A series I am going to occasionally come back to on my takes on early Church primary sources that I’m reading. We have a tendency to only read secondary takes, whether a talk, book, or commonly shared anecdote, but there are often insights buried in the primary sources that don’t make it into the collective consciousness.

Mormonism “Unvailed” (not to be confused with the much later work Mormonism “Unveiled” by John D. Lee/Lee’s ghostwriter) was the first anti-Mormon book. Most of it was a basic history of the Church thickly layered with invective about those scoundrelly scoundrel dupes thrown in, but the potentially useful part in terms of primary sources are the Hurlbut affidavits at the end that have antagonistic statements by people who knew the Smith family in Palmyra. 

I say potentially useful because, as has been well-documented elsewhere, the affidavits were not exactly an objective journalistic venture. The accounts are the kind of thing you would expect a handful of non-randomly selected people to remember with the passage of time after a controversial faith was founded. There are clearly plenty of exaggerations, but by the same token one does not get the impression that the affidavits were spun up from whole cloth either, and many make allusions to events that we know about from other sources. So the objective quality of the evidence is not enough to condemn Joseph or his family, but still, one gets the sense that after all of the invective there are some nuggets of truth that could be parsed out. I would be reading an affidavit and it would have the kind of incidental details that you’d expect to see from somebody sincerely trying to remember an event, and then sudden cartoon villain Joseph Smith would pop up (“he admitted to me it was all fraud and everybody was a dupe!”), but how much of that was motivated reasoning years after the controversial Church was founded, malleable memories, or prompting by Hurlbut is hard to parse out. (For example, famously the series of affidavits claiming that they saw a book by Solomon Spaulding that had “Nephi,” “Lehi,” and other clear connections to the Book of Mormon was later found to be inaccurate when the manuscript in question was discovered).  

Still, like Josephus’ supposed hagiographic sentence about Christ hiding some real, invaluable, third-hand statement about Jesus before the polemicising Christians got to it, we can parse out some details. For example, Ingersoll reports a “come to Jesus” moment between Joseph and his father-in-law Isaac Hale when Joseph renounced treasure digging and admitted that it was all a fraud. Alvin Hale, Isaac’s son, reports a similar conversation where Joseph promised to quit the business, but noted that Joseph said that he “was deceived himself but did not intend to deceive others.” Given that Joseph retained his seerstone and had it more or less in a private capacity for the remainder of his life, it appeared that he was sincere in his supernatural scrying beliefs, and I think we can conjecture that he had some kind of tense conversation with the Hale family over his involvement in the trade without giving up its attendant beliefs. 

Some of the accounts are objectively valuable. For example, Charles Anthon’s own description of the “Anthon Transcript” episode. Also, while still antagonistic towards Joseph, I never got the sense that Isaac Hale’s account was in bad faith or exaggerated, and given his familial tie his account is more meaningful than random people from Palmyra who claimed to know Joseph Smith intimately.

It’s worth noting that one strike against any L. Ron Hubbard/Joseph Smith comparison was that, while about half of Hubbard’s family turned on him as an abuser or charlatan, as far as I am aware virtually all of Joseph Smith’s immediate family and a lot of his extended family, who presumably knew him best, joined and by all accounts were completely sincere (others would know more than me, but there may have been some sisters for which we don’t have a lot of documentation?). The one exception of relatives who did turn against Smith, of course, were the in-laws who weren’t fond of young Joseph after he eloped with their daughter/sister.  

A few other interesting odds and ends. 

 

• I’m not super up on the history of Book of Mormon criticisms, but I was surprised at how many of these, like steel and Book of Mormon anti-masonry, made an appearance here so early on, but there were some fun anti takes that didn’t quite have the same shelf-life. 

 

The names of most of his heroes have the Latin termination of i, such as Nephi, Lehi, and Moroni. The word Mormon, the name given to his book, is the English termination of the Greek word “Mormoo,” which we find defined in an old, obsolete Dictionary, to mean “bug-bear, hob-goblin, raw head and bloody bones.” It seems, therefore, that the writer gave his book not only a very appropriate, but classical name. His experiment upon the human mind, he thought, would be more perfect, by giving it a name, in addition to its contents, which would carry upon its face the nature of its true character — a fiction of hob-goblins and bug-bears.

 

• I was also surprised to see the “Ten Tribes are Living in the North Pole” chestnut here. In this case surrounded by a wall of ice that will melt down when it is time for them to return. As some may be aware, there is a late, second-hand account of Joseph Smith teaching something along these lines, and there’s a history of this belief being bantered about in a low-key way until explorers actually reached the North Pole, so again given all the smoke there was probably some fire of something like this being taught very early on. 

 

• Credit where credit is due, even Howe recognized that the Missouri settlers were in the wrong in the early conflict there. 

 

These proceedings, on the part of the people of Jackson county, were in total disregard of all law, and must be condemned by all. They were wholly at war with every principle of right, and the genius of our institutions. Outrages can never be justified upon any ground, although the reasons which induced them, ought to be stated. Among the Mormon fanatics, as among every other combination, there are the prudent and the imprudent — some who are very civil agreeable citizens, and some who are extremely intolerant, unmannerly, bigoted and supercilious – priding themselves greatly upon their being supposed the peculiar favorites of Heaven, and their possession of greater light than all the world besides. 

 

• I don’t know if this account is reliable, but the idea of a “black pillar” as opposed to the pillar of light we’re all used to is kind of spooky. 

 

Smith describes an angel as having the appearance of a “tall, slim, well-built, handsome man, with a bright pillar upon his head.” The devil once, he says, appeared to him in the same form, excepting upon his head he had a “black pillar,” and by this mark he was able to distinguish him from the former.

 

• There are also some accounts of Joseph Smith speaking in tongues, which is an interesting aside. Obviously that the gift of tongues in the traditional sense (not in our modern variation where it means “I learned my mission language fast”) in the Church was a real thing, but I hadn’t read an account of Joseph Smith being the one doing the speaking, although I wonder if his penchant for including specific name and places in what he saw as ancient tongues in revelations was connected to his glossolalia.