Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  The disappointed members of Zion’s Camp dispersed to make their own way back to Ohio. Cholera chased after them, killing fourteen. Trudging back almost a thousand miles in summer heat was a disheartening ordeal. The venture had achieved nothing; the guiding revelations had proven empty. Yet the comradeship of shared adversity bound the believers even more firmly to their faith. The Mormons, like their leader, proved remarkably resilient.

  Back in Kirtland, Joseph further elaborated the structure of the Church. He incorporated some of his colleagues from Zion’s Camp into a powerful body known as the Twelve Apostles. Along with another group, the Seventy, they were “to go forth and gather the Elect,” undertaking a wide-ranging campaign to proselytize among the gentiles, as the Mormons referred to those outside the fold.

  Evangelical churches of the day tended to be simple and democratic. Following the lead of Charles Finney, more of them were open to active roles for women. The Latter-day Saints’ organization was to be hierarchical, complex, and decidedly patriarchal. To the original system of elders, teachers, and deacons, Smith added bishops, who were responsible for administering Church property. Overseeing all was the Church presidency, consisting of Smith himself and two counselors.

  Endowed with innate charisma, his mind crowded with ideas, young Joseph could not resist the force of his own creative nature. He spun further and further from orthodoxy. “The religious tenets of this people are so different from the present churches of the age,” a newspaper in Clay County, Missouri, noted, “that they always have and always will, excite deep prejudices against them.”

  When the itinerant preacher Nancy Towle met Smith in Ohio, she said, “Are you not ashamed, of such pretensions? You who are no more, than any ignorant, plough-boy!” Joseph answered, “The gift, has returned back again, as in former times, to illiterate fishermen.”

  Impressions of the prophet varied. “His language and manner were the coarsest possible,” a genteel visitor noted. A convert admitted that “he was a quear man for a Prophet.” But, he added, “I found him to be a friendly cheerful pleasant agreeable man. I could not help liking him.” Others were even more impressed. “On shaking hands with Joseph Smith, I received the Holy Spirit in such great abundance that I felt it thrill my whole system,” said the newly baptized Mary Hales.

  Smith published a volume of the revelations that flooded his mind. The book, Doctrines and Covenants, became, in its various editions, Mormon scripture. For Church members, the continued revelations were extraordinarily exciting. After centuries of silence, the Almighty was speaking to mankind as He had to the patriarchs.

  In 1835, Joseph gathered $2,400, once an unimaginable sum for the Smith family, to purchase four Egyptian mummies and some papyrus scrolls from a traveling showman. He declared the scrolls to contain the Book of Abraham, an elaboration of stories in the Bible. He set about translating the hieroglyphics, creating more scripture to supplement the Book of Mormon. But while the gold plates from Hill Cumorah remained elusive, a fragment of this papyrus survived. It turned up in 1967 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Scholars judged the document a routine funerary inscription unrelated to Smith’s “translation.”

  In addition to his multitude of Church-related activities, Joseph started a store, an echo of his parents’ ill-fated venture of 1802. A lack of business acumen ran in the family: ordering merchandise on credit, Joseph soon found himself heavily in debt.

  The idea of family was at the heart of the Mormon experience. Joseph had made his father the Church’s first patriarch, an official whose primary duty was to bestow formal blessings. This lovable underdog, so long scorned by his betters, was finally a somebody, a revered official in a burgeoning new religion. Hyrum was made a top counselor and would later succeed his father as patriarch.

  Smith’s continued emphasis on the Biblical patriarchs drew his attention to the fact that many of them had married multiple wives. A verse in 1 Kings said that Solomon “had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines.” The Book of Mormon had rejected polygamy, calling multiple marriages “wicked practices” that were “abominable before me, saith the Lord.”

  Joseph Smith was thirty years old, at the peak of his manhood, trembling with energy and endowed with enormous power within his Church. Soon after the move to Ohio, rumors about sexual unorthodoxy began circulating inside and outside the faith.

  Fanny Alger and her family were among the earliest Ohio converts to the Mormon faith. In 1833, when she was sixteen, Fanny moved into the Smith home to help with the housework. Emma was caring for two small children at the time. Fanny was “a varry nice & Comly young woman,” convert Benjamin Johnson observed. Everyone was partial to her, he wrote, but “it was whispered eaven then that Joseph Loved her.”

  Emma was fond of Fanny and looked on her as an adopted daughter. One story said that Emma discovered her husband engaged in a sex act with the girl by peeping through a crack in the door of the barn. Maybe. In some manner, she discerned that the relationship was “by no means a paternal affection.” On discovering this treachery within her own home, “Emma was furious,” a Kirtland convert reported, “and drove the girl, who was unable to conceal the consequences of her celestial relation with the prophet, out of her house.”

  A torrent of gossip swept the close-knit community. The Church high command approved a revelation, usually attributed to Oliver Cowdery, affirming that all marriages “should be solemnized in a public meeting.” This “Article on Marriage,” noted that “this Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy.” It declared that one man should have one wife, and one woman one husband.

  Joseph was playing a deeper game. He began to couch his sexual liaisons in the language of “plural marriage,” which would become accepted Mormon doctrine. Adultery in any form was clearly a sin. If Smith was to indulge his desire for women, it had to be in the context of marriage, however ad hoc the ceremony, however secret the banns. Over time, Joseph constructed an elaborate rigmarole to justify and regulate polygamy. For now, he was improvising and trying his best to keep Emma in the dark.

  Sexual license would have the most profound consequences for Smith and for the Church as a whole. In addition to Emma’s fury, Joseph had to contend with Oliver Cowdery, his early collaborator and boon companion in the priesthood. Cowdery looked on the prophet’s intercourse with Fanny as “a dirty, nasty, filthy affair.”

  The momentum of Joseph’s visionary mind and his unquenchable appetite for experience would continue to grow. This particular transgression seemed ordinary and petty, but the sex issue would become more complex and more grave as time went on. It introduced a dark secret into Smith’s Mormon program that would fester until it became fatal.

  Velocity

  DeWitt Clinton died suddenly in 1828 at the age of fifty-eight, only three years after the completion of the ditch that would be forever associated with his name. On August 9, 1831, an excited crowd gathered in Albany to confer on him a unique and fitting honor.

  The lucky few who had purchased tickets climbed either into carriages “of the old-fashioned stage-coach pattern” or took seats on benches mounted on open flatbed cars. They eagerly, nervously waited to take the “first ride on a railroad drawn by a locomotive.” In town and country alike, hundreds of spectators lined the sixteen-mile route to Schenectady.

  The conductor blew his horn, the engineer put the four-wheeled engine into motion. Because cars were connected by chains, each gave a mighty jerk as it started, throwing passengers around the carriages. Tall beaver hats were knocked asunder. As the train proceeded at a “considerable velocity,” smoke and sparks from the wood-fired boiler rained down on the passengers. They quickly put up umbrellas, which quickly caught fire. So did straw hats and summer coats.

  Passengers flapped at each other to extinguish the smoldering fabric. Spectators’ horses bolted at t
he novel sight and sound. Gaping farmers watched as a new era materialized before their eyes. The name of the engine was the DeWitt Clinton. The canal’s great proponent would have beamed had he lived to see the huffing, relentless engine, which was in perfect harmony with his interest in science and his determination to push into the future.

  Passenger steam locomotive service made its first appearance in America as an adjunct to the Erie Canal. The Mohawk & Hudson Railroad, which completed its debut run that day, was intended as a convenience to canal passengers, saving them the tedious, all-day passage up the many locks that marked the first thirty miles of the waterway. They could zip to Schenectady in an hour by rail and transfer to a packet boat for the ride west.

  John Jervis, who had started his career as an axman laying out a course for the ditch in 1817, was the railroad’s principal designer. Like many American engineers weaned on the canal, he was coming into his own and eager for a new challenge.

  In the first six months after this maiden trip, twenty-five railroad companies applied for incorporation in New York State alone. Canals were useless in winter, expensive to maintain, and limited in the routes they could cover. They would not quickly die out, but this short rail line was the harbinger of an entirely new mode of transportation.

  Spirit

  In the wake of the Morgan affair, Freemasons were widely denounced as “un-American.” Mobs broke into lodges to expose the brotherhood’s secrets. Masons made an effort to fight back. They attacked former brothers who publicly denounced the order. They sent their own mobs into the churches of ministers who preached against them. Masons packed Anti-Masonic meetings and shouted down speakers. Animosity ruled.

  The success of the Anti-Masonic movement proved the power of paranoia. A conspiracy was a perfect target for citizens’ anxieties. This was a second war of independence, aimed at freeing Americans “from the yoke of Masonic tyranny.” The answer to anyone who doubted the movement’s truths was simple: “The violence done to Capt. Morgan.”

  The ideals of the Revolution were indeed fading. But it was the reality of capitalism, not the fantasy of an aristocratic plot, that was bringing change. Riches, many suspected, were no longer a product of honest labor but of clever speculation. There had appeared in America, a Massachusetts congressman noted, “a race of non-producers, who render no equivalent to society for what they consume.” Independent citizens were becoming dependent. Conspicuous consumption was captivating the middle class. The lucky were amassing wealth, the unfortunate falling into poverty.

  Ironically, these same jarring factors had also encouraged men to join the Freemasons. In the lodges, they could find a refuge from the competitive market. They could find conviviality, mutual aid, benevolence. Both sides clung to a nostalgic dream of a time when American society was kinder, purer, more united in its devotion to republican principles.

  The revivalists and the Anti-Masons formed an alliance that injected a pious, religious impulse into political action. “There is a union between religion and politics in all this region of the country,” newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett said of Rochester. Anti-Masons stood with Christians to defend traditional ideals.

  Thurlow Weed, the publisher and political operator, along with other Anti-Masonic activists, pushed their party to overcome its conspiratorial roots and embrace wider issues. Internal improvements were high on the list. Protection of domestic manufacture through tariffs. The repeal of imprisonment for debt. The abolition of militia duty. The party attracted support from political giants like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.

  “We are all becoming anti-masonick,” William Seward, a lawyer based in Auburn, New York, wrote to his father in 1828. Seward became a close friend of Thurlow Weed. An early supporter of the cause, he was elected state senator on the Anti-Masonic ticket in 1830, beginning a meteoric political career. The most prominent of any politician to emerge from the Anti-Masonic movement, he would challenge Lincoln for the presidency in 1860, then serve as his secretary of state.

  In 1830, the Anti-Masons were just beginning to feel their political oats. Weed hoped to gain national credibility and visibility by sponsoring a candidate in the presidential election of 1832. Up until that time, U.S. presidential candidates had been chosen by the members of Congress from each party. Lacking such a caucus, the Anti-Masonic Party needed another method. Having established their strength through public meetings, they decided that the best way to nominate a candidate was to do it during a convention. It would be a political camp meeting to rally their followers and ratify the nomination.

  On September 11, 1831, the fifth anniversary of William Morgan’s disappearance, they came together in Baltimore in the first national presidential convention in U.S. history. They chose as their candidate William Wirt, a sixty-year-old Marylander who had served both James Monroe and John Quincy Adams as attorney general. His gravitas helped counteract charges of fanaticism against the Anti-Masonic zealots. Although Wirt had once been a Mason, he now saw that the brotherhood was “at war with the fundamental principles of the social compact.”

  The other parties quickly followed the Anti-Masonic lead. Adherents of the fading National Republicans met in December to nominate Henry Clay. Jackson supporters, who would soon call themselves Democrats, held their own convention the following May.

  In the 1832 election, Wirt won only Vermont. He may have taken some votes away from Clay, but it did not matter: Jackson won reelection in a landslide. With their defeat, the Anti-Masons lost cohesion. They were victims of their own success. As Freemasons closed their lodges, the exaggerated Anti-Masonic rhetoric rang hollow and the basic absurdity of their claims began to show. In the years after 1832, many Anti-Masons joined with other opponents of Jackson to form the Whig party. The political convention, that quadrennial amalgam of circus and speech fest, proved to be the most lasting contribution of the Anti-Masonic Party, which, born in 1828, would last barely ten years.

  Anti-Masons mixed conservative and populist impulses into a potent ideological stew. Fueled by fear, they were sure of their principles, reluctant to compromise, resistant to change. They lived in a world fashioned from stark moral contrasts. The themes and style they introduced have echoed down the corridors of American politics ever since, from the Free Soil and Greenback Parties to the modern Tea Party.

  Extermination

  Brigham Young had much in common with the prophet Joseph Smith Jr. Both were born in Vermont. Both came from families that had been drawn by “York Fever” to western New York. Both had grown up poor. Young’s family had headed for the frontier in 1804, when he was three, settling in the remote center of the state before trekking farther west into the Finger Lakes region. His father, like Smith’s, was a failed farmer who worked as a day laborer. Young and his siblings knew real hunger.

  When Brigham reached the age of sixteen, his father turned him out of the house to find his own way in life. The teenager settled in Auburn just as the canal was being built and apprenticed himself to a carpenter. Like the Smiths, the Youngs were more visionary than acquisitive. A Lorenzo Dow revival was one of Brigham’s early memories. His younger brother, like many frontier babies, was named for the Methodist exhorter. Other brothers became itinerant preachers themselves.

  Young tried unsuccessfully to catch hold of the prosperity the Erie Canal was bringing to the region. In 1828, he joined his extended family in Mendon, south of Rochester and a few miles from the canal’s famous Irondequoit embankment. There he made a good friend in fellow craftsman Heber Kimball. Neither Kimball’s pottery nor Young’s furniture-making could quite pay the bills. Both men struggled with debt.

  In 1830, Joseph Smith’s brother Samuel introduced Young’s brother Phineas to the “Golden Bible.” Brigham thought deeply about the book. After two years of contemplation, he embraced the new religion. His father and siblings joined him. On a chilly day in April 1832, Brigham was baptized in a
mill pond. He was made an elder in the Church “before my clothes were dry.”

  Brigham Young’s wife died in September of the same year. He, his brother Joseph, and Heber Kimball made a pilgrimage down the canal and along Lake Erie to meet the author of the book that had won them over. They expected to encounter a holy man “in his sanctum dispensing spiritual blessings.” Instead, they came upon a vigorous wood chopper a few years younger than themselves, a man who liked to laugh. Brigham, who had spent his boyhood at such work, picked up an ax, felled a tree, and formed a lasting connection with the smiling prophet.

  Less than a year later, Young had settled in Kirtland with his two daughters. He strengthened his bond with Smith when he marched to Missouri as a soldier in Zion’s Camp. In 1835, as Smith created his presidency, councils, priesthoods, and other Church structures, he raised Young to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a group he intended as his primary proselytizers.

  Early in 1836, Young joined Joseph’s inner circle for Pentecostal visitations of the Holy Spirit. The men practiced the laying on of hands and anointings known as endowments. Foot washing gave way to the washing of each other’s bodies “with whiskey, perfumed with cinnamon.” Smith reported that “the heavens were opened upon us.”

  In March they dedicated the Kirtland temple, a church three years in the building, with fifty-foot walls and a tower more than a hundred feet high. Smith declared that “the angels are coming to visit the earth.” Some who could not fit inside the building saw angels looking out the temple windows. Soon afterward, Smith and Oliver Cowdery saw “the Lord standing upon the breastwork of the pulpit.” Brigham Young spotted forty angels “in white robes & caps.”