More notes:
The persecution began very early. Joseph’s mother remembered that “every kind of opposition and persecution” started right after the First Vision.[1] During the period in which Joseph claimed to have the plates, he had to cope with various conspiracies to steal them from him.[2]
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.[3] 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.[4]
The early Saints were harassed from the very beginning. “Soon after the Church Began to gro,” remembered Joseph Knight, Sr., “the people Began to Be angry and to persecute and Cald them fools and said they ware Decived.”[5] Knight tells of one occasion, for example, when Joseph was arrested in Chenango County and, because the trial could not be convened soon enough, was held over night. But when the charges against him were dismissed the following day, he was immediately arrested by an officer sent from Broome County, and hauled off to the south—where the charges were again dismissed.[6] As the saying goes, this was the first day of the rest of Joseph’s life. His enemies would allow him very little rest.
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] See Bushman, “The Recovery of the Book of Mormon,” 36.
[4] Katharine Salisbury to Dear Sisters of the “Home Column,” 16 May 1886, The Saints’ Herald 33/26 (3 July 1886): 405. [See original]
[5] Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” 38.
[6] Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” 38. See also page 37, which speaks of persecutions accompanying some of the very earliest baptisms.
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I’m a bit late — it’s been an unusually busy day — but here’s a link to my column that appeared today (Thursday morning) in the Deseret News:
“The acts of remembering and forgetting”
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An important new volume, from my friend John Gee, recently returned from a year-long sabbatical in Heidelberg, Germany:
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Good listening, accessible through the website of the Interpreter Foundation:
“Becoming Like God–Gospel Topics Essay,” with Terryl Givens
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“‘To be or not to be?’ That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. ‘To become more or not to become more?’ This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.” (Truman G. Madsen)
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