Life of Joseph Smith from 1839 to 1844

The life of Joseph Smith from 1839 to 1844, when he was 34–38 years old, covers the period of Smith's life when he lived in Nauvoo, an eventful and highly controversial period of the Latter Day Saint movement. In 1844, after Smith was imprisoned in Carthage, Illinois, he was shot and killed when a mob stormed the jailhouse.

Overview In April 1839, Smith rejoined his followers who, having fled east from Missouri, had spread out along the banks of the Mississippi, near Quincy, Illinois. There, for both humanitarian and political reasons, the refugees had been welcomed."There was chronic border friction between Missouri and Illinois, and the 'Suckers' welcomed the chance to demonstrate a nobility of character foreign to the despised 'Pukes.' More important, a presidential election was in the offing, and the Democratic Association, which controlled the votes in the quincy area, was eager to make friends with this huge new voting bloc. Fearful lest the Mormons turn Whig in bitterness against the Democratic government in Missouri they solicited funds for relieving the Mormons' distress and did their best to provide housing." Fawn Brodie, 248-49. Purchasing waterlogged wilderness land on credit from two Connecticut speculators (who drove a hard bargain during this period of economic recession), Smith established a new gathering place for the Saints along the Mississippi in Hancock County.Bushman, 383-84. Smith also purchased land across the river in Iowa from a dishonest recent convert, Isaac Galland. Galland sold his land cheaply enough, but when courts finally straightened out the titles, Gallands' proved worthless. The 250 Mormon families who had settled had to return "penniless to Nauvoo." Brodie, 262. He renamed the area "Nauvoo", which means "beautiful" in Hebrew.A similar Hebrew word appears in Isaiah 52: 7. Latter Day Saints often referred to Nauvoo as "the city beautiful", or "the city of Joseph"—which was actually the name of the city for a short time after the city charter was revoked—or other similar nicknames) after being granted a charter by the state of Illinois. The soggy low land and river eddies were exceptional breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and the Saints suffered plagues of malaria in the summers of 1839, 1840, and 1841. (In 1841 malaria killed Joseph's brother Don Carlos and his namesake, Joseph's son Don Carlos, within a few days of one another.)Bushman, 384, 425.

Late in 1839, Smith went to Washington to seek redress from the federal government for the Saints' losses in Missouri. He met briefly with President Martin Van Buren, but neither man seems to have thought much of the other, and the trip produced no reparations. Whatever sympathy Van Buren or Congress might have had for Mormon victims was canceled out by the importance of Missouri in the upcoming presidential election.Bushman, 392-93. Nevertheless, Smith shrewdly made Missouri a "byword for oppression" and "saw to it that the sufferings of his people received national publicity."Brodie, 259. The editor of the Chicago Democrat wrote, "We will not go so far as to call the Mormons martyr-mongers, but we believe they are men of sufficient sagacity to profit by anything in the shape of persecution....The Mormons have greatly profited by their persecution in Missouri...let Illinois repeat that bloody tragedies of Missouri and one or two other states follow, and the Mormon religion will not only be known throughout our land, but will be very extensively embraced. March 25, 1840 in Brodie, 259.

Smith sent off the Twelve Apostles to Great Britain to serve as missionaries for the new faith. All left families in desperate circumstances struggling to establish themselves in Iowa or Illinois. While Smith had been imprisoned, Brigham Young, the senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had brought the believers out of Missouri, and the Saints "had obeyed him implicitly."Brodie, 258. But with Young and the others in Europe, Smith recovered his earlier prestige and authority. Meanwhile, the missionaries found many willing converts in Great Britain, often poor factory workers.Bushman (2005), 409; Brodie, 258, 264-65. Many converts came from dissatisfied members of English sects "along the margins of conventional church life." On the previous religious beliefs of these Mormon converts, see Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993). The Mormon missionaries were shocked by the poverty they witnessed, and as Fawn Brodie has written, they "began to preach the glory of America along with the glory of the gospel." The Mormon Millennial Star published in Liverpool "frequently had the ring of a real estate pamphlet." Brodie, 264. These first trickled, then flooded, into Nauvoo, raising Smith's spirits.Bushman (2005), 410.

In February 1841, Nauvoo received a charter from the state of Illinois, which granted the Latter Day Saints a considerable degree of autonomy. Smith threw himself into the work of building a new city. The charter authorized independent municipal courts, the establishment of a university, and the creation of a militia unit known as the "Nauvoo Legion." Smith dreamed of industrial projects, and even received a revelation commanding the building of a hotel, "that strangers may come from afar to lodge therein."Bushman (2005), 410-13; D&C, 124: 23. The revelation (still included in the Mormon canon) specifically provided the amount of stock to be owned by any individual and granted a suite of rooms to Joseph Smith and his posterity "from generation to generation, for ever and ever." D&C, 124: 59.

Work on a temple in Nauvoo began in the autumn of 1840. The cornerstones were laid during a conference on April 6, 1841. Construction took five years and it was dedicated on May 1, 1846, about four months after Nauvoo was abandoned by the majority of the citizens.

New doctrines

While burdened with the temporal business of creating a city, Smith also elaborated on the cosmology of the new religion. According to Richard Bushman, Smith moved from "a traditional Christian belief in God as pure spirit to a belief in His corporeality."D&C, 130: 22; Bushman (2005), 420. According to LDS theologian David L. Paulsen, this teaching was foreshadowed in the Book of Mormon by the story of the brother of Jared, although even Richard Bushman admits that the "doctrine of a corporeal God was not fully articulated until later." David L. Paulsen, "The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives, BYU Studies 34, no. 4 (1995-96), 19-21. The earliest unequivocal statement of Joseph Smith was made at the opening of the Nauvoo Lyceum, January 5, 1841: "There is no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bone." Kurt Widmer, Mormonism and the Nature of God: A Theological Evolution, 1830-1915 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2000), 122. See also Douglas J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75-76. In other words, Smith declared that God had a body of flesh and bone and taught that "the great principle of happiness consists in having a body."Bushman (2005), 421.

Instead of affirming that there was an eternal God who had created matter, Smith taught that matter was eternal and that it was God who had developed through time and space. God only assembled the earth from preexisting materials and then had drawn on "a cohort of spirits from the pool of eternal intelligences to place upon it."Bushman (2005), 421. In general see, Kurt Widmer, Mormonism and the Nature of God: A Theological Evolution, 1830-1915 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2000). Widmer notes that Smith's "Doctrine of Eternal Progression" includes four components: that God is an exalted man; that man's spirit is co-equal with God and he can become a god; that there are innumerable gods who are progressing in knowledge; and that there is a "council or plurality" of gods." (119) Another striking doctrine revealed to Smith after 1840 was baptism for the dead, an attempt to join "the generation of humanity from start to finish" by bringing "saving ordinances to the millions who had died without their benefits."Bushman (2005), 422. During the same period, Smith published the Book of Abraham, his translation of what later turned out to be an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead that he had purchased from a traveling exhibitor in 1835. The Book of Abraham, canonized by the LDS Church after Smith's death, also emphasized the plurality of gods, pre-mortal existence, and the concept that the earth had been organized out of preexisting matter.Bushman (2005), 452-58; Brodie, 170-75; Widmer, 90. The Book of Abraham was also used by later Mormons to justify discrimination against those with black skin because they were, like Pharaoh, descendants of Ham.

These doctrinal expansions culminated in a renewed effort to build another temple. Smith chose a site on a bluff in Nauvoo where he blessed the cornerstones in a public ceremony on April 6, 1841. In Kirtland, Smith had instituted rituals of washing and anointing, but in Nauvoo "the ceremonies were further elaborated to include baptism for the dead, endowments, and priesthood marriages."Bushman (2005), 448; Ostlings, 9; Davies, 205. Davies notes that "Baptism for the dead and covenant-endowments for the conquest of death both found their ultimate validation in the power of the priesthood yet these three elements are absent from the Book of Mormon, whose emphasis upon baptism is always a baptism of repentance of the living for themselves." Smith did not live to see the completion or dedication of the temple. The Saints began to receive endowments on December 10, 1845, and the temple dedication was held on April 30, 1845, just before Nauvoo was abandoned. Smith had "a green thumb for growing ideas from tiny seeds," and "portions of the temple ritual resembled Masonic rites that Joseph had observed when a Nauvoo lodge was organized in March 1842 and that he may have heard about from Hyrum, a Mason from New York days."Bushman (2005), 449. Smith was initiated as an Entered Apprentice Mason at the Nauvoo lodge on March 15, 1842. The next day, he was raised to the degree of Master Mason; the usual month-long wait between degrees was waived by the Grand Master of Illinois, Abraham Jonas. Some commentators have noted similarities between portions of temple ordinance of the endowment and the Royal Arch Degree of Freemasonry. Richard Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (Harper Collins, 1999), 188. "Smith was an active Mason when he introduced the endowment ordinance two years before his death, and many scholars have noted the strong resemblance between the Mormon ordinance and Masonic ritual." See also: Freemasonry and the Latter Day Saint movement.

Book of Abraham

In 1835, Smith encouraged some Latter Day Saints in Kirtland to purchase rolls of ancient Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor. He said they contained the writings of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Over the next several years, Smith dictated to scribes what he reported was a revelatory translation of one of these rolls, which was published in 1842 as the Book of Abraham.; The Book of Abraham speaks of the founding of the Abrahamic nation, astronomy, cosmology, lineage and priesthood, and gives another account of the creation story.