Joseph Smith

Source

• Born: 23 December 1805
• Birthplace: Sharon, Vermont
• Died: 27 June 1844 (murder)
• Best Known As: Founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Name at birth: Joseph Smith, Jr.

Raised a Christian in Vermont and New York, Joseph Smith was the founding prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon church. According to Smith's own account, he had a vision from God when he was fourteen years old. A few years later he was visited by an angel, Moroni, who told him of the Book of Mormon and how to revive the gospel of Jesus. At the age of 21, Moroni directed Smith to a hillside in rural New York, where he uncovered metal plates ("Gold Plates") and two "seer stones," divination tools sometimes referred to as the Urim and Thummim (terms used infrequently in the Old Testament and whose precise meaning is clouded in mystery). Smith said the Urim and Thummim were from a prophet, Mormon, and revealed the record of ancient Israelites who had escaped to the Americas around 600 B.C. Smith, using the stones, translated the word of Mormon to form the new canon of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was founded in 1830. With his followers, Smith settled in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois in search of the New Zion. A prophet to his followers and a fraud to his detractors, Smith was killed along with his brother by a mob in Carthage, Illinois in 1844. After his death, the Church was led by Brigham Young.

The name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is often shortened to simply LDS... The church's official website notes that while Mormon is an unofficial term for members of the faith, "members prefer to be referred to as Latter-day Saints."

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Smith, Joseph (1790-1877) Union naval officer, born in Massachusetts. In 1861 President Abraham Lincoln named Smith, then head of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, to the commission that was designing the Union ironclad Monitor. The Monitor arrived in Hampton Roads the day after Smith's son had been killed in battle when his ship was burned by the Confederate ironclad Virginia, formerly the Merrimack. In the ensuing battle, the Virginia eventually withdrew. Smith was promoted to the rank of admiral in recognition of his contribution to the successful design of the Monitor.

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(b Birmingham, 26 Nov 1881; d Toronto, 18 April 1952). Canadian composer and cellist. He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and emigrated in 1910 to teach the cello at the Toronto Conservatory; he was also professor at Toronto University (1938-50). His works use Canadian folk melodies but retain an English spirit. His textbooks have been much used.

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Joseph Smith (1805-1844), American religious leader, was the founder of a unique American sect, the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

On Dec. 23, 1805, Joseph Smith was born in Vermont; in 1816 his family migrated to western New York. Among the more prominent features of the terrain were the Indian mounds containing the skeletons of long-dead warriors. Shortly after his marriage in 1827, Smith began to talk of some golden plates he had discovered in these mounds under an angel's guidance, as well as magic spectacles that enabled him to decipher the tablets' hieroglyphics. Moving to Pennsylvania, he worked on the translation, which turned out, he said, to be a history by Mormon, an American prophet and historian of the 4th century, telling of two Jewish peoples who had migrated to North America and whom Jesus visited after his ascension. In 1830 the Book of Mormon appeared for sale and quickly became important in spreading the Mormon faith.

Smith soon announced the founding of a restored Christian church and proclaimed himself a "seer, a Translator, a Prophet, an Apostle of Jesus Christ and Elder of the Church." Eventually, his claim to special revelations stirred hostility among the residents of New York and Pennsylvania, and in 1831 he summoned his ever-increasing flock to an exodus. Settling in Kirtland, Ohio, the Mormon community evolved into a utopian communal experiment in which the church held all property and each family received sustenance from a common storehouse. When dissension inspired some to move to Independence, Mo., Smith joined them briefly to consecrate ground for a new temple.

In 1833 Smith published the "Word of Wisdom," which encouraged members of the church to abstain from tobacco, alcohol, and hot drinks and to eat meat only in winter. In 1836 Mormon temperance advocates forced a vote for total abstinence. Increasing criticism over his inept management of Kirtland's financial affairs caused Smith to rejoin his Missouri followers. That colony, too, attracted hostility, and Smith had to flee under sentence of death, leading a migration to Nauvoo, Ill.

In the 1840s Smith published a work which elaborated upon the "Hamitic curse" in such a way as to exclude blacks from the Mormon priesthood. At the same time he undertook a history of the Mormon Church. He had also arrived at a doctrinal position which permitted polygamy. He kept this potentially dangerous practice a secret, revealing it only to a privileged few. By 1844 Smith had come to regard Nauvoo as an enclave independent of the United States, and the leaders of his church crowned him king of this new kingdom of God on earth. That same year Smith offered himself for president of the United States, advocating the establishment of a "theodemocracy" and the abolition of slavery.

In 1844 an apostate published an exposé of Mormon polygamy. Smith ill-advisedly permitted his followers to destroy the defector's press, which gave the surrounding "Gentiles" an excuse to retaliate against the Mormons. The Illinois governor sent the militia to arrest Smith for riot, but the militiamen exceeded their orders and brutally murdered Smith on June 27, 1844.

Further Reading

Until recently the literature on Mormonism has been polemical, and the biographies of Smith have reflected either the uncritical views of his followers or the diatribes of disaffected converts. John Henry Evans, Joseph Smith: An American Prophet (1933), is a sympathetic account marred by important omissions. The most comprehensive treatment is Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (1945; 2d ed. 1971), which implicitly discounts Smith's claims of special gifts of revelation and prophecy but arrives at a favorable view of his accomplishments. Robert Bruce Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (1965), adds information on Smith's years in Illinois.

(1805-1844), founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). This charismatic and controversial religious leader was born in Sharon, Vermont, fourth in a family of nine children. His parents worked on rented farms before moving to Palmyra in western New York State in 1816, when Joseph was ten.

The Smith family was religious; young Joseph read the Bible, attended religious revivals, and pondered which church to join. In the spring of 1820, when he was fourteen, he went to a clearing in the nearby woods to pray and had a vision of God in which, he reported to his parents, he was forgiven his sins and instructed to keep a pure heart.

Three years later, he informed his family that during a nighttime prayer, he was visited by an angel named Moroni who told him about a sacred history engraved on gold plates, which gave an account of the religious and other experiences of former inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere who had migrated from the Near East. Young Joseph, however, was not permitted to take the plates until September 1827, after he had married and established a home on a farm in Manchester, New York. Over the next two years, in between farming and other enterprises, Smith dictated to his wife and other scribes the contents of the book, and it was published as the Book of Mormon in the spring of 1830. The six-hundred-page work was equivalent to a Bible for the Chosen People of ancient America.

Shortly after the book appeared, Smith gathered a few believers and organized the Church of Christ (later called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York. Smith, who claimed to be in communion with God, established a lay priesthood of all worthy adult males, revealed doctrines and practices, and set up gathering places for believers on the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio; in Jackson and Caldwell counties, Missouri; and Nauvoo in western Illinois.

A superb organizer, Smith ordained deacons, teachers, priests, elders, "seventies," and high priests and gave each appropriate tasks. As leader of the Latter-day Saint communities he also laid out cities, organized cooperative farms and industries, founded a university, built temples in Ohio and Illinois, and founded a woman's auxiliary, the Women's Relief Society.

Smith was a controversial personality. Ministers and members of other faiths refused to accept the Book of Mormon and his revelations as emanating from divine sources. Because of his claims of heavenly instruction and his leadership of an exclusivist community, Smith was subjected to kidnappings, tarrings and featherings, threats on his life, and vexatious lawsuits. There were also disputes among his followers over some of his precepts and policies. Nevertheless, Smith was able to attract and retain the loyalty of a large, diverse, and talented group of associates.

On June 27, 1844, an anti-Mormon mob, including many members of the Illinois state militia, broke into the jail in Carthage, Illinois, where he was being held on a charge of inciting a riot, killed Smith and his brother Hyrum, and injured two others who were in jail with them. At Smith's death there were approximately thirty-five thousand Latter-day Saints.

Bibliography:

Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (1984); Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (1977); Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet (1853).

Author:

Leonard J. Arrington

See also Mormons; Religion; Young, Brigham.

Smith, Joseph, 1805-44, American Mormon leader, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, b. Sharon, Vt. When he was a boy his family moved to Palmyra, N.Y., where he experienced the poverty and hardships of life on a rough frontier. He had visions when he was still young and later recorded that he was first told in a vision in 1823 of the existence of secret records, but it was not until 1827 that the hiding place of the records was revealed to him. According to his account, in 1827 he unearthed golden tablets inscribed with sacred writings that he translated. Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and others transcribed these records from his dictation, and the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. Further revelations led him to found a new religion after priesthood had been conferred upon him and Cowdery by an "angel." As prophet and seer he founded (1830) his church in Fayette, N.Y. (see Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of).

The hostility of his neighbors forced him to move his headquarters to Kirtland, Ohio, where with the help of Sidney Rigdon and others he embarked on extensive business affairs. The Panic of 1837 was one of the reasons for removal farther west to Missouri. There the industrious and self-contained members of his faith again ran into difficulties with their neighbors. Smith and others were arrested but escaped, and his faithful followers were driven from Missouri.

Having obtained a favorable charter from Illinois, Smith founded the settlement of Nauvoo, which, thanks to the concerted efforts of the members of his church, was soon flourishing. Disaffection grew, however, and some of the dissident members founded a newspaper, the Expositor, in which they bitterly criticized him. He put down the opposition, thereby giving the hostile non-Mormons a pretext for attacking him. When in 1844 he announced himself as candidate for the presidency of the United States, his enemies set upon him. He and his brother Hyrum were arrested on charges of treason and conspiracy. They were lodged in the jail at Carthage, Ill., and there on June 27, 1844, they were murdered by a mob.

The revelations experienced by Smith-including one enjoining plural marriage, which later caused the Mormons much trouble-were the foundation stones of a faith that after his death grew to be one of the great religions of the United States. Because he was a highly controversial figure, the literature on him is also controversial.

Bibliography

See biographies by L. Smith (1908, repr. 1969), F. M. Brodie (1954, repr. 1995), R. V. Remini (2002), and R. L. Bushman (2005); studies by R. L. Anderson (1971), and R. L. Bushman (1984).

(1805-1844)

1830

The Book of Mormon. A sacred text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, founded by Smith after several visions and the reported delivery of a book written on golden plates by the angel Moroni, which Smith translated using a device called Urim and Thummim. Smith won a small number of followers and began the church, though clergy and members of other sects rejected claims that the book was divine in origin.

Quotes:

"The knowledge of truth, combined with the proper regard for it and it's faithful observance, constitutes true education."