Joseph Smith Jr. December 23, โ June 27, was an American religious and political leader and the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Publishing the Book of Mormon at the age of 24, Smith attracted tens of thousands of followers by the time of his death fourteen years later.
The religion he founded is followed by millions of global adherents and several churches, the largest of which is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints LDS Church. Born in Sharon, Vermont , Smith moved with his family to Western New York , following a series of crop failures in Living in an area of intense religious revivalism during the Second Great Awakening , Smith reported experiencing a series of visions.
The first of these was in , when he saw "two personages" whom he eventually described as God the Father and Jesus Christ. In , he said he was visited by an angel who directed him to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization. In , Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he described as an English translation of those plates. The same year he organized the Church of Christ , calling it a restoration of the early Christian Church.
Members of the church were later called Latter Day Saints or Mormons. In , Smith and his followers moved west, planning to build a communal Zion in the American heartland. They first gathered in Kirtland, Ohio , and established an outpost in Independence, Missouri , which was intended to be Zion's "center place. Smith and his followers left Ohio and Missouri after the collapse of the church-sponsored Kirtland Safety Society and violent skirmishes with non-Mormon Missourians escalated into the Mormon extermination order.
Joseph Smith launched a presidential campaign in on a platform which proposed gradually ending slavery, protecting the liberties of Latter Day Saints and other minorities, reducing the size of Congress, reestablishing a national bank, reforming prisons, and annexing Texas, California, and Oregon. This inflamed anti-Mormon sentiment. Fearing an invasion of Nauvoo, Smith rode to Carthage, Illinois , to stand trial, but was shot and killed by a mob that stormed the jailhouse.
