And a quote I love comes from Leslie Poles Hartley,

who wrote that “the past is a foreign country;

they do things differently there.”

And I think that is so true, particularly of America at the time of Joseph Smith.

Coming up next: Joseph Smith’s America.

KJZZ Television, in cooperation with the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

Joseph Smith was born in 1805. At that time,

Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States.

It had only been twenty-nine years since the Declaration of Independence and only 18 since the ratification of the Constitution.

America was a young nation, still finding herself.

In our show today, our scholars will talk about the America of Joseph Smith's time.

It was a nation that he helped to form while it fashioned him

at this very same time, that Joseph’s born,

Lewis and Clark have reached the West Coast.

I love that juxtaposition. Two and two. And they're both in two lonely outpost, so to speak. I mean, yes, Joseph’s in New England,

there’s other farms around, but it’s on a cold,

lonely New England winter night.

You know, then you take it off to the West Coast and they've been traveling through the wilderness.

Then they have to build their cabins in the same day.

These events take place,

but that's sort of a romantic twist to something that I think is pretty significant.

At the time, America was a country trying to find itself, trying to define

define itself, trying to come to grips with who it was.

This was a new nation that was just being started.

But if you think of young America as sort of an adolescent,

US was an adolescent at the time, changing, growing, inner conflict,

sometimes misbehaving, wanting respect from other nations, but sometimes, frankly, acting very arrogant.

And wondering why they weren’t being taken seriously

at the time that Joseph Smith was born, roughly 90 percent of Americans lived on farms.

You know, at a time when there weren't a lot of jobs, it was easier to survive, to live on the land and was also part of the great American dream

for a lot of these people who came from foreign countries.

They didn't have a hope for land, but here land was plentiful.

Another thing that made

a rural life so appealing to a lot of people was that the idea that the grass was always greener,

that you could always pull up stakes if you didn't like where you were, where things were not going as they should,

you could pull up stakes and move to a new location.

We see that with the Smiths. You know, they start New England. They keep moving

all the way, you know, to New York.

There were only a few urban centers in America at the turn of the 19th century. New York was the largest city with a population of about 60000 in 1800. Philadelphia and Boston behind that. America at this time was primarily a rural frontier.

Life is hardscrabble. Life is on the edge. What happens day to day life is, what— I got to worry about feeding my family.

I got to worry about how I'm going to keep

a roof over their head.

I’ve got to worry about protecting them from

some pretty violent situations.

And I need to get along with neighbors also. Day to day. Plus, I have to get a leg up so that when I can't work anymore, my kids will still love me and hopefully take care of me.

And you had to be hardy to live on the frontier.

I mean, if you didn't grow it,

you didn't go to the store to buy it, you know?

But along with that hardy frontier, there were also challenges.

I mean, those who tended to go to the frontier tended to be more of the rough and tumble

individuals. And frequently

they brought their rough and tumble ways to—

they came in conflict with others.

If you're on the frontier, you really could not be a wimp.

You had to be physically tough,

and if you were going to say something, if

you were going to take a stand, you knew that—

I believe you knew you had a chance of ticking somebody off to the point of getting slugged.

Yet at the same time, the frontier is built

with people cooperating in a variety of ways. A town doesn’t get built, not just Nauvoo, but anywhere along the frontier.

There are degrees of acceptance, cooperation.

Joseph is very much a man of his times. He’s a man on the frontier. Always, from the day he’s born,

He’s always living on the frontier, which helps him.

He’s living in a time where people know how to build something from

almost nothing.

The nuclear family of the early 19th century was no more idyllic then than it is now.

But there were some differences.

It tended to be that at this time, most of the families

stayed, you know, fairly close together. I mean, in some ways,

one of the things you had to make the farms work was that the families were large,

they tended to be larger in size overall than we are today.

And part of that was that was your retirement, your health insurance,

to have your children take care of you in older age.

And you also need the extra hands to work on the farm.

But families tended, when they moved, tended to move,

you know, as a group.

So, you know, it's very common for, you know,

Lucy Mack to to later live with Emma and Joseph just to take care of them in their old age. Marriages is—it becomes a big issue. It does.

You know, one of the things that, you know, Joseph Smith was

criticized for was the fact that he married Emma, as he did.

You know, that they went away from home, you know, without the parents’ permission.

That was fairly common at the time for individuals if they wanted to get married,

to go out and get themselves married.

They weren't the big elaborate affairs now where you take months to plan this and have a wedding reception.

Marriage was a little more simple.

America in the early 19th century was a conflicted nation.

She was a nation born of lofty ideals and high principles that in some respects her people were just not living up to. Hence, reform movements were common.

America was a country that absolutely believed in democracy, but they lived with continual inequality.

Social activism was on the up.

People were trying to solve problems in health is as far as slavery. But during this time of trying to create social equality, there were great inequalities. There's racism, there is intolerance.

The US, for the most part, looked at itself as one nation,

but they were regionally,

narrowly divided on several issues.

America at this time was a land of reform.

There were those who basically said, what are we born for except for to be reformers?

And so individuals took a look at all aspects of what life was like.

We had the the women's rights movement start during this time.

Women were second class citizens in the United States in many regards.

They didn’t have, in many places, the right to own property.

They didn't have, of course, the right to vote and it would be many years before they had this.

While Joseph Smith received a health code that Mormons today call the Word of Wisdom,

temperance movements and health codes were not all that uncommon in his time.

An individual named Sylvester Graham also put forth

a law of health. You know, the Graham cracker is named after Sylvester Graham.

His law of health was a lot like Joseph Smith’s.

He believed in temperance, that you shouldn’t drink, except for he thought that there was one important exception.

He thought it was helpful that women when they were pregnant

would drink. You know,

one of the things that is interesting is that when Europeans would come over here to America,

they would comment upon the American diet,

and they were just flabbergasted by what they encountered. One European said it was like keeping indigestions,

one after another, upon you.

Americans ate an incredible amount of meat.

And they made note of the fact that you would sit down for a meal and meat, meat, meat, meat, meat and a few bread.

There weren't many fruits. There weren't many vegetables.

You know, people didn't have access to these things.

And a lot of people thought that they were—

there was no nutritional value in them.

Americans drank an incredible amount of

alcoholic drinks. One estimate puts that 40 gallons was not uncommon for kids as young as 15 to drink in a year of alcoholic beer and hard cider. Medicine at that time was also in its infancy.

The idea of taking people to solve their problem by cutting them and having bleed out the

bad spirits in you was was fairly rampant, fairly commonplace at this time.

Now we look with great respect upon doctors. Frequently then, it was a profession of last resort if you couldn’t make it anywhere else, you became a doctor.

And what about holidays? There were far less of them then than there are now. In America,

they normally celebrated two holidays throughout the United States. That was Washington’s birthday,

(President’s Day) and the Fourth of July.

And these were big events

and most places didn't have Christmas as a holiday. When it was proposed,

one legislator said, we’ve already got a winter holiday and a summer holiday.

Why do we need more holidays?

Which is a hard thing, in this day and age, to even fathom.

The Pledge of Allegiance, which wasn’t popularized until the 20th century:

it declared the United States to be one nation under God.

Well, in the early 19th century,

it would be some time before that “one nation” status was achieved.

They referred to their country as, “the United States are

a great country,” rather than “the United States is

a great country,” as we do.

And part of the idea was that these were

thirteen—they’re colonies that were united, in a lot of ways, in name only.

They had not really come to be the united nation that we know now and would not be as such during Joseph Smith's lifetime.

They viewed themselves as, “here

is the United States and each of the states are separate entities who had their own rights, who had their own authorities,” and these very seldom crossed.

From its Puritan roots,

it was common for some people in America to believe, in the early 1800s, that America was a promised land of destiny,

that it was to become as a city set on a hill for all the world to see.

Individuals were looking for a new work to commence, where God would restore His work,

and they were envisioning that to be restored here in America.

There was a book of scriptures that were in the East, that came from the East, from the Far East.

They also thought, why can’t we have one here? During this same time period,

one of the influences that came upon America was this idea of Manifest Destiny, that in fact, the idea that God has not only reserved this country for a great work, but He had reserved the entire continent from one coast to the other.

John O. Sullivan, who gives us that term “Manifest Destiny” or

or the variation on it that we’ve turned into Manifest Destiny— in 1839 he talks even in terms of “the temple that will crown this land” and “from this temple will go forth

this ideal of human progress,”

among the fundamental questions raised by the founding fathers and their successors was the extent of the people's sovereignty.

But many people had their own views on the matter.

I want people to understand that Jacksonian Americans

can be viewed, in their own way, as a self-appointed chosen people.

They have articles of faith.

They have deeply-held, even religiously-held, tenaciously-held ideals.

And foremost among those ideals is what these scholars call the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.

So what we have in Joseph Smith’s revelations is actually a

political order. If we want to go that far. A political order.

That retains sovereignty in God and locates agency and individuals, individuals are indeed free,

more free than in any other situation.

But there's no illusion of sovereignty in the people.

If sovereignty—if all power is vested in the people, well then, you’re in an a bad situation in an ultimate sense.

Do the people have power to save? Are they mighty to save?

Are the people God?

The framers of the United States Constitution,

they fashioned a government that was unlike any other in history,

but it was a work in progress.

You know, one of the things that was taking place is that America

didn’t come just—we have the Constitution, all of a sudden, here is America as we know it.

We had the words as far as what the Constitution meant.

It was a new experiment. It hadn't been tried before.

But exactly how would this nation develop, you know, evolve?

And I believe that although it's hard for us to know what their law was,

it might have been even harder for a lawyer in Joseph Smith today to know what the law was.

Law in America was in a very unusual period of transformation and change, following right after the constitutional amendments,

the American Revolution, and a lot of things that went on

as a result of expelling the king and

and British government.

And there's a lot of dust thrown up in the air legally that hadn't yet come down during Joseph Smith's lifetime.

American law became very dynamic and changes were of the essence.

American law came to promote competition

and economic development,

and changes in the law were in process in almost every area of the law during Joseph Smith’s very lifetime.

For now, we hold the the Bill of Rights to be very sacred, that there a very valuable part of influencing our lives and guaranteeing our protection.

That was not the case during Joseph Smith's lifetime.

The Bill of Rights was viewed only as a protection against wrongs by the federal government.

It won't be until after the Civil War that

the Bill of Rights will be extended to the states

so that states have to comply with the protections of the Bill of Rights. Before the Civil War,

it was simply the federal government that was limited by the rights against unlawful search and seizure and

the establishment of religion and other things like that.

Joseph Smith and his view of, the government had a right to step in and to assist in the Missouri—

give redress in Missouri.

The problems in Missouri actually would not be adopted until about a hundred years later.

He was really ahead of his times in how he viewed

the Constitution.

The post-revolutionary period was a time when the American experiment flourished.

Fresh thinking and ambitious innovation emerged from a number of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries.

Who are some of his peers?

You have literature coming, you have the great poets coming,

and you have Emerson and Thoreau. People are thinking about

a new American thinking is commonplace. Literature:

you have

James Cooper—James Fenimore Cooper.

Instead of copying English literature, or just reading English literature, he's developing a whole new American literature.

You know, we get The Last of the Mohicans, big time stuff.

We have Renaissance men like Samuel Morse, who is is there, where—he’s a painter, he invents the Morse code,

he also is a daguerreotypist. That time period that Joseph Smith was was living was a really

incredible populist explosion in religion, in

science, literature.

Ben Franklin stated, “I wish it had been my destiny to have been born two or three centuries later for inventions and improvement are everywhere.

The present progress is nothing less than astounding.”

And it's interesting to look at what is happening at this time.

The Lord’s Spirit seems to be poured out upon nations, and people are—

inventions are coming forth at an incredible rate.

You know, one think-tank has estimated that, you know,

from the time of Christ until about the 1800s,

there were about thirty-nine new inventions on average a year

during that time period.

During Joseph’s Lifetime it exploded to about 4000 a year.

This nation is just—there’s an aliveness to it.

I think Thomas Jefferson says,

“We can no longer say there’s nothing new under the sun.”

And he says that in 1801, things are happening.

Technological development in the 19th century changed the way many Americans did business.

An example of that is the power of steam.

It significantly altered the way many Americans traveled.

For the first time in history, real movement was possible.

You know, most people when they were in Europe, particularly,

you lived and died in the same location.

But here you had a chance to move and seek out new locations. You can get on a train. During this time what was called Tea-kettle Power. People started inventions regarding

the railroad.

Steam boats that would take you for the first time.

Your progress in getting across the country

was—it increased dramatically.

We look at Robert Fulton and the steam engine, which was

invented right after Joseph Smith

was born. You know, when he did his first demonstration,

people came along just basically to see it fail.

People lined the shore and said, “it will never start, it will never start.” And when it finally did start

and it started going, they all yelled, “it will never stop. It’ll never stop. You’ll never get off of this thing.”

So people are being inventive. It’s a hotbed of ideas looking at how we do things.

Now, as we've already mentioned, reformers addressed controversial social concerns of their day

and they gained some notoriety by doing so.

Among the most sensitive and volatile issues of the day was slavery.

But slavery was everywhere. It influenced all aspects of American life.

You could not—there was a period of time in Congress where it could not be brought up with the gag orders. You could not discuss slavery.

And slavery during this time period became synonymous with

states rights, and that was the guiding influence throughout this period,

that the states had more rights to govern—

that they had the right to govern themselves without the interference of the federal government.

And so you see the nation splitting apart.

The impact of slavery has never been so real to me as when I did the research for this book and

the division over slavery was so personal.

I talked just a little bit before that there was a desire for social justice, yet there was racism and intolerance.

And that intolerance—

when you have the abolitionists versus the slaves,

they took it personally. They went after each other. They burned each other’s presses. They would they would beat each other up. There was murder.

There were assassinations.

And slavery was so dehumanizing.

You know, one of the things I’ve read that just struck me is that—

I can’t remember where it was, I believe South Carolina— where they had a raffle.

And the winner of the raffle had the choice they could either get a

fine horse or a mulatto slave girl.

And whoever finished second got—I can’t remember the other prize.

What it was doing to individuals and to America at this time was truly,

truly it was a black eye upon American society.

One of those excesses that existed at this time in America's adolescence was the tendency toward violence among some people.

Americans solved a lot of their problems through violence.

The frontier mentality that you had to be tough to carve out a land carried over into many different ways,

and so violence was not unique to one group or one area. It was widespread throughout the United States.

At the same time that Latter-day Saints are being driven from Missouri, the Cherokee are being driven

from Georgia to settle in Oklahoma.

You know, one of the big differences is that for the Latter-day Saints, they had the great citizens of Quincy, Illinois, to welcome them and to help them at the end.

The Cherokee did not have that.

As we said before, America at this time was a nation in search of personal identity.

No more so was this true than in the realm of religion.

The United States was somewhat unique in that it didn't have a established, a dominant religion from which the government—to

which most of the people belonged.

As a result, we had throughout the United States what was known as the Second Great Awakening.

The Second Great Awakening was a populist movement.

It's when religion begins,

the established religions start losing their grip

on the people. And you get these camps,

camp meetings. People would come, that could either be in somebody’s cabin or in some cases they come from a hundred miles around

and they’d go for a weekend,

the participants. And they’d hear preacher after preacher.

The people would get the jerks, they’d speak in tongues,

but they began to own their religion. They were being told that they could develop a relationship with Heavenly Father,

that they owned their soul in the sense that they could determine whether they’re going to hell, or going to go to heaven.

What Joseph does is comes at the right time.

And so what we associate with revivals, you know, people searching for religion in upstate New York— this was actually a national phenomenon going from all the way from New England down to the southern states.

Now this is where Joseph comes in.

We're going to talk a little bit about Joseph.

He comes in with Heavenly Father’s gospel, says, “folks, there’s more to life here. Life isn’t just this survival.”

You know, scrap, you know, there’s hope, “there’s hope,” he says. “There’s hope.”

The message of Christ is very much like a warm spring wind after a long, hard winter.

There’s something more to life than just this day-to-day pain,

this day-to-day effort. There is something to live for. There is meaning to life.

Joseph Smith was born in obscurity in the hills of Vermont to parents who understood the meaning of hardship and struggle.

Next week on the Joseph Smith Papers, Joseph Smith’s Palmyra.

So Joseph grew up in an atmosphere,

in a situation, of rigorous work from daylight to sunset

and up to six days a week. Little time for

leaving the isolated farmstead and having social activity.

Very little with opportunity for schooling as mentioned.