THE 1800’s “NEW ISRAELITES”
R. Brothers, the Woods, the Cowderies, and M. M. Noah
British Israelites | The Wood Scrape | M. M. Noah's Israelite Gathering | Mormon Israelites
see also: The Halcyon Church | The Modern Pilgrims | New England Sects
Early Nineteenth Century American Freemasons in Ritualistic Israelite Garb The New Israelites: Part 1 (pre-1800) Richard Brothers and British Israeliteism 
PREFACE (from Richard Brothers' 1795 A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies...) WHEN I was commanded to write the Chronology of the World, I was immediately after influenced by Revelation how; without which I could not, nor could any other Man on the face of the Earth with certainty, however eminent for Wisdom and Learning he might be; after it was done, the LORD GOD said to me in a vision at night, -- that is the true age of the World, and the generally computed one is erroneous. As the SCRIPTURE is the only great fountain of Knowledge, or Book of written Truth in the World; as it contains the sacred Records of those things which GOD has pre-determined shall be hereafter -- as well as those which have been already; and as it contains the history of our own Creation, with that of every living thing besides, it alone, in preference to any man's opinion, ought to be, without the least doubt, freely believed and confidentially depended upon. Although I am enabled, from revealed knowledge, to write, considerably more than what this Book contains, and which in Justice to the Divine Spirit of truth from whom it flows, ought to be believed; yet GOD, who instructs me in all Things, that I may shew an example of precision to the learned, and be admired for it by the wife; that I may give instruction to the poor, and demonstrate the certainty of what I do write to every Man that has the least knowledge of his Creator, commands me to additionally seal its Truth by that great testimony of scriptural evidence which no nation can deny, and which no human arguments can oppose.  Richard Brothers, the British Prophet (1757-1824) Therefore, having Authority, I proceed through the Scripture, regularly uncovering, by revealed knowledge as I go, its sacred Records WHICH HAVE BEEN PRESERVED FOR ME, holding each one up for public view, beautiful and clear to the open mind; that all men may behold and examine them, that all men may perceive their truth, and admire at this late hour of the world, not only what was wrote by Daniel at Babylon, EXPLAINED IN LONDON, but likewise a familiar communication of REVEALED KNOWLEDGE...
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American Israelites: Part 2 (1795-1810) The Nathaniel Wood Cult and American Israeliteism 
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SOCIAL ARCHITECTS (pp. 238-244 of Chapter Eight in David M. Ludlum's 1939 Social Ferment in Vermont 1791-1850) THROUGH all the currents of social agitation of the early nineteenth century appeared a constant reiteration of a belief in the nearness of a millennial society. The vision of a free man inhabiting a free world has engaged the attention of aspiring souls in all ages and dimes. The back country of early America, stretching from interior New England across New York State and into the Ohio Valley, gave birth to numerous prophets and messiahs who aimed at being the architects and builders of a new social order. The communities among the Green Mountains produced their portion of these Utopians and gave an enthusiastic hearing to their variform plans. The chief actors in the contemplated reorganization of the American way of life fall into two categories in accordance with the mainspring of their thinking. in the first place, there were those who ran to an evangelical pattern and sought a return to the first principles of the Scriptures. The revivals of 1800-1837 had restored the Bible to a high place; to many it was the sole guide for the conduct of life. Accordingly, they felt it their imperative duty to realize the prophecies outlined in the Books of Daniel and Revelation. On the other hand, there were non-religious social planners whose approach was rationalistic. Following the trends of the popular natural-rights philosophy, they set out to discover the natural laws of social organization and to create a system of living guided by blueprints of their own fashioning. These two groups were mutually hostile, the one placing faith in the supernatural, the other in material means. [239] Nevertheless, their objectives were the same, and Vermonters lent receptive ears to each. RELIGIOUS MILLENNIALISTS There are records of several attempts to form a more perfect society in Vermont, and there must have been others which have passed into limbo. One of the first instances occurred in the latter 1790's on the Massachusetts border. A former English army officer by the name of Dorril brought together a circle of followers from Leyden in the Bay State and from Guilford in Vermont. Claiming to be a prophet of God through whom revelations were to be made, he set up a religio-political organization of unique character. 1 Unfortunately, few details of the actual working of this social economy have been preserved. A communism of property existed but no democracy; Dorril appears to have insisted on complete obedience to his divinely inspired commands. He enforced a strict vegetarianism on his followers, and even refused to allow them to don clothes which had been produced at the expense of life. Leather shoes were taboo, woolen foot coverings being the mode. The Dorrilites, so the rumor ran, frequently gathered for bacchanalian revels and thus aroused the suspicions of their neighbors. Joseph Lathrop, a distinguished clergyman of Springfield, Massachusetts, brought this singular sect into prominence by publicly castigating it in one of his tirades against the infidelities of the age. In the northern part of this State, I am well informed, there has lately appeared, and still exists, under a licentious leader, a company of beings, who discard the principles of religion, and obligations of morality, trample on the bonds of matrimony, the separate rights of property, and the laws of civil society, spend the Sabbath in labor or diversion, as fancy dictates, and the nights in riotous excess and promiscuous concubinage, ______________ 1 Material on the Dorrilites is limited: Federal Galaxy (Brattleboro), January 15, 1799; National Philanthropist (Boston), August 3, 1827; Thompson, History of Vermont, II, 203. [240] as lust impels. Their number consists of about forty, some of whom are people of respectable abilities and once, of decent characters. A society of this description, would disgrace the natives of The Reverend Lathrop believed the Dorrilites a manifestation of the Devil, failing to recognize that they were merely trying to conform to their interpretation of Biblical injunction. Like all single-purposed individuals, however, they ultimately took flight on wings of fancy that led to their undoing. One day Dorril announced to his disciples his immunity from pain as an illustration of his God-given powers. Captain Ezekiel Foster, not a member of the company, was drawn to a meeting by his curiosity and there challenged the leader's pretension that "no arm can hurt my flesh." Stepping forward, the Captain delivered a well-aimed blow on the prophet's chin and floored him. Upon being knocked down a second time, Dorril pleaded with Foster to desist. The latter agreed to stop his iconoclastic offensive if his adversary would acknowledge the pain so evident on his face and disclaim any further supernatural powers. With the puncturing of their leader's invulnerability, the Dorrilites dispersed. Nevertheless, a residue of susceptibility to religious excitement remained in the region, as was attested in later years by the occurrence of vigorous religious revivals and a strong attachment to the doctrine of the Second Advent. Among the amalgam that populated the valleys of western Vermont another outburst of fanaticism arose. In 1799 a mysterious fellow by the name of Winchell came to Middletown in Rutland County and took up a secretive residence on an out-lying farm, where he was suspected of being a fugitive from a counterfeiting indictment in Orange County. 3 Presently his ______________ 2 Joseph Lathrop, A Sermon on the Dangers of the Times from Infidelity and Immorality; especially from a lately discovered conspiracy against Religion and Government (Springfield, Mass., 1798), p. 14. 3 Source material on this incident is contained in Barnes Frisbie, History of Middletown, Vermont (Rutland, 1867), pp. 46-64; reminiscences of the affair appear in Vermont American (Middlebury), [241] money-making propensities appeared in a different form; he became a rodsman, one of those gifted frontier characters claiming an ability to discover hidden wealth by the use of a divining rod, usually a stick of witch hazel. During a year's stay in the vicinity Winchell duped many of his neighbors into contributing funds to finance his treasure hunts. Just as each cache was to be uncovered some slight incident occurred to break the mysterious spell. While at Middletown, Winchell made the acquaintance of Nathaniel Wood, who has been described by the historian of Middletown "as dishonest and unscrupulous in matters of religion as any modern politician has been in politics." 4 Wood was one of those defiant Separates of Connecticut who had sought a haven for his unorthodox beliefs in the free air of the Green Mountains. But even in a region given to radicalism Wood stood out from his fellows. In 1789 he was excommunicated from the local Congregational Society for "saying one thing and doing the contrary and persisting in contention." 5 He was therefore forced to organize his own religious sect around the nucleus of his large family. In Winchell's magical powers Wood saw a powerful instrument. Accordingly the divining rod became St. John's rod, and the whole business of the money digging took on an air of revelation and evangelism. The Middletown preacher shortly became conscious of divine inspiration revealed through the rod and commenced to issue pontifical pronouncements which were taken as Gospel truth by his followers. Believers began to exhibit signs of fanaticism under the spell of their faith in the nearness of the Almighty. On one occasion two young ladies felt the presence of the Devil in their clothing; fleeing on a cold night, they threw off their garments and sped naked over the snow to the summit of a near-by mountain to which the rod guided. The frenzy caused by Wood's frequent prophecies increased ______________ 4 Frisbie, History of Middletown, p. 45. 5 Thompson, History of Vermont, II, 200. [242] during the last days of 1800. His wrath against the Gentiles (all those who were skeptical of his disclosures) mounted with each taunt hurled at him. In a short time the announcement came forth that the catastrophe predicted in the Book of Revelation was near. On the fourteenth of January, 1801, God would send a great earthquake and all the unregenerate and their worldly goods would be destroyed. As the appointed time approached, signs were put on the doors of believers in anticipation of the heavenly visitation. The more staid residents of Middletown gave little credence to the local soothsayer, but on the fateful night the authorities called out the militia in the fear that some "destroying Angel" in his mad delusion might do bodily harm to a Gentile. The night passed but neither angel nor earth tremor approached. The Wood Scrape, as the incident was called, is indicative of the belief latent among the religious that the Day of Judgment was not far distant, and it demonstrated the ease with which subtle propagandists claiming divine inspiration could excite the credulous. Another significant aspect of the affair lay in its alleged inspiration of Mormonism. Winchell and Oliver Cowdry, a son of a prominent actor in the Wood Scrape, subsequently moved from Middletown to Palmyra in New York State and there became acquainted with another transplanted Vermont rodsman, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. 6 The strands of connection between the Wood Scrape and the Palmyra outcroppings are too tenuous to withstand historical criticism. Nevertheless the two incidents suggest similar social tendencies in the soil of these two "infected districts." Another group of religious primates appeared in the Green Mountain region in 1817, a year of widespread revivals following ______________ 6 The historian of Middletown was convinced of an intimate connection. "...it is my honest belief that this Wood movement here in Middletown was one source, if not the main source, from which came this monster -- Mormonism." Frisbie, History of Middletown, p. 64. [243] in the wake of a series of economic catastrophes. 7 Designated Pilgrims, they had their origin in Lower Canada near the forks of the St. Francis River, a region forming an extension of the cultural pattern of northern Vermont. In their retreat from a hostile environment the Pilgrims sought an earthly salvation in a return to a Biblical way of life. Bullard, their leader, like many other religious prophets, had suffered a long illness and upon recovery determined to devote himself to the service of Christ. He commenced preaching and soon gathered a following. In their search for the Promised Land the Pilgrims journeyed southward, finally coming to rest at South Woodstock where they gained proselytes to their faith. 8 In tune with the monarchical tendencies of these theocratic communities Bullard became a spiritual and secular dictator and commanded even the personal property of all converts. His fervent desire to return to first principles led him to pay little heed to historical evolution; he ordered his disciples to discard the ornaments of civilization and to clothe themselves in bear skins and leather girdles. By order of their leader the men shaved the upper lip but not the chin. The most notable characteristic was filth, to them a cardinal virtue. Finding no Scriptural command to wash, they never bathed, but delighted in rolling around in the thick dust which covers Vermont by-roads in summertime. To the relief of local religious bodies, they departed the Woodstock district in the fall of 1817, but not without close to a hundred converts, one of whom had formerly been a Methodist preacher. The Pilgrims turned southward then westward in search of their Promised Land. They were reported in Troy, N. Y., Sussex, N.J., Cincinnati, Ohio, and New Madrid, Mo., where Bullard ______________ 7 Thompson, History of Vermont, II, 203. 8 Henry S. Lee, Uncommon Vermont (Rutland, 1926), p. 198; William H. Tucker, History of Hartford, Vermont (Burlington, 1889), p. 271, speaks of "Puritans" in Hartford "around 1820." If would seem that the Pilgrims and Puritans were the same, [244] finally lost his charm and the pilgrimage appears to have ended. 9 At a New York village they were interviewed by Ira Chase, a Baptist elder, who reported that their leader was a red-bearded giant who "rules the whole company as an absolute monarch in all things spiritual and secular." When questioned closely about his tenets, the leader ordered silence, then "he and some of the others, poured forth upon both of us, a torrent of abuse, such as surpassed all that may be heard in a grog shop, from the lowest of the profane rabble, when ministers of the Gospel are made the theme of derision." 10 The Pilgrims represented an extreme expression of the fundamentalist spirit dominating religious men of the early nineteenth century. The greatest of the Vermont prophets was John Humphrey Noyes, born in 1807 in the valley of Federalism and Congregationalism, in conservative Brattleboro. The history of the development of the Noyesian theology of Perfectionism at the Putney Community in Windham County and its further expansion at Oneida in New York State is a fascinating story, one which has been told many times of late and told well. 11 Therefore, it will be pertinent to confine attention to the philosophical basis of the movement and to examine its relationship to the contemporary world. The focal point of Perfectionism was the belief that Christ had already reappeared on earth and that the reign of the Second Kingdom had commenced... ______________ 9 Budget (Troy, N. Y.), and Register (Sussex, N. J.) quoted in American Yeoman (Brattleboro), October 14, 1817; Cincinnati Bee quoted in North Star (Danville), May 22, 1818. 10 Letter of Ira Chase, Clarksburgh, Va., January 6, 1818, in The American Baptist Magazine (New York), May 1818, pp. 341-44. 11 Two works by George W. Noyes are practically source books of information about his ancestor's career: Religious Experiences of John Humphrey Noyes (New York, 1923), and John Humphrey Noyes, The Putney Community (Oneida, 1931). Pierpoint Noyes has written a penetrating appraisal of his father's later life: My Father's House (New York, 1937). The best of the biographies is Robert A. Parker, A Yankee Saint, John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community (New York, 1935).
THE NEW LIGHT STIR
[p. 40] THE most important religious event in rural New England during the Revolition was a revival that swept across the hill country and maritime Canada between 1776 and 1783... [p. 47] One such event -- the Dark Day of 1780 -- occurred about midway through the Stir and served to drive it to new heights of chiliastic fervor. On 19 May 1780, from early morning on the Hudson Valley to mid-afternoon as far east as Casco Bay, Maine, all of New England was plunged into an eerie and profound darkness. At Worcester, "the Obscurity was so great that those who had good eyesight could scarcely see to read common print... The impact of Dark Day was electric: To the already indubitable millennial signs of war and revival, God had added yet another through dramatic natural omens... It is not recollected from History... that a darkness of equal Intenseness & Duration has ever happened in any parts of the world, except in Egypt, and at the miraculous Eclipse at the Crucifixion... New England might soon see the climax of the divine drama begun with Exodus and the Crucifixion... that we may be filled with reverential awe of the divine majesty... [[transcriber's note -- cf 3 Nephi, pp. 471-2, Book of Mormon, 1830 ed.: And it came to pass that there was thick darkness upon all the face of the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof which had not fallen, could feel the vapour of darkness; and there could be no light... and there was not any light seen, neither fire, nor glimmer, neither the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, for so great were the mists of darkness which were upon the face of the land. And it came to pass that it did last for the space of three days, that there was no light seen; and there was great mourning, and howling, and weeping among all the people continually; yea, great were the groanings of the people, because of the darkness and the great destruction which had come upon them. And in one place they were heard to cry, saying: O that we had repented before this great and terrible day...]][pp. 54-55] ... A different pattern of local sectarianism appeared in the rise of the New Israelites of Middletown, Vermont. This community was inspired by Nathaniel Wood, a Separate from Norwich, Connecticut, who was one of Middletown's original settlers, and sire of its leading family. During the 1780a Wood's sons, Jacob, Ephraim, and Nathaniel, served the new settlement in most elective capacities including state representative, justice of the peace, and selectman. The Woods also had been prominent in the founding of the Middletown Congregationalist Church in 1780, but nine years later Nathaniel Wood was expelled for censoriousness and heterodoxy. "He had gotten up a new system of religious doctrine, and seemed determined it should prevail at all events." His three sons and their families allied with the patriarch and withdrew from the church. [48 Lee, Uncommon Vermont, p. 190] The new family sect soon assumed a menacing tone, pronouncing "supernatural agencies and special judgments of God" on local citizens. This defensive posture was elaborated into theological terms with "Priest" Woods's assertion that his followers were "modern Israelites or Jews, who were under the special guardianship of the Almighty while the Gentiles -- all who were opposed to them -- would suffer from their hostility." For about ten years Priest Wood and his New Israelites adopted rigorous dietary and sumptuary codes based on their reading of the Mosaic Law and manifested prophetic and other spiritual gifts. During this period the sect grew to a modest size, including in its numbers Joseph Smith, Sr., father of the Mormon prophet , and Oliver Cowdery, Sr. [sic], father of one of the three Mormon Witnesses. [49 James Frisbee, The History of Middletown, Vermont (Rutland, Vt., 1867), p. 57.] Around 1799 the New Israelites come under the influence of a diviner named Wingate [sic] who convinced the Woods that secret prophecies and miraculous root medicines could be discovered by use of divining rods. Priest Wood pronounced the rods to be instruments of God's judgment and used their powers to make increasingly bizarre demands on his followers. For example, the rods revealed to Wood that Satan was inhabiting the clothes of two adolescent females in the sect, who were then directed to strip and hike naked over a nearby mountain to purify themselves. A temple was built and then abandoned by command of the rods, and for several years New Israelites spent their summers digging for treasure under their guidance. This sectarian jumble of divination, prophecy, and alienation crystalized in Wood's prediction that "the destroyer would pass through the land and slay a portion of unbelievers" on the night of 14 January 1801 and that a great earthquake would obliterate the remaining unfaithful. The New Israelites recognized the prophecy as a second Passover preparatory to the end of the world. They abandoned their homes, painting over the doorposts the slogan "Jesus our Passover was sacrificed for us" as a sign for their possessions to be spared. They then gathered in a schoolhouse to observe the Passover by fasting, prayer, and exhortation. The local militia was mustered to meet any insurrectionary action by the New Israelites, but the night passed quietly. Wood announced a slight miscalculation, then eight weeks later instructed believers to contribute their specie to pave the streets of the New Jerusalem. [50 Ibid., pp. 60-61] At this point the diviner Wingate [sic] was exposed as a convicted counterfeitor, and the movement collapsed. The Wood, Smith, and Cowdery families [sic] left Middletown in disgrace for upstate New York, where their religious enthusiasm passed to a new generation. Still other, less documented sects flourished in the hill country. During the 1790s Thomas Fessenden of Walpole, New Hampshire, gathered several congregations around his unorthodox "science of sanctity." Around 1805 William Bullard, a Vermont prophet, organized an ascetic community of "pilgrims" in the central Green Mountains. Perhaps the most elusive sect was the Annihilationists, also called the Nothingarians, who believed that the souls of the unjust were not damned, but rather exterminated at death. This particular tenet, which assumed that the elect were the only immortal and truly alive beings on earth, was popular especially in the upper Connecticut Valley. [51 I. D. Stewart, The History of the Freewill Baptists (Dover, N. H., 1862), p, 58; Lee Uncommon Vermont, pp. 197-199; William Bullard, A Union Prescribed and Recommended (Windsor, Vt, 1804); Thomas Fessenden, A Theocratic Explanation of the Science of Sanctity (Brattleboro, Vt., 1804). |
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Marvin S. Hill Review of No Man Knows My History 2nd ed. from Dialogue, Winter 1972 [excerpt on Wood's New Israelites] ... a major discrepancy in Brodie's interpretation. Her thesis that the prophet grew from necromancer to prophet assumes that the two were mutually exclusive, that if Smith were a money digger he could not have been religiously sincere. This does not necessarily follow. Many believers, active in their churches, were money diggers in New England and western New York in this period. Few contemporaries regard these money diggers as irreligious, only implying so if their religious views seemed too radical. The historian of Middletown, Vermont, Barnes Frisbie, was much closer to the truth when he said that the rodsmen who flourished in Orange County, at Wells, Middletown and Poultney, Vermont at the turn of the nineteenth century were accentuated by religious not monetary motives. They saw themselves as the children of Israel and believed in impending judgments, in the restoration of primitive Christianity and in the healing gifts. Frisbie's characterization of these rodsmen is substantiated by Ovid Miner, who wrote about them in the Vermont American, May 7, 1828. About 1800 one or two families in Rutland county, who had been considered respectable, and who had been Baptists, pretended to have been informed by the Almighty that they were the descendants of the Ancient jews, and were, with their connexions, to be put in possession of the land for some miles around; the way for which was to be providentially prepared by the destruction of their fellow townsmen.... [They claimed] power to cure disease, and intuitive knowledge of lost or stolen goods, and ability to discover hidden treasures....Frisbie insisted that Oliver Cowdery's father was a member of this group. Despite some similarity between the ideas of the rodsmen and those later advocated by Joseph Smith, and despite the fact that when Oliver Cowdery took up his duties as a scribe for Joseph Smith in 1829 he had a rod in his possession which Joseph Smith sanctioned, there is no evidence as yet to prove a direct influence. Rather, what this suggests is that Brodie's dichotomy between money digger and prophet rests upon her twentieth century assumptions.... |
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Richard L. Anderson's 1984 Article "Mature Joseph Smith & Treasure Searching," from BYU Studies, 24:4 (Fall 1984) [excerpt on Wood's New Israelites] [p. 521] "The Gift of Aaron" "The gift of Aaron" first appeared in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, referring to powers of revelation that Oliver Cowdery should use as he began assisting Joseph Smith in Book of Mormon Translation... its first printing referred to Cowdery's "gift of working with the rod." [[101 A Book of Commandments for the Government of the Church of Christ (Zion, Mo.: W. W. Phelps and Co., 1833), 7:3. end101]] To some, this means that Oliver Cowdery had used a divining rod to locate buried wealth in pre-Mormon days... Some view Oliver Cowdery as a treasure diviner because of a local historian's theory in Oliver's boyhood area. Around 1801, a bubble of zeal burst for the Wood family and associates in Middletown, Vermont. They had enthusiastically claimed revelation setting up a new Israel and a new Jerusalem by using the Bible and treasure sticks.... About forty years later, the movement was investigated by lawyer Barnes Frisbie, who sought to prove that these money-digging Israelites were "one source, if not the main source from which came this monster -- Mormonism." [[102 Barnes Frisbie, The History of Middletown, Vermont (Rutland, Vt.: Turtle and Co., 1867), 64. This is the earliest printing of a history that was reissued in Abbie Maria Hemenway, The Vermont Historical Gazeteer (Burlington, Vt.: A. M. Hemenway, 1871), vol. 3, with the quote here on 819. An abridgment of these accounts is found in H. P. Smith and W. S. Rann, History of Rutland County, Vermont (Syracuse, N.Y.: D. Mason and Co., 1886), 653-60. This history also contains specific dates in Frisbie's life (889-90), showing how distant he was from the Wood affair. He was born in 1815 and married in 1843 after a late education and reading for law, resulting in bar admission in 1842. Thus his start of collecting serious history was about forty years after the discredited Woods had migrated. In fact, Frisbie's preface to his 1867 History mentions "the labor and attention I have given the matter during the last twelve years" (3), indicating serious collecting about 1855. (Compare n. 105 and the text there for Frisbie's development of a Mormon connection after 1860. ) end102]] His evidence was their biblical restorationism plus a fugitive counterfeiter named Winchell or Wingate, who had an undefined relationship with Oliver Cowdery's father, William, in nearby Wells, Vermont. Frisbie heard that the stranger "stayed at Cowdery's some little time, keeping himself concealed." [[103 Frisbie, History of Middletown, Vermont, 46; also cited in Hemenway, Vermont Historical Gazeteer, 3:812.]] The Wood group supposedly learned their rodding from this faceless individual. But Frisbie gives no reason for including William Cowdery in the Wood group except as host to Winchell/Wingate. ... William Cowdery is the only direct link between Mormonism and the Wood movement. Frisbie mentions him in two very disconnected paragraphs. At first he profiles William's supposed relationship with the counterfeiter.... But William Cowdery did not live near the Wood group, did not attend their meetings, nor is he even mentioned as a distant sympathizer.... Frisbie draws a strange conclusion: "I have before said that Oliver Cowdery's father was in the 'Wood scrape.'" But William Cowdery's knowing a man who knew the Woods does not make him a participant... The main group of Middletown survivors of the 1800 period... said nothing of a counterfeiter or of Cowdery... The 1867 recollections of a minister who visited the group in the final weeks of their movement include mention of the counterfeiter but not Cowdery... [[106 Laban Clark to Barnes Frisbie, 30 January 1867, Middletown, Conn., cited in Frisbie, History of Middletown, Vermont, 57; also cited in Hemenway, Vermont Historical Gazeteer, 3:816. end106]] Frisbie's own claims about the Cowdery connection to the Wood group are both unclear and unsupported. [[107 Like some who write today on Mormon origins, Frisbie features dark hints rather than definite information. For instance, the counterfeiter allegedly started his money digging at Wells, obviously an attempt to include William Cowdery, since he lived there... [p. 522] Frisbie's summation soars even further beyond his facts: "I have been told that Joe Smith's father resided in Poultney at the time of the Wood movement here, and that he was in it and one of the leading rodsmen." That claim is empty, for family and town sources clearly place the Prophet's father fifty miles away as a young married farmer in Tunbridge, Vermont... Frisbie is here building his picture of a Vermont money-digging team -- Winchell/Wingate and the elders Cowdery and Smith -- to be later revived in Palmyra with their sons added. But both Oliver and Joseph said they had never seen each other before beginning the 1829 translation. [[109 For Joseph Smith, see History of the Church, 1:32... For Oliver Cowdery, see Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate 1 (October 1834): 14...]] Frisbie also claims, without supporting evidence, that after leaving Vermont the counterfeiter was in the Smiths' New York neighborhood, a contention Frisbie claims "has been fully proven by men who... knew him in both places." Hardly so, for the historian's sources associate the counterfeiter with the Woods but not with New York Mormons.... Frisbie's sources may have carelessly assumed that his counterfeiter was the same as the "vagabond fortune-teller by the name of Waiters, who then resided in the town of Sodus ... the constant companion and bosom friend of these money digging imposters" (Palmyra Reflector, 28 February 1831; also cited in Kirkham, New Witness for Christ, 1:291-92).... the New York magician does not meet the conditions. Waiters has the wrong name, lives in the wrong town, and does not fit Frisbie's contention that the man went to Ohio with the Mormons... [p. 523] ... This guesswork deserves little notice, but it was apparently taken at face value by Whitney Cross, the analyst of New York revivalism, who shattered chronology by referring to the Wood movement and adding: "One of the two leaders, named Winchell, and a follower, named Oliver Cowdery, moved to Palmyra, New York, where the latter in time became Joseph Smith's clerical assistant." [[112 Cross, Burned-Over District, 38-39....]] The Wood movement deflated about 1801; Oliver was born in 1806, so he could hardly have been a "follower" of Wood or Winchell. Further, as we have seen, no Winchell is known in Palmyra or around the Smiths, nor does present evidence make William Cowdery a Wood adherent or a rodsman.... [p. 524] ... As discussed, the Wood episode is no more than a cultural analogy. Joseph Smith's reasons for approving the rod must be reconstructed from Mormon sources.... [p. 525] ... Oliver's initial revelation closes with the command to seek heavenly "treasures" by assisting "in bringing to light, with your gift, those parts of my scriptures which have been hidden because of iniquity" (D&C 6:27). The revelation on the gift of the rod probably followed within a week. [[121 See n. 119.]] It continued the theme of learning ancient truth through translating: "Remember, this is your gift" (D&C 8:5). And it could be exercised by believing "you shall receive a knowledge concerning the engravings of old records" (D&C 8:1). Then a second promise was made: Now this is not all, for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod. Behold, it has told you things. Behold, there is no other power save God that can cause this rod of nature to work in your hands, for it is the work of God. And therefore whatsoever you shall ask me to tell you by that means, will I grant unto you, that you shall know. [[122 Book of Commandments 7:3, present D&C 8.]]... So the "rod of nature" in Cowdery's "hands" would be a means of gaining revelation on doctrine.... [p. 529] Oliver's "working with the rod" suggests that the rod would bring revelation because it signified associate authority. This is the major distinction from Aaron's rod in early magical handbooks. Anyone could read the Bible and attempt to duplicate any practice -- anyone could attach Aaron's name to magical wands or divining sticks. The name is not the issue but the authentic context of delegated power. [p. 530] The revelation -- authority aspects of Oliver Cowdery's rod are clues to its method of operation. The Woods' rods probably chose between alternatives, so the dips of the stem would answer questions on a yes-no basis. But the prophetic authority staff provides a better model, one harmonious with Joseph Smith's known thinking as the leader of the restored Church. Some associates of the Prophet used a rod in a special prayer. In 1841, Orson Hyde wrote from the Near East after dedicating Israel for the Gathering: "On what was anciently called Mount Zion, where the temple stood, I... used the rod according to the prediction upon my head."... |
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David Persuitte's 1985 book Joseph Smith & the Origins of the Bk. of Mor. (© David Persuitte 1985 limited excerpts on "New Israelites") Appendix A The "Wood Scrape" [p. 234 "The "Wood Scrape" is the name given to an aggair that occured around the year 1800 in the vicinity of Middleton (now Middletown Springs), Vermont. Its possible relationship to the origin of Mormonism has not been generally recognized in the literature but it has some interesting aspects that deserve to be made better known. In it one finds moneydigging, a religious cult that seems to have been a kind of primitive precursor to Mormonism, and an individual who appears to have had a connection with Oliver Cowdery's father and with Joseph Smith and his father. [p. 234 Both Wells and Middletown are adjacent to Poultney, where Ethan Smith published his View of the Hebfrws some years after these events. At the time of the Wood Scrape, the Cowdery family lived in Wells, and it was there that Oliver Cowdery was born. The Cowdery family afterwards moved to Middletown... [p. 238 ...Frisbie could not find the name of Wingate or Winchell in any of the material on the Mormons that he had researched. Nevertheless, his statements concerning Wingate/Winchell find a remarkable fit in the statements about Walters the "juggler"... that Obediah Dogberry published in the Palmyra Reflector. ... it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that Walters was Wingate/Winchell... it would be quite remarkable that two different "jugglers" would have played such similar roles in association with the Smith family and the Palmyra moneydiggers... |
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D. Michael Quinn's 1987 book Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (revised ©1998 edition text excerpted below) [p. 35] ... a religious group began using forked divining rods for revelatory purposes in Vermont about 1800. This was not far from the Smiths, or from William Cowdery (father of future Book of Mormon scribe Oliver Cowdery). At Middletown, Vermont, Nathaniel Wood was instructing his followers that "they were descendants of the ancient Jews, and lawful inheritors of the whole country." They believed in alchemy and used a "cleft stick, or rod," to discover "the hidden treasures of the earth" and to receive instructions by "a nod of assent É from the rods," (emphasis in original) including a revelation "that they must build a temple"... The Wood group's civil prominence, fervor, and open conflict with non-believers led to the so-called "Wood Scrape," a sensational even known far beyond the Cowdery family's residence six miles away. The Wood group's "Fraternity of Rodsmen" boldly prophesied they would inherit that region of the country in an apocalyptic event on 14 January 1802.... This was happening six miles from the Cowderys' home.... In fact, an early history of Vermont reported that Joseph Sr. and William Cowdery had more than a casual awareness of the Wood group. Based on interviews with residents of the town, Barnes Frisbie wrote in 1867: "I have been told that Joe Smith's father resided in Poultney at the time of the Wood movement here, and that he was in it, and one of the leading rods-men... Oliver Cowdery's father was in the 'Wood scrape.' He then lived in Wells"... This rumored association of the Smiths and the Cowderys with the "Fraternity of Rodsmen" in Rutland County has recently been disputed [R. L. Anderson 1984, 521-24; cf. chap. 4, etc]... Frisbie was unaware of LDS evidence that Oliver Cowdery was a rodsman... Coincidence alone can account for Frisbie's accuracy in identifying the Cowderys with a diving rod... From 1800 to 1802, Nathaniel Wood's "use of the rod was mostly as a medium of revelation"... A connection between William Cowdery and the Wood Scrape would help to explain why his son Oliver had a rod through which he received revelations.... [p. 38] The historical record is silent about how or when Oliver Cowdery obtained the divining rod he was already using for revelation before April 1829. He was twenty-two years old, had been a school teacher, and that his father was later identified as a Vermont rodsman. If the Vermont reports about William Cowdery were accurate, Oliver probably obtained that knowledge of folk magic from his father, either by observation or personal knowledge. [p. 39] ... Aside from evidence that the Smiths and Cowderys used divining rods from the early 1800s to 1829, another early New York Mormon was also a rodsman. A resident of Livonia, about twenty-five miles from the Smith farm, Alva(h) Beman (also Beaman) was "a grate [sic] Rodsman"... [p. 122] In view of the 1830-31 published statements from Palmyra about the link between Smith and "Walters the Magician," it is intriguing that no reference to him appears in Howe's 1834 Mormonism Unvailed. The reason for this may be that the Mormon apostate Philastus Hurlbut, who gathered much of the information for Howe's anti-Mormon exposŽ... [p. 123] ... A Walter(s)-Winchell-Hurlbut family connection began in Connecticut. It coalesced around the Joseph Smith family in Vermont, where Winchell was was involved with the Wood Scrape. Members of Walter(s)-Winchell families followed the Smiths into New York, and were reputed to be linked with both Joseph Sr. and Jr. there. Members of the Walter and Hurlbut families even entered the LDS church. Philastus Hurlbut gathered almost all of the information about the Smiths in New York for Howe's book, yet, he may have had too many personal connections with folk magic to mention neighborhood claims of a Walter(s)-and-Winchell association with the Smith family. As previously noted, residents of Middletown (Rutland County) claimed that a man named Winchell was involved in activities of religious folk magic with William Cowdery, Nathaniel Wood. and Joseph Smith, Sr. After his excommunication from the Congregational church at Middletown in 1789, Wood taught that "himself and his followers [were] modern Israelites or Jews, under the special care of Providence." Middletown residents added that the quiet activity of these dissenters ended in 1799, when a visitor named Winchell introduced the divining rod to the neighborhood: "He was a fugitive from justice from Orange county, Vermont, where he had been engaged in counterfeiting. He first went to a Mr. Cowdry's [sic], in Wells É the father of Oliver Cowdry, the noted Mormon." According to these neighbors, "Winchell made the acquaintance of the Woods; and they then commenced using the hazel rod and digging for money, which was in the spring or early in the summer of 1800." Based on his interview with more then thirty old-time residents, local historian Frisbie added that the Wood group now gained converts among "several families" in nearby Wells and Poultney (which were 7.4 miles apart): "I have been told that Joe Smith's father resided in Poultney at the time of the Wood movement here, and that he was in it, and one of the leading rodsmen"... Winchell allegedly left Orange County at the time Asael Smith and his son Joseph lived there.... Eight months after the Wood incident, the September 1802 warning out of Justus Winchell was consistent with a newspaper report that Middletown put gradual pressure on Wood Scrape's participants to leave... [p. 124] After the Wood Scrape, Winchell apparently was in St. Lawrence County (Jefferson County as of 1805), New York, a few years after the Wood families settled there in 1804-1805. In December 1813 a minister from there wrote to two merchants in Poultney, Vermont. He referred to the Winchell these men already knew in Rutland County: "Col. Winchell who was married in Augst last to Leita Coates, was in Septr or Octr married to another woman in Adams; indited and sent to jail, broke out, catched, and now chained to the floor"... only eight miles from the Woodville [p. 125] settlement founded by Nathaniel Wood and other family participants in the Vermont Wood Scrape. ... the census of 1800 creates additional questions about the Smith family's location during the time of the Wood Scrape, because a Joseph Smith family is listed in both areas.... [p. 127] The Congregational church provides yet another link between the Winchells, Woods, Walters, Cowderys, Smiths, and other participants in the folk magic of Vermont and New York. Nathaniel Wood (b. 1729) was a Congregational minister in Norwich, Connecticut, and was a leader of the Congregational church in Middletown before he broke with its minister and formed his "Fraternity of Rodsmen"... Oliver Cowdery's grandfather was a deacon in the Congregational church in Vermont... Oliver's father William was interested in Wood's activities in forming a schismatic Congregationalist group six miles away. Joseph Smith, Sr., was a member of the Universalist society in Vermont, but Congregationalism was part of his family heritage... Similar residence and migration patterns alone do not establish personal associations, but civil and family records demonstrate that the leaders of Vermont's Wood Scrape originated in Connecticut and that the Wood Scrape's rodsman Winchell and "Walters the magician" of Palmyra originated in adjacent neighborhoods in Connecticut. In those same neighborhoods there were familial connections with three other associates of Joseph Smith in New York's folk magic: the Orrin Porter Rockwell family, Samuel Lawrence, and Alva(h) Be(a)man... [p. 130] ... On the basis of geographic movements, Royal Barney, Sr., was one early Mormon who may have had direct acquaintance with the Woods. Due to community pressure in the aftermath of the Wood Scrape of January 1802, Nathaniel Wood and his extended family moved from Vermont to Jefferson County, New York, where they established Woodville in 1803. In the spring of 1804, Royal's uncle Edward Barney moved his family from Vermont to Ellisburg, adjacent to the Wood clan's settlement. Royal apparently accompanied his uncle to Ellisburg, where Royal Sr.'s children were born prior to their conversion to Mormonism in the 1830s... [p. 131] Richard L. Anderson dismissed allegations of a possible Winchell-Walter(s) connection with the Smiths and Cowderys in the Middletown Wood Scrape and at Palmyra because "Walters has the wrong name, lives in the wrong town, and does not fit Frisbie's contention that the man went to Ohio with the Mormons.... To the contrary, his family history specifies that Luman Walters was "a clairvoyant who moved to Ohio"... |
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John L. Brooke's 1994 book The Refiner's Fire... (© Cambridge University Press 1994 limited excerpts on "New Israelites") [p. 57] ... Treasure-divining was a central dimension of the radical perfectionism of the New Israelite movement, which emerged in Rutland County, Vermont at the end of the 1790s and which would have direct links to early Mormonism. The New Israelites had roots in the broad orbit of sectarian dissent in southeast New England. The leader of the cult, Nathaniel Wood, had emigrated in the early 1780s from Newport Parish in Norwich, Connecticut, to Bennington, Vermont, where his brother Ebenezer had settled in 1761, and then moved on with his family to Middletown, in western Rutland County... Associated with the Newent Separates after the Awakening, Nathaniel Wood may have been among a group of Separates who rejoined the orthodox church in Newent in 1770. If so, he would have listened to the Reverend Joel Benedict, whose belief that Hebrew was "the language of the angels" might have shaped Wood's [p. 58] subsequent visions of a new Jerusalem. Benedict was dismissed by the Newent church in 1782, and in that year the Woods began to arrive in Middletown. Aspiring to be the minister of the local Congregationalist church, Nathaniel Wood quarreled with the church until he was excommunicated in 1789. He then began preaching to small meetings that evolved into New Israelite sect. [[93 John S. Wood, The Wood Family Index (Germantown, Md., 1966), 114, 261, 354, 411; Francis M. Caulkins, History of Norwich, Connecticut (New London?, 1874), 441; Goen, Revivalism and Separatism, 84; Barnes Frisbie, The History of Middletown, Vermont... (Rutland, Vt., 1867), 44-6.]] The beliefs of the New Israelites brought together magical practice and biblical restorationism in ways not seen since Ephrata and the English revolutionary sects. After his excommunication, Nathaniel Wood prophesied "special acts of Providence" and claimed powers of revelation. Claiming literal descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel and to be living in a special dispensation, his family and followers began work on a temple and divined for gold "to pave the streets of the New Jerusalem." Their expectations that a "Destroying Angel" would bring down earthquakes and plagues on the "gentiles" so alarmed the town on the appoinred night (January 14, 1802) the militia turned out under arms. When the Apocalypse failed to materialize, the Woods removed west to Ellisburg, in St. Lawrence County, New York. Their story was much entangled with the formative origins of Mormonism. [[94 Frisbie, Middletown, 44-6, 52-3, 56; Vermont American, May 7, 1828; Quinn, Early Mormonism, 30-2. 84-90; J. H. French, Gazetteer of the State of New York... (New York, 1860), 357-8.]] ... [p. 133] This Masonic millenarianism also seems to have shaped the hermeticism and restorationism of the New Israelite cult of Middletown, led by the Wood family, recently moved from Norwich, Connecticut. One nineteenth-century account places Joseph Smith Sr. himself among the New Israelites. If true, it would have taken him about fifty miles from his young family in Tunbridge. In any event, Joseph would boast in the 1830s in Ohio that his diving career had begun decades before in Vermont. [[11 Quinn, Early Mormonism, 22, 31-2; Hill, Joseph Smithg, 67; Ronald W. Walker, "The Persisting Idea of American Treasure Hunting," BYUS 24 (1984), 444; Stephen Green, "The Money Diggers," Vermont Life 24 (1969), 48; Hemenway, ed., Vermont Historical Gazetteer, 3:1089.]] The other Mormon connection with the New Israelites noted in this account is much more certain. William Cowdery, Jr., the father of Oliver Cowdery, who would be Joseph Smith Jr's closest associate in the early years of the Mormon church, was connected to the New Israeiites when he lived in Wells, Vermont, providing a room in his house for the counterfeiter Winchell. William Cowdery apparently learned to divine during these years, and his son Oliver carried with him to Palmyra and Harmony the power of the divining rod, which Joseph Smith spoke of in revelation as Oliver's "gift of working the rod." [[12 On the role of William Cowdery and Joseph Smith, Sr. in the New Israelite movement, see Barnes Frisbie, The History of Middletown, Vermont (Rutland, Vt., 1867), 46, 56-61; Marini, Radical Sects, 54-5; David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, N. C., 1985, 234-8; Quinn, Early Mormonism, 31-2, 84-90. For the revelation about the rod, see A Book of Commandmenys, for the Government of the Church of Christ, organized according to Law, on the 6th of April, 1830 (Zion {Independence, Mo.}, 19. There may have been a distant connection to the Cumberland, Rhode Island, perfectionists in the New Israelite cult, because an Ephraim Wood, possibly the grandson of Nathaniel Wood, was arrested with Appollus Finney for counterfeiting in Shrewsbury, Vermont, in 1795. Wood was aquitted but Finney was convicted...]] The story of the relaytionship between Joseph Smith Jr. and Oliver Cowdery is one of the central elements of early Mormon history. On April 5, 1829, twenty-three-year-old Oliver Cowdery presented himself to Joseph Smith in Harmony, Pennsylvania, and two days later replaced Martin Harris as the scribe for the translation of the Book of Mormon.... [p. 134] William Cowdery, Jr., Oliver's father, married Rebecca Fuller, Lydia Gates's second cousin, and settled to the west in Wells, Rutland County, Vermont, by 1788. Other Cowderies settled to the east in Orange County. Between 1785 and 1790 two of Nathaniel Cowdery's sons, Jabez and Jacob, settled in Tunbridge. Both were physicians, and Jabez's wife, Ruth, was also a healer, who achieved "marvelous" cures. These Cowdery relations may have provided a connection between Joseph Smith Sr. and William Cowdery Jr. later in the decade when the New Israelites offered another species of the "marvelous." Certainly William Cowdery was drawn to the Ontario country of western New York at roughly the same time as the Smiths. In 1810 he and his family were living on Lake Ontario north of Palmyra, and after returning to Middletown Springs by 1814, the Cowderies were living in Arcadia, just east of Palmyra, in 1830... |
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Dan Vogel's 1995 book Early Mormon Documents vol. I (© Signature Books 1995 limited excerpts on "New Israelites") [p. 613] ... William Cowdery, Oliver's father was closely associated with, if not a member of Vermont's Wood Scrape, and participated in folk magic. Quinn has linked him closely with Nathanael Wood's "Fraternity of Rodsmen." (Quinn 1987, 84-86) Alan Taylor also discovered this connection in his research on the previously cited "Treasure Seeking In the American Northeast," and states: In 1799 a seer named Wingate arrived in Middletown as a guest of the Woods and of William Cowdry [sic] in adjoining Wells, Vermont. The Woods began to feature divining rods in their rituals, insisting that the rods' jerks in answer to their questions represented divine messages. (Taylor 1986, 24)... [p. 614] ... Quinn goes to great lengths to establish links between the Smith family and other early Mormons, on the one hand, and the occultic activities of the 1802 "Wood Scrape" on the other. Pages 83-97 abound in second cousins and even third cousins twice removed, linked to associates of Nathaniel Wood by marriage.... [[Vogel is here quoting from Frisbie]] Mr. Clark says, "I ascertained afterwards that the eldest son of Priest Wood, called Capt. Wood, was the princi[p]al religious mover in sight, while Wingate kept concealed. Wood was Wingate's outside agent, and got up the religious excitement to aid the scheme." This Wingate and Winchell the name given me by Perry and others, are beyond question, one and the same person. What we get from Mr. Clark's letter, so far as it goes, of Wingate is the same I obtained from Perry of Winchell in 1862 -- that is, that he was detected in counterfeiting, in Bradford, Vt., came here and was with the Woods in their movement, and kept himself concealed in the time. Perry told me that he changed his name after he came, to avoid discovery by the officers of justice. Whether he did or not, I cannot be positive, but it is established beyond controversy, that a man came, first to Wells, then to Middletown, introduced the hazel rod, and afterwards acted a part with the Woods which we have indicated; and that Winchell, as given me by Perry, and Wingate the name in Mr. Clark's letter, both mean that man.... Now was this wild and mysterious affair a movement to cover up a counterfeiting scheme? Such has been the opinion of nearly all with whom I have conversed on that subject. The old folks who were here at the time, were very decidedly of that opinion. That Winchell availed himself of this "outside" movement to cover up and aid his nefarious schemes, is very likely. He was cool and deliberate -- he "could raise the wind and not be carried along with it," and turn the effects of it to his own advantage. In the Wood families, and especially in Nathaniel Wood's family, were some of the best minds the town ever had. Jacob Wood, the oldest son of Nathaniel, was elected one of the selectmen of the town at the first meeting after the town was organized, and almost constantly held some town office after that. He was more like his father than his other sons -- more inclined to be a religious agitator. Ephraim, the second son, was elected constable at the first annual meeting, and had several successive elections to that office. He and his brother, Nathaniel Jr., at first tacitly assented to their fathers religious notions, but after the rod delusion commenced, they were drawn into it, though they never took a leading part as their brother Jacob did. Nathaniel Wood, Jr., was undoubtedly the superior of all the Woods in point of ability and culture. He represented [p. 615] Middletown in the legislature five or six years in succession; was for a long time the active justice of the peace here; was town clerk several years, and held other offices. He was the father of Reuben Wood, [[26 Reuben Wood (c. 1792-1864), oldest son of Nathaniel Wood, was born in about 1792 in Middletown, Rutland County, Vermont. At age fifteen he went to Canada to live with an uncle. In 1812 he joined his widowed mother in Woodsville, Jefferson County, New York, then back to Middletown, Vermont, where he studied law with General Jonas Clark. He married Mary Rice in 1816. In 1818 he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he practiced law. Wood served in the state senate from 1825 to 1830, was elected president judge of the third common pleas circuit from 1830 to 1833, and was chosen for the Ohio supreme court from 1833 to 1847. On 5 February 1847 Wood went to Tiffin, Ohio, to judge a case against a General Sea, who was defended by R. G. Pennington and Oliver Cowdery. In 1850 Wood was elected governor of Ohio and served until he resigned in 1853 to serve as the American consul at Valparaiso, Chile. When he returned to America in 1855, he resumed his law practice in Cleveland. He died at Cleveland (Dumas 1962, 10:470-71; Lang 1880, 371; Wickham 1914, 1:215-17).]] ...The Wood families removed from Middletown as soon as they could conveniently after the failure of their earthquake enterprise; they went to Ellisburg, N.Y., and it has been said, that ever after, they and their descendants have demeaned themselves as good citizens. [[27 The Vermont American reported: "The leaders of the fraternity É seeing the 'slow moving finger of scorn' pointed towards them from all their neighbors; and fearing, moreover, that the heavy hand of the law would fall on them for their misdeeds; -- disposed of their property and removed into the county of St. Lawrence [later Jefferson County], New York; where it is said something of their former delusion struck by them" (7 May 1828). Quinn states that this is consistent with Nathaniel Wood Jr.'s resignation as justice of the peace in Middletown in 1803 and settlement of the Wood family in Woodville (adjacent to Ellisburg), St. Lawrence County (Jefferson County as of 1805), also in 1803 (Quinn 1987, 85, 90, 94).]] [p. 617] ... Mr. Clark in his letter says: "By what I have heard of them, (the Woods,) I have no doubt that the movement gave origin to the Mormons." This opinion of Mr. Clark, I have no doubt will be received by you as a surprise, as it would be to the people generally, both in and out of Middletown. But Mr. Clark is not the only man who has given the same opinion. I first got it from Jabez D. Perry, in 1862.... That the system of religion promulgated by Nathaniel Wood, and adopted by his followers in 1800, was the same, or "much the same," as the Mormons adopted on the start, is beyond question. It was claimed by the Mormons, so says a writer of their history, "that pristine christianity was to be restored, with the gift of prophecy, the gift of tongues -- with power to heal all manner of diseases -- that the fulness of the gospel was to be brought forth by the power of God, and the seed of Israel were to be brought into the fold, and that the gospel would be carried to the Gentiles, many of whom were to receive it."30 [[Quinn presents evidence that Justice Winchell was in Jefferson County, New York, about 1813, that he had a son who lived in various locations in western New York, that he may have occasionally visited Palmyra, and that he died in 1823 at Wayne, New York, only eighteen miles from the Smiths (Quinn 1987, 86).]] These were the doctrines of the Woods, as may be inferred from what appears in the foregoing. The Woods were very fruitful in prophecies, especially after the hazel rod came to their use; so were the Mormons in the beginning of their creed, and both the Woods and the Mormons claimed to have revelations, and sought for them and received them, as they pretended not only in matters of religion, but in matters of business. They pretended to be governed by the [p. 618] Divine will as revealed to them on the occasion. The question now arrises, how came the Mormons by these religious doctrines of the Woods? Was it a mere accident, that the Mormons afterwards got up a system like that concocted by Nathaniel Wood, years before, as the Wood affair collapsed in 1801 or 1802... when he (Smith) set on foot the Mormon scheme. What time Winchell went to Palmyra, I am unable to say, but he was there early enough to get Joe Smith's father to digging for money,[[31 Palmyra residents claimed the Smiths began treasure digging as early as September 1819, and on 6 October 1819 the Palmyra Register reported that the Palmyra post office possessed an unclaimed letter for a "Justice Winchel" (Quinn 1987, 86). Yet, as Anderson argues, there is no direct link between Justus Winchell and the Smiths (1984, 524).]] some years before Joe was old enough to engage in the business -- but Joe was at it as soon as he was old enough, and if his biographers can be relied on, he followed it until about the time he pretended to have found the golden bible. I have been told that Joe Smith's father resided in Poultney [[32 The location of the Smiths during the 1800 census is undetermined (see II.B.6, TUNBRIDGE [VT] CENSUS RECORD, 1800). There is no evidence of a Smith residence in Poultney (compare R. L. Anderson 1984, 522-23; Quinn 1987, 87-89).]] at the time of the Wood movement here, and that he was in it, and one of the leading rods-men. Of this I cannot speak positively, for [p.619] the want of satisfactory evidence, but that he was a rods-man under the tuition of this counterfeiter after he went to Palmyra has been proven, to my satisfaction, at least. [[33 Frisbie does not clearly state his reasons for claiming Joseph Smith, Sr., had contact with Winchell in Palmyra. Perhaps he learned of Smith's use of a divining rod and treasure-seeking activities in the Palmyra area from reading the Hurlbut affidavits, possibly in E. D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville, OH: E. D. Howe, 1834), or some other reprinting, and knowing Winchell lived in western New York simply surmised the connection. If Frisbie possessed any direct evidence, he certainly would have given it (see R. L. Anderson 1984, 522-24). end33]] I have before said that Oliver Cowdry's father was in the "Wood scrape."[[34 Frisbie did not previously say that William Cowdery was involved in the Wood Scrape but rather that he had hosted Winchell at his place in Wells and that they were "intimate afterwards" (p. 46; R. L. Anderson 1984, 522). end34]] He then lived in Wells, afterwards in Middletown, after that went to Palmyra, and there we find these men with the counterfeiter, Winchell, searching for money over the hills and mountains with the hazel rod, and their sons Joe and Oliver, as soon as they were old enough, were in the same business, and continued in it until they brought out the "vilest scheme that ever cursed the country." [[35 As Anderson notes, "[B]oth Oliver and Joseph said they had never seen each other before beginning the 1829 translation." There is no evidence of their having hunted for buried treasure together (R. L. Anderson 1984, 522; cf. I.A.15, JOSEPH SMITH HISTORY, 1839, 13; and III.G.6, OLIVER COWDERY TO W. W. PHELPS, 7 SEP 1834, 14). end35]] ... the name of the counterfeiter, whether it was Winchell or Wingate, does not appear in any account that I have seen, unless he had by this time assumed another name, but he had been at Palmyra for some years and went with them from Palmyra to Ohio. [[37 Anderson suggests that Frisbie confused Winchell with Luman Walters, another occult mentor of the Smiths who resided in the town of Sodus, New York, but rejects the connection because "Walters has the wrong name, lives in the wrong town, and does not fit Frisbie's contention that the man went to Ohio with the Mormons" (R. L. Anderson 1984, 554, n. 110). Quinn agrees that Justus Winchell died in 1823 and there is no evidence that Walters went to Ohio with the Mormons (Quinn 1987, 96-97). end37]] He was not a man who could endure the gaze of the public, but his work was done in secret; that he was at Palmyra, acted the part I have indicated, and went off with the Mormons when they left Palmyra, has been fully proven by men who were [p. 620] here during the Wood affair, and afterwards removed to Palmyra, and knew him in both places. [[38 According to Quinn's research, it would have been possible for Justice Winchell to have been seen in the Palmyra area before his death in 1823 (Quinn 1987, 84-91). end38]] |
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BYU Studies 39:1 (spring 2000) (© Brigham Young Univ. 2000 limited excerpts on "New Israelites")
Oliver Cowdery's Vermont Years ... [A theory] alleges that Joseph Smith Sr. and William Cowdery participated in a divining-rod incident known as the "Wood Scrape," forming associations that impacted their sons' founding of the Church a quarter of a century later. [[2 The earliest account of the Wood movement is in a newspaper article entitled "The Rodsmen," published in Vermont American, May 7, 1828. This article summarizes the Wood Scrape but does not name any of the participants, nor does it mention a counterfeiter. This was followed by Barnes Frisbie, The History of Middletown, Vermont (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1867), 43-64. Recollections by Wells residents are recounted in Hiland Paul and Robert Parks, History of Wells, Vermont, for the First Centrrry after Its Settlement (Rutland, Vt.: Tuttle, 1869; reprint, Wells, Vt.: Wells Historical Society, 1979), 79-82. For in-depth analyses of the Wood Scrape, see Richard Lloyd Anderson, "The Mature Joseph Smith and Treasure Searching," BYU Studies 24 (fall 1984): 489-560; David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, N.C,.: McFarland, 1985), 56-59, 234-38; D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, rev. and enl. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 35-36, 121-30; Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996), 1:599-621. [p. 113] TheWood Scrape The Wood Scrape actually took place in Middletown, Vermont, seven years before William Cowdery moved there... Nathaniel Wood... broke from the Congregational Church and claimed they were "modern Israelites or Jews, under the special care of Providence; that the Almighty would ... visit their enemies ... with his wrath and vengeance." In 1799, with the Wood movement gathering momentum, a man named Winchell, who contemporaries claimed was a fugitive and a counterfeiter, arrived on the scene and initiated the group to the use of the hazel rod... "[and] pretended to divine all sorts of things to suit their purpose." [[59.] Frisbie, History of Middletown, 47.]] ... Winchell and the Woods were soon using the rod to dig for buried treasure and search for missing persons. The frenzy reached its apex on the night of January 14, 1802, with the rodsmen preparing for a cataclysmic earthquake... "There was no sleep that night among the inhabitants; fear, consternation, great excitement and martial law prevaile[d] throughout the night," historian Frisbie wrote in 1867. [[60. Frisbie, History of Middletown, 54. Frisbie gives the year as 1801, but as Dan Vogel argues, "The year 1801 is probably an error since the earliest account of the Wood movement cites the date as January 14, 1802 (Vermont American, May 7, 1828)." See Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1:609 n. 15.]] But there was no earthquake, and the disgraced Wood group dispersed. Justus Winchell was "warned out" of town, and the Woods, who had previously been prominent citizens... bolted to New York. Frisbie saw the roots of Mormonism in the Wood movement, claiming that Joseph Smith Sr. and William Cowdery were both involved with Winchell in Vermont around 1800 and that they resumed that association two decades later in New York: There we find these men [Joseph Smith Sr. and William Cowdery] with the counterfeiter, Wincheil, searching for money over the hills and mountains with the hazel rod, and their sons Joe and Oliver, as soon as they were old enough, were in the same business, and continued in it until they brought out the "vilest scheme that ever cursed the country." [[61. Frisbie, History of Middletown, 62. Frisbie adds, though, that the fact that Joseph Sr. "was a rods-man under the tuition of this counterfeiter after he went to Palmyra has been proven to my satisfaction, at least" (62).]][114] ... Frisbie himself, however, admitted that the evidence for these claims was thin... Clark wrote a letter to Frisbie discussing the "rod-men," a letter that further complicated the picture by claiming the counterfeiter was named Wingate, not Winchell.... [other] survivors said nothing of a counterfeiter or of Cowdery. [[64. Frisbie, History of Middletown, 42-63.]] [115] Despite Frisbie's seeming lack of evidence, his concept of a Winchell - Smith - Cowdery association has been revived by D. Michael Quinn, who considers it likely that Winchell mentored the Smiths in the occult and that Oliver Cowdery's "gift of working with the rod" came by way of Winchell's influence on William Cowdery. [[65. Quinn, Magic World View, 37]] In reaching these conclusions, Quinn assumes (1) William Cowdery was involved in the Wood Scrape, (2) William Cowdery gained knowledge of working with the rod from Winchell and transmitted that knowledge to Oliver, (3) Joseph Sr. moved temporarily from eastern to western Vermont around 1800 and also got involved in the Wood Scrape, and (4) loseph Sr. was reunited with Winchell in New York in the early 1820s. A close examination of the existing documents, however, fails to support any of these assumptions. (1) William Cowdery was never actually identified as a rodsman or as a participant in the Wood Scrape... As Anderson has convincingly summarized, "William Cowdery's knowing a man who knew the Woods does not make him a participant. Indeed, Oliver's father is absent from all sources preceding Frisbie.... The main group of Middletown survivors of the 1800 period -- (more than thirty men and women -- were interviewed up to 1860, and they said nothing of a counterfeiter or of Cowdery." [[69. Anderson, "Mature Joseph Smith," 522.]] Existing records of William Cowdery's stay in Wells offer no indication that he was involved in the Wood Scrape... Cowdery remained in Wells and appears to have been a respected citizen both before and after the Wood Scrape.... [116] Nor can William and Keziah's [1810] move to New York be taken as an attempt to flee Middletown, because they returned three years later and remained in Middletown for another four years. (2) As Quinn himself has noted, "the historical record is silent about how or when Oliver Cowdery obtained the divining rod he was already using for revelation before April 1829." [[72. Quinn, Magic World View, 72]] ... According to Anderson, "no known source tells whether Oliver did money digging before becoming the Book of Mormon scribe." [[74. Anderson, "Mature Joseph Smith," 528.]]... (3) The connection of the Smith family to the Wood Scrape appears even more tenuous, since Joseph Sr.'s well-documented history does not include a move to Poultney, Vermont... [117] ... Thus, Quinn's allegation that Joseph Sr. participated in the Wood Scrape runs counter to several historical documents and rests entirely on a speculation that suffers from a "want of satisfactory evidence"... (4) Additionally, Joseph Sr. cannot be linked with Winchell in New York... Quinn concludes that "Winchell followed Joseph Sr. from Vermont to New York" and that Winchell was likely one of two "occult mentors to the Smiths." [[83. Quinn, Magic World View, 125, 132.]] But Quinn's assertion fails three fundamental tests. First, there is no evidence that Winchell lived in the Palmyra area... Second, a case has not been made that the Justus Winchel named in the newspaper notices is the same Justus Winchell who was warned out of Vermont in 1802... Third, nothing links Winchell with New York money-digging activities... Nor can William Cowdery be linked with Winchell in New York. This is a crucial point because Quinn relies heavily on Frisbie, who insists that [118] Winchell, Smith, and Cowdery were in the Wood Scrape in Vermont and were reunited in Palmyra. [[87. Frisbie, History of Middletown, 61-62.]] But, according to Quinn, Winchell's alleged Palmyra visit or residence does not begin until 1819 and ends with his death in 1823, and William and Oliver Cowdery were clearly in Vermont during this period, as shown previously. Thus, the Winchell-Cowdery-New York claim falls flat in the face of the documentary evidence.... |
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Vermont American, May 7, 1828 (Ovid Miner, Editor) Middlebury Wednesday May 7th, 1828. THE RODSMEN. Instances of great delusion or fanaticism have been rare thro' our country, and particularly so, among the intelligent yeomanry of New England. Since the days of the Salem witchcraft, and the times of the Connecticut Blue Laws, probably nothing has occurred in our states exhibiting such complete fanaticism , and so utter a destitution of propriety and common sense, as the origin and operations of the of a Fraternity of Rodsmen, (formerly existing in this state,) whose character it is now our purpose to briefly sketch. About 1800 one or two families in Rutland county, who had been considered respectable citizens, and who were, at the time, members of the Baptists church, pretended to have been informed by the Almighty, that they were descendants of the ancient Jews, and were, with their connexions, to be put in possession of the land for some miles around; the way for which was to be providentially prepared by the destruction of their fellow-townsmen. -- They claimed, also, inspired power, which was to cure all sorts of diseases -- intuitive knowledge of lost or stolen goods, and ability to discover the hidden treasures of the earth, as well as the more convenient talent of transmuting ordinary substances into precious metals. Within a year, numbers were added to this band of fanatics; and finally, most of the connexions of its originators were drawn in -- embracing parts of some fifteen families, and numbering nearly forty persons. The instrument of their miraculous powers, was a cleft stick, or rod, something of the form of an inverted Y; and when this talisman was firmly grasped in either hand, by its two points, it was believed to indicate the proper course to be pursued, or point out some substance of medicinal utility, or fix the locality of some valuable mine; -- whichever of these the agent was pleased to wish. In pursuing the directions of this monitor, the most ludicrous and occasionally very calamitous, results followed. Ill-shaped and craggy stones, the offals of animals, decayed wood, and even the most offensive ordure, were gathered up as possessing great virtues; and in one instance, at least, these last articles were administered to a sick person, until the credulous patient was relieved from her disgusting boluses by the hand of death. Before the adoption of any project among the fraternity, a nod of assent was required from the rods of the whole, which was usually not wanting, provided that of the leader, (or Mugwump, as he was technically called,) appeared favorable. In executing plans approved by "the sublime direction of the rod," excavations were made in the mountains, some to a great depth; -- the frame of a large building was put up, (which is now in use as a barn;) and numbers of horses were killed for their bones. From the bowels of the mountain valuable ore was to be taken; the building was to be erected into a furnace for smelting and refining it; and the horses' bones were to be converted into crucibles! The operations of this band of mystics attracted but little notice, till the latter part of the following year, when their movements indicated something more serious, and fears were entertained that some high-handed measure would be attempted, as a winding-up scene to their career of folly and infatuation. Their claims to being descendants of the ancient Jews, and lawful inheritors of the whole country, they declared were soon to be established by the hand of Omnipotence. An earthquake was prophecied to happen during the night of the 14th Jan. 1802; at which time theDestroying Angel was to move forward and smite all but the chosen. The scene of carnage which was to ensue had been much dwelt upon; and the ninth and eleventh chapters of the Book of Exekiel, (frequently made the subject of discourses at their meetings,) were declared to have special reference to the coming catastrophe. As the 14th of January approached, excitement increased throughout the town, and the militia were required to be in order for service at a moment's warning. -- The military stores belonging to the town, were removed from the house of the Mugwump, (who had been their depository.) and the means of producing an earthquake, it is believed, were thus removed. At sunset of the ominous 14th, the Rodsmen repaired to their leader's house, after nailing upon their door-posts a paper, on which was written -- "Christ our Passover was Sacrificed for us." This was to preserve the habitations of the Faithful from the destruction speedily to be visited upon those of their neighbors, and many affecting interviews were held by the Rodsmen with their children, who were not allowed by the stern decree of the rod to follow their parents, and of whom these infatuates pretended to believe they were taking their final leave. -- At 9 o'clock, the military were under arms, and a sergeant's guard was posted on each of the four streets diverging from the village. In a short time, six Rodsmen, fantastically dressed, and equipped according to the direction they supposed given them, -- (Ezekiel ix, 2), were observed rapidly approaching. After being hailed by the guard, they were fired upon, when they turned and fled. About midnight, the same men approached the village in another direction -- were again hailed, fired upon, and dispersed. Thus ended the strange drama. Immediately after this exhibition, which had created much consternation, the indignation of the whole people burst upon these shameless impostors. The leaders of the fraternity, therefore, feeling themselves contemptible by the failure of their earthquake; "seeing the "slow-moving finger of scorn" pointed towards them from all their neighbors; and fearing, moreover, that the heavy hand of the law would fall on them for their misdeeds; -- disposed of their property and removed into the county of St. Lawrence, New York; where it is said something of their former delusion stuck by them. They are now mostly dead. (Ovid Miner, Editor) To the Editor of the American. -- SIR, -- In a piece published in your paper, a short time since, under the head of "The Rodsmen," you fell into a small error which I think it would be well to correct. The statement to which I allude is, "and who were at the time, members of the Baptist Church," -- it should have been, and who were at the time members of the Congregational Church. As your publication may be the only record of these poor fanatics, which will descend to posterity, I could assign, if necessary, a number of good reasons, why it should be exactly true and correct. Yours, &c. P. Excerpt from Barnes Friesbie's 1867 History of Middleton [pp. 46-47] After Mr. [Nathaniel] Wood was excluded from the [Middletown Congregational] church, he set up meetings of his own, and preached to those who came to hear him, and succeeded, after awhile, in getting quite a congregation, consisting of his own family and family connections, and some others. He held his meetings mostly at the dwelling houses of his sons. His religious doctrines, whatever they might have been while in the congregational church, appeared to be far from orthodox after his independent organization, if organization it was. He professed to believe in supernatural agencies, and dwelt very much in his preaching on the judgments of God, which he claimed would visit the people by the special acts of Providence, as did the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the plagues of Egypt. The judgments of God were his favorite themes. At first his own family did not appear to adopt his new doctrines; but such was his tenacity and perseverance, that by the year 1800 he had drawn them all in, with many others outside of his family and family connections, so that he had at this time a number nearly equal to either of the other denominations in town. His peculiar religious doctrines will appear as we proceed. Suffice it to say, for the present, that he regarded himself and his followers as modern Israelites or Jews, under the special care of Providence; that the Almighty would not only specially interpose in their behalf, but would visit their enemies, the Gentiles (all outsiders), with his wrath and vengeance. In this condition we find Nathaniel Wood and his followers when the hazel rod was introduced, and the money digging commenced; but the Woods did not commence it, that honor belongs to a man of another name; but they were in a condition to adopt this man's rod notions, which they did with great effect in their work of deluding the people. A man by the name of Winchell, as he called himself when he came here, was the first man who used the hazel rod. From what we have learned of him, he was, undoubtedly, an expert villain. He sought to accomplish his purposes by working upon the hopes and fears of individuals, and by a kind of sorcery, which he performed with great skill. The time he came here I cannot give, but it was, undoubtedly, sometime in the year 1799. He was a fugitive from justice from Orange county, Vermont, where he had been engaged in counterfeiting. He first went to a Mr. Cowdry's, in Wells, who then lived in that town, near the line between Wells and Middletown, in the house now owned and occupied by Robert Parks, Esq. Cowdry was the father of Oliver Cowdry, the noted Mormon, who claimed to have been one of the witnesses to Joe Smith's revelations, and to have written the book of Mormon, as it was deciphered by Smith from the golden plates. Winchell, I have been told, was a friend and acquaintance of Cowdry's, but of this I cannot be positive, they were intimate afterwards; but Winchell staid at Cowdry's some little time, keeping himself concealed, and it is the opinion of some with whom I have conversed that he commenced his operations of digging for money in Wells, but I have been unable to determine as to that. It is well known that there was a good deal of money digging in that part of Wells. Whether it commenced at the time spoken of, when Winchell went there, or afterwards, is, to my mind, unsettled.... [pp. 62-63] It appears from some of the Mormon histories, that the Mormon organization first consisted of the Smith family, Oliver Cowdry and Martin Harris, the name of the counterfeiter, whether it was Winchell or Wingate, does not appear in any account that I have seen, unless he had by this time assumed another name, but he had been at Palmyra for some years and went with them from Palmyra to Ohio. He was not a man who could endure the gaze of the public, but his work was done in secret; that he was at Palmyra, acted the part I have indicated, and went off with the Mormons when they left Palmyra, has been fully proven by men who were here during the Wood affair, and afterwards removed to Palmyra, and knew him in both places. What I have now said of the Smiths, Cowdry and Winchell, has been obtained from living witnesses, to which I will add a few quotations from authors. Gov. Ford, in his history of the Mormons, says of Joe Smith, "That his extreme youth was spent in idle, vagabond life, roaming in the woods, dreaming of buried treasures, and exerting the art of finding them by twisting a forked stick in his hands, or by looking through enchanted stones. He and his father before him, were what were called "water wiches," always ready to point out the ground where wells might be dug and water found." In a work written by Rev. Kidder of Illinois, some twenty years ago, which is the best expose of Mormonism and the Mormons I have ever seen, he has a statement purporting to have been signed by sixty-two credible persons, residents of Palmyra, N.Y. In that statement, those men say of the Smiths, that "they were particularly famous for visionary projects, spent much of their time in digging for money, which they pretended was hidden in the earth; and to this day large excavations may be seen in the earth not far from their then residence, where they used to spend their time in digging for hidden treasures." In Dr. Kidder's work, the first Mormons are frequently characterized as "money diggers," as though that had been their principal avocation, as it doubtless was.... Excerpts from Arthur B. Deming's 1888 Naked Truths About Mormonism Vol. I: No. 1 (Jan. 1888.) [p. 1, col. 6] ABOUT SPAULDING. SOLOMON SPAULDING was born in 1761, in the town of Ashford, Connecticut, U.S.A. When a student in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, from which he graduated, he became much interested in what became of the lost ten tribes of Israel, and imbibed the views of one of the officers of the college, that the American Indians were most probably their descendants. He entered the ministry, and for ten years preached about the country as an evangelist. He never was a settled pastor. He wrote a manuscript on a few quires of letter paper, purporting to be an account of the wanderings and arrival in America of the lost ten tribes (similar to the "Book of Mormon"), probably while he preached in Middletown, Vermont. (See statement of Salmon S. Osborn and Judge Frisbie's letter)... Vol. I: No. 1 (Jan. 1888.) [p. 2, cols. 1-2] S. S. OSBORN'S STATEMENT. Mr. A. B. Deming, Esq. -- Dear Sir: According to your request I hand you a statement of my recollections of the Mormons, and of the "Manuscript" I saw in Vermont... In September, 1871, I spent some little time in Middleton, Vt., with my wife and her sister, who were both invalids. We had rooms and board at Hezekiah Haynes'. When he learned we were from the vicinity of Kirtland, O., inquiries were made about the Mormons, and I was then told about what they termed the Wood scrape, and that Mormonism undoubtedly originated in that town, and that Mr. Woodard (I think the name was), the Town Clerk, had a "Manuscript" written by Spaulding, which might throw some light on the subject, as he believed Spaulding's writings and the religious fanaticism of the Woods' gave rise to Mormonism. From him I learned also, that the Hon. Reuben Wood, late of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the clearest headed lawyers and best of Ohio's Judges, was a descendant of the same Wood, of Middleton, and himself read law there. I then became interested to know more about it. Soon afterwards I had occasion to call on the Town Clerk, who was also a shoemaker, for a little of his mechanical skill, and procured from him a sight of the manuscript and the rather reluctant loan of it on my promise to use it carefully and return it to him. As I now remember it was written in a fair, plain hand, upon foolscap; short-cap I think, and there may have been one quire or more or less of it stitched together: it purported to be an account of the journeyings of the ten lost tribes of Israel to America, and what they did and became on this continent, by Solomon Spaulding. I had abundance of leisure in Middleton and kept the document a week or more, and returned it to Mr. Woodard. I did not read all of it. It did not interest me much, and I have no distinct recollection of the story, nor had I then red the "Book of Mormon," having lost mine soon after I used it in Chardon, as before stated. I practiced law in Chardon from 1828 to 1833 or '34 and afterwards in Painesville until 1849. S. S. OSBORN |
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American Israelites: Part 3 (1818-1827) Mordecai M. Noah's Gathering of Israel MORDECAI M. NOAH and the Mormon ZION Part 1: 30 Ararat-Mormon Parallels Part 2: Source Texts/Resources Part 3: M. M. Noah & Oliver Cowdery Part 4: M. M. Noah & the Masons This section and its links is still under construction. Introduction "I, Mordecai Manuel Noah... by the grace of God, Governor and Judge of Israel, have issued this my proclamation, announcing to the Jews throughout the world that an asylum is prepared and hereby offered to them..."
Major Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851) was a noted American journalist, playwright, diplomat, New York politician, and Jewish advocate. In 1825 this utopian proto-Zionist proposed and planned a gathering of the world's "Israelites" to western New York state in order to establish a great city and a powerful theocracy -- for the protection and advancement of God's " chosen people." Although the goals of Noah's 1825 project was never realized, many elements of his "City of Refuge" plan for the restoration of Israel were revived, Christianized, and implemented by the early Mormons in their own attempts to build a North American "Zion." The Mormons originally planned the building of their "City of Refuge" at Independence, Missouri, but that goal was beset by various obstacles and they moved its location -- first to Kirtland Ohio, then to Nauvoo, Illinois, and finally, to Salt Lake City in Utah. Major Noah did not live to see his dreams for an Israelite gathering come true, either in the New World or in the Old. By the end of his life he, like the Mormons, had shifted his sacred geography but had not lost track of his original mission. Quietly abandoning his earlier hope to incorporate the American Indians into his Israelite utopia, Noah became a proto-Zionist whose eyes were finally fixed on Turkish Palestine as the proper place to gather his dispersed brethren. Mordecai M. Noah was not unaware of the Mormons' imitative gathering activity on their own behalf and for the restoration of the supposed Israelite Indians. As a newspaper editor he now and then directed a few choice words in the direction of these johnny-come-lately Saints, but mostly he simply chose to ignore them and their Christianized mutation of his old Grand Island scheme. Had Noah himself taken more trouble to respond to the Mormons' zionic activities, perhaps their mimicry of his own failed "Restoration" would not have gone unnoticed for many decades. Noah avoided the chagrin of making such an admission and today practically everybody has forgotten both him and his land promotion of 1825. Now, 175 years later, the time has arrived for people to take a new look at Major Mordecai M. Noah and his proposed gathering of Israel to "the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia," -- which he translated to read: "the land of the (American) Eagle!" Biographical Sketch of M. M. Noah: He was born in Philadelphia on July 19, 1785. His father was Manuel M. Noah, a Revolutionary War champion who had married Zipporah Phillips (of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish lineage) the year before. In 1795 Mordecai's mother died and he raised was thereafter primarily by her father, Jonas Phillips, a Prussian Jew who had immigratedto Charleston, South Carolina in 1756. While he was yet a young man the ever-ambitious Mordecai retraced his grandfather's footsteps to Charleston, where he hoped to study law, gain experience in journalism, and get a start in party politics. The youthful "Major" (in the Pennsylvania militia) found the both sensible and political climate in Charleston much to his liking and he was pleased to use his grandmother Phillips' Portuguese ancestry to establish himself socially among the aristocradic Sephardi of that city's Congregation Beth Elohim. Unfortunately, Mordecai's stay in the South appears to have infected his thinking with less than appreciative opinions of ante-bellum Black people he encountered there. At the same time, and rather incongruently, he also became an outspoken southern journalist who championed both American democracy and the cause of Jewish people world-wide. The verve and wit of Noah's patriotic "Mulek" articles in the Charleston Times, (generally supporting Madison's administration) did not go unnoticed in the capital city as the young nation entered the War of 1812. Noah's declared zeal on behalf of Madison's policies, a bold petition written to that same head of state, and an accompanying sheaf of recommendations from influential patrons (gathered as early as 1810-11) helped him gain an appointment as the U.S. Consul to the Kingdom of Tunis in 1813. The next year the administration sacked him, ostensibly for allowing his religious identity to color his dealings with the Moors and his free spending of government money in helping to free certain American prisoners held at Algiers. A few months after this disapppointment Mordecai moved to New York City, where he engaged in a letter-writing campaign to reestablish his good name, advanced his career in journalism, and continued to promote himself in partisan politics. Prior to his return to the city which had been a temporary home in his youth, the mature Mordecai had the good fortune to see his uncle, Naphtali Phillips, become the proprietor of the National Advocate, the favorite paper of New York's anti-Federalists and the political mouthpiece for that city's "Society of Tammany" (the regional political machine of the Democratic-Republicans). Mordecai soon became the chief editor at this prestigious enterprise, and he remained the editor (or an associate editor) at one or another of sundry New York publications for the remainder of his life. In 1820 Major Noah declared his candidacy for Sheriff of New York and the following year received an appointment to the same, a post he held until losing that dignity amid the intra-party feuding accompanying the election of 1828. In the meanwhile Noah had shifted his political ground and in 1826. he resigned his editorship at what was by then George White's National Advocate. In 1829 the "Clintonian" clique within the New York Democratic-Republicans befriended the Major and handed him a political plumb: the office of Surveyor and Inspector of the Port of New York. During these Big Apple political squabbles in the 1820s Mordecai M. Noah progressed from being a declared "Bucktail" enemy of Governor Dewitt Clinton, to tacitly supporting some Clintonian programs (such as the completion of the Erie Canal), to eventually allying with Clinton's Democratic faction in the 1829 campaign to send Andrew Jackson to the White House. Noah's political patron and mentor, Martin VanBuren, had accomplished some similar political footwork in order to become Jackson's running-mate. Throughout this entire period (whether as a collaborator with Tammany Hall or as its opponent) Major Noah remained an outspoken pro-slavery man and a chief adversary of the abolitionists. Ever active in local Jewish affairs, Noah delivered what became a famous speech in 1818, when he helped supervis the consecration of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York City. Noah's speech related the history of Jewish persecution around the world and argued that the Jewish people must be established as a nation with their own government, in order to avoid future oppression. The rhetoric expressed by Noah's in his 1818 speech anticipated the problems of growing anti-Semitism in Europe and the precarious position of Middle-Eastern Jews standing on the sidelines of the Greek rebellion against the Turks. Major Noah's 1818 oration also foreshadowed his still undisclosed plan to play midwife to a great gathering of Jews who might some day build an agrarian theocracy in upstate New York: "Jews must be turned aside from the crooked paths of traffic, miscalled commerce, to industry and agriculture..." Mordecai M. Noah's 1818 call for a new program among the Jews was not just empty oration. By 1820 he was petitioning the New York Legislature to grant him an extensive parcel of land on Grand Island in the Niagara River, so that he might establish there a new Jewish homeland where "Israelites" of all types might find refuge and opportunity. Grand Island, along with several other, smaller islands located upstream from Niagara Falls theoretically became part of the United States in 1783, following the end of the Revolutionary War. The British troops stationed along the Ontario frontier continued to occupy the banks of the Niagara until 1796, when the Iroquois Nation claimed possession of the islands in the River. The State of New York recognized the Iroquois claim, but both the national and state governments were eager to take permanent possession of the area as the War of 1812 drew to a close. On September l2, 1815, in order to forstall any future Canadian attempt to seize this borderland property, New York paid the Iroquois $1000 for Grand Island and its smaller insular neighbors. That minor bit of geographic news would eventually catch the imaginative attention of Mordecai M. Noah in New York City. Following his 1826 political divorce from the Tammany Democrats who controlled the National Advocate, Noah left its editorial offices in July of that year and immediately founded his own, independent New York Enquirer. By earky 1829 Noah had drifted into the camp of his previous rivals, the Clintonians, and that May he merged his newspaper with the New York Morning Courier, a anti-abolitionist Jacksonian paper previously published by men like John B. Skillman and James Gordon Bennett. At that time the Courier was managed by James Watson Webb. For several years he and Major Noah continued to operate the paper on good terms, but Noah's friendly feelings for Wood abated during the fight within the Democratic Party over whethe ror not to renew the charter of the United States Bank. Having finally abandoned his seven year alliance with the Jacksononians, Mordecai M. Noah drifted into the nascent Whig movement and in September of 1833 he again founded his own New York paper, supporting that growing political amalgamation. His new enterprise he called the Evening Star. This was an uneasy transformation on Noah's part and, although he won the friendship of partisans like Thurlow Weed of Rochester, the Major was never fully at home among the exuberant abolitionism and anti-Masonry which so frequently typified the early Whigs. Noah's career as an editor-publisher lasted until 1842 when the Star was discontinued. He managed to continue his career in journalism and politics to a degree, but all of that ended suddenly in 1851 when Mordecai died of a stroke. By that time Major M. M. Noah was arguably the best-known Jew in America. Noah's 1825 Plans for the Gathering of Israel As early as 1818 Mordecai Manuel Noah was of the opinion that there was no place in the Old World where Jews had a hope of achieving equality prior to their re-establishment in Israel at some time in the unknowable future. Instead, he turned his attention to the many advantages then available to settlers of all kinds in democratic America. Before 1820 Major Noah decided that the undeveloped western region of New York state offered the best promise for a successful relocation of his scattered people. Noah was not alone in pursuing this sort of idealistic proto-Zionism. The reigning Democrats of his day strongly favored an increased immigration into the young nation and the nationalistic yearning which was later to be called "manifest destiny" was already tempting some imaginative Americans to speak of importing organized companies of Jews to settle its western borderlands. More substantial plans were initiated by England and France to send some of their Jewish residents to proposed new homelands in the Caribbean or in Central America, but, for one reason or another, none of these programs were ever brought to fruition. Noah's interest in Grand Island was probably sparked when New York Governor Clinton and his Attorney General, Martin Van Buren, implored the Legislature to authorize the removal of a couple hundred squatters who had taken up residence on the island after the Iroquois gave up their claims to the place in 1815. The Assemblymen in Albany passed the requested eviction act in April 1819 and empowered the Sheriff of Niagara County to organize the local militia and drive out the undesireables. This eviction was accomplished by the beginning of 1820. That same year the Legislature took up consideration of splitting off the Niagara region south of Buffalo and Grand Island in order to form a new county which could meet the needs of the expected population increase at the western terminus of the Erie Canal (then still under construction west of Rochester). Mordecai M. Noah was both an informed journalist who kept close track of interesting news reports and an experienced politician who kept one ear attuned to any new developments coming out of Albany. He quickly recognized the unique opportunity then arising on the big island downstream from Buffalo, and, seizing the opportunity, he petitioned the Legislature to grant him a land patent on the recently vacated island. Noah's move was premature and was probably doomed to failure in a Clinton-loving state Assembly which every year added new members from the growing west. The Clintonians on both the eastern and western ends of the state expected a lucrative western land development to follow the completion of the Erie Canal out to Buffalo by the mid-1820s. These political minds were not particularly inclined to dispose of large amounts of frontier property for a song. The anti-Clintonian big city Jew lost his bid to become chief proprietor of the uninhabited forests encircled by and unbridged river at the antipodes of eastern "civilization." Major Noah was undaunted by this minor setback. Perhaps his land-grabbing attempt was more a publicity stunt than it was a true attempt to take possession of the island all by himself. The slow but inevitable progress of the Erie Canal westward matched the New York Jew's own measured evolution away from his old anti-canal rhetoric. He gradually came to the inescapable conclusion that this new waterway, extending from the Hudson to the Great Lakes, would make a huge, positive impact upon western New York. He saw Erie County created in 1821 and the subsequent commencement of construction at the western end of the canal in Buffalo. The plan then was to join this Buffalo segment of the canal to the westward extension, somewhere along the Niagara escarpment by 1825. A year before that date the boom-town of Lockport had sprung up at the junction point and the state surveyors had completed the sub-division of nearby Grand Island into dozens of 200 acre lots. Well before that time Major Noah had already formulated his plan to attempt the establishment of an Israelite colony on the island. By early 1825 he was deeply engaged in his selling this land development scheme to several of his friends and associates. The Legislature opened the bidding in a public auction to dispose of the State's lands on Grand Island on June 3, 1825. One of Major Noah's business partners, Samuel Leggett, purchased 2,555 acres in Noah's behalf. According to contemporary newspaper reports, twelve other parties also came away from the land auction with deeds to Grand Island lots in their pockets: Cornelius Masren, Herman H. Bogert, John G. Camp, Peter Smith, John Knowles, Alvin Stewart, Levi Beardsley, James O. Morse, S. R. Warren, C. R. Webster, Dudley & Gregory, and James Carmichael. Of these partners only Sheriff Camp of Buffalo was a resident in the far west of New York. He was perhaps one of those most directly involved in Noah's development scheme. The other men in the list were also involved with Noah's plan to one degree or another. A news report of the June auction made this announcement: It is said Mr. Noah's object is to accommodate his brethren, the Jews, many of whom are wishing to emigrate to this country, and to locate in a body, in sufficient numbers to form a colony or city, by themselves. Grand Island has been selected for this purpose, and it is stated in the Albany Gazette, that the corner stone of a city will be laid on this island, with suitable masonic and religious ceremonies, in the course of the present summer, probably about the time when the canal is completed and in operation. Major Noah's plan to make Grand Island into a "City of Refuge" was finally afloat in a sea of optimistic financing, and so was his own "rescue ark," a picture of which sailed the ocean of ink poured out in printing the masthead of his New York Enquirer. Noah's New York City paper continued to feature the Noah's Ark picture for months after the settlement plan became a condeded failure. During the October 1825 dedication celebration which opened the Erie Canal to commercial traffic, Moredcai M. Noah -- ever the theatrical showman -- also sponsored the sailing of a sizeable real ark filled with wild western animals, all the way from Buffalo to New York City. 
Even after Ararat's failure, M. M. Noah kept Noah's Ark in his newspaper masthead. In anticipation of his staging a gala dedication ceremony for the new land speculation scheme, Major Noah ordered the cornerstone for his enterprise from the distant quarries of Cleveland. Its inscription read: "Ararat, A City of Refuge for Jews, Founded by Mordecai Noah in the month Tizri 5586, September 1825 and in the 50th Year of American Independence."At the end of the summer of 1825 Major Noah and his private secretary journeyed to the region of his intended "happy land" of "Ararat," and there oversaw the pretentious dedication ceremony for the new refuge (jointly held in the Buffalo Masonic Lodge and at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in that town. Noah's visionary plan, his grandiose personality, and his apparent thirst for personal theocratic power were not well accepted by prominent Jews of his day. The plan elicited interest and discussion, but without substantial support from the leaders of European Jewry a practical immigration program could never be initiated, much less carried to fruition. The Noah program was widely ridiculed in the European Jewish press and no Jews from that part of the world moved to Mordecai's "happy land. The Failure of Noah's "Ararat" The would-be "Judge" of a new nation saw his financial and political backing melt away in New York City, while his Masonic support in upstate New York faded amidst the anti-Masonic chaos of the William Morgan affair in 1826. The U. S. and Canadian Indian tribes showed no signs of joining Noah's "Israelite" undertaking, and the entire scheme quickly turned into a dismal failure. Probably the deciding factor against Major Noah's scheme was the disinterest and criticism expressed by Jewish leaders in Europe. Writing in protest against Noah's 1825 project, the Grand Rabbi De Cologne in 1826 said, "inform Mr. Noah, that the venerable Messrs. Hiershell and Meldonna, chief rabbis at London, and myself, thank him, but positively refuse the appointments he has been pleased to confer upon us. We declare that, according to our degrees, God alone knows the epoch of the Israelitish restoration; and he alone will make it known to the whole universe, by signs entirely unequivocal; and that every attempt on our part, to re-assemble with any political-national design, is forbidden, as an act of high treason against the Divine Majesty." Given the almost inevitable refusal of the European Jewish leaders to sign on to Major Noah's emigration plans, the question might well be asked, "Just how serious was Noah about bringing the whole project to a successful outcome?" Is it possible that all of his lofty rhetoric and grandiose claims were merely a smoke-screen behind which Mordecai M. Noah was launching a great land speculation scheme -- a scheme designed primarily to enrich himself and his associates? This interpretation of his motives and methods was voiced in the 1825 response by the editor of Niles Weekly Register published in Baltimore: "It is very possible that this speculation may succeed, so far as to fill the pockets of Mr. Noah and his associates -- which, it is plainly evident, is the corner stone of the project just developed..." Writing a few years later, Mormon journalist W. W. Phelps was even less sympathetic in his assessment of Noah as being "a man [who] has failed to dupe his fellow Jews, with a New Jerusalem on Grant Island... to wheedle money from the Jews to fill his own pockets..." Had M. M. Noah in 1825-26 exercised less headline-grabbing theatrics and more productive communication with the European Jewish leaders, the basics of his plan might well have been carried to success in Jacksonian America. But that alternative would have included Noah simply as the promoter of a probably non-theocratic Jewish colonization, almost certainly shorn of its Israelite Indians and his solicitations of annual monetary payments from overseas. The very self-serving ostentation and staged media hoopla Major Noah counted upon to give his gathering scheme some free world-wide publicity ended up dooming the project before it ever got off the ground. The Masonic Connection W. W. Phelps (the man who accused Major Noah of trying to dupe his fellow Jews), had gained his own pre-Mormon reputation in western New York as the crusading editor of the anti-Masonic Ontario Phoenix of Canandaiga. At least part of the vitrolPhelps directed at Major Noah as late as 1835 probably came from the fact that Noah was a leading Masonic promoter, while Phelps expressed himself as being bitterly against that fraternal society and "secret combinations" of all kinds. Phelps' rhetoric typified the feelings of many of the puritanically-inclined former Yankees who had settled western New York. The same "rise of the common man" which helped put Andrew Jackson into the Presidency in 1830 also helped spawn the distrust and antagonism western New Yorkers heaped upon the Freemasons after 1826. It very likely that most (if not all) of Major Noah's twelve investment associates in the Grand Island scheme were also Freemasons. At the very least least, that identification of their private affiliations would fit in quite nicely with the blatantly Masonic trappings of Noah's Sep. 15, 1825 activities at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Buffalo and the Masonic Lodge of that place. The editor of Niles Weekly Register, in his article of Oct. 1, 1825, called Major Noah's calendar dating of the Grand Island dedication ceremonies "a strange mixture of Christianity and Judaism." He might well have extended that estimation to the whole of the September 15, 1825 Jewish-Masonic-Christian rendezvous in Buffalo. It would have been practically impossible for Mordecai, the Jewish leader from New York City, to have gained his commanding access of St. Paul's church in Buffalo without the specific cooperation and recommendation of Episcopal leaders in both cities. In those days it would have been far more likely for wealthy American Episcopalians, Diests and Jews to have become important Freemasons than it would have been for Christian primitivists and Calvinists drawn from the "common people." It is altogether likely that many of Mordecai M. Noah's associates (as well as the expected city lots buyers) involved in his Grand Island development plan came from the former social set and not the latter. The ruling, professional, and commercial elite class of New York State in the 1820s and 1830s was largely comprised of Episcopalians, Diests and Jews of Masonic affiliation who were not pious descendants of New England Puritans. Yet it was precisely the pioneering posterity of the latter group which made up most of the population of western New York. Whitney R. Cross, in his 1950 book The Burned-Over District, documents well the mentality and religious tendencies among this pioneer population. Cross's chapter 6 ("The Martyr") deals with the rise of anti-Masonic fervor in upstate NY in the late 1820s. In chapter 6, on page 115, he tells of the Burned-over District's New Englander pioneers' grass-roots reaction against the Masonic institition: "Increasingly it appeared that Masons held a monopoly of offices [in western NY] ... When local citizens' committees induced the state legislature to consider a special investigation, theur resolutions met such smaking defeats that a gigantic [Masonic] conspiracy seemed the only logical explanation. If corruption in high places extended over the whole state, surely the people must act..." Major Noah's imposing Masonic dedication ceremonies for the Grand Island project may have attracted the awe of western New Yorkers, but they also no doubt aroused their ire as well. Such pomp and ceremony may have been tolerable at such occasions as Dewitt Clinton's 1823 great conclave of Freemasons in New York City to extol the Erie Canal, but "out west" among the "common folk," it was less esteemed. In this regard, Major Noah's timing for his 1825 dedication could not have been worse. Most of the western New York Masonic lodges broke away from their eastern "City Grand Lodge" counterparts in 1823, throwing "blue lodge" Freemasonry west of Syracuse into a turmoil. Months before M. M. Noah arrived at Buffalo to orchestrate his 1825 dedication extravaganza, many of the Masons in the west (under the leadership of Joseph Enos and S. Van Rensselaer of Canandaigua) had already grown suspicious and resentful of their eastern counterparts (who remained loyal to Grand Master Martin Hoffman of New York City). Then, as though to roguishly compound that intra-fraternal problem many times over, in late 1826 the whole "Burned-over District" was caught up in the anti-Masonic turmoil which followed the Masonic abduction and probable murder of William Morgan -- the man whom Whitney R. Cross called "The Martyr." It did not matter to the common man in the west that the "Morgan Affair" was primarily attributable to the break-away "Country Grand Lodge" Masons. The westerners were soon tarring all Masons with the same blackened brush -- and that would have included Mordecai M. Noah as well. Western New York After the "Morgan Affair" In August of 1831 James Gordon Bennett, an associate editor (along with Mordecai M. Noah, until Noah left early in 1833) at the NY Morning Courier and Enquirer, paid a visit to the Palmyra area of western NY, probably partly for the purposes of doing some investigative reporting on the Mormons in that place. His articles on this subject appeared in the Courier on Aug. 31 & Sep. 1, 1831. In making his report Bennett editorialized as follows: "About this time [late 1820s] a very considerable religious excitement came over New York in the shape of a revival. It was also about the same period, that a powerful and concerted effort was made by a class of religionists, to stop the mails on Sunday to give a sectarian character to Temperance and other societies... and to organize generally a religious party, that would act altogether in every public and private concern of life. The greatest efforts were making by the ambition, tact, skill and influence of certain of the clergy, and other lay persons, to regulate and control the public mind... to turn the tide of public sentiment entirely in favor of blending religious and worldly concerns together. Western New York has for years, had a most powerful and ambitious religious party of zealots, and their dupes.... The singular character of the people of western New York -- their originality, activity, and proneness to excitement furnished admirable materials for enthusiasts in re |