1829: The Year of the Twelve Witnesses

1829 is usually remembered for one thing — the Book of Mormon — but the documentary record shows a year of continuous, overlapping activity: scribes arriving and leaving, priesthood restored twice, a translation finished and immediately put at financial risk, and, at the center of it, twelve men left in a position that could never be reissued to anyone else. This page follows the year in order, from a father’s visit in February to a printer’s press running through the following winter.

Winter and Early Spring: Scribes Arrive

The year opens with Joseph Smith Sr. traveling to Harmony, Pennsylvania in February to see his son, occasioning a revelation of counsel to the elder Smith. The following month, Martin Harris — who had served briefly as scribe in 1828 before the loss of the first 116 manuscript pages — returned to Harmony asking for some assurance that the work was genuine; the answer he received promised that witnesses would eventually be granted a vision of the plates. The translation itself, however, had no steady scribe until April 5, when Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher who had boarded with the Smith family in Manchester and heard of the plates there, arrived in Harmony with Samuel Smith. Two days later, on April 7, dictation resumed in earnest, with Cowdery as full-time scribe, beginning in the book of Mosiah — itself a sign that the small plates translated earlier had already been set aside after the manuscript loss. A cluster of revelations that same month addressed Cowdery’s own desire to scribe, and, briefly, to attempt translation himself.

Priesthood, Twice

Two ordinations anchor the late spring. On May 15, while praying near the Susquehanna River about a question the translation itself had raised — the mode of baptism described in 3 Nephi — Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery reported a visit from a heavenly messenger identifying himself as John the Baptist, who conferred the Aaronic Priesthood and directed them to baptize each other. Samuel H. Smith was baptized ten days later. Then, in the last days of May or the first of June, a second and higher ordination followed: Peter, James, and John were reported to have appeared near the same river, conferring what the record calls the Melchizedek Priesthood and the keys of the apostleship. The two restorations are often collapsed together in later retelling; in the 1829 record itself they are distinct events roughly two weeks apart, tied to two different scriptural questions the translation had surfaced.

Growing hostility in Harmony pushed the work again. On June 1, Joseph and Oliver relocated to the Peter Whitmer Sr. farm in Fayette, New York, David Whitmer having traveled to Harmony himself to provide the transportation.

The Twelve Who Could Not Be Replaced

At Fayette the translation moved quickly toward its end, and with it came the events that give this year its center of gravity. On June 11, Joseph Smith secured the U.S. copyright for the Book of Mormon in the Northern District of New York — a mundane legal act sitting oddly close to the extraordinary ones surrounding it. In the same stretch of mid-June came two revelations naming specific outcomes still pending: one promising Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris a view of the plates, the breastplate, the sword of Laban, and the Urim and Thummim; the other — addressed to Cowdery and Whitmer and later recorded as Section 18 — instructing them to “search out the Twelve,” language borrowed directly from the Book of Mormon’s own account of Christ naming twelve disciples among the Nephites.

Late that month, in the woods near the Whitmer farm, Cowdery, Whitmer, and Harris reported the promised vision fulfilled together. Within days, the dictation itself was finished at the Whitmer home. And in the same short window, eight more men — Christian, Jacob, and Peter Whitmer Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel H. Smith — were shown the physical plates at Palmyra and reported handling and lifting them directly. Between the Three, the Eight, and Joseph Smith as translator, twelve men now stood in a position no one after them would occupy: they had witnessed something unrepeatable, not been appointed to an office.

An early effort was made to seat these same twelve as the church’s first officers, but the church grew large enough, quickly enough, that additional officers were soon required, and the distinctive standing of the original twelve was absorbed into an ordinary and growing roster of callings. What survived was narrower than an office: a testimony that, once given, could not be reissued. A witness who left or died could not be replaced, and the number could not be brought back to twelve by appointing a new candidate, because it had been fixed by an event rather than a vote. The command to “search out the Twelve” given that same June, read narrowly by Cowdery and Whitmer at the time, would not be formally re-executed as a standing Quorum of Twelve Apostles until February 1835 — nearly six years later, and by then a considerably different kind of body.

Autumn: Printing and a Mortgaged Farm

With the text complete, the year’s second half turned entirely on getting it into print. On August 17, Joseph Smith and Martin Harris contracted with Palmyra publisher Egbert B. Grandin to print 5,000 copies for $3,000, and on August 25 Harris mortgaged 240 acres of his farm to guarantee the sum — a financial exposure that would shape church decisions for the next several months. Printing began shortly after, with Oliver Cowdery supervising in Palmyra while Joseph Smith returned to Harmony in October. Cowdery’s November 6 letter reporting typesetting had reached Alma 36 is the clearest surviving snapshot of the press’s pace.

Piracy and the Turn of the Year

The press was not left alone. Between December 1829 and January 1830, a former justice of the peace named Abner Cole used Grandin’s press after hours, under the pseudonym “Obadiah Dogberry,” to print unauthorized excerpts of the still-unpublished Book of Mormon in his own paper, The Reflector. Hyrum Smith alerted Joseph, who traveled to Palmyra and forced Cole to stop through arbitration rather than litigation. The episode is a small one, but it marks the first recorded attempt by an outsider to appropriate the text before the church itself had finished paying for it — a foretaste of the copyright anxiety that would carry the story into 1830.