A few days later, after a public reading of his campaign pamphlet, General Smith’s Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, Smith justified his candidacy to his followers. Smith launched his presidential campaign on January 29, 1844, when he accepted the nomination made by Willard Richards, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in a meeting of Church leaders. Smith’s run for the American presidency thus represents a nexus of idealism and pragmatism as well as an unusual combination of providentialism and contingency planning.
Yet the most significant aspect of Smith’s presidential campaign illuminated by the Council of Fifty minutes is that the campaign was merely one possible avenue by which Latter-day Saints could attempt to obtain federal redress and protection while awaiting the establishment of the political kingdom of God. While council members were certain that the campaigning efforts of Church leaders throughout the United States were essential to Smith’s success, they appear to have believed that his candidacy would ultimately require some form of divine intervention in order to succeed. The Council of Fifty minutes reveal that Smith was more than a protest candidate-that is, that he and other Church leaders viewed an electoral triumph as possible, even if unlikely. But the minutes of the Council of Fifty provide scholars with new source material on the presidential campaign that, when considered with sources previously known, better equips them to examine these key questions. Was Joseph Smith serious about his presidential ambitions or was he merely a protest candidate running to raise awareness of the Mormons’ plight? Did Smith and his fellow Church leaders believe that he could actually win the election? If they did, how confident were they that the campaign strategy they had devised would carry Smith into the White House? For decades, scholars defended their respective answers to these questions with relatively limited source materials, reliant instead on their own interpretations of the few surviving statements that Smith and his close associates made concerning the seriousness of his campaign.
He is a volume editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the author of Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (2016).ĭiscussion of Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential campaign elicits a fairly standard set of questions. McBride is a historian whose research interests include the intersections of religion and politics in early America.
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