Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Twice more that night, Moroni appeared in the room. Each time, he reiterated his message. The next morning, Joseph’s brain still reeled with the apparition, the tumble of ideas. He could barely concentrate on his work in the fields. His older brother Alvin reprimanded him for dawdling. His father, seeing Joseph’s pallor, told him to go back to the house. On the way, the boy stumbled and fell unconscious. As he recovered from his daze, Moroni appeared again to admonish him.

  Joseph returned to his father in the field and whispered to him the secret. Moroni had told him of a book “written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent.” Joseph was to retrieve this treasure from an underground cache on a nearby hill. The book’s value was not in its precious metal: Moroni had forbade him even to think of worldly gain. The text was something far greater, a new narrative of reality. Tools, which he would find with the plates, would allow him to see beyond earthly sight and to understand.

  The teenager waited for his father’s reaction. Joseph Sr. was fifty-two. A loving man, he had long known the relentless anxiety of poverty. He had acquired very little that he could pass on to his children. His tented eyes expressed the disappointment of a well-intentioned failure. Yet he lived in a world of possibilities. He knew his Scripture. “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” the Book of Joel declared, “your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” He believed his son. He told him to do exactly as the angel had instructed.

  The familiar hundred-foot-high hill that Joseph had seen in his vision was an elongated pile of glacial till located just off the road from Palmyra to Canandaigua, three miles south of the Smith farm. Joseph went there that very day. He dug near the top and pried a rock away. Beneath it, he found a stone box. Inside that, the golden plates, bound with rings. With them, a breastplate and diamond spectacles, the aids to vision.

  Although he had been warned, Joseph succumbed to the luster, the immense value of the gold. Reaching to grasp the treasure, he received a nasty shock. He looked up to see the stern celestial being. Moroni chastised him. He must approach the plates with nothing in mind but the glory of God. Nor would he be able to retrieve them now. He must come back every year on the same day. One day, perhaps, he would be allowed to possess them.

  Joseph returned home in a state of wonder. He poured out the story to his family, who had anxiously awaited his return. They sat in a circle and listened with rapt attention. His utter sincerity and compelling words instantly converted them. “The whole family were melted to tears,” his mother reported. “The sweetest union and happiness pervaded our house.”

  Joseph warned them that revelation entailed danger. When the wicked of the world knew what was happening “they would try to take our lives.” No matter. Joseph Smith Jr., not yet eighteen, had begun one of the most extraordinary spiritual journeys in modern history.

  Excited

  Life along the Erie Canal was changing too quickly. The new was rushing forward. Waves of prosperity buoyed some and left others to founder. Social status was growing more slippery, class distinction sharper. Money was the new idol, land speculation a national obsession. Fortunes were made and lost with shocking suddenness. Uncertainty generated resentment. The pace of change made citizens sensitive to anything that challenged revered values. Scandal raised the specter of conspiracy. Anxiety turned to fear.

  In 1826, the popular and respected Freemasons could hardly imagine that they were about to become the targets of public wrath. Their members occupied offices at all levels of government. New York governor DeWitt Clinton held the title of General Grand High Priest of the General Grand Royal Arch Chapter of the United States. Andrew Jackson, the war hero who had run for president in 1824, was a Mason. So was Henry Clay, the secretary of state. But a storm was bearing down on the brotherhood.

  In May 1826, William Morgan began writing his Illustrations of Masonry by One of the Fraternity Who has Devoted Thirty Years to the Subject. The title was hyperbole; the book an account, without commentary, of the first three degrees of the order: Entered Apprentice, Craft Mason, and Master Mason. On hearing of the project, local Masons inserted a notice in a Canandaigua paper that publicly labeled Morgan “a swindler and a dangerous man.” The Le Roy, New York, chapter appointed a vigilante committee assigned, “in case of emergency, to guard the institution from imposition.”

  Locals still breathed the air of the wilderness, including a tendency toward mob justice. As the project moved forward that summer, western New York Masons turned rabid. Samuel Greene, a Batavia politician, attended a Masonic meeting and reported that he “never saw men so excited in my life. . . . Committees were appointed to do this and that and everything went forward in a kind of frenzy.”

  Publisher David Miller, when he began the process of printing Morgan’s tome, stocked his shop with firearms, including twenty rifles, half a dozen pistols, and two menacing swivel guns. Morgan demanded that his backers put up a bond in the amount of $500,000 to secure the royalties due him and his family. The amount was fanciful, but the request was indicative of Morgan’s concern.

  Morgan left Lucinda and the children at home early that Monday morning, September 11, 1826, and headed for the print shop. A stranger approached him and told Morgan he was wanted at Danold’s Tavern, a well-known Batavia institution. Three men, all Masons, awaited him. They had with them a constable from Canandaigua.

  The men ate breakfast together. The conversation was tense but civil. The constable explained that they had traveled fifty miles from the east to arrest Morgan. The charge was the theft of a shirt and cravat that Morgan had borrowed from a Canandaigua bartender several months earlier. As a man of the world, Morgan might have been amused by the effrontery of these young hicks and their ludicrous charge. He offered no resistance. Miller showed up at the tavern and offered to put up Morgan’s bail. The men refused; they wanted Morgan.

  Allowing for stops along the way, the crowded stagecoach took ten hours to cover the distance back to Canandaigua. Arriving in early evening, the men brought Morgan before a justice, who promptly threw out the charge for lack of any evidence. At this point, Nicholas G. Chesebro, master of the Canandaigua Masonic Lodge, showed up with documents proving that he had purchased a promissory note, signed by Morgan, requiring him to pay $2.69. Morgan could not produce the cash; the judge ordered him locked up in the town jail.

  The author spent that night and the next day, September 12, behind bars. About seven that evening, a Mason named Loton Lawson appeared at the jail. Jailer Israel Hall was absent, so Lawson asked Hall’s wife Mary to release Morgan. He himself would pay the debt Morgan owed. Mrs. Hall had heard a rumor that Morgan was a dangerous man, and she would not take responsibility for setting him free. Lawson fetched Chesebro to assure her that the transaction was strictly legal. Finally persuaded, she released Morgan about nine that night. As he walked out of the jail, Lawson and another man fell in on either side of him, gripping his arms.

  The encounter quickly turned violent. Mrs. Hall heard Morgan cry out, “Murder!” He continued to scream for his life. In the light of a bright moon, she saw Morgan struggling vainly to free himself from the two men. A signal from Chesebro brought a carriage. The men together forced Morgan into the closed vehicle. With the pounding of horses’ hooves, they all disappeared into the night.

  On Fire

  In January 1826, Charles Finney rode into Rome, New York, on a wave of excitement. He held his first prayer meeting in the parlor of Moses Gillet, the local minister who had invited him to the city just off the canal. Finney was startled by the townspeople’s enthusiasm. “There was danger of an outburst of feeling, that would be almost uncontrollable,” he later wrote. He had yet to open his mouth; his very renown stirred people’s emotions. Stout men writhed in their seats “as if a sword had been thrust into their hearts.” Finney realized that his mere presence could “create a distress
that seemed unendurable.” He spoke for a few minutes, but “the agitation deepened every moment; and as I could hear their sobs, and sighs, I closed my prayer and rose suddenly from my knees.”

  Reverend Gillet nearly panicked at these manifestations in his flock, which seemed so like madness. Finney calmed him, but felt the peril of inducing people to approach too suddenly the emotional volcano of conversion. Stunned by his own power—the power of the Holy Ghost working through him—he told the agitated believers to go home in silence. Before they could leave, one young man nearly fainted. His friends began to swoon. Finney hurried to calm them. Go home, he told them. Be quiet. Pray. They went into the street sobbing. The revival had begun.

  The Rome revival teetered between celebrity worship and mass hysteria. When Finney and Reverend Gillet stepped into the street, residents rushed to them, begging them to visit their homes. When they entered a house, neighbors crowded in to hear them speak. Finney called an impromptu gathering in a hotel dining room and watched people sprint toward the meeting place. When he spoke in homes, schools, and churches, “men of the strongest nerves” were so moved by his remarks that “they were unable to help themselves, and had to be taken home by their friends.” As prayer sessions approached frenzy, he had to call off meetings “to prevent an undesirable outburst of overwhelming feeling.”

  “Ministers came in from neighboring towns,” he wrote, “and expressed great astonishment at what they saw and heard, as well they might.” Conversions came so fast that churchmen had difficulty recording them all. “Religion,” a resident wrote, “was the principal subject of conversation in our streets, stores, and even taverns.”

  Resistance crumbled. A doctor whose daughter began to suffer under a conviction—the prelude to a full-blown conversion—said it was impossible that she should give herself to Jesus. “It is fanaticism,” he declared, “it is madness.” But then, while he was riding several miles out of town to see a patient, the truth suddenly dawned on him. “The whole plan of salvation by Christ was so clear to him,” Finney said, “that he saw that a child could understand it. He wondered that it had ever seemed so mysterious to him.”

  A wealthy banker, a skeptical Unitarian, heard Finney speak and declared, “That man is mad, and I should not be surprised if he set the town on fire.” Yet when he went to Utica for a bank directors’ meeting, he found himself telling his colleagues, “There is something very remarkable in the state of things in Rome.”

  Finney worked feverishly. “I was obliged to preach altogether without premeditation; for I had not an hour in a week, which I could take to arrange my thoughts beforehand.” Visitors to the town could feel the spirit of God. A sheriff from Utica, a gruff man of fifty, felt as if God pervaded the whole atmosphere in Rome. While there “he had to rise from the table abruptly, and go to the window and look out, and try to divert his attention, to keep from weeping.” He noticed others around him, overcome in the same way.

  The town was full of prayer. “Go where you would,” Finney remembered, “you heard the voice of prayer.” Townspeople began to observe the Sabbath without fail. They became self-conscious about profanity, about quarreling, fighting, and gossiping. As the revival grew, merchants closed their shops in the evening to attend services. Even those who had lived through many revivals “were now made to tremble and bow.”

  It was not only the poor or uneducated who were affected, but members of the affluent middle class that was rising along the canal. “My meetings soon became thronged with that class,” Finney noted. “The lawyers, physicians, merchants, and indeed all the most intelligent people, became more and more interested, and more and more easily influenced.” They in turn swayed others: religious piety became the fashion.

  The personal, direct style of preaching that Finney introduced outraged some and excited others. “I said ‘you,’” he admitted. “I said ‘hell’ and with such an emphasis as often to shock the people.” That is, he spoke to his listeners directly and described their possible fate in no uncertain terms.

  Only four years after becoming a Christian, only a year and a half after his ordination, the young minister was becoming one of the most famous men in America. A man from a village near Utica pleaded with him to visit. The regular preacher there, he said, “is not plain-telling sinners to repent and that immediately. His feelings are too tender.” As Finney’s notoriety spread, requests came from as far away as Cleveland and New York City.

  He was not yet ready to venture so far. His next stop was Utica, a city whose population and prosperity were being pumped up by its location directly on the canal. He arrived in February 1826 and stayed until May. He continued to develop what were called his “new methods.” He broke precedence by allowing women to pray in “promiscuous” or mixed-gender assemblies. He couched his sermons in colloquial language. He prayed for sinners by name, making them squirm in their pews.

  All this was contrary to the decorum of orthodox churches. Finney’s methods were associated with the shenanigans of frontier exhorters, who thought they were doing God’s work when they got a Christian to howl and moan. His enemies labeled him “the madman of Oneida.” He frightened congregants, one critic said, with his “descriptions of hell, and his imagery of the infernal regions,” with which “he seems to be very familiar.”

  Finney was speaking to the young, who were enduring the shift from subsistence agriculture to an unsettled, market-oriented economy. Cast loose from the spiritual certainties of their parents and grandparents, they were quick to label an orthodox clergyman an “old hypocrite.” Traditionalists accused Finney of a “levelling of all distinctions of society.” He readily admitted to using the “language of the common people.” There were souls to save. “The results justify my methods.”

  Conservative clergymen in New England were particularly outraged by his methods. All their churches were closed to him. Finney was not fazed. His conversion had left him with a connection to God that gave him a deep confidence in his actions. Once, while engaged in prayer, the Lord drew so near him “that my flesh literally trembled on my bones. I shook from head to foot, under a full sense of the presence of God.” The experience left him calm, full of trust and with “the most perfectly kind feelings toward all the brethren that were misled, and were arraying themselves against me.”

  God seemed to sweep away opposition. Finney told the story of an older clergyman who was attending a Presbyterian convention in Utica. He had never seen a revival and did not approve. He made a speech condemning Finney and his irreverent methods. That night, Finney led congregants in asking God to keep the clergyman’s speech from dampening the revival. “The next morning, this man was found dead in his bed.”

  An atmosphere of salvation swamped Utica just as it had Rome. Even visitors to the town were instantly caught up in the enthusiasm. “I heard of several cases of persons that just stopped for a meal, or to spend a night, being powerfully convicted and converted before they left the town,” Finney noted.

  Finney went to visit a nearby textile factory. The workers were mostly girls and young women. As the clergyman walked through the building examining the machinery, he noticed one girl whose hands trembled. He cast a solemn look at her and she “sunk down, and burst into tears.” It did not end with her. “The impression caught almost like powder,” Finney observed, “and in a few moments nearly all in the room were in tears.” The pious owner ordered the mill temporarily shut down, proclaiming, “It is more important that our souls should be saved than that this factory run.” Within a few days, all the workers were converted.

  Conversions were always on Finney’s mind. When a fire drew a crowd to a gristmill, Finney showed up and said to one of the gawkers, “Good evening, we’ve had quite a fire, haven’t we? Are you a Christian?”

  His wife Lydia led prayer meetings specifically for women. She organized teams of two or three women to visit home after home and encourage familie
s to join the revival. The Finneys were taking advantage of the fact that women were much more likely to be church members than men. The ladies were gratified to be given a chance to exert their power for good.

  The couple’s efforts paid off. Hundreds were converted at Utica, more than three thousand in Oneida County as a whole. In addition to these immediate conversions, congregants continued to accept Christ for months after Finney left, influenced by his teaching and by friends and family members who had already converted.

  It was during the Utica revival that Finney gained his most influential convert. Theodore Dwight Weld was an erratic, energetic young man, zealous to the point of fanaticism. The son of a Congregational pastor, he had, like Finney, grown up in the hinterlands of New York State; Weld’s home was south of the salt springs that had become Syracuse. He attended Phillips Andover Academy, a citadel of orthodoxy outside Boston, with thoughts of following his father into the ministry. He was so avid for learning that he ruined his eyes by devoting too many candlelit evenings to intense study. After two years, he had to drop out. He toured the country teaching a memory-improvement system. The job polished his gift for oratory and provided him with a store of self-reliance and promotional savvy.

  By 1826, the twenty-three-year-old had taken up his studies again, this time at Hamilton College near Utica. More mature and experienced than his classmates, the zealous Weld developed great influence among the students there.

  While Finney was working his Utica revival, Weld visited his Aunt Sophia in the city. She had fallen under the spell of the famous evangelist and was anxious for her nephew to hear him preach. Weld sneered at Finney, his frontier emotionalism, and his criticism of established clergymen. “My father was a real minister of the Gospel,” he told his friends, “grave and courteous, and an honor to the profession. This man is not a minister, and I will never acknowledge him as such.”