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…

Scholarship as “Intellectual Kinship”: Richard Bushman’s Vision for the Academic Community

In order for the “Mormon Moment” (however you define it) to be successful, there must be able explicators. In the last half-dozen years, there have been few better faces of Mormonism than Richard Bushman. (See, for instance, the recent write-up here.) Whether the topic is Joseph Smith, religious fanaticism, or even the “Book of Mormon” musical, Bushman has been a go-to voice for reporters, and his insights are often poignant and insightful. He is the perfect blend of approachability, reasonable credentials (many of the highest academic awards, prestigious chair at an Ivy League institution), and brilliance. What makes him so likable in the public sphere is not just what he says, but how he says it.

Importantly, that is also one of the things that makes him so likable in academia.

Continue Reading

?The Cultural History of the Gold Plates?: Notes from the 2011 Bushman/Givens Seminar, Part II

Continued from Part I.

Sarah Reed, “Fantasy, Fraud, and Freud: The Uncanny Gold Plates in 19th Century Newspaper Accounts.” Sarah, a graduate student in German studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had the honor of bringing Freud to the party. Specifically, she explored the debates surrounding the Gold Plates through the lens of Freud’s “uncanny,” the idea that a thing or concept can be both familiar and foreign at the same time. Sarah examined how newspaper accounts presented Joseph Smith’s narrative—which in itself possessed many home-grown or native elements—in a way that repressed the familiar and emphasized the exotic. Attackers often contrasted JS’s message with Enlightenment ideals, thereby creating a safe distance between the Mormons and the audience. Fun stuff.

Continue Reading

A New Framework for a New Generation of Mormon Studies: The Conclusion from my Bushman Tribute Conference Paper

What follows is the conclusion from my paper “On Mormon Thought and its Context(s): Joseph Smith, Thomas Dick, and the Tricky Task of Determining Influence,” presented at the conference in honor of Richard Bushman a few weeks ago. The paper spends most of its time outlining how the question of Thomas Dick’s influence has been handled in Mormon historiography, the problems with past approaches, and then demonstrates a possibly more fruitful approach. (A very early version of the paper is found here.) Then, in this conclusion, I use the topic as an example of how new frameworks are needed, specifically when engaging the development of LDS thought, in the next stage of Mormon studies. This topic—and even much of my message—has been trumpeted of late (both by myself as well as others), including Richard Bushman’s own concluding remarks at the conference, but it is still an important enough message that it is worth repeating.

The Age of Cultural Power: Reflections on “Mormonism in Cultural Contexts: A Symposium in Honor of Richard Bushman”

What follows are my reflections on “Mormonism in Cultural Contexts,” a conference that took place on Saturday, June 18, 2011, in honor of Richard Bushman’s 80th birthday. The organizers—Steve Harper, Spencer Fluhman, Reid Neilson, and Jed Woodworth—deserve many congratulations for putting together such a great event.

Call for Papers: Mormon Scholars in the Humanities

Call for Papers

Conference Theme: Economies and Humanities
Conference Date: May 18?19, 2012
Proposal Deadline: February 15, 2012

Human beings have material needs. We claim, use, and trade the physical resources of earth and seas. We produce goods and services that we use or, not being self-sufficient, exchange. To the ancient Greeks, the consumer?the ?we??was a household. (The term ?economy? derives from Greek, meaning management of household labor and material resources.) Today the household remains the unit responsible for consumption decisions, and its internal roles adapt to external demands for members? labor.

Continue Reading

Digitizing Mormon History: Update, Potential, and Pitfalls

To say that the study of Mormon history has entered the digital age would be a drastic understatement. Last friday, representatives from the LDS Church History Library gave what appears to be an exhilarating introduction to new web content for both the Library itself as well as the Joseph Smith Papers. (A Mormon Times article last week also highlighted the JSP’s emphasis shift from print to web, though there will still be much printed goodness.) The awesomeness of these sites and their online content cannot be overstated. I fear that if I tried to outline the positive aspects of this I would merely be stating the obvious. Regardless, I drone on. I’d like to outline what some of the best online digital sources are, what the positive impact may be within the Church and the academy, and finish with a few words of caution.

Continue Reading

MHA 2011 Conference Preview: Paper Abstracts from JI Presenters

In case anyone needed more motivation to attend. (Or, in my case, more regret at not being able to attend.)

What follows are short abstracts of the MHA papers being presented by Juvenile Instructor contributors, just to give you a sampling. There are numerous other Mormon history and bloggernacle celebrities taking part in the conference (including JI’s friends Sam Brown, Brittany Chapman, Rob Jensen, Janiece Johnson, and Margaret Young, to name a few), so keep your eyes peeled to the online program.

Continue Reading