The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 1

To read the flux of books on the founder of Mormonism, one might think there were no middle course between vilification and deification. To sectarians Joseph Smith appears an ignoramus, a fanatic, an impostor, and a libertine; to his followers—a prophet, a seer, a vicegerent of God, and a martyr.^[1] While two generations of writers have been presenting Smith's character in its mental and moral extremes, they have been ignoring the all-important physical basis of his personality. If a solution of his perplexing individuality is wanted, the pathological grounds must be examined. The state of his body goes far to explain the state of his ​mind, and his ancestry to explain both. Like the distorted views of his grandfather 'Crook-necked Smith' Joseph's mental abnormalities are to be connected with physical ills.

Before getting at the roots of his ramigerous family tree and grubbing in the neural subsoil, it is well to obtain an idea of what the man was like in his maturity. Within a year of Smith's death and in the heyday of his power, four different persons visited Nauvoo, met the head of the Mormon Church, and wrote down what they saw. As outsiders their impressions are worth having. The first^[2] said that General Smith was not a fool, but somewhat of a jockey; that his socialistic schemes were crude, but that he had a clear insight into the grosser principles of human nature. The next eyewitness was an Englishwoman, the sister of a Mormon convert. With feminine intuition she saw into the paradoxical nature of the man, and pictures ​him as sensual^[3] and shrewd, boastful and popular, conceited and kind-hearted. If these descriptions are objected to as prejudiced, there remain two accounts which the Mormons quote with approval. The first was given by the legal counsel of the Saints in their Missouri troubles. He portrays Smith as of unprepossessing appearance, ordinary conversational powers, and limited education, and yet withal of indomitable perseverance, strange and striking views and great influence over others, ene​mies and followers alike.^[4] Of all these pen portraits, the latest is probably the most impartial. As the church historian gives it only in part,^[5] it is need​ful to sum up the whole. In May, 1844, forty-three days before his assassination, Smith was visited at his headquarters by Josiah Quincy, who left ​him 'a phenomenon to be explained.' The general was described as 'a man of commanding appearance; capacity and resource were natural to his stalwart person; and left an impression of rugged power.' But there were not only high lights in the picture. Smith gave the impression of kingly power, but his talk was garnished with forcible vulgarisms; he had a statesmanlike prevision in advocating the buying of slaves, eleven years before Emerson advocated that scheme, but with it all betrayed unexampled absurdities in showing off his museum, containing Egyptian mummies and the autograph of Moses. 'The man,' says Quincy in conclusion, 'mingled Utopian fallacies with his shrewd suggestions. He talked as from a strong mind utterly unenlightened by the teachings of history.'

Personal interviews furnish as good a way as any to get at a solution of 'the enigma of Palmyra.' Since these are few and fragmentary, recourse must be had to information furnished by the prophet under his own name. But, again, since Smith's writings have all the defects of personal interviews of an author with himself, there is need of considerable reading between the lines. This is fortunately supplied by various early works, which were so strongly apologetic that they were ultimately suppressed. For example, Smith's Journal ​and his History,^[6] are supplemented by Thompson's ​Evidences^[7] and Lucy Smith's Biographical Sketches, the latter being a sort of homeopathic antidote to her son's unctuous autobiography.^[8] So much for the sources, now for the movement and the man.

​Mormonism began before its founder. However strange was the appearance of this new prophet, whose 'creed was singular and wives plural,' there were preparatory influences back of him. The cult was no more peculiar than its causes. It was in western New York that the son of an obscure farmer gazed in his magic crystal, automatically wrote 'a transcription of gold plates,' dictated the Book of Mormon, and after strange signs and wonders, started his communistic sect. The movement arose between 1820 and 1830; its impelling forces began two generations before. Joseph Smith dreamed dreams, saw visions, and practiced healing by faith; so did his father, his mother and his maternal grandfather. It is with the latter that the investigation properly begins, for there are extant hitherto unused materials antedating the Revolutionary War. About 1810, Solomon Mack, a ​broken down old soldier, put forth a pamphlet with this suggestive title:—

A Narrative of the Life of Solomon Mack, containing an account of the many severe accidents he met with during a long series of years, together with the extraordinary manner in which he was converted to the Christian Faith. To which is added a number of Hymns, composed on the death of several of his relations. Windsor: Printed at the expense of the author.^[9]

In this rare Yankee chap-book there earliest appears the proneness of the Smith tribe to illusions of the mind. These are described, towards the close of the book, with an air of simple belief. But before that there are two-score ill-spelt pages, which throw a flood of light on the life of one of the dependent classes a hundred years ago. Yet along with its quaint fancies and pleasing humors, Mack's little work discloses three poor traits of the writer's descendants,—their illiteracy, their restlessness and their credulity. Lucy Mack, daughter of the fighting beggar-man and mother of the prophet, in her own book smoothed the style and corrected the grammatical errors of the Narrative. Lest the raciness and air of truth be left out, it is well to return to the original. The author opens with a quaint ap​peal to the piety of his hearers and recounts the hardships of an apprentice bound out to farm work:—

'My father went to the door to fetch in a back-log, and returned after a fore-stick and instantly droped down dead on the floor. You may see by this our lives are dependant on a sumpreme and independant God. . . . My Master was very careful that I should have little or no rest. From labour he never taught me to read or spoke to me at all on the subject of religion. . . . My mistress was afraid of my commencing a suit against them, she took me aside and told me I was such a fool we could not learn you. I was never taught even the principles of common morality, and felt no obligation with regard to society; and was born as others, like the wild ass's colt. I met with many sore accidents during the years of my minority.'^[10]

The writer next gives an instance of his practical cleverness, but adds thereto a confession of his lack of book learning. Recounting his adventures in the French and Indian war, near Fort Edward in 1757, he says:

'I espied at about thirty rods distance, four Indians coming out of the wood with their tomma-hawks, scalping knives and guns. I was alone, but about twenty rods behind me ​there was a man by the name of Webster. I saw no other way to save myself only to deceive them by stratagem—I exclaimed like this—Rush on! rush on! Brave Boys, we'll have the Devils! We'll have the Devils—I had no other weapon only a staff; but I ran towards them and the other man appearing in sight, gave them a terrible fright, and I saw them no more but I am bound to say the grass did not grow under my feet.'

******

'In the spring, 1754, I set out on another campaign. I went to Crown Point, and there I set up a sutler's shop which I kept two years, by means of a clerk I employed for that purpose, not knowing myself how to write, or read, to any amount, what others had written or printed.'^[11]

After giving the author's further experiences as a backwoodsman in Connecticut, an artilleryman in the American army, a sailor from Liverpool to Mount Desert and a privateersman in Long Island Sound, the Narrative is taken up with an Iliad of woes, a list of sufferings and accidents doubtless lengthened out to create sympathy and make the little book sell. In Mack's catalogue of fever sores, smallpox, and broken bones there is little of really vital interest, until mention is made of falling fits. ​These are causally connected with the seizures which afflicted his descendant sixty years later. The case reads like epilepsy; at any rate, thus early appear those symptoms, which go far to explain the 'visions and revelations' and other abnormalities of grandfather and grandson alike. But to resume the story at a later point: With his bodily sufferings in old age, Solomon's religious experiences begin and there are blended with these certain characteristic mental hallucinations; the narrator continues:

'In the 76th year of my age, I was taken with the Rheumatism and confined me all winter in the most extreme pain for most of the time. I under affliction and dispensation of providence, at length began to consider my ways, and found myself destitute of knowledge to extole me to enquire. My mind was imagining, but agitated. I imagined many things; it seemed to me that I saw a bright light in a dark night, when contemplating on my bed which I could not account for, but I thought I heard a voice calling to me again. I thought I saw another light of the same kind, all which I considered as ominous of my own dissolution. I was in distress that sleep departed from my eyes and I literally watered my pillow with tears that I prayed eagerly that God would have mercy on me.'^[12]

​Psychologically these phenomena will demand closer scrutiny, historically they are by no means unique. From the bishop of Hippo to Jonathan Edwards, such visions and voices have had mystic interpretation.^[13] The fantasies of the simple minded Revolutionary soldier may be connected with the past, their real significance lies with a coming generation. To the grandfather these impressions are vague, inchoate and hard to explain; to the grandson they are clear manifestations with a definite purpose,—they are messages of the angel Nephi announcing the Mormon dispensation.

The last pages of the Narrative are of interest as disclosing an almost medieval way of looking at peculiar mental experiences. This New Englander of the eighteenth century felt and thought like the English Puritan of the sixteenth. Mack's confession, for example, intimately resembles Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. There bodily ailments are followed by mental apparitions, but the two are scarce conjoined; it did not occur to the inspired tinker, that his physical hardships on Hounslow Heath were a cause of his imaginary fights with Apollyon in Bedford Gaol. So is it here,—the physical cause is stated, but the religious interpretation is predominant:—

'Another night soon after I saw another light as bright as the first, at a small distance from my face, and I thought I had but a few moments to live, and not sleeping nights, and reading, all day I was in misery; well you may think I was in distress, soul and body. At another time, in the dead of the night I was called by my christian name, I arise up to answer to my name. The doors all being shut and the house still, I thought the Lord called and I had but a moment to live. . . . I have often thought that the lights which I saw were to show me what a situation I was in. . . . The calls, I believe, were for me to return to the Lord who would have mercy on me.'^[14]

It is this referring of everything unnatural to the supernatural that continued as a mark of Joseph's family during three generations; dreams are warnings, visions are messages from on high. Even more characteristic is the belief in healing by prayer. The prophet constantly practiced this on his followers; his mother gave several instances; while his grandfather cited his own case at the end of his life:—

'All the winter I was laid up with the rheumatism. . . . I thought like this as I was setting one evening by the fire, I prayed to the Lord, if he was with me that I might know it by this token—that my pains might all be eased ​for that night; and blessed be the Lord, I was entirely free from pain that night.'^[15]

There remains one more incident which clearly displays the heights to which a persistent credulity may go, for the tale is repeated by Joseph Smith's mother. The old man gives in his appendix the following curious story:—

​The study of the Mormon leader's ancestry is more than a study in atavism: nature has not skipped a generation. The erratic tendencies in Joseph's mind appear constitutional because they are continuous. His mother acknowledges as much in her Biographical Sketches^[17] of her son, which, at ​first, had a wide circulation as 'Mother Smith's History,' but has since been discredited by the Utah Mormons, for it tells too plain a story.^[18] From this now scarce work, Joseph's mental outfit is seen to be largely a matter of inheritance. In his maternal grandfather there is disclosed an unthinking credulity, in his mother a positive hankering after the supernatural. She notes with relish every detail of her husband's seven dreams, as well as all the omens, visions and faith cures of her seven brothers and sisters. This book is all important as a source, yet a question of historic validity arises. If it was written 'under the inspection of the prophet,' may not its facts have been garbled? It was the practice of Joseph, as head of his church, to work over and amend his earlier writings; such are the grammatical corrections in the Book of Mormon and the doctrinal changes in the Book of Commandments. The doubt as to validity is legitimate, but the solution is at hand. In these Biographical Sketches there are published 'historical items and occurrences'—of such a kind that Joseph the wonder-seeker did not want them changed. The book teems with dreams, visions and miraculous cures. These were, in truth, 'events of infinite importance' to one who was not wont to distinguish between subjective illusions and objective realities.

​If, then, the book has not been seriously tampered with, because its subject-matter exactly suited the mind of the prophet, some plain facts about this 'remarkable family' may be extracted from it. To begin with, the education of Lucy Mack was of the most meagre sort.^[19]

Closely related to the partial illiteracy of the mother is her entire credulity. She too believes in miraculous recovery, and in dreams as heavenly admonitions. Her version of her sister's unexpected upraising is more sensational than the parallel account of Solomon. Mrs. Tuttle being bedridden for two years, suddenly exclaims: 'The Lord has healed. me, both soul and body—raise me up and give me my clothes. I wish to get up. Connected with this recovery is the inevitable vision. The patient gives the recital of the strange circumstance in the crowded church, and addresses the audience as follows: 'I seemed to be borne away to the world of spirits, where I saw the Saviour, as through a veil, which appeared to me about as thick as a spider's web, ​and he told me that I must return again to warn the people to prepare for death . . . that if I would do this my life would be prolonged.'^[20]

It was on these fables of the family and tales of a grandfather that the incipient prophet was fed.^[21] But this is only a beginning of the signs and wonders among Joseph's people. His mother also hears a supernal voice and has a miraculous recovery. Sick of a hectic fever and meditating upon death, she heard a voice saying: 'Let your heart be comforted.' From that time, she asserts, she became quite well as to bodily health, but her mind was considerably disquieted. It was naturally in this period, when there was only a 'faint glimmer of light beyond the gloom,' that the author's most notable psychic experience took place. A condensed extract will give the spirit of the dream:—

While we were living at Tunbridge, my mind became deeply impressed with the subject of religion. I began to attend Methodist meetings and, to oblige me, my husband accompanied me; but when this came to the ears of his father and eldest brother they were displeased. I was considerably hurt by this; after praying some time I fell asleep and had the following dream:

​I thought that I stood in a large and beautiful meadow; a pure and clear stream of water ran through the midst of it. I discovered two trees standing upon its margin. I gazed upon them with wonder and admiration and I saw that one of them was surrounded with a bright belt that shone like burnished gold. Presently, a gentle breeze passed by, and the tree encircled with this golden zone, bent gracefully before the wind. I turned my eyes upon its fellow, which stood opposite; but it was not surrounded with the belt of light as the former, and it stood erect and fixed as a pillar of marble. I wondered at what I saw, and said in my heart, What can be the meaning of all this? And the interpretation given me was, that these personated my husband and his oldest brother, Jesse Smith; that the stubborn and unyielding tree was like Jesse; that the other, more pliant and flexible, was like Joseph my husband; that the breath of heaven, which passed over them, was the pure and undefiled Gospel, which Gospel Jesse would always resist, but which Joseph, when he was more advanced in life would hear and receive.'^[22]

Already there is disclosed a threefold resemblance between Lucy Mack and her father: each heard voices, saw visions and believed in miraculous cures. And there is another element which was transmitted to the daughter. Solomon has his religious doubts, ​but they are of a simple and personal kind; Lucy is afflicted with a more complex depression of spirits.^[23] This melancholia, allied with a positive intolerance of the sects, was destined to exert an important influence on the young son's mind. In the case of the mother, at any rate, it led to a marked aloofness from denominationalism. A Methodist exhorter and a Presbyterian minister both attempted to gain her adherence, but she maintained her religious independence throughout. 'At length I considered it my duty to be baptized, and, finding a minister who was willing to baptize me, and leave me free in regard to joining any religious denomination, I stepped forward and yielded obedience to this ordinance; after which I continued to ​read the Bible as formerly, until my eldest son had attained his twenty-second year.'^[24]

The book now takes up the pedigree of Joseph, senior, whose ancestors originally came from England. His line is traced back through seven generations to first Samuel Smith, born 1666 in Essex County, Massachusetts. The education of the husband was not so defective as that of his wife, since at one time he eked out his living by teaching school. How much knowledge this would imply is conjectural. The course of study in a Vermont district school at the beginning of the last century did not consist of much more than reading, writing and arithmetic.^[25] At any rate with this equipment of the three R's, Joseph's father as Patriarch of the Mormon Church in the Middle West, was authorized to dispense written blessings to the Saints at a moderate tariff. If Joseph, senior, was, strictly, not illiterate, he still resembled his father-in-law in his restless habits. His occupations were varied, even for a Connecticut Yankee. He first owns a farm at Tunbridge, Vermont; he then moves to Royalton and then to Randolph and keeps a store. In the meanwhile he hunts for 'gensang' root for ​the China trade. He next rents a farm in Sharon, Windsor County, Vermont, but soon moves to Lebanon, New Hampshire; after that he migrates to Norwich, where his crops fail; and finally, when the boy Joseph was eleven years old, he takes up a land claim at Palmyra, Seneca County, New York. About this time he is described, by an eyewitness, as of gaunt and haggard visage, with the rusty clothes of a vagabond.^[26]

During these years of wandering Joseph, senior, was visited with a panorama of visions. They started about the year 1811, and were completed only with the mystic number of seven. The first two must be examined later, for the vision of the Magic Box gives the clue for the young prophet's discovery of the Golden Plates, and the vision of the Fruit Tree is substantially reproduced in the Book of Mormon.

Two things are noticeable in the whole series: first, that they arose in times of mental agitation, and, second, that the stuff the dreams were made of was largely derived from every-day waking experience. On the one hand the phantasms began, when the dreamer's mind 'was much excited upon the subject of religion.'^[27] On the other ​hand, the details are commonplace; the language is scriptural, but the color is local. For example, besides the vision of the Meeting House, there is that of the Magic Box, which is discovered in a wilderness of 'dead fallen timber'; and of the Fruit Tree which spread its branches 'like an umbrella,' and 'bore a kind of fruit in shape much like a chestnut burr.' The third vision is that of the Twelve Images which bow in deference to the father of the coming prophet, like the sheaves of Joseph's brethren of old. Here the dreamer enters a flower garden with 'walks about three and one-half feet wide, which were set on both sides with marble stones.'^[28] In the sixth vision there is more than a reproduction of the ordinary sights of a new New England village and more than a repetition of an Old Testament story. The conflict between the claims of Mercy and Justice is an echo of the theology of the day, an effort of the sleeper's mind to harmonize a nightmare with a doctrine of Calvinism. This dream is worth quoting at length:—

'I thought I was walking alone; I was much fatigued, nevertheless I continued travelling. It seemed to me that I was going to meeting, that it was the day of judgment, and that I was going to be judged. When I came in sight of the meeting house, I saw multitudes of people ​coming from every direction, and pressing with great anxiety toward the door of this great building; but I thought I should get there in time, hence there was no need of being in a hurry. But, on arriving at the door, I found it shut; I knocked for admission, and was informed by the porter that I had come too late. I felt exceedingly troubled, and prayed earnestly for admittance. Presently I found that my flesh was perishing. I continued to pray, still my flesh withered upon my bones. I was almost in a state of total despair, when the porter asked me if I had done all that was necessary in order to receive admission. I replied, that I had done all that was in my power to do. "Then," observed the porter, "justice must be satisfied; after this, mercy hath her claims."'^[29]

Examining the next dream' critically, it is clear that the higher mental activity of conception, not of mere reproduction, has a beginning but is not carried out. Evidently some involuntary muscular movement of the sleeper's body was made and the train of thought was interrupted. Says Joseph, senior:—

'I dreamed that a man with a pedlar's budget on his back, came in, and thus addressed me: "Sir, will you trade with me to-day? I have now called upon you seven times, I have traded with you each time, and have always found you ​strictly honest in all your dealings. Your measures are always heaped, and your weights overbalance; and I have now come to tell you that this is the last time I shall ever call on you, and that there is but one thing that you lack, in order to secure your salvation." As I earnestly desired to know what it was that I still lacked, I requested him to write the same upon paper. He said he would do so. I then sprang to get some paper, but, in my excitement, I awoke.'^[30]

This seventh and last vision was 'received' in 1819, but the family habit was not interrupted. In the following year Joseph, junior, began his operations, and in twenty-three years was vouchsafed those four hundred octavo pages of 'revelations,' found in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price.

As has been suggested, the dreams of the elder Smith have evidently undergone a process of redaction; the smooth and unctuous style points to the corrective hand of Joseph. For all that, their general validity may be accepted;—as they are recorded, so they happened. They could scarcely have been made out of whole cloth by the prophet in his later days of deception, for the Vision of the Fruit Tree was incorporated into the first edition of the Book of Mormon. To accuse Joseph of making ​up this vision and that of the Magic Box at the age of twenty-five, is to make him a juvenile forger rather than an unwitting plagiarist. As the case stands, it is damaging enough to the Saints, instead of being 'a divinely inspired record written by the forefathers whom we call Indians,'^[31] the Book of Mormon is disclosed as a home-made product of infant industry. Of the authenticity of the dreams,^[32] whether in or out of the Record, there is abundant evidence,—those commonplace and homely details which crop out from amid the flowery language. But as regards inward significance they reflect the ideas and opinions of the persons concerned. They first tell how the Smith tribe interpreted their thoughts of the night.^[33] From the comparative ethnic point of view their theory was an intermediate one:^[34] they did not, like primitive man, look on nocturnal experiences as of equal reality with those of the day; ​much less did they give them a material and physical explanation. Theirs was the mystic view: dreams are warnings from on high, visions are symbolic messages sent to guide the soul. Three stages in the conception of dreams are exemplified in the history of Joseph and his progenitors: first, personification,—to Joseph the deity sends a messenger or angel of radiant form; second, communication,—to Solomon Mack the divine message is heard by the dreamer, not by means of a material figure, but as an external voice; third, objectivation,—to Lucy and her spouse a symbolic picture is unrolled, with or without interpretation.

Inasmuch as the Smiths insisted on the supernaturalness of their dreams, it remains to give their natural conditions and causes. A difficulty arises at the start: if the physiological explanation is attempted, the data are either entirely lacking, or are wanting in exactness. Mother Smith's work is meant to be a faith-promoting handbook; and shed wells with delight on supernatural remedies and miraculous cures. When she does go in for morbid anatomy, the ailments and diseases are given obsolete and indeterminate names.^[35] In one place, however, ​nervous depression is given as a precondition of a dream. Immediately before her vision of the Two Trees, Lucy states that she had attended a Methodist meeting, when 'she returned to the house, much depressed in spirit, which state of feeling continued until I retired to my bed.'^[36]

Turning to the psychic correlations, a tentative use may now be made of the two ordinary forms of dreams, namely:—the illusion, or imitation of a sense perception, and the hallucination, or projection of a mental image outwardly. The latter is exemplified in Solomon Mack, when he saw a bright object at a small distance from his face. To him this seemed an extra-mental reality; to the physiologist the apparent patch of flame is due to changes of blood pressure on the eye-ball. The brightness and apparent nearness of the light would appear to uphold the theory that, if the nerve excitation arises in the organ of sight, the structure of the retina is reproduced perceptibly.^[37] Although it is contended that the psychologist has nothing whatever to do with the physiology of the ​retina,^[38] yet this experience of Mack's fulfils three out of the five general causes of hallucination given by the physiologist. There was no specific statement as to local diseases of the organ of sense, nor to drugs, but there was exhaustion of body and mind, a morbid emotional state of fear and outward calm and stillness.^[39] As the old man's statement runs:—being confined with rheumatism, he was not sleeping well, was in misery and distress soul and body, and, at the dead of night, when the house was still, the 'lights' came.^[40]

Returning to the illusion, or imitation of a sense-perception, the actions of the senses are variously illustrated in the dream series. The lower senses, as usual, here play little part. There is possibly a single case of an illusion of sense in the reference to delicate flowers; yet there are two instances of illusory taste, as when the dreamer starts to eat the ​contents of the Magic Box, and when he scoops up 'by double handfuls' the white particles of the Fruit Tree. The tactual element is also to be found, as when the dreamer is much fatigued in walking or seems to go lame. The auditory illusions are general,—the guide, or attendant spirit, audibly commands. Finally the visual element is universal, all the dreams were counted visions. The exciting causes of these phantasms are more or less conjectural.^[41] When the new settler had the nightmare of 'beasts, horned cattle and roaring animals bellowing most terrifically,' was the cause digestive discomfort, or did the sleeper dimly hear some commotion in the barnyard? Whether the stimulation came from without or within is a physiological question: there yet remain varieties of brain ex​citation, which may be more pertinently expressed in terms of psychology. Direct excitations are presentative and are connected with the immediate present; indirect excitations are representative, and are connected through the law of association with the past,—the brainly merely reviving impressions previously received.

The point of interest in all this is that the dreams of Joseph's progenitors hold the mirror up to nature, reflect their innermost notions, beliefs and modes of thought. Thus Solomon Mack connects those midnight flames with 'the horrible pit of sin in which he lay'; Lucy interprets 'the breath of heaven' which passed over the two trees as the 'pure and undefiled gospel'; and Joseph, the elder, attributed the 'withering of the flesh upon his bones' to the demands of Justice over Mercy.

The dreams of Joseph's ancestors are, at the best, but a dim avenue into their brains. In his own case there is more profit in reversing the process,—in studying the source of his phantasms before the fantastic in his character. Without a knowledge of his environment, his visions are inexplicable.