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Cultural Crisis in the Mormon Kingdom: A Reconsideration of the Causes of Kirtland Dissent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Marvin S. Hill
Affiliation:
Professor of American intellectual history in Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Extract

Until the time that the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left western New York (where the church had been founded in 1830) and moved en masse to Kirtland, Ohio and then Far West, Missouri (where a second gathering place was established), the Mormons constituted a close-knit and fairly harmonious group. At Kirtland, however, serious internal discontent developed. In the wake of the collapse of the Anti-Banking Society in 1837 came widespread apostasy of many Mormons, several apostles included, who challenged Joseph Smith's role as prophetic leader whose word was the will of the Lord in secular as well as spiritual affairs. According to the prevailing interpretation, the causes were essentially economic. Fawn Brodie maintains in her chapter on the “Kirtland Disaster” that the “toppling of the Kirtland bank loosed a hornet's nest.” Quoting Apostle Heber C. Kimball, she says that afterward “there were not twenty persons on earth that would declare that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.” Despite Smith's efforts to salvage his Ohio community, “with mercantile firms bankrupt, the steam mill silent, and the land values sinking to an appalling low, Kirtland was fast disintegrating.” In a recent work, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton repeat the generalization: “in Kirtland … Smith's failed bank led to internal dissension.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1980

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References

1. Brodie, Fawn M., No Man Knows My History (New York, 1945), pp. 199, 203, 205.Google Scholar

2. Arrington, Leonard and Bitton, Davis, The Mormon Experience (New York, 1979), p. 88.Google Scholar See also Allen, James B. and Leonard, Glen, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, 1976), pp. 113114Google Scholar, for similar stress on economic issues.

3. Hill, Marvin S., Rooker, C. Keith and Wimmer, Larry T., “The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics,” Brigham Young University Studies 17 (Summer 1977): 391476.Google Scholar

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8. The Kirtland Safety Society Stock Ledger Book, in the Chicago Historical Society, lists all the subscribers to the bank.

9. Journal of Wilford Woodruff, 6 and 9 April 1837, Historical Department of the Church, Salt Lake City.

10. The details of Zion's camp are found in Hill, Marvin S., “The Role of Christian Primitivism in the Origin and Development of the Mormon Kingdom, 1830–1844,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1968), pp. 143149.Google Scholar

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If we give all our privileges to one man, we virtually give him our money and our liberties, and make him a monarch, absolute and despotic, and ourselves abject slaves or fawning sycophants. If we grant privileges and monopolies to a few, they always continue to undermine the fundamental principles of freedom,

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31. Ibid., pp. 179–181.

32. Ibid., pp. 156–158; Journal of Newel Knight, 23 November 1835, Historical Department of the Church, Salt Lake City, where Joseph Smith performed the marriage of Newel and Lydia Bailey under religious authority only. Smith told Hyrum Smith that the “Lord said it was all right. She is his and the sooner they are married the better tell them no law shall hurt them.” Knight recorded that Joseph taught them “much” with regard to matrimony and “what the ancient order of God was and what it must be again concerning marriage.” Knight also recorded that on Sunday, 24 November, in a public address, Joseph Smith said that he performed the marriage “by authority of the Holy Priesthood, and the Gentile law has no power to call me to account for it … I have done as I was commanded and I know the Kingdom of God will prevail.”

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37. The Newell K. Whitney Collection at BYU has a note drawn up by Pratt and Johnson.

38. Cowdery explained his differences with Joseph Smith in a letter dated 21 January 1838. Cowdery's original letters are in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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49. Parrish's charges were recorded and preserved by Newel K. Whitney. See these allegations of 29 May 1837 in the Newel K. Whitney Collection, BYU.

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57. Other events would of course have to occur, such as the succession crisis in 1844; yet I believe much of the general cultural outlook of the Reorganized Church has its roots here, at Kirtland.

58. For an excellent and informative essay concerning the Reorganized Latter-day Saints, see Alma Blair's chapter in McKiernan, F. Mark, Blair, Alma and Edwards, Paul, eds., The Restoration Movement; Essays in Mormon History (Lawrence, Kans., 1973), pp. 209230.Google Scholar