zion's Camp, to aid the Latter Day Saints in Missouri. As a military endeavor, the expedition was a failure. The men of the expedition were disorganized, suffered from a cholera outbreak, and were severely outnumbered. By the end of June, Smith deescalated the confrontation, sought peace with Jackson County's residents, and disbanded Zion's Camp. Nevertheless, Zion's Camp transformed Latter-Day Saint leadership because many future church leaders came from among the participants.

After the Camp returned to Ohio, Smith drew heavily from its participants to establish various governing bodies in the church. He gave a revelation announcing that to redeem Zion; his followers would have to receive an endowment in the Kirtland Temple, which he and his followers constructed. In March 1836, at the temple's dedication, many who received the endowment reported seeing visions of angels and engaged in prophesying and speaking in tongues.

In January 1837, Smith and other church leaders created a joint stock company, called the Kirtland Safety Society, to act as a quasi-bank; the company issued banknotes partly capitalized by real estate. Smith encouraged his followers to buy the notes, in which he invested heavily himself. The bank failed within a month. As a result, Latter Day Saints in Kirtland suffered extremely high volatility and intense pressure from debt collectors. Smith was held responsible for the failure, and there were widespread defections from the church, including many of Smith's closest advisers.

The failure of the bank was but one part of a series of internal disputes that led to the demise of the Kirtland community. Cowdery had accused Smith of engaging in a sexual relationship with a teenage servant in his home, Fanny Alger. Construction of the Kirtland Temple had only added to the church's debt, and Smith was hounded by creditors. After a warrant was issued for Smith's arrest on a charge of banking fraud, he and Rigdon fled for Missouri in January 1838.

Life in Missouri (1838–39)

By 1838, Smith had abandoned plans to redeem Zion in Jackson County, and instead declared the town of Far West, Missouri, in Caldwell County, as the new "Zion". In Missouri, the church also took the name "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints", and construction began on a new temple. In the weeks and months after Smith and Rigdon arrived at Far West, thousands of Latter-Day Saints followed them from Kirtland. Smith encouraged the settlement of land outside Caldwell County, instituting a settlement in Adam-and-Ahman, in Daviess County.

Political and religious differences between old Missourians and newly arriving Latter Day Saint settlers provoked tensions between the two groups, much as they had in Jackson County. By this time, Smith's experiences with mob violence led him to believe that his faith's survival required greater militancy against anti-Mormons. Tensions between the Mormons and the native Missourians escalated quickly until, on August 6, 1838, non-Mormons in Gallatin, Missouri, tried to prevent Mormons from voting. The Election Day scuffles initiated the 1838 Mormon War. Non-Mormon vigilantes raided and burned Mormon farms, while Danites and other Mormons pillaged non-Mormon towns. In the Battle of Crooked River, a group of Mormons attacked the Missouri state militia, mistakenly believing them to be anti-Mormon vigilantes. Governor Lilburn Boggs then ordered that the Mormons be "exterminated or driven from the state". On October 30, a party of Missourians surprised and killed seventeen Mormons in the Haun's Mill massacre.

The following day, the Mormons surrendered to 2,500 state troops and agreed to forfeit their property and leave the state. Smith was immediately brought before a military court, accused of treason, and sentenced to be executed the next morning, but Alexander Doniphan, who was Smith's former attorney and a brigadier general in the Missouri militia, refused to carry out the order. Smith was then sent to a state court for a preliminary hearing, where several of his former allies testified against him. Smith and five others, including Rigdon, were charged with treason, and transferred to the jail at Liberty, Missouri, to await trial.

Smith bore his imprisonment stoically. Understanding that he was effectively on trial before his own people, many of whom considered him a fallen prophet, he wrote a personal defense and an apology for the activities of his followers. "The keys of the kingdom", he wrote, "have not been taken away from us". Though he directed his followers to collect and publish their stories of persecution, he also urged them to moderate their antagonism toward non-Mormons. On April 6, 1839, after a grand jury hearing in Daviess County, Smith and his companions escaped custody, almost certainly with the connivance of the sheriff and guards.

Life in Nauvoo, Illinois (1839–1844)

Many American newspapers criticized Missouri for the Haun's Mill massacre and the state's expulsion of the Mormons. Illinois then accepted Mormon refugees who gathered along the banks of the Mississippi River, where Smith purchased high-priced, swampy woodland in the hamlet of Commerce. He attempted to portray the Mormons as an oppressed minority and unsuccessfully petitioned the federal government for help in obtaining reparations. During the summer of 1839, while Mormons in Illinois suffered from a malaria epidemic, Smith sent Young and other apostles to missions in Europe, where they made numerous converts, many of them poor factory workers.

Smith also attracted a few wealthy and influential converts, including John C. Bennett, the Illinois quartermaster general. Bennett used his connections in the Illinois state legislature to obtain an unusually liberal charter for the new city, which Smith renamed "Nauvoo". The charter granted the city virtual autonomy, authorized a university, and granted Nauvoo habeas corpus power—which allowed Smith to fend off extradition to Missouri. Though Latter Day Saint authorities controlled Nauvoo's civil government, the city guaranteed religious freedom for its residents. The charter also authorized the Nauvoo Legion, a militia whose actions were limited only by state and federal constitutions. Smith and Bennett became its commanders and were styled Lieutenant General and Major General respectively. As such, they controlled by far the largest body of armed men in Illinois. Smith appointed Bennett as Assistant President of the Church, and Bennett was elected Nauvoo's first mayor.

The early Nauvoo years were a period of doctrinal innovation. Smith introduced baptism for the dead in 1840, and in 1841 construction began on the Nauvoo Temple as a place for recovering lost ancient knowledge. An 1841 revelation promised the restoration of the "fullness of the priesthood"; and in May 1842, Smith inaugurated a revised endowment or "first anointing". The endowment resembled the rites of Freemasonry that Smith had observed two months earlier when he had been initiated "at sight" into the Nauvoo Masonic lodge. At first, the endowment was open only to men, who were initiated into a special group called the Anointed Quorum. For women, Smith introduced the Relief Society, a service club and sorority within which Smith predicted women would receive "the keys of the kingdom". Smith also elaborated on his plan for a Millennial kingdom; no longer envisioning the building of Zion in Nauvoo, he viewed Zion as encompassing all of North and South America, with Mormon settlements being "stakes" of Zion's metaphorical tent. Zion also became less a refuge from an impending tribulation than a great building project. In the summer of 1842, Smith revealed a plan to establish the millennial Kingdom of God, which would eventually establish theocratic rule over the whole Earth.

It was around this time that Smith began secretly marrying additional wives, a practice called plural marriage. He introduced the doctrine to a few of his closest associates, including Bennett, who used it as an excuse to seduce numerous women, wed and unwed. When rumors of polygamy (called "spiritual wifery" by Bennett) got abroad, Smith forced Bennett's resignation as Nauvoo mayor. In retaliation, Bennett left Nauvoo and began publishing sensational accusations against Smith and his followers.

By mid-1842, popular opinion in Illinois had turned against the Mormons. After an unknown assailant shot and wounded Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs in May 1842, anti-Mormons circulated rumors that Smith's bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, was the gunman. Though the evidence was circumstantial, Boggs ordered Smith's extradition. Certain he would be killed if he ever returned to Missouri; Smith went into hiding twice during the next five months, until the U.S. Attorney for Illinois argued that his extradition would be unconstitutional. (Rockwell was later tried and acquitted.) In June 1843, enemies of Smith convinced a reluctant Illinois Governor Thomas Ford to extradite Smith to Missouri on an old charge of treason. Two law officers arrested Smith but were intercepted by a party of Mormons before they could reach Missouri. Smith was then released on a writ of habeas corpus from the Nauvoo municipal court. While this ended the Missourians' attempts at extradition, it caused significant political fallout in Illinois.

In December 1843, Smith petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory with the right to call out federal troops in its defense. Smith then wrote to the leading presidential candidates, asking what they would do to protect the Mormons. After receiving noncommittal or negative responses, he announced his own independent candidacy for president of the United States, suspended regular proselytizing, and sent out the Quorum of the Twelve and hundreds of other political missionaries. In March 1844 – following a dispute with a federal bureaucrat – he organized the secret Council of Fifty, which was given the authority to decide which national or state laws Mormons should obey, as well as establish its own government for Mormons. Before his death, the Council also voted unanimously to elect Smith "Prophet, Priest, and King." The Council was likewise appointed to select a site for a large Mormon settlement in the Republic of Texas, Oregon, or California (then controlled by Mexico), where Mormons could live under theocratic law beyond the control of other governments.