Cunning Distortions: Folk Christianity and Witchcraft Allegations in Early Mormon History

Abstract

As a variety of scholars have contended over the past decades, Joseph Smith and his family were involved in cunning-folk practices that their critics viewed as magic. Historian Stephen Fleming referred to these practices as an “extra-liturgical” liturgy within folk Christianity.1 Several family artifacts align with the accoutrements and practices from the Pennsylvania Dutch tradition of powwowing.2 For instance, Hyrum Smith owned a serpent cane similar to a Pennsylvania Dutch cunning-person's “throw-stick” used for “healing and divination.”3 Lucy Mack Smith's confession of “trying,”4 the use of “magic circles,” the “faculty of abrac,” and “soothsaying,” linked their family to the folk-medicinal practices of German Americans.5 The anonymous author writing as Maria Ward claimed as much when she wrote that a German peddler had taught Smith mesmerism.6 Indeed, the Smiths could have been exposed to these traditions through several potential sources available to them.Yet, while scholars have rightfully come to acknowledge the Smiths’ cunning-folk practices, they have come to also accept the misrepresentation of such practices in early sources. As this article will demonstrate, this form of folk Christianity had a long history of misrepresentation beginning with early modern demonologists who labeled these traditions as witchcraft; and later twentieth-century observers, including historians, who conflated it with representations of diabolical magic. Despite the significant differences between folk Christianity and diabolical witchcraft, the pseudonymous author Maria Ward exemplified this problem when she described Joseph Smith's teachings and practices as “the doctrine of witchcraft.”7 This connection was key to early allegations made against Smith. It is invaluable to those who wish to separate the rituals people practiced from the rituals people erroneously imagined and accused others of practicing. Thus, in this article, I show how allegations of nefarious magic and seemingly disenchanted allegations of non-magical misdeeds against Smith extend from a common heritage of witchcraft accusations. This article concludes with a brief discussion about the reliability of witchcraft allegations as historical evidence.The historiography of witchcraft reveals differences in ideas about witchcraft in early modern Europe, including popular religion, Christian high magic, exorcism-based Christian “necromancy,” Catholic “priestcraft,” and the myth of the diabolical witch. Modern historians of witchcraft have overwhelmingly rejected the diabolical witch's reality, showing that “witches” were a label that people projected onto their victims.8 As Christina Larner, an expert on Scottish witch trials, argues, “Witchcraft is the labeling theorist's dream. . . . Being a witch was entirely a matter of social recognition.”9 Those who wielded the witch as a label had a genuine, if self-serving, belief in witches as real beings.10 They then imposed that label onto real individuals and competing spiritual traditions in a systematic campaign to discredit and eliminate them. Thus, “Witch-hunting is a liturgy of fear,” mixing theological concerns of boundary maintenance and peasant fear of supernatural power to harm into a single weapon of attributed identity.11 This process can be seen in the writings of many English demonologists, such as the following passage by Puritan demonologist Richard Bernard: “In France there was a woman Witch, which did cure some with a pretended medicine, and by saying these words, In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy ghost, & of St. Anthony, and St. Michael, thou maist be cured of thy disease, commending withal the party to hear Mass nine days: but for all this, she had judgement to be burnt for her Witchcraft.”12 Until the nineteenth century, the pattern of misinterpreting cunning-folk practices with witchcraft was largely limited to ecclesiastical authorities.In colonial New England, authorities identified the cunning folk as witches. This corresponded with ecclesiastical depictions of witches that tended to focus on the alleged devil's pact and their rejection of Christianity. Meanwhile, village-level accusers tended to explain misfortune by accusing others of harmful magic referred to as maleficium.13One did not have to be ascribed all of the witch's stereotypical attributes to be accused of witchcraft. The stereotype's components were made up of a cluster of both magical and nonmagical activities.14 By the Enlightenment, this matrix of witchcraft identifiers had fully developed disenchanted counterparts used by skeptics to identify what was labeled pretended witchcraft and included astrologers, gypsies, and cunning folk. Brian P. Levack has identified a loose cluster of several behaviors associated with pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft by accusers. These crimes included: “Heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, maiming, murder, poisoning, theft, the destruction of crops, the killing of livestock, arson, sodomy, fornication, adultery, infanticide and conspiracy. The crime of witchcraft also overlapped with, and was often grouped together with, the crime of magic, which included such practices as necromancy, conjuration, alchemy, astrology, magical healing, love magic, fortune-telling, and magical treasure-hunting.”15After the Enlightenment, components of witchcraft were frequently used as substitutes for allegations of magic when people charged alleged witches with crime.16 In addition to Pavlack's components, it was claimed that the witch gained magic powers through secret pacts with the devil. These often took place at religious events, combining ideas from fairy lore, Greco-Roman, and Judeo-Christian motifs, to create a fictitious event called the witches’ sabbath or the witches’ synagogue.17 In the words of historian Elaine G. Breslaw, the sabbath “was as much a fantasy as the stories that developed in Salem.”18 These imagined events were portrayed as gatherings to which participants flew, often on broomsticks or demons. Here the participants allegedly sacrificed animals, killed and ate humans, had sex with demons and the devil, renounced their Christian baptism, and swore fidelity to Satan in return for spirit familiars and poisons that aided the witch in their maleficium. Historian Wolfgang Behringer provides an additional common belief about witches, “Ever since the days of the Malleus Maleficarum, being related by blood to a witch had been regarded as the most damning evidence of witchcraft.”19There were many risk factors for being accused of witchcraft. Being a woman was among the most decisive risk factors.20 Poverty was the second most significant risk factor, with those experiencing downward social mobility at a higher risk than those who were perpetually poor.21 Being perceived as a quarrelsome, beggarly, or criminal person also increased one's risk of being accused of witchcraft.22 There were also social-environmental risk factors: people used witchcraft to explain seemingly inexplicable misfortune; witchcraft allegations were used as weapons in confessional conflict; and/or as a means of releasing social and psychological tension, especially in environments where there is a breakdown in traditional economic aid and interdependency.23 Witchcraft allegations developed in what historian Robert Moore calls a “persecuting society,” where the state's authority and orthodox religion are asserted through the criminalization and persecution of a real or imagined other.24 Similarly, historian Gary K. Waite has demonstrated that witchcraft and heresy both served the purpose of designating the boundaries of acceptable religious activities. Heretics, witchcraft, and demoniacs could be held up as a means of proving the supernatural claims of the Bible and affirming the truth of the predominant faith.25 Many of these factors appeared in the Second Great Awakening, which occurred in the shadow of a new state developing a radical and not yet well-established church-state relationship. Anti-Mormonism utilized Mormonism to fulfill the same role that other alleged diabolical conspiracies had served in the previous centuries. According to historian J. Spencer Fluhman, “anti-Mormonism supplied a focused social enemy for a public divided by sectarianism and wracked by economic and political instability.”26 Historian Adam Jortner has demonstrated that the early American republic took up this role by criminalizing and persecuting groups that claimed the gift of prophecy and miraculous powers.27 This cultural context combined with the Smith family's folk-religious practice of treasure seeking, their publication of the Book of Mormon, and the many relationships that ruptured after they had done so, placed the Smiths at high risk of being accused of witchcraft.Broken relationships and economic friction escalated risk factors. Witchcraft allegations have historically stemmed from the deterioration of a social or financial relationship to the point of irreconcilability.28 Accordingly, allegations usually occurred between people who knew each other. As historian Richard Godbeer found, in seventeenth-century New England the accused “was usually a close neighbor with whom [the accuser] had a history of personal tension or conflict.”29 It is not surprising to find Manchester resident Roswell Nichols claiming the Smiths’ neighbors hated them, “For breach of contracts, for the non-payment of debts and borrowed money, and for duplicity with their neighbors, the family was notorious.”30 While the Smiths’ alleged duplicity is questionable, their poverty and inability to meet financial responsibilities are well documented.31 In an early American rural village's collaborative economy, the poverty of the Smiths would have been felt as the burden of their community. Attempts to link the Smiths to the begging witch's figure, demonstrate their accusers’ fixation with the Smith household's poverty.32Witchcraft allegations and treasure-seeking disputes were often tied to the village economy's zero-sum logic: it must be at another's expense for one person to do well.33 As historian Robin Briggs observed, “It is hardly surprising to find socio-economic relationships at the root of most of the disputes which underlay accusations; in a society where subsistence was so precarious, this was surely inevitable.”34 Former treasure-seeking companions, their friends, and their families would have felt entitled to a portion of Joseph Smith's successful treasure quests. Historian Whitney R. Cross made this point as early as 1965 when he claimed that “One of the potent sources of Joseph's local ill repute may well have been the jealousy of other persons who failed to discover golden plates in the glacial sands of the drumlins.”35 These enterprises’ communal nature strengthened a sense of ownership over the successful find of a fellow treasure seeker. According to historian Johannes Dillinger: “Treasure hunters’ groups combined elements of economical and religious communities. They resembled business enterprises akin to stockholding companies or sects. In some cases, they were both at the same time.”36 Thus, when Joseph Smith claimed to have uncovered what neighbors came to describe as a golden bible, his former treasure hunting companions likely felt that Joseph owed them a portion of the treasure, exemplified in Willard Chase's claim that Smith had offered him “a share in the book.”37 When Joseph Smith failed to liquidate the plates and distribute the funds among his old treasure-seeking partners, he would have left an economic and social wound that William Stafford, Willard Chase, Sally Chase, Samuel Lawrence, and others would never forgive nor forget. To add to this economic friction, there was a dispute over the ownership of a seer stone with both the Smiths and the Chases claiming it as their own.38 This explains why Joseph's former treasure-hunting companions attempted to obtain the plates from Joseph Smith by force: they felt they were being cheated of their rightful share of Smith's treasure.39Those who would publicize allegations of witchcraft against Smith in the coming years often had personal motivations. This included the anti-Mormon doctor Philastus Hurlbut, who after his excommunication from Smith's church, collected affidavits from old neighbors accusing him of witchcraft.40 The early anti-Mormon editor, Abner Cole, may have advised Hurlbut during his attempts to gather affidavits against Smith.41 Cole's relationship with Smith turned from warm to hostile after a legal conflict over the Book of Mormon's copyright.42 Notably, Cole's brother-in-law was Samuel Lawrence, one of Smith's alleged treasure-seeking companions.43 Editor E. D. Howe, who would eventually popularize narratives of Smith's treasure digging in his Mormonism Unvailed, was also communicating with Abner Cole as early as 1830–1831.44 John C. Bennett's allegations flourished after he was excommunicated from the church. The anti-Mormon minister and religious competitor, the Reverend Alexander Campbell; the Latter-day Saint turned vociferous anti-Mormon, John C. Bennett; and anti-Mormon editor Thomas Sharp demonstrated a profound interest portraying Joseph Smith and his church as a diabolical conspiracy against Christianity. Thus, the rogue's gallery of early nineteenth-century anti-Mormons is comprised of an extended network of accusers concerned with Smith's alleged witchcraft.45Although witchcraft beliefs in western Europe were relatively stable across time and space, there were variations. For example, fornication with the devil, the sabbath, and heresy were less central to English witchcraft belief than they were in continental European witchcraft belief. In early New England, cunning folk and folk magic were central to the paranoia that led to the Salem witch hunts.46 By the 1692 Salem witch trials, the witches’ sabbath and heresy assumed a central role in New England witchcraft paranoia.47 The folk-Christian practices of the cunning folk were labeled as “white witchcraft” by English demonologists.48 In New York this trend can be seen in both the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Levi Beardsley, a contemporary of Joseph Smith, identified a fortune teller as “the Albany witch.”49 Twentieth-century folklorist Emelyn Gardner referred to the cunning folk she encountered in rural New York as “white witches” and “witch doctors,” unaware that there was a difference between the folk-Christian cunning folk and mythical, devil worshipping witches.50Some elements of witchcraft belief were less prominent in England and New England than in continental Europe. Concerns over sexual intercourse with the devil were rare in the previous centuries’ New England witchcraft lore.51 However, prior to Salem, there were accusations that victims of allegation Rebecca Greensmith and Mary Johnson had engaged in sexual intercourse with the devil.52 Notably, New English Yankees were not the only people of New York. The presence of German, Dutch, Scots-Irish, and French Huguenot settlers throughout the state would have contributed to continental concerns entering the region's New English witchcraft lore.53Although most judicial witch hunts ended during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, paranoia over witchcraft continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as did witchcraft allegations.54 This was also true of New York. In 1937, folklorist Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner wrote, “If anyone thinks that the beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft died in America . . . he need only consult the police records of a number of up-to-date American cities to have his ideas on the subject rather thoroughly revised.”55 Notably, historian D. Michael Quinn observed that witchcraft belief was still common in Joseph Smith's America. “In fact, to the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans read about witchcraft because they feared witches. Accusations of witchcraft continued in Massachusetts, elsewhere in New England, in New York state, in the southern states, and western territories well into the nineteenth centuries.”56 More recently, Adam Jortner has demonstrated continued witchcraft belief and anti-witchcraft violence, often conflated with folk-Christian traditions, in the early republic.57 Jortner presents a dilemma, “That was the trouble: witches had no magical powers, yet people acted as though they did.”58 This dilemma is easily resolved when we take into consideration that witchcraft historiography has continued to further our understanding of post-Enlightenment witchcraft belief among transatlantic Europeans by demonstrating that although the skeptical model of pretended witchcraft was the primary model among post-Enlightenment elite, belief in the diabolical witch coexisted with skepticism.59 Jortner confirmed this pattern when he underlined the fact that “Fewer people believed in witchcraft as a demonic conspiracy in 1825 than in 1625—but that does not mean that people did not believe in witchcraft or in the supernatural.”60 Even in the nineteenth century, elite skepticism had not eradicated early modern belief in the supernatural among the masses. It is notable that Joseph Smith's early life contains hearings for pretended witchcraft and magic in an environment where Smith's enemies are accusing him of diabolical witchcraft through the label of necromancy.61Historians Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies have found that belief in the diabolical witch of the early modern period changed little in the nineteenth century, a “story of continuation as of decline.”62 Still, several aspects of witchcraft had changed. During the eighteenth century, the legal system ceased recognizing witchcraft and magic as real and replaced them with the crimes “pretended witchcraft and magic.”63 Before this change, most people tried as witches were not cunning folk. However, from the eighteenth century onward, pretended witchcraft trials focused primarily on cunning folk.64 During this period both the idea of the pretended witch and the diabolical witch were weaponized against cunning folk and popular religion. Historian Stuart Clark called this the “common missionary determination to impose the fundamentals of Christian belief and practice on ordinary people . . . a campaign . . . to discredit and eradicate a wide range of popular cultural forms as ‘superstitions.’”65 Clark further asserts, “There is now also a considerable body of evidence which indicates that a significant proportion of those who appeared as defendants in early modern witchcraft trials were practitioners of ‘white’ magic—precisely those healers, diviners, and blessers who feature so prominently in the demonologies.”66 Indeed, through a process of relabeling, folk Christianity was recast as diabolical witchcraft. During previous centuries, cunning folk like Chonrad Stoeckhlin, who had claimed to be visited by angels, were labeled as witches by religious and legal authorities.67 Historian Michael Slater shows that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “conjurors, fortune tellers, cunning-folk and witches were generally lumped into the same category by the press.”68 In 1824, the cunning-man Benjamin Baker was called “necromancer” by those who mocked his services and beliefs, with the press reporting his services as “pretended.”69 In the Second Great Awakening's highly competitive and polemical religious environment, a treasure seeker who claimed visitations from an angel promising new scripture would have been an intolerable threat to the campaign to reform the churchless.70 Thus, Joseph Smith was a prime target for allegations of witchcraft.During the post-Enlightenment period, both Europeans and Americans came to define a sincere belief in witchcraft as a sign of backwardness. A sign of erudition was one's skepticism. In New York, an anonymous author of a letter published by E. D. Howe through the Painesville Telegraph highlights witchcraft stigmatization. While discussing Joseph Smith and his followers, the letter claimed that “The whole gang of these deluded mortals, except a few hypocrites, are profound believers in witchcraft, ghosts, goblins, &c.”71 Latter-day Saints would not have been alone in this belief. Many of Smith's enemies believed in diabolical witches, too, though that did not stop them from using witchcraft accusations to discredit Smith and his followers for being credulous dupes. For example, a neighbor of the Smiths, Joseph Rodgers, told the anti-Mormon Arthur B. Demming in the late nineteenth century, “Many of Jo's victims . . . believed in witches and ghosts.” In the same interview, Rodgers also accused Mormonism's founder of threatening to cast a spell. He slyly used a third person allegation through Jack Murphey to do so.72 In an era when many people paranoically feared witches, these beliefs were underreported and even deliberately suppressed.73Witchcraft historians Davies and Blécourt have argued that in an era when witchcraft belief was stigmatized, “We can safely assume that instances of violence against witches were ‘tips of the iceberg,’ and they are thus only the extreme expressions of a much wider dispersed witchcraft discourse.”74 Joseph Smith experienced such violence beginning with an attempt on his life in 1824 at a time he was accused of necromancy.75 Later a former neighbor recalled that Smith was “ducked,” by angry neighbors.76 Smith and his followers suffered extrajudicial violence in New York and Pennsylvania by groups accusing him of necromancy. The mobbing at the Johnson Farm in Ohio contained violence characteristic of violent unbewitching.77 Well organized attacks on Latter-day Saints in Missouri in 1833 and 1838 peaked on All Hallow's Eve.78 The reported mutilation of Latter-day Saint corpses, and attempts to mutilate the body of Joseph Smith are also exemplary of this violence.79 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced numerous incidents of posthumous violence against corpses. The reanimated dead were believed to be malevolent spirits who had possessed corpses to harm the living.80 It should be remembered that Smith's enemies believed that he was a necromancer. Acts of violence employed against the living and the dead indicate that his enemies believed that Smith had diabolical powers.During the Second Great Awakening, the categories of pretended witchcraft and diabolical witchcraft continued to coexist. Notably, Reverend Frederich Quitman produced a skeptical demonology in New York in 1810, while Sir Walter Scott produced his skeptical demonology in Scotland in 1830.81 Joseph Smith's early nemesis Alexander Campbell encouraged belief in diabolical and pretended necromancy through his church's newsletter in 1841 and 1842.82 In spite of Frederich Quitman's skeptical beliefs, he was compelled to acknowledge that in the Second Great Awakening, early modern diabolical witchcraft belief was still common. He noted that an attack occurred against an alleged witch in his neighborhood.83 Quitman's observation concurs with Joseph Smith's contemporary and fellow New Yorker Henry Clarke Wright who claimed that “a belief in ghosts and witches was then very general.”84 Wright's witches are not cunning folk, but a clearly articulated belief in the diabolical witch of the early period, complete with sabbaths, night riding, flying on broomsticks, shapeshifting into a black cat, the evil eye, and the destruction of crops, livestock, and health.85 Joseph Smith lived and died in an environment where a belief in the diabolical witch was common. His involvement in cunning-folk practices, his claims to miraculous powers and angelic visitations, the heretical act of publishing new scripture, and hearings for pretended witchcraft and magic put Joseph Smith at high risk of being misidentified as a witch, even in the ostensibly skeptical environment of the post-Enlightenment period.In New York it was believed that treasure seeking was something witches did. In 1854, Franklin Benjamin Hough described a reported treasure quest as “heathenish orgies” and “absurdities of belief in witchcraft.”86 In the 1850 article, “The History of the Divining Rod,” a mineral prospector and moderate skeptic of the divining rod asked if the treasure seeking commodore was “a witch or a wizard?” Like many people, the prospector conflated the practice of treasure seeking with the myth of diabolical witchcraft.87 In 1937, New York folklorist Emelyn Gardner wrote, “witches possess knowledge of the location of buried treasure.”88 These were not forgotten tales of yore. More than a century after the publication of the Book of Mormon, Gardner discussed a contemporary of her informants in South Gilboa, New York, who placed crosses on the fence posts around his farm “to prevent witches from gaining possession of the treasure said to be buried somewhere on his land.”89 From the sixteenth century onward, English and New England law followed demonological precedent by recognizing treasure seeking as a component of witchcraft.90 It is not surprising to see treasure seeking and witchcraft associated in Yankees’ minds in early New York.91 Early anti-Mormons utilized this paradigm in their attempts to understand Smith's claimed acquisition of the gold plates.Shortly after Smith's failed 1824 attempt to acquire the plates, contemporaries alleged that someone had dug up Alvin Smith's body and “dissected” it.92 The use of body parts in witchcraft and necromancy is an idea that goes back to antiquity.93 The idea that witches used parts of human corpses to worship the devil or create magical substance for use in their sabbaths can be seen clearly in early modern demonologies.94 These allegations were taken so seriously that Joseph Smith Sr. had the body disinterred and wrote a public response in the local newspaper to silence such allegations. During this period of Joseph Smith Jr's life he was shot at by an anonymous attacker and possibly “ducked” by neighbors.95 The research of Owen Davies has shown that in nineteenth-century America, alleged witches often faced extrajudicial violence.96 The Smiths would have been wise to remove Joseph from a region where allegations of necromancy were circulating.Sources show that Joseph Smith's neighbors viewed his claimed acquisition of Cumorah's golden plates as an event similar to the witches’ sabbath. A friendly observer recalled the memories and beliefs of hostile former neighbors of Smith at the end of the nineteenth century: “His story about the discovery of the plates sounded like the German legends of the demons of the Herz Mountains,” alluding to the idea that witches’ sabbaths took place in remote mountainous regions.97 Many aspects of the sabbath began as demonized depictions of Waldensians living in the mountains of France and Switzerland.98 Mountains and highlands continued to be a quintessential location of the witches’ sabbath in the belief of the diabolical witch doctrine. Anabaptists reinforced this idea during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when they held their religious activities in the forests and mountains at night to avoid being executed for heresy.99 In similar fashion, Luman Walters, was alleged to have “retired to the mountains near Great Sodus Bay, where he holds communion with the Devil.”100 The fact that New Yorker Elizabeth Kane would summarize the stories about Smith's acquisition of the plates with the German legends of Herz Mountains shows how Smith's former neighbors linked stories around the plates’ acquisition with stereotypes regarding the witches’ sabbath.In “Book of Pukei—Chap. 1,” Abner Cole linked the Smiths and their treasure seeking to the witches’ sabbath through Luman Walters by claiming that he “led the rabble into a dark grove, in a place called Manchester,” where “latter-demallions,” engaged in “drawing a Magic circle, with a rusty sword.”101 Abner Cole described diabolism: “Within the centre, he sacrificed a Cock [a bird sacred to Minerva]102 for the purpose of propitiating the prince of spirits.”103 In the second passage, alluding to a witch's sabbath, Cole claims that Walters “took his book, and his rusty sword, and his magic stone, and his stuffed Toad, and all his implements of witchcraft.”104 This book was a nod to magical grimoires and the book that New English witches allegedly harassed their victims into signing.105 It is also likely an attempt to explain the origin of the Book of Mormon by insinuating that Walters was the book's original author.Cole's depiction of this event built heavily upon the legendary witches’ sabbath, mentioning ceremonial blades like the Mars dagger, folk-Christian seer stones, the spirit familiar in the form of a stuffed toad, and unambiguous allegations of witchcraft and diabolism. Cole would later refer to Smith as a “dark representative of old Pluto's domain,” in an article entitled “Diabolical.”106 Cole alluded to the devil's pact, the sacrifice of children and sexual orgies when he claimed that the treasure seekers told Smith that “we will be thy servants forever, do with us, our wives and our little ones as may seem good in thine eyes.”107Joseph Smith's enemies further linked Smith to the witches’ sabbath by claiming that Joseph and his wife, Emma Hale Smith, acquired the plates while dressed in black, riding in a black carriage, with a black horse—an apparent reference to the mythical Black Mass.108 A kernel of truth, later distorted, may lay at the heart of this allegation. Joseph Knight Sr. recalled that Joseph Smith had taken and returned his horse and buggy to acquire the plates. However, Knight's account does not provide any details about his horse and buggy's color or the clothing Joseph was wearing at the time. Nor did he identify Emma as having been with Smith during the plates’ acquisition, suggesting that Smith's neighbors likely added these elements as they ret