Solomon Spaulding Book of Mormon Origins

by Alma (05/29/2026 3:25 pm)

In the early days of the Book of Mormon people who knew Joseph Smith did not believe he had the education, literary training, or writing ability to produce the Book of Mormon on his own.

Joseph was not known as a polished writer. He had very little formal education, and the surviving examples of his own handwriting show a man who struggled with spelling, grammar, and composition. In one of the rare passages written in his own hand, Joseph described his education this way:

“It required the exertions of all that were able to render any assistance for the support of the Family therefore we were deprived of the bennifit of an education suffice it to say I was mearly instructid in reading writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic which const[it]uted my whole literary acquirements.”

That is not the writing of a trained author. It is elementary, rough, and filled with the kind of spelling and grammatical errors one would expect from a young man with limited schooling on the American frontier.

Emma Smith made the same point even more forcefully. As one of Joseph’s earliest scribes and the person who knew his abilities most intimately, she said that Joseph

“could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, let alone dictating a book like the Book of Mormon.”

That reality created a problem for early critics. If Joseph was a fraud, then where did the book come from? If he was too uneducated to produce it himself, then critics needed another author. Solomon Spaulding became the undisputed author for five decades.

Solomon Spaulding and Manuscript Found

Solomon Spaulding was a former minister, Revolutionary War veteran, Dartmouth graduate, and amateur writer. Around 1812, while living in New Salem, now Conneaut, Ohio, he wrote an unpublished historical romance usually called “Manuscript Found” or “Manuscript Story.”

The story was framed as if it were a translation of an ancient record discovered in a cave near the remains of an old fort on the west bank of the Conneaut River. In Spaulding’s story, a group of Romans from the days of Constantine are blown off course, cross the Atlantic, and arrive in America. The story then describes their interactions, wars, governments, and religion among the ancient inhabitants of the land.

At first glance, the story seems to have some parallels with the Book of Mormon. Spaulding had written about ancient people in America. The Book of Mormon was also about ancient people in America. For those already convinced Joseph Smith could not have produced the book, Spaulding became an attractive explanation for the origins of the Book.

How the Theory Began

In 1833, Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, a former Latter-day Saint who had been excommunicated from the Church for committing adultery while serving a Mission. After being re-baptized, and then was excommunicated again he became bitter and hostile to the church, vowing to wash Joseph Smith’s blood with his own hands. Somehow he heard reports that Solomon Spaulding had written a manuscript that somehow resembled the Book of Mormon. Hurlbut traveled to gather statements from Spaulding’s family, neighbors, and acquaintances.

Hurlbut gathered eight major statements from people connected to Spaulding who claimed that Spaulding’s manuscript resembled the Book of Mormon. These included statements from John Spaulding, Martha Spaulding, Henry Lake, John N. Miller, Aaron Wright, Oliver Smith, Nahum Howard, and Artemas Cunningham.

These witnesses claimed to remember similarities between Spaulding’s manuscript and the Book of Mormon, including ancient American peoples, wars, migrations, and even the Book of Mormon names Nephi and Lehi. Some claimed that Spaulding’s manuscript used a biblical style, including phrases like “and it came to pass.”

Those statements became part of E. D. Howe’s 1834 book, Mormonism Unvailed, the first major anti-Mormon book ever published. Howe used Hurlbut’s material to argue that the historical portion of the Book of Mormon had originally been written by Solomon Spaulding more than twenty years earlier and had then somehow been transformed into Latter-day Saint scripture.

To many readers in the 1830s, these statements sounded convincing. Newspapers repeated the claim. Critics promoted it. For decades, the Spaulding theory became one of the most common non-believing explanations for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

But the theory had serious problems from the beginning.

The Problem with the Witnesses

The first problem was memory. The witnesses were not comparing the Book of Mormon to a manuscript sitting in front of them. They were recalling something Spaulding had supposedly read or discussed more than twenty years earlier.

Human memory is especially unreliable when people are asked, decades later, to compare an old unpublished story with a controversial new religious book they already dislike.

The second problem was that Howe and Hurlbut actually obtained a Spaulding manuscript. He found it through Spaulding’s widow and family connections. But when Hurlbut examined it, it was not close to the Book of Mormon. It was a very different kind of story.

The manuscript did not contain Nephi, Lehi, Lamanites, Nephites, Moroni, Zarahemla, golden plates, Christ’s visit to the Americas, prophetic sermons, covenant theology, or the sweeping doctrinal structure of the Book of Mormon. It was a fictional romance about Romans who crossed the ocean and arrived in America.

But for anti-Mormons more interested in destroying Joseph Smith and the Church, the truth didn’t actually matter. What mattered was convincing people that Joseph Smith was a fraud, and with the obvious problem that the actual manuscript did not match the accusations.

So the theory had to be adapted.

The Spaulding Theory Becomes the Spaulding-Rigdon Theory

Neither Howe nor Hurlbut seemed to believe Joseph Smith was educated or competent enough to have produced the Book of Mormon. And Spaulding’s manuscript alone could not explain the book either. It did not have the theology. It did not have the doctrinal complexity. It did not have the scriptural framework.

So critics added Sidney Rigdon.

The revised theory argued that Spaulding wrote the basic ancient-American story, and Sidney Rigdon acquired it through a Pittsburgh printing office. Spaulding had reportedly taken his manuscript to the firm of Patterson and Lambdin, hoping to get it published. Since Rigdon had lived in the Pittsburgh area, critics claimed he must have had access to the manuscript, copied or stole it, added the religious material, and later secretly worked with Joseph Smith to publish it as the Book of Mormon.

This is how the Spaulding theory became the Spaulding-Rigdon theory.

But this version created even more problems. It required critics to prove several things at once:

That there was another Spaulding manuscript, different from the one Hurlbut actually found.
That this missing manuscript contained the basic storyline of the Book of Mormon.
That Sidney Rigdon somehow stole or copied the manuscript.
That Rigdon secretly edited or expanded it.
That Rigdon had a hidden relationship with Joseph Smith before the Book of Mormon was published.
Tthat Joseph Smith was then able to dictate the Book of Mormon in front of witnesses while somehow concealing this manuscript source.
That Sidney Rigdon pretended initial opposition to the Book of Mormon and denied that he had never seen or talked to Joseph Smith before 1831.

None of that chain has ever been historically verified.

The Rediscovery of the Manuscript

Despite its reliance on so many assumptions, for decades the Spaulding theory survived partly because people had not seen Spaulding’s actual manuscript. The manuscript disappeared among old papers connected to E. D. Howe.

Then, in 1884, it was rediscovered in Honolulu, Hawaii, by L. L. Rice, who had acquired papers from Howe’s old newspaper office. Rice recognized the importance of the manuscript and sent it to James H. Fairchild, president of Oberlin College.

Fairchild and others examined it and concluded that it had nothing to do with the Book of Mormon. Instead of vindicating the Spaulding theory, the rediscovered manuscript completely debunked the theory.

Fairchild said,

“Mr. Rice, myself, and others compared it with the Book of Mormon, and could detect no resemblance between the two, in general or in detail. There seems to be no name or incident common to the two. The solemn style of the Book of Mormon, in imitation of the English Scriptures, does not appear in the manuscript.”

The manuscript was later published, allowing readers to compare it with the Book of Mormon for themselves. The result was devastating for the theory. Spaulding’s story was not a lost version of the Book of Mormon. It was a frontier historical romance with a completely different plot, style, purpose, and religious content.

Spaulding’s story is about a Roman named Fabius, whose record is supposedly found on parchment rolls in a cave near Conneaut Creek. Fabius and other Romans are sailing toward Britain when a storm blows them across the Atlantic and they end up in America. They first meet a people called the Deliwans, then later encounter the Ohians, a more developed mound-building society. The story includes Roman characters Crito, Lucian, and Trojanus, native leaders Lobaska and King Bombal of Kentuck, religious festivals, native songs, courtship customs, ironwork, pottery, architecture, political reforms, a fabricated priesthood, and even a conflict called the War of the Blue Feather.

The witnesses had claimed to remember Book of Mormon names and scriptural language in Spaulding’s manuscript. But the rediscovered manuscript showed that those claims were just not true. It did not contain the Book of Mormon’s distinctive names. It did not read like scripture. It did not use the Book of Mormon’s prophetic voice or contain theology.

That forced defenders of the Spaulding theory into an even weaker position. They now had to argue that the manuscript discovered in 1884 was not the important one. The real source, they claimed, must have been a second Spaulding manuscript that had disappeared.

In other words, after the known manuscript failed, the theory had to depend on an additional unknown manuscript.

The Printing Story Also Works Against the Theory

The publication history of the Book of Mormon also cuts against the idea that Joseph was secretly working from a polished literary manuscript prepared by educated conspirators.

When Joseph sought to print the Book of Mormon, he first approached E. B. Grandin in Palmyra. Grandin refused. Joseph and Martin Harris then approached other printers, including Jonathan Hadley and Thurlow Weed, who also refused. Eventually, Elihu F. Marshall of Rochester agreed to print it. Only after that did Joseph and Martin return to Grandin, who finally agreed after Martin Harris mortgaged part of his farm to secure the cost.

This is not the behavior of someone sitting on a polished fraud with powerful backers and an easy path to publication. The process was uncertain, resisted, and financially risky.

If Joseph, Rigdon, or some secret group had carefully manufactured the Book of Mormon as a literary deception, the publication story is surprisingly clumsy. There was no smooth publishing plan. There was no wealthy sponsor waiting in the background. There was no obvious network of conspirators moving the book into print. There was a young, undereducated Joseph Smith, a manuscript produced by dictation, reluctant printers, and Martin Harris risking his farm to get the book published.

Why the Theory Survived

The Spaulding theory survived because it tried to solve a real problem for critics: Joseph Smith does not look like the kind of person who could naturally produce the Book of Mormon.

He was poor. He had little schooling. He was not a trained writer. His own handwriting shows limited ability. His wife said he could not write or dictate a coherent and well-worded letter, much less produce a book like the Book of Mormon.

So critics looked for someone else. Solomon Spaulding supplied a possible ancient-American story. Sidney Rigdon supplied a possible educated theologian. Together, they seemed to offer an explanation.

But the theory only works if the evidence is missing at every point where evidence is most needed.

The manuscript that exists does not match the Book of Mormon. The second manuscript required by the theory has never been found. The chain of custody from Spaulding to Rigdon has never been proven. The alleged pre-1830 connection between Rigdon and Joseph Smith has never been established. And the theory still has to explain how Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon in the presence of witnesses without using a visible manuscript.

That is why the Spaulding-Rigdon theory creates more problems than it solves.

Conclusion

The simplest historical fact remains: Joseph Smith was an undereducated young man with limited writing ability, yet the Book of Mormon came through him.

Believers explain that through revelation and translation by the gift and power of God. Critics have tried to explain it through stolen manuscripts, hidden collaborators, and elaborate chains of custody. But the Spaulding theory, one of the earliest and longest-running attempts to replace Joseph’s own explanation, has never carried the historical weight required.

It began with affidavits based on decades-old memories. It shifted when the actual manuscript failed to match the accusation. It depended on Sidney Rigdon when Spaulding alone was not enough. And after the manuscript was rediscovered in 1884, the theory was forced to rely on a second, missing manuscript that has never been produced.

The theory exists because critics needed another author. But needing another author is not the same thing as proving one.