Journal of Mormon History. O c t o b e r l V o l u m e 4 1 l N o. 4

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1 Journal of Mormon History O c t o b e r l V o l u m e 4 1 l N o. 4

2 Covers by Clint Whiting, painter in Holladay, Utah. Front cover: Lift, acrylic on board, 18x24 (2014): There are moments in life when we find ourselves in need of a hand; at other times, we are able to lend a hand. Back cover: Tree of Life, oil on board, 18x24 (2014): And it came to pass that I beheld a tree, whose fruit was desirable to make one happy (1 Ne. 8:10). The Mormon History Association The Mormon History Association { association.org} is an independent nonprofit 501(c)3 organization devoted to all aspects of the Mormon past. It strives to be the preeminent catalyst and forum worldwide for encouraging the scholarly study of Mormon history. It pursues its mission by sponsoring annual conferences; encouraging the highest quality research and publication; and awarding book, article, and other prizes. Its official periodical, the Journal of Mormon History, fosters the publication of independent, scholarly research. Membership in the association is open to all. Copyright 2015 Mormon History Association. Printed in the United States of America. ISSN Copies of articles may be made for teaching and for research purposes free of charge and without securing permission, as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. For other uses, permission must be obtained from the author(s). All statements of opinion are the authors own and not necessarily those of the Mormon History Association, its officers, directors, editors, and/or members. Authors alone are responsible for the factual accuracy of their articles, including quotations, citations, and all other uses of source materials. Articles are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life, published by ABC-CLIO. This periodical is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database (ATLA RDB ) and is also included in the full-text ATLA Serials (ATLAS ) collection. Both are products of the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606; atla@atla.com; The entire back run of the Journal of Mormon History is available online through JSTOR, the not-for-profit digital archive. For available issues and more information, see The Journal of Mormon History is published by the Mormon History Association and is distributed to association members. Annual dues are: regular, $60, including partner, $70; student, $30; digital only (U.S. and international), $25; institutional, $80; sustaining, $125; patron, $250; and donor, $500. For subscriptions outside the United States, DVDs of back issues, individual back issues, and all questions, see or contact (801) Digital copies of back issues are available at EBSCO and Utah State University Digital Commons: usu.edu/mormonhistory. Members are asked to notify the association immediately if they change their membership mailing address, including their address.

3 The Journal of Mormon History Publisher: Mormon History Association (founded 1965) President: Laurie Maffly-Kipp President-Elect: Brian Q. Cannon Past President: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Executive Director Robert L. Racker Outgoing Interim Executive Director: Mary Ellen Robertson Directors: Patrick Q. Mason (2016) Jonathan A. Stapley (2016) Joseph Stuart (2017) Bryon C. Andreasen (2017) J. B. Haws (2017) Darius Gray (2018) Lisa Olsen Tait (2018) Digital Commons: Noel A. Carmack Electronic Initiatives Coordinator: Connie Lamb Executive Board Production Staff Editor: Martha Taysom Copy Editor: Lavina Fielding Anderson Board of Editors: Production Manager: Brent Corcoran Ronald O. Barney Art Director: Thayne Whiting Gary J. Bergera Book Review Editor: Ronald E. Bartholomew Matthew Bowman Assistant Book Review Editor: Gary Woods Scott C. Esplin Advertising Manager: Steve Eccles Sarah Barringer Gordon Editorial Staff: David Hall Elizabeth Ann Anderson Benjamin E. Park Ryan Stuart Bingham Michael Harold Paulos Laura Compton D. Michael Quinn Linda Wilcox DeSimone Andrea Radke-Moss Samuel Alonzo Dodge George D. Smith Sherman Feher Gary Topping Zachary R. Jones Christian Larsen Linda Lindstrom H. Michael Marquardt Jerilyn Wakefield Manuscripts dealing with any aspect of the Mormon past are welcome. Primary consideration is given to manuscripts that make a strong contribution to the knowledge of Mormon history through new interpretations and/or new information. Acceptance is based on originality, literary quality, accuracy, and relevance. Reprints and simultaneous submissions are not accepted. Submissions should be sent to mormonjournal.taysom1@gmail.com in Word. The author s name and contact information should be located on a page separate from the manuscript. All illustrative materials, including maps, charts, tables, and graphs, should be attached in a separate file and not embedded in the electronic document. All such illustrative materials must be supplied by the author. The Journal s style guide, based on the Chicago Manual of Style and the LDS Style Guide, including specifications for illustrative materials, is available at The peer-reviewed evaluation process usually takes three to six months.

4 JOURNAL OF MORMON HISTORY Volume 41, No. 4 October 2015 CONTENTS LETTER Re: John C. Bennett Gary James Bergera vi ARTICLES Alexander Campbell: Another Restorationist RoseAnn Benson 1 The Young Democrats and High Nibley at BYU Nancy S. Kader 43 Joseph Smith s First Vision in Historical Context: How a Historical Narrative became Theological Gregory A. Prince 74 Memory as Evidence: Dating Joseph Smith s Plural Marriages to Louisa Beaman, Zina Jacobs, and Presendia Buell Gary James Bergera 95 The Lamanites Shall Blossom as the Rose : The Indian Student Placement Program, Mormon Whiteness, and Indigenous Identity ROUNDTABLE Elise Boxer 132 Reassessing the Refiner s Fire: A Twentieth Anniversary Retrospective 177 Introduction Benjamin E. Park 178 Camelot s Crucible: The Historiographic Context for Refiner s Fire Benjamin E. Park 188

5 CONTENTS v The Refiner s Fire: Rites of Scholarly Passage Susanna Morrill 198 Refiner s Fire and the Yates Thesis: Hermeticism, Esotericism, and the History of Christianity Stephen J. Fleming, Egil Asprem, and Ann Taves 209 Narrative Arcs and Scholarly Nerve David F. Holland 221 The Refiner s Fire s Atlantic Neil Kamil 228 The Refiner s Fire: In Retrospect John L. Brooke 228 REVIEWS Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker, eds. The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane William P. Mackinnon 238 Karen Lynn Davidson, Richard L. Jensen, and David J. Whittaker, eds. Histories Volume 2: Assigned Histories, Vol. 2 in the Histories Series of the Joseph Smith Papers Ronald E. Bartholomew 247 Raymond Kuehne. Henry Burkhardt and LDS Realpolitik in Communist East Germany Fiona Givens 264 Brock Cheney. Plain but Wholesome: Foodways of the Mormon Pioneers Kate Holbrook 269 Joseph Barnard Romney. Look Upstream: Junius Romney in Mexico and the United States Sherman L. Fleek 272 Richard Francaviglia, Mapmakers of New Zion: A Cartographic History of Mormonism Henry H. Goldman 276

6 LETTER Re: John C. Bennett Brian Hales s article, John C. Bennett and Joseph Smith s Polygamy: Addressing the Question of Reliability (41, no. 2 [April 2015]: ), asserts that some of us may have depended too uncritically on Bennett in attempting to recover the history of LDS plural marriage in Nauvoo, Illinois. While there is much to agree with in Hales s provocative analysis, I believe few researchers today would argue that Bennett is wholly reliable. As I wrote a decade ago: Given the many conflicting allegations surrounding Smith and Bennett, it is difficult to know with certainty who is telling the truth, who is not, and when. 1 The relevant issue, it seems to me, is not so much the extent to which Bennett may have been an early polygamy insider (Hales s term to imply a certain intimacy with Joseph Smith s controversial teaching) as how best to treat Bennett despite our biases as a potential source of accurate information. Hales made clear his own approach to Smith, Bennett, and Nauvoo plural marriage when he wrote in 2007 that he intended to DEFEND THE PROPHET (WITH DOCUMENTATION) (emphasis in original). 2 It should not be surprising, then, that Hales sometimes presents his sources in ways that portray Smith as positively, from Hales s perspective, as possible. In Bennett s case, Hales seeks to distance Smith from Bennett, whom Hales regards as a lascivious sexual opportunist. Hales writes, for example, that Bennett, not Smith, introduced the terms spiritual wives and spiritual wifery into LDS parlance. When Smith s own plural wives and other Nauvoo contemporaries referred to spiritual wives as they called them in that day, to spiritual wives, as we were then termed, and to spiritual wifery, Hales dismisses such uses as Bennett-tainted misrememberings. Yet considering the dearth of contemporary primary documentation regarding Smith s polygamy, isn t it as plausible perhaps even more likely that Smith s wives and followers took the terms from Smith, as they imply they did, rather than from Bennett? Hales notes that Smith sometimes looked to Church members outside the LDS hierarchy typically men who could facilitate Smith s access to potential plural wives in establishing plural mar- 1 Bergera, John C. Bennett, Joseph Smith, and the Beginnings of Mormon Plural Marriage in Nauvoo, John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 25 (2005): Request for Copying Services, signed by Hales and dated November 12, 2007, emphasis in original, available at org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jsp_book_27.pdf, p. 9; retrieved December 6, 2014.

7 Letter riage except when it comes to Bennett. Bennett, for thirty-nine weeks in resided with the Smith family and hence was physically closer to Joseph Smith than many other polygamy insiders. One wonders about the kinds of discussions which would have occurred during plural marriage s gestation such proximity generated. Hales also has yet to address the situation regarding Smith s younger brother, William, who was, for a time, a participant in Bennett s sexual activities, who used his relationship to Joseph Smith to justify Bennett s and his abuses, but who was never really punished for his involvement. Does not failing to treat William and Bennett s collaboration risk leaving readers with an incomplete understanding of Bennett s closeness to Joseph Smith? On the other hand, Hales accepts the accuracy of Bennett s version of Joseph Smith s so-called happiness letter, which functioned as an invitation for Nancy Rigdon, daughter of Sidney Rigdon, to become one of Smith s plural wives. Happiness is the object and design of our existence, Smith explained,... and this path is... keeping all the commandments of God. But we cannot keep all the commandments without first v knowing them, and we cannot expect to know all... unless we comply with or keep those we have already received. That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another. How might Smith s espousal of a heaven-directed morality explain how he and others justified engaging in activities transgressive of nineteenth-century and later sensibilities? Hales also concurs that Bennett correctly identified some of Joseph Smith s early plural wives, though he thinks that Bennett s source was someone other than Smith. Who else, besides Bennett, enjoyed the same physical proximity to Smith ca ? Bennett was many things: a charismatic scoundrel, a political trouble-shooter, a con man and liar, a gifted orator, and a self-serving opportunist. But I worry that an approach that takes as its primary goal to defend Smith, and to discredit Bennett, limits the scope of our investigations and potentially misrepresents the past. What is needed is an annotated edition of Bennett s important, problematic History of the Saints that distinguishes responsibly, dispassionately, non-defensively truth from error. Gary James Bergera Salt Lake City

8 A youthful Alexander Campbell, whose penchant for deeply studying the scriptures, caused him to advocate a restoration of the ancient order of things. Artist, Edward Dean Neuenswander.

9 ALEXANDER CAMPBELL: ANOTHER RESTORATIONIST RoseAnn Benson Students of Mormon history may be familiar with the term Campbellite because Parley P. Pratt suggested that the first missionaries heading west in 1830 to preach the gospel to the Lamanites stop in Mentor, Ohio, to see his friend Sidney Rigdon, his former Campbellite minister prior to his conversion to Mormonism. 1 Perhaps some know of the angry interactions in Hiram, Ohio, between the Campbellites and Mormonites, as they were pejoratively called at the time, or Alexander Campbell s published essay on the Book of Mormon, his main title Delusions proclaiming his point of view. 2 Many of the new converts to Mormonism in the Ohio region were previously reformed Baptists, Campbell s affiliation until about This competition for seekers of truth led to conflicts between the two groups. Interestingly, both Alexander Campbell and Joseph Smith called their life s religious work restorations; however, their approaches and outcomes were very different. 3 David Harrell, ROSEANN BENSON {roseannbenson@gmail.com} is an adjunct faculty member in religious education at Brigham Young University. 1 Followers of the reform movement of Alexander Campbell were commonly called Campbellites. However, until they left the Baptist church about 1830, they considered themselves reformed Baptists. 2 Alexander Campbell, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon; with an Examination of Its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of Its Pretences to Divine Authority, Millennial Harbinger 2, no. 2 (February 1831): Douglas A. Foster, director of the Restoration Studies Center at Abilene Christian University, points out that neither the Book of 1

10 2 The Journal of Mormon History a scholar in the Churches of Christ, noted, To speak of restoration is to speak of movements, not of one movement. 4 Such a statement may be surprising to some Latter-day Saints, who believe theirs is the restoration church; for them Campbell s restoration movement is relatively unknown. Similarly, those who trace their beginnings to Campbell believe they were reared in the restoration movement; for them Smith s restoration is not considered as such. 5 Because the Journal s readers are very familiar with Joseph Mormon nor Doctrine and Covenants uses restoration frequently although it is implied from the beginning. He argues that the designation of Smith s church as a restoration movement is a later development. Douglas A. Foster, Community of Christ and Churches of Christ: Extraordinary Distinctions, Extraordinary Parallels, in Restoration Studies, Vol. 14, edited by Peter A. Judd (Independence, Mo.: John Whitmer Historical Association/Community of Christ Seminary Press: 2013), 4 5. However, a computer search of LDS. org Scriptures using the terms restore, restored, restoring, and restoration in contexts that employ restoring priesthood powers, restoring Zion, restoring knowledge of true principles and doctrines especially regarding Christ, and restoring the house of Israel identifies a number of passages in the Doctrine and Covenants, Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith Translation, and Articles of Faith. See, for example Doctrine and Covenants 27:6; 45:17; 84:2; 86:10; 103:13, 29; 124:28; 127:8; 128:17; and 132:40, 45. The Book of Mormon yields 2 Ne. 3:13, 24; 30:5, 8; Alma 37:19; Hel. 15:11; 3 Ne. 5:25; 29:1; and Mormon 9:36. See also Joseph Smith Translation Matt. 17:10, 14, and John 1:22. See also Article of Faith No David Edwin Harrell Jr., Epilogue, in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, edited by Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), Various offshoots of the union created by Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone include the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, or Churches of Christ. See Paul M. Blowers, Anthony L. Dunnavant, Douglas A. Foster, and D. Newell Williams, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), xxi.

11 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 3 Smith and his restoration, this article will primarily focus on the lifework of Alexander Campbell and his father, Thomas. Thomas s strong paternal influence during Alexander s formative years established the trajectory of his life as one of the foremost restorationists of the nineteenth century. Understanding the Campbells history is key to appreciating why Alexander s response to Joseph Smith and the Mormons was so vehement. The conflict between the two restorations was both philosophical and personal. Whereas Joseph Smith claimed visions, revelations, and gifts of the Spirit that were part of religious enthusiasm, Campbell founded his restoration in Enlightenment thinking. This article will discuss restorationism s place in the post-revolutionary Second Great Awakening, the era of Enlightenment, enthusiastic revivalism, reformation, and religious conflict. It illustrates how Campbell s reasoned restoration reflected his Scottish Enlightenment common-sense education so very different from Joseph Smith s enthusiastic revelatory restoration. FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS Alexander Campbell was born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1788 to Thomas Campbell and Jane Corneigle Campbell, both of whom held strong moral and religious convictions. Thomas grew up in a strict Anglican (Church of Ireland) home in County Down in northeastern Ireland. 6 In his early youth, 6 The Scot-Irish Archibald Campbell, Thomas s father, converted from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Although the majority religion in Ireland was Catholic and most of the Scottish immigrants were Presbyterians, Anglicanism was considered the ascendency or ruling class of Ireland and would have given him privileges unavailable to Catholics or Presbyterians. The other two religious groups were considered dissenters. D. Newell Williams, Douglas A. Foster, and Paul M. Blowers, eds., Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History (St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press/Nashville, Tenn.: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 2013), (hereafter cited as Stone-Campbell Movement).

12 4 The Journal of Mormon History The United Kingdom featuring key cities and counties in Ireland and Scotland. Cartography by Edward Dean Neuenswander. Thomas s inherent love of the scriptures led him to associate with the Covenanters and Seceders, 7 movements within the Scottish Presbyterian Church that he found more devotional than the seemingly cold ritualism that he perceived in the Anglican Church. 8 7 The Covenanters derived their name from the desire to mimic the Old Testament custom of covenants sworn by ancient Israelites. They bound themselves in a National Covenant to maintain Presbyterian doctrines and policies as the sole form of religion in Scotland and protesting the king s efforts to change modes of worship. The Seceders protested against the official Presbyterian Church of Scotland because they claimed it did not recognize Christ as the supreme king, nor was it part of a covenant community. 8 The Scottish General Assembly had abolished patronage in 1690 when William and Mary reestablished Presbyterianism in the Church of Scotland; however, in 1712 the British Parliament reintroduced patronage into the Presbyterian Church of Scotland as an incentive for

13 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 5 Concerned for his own salvation, Thomas s distress became almost more than he could bear. While walking alone in the fields, he received the divine answer for which he had been seeking and felt the love and approval of God as never before. From this moment onward, he considered himself consecrated to the service of God and specially called because he regarded the feelings and sudden change of heart he experienced as proceeding from a direct divine influence. 9 Thomas was sent to a nearby military regimental school for his education. His father was opposed to his change in religion but eventually relented, and Thomas entered the University of Glasgow to study divinity for three years. At the university, the Scottish landowners, who as hereditary owners of the property on which the local church was built could name the minister, to support Queen Anne rather than the Catholic Stuarts. When the Presbyterian Church of Scotland reluctantly allowed patronage to be reinstated, a group seceded from it. The Seceders refused to allow patronage at all and withdrew from the General Synod of the Church of Scotland and in 1733 formed their own Associate Synod. Stone-Campbell Movement, Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 2 vols. (Germantown, Tenn.: Religious Book Service, 1897), 1: Alexander Campbell designated Dr. Robert Richardson, long-time friend, family physician, and co-editor of and contributor to the Millennial Harbinger as his official biographer. Richardson was tutored as a youth by Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott. He officially joined Campbell s restoration in 1829 and had access to papers and personal reminiscences of Campbell that other biographers did not. His Memoirs are considered an insider s perspective of Alexander Campbell and the first complete and, to date, the most extensive account of his life. See his Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 513. Stone-Campbell Movement, , also contains biographical information. Douglas A. Foster, director of the Center for Restoration Studies at Abilene Christian University, is currently at work on a critical biography. Other biographies are dismissed by restorationist researchers as hagiographies or do not have the comprehensive view of Richardson and later scholars.

14 6 The Journal of Mormon History Thomas was thoroughly immersed in the anti-traditional principles of the Scottish Enlightenment. Two of the major philosophers were Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, who dominated this movement at the university during the eighteenth century. These two Scottish thinkers promoted a reasoned approach to ethics based on universal human instincts an innate moral sense. 10 This system was made popular through a reading curriculum founded in common-sense reasoning and called Scotland s theistic mental science. These principles allowed for the repudiation of long-accepted cultural, social, political, and religious foundations tradition and history, divine revelation and the authority of religious denominations, social hierarchy, and inherited government and led eventually to an understanding that there were self-evident truths upon which society could be organized. 11 In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon had developed a scientific method highlighting the glory of God s handiwork which he believed would allow human beings to understand all of the hidden secrets of the universe. This method involved collecting data, conducting experiments, and carefully interpreting the results, thus learning the secrets of nature, and perhaps how God worked, by organized observation. Combining rational thinking and the scientific method, Hutcheson believed that, by attending systematically to what moral sense communicated, one could develop an ethical construct. The main focus of Hutcheson s ethical philosophy was defined by the Baconian scientific method: data collection from which conclusions through inductive reasoning could be drawn. As applied to ethics, self-conscious examination became the scientific data from which one drew 10 Peter W. Williams, America's Religions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, eds., Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), The results of this movement were that the only two reliable sources became the Bible and science.

15 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 7 broader conclusions about the nature of human existence. 12 Once Thomas completed his literary course work, he entered the Secession Presbyterian theological school of the Anti- Burghers. As mentioned, the Secession movement (Seceders) was opposed to the patronage which allowed wealthy landowners to appoint pastors instead of the representative presbytery government, and the Anti-Burgher movement was opposed to public officials being required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. 13 Seceders believed that these requirements were political in nature and an encroachment on religious freedom. Although freedom of political allegiance and local control became issues in the Campbell family, Thomas was more liberal and tolerant in his views and refused to become involved in the political and religious contention that pitted Catholics against Protestants and Irish against British. 14 In time, Thomas became a probationary Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian minister, sent to a congregation that lacked a fixed ministry. Likely prior to this time, as he traveled back and forth between Glasgow and northern part of Ireland, he became acquainted with and married Jane Corneigle, who was descended 12 Mark A. Noll, America s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 94. The Baconian method could be applied not only to the physical sciences but also to organizing ethics, epistemology, theology, and scripture study. 13 The Seceder Presbyterians further divided between Burgher and anti-burgher over the Burgess oath that was required of city officials in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Perth to keep Catholics out of public office after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. City officials were required to swear support to the true religion professed in this realm and renounce Roman Papistry. The Burgher Seceders believed this true religion could be interpreted as referring to the Seceder Presbyterian Church, whereas the anti-burgher Seceders did not, believing it to be interpreted as the Presbyterian Church from which they had seceded. Stone-Campbell Movement, Ibid., 18.

16 8 The Journal of Mormon History from French Huguenots. 15 This faction of the Protestant Reformation became known as the Reformed Church in France whose beliefs were greatly influenced by John Calvin. 16 They were highly critical of the doctrine and rituals of worship in the Catholic Church, believing instead that salvation came through simple faith in God and obedience to the teachings of the Bible. Persecution caused the Huguenots to flee from France for various other countries in Jane s ancestors had settled in County Antrim in the northern part of Ireland. Her parents were strict Calvinistic Presbyterians, and she was raised memorizing and reciting scriptures. Her capacity for scripture memorization was legendary, beginning in childhood and lasting until she was quite old. Alexander had great praise for her, both as his mother and as his father s helpmeet in the Christian ministry. 17 During his formative years, Alexander s main interests were outdoor activities and sports. He spent several years in boarding schools away from home, living with uncles and others. Upon his return home at about age nine, his father desired to supervise his education; however, he found an uninterested son who was averse to the confinement required for serious study. Thomas determined to subdue Alexander s desire for sport and to break him in to 15 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: In addition to Alexander, the oldest child, Thomas and Jane had six more children: Dorothea, Nancy, Jane, Thomas, Archibald, and Alicia. Three other children died in infancy. Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:29, The five points of Calvinism are often expressed with the acronym TULIP: total depravity (meaning total inability and original sin), unconditional election, limited grace, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints (once saved always saved). However, this summary does not fully represent his views. It was developed for the 1618 Synod of Dordrecht (Council of Dort) which was held to settle the controversy with the Arminians. 17 Alexander Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, together with a Brief Memoir of Mrs. Jane Campbell (Cincinnati, Ohio: H. S. Bosworth, 1861),

17 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 9 his books by putting him to work as a farm laborer. 18 After working hard for several years, Alexander s intellectual nature began to assert itself. He had matured not only physically but also intellectually, gaining a love of reading and desiring to become one of the best scholars in the kingdom. 19 Because Thomas Campbell was college educated and supplemented his preaching by teaching students, he was well qualified to guide the education of young Alexander. 20 Consequently, Alexander became well educated in Greek, Latin, and French, the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke, the scientific method of Francis Bacon, and their mutual application to common sense moral reasoning. In particular, Alexander admired Locke s Letters on Toleration, with its concepts of religious and civil liberty, and The Essay on the Human Understanding, with its views that human knowledge and understanding began at birth and moved forward. 21 Locke s philosophy influenced Campbell s view of the nature of man, the manner in which human knowledge originates, and the channels through which any communication from God must be made to man. 22 Alexander s reading interests illustrate that he enjoyed thinking deeply about the acquisition of knowledge found in Lockean epistemology and applying the inductive reasoning found in Bacon s scientific method to his reading of the scriptures; however, he always maintained a strict separation between the sources of knowledge of the natural and the supernatural world Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Ibid. 20 Ibid., 1:1 2, Winfred Ernest Garrison, The Sources of Alexander Campbell s Theology (St. Louis, Mo.: Christian Publishing, 1900), ; Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:33 34; also Noll, America s God, Garrison, The Sources of Alexander Campbell s Theology, 92 94, 107 9, See also Samuel Morris Eames, The Philosophy of Alexander Campbell (Bethany, W.V.: Bethany College, 1966), Richard M. Tristano, The Origins of the Restoration Movement: An

18 10 The Journal of Mormon History His religious training was as vigorous as his literary education. Daily, both morning and evening, the family worshipped by singing hymns, reading scriptures, memorizing Bible passages, and calling upon God in prayer. 24 These activities, along with the strong example of his father who believed in the supreme superiority of the Bible above all human compositions, molded Alexander s character into the intellectual, well-spoken, and well-reasoned preacher that he would become. 25 In a memoir about his father, Alexander shared a rhetorical question his father had posited: Are we living for time, or are we living for eternity? Such were the discussions he remembered his father leading in the family devotionals. His respect and admiration for his father s influence on his own life led him to confess that whatever good, little or much, I may have achieved under God, I owe it all... to his paternal care and instruction, and especially to his example. 26 In 1798 Thomas accepted a call to minister to a newly established Seceder church in Ahorey in the northern part of Ireland. Sometimes on Sunday evenings, Thomas and Alexander would quietly visit a congregation of Independents, a group loosely associated with some of the beliefs of the Presbyterian Church in the nearby town of Rich-Hill. 27 At these meetings, regionally well-known speakers such as Rowland Hill, James Alexander Haldane, and John Walker visited and advocated a far more liberal point of view than the Seceder Presbyterians. All of these men were highly educated, but each eschewed formal religion for independence, advocated itinerant preaching, and Intellectual History (Atlanta, Ga.: Glenmary Research Center, 1988), Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Ibid., 1: Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, iv. 27 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:60. When there were no Seceder meetings, occasional hearings to other churches were permitted but not encouraged.

19 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 11 nondenominational churches. 28 Hill was denied ordination into the Church of England six times perhaps because he taught a mix of Calvinist and Arminian ideas. 29 He preached in the open air and without ordination, drawing opposition from both the authorities and mobs. Haldane, initially part of the Church of Scotland, left it and, with his followers, organized Churches of Christ throughout Scotland and Ireland. Walker, a minister at Trinity College in Dublin for the Anglican Church of Ireland, resigned his position because his religious views had changed. His followers called themselves The Church of God. The fundamental principles of these Independent preachers apparently struck a chord with Alexander. In the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, the people were encouraged to read, but not permitted to interpret scripture, because interpretation was the minister s calling. Within the Independent Church, however, the right to judge for oneself the meaning of scripture was a distinguishing characteristic and points to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. Additionally, the 28 An itinerant preacher preaches the basics of Christianity in various locations and may or may not be ordained to a pastoral office or affiliated with a formally recognized religious community. 29 Calvinist and Arminian doctrines are considered the division in Protestant thought regarding soteriology (salvation). The Presbyterians were Calvinist, and the Baptists were almost universally Calvinist, with the exception of the General Baptists. Methodists were Arminian. The doctrines promulgated by John Calvin in the 1500s are typically identified with the acronym TULIP. See above. Doctrines associated with Jacobus Arminius and his followers, called the Remonstrants, in the early 1600s are: (1) The Fall affected humanity but did not predestinate humans to depravity. (2) Free will in spiritual matters is aided by the grace of God, meaning that election is conditional based upon individual choice. (3) Free will allows an individual to reject grace; no one is predestined to salvation. (4) Salvation requires the combined efforts of God who calls, and humans who respond. The believers in Arminianism are mixed in their belief of absolute regeneration or the idea that those who were once believers can fall from salvation. The 1618 Synod of Dordrecht condemned Arminianism.

20 12 The Journal of Mormon History Independents rejected the authority of the presbyteries, synods, assemblies, and conventions. Likely the ideas of independence percolated in young Alexander s mind as he contemplated his father s failed attempts to bring reform to their own congregation. Thomas had advocated for more frequent celebrations of the Lord s Supper than the standard of twice a year, lamenting that his recommendations were treated with indifference by the presbytery and synod. Further, Alexander could not help but observe the freedom of opinion and church governance that the Independents enjoyed. The Scottish Independents in the Campbells neighborhood were Haldanean adherents that weekly partook of the Lord s Supper and gave contributions for the poor but opposed communal living and the washing of feet. They also believed that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit had ceased. 30 It appears that initially, one effect of these conflicting doctrines and practices on Alexander was to increase his reverence for the Scriptures as the only infallible guide in religion. 31 In his late teens, Alexander began to pursue his own education and study with great passion, staying up late at the night and rising early in the morning. Due to the size of his family with six living siblings, it appeared that an opportunity to attend the university would not be possible. In addition to his studies, he was an assistant at his father s school and a private tutor to local children whose parents could afford it. His father, excessively busy with all his teaching and congregational responsibilities, was discouraged by his efforts to bring reform and greater unity among the churches of Ireland and by the political and religious 30 James Alexander Haldane, A View of the Social Worship and Ordinances Observed by the First Christians, Drawn from the Sacred Scriptures Alone Being an Attempt to Enforce Their Divine Obligation; and to Represent the Guilt and Evil Consequences of Neglecting Them (Edinburgh, Scotland: J. Ritchie, 1805), 65, 79, 92. See also Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:75.

21 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 13 unrest. He grew increasingly ill over a period of years. 32 In June 1800 he recorded in his journal that he felt dull and heavy, weak and sickly, both in body and in mind. 33 Finally his physician warned him he would die if he didn t give up his rigorous activities and recommended a long sea voyage as essential to his recovery. At the strong encouragement of his physician, family, and friends, Thomas Campbell determined to attempt a voyage to the New World. Alexander made his father s departure possible by volunteering to fulfill his father s commitments at the school. At almost twenty, Alexander was described as tall, athletic, and well-proportioned and quite capable of taking care of the family. 34 Additionally, he announced his own plan to immigrate to America when he came of age. Convinced on all accounts that he should go and make preparations for his family to follow, Thomas sailed April 1807 from Londonderry, Ireland, on the ship Brutus. Upon landing in Philadelphia, he learned that the united Burgher and Anti-burgher Presbyterians of the Associate Synod of North America were meeting in the city. He presented his papers and was assigned to the Chartiers Presbytery in southwestern Pennsylvania with his base in the town of Washington. 35 RELIGIOUS AWAKENING Almost a year and a half after Thomas s departure, the Campbell family, consisting of the seven children and mother 32 In 1804 Thomas had proposed to the synod the reuniting of the Burgher and Anti-Burgher factions of the Seceder Presbyterian Church in Ireland. (After all, these factions were a reality only in Scotland.) The Glasgow Synod quashed his proposal, not even allowing a vote to permit the Irish churches to make their own decision. Stone- Campbell Movement, Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Stone-Campbell Movement, 19; Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:76 81.

22 Cover of Alexander Campbell s diary, Journal of a Voyage from Ireland to America, Courtesy Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, Tennessee. 14

23 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 15 Jane, prepared to sail to America. 36 On September 28, 1808, as they boarded the Hibernia in Londonderry, Ireland, to sail for Philadelphia, Alexander noted, The sailors were almost all young and inexperienced. 37 He had a strong premonition in a dream that the ship they were on was in grave danger. 38 In his reminiscences he described in horrifying detail what actually happened: On Monday 3 October at 3 o clock we weighed anchor for as we thought the last time till we behold the [illegible] haven. The wind which was just now fair enough and a good sea blowing gale turned rather against us and soon we found we were unable to compete with it. We ran before it the whole night. [The] next morning we found ourselves on the coasts of Scotland and run into one of the western isles into a rocky shore and a very crooked cay... we were told that Locham Daal [Loch Indaal] Cay was very dangerous, that many ships were wrecked there. On the night of 7th of October about 10 o clock the wind rose so high that we 36 Jane, the fourth of the living siblings, had contracted smallpox, which required quarantine for several months. Consequently, they postponed sailing from the spring to the fall of Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Alexander Campbell, Journal of a Voyage from Ireland towards America 1808, manuscript D, 12L, Disciples of Christ Historical Society, Nashville, Tenn. Manuscript D is the designation for the entire journal, 12 denotes the page (not numbered in the journal), and the letter L designates left page while R designates right page. I express appreciation to Dr. Carisse Berryhill, archivist at Abilene Christian University, for sharing her notations on Campbell s journal and to archivists Sara Harwell and Elaine Philpott at the Disciples of Christ Historical Society for making all of the journals they had readily available for my examination. None of these journals have been transcribed. 38 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: This dream was not recorded in Campbell s Journal of a Voyage. However, he may have considered it a sacred personal experience that he shared only with family and very close friends such as his authorized biographer Robert Richardson.

24 16 The Journal of Mormon History were blown ashore and dash[ed] upon the rocks. In the midst of all this I got upon [the] deck the [main crew?] almost on her one side. For a little me thought that devouring flood must be the inevitable fate of every soul on board in about ½ an hour when the masts and rigging were all cut off. I began to weep a little but the long night [brought?] us down into despair. 39 Alexander s description of the tempest and the threat of death was not an exaggeration. That night another ship and large sloop also wrecked on the rocks nearby and no one survived. 40 As he contemplated death, Alexander found his priorities shifting: Kingdoms and scepters offered would not excite one wish. Their value here was like bubbles on a stream, not to be hunted after not to be desired... [and were] vain. 41 It appears he could clearly see the selfish nature and insignificance of most human ambitions, as well as the fragility of mortality. He recalled his father s life and devotion to God and, according to his biographer, resolved that if saved from the present peril, he would certainly spend his entire life in the ministry of the gospel. 42 His family survived the shipwreck but was forced to postpone their journey to America. This delay became providential for Alexander s intellectual and spiritual development. The family determined to remain in Scotland for the winter, relocating to Glasgow while they awaited the next sailing season. Fortunately, Alexander was able to obtain several introductory letters for Greville Ewing, a noted Independent religious leader. He obtained passage for his family from Bowmore to Glasgow and went ahead to find 39 Campbell, Journal of a Voyage from Ireland towards America 1808, 11R, 12L-R.The map of the United Kingdom shows the location of Loch Indaal Cay. 40 Eva Jean Wrather, Shipwrecks, Alexander Campbell, Adventurer in Freedom: A Literary Biography (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 2005), Campbell, Journal of a Voyage from Ireland towards America 1808, 12L. 42 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:102. Campbell did not record this commitment in his personal journal of the voyage.

25 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 17 lodgings for them all. As the family recovered from their frightening ordeal, Alexander studied for a year under Professor Ewing, a religious reformer, and under Professor George Jardine, who taught Scottish common-sense reasoning and had been a student of philosopher Thomas Reid. Alexander began to record his reflections and spiritual growth in both shorthand and Latin, confessing the usual deficiencies in spiritual-mindedness, selfconsecration and attention to duty, and the usual longings after a higher spiritual life. In time his reflections gave place to broader and more elevated views, and to appropriate meditations upon certain portions of Scripture. 43 As it had been during Thomas s time there, the University of Glasgow continued to generate Scottish Enlightenment ideas, similarly influencing the younger Campbell s thinking. His father had provided the introduction to these ideas and now the university broadened and deepened them, making him a capable and articulate spokesman for the application of common-sense moral reasoning to the scriptures. In his school journal, Juvenile Essays on Various Subjects by Alex Campbell in the University of Glasgow 1808, he wrote essays and orations about the following topics which give insight into some of his studies on Enlightenment thinking: Defining Genius, its culture, the faculties it more completely defines, etc. Logic as the art of directing the powers of knowledge in the search of truth and communication. Socratic Dialogue. The Difference between a Judgment and a Proposition. On the Syllogisms. On the Aristotilian [sic] Method of Dispute. 44 Alexander s mentor at the University of Glasgow Seminary, Professor Ewing, was an advocate of the religious ideas of 43 Ibid., 1: Campbell did not record this sentiment in his journal; however, his journal entries include notable academic and spiritual acumen. 44 Alexander Campbell, Juvenile Essays on Various Subjects by Alex Campbell in the University of Glasgow 1808, Manuscript B, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.

26 18 The Journal of Mormon History John Glas, Robert Sandeman, and Robert and James Haldane, eighteenth-century reformers. 46 Glas advocated a reinstatement of the primitive order of the church. Some of Sandeman s main ideas included separation of church and state with local autonomy, weekly worship with the Lord s Supper and scriptural reading, and no creeds, very similar to the ideas the Haldanes. Likely Alexander was previously familiar with brothers James and Robert Haldane from occasional secret attendance with his father at the evening meetings of the Independents in Rich- Hill. Both Campbells were either profoundly influenced by James Haldane s writing or at least came to many of the same conclusions. Haldane s intent was to encourage scripture study, a point with which the Campbells agreed. Thomas included it in his Declaration and Address. The Campbells also believed, like Haldane, that the New Testament contained all that was 46 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: John Glas and Robert Sandeman were eighteenth-century Scottish reformers who were connected by Sandeman s marriage to Glas s daughter and by some elements of their religious philosophy. Their followers were called respectively Glasites and Church of Christ. Glas, John in Blowers, Dunnavant, Foster, and Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ; E. Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2003), 294. According to Sandeman, Robert, in Blowers, Dunnavant, Foster, and Williams, Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 669, The role of faith in salvation, plurality of elders, and weekly communion are the clearest examples of a doctrinal relationship between Campbell and Sandeman. Campbell, however, vehemently denied any influence from Sandeman. Some scholars argue that Campbell s idea of faith arising through the proclamation of the facts comes from Sandeman and that Campbell s Christological doctrines came from the Haldanes. Sandeman proposed that neither good works nor a persuasion of being forgiven gave evidence of saving faith.... Faith meant intellectual assent to Christian teaching about redemption through Christ, and everyone who assented could be assured of salvation. Holifield, Theology in America, 139.

27 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 19 necessary for the Christian faith, that communalism and the washing of feet were not essential practices, and that a diversity of opinions on worship and ordinances should not be allowed. The Campbells also believed in unity but forebore dictating a mode of baptism until studying it further. Haldane advocated that where possible, the laying on of hands should accompany ordination to a particular office or work and for healing the sick. Alexander subscribed to the laying on of hands for ordination but not for healing the sick, which he considered unique to the apostolic era. Haldane restricted the laying on of hands for conveying the Holy Ghost to the apostles. Neither he nor Alexander connected this ordinance with baptism. Haldane listed other ordinances observed by the apostolic church including studying and proclaiming the gospel facts and truths, fasting, making contributions to care for the poor, the Lord s Supper, praying to and praising God, sanctification of the first day of the week, and baptism. Initially he advocated infant baptism, equating it with circumcision, but in 1808 embraced believers baptism by immersion. Alexander agreed with these ordinances and added confession and intercession to the list. 47 Haldane and the Campbells agreed on the extraordinary offices in the apostolic church of apostles, prophets, and evangelists, who were chosen by the Lord himself. Haldane warned against conflating them with the stated offices of elders or bishops, preachers or ruling elders, widows, deacons (who could be both men and women), and pastors all with a diversity of gifts among them to be used for the edification of the church; however, congregations should be independent. The Campbells embraced this view of church polity and agreed with Haldane that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit had ceased because those blessings were confined to the first ages before Christianity 47 Alexander Campbell, Christian System: The Christian System, in Reference to the Union of Christians, and a Restoration of Primitive Christianity, as Plead in the Current Restoration (Cincinnati, Ohio: Bosworth, Chase & Hall, 1871), 63.

28 20 The Journal of Mormon History was established. 48 The Haldanes and Campbells shared a deep devotion to the words in the Bible and held out for the independence of spirit found in lay and itinerant preaching. The Haldane brothers focused on preaching the facts of the scriptures in true Scottish Enlightenment fashion, appealing to the rational common sense of all Christians. Their knowledge and focus on the scriptures made them very successful even among those whose views did not completely coincide with their own. They did not urge the addition of new gospel tenets but looked back to a revival of the Protestant reformation begun by Luther and Calvin. The preaching of Christ crucified was the central part of their teaching all differences regarding ordinances and church organization should be matters of forbearance. They taught that it was the scriptural duty of every Christian, not just of ordained ministers, to warn sinners of God s wrath and to point to Jesus as the way, truth, and life. 49 Like the Haldanes, Alexander Campbell resolved that he would preach the gospel without fee or reward. 50 Campbell s scriptural journal of 1809 reflected his commitment to preparing to preach the gospel. His writings were filled with topics such as The heart is deceitful, On the Being of God and on the Truth of Divine Revelation, On God and Revelation, Ministerial character, For Professions on Confessions of Faith from the Scriptures, Proofs for the Sonship of Jesus, Christ being Eternal, Miracles, Life of Paul: Remarks on the life and conversion of Paul, Occupations of the disciples, Prophecies about Jesus: Quotations of Evangelists from the Prophets [of the Old Testament], Parables and Similes of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion that he drew from reflecting on the Parable of the Talents was a link to democracy leading him to claim that democracy was 48 Haldane, A View of the Social Worship and Ordinances. 49 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:149, 160, 172, 178, Ibid., 1:177.

29 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 21 vindicated by religion. 51 Additionally, he pondered deeply on faith, selecting Matthew 21:21 22 as his scriptural foundation regarding the withering of the fig tree and the promise of power to move mountains, if one asks in faith. He noted that faith is here opposed to doubt. Belief then is to assent of the understanding to the truth of some proposition upon good and undoubtable evidence or testimony one kind of evidence ergo faith is the assent of the mind to the truths of the gospel. 52 This statement on faith embraced the Enlightenment philosophy in the rational collection of facts that appeal to the mind and was based on the Baconian scientific method. Just as he had in Ireland with his father, Alexander often took the opportunity to listen to preachers of different denominations, observing their strengths and weaknesses. He also was aware of the opposition of the clergy in the various churches to every attempt at reformation. Ewing continued to greatly influence Alexander s thinking regarding principles of congregationalism or the belief that churches should be locally and independently run and emancipated from the control of synods and general assemblies. This belief underscored the independent beliefs of the Haldane brothers. 53 The influence of eminent men active in the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment movement guided Alexander s thinking on existing denominations and in particular his family s association with Presbyterianism. 54 Following the end of the school year, the semiannual communion time of the Seceder Presbyterians approached, and Alexander questioned whether he should participate. He underwent the required oral examination 51 Alexander Campbell, A Diary Jany 1st 1809, manuscript E, Disciples of Christ Historical Society. 52 Ibid., 76L. 53 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:176, James and Robert Haldane, Greville Ewing, John Campbell [not related], the writings of Robert Sandeman, and others particularly influenced Campbell. Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:148 49, 157, 160, 172.

30 22 The Journal of Mormon History for someone who did not have papers from his former synod and received the appropriate token to receive communion. However, he still felt uncertain about whether he could conscientiously recognize the Seceder Presbyterian Church as the Church of Christ. As the tokens were collected, he threw his on the plate but did not partake of the sacramental emblems. Thus, the token became the expression not of communion, but of separation. 55 Several months later, passage became available for him and the rest of the family to sail for America. Finally, in August 1809, over two years after Thomas had left, the family recommenced their journey, this time leaving from Greenock, Scotland, on the Latonia. 56 This trip also was not without danger and great distress, as Alexander recorded: Monday morning [the 7th] about 10 o clock I was disagreeably surprised with the intelligence that the ship had sprung a leak.... [The] wind blew a very heavy gale so that the sea ran very high and we were [cold?] greatly tossed indeed [illegible] very apprehensive of danger from the heavings of this gale insomuch that we forgot the danger of the leak. This evening I went to [sleep?] in the midst of many doubts and fears not knowing what might be my fate before I should see the sun of tomorrow. About midnight the wind fell and the danger of the gale was apparently gone. Next day I set to along with other passengers to pump in turn, to assist the sailors, and to know the extent of the leak. 57 The trip was beset by gales and squalls with brief respites of calm days. Between storms Alexander and the other men helped pump water to keep the ship afloat. Campbell noted that many were sure death was imminent. He turned to God with these personal thoughts: Such was that dreadful squall and such its effects (on the ship), but thanks be to the God who raises the winds and quells the tumult of the Seas, that it did not prove fatal 55 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Campbell, Journal of a Voyage from Ireland, 12L. He labeled this time period: Second Part of My Journal from Scotland toward America, 1st August Stone-Campbell Movement, Ibid., 24L R.

31 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 23 to us all, and may his great mercy bless us as a fatherly reproof to us all and instruct us by it to look in on habitual preparation for death when he calls for us. 58 Arriving safely in New York on September 29, Alexander began immediately to write a sermon based on John 5:39, Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me, prefaced with these words: I have heard a voice from heaven from the judge of heaven and earth addressed to me, to you and all people. 59 He then laid forth his arguments regarding the duty to study the scriptures. It seems that this preface and the sermon that followed were the renewal of his vow of loyalty and service to God. 60 Beginning October 5, 1809, the family traveled from New York to Philadelphia, and then westward to Washington, Pennsylvania, where Thomas was living. En route, Alexander discovered that the doors of the hotel where they were lodging had neither locks nor bolts. He felt as if he had discovered a golden age where robbery and injustice were unknown and where Providence had created free institutions, equal rights, educational advantages, and moral and religious obligations among a purely Protestant community. 61 This exuberance about America may have been the foundation for great confidence that the millennial age could be created in the wonderful circumstances found in America and that such a development would bring forth the second coming of Christ. 62 When Alexander and Thomas were united almost two weeks later, Alexander learned that his father had also experienced life- 58 Ibid., 24R. 59 Ibid., 33L. 60 After deliverance again from life-threatening storms, Richardson reported that Campbell renewed his vow of loyalty to God and promise of service in ministering the gospel, even though he did not record this vow in his journal. Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Ibid., 1: Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993), 25.

32 24 The Journal of Mormon History changing events. In southwestern Pennsylvania, although Thomas was highly regarded by the small group of Seceder congregations as the most learned and talented preacher in the region, his socalled liberal bent caused the local Seceder clergy to oppose his efforts to reform the church and promote Christian unity based on the Bible. 63 Thomas fervently believed that religious divisions occurred because human opinions were substituted for the pure apostolic Christianity of the New Testament. 64 In January 1808, the presbytery censured Thomas for not adhering to the Secession Testimony. Specifically, he had invited Presbyterians not of his Associate Synod to partake of the Lord s Supper and expressed in a sermon that there was no divine mandate for requiring a confession of faith, covenants, or fasting prior to administering the Lord s Supper. 65 A specially appointed committee charged with looking into the allegations also accused Thomas of advocating that lay ruling elders had the responsibility of preaching in congregations without a minister, and that it was acceptable to hear ministers not of the Secession Church... and of preaching in a church with a settled minister without being assigned to do so by the Presbytery. 66 He was removed from his ministerial duties. In February 1808, Thomas presented his written response to the charges of heresy in The Presbytery of Chartiers, Washington, County vs. Thomas Campbell, Minister of the Gospel brought before them in protest and appeal. Thomas defended himself by declaring, I dare not venture to trust my own understanding so far as to take upon me to teach anything as a matter of faith or duty but what was expressly taught and enjoined by Divine authority... the very same things that are said and done before our eyes on the sacred page. 67 He 63 Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, These sentiments became part of Thomas Campbell s Declaration and Address. 65 Stone-Campbell Movement, Ibid., Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, 13.

33 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 25 confessed his steadfast adherence to the Divine Standard my absolute and entire rejection of human authority in matters of religion my professed and sincere willingness to walk in all good understanding, communion, and fellowship with sincere, humble Christian brethren. 68 On two of the charges, the presbytery found his answers satisfactory, but they considered his answers on the last charge vague and evasive, decided he was likely guilty as charged, upheld the censure, and removed him from his ministerial standing. In May 1808, Thomas appealed his case to the Associate Synod which found sufficient informalities in the procedures to reprimand the presbytery and remove Thomas s suspension, although they also censured him with a rebuke and admonition. Thomas yielded to their reprimand in order not to give offense and with the hope that he would be able to continue preaching with the Seceder Presbyterians. He was required to preach in Philadelphia for two months under synod supervision. When he returned home to Washington, however, he discovered that the presbytery had given him no preaching assignments. 69 In September 1808 and May 1809, Thomas began to put down his thoughts, first to the presbytery and then the synod. In his letter to the synod, he accused them of ignoring his charges of libel and flagrant injustice against the presbytery. Even after closely examining his principles in his written protest, they had not found any errors. In his final paragraph, he wrote that it was with great reluctance that I find myself in duty bound to refuse submission to their decision as unjust and partial; and also finally to decline their authority while they continue thus to overlook the grievous and flagrant mal-administration of the Presbytery of Chartiers... the corruptions of that Presbytery now become also the corruptions of the whole Synod. 70 Unfortunately, the politics, sectarianism, and practices that caused divisions 68 Ibid. 69 Stone-Campbell Movement, Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, 18; see also Stone- Campbell Movement, 20.

34 26 The Journal of Mormon History in Ireland had migrated with the leaders of the Presbytery of Chartiers and the Associate Synod of Philadelphia. Continuing persecution by those in power caused Thomas to conclude that he must separate formally from all Christian communion and fellowship with the synod and those who were unwilling to work together to heal religious dissensions and whose own points of testimony were more important to them, as he saw it, than the writings of the Bible. 71 Censure, however, did not dissuade the large number of people who continued to be loyal attendees at Thomas Campbell s meetings each week. In time he proposed that a special gathering be held to formalize his ideas of Christian unity based upon the Bible alone. Many of those attending Thomas s meetings were still Presbyterians of some sort, and he did not propose separation from their churches. Their efforts were still vague sentiments of Christian union held together at this point by the personal influence and integrity of Thomas Campbell. He and his followers opposed the intolerant and sectarian spirit which pervaded the existing religions. They were searching for Christian liberty in thought and action which was missing among those they had previously deemed pious followers of Christ, regardless of their particular denomination. With the scriptures as their sole guide, none of Campbell s followers would have to sacrifice truth, and all disagreements not definitively revealed in the Bible could be matters of opinion and forbearance. 72 On August 17, 1809, his followers organized themselves into The Christian Association of Washington. By September of 1809, Thomas had completed his Declaration and Address clarifying the objectives of the movement. It was not a document for separation but an ecumenical call for Christians of all denominations to promote unity and further reform by using the original standard the Bible and simple New 71 Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, 18. See also Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:

35 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 27 Testament Christianity. 73 It was Thomas s signature restoration contribution, consisting of a preamble of how the Christian Association came about, a declaration of nine points giving the purpose and plan of the society, and the address, which was a more extended statement of the motives and intentions of the movement. 74 Alexander noted in his father s memoirs that the immediate cause for the writing of the Declaration and Address was the violent censuring of Thomas by his erstwhile co-presbyters; and in the address portion, Thomas expressed his feelings that the judgment rendered against him was contrary to the law of Christ. In the document, Thomas was able to defend himself and make his case public for unity and reform under the scriptures still holding out a naive hope for reunion with the Seceder Presbyterians. 75 Similar to what had occurred in Ireland, neither the presbytery nor synod was interested in his reform ideas; and jealousy, animosity, envy, slander, and injustice characterized their treatment of Thomas to the point that he was convinced his life was in danger. He testified to his family that nothing but the law of the land had kept his head upon his shoulders Stone-Campbell Movement, Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address, in Charles Alexander Young, ed., Historical Documents Advocating Christian Union ( Joplin, Mo.: College Press, 1985), 35. Many scholars have called the Declaration and Address the founding document for the followers of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. It is also the best document expressing the thoughts of the two major restoration groups that united the Christians of Barton Stone and the Disciples of Christ of Alexander Campbell. Furthermore, it is one of the first documents expressing the importance of ecumenical thought in Christianity. Thomas H. Olbricht and Hans Rollmann, eds., The Quest for Christian Unity, Peace, and Purity in Thomas Campbell s Declaration and Address: Text and Studies, ATLA Monograph Series, no. 46 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000). 75 Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:220.

36 28 The Journal of Mormon History Although indignant at the treatment of his father, Alexander rejoiced that he and his father, albeit in very different ways, had arrived at the same place in their religious sentiments. At the time his family arrived in America in late September 1809, Thomas had just received the proofs for the Declaration and Address which Alexander read with great interest and approval. 77 The foundation for this reformation was self-reliance in reading the Bible. Thomas declared: It is high time for us not only to think, but also to act, for ourselves; to see with our own eyes, and take all our measures directly and immediately from the Divine Standard. 78 Alexander had the conviction, energy, and intelligence to carry forward his father s mandate, testifying, I have been so long disciplined in the school of free enquiry that he could be influenced only by the authority of evidence, reason, and truth. 79 Father and son were not associated with the Seceder Presbyterians, but instead the non-denominational Christian Association of Washington, a diverse group of influential persons and families who were connected to the various religious communities in the region but who adopted Thomas s Declaration and Address as worthy of consideration by all Christians. Although no longer in school, Alexander continued to set high theological goals for himself with very specific means of accomplishing them. His resolutions for 1810 included: first in Theological Studies. He determined to accomplish this by daily effort: reading for a half-hour from the scriptures in the original references, reading a chapter each in the Old and New Testaments (with Scot s notes) noting practical observations, and memorizing a verse, verses, or chains of verses to be repeated as a whole each Sabbath. 80 On Saturday evenings, he would 77 Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, Campbell, Declaration and Address, Alexander Campbell, Reply, Christian Baptist 3 (April 3, 1826): Scott s notes refer to a five-volume Bible annotated by Calvinist Anglican Thomas Scott. It was first published in the United States

37 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 29 reflect on his work and note in his journal as fulfilled or not. He concluded his list of goals by asking for God s grace to attend him in his efforts. 81 Just as he had desired when he was younger to become one of the best scholars in the kingdom, now he wanted to be first in Theological Studies. 82 He was competing against no one but the inner drive within himself to know more than anyone else regarding the scriptures. Encouraged by his father, although as yet unordained, in 1810, Alexander, now about age twenty-two, made his first attempt at public preaching to a small congregation in a private home. During this same time period, Thomas applied for ministerial affiliation with the Presbyterian Synod of Pittsburg, part of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. His petition was rejected in October of 1810 probably in part because Alexander was preaching but not ordained, and likely because Thomas s previous reputation with the Associate Synod was known. Nevertheless, the abundant community respect for Thomas, the great interest in the Christian Association, and the rumors of Alexander s promising abilities drew a much larger group for his first true sermon given before the entire Christian Association. In his personal journal, he titled this section Skeletons of Sermons. He began with Sermon First, before the Christian Association in Washington, Nov. 1st 1810 and wrote a detailed sentence outline based on Isaiah 57:14 in connection with Isaiah 62: In his first year as a minister, Alexander became such a noted speaker that he preached 106 sermons. 84 More imposing than handsome, he stood almost six feet tall and bore the mien of a cultured European. He was urbane, intellectual, and eloquent.... He was always informative, usually interesting, and occasionally between 1804 and Noll, America s God, Campbell, manuscript E 29L 29 R. 82 Campbell, manuscript E 29L; Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Campbell, Skeletons of Sermons, Sermon First, manuscript D 34R. 84 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:

38 30 The Journal of Mormon History scintillating. 85 His sermons were based strictly upon the rules of the Scottish Seceder clergy. They had to be founded upon correct principles of logic and rhetoric. Thomas and Alexander customarily reviewed their discourses together, father teaching son. First, he ascertained whether or not the division of the subject had been such as to exhaust it; and secondly, whether or not the views or doctrines delivered were truly those of the text, taken in its proper connection with what preceded and what followed it. 86 In March 1811, Alexander married Margaret Brown, a Presbyterian and the daughter of a wealthy farmer. The two lived with her parents near Bethany, Virginia. Alexander helped on the farm and was able to meet his goal of preaching for free. Margaret was completely supportive of Alexander s choice to be a preacher of Christian reform and reformation. She managed the home affairs and endured patiently his frequent absences. 87 In May 1811, the Christian Association chose to build a modest house of worship near Buffalo Creek, Pennsylvania, calling it The First Church of the Christian Association meeting at Crossroads and Brush Run. The Brush Run church remained a nondenominational movement until Thomas became convinced that, due to continuing hostility, the Christian Association should assume the character of an independent Church to assure the enjoyment of those privileges and the performance of those duties which belong to the Church relation. 88 Although Thomas had never wanted to start his own denomination, rejecting the sectarianism of his day and calling 85 Alexander Campbell, in Blowers, Dunnavant, and Williams, The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: For an example of Thomas Campbell s Method of Discoursing, see Campbell, Memoirs of Elder Thomas Campbell, Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Alexander and Margaret had eight children. After Margaret died in 1827, Alexander married Selina Bakewell by whom he had six more children. 88 Ibid., 1:

39 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 31 for unity, he finally yielded to the apparent requirements for his Christian movement to survive. On January 1, 1812, Thomas officially ordained Alexander to the ministry by authority of the First Church of the Christian Association of Washington. In the spring of 1812, the birth of Alexander and Margaret s first child occasioned an intensive study of the subject of baptism. His wife and her parents were still Presbyterians who believed in infant sprinkling. The Christian Association had left the mode of baptism as a matter of forbearance, and Thomas and Alexander regarded it unscriptural to make it a term of communion. Up to this time, both Thomas and Alexander had regarded the question of baptism as of relatively small importance in comparison with their much larger battles of overthrowing sectarianism and restoring the Bible to its primitive Christian focal point. As Alexander began his study on baptism, he became embarrassed that he had let it slip. 89 Christ had connected the ritual with salvation therefore, it was important and could not be allowed to slip. His search then became to learn the proper mode of baptism and who should be baptized, infants or believers. In his research of the original Greek, he discovered that the term baptism was a transliteration rather than a translation and that it meant to immerse. He realized that as Presbyterians, no one in the family had been properly baptized. As a result, in June 1812 he and his wife, his parents, and his sister Dorothea were immersed by Baptist preacher, Matthew Luce (or Luse), not according to Calvinistic Baptist practice but according to the pattern given in the New Testament meaning that there was no need for each believer to recount a religious experience but simply to confess that Jesus is the Son of God. 90 Over the next few years, Alexander s understanding of baptism its mode, meaning, and for whom it was intended increased until on two occasions he debated Presbyterian ministers on the practice of 89 Ibid., 1: Ibid., 1:398. The regular Baptist requirement was that the convert must recite a religious experience prior to baptism.

40 32 The Journal of Mormon History paedobaptism and, by all accounts, was the victor. 91 The reformers became linked with the Baptists because they were the only denomination that believed in baptism by immersion. Campbell acknowledged, I had no idea of uniting with the Baptists more than with the Moravians or the mere Independents. I had unfortunately formed a very unfavorable opinion of the Baptist preachers as then introduced to my acquaintance, as narrow, contracted, illiberal, and uneducated men.... I confess, however, that I was better pleased with the Baptist people than with any other community. They read the Bible, and seemed to care but little for anything else in religion than conversion and Bible doctrine. 92 Although Campbell was reluctant to join them, finally in the fall of 1813 the Brush Run Church was welcomed into the Redstone Association an association of Baptist churches in western Pennsylvania that was favorable to Alexander s style of preaching from the scriptures and practice of baptism by immersion. Alexander obtained certain conditions before agreeing to join with the Redstone Association: We should be allowed to teach and preach whatever we learned from the Holy Scriptures, regardless of any creed or formula in Christendom. 93 Both Alexander and his father maintained a somewhat strained relationship with several regular Baptist associations for approximately seventeen years, but always considered themselves reformed Baptists. They never 91 Alexander Campbell s ideas on baptism appear to have solidified as he developed his 1816 Sermon on the Law. In his sermon, he very clearly separated the Jewish and the Christian covenants, making the point that Christian practices could not be defended by using the Old Testament. See also the Walker and McCalla debates in Jesse James Haley, The Debates that Made History: The Story of Alexander Campbell s Debates with Rev. John Walker, Rev. W. L. McCalla, Mr. Robert Owens, Bishop Purcell, and Rev. Nathan L. Rice (St. Louis, Mo.: Christian Board of Publication, 1920), Campbell, Anecdotes, Incidents, Facts, Millennial Harbinger 5, no. 6 ( June 1848): Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:441.

41 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 33 Thomas Campbell, right, and his son Alexander, left, both influential persons in the restorationist movements of the early nineteenth century. Edward Dean Neuenswander, artist. subscribed to the Philadelphia Confession or any other creed. In 1823 Alexander began to publish a monthly titled Christian Baptist with a masthead stating: [to] espouse the cause of no religious sect, excepting that ancient sect called Christians first at Antioch. Its sole object shall be the eviction of truth, and the exposure of error in doctrine and practice. 94 Campbell saw his publication as an opportunity to contend for the original faith and order, in opposition to all the corruptions of fifteen centuries. 95 In it Campbell set forth his principles of restoration, defended his point of view, answered questions, published his debates, and continued to argue from the scriptures for union and change. By 1827, Campbell had several powerful preachers arguing for his restoration ideas Walter Scott, Adamson Bentley, and Sidney Rigdon whose combined efforts brought in hundreds 94 Ibid., 2: Campbell, Preface in Christian System, 10.

42 34 The Journal of Mormon History if not thousands of new converts. The 1830 desertion of Sidney Rigdon along with numerous others in northeast Ohio to Joseph Smith s restoration certainly made the great Mormon defection personal, but it was also philosophical. 96 SECOND GREAT AWAKENING Thomas and Alexander came from an environment of religious philosophical ferment in Scotland, Ireland, and England to similar religious sentiments in America. In post-revolutionary America, the Second Great Awakening appealed particularly to the less educated and less wealthy with its populist flavor and anti-formal religious practices. Society was preoccupied with the Bible and many were convinced of the simplicity of its interpretation. 97 It was an era characterized by spiritual regeneration, itinerant preachers, revivals and camp meetings, and a restoration ideal. 98 One scholar called the Second Great Awakening the most influential revival of Christianity in the history of the United States. 99 This movement began in the 96 This phrase was written by Darwin Atwater in a letter to Amos Hayden. Amos Sutton Hayden, Early History of The Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio (Cincinnati, Ohio: Chase & Hall, 1875), Noll, America s God, Peter W. Williams, America s Religions (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2002), ; see also James D. Bratt, ed., Antirevivalism in Antebellum America: A Collection of Religious Voices (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), xvi. 99 Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1992), 166. The restoration ideal has been a pervasive and powerful theme throughout Christian history perhaps the driving force underlying Protestantism and all efforts to purify Christianity, continuing even today as a compelling idea. David Edwin Harrell Jr., Epilogue, in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, edited by Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 240. In American religious history, the reversion back to an ancient and primitive standard began with the Puritans in the seventeenth century, an era referred to as the First Great Awakening. This revival of

43 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 35 postcolonial era as the alliance between church and state was dissolving with the passage of the first amendment which President Thomas Jefferson declared was intended to create a wall of separation between church and state, allowing for the development of religious liberty, diversity, and toleration. 100 Unprecedented religious freedom and Christian revival that began at the end of the eighteenth century and continued until the middle of the next century gave birth to restorationism, a primitive gospel movement to recover the Christian primordial doctrines and organization. 101 The American religious reformation of the nineteenth century took two general forms, enthusiasm-driven or Enlightenment-directed. Unlike the First Great Awakening, this religious awakening spawned a new and dynamic religious fervor that was popular, evangelical, ecstatic, personal, and optimistic. religiosity influenced the more educated and wealthy with the desire for governmental freedom as well as religious freedom. See Mark L. Staker, Hearken, O Ye People : The Historical Setting for Joseph Smith s Ohio Revelations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2009), Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1802 in Daniel L. Dreisbach and John D. Whaley, What the Wall Separates: A Debate on Thomas Jefferson s Wall of Separation Metaphor, Constitutional Commentary 16, no. 3 (Winter 1999), 18. Spencer Fluhman describes the disestablishment of state patronage as gradual but complete by mid Religious liberty, diversity, toleration, and plurality of sects primarily occurred among Protestantism. The further a religion strayed from Trinitarian Protestantism, the further it moved down the scale of what was considered acceptable Christianity. J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People : Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 24, Robert Frederick West, Alexander Campbell and Natural Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), vi, identified the post-revolutionary religious awakening differently. He divided the era into (1) the Second Great Awakening in the eastern states; (2) the Great Revival on the western frontier; (3) the Methodist movement; and (4) the primitive gospel movement.

44 36 The Journal of Mormon History Visions, dreams, prophesying, and emotional spiritual outbursts became more acceptable to many. 102 It appears, however, that not all claims to religion were tolerable. Some religious leaders were concerned that disestablishment had left too much room for religious expression and that the anchor previously provided by formalist state-attached religions left Christianity dangerously unmoored. 103 The Enlightenment skeptics in America took the form of Christian deists. These free-thinking rationalists believed that religious principles were part of the natural order and could be discovered through the scientific method. Deists, like Protestants, rejected inherited authority and had great confidence in the ability of humans and their future. 104 Reason and observation were sufficient evidence that a Creator albeit a disengaged and non-interventionist God existed. Logic dictated that the universe was a self-sufficient machine that ran on its own. 105 From this viewpoint, visions, visitations, revelations, and miraculous events were intrusions into the natural order and processes of the universe. Enthusiastic religious expressions were considered eccentric, marginal, misguided, or even fanatical and extravagant. As a result, some religious leaders worried about a frenzied atmosphere leading to disorder, manipulation, and delusion of the revival audience Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, Fluhman, A Peculiar People, 9, Noll, America s God, Ibid., , notes that some seventeenth-century Enlightenment philosophers promoted deism as a comprehensive religion that would be an intellectual and social improvement on traditional Christianity. Ordinary human intelligence could understand God without the need for revelation, and this would cleanse Christianity of its supernaturalist superstitions. 106 According to James Bratt, Antirevivalism in Antebellum America, xvii xviii, enthusiasm was an epithet that lumped all forms of revival together and was part of an antirevival movement. Also interesting is that enthusiasm initially meant possessed by a god or god within,

45 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 37 Because of his great intellectual reservoir of knowledge and native talent, Alexander Campbell was considered by one writer to be the first reasoned and greatest debater of his time. 107 Campbell s defense of Christianity against all comers established him as one of the best-known Christian apologists of the nineteenth century with his debates against infant baptism and the infidelity of communitarian living. 108 In addition to arguing for baptism by immersion and against atheistic communal utopianism, his Enlightenment-oriented background made him highly critical of the claims of prophets, reports of miracles, and other signs of what might be labeled charismatic religious enthusiasm. These latter claims were threatening to the foundations of reasoned thinking upon which enlightened Christians based their beliefs, and he wanted deists to remain within the Christian realm and not reject the whole system due to the emotional responses of some. He warned, Enthusiasm flourishes, blooms under the popular systems and exhorted his readers, From all this scene of raging enthusiasm, be admonished, my friends, to open your Bibles and to hearken to the voice of God, which is the voice of reason. God now speaks to us only by his word. By his Son, in the New Testament, he has fully revealed himself and his will. This is the only revelation of his Spirit which we are to regard. 109 Campbell was particularly outspoken in his denunciation of referring to the muses or gods of the Greeks and Romans. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it meant pretended inspiration in contrast to true revelation. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. enthusiasm. The use of delusion in Campbell s critique of the Book of Mormon may have come from this assessment of enthusiasm-inspired religions. Fluhman, A Peculiar People, Haley, Debates that Made History, Richard J. Cherok, Debating for God: Alexander Campbell s Challenge to Skepticism in Antebellum America (Abilene, Tex.: Abilene Christian University Press, 2008), Campbell, To the Readers of the Christian Baptist, Part IV, Christian Baptist 1, no. 8 (March 21, 1824):

46 38 The Journal of Mormon History charismatic experiences, calling them the shrieks and howling of the damned... thrown upon the canvass, with the wild and lurid coloring of a Rubens, and held up to the gaze of the weak and timid. 110 Campbell was a cessationist, meaning that he believed the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit had ceased with the apostolic church. They were necessary for the establishment of the New Testament church, but once it was formed in its pristine purity, they ended. 111 He maintained, Since those gifts have ceased, the Holy Spirit now operates upon the minds of sinners only by the word. 112 Each claimant to supernatural events had to be investigated and proved counterfeit to protect the integrity of the authentic biblical prophets. Campbell did just this in Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon; with an Examination of Its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of Its Pretences to Divine Authority, first by attacking Joseph Smith personally and then by deriding the absurd claims of the Book of Mormon. 113 Why the pejorative term Delusions? Soberminded rationalists such as Campbell worried that religious excitement would manipulate truth and cause believers to be deluded into false forms of worship and, perhaps later, even disbelief. 114 Viewing religious enthusiasm through the lens of the Enlightenment, he believed that everything associated with Joseph Smith had to be thoroughly denounced and discredited, from Smith s claim of the prophetic mantle to the golden bible that he produced. The use of delusion and other negative descriptors put Campbell on common intellectual standing with 110 Bratt, Antirevivalism in Antebellum America, Campbell, Essays on the Work of the Holy Spirit in the Salvation of Men, No. 7, Christian Baptist 2, no. 7 (February 7, 1825): 124; Campbell, Essays on the Work of the Holy Spirit in the Salvation of Men, No. 4, Christian Baptist 2, no. 4 (November 1, 1824): Campbell, To the Readers of the Christian Baptist, Campbell, Delusions, Bratt, Antirevivalism in Antebellum America, xviii.

47 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 39 all Enlightenment-informed Christians and deists. Because deists spoke with the authority of some of the great names of the European and American Enlightenment Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Thomas Paine, and others Alexander Campbell defended Christianity in Enlightenment terms that deists could accept as common-sense and rational. 115 He wanted the American deists to remain within Christianity, unlike some of the deists in France and England, many of whom believed in God but rejected Christianity. Disciples of Christ scholar Robert West claimed that Campbell s rational defense of Christianity was crucial in rescuing America from the threat of deism and unbelief. 116 Thus, Campbell dismissed from his restoration that which he could not explain as logical and rational. From his point of view, the needed restoration could be found in the New Testament primarily in the organization and officers of the church, the proper components of worship, and appropriate Christian comportment or in other words form, structure, and behavior. 117 There was no room for visions, revelations, and the miraculous gifts of the Spirit. Campbell s simple definition of restoration was to bring Christianity and the church of the present day up to the standard of the New Testament. 118 This was the primitive Christianity that he wanted to restore and that he believed would unite all Christians. Campbell was not considered part of formalist mainstream 115 West, Alexander Campbell and Natural Religion, vii. See also Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and Skepticism, in Believing History, edited by Reid L. Neilson and Jed Woodworth (New York: Columbia University, 2004), West, Alexander Campbell and Natural Religion, viii. 117 In his monthly publication, the Christian Baptist, Alexander wrote a thirty-two part series entitled A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things outlining some of the tenets that he saw as essential in a true restoration. 118 Campbell, A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things, No. 1, Christian Baptist 2, no. 7 (February 7, 1825): 128.

48 40 The Journal of Mormon History Christianity, and some even viewed him as a marginal Protestant. 119 Evangelical Protestants in the Ohio Valley saw Campbell as something less than a true Christian: In their eyes he was the father of a heretical cult that despised the historic creeds, required immersion in water for regeneration, and stole sheep from their pastures by the thousands. 120 Nevertheless, his restoration generally stayed within the boundaries of what could be considered the broad range of historic Christian orthodoxy. He was fundamental in his belief in the superiority of the scriptures and their rational interpretation but considered extreme in his denunciation of the accepted religious creeds of the day. He embraced the radical reform that his father, Thomas Campbell, had proposed in his Declaration and Address. His aim over time became more sweeping than reformation. No longer satisfied with merely repairing defects in modern Christianity, he undertook the restoration of the original and pure gospel in letter, spirit, principle, and practice. 121 CONCLUSION Initially, both Thomas and Alexander Campbell searched for an existing denomination that mirrored the Christianity of the scriptures. Their goal was to return to a pure beginning, to recreate primitive Christianity by further reforming Protestantism. Thomas and Alexander s religious evolution went from Anglican to Seceder Presbyterian, to the nondenominational Christian 119 Samuel S. Hill Jr., Comparing Three Approaches to Restorationism: A Response, in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, edited by Richard T. Hughes (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988), 237. One way of defining Protestantism at this time is with two extremes formalism, a rather lifeless, cultural, and intellectual ritualism, and its opposite, enthusiasm, considered by some as religious craziness. 120 Don Haymes, quoted in Richard T. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 1996), Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:350.

49 ROSEANN BENSON/ALEXANDER CAMPBELL 41 Association, to reformed Baptist, and finally to their own primitive Christian denomination the Disciples of Christ. Alexander looked to his father as his role model, and Thomas s rejection and censure by the Seceder Presbyterians became part of Alexander s psyche. Their prolonged attempts at a reasoned reformation caused Alexander to strongly oppose Joseph Smith s revelatory restoration. When Rigdon abandoned them and took many followers with him, both of the Campbells were highly offended. They had been blindsided by an insider one of their own preachers. They had just turned the corner on their restoration of the ancient order of things by beginning to put in place a new organization when Joseph Smith s Mormonite preachers came to northeastern Ohio and turned the region upside down, teaching doctrines on faith, repentance, and baptism by immersion that sounded very similar to their own. In their view, Rigdon was a traitor of the first order. Alexander Campbell believed that the pure beginning could be found in the first Christian century. Therefore, he focused on the Acts of the Apostles and particularly the epistles to restore the correct forms, structures, and behaviors of the early church. He claimed that his restoration trimmed Christianity naked, asserting that the loss consists only of barren opinions, fruitless speculations, and useless traditions. 122 He eliminated nonscriptural beliefs and used a reasoned approach to reduce Christianity to his view of core essential practices and principles as presented in the New Testament and upon which he was 122 Alexander Campbell, Christianity Restored (Bethany, Va.: M Vay and Ewing, 1835), 8 9; see also Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 107, 117. Although Campbell believed that the inductive method helped join the primitive to the modern by opening up ancient truths, Hughes has written that Campbell s restorationism pointed backward in regression but his Millennialism pointed forward in progression, opposite directions which Hughes believed were incompatible. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 29.

50 42 The Journal of Mormon History certain that all Christians could agree and unite. Finally, he firmly believed that the facts of the gospel could be rationally understood and, when explained in clear scriptural language, would lead individuals to the religious feeling called faith. It was a rational approach to reading the scriptures and a philosophy that was thoroughly imbued with the sacred and not the secular. 123 Churches of Christ scholar Richard Hughes called Campbell s approach rational progressive primitivism. 124 Alexander s Scottish Enlightenment training under his father s tutelage was amplified in his classes and experiences at the University of Glasgow and reinforced with the philosophies of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and Thomas Reid, and the scientific method of Francis Bacon. These forces shaped his religious worldview. That which could be rationally comprehended by natural human instincts became the truth from which one could draw conclusions regarding larger concepts especially in regard to ethics. The Bible could be read and understood by the common sense that God gave each individual because biblical facts appealed to the rational mind and heart. Campbell would later proclaim, Where there was no evidence there could be no faith. 125 His paternal tutoring, his academic studies, and his innate intelligence provided a strong foundation for his ability to argue his religious beliefs from what he saw as a rational and enlightened point of view. Asserting his independent and Enlightenment interpretation, he declared, I have endeavored to read the Scriptures as though no one had read them before me. He saw his life s purpose as utilizing his many gifts in defense of Enlightenment-driven Christianity hence his passionate criticism of the enthusiasm-oriented Joseph Smith, the Golden Bible, and all things considered Mormonite Tristano, The Origins of the Restoration Movement, Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith, 30; emphasis his. 125 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1: Alexander Campbell, Reply, Christian Baptist 3 (April 3, 1826): 204.

51 THE YOUNG DEMOCRATS AND HUGH NIBLEY AT BYU Nancy Stowe Kader During the tumultuous antiwar years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, college campuses across the country roiled with student protests, demands, and demonstrations. Brigham Young University was said to be an exception, maintaining a reputation as an island of calm amid the discontent. In one lengthy news story published in both the Pittsburgh Press and the Cleveland Press in early 1970, BYU was referred to as riot-free, hippie-free. The authors stated with admiration that the church-supported university has never been shaken by a demonstration. 1 However, the lack of obvious turmoil only masked tense concern on the part of university administrators, particularly the well-known dictatorial university president, Ernest L. Wilkinson. His collected papers, housed in the BYU Library, 2 NANCY STOWE KADER {nkader@cox.net} received her B.S. degree in nursing from Brigham Young University. After working for many years as a critical care nurse, she earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Maryland in College Park with an emphasis in epistemology and ethics. She currently writes and consults in bioethics. She lives in Vienna, Virginia, with her husband, Omar Kader. 1 Richard Starnes and Richard Boyce, Church Flourishes Despite Rigid Rules, Pittsburgh Press, April 12, 1970, 8 9. This same article also appeared in the Cleveland Press, March 25, 1970, A1 A2. Copies of both are in the Ernest L. Wilkinson Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Lee Library, Brigham Young University. 2 The Wilkinson archive is a treasure-trove of information about his twenty-year control of the campus ( ). It includes his personal diary, minutes of meetings, correspondence with a broad range of individuals, some of whom can best be described as informants, and 43

52 44 The Journal of Mormon History Left: Robert Redford, actor and resident of Sundance, Hugh Nibley, BYU professor of ancient languages, and Ted Wilson, then mayor of Salt Lake City and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Orrin Hatch, campaign in Provo, Utah, in Nancy S. Kader Collection. contain numerous folders stuffed with newspaper and magazine clippings, along with internal memos and correspondence from other universities, all referencing with uneasiness the nationwide student demonstrations, university sit-ins, and protests by popular antiwar figures such as Abbie Hoffman. One article that Wilkinson clipped and filed was a 1969 warning from U.S. News and World public documents that he considered relevant. Special thanks to Gary Bergera who introduced me to this collection. The papers are divided between Wilkinson s Presidential Papers (UA 1086) and his Personal Papers (UA 1000) within the larger collection: Ernest L. Wilkinson, Presidential and Personal Papers, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. In this article, I cite items as in the Wilkinson Papers with the call number in parentheses distinguishing between the two subcollections.

53 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 45 Report: A suspicion that the student revolt is shifting from massive confrontation to guerilla warfare is beginning to bother college officials. 3 Definitely Wilkinson was greatly bothered by that possibility, even though this claim was much overstated. Worried about the amount of financial support being obtained by activist students, the article quoted an anonymous government official who claimed he had reason to believe this whole movement is communist activated, a belief that immediately got Wilkinson s attention, preoccupied as his worldview was with cold war Communist conspiracies. 4 As antipathy toward the war by student protesters across the nation reached a high point in 1969, Wilkinson personally sought to identify, repress, and when possible expel any student whom he perceived as a threat to campus order. Demonstrations and even classroom discussions about the tempest rocking the nation were generally suppressed, in part because he envisioned darker forces at work. In November 1969, Swen Nielsen, the head of Campus Security, wrote Wilkinson a memo suggesting that the true agenda of the war protestors was treason seeking to overturn the country. He wrote, It appears now that heretofore some of our students with radical political views have floundered about rather aimlessly; however, it appears now that they are being used by some rather skillful agitators, some of whom we might call known Communists. 5 Such alarmist language confirmed Wilkinson s fears and his determination to suppress such manifestations on his campus. He was willing to take a very narrow view of such Constitutional rights as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly to do so. Despite the possibility of being labeled radicals or Communists while studying in a repressive atmosphere on campus, some students were nevertheless determined to have 3 The Student Revolt: Where It Is Headed, U.S. News and World Report, October 13, 1969, 38, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 555, fd Ibid., Swen Nielsen, Memo to Wilkinson, November 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 515, fd. 7.

54 46 The Journal of Mormon History their antiwar voices heard, although there was little space for this point of view at BYU. Only one approved campus organization, the Young Democrats (YDs), had the belief system and the authority to distribute their message on campus. They also held a little power in that, if they were banned, then the Young Republicans must be banned also for the sake of consistency and equal treatment. If the political content of Young Democrat meetings were to be censored, then the same would be necessary for Young Republicans. The Young Democrats had long existed at BYU (in small numbers) as a certified campus organization that followed the time-honored system of recruiting membership by simply setting up a table, along with other campus clubs and social groups, near the cafeteria in the student center, using posters and flyers to make themselves known, and generally being ignored. The club was affiliated with and supported by both the state and national Democratic Party. Local candidates sometimes looked to them for organizational assistance in election years, but very little was heard from them in non-election years. The Young Republicans and their far-right counterpart, the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), maintained much higher enrollments and garnered greater publicity. 6 In 1969, in the absence of other means of expressing antiwar views, a small cadre of students realized potential in the Young Democrats as an officially recognized campus club and began a planned takeover with the goal of steering the group toward the development of an antiwar voice at the university. At the time, BYU students were not allowed to freely distribute literature or handbills on campus without prior approval (a rule which is still in place today). 7 Some emboldened students had briefly distributed 6 Gary James Bergera and Ronald Priddis, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1985), See especially Chapter 5, Partisan Politics, for a useful summary of political life at BYU, particularly pp , which describes the activities of the Young Democrats in the 1960s (p. 182). 7 Current rules are even more strict today. BYU University Policies are accessible online, specifically the section Public Expression Policy,

55 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 47 a satirical newspaper off-campus called Zion s Opinion for a year or so, but this outlet had a more general and less political purpose and, in any event, had no access to campuswide distribution. The Young Democrats, however, were allowed by campus policies to write a newsletter for their membership, and no specific rules forbade distribution outside their own membership; also, oversight of the content was rather ad hoc. Previously, such newsletters had been no more than announcements of meetings or activities; but under the leadership of a new president, and with the assistance of a small group of organizers, the newsletter became a broad vehicle for antiwar dissent. The new president of the Young Democrats for the key antiwar years of was Omar Kader, a Provo native and a non-mormon who attended BYU as his best local option for a college education. Kader was born to Palestinian Muslim parents who had made their way somewhat accidentally to Provo in the 1920s and made a struggling living as fruit farmers. His father, Musa (known in Provo as Mose) Kader, was intensely patriotic. He had been drafted during World War I and sent to France to fight for the United States. Through his service, he had the opportunity to acquire property and eventually his citizenship. January 23, 2012, which states: University-affiliated organizations that desire to engage in open public expression on campus such as rallies, gatherings, or other coordinated group expression with or without pre-selected speakers for the purpose of petition signing, protest, demonstration, or other public expression must complete a Request for Public Expression form, obtain applicable line vice president approval and meet with a duly designated representative of the Dean of Students Office. University-affiliated organizations include BYUSA, student chartered clubs, student academic associations, academic colleges, schools, and departments, and administrative units. All university-affiliated individuals who wish to engage in open public expression on campus must work through a university-affiliated organization. University-affiliated individuals include faculty, staff, and students. (accessed April 19, 2015).

56 48 The Journal of Mormon History He believed that of his eleven original children (of his eight sons and three daughters, two sons and one daughter died in early childhood), the remaining six sons should be happy to serve their adopted country in the military; and in fact, five of the six served a stint in the U.S. Army. The parents were devout Muslims, even making their pilgrimages to Mecca from Provo, but the Kader children felt discrimination from the local Mormons. For the most part, they steered their lives away from Utah and its Mormon culture, also tending to disregard Muslim practices as well. However, Omar joined the LDS Church in 1966, just before his Army service. (A few years later, his youngest sister attended BYU, joined the Church, and married. Her husband is now a BYU faculty member.) Despite his patriotism, Omar Kader was unhappy about being drafted in The Vietnam War was careening out of control. He was a twenty-three-year-old junior at BYU, a little older than the typical junior, because he had to work his way through college. As a dedicated follower of public policy, he believed that the war was a mistake; but despite his qualms, he was unable to avoid the draft. He and I had been dating since the winter of 1965 despite parental disapproval on both sides. Born in Ogden, I was a senior in BYU s Nursing Program, so we quickly married in early 1967, hoping to postpone his induction, but without success. The draft notice showed up in Omar s mailbox on our wedding day, so he accepted the inevitable, left school, and entered boot camp in Fort Bliss, Texas, to prepare for war. In a lucky sequence of events, however, he served in Germany instead of Vietnam, an assignment that gave him plenty of time to read in the battalion library. This study reinforced his understanding of the misguided ideas that defined our country s Asian misadventure. When he was discharged in late 1968, he reentered BYU to complete his degree as a political science and international relations major. 8 8 Omar Kader, Oral Interview, conducted in several question and answer sessions by Nancy Stowe Kader in January-May 2014, written

57 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 49 In addition to classes, Kader participated in a program, known as the Vietnam War Project, that further confirmed his antiwar views. This school-endorsed study group was primarily a discussion group, produced and organized by Stan Taylor, a popular and dynamic teacher in the Political Science Department, who arranged for the students to travel to other schools for discussion and debate. These students tended to oppose the war but took a cautious approach in asserting their new knowledge base. The experience was useful to Kader as it gave him several new ideas about campus politics first and primarily that antiwar activities could be introduced on campus if handled responsibly within the restrictive climate. He didn t want to lose his standing with only one year of school remaining before graduation. Second, he learned about a largely untapped student budget that clubs could use for their activities. These funds were primarily used by the conservative student leadership to invite conservative speakers to campus, so it occurred to Kader that student money could be accessed for liberal causes if funneled through permissible campus organizations such as the Young Democrats. Third, this type of political club was permitted to accept outside donations. Kader immediately applied to the local Democratic Party for support and soon received a small but helpful monthly stipend from the sympathetic chairman of the Utah County Democrats at the time, Grant Wightman, a creative and kind pro-union steelworker, who found some labor-union money to add to the club budget. Soon the Young Democrats had enlisted hundreds of students; in fact, they believe that membership exceeded 500 members at one point. The state Democratic Party told Kader that BYU had the largest such club in the country. 9 notes in my possession. Both Omar and Nancy Kader s memories of many of the events in this paper were substantiated by telephone interviews in 2014 with two former officers in the Young Democrats: Gar Jensen and Wes Shook. Notes in our possession. 9 Gar Jensen, telephone interview by Nancy Kader, April 4, 2014; notes in my possession. Jensen, now retired and living in Utah, recalled a state Democratic Party convention in 1970 in which the combined

58 50 The Journal of Mormon History Omar Kader (left) confers with two unidentified Young Democrats. Gar Jensen is on the far right. Several courageous faculty members acted as advisors to the club, and a few went so far as to publish short columns in the Young Democrat Newsletter. This action was bold considering the authoritarian political climate that Wilkinson imposed on campus, but the leadership and support of established professors gave credibility to the group. 10 Several students numbers of Young Democrats from all the other Utah colleges did not equal the number from Brigham Young University alone, causing a backlash. Skeptics from more liberal schools did not want to be led by Young Democrats who were associated with such a conservative religious school, so they combined their votes in an attempt to disfranchise BYU s chapter at BYU. They did not have the numbers to succeed. 10 Larry Wimmer, telephone interview by Nancy Kader, April

59 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 51 who became activists and risked expulsion sought validation to disprove the common notion that they were being led by outside agitators, Communists, or militants from back East, and the YD organization provided such validation. College administrators and Wilkinson himself were known to seek out and isolate students who expressed alternative opinions whose status in school would then be in jeopardy. As an example, a memo sent by President Wilkinson to the Dean of Students, J. Elliot Cameron, describes a girl (name withheld) who reportedly took part in a discussion of Jerry Rubin one day and she defended him. Wilkinson went on, Since that day another student [name withheld] has heard her comment that she would be very interested in seeing Jerry Rubin. Wilkinson admits that this information is altogether too hazy for any action. I am just notifying you in case you have anything about this girl. 11 It is not clear in this memo who questioned the girl and her opinions enough to report her comments; but Wilkinson, although a lawyer, did not apparently find it inappropriate to make this somewhat threatening observation in a presidential memo. The observant Wilkinson also singled out other questionable students. Bill Cowden earned a troublesome reputation that also bothered the president, who responded by trying to find a means to suppress him or persuade him to alter his antiwar stance. Cowden claimed publicly to be a member of SDS (Students Wimmer, then a professor of economics, recalls offering informal suggestions to Young Democrat leaders, keeping a firm eye on fairness and neutrality, along with history professor Carlton Marlow, and political science professor Lamond Tullis. But the former Young Democrats remember him as their advisor, and at least one issue of the Young Democrat newsletter names Marlow, Wimmer, and Curtis Ledbetter (who taught religion at BYU after retiring from the Air Force as a chaplain, and was considered to be very politically conservative), as advisors on their masthead. 11 Ernest L. Wilkinson, Memo to Dean J. Elliot Cameron, March 24, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd. 2.

60 52 The Journal of Mormon History for a Democratic Society) in a letter to the editor of the Daily Universe, the BYU student newspaper. 12 His claim appeared to be wishful thinking since no local chapter of SDS existed in Provo and there was no evidence that he took direction from the national group. Nevertheless, in private Wilkinson reacted strongly to this letter. In a staff meeting, he asked openly if there had been any other complaints about Cowden that could be used against him. Cameron acknowleged in a memo that he had been keeping Cowden under surveillance, although he admitted that he did not have anything as yet which would justify our taking any type of disciplinary action against this boy.... If he should be out of line in any way, he will not be here. 13 Nothing in the files indicates that any administrators spoke up or protested the ongoing surveillance of a student given the lack of evidence of misbehavior, nor did anybody suggest that it might be appropriate to obtain a warrant or other legal permission if they really believed that spying on Cowden was necessary. Another memo from Cameron to Wilkinson, written shortly before Cowden graduated, reiterated that Cameron had been watching Cowden very carefully during the entire year.... We do not have anything that would justify our taking any action against him. Nevertheless, Cameron continued his secret surveillance, despite the approach of graduation, because Cowden is seen regularly with the left wing group (the makeup of that group was not specified). With only a few days left in the term, Cameron stated, It is our intention to tag his records so that he will not return to BYU. 14 Wilkinson was particularly frustrated by any instance of interest or support for SDS after learning that the University of Utah was actually considering allowing an SDS chapter on its campus. He believed that the club s purpose is revolution 12 Bill Cowden, SDS, Letter to the Editor, Daily Universe, April 1, 1970; clipping in Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd J. Elliot Cameron, Memo to President Wilkinson, April 7, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd Ibid., May 20, 1970.

61 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 53 and to disenthrone the established structure in this country and was dismayed by the tolerance displayed by the University of Utah. 15 Looking back today, despite the fears of college leaders and parents at the time, Wilkinson s fear of revolution and Communist infiltration was clearly exaggerated. Although SDS did spin off some violent offshoots, such as the Weathermen, their existence depended on the continuation of the war. Once the war ended, students lost interest in groups such as SDS and returned to their studies rather quickly, especially at BYU. Furthermore, most, or perhaps all of the activist students who participated in antiwar activities at BYU in this time became solid citizens in their adult lives and can now be said to have been patriotic participants in democracy for showing courage in the 1960s in standing up for their beliefs while in a disapproving climate and while facing pressure from parents, church, and school Ernest L. Wilkinson, Memo to staff, January 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 517, fd Listed are some examples of contributions made by several former activists at BYU: Gar Jensen became a lawyer and worked for many years as a district attorney in California prosecuting drug cases. Wes Shook was told he was expelled from BYU for having long hair and going to school unshaven. However, a memo about his expulsion, in my possession, signed by Gerald Dye, director of the Office of University Standards, May 12, 1971, complains that Wes was completely inactive in the church. Most inactive students were not expelled from school at that time. Shook is now retired from a successful career in the U.S. Forest Service, although he was never able to complete his degree after this setback. Shelley Melville, a daughter of Professor Keith Melville (a faculty member who had run for Congress on the Democratic ticket but lost in a primary to Gunn McKay), became a dedicated wife and mother before passing away at an early age. Omar Kader earned a PhD in international relations, returned to BYU, and taught for ten years before moving to Washington, D.C., where he created a successful government contracting business. He has participated in Middle East peace diplomacy and is currently chairman of the Middle East Policy Council, a public policy think tank that publishes an academic journal

62 54 The Journal of Mormon History Some students were hampered in their studies due to the overemphasis on their political activities. Wes Shook, for example, did not have the support or financing to complete his education after being expelled for purported violations of the honor code. 17 Andy Kimball was under particular pressure because his grandfather, Spencer W. Kimball, was in line for the Church presidency and was, at the time, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; he became the twelfth Church president in This status did not protect Andy from Wilkinson s oversight. In a memo, the university president wrote; Young Andy Kimball is apparently trying to urge students to resist the draft. I should say something against this. 18 Next, Wilkinson delegated J. Elliot Cameron as dean of students to meet with President Kimball and gather recommendations on how to deal with his grandson. Cameron seemed to be searching for a way to deny Andy Kimball s student status but was unable to locate a good reason. 19 Wilkinson then went on Middle East affairs. Bill Cowden has passed away but was a popular high school teacher and track coach in Salt Lake City. Andy Kimball, because of his relationship with his grandfather, Spencer W. Kimball, was a particular worry to Wilkinson who insisted that the grandfather wanted his grandson to be treated the same as other militant students. Kimball later received a PhD from Harvard, worked in banking and finance, and co-wrote a biography about his grandfather: Edward L. Kimball and Andrew E. Kimball Jr., Spencer W. Kimball: Twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1977). 17 Wes Shook, Oral History, interviewed by Nancy Kader, April 4, See also Gerald J. Dye, director of Office of University Standards, Memo on expulsion of Wes Shook, May 12, 1971; photocopy in my possession. 18 Ernest L. Wilkinson, Memorandum for Speech to Students, August 10, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 10) Box 544, fd J. Elliot Cameron, Memo to Wilkinson, August 27, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 108) Box 544, fd. 2. In this memo, Cameron stated: I visited with President Spencer W. Kimball about his grandson. He had no particular suggestions other than to express

63 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 55 so far as to write to Andy s maternal grandparents in California, referring to Andy as one of our problems. He continued, I don t know how close you are to him, but if you are close to him, I think you might help check some of his rebel instincts. 20 ANTIWAR ACTIVITIES BY THE YOUNG DEMOCRATS It was in this atmosphere that the newly organized Young Democrats proceeded with their plans for a campaign of subtle protest during the fall semester of 1969, intending to disrupt the status quo as much as possible without facing threats to their standing. They accepted the risk of discipline or even expulsion from administrators like the Dean of Students J. Elliot Cameron, his assistant Lyle Curtis, and Executive Vice-President Ben E. Lewis. Five of their actions caught the attention of the student body and the administration and are worth some discussion here, although these protest actions were mild compared to the national war protests taking place. Nevertheless, any protest at BYU was generally unheard of, so the administration took note of the following activities: showing antiwar films on campus pushing for a right to petition on campus wearing black armbands participating in off-campus demonstrations, such as the Vietnam Moratorium, under a BYU banner publishing an antiwar newsletter containing original antiwar articles by Hugh Nibley. (That Nibley considered himself a Democrat may surprise many Mormons today who are generally inclined toward the Republican Party.) a great concern. We do not have anything at this point to preclude Andrew from school this Fall, but we are tagging his record so that we can have an opportunity to visit before he registers. 20 Wilkinson, Letter to Thatcher C. Jones, August 31, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (1086), Box 544, fd. 2.

64 56 The Journal of Mormon History Antiwar Films Showing films in the student center at BYU was generally a heavily censored activity; but while seeking for a useful way to spend their student-financed budget, the Young Democrats managed to obtain antiwar films for club members and at least two were shown in the Wilkinson Center Theater for the full student body. One of these movies, a British film titled The War Game, provided a graphic look at the horrors of nuclear holocaust. 21 Wilkinson slipped out to watch it on a busy Saturday afternoon and complained in his diary: In my judgment it should never have been shown, it was just a depressing thing about atomic warfare without in any way attempting to give alternatives. 22 The viewing, however, was considered to be a big success by the Young Democrats, both by aggravating Wilkinson and by chipping away at the pro-war hegemony at the school. Right to Petition A more defensive sort of protest, sponsored by the Young Democrats, was their reaction to the limits the university placed on what they saw as the Constitutional right of petition on campus. This activity is usually interpreted as a basic tenet of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Seemingly a university would be an obvious place to circulate petitions as a fairly innocuous way to express opinions and as a vehicle of free expression and debate values that universities are supposed to nurture. In fact, Wilkinson himself had occasionally allowed tables to be set up on campus for the purpose of collecting signatures for issues that he supported. For example, later in 1970, in the same year in which antiwar petitions had been basically prohibited, the 21 Peter Watkins, director and writer, The War Game, This film was first shown on the BBC in 1965 and won an academy award for best documentary in See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_war_ Game (accessed March 15, 2014). 22 Ernest L. Wilkinson, Personal Diary, April 17, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1000), Box 103, fd. 4.

65 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 57 local newspaper wrote about a petition-signing event on campus called Bring Nixon to BYU that collected over 12,000 signatures by way of tables placed throughout campus buildings. 23 The sponsoring students hoped to get Nixon to stop at BYU when traveling to the West Coast. I found no reference in Wilkinson s papers to complaints about this action or administrators discussion about whether this political petition was appropriate. When the subject for petition was disagreeable to him and was to the left of his own position, he argued that no form of petition could be allowed on campus since it was a distraction from the serious work of education. The Young Democrats complained and tried to set up tables in the Wilkinson Center anyway so that students could sign petitions against the war. Soon the issue became a discussion topic all over campus. Omar Kader wrote a letter to the administration demanding that petition rights be made available immediately. Dean of Students J. Elliot Cameron read the letter aloud in an administrator s staff meeting, commenting on his concern that Kader was extremely critical, but the policy was not changed; no petition tables were allowed. 24 Nevertheless, the topic didn t die down, and Wilkinson became concerned about it. He wrote in his diary that, during a brief absence from campus, his executive vice president, Ben E. Lewis, had practically given an order banning all petitions on national problems which Wilkinson knew carried some potential for legal problems for the university. Wilkinson wrote, I stand ready to support him in this, but a group of about eight of us got together and discussed this for two hours as to whether we should modify this in any way. 25 However, giving in to the students was not an appealing option, so the small group decided finally to wait until the next day and see what the situation was on campus in effect, hoping to wait 23 Y Students Appeal for Nixon Visit, Provo Daily Herald, October 4, 1970, J. Elliot Cameron, Minutes of Meeting of Presidents and Vice Presidents, (UA 1000), May 19, 1970, Box 252, fd Wilkinson, Memo, May 14, 1970, (UA 1000), Box 103, fd. 4.

66 58 The Journal of Mormon History out the student protest. Wilkinson s diary notes that this issue was taking too much of his time. The primary knowledge he had gained during this time of legal analysis was that he learned that the militants on campus are really stirring up trouble. 26 However Wilkinson, as a lawyer, knew he was not on firm ground. The next day, the pressure was still acute, so he then composed and distributed a full-page statement, written in a legalistic style, attempting to justify his ban. In the statement, Wilkinson asserted that the right of petition is not in question, but sign-up tables in campus buildings are not to be used for political petitions, in effect making it virtually impossible to gather signatures. The formal statement ironically suggested that the current nationwide politicization of college campuses had restricted the higher education community s spirit of free inquiry. In other words, he appeared to be arguing that there would be more free inquiry if petitions were banned. But buried in the content was an acknowledgement that some petitions might be allowed on campus if they had prior approval. The Young Democrats deemed this concession to be a victory for their position as it kept administrators uncomfortably on the defensive, although their petitioning was still basically prohibited. Black Armbands About the same time as the petition controversy, a largescale and very visible action was the donning of black armbands as a political statement against the war. This symbol had been a general antiwar trademark for several years, but the Young Democrats at BYU adopted it in preparation for one of the largest nationwide war protests, known as the Vietnam Moratorium, scheduled for October of BYU administrators apparently spent quite a bit of time and energy figuring out how to stop the black armband movement. Cameron reported that he would obtain identification of these students, although it was unclear how they would be reprimanded. Wilkinson wanted the staff 26 Ibid.

67 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 59 to collect individual names of participants in order to force compliance. Faculty and staff are all advised to admonish any student in an armband, he ordered. 27 Vietnam Moratorium Demonstrations Armbands were the tip of the iceberg. Moratorium Day was intended to be a nationwide student strike. A large demonstration was planned in Salt Lake City, and suddenly the war was the only topic that students wanted to discuss in class. The armband issue was hinting at a potentially larger threat to campus quiet, the possibility that student involvement in war protesting could lead to serious defiance of campus norms. Wilkinson expected the worst. In a memo to Dean Cameron, Wilkinson wrote: Herewith is another article on the Vietnam Moratorium on October 13; also an article on the student revolt which indicates that we are now going to have guerrilla warfare. 28 This fear was certainly overstated considering the tepid form of protest so far engaged in by BYU students, but the extent of nationwide student demonstrations gave him reason for concern. Wilkinson wanted to ban all moratorium activity on campus; 27 J. Elliot Cameron, Staff Meeting Minutes, January 12, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 526, fd. 12. The staff took seriously the order to stop the wearing of armbands. Gar Jensen recalled wearing an armband while recruiting students for the Young Democrats in the Wilkinson Center. The supervisor of the cafeteria (known then as the Cougareat) asked him to leave the building. Jensen tried to suggest that the armband was legitimate and could be seen as a symbol of mourning for family deaths as well as war deaths, but she insisted that he leave, stating that she had instructions from the administration to do so. Armbands also spread into the local community. I remember knocking on doors in residential Provo, wearing an armband and handing out antiwar material to the astonishment of local residents unused to this brand of politics emerging from BYU students. 28 Wilkinson, Memo to Dean Cameron, October 10, 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 515, fd. 7.

68 60 The Journal of Mormon History but to his surprise, he came under pressure from his own generally compliant and moderate student leaders, the Associated Students Executive Council (ASBYU). They took a politically neutral position on the war but supported at least some Moratorium Day activities, and their views were well publicized in the Daily Universe. 29 Their stance pushed Wilkinson to make a token acknowledgement of the special day, while trying to control and limit any repercussions. He issued a statement requiring faculty members to limit any antiwar discussion in their classes to ten minutes, and he strongly suggested that the best use of the ten minutes was to lead the students in prayer and meditation. Further, he expressed the hope that teachers would not allow discussions to erupt into any emotional outbursts. He finished his statement by denigrating those who disagreed with his prowar point of view as folks who have not studied the issues and are wholly ignorant in the field of international affairs and are pretending to speak for the American people. 30 The following day, the local newspapers found it newsworthy that BYU students were allowed to participate in the moratorium, however briefly, but made sure to mention the high-handed way Wilkinson had limited the faculty s use of their class-time. The Provo Daily Herald, under the headline Classwork As Usual on Y Campus, seemed amused in describing Wilkinson s way of controlling and limiting the released time he offered when he indicated that no class would be interrupted but that at the discretion of the individual instructor, there could be a ten minute period of discussion on the issue 31 The Ogden Standard Examiner wrote: Teachers at Brigham Young University were allowed to devote some class time to discussion of the war, and the Young 29 ASBYU, Daily Universe, October 14, 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 515, fd Wilkinson, Statement Regarding Proposed Vietnam War Moratorium, October 14, 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 515, fd Classwork as Usual on Y Campus, Provo Daily Herald, October 15, 1969, 4.

69 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 61 Democrats sponsored a slide presentation and an afternoon forum that attracted about 150 students. (This presentation was basically the same Vietnam Task Force project put together by Dr. Stan Taylor s class the previous year, which Kader had helped to develop and was now considered useful material in promoting protest.) But the Ogden paper also highlighted the defiance of some at BYU: Several BYU students participated in the Salt Lake City demonstration. Despite threats of persecution that we have received, said Jerry Owens, we come as individuals from BYU to voice our dissatisfaction with war to stand and declare to the world that now is the time for peace. 32 Jerry Owens was not a member of Young Democrats but worked in tandem with the group. He upset the administration by offering leftist literature to students from an off-campus peace center and bookstore he established. His actions were a thorn in the side of the administration, because they were unable to coerce his conformity. Like Kader, he was a little older than the average student and not compliant with authority figures. The mid-october Moratorium newspaper stories featuring Owens as a representative of BYU caused Wilkinson some embarrassment and seems to have been decisive in moving from frustration with Owens to action. By the end of the month, Owens was expelled from school charged with violating the Honor Code specifically wearing a beard. Furthermore he was formally classified as persona non grata on the campus. 33 Behind the scenes, Wilkinson was reacting rashly to what he considered the negative publicity for BYU as well as the Moratorium Day activities in themselves. He resorted to his previous methods of gaining information: surveilling, investigating, or in other words, spying on students, primarily by collecting private data which he would use to intimidate those 32 Steve Montiel, Utahns Sing, March for Peace, Ogden Standard Examiner, October 16, 1969, University Standards Committee, Minutes of Hearing before University Standards Committee in the Case of Jerry Lee Owens, October 30, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd. 2.

70 62 The Journal of Mormon History who disagreed with him. Despite the fact that his reputation had not yet recovered from the well-documented student spy scandal of , 34 memos in his collection show that he was continuing to engage in similar unethical methods of using informants to observe and obtain private information about students. Student protesters in that time tended to be a bit paranoid about the possibilities of being watched by the FBI, perhaps rightly so because in at least one case at BYU, Wilkinson asked his security chief, Swen Nielsen, to use the FBI to look into some questions he had about a student. 35 A month after the October Moratorium Day, the minutes of the Executive Committee of BYU Board of Trustees state: Careful surveillance is being made of a small group of students who participated with two identified Communists in a recent Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in Salt Lake City. Attempts will be made to encourage said students to disassociate themselves with the Communists. In his own handwriting, Wilkinson jotted on his copy of the minutes that the nationwide Moratorium activities were supported by the BYU Chapter of Young Democrats, about 40, along with Jerry Owens, Wayne Holley and John R. Sayer. These latter two were not students but were older well-known Utah County residents who took pride in referring to themselves as Communists but were closer to being harmless characters than a danger to American security. 36 At 34 Gary Bergera has authored the most definitive work on the student spy scandal of , establishing the facts as they have emerged. Bergera and Priddis, Brigham Young University, ; see also Gary J. Bergera, The 1966 BYU Spy Ring, Utah Historical Quarterly 79 (Spring 2011): Wilkinson, Memo to Swen Nielsen, May 18, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 244, fd. 2. Wilkinson asked Nielsen if he could find out from the FBI the full situation on a student.... Nielsen replied: I have asked the FBI to assist us in obtaining information.... I will report as soon as I am able to. 36 Executive Committee of BYU Board of Trustees, Minutes, November 18, 1969, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 515, fd. 7.

71 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 63 this same meeting, Wilkinson introduced a memo from Swen Nielsen, head of campus security, which provided in great detail the type of observations being conducted on both the antiwar BYU students and the small Communist faction, referred to here as the Holley/Sayer group. Neilson reported on his inability to get useful photographs of the group who had gathered in plain sight to car-pool to Salt Lake City for a demonstration. Amusingly, technology of the time made it impossible to obtain the pictures necessary for evidence of this supposed Communist ring, or even to confirm their identity as night fell. These conditions left Neilsen helpless except to admit he observed only law-abiding, non-criminal behavior by his targets. 37 Wilkinson s spying did not stop after the Moratorium activities ended. Bill Cowden, because of the letter to the editor he had written claiming membership in SDS, became a special target. Explaining a plan to deter Cowden s current behavior and to disrupt his future plans, Cameron wrote a memo to 37 Swen Nielsen, Memo to Wilkinson, November 17, 1969: On Friday, November 14, 1969, the BYU Young Democrats showed a film in the Varsity Theater and handed out leaflets in support of the Moratorium. Between each showing of the film, Jerry Owens, who along with others wearing black arm bands supposedly to mourn the war dead, would give a brief talk. Officers from our department had the afternoon proceedings under surveillance.... Those supporting the moratorium were planning to assemble at Carson s Market on the evening of Saturday, November 15, 1969, at about 6:00 p.m., and then leave as a group for Salt Lake City. Our officers put the area under surveillance for the purpose of identifying those participating and particularly their leaders. Due to early darkness and limitation of our equipment we were unable to photograph those assembled. The Nielsen memo named some of the students and pointed out that Jerry Owens had been observed on the television news on the evening of Sunday, November 16, where among some other demonstrators in the colosseum, he was openly carrying a sign reading, We are BYU students demonstrating for PEACE. It seemed to take a great deal of manpower to observe and write-up people acting openly on the evening newscasts.

72 64 The Journal of Mormon History Wilkinson: We have Bill Cowden under constant surveillance. We do not at this point have any justification for taking action against him. He will complete requirements for graduation at the end of this semester if everything goes well, and we may then want to preclude his entry into graduate school if he should attempt to return here. 38 In a similar vein, Swen Nielsen wrote to Wilkinson: We have suspected Cowden on narcotics [sic] for the past couple of years however we have never been able to substantiate a case.... We have successfully penetrated the group and have a female operator who is associating with them. We will ask her to concentrate on Owen, Cowden et al. [sic] Wilkinson responded, I note you are going to have your female operator concentrate on the two boys (Cowden and Owens). It is pretty late for Cowden, however, because he graduates tomorrow. This common use of surveillance of students at BYU for tenuous reasons is perplexing, but the lack of apparent qualms in using women to try to entice information from young men at a religious university is particularly unsettling, but also apparently unproductive. As the semester drew to a close in May of 1970, many of the activists were soon to be gone expelled, graduated, or moving on in their lives. At that point, the attention of the administration was beginning to be captured by new problems: especially bad publicity related to accusations of racism in BYU athletics as well as among the student body at large. However, the spying continued, although it was unsuccessful in proving that war 38 J. Elliot Cameron, Memo to Wilkinson, April 23, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd. 2. Note that the date of this memo is only a few weeks before Cowden s graduation, yet the surveillance continued. 39 Swen Neilsen, Memo to Wilkinson, May 27, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd Wilkinson, Memo to Swen Nielson, May 28, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd. 2.

73 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 65 protesters had Communist ties. 41 THE ROLE OF HUGH NIBLEY Then an unexpected defense for the activities of the Young Democrats and their antiwar associates emerged from the scholarly ranks, granting them some immunity from administrative harassment and criticism. The new supporter was Hugh Nibley, professor of ancient languages and wellconnected Church intellectual. Nibley was known on campus as dazzlingly erudite, but functioning on a level that left the average student unable to follow and grasp his lectures. He veered from topic to topic, jumping from one ancient language to another ancient language in his quotations. Few had the knowledge in Egyptology, Arabic, and other subjects of his expertise to contradict or debate his views. He was quoted regularly as a defender of the faith, an unimpeachable supporter of the tenets of the LDS Church, and a genuine LDS celebrity, at least partly because of his eccentricities. But to the great surprise of many, he was also an antiwar Democrat who agreed to publish his views in the Young Democrat Newsletter. Nibley and Kader had a long-time friendship stemming from Nibley s early acquaintance with Kader s father. Nibley liked to visit the Kader household to practice his Arabic with a native speaker, to discuss Islamic customs, and eat the Middle Eastern food prepared by Mose s wife, Aishe. He often took the Kader children, along with his own, for ice cream or other treats, and they looked upon him as a sort of uncle. Omar Kader had also studied the Book of Mormon under Nibley as a non-lds 41 Ernest L. Wilkinson, Letter to Harold B. Lee, October 24, 1970, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1086), Box 544, fd. 2. In this letter Wilkinson describes his concern that some antiwar students are participating in draft counseling to avoid military service and defends the school s action against Jerry Owens at great length. However, he also lists racial issues as a problem, expressing concern that the new student body president, Brian Walton, was supporting the argument that BYU was racist because of the very few black students attending the school.

74 66 The Journal of Mormon History student at BYU (religion credits were required for graduation from BYU for both LDS and non-lds students). Nibley made it clear to Kader that he had no desire to convert his Muslim family to Mormonism, since he respected Islam as a basic and important religion. This warm family association led Kader to presume upon their friendship, asking Nibley if he would perhaps like to write a letter or column in the YD newsletter expressing his personal Democratic values and beliefs. Surprised to have his request quickly accepted, Kader was even more pleased when, within a very short period of time, Nibley arrived with a draft of an article with an antiwar theme, the now well-known Brigham Young and the Enemy. This lengthy paper had to be printed in two parts in the YD newsletter about a month apart, and is known to have been published in late 1969 or early 1970, with Omar Kader listed as editor. However, for some unknown reason, perhaps the inexperience of the editor, no date was printed on the actual newsletter which would pin down exactly when the article was distributed. In his paper, Nibley cannily did not mention Vietnam or current politics, but it was clear to all involved that he was advising Latter-day Saints to adhere to stated Church doctrine and to the past words of Brigham Young who had, in a different context, made strong antiwar proclamations. Nibley himself referred to war as the game of power, the most dangerous, futile and foolish game in the world... the age old... game of world conquest, the mad-man s chessmatch as old as history. Although he accepted the typical Cold War fear of Communism, calling it extremely dangerous, he believed that the method for defeating it rested in the spiritual realm. We should put aside all feelings of malice and revenge, he said somewhat fatalistically, and depend on Brigham Young s conviction that the wicked shall destroy the wicked Hugh Nibley, Brigham Young and the Enemy, The Young Democrat (privately printed by Omar Kader, Young Democrat president, 1970), 10. The article is now available as a chapter in Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints, edited by Don E. Norton and Shirley S. Ricks, Vol. 13 of The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (Salt

75 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 67 Over time the Vietnam War rationale for this antiwar paper has been forgotten, and it is seen as more of a general ethical challenge to the LDS willingness to engage in war. However, though it may have been subtle, the article was clearly meant then to be a reminder to the leadership of the Church and the university that the antiwar students were acting in accordance with the gospel, while those who attempted to exclude the views and values of the antiwar students from public discourse and expel them from school were not following gospel values. Unquestionably, its readers saw and accepted this purpose. Those involved in publishing the Young Democrat Newsletter believe that Nibley also wrote a second article, The Uses and Abuses of Patriotism, for their use, but to date no copy of the particular newsletter has survived or been located to provide proof of the article s provenance. However, I recall Nibley arriving at our small married student apartment one day in 1970, wearing his well-known floppy hat with a pair of sunglasses parked on top of his regular glasses, and carrying a copy of the Patriotism paper in the distinctive blue ink resulting from the use of the ditto-master process. He offered this freshly typed draft to me for publication in the newsletter, and this original draft remains in my possession. However, without other evidence, the credit for the initial publication of the Uses and Abuses of Patriotism has been reported to be part of a presentation sponsored by the American Heritage Society at BYU, seven years later, in It is interesting to note that in their original format, neither of these articles cited sources or any references at all, although at some point, before their later publication in The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, references were added either by Nibley or his editors. What is interesting about the current references is Lake City: Deseret Books, 1994), Hugh Nibley, The Uses and Abuses of Patriotism, American Heritage: A Syllabus for Social Science 100 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977), This group gets the credit for first publishing this paper, now Chapter 8 in Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints,

76 68 The Journal of Mormon History that several of them cite articles which didn t exist or hadn t been published at the time Nibley s article was published in the Young Democrat Newsletter in In other words, the editors of the Collected Works or Nibley himself clearly added citations after the article s actual first printing. 44 This fact seems to be evidence for the common belief that Nibley worked primarily from memory without always stopping to add or scrutinize his own references for accuracy. In the Patriotism article, Nibley recapitulates the message he had previously derived from Brigham Young against using war to solve problems. He wrote with strong emotion, reminding his readers of the misery war inflicts on winners and losers: It is those who reject milder counsels who bring death and sorrow upon the Church, it is the labors of fanatics that make things hang by a thread, the greatest danger to Church and State according to the prophets, will come from the extremists.... There is no guarantee whatever that superior firepower will win; all that we can be sure of is that there will be waste and destruction, and the greater the victory, the greater the destruction. 45 A year later, as the Vietnam War continued, Nibley made his position even clearer by sending a letter to the editor of the Daily Universe. In Renounce War, he issued a timely reminder, a warning and forewarning that our acceptance of warlike behavior made it inevitable that we shall deserve what happens to us. He took seriously the warnings issued by nuclear scientists of the era, who were then worrying about the probability of bringing down nuclear holocaust on ourselves during the arms race, and he proposed that our choices were stark: either no 44 For example, the formal published 1994 version of The Uses and Abuses of Patriotism quotes President Joseph F. Smith s Gospel Doctrine although this book wasn t published until Also, Brigham Young and the Enemy makes several references to Elden J. Watson, ed., Manuscript History of Brigham Young , although the Watson edition was not published until Nibley, The Uses and Abuses of Patriotism,

77 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 69 more war or mutual annihilation. 46 As far as could be determined by Wilkinson s papers, the main response to Nibley s writings on war was a ruling made in an administration staff meeting that the Young Democrat Newsletter could no longer use BYU on their publication because it was out of order. The administration was perhaps hoping to undermine the club s credibility by disavowing its connection to the university, but those working on it continued to refer to themselves as the BYU Young Democrats in its editorial box, which was, in fact, an accurate representation of its status. In any event, the use of Nibley as a contributor put the publication in a special category, exempt from criticism and beyond even Wilkinson s power to contain. Nibley s reputation and writing also brought an influx of recruits to the club, strengthening their ability to continue their antiwar activities, although the pressure, harrassment, and surveillance continued. 47 In the meantime, Wilkinson maintained and even escalated his prowar stance. He encouraged membership in ROTC, a touchstone of dissent on other college campuses around the country, even at the University of Utah where the ROTC building was firebombed; 48 he also brought in pro-war speakers, and advocated in public forums that students serve in the military. He chose right-wing radio broadcaster Paul Harvey to speak at the May 1970 commencement exercises, causing some activist students to skip attendance at their own graduation. For some on the far right, including Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, even this pro-war agenda was insufficient. Benson and his supporters pushed Wilkinson to include the John Birch 46 Hugh Nibley, Renounce War, Daily Universe, March 26, 1971, J. Elliot Cameron, Minutes of Meeting of President and Vice- Presidents, November 17, 1969, (UA 1000), Box 250, fd Campuses across America in Foment, Provo Daily Herald, May 6, 1970, 1, terms=firebombing%2bof%2brotc%2butah (accessed April 20, 2015).

78 70 The Journal of Mormon History Beaming with delight, Robert Redford (left), listens to Hugh Nibley explaining a point during their campaigning for Ted Wilson. Nancy S. Kader Collection. Society on the list of approved student organizations, hoping to reinforce the right-wing prowar position of the school leaders, but Wilkinson was unable to satisfy Benson on this specific issue. He kept a letter in his files, written by Church president David O. McKay in 1964 specifically disallowing the Birch Society. McKay stated that no good purpose will be accomplished by encouraging this group and instructed Wilkinson in no uncertain terms to drop the matter entirely. 49 As for Nibley, the end of the Vietnam War did not end his support of the Democratic Party. In 1975, Kader returned to BYU, accepting a combined teaching and administrative position after he finished his Ph.D. work at the University of Southern California. Both he and I served as campaign managers for state and local candidates, and as officers in the county Democratic 49 Wilkinson, Letter to Ezra Taft Benson, quoting David O. McKay, May 4, 1971, Wilkinson Papers, (UA 1000), Box 271, fd. 17.

79 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 71 Party. Together with many others, we tried unsuccessfully to moderate the conservative climate in Utah County, only to see it continue to move farther to the right. During this time, Nibley was a willing participant in local campaigns, among the first to put lawn signs in his yard and endorse candidates. In 1982, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Ted Wilson, ran for the U.S. Senate, hoping to unseat the incumbent Orrin Hatch with the help of his friend, movie star Robert Redford. On one well-remembered occasion, the pair planned to campaign door-to-door in Provo to garner support for Wilson. Surprisingly, a third well-known local celebrity, Hugh Nibley, agreed to join them in a very public way, allowing the press and the public to photograph them for publicity. I was then chair of the Utah County Democratic Party and also the County Coordinator for the Ted Wilson campaign. Despite all the energy that the Young Democrats and their antiwar colleagues threw into their work at BYU, it must be admitted that the overall impact during this turbulent antiwar era was minor in comparison with the sit-ins and large protests that erupted at so many universities at the time. It certainly made no impact on the Republican dominance at BYU and the surrounding community, which is even stronger today than it was in the antiwar years. However, it has now become clear that the student movement nationwide had a great deal of impact in changing attitudes, in slowing, and finally in ending the war. That a conservative school like BYU felt the impact at all was a sign that large forces had been activated, and it was also a symbol of the power students and citizens can employ when united. The sheer number of protests on college campuses in 1970 are a reminder today of the ability of the public to make a difference when their group power is activated, and the numbers illustrate the widespread nature of the dissent. Following the killing of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, a day in which demonstrations were already taking place to protest the bombings in Cambodia, campuses erupted all over the country. By June 25, 1970, just weeks after Kent State, President Nixon established a commission

80 72 The Journal of Mormon History to examine student unrest, which was continuing to cripple universities everywhere. The commission later reported that even before Kent State, some twenty new student strikes began each day.... [D]uring the four days that followed the Kent State deaths, there were a hundred or more strikes each day.... [B]y May 10, 448 campuses were either still affected by some sort of strike or completely closed down... by the end of May, nearly one-third of the approximately 2,500 colleges and universities had experienced some form of protest activity. 50 Some BYU students also held a small protest in Pioneer Park in Provo on May 4, 1970, co-sponsored by the YD s, that went unmentioned in the press, but was attended by about 100 (including the Kaders) with music and short speeches. The impact was so minor that it appeared to be unnoticed on campus. A few days later, Wilkinson congratulated his students for remaining calm during the national crisis and remarked on their high sense of intellectual and emotional maturity... in the face of disturbances on many campuses of America. 51 Currently, free speech for students is still subject to repression at BYU, denying basic rights to students in favor of campus peace and quiet. The conflicts arising from repression do not often help the reputation of the school nor serve to maintain order. In the case of the antiwar dissent at BYU, one over-all loser in this campus conflict stands out, and that loser was not any of the antiwar activists. Rather, in trying to over-control student dissent and maintain an image of quiet at all costs, Wilkinson s influence was weakened, despite his long tenure at the school. 50 William E. Leuchtenburg, ed., Research Collections in American Politics, President s Commission on Campus Unrest, Congressional Information Service, Inc., A UPA Collection from LexisNexis, Bethesda, MD, 2003, assets/catalog/10616_prescommcampusunrestpt1.pdf (accessed April 22, 2015). 51 BYU Calm in Face of National Unrest, Provo Daily Herald, May 8, 1970, 1, newspapers.com/clip/ /the_daily_herald/ (accessed April 25, 2015).

81 Nancy Stowe Kader/The Young Democrats at BYU 73 The student spy scandals of had already damaged his image. The continued spying on students, his overall conduct during the antiwar era, the eruption of accusations of racism against BYU and his poor reaction to civil rights issues, and a waning of approval by Church leaders during the tumultuous years of all contributed to his retirement from BYU under pressure in 1971 with his public reputation badly damaged. As Kader remarked in a recent interview: Having observed elections, democratization efforts, and the effects of the Arab Spring in Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt and other authoritarian countries, it is clear that repressive and punishing environments can cause similar disruptive reactions from young and idealistic students everywhere. BYU was unable to repress this antiwar activity and the repression itself created even more authoritarian behavior. The environment at BYU encouraged everybody to become self-appointed and self-deputized police officers serving a capricious and arbitrary regime. In spite of Wilkinson s deep desire to serve on the barricades in the fight against Communism, fighting Young Democrats at BYU was the best he could do. 52 Given the unofficial motto of BYU ( The world is our campus ) and as new student uprisings occur around the world, it is up to students to find workable, viable, and just methods to project their voices within the university commons and beyond the university into the world. 52 Omar Kader, interviewed by Nancy Kader, May 10, 2014, notes in my possession.

82 JOSEPH SMITH S FIRST VISION IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT: HOW A HISTORICAL NARRATIVE BECAME THEOLOGICAL Gregory A. Prince INTRODUCTION More than a decade elapsed between Joseph Smith s First Vision and the first known account of the event. 1 Although the GREGORY A. PRINCE {gprince@erols.com} spent four decades in medical research and pioneered the prevention of respiratory syncytial virus disease in high-risk infants. He is the author of several articles on Mormon history, as well as three books: Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995); David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (co-authored with Wm. Robert Wright; Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005); and Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, in press). 1 This is not a review article, and thus I have used primary sources almost exclusively. Secondary sources for readers wishing to explore alternative treatments of the First Vision include Milton V. Backman, Joseph Smith s First Vision: The First Vision in Its Historical Context (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1971); John W. Welch and Erick B. Carlson, Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005); Matthew B. Brown, A Pillar of Light: The History and Message of the First Vision (American Fork, Utah: Covenant Communications, 2009); Samuel Alonzo Dodge and Steven C. Harper, eds., Exploring the First Vision (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2012); Steven C. 74

83 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 75 vision was unknown to most Church members during Smith s lifetime, he recorded several versions of it. The most important of these, written in 1832, 1835, and 1839, differ in important details even as they relate the same basic story. I propose that the differences are best understood by viewing the accounts as theological, rather than strictly as historical narratives, whose changing character portrays Smith s continually expanding understanding ( line-upon-line ) about God. Joseph Smith s earliest epiphany, his First Vision, is foundational to today s Church. Its role is summarized in an article entitled First Vision: Bedrock Theology that appeared in the official Church newspaper, Church News: The visitation of God the Father and Jesus Christ to Joseph Smith, dramatic in its own right, is fundamental to the theology of the Church. Upon the reality of the First Vision rests the Church s claim to divine authority. 2 As important as the vision is to the Church and its members today, relatively few even knew of it during Smith s lifetime. It was first published in Scotland in 1840 by Apostle Orson Pratt but remained in obscurity until 1880, when it was canonized as part of the Pearl of Great Price, after which it gradually became incorporated into the message that the missionaries took to the world. During Smith s lifetime, he dictated or recounted several versions; and while these accounts agree in many details, the only version that Joseph personally wrote is at variance with later accounts including the official 1838 version in the Pearl of Great Price in several crucial aspects. The disparity of the different accounts has been a stumbling block to many Latterday Saints and a frequent cause of criticism by the Church s detractors. Harper, Joseph Smith s First Vision: A Guide to the Historical Accounts (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012); and Matthew B. Christensen, The First Vision: A Harmonization of Ten Accounts from the Sacred Grove (Springville, Utah: Cedar Fort Publishing & Media, 2014). 2 First Vision: Bedrock Theology, Church News, January 9, 1993, 14.

84 76 The Journal of Mormon History HISTORICAL CONTEXT: THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING AND THE BURNED-OVER DISTRICT Joseph Smith grew up during the Second Great Awakening, an extended period of Christian revival that began late in the eighteenth century but gained great traction about 1820, after which formal religious affiliation soared for the following halfcentury. 3 Western New York State was particularly awakened, and the succession of religious revivals that swept over the area gave it the name of the Burned-Over District. Thus, Smith grew up in a time and place where religion was on everyone s mind. ACCOUNTS OF THE FIRST VISION Eleven accounts of the vision that were written prior to the death of Joseph Smith are known to exist: 1831: The Articles and Covenants, a manuscript version of which became Section 20 of the Doctrine and Covenants : A manuscript history in Joseph Smith Letterbook 3 See Roseann Benson, Alexander Campbell: Another Restorationist, in this issue for an examination of the background, theological development, and role in the Second Great Awakening of Alexander Campbell and his father, Thomas. 4 Few scholars have realized that this contains the earliest known account of the vision: For after that it truly was manifested unto this first Elder, that he had Received a remission of his sins he was entangeled again in the vanities of the world but after truly Repenting God ministered unto him by an Holy Angel... that he should translate a book. Church Articles & Covenants, in Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper, eds., Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, Vol. 1 in the Revelations and Translations series of The Joseph Smith Papers, general editors Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church Historian s Press, October 2009), Comparison of this cryptic account with the 1832 account verifies its priority as the earliest.

85 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 77 1, which is the only account in Smith s own handwriting. 1835a: An entry in Smith s journal on November 9 describing his encounter with Joshua the Jewish minister, the name under which Robert Matthews was advancing his career as a religious enthusiast. 1835b: An entry in Smith s journal on November 14 describing a visit from Erastus Holmes. 1839: The manuscript History of the Church, A-1, which is the basis of the canonized version of the vision now found in the LDS Church s fourth book of scripture, the Pearl of Great Price. 1840: A pamphlet written by Orson Pratt, A [sic] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, published in Edinburgh, Scotland. This was the first published account of the vision. 1842a: The Wentworth Letter, written at the request of John Wentworth, owner of the Chicago Democrat. Though never published by Wentworth or his colleague, George Barstow, the account appeared in the March 1 issue of the Church s newspaper, Times and Seasons. 1842b: A pamphlet written by Orson Hyde and published in German, in Frankfurt, Germany. The English translation of the title is A Cry from the Wilderness, a Voice from the Dust of the Earth. 1843: An interview of Smith published in the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette on September a: A book by I. Daniel Rupp, An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States, which published essentially a verbatim copy of the Wentworth Letter. 1844b: An entry in Alexander Neibaur s journal of May 24. Three of the accounts, 1832, 1835a and 1839, are most important, as well as most problematic for Latter-day Saints, and they form the basis of this analysis. But their very number

86 78 The Journal of Mormon History and variety raise an oft-asked question: For an event so pivotal as the First Vision, why did Smith neither produce a written account, nor mention the vision to anyone who left a record of such a conversation, for more than a decade thereafter? While there is no definitive answer to this question, a published account by Peter Bauder, a non-mormon, offers an intriguing possibility. Bauder stayed with the Whitmer family for a day and night in October 1830, just six months after the founding of the Church and three months prior to the very earliest, albeit cryptic, First Vision account (1831). While Smith freely spoke with Bauder about the gold plates and the process by which he translated them, he could give me no christian experience. 5 In the case of the first two vision accounts those described in 1831 and 1832 Smith expressed intensely personal feelings, which is probably why he had kept them private. It is possible that, in his conversation with Bauder, he sensed the other man s disapproval and concluded that his christian experience was not only authentic, but needed to be boldly advanced. The 1831 account (later canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 20) was the earliest reference, but not until late in 1832 was the experience first couched in the language of an epiphany. 6 (For economy of 5 Peter Bauder, The Kingdom and Gospel of Jesus Christ: Contrasted with That of Anti-Christ (Canajoharie, N.Y.: A. H. Calhoun, 1834), In the spring of 1832, Joseph Smith spent several weeks at Porter s Tavern in Indiana while his travel companion, Newel K. Whitney, convalesced from a fractured foot and leg sustained when he jumped from a runaway stagecoach. Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (Syracuse, N.Y.: Rick Grunder, 2008) 1946, noted: Nearly every day for several weeks in the spring of 1832, Joseph Smith retired to a grove of trees in southern Indiana where he could be alone. He prayed, meditated and wept at the thought of the adversary s influence upon him in times past. He emerged from these experiences triumphant, declaring that... God is merciful and has fo[r]given my Sins and I r[e]joice that he Sendeth forth the Comferter unto as many as believe and humbleeth [sic] themselves before him. Grunder is quoting Joseph s letter to Emma Smith, June 6, Smith s time in

87 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 79 expression, I refer to each by its date as a shorthand label.) The 1832 account claims highest priority as a historical account for three reasons: (1) it was written closest to the event that all of the accounts describe; 7 (2) it was the only account written in Joseph Smith s hand; 8 and (3) it is consistent with the external (i.e., non-mormon) historical record in being silent on the subject of persecution relating to the First Vision. (In contrast, the 1839 version contains an extensive description of vision-related persecution that is totally unsupported by external evidence. Rather, all known accounts of persecution are in the context of the Book of Mormon.) Here are the key features of the 1832 account: The concern that motivated him to pray was not which church he should join but instead, the wellfare of my immortal Soul. Indeed, prior to praying, by Searching the Scriptures I found that mankind did not come unto the Lord but that they had apostatized from the true and living faith and there was no society or denomination that built upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in the new testament [emphasis mine]. I felt to mourn for my own Sins and thus, I cried unto the Lord for mercy. In response to his prayer, a pillar of light above the brightness of the Sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me. There was no personage within the pillar; instead, the Lord opened the heavens upon me Indiana came between his writing of the 1831 and 1832 accounts. 7 The 1832 account contains all of the information of the brief account from 1831, plus much more information. I therefore base my analysis primarily upon it. 8 The importance that Smith gave to the writing of this account is evidenced by the fact that the history immediately before and immediately after the vision account was written in the hand of Frederick G. Williams. Smith took the pen from Williams, wrote the account, and then gave the pen back to him.

88 80 The Journal of Mormon History and I Saw the Lord. The message of the Lord was simple and a direct response to Smith s request for mercy: Joseph my Son thy Sins are forgiven thee. In subsequent days, although he was filled with great joy and the Lord was with me, he could find none that would believe the heavenly vision. The 1835 account (1835a) occurred during Smith s conversation with Robert Matthews, the Jewish minister who called himself Joshua. Its essential elements are: The question that sent Joseph to the silent grove was not his personal sinfulness. Rather, respecting the subject of religion and looking at the different systems taught the children of men, I knew not who was right or who was wrong. His initial attempts to pray vocally were frustrated, first by an apparently swollen tongue, and then by the distraction of a noise like some person walking towards me. Returning to prayer, he found his toung liberated, and I called on the Lord in mighty prayer. In response to his prayer, a pillar of fire appeared above my head, and a personage appeard in the midst, of this pillar of flame. This account does not identify the personage. Soon thereafter, a second personage appeared. This personage, whom he does not identify, said unto me thy sins are forgiven thee, he testified unto me that Jesus Christ is the son of God. Although Smith s purpose in praying was to determine which religion was right, this account says nothing of any response from either personage. I saw many angels in this vision. The 1839 version is the one with which Latter-day Saints

89 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 81 are most familiar, for it was incorporated into the Pearl of Great Price and canonized as part of it in It is far lengthier than any of the accounts that preceded it. Its essential elements are: The vision took place in the midst of unusual excitement on the subject of religion that involved a series of religious revivals. Although Smith attended meetings of several denominations, he could not determine which to join. To his own question, Who of all these parties are right? he described his bewilderment, The different sects understood the same passage of Scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible. Unable to resolve his question by resorting to the Bible, he retired to the woods to pray for the answer. As he attempted to pray, immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me and had such astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue So that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction. At the moment he was about to abandon myself to destruction, he saw a pillar of light exactly over my head above the brightness of the sun. When the light rested on him, he saw two personages (whose brightness and glory defy all description) standing above me in the air. Both spoke to him, the first pointing to the second and saying, This is my beloved Son. Hear him. The second, responding to his question of which church to join, for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong, said that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong. Several days later, while in the company of a Methodist preacher, he gave an account of the vision. The preacher treated it with great contempt, Saying it was all of the

90 82 The Journal of Mormon History Devil. The telling of the story was the catalyst for great persecution which continued to increase. Indeed, the great ones of the most popular sects of the day... united to persecute me. SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES IN THESE THREE ACCOUNTS Some of the differences between the three accounts are not necessarily problematic. For instance, the mention of evil forces in 1835a and 1839, but the absence of any such mention in 1832 could be explained as an inadvertent or even purposeful omission. The differing locations of the personage(s) relative to the pillar of light/fire may be viewed as trivial. The mention of only one personage in 1832, compared with one-plus-one and many angels in 1835a, and two simultaneously in 1839 could be argued as not ruling out the second personage being present that is, arguing from silence. Whether such reconciliations are satisfactory depends on the individual reader. More problematic are questions that relate to differences that cannot easily be harmonized: Among Joseph Smith s conflicting stated motives, what seemed to be most important in driving him to the grove to seek enlightenment in prayer, and what was the message he received from the personage who addressed him? What was the interplay between the question of which church was true and what light the Bible could shed on the question? If the persecution was as intense as Joseph describes in 1839, why was it not mentioned in 1832 or 1835a? Did it even occur? These questions, in turn, lead to two overarching questions: Why did the story change? Where does the changing of such a foundational story

91 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 83 place Joseph Smith in the larger context of Christian canon? Joseph Smith s Motives Question 1: Among Joseph Smith s conflicting stated motives, what seemed to be most important in driving him to the grove to seek enlightenment in prayer, and what was the message he received from the personage who addressed him? 1832 states that Smith had one motive: a desire to obtain forgiveness of his sins. One might argue (from silence) that he merely neglected to include the other motivation (which church was correct?); however, 1832 negates that possibility by stating that he had already concluded, prior to praying, that none of the churches was correct. 1835a is an interesting hybrid, for the motivation expressed in it, the desire to find out which church was right for him to join, is echoed by the 1839 account, while the message of the personage, thy sins are forgiven thee, is that of The motivation expressed in 1835a and 1839 was the same: Which church should I join? The message of 1839 matched the motivation: I must join none of them, for they were all wrong says nothing of the central motivation and message of 1832: I cried unto the Lord for mercy, and, Joseph my Son thy Sins are forgiven thee. Why the change in the story? As I discuss below, the historical content of the narrative gradually acceded to the theological content. In the process, the completely personal nature of 1832 receded, and the institutional nature of 1839 emerged, thereby becoming the creation narrative for the entire Church. The True Church Question Question 2: What was the interplay between the question of which church was true and what light the Bible could shed on the question? 1832 gives high priority to the Bible as a source for answers. Indeed, Smith s quest for the true church was resolved through his

92 84 The Journal of Mormon History study of the Bible well before his concerns for his own sinfulness took him to the grove. By 1839, institutional prerogatives had transformed a historical narrative into a theological one, and the prestige of the institutional church was greatly enhanced by a divinely uttered condemnation of all other churches. The Bible, which had all of the answers for Smith in 1832, now had none. It is ironic that 1839 does not contain a complementary declaration that Smith would restore the true church. Indeed, none of the First Vision narratives defines an institutional mission for Smith. Another irony is that Smith s distancing himself from the authority of the Bible was limited to One might think that he would have given priority to the Book of Mormon, which he later called the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion ; yet upon its publication in 1830, he immediately began a revision of the Bible, thereafter essentially ignoring the content of the Book of Mormon for the remainder of his ministry. The content of his writings and sermons was almost entirely informed by the Bible. Record of Persecution? Question 3: If the persecution was as intense as described in 1839, why was it not mentioned in 1832 or 1835a? Did it even occur? 1839 includes more words describing persecution following the vision than describing the vision itself. Nonetheless, there is not a hint either in 1832 or 1835a of any persecution related to the vision only notes of the vision s immediate aftermath that Smith could find none that would believe the hevenly vision, and 1835a is completely silent on the aftermath, moving directly from the First Vision to the Moroni vision of three years later. It is useful to consider the possibility that the First Vision may not have risen to the level of eliciting persecution. The term Burned-Over District referred to a region that not only was swept repeatedly with religious revivals but that was also replete with stories of people who had had remarkable visions. Perhaps the most striking account for Latter-day Saint

93 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 85 readers is that of Levi Hathaway, who in 1820 published in his autobiography: [At the age of 11] my mind became solemn, and I felt an anxious desire to know more about that God who made me. A short time after this, there was a great and glorious reformation began in the neighbourhood... and spread very gloriously; I heard of many that had experienced religion, and was very desirous to go to meeting.... One day while praying in this manner, it was clearly made known to my understanding, that if I would make my mind known to my brother and sister, I should find peace. The adversary of souls, then suggested to my mind; you are too young to have religion, no person ever experienced religion so young as you are.... [At age 23] I had now almost given up going to meeting; for, let me go where I would, I heard but very little preached but the confused unscriptural doctrines of the stoicks.... I travelled along the road weeping; my prayer was, O Lord, shew me the path that leads to heaven and happiness.... Travelling about two miles in this situation, I ascended upon the top of an hill, my face towards the west: On a sudden, the appearance of a great white cloud was before me, which extended to the west farther than my eyes could see.... The edge of the cloud seemed to come nigh to me.... While beholding the cloud, which was white as snow, I saw at some distance the appearance of a four wheel carriage, with two horses, coming towards me.... I then saw sitting in it, the most beautiful person that I ever beheld.... He leaned forwards towards me, spread his arms, and with an agreeable smile, bid me welcome to heaven.... My heart overflowed with the love of God; I cried aloud for joy of heart, and praised his precious name. My brother came back to me. I told him I had found the way that leads to heaven and happiness; for I had seen the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. 9 If one juxtaposes the Hathaway account to Joseph Smith s 9 Levi Hathaway, The Narrative of Levi Hathaway, Giving an Account of His Life, Experience, Call to the Ministry of the Gospel of the Son of God, and Travels as Such to the Present Time (Providence, R.I., 1820), 6 7, 8, 27,

94 86 The Journal of Mormon History 1832 account, the parallels are striking but not surprising when viewed in the context of the time and place, where such visionary experiences were not uncommon. Many other similar accounts exist from this time and region, and yet there is no indication that any of them elicited persecution. Indeed, given that Hathaway published his account in 1820, the same year as Smith s vision, the response to another boy s verbal account of a similar vision might range from interest to apathy; and apathy is, in fact, what Smith said he encountered in 1832: [I] could find none that would believe the heavenly vision. Apathy and persecution are hardly the same; and while Smith himself documented an apathetic response to the vision, there is not a single contemporaneous record, either published or unpublished, of persecution relating to the First Vision, except Smith s own accounts of the vision; and only those that he produced in 1839 or later contain such accounts. What might account for Smith s later claims of persecution given the lack of any external evidence to support such claims? One possibility was the added legitimacy that a legacy of persecution of the righteous would lend to the fledgling church s creation narrative. By comparing himself to the Apostle Paul, Smith placed himself in a position that his Bible-literate followers could easily appreciate. But another possibility, which I see as more likely, was that Smith projected to an earlier time the intense and continual persecution that followed general knowledge of his relationship to Moroni and the gold plates. Indeed, a derisive newspaper account of the Book of Mormon, published nine months before the book was printed, noted that speculation about the Golden Bible had existed in the area for some time past, and most people entertain an idea that the whole matter is the result of a gross imposition and a grosser superstition. 10 From that point forward, the persecution of Smith never let up, often increased, and ultimately cost him his life. 10 Wayne Sentinel, June 26, 1829.

95 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 87 Why Did the Story Change? I have already suggested part of the reason: that organizational needs for a creation narrative to which the fledgling church could subscribe moved the narrative from historical to theological, from personal to institutional. (See discussion below in Where Do the Changes Place Joseph Smith? ) The other reason, which focuses on the portion of the narrative describing the divine personages, is that the changing descriptions reflect a change in Smith s own understanding of the theology of Deity. In other words, line upon line refers as much to Smith as it does to individual seekers. This hypothesis can be tested by charting the changes in the First Vision accounts and comparing the timeline of those changes with a timeline of other authoritative writings and sermons that also deal with the theology of Deity. 11 Smith s earliest understanding of Deity is contained in the Book of Mormon. If one reads the 1830 edition of the book, instead of the current edition, several verses stand out as differing from current LDS orthodoxy: Behold, the virgin which thou seest, is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh (p. 25, line 3). The 1830 edition was not divided into verses at all, nor do the chapter divisions correspond completely to the current (2013) edition. And the Angel said unto me, behold the Lamb of God yea, even the Eternal Father! (p. 25, line 10). 11 References that are helpful in understanding the complex development of the contemporary LDS doctrine of Deity include Dan Vogel, The Earliest Mormon Concept of God, in Gary James Bergera, ed., Line upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 1989), 17 34; Melodie Moench Charles, Book of Mormon Christology, in Brent Lee Metcalf, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 1993), ; and Rick Grunder, Statement on Deity, in Grunder, Mormon Parallels,

96 88 The Journal of Mormon History Yea, the Everlasting God, was judged of the world (p. 26, line 9). The Lamb of God is the Eternal Father and the Saviour of the world (p. 32, line 9). Such a view of Deity is termed modalism, or the belief that there is one God, in one part or person at a time, performing various offices, but not simultaneously. 12 It is consistent with 1832, wherein only one personage was described. It is also consistent with a verse in the Articles and Covenants (the source of 1831):... which Father & Son & Holy Ghost is one God. This wording was preserved in the first published version of the revelation in and in the 1833 Book of Commandments 24:18. In 1835, however, a shift in theology occurred, moving the Church to binitarianism, which took the position of one God only (the Father), with a god-like, literal Son created in premortal existence, and fully divine through that inheritance. Only the Son (as Jesus) had a physical body. The Holy Spirit was an influence rather than a being, operating from the Father through the Son. 14 That same year, the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, was published, superseding the Book of Commandments. The Preface, signed by Joseph Smith Jr., Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Frederick G. Williams, was dated February 17, Its first part, Theology, consisted of what became known as the Lectures on Faith, and the second, titled Covenants and Commandments, consisted of a collection of revelations to Joseph Smith. 15 The fifth lecture reflected the shift: 12 Grunder, Mormon Parallels, Revelations. The Articles and Covenants of the Church of Christ, Evening and the Morning Star 1, no. 1 ( June 1832): Grunder, Mormon Parallels, The Lectures on Faith remained in the LDS Doctrine and Covenants until 1921, when they were removed.

97 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 89 We shall, in this lecture speak of the Godhead: we mean the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There are two personages who constitute the great, matchless, governing and supreme power over all things.... They are the Father and the Son: The Father being a personage of spirit, glory and power: possessing all perfection and fulness [sic]: The Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, a personage of tabernacle, made, or fashioned like unto man... possessing the same mind with the Father, which mind is the Holy Spirit... How many personages are there in the Godhead? Two: the Father and the Son. (1835 D&C pp , 55). Several weeks after the publication of Doctrine and Covenants, Smith met with Robert Matthews and related the account of the First Vision contained in 1835a, an account that described the appearance of one personage, who did not speak, followed by the appearance of a second personage, who said, Thy sins are forgiven thee in contrast to 1832, which described only one personage. The sequential, rather than simultaneous appearance of the two personages is consistent with their different natures the Father being a personage of spirit, and the Son being a personage of tabernacle (flesh) albeit not proof. The shift to binitarian theology was further signaled when the second edition of the Book of Mormon was published in The four previously cited verses from the book of 1 Nephi, which had reflected a modalistic theology, were changed to reflect a binitarian understanding (changes in italics): Behold, the virgin whom thou seest, is the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh (p. 27). And the angel said unto me, behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Eternal Father! (p. 27). Yea, the Son of the Everlasting God was judged of the world (p. 29). The Lamb of God is the Son of the Eternal Father, and the Savior of the world (p. 35). Other verses in the 1837 Book of Mormon were not similarly

98 90 The Journal of Mormon History revised, leaving the careful reader of the current edition with a confusing, patchwork theology of Deity that incorporates both modalism and binitarianism. The final step in Smith s evolving doctrine of Deity was tritheism, a belief in three separate personages comprising the Godhead describes two personages who appear simultaneously, both of whom speak to Smith. Since 1839 was not published for years thereafter and since there is no record that Smith spoke of it publicly, word of a shifting theology was slow to spread. In the first issue of the Gospel Reflector, the LDS newspaper published in Philadelphia beginning in 1841, Benjamin Winchester, Presiding Elder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Philadelphia, restated the binitarian doctrine from the Lectures on Faith : As this is the first number of the Gospel Reflector, it will not be amiss to give a few outlines of some of the leading principles of our faith, which will all be treated upon in their proper time, and scripture and reason be adduced to authenticate them. First, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, believe that the scriptures contain the words of God, and that they are true and faithful. Second, the Godhead, i.e., The Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father being a personage of spirit, glory and power; possessing all perfection and fullness; The Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, personage of tabernacle, made, or fashioned like unto man, or, rather, man was framed after his likeness, and in his image; he also possesses all the fullness with the Father, possessing the same mind with the Father, which mind is the Holy Spirit, that bears record of the Father and the Son, these three are one, or in other words, these three constitute the godhead. 16 The following year, perhaps in response to diverse teachings on the subject, the Church newspaper in Nauvoo clarified that the Father and the Son are separate persons and also that both have physical bodies. This statement contradicts the 1835 Lectures on Faith that described the Father as having a spiritual, but 16 Benjamin Winchester, To the Reader, Gospel Reflector 1, no. 1 ( January 1, 1841): 2 3.

99 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 91 not a physical, body. Although the author of this article is not identified, the fact that Smith is listed in the quoted issue of the newspaper as editor, printer, and publisher makes it likely that he wrote it. This theological statement declares defensively: The idea that Joseph Smith adapts his conversation to the company, is an error. Joseph Smith opposes vice and error, and supports his positions from revelation: no odds whether there be two, three, or Gods many. The Father, and the Son are persons of Tabernacle; and the Holy Ghost a spirit. 17 A similar statement the following year (1843) became part of the Doctrine and Covenants, thus canonizing the LDS doctrine of Deity: The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man[ ]s. The Son also, but the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit and a person cannot have the personage of the H G in his heart. He may receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. It may descend upon him but not to tarry with him. 18 Where Does the Changing of Such a Foundational Story Place Joseph Smith in the Larger Context of Christian Canon? The idea that doctrine can change is anathema to many perhaps most Latter-day Saints, as it is to many other Christians who cling to a view of scriptural literalism and inerrancy. Such a view, however, is unsustainable, not only given the wealth of documentation of the Church s formative years but also because it is antithetical to one of the Church s foundational beliefs: continuing revelation. Latter-day Saints often take a schizophrenic approach to the subject, on the one hand affirming their belief in continuing revelation while, on the other hand, recoiling when they learn that words such as continuing and line upon line mean change. It is at this intersection of beliefs 17 Tolerable Fair, Times and Seasons 3, no. 22 (September 15, 1842): Joseph Smith, Diary, April 2, 1843, in Scott H. Faulring, An American Prophet s Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, Signature Books, 1987), 341. This quotation appears in LDS D&C 130:22.

100 92 The Journal of Mormon History and data that a paradigm shift is essential. The new paradigm should assert not only that revelation is additive, but also, in some instances, subtractive. The fact that this revelation involves the foundational story of the LDS Church is very unsettling to many. Indeed, many who have not been able to deal with it successfully have responded by resigning their Church membership. However and more encouragingly, it is possible to deal with the data in light of Joseph Smith s definition of truth, And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come (D&C 93:24) a marked distinction from as we wish them to be. This approach promises to negotiate troubling data successfully without having to sweep any of them under the rug or, to use another metaphor, plow around them. To do so, however, requires the shift in paradigm. Such a shift is neither easy nor comfortable, but it does have the advantage of allowing the believer to keep believing, while still accepting data that others view as an inconvenient truth, to borrow Al Gore s phrase. A final question is how or if the changing narratives and underlying doctrines of the First Vision compare with biblical antecedents. The answer is very well, and the best case study is the Christology found within the New Testament. (A simple definition of Christology is the examination of the transformation of Jesus from a mortal man to a divine personage.) If one lines up the epistles of Paul and the Gospels in the order in which they were written, rather than their appearance in the New Testament, that order is Paul, Mark, Matthew/Luke (written simultaneously), and John. Each author selects a different event to signal the transformation of the merely mortal Jesus into something quite different into something divine. The chronology is important, because each subsequent writer pushed the Christological event successively earlier in time. What Paul placed at the end of the Savior s life, John pushed into the preexistence: Paul: The resurrection, which explains the absence in his

101 Gregory A. Prince/Joseph Smith s First Vision 93 epistles of any narratives of the mortal Jesus. Mark: The baptism, wherein the Spirit descended like a dove upon Jesus, and a voice from heaven pronounced, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. With the baptism as the defining Christological event in the life of Jesus, Mark made no reference to anything earlier, including the infancy narratives. Matthew/Luke: The nativity. John: The preexistence: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us ( John 1:1, 14). This pattern invites the question: What was the actual, historical event that signaled Jesus as being different from the rest of us? Five writers, four mutually exclusive answers. Does that mean that only one (or two, in the case of Matthew and Luke) of the five writers was telling the truth and that the others were lying? A similar charge has been leveled at Joseph Smith for changing the story of the First Vision. Or does it mean that as many as four of the New Testament authors, and perhaps all five, were using historical language to convey theology? And, as God s revelation increased why would line-upon-line have been any different anciently than it is today? the telling of the theology correspondingly changed. And thus it is with the First Vision. Those who choose to see Joseph Smith and his ministry through the eyes of faith, 19 while still paying attention to verifiable historical data can do 19 Whitney Cross perceptively wrote, In order to explain why Joseph developed into this role one must either utilize faith, traffic in a psychoanalysis which at such a distance from the event becomes highly imaginative, or descend to coincidence. Historical analysis profits little by any of these alternatives. Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 143.

102 94 The Journal of Mormon History so if they pay attention to the evolution of Christology and recognize that both issues represent history-become-theology. In neither instance is the actual event historically accessible consider that the first description of the First Vision came more than a decade afterwards and yet the process of revelation is apparent through the very fact that the stories evolved to keep up with that revelation.

103 MEMORY AS EVIDENCE: DATING JOSEPH SMITH S PLURAL MARRIAGES TO LOUISA BEAMAN, ZINA JACOBS, AND PRESENDIA BUELL Gary James Bergera The earliest known written mention of the dates of what are believed to be LDS Church Prophet Joseph Smith s first three plural marriages in Nauvoo, Illinois, may be that recorded by LDS Apostle Wilford Woodruff ( ) sometime after July 1, 1866, perhaps before the end of that same year. These are Smith s marriages to Louisa Beaman ( ), Zina Huntington Jacobs ( ), and Presendia Huntington Buell ( ). Neither the date(s) when Woodruff recorded the information nor the source(s) of his information are known. However, if recorded before May 1869 when LDS Apostle Joseph F. Smith ( ) began deposing people who asserted first-hand knowledge of Smith s polygamy Woodruff would be the first to provide dates for Smith s earliest plural marriages. In addition, Woodruff s record gives dates for these first plural marriages that are a year or so earlier than the dates tradition assigns to them: Beaman, traditionally April 5, 1841; Jacobs, October 27, 1841; and Buell, December 11, If accurate, Woodruff s record not only pushes back the beginnings of Joseph Smith s earliest Nauvoo plural marriages by a year, but Copyright the Smith-Pettit Foundation. GARY JAMES BERGERA is managing director of the Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City. He thanks Todd Compton and Christopher Smith for their comments and corrections. Any errors are Bergera s own. 95

104 96 The Journal of Mormon History it also requires that we reevaluate what we think we know and how we think we know it about the beginnings of LDS polygamy; that we consider more carefully our reliance on human memories as primary historical sources especially in areas as controversial and debated as the beginnings of LDS plural marriage; and that we should adopt more cautious, measured approaches in our attempts to reconstruct the past based on such sources. 1 DATING WOODRUFF S RECORD Wilford Woodruff s holographic record is found in his thirty-page notebook entitled Historian s Private Journal. 1858, located in the LDS Church History Library. 2 Immediately following the entry dated July 1, 1866, and on the same page, Woodruff wrote the following, reproduced here line for line: Joseph Smith & Louisa Beeman were Nauvoo Illinois 1 Without identifying the many historians of LDS plural marriage who have relied on the traditional dates, I refer only to my own past dependence. Having reconsidered the sources underlying the traditional dates, I now think that I and others have probably been too accepting of the supposed accuracy of these sources. 2 On November 24, 1878, Woodruff evidently handed the Historian s Private Journal to John Jaques ( ), an employee of the LDS Church Historian s Office, instructing Jaques, according to the inside the front cover of the Journal : I wish you to take special care of it yourself untill I call for it. Jaques worked in the Historian s Office from 1859 to 1863 and again beginning in the late 1870s; from 1889 to his death eleven years later, he was Assistant Church Historian. Woodruff s Historian s Private Journal is separate from Woodruff s personal journals as well as from the Church Historian s Office Journals. All of these documents are located in the LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. I was not permitted to examine the original of the Historian s Private Journal, but instead relied on typescripts, then on a color printout of two pages provided by the LDS Church History Library.

105 Wilford Woodruff s record dating several of Joseph Smith s plural marriages in Nauvoo. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 97

106 Wilford Woodruff, ca. mid-1850s, was Assistant LDS Church Historian from 1856 to 1883, then LDS Church Historian from 1883 to Courtesy Smith-Pettit Foundation. 98

107 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 99 sealed May [blank] 1840 by Joseph B Noble Joseph Smith and Zina Huntington was sealed Oct 27, 1840 By Dimick B Huntington in Nauvoo Joseph Smith & Presinda Huntington were sealed Dec 11, 1840 By Dimick B. Huntington in Nauvoo 3 Woodruff served as Assistant LDS Church Historian from 1856 to 1883 and as LDS Church Historian from 1883 to At that point, he was named Church president and was succeeded as Historian by Apostle Franklin D. Richards ( ). Woodruff also maintained an important multi-volume personal journal. Woodruff was as historically conscious and well positioned regarding the need to record significant events in LDS history as any LDS Church member. Though the exact dating of Woodruff s record may never be known, an argument can be made for the latter half of 1866, specifically September or thereabouts. As with the better-known Joseph F. Smith affidavits, Woodruff s record may have been prompted by the visit to the Salt Lake Valley of three proselytizing missionaries including one of Joseph Smith s own sons of the recently formed Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS). The RLDS Church, headed 3 A fourth entry, also in Woodruff s hand, immediately follows the third entry and reads: Joseph Smith & Rhoda Richards were Sealed // June , By Willard Richards in Joseph Store Nauvoo. The remainder of the page fifteen lines is blank (and unpaginated). The next page is dated at the top as November 18, 1878, and is Woodruff s transcription of an address reportedly delivered by Joseph Smith on June 22, 1844, and evidently recorded at some point by Church member Philo Dibble ( ). The date for the Smith-Richards marriage in the Woodruff record is the same date that tradition assigns to this plural marriage. 4 The RLDS Church was organized in 1860 and named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; in 1872, the Church added Reorganized to its name (to differentiate itself more explicitly

108 100 The Journal of Mormon History by Joseph Smith s oldest son, Joseph III, rejected plural marriage, and insisted that the teaching was false doctrine promulgated by LDS Church president Brigham Young and other LDS leaders. In late August 1866, Alexander Hale Smith ( ), the twenty-eight-year-old third son of Joseph Smith and his civil wife, Emma Hale Smith, arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Alexander and his traveling companions were met by John Smith ( ), the LDS Church s Presiding Patriarch and Alexander s thirty-four-year-old cousin. 6 The next day or so, the two cousins joined Brigham Young ( ) and party on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. 7 That same evening or shortly thereafter, Alexander preached against plural marriage at Line and Fox s Garden, a public resort. Another cousin, Joseph F. Smith ( John Smith s brother), received permission to reply and spoke in defence of Polygamy, and also Brigham [Young] s position. In rejoinder, Alexander delivered, according to his companion James W. Gillen, one of the worst castigations that from the LDS Church). For the impact of the RLDS Church on Joseph F. Smith s attempts to document the beginnings of Nauvoo polygamy, see Don Bradley and Brian C. Hales, LDS Joseph vs. RLDS Joseph: The Battle to Control the Public Memory of Joseph Smith, in The Persistence of Polygamy: From Joseph Smith s Martyrdom to the First Manifesto, , edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster (Independence, Mo.: John Whitmer Books, 2013), Bradley and Hales focus on the 1869 visit to Utah of RLDS missionaries since this visit seems to have prompted Joseph F. Smith s effort to gather affidavits regarding Nauvoo plural marriage. 5 Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (chronological scrapbook of typed entries and newspaper clippings, 1830 present), August 29, 1866, LDS Church History Library; Selected Church History Manuscript Collections, churchhistorylibrary.lds.org/primo_library/libweb/custom/chl/ pages/collections.jsp. See also Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff Journal, , typescript, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, ), 6:295-96, August 31, Journal History, August 30, 1866.

109 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 101 Alexander Hale Smith, third son of Joseph Smith, visited Salt Lake City in August September 1866 as a proselytizing missionary for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day, which disavowed the practice of plural marriage. Courtesy Community of Christ and Smith-Pettit Foundation. I ever saw any person receive. 7 Alexander later reported that he made use of some statements [opposing polygamy] which displeased President Brigham Young. 8 The next day, Young alluded to Alexander when he commented during a public meeting at which Alexander was not present on a dream he had had the previous evening regarding Alexander s family. 9 7 See James W. Gillen, Statement in True Latter Day Saints Herald (Plano, Illinois) 10 (December 15, 1866): Alexander H. Smith, Early Ministerial Experiences. No. 16, Autumn Leaves (Lamoni, Iowa) 14, no. 8 (August 1901): Wilford Woodruff Journal, 6:297, September 6, Young referred to the dream which was critical of the succession-related claims of the Smith family a month later. Apparently, Young s dream left him convinced that Joseph III s claim as his father s only legitimate successor was based on a belief in Spiritualism. Brigham

110 102 The Journal of Mormon History After two weeks, Alexander and his associates left for California on September The next day, Heber C. Kimball ( ), a confidant of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young s first counselor, stopped at the Church Historian s Office in downtown Salt Lake City to relate his own firsthand experience in connection with the establishment of polygamy. 11 Kimball, one of Nauvoo s earliest polygamists, insisted throughout his life that Smith introduced the practice. 12 When semi-annual LDS general conference convened in Salt Lake City three weeks later, Brigham Young reported of Alexander s visit: We treated him kindly.... Joseph F. Smith, who was from home, came back, and saw him, and met him in public in this city. Many of this congregation are acquainted with that circumstance. It was asked him... What do you think of the doctrine of polygamy? It is his business to preach against polygamy, and his brother Joseph [III] said that his father never introduced it. Several of the sisters testified to him that they were sealed to his father. Well, said he, if he did have any such revelation, or teach any such doctrine, or practice it, he must have got out of the way, or, in other words he must have been a fallen prophet, if he ever was a true prophet. That is the conclusion they come to when hard pressed with stern facts. 13 Young, Sermon, October 7, 1866, in The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, edited by Richard S. Van Wagoner, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: The Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2009), 4: Church Historian s Office Journal, September 13, 1866, LDS Church History Library. 11 Ibid., September 14, Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), Young, Sermon, October 7, 1866, in Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, 4:2379. Alexander returned to Utah three years later again as an RLDS missionary, was ordained as one of the RLDS twelve apostles in 1873, was ordained as president of the RLDS Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1890, and was named as Presiding Patriarch of the RLDS Church in 1897, a position he held at the time of his death twelve years later.

111 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 103 Wilford Woodruff, as official Church Historian, would have been sensitive to the need to document Joseph Smith s earliest plural marriages to refute the counter-claims of the RLDS missionaries. It seems reasonable to postulate that Woodruff s record of the dates of Smith s marriages to Louisa Beaman, Zina Jacobs, and Presendia Buell was made sometime during or shortly after Alexander s visit to Salt Lake City in September If so, Woodruff s record is the earliest known source for dating Joseph Smith s first three Nauvoo plural marriages. THE SMITH-BEAMAN MARRIAGE The only known self-reported eyewitness to Joseph Smith s plural marriage to Louisa Beaman to have specified a date of the marriage is Beaman s brother-in-law and officiator at the marriage, Joseph Bates Noble ( ). 14 Noble married Beaman s older sister Mary Adeline Beaman ( ) civilly in He later became a practicing polygamist in Nauvoo (discussed below). All known statements regarding the dating of the Smith-Beaman marriage, including Woodruff s, seem to 14 According to another of Smith s self-reported plural wives, Almera Johnson ( ), she and Beaman (whom Almera identifies as Eliza Beaman ) had many conversations... on the subject of plurality of wives, both before and after [April 25, 1843, by which time Johnson had reportedly married Smith]. See Almera W. Johnson Smith Barton, Affidavit, witnessed by John W. Brown, notary public, August 1, 1883, in Joseph F. Smith, comp., 40 Affidavits on Celestial Marriage, , Ms 3423, fd. 1, LDS Church History Library. Scans of the originals of the Smith-generated affidavits, and related documents, are available on-line, beginning at org/stream/affidavitsoncelestialmarriage/ms_3423_5-6#page/n0/ mode/2up (accessed May 25, 2015). Johnson did not leave any record of the date of Beaman s marriage to Smith. For lists of primary and other documents relating to Beaman s, Jacobs s, and Buell s marriages to Smith, see Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith s Polygamy, Volume 2: History (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013),

112 104 The Journal of Mormon History depend on Noble. 15 According to the personal diaries of Woodruff and Franklin D. Richards, recorded separately, Noble stated on January 21, 1869, during a dinner party, or feast, hosted by Jane Blackhurst 16 that he, Noble, performed the first Nauvoo plural marriage. Woodruff wrote: Brother Joseph B. Nobles said that he performed the first Marriage Ceremony according to the Patriarchal order of Marriage ever performed in this dispensation By sealing Eliza Beman to Joseph Smith on the 6 day of May Richards recorded: Br. Joseph B. Noble being the master of ceremonies was present and During the visit related that he performed the first sealing ceremony in this Dispensation in which he united Sister Louisa Beman to the Prop[h]et Joseph [Smith] in May I think the 5th day in 1841 during the evening under an Elm tree in Nauvoo. The Bride disguised in a coat and hat. 18 In both accounts, Noble is quoted as saying the Smith- Beaman marriage occurred in May 1841, though Woodruff writes the 6th, while Richards thinks the 5th. Five months later, Joseph F. Smith began taking affidavits 15 See the discussion in George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy:... But We Called It Celestial Marriage, updated and rev. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011), The first public mention of the Smith- Beaman marriage (without specifying a date) is in John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints: Or an Exposé of Joe Smith and the Mormons (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842), 256, where Beaman is identified in code as Miss L***** B*****, by Elder Joseph Bates Noble. The source, or sources, of Bennett s information is contested. 16 Probably Jane Hamilton ( ), who reportedly married William Blackhurst ( ) on January 27, 1846 ( findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&grid= (accessed February 8, 2014). 17 Wilford Woodruff s Journal, 6:452, January 22, Franklin D. Richards, Diary, January 22, 1869, LDS Church History Library. His entry is dated Thursday Jan 22 ; however, Thursday was January 21. Richards s is the only account to refer to Beaman s having been disguised apparently as a man for the marriage.

113 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 105 from LDS Church members asserting personal knowledge of his uncle s plural marriages. ( Joseph F. was the son of Joseph Smith s older brother, Hyrum. He had been ordained an apostle and named a counselor to Brigham Young on July 1, 1866, and joined the Quorum of Twelve Apostles on October 8, 1867.) Joseph F. was gathering evidence to refute the claims of the RLDS Church that his uncle never taught or practiced plural marriage. 19 On June 26, 1869, Noble, now age fifty-nine and twenty-eight years after the fact, signed a statement attesting that on the fifth day of April A.D at the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, he married or sealed Louisa Beaman, to Joseph Smith President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, according to the order of Celestial Marriage revealed to the Said Joseph Smith. 20 A second affidavit recorded the same day alleged that Noble asserted (in the third person): in the fall of the year A.D Joseph Smith, the Prophet, taught him [i.e., Noble] the principle of Celestial marriage, or a plurality of wives, and that the said Joseph Smith declaired [sic] that he had received a Revelation from God on the Subject, and that the Angel of the Lord had commanded him ( Joseph Smith) to move forward in the said order of marriage, and further, that the said Joseph Smith, requested him, ( Jos. Bates Noble) to step forward and assist him in carrying out said principle, Saying in revealing this to you I ^have^ placed my life in your hands, there- 19 Bradley and Hales, LDS Joseph vs. RLDS Joseph. 20 Noble, First Affidavit, June 26, 1869, witnessed by James Jack, notary public, in Joseph F. Smith, 40 Affidavits, 1. On October 9, 1869, LDS Church Apostle and Church Historian George A. Smith ( ) outlined in a letter to Joseph Smith III some of the information, including names and dates, that Joseph F. Smith had collected (copy in LDS Church History Library). Ten years later, Joseph F. referred to and summarized the main points of Noble s affidavit in Joseph F. Smith, Letter to the Editor, Deseret News, October 17, 1879, rpt. in Andrew Jenson, Plural Marriage, Historical Record 6 (May 1887): 221.

114 106 The Journal of Mormon History fore do not in an evil hour betray me to my enemies. 21 In the first statement, Noble had evidently settled on April 5, 1841 (a Monday), as the date he reportedly performed Smith s marriage to Noble s sister-in-law. In the second statement, Noble alleged some context for the beginnings of Nauvoo plural marriage discussions with Smith which Noble dates to the fall of 1840 and for Noble s participation in the Smith-Beaman marriage, including his recollection of Smith s exact words (more likely a paraphrase) to him. Noble s next known statement regarding the Smith-Beaman marriage occurred eleven years later. On December 19, 1880, Church member Charles L. Walker ( ) wrote in his diary: Br [ Joseph Bates] Nobles made a few remarks on the celestial order of marriage, He being the man who sealed Louisa Beeman to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1840 under his instructions. 22 Noble evidently did not specify a month and day, but did give a year (1840), which agrees with Woodruff s record but disagrees with the accounts in Woodruff s journal, Richards s diary, and Noble s affidavit. Noble s final statements occurred on two separate days in March 1892 the 21st and 23rd fifty-plus years after the fact, when he provided testimony of Nauvoo polygamy during the socalled Temple Lot Suit. The suit had been brought to determine which of two churches the Church of Christ Temple Lot or the RLDS Church was the legitimate successor to the church Joseph Smith founded in The purpose of the suit was an effort to determine the legal ownership of the parcel of land known as the Temple Lot in Independence, Missouri. Though both the Temple Lot Church and the RLDS Church rejected plural marriage, the LDS Church had agreed to offer some 21 Noble, Second Affidavit, June 26, 1869, witnessed by James Jack, notary public, in Joseph F. Smith, 40 Affidavits, Charles L. Walker, Diary, in A. Karl Larson and Katharine Miles Larson, eds., Diary of Charles Lowell Walker, 2 vols. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1980), 2:515.

115 Joseph Bates Noble s second affidavit (first of two pages) regarding his recollection of early plural marriage, also in Joseph F. Smith s affidavit book 40 Affidavits on Celestial Marriage. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 107

116 108 The Journal of Mormon History support to the Temple Lot Church. The LDS Church believed that by doing so, it might one day be positioned to acquire the temple lot itself should the Temple Lot Church sell it. Noble, age eighty-two, was a reluctant, occasionally combative witness. As Richard Ouellette, historian of the Temple Lot hearings, describes Noble: The courtroom could not have experienced a more frustrating and alternately entertaining deponent. Noble paused for extended periods before answering questions. He complained incessantly about head pain, and each question only seemed to increase the agony his agony and his questioner s agony. Yet when Noble spoke, he displayed a rascally, self-deprecating wit that ultimately resulted in without question the most entertaining deposition of the Temple Lot Case. 23 The relevant excerpts from the first day (March 21, 1892) of Noble s testimony read: 48 Q: You married Louisa Beeman to the prophet Joseph Smith? A: Yes sir. 49 Q: About what year was this?... A: In 41 or close to it. Now that is my best recollection. 50 Q: When did the prophet Joseph Smith first teach you that doctrine?... A: He taught me that doctrine in 40. It was in 40 or about that time, that is my best recollection. 23 Richard Donald Ouellette, The Mormon Temple Lot Case: Space, Memory, and Identity in a Divided New Religion (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2012), Ouellette also refers to Noble s wisecracks and salty language while testifying (p. 586). Noble s biographer and great-great-grandson agrees that Noble was ambiguous, exhibited a number of memory lapses, especially with precise dates, and sometimes became impatient. David L. Clark, Joseph Bates Noble: Polygamy and the Temple Lot Case (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2009), 5. Noble died eight years later on August 17, Objections by counsel for the RLDS Church are not reproduced but are signaled by ellipses.

117 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence Q: Where were you living when you were first taught that doctrine?... A: I was living in Montrose in Lee County, Iowa, right across the [Mississippi] river opposite Nauvoo [Illinois]. 25 Noble s testimony on the second day (March 23) addressed in greater detail his recollection of the Smith-Beaman marriage: 380 Q: Well when did you go to Nauvoo to live? A: Well it is my best recollection that we went there about Q: That is when you first heard the doctrine of polygamy talked, when you went over to Nauvoo to live in 1841 was the time you first heard that doctrine talked was it not? A: Well I don t know about that. 382 Q: Do you mean to say that you do not know about that? A: I don t know when it was I first heard of it. 383 Q: Well was it not that time? A: I could not tell yiu [sic] the time when I heard it first, for I have heard so much about it first and last that I really couldn t say when I first heard of it. 384 Q: You don t know whether it was before that or not? A: I cant [sic] say. 384 Q: Well it was some time in 41 wasn t it that you first heard it talked of, when you went over to Nauvoo to live? A: Yes sir I heard of it then, I guess, but I had heard of it before that time, and afterwards too I guess. 385 Q: Well where and when did you hear of it before? A: I heard of it in 40 I guess. 386 Q: In 1840 you say you heard of it? A: Yes sir. 387 Q: Where did you hear of it then? A: Let me see where I was then I was over there in Montrose I guess Q: Well now you are positive are you that you heard of it in 1840 when you lived in Montrose? A: My best recollection is that it was about that time. My best recollection that I heard of it was about that time. My best recollection is that I heard of it about 25 Temple Lot Case, Respondent s Testimony, 396, photocopy of typescript, Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City. See also the scanned version of testimony presented during the Temple Lot Case at (accessed January 24, 2015).

118 110 The Journal of Mormon History that time, but I heard more of it afterwards Q: When did you say the other day that Louisa Beeman was sealed to Joseph Smith? A: When? 602 Q: Yes sir? A: Let me see that was in, I can t remember that. 603 Q: Well you ought to remember that, for you said you were the elder that performed the ceremony? A: Yes sir. 604 Q: Well when was it? A: Well I was trying to call it up. 605 Q: Well call it up and tell us when it was? A: Well that was in 42 I think. 606 Q: You think to day it was in 42 do you? A: Or was it in 41, I am not certain. 607 Q: Well I am not so certain that it was then, or whether it was at all for that is what I am trying to get from you? [sic] As far as I am concerned I have no hesitation in saying that I don t believe it ever did occur? [sic] A: Yes sir it did, but I am not certain of the time. There comes in again the question of dates, and that is what I can t remember. 608 Q: Well when was it? A: Well it was in 41 or 42 some where. 609 Q: Well now was it either one of these years? A: Yes sir. It is difficult for me to remember, but I am pretty sure it was, in either one of these years. 610 Q: Well which one of them was it in? A: Well now that is what I can t remember. I think it was in 41, but it might have been in Q: Now you said the other day positively that it was in 1840, I would like you to reconcile the statement you make now with that? A: Did I say in 40? 612 Q: That is what you said. A: That he was sealed to her? 613 Q: Yes sir, that is what you said that it was in 1840, and that you performed the ceremony? A: Well I am inclined to think it was a little later than that. 614 Q: You think now that it was a little later than 1840? A: Yes sir. 615 Q: The other day you said it was when you lived in Iowa? A: Yes sir it was in Iowa. It was when I lived across the river in Iowa at Montrose. 616 Q: And you said that you went across to Nauvoo to live

119 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 111 in 1841, and that it was when you lived in Iowa before you moved to Nauvoo, so it must have been in 1840? A: Well I did live in Iowa in Q: Was that sealing for time and eternity? A: For time and eternity. 644 Q: For time and eternity? A: Yes sir. 645 Q: They were sealed for time and eternity? A: Yes sir. 646 Q: Well that was in 41 wasn t it? A: Yes sir, some time in 41 or Q: Well which was it, 41 or 42? A: Well I have tried to study it out and see which it was. 648 Q: Well it was either 41 or 42? A: Well it was there abouts. 649 Q: Well 43 would be there abouts? Which year was it? A: It was before that Q: Don t you know it was in 41? A: I am inclined to think it was thereabouts. 654 Q: You are inclined to think it was in 41 or thereabouts? A: Yes sir. 26 In his testimony, Noble was unable to specify consistently the year of his performing Smith s plural marriage to Beaman. The question of the month and day were never addressed. I can t remember, Noble stated more than once. When pressed, he said he thought 1841 or close to it, and was inclined to say a little later than 1840, but could not be certain of the time. He also had to guess when he was first introduced to Smith s teachings on plural marriage and thought it was while he was living in Montrose, Iowa, in 1840 or about that time. Noble arrived in Montrose a ferry ride west across the Mississippi River from Commerce/Nauvoo in January 1839, and arranged for his family to join him the following April- May. In May 1839, Joseph Smith and other Church leaders visited the Saints, including the Nobles. Two months later, Smith again visited Montrose, then in the midst of a malaria outbreak, and healed Noble. The next year, on either August Temple Lot Case, Respondent s Testimony, ,

120 112 The Journal of Mormon History or September 29, 1840 (the sources disagree), 27 Sarah Burtts Beaman (b. 1775), mother of Noble s wife, Mary (age thirty on October 11), and sister-in-law, Louisa (age twenty-five), died in Nauvoo. According to family tradition (not always a reliable source of information), Louisa then left her mother s house in Nauvoo, where she had been living, and moved in with the Nobles in Montrose. In July 1841, Noble purchased building lots in Nauvoo from Joseph Smith and subsequently moved his family, including presumably Louisa, to Nauvoo sometime after September 1841 but before the end of the year. 28 At almost any time during the thirty-two or so months ( January 1839 September 1841) that Noble lived in Montrose, Smith could have visited him to teach him the doctrine of plural marriage, to invite him to teach the doctrine to his sister-in-law, and to invite him to perform and for Noble to have performed the Smith-Beaman plural marriage. Noble s memory (beginning some twenty-five-plus years after the event) shifts between 1840 and 1841 as the year of Nauvoo s first plural marriage. As a source, Noble is, at best, inconsistent. Further complicating the matter is the date traditionally assigned to Noble s own first plural marriage on April 5, 1843, exactly two years to the day after the date traditionally assigned to Noble s having performed the Smith-Beaman marriage. His bride was Sarah B. Alley ( ). The source for the date of Noble s plural marriage is apparently family tradition. 29 That both plural 27 See the notice of Sarah Beaman s death in Times and Seasons 1, no. 11 (September 1840): 176 (which gives August 29), and Funeral Services of Sister Artimesia Beaman Snow, Deseret News, January 3, 1883, 795 (which gives September 29). According to Erastus Snow, his wife, Artimesia Beaman, had also been living with her mother while he was on a Church proselytizing mission. Erastus Snow, Diary, 92 (early September or October 1840), LDS Church History Library. 28 Clark, Joseph Bates Noble, See Hazel Noble Boyack, A Nobleman in Israel: A Biographical Sketch of Joseph Bates Noble, Pioneer to Utah in 1847 (Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing Co., 1962), 31 (no documentation for the Noble-

121 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 113 marriages occurred on the same month and day, separated by two years, seems unlikely, and suggests that the memory of one event influenced the date of the other. The problem, of course, is that we do not know if the date of Noble s own first plural marriage is accurate and/or if Noble s dating of the Smith-Beaman marriage is accurate, let alone which event may have influenced the memory of the dating of the other. 30 THE SMITH-JACOBS MARRIAGE Eighteen-year-old Zina Diantha Huntington arrived in Commerce/Nauvoo in mid-may Some six weeks later, she and other family members contracted malaria. A month later, Zina relocated with family members to a cabin built by her brothers Dimick ( ) and William Jr. ( ) on the banks of the Mississippi River. Later that winter, Zina lived for three months with Joseph Smith s family. According to her biography, during this time Zina was introduced to Smith s teachings on plural marriage (either by Dimick or by Smith himself, depending on the source) and was also courted by Henry Bailey Jacobs ( ). The following spring, Zina returned to her family s cabin, then several months later moved in with Dimick and his wife, Fanny Maria Allen Huntington ( , md. 1830). The following March 7, 1841, Zina married Jacobs, with Nauvoo mayor John C. Bennett ( ) officiating. 31 According to Alley plural marriage date is provided). See also Gary James Bergera, Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, , Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (Fall 2005): 1 74, esp. p. 18; and Clark, Joseph Bates Noble, From William Clayton s contemporary Nauvoo diary, we know that Noble s first plural marriage probably occurred by May 17, See the quotation in Bergera, Identifying, Bennett had moved to Nauvoo the previous September, been baptized into the LDS Church, boarded with Joseph Smith and his family from September 1840 to June 1841, and served as Nauvoo mayor from February 1841 to May Bennett was also assistant Church president from April 1841 to May 1842, before leaving the

122 114 The Journal of Mormon History tradition, Joseph Smith subsequently married Zina on Wednesday, October 27, 1841, with Dimick performing the ceremony. At the time, Zina was about seven months pregnant with Jacobs s baby (born January 2, 1842). 32 According to the Woodruff record, Zina and Smith were married exactly one year earlier than tradition assigns, on October 27, In her affidavit generated by Joseph F. Smith on Saturday, May 1, 1869, Zina, age forty-eight and, since September 1844 a plural wife of Brigham Young, stated: Be it remembered that on this first day of May A.d. 1869, personally appeared before me, Elias Smith Probate Judge for said County, Zina Diantha Huntington ^Young^ who was by me sworn in due form of law, and upon her oath saith, that on the twenty seventh day of October A.D. 1841, at the city of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, she was married or sealed to Joseph Smith, President of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by Dimick B. Huntington a High Priest in said church, according to the laws of the same regulating marriage; in the presence of Fanny Maria Huntington. 33 Dimick, who would turn sixty-one at the month s end, also stated on this same day of sisters Zina s and Presendia s plural Church in May According to some accounts, Joseph Smith was to have performed the Huntington-Jacobs marriage ceremony but decided not to since he believed Zina was destined to become his plural wife. See Todd M. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), See Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Plurality, Patriarchy, and the Priestess: Zina D. H. Young s Nauvoo Marriages, Journal of Mormon History 20 (Spring 1994): , esp (following Joseph Smith s death in June 1844, Zina married Young); and Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000), Zina D. H. Young, Affidavit, May 1, 1869, witnessed by Elias Smith, probate judge, in Joseph F. Smith, 40 Affidavits, 5.

123 Zina Huntington Jacobs s affidavit regarding her plural marriage to Joseph Smith, in Joseph F. Smith s affidavit book, 40 Affidavits on Celestial Marriage. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 115

124 Dimick Huntington s and wife Fanny Huntington s separate statements regarding the plural marriages to Joseph Smith of Zina Huntington Jacobs and Presendia Huntington Buell, in Joseph F. Smith s affidavit book, 40 Affidavits on Celestial Marriage. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 116

125 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 117 By his account, Dimick Huntington performed on separate days the plural marriages between Joseph Smith and Dimick s sisters, Zina Huntington Jacobs and Presendia Huntington Buell. Courtesy Smith- Pettit Foundation. marriages to Smith: Be it remembered that on this first day of May A.D. 1869, personally appeared before me, Elias Smith, Probate Judge for said county, Dimick B. Huntington, who was by me sworn in due form of law, and upon his oath saith, that on the 27th day of October A.D. 1841, at the city of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, he married or sealed Zina D. Huntington to Joseph Smith, President of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and also on the 11th day of December A.D at the same place he married or Sealed, Prescendia L. Huntington to the said Joseph Smith according to the laws of said church regulating marriage; in the presence of Fanny M. Huntington. 34 Finally, Fanny Huntington, age fifty-eight, reported similarly in her own affidavit, also made on May 1, 1869: Be it remembered that on this first day of May A.D per- 34 D. B. Huntington, Affidavit, May 1, 1869, witnessed by Elias Smith, probate judge, in Joseph F. Smith, 40 Affidavits, 19.

126 118 The Journal of Mormon History sonally appeared before me, Elias Smith, Probate Judge for said county, Fanny Maria Huntington, who was by me sworn in due form of law and upon her oath saith that she was present when Zina D. and Presendia L. Huntington were married or sealed to Joseph Smith, President of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, at the city of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, in the fall of the year Dimick s and Fanny s affidavits are the only primary statements from Zina s brother and sister-in-law giving, in Dimick s case, specific dates for his sisters plural marriages and, in Fanny s case, season and year only. All of Zina s other reminiscences are phrased more generally and tentatively. In a late 1894 account, more than fifty years after her plural marriage to Smith, she asserted, apparently drawing on statements from Dimick: He [Smith] sent word to me by my brother [Dimick], saying, Tell Zina I put it [plural marriage] off and put it off till an angel with a drawn sword stood by me and told me if I did not establish that principle upon the earth, I would lose my position and my life 36 Not quite four years later, Zina, now in her late seventies, was interviewed by John W. Wight ( ), an apostle (serving ) of the RLDS Church, about her plural marriage to Smith. Zina s responses comprise her most detailed account of her experience in Nauvoo polygamy. 37 Unfortunately, the 35 Fanny Maria Huntington, Affidavit, May 1, 1869, witnessed by Elias Smith, probate judge, in Joseph F. Smith, 40 Affidavits, p. 21. Elias Smith ( ) was a cousin of Joseph Smith; joined the LDS Church in 1835; immigrated to Utah in 1851; and shortly afterwards was elected probate judge for Salt Lake County, serving until He was a life-long monogamist. 36 Zina D. H. Smith, qtd. in Joseph, the Prophet. His Life and Mission as Viewed by Intimate Acquaintances. Memorial Services in Honor of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Held in the Sixteenth Ward, Salt Lake City, Sunday Evening, December 23, 1894, Salt Lake Herald Church and Farm Supplement, January 12, 1895, See Evidence from Zina D. Huntington-Young, in Saints

127 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 119 interview was not published until early 1905, three and half years after Zina s death, and may or may not reflect corrections, if any, she may have had. 38 The relevant portions of Zina s interview read: Q. Can you give us the date of that marriage with Joseph Smith? A. No, sir, I could not. Q. Not even the year? A. No, I do not remember. It was something too sacred to be talked about; it was more to me than life or death. I never breathed it for years.... Q. You say that Brigham Young repeated the ceremony after his return from England? A. Yes sir.... Q. Did you hear the question of plural marriage discussed either privately or publicly, prior to your having been sealed to Joseph Smith? A. No. We hardly dared speak of it. The very walls had ears. We spoke of it only in whispers. Q. How, then, could you have been sealed to Joseph Smith without first having heard the doctrine of plural marriage? A. Joseph Smith sent my brother Dimick to explain it to me. Q. Is it fact, then, that you were never taught it by Joseph Smith himself? A. My brother Dimick told me what Joseph had told him. I knew it was from the Lord, and I received it. Joseph did not come Herald 52, no. 2 ( January 11, 1905): The interview took place on October 1, Wight was a son of former LDS Church Apostle Lyman Wight ( ; ordained an apostle 1841), who was excommunicated from the Church in December 1848 and who subsequently aligned himself briefly with the RLDS Church. Lyman Wight was a practicing polygamist; son John W. was born to one of Lyman s plural wives. Thus, there is some irony in John Wight s attempts to distance Joseph Smith from Nauvoo polygamy. 38 Wight states at the conclusion of his account that both Zina and her daughter, who was present for the interview, stated that it [the transcription] was as Mrs. Young had given it. Evidence, 30.

128 120 The Journal of Mormon History until afterward. Q. You mean by that, then that after your brother Dimick had returned to Joseph and given him the information that you had accepted such teaching, that Joseph then came to you, prior to having been sealed, and taught you the doctrine of plural marriage? A. I told you that the Lord had revealed to Joseph Smith that he was to marry me. I received it from Joseph through my brother Dimick. Q. Who was present at the time that Joseph taught you the doctrine of sealing, besides, yourself and Joseph? A. My brother Dimick. Q. Were you sealed to Joseph on the occasion of this visit? A. Yes sir. Q. Is it a fact then, Mrs. Young, that Joseph was not married to you only in the sense of being sealed for eternity? A. As his wife for time and eternity. Q. Mrs Young, you have answered that question in two ways; for time, and for time and eternity. A. I meant for eternity.... Question to Mrs. Young. Mrs Young, you have stated that you were married to Joseph Smith for time and eternity. Now, how could you marry Joseph Smith for time when at the same time you were married to Mr. [Henry B.] Jacobs? A. I do not wish to reply. I only know that this is the work of God upon the earth, and I know by testimony from God that Joseph was a prophet. 39 Finally, in none of Zina s known autobiographies (all undated) does she specify the date of her marriage to Smith Ibid., In their biography of Zina, Bradley and Woodward cite one of Zina s autobiographies to report that Zina learned about plural marriage from Smith during the winter of ; that Smith in private conversations, taught Zina Diantha the controversial principle of plural marriage and invited her to become his plural wife ; and that Joseph pressed Zina for an answer to his marriage proposal on at least three occasions in 1840, but she avoided answering

129 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 121 The case for the traditional date of October 27, 1841, for Zina s marriage to Smith rests entirely on Zina s, Dimick s, and Fanny s May 1, 1869, affidavits. There are no other known statements from Dimick and/or Fanny. And Zina, in her own later known statements, insisted that she did not remember the date and was unable or reluctant to attempt any clarification. She reported that Dimick first broached the subject with her and that she only heard Smith teach the principle the day of her marriage to him. According to Zina, when Smith proposed, he insisted that he did so because an angel had seemed to threaten his life. Zina added that following her marriage to Smith, which Dimick reportedly performed, Brigham Young, following his return to Nauvoo from a proselytizing mission to England on July 1, 1841, repeated the plural marriage ceremony. (It is unclear if Zina meant that Young repeated the ceremony after his return but before her civil marriage to Jacobs; or if she had in mind Young s standing as proxy for Smith when Heber Kimball repeated the plural marriage sealing in the Nauvoo temple on February 3, 1846, and then immediately thereafter married Zina to Young for time. Zina s statement to Wight is the only known source for Young s having repeated Zina s plural marriage to Smith.) 41 him. Bradley and Woodward, Four Zinas, 107, 108, citing Zina D. H. Young, Autobiography, 4.3. Unfortunately, this particular autobiography (apparently one of four) cannot now be located; and the remaining other three autobiographies do not contain any such specific information (based on conversations in 2004 with Bradley and with employees of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, where Mary Brown Firmage Woodward s research papers are located.) Because I cannot independently confirm these statements, I do not include them in my discussion even though they, if accurate, could be read as supporting the Woodruff record. 41 Regarding the possibility that Young repeated Zina s plural marriage to Smith before her civil marriage to Jacobs, historian D. Michael Quinn speculates that Young may have also repeated Smith s

130 122 The Journal of Mormon History Finally, although Zina seemed not to understand fully Wight s pressing her on whether her marriage to Smith was for time and eternity (which may be understood as possibly including sexual relations) or for eternity only (and thus seeming to exclude sexual relations), 42 she did not contradict or correct him when he told her that she was married to Joseph Smith for plural marriages to Louisa Beaman and to Presendia Buell at or around the same time. Zina s subsequent civil marriage to Henry Jacobs thus would have functioned, according to Quinn, as one of Smith s secret-plural-marriage[s]-to-a-virgin [i.e., Zina]-followed-by-civilmarriage-of-this-polygamous-wife [i.e., Zina]-to-another-man [i.e., Jacobs] a pattern Smith later adopted with plural wives Sarah Ann Whitney and Flora Ann Woodworth. See Quinn, Sexual Side of Joseph Smith s Polygamy, December 31, 2012, 14 15, privately circulated, copy in my possession. According to the traditional narrative, Smith married Whitney on July 27, 1842, and Woodworth on March 4, Whitney then married Joseph C. Kingsbury civilly on April 29, 1843, and Woodworth married Carlos Gove civilly on August 23, The intent, at least according to Kingsbury in Whitney s case, was to conceal Smith s plural marriage. Quinn also speculates that, because the conflicting dates of Joseph Smith s marriages to Beaman and to the Huntington sisters 1840 vs complicated Joseph F. Smith s attempts in 1869 to document Nauvoo polygamy, someone obviously decided that the easiest way to avoid confusion was to emphasize the month and day of the original ceremonies performed in 1840 by two rank-and-file Mormons [i.e., Joseph Bates Noble and Dimick Huntington], yet assign them to the year (1841) when the ceremonies were re-solemnized by apostolic authority (Quinn, 15). Quinn s theory could explain as well that Smith did not officiate at Zina and Jacobs s civil marriage ceremony because Smith was, by this time, Zina s secret plural husband. 42 Eight months earlier, in February 1898, Zina s brother Oliver had reported that Zina s memory was very much broken so that in many instances she appeared almoste unsound a little demented, so that my heart was melted with pity and grief. Qtd. in Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 111. Such instances of possible dementia seem to have been episodic.

131 Presendia Huntington Buell s affidavit regarding her plural marriage to Joseph Smith, in Joseph F. Smith s affidavit book, 40 Affidavits on Celestial Marriage. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 123

132 124 The Journal of Mormon History time and eternity. 43 Given Zina s clear reluctance to discuss her plural marriage to Smith while also civilly married to Jacobs, 44 we can only speculate on why she chose not to offer any kind of explanation for her concurrent marriages. THE SMITH-BUELL MARRIAGE Presendia Lathrop Huntington, Zina s older sister, married Norman Buell ( ) on January 6, She was sixteen. Encouraged, in part, by Zina s example, the Buells were baptized into the Church in 1836 Presendia on June 6, and Norman on June 9. In early 1838, the Buells left Kirtland, Ohio, for Missouri, where Norman, according to reports, evidently became disaffected from Mormonism, though the couple continued to live together. Following Presendia s parents and siblings move to Illinois, the Buells visited them in October/November 1839, then about a year or so later moved to Lima, Illinois, thirty miles south of Nauvoo. 45 Their proximity allowed Presendia and 43 Brian Hales believes that Zina and Smith s plural marriage was for eternity only and hence did not include sexual contact. Hales, Joseph Smith s Polygamy, Volume 1: History (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), However, in reproducing the text of Wight s interview with Zina (253 56), Hales does not include the paragraph above beginning Question to Mrs. Young. This is not to argue any particular conclusion from silence but simply to suggest that the question of sexuality in the Smith-Jacobs marriage remains open. 44 Of her decision to marry Smith, Zina seems to have acknowledged a possibly sexual component in the marriage: I mad[e] a greater sacrifise than to give my li[f ]e for I never anticipated a gain to be looked uppon as an honerable woman by those I dearly loved. Zina D. H. Young, Autobiography, n.d., in Zina Card Brown Family Collection, MS 4780, Box 2, fd. 17, LDS Church History Library. Here, honerable seems best to reflect the Oxford English Dictionary s definition 3.a. of honour : (Of a woman) Chastity, purity, as a virtue of the highest consideration... (2d ed., Vol. 7). 45 The date of the Buells move to Lima comes from Emmeline Wells, A Venerable Woman: Presendia Lathrop Kimball, Woman s Exponent 11, no. 21 (April 1, 1883): 163. Wells s source is not identified,

133 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 125 Zina to visit one another periodically. Following her plural marriage to Smith, which tradition dates to December 11, 1841 six and a half weeks after the traditional date of Zina s marriage to Smith Presendia remained with Norman in Lima. Presendia was apparently sealed to Heber C. Kimball in September 1845 and, four months later, received her Nauvoo temple endowment without Norman, who was never endowed. The next month, on February 4, 1846, in the Nauvoo temple, Presendia was sealed by proxy to Joseph Smith (killed on June 27, 1844) for eternity and again to Kimball for time. (Kimball served as Smith s proxy for the eternity sealing.) Presendia was never sealed to Norman. Presendia and Norman remained together until about May 1846 when Presendia left Norman to join Kimball s extended family as they trekked west, with the main body of the Saints, to the Great Salt Lake Valley. 46 The primary sources for the dating of Presendia s marriage to Joseph Smith are fewer than those dating Zina s plural marriage. 47 Excluding the Wilford Woodruff record, these sources consist of Presendia s brother Dimick s 1869 affidavit, sister-in-law Fanny s 1869 affidavit (both quoted above), and Presendia s own 1869 affidavit. Presendia s affidavit reads: Be it remembered that on this first day of May A.D. 1869, personally appeared before me, Elias Smith, judge of Probate for said county, Prescenda Lathrop Huntington ^Kimball^, who by me sworn in due form of law, and upon her oath saith that on the eleventh day of December A.D. 1841, at the city of Nauvoo, county of Hancock, State of Illinois, she was married or sealed to Jothough Presendia seems a likely candidate. 46 Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, As with Louisa Beaman s plural marriage, the first public mention of Presendia s plural marriage to Joseph Smith, again without specifying a date, is in John C. Bennett s The History of the Saints, 256, where Presendia is Mrs. B****. Interestingly, Bennett does not identify Zina as a plural wife. Either Bennett was unaware of Zina s plural marriage or chose not to expose it. Again, the source, or sources, of Bennett s information Joseph Smith or someone else is contested.

134 The front cover of the first volume of Joseph F. Smith s compilation of statements regarding the beginnings of plural (also celestial) marriage in Nauvoo. Courtesy LDS Church History Library and Smith-Pettit Foundation. 126

135 Gary James Bergera/Memory as Evidence 127 Joseph F. Smith, ca Beginning in mid-1869, Joseph F. Smith began to collect statements from men and women regarding their recollections of Joseph Smith s doctrine of celestial, or plural, marriage. Courtesy Smith-Pettit Foundation. seph Smith, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints, by Dimick B. Huntington a High Priest in said church, according to the laws of the same regulating marriage; in the presence of Fanny Maria Huntington.48 Not quite twelve years later, Presendia wrote, without specifying month or season: In 1841 I entered into the New and Everlasting Covenant was sealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet and Seer, and to the best of my ability I have honored Plural Marriage, never speaking one word against the principle. 49 Aside from Presendia s, Dimick s, and Fanny s separate May 48 Presendia L. H. Kimball, Affidavit, May 1, 1869, witnessed by Elias Smith, probate judge, in May 1, 1869, Joseph F. in Smith, 40 Affidavits, Letter to eldest granddaughter living in 1880, dated April 1, 1881, qtd. in Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 122.