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who were tithing their services to the Prophet. “The day was spent by them in much pleasantry, good humor, and feeling,” he reported. The snow had melted, so no one could go sledding.
    Then Joseph devoted two hours to “reciting in German” before he oversaw Nauvoo court proceedings in the upstairs office of his redbrick store. Joseph was both mayor and chief justice in Nauvoo. There was a lawsuit to adjudicate, and a theft. While supervising the court, Joseph looked out the window and spotted two boys fighting with clubs in front of a nearby tavern. “The Mayor saw it and ran over immediately,” his journal records, “caught one of the boys and stopped him and then the other.” Joseph chided the bystanders for not breaking up the fight, and then walked back to his store. His final message to the two young miscreants: “No body is allowed to fight in this city but me.”
    Not everyone succumbed to Joseph’s bumptious self-absorption. “His whole theme was himself,” reported Pittsburgh editor David White, who visited Joseph at the Nauvoo Mansion in 1843: “The prophet ran on, talking incessantly.” That same year, Charlotte Haven, a young Gentile woman from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attended one of Joseph’s speeches. She “had expected to be overwhelmed by his discourse” but found him to be “a great egotist and boaster . . . his language and manner were the coarsest possible.” A month later, Charlotte visited the Smiths at home. “He talked incessantly about himself, and remarked that he was ‘a giant, physically and mentally,’” Haven told her mother. “I did not change my opinion about him, but suppose that he has some good traits,” she concluded. “They say he is very kind-hearted, and always ready to give shelter and help to the needy.”
    Benjamin Franklin Morris, a Congregationalist minister in nearby Warsaw, Illinois, found Joseph to be both awe-inspiring and detestable. “The power of Smith over his followers is incredible,” he wrote in a letter to his church brethren in New York.
    He has unlimited influence and his declarations are as the authority and influence of the world of God itself. He is a complete despot, and does as he pleases with his people.
    Some people consider him a great man; I do not. He is not possessed of a single element of greatness, except his greatness in vice and blasphemy. He is a compound of ignorance, vanity, arrogance, coarseness and stupidity and vulgarity.
    Joseph had an operatic personality. He embraced and exploited strong confederates, but he could be unsentimental when it came time to discard them. Typically, his anger flared hot and faded quickly; he often welcomed reprobates back into the fold. For instance, it was a major coup when Joseph converted the urbane and erudite Campbellite preacher Sidney Rigdon to his cause, because Rigdon’s entire congregation followed him, doubling the size of Joseph’s tiny church in 1830. Joseph admired Rigdon, famed for his fiery, revivalist preaching, and often deferred to the older man on theological questions or when it came time to deliver an important speech. The two men shared a famous 1832 vision, staring into the sky for over an hour while receiving a revelation of the three-tiered stratification of heaven. But when Rigdon defied him later that summer, Joseph unhesitatingly “disfellowshipped” him as his first counselor in the First Presidency, the church leadership triumvirate. Twenty-two days later, Joseph readmitted Rigdon to the high priesthood, declaring that “he has repented like Peter of old.”
    In the early years of the church, almost every one of his close confidants apostasized, usually in a dramatic falling-out with the Prophet. For instance, all three of the original Book of Mormon “witnesses” left the church. Three of the eight additional witnesses recruited by Joseph were also excommunicated. (Three others were family members.) Practically every major church leader, except for