Joseph Smith's campaign for President of the United States

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Criticism

Critics charge that Joseph Smith's decision to run for President of the United States in 1844 shows him to be either a megalomaniac bent on amassing ever more power, or a fanatic with delusions of grandeur.

Source(s) of the Criticism

• Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1945, 354.
• Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847, 2 vols. (1854; reprint, Chicago: Lakeside, 1946), 2:157.
• Henry Mayhew, History of the Mormons; or, Latter-day Saints. With Memois of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith, the "American Mahomet" (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1852), 163–167.
• Eduard Meyer, "The Origin and History of the Mormons: With Reflections on the Beginnings of Islam and Christianity," translated by Heinz F. Rahde and Eugene Seaich, 123–25, typescript, BYU Special Collections.
• Bruce Kinney, Mormonism: The Islam of America (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1912).
• I. Woodbridge Riley, The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902).
• T.B.H. Stenhouse, The Rocky Mountain Saints (New York: D. Appleton, 1873), 147.

Response

Joseph's reasons for running for president included the following:^[1]

1. Joseph wanted to provide the Saints with a political candidate they could support. Rather than "holding their nose" and voting for the "lesser of two evils," or abstaining from participation in the process, Joseph offered himself as an option.
2. Joseph's candidacy meant that Mormons would support neither Whigs or Democrats; this could help avert anti-Mormon sentiment in Illinois, since the party which did not receive LDS support would have further reason to resent the Mormons, who were numerous enough to hold a "balance of power" in the state.
3. Joseph hoped to publicize the Saints' grievances regarding their dispossession by the state of Missouri. Other efforts at legal redress had failed, and so Joseph saw the campaign for the Presidency as a means of attracting attention, with hopes that the public's sentiments could be appealed to directly.
4. Joseph knew that running for President would attract attention. This allowed him to preach his religious and political ideals on the national stage.

Other benefits which accrued to the Church:

• Members of the Quorum of the Twelve were safely out of reach of mob violence at the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum. (Wilford Woodruff reported that Joseph told him that Woodruff needed to leave to be protected. Some of the returning Twelve also faced mob attacks on their lives before reaching Nauvoo.)^[2] The visits of the Twelve to members not at Nauvoo also strengthened these members' commitment to the Church following the death of Joseph. Members might have concluded that Joseph's death meant the end of the Church; having met and known the apostles, they were more confident in the Church's new leadership.^[3]

• Campaigning for Joseph strengthened the Church through converts^[4]. Noted one author who reviewed the campaigners' diaries:

The electioneers did much more than merely campaign for Joseph Smith: one of the purposes of the candidacy, which becomes obvious from the journals of the campaigners, was to proselytize. By their own accounts, campaigning seemed secondary in comparison to the amount of time they devoted to preaching.^[5]

And, with Joseph's death, the travelers did not suddenly return home. They continued their work, which would be strange if their departure was primarily geared toward electing Joseph Smith.^[6]

• Having many traveling messengers who knew Joseph and the gospel well allowed the Church to suppress apostate practices or teachings in areas removed from the Church's center at Nauvoo.^[7]

• The preaching and campaigning managed "to remove a great deal of prejudice" against the Church.^[8] It also impressed many people favorably in the midst of an acrimonious presidential campaign:

...the electioneers did campaign. They held political meetings, and some even had electors apopitned for their respective states. The bulk of their campaigning effort involved presenting the Prophet's [platform] to the citizenry of the United States, who on the whole seemed impressed and pleased with this plaform. On the other hand, many of the elders did have difficulty campaigning and were sometimes severely opposed.^[9]

• The electioneers were working in their home state, so this gave them the chance to preach to many family members. Some joined the Church, while others merely abandoned the prejudices they had held against their Mormon kin. This is significant, since the Saints were soon to move west, far from these family ties.^[10]

Endnotes

1. [note]  Margaret C. Robertson, "The Campaign and the Kingdom: The Activities of the Electioneers in Joseph Smith's Presidential Campaign," BYU Studies 39 no. 3 (2000), 148.
2. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 149, 163–164.
3. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 162.
4. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 149.
5. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 152.
6. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 156–158.
7. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 159–161.
8. [note]  Jacob Hamblin, Journals, typescript, Perry Special Collections, 7; cited in Robertson, "Electioneers," 154.
9. [note]  Robertson, "Electioneers," 152.
10. [note]  See discussion in Robertson, "Electioneers," 154–156.