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prophet and the presidency: Mormonism and politics in Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential campaign, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Wood, Timothy L

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Joseph Smith devoted most of his adult life to the development of a religion that differed markedly from the forms of Christianity that had preceded it. As the Mormon church developed and articulated the concept of an actual physical gathering of believers, Smith's worldview expanded beyond the realm of mere speculative or revealed theology and grew to include social and political theory as well. Smith embraced an old-fashioned view of the church and community, believing those bodies to be the repository of society's moral and religious authority. However, Smith also embraced a limited concept of religious liberty, insofar as he believed the country's various communities ought to be able to coexist within one national entity, with individuals free to choose between them.

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Thus, Smith's 1844 presidential campaign amounted to the Mormon founder's attempt to publicize those views on the national level. Smith advocated a platform which assigned the president a primarily regulatory role, vigorously defending religious freedom against the "mobocracy" and violence of hostile communities which might try to crush unpopular minorities simply by the power of their numbers. However, the introduction of new doctrines into the church, especially plural marriage, at a critical moment threw that political theory off balance, pitting the interests of the government in regulating marriage against the Saints' newfound belief in polygamy. Upset by that new course, former believers and supporters emerged as opponents, precipitating a series of crises that ended with Smith's murder in Carthage, Illinois in June 1844. However, the seeds of a new social order had been planted, seeds which would take root in Salt Lake City and produce a harvest that would greatly affect the future of American westward migration in the nineteenth century, and serve as the foundation of Utah's vital and dynamic religious culture in the twentieth.

Notes

1 Joseph Smith, An American Prophet's Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith, ed. Scott H. Faulting (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 464.

2 Nauvoo Expositor, 7 June 1844, p. 2.

3 Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Mormon Prophet. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), ix. Illinois Governor Thomas Ford, who presided over the state at the time of Smith's murder, expressed a similar sentiment when he reflected that: "The Christian world, which has hitherto regarded Mormonism with silent contempt, unhappily may yet have cause to fear its rapid increase. Modern society is full of material for such a religion. At the death of the prophet... the Mormons in all the world numbered about two hundred thousand souls...; a number equal, perhaps, to the number of Christians, when the Christian Church was of the same age. It is to be feared that, in course of a century, some gifted man like Paul, some splendid orator... may succeed in breathing new life into this modern Mahometanism, and make the name of the martyred Joseph ring as loud, and stir the souls of men as much, as the mighty name of Christ itself.... And in that event, the author of this history [Ford] feels degraded by the reflection, that the humble governor of an obscure state, who would otherwise be forgotten in a few years, stands a fair chance, like Pilate and Herod, by their official connection with the true religion, of being dragged down to posterity with an immortal name, hitched on to the memory of a miserable impostor." Thomas Ford, History of Illinois From its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847 (New York: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1854), 359-60.

prophet and the presidency: Mormonism and politics in Joseph Smith's 1844 Presidential campaign, The

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2000 by Wood, Timothy L

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