The Papers
Browse the PapersDocumentsJournalsAdministrative RecordsRevelations and TranslationsHistoriesLegal RecordsFinancial RecordsOther Contemporary Papers
Reference
PeoplePlacesEventsGlossaryLegal GlossaryFinancial GlossaryCalendar of DocumentsWorks CitedFeatured TopicsLesson PlansRelated Publications
Media
VideosPhotographsIllustrationsChartsMapsPodcasts
News
Current NewsArchiveNewsletterSubscribeJSP Conferences
About
About the ProjectJoseph Smith and His PapersFAQAwardsEndorsementsReviewsEditorial MethodNote on TranscriptionsNote on Images of People and PlacesReferencing the ProjectCiting This WebsiteProject TeamContact Us
Published Volumes
  1. Home > 
  2. The Papers > 

The Book of the Law of the Lord, Book A

Source Note

Book of the Law of the Lord, Book A, Dec. 1841–May 1844; handwriting of , , , John McEwan, , and ; signatures of and ; 365 pages; in “The Book of the Law of the Lord,” Record Book, 1841–1845, CHL. Includes redactions and use marks.
Tithing and donations for December 1841–May 1844 were inscribed in a large, leather-bound blank book made with thick paper. The paper bears a star-shaped watermark in the middle of each leaf and was printed with forty-seven blue lines on each side. The text block was originally formed with thirty gatherings of eight leaves each. The second gathering, however, has only six leaves. Each set of front and back endpapers consists of a gathering of four leaves of unlined paper, but only two leaves are now extant in the back gathering. The trimmed pages measure 16¼ × 10½ inches (41 × 27 cm). Headbands were sewn onto the text block. The exterior pages of the endpapers are joined to the pasteboards with a strip of pink cloth. Marbled papers featuring a shell pattern with green body and veins of red and yellow are glued to the inside covers of the boards and to the exterior page of each gathering of endpapers. The leaf edges are stained green. The text block is bound in a ledger style to the boards. The spine was constructed with four false raised bands demarcating five panels. The boards and spine are covered in suede leather with additional leather strips over the top and bottom of the book. The suede leather was blind tooled on the outside covers, the raised bands of the spine, and the turned-in edges on the inside cover. The additional leather strips, which also cover the first and fifth panels of the spine, are embossed with dual lines and vegetal designs along the borders and have gold line filling. The spine is further embossed with the number “6” in 20-point type on the fifth panel. The second and fourth panels have black-painted squares of paper glued to them. These feature gold lining and decoration at the top and bottom. The completed volume measures 17 × 11 × 2¼ inches (43 × 28 × 6 cm) and includes 244 free leaves. A penciled inscription at the inside top corner of page [ii]—the verso of the front marbled flyleaf—gives what appears to be an expensive price for this high-quality blank book: “bth | 10.00”.
inscribed nine revelations in the book on the first twenty-three pages of lined paper. made minor revisions to these revelation texts. At some point page [1], the recto of the last leaf of unlined endpaper in the front of the book, was inscribed with a title: “THE | BOOK | of the | LAW | of the | LORD”. Because these words are hand lettered in various ornate styles, the handwriting cannot be identified. A matching title appears on the spine of the volume: the square label of black paper on the second panel of the spine bears a smaller square label of white paper with a hand-lettered inscription: “LAW | — of the — | LORD.” inscribed pages 26–126 of the book, with help from and on page 27, and on pages 72–87. inscribed the rest of the volume, pages 127–477, with help from on pages 168–171, on pages 189–190 and 192–201, John McEwan on pages 219–231, and on pages 313–343. These clerks and scribes generally paginated the book and inscribed dateline page headers along the way as they inscribed its texts. At various stages in the production of the volume, and signed their names to their work (pages 126, 181, 215).
Journal entries comprise 90 pages of the volume. The donation records constitute the majority of the volume, 387 pages.
Notes written on three white and three blue slips of paper of various sizes have been inserted in various places, as has a clipped portion of a -era elder’s certificate form with no notes (apparently just a placeholder). There are also two leaves of pink paper just inside the front of the volume. All of these slips and leaves of paper are loose and appear to have been added to the book at a later time.
The book is intricately related to its successor volume, the donation record, which the Joseph Smith Papers has titled “Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B,” and contains donations from May 1844–January 1846, as well as a volume that indexed the tithing and donation records. The “Law of the Lord” is listed as such in inventories of church records made in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the 1850s. These show that the volume was held for a time in the office of church president . In 1880, , president of the , carried the book to a stake Relief Society conference in Salt Lake City. At some point the book was marked on the spine with an archival sticker, which was later removed. The book eventually was housed with the papers of Joseph Fielding Smith, apparently during his tenure as church historian and recorder (1921–1970), and then became part of the First Presidency’s papers when he became church president in 1970. In 2010, the First Presidency gave custody of the book to the Church History Library. This evidence indicates continuous institutional custody and authenticity.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    This six-leaf gathering was either a binding error or the result of one sheet coming loose from the binding before the book was inscribed, as the book’s inscription and pagination runs through this gathering without skipping any text or page numbers.

  2. [2]

    The journal entries are inscribed on pages 26, 31, 33, 36, 39, 43, 44, 48, 56–61, 66–67, 88–95, 122–135, and 164–215.

Historical Introduction

In 1841 under the direction of JS, scribe started a record book that was eventually titled “The Book of the Law of the Lord.” Thompson and other scribes and church recorders, most notably and , used this ledger-style record book to keep important information for the church in , Illinois, from 1841 to 1845.
This book includes three types of records. The first, comprising twenty-five pages at the beginning of the volume, contains nine JS revelations copied in by between January and August 1841. Six of these nine revelations were canonized. The volume was also used to keep JS’s journal, covering the period from 11 December 1841 to 20 December 1842. The journal was recorded by scribes , , , and . The third and largest type of record in the volume is a listing of tithing and donations for the construction of the and . These donations were recorded by scribes Willard Richards, William Clayton, , , John McEwan, and Eliza R. Snow between late 1841 and 1845.
In December 1841, three months after ’s death, noted his appointment as “Recorder. for the Temple, and the Scribe for the private office of the President.” In this capacity, Richards took responsibility for keeping JS’s journal and also began recording donations and tithing in the Book of the Law of the Lord. Journal entries and donation records were kept concurrently, alternating sometimes every other page. This pattern is more pronounced at the beginning of the book, where donations and journal entries occasionally appear together on a single page. Over time, however, larger blocks of text were dedicated to either donations or journal entries.
In late June 1842, prepared to leave for a trip to the eastern to move his family from and collect donations for the . On 29 June, he transferred responsibility for the Book of the Law of the Lord to . JS appointed Clayton as temple recorder on 3 September 1842 to replace the absent Richards. After Richards returned to Nauvoo in fall 1842, he resumed work as secretary and historian for JS, while Clayton continued working as the temple recorder. In December 1842 Richards began keeping JS’s journal in a smaller and more portable volume, no longer using the Book of the Law of the Lord for journal entries. Clayton and other scribes used the remainder of the volume, pages 216–477, to record tithing and donations. A second volume was started in May 1844 to continue the record.
Tithing and donations were mostly recorded contemporaneously in the first volume from December 1841 to May 1844. However, in December 1844, used a portion of the volume, pages 216–231, which had likely been left blank for journal entries, to record donations collected as part of the penny fund subscription. Clayton recorded penny fund donations dating from 3 July 1844 to 25 April 1845. When he ran out of space in the first volume, he wrote the remaining subscriptions in the second volume.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    Thompson died on 27 August 1841. (“Death of Col. Robert B. Thompson,” Times and Seasons, 1 Sept. 1841, 2:519.)

    Times and Seasons. Commerce/Nauvoo, IL. Nov. 1839–Feb. 1846.

  2. [2]

    The six canonized revelations constitute, in order of their recording by Thompson, sections 124, 125, 105, 111, 87, and 103 in the current Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The three uncanonized revelations include one dated 20 March 1841 and two dictated on 12 January 1838 before JS departed Ohio and moved to Missouri.

  3. [3]

    JS, Journal, December 1841–December 1842.

  4. [4]

    See JS, Journal, 13 Dec. 1841.

  5. [5]

    “To The Eastern Churches,” Times and Seasons, 1 June 1842, 3:814.

  6. [6]

    See JS, Journal, 29 June 1842; Richards, Journal, 1 July 1842; and Clayton, History of the Nauvoo Temple, 30.

    Richards, Willard. Journals, 1836–1853. Willard Richards, Papers, 1821–1854. CHL. MS 1490, boxes 1–2.

    Clayton, William. History of the Nauvoo Temple, 1845. CHL

  7. [7]

    Clayton, History of the Nauvoo Temple, 30–31.

    Clayton, William. History of the Nauvoo Temple, 1845. CHL

  8. [8]

    For more on this division of labor, see Smith, “Book of the Law of the Lord,” 131–163.

    Smith, Alex D. “The Book of the Law of the Lord,” Journal of Mormon History 38 (Fall 2012): 131–163.

  9. [9]

    See JS, Journal, Dec. 1842–June 1844, bk. 1.

  10. [10]

    The Joseph Smith Papers Project has labeled this second volume “Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B.” See Historical Introduction to Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B.

  11. [11]

    For more on the Nauvoo penny fund, see Book of the Law of the Lord, Book A, 216.

  12. [12]

    See Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B, 551.

    Trustee-in-Trust. Tithing and Donation Record, 1844 May–1846 January. CHL.

Asterisk (*) denotes a "featured" version, which includes an introduction and annotation. *Blessing to John and Catharine Paine Wilkie, 15 March 1844

Page 216

[Fifty-two pages of JS’s journal have been omitted.]
Sometime during the Spring of the present year 1844 president , the of the made a proclamation to the female members of the Church, calling upon them to subsribe one cent per week each, in money, or fifty two cents for one year, and said, if all the sisters would do this, the amount subscribed would be abundantly sufficient to buy all the Nails and Glass which would be required in the , and if they would deposite their subscriptions in his hands, he would see that the money was appropriated for that purpose and none other. The sisters from that time commenced paying their subcriptions to him, and before he was murdered by the mob on the 27th. June 1844 he had received over two hundred dollars for the above purpose. After his death the sisters generally wished to have Elder one of the receive their contributions, and after much solicitation he consented. The amount received by him and the donors names are as follows.
1844
July 3rd. $0.50
4 Magdalene Moeser $1.00
5 Theodotia Houston $0.53
[5] $0.53
[5] $0.53
[5] Mary Ann Merrill $0.50
6 $0.50
8 Marcia Burnham $0.50
14 Sarah Hammon $0.52
[14] Lucinda Hammon (H.S.19) $0.33
[14] $0.52
[14] Catherine Crager $0.55
[14] Sophia Dame $0.50
[14] $1.00
[14] $0.25
[14] <​Mary​> Wright $0.25
15 Eveline Hales $0.52
[15] Lydia Carter (Simems) $0.52
[15] Jane Jop $0.05
[15] $0.52
[15] Louisa Cahoon (H.S.10) $0.45
[15] $0.52
[15] Olive Baldwin $0.52
[15] Rene Baldwin $0.53
[15] Alvira Whitaker $0.50
[15] Josephine Whitaker $0.50
[15] $0.75
[15] Lucy Harris $0.55
[15] (H.S. 20) $0.30
[15] (H.S. 12½) $0.37½
[15] Fanny Hartshorn $0.52
$15.63½
$15.63½
July 16 Dorcas Dykes $0.52
[July 16] Filenda Keeler $0.60
[July 16] $1.00
[July 16] Bridget Manware $1.00
[July 16] Lydia Hale $0.50
[July 16] $0.50
[July 16] Letitia Marshal $0.55
[July 16] $0.53
[July 16] $0.52
[July 16] Mary C. Dryer $0.52
[July 16] $0.55
[July 16] $0.50
[July 16] Mary Pearsons $0.55
[July 16] Rebecca Dew $0.55
[July 16] Elizabeth Madison $0.50
[July 16] Andromich Williams $0.50
[July 16] Lucretia Nelson $0.50
[July 16] $0.50
[July 16] $0.50
17 $0.52
[17] $0.52
[17] $0.52
[17] $0.52
[17] Jane M. Whitehead $0.52
[17] Sarah Gribble $0.50
[17] $0.52
[17] Sarah Horr $0.50
[17] $0.52
[17] Maria Kempton $0.50
[17] Margaret Stewart $0.55
[17] Loana Gardner $1.00
$33.21½
[p. 216]
View entire transcript

|

Cite this page

Source Note

Document Transcript

Page 216

Document Information

Related Case Documents
Editorial Title
The Book of the Law of the Lord, Book A
ID #
20389
Total Pages
382
Print Volume Location
Handwriting on This Page
  • William Clayton

Footnotes

  1. [65]

    In late 1843, Mercy Fielding Thompson organized a weekly subscription among women in the church of a penny a week, or fifty-two cents a year, to purchase glass and nails for building the Nauvoo temple. JS and Hyrum Smith endorsed the plan, and Hyrum was appointed to supervise the fund. After Hyrum’s death, Thompson and her sister, Mary Fielding Smith, continued to collect subscriptions while Alpheus Cutler managed the funds in Hyrum’s place. Mercy Fielding Thompson and Mary Fielding Smith also reached out to the sisters in England, requesting them to join the effort; many women in England participated and their names and donations are recorded in the Book of the Law of the Lord. The subscription effort expanded as women in Boston learned of the effort and began collecting subscriptions in 1844. On 26 December 1844, the sisters gave the church $526, representing all the money they had collected by that date. (Thompson, Autobiographical Sketch, 7–9; Notice, 25 Dec. 1843, Millennial Star, June 1844, 5:15; Brigham Young, Nauvoo, IL, to Mary Fielding Smith and Mercy Fielding Thompson, [Nauvoo, IL], 5 Dec. 1844, Mary Fielding Smith, Collection, CHL; Introduction to Boston Female Penny and Sewing Society, Minutes, Jan. 28, 1845 in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 163–166.)

    Thompson, Mercy Rachel Fielding. Autobiographical Sketch, 1880. CHL. MS 4580.

    Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star. Manchester, England, 1840–1842; Liverpool, 1842–1932; London, 1932–1970.

    Smith, Mary Fielding. Collection, ca. 1832–1848. CHL.

    Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.

  2. [66]

    TEXT: The following names were entered later into the Book of the Law of the Lord, beginning in December 1844. William Clayton apparently returned to the record book and used pages which were left blank, possibly for further entries in JS’s journal, to record the names of the women in Nauvoo and the surrounding area, and later women in England, who donated to the subscription effort begun by Mercy Fielding Thompson to raise money for the Nauvoo temple. The subscription began in 1843, but documents from the beginning of the effort have apparently not survived. The earliest extant records are those recorded here from June 1844. Clayton departed from the usual formatting of single line entries and entered names in two colums per page. (See Clayton, Journal, 10 Dec. 1844; and Book of the Law of the Lord, Book B, 169.)

    Clayton, William. Journals, 1842–1845. CHL.

    Trustee-in-Trust. Tithing and Donation Record, 1844 May–1846 January. CHL.

  3. [67]

    TEXT: The names on this page are listed in a two-column format. This spot marks the top of the second column.

© 2024 by Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of UseUpdated 2021-04-13Privacy NoticeUpdated 2021-04-06