Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith's Theology

Dialogue has a rich and long history covering Mormonism’s founding prophet Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith’s teachings and the development of Mormon theology have had a lasting impact on religious and cultural history. Exploring the curated topics below can provide a more detailed understanding of different perspectives and scholarly discussions on Joseph Smith’s life, teachings, and historical context.

A Reflection on Joseph Smith’s Restorationist Vision of Truth

Ryan D. Ward

Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 93–102
The way of viewing truth in the Church differs from the common philosophical concept of truth as something that corresponds to the historical or present facts of a given situation.

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler’s Theological Position on the Nature of God

Loren Pankratz

Dialogue 55.2 (Spring 2022): 37–72
Joseph Smith’s teachings on God found in his preaching at the April 7, 1844 general conference, known as the King Follett Sermon, and Smith’s Sermon in the Grove, given at a meeting held just east of the Nauvoo Temple on June 16, 1844, have appeared to many to give strong support to this view. There, he taught that God was not always God but developed into God over time.

Praise to the Man: The Development of Joseph Smith Deification in Woolleyite Mormonism, 1929–1977

Cristina Rosetti

Dialogue 54.3 (Fall 2021): 41–65
However, the 1886 Revelation and subsequent statement also raised their own doctrinal questions that were continually developed through the lineage that became Woolleyite Mormonism. Namely, why was the resurrected Joseph Smith present alongside Jesus Christ at the meeting with John Taylor?

The Secular Binary of Joseph Smith’s Translations

Michael Hubbard MacKay

Dialogue 54.3 (Fall 2021): 1–40
The debate about Joseph Smith’s translations have primarily assumed that the translation was commensurable and focuses upon theories of authorial involvement of Joseph Smith.

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Fiona Givens

Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.

Salvation through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment

Benjamin E. Park

Dialogue 43.2 (Summer 2010): 1–44
A discussion of the theology of the body being combined with the spirit for various different reasons.

The Limits of Naturalistic Criteria for the Book of Mormon: Comparing Joseph Smith and Andrew Jackson Davis

William Davis

Dialogue 53.3 (Fall 2020): 73–103
Davis compares the two men, saying “Davis, like Smith, was raised in a poor household and received little formal education—Davis, in fact, would claim to have received only “little more than five months” of schooling.”

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon: Co-Founders of a Movement

Steven L. Shields

Dialogue 52.3 (Fall 2019): 1–18
Shields argues that if you deny or dismiss Sidney Ridgon’s contributions to the early church, then the scripture canon during this time would need to be reinterpreted.

Pedagogy of Perfection: Joseph Smith’s Perfectionism, How It was Taught in the Early LDS Church, and Its Contemporary Applicability

Richard Sleegers

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 105–143
Richard Sleegers contrasts 19th century Protestant teachings about salvations to what Joseph Smith taught about life after death.

A Documentary Note on a Letter to Joseph Smith. Romance, Death, and Polygamy: The Life and Times of Susan Hough Conrad and Lorenzo Dow Barnes

William V. Smith

Dialogue 49.4 (Winter 2016): 87–108
The history behind a letter that was written by missionary Jedediah Morgan Grant to Joseph Smith, which contained information about Susan Hough Conrad and her brief love writings with a missionary who was serving in England named Lorenzo Dow Barnes.

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Keith Parry

Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.

Joseph Smith's Life

Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr.

Lawrence Foster

Dialogue 53.2 (Summer 2020): 1–35
This article will explore how one of the most open-ended psychological interpretations of Smith’s prophetic leadership and motivation might contribute to better understanding the trajectory of this extraordinarily talented and conflicted individual whose life has so deeply impacted the religious movement he founded and, increasingly, the larger world.

Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity

Steven L. Olsen

Dialogue 14.3 (Fall 1981): 89–100
Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account.

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In 1838, Joseph Smith reduced to written form the sacred experience which led him to establish Mormonism.[1] his narrative relates a series of heavenly visitations which Smith said had begun eighteen years earlier and had continued until 1829. Although Smith drafted earlier and later accounts of these events, only the 1838 version has been officially recognized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith commenced his official History of the Church with this narrative. It also appeared in an 1851 collection of sacred and inspirational writings published by the Church in the British Isles. The permanent status of this text in Mormonism was secured in 1880 by its canonization at the hand of John Taylor who had recently succeeded Brigham Young to the Mormon Presidency. Since its canonization, the "Joseph Smith story," as it is known among Mormons, has become a primary document for the explication of Mormon doctrine and the introduction for many proselytes to the Church. The text has come to demand the loyalty of orthodox Mormons and has become one of Mormonism's most sacred texts.

Remarkable is the contrast between the official status of the 1838 version and the general neglect by the Church of the other accounts. This difference in status cannot be explained by the historical accuracy of the respective accounts. Despite some serious challenges to the chronology of the official account, Mormons have firmly defended its historicity, even though several of the non-canonized versions do not suffer from these perceived historical inaccuracies.[2] Neither can this distinction be demonstrated by the degree of complementarity of the different versions. Although some inconsistencies exist among the accounts, no official attempt has been made to supplement the canonized version with many rich details from the other versions.[3] Finally, despite the principal use of the official version to validate Mormon doctrine,[4] other versions could conceivably perform these didactic functions as well. In short, the Mormon Church seems to view the 1838 "Joseph Smith story" as an account apart, a different kind of narrative from the other versions, even from those written by Smith himself. This exclusive and inviolate position reinforces its sacredness in Mormonism.[5]

One possible reason for the considerable contrast in the Mormon attitude between the canonized and all other accounts is their respective relation to Mormon identity. That is, the unquestioned loyalty to the official version may be an expression more of Mormon ideology than of Mormon historiography or theology. One of the most important roles of this text in Mormonism may be the manner in which it articulates Mormonism's self-conscious mission to mankind.

The social and humanistic disciplines abound with studies of the significance of sacred narratives, often called creation myths, for the expression and maintenance of cultural identity.[6] Meaning in such narratives has been found to be communicated through symbolic as opposed to propositional logic. That is, sensory elements in the story connected with objects, images, persons and places are combined and recombined in discernible patterns which give the story cultural significance considerably greater than that given by the events themselves. As Alan Heimert has observed,

To discover the meaning of any utterance demands what is in substance a continuing act of literary interpretation, for the language with which an idea is presented, and the imaginative universe by which it is surrounded, often tell us more of an author's meaning and intention than his declarative propositions.[7]

This imaginative universe or these symbolic patterns constitute the structure of a narrative. This article will seek to analyze in the context of Mormon identity the structures used by Smith to express, and thereby interpret, his early sacred experiences.

Although many structural theories have been developed, the structuralism of Jean Piaget possesses two distinct advantages for the present study.[8] n the first place, Piaget sees "structuring" as the human process of imposing greater degrees of order upon and deriving additional levels of meaning from preexisting oral, visual, material, written and other cultural traditions. From this perspective, the Joseph Smith story becomes as much the reflection of Smith's perceptions and intentions within an expanding Mormon world-view as the description of a series of historical occurrences.

Secondly, Piaget identifies three characteristics of a well developed symbolic logic, namely wholeness, transformation and self-regulation. These provide the model with a method of analysis and criteria of falsifiability which allow for a level of scientific rigor unattainable from more impressionistic structural theories.

Piaget's first principle, wholeness, requires that the structure of a narrative be completely developed within the story. In the same way that a good story includes all relevant elements for its complete exposition, an adequate symbolic logic must be fully expressed within the narrative.

The symbolic structure of the Joseph Smith story exhibits the quality of wholeness. Briefly, the structure of the text is based on the dynamic contrast between two pairs of opposed yet fundamental concepts in Mormonism, namely Kingdom/World and heaven/earth.[9] The Joseph Smith story symbolically expresses the ideal Mormon relation between these two binary oppositions. That is, the Kingdom/World distinction is magnified and the heaven/ earth distinction is diminished throughout the narrative until the Kingdom overcomes the World and heaven and earth are united. These developments are wholly contained within the narrative.

Piaget's second characteristic, transformation, suggests that the events of the story are ordered not only in chronological and geographical sequence but also in terms of the text's symbolic logic. In the words of the anthropologist Edmund Leach, “the chronological sequence is itself of structural significance.”[10]

Two transformational principles operate within the Joseph Smith story to produce the ideal relationships between the Kingdom and the World, on the one hand, and between heaven and earth, on the other. The first principle, evolution, is the process of creating a new condition from a quite different and outmoded condition. The evolutionary process in the Joseph Smith story symbolically creates the ideal Kingdom/World contrast. The Kingdom overcomes the World in the narrative by destroying the World's institutions, eliminating the World's influence on members of the Kingdom, and ceasing all communication with the World. The Kingdom establishes itself in the narrative through the evolution of an institutional framework of action with the Kingdom and the regeneration of the individual in the ideal image of the Kingdom.

The second transformational principle of the Joseph Smith story is dialectics, that is, the process of increasingly approximating an ideal state through the resolution of contrasts. Dialectics operate in the narrative to symbolically unify heaven and earth. This is accomplished through the resolution of two pair of contrasting elements characteristic of the heaven/earth opposition, namely light/dark and high/low.

Piaget's third characteristic of a well-developed symbolic logic is self-regulation. Self-regulation refers to the patterns in the narrative, which are analogous to meter and stanzas in poetry and rhythm and movements in music. These patterns help set the mood of the story and reinforce its meaning.

The most obvious rhythms in the Joseph Smith story consist in the division of the narrative into three vignettes, each of which is characterized by a significant heavenly manifestation. More specific devices of self-regulation in the text include repetition, series, climax, ·and denouement.

The first vignette (vv. 1-26), known to Mormons as the "First Vision," finds young Joseph searching for God's true religion but being confused and bewildered by the organized churches of his day. Strengthened in his resolve to find the truth, Joseph retires to the woods near his home to ask God directly the whereabouts of the truth. During the prayer, he is assailed by an evil presence which nearly causes his destruction. At the point of Joseph's abandonment, the evil is dispelled by a glorious light in which appear two heavenly beings, identified as God the Father and Jesus Christ. They instruct the lad to avoid all modern religions.

Three years pass before the second vignette begins (vv. 27-54), during which Joseph has been adversely influenced by his friends. Wishing to be cleansed of the resulting taints, Joseph withdraws to the security of his bedroom to seek God's forgiveness. His prayers are answered by the appearance of an angel named Moroni who calls Joseph to restore the Kingdom of God to earth.

The third vignette (vv. 55-75) opens with Joseph digging for buried treasure. Unsuccessful at this enterprise, he withdraws from the working world to begin translating sacred records which Moroni has entrusted to his keeping. This translation is eventually published as the Book of Mormon. Wishing to verify the accuracy of the translation, Joseph sends a sympathetic neighbor, Martin Harris, to Professor Charles Anthon. The professor first attests to the accuracy of the translation, but upon learning of its reputed source, he withdraws his approval in disgust.

Following this rejection, Joseph immerses himself in the work of the Kingdom, and God rewards him first by providing him a scribe, Oliver Cowdery, to assist in the translation, and second by sending the resurrected John the Baptist to authorize Joseph and Oliver to baptize each other and anyone else who believes them. The Joseph Smith story ends with Joseph secure in the heavenly Kingdom he has just restored, yet increasingly persecuted by former friends and strangers alike.

We will now consider how these events are expressed by Joseph Smith in an imaginative universe or symbolic structure which defines Mormonism's self-conscious identity. The Kingdom/World dichotomy is symbolized most dramatically by the demise of the major institutions of the World. In the first vignette, institutionalized religion is overcome by the Kingdom. As the narrative begins, Joseph has no other concern in life than to find God's true church. Instead of truth, Joseph experiences hypocrisy, contention and confusion among the “different religious parties" of the day and feels himself unable "to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong."

To seek an answer, Joseph removes himself from the religions of the World and in a grove of trees near his home communicates with two heavenly beings. They repeat four times the answer to his question of the whereabouts of the true religion. Joseph is told a) he "must join none" of the existing churches; b) "that their creeds were an abomination"; c) "that those professors [of religion] were all corrupt"; and d) again not "to join with any of them" (vv. 19-20). Although Joseph alludes to "many other things" (v. 20) he learned during the "First Vision," the divine condemnation of existing religions is the only information included in the text.

Following his experience with the heavens, Joseph defends his newfound truth not only to the minister of the sect which had once attracted him (v. 21) but to "professors of religion" in general (v. 22) and to the very "powers of darkness" (v. 20) which had so recently nearly proven his demise. From this point in the text, Joseph has no further contact with organized religion. As far as the Kingdom is concerned, this institution of the World has been negated.

The society of the World is at issue in the second vignette. For three years after the "First Vision" Joseph mingles with "all classes of men" (v. 27) and in "all kinds of society" (v. 28). In defending his supernatural experiences, Joseph is persecuted by "those who ought to have been my friends and to have treated me kindly . . .” (v. 28). These associations lead Joseph into "all kinds of temptations" (v. 28). Although he confesses that such "foolish errors" and 0foibles of human nature" were not serious (v. 28), he seeks forgiveness of God after having withdrawn from the society of the World. His visitation from the angel Moroni takes him out of the World to define his initial status in the Kingdom—translator of sacred records (vv. 34–35). Following his experience with Moroni, Joseph has no further social contacts with any worldly associate. In short, the coming of Moroni negates the society of the World.

The third vignette contains two encounters between the Kingdom and the World. As with previous encounters, the representative of the Kingdom is adversely affected by his involvement with the World. God, however, provides him a means of escape. First of all, Joseph becomes involved with the economy of the World. Although, he is not alone in this enterprise, Joseph refers to his fellow workers only in occupational terms. He does not relate to them in the text as companions or friends (v. 56).

This get-rich-quick scheme earns Joseph nothing but the reputation of being a "money-digger." Embarrassed, he withdraws from the economy of the World and begins his mission to the Kingdom. From this point in the text, Joseph never again encounters the World's economies. God, however, provides for his temporal needs by sending a "farmer of respectability," Martin Harris, with the "timely aid" of fifty dollars (vv. 60-61).

Once Joseph has begun his mission in the Kingdom, the narrative has him no longer personally involved with any institution of the World. As a result, it is Martin Harris who takes a portion of the translated manuscript and some transcribed characters from the plates to a professor of education for verification. The professor approves of both until he learns of their reputed source. Hearing that they came from an angel, he withdraws his support stating that "there was no such thing now as ministering of angels" (v. 65).

This response climaxes the widening Kingdom/World opposition. At this point, the distinction has become categorical. The World is now the arch-enemy of the Kingdom in principle as well as in practice. Reconciliation between them is no longer possible. Consequently, no further contact with the World is sought by the Kingdom. As far as the Kingdom is concerned, the institutions of the World have been overcome.

From the perspective of the World, however, the principle of opposition becomes the practice of persecution. As the Kingdom progressively overcomes the World’s institutions, the World increasingly mobilizes against the Kingdom. Opposition to the Kingdom comes first from a single Methodist preacher (v. 21) and then from "professors of religion" as a group (v. 22). In the second vignette, the source of persecution has expanded to include "all classes of men, both religious and irreligious" (v. 27). By the third vignette, "persecution became more bitter and severe than before, and multitudes were on the alert continually to get [ the plates] if possible" (v. 60).

Despite the increased opposition, the World's influence on the Kingdom wanes as its institutions are negated. In the first vignette, Joseph is ignorant, isolated and powerless as a result of his involvement with the World. In the second vignette, the World affects only his moral integrity. Joseph's involvement with the economy of the World leaves him embarrassed and penniless but does not assail his character, and the involvement with the education of the World results only in disappointment. The narrative suggests that as the World mobilizes in opposition to the Kingdom, its influence on the Kingdom declines.

Joseph's patterns of communication in the text reinforce this logical progression. In the first vignette, Joseph discusses his spiritual experiences only with the World, in the form of sectarian preachers (vv. 21-22). He comes no closer to communicate his experiences with trusted family members than to inform his mother that her religion was "not true" (v. 20).

The second vignette finds Joseph's communications exclusively with "those who ought to have been my friends" (v. 28). After the visitation of Moroni, however, Joseph initiates open communication with family members and ceases direct communication with the World. In the words of Joseph, Moroni "commanded me to go to my father and tell him of the visions and commandments which I had received,, (v. 49).

The World, however, is still informed of the activities of the Kingdom, but only in an oblique manner, as indicated by the use of the passive voice in the text: '' . . . no sooner was it known that I had [ the plates], than the most strenuous exertions were used to get them from me” (v. 60). Joseph also indicates that by this time profane communication or "rumor with her ten thousand tongues was all the time employed in circulating falsehoods" about the Kingdom (v. 61).

After Joseph begins to translate the sacred record and after he becomes authorized to enlarge the Kingdom through baptism, communication with the World ceases altogether, and communication within the Kingdom, including that between heaven and earth, becomes well developed.

Our minds being now enlightened, we began to have the scriptures laid open to our understandings, and the true meaning and intention of their more mysterious passages revealed unto us in a manner which we never could attain to previously, nor ever before thought of. In the meantime we were forced to keep secret the circumstances of having received the Priesthood and our having been baptized, owing to a spirit of persecution which had already manifested itself in the neighborhood (v. 74).

In short, as the Kingdom grows, the institutions of the World—religion, society, economy and education—are destroyed until the Kingdom has no more use for the World. The adverse effects of the World upon members of the Kingdom are also progressively eliminated. The increasing rift between the Kingdom and the World is seen as well in the mounting persecution of the Kingdom by the World and in the decreasing communications between them.

In the process of destroying the institutions of the World, the Kingdom recreates the individual in the ideal image of the Kingdom. In this respect1 Joseph Smith becomes the model of conversion in this sacred Mormon text. In the first vignette, Joseph describes himself as ignorant of the truth and unable of himself to find it: ". . . so great were the confusion and strife among the different denominations, that it was impossible for a person young as I was, and so unacquainted with men and things, to come to any certain conclusion who was right and who was wrong" (v. 8). The "two Personages" in the 11sacred grove" give Joseph sufficient knowledge not only to satisfy his own yearnings but to withstand the opposition of the "great ones of the most popular sects of the day" (v. 23) and the very /✓powers of darkness" (v. 20). After receiving this knowledge and throughout the rest of the narrative, Joseph never lacks for confidence or resources in establishing the Kingdom.

The second vignette is concerned with Joseph's moral integrity. His involvement with the society of the World results in his committing 11many foolish errors" and displaying "the weaknesses of youth, and the foibles of human nature" (v. 28). Joseph's repeated visits with the angel Moroni assure him of his acceptance by God. From this point in the narrative, Joseph shows no evidence of any faults in his character.

In the third vignette, Joseph acquires the trait of sociality. Until this point in the narrative, Joseph's companions have been either worldly as with 1 'those who ought to have been my friends . . ." or temporary as with his father and Martin Harris. Oliver Cowdery becomes Joseph's first companion in Kingdom building, assisting the Prophet to translate the plates. Not until Oliver begins his service does Joseph use the first person plural to describe his activities in the Kingdom (v. 68).

A final quality acquired by Joseph in coming to personify the Kingdom is power. Although he experiences the great power of the Kingdom from reading the Bible (vv. 11-12), he does not possess a portion of that power until John the Baptist confers on him the "Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys [authority] of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins. . . " (v. 69). Upon being baptized, Joseph also receives the Holy Ghost which becomes an unexpected key of knowledge in establishing the Kingdom.

Joseph's experiences with the Kingdom withdraw him from a declining World and initiate him into the emerging Kingdom by developing in him the qualities of knowledge, purity, sociality and power. By the end of the narrative, Joseph has acquired not only these traits himself, but also the mechanisms in the form of baptism, Priesthood and the Holy Ghost to extend the qualities of conversion to all who will accept the Kingdom.

The evolution of the Kingdom is manifest, finally, on an institutional level in a series of activities having increasing significance for the Kingdom. The first activity, namely instruction, characterizes the Kingdom through the first two vignettes. The "First Vision" and Moroni's repeated visitations are wholly concerned with giving Joseph "instruction and intelligence . . . respecting what the Lord was going to do, and how and in what manner his Kingdom was to be conducted in the last days" (v. 54).

After Joseph receives the plates, the focus of institutional activity shifts to production. That is, Joseph now applies the instruction he has received to produce the first material evidence of the Kingdom's restoration, namely the Book of Mormon.

With the coming of John the Baptist the institutional activity of the Kingdom begins to shift once more from production to reproduction. That is, the Kingdom has evolved to the point at which others can begin to share in its growth. The ordination and baptism of Joseph and Oliver initiate this stage of the Kingdom's expansion.

In sum, the symbolic evolution of the Kingdom in the Joseph Smith story consists of destruction of the institutions of the World and the concurrent construction of the Kingdom. The former consists of the demise of the World's institutions, the World's influence on the Kingdom and its communication with the Kingdom. The latter involves creating the individual member in the image of the Kingdom and developing a framework of institutional activity consistent with the Kingdom's ultimate scope.

The second principle of systematic transformation in the Joseph Smith story is dialectics, which integrate the contrasting elements of heaven and earth in the text. The unification is symbolized first in the contrast of illumination, or light/dark dichotomy. As Joseph prays in the woods to find God's truth, "thick darkness gathered around" him. This darkness signals the presence of "some actual being from the unseen world," whose power causes Joseph nearly to "sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction.” Yet “just at this moment of great alarm," a pillar of light appears to disp·e1 the darkness. Joseph reports, "It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound." Within the light are "two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description'' (vv. 15-17). A more powerful contrast between light and dark could not be imagined than that which introduced Joseph to the Kingdom.

The light/dark contrast in the coming of Moroni is striking, but less so than in the "First Vision." Moroni comes to Joseph at night, which is simply the absence of light, not the presence of evil. The contrast is further muted by he light gradually dispelling the darkness. Joseph reports, "a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday" (v. 30). Joseph also uses language less sublime in describing Moroni's appearance than the "First Vision." Joseph describes Moroni's robe as having "a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen" and Moroni's countenance as being "glorious beyond description, and . . . truly like lightning" (vv. 31-32).

In the final manifestation of the Kingdom, John the Baptist appears to Joseph and Oliver during the day. The only contrast between the glory of the Baptist and the surrounding daylight is that John "descended in a cloud of light" (v. 68). Not only is the contrast minimal but it is made without further textual elaboration. In the three successive light/dark oppositions in the narrative, the contrast decreases and is the least at the point in the story when Joseph and Oliver are inducted into the Kingdom. In short, the resolution of the light/dark dichotomy symbolizes the union of heaven and earth which the restoration of the Kingdom was effecting.

Confirmation of this symbolic pattern exists as well in the opposition of elevation, or the contrast of "high" and "low." In the "First Vision," Joseph describes the "pillar of light" as appearing "exactly over my head" and descending "gradually until it fell upon me" (v. 16). The contrast between Joseph's position, namely "lying on my back, looking up into heaven," (v. 20) and the position of the "two Personages," "standing above me in the air," is considerable.

In the second vignette, Moroni appears somewhat elevated above Joseph, but less than the "two Personages." In Joseph's words, Moroni "appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor" (v. 30). The final vignette mentions no specific distinction in elevation between John the Baptist, on the one hand, and Joseph and Oliver, on the other. The only suggestion of a difference is that John lays his hands on Joseph and Oliver to confer on them the "Priesthood of Aaron" (vv. 68-69).

As the Kingdom becomes established, two of the principal symbolic distinctions between heaven and earth, namely light/dark and high/low, are eliminated. The evolution of the Kingdom also destroys all effective opposition so that by the end of the Joseph Smith story the Kingdom is secure in its foundations and optimistic in its directions. At the conclusion of the narrative, Joseph "prophesied concerning the rise of this Church, and many other things connected with the Church, and this generation of the children of men. We were filled with the Holy Ghost and rejoiced in the God of our salvation."

The symbolic logic of the Joseph Smith story expresses a fundamental aspect of Mormonism's self-conscious identity. Mormons believe that the religion founded by Joseph Smith embodies the Kingdom of God restored to earth following a long separation of man from the truth. According to Mormon reckoning, this heavenly kingdom in temporal form is destined to overthrow the kingdoms of the World and literally transform the earth into heaven. In other words, the 1838 Joseph Smith story not only experientially confirms much of Mormon theology, it symbolically defines its self-conscious identity.

None of the other versions express Mormon identity so simply yet so completely and elegantly as does the 1838 account. In fact, no other Mormon document can serve so well the role of cultural charter or creation myth. Smith's introduction to the 1838 version suggests that he intended to compose an official charter when he began to write.

Owing to the many reports which have been put in circulation by evildisposing and designing persons in relation to the rise anq progress of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . . . I have been induced to write this history, to disabuse the public mind, and put all inquirers after truth in possession of the facts ... so far as I have such facts in my possession (v. 1).

By integrating fundamental aspects of Mormon historical, theological and ideological consciousness into a simple narrative form, the Joseph Smith story becomes the model testimony among a people whose declarations of faith are often expressed in experiential terms. The text also establishes Joseph Smith as the model convert to a religion for which "overcoming the world" and "establishing heaven on earth" are as significant for the individual member as for the entire church. These slogans have been used throughout Mormon history to validate its theology, ethics, social organization and cosmology. Because the ideal Mormon relations between the Kingdom and the World and between heaven and earth are symbolically expressed in the Joseph Smith text, the narrative provides Latter-day Saints with an interpretive framework to order their lives and make meaningful their social and religious experiences.[11] The use of the text as an absolute marker of Mormon history and doctrine is largely a function of its ability to articulate the structure of Mormon identity.

Note: The Dialogue Foundation provides the web format of this article as a courtesy. There may be unintentional differences from the printed version. For citational and bibliographical purposes, please use the printed version or the PDFs provided online and on JSTOR.

[1] Joseph Smith Jr., The Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith 2 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978), pp. 46-57, originally published serially in Times and Seasons (Nauvoo, Illinois), 15 March-1 August 1842. Numbers in parentheses throughout this article refer to the verse(s) in the Joseph Smith text from which the information was taken.

[2] E.g., Reverend Wesley P. Walters and Richard L. Bushman, "Round table: The Question of the Palmyra Revivals," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969), pp. 60-100.

[3] James B. Allen, "Eight Contemporary Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision: What do we Learn from Them?" The Improvement Era 73 (April 1970), pp. 4-13; Paul R. Cheesman, "An Analysis of the Accounts Relating Joseph Smith's Early Visions" (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University, 1965).

[4] James B. Allen, "The Significance of Joseph Smith's 'First Vision' in Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Autumn 1966), pp. 29-45.

[5] The Durkheimian tradition has viewed sacred phenomena as those which are separated and protected from mundane existence by ritual and moral imperatives, Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1915).

[6] Michael Lane, ed., An Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology I, II (New York: Basic Books, 1963, 1976); International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968 ed., "Myth and Symbol," by Victor Turner.

[7] Alan Heimerl, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 11.

[8] Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Channah Maschler (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).

[9] For present purposes, "Kingdom," "World," "Heaven" and "earth" are roughly equivalent to "sacred," "secular," "spiritual," and "material," respectively.

[10] Edmund Leach, "The Legitimacy of Solomon," in Genesis as Myth and other Essays (London: Cape Editions, 1969), p. 79.

[11] See Gifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 193-233.

1981: Steven L. Olsen “Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 14 No. 3 (1981): 89–100.

Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account.

[post_title] => Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 14.3 (Fall 1981): 89–100
Joseph Smith’s 1838 account of the First Vision has taken priority in structuring Mormon identity, despite the existence of different versions. This article explores why that version is so meaningful to Latter-day Saints, reflecting on the symbolic strucutre of the account. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => joseph-smith-and-the-structure-of-mormon-identity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-07 21:02:17 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-07 21:02:17 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=16445 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

JOSEPH SMITH'S EXPERIENCE OF A METHODIST "CAMP-MEETING" IN 1820

D. Michael Quinn

Dialogue E-Paper July 12, 2006
As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 30803 [post_author] => 2479 [post_date] => 2022-10-27 16:24:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-10-27 16:24:12 [post_content] =>

Since 1967, disbelieving critics of Joseph Smith Jr.'s accounts of his “First Vision" of deity have repeated the arguments and evidence given by minister-researcher Wesley P. Walters against the existence of an 1820 "religious excitement" (revival) in or near Palmyra, New York, as affirmed by the Mormon prophet's most detailed narrative. Since 1969, Smith's believing apologists[1] have repeated the rebuttal arguments and evidence given by BYU religion professor Milton V. Backman Jr. in support of such a revival which, Smith declared, led to his vision in 1820. For four decades, both sides have continued to approach this debated topic as if there were no alternative ways to examine the materials Walters and Backman cited, and as if there were no additional sources of significance to consider. The skeptics have been uniformly intransigent, while some apologists have made significant concessions.

This essay maintains that both sides have examined their evidences with tunnel vision, while both have likewise ignored issues and documents crucial to the topic. As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany. This is conservative revisionism.

An oddity in Mormon studies has been the decades-long repetition of Reverend Wesley P. Walters' claim in 1967 that "no revival occurred in the Palmyra area [of western New York State] in 1820." Rejecting all reminiscent accounts by Mormons, he made this assertion because of an allegedly "massive silence" about such a revival in documents written or published during that year. Instead, he argued, "the statement of Joseph Smith, Jr. cannot be true when he claims that he was stirred by an 1820 revival to make his inquiry in the grove [of trees] near his home." Walters insisted that various evidences showed Palmyra having no revivals from the fall of 1817 until 1824. Thus, Smith allegedly invented a fictitious revival to support his allegedly fictitious "First Vision" of deity in 1820 by superimposing on that year the extensive revivals which contemporary sources clearly described for Palmyra in 1824 and the following year.[2] Likewise, a hostile biographer wrote in 1999: "There was no significant revival in or around Palmyra in 1820," adding that "no known revival occurred in Palmyra between 1818 and 1823," and repeating: "no revivals in or around Palmyra [--] 1820.”[3]

Such unconditional denials seem odd for several reasons. First, the published diary of minister Aurora Seager commented that Palmyra had a revival in June 1818. After returning to his "home at Phelps on the 19th of May," he prepared to attend the annual meeting of the Methodist Episcopal Church's Genesee Conference (the organizational subdivision for western New York):

I received, on the 18th of June, a letter from Brother [Billy] Hibbard, informing me that I had been received by the [eastern] New York Conference, and, at my request, had been transferred to the Genesee Conference. On [Friday,] the 19th [of June 1818,] I attended a camp-meeting at Palmyra [nearly fourteen miles from Phelps]. The arrival of Bishop Roberts, who seems to be a man of God, and is apostolic in his appearance, gave a deeper interest to the meeting until it closed. On Monday [at Palmyra's camp-meeting,] the sacrament was administered, about twenty were baptized; forty united with the [Methodist] Church, and the meeting closed. I accompanied the Bishop to Brother [Eleazer] Hawks, at Phelps, and on the 14th of July [1818,] I set out [from Phelps] with Brother [Zechariah] Paddock for the Genesee conference, which was to hold its session at Lansing, N.Y.[4]

This narrative in itself undermined Reverend Walters' emphatic declaration that Palmyra had no revival for more than six years after the fall of 1817.

In 1969 BYU religion professor Milton V. Backman Jr. made him aware of this diary entry, and Walters should have recognized that it demonstrated a fundamental flaw in part of his argument. However, he never acknowledged this document. Furthermore, in a 1980 article where he claimed to have read the "entire manuscript" which summarized the above entry from Seager's diary,[5] Walters ridiculed a Mormon author's assertion that Palmyra's revivals of 1817 continued into 1818.[6]

The second oddity about the decades-long repetition of the minister-researcher's denials involves Palmyra's weekly newspaper. Its edition of 28 June 1820 referred to out-of-town visitor James Couser, who died on June 26th, the day after he drunkenly left "the Camp-ground" following the evening services of "a camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity."[7] The Palmyra Register’s next edition denied that its editor intended "to charge the Methodists" with selling alcohol at "their camp-ground" while they "professedly met for the worship of their God."[8] Third, farmer's almanacs—on which the Smiths and other village dwellers depended—specified that spring began on 20 March 1820 and ended when summer commenced on 21 June.[9] Traditional LDS statements that Joseph's revival-inspired theophany happened at an unspecified time "in the spring of 1820"[10] thus allow for an event as late as one minute before midnight on June 20th. Fourth, starting with Backman and BYU religion professor Richard Lloyd Anderson in 1969, for more than thirty years LDS authors cited one or both of those newspaper articles as proof that there was at least one religious revival in Palmyra during the first six months of 1820.[11]

Why have some scholars continued to deny that there was a religious revival that year? First, because Joseph Smith's most detailed narration about the pre-vision revival (and especially commentaries on it by his mother Lucy in the preliminary manuscript of her "History," by his brother William, and by his scribe Oliver Cowdery—after consultation with Joseph) referred to circumstances of Palmyra's revival in 1824-25 (such as its occurrence after the death of Alvin Smith—who died in November 1823, the preaching by Methodist minister George Lane, the revival's expansion to include the Baptists and Presbyterian preachers like Benjamin Stockton, and the conversion of "great multitudes," including several Smith family members to the Presbyterian Church). Thus, nay-sayers conclude that Joseph's dating of the crucial revival as 1820 was "anachronistic" at best, and fraudulent at worst.[12]

Second, in his 1969 expansion of the original 1967 article, Walters himself mentioned the Palmyra Register’s articles about the camp-meeting of June 1820. Paradoxically, he cited them in a footnote to support his narrative statement: "Even the Palmyra newspaper, while reporting revivals at several places in the state, has no mention whatever of any revival in Palmyra or vicinity in 1819 or 1820.”[13]

It seems mind-boggling for the minister-researcher to cite confirming documentation as if it were disconfirmation, but Walters did so for a reason he only implied (that the articles did not specify the "camp-meeting" was a "revival"), as well as for two incomplete explanations. In the footnote, he wrote: "Even the Methodist camp meeting being held in the vicinity of the village has nothing more significant reported about it than that a man had gotten drunk at the grog shops while there and died the next morning." In other words, this meeting was insignificant because Palmyra's newspaper mentioned it in passing as simply the background for reporting a man's death, not as a newsworthy event in its own right. Later in the narrative text, he gave another explanation (again only partly stated): that this 1820 meeting was merely an outdoors gathering of the local congregation at "the Methodist camp grounds a mile from Palmyra, in the wooded area adjoining the Methodist chapel." Therefore, by implication only, Reverend Walters dismissed this "camp-meeting" as a regular congregational service on the evening of Sunday, 25 June 1820—thus, not a special revival.[14]

A third reason why some scholars have continued to deny that there was a revival that year is the evidence he presented in 1967 and 1969 that there was no dramatic increase (or "spike") in the denominational membership of Palmyra and surrounding towns during 1820, as one might expect following a religious revival as extensive as Smith described: "Indeed, the whole district of country seemed affected by it, and great multitudes united themselves to the different religious parties . . .”[15]

In 1969 Backman chipped away at Walters' arguments. During 1819-20, there were revivals in seven towns "within a radius of twenty-five miles of the Smith farm" and also throughout New York State, with increases among Baptists and Presbyterians both locally and statewide. Furthermore, although Methodist records for the immediate vicinity of Palmyra did not survive, existing records verified the denomination's conversions during 1820 in nearby towns, with a total increase of 2,256 Methodists in western New York as a whole for that year.[16]

Backman did not specify it in this way, but his expansive geography was justified because Joseph's phrase "the whole district of country" indicated the young man's familiarity with Methodist terms and regional organization. In July 1819 the Genesee Conference of western New York created the Ontario District, which comprised Ontario County, in which Palmyra was then located.[17] Specifically, Palmyra and Farmington (later named Manchester) were among the villages within the smaller Ontario Circuit of the Ontario District, and the Smith family lived in both villages from late 1816 through 1830.[18]

As the subdivision of a district, a Methodist circuit comprised "stations" or villages for preaching. One circuit might have few stations, while another had more than forty. Each circuit was served by an itinerant preacher (Methodist "circuit rider") who traveled on horseback to visit each station within a circuit.[19] For example, in 1817 the Genesee Conference assigned Alvin Torry to a circuit dozens of miles east of Palmyra, which circuit "embraced Scipio, Cayuga, Mentz, Elbridge, Jordan, Manlius, Onondaga, Owasco, Otisco, Auburn, Skaneateles and Spafford. . . . It was a four weeks' circuit, and all we could do in the preaching line, was to give each congregation one sermon once in two weeks; and this required us to preach almost every day in the week . . .” After the weeks necessary to make one circuit of preaching visits, the circuit-riders started all over again, whether they traveled in pairs or alone.[20]

From 1773 onward, the Methodist Episcopal Church published its annual statistics of membership for each conference (such as the Genesee), for each district within that conference, and for each circuit within that district. However, the published statistics did not reach to the level of each "station" (town/village within a circuit).[21]

Previous to 1819, Palmyra was in the Genesee Conference's same-named subdivision, "the Genesee District [which] embraced the whole territory from Cayuga Lake to Lake Erie, and from Lake Ontario, on the north, into Pennsylvania . . .”[22] Backman explained that this was "about five hundred miles" east-to-west, and "about three hundred miles" north-to-south. Also, contrary to Walters' initial assumption that the June 1820 camp-meeting took place at an existing chapel, Backman pointed out that the Methodists did not build a meetinghouse in Palmyra until 1822.[23]

In his 1980 article, the minister's most significant rebuttal was to challenge as "wishful thinking" the application to Palmyra of Methodist growth in western New York as a whole. This is the "ecological fallacy" in statistics, because an individual case can be very different from the general pattern of which it is only one part. Specifically, Walters charged Backman with wrongly calculating the statistics for Ontario Circuit:

What he should have done is to subtract the July, 1820, figures from the July, 1819, figures to look for any [Methodist] increases for the spring of 1820. Had he done this[,] he would have discovered a total loss of 59 members for the Ontario District [sic], the district where Joseph Smith lived.[24]

However, to arrive at this net loss, the minister-researcher actually did the opposite of what he described and then (at best) made an error of subtraction in the direction for which he was arguing. First, he inaccurately claimed that his calculations were based on "District" membership (roughly the entire county), when he meant the smallest Methodist unit of reported affiliation, the Ontario Circuit of a few towns/villages. Membership differences at the district level were in the hundreds during those years, and bore no similarity to the result he tabulated. Second, a comparison of the July 1819 Methodist affiliation of the Ontario District's Ontario Circuit (677 total) with the circuit's July 1820 membership (671 total) reveals a net loss of only six members. Walters was able to arrive at the non-existent "loss of 59 members" in only one way: he compared the circuit's July 1821 affiliation (622 total) with the July 1820 total of 671,resulting in a net loss of 49 which he then increased by ten. Those errors in his 1980 article (directed to evangelical ministers) appeared to be intentional, since his 1969 article (directed to Mormon apologists) correctly stated in the narrative text that the Methodist decline "for the entire circuit" was "6 for 1820," which he repeated in a 1969 source-note as "a net loss of 6."[25]

In fact, his eighteen-page article in 1980 was a polemical screed that began with the emphatic statement: "there was no revival either in Palmyra or anywhere near Joseph Smith's home in the year 1820," which Walters restated sixteen times before his concluding comment that "one cannot expect to find historical support for legendary events." Among the article's denials were: "this supposed 1820 camp meeting," and "without any evidence that there was either a camp meeting or a revival," and "nor can even a spark of a revival be found within at least a 15-mile radius of his home during that year." This 1980 response made no reference to the Palmyra Register’s articles about the villages “camp-meeting” in late June 1820—which Reverend Walters had at least mentioned in his 1969 footnote.[26]

He then prepared a book-length response, which H. Michael Marquardt revised and published in 1994 after the minister's death. Despite the expansiveness of Smith's phrase "the whole district of country," they countered that statewide, region-wide, and even county-wide indications of revivalism and moderate growth cannot compensate for no documentation to support Joseph's narrative of dramatic revivalism "in the place where we lived" during 1820.[27] By contrast, the spike in conversions described by Smith can be found only in 1824-25. In effect, they also thanked LDS apologists for demonstrating that Palmyra's Methodists had no chapel in June 1820 and therefore had camp-meetings outside for congregational purposes, apparently nullifying the significance of the newspaper's observations.[28] Like-minded authors have continued to restate Walters' 1967-94 arguments in part or whole.[29]

However, there was a crucial contradiction in Walters' claim for "massive silence" about Palmyra's 1820 revival. On the one hand, he insisted that it "is completely beyond possibility" that the local "Presbytery should have been ignorant of a great awakening at Palmyra" in 1820. On the other hand, he acknowledged that this same local Presbyterian Church declared in September 1824 that there had been "no remarkable revival of religion within our bounds," even though the Methodists were publishing reports of their own revivals near Palmyra since the late spring of that same year. Rather than acknowledging these as equivalent examples of Presbyterian myopia about the competing revivals by Methodists, Walters cited the Presbyterians for making a curious denial of the 1824 Palmyra revivals he emphasized, while he polemically used their 1820 denial as alleged proof of his argument that Palmyra had no revival that year.[30] Ironically, the minister openly used unequal standards to assess the same kind of evidence from the same source in order to arrive at opposite conclusions about 1820 and 1824.

In addition, before and after Palmyra's camp-meeting of late June 1818, the village's newspaper did not refer to this three-day revival (Friday to Monday). This silence is even more glaring because its principal speaker was Robert R. Roberts, one of only three Methodist bishops in North America.[31] This Palmyra revival (which commenced in the last days of spring 1818) also followed the pattern of "massive silence" in the kinds of documents that Walters emphasized to dismiss Joseph's affirmation of an 1820 revival in the spring.

This contemporary silence about two Methodist camp-meetings that unquestionably occurred two years apart in Palmyra should have raised fundamental doubts about the assumptions and assertions by Walters, as well as about his methodology. He discouraged such assessments by maintaining his own silence about the documentation of Palmyra's 1818 revival. Truly mystifying, however, is the fact that during four decades most apologists ignored the evidence for this 1818 revival, a confirmation that Backman himself buried in a footnote.[32]

Given ample opportunities for challenging the factual errors, historical misrepresentations, statistical gaffes, logical fallacies, and withheld evidence by Reverend Walters, various authors chose other alternatives for nearly forty years. Thankfully, LDS apologists generally avoided the disreputable approach of ad hominem attack, but a rigorous academic critique does not need to be polemical. Instead, many wrote as if his articles and book did not exist, others critiqued his writings superficially, and some apologists actually deferred to him.

Nevertheless, the most significant problem with Palmyra's camp-meeting of late June 1820 is that the Prophet specifically stated that his vision of deity occurred "early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty.”[33] Therefore, citing the Palmyra Register in June-July 1820 to demonstrate pre-vision revivalism would seem to be a fallacy of irrelevant proof, and skeptics can accurately say there is no indication of a revival there in March, April, nor even in May of that year. FARMS reviewer Gary F. Novak acknowledged that "merely finding a revival does not clear up every seeming problem with Joseph's story. . .”[34]

As a historian who has analyzed original narratives and revised documents that anachronistically changed Mormon developments,[35] I have another perspective about the fact (and it is a fact) that Smith's official narrative about 1820 included circumstances which occurred during Palmyra's revivals of 1824-25. Merging (conflating) circumstances from similar events that happened years apart will certainly confuse the historical record and will perplex anyone trying to sort out basic chronology. Nonetheless, conflation of actual circumstances from separate events is not the same as fraudulent invention of events that never occurred. Conflation also is not the combination of an actual event with a fictional event. Instead, it is very common for memoirs and autobiographies to merge similar events that actually occurred, due to the narrator's memory lapses or her/his intentional streamlining of the narrative to avoid repeating similar occurrences.[36]

I think the latter was the reason that in describing his 1820 vision, Joseph Smith's 1838 official history conflated circumstances of Palmyra's solitary Methodist revival in late spring of 1820 with the circumstances of Palmyra's extensive revivals of 1824 that resulted in his mother, his sister Sophronia, his brothers Hyrum and Samuel joining the Presbyterian Church. Joseph merged the two revivals, combined two different kinds of family conversions, and dated this multi-year conflation as 1820. While this is partially inaccurate, I see it as streamlining his narrative, not as an example of fraudulent invention.

This is not "privileging" Joseph's narrative. It is, in fact, acknowledging a general pattern in all autobiographies. A repeatedly published handbook for historical research explained that "not all discrepancies signalize a myth or a fraud. In autobiographies, for instance, one must be prepared to find errors in dates and names without necessarily inferring that the account is false. . . . It would be absurd to disbelieve the main fact [simply] because the date is two years off."[37]

Significantly, New York's Methodist Magazine also conflated its reports of multiple revivals into a single revival. For example, a March 1818 article about "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in Maine described camp-meetings and chapel revivals in eight towns during four months, and an article that same year about "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in Suffolk County, New York, referred to eight towns during a ten-month period.[38] An 1821 "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR" likewise described eight towns during ten months.[39] An 1824 article about "REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF RELIGION" referred to ten towns in six months.[40]

This conflation into one revival also appeared in reports about multiple revivals in a single city of New York State. "A SHORT SKETCH OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF TROY" started with February 1816 and concluded: "Upwards of a year has elapsed, since this good work commenced."[41] Another "SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF SCHNECTADY" referred to separate outbursts of religious renewal from December 1818 through April 1819.[42] Beyond the Empire State, an article on "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD IN PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA" also referred to camp-meetings from August 1819 to "last August" (1820).[43]

Even more relevant to the conflation in Joseph's 1838 history, New York’s Methodist Magazine—as indicated by the previous example—conflated into a single event various instances of revivalism that actually occurred during a year or more. The magazine's report of one "REVIVAL OF RELIGION" in four towns skipped from camp-meetings in July 1818 to camp-meetings in June of 1819.[44] Another article referred to "the memorable revival of religion in Chillicothe in 1818-19."[45] In an 1819 article, its minister-author concluded: "It is now fourteen months since this revival began, during which time it has spread an extent of more than twelve miles.”[46] An 1825 article about the "Revival in Bridgetown, N.J." referred to intermittent revivals "in this place during the two last conference years."[47] Even in the official magazine of New York's Methodists, it was standard practice to conflate time and space by regarding multiple camp-meetings and revivals as a single "revival."

This is consistent with Joseph's using the phrase "an unusual excitement on the subject of religion"[48] for local revivals that were actually separated by an interval of three or four years.[49] Then, as now, the word "excitement" has no plural, and can refer to multiple events.[50]

Whether the Mormon prophet, or a Methodist minister, or magazine editors—early nineteenth-century narrators saw no problem of accuracy when they conflated multiple revivals into one revival while giving retrospective narratives. It reflects the "presentist bias"[51]—used polemically in this case—to hold the unschooled Mormon prophet to a standard of literal accuracy not manifested by the well-educated editors of New York's Methodist Magazine in their reports about the religious “excitement” of revivalism.

Thus, when LDS apologists insist on the technical accuracy of every detail in Smith's official account of the First Vision,[52] they misread nineteenth-century narrative style and unnecessarily adopt the assumptions of disbelievers. As the most prominent example, LDS historian Richard Lyman Bushman wrote in 1994:

Can we be absolutely sure that we know Joseph must have been referring to the 1824 revival when he wrote his story? Marquardt speculates that he conflated events: "Perhaps Smith in retrospect blended in his mind events from 1820 with a revival occurring four years later" (p. 32). Possibly, but that conclusion, based on the confidence that we know better than the person who was there, seems premature to me.[53]

Resisting the reasonable explanation that Smith's official account conflated two different responses within his family to different revivals happening four years apart—an explanation which preserves the emphasis on 1820—Bushman paradoxically retreated from the traditional affirmation of 1820.[54]

He omitted from his 2005 bicentennial biography any reference to a revival that year. His "JOSEPH SMITH CHRONOLOGY" mentioned no revival, and his narrative gave specific dates only for Palmyra's "revival of 1816 and 1817." The text and source-notes also made no reference to Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1818, although Bushman's 1969 response to Walters had cited the manuscript which mentioned it and even though Bushman's 1970 response to another skeptic had paraphrased the manuscript's description of this 1818 revival.[55]

One of the source-notes in Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling even seemed to defer to the minister-researcher's assessment "that revivals in 1824 were the background for Joseph's first vision." The book's index reemphasized this with its entry for "Palmyra, New York . . . revivals in," whose only page referred to the revival "the year after Alvin's death" (in November 1823).[56] In view of Bushman's complaint in 1994 about the Walters-Marquardt "attempt to dynamite a segment of the traditional story" by ignoring the 1820 Palmyra Register’s references to a local camp-meeting,[57] it seems extraordinary that eleven years later his 740-page biography made no mention of the newspaper article he once found so important.

Aside from citing Walters, Bushman's only implied explanation for this lapse in 2005 was the observation: "When the census taker came to the Smiths in 1820, Joseph Jr. was not listed, probably because he was living elsewhere earning [money] during the growing season."[58] Like Donald L. Enders,[59] Bushman apparently assumed that the census enumeration commenced in June 1820 (the starting month for subsequent censuses). Since he concluded that young Joseph was absent from the Palmyra area during its camp-meeting, Bushman declined to mention the Palmyra Register’s articles. However, census-takers did not begin their work until 7 August 1820.[60] Joseph's absence from the census of his family had absolutely nothing to do with his whereabouts during Palmyra's religious revival two months earlier.

Nevertheless, Bushman is only one example of the withering effect that Reverend Wesley P. Walters has had on the previously confident declarations by Mormon apologists about dating the First Vision. In a 1994 interview (not published until 2005), Milton V. Backman Jr. declined to name "a Presbyterian minister" whose "pamphlet" had prodded him to begin researching New York State's early revivalism, but the BYU religion professor commented: "During this research, I found no evidence of a great revival in Palmyra in 1819 or 1820." In a remarkable turnabout, Backman said nothing about Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting that had been a sort of rallying cry by LDS authors for the previous decades. Instead, he claimed that Joseph Smith had been wrongfully interpreted as saying there was an 1820 revival in the immediate vicinity of Palmyra-Manchester, whereas "I found that probably there were more revivals and more people joining churches in upstate and western New York in 1819 and 1820 than in any other region of the United States." Thus, the crucial revivalism was strictly regional and allegedly not in Joseph’s neighborhood—a view that seemed to be a full-scale retreat from Backman's earlier emphasis on the Palmyra Register’s articles of 1820.[61]

Also for the bicentennial of the Mormon founder's birth, after a footnote citation to the findings and objections by the minister-researcher, James B. Allen and John W. Welch ended their 2005 essay (published by Church-owned Deseret Book Company) with these words: "In sum, this examination leads to the conclusion that the First Vision, in all probability, occurred in spring of 1820, when Joseph was fourteen years old. The preponderance of the evidence supports that conclusion."[62] While I applaud such willingness to be tentative when necessary, the evidence does not require it. In face, it demands a forthright emphasis on revivalism in Palmyra during the late spring of 1820.

For instance, there is a reasonable explanation for the lack of local reference to religious revivals in or near Palmyra, and for why the village newspaper ignored the "camp-meeting" of June 1820 until someone died. Aside from paid advertisements, it was unusual for small newspapers of this era to report local events.

In his book about New York State's village newspapers, Milton W. Hamilton explained more than forty years ago that "the editor's definition of his function included neither the purveying of neighborhood gossip nor the describing of outstanding happenings in the immediate vicinity." Why? Because small-town editors assumed that local residents would not "pay for information which they could secure by word of mouth from their neighbors." According to Hamilton, not until 1827 did a village newspaper start to regularly include local events, an editorial practice that took years to become common in rural newspapers of New York State. This was Walter A. Norton's 1991 response to the assertion of "massive silence" by Reverend Walters, a critique that skeptical authors have not acknowledged.[63] Likewise, as indication of his own silent abandonment of an 1820 revival, the seemingly exhaustive bibliography of Bushman’s 2005 Rough Stone Rolling cited neither Hamilton nor Norton,[64] even thought Bushman had criticized Walters and Marquardt in 1994 for ignoring the evidence and rebuttal.[65]

Apparently unaware of Reverend Seager's published account of a June 1818 revival in Palmyra that the village newspaper also ignored, Norton omitted this data that would have significantly strengthened his argument. However, as Norton did emphasize, the Palmyra Register was not merely reporting a local death in June 1820. Despite a disingenuous disclaimer, its editor used the dead man's drunkenness as reason to make snide comments about the Methodists who "professedly" gathered for worship. A strident advocate of alcohol "temperance," editor Timothy C. Strong was echoing a decades-long controversy.[66]

Unlike other evangelical Protestants, Methodists of this era did not require abstinence from alcoholic drinks, nor did most of the denomination's leaders even suggest it. English founder John Wesley "did not hesitate to recommend ale or beer" and approved drinking "a little bit" of wine every day, but he "drew a rather sharp line between a fermented liquor such as beer, ale, or wine and a distilled liquor such as rum or brandy." The American church's general conference meetings did not include alcohol abstinence among their numerous regulations governing personal conduct, and also followed Wesley's emphasis by forbidding Methodists only from engaging in the sale and manufacture of distilled liquors from 1780 to 1812. Until 1848, their official Disciplines did not even mention beer or wine with regard to the rank-and-file’s conduct.[67]

This official policy (or lack of it) became obvious during Methodist revivals. In a defense of camp-meetings (published in Brooklyn, New York), one minister acknowledged in 1806 that "some of the wild beasts of the people had half intoxicated themselves with ardent spirits.”[68] Two years later, a critical participant wrote that he "saw many" Methodist revivalists “drinking wine.”[69] In 1810 an observer of a camp-meeting at Bern, New York, reported that the Methodists even set up "grog-tents" to sell alcohol.[70] The official explanation for alcohol-selling "shops" at camp-meetings was to blame "those in the community who, [are] actuated from monetary motives. . ."[71] As described later in this essay, the isolated setting, physical dimensions, and duration of camp-meetings required the organizers to provide beverages for thirsty revivalists, even if a stream, river, pond, or lake was nearby. Therefore, because bottled beverages of some kind were a necessary supplement to the natural sources of water, Methodist camp-meeting attenders often brought or purchased bottles of beer and wine, which did not have the same stigma as distilled liquors and whiskeys (often called "spirituous drinks," or "spirits," or "ardent spirits").[72] Such behavior resulted in the Palmyra Register's sarcastic comments about the local camp-meeting.

This leads to the very specific understanding about the kind of religious gathering mentioned in Palmyra's newspaper of June 1820—a perspective that Walters never acknowledged and that Mormon apologists have insufficiently emphasized. In 1800 Methodists invented both the practice and term of "camp-meeting."[73] From its first issue in January 1818 through December 1828, New York's Methodist Magazine never used the term for the regular Sunday service of a congregation, whether it had a chapel or not. After attending such meetings for decades, a Methodist minister wrote emphatically: "Camp Meetings were never held to supply the lack of church buildings."[74]

Although it was customary to refer to a camp-meeting "in" or "at" a community, the gathering's structured space actually required a forest within walking distance from the outskirts of the community. Thus, the 1820 Palmyra newspaper referred to the "camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity."

Even when convening near a chapel, as in the 1819 "camp-meeting at Fountain-head meeting-house," Methodists shunned the confining structure of a building: "Here we had a large encampment" of revivalists in tents, and the writer observed that by the end of this camp-meeting, "the slain of the Lord [i.e., ecstatic converts] were lying in almost every direction—in the altar, in the woods, and in the tents. . ."[75] Even this camp-meeting's "altar" was not inside a chapel, as a non-Methodist observed at one of New York's forest-revivals in 1810: "Before the [preaching stand or] stage was a yard about thirty feet square, (which they called the altar). Their tents were made chiefly of canvas. . ."[76]

Correspondingly, in an 1819 "revival of religion" in Westchester County, New York, although there were too few Methodists to have a "house for divine worship" in the community, they could sleep in their own houses during the locals-only revival which, therefore, was called "the assembly," not "camp-meeting."[77] Repeatedly, when Methodists held a "revival of religion" in a chapel, they called it an assembly, or a "prayer meeting," or a "class meeting," but never “camp-meeting.”[78] Ignoring the denomination’s procedures, Reverend Walters and like-minded authors have also contradicted all historical documentation by even implying that Palmyra's 1820 "camp-meeting" was a regular Sunday meeting of local Methodists—with or without a chapel.

A camp-meetingwas a revival, but Methodists rarely used the cumbersome phrase "camp-meeting revival."[79] In fact, because local Methodists had no need to sleep in tents overnight in order to worship, the Palmyra Register's articles were actually emphasizing the noncongregational nature of this June 1820 gathering and its non-local attenders by referring to its "Camp-ground." In view of Palmyra's newspaper articles, it is significant that the Prophet's official reminiscence said this "unusual excitement . . . commenced with the Methodists."[80]

Moreover, there was no relevance in the objection by Walters that "the Methodists did not acquire their property in Palmyra `on the Vienna Road' until July 7th, 1821."[81] The Methodist Church rarely (if ever) owned the forested land on which its members held camp-meetings, because the only necessity was to obtain permission from the landowner for this temporary use.[82]

But if the crucial revival "in the place where we lived" actually commenced in late spring of 1820, then Joseph Smith's First Vision occurred no earlier. Why did he specify "early in the spring"[83] while giving his most detailed account in 1838? First, "early" or "late spring" might have seemed a distinction without a difference as he related events that happened eighteen years earlier in his tumultuous life.

Second, and more to the point, "early spring" of 1820 was too cold for a New York farmboy to visit "the woods" in "the morning of a beautiful clear day" for the motionless activity of solitary prayer.[84] During that year, an official of the U.S. Weather Service recorded temperatures for western New York at 7 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM daily. After the technical arrival of spring, temperatures were under 50 degrees Fahrenheit even at two in the afternoon for all but two days during the rest of March 1820. Those relatively warmer days of 25-26 March reached no higher than 64 degrees at 2 PM, after the mornings started at 54 degrees and 56 degrees, respectively. It was snowing on 31 March, 5 April, and 7 April 1820. The first two weeks of April 1820 were chilly, reaching no higher than 58 degrees at two in the afternoon on the fifteenth, which began with a temperature of forty degrees at 7 AM. The last two weeks of April were not much better, and when the temperatures finally reached 72 degrees at 2 PM on April 21st, the morning commenced at 50 degrees. The next day was a bit warmer, but then the month cooled again until morning temperatures were in the low-fifties. The last two days of April 1820 reached only 62 degrees by 2 PM.[85] Although such weather conditions can occur on "the morning of a beautiful clear day," those frigid temperatures would not encourage any teenager to think of kneeling in a shaded grove of trees, which would be even colder than temperatures recorded by the weather service in the open air.

Published in Canandaigua, seventeen miles from Palmyra,[86] The Farmer's Diary had even predicted: "Clear and pretty cold" weather for 6-8 April 1820, with "some showers of hail, rain, or snow" for 14-18 April.[87] In one of its rare observations about local events, the Palmyra Register commented on 24 May 1820 that “we have been visited with two or three severe frosts, followed by a storm of snow, which happened on the morning of the 17th inst. [instant, i.e., of this month] . . . It is worthy of remark, that on the morning of the 17th May 1819, we had a similar snow storm, preceded and followed by very similar weather."[88] Therefore, because most people connect spring with warmer temperatures (above 70 degrees Fahrenheit), it is understandable that (eighteen-years-after-the-fact) Joseph forgot the late-arrival of spring weather to western New York in 1820.

He remembered it was warm enough to kneel in the wooded grove for an hour or so. This seemed like "early spring" in retrospect, especially because he began dictating this official narrative to clerk George W. Robinson on 27 April 1838 in Missouri, a southerly latitude where early spring was much warmer. This memory conflation (which changed western New York's chilly "early spring" of 1820 into comfortably warm morning weather) continued in the late spring of 1839 (on 10 June), when clerk James Mulholland started rewriting Robinson's 1838 version (now missing) into the final form known officially as "Joseph Smith's History."[89] Both believers and non-believers should accept the assessment of non-Mormon historian Lawrence Foster about Smith's first theophany: "whether or not an error was made in dating precisely when a vision occurred has no necessary connection with whether it [actually] occurred . . ."[90]

The unpredictability of warm days followed by chilly temperatures, rain, and even snow from March through May was why New York State's Methodists waited until late spring to schedule the first of each year's camp-meetings. They wanted a reasonable likelihood of several days with "agreeable weather,"[91] by which camp-meeting organizers meant "no rain,"[92] and "no breezes to disturb the candles, and no cold winds nor chilling damps, to render it very uncomfortable," even at night.[93]

In every report by New York's Methodist Magazine about revivals from 1818 through 1828, where the report included the word "camp-meeting," not a single one in the Northern States began earlier than June and none occurred after September.[94] The earliest reported date was 4 June 1819 when the "camp-meeting for Erie circuit" commenced.[95] In 1825 the earliest was June 7th,[96] while Palmyra hosted an 1826 camp-meeting that also started on 7 June.[97] Concerning the Susquehanna River border of western New York State, one minister wrote in 1825 that "our last camp-meeting in the district commenced on the 15th of September,"[98] and another New York camp-meeting began as late as September 26th.[99] Nevertheless, Methodist revivalists wanted to avoid the unfortunate experience of a camp-meeting in western New York's Genesee Conference that pushed the weather boundary too far into September 1817: "the season being cold and rainy, rendered our situation in the tented wilderness very unpleasant."[100] Therefore, for the best outcome, a Camp Meeting Manual later specified that these outdoor gatherings in "the latitude of the Middle States" should start no later than "the 15th of September."[101]

Small revivals did occur in the Northern States from October through May each year, but rain, cold weather, and snow limited such gatherings to homes, chapels, barns, or school houses.[102] Compared with forest camp-meetings attended by hundreds or thousands, the October-May revivals were family-sized. Because there were too few Methodists in Palmyra to have a meetinghouse until 1822, it was impossible for the village (in Ontario County at that time) to host a revival of significant size except during the camp-meeting "season," as Methodists called the revival period from June through September.[103]

A revival that "commenced with the Methodists ... in the place where we lived"[104] was not available to teenage Joseph until the late spring of any year. The "camp-meeting" mentioned by the Palmyra Register in June 1820 was the first local revival he could have attended that year.

In fact, Methodist revivals had uniform characteristics, as reported in numerous publications before 1820. By referring to early descriptions of camp-meetings, we can understand what fourteen-year-old Joseph saw and experienced at Palmyra that June. Even those who disbelieve his account of an 1820 revival have agreed that Methodism was the only denomination for which he showed any interest and participation.[105]

Methodist camp-meetings did not happen spontaneously, but were planned far in advance to occur in a physical space created according to instructions by the denomination's ministers and in printed guidelines. As the Camp Meeting Manual observed, “it was soon reduced to a regular system.”[106]

By 1817, multiple editions of a New York hymn book advised: "A Camp-meeting ought not to consist of less than fifty or one hundred tents or places for lodging" in the woods. Its Methodist author John C. Totten further specified: "It should continue, if the weather admitted, not less than three days and nights. It is not desirable to have more than two or three thousand people present, unless the majority were [converted] Christians."[107] The several-day duration was standard, and his caution was necessary because Methodist camp-meetings were sometimes attended by "two or three hundred spectators" who were not believers.[108]

Out-of-town worshippers dominated camp-meetings because the most devout followed revivalist preachers from place to place, while word-of-mouth notified an entire region of what would otherwise be a local event. From June to September, people journeyed "from fifty and sixty miles around" to attend Methodist camp-meetings.[109] While most traveled such distances in carriages, wagons, or on horseback, "a Sister Hendricks, who is the mother of seventeen children, fifteen of whom are living, walked seventeen miles to this [1819 Methodist] meeting."[110] Fifteen-year-old David Marks, a New York Baptist also living in Ontario County, walked "about 25 miles" in all kinds of weather to revivals in the early months of 1821.[111]

During the Methodist camp-meeting season, there was need for outsiders to "camp" in tents, while local residents could sleep at home--unless they wanted to participate in late night revivalism that "was carried on until morning without interruption."[112] For example, "several thousands of precious souls" attended a four-day camp-meeting at Rhinebeck, New York. There "the line of tents encircled the [preaching] ground, in most parts three deep, in number eighty five, besides covered waggons [sic]. On Thursday a person undertook to count the waggons [sic] and other carriages, and after reckoning several hundred, was obliged to desist, as he could not go through them all."[113]

Another Methodist author explained: "Sometimes there were many circles of tents divided by narrow streets and alleys, allowing room for the vast multitudes to pass, and space for small fires for the purpose of cooking." In keeping with Methodist regimentation, each camp-meeting's tent-lined "several streets, [were] numbered and labelled, so that they may be distinguished one from another" within the surrounding forest.[114]

Having a three-day duration as their minimum, camp-meetings most commonly lasted four days, according to New York's Methodist Magazine. At Long Island in August 1818, "there were from six to eight thousand people on the encampment" from Tuesday morning to Saturday morning.[115] "Between five and six thousand" attended a "Camp-meeting, held at Barre, Vermont" from Thursday to Monday in 1820.[116] "Not less than five thousand people" attended another 1820 "Camp-meeting, which commenced on Friday, July 14th," and ended on Tuesday, followed by "an extra Camp-Meeting" lasting from Friday to Tuesday in August.[117] One of the "highly favoured Camp-Meetings" in the Hudson River Valley began on 2 September 1822 "and closed on the 6th of September."[118] In 1825 a camp-meeting in the Champlain District lasted from Thursday, "the first to the morning of the fifth of September," Monday.[119]

Five-day revivals were the next most common. An 1821 camp-meeting in Kentucky started "on Friday night," and "we continued the meeting until Wednesday."[120] Another "camp-meeting” in New Hampshire "commenced on Thursday, and closed on Tuesday."[121] An 1823 camp-meeting in Maryland began on Friday, ending on Wednesday.[122] "From four to five thousand persons" attended a New Jersey camp-meeting that "commenced on [Thursday] the 5th and continued till [Tuesday] the 10th of August, 1824."[123] One in August 1825 started on Thursday and ended on Tuesday,[124] and two camp-meetings in 1826 began on Friday and ended on Wednesday.[125]

A six-day camp-meeting on Long Island was attended by "not less than 10,000" New Yorkers in August 1821.[126] An 1830s history of American Methodism (by the editor of New York Methodist Magazine in 1820-28) noted that “the meeting generally continues for four or five days, and in some instances eight or nine days.”[127]

Even that was not the maximum duration in the 1820s. One minister wrote in 1822: "This is the tenth day of the revival," and an 1825 camp-meeting in the Genesee Conference "continued ten days."[128]

Although Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting might have been as short as three days or as long as ten days, its mention in the newspaper's weekly issue on Wednesday, 28 June 1820 gave clues for the revival's commencement. Camp-meetings started on various days of the week, but Methodists showed a clear preference for beginning them on Thursday or Friday.[129] This was so widely known that a Methodist minister in Illinois (whose first camp-meeting was in 1818) wrote: "The meetings generally commenced on Friday."[130] For example, Palmyra's three-day camp-meeting of June 1818 began on Friday.[131]

This Methodist preference indicates a likely start-date of June 22nd or 23rd (early summer) for a short revival before the newspaper story about Couser's death, with an equally likely start-date of June 15th or 16th (Thursday-Friday) for a long camp-meeting commencing in late spring of 1820. While not precise, these beginning parameters are possible because his death was "a fixed point: [where] no doubt is possible" for verifying chronology.[132]

Neither the weekly newspaper nor another "fixed point" indicated when this camp-meeting revival adjourned, but almost none did so on Sundays, according to New York's Methodist Magazine. If a camp-meeting included Sunday, it typically ended on one of the following weekdays—in the morning or around noon. Palmyra's Methodist revival was definitely not concluding when Couser left it on the Sunday "evening preceding" his death.[133] Even with the extended daylight of summer, camp-meetings never ended during evening hours, because single females and out-of-town revivalists with children needed at least half a day of sunlight to travel safely back to their homes.[134]

Six years after this revival in late June 1820, "not less than ten thousand people" attended a camp-meeting "near the village" of Palmyra.[135] Such multitudes dwarfed the total population of host-villages such as Palmyra which had 3724 residents in 1820.[136] This was just one reason why camp-meetings were sensational events wherever they occurred.

Minister-researcher Walters repeatedly distorted the historical evidence by implying that a camp-meeting was an inferior kind of revival, not even worth mentioning as "a spark of a revival" in his discussion of Joseph's narrative about "religious excitement" in 1820. For American Methodists from 1800 to 1830, a camp-meeting was the most significant kind of religious revival.

As previously indicated, Zechariah Paddock was the traveling companion of Reverend Seager after Palmyra's camp-meeting in June 1818. Paddock "was licensed to preach in Canandaigua, N.Y., in the spring of 1817," and later wrote concerning the year "1817-18," that "the woods seemed to the Methodists to be God's special earthly temple. Their greatest revival triumphs were achieved in the grove."[137] Likewise, in describing "the great revivals of religion," the 1830s History of the Methodist Episcopal Church (be the editor of Methodist Magazine in 1820-28) stated that “the camp meetings were among the most efficient means of awakening the attention of the people to the things of eternity.”[138]

In keeping with their general silence about local matters during this time-period, weekly newspapers did not need to inform a town's residents about what had happened days earlier at such gatherings. Aside from the enormous increase of visitors, another reason for not reporting the obvious to village residents was "the sound of the singing, which was heard several miles" from a Methodist camp-meeting.[139] In addition, both favorable and unfavorable observers reported that the blare of trumpets heralded the commencement of Methodist preaching at 8 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and even at midnight during these camp-meetings.[140] After the midnight sermon, it was common that "singing, prayers and exhortation were continued more or less until three o'clock next morning . . ."[141]

In the stillness of June nights, sounds from the 1820 camp-meeting's trumpets and singers easily reached the Smith farm, creating an irresistible magnet for curious teenagers who were not already at the "Camp-ground." Fourteen-year-old Joseph was known around Palmyra as "inquisitive."[142]

Aside from unusual sounds, in the evenings a Methodist camp-meeting created an enchanting sight, "illuminated in every part by lamps, and formed the appearance of a populous city." In these forest-revivals, "at night the whole scene was awfully sublime. The ranges of tents, the fires reflecting light amidst the branches of the forest-trees, the candles and lamps illuminating the ground, hundreds moving to and fro with torches like Gideon's army . . ."[143]

But three-to-ten days of religious revivalism were only part of a camp-meeting's actual duration for a community. First, it took days to clear the "Camp-ground."

It required "two whole days" to clear the campsite attended by "several thousands" at Rhinebeck, New York. "Some of the brethren came more than ten and twelve miles to assist in the preliminary labours. When the underwood and lower branches of the trees were cleared away, the [preaching] stand for the preachers [was] erected and covered with an inclined canopy of boards . . ."[144] This took days because camp-meetings required a huge space.

For example, an 1825 Connecticut "encampment stretched about three quarters of a mile through a beautiful grove of oaks and cedars." Equal to thirteen American football fields placed end-to-end, this was the space necessary for the 1825 camp-meeting's "congregation of ten thousand" as they camped in tents.[145] Because that was two or three times more people than at Rhinebeck, it would correspondingly require more time to clear the "Camp-ground" of trees and foliage—probably four to six days. This was the only description of a camp-meeting's physical dimensions in New York’s Methodist Magazine, but its attendance was the same as the following year’s camp-meeting in Palmyra.[146]

Whether at Rhinebeck or at Palmyra, New York Methodists chose heavily wooded areas in order to control access. For instance, near Albany, "the place, that they had chosen for their rendezvous, was situated in a forest, at the foot of a large hill, with a creek on the opposite side, and about one hundred rods distant [i.e., 550 yards, five football fields] from any clearing or road; so that it could not be easily approached with a carriage or on horseback, except in one narrow path."[147]

In describing a camp-meeting at Petersburgh, New York, Reverend Francis Ward specified why he and fellow Methodists preferred the painstaking labor of carving out a worship space within a forest of dense undergrowth: "The place was chosen in a close forest, and was well suited for the purpose. Surrounded on all sides by a thicket, which was rendered almost impassable by the brush and underwood piled outside the lines, and only one narrow road opening into it, we found ourselves well secured against any annoyance from the wicked: a guard having been placed at the entrance to keep out those who came intoxicated or riotously . . .”[148]

Palmyra had not hosted a revival since June 1818.[149] Even if the organizers chose the same location for this 1820 camp-meeting, they had to use axes, saws, and hatchets against two years of new trees, branches, bushes, and brambles. Reverend Ward noted that this was noisy work: "The groves echoed with the strokes of the axe . . ."[150]

Furthermore, clearing away trees and undergrowth was only the first phase in the physical preparations for a camp-meeting. As indicated, the second phase required those with skills in carpentry to build the preaching stand and cover it "with an inclined canopy of boards."[151] The third phase, which the Camp Meeting Manual regarded as “especially” important, was “the grading” (or leveling) of the ground on which tents would be pitched and of the cleared space of ground (“the altar”) in front of the preacher’s platform.[152] This flat, cleared area for the standing listeners was at least 25-30 feet square, and sometimes “two or three acres, nearly square.”[153]

There was yet a fourth phase in the physical preparations for a camp-meeting. While some families brought small tents of their own, the organizers also provided huge tents, "many of which would hold several hundred persons" each.[154] These Methodist "society tents" were of substantial construction, as described for an 1819 camp-meeting: "The place was in a beautiful grove—the tents were generally well built of plank, with good floors, so as to be quite comfortable."[155] This required more days of work by volunteer carpenters after they finished the preaching stand, plus the time needed in the surrounding woods for "the cutting of poles for [these] tents."[156] Furthermore, it required time for laborers to erect these heavy poles to secure the massive tents against collapse from the multitudes jostling in and out of them almost constantly for days. In the Champlain District, "one week preceding the time appointed for the commencement of this [camp-]meeting, a number of tents was erected; and two or three days before the meeting began, there were many engaged in rearing up [more] tents . . ."[157]

Whether Palmyra had a short camp-meeting (with opening prayer and sermon on Thursday or Friday, 22-23 June) or a long camp-meeting (opening on June 15th or 16th), the four phases of its physical preparations were expected to take a total of "some weeks."[158] In other words, these "preliminary labours" began at the Palmyra campsite as early as the first week of June 1820. Even that was no surprise to Palmyrans because, as the Camp Meeting Manual later specified, the local clergy or a Methodist circuit-rider was supposed to give the town’s residents advance “notice of several months” for the event.[159]

The village newspaper maintained its general policy of avoiding local news (except paid advertisements), but Palmyra's anticipation of this camp-meeting led to the front-page story on Wednesday, 7 June 1820 about "Great Revivals in Religion." This article described "the religious excitement which has for some months prevailed" in Schnectady and five other communities of New York State, resulting in "not less than twelve hundred” converts. Next to it another article, a letter dated 1 May 1820, stated that "the glorious work of divine Grace" in Providence, Rhode Island had resulted in "not less than FIVE HUNDRED" converts locally and that "the work has spread into" ten other towns.[160]

With a newspaper editor as shrewd as bookseller Timothy C. Strong, there is every reason to believe that (for maximum sales of this issue of Palmyra Register) he timed these front-page articles to appear during the week the camp-meeting’s noisy preliminaries started. For Palmyrans in early June 1820, the obvious question was: “What will be the results of our revival?” Although not “early spring,” the first week of June was still well within the spring of 1820.

Two years earlier, Enoch Mudge's handbook had summarized the regimentation that Methodists imposed on these gatherings: "the setting [of] the watch [i.e., sentries]—the duty of the watch—their call to the people in the morning." In addition, these sentries were "appointed to superintend the encampment at night, to keep order, to see that no stragglers are on the ground, and to detect any disorderly conduct."[161] Thus, an 1819 booklet (originally published in New York) stated: "A Methodist camp-meeting has the appearance of a military expedition. The people generally take with them their luggage, [food] stores and provisions, and encamp in a forest."[162]

In reporting on a subsequent camp-meeting at Palmyra, the Methodist Magazine described its location: "a most beautiful and picturesque grove, near the village . . ."[163] As already stated, the camp-meeting in such a "grove" sometimes extended "three quarters of a mile" (thirteen football fields in length). Marquardt and Walters acknowledged that the later camp-meeting was "undoubtedly" at the same "site which also received mention in the Palmyra paper during the last week of June 1820 . . ."[164]

Nevertheless, Walters ignored the significance of the Palmyra newspaper's report and also contradicted all the descriptions of revivals he claimed to have read in New York's Methodist Magazine when the minister-researcher wrote: “Joseph’s account of the revival does not speak of it in terms that are compatible with it having been a camp meeting. It is clearly a local meeting where one could drop in on the meetings ‘as occasion would permit.’”[165]

As previously indicated, it was only after "some weeks" of physical preparations that the Methodist organizers regarded Palmyra's "Camp-ground" as ready for the arrival of out-of-town revivalists in June 1820. Even at the smallest reported camp-meeting, "the number of Methodists [was] probably, about four hundred,"[166] but there was no way to know in advance whether attendance would be small.

The organizers had to prepare Palmyra's "Camp-ground" for an attendance of thousands, or they invited chaos. That was a potentially dangerous outcome that Methodist regimentation had avoided for two previous decades of forest-revivals. For example, prior to commencing a Delaware camp-meeting, "seats were prepared for about two thousand. Meeting opened at three [PM]—a small congregation, and a small sermon." Yet within three days, the camp-meeting's attendance was "about three thousand."[167]

The objection of Reverend Walters and others[168] about the small increase of membership in Palmyra's churches during 1820 is based on the inaccurate assumption that a several-day revival always resulted in large numbers of local converts. To the contrary, at Canaan, New York: "In the year 1808 a revival broke out, and for a short time went on gloriously; fifteen or twenty souls were delivered from the bondage of sin," and then Canaan's Methodist minister wrote enthusiastically about an 1815 revival: "In this meeting several found redemption . . ."[169] Likewise, one Methodist minister said it was "most consoling" when "about a dozen sinners were converted" out of the six hundred persons who attended a camp-meeting in September 1822.[170] It was common for Methodist ministers to regard twenty total converts as cause for celebrating the success of camp-meetings with large attendance, and Palmyra's 1818 camp-meeting resulted in "about twenty" baptized converts.[171] Rather than always producing a spike in local church affiliation, in the 1820s a Methodist revival sometimes resulted in a few conversions that "not so much resembled a sudden and violent tempest, as the soft and fertilizing shower . . .”[172]

Nonetheless, there was a very significant (and heretofore overlooked) pattern in the statistics of Methodist affiliation as reported from 1 July 1819 to 20 July 1820. It is true that Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) declined from 677 Methodists to 671 during this period, a net loss of six members. However, this decline of less than one percent was dramatically lower than the declines reported in July 1820 for every other circuit in Ontario District, as compared with each circuit’s membership a year earlier. From the report of July 1819 to that of July 1820, Crooked Lake Circuit had a 42.9 percent decline in Methodist affiliation, Lyons Circuit had a 44.4 percent decline, Canandaigua Circuit had a 56.0 percent decline, and Seneca Circuit had a 56.6 percent decline in Methodist membership.[173] In other words, shortly after spring 1820, the Methodist retention rate in the immediate vicinity of Palmyra was 40-50 times greater than in the surrounding region.

What can explain the radically different statistics in Ontario Circuit? The obvious answer is that there were enough local converts to Methodism at Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820 to compensate for the rest of the circuit's decline in membership as reported in late July. In this case, the ecological fallacy of statistics has been to regard Ontario Circuit's very small decline as reflecting a decline in Palmyra's religious affiliation. To the contrary, as only one of the circuit's several preaching stations, Palmyra's significant conversions at its 1820 revival were what raised Ontario Circuit so far above the plummeting statistics of Methodist membership in the adjacent circuits. Rather than being some insignificant event, Palmyra’s 1820 camp-meeting was a crucial factor in local Methodism and in at least one person’s life who attended it.

Orsamus Turner, a nineteen-year-old apprentice in the office of the Palmyra Register, helped set the type for the articles of June 1820 about “Great Revivals” and about the local revival. He later described Joseph Smith Jr. "catching a spark of Methodism in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road . . ."[174] Even in his most polemical publication, Reverend Walters admitted that Turner "left Palmyra about 1822," two years before the extensive revivalism the minister-researcher emphasized.[175]

From contemporary accounts of such Methodist revivals, this was what teenage Joseph experienced at the camp-meeting in June 1820:

. . . the meeting was conducted agreeably to the arrangements determined at its beginning. Family prayer in the morning at the tents; at eight o'clock, general prayer meeting at the stand; preaching; followed by exhortation, as occasion would require, at ten, two [in the afternoon], and six o'clock [in the evening], and the congregation called together by sound of trumpet. The intervals were occupied with occasional exercises [of faith and prayer] by groups of people in different parts of the [camp] ground. In the midst of those groups, one might observe some struck down to the earth by the power of God, and others agonizing for them in mighty prayer. As souls were brought out into the liberty of either justifying [grace] or sanctifying grace, and as distress changed to spiritual joy, prayer would also turn to praise, and the songs and shouts of salvation [would] break from the glad hearts and voices of scores and hundreds. . . .

. . . Now shrieks and groans of terror and distress issue from hearts pierced with the arrows of the Lord, and from hearts rejoicing in the Holy Ghost [issue] bursts of ["]glory, glory, glory,[" and those words] reverberate through the echoing woods. But these praying companies were generally broken up when the voice of the trumpet proclaimed the publication of the gospel [by preachers] . . .

On the successive days[,] we had vast congregations, who appeared possessed of invincible patience and fortitude, while with fixed attention they listened to the sermons . . .

On Friday and Saturday nights, at a very late hour, the people seemed exhausted with fatigue and retired to rest; but on Sunday night the work broke out with fresh power, and was carried on until morning without interruption. The camp exhibited a truly grand and magnificent scene. Very large fires were lighted up and blazed high all round inside the circle of tents—lighted candles were fastened to the trees, [so that] the reflection of the light on the tents and [on] the faces of the people, the variegated green of the spreading foliage above, and the deep sylvan shades which arrested the eye in every direction, were sufficient to impress the mind of the beholder with solemnity.—At twelve o'clock [midnight on Sunday,] the well known sound [of the trumpet] spread through the grove, and invited the people to attend the word of God—a profound silence ensued—the [preaching] stand was illuminated; and soon the midnight cry of judgment was anticipated: the Lord, who preached from heaven through the meeting, sent his word into the hearts of saints and sinners; the prayer meetings were increased with new convicts and converts, and on Monday morning [the camp-meeting's final day,] the love-feast commenced at the rising of the sun. It was opened with singing and prayer, and many spoke feelingly of the things of God; their joy was full, their cups were running over, and others catched the streaming bliss. . . .

[After] the love-feast[,] succeeded the last prayer-meeting . . . At length the last sermon was delivered and followed by exhortation, when the preachers, about twenty in number, drew up in a single line, and a procession was formed four deep, led by a preacher, in front of a number of little children singing hymns of praise, and followed by hundreds who joined in the songs of Zion, marching round the encampment.

. . . no eloquence can picture the animation, the affection, the tenderness of the people and preachers on separating . . . tears gushed from their eyes: some attempting to bid an adieu, sobs and sighs almost choked their utterance, while in others it was like a torrent bursting through every obstruction . . . the big drops rolled down their faces, or glistened in their eyes, and they seemed to say in the language of the ancient heathens, "See how these Christians love!" The tents were struck and the people dispersed . . .[176]

Although the above was Reverend Ward's description of a revival in Connecticut, this was how the highly regimented Methodists conducted every camp-meeting (including Palmyra's of 1820).

He verified this when next describing a Methodist camp-meeting in rural New York: "The plan of our proceeding was arranged in the usual way: family prayers at the opening and close of each day, in the tents—general prayer meetings before the [preaching] stand at eight [AM]—preaching at ten [AM], two [PM], and six o'clock [PM] in the day, and also at midnight— the intervals [in between] to be occupied with irregular [i.e., spontaneous] services."[177] This Methodist regimentation was still evident decades later in the Camp Meeting Manual’s hine-point outline for the daily “order of exercises and of domestic arrangements.”[178]

Who were the ministers at Palmyra's 1820 revival? As already indicated, the traditional Mormon claim for Reverends George Lane and Benjamin Stockton as the preachers is anachronistic conflation of memory and narrative. At a camp-meeting with small attendance, 20-40 percent of the participants were ministers who traveled from a large region surrounding the host-village (in this case, near Mount Pleasant, New York): "It was not very numerously attended, probably from 500 to 1000 persons, upwards of 200 of whom were professors of religion.”[179] But what about Palmyra’s camp-meeting?

A partial answer to that question was in the decades-later "Notes for a History of Methodism in Phelps" by Reverend M. P. Blakeslee. Harry Sarsnett said that preacher Elisha House "held" a "camp-meeting," at which Sarsnett converted to Methodism. Although Blakeslee did not give a specific date for this revival, his chronological discussion mentioned it after comments for 1 July 1819 and "for 1820," but before Blakeslee's comments on events in November-December 1820.[180]

How far in advance of November? Because participant Sarsnett remembered it as a "camp-meeting," this happened during the "season" from June to September. With the extensive preparations necessary, did two camp-meetings occur in the area between Palmyra and Phelps during the 1820 "season"? or did only one? Fragmentary evidence cannot answer that question definitely, but the evidence can support my conclusion that Sarsnett converted at the camp-meeting held near Palmyra, the same revival Joseph Smith attended.[181]

Listed as a Methodist elder since 1818,[182] House was a resident of Phelps, nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra,[183] yet much closer than Canandaigua. As indicated by Reverend Seager in June 1818, residents of Phelps traveled to camp-meetings in Palmyra, an out-of-town attendance which certainly occurred at Palmyra's revival in June 1820.

The list of unclaimed letters at Palmyra's post office provided a contemporary answer to the question of attendance at this camp-meeting, even though the list obviously did not identify all visitors. Most probably did not arrange for mail to be sent to them in Palmyra, while others picked up the mail they did receive there. The postal notices therefore mentioned only a very small percentage of actual visitors.

Nevertheless, the postmaster's notice for 30 June 1820 included "Rev. Benj. Bailey," who had traveled fifteen miles from his residence in Lyons to Palmyra, probably to attend its camp-meeting. He was the only Benjamin Bailey in Ontario County according to the censuses of 1810 and 1820.[184] As the Presbyterian minister assigned to Macedon (later named "East Palmyra"),[185] Reverend Bailey's attendance at Palmyra's 1820 Methodist revival was undoubtedly why Joseph Smith linked it with the Presbyterians, even though he conflated that linkage with the conversion of his relatives to the Presbyterian Church four years later.

In addition, the same postal notice showed that at least two ministers had journeyed long distances to Palmyra, undoubtedly to attend its camp-meeting in June.[186] Subsequently a Methodist minister in Victor, only eighteen miles distant, Samuel Talbot in 1820 was a resident of Pompey, eighty-five miles from Palmyra.[187] The postal notice also listed "Deacon Barber," but no one by the name of Barber resided in Palmyra according to the 1820 census. Although Barber families lived in Ontario County at this time, there apparently was only one "Deacon Barber" in western New York. "Deacon William Barber" (apparently a Methodist) lived near Scipioville, Cayuga County, nearly fifty miles from Palmyra. This was not an unusual distance even for non-ministerial attenders of camp-meetings.[188]

Because camp-meetings "ought to be almost continually vocal with psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs,"[189] publishers circulated hundreds to choose from. "HYMN XII" in Methodist minister Stith Mead's 1811 collection was one that Palmyra's revivalists of 1820 probably sang, just as Latter-day Saints have continued to do so to the present:

SWEET is the work, my God, my King.

To Praise thy name[,] give thanks and sing.[190]

Another selection for New York's rural camp-meetings was "Hymn 44" as published at Poughkeepsie the same year as Mead’s hymnal.

I know that my Redeemer lives,

What comfort this sweet sentence gives!

He lives, he lives, who once was dead,

He lives[,] my ever living head.[191]

Of these two hymns, only the latter was in the first hymnal of the new church Joseph Smith Jr. eventually organized.[192]

Of greater importance for understanding the First Vision were other selections from New York hymnals. Among the songs Joseph undoubtedly joined in singing at Palmyra's camp-meeting in June 1820 was this one from the 1811 Poughkeepsie collection of hymns Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings:

O do not be discourag’d

For Jesus is your friend,

And if you lack for knowledge,

He’ll not refuse to lend;

Neither will he upbraid you,

Though often you request

Those words restated the "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God" passage from the New Testament's Epistle of James that Joseph said inspired him in 1820. This hymn's first line ("O When shall I see Jesus") implied that such "knowledge" could reach the teenager through actually seeing the Savior during this life.[193]

Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting attenders definitely heard that hymn as revivalists "almost continually" participated in days and nights of singing. Its words were also in Reverend Mead's 1811 hymnal,[194] and by 1817 had been reprinted in nine editions of Totten's New York hymns USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS.[195] In addition to eight printings of a Boston hymnal by1817, those words were also in two hymnals of 1819, including New York's fourth edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs For the Use of Religious Assemblies.[196] Rather than a sermon, it was a universally sung camp-meting hymn that inspired Joseph Smith with the promise of James 1:5.

From 1809 to 1817, nine editions of Totten's New York hymnal even affirmed the literal reality of having a daytime vision of Jesus:

As at the time of noon,

My quadrant FAITH, I take,

To view my CHRIST, my sun,

If he the clouds should break:

I’m happy when his face I see,

I know then whereabouts I be.[197]

By 1817, these words had also appeared in the eight editions of Boston's hymnal.[198] It should be no surprise that many American revivalists published their visions of Jesus, even of seeing the Father and Son together.[199]

In 1809 Totten's New York collection of hymns USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS even explained how a young man could obtain such a vision:

ONE ev'ning, pensive as I lay,

Alone upon the ground,

As I to God began to pray,

A light shone all around.

These words with power went through my heart

I've come to set you free;

Death[,] hell[,] nor grave shall never part,

My love (my son) from thee.[200]

Although Totten did not reprint this as often as the one about daytime theophany, Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting almost certainly sang this hymn. It was in Reverend Mead's 1811 hymnal, in the 1811 Poughkeepsie collection of hymns Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings, in Totten's 1811 edition, in the second edition of an 1818 collection of Camp-meeting Songs for the Pious, and in the second edition of Collection of Camp Meeting Hymns by the wife of famed revivalist Lorenzo Dow.[201] If (as seems very likely) Joseph sang this hymn at Palmyra's Methodist revival of 1820, it explains why the fourteen-year-old boy thought it not unusual to pray to God alone, to see Him in a "pillar of light," and to be "lying on my back, looking up into heaven."[202]

In 1820 the teenager took the words of these hymns literally, as he did the scripture from James. Even though they often read the same biblical passage and sang the same modern hymns, most Methodist ministers now regarded those words as literal only for biblical times and for the afterlife. This was a reversal in American Methodism, whose members and leaders had sometimes professed visions of Jesus from the 1790s through the first decade of the nineteenth century. However, "by the 1820s and 1830s in the mostly white Methodist Episcopal Church, there was a noticeable shift away from overt enthusiasm," especially visions and dreams.[203] As Joseph Smith said, these nay-sayers insisted "that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them."[204]

In this regard, it is crucial that a leader of the Methodist Episcopal Church criticized some of those at Palmyra's June 1820 camp-meeting. In reporting on the later upsurge of revivals in the Ontario District (which included Palmyra), Reverend Abner Chase wrote on 1 July 1824 that "four years" ago [i.e., June 1820] "wild and ranting fanatics, caused the spirits of the faithful in a degree to sink." Previously a circuit-rider, he was "presiding elder" of the Ontario District in the summer of 1820. At Palmyra's 1820 Methodist camp-meeting, unnamed persons acted "wild" (like its drunk revivalist James Couser) and others said things that Reverend Chase regarded as fanatical.[205]

"Some few days after I had this vision," teenage Joseph confided his theophany to "one of the Methodist preachers who was active in the before mentioned religious excitement." The minister condemned Joseph's description "with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil . . .”[206] Various writers[207] have assumed that George Lane was the preacher, but in June-July 1820, Reverend Lane's responsibility was in the Susquehanna District on the Pennsylvania border, and there is no evidence that he attended Palmyra's camp-meeting revival in June 1820.[208]

William Barlow would be a likely candidate for this disbelieving preacher. He was circuit-rider for Ontario Circuit (in which Palmyra was located) from 1815 to July 1817. In July 1819 he became circuit-rider for his hometown of Canandaigua, seventeen miles from Palmyra.[209] However, within months he left the Methodists "in an irregular, unofficial manner," converted to "the Protestant Episcopal Church" (i.e., Anglican Episcopalian), and became Canandaigua's Episcopal rector in January 1820.[210] Without its own resident Methodist minister, Palmyra was served by circuit-riders, and Barlow's apostasy removed one of the nearest organizers for the town's camp-meeting of June 1820.

Although Methodist elder Elisha House was not currently a circuit-rider for this area,[211] his residence in Phelps was even closer to Palmyra, and it was practical for him to take over at least some of Barlow's responsibilities for the upcoming revival. As previously indicated for another camp-meeting in rural New York, "some of the brethren came more than ten and twelve miles to assist in the preliminary labours." It is therefore understandable why revival-convert Sarsnett, also living in Phelps,[212] remembered fellow-resident House as leader of the 1820 camp-meeting.

This camp-meeting was a turning point in the differing religious vitality of the two towns. Phelps had a Methodist meetinghouse by 1819, three years before Palmyra. Following Palmyra's 1820 revival, however, the Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) nearly maintained its rate of Methodist retention, while the Lyons Circuit (which included Phelps) plummeted. By the end of the 1820s, Palmyra was its own Methodist preaching circuit—four years before Phelps.[213] The camp-meeting of June 1820 began a shift of Methodist strength toward its host-village of Palmyra, a pattern that intensified with the dramatic revivals of 1824- 25 and continued into the next decade. It is no wonder that Joseph Smith and three residents of Phelps emphasized 1820 for this religious transition.[214]

Official appointments occurred only at the annual meetings of the Genesee Conference each July, but (during the six-month interim after Barlow's apostasy from Methodism in January 1820) Abner Chase apparently helped substitute for his abandoned duties at the upcoming revival in Palmyra. Barlow had married in the town of Pompey two years before Chase's 1818 appointment to its circuit, and the Methodist conference appointed Chase as Ontario District's presiding elder on 20 July 1820.[215]

As an isolated fact, Reverend Chase's pre-July assignment to Pompey, eighty-five miles from Palmyra, might seem to make it unlikely that he had any role in Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820. However, since one of his Methodist associates (Talbot) also traveled from Pompey to Palmyra before the village's postal notice at the end of June, this indicates that the two men traveled together to the camp-meeting that month.

Elisha House or Abner Chase was probably the Methodist minister who listened to the teenager's testimony of seeing God in June 1820. Either way, Chase learned of Joseph's assertion and dismissed the unschooled farmboy as a "ranting" fanatic.

Eighteen years after his First Vision of deity in 1820, Joseph Smith Jr. created problems for historical understanding by misremembering "early spring" and by conflating circumstances of that year with circumstances of Palmyra's revivals in 1824-25. Nevertheless, I disagree with BYU religion professor Paul H. Peterson's 1995 assessment "that Marquardt and Walters have a strong case in claiming that the 1824-25 revival satisfies all of the elements of Joseph's 1838 history more adequately than any other account."[216] That conclusion is based on the unnecessary assumption that all details in his account of local “excitement on the subject of religion” must apply to only one year’s experience with revivalism.

Fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith caught "a spark of Methodism" at Palmyra's camp-meeting revival in the late spring of 1820. This led him to seek forgiveness "for my own Sins" and to find theophany.[217]

Note: This article one of the special web-only series and not printed in a physical issue.

[1] For example, from 1994 to 1998 I published "revisionist" books that nonetheless cited Backman and emphasized his point of view about the First Vision (see my note 35 in this article). I use "apologist" as a non-judgmental, descriptive term, as explained in D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. and enl. ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), x:

"Not every believer is an apologist, but apologists take special efforts to defend their cherished point of view—whether in religion, science, history, or some other belief/endeavor. It is not an insult to call someone an `apologist' (which I often do), nor is `apologist' an unconditional badge of honor. Like drivers on a highway, some apologists are careful, some are careless, some unintentionally injure the innocent, some are Good Samaritans, and a few are sociopaths. Like drivers, even good apologists make errors in judgment and occasionally violate the rules. The same is true for those who don't think they're apologists.

"In a tradition as old as debate, polemics is an extreme version of apologetics. Defending a point of view becomes less important than attacking one's opponents. Aside from their verbal viciousness, polemicists often resort to any method to promote their argument. Polemics intentionally destroys the give-and-take of sincerely respectful disagreement. In the resulting polarization, `all are punish'd.' Moving beyond apologist persuasion, LDS polemicists furiously (and often fraudulently) attack any non-traditional view of Mormonism. They don't mince words—they mince the truth."

By those definitions, I have always regarded myself as an honest apologist for Mormonism, especially in its controversies (where I have acknowledged perspectives of disbelief but also options for faith, and have allowed readers to arrive at their own conclusions). As in the above book, this article uses the term "apologist" to describe authors writing from a faith-perspective I share, even though we have not always approached various topics in the same ways.

In that regard, current readers can decide whether the following is an honest summary of my above-quoted statements, or whether the following is an example of polemics. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 292n71, commented on “his [Quinn’s] vitriolic response to his critics (some LDS apologists are, he suggests in his revised work, ‘sociopaths’[x]).”

[2] The nicknames "Mormon" and "Mormons" derive from Joseph Smith Jr.'s publication of The Book of Mormon in 1830 at Palmyra, New York, as his “translation” of extra-biblical scripture. See John W. Welch and Tim Rathbone, "Book of Mormon Translation by Joseph Smith," in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism: The History, Doctrine, and Procedure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1992), 1:210-12. Wesley P. Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 67 (for “massive silence”), 61 (for “cannot be true”), 66 (for Palmyra “revivals in the years 1817, 1824, 1829, etc.”), 77n44 (for “reports of the 1816 [Palmyra] revival can be found in” various sources, with last citation as “Nov. 1, 1817”). Although Walters published a similar article by that title in Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 10 (Fall 1967) in which these quotes first appeared, he expanded it by one-third for what Dialogue’s editors called a “reprint” in their introductory essay, “Roundtable: The Question of the Palmyra Revival” (69). Because readers are more likely to have access to the Dialogue version of Walters’ article, I quote from it and cite its pagination. With one exception (in my note 13), I do not indicate variations between his 1967 and 1969 articles of the same title.

[3] Robert D. Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999), 9, 69, 75. For discussion of this biography’s unrelenting hostility, see D. Michael Quinn, “biographers and the Mormon ‘Prophet Puzzle’: 1974-2004,” Journal of Mormon History 32 (Summer 2006): 229.

[4] E. Latimer, The Three Brothers: Sketches of the Lives of Rev. Aurora Seager, Rev. Micah Seager, Rev. Schuyler Seager, D.D. (New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1880), 12 (for Aurora’s death in 1819), 21-22 (for quotes, including his 1818 “diary”); also F[rancis]. W. Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Nelson & Phillips, 1876), 139, for the July 1818 annual meeting in Lansing, New York, attended by Methodist bishop Robert R. Roberts; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828 (New York: T. Mason, G. Lane, J. Collord, 1840), 316 (for Billy Hibbard in New York Conference), 317 ("Aurora Seager goes to the Genesee Conference"), 318 (for Aurora Seager in Clarence Circuit of Genesee District in Genesee Conference and for "Zechariah" Paddock in Ridgeway Circuit of Genesee District—his brother Benjamin G. Paddock was assigned to a different district (roughly a county) this year and was less likely to be the "Brother Paddock" in Seager's diary entry). For modern studies, see Charles A. Johnson The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religious Harvest Time (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1955); Dickson D. Bruce, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800-1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974); Kenneth O. Brown, Holy Ground: A Study of the American Camp Meeting (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).

Although the town of Vienna did not change its name to Phelps until the 1850s, various sources had previously referred to Phelps as if it were a town (including Reverend Seager in 1818 and the U.S. censuses from 1820 to 1850—see my note 212), when Phelps was actually a "township" containing several towns. Likewise, History of Ontario County, New York (Philadelphia: Everts, Ensign, and Everts, 1876), 179, noted: "seven villages have an existence, either wholly or in part, within the bounds of Manchester," the township where the Smith family lived in the village of Farmington (later named Manchester) during the 1820s (see my note 18). Because several quotes in my narrative text refer to the town by its subsequent name of Phelps, my narrative uses the later name instead of the cumbersome alternatives "Vienna (later named Phelps)" or "Phelps (called Vienna in 1820)." For 13.6 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Phelps, consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet. For explanation of this article's use of Mapquest, see my note 86.

[5] Milton V. Backman Jr., "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District: New Light on the Historical Setting of the First Vision," BYU Studies 9 (Spring 1969): 307, 307n14. His footnote did not cite Seager directly, but referred to a document whose full title and location are "NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF METHODISM IN PHELPS by Rev. M. P. Blakeslee, 1886," photocopy of typescript (17 numbered pages), Folder 5, MSS 847, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Blakeslee's manuscript stated on page 7: "Some interesting notes are gathered from published portions of the diary of Rev. Aurora Seager. He mentions the quarterly meeting held in Phelps, [where] Jonathan Huestis, the presiding elder preached. This was on Saturday, May 23, 1818. . . . Mr. Seager also mentions in his diary a camp meeting at Palmyra, which he attended on the 19th of June, at which Bishop Roberts was present. At this meeting he says twenty were baptized and forty united with the church." Blakeslee's page 8 also gave the first name for the Methodist identified as "Bro. Hawks" in Seager's published diary. For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York and for the distance of nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra to Phelps, see my note 4.

Aside from pre-publication access to Backman's 1969 article (see my note 13), Wesley P. Walters, "A Reply to Dr. Bushman," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 98, indicated that he had read Blakeslee's manuscript by commenting that Richard L. Bushman "appeals to an equally late reminiscence by a Mr. Sarsnett" (see narrative for my note 180 and comments within notes 180-81). Neither Backman nor Bushman mentioned Sarsnett in their articles of 1969, a name Walters knew in this regard only because he had already consulted Blakeslee's manuscript, which was in a source-note for Bushman, "The First Vision Story Revived,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9 (Spring 1969): 93n15.

In addition, Wesley P. Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," Journal of Pastoral Practice, 4 (1980), No. 2: 103, also referred to his having read "Blakeslee's entire manuscript, which catalogues events consecutively under separate years ..." Despite the fact that Walters had read the "entire" Blakeslee document (and therefore knew about this published diary reference to a Palmyra revival in June 1818) and despite the corresponding fact that a copy of Blakeslee's "Notes" is in Folder 13, Box 164, of H. Michael Marquardt's research papers, Manuscripts Division, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, they did not acknowledge that Palmyra had a camp-meeting revival in June 1818--neither in H. Michael Marquardt and Wesley P. Walters, Inventing Mormonism: Tradition and the Historical Record ([San Francisco:] Smith Research Associates, 1994), 18-19, 35n11, 239 (index for "Palmyra, NY . . . revival . . ."), nor in H. Michael Marquardt, The Rise of Mormonism: 1816-1844 (Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2005), 19, 20n20, 668 (index for "Palmyra, New York . . . revival"), 670 (index for "Revival in Palmyra"); also comments within my notes 13 and 165. However, in fairness to Walters and Marquardt, see text discussion for my notes 32, 55, 56, 61, 62, 66, as well as comments within my notes 32, 52, 55, 56, 61, 62, 149.

[6] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 108, stated that the author "erroneously moves the revival date [in Palmyra] ahead a year (shades of Backman) to 1817-1818." Compare with my note 5.

[7] "Effects of Drunkenness," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 28 June 1820, [2]; Richard Lloyd

Anderson, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision Through Reminiscences," BYU Studies 9 (Spring 1969): 380. Because I cannot find a modern transcription that is readily

available in print or on the Internet of this important article, here it is in full:

"Effects of Drunkenness.—DIED at the house of Mr. Robert M'Collum, in this town, on the 26th inst. [i.e., instant, of this month,] James Couser, aged about forty years. The deceased, we are informed, arrived at Mr. M'Collum's house the evening preceding [i.e. Sunday, June 25th], from a camp-meeting which was held in this vicinity, in a state of intoxication. He, with his companion who was also in the same debasing condition, called for supper, which was granted. They both stayed all night—called for breakfast next morning—when notified that it was ready, the deceased was found wrestling with his companion, whom he flung with the greatest ease,—he suddenly sunk down upon a bench,—was taken with an epileptic fit, and immediately expired.—It is supposed he obtained his liquor, which was no doubt the cause of his death, at the Campground, where, it is a notorious fact, the intemperate, the lewd and dissolute part of the community too frequently resort for no better object, than to gratify their base propensities.

"The deceased, who was an Irishman, we understand has left a family, living at Catskill [in]this state."

[8] "`Plain Truth' is received," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 5 July 1820, [2]; also quoted in Walter A. Norton, "Comparative Images: Mormonism and Contemporary Religions as Seen by Village Newspapermen in Western New York and Northeastern Ohio, 1820-1833" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1991), 255. Because I cannot find a modern transcription that is readily available in print or on the Internet of this important article, here it is in full:

"`Plain Truth' is received. By this communication, as well as by the remarks of some of our neighbors who belong to the Society of Methodists, we perceive that our remarks accompanying the notice of the unhappy death of James Couser, contained in our last [weekly issue], have not been correctly understood. `Plain truth' says, we committed `an error in point of fact,' in saying that Couser `obtained his liquor at the camp-ground.' By this expression we did not mean to insinuate, that he obtained it within the enclosure of their place of worship, or that he procured it of them, but at the grog-shops that were established at, or near if you please, their camp-ground. It was far from our intention to charge the Methodists with retailing ardent spirits while professedly met for the worship of their God. Neither did we intend to implicate them by saying that `the intemperate, the dissolute, &c. resort to their meetings.'—And if so we have been understood by any one of that society, we assure them they have altogether mistaken our meaning."

[9] This requires some explanation because all U.S. almanacs in 1820 skipped a step, due to their publishers' assumption that American farmers were so knowledgeable about both the seasons and astrology that they did not need an explanation that spring begins when the sun enters Taurus in March and that summer begins when the sun enters Pisces in June. Like all the other almanacs, the one published near the Smith home simply gave astrological symbols showing that for "1820—3d Mo. MARCH," the sun enters Taurus on 20 March, and for "1820—6th Mo. JUNE," the sun enters Pisces on 21 June. See THE FARMER'S DIARY, OR BEER'S ONTARIO ALMANACK FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1820 (Canandaigua, NY: J. D. Bemis, [1819]), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 47953 in the "Early American Imprints, 2nd Series," microform collection available at university libraries. For Canandaigua as nine miles from Joseph Smith's home, see his mother's statement in Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed., Lucy's Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Family Memoir (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 369.

The words "spring" and "summer" were absent from nearly all U.S. almanacs published in 1820, but The Farmer's Almanack For The Year of Our Lord 1820 (Portland, ME: A. Shirley and F. Douglas, [1819]), Shaw and Shoemaker item 47948, specified that the "THIRD MONTH. MARCH 1820" was the month of "spring's return" and that the "SIXTH MONTH. JUNE 1820" was when "summer's full bounty will be displayed." For the general public's astrological awareness, upon which these early almanacs relied, see George Lyman Kittridge, The Old Farmer and His Almanack (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 39-61; Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); David J. Whittaker, "Almanacs in the New England Heritage of Mormonism," BYU Studies 29 (Fall 1989): 91-92, 109; Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1998 ed.), 21-24.

[10] Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London and Liverpool: Latter Day Saints Book Depot, 1854-86), 11: 2; Brigham H. Roberts, The Missouri Persecutions (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1900), 10; James E. Talmage, "A Theophany Resplendent," Improvement Era 23 (April 1920): [514]; Brigham H. Roberts, ed., A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: "By the Church," 1930), 1: 51; Joseph Fielding Smith, The Restoration of All Things (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1945), 30; David O. McKay, Pathways to Happiness (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1957), 42; Roy W. Doxey, The Doctrine and Covenants Speaks, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1964), 1: 10, 524, 2: vivii, 13-14; Bruce R. McConkie, The Millennial Messiah: The Second Coming of the Son of Man (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1982), 57, 74, 87, 100, 105, 112, 125, 175, 334, 389; Dean Hughes, The Mormon Church: A Basic History (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986), 5; Ezra Taft Benson in I Know That My Redeemer Lives (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990), 215; James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints, rev. and enl. ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 8; Milton V. Backman Jr., "First Vision," in Ludlow, Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 2: 515; Joseph Fielding McConkie and Robert L. Millet, Joseph Smith: The Choice Seer (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996), 35, 37, 114, 367; Clyde J. Williams, ed., Teachings of Howard W. Hunter (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1997), 28; Gordon B. Hinckley, Teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997), 141; Terryl L. Givens, The Latter-day Saint Experience in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 9; Stephen C. Harper, "On the Eve of the First Vision," in Susan Easton Black and Andrew C. Skinner, eds., Joseph: Exploring the Life and Ministry of the Prophet (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 31.

[11] Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," and Anderson, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision," BYU Studies 9 (Spring 1969): 309, 380; Bushman, "First Vision Story Revived," 87, 93n14; Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 458n30; Milton V. Backman Jr., Joseph Smith's First Vision: Confirming Evidences and Contemporary Accounts, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980), 74; Norton, "Comparative Images," 254-56; Richard Lyman Bushman, "Just the Facts Please," FARMS Review of Books 6 (1994), No. 2: 126, and 126n3; Paul H. Peterson, untitled book review, BYU Studies 35 (1995), No. 4: 214; Gary F. Novak, "`The Most Convenient Form of Error': Dale Morgan on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon," FARMS Review of Books 8 (1996), No. 1: 155, 155n69; Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1998 ed.), 136, 456n2; Craig N. Ray, Joseph Smith's History Confirmed (Redding, CA: Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research [FAIR], 2002), 5; Davis Bitton, "The Charge of a Man with a Broken Lance (But Look What He Doesn't Tell Us)," and Stephen C. Harper, "Trustworthy History," FARMS Review of Books 15 (2003), No. 2: 261, 295. However, see narrative text for my notes 57, 61.

[12] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 62-64; Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 95-96; Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 98-100; Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 15-16. The anachronisms are best presented in the verbatim printing of the Smith family's reminiscent accounts and Cowdery's narrative, as discussed in footnotes by Dan Vogel, comp. and ed., Early Mormon Documents, 6 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996-2004), 1: 58n19, 59n20, 146n1, 213, 243n33, 288n87, 306nn103-104, 487n13, 490nn1-2, 494n5, 495nn6-7, 504n4, 512n8, 513n10.

Compare Roberts, Comprehensive History, 1: 51-53; Joseph Smith, Jr., et al., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Period I: History of the Joseph Smith, the Prophet and ... Period II: From the Manuscript History of Brigham Young and Other Original Documents, ed. B.H. Roberts, 7 vols., 2nd ed. rev. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1978), 1: 2-3, available as "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5-7, in recent editions of The Pearl of Great Price, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Salt Lake City, Utah; Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," 69; Larry C. Porter, "Reverend George Lane—Good `Gifts,' Much `Grace,' and Marked `Usefulness,'" BYU Studies 9 (Spring 1969): 337-38; Milton V. Backman Jr. and James B. Allen, "Membership of Certain of Joseph Smith's Family in the Western Presbyterian Church of Palmyra," BYU Studies 10 (Summer 1970): 482-84.

[13] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival" (in 1969 Dialogue "reprint"), 67 (for narrative quote), and 78n47 (for citation to Palmyra Register's "issues of June 28 and July 5, 1820, p. 2"), which latter citation was not in the source-notes of his original 1967 article in Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society. Before submitting his article for its expanded "reprint" in Dialogue, Walters had pre-publication access to Backman's 1969 article, as did Richard L. Bushman for his "First Vision Story Revived" in the same issue of Dialogue. Bushman cited (93n13) Backman's essay by its preliminary title "An Awakening," but Reverend Walters did not acknowledge it as his source for the articles of 1820 he cited. The minister-researcher’s 1969 article also rebutted Backman's arguments without acknowledging the existence of the 1969 article in BYU Studies to which Walters was actually responding.

That the minister recognized he was violating an expectation of honest disclosure in scholarly writing is obvious from Wesley P. Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," Journal of Pastoral Practice, 4 (1980), No. 2: 92-109, in which he complained on page 93: "Although written to answer our [1969] article [which had been "revised and enlarged"--92], Dr. Backman nowhere refers to it, either in the text, the footnotes, or in the 12-page Bibliography of his [1971] book." Walters added with obvious irritation on 94n2: "In the second edition (1980) of his book, Dr. Backman finally included in a footnote (p. 195) a passing reference to our [1967] article. However, he has still avoided all reference to the enlarged version of this article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. He is aware of its existence for he quotes from Dr. Richard Bushman's rebuttal to it (p. 196), but he ignores our reply. The footnotes in that [1969] printing answered a number of criticisms raised by Dr. Backman in his present edition [of 1980]." Walters' ministerial readers in 1980 might have been puzzled by this claim that his 1969 article had replied to criticisms in Backman's book, which was first published in 1971. If Walters recognized that the two editions of Backman's book gave the reverend-researcher's 1969 article the same silent-treatment as Walters had given his advance reading of the BYU professor's 1969 article, Walters did not explain this to his fellow ministers in 1980.

In making this and other stark assessments about the publications by Wesley P. Walters, I hope that I am not perceived as engaging in polemics or in ad hominem attacks (see my note 1). Aside from trying to avoid both, I personally regarded him as a kind, thoughtful, and congenial man--a diligent researcher who invited me to his home in Marissa, Illinois, for dinner, for hours of engaging conversation, and for an overnight stay during one of my research trips in the mid-1970s. Nonetheless, while writing about Mormon history, Reverend Walters demonstrated academic and ethical lapses that I cannot ignore (nor minimize) while I closely examine the same topics and (especially) the same sources. See text discussion for my notes 6, 25, 26, 30, 165; see text after my notes 32, 78, 136; see comments within my notes 5 and 165; also see the minister-researcher’s ethical lapses involving his unauthorized removal of official documents about Joseph Smith's 1826 court appearance for treasure-scrying, as related (with copy of letter from New York county court officer to Walters) in Larry C. Porter, "Reinventing Mormonism: To Remake or Redo," FARMS Review of Books 7 (1995), No. 2: 141-43. When I began researching and writing this present essay in 2005, I did not want to mention Porter's observation and initially rejected it as tangential to my analysis. Even after my own unexpected discoveries of the minister-researcher's ethical lapses, it required dozens of re-writes before I concluded that Porter's observation seemed too relevant to withhold from my essay's commentary about the historical approach of Reverend Walters toward Joseph Smith Jr.

[14] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 69 (for "adjoining" quote), 78n47 (for the happenstance reference to the camp-meeting); with a close paraphrase of Walters' note-comments in Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 20n20.

[15] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 64-65, 66, 69, 76n37, 77n40; Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 98-99; compare Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2-3; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5.

A fourth argument against the 1820 revival has involved analysis of land transactions to dispute Joseph's statement that it began "some time in the second year after our removal [from Palmyra] to Manchester," Ontario County, New York. I skip that discussion-controversy here because it seems to be another example of the Prophet's conflation of actual events surrounding Palmyra's small revival of 1820 with the village's extensive revivals of 1824-25 (see narrative text for my notes 36-38). However, readers may agree with me that there is logical circularity (and corresponding weakness) in nay-sayer objections about this matter, as most recently expressed in the summary by Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 12.

[16] Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," 311 (for quote), 314-18 (for statistics); also Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 34n7 ("The records of the Palmyra Methodist Church were burned in a fire at Rochester, New York in 1933").

[17] Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 160.

[18] For the Smith family's residence in first Palmyra and second in Farmington (later named Manchester), New York, see Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 3. For both towns during this period as in the Methodist Ontario Circuit of Ontario District, see Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 63; Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 70; Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 97.

While Joseph Sr. arrived in Palmyra by the fall of 1816, his wife Lucy arrived with Joseph Jr. and the other children after the snows of winter had begun. Since 1816 was a very cold year (due to worldwide cooling caused by the massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano), it is unclear whether the entire family arrived in Palmyra in late 1816 or early 1817. Compare two prize-winning biographies: Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 21 ("they began their trip perhaps as late as January 1817" in leaving Vermont for Palmyra, New York) and 542 (for their departure from Manchester in December 1830); Richard Lyman Bushman "with" Jed Woodworth, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), [30] ("the Smiths arrived in western New York in the winter of 1816-17"), with no specificity about their departure from Manchester in 1830.

Although it is customary to list co-author(s) in narrative references, my text refers only to Bushman as the biographer, because the preface of Rough Stone Rolling (xxiii) clearly showed that he claimed to be the biography's author and that Woodworth's role as "collaborator" was significantly less than co-authorship. However, for bibliographic accuracy, my source-notes include Woodworth with each citation.

[19] George Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828 (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1860), 353 ("On horseback, and to a Methodist preacher there was then no other mode of conveyance"), 355 ("circuit rider"); Milton V. Backman Jr., "The Quest for a Restoration: The Birth of Mormonism in Ohio," BYU Studies 12 (Summer 1972): 348 (concerning "the Grand Circuit which consisted of forty-four preaching stations in Ashtabula, Geauga, and Trumbull counties" of Ohio); also Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 70.

[20] William Hosmer, ed., Autobiography of Rev. Alvin Torry (Auburn, NY: William J. Moses, 1861), 214 (for Torry's assignment to the Ulysses Circuit at the Genesee Conference annual meeting at Wilkesbarre in 1827, "this circuit embraced all the country lying between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, from the town of Enfield to Ovid. Within the bounds of that circuit, there are, at the time of my writing this, nine different stations, with as many ministers"); also Milton V. Backman Jr. wrote: "One of the most famous [Methodist] circuit-riders of early America was Peter Cartwright. At the age of sixty-eight, this itinerant had a circuit [of] almost 500 miles by 100 miles," in American Religions and the Rise of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1965), 284, citing W. P. Strickland, ed., Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher (New York: Carleton & Porter, 1857), 484-86.

[21] Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773- 1828; also Bushman, "First Vision Story Revived," 87 ("Methodist figures take in an entire circuit and fail to note changes in smaller locales"); Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 97 ("The individual church figures are not available, it is true, but the membership figures for the Ontario Circuit on which Palmyra was located are part of the printed Minutes of the denomination").

[22] Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 142, referring to the situation before July 1819.

[23] Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," 308 (for quote), 305 (for chapel); his statement of dimensions was taken from "GENESEE CONFERENCE," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 5 (November 1822): 428. Backman observed that Joseph's phrase might have the "meaning possibly [of] western New York or eastern and western New York and not necessarily Palmyra, Farmington [later named Manchester], or just the neighborhood where he lived" (315). However, see narrative text for my note 61.

[24] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 103 (for "wishful thinking"), 103-04n6 (for statistical quote, emphasis in original). For "ecological fallacy" (a term and concept Walters did not actually use), see Wikipedia on the Internet, whose entry cites Stephen K. Campbell, Flaws and Fallacies in Statistical Thinking (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Because the Methodist membership reported in July 1819 was larger than the membership reported in July 1820, Walters wrote that the 1820 figures should be subtracted from the 1819 figures. Statistically, later figures should always be subtracted from the earlier figures, which would show "negative growth" in this instance.

[25] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 66, 76n21. For narrative flow, I reverse the order of the first two phrases as quoted from his text on page 66, but the meaning remains the same as in the original. Aside from my narrative's quotation from his above source-note, his source-note (77n41) for the statements on page 66 correctly reported the total "white and Negro membership for the Ontario Circuit," as given for 1819, 1820, and 1821 in Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 330, 346, 366. With reference to his 1980 article's claim for an arithmetical result of "59," those numbers were also not a stray memory of contiguous numerals in the figures for Ontario District in 1820 (the newly created district's first annual report), nor in 1821, nor in the difference between those years. The Ontario District (roughly the entire county) had 3128 "white" and 19 "colored" members in 1820 (3147 total), and had 3528 "white" and 17 "colored" in 1821 (3545 total), which was an increase in Ontario District of 400 "white" members, a loss of two "colored" members, and a net increase of 398. Created in July 1819, the Ontario District was not in the 1819 report for the period from July 1818 to 1 July 1819. See comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[26] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 92 (for "there was no revival"), 100 (for "this supposed 1820 camp meeting"), 104 (for denial of "either a camp meeting or a revival"), 106 (for denial of "even a spark of a revival"), 109 (for "legendary events"); also see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165. For definition of "polemics," see my note 1.

[27] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5.

[28] Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, xxvi-xxviii, 15-41 (with page 29 for new chapel in 1822), 36n13; also see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[29] Dan Vogel, Religious Seekers and the Advent of Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988), 43n32; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 58n19, 288n87, 306n103, 2: 424n6, 3: 94n31, 416n2, 5: 390; Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith, 106-07; Grant H. Palmer, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 240-44; Vogel, Making of a Prophet, 587n11 (for discussion on his page 58); Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 13-16, 670 (index citation for "Revival in Palmyra").

[30] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 64 (for the local Presbytery's statement about "no remarkable revival" in 1824), 77n39 (for "completely beyond possibility" about similar statement of alleged absence in 1820); also Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 18, 22, in which Marquardt dropped his deceased co-author's statement of "beyond possibility." See comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[31] Latimer, Three Brothers, 22 (for quotation from Reverend Aurora Seager's "diary" about his attendance with "Bishop Roberts" at Palmyra's camp-meeting, 19-22 June 1818); also Blakeslee, "NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF METHODISM IN PHELPS," manuscript page 7; compare Palmyra Register's weekly editions (on Tuesdays during this period) from 19 May 1818 through 21 July 1818 for total absence of any reference to this Methodist revival; "Who are the bishops and superintendents?" in Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 290 (for 1817), 305 (for 1818); also Charles Elliott, The Life of the Rev. Robert R. Roberts, One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: G. Lane and C. B. Tippett, 1846), 167; Worth Marion Tippy, Frontier Bishop: The Life and Times of Robert Richford Roberts (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1958), 106, 130. Neither biographer mentioned Roberts' attendance at Palmyra's camp-meeting nor at most other revivals after his ordination as bishop in 1816, emphasizing instead his attendance at regional and national meetings.

[32] Concerning the evidence he cited from BYU's library, Backman commented in 1980: "Blakeslee discusses in his manuscript history a camp meeting held near Palmyra in 1818, in which twenty were baptized and forty converted to the Methodist society, and which was not reported in the newspapers and religious journals of that age" (Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 74n34). Rather than burying the last phrase in a footnote, Backman should have emphasized this fact repeatedly in the text as the most significant answer to the "massive silence" argument by Walters, to whom Backman was responding. However, because Backman subordinated this conclusive evidence for Palmyra's 1818 revival and its absence from newspapers, those facts failed to show up in subsequent writings by both apologists and disbelievers. Compare text discussion for my notes 4, 5, 55, 66, as well as comments within my notes 5, 55, 149; also see comments about Walters and his approach in following paragraph of the narrative text and within my notes 5, 13, 165. For definition of "apologist," see my note 1.

[33] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 5; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 14.

[34] Novak, "Most Convenient Form of Error," 155.

[35] D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books/Smith Research Associates, 1994), 5-32 (for analysis of revised documents and problems of anachronism), also 268n10 (for citation of two of Backman's publications about the First Vision, with acknowledgement of the differing view by Walters and Marquardt), and with my concluding statement (269n10): "For me this is sufficient evidence from two different directions that Smith's vision of deity occurred in 1820, as officially dated." In 1998 I restated this in Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1998 ed.), 136-37, 456n2 (citing both Backman and Walters, but emphasizing Backman's point of view), and 457nn9-10 (citing Backman and Bushman, but not Walters, nor Marquardt).

[36] For example, Victor H. Matthews, A Brief History of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2002), 80 ("an unintentional conflation of events"); also Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83. Also see my note 180 for similar conflation of revivals by Mrs. Sarepta Marsh Baker and Reverend M. P. Blakeslee.

[37] Jaques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 4th ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 119. Also see my note 180 for similar conflation of revivals by Mrs. Sarepta Marsh Baker and Reverend M. P. Blakeslee.

[38] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN KENNEBECK DISTRICT" [page-heading], Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (March 1818): 119-20; "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN SUFFOLK COUNTY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (June 1818): 237-40. This periodical had no issues for 1829 and changed editorial format in the first issue of its "new series" in January 1830, after which it did not give the same attention to individual revivals. For its editorship, see my note 127.

[39] "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (February 1821): 69-71. Although there is a town of the same name in New York State, the article's internal references identify this as Fountain-Head, Kentucky.

[40] "REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF RELIGION ON WEST-JERSEY DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (March 1824): 115-16.

[41] "A SHORT SKETCH OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF TROY, A.D. 1816," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (April 1818): 152 (for its beginning), 154 (for quote).

[42] "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF SCHNECTADY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (July 1819): 275.

[43] "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD IN PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (May 1821): 197-99.

[44] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON OHIO DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (August 1819): 308-10.

[45] "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD IN CHILLICOTHE, OHIO," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (April 1825): 155.

[46] "ACCOUNT OF THE LATE REVIVALS OF RELIGION IN THE PROVINCE OF UPPER-CANADA," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (January 1819): 33 (for above title, with page-heading of "REVIVAL" on all subsequent pages for this article), 37 (for quote).

[47] "Revival in Bridgetown, N.J." [page-heading], Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (June 1825): 238.

[48] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5. He referred to this as the "before mentioned religious excitement" in Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 6; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 21.

[49] During 1824-25, Palmyra experienced its most dramatic revivalism of the 1820s, but in "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON ONTARIO DISTRICT," letter dated 1 July 1824, Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (November 1824): 426, Reverend Abner Chase (currently the presiding elder of this district) indicated that this was a crescendo of revivalism that actually began in 1823: "The work [of revivals] has been gradually progressing for eight or ten months." Ten months before his letter was 1 September 1823, a little over three years since Palmyra's camp-meeting of late June 1820. Even though Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 105, quoted from this letter, the minister-researcher asserted on page 104: "Just how Joseph could be stirred in 1823 by a revival that did not occur until September 1824, the writer does not explain." Walters disregarded the possibility that just as a spring 1820 camp-meeting was a likely catalyst for Joseph Smith's vision of deity, a September 1823 revival was a likely catalyst for his vision of an angel on 21 September 1823. For the latter, see Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 9-11; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 27, 29-33; see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165. For other circumstances of Joseph's 1823 epiphany, see Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1998 ed.), 137-58.

[50] Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. "excitement." For example, "Great Revivals in Religion," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 7 June 1820, [1], used the phrase "religious excitement" to describe seven different locations/occurrences of revivalism in New York State.

[51] Barzun and Graff, Modern Researcher, 50 (for "the distortions brought about by ‘present-mindedness,’ the habit of reading into the past our own modern ideas and intentions"); Harry Ritter, Dictionary of Concepts in History (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 9 ("the conscious or unconscious attribution of present attitudes, values, and modes of behavior upon the past is `presentism,' an inexcusable violation of the past's integrity"); Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, Heritage and Challenge: The History and Theory of History (Wheeling, IL: Forum Press, 1989), 204; also James B. Allen, "Emergence of a Fundamental: The Expanding Role of Joseph Smith's First Vision in Mormon Religious Thought," Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): [43], began the article with this statement: "One of the barriers to understanding history is the tendency many of us have to superimpose upon past generations our own patterns of thought and perceptions of reality."

[52] Larry C. Porter, "Reinventing Mormonism: To Remake or Redo," FARMS Review of Books 7 (1995), No. 2: 129 (referred unapologetically to "apologists"--see my note 1) and insisted on page 125: "If the long-established Latter-day Saint chronology of events can be thrown out of whack, then doubt can be cast on the integrity of the whole continuity of occurrences recounted by the Prophet and the brethren in the recorded history of the Church." To avoid what he perceived as a slippery slope, his essay regarded only one kind of historical revisionism as legitimate: "when valid dates and events are discovered," they can "readily be added to the early chronology of Mormonism" to fill in the "numerous informational voids [which] are to be found in the early history of the Latter-day Saint Church." In other words, filling gaps within traditional LDS history is legitimate as long as that process does not revise a single date or interpretation in the official-or-traditional accounts.

It was apparently for this reason that neither in his essay against the approaches of Wesley P. Walters and H. Michael Marquardt, nor in Porter's doctoral dissertation about pre-1831 Mormonism, nor in its publication (for which he added information to some of the source-notes)—nor in other historical articles, nor in any of his other book reviews against critics of Smith's claims for an 1820 revival--has Porter even mentioned the Palmyra Register's references to a local camp-meeting in June 1820, despite its repeated citation since 1969 by other apologists for Smith's claims (including myself). See Larry C. Porter, "A Study of the Origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the States of New York and Pennsylvania, 1816-1831" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brigham Young University, 1971), 45-62 (no reference to Palmyra Register in section, with source-notes, on "The Revival of 1820"), 341-42 (no reference to Palmyra Register in bibliography of "NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS"); Porter, A Study of the Origins of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the States of New York and Pennsylvania (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History and BYU Studies, 2000), iii ("occasionally, the author has included additional information in the endnotes to update old material"), 17-23 (no reference to Palmyra Register in section on "The Revival of 1820"), 39-40 (no additions to the source-notes for "The Revival of 1820"). Paradoxically, without those citations, Porter made a revisionist expansion of Joseph's official history to allow for chronological possibilities beyond "early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty," as follows: "The `First Vision' probably occurred before July, 1820" (see Porter, "Study of the Origins," 58; Porter, Study of the Origins, 21). I have no explanation for why Porter made that statement while declining to mention possible evidence for a June dating of the First Vision; also see note 61.

[53] Bushman, "Just the Facts Please," 128. As an odd coincidence in typesetting, Marquardt's quote appeared on the same numbered page in books published eleven years apart. Compare Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 32, with Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 32.

[54] Seventeen years earlier, a similar retreat seemed to occur in BYU religion professor Paul R. Cheesman's The Keystone of Mormonism: Early Visions of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Provo, UT: Eagle Systems International, 1988), 9-21, which discussed the 1820 vision without specifically asserting that there was a revival that year, instead stating on page 9: "It was during one of these revival periods that four of the Smith family were influenced and united with the Presbyterian Church."

[55] Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, [xiii, for "JOSEPH SMITH CHRONOLOGY"], 35, 37 (for quote), 39-41, with no specific mention of the Palmyra Register articles, nor of a revival of 1820 in the endnotes on 569-71; compare with Bushman's 1969 "First Vision Story Revived," 93n15 (which cited "M. P. Blakeslee, `Notes for a History of Methodism in Phelps, 1886,' pp. 7-8, copy located in the Brigham Young University Library. Cited in Backman, `An Awakening,' note 16"); Richard L. Bushman, "Mr. Bushman Replies," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 5 (Autumn 1970): 8 ("In June of 1818, for example, twenty people were baptized and forty united to the church"), which was a close paraphrase of Blakeslee's manuscript (see my note 4). Aside from failing to mention the 1818 revival in Palmyra, Bushman's biography in 2005 avoided specific reference to an actual "revival" in 1820 while discussing Smith's "First Vision," substituting a less affirmative comparison of Smith with "countless other revival subjects" (39).

[56] Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, 46 (for revival "after Alvin's death"), 729 (index entry). The source-note (570n57) on the matter referred to "a debate on the timing of the revivals. For the argument that revivals in 1824 were the background for Joseph's first vision, see Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 15-41. The [earlier] rebuttal is in Backman, see Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 15-41. The [earlier] rebuttal is in Backman, seemed to tip the scales in favor of 1824 and against Smith's veracity. In Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 53, 192, Bushman at least mentioned the year 1820 in the text and source-note about this matter.

[57] Bushman, "Just the Facts Please," 124 (for quote), 126, and 126n3, which replayed his less emphatic 1969 complaint in Bushman, "First Vision Story Revived," 87, 93n14.

[58] Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, 32. See Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 3: 422-23, for the Smith family's residence as Farmington (later named Manchester), next to Palmyra, during the 1820 census.

[59] Donald L. Enders, "The Joseph Smith, Sr. Family: Farmers of the Genesee," in Susan Easton Black and Charles D. Tate Jr., eds., Joseph Smith: The Prophet, the Man (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1993), 215, where Enders claimed that "enumerated in June, [the] (1820 Federal Census), also identifies the Smith family as living there by June 1820," thus giving the wrong month for the census (see my note 60).

[60] Ronald Vern Jackson, ed., New York 1820 Census Index (North Salt Lake, UT: Accelerated Indexing Systems, 1977), 17 (for date census began); Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 3: 422, that "census taking by law was to begin on the first Monday in August (7 August 1820) and was completed by 5 February 1821."

[61] Steven C. Harper, "History Is People, Places, Sources, and Stories: An Interview with Milton V. Backman, Jr.," Mormon Historical Studies 6 (Spring 2005): 99-100 (for interview occurring during 1994 meeting), 110-11 (for quotes). For the 1988 retreat by BYU religion professor Paul R. Cheesman about the 1820 revival, see my note 54; for the 1989 reversal by BYU historian Marvin S. Hill, see my note 90; for the 1995 concession by BYU religion professor Paul H. Peterson, see the quote for my note 216; for several kinds of retreat in Richard Lyman Bushman's 2005 biography, see narrative discussion for my notes 54-57; for the tentativeness of BYU professors James B. Allen (historian) and John W. Welch (lawyer) in 2005, see following quote (for my note 62).

The First Vision and its related topics were not among the issues examined in John-Charles Duffy, "Defending the Kingdom, Rethinking the Faith: How Apologetics Is Reshaping Mormon Orthodoxy," Sunstone 132 (May 2004): 22-55. Nonetheless, the shifts in apologist positions regarding traditional claims for an 1820 revival are consistent with Duffy's observation (37) that "orthodox intellectuals are willing to judge the truth of traditional faith claims by how well those claims coincide with conclusions yielded by scholarship." However, it is inexplicable that LDS apologists eventually abandoned their own confirming evidences and deferred instead to the polemical writings by Reverend Walters whose historical lapses and misrepresentations can be so easily demonstrated and documented.

[62] James B. Allen and John W. Welch, "The Appearance of the Father and the Son to Joseph Smith in 1820," in Welch "with" Erick B. Carlson, eds., Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 55. See also the decades-earlier statement of a more liberal probability by apologist Larry C. Porter in last sentences of my note 52.

[63] Milton W. Hamilton, The Country Printer: New York State, 1785-1830, 2nd ed. (Port Washington, Long Island, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1964), 139 (for quote), 143 (for Cayuga's newspaper in 1827), as quoted in Norton, "Comparative Images," 249, also 252n69 for Hamilton's emphasis on the 1827 newspaper. On page 249, Norton also cited David J. Russo, "The Origins of Local News in the U.S. Country Press, 1840s-1870s," Journalism Monographs, No. 65, ed. Bruce H. Westley (Lexington, KY: Association for Education in Journalism, 1980), 2, for this assessment of the national pattern of the early 1800s: "In the intimate little rural communities of this time, local news would be spread by word of mouth long before a weekly newspaper could be put into print."

Neither Hamilton, Russo, nor Norton claimed that there was a total absence of local events in village newspapers. Norton explained (250): "Village editors like Timothy Strong did publish some items of local interest. These included the local advertisements which sustained the paper, some deaths and marriages, legal notices, town celebrations, especially for the Fourth of July or for the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, town meetings, and church dedications. In larger villages unusual accidents, spectacular fires, and serious crimes were occasionally reported. These few items, however, except for the advertisements, were usually brief and occupied only a few lines or paragraphs in the paper. ... But society news, town gossip, individual religious experiences, and other village incidents did not appear in the local paper."

Too late to be included in Marvin S. Hill's relevant publications, or in the publications of Reverend Walters before his death, or in Dan Vogel's early publications--Norton's 1991 dissertation was absent from all source-notes and bibliographies in the previously cited books by Robert D. Anderson, H. Michael Marquardt, Grant H. Palmer, and from Vogel's post-1991 publications. Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 2: 555, did list Hamilton in the bibliography for that volume, but only because of a footnote citation to establish a man's place of death (518n4), not to cite Hamilton's explanation for the absence of local news in village newspapers like Palmyra's.

[64] Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, 686, 699.

[65] Bushman, "Just the Facts Please," 126 and 126n3.

[66] Norton, "Comparative Images," 254-56 (for the newspaper editor's opposition to alcoholic beverages and his tongue-in-cheek apology to the Methodists), with no reference in Norton's bibliography to the sources that verified Palmyra's 1818 revival--Aurora Seager's diary, its publication by Latimer, and its summary by the Blakeslee manuscript in BYU's Library (see my notes 4, 5, 31). This oversight was especially odd, because Milton V. Backman Jr. (see my note 32) served as the main adviser for Norton's dissertation. For other apologists who overlooked Seager's published reference to Palmyra's 1818 revival (despite its location in BYU's library), see my notes 55 and 149.

[67] Ivan Blackwell Burnett Jr., "Methodism and Alcohol: Recommendations For a Beverage Alcohol Policy Based on the Ever-Changing Historic Disciplinal Positions of American Methodism," D.M. dissertation, Claremont School of Theology, 1973, 33-34 (for Wesley's views and practices, with order of quotes reversed in my narrative), 80-81 (for regulations from 1780 to 1812), 90 (for new emphasis in 1848).

[68] Francis Ward, An Account of Three Camp-Meetings, Held By the Methodists, At Sharon, in Litchfield County, Connecticut; at Rhinebeck, in Dutchess County [New York State]; and at Petersburgh, in Renssalaer County, New York State (Brooklyn: Robinson and Little, 1806), [6], available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 11793.

[69] Anonymous, A Faithful Narrative of the Transactions Noticed At the Camp-Meeting, In Goshen, Connecticut, September, 1808 (N.p., 1809), 18, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 17473, emphasis in original; also see Anonymous, The Camp Meeting. By the Druid of the Lakes (N.p.: 1810), 5, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 19707.

[70] Anonymous, A Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y.[,] County of Albany; Which Commenced on Friday, the Seventh of September, 1810, and Ended the Monday Following, By a Spectator (Albany: Webster and Skinner, [1810]), 10, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 21512.

[71] Nathan Bangs, A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2 vols. (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1839), 2: 268.

[72] B. W. Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual: A Practical Book for the Camp Ground (Boston: H. V. Degen, 1854), 134, observed that a camp-meeting "will consume an amount of water entirely incredible to persons not experienced in such matters ..." Although Methodists located their revival campsites near a stream or other natural source of drinking water, camp-meetings sometimes extended thirteen football fields in length (see my note 145), which required some revivalists to make a mile-roundtrip from their tents for a drink of water. Thus, forest-revivalists needed bottled beverages.

[73] "Introductory remarks to Short Sketches of Revivals of Religion, among the Methodists in the Western Country," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (May 1819), 186 ("In the summer [of 1800,] they took to the woods. The people in order to accommodate themselves, carried provisions for their families and beasts, in their waggons [sic]; erected tents, and continued some days in the exercises of singing, praying and preaching! Thus commenced what has since received the appellation of `Camp-Meetings'"); also Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "camp-meeting"; Charles Yrigoyen Jr. and Susan E. Warrick, Historical Dictionary of Methodism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 45.

[74] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 24.

[75] "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (February 1821): 72, also a less-detailed reference to a forest "camp meeting at Pleasant-Run meeting-house" on page 70. Although there is a town of the same name in New York State, the article's internal references identify this as Fountain-Head, Kentucky. For an example of Methodist families bringing their own tents, see George Peck, The Life and Times of Rev. George Peck, D.D., Written By Himself (New York: Nelson & Phillips; Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1874), 79-80 ("During this [1817-18] visit[,] a camp-meeting was held at Columbus, some ten miles from my father's. We took our tent, and spent there a very pleasant and profitable season").

See the family-sized tents in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60. This lithograph, for style and convenience, depicted barely 150 attenders, giving a false impression that camp-meetings were the size of a small congregational meeting; see also last comments in my note 145. Sources cited in this article (including New York's Methodist Magazine from 1818 through 1828) described no camp-meeting with fewer than 400 attenders and described many with attendance in the thousands.

[76] Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., 3; also Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 131 ("The altar should generally be at least twenty-five feet square"); see the preaching stand and space in front of it for revivalist listeners in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60. Concerning the physical misrepresentations within this commonly published lithograph see last paragraph in my note 75 and see last comments in my note 145.

[77] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN WEST FARMS," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (May 1819): 200.

[78] "A SHORT SKETCH OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF TROY, A.D. 1816," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (April 1818): 152-53; "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF SCHNECTADY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (July 1819): 275; "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN KENSINGTON CHAPEL, PHILADELPHIA, Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (November 1824): 399; "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON ROCKINGHAM CIRCUIT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (July 1826): 273-74 (which began with summer camp-meetings, then shifted to October "prayer-meetings”— the latter described as "this revival ... at the Spring Creek meeting-house"); "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD AT UTICA," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (August 1826): 309 (which began "in the month of March last, at a prayer-meeting held at the meeting-house"); "Extract of a letter from the Rev. B. Sabin, dated Ithica [sic], Jan. 13, 1827," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 10 (March 1827): 133; "Revival in Baltimore," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 10 (April 1827): 181 ("confined to Wesley chapel").

[79] For an example of the longer phrase (by contrast to numerous references only to "camp-meeting” before and after), see Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 185, quoting from a description of meetings in 1821; also see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[80] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5.

[81] Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 99; repeated in Vogel, Religious Seekers, 42n21, in Vogel, Making of a Prophet, 589n33, in Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 49. For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York and for the distance of nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra to Vienna (now named Phelps), see my note 4.

[82] See Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [3], 11, for the separate references in 1806 to arrangements with the owner and "proprietor" to use their forested lands as the site for camp-meetings; John F. Wright, Sketches of the Life and Labors of James Quinn, Who Was Nearly Half a Century a Minister of the Gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern and R. P. Thompson, 1851), 101 (for a camp-meeting "in the month of September, 1810, that we pitched our tents in a beautiful sugar grove, on the lands of Richard Lee"); Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828, 154 ("the camp-meeting on Squire Light's ground"), 322 ("a camp-meeting in September of this year on the land of Edward Paine"); Peck, Life and Times of Rev. George Peck, 82 ("a camp-meeting on Broome Circuit, on the ground of Charles Stone"); also Bushman, "Mr. Bushman Replies," 8 ("Again in 1820 the Palmyra paper referred to activities at the Methodist camp ground. But the Methodists did not own property yet. As was the usual practice elsewhere, they held camp meetings on borrowed land").

By the 1850s, American Methodists had chapels in virtually every town and in most villages. Even then, the Methodist Church did not own the land on which it held camp-meetings, and Gorham's 1854 Camp Meeting Manual, 122, said it was always necessary for the organizers to carefully consider: "Will the owner of the ground, or of contiguous woodlands, allow the cutting of poles for tents, and the use of wood for fuel?"

[83] For Joseph Smith's 1838 account as the only one of his various retellings to specify "early spring," see Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 27-28, 36, 37, 39, 44, 60, 169-70, 181-82, 184, 187-88, 189-90, 192, 194, 207, 208.

[84] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 4-5; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 14. I acknowledge the subjectivity in this discussion of chilly-cold weather as a barrier to morning prayer in a grove of trees. In itself, this is a weak argument against "early spring" for the First Vision, but the role of history is to avoid seeing evidence in isolation. When combined with the discussion connected with my notes 103-04, this weather-data seem compelling as further evidences that Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820 was, in fact, the catalyst for Joseph's prayer-vision that actually occurred in late spring.

[85] Partial photos of the left-side in manuscript pages for March-April 1820 of the weather diary kept at Sackets Harbor, western New York, plus complete transcription of left-and-right side for March 1st through April 15th, in Don C. Lefgren, "Oh, How Lovely Was the Morning: Sun., 26 Mar 1820," Meridian Magazine: The Place Where Latter-day Saints Gather, Internet publication on 9 October 2002 (available at http://www.johnpratt.com/items/docs/lds/meridian/2002/vision).

Holding to Smith's "early spring" description, Lefgren argued that 25-26 March 1820 (Saturday-Sunday) were the only possible days warm enough for young Joseph to attempt to pray in a forested grove, and Lefgren chose Sunday as likelier. Even those two days seem very unlikely for a visit to pray under shade trees, since the outside temperature would have been no higher than 59 degrees Fahrenheit at 10 AM—even in direct sunlight.

[86] Consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 17.05 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Canandaigua, New York). Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 106, referred to "Canandaigua, which according to the 1824 gazetteer was 13 miles from Palmyra." Even though that source strengthens my narrative commentary (especially in connection with my note 209) about the near proximity of the two towns, this article gives various mileages from the Internet source, due to its easier access for readers (as compared with the difficulty of consulting an old gazetteer, which also did not give distances between all the towns mentioned in this article).

[87] THE FARMER'S DIARY, OR BEER'S ONTARIO ALMANACK FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1820 (Canandaigua, NY: J. D. Bemis, [1819]), calendar for April, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 47953. These farmer's almanac predictions for weather varied from town to town within the same state. For example, FARMER'S DIARY; OR Catskill Almanack, FOR THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 1820 (Catskill, NY: J. S. Lewis, [1819]) predicted different weather for 15-16 April 1820 ("C. [Clouds] together then clear"), with "and more pleasant" for 18-20 April. Available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 47954.

[88] "SNOW STORM," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 24 May 1820, [2].

[89] Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 54 (for the spring dates in which this history was dictated/written, first in 1838 and again in 1839). He made no reference to the idea of a seasonal-temperature conflation as discussed in my narrative.

[90] Lawrence Foster, "First Visions: Personal Observations on Joseph Smith's Religious Experience," Sunstone 8 (September-October 1983): 40. This echoed Marvin Hill, "The First Vision Controversy: A Critique and Reconciliation," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Summer 1982): 41 ("if Joseph Smith in 1838 read back into 1820 some details of a revival that occurred in 1824, there is no reason to conclude that he invented his religious experiences"), which seemed to be a confident conclusion to Hill's observation on page 37: "even by Walters' standards[,] the 1819-20 season of revivals was not so dull as Walters said."

Nevertheless, despite criticizing Walters for his polemical approach, this 1982 article was a mid-point in the BYU history professor's gradual acceptance of the minister-researcher's basic argument, as stated in Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight From American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 193n54 ("I set down here my reasons for believing that none of the small revivals around Palmyra and environs before 1823 and described by Backman satisfy all the conditions in Joseph's descriptions"). There was one indication that Hill was already moving toward his 1989 conclusion by 1982: he referred to Backman's use of the Palmyra Register without acknowledging that Backman cited it to show that Palmyra had a camp-meeting revival in 1820 ("First Vision Controversy," 36).

[91] "ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING AT BARRE, VT." Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (December 1820): 470.

[92] "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN NEW-HAMPSHIRE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (March 1821): 109, concerning "our camp-meeting in September last.”

[93] "DESCRIPTION OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD ON FAIRFIELD CIRCUIT, LANCASTER DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (December 1819): 475.

[94] For references to which months a "camp-meeting" occurred (including its variant spellings) in the Northern States, see Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (March 1818): 119; 1 (June 1818): 237; 1 (September 1818): 356; 2 (February 1819): 75; 2 (June 1819): 233, 235; 2 (August 1819): 308, 309, 310; 2 (December 1819): 474; 3 (May 1820): 199; 3 (December 1820): 470; 4 (January 1821): 70-71; 4 (February 1821): 78; 4 (March 1821): 109; 4 (May 1821): 197; 4 (October 1821): 387, 392-93; 5 (March 1822): 116; 5 (October 1822): 375, 394; 5 (December 1822): 474, 475; 6 (March 1823): 117; 6 (October 1823): 397; 7 (March 1824): 115, 116, 117; 7 (September 1824): 353; 7 (October 1824): 397; 7 (November 1824): 436; 8 (March 1825): 111; 8 (April 1825): 158, 159, 162; 8 (June 1825): 240; 8 (July 1825): 285; 8 (August 1825): 321; 8 (November 1825): 436, 438, 440; 8 (December 1825): 481, 482, 483, 484; 9 (August 1826): 313; 10 (September 1827): 423; 11 (April 1828): 161; 11 (June 1828): 234, 235; 11 (September 1828): 356.

Because of the more temperate weather in the Southern States, Methodist camp-meetings were reported as early as May but no later than October for the South in Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (June 1819): 223; 3 (April 1820): 156; 4 (January 1821): 37; 4 (February 1821): 70, 71; 4 (May 1821): 191-92, 193, 194; 4 (December 1821): 475; 5 (October 1822): 400; 6 (February 1823): 72, 74, 75; 7 (September 1824): 351, 352, 353; 7 (November 1824): 436; 8 (November 1825): 442; 8 (December 1825): 487; 9 (July 1826): 273; 9 (November 1826): 432, 433, 475; 11 (April 1828): 160; 11 (July 1828): 279. When it was unclear to which region various articles referred, I compared the named circuits and districts with entries in Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828.

[95] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON OHIO DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (August 1819): 308-09.

[96] "GOOD EFFECTS OF CAMPMEETINGS," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (August 1825): 321.

[97] "GENESEE CONFERENCE," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (August 1826): 313.

[98] "STATE OF RELIGION ON THE SUSQUEHANNAH DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (December 1825): 482.

[99] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 17.

[100] "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN ONEIDA DISTRICT, IN THEGENESEE CONFERENCE," written on 2 August 1818, Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (February 1819): 75.

[101] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 123. Although this 1854 manual also recommended a start-date no earlier than "the 20th of June," New York's Methodists were obviously having successful camp-meetings during the first week of June from 1819 to 1826.

[102] "ACCOUNT OF THE LATE REVIVALS OF RELIGION IN THE PROVINCE OF UPPER-CANADA," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (January 1819): 33; "Account of a remarkable revival of Religion in Chillicothe, (O.) [Ohio]," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (June 1819): 239 ("From the commencement of this revival of religion--say in October last, till the close of it in the month of February following"); "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN THE CITY OF SCHNECTADY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (July 1819): 274-75 (regarding revival meetings from December 1818 through April 1819); "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON ONTARIO DISTRICT," letter written on 25 January 1825, Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (April 1825): 159 (in Palmyra, "at a prayer meeting at Dr. Chase's, there were seven [converts]"); "Extract of a letter from the Rev. B. Sabin, dated Ithica [sic], Jan. 13, 1827," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 10 (March 1827): 133. This periodical published many other reports of winter revivals in chapels and houses from 1818 to 1828, but I did not take notes on most of them because of my research emphasis on camp-meetings. My notes show no references to barn-revivals in the Methodist Magazine.

For October-May revivals in barns and school houses, see Hosmer, Autobiography of Rev. Alvin Torry, 17-18 (Methodist revival in a barn); Maxwell Pierson Gaddis, Brief Recollections of the Late Rev. George W. Walker (Cincinnati: Swormsted & Poe/R. P. Thompson, 1857), 112 (in 1825 the Methodist "congregation was too large to crowd into the dwelling-house, and the meeting was held in a large barn, which was no uncommon occurrence at that early period"); "REVIVAL OF RELIGION: EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM REV. CYRENIUS M. FULLER, DATED Dorset, [Vermont,] March 28, 1822," The American Baptist Magazine and Missionary Intelligencer [Boston]3 (September 1822): 437-38 ("Meetings were attended almost every day ... In one instance[,] after attending a lecture at a school house, a number of young people returned to a neighbouring house when it was soon ascertained, that one of the family had entertained a hope in Christ during the meeting"). This Baptist minister used "lecture" to refer to sermons given on days other than Sunday.

[103] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 120, referred to its "season"; also the more contemporary "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON SCIOTO DISTRICT, (OHIO)," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (June 1819): 233 ("Camp-Meetings have been rendered a great blessing to this country, especially during the last season"); also, "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN HOLSTON DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (September 1824): 352 ("Our first Camp-Meeting was held in the last week of July. ... Many in the neighbourhood have become convinced of the utility of Camp-Meetings, and have resolved to build tents by the next season").

[104] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 2; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 5. For narrative flow, I reverse the order of these separate phrases, but the meaning remains the same as in the original.

[105] Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 99; Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 101; Vogel, Religious Seekers, 30; Hill, Quest for Refuge, 12; Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 54-55, 61n49; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 59, 59n21, 213; Anderson, Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith, 5, 140; Palmer, Insider's View of Mormon Origins, 44, 252; Vogel, Making of a Prophet, 59, 127-29, 505; Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 48, 50, 136.

[106] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 16 (for quote), which was a briefer statement in 1854 of the 1839 observation by Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 265 ("soon led to a regular method of holding them in different parts of the country, by previous appointment and preparation"). For Bangs, see my note 127.

[107] A Collection of the Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, with the Choruses Affixed: As usually sung at Camp-Meetings, &c. To Which Is Prefixed A Concise Account of the Rise of Camp-Meetings, And some observations relative to the manner of conducting them, 3rd ed. (New York: John C. Totten, 1813), 5 (for Totten as Methodist), 5-6 (for quotes), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 28180; John C. Totten, comp., A Collection of the Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, with the Choruses Affixed: As usually sung at Camp-Meetings, &c. To Which Is Prefixed A Concise Account of the Rise of Camp-Meetings, And some observations relative to the manner of conducting them, 5th ed. (New York: By the author, 1815), 7 (for Totten as Methodist, also 24, 94), 7-8 (for quotes), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 34391. The same quotes appeared on pages 7-8 in Totten's eighth New York edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1817 (not in Shaw and Shoemaker, but a copy available at Special Collections, Honnold Library, Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California).

[108] Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., 6.

[109] Robert Drew Simpson, ed., American Methodist Pioneer: The Life and Journals of The Rev. Freeborn Garrettson, 1752-1827 (Rutland, VT: Academy Books/Drew University Library, 1984), 318 (for quote from diary entry on 4 August 1809 about a Delaware camp-meeting that began on Thursday); Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828, 166 ("This year [1809] the first camp-meeting was held in Luzerne county. ... People were there from fifty miles around"); Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 16 ("three persons were converted about thirty miles off, on their way to the camp meeting").

[110] "COPY OF A LETTER TO REV. JAMES QUINN," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (February 1820): 79. She walked this distance to a revival held at a "quarterly meeting."

[111] Peter Crawley, "A Comment on Joseph Smith's Account of His First Vision and the 1820 Revival," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 6 (Spring 1971): 107.

[112] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [6]; see end of the first paragraph within my note 75 for example of a family bringing its own tent.

[113] I Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 12.

[114] Wright, Sketches of the Life and Labors of James Quinn, 107 (for the camp-meeting's "narrow streets and alleys"); Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 266 (for its "numbered and labelled" streets); see my note 155 for distinction between the small "family tents" and the huge "society tents." For Bangs, see my note 127; for the extensive size of typical camp-meetings and its corresponding misrepresentation in a commonly published lithograph, see last paragraph in my note 75 and see last comments in my note 145.

[115] "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD AT COW-HARBOUR, LONG-ISLAND, WHICH COMMENCED AUGUST 11th, 1818," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (September 1818): 356 (for beginning on Tuesday morning and for its attendance), 359 (for ending on Saturday morning).

[116] "ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING AT BARRE, VT.," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (December 1820): 470-71 (Thursday to Monday).

[117] "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN NASHVILLE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (May 1821): 191-92, 194.

[118] "PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD ON HUDSON-RIVER DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 5 (December 1822): 474-75.

[119] "CAMPMEETING ON THE CHAMPLAIN DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (December 1825): 484; also Anonymous, A Short Account of the Proceedings of the Camp Meeting, Holden By the Methodists, In Pittsfield, [New York,] June 1808, by a Spectator (Albany, NY: Van Benthuysen & Wood, 1808), 24 ("during the four days this meeting was holden"), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 16234.

[120] "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (February 1821): 72. Although there is a town of the same name in New York State, the article's internal references identify this as Fountain-Head, Kentucky.

[121] "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN NEW-HAMPSHIRE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (March 1821): 109.

[122] "ACCOUNT OF CAMP MEETINGS ON THE BALTIMORE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 6 (October 1823): 397.

[123] "ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING IN GLOUSTER COUNTY, NEW JERSEY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (October 1824): 397. For narrative flow, I reverse the order of these separate phrases, but the meaning remains the same as in the original.

[124] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON ROCKINGHAM CIRCUIT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (July 1826): 273, regarding previous year's camp-meeting.

[125] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON HANOVER CIRCUIT," and "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON BOTETOURT CIRCUIT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (November 1826): 432, 433.

[126] "ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD ON LONG-ISLAND, NEW-YORK STATE, FROM THE 7TH TO THE 13TH OF AUGUST, 1821," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (October 1821): 387. This occurred at a time when a resident referred to Brooklyn as "this village," in "PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN BROOKLYN, LONG-ISLAND, Methodist Magazine [New York City] 6 (March 1823): 117.

[127] Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 266; Abel Stevens, Life and Times of Nathan Bangs, D.D. (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1863), 203 (for his appointment as presiding elder of the Rhinebeck District of eastern New York in May 1813), 222 (for end of that appointment in June 1817), 243 (from "1820-1828, Bangs was also editor of the Methodist Magazine"). Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 79n55 cited an 1853 edition of Bangs (which had same volume and page as for my quote from the 1839 edition); see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[128] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 5 (October 1822): 400; Peck, Life and Times of Rev. George Peck, 144 (for the 1825 camp meeting). Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 75n19, cited Peck's autobiography; see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[129] When days of the week or dates of the month were given in the sources cited for this article, 63 percent of camp-meetings began on Thursday or Friday, compared with a random expectation of 28.6 percent for those days combined. In addition to the starting days already given in the text for meetings of four to six days duration, Thursday or Friday was the starting day for the shortest camp-meetings (three-days) in Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [3, "Our camp meeting was held at Sharon, from Friday the 27th"], 17 ("the camp meeting at Petersburgh began on Friday the 26th"); Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp- Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y. specified in the title that it Commenced on Friday, the Seventh of September, 1810, and Ended the Monday Following; "DESCRIPTION OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD ON FAIRFIELD CIRCUIT, LANCASTER DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (December 1819): 474 (began Friday and ended on Monday). Also Thursday or Friday was the starting day for camp-meetings whose closing dates were not given in Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828, 154 ("Saturday, 11, brought us to the camp-meeting on Squire Light's ground. We found it had been in operation two days," i.e. since Thursday), 242 ("August 9 [1805--Friday]. A Camp-meeting was held on my circuit, which was kept up almost day and night"), 429 ("Our camp-meeting commenced on the 13th of September [Thursday]" in 1821), 437-38 ("This year [1825] a camp-meeting was held in Canaan, commencing on the seventh of September"--Wednesday); "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON OHIO DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (August 1819): 309 (for Friday, 4 June 1819 and Thursday, 10 June 1819); "ACCOUNT OF THE REVIVAL AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD IN FOUNTAIN-HEAD CIRCUIT THROUGH THE LAST YEAR," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (February 1821): 70-72 (for Friday, 11 June 1819, followed by camp-meetings starting on the two following Fridays); "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN NASHVILLE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (May 1821): 193-94 (for Friday, 21 July 1820, for Thursday, 3 August 1820, for Thursday, 21 September 1820); "PROGRESS OF THE WORK OF GOD ON HUDSON-RIVER DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 5 (December 1822): 474 (for Thursday, 27 June 1822); "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN HOLSTON DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (September 1824): 352 (for Friday, 19 September 1823); "GOOD EFFECTS OF CAMPMEETINGS," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (August 1825): 321 (for Friday 24 June 1825); "STATE OF RELIGION ON THE SUSQUEHANNAH DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (December 1825): 481 (for Thursday, 11 August 1825, and for Thursday, 15 September 1825).

[130] John Stewart, Highways and Hedges; or, Fifty Years of Western Methodism (Cincinnati: Hitchcock and Walden; New York: Carlton and Lanahan, 1872), 80 (for quote), with 1818 as the year of his first camp-meeting (44, 51).

[131] Latimer, Three Brothers, 22; Blakeslee, "NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF METHODISM IN PHELPS," manuscript page 7.

[132] Barzun and Graff, Modern Researcher, 115.

[133] "Effects of Drunkenness," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 28 June 1820, [2], which is fully transcribed in my note 7.

[134] In one instance, Methodist ministers were unable to dissuade some revivalists from leaving an August camp-meeting with their families on Tuesday evening, but the camp-meeting itself adjourned during the daytime on Wednesday. See "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON HANOVER CIRCUIT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (November 1826): 433.

[135] "GENESEE CONFERENCE," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (August 1826): 313.

[136] "Aggregate amount of each description of persons within the Northern District of New York," with totals for various towns, including Palmyra, from unnumbered page in manuscript U.S. census of 1820 for Ontario County, New York, microfilm 193,717 in LDS Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[137] Samuel Gregg, The History of Methodism Within the Bounds of the Erie Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1865), 194 (for Paddock's licensing in 1817); Z. [Zechariah] Paddock, Memoir of Rev. Benjamin G. Paddock (New York: Nelson & Phillips; Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1875), 163n (for "special earthly temple"); compare my note 4 about the latter author and his brother Benjamin.

[138] Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 142 (for second quote); my note 127. Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 79n55 cited an 1853 edition of Bangs (which had same volume and page as for my quote from the 1839 edition); see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[139] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 11.

[140] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [4], [5], 6; Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., 4-5, 9; Anonymous, Short Account of the Proceedings of the Camp Meeting, Holden By the Methodists, In Pittsfield, [New York], [5], 7, 8, 12, 13. In keeping with Methodist regimentation wherever these camp-meetings were held, "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON OHIO DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 2 (August 1819), 310, reported: "The solemn trumpet had summoned us to the concert of prayer"; and "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN NASHVILLE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (May 1821), 192 ("We had the trumpet blown according to the order of the meeting"); also "GOOD EFFECTS OF CAMPMEETINGS," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (August 1825): 321; "Campmeeting at Compo, Con. [Connecticut]," and "NEWBURGH CAMPMEETING," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (November 1825): 435, 441; also Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 267.

[141] "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD AT COW-HARBOUR, LONGISLAND, WHICH COMMENCED AUGUST 11th, 1818," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (September 1818): 359; Anonymous, Faithful Narrative of the Transactions Noticed At the Camp-Meeting, In Goshen, Connecticut, 12 ("about three o'clock [AM,] as I judged, the exercises concluded ... [and] I wished for day," emphasis in original); also Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [6]; Anonymous, Short Account of the Proceedings of the Camp Meeting, Holden By the Methodists, In Pittsfield, [New York], 12-13, 21 ("Thursday morning at one o'clock [AM,] a sermon was preached"), 22 ("Between the hours of four and five [AM,] they formed their circular prayer meetings").

[142] Orsamus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase (Rochester, NY: William Alling, 1851), 214, reprinted in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 3:49.

[143] "Campmeeting at Compo, Con. [Connecticut]," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (November 1825): 438 (first quote); Wright, Sketches of the Life and Labors of James Quinn, 108 (second section of quotes).

[144] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 12 (for "several thousands"), 11-12 (for rest of my quotes); see the preaching stand, with its inclined roof of boards, in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60. Concerning the physical misrepresentations within this commonly published lithograph, see last paragraph in my note 75 and see last comments in my note 145.

[145] "Campmeeting at Compo, Con. [Connecticut]," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (November 1825): 438 (for quote and also "a congregation of ten thousand"). For a mile as equal to 1760 yards, see "WEIGHTS AND MEASURES" entry-chart in any standard dictionary, or do Google search on Internet; for American football field as 100 yards in length, see DK Illustrated Oxford Dictionary (London: DK Publishing; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 317, or do Google search on Internet. Thus, three-fourths of a mile equals 1320 yards, which equals 13.2 football fields. Compare with the inaccurately compressed space and unrealistic visual perspective in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60; also see last paragraph in my note 75.

[146] "GENESEE CONFERENCE," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (August 1826): 313 (for "not less than ten thousand people" attending Palmyra's camp-meeting).

[147] Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., [3]. For a rod as equal to 5.5 yards, see "WEIGHTS AND MEASURES" entry-chart in any standard dictionary, or do Google search on Internet; for length of football field, see my note 145.

[148] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 17.

[149] Latimer, Three Brothers, 22; Blakeslee, "NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF METHODISM IN PHELPS," manuscript page 7; Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," 307; Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 74n34. Disbelievers of Smith's narrative about an 1820 revival are not the only ones who have overlooked Palmyra's 1818 camp-meeting revival, as described by Reverend Seager. Anderson, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision," 373, likewise claimed that the town's pre-1820 revival was in 1817. See the same oversight as discussed in narrative for my notes 32, 55, and 66.

[150] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 3.

[151] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 12.

[152] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 125.

[153] Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., 3 ("about thirty feet square"); Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 131 ("at least twenty-five feet square"); Anonymous, Faithful Narrative of the Transactions Noticed At the Camp-Meeting, In Goshen, Connecticut, 5 ("two or three acres"); also see revivalists standing in the cleared "altar" space in front of the preaching stand, in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60. Concerning the physical misrepresentations within this commonly published lithograph, see last paragraph in my note 75 and see last comments in my note 145.

[154] "Campmeeting at Compo, Con. [Connecticut]," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (November 1825): 438. In contrast with the organizer's comment in 1825 that his camp-meeting's tents had a capacity of hundreds, in 1839 Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 266, more conservatively suggested that the largest tents should accommodate "a hundred individuals" each. See end of the first paragraph within my note 75 for example of a family bringing its own tent.

[155] "LETTER FROM THOMAS KENNERLY," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (April 1820): 156, concerning a camp-meeting "in August last." Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 125, 140, distinguished between "family tents" and the "society tents" provided by the Methodist organizers. For "society" as another way of referring to the Methodist Church, see "`Plain Truth' is received," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 5 July 1820, [2], which is fully transcribed in my note 8; The Discipline of the Methodist Society: As Adopted in the City of New-York, 16th of July, 1821 (New York: "Printed for the Society" by Bolmore, 1821); also see the family-sized tents in illustration labeled "A western camp meeting in 1819. after lithograph by J. Miller," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Spring 1969): 60. Concerning the physical misrepresentations within this commonly published lithograph, see last paragraph in my note 75 and see last comments in my note 145.

[156] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 122.

[157] "CAMPMEETING ON THE CHAMPLAIN DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (December 1825): 483.

[158] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 125, which stated in full: "For obvious reasons, the clearing of the ground, trimming of trees, and especially the grading [i.e., leveling of the ground in front of the preaching stand], should be done some weeks before the meeting." By implication, his estimate of "weeks" included the time necessary to erect "an hundred family tents, or their equivalent in society tents" which he had already mentioned on this page.

[159] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 120-21.

[160] "Great Revivals in Religion" and "Extract from a letter from a gentleman in Providence, R.I. to his friend in this town, dated May 1, 1820," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 7 June 1820, [1]. Emphasis in originals.

[161] Enoch Mudge, The American Camp-Meeting Hymn Book (Boston: Joseph Burdakin, 1818), vii (for first quote), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 44918; Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 267 (for second quote).

[162] Anonymous, A Poetical Description of a Methodist Camp-Meeting (Philadelphia: N.p., 1819), 14n, first printed in New York City in 1807 as A Poem Written on a Methodist Camp-Meeting, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 49145.

[163] "GENESEE CONFERENCE," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 9 (August 1826): 313.

[164] Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 29.

[165] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 101. His statement of unconditional generality about the characteristics of "a camp meeting" went far beyond that page's arguments against apologist claims for a revival in Vienna (now named Phelps), New York in 1819-20. In 1969 Walters claimed in "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 77n46, that he had "examined all the issues of the following ... The Methodist Magazine (Jan. 1818-Dec. 1821)," and he cited various issues of the magazine's volumes for 1824, 1825, and 1826 in his 1969 source-notes 75nn19-20, 76n22, 76n30, 76n32, 77n43, 79n59.

To me, it is therefore inconceivable that this minister-researcher was unaware of the repeatedly described characteristics of camp-meetings in that official Methodist source, characteristics which he either misrepresented or concealed in his articles of 1967, 1969, 1980, and in his posthumously published book of 1994. Thus, I can only conclude that Reverend Wesley P. Walters knowingly and intentionally misled his readers about the significance of camp-meetings that he knew occurred on the outskirts of Palmyra in June 1818 and in June 1820. See comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5 and 13.

[166] Report in 1810 by Anonymous, Treatise on the Proceedings of a Camp-Meeting Held in Bern, N.Y., 10. By contrast, Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 266, stated in 1839 that his experience was with camp-meetings in New York, and that "five hundred" was their smallest attendance (268). Not only had he served as presiding elder of the Rhinebeck District in the eastern part of the state from 1813 to 1817, but Bangs was also editor of the Methodist Magazine from 1820-1828 (see my note 127). Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 79n55 cited an 1853 edition of Bangs (which had same volume and page as for this quote from the 1839 edition), and this should have alerted Walters to the fact that Palmyra's camp-meetings of June 1818 and June 1820 should not simply be dismissed as insignificant; see the two paragraphs in narrative before my note 137, and see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[167] Simpson, American Methodist Pioneer, 318 (for diary entry on Thursday, 4 August 1809).

[168] Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 64-65, 66, 69, 76n37, 77n40; Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 98-99; Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 96-98; Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 17-18; Palmer, Insider's View of Mormon Origins, 241, 243; Marquardt, Rise of Mormonism, 13, 15-17.

[169] "AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD IN CANAAN, N.Y.," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (October 1820): 393.

[170] "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD ON OCONEE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 6 (February 1823): 72.

[171] "REVIVAL OF RELIGION IN WELLFLEET," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 4 (February 1821): 78 (for "upwards of twenty" converts); "ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF GOD ON RHINEBECK DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (September 1824): 353 ("ever since our Camp-meeting in Hilldale, in September last, about twenty, principally heads of families, have been added unto the Lord's people in this place"), emphasis in original. Concerning the previously quoted minister who felt comforted with a dozen converts out of 600 revivalists, he next held another camp-meeting that "was more numerously attended than the others ... and about twenty converted" at the largest of these camp-meetings in September 1822. See "REVIVAL OF THE WORK OF GOD ON OCONEE DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 6 (February 1823): 72. For Palmyra's 1818 camp-meeting, see quotes for my note 4 and within my notes 5, 32, 55.

[172] "Revival in Bridgetown, N.J." [page-heading], Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (June 1825): 238.

[173] Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 345-46 (1820 statistics of total "white" and "colored" members for all circuits in Ontario District), as compared with 330 (1819 statistics of total "white" and "colored" members for the same circuits in what was then "Genesee District"), which are summarized here as follows: Lyons Circuit had 374 total in the July 1820 report, as compared with its previously higher total of 673 in the July 1819 report; Seneca Circuit had 438 total in the July 1820 report, as compared with its previously higher total of 1,010 in the July 1819 report; Ontario Circuit had 671 total in the July 1820 report, as compared with its previously higher total of 677 in the July 1819 report; Canandaigua Circuit had 88 total in the July 1820 report, as compared with its previously higher total of 200 in the July 1819 report; Crooked Lake had 374 total in the July 1820 report, as compared with its previously higher total of 656 in the July 1819 report. Such comparison is not possible for the following circuits listed for Ontario District in July 1820, but not in the report for 1819: Catharine, Danville, and Prattstown. Because the above minutes do not specify the exact dates these reports were submitted for the Genesee Conference's annual meeting, see Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 158 (for its annual meeting and reports as of 1 July 1819), 165 (for its annual meeting and reports as of 20 July 1820).

[174] Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham's Purchase, 214, reprinted in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 3: 50; also discussion in Anderson, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision," 378-84. For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York and for the distance of nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra to Vienna (now named Phelps), see my note 4.

Vogel, Making of a Prophet, 589n33, implied that it is anachronistic to apply Orsamus Turner's description to 1820 (since "the Methodists did not acquire their property in the woods on the Vienna Road until July 1821"). However, Making of a Prophet, 153, contradicted Vogel's apparent objection by affirming: "It was this kind of revival meeting that Joseph Jr. experienced firsthand on the outskirts of Palmyra Village," and Vogel's index (705) identified this statement on page 153 as applying to "Palmyra (NY) ... revivals (1817)." With regard to the 1817 revival he affirmed, Vogel clearly recognized that the Methodists had no need to own the property on which they held a revival (as discussed in text for my note 82 and within the note itself). However, he paradoxically seemed to assert that such ownership was necessary in 1820, the year for which he denied there was a Palmyra revival.

As part of a letter to the editor in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16 (Spring 1983): 6, Marvin S. Hill referred to Turner's statement and commented: "Charles Brown says that Joseph acquired a `spark of Methodist fire' on the Vienna Road and became an exhorter in the evening meetings. We have no indication here as to whether Joseph's interest was brief or otherwise, but Brown's comment that he was an exhorter at `meetings' suggests some length of time." Hill wrote as if (1) Brown were alive to be a contemporary witness of an 1820 revival and (2) as if Brown's statement were independent of Turner, both of which I sincerely wish were true. However, neither of which was the case. Hill was referring to a source described in Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 16n20, as "Charles Brown, `Manchester in the Early Days.' Files of the Shortsville Enterprise Press, October 18, 1902; October 25, 1902, copy located in the Brigham Young University Library." Not alive to be a credible witness of anything in 1820, Brown was obviously paraphrasing in 1902 what he had read in Turner's 1851 book. Also see comments about Hill's approach in my note 90.

[175] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 100; also Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 29, 44, 54-55; Vogel, Religious Seekers, 29-30; see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[176] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, [4-5], 6-9. Likewise, "many fell to the ground under the mighty power of God, while shouts of the redeemed seem to rend the heavens," in "A SHORT ACCOUNT OF A CAMP-MEETING HELD AT COW-HARBOUR, LONG-ISLAND, WHICH COMMENCED AUGUST 11th, 1818," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 1 (September 1818): 359.

[177] Ward, Account of Three Camp-Meetings, 12.

[178] Gorham, Camp Meeting Manual, 155-56; also in the 1839 edition of Bangs, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 2: 266-67, which included a tenth rule that applied only to New York City, where Bangs had been editor of the Methodist Magazine from 1820 to 1828 (see my note 127).

[179] "GOOD EFFECTS OF CAMPMEETINGS," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 8 (August 1825): 321.

[180] "NOTES FOR A HISTORY OF METHODISM IN PHELPS by Rev. M. P. Blakeslee, 1886," manuscript pages 7-8. Walters, "Reply to Dr. Bushman," 98, referred disparagingly (and without mentioning Reverend House) to the "late reminiscence by a Mr. Sarsnett reporting a camp meeting near Vienna."

Interestingly, Backman and Bushman ignored Sarsnett's testimony about the 1820 camp-meeting and instead emphasized Blakeslee's very quotable statement by Mrs. Sarepta Marsh Baker (sometimes without identifying her by name) that this revival was a "religious cyclone which swept over the whole region round about." Blakeslee's phrase (also on page 7 of his manuscript) was "flaming spiritual advance." See Backman, "Awakenings in the Burned-Over District," 308; Bushman, "First Vision Story Revived," 88-89; Bushman, "Mr. Bushman Replies," 8; Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 89. By contrast, Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 105, wrote that in giving this description, "Blakeslee is three years too early," an assessment repeated in Hill, "First Vision Controversy," 38 ("was three years too early"), and in Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 32 ("three years too early").

Ironically, neither believing apologists nor disbelieving critics have been willing to consider that Mrs. Baker's statement (which they often attributed to Blakeslee) was a conflation that linked the 1820 camp-meeting she and other residents of Phelps attended with the dramatic revivals in "the whole region" during 1824-25. Likewise, for Blakeslee's quotable phrase. My view is that Mrs. Baker and Rev. Blakeslee both made the same kind of conflation that Joseph Smith Jr. did in his own narratives.

[181] Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 102-06, dismissed Blakeslee's account as both irrelevant and erroneous, but again made no comment about the eyewitness Sarsnett's emphasis on Elisha House. Instead, he attacked Blakeslee's passing comment: "For 1820, Loring Grant and John Baggerly were the preachers" (manuscript page 7). To the contrary, Walters asserted: "when the Rev. Blakeslee speaks of the year 1820, he does not mean the calendar year 1820, but the Methodist conference year 1820 ... [which] ran from the summer of one year to the summer of the next, in this case between the summer of 1820 and 1821," and concerning Grant and Baggerly, "these men were not appointed to the Lyons Circuit (on which Vienna was located) until the July 1820 conference, too late to fit the `spring of eighteen hundred and twenty' date mentioned in Joseph Smith's account" (103); stated similarly in Marquardt and Walters, Inventing Mormonism, 30-31. Emphasizing the precise date of 20 July 1820 for the appointment of Grant and Baggerly is one way of understanding Blakeslee's chronological introduction to Sarsnett's reminiscence, but it is not the only way.

First, the manuscript's narrative clearly indicated that Sarsnett converted to Methodism at a "camp-meeting" before the events Blakeslee chronicled for November-December 1820. As indicated in my narrative text, the first essential question is how far in advance of November? Blakeslee did not address that question, but the camp-meeting season began in June. The second essential question is where exactly? Blakeslee understood that Sarsnett's camp-meeting occurred "on the farm of W.W. Gates" on the outskirts of Phelps (then named Vienna), but Palmyra's newspaper (which Walters did not mention in his assessment of Blakeslee) verified that by Sunday, 25 June 1820, a camp-meeting was occurring in the "vicinity" of Palmyra. The newspaper's apprentice Orsamus Turner said Joseph Smith's conversion occurred "in the camp meeting, away down in the woods, on the Vienna road" (see my note 174), but Vienna (now named Phelps) did not have its own newspaper in 1820, so residents depended on the Palmyra Register. As acknowledged in my narrative, the evidence connecting Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting with Blakeslee's narrative is nowhere near definitive, but it allows for my conclusion that the two accounts referred to the same camp-meeting, a revival that residents of Phelps attended on the outskirts of Palmyra. For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York and for the distance of nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra to Phelps, see my note 4.

Second, Reverend Baggerly's association with Phelps did not begin in July 1820. The History of Ontario County, New York stated (181) that he had been the resident minister of "the Methodist Episcopal Church at Clifton Springs" since 1808, and that Clifton Springs was one of the "villages" that were "partly in Phelps" (179). Concerning the ease of Reverend Baggerly's attendance at Palmyra's June 1820 camp-meeting, Clifton Springs was only ten miles distant. Baggerly (sometimes spelled "Beggarly" or "Beggerly") was assigned to the Crooked Lake Circuit as of July 1818, replacing Loring Grant as its circuit-rider (Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 302, 318, 337). Due south of Syracuse and nearly seventy-seven miles from Baggerly's residence in Clifton Springs, Crooked Lake involved enormous distances for his assignment as circuit-rider, but this was not uncommon. For example, Aurora Seager resided in Phelps (Vienna) while his assigned circuit was in Clarence, New York (my note 4), nearly eighty-two miles from his home; also Hosmer, Autobiography of Rev. Alvin Torry, 214 ("I immediately took leave of my mother, and started for my circuit, which was some sixty miles distant" from home); Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828, 353 ("it took me nearly a week to reach my circuit"); also consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 9.94 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Clifton Springs, New York, for 76.65 miles from Clifton Springs to Crooked Lake, New York, for 81.7 miles as the distance from Phelps to Clarence, New York)

Third, Reverend Grant's association with Phelps apparently also pre-dated 1820. After Baggerly replaced him in the Crooked Lake Circuit, Grant was assigned to the Seneca Circuit in Ontario District for 1818 and 1819. Depending on which Seneca village the circuit centered, Grant's assignment was either very close (8 miles) or relatively close (25 miles) to Phelps, where both Grant and Baggerly were reported as residents in the 1820 census. Like Seager, Torry, Peck, and Baggerly, Reverend Grant also traveled from his residence to his assigned circuit. See Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 318, 337; Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 18, 192; consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 8.22 miles as the distance from Phelps to Seneca Castle, Ontario County, New York, for 25.2 miles as the distance from Phelps to Seneca Point, Ontario County, New York).

[182] Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 141.

[183] Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 235. For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York and for the distance of nearly fourteen miles from Palmyra to Vienna (now named Phelps), see my note 4.

[184] "List of Letters REMAINING in the POST-OFFICE at Palmyra, June 30th 1820," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 19 JULY 1820, [4]; Ronald Vern Jackson, Gary Ronald Teeples, and David Schaefermeyer, eds., New York 1810 Census Index (Bountiful, UT: Accelerated Indexing Systems, 1976), 12; Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 18; consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 15.0 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Lyons, New York).

Because he was a resident of Palmyra (Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 247), my narrative does not include "Rev. Jeremiah Irons," even though he was also in the above list. Whereas non-residents were in the list because mail was intended to reach them while they visited Palmyra, Reverend Irons might actually have been away from his Palmyra residence during June, despite the village camp-meeting. However, my own view is that he attended it and was the reason for Joseph Smith's linking the Baptists with the 1820 revival held by the Methodists. For Irons as Palmyra's Baptist minister, see Minutes of the Ontario Baptist Association Held At Avon, September 22d and 23d, 1819 (N.p., 1819), 3, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 47119; Minutes of the Ontario Baptist Association, Holden At Benton, September 26th and 27th, 1821 (Canandaigua, NY: John A. Stevens, 1821), 3, not available in Shaw and Shoemaker, but in Lee Library; Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 65.

[185] James H. Hotchkin, A History of the Purchase and Settlements of Western New York, and of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Presbyterian Church in That Section (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1848), 376 ("Rev. Benjamin Baily [sic] was installed as pastor, and sustained to that relation till Sept. 5th 1821, when he was dismissed"). Backman, Joseph Smith's First Vision, 69, follows Hotchkin's spelling of "Baily."

[186] "List of Letters REMAINING in the POST-OFFICE at Palmyra, June 30th 1820," Palmyra Register (Palmyra, NY), 19 JULY 1820, [4], for "Deacon Barber" and "Samuel [sic] Talcot." The latter was a misspelling, as demonstrated in Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 457, which shows no head-of-household named Samuel Talcot, and only two persons named Samuel Talcott--one in Madison County and one in Herkimer County. The same index-page shows no Samuel Talbotor Talbut in Palmyra, nor even in Ontario County, but does list Samuel "Talbott" in Pompey, Onondaga County. My narrative text identifies Barber and explains the significance of the town of Pompey for Palmyra's 1820 camp-meeting.

[187] Consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 84.74 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Pompey, New York, and for 17.85 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Victor, New York); History of Ontario County, New York, 203 (for "Rev. Samuel Talbot" as one of the early Methodists in Victor); see my note 186 for identifying him as the person listed in Palmyra's postal notice for 30 June 1820 and for his residence in Pompey.

[188] Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 24 (for absence of persons named Barber in Palmyra, with the only other Ontario County families by that surname living in Gorham, Groveland, Seneca, and Victor); Elliot G. Storke, History of Cayuga County, 1789-1879 (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason, 1879), 422 (for "Barbers Corners, which place derives its name from Deacon William Barber who was an early settler [in 1796], and died there February 2d, 1844, aged 77"), also 373 (for incorporation of a "Methodist Society" in 1846 by William B. Barber, possibly a namesake-son of Deacon Barber); with no further information (according to research report dated 3 July 2006) about Deacon William Barber in the files of the Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society, Moravia, New York, which has assembled information about several towns, including Scipio. This "Deacon William Barber" is different from the William Barber of Gorham, Ontario County, whose biographies do not mention him holding any church office. Consult http://www.mapquest.com/directions on the Internet (for 49.76 miles as the distance from Palmyra to Scipioville, New York, and for Scipioville as the town nearest the junction named "Barbers Corners" on maps). For fifty-to-sixty miles as a distance traveled by camp-meeting attenders, see my note 109.

Various denominations have the office of deacon, but I have been unable to find William Barber as a deacon, minister, or preacher in any of the following sources relevant to the churches of western New York during this period: "Who are the deacons?" (followed by names for all of North America) each year in Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 22-568; Minutes of the Cayuga Baptist Association Held With the First Church in Camillus, Sept 18 and 19, 1817 (Auburn, NY: H. C. Southwick, 1817), which included deacons, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 40094; Minutes of the Cayuga Baptist Association, Held With the First Church in Marcellus, September 16th and 17th, 1818 (Auburn, NY: J. Beardslee, 1818), which included deacons, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 43195; Minutes of the Ontario Baptist Association Held At Avon, September 22d and 23d, 1819, which included deacons; Minutes of the Ontario Baptist Association, Holden At Benton, September 26th and 27th, 1821, which included deacons; Hotchkin, History of the Purchase and Settlements of Western New York, and of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Presbyterian Church in That Section, which also included Congregationalist ministers; A. Russell Belden, History of the Cayuga Baptist Association (Auburn, NY: Derby & Miller, 1851), which included congregations from Scipio to Palmyra; "A list of all who have been members of the Genesee Conference, but whose names were taken from the roll previous to the Centennial session, 1910," in Ray Allen, A Century of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1810-1910 (Rochester, NY: By the author, 1911), 69.

[189] Totten's third New York edition (1813) of Collection of the Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 6; his fifth New York edition (1815) of Collection of the Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 8; his eighth New York edition (1817) of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 8.

[190] Stith Mead, A General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Lynchburg, VA: Jacob Haas, 1811), 23, with copyright [page 4] for "Rev. Stith Mead [--] Preacher of the Gospel [--] M.E.C. [Methodist Episcopal Church]," available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 23361.

[191] Hymns on Select Passages of Scripture: With Others Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings, &c. (Poughkeepsie, NY: Paraclete Potter, 1811), 83-84, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 23081.

[192] Emma Smith, A Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Kirtland, OH: F. G. Williams, 1835), "Hymn 79. L.M." [Ladies Meeting hymn] (for "I Know that my Redeemer lives").

[193] Hymns on Select Passages of Scripture: With Others Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings, 80 (with first line: "O When shall I see Jesus" on page 79); compare with Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 4; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 11-12.

[194] Mead, General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 110 (for "HYMN LXIV--Longing to see Jesus," with first line: "O WHEN shall I see Jesus" on page 109). In all the reprintings of this hymn before 1820, only Mead phrased one line as "He'll not forget to lend."

[195] A COLLECTION OF THE MOST ADMIRED HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS, With the Choruses affixed, AS USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS, &c. (New York: John C. Totten, 1809), 78, first edition, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 17250; John C. Totten, comp., HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS, WITH THE CHORUSES AFFIXED: as usually sung at CAMP-MEETINGS, &C, 9th ed. (New York: By the author, 1817), 64, available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 42312.

[196] Elias Smith and Abner Jones, Hymns, Original and Selected, For the Use of Christians, 8th ed. (Boston: Thomas G. Bangs, 1817), 4 (for "HYMN I. P.M. [Prayer Meeting hymn] Longing for Heaven," with first line: "O WHEN shall I see Jesus," and with last line as the variant: "Though offner you request"), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 42133; Amos Pilsbury, The Sacred Songster; Or, A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs For the Use of Religious Assemblies, 4th ed. (New York: Duke Goodman and Abraham Paul, 1819), 162 (for "Hymn CXLVI. O WHEN Shall I see Jesus," with last line as the variant "Though often you request"), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 49117; The Spiritual Songster: Containing a Variety of Camp-Meeting, and Other Hymns ("Frederick-Town," MD: George Kolb, 1819), 33-34 (for "Hymn 15. O When Shall I See Jesus"), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 49481.

[197] Totten's first edition of COLLECTION OF THE MOST ADMIRED HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS (1809), 101 (titled "THE HEAVENLY MARINER," with first line: "THROUGH tribulation's [sic] deep" on page 100); also repeated republished until Totten's ninth edition, titled HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS, WITH THE CHORUSES AFFIXED: as usually sung at CAMP-MEETINGS, &C, 81.

[198] Smith and Jones, Hymns, Original and Selected, For the Use of Christians, 114 (for "HYMN CVIII. P.M. [Prayer Meeting hymn] The Heavenly Mariner").

[199] For quoted examples of American theophanies published from 1791 to 1826, see Neal E. Lambert and Richard H. Cracroft, "Literary Form and Historical Understanding: Joseph Smith's First Vision," Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 34-35, for published examples by Protestants whom Lambert and Cracroft dismissed as "St. Pauls-on-the-Hudson" (33); Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1998 ed.), 14-16; Richard Lyman Bushman, "The Visionary World of Joseph Smith," BYU Studies 17 (1997-98), No. 1: 183-204; Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, 41; also Peck, Early Methodism Within the Bounds of the Old Genesee Conference from 1788 to 1828, 187, observed that in 1800 "the Spirit was poured out from on high upon multitudes, and men and women, old and young, dreamed dreams, saw visions, and were filled with the spirit of prophecy."

[200] Totten's first edition of COLLECTION OF THE MOST ADMIRED HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS (1809), 122 ("PART II" OF "Hymn 85. C.M. [Camp Meeting hymn] THE BACKSLIDER. PART I," with first line: "YE happy souls," by which the second part of the hymn was also indexed).

[201] Mead, General Selection of the Newest and Most Admired Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 63 (for stanza "One ev'ning, pensive as I lay"), which began on page 62 ("HYMN XXII. Recovery from despair," with first line: "YE happy souls, whose peaceful minds"); Hymns on Select Passages of Scripture: With Others Usually Sung at Camp-Meetings, 87 (for "The Backslider.—Part II,” with first line: "One ev'ning, pensive"), which was continuation of hymn on 62 (with first line: "Ye happy souls"); A COLLECTION OF THE MOST ADMIRED HYMNS AND SPIRITUAL SONGS, With the Choruses affixed, AS USUALLY SUNG AT CAMP-MEETINGS, &c., 2nd ed. (New York: John C. Totten, 1811), 122 ("PART II" OF "Hymn 64. C.M. [Camp Meeting hymn] THE BACKSLIDER. PART I," with first line: "YE happy souls" on page 120), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 22563; Peggy Dow, A Collection of Camp Meeting Hymns, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: D. Dickinson, 1816), 119 (from "86. A SPIRITUAL HYMN," with first line: "Ye happy Souls"), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 37468; Social and Camp-meeting Songs for the Pious, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: F. Lucas, J. J. Harrod, and John D. Toy, 1818), 130 (of "HYMN 81," with first line: "YE happy souls" on page 128), available as Shaw and Shoemaker item 45747.

[202] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 5, 6; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 14, 16, 20.

[203] John H. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 121-22 (with visions of Jesus on 114, 122), and 124 (for quote); also W. Stephen Gunter, The Limits of "Love Divine": John Wesley's Response to Antinomianism and Enthusiasm (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books/Abingdon Press, 1989), 13 ("This specific accusation of special inspirations and revelations was generally labelled enthusiasm"); and Umphrey Lee, The Historical Background of Early Methodist Enthusiasm (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 147-48 (founder John Wesley "would listen respectfully to the most boresome accounts of visions and inner impulse. But practically speaking, he so regulated this enthusiasm by doctrinal and organizational safeguards," that the final result was: "In Methodism, then, English enthusiasm in the classic sense, came to an end").

[204] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 6-7; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 21.

[205] Abner Chase's letter from Milo, New York, 1 July 1824, published as "REVIVAL OF RELIGION ON ONTARIO DISTRICT," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 7 (November 1824): 435; also Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 265, 286, 301, 318, 337, for Chase as responsible for more than one circuit from 1815 until his 1820 appointment as presiding elder of the Ontario District (which included Palmyra). He was still its presiding elder when he wrote this letter.

Because of the importance of Chase's letter to this essay and due to the erroneous use of his words as cited below, here is the full text of his statement on 1 July 1824 about the Ontario District: "Four years since, Unitarianism or Arianism seemed to threaten the entire overthrow of the work of God in some circuits on this District, and on some others, divisions and wild and ranting fanatics, caused the spirits of the faithful in a degree to sink" (Methodist Magazine, 7:435).

To support the existence of revivals before the First Vision of 1820, Hyrum L. Andrus, Joseph Smith: The Man and the Seer (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1960), 65, mistakenly applied Chase's words to the Genesee Conference's annual meeting of July 1819. However, Chase's 1824 statement about "four years" was an unambiguous reference to 1820 and (in context of his emphasis on revivals) applied to the Ontario District. Likewise, because of that local reference within the reverend's statement, Chase's words did not apply to the Genesee Conference's annual meeting of 20 July 1820, which convened in Niagara, Upper Canada (see Conable, 165; Porter, "Reverend George Lane," 332). There also was no conflict at the Niagara meeting, but instead "a dispassionate multitude [who] eagerly listen to the word of life," as described in the letter of ministers Henry Ryan and William Case from Niagara on 28 July 1820, published as "State of Religion In Upper Canada," Methodist Magazine [New York City] 3 (October 1820): 395.

On the other hand, to dispute the existence of a Palmyra revival in the year claimed for the First Vision, Walters, "New Light on Mormon Origins From the Palmyra Revival," 80n65, also misapplied Chase's 1824 statement by claiming that it referred to a dispute at the meeting of the national General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Baltimore in 1820 (the first convened since 1816). Walters was wrong for several reasons. First, Chase referred specifically to local developments of "this District" in New York, not to distant Maryland. Second, "wild and ranting fanatics" did not fit the way the Methodist minister's autobiography described his opponents in the calm and longstanding dispute: "For eight years previous to this the `presiding elder question' had agitated the Church generally and our Conference in particular ... But there were moments during the session of that General Conference when the fears of many were exacted for the safety and unity of the Church. But God interposed, and though a partial secession afterward took place, yet it was comparatively small," as quoted in Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 159, with capitalization differences from the original in Abner Chase Recollections of the Past (New York: Joseph Longking, 1846), 125-26. Third, "wild and ranting fanatics" was not consistent with the detailed minutes of this 1820 controversy, during which minister-delegates calmly expressed their opposing views at the General Conference in Baltimore, politely asked for extensions of the allotted time so that they could continue their arguments, which extensions the opposing delegates joined in voting to grant to the speakers. See Journals of the General Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1796-1836 (New York: Carlton & Phillips, 1855), 211-13, 231, 236; see comments about Walters and his approach within my notes 5, 13, 165.

[206] Smith, et al., History of The Church, 1: 6; "Joseph Smith--History," 1: 21.

[207] Roberts, Comprehensive History, 1: 53, 56n10; John A. Widtsoe, Joseph Smith: Seeker After Truth, Prophet of God (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1951), 16; Hyrum L. Andrus, Doctrinal Commentary on the Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1967), 429; Charles D. Tate Jr., "BYU Studies in the 1970s," BYU Studies 31 (1991): 2; comment of editors Scot Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor for Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith, Revised and Enhanced (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996), 106n12; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 61n25.

[208] Porter, "Reverend George Lane," 335; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 337, 352; Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 160, 170.

[209] Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 265 (for Barlow in Ontario Circuit as of July 1815), 286 (for Barlow in Ontario Circuit as of July 1816), 318 (for Barlow's appointment to the Canandaigua Circuit in July 1819). For the distance, see my note 86.

[210] History of Ontario County, New York, 111 (for the date of Barlow's conversion in January 1820 from Methodist minister to being rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Canandaigua); Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 168 (for his abandoning Methodism at an unspecified date before the annual meeting of the Genesee Conference on 20 July 1820); parish register of Saint John's Episcopal Church, Canandaigua, New York (for Barlow performing his first Episcopal ordinance, a marriage, on 13 January 1820), microfilm 1,420,001, item 18, in LDS Family History Library.

[211] Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 337, 352.

[212] Jackson, New York 1820 Census Index, 403, listed only one Sarsnet/Sarsnett family in the entire state (with John as head-of-household in Phelps, Ontario County). He was the father of the 1820 camp-meeting's boy-convert Harry Sarsnett, who was about ten years old at this date. See microfilm 444,288 at LDS Family History Library for 1850 census of Phelps, Ontario County, New York, manuscript page 387, for Harry "Sarsnet" as age forty in 1850 (i.e. born in 1810). For the connection of Phelps with Vienna in western New York, see my note 4.

[213] Bushman, "Mr. Bushman Replies," 8 (for Phelps as "the more vigorous of the two villages in 1819 and 1820" regarding Methodism); Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 569 (for the creation of Palmyra Circuit within the Ontario District in 1828, in addition to the pre-existing Ontario Circuit), compared with 536-37 (when there was no Palmyra Circuit within that district as of the 1827 report); Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1829-1839 (New York: T. Mason, G. Lane, J. Collord, 1840), 158 (for the creation of "Vienna" Circuit within the Ontario District in 1832), compared with 111-12 (when there was no "Vienna" Circuit within that district as of the 1831 report); also narrative text for my note 173 about dramatic differences in rates of Methodist retention for Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) and Lyons Circuit (which included Phelps) after Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820. For Vienna as the name for the town of Phelps until the 1850s, see my note 4; for significance of Methodist circuits, see narrative discussion for my note 19.

As a clarification, I do not claim that 1820 was the only turning point for the comparative strength of Methodism in these two towns. Because the early membership records have been destroyed (see my note 16), it is not possible to verify whether the Methodist affiliation shifted back and forth between the two towns before 1820. Furthermore, since I have not made comparisons after the 1832 conference report, I have no knowledge about changes of Methodist strength in Palmyra and Vienna (now named Phelps) during subsequent years.

[214] Aside from Joseph Smith's statement quoted for my note 15, see my note 180 for discussion of references by Phelps resident Harry Sarsnett to this "camp-meeting" and by Reverend M. P. Blakeslee and Mrs. Sarepta Marsh Baker (also residents of Phelps) to this 1820 revival as causing a "flaming spiritual advance" and "religious cyclone which swept over the whole region round about"; also narrative text for my note 173 about dramatic differences in rates of Methodist retention for Ontario Circuit (which included Palmyra) and Lyons Circuit (which included Phelps) after Palmyra's camp-meeting of June 1820.

[215] "Barlow Marriage Records of New York," available as http://www.barlowgenealogy.com/NewYork/nymarr.html on the Internet; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, For the Years 1773-1828, 318 (for Chase's 1818 appointment to Pompey Circuit in Chenango District of Genesee Conference), 337 (for his same assignment as of July 1819); Conable, History of the Genesee Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 143, 162, 170; also Chase Recollections of the Past, 125.

[216] Paul H. Peterson, untitled book review, BYU Studies 35 (1995), No. 4: 214, emphasis in original, as restatement of Walters, "Joseph Smith's First Vision Story Revisited," 98 ("The revival that occurred in Palmyra in the winter of 1824-1825, on the other hand, is the only one that matches all the details as set forth by Joseph Smith"--which Walters specified as "Joseph Smith's 1838 story" on page 99n4); also similar statement by Marvin S. Hill within my note 90.

[217] For significance of Joseph's seeking forgiveness prior to his First Vision, see Lambert and Cracroft, "Literary Form and Historical Understanding: Joseph Smith's First Vision," 36-37, 39; Jessee, Papers of Joseph Smith, 1: 5-6; Quinn, Origins of Power, 3; McConkie and Millet, Choice Seer, 35, 370-71; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1: 27-28; Bushman "with" Woodworth, Rough Stone Rolling, 39-40.

As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany. This is conservative revisionism.

[post_title] => JOSEPH SMITH'S EXPERIENCE OF A METHODIST "CAMP-MEETING" IN 1820 [post_excerpt] => Dialogue E-Paper July 12, 2006
As an alternative to myopic polarization, this essay provides new ways of understanding Joseph's narrative, analyzes previously neglected issues/data, and establishes a basis for perceiving in detail what the teenage boy experienced in the religious revivalism that led to his first theophany [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => joseph-smiths-experience-of-a-methodist-camp-meeting-in-1820 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-06 00:58:16 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-06 00:58:16 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=30803 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

The Reliability of the Early History of Lucy and Joseph Smith

Richard Lloyd Anderson

Dialogue 4.2 (Summer 1971): 13–28
ormon history is a part of this magnificent proliferation of data and research techniques. Its own archives are in the midst of classification by professionally competent standards. There is hope for a new era, in which Mormon and non-Mormon may meet on the common ground of objective fact.

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 17654 [post_author] => 3266 [post_date] => 2018-05-03 01:24:23 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-05-03 01:24:23 [post_content] =>

The second half of the twentieth century is an exciting time both to live and to pursue research. The field of history as a whole has been characterized by change and revision in past decades. New points of view are responsible for much rewriting of history. But if that is the major source of modification, historical composition, like current theology, will be characterized by impermanent (and perhaps impertinent) fashions. Any historian with the deep love of his discipline hopes for something better.

The study of the past is now characterized by the greater availability of information. Rare publications and inaccessible manuscripts can now he duplicated and placed in the private files of researchers. Indexes and other methods of information retrieval are constantly more available. There is no shortage of records in any historical field—only an acute deficiency of time on the part of the historian. Mormon history is a part of this magnificent proliferation of data and research techniques. Its own archives are in the midst of classification by professionally competent standards. There is hope for a new era, in which Mormon and non-Mormon may meet on the common ground of objective fact.

Since history attempts to reconstruct complex lives and movements by means of often meager documentation, it would be naïve to believe that research will neatly settle all questions of Mormon history. What can be realistically envisioned, however, is the better identification of the chief sources from which responsible historians must draw their inferences. Since history is a discipline whose accuracy is entirely dependent upon the testimony of eyewitnesses of events, a better study of the lives of the early Latter-day Saints will give the. perspective from which to evaluate their contemporary publications, diaries, and. recollections. Basically, the study .of Mormon origin resolves itself into the credibility of the earliest Mormons. Once this question is stated, the difficulty of answering it lies in the terribly conflicting opinions about Joseph Smith from the beginning. But one seasoned in human experience is hardly shocked to find vigorous reformers at the heart of controversy. In terms of probabilities, one ought not to take the angry reaction of some of Joseph Smith's neighbors at face value. One striking at the establishment will stand squarely before a vigorous backlash. The majority of the Smith family left personal recollections of their Palmyra-Manchester life. Yet non-Mormon historiography has virtually canonized antagonistic neighborhood affidavits. Since L.D.S. writing is even now very poorly publicized and distributed, the libraries of this country have typically ignored the main publishers of Salt Lake City and have ordered from trade lists containing interpretations of the Smiths based on hostile sources. Consequently, textbooks and studies are produced in ignorance that Mormon sources are relatively detailed on Mormon origins and present a picture of the Smiths quite opposite the malicious exposures. It is appalling to visit the smaller libraries and theological schools of the United States and see how consistently the typical Mormon collection simply does not make available the Smiths’ own recollections of their early lives. Such one-sided selectivity. whether accidental or not, cannot promote authentic history.

In the time of shoddy television and stereotyped movies, one, might even doubt that such a thing as authentic history is wanted. Perhaps the age that preferred the Victorian image of oppressed Mormon females to factual sociology is succeeded by our own that prefers historical novels to history itself. What is commonly labeled as the leading biography of Joseph Smith was immediately characterized by Vardis Fisher as "almost more a novel than a biography," on the ground that the author "rarely hesitates. to give the content of a mind or to explain motives which at best can only be surmised."[1] The ground of that criticism is the point of responsible history—speculations make fascinating reading, but do not qualify as factual until documented. Good history possesses a toughness of fiber that cannot be achieved by mere name dropping. That is to say, numerous footnotes are not the proof of history. That is historical which carefully follows the precise course laid out by sources invariably in a position to know - and which confesses ignorance where there is no such course. In the book just mentioned, there is only a partial compliance with source-oriented history.

No Man Knows My History builds its picture of young Joseph Smith as a religious deceiver· mainly from "the detailed affidavits of his Iieighbors.”[2] The story of obtaining these statements must leave an impression of crumbling foundations of any study erected upon these. One Philastus Hurlbut was excommunicated from the L.D.S.· Church for sexual immorality and duplicity in his professions of repentance.[3] With a clear motive of retaliation, he sought to e,c.pose Mormonism and its founder. His hatred against Joseph Smith is fairly measured by a court decree thereafter placing Hurlbut under bond "to keep the peace," based on the finding that the Mormon Prophet "had ground to fear . . . Doctor P. Hurlbut would wound, beat, or kill him, or destroy his property. . . .”[4] Hurlbut had a thesis to prove, since his work of collecting evidence was promoted and subsidized by an anti-Mormon citizens' committee, who publicly indicated their goals to establish Solomon Spaulding as the real author of the Book of Mormon and to "completely divest Joseph Smith of all claims to the character of an honest man, and place him at an immeasurable distance from the high station which he pretends to occupy.”[5] Nor is it clear that the personal statements gathered by Hurlbut present only the problem of vindictive· bias. His documents were shortly published by the editor E. D. Howe, who in later life held the opinion that “Hurlburt was always an unreliable fellow. . . .”[6]

The first scene of activity for this affidavit prospector was Conneaut, Ohio, the form.er home of the amateur historical novelist, Solomon Spaulding. Taking formal statements from relatives and friends who could equate the names and historical portions of Spaulding's fiction· with the Book of Mormon plot and personalities, Hurlbut produced eight different statements that prove the point too well. Mrs. Brodie observes:

It can clearly be seen that the affidavits were written by Hurlbut, since the style is the same throughout. It may be noted also that although five out of the eight had heard Spaulding's story only once, there was a surprising uniformity in the details they remembered after twenty-two years. . . . The very tightness with which Hurlbut here was implementing his theory rouses an immediate suspicion that he did a little judicious prompting.[7]

The foregoing statements were taken in Ohio and Pennsylvania in August and September, 1833. After a month, the persistent Hurlbut spent about six weeks in western New York gathering signatures, now on the supposed bad character of the Smiths. About a dozen individual affidavits were taken, but the bulk of the signatures were appended to two collective statements, one of which listed Palmyra residents who agreed that Joseph Smith, Jr. and Sr. were "entirely destitute of moral character, and addicted to vicious habit.”[8] In this case the Prophet publicly repudiated such charges, admitting youthful vitality and. human imperfections, but bluntly denying serious wrongdoing.[9] Faced with Hurlbut and fifty-one signatures on the one hand, and the straightforward avowal of Joseph Smith on the other, Mrs. ·Brodie finds no difficulty in ruling out "viciousness" and asserts, "his apology can be accepted at full value.”[10]

Since it is fairly demonstrable that Hurlbut heavily contaminated the Spaulding affidavits with his own theories and language, the question is why the Palmyra-Manchester affidavits should be treated as infallible sources. The non-Mormon historian of revivals, Whitney Cross, is blunt:

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.’[11]

If the negative testimonials are this unreliable on their essential charges, one may wonder why Mrs. Brodie relies upon them in outlining a detailed picture of supposed moneydigging on the part of the Smiths. This is completely open to question as an after-the-fact distortion of the same dimension as the discredited Spaulding story, falsely enshrined in Hurlbut's other affidavits. If Mrs. Brodie finds Joseph Smith more credible in a simple statement than fifty-one neighbors swearing on the same issue, it is time for all Mormon historians to seriously examine the detailed histories of Joseph Smith and his mother as potentially the most reliable sources for Mormon foundations because they are essentially the only ones who wrote about the period from consistent first-hand knowledge.

[Editor’s Note: See PDF for printed version of Mormonism Unvailed, pp. 17–18].

The Palmyra-Manchester residents who knew the Smith family did not uniformly consider them disreputable. If ai dozen individual statements were made against the early Mormons at the instigation of an enterprising apostate, two dozen individuals from the same area joined the new religion and sacrificed because of their faith in Joseph Smith's story.[12] A total of sixty-two names were printed in two blanket condemnations of the Smiths as "destitute of moral character" or "a lazy, indolent set of men."[13] But Lucy Smith describes an illuminating incident that can now be definitely dated in 1825 that speaks to the contrary. Like many another impoverished pioneer family, the Smith family deferred payments on their land contract. Mother Smith reports that a new land agent was falsely informed that the family was unreliable and unable to meet their final payment, which was counteracted by Hyrum's immediate visit to their family friend, Dr. Robinson. Indignant, he responded as follows:

[T]he old gentleman sat down, and wrote at some considerable length the character of the family—our industry, and faithful exertions to secure a home, with many commendations calculated to beget confidence in us with respect to business transactions. And, keeping this writing in his own hands, he went through the village, and in an hour procured sixty subscribers.[14]

Sixty-two negative signatures are obviously balanced by the some sixty favorable signatures plus Dr. Robinson's that Hyrum took to the Canandaigua land agent. On closer examination of the negative signatures, the question is how well' most of the individuals knew the Smiths. Lucy Smith indicates that the family physician was Dr. McIntire, whose name is ·notably absent in the 1833 condemnations.[15] No one in Palmyra was more responsible than the son-in-law of Dr. Robinson, Alexander McIntire. He was repeatedly president of the county medical association and a community leader. Mother Smith describes two occasions when he went out of his way to defend the Smiths against persecutions in the community.[16] The major financial transaction that Joseph Smith ever had in Palmyra was the printing of the Book of Mormon, and the practie.al business􀄳an who negotiated with him and performed the job, Egbert B. Grandin, is also notably absent from the negative affidavits. The support of Dr. Gain Robinson in procuring a testimonial for the Smiths is impressive; his obituary in 1.831 stated that he was “deeply lamented by a large circle of relatives, and this whole community."[17]

Several Mormon converts investigated the Smiths' community reputation before Hurlbut, and they were not dissuaded from accepting the reliability of the Prophet's family. John Corrill, who had known Sidney Rigdon in Ohio prior to his conversion, wrote the following words after he had left the L.D.S. Church and no doubt is accurate on Rigdon's general experience in the Palmyra area:

[A]fter Rigdon had joined the Church in Kirtland, he was afraid that he had been- deceived,· so he and Edward Partridge went to the State of New York to inquire further into it. Rigdon said he went to the enemies of the Church to find out their feelings and objections, and then went to its friends and heard their story, and became satisfied that it was true. . . .[18]

Lucy Smith remembered the arrival of the two men at their temporary home in Waterloo, N.Y., and Partridge's report of their visit to the Smiths' former neighborhood of Manchester:

[H]e had made some inquiry of our neighbors concerning our characters, which they stated had been unimpeachable, until Joseph deceived us relative to the Book of Mormon. . . . Having heard that our veracity was not questioned upon any other point than that of our religion, he believed our testimony. . . .[19]

What Hurlbut sought to prove is obvious from examining the most redundant themes of his affidavits. In this study, there is only space for evaluating his main and most important contention. Almost every Palmyra-Manchester statement contains a reiteration of the theme of no occupation but moneydigging:

The general employment of the family was digging for money.

A great part of their time was devoted to digging for money. . . .

At that time [1820], they were engaged in the money digging business, which they followed until the latter part of the season of 1827.

It is well known, that the general employment of the Smith family was money digging and fortune-telling. . . . It was a mystery to their neighbors how they got their living.

They were a family that labored very little—the chief they did, was dig for money.

Their great object appeared to be, to live without work. While they were digging for money, they were daily harassed by the demands of their creditors, which they never were able to pay.[20]

A simple study of the economics of the Smith family in this period can determine the accuracy of this main contention of the affidavits. After a short period of merchandising upon arrival in the Palmyra area about 1816, the next identifiable livelihood for the men is operating the Manchester farm. Lucy's account reads:

My husband and his sons, Alvin and Hyrum, set themselves to work to pay for one hundred acres of land, which Mr. Smith contracted for with a land agent. In a year we made nearly all of the first payment, erected a log house, and commenced clearing. I believe something like thirty acres of land were got ready for cultivation the first year.[21]

Anyone familiar with the patterns of settlement of western New York will recognize the above description as accurately reflecting the physical and economic realities of the period. All. land in this region was purchased on contract, often from land agents representing large interests. The forest had to be cleared, which was done in stages, with the building o( the inevitable log house in the beginning. Orasmus Turner, the respected historian of western New York, was in 1819 a hard-working printer's apprentice in his late teens, and of the Smiths-and their farm he later wrote: "Here the author remembers to have first seen the family, in winter of ’19, ’20, in a rude log house, with but a small spot underbrushed around it.”[22] One may test Lucy's recollection of purchasing a hundred acres. Title to this land was never recorded in the Smith name, as will shortly be discussed. However, Lemuel Durfee, who purchased the land while they resided on it and permitted their continued tenure, alluded both to the Smiths and this property in his will, referring to "the Everton lot, situate in the northwest comer of the Town of Manchester . . . on which Joseph Smith now lives, containing about one hundred acres of land.”[23] Lucy’s memory on this point is precise.

All of the Smith recollections of this early period mention the hard work of the whole family for survival. William, for instance, consistently attributed stories of family laziness to community resentment after Joseph had told of his religious experiences. A typical statement follows, in direct answer to mention of the charge that the family was "lazy and indolent":

We never heard of such a thing until after Joseph told his vision, and not then, by our friends. . . . We cleared sixty acres of the heaviest timber I ever saw. We had a good place, but it required a great deal of labor to make it a good place. We also had on it from twelve to fifteen hundred sugar trees, and to gather the sap and make sugar and molasses from that number of trees was no lazy job.[24]

Lucy Smith indicates that wheat became the staple crop of the farm,[25] which was generally true for the region, but there were other major sources of income. She describes the "cooper's shop" across the road from the cabin and relates brief employment of Joseph Smith, Sr. at this trade in Canandaigua.[26] Pomeroy Tucker refers to the "manufacture and sale of black-ash baskets and birch brooms" on the Smith farm, handicrafts utilizing coopering skills.[27] This type of activity is specifically confirmed by the 1820 census, which listed professions in three categories: agriculture, commerce, and manufactures. Of the three male adults listed in the Smith family, two are placed in "agriculture" and one is placed under "manufactures."[28] This probably means that Joseph Smith, Sr. plied his trade of coopering and similar production, whereas Alvin and Hyrum, then twenty-one and twenty, were engaged mainly in the heavy work of farming. The instructions to the census takers on this point in 1820 read as follows:

[I]n the column of manufactures will be included not only all the persons employed in what the act more specifically denominates manufacturing establishments, but all those artificers, handicrafts men, and mechanics, whose labor is preeminently of the hand, and not upon the field.[29]

The two young adolescent sons, Samuel and Joseph, were not listed with their family on the 1820 census. This tends to confirm another Smith recollection. William said:

Whenever the neighbors wanted a good day's work done they knew where they could get a good hand, and they were not particular to take any of the other boys before Joseph either.[30]

Joseph recalled the realities of the general period about 1823 in like terms:

[W]e were under the necessity of laboring with our hands, hiring by days works and otherwise as we could get opportunity; sometimes we were at home and sometimes abroad, and by continued labor were enabled to get a comfortable maintainance.[31]

The 1820 enumeration was held by law during August and September, and the twelve-year-old Samuel and the fourteen-year-old Joseph were likely boarded temporarily at another farm for some type of harvest labor. Another instruction to the enumerators seems to apply to them:

It follows . . . that any person who, at the time of taking the number of any family, has his usual abode in it, is nevertheless, not to be included in the return of that family, if his. usual place of abode was, on the first Monday of August, in another family.[32]

A survey of the Smiths' sources of income must include the "distinct" recollections of Orsamus Turner about the teenage Joseph: "He used to come into the village of Palmyra with little jags of wood. . . .”[33] Pomeroy Tucker stated that the Smith family retailed cord-wood, as well as small crops and vegetables, and he also claimed that on holidays the Smiths, particularly Joseph, did not rest, since they sold "cake and beer in the village on days of public doings."[34] Lucy Smith also indicates that she supplemented the family income by painting oil cloth and selling it.[35] All in all, the number of activities of the Smiths is a devastating refutation to the group affidavit claiming them to be "lazy'' and "indolent." One of the most glaring inconsistencies in Mormon historiography is the repeated insistence of Pomeroy Tucker that the Smiths lacked "habits of profitable industry" right after describing five different farming, manufacturing, and trading activities. His communityimposed theory evidently did not fit his own recollections. The Prophet's younger brother William is far more believable when he insists that his family was so intent on economic survival that they worked continually and did not have the unoccupied time alleged in the Hurlbut depositions.[36]

It must weigh heavily in the balance of history that Oliver Cowdery, later a ,discriminating and astute lawyer, lived a school term in the Smith home in 1Manchester in 1828-9 and defended the Prophet and his family as "industrious, honest, virtuous, and liberal to all."[37] As far as opportunity to observe, this single opinion based on day-by-day experience at close quarters should count for more than all of the Hurlbut-Howe affidavits, which caricature their subjects. instead of measure them as the able people that their later careers show them to be. Cowdery said in direct reference to the Palmyra-Manchester statements that he personally had “the testimony of responsible persons” to contradict the character assassination of the affidavits.[38] Although the historian would like to have the depositions of New York neighbors who respected the Smiths, perhaps it says something for the confidence of Joseph Smith in his own position that he declined to fire a return salvo of testimonials to his good character. But at least one person is known who fits Cowdery's description (and Rigdon's and Partridge's) of non-Mormon neighbors who respected the honor and industry of the Smiths.

When the chief compositor for the Book of Mormon, John H. Gilbert, was approached· in 1879 regarding available recollections of the Smiths, he wrote:

Mr. Orlin Sanders, who lives about two miles south of the village, was well acquainted with the Smith family. and probably recollects many things I know nothing about.[39]

Whether Gilbert followed a local practice of shortening the full name of Orlando Saunders or was inexact in his recollection is not clear. However, his recommendation of Saunders as in a firsthand position to know about the Smiths squares with Orlando's birth to a pioneer Palmyra family in 1803, the Saunders' residence in the immediate neighborhood of the Smith farm, and the intriguing fact that Orlando's sister Melissa married Willard Chase, whose name appears on a Hurlbut affidavit.[40] Saunders was interviewed by the able Kelley brothers, RLDS leaders of legal and documentary orientation, and he volunteered no lore about money digging, but instead made pointed remarks about the practical charity of the Smiths and Joseph Smith's consistency in attributing the Book of Mormon to the coming of an angel. On the specific issue of industry, he said:

[T]hey have all worked for me many a day; they were very good people. Young Joe (as we called him then) has worked for me,· and he was· a good worker; they all were. I did not consider them good managers about business, but they were poor people; the old man had a large family.[41]

The proof that Saunders is accurately reported here is the independent interview about a year earlier of Frederic G. Mather, a non-Mormon professional writer, whose paraphrase of Saunders' words fits precisely the key ideas recorded by the Kelleys:

Orlando Sanders . . . tells us that the Smith family worked for his father and for himself. He gives them the credit of being good workers, but declares that they could save no money.[42]

If the Hurlbut-Howe affidavits are unreliable in their basic claim about the life of the Smiths in New York, can the historian trust the only remaining sources, the histories of Joseph and Lucy Smith? Their consistency in subtle interrelations of independent recollection must be impressive, but one may relate each to non-L.D.S. public records that verify certain details of the Smith stories. It has been shown above that Lemuel Durfee's will proves the Smith occupancy of a farm of about one hundred acres, in precise agreement with the later recollection of Lucy Smith—and that the 1820 census fits in detail the recollections of Lucy, Joseph, and William of the family economics of that time. The Manchester location of the family in that census also fits the chronology of Lucy and Joseph regarding the move to that farm before the time of the First Vision, a fact independently verified by a road survey of June 13, 1820, in the Palmyra Township records, indicating that "Joseph Smith's dwelling house" was already standing at that time.[43]

The chronology of the family history is further supported by the existing gravestone of Alvin, which reads: "In memory of Alvin, son of Joseph and Lucy Smith, who died November 19, 1823, in the 25th year of his age."[44] By this time, according to Joseph and his mother, the young Prophet had received the visit of the angel, in which Alvin devoutly believed. And there are other verifications of the accuracy of the Smith history of this early period that necessitate outlining some events of the years 1825 and 1826 rather fully.

The first incident that Joseph relates after Alvin's death is working for Josiah Stoal, who paid for excavation of a supposed Spanish silver mine in Harmony Township, Pennsylvania. Joseph evidently discouraged the project at the outset and toward the end "prevailed with the old gentleman to cease digging. . . .”[45] A set of statements about this period exists from Joseph Smith's in-laws and their Pennsylvania friends. Although appearing in the same publication with E. D. Howe's first publication of the Hurlbut affidavits, they were apparently procured by Howe•􀃊 direct correspondence independent of Hurlbut.[46] Prejudiced and even vitriolic against Joseph (who had among other crimes stolen Emma from them), the statements from the Hale circle allege superstitious mineral witching on the part of Joseph .and also claim that he confessed that there was no merit in such practices. Since it is doubtful that the Hales had firsthand knowledge of Joseph engaging in such practices, it is only fair to accept his explanation that he did not take the project seriously, a point which when stated to the Hales, may have been wrongly interpreted as a confession of former involvement.[47] For all of their prejudice, the affidavits from the Hale circle are far closer to the known claims of Joseph Smith regarding the Book of Mormon than Hrulbut’s Palmyra-Manchester productions. Mather interviewed Harmony residents about 1880 who remembered Joseph Smith as "a good and kind neighbor," which shows- that the Pennsylvania affidavits also tell less than the full story about the young Prophet.[48]

Joseph dates his first Pennsylvania stay as October, 1825, and Isaac Hale's statement identifies the month of November for the Spanish mine project, with termination "about November 17, 1825," a close approximation of the Prophet's chronology. Lucy tells the dramatic story of the loss of their partially paid-up property immediately after Joseph came back from Pennsylvania to his parent's home in New York:

Soon after his return, we received intelligence of the arrival of a new agent for the Everson land, of which our farm was a portion. This reminded. us of the last payment, which was still due􀃌 and which must be made before we obtain a deed of the place.[49]

Lucy gives the due date of this. final payment, perhaps· already an extension, as December 25, 1825.[50] Joseph Sr. and Jr. had set out again for the Susquehanna area to collect money from their wheat crop. As discussed earlier, certain parties falsified the Smiths' reliability and purchased their farm from the new land agent. Lucy indicates that this agent was incensed at the misrepresentations, and in-a complicated series of negotiations the Smiths finally interested an older Mr. Durfee in purchasing the property and permitting their continued occupancy, with the deed recalled and cancelled from the misrepresenting parties. The documentary evidence that Lucy is correct here has been given in part. Lemuel Durfee's will identified the Manchester property as that of the Smiths' and referred to its extent of "about one hundred acres.” Since it was made on June 12, 1826, a half year after the above incidents, and refers to “the Everton lot . . . on which Joseph Smith now lives,” it also proves the tenancy of the Smiths after Durfee took title.[51] The names and date on the· actual deed harmonize precisely with Lucy Smith's history. This instrument of record is dated December 20, 1825. in which Eliza Evertson and David B. Ogden, executors under the will of Nicholas Evertson, convey ninety-nine and one-half acres in Manchester to Lemuel Durfee of Palmyra.[52]

In narrating the loss of the. farm, Lucy Smith is somewhat inexact in only one respect. She indicates that Joseph had gone to Pennsylvania to bring Emma. home as his wife at the dose of. 1825, when the Smiths' land tide failed to mature. She also recalls that Hyrum had been recently married at

this time. Both events are in correct sequence, at the right season of the year, but are evidently placed a year too early as Lucy recalled them two decades later. Hyrum's marriage (November 2, 1826) was given in the correct year in the genealogical section of Lucy's memoirs, perhaps from written records.[53] This dating is authenticated by its report in the Wayne Sentinel, November 24, 1826.[54] Joseph gives his marriage date as January 18, 1827,[55] and Lucy perhaps confused the business trip to Pennsylvania about a year earlier with the marriage trip to Pennsylvania. It would be easy for Mother Smith to associate the marriages with the events of late 1825, when in reality the romances were taking place then. But it is remarkable that when Lucy Smith's dictated history is inaccurate in chronology, the deviation is confined to narrow limits.[56]

To restate the question posed at the outset, which are the authentic sources of early Mormon history? The chief actors, the Smith family, produced two narrative histories of the early period from the vantage point of eyewitnesses. At literally scores of critical points it can be demonstrated that the framework of external events related by Joseph and Lucy is historically reliable. This paper has merely surveyed those verifications from the move to Manchester about 1818 up to 1827, when the Book of Mormon drama began in earnest.[57] The counter-sources, the Manchester-Palmyra affidavits, are clearly not factual in their main allegation, the supposed indolence of the Smiths. In summary, the histories of Joseph and Lucy Smith in this period prove to be basically accurate in every case where there is some vital or legal record that permits verification of the story. The Smith histories are correct on the move to Manchester prior to 1820, the status of the father as a craftsman and the younger sons' boarding out at that date, as also the erection of the first Smith house in Manchester by then. Alvin's gravestone establishes his death in 1823, as the Lucy-Joseph chronology requires. The loss of the farm follows in 1825, the precise time stated by Lucy's narrative, which correctly furnishes the number of acres and the grantor Evertson and the grantee Durfee, and the will of the father proves the tenancy of the Smiths upon this land after title was lost. The marriage of Hyrum the following year is also factual, fitting approximately into Lucy's reconstruction from memory. This independent verification of about a dozen facts in the most remote period of the Smith histories is an impressive record. The question. raised is obvious: if Joseph and Lucy Smith have written authentic history on a practical level, can they not also be trusted in reporting the revelations that motivated their lives?

Like a law case, the point of history is to allow the participants to tell their own story. The historian of Mormonism really disqualifies himself if he cannot empathize with the spiritual experience .at the heart of this new religion. If this is preposterous, then perhaps he should write about other phases of Mormonism where his naturalistic bias does not so limit him. History may be poorly equipped to affirm or deny the truth of Joseph Smith's visions, but it can nevertheless assess the credibility of the historical tradition that asserts those visions. Credit ratings are compiled by instances of reliability. Whereas one can document the lack of such reliability in Hurlbut's Palmyra-Manchester affidavits, the factual content of the histories. of Joseph and Lucy Smith is demonstrably high. The logical conclusion from these realities is that the narratives of the Prophet and his mother must stand as the essential sources for Mormon origins.

Richard L. Anderson is one of the most versatile scholars in the Church. Holder of an L.LB. from Harvard, and Ph.D. in Ancient History from Berkeley, Professor Anderson now teaches Religion and History at Brigham Young University. In this article, which was delivered at the fourth annual Dialogue Board of Editors Dinner, he sheds light on the question of evidence for the early period of Church history, which was raised in the Spring, 1969, issue of Dialogue, by Rev. Wesley Walters, and demonstrates to both Mormon and non-Mormon historians the importance and consistency of the most primary of sources, the testimonies of Joseph and Lucy Smith. He has been studying the witnesses of the Book of Mormon for many years and will soon publish a new book on this subject.

[1] Vardis Fisher, “Mormonism and Its Yankee Prophet,” New York Times Book Review Section, November 25, 1945.

[2] Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History (New York, 1946), pp. 23-4.

[3] Times and Seasons, Vol. 6 (1845), pp. 784–5. Also cit. Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Salt Lake City, 1946), Vol. 1, pp. 352–355. See also Benjamin Winchester, The Origins of the Spaulding Story (Philadelphia, 1840), pp. 1–11. Although L.D.S. records spell the surname Hurlburt, it is preferable to follow D. P. Hurlbut's own preference as indicated by his will at the Sandusky County courthouse, Fremont, Ohio, which agrees with the early signature on the certificate discovered with Spaulding's manuscript.

[4] Journal of the Court of Common Pleas, Geauga County, Ohio, Book M, p. 193, April 9, 1834. Also cit. History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Independence, Missouri, 1951), Vol. 1, pp. 444–446.

[5] Painesville Telegraph, January 31, 1834. Changes in the text of quotations are limited to spelling and punctuation.

[6] Ellen E. Dickinson, New Light on Mormonism (New York, 1885), p. 73.

[7] Brodie, op. cit., pp. 423–4.

[8] E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, Ohio, 1834), pp. 261–2.

[9] L.D.S. Messenger and Advocate, Volume 1 (December, 1834), p. 40. Howe’s preface to Mormonism Unvailed was written in October, 1834, and the initial advertisement for the book appeared in the Painesville Telegraph, November 28, 1834.

[10] Brodie, op. cit., p. 18.

[11] Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (Ithaca, 1950, 1965), pp. 141–2. Although Cross accepts the treasure hunting thesis of the affidavits, it is open to the identical objections that he raises against the testimonials to laziness.

[12] Pomeroy Tucker furnishes the names of this many converts in the vicinity of Palmyra and Manchester. Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism (New York, 1867), pp. 38–9. Cf. the printed letter from Palmyra, March 12, 1831: “Their numbers may be twenty in this vicinity . . .”; Painesville Telegraph, March 22, 1831.

[13] Howe, op. cit., pp. 261–2.

[14] Lucy Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith (Liverpool, 1853), p. 95. This incident occurred no later than December 20, 1825, the date at which the title to the Smith farm was transferred to Lemuel Durfee, as discussed below.

[15] Ibid., p. 87.

[16] Ibid., p. 113, p. 141.

[17] Wayne Sentinel, June 26, 1831. Lucy Smith mentions another half-dozen individuals who befriended the family in various difficulties and can be presumed to have a favorable opinion of them.

[18] John Corrill, A Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (St. Louis, 1839), p. 17.

[19] Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 170. [Editor’s Note: The footnote within the text is not provided in the PDF, but the footnote within the footer is provided.]

[20] Howe, op. cit., pp. 232, 237, 240, 249, 251, 260.

[21] Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 70.

[22] Orsamus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase and Morris’ Reserve (Rochester, 1852), p. 213.

[23] Will of Lemuel Durfee, Surrogate’s Court, Wayne County Courthouse, Lyons, New York.

[24] Interview of J. W. Peterson with William Smith, Zion’s Ensign, Vol. 5 (1894), No. 3, p. 6, also cit. (with minor inaccuracies) Deseret Evening News, Jan. 20, 1894. Tucker, op. cit., p. 14 also refers to the Smiths’ “making of maple sugar and molasses in the season for that work . . .” Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 95 also refers to their “sugar orchard.”

[25] Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 92.

[26] Ibid., pp. 108–9, p. 165.

[27] Tucker, op. cit., p. 14.

[28] US Census, Ontario County, New York, Farmington Township, Family 524.

[29] "Instructions to Marshals — Census of 1820," cit. Carroll D. Wright, History and Growth of the United States Census (Washington, D. C., 1900), p. 135.

[30] Interview of Peterson with William Smith, op. cit.

[31] Times and Seasons, Vol. 3 (1842), pp. 771-2, also cit. Joseph Smith, op. cit., p. 16-17.

[32] "Instructions to Marshals—Census of 1820," op. cit., pp. 135-6.

[33] Turner, op. cit., p. 213.

[34] Tucker, op. cit., p. 14.

[35] Lucy Smith, op. cit., pp. 70, 107.

[36] See, e.g., Sermon of William B. Smith on Deloit, Iowa, June 8, 1884, cit. Saints’ Herald, Vol. 31 (1884), p. 643: “After my father’s family moved to New York State, in about five years they cleared sixty acres of land, and fenced it. The timber on this land was very heavy. . . . We built a frame dwelling house and out buildings. My brothers Joseph and Hyrum had to work. Joseph did not have time to make gold plates.”

[37] L.D.S. Messenger and Advocate, Vol. 2 (1835), p. 200.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Letter of J. H. Gilbert to Mr. Cobb, Feb. 10, 1879, Palmyra, New York. A microfilm of this ms. was kindly loaned to me by Larry C. Porter. Palmyra sources and interviewers are divided on the spelling of the surname. Saunders must be correct, since that is the spelling in the will and estate papers at the Wayne County courthouse, Lyons, N.Y.

[40] See Thomas L. Cook, Palmyra and Vicinity (Palmyra, New York, 1930), pp. 235–7.

[41] Saints’ Herald, Vol. 28 (1881), p. 165. Since Cook indicates that “Orlando came into possession of the homestead” at his father’s death in 1825, several years exist when he might have employed the Smiths himself. The brief obituary notice of Enoch, the father, appeared in the Wayne Sentinel, October 18, 1825.

[42] Frederic G. Mather, “The Early Days of Mormonism,” Lippincott’s Magazine, Vol. 36 (1880), p. 198. An interview is confirmed by another quotation from Orlando Saunders, p. 205. For Mather’s biography, see National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 20 (New York, 1929), pp. 492-3.

[43] Palmyra Town Record, Book 1, p. 221.

[44] Photographs of the inscription are in the L.D.S. Historian’s Office. The notice of Joseph Smith, Sr., published the following September 29, 1824, in the Wayne Sentinel, verifies the 1823 death date. [Editor’s Note: The in-text footnote number is not in the PDF version of this article; however, a footer footnote exists, so it has been added here.]

[45] Times and Seasons, Vol. 3 (1842), p. 772, also cit. Joseph Smith, op. cit., p. 17. Cf. Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 92: “Joseph endeavored to divert him from his vain pursuit, but he was inflexible in his purpose and offered high wages. . . .”

[46] Letter of E. D. Howe to Isaac Hale, February 4, 1884, Painesville, Ohio, cit. Susquehanna Register, May 1, 1834, cit. New York Baptist Register, Vol. 11 (1834). Howe's letter discloses that Hale had written to Hurlbut but that Howe wished verification and sought an attested statement "to lay open the imposition to the world." A battery of sworn statements were made in the Harmony, Pennsylvania area by Hale and his neighbors, published first in the newspaper at the county seat of Susquehanna County, and then reproduced in slightly abbreviated form by Howe.

[47] The Smith histories and the Hale affidavit all agree that the contact of the Hales with Joseph was through the latter boarding at Isaac's home. Since Isaac Hale told Joseph that he "followed a business that I could not approve," one must assume that Hale never participated in the digging operations at the "Spanish Mine" and therefore relied on hearsay for Joseph Smith's supposed "peeking" activities in locating treasure. What the Hales knew personally was that Joseph Smith associated with a questionable operation (a point of view shared by Joseph Smith), but these statements really do not prove that the young Prophet was mystically locating treasure unless the Hales were themselves involved. In relation to what Isaac and Alva remember Joseph saying to them, what is assumed to be ridiculous is likely to be distorted in that direction in the telling.

[48] Mather, op. cit., pp. 200–1.

[49] Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 92.

[50] Ibid.

[51] See n. 23 supra.

[52] Book 44, pp. 232-234, Ontario County, New York. The deed no doubt contains the correct spelling of Evertson, and the “Everson” of Lucy Smith and the “Everton” of the Durfee will are approximations.

[53] Lucy Smith, op. cit., p. 40.

[54] The notice reads: MARRIED — In Manchester . . . Mr. Hiram Smith, to Miss Jerusha Barden.”

[55] Citation at n. 31, supra.

[56] See examples in Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision Through Reminiscences,” Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 9 (1969), pp. 390–1.

[57] See ibid. for several striking confirmations of Lucy Smith’s basic accuracy from Palmyra sources around 1830.

[post_title] => The Reliability of the Early History of Lucy and Joseph Smith [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 4.2 (Summer 1971): 13–28
ormon history is a part of this magnificent proliferation of data and research techniques. Its own archives are in the midst of classification by professionally competent standards. There is hope for a new era, in which Mormon and non-Mormon may meet on the common ground of objective fact. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-reliability-of-the-early-history-of-lucy-and-joseph-smith [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-06-06 01:01:39 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-06-06 01:01:39 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=17654 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Manuel W. Padro

Dialogue 54.4 (Winter 2021): 35–70
When we assess Joseph Smith’s early trials as if the word “pretended” indicated deliberate deception on Joseph’s part, we miss the larger picture.

"’I Never Knew a Time When I Did Not Know Joseph Smith": A Son's Record Of The Life And Testimony Of Sidney Rigdon

Karl Keller, editor; John Wickliffe Ridgon

Dialogue 1.4 (Spring 1966): 15–42
Not very long after the death of Sidney Rigdon, the influential preacher and compatriate to Joseph Smith in the first years of the Church, his son, John Wickliffe Rigdon, wrote an apology for his father.

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 18058 [post_author] => 3239 [post_date] => 2018-05-04 14:17:05 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-05-04 14:17:05 [post_content] =>

From time to time we plan to publish in Dialogue original documents or little-known writings that speak with a personal voice from the Mormon cultural heritage and historical experience. Karl Keller, who has edited the following manuscript lecture by Sidney Rigdon's son, is a frequent contributor to Dialogue and a member of the Board of Editors; he has recently taken a position as Assistant Professor of English at San Diego State College, has just published an article on Emerson in American Literature, and has a book on Emerson and an anthology of Mormon literature in preparation.

Edited by Karl Keller

Not very long after the death of Sidney Rigdon, the influential preacher and compatriate to Joseph Smith in the first years of the Church, his son, John Wickliffe Rigdon, wrote an apology for his father. He delivered it at Alfred University and other colleges and communities in the Central New York area around the turn of the century, in an attempt to revive interest in his almost entirely forgotten famous family and in an attempt to clear his father's name once and for all of criticisms connected with the founding of Mormonism.

The son, who moved in his last years to New York City after losing all his holdings in the oil refinery business and meeting with only small success as a lawyer, wrote the lecture obviously out of pride for his father. But he appears to have written it also as a way of explaining his father to himself. His main emphasis in the lecture, as the reader will detect, is the great fame and fortune that Sidney Rigdon might have achieved had he been able to adapt his abilities and his personality fully to any one philosophy—Baptist, Campbellite, or Mormon. He sees his father as a tragic figure and is perhaps trying to account for the family's decline through an exploration of that tragedy. Yet the son's main point is that his father did much for the Church, and, though he was rejected by it and became bitter, he kept his faith—and that, to the son, transcends the tragedy. As an "outsider" he is obsessed with that transcendence.

The son is no great writer (it is difficult to see how he, with all his redundancy and verbiage and, to his New York listeners, minute detail, could have kept an audience's attention), yet the affection with which he remembers people and incidents and the effort at dramatizing events make his lecture worth reading. "I was there, I saw the makings of things, I watched a great man rise and fall," he seems to be saying. He senses well that through his father he has played a small and possibly significant role in history. He does not have much verve of language, yet his pride in his father's heroism and his efforts to understand his father's tragedy keep his narrative alive.

According to the few remaining relatives of the Rigdon family in the area of Friendship, New York, where Rigdon went with his family after the death of Joseph Smith, all of the other personal records written by Sidney Rigdon and his family have been destroyed. (A granddaughter and the only remaining descendant of Sidney Rigdon—a woman now residing in Florida and wishing to remain anonymous—reports that after returning to New York Rigdon wrote "novels and other books/' hut, she says, these have all been destroyed by the family.) And so these lecture notes of John Wickliffe Rigdon become the most intimate report of Rigdon extant. Yet the lecture has, as far as I can find, never been published or known widely outside of the quiet little town where he lived his last years and where he died in 1876.

Also in the late 1890's after he had rejoined the Church, the son took the time to write out these lecture notes in a longer form. He called his manuscript the "Life Story of Sidney Rigdon." That work was never published and is now in the Church Historian's Office in Salt Lake City. Although permission has never been granted anyone to publish or to quote extensively from that version,[1] I have gained permission from President Joseph Fielding Smith to collate the text of the manuscript printed here with the one in the Historian's Office. They are very" similar in form and approach, though the Salt Lake manuscript has more detail and relates several additional events in the life of Sidney Rigdon.

In September, 1900, John W. Rigdon visited the First Presidency of the Church and offered to sell the "Life Story" of his father to the Church. It was purchased at that time but was never published, though I think the son assumed that the Church would print and distribute it. The style is the same as the manuscript printed here, but it is considerably less dramatic and more redundant, without being much more explicit. In expanding his narrative for the version that he gave the First Presidency, he has in some instances drawn at length upon sources already in print (for instance, some of Sidney Rigdon's sermons from Joseph Smith's History and from the Times and Seasons are included complete).

In the "Life Story" the son makes himself out to be much more favorable toward the Church than he does in this lecture. He makes no mention of the Spaulding Theory and does not call into question the authority of the Reorganized Church, as he does in the version printed here. And he makes his purpose more explicit; it is, he says, to correct "some of the erroneous beliefs that have heretofore been entertained of the character and purposes of Sidney Rigdon." The version printed here is altogether much more succinct and readable, however, than the "Life Story." I have referred in my footnotes to significant differences between the two manuscripts.

As long as John W. Rigdon's other "Life" remains under the protective custody of the Church Historian, the version printed here remains the only available primary source of the final testimony of Sidney Rigdon.

In editing the manuscript, I have regularized the spelling, punctuation, and grammar, and have made sentences and paragraphs out of the writer's sometimes incoherent notes, in order to facilitate reading. I have also added connecting words and articles where they are needed, but have noted all otherwise significant changes with brackets or in footnotes wherever there is likely to be controversy over the writer's intent. Yet I have left the manuscript intact so that the reader might sense the style for himself.

The lecture was written out in longhand in a rambling style that made informal delivery easy and additional commentary possible. The manuscript has yellowed slightly with time but is kept for anyone to see by a distant cousin of the author (again a relative who asked to remain anonymous) at her farm home near Cuba Lake where the Rigdon family once lived for a short time. I am indebted to Mrs. Sam Hess of Frien4ship,·New York, for obtaining the manuscript for me to edit for publication in Dialogue.

In July, 1965, the town of Friendship, near where I lived at the time, held a Sesqui-Centennial commemoration and celebrated Sidney Rigdon as one of the town's most famous sons, even though few in the area had ever heard of the man and his influence on early Mormonism. Mrs. Hess, a Roman Catholic, was largely responsible for the revival of interest in Rigdon at the time. The site of the RigdonRobinson farm on Jackson Hill, the later Rigdon house on Main Street in Friendship, and the Rigdon family graves outside of town were made points of interest, largely through the influence of Mrs. Hess. It was during this commemoration that I first became acquainted with the Rigdon history· in the area and became aware of the existence of this manuscript.

During this celebration, a commemorative service was conducted by President H. Lester Petersen of the Cumorah Mission and President H. H. Christensen of the Susquehanna District of the Church at the local Baptist church, a building that Rigdon was forbidden to enter all the days of his life in Friendship, New York. That event was symbolic; for Sidney Rigdon, if only in a small way, came thus into some of the fame that he so passionately desired. With the publication of this manuscript by his son, he perhaps comes into a little more.

The Life and Testimony of Sidney Rigdon

John Wickliffe Rigdon

I am the only living child of Sidney Rigdon. who died in the town of Friendship, Allegany County, New York, in the summer of 1876, and who was at the time of his death almost 83 years old. There were twelve children in my father's family; they are all dead except myself. Sidney Rigdon joined the Mormon Church in the year of 1830 at Kirtland, Ohio, and in the year 1833 was ordained Joseph Smith's first counselor, which position he retained up to the time of Joseph Smith's death at Carthage. Ill. (He was killed by a mob on the 27th day of June 1844.)

I never knew a time when I did not know Joseph Smith. I knew him from my earliest recollections up to the time of his assassination at Carthage in the State of Illinois. I was as familiar with him as I was with my own father. I used to see him almost every day of my life. My father and his family almost always lived very close to him. I used to see him every day and sometimes much oftener.

When my father and mother joined the Mormon Church at Kirtland, Ohio, he, my father, was living at a little town called Mentor in the State of Ohio about five miles from Kirtland. He was, at the time he joined the Mormon Church, preaching what was then Campbellitism, now called Christian, and soon after he joined the Mormon Church, he was charged with having written the Book of Mormon. He always denied the same to friend and foe alike, but they would not believe him. The world claimed that he stole one Solomon Spaulding's manuscript and from that concocted out of the said manuscript the Book of Mormon.[2] He used to tell them he never saw Spaulding􀀍s [manuscript] in his life, but the people of the world would not believe him and continued to assert that he did write the Book of Mormon and gave it to Joseph Smith to introduce to the world. The religions of the world were determined to prove, if they could, that the Book of Mormon was not obtained as Joseph Smith claimed (i.e., that an angel from heaven appeared to him and told him where to go and find that which was buried in a hill near Palmyra, N.Y.). The fact [is] that Joseph Smith had the book, all that knew him said he did not know enough to have written it, and somebody else must be found who they thought could have written it; for to admit that an angel appeared to Joseph Smith and told him where to go to find it was a reflection on their religion, and their religion must be maintained at all hazards, and therefore they selected Sidney Rigdon as the man.

Perhaps it might be well enough for me to tell you what kind of a man Sidney Rigdon was and then you will see why the world claimed he was the author of the book. Sidney Rigdon was born in the year of 1793 in Washington County, Pennsylvania.[3] His father, William Rigdon, was a farmer living on a farm ten miles from Pittsburg, being then a city of about 10,000 inhabitants. His father, William Rigdon, married a wife by the name of Nancy Gallaher. They bad four children. Sidney Rigdon was the youngest. He had two brothers and one sister. His oldest brother, Carvel Rigdon, married and moved on a farm near to the old homestead. The second brother, Loami Rigdon, was a sickly boy and unable to work on the farm. His sister, Lucy Rigdon, married one Peter Boyer, who owned a farm near the old homestead, and moved with her husband to his farm, leaving Loami Rigdon and Sidney Rigdon on the old homestead with their father and mother.

It was the rule in the country that when a boy was too feeble to work on a farm, they would send him to school and give him an education. Loami Rigdon was too sickly and feeble to labor on a farm, and his parents decided to send him to school and give him an education. Sidney Rigdon wanted to go to school, and pleaded with his father and mother to let him go with his brother to school, but they would not consent to let him go, saying to him that he was able to work on the farm and he could not go. At last finding they would not let him go to school, he said to them in anger that he would have as good an education as his brother got and they could not prevent it. So his brother Loami was sent to school; he went to Lexington, Kentucky, and studied medicine and became a physician. He never returned to the old homestead to live but went to Hamilton in the State of Ohio and there practiced medicine for over forty years, leaving Sidney Rigdon and his father and mother on the farm to live.

Sidney Rigdon, after his brother Loami Rigdon had gone to Lexington, borrowed all the histories he could get and began to read them. His parents would not let him have a candle to read by night; he therefore gathered hickory bark (there was plenty of it around the old farm), and he used to get it and at night throw it on the old fireplace and then lie with his face and head towards the fire and read history till near morning unless his parents got up and drove him to bed before that time. In this way, he became a great historian, the best I ever saw. He seemed to have the history of the world on his tongue's end and he got to be a great biblical scholar as well. He was as familiar with the Bible as a child is with his spelling book. He was never known to play with the boys; reading books was the greatest pleasure he could get. He studied English grammar alone and became a very fine grammarian. He was very precise in his language.

At length his father, William Rigdon, died, leaving Sidney Rigdon and his mother alone on the farm. At length they got tired of living alone on the farm. It was lonesome and they sold the farm and his mother went to live with her daughter, Mrs. Peter Boyer, and Sidney Rigdon went to study theology under a Baptist minister by the name of Peters who belonged to what was called the straight Baptists.[4] (I do not know what straight Baptist means, unless it is those Baptists who believe in infant damnation, and that, it would seem to me, to be straight enough for almost anyone.) After getting his license to preach, he went to Pittsburg and preached a short time there and then went to the town of Warren, Trumbull County, in Ohio, and remained there about two years.[5] He did not have any particular charge of a church, but whenever a vacancy occurred in the country, he always filled it, and in that way got a reputation of being a very eloquent preacher.

Nature made him an orator and his great knowledge of history of the Bible gave him the knowledge so he was able to talk on almost any subject. He was of a natural religious tum of mind and he delighted in preaching the gospel.

At length he got married.[6] He married a daughter of Jeremiah Brooks, who was also a great Baptist. Soon after his marriage he and his wife started on their wedding tour to go to Pittsburg to visit his brother, his mother, and his sister, who resided ten miles from Pittsburg. They went on horseback; that is the way they rode in those days. They reached Pittsburg on Saturday night and stayed there overnight. One of the members of the Baptist church who had heard my father preach came to see him and wanted to know if he would not come to the Baptist church and preach to them Sunday morning. He said they had one of the largest churches in the city of Pittsburg, but the church had become divided and they had no minister and had no preaching in the church, and he would be much pleased if he would come and preach to them Sunday morning. He told the brother he would. The brother gave notice that night that there would be preaching in the church.

The next morning quite a little congregation gathered at the church to hear him preach. After his discourse was ended and the congregation were dismissed, he told the congregation that he was going out into the country about ten miles from the city to visit his brother and mother and sister and should remain out there about four weeks, and if they wished him to come into the city and preach to them every Sunday morning during the time he remained out in the country, he would do so, as he could ride into the city every Sunday morning and preach to them and then go back in the afternoon. This offer they gladly accepted and my father preached in the church for four Sundays in succession. When he got ready to go home, he and his wife again came to Pittsburg and stayed overnight, and quite a number of the members of the church called to see them and wanted to know if he would not, when he got back homeJ come back and take charge of the church and be their pastor. They said to him that they had the largest congregation in Pittsburg when they were united and they thought from what they had heard of his preaching that he could unite them and they would be much pleased to have him come back and be their minister. He said to them that he would take the matter under advisement and when he got home he would consider the matter and let them know.

When he got home, he told his father-in-law of the offer the church at Pittsburg had made him, and he, being a great Baptist, urged him by all means to accept it, as it was not very often a young minister received such an offer. It might be the making of him and give him a great reputation. He therefore informed the members of the church at Pittsburg that he accepted their offer and would soon come to Pittsburg and become their pastor. Soon after informing them of his acceptance, he returned to Pittsburg with his wife and became the pastor of the Baptist church.[7] It was not long after he took charge of the church until he united the church, and he had the largest congregation in the city, and in less than one year he had the reputation of being one of the most eloquent preachers in the city. Everything went smoothly along; fame and fortune seemed to be within his grasp.

At Iength[8] an old Scotch divine came to Pittsburg and wanted to know of my father if he preached and taught the Baptist confession of faith [regarding] infant damnation. He told him that he did not, as he did not believe it and would not teach it. The Scotch divine replied to him that he would have to teach it, as it was part of the Baptist confession of faith. My father replied to him that he did not care if it was a part of the Baptist confession of faith. It was to him too horrible a doctrine for him to teach and he would have nothing to do with it. His refusal to teach the Baptist confession of faith occasioned quite a stir among the congregation. The older members of the church thought he ought to teach it, as it was a part of their confession of faith, while the younger members thought he acted wisely in refusing to teach the doctrine. My father, seeing there was to be a division in the church, tendered his resignation and the church got another minister.

After resigning the pastorship of the Baptist church, he remained in Pittsburg about two years.[9] After that [he worked] in a tan yard with his brotherin-law, Richard Brooks, who was a tanner and conyer [?] by trade who started a tannery in Pittsburg. My father contributed some money to the business. At the end of two years they sold the tannery.

Soon after that Sidney Rigdon became acquainted with Alexander Campbell, who was a very leanred man but not much of an orator.[10] He and Campbell got their heads together and started what was then called the Campbellite Church, now called Christian.[11] Sidney Rigdon baptized Campbell and Campbell baptized him, and the church was started. There was not much to their confession of faith. It was to believe on the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, be baptized for the remission of your sins, and take the Bible for your guide was all there was of it. Its simplicity recommended itself to the general public, and Sidney Rigdon went to Mentor, Ohio, and commenced to preach the doctrine.[12] He soon had quite a large congregation.[13] They built him a church and he again seemed to be on the high road to fame and fortune.

One day the congregation asked him what he was going to charge them per year for his preaching. He said, nothing; he said the apostles asked nothing for their preaching and he was not a-going to charge anything. They said to him in reply that he had been giving them the gospel and now they were akgoing to give him something. They bought him a little farm coming right up to the edge of the village and built him a house. It was almost ready for him to move into when along came Parley Pratt, Oliver Cowdery, and one Ziba Peterson with the Book of Mormon.[14] It was a bound volume and it was the first time Sidney Rigdon ever saw it or ever heard of the man called Joseph Smith.[15] Parley Pratt presented the book to my father in the presence of my mother and my oldest sister, Athalia Rigdon Robinson, who was a young girl of ten years of age. Parley Pratt used to be a Baptist minister and was somewhat acquainted with Sidney Rigdon.

In presenting the Book of Mormon, he said, "Brother Rigdon, here is a book which is a revelation from God. One Joseph Smith, a young boy, had an angel appear to him who told him where to go to find the plates upon which the book was engraved. They were gold plates. Joseph Smith went as directed by the angel and found the plates in a hill near Palmyra, N. Y., and brought them to his home and there by the power of God translated them, and it was the everlasting gospel given to the children of men."

My sister and mother told me that my father replied to Parley Pratt, "You need not argue the case with me. I have one bible which I claim to have some knowledge {of] and which I believe to be a revelation of God. But as to this hook, I have some doubts, but you can leave it with me when you go away in the morning and I will read it, and when you come again I will tell you what I think about it."

Pratt said he would do it. "But," said he, ''will you let us preach in your church tonight?" My father hesitated for a moment and finally said it would probably do no harm and they might preach in the church if they wished to do so.

Quite a little congregation gathered at the church to hear the strangers preach their strange doctrines about an angel appearing to a young boy who told him where to go to find a book engraved upon gold plates hid up in a hill near Palmyra, N. Y., which had the everlasting gospel to preach to the children of men engraved upon it. Oliver Cowdery and Parley Pratt preached. Peterson did not say anything. Pratt spoke last. At the conclusion of his remarks, Pratt asked my father if he had any remarks to make. If so he should be pleased to hear him.

Sidney Rigdon arose and said, "Brethren, we have listened to strange doctrines tonight but we are commanded to prove all things and to hold fast to that which is good. I would caution you not to be too hasty in giving your opinion upon what you have heard, but give this matter your careful consideration and then you will be better prepared to tell whether it is true or not."

The meeting was dismissed and Cowdery, Pratt, and Peterson went home with my father and stayed over night. And in the morning when they went away, they left him the Book of Mormon, telling him that they were going to the town of Kirtland about five miles from there and would be back in about two or three weeks.

My father, immediately after the strangers had gone away, commenced to read the book. He got so engaged in it that it was hard for him to quit long enough to eat his meals. He read it both day and night. At last he had read it through and pondered and thought over it.

At length Pratt and his two companions got back. My father asked them who this Joseph Smith was and how much education he had. They said he was a man about 22 years old and had hardly a common school education.[16] My father replied if that was all the education he had, he never wrote the book. Pratt told my father that they had converted some people at Kirtland while they were gone and were a-going to baptize some of them the coming week and would be pleased to have him and his wife come down and see them at the time that the baptism took place. My father promised that they would and did so, and while there and before they left for Mentor, they were both baptized into the Mormon Church.[17]

When they got back and his congregation heard of what he had done, they were furious at him and said to him that if he had remained a Campbellite and continued to preach the gospel which he had helped to create, he might [have] gone down to the grave as one of the great divines of the age, but now he had gone and thrown it all away and was a-going to follow a fool of a boy who claimed an angel had appeared to him and told him where to go to find some plates of gold upon which there was engraved the Book of Mormon, which was to be the foundation of the Mormon Church. It was nonsense and a man of his knowledge ought to have known better than to have had anything to do with such impostures. He ought not to have let them preach in their church, should not have let them stay overnight in his house, and should have refused to have anything to do with them. My father replied to them that they could talk to him as they pleased [but] he was convinced in reading the Book of Mormon that the doctrine preached by the Mormons was true and he was a-going to preach the doctrine, let the consequences be what they may.

He was not permitted to move into the little house which they finished for him to live in, and the Campbellite Church refused to have anything more to do with him. Therefore, he took his family and his little belongings and went to a little town called Hiram, about two and a half miles from Kirtland, and then lived with those people who had been baptized by Parley Pratt and his associates at Kirtland.[18]

When be had got there with his family, they wished him to go to Palmyra to see Joseph Smith, and he went and saw Joseph at that time,[19] being the first time he ever had seen or met him, and he never saw the Book of Mormon until Parley Pratt presented it to him at Mentor, Ohio. He did not see the plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, but he talked with him and also the witnesses who saw the plates and helped to write the book as translated by Joseph Smith from the plates. After spending a few days with Joseph Smith, he came back to Hiram firmly convinced that he had found the everlasting gospel to preach to the children of men.[20] In 1833 he was ordained to be Joseph Smith's first counselor, which position he held up to the time that Joseph was killed at Carthage, Ill., in the month of June 1844.[21]

Not long after he had moved to Hiram, Ohio, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were taken out of bed one morning before daylight and tarred and feathered by a mob. The mob came and got Rigdon first. He was a man weighing about 225. They dragged him some distance over the frozen ground by his heels, bumping the back of his head, so that when they got him to the place where they were to put the tar and feathers on him, he was insensible. They covered him with tar and feathers and pounded him till they thought he was dead and then went to get Joseph Smith. He found them.[22] but they got hold of him at last and carried him out, and they took him where Rigdon lay, and Joseph thought he was dead. The mob covered him with tar and feathers and pounded him till they got tired and left them both on the ground. Soon after the mob left, Joseph Smith got up and went home, not very badly hurt. He was bruised some about the head. My father must have lain on the ground for some time where the mob left him. At last he got up in a dazed condition and did not know where he was nor where to go, but at last he got his face turned toward his home, more by accident than design, and went reeling along the road not knowing where he was; he would have passed his house but my mother was out the door watching for him and went out as he came along and got him in the house. She got the tar and feathers off from him as best she could and got him to bed. In the morning Joseph Smith came over to see him, but he was crazy. He wanted him to get him his razor. Joseph Smith wanted to know what he wanted it for. He said that he wanted to kill his wife. Joseph Smith soothed him as best he could and left him. In a few days my father regained his mind.

Soon after getting over the effects of the tar and feathers, they took their horses and started for Jackson County, Missouri, a distance of about 1000 miles.[23] They laid out the town of Independence in Jackson County and selected a site for a temple and came home. They left a few Mormons in Independence. Missouri. Among the number was W. W. Phelps. He was publishing a little paper at Independence which was published once a month.[24]

But the few members of the church at Independence got to quarrelling with the Missourians and they drove them out of Jackson County and they went into Clay County, and there they got into trouble again with the Missourians.[25] Philo Dibble was shot. Dibble told me he was shooting at the Missouri mob and went to load his gun after shooting at them but found that the end of his powder horn had been shot ,off and powder spilled. He saw a hole through his coat and unbuttoning it found a hole through the vest. He did not examine any farther since he then was in no pain. He remained there looking at the boys shooting at the Missouri mob for nearly an hour. At last pain came on and he was in dreadful agony. After the fight was over he was attended by his brethren and got well and lived to be about 83 years of age and was buried at Sah Lake, and the ban that wounded him in the fight in Clay County, Missouri, remained in the body when it was carried to his grave.

The Missouri mob drove the few saints from Clay County, but told them if they would go into Caldwell County, Missouri, they might stay there. They would not be disturbed. So they moved into Caldwell County and founded the town of Far West. Joseph Smith and Rigdon, after returning again to Ohio, concluded that as the Missouri mob was acting so badly, they would make the gathering place Kirtland, Ohio, about two and a half miles from Hiram. They accordingly moved their families to Kirtland.[26] There was where my first recollections began.

There they began the erection of a temple. I remember well while they were building the temple. It was finished in 1836 and was dedicated. Sidney Rigdon preached the sermon.[27] How the Mormons succeeded in building the temple I could never understand. They had no money but somehow contrived to get the lumber. And the members of the church worked from early morning till ten or twelve at night. Some got board, some didn't, so at the end of three years it was finished and was one of the largest houses then in the State of Ohio.

On the day when the temple was to be dedicated, there was a great time of rejoicing by the members of the Church.[28] They could not all get into church the first day, so the ceremony was continued on a second day. My father preached the sermon on the first day. He took for his text Psalm 8 of the Savior:[29] Foxes have holes and the birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. He said that this was the first temple that had ever been erected and dedicated to the service of the living God in modem times that he had any knowledge of. This sermon was said to be one of the great efforts of his life.[30]

What glorious times the Saints had when the temple was dedicated and what shouts of Hosannah have I heard from the old temple while the Mormons were permitted to worship God within its walls! The people came to church every Sunday because they wanted to come. You could not keep them away. A great many strangers came to hear the Mormons preach. My father usually preached on Sunday morning and great crowds, both members and strangers, came to hear him.

The upper story of the temple was used for schools. I went to school the last year we remained at Kirtland. Elias Smith, who was probate judge of Salt Lake in 1863, was my teacher.

It seemed, however, that Mormons were not permitted to remain at Kirtland a great length of time after completion of the temple. In less than two years from its completion Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon were forced to leave Kirtland on account of their starting of the Kirtland Bank.[31] My father opposed it. He said it would not be legal as they had no charter. He did not wish to have anything to do with it, but Joseph Smith thought differently and persuaded Father to sign bills as president and Joseph signed them as cashier. They gave their notes for the silver needed to start the bank. It ran but a short time as they could not get the silver to redeem the bills; the bills came back to the bank faster than silver could be gotten to redeem them with. And the bank went down.[32]

The notes which they had given to get hard money to redeem the bills came due. One Warren Parrish, who used to be a good Mormon and who got notes in his possession and had apostatized from Mormonism, got angry with Joseph for some reason unknown to me and told Joseph that he had notes which Joseph and Sidney had given upon which they had borrowed money to start the bank with. And they were about due. And if the notes were not paid at maturity, he would sue them and get judgment against Joseph and Sidney, and if judgment was not paid, he would put them in jail where they would stay until judgment was paid. There was a law in the State of Ohio to the effect that if one got a judgment on a debt against another and it was not paid, he could be thrown into jail and remain there until he paid it. As they could not pay judgment, all they could do was to get out of the state.[33]

Therefore, in the winter of 1837, they and their families started for Caldwell County, Missouri, a distance of about 1000 miles. I was attending school in the upper part of the temple when we left. On coming home from school one day in the afternoon of the day we left, I saw considerable commotion about my father's house. I inquired of Mother what was the reason. She said, nothing that concerned me. In the evening I saw several men come to our house and whisper a time and go away. I wanted to know of Mother what was the trouble, but could get no reply; and was at last ordered to bed. And I and my brother Sidney went to bed.

Along in the night, I was awakened by a man trying a pair of shoes on my feet. I asked what he was doing. He said he had gotten me a new pair of shoes. I said that was all right, but had he not better wait till morning, then I could try them on better. He said, "You go to sleep and don't ask questions." I did so. Not long after that, my brother and I were awakened and told to dress as we were going away. I asked where we were going, and he said to a land flowing with milk and honey that I had heard talked so much about. Well, I thought, if I was going to that land which. was flowing with milk and honey, it was a pretty good place for me to go. And I wanted to go. That night about twelve o'clock we started in om open lumber wagon, leaving my brother-in-law, George W. Robinson, behind to sell some property and get two spans of horses, a carriage, and another lumber wagon and meet us at Dublin in the State of Indiana, where we were to wait for him to come up.

We rode all night in the lumber wagon, which we left Kirtland in. Joseph Smith met us with all his family just as we were leaving the village of Kirtland. We stopped the next morning a little after daylight to get breakfast at a hotel and from there went to Akron, Ohio. A short distance from there we stopped at a friend's house and stayed some two days in order to put covers on the wagons so we would be warmer. Then we again started for Dublin, Indiana, and reached there without accident. There we waited three weeks[34] for Robinson to come up. When we came to Dublin, we all started for Far West, Caldwell County, Missouri.

We travelled together for a while and then separated, as it was difficult for us to get accommodations travelling together. Joseph Smith took one half of the party, my father the other. We agreed to meet in Indiana and we did meet there,[35] and then separated again. Joseph Smith was to cross the Mississippi River at Scunedy and we were to cross the Mississippi at Louisiana, twenty miles below.[36]

We left Joseph Smith in Indiana and got along all right till we got to a town called Paris, Illinois, where we stayed overnight. In the morning there was a great snowstorm. It would be called a blizzard now. We had prairie to cross of about ten miles and were cautioned not to attempt to cross it in such a storm. The people said the road was filled up with snow and we would be liable to get lost and, if we did, be frozen to death. But my father thought differently and thought we could get across without trouble. We could see woods on the other side and we started, but we had not been out but a short time when the storm was so great that we could not see across the prairie, and there was no road to be seen. Robinson took the lead and a man by the name of Darrow followed him in an open wagon. I and my brother were in the third wagon. We had lost sight of Robinson and Darrow when one of the four wheels of the wagon I was in came off and let us down in th

EDUCATION	PEDAGOGY
Principle = Knowledge	Ordinance = Experience
Repentance, new life, resurrection	Baptism, washed clean, out of water
Pure life, overcome sins of generation	Washing, blessings on bodily parts
Act righteously with power given, stewardship from small to great	Anointing, preparatory king and priest
Set apart from the world, discipline over body, searching for truth, faithfulness	Priesthood garments, wear always, constant reminder, protection, etc.
Line upon line, growth in priesthood power, strong against temptations of Satan	Endowment, going from room to room, learning, clothing, covenants
Marriage for eternity, fidelity, family, offspring	Temple marriage, sealing, blessings
. . .	. . .
ALL: preparing to meet and be like God	ALL: preparing to meet and be like God

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith's Theology

A Reflection on Joseph Smith’s Restorationist Vision of Truth

Truth Revealed Anew

Truth as an Independent Agent

Truth as the Action of Embodied Humanity in History

Jesus as the Truth

God’s Glory as Truth

An Expanded Restorationist View of Truth

Was Joseph Smith a Monarchotheist? An Engagement with Blake Ostler’s Theological Position on the Nature of God

An 1840 Sermon of Joseph Smith

The King Follett Sermon

Sermon in the Grove

Conclusion

Praise to the Man: The Development of Joseph Smith Deification in Woolleyite Mormonism, 1929–1977

The Lorin C. Woolley Statement

Mingling with Gods

The Office of the Holy Ghost

Gods Above Gods Infinitely

Conclusion

The Secular Binary of Joseph Smith’s Translations

The Book of Mormon

Early Revelations

Pure Language Document(s)

The Kirtland Egyptian Alphabets

Chart 6

Egyptian Grammar and Alphabet and the Book of Abraham

Esotericism and Symbolic Translation

The Prison of Language

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Reclamation of Divine Collaboration

Reclamation of Ecclesiastical Collaboration

Salvation through a Tabernacle: Joseph Smith, Parley P. Pratt, and Early Mormon Theologies of Embodiment

The Limits of Naturalistic Criteria for the Book of Mormon: Comparing Joseph Smith and Andrew Jackson Davis

Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon: Co-Founders of a Movement

Pedagogy of Perfection: Joseph Smith’s Perfectionism, How It was Taught in the Early LDS Church, and Its Contemporary Applicability

Conceptual Notes

1: Historical Context: Protestant View of Perfectionism; Search for Certainty of Salvation

2: Joseph Smith’s Own View on Certainty and Perfection: The Pinnacle of Salvation

3: Outward Forms: Joseph Smith’s Search for Fitting Ordinances: A Pedagogy of Perfection

4: Extension of Teachings and Blessings to the Saints Abroad—Gathering Reversed

Conclusion and Suggestions: Pedagogy of Perfection: The End in Mind and Education Toward That End

A Documentary Note on a Letter to Joseph Smith. Romance, Death, and Polygamy: The Life and Times of Susan Hough Conrad and Lorenzo Dow Barnes

Lorenzo Barnes

Susan Hough Conrad

Romance

Polygamy

Conclusion

Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures

Joseph Smith's Life

Why the Prophet is a Puzzle: The Challenges of Using Psychological Perspectives to Understand the Character and Motivation of Joseph Smith, Jr.

Joseph Smith and the Structure of Mormon Identity

JOSEPH SMITH'S EXPERIENCE OF A METHODIST "CAMP-MEETING" IN 1820

The Reliability of the Early History of Lucy and Joseph Smith

Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Believers’ Demonology and Diabolical Witchcraft Legislation

Skeptical Demonology and Pretended Witchcraft Legislation

The Coexistence of Pretended Witchcraft and Diabolical Witchcraft Paradigms

Context of Joseph Smith’s 1826 Pretrial

The 1826 Pretrial: Folk-Christian Belief

The 1826 Pretrial Allegations of Diabolical Witchcraft

Allegations of Delusion and Pretended Practices

The 1829 Charges in Lyons

The 1830 Charges in Bainbridge and Colesville

Conclusion

"’I Never Knew a Time When I Did Not Know Joseph Smith": A Son's Record Of The Life And Testimony Of Sidney Rigdon

The Life and Testimony of Sidney Rigdon