The Benefits of Partisanship | Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism

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During the 1970s a comprehensive history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in sixteen volumes was contemplated as one of the projects of the Historical Department of the Church, with Leonard J. Arrington, then Church Historian, as general editor, and Deseret Book Company as publisher. Although the format for editing and publishing this monumental work has changed, volumes once intended for the series have begun to appear. Mil ton Backman’s The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio was the first; now comes Richard L. Bushman’s Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. 

A noted scholar of American history and a skilled interpreter of early New En gland life, Bushman brings impressive credentials to the task of writing on Joseph Smith and the beginnings of Mormonism. 

This book, one of several works on Mormonism recently produced by the University of Illinois press, covers the period of Mormon beginnings up to 1831. It is an attractively designed work printed on quality, acid-free paper. It contains two informative maps and one additional illustration: William Whiaker’s painting of Joseph Smith. Extensive notes giving considerable insight to the text are placed at the back of the book but are easily located with numbered page headings. 

Bushman acknowledges his pro-Mormon bias but suggests that “partisanship has its benefits too,” the most important being “the industry and thoroughness of researchers on Mormon topics simply because more than the satisfaction of curiosity is at issue. Thanks to the intensity of the students of Mormonism, we know more about the Joseph Smith, Sr., family than any other poor farmers of the nineteenth century” (p. 189). 

The purpose of Bushman’s volume was not to trace the origin of all “the images, ideas, language, and emotional structure” of Mormonism, but rather to “narrate what happened as Mormonism came into being in the early nineteenth century.” Faced with the task of communicating transcendant religious experiences to a general audience, Bushman’s method was “to relate events as the participants themselves experienced them, using their own words where possible,” and insofar as divine revelation was a reality to them, treating it as reality in his narrative (p. 3). Within this framework he has produced a sympathetic, scholarly treatment — appealing to Latter day Saints and informative to readers of diverse viewpoints. 

Bushman packages the world of Mormon beginnings in six chapters. Adding his own expertise to the previous work of Richard Anderson, Milton Backman, Mar vin Hill, Francis Kirkham, Larry Porter, and Jan Shipps, he focuses upon the Smith family background, Joseph’s early visions, the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and the founding of the Church, and concludes with a definition of Mormonism at the advent of the move to Ohio. 

Beside dealing with the traditional events of the time period, the author does not ignore obscure and difficult issues. He seeks to “recognize the unusual as well as the common in Joseph Smith’s early work, to tell how Mormonism unloosed itself from its immediate locale . . . and to portray as accurately as possible what it had become by the time the Prophet, his family, and his followers left New York for Ohio early in 1831” (p. 8). Bushman’s understanding of the social setting in which the Smith family lived and moved adds broad new understanding to the time period. 

For instance, by placing Joseph Smith in the “turbulence of a contested cultural boundary” that divided superstition from rational belief, Bushman launches insight fully into the mystic world of seerstones and treasure hunting that is so foreign to present experience, yet essential to the discussion of Joseph Smith’s life. He defines the conflict between Joseph and his neighbors as a conflict between traditional Chris tian and Enlightenment values; he notes that “culturally Joseph looked backward toward traditional society’s faith in the immediate presence of divine power, communicating through stones, visions, dreams, and angels,” but on the other hand Joseph “repudiated the superstitions of the past, particularly the Palmyra money diggers’ exploitation of supernatural power for base purposes. In the end he satisfied neither religionists nor the local magicians” (p. 79). 

Bushman cites evidence that by the mid-1820s Joseph was known for his ability to see in a stone; that he regarded his ability as a gift from God; that he was reluctant to use his gift to hunt for treasure; and that during the process of extricating himself from association with local money diggers he incurred their Wrath — which explains some of the violence heaped upon the Smiths during their sojourn in New York. 

Bushman places the appearance of Peter, James, and John to Joseph Smith in an August 1830 context rather than the traditional 1829. As evidence he cites two second- and third-hand fifty-year recollections. Granted, as he indicates, that additional information is necessary to completely clear up the dating of this event, there is a question whether the evidence for the 1830 date is compelling enough to warrant the abandonment of the traditional date. 

In Chapter 4 Bushman evaluates non-Mormon explanations for the origin of the Book of Mormon. In considering the environmentalist theory current in the twentieth century, which is that Joseph absorbed images, attitudes, and conceptions from upstate New York culture and wove them into the Book of Mormon story, the author deals with anti-Masonry, Republicanism, and Ethan Smith but does not address archeological questions; the issue of the presence of Christian terminology, practices, and institutions in what is presumed to be a pre-Christian setting; and the phenome non of automatic writing. 

Textual flaws are few; I have noted less than a dozen typographical errors. Reference to Marlow, “a southern New Hampshire town just west of the Connecticut River,” (p. 13) does not agree with the map; and in light of the evidence that the work titled Defence in a Rehearsal of My Grounds for Separating Myself from the Latter Day Saints, attributed to Oliver Cowdery, is a nineteenth-century anti Mormon hoax, its use is questionable. 

In an area of history where the sources are highly complex and contradictory, Richard Bushman has made a profound contribution to the understanding of Mor monism at its most critical juncture. Written with style and felicity, a product of Bushman’s superb analytical powers, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mor monism is a major work in Mormon historiography. 

Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism by Richard L. Bushman (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 262 pp.