Cunning and Disorderly: Early Nineteenth-Century Witch Trials of Joseph Smith

Abstract

Joseph Smith Jr. found himself in court many times throughout his life. Historians argue that his problematic relationship with the law began in 1826 when he faced disorderly person charges in Bainbridge, New York. According to the pretrial sources, some of Josiah Stowell's family members charged that Joseph Smith claimed to have supernatural powers: Horace Stowell and Arad Stowell claimed that he used seer stones to see lost, stolen, and hidden things and to seek treasure.1 An additional disorderly person hearing followed in 1829 in Lyons, New York. In 1830, a disorderly person charge brought Joseph Smith back to court in Bainbridge, New York. In the same year, a final disorderly person charge took him to court in Colesville, New York.2 Since these events, there has been a vigorous discussion over whether Smith's implication in these practices should disqualify his prophetic claims. This framing of the charges has sometimes overshadowed the legal debates.3Previous attempts to understand these legal events have assumed that these cases were built upon early examples of anti-fraud legislation.4 The basis of this interpretation is the use of the word “pretended” and allegations of “juggling,” or sleight-of-hand, which appear in both New York's 1813 disorderly person statute and the accounts of Joseph Smith's court proceedings. However, reading these cases in terms of fraud may result from a cultural misunderstanding between modern researchers and their nineteenth-century subjects. For instance, Dan Vogel noted that Justice Neeley, who oversaw the 1826 case, was interested in allegedly pretended powers not economic deception.5This article proposes that Joseph Smith's early trials were about “pretended witchcraft and magic”6 and the related thoughtcrime of “pretended religion,” categories of crime generated during the Enlightenment to categorize unorthodox religious traditions as witchcraft while negating their claims to miraculous or supernatural powers. Smith's defense that he really was a seer was irrelevant because the legal system categorized the spiritual practice of treasure seeking as pretended witchcraft and magic.To understand Joseph Smith's interactions with New York's 1813 disorderly person statute, historians must evaluate the historical and cultural trends associated with the legislative precedent that contributed to the 1813 statute. This comparative method has been a standard in witchcraft studies for decades.7 Throughout the analysis of these laws and charges, I use evidence from Joseph Smith's life outside the courtroom to demonstrate that fear of witchcraft motivated these charges while expressions of that fear were suppressed in the later narratives of these legal persecutions. Evidence outside the courtroom demonstrates that the conspiracies and persecutions endured by Joseph Smith were echoes of the witchcraft belief exemplified more than a century earlier in Salem, Massachusetts.The New York disorderly persons statue belongs to a specific legislative history aimed at magic and witchcraft. Legislation aimed at policing treasure seeking, the use of seer stones, and finding lost and stolen items through a gift from God or other supernatural means was meant to curb the influence of “the cunning-folk.”8 Cunning-folk were folk-Christian healers whom religious authorities conflated with “diabolical witches” in early modern Europe, an imaginary category of people who were alleged to renounce their baptism and swear loyalty to the devil and his war on Christendom.9 Folk-Christian beliefs covered a range of magical practices. The King Henry Witchcraft Act of 1542 marked the earliest Anglophone legislation aimed at curbing treasure seeking. Queen Elizabeth's Witchcraft Act of 1563 repealed and replaced King Henry's Act and was subsequently superseded by the King James Witchcraft Act of 1604.10 All three intended to control the diabolical witch, but their language reveals their intent to penalize the cunning-folks’ spiritual practices. This was also true of other acts passed throughout the British Isles.11 In 1692, the Massachusetts colony passed a witchcraft act based on the King James Act of 1604, explicitly targeted cunning-folk practices, including treasure seeking.12 This was the cornerstone upon which all Anglophone witchcraft legislation was founded, including the pretended witchcraft legislation of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.The cultural conversation around demonology informed this legislation's development. Early modern demonologies began in a Roman Catholic environment obsessed with controlling heresy.13 These works fused ideas from the Bible, Patristic writings of the early church, the Lives of Saints, Greco-Roman literature, and classical poetry to construct a historical foundation of the “witch” stereotype. This stereotype combined with diabolized depictions of popular fairy belief, folk-Christianity deemed superstitious by religious authorities, heresy, and popular concerns about maleficium. Continental believers’ demonologies targeted the folk-Christian observances of the cunning-folk as examples of superstition and a living tradition of witchcraft.14 This tool could be abused against a wide variety of people regardless of the content of their beliefs and practices. For example, demonologist Nicholas Rémy claimed that a woman whose practices were completely orthodox could still be guilty of witchcraft, that witches were guilty of imitating Elijah and Elisha, and that witches were guilty of using religion to mask their alleged diabolism.15 Thus folk-Christian practices were easily distorted into diabolical witchcraft by religious and legal authorities.English demonologies appeared in the decades after the English Reformation when religious leaders led “a Henrician assault on popular religion.”16 Fear of cunning-folk carried over to North America, where Cotton Mather attributed the rise of witchcraft in New England to the arrival of Quakers, cunning-folk, and Native American shamans.17 When Richard Boulton wrote one of the last significant believers’ demonologies in England, paraphrasing Exodus 22:18, he asserted, “wise Women are not fit to live,” without elaboration.18 He fully expected his eighteenth-century audience to understand that the cunning-folk were the witches targeted in English demonology and anti-witchcraft law. At the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, Ezra Stiles would preach a sermon conflating cunning-folk activities and Native American spiritual practices with witchcraft. He did so to “lay this whole Iniquity open, that all the remains of it might be rooted out.”19 Concerns over the diabolical witch and the cunning-folk would continue in the Anglophone world into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.20Belief in the “diabolical witch” was the orthodox position between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, but there were also detractors. The Dutch physician Johann Weyer argued that the devil took advantage of imbalances in the humor of black bile to produce a mental illness (melancholy). He argued that the devil did so to generate illusions that deceived people into believing that witches were real and that magic was efficacious.21 Weyer still targeted cunning-folk practices and conflated them with necromancy, but he denied their efficacy. English skeptic Reginald Scott argued that the sorcerers of the Bible, the religious authorities of the pagan world, Catholic priests, and cunning-folk—whom he called “cozening witches”—all utilized sleight of hand and deception, not actual demonic powers, to lead people into idolatry or to deceive them.22 These skeptical demonologists described the beliefs and practices of pagan religions, Catholicism, Christian enthusiasts, and the cunning-folk as false prophecy, legerdemain, juggling, and pretended powers. They remained a vocal but marginalized position within demonology throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.By the eighteenth century, skeptical demonology replaced believing demonology as the dominant view, and unorthodox spiritual practices came to be defined as pretended by those in power. In the Anglophone world, this included the practices of cunning-folk, gypsies, Catholics, and Indigenous peoples. However, it also included the beliefs and practices of charismatic Christians pejoratively labeled “enthusiasts.” For example, Reverend Francis Hutchinson cited the beliefs and practices of radical Protestants known as the French Prophets as pretended. In his book on this religious minority, he consistently defined charismatic Christian claims to spiritual power as enthusiasm, pretended, legerdemain, and juggling.23 The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended diabolical witchcraft as a legal category in England and Scotland and made “pretended” the legal standard in Enlightenment England.24The King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 developed within a broader legal environment that had produced similar statutes throughout Europe.25 The first of these was the French Edict of 1692, which reclassified witchcraft into crimes like poisoning, sacrilege, and pretended powers. Notably, a similar law produced in the same environment defined Protestantism as a pretended religion and penalized Protestant leaders for advocating pretended religion.26 In colonial America, the state used anti-vagrancy legislation to control religious deviants like Jesuits, Quakers, and Enthusiasts by labeling them vagabonds and disorderly persons, then penalizing them for breaking vagrancy law.27Skeptical witchcraft legislation continued to be developed in the American colonies and then the United States into the nineteenth century.28 When New York drafted the 1813 disorderly person statute, it continued this trend by utilizing the language of early European witchcraft legislation. The relevant portion of the law addresses vagrancy and defines a disorderly person as “all jugglers [those who cheat or deceive by sleight of hand or tricks of extraordinary dexterity], and . . . all persons pretending to have skill in physiognomy, palmistry, or like crafty science, or pretending to tell fortunes, or to discover where lost goods may be found.”29 This statute had much in common with the anti-vagrancy and pretended witchcraft legislation of the Anglophone world of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, a product of a larger legal environment that employed the King George Witchcraft Act of 1735 as a model.30 This model preemptively defined religious and spiritual unorthodoxy as pretended witchcraft, magic, or religion. By categorizing people's beliefs and practices as pretended this legislation allowed the state to discriminate against unorthodox spiritual traditions by deliberately conflating them with criminal deception.Legislation based on skeptical demonology continued in nineteenth-century England with the 1824 Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in that Part of Great Britain called England.31 This act criminalized “every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle Craft, Means, or Device, by Palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose.”32 According to Owen Davies, the clause was “widely used in prosecuting rural cunning-folk.”33 Throughout the British Empire and its former colonies, the government used anti-vagrancy legislation and skeptical witchcraft legislation to categorize people's genuine beliefs and religious practices as “pretended” as late as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.34Besides Joseph Smith, only one other well-known example of disorderly person prosecution for treasure seeking in early America employs the word “pretended” to describe alleged supernatural gifts—the disorderly person charges against Dr. Luman Walters.35 Walters's case is only known due to newspaper articles discussing a documented case in New Hampshire.36 Because the notes from Luman Walters's trial are not available, it is impossible to explore how the court used “pretended” in disorderly person trials in the nineteenth century. But through Walters's alleged conviction in New York we can see how this legislation was used to penalize Walters for cunning-folk practices.37 Later allegations that Walters was a necromancer reveal the underlying religious bias which conflated cunning-folk with witches.38Although it is tempting to read “pretended” as fraud, there is reason to be cautious. According to Lynne Hume, in Anglophone witchcraft legislation “‘pretends to exercise’ means something else. The presumption is that people are not able to do these things and therefore whoever says they can is acting in a fraudulent manner.”39 In previous generations, legal authorities and religious authorities superseded the cunning-folks’ beliefs and practices by presuming that the cunning-folk were diabolical witches. After the Enlightenment, the same psychological process allowed Anglophone legal authorities to recategorize genuine belief and practices as pretended witchcraft. In both cases the legal system deliberately conflated unorthodox spiritual traditions with another crime to enable the policing of unorthodox spirituality. This tells us more about the beliefs of those in power than it does about the traditions these legal categories were designed to punish.Despite legal skepticism, belief in diabolical witchcraft continued into Joseph Smith's lifetime and beyond.40 The nineteenth-century repeal of Ireland's 1586 witchcraft statute inspired the publication of the anonymous pamphlet Antipas, which conflated Catholicism and Dissenters with witchcraft and urged Parliament to restrict both groups’ religious activities. The pamphlet would have had a broad audience. As Andrew Sneddon has explained, “for the vast majority of those placed lower down the social ladder, especially those living in small, close-knit rural areas, the existence of the malefic witch continued to be regarded as a threat to their property and persons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same holds true for North America.”41The diabolical witch doctrine still had its believers in Joseph Smith's early nineteenth-century environment, although the law no longer recognized diabolical witchcraft as a reality. Smith's critic Alexander Campbell argued for a synthesized demonology that allowed for pretended necromancy and diabolical necromancy to coexist as two different kinds of witchcraft.42 Campbell's use of necromancy charges in witchcraft allegations was a standard pattern within the Second Great Awakening.43 Likewise, treasure seeking became a primary target of witchcraft fear and belief during this period.44 People who feared cunning-folk, alleged false-prophets, Catholics, Atheists, non-white spiritual practices, and religious movements like the Quakers, the Shakers, and the Wilkensonians saw the practices they feared most as both pretended and diabolical, often describing these groups as practicing necromancy.45 In the early nineteenth-century environment of legal skepticism and the common suppressed belief that diabolical witches existed, one would expect to find the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft used to label Joseph Smith's folk-Christian practices of treasure seeking in 1826 as well as charismatic expressions of Christian belief in 1830.When Joseph Smith, a young treasure seeker, had his first visionary experience, local religious leaders reacted negatively in ways that Smith family members considered surprising.46 At the age of fourteen, an unnamed assailant fired a bullet at Joseph Smith as he returned home.47 In 1823, Joseph Smith experienced an envisioned visitation of an angel, who declared that Smith would be a prophet and uncover a buried scripture. Within a year of this experience, rumors began to circulate that someone had disinterred and dissected his older brother Alvin's body.48 Dan Vogel and Michael Quinn believe that these were allegations of utilizing part of Alvin's body to acquire the golden plates. These rumors portrayed the act of acquiring the golden plates as a form of necromancy.49 These allegations may have been an initial, failed, attempt to charge Joseph Smith with a crime. As William Morain points out, “violating a grave” was “a felony offense for which, in 1824, he could have been incarcerated in the New York state prison for five years.”50 A year later, in 1825, Josiah Stowell heard about Joseph Smith's gift for using his seer stone, perhaps tied to rumors of Joseph's 1823 vision of an angel who led him to the gold plates. Josiah Stowell requested that Joseph reside at his home as a farmworker who would aid Stowell in his treasure seeking. Joseph's parents agreed, perhaps to remove him from a dangerous environment. However, trouble followed Joseph Smith Jr. to Bainbridge, New York. In 1826, Stowell's nephew took Joseph Smith to court as a disorderly person.51Allegations of witchcraft continued after the trials as well, with some ascribed to Joseph's life in the 1820s. In 1834, testimonies ascribed to Smith's neighbors appeared in the anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed.52 The affidavits in this book describe Smith's activities through the paradigms of pretended and diabolical witchcraft. In one of these affidavits, discussing a period between the 1826 and 1830 hearings, Sophia Lewis, who also served as Emma Smith's midwife, reported that Joseph and Emma's child died horribly deformed at birth. Her affidavit is notable because the diabolical witch's doctrine and folklore viewed deformed births and stillbirth as evidence of witchcraft.53 Shortly after Alvin's death, Emma Smith returned to her parents’ Methodist church in Harmony. When Joseph Smith attempted to attend, it sparked a controversy that included church members’ allegations of necromancy and other witchcraft practices. In the 1879 remembrances of these events, Emma's relatives made it clear that those involved in this controversy believed Joseph Smith “was a conjurer” and “a sorcerer,” clarifying that these were forms of “witchcraft.”54 This same Methodist congregation later threatened violence against Joseph Smith, which forced him to move to the home of Peter Whitmer Sr. in Fayette, New York.55Beginning in 1830, Joseph Smith's restorationism utilized the example of the Christian curses used by Old Testament Prophets, as well as Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Joseph instructed his missionaries and followers to employ ritualized dusting of feet and clothing as a testament against those who persecuted them and rejected their message. This practice continued into the 1890s and would have provided ample material for those who believed that Joseph Smith and his followers were witches.56 Allegations of witchcraft continued in February 1831 with Alexander Campbell's publication of “Delusions,” an anti-Mormon article in his periodical the Millennial Harbinger.57 In this article, Campbell uses familiar skeptical tropes and employs demonology to compare Joseph Smith and Mormonism with false prophecy, enthusiasm, and witchcraft. He directly compared Joseph Smith to Simon Magus and Elymas, the sorcerers of the Bible.58 Campbell leaves no room for equivocation: “I have never felt myself so fully authorized to address mortal man in the style in which Paul addressed Elymas the sorcerer as I feel towards this Atheist Smith.”59 During the same year, mobs pursued Joseph Smith's followers as they left New York for Ohio.60 In 1832, Campbell's “Delusions” was reprinted as a pamphlet.61 In Kirtland, potential anti-witchcraft violence can be seen in the mob that attacked Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon in 1832. While remembering this event, Joseph Smith recalled that these attackers cried out “Simond! Simond!” which he interpreted as a reference to their Campbellite leader Simond Riders. As a victim of a tumultuous mobbing by Campbellites, Smith may have misheard shouts of “Simon! Simon!” comparing Joseph Smith to Simon Magus. While they assaulted Joseph Smith, the mob attempted to destroy his ability to speak (and therefore prophesy, curse, or bewitch). Joseph remembered the mob shouting, “God dam it . . . Let us tar up his mouth!”62 They simultaneously attempted to force a “phial” of liquid into his mouth. Joseph claimed that the mob decided not to kill him, but instead they would “scratch me well. . . . All my clothes were torn off me except my shirt collar; and one man fell on me and scratched my body with his nails like a mad cat.”63 Afterward, Smith had to scrub the tar from his lips to “breath more easily.”64 The easily overlooked use of scratching has tragic gravity. In the nineteenth century, “scratching above the breath,” was widely believed to be a means of deactivating a witch's powers and was consequently a common aspect of extrajudicial anti-witchcraft violence.65Echoes of witchcraft belief continued later into Joseph Smith's life. In 1834, the Campbellite E. D. Howe would publish the Hurlbut affidavits in his work Mormonism Unvailed. This work reads like a combination of skeptical and believers’ demonologies, describing Smith's alleged folk-Christian activities through the pretended and diabolical witchcraft paradigms. As late as 1835, Smith complained of Campbell's continued witchcraft allegations.66 The following year, Joseph Smith's last recorded treasure quest ended with a revelation that encouraged his companions to “inquire diligently concerning the more ancient inhabitants and founders of this city; For there are more treasures than one for you in this city” (D&C 111:9–10). This treasure quest took place in Salem, Massachusetts, suggesting that the troubles that had followed Smith to this point in 1836 could be explained through a knowledge of early American witchcraft belief and violence. In 1837, Smith's enemy Grandison Newell accused Joseph of attempting to murder him. He claimed that Smith, the “high priest of satan,” had bewitched two assassins who stopped short of murdering Newell when they “broke the spell of the false prophet” and “were restored to their right minds, and are now rejoicing that they were not left to the power of the devil and co-adjutor Smith, to stain their souls with a crime so horrible.”67 It would appear that many of Smith's enemies accused him of witchcraft and magic throughout his early life and career.According to the standards established by Alan Charles and Edward Peters, there are three sources of materials in witchcraft studies.68 The first and most reliable archival documents consist of court records and verified reproductions of contemporary pamphlets.69 The second type is literary sources. These documents require caution, recognizing that the authors’ biases shaped these accounts, often overshadowing the beliefs and actions of the accused. Nevertheless, historians of witchcraft utilize these documents by controlling for allegations of diabolism injected into these accounts by their authors. The third category are pictorial sources.70 In Joseph Smith's 1826, 1829, and 1830 disorderly person proceedings, only the court bills fall into the category of archival records.71 We do not have the original trial notes or pictorial sources, only literary sources.Two of the literary records used to reconstruct the 1826 pretrial are known as the Pearsall narrative and the Purple narrative. The Pearsall narrative exists only in articles claiming to recreate the original pretrial notes. The first of these articles appeared in 1872 with subsequent version printed in 1883 and 1886.72 The Purple narrative is purportedly authored by William Purple as a memoir of his alleged role as notetaker at the 1826 pretrial. It was published in 1877.73 Additionally, for the 1830 cases, there are accounts written by Joseph Smith, his mother, and other friendly observers, a rarity in witchcraft records. An additional narrative account related to the 1830 disorderly person cases is a letter ascribed to Justice of the Peace George H. Noble, who oversaw the Colesville disorderly person proceedings of 1830.74 As with all sources, these narrative accounts should be read cautiously—the events they describe may not accurately reflect what took place in court. They may also include deliberate or unintentional distortions of these events. As in all narrative accounts of witch trials, we must account for the injection of demonological stereotypes in descriptions of Joseph Smith's alleged behaviors.The narrative accounts of the 1826 disorderly person pretrial feature evidence that they fall into the larger pattern of religiously persecuting cunning-folk. In the Purple narrative, there is strong evidence about Joseph Smith's, his followers’, and his father's folk-Christian beliefs. The Purple narrative describes Joseph Smith as a “Seer,” a term for cunning-folk who compared themselves to Old Testament prophets.75 The Purple narrative addresses the cunning-folk practice of utilizing seer stones. It also affirms that these were genuinely held beliefs: “Deacon Stowell and others as firmly believed it.” As an afterthought, the Purple narrative claims that Josiah Stowell's “ward and two hired men . . . were, or professed to be, believers.”76The Purple narrative's description of Joseph Smith's acquisition of his seer stones includes folk-Christian practices. It claims that after seeing a vision of a particular stone, Joseph Smith set off to find his seer stone, and the narrative provides significant detail about how he washed the stone after he found it. This detail is less perplexing when one reads the writings of Karl Herr, a modern Pennsylvania Dutch cunning man. In his book on his folk-Christian practices, Herr provided a theological justification for the washing of miraculous stones before praying to God and asking for God's blessing upon the stone.77 This fits a larger pattern of Joseph Smith consecrating his other seer stones, as observed by Mark Ashurst-McGee.78 This may be a description of Joseph consecrating his first seer stone. The Purple narrative also portrays the stone's powers within a folk-Christian paradigm, claiming that when Joseph had the stone, “he possessed one of the attributes of Deity, an All-Seeing-Eye,” repeating an earlier description of Joseph Smith's alleged gifts as a seer as an “omniscient attribute.”79 According to this account, Joseph Smith Sr. defended his son's alleged gift and “described very many instances of his finding hidden and stolen goods” and that he “swore that both he and his son were mortified that this wonderful power that God had so miraculously given him should be used only in search of filthy lucre, or its equivalent in earthly treasures, and with a long-faced, “sanctimonious seeming,” he said his constant prayer to his Heavenly Father was to manifest His will concerning this marvelous power. He trusted that the Son of Righteousness would some day illumine the heart of the boy, and enable him to see His will concerning him.”80These testimonies of Smith's divine powers were a recurring theme in the Purple narrative. The next witness was Deacon Josiah Stowell, who affirmed the testimonies of Joseph Sr. and Joseph Jr., giving several examples of the junior Joseph Smith's abilities. Stowell “delineated many other circumstances not necessary to record,” affirmed that Smith possessed the abilities he claimed, and “described very many circumstances to confirm his words.” The Purple narrative then reports that Justice Neely questioned Stowell's belief in Joseph Smith's alleged abilities as a treasure seer, “Do I believe it?” says Deacon Stowell, “do I believe it? no, it is not a matter of belief: I positively know it to be true.”81The Purple narrative claims Joseph Smith told his fellow treasure seekers that the treasure “could not be obtained except by faith, accompanied by certain talismanic influences. So, after arming themselves with fasting and prayer, they sallied forth to the spot designated by Smith.”82 These talismanic influences are likely a description of the folk-Christian amulets utilized by treasure seekers, four of which Joseph Smith Sr. is believed to have owned.83 According to both the Purple and Pearsall narratives, these talismanic influences were necessary to break a protective spell placed on the treasure by the person who buried it. When their attempts to acquire the treasure proved unsuccessful, the Purple narrative hints at the folk-Christian motivation for the treasure quest: a struggle against the devil over the souls of sinners seeking redemption from purgatory.84 “After some five feet in depth had been attained without success, a council of war against this spirit of darkness was called, and they resolved that the lack of faith, or of some untoward mental emotions, was the cause of their failure.”85The Purple narrative alternates between folk-Christian descriptions and justifications for Joseph Smith's behavior and alternating depictions of these practices as diabolical.86 When demonologists argue against public perception of cunning-folk beliefs and practices, they systematically described the common perception that practices were powered by the Christian God. Demonologists would then attempt to refute commonly held opinions by arguing that folk-Christian practices were blasphemous forms of false Christianity disguising an implicit pact with the devil. For those who believed demonologists rather than folk-Christians, evidence of folk-Christian activity was evidence of witchcraft.Notably, the Pearsall narrative is relatively circumspect on this aspect of the 1826 pretrial. While it discusses Joseph Smith's seer stone use and treasure seeking, it does not give a detailed account of what power he ascribed these abilities to nor details that would allow us to compare his alleged practices to the ethnographic record. In place of these details, it systematically describes Joseph Smith's motives and activit