A note on Joseph Smith and persecution

“The Book of Mormon is true,” David Osborn heard Joseph Smith testify in 1837, “just what it purports to be, and for this testimony I expect to give an account in the day of judgment. . . . If I obtain the glory which I have in view I expect to wade through much tribulation.”[1]

The persecution began very early. Joseph’s mother remembered that “every kind of opposition and persecution” started right after the First Vision.[2] During the period in which Joseph claimed to have the plates, he had to cope with various conspiracies to steal them from him.[3]

Within a week of the Book of Mormon’s publication on 26 March 1830, the Rochester Daily Advertiser announced the book under the headline “BLASPHEMY,” declaring that “The Book of Mormon has been placed in our hands. A viler imposition was never practiced. It is an evidence of fraud, blasphemy, and credulity shocking to both Christians and moralists.” Within weeks, other newspapers in Boston and Vermont had picked up the same theme.[4] His sister Katharine describes an event that occurred when all of the males of the Smith household were away from home. Katharine was about seventeen, and her sister Lucy was nine.

A few days after [Hyrum] was gone, a number of men, came and searched our house for him. Mother, myself and younger sister were the only ones at home. . . . They had come in carriages with dark lanterns, and if they had found Hyrum it was their intention to have him put to death. . . . When we insisted that he was not there, their anger turned upon us and they commenced to rob the house. While they were plundering us, my [nineteen-year-old] brother, William, came. . . . Upon coming in he asked mother, “What were those men doing?” She told him they had come for Hyrum and were now plundering the house. Arming himself with a stout club, he soon drove them from the house.[5]

[1] The Juvenile Instructor 27 (15 March 1892): 173.

[2] Lucy’s Book, 335. Though the episode is rather obscure, such persecution may even have included the spreading of the gruesome rumor that the body of Joseph’s deceased older brother Alvin had been exhumed and dissected, which obliged Joseph Sr. to uncover the body himself in order to lay the rumor to rest. See Anderson, “Circumstantial Confirmation,” 393.

[3] See, for example, Lucy’s Book, 380-383; Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 2:180-181; Joseph Smith, HC, 1:18; also the “Reminiscences of Joseph Knight,” a manuscript written between 1833 and 1847 and now present in the Church Archives and published as Dean Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” BYU Studies 17 (Autumn 1976): 33-34.

[4] See Bushman, “The Recovery of the Book of Mormon,” 36.

[5] Katharine Salisbury to Dear Sisters of the “Home Column,” 16 May 1886, The Saints’ Herald 33/26 (3 July 1886): 405. 

Thus far, on this trip, we’ve visited the room in the John Johnson home near Hiram, Ohio, from which Joseph Smith was dragged during the night of 24 March 1832, scratched, beaten, almost castrated, nearly poisoned, tarred, feathered, and left for dead.  (A tooth that was chipped when his attackers tried to force a vial of poison into his mouth left him with a whistling “s” for the rest of his life.  A baby that he and his wife had adopted died of exposure from the incident.)

We’ve also visited the cramped, dank, and cold jail at Liberty, Missouri, where Joseph and others were incarcerated for roughly five and a half months during the winter of 1838-1839.

And we’ve visited Carthage Jail, in Hancock County, Illinois, where, on 27 June 1844, Joseph and his brother Hyrum were assassinated by an armed mob with painted faces.

That all sounds a bit tough, but it sure beat working for a living!  And he must have been laughing the whole time at how he’d fooled everybody!

Posted from Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada