Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith Jr. was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith ^[1]. The family farmed poor New England soil with little success, and repeated crop failures, including the devastating cold summer of 1816, pushed them westward. By 1817 they had settled near Palmyra in western New York, a region so frequently swept by religious revivals that historians later called it the burned-over district ^[2].

The Smiths lived close to the economic edge. Young Joseph received only a few years of formal schooling, worked as a hired hand, and for a time joined local treasure-seeking ventures, a folk practice common in rural New York that later drew criticism from his opponents ^[1]. A childhood leg infection, treated by surgery without amputation around 1813, left him with a slight limp.

Religion saturated the household. Lucy Mack Smith leaned toward Presbyterianism while her husband distrusted organized churches, and the competing revival preachers around Palmyra left the teenage Joseph uncertain which denomination to join. According to his own later accounts, that confusion prompted him to pray in a grove of trees near his home in 1820, where he said God and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision ^[3]. Latter-day Saints now call this event the First Vision and treat it as the founding moment of their faith.

Smith said that beginning in 1823 an angel named Moroni directed him to a set of golden plates buried in a hillside near his home, engraved with the record of an ancient American people ^[1]. He reported recovering the plates in 1827 and, over the following two years, dictated a translation to scribes, chiefly Oliver Cowdery. The result, published in Palmyra in March 1830 as the Book of Mormon, ran to nearly six hundred pages and presented itself as a companion scripture to the Bible ^[2].

Anyone reading the Joseph Smith biography must reckon with this book, because it made him a public figure at twenty-four. Local newspapers mocked the golden bible, yet the volume found readers, and on April 6, 1830, Smith formally organized the Church of Christ in Fayette, New York, with a handful of members ^[3]. He assumed the role of prophet, claiming continuing revelation, and his dictated revelations were later collected in the Doctrine and Covenants.

Missionaries carried the new faith quickly beyond New York. A mission to Ohio in late 1830 converted Sidney Rigdon, a Campbellite preacher, along with much of his congregation, and within months Smith moved the church's center to Kirtland, Ohio ^[2]. The pattern of gathering converts into a central settlement, then moving when conflict erupted, would define the rest of his life.

During the 1830s Smith led two church centers at once: Kirtland in Ohio and a colony in Jackson County, Missouri, which he designated as Zion, the site of a future holy city ^[1]. In Kirtland he oversaw construction of the movement's first temple, dedicated in 1836, an ambitious project for a young and cash-poor community ^[4].

Trouble followed growth. Missouri settlers, alarmed by the influx of northern converts, drove church members from Jackson County in 1833. In Kirtland, the collapse in 1837 of a church-backed financial venture, the Kirtland Safety Society, ruined many members and turned some leading followers against Smith, who fled to Missouri in early 1838 to escape lawsuits and dissent ^[2].

The Missouri period ended in open violence. Clashes between church members and other settlers in 1838, remembered as the Mormon War, prompted Governor Lilburn Boggs to issue an order declaring that the Mormons must be treated as enemies and expelled from the state ^[4]. Smith surrendered, spent the winter of 1838 to 1839 imprisoned in Liberty Jail on charges including treason, and escaped custody in the spring while being transferred, rejoining his exiled followers in Illinois ^[1].

On a bend of the Mississippi River in Illinois, Smith and roughly ten thousand refugees built Nauvoo, chartered in 1840 with unusually broad powers of self-government, including its own courts and a militia called the Nauvoo Legion ^[1]. For a few years the city rivaled Chicago among the largest settlements in Illinois, and converts from Britain, gathered by an energetic overseas mission, swelled its population ^[2].

Smith's authority in Nauvoo was sweeping. He served as mayor, lieutenant general of the Legion, and trustee of the church, and he directed construction of a limestone temple overlooking the river ^[4]. He also introduced his most distinctive doctrines there: baptism for the dead, temple rituals of endowment, the teaching that God and humans are of the same species, and eternal marriage. Privately, he began the practice of plural marriage, taking additional wives in a doctrine disclosed only to an inner circle, a practice that generated lasting controversy and eventually deep internal dissent ^[3].

In January 1844 Smith announced a campaign for president of the United States, running on a platform that included the abolition of slavery through compensated emancipation, prison reform, and a national bank ^[5]. The candidacy was quixotic, but it reflected his conviction that neither major party would protect his people, whose appeals for redress after the Missouri expulsions had gone nowhere in Washington. Among notable Joseph Smith facts, he remains one of the first presidential candidates in American history to be assassinated during a campaign.

Smith married Emma Hale in January 1827, eloping after her father objected to the treasure-seeking reputation of his prospective son-in-law ^[1]. The marriage endured extraordinary strain: repeated forced moves, poverty, Joseph's imprisonments, and the deaths of several children. Of the eleven children Emma bore or the couple adopted, only five lived to adulthood, among them Joseph Smith III, who later led the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ^[2].

Emma publicly opposed plural marriage, and the tension it created inside the household is well documented in the correspondence and later recollections gathered by historians ^[3]. After her husband's death she remained in Nauvoo, remarried, and never joined the westward migration led by Brigham Young.

Contemporaries described Smith as tall, athletic, and personally magnetic, a man who wrestled with friends, loved company, and preached extemporaneously for hours. Even hostile observers conceded his hold over his followers, while admirers recorded his warmth toward children and his informal, joking manner, traits that sat oddly beside his prophetic claims and helped fuel both devotion and suspicion ^[4].

By 1844 opposition to Smith came from inside the movement as well as outside it. A group of dissenters, angered by plural marriage and by Smith's growing political power, published the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor on June 7, 1844, exposing the secret practice of polygamy ^[1]. Acting as mayor, Smith and the city council declared the paper a public nuisance and ordered its press destroyed, a decision that handed his enemies a legal weapon and inflamed non-Mormon opinion across western Illinois ^[4].

Charged with riot and later with treason for declaring martial law in Nauvoo, Smith submitted to arrest and was held at the jail in Carthage, the county seat, under a guarantee of protection from Governor Thomas Ford ^[5]. The guarantee failed. On June 27, 1844, a mob of about two hundred men with blackened faces stormed the jail. Smith's brother Hyrum was shot first and died instantly; Joseph was hit multiple times and fell from a second-story window, dying at age thirty-eight ^[1].

Five men were tried for the murders in 1845 and all were acquitted by a local jury, an outcome examined in detail by legal historians Dallin Oaks and Marvin Hill ^[6]. The assassination did not destroy the movement. After a succession crisis, the largest body of members followed Brigham Young to the Great Basin, founding Salt Lake City in 1847, while smaller groups remained in the Midwest under other claimants to Smith's mantle ^[2].

The question of who was Joseph Smith admits no neutral answer, which is exactly why he continues to attract serious scholarship. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the largest denomination tracing itself to him, reported more than 17 million members worldwide in the 2020s, and dozens of smaller churches also claim his founding revelations ^[3]. The Book of Mormon has been translated into over one hundred languages and remains one of the most widely printed books produced in the United States ^[2].

Among Joseph Smith achievements, historians typically count the creation of a durable new religious tradition, a body of scripture and doctrine produced in under fifteen years, and the founding of communities from Kirtland to Nauvoo whose cooperative economics and gathered settlement pattern shaped the later colonization of Utah ^[4]. Biographer Fawn Brodie, writing in 1945, treated him as a gifted mythmaker; Richard Bushman, in his 2005 study Rough Stone Rolling, presented him as a genuine visionary embedded in the culture of his time ^{[1] [4]}. The distance between those two portraits still defines the field.

Smith's papers, sermons, and revelations are now available in a multi-volume scholarly edition, the Joseph Smith Papers, published with support from the church he founded, giving researchers direct access to the documentary record of one of the most consequential religious careers in American history ^[5].