(1790)
ENTHUSIASTIC CITIZENS
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"Mormonism was both product and victim of the American Republic."
Lucy Mack Smith
Lucy Mack Smith’s life revolved around religion. It also reflected the central tensions of the early American republic. She was born in 1775 in Gilsum, New Hampshire, to Solomon Mack and Lydia Matilda Gates. Visions ran rampant within the family. Her father, Solomon, experienced a religious conversion later in life and narrated how “a bright light” and heavenly voice cured his rheumatism. Lucy’s brother, Jason, became a “seeker” at an early age and a minister shortly afterward. Another sibling, Lovisa, experienced a miraculous healing and then “testified with boldness to the power of God in her behalf.” The family seemed chosen for a special purpose. Deep spirituality and miraculous episodes were Lucy’s birthrights, and she eagerly passed them on to her own children— including her son, Joseph.
Both before and after the organization of the Church of Christ—later renamed The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—in April 1830, the Mormon movement was centered around a family faith. Joseph Smith Jr. may have received his name from his father, Joseph Smith Sr., but he also inherited his mother Lucy’s earnest faith, penchant for visions, and conviction that he had been chosen for a greater purpose. Tracing the first experiment, a tumultuous and topsy-turvy climate that both rewarded and punished ecclesiastical experimentation. Very few traditions born from this era have lasted as long or grown so large as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, despite consistent and substantial challenges. And yet it all began with a devout mother.
"An Earnest Yearning to Discover Hidden Truths"
Lucy Mack’s spiritual yearning was paired with an institutional commitment to the Presbyterians, one of the fastest growing denominations in the early republic. Joseph Sr., whom Mack married in 1796, identified with the Universalists, a liberal faith that challenged traditional conceptions of hell and damnation. It was a daring choice for a period in which many Christians feared the nation might slide into immorality without proper ecclesiastical oversight. Ezra Stiles, president at the nearby Yale University, for instance, warned students that failure to embrace orthodox Christianity could undermine national values. Would religious freedom result in rampant heresy? The young Smith couple represented two answers to the question: Lucy felt safest in a mainstream denomination while Joseph Sr. found traditional dogmas stifling. Once. when Lucy convinced her husband to attend Methodist meetings with her, his brother became so enraged that he “threw Tom Pain[e’]s age of reason” at Joseph Sr. and “angrily bade him read that until he believe it.” The question of faith and affiliation would cause domestic tensions that would not be solved for decades.
Even as both Smiths frequently asserted their particular versions of faith, the family’s spiritual wandering continued. After the birth of her second child, Lucy became gravely ill and worried that she would die. She pled to God that if he “would let me live, I would endeavor to get that religion that would enable me to serve right.” She was answered by a voice that quoted scripture and promised salvation. Sometime later, Joseph Sr. narrated his own series of dreams and visions that he interpreted as implying that the true church was absent from the earth but would soon be restored through miraculous means. The two Smiths taught their children to believe in an intervening God who answered prayers and spoke in mysterious patterns. One son, William, later remembered that they were anxious to “get us engaged in seeking for our soul’s salvation,” and encouraged them to attend revivals and pray “until almost all of the family became either converted or seriously inclined.” The groundwork for a vibrant religious community was being set.
The Smith family’s spiritual searching was only matched by their economic struggles. At first, they opened a mercantile store in Vermont, but after an audacious business plan went awry—they were swindled after investing all their savings into a doomed ginseng venture—the Smiths were forced to move from town to town as itinerant farmers, never rich enough to purchase their own land. These dire straits enticed Joseph Sr. and his oldest boys to find alternative options for money and belonging, which included magic and treasure digging, in which sacred objects like seer stones could reveal hidden gold or silver. Treasure-digging borrowed occultic, magical practices that were common, though increasingly controversial, at this time.
Lucy for one felt ashamed by her family’s connections to the occult. When she narrated her life story decades later, she paused in this part of her story to emphasize the family’s Christian bona fides. “Let not my reader suppose,” she urged, that because we “stopt our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing magic cirlces or sooth saying” that they “neglect[ed] of all kinds of business” in work and faith. Lucy insisted that their practice of folk-magic traditions did not keep them from “remember[ing] the service & the welfare of our souls.” The Smiths lived in a transition period, in which many were moving away from folk habits and toward “respectable” Christianity. For the time being, the Smiths existed in a liminal space where both intersected seamlessly.
Lucy gave birth to Joseph Smith Jr., the fourth her ten children, on December 23, 1805, amid the family’s economic struggles and spiritual wanderings. He inherited from both parents a sense of wonder concerning God’s mysterious ways and an earnest yearning to discover hidden truths. Young Joseph, Jr., was raised in a household that was divided by religious opinion, united in a search for spiritual meaning, and steeped in folk magic practices and beliefs. Lucy believed her family’s providential destiny would be made possible through her children. Given Joseph Jr.’s personal independence and torn familial setting, he felt it was up to him to find a way to blend all these impulses and to unite their spiritual home.
"No Boundaries for the Republic's Early Dreamers"
By the time Joseph was a teenager, the Smith family had recently relocated from New England to upstate New York, the latest in many moves Lucy suffered as she continued to yearn for stability. They now lived in a region across which a series of religious revivals had spread. Lucy and her family did not know what to make of this “great revival of religion” in which many “came forward and presented themselves as seekers.” Their new community’s spiritual zeal apparently exceeded even the growing Smith family’s earnest quest. The whole world felt upended. None appeared more troubled than the teenaged Joseph. Lucy remembered that he “always seemed to reflect more deeply than common persons of his age upon everything of a religious nature.” He was lost in a rocky sea without an anchor.
Which of the many churches that claimed to be uniquely correct were actually right? That was how Joseph later described the question that most haunted him. Like many in early America, he worried that the free marketplace had produced plentiful religious options but few certainties. And when it came to the state of his eternal soul, he wanted to be certain. Sometimes he attended a Presbyterian service with Lucy and some of his siblings; other times he sought God in nature like his father. If there was any denomination that came closest to satisfying his preferences, it was the Methodists, yet he still did not feel strongly enough about them to become a formal member.
So Joseph Smith did what had become so common for the era, what many revivalist ministers had encouraged: he trusted in his own ability to discover the truth. Smith wanted to be born again. So around 1820. he retired to the woods near the family’s home and prayed for guidance. The nature and meaning of what happened next would be disputed for generations. In an official and canonized account produced two decades later, Smith claimed that he was visited by God and Jesus Christ, who told him that all churches were wrong, and that the true faith would be restored through him. Although Smith’s accounts of the “First Vision”—as Latter-day Saints came to refer to their founding story—vary in some details, his earliest narrations fit the Smith family’s wider “seeker” context. Smith’s interest had been piqued by revivals. He had decided to pray for his own answer. When he did so, God appeared to him in some form—a theophanic experience that set him on a new direction. Amid a tumultuous religious marketplace, Smith rejected all existing options and instead decided to produce his own product.
In the spiritual memoir Lucy Mack Smith narrated in the 1840s, the story of Joseph’s First Vision does not appear. even though Smith’s later miraculous visitations did. Perhaps Joseph ever confided this vision to his mother. Perhaps he did, but because visions were so commonplace, both within the Smith family and the wider culture, she did not consider it to be unique. Joseph Smith’s vision may not have been unique, but it was controversial. When Joseph informed a local Methodist minister of his vision, he was told that the era of such miraculous episodes was past. He was told that “there were no such things as visions and revelations in these days,” and that “all such things had ceased with the apostles.” Smith was instructed to keep such stories to himself.
To Lucy’s delight, however, Joseph’s stories only became more audacious. Indeed, it was an era that rewarded audacity—revivals were springing up nearly everywhere; families were migrating from one evangelistic sect to the next; and visionaries were proclaiming wholly new denominational options. Charles Grandison Finney, an itinerant Presbyterian minister, animated thousands with month-long meetings. Followers of Ann Lee, the female incarnation of Christ, forfeited money, material, and sex to join zealous “Shaker” communes across the young nation. William Miller, a lowly Vermont constable, announced that he had deciphered the precise date upon which Christ would return. And now Joseph Smith, undereducated farm boy, proclaimed that he would facilitate the restoration of God’s primitive church. There seemed to be no boundaries for the early republic’s dreamers.
"Joe Smith's Gold Bible"
If Joseph Smith Jr.’s First Vision story matched the excesses of early America’s spiritual hothouse, his next supernatural tales grew from his family’s occultic ways. The young teenager did not follow his vision with an immediate call to the ministry, but instead joined a local treasure-hunting crew. A neighbor taught Joseph how to use a seer stone to find lost belongings, and though he never landed a major score, Joseph was apparently successful enough to develop a regional reputation. Lucy Mack Smithed hoped that her family would eventually be united in a shared faith, and that they would achieve their long sought-after stability. But in the meantime, the Smiths continued to till the land and to dedicate time and resources to find “slippery treasures” through magical means.
Then, one night in September 1823, Smith claimed another visitation. This time it wasn’t God, however, or even Jesus Christ, but an ancient American named Moroni, who had lived on the continent centuries before. Smith was told that a sacred record left by a lost civilization was buried in a nearby hill, and instructed on how to retrieve them. The following day, Smith travelled to the Hill Cumorah and was allowed to see the “gold plates.” But because of the lust in his heart—the angel declared that it was obvious that Smith wished to sell them as he would any uncovered treasure—Smith was told that he would not be able to retrieve the record for several years.
Lucy was nonetheless thrilled with the possibilities of her son’s latest vision. “We sat up very late and listened attentively to all that he had to say to us,” she recalled. The story “confirmed” that God had chosen their family for a special purpose. “This caused us greatly to rejoice,” she wrote, as “the sweetest union of happiness pervaded our house, and tranquility reigned in our midst.” The family’s treasure-seeking friends were also enthused—they all believed that this was the score they had long sought.
Success did not immediately follow, for either the Smith family or the treasure seeking crew. Another financial setback and the loss of Lucy’s oldest son, Alvin, once again placed the Smiths in a precarious financial position. Desperate, Joseph Jr. accepted an offer by a successful farmer named Josiah Stowell to use his seer stone to hunt for Spanish treasure. But when the expedition proved fruitless, Stowell’s nephews sued Smith as a swindler. The ensuing legal hearing in early 1826, in which Smith was accused of being a “glass looker,” was enough to scare the twenty-year-old straight. Young Joseph promised to leave all treasure-hunting behind. The misadventure did result in one discovery, however: he fell in love with his landlord’s daughter, Emma Hale, whom he soon married. Lucy was thrilled with her son’s union: Emma appeared to give Joseph a sense of purpose and companionship that he had lacked since his brother Alvin had passed.
Chastened by the law, anxious to move beyond his treasure-seeking past, and spurred by another string of religious revivals in town, Joseph Smith Jr. reinvented himself once again. He now spoke of the “gold plates” not as a precious artifact but as a sacred text. His wife Emma, who, like Lucy, was more included to institutional religion than he was, now accompanied him as he visited the Hill Cumorah to collect the record, which he finally retrieved in September 1827. The relic would eventually become the source for the Book of Mormon, a new contribution to the global canon of scriptural texts.
Lucy—unlike many believers, critics, and scholars then and now—never questioned whether or not Smith ever had physical plates. Lucy never saw the plates herself but she did not mind: she had the utmost confidence, both in her son’s stories as well as her family’s status as “chosen.” While her son claimed to be out retrieving the record, Lucy he stayed up all night long, praying “for the anxiety of my mind would not permit me to sleep.” As she made breakfast the next morning, still waiting for Joseph to return, her heart “flutter[ed] at every footfall”. When Joseph finally walked through the door, telling her the plates were buried outside in an “old birch log,” Lucy celebrated.
The following years were a whirlwind of activity. Working with a series of assistants, and using the same seer stones from his previous treasure hunts, Joseph eventually dictated a scriptural text that totaled over five hundred printed pages—an epic story of ancient Christians who inhabited the Americas before and after the lifetime of Jesus Christ. Many people in the early United States speculated about the origins of the continent’s indigenous inhabitants, and now Smith’s Book of Mormon, so named after Moroni’s father and keeper of the record, placed them within the House of Israel. Lucy was so smitten with the text that she quoted long passages of it in earnest letters to family members. “[God] has now commenced this work,” she petitioned her siblings, and “hath sent forth a revelation in these last days, & this revelation is called the book of Mormon.” She hoped they would join her son’s growing movement. But to many outsiders, the new scripture was just as blasphemous in its content as it was absurd in its origins. Many dismissed it as “Joe Smith’s gold bible.”
Martyrs for God's Cause
Joseph Smith’s increasingly radical stories about ancient Christians and modern prophets could have remained merely a family religion, living and eventually dying with the Smiths themselves. There were plenty of itinerant movements and independent communities during the early republic that eclipsed within a generation. But Smith moved from merely reproducing alleged ancient scripture to dictating his own, which responded to contemporary questions. “Thus saith the Lord,” many of Smith’s new revelations proclaimed. They were textual testaments to the young prophet’s place among ancient “prophets, seers, and revelators” like Moses. “Whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants,” the revelation proclaimed, “it is the same.” Some of the revelations even commanded the creation of a new church altogether. Lucy and many other believers readily complied. The Smiths and their growing number of converts completed that task when they organized the Church of Christ on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York.
The new church, a breakaway from all existing denominations and an alleged restoration of the primitive, pure institution of Christ’s day, was a fulfillment of the Smith family’s spiritual wandering. Joseph Sr., who had fervently sworn off any and all organized religions, was finally baptized in the one founded by his son. Lucy joyfully recalled watching Joseph Jr. embrace his father immediately after he exited the waters, proclaiming, “Oh, my God! I have lived to see my own father baptized into the true Church of Jesus Christ!” The two men sobbed uncontrollably as they held each other on the river’s edge.
Converting to Mormonism, as the movement quickly became known, meant much more than merely adopting the Book of Mormon. Mormons faced immense hostility, as neighbors, family, and critics denounced the new sect as blasphemous. They also received increasingly radical and expansive teachings and scriptures, as Joseph Jr. began producing a new translation of the Bible as well as dictating over hundreds of his own revelations. His most radical revelatory edict, that righteous men could take plural wives like the patriarchs of old, was still a decade away.
And finally, conversion to Mormonism meant moving, as the faithful were soon commanded to relocate from New York to Kirtland, Ohio. Nor would it be their final removal, as internal dissension and external opposition prompted further migrations to Missouri, to Illinois, and finally to the Great Basin region in what is now Utah. Even as the Jacksonian era was known for its staunch individuality, as represented in the hothouse revivals, Joseph Smith’s religion was predicated on communal compliance.
Throughout these early years of Mormonism, Lucy’s faith in her son was unshakable, especially because it confirmed her family’s special status within God’s kingdom. Such faith helped her persevere while they “had to endure great fatigue and privation, in consequence of the opposition they met with from their enemies.” She often gave up her own bed for new converts and volunteers who arrived at church headquarters, especially those who came to build their grand temple in Kirtland, Ohio, which was completed in early 1836. By that point, Joseph Sr. had been named as the growing church’s “patriarch,” a distinguished position that granted even more glory to the family. Lucy felt sure they had finally met their spiritual potential.
That potential was much grander than even Lucy could imagine. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would go on to become one of the largest, wealthiest, and most successful American religions. It today boasts nearly eighteen million members worldwide and financial reserves in the hundreds of billions. All of that was in the future, of course. During Lucy’s lifetime, the faith was all ambition and potential. Mormonism was born as a family faith, tethered to a rowdy yet earnest community, and nurtured by a woman who merely desired spiritual unity within her home.
But the same religion that brought fulfillment and purpose to the Smiths also caused their greatest tragedies. In June 1844, Joseph Smith Jr. and his elder brother, Hyrum, had been charged with treason and held in a county jail. Their “gentile” neighbors in Illinois saw Mormons as a direct threat to political and social stability. Joseph Smith and his followers, critics insisted, had no place in the American republic. When the law proved unable to bring the Latter-day Saints to justice, this mob, who believed they stood for Christianity and civilization, took matters in their own hands: they gunned down the Smith brothers before a trial could even commence. Democracy and religious freedom might enable endless experimentation, but they also prompted entrenched fears and drew violent backlash. Vigilante justice was as American as, and often a response to, cultural innovation.
It was just a few months afterwards that Lucy Mack Smith began to dictate her family’s story, as a way to manage her mourning. Seeing her sons’ bodies was a heartbreak that Lucy could hardly bear. “I will not dwell upon the awful scene which succeeded,” she dictated, as “my heart is thrilled with grief and indignation, and my blood curdles win my veins whenever I speak of it.” She believed her sons were martyrs for God’s cause, and had been sacrificed due to the nation’s wickedness.
Lucy Mack Smith’s story is one of America’s most harrowing and poignant spiritual memoirs. It was also meant as an indictment of a country that failed to protect her family and their faith. Though “My Father and my brothers Fought hard and struggled manfully to establish a government of liberty and equal rights,” she chastised, the nation had “become so corrupt that there are none to defend and maintain the sacredness of the Law.” Mormonism was both product and victim of the American republic.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
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Benjamin E. Park
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