Joseph Smith

Smith, Joseph

(1805–44) religious leader; born in Sharon, Vt. He moved to New York state with his parents in 1816 and received his first "call" as a prophet four years later, at age 15, when he claimed that God confided in him the first of several revelations of the true Christianity. In 1823 an angel told him of a hidden gospel on golden plates, with accompanying stones that would enable him to translate the text from "reformed Egyptian." On September 22, 1827, these records were delivered to him. He published them as The Book of Mormon in 1830 and organized the Church of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) in April of that year. Despite ridicule, hostility, and occasional violence, Smith's sect gained converts. In 1831 the Mormons established a headquarters in Ohio and later built a community called Zion in Missouri. After an anti-Mormon uprising in Missouri in 1838, Smith founded the community of Nauvoo in Illinois; by the early 1840s nearly 20,000 Mormons had settled there. Meanwhile, Smith introduced the custom of polygamy, and when he announced he would run for the presidency in 1844, he and his brother Hyrum Smith were imprisoned. On June 27 a mob of 150 men broke into the jail at Carthage, Ill., and shot them both dead. The Mormons thereafter migrated westward to Utah under Smith's successor, Brigham Young.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.