Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith

The early 1830s were banner years for preachers and prophets in America. Circuit riders and evangelists fanned out over the whole of the settled US, and church membership increased exponentially under the influence of itinerant clergy. An explosion of religious periodicals allowed newly formed and reinvigorated denominations to reach thousands of potential converts; by 1830, there were 605 different religious journals, and the American Bible Society was producing more than a million Bibles a year (Hatch 142, 141). The age saw a rise in a variety of eccentric religious activities, including speaking in tongues, divinely inspired "shaking" and dancing, spirit-possession, and faith healing. Numerous self-proclaimed prophets emerged, including William Miller, founder of the Adventists; "Count de Leon" Bernhard Müller, who claimed to be the Messiah; Robert Matthews, the prophet Matthias; Elijah Pierson, the prophet Elijah; and John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida community. And two particularly charismatic and divisive prophets emerged on the national scene: in April 1830, Joseph Smith, claiming to have miraculously discovered and translated the Book of Mormon, founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and in August 1831, the slave Nat Turner, citing visions from God, organized a bloody slave revolt, killing dozens of local families and setting off panicked reactions throughout the South.¹

Turner and Smith both sought to gain direct access to the transcendent and, through their own extraordinary testimony, to bring the voice of the divine bodily to earth. As mediators for the divine, these visionaries pushed at the conventional boundaries of scripture and of prophecy, claiming immediate access to voices thought distant, and taking on biblical roles thought long dead. Outsiders to mainstream culture, both received direct prophecies from God, and both ultimately produced written testimonies that were as unusual in their narrative technique as in their wide influence. These narratives—The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) and the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1835)—create powerful and influential personas out of Nat Turner and Joseph Smith while deliberately obscuring their roles as authors of their own works. Both Turner and Smith, I will argue, strategically blur the narrative categories they inhabit. Their astonishing narratives help us to reconfigure our understanding of the Second Great Awakening and its impact—both theological and narratological. Though the pairing is an unlikely one, bringing together Turner and Smith reveals the ways that the Second Great Awakening crosses racial and regional boundaries and creates a new public understanding of prophecy. Turner and Smith both employed a type of mediated voice that challenged fundamental assumptions about individuality, subjectivity, and narrative authority. Nat Turner, by casting himself as a new Messiah and creating powerful testimony out of ventriloquized narrative, and Joseph Smith, by creating a theology that understands all humans as potential prophets—and as potential gods—participate in a fundamental revision of the meaning of prophetic voice in America.

Prophecy is necessarily bound up with narration; by definition, a prophet must pronounce his or her message to a wider audience. But what does it mean to possess such earthly authority yet speak in the voice of another? Through their prophecies, each appears to speak from a position of narrative weakness: Nat Turner, enslaved and imprisoned, can speak only through an amanuensis with his own ambitions, while Joseph Smith begins as God's amanuensis and translator, speaking in God's first-person voice and seemingly possessing no original voice of his own. Paradoxically, each becomes an authoritative narrator and—even more radically—in the process of narrating, actually becomes divine. The Confessions of Nat Turner and the prophecies Joseph Smith published as The Doctrine and Covenants destabilize the standard narrative categories of author, narrator, and character. In the models of prophecy that develop out of the Second Great Awakening, the first-person narrator is no longer an individual actor in control of his or her identity, and the third-person narrator is no longer an authority in sole control of the story. Humans talk back to and share control with the divine, blending together first-and third...