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I

Acccording to republican purists of the Revolutionary generation, the values of commerce, which “fostered a love of gain, ostentatious living, and a desire for luxuries,” could be contrasted with those of agriculture, which encouraged frugality, industry, and a desire for competence. The contrast was largely a fiction, of course, and de Crevecoeur’s recognition that self-interest was what held farming communities together should warn us against a naive reading of Jeffersonian texts. Nevertheless, as the income of most small farmers in North America in the late eighteenth century did not allow for conspicuous consumption, and rural neighbors were bound together by interlacing social obligations and debts, the farmer of the Revolutionary generation could legitimately be given iconic status as the antithesis of aggressive commercial individualism. But what if agriculture were itself to become (even more) commercialized? What if obligations to others were reduced to the honoring of debts, and benevolence was thought to lie, not in traditional acts of charity such as helping the needy, but rather in helping the bottom line—in inducing men “to pursue with increased energy, that business, or that course of conduct, to which their true interest directs them”? 

These were not idle questions for those living in upstate New York in the 1820s. Agriculture was changing in the state’s western counties in the years before Jackson’s presidency, as improved transportation routes (including most notably the completed Erie Canal) dramatically multiplied the opportunities for shipping farm products. Clarence Danhof notes that 20 percent of northern farm goods were sold in urban markets at the beginning of the decade, a percentage that would rise. From west of Albany, historians have traced the movement of beef, pork, salt, flour, and potash to Quebec, wheat and flour to Schenectady (for reshipment to New York and the West Indies), grain, lumber and whisky to Baltimore, and cattle to Baltimore and Philadelphia. As one might expect, these new opportunities led some to advocate a market-driven agriculture that would maximize yields and profits; and no less predictably, not everyone agreed that these changes were for the good. Although the recognition that in a commercial society an entrepreneur “deals with [others] as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the profits they bring” was an eighteenth-century commonplace, the unapologetic equation of this philosophy with virtue if as new—and some protested both this new definition and the changes that it brought to the social meanings embedded in market exchanges. It is one such protest that concerns me here. Among those who felt that a move to surplus-market agriculture was retrograde was Joseph Smith Jr. who, living ten miles from the booming canal town of Palmyra, would in 1830 present to the world in the Book of Mormon an alternative vision of how rural America should be. 

Some might question this attribution. Smith claimed that the Book of Mormon was an inspired translation of works authored in ancient America and then edited for those who would read them in the latter days; for those who accept this account of the work’s origin, any similarities between the practices and values of Book of Mormon peoples and those of its first readers would presumably be explained as a providential coincidence—indeed, as providing the justification for the book’s coming forth when it did. That possibility is not addressed in what follows, for my concern here is not with the coming forth of the Book of Mormon but with the ways in which—whatever its origins—the work engages the concerns of its first readers. The question of the historicity of the Book of Mormon can hardly be dismissed, of course; but however we account for the work, it is surely helpful to remember the words of J. R. R. Tolkien, as he rather sardonically surveyed the state of Beowulf criticism some seventy years ago: “At last then, after inquiring so long whence the material came, and what its original or aboriginal nature was (questions that can not ever be decisively answered), we might now and again inquire what the poet did with it.” Substituting “prophet” for poet (and bracketing the question of who the prophet was), I believe that we might usefully do the same.

II

For those unwilling to bracket questions of origins, it might seem logical to appeal to Smith’s biography and assume that his thinking on the dynamics of an agricultural society was influenced by his family’s experience of economic failure. They were still smarting from the loss of their farm when he dictated the Book of Mormon text. However, the Smith family story was far from unique and the issues addressed in the work were generally relevant to the situation of small landowners, tenant farmers, and hired hands in upstate New York. After all, those who prospered from the canal boom were large landowners—farmers able to operate on a commercial scale—and tradesmen. Small farmers were squeezed, indeed often squeezed out, by the canal’s arrival and the consequent changes in land prices; and Eric Hobsbawm’s observation that, for those who responded to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (1795), “poverty was … a collective fact, to be solved and not merely escaped” also applies to those who responded to Smith’s work a generation later. The Smiths, that is to say, were not alone in discovering that, although the capitalism of the day offered, as James Fenimore Cooper had written, a lure of “competence and happiness,” the reality could be quite other. There was an audience ready to respond to the “profound social protest” that the Book of Mormon articulated. 

The depth of this protest can hardly be exaggerated. Rather than advocating the pursuit of market opportunities, the Book of Mormon counseled temperance, condemned the display of wealth, and elaborated an economic system based on a labor theory of value. Distrusting the pursuit of profit, as prosperity could lead to pride, and pride could lead to contempt for and “oppression to” the poor, it urged the limitation of consumption, and proclaimed an egalitarian message. In a just society, the argument went, there would be “no respect to persons” on economic grounds; rather all would be “rich like unto [each other].” The message could hardly be clearer: While having “respect to persons” follows from the acceptance of class divisions, having “no respect to persons” implied an egalitarian vision of community life. Significantly, in the Book of Mormon the development of a class structure was a sign of spiritual decline (4 Ne. 1:28 [1:25]). 

We might seem in all of this to be revisiting Charles Sellers’s Kulturkampf, the struggle between, on the one hand, a morality sanctioning “competitive individualism and the market’s rewards of wealth and status” and, on the other, a morality drawing its strength from a revivalism that “recharged America’s communal egalitarianism.” And to some extent, we are. Smith did look for an egalitarian society, his message would challenge those with wealth and status to use their surplus for the good of the community, and the theology of the Book of Mormon was revivalistic. However, we cannot stop here. A coloring of revivalism is hardly a distinguishing feature, given that for most Americans the first decades of the nineteenth century were, in Perry Miller’s words, “a continuing, even though intermittent, revival” and given that, in other respects, the message of early Mormonism was more complex than Sellers suggests. 

Smith was not communalistic. Although, as we shall see, Smith’s translation describes a society that owned land communally and restricted market exchanges, Smith did not think that this system necessitated a communal system of production. New England ministers had seen the good life in terms of individual property-holding, drawing on Micah 4:4 to flesh out their descriptions. This dream, part of the political rhetoric of Ontario County in Smith’s day, was implicit in the Book of Mormon. The prophet presumed that there were individual allocations of land (“inheritances,” 3 Ne. 3:4 [6:3]), and that, although the community would come under the judgment of history as a collective, such collectiveness did not do away with personal accountability for stewardship. 

Further, Smith’s vision did not presume absolute, synchronous equality. Linking economic and moral stewardship and drawing on the covenant theology of the Old Testament, Smith assumed that righteousness would inevitably lead to communal prosperity; but he also recognized that, luck apart, it was hard work and entrepreneurial flair that would lead to individual success. What disturbed him was not that some would become wealthy but that they would not use their wealth to help those in need. 

That said, the Book of Mormon does signal a clash of cultures, even if not precisely the one Sellers describes. Adam Smith had noted that, with the division of labor and the consequent impossibility of every man providing everything for himself, it was necessary to divide’s one’s stock into assets necessarily held in reserve for immediate consumption and capital which could be used (or invested) to meet these needs in the future. When one “possesses stock sufficient to maintain him for months or years,” he explained, “he naturally endeavours to derive a revenue from the greater part of it; reserving only so much for his immediate consumption as may maintain him until this revenue begins to come in.” This use of capital goes unquestioned in the Book of Mormon. What is questioned, however, and what set the Prophet down a different road from that followed by his contemporaries is the question of what one should do when one’s revenue exceeds one’s needs for immediate consumption and reinvestment, in short, when one possesses what I refer to in the following discussion as “surplus.” For contemporaries, it went without saying that such surplus should be put to use. “A man must be perfectly crazy,” Adam Smith had reflected, “… who does not employ all the stock which he commands” either to improve his standard of living or secure future profits. Joseph Smith disagreed. Self-aggrandizement, he would tell a follower, “may be indulged upon only one rule or plan—and that is to elevate, benefit and bless others first.” Riches, a Book of Mormon prophet affirmed (meaning, by the term, surplus), should only be sought “for the intent to do good.” 

In exploring Smith’s vision, we must, of course, remember that the Book of Mormon is not an economic treatise but a series of narratives describing migrations, wars, church-plantings, and apostasies in pre-Columbian America. As a result we have to determine for ourselves a starting point that can be used in tracing the book’s argument, and I find it in King Benjamin’s words before resigning the throne to his son, Mosiah (Mosiah 1-3 [1-5]). According to the Book of Mormon, Benjamin’s people were the Nephites, descendants of a group called out of Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah (around 600 B.C.E.) and led to a promised land in the New World. For the most part, they are farmers. Although, as LDS economist Garth L. Mangum notes, there seems to have been no period in Nephite history characterized by isolated farmsteads, there being an “almost immediate establishment of cities” following the group’s arrival in the Americas, the Nephite economy is nevertheless limited to agriculture, mining, and handicraft. In 1830, that would not have been thought surprising. Although it was popularly supposed that farming was unknown to the Nephites’ descendants, the Native Americans of Smith’s own day, it was a staple of missionary discourse that Smith and his contemporaries never thought to question that the Native American would turn to farming following conversion to Christianity. Since the Book of Mormon represented the Nephites as Christian, it would have seemed logical that, if Christianity could lead to a settled Indian agriculture in the nineteenth century, it could have done the same thing some two thousand years earlier. Similarly, given the conviction that the abandonment of settled agriculture was evidence of spiritual decline and a reversion to a savage state, it would have been thought unremarkable that in the Book of Mormon those who abandoned the gospel increasingly relied on hunting and raiding settlements. 

Readers would also have found it logical that Nephite agriculture would—like that of upstate New York —be based on flocks of sheep and goats, herds of cattle, food crops such as barley, corn, and wheat, or chard produce, and (implicitly) flax. Nor would they have caviled at a conventional European-American division of labor, with men tilling the ground and raising crops, and women spinning “and work[ing] all manner of fine linen; yea, . . . cloth of every kind.” Given the presumption that Nephite civilization had ended in the fratricidal struggle that had climaxed at the Hill Cumorah near Palmyra, readers would not have expected an exotic agriculture or a radically different social system. 

What would have been surprising, however (because by 1830 it would have seemed old-fashioned), would have been Benjamin’s commitment to the yeoman dream, in which economic independence and a modest standard of living defined one’s ambition. This dream was fundamental to Nephite society, and three mechanisms allowed for its realization. First, there was communal ownership of unoccupied land, with the assignment of family inheritances determined by need. The most no table example comes when imprisoned members of group who had lived by raiding the Nephites and exacting tribute are set at liberty and given an inheritance. This arrangement is seen as a civil obligation; although converted Lamanites are also given enough land to support their families, these ex-prisoners—former members of the Gadianton band—do not convert. They merely repent of former sins and covenant to keep the peace. 

Second, there is group control of prices, with a fixed price for “every kind” of grain, irrespective of the kind or the quality of the harvest. “Some known commodity, as measured grain, is better, and more intelligible and unalterable than any money whatever,” John Witherspoon had argued in his discussion of commercial exchange, drawing on Adam Smith’s labor theory of value. King Benjamin’s successor-son Mosiah, who introduced the Nephite system of measures, thought the same—apparently going beyond the market-based idea of a just price (traditionally defined as the price uncoerced buyers would pay for goods) in favor of a system of exchange where grain could maintain a constant value. Third, although trade and traffic are seen as normal functions of the economy, providing a mechanism of exchange, they are not seen as the means to laying up a store of personal wealth. Inevitably some members of society would fail to prosper. That being so, there was a communal responsibility to provide a safety net to avert disaster (3 Ne. 3:4 [6:3]; Mosiah 2:40 [4:24]). 

Benjamin summarizes what this concern for others might mean when he urges his hearers not to injure one another (they should avoid violence and respect property rights) (Mosiah 1:44, 2:44, 26 [2:23, 4:13-14]), not to take advantage of the other, and more positively—and radically—”to render to each his due.” A person’s due was what was necessary for a life of dignity; and when individual effort failed to provide this “due,” the community had a responsibility to help. This was the case no matter who was in need and no matter what the cause of the poverty, with no distinction being made on grounds of faith, birth, or “worthiness.” Just as God’s love embraces all that come unto him, “black and white, bond and free, male and female,” so the charity of the Saints should have no limits. Those who had prospered were to “administer of [their] substance to him that stands in need” without hesitation. No matter what circumstances led to a person’s poverty, the beggar should not be “put out” to perish. 

III

Needless to say, such concern for others was not characteristic of life in 1820s Palmyra or, indeed, elsewhere in America at the time. Smith knew this well. The contemporary generation was “not far” from the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, he declared in March 1829 —and the reference pointed not just to the scope of the destruction that he expected to be poured out on America but also to the cause of God’s anger: “Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth,” Smith had read in James 5:4 —and he would not have missed the echo of the Sodom story in James’s continuation: “The cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.” This warning of impending destruction as punishment for neglecting the poor was repeated in the Book of Mormon with reference both to the Nephites and the latter-day readers of their history: “If ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted, and impart of your substance if ye have, to those who stand in need,” one of the leaders of the Book of Mormon church explained, “. . . ye are as dross, which the refiners do cast out, (it being of no worth,) and is trodden under foot of men.” This would also be the fate of America in the latter days if its people did not repent, a later prophecy made clear. 

The call to repentance found in the Book of Mormon was, of course, one that America had heard before. Indeed, even the Nephite covenant to witness their commitment to God by “bear[ing] one another’s burdens, that they may be light;… mourn[ing] with those that mourn … and comforting] those that stand in need of comfort,” would have seemed familiar to the work’s first readers. “We should bear one another’s burdens; mourn with them that mourn, and rejoice with them that rejoice,” Joseph Bellamy had explained in 1750, as he sought to ground the lessons of the Great Awakening in reformed thought. “Love will dispose men to all acts of mercy toward their neighbors when they are under any affliction or calamity. . . ,” Jonathan Edwards had already noted. “It will dispose men to give to the poor, to bear one another’s burdens, and to weep with those that weep, as well as to rejoice with those that do rejoice.” Or as Smith’s contemporary Nathanael Emmons explained, “True benevolence always disposes those who possess it, to enter into the feelings of their fellow men under all circumstances, to rejoice with them that rejoice, to mourn with them that mourn, to weep with them that weep, and suffer with them that suffer.” 

However, such pieties had not created a society characterized by justice. Instead, Christian duty was becoming increasingly seen as the duty to succeed economically. As we have seen, by the time that the Book of Mormon came from the press, an Ontario County landowner like Samuel Chipman (quoted above) could confidently argue that benevolence should be seen to inhere not in acts of charity but in inducing others “to pursue with increased energy, that business or that course of conduct, to which their true interest directs them.” 

Such a stance followed in part from the failure of Bellamy and Edwards, and subsequent New Light preachers, to focus on physical rather than spiritual needs. For them it had gone without saying that charity to the souls of others was the highest form of benevolence and that it was therefore legitimate to disregard physical needs to focus on spiritual ones. Although those who distributed Bibles and tracts or who preached up revivals were hardly blind to the poverty around them, they found the number of the poor less troubling than the number of the unchurched. “I wish I was poor,” reflects Lucy Lee in a tract published a generation after the Book of Mormon, but reflective of earlier attitudes. “Then Christians would talk to me about [religion]; they always do talk [about it] to poor people.” 

However, two additional factors contributed to the new focus that we find in Chipman. The first was the way in which true religion was thought to be manifested in evangelical faith, not works of charity. As the Rev. Alonzo Clark explained, preaching in Palmyra on September 14, 1828, it was impossible to please God with good deeds for even the best were “spotted with sin and stained with guilt.” He took as his text Malachi 1:8: “And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye offer the lame and sick, is it not evil?” Clark ignored the acceptable offering of Malachi 3 and its association with social justice. 

The second factor was the way in which changes in the economy of upstate New York were making the use of surplus for charity increasingly difficult. In de Crevecoeur’s sketch “The American Belisarius,” those facing “extreme indigence” can turn to the “princely farmer” S. K., who “opens to them his granary . . . lends them hay . . . [and] assists them in whatever they want.” We need not suppose that there were ever many like S. K. to accept that such figures had existed. Neither need we look too closely at their motives. As John Locke had argued that large possessions could be legitimated by the absence of waste, they might well have thought that to give away in charity what would otherwise perish would have been prudential as well benevolent. But whatever the mix of motives driving his generosity, we might well suppose that S. K.’s granary would have been full because all his grain had not been sold—and this was as much because he lacked opportunity as because of a conscious decision to hold some of his harvest back to meet communal needs. By 1830, however, few New York farmers lacked opportunities to sell their produce, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to follow S. K.’s example. With improved transportation, more and more of one’s grain was carried to market, and surplus was ceasing to be something stored in granaries and barns. 

Chipman’s insistence that a farmer’s first concern should be to determine which crops would “afford the greatest net profit”—”what kind of crops are most profitable,” “what crop will produce the greatest clear profit” —was, in short, a response to new possibilities. Earlier addresses to the Ontario Agricultural Society had defined success differently. “Our work is well done,” Thomas D. Burrall had reflected in 1822, “when our lands are cultivated in a way to give the greatest amount of produce at the least expense of farming capital.” But Burrall’s concern for yield rather than profit was, however, looking old-fashioned by the time Smith was at work on his translation. Surplus could be sold, and the resulting profit could be used to improve one’s life with goods originating outside of the local economy. (A traveler reported in 1822 that the log huts of settlers west of Canandaigua were being replaced “with new and often stately mansion[s].” ) Or it could be reinvested to increase revenue. Not surprisingly, recognizing the opportunities that existed, farmers went into debt for more land or machinery, or to purchase bank stock. “Once the financial sector expanded its reach into the hinterlands, as it did after 1820 or so,” Howard Bodenhorn has noted, “financial instruments became an outlet for rural savings.” Increasingly, “farmers faced a choice between physical and financial capital”; and by the 1830s a farmer who prospered was much less likely to maintain his wealth in land and agricultural products than he would have done even twenty years before. 

Nothing in the Book of Mormon suggests hostility to banks as such. Although the Nephite use of gold and silver measures might seem to reflect Jeffersonian suspicions of paper money, there is no reason to suppose that Smith was blind to the advantages of increased liquidity. However, inevitably, the increasing importance of cash over barter was transforming society by reducing the interdependence of neighbors. This interdependence had traditionally manifested itself in an exchange of services whereby, for example, well-digging could be credited for the cost of coffin-making; and though such services had a book value, debts could be carried for years with a tolerance that the new economy would not allow. For example, Elisha Fish of Farmington (less than fifteen miles from Palmyra) recorded debits and credits against Martin Power for nine years (1817-26), at the end of which Power owed $5.32. They resumed the exchange of services in 1828, and by 1832 Power had 32 cents credit. As another example, Nicholas Howland of Manchester noted the first of a series of gifts of farm produce to James Monroe on April 6, 1826; by October, Monroe had reduced his debt to $2.30 by working on Howland’s land and agreeing to a settlement of $2.85. Two years later, Howland notes without any particular concern that this settlement was still due.

Such willingness to carry accounts forward made the exchange of commodities and services work; and inasmuch as this exchange had bound communities together, it is hardly surprising that, from a Book of Mormon perspective, the most regrettable aspect of a breakdown in property rights is that people no longer borrow or lend (Eth. 6:36 [14:2]). Committed to a vision of communal interdependence that did not seem likely to survive economic change, we might suppose that, in April 1829, Smith heard the news that there were plans for a Wayne County Bank, whose “operations of discount and deposit [were to] be carried on in the village of Palmyra, and not elsewhere,” with mixed emotions. 

IV 

Given the way America was changing, the report that Nephi’s people “lived after the manner of happiness” would have seemed both reassuring and challenging to the work’s first readers. On the one hand, it would have reassured them that happiness was attainable. On the other, it would have challenged them with its assumption that pursuit was inescapably linked to the pursuit of virtue—that the twin goals of de Crevecoeur’s American farmer, seeking to be “happy and . . . good,” were inseparable. Unavoidably, the story of the Book of Mormon people was a call for reformation. The virtues of the Nephites were familiar from Christian tradition: indeed, they were doubly familiar as they were conventionally attributed to Native Americans. “No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace,” Mary Jemison had reported of the eighteenth-century Seneca in terms that inevitably bring the Book of Mormon to mind. “They were temperate in their desires, moderate in their passions, and candid and honorable in the expression of their sentiments.” But for all their familiarity, these virtues had the power to challenge a reader’s complacency. 

Consider, for example, the question of “temperate . . . desires.” Although the Nephite concern for simple clothing was arguably little different from what Jemison reported of the Seneca—or, for that matter, what would be professed by most Americans in Smith’s world —the thinking of Book of Mormon authors was anything but traditional. If the Nephites prefer linen and homespun and avoid more expensive cloths (Hel. 5:38 [13:28]), it is not just because of the intrinsic merits of temperate habits or the questionable morality of using fabrics such as silk. It is also because eschewing luxury goods preserved one’s surplus and therefore one’s capacity to meet the needs of others. Although Benjamin cautions those with wealth not to impoverish themselves, he expects those who accept the gospel to give to the needy in proportion to what they themselves own and condemns any attempt on their part to hold on to more than is necessary for a competence and to become “lifted up one above another.” A person’s extravagance (in clothing or otherwise) was purchased at the expense of someone else’s unmet need. This was a radical concern for others in the face of massive societal change. 

Others, no less troubled by the way society was changing, had responded to the changes by focusing on inner rewards rather than profit. Robert Bellah and his colleagues have traced to the Prophet’s generation the rise of what they call “expressive individualism,” or the elevation of emotional self-fulfillment as the highest human good—something that they have seen as a reaction to the increasing “utilitarian” individualism of the market. However, this pursuit of inner satisfaction was not an option for Smith: Prioritizing self-fulfillment in this way would be, from a Book of Mormon perspective, just as misguided as pursuing wealth, for it was but another form of selfishness—and selfishness was to be met with self-denial. After all, you could be contented, as the Canandaigua Farmer’s Diary had advised two years after Smith’s family had moved to Palmyra, “if you have a small farm or trade, that will support your family, and add a hundred dollars a year to your capital.” (One needed to add to capital to provide inheritances for one’s children.) Indeed, Smith urged, one should be content with a competence. Although, inevitably, some would prosper more than others, any surplus gained could be used to benefit others. For those who prospered not to “clothe the naked, … feed the hungry,… liberate the captive, and administer relief to the sick and the afflicted” when confronted with suffering was to surrender to covetousness—was to be guilty of sin. 

In 1829, Smith’s answer to the sin of covetousness is not yet a program. He makes no attempt in the Book of Mormon to define in detail the mechanisms of exchange and regulation that should prevail in society. Even the well-known account of people having “all things common” (3 Ne. 12:11 [26:19], 4 Ne. 1:4, 28 [1:3, 25]) should probably not be taken as implying a particular economic order. The same had been reported of the Jerusalem church (Acts 2:44, 4:32), and biblical commentators usually did not presume communal ownership of goods in their exegesis. “One wanted not what another had, for he might have it for the asking,” Matthew Henry had explained in 1722, and it was that level of giving that the Book of Mormon sought to provoke, not a new economic order. That should not be thought to diminish the work’s importance. At a time characterized by a demoralizing of the theory of trade and consumption and an “all pervasive, all-engrossing anxiety to grow rich,” Smith set his face against the trend, and that in itself merits attention.