Joseph smith who is

In Illinois, Mormons were accused of counterfeiting, thieving, and being clannishly exclusive. But one issue underlay all the local concerns: Mormonism and democratic government clashed. They believed that because his revelations came first, he would sacrifice obedience to worldly government.

He was determined, they were sure, to build his kingdom by force if necessary. Nothing he did could allay suspicion. There was always the question of which took precedence, the voice of the people acting through democratic government or the voice of God speaking through his prophet. Smith assured the world he had no intention of breaking the law, and a revelation admonished his followers to submit to legal proceedings. A committee of Illinois anti-Mormons summed up the prevailing reasoning.

We find them yielding implicit obedience to the ostensible head and founder of this sect, who is a pretended Prophet of the Lord.

We believe that such an individual, regardless as he must be, of his obligations to God, and at the same time entertaining the most absolute contempt for the laws of man, cannot fail to become a most dangerous character, especially when he shall have been able to place himself at the head of a numerous horde, either equally reckless and unprincipled as himself, or else made his pliant tools by the most absurd credulity that has astonished the world since its foundation.

That was the essential anti-Mormon argument: a pretended prophet, who put himself above the law, leading a horde of unprincipled or credulous believers. The political implications were obvious. After their expulsion from , they vowed that they would never be subjected to such abuses again. In Illinois, they negotiated a strong city charter as a form of protection against further persecution and organized a state-sanctioned militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to withstand attack.

Over and over, they rehearsed the horrible tale of their sufferings, certain the manifest injustice of their treatment would evoke sympathy and bring redress. But few came to their aid. Governor of Illinois explained why. It did not help that the temperature of Mormon rhetoric rose to match that of their enemies. Fearing mobs were forming in Illinois like those that had expelled the Mormons from , Joseph Smith let loose his anger and frustration.

He had taken more than he could tolerate. This language and the combination of powers bestowed on Mormons by the charter inflamed their enemies.

By building up the Nauvoo Legion to thousands of men, Smith appeared to his enemies as a prophet armed. Using the Nauvoo Municipal Court to protect himself from arrest made him seem to set himself above the law. His acquisition of the major offices in the city, the courts, and the militia, as well as in the church, opened him to charges of megalomania. By , hundreds of citizens from nearby towns were ready to invade Nauvoo and drive the Mormons out.

His enemies may have feared Joseph Smith all the more because he was formidable personally. Joseph Smith seems rarely to have been intimidated. I could clearly see that Joseph was the captain, no matter whose company he was in, Knowing the meagerness of his education, I was truly gratified, at seeing how much at ease he always was, even in the company of the most scientific, and the ready off hand manner in which he would answer their questions.

Joseph Smith may have tried for the upper hand because of a sensitivity to insult. He came from a social class that bore the onus of contempt almost as a way of life. Poor tenant farmers like the Smiths were looked down upon as shiftless and crude.

The ridicule that followed his stories of revelation may have magnified his unease and led him to compensate with abrasive behavior and brave flourishes. He clung to his military title in the Nauvoo Legion as a badge of honor and expected recognition of his standing. When slighted, he would lash back. Against his enemies he was adamant. Upon reading the piece, Smith canceled his subscription:. Sharp, Editor of the Warsaw Signal:. Sir --You will discontinue my paper--its contents are calculated to pollute me, and to patronize the filthy sheet--that tissue of lies--that sink of iniquity--is disgraceful to any mortal man.

Yours, with utter contempt,. Joseph Smith. Please publish the above in your contemptible paper. Although Smith was perpetually caught up in controversy, strife pained him.

The anger and hatred the Mormons suffered was exactly the opposite of his own vision. During the expulsion of Mormons from in winter —, he was kept under prison guard for five months, charged with treason for having resisted attack. During those months, Smith meditated on the evils of power—in society and within the church.

In the same letter he wrote to his wife and children:. Oh my affectionate Emma, I want you to remember that I am a true and faithful friend, to you and the children, forever, my heart is intwined around you[r]s forever and ever, oh may God bless you all, amen I am your husband and am in bands and tribulation. Sadly, in the end, the bands between the couple were tried to the breaking point. At times revelation became a burden as well as a blessing, at no time more than when plural marriage was revealed.

Plural marriage was the final component of the logic of restoration. He went about it carefully, one woman at a time, usually approaching her relatives first and going through a prescribed wedding ceremony. During his lifetime, he was married to approximately thirty women. At first aghast at what her husband was doing, Emma eventually agreed to a few of the plural marriages but then pulled back. She never admitted to her children that their father had been involved. To add to his unpopularity, in the final six months of his life Joseph Smith set out on a course of political action that outraged his critics.

Whether or not he believed he could win the presidency, he spoke optimistically, as candidates do in the beginning of a campaign. Certainly his patience with government had run out. The Mormons had been abused many times with no compensation for confiscated property from any level of government, and in they felt the tide of hatred rising again. Smith could not understand why the Constitution did not compel the government to protect the rights of Mormons.

His platform defended all downtrodden people of his time: slaves, whom he felt should be purchased from their masters with revenues from public lands; prisoners held under cruel and unsanitary conditions; court-martialed soldiers; and sailors, whose suffering at the hands of tyrannical ship captains was attracting the sympathy of reformers.

To all, he promised justice. They organized to remove him from office and return the church to its pre-polygamy and pre—Kingdom of God course. When they published a newspaper to rally the opposition, Smith, fearful the paper would incite mob violence, had the press shut down by city authorities and destroyed.

Nearby citizens were infuriated. When Smith went to , the county seat, for trial, a mob attacked him in jail. He was shot through an open window, fell to the ground, and died on 27 June From the viewpoint of the present, what is the significance of this charismatic and forceful man? His claims to direct revelation put him too far beyond the pale of conventional Christianity to be taken seriously while he was alive; outside of Latter-day Saint circles, he is scarcely studied as a thinker or a theologian to this day.

But he aimed a question at the heart of the culture: Do Christians believe in revelation? If believers in the Bible dismissed revelation in the present, could they defend revelation in the past? By , when Smith came on the religious scene, revelation had been debated in Anglo-American culture for well over a century. Since the first years of the eighteenth century, rational Christians had struggled with deists, skeptics, and infidels over the veracity of miracles and the inspiration of prophets and apostles.

In , debated the atheist Robert Owen for a full week on the value of religion and the truth of the Bible. Over the course of the nineteenth century, belief in revelation eroded among the educated classes, reflecting the notorious disenchantment of the world. At first the loss of confidence in revelation was only dimly perceived by everyday Christians, but in the century to come, the issue divided divinity schools and disturbed ordinary people.

Joseph Smith stood against that rising tide. He received revelation exactly as Christians thought biblical prophets had done. At a time when the foundations of Christianity were under assault by Enlightenment rationality, he turned Christian faith back toward its origins in revelation.

Mormonism could be categorized as another rearguard action against advancing modernity had not Smith complicated the picture.

In the political realm, for example, he thought of himself as democratic. He was, moreover, no enemy of learning. In that same spirit, they established a school at which the students studied Hebrew under the tutelage of a.

Combining a set of apparently conflicting impulses, Smith left a complex legacy for his people. His revelations sustained a literal belief in scriptural inspiration yet promoted learning and knowledge as if religion and the Enlightenment were compatible. In the fourteen years he led the church, Joseph Smith created a religion and a culture that incorporated these paradoxes into its core beliefs. After his death, Mormons withdrew from the to a refuge in the Great Basin, where for a half century they nurtured their faith in relative isolation.

Never, however, did they cut themselves off from the world. During this period of consolidation, they carried on a worldwide missionary program that brought tens of thousands of converts to Utah.

Faith in revelation persists to this day among Latter-day Saints. The same force that enabled him to build cities and gather thousands of converts motivates ordinary church members today. Modern Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is a revealed translation, solemnly receive priesthood ordination, and consider temples to be houses of God, much as Smith anticipated. The publication of his papers will permit readers to observe the origins of this resilient religious culture and throw light on the achievements—and the complexity—of its intrepid founder.

Joseph Smith and Record Keeping. He had only a modest education and no literary aspirations. He keenly felt the limitations of writing. He dictated revelations, prepared translations of ancient documents, and assigned clerks to write letters, his history, and his journals.

Joseph Smith started writing in when he began dictation of the Book of Mormon in earnest. Though in his youth Joseph was largely deprived of a formal education, he was "instructed in reading, writing, and the ground rules of arithmetic. He encountered a passage in the Bible instructing any who lacked wisdom to "ask of God" James Early one morning in the spring of , Joseph went to a secluded woods to ask God which church he should join.

According to his account, while praying Joseph was visited by two "personages" who identified themselves as God the Father and Jesus Christ. Smith attracted a circle of followers, mostly men of modest means—farmers, clerks, small-time pastors, and schoolteachers—from New York and Pennsylvania at first, then from farther afield.

But self-declared prophets seldom sit well with the political establishment, and, almost immediately, Smith and his adherents got into trouble with the law. As grave as some of those charges were, they were the least of the problems faced by members of the new faith. Anti-Mormon mobs harassed known believers and attacked their houses; they even tarred and feathered Smith one night in Hostilities like these gradually pushed the Mormons farther and farther toward the frontier: they established their first new Jerusalem in Kirtland, Ohio; then a newer new Jerusalem in Independence, Missouri; and their newest new Jerusalem in Far West, Missouri.

In each place, local opposition increased in tandem with the growth of the Mormon population. In , having already been evicted from one Missouri county, they went to vote in the county seat of another, where a mob attempted to stop them. There were allegations of violence in what came to be known as the Gallatin County Election Day Battle, and subsequent vigilantism left more than twenty people dead. The next day, Smith was arrested and imprisoned for four months, during which time thousands of Mormon refugees moved to Illinois, where they had been promised protection by the state legislature, whose members included a young Abraham Lincoln.

Smith escaped from jail before standing trial—possibly with the help of sympathetic guards—and he and other Mormon leaders then went to Washington, D. Aggrieved but also entitled, they carried four hundred and eighty-one individual petitions for reparations from harm suffered in state-sanctioned violence, demanding compensation for everything from lost livestock to lost husbands. The largest of the claims came from Smith himself, who demanded a hundred thousand dollars for loss of property and what he described as false imprisonment.

Those petitions represented a peculiar understanding of American federalism: predictably, the Mormons got nowhere with their argument that the national government should compensate them for the actions of a particular state.

Disillusioned and angered, Smith and the others headed back to Illinois, where the Mormons had already chosen a place to resettle. The town was called Commerce, so they bought it.

But, unlike the Windy City, Nauvoo, operating under a permissive charter from the state of Illinois, developed a distinctly theocratic character: its independent judiciary could deny the validity of arrest warrants issued by neighboring authorities in order to shield Church members from prosecution, and its standing militia of several hundred armed men, known as the Nauvoo Legion, was empowered to protect citizens from any threat.

Smith wanted the temple of Nauvoo to rival the one built by Solomon; when it was finished, thanks to the tithe in time and muscle required of every resident, it was twice as tall as the White House. Smith had continued to receive revelations about how the faithful were meant to serve God, so this new sanctuary housed new religious rituals. One of them called for posthumous baptism, through which Mormons could baptize a living person as a proxy for someone already deceased.

Another—which would divide the Church, attract the permanent suspicion of the state, and forever taint the public perception of the faith—called for plural marriage.

The origins of this rite are not well known. Some historians, including Park, believe that he took his first plural wife in April, , though whenever it happened, he did not tell Emma, and it was some time before she learned the truth.

Originally, only Smith had multiple wives. But he gradually revealed the practice to other Mormon leaders, inviting them, selectively, to witness his plural marriages, then encouraging them to pursue their own. Hyrum was a widower, and his hostility to the practice weakened after he learned of its supposed posthumous benefits, through which he could be united in the afterlife with both his late wife and any future ones.

Other Mormons remained unenthusiastic. Emma then threatened him with divorce, at which point he promised to take no additional wives and signed his property over to her and their children, in order to secure their financial well-being in case of rival claims. It would be years before any Mormon leader formally acknowledged the practice of polygamy. Instead, somewhat shockingly, the Nauvoo city council passed a law punishing adultery with six months in jail and a fine of up to a thousand dollars.

The first, John C. Bennett, had been the mayor of Nauvoo; when his own polygamy became public, he accused Smith of having sanctioned it. The second, William Law, had denounced plural marriage after Smith propositioned his wife. Not only was he struggling to maintain control of his followers—suppressing dissent over plural marriage and quashing concerns about his own moral purity—he was also trying to expand his secular power.