Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Mormon’s book is the very definition of an epic. It embraces vast stretches of time, is peopled by more than three hundred named characters, and relates family sagas, century-long rivalries, monumental battles, catastrophes, prophecies, transformations, crimes, betrayals, quests, and a steady stream of divine revelations. It tells how a single family, without riches, position, or glory, could change history.

  Its language is reminiscent of the King James Version of the Bible, which itself combined the English of 1611 with the style of William Tyndale’s 1525 translation. The King James Bible reflects its translators’ attempts to convey the flavor and word order of the original Hebrew and Greek texts. Joseph Smith employed the scriptural language with which he was familiar to render the “reformed Egyptian” in which his golden book was recorded.

  Skeptics quickly pointed out the book’s historical inaccuracies. Horses, cattle, wheat, and honeybees are mentioned, yet all were brought to the New World by Europeans after Columbus. Nephites quote the New Testament directly, but they had left the Middle East centuries before it was written. Israelites fight with steel weapons and use compasses, neither of which existed in the ancient world.

  Literalists on both sides have fought over the book’s fanciful elements and its archeological foundation. What mattered in Joseph Smith’s time was the very existence of a modern divine revelation. A prophet had produced a book, the book established the prophet’s authority. The Almighty was speaking directly to men after a 1,500-year silence since the days of the early Christian Church. That was the big news.

  Was it true? The truth of the Book of Mormon was not to be found in the book itself. In the same way that the translation was revealed to Joseph, the book’s authenticity would be revealed to each reader: in his or her own heart. Converts were instructed not to try to comprehend its mysteries with their inadequate understanding. They should ask God if it was true. That was always Smith’s answer to skeptics. Search your heart. Ask God.

  Mark Twain famously labeled the Book of Mormon “chloroform in print.” It was, he said, “an insipid mess of inspiration,” very “tiresome to read.” The nineteenth century was the era of the nine-hundred-page novel and of speeches and sermons that could go on for three hours and more. A man who knew Joseph Smith in Palmyra said, “He could never tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination.” Where the King James Bible could be brilliantly succinct, Mormon scripture was wordy, padded with repetition and with empty constructions like I say unto you; verily, verily; and it came to pass.

  The Book of Mormon emphasized that America was a promised land preserved for a chosen people. The New World was the site of the Garden of Eden. Smith eventually identified a valley in Missouri, which he called Adam-ondi-Ahman, as the very place where Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit. Nearby, he planned to found his new Jerusalem, his Zion.

  Readers of the book were warned of the dire consequences for any people who turn away from God. Again and again, unfaithful nations were chastised. To see the effect firsthand, one need only look at the remnants of the Indian tribes, the erstwhile Lamanites. Their dark skin and lack of civilization were their degrading punishment for unfaithfulness. Only by widespread repentance could a nation be saved. And what nation needed saving more than the chaotic, sin-ridden, blasphemous America of 1830?

  The text included or reflected on many other themes relevant to the time. One minister said it weighed in on “infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government.” The Anti-Masonic fever then burning through western New York was alluded to repeatedly. The book was said to make an effort to treat “every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years.”

  Yet who could ignore this vast, awkward, monumental work of religious literature? Who could fail to marvel that a ditch-digging, barely educated, twenty-four-year-old farm boy had woven this fabulous word tapestry? He had tapped into a miraculous source of inspiration and had transcribed the whole thing without making a single revision. It was an achievement for the ages.

  Awake

  “It was a young city,” Charles Grandison Finney said of Rochester, “full of thrift and enterprise, and full of sin.”

  Just past dawn on September, 15, 1830, Finney floated up the Erie Canal into this venal settlement. Somber forest gave way with breathtaking suddenness to a dense conglomeration of frame houses. The air was rich with the yeasty aroma of brewing, the smell of sawdust, and the rank odors of draft animals. The din of twenty-one flour mills assaulted Finney’s ears. Looking up the river to his right, he could see the spot where Sam Patch had leapt over the Genesee Falls the previous November.

  So quickly had Rochester grown that Hamlet Scrantom, its first permanent resident, still raised chickens on his State Street homestead even as paved sidewalks and office buildings crowded around him. The artist Thomas Cole judged Rochester “one of the wonders of the world,” a city that “has risen in the midst of a wilderness almost with the rapidity of thought.”

  The city was a microcosm of America in a time of optimism and opportunity, of suspicion and rancor, of scrambling, grabbing, and greedy hurry. It boasted eleven churches, seven newspapers, hotels, libraries, a museum, and a glass-ceilinged business arcade. Three quarters of its ten thousand residents were under thirty.

  Rochesterians defied piety. Lottery kiosks, which offered the promise of a splendid fortune to the lucky, made a mockery of Providence. Canal boatmen brawled along the wharfs. At the city’s theater, “a noisome sink of immorality,” strolling entertainers, ropedancers, pugilists, and hurdy-gurdy men entertained crowds of rowdies.

  But Rochester was already developing a more staid element: mill owners, successful artisans, lawyers, physicians, bankers. All puckered their lips in distaste at the shenanigans of the lower classes. Respectability was their creed. Social order. Prayerful adherence to religion. They had little patience with those who rejected the cant of domesticity, who failed to show up for work after a weekend drunk, or who brazenly defied their betters.

  The Erie Canal was the source of the city’s enterprise, its phenomenal growth, and its sin. Millers had shipped ten thousand barrels of flour from the city the week the canal opened in 1825. Rochester had quickly become the greatest flour producer in the world.

  The waterway had brought the atmosphere of a port to this inland town. Canal boatmen, footloose boys who served as mule drivers, wandering adventurers, prostitutes, swindlers, impostors, and cardsharps, all crowded the dramshops, gambling dens, and boardinghouses along the banks of the ditch. They were part of the most mobile generation in the nation’s history. A steady stream of newcomers replaced those who decided to venture farther west. Seedy former canal diggers, mostly Irish, crowded into the slum neighborhood known as Dublin.

  The moral license of the town went beyond what its respectable citizens could tolerate. The stiff-necked city fathers, fearful that their community was sinking into permanent debauchery, had called in the greatest evangelist of the day to put the city’s moral house in order.

  Although only thirty-eight, Finney had adopted the “dignity and majesty of one of the old prophets.” He doted on his children. Helen, now almost three, could just peep over the gunwales of the canal boat. Charles Jr. was still in the arms of Finney’s wife, Lydia.

  Finney was determined to use his growing celebrity to accomplish God’s work. It did little good to light a small fire of enthusiasm in a single church. Only a massive bonfire that set a whole city ablaze, that singed believers and nonbelievers alike, would accomplish his goal.

  Winter was the ideal time for a revival. By December the canal would be shut down and drained. No way had been found to keep it free of ice, and the ditch needed yearly maintenance to repair leaks. Farmers would have complete
d their harvests. A snowbound Rochester would become Finney’s workshop.

  His timing was perfect. Sinfulness had enjoyed a jubilee of sorts a year earlier when Sam Patch jumped over the falls. The young man had lost control of his erect posture halfway down. Waking into a nightmare, he panicked. His arms flailed. He tipped sideways. Some spectators covered their eyes. The True Sam Patch slammed into the river.

  “When the bubbling water closed over him,” wrote Thurlow Weed, who had witnessed the spectacle, “the almost breathless silence and suspense of the multitude for several minutes was indescribably impressive and painful.” No one moved or spoke. Then, finally, “it became too apparent that poor Sam had jumped from life into eternity.”

  Soon afterward, Josiah Bissell, a leader of Rochester’s respectable class, rose in the Third Presbyterian Sabbath School and warned that anyone who had “encouraged that soul to leap into eternity” would be held accountable on Judgment Day.

  Eternity. The echoing word sounded an ominous note. A drunk and a sinner, Patch had lost his only chance for salvation. His soul was condemned to everlasting torment. Each spectator who had watched him perish bore a portion of the blame. Patch’s death was the last straw. Bissell, in consultation with the pious citizens of Rochester, had begged Charles Finney to mount a revival.

  Now local ministers were greeting the great evangelist as he stepped off the canal boat. Finney’s blue eyes surveyed the curious, hard-faced mechanics, the merchants intent on the work of Mammon, the smirking jokers, the tipsy idlers. He had, he was sure, come to the right town. “Rochester was the place,” he later asserted, “to which the Lord would have me go.”

  Tell It to the World

  What do you do when you find out that the world will end within the lifetime of most people on earth? The knowledge left William Miller, the Low Hampton farmer, deeply conflicted. He immediately felt “the duty to publish this doctrine that the world might believe and get ready.”

  Yet he did nothing, alerted no one. At first, he blamed his failure on doubts. As he read the Bible, “texts would occur to me, which seemed to weigh against my conclusions.” Speaking of the time heaven and earth would pass away, Jesus had said, “of that day and hour knoweth no man.” Miller had faith in his intricate calculations, but should he presume to know?

  Nor was he the type to draw attention to himself. “I told the Lord I was not used to public speaking,” he wrote, “that I had not the necessary qualifications.” Miller was a shy, simple man, not a preacher or an orator. “I was very diffident and feared to go before the world.”

  What was more, he had responsibilities. His wife and eight children, along with his mother, his sister, his brother’s family, and a number of farm laborers, were all part of his extended household. He owned three farms around Low Hampton and was looked on as a man of stature, a war hero. He was an important figure in the Baptist church. He had enjoyed a very public role as a school trustee, town supervisor, and justice of the peace.

  Why put his hard-earned reputation on the line? Why risk being labeled a fanatic? During the late 1820s, he saw how much animosity religious and political controversy could generate. The Anti-Masonic fervor resulting from William Morgan’s disappearance was tearing churches apart. Six Baptist congregations in eastern New York had split from the local confederation over the issue, barring all Freemasons from fellowship.

  Miller was himself a Mason. The brotherhood’s enlightened rationality appealed to him. He had risen to become a Grand Master. But more and more evangelical Christians had turned against the Masons as reprobates. Miller reluctantly decided that he must resign from the order. He did so, he said, to avoid “any practice that may be incompatible with the Word of God.”

  As years passed and he kept his awful secret locked in his heart, Miller told himself that someone else would surely raise the alarm. He hoped that the Bible’s prophecy, so clear to him, would inspire some established minister to speak out. He sent one clergyman “a few Evidences of the time of the 2nd coming of Christ,” hoping he would take up the message.

  Many preachers did cite the end times. They raised the specter of destruction mentioned in the Bible in order to spur their listeners to greater piety. But they generally did not point to a specific date.

  Miller “began to speak more clearly my opinions to my neighbors, to ministers, and others.” He was dismayed by their reaction. “To my astonishment, I found very few who listened with any interest.”

  He had acquired, he said, “no little celebrity” locally as a man with unusual and striking views about the end of time. In 1831, Miller was approaching his fiftieth birthday, no longer a young man. Time was short. Thirteen years had passed since he had learned of the imminent end of the world. In twelve more, the awful event would descend on an unsuspecting human race. One Saturday afternoon, he felt a sudden urgency. A voice told him to raise the warning, the midnight cry.

  Still he hesitated. He vowed to God that he would preach the awful truth, but only if someone invited him to. That same day, his nephew arrived at Miller’s farm. Miller’s sister lived in the tiny hamlet of Dresden, New York, sixteen miles away on Lake Champlain. The Baptist church there lacked a regular minister and the faithful were interested in Miller’s ideas about the millennium. They wanted him to preach to them. He honored his vow and went.

  The next Sunday morning, he mounted the pulpit and talked for the first time in public about the coming last days. The isolated Baptists found the notion fascinating. They induced him to stay for a week, as he explained in detail his celestial arithmetic. He returned again and again, for a year serving as the lay leader of the small congregation. He baptized twenty new members.

  Now, finally, Miller was determined. He would continue to heed the inner voice that had so long whispered to him: “Go and tell it to the world!”

  Latter Days

  The crucial nucleus of Joseph Smith’s new faith was his own family. “We are a visionary house,” his brother Hyrum had told a visitor. When, soon after the formation of his new Church, Joseph witnessed the baptism of his father in a stream near the cabin, he cried, “I have lived to see my father baptized into the true church of Jesus Christ.” He broke into an ecstasy of sobbing. He was “the most wrot upon that I ever saw any man,” Joseph Knight said.

  The Smiths had long been accustomed to the curled lip and averted glance. But now they had arrived. The success of the Church had vindicated them. Joseph had found them a path to greatness. His family’s loyalty was clannish and unwavering. Confidence was swelling in Joseph’s own breast. “Criticism,” an admirer noted, “even by associates, was rarely acceptable, and contradiction would rouse in him the lion at once.”

  The Church Joseph invented shared much with the sects he had long scorned. Like Methodists, Mormons believed that salvation was open to all. Like Baptists, they practiced adult baptism by immersion. Like the Shakers, they were open to Pentecostal powers—visions, healings, speaking in tongues—and encouraged believers to gather together, separating themselves from the larger society. Like many evangelical sects, they expected the literal return of Christ and the establishment of his kingdom on earth.

  After formally organizing the Church in April 1830, Joseph returned to his home in Harmony. His family, the Whitmers, his financial backer Martin Harris, and a few others formed the core of his followers along the canal. The Knight family and Josiah Stowell were among the cadre of believers in the Pennsylvania border region. These outposts were the seeds of a church that was intended to restore the earliest Christian faith. The members were Latter Day Saints. Some called them Mormonites—they would later be known simply as Mormons.

  Joseph hurried back and forth between the two groups of believers. Unlike Charles Finney and other masters of the pulpit, Joseph was not a fluent sermonizer. He was to be “a seer, a translator, a prophet, an apostle of Jesus Christ.” His church pivoted on
the fact that God was speaking to his people now. Revelations vital to these latter days were issuing from Joseph’s mouth.

  In June, he held his Church’s first conference back at the Whitmer farm in Fayette. Thirty members gathered to kick off the new religion. Joseph Smith Sr. was licensed as a priest, Joseph Jr. and Oliver Cowdery were made first and second elders.

  A few weeks later, back at the Knight farm, Joseph and Emma, accompanied by Cowdery and two of the Whitmer boys, dammed a stream to form a baptism pool. The next morning they found it smashed by vandals. Trouble was brewing. They rebuilt the dam and Cowdery baptized Emma, Joseph Knight, and Knight’s wife, Polly, along with eleven friends of the Knight family. The ceremony was barely over when fifty men, “raging with anger” at what they considered blasphemous services, surrounded Knight’s farmhouse.

  A local doctor named A. W. Benton brought charges against Joseph Smith Jr. Constable Ebenezer Hatch arrested the prophet and transported him to a court in South Bainbridge. A mob followed. Hatch grew apprehensive that Joseph would be taken from him and lynched. He had been won over by the young man’s sincerity and regretted his role in the case. He guarded his prisoner at a tavern by sleeping with his feet against the door and a loaded musket by his side.

  Joseph said the trial had to do with his “setting the country in an uproar by preaching the Book of Mormon.” Others claimed it was about his pretending to see underground. Josiah Stowell, the farmer who had hired him five years earlier to find a silver mine, was called as a witness. Dr. Benton said the trial was to “check the progress of delusion.” The judge in the case returned an acquittal.

  Smith was immediately rearrested and carried fifteen miles south to stand trial in Broome County. Witnesses in this case followed each other until two in the morning. Joseph was again acquitted. He snuck out the back door to avoid danger. He and Cowdery escaped by night, fearful of pursuit.

  In spite of the persecution, the Church was taking off. Joseph moved to solidify his power. The first person he subdued was the one who knew the most about him, his wife Emma. In July, he had a revelation from God that addressed her directly. “Let thy soul delight in thy husband and the glory which shall come upon him,” the Lord said. “Murmur not.” If she worried about his ability to provide for his family, she must “lay aside the things of this world, and seek for the things of a better.” As consolation, God named her “an elect lady,” who was to create a selection of hymns for the Church.