Did Spaulding and Rigdon Produce the Book of Mormon?

Summary

The Spaulding theory is not one claim. It is a chain of five, and the links have very different strengths. Counting them as one claim is how both sides get this wrong: critics announce that "eight affidavits" prove plagiarism, and defenders announce that one surviving manuscript disproves everything. Neither is true. Each link is scored separately below.

Link 1 — the Book of Mormon was copied from the manuscript now at Oberlin College: rejected. Solomon Spaulding's surviving story is an unfinished tale about Romans blown across the Atlantic on a voyage from Rome to Britain. It has no Jerusalem migration, no Nephites or Lamanites, no Christian preaching, and no sustained King James English.¹ Two non-Latter-day Saints who examined it first, Lewis L. Rice and Oberlin president James H. Fairchild, said so before any Latter-day Saint had a chance to. Rice wrote that he would "as soon think the Book of Revelations was written by the author of Don Quixotte."² That verdict is correct and this article does not dispute it.

Link 2 — Spaulding wrote and read an ancient-America story that his family and neighbors genuinely remembered: established. The surviving manuscript itself proves he wrote one. Eight people who had real, checkable relationships with him — a brother, a sister-in-law, a business partner, a boarder, a landlord, a neighbor physician, a creditor, and a local magistrate — were printed in 1834 as recognizing its historical material in the Book of Mormon.¹ His brother Josiah, writing in 1855 for a family genealogy and not for an investigator, independently described a found history, an Old World voyager, a civilized American nation, savage enemies, and destruction.³ That broad memory is multiply supported and should not be dismissed.

Link 3 — the exact Book of Mormon names and phrases were in Spaulding's writing: not demonstrated. All eight of the 1833 witnesses had already read or heard Book of Mormon material when they gave their statements; several say so in the statements themselves.¹ All eight texts survive through one hostile collector, Philastus Hurlbut, who chose the witnesses, asked the questions, and appears to have written the prose. No original signed statement, interview note, or question list has been located. Howe introduces them as things the witnesses "say," not as sworn affidavits.¹ The names get more numerous and more confident in later accounts, and Spaulding's daughter said in 1882 that other people asked her about the names first and "then I remembered."⁴ Their honesty is not in question. Their independence is.

Link 4 — a distinct or heavily revised second manuscript existed: open. This is not a modern repair. Howe reported in 1834 that witnesses shown the Roman story recognized Spaulding's handwriting but said it "bears no resemblance" to the work they meant.¹ Aaron Wright put the same distinction in writing on 31 December 1833.⁵ So the two-manuscript claim is part of the original theory, not an excuse invented after 1884. But no second object survives, and there is no direct evidence that Hurlbut ever held two Spaulding manuscripts.

Link 5 — the manuscript reached Sidney Rigdon and then Joseph Smith: unestablished. Spaulding probably did offer a manuscript to a Patterson printing business in Pittsburgh; Robert Patterson Sr. signed a statement in 1842 recalling an unnamed eastern author's manuscript "chiefly in the style of our English translation of the Bible."⁶ The familiar phrase "Patterson & Lambdin" is anachronistic — that partnership began in 1818, after Spaulding died in 1816. No evidence shows Rigdon worked for Patterson. Robert Patterson Jr., who spent three years chasing this very question in the 1870s, reported that Pittsburgh's oldest residents all repeated the employment story as common knowledge but, "when pressed as to their personal knowledge of it or their authority for the conviction they had none."⁶ Rigdon's documented Pittsburgh pastorate gives about one year of overlap with the firm, in 1822–23. The best testimony that he held a Spaulding manuscript comes from Dr. John Winter — and every surviving version of it is secondhand, recorded after Winter's death in 1878, about fifty-six years after the alleged event.⁶

Pre-1830 Rigdon–Smith collaboration: unproved, and the dated record points the other way. A hostile Ohio newspaper letter printed on 15 February 1831 describes the missionaries arriving, Rigdon reading their book and partly condemning it, arguing with Oliver Cowdery about signs, then converting, being baptized, and traveling to New York "about three weeks after."⁷ A revelation dated 7 December 1830 addresses Smith and Rigdon together.⁸ The alleged earlier Palmyra sightings are all recorded from 1867 onward and identify Rigdon through unnamed third parties. Secret prior contact is not impossible. It is simply not documented.

Stylometry supplies nothing. The often-cited 2008 study forced every Book of Mormon chapter to pick one author from a fixed list. Given the same method and the same list, Sidney Rigdon "wrote" thirty-four Federalist papers five years before he was born, and Oliver Cowdery "wrote" the 2008 paper itself.⁹ When the analysis was allowed to answer "none of these," it assigned 93 percent of chapters to "Someone Else," 4 percent to Cowdery, 3 percent to Joseph Smith, and none to Spaulding or Rigdon.⁹ That kills the 2008 identification. It does not prove ancient authorship, and it cannot test a manuscript that no longer exists.

The overall verdict is split, and should stay split. There really was a Spaulding ancient-America story, and there really was a recognition episode in 1832–33 that a fair historian has to explain. There is no surviving second manuscript, no documented transfer to Rigdon, and no contemporary record of Rigdon and Smith together before late 1830. The strongest link cannot be used to carry the weakest, and the weakest cannot be used to erase the strongest.

The claim being tested

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that the Book of Mormon "was translated from ancient records by the gift and power of God" and "has no connection with the Spaulding manuscript."¹⁰ The competing claim, first printed in full by Eber D. Howe in 1834, is that the book's historical narrative was written as fiction by Solomon Spaulding between about 1809 and 1816, reached Sidney Rigdon through a Pittsburgh printing office, and was revised into scripture before publication in March 1830.¹

Those are the endpoints. The fullest modern statement of the critical case is Wayne Cowdrey, Howard Davis, and Arthur Vanick's Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? The Spalding Enigma (2005), which was not obtained for this draft; where its arguments appear below they are reported as quoted in Matthew Roper's hostile review of it, and that limitation is stated each time.¹¹

Between the endpoints sit five separate propositions that get blurred together in almost every popular treatment, on both sides.

Proposition 2 is not evidence for proposition 5. Refuting proposition 1 is not a refutation of proposition 4. A theory is only as strong as its weakest necessary link, and every link from 3 onward is necessary for the theory to be true.

Two terminology traps have to be cleared before the evidence, because both of them decide the question in advance.

The surviving manuscript has no title on it. Spaulding wrote none. The old wrapper it arrived in bore the penciled words "Manuscript Story — Conneaut Creek," and Rice stated plainly that the additional ink words "Solomon Spaulding's Writings" were added by him after he learned what was inside.² "Honolulu manuscript" names where Rice rediscovered it. "Oberlin manuscript" names where it now lives. Calling it Manuscript Found — as the Church's own topic page, FAIR, and Mormonr all effectively do — settles the disputed identity by naming convention. This article calls it the Oberlin manuscript.

Second, the eight 1833 documents are not affidavits. Howe introduces the first witness with "who says," and Artemas Cunningham's is introduced in the third person as a man who "states as follows."¹ No notarized original has been located for any of the eight. The official Church topic page says these people "signed affidavits."¹⁰ The correct description is the eight statements collected by Hurlbut and printed by Howe.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

Stated at full strength, the case against the Spaulding theory is not an appeal to authority or to faith. It is a cumulative historical argument, and most of it is built out of the theory's own documents.

The one surviving specimen is the wrong book, and the two men who examined it first had no reason to say so. L. L. Rice bought E. D. Howe's Painesville Telegraph in 1839 or 1840, acquired a pile of books and manuscripts with it, and did not look inside for forty-four years.² When he did, he found a story of wars between Ohio and Kentucky Indians with "no identity of names, of persons, or places" and "no similarity of style" to the Book of Mormon.² Rice was not a Latter-day Saint and was in fact being courted by anti-Mormon writers who wanted the manuscript. He handed it to Oberlin College anyway.² Anyone who claims direct textual dependence must answer him.

Matthew Roper's one-manuscript model explains the testimony without calling anyone a liar, and it is the strongest faithful argument in print. Roper's 2005 and 2009 studies do not rest on the manuscript's mere survival. They argue positively that the Conneaut witnesses remembered many genuine features of the Oberlin story — a record found buried, an Old World voyage, rival American nations, wars, mounds, fortifications, arts, and unusually large people — and then absorbed the Book of Mormon's names, biblical diction, and Israelite plot from reading it in 1832 and 1833.¹² The model has a specific, testable virtue: it predicts exactly the pattern the sources show, in which broad content matches the surviving text and only the diagnostic vocabulary does not.

Roper's supporting details are concrete, not rhetorical. Henry Lake remembered a "tragic account of Laban"; the Oberlin manuscript has a character named Labanko.¹ Joseph Miller remembered warriors marked with red; the Oberlin manuscript describes men with "one half of the head" shaved and "painted with red" and half the face painted black.¹³ Every family member who testified before 1884 spoke of one ancient-America story, not two.¹² And Spaulding's own daughter, asked in 1882 when she first connected her father's names with the Book of Mormon's, answered: "My attention was first called to it by some parties who asked me if I did not remember it, and then I remembered that they were."⁴ That single answer is the most damaging piece of evidence against the recognition testimony, and it comes from the theory's most important surviving family witness.

Hurlbut's collection has a structural problem that no amount of witness-counting fixes. One man chose the eight, interviewed them, and appears to have drafted their statements. Their prose repeats the same distinctive package in the same order: first settlers of America, descent from the lost tribes, a journey from Jerusalem by land and sea, wars and mounds, "the historical part," and religion added later. FAIR is right that this creates a common-source problem, and right that a shared drafter means the surviving wording cannot show which details each witness volunteered.¹⁴

Negative witnesses existed and were not printed. Benjamin Winchester, writing in 1840 — forty-four years before the Oberlin manuscript resurfaced — reported that a man named Jackson who had read both the Book of Mormon and Spaulding's manuscript refused to sign anything for Hurlbut, because Spaulding's work was "a very small work, in the form of a novel, saying not one word about the children of Israel," describing instead a people "who originated from the Romans."¹⁵ That description matches the Oberlin manuscript, which nobody had seen for decades. Orson Hyde wrote in 1841 that he preached at New Salem in 1832, baptized many of Spaulding's old neighbors, and that they "never intimated" any similarity until Hurlbut raised it, and were "surprising[ly]" dismissive when he later asked them.¹⁶ Howe himself wrote that he could have produced "a great number of witnesses" but "have not taken the trouble to procure the statements of but few."¹ Selection cuts both ways, and it cuts against the theory here.

The 1830 conversion sequence is positive evidence, not merely the absence of evidence for a plot. The hostile account printed in the Painesville Telegraph on 15 February 1831 was written by Matthew S. Clapp, a Campbellite minister in Rigdon's own neighborhood who despised the new movement. He describes the missionaries lodging with Rigdon, Rigdon reading their book and "partly condemn[ing]" it, then being "heard to confess his conviction of its truth"; Rigdon publicly opposing the immediate baptisms and withstanding the missionaries "to the face"; Rigdon lecturing Oliver Cowdery from scripture on the danger of asking for signs, then asking for one himself; his baptism; his public confession of "his great pride, ambition, vainglory"; and his journey to New York "about three weeks after."⁷ An enemy invented none of that to help Rigdon. A revelation dated 7 December 1830 addresses Smith and Rigdon together, which puts them in the same place by that date.⁸ Rigdon lost his congregation and his standing in the Campbellite reform to join a despised sect in a subordinate role.

The production evidence constrains any collaboration theory. Brian Hales notes that Oliver Cowdery wrote most of the surviving original manuscript between April and June 1829, that what survives of it "contains no evidences of extensive editing or revision," and that friendly and hostile witnesses alike described Joseph dictating while Oliver wrote, with no accounts of drafts being written and rewritten.¹⁷ A theory in which Rigdon revised a long prior document has to explain how that document entered an oral, sequential, largely unrevised dictation without any observer reporting it.

And Rigdon flatly denied it, in print, within weeks of the charge. Writing from Commerce, Illinois, on 27 May 1839, he said that until Hurlbut told him such a man had lived, "I had not the most distant knowledge of his existence," and that the story of his connection with Patterson's printing office "is the most base of lies, without even the shadow of truth."¹⁸ He is an interested party. He is also the only person alive who could know.

Any honest treatment of this subject has to get past all of that. The rest of this article tries to.

What Solomon Spaulding wrote

Spaulding was born in Ashford, Connecticut, in 1761, studied at Plainfield Academy, entered Dartmouth College intending the ministry, was ordained, preached three or four years, gave it up, and went into the mercantile business at Cherry Valley, New York, with his brother Josiah. He failed, moved to Conneaut, Ohio, in 1809, and built an iron forge there. He failed again. In 1812 he moved to Pittsburgh, then to Amity in Washington County, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1816.¹ Those facts come from his brother John's 1833 statement, and where they can be checked against other records they hold up. A business agreement between Spaulding and Henry Lake dated 8 March 1811 survives, and is now in the New York Public Library.⁵

He wrote more than one thing. This is not disputed by anyone. His widow told Hurlbut's messenger that he had "a great variety of manuscripts."¹ John N. Miller, who boarded in the Spaulding house for several months in 1811, said he "had written two or three books or pamphlets on different subjects."¹ His daughter remembered the family trunk holding "sermons and other papers" along with children's stories, one of them called "The Frogs of Wyndham."¹⁹ Aaron Wright said Spaulding had other manuscripts besides the one he had heard.¹ None of that establishes two ancient-America novels. It establishes a man who wrote a lot.

One work survives. It is an unfinished first-person story, told by a Roman named Fabius, whose ship is blown across the Atlantic on a voyage from Rome to Britain. He lands in America and describes the peoples he finds: their kingdoms, laws, amusements, dress, fortifications, mounds, and wars. The frame is a discovered record — twenty-four rolls of parchment in a cave on the bank of Conneaut Creek, translated from Latin.¹ It runs to eighty-four sheets of paper about 16.4 by 20.2 centimeters, now bound in a twentieth-century red leather cover.¹³ Its characters are named Lobaska, Bombal, Hadokam, Labanko, and the like. There is no Jerusalem, no Lehi, no Nephi, no Christ, no priesthood, no plates, and no sustained scriptural cadence.

The Book of Mormon is a different kind of book in almost every respect that matters. It is far longer. It opens in Jerusalem in the reign of Zedekiah. It is written throughout in imitation King James English. Its central conflict is between two descent groups, Nephites and Lamanites, and its central subject is prophecy, covenant, apostasy, and the visit of the resurrected Christ. Those differences are the reason link 1 fails, and the reason Rice and Fairchild reached the conclusion they did without any denominational motive.

The surviving object also has no title. Rice found it inside a wrapper penciled "Manuscript Story — Conneaut Creek," and said explicitly that the ink words "Solomon Spaulding's Writings" on that wrapper "were written by me, after I became aware of the contents."² The 1885 Reorganized Church edition that first printed it was titled The "Manuscript Found" by its editors, not by Spaulding. Every modern label for this object — including the Church's own "Spaulding Manuscript" — is a later convenience, and some of those labels quietly assume the answer to the question the whole controversy is about.

The Conneaut testimony

In the spring of 1832, two Latter-day Saint missionaries, Orson Hyde and Samuel H. Smith, preached from the Book of Mormon at New Salem, Ohio — the village on Conneaut Creek where Spaulding had lived twenty years earlier.¹⁶ Within a year, people in that village were saying the book sounded like Spaulding's old story. In August and September 1833, Philastus Hurlbut — a former Latter-day Saint elder, excommunicated that June, and hired by a local anti-Mormon committee — collected eight statements. Eber D. Howe printed them in Mormonism Unvailed in 1834, on pages 278 through 287.

What the eight actually said

The relationships are real and several are independently checkable. Lake's partnership with Spaulding is documented by their surviving 1811 agreement. Wright, Howard, and Nehemiah King appear together on a surviving 1816 court summons from the same township.⁵ Hurlbut did not invent these people's access to Spaulding, and any treatment that implies he did is wrong.

The specific claims are strong ones. John Spalding said the book "gave a detailed account of their journey from Jerusalem, by land and sea, till they arrived in America, under the command of NEPHI and LEHI," and that after reading the Book of Mormon he found "nearly the same historical matter, names, &c. as they were in my brother's writings."¹ Martha said "the names of Nephi and Lehi are yet fresh in my memory, as being the principal heroes of his tale."¹ Cunningham said "the frequent repetition of the phrase, 'I Nephi,' I recollect as distinctly as though it was but yesterday."¹ If those memories are independent and accurate, the theory is essentially proved.

Why they are not independent

Every one of the eight had encountered the Book of Mormon before making a statement, and most say so. John had "recently read" it. Martha said reading it "brought fresh to my recollection the writings of Solomon Spalding."¹ Lake's wife read it aloud to him and he later "more fully examined" it. Miller had "recently examined" it. Wright said the names were familiar "before I read it," which means he read it. Oliver Smith first heard "the historical part of it related" and only afterward obtained the book. Howard had "lately read" it. Cunningham had "partially examined" it.¹ Not one of these recognitions was recorded before exposure. Recognition normally requires a cue, so this does not make the testimony worthless — but it does mean that a twenty-year-old memory is being reported after a fresh reading of the text it is being compared to.

Wright, the local magistrate with the longest acquaintance, supplied no names at all. He asserted that "the names more especially are the same without any alteration" and then named none.¹ Howard, a physician who knew Spaulding from December 1810 and read his writings, likewise supplied no name, no phrase, and no incident — only the conclusion that the Book of Mormon was "the same as Spalding wrote, except the religious part."¹ The two witnesses whose statements are least colorful are also the two with the least to check.

The eight texts are one document channel, not eight. They share a distinctive vocabulary and a distinctive structure: first settlers of America, the lost tribes, a journey from Jerusalem "by land and sea," wars and mounds, "the historical part," and "religious matter" added or absent. No original signed copy, witness-written draft, interview note, or list of Hurlbut's questions has been located for any of the eight. The differing order of details in the printed statements is sometimes offered as proof of independent recollection. It is not. An editor working from his own interview notes can vary order freely, and a fixed question sequence can produce differently ordered summaries from the same answers.

Hurlbut wrote at least one of these documents in his own hand. The clearest evidence is a paper that never reached print. On 31 December 1833, at Wright's store in Conneaut, a letter was drafted in handwriting that closely resembles Hurlbut's, unsigned, reporting Wright's inspection of the manuscript Hurlbut had obtained from Spaulding's widow. It survives because Mrs. Hiram Lake donated it to the New York Public Library in 1914 along with the 1811 Spaulding–Lake agreement.⁵ Its content is important in two directions. It shows Hurlbut acting as scribe for a witness statement, which is exactly the drafting problem Roper and FAIR describe.²⁰ It also repeats the August statement's substance closely, including the closing line that the names and historical part of the Book of Mormon are "as familiar to me as Most modern history" — which is nearly word for word what Howe printed.⁵ A witness whose second statement reproduces his first that closely is either consistent or being read back his own file.

That is the honest position. The mechanism of error cannot be identified from the surviving record. Hurlbut may have standardized genuine answers, asked leading questions, blended what several people told him, or invented details. There is no way to choose among those with the documents that exist. What can be said is that the eight statements do not function as eight independent replications of a name list, and that the article's own side of the argument loses the right to call them that.

The one detail that can be tested, and what it shows

Lake's "tragic account of Laban" is the collection's most checkable claim, because the Book of Mormon's Laban episode is specific: Nephi finds Laban drunk in the street and beheads him with his own sword. Lake says he pointed out an inconsistency in Spaulding's version, that Spaulding promised to fix it, and that in the Book of Mormon "it stands there just as he read it to me then."¹ He never says what the inconsistency was. The Oberlin manuscript contains a character named Labanko, which is suggestive and no more; a name is not a scene. Roper treats the resemblance as evidence that Lake was remembering the surviving story.²⁰ That is a reasonable reading but not a demonstration, and the reverse reading — that Lake was remembering a different text — is equally undemonstrated. The most testable item in the whole collection cannot be tested, because the witness did not state it.

The family: three witnesses and three different stories

Matilda Davison did not write the statement published under her name

On 19 April 1839 the Boston Recorder printed a long statement attributed to Spaulding's widow, Matilda Davison. It says her husband wrote "an historical romance of the first settlers of America," gave it "the title of the 'Manuscript Found,'" wrote it in "an ancient style," that the neighbors recognized it when the Book of Mormon was read at New Salem, and that in Pittsburgh her husband exhibited the manuscript to "Mr. Patterson, an editor of a newspaper," who "borrowed it for perusal," kept it "a long time," and offered to publish it if Spaulding would supply a title page and preface.¹⁶ For a century this was the single most quoted document in the controversy.

Davison did not write it, did not sign it, and had not seen it before publication. That is established by an interview conducted the same year by Jesse Haven, reported in a letter from his father John Haven, copied by A. Badlam, and reprinted by Benjamin Winchester in 1840. Asked whether she wrote the letter sent to John Storrs, she answered, "I did not." Asked whether she signed it: "I did not; neither did I ever see the letter till I saw it in the Boston Recorder: the letter was never brought to me to sign." Asked what part she had in it: "D. R. Austin came to my house and asked me some questions; took some minutes on paper, and from these wrote the letter."¹⁵

Asked whether the letter was true, she said, "In the main it is." Asked whether she had read the Book of Mormon: "I have read some in it." Asked whether Spaulding's manuscript and the Book of Mormon agree: "I think some of the names are alike." Asked where the manuscript was: "Dr. P. Hulbert came here and took it, and said he would get it printed, and let me have one half of the profits." Asked whether he had printed it: "I received a letter, stating that it did not read as they expected, and they should not print it." Asked how large it was: "About one-third as large as the Book of Mormon."¹⁵

Three things follow, and they point in different directions. First, the widow affirmed the substance of the published account. It cannot be dismissed as fabrication. Second, her own comparison is far weaker than Austin's version of it — some names seemed alike, and she had read only part of the Book of Mormon. Third, and most damaging to the theory, she says Hurlbut's sponsors told her the manuscript they got from her "did not read as they expected." That is a hostile channel reporting a disappointing manuscript, in 1839, forty-five years before the Oberlin story resurfaced to explain why they were disappointed.

Winchester's chain is not clean — Haven's memory, John Haven's letter, Badlam's copy, Winchester's reprint — and John Haven says the question-and-answer form may not reproduce the exact wording.¹⁵ It is nonetheless near-contemporary, and it is adverse to the publisher printing it, which is the classic mark of a reliable admission.

Matilda McKinstry became more certain as time passed

Spaulding's daughter is the most important family witness, and her testimony moves in one direction over forty-three years.

In 1839, in the same Haven interview, she said she was about five when her father wrote the manuscript, that "when I was about twelve years old I used to read it for diversion," that she thought "some of the names agree," and then — asked whether she was certain — "I am not." Asked whether she had ever read any of the Book of Mormon, she answered, "I have not."¹⁵

In 1880, in a statement dictated to Ellen E. Dickinson, recopied until she approved it, sworn before a notary, and printed in Scribner's Monthly, she was specific and confident. Of the names her father read aloud at Conneaut when she was in her sixth year she wrote: "They are as fresh to me to-day as though I heard them yesterday. They were 'Mormon,' 'Maroni,' 'Lamenite,' 'Nephi.'" Of the trunk manuscript at her uncle's house in Onondaga Valley she wrote: "On the outside of this manuscript were written the words, 'Manuscript Found.' I did not read it, but looked through it and had it in my hands many times, and saw the names I had heard at Conneaut."¹⁹ She was about eleven then, and sixty-eight years had passed.

The 1880 statement also says she "did not read it," while the 1839 report has her reading it for diversion at twelve. Both cannot be right.

In 1882 she was interviewed by Edmund L. Kelley of the Reorganized Church. Asked whether she could identify the manuscript if it were produced, she answered, "I don't think I could," and, when told she had samples of her father's handwriting, "No, sir, I think not" — changing to "Well, perhaps I could" only after her daughter interjected that she ought to be able to. Asked how she came to remember any of the names, she said she supposed she should not, but that Spaulding drew "a very fancy capital letter at the beginning of a chapter" and she remembered "the name Lehi, I think it was, from its being written this way." Asked when she first thought about the names in the manuscript and the Book of Mormon agreeing, she said: "My attention was first called to it by some parties who asked me if I did not remember it, and then I remembered that they were."⁴

All three stages are evidence. Publishing only the 1880 affidavit — as critics routinely do — conceals the trajectory. Publishing only the 1882 retraction — as apologists routinely do — conceals that she also gave a sworn, specific, notarized account, and that she consistently placed a thick manuscript labeled "Manuscript Found" in the family trunk. Her 1880 statement remains the best evidence for the object's existence and title, and her 1882 answers remain the best evidence that the name recognition was prompted.

Josiah Spaulding is the control

Solomon's older brother and former business partner wrote a family letter on 6 January 1855, printed in Samuel J. Spalding's Spalding Memorial in 1872. He was not writing for Hurlbut, for a newspaper, or for a lawsuit. He was writing family history, and he began by saying his memory was impaired.³

He remembered a young man's dream of opening a mound and finding a written history, which gave his brother the idea of a novel "merely for amusement." He remembered the title as "'Historical Novel,' or 'Manuscript Found.'" The author-figure "he brings from the Old World, but from what nation I do not recollect, I think not a Jew; nor do I recollect how long since, but I think before the Christian Era." The man went to sea, lost his compass, landed near the mouth of the Mississippi, traveled through wilderness inhabited by savages, and reached "a country where the inhabitants were civilized, cultivated their land, and had a regular form of government which was at war with the savages." Josiah added that he "never saw the Mormon bible but once, and then only for a minute, no time to examine it."³

That description matches the Oberlin manuscript closely and matches the Book of Mormon hardly at all. Not a Jew. Before the Christian era. A single Old World narrator, not a migrating family. No Nephi, no Lehi, no Lamanites, no Moroni, no Zarahemla, no Jerusalem, no "it came to pass." This is what a family memory looks like when it has not been through Hurlbut and has not been cued by reading the Book of Mormon. It strongly supports the broad Spaulding story and strongly undercuts the claim that the diagnostic vocabulary was a stable family memory.

Josiah's letter contains one item that cuts the other way, and it should not be buried. Relaying what his brother's widow had told him, he wrote that "soon after they arrived at Pittsburg a man followed them, I do not recollect his name, but he was afterwards known to be a leading Mormon. He got into the employment of a printer, and he told the printer about my brother's composition." The printer borrowed it, kept it, urged publication, and Spaulding took it back.³ That is a non-Hurlbut family channel reporting the transmission story. It is also secondhand from a woman then dead, recorded thirty-nine years after her husband's death by a man who said his faculties had failed, and it names nobody. Sidney Rigdon was nineteen in 1812 and living in Allegheny County; the documented record does not place him in a Pittsburgh printing house at any date. The item deserves to be on the table. It cannot carry the link.

The later witnesses, and how memory actually behaves

Two men who knew Spaulding at Amity, in the last two years of his life, gave statements in 1869. They are worth studying because they are independent of Hurlbut as a collector, and because one of them shows precisely how a genuine memory and an imported one can end up in the same sentence.

Joseph Miller Sr. was an Amity neighbor who attended Spaulding's last illness, made his coffin, and helped settle the estate. In a letter printed in the Washington Reporter in 1869 and reprinted the next year in Alfred Creigh's county history, he said Spaulding read "select portions" of "detached sheets of foolscap" to amuse them in the evenings, and called the work "the 'Manuscript Found,' or 'The Lost Manuscript Found.'" His son read the Book of Mormon aloud to him because a tremor prevented him from reading. He then recalled: "He speaks of a battle, and says the Amalekites had marked themselves with red on the foreheads to distinguish them from the Nephites. The thought of being marked on the forehead with red was so strange, it fixed itself in my memory."²¹

Three facts collide here. The Book of Mormon does describe a group marking their foreheads red before battle — but it calls them Amlicites, not Amalekites, and Miller changed his own wording to "Amlicites" in a second statement ten years later. The Oberlin manuscript does describe warriors with "one half of the head" shaved and "painted with red."¹³ And Miller had just heard the Book of Mormon read to him. The most economical reading is that a real Spaulding image — red paint on a warrior's head — has been fused with a Book of Mormon scene and a Book of Mormon name that Miller then misremembered. That is not a reason to think Miller dishonest. It is a working model of how these recognitions were formed, and it is the strongest single piece of support for Roper's memory-contamination argument.

Redick McKee, who boarded near Spaulding's Amity tavern, wrote a letter dated 14 April 1869 to the same newspaper. He remembered reading or hearing "many wonderful and amusing passages," and gave the title as "Lost History Found, — Lost Manuscript, or some such name."²² His broad recollection is a genuine second Amity channel. His corroboration of Miller's red-mark detail is not: he says outright that he has "an indistinct recollection of the passages referred to by Mr. Miller," which makes it dependent on Miller's just-published letter rather than independent of it.²²

Abner Jackson's statement, dated 20 December 1880 and printed on 7 January 1881, shows the other pattern — accounts growing more detailed as the decades pass. Jackson said he was present as a boy when Spaulding read, and produced the fullest name list of any witness: "Maroni, Mormon, Nephites, Moroni, Lama, Lamanite, Nephe, and others," plus the story that when the Book of Mormon was read at Conneaut in 1832 Aaron Wright exclaimed, "Old come to pass' has come to life again."²³ Jackson took care to say he had not seen or communicated with Matilda McKinstry and that they were "now perfect strangers" — but he also says in the same paragraph that his reader had probably seen her Scribner's Monthly statement, which had appeared four months earlier and which he corrects on a point of local detail.²³ He knew the local facts. Sixty-eight years after the event, with the published claims of two generations behind him, his name list is not usable as independent recall.

The pattern across all the late testimony is consistent. The broad story stays stable and is confirmed from unrelated directions. The Book of Mormon-specific vocabulary appears only after Book of Mormon exposure, grows richer with time, and drifts in its details.

The manuscripts: what survives, and what does not

The custody chain is the strongest evidence in the whole controversy — and it belongs to the other side

Popular critical accounts still say Hurlbut stole or suppressed the decisive Spaulding manuscript. That claim should be retired. The Oberlin manuscript has an unbroken and well-documented custody chain, and every link of it can be checked.

Howe described the object in 1834, fifty years before it resurfaced. His messenger found Spaulding's widow in Massachusetts; she said Spaulding had "a great variety of manuscripts," recalled one titled "Manuscript Found," thought it had once gone to "the printing office of Patterson & Lambdin," and believed that if it had come back it was in a trunk left in Otsego County, New York.¹ The trunk was examined, and Howe reports that it held "only a single M. S. book, in Spalding's hand-writing, containing about one quire of paper," a romance "purporting to have been translated from the Latin, found on 24 rolls of parchment in a cave, on the banks of Conneaut Creek," about a ship "driven upon the American coast, while proceeding from Rome to Britain."¹ That is the Oberlin manuscript, described in print in 1834.

The last page of the surviving manuscript carries Hurlbut's own note that Aaron Wright, Oliver Smith, John N. Miller and others had proved the handwriting and that their testimony was in his possession.²⁴ Howe's business was sold to L. L. Rice in 1839 or 1840 with "a large collection of books, manuscripts, &c." included without examination.² Rice carried it to Honolulu, found it in 1884, and sent it to James H. Fairchild at Oberlin on 12 June 1885, "enclosed in the same wrapper, and tied with the same string that must have enclosed it for near half a century."² Fairchild certified a copy on 23 July 1885.² It has been at Oberlin ever since.

Hurlbut → Howe → Rice → Fairchild → Oberlin. That chain is far better documented than anything on the other side of this dispute, and it is fatal to the stolen-manuscript story.

But Howe himself said the witnesses rejected this manuscript

Here is the part that both the official Church page and FAIR pass over. Immediately after describing the Roman story, Howe wrote:

This old M. S. has been shown to several of the foregoing witnesses, who recognise it as Spalding's, he having told them that he had altered his first plan of writing, by going farther back with dates, and writing in the old scripture style, in order that it might appear more ancient. They say that it bears no resemblance to the "Manuscript Found."¹

That was printed in 1834. The distinction between the recovered Roman story and the remembered work is not a modern repair invented after 1884 to save a failing theory. It is in the founding document, written by the man who owned the manuscript, and printed against his own interest — he could have simply kept quiet about the nonmatching object he was holding.

Aaron Wright's unsigned draft of 31 December 1833 says the same thing in a private paper: he examined the writings Hurlbut had obtained from the widow and recognized them "to be the hand writing of sd Spalding but not the manuscript I had refferance to in my statement," adding that Spaulding "wrote for his own amusement and then altered his plan and commenced writing a history of the first Settlement of America."⁵ Whatever else is true, a revision story was being told at Conneaut before Howe's book went to press.

Three "two manuscript" claims, three verdicts

The middle claim also has two versions that the evidence cannot separate. Spaulding may have abandoned the Roman tale and written a different book. Or he may have revised the Roman tale so heavily — moving the dates back, adopting scriptural style, as Howe's witnesses reported him saying — that hearers of the later version remembered a different book. The surviving object is unfinished and shows revision, which fits the second model. Neither model is the same as the faithful claim that Book of Mormon reading created all these memories from nothing.

What Hurlbut actually had

Matilda McKinstry believed Hurlbut took "Manuscript Found" from the trunk and never returned it. But she was not present: Hurlbut visited her and her mother in Massachusetts, and the trunk was retrieved later through her uncle in New York.¹⁹ Her identification of what he got is an inference from what he said he wanted.

W. R. Hine, Jacob Sherman, and Charles Grover said in the 1880s that they had heard Hurlbut lecture from or display "Manuscript Found" in 1833–34, Grover recalling a letter-size manuscript nearly two inches thick.²⁰ These may preserve a real public display. They cannot identify what was displayed, they were recorded more than fifty years later, and Hurlbut had an obvious incentive to call whatever he was holding by the name his audience expected. Hurlbut's own late statements say he received one manuscript, read enough to see it was not the source, and gave it straight to Howe, expressly denying that he received any other.⁶

One physical discrepancy deserves to be flagged rather than smoothed over. Howe said the trunk manuscript contained "about one quire of paper."¹ A quire in ordinary paper-trade usage is twenty-four or twenty-five sheets. The Oberlin manuscript has eighty-four.¹³ That is not a small gap. It is outweighed for identification purposes by Howe's precise plot description, Hurlbut's surviving endorsement on the object, and Rice's custody account — but it is a loose end that a physical study of the paper, gatherings, and watermarks could resolve and nobody has published.

The honest summary is that the evidence establishes exactly one physical Spaulding manuscript in Hurlbut's hands, leaves the existence of a second remembered work open, and gives no support at all to the idea that a matching manuscript was stolen.

Patterson, Lambdin, and Pittsburgh

The submission is plausible

Three independent-ish channels say a Spaulding manuscript went to a Patterson business in Pittsburgh. The widow told Hurlbut's messenger she thought it "was once taken to the printing office of Patterson & Lambdin," though she was "quite uncertain" whether it came back.¹ Her daughter wrote in 1880 that her father "loaned this 'Manuscript Found' to Mr. Patterson, of Pittsburgh," who returned it with advice to polish and finish it.¹⁹ Joseph Miller said at Amity that Spaulding "entered into a contract with a Mr. Patterson, of Pittsburg, to publish the same."²¹

There is also a signed statement from the printer. On 2 April 1842 Robert Patterson Sr. certified that his foreman Silas Engles had told him "a gentleman, from the East originally, had put into his hands a manuscript of a singular work, chiefly in the style of our English translation of the Bible." Patterson read a few pages, found nothing objectionable, and told Engles he could publish it if the author supplied the funds or good security. The author did not, and "Mr. Engles returned the manuscript, as supposed at that time, after it had been some weeks in his possession with other manuscripts in the office."⁶

A biblical-style manuscript, from an eastern gentleman, at the right shop, in the right period, returned for lack of money. That is a real convergence and the article does not minimize it.

But it does not deliver what the theory needs

Patterson's certificate never names Spaulding. His son published it in 1882 with regret that "so meagre a document is all the written evidence that Mr. Patterson has left."⁶ It was signed twenty-six years after the events and in 1834 Howe had reported the opposite: "Mr. Patterson says he has no recollection of any such manuscript being brought there for publication."¹ Most important for the transmission theory, Patterson's own words are that the manuscript was returned. A returned manuscript is not sitting on a shelf a decade later waiting for Sidney Rigdon.

The firm name in the popular version is also wrong. Patterson & Hopkins was formed on 14 June 1810 and dissolved on 31 October 1812; the business then became R & J Patterson; only in January 1818 did it become R. Patterson & Lambdin, which collapsed in February 1823.²⁰ Spaulding died in 1816. He cannot have submitted anything to Patterson & Lambdin. He could have submitted it to a predecessor Patterson firm — the widow may simply have used the later familiar name for a continuing business — but the step from "a predecessor firm received it" to "it was still there in 1822" is conjecture, and Patterson's own statement contradicts it.

Rigdon's opportunity, measured

The relevant overlap is not between Rigdon and Spaulding. It is between Rigdon and the printing business after Spaulding died.

Hans Rollmann's reconstruction from the Warren, Ohio, Baptist church record — published in BYU Studies, in a faithful venue, and correcting the Church's own nineteenth-century chronology — establishes the outline. Rigdon presented a letter of dismission from Providence, Pennsylvania, dated 4 August 1819 and was received at Warren on 4 March 1820. He was licensed there on 1 April 1820 and ordained between April and August. On 5 January 1822 he and his wife "requested letters of dismission to the Baptist Church at Pittsburgh," which was granted.²⁵ He became minister of the First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh in February 1822. The Joseph Smith Papers biographical entry gives 1821–1824 for that ministry and puts him at Bainbridge, Ohio, in 1826 and Mentor in 1827.²⁶

Rollmann also does something a partisan would not. He argues from Rigdon's son's lecture notes and the Warren record that a short earlier Pittsburgh ministry in 1819 or early 1820 is likely, and observes that this makes it "historically possible—but unlikely—that Sidney Rigdon met Solomon Spaulding (who died in 1816) or the printer in whose office Sidney was said to have read the manuscript." He immediately adds that the timing "still does not establish any link with Joseph Smith, the necessary basis for the Spaulding theory."²⁵ That is the correct shape of the concession. A flat apologetic claim that Rigdon was never in Pittsburgh before 1822 is too strong. It also does not matter much, because opportunity is not the disputed link.

Even taking the fullest version, Rigdon and R. Patterson & Lambdin coexisted in the same city for about one year, February 1822 to February 1823. Pittsburgh lists of unclaimed mail name Rigdon on 30 June 1816 and 31 August and 31 October 1818, which supports occasional visits or correspondence and nothing more.²⁰

Did Rigdon work there? No evidence says so

This is where the popular theory has been repeating a claim that its own leading nineteenth-century investigator retracted.

Robert Patterson Jr. spent about three years in the late 1870s tracking down Pittsburgh's oldest residents on exactly this question. His conclusion, printed in his own 1882 compilation, is worth quoting in full because it is so rarely quoted:

In making inquiries among two or three score of the oldest residents of Pittsburgh and vicinity, those who had any opinion on the subject invariably, so far as now remembered, repeated the story of Rigdon's employment in Patterson's office, as if it were a well-known and admitted fact; they "could tell all about it," but when pressed as to their personal knowledge of it or their authority for the conviction they had none.⁶

That is a description of a rumor with no source. Of the witnesses he did find, Patterson wrote that "of this employment none of them speak from personal knowledge."⁶ "Sidney Rigdon worked for the Patterson printing business" should not appear in any responsible account of this subject.

Where Howe's argument stops being evidence

Howe's own reasoning at this point is explicit about its own status, and reading it carefully is the fastest way to see the theory's structure. Because Spaulding's book "can no where be found," Howe writes, "there is the strongest presumption that it remained there in seclusion, till about the year 1823, or '24, at which time Sidney Rigdon located himself in that city. We have been credibly informed that he was on terms of intimacy with Lambdin, being seen frequently in his shop."¹ He then concludes that the reader is "irresistibly led" to the view that Lambdin, having failed in business, "placed the 'Manuscript Found,' of Spalding, in the hands of Rigdon, to be embellished, altered, and added to, as he might think expedient."¹

Presumption, an unnamed informant, and an inference presented as irresistible. No shop record, no receipt, no letter, no named person who saw Rigdon with a manuscript. That is the load-bearing joint of the entire theory, and in the founding document it is held together by the word "presumption."

Did a manuscript reach Sidney Rigdon?

Four kinds of testimony are offered. None of them supplies a contemporary document, and their quality varies sharply.

John Winter is the best of them, and he is dead. Rev. John Winter, M.D., taught school in Pittsburgh while Rigdon was pastor of the First Baptist Church there. The claim is that during 1822–23 Winter was in Rigdon's study when Rigdon took a large manuscript from his desk and said in substance, "A Presbyterian minister, Spaulding, whose health had failed, brought this to the printer to see if it would pay to publish it. It is a romance of the Bible."⁶

If that is accurate, it supplies the missing link. But no statement by Winter has ever been found. The account reaches print through Rev. A. G. Kirk, to whom Winter told it in conversation at New Brighton, Pennsylvania, in 1870 or 1871, and who wrote it out for Patterson by letter on 23 March 1879 — after Winter's death in 1878, and about fifty-six years after the alleged event. Winter's daughter Mary W. Irvine wrote in 1881 that she had "frequently heard my father speak of Rigdon having Spaulding's manuscript." His stepson, Rev. A. J. Bonsall, gave a similar family recollection. All three thought Winter had written his recollection down, and Patterson reports that "a careful search among his papers has thus far proved unavailing to find it."⁶

Patterson concluded that "Dr. Winter's evidence, thus attested, is of itself sufficient to establish the certainty that Rigdon, in 1822-23, had possession of Spaulding's manuscript."⁶ That is far too strong for a posthumous, thrice-relayed recollection. The daughter's version also runs past anything Winter could have observed in Pittsburgh: she reports her father as saying "Rigdon helped Smith in his scheme by revising and making the Mormon Bible out of Rev. Spaulding's manuscript," which is a conclusion about events in New York, not a memory of a conversation in a study.

Rebecca Eichbaum places Rigdon at the shop but declines to say why he was there. She was postmaster's daughter and then clerk at the Pittsburgh post office from 1811 to 1816, and her statement of 18 September 1879 is unusually circumstantial. She remembered Robert and Joseph Patterson, Lambdin, Engles, Rigdon, and Spaulding — the last "simply as one who occasionally called to inquire for letters." She remembered "an evident intimacy between Lambdin and Rigdon," their coming to the office together on Sabbath afternoons, and Engles saying that "Rigdon was always hanging around the printing-office." Then comes the qualification: "I do not know what position, if any, Rigdon filled in Patterson's store or printing-office."⁶

She was eighty-seven and writing about a period sixty-three years earlier, when Rigdon was a teenager who by every other record was in Allegheny County. Her memory could easily have merged that period with Rigdon's actual 1822–23 Pittsburgh residence, when Lambdin was indeed his contemporary. Roper notes that Pittsburgh unclaimed-mail lists really do name Rigdon in 1816 and 1818, which supports her claim to have seen him at the post office and nothing beyond it.²⁰ Acquaintance is not custody.

The remaining accounts are weak, and one is impossible. Mrs. Amos Dunlap recalled as a child in Bainbridge seeing Rigdon read a manuscript he kept locked up; nothing in her account identifies it. James Jeffery said in 1884 that Rigdon confessed around 1844 that he and Smith read Spaulding's manuscript in an Ohio printing office on Sundays and then took it to Palmyra — but the Patterson shop was in Pennsylvania, Smith was not in Ohio before 1830, and Jeffery was recalling a conversation forty years later after the theory was famous. Rigdon's grandson told an interviewer in 1888 that the family believed Joseph and Sidney planned the scheme before the plates appeared; he was born long after the events, and his account conflicts with direct denials by Sidney and several of his children. These items show a divided local and family tradition. None is a witness.

The preknowledge statements are the strongest thing the theory has, and they are not about a manuscript. Adamson Bentley — Rigdon's brother-in-law and close friend — wrote to Walter Scott on 22 January 1841: "I know that Sidney Rigdon told me there was a book coming out, the manuscript of which had been found engraved on gold plates, as much as two years before the Mormon book made its appearance or had been heard of by me."⁶ Alexander Campbell added that the conversation happened in his presence too, that his own recollection agreed with Bentley's "in every particular, except the year in which it occurred — he placing it in the summer of 1827 — I, in the summer of 1826," and that Rigdon said the New York plates contained an account of the aborigines and of Christian preaching in America in the first century.⁶ Darwin Atwater wrote in 1873 that Rigdon, years before his conversion, described American mounds and antiquities and "said there was a book to be published containing an account of those things."⁶

This is real evidence and should not be waved away. Two men in Rigdon's own religious circle, one of them his brother-in-law, independently remembered him predicting a book from gold plates before it appeared. Bentley's letter is eleven years after publication, which is early by the standards of this dispute.

Its limits are equally real. The two witnesses disagreed on the year by twelve months, which shows the memory was already soft when it was written down. Talk of a coming book about America's ancient inhabitants was not exotic in the 1820s; the Smith family's plates story was circulating in New York from 1827 and reached print in the Palmyra papers before publication. Neither statement places Rigdon with Joseph Smith, describes a manuscript, or connects anything to Spaulding. Preknowledge of a book is consistent with collaboration. It is also consistent with having heard a widely circulating rumor.

Provisional finding. The evidence establishes that Rigdon lived in the same city as the Patterson business for about a year, was remembered as familiar around it, and may have spoken of a coming gold-plates book before 1830. It does not establish that he was employed there, that he ever held a Spaulding manuscript, or that any manuscript left that shop.

Did Rigdon know Joseph Smith before 1830?

This is the link the theory cannot do without, and it is the link with the least evidence.

What the dated record says

The Book of Mormon was published in March 1830. That fall, Oliver Cowdery, Parley P. Pratt, Peter Whitmer Jr., and Ziba Peterson traveled west on a mission to the Indian country by way of northeastern Ohio.

Parley Pratt's own account, written in answer to an anti-Mormon pamphlet and reprinted by Winchester in 1840, says he encountered the book in Ontario County, New York, in August 1830, read it, was baptized, met Joseph Smith for the first time on returning, and "about the 15th of October, 1830" set out for Ohio with Cowdery and Whitmer. "We called on Elder S. Rigdon, and then for the first time his eyes beheld the Book of Mormon; I, myself, had the happiness to present it to him in person. He was much surprised, and it was with much persuasion and argument, that he was prevailed on to read it."¹⁵ Pratt is firsthand for what he did and interested in what he concludes: he can testify that he handed Rigdon a book, not that Rigdon had never seen the text before.

The independent check comes from an enemy. Matthew S. Clapp, a Campbellite minister in Mentor, published a detailed account in the Painesville Telegraph on 15 February 1831 — within four months of the events, in the same neighborhood, and hostile to everyone in the story. He describes the missionaries lodging with Rigdon, who "read their book and partly condemned it -- but, two days afterwards, was heard to confess his conviction of its truth." He describes Rigdon publicly opposing the missionaries' rapid baptisms, withstanding them "to the face," and lecturing Cowdery from scripture against praying for a sign; then Rigdon asking for a sign himself, receiving one, and being baptized on the Monday following. He describes Rigdon's sermon confessing "the sins of his former life, his great pride, ambition, vainglory." And: "About three weeks after Mr. R. was baptized by Oliver Cowdery, he went to the state of New York, to see Joseph Smith, jr."⁷

The Palmyra Reflector gave a similar sequence from the other end of the story on 14 February 1831, reporting that the book was put before Rigdon in early November and that he converted after several days.²⁷ A revelation dated 7 December 1830 addresses Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon together; the earliest surviving copy was made about March 1831 in Revelation Book 1, and a second early copy in another hand descended through the Whitmer family.⁸ That establishes their association by 7 December 1830. It does not certify a first meeting, and no document does.

What the opposing evidence says

The earliest printed suggestion of a pre-publication Rigdon is James Gordon Bennett's report of 31 August 1831, which places an Ohio religious "money digger" named "Henry Rangdon" or "Ringdon" with the Smith family during the treasure-seeking period. Because it is contemporary, it cannot be dismissed as a story invented in the 1860s. But it names no observer, dates no visit, gets the man's first name wrong, and reads like a rumor built backward out of Rigdon's known 1830 arrival.²⁸

The named sighting accounts all begin thirty-seven years or more after the fact. Pomeroy Tucker published the "mysterious stranger" story in 1867 and later identified the stranger as Rigdon, without naming who saw him or explaining how the identification was made.²⁹ Abel Chase swore in 1879 that he saw a stranger at the Smith home "who they said" was Rigdon, several times, around 1827 — he was twelve or thirteen at the time and attributes the identification to unnamed others. Lorenzo Saunders claimed in 1885–87 to have seen Rigdon in March 1827, fall 1827, and summer 1828; in the same narrative he places Oliver Cowdery in the Smith neighborhood working on the Book of Mormon in 1826, although Cowdery's documented Manchester school term was 1828–29.³⁰ Sarah Fowler Anderick's 1887 affidavit rests on Sophronia Smith identifying strangers, which is hearsay at almost sixty years' remove.

These accounts are cumulative only if they are independent. Nobody has shown that they are, and every one of them derives the identification from someone else.

Weighing it

The 1830 conversion evidence is unusually good for this period: near-contemporary, hostile, locally specific, and internally awkward in ways that fabrications are not. An invented conversion narrative does not normally include the convert arguing against the missionaries, being embarrassed by his own earlier reasoning, and losing his congregation.

It is not, however, a logical disproof. A concealed collaborator would need a public conversion, and a good one. Rigdon's later denials — his 1839 letter says he had "not the most distant knowledge" of Spaulding's existence until Hurlbut named him¹⁸ — come from an interested party, and the later denials collected from Emma Smith, William Smith, Katherine Salisbury, David Whitmer, and Rigdon's own family are late and loyal.³¹ They are entitled to the same skepticism the article applies to Hurlbut's witnesses, no more and no less.

The defensible conclusion is this. A genuine introduction to the Book of Mormon in late October or early November 1830, baptism in early or mid-November, and a first meeting with Joseph Smith in early December is the best fit to the dated record. It is an inference from that record, not a fact stated in any single document. Secret earlier contact is unproved, and the burden falls on the theory that requires it.

What the text statistics show

In 2008, Matthew Jockers, Daniela Witten, and Craig Criddle published a stylometric study in Literary and Linguistic Computing that assigned large portions of the Book of Mormon to Spaulding and Rigdon. It is still the most-cited "scientific" support for the theory. It should not be used.

The problem is not the arithmetic. It is the question the method was asked. Nearest shrunken centroid classification is a closed-set technique: it takes a chapter, compares it with a fixed list of candidate authors, and reports which candidate it most resembles. It has no option to answer "none of these." Joseph Smith was not in the candidate list.

Paul Fields, G. Bruce Schaalje, and Matthew Roper demonstrated the consequences in 2011 by running the same method with the same candidate list on texts whose authors are known. Using that approach, Sidney Rigdon "wrote" thirty-four of the Federalist Papers, published in 1788, five years before he was born in 1793. And Oliver Cowdery, who died in 1850, "wrote" the 2008 paper itself — with 99 percent probability.⁹ A classifier forced to pick a nearest neighbor will always pick one, and will report high confidence while doing it.

They then reran the analysis properly. With the control authors removed and Joseph Smith included, the closed-set method assigned 0 percent of chapters to Spaulding, 12 percent to Rigdon, 61 percent to Cowdery, 3 percent to Parley Pratt, and 24 percent to Smith. The open-set version, which is allowed to reject every candidate, assigned 0 percent to Spaulding, 0 percent to Rigdon, 4 percent to Cowdery, 3 percent to Smith, and 93 percent to "Someone Else."⁹

Two conclusions follow, and only two.

The 2008 chapter attributions are unusable as evidence that Spaulding or Rigdon wrote anything. Even under the flawed closed-set method, once the control authors were removed the result pointed at Oliver Cowdery, not at the theory's candidates.

And "Someone Else" is not an answer. It means only that none of the tested writing samples resembles the Book of Mormon under that word list, that segmentation, and those candidate texts. It does not identify an author, does not establish antiquity, and cannot possibly test a manuscript that no longer exists — which is precisely what the strongest form of the Spaulding theory postulates. Scripture Central's evidence page is careful about this and concedes that stylometry cannot prove the text is ancient.³² That concession is correct and cuts both ways.

The 2008 paper itself was not opened for this article; its design and results are reported here as the 2011 response describes them, from the response's own quoted figures and controls.³³

What would settle the textual question is a replication that nobody has yet published: a prespecified analysis with a public corpus and public code, Joseph Smith included as a candidate, King James and genre controls, positive controls that recover known authors, negative controls that reject known non-authors, candidate-removal sensitivity tests, and a method permitted to attribute nothing. Until that exists, text statistics contribute nothing to either side of this dispute.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

The official Church topic page

The Church's Topics and Questions page on the Spaulding manuscript is the only official response here. Everything else in this section is independent Latter-day Saint scholarship or apologetics, however faithful or however hosted.

The page is right about the thing it addresses. It describes the surviving story accurately — Romans blown off course en route to Britain, two nations near the Ohio River, an elopement, a war — and says that "similarities between his manuscript and the Book of Mormon are general and superficial."¹⁰ It correctly notes that Hurlbut and Howe possessed this manuscript and did not publish it, and it correctly credits Rice and Fairchild, neither of them Latter-day Saints, with concluding that it could not be the Book of Mormon's source.¹⁰

Three things in it are inaccurate or incomplete, and they matter.

It says the Conneaut witnesses "signed affidavits."¹⁰ No notarized original has been located for any of the eight, and Howe presents them as statements the witnesses "say."

It says that after Hurlbut and Howe declined to publish it, "eventually, the manuscript was lost."¹⁰ The manuscript was not lost. It passed with Howe's printing business to Rice in an ordinary commercial sale and sat unexamined in his papers, exactly as Rice described.²

Most importantly, by calling the surviving object "the Spaulding Manuscript" and comparing it with the Book of Mormon, the page leaves a reader with the impression that the 1833 witnesses had compared these two texts and been refuted. Howe's own account says the reverse: those witnesses were shown this manuscript, identified it as Spaulding's handwriting, and said it was not the work they meant.¹ The official page answers direct copying from the surviving text well. It does not engage the claim that actually generated the controversy.

Matthew Roper

Roper's 2005 and 2009 studies are the strongest faithful work on this subject and the ones a critic has to answer. Their central argument is positive rather than defensive: the surviving story really does contain a discovered record, an ocean voyage, rival American nations, wars, mounds, fortifications, arts, and unusually large people, which is a large fraction of what the witnesses described; and the elements that do not fit are exactly the elements most vulnerable to contamination by a book every witness had just read.¹² He supports it with the family's consistent singular language about one story before 1884, the extant manuscript's unfinished and revised state, Josiah's independent account, John Spalding's contradictory 1851 version, and McKinstry's own admission that others prompted the name comparison.¹²

Where the model strains is on specifics. Roper's own final tabulation marks Jerusalem, Nephi, Lehi, Laban, Mormon, Moroni, Nephites, Lamanites, Zarahemla, "it came to pass," and the title itself as absent from the extant story. Those are not vague resemblances that a hazy memory might supply from anywhere; they are the exact items in dispute. His inference that Hurlbut fed the names to the witnesses is plausible and undocumented — no question list or interview note survives to show it. And the negative witnesses he leans on are thin: Winchester's Jackson has no first name, no statement, and no explanation of how Winchester learned his answer,¹⁵ while Hyde's Conneaut converts are unnamed and reported nine years after the fact by an apostle who was also a Rigdon associate.¹⁶ Roper's case makes one evolving manuscript the better-supported hypothesis. It does not close the question.

FAIR

FAIR is at its strongest on the two genuine holes: no second manuscript has ever been produced, and no contemporary document establishes a pre-1830 Smith–Rigdon relationship.³⁴ Its page on Hurlbut correctly identifies the common-drafting problem that makes the eight statements less than eight independent observations.¹⁴

It overreaches in a specific and repeated way: it converts "not demonstrated" into "does not exist." It writes that "claims that Spalding wrote a second manuscript are easily discredited by the fact that the published Spalding manuscript clearly shows that it was not finished."³⁴ That does not follow. An unfinished draft is evidence that Spaulding abandoned or reworked something, which is as consistent with revision as with a single static work — and it cannot be a refutation of a distinction that Howe printed in 1834 and Wright wrote down in December 1833. FAIR also writes that critics are left with "a nonexistent document which they can claim says anything they want."³⁴ The rhetorical point is fair against sloppy critics. As a description of the evidence it is not: dated 1833–34 testimony that a different work existed is evidence, even if it is not proof, and calling it nothing is the mirror image of the error FAIR is criticizing.

Mormonr

Mormonr's public dossier is not scholarship and does not claim to be, but it contributes one argument the others omit: in 1977 two document examiners identified Spaulding's handwriting in the Book of Mormon's original manuscript and both later withdrew the identification, while Jerald Tanner — no friend of the Church — independently rejected the match.³⁵ Its own summaries repeatedly call the extant Roman story Manuscript Found and describe Howe as claiming the Book of Mormon plagiarized that recovered story, which is the opposite of what Howe wrote. Use it as a source index, not as a framework.

Roper and Fields on Rigdon; Fields, Schaalje, and Roper on stylometry

The 2011 historical paper assembles the conversion chronology, Rigdon's doctrinal distance from the Book of Mormon before 1830, his later conduct toward the book, and the weakness of the alleged earlier contacts.³¹ It is a strong case and this article largely accepts its conclusion. Its one recurring slip is moving from "no contemporary record exists" to a confident first-meeting narrative built mostly out of later insider testimony.

The 2011 statistical paper is simply decisive on its own question, for the reasons set out above.⁹ Its authors are careful not to claim more: the open-set result shows the tested candidates are poor matches, not who wrote the book.

Benjamin Winchester, 1840

Winchester matters for a reason that has nothing to do with whether he was right. His pamphlet shows that the central faithful answers are not modern repairs. In 1840 — forty-four years before Rice opened the wrapper in Honolulu — Winchester was already arguing that Spaulding's manuscript was a short Roman novel unlike the Book of Mormon, that Hurlbut failed to find a matching text and invented a second one, that Patterson denied knowing of any such submission, that Rigdon had no access, and that Pratt personally introduced the published book to Rigdon in October 1830.¹⁵

He is also a warning about how not to argue. He calls the opposing evidence lies and forgery, attacks Hurlbut's character at length, and treats motive as if it settled fact. His best material reaches him through intermediaries: Green reports Patterson's denial; Badlam copies John Haven's letter reporting Jesse Haven's interview; the Jackson report has no named source at all. Read for its evidence rather than its verdicts, Winchester is valuable — most of all for preserving the widow's admission that Hurlbut's manuscript "did not read as they expected."¹⁵

Brian Hales on production

Hales adds a constraint the other responses miss. The surviving original manuscript, mostly in Cowdery's hand from April to June 1829, shows no signs of extensive editing or revision, and friendly and hostile witnesses alike described Joseph dictating while a scribe wrote.¹⁷ Any theory in which Rigdon reworked a long prior document has to explain how that document entered a fast, oral, sequential process without anyone reporting it.

The constraint is real but narrower than it looks. Dictation does not exclude prior composition, memorized structure, or a source consulted out of sight; no witness observed the entire process. And Hales's own Spaulding section reverses the standard nomenclature, calling the recovered Roman manuscript Manuscript Found while giving the hypothesized second work the name Manuscript Story — which assumes the answer to the identity question. Cite the dictation records, not the naming.

Common objections and responses

"The surviving manuscript proves the whole theory false"

It proves that the Book of Mormon was not copied from the Oberlin manuscript in anything like its present form. That is a real and important result, and it is the only thing the manuscript can prove by itself. It cannot show that Spaulding wrote nothing else, because he demonstrably did, and it cannot answer a distinction that Howe published in 1834 and Aaron Wright wrote down in December 1833 — before anyone knew this object still existed.¹

"Eight sworn affidavits prove plagiarism"

No. The eight printed statements are not located notarized affidavits, and they are not eight independent documentary channels. Howe presents them as things the witnesses "say."¹ One man selected the witnesses, interviewed them, and appears to have drafted the prose; in the one surviving case where an original exists, the paper is unsigned and in Hurlbut's hand.⁵ They establish a recognition episode among people who really knew Spaulding. They do not establish a route through Rigdon, which is a separate question their contents never touch.

"Hurlbut was a hostile, excommunicated fraud, so the testimony is worthless"

Hostility explains why the evidence was collected and creates real risks of selection, prompting, and tendentious drafting. It does not erase the witnesses' documented relationships with Spaulding, and it is not an argument. Rigdon's 1839 reply, which spends most of its length on Hurlbut's morals and Howe's family, is a case study in why: it never addresses a single one of the eight statements.¹⁸ A collector's character is a reason to check his work, not a substitute for checking it.

"Spaulding wrote several things, so a lost source is likely"

Several writings make another work possible. They do not establish that one of them was a biblical-style ancient-Israel narrative, or what it contained, or that it survived in a print shop for a decade. Sermons, a children's story about frogs, and "two or three books or pamphlets on different subjects" are exactly what one would expect from a former minister with time on his hands.¹

"Rigdon's public conversion proves he knew nothing earlier"

The conversion evidence is genuinely strong: near-contemporary, hostile, locally specific, and costly to Rigdon. But a concealed collaborator would need a public conversion too, and would have every reason to stage a convincing one. The conversion record makes innocence the better explanation of the surviving evidence. It does not make guilt impossible, and Latter-day Saint writers should stop presenting it as though it did.

"Rigdon worked at the Patterson print shop"

He did not, so far as anyone has ever been able to show. Robert Patterson Jr. interviewed dozens of Pittsburgh's oldest residents in the 1870s and found that the story circulated as common knowledge but that nobody, when pressed, had personal knowledge or any authority for it.⁶ Rigdon himself said there was no Patterson printing office in Pittsburgh during his residence, and Roper's reconstruction of the firm's dates supports him on that narrow point: R. Patterson & Lambdin collapsed in February 1823, and the surviving Patterson business afterward was a small bookshop.²⁰

"The 2008 computer study independently confirms the theory"

It does not. The method was required to name one of the supplied candidates and could not answer "none of these." Joseph Smith was left out of the candidate list. Given the same method and list, Rigdon "wrote" Federalist papers published five years before his birth.⁹ When the analysis was allowed to reject all candidates, 93 percent of chapters went to "Someone Else" and none to Spaulding or Rigdon.⁹

"The witnesses' memories are worthless because they had read the Book of Mormon"

This overcorrects. Recognition normally needs a cue, and being reminded of something does not make the memory false. The Josiah Spaulding and Joseph Miller cases show what the evidence actually supports: a real and stable memory of a Spaulding ancient-America story, and an unreliable memory of the specific names attached to it. Roper's memory model is the best available explanation of that pattern. It is a good explanation, not a proof, because no interview record survives to show what was asked.

"Non-Latter-day Saint historians reject the theory, so it is dead"

Most do, and that is worth knowing — Fawn Brodie and Dan Vogel are not defending the Church when they reject Spaulding–Rigdon. But a head count is not evidence. The reasons matter, and the reasons given by critical historians are the same ones given here: no second manuscript, no custody chain, no documented pre-1830 contact. Those reasons stand on their own and would stand if the vote went the other way.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

What would strengthen the Spaulding–Rigdon theory sharply. A pre-1830 copy, or a pre-1830 description, of a biblical-style Spaulding narrative containing any of the disputed names. A contemporary document placing that manuscript in Sidney Rigdon's possession — a receipt, a shop ledger, a letter, a diary entry. A contemporary named witness placing Rigdon with Joseph Smith before March 1830, with a date that survives cross-examination. Hurlbut's interview notes or question list, if they show the witnesses volunteering names rather than confirming them. An autograph or pre-1878 writing by John Winter. A signed original of any of the eight 1833 statements, in a hand other than Hurlbut's.

What would weaken it further. A physical study of the Oberlin manuscript's paper, gatherings, watermarks, and ink changes showing that Howe's "one quire" describes it after all, and that its revisions account for the remembered "altered plan." Identification of Winchester's Jackson, with a statement in his own words. Recovery of the original Austin interview minutes behind the 1839 Davison statement. A demonstration that the Conneaut name lists derive from a common oral source in the village after Orson Hyde's 1832 preaching. Open-set stylometric replication on public data, with Joseph Smith included and King James controls, that again excludes both candidates.

What would settle very little either way. Another Spaulding manuscript that is not a biblical-style ancient-Israel narrative. More late recollections of Rigdon seen near a printing office. More denials from Rigdon's family or from Latter-day Saint insiders. A closed-set stylometric study of any kind.

The reason the article's verdict is split rather than clean is that the two halves of this question have been researched to very different depths. The manuscript's physical history has never been properly published. The Pittsburgh business records have never been systematically searched. Until someone does that work, the recognition testimony will remain a real historical episode without a demonstrated cause, and the transmission chain will remain a hypothesis with a missing document at every joint.

Sources