Martha S. Bradley-Evans - Glorious in Persecution: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839-1844

Glorious in

Persecution

Joseph Smith | American Prophet

1839-1844

Martha Bradley - Evans

Smith-Pettit Foundation

Salt Lake City

To Bob

The opinions expressed in this book are not necessarily those of the Smith-Pettit Foundation.

Copyright 2016 the Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City, Utah. All rights reserved.
Printed on acid-free paper. Composed, printed, and bound in the United States of America. Distributed by Signature Books Publishing LLC.www.signaturebooks.com

Designed by Jason Francis.

Frontispiece: Water color portrait of Joseph Smith, ca 1844, by Sutcliffe Maudsley. All illustrations, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy of the Smith-Pettit Foundation.

2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bradley-Evans, Martha, author.

Title: Glorious in persecution : Joseph Smith, American prophet, 1839-1844 / Martha Bradley-Evans.

Description: Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041614 | ISBN 9781560852643 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Smith, Joseph, Jr., 1805-1844. | Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints PresidentsBiography. | MormonsUnited StatesBiography.

Classification: LCC BX8695.S6 B73 2016 | DDC 289.3092dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041614

Introduction

deep water is what I am wont to swim in; it has all become second nature to me.

Joseph Smith, in History of the Church, 5:143

I cannot remember a time when the world as I knew it was not shaped in some way by the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (1805-44). For members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) and sister churches, Joseph is where everything begins. He embodies what makes Mormonism worth living for. Joseph is an icon, larger than life, who said he knew God and wrapped his life around that knowledge. It is unrealistic to believe that a Mormon could write a biography about Joseph without this lifetime effect shadowing it. Regardless of the measures I have taken to step back from this immensely interesting subject, the truth is that I bring my own life and experiences to my interpretation of Joseph.

My father was a member of an LDS ward bishoprica lay appointmentin Lavonia, Michigan, when I was young, but our relatives lived in Utah. Each year, we traversed the distance between Michigan and Utah in a series of cars created by American Motors, moving through the spaces of the Mormon narrative of persecution and exodus. My fathers stories about the 1840s Mormon boomtown Nauvoo, Illinois, kept us awake for miles; and when we stopped and walked up wooden stairs to trace our fingers along holes in the Carthage jail (Illinois) that we imagined had been made by bullets barely missing Joseph, this narrative became our narrative. It contributed to our identity, our sense of who we were. Stories about a mob crashing through the door to shoot beloved brothers Joseph and older sibling Hyrum (1800-44) were too hideous to believe, yet my three brothers and I begged our father to tell the story over and over again.

I have written this account of Josephs final years as if peering through a series of layers, struggling to see what is clearest on the surface, what is hidden behind lines of propriety or privacy, and what is intentionally obscured.

The Prophet-Narrative

The first layer of narrative is most evident, like the skin on ones face shaped by but covering a structure of bones, muscles, and sinews. This layer consists of the basic chronology of public events noted by Josephs contemporaries. The next layer is Josephs private relationships at homethe world created by Joseph and his wife, Emma Hale (1804-79), with children, parents, brothers and sisters, and close associates. The third layer is the set of experiences and associations that Joseph concealed from the public, even from insiders.

I believe that Joseph saw himself as a genuine prophet of God and spent much of his time trying to explain to himself and to others what that meant. His experience with what he understood to be transcendence changed him. In part because of this, Joseph identified closely with Godwith his understanding of Godand believed that he and the rest of humanity were, literally, gods in embryo. This awareness colored everything he did, suspended him above earthly rules, and transported him into an imagined world of heaven. His was not an ordinary, commonplace identity, either in conception or achievement.

Psychologists sometimes talk about ones narrative. The way men and women talk about themselves reveals patterns and traces of who they think they are or ought to be. When Joseph tells his story, he talks about how others must live, and often uses himself as the model of what others may become. Be like me, he seems to say, and you too can speak with God. The way he talked about himself helped him to grapple with and to understand his prophetic reality. In telling the Latter-day Saints about his role as prophet, he also told himself what he had learned about being a prophet.

Josephs story became crucial to the creation and maintenance of Mormon identity. It furnished legitimacy to the Saints efforts to build a new Zion in preparation for the second advent of Jesus Christ. Moreover, such narratives define what has the right to be said and done. In Josephs case, the prophet-narrative not only helped to explain his behavior and choices but to justify them.

Narrative comes from the Indo-European root gna, meaning to tell and to know. Joseph obtained his self-knowledgewhat it meant to be a prophetin part, through telling his story. His retellings changed not only him, but the ways he embraced the world, related to others, and how he operated in a world of rules, obligations, and responsibilities. Did the role of prophet provide him with a release from earthly concerns? Or did it confine him in ways he struggled to resist? Nineteenth-century expectations about leadership and authority also impacted Josephs understanding, as did his explorations of what it meant to be a man in nineteenth-century America.

Josephs narrative is composed of both sacred and mundane tales; where the former are ineffable and cannot be directly related at all, the latter presents the sacred in an objective form. Josephs sacred/mundane story demonstrates the self-shaping quality of human thought, the way stories create and refashion ones identity. British philosopher R. G. Collingwood elaborates:

As historians, social scientists, or (for that matter) prophets and bards weave narratives that connect individual minds to the social world[,] they create artifacts that soon take on a life of their own. These stories, told and retold, furnish the stock from which individual life narratives can be constructed. In other words, the story of an individual life usually plays off of one or more historically and socially transmitted narratives, which serve as prototypes for the elaboration of personal identity.

In addition, such stories forge social bonds and create communities. Communities constituted by stories maintain a degree of coherence, identity, and meaning that help members to know what they must do with their lives.

Stories such as Josephs place events in a sequential order with a beginning, middle, and end, a sequence that adds up to something particular and sensical. Joseph wove events together with meaningful interconnections that organized his experiences in the world and located his spiritual self in them. Those who study narratives try to find terms to describe the way this process works, terms such as paradigms, capsule views of reality, interpretive devices, or world views. Although Josephs narrative ultimately dealt with heaven, it began with everyday life and the prophets role.