Fringe candidates in the 1848 presidential election were not confined to horses and asses. Also running that year—and in every subsequent presidential election up through 1868–was Leonard Jones.1 More commonly known as Live Forever Jones, this perennial candidate from the self-created High Moral Party based his campaign on a single pledge: Through faith and adherence to a completely moral life, you can live forever.
While Americans were, and remain, reluctant to laugh at others’ religious beliefs (though not so reluctant to castigate certain religions), many responded to Live Forever Jones with the age-old technique to avoid laughing at a person by humoring him or her. “Sometimes a band of music would undertake to play him down,” one reporter wrote regarding Jones’s campaign speeches, going on to add, “He always waited and had his say to the rollicking, shouting crowd that was ever ready to applaud and extol him.”2 Suppressed laughs can also be detected from an incident in 1833, when Jones sought federal funds to create an “endless life” settlement. That session of the U.S. Senate’s transcript noted that the debate, if one could call it that, “was couched in respectful language.”3 Respectful, but the request was rejected.
To some extent it is difficult to assess Live Forever Jones. On the one hand, reporters could not resist remarks such as “Live Forever Jones favored our citizens with one of his characteristic speeches. He is still a candidate for the presidency.”4 On the other hand, in this article as in others, none of the content of his speeches was included. Back to the first hand, the press did mention that the exclusion of his remarks in news reports greatly irritated him.5 In addition no writings by Jones were ever published, though there’s reason to believe he did write. In 1852 Congressman Edson Olds told of an instance (possibly apocryphal) in which Jones asked an acquaintance for his opinion of an essay he’d written. After reading it, this person said he was unable to grasp the point, to which Jones is said to have replied, “That’s just what I want; for when I make a point, they are always sure to get me on that point.”6 Maybe it happened, maybe not, but neither the essay nor any other writing by Jones has survived. Most of what we know of him comes from reminiscences published, ironically, at the time of his death. Not all the details fit together neatly, however. Some said “his information was limited and gained only from his long and varied life rather than from study,” while others remembered him as a former attorney and as “having been a constant reader.”7
This much is known: Live Forever Jones amused a considerable number of Americans but amassed only a few followers and, there is reason to believe, no votes. Not even his own if, as one obituary reported, “he always went to the polls on Election Day, and the judges would receive his ballot and pretend to deposit it.”8 The generally agreed upon assessment was that Jones was nutty but not nuts. “The physicians assert that he was not insane,” one newspaper reported, “and incline to the belief that his mind was in a state of ‘quasi deformity.’”9
Whether or not his mind was deformed, Jones was not alone in his era for espousing nontraditional spiritual views. During his lifetime the newly formed Mormon Church was attracting many thousands of adherents to the prophecy of its founder (and one-time presidential candidate) Joseph Smith that Christ would return to the world’s New Jerusalem: the United States. Thousands also flocked to the Shaker movement as word spread that one of its leaders, Ann Lee (known as Mother Ann), was herself the Second Coming of Christ. On the pessimistic side, thousands were drawn to the preaching of William Miller, who predicted that God would end the world in 1843. When God didn’t, Miller rechecked his math and declared 1844 to be the end of days. Wrong again, as it turned out. Amid all of which emerged Leonard “Live Forever” Jones.
What was it in the social landscape of that era that produced this bumper crop of apocalyptic and messianic views? And how did a guy who claimed we can live forever fit into that?
Leonard Jones was not the first person (nor the last) to espouse the possibility that human beings could live forever.10 Likewise, messianic and apocalyptic fervors were not new to the world, either, but dated back to the earliest recorded times in multiple cultures. Worth noting in regard to Jones’s era is that the advent of Christ occurred at a time when the Jews, under the domination of the Roman Empire, so feared the extinction of their culture many placed their faith entirely in God’s sending a savior. While many believed (and, of course, still do) Jesus to be the Messiah, other Jews at the time believed the messiah was Simon Bar Kochba, the leader of a failed Judean revolt. In the United States, when the Lakota feared in the late nineteenth century that their culture and nationhood faced extinction, many joined in the Ghost Dance movement, which sought to summon a messiah who would reunite them with their ancestors while covering the Earth with new soil that would both replenish the wildlife and bury the white people.11
Seeking to understand the new religious sects emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century, scholars have posited a variety of views, all of which are based on existential fears at that time similar to those felt by Jews during the Roman Empire and the Lakota in the run-up to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. These scholars have identified social impacts resulting from geographic change as Americans trekked into new regions and the nation’s rapidly increasing industrialization caused great economic changes, while others have examined discontent with established churches having failed to bring about the promise of a New Jerusalem in the United States.12 Yet another element was demographic change, as immigration to the United States in these years went from flowing to flooding. Many of these new arrivals were Irish Catholics, seeking opportunities created by industrialization. Under the headline “Popery in the United States,” one newspaper told readers in 1843, “This degrading superstition [Catholicism], which the good and wise Lafayette predicted many years ago would eventually become the dangerous enemy to the liberties of this Republic, is increasing among us with great rapidity.” While there is dispute as to whether or not Lafayette, himself a Catholic, ever made such a statement, it is indisputable that the statement was first cited, factually or not, during Jones’s era to buttress fears that Catholic immigrants threatened the foundations of the United States.13
Industrialization and the social shifts it spawned were not, of course, limited to the United States. By the same token, neither were the era’s apocalyptic fears. The British writer Mary Shelley, most remembered as the author of Frankenstein, published The Last Man in 1826, the first literary work in which the end of the world is based more on human choices than biblical prophecy. On these shores Edgar Allen Poe wrote an end-of-the-world story, “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” in 1839.
Fears of doom were endemic. Among those affected was the young Leonard Jones, as he migrated from Virginia, where he was raised in a Methodist family, to Kentucky and soon joined a community of Shakers. During this time, by some accounts, Jones practiced law and, by all accounts, engaged in land speculation—and (by one account) land swindles. He soon grew disenchanted with the Shakers for reasons that, all accounts agree, had more to do with a failed love affair than a failure of faith. After leaving the Shakers he was briefly attracted to the Mormons but lost interest when unable to speak in tongues.14 He next became entranced with a man remembered only by his last name, McDaniel, who preached the “live forever” doctrine that Jones embraced the rest of his life. They formed a team in the early 1830s and soon after made their attempt to create a “live forever” colony. It lasted only briefly, however, losing whatever followers it had when McDaniel upped and died.15
Jones, however, did not lose his belief that, through strictly moral behavior, one can elude death, nor did he lose his sense of humor that enabled him to tickle so many Americans through his repeated political campaigns. When asked about his reaction to McDaniel’s death, he was remembered as saying that his faith remained, but, he added, “I was very much embarrassed to preach his funeral.”16
Still, the most essential question remains: What led Jones to run for president? Might it have been, at some subconscious level, a desire to live forever either physically or, if that didn’t pan out, historically? Either way, immortality was clearly the driving passion in his life. And therein is one of the key insights provided by his presidential candidacy since, in this respect, he did not differ from mainstream presidential candidates. Abraham Lincoln, for example, confided in despair to a friend when he was a young man “that he had done nothing to make any human remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name with . . . something that would redound . . . was what he desired to live for.”17
Most significant, however, is what the candidacy of Live Forever Jones brings into focus regarding the political shape of the nation at that time. Just as Joseph Smith preached a particularly American theology by virtue of believing this land to be the latter-day Zion to which Christ would return, so too Jones, despite so many in his day believing the end of the world was near, preached an optimism that grew from that same political soil of “American exceptionalism.”
Few Americans, however, shared his larger-than-life view. Or cared. When Jones died during his 1868 quest for the presidency, none were at his funeral other than the sextons who prepared his grave.18