Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith grew up in the burned-over district of western New York, so called because revivals swept it so often that it seemed there was no one left to convert. His family was poor and given to visions and treasure-seeking. As a teenager, he later said, he prayed in a grove to ask which church was true and was told by God and Jesus that none was. In 1823, he said, an angel named Moroni led him to golden plates buried in a hill near Palmyra.

The Book of Mormon, which Smith said he translated from the plates, was published in 1830. It tells of ancient Israelites who sailed to the Americas and of Christ's visit to them after his resurrection. That April Smith organized a church with six members. It grew quickly, and so did hostility toward it. The Saints gathered first in Kirtland, Ohio, and then in Missouri, where in 1838 the governor ordered that they be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state.

They fled to Illinois and built Nauvoo on the Mississippi, which by the early 1840s rivaled Chicago in size. Smith was mayor, commander of a large militia, and in 1844 a candidate for president. He also privately introduced plural marriage and took dozens of wives, a practice revealed to most members only later. When dissidents published a newspaper exposing it, Smith had the press destroyed.

He was charged with riot and treason and jailed at Carthage. On June 27, 1844, a mob with blackened faces stormed the jail and killed him and his brother Hyrum. He was thirty-eight. Most of his followers went west with Brigham Young to the Salt Lake Valley, while others formed smaller churches. To Latter-day Saints, now numbering more than seventeen million worldwide, Smith is a prophet of God. To historians of every persuasion he is one of the most consequential religious founders the country has produced.