Introduction to Documents, Volume 5: October 1835–January 1838
Joseph Smith Documents from October 1835 through
January 1838
The 118
documents found in this volume of The Joseph Smith
Papers cover a period of Joseph Smith’s life, October
1835–January 1838, that was punctuated both by moments of elation
and moments of upheaval. The volume opens in the hopeful months
leading up to the completion of the first Latter-day Saint temple,
the in , Ohio. Church members worked diligently and
sacrificed much to complete the temple, and they were rewarded with
spiritual outpourings in early 1836. Joseph Smith’s journal for this period includes such exclamations as,
“This has been one of the best days that I ever spent.”
The
exuberance soon dissipated, however. Word reached of renewed threats of violence in the church’s
settlements in , Missouri, forcing
the Saints there to once again abandon their homes and find another
place to settle. Church debts mounted in both and , and from late 1836 through
the end of 1837, Joseph Smith was heavily involved
in temporal and financial matters. Compounding his difficulties, the
economic problems led many disaffected church members to challenge
Smith’s authority as a prophet. The volume closes with the Kirtland
church in chaos and Smith facing legal and physical threats. At the
command of revelation, he departed Kirtland and rode
through the night, bound for Missouri. There he would resettle his
family in , a new gathering place for the Saints.
The majority of documents found in this volume, as with
previous volumes of the Documents series of The Joseph Smith
Papers, are letters, minutes of meetings, and
revelations. A wide range of other document types is also found
here, including ecclesiastical charges, a conversation with an
infamous visitor, a marriage license and a marriage certificate,
rules and regulations for the temple, deeds, mortgages, promissory
notes, an application for a federal land patent, and selections from
the Elders’ Journal, a church-run periodical with
Joseph Smith as its founding
editor. Two unusual documents warrant particular mention. Smith and
several associates—notably , , , and
—spent substantial
time in the late summer and fall of 1835 studying recently acquired
Egyptian papyri.
Their efforts produced several texts, two of which are presented in
this volume: the first is a portion of what would later be
referred to as the Book of Abraham; the second is a manuscript that was fashioned as an Egyptian
alphabet.
The first six months documented here emphasize the role
Joseph Smith played, as president
of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, in organizing the church and
preparing its members for the dedication of the and the blessings they expected to
receive there. Smith
is seen pursuing various endeavors, such as entertaining visitors to
, translating inspired texts, dictating
revelations, studying Hebrew, and dealing with internal church
business. Several documents
detail his efforts to maintain harmony among church leaders and his
own family members, particularly his brother . The Kirtland community also
continued to develop as the population grew and church members built
the physical landscape to match their ideal of a Zion
community. But it is the
House of the Lord in Kirtland that most occupies Smith’s documentary
record in this period; more than a third of the documents created
between October 1835 and April 1836 relate to his efforts to prepare
the church and its members for the promised endowment of spiritual
power that his revelations taught would occur in the completed
temple.
A January 1831 revelation had instructed church members to gather to
and promised, “There you shall be endowed with power
from on high.” Another revelation dictated by Joseph Smith in
December 1832 called on church members to “establish, an house, even
an house of prayer an house of fasting, an house of faith, an house
of Learning, an house of glory, an house of order an house of
God.” The initial building work began on 7 June 1833 but
was halted in fall 1833 because builders lacked sufficient materials
and because church leaders decided to focus on redeeming Zion—that
is, helping the Saints regain the land in , Missouri,
from which they had been violently expelled. Despite the shifted focus, Smith
dictated a revelation instructing the elders of the
church that they “should receive their endowment from on high” in
the
. Construction on the religious edifice resumed in
spring 1834 and proceeded continuously, if slowly at times, until it
was completed. Many Saints contributed to
the building of the temple, and
perhaps best summed up the general sentiment of the Saints in 1835
and early 1836 when she wrote, “There was but one main spring to all
our thoughts and that was building the Lords house.”
As construction on the neared completion, Joseph Smith’s instruction and the
revelations he dictated encouraged church members and leaders to
unify themselves, repent, and live by the principles of equality and
humility. In January and
February 1836, Smith oversaw a series of meetings intended to
prepare men who held priesthood office to be endowed with power.
Death and disciplinary removal had brought several changes in the
church’s administrative structure in the previous thirteen months,
as had the creation of new offices such as the Quorum of the Twelve
Apostles and Quorum of the Seventy. On
13 January 1836 the church’s “grand council,” which consisted of the
presidencies of and , the Quorum of the
Twelve, and the high councils and bishoprics of Kirtland and
Missouri, met to organize the church’s leadership structure. They
set the quorums of the priesthood in order, ordained several men to
priesthood offices, and established rules “for the regulation of the
house of the Lord in times of worship.” Joseph Smith’s
journal noted his optimism and joy following the meeting: “There has
been an entire unison of feeling expressed in all our proceedings
this day, and the Spirit of the God of Israel has rested upon us in
mighty power, and it has been good for us to be here, in this
heavenly place in Christ Jesus, and altho much fatiegued with the
labours of the day, yet my spiritual reward has been verry great
indeed.” The
Saints believed they needed increased preparation and unity to
receive the endowment of power, and Smith’s journal indicates that
in his estimation, they were approaching that state of
readiness.
Several church leaders gathered on 21 January 1836 to
further prepare themselves. Drawing from Old Testament examples,
Smith and others met that afternoon
to perform a ritual of washing and perfuming their bodies,
“preparatory to the annointing with the holy oil.” Later that day, several were
“annointed with the same kind of oil and in the man[ner] that were
Moses and Aaron, and those who stood before the Lord in ancient
days,” and were then blessed by the laying on of hands. Joseph Smith was blessed
by his and then under the hands of
“all of the presidency,” after which the “heavens were opened.”
According to Smith’s journal, he and others beheld “vissions and
revelations,” and “angels ministered unto them.” His
account of those heavenly manifestations included a description of
the celestial kingdom, supplementing an 1832 vision that depicted the separation of the afterlife into
three kingdoms of heavenly glory: celestial, terrestrial, and
telestial. In his 1836 vision, Smith reported, he saw in the celestial kingdom
both individuals then living—including the presidency and his
parents—and deceased individuals such as his brother Alvin. Joseph
Smith also described a series of visions involving members of the
Twelve and the redemption of Zion.
In addition, bishop recorded that a
number of those present at the 21 January evening meeting “saw
visions & others were blessed with the outpouring of the Holy
Ghost.” Between 21 January and 6
February, Smith instructed men of the priesthood to anticipate more
visions as they performed washings, anointings, and other blessings
leading to the endowment of power.
Then, on Sunday morning, 27 March 1836, a crowd of
approximately one thousand men and women filled the completed to capacity for the dedicatory service. Joseph Smith’s prayer of
dedication, written out beforehand with the assistance of
other members of the church presidency, echoed language from the
December 1832 revelation that called on the Saints to
build the temple, and it also spoke of the 1833 violence against the
Latter-day Saints in . The prayer asked that the House of the Lord be a place
where the glory of God could rest upon his children.
, who was in
attendance, later stated, “The ceremonies of that dedication may be
rehearsed, but no mortal language can describe the heavenly
manifestations of that memorable day. Angels appeared to some, while
a sense of divine presence was realized by all present, and each
heart was filled with ‘joy inexpressible and full of glory.’”
Two days later, on the morning of 29 March, Joseph Smith and other church
officials began two days and nights of meetings in the to receive instruction about Zion and to
participate in the ordinance of foot washing. This purification
ritual, described in the New Testament, was viewed by the
participants as the culmination of the Saints’ spiritual preparation
and ceremonial order.
called it “a
solemn scene” to witness members of the church presidency, the presidency, and the two bishoprics of the church
ceremoniously cleanse one another’s feet. They
also partook of the Lord’s Supper of bread and wine and then spent
the night in the House of the Lord “prophesying and giving glory to
God.” The next day, 30 March,
three hundred men, including church officers and others ordained to
the priesthood, met Smith inside the temple to participate in a
solemn assembly during which they too received the foot-washing
ordinance, the sacrament, and instruction. In the afternoon, church
leaders including Joseph Smith “commenced prophesying.” The “Spirit
of prophecy was poured out upon the congregation,” and the men in
attendance gave “shouts of hosannas to God and the Lamb with amen
and amen.” During the meeting, Smith stated that he
“had now completed the organization of the church” and that the
church officers and ordained men “had passed through all the
necessary ceremonies” and had, therefore, received the long-awaited
endowment of power from on high. The participants in this solemn
assembly viewed themselves as armed with new knowledge and
instruction from the prophet and as authorized “to go forth and
build up the kingdom of God.” In the following
weeks most of the ordained men left to proselytize and to raise money for land in
Missouri.
The solemn assembly and endowment of power were not the
end of the spiritual outpourings that accompanied the completion of
the . Joseph Smith
reported a manifestation he and
experienced one week after the dedication—a vision of immense
theological and eschatological importance for the Latter-day Saint
faith. According to Smith’s journal, Jesus Christ, Moses, Elias, and
Elijah appeared in succession to the two men in the temple and
bestowed upon them “the Keys of this dispensation.” These keys
included the authority to gather “Israel from the four parts of the
Eearth and the leading of the ten tribes from the Land of the North”
and the authority “to turn the hearts of the Fathers to the
children, and the children to the fathers,” as had been prophesied
in the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon.
Believing that the long-promised endowment of spiritual
power had now been bestowed, Joseph Smith turned
to other unfinished business, the most important of which was
redeeming Zion in , Missouri.
Following counsel given in a June 1834 revelation, he had encouraged Latter-day Saints to settle
in as a step toward
regaining Mormon lands in Jackson County.
However, just three months after the dedication of the in , and unbeknownst to Smith at the time, the
threat of displacement again loomed over church members in . As the Mormon population in Clay County
swelled, other residents had grown increasingly uneasy. By spring
1836, hundreds of Latter-day Saint families lived in the county,
where they owned approximately sixteen hundred acres of land, and more than one
hundred additional families arrived in the summer. In addition, reports
circulated among Missourians that Latter-day Saints planned to
undertake a second Camp of Israel expedition, patterned after the
1834 expedition Smith led in an attempt to restore the Saints to
their Jackson County lands.
The St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican reported that
upwards of fifteen hundred Mormons, traveling in groups of between
twenty and two hundred individuals, planned to come with arms to
Clay County. In an article entitled “Another Mormon Invasion,” the
newspaper encapsulated the discontent of Clay County residents: “No
doubt can remain but that the peace of this section is again to be
disturbed by a military array of ragamuffins” under the command of
Joseph Smith, whom the article called “the modern Mohamed.” As had occurred earlier in
Jackson County, the tensions in Clay County between Mormons and
other residents were fueled in part by fear that Mormons were
opposed to slavery and would seek alliances with American
Indians.
According to church member , “The
old feelings, and excitement of Jackson County now began to show
itself in Clay.”
Violence erupted by late June. Anderson
Wilson, a
citizen who organized forces against the Saints, recounted that
“there were Several outrages Committed on the night of the 28 [June
1836] Six of our party went to a mormon town Several mormons Cocked
their guns & Swore they would Shoot them after Some Scrimiging
two white men took a mormon out of Company & give him 100 lashes
& it is thought he will Die of this Beating.”
Latter-day Saint remembered that in
the early summer of 1836, “it appeared that war was even at our
doors.”
Local citizens and community leaders met in the town of
to devise a resolution to the impending
conflict. On 29 June, citizens organized a
“Committee of nine” to negotiate the departure of the Latter-day
Saints from the county. Four of the committee members had previously
assisted the Saints in their efforts to obtain redress and justice
for their exile. The
committee met the same day, drafted a set of resolutions calling for
the removal of the Latter-day Saints from the county, and presented
these resolutions to church officers.
Under the guidance of , the church
leaders responded on 1 July. “For the sake of friendship,” they
said, “and to be in a covenant of peace with the citizens of ,” they acquiesced to
the committee’s request to leave. This pacifist
reaction likely prevented violence and bloodshed comparable to that
experienced during the
episode nearly three years earlier, when church leaders did not
immediately comply with demands for members to leave their homes and
property. On 2 July 1836, church representatives met with the
citizens’ committee, which resolved to “assist the Mormons in
selecting some abiding place for their people where they will be in
a measure the only occupants and when [where] none will be anxious
to molest them.” The Clay County committee
suggested the church remove to , where they would be the first white settlers
and therefore able to exercise local self-determination under the
federal government’s supervision. Instead, church leaders, who had
been scouting new locations north and east of Clay County for a more
permanent settlement place since at least May 1836, favored a “mill
seat on ” approximately
thirty miles north of , Missouri. That location
would eventually be known as . By the end of 1836, and
other Clay County citizens introduced a bill in the state legislature that, when passed, designated
the region around Far West as , a state-sanctioned haven for Mormon settlers. Church members flooded into the area, and
by July 1837 Far West included a population of fifteen hundred,
almost all of whom were church members.
and others in wrote to Joseph Smith and fellow church
leaders in on 1 July 1836 to inform them of the agreement
they had made to vacate the county. The church presidency replied
in two letters dated 25 July, declaring the Saints innocent of wrongdoing in the conflict
but indicating that it made good sense for them to leave the county
peaceably. That same day,
Smith departed Kirtland for the eastern with his
brother , , and , likely seeking a solution to the church’s
financial troubles in Kirtland and Missouri. They spent most of
August in the ,
Massachusetts, area, where they preached, raised funds, and
reportedly searched for a buried treasure.
His trip east being financially unsuccessful, Smith returned to in September 1836 with a renewed focus on
temporal, mercantile, and financial affairs. This focus is manifest
in the documents created from October 1836 through spring 1837,
which are devoted almost exclusively to pecuniary matters. In
October 1836, on his own and in partnership with others, Smith
purchased approximately 440 acres of land in Kirtland. These acquisitions
seem to have been motivated by a desire to make land available for
church members newly arriving in Kirtland and, perhaps, to provide
real estate backing for the establishment of a bank in
Kirtland.
Joseph Smith and other leaders of
the church organized the Safety Society Bank on 2 November 1836, and
expectations were high. A bank, if successful, could provide
considerable financial aid to the Latter-day Saints by supplying
residents with a local currency and a source of credit, thereby
establishing a stronger foundation for the local economy and a
better means to provide liquidity for land purchases, construction,
and mercantile activity. When a bank
was established in a frontier community, it was often eagerly
supported by the local residents, but they often lacked the
necessary capital. As a result, investors from the eastern frequently
funded new banks. Many frontier banks were operated by
men who, like Joseph Smith and the Mormon leaders in Kirtland, had
little or no banking experience and who came from diverse
backgrounds. Given such
circumstances, bank closures and failures were a known risk in
nineteenth-century America.
Though the question of federal involvement in banking
was a highly partisan and divisive issue in the 1830s, most
financial transactions—particularly after the closure of the Second
Bank of the in 1836—were
managed by banks that were officially recognized and regulated at
the state level. Some
states restricted banking services to a single bank operated by the
state government, while other states, like ,
granted charters to private community banks. The Ohio legislature
had granted a considerable number of bank charters in the early
1830s, but it began issuing fewer charters by the 1835–1836
legislative session. In the 1836–1837 session, when was seeking state authorization for the Safety Society, the legislature did not approve
any bank charters. By January 1837, uncertain whether
they would be able to obtain a charter, Joseph Smith and his contemporaries
decided to restructure their institution and rename it the Kirtland
Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. The officers and
stockholders drew up new articles of agreement to replace the
original bank constitution on 2 January, and in the days
following the reorganization, the society opened and began
conducting banking services in an unofficial capacity. The
institution continued, unsuccessfully, to seek a bank charter from
the state.
By spring 1837 the optimism that came with the banking
venture had all but ended. The Safety Society was heavily
underfunded and barely had its doors open before it was putting an
even greater strain on Joseph Smith’s
already precarious financial situation. Enemies of the church worked
against the Safety Society, and church members themselves became
divided over the institution and Smith’s role in it. Hoping to quiet
critics, Smith spoke on the temporal affairs of the church at a 6
April 1837 meeting, while his brother asked church members to support the Safety Society.
Notwithstanding such appeals, unrest among church
members spread, while external opposition increased. Amid
allegations made by a staunch opponent, , Joseph Smith left by 13 April, fearing for his life. His
whereabouts for the next few weeks are largely unknown.
wrote two poignant letters
to her husband during his absence, detailing the problems and
anxieties she and her three young children faced. “I wish it could
be possible for you to be at home,” she wrote, encouraging him to
return and asking that he remember his children, “for they all
remember you.” She continued, “I could hardly pacify and when they found ou[t] you
was not coming home soon.” Still, she assured her husband, “I shall
do the best I can in all things, and I hope that we shall be so
humble and pure before God that he will set us at liberty to be our
own masters in a few things at least.” Emma’s letters featured
in this volume provide some insight into the increasingly
challenging conditions faced by church members in .
At about the same time Joseph Smith was away from , the national financial panic of 1837 reached
its climax and began to adversely affect the
economy. Important banking institutions in and
failed in the spring of 1837, and the ramifications reverberated
outward. Prosperity in
the 1830s had allowed investors, primarily from the eastern , to engage
extensively in land speculation, purchasing land on the western
frontier and then selling it to farmers or other investors at much
higher rates. In an effort to curb this
practice and to reduce the use of banknotes and other paper
currency, United States president Andrew Jackson issued an
executive order in July 1836 known as the Specie Circular, which
stipulated that government lands could be purchased only with
specie—that is, gold or silver coin—and not with paper money. Specie
shortages followed, and other government interventions left
prominent banking houses unable to fulfill their financial
obligations to investors, primarily those in
Britain. Drained of their gold and
silver, banks announced that they would no longer redeem notes with
specie. These and other economic developments, such as a downturn in
the international cotton trade, resulted in the financial panic of
1837 and a subsequent depression that continued into the 1840s.
Fearing economic collapse, the public made runs on banks, and in
response, financial institutions in suspended redemption of their banknotes for specie on
10 May 1837. Banks in other states quickly did likewise, severely
curtailing people’s access to specie. This in turn led creditors to
prematurely demand repayment and left individuals throughout the
country unable to meet the debts they had amassed under the
assumption of continued economic success.
Encouraged by the prosperity of 1836 and the
availability of credit, many church members, including Joseph Smith, had purchased land or
begun new business ventures. In partnership with , Smith opened a mercantile store in ,
Ohio. These investments and those of many other
Kirtland church members—including investments in the Kirtland Safety
Society—foundered in part because of the Panic of 1837, which caused
devalued currency, inflation, declining land values, and a general
downturn. By summer 1837, the store in Chester
had closed. Saints throughout Kirtland were affected by the
decline in the local economy and the difficulty they faced in
finding work and feeding their families. In a July 1837 letter to his son, noted the inability of several individuals in
Kirtland to repay him, writing: “I have not Re[ceive]d money from
any of those we held [promissory] notes against since you Left[.]
Br. D Wood I fear will not be able to pay us
very soon if at all.”
Joseph Smith and his financial
partners faced frequent litigation in the summer and fall of 1837
regarding their outstanding debts. The
church president was involved in at least twenty-two different
lawsuits between June 1837 and January 1838. These cases involved
debts in the form of unpaid promissory notes for land, mercantile
goods, loans, or other purchases made by Smith and his associates.
Much of the litigation was brought against Smith in the June term of
the Court of Common
Pleas, where he was a party to seven different cases. To offset debts
owed by their mercantile firms, Smith, , , , , and signed an
agreement on 11 July 1837 mortgaging the
to the firm
Mead, Stafford & Co. Using their
greatest asset—the object of the past four years of labor and the
spiritual core of the Latter-day Saint community—as collateral
demonstrated the desperate financial situation in which Joseph Smith
and his associates found themselves. In order to avoid further
litigation, the mercantile firms involving church leaders
renegotiated their outstanding debts with several merchants in New
York City and , New York,
during the month of September 1837.
By the end of the turbulent year, the Safety Society
had ceased its operations and financial hardships had befallen many
of the Saints.
Extant sources offer little credible documentation of monetary
losses caused by the Kirtland Safety Society’s closure, but it is
clear that only a few individuals invested sizable funds in the
institution.
Joseph Smith invested the most
money, several thousand dollars, and no one lost more in the
collapse of the Safety Society than he did. The
devaluation of society notes and the unwillingness of other banks to
accept the notes as payment contributed to the financial hardships
in Kirtland, but most individuals there were more adversely affected
by the broader Panic of 1837, which caused the price of goods to
increase and land values to decrease drastically.
wrote to
her husband, , in January 1838
that “land will not sell for any thing.”
The spiritual exuberance that attended the dedication
of the just eighteen months earlier seemed a
distant memory. The debts, litigations, doubts, and accusations
resulting from Joseph Smith’s financial
entanglements, including his role as an officer of the Safety Society, further divided church members,
with some remaining supportive and others unwilling to follow his
direction. Many documents in this volume dating from May 1837
through January 1838 demonstrate the turmoil within the church and
in Smith’s life. In May 1837 he faced opposition from various church
members, including
and . Some had
specific complaints related to the bank or land transactions, but
dissenters also indicted him more broadly for his involvement as a
religious leader in financial matters, challenging his authority
over temporal affairs. In
June 1837 , one of the
Twelve Apostles, denounced Joseph Smith as a “fallen prophet.” By the end of July the dissent seemed to be
lessening, particularly within the Quorum of the Twelve as worked to
correct and reconcile several apostles who had challenged Smith’s
leadership. Boynton and others, meanwhile, continued to disagree
with Smith. In spite of the
difficulties in this period, however, Smith organized an ambitious
proselytizing endeavor. Led by ,
missionaries departed for in June
1837, and they became the first Latter-day Saints to preach
overseas.
In late summer 1837, the church president confronted
the dissenters directly: he called the church together at a
conference on 3 September to vote to support or disapprove its
current leadership. The conference voted to sustain Smith as church president and
supported the remainder of the presidency, but voted against high council members , , and as well as apostles , , and , all of whom had been involved in dissent
against Smith’s leadership. The three dissenting high counselors
were removed from office, but Boynton and Luke and Lyman Johnson all
retained their positions in the Twelve after they made a public
confession on 10 September 1837.
The day after the conference, Smith sent word of the proceedings
and changes in the church hierarchy to the Saints in , Missouri. Shortly after
that, he traveled to Far West to oversee church business there,
which included convening a conference similar to the 3 September
gathering in . This marked Smith’s first visit to the new
town. He presided over meetings wherein decisions were made about
church officers, land, and plans for a new in Far West. These meetings brought
direction and a sense of unity to the church’s operations in , but Smith’s visit was not without controversy.
Even though was the “second elder”
of the church and a longtime friend of Smith’s, the two men’s
relationship was deteriorating during fall 1837, and during Smith’s
stay in Far West, Cowdery aired grievances that had divided the
two.
Joseph Smith returned to in early December 1837 only to discover that in
his absence, dissent had revived and become more threatening.
Kirtland resident Hepzibah Richards wrote that
the situation was a continuation of earlier events and that if the
dissent had “appeared to be quelled it now appears that it was only
preparing to operate with greater virulence.”
wrote his son that the
dissenters were “striving to Distroy” the church “with a great Deal
more Zeal than they ever had to build [it] up,” and that their
“greatest enmity” was against those they had called friends. By late December the Kirtland high council had
excommunicated twenty-eight Saints, and by 1 January 1838 John Smith
estimated that altogether church councils had “cut off Between 40
& 50 from the ch[urc]h.”
Divisions in Kirtland became more pronounced in January 1838 as
dissenters and other opponents threatened to kill Joseph Smith and
other members of the First Presidency. Though Smith had long
contemplated moving to , it was not until a
12 January 1838 revelation directed him and the First
Presidency to leave Kirtland with their families that he ultimately
left the place he and other Latter-day Saints had built with their
precious resources. Following this
revelation and seeking to escape the threatened violence, Smith and
hastily departed Kirtland the
evening of 12 January. Their families later met them in , Ohio, and
by 16 January they had begun their journey to . On 21 January, penned a
terse letter to Smith. The cold tone of Cowdery’s letter, the
last document featured in this volume, exposes the deep division and
discontent that had emerged between the former friends and is
indicative of continuing disunion in the church’s leadership at the
time Smith departed Kirtland for Far West.
Violence in escalated after Joseph Smith’s departure. During
the evening of 15 January, the was set on fire and the building and its
contents were destroyed. Dissenters and non-Mormon opponents had
organized and threatened church members with additional violence
mere days after the church president left. Of the conditions in the
city, Hepzibah Richards wrote her brother , “We feel that we are in
jeopardy every hour.” During spring and summer 1838, many Saints in
Kirtland followed the church president west, including a company of
more than five hundred known as the Kirtland Camp, which departed
Kirtland on 6 July 1838. Still, Kirtland was not
wholly abandoned. A local church presidency was appointed,
consisting of , , and , and
agents remained to take care of the land and other church
properties, settle debts, and oversee the preparation and
facilitation of the migration of more Latter-day Saints to .
The texts that document these critical years of Joseph Smith’s life come from
disparate places. Approximately half of the documents featured in
this volume come from two sources: a record book kept by church
scribes called Minute Book 1, and Joseph Smith’s 1835–1836
journal. Minute Book 1 is the source for twenty-six of the
documents, including minutes of meetings led by Smith and an
assortment of documents dealing with organizational, administrative,
and disciplinary matters. Twenty-six other texts come from Joseph
Smith’s journal, which was kept by various scribes including , , and . The texts taken
from the journal represent a variety of document types such as
revelations, blessings, letters, minutes, and a discourse. Because
they were copied into the journal, many of these documents were
published in the Journals series of The Joseph Smith
Papers; here in the Documents series, they are presented
and contextualized as individual texts. Unfortunately, there is no
extant journal for Joseph Smith from April 1836 to January 1838, a
period that is one of the most poorly documented in the history of
the early church. The remainder of the documents featured in this
volume come from archival collections or from a range of other
sources including periodicals, letterbooks, other Latter-day Saints’
diaries, and county deed ledgers. Given the
paucity of extant sources, the documents presented here are among
the best contemporary sources for researching and understanding this
period of Mormon history.
The twenty-eight months covered by this volume of
The Joseph Smith Papers reveal a tempestuous and
unsettled time for Joseph Smith and the church he led.
Smith and the Saints experienced spiritual elation surrounding the
dedication of the
, followed by a series of intense
trials. The church president struggled against major challenges to
his leadership and left Kirtland for amid threats of violence. The documents
presented in this volume provide greater details and insights into
these and other events in Joseph Smith’s life. This turbulent period
can be better understood by studying these texts within their
historical context, a task each document introduction undertakes.
Although there is a scarcity of documents and other records, leaving
important questions from this time period unanswered, the documents
found in this volume and the discussion of their historical context
illuminate the highs and lows of the period and shed light on the
complex figure of Joseph Smith.