The New International Encyclopædia/Smith, Joseph

SMITH, Joseph, Jr. (1805-44). The founder of Mormonism. He was born in Sharon, Vt., December 23, 1805. Of illiterate and neuropathic ancestry and dissatisfied with the ‘clash of creeds’ in Palmyra, N. Y., whither his parents had removed in 1815, Smith at fourteen claimed to receive a series of visions concerning the founding of a new Church and the writing of a religious history of the aborigines of America. The ‘translation’ of this Book of Mormon began in 1827; the various ‘witnesses’ to the book formed the nucleus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which was founded in 1830 and of which Smith was successively first elder, prophet, seer, and revelator. (For a description of the origin of the Book of Mormon, see Mormons.) In 1831 Smith moved with his followers to Kirtland, Ohio, where he absorbed the Church Joint Stock Company of Sidney Rigdon (q.v.), an ex-Campbellite minister. The prophet succeeded in neither his community store-house nor the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, and fled to Independence, Mo., where he founded the city and temple of Zion. Characteristic alike of Smith's activity and his ambition were his putting himself at the head of the first presidency of the Church in 1834, his choice of his own adherents as the Twelve Apostles in 1835, his proselyting in the East in 1838, his assisting the persecuted saints to escape from Missouri in 1839, and finally his running for President of the United States in 1844. Driven from Missouri on the charge of fostering polygamy, Smith, as Mayor of Nauvoo, Ill., and head of the Nauvoo Legion, was accused of attempting to found a military Church. He was indicted for perjury and adultery and was murdered in Carthage jail on June 27, 1844. In spite of the opposition of his son, Joseph Smith, third, he was succeeded in the presidency of the Church by Brigham Young (q.v.). See Mormons.