Was Joseph Smith in it for the money?

For much of his lifetime, newspaper reports insinuated that Joseph Smith was duping his followers in a greed-motivated religious scam. 

For a person of his remarkable abilities and undeniable charisma, however, it seems that he derived very little monetary profit from his devilish scheme, if such it was.

“Now father,” Helen Soby wrote in an 1841 letter responding to such concerns, “if you want to know about us or Joe Smith read the Book of Mormon . . . instead of newspapers’ statements.  All the money that he has had of us is 100 dollars that I lent him, and that has been proffered to me three times and I would not receive it.”

Joseph was seriously hurt financially in 1840.   He had invested in a partnership to buy the steamboat Des Moines, an undertaking intended to bring people (overwhelmingly new converts) and development to the new city of the Saints on the Mississippi.  But that investment was lost three months after the purchase, when the steamboat, rechristened the Nauvoo, ran into rocks and sank on a hidden sandbank.  

At that point, he owed $73,066.38.  By contrast, his monetary assets — in a large but cash-poor new settlement on the cash-poor American frontier — included less than twenty thousand dollars . . . in notes receivable.

Accordingly, in April 1842, pursuant to a new federal law that had become effective just the previous February, Joseph declared bankruptcy, seeking relief from creditors whom he simply could not pay.

He defended his decision as the only way he could settle the debts he owed:  “I was forced into the measure by having been robbed, mobbed, plundered, and wasted of all my property, time after time, in various places.”

“Some observers,” writes historian Glen Leonard, “could not imagine that Smith lacked means, since as trustee-in-trust for the church he controlled vast assets in land and buildings.  But these were not his own.  When the Twelve took over management of Nauvoo property sales in 1841, the Prophet prepared an inventory.  His personal belongings, said the Twelve, included ‘his old Charley horse, given him in Kirtland; two pet deer; two old turkeys, and four young ones; the old cow given him by a brother in Missouri; his old Major, dog; his wife, children, and a little household furniture.’  The Prophet kept his own real estate separate from land registered in his name as trustee-in-trust for the church by filing it in Emma Smith’s name.”

Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise (Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book and Brigham Young University Press, 2002), 149-150, 168-169.

Posted from Springfield, Illinois