Somewhere along the six-hour horseback ride from Nauvoo to Carthage, Ill., where Joseph Smith was martyred in 1844, he shared with his small group of travel companions a foreboding that he would soon be killed. “But,” he said, “I am calm as a summer’s morning; I have a conscience void of offense toward God, and toward all men.”
That’s how Joseph Smith — the founding prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — described his own conscience, days before being fatally attacked by a 150–200-person mob.
But in the years since Joseph Smith’s death, another kind of mob has grown, comprised of those aiming to sully his reputation.
Born 220 years ago on Dec. 23, 1805, Joseph Smith spoke openly about a visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ.
After being visited by the angel Moroni, another heavenly messenger, in September of 1823, Joseph Smith said he was warned three separate times that his name “should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”
Matthew C. Godfrey, managing historian of The Joseph Smith Papers, says that since he was a teenager, Joseph Smith was accused of being “an impostor and a charlatan and trying to pull one over on people.”
“But when you read his papers, his journals, letters that he wrote, his discourses,” Godfrey adds, “he doesn’t come across like that to me. He comes across as someone who is sincere, who believes he’s been called of God, and he cares very deeply about the Latter-day Saints and about their welfare.
“He wanted them to be happy, and he wanted them to know how to access the Savior’s Atonement. That was his life’s work, to help people do that.”
There is a cloud of witnesses of people attesting to exactly this — people who knew Joseph Smith, interacted with him directly and heard his teachings. These people who knew him best, described a good man whom they trusted.
A ‘most remarkable and wonderful man’
Women’s rights advocate and journalist Emmeline B. Wells defended Joseph Smith’s character when people demeaned him, according to Cherry Bushman Silver, coeditor of The Diaries of Emmeline B. Wells. When some at national suffrage meetings scorned Wells because of her commitment to Smith’s teachings, the future Relief Society president said, “The women of the world who deride the name and who defame the character of Joseph Smith should take a little time to look up on his advanced ideas of womanhood.
“His gentle, chivalrous and reverential manner towards all women was a distinguishing trait in the character of this most remarkable and wonderful man,” she continued. “One could not meet him even casually without feeling the potent influence of the atmosphere that enveloped him, as entirely different from other men of the same period.”
Joseph Smith was scorned after speaking about not only seeing angels, but also the Father and Son. Richard E. Turley Jr., lead author on an extensive upcoming biography about Joseph Smith, tells Deseret News that “there would have been benefit to him in his sociocultural setting, to have either denied what had happened or to say he was mistaken.”
The fact that Smith didn’t deny it — and couldn’t deny it — is a reflection of the man’s integrity, said Turley. “That kind of integrity is difficult for people to have in today’s society, you watch a lot of people who are raised with certain moral scruples, who sometimes readily, sometimes hesitatingly give them up for social acceptance.”
“Joseph Smith did not do that.”
‘A plain, sensible, strong-minded man’
Wells recalled stepping ashore as a 16-year-old girl arriving in Nauvoo and seeing one person who “towered away and above all the others around him,” with bearing “so entirely different from any one I had ever seen.”
Upon shaking his hand, Wells recalls being profoundly affected: “The one thought that filled my soul was, I have seen the Prophet of God.” She added, “this testimony has never left me … It is as vivid today as ever it was. For many years, I felt it too sacred an experience even to mention.”
While such witnesses among believers may be easy to write off, Godfrey notes that most “dispassionate observers of Joseph Smith (people who didn’t have any reason to depict him favorably or unfavorably)” also found Joseph Smith to be “sincere as well.”
He cites journalist Matthew Davis, who heard the prophet teach and met him in Washington, D.C., at the time that Joseph Smith was back there seeking redress for the Missouri persecutions. In an 1840 letter to his wife back in Pennsylvania, Davis describes Joseph Smith as “a plain, sensible, strong-minded man” who spoke “in a manner to leave an impression that he is sincere,” with “no levity — no fanaticism — no want of dignity in his deportment.”
Davis added that his encounter had changed his view of early Latter-day Saints, whom he called “an injured and much abused people.”
Jonah Randolph Ball likewise wrote to a friend after arriving in Nauvoo that he found Joseph Smith “easy and assuming” in conversation. “I found no sycophancy,” he said, adding that Joseph Smith was who the Latter-day Saints “represent him to be” — asserting that “the stories about him are false … this I tell you as the truth of a friend and brother.”
Ronald O. Barney, former associate editor with the Joseph Smith Papers, refers to dissimulation as defining “someone who was a pretender — a person who was actually not what he represented himself to be.” He then cited a letter from John M. Bernhisel, who had lodged with Joseph and Emma Smith for the last nine months of the Prophet’s life, where he described Joseph Smith as “honest, frank” and “as free from dissimulation as any man to be found.”
‘Gentle charities’ of Joseph Smith
In this same letter from Bernhisel appealing to Illinois Gov. Thomas Ford for his support, he emphasized the “gentle charities” of Joseph Smith’s family life “as the tender and affectionate husband and parent, the warm and sympathizing friend.”
Historian Nathan N. Waite, who has contributed to the Joseph Smith Papers Project, highlights an entry in the Prophet’s journal on the evening of Feb. 8, 1832, where the record states he took his 6-year-old son and “went out. With Frederic to slide on the ice.”
The late Truman Madsen, a student of the Prophet’s life, once wrote of his marriage to Emma: “the certainty of the record is this simple: Joseph Smith loved her with his whole soul.”
Historian Mary Jane Woodger notes how often Joseph addressed Emma as “Dear and Affectionate Wife,” “My dear Emma,” and “My dear and beloved companion.”
In a world where appearances often obscure ugly realities, it’s not always so easy to tell the kind of person someone is. How people act in day-to-day relationships with family, neighbors and even strangers, is a pretty good sign.