Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Bumps in the road were unavoidable. One convert left in disgust when his name was misspelled in a revelation. A mission to Canada to try to sell the copyright to the Book of Mormon in order to raise money for the Church, prompted by a direct order from God, failed.

  Oliver Cowdery wanted his share of the glory. From the Whitmer farm, he wrote to Smith in Harmony objecting to one of the prophet’s revelations. Joseph wrote back to demand “by what authority” Cowdery commanded him to “alter or erase, to add to or diminish” any revelation from God? In September Smith journeyed to Fayette to confront Cowdery and the Whitmers, who had joined in questioning him.

  Joseph’s divine revelations, as much as the Book of Mormon, were the bedrock of the growing movement. Some of these revelations occurred quite casually. Joseph decided matters in church council meetings by issuing sudden edicts from God. Some he wrote down, most he dictated. A witness who watched him receive one saw “his countenance change [and] he stood mute . . . there was a search light within him, over every part of his body. I never saw anything like it on earth.” Smith himself said the process was “light bursting upon the world.”

  After disciplining Cowdery and the Whitmers, he faced down Hiram Page, the Whitmers’ brother-in-law. Page had announced his own revelations, which he said were given authority because he had achieved them by means of a seer stone. At the next quarterly conference of the Church, Smith established his dominance as prophet. “Brother Joseph Smith Jr. was appointed by the voice of the Conference to receive and write Revelations and Commandments for this Church.”

  Now firmly in control, Joseph was on the verge of his most consequential revelation yet. The Latter Day Saints were about to move toward their destiny.

  All Rochester

  The black evening air that drapes the church glitters with snowflakes. Congregants nod to acquaintances as they enter the sanctuary. The candles and oil lamps emit a nervous, ghostly light. Shadows dance in the church’s corners and ascend to the gloomy ceiling. The pews are packed, the smell of wet wool pervades.

  Everyone is alive with excited expectancy. They are accustomed to a calm and decorous church experience. Tonight the atmosphere is unfamiliar. The air crackles with electric tension. The alert congregation frets. The prayers have a secret listener, the hymns a new meaning. The whole gathering seems aimed toward a grave and ominous purpose. Anticipation mounts.

  A rustle of excitement shoots through the dark cavern. A man walks in from the wings and mounts the pulpit. The renowned Charles Grandison Finney is tall and slender, dressed in an ordinary gray suit rather than in clergyman’s black. He exudes a majestic confidence. Those who expected either a studious ecclesiastic or a wild man are disappointed. Energetic, somber, he grips the sides of the lectern and looks out at the congregation. The craggy dome of his forehead, the gaunt face, the patrician nose, all testify to his authority. His eyes, frightening in their intensity, stare silently, roaming the faces, as if taking the measure of each person’s soul.

  “If ye will hear his voice,” Finney intones, “harden not your hearts.” A long pause. He cites the source of the verse: Hebrews, chapter 3. Speaking without notes, he begins his sermon. It is not the expected hellfire. He does not harangue. He defines his terms, builds his argument. What is the heart? It is a man’s will. Why do sinners harden their hearts? Prejudices. Habits. Erroneous beliefs.

  He uses logic like a knife to stab the resistant minds of sinners, to lacerate those unwilling to throw themselves on the mercy of the Almighty. He does not need hysterics. He speaks like a lawyer, appealing irresistibly to the mind and the reason of each hearer.

  Why do you harden your heart? he demands. Is it procrastination? You will follow Jesus, but not now? You have more important things to attend to? Or is it because you will have to lead an upright life if you become a Christian? You fear what will be required of you? You fear to be humble, to mend your ways?

  His pace increases.

  One time, you have one reason, at another, another; and you have, in fact, as many reasons as occasions.

  He claps his hands.

  Your excuses come up whenever you are pressed immediately to surrender your heart to God. I ask you if you do not know that it is true, as well as you know that you exist?

  He throws words with grand gestures that make congregants duck. His voice thunders, then drops to a whisper. He paints heaven and hell in vivid colors. He makes listeners hold their breath.

  The veriest sinner in the world will make some excuse for what he is doing. It is remarkable to see how a man will evade conviction.

  The future feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton remembered him describing sinners plunging “into the burning depths of liquid fire.” There, he demanded, do you not see them! So vivid was his imagery that young Elizabeth jumped up to look where he pointed.

  God never forces you against your will. If he cannot gain your own consent to be saved in his own way, he cannot possibly save you at all.

  Each person feels the sting of his you. He is not accusing but questioning, not condemning, but pleading. Jesus is going to give his life for you. Right now, tonight.

  The evangelist makes each person see the need to let go. If you can relax your grip on yourself, God will do the rest. The Lord will receive you into his bosom.

  All your merciful saviour asks is for you to remember his struggle, his agony, and his death. Will you obey? Why do you turn your back upon him? Would you not rather say, This night, Lord, I give thee a solemn pledge that, by thy grace, I will remember thee always! Always!

  Finney keenly remembers his own embarrassment when, as a young lawyer, he endured his spiritual crisis. He understands the importance of making a physical commitment. He needs to include “some measure that would bring sinners to a stand.” It is as simple as that. Stand up.

  Stand up and walk forward and acknowledge that you are a sinner in need of God’s loving grace. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be proud. Come forward now.

  He sets aside pews at the front for those whose minds are torn between sin and redemption, between the old life of selfishness and the new life in Christ. If a sinner removes himself to this “anxious bench,” it is an invitation for the whole congregation to pray for his or her conversion.

  Women play a large role in the revival. In general, men go to church as a matter of show; women out of faith. Finney enlists them to help convert their husbands. He organizes women’s prayer groups. He sends them door to door to visit potential converts. At church services, groups of women gather around the anxious bench murmuring for the salvation of the struggling sinners. The participation shocks some, but it gives Christian women a sense of their power and importance.

  Everything about Finney’s revivals is meant to make commitment public, to enlist the members of a community to help each other toward salvation. When he is not preaching, Finney brings Rochesterians together. Inquiry meetings welcome those who feel a stirring in their hearts. Home visits target those who have taken steps but needed further exhorting. Finney is not beyond knocking on the doors of skeptics who he knows will not receive him. He welcomes their rebukes. His acolytes circulate the story of this or that proud man who rejected his appeal. Anything that encourages talk promotes the revival.

  It worked. “All Rochester was moved that winter,” a resident remembered. “You could not go upon the streets, and hear any conversations, except on religion.” Religion became the rage. Every person who was converted instantly became an evangelist. You could not believe and keep the good news to yourself. You took on an obligation to spread the Word.

  Prayer groups roamed through the city seeking the unconverted. Students at a high school administered by a skeptical teacher became anxious about their souls. They refused to continue their class work. Many wept, terrified of damnation. Their master was “confounded.” He called on Finney. When the famous man
strode into the school, the effect among the teenagers was electrifying. “The revival took a tremendous hold of that school,” Finney related. The teacher was himself converted. Many of the students resolved to devote themselves to the ministry.

  Finney had engineered many revivals, but none like this one. He gave credit to the Holy Spirit, but he was the one who made it happen. Up at dawn for prayer meetings. Wading through snow-packed streets to visit house after house. Preaching every night, three times on Sunday. He wore himself to exhaustion, then pushed on.

  From the beginning, Finney targeted for conversion members of Rochester’s upper and rising middle classes: men of property, manufacturers, physicians, mill owners. He had barely stepped down from the canal boat when he was introduced to a “lady of high standing,” the wife of a lawyer. She was “a gay, worldly woman, and very fond of society.” She was afraid the revival would interfere with her high-toned pleasures. Conversing with her, Finney saw that under her haughty demeanor, she was wrestling with doubt, with the suspicion that she was a sinner.

  “I pressed her hard,” he remembered, “to renounce sin, and the world and self.” He emphasized the line from Matthew that had troubled him so deeply in his own time of doubt: “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” The words took hold of the woman’s mind. As little children. Finney closed his eyes and prayed for her to embrace Jesus in this way—as little children. When he opened them he saw “tears streaming over her face.” She accepted the faith from that moment and became “zealous for the conversion of her friends.”

  Finney directed his energy toward the “highest classes of society” for a tactical purpose. If they were converted, others would follow their example. Accepting Jesus would become fashionable. He did not leave the matter to chance. He identified likely targets among the town’s elite, visited their homes, pressed them to attend services, exhorted them by name during sermons, and soon had them sweating on his anxious bench. Each conversion was newsworthy.

  With the passing months, Finney’s efforts in Rochester bore more and more fruit. Word spread through religious circles around the country. Something miraculous was happening in western New York.

  Wedding

  It would be a grand experiment in telecommunication. Governor DeWitt Clinton thought that scientists might “by the use of accurate chronometers” take advantage of the occasion to determine the speed of sound, but no one took him up on the idea. On the Buffalo waterfront, a 32-pounder cannon, one of the largest in the American arsenal, stood ready. At exactly 10:00 a.m. on October 26, 1825, the gun sent out an enormous blast that rippled the waters of Lake Erie. Farther along the canal line, cannoneers waited at intervals of ten or fifteen miles. Each team of gunners listened intently for the signal from the previous firing. On hearing it, they immediately ignited their own piece.

  Onward the message went, gun after gun, for an hour and twenty minutes until it reached the Atlantic, more than five hundred miles away. It was the first time that news of an event in the interior had arrived at the coast in an approximation of real time. Now the signal was relayed back, reaching Buffalo just after 1:00 p.m. The speed hinted at the earth-shrinking technology, the telegraph and the steam locomotive, that lay just over the horizon.

  The first thunderous peal marked the departure of a flotilla of boats down the Grand Western Canal, afterward known as the Erie Canal. The vessels were to travel the length of the waterway, from the shore of Lake Erie to Albany, then down the Hudson to New York City. From a luxury packet boat, James Geddes could examine the transformation along the route he had first surveyed in 1808. Benjamin Wright could inspect the technology that his team of self-taught engineers had made possible. Governor Clinton could revel in the project on which he had staked his political fortunes and which had catapulted him to his exalted position.

  Before the boats left, Jesse Hawley gave one of the celebratory speeches. In July, he had finally unmasked himself as the “Hercules” who had, eighteen years earlier, penned the essays that had helped set the whole grand project in motion. He noted how he himself had “by laborious industry, attained from bankruptcy to a comfortable moderate competency.” The fact that three thousand barrels of flour were now flowing down the canal every day afforded him deep satisfaction. The opening of the canal, he said, was “among the greatest events of our Nation.” New Yorkers had built “the longest Canal—in the least time—with the least experience—for the least money.” In fact, they had spent just over $7 million. When the canal matured, it would take in more than that in tolls every year.

  The dignitaries rode the boat called Seneca Chief, but the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy, through whose ancestral land the canal had been carved, was represented only by two Indian boys aboard the last boat in line. This vessel, designated Noah’s Ark, carried curiosities in the form of a bear, a couple of fawns, two eagles, and numerous “creeping things.” The undisturbed habitat of these creatures, along with the Indians themselves, had now faded into a bucolic and irretrievable past. Noah’s Ark later fell behind the other boats and had to drop out of the parade.

  After passing the Deep Cut and the amazing flight of locks at Lockport, the boats ambled eastward. Along the way, the celebrants hailed a group of nineteen travelers headed west, who answered in an unfamiliar language. They turned out to be the first Norwegian immigrants to America. Having crossed the Atlantic on a fifty-four-foot fishing sloop, they had purchased land on the Lake Ontario plain. Their settlement became a way station for the thousands of Nordic immigrants who traveled the canal to populate the Great Lakes region.

  Just outside Rochester, the Seneca Chief met a boat that bore the city’s nickname, the Young Lion of the West. The captains of the two boats went through some ritualistic rigmarole with a Masonic flavor. “Who comes there?” “Your brothers from the West. . . . By the channel of the Grand Erie Canal.”

  Farther east, having stopped briefly at Palmyra, the flotilla paused for speeches at Lyons. A local editor noted that in previous years “coarse epithets, and vulgar sarcasms were heaped upon the abbettors of this project.” Now, all the canal’s opponents were chewing diligently on humble pie and singing the project’s praises. A month before he died, Thomas Jefferson admitted that “this great work will immortalize the present authorities of N.Y.”

  In Weedsport, west of Syracuse, the festivities had been marred when an old cannon exploded, killing two men. They might have stood in as a symbol of the hundreds of workers who had died from illness and accidents during the eight years of the canal’s construction.

  The boats arrived in Syracuse, a town brought into existence by the waterway. Joshua Forman, who in 1808 had introduced the bill in the state legislature to get the project started, said its completion “marks a new era in the history of man.” He and his fellow citizens had “broken down the old barriers of nature.”

  Then they were passing into the Hudson River at Albany. More ceremonies, more speeches. Two powerful steamships took over from the mules to tow the fleet of canal boats the 150 miles to New York City. Cannons fired from towns along the shore to welcome the fleet. Fireworks set the sky ablaze.

  They reached New York on November 4. A city of 25,000 during Clinton’s youth, the metropolis was now crowded with 166,000 citizens. They were determined to celebrate “in a manner suited to the character of our City.” And they did. Tens of thousands turned out to line the shore and pack the Battery. All were eager to view the Grand Aquatic Procession. A mass of ships and barges accompanied the canal boats to Sandy Hook, at the mouth of the harbor.

  Rocked by the waves of the ocean, his eyes wet with tears, Clinton “wedded” the waters of the Great Lakes with the Atlantic by pouring Lake Erie water from a gaudily decorated cask. The governor gave a nod to the Almighty, asking Him to “smile most propitiously on this work.” But he also sang the praises of Mammon, t
elling New Yorkers there were now “no limits to your lucrative extensions of trade and commerce.”

  The celebrants returned to Manhattan to join the greatest parade ever staged in North America. Cordwainers (shoemakers), hatters, and shipwrights by the hundreds marched to honor their professions. Tinsmiths towed a float containing a replica of the Lockport lock system, complete with pumped water. Fire companies hauled decorated engines. Volunteers of Company Number 41, whose founder and once most active member was DeWitt Clinton himself, had painted theirs with canal scenes.

  Two working printing presses were towed through the streets, stamping out broadsides of treacle-saturated verse for immediate consumption. Of course there had to be a book. Promoters marked the occasion by commissioning a four-hundred-page Memoir of canal scenes sketched by such noted American artists as Asher Durand. Citizens dined on Canal Beef, wrapped their heads in Canal turbans, and that evening crowded into the Grand Canal Ball, where a canal boat modeled from maple sugar slowly dissolved in Erie water. The city’s buildings were ablaze with oil and gas lights. Overhead, skyrockets blazed. Through it all, the future whispered in every ear.

  Big Things

  Parley Pratt had grown up in central New York, son of a poor farmer. His education was limited, but, he said, “I always loved a book.” He hired out as a farm laborer before traveling west in search of brighter prospects. In 1827, at twenty-one, he married and settled with his bride in northern Ohio. Always a spiritual seeker, he put his faith in a frontier Baptist exhorter there named Sidney Rigdon.