The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 4

The Book of Mormon^[1] is about one-third the size of the Bible. It purports to be 'the Sacred History of Ancient America from the Earliest Ages after the Flood to the Beginnings of the Fifth Century of the Christian Era.^[2] The author's aim was to invent a ​series of fictitious writers, on whom to father all his own compositions. The names of these worthies range from Jarom to Mormon, from Nephi to Zeniff. Their works have been thus summarized by the prophet himself:^[3]

'We are informed by these records, that America, in ancient times, has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites, and came directly from the tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem, about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites, of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed, about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians, who now inhabit this country. This book also tells us that our Saviour ​made His appearance upon this continent after His resurrection; that He planted the gospel here in all its fulness and richness, and power, and blessing; that they had apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, and evangelists; the same order, the same priesthood, the same ordinances, gifts, powers, and blessing, as was enjoyed on the Eastern continent; that the people were cut off in consequence of their transgressions; that the last of their prophets who existed among them was commanded to write an abridgment of their prophecies, history, etc., and to hide it up in the earth, and that it should come forth and be united with the Bible, for the accomplishment of the purposes of God in the last days.'^[4]

In the second and subsequent editions it is stated that the book was 'translated by Joseph Smith, jun​ior,' but on the title page of the first edition is an important variation,—Joseph Smith was not the translator but the author:—

​This inadvertent admission of authorship is invaluable. Being reiterated and gratuitous, it points to the authenticity of the book; hence an analysis of its contents will serve as an analysis of the prophet's mind, an intimate means of judging his early mental ability. Yet a mere repetition of the story^[5] is not so illuminating as a study of the sources. How did the young writer come by these curious notions about Old Testament history, the lost ten tribes, ancient America and the like? The elements of the environment provide a satisfactory answer,—Joseph's life in the backwoods, the books he read, the education he received, the sermons he heard,—these, and all the rest of his experiences, furnished the matter for this 'account of the aborigines of America.' Thus the dedication to the Lamanites or Indians may be laid to the author's situation in the heart of the Iroquois country, just when Fenimore Cooper was evolving his Leather-Stocking Tales.^[6] The manner of writing likewise reflected the times,—it took the easy form of scriptural paraphrase much like the current parody of the Boston Tea Party entitled The First Book of the American Chronicle.^[7]

​But to take up in order the links between the volume and the surroundings. The atmosphere being oversaturated with religion, its borrowings were necessarily biblical. Most obvious are lengthy excerpts from the King James' version: than which 'the sense is materially better and clearer, in the texts from the Book of Mormon,' says the apologist. Yet the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are given in their entirety, and eleven chapters of Isaiah are 'taken by Nephi from the brass plates;^[8] while the whole work is a mosaic of Old Testament allusions and New Testament proof-texts.^[9] In addition to these verbal quotations, there are elaborate adaptations:—a long imitation of the chapter in Hebrews on faith, new variations in the woes against the Pharisees, and twenty-six pages of the suppositious sayings and doings of the Lord in his advent to America.^[10] There are finally numerous transformations of canonical matter; for example, the parable of the dying olive-tree is grafted on the metaphor of the ​wild olive-tree and the whole, with its ramifications, spreads over nine pages. These quotations, variations and expansions are a considerable block to be subtracted from the original mass.^[11]

The method of manufacture is further revealed by the discovery that, in many parts, the Book of Mormon is nothing but a thinly veiled autobiography. As The Pilgrim's Progress contained hints of Bunyan's life,^[12] so in this unwitting allegory the thread of fact frequently comes to the surface. How completely this line of actuality runs through the book will be seen only at the conclusion of the analysis. Yet the opening verse furnishes the clue: the name of the prophet is Nephi, but the acts are the acts of Joseph:—'I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my fathers; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days—nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days.'

​An assurance that Nephi is Joseph, junior, is found in the coincidence that the dream of his father Lehi, is none other than the dream of Joseph, senior. The account in the Book of Mormon is inflated with scriptural phrases, but the ideas—with but trifling exceptions—are the same throughout.^[13]

​This quotation implies and reverts to ancestry; even more does it disclose environment. Its poverty of style at once evinces the scanty education within ​reach of the boy. With the disappearance of the original manuscripts there is no way of judging the sum total of grammatical errors: their quantity may ​yet be inferred from the rhetorical quality of the present editions.

​Barbarisms and solecisms abound, due to what Smith called his 'lack of fluency according to the literati.' Over and above these are unique expressions, which well deserve the name of 'Smithisms.' Thus:—'Nephi did molten ore out of the rock, that he might engraven upon them the record of the more history part.' The author's meagre schooling is not indicated so much by these verbal peculiarities, as by the lack of ideas derived from primary education. There are some references to geography and history, but the former is made so indefinite and the latter so obscure, that much elucidation is called for. Lest the profane read with one eye shut, the Saints have provided annotations. Take for example Nephi's vision of the future, and Moroni's prayer for the land:—

All this was written by a youth who was not much 'inclined to the study of books.' But if the sphere of knowledge was small,—by a sort of imaginative aëration, it swelled to a large bulk. Joseph's wits were early at work; three years before the gold plates were delivered, his mother said, 'During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this country, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them.'^[15]

The boy's inventions naturally reappeared in his book. As those that 'went forth out of captivity' were the Pilgrim fathers seen through a haze of tradition, so the Lamanites were the Indians of yesterday, with an air of mysterious antiquity thrown about them. The novelist in an adjoining ​county succeeded in idealizing the last of the Mohicans. The inexperienced youngster failed to make him anything but the ignoble red man. Here is the composite portrait:—In appearance, the Lamanites 'were a dark, loathsome, filthy and idle people, they wore a girdle about their loins, their heads were shaven, they had marked themselves with red in their foreheads.' As to their habits, 'they dwelt in tents; seeking in the wilderness for beasts of prey; at night they did rend the air with their cries and howlings and their mournings for the loss of the slain.' In war 'they carried the bow, the cimiter and the axe, they smote off the scalp of their enemies; they took many prisoners and tortured them.'^[16]

And these were 'the seed of Abraham, remnants of the house of Israel.' The Book of Mormon is indeed the 'record of a fallen people'; the degeneration is so complete that, when, in the parable, this branch of the wild olive-tree is said to be 'of no worth,' the commentator hastens to refer this to the present condition of the Indians.^[17] But the annotation does not agree with the text; these same Lamanites were those who left behind 'bones as heaps, and works of timbers upon the top of the ​ridges of earth, or in other words,—the ancient mounds of North America.'^[18]

The Mormons were hard pressed to explain why the Indians had lost their theological traditions,^[19] so they laid great stress on their material remains. Yet here is manifest if at all, the influence of Joseph's surroundings. He lived in a country full of mysterious aboriginal monuments.^[20] Along the shores of Lake Ontario there was a series of ancient earthworks, entrenched hills and occasional mounds or tumuli. These works spread over the lands of the Holland Land Company,^[21] where Joseph, senior, had taken up his claim. At Canandaigua, only nine miles away, there was an embankment on a hill, where human bones and relics were found. At Livonia,^[22] in adjacent Livingstone County, there was an artificial embankment and ditch inclosing an area of sixteen acres. The other way, in Seneca County, ​there were ancient caches full of art relics and fragments of pottery. But there were more notable remains nearer home; if not within walking distance, at least within the circle of rumor. Just east of Geneva was a so-called Indian Castle; here stumps of the palisades were struck by the plough, when the land was first cultivated, and the holes formed by the decay of the pickets were still visible in 1847. Finally, in the vicinity of Manchester, enough hatchets and spear heads were dug up to supply the local blacksmiths with iron. Now popular opinion regarded the origin of these remains as buried in antiquity. Governor De Witt Clinton, in his pamphlet of 1811,^[23] dubbed these mound-builders 'the Romans of the Western World.' Examining the three works near Canandaigua and counting the rings in the trees growing upon them, he estimated that they were one thousand years old; hence not the work of present Indians, nor of European explorers. Other writers held views more positive, if less probable; these were the remains of Phœnician and Scandanavian colonists,—of the apocryphal Madoc with his ten ships.

But the theory of Hebraic origin was the favorite. It began with the very discovery of America, continued through Puritan times and was rife in these ​parts when Joseph was growing up. There is an abundant literature on the subject. The early Spanish priests identified the native Americans with the lost ten tribes of Israel; in 1650 a Jewish Rabbi advocated it;^[24] the same year appeared Thorowgood's 'Jews in America, or Probabilites that the Americans are of that Race;' two years after, John Eliot, apostle to the Indians, wrote an essay to the same effect. Since the conversion of the aborigines was one of the aims in settling New England and was enjoined also in the charters of other colonies,^[25] both New England divines and founders of states welcomed these speculations. The line of belief persisted through Mayhew Mather, Roger Williams, William Penn, Jonathan Edwards down to Elias Boudinot's work in 1816, entitled A star in the West, or an attempt to discover the lost Ten Tribes of Israel.^[26]

Interest in these theories was wide; as was said by Ethan Smith in his 'View of the Hebrews or the Tribes of Israel in America,'^[27]—the importance of the question 'Where are the ten tribes ​of Israel,' brought about a speedy sale of the first edition. This work was published in Poultney, Vermont, next to Windsor County, where Joseph's parents once lived, and by 1825 had circulated to westernmost New York. A letter to the author, from a clerical reader in Erie County, mentions a general religious revival which had taken place among the Senecas seven years before. Dissatisfied with their old rites they had brought together their wise men, who say they are persuaded they are the people of God, but have lost their way. Hence, this observer concludes, these Indians are the outcasts of Israel, for they have a manifest shadow of the Mosaic rituals,—the feasts of first-fruits, and of ingathering; a day of atonement, and peace offerings.^[28] The author's cumulative proof, derived from the accounts of travelers, is this:^[29] the Indians must be the lost tribes of Israel because they have one origin; their language appears Hebrew;^[30] they have acknowledged one and only one God; they are in tribes; they have ​cities of refuge; they have sacrifices and anointings, high-priests, festivals, feasts and purifications. The compiler also quotes with approval Adair's twentythree reasons for the Indians being Jews.^[31]

As has been already noted, a volume containing these arguments was in the possession of one young Mormon from New York. But if there was any book, akin to Joseph's fancy, it was one published in Albany about this time,^[32] namely,—Priest's American Antiquities. An Exhibition of the Evidence that an ancient population peopled America many centuries before its Discovery, and Inquiries into their Origin. The wording of this title should be compared with a portion of the Prophet's first vision; he says:

Moreover the contents of this book resembles that of the plates of Nephi. The chapter on the course of the lost ten tribes is suggestive of the wanderings of the Nephites. In 1841 the prophet, reviewing a volume of Mormon evidences, noted four parallel passages drawn between Priest's work and the Book of Mormon.^[33] The fact that the Mormon book was subsequently called in by Brigham Young, would excite a suspicion of Joseph's original plagiarism from Priest's American Antiquities, except that the latter appeared in 1833. However Smith frequently printed in his newspaper curious notices of the current works on American archæology, and pointed with triumph to various 'ancient records,' as they were dug up from time to time.^[34]

​Whether or not the boy in the log cabin had a chance to read Priest's volume or any of the series, these judaizing theories were in the air, and were especially prevalent among the clergy.^[35] Hence the source of Joseph's antiquarian fancies need not have been literary; what he heard from the pulpit was enough to set his fancy at work. In this western district the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the Indians was active,^[36] and a certain missionary to these lost branches was, at one time, in charge of the Presbyterian Church in Palmyra.^[37] Tradition also fired the young boy's brain. His Uncle Stephen had launched forth on the frontiers at Detroit as an Indian trader.^[38] Moreover three of the ​Green Mountain villages, in which his family once sojourned, had been destroyed by the savages not a generation before his birth;^[39] in New York the Cherry Valley massacre was still remembered,^[40] and in 1805 an itinerant Methodist said that 'the shining tomahawk and the glittering scalping-knife were within sight.'^[41] These things lay back of the portrayal of the Lamanites as 'wicked, wild and ferocious,—a people who delighted in murdering the Nephites and robbing and plundering them.'^[42] Besides local hearsay, the youth had his own eyes to give him information; around him lay the reservations of the Six Nations containing, at this time, between three and four thousand warriors.^[43] Naturally it was his own knowledge of the Iroquois that he transferred to the ancient inhabitants.

Finally one of his occupations provided him with an excuse for mystification. He confesses, with some reluctance, that he was hired as a money digger.^[44] Since Indian mounds were the favorite ​haunts of money diggers,^[45] this search for hidden treasure furnishes the clue to Joseph's passion for the antique. He mixed up what he knew about living Indians, with what he could gather about the dead ones, and the amalgam was the angel Moroni's 'brief sketch concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country.' The mixture of the two elements, present and past, is shown by the popular errors embedded in the narrative. The great number of skeletons in the burial mounds were not due to terrible massacres,^[46] but to the Indian custom of collecting the bones of their dead at stated times.^[47] So with the Indian 'forts' or 'castles,' described as the 'high places of Israel.'^[48] In 1615 Champlain cited those palisaded works.^[49] They were not prehistoric, but were taught to the natives by nameless adventurers from Europe. So the Iroquois body-coverings of thick hide, such as the Nephites wore, were an imitation of European armor.^[50] And the ​numerous hatchets and arrow-heads in Joseph's fabulous Zarahemla, were to be found on the sites of Kenandaga and Seneca villages of the seventeenth century.^[51] The explanation of scientific investigators being unknown at that time, there was nothing to prevent the throwing of an air of primitive mystery around more or less historic facts. So in Joseph's lucubrations the mounds which the Indians regarded with great reverence, and of which they had lost the tradition,^[52] were built by Moroni as defenses of his people against the Lamanites; while the caches of arms were due to the penitent Lamanites burying their weapons rather than commit sin.^[53]

In the mental habits attributed to his aborigines the author's inventive powers fail, and he unwittingly falls back on current thought. The religious ideas of the Lamanites were not archaic and pagan, but only what Joseph's contemporaries erroneously attributed to the natives. He said the Lamanites believed in a great spirit;^[54] a writer of the same decade cites, among the manners and customs of the various Indian tribes,—their belief in a great ​spirit.^[55] The modern critic says that the primitive red man had no idea of a great spirit, and that the observations of early writers were made upon savages who had been for generations in contact with the doctrines of Christianity.^[56] This interpretation of the religious opinions of the Indians, after preconceived ideas of the times, offers another point of contact between the Book of Mormon and the author's surroundings. Like the Senecas, thirty miles away, who had lately performed the sacrifice of the white dog^[57] Joseph's Lamanites 'did worship idols.' And yet, at the same time, they held the various beliefs of local Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists.

Strange as it may seem, the earliest tribes were Old School Presbyterians. If the speech of Nephi, to his brethren, be compared with the Westminster Standards, a close parallelism will be disclosed.^[58] ​In all this the author's borrowings were the easiest possible. Even if the rest of the family did not remain good Presbyterians,^[59] the Westminster Confession was to be had in other ways; it appeared, for instance, in the frequent reprints of the New England Primer, so that as children thumbed its quaint pages, they sucked in Calvinism.^[60] But if the young prophet had once learned what 'man's chief end' was, he did not continue to believe that 'In Adam's Fall we sinned all'; early in his book. he began to drift towards Universalism, saying that ​'the way is prepared from the fall of man,' and that 'salvation is free for all.'^[61]

This marked transition in habits of thought is to be gathered from the elements of the reaction. The Book of Mormon is said to present orthodox Trinitarianism; the reverse is the truth: it is a hodge-podge of heterodoxy. How the author came by the variant doctrines is a pertinent question, for it shows his absolute dependence on his own times. Absurd attempts have been made to trace to the old world, ​the peculiar tenets of the American sectary.^[62] It is true that towards the five points of Calvinism, he had an Arminian attitude, but Joseph Smith knew as little about Arminius as Arminius did about Joseph Smith. It was from the voice of the wilderness preacher that he obtained notions at variance with Presbyterian dogma. A document of the times gives a lively idea of local theologic Donnybrook fairs. In the Western Memorial of 1834, the Presbytery of Geneva was charged by the General Assembly with 'sixteen gross errors in doctrine.'^[63] In answer, it was said that these errors were advanced and strenuously propagated in Western New York, but not by Presbyterians. One apologist adds,^[64] in defense, that the local churches, in good standing, still believed in original sin, infant dam​nation, and man's inability to obey the commands of God. Another writer^[65] goes deeper, and gives reasons for the undermining of High Calvinism. At this time, he observes, there was a suspicion that Western New York was altogether unsound; in the conflict between the old doctrines and the new metaphysics, dangerous errors came through the candidates sent out as home missionaries,^[66] with the consequence that there was an alarming looseness among young preachers.

Now all this had no small bearing on the mentality of the founder of Mormonism. The prophet of the backwoods was at an infinite remove from a thinker like Channing in his Moral Argument against Calvinism.^[67] Yet the freer thought of the East had already reached these parts. It was to the 'New England influence' that the Presbyterians hereabouts charged these 'dangerous errors.'^[68] Considering the number of itinerants from the various ​home missionary societies at work in the Genesee country, it was not surprising that these new views ultimately found a devious way into the Book of Mormon. The steps between source and destination may be traced with some assurance,^[69]—with New England as the 'fountain head of heresy,' and the Geneva presbytery as the channel, a few trickles of rationalism were bound to seep into Joseph's skull.^[70]

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