He was charged as such.
“JS was “charged” numerous times as a form of harassment. The cases were usually thrown out without even a trial.”
I guess you could call it harassment when they sent him to jail at Liberty for inciting the distruction of a County, running the Danite militia and nearly allowing a thousand of his men to be killed. I guess it was harassment to fine him $1000 for running a bank without a charter (and apparently no assets) which went belly up and ruined numerous lives. And I guess when he had a Free Press destroyed, the free press was harassing Saint Smith.
But I always forget, it was always someone else’s fault.
He was charged as a con artist too.
No doubt the early Mormons were harassed a great deal without cause. But I find the affidavits in Mormonism Unvailed convincing because they were gathered very soon after the events in question from people in a position to know the Smiths very well, and my judgment is that they sound believable and not made up.
Would you like to address this specious defense of a fraudulent peepstone prophet?... I think your files are larger than mine.
The Mormon writer Francis W. Kirkham just could not allow himself to believe that the 1826 court record was authentic. He, in fact, felt that if the transcript were authentic it would disprove Mormonism:
“A careful study of all facts regarding this alleged confession of Joseph Smith in a court of law that he had used a seer stone to find hidden treasure for purposes of fraud, must come to the conclusion that no such record was ever made, and therefore, is not in existence.... had he [Joseph Smith] made this confession in a court of law as early as 1826, or four years before the Book of Mormon was printed, and this confession was in a court record, it would have been impossible for him to have organize the restored Church. (A New Witness For Christ In America, vol. 1, pages 385-387)
“If a court record could be identified, and if it contained a confession by Joseph Smith which revealed him to be a poor, ignorant, deluded, and superstitious person unable himself to write a book of any consequence, and whose church could not endure because it attracted only similar persons of low mentality—if such a court record confession could be identified and proved, then it follows that his believers must deny his claimed divine guidance which led them to follow him.... How could he be a prophet of God, the leader of the Restored Church to these tens of thousands, if he had been the superstitious fraud which ‘the pages from a book’ declared he confessed to be?” (Ibid., pp.486-487)
The noted Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley published a book in which this statement appeared: “...if this court record is authentic it is the most damning evidence in existence against Joseph Smith.” (The Myth Makers, 1961, page 142) On the same page we read that such a court record would be “the most devastating blow to Smith ever delivered.” Because he could see the serious implications of the matter, Dr. Nibley tried in every way possible to destroy the idea that the court record was an authentic document.
As we indicated earlier, in 1971 Wesley P. Walters made an astounding discovery which destroyed many of the arguments Mormon writers had used to discredit the 1826 Court record. While searching through some old records stored in the basement of the county jail in Norwich, New York, Wesley Walters and Fred Poffarl discovered two documents from Bainbridge which confirmed the authenticity of the printed court record. The most important was Justice Albert Neely’s bill to the county for his fees in several legal matters he was involved with in 1826. The fifth item from the top mentioned the case of “Joseph Smith The Glass looker.”
The fact that Justice Neely said Joseph Smith was a "Glass looker" fits very well with the published version of the legal proceedings. Hugh Nibley and other Mormon apologists became strangely silent after these documents were discovered.
While most Mormon scholars accepted the evidence which Wesley Walters discovered, an overzealous supporter of Joseph Smith decided to resort to forgery in an attempt to discredit the documents. In 1986 Ronald Vern Jackson, a Mormon researcher who wrote the book The Seer, Joseph Smith, appeared on the Mormon Church’s television Station, KSL-TV with the startling claim that Justice Neely’s bill had been altered. He claimed that the name “Josiah Stowell” originally appeared on the document, but that these words had been changed to “Joseph Smith.” Although Mr. Jackson did not directly state it, the implications were clear-Walters had found a genuine bill referring to Josiah Stowell and that he had deliberately altered it to discredit the prophet Joseph Smith! Jackson professes to believe that Mark Hofmann was not alone in creating forgeries. In an introduction to his publication of the Mark Hofmann Interviews, Jackson wrote that he had “very incriminating evidence that others were involved!” He also declared that “It was a conspiracy to rewrite L.D.S church history and Mark Hofmann was but a pawn that was sacrificed to save the King. There are those who would love to disgrace the L.D.S. church by proving it’s history to be a sham. And Mark Hofmann was the tool through which they were going to do it.” He also stated that “Mark Hofmann was just the tip of the iceberg,...” In an advertisement for his publications, we find the following:
“So incriminating is his [Jackson’s] evidence, information and documentation in this case, not only of Hofmann, and his Associates, but of the ‘Wider’ Co-conspiratorial Ring, that several attempts have been made on his life!” We understand that Mr. Jackson has hinted that the King of Mormon document forgery is a minister who lives in the Midwest. Since Wesley P. Walters pastors a church in Illinois and is deeply involved in research on Mormon history, it seems reasonable to believe that Jackson is hinting that he is the “King.”
In any case, Wesley P. Walters made these observations about Ronald Jackson’s charges:
“Recently, Ron Jackson, a pro-Mormon historian from Bountiful, Utah, appeared on KSL-TV in Salt Lake City and claimed that the 1826 justice of the peace bill had been altered. He claimed that when this writer was lecturing in Salt Lake City in 1976, a friend had inadvertently picked up some of this writer’s notes and kept them. Accompanying the notes, he claimed, was a reproduction of the trial bill as it originally read. Jackson said that instead of reading the people ‘vs. Joseph Smith the glass looker,’ it originally read, ‘vs. Josiah Stowell the glass looker.’
“The reproduction bearing the name Josiah Stowell and purportedly obtained from this writer’s notes shows signs of forgery. Someone has obliterated parts of ‘Joseph’ and in a sloppy hand tried to change this to read ‘Josiah.’ He has left the ‘S’ of ‘Smith’ but obliterated the remainder and placed the name ‘Stowell’ into that space. The final ‘ell’ in Stowell appears to have been taken from the name Darnell, which appears further down in the same manuscript, and inserted as the final letters of Stowell. Moreover, the letter ‘a’ in Josiah and the ‘o’ in Stowell do not match the way these letters are formed in the rest of the document, and the crossing of the ‘t’ is quite different.” (Personal Freedom Outreach Newsletter, April-June 1986, p. 2)
[Calpernia at FR]
And the others?