"Egypt is trying to break him."
Deliverer
We don't know, exactly, what Emma thought. Or Joseph. We see them in 1837 and 1838 elliptically, through the eyes and in the words of those around them, with the brief, rending exceptions of Joseph's cries from prison.
But we know Joseph, or are coming to. We know that he wept on his father's chest after baptizing the broken old man, and that the soothing cool of forgiveness and the joy of standing within the powerful circles of the councils he raised up were the palliatives that calmed his temper and quieted the restless insecurities that drove him to seek a religion that bound people together with the power of heaven. And because of all this we know that the years of 1837 and 1838 were likely the worst of his life.
God and men and his own mistakes forced Joseph alone into the wilderness in 1837.
Joseph's oldest friend, in his own words his "bosom friend," was Oliver Cowdery, the man who baptized him, who scribed the Book of Mormon, who had stood next to Joseph during the keystone visions of the Church. In late 1837, Cowdery was shaken to the core, because he became convinced that Joseph Smith had been sleeping with Emma's maid, a teenage girl named Fanny Alger.
We are not sure why he came to this conclusion. There are late reports, forty years after the fact, that Cowdery caught his friend in a compromising position. There are also reports - from Alger's family as well as other Mormons - that Joseph had married Fanny polygamously sometime around 1833. Fanny, still a teenager, went with her family when they moved from Kirtland in 1836. Decades later, she said only that her relationship with Joseph was "a matter of my own."
But Cowdery knew nothing of that. He turned to David Patten, president of the Quorum of the Twelve, and found himself denounced and eventually on trial for apostasy. Joseph vigorously, and specifically, denied that he had committed adultery; Patten and Thomas Marsh, another senior apostle to whom Cowdery went, were horrified at the accusation.
Of Emma's reaction, we know nothing. She had just given birth when Cowdery was excommunicated in April1838. Joseph appeared at the trial, but he remained silent. If his mind had lighted upon polygamy already, he chose to brood over the doctrine privately. He never seems to have mentioned his lost friend again. He threw himself into his church, but found the rock turning to water beneath his fingers.
For almost simultaneously, the strong twin stakes of Zion, Kirtland and Far West, collapsed.
The Saints constantly had struggled for money. Joseph, exhibiting characteristic exuberance and optimism, believed that founding a bank would not only provide the church with financial stability; it would also be among the greatest financial institutions in America, and make Kirtland the central city of the nation. His confidence in his power to build shone through. But this time he was wrong. The Kirtland Safety Society was terribly underfunded; the state refused to grant it a charter, a warning sign Joseph ignored. The Saints (Joseph included) invested heavily, purchasing the notes that Joseph himself signed with a flourish. But the bank collapsed within a month. Cumulative losses exceeded what the Saints had donated to the Kirtland temple; families began to starve and lose their homes.
More terrifying than the money was that Joseph's dreams for his brethren had turned them against him. Patten, who had defended Joseph so staunchly against Cowdery, went to him with financial frustrations; Joseph took his complaints personally, slapped him in the face and threw him from the house. The Pratt brothers, apostles both, similarly confronted their prophet in rage when Joseph came to Parley and demanded repayment of debt to the bank only weeks after the currency collapsed. By June, 1837, Heber Kimball (in a poetic exaggeration) said that not twenty men in Kirtland remained unshaken behind Joseph Smith.
In late May Joseph's loyalists, with his approval, brought charges against those who complained, accusing the Pratts, David Whitmer, First Presidency member Frederick Williams and others of apostasy. And the council system that had worked so well before collapsed. Williams argued that, per the Doctrine and Covenants, only a bishop's court could try someone in his position; Parley Pratt argued that Joseph Smith would not be a fair judge. The council collapsed, and Joseph with it. By June, he lay stricken with illness, and would not rise for weeks. And Kirtland never recovered. By December, there were forty excommunications among the church leadership, growing turmoil, and Joseph had lost his first Zion. He and Sidney Rigdon fled the city for Far West, Missouri, late at night in January 1838, just ahead of a mob of impoverished, angry excommunicants. He left a quarter of his quorum and his second counselor behind.
He hoped for peace in Missouri. Soon after arriving he again began building a sacred world around him. He identified Caldwell and Daviess counties, newly created by the Missouri government in an attempt to provide the Mormons with a safe place, as Edens, literally putting Adam-ondi-Ahman in the center, and a new temple lot in Far West. From the cold nights of Kirtland the church could be born again in the warm Missouri summer.
But his efforts only seemed to turn back upon him. The Mormons of Missouri, increasingly bitter about their expulsion from Jackson County, rose up against the presidency Joseph had placed over them: David Whitmer, WW Phelps and Cowdery. These men had sold their land in Jackson County; this was, members of the Missouri high council believed, tatamount to repudiating Joseph's prophecies. Tensions rose, and Joseph, eager to restore harmony, allowed the high council to draw a picture placing Whitmer's presidency against Joseph and to proceed with excommunications. Cowdery was the first to fall; the other two men soon after. Joseph increasingly prized loyalty; after Kirtland, he no longer trusted friendship.
But loyalty itself backfired. The Mormons who followed him to Missouri, eager to build Joseph's vision, rushed past their prophet, settling not only in Caldwell, designated particularly for Mormons, but increasingly dominating Daviess. Sampson Avard, a brash and confrontational physician, resolved that to protect Joseph's church from dissenters, a secret society was necessary. The Sons of Dan were born in the summer of 1838, intimidating the faction in support of the Presidency. It is unclear to what extent Avard received Joseph's sanction. He knew about the society, attended at least one meeting, and blessed its officers, giving a speech endorsing strong action. These are the behaviors of a man in need of support. But beyond that?
By the fall of 1838 war had broken out in Missouri. Mobs had intimidated and assailed Mormons outside Caldwell County, attempts had been made to stop Mormons from voting. and in response Joseph and Rigdon had preached fiery sermons. Joseph resolved to call out the Caldwell County militia - made up of and headed by Mormons - to defend the Mormons of Daviess. The apostles Lyman Wight and David Patten led raiding parties, burning homes and farms across Daviess County, and Joseph exulted in the righteousness of self defense. He had had enough of persecution from inside and out; now he would resist.
But the Mormons could not stand up to the state of Missouri, and Joseph was quick to realize it. He had been angry, frustrated, feeling powerless and betrayed; in that state he had let men like Avard and Wight lash out in proxy. But Patten was killed at the Battle at Crooked River, and soon after, a mob brutally massacred seventeen defenseless Mormons at Haun's Mill. Joseph realized that overcorrection would not heal his pain or fix his errors. On November 1, Far West surrendered to Colonel Samuel Lucas, and Joseph, Hyrum, Amasa Lyman, Rigdon, and Wight went quietly into chains.
Joseph would remain in Missouri prison, accused of treason, nearly executed as a prisoner of war, for six months. He cried to God. He did not know why the work had failed, so utterly and spectacularly. And he rose above his pain by going through it. He reached out again to Emma, by letter, pledging that he was "yours forever," and asking, pitifully, "Dear Emma do you think that my being cast into prison by the mob renders me less worthy of your friendship?"
He begged her to "never give up an old tried friend," and "not to harber a spirit of revenge." And she reponded, visiting him in prison.
Characteristically, he sought healing in binding ties. It was a solution for the church as well. He wrote to the Saints that they should pursue understanding, forgiveness, and common ground with the non Mormons of America. And finally, his faith was rewarded. The Missouri officials quietly decided that the Mormon War had been an embarrasment, and in April of 1839 let their prisoners escape.
Joseph had already directed the scattered remains of his church north, to a small town on the banks of the Mississippi River named Quincy, Illinois. He followed, and there was a renewed community to greet him. He met Emma and his children first, and the next day, called a council. Wilford Woodruff, a new apostle, noted that "Brother Joseph greeted us with great Joy." Joseph's will was strong; again, for the third time, he resolved to build Zion.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Rough Stone Rolling IV: educations
“The waters never parted for him, not once.”
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
For Joseph, the waters did part, sometimes. But they crashed closed before him with some frequency as well. His frustrations, reversals, tragedies matched his outsized ambitions, and the dazzling light of revelation threw the painful shadows of God’s frequent absences and inscrutability into sharp relief.
Joseph felt all abandonment sharply. He feared the sting of betrayal and loss above all other pain, and thus had dual weaknesses. First, he frequently confronted such fear (as many do), with the charged energy of anger. He brooded over failure and loss; as Bushman notes, he spent more time in his history dragging himself again through the loss of the 116 pages than he did discussing the rest of the translation of the Book of Mormon. And the several years following the first trials in Missouri confronted him with all these fears.
But he also had weakness for its grand mitigation. He loved the spectacle of salvation, the cascading emotions of redemption and forgiveness, the divine dramatics of ordinance and priesthood applied to the healing of human relationships.
Zion’s Camp, in retrospect, seems almost ludicrous; a motley batch of some hundred to two hundred men marching in the heat of June 1834 a thousand miles across the Midwest, underarmed, untrained, to confront the Missouri militias and, in Joseph’s grandiose words, to redeem Zion. The camp failed, majestically; the governor of Missouri declined to assist the Mormons as Joseph had hoped and mediators convinced Joseph that his best and only alternative was to accept peaceful resettlement in Clay County, north of Jackson. The men of Zion’s Camp, upon arriving in Missouri, quietly turned and headed for home.
Yet Joseph had thrown himself into it. He spent the months of spring rallying troops; he took upon himself the name ‘Baurak Ale,’ the “officer of the highest rank in the army of the strength of the Lord’s hosts,” and appointed an ‘Armour Bearer’ to carry his pistols. Along the way he pointed out Nephite graves and primordial altars to his followers In his vision, the Camp was redemptive, with every step sacralizing the landscape and binding the Mormons in holy fellowship.
The disappointment, then, was all the more crushing. The harmony Joseph sought collapsed when he picked a fight with Seventy Sylvester Smith over Smith’s complaints about Joseph’s dog; a petty feud that degenerated, ultimately, into Joseph heaving a bugle at the other man. And the Camp, horrifically, was smitten with cholera just as it left Missouri; a plague Joseph read as God’s punishment for his failures. Upon returning home, frustrations remained; he feuded with his brother William, made Emma cry for leaving a church meeting early, and picked a fight with Orson Pratt.
But in weakness, Joseph found strength. He was quick to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and at the same time willingly submitted himself to a disciplinary council, facing Sylvester Smith’s charges with equanimity. In the trial, Joseph may have seen strength, for his new faith had made a transition: the intricate system of councils and hierarchies he had begun to establish no longer depended upon his personal charisma. In 1835 his vision of organization was finally realized, and it extended across the entire globe. Authority in the world was divided into two separate spheres: Zion and the mission field. Over Zion – defined as the cities of the Saints - watched the High Councils and the stake presidencies – two, by 1835, one in Kirtland and one in Missouri. Over the world watched the Quorum of the Twelve, those who went out and sought converts and preached the gospel. Over these two equal branches sat the First Presidency. The ‘great revelation’ on priesthood, the current D&C 107, was completed at this time; Joseph had in 1831 dictated the first 58 verses, now, in 1835, he completed it, adding the final 42, which discussed the mission of the Twelve. In February of that year, Joseph directed the Three Witnesses to call twelve men, to ordain them, and to send them out. Nine of the twelve were Zion’s Camp veterans.
The dedication of the Kirtland temple on March 27, 1836 was the culmination of Joseph’s multifacted experience. He had for years been promising the Saints an ‘endowment of power.’ As the temple approached completion, he began inviting selected leaders to its unfinished rooms, where they washed and anointed each other. Late on a January night in 1836, Joseph, having received anointing, saw visions, which quickly spread to his fellows. A week later he taught the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy to pray with uplifted hands, and again felt a rush of the Spirit. The dedication of the temple was a slight disappointment after these experiences; Joseph, in love with his councils, spent much of the time on procedural affairs, but again, that night, in private, there was speaking in tongues, inspired exhortions and hymn singing that went on for two days. And finally, after the first Eucharist held in the temple a week after the dedication, the veil dropped, and Joseph and Oliver saw Christ.
Joseph’s journal (his second, but most detailed) runs from September 1835 to April 1836. This is the final entry. There is no evidence that he or Oliver shared this vision; it appears nowhere else in the sources of the time. And the torrent of Joseph’s revelations faded to a trickle after it. Bushman speculates that Joseph did not quite understand, or was afraid to share, what came next. In the vision, he received three keys. The gathering of Israel he understood. But what were the keys of Malachi? And what was the work of Abraham?
He had already pushed the Saints far. The liturgy of anointing was an exceptional thing on the American frontier. The strangeness of Malachi and Abraham, however, as Bushman says, not many could bear.
-Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
For Joseph, the waters did part, sometimes. But they crashed closed before him with some frequency as well. His frustrations, reversals, tragedies matched his outsized ambitions, and the dazzling light of revelation threw the painful shadows of God’s frequent absences and inscrutability into sharp relief.
Joseph felt all abandonment sharply. He feared the sting of betrayal and loss above all other pain, and thus had dual weaknesses. First, he frequently confronted such fear (as many do), with the charged energy of anger. He brooded over failure and loss; as Bushman notes, he spent more time in his history dragging himself again through the loss of the 116 pages than he did discussing the rest of the translation of the Book of Mormon. And the several years following the first trials in Missouri confronted him with all these fears.
But he also had weakness for its grand mitigation. He loved the spectacle of salvation, the cascading emotions of redemption and forgiveness, the divine dramatics of ordinance and priesthood applied to the healing of human relationships.
Zion’s Camp, in retrospect, seems almost ludicrous; a motley batch of some hundred to two hundred men marching in the heat of June 1834 a thousand miles across the Midwest, underarmed, untrained, to confront the Missouri militias and, in Joseph’s grandiose words, to redeem Zion. The camp failed, majestically; the governor of Missouri declined to assist the Mormons as Joseph had hoped and mediators convinced Joseph that his best and only alternative was to accept peaceful resettlement in Clay County, north of Jackson. The men of Zion’s Camp, upon arriving in Missouri, quietly turned and headed for home.
Yet Joseph had thrown himself into it. He spent the months of spring rallying troops; he took upon himself the name ‘Baurak Ale,’ the “officer of the highest rank in the army of the strength of the Lord’s hosts,” and appointed an ‘Armour Bearer’ to carry his pistols. Along the way he pointed out Nephite graves and primordial altars to his followers In his vision, the Camp was redemptive, with every step sacralizing the landscape and binding the Mormons in holy fellowship.
The disappointment, then, was all the more crushing. The harmony Joseph sought collapsed when he picked a fight with Seventy Sylvester Smith over Smith’s complaints about Joseph’s dog; a petty feud that degenerated, ultimately, into Joseph heaving a bugle at the other man. And the Camp, horrifically, was smitten with cholera just as it left Missouri; a plague Joseph read as God’s punishment for his failures. Upon returning home, frustrations remained; he feuded with his brother William, made Emma cry for leaving a church meeting early, and picked a fight with Orson Pratt.
But in weakness, Joseph found strength. He was quick to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and at the same time willingly submitted himself to a disciplinary council, facing Sylvester Smith’s charges with equanimity. In the trial, Joseph may have seen strength, for his new faith had made a transition: the intricate system of councils and hierarchies he had begun to establish no longer depended upon his personal charisma. In 1835 his vision of organization was finally realized, and it extended across the entire globe. Authority in the world was divided into two separate spheres: Zion and the mission field. Over Zion – defined as the cities of the Saints - watched the High Councils and the stake presidencies – two, by 1835, one in Kirtland and one in Missouri. Over the world watched the Quorum of the Twelve, those who went out and sought converts and preached the gospel. Over these two equal branches sat the First Presidency. The ‘great revelation’ on priesthood, the current D&C 107, was completed at this time; Joseph had in 1831 dictated the first 58 verses, now, in 1835, he completed it, adding the final 42, which discussed the mission of the Twelve. In February of that year, Joseph directed the Three Witnesses to call twelve men, to ordain them, and to send them out. Nine of the twelve were Zion’s Camp veterans.
The dedication of the Kirtland temple on March 27, 1836 was the culmination of Joseph’s multifacted experience. He had for years been promising the Saints an ‘endowment of power.’ As the temple approached completion, he began inviting selected leaders to its unfinished rooms, where they washed and anointed each other. Late on a January night in 1836, Joseph, having received anointing, saw visions, which quickly spread to his fellows. A week later he taught the Twelve Apostles and the Seventy to pray with uplifted hands, and again felt a rush of the Spirit. The dedication of the temple was a slight disappointment after these experiences; Joseph, in love with his councils, spent much of the time on procedural affairs, but again, that night, in private, there was speaking in tongues, inspired exhortions and hymn singing that went on for two days. And finally, after the first Eucharist held in the temple a week after the dedication, the veil dropped, and Joseph and Oliver saw Christ.
Joseph’s journal (his second, but most detailed) runs from September 1835 to April 1836. This is the final entry. There is no evidence that he or Oliver shared this vision; it appears nowhere else in the sources of the time. And the torrent of Joseph’s revelations faded to a trickle after it. Bushman speculates that Joseph did not quite understand, or was afraid to share, what came next. In the vision, he received three keys. The gathering of Israel he understood. But what were the keys of Malachi? And what was the work of Abraham?
He had already pushed the Saints far. The liturgy of anointing was an exceptional thing on the American frontier. The strangeness of Malachi and Abraham, however, as Bushman says, not many could bear.
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