Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  What were the brotherhood’s precious secrets? That, Morgan understood, was what everyone wanted to know. The man who dared break the oath, scribble down the mysteries, and publish them in a book would have the world rushing to pay him for his efforts. So Morgan thought. He was sure he had finally hit on a lucrative venture. Living hand to mouth, chased by creditors, he came to see it as an indispensable venture. As his salvation.

  Eager to “create a stir among the masons,” he teamed up with David Miller, a printer and newspaper publisher in Batavia. Together, they would produce a book. The project would require a substantial investment in time and materials. Several backers chipped in. The members of this little consortium had high hopes. Who would not want to read the groundbreaking volume?

  On the morning of September 11, 1826, Lucinda nervously watched her husband as he prepared to leave their small Batavia apartment over a silversmith’s workshop. William’s book was the center of a storm of wrath, and Lucinda knew that the closer the project came to completion, the greater the danger.

  The Morgans’ daughter, two years old, still lay sleeping in her cradle. Lucinda was nursing their two-month-old son. The baby’s birth that year on the Fourth of July, exactly fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, had seemed auspicious. They named him Thomas Jefferson Morgan. They might have been struck by an eerie coincidence—on that same day, the former president and author of the Declaration had died.

  Lucinda’s hopes were wrapped in fear. She lived in a precarious world where fortune could make sudden turns and citizens could be thrown into prison for debt. She worried about what would happen to her and her children if the venture misfired.

  All that summer, Morgan had worked on the manuscript. He recorded the rituals, the interrogations, the initiation rites, the sacred symbols. He wrote down the Grand Royal Arch word. He included descriptions to clarify the signs, known as due-guards, and the hand grips by which one Mason could recognize another. He explained the five points of fellowship, an initiatory embrace that replicated the manner in which Solomon had drawn Hiram Abiff from his tomb. Morgan added his own knowledge to information he lifted from earlier exposés of Freemasonry that had been printed in Europe. David Miller, the printer, later said that Morgan had “compiled” the book rather than written it.

  To the young, enthusiastic Freemasons of western New York, Morgan’s plan was an outrage not to be countenanced. When they found out about it, they harassed him. Several times he was arrested for small debts. For a time, he moved back to Rochester to avoid their attention. Now that the book was written and Miller was pulling the damp page proofs from the press, the Masons were desperate to stop the publication.

  The night before, Morgan’s enemies had set fire to Miller’s print shop. Some teamsters headed for the canal had been sleeping in their wagons along a Batavia street that night. They noticed the fire and extinguished it before it engulfed the building.

  Morgan and Miller felt that such harassment played into their hands. Why would the Masonic brothers be so determined to stop the book’s publication? It must contain juicy secrets, crucial warnings, eye-widening revelations. Readers everywhere would have to have a copy. The book would sell. Let the foolish Masons drum up publicity for the volume: the more, the better.

  After William Morgan walked out the door early that September morning in 1826, Lucinda never saw the father of her children again. His fate, soon to be labeled an “outrage” by newspapers, became the most publicized crime of the century. It engendered a mystery that would outlast the secrets of the Masons. The reaction to it would influence the nation’s politics for years to come. “No subject has ever spread with such rapidity over the continent, and harrowed up so much ill-feeling in the minds of the people,” a newspaper would later report, “as the abduction of Morgan.”

  Groundbreaking

  On July 4, 1817, a boisterous throng of citizens paraded out of their small village in central New York before sunrise. They were armed, but not for war. Many had been up all night celebrating the holiday and the impending grand event. They proceeded to a flat, marshy meadow studded with hemlock and birch a mile south of town. Each carried a shovel.

  The stockade known as Fort Stanwix, built by the British, had occupied the site of their town during the Revolution. The place was now called Rome. Applying the name of the Eternal City to a frontier outpost surrounded by wilderness did not strike the residents as incongruous. Rome had been the capital of a storied empire, and citizens here were embarking on an imperial project. Jesse Hawley had proven more prophet than madman. A dozen years after the idea took shape in his head, it had engendered a project that New Yorkers hoped would catapult them to greatness.

  DeWitt Clinton, who had taken office as governor three days earlier, understood that the state was gambling its future. The canal commissioners had decided to rely on American amateurs to oversee the construction. Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer, had never built a canal. James Geddes had proven himself as a surveyor but was also a novice regarding hydraulic science. The other engineers recruited for the project had even less experience.

  Delineating land parcels, the traditional work of surveyors, was largely a two-dimensional task. A surveyor laying the course of a canal had to think in three dimensions. The level of the ground was as important as direction and distance. Determining levels on undulating ground required subtle calculations. A canal demanded precision in ways that building a road or a log cabin did not. Running test levels for the middle section of the canal, Geddes and Wright had made calculations that differed by more than a foot. The water that would fill the canal would put the levels to a mercilessly exacting test. Any canal off by a foot would fail.

  Canal commissioners suspected that “Geddes will be found to be right and Wright wrong.” They were losing confidence in Wright, who at times put his own business ahead of his canal duties. But given the shortage of men with any knowledge of canals at all, they could not do without him.

  Geddes, in an impressive demonstration of his expertise, surveyed a hundred-mile circle around Oneida Lake. Measuring up and down hills and across valleys, he found that on completing the circuit, his calculations were off by less than an inch and a half. In an age of rough-and-ready approximations, it was a remarkable feat.

  Now, as the ruddy July sun flamed over the horizon, a cannon fired from the arsenal in town: time for the ceremonies to begin. Village president Joshua Hathaway declared that they were about to undertake “one of the grandest objects that ever has and perhaps ever will grace our nation.” Men impatiently gripped their shovels as state canal commissioner Samuel Young spoke of the “unborn millions” who would have access to the markets of the world. His sentiment was an expression of high optimism. The odds favored the skeptics.

  The citizens of Rome gathered around a butternut-wood stake labeled “No. 1, True Canal Line,” which marked the beginning of the massive digging project. A second resounding cannon boom marked the end of the speechmaking. Magistrate John Richardson had won the bid to dig the first section of the canal and would enjoy the privilege of scooping the initial shovelful of earth.

  The canal had been a vision, a concept, a dream, and a cause. It had set off contentious debates in the legislature and heated conversations in taverns. It had been a subject of derision, of oratory, and of hope. Now, the speculating and imagining were over. Americans were about to turn the fantastic idea into a physical reality.

  Commissioner Young handed a spade to Richardson. The contractor plunged it into the soil. The gesture touched off a frenzy of flying dirt. Everyone in attendance began to dig, “each vieing with the other,” said the Utica Gazette, in the pure joy of participating in history.

  To Feel and Shout

  Palmyra was buzzing when the Joseph Smith Sr. family arrived in 1816. Its population of three thousand souls was twice that of Rochesterville, the settlement a
round the falls of the Genesee River. In November 1817, the town gained its first newspaper, the Palmyra Register. It already had four churches. The Erie Canal was on its way and would pass straight through the village.

  At first, the Smiths and their children lived in a rented house in town. Joseph Sr. and the older boys—Alvin was almost nineteen, Hyrum seventeen—sought day labor from local farmers. They helped weed gardens, dig wells, plow fields, clear ditches. Lucy continued to paint canvas oil cloth rugs. She and the girls also sold refreshments from their home: boiled eggs, ginger cakes, birch beer. On public occasions, they loaded a cart with sweetmeats and peddled them to the crowds.

  By 1818, the family was able to contract for a farm: a hundred-acre plot two miles south of the village in the township of Manchester. It was the first time Joseph and Lucy had lived on their own land since the ginseng disaster fifteen years earlier. Not entirely their own—the contract required payments each autumn to the agent of the New York City land speculator from whom they were buying the property. They would be in debt until the purchase price of seven hundred dollars was paid off.

  Before the deal was finalized, they constructed a log cabin on a small adjacent plot, which they also planned to purchase. Two rooms, a bedroom in a shed at the rear, and two sleeping lofts for six boys, two girls, and their parents. Lucy, always upbeat, called it a “snug log house, neatly furnished.” Three years later, at the age of forty-six, she would give birth to another baby, a girl named for herself.

  Next came the work of clearing the land. Tocqueville wrote that upstate New York’s virgin forests consisted of “trees of all ages, foliage of all colours, plants, fruits and flowers of a thousand species, entangled and intertwined.” From this, pioneer families like the Smiths had to produce sustenance. They chopped the trees, removed the branches, amassed logs into giant pyres, set them ablaze. They sold the ashes to potash dealers, who turned them into the alkali used to make soap, gunpowder, and glass.

  A good axman could clear ten acres in a year. The Smiths, working together, cleared thirty. At the same time, they gathered maple sap and boiled it down to sugar. They set up hives for honey. Lucy and the girls made brooms and baskets for sale in town.

  That first year, the tangle of roots allowed only a crop of Indian corn and squash. The second year, they planted wheat, their cash crop. The land was far from picturesque. Like most raw farms, it was blighted with charred trees and stumps. Crops had to be grown in the midst of the debris left from clearing.

  In 1819, just as the Smiths were harvesting their first wheat and preparing to make their land payment, a financial panic collapsed grain prices. The family was not able to accumulate enough cash, even with Alvin’s paid labor, to meet their obligation. The debt piled up.

  The work was dirty, monotonous, wearying, and endless. It began at dawn and continued until dark. Respites were few, the mental stress intense. Yet Lucy was proud of what they accomplished. Having arrived in Palmyra “destitute of friends, house, or employment,” they had carved out a life by their own industry. When a group of Lucy’s women friends gathered in her cramped log house, a merchant’s wife commented that Lucy deserved better. “I am the wealthiest woman that sits at this table,” Lucy told her. “I have never prayed for riches of the world, as perhaps you have.” Pride amid poverty was a principle Lucy conveyed to her children.

  The world had its delights. Sunshine. Air scented with juniper and honeysuckle. A meal eaten with capacious appetite. An abundance of wildlife. The deep quiet that left room for the voices of nature. One upstate pioneer remembered these sounds: the whisper of rustling leaves, the notes of the whip-poor-will, a wolf’s distant howl. They formed a delightful chorus that left the careful listener with a sense of pleasure and awe.

  Soon after arriving in Palmyra, Lucy attended a revival, accepted Jesus, and cast her lot with the Presbyterians, a Calvinist sect in which local congregations were guided by bodies of elders. God’s sovereignty and his plan to grant salvation to only an elect few were fundamental tenets. Her sons Hyrum and Samuel and her daughter Sophronia were baptized with her. The other family members stayed home, but discussion of religion dominated evenings by the fire.

  Unlike his brother Alvin, whom observers described as “the soberest of men,” young Joseph had a lively personality given to whimsy and play. He could be “joyously funny.” A great talker, he entertained his family with “amusing recitals” about the Indians who had populated this region. He described their dress and houses, their beliefs and wars, his mother reported, “with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them.”

  Always restless of mind, Joe Jr. had been searching for a “liveing faith” that he could embrace. He was partial to the Methodists, enthusiasts who declared heaven open to all, but he remained unconvinced. The competition for souls that accompanied the revivals seemed to him contrary to Christian sentiment. He commented, “All their good feelings for one another (if they ever had any) were entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.”

  By 1819, when he turned fourteen, Joseph’s yearning, charged with the bewildering energy of adolescence, had ratcheted the tension inside him. His “mind at times was greatly excited,” he later wrote. He wanted “to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing.”

  To feel and shout was a common desire in those days of religious excitement. When you saw your neighbors fall into an ecstasy of belief, it was easy to sense you were being left out. The following year, Joseph came across the Bible verse, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God . . . and it shall be given.” His eyes were opened. “Never did any passage of scripture,” he would declare, “come with more power to the heart of man.” He would ask God, would turn to prayer. Privacy was impossible in the crowded log cabin. On a mild spring morning in 1820, Joseph walked off into a nearby grove of trees. “I made a fruitless attempt to pray,” he later recorded; “my toung seemed to be swolen in my mouth, so that I could not utter.”

  Suddenly the sweet air, laced with birdsong, came alive with grandeur. Joseph felt his heart leap. “A pillar of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of god.” Charles Finney would undergo a similar glory in a grove of trees the following year. So would many others during that enchanted time.

  “The Lord opened the heavens upon me,” Smith marveled, “and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me.” He saw “two personages (whose brightness and glory defy all description) standing above me in the air.” He was told his sins were forgiven. His soul was “filled with love and for many days I could rejoice with great Joy.” It was now clear which religion he was to join: none of them. One of the personages told him that “all their Creeds were an abomination in his sight.”

  Still tingling from his soul-shaking experience, Joseph sought out a Methodist minister and described the vision. This was standard procedure. A learned man of God could distinguish a genuine conversion from a childish fantasy, or, worse, a notion planted by Satan. The clergyman was not impressed. He had heard similar tales before. Frontier eccentrics had long been encouraging religious seekers to turn away from the corrupt churches. All creeds an abomination? No, no. The young man had been deceived.

  The clergyman’s pat dismissal turned Joseph even more strongly against the established sects. He had seen heavenly beings in the forest, and “they did in reality speak to me.”

  Damned If You Do

  In the early nineteenth century, itinerant Methodist preachers traveled the American frontier, setting fires of religious enthusiasm. The most incendiary of them was Lorenzo Dow. A Connecticut native, he was “thin and weather-beaten, and appeared haggard and ill-favored, partly on account of his reddish, dusty beard.” Asthmatic and sickly as a child, he had found himself, at fourteen, “taken up by a whirlwind and carried above the skies.” Li
ke Jemima Wilkinson, he had rubbed shoulders with angels and had looked into the face of God. He had returned to earth reluctantly, clutching a promise of salvation.

  In 1799, at the age of twenty-two, Dow headed to the hinterlands to preach. He had a phenomenal gift for oratory. He could spin yarns, tell jokes, mock, exaggerate, and enthrall. He understood life in all its squalid richness, and he used earthy parables to thrust home his points.

  Dow understood country people, their canniness and limitations. He knew that ordinary folks loved sarcasm and humor, gripping stories and vivid imagery. He catered to their taste for histrionics. He shaped his appearance to resemble the popular image of John the Baptist. He could act out the role of the devil, bringing his congregation “messages from hell.”

  Few persons in the age before railroads traveled as far as Dow. He routinely covered six thousand miles in a year, either on horseback along bad roads and forest paths, or bushwhacking through uncharted backlands.

  In 1802, two decades before the Erie Canal transformed the region, he made his first visit to what would become the epicenter of religious enthusiasm on the New York frontier. He converted a hundred sinners in three hours at the town of Western, near Rome, whose inhabitants would later quake to the preaching of Charles Finney. Dow returned to the area three times and showed the profound influence a revival could have in the hands of a master preacher. His spiritual bonfires would burn across the backcountry for decades to come.

  Most Methodist preachers roamed the frontier with simple hearts, their way lit by the glow of their own conversions. Lorenzo Dow called himself “the Cosmopolite.” Cosmopolitan thinkers had enjoyed a vogue during the Enlightenment—the archetype was Ben Franklin, a man of the world, free of prejudice and parochialism. Dow’s wide travels justified the label. So did his open-minded stance—he shunned all religious denominations and urged universal repentance. So did his uncommon lack of race prejudice—he routinely preached in the churches of African Americans and mingled socially with blacks. He spoke out against slavery as a “Moral Evil.”