Once the Latter-day Saints were in Nauvoo,

once it looked to the Prophet and the other leaders of the Church

that there was going to be some stability, some structure,

growth, and development—

very clearly, the thinking of Joseph Smith expanded

regarding the spread of the gospel.

Coming up next, the beginnings of international Mormonism.

KJZZ Television, in cooperation with The Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series, highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

The Latter-day Saints fled Missouri and settled in the area of Commerce, Illinois, in the late spring of 1839.

At the time, Commerce was only a small village.

Then under Joseph Smith’s direction, a city was laid out in that area—

the city of Nauvoo—and converts began gathering to it.

Then, January the 19th, 1841.

Joseph Smith received a revelation wherein he was commanded

to issue a proclamation.

Nauvoo was the cornerstone stake,

and nations of the Earth were invited to come to it and gather with the Saints.

Mormonism was not a provincial religion.

The revelation begins with a commandment to the Prophet to immediately issue a proclamation,

and this proclamation is to go to kings and other leaders worldwide and to the governors of the United States.

It's an invitation for them, in a sense,

to listen to the message of the missionaries,

to listen to the gospel message, and it invites them to come

and gather. That is, come to Nauvoo and learn about us.

“I say unto you that you are called to issue a solemn proclamation of my gospel, and a proclamation of this stake

which I have planted to be a cornerstone of Zion.” Zion is temporarily abandoned,

but here’s the cornerstone; it’s the headquarters. It can perform the same function.

“This proclamation shall be to all the kings of the world, to the four corners thereof, to the honorable president-elect,

and the high-minded governors of the nation in which you live,

and to all the nations of the earth scattered abroad.”

I think Joseph, in the Nauvoo period, comes to see Zion as national, if not international.

The Quroum of the Twelve certainly encourage that notion.

But during the Nauvoo period, Joseph Smith is going to call Orson Hyde to go dedicate

the land of Palestine for the return of the Jews.

He calls missionaries.

We don't know if it ever occurred, but a missionary to go into the Caribbean, one to go to Russia. So there's a growing international flavor under Joseph Smith's direction during this period.

Zion was his favorite subject.

He saw that as his chief goal, to gather people. And initially, of course, he wants to reorient the economic order so that there will be greater equality and more sharing. That doesn’t work out.

But that idea of a harmonious city where you could build the people of God in preparation for the return of Christ was the heart of his teachings.

It’s what he called “the work.”

By “the work,” he meant that you would send missionaries

out into the world,

find people who would hearken to their message,

gather them in to Zion,

where there would be a temple

and they would be instructed in divine intelligence.

And then they would go out again and collect a new group.

So you would keep—sort of like a pump,

you sort of bring people in,

and then you would build more cities,

so you would sort of fill up the world in these last days, as he said at one time.

So that's the heart of what he's trying to do.

It's sort of almost more practical than doctrinal.

You know, it's not like the three degrees of glory.

It’s an activity that’s going to reform the whole world.

Joseph Smith, in contemplating the expansion of the gospel,

was not limited by geography.

Even Russia became an objective of the Prophet’s long-range vision.

George Adams was sent by the Prophet to Russia to see if there was the possibility for Latter-day Saints to establish a colony in Russia.

And this didn't get very far off the ground at this period of time, but at least there were some overtures in this direction.

There was some consideration given to settling in upper California,

and even some spoke about maybe moving on to one of the islands of the sea and establishing some Mormon colonies in that part of the world. And so they’re really looking broadly over the whole Earth to see,

and establishing centers in a number of different areas.

Since 1830, the command to preach the gospel had always been a fundamental tenet of Mormonism.

You'll recall that the first organized mission of the Church was to the Lamanites in 1830.

Then later, there was a mission in Upper Canada,

which was somewhat coincident to the mission of the Quorum of the Twelve to the British Isles.

We have to remember that really the first international push of the Church was into Canada, which was actually more British North America,

but it's only across the lake from the New York region, Palmyra and so on. And very early on, we have Mormon missionaries going in, particularly to the province of Ontario,

and they're proclaiming the gospel. So we have to say the first international mission of the Church is Canada.

Just how far-reaching were Joseph Smith’s international designs?

Well, they included even the Holy Land.

Years earlier, Orson Hyde had received a blessing or promises that he would preach the gospel among the Jews

and in Jewish synagogues and congregations.

And while the rest of the Twelve made their way to Great Britain and had

marvelous success there,

John E. Page and Orson Hyde began preaching throughout the East and making their way to the East Coast and preaching together.

But Orson Hyde was trying to get enough money and means to be able to actually go to the countries of Europe and even all the way to the Holy Land or Palestine,

and there dedicate the land for the return of the Jews.

Orson Hyde is sent to Jerusalem largely because of this central core doctrine that before the Savior can return to the Earth for a second time,

the Jewish people have to gather back to Palestine and they have to be prepared to build a temple there, as well as the temple that's going to be built in the new Jerusalem. John E. Page chose not to fulfill that call.

Some have traced this as to the beginnings of

Elder Page’s apostasy and his leaving the Church, which will cause the calling of Ezra T. Benson to take his place in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

But Orson Hyde took this call very seriously,

and he was very much upset to learn in a notice that appeared in the Times and Seasons the Prophet was displeased with him because he hadn't taken this calling seriously.

And the Prophet

apparently was heaping some of the blame on Orson Hyde,

where it really belonged to John E. Page.

Orson Hyde was doing the best he could to get there.

He finally is able to go to England,

where he preaches for a little while, and then

raises enough money that he’s able to get to Germany,

where he writes his pamphlet,

and he lives with some people that are kind to him.

And eventually he does

reach Jerusalem. His story, if you read

the account of his getting there, is just incredible—

to have this lone Latter-day Saint traveling alone from Nauvoo, Illinois, all the way to Jerusalem.

In October of 1841, on a beautiful morning, he ascended the Mount of Olives,

erected a small monument, and there dedicated the land for the return of the Jews and for the Lord to take away the barrenness of this land.

And this is monumental.

Think of him doing that alone, all by himself— just, uh, just an incredible story.

I mean, to think that within 11 years,

after the organizational meeting of the Church,

that an apostle of Lord Jesus Christ has penetrated Europe

and gone all the way to the really most sacred spot

and region of the world, is remarkable to me, to sense the vision Joseph Smith had of this Church and this kingdom and this movement, and not only of Mormonism, but of

the Jewish people.

It was also in Nauvoo in 1843 that Joseph Smith called missionaries to the Church’s first foreign language mission.

Interestingly, the assignment that was given to these four courageous missionaries was half a world away in the South Pacific.

As early as 1831,

in the Doctrine and Covenants, it says that the gospel would be taken to the islands of the sea.

That was first realized in 1843, when Joseph Smith called Addison Pratt to preach in the Sandwich Islands, the Hawaiian Islands.

Addison Pratt had earlier been to the Hawaiian Islands as a sailor before he had joined the Church,

and he had picked up some of the language.

And he also realized that these people were—that the Native Hawaiianers—were receptive to the gospel. And when he’s working—

when Addison Pratt joins the Church

after his sailing years, comes into the Nauvoo period

and is working on the Nauvoo Temple actually with Joseph Smith,

and he tells Joseph Smith about the Hawaiianers.

Three other men were assigned to travel with him as companions. One was a man by the name of Benjamin Grouard,

a second one by the name of Noah Rogers, and the third by the name of Knowlton F. Hanks.

They left in May of ’43 from Nauvoo and went east, and were hoping to catch a vessel headed to Hawaii,

the Sandwich Islands, from Massachusetts. When they got there, there was no ship headed that direction.

So they picked up another one, a whaling vessel called the Timoleon, and boarded it, but it was headed for Polynesia or Tahiti.

They’ll sail into the Atlantic around Cape Hope,

come around the Indian Sea, and then come underneath Australia. It’s a six-month journey.

Just four weeks out, they will have

the death of Knowlton Hanks, and they will bury him at sea.

I believe he's the first Mormon missionary buried at sea.

So now we’re down to three missionaries: Addison Pratt, [Benjamin] Grouard, and Noah Rogers.

There are—the captain won’t let them preach while they’re onboard. This is unfortunate. But there are two—

there’s a family there who have come from the East Coast who are planning to go settle in Tahiti.

The missionaries were six months into their journey and about 350 miles south of Tahiti,

when the ship, needing supplies, cast anchor at a small island called Tubuai. It is there that—I mean, it’s out of small things, you know, the gospel really takes hold. And

if the captain—up to this point had never let anybody off the ship, they had docked in other places, but none of the passengers were able to go ashore.

And he granted permission for Addison to go ashore. As he—

they loaded him in a canoe— as he came on to the shore.

He yelled, “Aloha!” and they yelled back, “Aroha!”

And they knew immediately there was a bond of language there in a greeting. And within the two or three days that they were on that side of the island, they real— Addison Pratt was faced with a decision now,

for the local islanders were begging Addison Pratt to stay. Well, that would be to avert his mission call. His mission call was to the Hawaiian Islands, the Sandwich Islands. So here he is.

He prays to the Lord and he feels moved that

this is where the Lord wants him to serve.

Addison Pratt remains there,

and the island is just ripe for Mormonism.

Earlier, I believe as early as 1817, the London Missionary Society had come through there.

They had Christianized the island— basically, everyone was Christian.

And so the message of Mormonism could—

could build upon that.

Addison Pratt’s first convert, quite interestingly, was a white European who was a shipbuilder down on the island. But he immediately began to preach the gospel among the natives. And within weeks, months anyway,

literally a third of the island had converted to Mormonism.

While Addison Pratt remained on Tubuai, his two companions, Elders Rogers and Grouard, traveled on to Pape’ete, Tahiti,

and there they remained, preaching the gospel, while they waited for a ship to take them on to Hawaii.

There is a battle going on between the local islanders and the French government to gain control of who’s, you know,

who’s going to run the island. After some—a number of battles, and it’s hard to preach the gospel during this time. So they decide, and they’re having no success— although I must note here,

the first baptisms now that take place in Tahiti are two—are

the two passengers who were on board

the Timoleon who had been befriended by, of course, the missionaries, and they joined the Church in Tahiti. Because of political turmoil between the French and the British, there were some problems there, and so they didn't have near the success and eventually,

Noah Rogers basically decided it was time to return home,

and did so, and he returned to Nauvoo.

And I believe it was in 1845—December of ’45,

he finally gets back.

Probably gave a firsthand report of the mission to Brigham and the others—by this time, Joseph had been killed.

But tragically, Noah Rogers dies during the spring exodus of 1846, and so he never was able to make it to the West, but Grouard stayed on.

And he began to proselyte in some of the islands around Tahiti.

And then Addison Pratt came up and joined him from Tubuai,

and between the two of them, they canvassed nine or 10 other islands

and experienced marvelous success.

Grouard then builds a ship called the Ravaai,

which is called “The Fisher,” and now he—it’s a schooner, a small schooner—travels now for two years in and out of these islands.

And he’ll baptize nearly 1,800 members of the Church.

Amazing proselyting effort by these men.

Now, of course, this is—by this time Joseph Smith is no longer alive. But Joseph Smith clearly,

obviously, had inspiration to send these men to this region.

And of course, the ultimate aim was to get to Hawaii. And yet they were diverted from that

and experienced success that I'm sure none of them could have envisioned. There are Saints in this region far longer before than

Saints in areas today where we have Latter-Day Saints—Mexico, Central America, South America, parts of Europe.

There’s this incredible nucleus of Mormon converts in this Polynesian region earlier than any of these other places.

At the same time that missionaries were abroad in the Earth, the gospel was also expanding in the United States along the Atlantic seaboard,

including New England, where Joseph Smith was born.

A small cadre of Latter-day Saint missionaries entered New England.

The Church had been established there in the 1830s and some progress had been made, but the churches had dissipated.

There were very few leftovers.

And so we kind of had to start anew.

This young group of missionaries who went into New England had a lasting impact upon the Church— and they were young men.

Erastus Snow,

maybe the center of the missionary activity, was just 24 years old.

Another young man, Eli P. Maginn, was just 24 years old.

George J. Adams, just 29 years old.

Now there was a senior missionary among them by the name of Freeman Nickerson, who was in his mid-60s.

But most of the activity, most of the attention,

most of the work was accomplished by these three young men,

and it spread all along the coast of Massachusetts, in Boston, in Salem, in Marblehead, in Chelsea,

in Lowell. One of those missionaries, Eli P. Maginn,

was a charismatic young man. He had,

as some described, “the Bible on the tip of his tongue.”

He had a great influence,

brought a number of people into the Church who had lasting influence.

This young man, Eli P. Maginn, for example, who

perhaps had the interesting distinction of once becoming

a missionary at the age of 19,

he served really for the rest of his life in that capacity.

It was a life abbreviated by tuberculosis.

He had a magnetic presence

and what happened in the aftermath of

the work that he did demonstrates, I believe, the significant way in which he served. For example,

in 18 months in the very early part of the 1840s,

he had built The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints into a congregation that was comparable to those that had been existing in Peterborough for 100 years.

It certainly drew the attention of the townspeople.

Emmeline B. Wells and a number of other families came into the Church during that period of time.

The Little family, who later became so contributive to the Latter-day Saints in Utah, came out of Peterborough,

Vermont—or, Peterborough, New Hampshire—

and the work of Eli Maginn.

In 1842, young Elder Maginn wrote a letter to Joseph Smith in which he described the work in New England.

He wrote, “I have preached from one to three times almost every day and cannot fill one to 20 of the calls for preaching.

There is the greatest excitement in this country that I ever beheld during my travels since I left Nauvoo,

a period of near three years in which I have traveled through 18 states and British provinces.”

This is an evidence of this young man’s zeal in spreading

the gospel of Jesus Christ. Such a stir was created amongst those who lived in New Hampshire

that a young Boston lawyer, who was a native of New Hampshire, who was writing about his home state, in trying to cover a part of his book on the religious influence among the folks of New Hampshire,

decided to find out about the Latter-day Saints,

who did not look like they were just going to be a passing entity.

And of course, as the story goes, George Barstow wrote to his Dartmouth College friend John Wentworth, who then asked Joseph Smith to produce

a little story about Mormonism.

And Joseph Smith, we believe, sent that story to John Wentworth,

who then forwarded the story to George Barstow.

George Barstow ended up not publishing

about religion in contemporary New Hampshire,

so that story never appeared in George Barstow’s publication, which came out at the end of 1842.

John Wentworth did not publish it, but Joseph Smith did in the Times and Seasons. We know it today as the Wentworth letter.

It was titled “Church History” back then. And of course, that's where Joseph Smith first tells the story of the First Vision in print,

along with the Book of Mormon,

the history of persecutions of the Latter-day Saints, and then, very importantly to us, the production of what we call today the Articles of Faith.

So there were great things that were occurring in the United States. At the same time, there were

enormous strides being made that would set the foundation for

the international proselytization

of the Latter-day Saints in the world.

Missionary work flourished in New England, the South Pacific, and other places.

Nauvoo prospered and the Church grew and converts gathered.

However, opposition was ever present, and against Joseph Smith, it was intensifying. And not all that opposition was coming from enemies outside the Church.

These were not easy times for Joseph Smith, despite the outpouring of information and the importance of the things that were given to him. On the 7th of May 1842,

the Nauvoo Legion, perhaps in its fullest form,

conducted a sham battle in Nauvoo,

a practice run in order to ensure that they could defend Nauvoo in light of some of the threats that had been made against the Latter-day Saints.

It was in this sham battle,

the first week of May 1842, that Joseph Smith said an attempt was made on his life—

that he said was directed at him from his erstwhile friend,

John C. Bennett. And in the aftermath of this, before the month was over, John C. Bennett had been removed as mayor of Nauvoo and had left the city

and began what became something that was of particular note to the Latter-day Saints because he published a series of exposes about the Church,

beginning the 8th of July, 1842, in Springfield, Illinois’s

primary newspaper, the Sangamo Journal, wherein he made allegations regarding the Latter-day Saints that inflamed the public against the Saints,

and in understandable fashion, helped to bolster the anti-Latter-day Saint feelings that already existed.

So by 1844, I mean, if you were living down the river,

one might be a little concerned. Say you were a non-Mormon downriver from Nauvoo or inland into Illinois.

Here you have a religious community that's grown large,

lots of people still gathering.

It’s led by a man who is now chief justice of the Nauvoo court,

who is lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion,

who is President of the Church—

you begin to have an anti-Mormon literature,

a strong use of the term “Muhammad”

to apply to Joseph Smith.

Here's a man with a standing army.

Now remember, outside perceptions— I don’t think the Mormons trust—

I think Mormons trusted Joseph Smith with this kind of power,

but an outsider seeing these developments might be a little concerned. They might see that as un-American. They might be seen as not just an economic threat, but a major political and maybe a military threat.

And then if you hear rumors of plural marriage

and then you hear rumors of secret oaths and temple, you know, secret ritual, it begins to fit all of the stereotypes of being un-American and undemocratic.

And so one could see how that— how that might develop.

It was B.H. Roberts who once said that Joseph Smith’s was “a life in crescendo.”

By 1844, things in Nauvoo were building to a climax.

As Joseph Smith and the Mormons gained power and prosperity,

they also gained enemies. Next week on the Joseph Smith Papers,

“The Climax of Nauvoo, Part 1.” I’m Glenn Rawson.

Thanks for joining us.