What Hath God Wrought (46 page)

In 1825, Wright published a pamphlet describing her
Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South
, hoping to elicit federal aid and private contributions. With her own money she purchased a few second-rate acres at Nashoba, Tennessee. Leaving nine adult slaves and some children there under the direction of an untrained overseer, she departed for Britain to fund-raise. In 1827, Wright returned to Nashoba, bringing not money but a friend named Frances Trollope. The wife of an ineffectual country gentleman, Trollope had fallen for Fanny Wright’s exaggerated promises of an idyllic plantation life. Upon arrival, “one glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth,” Trollope later wrote. “Desolation was the only feeling” inspired by Nashoba.
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Wright soon torpedoed whatever chance of success her undercapitalized experiment might have had by endorsing Owenite principles of free love, to which she added an interracial dimension. She left Tennessee for good in 1828; Nashoba’s slaves eventually obtained their freedom in Haiti.

Forgiving her friend Wright for having been blinded by idealism, Frances Trollope headed for Cincinnati to meet her husband. She had heard much of America’s foremost inland city, “its beauty, wealth, and unequaled prosperity,” but found “the flatness of reality” there in 1828 disappointing. She conceived an ambitious plan to make Cincinnati a more lively, cosmopolitan city by constructing a building something like a modern shopping mall plus cultural center and ballroom, which she called a “Bazaar.” Like many another entrepreneur in America, Frances Trollope found difficulty raising enough capital to realize her grandiose ambition, and her enterprise ended in bankruptcy. But the resourceful Mrs. Trollope recovered her family’s fortunes by writing a successful account of her travels:
Domestic Manners of the Americans
(1832). Unlike Martineau and Wright, Trollope felt no sympathy for democracy or equality, and unlike Tocqueville, she wanted Europe to stay clear of them. Her vividly written story sold well in Britain, where it was cited by opponents of Parliamentary Reform, infuriated Americans, and launched the fifty-three-year-old mother of five into a career that included 113 other books—a torrent of print that would be continued by her still more famous novelist son Anthony.

It is easy to put down Frances Trollope as a Tory embittered by her American business failure. But her observations on American manners, confirmed by many other observers foreign and domestic, actually provide a sharply drawn picture of daily life in the young republic. Most observers at the time agreed with her in finding Americans obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and relatively uninterested in leisure activities. Not only Tories but reformers like Martineau and Charles Dickens angered their hosts by complaining of the overwhelmingly commercial tone of American life, the worship of the “almighty dollar.”
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Americans pursued success so avidly they seldom paused to smell the flowers. A kind of raw egotism, unsoftened by sociability, expressed itself in boastful men, demanding women, and loud children. The amiable arts of conversation and cooking were not well cultivated, foreigners complained; Tocqueville found American cuisine “the infancy of the art” and declared one New York dinner he attended “complete barbarism.”
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Despite their relatively broad distribution of prosperity, Americans seemed strangely restless; visitors interpreted the popularity of the rocking chair as one symptom of this restlessness. Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor. Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the tendency toward social segregation of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their occupations: the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and children.
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Hypersensitive to foreign opinion, the American public resented any criticism from outsiders, especially women. Even the sympathetic Harriet Martineau found enough faults to render her unpopular in the States. Years later, Mark Twain would declare that “candid Mrs. Trollope” deserved American gratitude for her forthrightness. “She knew her subject well, and she set it forth fairly and squarely.” But his observation, made in
Life on the Mississippi
, was suppressed.
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An Anglican, Frances Trollope criticized aspects of American religion as well as manners. She disliked the proliferation of religious sects and missed “the advantages of an established church as a sort of headquarters for quiet, unpresuming Christians, who are content to serve faithfully, without insisting upon having each a little separate banner.” After witnessing a religious revival in Cincinnati, she commented that “I think the coarsest comedy ever written would be a less detestable exhibition for the eyes of youth and innocence.”
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Mrs. Trollope concurred with most other foreign visitors, whatever their political or religious views, in deploring American slavery and the hypocrisy that sanctioned it in a land dedicated to freedom. One Englishwoman whose repugnance for slavery affected her life profoundly was the beautiful stage star Fanny Kemble. She married an American named Pierce Butler without realizing that the source of his fortune was a Georgia cotton and rice plantation. Upon her visit to his estate in 1838, what she found distressed her deeply. When she carried slaves’ complaints to their master, he assured her that it was “impossible to believe a single word any of these people said.” But she believed the women who told her they had been impregnated by a former overseer. (The overseer’s wife believed them too: She had them flogged.) Kemble’s revulsion against the slave system and her condemnation of Butler’s part in it led to the couple’s estrangement and eventual divorce, in which her husband, as was customary at the time, gained custody of their two daughters. Fanny Kemble’s frank, unsparing journals of plantation life, published in 1863 in an effort to influence British public opinion against the Confederacy, remain a valuable antidote to conventional accounts of planter paternalism.
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American opposition to slavery owed a good deal to encouragement from overseas. Lafayette on his grand tour sometimes used his American platforms to reproach his hosts for their oppression of blacks; in several southern cities the authorities accordingly forbade blacks to attend the rallies in his honor.
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Tocqueville treated the oppression of the nonwhite races as the worst example of the tyranny of the majority. Both he and Lafayette actively opposed slavery in the French overseas empire. The relationship between the British and American antislavery movements was even closer because of their common language, Protestantism, and (often) millennial hopes. The example of the Englishman William Wilberforce, the earnest evangelical Anglican who persuaded Parliament to make the Atlantic slave trade illegal and then went on to attack slavery itself, inspired reformers on both sides of the ocean. Harriet Martineau and her Boston friend Maria Weston Chapman fostered the development of a transatlantic network of antislavery women. British evangelicals like George Thompson visited the United States on antislavery speaking tours; American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass toured Britain raising money. When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, and the Second French Republic followed suit in 1848, their actions served as encouraging examples to antislavery Americans. This was not the way American exceptionalism was supposed to work; Americans expected to set the example. But on the subject of slavery, white Americans needed foreigners to remind them of the full implications of their country’s millennial aspirations.

V

“They draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me, and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them according to their ungodliness.” So spoke Jesus Christ, reported by a young man in the “burned-over district” of western New York state who claimed to have seen Him in a vision. Christ’s Second Coming, thus ominously proclaimed, would not be long delayed. “Behold and lo I come quickly as it [is] written of me in the cloud clothed in the glory of my Father.”
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For Joseph Smith Jr., of Palmyra on the Erie Canal, this vision led not merely to his personal conversion but to revelations prompting him to found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Jesus was returning “quickly,” then the people of the 1830s were already living in the “latter days” of history. Joseph Smith, like William Miller, felt called to preach an urgent premillennial warning. Smith’s prophecies, however, contained a far more elaborate and novel message than Miller’s calculations.
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Joseph Smith’s background was perfectly ordinary, even humble. He came from a close-knit farming family who had moved to western New York along with thousands of other Vermonters after the disastrously cold and snowy summer of 1816. To feed eight children and make mortgage payments, they pursued the typical strategy of mixing subsistence farming with selling products on the local market; notwithstanding all their hard work, however, the mortgage on their New York farm was foreclosed in 1825. Pressed for cash, Joseph and his father earned some money by advising farmers on the location of buried treasure. The region contains relics of the prehistoric Mound Builders, and local lore, nourishing local hope, encouraged belief that there would be gold among the artifacts. In his divinations, young Joseph employed a “seer-stone,” a form of folk magic that had been common among New Englanders for generations. Such peepstones also helped find lost belongings and identify places to dig wells.
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An angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph in a series of visions beginning in 1823. The angel delivered similar warnings of the Second Coming but also told the youth that at the Hill Cumorah, not far away, was buried a lost scripture inscribed on golden plates in an unknown language known as Reformed Egyptian. Joseph claimed to unearth the golden plates in 1827 and read them by looking through two seer-stones fastened into a breastplate and named Urim and Thummim, which miraculously translated the inscriptions into English. After a while Smith could use one of his own seer-stones instead of the Urim and Thummim to translate. (Meanwhile, across the sea, Jean-Franc¸ois Champollion was deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, and the news appeared in the American press.)
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Over the next two years, Smith dictated the contents of the plates to a scribe while sitting behind a screen to shield the sacred records from profane eyes. When the translation was complete, the angel took the golden plates along with the Urim and Thummim away to heaven. In 1830, a printer in Rochester, New York, published
The Book of Mormon
, with Joseph Smith, Jr. listed on the title page as author.
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The Book of Mormon purports to chronicle the history of an ancient people who once inhabited the American continent. The Nephites, a Hebrew kinship group, made their way to the New World on the eve of the Babylonian captivity. There one branch of the family, the Lamanites, rebelled. As the generations passed, the Nephites and the apostate Lamanites grew into rival nations and fought war after war. The Nephites represented the authentic faith of Israel, had prophets of their own, and were even visited by Jesus Christ. The Book of Mormon is named for the prophet Mormon, who recorded much of it. Eventually the wicked Lamanites prevailed, and Nephite civilization, having lost touch with its religious roots, became extinct. The last of the Nephite prophets, a man named Moroni, buried the records of his people after their final battle with the Lamanites, which took place at the Hill Cumorah. Centuries later, this same Moroni, as a resurrected angel, revealed the plates to Joseph Smith. To the Latter-day Saint, this is scripture, a supplement to the Old and New Testaments. To the unbeliever, it is a fantastic tale invented by the imaginative Joseph Smith.

True or not, the Book of Mormon is a powerful epic written on a grand scale with a host of characters, a narrative of human struggle and conflict, of divine intervention, heroic good and atrocious evil, of prophecy, morality, and law. Its narrative structure is complex. The idiom is that of the King James Version, which most Americans assumed to be appropriate for a divine revelation. Although it contains elements that suggest the environment of New York in the 1820s (for example, episodes paralleling the Masonic/Antimasonic controversy), the dominant themes are biblical, prophetic, and patriarchal, not democratic or optimistic. It tells a tragic story, of a people who, though possessed of the true faith, fail in the end. Yet it does not convey a message of despair; God’s will cannot ultimately be frustrated. The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith’s authorship, and non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more likely to ridicule than read it.
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In a society where religious doctrine aroused so much interest as western New York in 1830, Smith’s purported revelation was of course subjected to elaborate examination, refutation, and satire. Alexander Campbell, leader of the Christian movement, made serious criticisms; no doubt he recognized Smith as a potential rival because both preached the restoration of authentic New Testament religion and the coming millennium.
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Despite such opposition, by the end of 1830, some two hundred people, including Joseph’s own large family, had been baptized Latter-day Saints, commonly nicknamed “Mormons” from their holy book. Their tall, magnetic young leader, styled “Joseph the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” as well as president of the church, ruled his little community firmly. He combined personal charisma with a talent for organizational innovation. He cast out devils and cured the sick. He continued to receive revelations from God (sometimes using a seer-stone) that amplified what was in the Book of Mormon and provided guidance to the faithful; these the LDS Church has codified as their
Doctrine and Covenants
.