Joseph Smiths Political Concept of Zion

#Joseph Smith’s Political Concept of Zion

Most histories of early Mormonism and biographical treatments of Joseph Smith have focused on his religious experiences, doctrinal teachings, and ecclesiastical projects. Any political perspectives or agenda he may have had have not been much examined. Today, most all members of the Church see Joseph’s life and efforts as having been focused on establishing the restored Church of Jesus Christ or the Kingdom of God (“Zion”) upon the earth. The newly restored Church was understood to be a church among many other incomplete or “apostate” Christian churches. It would provide access to new scripture and additional spiritual truths. It would include divinely sanctioned and authorized ordinances. It would provide direct heavenly oversight through the leadership of the Lord’s one true prophet. It would provide an opportunity for its members to belong to a loving, supportive, and edifying fellowship to the end that its members would be enabled to progress to become more like God and one day return to live with him. The setting for the establishment of Zion was the United States of America, a country whose founding was divinely orchestrated and carried out by men especially called up and prepared by the Lord. While those men created a Constitution that guaranteed the free exercise of religion to all the nation’s inhabitants, the Constitution’s particular divine purpose was to allow the establishment of the Lord’s one true Church and kingdom on the earth.

The purpose of this chapter is to make the case that Joseph had additional and powerful motives—indeed political motives—as he set about establishing the Lord’s kingdom here on earth. He actually saw Zion as a new society—a new and independent nation—one that would initially arise along side the United States of America. Then, in relatively short order, it would actually replace the United States and its government. This new Zion would ensure divine, righteous, and stable governance to the land and people of North America. This new nation would persist until and during the thousand years following the Lord’s second coming.

This chapter will consider questions that have arisen concerning the disparities between Joseph’s early political concept of Zion and our present practical and “limited” concept. These include such questions as: How are we to regard this unmistakable element in Joseph’s political thinking—this Mormon nationalism? Was it actually the Lord’s intention that the early saints should set about to establish a nation and government independent of the American government? Or, did that notion come from Joseph himself? Surely the Lord knew in advance the result of Joseph’s attempts to establish, in his day, a Zion independent of and outside United States governmental control. If Joseph was indeed a prophet in close touch with God, why did Joseph not understand earlier the inevitable need to fully accommodate the government of the United States of America in his plans to establish Zion? Why did not the Lord peremptorily inform Joseph of the consequences of his trying to establish this Zion in Missouri? Why did Joseph and the Church have to learn the hard way? Why were the saints not allowed and enabled to avoid the severe persecutions and loss of properties that resulted from Joseph’s misunderstandings? These are questions for which we will seek answers. We will also explore other implications and impacts of Joseph’s political perspectives on the early saints.

Much of the resource material used for this chapter comes from the 2008 PhD dissertation (Arizona State University) of Dr. Mark Roscoe Ashurst-McGee, “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought” (hereafter Ashurst-McGee). In his dissertation, Brother Ashurst-McGee compellingly points out the unequivocal existence of Joseph’s concept of “Mormon nationalism.” He then, painstakingly, attempts to analyze the origins of that nationalism. I gratefully acknowledge him and his thoughtful and thorough analysis of this topic. The Lord’s Preparations for the Restoration of his Gospel and Kingdom

We will first consider the several influences in the environment of Joseph Smith that shaped the milieu into which the Lord would restore his earthly kingdom. The land and its inhabitants had to be prepared. The Lord gave particular attention to the specific setting in which his Church would be organized—The United States of America and particularly the area of Western New York.

The United States of America. There can be no doubt of the Lord’s role in orchestrating the founding of the United States of America. The Lord’s Spirit was over this land early on. Thus began the arrival of the pilgrim settlers from Europe seeking religious freedom. Other immigrants followed looking for a new life and new opportunities. The spirit of revolution certainly had divine trappings, and the Lord attended those who led and those who fought to ensure the necessary independence. He then inspired and assisted with the writing of the Constitution and the establishment of the principles of government. These would provide the vital guarantees and protections necessary for the establishment and survival of the nascent Kingdom of God on earth.

The prophet Joseph Smith. We would not expect the Lord to insert himself and his Church and gospel “of a sudden” into an unprepared environment and to an unprepared people. A need had to be created so that at least some of the people would yearn for, seek for, recognize, and then accept the gospel. And one individual in particular had to be carefully prepared—the Lord’s future prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. A need and yearning had to be established in his heart for the restoration. Then, features of the Church and gospel the Lord intended to be included in the restored Church had to be introduced to him in his life’s setting so that he would recognize, embrace, and incorporate them. He had to come to feel passionately about what would transpire even before it transpired. He would not be enabled to take direct and clear heavenly dictation and instruction on every decision and issue that lay in his path. Joseph would be prepared over his lifetime, and his environment would also be organized and readied. Then Joseph himself would take the reins and lead—albeit with considerable heavenly inspiration along the way.

Critics of the Church often misinterpret the Lord’s preparatory steps. They look at the setting of the restoration and the interactions of Joseph and others with that setting and conclude that Joseph needed no direct divine intervention. The Church came about quite “naturally” as the result of the needs and desires of the people in the area of Western New York at that time. Critics reason that the Church and all its features were already found in the mind and heart of Joseph Smith. Joseph had acquired them through interacting with his environment over his lifetime. He did not have to receive them by revelation from God. Further, they reason, Joseph’s First Vision experience was manufactured by him as his own strategy for setting the movement in motion.

The influences of Joseph’s family’s experiences. Joseph Smith lived at a time when we would expect him and his contemporaries to be highly patriotic. He was born within a quarter century of the Revolutionary War in which both of his grandfathers had served. He grew to manhood in the intense period of nationalism following the War of 1812.

Joseph’s paternal grandfather, Asael, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Following the war, Asael’s writings indicated that he viewed the war in terms of the millennial prophecy of Daniel 2. He saw the defeat of the monarchical British government and the formation of a republican government as step toward the secular millennial reign of the Savior which he assumed to be imminent. He felt that the peoples of the world should look upon the American Revolution as a model as to what ought to happen in their nations. He also viewed the war as a model for what should happen in the religions of the world. In other words, he saw the war as a symbolic defeat for all false religions and religious contention and intolerance. He viewed it as a step toward the Lord’s establishing his earthly spiritual kingdom in the proximate future. He believed in the imminence of the world millennial peace and rest.

Asael’s son Joseph, with his wife Lucy Mack Smith, suffered a life of constant economic disappointment and hardship. Joseph tried farming but soon left it and became involved in merchandising. He tried selling roots and herbs for healing. He even conceived of a plan to distribute ginseng in China, and he traveled to New York and Boston to try to arrange the details. This venture failed, and, in shame and deeply in debt, Joseph returned to the Smith family cooperative farm in Tunbridge, Vermont. He eventually had to sell his share of that farm to pay his debts. He and Lucy became tenant farmers. Their landlord was Solomon Mack, Lucy’s father. Solomon was also a Revolutionary War veteran.

Lucy became a constant seeker after true religion. She tried affiliation with various sects, but remained unsatisfied. She respected her elder brother Jason Mack who, at age sixteen, had become a “seeker” and by twenty, a “minister of the gospel,” as Lucy put it, though connected with no particular institution. Jason held that there was no church in existence that held to the pure principles of Christ’s gospel. Lucy remembered hearing in her youth Jason publicly declare that the primitive church established by Jesus Christ “was not now among the Christian denominations of the day” (Lucy’s Book, 464). But he held out hope that the pure church may soon be established. Jason may have contributed to Lucy’s eventual rejection of the churches of the day. She was eventually joined, in her conviction that the true church of Jesus Christ was not to be found on earth, by her husband. Joseph and Lucy passed down to their children both their Christian devotion and their alienation from the existing churches.

It was on the Mack farm in the hills of Vermont, about twenty

miles up the White River from its mouth on the Connecticut River, that Joseph Junior was born on 23 December 1805. Vermont was part of the newly settled American west within which Joseph Smith would live out his entire life—moving westward again and again. The trajectory of his life would follow that of the expanding nation.

[Joseph] Smith was born in the moment of America’s

territorial exploration. The previous year, President Thomas Jefferson had sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Missouri River— where [Joseph] Smith would later try to build the New Jerusalem. In December 1805, Lewis and Clark had crossed over the continental divide and were wintering on the Columbia. By 1805, Vermont was no longer frontier, but was still very young and was

northwestern New England both geographically and culturally.

The state’s transition to America’s new market economy was

well underway but far from complete. The cultural environment of Vermont during Joseph’s early childhood consisted of a mixture of the egalitarian values of the rural agrarians who settled the state and the more acquisitive habits of more recent immigrants

(Ashurst-McGee, 40-41).

In his earliest childhood, young Joseph was powerfully influenced by both his grandfathers. He lived within a short walk from the home of his grandfather Solomon Mack and within a half dozen miles of the Smith family farm [and his grandfather Asael Smith] in Tunbridge. Joseph Junior would later be reported as saying that “civil and religious liberty—were diffused into my soul by my grandfathers, while they dandld [sic] me on their knees” (Joseph Smith Journal, 9 July 1843, Joseph Smith Collection).

In March 1807, Solomon Mack mortgaged the farm on which the Lucy and Joseph Smith were living. The Smiths soon moved on—perhaps because of Mack’s financial difficulties—apparently falling back once again on the Smith family farm in Tunbridge.

About 1812, the family moved again, this time to western Lebanon Township in New Hampshire, just across the Connecticut from the mouth of the White. This township was only a few miles downriver of Hanover and Dartmouth College—the cultural capital of the upper Connecticut. During this time, their son Hyrum attended a Dartmouth-associated charity school. Down from the hills of Vermont, the Smiths may have felt scorned by the cultural elite of Hanover and Dartmouth.

The Smiths were able to improve their economic situation in Lebanon and had begun saving for land and retirement when calamity struck. A typhoid epidemic raged through the Connecticut valley in which all the Smith children came down with the dreaded disease. Sophronia, just older than Joseph, nearly succumbed. Lucy had seen death among her sisters and had faced it herself. She and Joseph, Sr., prayed and exercised faith in God. Lucy felt her prayer was answered. But when Sophronia stopped breathing, some present told Lucy to give up. Lucy refused. She pressed her daughter tightly against her breast and walked with her until her daughter cried and breathed. She then began her recovery.

Young Joseph’s bout with the disease may have been less lifethreatening, but it was more expensive. After a “physician” was unable to cure an infection in the bone of his lower leg, Joseph’s parents sought a second opinion in a “council of surgeons”—now identified as Dartmouth surgeon Nathan Smith and his students. According to Lucy, the surgeons initially wanted to amputate the leg. Dr. Smith, however, was pioneering a new treatment for osteomyelitis that had shown promising results. Having been involved in medical malpractice suits before, Dr. Smith apparently used the threat of the extreme case of amputation to elicit explicit consent for his successful yet still unorthodox technique of osteomyelitis treatment. Dr. Smith saved the leg, but in Lucy’s telling, she herself had saved it by withholding her consent for amputation. While Lucy was forced to look to doctors for help, in her accounts of Sophronia and

Joseph’s illness, she remains the one very much in charge of their care. Her narration further suggests an anti-professional temperament, contrasting her simple faith and maternal protection against the learning of “incompetent” physicians and amputating surgeons. Yet while Lucy claimed the high ground of character, the doctors certainly claimed the fees. The Smiths lost the financial ground they had recently gained.

Joseph recovered slowly. Lucy believed that sea breeze would improve his health, so he was sent with his uncle Jesse Smith on a trip to Salem, Massachusetts. Salem was at the time one of the largest American cities and a key port in the Atlantic trade. Joseph’s visit to Salem would have enlarged his perception of the country and exposed him to its developing market economy.

By 1815, the Smiths had moved back to Vermont, this time to nearby Norwich, where they set to work as tenant farmers. In March of that year, Joseph and his family were served with a notice warning them to leave the town. This notice—which probably functioned to preclude them from applying for the township’s welfare—indicates their quasi-vagrant status. To their further misfortune, adverse weather ruined their chances to make progress there. Mount Tambora erupted in April of that year—half a world away in the Pacific but spreading its volcanic debris throughout the global atmosphere. In the cold that followed, Vermont crops froze and were ruined.

After an additional crop failure in Norwich, Joseph, Sr., resolved to move on and make a new start in western New York. In July 1816, he left to scout out a new location for the family. Lucy stayed behind with the children to settle the family’s affairs and satisfy their creditors. With resources reduced to next to nothing, the family trekked through the snow to join Joseph, Sr., in the village of Palmyra and make another go at establishing a sustainable family economy in a rapidly developing America.

Asael Smith, Joseph, Sr.’s father, had been optimistic in his expectations of the future of the nascent country. He had trusted in God’s providence and was hopeful that the republic would continue to thrive and that freedom would extend throughout national government and religion. The economic struggles of Joseph and Lucy failed to match Asael’s optimistic expectations. Also Asael’s concerns over divisive secular religions had passed down to his son, Joseph, Sr. Joseph eventually came to feel he could not respect the church in any of its forms. His family’s Vermont years were marked by religious controversy, desperate seeking, and an eventual rejection of denominational Christianity.

We may summarize the socioeconomic situation of Joseph, Jr.’s immediate family: The country was changing economically, with the market revolution creating a new and more stratified social structure. Joseph, Sr., came to sense this socioeconomic division in society and his lowly station within it.

Setting aside his father Asael’s advice to be content in farming or any other ordinary and “honest” occupation, Joseph invested in merchandizing and trade. He failed in both. Over the next dozen years, Joseph and Lucy moved a half dozen times attempting to secure their financial well-being, twice falling back on the family farm in Tunbridge. Asael had advised his family not to trouble themselves with socioeconomic status but to cooperate on the family farm. Instead, Joseph and Lucy repeatedly broke away, attempting to establish a positive family economy. But when they moved down from the hills of Vermont to the Connecticut River, they felt scorned by the more prosperous residents. Unpaid store credit, sickness and doctor’s bills, bad weather and bad luck had all conspired against their financial fortune and social standing. The family was reduced near to the status of vagrants. The family’s anti-professional attitude serves as further evidence of their class consciousness and resentment of their social position.

Joseph’s own youth experiences. Young Joseph’s experiences growing to manhood during a time of transformation in American society help us understand some of his perspectives of the new Kingdom of God he would establish in 1830. Joseph inherited his family’s hopes and frustrations. He was indoctrinated in the revolutionary ideas of civil and religious liberty by his grandfathers, and he learned from his father to respect liberty of conscience. He spent his childhood in Vermont’s culture of revolutionary heritage and pride. His family, like many others, had moved quickly into the early republic’s new world of economic opportunity but had met with failure and disappointment. Joseph probably began to sense his family’s economic marginalization while in his Vermont adolescence.

Joseph inherited his grandfather Asael Smith’s penchant for a free yet harmonious society. He inherited his parents’ religious seeking and their desire for primitive Christianity, as well as their frustration with religious controversy and confrontation. As he helped develop the family’s New York farm and hired out for labor to contribute to the household economy, he also inherited their desires for socioeconomic stability and respectability. He also shared in their shame of poverty and failure. He came to realize that society was divided into economic classes and he came to recognize his place in the lower strata.

Joseph also grew to manhood during the disintegration of what was called the political Era of Good Feelings. During this period Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe had served as president, and politics was a relatively peaceful and dignified affair with little rancor. However, the election of 1824 was different. None of the candidates that year received a majority of electoral votes. The field consisted of four candidates: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay. Based on electoral votes the field was narrowed to three after Henry Clay was ousted. The election of the president then passed to the House of Representatives. Though Andrew Jackson had received the most electoral (and popular) votes, John Quincy Adams was made president after Henry Clay threw his support to Adams in exchange for being made Secretary of State—a traditional stepping stone to the presidency. Jackson was angry and charged Adams and Clay with conspiracy to subvert the will of the people. He leveled the charge of “corrupt bargain” against Adams and Clay. This charge spread throughout the nation and blighted the ensuing administration.

Most Americans preferred a limited government and believed that the Era of Good Feelings was over and the Age of Jackson had begun. They feared it would feature shady deals, unfair privilege, embezzlement, and other forms of corruption. Many believed that the government had been corrupted. From his apocalyptic standpoint, Joseph, Jr., probably considered this political competition as a detrimental division in society and an indication of national decline, and a sign of the end-times.

The Smiths were among thousands caught in the tide of westward migration. For three centuries settlement had been confined to the Atlantic seaboard. But in the wake of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, Americans crossed the Appalachians and streamed into the Mississippi basin. Joseph, Sr.’s own westward course landed him in Palmyra, New York. He may have aimed there in expectation of the financial opportunities that would be opened by the Erie Canal, which had been approved in April 1816 and was surveyed during the summer and early autumn of that year. On arriving in Palmyra, the Smiths found a place on Main Street, where they scraped together a living running a small “cake and beer shop” featuring ginger bread and root beer. Joseph, Sr., and the boys supplemented the family income by hiring out as harvesters and well-diggers. The family planned to work and save their money to buy a farm.

Joseph Smith’s exposure to Christianity consisted initially of religious “pluralism”—the idea that all religions, though different from one another were valid and adequate. Later he was exposed to a period of “awakening” which consisted of campaigns of religious regeneration, religious revivals, camp meetings, and fierce religious competition. Ministers preached hell fire and damnation, and many converts came forward to be baptized. These revivals began in 1817 and continued intermittently through 1825. Because of the intensity and frequency with which western New York underwent these revival “baptisms by fire,” historians commonly refer to the area as “the burned-over district.” These resulted in religious contention between sects.

Both of these phases were interesting but confusing to Joseph. Meanwhile, Joseph pondered and stewed over his religious concerns. While religious turbulence at that time could be found throughout the country, the frontier was especially susceptible. Joseph found the doctrinal contentions of the various denominations not merely emotionally upsetting, but intellectually distressing. He recounted that, “so great was the confusion and strife amongst the different denominations,” a young person like himself could hardly think clearly. He recalled that while “in the midst of this war of words, and tumult of opinions,” he often asked himself, “Who of all these parties are right? Or are they all wrong together? And if any one of them be right which is it? And how shall I know it?” (HC, 1-2). He eventually concluded “that God could not be the author of so much confusion.” Turning to the Bible, he determined “to investigate the subject more fully, believing that if God had a church, it would not be split up into factions” (Smith, “Latter-day Saints,” in Rupp, ed., An Original History of the Religious Denominations, 3-5).

About 1819, the Smith family moved southward to the Palmyra- Manchester township line. There, in the wake of the national depression that followed the Panic of 1819, the Smiths attempted to establish a new family farm. Joseph later recounted, “While I was laboring under the extreme difficulties caused by the contests of these parties of religionists, I was one day reading the Epistle of James, first Chapter and fifth verse which reads, ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him’” (JSH 1:11-12). The passage deeply impressed him. While the revival had convinced Joseph of his sins, the ensuing sectarian strife led to confusion over true doctrine and which church to join. The Bible led him to take his concerns directly to God.

Joseph did so and reported that God the Father and the resurrected Jesus Christ descended in a bright beam of light. The Father introduced the Son, who informed Joseph that his sins were forgiven. He also instructed him not to join any of the churches, as they were all wrong. The resurrected Christ declared that “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight, that those professors were all corrupt” (JSH 1:13-20).

Like his parents, Joseph then believed the world was in apostasy from the purity of the primitive church. And, like his parents, he came to understand that apostasy in terms of the competing denominational ministers and their doctrinal contentions.

In the vision, the Lord had also stated, “mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth,” and stated that he would soon “visit them according to their ungodliness and to bring to pass that which [hath] been spoken by the mouth of the prophets and Apostles behold and lo I come quickly” (Smith,

History, 1832, in Smith, Letterbook 1, 3, Joseph Smith Collection). Joseph’s apocalyptic vision of the future stood in stark contrast to the generally optimistic vision growing out of the great Protestant revival and awakening occurring at the time. The Protestant clergy sought to reform America and then the world, establishing righteousness and perfection and thus hastening the onset of the millennial thousand years. In Joseph’s view, the Lord would return because of wickedness, not righteousness, and to fulfill the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible. Joseph did receive a promise, however, at the end of his vision, “that the fullness of the gospel should at some future time be made known unto me” (Smith, “Latter-day Saints,” in Rupp, ed., An Original History of the Religious Denominations, 405).

Joseph claimed that he shared his experience with a Methodist minister, who denounced the vision “with great contempt” and informed him that “all such things had ceased with the apostles.” The minister’s condemnation served only to complete Joseph’s severance with the churches of the day (HC, 3-4). At that time, while most Evangelicals wanted to feel God’s presence in enthusiasm and spiritual gifts, the Methodists had become wary of dreams, visions, and other manifestations of the power of God. They were becoming socially established, and had begun to attract the more religiously conservative emerging middle class. Joseph’s rejection by the Methodist minister may be understood not only in religious terms, but in socioeconomic terms as well.

In Joseph’s day, the water witches, treasure diviners, and other practitioners of folk magic held fervently to overt divine manifestations. Joseph’s vision of deity and the rebuke of the minister may have served to drive Joseph away from the churches and even more into the world of water witching and treasure dowsing (see chapter , The Role of Divination [“Magic”] in Joseph Smith’s Early Life). The water witching and dirt digging of the Smith males probably contributed to the negative view of them that some of their neighbors later expressed. Young Joseph’s realization of the family’s social position in Palmyra may have begun soon after moving there.

Though financially unfortunate, and perhaps not among the most money wise, the Smiths were far from lazy. Starting anew in New York, the family had worked hard to establish a sustainable economy of farming and sugaring— supplemented by Joseph, Sr.’s coopering (barrel making) and Lucy’s home crafts (see chapter , The Character of Joseph Smith and the Smith Family). Young Joseph probably felt the sting of social status most acutely when visiting Palmyra village. Villager Orsamus Turner recounted seeing Joseph when he brought wood “from his backwoods home” to sell in the village. Turner, a printer’s devil, saw him at least once a week when Joseph “would stroll into the office of the old Palmyra Register, for his father’s paper.” Turner described Joseph as a curious country boy loitering about the village—”sometimes patronizing a village grocery, sometimes finding an odd job to do about the store of Seymour Scovell.” He remembered that on more than one occasion, when Joseph got in the way of the work of the press, the devils would use their inking balls to “blacken the face of the then meddling inquisitive lounger” (History of the Pioneer Settlement, Rochester, NY: William Ailing, 1851, 213-214).

The local youth organizations of the day included a Young Men’s Literary Club that formed “for the purpose of debate and general improvement.” Current issues of the day were often vigorously discussed by the attenders. One participant noted that “even an evening of mutual improvement at the Young Men’s Literary Club, among age and class peers, could end in bitter quarrels over national politics” (“Literary Club Journal,” 29 September 1832, in Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 130; see also 128-30,141-42). Politics was also a subject in Palmyra’s youth debating club. Orsamus Turner recalled Joseph Smith participating in grave discussions of “political ethics” (History of the Pioneer Settlement, 214).

While exposed to such social developments of village living, Joseph’s experience was still primarily rural. Work on the family farm and hiring out for labor on the farms of others occupied most of his time. On occasion he searched for buried treasure.

On the night of September 21, 1823 an angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph and showed him the location of an ancient scriptural record, akin to the Bible, that was inscribed on metal tablets that looked like gold. The record had been made by former inhabitants of the land descended from Israel. The angel informed Joseph that “the Lord had prepared spectacles for to read the Book.” With the plates, “there were two stones in silver bows” with which to translate the record into English. The plates and spectacles lay buried in a stone box in a nearby hill.

The angel Moroni also repeated the millenarian message of Joseph’s initial vision. He informed him that “the preparatory work for the second coming of the Messiah was speedily to commence; that the time was at hand for the gospel in all its fulness to be preached in power, unto all nations, that a people might be prepared for the millennial reign” (Smith, “Latter-day Saints,” in Rupp, ed., An Original History of the Religious Denomination, 405). Moroni quoted several millenarian passages from the Bible and explained them to Joseph, telling him of “great judgments which were coming upon the earth, with great desolations by famine, sword, and pestilence,” and that these grievous judgments would come on the earth in this generation” (JS-H 1:45). Joseph claimed that he went to the hill the following day and found the plates, but that the angel forbade him from taking them at that time as he was not yet spiritually prepared. Joseph’s mother stated that following his vision of the plates he received further visions and divine communications. She recalled the family “all seated in a circle, father, mother, sons and daughters” to hear Joseph share his experiences, from which “the sweetest union and happiness pervaded our house” (Lucy’s Book, 344-45).

The family’s peace and happiness were shattered with the death of Alvin, the eldest child. When Alvin became acutely ill, the family sought out a local doctor they preferred, but he was unavailable. A substitute came to the Smith home and over Alvin’s objections insisted on administering an oral dose of mercurous chloride, on which Lucy blamed his subsequent death. As she reported it, Alvin was “murdered as it were by the hand him at whose hand relief was expected—cut off from the face of earth by a careless quack” (Ibid., 350- 355).

Joseph’s younger brother William remembered his father’s anger when Benjamin Stockton, a local Presbyterian reverend, preached at Alvin’s funeral and “intimated very strongly that he had gone to hell, for Alvin was not a church member” (“William. B. Smith’s last Statement,” in Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 1:512-13). Joseph, Jr., and Lucy later recounted the family’s deep grieving at the loss of the beloved Alvin, killed and condemned by the doctors of medicine and theology. Alvin’s death thus invoked, and probably deepened, the family’s anti-professional disposition.

Lucy sought for comfort in the religious revival that began the following year. She couldn’t stand to hear more of the golden plates at that time, as it reminded her of Alvin—who of all the family was the most interested in their recovery. Though she had earlier determined to remain apart from the churches, she now joined the Presbyterian Church in Palmyra. Like other women responding to the revivals of the day, Lucy took initiative and leadership. She brought her children Hyrum and Samuel into the fold with her (“Records of the Sessions of the Presbyterian Church in Palmyra,” in Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents 3:496-501; also “William. B. Smith’s last Statement,” in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents 1:512-13).

Lucy’s decision to join a church and to join with the Presbyterians, the most respectable denomination in the village, may reflect some of the status anxiety that appears here and there in her memoir—such as the financially premature push to replace the family’s log home with a frame home. Social stratification was further reflected within the walls of the church house. Palmyra’s church had pew fees like the rest, seating the wealthiest congregants in the best seats in the house. Ministers knew that their survival depended on the donations of their congregation. This introduced the social pressure to shape their preaching to attract and retain congregants as well as to please them and encourage them to open their wallets. Sustaining meetinghouse and minister required congregants who attended and paid. Ministers stood to gain the most by suiting their sermons to satisfy and gratify those with the most money to give. Conversely, those with the least to donate commanded the least pastoral attention. Markers of class and prestige among ministers and their congregants struck Joseph, Jr., wrongly. Reflecting back on his youthful study of the Bible, he wrote, “I learned in the scriptures that God . . . was no respecter to persons” (Joseph Smith, Letterbook 1-2, Joseph Smith Collection. Compare Acts 10:34- 35). Joseph was highly aware of the connections between his religious and social status.

While some of the older children converted with Lucy, Joseph, Sr., and Joseph, Jr., would not. Joseph, Sr., was still upset with the Presbyterian reverend who had condemned Alvin. During the earlier revival, Joseph had attended the meetings “as often as occasion would permit,” but following his visions, he declared he would join no church and refused to attend the meetings. Lucy recounted his expressing respect for her choice though disagreeing with it: “Mother I do not wish to prevent your going to meeting or joining any church you like or any of the family who desire the like, only do not ask me to go, for I do not wish to go. But I will take my Bible and go out into the woods and learn more in two hours than you could if you were to go to meeting two years” (Lucy’s Book, 357). Joseph felt he could pursue religion on his own. Though his education was meager, he was a literate Christian and could read the Bible for himself just as well as a good citizen reads the newspaper. He neither needed nor wanted a creed-bound cleric to explain the scripture to him. Joseph believed he could understand the Bible well enough to see that the churches of the day did not measure up to the purity of the primitive church in the New Testament. Unlike others Joseph felt he could not answer doctrinal questions by an appeal to the Bible. He wanted guidance, but not from an apostate clergy. Instead, he sought for guidance from heaven.

Referring to secular clerics, Joseph also told his mother that she “did not know the wickedness of their hearts.” On one occasion, Lucy recounted, Joseph gave an example and said they could record it as prophecy: “You look at Deacon Jessup,” said he, “and you hear him talk very piously. Well, you think he is a very good man. Now suppose that one of his poor neighbors should owe him the value of a cow, and that this poor man had eight little children; moreover, that he should be taken sick and die, leaving his wife with one cow, but destitute of every other means of supporting herself and family—now I tell you, that Deacon Jessup, religious as he is, would not scruple to take the last cow from the poor widow and orphans, in order to secure the debt, notwithstanding he himself has an abundance of everything.” “At that time,” as Lucy remembered it, “this seemed impossible to us, yet one year had scarcely expired when we saw Joseph’s prophecy literally fulfilled” (Lucy’s Book, 357-8).

Joseph and his father thus rejected the false and self-righteous piety they perceived in Reverend Stockton and Deacon Jessup. While his mother and some of his siblings affiliated themselves with the Presbyterians, Joseph and his father remained “unchurched treasure seekers.” The family, so recently in “the sweetest union,” was now divided. Earlier Joseph had despaired at the division in society that grew out of the revivals. Now religious division had made its way to the core of his family. This violated the need for familial harmony that was so central to his personality.

The Smiths moved into their newly finished frame home about October 1825. That month they were approached by Josiah Stowell of South Bainbridge, in south-central New York, to help find a legendary Spanish mine. It is likely Stowell hired Joseph because of his seer stones and his reputation for having a gift in using them. Joseph’s mother Lucy also remembered Stowell’s offer of “high wages to those who would dig for him” (Lucy’s Book, 360). Joseph and his father joined the venture, following Stowell to Harmony, Pennsylvania—down the Susquehanna River from Stowell’s home in South Bainbridge, New York. In addition to earning wages as laborers, Joseph and his father stood to gain in a share of any treasure they might find. In Harmony, Joseph and his father boarded with the rest of Stowell’s digging crew on the property of Isaac Hale. After half a month of unsuccessful digging, as Joseph remembered it, he “prevailed with the old gentleman to cease digging after it” (HC, 8).

While Joseph and his father were away, the Smiths lost the title to their farm. They had not been able to make their recent payments. Instead of saving their earnings for the day payment came due, they had invested in the new frame home. Through a complicated series of events—initiated by the deceitful machinations of a pair of men who meant to obtain the land for little expense— the title was transferred to Palmyra resident Lemuel Durfee. After receiving word of this shocking development, Joseph, Sr., returned home to attempt to iron out the difficulty.

Joseph, Jr., stayed in the upper Susquehanna country, working for Stowell in South Bainbridge. While there, Joseph and Stowell participated in further treasure seeking. In March of 1826, a nephew of Stowell attempted to stop his uncle’s participation by having Joseph arrested on the misdemeanor charge of “disorderly person.” This vague catch-all statute was used in New York against vagrants and other undesirables. Joseph was arrested, taken by the constable to Bainbridge, held overnight, and then delivered for trial. It is unclear in what manner of custody Joseph was detained during the night—whether the constable kept him in a tavern, held him in a certain room of his own Bainbridge home, or otherwise. Notes of the trial refer to him as “the prisoner.”

This was not Joseph’s first experience in court. In 1819, Joseph had served as a witness on behalf of his father in a suit against Jeremiah Hurlbut for selling him a bad pair of horses. The day after the trial, wherein the jury had found for Joseph, Hurlbut hired local justice of the peace Frederick Smith (no relation to Joseph) as an attorney and appealed. Hurlbut’s attorney attached to the appeal a plea of trespass on the case—a sort of appended countersuit— causing Joseph Smith, Sr., to be arrested and bound over for the next court of common pleas. Hurlbut’s attorney succeeded in overturning the initial acquittal decision in an interlocutory judgment—a judicial ruling made without a jury.

Now in 1826, Joseph, Jr., was in court not as a witness, but as a defendant. According to notes of Joseph’s 1826 trial, Joseph testified “that he had a certain stone, which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were . . . and had looked for Mr. Stowell several times and informed him where he could find those treasures.” Stowell, himself, testified, relaying that when he had hired Joseph in Palmyra, Joseph “looked through [a seer] stone and described Josiah Stowell’s house and out houses” and that he “had the most implicit faith in [the] prisoner’s skill.” Joseph Smith’s defense was that he really could see in the stones. His father, who attended the trial, reportedly expressed his regret that “this wonderful power which God had so miraculously given him [Joseph Junior] should be used only in search of filthy lucre” (William Purple, “Joseph Smith, the Originator of Mormonism,” Chenango Union, 2 May 1877, 3).

To the complainant and his witnesses—as well as to the judge—Joseph was essentially on trial for deception. To Joseph, it was his religious beliefs and practices that were on trial. Because Stowell, the supposed victim, testified in Joseph’s defense the case was apparently dismissed. But the experience of being arrested and tried must have shamed and distressed Joseph. And to a person who so dearly valued social harmony and order, the charge of “disorderly person” must have left him feeling misunderstood and maltreated. His treasure seeking seems to have drawn to a close following the trial.

Joseph remained on the Susquehannah, working farther south on the river as a laborer for Joseph Knight in Colesville, New York. He occasionally traveled downriver to Harmony, Pennsylvania, to court Emma Hale, the daughter of Isaac Hale, on whose land the Spanish mine treasure hunters had boarded. Isaac disapproved of his daughter’s suitor. He considered Joseph “not very well educated” and stated that he “followed a business that I could not approve” (Isaac Hale statement, Harmony, Pennsylvania, 20 March 1834, in Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic], 203). Joseph’s lack of education and his labor as a diviner and treasure digger placed him below the company of the relatively welloff Hale family and their educated daughter Emma (On the Hale family and Emma’s education, see Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, 2-4).

In January of 1827, Joseph and Emma eloped, moving in with the Smiths on their farm in the Palmyra countryside. Joseph probably farmed with his father that summer. On 22 September 1827, exactly four years after seeing his vision of the angel Moroni and uncovering the golden plates, Joseph was permitted to take them. The men who had hunted for treasure with Joseph in earlier years viewed the ancient record as a treasure—more as plates of gold than as an ancient record. Now that precious metal had finally been unearthed, they wanted their share. On the way home with the plates Joseph was attacked and injured but escaped. On one night the treasure hunters tore up the floor of the Smith’s cooper shop, thinking to find the plates hidden under the floorboards. On another night they surrounded the Smith home, but the Smith men chased them off.

Joseph decided to take the recently extended offer of his father-in-law Isaac Hale and move to Harmony. On arriving at the Hale home, Isaac requested to see the golden plates. Joseph refused, explaining that the angel had prohibited him from showing them. Hale insisted that he would not allow anything to be kept in his own home that he was not allowed to see. Joseph hid the plates in the woods for the moment. He and Emma soon moved into her brother Jesse’s home on the same property.

One Palmyra resident, Martin Harris, believed that Joseph had the plates and wanted to help him translate and publish them. In February 1828, after visiting Joseph in Harmony, Harris took copies of the characters on the plates to prominent classicists Samuel Mitchill and Charles Anthon in New York City. Harris reported that both affirmed the antiquity of the characters. Anthon, however, retracted his statement when Harris told him the location of the plates had been revealed by an angel. Anthon then said he would translate the plates if Harris brought them, to which Harris responded that a part of the plates were sealed and that he could not bring them anyway. According to Harris, Anthon then responded by saying “I cannot read a sealed book.” Harris returned to Harmony satisfied with the outcome, which he and Joseph took as the fulfillment of a prophecy in Isaiah 29:

And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a

book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed: And the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvellous work among this people,

even a marvellous work and a wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall

be hid (verses 11-12).

Joseph’s interpretation of this episode reinforced his anti-professional outlook. The Lord would work wonders though him because he was unlearned and unspoiled by worldly accolades. It was the spiritual gift of seeing in stones, not classical training, that would enable him to translate the ancient record.

In the spring of 1828, Joseph began translating the plates with the spectacles and one or more of his seer stones while Martin Harris served as the scribe. In the summer, after translating one hundred sixteen pages, Harris headed back to Palmyra with the manuscript to show it to his skeptical family. When Harris lost the manuscript, Joseph received a revelation that rebuked them both. Martin could no longer serve as a scribe and Joseph could not translate until he repented. While the revelation shut down the translating for the moment, it also explained the purpose of the eventual finished product. The Lord, speaking of the issue of hardening one’s heart against the Book of Mormon, said: “If this generation harden not their hearts, I will establish my church among them” D&C 10:53). All the religious confusion and contention in America could be swept away with a restoration of the Lord’s primitive church if only the people would not harden their hearts against the Book of Mormon.

While Joseph waited to resume the translation of the plates in earnest, the nation entered a period of intense political conflict—the election of 1828—the one following the election of John Quincy Adams referred to above. New York’s Martin Van Buren—who epitomized the rising new class of professional politicians—invested his future in the candidacy of Andrew Jackson and forged an opposition party to support it. Van Buren, in fact, defended the existence of political parties, traditionally thought to be dangerous. The election of 1828 was more contentious and slanderous than the nation had ever experienced. Jackson men accused Adams of being a gambler and a pimp, a snobby aristocrat, and a corrupt politician. Adams men branded Jackson a bastard and an adulterer or bigamist or both, a vengeful duelist and a military chieftain, an impetuous and dangerous man for the office, a potential tyrant (Watson, Liberty and Power, 91-94). Both campaigns invoked the fear that the virtuous republic was in decay. Interest in the campaign grew as the rhetoric grew more rancorous.

Most farming folk of the west identified with Jackson as a champion of the common man. This appeal, however, was far from universal. Many rural and evangelical Americans opposed Jackson for his connections to Freemasonry. The anti-Masonic hullabaloo streaked through the northeast following the mysterious disappearance in 1826 of ex-Mason William Morgan, who was preparing an expose of the craft’s secrets (see the notes on “The Morgan affair” in the section titled “Opposition to and Criticism of Freemasonry” in chapter , Freemasonry and Mormonism). Joseph did not write about the political persuasions or attitudes he held during this period of his life. We can only surmise that he despised the conflict in national politics as he did the conflict within American Christianity. Religious conflict had contributed to his rejection of the churches of the day. Political conflict had the potential of turning him away from governmental authority as well.

Following the loss of the one hundred sixteen pages of manuscript, the plates were taken from Joseph but returned in September, 1828. Having lost the financial and clerical support of Martin Harris, Joseph attempted some translating with his wife, Emma, and his brother Samuel while simultaneously attempting to provide for himself and Emma. He had eventually become “reduced in property,” as he recalled, and Isaac Hale was ready to evict him. Things suddenly turned around with the arrival of Oliver Cowdery in Harmony in April 1829. Oliver became Joseph’s new scribe. Oliver had become converted to the golden plates story while boarding with the Smith family in New York as a local teacher. He traveled to Harmony, Pennsylvania, eager to help. It may have been with Cowdery’s recent teacher’s pay that Joseph purchased a small 13-acre farm from Isaac Hale the day following Cowdery’s arrival. They then set to translating the ancient record, which spanned through April and into May. When the two ran out of provisions, they searched for day labor but could find none. They continued with the help of Joseph Knight, Joseph’s former Colesville employer, who provided them with paper, grain and potatoes, and a few other provisions.

In May, after translating a passage regarding the necessity of baptism for salvation, Joseph and Oliver prayed to know how they could be baptized. A heavenly messenger appeared to them in vision, announcing himself as John, the son of the Levitical priest Zacharias and the man who had baptized Jesus. The messenger conferred upon them the Old Testament priesthood of Aaron and the authority to baptize. Upon baptizing each other in the nearby Susquehanna, while still in the water, Joseph and Cowdery were filled with the Holy Ghost and prophesied many things, including the restoration of the primitive church. “Our minds being now enlightened,” Joseph recounted, “we began to have the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us, in a manner which we never could attain to previously” (HC, 18).

Sometime after this, Joseph and Oliver experienced another vision in which the apostles Peter, James, and John gave them the New Testament priesthood of the primitive church. Joseph and Oliver kept their new authority secret, however, “owing to a spirit of persecution which had already manifested itself in the neighborhood.” In particular, they “had been threatened with being mobbed from time to time, and this too by professors of religion.”

To escape their threatening environment, Joseph and Oliver left Harmony, Pennsylvania, in late May and traveled to Fayette, New York. There, they received room and board at the family farm of Oliver’s friend David Whitmer, who agreed to support them until they could finish the translation. Joseph later recounted: “We continued to translate, at intervals, when not necessitated to attend to the numerous enquirers, that now began to visit us; some for the sake of finding the truth, others for the purpose of putting hard questions, and trying to confound us. Among the latter class, were several learned Priests [who] generally came for the purpose of disputation: However the Lord continued to pour out upon us his Holy Spirit, and as often as we had need, he gave us in that moment what to say; so that although unlearned, and inexperienced in religious controversies, yet were we able to confound those learned Rabbis of the day, whilst at the same time, we were enabled to convince the honest in heart” (HC, 26).

Joseph and Oliver had received the true priesthood and the Holy Ghost, by which they could confound the false priests and their learning and finish the translation. By the end of June, the work was complete. The new book of scripture, though ancient, was prophetic and had much to say to Joseph’s generation—particularly to the Whites and Native Americans of the American continent.

In the Revolutionary War fought by Joseph’s grandfathers, the British yoke of monarchy had been thrown off of America and a republic had taken its place. The former colonies had united in a confederation, soon formed “a more perfect union” under the federal constitution, and once again stood together against their common enemy in the War of 1812. The period of intense nationalism following the war was accompanied by a strong economic growth, which was fueled by the emerging market economy. The amended state constitutions of the early 1800s had thrown off the yoke of established religion, allowing all churches to compete equally in the religious marketplace. The hope of Joseph Smith’s grandfather Asael Smith, that America would be the stone seen in vision by Daniel, rolling forward to crush all political and religious tyranny, had been largely realized in Joseph’s life. But not in the sense Asael had anticipated. While making way for a nation free from political and religious tyranny, the rolling stone of democracy and disestablishment (withdrawal of state recognition of a particular church) had shattered the hopes of a harmonious republic and instead left social, political, and religious chaos in its wake.

The post-war boom in nationalism and in the national economy failed to square with the Smith family’s failed financial status. The Smiths had lost the title to the farm in which they had invested so much time and effort. The Erie Canal, which had been dug right through Palmyra, should have carried their crops to market and sustained their household economy. Instead, it symbolized the surging market economy that was passing them by, giving rise to a new class system and increasing urban and rural differences. Joseph’s poverty, lack of education, and rural culture subjected him to social discrimination and alienation.

In the great awakening of religion that swept through town, Methodists, Presbyterians, and other denominations were divided among each other, yet united against un-churched religious seekers. Joseph’s golden plates and their translation brought on him personal attack and the threat of mobs. In a democratic society, economic and religious issues inevitably translate into the political sphere, which was becoming increasingly divisive. Joseph found himself living in an era of corrupt priests and politicians who had divided the Christian republic into a contentious society of sects and parties. The Book of Mormon and Joseph’s subsequent revelations would meditate much on the causes and consequences of social and political turmoil and would develop a concept and plan for a righteous and just society.

The influences of the Book of Mormon. Joseph represented the Book of Mormon to the people as what it really was—the scriptural record of an ancient people. Joseph Smith’s oral dictation of the text to Oliver Cowdery and other scribes unfolded the saga of the Nephites—a group of Christian Israelites that had once lived somewhere in the Americas. Just before the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon some six centuries prior to Christ’s mortal advent, the Lord had led the family of the prophet Lehi from the area of Jerusalem through the desert and across the ocean to a new promised land. After arriving in the Americas, the family of Lehi divided into two groups: those who followed Laman, the oldest but most wicked son—the Lamanites—and those who followed Nephi, a younger but righteous son—the Nephites. Nephi and his righteous posterity kept the record that Joseph Smith claimed to have discovered in a hill nearby his boyhood home. The record of the Nephites chronicled their ongoing wars with the Lamanites and the continual efforts of the Lord’s prophets to reform society. Also appended to the Book of Mormon is a brief history of the Jaredites, an earlier group of immigrants that came to the Americas during the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. The Nephite and Jaredite records reveal God’s hand in the history of ancient American civilizations.

Published in 1830, this text of over 500 pages rivals in size the balance of Joseph’s other personal writings and dictations. The history of the Nephites is rife with political ideas and implications. The historical analysis and commentary of the ancient American prophets ruminates more on political ideas than the revelations Joseph subsequently dictated while trying to make his vision of society a reality. Of necessity, Joseph’s later revelations often concern themselves with the mundane mechanics of putting the ideas into practice—who to send where on what church business and the like. The Book of Mormon, therefore, is a fundamental document for understanding the early Mormon worldview. Read closely, it presents a complex but distinct message about America as a chosen land of liberty established by divine providence but facing social divisions that threaten its survival. America was “the land which is choice above all other lands” (1 Nephi 13:30; see also 1 Nephi 2:20; 2 Nephi 3:2,1:5, 10:19; Alma 46:17; Ether 2:7,10,12,15, 9:20; 13:2). The Lord therefore required that “all men should serve him who dwell upon the face thereof” (Ether 13:2; see also 2 Nephi 10:19; Ether 2:10, 15). Many in the early republic viewed America as an Edenic land in a natural state, where the influence of the corrupted governments of Europe could be cast off. The Book of Mormon explicitly taught that the Lord had maintained the Americas as such a land.

The Lord promised the Jaredites great blessings for their righteousness, but he also “had sworn in his wrath unto the brother of Jared, that whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when the fulness of his wrath should come upon them” (Ether 2:8; see also 2:9, 15). There was thus both “the cursing and the blessing of God upon the land” (Alma 45:16; see also Jacob 2:29, 3:3; Enos 1:10; Alma 37:28, 31; Helaman 13:17-36; Mormon 1:17- 18; Ether 7:23, 9:28; 11:6; 14:1).

The prophets of the Book of Mormon constantly reminded the people of this dual aspect of the chosen land (1 Nephi 4:14; 2 Nephi 1:7-11, 3:2, 4:4; Enos 1:10; Jarom 1:10; Omni 1:6; Mosiah 2:22; Alma 9:24, 36:30, 37:13, 50:20-22; Ether 9:20). The curse on the land was born out among the Jaredites when they destroyed themselves in civil war. The prophets had warned them that if they did not repent, “the Lord God would execute judgment against them to their utter destruction; And that the Lord God would send or bring forth another people to possess the land” (Ether 11:20-21; see also 13:21). When the Nephites reached a “fulness of iniquity” the Lord completely destroyed them by the hand of the Lamanites (Ether 2:12; Mormon 8:1-8).

In addition to prosperity, the Lord’s blessing on the Americas included freedom and political independence. Lehi explained the conditional nature of America’s freedom to his children. He prophesied that should their progeny obey the commandments, “it shall be a land of liberty unto them; wherefore, they shall never be brought down into captivity; if so, it shall be because of iniquity” (2 Nephi 1:7-9; see also Alma 46:17).

The Book of Mormon explicitly teaches that these conditions of the land were enduring principles. They would apply in the future as well as they had in the past. Lehi, in the very act of settling his family in the promised land, prophesied that in a future day his progeny would be largely displaced by a new group of immigrants “brought by the hand of the Lord.” The Lord would bring this new people out of the “gentile” nations. Nephi, Lehi’s son, saw these future inhabitants in vision (1 Nephi 13:12; 2 Nephi 1:5-6). Regardless of their actual blood-line origins, they are referred to in the book as “Gentiles,” and the nation they would found is “the great Gentile nation.”

The blessing and cursing attached to the land extended to the last days and to the great Gentile nation. Thus, while the modern American “Gentiles” would enjoy the blessing of the land while righteous, should they turn to wickedness they would face the same curse suffered by the Jaredites and Nephites before them. Political independence was a part of the blessing of the American continent. “Whatsoever nation shall possess it,” the prophet Moroni wrote, “shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven” so long as they would serve the “God of the land” (Ether 2:12; see also 2 Nephi 1:7). Thus, after their escape from “captivity” in Europe, America would be “a land of liberty unto the Gentiles, and there shall be no kings upon the land” (1 Nephi 13:30; 2 Nephi 10:11). If, however, the American Gentiles turned away from the Lord, they could return to a state of bondage and captivity (1 Nephi 14:6-7).

The Book of Mormon is political history on the grand scale of the rise and fall of civilizations. Both the Jaredite and Nephite histories began with an exodus from wicked civilizations facing an impending doom. Both groups were brought to the Americas to found civilization anew. Upon instructing the Brother of Jared and his family to leave Babel, the Lord promised him he would make them a “great nation” and that there would be “none greater than the nation which I will raise up unto me of thy seed, upon all the face of the earth.” The Lord also promised to make a “nation” in the Americas among the children of Lehi (1 Nephi 14:6-7).

When Lehi died not long after his family’s arrival in the Americas, those sympathetic to the older brother Laman sought to kill Nephi. Warned of the Lord, Nephi took the brass plates (essentially an Old Testament record) and those who would follow him—soon called “Nephites”—to new country. Nephi and his brother Jacob used the brass plates to teach the Nephites the commandments. The Lord also commanded Nephi to begin keeping a record of his own people. With the word of God recorded in their scriptures, the Nephites founded a prosperous civilization. In contrast, the group that stayed with Laman—soon called the Lamanites—neglected the commandments and kept no record of themselves. They had no prophets and therefore no sacred record of their own to keep. Whereas the commandment-and-record-keeping Nephites built a civilization, the negligent Lamanites became a wild and nomadic people. The Lord cursed them with a dark skin to make them unattractive to the Nephites, who subsequently described the Lamanites as filthy and loathsome, mischievous and subtle, wicked and evil-natured, ferocious and bloodthirsty (2 Nephi 5:15-17, 20-25; Jacob 3:5; Enos 1:20-21; Mosiah 10:12; Alma 17:14).

The first Nephite nation did, however, come to ruin within a few hundred years. Escaping the crumbling society, in about 210 BC, a prophet named Mosiah led a group of righteous Nephites on another exodus. They traveled to a land called Zarahemla, where they encountered the Mulekites—another group of people the Lord had brought from Jerusalem to the promised land. Mulek, of the royal Jerusalem household, had escaped just before the Babylonian conquest. Like the Lamanites, the record-less Mulekites provided a foil to the recordbearing Nephites. While the brass plates kept Mosiah’s group of Nephites from having “dwindled in unbelief,” the Mulekites “had brought no records with them; and they denied the being of their Creator.” The Mulekites received the Nephite exiles and united with them under the leadership of Mosiah “because the Lord had sent the people of Mosiah with the plates of brass which contained the record of the Jews.” In terms of political leadership, the immigrants’ possession of the Hebrew scriptures trumped even the royal ancestry of the native inhabitants of the land (Omni 1:14-19).

The Nephite and Jaredite histories follow a cyclical pattern of righteousness and wickedness among leaders and the populace reminiscent of ancient Israel’s national history as recorded in the books of Kings and Chronicles. While wicked rulers brought the Jaredites to the brink of destruction, righteous rulers established peace, built great cities, and extended the territory of their kingdoms. Under the reign of the righteous King Lib, the Jaredites realized all the blessings of the American continent: “Never could be a people more blessed than were they, and more prospered by the hand of the Lord” (Ether 10:28). Generations later, the Jaredite national history came to a close with the disintegration of the government, whereupon “there began to be a war upon all the face of the land, every man with his band fighting for that which he desired.” Without any established order, “all the people upon the face of the land were shedding blood, and there was none to restrain them” (Ether 13:31).

After going through several minor cycles of their own, the Nephite- Mulekite civilization finally collapsed around AD 30. When its chief judge was assassinated, the corrupted government failed and the nation disintegrated into tribes (3 Nephi 6:30-7:14). However, following Christ’s resurrection in the old world, he destroyed the wicked cities in the Americas, reestablished civil society among the surviving Nephites and Lamanites, and “did prosper them exceedingly in the land.” After two centuries, however, this resuscitated civilization also began to falter. They soon re-divided into “Nephites” and “Lamanites” who went to war and committed great atrocities against each other. As wicked as the entirely disbelieving Lamanites were, the Nephites were worse. After capturing Lamanite girls, they would rape them, torture them to death, and then “devour their flesh like unto wild beasts” (Moroni 9:9-10). In a letter to his son Moroni, the prophet Mormon asked if God could spare such a people “without civilization” (Moroni 9:11-14).

In documenting the demise of the Nephites and Jaredites and the causes thereof, the national histories recorded in the Book of Mormon provide a voice of warning to future American nations. To the latter-day Gentiles, the nation’s final prophet-historian wrote, “This cometh unto you, O ye Gentiles, that ye may know the decrees of God—that ye may repent, and not continue in your iniquities until the fulness come, that ye may not bring down the fulness of the wrath of God upon you as the inhabitants of the land have hitherto done” (Ether 2:11). The Book of Mormon thus made the lessons of the land available to future nations.

The identification of Gentiles and Israelites in the Book of Mormon demands a close look. The Gentiles are generally the European Christian immigrants in the United States. Obviously, many of these are actually Israelites descendants. The identification of Israelites or the Israelite remnant is a bit problematic. It would seem that Joseph, in his day, regarded the Native American Indians as Israelites. Further, he felt that the Indians were descendants of Book of Mormon peoples. Most scholars concerned today with Book of Mormon geography have concluded that the Book of Mormon story took place in a limited location in Central America probably not larger than two hundred by seven hundred miles. Also, it is now believed that when Lehi and his party landed in the Western Hemisphere, he found the land already inhabited with many different peoples. Today, most scholars feel that most of the North American Indians are not of Book of Mormon origin. They likely stem from many various sources. Actually, then, the meaning of the term “Israelite remnant” in the Book of Mormon is not clear. It could refer to all North American Indians, though, as mentioned, many of these are likely of non-Israelite origin. It could refer to Western Hemisphere natives in North, Central, and South America. Perhaps it refers exclusively to any remnants of Book of Mormon peoples that may exist in North, Central, or South America. Or, it could refer to any Israelite immigrant into this country.

The Lord would use the new Americans—the Gentiles—as a “scourge” to chasten the Israelite remnant (3 Nephi 20:28; see also 1 Nephi 13:34). “By the hand of the gentiles,” the Lord “laid siege” against the Indians and “raised forts against them” (2 Nephi 26:15). The Indians would be “driven to and fro upon the face of the earth, and be hunted” (Helaman 15:12; see also 1 Nephi 22:7; 3

Nephi 16:8; Mormon 5:20). In this manner, the Lord declared, “I have caused my people who are of the house of Israel to be smitten, and to be afflicted, and to be slain, and to be cast out from among them, and to become hated by them, and to become a hiss and a byword among them” (3 Nephi 16:9; see also 16:8). Under God’s chastening hand, the Indians would be “brought down low in the dust” (2 Nephi 26:15). However, because the Lord had covenanted with Lehi that the land was consecrated to “his seed” forever, he would not allow the American Gentiles to “utterly destroy” the Indians (1 Nephi 13:30-31; see also Helaman 15:12-13).

Nephi beheld in vision that the Gentiles who inherited the Americas prospered in the land and that a book “was carried forth among them.” This was the Bible. An angel explained to Nephi that this book contained the writings of the ancient Jewish prophets and was “a record like unto the engravings which are upon the plates of brass, save there are not so many; nevertheless, they contain the covenants of the Lord, which he hath made unto the house of Israel.” For this reason, the book was “of great worth unto the Gentiles,” just as the brass plates had been “of great worth” to Lehi and his family (1 Nephi 13:20-23). The Gentiles thus came into the Americas with the Hebrew scriptures just as Lehi and his family had come centuries earlier with the brass plates—and as the children of Israel had come into Canaan with the original Hebrew scriptures inscribed on stone tablets. Like ancient Israel and the Nephite nation, the United States would be built on the foundation of the scriptures—the Bible.

The Book of Mormon shows that Joseph Smith viewed America from within a very literal biblical framework of promised lands and sacred covenants. The possibility of the United States’ downfall, therefore, was just as real to Joseph as its recent rise to power. Joseph viewed the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States as harbingers of the millennium. But Joseph did not really believe in America’s extended future. The Book of Mormon singled out the American Gentiles from other nations, but ultimately classified them with the other gentile nations that rose and fell through the ages. The Book of Mormon also identified a fatal flaw in the foundations of the new American civilization. The United States had been built on an imperfect civic text. Unlike the brass plates, the scriptures that the American Gentiles carried with them had been corrupted. The angel explained to Nephi in his vision that “many plain and precious things” had been removed from the Bible; the Gentiles had the gospel but not a “fullness of the gospel.” The removal of these plain teachings from their scriptures put the Gentiles in an “awful state of blindness” in which many would “stumble exceedingly”—even to the point that the devil overpowered them (1 Nephi 13:29-35). The fullness of the gospel would be revealed by the discovery and translation of the Book of Mormon. The American Israelites, along with a few of the American Gentiles, would find the Book of Mormon to be “of great worth” (1 Nephi 22:8; 2 Nephi 25:8, 28:2; see also 2 Nephi 3:7, 33:3; Mormon 8:14).

This is the point at which Joseph’s eschatology would veer sharply away from that of his countrymen. The latter-day appearance of the Book of Mormon, an ancient Israelite record, signaled the imminent restoration of an Israelite nation in the Americas. Protestant rhetoric of Joseph’s day included Jeremiahlike warnings (“jeremiads”) to Israel to repent or be destroyed. The purpose of the conventional American jeremiad was to take its audience to the brink of ruin to let them peer over the edge in order to scare them back. It explained current conditions as temporary, not terminal, disease—as loving chastisements meant to put America back on the track of its divine errand. The American jeremiad always concluded with optimism for America’s future (see Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 6-9). The Book of Mormon did not. The Book of Mormon negated its own open-ended warnings with prophecies of certain failure.

Protestants saw America’s immigrants as metaphorical Israel. The Book of Mormon cast the European immigrants—American Gentiles—as the scourge that would chasten American Israelites—assumed by Joseph to be Native American Indians—and prepare them for their return to power. As the American Gentiles rejected the Book of Mormon and the American Israelites accepted it, the United States would begin to fall and the Indians would begin to rise. The Lord would remember and reinstate the covenant he had made with their father Lehi that the land would belong to his seed forever. As the Gentiles had initially gone forth with the Bible conquering the Indians, the Book of Mormon would allow the Israelite remnant (the Native American Indians) to eventually realize their status as a covenant people.

Those Gentiles who would accept the Book of Mormon and the fullness of the Gospel would join the Indians and be “numbered among the house of Israel.” The Book of Mormon would become the founding text for a new American civilization that would rise but never fall. Joseph believed the very existence of the Book of Mormon implied the demise of the United States. The land of America was blessed but it was also cursed. While a land of freedom and prosperity for the righteous, America was simultaneously a land of bondage and destruction for those people that turned away from the Lord. The Book of Mormon then was much more than a religious book. It testified that Christ was the author of political freedom as well as eternal salvation. It warned America that it would lose the blessings of freedom if it did not repent.

The desire for peace and harmony in society pervades the Book of Mormon—as does a deep concern over any form of social strife. The Book of Mormon prophets couched much of their social commentary in the dual framework of peace and contention. They addressed religious, economic, and political developments in Nephite history in terms of this framework. Peace and contention, in fact, frame the entire Nephite saga. The Book of Mormon opens with a narrative involving contention in the family of Lehi over religious devotion and righteousness. In the Americas, the family divided into two nations whose wars occupy much of their subsequent history. Though the Book of Mormon is primarily a work of scripture, like the Bible, the Nephites also described it as a record of “their wars, and their contentions, and the reigns of their kings” (Jacob 3:13). In the end, Nephite contention over religious belief, economic and social status, and political affiliation would culminate in civil wars, foreign wars, and destruction.

True religion in the Book of Mormon meant to establish social harmony and unity. Nephi taught those who followed him the commandments that “men should not murder; that they should not lie; that they should not steal; that they should not take the name of the Lord their God in vain; that they should not envy; that they should not have malice; that they should not contend one with another” (2 Nephi 26:32-33). Nephi also proclaimed God’s willingness and desire to accept and save all of humankind, “black and white, bond and free, male and female.” Divisions and enmities based on race, class, or gender could and should melt away within the church. When the elder Alma founded the church, he commanded the members “that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another” (2 Nephi 26:32, 33, Mosiah 18:17, 21).

This harmony included doctrinal unity. For example, when the church faced “a few contentions concerning the points of doctrine, which had been laid down by the prophets,” it resulted in “much strife.” But the current Nephite prophets “who knew concerning the true points of doctrine, having many revelations daily . . . did put an end to their strife in that same year” (Helaman 11:22-23). The best solution for differences of scriptural interpretation was not a tolerant religious pluralism, but rather restored unity through new scripture (see also 3 Nephi 1:24-25). The resurrected Christ also resolved doctrinal disputes when he appeared in the Americas (see 3 Nephi 11:8-22, especially 22). After teaching the proper mode of baptism, he declared, “there shall be no disputations among you, as there have hitherto been; neither shall there be disputations among you concerning the points of my doctrine, as there have hitherto been. . . . Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away” (3 Nephi 11:28-30; see also 18:34). The religious unity established by Christ lasted for two centuries. The religious peace ended when the people built “many churches in the land.” The people had come to follow “many priests and false prophets to build up many churches, and to do all manner of iniquity” (4 Nephi 1:27, 34).

Nephi prophesied a similar situation in the last days, when the removal of many “plain and precious parts” from the Bible would constitute a “stumbling block” for the Gentiles—causing doctrinal confusion and disagreement. In his vision, Nephi foresaw “there are many churches built up which cause envyings, and strifes, and malice” because their members “contend one with another; and their priests shall contend one with another” (2 Nephi 26:20-21, 28:4). However, whereas the corruption of the revelations (the Bible) led to religious disputation, new revelation would resolve the controversy. The translated Book of Mormon would join with the Bible “unto the confounding of false doctrines and laying down of contentions, and establishing peace” (2 Nephi 3:12).

Ideal harmony in the church was not only religious but economic. Church law mandated that “there should be an equality among all men; That they should let no pride nor haughtiness disturb their peace; that every man should esteem his neighbor as himself, laboring with their own hands for their support” (Mosiah 27:4-5). Supporting one’s own self included ministers as well, who “did impart the word of God, one with another, without money and without price” (Alma 1:20). In the Nephite church, “the preacher was no better than the hearer, neither was the teacher any better than the learner; and thus they were all equal” (Mosiah 27:3-4; Alma 1: 20, 26; see also Alma 5:49, 6:5,16:14,16; Helaman 3:34; 4 Nephi 1:41). The Book of Mormon prophets held that inequalities of wealth would necessarily result in contention between different socioeconomic classes (see, for example, Jacob 2:13). The Book of Mormon also criticized the wealthy for further enriching themselves through their privileged access to education and professional occupations (3 Nephi 6:10-12; also 14).

The Book of Mormon prophets criticized economic and social division as much or more than they criticized religious division. The elder Alma, when he founded the church, commanded that the people of the church should impart of their substance, every one according to that which he had; if he have more abundantly he should impart more abundantly; and of him that had but little, but little should be required; and to him that had not should be given. And thus they should impart of their substance of their own free will and good desires toward God, and to those priests that stood in need, yea, and to every needy, naked soul (Mosiah 18:27-28; see also Alma 1:27, 30, 5:55).

While differing markedly in spirit from the rampant individualism of Jacksonian America, this was no Marxist call for class revolution. When the younger Alma preached to the poor who had been cast out of the Zoramite churches, he admonished them that they “not revile against those who do cast you out because of your exceeding poverty, lest ye become sinners like unto them.” Class conflict would only deepen the antagonism in society.

Although the Book of Mormon generally criticized riches, it envisioned the possibility of great wealth spread evenly through society. The solution was to concern oneself with people instead of possessions (Jacob 2:17-19; see also 2 Nephi 9:28-29). When Jesus Christ visited the Americas following his resurrection, he established a social and economic utopia: “there were no contentions and disputations among them, and every man did deal justly one with another. And they had all things in common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift” (4 Nephi 1:2-3; see also 3 Nephi 26:19). After two centuries, however, pride eventually found its way back into the hearts of the people: “And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them. And they began to be divided into classes; and they began to build up churches unto themselves to get gain” (4 Nephi 1:26).

The Book of Mormon occasionally associates the quest for wealth and popularity with the quest for political power. Satan tempted men “to seek for power, and authority, and riches, and the vain things of the world” (3 Nephi 6: 15). In the Book of Mormon, the professional class of lawyers fed off of social disputes not only through private work for hire but through official appointments in the judicial system (Alma 10:14; 24; see also Jacob 7:2; Mosiah 11:7; Alma 1:3, 30:47,46:7,10; Helaman 1:7, 2:5, 13:28, 3 Nephi 1:29, 7:12; Ether 8:2). Through judicial appointments, the lawyers had entered into a relationship with the judges that threatened to corrupt the government and the nation (the judges and lawyers in Ammonihah repeatedly appear together; see Alma 14:2, 5,14:18, 23-25; see also Alma 10:27).

An attempt to reestablish a monarchy in the early years of the reign of the judges further illustrates the connection between class division and political division. The movement divided the nation into two parties: the “king-men” and the “freemen.” The monarchist party (king-men) was led by men of “high birth” who “professed the blood of nobility.” These men “sought to be kings; and they were supported by those who sought power and authority over the people” (Alma 51:5-6, 8, 21). Another party of monarchists rose shortly before the appearance of the resurrected Christ. This elite society was composed of chief judges, chief priests, and lawyers—with their “friends and kindreds.” They plotted to assassinate the chief judge and replace him with a king (3 Nephi 6:20-7:6). In these narratives, where class differences eventually lead to professions of nobility and attempts to establish a monarchal form of government, the Book of Mormon makes a dramatic connection between class and politics.

As with religious division and social strife, the Book of Mormon condemns political contention. The rare contest for political appointment consistently appears in negative hues, while the transition of power from a chief judge to his son generally appears as a peaceful episode (Alma 50:39; Helaman 3:37, 6:17- 19; 3 Nephi 1:2, 6:19; compare Mosiah 29:42; Alma 5:3, 62:43). The orderly hierarchy of the supreme chief judge, the other chief judges, and the lower judges contributed to political harmony within the Nephite government—which exhibited nothing in the way of separation of powers or a theory of checks and balances. The chief judge was actually both “chief judge and governor”— judiciary and executive officer (see, for example, Alma 2:16, 30:29, 50:39; Helaman 1:5,13; 3 Nephi 1:1). The Book of Mormon does not partake in the American paranoia with concentrated power. Power seemed to exist independent of virtue and vice. The wicked sought for power through various means—flattery, patronage, bribery, intrigue, fraud, and assassination—and then used that power to support their iniquity. The virtuous accepted power reluctantly when it was thrust upon them and then used it on behalf of the public good. In all the book’s narratives of righteous and wicked kings, power never corrupts. No Saul or David can be found in its pages. The balance of concern in the Book of Mormon rests not on the danger of power and the need to check it, but on the social necessity of concentrated power in order to keep the peace and protect the innocent. The chief judge even used the Nephite armies to enforce domestic tranquility (see Alma 50:39, 51:22; 3 Nephi 6:6).

Under the reign of the judges, the main danger of having so much political power concentrated in one individual was the destabilizing threat of assassination. When a conspiracy led by Jacob murdered the chief judge, it led to a political collapse: “The people were divided one against another; and they did separate one from another into tribes” (3 Nephi 7:1-2; also 7). In the natural disasters that preceded the appearance of the resurrected Christ, Jacob’s city was among several destroyed. A voice from heaven singled out the city from among the rest as “above all the wickedness of the whole earth. . . . for it was they that did destroy the peace of my people and the government of the land” (3 Nephi 9:9; see also 7:6). Destroying the government and the social order and peace it maintained constituted the greatest offense toward God and merited his greatest condemnation.

Several narratives in the Book of Mormon trace the escalation of social contention to the point of violence and even civil war. For example, about twenty years before the sign of Christ’s birth, “there began to be contentions insomuch that they were divided against themselves and began to slay one another with the sword” (Helaman 10:18; compare 4:1). Then the “contentions did increase, insomuch that there were wars throughout all the land among all the people of

Nephi” (Helaman 11:1; early in the reign of the judges a monarchist movement caused a brief civil war; Alma 2:5-6). The national history of the Jaredites chronicles numerous instances of civil war (Ether 15). Civil war withing the Nephite nation posed an exceptionally acute danger to that nation during times of war against the Lamanite kingdom (Alma 60:16; see also 51:9,16; 48:20; 53:9; 60:24).

Shortly after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Daniel Webster would explicate the threat disunion and civil war posed to American independence in his famous debate with Robert Hayne. Webster maintained that a country’s liberty and that country’s union were inseparable. He despaired over “the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder” (Belz, ed., The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union, 143-44; Webster had earlier attributed this doctrine that “the Union of the States is essential to the prosperity and safety of the States” to the “framers of the constitution themselves”). The Book of Mormon accentuated this idea by portraying the Nephite wars with the Lamanites as extensions of their own civil wars. Lehi, the father of both nations, had given it as his dying admonition that his children “be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things” (2 Nephi 1:21).

When Jesus Christ visited the Americas following his resurrection, he effected the complete resolution of the original contention among the children of Lehi: “There was no contention among all the people, in all the land. . . . neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.” This unity lasted for two centuries before “there was a great division among the people” (4 Nephi 1:13-17, 35). Those who turned away from the gospel and separated themselves from the church eventually made a political separation as well. The two groups adopted the old national nomenclature of “Nephites” and “Lamanites.” When the countries went to war, “there was blood and carnage spread throughout all the face of the land, both on the part of the Nephites and also on the part of the Lamanites; and it was one complete revolution throughout all the face of the land” (Mormon 2:8). The prophet Mormon recorded that “every heart was hardened, so that they delighted in the shedding of blood continually. . . . there never had been so great wickedness among all the children of Lehi, nor even among all the house of Israel.” He wrote to his son Moroni that the Nephites had “lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually.” The Nephite-Lamanite war had become a war of extermination. Facing the likelihood of a Nephite defeat, Mormon wrote, “If they perish it will be like unto the Jaredites, because of the wilfulness of their hearts, seeking for blood and revenge” (Mormon 4:11-12; Moroni 9:5, 23). The bloodthirsty Nephites waged war to the bitter end. The book closes with their annihilation.

Through numerous incidents and episodes, the epic of the Nephites established the interconnectedness of religion, class, and politics. The narratives tethered political conflict to broader patterns of social division and strife. The Book of Mormon traced the history of the Nephites to the point of a nation suffering from religious dissent and persecution, social stratification and oppression, political divisions and conflicts, and civil and foreign wars. But the book also held forth the possibility of a society that is both free and peaceful. After the appearance of Christ, the people lived in love and harmony with one religion, one class, and one nation. Two centuries later, they had again divided into separate churches, unequal classes, and enemy nations. This time, the Book of Mormon followed the trajectory of escalating contention to its ultimate extremity: national extinction. In the last days, the record of these ancient peoples would serve as the foundational text for a new society united in its religious belief, economic effort, and social order.

Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon affirmed that America was a special land of liberty blessed by the Lord. It affirmed the Lord’s hand in America’s deliverance from the bondage of European monarchy. But it also warned that the nation was being internally divided by religious controversy, social stratification, and political parties. The Book of Mormon also spoke to the rise of violence in Jacksonian America and the threat of civil war. This contention and violence loomed as the unrighteousness that would deprive them of the blessings of freedom. The Book of Mormon, therefore, indicted the American Gentiles as a once humble people who when prospered had become proud, envious, and contentious. Once blessed of the Lord, they would soon be cursed.

The ongoing history of chosen people in the chosen land would continue with the return to power of the Israelite “remnant” (in Joseph’s view at that time, the Native American Indians). This brings to the fore the fundamental questions regarding the nature of “Israelite” government (as opposed to “Gentile” government) in the Americas. The Book of Mormon describes the structure of godly government and the role of that government in preserving freedom and keeping peace. The Book of Mormon not only prophesies of a future American Israel, but outlined the shape of Israelite government in the Americas. The Nephite record includes numerous teachings on the structure and role of government and its relationship to true religion and to the true church.

The transition from the reign of kings to the reign of judges constitutes the pivotal political development in the Book of Mormon. Book of Mormon political configurations followed an Old Testament paradigm. After delivering the Israelites from Egyptian bondage, Moses received the religious and civil law of

God for Israel and instituted a system of judges to govern the affairs of the people. Moses initially judged all disputes by himself, but his father-in-law, Jethro, convinced him to train and appoint lesser judges. Moses became something of a chief judge, reserving the most difficult cases for himself (Exodus 18:13-26). After the conquest of Canaan, the Israelites lived under the reign of the judges for several generations (See Judges). But in the days of the prophet Samuel, the Israelites requested that he appoint a king to rule over them (1 Samuel 8:20). Samuel warned them that kings would claim their best fields and vineyards, tax their herds and flocks, and impress their sons and daughters as soldiers and servants. However, with God’s permission and direction to follow “the voice of the people,” Samuel appointed Saul the first king of Israel and later established the royal house of David (1 Samuel 8:7; see also 1 Samuel 8-2 Samuel 8). Not only did the kings of Israel burden their people, as Samuel had warned, but many of them turned away from the Lord and inflicted their corruption upon the kingdom. The cycle of righteous and wicked kings in the Old Testament finally ended in the conquest of Israel by foreign powers.

Departing from Israel after centuries of rule by kings, the Nephites and Lamanites naturally established their own monarchies—their own kings. However, the remnant of Israel in America would eventually restore the primitive pattern of Israelite government. The Nephite transition from kings to judges must be understood against this biblical backdrop.

Like the Old World Israelites under Samuel, the New World Israelites wanted a king. This system worked well for a time due to the diligence and righteousness of the kings. In Nephi’s words, “they would that I should be their king I, Nephi, was desirous that they should have no king; nevertheless, I did for them according to that which was in my power” (2 Nephi 5:17). Unlike the demanding Israelite kings, Nephi “labored in all his days for their welfare” (Jacob 1:10; see also 2 Nephi 6:2). In the second Nephite kingdom in the new land of Zarahemla, Mosiah was succeeded by his son Benjamin, who was succeeded by his son Mosiah (Omni 1:23; Mosiah 2:30-31, 6:3-6). As had Nephi, these first monarchs of the new Nephite kingdom spent their reigns in the service of their people (Mosiah 2:10-28, 6:7, 29:13). Like Nephi, Benjamin also served as a protector to his people and himself wielded the sword of Laban in defense of his people (Words of Mormon 1:13). Like Moses, Benjamin’s son Mosiah established as law the commandments he received from the Lord (Alma 1:1; also Mosiah 2:31; Alma 1:14, 27:9; Helaman 4:22). Mosiah also reasserted among the combined group of Nephites and Mulekites “the laws which have been given you by our fathers, which are correct, and which were given them by the hand of the Lord” (Mosiah 29:25).

This was apparently a modified version of the Law of Moses as it had been lived by the Israelite ancestors of the Nephites and Mulekites. When Lehi’s family first arrived in the promised land, he explained, “I desire that ye should remember to observe the statutes and the judgments of the Lord; behold, this hath been the anxiety of my soul from the beginning” (2 Nephi 1:6). This passage echoes the phrasing in Deuteronomy referring to the Law of Moses that the Israelites were supposed to live by in their original promised land: “These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it” (Deuteronomy 12:1; see also 16:12; 3 Nephi 25:4). Deuteronomy also refers to the Mosaic law as God’s “commandments and his statutes” (Deuteronomy 27:10). After Lehi’s death, his oldest children turned to wickedness and threatened those who followed the teachings of their younger brother Nephi. However, when Nephi led his disciples to a new land, they “did observe to keep the judgments, and the statutes, and the commandments of the Lord in all things, according to the law of Moses” (2 Nephi 5:10). These evidently became law in the Nephite kingdom. The Law of Moses—and its American adaptation—was not only religious but political. Nephi took the brass plates, which contained the Law of Moses, so that his “nation” would not dwindle in unbelief (1 Nephi 4:13, 5:10-16; 2 Nephi 5:5-12).

At the end of his reign, Mosiah, the son of Benjamin, reintroduced the ancient Israelite government of judges instituted by Moses. Mosiah enjoined his people to “appoint wise men to be judges, that will judge this people according to the commandments of God. Now it is better that a man should be judged of God than of man, for the judgments of God are always just, but the judgments of man are not always just.” Whereas kings had the authority to establish and rescind law, judges could only rule on established law. If that law were the commandments of God, the judges would rule accordingly. Citing the example of his father, Benjamin, Mosiah held that “if it were possible that you could have just men to be your kings, who would establish the laws of God, and judge this people according to his commandments, yea . . . if this could always be the case then it would be expedient that ye should always have kings to rule over you.” Yet there was no guarantee on this. Mosiah explained that “an iniquitous king . . . teareth up the law of those who have reigned in righteousness before him; and he trampleth under his feet the commandments of God; And he enacteth laws, and sendeth them forth among his people, yea, laws after the manner of his own wickedness” (Mosiah 29:11-13, 21-23). In contrast, the new regime of judges would govern according to the commandments of the Lord—as they had after the Law of Moses was established (Mosiah 29:25, 39, 41). Ideally, kings were righteous men—even prophets—and monarchy was a form of theocracy. Because of dependence on God’s law, a stable system of judges was even more theocratic. The transition from monarchy to judges therefore was a shift in the direction of greater theocracy.

The transition from kings to judges was a shift not only toward theocracy but toward democracy. Whereas monarchs inherited the throne by birthright, judges were appointed “by the voice of the people” (Mosiah 29:25; see also Mosiah 29:39; Helaman 1:5,13; 2:2). And whereas an evil king would use his power to retain his position, an unrighteous judge could be removed through orderly channels upon complaint. Mosiah taught his people, “ye cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood. For behold, he has his friends in iniquity, and he keepeth his guards about him . . . and whosoever doth rebel against him he will send his armies against them to war, and if he can he will destroy them” (Mosiah 29:21-23). In contrast, any judge who abused or neglected his authority could be judged by a higher judge, and the chief judge could be judged by a group of lower judges “according to the voice of the people” (Mosiah 29:28-29; 3 Nephi 6:25). The law of Mosiah also established a procedure by which the voice of the people could fundamentally alter the law (Alma 2:3-7, 4:16, 51:7; Helaman 5:2; 3 Nephi 6:4). As Mosiah explained, “it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right” (Mosiah 29:26).

The virtue of the majority was “common” but not guaranteed. The majority of the people were only less likely to choose wrong than a minority of the people or an absolute minority of one—a king. The possibility of an unvirtuous majority existed as a conscious reality, and as Mosiah warned, “if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction” (Mosiah 29:27; see also Alma 10:19). Democracy, the rule of the people, was good only if the people were good. If the people turned to wickedness, they were better off ruled by a righteous king.

In addition to propounding a particular form of government, the Book of Mormon identifies a threatening form of counter-government in the various “secret combinations” that plagued both the Nephite judges and the Jaredite kings (Ether 7-14). These secret bands sought to usurp the power of government office through intrigue and assassination (see, for example, Helaman 2:8, 6:17-19, 7:21; Ether 8:16, 23, 9:5-6, 14:7-10). Secret combinations only flourished when the larger society willingly tolerated them. The system of judges initiated by King Mosiah served in part to place the burden of responsibility for good government upon the people, and this included a wary vigilance to keep corruption from seeping into power. Although it was a secret combination of high judges and others who assassinated the chief judge and destroyed the Nephite government, the general populace was at fault: “All this iniquity had come upon the people because they did yield themselves unto the power of Satan” (3 Nephi 7:5. Compare Ether 9:6). The success of secret combinations, therefore, implicated the general citizenry.

The Book of Mormon, in fact, documents the failure of democracy. By the birth of Jesus Christ, the Nephites had appointed several wicked judges and “had altered and trampled under their feet the laws of Mosiah, or that which the Lord commanded him to give unto the people; and they saw that their laws had become corrupted, and that they had become a wicked people” (Helaman 4:22; 8:1). The good government laws established by a king had been ruined by the people: “For as their laws and their governments were established by the voice of the people, and they who chose evil were more numerous than they who chose good, therefore they were ripening for destruction, for the laws had become corrupted” (Helaman 5:2; see also 8:1). These passages complicate a simplistic democratic reading of the Book of Mormon (See Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity, 115-20). Joseph knew that a democratic system could become corrupt and fail.

As a work of both history and prophecy, the Book of Mormon applied its political analysis to the last days. Nephi, conveying his vision of the American Gentiles, wrote, “There are many churches” and “there are also secret combinations” (2 Nephi 26:20-22). The American Gentiles had been inspired and empowered by God and delivered from the captivity of Europe, but their providentially established government faced the threat of Satan-inspired churches and political conspiracies. The Book of Mormon’s concern with government corruption through secret agreements and political spoils paralleled the concern of many Americans during the presidential politics of the 1820s. In the alleged “corrupt bargain” of 1824, John Quincy Adams secretly offered Henry Clay the spoils of succession for his support in the House election. While many saw Jackson as the people’s choice, others believed he obtained the presidency through the support of the secret brotherhood of Freemasons. Jackson’s critics held that his rhetoric of healthy rotation in government offices only masked his award of government posts to political supporters as spoils of conquest. The Book of Mormon stridently asserted that the toleration of this kind of corruption in government implicated the general populace.

Like Nephi, the prophet Moroni also foretold secret combinations among the Gentiles in the latter days. Moroni explained that those who organized these secret combinations sought to “overthrow the freedom of all lands, nations, and countries,” and that “whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation, behold, they shall be destroyed” (Ether 8:22, 25). As the last prophet to write in the Book of Mormon,

Moroni explained that the Jaredite and Nephite records constituted an explicitly political warning to the American Gentiles of the latter days:

Wherefore, O ye Gentiles, it is wisdom in God that these

things should be shown unto you, that thereby ye may repent of your sins, and suffer not that these murderous combinations shall get above you, which are built up to get power and gain—and the work, yea, even the work of destruction come upon you, yea, even the sword of the justice of the Eternal God shall fall upon you, to your overthrow and destruction if ye shall suffer these things to be

(Ether 8:23).

The American Gentiles of the last days, like the Jaredites and the Nephites of the American past, faced the threat of national annihilation.

The close relationship of church and state among the Nephites included the concept of a covenant society and the corollary concept of exodus when the covenant had been forsaken. The Book of Mormon begins with a story of exodus and of establishing a new nation in a new land. Lehi led his family into the wilderness where, joined by the family of Ishmael, they became a people apart. Lehi removed his family not from a heathen nation, but from Jerusalem—the political and religious center of the promised land to which Moses had led God’s people. In its opening pages, the Book of Mormon makes the point that a nation even God’s chosen nation—can become so evil that the best course for the righteous is to disengage from society and physically remove themselves from it. Called by the Lord, the prophet Lehi had cried repentance in Jerusalem— desperately engaging in a final attempt to reform the nation. But when the Jews rejected his message and threatened his life, the Lord instructed him to leave the nation and then led him across the sea to the Americas (1 Nephi 1:4). This pattern would be repeated in the Americas. While the Book of Mormon encouraged vigorous attempts to engage and reform society—in the form of prophetic warning—it also foresaw the moment of disengagement and withdrawal, self-imposed exile, and the creation of a new covenant society in a new precious land.

After lying hidden for centuries, the Book of Mormon heralded the dawn of a new era for the covenant people of Israel (3 Nephi 16:4-5, 21:1-9). When he appeared in the Americas following his resurrection, Jesus Christ explained that although he had fulfilled the Law of Moses he had not fulfilled his covenants with the House of Israel (3 Nephi 15:8). The Gentile era was coming to its “fulness” and the covenants of the Lord with Israel would be rejuvenated (3 Nephi 16:4). The covenant promises to the American Israelites included the land (2 Nephi 1:5; 10:19). The Book of Mormon delivered an explicit message to the Gentiles of the last days that “the covenant which the Father hath made with the children of

Israel, concerning their restoration to the lands of their inheritance, is already beginning to be fulfilled” (3 Nephi 29:1). The resurrected Christ declared he would effect this territorial restoration in the last days as it was his father’s “great and eternal purpose” (Mormon 5:14. See also 3 Nephi 16:16, 20:14). The Book of Mormon would come to the Gentiles before the Indians in order to give them a chance to repent. If they accepted the book and repented, they would “come in unto the covenant and be numbered among this the remnant of Jacob, unto whom I have given this land for their inheritance” (3 Nephi 21:22. See also 1 Nephi 14:1-2; 2 Nephi 10:18; 3 Nephi 16: 6-7, 13, 21:6, 30:2; Ether 13:10). On the other hand, if they rejected the book, the resurrected Christ foretold, they would be “cut off from among my people who are of the covenant”—which included being cut off from the land (3 Nephi 21:11).

Those Gentiles who did accept the Book of Mormon would take it and the pure gospel found therein to Indians (3 Nephi 16:11-12). The Book of Mormon would also help the Indians accept Christianity and the Bible (2 Nephi 3:11). Ironically, these American Gentiles would thus play a role in the demise of Gentile sovereignty in America. Similarly, freedom of religion in America would paradoxically play its role in the coming Indian revolution: The Gentiles would be established “as a free people” so that missionaries could bring the Book of Mormon to Israel and “the covenant of the Father may be fulfilled which he hath covenanted with his people” (3 Nephi 21:4). The Book of Mormon clearly stated that its primary audience was the Israelite remnant and that it aimed to empower them with the knowledge of their covenant status and claim upon the land (see, for example, 3 Nephi 21:7; Mormon 5:12; 7:1; 8-10).

The Book of Mormon also foretold that in the last days the Lord would raise up a prophet named Joseph—apparently Joseph Smith. This prophet would be “like unto Moses” and help restore the House of Israel (2 Nephi 3:6-25; 3 Nephi 21:10-11). This latter-day prophet would evidently lead the converted Gentiles to join with the Israelites among whom they would be numbered. There they would assist them in building a city—the “New Jerusalem” prophesied in the Book of Revelation (3 Nephi 5:23; 20:22; 21:23-24; also Ether 13:4-8; compare Revelation 3:12; 21:2).

The Book of Mormon seems to map the city in the interior of the continent. From this central location, the Gentiles would assist the Indians “that they may be gathered in, who are scattered upon all the face of the land, in unto the New Jerusalem” (3 Nephi 21:24; see also 5:25-26; 16:4-5; 21:28-29). Then with the city built, the “power of heaven” would “come down among them” (3 Nephi 21:25). In the New Jerusalem, the Indians would “no more be confounded, until the end come when the earth shall pass away” (Ether 13:4-8; see also 3 Nephi 16:12; 20:12-14; 3 Nephi 21:26).

From the central gathering point of the New Jerusalem, the Indians would begin to reclaim their land. They would “break forth on the right hand and on the left” (3 Nephi 22:3). The New Jerusalem would stand as the capital city of a nation for the American Israelites, just as Old Jerusalem would stand as the capital of a restored nation for the Jews. Zion was the successor nation to the Jaredites, the Nephites, and the Gentiles in the Americas (1 Nephi 4:13; 17:37; 22:7; Alma 9:20; 37:25; Ether 1:43; 2:9, 12; Moroni 8:27; see also 2 Nephi 10:3). The Book of Mormon further defined Zion and Jerusalem as nations by placing them in a complementary relationship with the gentile nations from which Israel would be gathered home (2 Nephi 15:26). As Indians and other Israelites gathered to Zion, her territory would expand. To project Zion’s manifest destiny, the Book of Mormon employs Isaiah’s tent metaphor for the expansion of Israel: “Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations; spare not, lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes” (3 Nephi 22:2—compare Isaiah 54:2). In the closing lines of the Book of Mormon, the prophet Moroni admonished Zion, “Strengthen thy stakes and enlarge thy borders,” that “the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee, O house of Israel, may be fulfilled” (Moroni 10:31). The covenants that the Father had made would be fulfilled when America belonged to the Indians (See 3 Nephi 20:22).

In order for the Indians to have a “place for their inheritance,” the land had to be emptied of Gentiles (2 Nephi 1:8). The Book of Mormon declared that the: remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles, yea, in the midst of them as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep, who, if he go through both treadeth down and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver. Their hand shall be lifted up upon their adversaries, and all their enemies shall be cut off (3 Nephi 21:12-13. See also 3 Nephi 16:15, 20:15-19;

Mormon 5:24).

The Lord would use the remnant to bring down the Gentile strongholds, empty their cities, and “execute vengeance and fury upon them” (3 Nephi 21:15, 21). The Indians would “inherit the Gentiles and make the desolate cities to be inhabited” (3 Nephi 22:3; see also Jacob 5:65-75; 3 Nephi 20:19; 21:15). However, the Lord would not allow the Indians to destroy those Gentiles who had accepted the fullness of the gospel in the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi 16:14). This suggests that whereas these Gentiles had brought the Book of Mormon to the Indians and had helped them build the New Jerusalem, their nursing role had ended there. Israel was now the agent of its own independence and territorial reclamation.

While prophesying the restoration of Israelite sovereignty, the Book of Mormon also identified the proper model of Israelite government. Whereas Joseph sought to restore the order and teachings of the New Testament church, the Book of Mormon also contemplated the restoration of Old Testament government. Through Moses, the Lord had established his law and the judges. This suggested that the covenant restoration effected by Joseph, the Moses-like prophet of the last days, would include political restoration. The Nephite history propounded a unique vision of freedom, rights, and democracy, as well as revealed law, concentrated political authority, and state-established religion. The Book of Mormon, including its model for the government of Israel in America, would serve as the foundational civic text for the latter-day Zion.

Joseph’s projected eschatological timetable. Joseph’s initial concept of the timetable of events prior to the Lord’s second coming included the following:

1. First, the Book of Mormon would be translated and published. The book would resolve, for those who accepted its teachings, the differences of belief among those European Americans of various national and religious origins. It would establish, for the Lord’s earthly kingdom a clear and unified system of doctrine. The printing and binding of the book was finally completed and it came available on March 26, 1830.

2. The Church would then be organized on April 6, 1830. The Church would provide the vehicle (the missionaries) by which the Book of Mormon would be made available and distributed to the world. The acceptance or rejection of the book would be a key element in the future salvation of those exposed to it.

3. Finally by natural political processes the Kingdom of Zion would arise and provide the saints a new nation. The Savior would then return to earth to rule over the new nation either personally or through his prophet. This would allow the saints to live unfettered by the corruption of existing governments including that of the United States of America. The efforts of gathering together all of the converts to the Church was the beginnings of the establishment of the kingdom or nation of Zion.

The Book of Mormon actually failed to provide for the prophet Joseph and the saints a comprehensive scriptural model for the new Zion to be established, flourish, and persist. The book began with the sacking of Jerusalem. It charted the rise but also the ruin of the Nephite and Jaredite nations. For any ancient civilization to serve as a perfect model to emulate, it would have had to have overcome any external enemy and internal weakness. Yet no such government is found in the Book of Mormon, nor is such a government found in all the history of this earth, save for one only.

In working on his inspired revision of the King James Bible, Joseph, while “translating” the book of Genesis, received by revelation the book of Moses. This book contained information on Enoch and his Zion society. Enoch’s Zion—a civilization that rose and never fell—offered an ideal model for Joseph Smith’s Zion. It provided the model for the Zion Joseph Smith meant to build. It was a model that Joseph felt could be followed.

The prophet Enoch was allowed a vision of the future history of the world. In his vision, Enoch saw not only the flood, but the life and atonement of Jesus Christ in the meridian of time and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in the last days. The Lord explained that the Book of Mormon would serve to “gather out mine own elect from the four quarters of the earth unto a place which I shall prepare—an holy city—that my people may gird up their loins and be looking forth for the time of my coming. For there shall be my tabernacle, and it shall be called Zion, a New Jerusalem.” The Lord further explained, “Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there” (Moses 7:61-64, in Jackson, ed., The Book of Moses and the Joseph Smith Translation Manuscripts, 168-69). Enoch’s Zion would return to earth with the Lord and join the latter-day Zion. His city therefore was much more than a model for the latter-day Zion. Their destinies actually intertwined. Enoch had seen the rise of Joseph’s Zion in the last days. Joseph now foresaw the return of Enoch’s Zion at the end of the world. With the Lord, the “King of Zion,” Enoch and Joseph would reclaim the world for God’s people. This was the ultimate territorial restoration. The meek would truly inherit the earth.

Persecution would soon scuttle this earliest Mormon eschatological timetable. Early convert Joseph Knight recalled: “Through that season there were many baptized in many places and the Church grew and multiplied. But soon after the Church began to grow the people began to be angry” (Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” 37-38).

On the night of Saturday, 26 June 1830, a group of men from Colesville, Broome County, New York, tore out the dam that Joseph Smith and others had built that day on Knight’s property for a Sunday baptismal service. When Joseph and his friends rebuilt the dam on Monday, a mob of about fifty arrived and began to harass them and threaten violence. Soon a constable arrived and arrested Joseph on the charge of disorderly person for “pretending to discover where lost or stolen goods may be found.” This was an attempt to resurrect the charges from the 1826 trial of using a seer stone to find buried treasure (see the section titled “Joseph Jr.’s Transition from Treasure Seeker to Prophet” in chapter , The Role of Divination (“Magic”) in Joseph Smith’s Early Life). Abram Benton, whom Knight later identified as a leader of the mob, wrote in an evangelical newspaper that he caused the arrest of Joseph “in order to check the progress of the delusion, and open the eyes and understandings of those who blindly followed him” (Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” 34. See also A[bram] W. B[enton], letter to the editors, in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents 4:94-99). Joseph recounted that the constable soon informed him that the he, the constable, was sent to take Joseph as part of an ambush. After having met Joseph, the constable changed his mind and determined to ensure the safety of Joseph. The mob followed the two all the way to the village of South Bainbridge in neighboring Chenango County. The constable lodged Joseph and himself in a room in a tavern and slept “with his feet against the door, and a loaded musket by his side” (HC, 44. See also Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” 38).

In the meantime, Joseph Knight hired local attorney James Davidson to defend Joseph. When Davidson saw the crowd that had gathered to attend the trial, he talked Knight into adding John Reed, a locally esteemed attorney, to Joseph’s legal counsel. The trial lasted throughout the day. As Davidson and Reed deftly handled the testimony brought against Joseph, the prosecution began maneuvering for time so they could press similar charges back in Colesville. When the trial ended in Joseph’s acquittal, the Broome constable was there ready to take him. Joseph was marched about fifteen miles to the site of his next trial. He was again lodged in a tavern for the night and given some bread crusts and water, his first meal since being arrested the evening of the previous day. The constable treated him meanly and physically restrained Joseph through the night, suspecting that his prisoner meant to escape.

On the morning of July 1, 1830, Joseph was charged with “breach of the peace” for “looking through a certain stone to find hid treasures & etc” (Joel K. Noble, trial minutes, 30 June 1830, in “Mormonism,” Zion’s Herald, 9 September 1835). This time the trial lasted all day and all night. Justice of the Peace Joel K. Noble remembered that he and two other justices heard over forty witnesses take the stand. Though the witnesses vilified Joseph, Davidson and Reed again secured his acquittal as the statute of limitations had run out. The justices did, however, severely reprimand Joseph before discharging him. Reed later gave his understanding that the justices did this in order to appease the agitated crowd. This may have been for their own personal safety or even Joseph’s. In either case, the public castigation must have caused Joseph further humiliation. After seeing all he had been through, the constable took pity on him and warned him that the mob had plans to administer their own punishment if the court did not. He told Joseph how to exit the building unawares while Reed, his attorney, set up a distraction, Joseph escaped and was soon back home in Harmony, Pennsylvania, with his wife Emma.

Joseph later recounted that the initial harassment, the ambush scheme, the legal machinations, and the plot to administer vigilante justice had been instigated by “certain sectarian priests of the neighborhood, who began to consider their craft in danger” (HC, 42-48. See also Bushman, Joseph Smith, 117-18; Vogel, Joseph Smith, 510-19). Reed also viewed the episode as a result of the local churches “uniting their efforts” against Joseph and his quickly growing flock.

Joseph was not the only target of the Colesville mob’s hatred or harassment. After Joseph’s acquittal in South Bainbridge, the mob paid a visit to the Knight farm, knocking over their wagons, sinking chains in the water, and otherwise vandalizing the property. Preaching the Book of Mormon and the fullness of the gospel consistently provoked antagonism toward Mormon missionaries and those who joined them. The book became a self-fulfilling prophecy, engendering persecution that reinforced its millennial vision. The persecution of the church’s converts began to shape their identity as a people apart.

Within a few weeks of the trials, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery made another visit to the Colesville converts to minister to them. Shortly after their arrival, however, the local mob reassembled. Joseph and Oliver fled back down the Susquehanna to Harmony. Avoiding the road, they traveled all night through mud and water (HC, 47; Bushman, Joseph Smith, 117-18). Colesville had become like Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah and Lehi, when prophets faced the threat of prison or murder. In a letter to the converts there, Joseph wrote that it was only their presence and prayers that kept the Lord from already having “thundered down his wrath upon the inhabitants of that place.” Nevertheless, he stated, “the cold hand of death, will soon pass through your neighborhood, and sweep away some of your most bitter enemies.” Joseph wrote that not only would the Lord exercise “his wrath upon the inhabitants of that place (Colesville),” but that he would let it fall on the country at large. There would soon be “great destructions upon the face of this land” (John Whitmer and Joseph Smith, 20 Aug. 1830, in Newel Knight, “Autobiography,” 128-136, Joseph Smith Papers Project Files).

While less threatened in Harmony than in Colesville, Joseph felt uncertain of his safety there as well. Earlier, when translating the Book of Mormon, he and Oliver Cowdery “had been threatened with being mobbed from time to time, and this too by professors of religion” (HC, 18). By September of 1830, Joseph apparently came to suspect a conspiracy to poison him. When Colesville converts paid a visit, he went to procure wine for communion but soon returned claiming that he was stopped by an angel who had commanded the church to make their own wine instead of purchasing it from “enemies” (D&C 27). Joseph had initially moved onto his father-in-law’s property in Harmony, Pennsylvania, to escape the group of men in Manchester, New York, who had “clubbed together” with treasure seeker Willard Chase. Believing that Joseph had indeed discovered plates of gold, these men had attacked Joseph, ransacked the family’s property, and hatched other plots in their continual efforts to steal the gold (Lucy’s Book, 380-93). It was in nearby Palmyra, New York, that the initial batch of Book of Mormon translation had been stolen. A revelation informed Joseph that the manuscript had been stolen by Satan-inspired enemies with a “cunning plan” to expose him when he produced a new translation that didn’t match what they had altered. This secret combination sought to “destroy” him (Smith, revelation, May 1829, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 38-41).

Palmyra newspaper editor Abner Cole’s purloining of the Book of Mormon proofs added to the Mormons’ apprehensions. Whether the plates, the manuscript translation, or even the typeset text were under threat of theft, the Book of Mormon seemed to invite the work of secret combinations and robbers. Within months of publishing the book and organizing the Church of Christ, Joseph encountered further secret combinations. He faced mobs in Colesville and the threat of mobs and poisoning in Harmony. Everywhere Joseph went he provoked enemies to combine and plot against him.

The solidifying of Joseph’s political concept of Zion. While Joseph was indeed patriotic and convinced of America’s special election, he believed the country had fallen from grace. Joseph generally viewed the nation as a contention-ridden society doomed to destruction. He believed the golden age of the early republic had given way to irredeemable corruption. In his assessment, the American government and freedom were falling to conspiracies of power, while the peace and harmony of the republic was giving way to contention and strife between religious denominations, socioeconomic classes, and political parties. The hopes and dreams of the new republic were going and would continue to go unfulfilled. In revelations subsequent to his first vision, Joseph learned that the contention in American society would escalate into violence, war, and destruction. Joseph also learned and proclaimed that a new nation, called Zion, would arise. Further revelations established Zion’s laws and government. The Book of Mormon, published in 1830, warned the nation to repent or be destroyed. Joseph held out little hope that the nation would repent. He came to envision the American nation’s purpose as providing a peaceful, orderly, and free setting for the coming forth of the Kingdom of God. Joseph came to believe that the course being taken by the United States of America eliminated it from consideration. A new nation had to be established.

#The Revealed Components of the New Zion Nation

Between 1831 and 1833, Joseph Smith’s Zion project focused on implementing the political restorationism and social ideology of the Book of Mormon and Enoch’s City of Zion. A revelation received January 2, 1831 asserted the independence of the Church from the current political power occupying America (D&C 38). A flurry of revelations received over the next few months defined the basic particulars of early Mormon nationalism. Revelations dictated in February 1831 reestablished the law of God and the Israelite model of government by judges. Revelations on June 7 and July 20, 1831, staked out a political territory in the western borderlands (D&C 52; 57). These and other revelations prophesied the eventual attainment of Mormon sovereignty.

The revelation Joseph Smith dictated on the eve of the New York exodus in January 1831 plainly stated, “The kingdom is yours and the enemy shall not overcome” (D&C 38:9). And, the Lord explained: “In time ye shall have no king nor ruler, for I will be your King and watch over you. Wherefore, hear my voice and follow me, and you shall be a free people” (D&C 38:21-22). In this context, “free people” meant a people free from bondage to foreign or domestic powers. The revelation spoke to the political independence of the Church. Just as the American Gentiles had become free of their “mother Gentiles” in Britain, the Lord’s people would become free of the United States—and its laws. As the Lord further explained, “Ye shall have no laws but my laws, when I come, for I am your Lawgiver, and what can stay my hand” (D&C 38:22).

Embarking to the West, toward the future land of Zion, Joseph believed that God was once again setting up his kingdom on the earth. As the United States had sunk into corruption, Joseph now called on the same higher power to which the signers of the Declaration of Independence had appealed. Unlike Jefferson, Hancock, and the other signers, however, Joseph did not make a public announcement. The Church was still far too small and powerless to make a declaration of independence. For the present, political independence remained a prophecy.

The establishment of the new nation, however, was not a vague dream of uncertain timeline. It was as near as their immediate destination. The revelation promised them: “Go to the Ohio: and there I will give unto you my law” (D&C 38:32). After the Israelites had escaped Egypt, but before arriving in their promised land of Canaan, the Lord had given them his law at Mt. Sinai while they traveled through the wilderness. Joseph and his followers would receive the law in Ohio, an intermediate stop between “the enemy” in the eastern states and their own promised land in Missouri. The middle ground of the Ohio would also serve as a borderlands outpost from which Mormon missionaries would make forays into the eastern states and even to the nations and kingdoms of Europe. A later revelation prophesied: “By the weak things of the earth, the Lord should thresh the nations” and gather converts to Zion, which he would make into “a strong nation” (D&C 133:58-59). Joseph’s revelations also affirmed the prophecies of the Book of Mormon and of Enoch that this Zion would rise and never fall. Joseph wrote that it would eventually “triumph above all the kingdoms of this world” and join with Enoch’s Zion for a thousand years of peace (Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, 27 November 1832, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 284-91).

On February 4, 1831, the day Joseph arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, he dictated a revelation commanding that the leading priesthood officers assemble to receive God’s law (D&C 41). Five days later, on February 9th, Joseph met with a group of twelve Elders and revealed the Law to them in a question and answer format (D&C 42). The Law had several basic components. First, it incorporated the articles and covenants formulated in the church’s first conference (D&C 20). Next, the Law rehearsed the social commandments of the decalogue. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Abinadi had presented decalogue commandments as God’s “law,” adding proscriptions against envy, malice, and contention. Joseph’s revelation of God’s law similarly augmented the decalogue commandments with further social commandments.

Foremost among these added measures was a plan for economic leveling. The revelation commanded the adult males to “consecrate” all of their property to the Church with an unbreakable covenant. The Church would then appoint to each man a portion of land, sufficient to provide for his family, over which he would serve as a “steward.” Those who participated in this program often received their own consecration back as a stewardship. However, if they donated significantly more real property than necessary for family sustenance, the excess was withheld to be redistributed among the poor. Through this effort, every man would “receive according as he stands in need.” Surplus money and goods were to be funneled through a central “storehouse” and redistributed among the poor (D&C 42:30-36). This “overplus” was “to be administered according to the law.” The rest of the funds were to be used to purchase further land or saved for the church plan of “building up the New Jerusalem.” During a time when American culture was celebrating individualism and entrepreneurship, Joseph instructed his followers to consecrate their properties for the good of the whole.

The society envisioned in Joseph’s revelation of God’s law was naturally defined by adherence to that law: “He that receiveth my law and doeth it the same is my disciple; And he that saith he receiveth it and doeth it not, the same is not my disciple” (D&C 41:5).

In addition to institutionalizing economic interdependencies within the Zion society, God’s law instructed the “disciples,” as revelations now referred to the early Mormons, to become economically independent of outside forces. To the question, “How far it is the will of the Lord that we should have dealings with the world & how we Should conduct our dealings with them?” the revealed answer came: “Thou shalt not contract any debts with them” (Smith, revelation, February 9, 1831, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 107-15). In a later revelation, the voice of the Lord explained that he gave the Church such financial direction that they might “stand independent above all other creatures beneath the celestial world” (D&C 78:14). The economic independence mandated in the Law was thus a part of the project of attaining political independence.

Over the course of the following weeks, Joseph dictated further revelations announcing themselves as additions to God’s law. In a much later revelation, the Lord would declare that his “statutes” and “judgments” must be kept in the land of Zion for it to be a holy land (D&C 119:6). This echoed the language in the Book of Mormon establishing God’s law as the law of the land, which in turn drew on the account of God giving his law to Moses prior to the Israelite invasion of Canaan: “These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it” (Deuteronomy 12:1). Zion’s future sovereignty was implicit in the Law. Though not yet in their promised land in the far west, the revelation declared, these laws you have been given are “sufficient to establish you, both here and in the New Jerusalem” (D&C 42:67). Although the law of God was meant for the land of God, they would begin living it at the Ohio way station.

The administration of a new law required a new legal system. In addition to restoring God’s law, Joseph Smith therefore restored God’s government. Like Moses in the Old Testament and Mosiah in the Book of Mormon, Joseph followed the establishment of God’s law with the establishment of government by judges. Isaiah had prophesied such a political restoration as a precursor to Zion’s rebirth: “And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning: afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the faithful city. Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness” (Isaiah 1:26-27). Following Isaiah’s formulation, Joseph appointed both judges and counselors. Edward Partridge, a former disciple of Sidney Rigdon, was appointed the first bishop in the Church. John Corrill and Isaac Morley were appointed as counselors to Partridge. Morley had led the communitarian “family” under Sydney Rigdon’s direction prior to their conversions. Joseph equated the Old Testament office of judge with that of the New Testament office of bishop, and more often referred to the office by the latter title. The revelations, however, speak of the “bishop or judge” and “the judge of my people,” as well as “the Judge & his councillors.” They state explicitly that the Mormon bishop was “a judge in Israel, like as it was in ancient days” (D&C 58:17). Joseph erected the government of Zion using the stories of Israel’s primitive government and of Mosiah’s establishment of judges in America. The court of the Mormon judge constituted an independent legal system to which the faithful resorted when at all possible—”and that not before the world” (D&C 42:89).

The divinely mandated duty of the bishop-judge was “to sit in judgment upon transgressors upon testimony as it shall be laid before him according to the laws by the assistance of his counsellors whom he hath chosen or will choose among the elders of the church” (D&C 107:72). The bishop was warned against taking on legislative powers: “Let no man think that he is ruler, but let God rule him that judgeth, according to the counsel of his own will” (D&C 58:20). As in ancient Israel and among the Nephites, the bishop-judge ruled “according to the laws of the kingdom which are given by the prophets of God” (D&C 58:18). As the Old Testament judges ruled on the law received though the prophet Moses, and as the Book of Mormon judges ruled on the American version of the law revealed to and established by Mosiah, the latter-day bishop rendered judgment based on the law revealed through Joseph Smith.

The Mormon government of judges thus established a relationship between religious and political power similar to the church-state relations in the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon. The judge also governed the economic aspect of God’s law. The disciples met with the bishop annually to “render an account of their stewardship,” which included the consecration of surplus money and goods (D&C 72:5). This settlement was itself an aspect of the bishop’s judicial role. With the consecrated goods he received, the bishop then acted in an executive role as he redistributed them “according to the law.” Bishop Partridge was also commissioned to oversee the future migration to the West, collect money to purchase property in the promised land, and to then “divide the lands of the heritage of God unto his children” (D&C 58:17).

However, until the time came to resume their journey, the saints had to maintain an existence in Kirtland, Ohio. Joseph dictated a revelation in May 1831 in which the Lord stated, “I consecrate unto them this land for a little season until I the Lord shall provide for them otherwise and command them to go hence and the hour and the day is not given unto them wherefore let them act upon this land as for years and this shall turn unto them for their good” (D&C 51:16).

Joseph Smith’s Mormon nationalism extended beyond a prophecy of independence, an independent law, and an independent legal system. The plan for Mormon independence included the sine qua non of real sovereignty— territorial domain. Joseph’s concept of territory developed unevenly but rapidly.

The persecution of the early church in New York and Pennsylvania confirmed in Joseph’s mind that the time had come for the fulfillment of the Book of Mormon’s geopolitical prophecies of a New Jerusalem in the continental interior. First came the revelations to gather to “the Ohio” while awaiting further word from the Lord. The Ohio existed as an in-between place, a vast borderland between western Zion and the corrupted eastern states. In the context of the continent’s physical and cultural geography, Ohio was indeed situated between the East and the West.

The major gathering revelation commanded Joseph Smith’s followers to emigrate “from among the wicked” that they might “escape the power of the enemy, and be gathered unto me a righteous people” (D&C 38:31, 42). For the moment, the Ohio was a suitable place for gathering. Though not the New Jerusalem, it was in a different geographical zone than New York.

Whereas Ohio was considered to be in the borderland between the east and Zion, apparently another version of early Mormon geography was preached early on. It placed Ohio on the Zion frontier. A resident of Waterloo, New York, who heard Sydney Rigdon preach there reported his claim that Kirtland, Ohio, was “just within the east bounds of this new land of promise, which extends from thence to the Pacific Ocean, embracing a territory of 1500 miles in extent, from north to south” (Waterloo correspondent to the editor, 26 January 1830 [1831], in The Reflector, 1 February 1831, 95). Rigdon expressed a similar geography at about the same time in a letter John Whitmer delivered to the Church in Ohio: “You are living on the land of promise, and that there is the place of gathering, and from that place to the Pacific Ocean” (Undated Rigdon letter reproduced in Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 110-111). According to E. D. Howe, the wary editor of a newspaper in Painesville, Ohio, Whitmer conveyed instructions that the Ohio Mormons stop selling land. Apparently some had already sold their property in anticipation of moving to the New Jerusalem nearer Indian country. However, as Kirtland lay within the massive land of promise that New Jerusalem anchored as a capital, they were rather to purchase additional land as possible (“Mormonism,” Painesville Telegraph, January 18, 1831, 3).

This early conception of Zion’s geography was also held by Joseph Smith. The day Joseph arrived in Kirtland, Ohio, he designated the first Mormon judge. Within the week he had revealed God’s law. Two weeks later he wrote to New York disciple Martin Harris encouraging him to immigrate to “this our inheritance” (Smith to Martin Harris, 22 February 1831, Joseph Smith Collection). Joseph’s use of the term “inheritance” and “land of your inheritance” in this period employed the biblical language of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. America, like Canaan, was a promised land but one with prior occupants.

On the eastern frontier of this inland empire, “the Ohio” would serve as a missionary outpost. The revelation to gather there had commanded, “go to the Ohio: and there I will give unto my law, and there you shall be endowed with power from on high, and from thence, whomsoever I will shall go forth among all nations . . . and no power shall stay my hand” (D&C 38:32-33). These “nations” were the European “nations and kingdoms of the Gentiles” mentioned in the Book of Mormon (see 1 Nephi 13:3). From Kirtland, Ohio, the Mormon missionaries would proselyte throughout the eastern states and eventually cross the Atlantic to Britain and then the European continent.

The Lord had promised the saints an “endowment of power” in Ohio and farther west. This promise carried territorial implications and invoked an immediate historical precedent: the Enoch narrative that Joseph had just dictated to Sydney Rigdon in Moses 6:26-50 and Moses 7 (Richard Bushman points out that the Zion revelations look back more to Enoch’s city than to the New Testament church. Joseph Smith, 594, note 48). In calling Enoch to preach and prophesy, the Lord had empowered him with his spirit such that “fear came on all them that heard him” (Moses 6:39). Later, Enoch infused the entire city of Zion and its surrounding territory with this godly power. “And all nations feared greatly, so powerful was the word of Enoch and so great was the power of the language which God had given him. . . . And so great was the fear of the enemies of the people of God that they fled and stood afar off” (Moses 7:13-14). In the revelation regarding the “endowment of power” to be received in the Ohio, the Lord announced himself as “the same which hath taken the Zion of Enoch into mine own bosom” (D&C 38:4). The revelation thereby implied that the endowment or empowerment promised in the Ohio would eventually crystallize into political empowerment for Zion. A month after arriving in Ohio, Joseph dictated a revelation that prophesied, “It shall be said among the wicked let us not go up to battle against Zion . . . they shall stand afar off and tremble and all nations shall be afraid because of the terror of the Lord and the power of his might” (D&C 45:70, 74-75). As Kirtland began to grow, Joseph and Sydney Rigdon would write, “When the enemies look at her, they wag their heads and march along. We anticipate the day when the enemies will have fled away and be far from us” (Joseph Smith and others to “Brethren in Zion,” 25 June 1833, Joseph Smith Collection. Sydney Rigdon, who penned the letter, stated that he wrote on behalf of the church presidency). Zion’s sovereignty—its independent government and its territorial domain—was the ultimate implication of God’s command to go to Ohio in order to receive his law and his power.

The real focus on Zion was at its center in western Missouri and not on its eastern border at Kirtland. Among the Indians living near this center, the Lord promised to provide the saints with “greater riches . . . a land flowing with milk and honey” (D&C 38:18-20). The anticipation of joining the Indians was reflected in an outbreak of spiritual manifestations among the Ohio converts. Speaking in tongues was interpreted by some as preaching in Indian languages. The disciples eagerly awaited news from Oliver Cowdery and the other missionaries to the Indians. It was, as Joseph Smith’s history recounted, “the most important subject which then engrossed the attention of the saints” (This comment appears amidst the historical information for May 1831. “History of Joseph Smith,” Times and Seasons, 15 February 1844, 432).

In fact, the missionaries had reached the western Missouri border in January 1831. Here, Oliver Cowdery and his companions apparently became apprised of the proselyting efforts already underway among the Indians by the Baptists and Methodists. The Mormon missionaries first approached a settlement of Delaware Indians. The English name of their chief was William Anderson. He and his tribe warmed slowly to the Mormon elders and their message of the Book of Mormon. Eventually the whole tribe began to feel a spirit of inquiry and excitement about the Book of Mormon. The prospects for success among the Indians appeared bright initially, but they quickly dimmed. Opposition arose primarily from government Indian agents. Sectarian missionaries, and even some of the border settlers also opposed the Mormon missionaries’ efforts to preach among the Indians.

The missionaries were apparently unaware of the federal laws forbidding white residence on Indian land without a special permit. They were ordered off Indian lands by the Indian agent. But the United States government in the East felt so far away. Also the revelation commissioning Olvier Cowdery to prepare the way for Mormon settlement among the Indians had spoken in terms of the anticipated sovereignty of New Jerusalem, not of the United States. Commissioned by God, as they believed themselves to be, the missionaries discounted the agent’s authority and ignored his order. The next time the agent confronted the missionaries, he gave them twenty-four hours to remove themselves before he sent soldiers from Ft. Leavenworth to incarcerate them in the fort’s guard house. The missionaries then crossed back over into Missouri, where they preached and converted a few white settlers.

In the meantime, Oliver Cowdery wrote to General William Clark, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, requesting a permit “to have free intercourse unto the several tribes in establishing schools for the instruction of their children and also teaching them the Christian religion” (Oliver Cowdery to Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 14 February 1831, in Romig, “The Lamanite Mission,” 29). Of course Oliver did not mention that the primary text in his Christian curriculum would be the Book of Mormon, with its prophecies of Indian revolution. Oliver also sent word to Joseph Smith. In a letter he explained the government policy and their ejection from Indian land but relayed his expectation of resolving the problem. He had sent Parley Pratt to St. Louis to obtain the needed permits. As for the Delaware Indians, Oliver gave Joseph an exuberant report: “The principle chief says he believes every word of the Book [of Mormon] & there are many more in the nation who believe & we understand there are many among the Shawnees who also believe & we trust that when the Lord shall open our way we shall have a glorious times.” Cowdery expressed his belief that God was “in very deed about to redeem his ancient covenant people” (Cowdery to Smith, 8 April 1831, in Joseph Smith, Letterbook 1,10-12, Joseph Smith Collection). Unfortunately, perhaps due to General Clark’s absence from St. Louis, Pratt failed to secure the permits. What the fledgling Church would have looked like demographically had it joined with the Delaware became a moot point. Parley traveled on from St. Louis to Kirtland, bearing the news of frustrated plans. He wrote that when he rode into the Mormon community in March 1831, hundreds of saints crowded around to hear the outcome of the Indian mission. He did not record their reaction to his report.

Joseph Smith eventually reconciled himself to the prevailing circumstances and settled on Missouri as the locus of Mormon immigration. In June 1831, two months after Parley Pratt’s arrival in Kirtland, Joseph dictated a revelation in which the Lord identified Missouri as “the land which I will consecrate unto my people, which are a remnant of Jacob”—the Native Americans—”and them who are heirs according to the covenant”—the European American members of the Church (D&C 52:2). Like Ohio, Missouri was the saints’ “inheritance.” But at Zion’s center rather than its periphery it was all the more so.

The next revelation instructed the faithful saints from Colesville, New York—whose Ohio arrangements for settlement had fallen through—to “journey into the regions westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites” (D&C 54:8). They would settle as close to the Indians as possible. Subsequent revelations followed this one in referring to Missouri as “the land of Missouri.” Like revelation regarding “the Ohio,” Joseph’s Missouri revelations opted for identification by physical geography rather than acknowledging the sovereignty of the state. “The Ohio” and the “the land of Missouri” together defined the interior territory that belonged to Zion. And the Missouri was the gateway to Indian country, the far west, and the fading of American power.

In late June, Joseph traveled to Missouri to establish the land of Zion at its center. After meeting up with Oliver Cowdery and surveying the area, Joseph dictated a revelation on July 20, 1831, in which the Lord stated that “the land of Missouri” was “the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the saints.” The Missouri revelation designated the saints’ new “land of promise and the place for the city of Zion” (D&C 57). Joseph intended to build a temple and a city—the New Jerusalem—on a hill (Mount Zion) as the new world counterpart of old world Jerusalem.

When warned out of Indian territory by the local agent, Cowdery and his companions regrouped just inside the Missouri border at the town of Independence, the seat of Jackson County. The town had been built on a bluff between the mouths of two rivers. The county courthouse stood on the highest point of the bluff. Joseph’s revelation of July 20th naming “the land of Missouri” as the “place for the city Zion” also specified that “the place which is now called Independence is the center place and the spot for the temple is lying westward upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse” (D&C 57:3). The revelation thereby located New Jerusalem and its temple in reference to the highest point in the area. On August 3rd, Joseph laid a cornerstone for this temple just west of the town line on a small hill on the crest of the same bluff on which Independence had been built. Though less imposing than the hill on which old Jerusalem sits, this was for him the Mount Zion of the Americas.

Now the saints knew where to build Zion’s capital. Joseph commissioned Sydney Rigdon to write an official description of the land. Sydney described the land of Zion as a land “situated in the center of the continent on which we dwell . . . its climate suited [to] persons from every quarter of this continent” (Rigdon, description of Zion, 31 August 1831, as copied in Whitmer, From Historian to Dissident, 90). Joseph returned to Kirtland, leaving behind about three hundred saints to begin purchasing lands and settling them.

Joseph Smith’s mental map Zion’s capital found its way onto paper in June 1833. Centered on the land dedicated for the temple, as well as a bishop’s “storehouse,” Joseph’s plat of the city lays out one square mile of residences. The city was not American in design. Instead of surrounding a courthouse, it surrounded a temple. Instead of having a jailhouse for incarcerating debtors and criminals there was a storehouse for redistributing goods. Instructions accompanying the map describe a municipality of 15,000 to 20,000 citizens. This was an immense city for the West and large for the country as a whole. America had less than two dozen cities over 10,000 at the time. Yet Zion was the center place for the gathering of Israel in the last days.

Joseph never meant for the Church of Christ to be one congregation among others in the village. Like ancient Israel, it was destined to be a people apart in a land. As laid out in the “land of Zion” revelation, all of this would begin with the saints’ purchasing the land designated for the temple site. The revelation further instructed them to purchase “every tract lying westward even unto the line running directly between Jew and Gentile”—the border between Indian territory and the state of Missouri—”and also every tract bordering by the prairies”—Missouri land along the border (D&C 57:4-5). After giving the revelation, Joseph helped locate the saints from Colesville, New York, within three miles of the border. All of the Mormon settlements in Jackson County lay west of Independence within five miles of the border. The “prairie” tracts lay within one mile and included tracts adjoining Indian territory. This strategic plan for property purchase meant to create a funnel of contiguous Mormon-owned land connecting Indian territory to the designated site of the New Jerusalem temple. If the saints could not work among the Indians, the swath of Mormon property could open a pathway for the Indians to work on New Jerusalem. The Mormon land bridge could convey the American Israelites from their designated reservations in Indian Territory to the New Jerusalem in Missouri. By this means, the saints could salvage the plan.

Joseph Smith’s Missouri revelation went on to instruct the saints to buy up the “whole region of country” as soon as possible (D&C 58:52). After that, they were to purchase land “in all the regions round about” (D&C 57:6). An 1833 revelation would clarify that the saints had been commanded to purchase “Jackson county and the counties round about, and leave the residue [of the Missouri counties] in mine hand” (D&C 101:71). The saints could not afford to purchase the entire state; the Lord would find another way to place Missouri under its proper sovereignty. Joseph’s early revelations therefore spoke not only of the “City of Zion,” but the “land of Zion.” This latter label was apparently the “land of Missouri” that was the land of their inheritance—the entire state would belong to Zion. Another revelation referred to this land as “holy land” (D&C 84:59).

In 1832 an article in the church’s Missouri newspaper declared all the land between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains to be the land of Zion, which “maybe called the centre of America.” As massive as this claim was, it was more modest than Sidney Rigdon’s 1831 claim of a promised land stretching from “the Ohio” to the Pacific Ocean. In fact, the smaller territory roughly represented the actual boundaries of Indian country. The article stated that whereas the land of Jerusalem belonged to the tribe of Judah, the land of Zion belonged to the tribe of Joseph (“The Far West,” The Evening and the Morning Star, October 1832, 37). To the state’s earlier settlers, Missouri was the western frontier of the United States. For the Mormon settlers, it was the eastern frontier of the land of Joseph.

Joseph Smith’s visit to Missouri further developed his geographical view of the Mormon community in Ohio. In the autumn of 1831, back in the missionary outpost of Kirtland, Joseph delivered a revelation that clarified Kirtland’s position in reference to Jackson County. Although the central gathering spot had now been established in Independence, the revelation stated, “I, the Lord, will to retain a strong hold in the land of Kirtland, for the space of five years, in the which I will not overthrow the wicked, that thereby I may save some. And after that day, I, the Lord, will not hold any guilty that shall go with an open heart up to the land of Zion; for I, the Lord, require the hearts of the children of men” (D&C 64:21-22).

Joseph continued to labor over Zion’s cartography through the summer of 1833. A June 1833 revelation commanded the saints in Kirtland to build a temple of their own “in the which house I design to endow those whom I have chosen with power from on high” (D&C 95:8). When Joseph drew up the plat for the City of Zion in Missouri, he included two dozen temples in its central blocks, as well as an entire block for storehouses. At this time there were about eight hundred saints in Missouri and about one hundred and fifty in Kirtland. The map of early Mormon territory was now essentially complete. Cities and stakes of Zion would be built around temples. Zion’s outlying stakes would surround her cities in Missouri in the land of Zion. The Mormon cities of Zion in Missouri would be centered in Jackson County and the counties around it. The Zion cities in Jackson County would surround the New Jerusalem built around a bank of two dozen temples.

A revelation accompanying the plat of the City of Zion in Independence focused the saints on the immediate task of completing a temple in which to receive God’s glory and power:

And, now, behold, if Zion do these things she shall prosper,

and spread herself and become very glorious, very great, and very terrible. And the nations of the earth shall honor her, and shall say: Surely Zion is the city of our God, and surely Zion cannot fall, neither be moved out of her place, for God is there, and the hand of the Lord is there; And he hath sworn by the power of his might to

be her salvation and her high tower (D&C 97:18-20).

The divine power received through the temple would ensure Zion’s security. The “land of Zion” revelations of July 20, 1831 and August 1, 1831 (D&C sections 57 and 58) developed not only the concept of territory, but of government. They reinforced the legal authority of the bishop-judge and his counselors. As the voice of the Lord declared, “my laws shall be kept on this land” (D&C 58:19). To accomplish this, each city of Zion in Missouri would have its own municipal judge. The reader will recall that Edward Partridge had been appointed bishop-judge in Independence. Joseph also appointed a bishop-judge for the Kirtland stake of Zion—Newel K. Whitney.

Revelation established an arrangement between the two bishops. Before gathering to Missouri, the saints first “consecrated” all of their assets to Bishop Whitney. Bishop Whitney in turn gave the emigrant head of household a certificate vouching for his faithfulness. These consecrations were used for land purchases and provisioning in Zion and in the Kirtland stake. Upon gathering to Missouri, saints presented their certificates to Bishop Partridge, who then assigned them lots as stewardships. In this role, Partridge served as “a judge in Israel, like as it was in ancient days, to divide the lands of the heritage of God unto his children” (D&C 58:17).

The Mormon bishops stood in relation to Joseph Smith as the ancient Israelite judges had in relation to Moses. In June 1831, a few months after appointing the first bishop, Joseph ordained several men to the office of high priest. A revelation of November 11, 1831 established presiding officers over each rank in the priesthood. This ecclesiology required the appointment of a presiding high priest. Joseph Smith’s appointment to this office secured his role as the Moses-like leader over the saints. After revealing the law of God for Israel, Moses had initially judged all cases himself. He later appointed the first Israelite judges to ease this burden. Yet Moses remained the supreme judge. As recorded in the Book of Exodus, his appointees “judged the people at all seasons: [but] the hard causes they brought unto Moses” (Exodus 18:26). As “president of the high priesthood,” Joseph would assume this role.

In early 1832 Joseph was officially appointed to this position and received two permanent counselors: Sidney Rigdon and Jesse Gause. Joseph and his counselors together constituted the church’s general “presidency.” A revelation on the role of a counselor to the church president alludes to the biblical account of Israel’s battle with Amalek in Rephidim. The host of Israel had the advantage in this battle while Moses held up the rod of God, but lost ground when Moses’ arms grew weary and hung down. Aaron and Hur, Moses’ lieutenants joined him on either side and held up his hands until Israel prevailed. The duty of Joseph Joseph’s counselors to “lift up the hands which hang down” associated them with Aaron and Hur in relation to Joseph Smith as Moses. In fact, Joseph and his counselors became the supreme court in restored Israel. And, like the bishops, or common judges, they also oversaw church property. Both of Joseph’s counselors had experience in communities living the law of consecration. Sydney Rigdon had mentored the Morley “family” in Kirtland, while Jesse Gause was a former Shaker. Though Joseph and his counselors remained in Ohio for the present, they intended to immigrate to Missouri and preside over Zion from its center.

From time to time, Joseph’s organizational revelations would also associate the role of judgment with a body of twelve men. In the New Testament, Jesus appointed his twelve apostles to govern the church and designated them as the future judges of the House of Israel Matthew 19:28). In the Book of Mormon account of Christ’s appearance to the Israelites in the Americas, he called twelve disciples to govern the church, and he established them as judges over the people (3 Nephi 27:23-31). As early as June 1829, Joseph intended to appoint twelve disciples in the restored church. When he dictated “the Law” on February 9, 1831 he did so “in the presence of twelve elders” (see heading of section 42). The revelation for bishops to act as “a judge in Israel, like as it was in ancient days, to divide the lands of the heritage of God unto his children” alluded to Moses’ appointment of twelve men to divide conquered Canaan among the twelve tribes of Israel. The revelation establishing Joseph’s role as supreme church judge empowered him to call twelve high priests as court counselors.

From Kirtland, the church presidency wrote to the Zion bishop instructing him to lay unresolved consecration cases before a council composed of twelve high priests. Joseph would later organize a permanent “high council” of twelve high priests in Kirtland to try church cases appealed from the bishop’s council and to otherwise govern the church under the authority of the church presidency. He explicitly organized this high council on the model of the twelve apostles in the New Testament. He then organized a similar council in Missouri and a traveling high council to govern the church in the outlying branches. Joseph eventually appointed this traveling council, also called the Twelve Apostles, as the ruling church council beneath the church presidency.

The councils of the first presidency, twelve apostles, and the intermediary high councils established a vertical appeal process within the Mormon judicial system. This provided a check on power. However, as under the reign of the judges in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon, there was no horizontal separation of powers. Neither was there a separation between religious and political authority. The Mormon system of judges differed greatly from the American system of government, which was grounded not only in the separation of state powers but in a more fundamental separation of church and state. Joseph Smith envisioned a political order not only independent of but fundamentally incompatible with the United States.

The revelations establishing Zion’s government complemented those establishing God’s law. These concepts of divine law, government, and territory defined the nationalist aspirations of the yet fledgling movement. Joseph depended on the gathering of Israel, combined with the calamities of the last days, to make sovereignty a reality.

#The Sovereign Destiny of Joseph’s Zion

The word sovereign means having supreme or preeminent rank, power, or authority. Joseph’s view of Zion included her relationships with other nations of the world. More than prophesying Zion’s ability to carve out a sovereign domain on the western frontier of the western United States, the revelations charted her rise to world power among all world nations. Zion’s international relations began with her proselyting program. The revelations received on the eve of the New York exodus mandated the church agenda of sending elders to gather people of “all nations” (D&C 38:32-33). Several subsequent revelations affirmed the global reach of Zion’s missionaries. As one prophecy assured, “And she shall be an ensign unto the people, and there shall come unto her out of every nation under heaven” (D&C 64:42). Zion was to exist not merely apart from but in a dynamic geopolitical relationship with the worldly nations. Mormon missionaries journeyed out of Zion to preach the gospel to the nations and converts gathered out of the nations to settle in Zion.

Early on, Joseph had seen the possibilities for wars throughout the world. One revelation had stated: “Ye hear of wars in far countries, and you say that there will soon be great wars in far countries, but ye know not the hearts of men in your own land” (D&C 38:29). A month after arriving in Ohio, Joseph dictated a revelation instructing the saints how to escape this impending violence:

For verily I say unto you, that great things await you; Ye hear

of wars in foreign lands; but, behold, I say unto you, they are nigh, even at your doors, and not many years hence ye shall hear of wars in your own lands. Wherefore I, the Lord, have said, gather ye out from the eastern lands, assemble ye yourselves together ye elders of my church; go ye forth into the western countries, call upon the inhabitants to repent, and inasmuch as they do repent, build up churches unto me. And with one heart and with one mind, gather up your riches that ye may purchase an inheritance which shall hereafter be appointed unto you. And it shall be called the New Jerusalem, a land of peace, a city of refuge, a place of safety for the saints of the Most High God; And the glory of the Lord shall be there, and the terror of the Lord also shall be there, insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it, and it shall be called Zion

(D&C 45:62-67).

Joseph’s eschatology thus established another dynamic geopolitical relationship between Zion and the nations: Zion would be a territorial refuge of peace amidst a world at war.

A major factor in Zion’s future rise to power was war in the United States. Joseph’s most specific war revelation predicted a civil war between the North and the South. A concern over conflict between the northern and southern states had lingered from the time of the stormy debates in Congress over Missouri statehood in 1820 and even earlier. Concern deepened when the federal government proposed tariffs on imported goods in order to protect domestic manufacturers. Specifically, the state of South Carolina was the center of this controversy. Southerners, and particularly South Carolinians, felt oppressed and disadvantaged by the high protective tariff of 1828, the so-called “Tariff of Abominations.” This tariff imposed heavy duties on foreign manufactured goods imported to any state. The states themselves were required to pay the tariff to the federal government. This favored the industrial North which had its own manufacturing capabilities. At the same time it worked against the interest of the agrarian South which was more dependent on foreign imports. In addition to the economic problems, the South was becoming increasingly wary of the nascent antislavery movement in the North.

In order to protect itself from these threats, South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Nullification on November 24, 1832. This ordinance nullified the new federal tariff and threatened to secede if impeded. This quickly drew a response from President Andrew Jackson. In a December 10th proclamation, Jackson fired back with a resounding defense of the perpetual union, an insistence on his constitutional duty to execute federal law, and a declaration of his willingness to use armed force in order to do so.

News of these eastern states events reached the area of Kirtland, Ohio,

st

through the nearby Painesville Telegraph later that month. On December 21 , the Painesville paper reprinted the South Carolina ordinance and commentary from various eastern papers, as well as providing notice of Jackson’s response: “He tells them plainly that the laws and the Union must be maintained, at all events, and warns them of the consequences of resistance” (Painesville Telegraph, December 21, 1832, 2-3). Report of this information probably reached Kirtland, about ten miles southwest of Painesville, within a day or two.

It was apparently in response to this alarming intelligence that Joseph Smith delivered his most dramatic war prophecy on Christmas day of 1832. The prophecy confirmed national fears that South Carolina’s rebellion would affect a regional rift in America: “The southern states shall be divided against the Northern States.” Then, the prophecy continued, “The Southern States will call on other Nation[s] even the Nation of Great Britain, as it is called, and they shall also call upon other Nations in order to defend themselves against other Nations and thus war shall be poured out upon all Nations” (D&C 87:3). Joseph’s prophecy of civil war connected the immediate circumstances of the nullification crisis with his earlier revelations on war and placed all of these events into an eschatological sequence: The rebellion in South Carolina would lead to civil war between the northern and southern states, which would lead to global war. It seems obvious that Joseph regarded this great and coming war as an eschatological event. And he expected it in the life times of the saints then living. He likely felt it would be the downfall of the Great Gentile nation. From our present time frame, we may conclude that the Civil War and the other Great

World Wars that followed were, indeed, eschatological events. But the eschatological time table has turned out to be more gradual or delayed than Joseph anticipated.

Social disharmony was another factor threatening the stability of the United States. The church was split between Ohio in the North and Missouri in the South. Slavery became a major issue. The differences between northern and southern culture became readily apparent in Jackson County when Joseph planted his colony of northerners among the resident southerners.

In the day of Enoch’s Zion, God had provided protection for the city by occupying her enemies with war. He had also protected the early Zion by blessing Enoch with the ability to speak God’s word with overwhelming power and by infusing the entire city of Enoch with the fearsome majesty of his presence. The March 1831 revelation in which the Lord announced himself as “the god of Enoch and his brethren” promised similar divine protection to the Latter-day Saints if they would build up a Zion in Missouri: “The glory of the Lord shall be there and the terror of the Lord also shall be there insomuch that the wicked will not come unto it” (D&C 45:67). Zion’s territory would be established and maintained by the sheer terror of God’s glory. Then, the revelation continued, as God endowed his people with his power, “it shall be said among the wicked let us not go up to battle against Zion for the inhabitants of Zion are terrible wherefore we cannot stand” (D&C 45:11, 70, 75). When Joseph returned to Ohio from his first journey to Missouri, he similarly prophesied, “And the day shall come when the nations of the earth shall tremble because of her, and shall fear because of her terrible ones. The Lord hath spoken it” (D&C 64:43).

Echoing the book of Deuteronomy, another revelation prophesied of the day when a pair of Zion’s terrifying warriors could set “tens of thousands to flight” (D&C 133:58). As the nations came to fear her and recede from her, a flourishing Zion could fill the resulting territorial vacuum without the violence and bloodshed of conquest. Over time, Joseph came to identify the temple as the place of God’s presence, his power, and the empowerment of his people. In August 1833, a revelation promised the Missouri saints that if they would build the New Jerusalem temple, Zion would “prosper and spread herself and become very glorious very great and very terrible, and the nations of the earth shall honor her, and shall say surely Zion is the City of our God, and surely Zion cannot fall neither be removed, out of her place” (Smith, revelation, August 2, 1833, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 241-43). With the power of God, peaceful Zion would preserve and even extend its territory without a single act of aggression.

As the plague of international conflict spread, Zion would serve as a neutral territory and safe harbor for any wishing to escape the destructions of war. Joseph prophesied “And it shall come to pass among the wicked, that every man that will not take his sword against his neighbor must needs flee unto Zion for safety. And there shall be gathered unto it out of every nation under heaven; and it shall be the only people that shall not be at war one with another” (D&C 45:68-69). Those willing to live by the sword would die by the sword. As a subsequent revelation affirmed, “the wicked shall slay the wicked” (D&C 63:33). And while the violent would destroy each other from the face of the earth, the peaceful would immigrate to Zion. This vision of Zion as a refuge of peace in a world at war not only embodied Joseph Smith’s love for harmony and his aversion to contention, but established a dynamic relationship between the two. The violence of war would drive people to the peace of Zion. Even the unconverted, if peaceful, would join in the Mormon gathering. Joseph saw the future Mormon nation as a country for all peaceful men. A cosmopolitan and racially inclusive Zion would receive refugees from “every nation under heaven” (D&C 64:42). The theocracy of Zion offered its Gentile refugees/immigrants peace, not a share in government. That belonged to Israel and those who joined its covenants.

Zion’s role in world history was seen as a part of a larger pattern of eschatological workings. The Jews, for example, would be saved from war in a Zion in Jerusalem—not by joining the Mormons in Missouri. After the destruction of the United States and all other nations, Zion would be left standing as the sole sovereign in the Americas. It would be the site of refuge for all non-Jewish Israel—not just the Indians but also the lost ten tribes and other “remnants” of scattered Israel. Presumably the Jews in old Jerusalem would be left standing as the sole sovereigns in the eastern hemisphere.

Daniel, John, and other prophets predicted not only the millennium of peace but precursor events that would make it possible. The Lord would make peace for the peaceful by sweeping the violent from off the earth with the broom of destruction. Joseph’s Zion prophecies took up those of the Bible and then worked on the eschatological details of war and peace with regard to his plan to make a space for his people on the American frontier.

On the way toward the harmonious millennium, Joseph Smith faced not only the near future of latter-day calamites, but the realities of the present. Like ancient Israel’s Canaan, the land of Missouri was already occupied. His Missouri revelation acknowledged this predicament, calling it “the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies” (D&C 52:42). The immediate moment called for practical action on a small scale. Still, Joseph’s grand vision of Zion’s destiny would frame his early efforts to create political power for his people.

#Achieving Mormon Power

As he took the first steps toward the peaceful Millennium, Joseph encountered real obstacles. He planned to assert theocracy in Ohio and Missouri and obtain real property/territory in Missouri. But these plans brought him head on against the sovereignty of the two states and of the federal government that united them.

He obtained additional revelations that marked the course to real power. But it wasn’t going to be easy. In addition to further revelation, additional thinking, planning, and real work would be required. The Ohio territory had come under America’s sovereign domain almost half a century earlier. Ohio had been a state for almost three decades. It already had dozens of counties and thousands of Gentile residents. This was a glaring reality against which Mormon theocracy had to compromise itself. The plan was that the saints were to establish a de facto church government (existing but outside legal authority) within the de jure (according to law) system of state and federal law. In time, the gathering would create a demographic majority of God’s people in Kirtland Township (and Geauga County) and Independence (and Jackson County). The saints could then dominate the local offices and channels of government and create a political space for the church to live God’s law. This power was to increase “until all things may be done according to my law” (D&C 44:6).

This plan to create a supreme authority within a supreme authority acknowledged the reality of Gentile sovereignty while at the same time underscoring Joseph’s goal of Mormon independence. Joseph probably expected to be freed of such compromising when the Mormons joined the Indians in the far west.

The missionaries Joseph had sent to the Lamanites evidently anticipated little or no conflict with Gentile law while they were laboring in Indian country. But they quickly came face to face with the authority of the federal government and its army. Indian policy ruled out unauthorized proselytizing. The Mormons were forced to acknowledge and work within, the legal system of the Gentile sovereigns. Oliver Cowdery persisted in his efforts to reach the Indians by applying for a teaching permit. Ironically, Oliver planned to awaken Indians to their Israelite identity and territorial inheritance from within the federal government’s program for Americanizing the Indian. Of necessity, the Mormons labored with ulterior motives. If denied permission to work among the Indians in American territory, Oliver had considered moving further west to the Rocky Mountains. But that proved to be just too far away and did not fulfill the requirement that Zion be built in the center of the country.

When the Mormon’s were denied access to the Indians, Joseph fell back on the plan of creating political space for themselves within the democratic structure of state government in both Ohio and Missouri. Mormon gathering and land sharing in Ohio had already engaged the saints in the mechanisms of state law.

One Ohio convert who had consecrated his property and shared it with New York immigrants soon became disaffected and demanded the removal of the New Yorkers. It was according to the divinely revealed law that he had given his land to the church. Under Ohio law, however, he still held sole title. While the initial revelation appointing the bishop outlined his duty to “to see to all things as it shall be appointed unto him, in my laws” (D&C 41:10), new revelation instructed the church bishop to obtain deeds for all consecrated land, that “all things shall be made sure according to the Laws of the land” (D&C 51:6). The expanding canon of divine law had to accommodate itself to and thereby recognize the laws of the land. Joseph later gave instructions on using the proper legal forms for securing monetary gifts and provided detailed instructions on filling them out properly—”otherwise the power will be of non effect” (Joseph Smith and others to “Brethren in Zion,” 25 June 1833, Joseph Smith Collection. See also “The Elders Stationed in Zion to the Church Abroad, in Love, Greeting,” The Evening and the Morning Star, July 1833, 110). These measures were necessary for the Church to control its money and real property. Joseph Smith knew the Mormons would settle Missouri land only by purchasing it through the established legal channels. For the time being, they would have to pursue their destined territorial sovereignty by working within the secular law.

Although Joseph had originally anticipated living by God’s law in their western land of inheritance, on arriving in Missouri he quickly reconciled the law of God and the law of man. In the revelation locating the site for the temple, the center for the projected city, the Lord commanded, “Let no man break the laws of the land, for he that keepeth the laws of God, hath no need to break the laws of the land: Wherefore be subject to the powers that be, until He reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under his feet” (D&C 58:21-22). By living the social commandments of God’s law, the saints would naturally tend to steer clear of trouble with local justice.

Though warned out of Indian country, the saints did not give up on their mission to “Israel.” The Mormon settlements in Jackson County strategically placed them within communication range of the Shawnee and Delaware. Just as Oliver Cowdery had attempted to access the territory through an Indian school arrangement, Joseph Smith worked to find legal avenues for reaching the remnant. One revelation encouraged intermarriage. As the disaffected Ezra Booth explained, “by this means the Elders, who comply with the thing so pleasing to the Lord, and for which the Lord has promised to bless those who do it abundantly, gain a residence in the Indian territory, independent of the [federal Indian] agent” (Ezra Booth to Ira Eddy, 6 December 1831, in “Mormonism—Nos. VIIIX,” Ohio Star, December 8, 1831, 1).

The land revelation also instructed the saints to try to reach the Indians by obtaining a federal trading permit. Kirtland merchant Sidney Gilbert was commanded to open a store in Missouri not only to serve as the Mormon “storehouse” but to “obtain a license (Behold here is wisdom and whoso readeth let him understand) that he may send goods also unto the Lamanites even by whom I will as clerks employed in his service and thus the gospel may be preached unto them” (D&C 57:9). Ezra Booth wrote that the store would carry “goods suited to the Indian trade” (Ezra Booth to Ira Eddy, 6 December 1831, in “Mormonism—Nos. VIIIX,” Ohio Star, December 8, 1831, 1).

For the time being, Zion’s sovereignty existed only through these various plans for stealth operations. And even these plans fell flat. None of the elders entered Indian marriages. No permits were secured for Indian trade. The saints would ultimately claim the Israelite territory of Zion by seeing themselves as blood Israel that had been scattered among the nations.

The church’s efforts to become financially independent in Missouri came to naught. By the summer of 1833, the Church was deeply in debt, behind on payments, and facing the threat of lawsuits (Joseph Smith and others to “Brethren in Zion,” 25 June 1833, Joseph Smith Collection).

Though the saints’ practical reality fell far short of the anticipated ideal, they did begin taking real strides toward creating an independent society insofar as they were able. The very dynamics of the gathering contributed to Mormon nationalism. Unlike ordinary frontier communities, the saints living in areas designated for Mormon immigration had a strong sense of community from the very beginning—from before they even arrived. Elders working out of the missionary station in Kirtland would preach the gospel, baptize the converted, organize them into “branches,” and instruct them to settle their debts and affairs in order to emigrate to Zion. The elders’ revealed directive was to “push the people together from the ends of the earth” (D&C 58:45).

The Mormon missionaries encouraged their converts, who lived away from Missouri, to keep in contact with church headquarters by subscribing to the church newspaper, The Evening and the Morning Star. Through its publication of Joseph’s revelations and various articles, the Star bolstered the faith of new converts, indoctrinated them in the Mormon worldview, and cultivated their identity as God’s chosen people. It also encouraged immigration to Zion. The Star was an integral part of the gathering program. In fact, the establishment of the Mormon press in Independence had been mandated by God a part of Joseph’s “land of Zion” revelation of July 20, 1831 (D&C 57:11-12).

More than forging identity and creating community, The Evening and the Morning Star helped to shape the nationalism of that community—whether scattered or gathered. The Star published Joseph’s revelations proclaiming Mormon independence and the law of God. It published revelations and articles that defined the concept of Zion and demarcated its territory. It brought the saints there to build it. The Mormon press attempted to establish an independent land of Zion.

Immigration naturally deepened Mormon identity and allegiance. The program of focused settlement necessarily invented community. It also defined others as enemies and justified consolidated settlement in terms of mutual protection reinforced the resulting community’s identity. Bringing the saints

together under these circumstances created a situation that demanded social engineering. Joseph’s revelations would direct and manage the course of this cultural construction. By bringing a people into a place, the gathering had an

inherent potential for nation building.

The economic plan for consecration and stewardship (the “United Order”) also built community solidarity. In fact, those who gathered ideally entered the economic order of the Church pursuant to their emigration. The initial group of New York saints arrived in the Kirtland area not only as a religiously cohesive group of immigrants but as an economic bloc. The gathering revelation of January 2, 1831 called for the appointment of men to “govern the affairs of the property of this church”—helping emigrants settle their affairs—and to look after “the poor and the needy” among them so that no one would be left behind (D&C 38:35-36).

While the law of consecration and stewardship tied the saints together, it also cut economic ties to the wider community. Instead of developing accounts and obligations with the local merchants, the saints would ideally deal only with their bishop. Instead of enmeshing themselves in the broader economic fabric, they would rend it. Just as the Mormons used their own store, they used their own court. Whenever possible, instead of taking grievances and public concerns to local officials, they took them to the Mormon judge. Extant minutes for both Missouri and Ohio testify to the wide scope of the early Mormon court system. Instead of joining the political life of the wider community, they withdrew from it. Joseph’s revelation of God’s law had instructed the saints to deal with outsiders as little as possible.

The United Order was not the only aspect of Joseph’s program for social reform. Another of these group preparations was education. In early 1833, following instructions revealed to Joseph, the saints in Ohio and Missouri organized a rudimentary seminary for the instruction of elders and high priests, which they called the “School of the Prophets.” That summer, the Kirtland saints also commenced building a temple that would serve not only as a “house of God,” but as a “house of Learning” in which to convene the school (Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, 11 January 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 292-93; Joseph Smith and others to “Brethren in Zion,” 25 June 1833, Joseph Smith Collection). Initially the Kirtland brethren held their school in a private residence or local schoolhouse.

The primary purpose of this instruction, a revelation declared, was for the elders to be “perfected in your ministry to go forth among the gentiles” (D&C 88:84). The small army of lay Mormon preachers had nothing in the way of the formal training ministers of other denominations had. Painesville critic Eber D. Howe wrote that the church leaders in Kirtland were “sending abroad everything that could walk, no matter how ignorant” (Mormonism Unvailed, 130). The early Mormon educational program thus helped the missionaries prepare for their labors abroad by instructing them in church doctrine, English grammar, and various other subjects. Joseph wanted instructors for the school who could teach the elders “to silence gainsayers” (Joseph Smith and others to “Brethren in Zion,” June 25, 1833, Joseph Smith Collection. Sidney Rigdon, who penned this letter, stated that he wrote it on behalf of the church presidency). This would hasten the day, as the proselytizing revelations put it, “when the weak should confound the wise . . . and by the weak things of the earth, the Lord should thresh the nations by the power of his Spirit” (D&C 35:13). The Lord told his missionaries, “Ye are not sent forth to be taught, but to teach the children of men the things which I have put into your hands by the power of my Spirit: and ye are to be taught from on high.” Educational preparation would combine with the divine “endowment” to enable the elders to preach with power, as had Enoch.

In early 1833, Joseph Smith also presented a revealed code of health. Like other advocates of temperance and health reform, Joseph’s revelation discouraged the use of alcohol and tobacco and encouraged the consumption of grains. The health revelation also warned against “hot drinks,” interpreted as coffee and tea, and advocated eating fruit in its season. Joseph would deliver God’s word on any aspect of life, whether within or without the conventional sphere of religion. As the Lord explained in an earlier revelation, “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at an time have I given unto you a law which was temporal” (D&C 29:34-35). The revelations on religious doctrine and moral behavior, law and adjudication, migration and settlement, consecration and stewardship, education and health, and other facets of life gave rise to a comprehensive Mormon culture. As the gathering continued, the body of the saints grew and new social developments required new revelations, which increasingly differentiated Mormon culture from the surrounding American culture.

The efforts to build Zion in Missouri changed over time as new obstacles required altered plans, as new strategies failed or faltered, and as unintended consequences took their course. They were shut out of the federally protected Indian lands. Their various schemes for connecting with the Indians went nowhere. The saints did increase their western land holdings in Jackson County but never were able to form a land bridge from Independence to Indian country. They established a store but never obtained a trading permit. The challenge of settlement quickly demanded their full attention. Yet the very dynamics of the Mormon gathering generated community and solidarity. And as Joseph temporarily conceded Mormon sovereignty to the political realities of the present, he maintained a stance of emergent nationhood.

For reasons of self protection, the saints found it expedient to keep their aspirations of Mormon nationalism to themselves. In a March 1831 revelation, the Lord admonished his people in this regard:

And now I say unto you, keep these things from going

abroad unto the world until it is expedient in me, that ye may accomplish this work in the eyes of the people, and in the eyes of your enemies, that they may not know your works until ye have accomplished the thing which I have commanded you; That when they shall know it, that they may consider these things. For when the Lord shall appear he shall be terrible unto them, that fear may seize upon them, and they shall stand afar off and tremble. And all nations shall be afraid because of the terror of the Lord, and the

power of his might. Even so. Amen (D&C 45:72-75).

Yet however successfully the saints guarded their tongues, the political implications of their ever-increasing numbers in Jackson County were obvious. By the summer of 1833, two years after Sidney Rigdon dedicated the land of Zion, the saints constituted about a third of the county population. According to a Missourian living in western Jackson, “the Mormons had been quiet upon the subject of politics, but it was easily perceived that as matters were progressing, at no distant day they would carry with them an influence which would control all county business” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in “The Disurbances in Jackson County,” Missouri Republican, December 20, 1833, 2-3).

#The Balance of Freedom and Harmony in Zion

Joseph had grown up in an America brimming with contention. American churches were proliferating and competing for congregants and competing also for their tithes and offerings. National politics had become contentious. America was a land of increasing freedoms—those of religious choice, economic opportunity, and democratic participation. And this freedom was tearing apart the old peaceful social order. Joseph perceived an America giving way to contention and violence. Joseph had sought for the ideals of union, order, and peace but hadn’t found them. He had lost his allegiance. Using the example of the New Testament account of the primitive church, its counterpart in the Book of Mormon, and the story of the original Zion of Enoch, Joseph attempted to build a new society where harmony and love would prevail, where religion would unite men instead of dividing them, where economic classes and political parties would cease to exist.

Just prior to his death, Joseph’s grandfather Asael had come to regard America as the stone of Daniel’s vision which would roll forth and destroy all evil. But Asael’s America was not to be. Zion, not America, would be the stone of Daniel’s vision.

Joseph also held to the American ideal of freedom. But America’s freedom was destroying its harmony. The Book of Mormon had expounded doctrines of freedom as well as peace. It was possible for both to exist. Joseph had to rebalance the two. He had to work out a compromise between the two principles.

The promise of Zion’s peace lay in the gathering. Starting a new church in itself only added to the religiously fractured landscape. It was the migratory gathering of the converts—the bringing of a people together in a place—that created social harmony. For Joseph Smith there was no substitute for the one true church. And he attempted to restore not only the primitive church of the New Testament, but the Israelite church-state of the Old Testament.

In many ways, the saints cultivated and expressed their religious unity like other churches. They observed a Sunday Sabbath and met together for congregational worship. Baptized members in good standing shared the Lord’s Supper together. But like the Shakers and other communitarian Utopians, they yearned for a deeper level of unity.

A unity among the adult male membership of the Church resulted from democratizing the priesthood. In an era when many American Protestants associated priesthood with “Popery” and the symbols of anti-Catholicism, Joseph eliminated the dividing line between the religious classes of clergy and laity by ordaining any man in good standing to priesthood office. The priesthood gave men access to periodic Mormon conferences, where they participated in an egalitarian pattern of preaching and praying in turns. This universal manhood ordination functioned as more than an equalizer. The male members of church experienced unity through the brotherhood of the priesthood.

The democratic procedure of common consent provided elements of spiritual freedom and church harmony. Spiritual harmony was also directly tied to economic harmony. An early revelation offered this commandment and instruction: “In your temporal things you shall be equal, and this not grudgingly, otherwise the abundance of the manifestations of the Spirit, shall be withheld” (D&C 70:14). From his upbringing, Joseph Smith was familiar with the social sting of upper-class scorn. Narratives in the Book of Mormon showed that differences in wealth led to social division and enmity. Zion’s inhabitants would find harmony in a classless society. As another revelation put it, “let every man deal honestly and be alike among this people and receive alike that ye may be one even as I have commanded you” (D&C 51:9). Equal in wealth, the saints would be united in heart and spirit and thus worthy of the Lord’s blessings.

The revelations expressed the ideal of social and economic unity as more than equalized wealth. It was also a matter of the heart, of the love that prevailed in the fellowship of Christ, and of compassion for the downtrodden. While still in New York, a revelation had outlined the church mission to “look to the poor and the needy, and administer to their relief, that they shall not suffer” (D&C 38:35). The divinely revealed law received on Joseph’s arrival in Ohio and other revelations instructed the saints to always remember “the sick and the afflicted” (D&C 52:40). Church members were to help care for the families of missionaries preaching abroad. The bishop/judges with oversight of the storehouse and its provisions, were prohibited from resting easy in Zion. They were charged to “travel round about and among all the churches searching after the poor to administer to their wants” (D&C 84:112). All of these expressions corresponded with a commandment in the divinely revealed law: “thou shalt live together in love” (D&C 42:45).

Zion citizenship usually began with Bishop Partridge assigning the immigrant’s basic provisions back to him as a stewardship. Partridge usually parceled out the church’s Missouri properties in twenty-acre inheritances to be farmed. But Zion was for the laborer as well as the farmer. Joseph’s “land of Zion” revelation instructed, “inasmuch as there is land obtained, let there be workmen sent forth, of all kinds, unto this land, to labor for the saints of God” (D&C 58:54). The saints needed to raise homes quickly, followed by improvements, with the hope of soon building the city with its homes, its storehouses and schoolhouses, and its temples to the Lord. Joseph platted the city of Zion with a square-mile grid of one-acre lots. As the written explanations surrounding the plat explicitly stated, “It makes all the lots in the city of one size” (Plat of city of Zion, June 24, 1833, Church History Library). This measure would function so as to level the Zion society, as land was the traditional marker of socioeconomic standing. By the early 1830s, most states had eliminated property qualifications for voting, but not all had. Cultural and political power still lay in the land. In giving all men an equal lot, the New Jerusalem plat was clearly a work of social engineering as well as city planning. Even the bishop’s lot was no larger than that of the common laborer. The only distinctive lots in the Zion plat were those devoted for the temples and storehouses. The storehouses at the center of the equally apportioned real estate would serve to further equalize property by redistributing provisions. Of course, Joseph wasn’t the only reformer interested in city planning. Ralph Waldo Emerson would write to Carlyle that there was “not a reading man” in Boston “but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket” (Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 1840, in Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 13).

Joseph’s revelations also attempted to shape an egalitarian society by circumventing the class dynamics of professionalism. Instead of running to lawyers, the saints took their legal complaints to the Mormon courts. Rather than dealing with worldly merchants, the saints were to provision and be provisioned at the church storehouse. Rather than calling on doctors, church members were to be healed through faith, prayer, and a blessing from the elders. Those without the faith to be healed were to be nourished with herbs and mild food. Frederick G. Williams, Joseph’s counselor in the general church presidency, was the first of several “Thomsonian” doctors in the Church. The church’s priestly and botanic healers replaced doctors of the conventional profession.

According to the caustic Painesville publisher Eber D. Howe, “Nearly all of their male converts, however ignorant and worthless, were forthwith transformed into ‘elders,’ and sent forth to proclaim, with all their wild enthusiasm, the wonders and mysteries of Mormonism” (Mormonism Unvailed, 115). The early Mormon elders not only preached the gospel without the formal training of the seminary, they also traveled without purse or scrip. The Mormon democracy of elders rejected the professionalism of the trained and paid clergy.

For all their condemnation of “the proud and the learned,” Joseph’s revelations were really a criticism of social class and of scholastic elitism not of education in and of itself. The Book of Mormon clarified that “to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God” (2 Nephi 9:29). Joseph later promoted education in the church’s School of the Prophets. In addition to appointing a teacher, the elders in the church school held to the Lord’s instruction that through education “all may be edified of all, and that every man may have an equal privilege” (D&C 88:122). As with economic measures, the egalitarian educational system of the Mormon seminary was not meant simply to equalize but to unify.

The saints were also to avoid class distinctions by wearing plain clothing. The Book of Mormon had recorded that the demise of the Zion-like peace of the primitive church in the Americas had begun with distinctions in clothing: “There began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of the world. And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them” (4 Nephi 1:25). Moroni, the last Nephite prophet, saw that social distinction based on clothing would pervade society in the last days when the book would come forth:

Behold, Jesus Christ hath shown you unto me, and I know

your doing. And I know that ye do walk in the pride of your hearts; and there are none save a few only who do not life themselves up in the pride of their hearts, unto the wearing of very fine apparel, unto envying, and strifes, and malice, and persecutions, and all

manner of iniquities (Mormon 8:36).

In the gathering revelation dictated on the eve of the New York exodus, the Lord stated that he had made both the rich and the poor and was “no respecter of persons” (D&C 38:16). According to this divine perspective, he likewise commanded that “every man esteem his brother as himself.” The revelation then illustrated this principle with a parable:

For what man among you, having twelve sons, and is no

respecter to them, and they serve him obediently, and he saith unto the one, be thou clothed in robes and sit thou here; and to the other, be thou clothed in rags and sit thou there, and looketh upon his sons and saith I am just. Behold, this I have given unto you a parable, and it is even as I am, I say unto you, be one; and if ye are

not one, ye are not mine (D&C 38:26).

The church was to clothe itself in plain and decent homespun. In another revelation, the Lord declared that he had created the animals and plants of the earth “for the use of man, for food, and for raiment, and that he might have in abundance, but it is not given that one man should possess that which is above another” (D&C 49:19-20). Oneness, however, could be pushed to extremes. Shortly after moving to Ohio, Joseph Smith had taken up residence on the farm of Isaac Morley, leader of the communitarian (communistic) group mentored by Sidney Rigdon. Morley’s “family” followed an extreme reading of Acts 2:44, which recorded that the primitive church “were together, and had all things common.” Some of the Family had earlier belonged to the Owenite community in Kendall, Ohio. Robert Owen, while falling far short of his plans for social engineering, had been inspired and influenced by the communitarianism of the Harmonists and the Shakers. The latter group also organized into “families.”

Like an actual family, Morley’s group was living together on one property—but without the regulated order like that found among the Shakers. And, as early church historian John Whitmer recounted, that they considered from reading the scripture that what belonged to a brother belonged to any of the brethren, therefore they would take each others clothes and other property and use it without leave. This brought about confusion and disappointments (Whitmer, From Historian to Dissident, 27). It was all consecration and no stewardship.

Joseph dictated the law of God a few days after moving in with the Morley group. It instructed that, while the church members should live in close proximity, “every family shall have place that they may live by themselves” (D&C 48:6; 51:3). In Missouri, Bishop Edward Partridge parceled out church land on a family-by-family basis, with deed-like documents given to every head of household. The family patriarch met with the bishop on an annual basis with an inventory of his stewardship. Together, they would determine what was needed to maintain the individual stewardship and what was surplus that could be consecrated to the wider community. For the rest of the year, the family managed their real estate, improvements, and material property on their own initiative and enterprise. This was the economic freedom of Zion.

The annual accounting between the Zion bishop and steward developed from the instruction in the divinely revealed law that the bishop and the elders “counsel together” over economic matters and follow “the direction of the spirit.” The work of the bishop was to counsel, not to command. In the summer of 1833, the church presidency wrote Bishop Partridge in Missouri with further instruction on the duties of his office. They admonished him to respect the steward’s own judgment on what was needed and what was surplus. While Bishop Partridge had the responsibility of serving as the judge in Zion, it was also the case that “every man must be his own judge.” The steward was responsible to make a reasonably fair assessment of his needs, and the bishop was not to quibble over particulars. Mainly there was to be agreement: The matter of consecration must be done by the mutual consent of both parties. To give the bishop power to say how much every man shall have and he be obliged to comply with the Bishop’s judgment, is giving to the Bishop more power than a king has and upon the other hand, to let every man say how much he needs and the bishop obliged to comply with his judgment, is to throw Zion into confusion and make a slave of the bishop. Neither of these extremes fit the polity of Zion. Rather than a king commanding a subject or a slave serving his master, the annual settlement between bishop and steward was ideally that of a judge counseling with a citizen.

Priesthood belonged not only to the Israelites but to men of any race who would join their covenant and be numbered with them. Along with the hundreds of European Americans who had joined the church, there were a small number of

African American converts. These too received the priesthood and voting power in the conference system. Women were excluded from the Mormon priesthood and its conferences whether Israelite or not.

As with economic leveling, the universal manhood suffrage (right to vote) of the Mormon priesthood was meant not only to equalize but to unify. The system worked as a compromise. Joseph Smith combined the theology of revelation with the ecclesiology of appointment. While church conferences made some assignments through the democratic process of convened assembly, motion, nomination, and voting, the most important church officeholders were appointed by revelation. The resolution of divine appointment and democratic election began when converts accepted the legitimacy of such revelations and voted accordingly.

As when the children of Israel followed Moses out of Egypt toward Canaan, the Church of Christ willingly followed Joseph out of the East toward their Zion in the West. Joseph saw this as a combination of theocratic appointment and democratic consent in the primitive church as well. He would later teach that Peter, the chief apostle, “was appointed to this office by the voice of the Savior and acknowledged in it by the voice of the Church” (Kirtland High Council, minutes, 17 February 1834, in Collier and Harwell, eds., Kirtland Council Minute Book, 23-29). This “theodemocracy,” to borrow a term from Joseph’s later teachings, brought political freedom and harmony into decision making.

Joseph derived his political power from the consent of the governed. The practice of appointment beginning with God and his prophet flowed downward through the structure of the church (see D&C 63:59 and chapter 14, volume 1, of Ye Shall Know of the Doctrine, The Power of God).

Joseph’s system of theocratic appointment and democratic consent even had a parallel in his theology of man. An 1833 revelation declared that “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence” (D&C 93:29-30). While pronouncing this shocking doctrine that man’s mind was co-eternal with God and an agent unto itself, the revelation went on to describe man’s progression in terms of accepting and receiving the light and truth of God’s superior intelligence. In contrast to the theory that happiness was pursued through the independent exercise of man’s own reason, man actually found happiness by accepting God’s direction (See Bushman, Joseph Smith, 209-10).

Though the saints consented to the church’s government and its doctrine of appointment, critics of the Church looked on the policy as decidedly undemocratic (Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty, 68-71). Voting and election was the bedrock of authentic representative democracy, but the saints’ submissive consent seemed to undermine the validity of the Mormon version of voting. Nevertheless, the saints accepted and believed in the divine origins of their own governmental system.

On August 2, 1831, two weeks after Joseph Smith’s “land of Zion” revelation (D&C 57), he and Sydney Rigdon met with the saints to bring their new nation into being. Sydney arose and asked the saints, “Do you pledge yourselves to keep the laws of God on this land, which you have never have kept in your own land?” When the saints voiced their ayes, Sydney pronounced the land “consecrated and dedicated to the Lord for a possession and inheritance for the saints, in the name of Jesus Christ having authority from him. And for all the faithful Servants of the Lord to the remotest ages of time Amen” (Whitmer, From Historian to Dissident, 86). With both divine authority and the consent of the governed, Rigdon established Zion for its pioneer citizenry and for the faithful to follow.

#Challenges of the Zion Project

From the beginning, Joseph Smith’s project of creating a unified community through selective immigration faced challenges. Not all of the saints who followed the founding cohort were faithful. The Mormons had difficulty screening their joiners. As appointed church historian John Corrill would later recount, “the church got crazy to go up to Zion . . . . the poor crowded up in numbers, without having any places provided” (Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, 18-19). Many moved to Zion who had not consecrated any property—and thus had not obtained a “recommend” which authorized them to move to Missouri. Most of these also arrived in Missouri without any resources. They arrived in Jackson County eager to receive their “inheritance” from the bishop with no evidence that they had invested in the cooperative plan. This quickly exhausted the funds available for purchasing new lands to house the immigrants. In letters to Missouri, Joseph complained about those who had made the move without authorization. He described them as acting “contrary to the will and commandment of God.” He considered them to be “iniquitous persons and rebellious,” and he withdrew from them the “right hand of fellowship” (Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, July 31, 1832, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 269-76; Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, November 27, 1832, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 284-91). By taking the liberty of moving to Missouri independent of the church’s regulations they had violated Zion’s order. In this case, freedom had overrun harmony.

Even those who entered Zion’s borders with documentation—a proper “recommend”—did not always live up to the obligations required of its citizens. In the revelation designating Missouri as the “land of Zion,” the Lord made it clear that the citizens of Zion were to obey the law of the Lord (D&C 58:19-23). Like those who immigrated prematurely, those who broke the law were also considered rebellious. Also, as indicated by Joseph’s letters and revelations, many saints in Missouri lost their faith or were questioning Joseph’s leadership (see, for example, Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, July 31, 1832, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 269-76; Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, January 11, 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 292-93). The strict religious and economic order of Zion had resolved freedom and harmony through the willing consent of her citizens. But when obedience and compliance failed and consent was withdrawn, the resolution fell completely apart, replacing what had been the freedom of the individual with oppression and replacing what had been the harmony of the community with discord. Zion’s inhabitants were supposed to be of one heart and one mind. How could Zion be the refuge of peace if it was filled with mutiny? In a revelation received within a few months of Zion’s establishment, the Lord promised to rectify this situation: “Behold, the Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind; and the willing and obedient shall eat the good of the land of Zion in these last days. And the rebellious shall be cut off out of the land of Zion, and shall be sent away, and shall not inherit the land” (D&C 64:34-35).

The glorious concept of bringing God’s people together in a place apart thus included a dark corollary: the expulsion of dissenters. The Book of Mormon wrestled with the same problem. Lehi had led his family out of the corrupted city of Jerusalem in order to start a righteous nation anew. But then dissent broke out in his immediate family. His son Nephi and later Mosiah I followed the pattern of reestablishing the holy society through emigration. Yet apostasy inevitably crept back in, causing great distress to the righteous. In addition to emigration, the Book of Mormon offered further solutions to the problem of maintaining a godly society. While the majority of the Nephite nation remained righteous, it was the dissenters who emigrated. They usually left voluntarily— though they often returned with a vengeance and with enemy Lamanites in tow. Other dissenters stayed, and their rebelliousness was painfully tolerated. But never for too long. More often than not their dissent eventually crossed over into robbery, murder, or treason—thereby justly meriting deportation or death. Either punishment removed them from the society. But tolerating dissent ran the risk of corrupting the majority of the society. One instance of this occurred contemporary to the mortal ministry of Jesus in Palestine. Rather than commanding another exodus of the righteous, the Lord destroyed the wicked with natural calamities like those that would attend his glorious return in the end of days. When apostasy led to the complete corruption of Nephite society, as it had with the Jaredites before them, the Lord used war to completely destroy them (Mormon 6).

The solution adopted among the Mormon faithful in Jackson County was to defer final justice until the imminent expected coming of the Lord. This policy followed the toleration program outlined in the Book of Mormon. When members of the Nephite church dissented or fell into transgression, their names were merely “blotted out” of the church records. In a revelation to Joseph, the Lord instructed that a record be kept recording the names “of all those who consecrate properties, and receive inheritances legally from the bishop; And also . . . of the apostates who apostatize after receiving their inheritances. It is contrary to the will and commandment of God that those who receive not their inheritance by consecration . . . should have their names enrolled with the people of God” (D&C 85:1-2). At the coming of the Lord, this book would serve a function similar to the Lamb’s book of life featured in the apocalypse of John (Revelation 3:5,13:8,17:8, 20:12-15, 21:27, 22:19; also Philippians 4:3). Though unable to reclaim their original consecrations, Zion’s apostates were allowed—for the present—to reside on the land the church had apportioned them. A revelation reiterated the assurance that when the Lord came in glory the “fatness of the earth” would be given to the saints forever. But the apostates are warned:

But wo unto them that are deceivers and hypocrites, for, thus

saith the Lord, I will bring them to judgment. Behold, verily I say unto you, there are hypocrites among you, who have deceived some, which has given the adversary power; but behold such shall be reclaimed; But the hypocrites shall be detected and shall be cut off, either in life or in death, even as I will; and wo unto them who are cut off from my church, for the same are overcome of the world

(D&C 50:6-9).

The reclassification of these apostate saints as Gentiles, as opposed to Israel, lumped them in with the prior inhabitants of the land. Just as Israel’s promised land of Canaan was filled with Canaanites, the “land of Missouri” was filled with Missourians (Gentiles).

Revelation had declared the immediate environs of Independence as the “center place” (D&C 57) and had instructed the saints to begin their occupation of Missouri by buying up the land in Jackson and the surrounding counties. Independence itself and Jackson County generally were still dominated by Gentiles—not to mention the surrounding counties and the rest of the state. Hence, most of Zion’s residents were out of harmony with the saints, and would have considered the assertion of her sovereignty—had they known about it—an imposition on their freedom. How would Zion deal with its prior inhabitants? Ancient Israel, under Moses’ appointed successor, Joshua, had followed God’s direction to utterly destroy them (see, for example, Numbers 21:2-3; Deuteronomy 2:34, 3:6, 4:26, 7:2, 12:2,13:15, 20:17; Joshua 2:10, 6:21, 8:26,10:1, 28, 35-40,11:11-12, 20-21). However, in the summer of 1833, when the Mormon population was approaching a demographic equilibrium in Jackson, the church newspaper clarified that “the circumstances of the saints in gathering to the land of Zion in these last days, are very different from those of the children of Israel. . . . to suppose that we can come up here and take possession of this land by the shedding of blood, would be setting at nought the law of the glorious gospel, and also the word of our great Redeemer” (“The Elders Stationed in Zion to the Churches Abroad, in Love, Greeting,” The Evening and the Morning Star, July 1833, 110). The saints would follow Christ’s instructions to the Church instead of Jehovah’s to the camp of Israel. Even during his arrest—the pivotal moment between his freedom of movement and preaching and his incarceration and crucifixion—Jesus had said to Peter, “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). So it was with the saints. If they pursued territorial conquest through violence, they would reap their own destruction. According to a revelation Joseph dictated just after establishing the Missouri settlements, “Wherefore, the land of Zion shall not be obtained but by purchase or by blood, otherwise there is none inheritance for you” (D&C 63:29). They would only succeed by buying out all of the Gentiles.

The Lord stated, “I will not overthrow the wicked that thereby I may save some” (D&C 64:21). The earliest Mormon foothold in Jackson came with the conversions of a handful of the county’s residents. The plan was an orderly lawful takeover. Both freedom and harmony would prevail in Zion.

In addition to illegal immigrants, rebellious apostates, and native inhabitants, one other social group compromised Zion’s holiness. It was the body of saints themselves. Just over a year into Zion’s settlement, a revelation declared that the disbelief and disobedience of her inhabitants had reached the point that the society as a whole was culpable:

Vanity and unbelief have brought the whole church under

condemnation. And this condemnation resteth upon the children of Zion, even all. And they shall remain under this condemnation until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon and the former commandments which I have given them, not only to say, but to do according to that which I have written— That they may bring forth fruit meet for their Father’s kingdom; otherwise there remaineth a scourge and judgment to be poured

out upon the children of Zion. For shall the children of the kingdom pollute my holy land? Verily, I say unto you, Nay (D&C 84:55-59).

Just as the children of Israel had been conquered and removed from their promised land, modern Zion could be removed or destroyed. In an early 1833 letter to Missouri, Joseph admonished the saints to heed God’s warning “lest Zion fall.” Some of the Zion leaders had responded to Joseph’s admonitions with resentment. Joseph wrote that the spirit of rebellion was “wasting the strength of Zion like a pestilence, and if it is not detected and driven from you it will ripen Zion for the threatened Judgments of God” (letter from Joseph Smith to William W. Phelps, 11 January 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 292-93). For the Mormons, tolerating the presence of dissenters ran the risk of allowing their corrupting influence to spread, which could lead to an unworthiness to possess the land of promise. Losing the prospect of territorial domain meant losing the dream of political independence—of being a “free people” as the Church was promised in the New York exodus revelation.

By summer of 1833, the body of saints had grown substantially in Jackson County. Two years earlier, in the summer of 1831, Joseph had established Zion in Missouri with a small colony of about sixty saints. By spring of 1832, there were over 400, and by autumn of 1833, approximately 1200—constituting about one third of the county. Within the next year or so, the saints would have been in a position to control the outcome of county elections. The time was approaching when they would, as an early revelation put it, “obtain power to organize yourselves, according to the laws of man; That your enemies may not have power over you . . . That you may be enabled to keep my laws” (D&C 44:4). The early settlers of the county understood this perfectly, partly as a result of the boasting in which some saints indulged. Writing on Joseph’s behalf, Oliver Cowdery would later place blame on such men—”those whose mouths are continually open, and whose tongues cannot be stayed from tatling!” He castigated them as an offense to God and a danger to the peace of Zion (Oliver Cowdery to William W. Phelps and others, with Joseph Smith postscript, 10 August 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 304-6). The overzealous as well as the underzealous thus placed Zion in jeopardy at this moment when the balance of power approached its tipping point.

By the summer of 1833, the earlier settlers of Jackson County had developed a deep antipathy and intolerance toward the saints. Joseph understood from his revelations that his Zion project would be menaced by enemies. But the prophet had no stomach for violence and bloodshed. He had counted on keeping enemies at bay with godly power. Now, just when they needed divine protection most, their disobedience and disorder was bringing down God’s wrath on themselves instead of their enemies.

#Failure of the Zion Project

Violent conflict between the saints and the Gentiles in the “land of Missouri” may have been inevitable. The Mormon newcomers and the earlier settlers of Jackson County had always been wary of one another. The first few months of Mormon settlement passed peacefully, but in the spring of 1832, ruffians broke the windows of some Mormon homes and threatened to drive the Mormons from the county. A meeting was held to discuss driving the Mormons out, though it ended in disagreement and confusion (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15; John Whitmer, From Historian to Dissident, 102). Subsequent incidents may have occurred in response to the spring and fall surges in Mormon immigration. Shots were fired into Mormon homes in the fall of 1832. About the middle of July 1833, more windows were shattered. The Zion brethren apparently sent word of this third episode to Joseph Smith in Kirtland. With the saints’ swelling numbers, the conflict in Jackson would soon come to a head.

In July 1833, the expulsion movement that had faltered the previous year received the backing of the county’s most prominent residents. By the end of the year, the saints would lose their “center place.” A group of organizers met and created a document that compiled grievances and declared the intent of forcing the Mormons out. The circular announced a countywide meeting to be held in Independence on July 20, 1833—two years to the day from Joseph Smith’s revelation declaring Missouri the land of Zion and Independence the place for the New Jerusalem (D&C 57). The four or five hundred men who responded to the circulating announcement rehearsed their complaints and drafted a set of specific demands to present to the Mormon leadership. This document and the earlier circular outline the major points of conflict between the two societies living within the physical confines of Jackson County. The early settlers attacked the Mormons on religious, economic, and political fronts.

The preamble to the resolutions complained primarily of the Mormon belief in and exercise of spiritual gifts. The early settlers were offended by their neighbors’ claims to see visions, prophesy, heal, speak in tongues, and “all the wonder working miracles wrought by the inspired apostles and prophets of old.” In the circular, the county leaders wrote:

They openly blaspheme the most high God, and cast

contempt on his holy religion, by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues; by direct inspiration, and by diverse pretences derogatory of God and

religion.

Even Alexander Campbell, America’s preeminent restorationist, had rejected the restoration of gifts as a manifestation of true and living faith. To the early settlers of Jackson, Mormons exercised spiritual gifts “to the utter subversion of human reason” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15).

While there were a few local religious societies—some Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—Jackson County was not especially religious. Despite several hundred residents and several years of settlement, no meetinghouse had yet been erected. Nevertheless, the Mormons offended what religious beliefs county residents did hold and were labeled either “fanatics” or “knaves”—”for one or the other they undoubtedly are” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). After lodging these complaints, however, the circular waved them aside as ultimately irrelevant. The resolutions followed suit:

Of their pretended revelations from heaven—their personal

intercourse with God and His angels—the maladies they pretend to heal by the laying on of hands—and contemptible gibberish with which they habitually profane the Sabbath, and which they dignify with the appellation of unknown tongues, we have nothing to say; vengeance belongs to God alone (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor,

2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99).

The Jackson Gentiles insisted that the Mormon religion, however obnoxious and blasphemous, was not the ultimate grounds for removal. To the contrary, they claimed, “If they had been respectable citizens in society, and thus deluded they would have been entitled to our pity rather than to our contempt and hatred” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114- 15).

But the Mormons were not respectable citizens in the eyes of the earlier settlers. As the circular explained, “From their appearance, from their manners, and from their conduct, since their coming among us, we have every reason to fear, that with but very few exceptions, they were of the very dregs of that society from which they came, lazy, idle and vicious.” As evidence for this, Jackson’s leading citizens noted that the Mormons had arrived in the county with very little property. It is unclear whether those who composed the circular understood the Mormon program of pre-immigration consecration. They saw the immigrants as men with nothing to lose. Some of the leaders, in their opinion, deserved to be in jail. According to Jackson resident Isaac McCoy, only a few of the saints had the education “sufficient for the transaction of the ordinary business of the country,” while the majority were “illiterate, uninformed and superstitious.” “Some,” McCoy wrote, “appeared to have been gathered from among the shiftless and ignorant. . . . who live, as the saying is, from hand to mouth, and whose condition in life, could hardly be made worse” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). The circular complained that each successive wave of immigrants exhibited “a gradual falling off in the character of the people, until they have now nearly reached the low condition of the black population” (“The Mormons, or New-Jerusalem in Jackson County Missouri,” Jeffersonian Republican, 17 August 1833, 2). This was a severe criticism given that all the African Americans in Jackson were enslaved. When the citizens met to draft their resolutions, they stated that the Mormons were “characterized by the profoundest ignorance, the grossest superstition, and the most abject poverty” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99). Josiah Gregg, a Santa Fe trader who periodically resided in Jackson County, later wrote that “the old settlers could not think of bringing up their families in the midst of such a corrupt state of society as the Mormons were establishing” (Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies 1:315).

The manifest hatred of the Mormons, however, probably had more to do with their real estate plans than with their poverty. According to disaffected Mormon Ezra Booth, when the Church was buying up land in 1831, “It was conjectured by the inhabitants of Jackson County, that the Mormonites, as a body are wealthy, and many of them entertain fears, that next December, when the list of the land is exposed for sale, they will out-bid others, and establish themselves as the most powerful body in the County” (“Mormonism—No. V,” Ohio Star, 10 November 1831, 2).

While the church never raised the money to outbid others on Jackson’s most choice tracts, they managed to acquire over 24,000 acres by the summer of 1833. Isaac McCoy wrote that as word of the Mormon presence in Jackson spread, “emigration to this county, of others than Mormons, decreased” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). The more Jackson became known as a Mormon county, the more local land speculators like McCoy stood to lose.

This context makes clear why Jackson’s old guard objected to the territorial aims of the Mormons. According to Josiah Gregg, the saints became more vocal about their plans as their numbers grew, until they were “so emboldened by impunity, as openly to boast of their determination to be the sole proprietors of the ‘Land of Zion’” (Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies 1:315). A rumor, circulated in mid-July 1833, complained of how the Mormons would “declare openly that their God hath given them this county of land, and that sooner or later they must and will have the possession of our lands for an inheritance” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114- 15). Some early settlers in Missouri complained: “We are daily told . . . that we, (the Gentiles), of this county are to be cut off, and our lands appropriated by them [the Mormons] for inheritances” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99). Isaac McCoy similarly reported that the saints had “repeated, perhaps, hundreds of times, that this country was theirs, the Almighty had given it to them, and that they would assuredly have entire possession of it in a few years.” Jackson’s early settlers understandably feared this mentality, and rumors abounded on how the saints meant to accomplish this territorial consolidation (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3. see also Jennings, “The City in the Garden,” 102-3; Hill, Quest for Refuge, 40).

For a time, it appeared that this arrogance of impending conquest might become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Isaac McCoy wrote that the Mormons “were introducing a state of society which would evidently become intolerable to others and would rid the county of all who did not belong to their party.” McCoy wrote that the Mormons “gloried” in this (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). This was indeed the sort of peaceful conquest Joseph Smith had in mind. John Corrill, a Mormon, wrote that “the old citizens became more and more dissatisfied, and from time to time offered to sell their farms and possessions, but the Mormons, though desirous, were too poor to purchase them” (Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, 19). Under these circumstances, as Isaac McCoy put it, “the Mormons alone would be purchasers of their property, and consequently at their own prices, as they often boasted would be the case. Matters had not yet reached this state of things but were rapidly approaching it” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3).

In the eyes of the early settlers, the contest over property extended beyond real estate to bond servants. The Mormons had been discovered, the circular claimed, “tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to sow dissentions and raise seditions amongst them.” This alleged slave tampering, more than the poverty of the saints, revealed “their characters in their true colors” and disqualified them from citizenship (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). It is unknown whether or to what extent the Mormon leadership in Missouri shared Joseph’s prophecy that slaves would rise up against their masters. When confronted with the allegation of slave tampering, the church leaders had promised to discipline any Mormon doing anything of the kind. The county’s principle men, however, found their suspicions confirmed when The Evening and the Morning Star, the Mormon newspaper in Independence, published the Missouri statutes regarding free blacks along with words of caution: “Slaves are real estate in this and other states, and wisdom would dictate great care among the branches of the Church of Christ, on this subject. So long as we have no special rule in the church, as to people of color, let prudence guide” (“Free People of Color,” The Evening and the Morning Star, July 1833, 109). Whatever sensitivity to the issue the article meant to display did not satisfy Jackson’s early settlers.

White Missourians had long manifested an exceptional intolerance for the presence of free blacks. An indignant attitude on the issue had been burned into the soul of Missouri at the moment of its birth—when their attempt to constitutionally exclude free blacks from the state set off a scorching debate in the national congress. James Aull, a Missouri merchant with stores in Jackson and nearby counties, wrote in 1835 that he had spoken with many slave owners in the area and found them interested in the idea of a local initiative for gradual emancipation. Not one of them, however, “would consent to let them remain amongst us after they are free” (Jennings, “Zion is Fled,” 133-34). The prospect of free black Mormons moving into Jackson County was more than the early settlers could bear. The county’s eminent citizens made their sentiments clear on this point in their call for a public meeting. In their assessment, the Star’s “Free People of Color” article revealed the Mormon character “in still more odious colors.” It was nothing less than a deliberate attempt, as they viewed it, “to inflict on our society an injury that they know would be to us entirely insupportable, and one of the surest means of driving us from the county; for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to, to see that the introduction of such a cast amongst us, would corrupt our blacks and instigate them to bloodsheds” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). In the citizens’ meeting of 20 July, the Jackson Gentiles agreed that the article was a plot “to drive us to emigrate” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99.).

William Phelps, the editor of the Star, quickly issued an extra claiming that the Church had published the article in order to discourage, not invite, black immigration. A spokesman for the early settlers declaimed this damage control as an insult to their intelligence, alleging that at the time of the article’s publication there was an “expectation among the brethren” that a “considerable number” of black Mormons in Illinois awaited instructions to immigrate. In Mormon policy, the early settlers saw “all the necessary directions and cautions, to enable the free blacks, on their arrival there, to claim and exercise the rights of citizenship” (“The Mormons, or New-Jerusalem in Jackson County Missouri,” Jeffersonian Republican, 17 August 1833, 2). The Star regularly printed articles touching on the doctrine of the gathering, as well as letters from missionaries and church branches reporting on immigration plans. Several of Joseph Smith’s revelations, some printed in the Star, had projected that Zion’s citizens would be gathered from “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” (D&C 77:8). The Gentiles took the article as an open invitation for “free brethren of color” to “come up like the rest, to the land of Zion.” This, the early settlers deemed completely unacceptable. They could never abide “the stench, both physical and moral, that their introduction would set afloat in our social atmosphere, and the vexation that would attend the civil rule of these fanatics.” The early settlers saw the Mormons constructing a citizenry that was entirely incompatible with their own (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395- 99).

It was under these circumstances that the leading men of Jackson determined to take action. Rather than leaving the county, they would push out the Mormons. Wanting to cast their contention with the Mormons as a fundamentally political problem, a circular announced a state of emergency: “An important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society.” It was therefore, they believed, “a duty we owe ourselves to our wives and children, to the cause of public morals, to remove them from among us.” The early settlers preferred that their enemies leave voluntarily. Following the pattern of Indian removal, Missourians had executed in the previous decade, they proposed to offer the Mormons a “timely warning” and compensation for lands lost. Claiming the high ground of the county’s rightful citizenry, they called for a meeting at the courthouse. Imitating the Declaration of Independence, they closed their call to action by pledging their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honors” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). The gathering of vigilantes who answered the call made their own “solemn declaration” in which they described themselves as an assembly of “gentlemen” who represented “every part of the county.” They enumerated their grievances and announced their determination to preserve the county’s “good society” and “public morals” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395- 99). In the production of documents and in their subsequent actions, the early settlers covered their backs with all the usual legalistic rituals. Black immigration was only the most recent and obnoxious development in the larger scheme of immigration that would soon give the Mormons a democratic majority. Resenting Mormon prophecies of territorial dominion, the reporter for the vigilante meeting wrote, “It requires no gift of prophecy to tell that the day is not far distant when the civil government of the county will be in their hands; when the sheriff, the justices, and the county judges will be Mormons” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99). Parley Pratt wrote that “political demagogues” had become “jealous of our growing influence and numbers” and “were afraid we should rule the county” (Pratt, Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, 78. See also Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, 19). A committee appointed by the public meeting expressed its fears of what would follow when the Mormons took the reins of government:

The lives and property of other citizens would be insecure,

under the administration of men who are so ignorant and superstitious as to believe that they have been the subjects of miraculous and supernatural cures; hold converse with God and his angels, and possess and exercise the gift of divination, and of unknown tongues, and are, withal, so poor as to be unable to procure bread and meat (“The Mormons, or New-Jerusalem in Jackson County Missouri,” Jeffersonian Republican, 17 August

1833, 2).

The religious fanaticism and severe poverty of the Mormons made them “unfit to rule.” In a democracy, where citizens could not only vote for officers but run for office themselves, this meant the Mormons were unfit to be citizens. Like Indians or free blacks, they did not belong. They needed to be removed.

In their accounts of the episode, the early settlers commonly refer to themselves as “the citizens”—and this to the exclusion of the county’s Mormon residents. Yet this was fair in the sense that the Mormons had given their allegiance to Zion—not to Jackson, Missouri, or America. The saints viewed themselves as citizens of Zion and their Gentile neighbors as non-citizen residents. Joseph Smith’s revelation that the “land of Missouri” was the “land of Zion” instructed the saints to buy up the “whole region of country” as soon as possible and then “the regions round about” (D&C 58:52). An 1833 revelation clarified that the saints had been commanded to purchase “Jackson county and the counties round about” (D&C 101:71). The saints meant to buy out the Gentiles and have the place for themselves. The early settlers and the Mormons thus constituted incongruous citizenries.

Parley Pratt’s complaint about “political demagogues” opens a window on both the old guard leading the county and its citizenry. A demagogue is a person, particularly a political leader who gains power by arousing peoples’ emotions and prejudices. Among the hundreds of signatures added to the “citizen” circular were those of the county judge and two justices of the peace, the constable and the jailor, the county clerk and his deputy, and the colonel of the county’s regiment of state militia with his lieutenant and a captain—as well as the postmaster and local Indian agent Richard Cummins. But for the most part, as the Zion printer William Phelps recounted it, the rest of the vigilantes were men “of little or no reading; and being thus ignorant, were the more easily persuaded to believe, that their privileges and rights as citizens were about to be unlawfully taken from them.” These were those who were plied by the demagogues, who “when once roused to acts of violence, were constantly heated by the insinuations of a few” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15).

At the far western reaches of the organized states, the majority of Jackson County residents were rough-hewn frontier folk. Most had emigrated from the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee. Some were undoubtedly squatters who feared Mormon property plans. Whether they were old guard, ordinary residents, or even relatively recent squatters, they all claimed the right of prior habitation. With a united voice, they expressed their desire that the Mormons “leave us in peace, as they found us” (Ibid.).

Other elements in the county contributed to its susceptibility to vigilantism. At the eastern terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, Jackson was the occasional residence of traders like Josiah Gregg, whose father Harman Gregg signed the declaration warning out the Mormons. In his memoirs, Josiah Gregg celebrated “the wild, unsettled and independent life of the Prairie trader.” The trail life of the trader, Gregg wrote:

makes perfect freedom from nearly every kind of social dependence an absolute necessity of his being. He is in daily, nay, hourly exposure of his life and property, and in the habit of relying upon his own arm and his own gun both for protection and support. Is he wronged? No court or jury is called to adjudicate upon his disputes or his abuses, save his own conscience; and no powers are invoked to redress them, save those with which the God of Nature has endowed him. He knows no government—no laws, save those of his own creation and adoption. He lives in no society

which he must look up to or propitiate [conciliate, appease].

Gregg wrote that traders and other men like him preferred this “untrammeled condition—this sovereign independence,” over the compromised autonomy of settled community, “where both his physical and moral freedom are invaded at every turn, by the complicated machinery of social institutions” (Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies 1:156-57). In addition to men like Gregg who were laws unto themselves, Jackson County harbored an outlaw element that used the western border to its advantage. The saints, who had settled at the western boundary to be near the Indians, complained of these “desperadoes” who could murder or steal and then “escape, in a few minutes, beyond the reach of process” (William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15).

Jackson’s anti-Mormon vigilantes, while including those who held the reins of political power, did recognize themselves as an extra-legal body. Not all of the circular signatories whom the Mormons singled out as vigilante leaders were government officials. The doctor, the lawyer, and the merchants who affixed their signatures to the circular represented Jackson’s socioeconomic establishment. While enjoying substantial support from county leaders and the citizenry generally, the vigilante leaders nevertheless acknowledged they were leaving Missouri law behind. As they stated in their circular, “The arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one against the evils which are now inflicted upon us.” It was therefore “expedient,” they claimed, “to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose, a purpose which we deem it almost superfluous to say, is justified as well by the law of nature, as by the law of self preservation” (Ibid.). While operating outside of Missouri law, this “company” received such widespread support among Jackson’s governing officials and citizenry that it constituted a de facto county government.

When the vigilantes assembled, they reiterated the position that the problem of the Mormon invasion was “one that no one could have foreseen, and therefore unprovided for by the laws.” They therefore organized themselves as a natural “organ” of the county (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99). Josiah Gregg, the self-sovereign trader of the prairie, while sympathetic to the early settlers may also have been able to view this conflict from an outside perspective. “It was evident,” he wrote, “that one of the two parties would in the course of time have to abandon the country” (Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies 1:315). In the last analysis, there were neither citizens of the county of Jackson nor saints of land of Zion, but two parties competing for the same country.

In a sense, both the Mormons and the vigilantes had left the laws of the land behind. Both parties appealed to higher law. The Mormons, on the one hand, had all along wanted to live by the law of God revealed through their prophet. They followed Missouri law as an expedient in order to steer clear of trouble while building their numbers. When large enough to seize the reins of government, they could create a space for themselves to live by God’s law. Jackson’s vigilante leaders, on the other hand, justified their plan to rid the county of Mormons with “the law of self preservation”—the first law of nature cited by vigilantes throughout the nation. In imitating the Declaration of Independence, the circular embodied the appeal to higher law with form as well as content. Of course, the appeal to natural law was indirectly an appeal to nature’s God. But the residents of western Missouri, like Americans throughout the nation, saw the will of nature’s God expressed in the will of the people generally—vox populi, vox dei. While the Mormons found God’s will in the revelations of the prophet Joseph Smith, Jackson’s early settlers equated God’s will with their own. The Mormons and the early settlers constituted different citizenries with different governments. They appealed to different higher laws based on different concepts of sovereignty in pursuit of the same sovereign domain.

The July 20th meeting of over 400 vigilantes began its work by producing a set of resolutions. The Mormons were required to leave. Those who pledged to go of their own accord would be given reasonable time to settle their affairs. Church leaders would be held responsible for putting a stop to the flow of new immigration. Since another resolution demanded that the Mormons immediately close down the office of the Star, the vigilantes would send copies of their resolutions to major eastern newspapers, “that the Mormon brethren may know at a distance that the gates of Zion are closed against them.” In addition to closing the printing shop, the Mormons were to also close “all other stores and shops belonging to the sect”—including the storehouse. With macabre humor typical of vigilante actions, the committee appointed to draft the resolutions recommended that “those who fail to comply with these requisitions, be referred to those of their brethren who have the gifts of divination, and of unknown tongues, to inform them of the lot that awaits them” (“Mormonism,” Western Monitor, 2 August 1833, in History of the Church 1:395-99. The assembly then sent delegates to present the resolutions to the Mormon government and awaited news of their reception.

The Mormon leaders were shocked by the demands of the vigilantes. When they asked for time to consider the demands, the vigilante delegates were done negotiating. They returned to the town square to report the Mormon rejection of the terms and pursue the next course of action. The assembled crowd soon moved to the publishing house, where they wrecked the press and began tearing down the building. Isaac McCoy reported that there had been talk of doing this earlier, but the Mormons had seemed unconcerned:

About this time threats were occasionally made to throw

down houses, &c; their printing-office, and their store house in Independence were considered most in danger, but the Mormons were not much intimidated; their store they said was the Lord’s Store House, and therefore it could not be injured, and if any one should extend his hand to injure the house in which their Revelations, &c. was printed, his hand would immediately wither.

However, McCoy related, when the assembly moved to the printing office they “razed it to its foundation, to the apparent astonishment of many of them who were looking on at a distance” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833 in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). The revelations regarding the latter-day Zion, and the Zion of Enoch on which it was modeled, described a land of refuge, a place of safety, a sacred space that God protected from enemies. Although the saints had not yet built the City of Zion and its temple, they apparently expected that God would protect the buildings they had erected so far.

After demolishing the Mormon ministry of information (the printing office), the vigilantes attacked the locus of Zion’s economic power: the storehouse. This time, the Mormons did not stand by in astonishment. Sidney Gilbert, who managed the store, stepped forward and agreed that he would close up the operation within three days. Accepting Gilbert’s pledge, the crowd moved on to the home of Bishop Edward Partridge, whom they seized and marched back to the town square. After being forced to undress himself, he was tarred and feathered. A good feathering required a well-heated and thin tar—which easily clung to the skin and to which feathers dumped from a sack or from a ripped pillow or mattress easily stuck. Excruciating when applied, the tar was also painfully removed. But the main point of the tar was getting feathers on flesh. Tarring and feathering was less an act of violence than of humiliation and dehumanization. By making a chicken of the bishop, the vigilantes meant to rob him of his power. The feathering of the Zion judge was primarily a political attack, like the featherings of British officials in revolutionary Massachusetts. When the vigilantes were finished with Partridge, they “adjourned” their meeting for three days.

rd

July 23 was a joyful occasion back in Kirtland, Ohio. Having finished the groundwork for their temple, Joseph and a small band of church brethren met to ceremonially lay its cornerstones. Independence, Missouri, presented another scene entirely. About 500 men gathered from around the county, “many of them armed with rifles, dirks, pistols, clubs and whips,” as Phelps recounted. When the group began rounding up Mormons and threatening to whip them, the church leaders “offered themselves a ransom for the church, willing to be scourged or die, if that would appease their anger toward the church.” The vigilantes assured them, however, “that every man, woman, and child would be whipped or scourged until they were driven out of the county, as the mob declared that they or the Mormons must leave the county, or they or the Mormons must die” (“To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). Whipping and expulsion were the most common punishments inflicted by early American vigilantes through the 1840s. It was also the Missouri remedy for free blacks without a certificate of citizenship—as prescribed in state statute. The vigilantes also threatened to “let their Negroes loose to go through our [the Mormons] plantations and lay open our fields for the destruction of our crops.” So the tables had been turned: Rather than allowing the Mormons to introduce the corrupting influence of free blacks among their bonded field labor, the masters of Jackson County would use their slaves to destroy the Mormon fields. The Jackson slavocracy thus reasserted its mastery over the land and its human inhabitants. The Mormon leaders saw no choice but to work out a removal agreement. Both parties signed a memorandum of understanding that half of the Mormons and their principle leaders would leave the county by the end of the year, with the remainder out by April of 1834.

The Mormons were not to re-institute a newspaper, but Phelps would be remunerated for the destruction of the publishing house upon his departure (“The Mormons, or New-Jerusalem in Jackson County Missouri,” Jeffersonian Republican, 17 August 1833, 2).

While these events unfolded, intelligence of the initial mid-July vandalism slowly made its way to Joseph Smith in Kirtland, Ohio. Correspondence between the Missouri and Ohio brethren usually took about two weeks to arrive, so Joseph apparently received word of these events sometime in early August. A

nd

revelation dictated on August 2 concerned the ordinary affairs for Zion: It gave instructions on the School of the Prophets and reiterated an 1832 commandment that the Missouri saints build a temple. However, it repeated the promise of securing Zion’s safety through the glory of God’s presence. When the saints completed the temple, the Lord declared, “My presence shall be there, for I will come into it.” Then the nations of the earth would fear and honor her, acknowledging that “Zion cannot fall neither be removed, out of her place, for God is there . . . and he hath sworn by the power of his might, to be her salvation and her high tower” (D&C 97).

Four days later, Joseph dictated another revelation that directly addressed the issue of offenses toward God’s people (D&C 98). The Jackson County saints had suffered three incidents of property damage—in the spring and fall of 1832 and now in the summer of 1833. In a dramatic change from previous Zion revelations, a new middle ground was opened up between the law of God and the law of the land:

And now, verily I say unto you concerning the laws of the

land, it is my will that my people should observe to do all things whatsoever I command them. And that law of the land which is constitutional, supporting that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges, belongs to all mankind, and is justifiable

before me. Therefore, I, the Lord, justify you, and your brethren of my church, in befriending that law which is the constitutional law of the land; And as pertaining to law of man, whatsoever is more or

less than this, cometh of evil (D&C 98:4-7).

This was the first acknowledgment of the United States Constitution in Joseph’s revelations. In addition to justifying Gentile laws that protected freedom, the revelation seemed to encourage the saints to appeal to Gentile officials for protection under such laws. The revelation also acknowledged, however, that governing officials did not always uphold the rights of others:

I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore ye are free indeed;

and the law also maketh you free. Nevertheless, when the wicked rule, the people mourn. Wherefore, honest men and wise men should be sought for diligently, and good men and wise men ye should observe to uphold; otherwise whatsoever is less than these

cometh of evil (D&C 98:8-10).

Formerly disengaged from outside politics and politicians, the saints were now to support those Gentile officials who were willing to uphold those laws consistent with the principles of freedom articulated in the United States Constitution. But this was not the revelation’s only solution for the Missouri saints’ troubles. The revelation also outlined the divine law of vengeance. When offenses came, a true Christian disciple was to bear them patiently and to forgive the enemy. If, however, an enemy committed three offenses and also escaped Gentile justice, the disciple was to warn the enemy to cease and desist in the name of Lord. If that enemy attacked again, the Lord declared, “Thine enemy is in thine hands; and if thou rewardest him according to his works thou art justified; if he has sought thy life, and thy life is endangered by him, thine enemy is in thine hands and thou art justified” (D&C 98:31). Then Lord then proceeded to give his “law of war” or “law of vengeance”:

Behold, this is the law I gave unto my servant Nephi, and thy

fathers, Joseph, and Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham, and all mine ancient prophets and apostles. And again, this is the law that I gave unto mine ancients, that they should not go out unto battle against any nation, kindred, tongue, or people, save I, the Lord, commanded them. And if any nation, tongue, or people should proclaim war against them, they should first lift a standard of peace unto that people, nation, or tongue; And if that people did not accept the offering of peace, neither the second nor the third time, they should bring these testimonies before the Lord; Then I, the Lord, would give unto them a commandment, and justify them in going out to battle against that nation, tongue, or people. And I, the

Lord, would fight their battles, and their children’s battles, and their children’s children’s, until they had avenged themselves on all their

enemies, to the third and fourth generation (D&C 98:32-37).

The saints therefore were to “renounce war and proclaim peace.” If, however, a fourth offense came upon them, the Lord would issue a commandment to engage in battle and avenge themselves.

On August 9, Oliver Cowdery arrived from Missouri bearing news of the brethren’s agreement to terms of removal. The next day, Cowdery wrote back to Missouri with instructions, as he put it, “that may be relied upon”—apparently based on counsel from Joseph Smith. The letter informed them that recent events “would not have come upon Zion had it not been for rebellion.” The saints themselves, and not only the Gentiles, were to blame for their troubles. In addition to rebellion, there was the problem of those who talked openly about Zion’s sovereign destiny, and worse, those who were “telling that which was not true, and putting false coloring to the things of God.” As Zion could “never have peace while such remain in her,” Oliver instructed the brethren to purge them from the ranks. “It was necessary that these things should come upon us,” Cowdery explained. “Not only justice demands it, but there was no other way to cleanse the church.” Cowdery sent the recent revelations regarding the temple and the law of vengeance with the letter, instructing the Zion leadership to “read them carefully, and keep them from false brethren and tatlers.” While considering the need to sell some of their land, Cowdery instructed the Jackson saints to “hold on to the sacred places.” This certainly included the site for the temple and perhaps the storehouse and printing house. They were to locate a place for temporary exile should it be needed, but they were not to move before the agreed-upon deadlines. Instead, they were to pray for the Lord’s deliverance, “for this is his will that you should, and fear not for his arm will be revealed, and it will fall upon the wicked and they cannot escape.” Joseph Smith added a postscript admonishing the Zion brethren to “be of good cheer for our redemption draweth near. Oh, God save my Brethren in Zion” (Oliver Cowdery to William W. Phelps and others, with Joseph Smith postscript, 10 August 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 304-6).

A week later, Joseph himself wrote to the Zion leadership in Missouri. As in so many letters and journal entries, Joseph’s prose turned to prayer. He asked, “O Lord what more dost thou require at their hands before thou wilt come and save them.” Joseph wrote that he knew God would deliver Zion, but also that “God is pleased to keep it hid from mine eyes the means how exactly the thing will be done” (Joseph Smith to William Phelps and others, 18 August 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 307-16).

Meanwhile, Joseph’s strategy was for the saints to hold on and await the Lord’s deliverance. They were not to sell any of their land to the Missourians. Joseph instructed the saints to petition the federal government for their losses suffered in Missouri. But a deep pessimism underlay this ambassadorial mission. Its real purpose was a condemnatory witness to the suffering of the saints, “that they [the government] may be left with out excuse that a righteous judgment might be upon them.”

Joseph plead with the Lord: “0 god send forth judgment unto victory” (Joseph Smith to William Phelps and others, 18 August 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 307-16). But would God answer this prayer? Joseph’s communications over the next four months manifest his anxiety over Zion’s survival. In an early September letter to a saint in Jackson County, Joseph wrote that he was “not at all astonished” with the tribulation that had come upon them, given their disobedience. This did not mean that he was indifferent to their suffering. As he wrote, “I feel to cry mightily unto the Lord that all things might work together for good which has happened . . . let thy Judgments be sent forth unto victory and after this great tribulation let thy blessings fall upon thy people.” Again, Joseph hoped this trial would purify the saints to receive the promised endowment of power (Joseph Smith to Vienna Jacques, 4 September 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 317-20).

In early October, while on a proselyting mission in Upper Canada, Joseph received a revelation that “Zion shall be redeemed, although she is chastened for a little season” (D&C 100:13). But what did this mean? In a November letter to one of the Canadian converts, Joseph commented on the violent behavior of the Jackson vigilantes and admitted, “How far they will be suffered to execute their threats we know not, but we trust in the Lord, and leave the event with him to govern in his own wise providence” (Joseph Smith to Moses Nickerson, 19 November 1833, in Jessee, ed., Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, 325-27).

Back in Jackson, having received Joseph’s communications, the Zion leadership spent September and October preparing petitions to send to United States president Andrew Jackson and Missouri governor Daniel Dunklin. According to John Corrill, they circulated the petition to Dunklin “in as prudent a manner as possible; for the mob threatened, that if we petitioned or prosecuted, they would massacre us in roto [in short order]” (John Corrill to Oliver Cowdery, December 1833, in “From Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, January 1834, 124-26. See also William W. Phelps, “To His Excellency, Daniel Dunklin, Governor of the State of Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, December 1833, 114-15). The early settlers, however, began to realize something was amiss. Isaac McCoy wrote that the saints “became silent upon the subject of removal, and as formerly, appeared to be preparing fields with a view of remaining” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). Governor Dunklin agreed to help the saints but only after they had exhausted the local channels for redress. As Jackson County’s court officers had signed the vigilante circular, he advised the saints to take their case to the local circuit court seated in the neighboring county of Lafayette. To prepare their cases for trial, the Zion leaders retained the services of attorneys across the river in Clay County. They also prepared to defend themselves by importing and distributing guns, powder, and lead.

In late October, when the Jackson vigilantes discovered that the saints were meeting with lawyers and arming themselves—obviously planning to stay in the county—they were outraged. Isaac McCoy added that at about this time, the Mormons “became strongly suspected of secretly tampering with the neighboring Indians, to induce them to aid in the event of open hostility” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). Soon vandals were again breaking Mormon windows and shouting threats to them. The vigilantes began to reorganize. On October 31st, the day after lawyers in Clay County agreed to press a lawsuit on behalf of the Mormons, night riders entered one of the Mormon settlements where they tore the roofs from ten cabins and whipped some of the men. The next night, vandals in Independence smashed doors and windows of Mormon homes and the storehouse. The local Mormons were gathered at their temple site just west of town. Hearing the sounds of property damage as they carried in the night air, they returned to town and chased off the men who were smashing the doors and windows of the store. They also caught one man, Richard McCarty, and took him to Justice of the Peace Samuel Weston, but Weston refused to take any action (John Corrill to Oliver Cowdery, December 1833, in “From Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, January 1834,124-26; Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, in Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833; Jennings, “The Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri,” 43-46).

Feeling unsafe in Independence, the saints there agreed on a plan. John Corrill recalled that they decided to bring “our families and effects into one place” (John Corrill to Oliver Cowdery, December 1833, in “From Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, January 1834, 124-26). They packed their belongings and moved onto the temple site, where they set up a guard of about thirty men. Vigilantes soon took up positions in the surrounding woods to harass them. One child later recounted all the “yelling and hollering and swearing and shooting” (Quoted in Jennings, “The Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri,” 46). That night, vigilantes raided another Mormon settlement and started in on the work of unroofing homes. Mormon resistance quickly led to an exchange of gunfire, with men on both sides injured. The next day, November 3rd, word that the Mormons had engaged and wounded some of the county regulators spread like wildfire. The vigilantes spent the day rallying their forces, while the Mormons prepared to defend themselves.

On the following day, regulators rode into the area of Mormon settlements in west Jackson in broad daylight and captured their ferry on the Big Blue. Again, gunfire was exchanged. This time the Mormons killed two men and injured several others. Back in town, several Mormon leaders were arrested on the complaints of Richard McCarty, the captured storehouse vandal, for assault and battery and for false imprisonment. News of the fallen regulators spread swiftly, as did rumors that a Mormon-Indian alliance had been activated and that an army was coming to take Independence. When court proceedings for the arrested Mormon leaders were interrupted by a lynch mob, the Mormons asked to be placed in the jail to be kept safe. As they listened to the heated argument between the court officers and the vigilantes, they decided it wise to evacuate the saints from the county in order to prevent, as Corrill put it, “a general slaughter of our people.” The sheriff escorted them from the jail, and they notified the Mormons gathered at the temple site. That night, Missouri Lieutenant Governor Lilburn Boggs, an Independence merchant and speculator, commissioned Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pitcher to call out the militia to restore order in the county (John Corrill to Oliver Cowdery, December 1833, in “From Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, January 1834, 124-26; Jennings, “The Expulsion of the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri,” 49-52).

Answering the call to duty, Jackson men began mustering in Independence on the morning of November 5th. Josiah Gregg remembered that the “note of alarm was sounded far and near, and armed men, eager for the fray, were rushing in from every quarter” (Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies 1:317). Isaac McCoy recalled the environment of heightened anticipation in Independence that morning. As the militia of Missouri settlers assembled, they learned that a company of about 150 of the western Jackson Mormons were marching toward Independence. “At that time,” McCoy wrote, “there were perhaps not more than fifty guns [among the settlers’ militia] in the village.” Soon the Mormon force was within a mile of the town. “Had they [the Mormon army] reached Independence an hour sooner,” McCoy believed, “it [Independence] must in all human probability, have fallen into their hands; and had they marched straight forward into the village as they approached it, without hesitation, I think they would have succeeded in taking it” (Isaac McCoy, statement, 28 November 1833, as printed in the Daily Missouri Republican, 20 December 1833, 2-3). The Mormon army did not march into Independence because they were headed for the temple site just west of town. Unaware that their leaders had agreed to leave, they had mobilized to join the encampment of Independence-area saints. Corrill recounted that they determined to “maintain the ground or die upon it.” The setters’ militia reached the Mormon army before they turned off the road toward the temple site and informed them of the removal agreement.

With Lieutenant Governor Boggs mediating, the militia then ensured all the Mormons safe passage out of the county in exchange for their weapons. The Mormons relented and returned to home to prepare for the evacuation. On the following day, November 6, 1833, forces of from fifty to eighty vigilantes rode into the Mormon settlements to finish the job. Breaking in doors, they ransacked homes for hidden weapons. Men were whipped, shot at, and chased into the woods. The now disarmed Mormons were told to be gone before nightfall or be massacred. Frightened and scattered, the saints fled northward to Clay County in small groups, in families, or as individuals—some with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They collected along the western and eastern banks of the Missouri as they slowly ferried across from Jackson to Clay. Parley Pratt later described the scene as he came upon it: “Hundreds of people were seen in every direction, some in tents and some in the open air around their fires, while the rain descended in torrents. Husbands were inquiring for their wives, wives for their husbands; parents for children, and children for parents” (Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, 82). In the nearby village of Liberty and in other parts of Clay County, the Mormons refugees were received with kindness and sympathy.

The irony of being driven from Jackson County could not have escaped the Mormons. It was supposed to be their Zion, a place of refuge for the saints of God. From the beginning, the essential meaning of Zion had been to escape the contention and violence of America. Joseph Smith’s dream of a peaceful society had been born in the fractured religious landscape of the early American republic. Upset by competition between churches and confused by their varying interpretations of scripture, Joseph sought guidance from God. While his early visions and revelations provided him with the religion he craved, the persecution he then experienced deepened his assessment of America’s social deterioration. Joseph did not take the road of most Evangelicals. He did not try to reform the nation. The Book of Mormon indicated that America was or would soon be beyond redemption. Neither was Joseph a revolutionary, determined to destroy the machine of government and rebuild on its ruins. The violent pathway to peace was not the mission of the saints. Instead of reform or revolution, his solution was withdrawal. By gathering the good and peaceful from among the wicked and violent, Joseph could build a new society in a new place.

The biblical model of a godly people in a goodly place was Israel in Canaan. The Lord liberated Israel from their bondage in Egypt and led them to a promised land. Joseph Smith’s problem consisted in finding a promised land for himself and those who accepted his restoration of the gospel. The narrative provided in the Book of Mormon fashioned an eschatology that included a restoration of national Israel in America. Moreover, it was an Israel with which Gentiles could be gathered and included. The book also foretold that the New Jerusalem of biblical prophecy would be built in the new world. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon articulated a theory of peace and harmony on which to base the creation of a new society. The theology of gathering and oneness, when projected onto America’s physical terrain, mapped New Jerusalem into the heart of the continent.

Lying west of the organized states, the continental heartland seemed like a land apart—a place for the peaceful to escape America. However, as the church’s missionaries had discovered, the United States not only claimed the territory but administered it with an Indian agency and an army. Fleeing the contention they perceived in the American northeast in search of a western land of milk and honey, the saints instead had landed in the rugged frontier of the South. Joseph and his northeastern colonists ended up trying to create an independent nation among the rough-hewn southern settlers of the western Missouri borderlands. In the cluster of Mormon settlements in Jackson County, Joseph believed he had laid the foundations of a superior society destined to replace the United States on the North American continent. For the near future, he depended on the engine of the gathering to give the Mormons a demographic majority in Jackson and then the surrounding counties. As they assumed control of local government through conventional democratic channels, they could increasingly create for themselves the space in which to live by God’s law and his law only. Trapped within the United States but committed to peace, this was the necessary geopolitics of Zion.

The dynamics of the gathering had increased the likelihood that the Mormon colonists would come into conflict with Jackson’s prior inhabitants. Rapid immigration created instant communities that demanded social engineering. As Zion grew, Joseph addressed its ever-changing circumstances with further revelations. A growing body of commandments that addressed issues ranging from economics and education to dress and diet further developed the tightly knit culture of the saints. The swagger of Zion’s overzealous nationalists earned both the fear and loathing of their Gentile neighbors. Zion became not only a focal point for convert-immigrants but a vortex of persecution. Built among the violent settlers of Jackson County, Zion was less a refuge of peace than an invitation for war. When the Mormons became a real political threat, Jackson’s vigilante element mobilized for action. Unwilling to surrender the county, they drove the Mormons out. The saints fell victim to the violence they meant to escape.

Including the American government in the plans for Zion—Hope for Zion’s eventual redemption. Joseph Smith began receiving the “melancholy intelligence” of the expulsion from Jackson County in late November of 1833. In an early December letter to Bishop Edward Partridge and other Missouri leaders, Joseph wrote that he had long expected “that Zion would suffer sore affliction.” Still it was a tremendous blow to his sense of mission. The center place of Zion in Jackson County had been the subject of so many of his revelations. Jackson was the place to build the New Jerusalem, the future seat of Christ’s millennial government.

The Church had invested most of its financial resources there in land and improvements that were now lost to them. What were the saints to do? Joseph tendered Bishop Partridge some comfort in the promise of an endowment to come after the trial but admitted, “how many will be the days of her purification, tribulation and affliction, the Lord has kept hid from my eyes” (Smith, revelation, August 1831, in Marquardt, The Joseph Smith Revelations, 145-49). Joseph wrote of his puzzlement that God had allowed such devastation to befall his people and wondered how he would restore them to the land of their inheritance. These things, he admitted, “the Lord will not show me.” He advised Bishop Partridge not to sell any Jackson land and to try “every lawful means to obtain redress of your enemies.” Turning to prayer, he asked that their enemies “be destroyed from off the face of that Land,” that the temple could be built and the saints rewarded therein, “that the borders of Zion be enlarged forever, and let her be established no more to be thrown down” (D&C 103:13).

The answer to Joseph’s questions came in a revelation received a few days later, on December 16, 1833 (D&C 101). The revelation explained that the Lord had allowed the saints to be driven from Zion because they had not lived up to its peaceful purpose: “Behold, I say unto you, there were jarrings, and contentions, and envyings, and strifes, and lustful and covetous desires among them; therefore by these things they polluted their inheritances. They were slow to hearken unto the voice of the Lord their God; therefore, the Lord their God is slow to hearken unto their prayers, to answer them in the day of their trouble” (D&C 101:6-7). Yet the saints were not entirely forsaken; the pure in heart would return. In fact, it would be a fresh start. Zion would eventually be redeemed. The current trial would purge out those who were not sufficiently devoted to living God’s law in his land. By no means were the saints to seek out a new land. “And, behold, there is none other place appointed than that which I have appointed; neither shall there be any other place appointed than that which I have appointed, for the work of the gathering of my saints” (D&C 101:20). The revelation explained that the saints would need to be gathered safely in holy places for the coming days of calamity and in the day of God’s judgment at the time of his second coming. In that day, the Lord declared, “The enmity of man and the enmity of beasts, yea, the enmity of all flesh shall cease from before my face” (D&C 101:26). Peace would reign for a thousand years. Until then, the only safety was in Zion. The saints must and would return. But how?

The revelation (D&C 101) addressed the means of Zion’s redemption with two parables. The first parable (verses 43-62) involved a vineyard, its lord, and his servants. The servants, who were “at variance one with another,” became slothful. They were not on the lookout for trouble when it came. Enemies surprised and frightened off the servants and took the vineyard for themselves. In response, the lord of the vineyard commanded his servants to gather “all the strength of mine house which are my warriors” and “redeem my vineyard for it is mine I have bought it with money.” The lord’s warriors were to surprise and scatter the enemies and retake the vineyard. This time the lord’s servants would remain harmonious and vigilant. If the enemies regrouped and attacked, the servants would not only defend the vineyard but avenge the lord. The revelation then explained and applied the parable. The saints were not to sell any land in Jackson. If possible they were to purchase more. They were also to buy land adjacent to the county and gather their forces there. Then they were to return to their properties in a sudden show of force that scattered the enemy. This stratagem, like those of Captain Moroni in the Book of Mormon, would allow them to reoccupy their rightful lands without the violence of pitched battle (intense battle at close quarters). If their enemies regrouped and tried to drive them off again, they would be ready for them. And the Lord would justify them in defending and avenging themselves. This was the battle commandment promised in the recently revealed law of vengeance (D&C 98:32-37). The revelation cast church members as God’s warriors, but its strategy was based on their ownership of the land—an ownership defined by their federal patents and Missouri property law. Their commission to battle was thus justified both in terms of divine revelation and Gentile law.

The second parable adapted Jesus’ parable of the unjust judge (verses 81-85), in which a widow pled her case before a judge who “feared not God, neither regarded man.” The widow continually wearied the judge with her complaints until he finally avenged her of the wrongs she had suffered—not out of a sense of justice but to relieve himself of her pestering. The saints were to weary the government in a similar manner. “It is my will,” the Lord commanded, “that they should continue to importune for redress and redemption by the hand of those who are placed as rulers and are in authority over you according to the Law and constitution of the people.”

This was a most important step in Joseph’s changing political thought. It both affirmed and completed the turn away from Zion isolationism toward engagement with American government. It was now the Lord’s express will that they take their claims to Gentile officials. The saints had taken their case to the Lord, and he had sent them to the government. Mormonism was compelled to engage with America on its own political terms.

The Lord taught the saints one sense in which sending the saints to the government was appropriate. The Lord himself had watched over the creation of the Constitution. As the Lord explained, “I established the constitution of the land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose” (D&C 101:80). This revelation on Zion’s redemption led to the saints’ adopting the Constitution as a sort of scripture. This made it easier for the saints to seek its protection. The revelation expressed the Lord’s will that the Constitution “should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh.” For the saints, this was a significant break with the past. While the saints had seen the American Revolution and the founding of America as acts of providence, the emergence of Zion had been dependent on America’s demise. Now, when Zion’s establishment had failed, section 101 expressed God’s will that the Constitution be “maintained.” However corrupted American government had become, its responsibility to protect the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution was still a divine charge. The relationship between America and Zion had become complicated; the redemption of Zion was now tethered to the maintenance, not the demise, of America. Instead of the saints’ praying for vengeance on their enemies as they were previously inclined to do, they were now urged by revelation (D&C 101:81-101) to pray for the American judges, governors, and presidents—that they would hear their complaints, redeem Zion, and escape God’s fury. The saints were activated to make a genuine attempt to redeem a compromised Zion from within the American political system. They were urged, however, to still place their ultimate trust in the Lord. For the time being, D&C 101 provided a way for the saints to live in America instead of Zion.

The revelation on Zion’s redemption became as important in Joseph’s mind as the revelations that had brought Zion into being. It would shape his efforts and his understanding of events through the rest of his life. The saints adopted the Constitution as a sacred text. The rhetoric in the Star quickly shifted away from Zion nationalism toward American pluralism. Pluralism is a condition in which minority groups (in this case religious sects) participate fully in the dominant society and yet maintain their cultural differences. Applicable to the saints, they remained a distinct Church yet participated in the American secular government. An article in the January 1834 issue pointed to the Constitution as the embodiment of freedom and rule of law. Under it, the saints asserted an “equal claim” on government protection “with all other citizens” (“The Outrage in Jackson County, Missouri,” The Evening and the Morning Star, January 1834, 121-23). This and other editorials called for the protection of minority rights over the tyranny of the majority.

In their fear of further persecution and in their appeals to the American government, the saints, for the moment and for the sake of expediency, turned away from their former interest in the oppressed peoples, like the black slaves. So long as they maintained a presence in Missouri, the Mormons went out of their way to distance themselves from the broad cause of anti-slavery. Also the mission to join with the Indians faded even further into the future.

The first step toward redeeming Zion was to seek redress through the local courts. In response to earlier incidents of vandalism, the saints had already attempted to enter complaints with officers of the Jackson County court, many of whom had signed the vigilante circular that urged the expulsion from the county of the Mormons. As the Jackson court refused to take their complaints, the saints took them instead to the local circuit (federal) courts. When the circuit court came to Jackson County in February 1834, several criminal cases connected to the expulsion had been entered on the docket. Mormon witnesses reentered Jackson with an escort of fifty men from the state militia. However, when the party approached Independence, the captain in charge sensed danger and called for a reinforcement of another two hundred men. Robert Wells, the state attorney general, also came to Independence to attend the proceedings and guarantee the integrity of the judicial process. After sensing the hostile climate, however, he dropped the state’s Mormon cases. He explained to the saints that it was useless to try them before a jury of Jackson citizens. Mormon civil cases in neighboring Ray County, fared little better.

The saints soon shifted the focus of their attention to government at the state level. Acting on the governor’s willingness to provide them with a militia escort to reoccupy their lands—but not to protect them once there—Joseph Smith raised an army known as Zion’s Camp. In the summer of 1834, over two hundred Mormon men gathered from Kirtland and the eastern branches to march to Missouri. However, news of the Mormon army reached Missouri before the army itself. Seized with war hysteria, the Jackson citizenry prepared to hold the county or die fighting. Joseph aborted the venture when his army reached Zion’s exiles in neighboring Clay County and learned that state support for the reoccupation had evaporated. Several months later, however, the state legislature found a new solution to the “Mormon problem” in the organization of Caldwell County. It was commonly understood that Caldwell had been set aside for Mormon settlement.

New conflict erupted in 1838 when the Mormon settlers filled Caldwell and expanded into neighboring counties. Asserting their rights to settle in neighboring Daviess County with other Missourians, the saints called on Lilburn

Boggs, now governor of Missouri, to protect them from the vigilante activity that had commenced there. Boggs dispatched the state militia, which disbanded and dispersed the Daviess vigilantes. Appealing again to Boggs for protection from vigilantes in Carroll County, the saints were denied help. They had to abandon their Carroll colony. When vigilante activity resumed in Daviess, the saints fought back on their own. In response to this and an engagement on the border between Caldwell and Ray counties, Governor Boggs ordered the state militia to arrest Joseph Smith and drive the Mormons out of Missouri. Clearly the saints had satisfied the Lord’s commandment to weary the state executive. From the dungeon of a Missouri jailhouse, Joseph Smith wrote to the saints—who had resettled in Illinois and Iowa—and instructed them to begin counting the costs of the Missouri expulsion in lands lost and militia-requisitioned livestock and personal affects. Using the language of the revelation on Zion’s redemption, he informed the saints it was time to focus their efforts on the national level. After escaping from his guards and rejoining the saints, Joseph gathered up all the documentation he could and took it to the nation’s capital to present to President Martin Van Buren and the 26th congress. He hoped that the federal government would intervene to restore the saints to their land or remunerate them for their losses. In December 1839, when Joseph arrived in the city, he called on the President at the White House. Upon hearing his case, Van Buren reportedly replied, “What can I do? I can do nothing for you,—if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri” (Joseph Smith and Elias Higbee to Hyrum Smith, 5 December 1839, Joseph Smith Collection). Van Buren was unwilling to interfere in Missouri’s domestic affairs. Joseph viewed this as a campaign issue as well. In another version of the incident, Van Buren was reported to have said, “Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you . . . If I take up for you I shall lose the vote of Missouri” (HC, 480).

While President Van Buren’s unwillingness to help the saints almost closed the door on the presidential level of appeal outlined in the redemption revelation, the context of the upcoming election year opened the door wide again. If Van Buren would not help them, perhaps William Henry Harrison and the Whigs would. As the party of moral activism, the Whigs were more likely to interfere in domestic matters. Since their Democratic patronage proved unprofitable, the saints shifted their allegiance to the Whig party and voted for Harrison. Although Van Buren took both Missouri and Illinois, he did not retake the White House. But then neither did Harrison, as he died on his thirty-second day in office of pneumonia. His vice president, John Tyler assumed the role of president but separated himself from the policies of the Whig party.

Unsatisfied with the “pseudo whig democrat reign” of John Tyler, Joseph and the saints waited for the next election. In the meantime, ongoing immigration made them a demographic force to be reckoned with in Illinois. They became deeply involved in politics at the county and state levels. From the state legislature, they obtained a charter for their city Nauvoo granting broad powers of political autonomy. The new city council quickly passed a law protecting religious freedom for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Joseph soon became the mayor.

As the 1844 election approached, Joseph and other leaders sent letters asking the various candidates what they would do for the Mormon people if elected. Those who responded offered no assurance of help. The purpose of the Mormon inquiry was to throw their votes behind the candidate most likely to hear their appeal. The responses they received ruled out the promise of appeal even before the election. However, the saints had not completely exhausted the injunction to appeal to the national executive. They could run their own candidate. Joseph prepared to run for president himself. Once a disengaged separatist, he had become a petitioner to the government and then a candidate for its highest office. His sights were now set on Washington, not New Jerusalem.

The campaign was another huge step for Joseph and the saints toward participation in American political culture. Joseph converted his entire missionary force into campaign workers and sent his chief lieutenants into the field to manage their efforts. Reaching out to Catholics and other minorities, he tried to build a “coalition of the oppressed” (Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty, 205). Drawn into public dialogue, Joseph constructed a platform that weighed in on contemporary issues ranging from banking and commerce to the question of Texas annexation. Joseph’s platform centered, however, on civil rights and the federal protection they deserved. Though with the interests of his own people foremost in his mind, he focused his critique on slavery and the American prison system advocating universal emancipation from both. In politics, as in religion, Joseph’s views were far from orthodox. His political philosophy derived not from a deep study of classical theory but from his unique religious worldview and from the experience of oppression. His most relevant political views were developed out of necessity. Joseph Smith knew firsthand the dark side of democracy and the dilemma it posed for American public life.

Beyond serving as a Moses to his own people, Joseph Smith now offered a prophetic critique of the government to the nation at large. Attacking states rights, he explicitly advocated federal protection of the freedoms articulated in the Constitution. Around the same time, the Mormons in Nauvoo grew to constitute a majority of the Hancock County population. Their bloc vote now determined who would attain office. Joseph’s bid for the American presidency, however unlikely, only further incensed those who despised the concentrated religious and political power he wielded. Conflict with the area’s early settlers, very similar to that which had occurred in counties of western Missouri, eventually led to Joseph’s murder. A lynch mob gunned him down in June 1844 while he was being held prisoner in the Hancock County jailhouse.

While the campaign for the presidency had significantly engaged the saints in national politics, it had simultaneously caused them to lose faith in appealing to the American political and judicial systems. In fact, it was largely due to Joseph’s assassination that the Mormon leadership determined they had fulfilled their obligations in appealing to the government at the national level. Although several months remained before the election, they did not field a new candidate.

As persecution and violence continued to grow, the saints once again disengaged from American politics and set their sights on finding a place apart where they could live independently and peacefully. Again they looked to the far west, but this time beyond the reach of American territorial claims. They hoped to carve out a piece of northern Mexican territory for themselves. After the Mormons left the states, but before they reached the intermountain west, America declared war on its neighbor to the west—Mexico. A year after the Mormons reached their new home by the Great Salt Lake, the treaty ending the war placed them once again within American territory. There they would struggle against the United States for another half century before submitting to its sovereignty.

#Why Did the Zion Project Fail?

How could all this have happened? If Joseph was, indeed, the Lord’s prophet of the great final restoration, how is it that Zion did not emerge in Joseph’s day as a great, divinely-governed nation? Why did Joseph’s dream of a peaceful, utopian society not come to fruition? Why was the law of consecration and stewardship not sustainable in Joseph’s day and for the years that followed?

On another level, surely the Lord knew that Joseph and the saints would fail in their attempts to found the new nation. Why would the Lord allow the immense suffering and loss of property consequent to their expulsion from Jackson County in 1833 and their expulsion from the entire state in 1838? If the Lord intended to try and to school Joseph and the saints, might there not have been a less traumatic way to accomplish that?

Critics of the Church, of course, claim that the entire concept of Zion was Joseph’s own idea and not the Lord’s. Further, they would point out that Joseph’s failure is evidence that he was not, in fact, a real prophet. Allow me to put forth two possible explanations for the consideration of the reader.

Joseph was allowed by the Lord to err. Most members of the Church hold to a rather simplistic, and frankly somewhat naive, construct in their understanding of the Lord’s relationship with the prophet Joseph. We tend to believe that from the time of Joseph’s first vision experience and Joseph’s five annual “seminars” with the prophet Moroni (between 1823 and 1827), that Joseph’s every thought and action was the result of direct and clear heavenly dictation. We are inclined to think that Joseph enjoyed the constant blessing of the Lord or his angel sitting on his figurative shoulder and whispering in his ear. We are conditioned to feel that the Lord would preempt any potential error that Joseph, on his own, might be inclined to commit.

It is clear that the prophet Joseph came into the earth as a highly gifted and foreordained prophet destined to do a magnificent work (D&C 135:3). It is also clear that the Lord prepared him for his ministry during his early mortal life. His family’s experiences, their economic struggles, and the sociopolitical environment of western New York were all the Lord’s tools for shaping the thinking, priorities, and abilities of his prophet. While there were a few instances where Joseph enjoyed “writing-on-the-wall” revelation, mostly the Lord left him on his own and allowed him to use his own judgment. Never bereft of inspiration, nonetheless there was room for Joseph to err.

It seems clear that between 1829 and the Nauvoo period, for example, that Joseph held to the “one people, one hemisphere” concept of the Book of Mormon.” That is, he seemed to see the Lehites disembarking on a relatively pristine and uninhabited land. He appeared to feel that the progeny of the Lehites and Mulekites, and perhaps any remnants of the Jaredites, became the main founding fathers of the Western Hemisphere. Hence, he looked on the Native American Indians of his day as direct descendants of Book of Mormon peoples. Modern scholarship has leaned us in the direction of the limited geography concept of the Book of Mormon. When the Lehites disembarked somewhere in Central America, they found many peoples inhabiting the land. There seems to be little question that both Nephites and Lamanites intermarried with the indigenous people. The characters in the Book of Mormon drama remained a relatively small group of people in great land inhabited by many peoples. Also, the people and events of the Book of Mormon story likely lived and occurred in a limited area in Central America. It is certainly far from clear today that the Native Americans descended from Book of Mormon peoples. It is possible that Joseph misjudged these relationship, and the Lord simply tolerated his errors rather than immediately correcting them.

Failure of the Missouri saints to fulfill their necessary obligations. It may well be that Joseph’s political concept of Zion was entirely sound, but

Joseph’s—and the Lord’s—timetable was altered by the careless disobedience of the Missouri saints.

In a revelation received on December 16, 1833 (D&C 101) we learn the Lord had allowed the saints to be driven from Zion because they had not lived up to its peaceful purpose: “Behold, I say unto you, there were jarrings, and contentions, and envyings, and strifes, and lustful and covetous desires among them; therefore by these things they polluted their inheritances. They were slow to hearken unto the voice of the Lord their God; therefore, the Lord their God is slow to hearken unto their prayers, to answer them in the day of their trouble” (D&C 101:6-7).

“I know that Zion, in the own due time of the Lord will be redeemed, but how many will be the days of her purification, tribulation and affliction, the Lord has kept hid from my eyes; and when I enquire concerning this subject the voice of the Lord is, Be still, and know that I am God! . . . Now there are two things of which I am ignorant and the Lord will not show me. . . . and they are these, Why God hath suffered so great calamity to come upon Zion; or what the great moving cause of this great affliction is. . . . And again by what means he will return her back to her inheritance” (The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, ed. Dean C. Jessee [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1984], 308-9: see also Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 34.