No Man Knows My History
M rs. Brodie w as professor of history at the U niver-
sity of C alifornia, Los A ngeles. She died in 19 81,
shortly after completing her last book,
Richard
 
Thom as Jefferson: An Intimate History (197 4)
From Crossbow to H-Bom b (with Bernard Brodie, I973)
The D evil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard F. Burton (1967)
Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (1959)
Edited by Fawn M. Brodie
The C ity of Saints by Richard F. Burton (1963)
Route from Liverpool to Great Salt Lake Valley
by Frederick Hawkins Piercy (1962)
 
 
 
t.arcAiLl
 
1995
Copy right 1945 by A lfred A. K nopf, Inc.
Copy right renew ed 1973 by Fawn M . Brodie
Copyr ight 01971 by Fawn M . Brodie
All r ights reserved und er International and Pan -American
Cop yright Conven tions. Published in the U nited s tates by Vintage
B00ks, a divis ion o f Rand om H ouse, Inc. , New Yo rk, and
simultaneously in Canada by Ra ndom H ouse of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Originally published in ha rdcover by A lfred A . Knopf,
Inc., New Y ork, in 1945. This revised edition first published in
hardcover by Alfred A. Kno pf, Inc. , New Y ork, in 1971.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Kno pf edi t ion as fol low s:
Library of Congress C atalog C ard Number: 7t-136333
Vintage IsBN: 679-73054-o
M anufactured in the U nited s tates of America
20 19 18 17 16
 
Lieutenant McKeen Eccles
 
L WAS
in a funeral sermon that the Morm on prophet flung a
challenge to his future biographers. To an audience of ten thou-
sand in his bewitching city of Nauvoo Joseph Sm ith said on
A pril 7, 1844 :
You don 't know m e; you never knew m y heart.
No m an kn ows m y history. I cannot tell i t; I shall never under-
take it. I don't blame a nyo ne for no t believing m y history. If I
had n ot experienc ed w hat I have, I could not have believed i t
myself.
Since that mom ent of candor at least three-score writers have
taken up the ga untlet. Many have abu sed him; som e have d ei-
fied him ; a few have tried their ha nd s at clinical diagn osis. All
ha ve insisted , either directly or by im plication, that they kn ew
his story. Bu t the results ha ve been fan tastically dissimilar.
In official Mormon b iographies he has been m ade a prophet of
greater stature than Moses. Nineteen th-cen tury preachers m ad e
him a leche rous rogue ; and twentieth-century chroniclers have
been bemused w i th w ha
 they diagnosed as paranoiac delusions.
The reason for these disparate opinions is by no means
lack of
biographical d ata, for Joseph Sm ith d ared to foun d a new reli-
gion in the age of printing. W hen he said "T hus saith the L ord "
the words were copied down by secretaries and congealed for-
ever into print.
Th ere are few m en, however, who have written so mu ch a nd
told so little a bou t them selves. To search in his six-volum e a u-
tobiograp hy for the inne r springs of his cha racter is to com e
away baffled . The reason is partly that h e d ictated a ll of it to sec-
retaries as the official h istory of his chu rch . His story is the an-
tithesis of a con fession.
L egend ha s it that shortly before his death h e pu t all his pri-
vate records in a great copper pot and ordered W illiam Hun t-
ing ton to bury them dee per than a p low's furrow in som e ob-
scure corner of Nau voo. B ut even if the se shou ld m iracu lously
com e to ligh t, it is d oub tful if the y would b e an y m ore self-
searching than the records already pub lished. F or Joseph Sm ith,
like m ost great na tural lead ers, seldom wrote or spoke exce pt
like m ost great na tural lead ers, seldom wrote or spoke exce pt
[ vii
r e f a c e
w ith an audience in m ind. This fact is w hat makes i t so difficult
to evaluate his ow n account of his adolescent li fe , which w as
w rit ten tw o de cades af terward at the height of his career. And
the later years of his journal — in wh ich he w rote repeated de-
nials of polygamy — are no less troublesom e, for after his death
a dozen w omen proudly signed affidavits that he had taken them
as wives.
W herever Joseph Sm ith w ent he roused a storm, and from his
earl iest years coun try new spapers ga ve h im l iberal publici ty .
Copies of these newspapers, some of which antedate all the
early M ormo n histories, have fortunately been preserved. Dur-
ing his short, tumultuous career Joseph was haled into court
more than a score of t imes, on charges v arying from d isturbing
the peace to treason. M any o f the court records are also extant.
Thus, it is not that do cume nts are lacking: it is rather that they
are fiercely contradictory, and — even mo re imp ortant — that
they are scattered from Verm ont to C alifornia.
The task of assem bling these do cumen ts — of s i f ting f i rs t -
han d accoun t from third-hand p lagiar ism, of f it ting M ormo n
and n on-M ormo n narrat ives into a mosaic that makes credible
history, absorbing all the w hile the long-forgo tten reali ties of
religion an d po litics betwe en 1805 and 1844 — is not a dull one .
It is excit ing an d en lighten ing to
see a religion born. And Jo-
seph
Smith's w as no mere d issenting sect . It w as a real religious
creation, on e intended to be to Ch rist ianity as Ch rist ianity w as
to Judaism: that is , a reform a nd a con summ ation.
B ut the story of Joseph Smith is more than the story of a new
religion. If on e w ere unscrupulously selective in cho osing d e-
tails , one c ould make h im out to be not o nly a prop het, but also
a political menace — a dictator comp lete w ith army, propagan da
ministry, and secret police w ho created an authoritarian dom in-
ion o n the Am erican frontier . It is easy to match h is unscientif ic
racial theo ries , his autocrat ic o rganizat ion, an d his boun dless
ambition with the theories, organizations, and ambitions of
mo dern dictators . B ut to be content with draw ing such paral-
lels is to reject history for yellow journalism.
It is true that Joseph Sm ith bucked cherished A merican t ra-
dit ion s — the rigid sep aration of church an d state, the sancti ty
of private prop erty, and the inviolabili ty of the m arriage code .
 
ix
precipitated his lynching . But it is also true tha t he wa s purely
a Y ankee product and that a great deal that was good in A m eri-
can folklore and thinking fou nd its wa y into his writings an d
into his ch urch . Th e cornerstone of his m etap hysics was that
virile concept wh ich pervaded the whole A m erican spirit and
which wa s ind eed the n oblest idea l of Jesus and B ud dh a, that
m an is capable of eternal progress toward perfection.
But Joseph 's conception of p erfection was by n o m eans exclu-
sively spiritual. His kingd om of God u pon e arth w as saturated
with the Y ankee enthu siasm for earthly blessings. No one m ore
ingeniously than he com bined Jewish and C hristian m ysticism
with the g oal of perpetual p rosperity. " A da m fel l tha t m en
m ight be," h e wrote, "an d m en are that they might have joy."
A nd for Joseph Sm ith joy cam e, not from m elanch oly contem -
plation, bu t from plann ing bigger an d better cities, building
bigger and nobler tem ples, and creating for himself the nucleus
of an A m erican em pire.
The source of h is power lay n ot in his doctrine b ut in h is per-
son, and the rare q ua lity of his genius was due n ot to his reason
bu t to his imag ination. He was a m ythm aker of prodigious tal-
ent. An d a fter a hun dred yea rs the m yths he created are still an
energizing force in the lives of a m illion followers. The m oving
power of Morm onism was
a
fable — one that few converts
stoppe d to que stion, for its m ean ing seem ed p rofound an d its
inspiration was contagious.
L
THE twen ty-five y ears since the first printing of this biog-
raphy others besides my self have d one m uch digging in docu-
ments relative to Joseph Smith's life, and have published
considerable material that adds mea surably to my o w n research.
These same years have seen also the continuing growth of a
considerable clinical literature on human behavior, some of
which is decidedly relevant to an understanding of the more
baffling aspects of the M ormo n prop het 's character. Ho w ever,
there is as yet no competent appraisal of Joseph Smith by a
psych ologist, psychiatr is t , or psy cho analyst . I have w ri tten a
supplement for this edit ion that is intended to inform the read er
of the n ature of new historical discoveries, particularly in regard
to Joseph Sm ith's "first vision ," and his controv ersial B oo k of
Abrah am. The supplemen t also includes additional speculation
on the nature of his evolution, but it is not intended to be a
comprehensive clinical portrait, which would have to be the
w ork of a profess ional based on m uch more in t imate know l-
edge of the man than is presently possible.
The new discoveries do not necessi tate impo rtant revisions in
this biography. On the contrary, I believe that the new data
tend on the whole to support my original speculations about
Joseph Sm ith's character. The text of this edit ion contains cer-
tain significant add itions, but they are n ot long, and h ave be en
w oven into the original in a fashion that permits the pagination
to remain unchanged. A few specific details shown to be in-
accurate by new discoveries have been de leted. Because of the
techn ical difficulties of massive inse rt ion and deletion, I hav e
elected to put the detailed account of new material into the
supplement. It should be read as an addition to, and not as a
correc tive for, the text itself.
Considerable new material relating to the many wives of
Joseph Smith has been published; one new listing by Jerald
and S andra Ta nner, in their
Joseph Smith and Polygamy
Lake City, 1969), raises the putative number to eighty-four.
Ev idence for the addi t iona l marr iages com es from reco rds of
 
reface to the Second Edition
evidence is the fact that over two hundred w om en, apparent ly
at their ow n request, w ere sealed as w ives to Joseph Sm ith after
his death in special temple ceremonies. M oreover, a great many
distinguished women in history, including several Catholic
saints , ere also sealed to Joseph Sm ith in U tah. I saw these
astonishing l ists in the L atter-day S aint Genea logical Archives
in Salt Lake City in 1944. I rejected all such name s except those
like Nancy Hyde and Patty Sessions, w here there w as addit ional
evidence of some kind of marr iage in Nauvoo. I d id not con-
sider a Utah tem ple record by i tself to be ev idence en ough.
So long as i t is impossible to distinguish amo ng those w ome n
who requested the sealing after Joseph Smith's death, and
those who wanted an additional sealing in a Utah temple to
further solemnize a ceremony of some so rt that had taken place
in Nauvoo , I will keep the number of w ives tentat ively at forty-
eight. I che erfully con cede , ho w eve r, that this list is inco mp lete
and tha t it may w el l be expan ded, perhaps grea t ly exp anded,
should add i tional new man uscript evidence becam e ava i lable .
In past yea rs I have t ried in successive pr int ings to
edit out
small factual errors as they w ere po inted out to me. H ope fully,
this edi tion w ill see the el iminat ion of almo st all of them. Of
course, I have not chan ged ev erything declared to be an error
by critics, because I count ma ny of these c riticisms subjective,
interpretative, and often altogether inaccurate.
R esearch for this new edi tion has taken me into a m orass of
contradictory m aterial I was not eager to step back into. But the
experience has proved exhilarating rather than depressing. I
have fo und impressive the indefatigability of many of the yo ung
his tor ians of M ormonism, some of w hom follow h igh s tandards
of research. Important ma ter ial that had been k ept buried for
generations has been released from the Mormon Church
archives in Salt Lake City. The honesty and courage of the
editors of the new Mormon journal Dialogue,
which is un-
censo red by church leaders, has mad e possible the dissemination
of valuable research that in ear lier times w ould have found n o
outlet. The fear of church punishment for legitimate dissent
seems largely to have disappeared , and I am hap py to give spe-
cific thanks to several historians who have blossomed in the
new
in M ormon history is primarily library research, I
owe much to the patience and friendliness of librarians at the U niver-
sity o f Chicago, the U tah State Historical Society, the W estern Re-
serve H istorical Society, the New Yo rk Public Library, the N ew
York State Library, and the Library of Congress. The H untington
Library furnished me w ith a microfilm o f early letters of Oliver
Cow dery. The county clerks at Ch ardon, Ohio, and W ood stock,
Vermont, w ent to much trouble to unearth for m e early court rec-
ords involving Joseph Smith and his father.
I
am indebted to D r. Frederick M . Smith, president of the R eor-
ganized C hurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for permission to
examine the letters of Em ma Smith and other man uscript material
in Independe nce, M issouri, and am grateful for the many courtesies
of M r. Israel A. Smith and M r. S. A. Burgess.
M r. Alvin Sm ith at the Latter-day Saints Church H istorian's Of-
fice in Salt Lake City kindly permitted me to examine sev eral early
M ormon periodicals. Mrs. Vesta P. Crawford, M rs. Claire Noall, Mr.
Stanley Ivins, and M rs. Juanita Brooks w ere notably generous in allow-
ing me to exam ine the fruits of their ow n excellent research in early
M ormon d ocuments. Dr. Milo M . Quaife and Dr. Dean B rimhall
read my ma nuscript and gav e me the ben efit of their extensive know l-
edge of M ormon history and psychology. The map "M ormon Coun-
try" was d rawn by M r. Jerome S. Kates.
I have been particularly fortunate in having the friendly assistance
of M r. Dale L. M organ, whose indefatigable scholarship in Mo rmon
history has been an add ed spur to my ow n. He not only shared freely
w ith m e h is superb l ibrary and man uscript f iles , but a lso w ent
through the manuscript with painstaking care. He has been a n ex-
acting historian and a penetrating critic.
Throughout a period of research and w riting extending into seven
years I have needed and received the constant encouragement of my
husband, Dr. Bernard B rodie. His ow n special perspective on the
M ormon society and h is enthusiastic interest in my research w ere of
immeasurable value. He read the manuscript many times, each time
effecting some improvement in its literary qualities. But all this was
secondary to a more intangible kind of assistance w hich came from
his qualities of judgment and perception
a n d
F . M . B .
HI
4
iv
o
vii The Perfect Society and the Promised Land
8
4 3
X I
xiii My Kingdom is of this World
8 1
25
xvii
41
75
84
9 7
34
xxv
of Joseph Sm ith
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Illustrations
Joseph Smith, from an oil painting by Majors, m ade in
Nauvoo
rontispiece
F O L L O W I NG P A G E
Emm a Smith
2
Ch aracters said to have been copied from the golden p lates
Hyrum Sm ith
4
The T hree W itnesses to the Book of Morm on
Facsim ile from the Book of Abraham 7 0
Facsim ile from the Book of Abraham
Facsimile of Mormon m oney
02
42
58
L ucy Mack Sm ith in Nauvoo
98
Oliver Buell
Nauvoo
38
Z ina D. Hunting ton Jacob s and Eliza R. Snow, plural
wives of Joseph Sm ith
U nfinished Na uvoo house
54
L ast public address of L ieutenant-G eneral Joseph Smith
Carthage jail
90
 
A
gazetteer, s inging the charms o f Ver-
mon t's villages an d the glories of he r heroes, strikes a discorda nt
note when it comes to Sharon: "This is the birthplace of that
infamous impostor, the M ormon prophet Joseph Sm ith, a dubi-
ous hon or Sharon w ould relinquish w ill ingly to another tow n."
The shame that Sharon once felt has faded with time. The
church that Joseph found ed is eminently respectable, and the
dreamy town in the White River Valley w here he w as born has
long since abandoned hope of being noted for anything else.
Near by, on one of the lovely hills of which New England is
fashioned, s tands a shr ine tha t draw s M ormon pi lgr ims f rom
afar and stops many a passer-by.
Far to the w est lie the geographical a reas w i th w hich M or-
mo nism is gen erally ident if ied, but one can not und erstand the
story of its founder w ithout know ing something of Verm ont at
the turn of the nineteenth century. Joseph Smith was not a
mutat ion, spew ed up o ut of nature 's plenty w ithout regard to
ancestry or the prov incial culture of his state; he w as as much a
product of New England as Jonathan Edwards. Much about
him can be explained only by the sterile soil, the fo lk magic of
the midw ives and scryers, and the sober discipline of the scho ol-
masters.
His ancestors had been in New En gland for more than a cen-
tury. Robert Smith had come to M assachusetts in 1638 and John
Mack in 1669. But Joseph Smith was born not in Topsfield,
M assachusetts, nor in Lyme, Con necticut — w here the houses of
imported br ick and Lom bardy pop lars were already old, where
the cemeter ies were spacious and de cently maintained — but
among the w ooded footh i lls of the Green M ounta ins . An d the
migration of his grandparents into Verm ont is a s tory o f dis in-
tegration n ot only o f a fam ily but of a w hole culture.
For the century and a h alf in wh ich the descen dants of Ro bert
Sm ith l ived in To psfield they w ere con servat ive, respectable,
[I
I
o M an Knows M y H istory
active in local politics, and mod erately prosperous. Asa el Smith,
grandfather of the p roph et, w as the first to respo nd to the rest-
lessness that followe d in the w ake of the R evolution. The older
social and m oral tradi tions in M assachuset ts w ere cracking a s
the ideas that had broken the colonies loose from England
seeped into the church.
Like many o thers of the time Asael w as avow edly Chris tian
but basically irreligious. "As to religion ," he w rote to h is chil-
dren, "I w ould not w ish to point any part icular form to y ou; but
first I would w ish you to search the Sc riptures and con sult sound
reason. . . . Any honest calling will honor you if you honor
rich farmer than a poo r preacher." *
In middle age he left M assachusetts to clear a farm in the v ir-
gin forests of the Green Mountains. With him went his son
Joseph (father of the M ormo n prophe t), a tw o-hundred-po und
youth, six feet tall and han dsome, w ho, Jacob-like, wrestled w ith
only one man whom he could not throw. They chopped and
burned, and l ike their migrant neighbors coun ted the harvest
before the stumps w ere rotting, and heaped scorn upo n the low
valleys to the south.
In 1789 a Connecticut minister touring central Vermont
wrote: "Words cannot describe the hardships I undergo.
People nasty — poo r — low -lived — inde licate — and m iserable
cooks. All sadly parsimon ious — ma ny profane — yet cheerful
and m uch more contented than in H ar tford — and the w omen
more contented than the men — turned tawney by the smoke
of the log huts — dress coarse, and mean, and nasty, and ragged
. . yet the wo men quiet — serene, peaceable — contented, lov-
ing their husbands — their home — w anting never to return —
nor any dressy clothes; I think how stranget I ask myself are
these w om en of the same sp ecies with our f ine ladies ? Tough
they are, brawny their limbs — their young girls unpolished —
and w ill bear wo rk as w ell as m ules."
Not long after Perkins recorded his mixed admiration and
distaste, Joseph Smith met an d m arried a daughter of this breed.
. This letter was dated Aprit so, 1799. See
Topsfield Historical Society Col-
Narrative of a Tour through the State of Vermont, 1789
(Tuttle, 1930), p. 18.
3
If she too was tawny, tough, and brawny-limbed we cannot
know , for Lucy M ack Smith had no p ortrai t mad e t il l she w as
toothless and w ithered. Pretty she must have been , for her sons
w ere handsom e and her daughters marr ied yo ung, but she had
know n neither luxury nor security. Her father, Solomo n M ack,
w as a son o f misfortune.
Al though Solomon came f rom a l ine of Sco tch c lergymen,
poverty had kept him from the seminary, and he had grown
up on a fa rm w i thout school ing or re l ig ion — to use h is ow n
w ords, "l ike a w ild ass 's colt ." He had fought in the French and
Indian War, and then in the Revolution with his two sons,
Jason and S tephen. But wh en his daughter Lucy w as marr ied,
Solomon w as an impecunious and rheumatic old man w ho rode
about the countryside on a side-saddle and talked about w rit ing
a me moir of h is tr ials and misadven tures.
The surpris ing thing ab out Joseph S mith 's maternal grand -
father is that he actually succeeded, wh en h e w as seven ty-eight
years old, in gett ing o ut his chapboo k:
A Narrative of the L ife
of Solomo n M ack, containing an account of the many severe
accidents he me t with during along series of years, together with
the extraordinary manner in which he was converted to the
Christian Faith. To w hich is added a num ber of Hym ns, com-
posed on the death of several of his relations.*
That the spelling
w as bad and the hym ns unfortunate wa s quite overshadow ed
by the substantial accom plishm ent o f the w rit ing i tself. I t gave
the family status. In later years Lucy could read the book suc-
cessively to each o f her nine c hi ldren, point ing to i t as proof
that the M ack blood w as something mo re than co mm on stuff .
A nd it set a family preceden t. The m antle of authorship w as
to rest not only upon Solomo n, the grandfather, but upon L ucy,
upon her son Joseph, and in fact upon h is son an d grandson —
an unbroken tradition for five gen erations. Neither Solom on n or
his daughter had much formal schooling, but the impulse to
self-expression w as s t rong w ithin them , and the fact that both
married schoo lteachers com pen sated in part for the absence o f
slate and birchro d drilling.
Solomon M ack admitted in his
Narrative
that he had suffered
from fi ts , and this has been p ounced upo n by biographers eager
•
 
a
con genital instabi li ty . For a long t ime i t w as po pularly be
lieved that Joseph Sm ith ha d inherited a tendency to epilepsy .
B ut the Narrative
makes clear that the fi ts follow ed a head in-
jury that Solomo n received late in l ife wh en struck by a falling
tree.
Actually the M ack family w as marked nei ther by psychoses
nor by literary talent, but rather by a certain nonconformity
in thinking and action. As religious dissenters they believed
mo re in the integrity of ind ividual religious experience than in
the tradition of an y o rganized sect . Solomon in his old age fell
into a kind of senile mysticism, w ith l ights and v oices haunting
his sickbed. Jason Mack, Lucy's eldest brother, ran sharply
counter to the rel igious and econ om ic tradi tions of New En g-
land wh en he became a "Seeker" and set up in New Brunswick
a quasi-comm unistic society of thirty ind igent families wh ose
econ om ic and spiritual w elfare he sought to direct .*
Jason, howe ver, has not received the attention from M ormon
historians that has bee n de voted to another o f Lucy's brothers.
When the stock from which the Mormon prophet sprang is
called idle, thriftless, and d egen erate, Stephen M ack is cited tri-
umph antly to the con trary. He m ade a for tune in Detroi t and
left an estate w orth fifty thousand do llars at his dea th. He had
prospered ev en before he lef t Vermont , for he furnished Lucy
w ith the dow ry w hich the father could not provide. The thou-
sand dollars he and his partner gave h er just after her ma rriage
mad e the girl — considering that this was V ermon t in 1796
— a
irtual heiress.
Joseph and Lucy uni ted in their marr iage the d ivergent het-
erodoxies of their parents , both of w hich w ere react ions from
Jonathan E dw ards 's soul-sear ing Calvinism. "I spent much of
my t ime," Lucy w rote in la ter years , " in reading the B ible an d
praying; but, notwithstanding m y great anxiety to experience a
change of heart, another matter w ould always interpose in all my
med itations — If I remain a m ember o f no ch urch all religious
peo ple w ill say I am of the w orld; and if I join som e on e of the
different den om inations, all the rest w ill say I am in error. No
church w ill admit that I am r ight , except the o ne w ith w hich I
• Lucy sm ith:
Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet and His Pro-
genitors for Many Generations
52.
5
am
associated. This makes them w itnesses against each o ther." *
This w as the universal logic of dissent, a conviction shared by
thousands of New Eng landers in this period. Lucy had a v igor-
ous though unschooled mind, and her belief was simply the core
of Antinomianism — the inner life is a law unto itself; free-
dom and integri ty o f religious exp erience m ust a t a ll costs be
preserved4
Joseph and L ucy spent tw enty years together in New Eng-
land, yet neither joined a denom ination or p rofessed more than
a passing interest in an y sect. The M ethodist revivals in Vermont
in z8io excited Lucy for a time, but only further convinced
Joseph "that there wa s no ord er or class of religionists that knew
any more concerning the kingdom of God than those of the
world."
He
reflected that contemp t for the established church w hich
had perm eated the Revo lution, wh ich had made the federal gov-
ernment completely secular, and which was in the end to di-
vorce the church from the government of every state. In the
New W orld 's freedom the ch urch had d is integrated, i ts cere-
monies had changed, and its stature had declined. Joseph's
father, A sael, had frankly gloried in his freedo m from ecclesi-
ast ical tyranny . The son remained aloof f rom any church unt il
the one organized by his ow n son, looking instead to his ow n
dreams— called "visions" by his w ife— for spiritual guidance.
Lucy especially was devoted to the mysticism so often
found among those suddenly released from the domination
and d iscipline o f a church. Like her father she accep ted a highly
personalized God to whom she would talk as if He were a
member of the family circle. Her religion was intimate and
hom ely, w ith G od a ubiquitous presence invading d reams, pro-
voking miracles, and blighting sinners' fields. Her children
probably never learned to fear H im.
Had Joseph and L ucy Smith remained in New England for
the secon d tw enty y ears of their married l ife they m ight , l ike
their grandparents , have set tled into respectable obl ivion. But
the Re volution, w hich had uproo ted their parents from a ce n-
. Biographical Sketches,
p. 37.
The Story of Am erican D issent
(New Y ork,
o Man Kno ws M y History
tury-old New En gland farm tradi tion, had w akened the w hole
Atlantic seaboard peop le, w ho stood up to peer ov er the Appa-
lachians an d see fo r the first time their va st, fruitful hinterland.
The cal l of the Gene see country and the Finger Lakes w as al-
ready s t ir ring the blood of young N ew England m en w hen this
couple spoke the ir marr iage vo w s. And events moved s low ly
but inexo rably to p ush them into the t ide that w as spilling ov er
into the W est.
After six years of tilling a rocky farm in eastern Vermont,
they set up a shop in Randolph. Here Joseph Smith, Senior,
first heard of the fantastic profits pouring into the laps o f specu-
lators w ho exported the arom atic ginseng, the root of a plant that
grew w ild in the Green M ountains . New E nglanders preferred
sarsaparilla, Solomon's-seal, maidenhair, pleurisy root, and
skunk cabbage, but ginseng in Ch ina w as considered a remedy
for everything from dizziness to pleurisy. Vermont farmers
w ere sel ling i t for exp ort a t tw o sh i ll ings a p ound , and a roo t
shap ed like the body o f a man w as guaranteed to sell in China,
w here i t w as prized as a cure for declining viri li ty, for two hun-
dred to four hund red do llars.
Joseph invested all his mon ey in a shipme nt of ginseng. Lucy
wrote that the agent entrusted with the cargo returned from
Ch ina with a chest of mon ey but absconded to C anada, leaving
them p enniless.* Her husband had recent ly lost $2,000 in bad
debts and o w ed $x,800 to B oston mercha nts. To satisfy his credi-
tors he sold the farm for $800, and Lucy m ade up the difference
w ith he r dow ry. The family no w began i ts peregrinations, first
to Royalton and thence to Sharon, where Joseph rented his
father-in-law's farm an d supplemen ted his meager earnings by
teaching school in the w inter.
Their new home was lonely and isolated, high in the hills
above the W hite River, with w ooded knolls roll ing aw ay tow ard
the sunset in lush green disarray. Be auty w as there, but li tt le
promise. The land agents had cruelly tricked their Yankee
brothers w hen they so ld them V ermon t , for wh en the hi llsides
w ere cleared o f t imber the farmers discove red that all their toil
• This may have been the
case,
although historians of the time reported that the
market at this date was glutted. See Samuel Williams: Natural and Civil History of
Vermont
(Burlington , 1809), Vo l. I , pp. 85-6; and Ge orge V. Nash : "Am erican
Ginseng,"
No. 16,5898.
7
had uncovered only barren soi l and boulders . The Smiths, like
their neighbors, wearily rolled the great rocks off the fields and
piled them up into w alls that ran l ike causew ays up, dow n, and
around the hills.
Lucy meanw hile had borne two sons and a d aughter , and on
Decem ber 23, 18o5 she gave birth to a third son. No comet ap-
peared in the sky at his coming; no alarums startled the co untry-
side. He was accepted that cold winter night probably with
mo re resignat ion than del ight, and w as chris tened w ithout un-
due ceremo ny Joseph Smith, after his father.
The child was born into an insecurity that in a lifetime of
thir ty-eight years he w as nev er to escape. By his f if th y ear the
family h ad m oved three t imes, f rom Sharon back to R andolph,
thence again to Royalton, and finally to Lebanon, across the
border in New Hampshire. Depression hung over New Eng-
land, for its com merce w as ruined by Jeiferson's embargo against
England and France and la te r by the W ar of 1812, and only a
thriving smuggling business around L ake Ch amplain remained
of the formerly lucrative trade w ith Canad a.
Coun terfeiters infested the area, duping the unw ary and flee-
ing over the bo rder at the first wh isper of pursuit . On the 1st of
April 18o7 Beniah Woodward passed on to the elder Joseph
Sm ith a false ten-do llar bill , and a fortnight later A bner H ayes
paid him thirty-seven do llars in w orthless pap er. W hen Josep h
launched a com plaint in the W oodstock co urt on A pril 14, Hayes
skipped to Canad a, but W oodw ard paid w ith thirty-nine str ipes
and tw o years a t hard labor for this and other misdeeds. M any
years la ter a relat ive of W ood w ard took a neat reven ge by in-
s inuat ing that Sm ith h ad h imself been guilty of ma king bogus
mon ey, and his account w as widely believed.*
W hen the family mov ed to Lebanon , New Ham pshire, i ts for-
tunes br ightened. Hy rum, the secon d son, w as sent to M oore 's
Academy in Hanover . But he brought home from school a fever
that was dev astating the w hole countryside in 1813. The po pular
• See the article signed "Vermon ter" in the
Historical Magazine,
November 5870,
pp. 355-56. There it is said that Daniet W00dward stated that smith had been
"impllcated w ith one Jack Do wn ing in counterfeiting mo ney, but turned State's evi-
dence and escap ed the penalty."
I
have exa mined the reco rds of these trials in the
W 00dstock, Vermon t, courthouse. The trial of George Dow ner, the only name co r-
responding w ith Down ing, makes no mention of Joseph smith, and the other trials
at
 
8 ]
o M a n K n o w s M y H isto ry
remed y was a hot bath m ad e of a decoction of hem lock b oughs,
bu t since tubs big enoug h to hold a m an w ere rare in every vil-
lage, a c offin-like tub of pine b oards was carried from house to
house. Sm all wonder that Vermont had a dea th toll of six thou-
sand.*
O ne b y one the ch ildren of Joseph an d L ucy Sm ith fell il l .
T he eight-year-old Joseph seem ed to recover well enoug h,
though slowly, until one day L ucy was terrified to discover hug e
infections breaking ou t up on his shoulde r and leg . Herb p oul-
tices were as un availing as the u sual prayers, and L ucy finally
called in a ph ysician. He bled the boy, plied him with pu rges,
an d p robed his ugly sores. W hen the leg infection refused to
hea l, he talked of am putation, bu t L ucy fought aga inst the saw
and kn ife with a fury that ann oyed b ut checked the b arber-
surgeon. He h ad to conten t him self with c hiseling out a piece
of bone below the ch ild's knee.
W hen the savage operation bega n, Joseph would not let him -
self be tied to the b ed , nor could the fa ther force w hiskey be-
tween his lips to stifle the p ain. He scream ed to his m othe r to
leave the room , lest she should suffer m ore than he, an d L ucy
later sprea d the story of his he roism dow n the valley. It m ay
ha ve bee n this suffering tha t end eared Joseph to his m othe r
above her other children. G reat things were expected of the ch ild
whose m ettle had been tested in so fearsom e an ordea l.
W hen the boy's convalescence seem ed tardy, he was sent to an
un cle in Salem , where he got the first tang of salt air in h is nos-
trils. Salem h e always rem em bered, and the port city lured h im
ba ck u nd er singular circum stances twen ty-five years later. Now
he m ade a qu ick recovery and returned to Leb anon with only a
barely perceptible limp, wh ich, however, stayed with h im for life.
U nd er the p ressure of months of sickn ess the fam ily's hopes
of prosperity collapsed , and the Sm iths m oved b ack across the
C onn ecticu t R iver into Verm ont. F or three years they sowed
seed in Norwich an d h opefu lly wa ited for a harvest from a soil
that had long since given up its best. Th e elde r Sm ith listened
ever m ore avidly to descriptions of the dee p b lack loam an d
m ild c lim ate of Oh io. Fina lly in 18 16 , the h istoric year withou t
a sum m er, he was rooted out.
. J . A . Gal lup:
Epidemic Diseases in the S ta te o / Vermo nt
(Boston, 1815), pp.
9
Sno w fell in June; leaves froze o n the t rees , and the farmers
had to replant. Then came in July what Lucy called an "un-
t ime ly frost ," and their crops w ere again w iped out . Disheart-
ened farmers packed their w agons and m oved along the muddy
roads to the w est . Em igration in this year , cal led in V ermo nt
folklore "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death," reached its
peak for all time. In the train w ent Joseph Sm ith, leaving L ucy
and e ight children, the younge st only a few mo nths old.
Weeks later, when his letter came bidding them pack the
buckboard and fol low him w est , i t w as not f rom O hio, w here
mo st Vermonters expected to find the prom ised land , but from
Palmyra in western New York, two thirds the distance from
A lbany to the great falls of the Niagara. Youn g Josep h, at ten,
was old enough to know that this was not a move to another
village ov er the hills, but a tearing up at the roots. Few m en w ho
left Vermont for the W est ever came back. Crossing the moun -
tains h ad the same exciting and frightening finality as crossing
the sea on an imm igrant ship.
Joseph w atched his mother f il l the w agon and heard her argue
w ith their credi tors ove r the value of their meager h ouseho ld
goods and farm. The land sharks knew the wo rth of a n ote f rom
a man gone in to the sunset and they h ounded L ucy for debts
ti ll she w as frantic lest she ha ve too li tt le left for food . Alvin
w as eighteen and Hyrum sixteen, but even they w ere no match
for the men w ho sno oped about the Norwich hom e offer ing pi t -
tances for the things they prized. The boys stood by in outraged
helplessness, miserable and dumb, and ev er more eager to see the
good new land beyond the mountains where you could dig a
six-foot grave and not chip yo ur shovel on a single stone.
B iographers of Joseph Sm ith have com mon ly held that w est-
ern New York was then a wilderness, where wolf packs still
roamed and local l ibraries w ere rarer tha
 Indian reservations.*
But w hen the buckboard came to a s top in Palmyra, the w eary
brood looked out upon a tow n of almost four thousand cit izens,
twice the size of the vil lage they h ad left . Can andaigua, twelve
miles south, w as even bigger, and boasted a tw enty-year-old
academy , two "respectable private female seminaries," five com-
•
The Founder of Morm onism
(New Y ork,
19o2 , p. 42.
T o ]
o M a n K n o w s M y H isto ry
three churches, and paved sidewalks. And Manchester village,
on whose borders the Smiths eventually settled, had not only a
school and a tow n l ibrary of s ix hundred v olumes, but a woo len
mill, a flour mill, a paper mill, and a blast furnace.
Palmyra was booming in 1817 as never before or since. De
Witt Clinton had just forced through the New York Assembly
a bi ll providing for the mo st s tupend ous en gineer ing feat of his
generation, the construction of the 363-mile Erie Canal to con-
nect the Great Lakes with the port of New York. Palmyra was
on
the surveyed route . Al though the can al was to be e ight years
in the building, farmers already w ere coun ting their profi ts , and
land prices across the state were leaping upward. In 1790 un-
improved land had sold for two to four shillings an acre; by
i800 it cost betw een $1.5o and $4. But by 1817 every lando w ner
had become a speculator and was charging $6 an acre for un-
w anted uplands and $3o to $45 for improved land w ith a cabin.
In Ohio Joseph Smith, Senior , could have found equal ly goo d
land for $1.25 an acre; in Manchester township he paid boom
prices and began clearing a farm
under a crushing burden of
debt and the constant threat of foreclosure. He could not know
that he had c om e at the p eak of a spec ulative spiral, that Palmyra,
instead of doubling its population in the next decade, would
actually shrink by three hund red ci t izens and rem ain even a cen -
tury later a town of little more than four thousand. Ontario
Co unty w as no t the fron tier , but relat ively sett led co untry, with
sixteen taverns on the sixteen-mile road between Canandaigua
and Geneva. The Mormon prophet's father was not a Thomas
Lincoln, wh o in that same year w as hew ing out a farm s ix hun-
dred miles west in Indiana's isolation.
There were no squatter privileges in western New York, and
Smith neede d cash to p ay the ins ta llments on his land. For more
than two years he l ived in Palmyra, w here Lucy op ened a sm all
"cake and beer shop," selling gingerbread, boiled eggs, root
beer, and oilcloth accessories which she designed and painted.
After months of hiring out to farmers, Smith signed a note for
a
hund red acres of unimpro ved land tw o miles south of Palmyra.
In
one year they made a substantial initial payment, built a log
ho use, and began the arduo us task of clearing the forest .
Like their neighbors the Smiths tapped their sugar maples
 
xi
thousand pounds in one season and won the fifty-dollar bounty
for top production in the county. But, for all their toil, the
making of a profitable farm was a slow and uncertain process.
It took three men and a yoke of oxen five weeks to clear and
sow a ten-acre field. When the wheat turned yellow between
the stumps, the farmers dreamed of reaping forty bushels an
acre . But the crude threshing devices — a f la il or the bare hoo fs
of cattle -- wasted the kernels, and when the winnowing was
don e there wa s no buyer for the product . In 1818 wh eat brought
only twenty-five cents a bushel in barter value, for in that dec-
ade it was seldom a cash crop unless one paid the prohibitive
costs of ov er land t ranspo r t to A lbany.
Harvests were fair from 1817 to 1819 and then excellent un-
til 1824. But debts piled up nevertheless, and one dispossessed
se t tler after another mov ed o n in to Oh io, and f rom there to Indi-
ana , w here they bought the fa rms abandoned by the men w hom
Ill inois h ad lured st i l l far ther w est . The greatest migrations w ere
in depression y ears, 1819 seeing the sale of over five million acres
of public land.*
The v ast resources of the hinterland st irred the mo st sluggish
fancies , and an opt imism that was to becom e basic in A merican
thinking for a hundred years now swept the United States.
A
reflection of this optimism was the noisy campaign for public
w orks in the 182 0 's , which reached i ts peak w i th the bui ld ing of
the Erie Canal . W hen the las t load of di r t w as hauled away and
the last aqueduct finished in 1825, De Witt Clinton filled
a
bucket with salt water from the Atlantic Ocean and sailed in
state, to the sound of guns by day and the light of bonfires by
night, to pour it into the fresh waters of Lake Erie. All along
the route the settlers drank and feasted and planned the spend-
ing o f their pro fi ts .
In this atmosphere of unbridled anticipation Joseph Smith
grew into manhood. Coupled with the optimism was a militant
patriotism. The West believed that America was the greatest
• For a d e ta iled p ic ture of the econom y and soc ia l l ife of w es tern New York in
this period see 0. Turner:
History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's
Purchase
A Tour from the City of New
York
A View of the Present Situation of the
Western Parts of the State of New York
(Frederick-Town, 1804); John Fowler:
Jour-
nal of a Tour in the State of New York in the Year 1830
(Londo n, 1831);
12 o Man Knows My History
of nations because its democracy was based on the laws of na-
ture, and that it would steadily become more perfect and its
people more purified until the whole world would follow its
example. General Lafayette's tour of the United States in 1825
was the signal for a patriotic orgy. In Joseph Smith's neighbor-
hood, where he arrived in June, "bonfires blazed on hilltops;
cannon thundered their salute; old soldiers rushed weeping to
his arms; committees met and escorted him to their villages,
and hundreds sought the honor of a grasp of his hand." *
Such spectacle and parade m itigated the d rudgery that pr imi-
tive farming methods imposed on the Smith family and their
neighbors. But more enduring were the extravagant hopes for
prosper i ty that buoyed up the co untrys ide . The comm unity w as
unstable, not only because of the lure of cheaper land in Ohio
and the general fever of speculation, but also because of the
character of the c i t izens themselves . Emigrants f rom New En g-
land were the adventurous, the discontented, the nonconform-
i s ts . The old m ores that they brought to the yo ung co mm unities
w ere bound to be f lexed and dis tor ted by the new freedom.
Nowhere was lapse from the old codes more evident than in
the churches , w hich w ere racked w i th schisms. The M ethodis ts
split four ways between 1814 and 1830. The Baptists split into
Reformed Baptists, Hard-Shell Baptists, Free-Will Baptists,
Seven th-Day B apt is ts , Footwashers , and other sects . Unfet tered
religious liberty began spawning a host of new religions.
Carried along in the migration had come the flotsam of the
godly. There w as Isaac B ullard, w ear ing nothing but a bearskin
girdle and his beard, wh o g athered a fol low ing of "Pi lgr ims" in
1817 in W ood stock, Vermo nt , hal f a dozen hi lls aw ay from the
old Smith farm. Cham pion o f free lov e and co mm unism, he re-
garded w ashing as a s in and bo asted that he had no t changed his
clothes for seven years. Forsaking Vermont for the promised
land, the Pilgrims crossed the mountains into New York, fol-
lowed the same long road across the state as had Joseph Smith,
and drifted down the Ohio into Missouri.
There was Ann Lee, mother of the hakers, who called her-
self the reincarnated Christ and who with her celibate commu-
nists had fled New England's wrath. In the religiosely fecund
atmosphere of New York State her sect flourished and spread.
• History of Ontario County,
1
3
In
dance, watching first one and then another break away and
w hirl dervish-like t i ll they fell exha usted o n the floo r, uttering
an inco herent gibberish gene rously referred to as " the gif t of
tongues." Wherever the Shakers settled, there circulated the
usual obscene my ths, one that they castrated their males; others
that they str ipped and d anced naked in their meetings, indulged
in prom iscuous de bauchery, and practiced infanticide.
For all their incongruity the Shakers had a certain dignity,
w hich came from their cleanly habits and intense industry. Such
was not true of the entourage of another female subdivinity
ruling in Jerusalem, twenty-five miles from Joseph Smith's
home. This was Jemima Wilkinson, the "Universal Friend,"
w ho though t herself to be the C hris t. Un perturbed by the Pa l-
myra new spaper w hich unsymp athetica lly pref ixed an "anti"
and called her a con summate impostor, she governed h er colony
by revelations from hea ven an d sw ore that she w ould never die.
She w as a handsom e w om an w ith f ine eyes and je t -black hair,
w hich curled o ver the purple robe hanging from her shoulders.
Gossip had i t that al though she could neither read no r w rite she
could recite the w hole B ible from i ts having been read to her .
Jemima's chief aide, who m she called the Prop het Eli jah, w ould
tie a girdle tight about his waist, and when his belly swelled
in protest, he w ould be filled w ith prophe tic visions.
Tw o ye ars after the Smiths arrived in Ontario County, rumors
stirred the neighborhood that "the Friend" had died and that
despite her follow ers ' denials her body w as mo ldering in a Jeru-
salem cellar. For nine y ears lawsuits over the d isposition of h er
property troubled the Canandaigua courthouse and kept re-
mem brance of her fresh.*
Eccentrics like Bullard, Ann Lee, and Jemima Wilkinson
were only the more conspicuous personalities on the purple
fringe o f organized religion. The sober preac her trained in the
dialect ics of the seminary w as rare w est of the A ppalachians.
. For accounts of Jemima Wilkinson, the Shakers in western New York, and
Isaac Bullard, see David Hudson:
History of Jemima Wilkinson
(Geneva, New Y ork,
182i) ; Richard McNem ar:
History of Vermont,
Wayne Sentinel
(Palmyra, New
 
One found instead faith healers and circuit-rider evangelists,
who stirred their audiences to paroxysms of religious frenzy.
The Baptists boasted in 1817 that in New York State west of
the Hudson there were on ly th ree preachers w ho h ad ever been
to college. The settlers in the old Northwest Territory de-
manded personality rather than diplomas from the men who
cal led them to Go d.
Palmyra was the center of what the circuit riders later called
the "burnt over" district. One revival after another was sweep-
ing through the area, leaving behind a people scattered and
pee led, for rel igious en thusiasm w as l iterally being burn t out of
them. There are no detailed descriptions of the revivals in Pal-
myra and M anches te r be tw een 1824 and 182 7 , w hen they were
at their wildest; and we cannot be certain that they matched in
pathological in tens i ty the fam ous revivals that had shaken Ken -
tucky at the turn of the century.
Evangelists had swarmed over the hill country, preaching in
great open-ai r camp meet ings w here s i lent , lonely f ront iersmen
gathered to sing and shout. Revivalists knew their hell inti-
mately — geography , c limate , and vi ta l s ta ti s tics — and painted
t h e
forward to the bushel-box altars to be born again. Hundreds
fell to the ground senseless, the most elegantly dressed women
in Kentucky lying in the mud alongside ragged trappers. Some
were seized with the "jerks," their head and limbs snapping
back and forth and their bodies grotesquely distorted. Those
who caught the "barks" would crawl on all fours, growling and
snapping like the camp dogs fighting over garbage heaps be-
hind the tents.
the sound of hallelujah seemed to run through infinite space;
w hile hund reds of peop le lay p rostra te on the groun d crying for
mercy. Oh my dear brother, had you been there to have seen
the convulsed limbs, the apparently lifeless bodies, you would
have been constrained to cry out as I was obliged to do, the
gods are among the people " *
Revival conversions were notoriously shortlived. The great
evangelist Charles G. Finney noted with dismay that where
* see C atherine C leveland:
The Great RevivaI in the West, 1797-1805
(Chicago,
The Kentucky Revival,
15
the excitement had been w ildest i t resulted in "a reaction so ex-
tensive and profound as to leave the impression on many m inds
that religion wa s a mere delusion." James B oyle w rote to Finney
in 1834: "I have v isited and revisited ma ny of these fields, and
groaned in spir it to see the sad, f r igid, carnal and content ious
state into which the churches had fallen . . . within three
mo nths after we left them ." *
The revivals by their very excesses deadened a n ormal antip-
athy tow ard religious eccen trici ty. A nd these pen tecostal years,
w hich coincided with Joseph Smith's adolescence and early man-
hood, were the most fertile in America's history for the
sprouting of prop hets . In the same d ecade that young Josep h
anno unced h is mission, W ill iam M iller proclaimed that Jesus
would visit the earth in March i843 and usher in the millen-
nium. Thousands flocked to h is ranks, auctioned off their prop-
er ty , and bought ascens ion robes . John Hump hrey Noy es w as
conv erted to the theory that the millennium h ad already begun,
and laid plans for a community based on Bible communism,
free love, and scientific propagation. M atthias strode abo ut New
Yo rk City brandishing a sw ord and a seven-foot ruler, shouting
tha t he had come to redeem the w or ld . And dow n in the south
of Ohio, Dylks, the "Leatherwo od G od," proclaimed his divin-
ity to a groveling congregation with shouts and snorts that
shook the roof of his tabernacle.
Of these and o ther prophets only one w as des t ined for rea l
glory. Jemima W ilkinson w as forgotten with the division of her
property; the Noyes On eida comm unity degene rated from a so-
cial and religious experiment into a business enterprise; and
Dylks was ridden out of the Leatherwood country astride a
rail. W illiam M iller, although his Ad ven tists are still an aggres-
s ive minori ty sect , neve r regained face a f ter 1845, wh en a f ter
tw o recalculations Jesus still failed to come. B ut Josep h Sm ith,
a century af ter his death, had a m ill ion followers w ho held his
nam e sacred and his mission divine.
. See
Literary and
Theological Review,
 
led Joseph S mith into the career of "proph et,
seer , and rev elator" is overgrow n w ith a tangle of legend and
contradiction. M ormon and non-M ormon accounts seem to con-
flict at every turn. The earliest non-Mormon documents that
men tion h im at a ll — a n ear ly court record and n ew spaper ac-
counts — indicate that Joseph reflected the religious indep end-
ence o f his father . The h aranguing of the rev ival is t preachers
seem s to have f i lled him only w ith con tempt. B ut these do cu-
ments co ntrast remarkably w ith Joseph's official biography , be-
gun many years later when he was near the summit of his
career. The latter tells the story of a visionary boy caught by
revival hysteria and ch anneled into a l ife of my stic ism a nd ex-
hortation.
The ev idence , how ever , leaves no doubt tha t , w hatever Jo-
seph's inner feelings, his reputation before he organized his
church was not that of an adolescent mystic brooding over
visions, but of a l ikable ne'er-do-w ell who w as no torious for tall
ta les and necrom antic ar ts and w ho sp ent his le isure leading a
band of idlers in d igging for buried t reasure. This behav ior is
con firmed by the mo st coldly object ive de script ion of youn g
Joseph that remains, which historians have hitherto overlooked
or ignored . This description seem s also to be the earliest public
docum ent that mentions him a t all . The d ocumen t , a court rec-
ord dated March 1826, when Joseph was twenty-one, covers
his t ria l in B ainbridge, New Yo rk, on a charge o f being "a dis-
orderly person a nd a n impo stor." On the basis of the testimo ny
presented, including Josep h's ow n ad missions of indulging in
magic arts and organizing hunts for buried gold, the court ruled
him guilty of disturbing the p eace .
Four years after this tr ial Joseph 's Bo ok of M ormon appe ared,
w hereupon the local edi tors in Palmy ra, w ho h ad nev er previ-
ously considered him w orthy of comm ent, began to explore the
vagaries of his youth. The editor of the Palmyra
Reflector,
Reflector,
1 7
Abn er Cole , under the pseudony m O badiah Dogberry , w rote
during 183o an d 1831 a series of articles describing in exuberant
detail Josep h's adolescent yea rs.
Later , in 1833, whe n Josep h's church w as rapidly gaining in
notoriety and power, a disgruntled ex-Mormon named Hurl-
but went about Palmyra and Manchester soliciting affidavits
f rom m ore than a hundred persons w ho had know n Joseph be-
fore he began his religious career. These sworn testimonies,
w hich w ere published in 1834 by E ber D. How e in a v itriolic anti-
M ormon book ca l led
Mormonism Unvailed,
may have been
colored by the bias of the man w ho co llected them, but they cor-
roborated and supp lemented the court record and D ogberry 's
edi tor ials .* Since the s tory that they relate o f Joseph Sm ith 's
ado lescent years is further substantiated by certain a dm issions
in his own autobiography and in the naive biograph y dictated
by h is mother, i t is po ssible to reco nstruct Joseph's youth w ith a
fair degree of accuracy.
Significantly, Josep h Sm ith's first sketch of his early years too k
the form of an apology for his youthful indiscret ions. Sho rt ly
after Mormonism Unvailed
church newspaper:
At the
age of ten my father's family removed to Palmyra, New
York, where, and in the vicinity of which,
I
lived, or, made it my
place of residence, until I was twenty-one; the latter part, in the town
of Manchester. During this time, as is common to most or all youths,
I fell into many vices and follies; but as my accusers are, and have
been forward to accuse me of being guilty of gross and outrageous
violations of the peace and good order of the community, I take the
occasion to remark that, though, as I have said above, "as is common
to most, or all youths, I fell into many vices and follies,"
I have not,
neither can it be sustained, in truth, been guilty of wronging or in-
juring any man or society of men; and those imperfections to which
I allude, and for which I have often had occasion to lament, were a
light, and too often, vain mind, exhibiting a foolish and trifling con-
versation.
. Since the books and newspapers in which these documents originally appeared
are so rare as to be inaccessible to the general reader, the court record, the significant
portions of Dogberry's editorials, and the most important affidavits are reproduced
in Appendix A.
1 834), p. 40.
Although fifty-one of Joseph's neighbors signed an affidavit
accusing him of being "dest i tute of
moral character and addicted
to viciou s habits,"
there is no evidence that viciousness w as a part
of h is nature , and his apology can be accepted a t ful l value. Ac-
tually he w as a gregarious, cheerful , imagina tive y outh, born to
leadership, but hampered by meager education and grinding
poverty.
A landlord c lass w as bat tening on his labor , dr iv ing w estward
helplessly ensnared families like his ow n. In the Palmyra new s-
pape r he could read o f their mortgage sales, s ix to ten e very w eek
on the f ront page. He l ived far enough eas t to see opulence and
parade and not far enough west to escape a crushing burden of
debt. His family, having sl ipped do w nhil l s ince those early years
when his mother's dowry had been the envy of the neighbor-
ho od , had lost securi ty an d respec tabili ty.
But the need for deference was strong within him. Talented
far beyond his brothers or friends, he was impatient with their
mo dest ho pes an d h umdrum fancies . Nimble-w itted, ambitious ,
and gifted with a boundless imagination, he dreamed of escape
into an i l lustr ious an d affluent future. For Josep h w as no t mean t
to be a plodd ing farmer, tied to the earth by habit or by love for
the recurrent miracle of harvest. He detested the plow as only
a farmer 's son can, and looked w ith d espair on the fearful mo rt-
gage that clouded their future.
The re is , of course, a gold mine o r a buried treasure on eve ry
mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or
not , it is there , haunt ing his dayd reams w hen the burden of debt
is
— poor, desperate farmers who, having unwittingly purchased
acres of rocks, looked to those same rocks to yield up golden
recompense for their back-breaking toil. "We could name, if
we pleased," said one Vermont weekly, "at least five hundred
respectable men who do in the simplicity and sincerity of their
hearts believe that immense treasures lie concealed upon our
Green Mountains, many of whom have been for a number of
up." *
When these men migrated west, they brought with them the
w hole folklore of the mo ney-digger , the sp el ls and incanta tions ,
• Reprinted in the
 
the witch-hazel stick and mineral rod. But where the Green
M ountains yielded n othing but an occasion al cache of counter-
fe it money, w es tern New Yo rk and Oh io were r ich in Indian
relics.
with skeletons and artifacts of stone, copper, and sometimes
beaten si lver. There w ere eight such tumuli within twelve miles
of the Sm ith farm.* It w ould have bee n a jaded curiosity indeed
that would have kept any o f the boys in the family from spading
at least once into their pitted surfaces, and even the father suc-
cumbed to the local enthusiasm and tr ied his hand w ith a w itch-
hazel s tick. Yo ung Joseph co uld no t keep aw ay from them .
Excitement o ver the possibili ties of Indian treasure, and per-
hap s buried Sp anish gold, reache d i ts height in Palmy ra w ith
the coming o f w hat the edi tor of the Palmyra
Reflector
called
a "vagabond fortune-teller" named Walters, who so won the
confidence o f several farmers that for some m onths they p aid
him three dollars a day to hunt for buried mo ney o n their prop-
erty. In addition to crystals, stuffed toad s, and mine ral rods, the
scryer 's usual paraph ernalia, W alters claimed to hav e found an
anc ient Ind ian record that described the locations of their hid-
den treasure. This he w ould read aloud to his follow ers in wh at
seemed to
be a strange a nd exotic tongue but was actually, the
newspaper editor declared, an old Latin version of Caesar's
[Cicero's ?]
Orations.
The press acco unts describing W alters 's
activity, published in 183o— I, stated significantly that w hen he
left the neighborhood, his mantle fell upon young Joseph
Smith.t
Josep h's neighbors later poured o ut tales of seer stones, ghosts,
magic incantations, and n octurnal excavations. Joseph Ca pron
sw ore that young Josep h had told him a chest of gold w atches
w as buried on h is property, and ha d given orders to his follow-
ers "to stick a parcel of large stakes in the ground , several rods
aroun d, in a circular form," directly over the sp ot. One of the
group then marched around the circle w ith a draw n sw ord "to
° For descript ions and locations of the Indian tumuli in western New York see
E. G. S quier:
Antiquities of the State of New York (Buffalo, 1850, pp. 31, 66, 97, 99 ;
O. Turner:
Pioneer History of the Settlement of Phelps and Go rham's Purchase
(1851),
on Au-
gust x4, 1822 and
the Palmyra Register on M ay 2 6, t819 reported discoveries of new
mounds.
o Man Knows My History
guard any assault w hich his Satanic majes ty m ight be dispo sed
to make," and the others dug furiously, but futilely, for the
treasure.
Another neighbor, William Stafford, swore that Joseph told
him there was buried money on his property, but that it could
not be secured until a black sheep was taken to the spot, and
"led around a circle" bleeding, with its throat cut. This ritual
was necessary to appease the evil spirit guarding the treasure.
"To gratify my curiosity," Stafford admitted,
"I
let them have
a large fat sheep. They afterwards informed me that the sheep
was killed pursuant to commandment; but as there was some
mistake in the p rocess, i t did n ot hav e the de sired effect . This, I
believe, is the on ly t ime they ever ma de m oney -digging a profi t-
able business." *
Joseph's money-digging began in earnest with his discovery
of a "seer stone" wh en he w as digging a w el l for M ason C hase .
Martin Harris stated that it came from twenty-four feet under-
ground, and Joseph C apron tes t if ied that Joseph could see w on-
drous sights in it, "ghosts, infernal spirits, mountains of gold
and silver." Joseph's wife once described thi
 stone as "not ex-
actly black but rather dark in color," though she admitted to
none of the early uses to which it was putt
In later years Joseph frankly admitted in his church news-
paper and also in his journal that he had been a money-digger,
although, he wrote, it was not particularly profitable as he got
See Ap pendix A for more comp lete extracts from these affidavits.
1
-
Emm a Smith's description was written in a letter to a M rs. Pilgrim from Nauv oo,
I l linois , M arch 2 7, 1871. I t is now in the l ibrary of the R eorganized C hurch in Inde-
pend ence, M issouri. M art in H arris 's s tatemen t was published in
Tiffany's Monthly,
1859, pp. 163-70. He said fur ther: "There w as a com pany there in that neighborhood,
w ho w ere digging for money supposed to hav e been hidden by the ancients . Of this
company w ere old Mr. Stowel — I think his name w as Josiah — also old M r. Beman,
also samuel Lawrence, George Proper, Joseph smith, jr., and his father, and his
brother Hiram smith. They dug for money in Palmyra, Manchester, also in Penn-
sylvania and o ther places."
Joseph exhibited his seer stone as late as December 27, 1841. (See Brigham
Yo ung's journal in the
Millennial Star,
Vol. XXVI, p. 119.) After his death it was
taken to Utah. A ccording to Hosea s tout, Brigham Y oung exhibi ted to the regents of
the University of Deseret on February 26, 1856 "the see/'s stone with which The
Prophet Joseph discovered the plates of the Book of M ormon ." Hosea Stout
said
it
was almost black, with light-colored stripes. (see the typewritten transcript of his
 
21
"only fourteen do llars a mo nth for i t ." * But that he indulged
in all the hocus-pocus attributed to him by his neighbors he
vigorously denied.
Crystal-gazing is an old profession an d has beer an h ono red
one. Egyptians stared into a pool of ink, the Greeks into a
mirror , the A ztecs into a quartz crystal , and Europe ans into a
sw ord blade or glass of sherry — any t ranslucent surface that
mad e the eyes blur with long gazing. W hen Joseph S mith f irs t
began to use h is seer or "peep" stone, he em ployed the folklore
familiar to rural A merica. The d etails of his rituals and inc anta-
tions are unimportant because they were commonplace, and
Joseph gave up money -digging w hen he w as tw enty-one for a
profession far m ore exciting.
WHEN
in later years Joseph Smith had become the revered
prophe t of thousands of M ormon s, he began w riting an official
autobiography , in w hich his account o f his adolescent yea rs dif ,
fered surprisingly from the brief sketch he h ad w rit ten in 1834
in answ er to his crit ics. Here w as no apo logy but the beginning
of an ep ic.
W hen he w as fourteen years o ld , he w rote , he w as t roubled
by religious revivals in the neighborhood and went into the
w oods to seek guidance o f the Lord.
It was the first time in my life that I had mad e such an a ttempt, for
amidst all my an xieties I had never as y et made the attempt to pray
vocally. . . . I kneeled dow n and began to offer up the desires of my
heart to God. I had scarcely dGne so, when immed iately I was seized
upon by some pow er which entirely overcame me, and had such an
astonishing influence ov er me as to bind my tongue so that I could
not speak. Thick darkness gathered around m e, and it seemed to me
for a time as if I were do omed to sudden destruction. B ut, exerting
all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this
enemy w hich had seized upon me, and at the very moment w hen I
was ready to sink into despair and abandon m yself to destruction —
not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from
the unseen wo rld, who had such marvelous power as I had never
* EIder's Journal,
Far West, Missouri, Vol. I (1838), P. 43; and Joseph Smith:
History of the Church, Vol. III,
p. 29. (This history, compiled chiefly from Smith's
man uscr ipt journals on the f i le in Sal t Lake C i ty , wi l l hereaf ter be referred to s imply as
History of the Church.)
22 o Man Knows My History
before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw
a
pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun,
which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the
enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw
two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description,
standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me
by name, and said — pointing to the other —"This is my beloved
Son, hear Him ."
My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of
all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner,
therefore, did I get possession of my self , so as to be a ble to speak, than
I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all
the sects was right — and which I should join. I was answered that
I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and the personage
who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in
His sight: that those professors were all corrupt; that "they draw
near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; they
teach for doctrines the commandments of men: having a form
of
godliness, but they deny the power thereof." He again forbade me to
join with any of them: and many other things did he say unto me,
which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I
found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven.*
Lesser vis ions than this w ere comm on in the folklore of the
area. Elias Smith, Vermont's famous dissenting preacher, at
the age o f sixteen h ad h ad a str ikingly similar experience in the
woods near Woodstock, when he saw "the Lamb upon Mt.
Sion," and a bright glory in the forest. John Sam uel Thompso n,
w ho taught in the Palmyra Academ y in 182 5, had seen Chr ist
descend from the firmament "in a glare of brightness exceeding
tenfold the brill iancy o f the m eridian Sun ," and h ad h eard H im
say: "I commission yo u to go an d tell mankind that I am com e;
and bid every man to shout victory " but Thom pson h ad neve r
described this as any thing but a dream . Asa W ild of A mster-
dam , New Yo rk, had talked w ith " the aw ful and glorious maj-
esty of the Great Jehovah ," and h ad learned "that every den omi-
nation of p rofessing C hristians had become extremely co rrupt,"
that tw o thirds of the w orld 's inhabitants w ere about to be de -
stroye d and the remainder ushered into the millennium. "M uch
more the Lord revealed," Wild had said, "but forbids my re-
. History of the Church, Vol. I,
pp. 5-7.
2 3
lating i t in this way . I shall soon publish a ch eap p amp hlet , my
religious experienc e and trav el in the divine life."*
But h is ow n v ision, as described by Joseph Smith e ighteen
years after the even t, clearly d w arfed all these e xperiences. One
w ould naturally exp ect the local press to have g iven i t consid-
erable publicity at the t ime it allegedly occurred. A nd Joseph 's
autobiography w ould inde ed lead one to believe that his vision
of God the Father and His Son had created a neighborhood
sensation:
I
soon found, how ever, that my tell ing the story h ad excited a great
deal of prejudice against me am ong p rofessors of rel igion, and w as
the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase; and
though I wa s an obscure boy, only between fourteen and fifteen years
of age, and m y circumstances in l ife such as to make a bo y of no con-
sequence in the w or ld , ye t men of h igh s tanding w ould take not ice
sufficient to excite the public mind against me, an d create a bitter per-
secution; and this was co mm on to all the sects — all united to p erse-
cute me.
Oddly, how ever, the Palmyra new spapers, which in later years
gave
notice
of Jo-
seph's vis ion at the t ime i t w as suppo sed to hav e occurred. In
fact, Dogberry insisted in the Palmyra
Reflector
on February I ,
1831: "It how ever ap pears quite certain that the p rophet h imself
never made any serious pretentions to religion until his late
pretended revelat ion [ the d iscovery of the B ook of M ormon]."
He n oted on F ebruary 14 that Joseph 's followe rs in Oh io we re
claiming he had "seen G od frequently and p ersonally," and that
"comm issions and p apers w ere exhibited said to be
signed
by
28:
"It is well
know n that Joe Smith never pretended to have any com munion
w ith an gels unt il a long period af ter the
pretended
vision is described in
by,
himself (Portsmouth, New H ampshire, 1816), p. 58. He cam e originally from
Lym e, Connecticut, the home tow n of Solomon M ack, and migrated to Vermont
in the same period that M ack did. Thompson's dream is described in his
Christian
1 -
Palmyra Reflector
files are in the New York H istorical society; other Palmyra
 
Joseph's first published autobiographical sketch of 1834, al-
ready noted, contained no whisper of an event that, if it had
happ ened, w ould have been the most soul-shat tering exper ience
of his wh ole youth. But there are two m anuscript versions of the
vis ion between 1831 and the publ ished a ccount in Orson Pratt 's
Rem arkable Visions in 1840 which indicate that it underwent a
remarkab le evolution in d etai l. In the earl ier , w hich Jo seph dic-
ta ted in 1831 or 1832 , he s ta ted that " in the 16th yea r of my age
... the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord."
B y 1835 this had chan ged to a v is ion o f tw o "personages" in "a
pillar of fire" above his head, and "many angels." In the pub-
lished version the personages had become God the Father and
His son Jesus Chris t , and the angels had v anished. Joseph 's age
had changed to fourteen.*
Although Joseph's final dating of the beginning of his mis-
sion was fixed at 1820, there is evidence that his mother and
brothers, Hyrum and Samuel, apparently did not stop going to
their Presbyterian church until September 1828.+ Lucy Smith,
w hen w rit ing to h er brother in 1831 the full deta ils of the B ook
of Mormon and the founding of the new church, said nothing
about the "first vision." The earl iest published M orm on h istory,
begun with Joseph's collaboration in 1834 by Oliver Cowdery,
ignored it altogether, stating that the religious excitement in
the Palmyra area occurred when he was seventeen (not four-
teen). Cowdery described Joseph's visionary life as beginning
in September 1823, with the vision of an angel called Moroni,
w ho w as sa id to have d i rected Joseph to the d iscovery of h idden
golden plates. Significantly, in later years some of Joseph 's close
relatives confused the "first vision" with that of the angel
Moroni .$
. See
(Nauvoo, lllinois) March 15, 1842. For the three
differing accounts of the vision dictated by Joseph Smith in 1831-2, 1835, and 1839,
see Dean D. Jessee's "Early Accounts of Joseph smith's First Vision,"
Brigham Young
University Studies,
Vol. IX, 1969, pp. 275-294. For details see the supplement.
f Records of the Presbyterian Church in Palmyra, as filmed in 1969 by Reverend
Wesley P. Walters, describe the proceedings on March 3, 10, 24, and 29, 1830, when
Lucy Smith and her sons Hyrum and samuel were suspended from the church for
"neglecting public worship and the sacrament of the Lord's supper for the last
eighteen months."
 
of Mormon Literature (Chicago, Illinois, 190?) Vol. 1, p. 543. When Lucy wrote her
biography of Joseph in 1845, with the collaboration of Martha Coray, she quoted
 
PT Treasures in the Earth
W hen Joseph began his autobiography , in 1838, he w as w rit -
ing not of his own life but of one who had already become the
most celebrated prophet of the nineteenth century. And he was
writing for his own people. Memories are always distorted by
the wishes, thoughts, and, above all, the obligations of the mo-
ment .
I f something hap pened that spr ing mo rning in 182o, i t passed
totally unnoticed in Joseph's home town, and apparently did
not even fix itself in the minds of members of his own family.
The awesome vision he described in later years was probably
the elaboration of some half-remembered dream stimulated by
the early revival excitem ent and reinforced by the r ich folklore
of vis ions c i rculat ing in h is neighbo rhood . Or it may h ave been
sheer invention, created some time after 183o when the need
arose for a m agn ificen t tradit ion to canc el out the stories of his
fortune-telling and money-digging. Dream images came easily
to this youth, whose imagination was as untrammeled as the
whole West.
A FEW
discerning c i tizens in Joseph 's neighborho od w ere more
amused at h is follow ers than a larmed at the mo ral imp l icat ions
of his mo ney -digging. On e nat ive , in w rit ing his impress ion s of
the boy in later years, recog nized ce rtain positive talents: "Josep h
had a little ambition, and some very laudable aspirations; the
any of it in her own words. For Cowdery's history see
Latter-Day Saints Messenger
(Kirtland, Ohio, 1834-3), especially Letter 1V, February 1835, p. 78.
Joseph's brother William said in a sermon in Deltht, Iowa, June 8, 1884: "It
will be remembered that just before the angel appeared to Joseph, there was
an unusual revival in the neighborhood. . . . Joseph and myself did not join;
I had not sown all my wild oats. . . . it was at the suggestion of the Rev.
M—, that my brother asked of God. While he was engaged in prayer, he saw
a pillar of fire descending. saw it reach the top of the trees. He was overcome, became
unconscious, did not know how long he remained in this condition, but when he
came to himself, the great light was about him, and he was told by the personage
whom he saw descend with the light, not to join any of the churches. That he should
be instrumental in the hands of God in establishing the true church of Christ. That
there was a record hidden in the hill Cumorah which contained the fulness of the
Gospel. You should remember Joseph was but about eighteen years old at this time,
-
4)•
Joseph's cousin George A. Smith made the same kind of error in two sermons in
Salt Lake City. see
334,
ward stevenson, in his Reminiscences of Joseph the Prophet
(salt Lake City, 1893),
p. 4, stated that in Pontiac, Michigan, in r834 he heard the prophet testify "with
great power concerning the vision of the Father and the Son." But the manuscript
autobiography upon which these reminiscences are based, written in 1891, when
 
o Man Knows My History
mo ther 's intellect sho ne o ut in him feebly, especially w hen he
used to help us solve some portentous questions of moral or
political ethics in o ur juvenile debating club, wh ich w e m ove d
down to the old red schoolhouse on Durfee street, to get rid
of the cr i t ics that used to drop in upon us in the vi llage. And
subsequently, after catching a spark of M ethodism in the camp
meeting, away do w n in the w oods, on the Vienna road, he was
a very p assable exhorter in the eve ning m eetings."*
This is one of two non-M ormon accounts w hich indicate that
Joseph S mith, for a ll his enthusiasm for necrom ancy, w as not
immune to the religious excitement that periodically swept
through Palmyra. His mo ther w rote that from the first he flatly
refused to attend the camp meetings, saying: "I can take my
Bible, and go into the wo ods and learn more in two hours than
you can learn at m eet ing in tw o y ears , i f you should go a l l the
time." t B ut it is clear that he w as keen ly alert to the the ological
differences d ividing the sects and w as genuinely interested in the
controversies. Although contemp tuous of sectarianism, he l iked
preaching because i t gave him an audience. An d this was as es-
sential to Joseph as food .
Danie l Hendr ix , w ho helped se t type for the B ook of M or-
mon , once w rote that Joseph h ad "a jovial, easy, don 't-care w ay
about him that made him a lot of warm friends. He w as a good
talker, and w ould have mad e a f ine stump speaker if he had h ad
the t ra ining. He w as know n am ong the yo ung men I associated
w ith as a rom ancer of the first water. I nev er knew so ignorant
a man
as Joe w as to hav e such a fer ti le imaginat ion. H e could
neve r tell a comm on occurrence in his daily l ife w ithout embel-
l ishing the s tory w ith h is imaginat ion; yet I reme mber that he
w as gr ieved one d ay w hen old Parson R eed told Joe that he w as
going to hell for his lying ha bits." $
Joseph h imself spoke frequently of h is "nat ive cheery tem-
perament," and it is evident that from an early age he was a
fr iend ly, enter taining yo uth wh o del ighted in performing be-
fore his friends. At seventeen he was lank and powerful, six
feet ta l l and mo derately h andso me. H is hair, turning from tow
• O .
Turner: History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase,
p .
1897, published in the St. Louis GIobe
Dem ocrat, as
cited in William A. Linn: The Story of the Morm ons
(New York, 5902),
2
7
color to l ight brown , swep t back luxuriantly from his forehead.
E ven at this age there w as something co mp elling in his bear-
ing, and older m en l is tened to his s tor ies half-do ubting, half-
re s
pectful, He n ever lacked a follow ing.
His imaginat ion spi l led o ver l ike a sp ring freshet . W hen he
stared into his crystal and saw gold in every od d-shaped hill , he
w as escaping from the drudgery of farm labor into a glor ious
opulence. Had he been able to co ntinue his schooling, subject-
ing his plast ic fancy and t reme ndous drama tic talent to d isci-
pl ine and m olding, his l ife might nev er have taken the exot ic
turn i t did. His mind w as agile and eager, and d isciplined study
might hav e caused his creat ive talents to turn in a mo re con-
ventionally profitable direction.
Stephen A. D ouglas, also a great natural leader, w as in these
same years attending the Canandaigua Academy, some nine
miles south, and it w as there that he took the me asure of his own
vigorous talents and proceed ed to put them to use. The tw o prob-
ably did not m eet in their youth, but w hen their paths crossed
years later in Ill inois the two men h ad becom e, each in his ow n
fashion, the mo st celebrated figures on the M ississippi frontier .
B ut wh ether Joseph's ebull ient spir its could ev er have been
canalized by any discipline is an open question. He had only lim-
ited
formal schooling after leaving New En gland. And since he
nev er gained a t rue perspect ive of his ow n gif ts , he prob ably
was inclined to regard them as more abnormal — or super-
natural — than they actually w ere. Wh at wa s really an extraordi-
nary capacity for fantasy, which w ith p roper training might even
hav e turned h im to novel-w rit ing, wa s looked upon by h imself
and his followers as genuine second sight and by the mo re pious
tow nspe ople as outrageous lying.
WHEN
Joseph w as eighteen his eldest brother Alvin died in
sud-
den
and d readful agony from w hat his mo ther described as an
ove rdose of calomel prescribed by a phy sician to cure a stomach
disorder. Lucy Smith in her narrative mentioned the death
briefly and almo st philosoph ically, for twen ty years had passed
to m itigate her sorrow , but she om itted al together i ts curious
sequel.
Alvin had been n o churchgoer, and the minister w ho p reached
 
o Man Knows My History
hell ."* The fam ily's rage aga inst the p arson h ad barely coo led
w hen they heard a rum