MORMONS  PLAN  TO  RETURN
TO  OLD  HOME.
________

Temple Greater than That at Salt Lake City to be Built
at Independence to Fulfill Prophecy of Joseph Smith.

(under construction)

Notes: (forthcoming)

LIGHT  ON  MORMON  BIBLE.
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Grandson of Widow of Solomon Spaulding Explains
How Joseph Smith Secured the Manuscript.

Sterling, Ill., March 21. -- (Editor of the Tribune.) -- I have noticed several articles in The Tribune in reference to the authorship of the so-called Mormon Bible. There can be no reasonable doubt but that Joseph Smith got hold of the book by fraud, and that the Rev. Solomon Spaulding was the real author. I think I can help to corroborate this fact.

After the Rev. Solomon Spaulding's death my grandfather, Mr. John Davidson, married the widow for his second wife -- they having been old friends in Munson, Mass.

My grandfather brought his wife to his home in Otsego County, N. Y., where they resided for several years. She survived her husband, but spent the last years of her life in Massachusetts. I often heard my father and other members of our family say that she told them how her former husband wrote for amusement, while living in Ohio, a romance about the "lost tribes of Israel;" that she had often heard him read the manuscript to herself and the neighbors, so that she became quite familiar with the story. Her testimony was that the romance written by her husband and the Book of Mormon was one and the same. Her idea, as I remember it, was that some one had borrowed the manuscript and copied it word for word.     GEORGE DAVISON.


Note 1: The marriage of the Widow Spalding (Matilda Sabin, 1767-1846) and John Davison (or Davidson) took place on Nov. 22, 1819 in Cooperstown, Otsego Co. New York. Evidently the Widow Spalding had moved to Otsego Co., from her former, temporary residence at Onondaga Hollow earlier that same year. Exactly how she became involved with John Davison, Jr. remains unknown. He was her first cousin, the son of the widow's Uncle John Davison and her Aunt Mehitable Sabin Davison. John had lost his first wife (Phebe Hoar) some time after 1810. Mehitable was also a widow by the time her neice came to visit -- her husband, John Davison, Sr., had died four years earlier. Eventually the Widow Spalding decided to marry her cousin and that John's home at Hartwick, in Otsego Co., would be her new permanent residence; then she transferred from Onondaga Hollow her various belongings, including those items she had inherited following the death of her first husband, Solomon Spalding, in 1816. According to her daughter's statement: "In 1820 she... sent for the things she had left at Onondaga Valley, and I remember that the old trunk [of Solomon Spalding], with its contents, reached her in safety. In 1828, I was married to Dr. [O]. McKinstry of Monson, Hampden county, Massachusetts, and went there to reside. Very soon after my mother joined me there."

Note 2: The 1820 Census for New York shows a John Davison, about 55 living at Hartwick, with a woman near his own age and several younger members of his household (his children, etc.) By the time that the 1830 census was taken, John had a new and younger female partner -- perhaps that was the reason the Widow Spaulding left Hartwick in 1828 or 1829. Mehitable Sabin Davison died at Hartwick on February 28, 1829 and with her passing Solomon Spalding's widow probably had no remaining strong ties to New York. George Davison says in his 1901 letter, "She survived her husband, but spent the last years of her life in Massachusetts." Perhaps John Davison, Jr. died shortly after the 1830 census was taken. The widow's daughter, Matilda Spalding McKinstry joined the Monson, Massachusetts Congregational Church in December of 1829. It appears that the widow (under the name of Matilda Davidson) joined the same church group early the following year -- indicating that by early 1830, at least, the widow had left her Davison relatives in Hartwick and had departed for Massachusetts.

Note 3: The John Davison, Jr. who married Solomon Spalding's widow, was born on Apr. 30, 1764, at either Pomfret, Connecticut or (more likely) at Monson, Hampden Co., Massachusetts. About 1800 he moved, along with his father's family, to Hartwick, New York and established a separate residence near his parents. He took with him his wife, Phebe Hoar, whom John had married at Monson on Jan. 29, 1789, and at least three children who were born before 1800: Lemuel, Chester and Polly. At Hartwick the couple had at least five more children: -- Mariam, Lucey, Emmy, William and Hamilton. Any one of the four sons may have been the father of George N. Davison, who was evidently born at Hartwick in about 1833. However, William and Hamilton (who were christened in 1804 and 1806, respectively), appear to have left no male children of George's age -- and Lemuel may have never married. That leaves Chester Davison as the most probable "father" who said that Spalding's widow had told him "how her former husband wrote for amusement, while living in Ohio, a romance about the 'lost tribes of Israel.'"

SMITH  AS  AN  EPILEPTIC.

I. Woodbridge Riley's Explanation of the Mormon Phenomenon.

As a thesis for the degree of doctor of philosophy at Yale, Mr. I. Woodbridge Riley offered his book, "The Founder of Mormonism: A Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr." (Dodd, Mead & Co.) William Alexander Linn's "Story of the Mormons" was published but a few months ago, but the two books cannot be said to conflict. Mr. Riley has addressed himself to the psychological and not to the historical or biographical side of the question, save where it was absolutely necessary.

The first two chapters are devoted to Smith's ancestry and environment in western New York. In the remaining chapters Mr. Riley endeavors to show that Smith's later acts and hallucinations were the outcome of that ancestry and environmnet. The story of his maternal grandfather, Solomon Mark, as related in Mack's celebrated chapbook narrative, is of great interest, and Mr. Riley evidently considers that the demented beggar-man with his seizures, his visions, his epilepsy, and his religious exaltation is one of the direct casuses which led to Smith's proclaiming himself prophet and vice regent of God. An alienist would have slight difficulty in tracing the connection. The psychologist in this instance certainly leans to this theory rather than to the theory that Smith was a fraud, pure and simple. The prophet's father was an erratic man, more than half vagabond, and notorious as such. His mother, the daughter of Mack, believed in visions and faith cures and asserted that her children's ailments were cured by miracles. Smith himself was early subject to fits of exaltation, seizures, etc., and these continued all his life.

Mr. Riley thinks there was no call for Thurlow Weed's denunciation of Smith as a crazy man or a shallow imposter. "The visionary seizures," he says, "were not consequent on dementia, nor were they feigned. There is a truer and, at the same time, more charitable explanation -- it is, in a word, that Joseph Smith, Jr. was an epileptic... One must rest content with epilepsy as a working hypothesis."

In the appendices of the book there are more chapters on the contents of the Book of Mormon, epilepsy, and visions. the Spaulding-Rigdon theory, and polygamy, and hypnotism. There is a long bibliography added. Mr. Riley does not appear to agree with Mr. Linn in the importance of the part played by Sidney Rigdon in the Mormon drama. George Trumbull Ladd of Yale furnishes a preface ro the book.

On page 317 there is a passage which will strike Chicago readers as analogous to a similar phenomenon passing now before their eyes. It is [a] description of the multiciplicy of Smith's activities in his last years: "To run over his Journal, and to extract but one event a year will give an idea of the number of irons he had in the fire. Besides the United Firm and the Safety bank, he had already started the literary firm and mercantile establishment. In 1833 he dedicated the printing office of the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, etc.


Notes: (forthcoming)