The first leader of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844) was reviled and persecuted during his lifetime but is now revered by millions of Mormons worldwide as the church’s founding prophet.
Smith was born in a tiny farming village in central Vermont, and he and his family moved to Palmyra, New York, in 1816. A sensitive child, Smith experienced religious visions in 1820 and again in 1823, purportedly of an angel named Moroni who appeared to him as he was walking in the woods.
The angel told Smith that the authentic Christian church had vanished from the world and it was Smith’s job to bring it back. He was instructed to dig into a hillside near Manchester, New York, where he would find holy books inscribed on gold plates. In 1827, according to Smith, he uncovered the plates in a large stone box. They were written in a hitherto unknown language, “reformed Egyptian,” and Smith was able to complete what he claimed was a translation, which was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon.
According to the story related in the Book of Mormon, the ancient Hebrews of the Old Testament had migrated to North America thousands of years before by sailing across the Pacific Ocean. Although their society and language had been destroyed, their descendants lived on as the Native Americans.
Smith officially organized the church on April 6, 1830. However, the Mormons were immediately regarded with suspicion, Smith’s gold plates were widely derided, and he was even tarred and feathered by a mob in 1832. The Mormons eventually fled to Ohio and Missouri to avoid persecution and finally moved to the town of Commerce, Illinois, which Smith renamed Nauvoo.
By the time he settled in Nauvoo, Smith had nearly 20,000 followers. He set himself up with near-dictatorial powers in the town, formed a militia, and shut down a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, that opposed him. The closure of the newspaper provoked protests, and when Smith called out the city’s militia to protect Nauvoo, he was arrested by the Illinois authorities and charged with treason. While awaiting trial, he was killed by an angry mob on June 27, 1844.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Only 5,000 first-edition copies of Smith’s Book of Mormon were printed; one copy sold at auction in 2007 for $105,600.
- After Smith’s death, many of his followers departed for Utah. The territory tried to join the United States in 1849, but was refused because congressional leaders were opposed to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Church leaders banned plural marriage in 1890, and Utah was finally admitted to the Union as the forty-fifth state in 1896.
- Smith married his first wife, Emma Hale (1804–1879), in 1827. After founding Mormonism, he wed dozens more women—as many as thirty-four, by some estimates.
