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Isaac Hale: Antagonist of Joseph Smith

Susan Easton Black

Isaac Hale Tombstone, McKune Cemetery, Harmony (now Oakland Township), Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, photographer, unknown. Courtesy Larry C. Porter.

The years between 1825 and 1830 might have been years when Isaac Hale could reap the recognition, security, and peace that a hard working, God-fearing family man between the ages of sixty-two and sixty-seven should expect. However, the arrival of Joseph Smith in 1825 was to change all that.

Isaac was to briefly accept Joseph in 1825 and again in 1830. But in the interim his feelings vacillated. This vacillation was to become a pattern which repeated itself. Most of the time, Isaac viewed Joseph as a money digger, abductor of his daughter, and fabricator. Only during the early summer months of 1830 does Isaac appear willing to acknowledge Joseph as a Prophet and also the Restoration. Following his brief fling with belief, Isaac eventually ended his dilemma by proclaiming Joseph to be a "fabricator [who sought to] live upon the spoils of those who swallow the deception."

This chapter will focus on Isaac's life before Joseph came to Harmony and his dilemma thereafter. It will reveal the character weakness of Isaac Hale as an antithesis of the constant Joseph, who wrote, "I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I could not deny it" (JS-H 1:25 ). Isaac, a good man by the frontier standards of his day; was privileged to hear truth from a prophet; he vacillated and eventually angrily denied both the prophetic message and also Joseph as a prophet of God. I will attempt to explain why Isaac's relationship with Joseph caused Isaac to appear like "a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed" (James 1:6 ).

This chapter will also challenge suggestions that in his reactions to Joseph, Isaac was merely a senile old man in 1825 who was not responsible for his actions and statements. His own words convincingly reject such a view. Fourteen years after his initial meeting with Joseph, at the age of seventy-six, in his will of 1839, Isaac proclaimed his mental stability: "Being in a feeble state of health yet through the blessing of a kind providence, of a sound mind and memory." The evidence is convincing that Isaac Hale should be viewed as a man with a sound mind-but of a weaker character.

This chapter considers three possible reasons for this weakness of character: (1) his desire for wealth, (2) his anguish over his daughter's unsanctioned marriage, and (3) his open antagonism of Joseph, nourished by the vitriolic reaction of his relatives and neighbors to Joseph.