Smith's Fruits: Conduct as Primary Evidence
Joseph Smith's own narrated accounts of his visions and revelations are a single, unverifiable, self-interested source: the same status this index gives any Speaker's testimony about themselves. His documented public conduct is a different, independently sourced category of evidence, drawn from court records, city council minutes, banknotes, and papyrus fragments that survive apart from his own narration.
This entry catalogues three episodes on that basis: the Kirtland Safety Society's collapse, the Book of Abraham's translation claims against the recovered papyri, and Smith's order, as mayor of Nauvoo, to destroy a newspaper press.
None of what follows requires assuming criminal intent as a settled conclusion. It requires weighing documented conduct as evidence in its own right, at least equally with the narrated account of events Smith himself supplied, rather than granting his testimony default credibility because it was later canonized.
The Kirtland Safety Society
Smith and other church leaders organized the Kirtland Safety Society in November 1836, in Kirtland, Ohio, with a stated capital stock of four million dollars, a figure far exceeding the specie actually available in the region. When the Ohio legislature denied the venture a banking charter, its organizers reconstituted it on January 2, 1837 as the "Anti-Banking Company," an unchartered financial institution issuing its own banknotes, signed by Smith as cashier and Sidney Rigdon as president.
By a contemporary account from Warren Parrish, the Society's clerk and later cashier, Smith declared to associates that the institution held sixty thousand dollars in specie and could command six hundred thousand more, when in fact, Parrish wrote, holdings did not exceed six thousand dollars and no more could be commanded. The bank collapsed by September 1837, amid the broader national Panic of 1837. Smith was fined for operating an unchartered bank; he withdrew from formal association with the Society in mid-1837 and publicly warned members against accepting its own banknotes as worthless.
Church member Wilford Woodruff recorded Smith stating, in the presence of other leaders, that he had received "the word of the Lord upon the subject of the Kirtland Safety Society" the same morning the institution was organized, presenting the venture's founding as divinely directed rather than an ordinary financial decision.
LDS-affiliated historical scholarship (BYU Studies, FAIR) attributes the failure primarily to the national financial panic, poor legal counsel, and the general fragility of unchartered frontier banks, not to fraud or personal enrichment, and notes no court ever found Smith guilty of financial fraud in the matter, only of operating without a charter. Independent and critical accounts note that many church members who lost money believed Smith had organized the institution to enrich himself and other leaders, and that the venture was founded on a revelation whose divine origin cannot be independently verified, only asserted by Smith and reported secondhand by his associates.
The Book of Abraham
In 1835, Smith acquired a small collection of Egyptian funerary papyri and mummies from a traveling exhibitor. He announced that one scroll contained the writings of the biblical Abraham, and began producing an English text, the Book of Abraham, that he stated was a translation of the papyri. It was published serially beginning in 1842 and canonized as LDS scripture, part of the Pearl of Great Price, in 1880.
Most of the original papyri were believed destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In 1966, surviving fragments were rediscovered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and transferred to the LDS Church, which published them the following year. This allowed, for the first time, direct comparison between Smith's published translation and the source material using the tools of modern Egyptology, which did not exist as a decipherment method in Smith's lifetime. Champollion's breakthrough decipherment of hieroglyphs occurred in 1822, and was not in wide practical use in the United States by 1835.
In 1912, Episcopal bishop Franklin Spalding sent Smith's facsimiles to eight of the era's leading Egyptologists and Semitists for independent assessment. James H. Breasted, who held the first American university chair in Egyptology, wrote that Smith's interpretations "very clearly demonstrates that he was totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents and absolutely ignorant of the simplest facts of Egyptian writing and civilization." Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie of University College London stated of the same explanations: "there is not one single word that is true in these explanations." The papyrus fragment adjacent to the drawing Smith identified as part of the Abraham narrative was later identified as a standard, common Egyptian funerary text known as the Book of Breathings, used broadly across Egyptian burials of that era and bearing no narrative relationship to Abraham.
The church's own 2014 Gospel Topics essay states plainly that "the relationship between the fragments and the published text is largely a matter of conjecture," and that no eyewitness account of Smith's translation process survives. LDS apologetic scholarship (FAIR, BYU's Religious Studies Center) argues the recovered fragments may represent only a portion of the original scroll material, that the published text may derive from a portion of papyrus no longer extant, or that the process was revelatory rather than a literal linguistic translation of the physical papyrus in hand, framings that cannot be independently verified against physical evidence, since the relevant source material is, by this argument, no longer available to check.
The Nauvoo Expositor
On June 7, 1844, a group of dissenting former and current church members, including William Law, formerly a counselor in Smith's own First Presidency, published the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. The paper detailed Smith's practice of plural marriage, which he had publicly denied, and accused him of abuses of religious and civic power.
As mayor of Nauvoo, Smith convened the city council, which met for more than fourteen hours across two sessions. On the evening of June 10, the council declared the Expositor and its printing office a "public nuisance" and ordered Smith, in his capacity as mayor, to have it removed. Smith directed the city marshal, who led a posse of roughly 100 men to destroy the press, scatter its type, and burn the printed copies that evening.
The destruction of the press inflamed regional anti-Mormon sentiment and led directly to Smith's arrest on charges including treason. On June 27, 1844, seventeen days after the press was destroyed, a mob stormed the Carthage, Illinois jail where Smith was being held and killed him and his brother Hyrum.
Smith and the city council cited American legal precedent and Blackstone's commentaries on common law in classifying the press as a public nuisance, and press suppression on similar grounds, while unusual, was not without precedent in 19th-century America. LDS-affiliated sources emphasize the Expositor's own inflammatory language toward Smith and argue the council's stated fear of civil unrest was reasonably founded, given a documented pattern of mob violence against controversial presses elsewhere in Illinois during this period. Independent accounts note plainly that the paper's central, factual charge, that Smith was secretly practicing plural marriage while publicly denying it, was true, and that the press was destroyed by the person and government body it had just accused, using an emergency civic power to eliminate exactly the accusation it was making.
Reading the three together
None of these three episodes turns on Smith's account of a vision or a spiritual experience. Each is a matter of civic record, banknote, court filing, or papyrus fragment, independently checkable against his own public statements and conduct at the time. In each case, a claim of divine sanction or special knowledge, a revelation authorizing the bank, an inspired translation of ancient scripture, a lawful civic action, sits directly beside a documented gap between that claim and what independent examination or subsequent events showed. That gap is the evidence this entry treats as primary: not proof of concealed motive, but a consistent, recorded pattern worth weighing on its own terms, apart from any account Smith gave of his own intentions.
Sources
- The Joseph Smith Papers, "Articles of Agreement for the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company, 2 January 1837," and "Kirtland Safety Society Bank Stock Ledger, 18 October 1836–12 June 1837," josephsmithpapers.org, for Warren Parrish's letter to the Painesville Republican, 15 February 1838, and the recorded minutes of the 2 January 1837 meeting.
- The Joseph Smith Papers, "Order to Destroy Nauvoo Expositor Press," josephsmithpapers.org.
- BYU Studies, "The Failure of the Kirtland Safety Society" and "The Kirtland Safety Society and the Fraud of Grandison Newell."
- FAIR, "Creation of the Kirtland Safety Society" and "Joseph Smith and the Nauvoo Expositor."
- National Museum of American History, "5 Dollars, Kirtland Safety Society Bank, Ohio, United States, 1837."
- "Kirtland Safety Society," Wikipedia.
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essay, "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham," churchofjesuschrist.org.
- Religious Studies Center, BYU, "Egyptian Papyri and the Book of Abraham: Some Questions and Answers," Kerry Muhlestein.
- Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, "Egyptology and the Book of Abraham," citing the 1912 Spalding pamphlet responses from James H. Breasted and W. M. Flinders Petrie.
- The Joseph Smith Papers, "Introduction to Revelations and Translations, Volume 4" (Book of Abraham and Related Manuscripts).
- Encyclopedia of Mormonism, "Nauvoo Expositor," eom.byu.edu.
- Scripture Central, "Why Did the Nauvoo City Council Order the Destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor Press?"
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Nauvoo Expositor," churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics — on the posse of approximately 100 men and the council's stated legal reasoning.