)

SOURCE: "The Prophet," in The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850, Cornell, 1950, pp. 138-50.

[In the following excerpt, Cross suggests that the doctrines and organization of Mormonism were products not of the American frontier but of "that Yankee, rural, emotionalized, and rapidly maturing culture which characterized western New York so markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. "]

The Mormon Church, having survived and grown in the last hundred years as did none of its companion novelties, interests the present generation far more than any other aspect of Burned-over District history. Yet its impact upon the region and period from which it sprang was extremely limited. The Saints made their first westward removal immediately upon founding the religion, when they numbered not more than a hundred persons. The obscurity and scarcity of local material on the subject reinforces the logical conclusion that few western New Yorkers could have been seriously aware of the episode. In this respect it contrasts strongly with the other omens of the day. In another way, however, Mormonism comes closer to being the true oracle than other developments in the inaugural years just before 1831. It was the first original product of the common circumstances which would breed a train of successors within the quarter century. It predicted what was to come, whereas the larger simultaneous excitements merely heated the cauldron from which future experiments would boil.

The Smith family arrived in western New York in 1816 when Joseph was ten years old. Fate had been rough on them in Vermont, where each of several different ventures and consequent removes left them poorer than the one before. The war years had been hard enough in the home state, but peace canceled the business of supplying the armed forces, or indulging in trade with the enemy across the border, which had helped sustain the local economy. The postwar slump which gradually spread over the nation was punctuated in the north country by the frigid summer of 1816. Vermont farmers started west in droves. The Smith family poverty doubtless reached the extreme among the emigrants, since for several generations both the Smith and Mack lines had been running to the visionary rather than to the acquisitive Yankee type. Even so, the Smiths could in no way be considered uncommon in the westering horde. Like the bulk of their fellows, they sought a new start in the acres of New York just about to be enriched by the projected Erie Canal. Unwisely perhaps, again like many others, they shunned the rugged pioneering life demanded by the more primitive regions in Ohio or west of the Genesee in New York, in favor of a community of some age, respectability, and commercial prospects, where they would have a greater struggle to pay for their land.

Northward from Canandaigua, the rolling hills of the Finger Lakes section gradually descend to meet the drumlin-studded Ontario plain. Twelve miles takes one across the line between Ontario and Wayne counties to Palmyra, situated on the lower level among the glacial hills. Halfway between the two towns, nearly in the dead center of the richest soil area in western New York, lies the village of Manchester. All three villages and their immediate vicinities had been early settled and by 1820 had attained populations approximating sixty persons per square mile. From Palmyra north to the lake, habitations appeared less frequently, while a journey of thirty miles west or south would reach towns where little land had been cleared more than ten years.

Canandaigua, the oldest town of the three and in fact one of the two oldest in western New York, had until the twenties enjoyed a dominant position in the region's economy. Here the stage route to Albany crossed the main route to the south, which from the days of the Iroquois had connected Irondequoit Bay, Canandaigua Lake, and the southward-facing valleys of the upper Susquehanna. Up to 1824 Rochester millers had to use pony express to reach the banks at this center. As a seat of culture, the Finger Lakes village retained its leadership even later. For years the country seat of great landlords and their agents, it was for this section a sophisticated, aristocratic community with a strong Episcopal church. Even Presbyterians there maintained a conservative tone throughout the period. Its newspapers and schools had attained establishment and reputation. But with the approach of the canal the economic orientation of the three villages rapidly changed.

Palmyra for a time became the chief local mart. Limited use of the waterway began in 1822, and the same summer brought daily stage and mail service connecting several canal towns with each other and with Canandaigua. By the following autumn the canal had opened to Rochester. Palmyra and Manchester, unlike their southern neighbor, very nearly typified the region. Their folk came chiefly from Connecticut and Vermont. Younger and less culturally sophisticated, they had nevertheless enjoyed the services of evangelistic churches from their earliest days, as well as the schools and journals which always followed in rapid succession. Palmyra particularly would have a considerable bonanza in the early twenties and evince the social restlessness accompanying such rapid expansion. But before the end of that decade the village was destined to come quite suddenly to stability, with even a touch of the doldrums, after the canal had reached Buffalo and Rochester had seized local commercial leadership.

Thus the Smiths came to no frontier or cultural backwash. Though the society they entered was more youthful, it was less isolated and provincial, more vigorous and cosmopolitan, than Vermont. It was reaching economic stability but remained on the upgrade, whereas rural Vermont had already started into decline.

Nor yet in religion was the younger area less experienced than the homeland. The Great Revival had come here at the turn of the century, just as to western New England. Seven of twelve primary centers of enthusiasm ranged from Palmyra southward. The crest of fervor following the War of 1812 noticeably affected towns sprinkled about the same neighborhood, and the pattern repeated, though less intensively, during the early twenties. So the area had been thoroughly indoctrinated in revivalistic religion throughout thirty years of its youth. And Palmyra at least was old enough by the mid-twenties to exhibit the increased interest in community morals and spirituality which characteristically grew upon villages and countrysides of Yankee stamp as the problems of maturity replaced the struggle to live.

In this richer clime the Smiths and their fellow Vermonters fared better than before. A shop in Palmyra and the labor at hire of father and sons swelled the family funds in two years sufficiently to permit initial payment on a hundred-acre farm practically astride the Palmyra-Manchester town line. It must have been a relatively inferior piece of land, else it would long since have been cleared. It seems to have been contracted for at the height of a speculative boomlet which a decade's time would demonstrate to have been based on false expectations. Evidence exists, in any case, to show that the family exerted considerable diligence and enterprise in hope of completing payment. Nevertheless, the farm had been foreclosed by 1830.

Many companion emigrants, managing more wisely, made good in the Genesee country, some having brought with them at least enough money for the first deposit on a farm. A sizable minority found land values here inflated beyond their earning ability and were making for Michigan or Illinois about the time the Smiths were losing out. In April, 1829, a Manchester clergyman noted: "Many families are floating about . . . because in two or three months they expect to remove." Every circumstance seems to invalidate the obviously prejudiced testimonials of unsympathetic neighbors (collected by one hostile individual whose style of composition stereotypes the language of numerous witnesses) that the Smiths were either squatters or shiftless "frontier drifters." Many an honest and industrious farmer followed their identical experience, pursued by bad luck or poor judgment, and sought a new fling at fortune farther west. No doubt the Smiths, like many of their fellows, wasted valuable time hunting gold at the proper turn of the moon. One of the potent sources of Joseph's local ill repute may well have been the jealousy of other persons who failed to discover golden plates in the glacial sands of the drumlins.

The entire family was at least barely literate. Hyrum had attended a Vermont seminary, and Joseph had some part of a few years' schooling in Palmyra, possibly increased by brief attendance at Bainbridge in 1826. He had belonged to the young men's debating society in Palmyra. Though he read easily, his writing was at best halting and he attained only the rudiments of arithmetic. Probably the family budget had required his labor a good deal of the time when he might have been in school. But this was rather the average than an unusual experience among the poorer Yankee migrants to western New York. Despite testimonials to the contrary, it must be concluded that neither Joseph nor any of his family was especially ignorant according to the standards of the place and time. Interest in things marvelous and supernatural they certainly had abundantly, but even this made them differ only in degree from their neighbors. After all, Joseph's peeping stone attracted loyal followers. The rest of the family, though perhaps not the prophet himself, behaved like others in attending services in revival seasons. Perhaps, as not infrequently happened, they shifted sectarian affiliation considerably as different denominations happened to lead the awakenings from time to time. Joseph, Senior, was by profession Methodist; and Lucy, the mother, and Hyrum, the elder brother, had most recently been Presbyterian when Joseph's thoughts began to turn toward religion.

The whole Smith family seems to have been quite thoroughly typical of the westering Yankees in the Burned-over District. It seems entirely plausible, as his most recent biographer [Fawn Brodie] claims, that Joseph became a prophet in quite accidental fashion. Having risen above his own early experiments in necromancy, his imagination wandered into new realms. When he found others taking his new hobby seriously, he had to live up to expectations and spend the remainder of his short life learning to assume the consequent responsibilities. In so doing he improved and demonstrated his naturally dynamic character. This was nothing more than happens to any man who enjoys the great responsibilities which fate thrusts upon him, though religious leadership demands somewhat rare personal qualities. It might have happened to almost anyone of Joseph's fellow Yankee migrants. The fundamental condition leading to the new faith was the credulity and spiritual yearning which made people anxious to follow a prophet, whoever he might be. In order to explain why Joseph developed into this role one must either utilize faith, traffic in a psychoanalysis which at such a distance from the event becomes highly imaginative, or descend to coincidence. Historical analysis profits little by any of these alternatives.

It should be added, however, that interest in Mormonism was no necessary indication either of extraordinary ignorance or of unusually febrile imaginings. Converts like Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, J. J. Strang, William Phelps, Sidney Rigdon, Orson Pratt, and Lorenzo Snow, to name only a few, had on the whole superior education for their times, and most of them proved to be as vigorously realistic pillars of the church as anyone might desire. The man who exercised primacy over these individuals approached some kind of genius, however it may have been inspired.

What was it, then, about Joseph Smith which satisfied the spiritual needs of his converts? Clearly it was no case of deliberate imposture, no consciously calculated set of devices to attain power over others. Joseph may have gathered some inklings from an imperfect knowledge of the Shakers or of the New Jerusalem on Keuka Lake, just as he did from Owenite communism by way of Sidney Rigdon at Kirtland, Ohio, but he did not premeditate a system for self-advancement patterned upon the observed success of Jemima Wilkinson or anyone else. This kind of hypothesis, like the one which claims that the Book of Mormon was copied from Solomon Spaulding's novel on the early Indian wars, is too transparently simple to explain the broad appeal of the new church. Such myths not only distort Joseph's character but also breed serious misconceptions of how any religious novelty is likely to arise. All the spiritual experiments of western New York were alike genuine growths, rooted in a heritage of moral intensity and blossoming in the heat of evangelistic fervor.

The question is better put this way. How did the Church of Latter-day Saints select and emphasize from its Burned-over District milieu those principles of religion and society which would patently attract persons bred in the same environment? First of all, it crystallized and provided an apparently authoritative formulation for what had perhaps been from the beginning the most prominent legend in the region's folklore. The story of a gigantic battle on the hill Cumorah, in which the superior pre-Indian civilization was exterminated, seems today both fantastic and remote from the realm of religion. It was not fantastic to a generation bred in the belief of such a civilization's existence; and neither American society generally nor that of western New York in particular had passed the stage wherein common myth might reinforce Biblical sanction of doctrine.

The Book of Mormon also incorporated contemporary interests of the locality, supplementing the sense of familiarity to be gained from its historical approach. Walter F. Prince [in "Psychological Tests for the Authorship of the Book of Mormon," American Journal of Psychology, XXVII, 1917, and "A Footnote; Authorship of the Book of Mormon," American Journal of Psychology, XXX, 1919] proved beyond dispute thirty years ago, by a rigorous examination of the proper names and other language in the volume, that even if no other evidence existed, it could have been composed only in western New York between 1826 and 1834, so markedly did it reflect Antimasonry and other issues of the day. Unfortunately, his work has been so neglected that the most recent historian of the movement [Brodie] had to demonstrate the proposition all over again, independently.

The prophet, moreover, for all his imagination, was, like the Yankees he led, in many respects an eminently practical man. He combined appeals to reason and self-interest with emotional attractions. The logic of his mythology and theology, specious though it seem to the Gentile of today, satisfied the inbred desire of Yorkers to achieve an orderly, intellectual formulation of their beliefs. Again, he expected all laymen to participate in the priesthood of the church. This democratic and flattering conception paralleled chronologically the developing controversies over clerical influence in most of the sects of western New York; and its reasonableness, like the Mormon approach to doctrine by argument rather than excitement, contrasted pleasantly with the flamboyant oratory of orthodoxy's revivals. And whereas the evangelists emphasized salvation from personal sins in preparation for the life to come, Joseph's ideas about earthly and heavenly society alike judged happiness more largely in terms of physical comfort and earthly abundance. His degree of communism resurrected the strong sense of social obligation that all should have for each and each for all, which had been long declining in the Puritan tradition of old New England. Born Yankees troubled by the problems of security in a more individualistic society found this doctrine pleasing.

In theology, again, this practical emphasis appeared. Alexander Campbell [in his Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, 1832] very quickly discerned how accurately the Book of Mormon reflected "every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years." It presented a definitive answer indeed to every issue of orthodox evangelical religion:

infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonary, republican government, and the rights of man.

Especially did the Saints lay emphatic stress upon, and offer concrete instead of vague conceptions of, the very doctrines which thirty years of revivalism had made most intensely interesting to the folk of western New York. They incorporated literal interpretations of the Bible, made expectation of the millennium coincident with the prophet's career on earth, and provided a mode for fresh revelation direct from God. Above all, in the person of Joseph Smith they found living, intimately available embodiment of their entire faith. How much more effectively than the orthodox evangelists could they hammer home the consciousness of sin and the hope of regeneration which had been preached here since the first settlement of the region!

Mormonism has usually been described as a frontier religion. But study of the circumstances of its origin and its continuing appeal in the area which bred it suggests a different view. The church did not rise during the pioneering era of western New York. Its early recruits came from many sects, but invariably from the longest-settled neighborhoods of the region. Joseph's peregrinations during the period when he was pregnant with the new religion were always eastward, not westward, from his Manchester home. The first congregations of the church formed at Manchester, Fayette in Seneca County, and Colesville in Broome County. These facts, together with the realization of Mormonism's dependence on current excitements and upon myths and doctrines built by the passage of time into the locality's very fabric, demonstrate that the Church of the Saints was not a frontier phenomenon in origin.

Nor did it expand through an appeal to frontiersmen. The far greater gathering of converts from this area came during the region's riper maturity, after Zion itself had removed to the West. And the recruits enlisted here and elsewhere in the East by returning missionaries far outnumbered those gained in areas of the Middle West where Mormon headquarters chanced from time to time to be located. These propositions could best be supported by the church's publication of missionary journals, if they exist in the official archives. Even without that evidence, however, they can be adequately documented from scattered references of orthodox sources to Mormon proselytizing, and from an analysis of the nativity figures in the Utah Territorial Census of 1860.

Whether particularly successful missionary tours are indicated by the concentration in certain years of occasional remarks by others on the Mormon conversions, or whether coincidence is responsible, the notices discovered focus upon 1832 and 1841. During earlier years Mormons had "made considerable inroads in the southern part" of the town of Borodino, whose people, according to the Presbyterian minister, had been "wafted and bemused with every wind of doctrine, till they neither know nor care what is truth, or what is error." In northern Allegany County, "A Mormon Preacher came along" carrying "a solemn visage and nearly persuaded some over to his delusion." In the same year Alexander Campbell's strictures on the new faith were republished by Joshua Himes at Boston, because two Mormons already had fifteen converts from that city. Early the following summer missionaries in the middle Genesee Valley were reported to have collected fifty recruits by making use of the northern lights to scare the superstitious. A few Mormons helped to turn West Otto, in Cattaraugus County, against Presbyterian doctrine in 1835. The Baptist Register of Utica began publishing occasional exposures of Mormonism in 1839, intensifying its interest during the following two years. Explanation came forth in February of '41. "Mormon emissaries are now circulating in various directions through the State . . . and in some instances [are] surprisingly successful." The Methodist Zion's Watchman in the same year commenced to present anti-Mormon material in some quantity. Occasional press notices emanated from Rochester throughout the forties. One of John Humphrey Noyes's supporters recommended that he visit Utica, where the correspondent and forty-four others had supported a Mormon Church in 1841. The same year a returned missionary visiting friends in Low Hampton requested permission to attend William Miller's preaching.

But what degree of success did this proselytizing achieve, and how did it compare with similar efforts farther west? In 1860, when many original New York converts who had been adults in 1830 must have died, the natives of this state in Utah Territory numbered fewer only than those from Illinois. Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Missouri followed in order. The manuscript of the census shows that the numbers from Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri were of such an age range that they must have been mainly the children of the fertile members transplanted from the East. While it is thus clear that few adults joined in the Middle West, many whose nativity was in New England or Pennsylvania had removed once and resided in New York at the time of their conversion. No exact analysis is possible, but it is clear that many more adherents came from the East than from the West, and probably more of them from New York than from any other state. It may not be improper to imagine that the bulk of these hailed from the same Burned-over District which in these very years provided so extensive a personnel for a host of other religious experiments.

To discover when the conversions in the region occurred is again difficult, but basis for an estimate is found by analyzing age groups among the New Yorkborn in Utah in 1860. Of 923 persons so counted, 221 were over 45 and might have been original members, though many presumably emigrated and joined later farther west or came under the influence of the Mormon itinerants who combed this region after 1831. The remainder under 45 could have been children of original members. But since only a hundred persons in all removed to Kirtland, Ohio, in the first hegira, the greater number must have been later converts or their children. Persons under 25, and families with a member in this age group born in this state, could scarcely have emigrated before 1835. The number in this category totals 446 out of the 923 counted, or more than 50 per cent.

It seems conservative to estimate that of Mormons brought into the church from the Burned-over District at least three-fourths must have been gathered by returning itinerants between 1831 and the early fifties. Yankee groups in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England itself responded similarly, but less intensively, and after 1850 a substantial portion of new members came from England and Scandinavia. Obviously, then, Mormonism should not be called a frontier religion in terms of the persons it appealed to, any more than it should in terms of its origin.

To be sure the church existed generally on the frontier and kept moving westward with the tide of settlement. It also carried into the West a number of ideas characteristic of the Burned-over District. Its location was determined by the fact that the evangelistic-mindedness from which it developed in the beginning, and which constantly fed it with members, had little tolerance for such an unorthodox offspring, and drove the Saints by its persecution along their westering course. But neither the organization of the church, nor its personnel, nor its doctrines were frontier products. All belonged rather to that Yankee, rural, emotionalized, and rapidly maturing culture which characterized western New York so markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.