It’s time to debunk the Spalding Theory. Some people continue to believe that Joseph Smith plagiarized the Book of Mormon from an earlier work by Solomon Spalding. First I’ll give some background on Solomon Spalding. Check out our conversation…
Who Was Solomon Spaulding?
Interview
GT 00:01 Welcome to Gospel Tangents, the best source for Mormon history, science and theology and first daily Mormon History podcast. I’m Rick Bennett. I’m excited to present a little segment, [that] I’ve wanted to do for a long time, debunking the Spalding manuscript theory.
GT 00:16 I’m surprised at how many people still believe this theory. And we’re going to go into it big time. We’ll talk a little bit about the history of Solomon Spalding, as well as why this theory just breaks down. So, you don’t want to miss this conversation. Check it out.
GT 00:31 All right. Well, it’s so good to be with you guys. Again, these are my favorite meetings. I’m going to see if I can share my screen here. Here we go. Hopefully you guys can see my first slide. All right, perfect. So it’s funny, Robert, you mentioned that I did statistics. We’re not going to go deep into that. But statistics is going to come up in this conversation today. So, that’s right up my alley. I like this kind of stuff.
GT 01:13 We’re going to talk about debunking the Spalding Manuscript Theory. Probably, this is the oldest theory ever, on the composition of the Book of Mormon. This is a picture or painting, I’m not sure exactly, of Solomon Spalding. I’m amazed that this is a theory that will just never seem to die. And so I want to address it and talk about it. Following the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, critics of Joseph Smith believed he must have plagiarized it from someone, because clearly, Joseph didn’t have the capacity to write that book. Now, I will just mention here really quickly, I think this is changing. But, back in 1830, everybody was like, Joe was way too dumb to have written that sort of thing. The most popular theory was known as the Spalding theory. You’ll notice the Spalding [Spaulding] is spelled with and without an AU in it. And even you’ll notice in my slides, it’s all over the place. I don’t think he really cared all that much on how it was spelled, with or without the U. We’ll talk a little bit about Solomon Spalding. He was born February 20, 1761, in Ashford, Connecticut. He served in the Continental Army during the revolution, which was interesting to find out. He was in the class of 1785 at Dartmouth College, which is in New Hampshire. He was ordained two years later, as a Congregationalist preacher in Windham, Connecticut.
GT 03:00 In 1799, he moved to Conneaut, Ohio, and started writing the novel, which was never actually named. When it was found, they called it Manuscript Found. And so that’s the name it has taken on. Anyway, that’s when he probably started writing it. He moved to Pittsburgh during the War of 1812. Pittsburgh is going to be an important site/city, because that’s where Sidney Rigdon is from. There have been many attempts to try to tie Solomon Spalding to Sidney Rigdon, as we’ll learn here. He [Spalding] died October 20, 1816 in Amity, Pennsylvania, which is about 40 miles from Pittsburgh. He was dead long before, even, the First Vision. And so according to this theory, Sidney Rigdon, who’s also from Pittsburgh somehow allegedly obtained this manuscript. There have been lots of people that have tried to link those two. There’s really been nothing to link them together. But the idea is that Sidney Rigdon surreptitiously gave the manuscript to Joseph Smith sometime before 1827. Some people have said, “Well, that’s what was in the hat. Joseph was reading from the manuscript in the hat.” I just find this theory crazy, because why wouldn’t Sidney just claim it himself? That seems to me to be the way more obvious thing. But then he [Rigdon] faked his conversion, in November of 1830, that was seven months after the founding [of the Church.]
GT 04:45 Sidney Rigdon has always denied any role in writing the Book of Mormon and he actually didn’t even meet the Prophet, Joseph, until December of 1830. So, he converted before he met Joseph Smith. But, according to the theory, he had some secret connection to Joseph Smith. And nobody’s ever been able to explain those connections. The earliest mention of the Spalding theory was in the 1st of September 1831 issue of the New York Courier and Enquirer. It was reprinted just before Halloween in 1831, October 29, in the Hillsborough Gazette in Ohio. And in the newspaper article, it said, “There is no doubt, but the ex-parson from Ohio,” referring to Sidney Rigdon, “is the author of the book, which was recently printed and published in Palmyra and passes for the new Bible.” This quote comes from Richard Van Wagoner’s biography on Sidney Rigdon: a Portrait of Religious Excess.[1] You’re going to notice that I’m going to refer a lot to both Richard Van Wagoner, and Fawn Brodie in this presentation. That’s where most of most of this information comes from.
GT 06:02 Some of the earliest Mormon critics, guy by the name of Doctor, Doctor was his first name. It was not a title, Doctor Philastus Hurlbut. He lived from February 1809 to June of 1883. He was a former Methodist minister. He joined Joseph Smith’s Church of Christ sometime in 1832 or 1833. He was excommunicated in June of 1833 on charges of sexual immorality. Following that, he became probably the most prominent anti-Mormon of the day. He went to Palmyra and collected a bunch of affidavits from Joseph Smith’s neighbors, trying to dig up dirt on Joseph Smith. In 1834, he was arrested for threatening Joseph Smith’s life. He threatened he would “wash his hands in the prophet’s blood.” In January of 1834, Joseph Smith filed a legal complaint bringing Hurlburt to trial on the first of April. The court found him guilty, fined him $200 and ordered him to keep the peace for six months. And so, the notoriety surrounding Hurlbut compounded by an embarrassing incident when his wife was discovered in bed with Judge Orris Clapp, tarnished his image. He sold his research to Eber D. Howe, who was the editor of the Painesville Telegraph and E.D. Howe held a long-term grudge against Mormonism for converting his wife and daughter. So, we’ll talk about him, as well. Eber D. Howe was born in 1798 and died in 1885. He’s the founder of the Painesville Telegraph, from 1822. And he was the one who actually published the first anti-Mormon book called, Mormonism Unvailed in 1834.
GT 08:02 I will tell you that a few years ago, Dan Vogel[2] actually published a scholarly edition[3] where he footnoted all of the charges of E.D. Howe in the book. It’s really fascinating. Dan did a great job with that book. I highly recommend it. I think that’s through Signature Books. I can’t remember. One of the other interesting things about E.D. Howe, a lot of times we like to paint these guys as villains. He was actually a strong abolitionist, and his home was used as a station for the Underground Railroad. So, I’ll put in a good word for that there with E.D. Howe. So, between Doctor Philastus Hurlbut and E. D. Howe, those were the two people who collected most of the information on the authorship of the Book of Mormon, as early as 1834. According to Fawn Brodie, on page 144 of her book, No Man Knows my History,[4] “Now to his bitter chagrin, he found that the long chase had been in vain,” and we’re referring to Philastus Hurtbut or Hurlburt. Once again, spellings are very loose back then. Sometimes there’s an R in his name, sometimes not.
GT 09:22 “For while the romance did concern the ancestors of the Indians, its resemblance to the Book of Mormon ended there. None of the names found in one could be identified in the other. The many battles, which each described, showed not the slightest similarity with those of the other. And Spalding’s prose style, which aped to the 18th century British sentimental novelists, differed from the style of the Mormon Bible, as much as Pamela or Virtue Rewarded differed from the New Testament.” So that’s a quote from Fawn Brodie’s book, No Man Knows My History.
GT 09:57 So despite this, it’s been interesting to me, to see how many people still love this theory for some strange reason. So, Hurlburt or “Hurlbut proposed that there must have been a second manuscript. E.D. Howe wrote to Robert Patterson, the Pittsburgh printer mentioned by Spalding’s widow. He replied that he had no recollection of any manuscripts being brought there for publication, neither would he have been likely to have seen it, as the business of printing was conducted wholly by Lambdin at the time.
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“Disappointed in this source and unable to get any confirming evidence from Joseph Smith’s neighbors in western New York, Hurlbut had to be content with insinuating that Sidney Rigdon, who had once lived in Pittsburgh, was somehow responsible for getting the Spalding manuscript into Joseph Smith’s hand.” So, that’s another quote from Fawn Brodie’s book, page 449.
GT 11:01 Fawn Brodie continues, “If the evidence pointing to the existence of a second modern Spalding manuscript is dubious, the affidavits trying to prove that Rigdon stole it or copied it, are all unconvincing and frequently preposterous. First, there is no evidence that Rigdon ever lived in Pittsburgh, until 1822.” So, this is six years after Spalding’s death. “Rigdon became the pastor of the First Baptist Church. Robert Patterson, Jr, son of the Pittsburgh printer, conducted an exhaustive research among the old settlers of the city to try to establish the truth of the Spalding theory. This was in 1882, 66 years after Spalding’s death. Many were familiar with the theory and believed it, but few could give first-hand information. Rigdon’s brother-in-law, not a Mormon, and Isaac King, the old neighbor, swore to him that Rigdon did not go to Pittsburgh before 1822. Mrs. Lambdin, the widow of Patterson’s partner, denied any knowledge of Rigdon, as did Robert Dubois, who had worked in the print shop between 1818 and 1820.”
GT 12:13 That’s Another reference from Fawn Brodie’s book. According to the theory, we’ve got to tie Sidney Rigdon to Joseph Smith somehow before 1830, when his first visit in December of 1830 is well-documented. Brodie continues, “The tenuous chain of evidence accumulated to support the Spalding/Rigdon theory breaks altogether when it tries to prove that Rigdon met Joseph Smith before 1830. Rigdon’s life between 1826 and 1829 has been carefully documented from non-Mormon sources. It is clear from the following chronology that he was a busy and successful preacher and one of the leading figures in the Campbellite movement in Ohio until August of 1830, when he broke with Alexander Campbell over the question of introducing communism into the Campbelllite church. He was one of four key men of that church. It cannot be held that Sidney Rigdon rewrote the Spalding manuscript before 1827, since the anti-masonry permeating the book, clearly stemmed from the Morgan excitement, beginning late in 1826.”
GT 13:26 So, in Brodie’s book, she lists a table of all the funerals, marriages and other meetings between 1826 and 1830 that Sidney Rigdon attended, along with gaps of his where his whereabouts aren’t known. But there is no link between Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, prior to 1830. It just doesn’t exist. I know a lot of people are still trying to find that, but no link exists.
{End of Part 1}
[1] Can be purchased at https://amzn.to/3LoNwN4
[2] See our interviews at https://gospeltangents.com/people/dan-vogel
[3] Can be purchased at https://amzn.to/2UgOV0n
[4] Can be purchased at https://amzn.to/2qMer1N
