America in 1805: Five Snapshots of the World Joseph Smith Inherited

John J. Barralett, “America guided by wisdom” (1815)

I’ve been digging into the world surrounding Joseph Smith’s birth in 1805, trying to understand the worldview, pressures, and anticipations of early-republic New England. This is not an area of expertise for me, so it’s a bit overwhelming. But the more I’ve learned, the more I’m convinced I underestimated just how strange and accelerated that era really was.

Here are five things I learned that helped me feel the texture of Joseph’s world a little more clearly.

Hopefully, they help you, too.

1. The distance between Joseph Smith and the American Revolution isn’t as long as it seems.

Joseph was born just two decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War. For perspective, that’s roughly the same distance between 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s how immediate the nation’s founding struggles still felt. Veterans were still talking about the war during Joseph’s childhood, being closer to the American Revolution than we are to Desert Storm. In fact, Joseph’s grandfathers—Solomon Mack and Asael Smith—both fought in the war, and possibly relayed their experiences to him (Solomon wrote about it in his memoir).

Benjamin West’s unfinished oil sketch (Winterthur Museum), shows American delegates, including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. The British refused to sit, unwilling to memorialize their defeat. *chuckles in American bald eagle*

2. The month before Joseph Smith was born, Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean.

In November 1805, after a grueling, continent-spanning journey through newly purchased territory, the Corps of Discovery stood at the western edge of lands the United States had claimed only two years earlier through the Louisiana Purchase. Their survival and success depended heavily on Indigenous guidance, most famously that of Sacagawea, whose knowledge of terrain, languages, and diplomacy proved to be indispensable. Joseph arrived a few weeks later into a nation just beginning to grasp the scale of what it had acquired. America had touched its western horizon, but it barely understood what that horizon meant.

Captains Lewis & Clark holding a Council with the Indians (1810), University of Virginia Library.

3. Joseph Smith was born the same month as one of Napoleon’s most consequential victories, heightening a climate already charged with eschatological anxiety.

He entered the world in December 1805, the same month as the Battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon crushed the combined Russian and Austrian forces and dramatically reordered the map of Europe. Americans followed these sorts of conflicts closely, not only because of their political and economic implications, but also through a distinctly apocalyptic imagination shaped by biblical language about “wars and rumors of wars.” European upheaval registered in American religious thought as a possible signal that history itself was nearing its close, heightening millenarian anticipation.

The Battle of Austerlitz was recently depicted in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, played by Joaquin Phoenix. It’s the wild scene where Napoleon tricks the opposing army into retreating onto a frozen lake, then blasts it with canon fire.

4. When Joseph was two, Vermont became the first New England state to end religious taxation.

In 1807, the state abolished its ministerial tax, severing one of the last formal ties between church and public funding in the region and making religious support entirely voluntary. This marked a decisive shift away from inherited parish Christianity to a more persuasion-based form. Without state backing, clergy had to compete for members and resources. And as the frontier expanded westward, denominations scrambled to establish presence in new settlements, often clashing over theological differences that had previously been contained within colonial borders. No wonder Joseph would later report on the cacophony of denominationalism; it was practically structural at that point. Throw on top of it all the Second Great Awakening, and later, Joseph living in the “Burned-Over District” to boot.

“Minister Of Protestant Worship (pastor) Making His Sermon During Religious Service In A Village Church, Circa 1800” Based On An Illustration By Eaabbey.

5. One of the most iconic ships in American history was already out policing the Mediterranean.

By the time Joseph was born, the USS Constitution, later nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” had defeated Barbary corsairs and helped bring the First Barbary War (1801–1805) to a close. Americans talked about the ship for years afterward because it symbolized something new: that a fragile republic could project power overseas and defend its commerce against old-world empires. It reassured citizens that independence wasn’t merely declared but defended. You can still visit that same ship today in Boston, a surviving artifact from Joseph’s birth-era world.

Aram Boghosian (2012)—The Boston Globe/Getty Images.

All of this has reshaped how I imagine Joseph’s earliest world. He wasn’t born into a settled culture or a stable religious order but into a society already in motion, stretched between revolution and expansion, order and experimentation, inheritance and improvisation. Politics, faith, commerce, and imagination were all being renegotiated at once. Whatever else one makes of Joseph Smith, he grew up in a world where change wasn’t the exception but the very air breathed.

No wonder he would grow up convinced that God would intervene in history.

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