Joseph Smith (1805–1844) was the founding prophet and first president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Joseph Smith Papers Project is an effort to gather together all extant Joseph Smith documents and to publish complete and accurate transcripts of those documents with both textual and contextual annotation. All such documents will be published electronically on this website, and a significant number of the documents will also be published in print. . . For the first time, all of Joseph Smith’s known surviving papers, which include many of the foundational documents of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will be easily accessible in one place.

The publication of Joseph Smith’s papers two centuries after his birth opens a window on a life filled with what he called “marvilous experience.

His enemies may have feared Joseph Smith all the more because he was formidable personally. Josiah Quincy, soon to be the mayor of Boston, visited Nauvoo in spring 1844 with Charles Francis Adams, son of former American president John Quincy Adams. Quincy compared Smith to the Rhode Island congressman Elisha Potter, who had impressed Quincy in Washington. Quincy said both Smith and Potter “were of commanding appearance, men whom it seemed natural to obey,” who emanated “a certain peculiar moral stress and compulsion which I have never felt in the presence of others of their countrymen.” Peter Burnett, one of Smith’s attorneys in the aftermath of the Missouri war and later governor of California, saw the steel in his client’s character. “He possessed the most indomitable perseverance,” Burnett wrote after watching Smith’s conduct in prison. He “deemed himself born to command, and he did command.” By comparison, church counselor Sidney Rigdon, though a man of superior education and fine appearance, “did not possess the native intellect of Smith, and lacked his determined will.”