The Joseph Smith Papers at the Association for Documentary Editing’s America 250 Celebrations

Joseph Smith has much to teach scholars about the founding of the United States. Last month, Joseph Smith Papers historian Spencer W. McBride shared his research on the subject with the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE).

McBride joined ADE’s virtual America 250 sessions, which explored the legacy of the US founding through historical documents. McBride analyzed the campaign pamphlet General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States. In it, Joseph Smith looks to correct the government’s failure to protect the rights of early Latter-day Saints in Missouri.

Where Joseph Smith and other early Saints had held the prevailing nineteenth-century beliefs about the Constitution’s sanctity, Smith’s experiences in Missouri compelled his presidential campaign platform to reckon with a fallible Constitution. McBride explains, “Of course, Joseph Smith was not alive during the American Revolution, but his engagement with politics in the 1830s and 1840s is a valuable lens through which to view how later Americans remembered and interpreted the country’s founding.”

McBride’s presentation was one of five on “Diverse Lives in the Early United States.” Though McBride and other speakers each had only seven minutes to present, he called it “a fun and enlightening challenge” and “a great opportunity to tie the Joseph Smith Papers Project to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States.” The meeting closed with a Q&A session, where McBride’s presentation was a popular topic. Attending historians expressed their surprise that Joseph Smith’s experience aligned well with other diverse lives on the panel. McBride and his audience agreed: Dissimilar perspectives often reveal history’s cyclical patterns.

JSP readers can learn more about the early Saints’ struggles and views on government in the original campaign pamphlet and elsewhere on the ​Joseph Smith Papers site​.