In November 1839, Joseph Smith traveled to Washington, D.C. Styled the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he sought an audience with then-president Martin Van Buren. The Saints, popularly called “Mormons” after the reputed author of their holy writ, had been hounded by vigilante mobs in Missouri. Van Buren expressed his sympathy for the Mormons but said regretfully that “if I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri.” A little over four years later, Smith, then running for president, would call Van Buren a “fop or a fool” and blame him for corrupting the principles of the American Founding.

Van Buren was one of many prominent politicians to whom Smith appealed during his meteoric rise to national attention in the 1830s and ’40s. He even once dined with a young Illinois state representative, Stephen A. Douglas, and predicted that Douglas would “aspire to the presidency of the United States.” In his exhaustively researched biography, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet, George Mason University Religious Studies historian John G. Turner tracks the Mormon leader’s astonishing trajectory.

Smith was in many respects emblematic of the populist Jacksonian era. He was a man of humble origins and minimal formal education who, through sheer ingenuity and force of personality, achieved a remarkable degree of success and influence. His father, Joseph Smith, Sr., was a modest Universalist farmer and hapless entrepreneur who lost much of his wealth on a failed scheme to sell ginseng (briefly a cash crop in New England). His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, came from a devout but untraditional family of lay evangelists influenced by then-popular revivalist movements.

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Often in debt, Smith’s family moved multiple times. He was born in eastern Vermont but grew up in Palmyra, New York. The town was part of what came to be known as the “burned over district” of western New York because it hosted so many impassioned evangelical revivals. The young Smith was surrounded by a diverse panoply of religious groups, among them not only more established denominations such as Methodists and Presbyterians, but also fledgling movements such as the Millerites (predecessors to the Seventh-day Adventists), the Shakers, the utopian Oneida Community, and the Ebenezer Colonies.

It was in this milieu that a teenaged Smith, never himself baptized in any Protestant church, sought to learn which religious movement held the truth. After a harrowing spiritual experience in a quiet grove, Smith claimed he was confronted by Jesus Himself. The young man asked the Lord which church he should join. “None of them, for they were all wrong,” was the answer. In time, his parents came to believe Smith’s story.

Dreams, visions, and mystical practices all carried great weight in the folk traditions that shaped the Smiths. One such practice was searching for buried treasure. Joseph Jr. became a “glass-looker,” seeking valuable objects with a seeing stone. It was during one of these searches that Smith claimed to be visited by an angel who told him about “plates of gold” buried in the earth by Mormon, a long-dead indigenous inhabitant of the Americas who was himself descended from the ancient Israelites.

The story goes that Smith, along with several close family members and friends, translated the golden plates into what is now the Book of Mormon. This is an aspect of Smith’s life for which, Turner notes, historians lack significant contemporary evidence. Smith himself claimed he returned the plates to the angel. The Book of Mormon was an “incredibly unlikely achievement” and a “stunning display of American audacity,” writes Turner. It was also a reflection of American entrepreneurship, published with the hopes of selling sufficient copies to cover the $3,000 price of printing.

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Unfortunately for Smith, the text received quite censorious reviews. Mark Twain would later ridicule it as “chloroform in print,” joking, as Turner summarizes, that “the real miracle was Smith’s ability to stay awake while composing or translating it.” Yet Smith persisted, allegedly performing exorcisms and faith healings which, in the eyes of the growing number of the faithful, confirmed his identity as “seer and translator and prophet.” There followed an abundance of revelations, mediated through Smith, guiding the church’s doctrine and disciplining various dissident members. In 1831, with creditors increasingly hounding him, the prophet was instructed in a vision that he and his church should move west to Ohio. Within a year of his arrival there, however, a dozen assailants burst into his family’s bedchamber to tar and feather him, pulling out a clump of hair that left a permanent bare spot. Yet, Turner notes, Smith had “an almost preternatural resilience…. [H]e moved on quickly from failures and setbacks.” He traveled widely and encouraged the church’s nascent business operations, including stores, an ashery, landholdings, and a publishing operation.

In 1832, with the nullification crisis provoking national tensions, he prophesied that the “rebellion of South Carolina” would provoke a civil war between North and South. Regarding the “peculiar institution” that would kindle such a conflict, Smith’s opinions were troubled and contradictory. In 1836, he described blacks as laboring under the curse of Canaan, an ancient Biblical judgment that allegedly doomed them to servitude. Though he opposed miscegenation and did not believe black Americans should vote, hold office, or perform military service, he once told a dinner party he would never vote for a slaveholder. In 1843 he proposed a plan of “making all coloured people free.”

Even as Smith worked out the finer points of his theology—including shifting away from an early focus on converting American Indians—the numbers of the Latter-Day Saints grew exponentially. By 1833, there were about 1,200 church members in Jackson County, Missouri alone. As this curious new faith spread, the residents and governments of its host states grew increasingly hostile to it. In Missouri, in 1838, mob violence against the Mormons prompted them to form their own militia. The resulting conflict was severe enough to become known as the “Mormon War.” Smith’s troops ransacked stores and burned the courthouse in Gallatin. Vigilantes responded in kind, killing 17 Saints—including a nine-year-old boy—in Caldwell County. Smith was soon apprehended and might have been executed, save for a sympathetic judge who allowed him and several others to escape. Smith then led the Saints to Illinois, founding a colony in Nauvoo.

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