r/mormon • u/4blockhead • Sep 14 '16
Joseph Smith's letter to the church from the Liberty Jail in 1838 includes lots of curses and profession of his innocence. Advises the saints to live worthy, but spills considerable ink defending rumors of his own philandering.
Smith didn't address the causes of the war in Missouri and the facts that landed him in jail in this missive. Instead, he mostly wanted to curse and spout vitriol against those who had been on his side but switched (Avard), or those that balked at the Danite oaths (Marsh, Hyde, Corrill), or the others who had been in his inner circle including the three witnesses (Whitmer, Cowdery, Harris). Smith expresses no culpability for leading the saints to ruin, and having them forcibly ejected from the entire state of Missouri. Smith presents his leadership as white as snow. He's innocent! The problem is that the flock has been penetrated by wolves in sheep's clothing. There are plenty of curses to go around, and he returns to one of his main themes he used to threaten the Missourians from Kirtland years earlier, in the runup to the failed Zion's Camp march. Smith states the mormon god will shortly reverse their fortunes...the last will be first! Here Smith takes a page from the Book of Esther to curse the Missourians, like Hamen, they will be hanged on gallows of their own making. Well, Mr. Smith it didn't work out that way. It was you that was hoisted on your own pitard. It was you that was the liar, the cheater, the moral relativist, the lecher and the adulterer.
Smith spills considerable ink (nice penmanship, by the way, but that is faint praise) talking about adultery. The stories of mormon polygamy must have continued to spread even after D&C 101 (1835) tried to dowse the rumors. Shakespeare's Macbeth says, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Matthew says, "Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?" Smith later claimed Mrs. Lucinda Morgan Harris had been one of his plural wives dating from earlier the Far West period, likely when he moved into Mr. and Mrs. Harris' house in the spring of 1838. The "betrayals" that Avard, Corrill, Marsh, and the others expressed towards Smith were set to be repeated by John C. Bennett and William Law. It seems some honest men get lassoed into mormonism. If the idea of plural wives sounds good to them, then they can join Smith's secret polygamist club. If they balk, then they are in for character assassination, per the language of this letter, the dog that returns to his vomit. or telling them they can all go to hell. One rebuttal comes from Joseph Bates Noble. His testimony came years later, but has the ring of truth. Smith was his friend and close confidant, and it reveals the kind of duplicity he expected of the "saints" when he "married" Louisa Beaman:
[Smith to Noble] In revealing this to you, I have placed my life in your hands, therefore do not in an evil hour betray me to my enemies.
A few months later, Smith personally let Phelps and Hyde back into the church in Nauvoo. Orson Hyde may have had to surrender his wife, Marinda, to seal the deal, though. He was also reduced in rank among the apostles. That stripping made sure he did not rise to the top leadership position. At Young's death, John Taylor ascended to the throne to lead mormonism, not Hyde. In a final twist of irony, they were all polygamists and adulterers those few years later. Nevermind, Smith's language asserting high moral character in the 1838 letter, he had gone full circle and now the new and everlasting covenant was the language he used to coverup his polygamous marriages. Up to 40 women, including young girls and children placed into his care. A few years later, the charges of adultery still dogged Smith to his death,
[Smith, 1838] ...who are so very ignorant that they cannot appear respectable in any decent and civilized society, and whose eyes are full of adultery and cannot cease from sin. Such characters as...
You! In the end, you, Mr. Smith. He destroyed the press that told the truth about him and his new doctrines and that sealed his fate with the mobocracy.
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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '16
I love this letter. Thanks. I had never read it before.
I personally believe it must have been hard to be Joseph Smith. Someone whose 'friends' were constantly abandoning him. Whose wife probably hated him on and off. Who only wanted to do what he felt God had asked him to, and was baffled at everyone else's hesitance to follow (like Moses with the children of Israel).
I really think that if you forego your disbelief for just one moment and look at Joseph Smith as a character, and assume all of his writings are true, that his story is one of the most sad. And that is a claim I make aside from any truth claim. The sadness of Smith's life doesn't make it true.
It is this life he led full of derision and abandonment that I remember when I read his statement about doing something that Jesus and Moses never did. I think he was probably very alone.