The 1820 Revival and Historical Context

The CES Letter argues that no one recorded the First Vision for twelve to twenty-two years and that there was no religious revival in Palmyra in 1820 — only in 1817 and 1824. Both claims are checkable against the documentary record. Both, checked, point the other way.

The CES Letter Claim

CES Letter — the argument in summary

Jeremy’s argument, in paraphrase, runs like this: there is no record of the First Vision that anyone knew about for twelve to twenty-two years; there was no revival in Palmyra, New York in 1820 — the documented revivals were in 1817 and 1824; and so the historical record undercuts Joseph’s claim that his family was caught up in an 1820 revival that drove them toward the Presbyterians.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

On this issue there were two roads, and Jeremy could see both.

The simplistic road: read the 1838 canonical account (Joseph Smith—History 1:5–20) as if it demands one large, formal, single-town revival datable to the calendar year 1820; discover that a Presbyterian minister’s 1960s survey of denominational rolls found the big Palmyra revivals in 1817 and 1824 but not 1820; and conclude that Joseph invented or backdated the whole setting. Then treat “12–22 years” as if it meant total silence — a story with no paper trail until it was conveniently produced.

The nuanced, better-supported road: read what Joseph actually wrote — “unusual excitement on the subject of religion” that “commenced with the Methodists” — against the region historians literally named the “Burned-over District” for its unbroken waves of revivalism; notice that Joseph’s earliest account, written in 1832, does not hinge the vision on a revival at all; and recognize that Jeremy’s own bracket, “12–22 years,” is bounded on its low end by a written record that exists — the 1832 account — only twelve years out.

Jeremy took the first road. The rest of this page shows why the second is better supported by the very documents in play — and why the first requires reading Joseph less carefully, and his critics not at all.

“12–22 Years” Is Refuted by the Number 12 Itself

Start with the phrase Jeremy chose: 12 to 22 years. Where do those numbers come from? They are not arbitrary. The earliest surviving account of the First Vision was written in 1832 — twelve years after 1820. The first account published in a Church periodical appeared in the Times and Seasons in 1842 — twenty-two years after. Jeremy’s own range is bounded on one end by a document he has read.

So “no record anyone knew about for 12–22 years” quietly equivocates between two very different claims: (1) no surviving written record exists — false, one exists at year twelve; and (2) the account was not widely published for two decades — true, and unremarkable. The rhetorical force comes from letting the reader hear (1) while only claim (2) is defensible.

The 1832 account matters for a second reason: part of it is in Joseph Smith’s own handwriting — the only First Vision account partly penned by his own hand — recorded when he was a young man of twenty-six, years before the Church’s theology or his own public standing gave him any motive to embellish. In it he writes of seeing “the Lord” and receiving a forgiveness of sins. This is not a story that surfaces only after decades of silence. It surfaces early, privately, in his own hand. The 1832 account also differs from the later 1838 telling in its details — it describes a single divine personage rather than two, foregrounds the forgiveness of Joseph’s sins, and does not build the scene around a revival — and those differences are themselves part of Jeremy’s wider case; we take them up directly, rather than gloss over them, on the companion page below. The four accounts he left over his life — 1832, 1835, 1838, and 1842 — are examined in detail on our companion page, The Four First Vision Accounts — What They Actually Show.

There Really Was Religious Excitement in 1820

The “no 1820 revival” argument traces to Wesley Walters, a Presbyterian minister who in the 1960s searched Methodist and Presbyterian membership rolls, found the large documented revivals of 1817 and 1824–25, and argued that the intervening years were quiet. But this method can only find what denominations formally tallied — and it stumbles on Joseph’s actual words.

Joseph never described a single formal revival. Joseph Smith—History 1:5 speaks of “an unusual excitement on the subject of religion” that “commenced with the Methodists, but soon became general among all the sects,” until “the whole district of country seemed affected by it.” That is a description of a religious climate, not a single dated event on a circuit calendar. Requiring Walters’ kind of tidy denominational entry is answering a claim Joseph did not make.

And there is documentary evidence anyway. The Palmyra Register — the town’s own newspaper — reported in June and July 1820 on a Methodist camp meeting in the Palmyra area that summer, in the course of reporting the death of a man who had attended it. (How close to Palmyra that particular camp meeting sat has been debated, and a single camp meeting is not by itself a full-blown “revival.”) Still, that is contemporaneous, non-Mormon, local evidence of Methodist revival activity in the Palmyra area in 1820 — matching precisely Joseph’s detail that the excitement “commenced with the Methodists.” Historian Milton Backman catalogued numerous Baptist and Methodist activities across western New York in 1819–1820 in Joseph Smith’s First Vision (1971).

The Smiths were not bystanders to this Methodist culture. Joseph’s own documented later brush with a Methodist class — examined in Did Joseph Smith Join the Methodist Church? — shows a family embedded in exactly the revival milieu the 1838 account describes. And this is not merely a believer’s reading: Columbia University historian Richard Bushman, in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), concludes that the religious environment Joseph portrayed is historically accurate for that time and place.

The Strongest Form of the Objection: The 1824 Presbyterian Timeline

Here is the objection at full strength, stated fairly. Joseph Smith—History 1:5–7 places the “unusual excitement” and his family’s joining of the Presbyterians in the same window — “some time in the second year after our removal to Manchester,” which points to about 1820. Yet the documented Palmyra revival that produced a wave of Presbyterian enrollments came in 1824–25, and Alvin Smith — whose death seems tied to the family’s religious turn — died in November 1823. Lucy Mack Smith’s and William Smith’s later recollections associate the family’s Presbyterian affiliation with that later period. So the narrative frame in 1838 appears to gather the family’s formal churchgoing under a date several years too early.

This is the real question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dodge. Three things resolve it without asking anyone to strain.

First, the vision’s date does not depend on the revival at all. Joseph’s earliest account — the 1832 one — frames the vision not as the product of a revival but of personal scripture study and a young man’s grief over sin. The revival framing is prominent only in the later 1838 telling. So even if one grants that the family’s formal Presbyterian enrollment belongs to the 1824 wave, that concession does not move the vision off spring 1820. The two are separable, and Joseph’s own first pen separated them.

Second, the excitement of 1819–1820 is independently documented — the Methodist camp meeting in the Palmyra Register, Backman’s catalogue of regional activity. The Burned-over District did not fall silent between 1817 and 1824; it simmered continuously. “Unusual excitement” in 1820 is a historically real thing to describe, whether or not a denomination logged a formal “revival” that year.

Third, what remains is ordinary retrospective telescoping — and Jeremy applies it with a double standard. A narrative written in 1838 about events beginning in 1820 naturally groups a continuous eight-year season of family religious ferment into a single frame. That is how honest human memory renders a long, connected period — not fabrication, but the normal compression of retrospect. Yet the very document Jeremy uses to convict Joseph of this is Lucy Mack Smith’s history — dictated in 1845, a quarter-century after the events, and later revised. Jeremy demands verbatim precision from Joseph while resting his case on a source with the same memory-distance he refuses to forgive. The standard he applies to the prophet, he suspends for the witness he prefers.

Why It Wasn’t Published Sooner — and Why That’s Expected

Jeremy leans on BYU historian James B. Allen’s observation that the First Vision was not emphasized in 1830s Church publications. That observation is true — and notice who made it. Allen was a believing Latter-day Saint historian, and he published it openly in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought in 1966, decades before the CES Letter. Dean Jessee published transcriptions of all the early First Vision accounts, including the 1832 holograph, in BYU Studies in 1969. The multiplicity of accounts and the shift in emphasis were laid out candidly by the Church’s own scholars, in the Church’s own university journal, on the open record for two generations. A fact that faithful historians published themselves cannot be a fact the Church “hid.”

Why the shift in emphasis, then? Because in the 1830s the Church’s public case rested on the Book of Mormon and the restoration of priesthood authority — tangible, testable, missionary-ready claims. Joseph’s theophany, prompted by the counsel of James 1:5 to ask God for wisdom, was a private and sacred experience, not yet the institutional founding story it later became. Religious movements routinely foreground different parts of their origin over time: the earliest Christian preaching centered on the resurrection, not the nativity, which became central only as the tradition matured. The later prominence of the First Vision follows the same ordinary arc.

The Silence That Actually Matters Is the Critics’

If the “late fabrication” theory were true, it makes a testable prediction — and the prediction fails. From the 1820s onward Joseph faced relentless, well-networked, motivated hostility: Eber Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834), Alexander Campbell’s reviews, dozens of newspaper attacks, and the affidavits Howe gathered from Palmyra neighbors who had known the Smiths for years.

These critics attacked everything they could. Had the First Vision been freshly invented in 1838 and genuinely unknown before, the obvious kill-shot was available: neighbors, disaffected former members, and rival clergy had only to say, “We knew this man for two decades and never once heard of any such vision.” That charge would have been devastating, easy, and free. Not one of them made it. The critics’ silence about the First Vision as a novelty is far better explained by its being a long-known, privately-held experience than by a fabrication that the very people best positioned to expose it somehow declined to expose.

Verdict

Resolved. There is a written record of the First Vision at year twelve — the 1832 account, partly in Joseph’s own hand — so “no record for 12–22 years” collapses into the far weaker “not widely published for two decades,” which is expected and was documented by faithful Church historians themselves in the 1960s. There was real Methodist revival activity in the Palmyra vicinity in 1820, reported in the town’s own newspaper. And the hostile critics who could most easily have exposed a late invention never did. On every checkable point, Jeremy chose the reading the evidence supports least.

Mildly open. The precise relationship between the 1819–1820 excitement and the larger 1824–25 Palmyra revival — and exactly how the 1838 narrative frames the family’s Presbyterian affiliation within that longer season — remains a genuine question for historians of memory and narrative. It is a question about how a fourteen-year-old’s experience, recollected and set down years later, orders a continuous stretch of his youth. It is not, on any honest reading of the sources, evidence that the vision did not happen or that its 1820 date was invented. The fork here is narrow, and the better-supported branch is not close.

Further Study