Overview of the Joseph Smith Papers

The papers of Joseph Smith make record of the beginnings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it originated in the life and teachings of the Mormon prophet. Of all the American visionaries of his time, Smith had the most lasting impact. In his lifetime, Mormonism attracted tens of thousands of converts in the United States and Great Britain. Following his death and the church’s exodus to the West, Latter-day Saints settled hundreds of communities in the desolate regions of the Great Basin. Two centuries after Smith’s birth, the movement he founded has millions of members in over one hundred fifty countries, is recognized as a major feature on the American religious landscape, and is increasingly significant globally. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark argues that Mormonism affords the rare opportunity to study the origins of a world religion.¹ The papers of Joseph Smith give access to those beginnings.

Despite the church’s ever-growing significance, no complete edition—or even a  listing—of Smith’s papers has existed, until now.² The Joseph Smith Papers Project will publish or calendar every extant document written by Smith or by his scribes in his behalf, as well as other records that could be said to originate in his mind. The aim of the project is to make available to scholars and general readers the sources essential to the study of Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith and Record Keeping

The Joseph Smith Papers are extraordinarily voluminous for a person who did not consider himself a writer. Smith had only a modest education and no literary aspirations. He keenly felt the limitations of writing. To the newspaper editor William W. Phelps, he wrote: “O Lord God deliver us in thy due time from the little narrow prison almost as it were total darkness of paper pen and ink and a crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.”³ Yet over the years an immense collection of documents accumulated. He dictated revelations, prepared “translations” of ancient documents, and assigned clerks to write letters, his history, and his journals. He and his scribes produced an array of documents in a variety of genres, which together make record of Smith’s life and the development of his infant church.

Joseph Smith’s entree into the literary world occurred in 1828 when he began translating the Book of Mormon. The first 116 pages were lost through the error of his scribe, but Smith began again, and in the three months until the end of June 1829, he dictated most of what became 584 pages of printed text in the first edition. In that same period, he received more than a dozen revelations given in a distinctive prophetic voice. Neither the Book of Mormon nor the revelations, in his view, were his own compositions. “I translated by the gift and power of God,” he said of the Book of Mormon.⁴ The revelations were given in the voice of God speaking from the heavens. They outlined church structures, gave instructions to individuals, charted the church’s goals, and established doctrine. They made Mormonism a fellowship of belief. By fall 1830, Smith was preparing his revelations for publication, which commenced in serial form in the church newspaper, The Evening and the Morning Star, in June 1832.

For the first two years after the organization of the Church of Christ on 6 April 1830, Smith assigned the work of keeping a history first to Oliver Cowdery and then to John Whitmer, two of the early believers. In 1832, he wrote a history of the visions he had received as a young man and in the same year started a personal journal and began to preserve correspondence and other documents in a letterbook.⁵ At first, these record-keeping projects were sporadic: the history ended after six pages, and his journal keeping lapsed after ten days. But Smith gradually established a pattern of assigning scribes to work on histories, journals, letters, and other documents. His record keeping eventually settled into more consistent patterns. By the early 1840s, he and his clerks were composing a comprehensive history, keeping a continuous diary, accumulating minutes from meetings and councils, and preserving his correspondence and discourses.

Joseph Smith drew upon these materials in 1838, when he again personally started a history, dictating an autobiographical narrative interspersed with revelations, correspondence, and other documents pertaining to his life and the beginnings of the church. When the chronology of the story reached November 1832, the narrative shifted to a day-by-day diary format using Smith’s journal as the featured text, supplemented by additional documentary material. Gaps in the narrative where the journal was deficient were fleshed out from other sources edited to maintain the first-person style of the Smith journals. When Smith was killed in June 1844, work on the history had proceeded only as far as 5 August 1838, but his secretary and clerks continued to utilize his journal and other available documents to extend the narrative to the end of his life.

In addition to the published revelations and history, the manuscripts resulting from Joseph Smith’s record keeping include  two volumes of revelations, ten journals,  two copybooks of correspondence, several volumes of church history, a half dozen volumes containing the proceedings of civic and church administrative organizations that he organized, and  numerous miscellaneous papers, many of which are legal and business records. The flow of documents sometimes slowed to a trickle during times of particular stress, and he often required outside impetus to refocus his attention amidst a life teeming with travels,  meetings, moves, betrayals, lawsuits, persecutions, illnesses, births, and deaths.⁶ Nevertheless, record  keeping clearly played a prominent role in his thoughts and activities. His papers exhibit remarkable variety, depth, and constancy of purpose if not execution.

Joseph Smith and his Clerks

Only a tiny proportion of Joseph Smith’s papers were penned by Smith himself. These and the relatively small body of personal writings dictated by him are valued for offering a closeup view of his temperament and outlook. To the extent that his sermons and speeches have been recorded and preserved, they provide additional access to his own voice, but probably fewer than one-fifth of them were reported in any detail—most from the last years of his life, most incompletely.

The large majority of the remaining papers—beyond the personal writings, dictated documents, and discourses—were not only penned but composed by his clerks. Smith’s scribes must be credited for recording much of what we know about him and his church. Information they provide about Smith from an observer’s perspective supplements what he chose to tell. Yet those same scribes often stand between Smith and the reader hopeful of capturing his spirituality, character, and appeal. However efficient or close to the action Smith’s scribes may have been, none could offer readers full and unobstructed access to his mind.

History of the Joseph Smith Papers

The work of collecting Joseph Smith’s papers, which he began himself, continued after his death. In February 1846, the papers—then in the possession of Brigham Young and other church leaders—were packed into two boxes for the exodus to the West. The papers were unpacked in Salt Lake City in June 1853 and beginning in April 1854 were used to complete Smith’s history. Not everything relevant was included. John Whitmer retained the history he wrote at Smith’s behest, declining to turn it over when requested in 1838. Other significant documents remained with Smith’s widow Emma, who stayed in Illinois. These and other documents eventually came under the care of the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints). The relevant items, with the permission of the Community of Christ, will be published in The Joseph Smith Papers.

When finished in 1858, Joseph Smith’s history consisted of six large handwritten volumes numbering some 2,200 pages. Publication of the history that had commenced in the Nauvoo Times and Seasons in 1842 was continued in church publications in Utah and England until 1863. Because of its lengthy serial publication, the history was almost totally inaccessible by the turn of the century. In 1901, Brigham H. Roberts, assistant church historian, was commissioned to make the Smith history available again. Between 1902 and 1912, Roberts edited the previously published installments to produce a six-volume publication titled History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Period I: History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, by Himself. Because of the inclusion of so many complete documents, the History of the Church has been widely referred to among Mormons as the “Documentary History of the Church.”

As the culmination of Joseph Smith’s history writing endeavor, the History of the Church will continue to be a valuable resource for students of Mormonism, but it has limitations that detract from its value as a scholarly resource. The chief fault is a failure to distinguish Smith’s voice from others whose writings are presented as his own. A reader assumes the first person passages are from Smith when actually many were composed by clerks after his death using sources not from Smith himself. Modern editorial procedures require authorship and provenance to be described as fully as possible. The Joseph Smith Papers will include an edition of the manuscript History of the Church which will identify underlying sources. Other series of The Joseph Smith Papers will also include numerous items not published in the History of the Church.

Roots of the current effort to publish Smith’s papers extend back to the late 1960s when Truman G. Madsen, then director of the Institute of Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University, invited Dean Jessee, then an employee of the Church Historian’s Office of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to contribute to special issues of BYU Studies focusing on Joseph Smith and early Mormon history. This resulted in published articles on Smith’s early writings and reinforced in Jessee a desire to understand and publish the documentary record of Joseph Smith. Jessee’s opportunity came following Leonard J. Arrington’s 1972 appointment as the official historian of the church. Arrington assigned Jessee to locate, collect, and transcribe Smith’s writings. As Jessee developed a methodology, he was aware of the massive documentary editing projects sprouting around the United States since volumes of the Thomas Jefferson Papers began appearing in the early 1950s. In response to the publication of Jefferson’s early papers, United States President Harry S Truman had directed the National Historical Publications Commission to promote publication of the papers of America’s Founding Fathers. It was said that “no country in the world will have so complete a record of its beginnings.”⁷ Jessee and Arrington believed that the papers of Joseph Smith were equally essential to the study of Mormon beginnings.

In 1980, the project was transferred from the Church Historian’s Office to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. There Jessee continued his work as a member of the newly formed Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, encouraged and aided by institute directors Leonard J. Arrington and then Ronald K. Esplin. In 1984, Jessee published The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (with a second edition in 2002), containing nearly everything Smith wrote himself and a substantial portion of his dictated writings. This was followed by a broader initiative that resulted in the publication of the two-volume The Papers of Joseph Smith—a volume of Smith’s autobiographical and historical writings in 1989 and a volume of journals in 1992.

As this work proceeded, a more comprehensive plan was developed for publishing Smith’s papers. In 2001, the Joseph Smith Papers Project was established as a collaboration between Brigham Young University and the Church Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This resulting edition will include virtually all extant documents that were written by Joseph Smith, were products of his office, or were produced under his direction. Jessee, now general editor, Esplin, now managing editor, and Richard Bushman, chairman of the executive committee, took responsibility for coordinating teams of historians serving as editors of various volumes and a central staff of editors and researchers to update, expand, and complete the project. Fortunately, as the expanded project got underway, Larry H. and Gail Miller offered to fund the operation.

Scope and Content of the Papers

The new Joseph Smith Papers Project has adopted an enriched editorial procedure and a new organization of materials. All the material in the two previously published volumes of  The Papers of Joseph Smith that qualify for inclusion under new criteria will appear in the new format with expanded annotation as part of The Joseph Smith Papers. In this edition, we intend to publish every extant document to which we can obtain access.⁸ Work is underway on six series of The Joseph Smith Papers:¹

1. The Journal Series will contain the ten journals kept by Smith and his various clerks from 1832 through the end of his  life in 1844.
2. The Documents Series will bring together the early versions of revelations, correspondence sent and received, addresses and sermons, editorials and periodical articles, and official declarations and pronouncements for which Smith was responsible.
3. The History Series will publish the entire manuscript history that Smith began in 1838, which was continued by his clerks after his death. The first volume in this series will serve as an introduction that chronicles Smith’s history-writing initiative that began in 1830 and led up to the official work begun in 1838.
4. The Legal and Business Series will reproduce legal papers from the scores of judicial proceedings in which Smith was either a plaintiff, defendant, or witness. Recent research has uncovered so many new legal documents that only electronic publication may be practical for some of the more routine papers in this series.
5. The Revelations and Translations Series will present the earliest manuscript texts of the Joseph Smith revelations and those published during his lifetime. These include the Book of Mormon and the manuscripts from which it was produced.
6. The Administrative Series will publish records pertaining to church institutions that were established under Joseph Smith’s direction and contain his personal instruction and involvement.

Most of Joseph Smith’s papers are located in the Latter-day Saint Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, while another significant body of his materials is found in the Community of Christ Library-Archives at Independence, Missouri. Additional important items have been located in other public and private repositories.

The diversity and expansiveness of this documentary collection stem from Smith’s extensive leadership in religious and civic roles. He was a translator, revelator, church president, city builder, mayor, city council member, judge, militia leader, and presidential candidate. His papers reflect all those roles. These volumes provide essential resources for the study of Joseph Smith’s life and times.

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