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The Church on the Early 19Th-Century Frontier
Richard Neitzel Holzapfel
The Latter-day Saint movement began with one family, that of Joseph Smith, Sr., and Lucy Mack. Migration to the advancing American frontier was one of the dominant forces shaping their social world. Westward expansion, social change, and religious ferment were the principal features of this new world. Economic necessity, war, and migration by their parents and themselves separated the family from central aspects of New England society: extended family members living in close geographical proximity, well-established town hierarchies, and the hegemony of the established Congregationalist Church. Their physical and social separation from New England played a fundamental role in circumstantial preparations for the establishment of the LDS Church. The western frontier of the new nation dramatically expanded in the postrevolutionary period. Immigrants flooded the new wilderness opening up before them; most came hoping to find inexpensive land and a new beginning. By the first American census (1790), nearly one million African Americans and four million European Americans resided in the United States, an area of 891,364 square miles. Internal migration opened up new territories in Pennsylvania, New York, the Ohio River valley, and Tennessee before the end of the 18th century.
By 1800 the fringe of settlement had formed an arc from western New York south through the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee to Georgia. U.S. territory nearly doubled with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. The War of 1812 had disastrous results for most Indian peoples, who occupied much of the frontier. With the loss of their strongest ally, Great Britain, they were unable to resist U.S. expansion. By 1820 the frontier had shifted to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the north. The natural orientation of the 1800 frontier (Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee) was south--along the southward-flowing Ohio and Mississippi rivers, which were the lifelines of early western settlement. The canal fever of the 1820s and 1830s and the railroad fever of the 1830s and thereafter changed the orientation to east-west travel.
The Smith family followed the patterns of western settlement, moving several times by the time the younger Joseph Smith was 12 years of age. His parents were married in Tunbridge, Vermont, on January 24, 1796. They remained near their extended family for six years on their own farm before they made their first move in 1802 to Randolph, a neighboring village seven miles to the west, to open a store. They were forced to sell their Tunbridge farm to pay the debts of their unsuccessful business venture, and as a result the family, like other propertyless individuals, was required to move frequently (at least seven times during the next 14 years).
Between 1803 and 1811 all of the Smith family moves were in a tiny circle around Tunbridge, Randolph, Royalton, and Sharon (the birthplace of Joseph Smith, Jr., in 1805). The circle then enlarged when they relocated 20 miles across the Connecticut River to Lebanon, New Hampshire, in 1811. The family returned to Vermont and moved to a rented farm in Norwich in 1814. Finally, they separated themselves in 1816 from family and friends and removed to Palmyra, New York, some 300 miles west.