1832 sits between two years this site treats at length — 1831’s gathering to Ohio and Missouri, and 1833’s plat and persecution — and is easy to skip past for lack of a single defining document. It shouldn’t be skipped. In the span of twelve months the church created its first Presidency of the High Priesthood, watched its first counselor in that office fall and be removed, received one of its most theologically significant revelations, and saw its founder beaten by a mob in the middle of the night. Read in sequence, 1832 is the year the office of church president first existed as an office at all — and the year that immediately tested what happened when the man holding a subordinate office in it failed.
January 25: An Office Is Created
At a conference in Amherst, Ohio, Joseph Smith was ordained President of the High Priesthood — the first time the church had formally invested one man with standing presidency over the priesthood as a body, rather than the more diffuse pattern of elders and licensed officers established in 1830. The office had been anticipated by revelation as early as November 1831, but January 25, 1832 is the date it was actually conferred.
February 16: The Vision
Three weeks later, working with Sidney Rigdon on the inspired revision of the New Testament at the John Johnson farm in Hiram, Joseph Smith reached John 5:29 — the resurrection “unto life” and “unto damnation.” Dictating the passage prompted a vision, recorded afterward as Section 76, describing three distinct degrees of post-mortal glory rather than a simple binary of salvation and damnation. Joseph Smith later said that “light . . . burst upon the world” through what the two men saw that day; the Lord’s own instruction within the vision was that some of what had been shown was not to be written down at all. Whatever its theological reception since, the immediate documentary fact is that it arrived in the middle of routine scribal work on the Bible revision, not as the answer to any question the church had been actively asking.
March 8 – 15: A Presidency, and Its First Counselor
Three weeks after the Vision, Joseph Smith called Jesse Gause and Sidney Rigdon as his counselors “in the ministry of the presidency of the High Priesthood” — the office that would only gradually come to be called the First Presidency. A week later, on March 15, a revelation recorded as Section 81 confirmed Gause’s call and set out his duties. Gause himself is one of the more obscure figures in this year’s record: a former Baptist minister, baptized only months earlier, who rose to the second-highest office the church had yet created without having been a member of it for very long at all.
March 24–25: The Mob at Hiram
Within days of Gause’s confirmation, a mob dragged Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon from their beds at night in Hiram and tarred and feathered both men; Rigdon was struck badly enough on the head that associates later described lasting effects. Joseph Smith preached at a Sabbath meeting the very next day and baptized three people that afternoon. Days later, on March 29, Joseph Murdock Smith — the infant son Joseph and Emma Smith had adopted the previous year — died. Some accounts connect the death to exposure suffered the night of the attack, four days earlier; the surviving record does not establish that causal link conclusively, and this page treats it as a fact of timing rather than a settled diagnosis.
April: The United Firm
Undeterred, Joseph Smith traveled to Independence, Missouri that April with Rigdon and Bishop Newel K. Whitney, obeying a revelation to organize a body — later known as the United Firm — to manage consecrated properties and care for the poor across both the Ohio and Missouri branches of the church jointly. On April 26, at a council of high priests and elders in Independence, a further revelation forgave the brethren involved in the Firm’s affairs their past trespasses while warning them again against pride and mismanagement of the church’s temporal resources — language suggesting the new arrangement had already run into friction within its first weeks.
June: A Press in Missouri
That June, W. W. Phelps began publishing The Evening and the Morning Star from Independence — the church’s first newspaper, and the press that would, within thirteen months, become a direct target of the mob violence this site treats under 1833. Its early issues carried church revelations to a wider public readership for the first time, including material later gathered into the printed Doctrine and Covenants.
Autumn – Winter: A Counselor Falls, and a Prophecy of War
Jesse Gause’s tenure as counselor did not survive the year. Having failed to bring his former Baptist congregation with him into the church, and finding himself estranged from the livelihood it had once provided, Gause grew openly critical of the movement through the fall; by December 1832, Joseph Smith recorded that his counselor had been excommunicated. The office Gause vacated would not be filled again until Frederick G. Williams was called the following March.
The year closes with two more revelations in quick succession. On December 25, Joseph Smith dictated what became known as the Prophecy on War, describing a coming rebellion beginning with South Carolina’s rejection of federal authority — a description later read as anticipating the Civil War by nearly three decades. Two days later, on December 27–28, a further revelation instructed the church’s leading elders to organize themselves and establish a school — the instruction that would produce the School of the Prophets the following January, and with it the setting for the Word of Wisdom this site covers under 1833.
Reading the record
1832 created the office its own founder would hold for the rest of his life, and within the same twelve months demonstrated that the office’s subordinate positions were not immune to failure: Jesse Gause held the second-highest calling in the church and was gone before the year was out. The Vision expanded what the church taught about the afterlife permanently; the mob at Hiram nearly ended the movement’s founder outright; and the press that began quietly publishing that June would be in ashes within thirteen months. Little of this required a plat or a law to matter. It required only that the office created in January be tested, repeatedly, before December.
Primary sources: Joseph Smith Papers, Vision, 16 February 1832 [D&C 76]; Revelation, 1 March 1832 [D&C 78]; Revelation, 8–24 March 1832 [D&C 81]; Revelation, 26 April 1832 [D&C 82]; Revelation, 25 December 1832 [D&C 87]; Revelation, 27–28 December 1832 [D&C 88]. This page links out to primary sources rather than reproducing them at length.