What Hath God Wrought (47 page)

Under the prophet’s guidance, in 1831 the Saints moved into the Western Reserve area of northeastern Ohio, to a town called Kirtland. There Sidney Rigdon, a Campbellite millenarian minister influenced by Robert Owen, had converted to Mormonism along with members of his local utopian socialist community. In Kirtland the Mormon church set up a communal experiment of its own under a Law of Consecration, holding property given to it by the members. (Joseph and his wife Emma had lived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, former hometown of the Rappite millennial community.) Converts swelled the ranks of the LDS Church; by 1835 they may have numbered four thousand, half of them in Kirtland.

Joseph Smith was winning followers in the same time and region as Charles Finney, but while Finney’s converts tended to be from the middle class, early Mormons usually came from among small farmers and the small-town working class. Although it is tempting to try to fit them into theories about premillennialism appealing to the disinherited of this world, the first generation of Mormons were actually defined more by their culture than by socioeconomic attributes. They tended to be people of New England birth or heritage, carrying the cultural baggage of folk Puritanism (as distinguished from Calvinist theology): communalism, chiliasm, identification with ancient Israel, and the practice of magic. Often they had been involved in other Christian restorationist movements, but no particular denominational background predominated. The prophet and his followers perpetuated traditions of a culture, Richard Bushman explains, “in which the sacred and the profane intermingled and the Saints enjoyed supernatural gifts and powers as the frequent blessing of an interested God.”
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Many people shared this culture, among them some jealous neighbors who tried to steal Smith’s golden plates. Seeking to build a new Zion, Mormon missionaries claimed to be “looking for the blood of Israel”: They assumed their converts would be descended from one of the tribes of Israel. They meant it literally, but one may also see “the blood of Israel” as a graphic, physical metaphor for the inherited biblical cosmology that predisposed converts to accept the Mormon gospel.

For all its affinities with Yankee folk culture, in years to come Mormonism proved able to reach out to even wider audiences. Like the prophet himself, many converts were young males who had moved repeatedly.
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Some, including the Smith family members, had been religious “seekers” unattached or only marginally attached to any organized congregation. To rootless people confronting a bewildering diversity of sects and movements on offer, or to those of any background who felt spiritually starved, Mormonism presented itself as an authoritative and authoritarian solution. Within a few years, Mormon missionaries took their gospel successfully across the Atlantic to the working classes of Britain and Scandinavia.

The Mormons did not passively await Christ’s millennial kingdom but worked to prepare for it. Their brand of premillennialism was as activist as any postmillennialism, and even more certain of a special millennial role for America. Prophet Joseph dispatched missionaries to western Missouri to convert the Indians as part of his plan to create a Mormon haven there, a New World counterpart to the Old World Jerusalem, where the Saints could gather and await the Second Coming in security. He called this American haven “Zion” and applied the biblical prophecies relating to Zion to it. The Mormons embraced a particularly extreme version of American exceptionalism.

Smith’s missionaries to the Indians received a warm welcome from the Delaware tribe, especially when they promised that restoration of Native lands formed part of God’s plan along with restoration of the Jews to Palestine. But soon the government’s Indian agent expelled the missionaries, and the prophet decided to rely on white converts to build up Zion in Missouri.
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In the summer of 1831, he and Rigdon journeyed west and consecrated the site for a Zion temple at what is now Independence, Missouri, returning afterwards to Ohio. For the next several years there would be two centers of Mormon settlement, one in Ohio and one in Missouri.

The Book of Mormon never explicitly asserts that the Native Americans of modern times are descended from the Lamanites; however, readers of the book invariably drew that conclusion, and Joseph Smith himself evidently shared it.
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The speculation that American Indians constituted some of the Lost Tribes of Israel had been expressed by many writers over the years and was current in Smith’s milieu. Native Americans themselves sometimes endorsed the Lost Tribes theory of their origins.
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Early Mormons accordingly hoped to convert the Indians—or rather, reconvert them back to the authentic faith their ancestors had known in ancient times. When the Lamanites converted en masse, the Book of Mormon promised, they would once again become a “white and delightsome people” as their Hebrew ancestors had been.
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In February 1833, the prophet received his famous revelation, “the Word of Wisdom,” which came to him after his wife had complained about men smoking and spitting tobacco juice in their house. It enjoined abstinence from “wine or strong drink,” from tobacco, and from “hot drinks” (interpreted to mean tea and coffee). Meat and poultry should be eaten only “sparingly.” The advice was typical of contemporary dietary reform and temperance, but the revelation couched it in poetic biblical eloquence. Saints who followed the rule were promised “health in their navel and marrow in their bones.” They “shall run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint. And I, the Lord, give unto them a promise, that the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them.”
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Originally considered advisory, keeping the Word of Wisdom became mandatory in the twentieth century for Latter-day Saints.

The Kirtland community eventually disintegrated as a result of external hostility and internal dissension. In 1834, the community decided to divide up its common property, although the Missouri Mormons continued to follow the Law of Consecration. The economic boom in Ohio during the years of Jackson’s presidency facilitated the construction of a fine Mormon temple, which still stands in Kirtland. Early in 1837, however, the unchartered bank set up by church leaders failed, taking with it some of the faithful’s savings, and other Mormon enterprises headed toward bankruptcy amid the general economic crash of that year. Pursued by lawsuits and a criminal prosecution for banking fraud, Smith lit out for the Mormon haven in Missouri, denounced by disillusioned dissidents but followed in due course by at least six hundred Saints who remained loyal.

The move from Ohio to Missouri proved a flight from the frying pan into the fire. The Mormon community in Missouri had already been subjected to a campaign of frontier terror including robberies, floggings, and burnings, going well beyond anything that had happened in the Western Reserve, whose gentiles (as the Mormons call non-Mormons) were at least fellow Yankees. In Missouri, the unpopularity of the Mormons’ religion was compounded by resentment of their Yankee ethnicity, their mutual economic cooperation, their suspicious overtures to the Indians, and the presence of a few free black Latter-day Saints in a slave state that wished to exclude free black settlers. Mormon preaching of the gathering of the Saints in Zion alarmed their neighbors, who feared being crowded out by these strange intruders. Western Missouri remained a frontier area where vigilantes made up their own law and then took it into their own hands. Organized, purposeful citizen bands, not just criminal gangs, attacked the Mormons. Driven out of the area around Independence, many of the Saints took refuge at a town called Far West. Yet persecution did nothing to stem the flow of converts; by this time there were more than ten thousand Mormons in Missouri.

Encouraged by the reinforcements from Kirtland, some of the Mormon men in Missouri organized a paramilitary group called the Danites for self-defense and reprisals. When a Mormon was denied the right to vote at a polling place in August 1838, a riot broke out. A series of violent encounters between Danites and gentiles ensued, collectively termed the Mormon War of 1838. Once it became clear that the Mormons had started to fight back, the alarm of the Missourians knew no bounds. Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had ignored years of recurrent violence so long as the victims were all Mormons, now called up state troops, not so much to restore law and order as to crush what he considered a Mormon rebellion. His notorious order to the militia of October 27, 1838, reads: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.”
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Rather than face the might of the state, on November first the prophet ordered his people to lay down their arms. The brief “war” had cost the lives of one gentile and at least forty Mormons. Now, the Danites watched as the gentiles looted their homes and slaughtered their livestock. Mormons sold their farms for a fraction of their worth and departed; speculators resold them at great profit.
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The militia commander ordered Joseph Smith shot after a brief illegal court-martial, but the officer charged with the execution refused to carry it out. Turned over to the civil authorities, the prophet escaped custody five months later and joined his refugee people on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. There they immediately turned their faith and talents to building up another new community, larger and more beautiful, which they named Nauvoo.

VII

Alone among major religious denominations in the antebellum United States, the Roman Catholic Church did not teach the doctrine of the millennium. The church followed St. Augustine of Hippo in interpreting the Book of Revelation as an allegory of the spiritual conflict between Christ and the powers of evil. The Second Coming and the Last Judgment, Catholic authorities taught, will occur supernaturally and not be accompanied by a literal earthly messianic age. Nevertheless, chiliastic movements, common in the early centuries of the Christian era, appeared sporadically in the Middle Ages despite the church’s teaching, and they flared up again after the Protestant Reformation, particularly in England during the 1640s and ’50s.
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The Puritan-pietistic religious tradition so powerful in America had perpetuated and disseminated millennialism in the United States. Catholic rejection of the doctrine of the millennium affected the attitude of the church in America in at least two ways. It meant that the church lacked the millennial sense of urgency, widespread among evangelical Protestants, to remake the world and fit it for Christ’s return; it also meant that Catholics did not share in the belief that the United States had a special role, analogous to that of ancient Israel, as an example of divine providence to the rest of the world. While Protestant churches synthesized Christianity with the Enlightenment’s science, individual rights, and faith in progress, the nineteenth-century Church of Rome did not. In an age when Americans’ belief in progress was typically associated with millennial hopes, Catholic doctrine accepted neither the idea of secular progress nor the millennium.
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Many American Protestants had an interpretation of their own for the Book of Revelation. The Antichrist whose downfall it seems to predict they identified with the Roman Catholic Church. The overthrow of the papacy would be one of the events heralding either a premillennial or a postmillennial Second Coming. This vision of the Last Things, coupled with the identification of Roman Catholicism with royal absolutism in Anglo-American historical tradition, and reinforced by the very real hostility manifested by the nineteenth-century papacy toward political liberalism and “modern” ideas of many kinds, combined to foster an ideological hostility toward Catholicism that went well beyond the interdenominational rivalry among Protestant sects. The growth of the Roman Catholic Church, deriving chiefly from immigration but also manifested in efforts to win converts, seemed to some Protestants to threaten American democratic institutions. In their minds, modern liberalism blended with millennial religion to reach a single conclusion: Catholicism could not be allowed to flourish in America if America were to fulfill her mission to the world.
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Antebellum Catholic evangelism by no means reached out only to immigrants or others of Catholic background. The religious orders in particular seized upon American freedom of religion to seek converts from Protestantism; means to this end included holding high-profile public theological debates and founding educational institutions. Some 57,400 American Protestants converted to Roman Catholicism between 1831 and 1860, among them the prominent lay theologian Orestes Brownson, as well as Isaac Hecker and Elizabeth Seton.
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Protestants reacted strongly to such Catholic proselytizing. They attributed the Catholics’ success in part to the cultural appeal of their imagery and art. Accordingly, Protestants began to make use themselves of the symbol of the cross (though not the crucifix), of sacred music performed by organ and choir in church to supplement congregational singing, and of Gothic architecture. Protestants also redoubled their own evangelical and educational initiatives to compete with the Catholics. As Lyman Beecher put it, “The Catholics have a perfect right to proselyte the nation to their faith if they are able to do it. But I too have the right of preventing it if I am able.”
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When a politically conservative association in the Austrian Empire set about raising funds to proselytize for Catholicism in the United States, it set off alarm bells among certain American evangelicals. America was supposed to redeem monarchical Europe, not the other way around. Those most worried included the prominent painter Samuel F. B. Morse, son of the geographer and Indian demographer Jedidiah Morse. A fervent nationalist and Calvinist like his father, Morse the younger had begun to tinker with the idea of an electric telegraph. Starting in 1835, he led the Native American Democratic Association in New York, a city which already contained substantial Irish Catholic neighborhoods. (In those days, “Native American” meant whites born in the United States, not American Indians.) In letters to the
Journal of Commerce
that year, soon published in pamphlet form, Morse complained that Jesuit missionaries, emissaries of Europe’s reactionary Holy Alliance active among the immigrants, dangerously exploited American freedom on behalf of “superstition and ignorance.” In 1836 and 1841, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for mayor on a platform of limiting the political influence of immigrant Catholics.
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Morse’s strident warnings were among the earliest expressions of a movement known as nativism that would become more powerful after Catholic immigration increased during the late 1840s.