The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormon / Melville - Timeline

Nigel Bruce

• 3 min read
  • 1805 Birth of Joseph Smith
  • 1809 Birth of Abraham Lincoln
  • 1814 The Golden Pot. A Modern Fairytale by E.T.A. Hoffmann published
  • 1819 Birth of Herman Melville
  • 1820 Joseph Smith’s first vision; further visions through the 1820s
  • 1823 Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews published, reflecting widely held views
  • 1827 Joseph Smith marries Emma Hale
  • 1830 Book of Mormon published in Palmyra; formal creation of the Church of the Latter Day Saints followed; Herman Melville studying in Albany, New York
  • 1832 Rumors Joseph Smith has an affair with Fanny Alger (Oliver Cowdrey calls it a “dirty, nasty, filthy affair”)
  • 1836 Emerson’s essay Nature published; The American Scholar comes the following year. American Transcendentalism on the rise.
  • 1837 Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales published and makes him well known
  • 1838 excommunication of Oliver Cowdery and the first dissenters following allegations of Smith’s affair with Fanny Alger
  • 1838 Emerson’s Harvard Divinity School address
  • 1838 Mormon War in Missouri, Mormons move to Nauvoo, Illinois by 1839.
  • 1839 Joseph Smith and the LDS found Nauvoo
  • 1839 Melville voyage to Liverpool and back (almost 20 years old)
  • 1839 Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle published as Journal and Remarks and so is Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
  • 1840 Melville, aged 21, on Mississippi riverboat from Galena to Cairo, passes by Nauvoo
  • 1840 September John Cook Bennett arrives in Nauvoo and this is around when Smith begins writing of the baptism of the dead
  • 1840 Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd become engaged then he breaks it off; a roller-coaster of emotions follows
  • 1841 Melville on a whaling ship: later says his life begins at this point.
  • 1841-42 First major sexual scandals in Nauvoo centered around Bennett and Joseph Smith. This is also when Smith’s first plural marriage occurs (with Louisa Beaman in April 1841). Scandal comes to a climax between May and July of 1842 when Bennett is excommunicated and his exposes start appearing in the press
  • 1842 Articles of Faith letter
  • 1842 Emerson’s essay Self Reliance published in Essays.
  • 1842 Book of Abraham published (translation may have begun in 1835)
  • 1842 Abraham Lincoln marries Mary Todd
  • 1843 William Miller begins prophesying the Second Coming
  • 1843 July - Joseph Smith’s revelation endorsing polygamy and “the restoration of all things”; plural marriages increase and the second phase of scandals begins
  • 1843 October – Joseph Smith publicly preaches against polygamy
  • 1844 February: Joseph Smith declares his candidacy for the US presidency
  • 1844 April: the King Follett discourse by Joseph Smith
  • 1844 June 7 inflammatory issue of the Nauvoo Expositor – its only issue – accusing Smith of encouraging and practicing polygamy
  • 1844 June 27: Death of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in Carthage, Illinois; another brother dead July 30
  • 1844: September: Sidney Rigdon excommunicated
  • 1844 early October: Melville returns to the US – to Boston
  • 1844 October 22: The Great Disappointment of the Millerites. And Ellen G. White then has her vision of New Jerusalem.
  • 1844 October Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation published anonymously
  • 1844 Some time this year the first Mormon missionaries in the Pacific
  • 1845 January: Nauvoo’s city charter repealed by the Illinois Legislature
  • 1845 Melville’s Typee completed by summer; published the following year
  • 1846 February: LDS migrations to Utah begin – main migration completed by 1852. Joseph Smith’s wife, Anna Hale Smith remains in Nauvoo.
  • 1846 Lincoln elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
  • 1846 April - The Mexican-American War – resolved in 1848
  • 1847 Melville’s Omoo completed
  • 1847 Melville marries Elizabeth Shaw
  • 1848 Gold discovered in California – Gold Rush begins
  • 1848 Edgar Allen Poe’s Eureka
  • 1848 The Mexican-American War ends – Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
  • 1849 January, Melville’s Mardi: And a Voyage Thither completed
  • 1850 The Compromise of 1850 introduced; Congress passes The Fugitive Slave Law
  • 1850 Establishment of the Utah Territory
  • 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
  • 1850 Melville’s White Jacket
  • 1850 Melville’s Hawthorne and His Mosses
  • 1851 The Mormons’ The Pearl of Great Price
  • 1851 Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale
  • 1852 Brigham Young makes Smith’s polygamy revelation public, saying it was in 1843
  • 1852 Melville’s Pierre
  • 1855 Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
  • 1856 Melville's The Piazza Tales
  • 1857 Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
  • 1861-65 American Civil War
  • 1865 Lincoln assassinated
  • 1867 Melville's oldest son, Malcolm, commits suicide
  • 1870 Utah grants women the right to vote (revoked 1887, restored 1895)
  • 1876 Ann Eliza Young publishes Wife No. 19
  • 1876 Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
  • 1877 Death of Brigham Young
  • 1886 Melville's younger son, Stanwix, dies in San Francisco
  • 1886 Sarah Pratt interview, alleges Joseph Smith propositioned her to be a spiritual wife
  • 1890 September Manifesto by the Mormons officially bans plural marriage
  • 1891 Melville completes Billy Budd (unpublished till 1924)
  • 1891 September Death of Herman Melville
  • 1896 Utah admitted to the US as the 45th state