If Joseph Smith had Become President of the USA

[_why me]

Well, now that I checked the FAIR site I see that FAIR agrees with me. This should come as no surprise since I do believe in traveling in good company:

http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith_and_politics

I was spot on.

[_why me]

Here is a book about his presidency:

http://store.fairlds.org/prod/p1932597530.html

[_Pokatator]

Well, now that I checked the FAIR site I see that FAIR agrees with me.

Boy, it's about time they agreed with you. Now that you have them straightened out you can go back to work on straightening us out.

After all that is the only reason you are here, remember?

[_solomarineris]

Joseph Smith's 1844 bid for the US Presidency was a "long shot." but not
an impossibility. Had the Democrat and Whig candidates somehow alienated
enough voters, Smith might have possibly made it into office as an unexpected
"dark horse" third-party leader.

Your conjecture is based on an impossible hypothesis.
There wasn't even a remote possibility of this scenario. Joseph Smith was living in an isolated island
full of hardcore followers, outside people hated him, resented his charisma, success not to mention
his religion.

[_Uncle Dale]

Joseph Smith's 1844 bid for the US Presidency was a "long shot." but not
an impossibility. Had the Democrat and Whig candidates somehow alienated
enough voters, Smith might have possibly made it into office as an unexpected
"dark horse" third-party leader.

Your conjecture is based on an impossible hypothesis.
There wasn't even a remote possibility of this scenario. Joseph Smith was living in an isolated island
full of hardcore followers, outside people hated him, resented his charisma, success not to mention
his religion.

Smith would have definitely lost the states of Ohio and Missouri. He could have won Illinois.
After that, the best case scenario would have involved keeping the Whig and Democrat electors
evenly divided, and bribing/threatening/faking enough additional electoral votes to give Smith a
slight plurality.

Probably there was not enough money in Mormon hands (counterfeit or real) to bribe
enough election officials and electors -- but that would have been one way for Smith to
have gained at least a few extra electoral votes.

He might also have character-assassinated the Whig and Democrat candidates at some turning
point in the campaign (or even physically assassinated them -- thus promoting himself to be the
best-known living candidate).

UD

[_Mercury]

Well, now that I checked the FAIR site I see that FAIR agrees with me. This should come as no surprise since I do believe in traveling in good company:

http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith_and_politics

I was spot on.

So a fringe group shares the same opinion as you, therefore you have confirmed your own thoughts as fitting with your perception of reality.

Ahh, I see what you did there.

[_Nevo]

. . . and Joseph had a "revolutionary" approach to get rid of slavery (selling public land and buying the slave's freedom).

I guess it was "revolutionary" in the sense that it had been around since at least the 1780s (see, e.g., Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution [Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990], 36-37).

[_Uncle Dale]

. . . and Joseph had a "revolutionary" approach to get rid of slavery (selling public land and buying the slave's freedom).

I guess it was "revolutionary" in the sense that it had been around since at least the 1780s (see, e.g., Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution [Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990], 36-37).

Where Smith diverged from past proponents of these sorts of schemes,
was in his theological linkage of the enslaved and the imprisoned. This
was a radical interpretation of the gospel injunction to "free the captive."

Smith makes this statement in the opening paragraph of his 1844
campaign platform:

Born in a land of liberty, and breathing an air uncorrupted with the sirocco of barbarous climes, I ever feel a double anxiety for the happiness of all men, both in time and in eternity. My cogitations, like Daniel's, have for a long time troubled me, when I viewed the condition of men throughout the world, and more especially in this boasted realm, where the Declaration of Independence "holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," but at the same time some two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours; and hundreds of our kindred for an infraction, or supposed infraction, of some over wise statute, have to be incarcerated in dungeon glooms, or suffer the more moral penitentiary gravitation of mercy in a nut-shell, while the duelist, the debauchee, and the defaulter for millions, and other criminals, take the upper-most rooms at feasts, or, like the bird of passage find a more congenial clime by flight. ...

Obviously Smith believed strongly on the power of redemption. He was willing to
empty the jails and prisons of America -- perhaps relying upon little more than
a promise from the freed inmates to "do better in the future."

Smith and other LDS leaders were accused of harboring criminals in Nauvoo --
and Orson Hyde later accused Sidney Rigdon of tolerating criminality in converts
or Rigdonite followers.

How Smith would have managed to fulfil his campaign promises is anybody's
guess. The southern planters did not just need some money in their pockets --
they needed cheap farm workers who would not combine to endanger the
Southern Society of that day and age. Any slaves freed under Smith's plan
would, no doubt, have quickly become share-croppers and indentured servants,
remaining on the plantations and under the control of their former owners.

How Smith would have managed to empty the prisons and jails is even a
greater mystery. Perhaps the answer lies in a subsequent development of
Mormonism, called "Mountain Law" -- an offshoot of English Common Law
that allowed for some changes in what had been age-old precedent.

Another possibility is that Smith hoped to extend his own powers of pardon,
and influence state governors to greatly expand the number of pardons
they granted.

Looked at from a gospel perspective, I'm not sure that either of Smith's
proposals exemplify the precept of "freeing the captive."

UD

[_cinepro]

Where Smith diverged from past proponents of these sorts of schemes,
was in his theological linkage of the enslaved and the imprisoned. This
was a radical interpretation of the gospel injunction to "free the captive."

UD

That was another thing mentioned in Gospel Doctrine: Joseph Smith's innovative idea to abolish debtor's prisons and introduce "rehabilitative" prison programs that would teach prisoners instead of just punishing them.

[_why me]

Where Smith diverged from past proponents of these sorts of schemes,
was in his theological linkage of the enslaved and the imprisoned. This
was a radical interpretation of the gospel injunction to "free the captive."

UD

That was another thing mentioned in Gospel Doctrine: Joseph Smith's innovative idea to abolish debtor's prisons and introduce "rehabilitative" prison programs that would teach prisoners instead of just punishing them.

Joseph Smith had some great ideas and as I said, he wanted to create a foundation that would revolutionize the world. He also had a program of equality which he tried to put in place among the saints. It failed but the dream was there. Unfortunately, he knew that he couldn't succeed. But thinking about the saints and attempting to address the problems between the LDS community and the outside world was a good start for him.

Unfortunately, the posters here are a little prejudice against him. But FAIR shows that Joseph Smith's heart was in the right place.