Was the 1832 account of the First Vision cut out of a letter book and restricted from public access?

As you study Church history, it is important to understand facts, events, and statements in their context. Learn more about this and other principles for seeking answers and helping others with their questions.

During the mid-20th century, Church Historian Joseph Fielding Smith kept several valuable historical artifacts in a safe in his office. The bound volume in which Joseph Smith wrote his 1832 history was likely a part of this collection. Joseph Smith and his associates also used this volume as a letter book, hand copying a record of the Prophet’s incoming and outgoing letters for a few years.

Scholars with the Joseph Smith Papers have concluded that someone—likely a member of the Historian’s Office staff—removed the pages of the 1832 history from its bound volume sometime between 1930 and 1965.

Some people have seen a conspiracy to hide history in this action. However, the volume was already in the control of the Historian’s Office, suggesting that hiding the account was not the reason for the excision. One possible explanation for the removal is that at this time the archival staff was working to organize the Church’s collections based on name and topic. Because the history was written in a letter book, archivists may have removed it to fit this organizational system. By the early 1960s, still during Joseph Fielding Smith’s tenure as Church Historian, the 1832 history was made available to researchers, having been reunited with the volume from which it had been removed.

There is nothing about the 1832 account that would merit cutting it out and hiding it. Understood in its context, it is a valuable addition to our understanding of the First Vision.

Learn more

Steven C. Harper, “Raising the Stakes: How Joseph Smith’s First Vision Became All or Nothing,” BYU Studies, vol. 59, no. 2 (2020), 23–58