About Elders' Journal

Elders' Journal

The Elders' Journal, in full the Elders' Journal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was a monthly newspaper and the official organ of the early Latter Day Saint church. It was founded in October 1837, edited by Don Carlos Smith, the younger brother of Joseph Smith, as the successor to the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate. Only four issues ever appeared: two in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1837, and two more in Far West, Missouri, in 1838. With its third issue the paper's name expanded to include Jesus Christ in the church's title. Publication ended in August 1838 amid the events of the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, and the paper was eventually replaced by Times and Seasons.

Brief as it was, the Elders' Journal occupies a central place in the documentary history of the Latter Day Saint movement. Its four issues contain sermons, letters, doctrinal exposition and church news from the movement's crisis years in Ohio and Missouri, and they are preserved and studied through the Joseph Smith Papers project and the Church History Library. The paper's printing presses were themselves actors in its story: the Kirtland press fell into the hands of a schismatic group, and the Far West press printed Sidney Rigdon's famous July 4th oration, one of the sparks of the conflict that destroyed the paper and expelled its readers from Missouri.

Successor to the Messenger and Advocate

The Elders' Journal stood in a line of official church periodicals that began with The Evening and the Morning Star in Missouri and continued in Kirtland with the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, published from 1834 to 1837 under editors including Oliver Cowdery. When the Messenger and Advocate ended in September 1837, the Elders' Journal succeeded it the following month as the church's official organ. The succession mattered: an early nineteenth-century religious movement spread across scattered settlements depended on its periodical to carry the prophet's teachings, conference reports and correspondence to members who might never hear a leader in person. The official organ was the movement's nervous system, and in October 1837 that function passed to Don Carlos Smith's new monthly.

The first two issues were printed in Kirtland on the same press that had produced the Messenger and Advocate. Kirtland, with its temple completed in 1836, was then the church's headquarters, but it was also entering crisis: financial failure, internal dissent and legal trouble were fracturing the community even as the Journal's first numbers appeared. The paper therefore began as an organ of a headquarters already under strain, and its short life maps exactly onto the collapse of Kirtland and the church's removal to Missouri.

Don Carlos Smith, Editor

Don Carlos Smith, Joseph Smith's younger brother, edited the Elders' Journal as his first experience in a printing office, an appointment of trust recorded in accounts of his life: baptized in 1830 among the movement's first converts, ordained a high priest at nineteen and made first president of the high priests quorum, he took control of the Kirtland printing establishment at the Journal's commencement. A later entry in Joseph Smith's history records that Don Carlos took control of the establishment until the office was destroyed by fire in December 1837, an event that ended the paper's Kirtland phase as surely as the schism that seized its press.

His editorship continued the family's central role in the movement's print culture. The Smith family's involvement in publishing ran from Joseph Smith's supervision of the church's papers to the later work of other relatives, and Don Carlos would go on to edit the successor paper, Times and Seasons, in Nauvoo. The Elders' Journal was his apprenticeship, undertaken at about twenty-one years of age, in a print shop that was simultaneously a church office, a target of dissenters and, by December 1837, a burned building. That he produced two creditable issues in Kirtland and carried the paper's mission west to Missouri testifies to the seriousness with which the young editor and his brother treated the printed word.

The Kirtland Issues of 1837

The two Kirtland issues, dated October and November 1837, carried the church's message from its Ohio headquarters in the movement's established periodical style: doctrinal articles, letters from travelling elders, notices and reflections on the state of the work. They also appeared amid the Kirtland Safety Society's failure and the dissent that produced a rival church organization under Warren Parrish. When the printing office passed from the main church's control, the press that had printed the Messenger and Advocate and the Journal's first issues fell to Parrish's schismatic Church of Christ, and the Journal could no longer be printed in Kirtland. The loss of a press was not an inconvenience but an amputation: without its own press, a headquarters church could not speak regularly to its scattered members.

The fire that destroyed the printing office in December 1837, noted in Joseph Smith's history, completed the Kirtland story. Early in 1838 Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon removed to Far West, Missouri, where the church's Missouri settlements were concentrated and where a new headquarters was forming. The Elders' Journal followed its church west, but it required a new press before printing could resume, which is why eight months separate the second Kirtland issue from the third issue in Far West.

Removal to Far West, Missouri

Far West, in Caldwell County, Missouri, had been established as a Latter Day Saint settlement and became the church's headquarters in 1838. Don Carlos Smith's own journey west illustrates the removal's hardships: in the spring of 1838 he travelled to Virginia and Pennsylvania soliciting funds to help remove the Smith families from Ohio, then set out on 7 May 1838 with his extended family for Missouri, a journey of about a thousand miles in which his wife Agnes gave birth along the way. Joseph and Hyrum Smith's families had arrived earlier, Joseph reaching Far West on 14 March 1838. The editor thus reached the new headquarters as a refugee of the old one, and the paper he resumed there was a refugee publication as well.

In Far West the church obtained a press and revived the Elders' Journal for its third issue in July 1838, now bearing the expanded title Elders' Journal of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, reflecting the church's newly revealed name that year. A fourth issue followed in August 1838. The two Far West issues carried correspondence and church news from the Missouri headquarters, including material from leaders such as Thomas B. Marsh, whose letter to Wilford Woodruff appeared in the July 1838 number, documents now mined by historians for the movement's internal state on the eve of catastrophe.

Rigdon's July 4th Oration and the Road to War

The Far West press's most consequential product was not an issue of the Journal but a pamphlet: Sidney Rigdon's July 4th oration of 1838, printed on the Elders' Journal press. In that speech Rigdon, the church's most powerful orator, declared in militant terms that the Saints would resist mob violence and persecution, language that alarmed Missouri settlers already fearful of the growing Latter Day Saint settlements. Histories of the period, and the paper's own reference record, identify the oration as one of the factors that increased tensions between the Saints and their non-Mormon neighbours in northwestern Missouri through the summer of 1838.

The sequence that followed is the 1838 Mormon War: escalating clashes, the election day fight at Gallatin, state militia involvement, Governor Lilburn Boggs's extermination order and the surrender of the church's leaders and the expulsion of its members from Missouri. For the Elders' Journal, the war was simply the end. Publication ceased with the August 1838 issue, operations in Missouri became impossible, and the church's next periodical would be established in a new state, in a new headquarters city built from the Mississippi swamps at Nauvoo, Illinois.

Replaced by Times and Seasons

The Elders' Journal's successor was Times and Seasons, begun at Nauvoo in 1839 and edited first by Don Carlos Smith, the Journal's own editor, preserving personal continuity across the two papers and the two exoduses that separated them. Times and Seasons ran until 1846 and became one of the most important periodicals in Latter Day Saint history. The line of succession, Evening and Morning Star, Messenger and Advocate, Elders' Journal, Times and Seasons, forms the spine of the early church's official print record, and the Elders' Journal's four issues are the link covering the Kirtland collapse and the Missouri disaster of 1837 and 1838.

That brevity gives the Journal a concentrated historical value. Where other church papers run to hundreds of issues, the Elders' Journal compresses a turning point into four monthly numbers and two print shops, one lost to schism and fire, the other to war. Every surviving document in it was written by people who did not know, as they wrote, that their Ohio experiment had failed and their Missouri refuge would fail within the year, which makes its pages an unusually unguarded record of the movement's hopes at the moment before both collapses.

The Journal as a Historical Source

Modern scholarship treats the Elders' Journal as a primary source of the first rank. The Joseph Smith Papers project has published its issues with documentary editing, including the October 1837 number, and the Church History Library makes the paper available to researchers, with its issues also accessible through archive collections. Hymn and music scholarship indexes even the songs printed in its pages. Letters and editorials in the Journal, such as Joseph Smith's address to the Saints scattered abroad in November 1837 and Thomas B. Marsh's 1838 correspondence, are cited throughout the literature on early Mormonism for doctrine, church governance and the personalities of the movement's founding generation.

The paper's material history is part of that scholarship. Which press printed which issue, who controlled the Kirtland office when it burned, and how the Far West press came to print Rigdon's oration are questions the documentary record answers in detail, because the Journal's editors and printers were the movement's leaders themselves. Few four-issue newspapers anywhere have been studied so closely, and the attention is justified by what the issues contain: the official voice of a new religious movement during the most dangerous year of its early existence.

A Four-Issue Newspaper's Long Afterlife

The Elders' Journal ceased publication in August 1838, nearly two centuries ago, yet it remains in print in scholarly editions, in digital archives and in the footnotes of every serious history of the Latter Day Saint movement's Ohio and Missouri periods. Its editor went on to Nauvoo and further editorial work before his early death, its church survived the expulsions that killed the paper, and its four issues outlasted the towns' printing offices that produced them. Judged by longevity it is a minor paper; judged by documentary significance it is indispensable, the official record of a faith's passage from Kirtland to Far West to catastrophe.

For the history of American religious newspapers, the Journal demonstrates how completely a movement's fate could be bound to a single monthly and its press. When the press was lost in Kirtland, the paper paused; when a new press rose in Far West, it spoke again, and printed the speech that helped ignite a war; when the war came, the paper ended and its people scattered. The Elders' Journal's whole biography is contained in that sequence, and its four surviving issues preserve, in the movement's own words, the last months of the first two Latter Day Saint homelands.