The Spalding-Rigdon Theory: Did a Dartmouth Man Author a Divine Text?

What if a text that some consider to present the Word of God was actually written by a Dartmouth student? The Book of Mormon is seen as a holy text by the Latter Day Saint movement, a collection of churches that claim sixteen million adherents worldwide and trace their roots back to the 19th-century religious leader Joseph Smith. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (by far the largest church of the Latter-Day Saint movement), the Book of Mormon was revealed to Smith by the angel Moroni. According to this account, Moroni revealed to Smith that a collection of hidden ancient religious writings were buried in a hill in what is today Wayne County, New York. Upon instruction from the angel, Smith located these writings in the form of golden plates. The angel gave Smith permission to translate the plates from their “reformed Egyptian” into modern English, which he did in the late 1820s, ultimately publishing this new religious text in 1830. Smith’s translation of these angelically revealed plates constitutes the Book of Mormon, forming the sacred text behind Smith’s religious movement that would gain traction over the succeeding decades and be the basis for the Latter-Day Saint Church today.

The Book of Mormon itself tells the story of a people who flee from Jerusalem around 600 BC before the fall of the temple at the hands of the Babylonians. Leaving Israel, they escape to what is today America, and most of the narrative of the Book describes these people’s dealings in the New World. Notably, a recently resurrected Jesus Christ comes to visit these people as well. The Book also tells of an earlier people, who fled after the fall of the Tower of Babel, and their own dealings.

While to a modern audience the story of ancient Jews traveling from Israel to the New World might seem fantastic, there was a long history and literature that claimed natives in America were actually descendants of Israel’s lost tribes. For instance, in the mid-17th century, the Portuguese Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel published The Hope of Israel, which argued, based on reports from the explorer Antonio de Montezinos, that the natives of the New World were descendants of the lost tribes. Menasseh’s book proved to be greatly popular and was translated into English, and New England Puritans were greatly intrigued by Menasseh’s proposition. This “Jewish Indian Theory,” as it was called, maintained itself in early America and found renewed interest at the time of the American Revolution in the writings of James Adair. Recounting his exploration of the modern American South and its natives, Adair released his own book, History of the American Indians, in 1775. This book also found an audience, and there is evidence that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were intrigued by Adair’s claims, although they do not seem to have been convinced by his arguments. Needless to say, the idea that there were ancient Jews in America was not an outlandish proposition to early 19th-century Americans.

The question of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon has beset Smith’s religion since the beginning, and this exact problem is how Dartmouth enters into the equation. I note that this article is not seeking to prove or disprove anything about the Book itself, but simply trying to explore, from a purely historical perspective, the role that Dartmouth may well have played in the history of the Book. The first link between Dartmouth and the Latter-Day Saint movement is Smith himself—he was born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, which is only about a half-hour drive from Hanover. However, the most important role that Dartmouth plays in one story of Smith’s movement relates to the origins of the Book of Mormon itself.

Solomon Spalding was born in Ashford, Connecticut, in 1761. Like many Dartmouth students of this early period, he traveled up from Connecticut to the College, graduating with the Class of 1785. Shortly after graduating, he was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1787 in Connecticut, and, over the course of his life, he slowly moved west. The bulk of his life—and where most of his writing occurred—was in Conneaut, Ohio, located on the shores of Lake Erie on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Due to disruptions from the War of 1812, he moved again but passed away shortly thereafter, in 1816, in Amity, Pennsylvania.

Spalding’s career as a minister and later as a shop owner are not what makes him a notable son of Dartmouth; rather, it is his amateur fiction writing that causes his name to be mentioned today. While in Conneaut, he began writing historical fiction about Romans discovering the Americas. In one surviving manuscript of his fiction, which has been referred to as the “Oberlin Manuscript,” Spalding tells a tale of lost seafaring Romans who stumble upon America, and he frames this fiction as originating from ancient manuscripts that he has discovered and translated from Latin. While this story is the only work of Spaulding that survives to this day, there is another alleged, now-lost work that he attempted to get published before his death. This lost work allegedly tells the story of ancient Romans who describe the natives of America as descendants of lost Jews who frequently fought each other and buried each other in large mounds (explaining the mounds found in Ohio and other parts of the country).

Spalding became connected to the Book of Mormon more than a decade after his death when, in 1834, Eber D. Howe released his anti-Mormon book Mormonism Unvailed [sic]. Howe’s book was the earliest full-length book dedicated to counter Smith’s growing religious movement. Smith first published the Book of Mormon in 1830, and Howe’s attack was the first book to address the contents of the Book of Mormon. Howe proposes a theory known as the “Spalding-Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship.” This theory argues that Sidney Rigdon, an early leader in Smith’s growing movement, was the author of the Book of Mormon, greatly borrowing ideas from Spalding’s unpublished manuscript. While this exact manuscript which is claimed as the inspiration for Rigdon has never been located, Howe’s argument relies on a series of affidavits from Spalding’s neighbors. Specifically, Howe asserts that these neighbors stated that, in Spalding’s lost historical fiction, there were warring tribes led by Nephi and Lehi, and these respective tribes were called the Nephites and Lamanites, which are the names of pertinent tribes in the Book of Mormon. The theory claims that Rigdon was working for the publisher to whom Spalding sent his manuscript, and, due to Spalding’s premature death, the manuscript sat undisturbed until Rigdon discovered it and copied its ideas into the Book of Mormon. Critically, however, no such manuscript has ever been found. Spalding’s one manuscript that survives (the “Oberlin Manuscript”) contains no such similarities, and, while the presence of certain thematic similarities could be argued, the lack of this alleged manuscript lends substantial doubt to the accuracy of Howe’s “Rigdon-Spalding” hypothesis.

This early claim against Rigdon would haunt him for the rest of his life and career. Rigdon was adamant in denying that he had any role to play in the authorship of the Book of Mormon, stating that Joseph Smith himself handed him a copy of the Book. Important for the timeline of the events, it is widely believed that Rigdon did not meet Smith until late-1830, which is after the Book of Mormon became commercially available in March of 1830. While Rigdon played a role in the growth of Smith’s movement and followed the group as it gradually traveled westward to Illinois and Missouri, Smith’s death in 1844 started a succession crisis that would split Rigdon off from the Brigham Young contingent that headed west to present-day Utah and form the modern Latter-Day Saint Church. Instead, Rigdon returned back to western Pennsylvania where he led his own independent Latter-Day Saint faction. This faction struggled with success, but its adherents would go on to form what is now known as The Church of Jesus Christ, or the “Bickertonite Church,” which is the third largest Latter-Day Saint church today, claiming around 23,000 members.

Rigdon would die claiming he had no role in the creation of the Book of Mormon, and his son John Rigdon would affirm these beliefs. However, his grandson Walter Sidney Rigdon would claim that it was family knowledge that the Book of Mormon was a hoax created by Rigdon and Smith based on the Spalding manuscript.

The Spalding-Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship would wane in popularity due to the lack of concrete evidence supporting it, but it did remain a theory for the origins of the sacred text through the 19th and 20th centuries. Most recently, there was a Stanford study in 2008 that used computational linguistics to analyze the possibility of Rigdon as an author of the Book of Mormon. According to the study’s models, Rigdon was found to be a likely author of the Book, but the methodology of this study has been criticized by various commentators. For example, the same methodology also found that Rigdon could have been a possible author of the Federalist Papers, which were written five years before his birth.

While the evidence behind the Spalding-Rigdon theory is questionable, this posited connection between Dartmouth and the Book of Mormon is still remarkable. Without more concrete evidence—which at this point is likely impossible even to hope to find—the theory cannot be readily accepted. Nevertheless, the history of the theory itself is important to consider. While Dartmouth has produced many great writers in its storied history, what Eber D. Howe and some since him have maintained, in effect, is that the most influential writer to emerge from the College was an author of historical fiction whose writings were not published in his lifetime.