John Corrill’s 1839 history is easy to quote as an anti-Mormon source. That misses what makes it useful. Corrill did not spend the early years of Joseph Smith’s movement standing outside it. He joined after trying to disprove it, defended the Saints against accusations he thought were false, served in church leadership, and eventually decided that the movement was a false religion.[1][2]
What changed his mind was a pattern which he had watched develop from the inside: failed plans, financial collapse, pressure against dissenters, escalating militancy, and promises of divine protection that always ended in disaster.[1] That makes Corrill’s story more useful than a simple hostile exposé. It records both why an intelligent early convert believed and why he later stopped believing.
The complete 1839 text is available in the Lucifer’s Lantern Full Text Library, including Corrill’s own account of his conversion, church service, the Missouri conflict, and his final remarks to the Saints.
He first tried to disprove Mormonism
Corrill’s first reaction to the new religion was skepticism. When missionaries passed through northeastern Ohio in 1830, he looked at the Book of Mormon, read the witnesses’ testimony, and concluded that the whole thing was probably a speculation. He called the missionaries impostors and expected Sidney Rigdon and the people around him to expose them.[1]
Instead, Rigdon converted. That bothered Corrill because he respected several people in Rigdon’s circle. He went to Kirtland expecting to argue against the new movement, but the visit pushed him toward a more serious investigation. He later wrote that he did not want to reject something merely because it sounded strange if there was a chance he might be “fighting against God.”[1]
He read the Book of Mormon, compared Mormon teachings with the Bible, investigated hostile reports, and attended meetings looking for deception. At one all-night meeting, he said he watched closely for fraud and came away convinced that something supernatural had happened.[1]
Corrill also found the Book of Mormon witnesses difficult to dismiss. After becoming acquainted with them, he wrote that he was “unable to impeach their testimony.” He reasoned that accepting their testimony was not obviously less rational than accepting ancient religious testimony from people he had never met.[1]
His eventual decision was cautious rather than absolute:
Although I was not fully satisfied, yet viewing this religion to be much nearer the religion of the Bible than any other I could find, I concluded to join the Church, with this determination, that if ever I found it to be a deception, I would leave it.[1]
Corrill was baptized at Kirtland on January 10, 1831, and was ordained an elder within days. He later became a high priest and a counselor to Bishop Edward Partridge.[2]
He became part of the institution
Corrill’s importance as a witness comes from what happened next. He was not simply a member attending meetings from a distance. He served in church administration, lived in Missouri during the Jackson County expulsion, worked on the Kirtland House of the Lord, helped establish Far West, became keeper of the Lord’s storehouse, and was elected to the Missouri legislature from Caldwell County.[2]
On April 6, 1838, Corrill and Elias Higbee were appointed “to write and keep the Church history.” The Joseph Smith Papers notes that this appointment probably helped prompt the work that eventually became his published history.[3]
So Corrill’s book occupies an unusual position. It is the work of a dissenter, but much of the information came from someone who had spent years near the center of the movement. The Joseph Smith Papers describes him as bringing “several years of church leadership and experience” to the history and treats the account as a valuable source for early Mormonism, especially Missouri.[3]
That does not make everything Corrill wrote automatically correct. It does make his change of mind worth examining on its own terms.
What changed in 1838
Corrill’s doubts grew during the financial and leadership crises surrounding Kirtland and Far West. He described debt, failed business ventures, the Kirtland banking collapse, disputes between church leaders and dissenters, and growing complaints about money and authority.[1]
But the turning point in his narrative comes in Missouri in 1838. Corrill objected to the treatment of dissenters after Sidney Rigdon’s so-called Salt Sermon. When several dissenters became frightened and left Far West, Corrill wrote:
This scene I looked upon with horror, and considered it as proceeding from a mob spirit.[4]
His account then turns to the Danites, a secretive organization formed during the increasingly tense Missouri conflict. Corrill described oaths of secrecy and loyalty, pressure against dissent, and an expectation that members would support church leadership. Yet his account also contains an important restraint that is easy to miss when Corrill is quoted only for his accusations.
“Who first started this society I know not,” he wrote. When discussing how much support the organization received from the First Presidency, he again admitted, “How much he was assisted by the presidency I know not.”[4]
Corrill still drew conclusions. He thought church leaders had enabled or sanctioned dangerous behavior. But he repeatedly marked the line between what he believed, what he had heard, and what he could actually verify.[4]
He still defended the Saints when he thought they were right
Corrill’s break with Joseph Smith did not turn him into an indiscriminate defender of Missouri’s treatment of the Latter-day Saints.
His history condemns the violence that drove church members from Jackson County. He argued that, at the time of that first expulsion, the Saints had not committed crimes that justified what was done to them. He also described abuses committed during the later Missouri conflict and treated Governor Lilburn Boggs’s extermination order as a terrifying threat against innocent and guilty Mormons alike.[1]
Even while becoming religiously estranged from the church, Corrill represented Caldwell County in the Missouri legislature. On December 19, 1838, he presented a petition seeking relief for the displaced Saints, including reconsideration of the expulsion order and relief for losses and property taken during the conflict.[1][2]
The Joseph Smith Papers notes that Corrill retained a degree of sympathy for the Saints even after his estrangement and 1839 excommunication.[3]
That complicates the easiest reading of his book. Corrill was not saying, “The Mormons were bad and their enemies were right.” His argument was closer to this: the Saints had suffered real persecution, but persecution did not excuse the decisions of church leaders or prove that those decisions came from God.
His criticism was cumulative
Near the end of the book, Corrill explains why those experiences changed the religious conclusion he had reached in 1831.
He did not focus on one archaeological objection to the Book of Mormon or one scandalous story about Joseph Smith. He focused on outcomes. He had joined a movement claiming continuing revelation and divine leadership. After years of following it, he believed the promised results repeatedly failed to appear.[5]
His final address to church members begins:
I have left you, not because I disbelieve the Bible, for I believe in God, the Saviour, and religion the same as ever; but when I retrace our track, and view the doings of the Church for six years past, I can see nothing that convinces me that God has been our leader; calculation after calculation has failed, and plan after plan has been overthrown, and our Prophet seemed not to know the event till too late.If he said go up and prosper, still we did not prosper; but have labored and toiled, and waded through trials, difficulties, and temptations, of various kinds, in hope of deliverance. But no deliverance came.[5]
For Corrill, this was evidence against the claim that Joseph Smith was successfully leading the church by revelation. The problem was not simply that bad things happened. Corrill had endured persecution before without abandoning Mormonism. His problem was that the movement’s own promises, plans, and claims of divine direction appeared to him to fail repeatedly while members were still expected to follow the prophet with increasing obedience.[5]
That distinction helps explain why his final recommendation was “common sense” and “sound reason” rather than another religious authority.[5]
How much weight should Corrill carry?
Corrill should not be treated as a neutral transcript of early Mormonism. He wrote after a bitter rupture and explicitly intended his book to explain both why he had joined and why he had left. The Joseph Smith Papers describes the work as a personal defense of his own conduct as well as a history.[3]
Some of his information came from reports rather than direct observation. His interpretations of Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and the Danites were his interpretations, and other participants disputed parts of the story. Corrill also wrote while the Missouri conflict was still fresh, when almost everyone involved had reasons to defend their own actions.[3][4]
But those limitations do not erase what makes the source valuable. Corrill often tells the reader when he does not know something. He rejects accusations he thinks are unsupported. He records positive arguments for Mormonism that once persuaded him. He condemns anti-Mormon violence even after losing faith. And the institutional record confirms that he really did occupy many of the positions that placed him close to the events he described.[1][2][3]
His history is strongest when read as the testimony of a deeply involved participant whose confidence eroded over time, not as an infallible verdict on every disputed event.
Corrill’s conclusion
Corrill was excommunicated on March 17, 1839, and published A Brief History later that year.[2] By then he had kept the determination he said he made before baptism: if he became convinced the movement was a deception, he would leave.[1]
That does not prove that every conclusion Corrill reached was correct. It does explain why his history remains difficult to dismiss.
The man writing against Joseph Smith in 1839 was the same man who had once investigated hostile stories and rejected them, defended the Book of Mormon witnesses, believed he had seen supernatural manifestations, preached the new religion, served its bishop, worked on its temple, helped administer its Missouri communities, and defended its members when their enemies abused them.[1][2]
Sources
[2] “John Corrill,” Joseph Smith Papers, biography.
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