Early years

Smith came from an unremarkable New England family. His grandfather, Asael Smith, lost most of his property in Topsfield, Massachusetts, during the economic downturn of the 1780s and eventually moved to Vermont, where Smith’s father, Joseph Smith, Sr., established himself as a farmer. After the birth of Joseph Smith, Jr., a series of crop failures forced the family to move to Palmyra, New York. His mother, Lucy Mack, came from a Connecticut family that had disengaged from conventional Congregationalism and leaned toward Seekerism, a movement that looked for a new revelation to restore true Christianity. Although privately religious, the family rarely attended church, and after they moved to Palmyra they became involved in magic and treasure-seeking. Lucy Smith attended Presbyterian meetings, but her husband refused to accompany her, and Joseph, Jr., remained at home with his father.

Palmyra: boyhood home of Joseph Smith Restored boyhood home of Joseph Smith, Palmyra, New York. JonRidinger

Religious differences within the family and over religious revivals in the Palmyra area left Smith perplexed about where to find a church. When he was 14, he prayed for help, and, according to his own account, God and Jesus appeared to him. In answer to his question about which was the right church, they told him that all the churches were wrong. Although a local minister to whom he related the vision dismissed it as a delusion, Smith continued to believe in its authenticity. In 1823 he received another revelation: while praying for forgiveness, he later reported, an angel calling himself Moroni appeared in his bedroom and told him about a set of golden plates containing a record of the ancient inhabitants of America. Smith found the plates buried in a stone box not far from his father’s farm. Four years later, the angel permitted him to remove the plates and instructed him to translate the characters engraved on their surfaces with the aid of special stones called “interpreters.” Smith insisted that he did not compose the book but merely “translated” it under divine guidance. Completing the work in less than 90 days, he published it in March 1830 as a 588-page volume called the Book of Mormon.

Joseph Smith and Moroni Moroni delivering the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, lithograph, 1886. Everett Collection Historical/Alamy

The Book of Mormon told the 1,000-year history of the Israelites, who were led from Jerusalem to a promised land in the Western Hemisphere. In their new home, they built a civilization, fought wars, heard the word of prophets, and received a visit from Christ after his resurrection. The book resembled the Bible in its length and complexity and in its division into books named for individual prophets. According to the book itself, one of the prophets, a general named Mormon, abridged and assembled the records of his people, engraving the history on gold plates. Later, about 400 ce, the record keepers, known as Nephites, were wiped out by their enemies, the Lamanites, presumably the ancestors of the American Indians.