The year 1837 marked both Parley P. Pratt’s greatest spiritual trial and his greatest theological contribution as a Latter-day Saint. During a few weeks, Pratt emerged as a powerful dissident, spurred by the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society, a community bank with Joseph Smith as president, which caused Pratt to lose his home.
Sign up to be notified when we publish new content, like articles about Council of Fifty quotes, a poetic version of D&C 76, and the Kinderhook Plates.
Learn more. From Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism by Terry L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow. Copyright © 2011 by Terry L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
But if Parley P. Pratt was impetuous, he was also tractable and capable of contrition, as he demonstrated more than once.
Pratt quickly rebounded from his disaffection, and, as if in penance or at least compensation, he produced A Voice of Warning, a work that served the church as its most powerful proselytizing tool—after the Book of Mormon—for more than a century. It also initiated his growing role as shaper, and not just purveyor, of Mormon doctrine.
Pratt felt betrayed.
In addition to his educational efforts during the winter of 1836 to 1837, Pratt devoted time to a project he must have found as satisfying as preaching about the Book of Mormon. He published the second edition of that volume, which Joseph Smith had revised for reissue. Pratt partnered in the project with John Goodson, one of his Canadian converts from the previous year. (They had operated a small commercial venture together in Kirtland, likely renting space in an established store to hawk some wares; that attempt probably ended unsuccessfully as they left their 1837 merchants’ taxes unpaid.)
Goodson and Pratt likely funded the publication in exchange for shares in the profits, a typical arrangement. Pratt’s participation in the project demonstrates his ardor for the Book of Mormon. Whereas many Mormons of his generation used the Book of Mormon primarily as a sign of divinely sanctioned restoration (a point with which Pratt wholeheartedly agreed), Pratt was one of the few who seriously probed the book’s content and often preached from its pages.
He never earned substantial amounts from any of his publishing efforts, the Book of Mormon included. But it must have been a source of the greatest pride to him that his name appeared on the title page of that volume’s second edition, and that along with the eleven witnesses (three who said they saw the plates in the hands of an angel and eight who testified they had held them), his name and personal testimony prefaced every one of the copies he printed.
To “the thousands whose faces [he would] never see on this side of eternity,” he affirmed his “sincere conviction of its truth, and the great and glorious purposes it must effect.”
In March 1837, Parley became the proud father of his firstborn—a son and namesake. The most unlikely of Heber Kimball’s prophetic utterances had been fulfilled. He had served his Canadian mission, found contacts to pave the way for missionary work in England, seen his wife restored to health and delivered of a child.
But the same day also found him a grieving husband.
Death of his wife
[His wife] Thankful had been weak and sickly for most of their marriage. Stress, poor diet, and exposure brought on through harrowing days in Missouri had weakened her both physically and emotionally.
One friend in this period described her as having “very delicate health,” with “severe spells of sick headache, which came upon her monthly.” She may have also suffered with depression, as her obituary noted that her “ill health” combined with her “peculiar anxieties for [Pratt] in his absence, to prey upon & depress her spirit.”
And while her health had improved sufficiently to conceive and carry the child to term, she now, in a pattern all too common in nineteenth-century childbearing, succumbed to complications hours after giving birth. “Puerperal convulsions,” read the obituary, suggesting eclampsia and its attendant seizures.
She had turned forty just seven days earlier. “My grief, and sorrow, and loneliness I shall not attempt to describe,” Pratt later wrote, a loss for words unusual for one as quick as Pratt to give utterance to his feelings through poetry or other writing.
But his relationship with Thankful went much deeper than the poetic and sentimental modes of expression that he so often employed. When he recounted the details of her death just a few years before his own, and after marriage to eleven more wives across a span of years, a distinct tenderness and sorrow shone through:
Farewell, my dear Thankful, thou wife of my youth, and mother of my first born; the beginning of my strength—farewell. Yet a few more lingering years of sorrow, pain and toil, and I shall be with thee, and clasp thee to my bosom.
Parley P. Pratt, Autobiography, 209.
Pratt’s tragic loss was not completely unanticipated—he had spent most of their marriage apprehensive about her health. His distress over Thankful’s passing was slightly assuaged by intimations and dreams she had shared with Parley of her imminent death.
Assured that she was going to “the Paradise of rest,” he recorded, “she was overwhelmed with a joy and peace indescribable.”
Parley gave his newborn son over to be cared for by a Mrs. Allen, who had recently lost her own child. Mary Ann Angell Young, Brigham Young’s wife, served as a wet nurse for Parley Jr., alongside her own Brigham Jr.
Return to Canada
Not one to wallow in grief or idleness, Pratt found distraction from his loss by abruptly departing for a return visit to Canada, this time with plans to lay the final groundwork for a momentous development in Mormon history: the first mission to overseas soil, planned for England.
In the church’s infancy, Joseph Smith had a revelation that commanded him to “send forth the elders of my church unto the nations which are afar off; unto the islands of the sea; send forth unto foreign lands.”
Although he, Pratt, and others undertook a few excursions to Canada, Smith hesitated at the prospect of sending missionaries across the Atlantic. But a natural progression from Canada to England unfolded, as first intimated in the call of the apostles in 1835 to be special witnesses for Christ “in all the world.” Among the spiritual manifestations in the Kirtland Temple in January 1836, Smith “saw the 12 apostles of the Lamb, who are now upon the earth who hold the keys of this last ministry, in foreign lands.”
Pratt sped home.
A few months later, in April 1836, Kimball predicted to Pratt that a Canadian mission would lay the foundations for a greater work in England. The next year, as spring approached, Kimball raised the issue of an English mission yet again with Pratt and Brigham Young. Kimball was “deeply impressed and exercised about a foreign mission,” he said, that loomed “nearer than many knew or thought.”
Seizing the initiative, Pratt headed to Canada the first week of April 1837, less than two weeks after his wife’s burial, to “visit the Saints, and to confer on the subject of a mission to England.”
His earlier efforts there had yielded a number of converts with English ties, including John and Lenora Taylor, Joseph Fielding and his sisters Mary and Mercy, Isaac Russell, John Goodson, and John Snider. Pratt also indicated that other preparatory steps had been taken, including letters about the church being sent to England. The Fieldings had written to relatives there, and John Taylor sent a lengthy missive to two English clergymen related to Fielding.
But Pratt most likely had in mind the formal epistle he had himself written and sent to England as preparation for a journey there. He addressed his “Epistle Written by An Elder of the Church of Latterday Saints” to “those In Europe who took for the glorious Appearing of our Lord and Saviour.”
Framing his message as the fulfillment of millennial expectations would be Pratt’s consistent practice. Written before he heard Joseph Smith speak publicly on the subject, he had related the story of the angel Moroni’s visit to Smith as one in a series of “great Events” which are mooving By the hand of God,” bearing witness to Christ’s imminent return.
Pratt consistently used these events, rather than doctrines, as the principal exhibits for the truthfulness of Mormonism, thus making its history foundational to its theology.
These events included the miraculous appearance and translation of the gold plates, the great work of gathering, and the persecution that he believed follows true disciples of Christ. After a brief summary of these developments, Pratt preached the simple gospel of repentance and baptism, closing with the hope that he would soon “stand on the shores of Europe” to give a fuller message “face to face.”
An apostolic rebuke
Perhaps Pratt expected to depart directly from Toronto to fulfill that very desire. If so, his ambitions and initiative were abruptly stymied by the arrival of a letter containing a stinging rebuke from the two most senior apostles, Thomas Marsh and David Patten. Writing from Far West, Missouri, in early May, they upbraided Pratt for his lack of coordination with the other apostles, expressing dismay at his plans to depart Toronto for England “in such a hasty (manner) without consulting, without exchanging with us the first word upon the subject.”
Marsh must also have remembered Joseph Smith’s promise that he would lead an English mission, and taken that to mean that he, not Pratt, would launch the church’s first foray overseas.
But Marsh and Patten were also legitimately alarmed at the prospect of a major undertaking as the church faced its most severe internal crisis to date, with dissent in Kirtland threatening its very survival.
Having heard reports of rebellion spearheaded by apostles Luke Johnson, John Boynton, and Lyman Johnson, they asked Pratt rhetorically but anxiously:
Where is Luke and John and Lyman. . . . We hear much evil concerning them by letter and otherwise & will you leave while things are thus—No! the 12 must get together, difficulties must be removed and love restored.
Thomas B. Marsh and David Patten to Parley P. Pratt
Back to Kirtland—and a new marriage
At this point in Mormon history, the apostles still functioned more as a group of semi-autonomous traveling elders, than as a tightly controlled body subject to a quorum presidency. Nevertheless, obedient to their summons but likely unhappy with their recall, Pratt sped home.
He must have returned in a very anxious state himself, concerned about financial as well as spiritual matters. He had left Kirtland heavily in debt, and at the very time he was traveling to Canada the economy of Kirtland had imploded. At this time of spreading turmoil, thwarted plans, and an uncertain future, Pratt attempted a return to domestic normalcy by marrying Mary Ann Frost Stearns, a convert he had met almost two years earlier at the conference in Saco, Maine.
It is likely that Pratt planned the step while in Canada, given his abrupt departure after Thankful’s death and his hasty proposal upon returning.
Mary Ann’s first husband, Nathan Stearns, had died from typhoid fever in August 1833 after eighteen months of marriage. Mary Ann, after almost dying from typhoid herself, was left a twenty-four-year-old widow with a four-month-old daughter, also named Mary Ann.
In 1834, missionaries in Maine baptized one of Mary Ann’s relatives by marriage, Party Bartlett Sessions, who later became pioneer Utah’s premier midwife. David Patten baptized Mary Ann in August 1835, along with her mother; her father and sister Olive were baptized in the following years.
A year later, six apostles traveled to Maine and preached the doctrine of a literal gathering of Zion in her town of Bethel. Persuaded of the principle, and without consulting her parents and over the objections of a guardian appointed to oversee her daughter’s inheritance, Mary Ann left for Kirtland in the middle of the night with Patty Sessions’s husband, David, arriving in August 1836.
Over the next ten months, the young widow, described as “an amiable, interesting woman,” and her daughter boarded with several different families, including Jonathan and Caroline Crosby in a house next to Pratt’s, Brigham and Mary Ann Young, and Hyrum and Jerusha Smith.
Her daughter recalled how:
a kind friend took me in her arms and told me I was going to have a new papa, and also a little brother. The sound of these words had quite an attraction for me, though I could not understand the full purport of them.
“Autobiographical Sketch,” 485.
At least, not until “Parley P. Pratt called at our house and talked with my mother.”
On May 14, 1837, days after Pratt’s arrival, Frederick G. Williams married Mary Ann to Parley in Hyrum Smith’s home.
Perhaps Pratt expected to take Parley Jr. back into his home soon (though this did not happen for more than a year), which might explain the quick remarriage. In any case, the following year, Joseph Smith condemned such haste.
“We do not disapprove of the customer,” he wrote, “which has gained in the world, and has been practiced among us, to our great mortification, in marrying in five or six weeks, or even in two or three months, after the death of their companion.”
In any case, neither abrupt marital readjustment nor connubial bliss could distract Pratt from the factionalism tearing the Kirtland church asunder. He immediately became a vocal participant.
Pratt’s triggers
Polygamy
The Saints in Kirtland had long suffered opposition from local residents. Some enemies of the church, such as Grandison Newell of Mentor, used both the press and the legal system to harass and stymie the Latter-day Saints.
By 1837, however, the problems were largely internal and fueled by two principal catalysts. First, controversy over a possible secret polygamous union by Joseph Smith with Fanny Alger created dissent. Smith perceived a duty to restore the Old Testament practice of plural marriage as early as 1831.
Rumors had long been circulating about unusual sexual practices among the Saints, as they did in the case of many new religious movements. An “Article on Marriage” published in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants referred to allegations against the church of “fornication, and polygamy.” Smith’s associate Benjamin F. Johnson held that these whispered rumors were “one of the causes of apostasy and disruption at Kirtland, altho at the time there was little said publicly on the subject.”
John Whitmer agreed that disunity in 1837 partially resulted from the “spiritual wife doctrine, that is pleurality of wives.” Even Smith noted in November of that year that he was asked “daily and hourly” in his travels, “Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?”
Nevertheless, most scandalous rumors hinted of adultery, not polygamy.
It was just such an interpretation that Oliver Cowdery put on Joseph Smith’s relationship with Fanny Alger, openly breaking with Smith as a result.
In the very month that Pratt retuned to Kirtland, Warren Cowdery, the editor of the Messenger and Advocate, issued a warning that leaders of the Seventy (a priesthood quorum established in 1835) “will have no fellowship whatever with any Elder belonging to the quorum of the Seventies who is guilty of polygamy or any offense of the kind.”
Finances
Kirtland Safety Society
A financial fiasco associated with the failure of the Kirtland bank served as the second trigger as financial pressures, a spirit of speculation, national economic conditions, and internal fissures laid the foundation for bitter division and eventual disaster.
Kirtland had experiences years of prosperous growth, and while huge profits could be made by the ambitious, the temple construction had incurred large debt. Its building had also functioned as a large public works project, and its completion signaled the end of ready employment for many.
Warren Cowdery suggested that Saints viewed the city’s sudden prosperity as a sign of divine approbation attending the gathered faithful:
The starting up, as if by magic, of buildings in every direction around us, were evincive to use of buoyant hope, lively anticipation, and a firm confidence that our days of pinching adversity had passed by.
Messenger and Advocate 3, 32 (May 1837): 521
Many Saints translated their optimism about the future into a rising debt load and speculative land purchases.
In early November 1836, Joseph Smith and others launched plans for a Kirtland Bank to liquidate land that had recently skyrocketed in value, as a partial solution to an acute shortage of specie. Denied a charter by the state legislature, they changed the banknote plates they had already manufactured to read, the “Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company.”
Pratt expressed concern about rising speculation.
Such circumvention was not unprecedented, and they thought such a maneuver complied with the law. More egalitarian than most banking institutions in the Jacksonian era, the Kirtland institution offered stock for $50, generally purchased with an initial payment of only 26 cents a share.
In October 1836, Pratt purchased one thousand shares, with a face value of $50,000, for $102. Sidney Rigdon served as bank president, with Joseph Smith as cashier, and thirty-two individuals—likely including Pratt—as directors.
At the same time, Smith moved to curb the downside of Pratt’s and others’ missionary success: the influx of destitute converts was simply beyond the capacity of the Kirtland Saints to assimilate.
“It becomes the duty, henceforth, or all the churches abroad to provide for those who are objects of charity, that are not able to provide for themselves; and not send them from their midst, to burden the Church in this place,” read a resolution approved by Pratt’s quorum.
It continued by urging “that there be a stop put to churches or families gathering or moving to this place, without their first coming or sending their wise men to prepare a place for them, as our houses are all full.”
A small Kirtland “anti-bank” had no chance.
The resolution warned that “speculators, and extortioners” would prey on the vulnerable newcomers.
The credit extended by the Kirtland Safety Society initially led to an economic boom and skyrocketing real estate prices. Church officials, including Smith, purchased property, which they often subdivided to sell to newcomers. By 1837, some leaders, including Pratt, expressed concern about the rising speculation and worldliness among the Saints.
The unraveling of the Kirtland Safety Society gave credence to their fears. Undercapitalization, unfettered speculation, and a run on the company’s limited specie engineered by Grandison Newell all coincided with a national financial catastrophe: the Panic of 1837.
President Andrew Jackson had issued his Specie Circular a year before, requiring all purchases of federal land to be paid for in silver and gold coin. The value of federal currency had already been damaged by Jackson’s destruction of the national bank. His Specie Circular created a crisis of confidence in state currencies as well.
Holders of bank notes, in a panic, began a run on New York banks for gold and silver. By May 1, 1837, New York bank reserves had plummeted from $7.2 million to $1.5 million, and the banks suspended specie payments, prompting similar actions across the country.
Discontent spread like a virus.
If New York banks could not withstand the crisis of confidence, a small Kirtland “anti-bank” had no chance at all. For Kirtland Saints, the national economic recession did little to mitigate their feelings of disillusionment or even betrayal, given the fact that their bank had been instituted at the best of a supposed prophet.
Latter-day Saints turn against Joseph
Discontent spread like a virus, engulfing not just the rank and file but the highest echelons of leadership. Among those who broke ranks with Joseph Smith were his second counselor, Frederick Williams; two of the three Book of Mormon witnesses; Martin Harris and David Whitmer; and five of the twelve apostles.
These people joined other dissenters who objected to Smith’s leadership, leading to the greatest crisis the church had yet faced. Returning from Canada, Pratt found himself suffering personally from efforts by Smith, in growing desperation and scrambling for disappearing resources, to alleviate his own plight.
He wanted my house and home also.
Pratt had purchased three lots from Joseph Smith for the extravagant sum of $2,000, which seemed justified in a time of wildly escalating land values even though Pratt believed Smith had paid less than $100 for the same lots. Pratt made a down payment of $75, and when Pratt’s payments lagged, Smith turned the debt over to the Kirtland bank for collection.
On May 22, a week after Pratt’s wedding, bank president Sidney Rigdon informed him that Smith “had drawn the money from the Bank, on the obligation [he] held against [you] and that [he] had Left it to the mercy of the Bank and could not help what ever course they might take to collect it.”
In the era’s legal culture, Pratt reasonably expected that Smith would take back the property in satisfaction of the note. Smith, however, had sold the note to the bank for either cash or as collateral for another transaction and left Pratt to answer to the bank.
Pratt thus offered to return the lots to Rigdon, as an officer of the bank, but “he wanted my house and home also.” Reeling from this unexpected demand and the specter of financial ruin, Pratt felt betrayed by both Rigdon and Smith, the men who had served as his spiritual fathers.
Indeed, he wrote, Smith had given him “the most sacred promise” that he would “not Be ingured” by the real estate transactions and that “it was the will of God that Lands Should Bear such a price.”
That same day, Pratt found solidarity with another disgruntled member. John Johnson—one of the banks major stakeholders who feared the bank’s collapse—deeded several lots at little or no cost to family members and a few others now at odds with Smith, including Pratt.
The property had originally been purchased with the church’s money and placed in Johnson’s name as a steward. Johnson likely hoped to recoup some of the substantial money he had invested in the church’s operations; it was also a gesture of conspicuous—perhaps defiant—generosity in light of Smith’s actions. He sold one lot to Pratt, down Whitney Street from the Kirtland Temple and perhaps the location of Pratt’s home, for a discounted price of $55.
An angry letter to Joseph Smith
The next day, Pratt responded to Joseph Smith with a furious letter which charged that the
whole scene of Speculation in which we have Been Engaged is one of the Devel; I allude to the covetous Extortionary Speculating spirit which has reigned in this place for the Last season; which has given rise to Lying, deceiveing, and takeing the advantage of ones Nabour and In Short to Every Eavle work.
In Pratt’s eyes, Smith and Rigdon, “Both By presept and Example have been the principle means In Leading this people astray” and had ensnared Pratt with their “false Prophesying and preaching.”
Following their advice, Pratt had “done many things Rong and plunged myself and family and others well night in to distruction. I have awoke to an awful sense of my situation, and now resolve to retrace my steps, and get out of the snare and make restitution as far as I can.”
Even if Smith was “determined to persue this wicked course untill your self and the Church shall sink down to hell,” Pratt pleaded for mercy for himself, his family, and “others who are Bound with me for those certain 3 lots.” Specifically, he asked Joseph Smith to take back the lots and return Pratt’s original down payment of $75.
Pratt called his spiritual mentor to repentance
or will you take advantage of your Nabour Because he is in your Power if you will receive this admonition from one who Loves your Soul, and repent of your Extortion and covetiousness in this thing, and make restitution you have my fellowship and Esteem as far as it respects our dealings between ourselves.
If Smith refused, Pratt would bring charges in an ecclesiastical court against him “for Extortion, covetousness, and takeing advantage of your Brother By an undue religious influence.”
The bitter memory of Heber Kimball’s promised blessing of prosperity likely added to the sting of his financial crisis. Pratt’s wife had been promised health, and now she lay buried in a Kirtland cemetery. He had been promised “riches, silver and gold,” and he was destitute.
Nevertheless, Pratt added a postscript, which the letter’s first publisher, intent on embarrassing Pratt and Smith, omitted:
Do not suppose for a moment that I lack any Confidence in the Book of Mormon or Doctrine and Covenants Nay It is my firm belief in those Records that hinders my Belief In the course we have Been Led of Late.
Others who dissented from Joseph Smith’s leadership likewise avowed their continuing belief in his earlier translations and revelations.
William McLellin, for example, lost all faith in Smith, but not the book associated with his name. “I have no faith in Mormonism,” he wrote to defectors who hoped to enlist his support, “no confidence that the church organized by J. Smith and O. Cowdery was set up or established as it ought to have been. . . . But when a man goes at the Book of M[ormon] he touches the apples of my eye.
Another Ohio Mormon noted after the Kirtland wave of defections that “there are some that are departed from the faith,” most of whom nevertheless continued to “hold on to the Book of Mormon.”
Vocal opposition
Pratt’s letter (along with a second, of unknown details) was widely circulated, and he engaged in vocal, public denunciations of Joseph Smith as well.
Because it came from an apostle, Pratt’s dissent was particularly influential with those wavering in their loyalties.
At the end of May, Orson Pratt and Lyman Johnson charged Smith before Bishop Newel K. Whitney with “lying and misrepresentation” and extortion. Parley likely supported the two men though he was not a formal signatory to the charges.
High Council charges
As a consequence of these cumulative actions of disloyalty, five more steadfast members of the church petitioned the High Council of Kirtland to try Parley (along with David Whitmer, Frederick Williams, Lyman Johnson, and Warren Parrish) for “behavior . . . unworthy of their calling.” The complainants alleged that the course of the five men “for some time past has been injurious to the Church of God in which they are high officers.”
The council convened on May 29, in a flurry of charges and countercharges. Four members loyal to Joseph Smith appeared as complainants against Williams, Smith’s second counselor; Parrish, his scribe; Whitmer, who had been presiding over the Missouri church; and apostles Johnson and Pratt.
Sidney Rigdon, Joseph Smith’s first counselor, presided over the meeting and began by reading the complaint. Parrish immediately protested that the version differed from the one of which they had been apprised. Williams challenged the authority of the council. Rigdon affirmed the council’s legitimacy, whereupon Whitmer joined Parrish in objecting. Williams relented, but Whitmer did not and was now joined by a sympathetic member of the council.
The council voted not to try Williams and Whitmer, adjourned, and then reconvened an hour later to try the others.
This meeting also erupted in disorder, with objections and debates over questions of jurisdiction and procedure. Pratt objected to being tried by either Rigdon or Smith, “in consequence of their having previously expressed their opinion against him.”
Rigdon admitted his sentiments, defended them, and then stepped down from the stand leaving judgment to others. Cowdery arose and said that he, too, was already disposed to judge Pratt and the others guilty. This left Williams, but as he had already been implicated in the others’ guilt, he recused himself and stepped down. At this point, the clerk noted, “The council and assembly then dispersed in confusion.”
Pratt publicly denounced Smith in the temple.
A few days later, at the height of the crisis, Joseph Smith decided a major new initiative was imperative—either as distraction from present difficulties, to procure fresh convert blood, or merely as a strategy for bypassing the immediate obstacles to church progress and forge ahead.
Heber Kimball later related, “The word of the Lord to the Elders of Israel was, go forth to the distant nations of the Earth.”
So, Joseph Smith acted decisively, calling Kimball to preside over the mission to England that Pratt had been planning to launch just weeks before. (Marsh was by now occupied as a church leader in troubled Missouri.)
On June 11, Smith instructed Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Joseph Fielding regarding their English mission. That same day, Pratt publicly denounced Smith in the temple, delivering a sermon which asserted “that nearly all the Church had departed from God and that Brother J. S. had committed great sins.” Pratt, however, “entirely cleared him self of all blaim.”
Referring to his letters against Smith, Parley P. Pratt “declared he would not retract anything in them,” except one of his charges against Rigdon. Unsatisfied, Rigdon, “with feelings of great disgust,” dismissed “the large congregation of Saints.”
His intentions remain mysterious.
Mary Fielding, one of Pratt’s Canadian converts who had recently arrived in Kirtland and would marry the prophet’s brother Hyrum later that year, wrote with shock to her sister Mercy that Pratt’s “very plausable discourse” left “some pleased but many greatly displeased.”
The meeting reconvened in the afternoon; after an emotional protest against the dissenters, Rigdon left with a faction of supporters. When die-hard critic Orson Pratt took the stand, Fielding “and a great many more” also departed.
Many, like Fielding, were confused, heartbroken, “destitute,” and “oppressed” that the church they had sacrificed so much to gather to was on the verge of collapse.
On top of it all, Joseph Smith suddenly took so sick that very evening that Fielding wondered, as she walked home past his house, “wether he [would] live till next morn.”
In the aftermath of the tumultuous meeting, “a greet number” of anxious persons asked Fielding for details. Judging from her letter, Pratt’s high standing and influence made him the special focus of public interest. Fielding further reported that subsequent to the meeting, “Elder Parley has left all his Family and set of[f] as he says for Misseurey [Missouri] without even calling upon Brother J.S. or acquainting the heads of the Church with his designs.”
His intentions—whether to stew in solitude or sow dissension—remain mysterious. Fortunately, although fiery and headstrong, Pratt was apparently open to mollification and reconciliation.
Pratt’s reconciliation
John Taylor, who had arrived in Kirtland in March, later related that Parley P. Pratt told him the grievances against Joseph Smith. Taylor reminded Pratt of the testimony he had borne in Canada of the prophet’s calling, saying, “If Joseph Smith was then a prophet, he is now a prophet.”
Able to see past his anger, Pratt recognized the validity of Taylor’s point. As Taylor charitably recounted, “he, with many others, was passing under a dark cloud.”
Nevertheless, Pratt persisted in his plans to leave Kirtland and moved to recoup his financial losses. On June 10, he sold his shares of Kirtland Bank stock to Lorenzo Young. More important, two weeks later, he made two real estate transactions, dividing the half-acre lot he had purchased from John Johnson and selling the lots for a total of $750, nearly fifteen times the price he had paid just a month earlier.
As Pratt headed for Missouri, a timely intervention paved the way for rapprochement. After a few hundred miles of travel, Pratt encountered senior apostle Thomas B. Marsh, hastening to Kirtland along with David Patten “to try and reconcile some of the Twelve and others of high standing who had come out in opposition to the Prophet.”
Marsh “prevailed on him to return with us to Kirtland” and persuaded him to make peace with Smith.
In his writings, Parley P. Pratt never mentioned the meeting or any details of his change of heart. Most likely, Pratt, like Joseph Smith, could be as quick to forgive as he was to anger.
In early July, Mary Fielding described a church service full of reconciliation and spiritual outpouring:
the Spirit & power of God rested down upon us in a remarkable manner many spake in tongues & others prophecied & interpreted. it has been said by many who have lived in Kirland a great while, that such a time of love & refreshing has never been known.
Descriptions of bright lights, angels, and speaking in tongues recalled the temple dedication of 1836. Mary Fielding also reported the return of Marsh and Patten from Missouri, confident that “the difficulties between the Presidency & the twelve will very shortly be settled and then we expect better days than ever.”
Marsh achieved his design when Joseph Smith agreed to call several of the aggrieved leaders to his home, where Marsh served as a moderator. “A reconciliation was effected between all parties,” he simply recorded.
In Parley P. Pratt’s brief summation:
I went to brother Joseph in tears, and, with a broken heart and contrite spirit, confessed wherein I had erred in spirit, murmured, or done or said amiss. He frankly forgave me, prayed for me and blessed me.
Pratt rose in Sunday meeting and made “considerable acknowledgment” of his faults, although Fielding considered the confession less satisfactory that his brother Orson’s.
Joseph Smith apparently considered it adequate, never mentioning the temporary estrangement thereafter.
After his reconciliation, Parley P. Pratt never again wavered in his devotion to Joseph Smith or the church he led.
Excerpt from Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism by Terry L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow. Copyright © 2011 by Terry L. Givens and Matthew J. Grow and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Minor style changes have been made with permission for online reading, including modifying paragraph length, adding headers, and using full names.
About the authors
Terryl L. Givens is a Senior Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. He is the author of many publications about Latter-day Saint history and theology, including books published by Oxford University Press like Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism, By the Hand of Mormon, Wrestling the Angel, When Souls Had Wings, and The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism.
Matthew J. Grow is the Managing Director of the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He is currently working on a biography of Brigham Young and has produced several publications about Latter-day Saint history, including Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of Mormonism,“Liberty to the Trodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer, and The Council of Fifty: What the Records Reveal About Mormon History.
Further reading
- How Did Early Latter-day Saints React to “The Vision”?
- What Was Parley P. Pratt’s Council of Fifty Assignment?
- What Did It Mean to Shake Dust From Your Feet?
- How Important Was ZCMI to Utah Pioneers?
- What Was the Purpose of Zion’s Camp?
Did Parley P. Pratt leave the church resources
- The Apostle Paul of Mormonism (Oxford)
- Letter From Parley P. Pratt, 23 May 1837 (Joseph Smith Papers)
- Parley P. Pratt (Church History Topics)
- The Kirtland Safety Society (Church History Topics)
- Two Biographies of Parley P. Pratt (BYU Studies)
One reply on “Did Parley P. Pratt Leave the Church?”
Nice exposition of the matter.
I understand this is about Pratt’s journey but could you shed light on Joseph’s side of things? At any point did he admit in private or public to fault, naivete, or assume a portion of responsibility for the debacle?