Histories of Joseph Smith and the beginnings of Mormonism often place Joseph Smith squarely in the New England environment. The Church History text for LDS Religion classes describes the Smith family qualities of "hard work, patriotism, and personal legacy" (15) as being peculiar to New England. While occasional scholarly works question the promotion of Mormonism as a New England product--Bushman warning, "The shortcoming of this form of analysis [historical forces acting upon a person] is that it exaggerates similarities and suppresses differences" (7) and Brooke propounding, "I must dissent . . . Rather than running from the Puritanism brought to New England . . . Mormonism springs from the Radical Reformation [in Europe]" (xv)--nevertheless, most historians agree that the Smith family carried out of New England beliefs and habits which influenced ideas and actions within the growth of Mormonism. What is less definite is whether the Smiths saw themselves as New Englanders.
We can examine the Smith family attitude towards their New England heritage through the voice of Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith, Jr.'s mother. From 1844-45, Lucy Mack Smith dictated a series of reminisces to a young convert, Martha Jane Knowlton Coray. Coray then prepared two finished manuscripts, one of which was taken to England by Apostle Orson Pratt and printed in 1853. My quotes come from the dictated rough draft. Some adjustment of punctuation has been made.
What transpires from reading "Mother Smith's" original transcript is that the Smiths, while not claiming such labels as "New Englander" or "Yankee," did self-consciously possess certain New England traits: pride in the Revolutionary War, Yankee ambition, and respect for Republican motherhood. The strength of these traits in the Smith family can be traced to Lucy's influence. As a "Mack," Lucy saw herself steeped in New England patriotism. At the end of her memoir, she cries out in anguish over the deaths of her sons (Hyrum and Joseph had been murdered six months before). She testifies that the country has "become so corrupt that there are none to defend and maintain the sacredness of the Law" (747) and deplores that her family has been "imprisoned and murdered . . . although I am . . . a Native of the united states [sic] and although My Father and my brothers Fought hard and struggled manfully to establish a government of liberty and eaquel [sic] rights" (747). Lucy was familiar with Revolutionary rhetoric. When Joseph Smith, Sr. attended a Methodist meeting with Lucy, his father "thr[e]w Tom Pains [sic] age of reason into the house and angrily bade him read" (291). In this case, Age of Reason is being used in a religious argument, but it is clear the family was familiar with the more intemperate words of one of the America's "rebels."
After all, Solomon Mack, Lucy's father marched under Colonel Whiting to Fort Edwards and fought in a battle at "Half-way Brook" (222). Her brothers Jason and Stephen Mack also fought in the War. With such connections, Lucy would have felt every right to appeal as a citizen to "lawyers, judges, governors and President," and mourn that "[l]aws were trampled upon and . . . states were tarnished and despite was done to the statutes." (746). The Smiths believed thoroughly in the Revolutionary War's idealistic purposes. Although Lucy never uses the term, the Smiths were "Yankee-Doddles," who, as Joseph Conforti writes, "represented the republican virtue and attachment to liberty of New England common folk" (154). A negative term to many, the Smiths would have approved the association of themselves with the Yankee-Doodle persona: "the New England commoner's increasingly bold assertions of the rights, native ability, and distrust of deference and hierarchy" (154).
The Smiths may not even have minded the negative capitalistic associations with "Yankee"—that ambitious, cunning peddler who so disturbed Washington Irving and Timothy Dwight—although they may have resisted it on principle. One of the most common themes in Lucy's memoir is the family's continual struggle for a living. Within six years of marriage, Lucy was forced to use her impressive dowry of $1,000 to pay her husband's debts, accumulated in connection with a failed ginseng business. Lucy does not reproach her husband in her memoir, but it is clear that she respected successful "merchandising." She boasts that her brother Stephen "left his family with legsy [sic]," describing him as a "Moral man/a man of business" (251). She also mentions her younger brother, Jason, who has "gathered to himself in that rocky Region [New Hampshire] Fields Flocks and herds that multiply and increase upon the Mountains" (254). Her detailed explanation of her husband's business failings speak of a need to defend herself as a Mack; Macks are usually more financially astute. It was likely Lucy's influence that encouraged the family, in New York, to invest in "a Piece of land" despite the family's "destitute circumstances" (318). She proudly reports, "In one years time we made nearly all of the first payment" (319), although to do so the family had to labor out. They eventually fell behind and were forced to foreclose.
This is pure New England ambition, the rung-climbing, insatiable, capitalistic yearnings of the Yankee lower class. But Lucy was not all capitalistic Yankee. She was also a Republican mother, ascribing to herself those traits of sufficiency, frugality and family devotion eventually encapsulated in Lydia Child's American Frugal Housewife. In one of the most delightful passages in her memoir, Lucy describes a meeting in Palmyra where she defends her reduced circumstances to another woman. "I have never prayed for riches," Lucy tells her well-meaning detractor. "I now find myself very comfortably situated to what any of you are/what we have has not been obtained at the comfort of any human being/we owe no man" (322). In the very next paragraph, Lucy mentions that their farm makes 1000 pounds of "Mapel sugar" per year (322).
Despite her money concerns, Lucy is less concerned with her impact on her family as a frugal manager and more concerned with the Smith family's religious feelings and education. Lucy begins her dictation with quotes from her father's writings about her mother. Solomon wrote, "[My wife] was not only pleasant and agreeable by reason of the polish of Eeducation [sic] but she also possesed [sic] that inestimable jewel which in a wife and Mother of a family is truly a pearl of great price/namily a pious and devotional Character" (227). Her mother was a source of inspiration to Lucy throughout her life.
This image of women as spiritual guides and civilizers swept beyond New England Republicanism. It grew into the 19th century "cult of domesticity." Julie Roy Jeffrey in her book Frontier Women ensamples Catharine Beecher as one who promoted the idea "that women had significant cultural and social responsibilities" (13-14). These responsibilities emanated specifically from a woman's sex, her innate morality, her ability to influence husbands and children. Beecher was primarily interested in moving the cult of domesticity West; she wrote and worked several years after the events Lucy speaks of, but both women were coming out of a similar philosophy: the woman as mediator of the family's spiritual/ethical education, a role that stretches back to Puritan times (see Laura Ulrich's Good Wives) and forward into conservative Christianity.
Lydia Child also promoted this image of women as a spiritual influence. She would likely have approved Solomon Mack's later exposition, "[T]heir mother's percepts [sic] and example tooke deeper root in their infant minds and had a more lasting influence . . . than all the flowery eloquence of the pulpit" (228). However, Child's Unitarian/Episcopalian soul may have balked at Lucy's next examples of Republican womanly influence. Concerning her sisters Lovisa and Lovina, Lucy relates stories regarding their "peculiar faith" (235), their connection to God and their words of advice to family members before they both, separately, died. Lucy later rehearses her own spiritual journey: her "miraculous" recovery from sickness and her spiritual vision (292). She follows this immediately with a description of her husband's dreams; it is evident that Lucy saw herself as the religious mainstay of the Smith family, bringing purpose to her husband's otherwise chaotic agnosticism. She is willing to pass this burden of religious inspiration on to her son, Joseph; she extols "the sweetest union and happiness" in the family circle when Joseph, still sixteen, teaches the family. What matters is the family's collective spiritual welfare and, in particular the family's new construction of its religious identity.
Identification with the American Revolution; Yankee ambition and frugality and Republican womanhood were all transmitted by the Smith family, in particular Lucy Mack Smith, into Mormonism. Mormonism came into being in upstate New York. The Smiths moved to New York in 1816 to the area near Rochester known as the Burnt Over District. There they participated in the Second Great Awakening, Lucy, her sons Hyrum and Samuel and her daughter Sophronia joining the Presbyterian faith while her husband and other children stayed aloof. At the age of fourteen, Joseph Smith, Jr. experienced the First Vision in which Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ instructed him not to join any of the available sects. Three years later, Joseph Smith received a visit from a resurrected prophet, Moroni. Moroni instructed Joseph Smith on the location of ancient golden plates.
America at this time was awash with folktales and magical practices, an atmosphere beautifully captured in Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series. Joseph Smith was himself involved in treasure-hunting in his early working life. His retrieval of the golden plates--and the resulting rumors--elicited curiosity and greed (understandable considering the depressed times) from his neighbors; they were convinced that Joseph had found a treasure by magic.
Joseph Smith translated the plates between 1827 and 1829. The translation, known as The Book of Mormon, was published in 1829, eight months before Joseph Jr. formed the Church of Saints (1830). That same year, Joseph moved the small church and his family to Kirtland, Ohio. A second church center was set up in Missouri. Independence was revealed as the location of the latter-day Jerusalem or Zion. Intense persecution altered the Church's plans. Kicked out of Missouri, Mormons gathered instead at Nauvoo, Illinois.
The Smith family loyally followed their son and sibling to each new location: Kirtland, Far West (Missouri), Nauvoo. Joseph Sr. died in Nauvoo on September 14, 1840. His two sons, Joseph and Hyrum were killed four years later in Carthage, Illinois. Lucy Mack Smith lived to see Brigham Young confirmed as the new prophet and the Saints' exodus West. She stayed in Nauvoo with Emma, Joseph Jr.'s widow, dying May 14, 1856.
Throughout these early years of Mormonism, Lucy Mack Smith exercised a vital and sustaining influence in her new church. She saw Mormonism through the prism of her family, embued as they were with New England ideas, habits and self-respect. When a "large company of men" visited the Smith home in New York, hoping to see the plates, Lucy reports proudly that her son, Joseph, used a "stratagem of his Grandfather Mack." Joseph called out, pretending to have a "legion at hand." (391). The men scattered. No doubt Lucy had passed on this tale of Revolutionary cleverness to her children.
Her pride in her Revolutionary War connections sprinkles Lucy's narrative of Mormonism. Desiring to see her brother's family, Lucy accompanied several Mormon elders to Detroit (the elders went on to Missouri). She relays, triumphantly, that despite many set-backs the name of her brother, General Mack, evoked only respect: "[The elders] applied for the Methodist Church to preach in but [were] refused. The minister . . . said that if he had known it to be the request of Gen. Mack's sister they should have preached in his church" (550). Lucy, ever forthright, informed the minister she was sure he would get another chance.
Not only her ties to the Revolutionary War but Lucy's sense of American citizenship recurs throughout her memoir. She gives a full summary of a speech by Joseph Jr. in which he assures law officers that Mormons "were a people who had never broken the Laws to his knowledge but if they had they stood ready to be tried by the Law" (632). Lucy and her family perceived themselves as holding all the "priviledges [sic] of franchise" (630); that is, a say in their local and national governments.
In fact, unlike other reform and utopian experimental religions of the time, Mormonism was not initially devoted to pacifism or reclusion. Mormons often fought back against their persecutors, confident that good citizens had a right to defend themselves. This militant self-confidence would be found later in the brash Utah War and, with devastating irony, warped into mob paranoia at the root of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Lucy displays this confidence in her reaction to U.S. President Van Buren's statement to a delegation of Mormons: "Gentlemen, your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you" (708); in response, Lucy invokes the founding fathers: "You that at the peril of your lives your fortunes and your sacred honor . . . nobly stood targets for vengeance of the oppressor/ willing to sacrafice [sic] your own lives to save your children—Spirit of our departed Washington . . . we are your children/we love the constitution and the law . . . we love the hands that fought for us in our infant years/we have your brethren in our midst/some who battled by your side" (709). For Lucy, Mormons have become the true inheritors of the Revolutionary purpose.
Lucy also believed Mormons were, or should be, the epitome of industry and frugality, traits associated with Yankee New Englanders. Such qualities would make personal sacrifice "for the sake of Christ and salvation" (437) easier to effect. One of the first sacrifices the Smith family made, vicariously through Joseph Jr., was the monetary wealth of the golden plates. Lucy reports that when Joseph first uncovered the plates, "the thought flashed across his mind that there might be a benefit to him in a pecuniary point of view" (346). This desire for money has to be overcome before Joseph Jr. can receive the plates from Moroni.
The second sacrifice is more personal to Lucy. When the Smith family loses the Palmyra property due to the loan being called, Lucy reports, "I looked upon the proceeds of our industry . . . with a yearning attachment that I had never felt before" (371-372). The rewards of Yankee ambition are fully felt and appreciated. Yet once appreciated, Lucy can state unequivocally, "I will not cast one longing look upon anything which I leave behind me" (437). She is later rather acerbic about those Mormons who "murmur at the trifling troubles/ inconveiniences [sic] which they have to encounter in living in a little less stylish establishment than they have been accostomed [sic] to . . . All like the purchase/few the price to pay" (584). Lucy would have agreed with Mrs. Child's advice, "True wisdom lies in finding out all the advantages of a situation in which we are placed, instead of imagining the enjoyments of one in which we are not placed" (Child, 106).
Industry, sacrifice and one's proper place—the essence of good Yankee living—are all extolled by Lucy. They find their expression in the Mormon Law of Consecration. In a revelation received in Kirtland in 1831, Joseph Smith detailed a plan whereby goods and properties would be consecrated to the church and then parceled out to each male church member "as is sufficient for himself and family" (Doctrine & Covenants 42:32). The head of each family became "accountable . . . a steward" (42:32). The same revelation instructed the Saints "not to be idle" (42:42). Later revelations advised, "Neither shalt thou bury thy talents" (60:13), "labor in the church" (75:28) and "be diligent in all things" (75:29). Yankee ambition, frugality and sacrifice are combined to form an utopian economic system, similar to those practiced by transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott.
This ability to sacrifice as an aspect of Yankee industry is illustrated through one of the most dramatic events in early Church history. Martin Harris, one of Joseph Jr.'s supporters in New York, borrowed transcribed pages to show his family and friends. The pages were lost, possibly taken by Harris' wife. Lucy devotes nearly one-fourth of the New York years to a discussion of this one incident. In Lucy's memoirs, Mrs. Harris takes on all the negative attributes of Yankee ambition. Like her husband, Mrs. Harris became interested in Joseph Jr. Unlike her husband, who Lucy paints as generous and selfless, Mrs. Harris is described by Lucy as "jealous" and "suspicious" (394); she is continually offering money to the Smiths to catch a glimpse of the plates. It is likely that Mrs. Harris simply wanted some kind of material guarantee for the money spent by Mr. Harris. She later complained about her husband's loans to Joseph Jr., asserting, "I know how to take care of my property & I'll let them see that pretty shortly" (407). To Lucy, however, Mrs. Harris' overconcern with property makes her incapable of true sacrifice.
Mrs. Harris' money concerns also disqualify her as a good Republican housewife. Not only is she "a woman who piqued herself upon her superiority to her husband," she also has a "private purse which her husband permited [sic] her to keep to satisfy her peculiar disposition" (395). On one occasion when Mrs. Harris pestered Lucy for information, Lucy replied "that the business of the House which were the natural cares of a woman were all that I atempted [sic] to dictate or interfere with unless by my Husbands or sons request" (403). Coming from Lucy, a definitive power in her husband's and sons' lives, this statement is fraught with irony. But Lucy was speaking from the perspective of a frugal Republican mother who eschews wastefulness and embraces domestic duties.
Lucy would have backed Mrs. Child's belief that "true, hearty, well principled service" (Child, 108) should be a woman's goal, and to pass on a "thorough, religious useful education" (111) the best gift a mother can offer her family. Lucy was proud of her domestic role. She quotes her husband's parting words to her: "You are the mother of the greatest family that ever lived upon the earth . . . You have brought up my children for me by the fireside" (715, 722). Yet Lucy's religious influence extended beyond the usual bounds of Republican motherhood. She not only trained her children in their religious education, she participated in her son Joseph's religious quest. In her memoirs, Lucy refers to her own prophecies concerning the growing church: she prophesied regarding the conversion of a Presbyterian deacon; she prophesied that her sons Joseph and Hyrum would not die in Liberty Jail, and she had a vision in which she saw her sons "on the prarie [sic] in Misouri" (697) before the family has learned of their release from Liberty.
Her religious influence extended to direct intervention. On their first trip to Missouri, her sons fell sick with cholera. On their return, Hyrum relates the experience to Lucy, reporting that he received comfort when he saw a vision of "Mother on her knees under an apple tree praying for us" (578). Joseph Jr. then interposes, saying to Lucy, "Oh my Mother . . . how often have your prayers been a means of assisting us when the shadows of death encompassed us" (578).
Lucy's role as spiritual guide and agent impacted the early Mormon experience. For many women, including Joseph Smith's plural wife Eliza R. Snow, Lucy became "Mother Smith." Eliza wrote a poetic tribute to Lucy in 1845. Lucy is described, rather fervidly, as a survivor who has "suffer'd much and much she has Enjoy'd" (782). Eliza depicts Lucy as one who has seen it all—from the church's foundations to the martyrdom and beyond. In Eliza's poem, Lucy is always standing--"beside the death bed of her noble lord;" "beside the bleeding forms of those Great brother-martyrs" (783). Respect for Mother Smith extended beyond women to the men of the church. Many men visited Mother Smith on their journeys back and forth to Utah. Wilford Woodruff (later a president of the church) referred to Mother Smith as a "Prophetess" (779) and gave her a blessing shortly after the martyrdom in which he called her "the greatest Mother in Israel" (780).
Such strength and purpose, admired and related by both men and women, gives credence to Julie Roy Jeffrey's image of pioneer Mormon women as independent, economically powerful and self-sufficient even within polygamy. Well before the Mormons moved West, the church's first women's organization--the Relief Society--was formed on March 17, 1842. Similar organizations were attracting women throughout the nation at the time. The Mormon Relief Society, headed by Emma Smith, reached a membership of 1,142 by September 1842 (200). Lucy had become a member earlier that year on March 24th. After all, a woman who would leave bread baking to attend a religious service (568) knew where her real interests and priorities lay. In this respect, Lucy departs from Child and Child's philosophy. Rather than submerging her energies into her domestic sphere, Lucy's idea of Republican womanhood entailed pushing beyond the home's boundaries, into the community, even to the door of heaven.
Hence Mormonism, for Lucy, was not so much the personal vision of Joseph Jr. but a family triumph. This is possibly why the Church removed the 1853 published rendition of Lucy's memoir (called Biographical Sketches) from sale. The Church was then established in the West and needed to secure itself internally. It was no longer a family achievement. Although Brigham Young and the quorum continued to write and visit Lucy during treks to the east and Brigham Young offered many times to help Lucy take the journey West, the Church in Utah was rapidly evolving into an delimited empire stressing economic, political and doctrinal independence from the east.
At the beginning of the 20th century, under the direction of Joseph F. Smith, the Church began to look once more to its eastern, New England roots. Joseph F. Smith, and the presidents after him, wished to move Mormonism into a position of acceptance within American culture. They drew upon Mormonism's New England beginnings to gain that acceptance. In 1905, Joseph F. Smith traveled to Vermont to dedicate a monument at Joseph Smith's birthplace. In her book The Politics of American Religious Identity, Kathleen Flake writes that at this time "the Latter-day Saints were encouraged to manifest Yankee virtues and Progressive Era values" (132). Lucy Mack Smith would have approved. For her, the spirit of the Revolutionary War, Yankee industry and frugality and Republican womanhood were virtues the Church could ill-lose. Her belief in their use, their instrumentality, is telling. She saw their effect in her life and in her family. Through her, they infused the beginnings of Mormonism: Mormon beliefs in self-government, Mormon economic experiments and Mormonism's attitudes towards women. Whatever other backgrounds Mormonism emerged from, for Lucy it was a Smith/Mack family achievement and therefore, a New England achievement.
Lucy Mack' Smith's memoir, with its sincere, even aggressive religiosity, in many ways supplies an alternate narrative to the better educated, wealthier, more Protestant narratives of New England (Child, Hawthorne), but it is important to recognize that she would not have seen herself as an alternate. Like William Apess, who laid claim to true Christianity at the expense of his white counterparts, Lucy laid claim to the authentic New England character for herself and Mormonism. I'm sure that in her typical forthright manner, she would have informed any skeptics, "[W]e love those hearts from whose pure depths that constitution emmanated" (709) and considered that proof enough.
Bibliography
Apess, William. On Our Own Ground. Edited by Barry O'Connell. University of Massachusetts Press: Amherst, 1992.
Brooke, John L. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844. Cambridge University Press: New York, 1994.
Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1984.
Child, Lydia Maria. 1833. The American Frugal Housewife. Applewood Books: Bedford.
Conforti, Joseph. Imagining New England. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2001.
Church History in the Fulness of Times. Prepared by the Church Education System. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: SLC, 1989.
The Doctrine and Covenants. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: SLC, 1990.
Flake, Kathleen. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of the Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2004.
Hymns. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: SLC, 1985.
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. Frontier Women. Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, 1979.
Smith, Lucy Mack. Lucy's Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Family Memoir. Edited by Lavina Fielding Anderson. Signature Books: SLC, 2001.
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