Book Review: Mason, Patrick Q. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In The Mormon Menace, Patrick Mason adeptly traces the contours of anti-Mormonism in the late nineteenth-century South and explains how proselytizing, polygamy, and extra-legal violence shaped the South’s response to Mormonism. Mason attends to the ways in which southern honor, defined by a communal estimation of the individual and often deployed to protect or avenge the virtuous female, provided justification for illicit actions against Mormon missionaries. While granting that anti-Mormon violence paled in comparison to racial and political attacks against African Americans, Mason contends that “Mormonism was unique in the way it inspired southerners to set aside general norms of civility and religious tolerance” (13).

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Graduate Studies, Mormonism, and the Bloggernacle: A Survey

From Patrick Mason:

At the January 2012 meeting of the American Society for Church History, I’ll be on a panel called “Teaching Mormonism in a Digital Age.” In my comments I’ll be considering the impact of the “bloggernacle” on Mormon studies, specifically in regard to the current generation of graduate students. I have designed the following questionnaire to get a better handle on why people read Mormon blogs and what they get out of them. The questionnaire is for any graduate student, full or part time, LDS or non-LDS, in any academic field. The informed consent form on the first page will explain more, or you can contact me at patrick.mason@cgu.edu with any questions. Thanks for participating.

The link to survey is found here.

Thoughts on the introduction to the new JSP Volume: Journals Vol. 2 (1841-43)

Though they haven’t held a “bloggernacle event” or “virtual launch” yet, the Joseph Smith Papers just released the most recent addition to their foundational series. Journals, Volume 2 (1841-1843) covers the first half of Smith’s Nauvoo journals, and includes many great gems that will help future researchers of this important period in Mormon history. While there is much to cover in the actual journals—I’ll leave that to J Stapley, who I hope will do another excellent review of the overall text like he’s done for the other volumes—I just want to comment on a single section of the introduction; in fact, only about seven pages of the introduction.

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“Mormon Women and Modernity” at AAR San Francisco

It’s a gorgeous sunny day in San Francisco – where’s that fabled fog?? I’m sporting the already-ubiquitous free red tote bag and lanyard as I stroll between the hotels in and around Union Square downtown. This my first AAR/SBL and yes — it is a BIG conference. I’m being remarkably restrained in the book exhibit although there’s lots to drool over (I was tweeting some of the more notable titles, feel free to follow my conference tweets @tonahangen, and the conference hashtag is #sblaar).

Saturday morning I headed over to the session sponsored by the Mormon Studies Consultation. Colleen McDannell was presiding (really, that’s the way it’s printed in the AAR program) over a session on “Mormon Women and Modernity.”

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Joseph Smith’s Politics, part 2

 Continued from part 1

The Saints soon shifted the focus of their attention to government at the state level. Acting on perceived signals from the governor’s office of his willingness to provide them with a militia escort to reoccupy their lands–but not to protect them once there–Joseph Smith raised a security force. In the summer of 1834, over two hundred Mormon men gathered from Kirtland and other eastern congregations to march to Missouri. However, news of the Mormon army reached Missouri before the army itself. Seized with war hysteria, the Jackson citizenry prepared to hold the county or die fighting. Smith aborted the venture when his army reached Zion’s exiles in neighboring Clay County and learned that state support for the reoccupation had evaporated. Several months later, however, the state legislature found a new solution to the “Mormon problem” in the creation of Caldwell County. It was commonly understood that Caldwell had been set aside for Mormon settlement.

New conflict erupted in 1838 when the Mormons settlers filled Caldwell and began spilling into neighboring counties. When vigilante activity began in Daviess County, the Saints called on Governor Lilburn Boggs to protect them. Boggs dispatched state militia, which disbanded and dispersed the vigilantes. When vigilantes attacked in Carroll County, the Saints’ appeals for help were denied and they had to abandon their colony there. Then vigilante activity resumed in Daviess County, and the Saints decided they would have to defend themselves. In response to a preemptive strike they made in Daviess and another engagement on the border between Caldwell and Ray counties, Governor Boggs declared the Mormons enemies of the state and ordered the state militia to drive them out of Missouri. Clearly the Saints had satisfied the injunction in the redemption revelation to weary the governor.

From the dungeon of a Missouri jailhouse, Joseph Smith wrote to the Saints–who had resettled in Illinois and Iowa–and instructed them to begin counting the costs of the Missouri expulsion in lands lost and confiscated chattel property. Using the language of the revelation on Zion’s redemption, he informed the Saints it was now time to focus their efforts on the national level. After escaping from his guards and rejoining the Saints, Smith gathered up all the documentation he could and took it to the nation’s capital to present to President Martin Van Buren and the 26th congress. He hoped that the federal government would intervene to restore the Saints to their land or remunerate them for their losses. In December 1839, when Smith arrived in the city, he called on the President at the White House. Upon hearing his case, Van Buren reportedly replied, “what can I do” I can do nothing for you,”if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” Following Constitutional interpretation–and especially as a states’ rights Democrat–Van Buren was unwilling to interfere in Missouri’s domestic affairs. But Smith viewed his reaction in a campaign context as well. In another version of the incident, Van Buren was reported to have said, “your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you . . . If I take up for you I shall lose the vote of Missouri.”

While Van Buren’s unwillingness to help the Saints almost closed the door on the presidential stage of appeal outlined in the redemption revelation, the context of the impending election opened the door wide again–for if Van Buren would not help them perhaps William Henry Harrison and the Whigs would. As the party of moral activism, the Whigs were more likely to interfere in domestic matters. With their Democratic patronage uncompensated, the Saints shifted their allegiance to the Whig party and voted for Harrison. Although Van Buren took both Missouri and Illinois, he did not retake the White House. But then neither did Harrison, except for a few weeks of terminal illness. Smith–unsatisfied with the “pseudo whig democrat reign” of John Tyler–waited for the next election. In the meantime, ongoing immigration made the Saints a demographic force to be reckoned with in Illinois. They became deeply involved in politics at the county and state levels. From the state legislature, they obtained a charter for their city Nauvoo granting broad powers of political autonomy. The new city council quickly passed a law protecting religious freedom for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. Smith soon became the mayor.

As the 1844 election approached, Smith and other leaders sent letters asking the various candidates what they would do for the Mormon people if elected. Those who responded offered no assurance of help. The purpose of the inquiry was to find the candidate most likely to do something about their redress petitions, but the responses they received ruled out the viability of support even before the election. However, the Saints had not exhausted all of their options in pursuing the divine mandate to appeal to the national executive; if none of the candidates in the field were willing to take up their cause, the Saints could field their own candidate. Joseph Smith prepared to run for president himself. Once an alienated separatist, he had become a petitioner to the government and then a candidate for its highest office. His immediate sights were now set on Washington, not New Jerusalem. The campaign was another huge step for the Saints toward participation in American political culture. Smith converted his entire missionary force into campaign workers and sent his chief lieutenants into the field to manage their efforts. Reaching out to Catholics and other minorities, he attempted to build a “coalition of the oppressed.” Drawn into public dialogue, Smith constructed a platform that weighed in on contemporary issues ranging from banking and commerce to the question of Texas annexation.

Smith’s platform centered, however, on civil rights and the federal protection they deserved. Though with the interests of his own people foremost in his mind, he focused his critique on slavery and the American prison system–advocating universal emancipation from both. In politics, as in religion, Smith’s views were far from orthodox. Smith’s political thought derived not from a deep study of classical theory but from his idiosyncratic religious worldview and from the existential experience of oppression. Smith knew firsthand the dark side of democracy and the dilemma it posed for American public life. Beyond serving as a Moses to his own people, Smith now offered a prophetic critique of the government to the nation at large. Attacking states rights, he explicitly advocated federal protection of the freedoms articulated in the Constitution.

Though more deeply engaged in American politics than ever, Smith had also placed himself and his people on the brink of fulfilling the commandment to seek government redress at the national level and thereby justifying them in taking their case back to God. And so, in the middle of his campaign for the American presidency, Smith also organized a secret Mormon government and made contingency plans to move his people once again and build a newer Zion in a farther west.

Around the same time, the Mormons in Nauvoo grew to constitute a majority of the Hancock County population. Their bloc vote now determined who would attain office. Smith’s bid for the American presidency, however unlikely, only further incensed those in western Illinois who despised the concentrated religious and political power he wielded. Conflict with the area’s early settlers, similar to that which had occurred in the counties of western Missouri, eventually led to Smith’s murder. A lynch mob gunned him down in June 1844 while he was being held prisoner in the Hancock County jailhouse. It was largely due to Smith’s assassination that the Mormon leadership determined they had fulfilled their obligations in appealing to the government.

As persecution and violence continued to grow, the Saints once again disengaged from American politics and set their sights on finding a place apart where they could live independently and peacefully. Again they looked to the far west, but this time beyond the reach of American territorial claims. Following the example of the Republic of Texas, they hoped to carve out a piece of northern Mexican territory for themselves. After the Mormons left the states, but before they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, America declared war on its neighbor to the west. A year after the Mormons reached their new home, the treaty ending the war placed them once again within American territory. For the moment, however, their new land was no more American than it had been Mexican. The Great Basin was Indian country. Brigham Young took up again Joseph Smith’s Zion project.

And so it was that Smith’s political ideas were not without consequence. His dream of independence and isolation affected the lives of tens of thousands of converts who migrated to the Mormon stronghold in the intermountain west. There they would struggle against the United States for another half century before submitting to its sovereignty.

Two Queries

I’m surfacing from a very busy semester to ask two things:

–when did the term “FLDS” develop? I have my ideas and some initial research but if anyone has insight on that, I’d be grateful for input.

–who’s going to be at AAR/SBL in San Franciso this weekend and would there be interest in organizing an informal JI meetup?

This is my first time at AAR – I’m looking forward to it. I will be speaking in a panel sponsored by the History of Christianity Section on Monday morning on the state of the field of fundamentalism (Session A21-104), and among other things I’m musing about the emergence of the FLDS wing of Mormonism’s house–or at least the emergence of CALLING it that, and about what that might say about the changing meanings for the term “fundamentalism.” My fellow panelists are Matthew Sutton, David Harrington Watt, Randall Stephens, and Mary Beth Mathews.

FYI, the Mormon Studies Consultation panel will be on Saturday morning at 9, with Colleen McDannell at the helm, on “Mormon Women and Modernity” (Session A19-130). It sounds like it angles towards sociology rather than history, but should be interesting to attend. The contributors and papers:

Ann Duncan (Goucher College) “The Mommy Wars, Mormonism and the ‘Choices’ of American Motherhood”
Jennifer Meredith (U of U) “Western Pioneer Mythos in the Negotiation of Mormon Feminism and Faith”
Jill Peterfeso (U North Carolina) “Scripting, Performing, Testifying: Giving Faithful ‘Seximony’ Through the Mormon Vagina Monologues”
Doe Daughtry (Arizona State) “‘Further Light and Knowledge’: Ways of Knowing in Mormonism and the New Spirituality”

Respondant is R. Marie Griffith from Harvard, and James M.McLachlan and Grant Underwood will be on hand for the business meeting.

Are other JI contributors, readers & fans going to be attending AAR? Maybe we could all have a breakfast or lunch together at some point over the weekend.

Joseph Smith’s Politics, part 1

Friend of the blog Mark Ashurst-McGee has agreed to share with us his 2010 AHA paper, which provides an overview of the arguments in Mark’s award-winning dissertation on Joseph Smith’s political thought. For those who don’t know Mark’s work, you should stop what you’re doing and start catching up now. He’s currently working as an editor on the Joseph Smith Papers. I’ve broken the paper into two parts. For full documentation, see the dissertation, “Zion Rising: Joseph Smith’s Early Social and Political Thought” (ASU, 2008) –DG

I would like to speak to the fundamental impulse within Mormonism to withdraw from the wider society into a sectarian “Zion”–as Joseph Smith called it–as well as the paradoxical necessity of political involvement to protect this separatist project.

As founding prophet and president of a new church–now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–Joseph Smith sent missionaries throughout the English Atlantic world inviting all who would listen to leave worldly Babylon behind. His missionary force called on individuals not only to embrace the gospel through baptism and confirmation but to migrate to the Mormon center of “gathering.” Converts were to leave behind not just their inner sins and worldly habits but their lands and improvements, family and friends, churches and communities. The Latter-day Saints were to move to the western reaches of the United States and build the new society of Zion.

Smith’s disengagement from America is perplexing given the patriotic tenor of the times. He was born within a quarter century of the Revolutionary War, in which both of his grandfathers had served. He grew to manhood in the period of nationalism following the War of 1812. But for Smith and his family, as for many other Americans, the hopes and dreams of the new republic went unfulfilled. Smith considered America’s revolution and founding to be acts of providence, but he also believed that the republic’s golden age had come and gone. Peace and harmony were giving way to contention and strife between religious denominations, socioeconomic classes, and political parties. His Book of Mormon, published in 1830, identified the American Indians as a branch of the House of Israel to whom God had given the Americas as a promised land. The book also foretold that in the last days these American Israelites would reclaim the continent as sovereign territorial domain. Smith’s further revelations charged his followers to awaken the Indians to their true identity, join with them, and help them build the New Jerusalem in the New World. The Indians would then begin reclaiming the Americas for Israel beginning at this capital city. Zion, the holy land of the western hemisphere, would grow in size and power without aggression as the contention in America and the other nations of the world escalated into violence, warfare, destruction, and collapse. The Zion of Joseph Smith’s mind was essentially Mormon and exclusivist in its government rule by the Mormon priesthood, but Zion had a cosmopolitan and inclusivist aspect as well: It would welcome converts from every “nation, kindred, tongue, and people”–regardless of race or class–and would also welcome the unconverted who fled to Zion seeking refuge from the wars of nations.

Mormonism’s genesis illustrates clearly that not all Americans shared the optimism of the early republic. Most early American reformers, while seeing serious problems in American society, believed fervently in their ability to provide the necessary legal remedies or institutional support to solve the nation’s problems. Even abolitionists, feminists, and others who perceived flaws deep within American society optimistically pursued their crusade to save the nation. In contrast, Shakers, Harmonists, and other separatists abandoned the endeavor of general reform and turned to internal projects. More pessimistic than these separatist groups, who created pockets of sacred community within America, Joseph Smith called upon his followers to leave America behind and help him establish a new nation in the western borderlands. The early mission of the Latter-day Saints to leave America and join the Indians shows the depth of their alienation. It serves as a potent illustration of the profound discontent experienced by many in the social turbulence following America’s political, economic, and religious revolutions.

In 1831, a year after organizing the “Church of Christ” in New York, Joseph Smith led a small group of church members to the western edge of the United States. From a cluster of settlements in Jackson County, Missouri, the Saints attempted to affect a communion with the Indians living in the reservations just across the border. When their efforts failed, they pressed forward to establish Zion themselves. The early settlers of Jackson County watched with concern, then with fear and loathing, as the Mormon community grew in size and strength. After two years of Mormon migration, the early settlers could see that the demographic balance of power was about to shift. Then, in the summer of 1833, the Mormon newspaper published the Missouri statutes regarding free blacks along with a word of caution regarding immigration. The prospect of free black Mormons moving into Jackson County was more than the early settlers would bear. They saw the Mormons constructing a citizenry that was entirely incompatible with their own. Vigilantes destroyed the Mormon print shop that had published the paper and demanded that the Mormons leave. By the end of the year they had driven the Saints from the county with whips and rifles.

The magnitude of their losses in land and improvements–and their inability to recover their lands on their own–compelled Smith and the Saints to engage with America on its own political terms. In December 1833, Smith delivered a revelation to his people in which God commanded them to seek redress from government and “redeem” Zion. The revelation explained the means of this redemption by using Jesus’ parable of the unjust judge, in which a widow pled her case before a judge and continually wearied him with her complaints until he finally avenged her of the wrongs she had suffered–not out of a sense of justice but to relieve himself of her pestering. The Saints were to weary the government in a similar manner. Before, the Mormons had gone to great lengths to distance themselves from worldly government. Now they mounted an aggressive campaign to win political favor for their cause. Their effort to resuscitate the separatist Zion project ironically required them to accommodate themselves to the broader political landscape.

While the appeal for help forced the Saints to abandon their theocratic posturing, in their fear of further persecution and in their appeals to American government the Mormons turned away from their former interest in the nation’s most oppressed peoples. Like white laborers and immigrants, when they claimed the privileges of American citizenship they played by the rules of the dominant political culture of white manhood suffrage. So long as they maintained a presence in Missouri, the Mormons went out of their way to distance themselves from the broad cause of anti-slavery. The mission to join with the Indians faded even further into the future.

An even more crucial point regarding the revelation on Zion’s redemption was that it introduced a process of appeal that ultimately led back to God. If rejected in the courts, the Saints were to take their case higher: “let them importune at the feet of the Judge and if he heed them not let them importune at the feet of the Governor and if the Governor heed them not let them importune at the feet of the President and if the President heed them not then will the Lord arise . . . and in his fury vex the nation.” The revelation placed the immediate burden of redeeming Zion on the Saints and committed them to engage with the government at the local, state, and even national level. And yet, at the same time, the trajectory of appeal traced out in the revelation suggested that in the end only God would avenge them. The effort to reclaim their lands was a tenuous reengagement with America.

The pivotal revelation on Zion’s redemption became as important in Smith’s outlook as the revelations that had brought Zion into being. It would frame his efforts and his understanding of events for the rest of his life. The first step toward redeeming Zion was to seek redress through the local courts. In response to earlier incidents of vandalism, the Saints had already attempted to enter complaints with officers of the Jackson County court–many of whom had signed the vigilante circular calling for an expulsion posse. As the Jackson court had earlier refused to take their complaints, the Saints filed their complaints at the local circuit court. When the circuit court came to Jackson in February 1834, Mormon witnesses reentered the county with the state attorney general and an escort of 250 state militia. However, after the attorney general read the hostile climate he dropped the state’s Mormon cases. He explained to the Saints that it was useless to try them before a jury of Jackson citizens. Mormon civil cases, though granted venue in neighboring Ray County, fared little better.

To be continued…

Teaching Mormonism in the U.S. Survey

We’ve spent quite a bit of time at JI over the years considering how Mormonism fits into larger narratives of U.S. history, and I was finally able to put some of those discussions and recommendations to use this semester while teaching the first half of the U.S. History survey (U.S. History to 1877) to a group of 35 students, most of whom are from the mid-Atlantic and upper South and have very little personal experience or interaction with Mormons or Mormonism.

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Review: Charles R. Harrell, “This is my Doctrine”: the development of Mormon theology (Kofford, 2011)

Before I dive into the substance of this review, it’s worth pointing out, I think, a few of the things which are going on beneath its surface. The first is me once again trying to work out the relationship between trained academic scholars and autodidact scholars, and to assess their ongoing discussion about the proper form and the structure of scholarship. This is a popular topic at the JI, which reflects more generally the state of Mormon studies. Many of the points I make below have to do with my judgment of the ways this book holds up as an academic work. A book of this scope and ambition would normally, in an academic setting be a synthesis, weaving together a vast array of work into a single whole by a scholar familiar with the field. But its author is neither a trained theologian nor a trained historian – and, of course, that wide array of secondary literature on the history of Mormon theology simply does not exist. This my mean that we should take its ambitions somewhat differently than we might otherwise. Furthermore – and second – while the work itself certainly has academic aspirations, it also reads in many places as prescriptive as well as descriptive – that is, this is a work of Mormon theology as much as it is a history of Mormon thought. Harrell thinks certain ways of believing are more useful than others, and he seeks to convince us of the fact. This is not bad; indeed, I think Mormonism needs more theology, not less, and I am delighted with Harrell’s contribution to that discussion. But again, it complicates how one might engage with the book as a work of scholarship: how should it be read? Those caveats noted, the review.

Additionally, this essay will appear in a slightly altered form in an upcoming issue of Dialogue. Subscribe!

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Introducing Ordinary Mormons to Academic Mormon History

Recently, I’ve been think about how ordinary members use church history in their everyday lives. In my limited experience, few members read much church history, especially if it wasn’t published by Deseret Books. I realize this isn’t news to anyone reading this blog, as we’ve discussed in several of Ben’s recent posts why many church members resist more academically-oriented literature if it challenges accepted oral traditions, is seen as unaccessible due to academic prose and/or jargon, among other reasons. But I’ve wondered what more we could be doing to encourage ward members to see the benefits of incorporating more academic history into their busy schedules.

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