Glorious in Persecution: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839-1844

697 Pages·2016·7.9 MB·English

by  Martha S. Bradley-Evans

GLORIOUS IN
PERSECUTION
JOSEPH SMITH | AMERICAN PROPHET
1839-1844
MARTHA BRADLEY-EVANS
SMITH-PETTIT FOUNDATION
SALT LAKE CITY

To Bob
The opinions expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the Smith-Pettit Foundation.
Copyright © 2016 the Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City, Utah. All rights reserved.
Printed on acid-free paper. Composed, printed, and bound in the United States of America.
Distributed by Signature Books Publishing LLC.www.signaturebooks.com
Designed by Jason Francis.
Frontispiece: Water color portrait of Joseph Smith, ca 1844, by Sutcliffe Maudsley. All
illustrations, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of the Smith-Pettit Foundation.
2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 5 4 3 2 1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Bradley-Evans, Martha, author.
Title: Glorious in persecution : Joseph Smith, American prophet, 1839-1844 / Martha Bradley-Evans.
Description: Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041614 | ISBN 9781560852643 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Joseph, Jr., 1805-1844. | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–Presidents–
Biography. | Mormons–United States–Biography.
Classification: LCC BX8695.S6 B73 2016 | DDC 289.3092–dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041614
Introduction
… deep water is what I am wont to swim in; it has all become second
nature to me.
–Joseph Smith, in History of the Church, 5:143
I cannot remember a time when the world as I knew it was not shaped in some
way by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (1805-44). For members of The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) and sister
churches, Joseph is where everything begins. He embodies what makes
Mormonism worth living for. Joseph is an icon, larger than life, who said he
knew God and wrapped his life around that knowledge. It is unrealistic to
believe that a Mormon could write a biography about Joseph without this
lifetime effect shadowing it. Regardless of the measures I have taken to step
back from this immensely interesting subject, the truth is that I bring my own
life and experiences to my interpretation of Joseph.
My father was a member of an LDS ward bishopric–a lay appointment–in
Lavonia, Michigan, when I was young, but our relatives lived in Utah. Each
year, we traversed the distance between Michigan and Utah in a series of cars
created by American Motors, moving through the spaces of the Mormon
narrative of persecution and exodus. My father’s stories about the 1840s
Mormon boomtown Nauvoo, Illinois, kept us awake for miles; and when we
stopped and walked up wooden stairs to trace our fingers along holes in the
Carthage jail (Illinois) that we imagined had been made by bullets barely
missing Joseph, this narrative became our narrative. It contributed to our
identity, our sense of who we were. Stories about a mob crashing through the
door to shoot beloved brothers Joseph and older sibling Hyrum (1800-44) were
too hideous to believe, yet my three brothers and I begged our father to tell the
story over and over again.
I have written this account of Joseph’s final years as if peering through a series
of layers, struggling to see what is clearest on the surface, what is hidden behind
lines of propriety or privacy, and what is intentionally obscured.
The Prophet-Narrative
The first layer of narrative is most evident, like the skin on one’s face shaped
by but covering a structure of bones, muscles, and sinews. This layer consists of
the basic chronology of public events noted by Joseph’s contemporaries. The
next layer is Joseph’s private relationships at home–the world created by Joseph
and his wife, Emma Hale (1804-79), with children, parents, brothers and sisters,
and close associates. The third layer is the set of experiences and associations
that Joseph concealed from the public, even from insiders.
I believe that Joseph saw himself as a genuine prophet of God and spent much
of his time trying to explain to himself and to others what that meant. His
experience with what he understood to be transcendence changed him. In part
because of this, Joseph identified closely with God–with his understanding of
God–and believed that he and the rest of humanity were, literally, gods in
embryo. This awareness colored everything he did, suspended him above earthly
rules, and transported him into an imagined world of heaven. His was not an
ordinary, commonplace identity, either in conception or achievement.
Psychologists sometimes talk about one’s “narrative.” The way men and
women talk about themselves reveals patterns and traces of who they think they
are or ought to be. When Joseph tells his story, he talks about how others must
live, and often uses himself as the model of what others may become. “Be like
me,” he seems to say, and “you too can speak with God.” The way he talked
about himself helped him to grapple with and to understand his prophetic reality.
In telling the Latter-day Saints about his role as prophet, he also told himself
what he had learned about being a prophet.
Joseph’s story became crucial to the creation and maintenance of Mormon
identity. It furnished legitimacy to the Saints’ efforts to build a new Zion in
preparation for the second advent of Jesus Christ. Moreover, such narratives
define what has the “right to be said and done.”1 In Joseph’s case, the prophet-
narrative not only helped to explain his behavior and choices but to justify them.
Narrative comes from the Indo-European root gna, meaning to “tell” and to
“know.” Joseph obtained his self-knowledge–what it meant to be a prophet–in
part, through telling his story. His retellings changed not only him, but the ways
he embraced the world, related to others, and how he operated in a world of
rules, obligations, and responsibilities. Did the role of prophet provide him with
a release from earthly concerns? Or did it confine him in ways he struggled to
resist? Nineteenth-century expectations about leadership and authority also
impacted Joseph’s understanding, as did his explorations of what it meant to be a
man in nineteenth-century America.2
Joseph’s narrative is composed of both “sacred” and “mundane” tales; where
the former are ineffable and cannot be “directly related at all,” the latter presents
the sacred in “an objective form.”3 Joseph’s sacred/mundane story demonstrates
the self-shaping quality of human thought, the way stories create and refashion
one’s identity. British philosopher R. G. Collingwood elaborates:
As historians, social scientists, or (for that matter) prophets and bards weave
narratives … that connect individual minds to the social world[,] they create
artifacts that soon take on a life of their own. These stories, told and retold,
furnish the stock from which individual life narratives can be constructed. In
other words, the story of an individual life usually plays off of one or more
historically and socially transmitted narratives, which serve as prototypes for
the elaboration of personal identity.4
In addition, such stories forge social bonds and create communities.
Communities constituted by stories maintain a degree of coherence, identity, and
meaning that help members to know what they must do with their lives.
Stories such as Joseph’s place events in a sequential order with a beginning,
middle, and end, a sequence that adds up to something particular and sensical.
Joseph wove events together with meaningful interconnections that organized
his experiences in the world and located his spiritual self in them. Those who
study narratives try to find terms to describe the way this process works, terms
such as “paradigms,” “capsule views of reality,” “interpretive devices,” or
“world views.” Although Joseph’s narrative ultimately dealt with heaven, it
began with everyday life and the prophet’s role.
What some might term “creative genius” also impacted the development of
Joseph’s narrative. Studies suggest that those with heightened creativity tend to
be more open and moody, have an inflated sense of self-importance, and
generate a constant stream of ideas and thoughts, engaging lavishly in the world
surrounding them.5 According to historian Lawrence Foster, prophets struggle
more with cognitive dissonance as they “seek with unusual intensity to try to
make sense of both their personal lives and their world.”6 Such individuals
exhibit emotion beyond the norm and seize on the emotions of others. They are
physically and intellectually vibrant, often swinging between ranges of choices–
whether emotional, perceptual, or behavioral. Life is unrestrained by imagination
or convention. Creative genius banks on sharp contrasts, boundlessness, and the
sense that rules do not apply.
Joseph did not see himself as an ordinary man, certainly not one ultimately
confined by human law. Rather, he saw himself as exploring uncharted territory,
including godhood itself. Despite moments of doubt, such explorations
functioned as points of equilibrium to which he persistently returned. They drew
him through the darkest nights, providing shape and meaning in his sometimes
confusing anomie. I hope to show that this powerful concept/self-concept was
demonstrated in, and helps to make understandable, Joseph’s practice of plural
marriage, what may have been the pinnacle of his theological program.
Joseph found religious and apocalyptic significance in every offense and
persecution–actual or imagined–and wove these slights into his prophet-
narrative. Insults became badges of honor, confirmation that his life was playing
out on a mythic stage of opposition. By the time Joseph led his people to Illinois,
he had lived with the adulation of followers and the vilification of enemies for
more than a decade. Joseph’s worst challenges often proved to be his greatest
triumphs. He forged devotion through disaster, faith through depression. Joseph
interpreted each new event as God’s will set against manifestations of evil
opposed to the restoration of all things. This consciousness of a larger Mormon
drama flowered especially in Nauvoo, coloring Joseph’s interpretation of his life
course, the people in it, and the way a hostile world battled the Mormons in their
pursuit of truth.
Efforts to unravel the story of the Latter-day Saint prophet are complicated by
his own record, begun in the 1830s and continuing until his death. Most of what
we attribute to Joseph was dictated to, or created by, scribes or assistants. It is
impossible to see this record as absolutely representational, since Joseph’s
scribes routinely interpreted what he said. Conscious of his story’s significance,
he created a narrative. Equipped with little more than a rudimentary education,
his own writing, like that of others from his time, was marked by what he called
“imperfections.”7 He lamented the almost “toteal darkness of paper pen and ink
and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.”8 During the last years
of his life, Joseph often had scribes with him, actively making a record of his
life. He said on one occasion, “The history must continue and not be disturbed,
as there are but few subjects that I have felt a greater anxiety about.”9
Joseph perhaps more than any other Mormon of his generation anticipated the
future, knowing that his was a story that would be retold. From his letters,
missives, and epistles–and especially from his memory–he self-consciously
composed a narrative compelling enough to be proof of revelation and scripture.
Like the story of other religious traditions, it took on cosmic significance,
transcending space and time and pitting evil against good in the confrontations
the Mormon people survived. Joseph made no attempt to split off his own
history from that of his church’s. Joseph was at the center of all stories at
virtually every turn.
Joseph’s sense of wonder at his own life course often surfaced in sermons and
in writings. On September 1, 1842, he wrote to the Latter-day Saints: “As for the
perils which I am called to pass through, they seem but a small thing to me, as
the envy and wrath of man have been my common lot all the days of my life;
and for what cause it seems mysterious, unless I was ordained from before the
foundation of the world, for some good end, or bad. … But, nevertheless, deep
water is what I am wont to swim in; it has all become second nature to me.”10
In the most-often cited of such moments, eleven weeks before he died, Joseph
exclaimed to followers: “You don’t know me; you never knew my heart. No
man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don’t blame
anyone for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I
would not believe it myself.”11 Joseph was aware of his differentness and
searched to understand the meaning of that difference.
Accounts of Nauvoo and Joseph that appeared in national newspapers
enhanced his sense of his role in American religion and his impact on people
around him. His speculations about the role of prophets in society evolved into a
theory of government that grounded his empire-building efforts. “The great and
wise of ancient days have failed in all their attempts to promote eternal power,
peace, and happiness,” he proclaimed in mid-1842. But where others had failed,
Joseph would succeed. As God’s prophet, he would establish a government
founded on righteous principles.12 This type of government “is the only thing
that can bring about the restitution of all things spoken of by all the holy
Prophets.”13
Was it confusing for Joseph’s followers to listen to him grapple with the
contradictions in his life? He struggled for understanding in a speech in mid-
1843: “God judges men according to the use they make of the light which he
gives them.” He then launched into a memorable comparison: “I am like a huge,
rough stone rolling down from a high mountain … [and] will become a smooth
and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty … I could explain a hundred
fold more than I ever have of the glories of the kingdoms manifested to me in the
vision, were I permitted, and were the people prepared to receive them.”14 For
Joseph, the story of his final years is the unfolding of a narrative, in metaphor, in
perceived but undisclosed revelation, and in the actions and lives of the Mormon
people themselves.
When the Mormons gathered in Zion, creating boundaries between them and
“Babylon,” they became a covenant people. They performed the theology they
believed. They restored ancient practices and made them current. The story of
the Mormons in Zion was the manifestation of ancient prophecy, anchoring their
efforts in a sacred story that began before they were born and guaranteed them a
future in which they would draw Jesus down from heaven for his second
coming.
The revelation of new scripture provided conceptual maps that legitimated
contemporary efforts to build Zion. Ordinances became rituals which embodied
prophecy and were enacted in a social community. They asserted the
continuation of revelation beyond the New Testament. On every Sunday when
they gathered in the temple grove for preaching, they were in touch with
Heaven; on every Monday morning when they went to the quarries to bring out
stone for the temple, they created a future of redemption and hope.
Joseph’s life mirrors that of other charismatic men and women. Psychologist
Len Oakes’s work on prophets places Joseph in a broader context of individuals
who generate trust and inspire those who hear their message. Standing out from
ordinary people, the charismatic prophet seems sketched by some larger design.
His role is rendered meaningful through his relationships with others,15 with
God to be sure, but also with those whose lives are changed under the impact of
his story. Max Weber, the pioneering German sociologist, went so far as to say
that the prophet’s followers are sovereign, interpreting his power in ways that
create it. Without them, the prophet is not.16
Joseph’s joie de vivre is typical of the prophet. Oakes suggests that the
“grandiose self-confidence of charismatic leaders is legendary.” This was
certainly true of Joseph who moved from moments of confidence to periods of
self-doubt.17 An accompanying fearlessness, paired with this self-confidence
that “makes everything they say seem authoritative,”18 marked Joseph as it does
other prophets. Joseph acknowledged the confusing distance between the
moments of inspiration when God’s light bloomed in his mind and those dark
moments when it did not. Those around him proposed him as always a prophet,
always on stage, always subject to evaluation. But Joseph was also a man who
faltered as he sought to understand his life and what he asked of his people.
Humor, “social insight,” and “detached availability” are other characteristics
of Joseph that are typical of prophetic leaders.19 These traits prepared Joseph for
each conversation with potential converts or with those who had already