Penguin History of the United States of America (43 page)

In the Burned-Over District it produced a willingness to take up novel creeds that far outstripped the interest in Methodism and Presbyterian-ism of the earlier period. Joseph Dylks of Ohio proclaimed himself the Messiah and promised to found a holy city at Philadelphia. One of his followers discovered that Jesus Christ was a woman. Another prophet proposed to save the world by walking the streets of New York with a sword and a seven-foot ruler. John Chapman of Massachusetts (c. 1775–1847) took up the faith according to Emanuel S wedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary. He hit on a highly original manner of diffusing it. He went off to the Old North-West and bought up odd corners of land, never more than an acre or two, here and there, which he planted with appleseeds and apple-slips. When his little orchards matured, he sold them; bought more land and more seeds; and, with what was left of the profits from these transactions, obtained and distributed Swedenborgian tracts. He did not have much success in converting his countrymen; but his gentle selflessness (spending nothing on himself, he went about in rags, with a tin dish for a hat) and, above all, his orchards won every heart on the frontier. It was so pleasant, after hacking your way through the wilderness, to arrive at your holding, where you expected nothing but back-breaking toil, to find well-grown apple-trees waiting for you. As a result, Chapman is immortal: his original name forgotten, he is known to every American child as the forest demi-god, Johnny Appleseed.

Of all these enthusiasts, Joseph Smith (1805–44) and his follower Brigham Young (1801–77) left the deepest mark on history. The Smiths and the Youngs were poor families from Vermont, who drifted like so many others into the Burned-Over District. There young Joseph Smith was visited by the angel Moroni
⁸
and given an account of the pre-Columbian history of North America which has not so far been confirmed by archaeology. More important, Moroni indicated that Smith was the Prophet of the Lord, destined to redeem the world. He led the Prophet to certain sheets of solid gold buried in a hill near Palmyra, NY, on which were inscribed the text of the
Book of Mormon
. Mormon, Moroni’s father, had written in ancient Egyptian, but fortunately Smith (who had received only a minimal education) was given some angelic machinery which enabled him to translate his author into a quasi-Biblical English disfigured by anachronisms. Eleven admirers (including the Prophet’s father and brothers) signed affidavits to the effect that they had seen the golden pages, and one of them actually
mortgaged his farm to pay for the publication of the book, in July 1830, which Smith then began to peddle round the countryside. Previously it had come to him that the elect of God must gather themselves into a new church, in a new place, under one leadership, turning their backs on the Gentiles, to carry out Moroni’s programme. On 6 April 1830 he founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, who are known to the rest of the world as Mormons. He soon made converts, among the earliest being Brigham Young and his family.

The church developed rapidly from these small, eccentric beginnings. Partly this was because Joseph Smith, in spite of many failings, was a religious genius, a man of huge creativity, who never let things get dull. Like all such leaders he assured his followers that they were the chosen people of God, which was excellent for their self-respect; he received a constant flow of divine revelations, and was forever creating new bodies of government, inspiration and privilege – the Twelve Apostles, led by Brigham Young, ‘the Lion of the Lord’, the Sons of Dan, the Council of Fifty. Even the doctrine of polygamy seems to have been introduced, in part, to keep the pot boiling. But more important than Smith’s dynamism (and good looks) was the suitability of his new creed to the frontier society which gave it birth.
Mormon
had the answers to all the questions which tormented the pioneers. Most of the original converts, including Brigham Young, were barely literate, but they came from New England and had a deep respect for anything that could pass for learning or take on the authority of Scripture. It was therefore very necessary to found a new church on a new Testament. And this particular Testament ministered to the fact that although Americans of the time were enormously proud of their country, they also felt inferior when they heard about the history and achievements of the Old World. It was very soothing to be assured by Joseph Smith that the Garden of Eden had been in America – to be precise, in Missouri. Then,
Mormon
answered questions that many were asking. For instance, one of the Indian cultures of the pre-Columbian age had left huge sacred mounds as conspicuous monuments in the Ohio country. Settlers there were naturally curious, and as they had no means whatever of learning anything true about the history of the mounds, they invented various unsound theories. One, that the mounds were the work of a non-Indian race which had since vanished, found its way not only into the
Book of Mormon
, but into Alexis de Tocqueville’s great commentary on American society,
Democracy in America
, which was published five years after
Mormon
, a work with which it otherwise has nothing in common.

It was also understandable that the Mormons went in for faith-healing. Medical science, even at the centre of civilization, was still in its infancy; in the American West it was almost non-existent. Yet people could not submit to pain and illness without a struggle; and it was natural for them to seek physical as well as spiritual salvation from their religion. This was the root of the Church of Christ, Scientist, founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy
(1821–1910) as well as many other nineteenth-century experiments in alternative medicine. So it is not surprising that this movement found expression among the Mormons. Heber Chase Kimball, Young’s brother-in-law, could cure the sick by sending them a handkerchief which he had blessed or by throwing his old cloak onto their beds. It was at least as much in order for him to do this as for more conventional practitioners to offer useless bleedings, purgings and pills. Indeed, a religion which did
not
offer medicines for the body as well as for the soul was not going to get very far.

Even polygamy, the most contentious of Mormon practices, should be looked at in the same light. The practice is quite unacceptable in an advanced society, such as the United States was becoming; but the old Puritan sexual morality had become an intolerable burden to many, and something had to be put in its place.
⁹
The literature of nineteenth-century America is suffused with sexual guilt and longing; significantly, one of its most powerful and convincing expressions, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
(published in 1850), is set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The misery caused to many by the iron code of Puritanism was an evil to be fought; and Joseph Smith, a decided womanizer, by heeding his own impulses and then universalizing them, opened the way to reform of a kind. It was not an easy victory. Brigham Young, for instance, longed for death when commanded by the Prophet to take extra wives to himself; but he got over the difficulty, and in the end was ‘husband’ to seventy women. Few other Saints approached such a total; the practice was generally condemned by the Gentiles (as non-Mormons were called); but given the frequent association at this time of religious and sexual radicalism, it cannot be doubted that this too, or something like it, was what many male Americans wanted. And virtuous New England wives and spinsters were amazingly ready to fall in with polygamy. Perhaps they too were tired of Bostonian sexual primness.

Polygamy remained a scandal nearly to the end of the nineteenth century; in the infancy of the church other accusations were heard. Yet they too show how much Mormonism was a thing of the frontier. Smith was said to be a swindler because in 1837 he established a Mormon bank which issued large quantities of virtually worthless bank notes. In January 1838 he had to flee from Ohio in the dead of night to escape his creditors; but if he was dishonest it was only in the fashion of the West, where everyone counted on getting rich so quickly that all promises would be redeemed without effort. Smith was one of hundreds who launched banks with insufficient capital. Like many others he fell a victim to the panic of 1837, which closed banks and shattered fortunes throughout the country. He had done his best for his followers. In the same way his deep involvement in the more squalid processes of American party politics, which ended as
disastrously as his financial speculations, may be excused: corruption, in a way, was only an extension of land speculation, and at first it rewarded the Mormons handsomely.

Land, indeed, was the key to Mormon success: land and organization. It was an egalitarian, democratic age, and at first sight the extremely autocratic rule of the Prophet was inconsistent with it; but in fact Smith’s autocracy ensured that the Mormons would enjoy equality in the one respect that really mattered. This was still the People Greedily Grasping for Land. Mormon towns and villages were laid out by authority; Mormon business ventures were all co-operative; Mormons could have dealings with Gentiles only through the church. A Mormon settlement, in other words, was somewhat like a company town, the company being the hierarchy of apostles and bishops. Mormon discipline and unity created a monopoly. In the free-and-easy conditions of the frontier, where it was usually each man for himself, the operations of this phalanx of co-operative farmers were irresistible. The resultant prosperity naturally encouraged members of the church to convert others. Missionary work thus proved another strength, for promises were made which could be kept. As Brigham Young was to boast in 1855, after the settlement in Utah,

We have taken the poor and the ignorant from the dens and caves of the earth and brought them here, and we have laboured day and night, week after week, and year after year, to make ourselves comfortable, and to obtain all the knowledge there is in the world, and the knowledge that comes from God, and we shall continue to do so. We shall take the weak and the feeble and bring them up to the standard that God requires.

In 1838 Young carried this glad message to England, which like America was suffering from an economic crisis; he made many converts, and from then on a stream of recruits crossed the Atlantic. When they could not come immediately, they sent money. Either way, it was a welcome addition. In return, the converts got economic security for the first time in their lives. Here, once again, the influence of the time and place can be seen. Smith had picked up the communist ideas that were so popular among reform enthusiasts in the early nineteenth century. Not much good in that: the Pilgrim Fathers had tried to hold property in common and been beaten by the desire for individual property. So were most of the humanitarians and early socialists (among them the Welshman Robert Owen) who tried out their ideas in the American back-country. Mormon arrangements were more successful, by luck or by skill.

Or perhaps by persecution. The Mormons were extremely unpopular. Life on the frontier was dominated by the struggle for the best land: wherever the Latter-Day Saints appeared, the best land rapidly became theirs (rather as slave plantations competed successfully against free farmers in the South). Furthermore, Mormon practices revolted those whom they did not entrance.
Psychologically, the total surrender of the individual will to the church seemed deeply un-American.
¹⁰
Polygamy was immoral. Smith and Young seemed to be men whose capacity for deceiving themselves was only surpassed by their taste for deceiving others. As if all that were not enough, Mormons further affronted their neighbours by their total cynicism about democracy. This was the period when the American political system was maturing;
¹¹
men took their duties and privileges as citizens very seriously. It was no light matter that the Mormons abandoned their political rights and freedoms to the Prophet, who sold their votes unscrupulously to political leaders, as if he were the boss of a late nineteenth-century city machine. When, for instance, the Mormons established themselves in Illinois, at the place on the Mississippi they named Nauvoo, Whigs and Democrats in the state legislature fell over themselves to grant a city charter and various unusual privileges, both parties hoping to get the solid block of Mormon votes in return.

That was in 1841. Before then the Saints, growing in numbers but not in acceptability, had wandered from the Burned-Over District to Kirtland, Ohio, and Jackson County, Missouri.
¹²
Wherever they went they met ferocious hostility; in Missouri, indeed, a state rent by violent passion on many issues (including slavery), there had been something like a miniature civil war: blood had been shed on both sides. Joseph Smith eventually cursed Jackson County, prophesying its destruction (a prophecy that came true during the great Civil War). Matters were soon as bad in Illinois. Nauvoo and its neighbourhood acquired a population of 25,000 Mormons who prospered exceedingly. They began to throw their weight around, politically, economically and morally: the secret of polygamy began to leak out. They formed their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, answerable only to Smith, and a secret society, the Sons of Dan, not unlike a secret police or the Ku Klux Klan. The Gentiles resorted increasingly to violence, which reached a climax in the summer of 1844. Smith and his brother Hyrum were arrested for destroying the printing press of an apostate Mormon newspaper. They were thrown into jail and lynched there.

After that the feeling was that it was open season on the Mormons, and only their willingness to resist by force of arms taught their enemies a little prudence. Thanks to Brigham Young, who instantly asserted his authority
as Smith’s
de facto
successor, the church stayed together, though there were some alarming defections. Yet if it remained at Nauvoo there would be war on the frontier. Closing ranks, the Saints ran dissidents out of town and (literally) whipped others into line; a leading Son of Dan ambushed and shot one of Smith’s assassins. But the Gentiles were more numerous and reckless. Many of them had come up the Mississippi from the slave South, where violence was all too common a technique. They took to burning down Mormon houses. The state authorities indicated that they could not and would not protect the Mormons indefinitely (not that they had ever done so very effectively). The Saints were just completing the Nauvoo temple; but in the circumstances it is not surprising either that Smith, before his death, had begun to talk of moving on again; or that Young now took the great decision.