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The Social Sources of Mormonism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Mario S. De Pillis
Mario S. De Pillis
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
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Extract

Since the very beginnings of Mormon history, non-Mormon historians (and “anti-Mormon” polemicists) have traced the sources of the religion in one way or another to some conception of New England. The conceptions have been as varied as the writers themselves: New England has been the land of both enthusiasm and rational religion; of educated, enlightened Yankees and of credulous, antiintellectual Yankees; of a culture east of the Hudson and of a culture extending across the northern half of the United States; a region of people with great civic and religious virtue but also a people noted for deception, cunning, and hypocrisy. The problem of the New England Mind has never been settled, but all writers have assumed that at one time or another western New York, the supposed birthplace of Mormonism, was a “frontier” of New England.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 50 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1968

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References

1. The word “anti-Mormon” is a traditional term in the historiography of Mormonism. It refers generally to the vast literature of exposé, much of it written by persons considered respectable in their day. This genre has practically disappeared from Mormon studies since the 1950's, when objective accounts by non-Mormons began to appear. For a general survey see Hill, Marvin S., “Survey: the Historiography of Mormonism,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XXVIII (12. 1959), 418–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Cross, , The Burned-over District: the Soc-i at and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1880–1850 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1950)Google Scholar; Davis, , “The New England Origins of Mormonism,” New England Quarterly, XXVII (06 1953), 148–163.Google Scholar

3. Cross, 150. The tendency of urban historians to underestimate the rural or frontier element in American history is too universal to be documented here. It is also understandable in a new field of history that is by definition nonrural.

4. O'Dea, Thomas F., The Mormons (Chicago, 1957), 7.Google Scholar

5. Hill, Marvin S., “Survey: The Historiography of Mormonism,” 421.Google Scholar

6. Cross, 7, 11–13, 143–150; Davis, 148–149, 53–154, 162.

7. Cross, 9. The historian cannot psychoanalyze revivalist feelings, but it seems more reasonable to say that Yankees were quite capable of intense religious emotion but simply were less likely to express it outwardly. Cross's own words accurately express this ordered self-restraint of the Yankee: “their inbred desire … to achieve an orderly, intellectual formulation.”

8. Cross, 144–145.

9. Cross, 146–150. Although Cross speaks of the conversion of Englishmen “after 1850” (150), the English mission was established in 1837 and was already a booming enterprise by 1840.

10. Cross, 146–148.

11. Cross unconsciously shifts the ground of his East-West argument. He is mainly concerned with the east-west division within New York state. But sometimes all of New York is itself an “east” contrasted with the “midwest” of Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Sometimes it is a west contrasted with the eastern parts of New England.

12. History of the Church, I, 2Google Scholar. In starting this History of the Church about 1838, Smith was a bit uncertain concerning the exact date of the arrival of his family in Palmyra.

13. Autobiographical note reprinted from the Messenger and Advocate in the History of the Church, I, 10, note.Google Scholar

14. The sources are contradictory on this date, but 1818 seems to be the most widely accepted.

15. History of the Church, I, 14, 16.Google Scholar

16. The most orthodox Mormon historians now seem to accept the treasure-hunting activities of the Prophet as fact and seem only to take exception to the implication of non-Mormon historians (chiefly Mrs. Fawn M. Brodie) that Joseph used a seer stone with intent to defraud. See Kirkham, Francis W., A New Witness for Christ in America, the Book of Mormon (enl. ed.; II vols.; Salt Lake City 1959–1960), II, 423–473Google Scholar; and Brodie, Fawn M., No Man Knows My History; the Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet (New York, 1945), 18–21.Google Scholar

17. History of the Church, I, 17.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., I, 18–19.

19. Ibid., I, 47, 81.

20. Ibid., I, 19–21.

21. Ibid., I, 49, 71.

22. Ibid., I, 59.

23. Ibid., I, 81.

24. Ibid., I, 81–84.

25. I assume that when he referred in the following passage to “my own house” the Prophet meant the house in Harmony: “I returned to my own house, and from thence, accompanied by my wife, Oliver Cowdery, John Whitmer, and David Whitmer, went again on a visit to Mr. Knight of Colesville. … “Ibid., I, 86.

26. Ibid., I, 87, 97–98.

27. Ibid., I, 109.

28. Section 28 of the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Containing Revelations Given to Joseph Smith, the Prophet; with Some Additions by His Successors in the Presidency of the Church (Salt Lake City, 1921), hereafter cited as D & C.

29. Brigham H. Roberts, the leading official church historian, went so far as to characterize the Nauvoo years as the “essentially… formative” period of Mormon doctrine. See Roberts, , The Rise and Fall of Nauvoo (Salt Lake City, 1900), 17, 165–215Google Scholar. Another professing Mormon, Daryl Chase, echoes this in Joseph the Prophet (Salt Lake City, 1944), 74–75Google Scholar. See also the History of the Church, III, 379–381, 386ffGoogle Scholar. I have argued this developmental thesis in some detail in “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, I (03, 1966), 60–88.Google Scholar

30. Cross, 141–142.

31. Cross, 146–148.

32. Cross, 144.

33. See Brodie, 69, 86. Mrs. Brodie, like many non-Mormon historians, quotes the same famous passage in Campbell to make the same point. I have discussed the harmful influence of Campbell's famous passage in “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism,” 79. Even if one should consider the Book of Mormon the source of Mormon teachings up to 1830, it is difficult to state clearly which teachings were peculiar to Mormonism because Smith took few forthright or unusual doctrinal positions in his Book of Mormon. As Mrs. Brodie noted (70), the arguments of the atheist Korihor are presented as eloquently as those of his Christian antagonist—a very different situation from Alexander Campbell's own violent and bigoted attacks on the atheism of Robert Owen in 1829. Indeed, except for the purely historical parts of the Book of Mormon (including Christ's visit to the Western Hemisphere), the Christian doctrines therein advocated could be accepted without difficulty by most Baptists and Methodists of the day.

34. Cross, 144–150. The map is number XIX.

35. History of the Church, I, 76–77, note.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., I, 77 (note), 120, 124, 146.

37. Because it is indispensable and convenient, I have cited only the History of the Church. But where necessary I have consulted Andrew Jenson (comp.), Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia (III vols.; Salt Lake City, 1901–1920)Google Scholar, and other standard sources.

38. Cowles, George W., Landmarks of Wayne County, New York (Syracuse, 1895), 171Google Scholar; Ms. genealogies of the Harris family.

39. History of the Church, I, 19, 20, 55, 79.Google Scholar

40. Andrew Jenson 's biographical sketch of David Whitmer is inaccurate concerning the place where Peter, his father, first settled. See Jenson, I, 263.

41. History of the Church, I, 39Google Scholar. See also D & C, 128:20.

42. History of the Church, I, 39–41.Google Scholar

43. Quoted from the Messenger and Advocate (1834) in the History of the Church, I, 43, note.Google Scholar

44. D & C, 128:20.

45. Cross, 146, 149. The most superficial acquaintance with Mormon history, especially with the early Mormon doctrines of “the Gathering” and the City of Zion, would reveal that Mormon headquarters did not “chance” to be located in the middle west. The removals from Kirtland, Independence, Far West, and Nauvoo were caused by doctrine and persecution and not whim.

46. Cross, 147–148.

47. Furniss, Norman F., The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, 1960), 248.Google Scholar

48. The vast Mormon evidence for the geographical and social patterns of Mormon proselytizing was thoroughly exploited by Ellsworth, S. George in his excellent “History of Mormon Missions in the United States and Canada, 1830–1860,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California (Berkeley), 1951Google Scholar. Ellsworth 's findings will be discussed below.

49. Evanoff, Alexander, “The Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings in New York and Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly, XXX (Spring 1965), 157–173Google Scholar. Since Evanoff's article is based mainly on a nonspecialist's loose reading of a few secondary sources, I have not based my discussion of the Utah census of 1860 on it. As my own article was nearing completion, a well-informed and able response to Evanoff's historically unrigorous attempt to defend the Turnerian interpretation of the origins of Mormonism appeared. See Davis Bitton, “A Re-Evaluation of the ‘;Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings…’,” Utah Historical Quarterly, XXXIV (Fall 1966), 326–333Google Scholar. Neither article presents new evidence. Both start with Cross, but as a historian Bitton is aware of other evidence, and easily rebuts the loose Turnerian statements of Evanoff. But it is precisely this kind of sterile Turnerian-anti-Turnerian posing of questions that I have tried to avoid in the present article. The frontier, as Bitton points out (but does not illustrate), was a psycho-social environment as well as a man-land ratio.

50. Cross, 140, 150.

51. U.S., Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1864)Google Scholar, Territory of Utah, Table 5, “Nativities of the Free Population,” 578.

52. Cross, 149.

53. Cross, 149.

54. See the exhaustive study by Ellsworth, S. George, A History of Mormon Missions, especially the maps following p. 342.Google Scholar

55. Cross, 150.

56. For conditions in Chester and Delaware Counties, see Doherty, Robert W., The Hiclesite Separation: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Schism, in Early Nineteenth Century America (New Brunswick, N. J., 1967)Google Scholar, chap. iv, “Sect and Church: Non-urban Friends.” For a brief summary of Mormon missionary activities in this area, see the biographical sketch of Bishop Edward Hunter in Andrew Jenson (comp.), I, 228–229. Bishop Hunter was to the Saints of southeastern Pennsylvania what Joseph Knight, Sr., was to the “Colesville Saints” of southeastern New York.

57. Cross thought that his antifrontier interpretation “could best be supported by the church's publication of missionary journals, if they exist in official archives,” 146.

58. See Ellsworth, “A History of Mormon Missions in the United States and Canada, 1830–1860,” 342ff. The first map, for example, entitled “Areas from Which Mormon Converts Came, 1830–1839,” shows about 256 Mormon missionary locales. The map appears on first sight to reflect a pro-frontier bias in that it locates Mormon locales dating from 1830 to 1839 (a decade of explosive population growth) against a population density map dated 1830. But actually the map, like Ellsworth's work as a whole, shows an antifrontier pattern in two ways. First, it does not show either the duration of proselytizing or the number of converts in each Mormon locale. (Ellsworth warns the reader of this shortcoming, 331.) Thus, the seventeen centers located on the densely populated coast between Philadelphia and Portsmouth, Maine, were mostly shortlived and unfruitful. Those in the sparsely populated areas of northern Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine were long lasting and richly rewarding and totaled more than 100. Second, the base map, compiled from the census reports, does not show local conditions, which were often very primitive and unstable—and sparsely populated. This kind of localized exception to the simplified U.S. Census maps used by Ellsworth is true, for example, of the three centers in western North Carolina. It is dramatically true of the whole state of Vermont, which the U.S. population density map shows as a unit with an average density of III (on the Census scale of I to V). Most of the Mormon centers of Vermont were located in northern and eastern townships which had nver been this heavily populated and which had been suffering a massive loss of population since 1812. This is clearly shown in Lewis D. Stillwell's detailed township-level maps of Vermont in his classic monograph, “Migration from Vermont, 1776–1860,” Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, V, New Series (June, 1937), 63–245. In the very few Mormon centers that were not sparsely populated like Chester and Delaware Counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, the local environment was often still agrarian. Despite the many mills and small factories related to the industrialization of Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania remained predominantly rural and the social instability of the area focused on the rise of commercial agriculture. See above, p. 72 and note 56. Thus, when Ellsworth implies that the “eastern” counties of Pennsylvania were more productive of Mormon converts because they were more densely populated (Ellsworth, 335), he not only contradicts his own statistics (in maps, following 342) but does not consider the changing, local, concrete, human conditions in the rural parts of the eastern counties. conditions that favored Hicksite Quakerism and Mormonisnism— as well as other new religious currents.

59. See the Table 7 and the second map in Ellsworth (entitled “Areas from Which Mormon Converts Came, 1840–1846”), following 342. Both in 1830 and in 1840, west of this meridian, Mormon missionaries concentrated their efforts in area II (six to eight persons per square mile). This area of population density very nearly fulfills the crudest and most orthodox definition of the frontier—two to six persons per square mile.

The two maps in Ellsworth are not very instructive for comparing western New York with Pennsylvania and Ohio, or western New York with New England. Both in the 1830's and 1840's, New York and New England, whether considered separately or together, produced more converts than Ohio and Pennsylvania combined—a fact long known. The proportion, however, as represented by mission centers, was not as large as Cross would have his readers to believe. Ellsworth nevertheless argues for Cross on this point, noting the following birthplaces of twenty-six early Mormon leaders (including two members of one family): Vermont (8), New York (6), Massachusetts (4), Connecticut (3), Pennslyvania (1), New Hampshire (1), Tennessee (1). and England (1). But these proportions do not hold for the thousands of rank-and-file converts made between 1830 and 1940.

It is nearly impossible to make interregional analyses on the basis of early census statistics, and Ellsworth very reasonably concludes that “the yield was in proportion to the quantity and quality of the effort and the population of the region” (333).

60. Ellsworth is especially happy to agree with Cross's thesis that Mormonism was a product of longer-settled areas (Ellsworth, 331–335). But as a Mormon, Ellsworth is less concerned with grinding an antifrontier axe than in dissociating Morinonism from a frontier religion in the sense of crudity and revivalism. See Ellsworth, 337, n. 12, and 339–340. Mormons as far back as Joseph Smith himself (especially in the later, less “enthusiastic” part of his career) have diligently tried to keep from being confused with what they contemptuously called “sectarians” or “common stock” religions and from any notion of “unrefined” society. See Smith's, History of the Church, I, 146, 189, 199Google Scholar; VI, 37–38. After the rise of the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), historians among the Mormons expressed their desire to dissociate Mormon origins from anything primitive. The “frontier,” a generation ago as now, was commonly understood among the Mormons to be a very primitive area inhabited by culturally deprived people. See, e.g., Neff, Andrew L.. History of Utah, 1847 to 1869 (Salt Lake City, 1940), 206–207Google Scholar. Similar repudiations of the frontier as a “cause” of Mormonism can be found in the works of Mormon writers like William Edwin Berrett and Francis Kirkham. Such attempts are, it seems to me, unnecessary as well as unedifying. There were only two major outbreaks of enthusiasm among the early Mormons, one in 1830 in Kirtland caused by the appearance of the mission to the Lamanites among the followers of Rigdon; and the second at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple in 1836. See the History of the Church, I, 146–147Google Scholar, and II, 379–383, 420–436. Smith rejected any repetition of such excesses not because he was himself “staid” (Cross, 9) or “conservative” (Ellsworth, 339), but because he had fashioned a religion which was an institutionalization of revivalistic activities and ideas. Once institutionalized and incorporated under a powerful leader-prophet, revivals were unnecessary. They became “reformations,” such as those among the Mormons in Utah in the 1850's or among the Shakers between 1837 and 1842. Orthodox religions like Anglicanism and Catholicism have a similar way of transforming enthusiastic impulses into “reform movements”

61. An omission I have tried to remedy by introducing the meridians in Table I, above.

62. Ellsworth's exact phraseology is only estimate based, not on hard figures, but on narrative. “Based on the history of missions narrated in earlier chapters, it is estimated that … the West and the South received about one-third the attention in duration by a third of the missionaries” as the more densely populated East.

63. Ellsworth, 332.

64. Reflecting the explosive growth of population, Mormon locales increased to over 300 by 1846. The percentage of locales in the settled areas (III and IV in Table 1) declined from 71 per cent to 62 per cent. This 9 per cent loss, despite the huge net gains of population in the east, is underlined by a 10 per cent gain in Mormon locales in the sparsely populated census area II (six to eighteen persons per square mile). In fact, it will be seen from the East-West breakdown of the figures in Table 1 that during the 1830's in the West the Mormon locales are to be found mainly in the less populated areas, leading to a commonsensical conclusion: Mormon converts in the less populated areas came, understandably, from less populated areas, and those from densely populated areas came from densely populated areas! This obvious development applies even more strongly to the 1840's. Ellaworth, it seems to me, strains to find an obatruse antifrontier explanation of the change: between the 1830's and the 1840 's a mere 2 per cent increase in what the census calls “metropolitan areas”despite the admitted total increase of 10 per cent in sparsely settled areas. This latter increase he attributes to the proximity of the frontier to Nauvoo: “It will be remembered that beginning in 1840 (with the Mormon period in Illinois) there came a greater emphasis upon the neighboring states to the east—the Western and Southern States, due to proximity.” It is an axiom of frontier history that a large percentage of settlers always came from adjacent states, usually those to the east of the frontier. The proximity principle did not begin in the 1840's either for Mormon missionaries or for the closely related process of settlement. Both the earlier Mormon gathering places of Independence, Missouri, and Kirtland, Ohio, were affected by the same principle. A reading of scores of missionary journals reveals that missionaries from Independence went to eastern Missouri, Illinois, and other neighboring states (there were, of course, no settlements west of Independence in Indian Trritory) and those from Kirtland combed the midwest, especially Ohio, and the southern and eastern states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and western New England.

65. Ellsworth, 33.

66. I have cited some evidence for the preponderant development of Mormon doctrine after 1830 in note 28, above.

67. The pioneering attempt to demonstrate the psychologically unsettling effects of migration from Europe was made by Handlin, Oscar in his Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, 1951)Google Scholar; and recently the social and psychological effects of internal migration have been keenly analyzed in a series of articles by George Wilson Pierson. The best known of the latter Ia “The M-Factor in American History,” American Quarterly, XIV (Summer 1962, Supplement), 275–289Google Scholar. One of the chief unsettling effects was the breakdown of religious unity and authority. I have dealt with the appeal of religious authority in the article cited above on “The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism.” My frequent allusions to the social disorientation of the rural or “frontier” societies in which Mormonism flourished cannot be fully documented here. But the fact that much anxiety was produced by revivalism and sectarianism in the Burned-over District and other locales is universally accepted. And an orthodox frontier historian has even suggested that social normlessness (anomie) was endemic to new settlements. See Billington, Ray Allen, America's Frontier Heritage (New York, 1966), 42Google Scholar. Billington has perhaps misapplied the term in this passage. But there is little doubt that the continually migrating people of the “frontier”, i.e., the rural clientele of Mormonism, had lost their sense of social cohesion. They no longer accepted the old social and religious norms.

68. The widespread folk belief in lost, secretly buried treasures abandoned by ancient American civilizations is one obvious example of a folkloristic source for Smith's discovery of the Golden Plates. Another idea, his communitarianism, was a standard phenomenon in the rural environment of western New York and Ohio. But these familiar intellectual aspects of the Mormon story are not directly related to the social sources that form the theme of this article, especially “personnel”