Personal Writings of Joseph Smith

The problem of understanding who Joseph Smith was, what his personality was like, is not so hopeless, but nevertheless real. For while the Mormon prophet produced a sizable collection of papers, the question remains as to how clearly they reflect his own thoughts and personality. The answer lies in the documents themselves and becomes particularly clear when we note that the sources are not the past but only the raw materials whence we form our conception of the past, and in using them we inherit the limitations that produced them—the lack of personal writing, the wide use of clerks taking dictation or even being assigned to write for him, and the editorial reworking of reports of what he did and said. For example, Howard Coray, employed with E. D. Woolley in 1840 to work on the Prophet's History, relates that Joseph furnished all the material and that "our business, was not only to combine, and arrange in chronological order, but to spread out or amplify not a little, in as good historical style as may be." 5

When Joseph Smith began his record-keeping career in the early 1830s, he tenaciously sought to preserve records of personal and public value and to hand down to posterity an accurate picture of his life and the work in which he was engaged. The history he produced is of monumental importance. But limitations inherent in record keeping and history writing have had a screening effect upon our understanding of the Prophet. The very sources that inform also tend to obscure.