There were many religious "outbreaks" after 1816---all over the country. These continued for several years. Religion was a hot topic and everybody was talking about it. The book, View of Hebrews, had a theme that was not unknown at all, quite talked about. JS had been interested in religion, his father and grandfather having had visions themselves and the family dealt with a lot of "folk magic", as called back then. With the family background if intense interest in religion, it is naive, at best, to think that JS had never heard of the View of Hebrews or of the theme.
First published in 1823, with a second edition in 1825, Ethan Smith's
hugely popular book
View of the Hebrews reflects the prevailing notions of the origin of the American Indians of the time. Ethan Smith, a pastor of a church in Poultney, Vermont, was by no means the first to advance the idea that the Indigenous Americans were descended from the Hebrews; such an idea was first advanced as early as
1815 and before, and had been the subject of much speculation in the intervening years. Ethan Smith's work intended to bring together the latest research on the subject, consisting largely of apocryphal stories gleaned from frontier missionaries.
As popular as the book was in it's day, scientific inquiry and archaeology eventually combined to defeat the notion of a Semitic origin for the First Americans, and the
View of the Hebrews would have been consigned to the wastebasket of history, were it not for one singular event.
In 1830, a young New England farmer published a book which he claimed to have translated from some ancient plates under divine guidance. The
Book of Mormon, as it was called, purported to tell the story of the First Americans by giving them a Hebrew ancestry. The book and the man, Joseph Smith, kindled a religion that today numbers over nine million members.
It was not long, however, before a number of people realised that the
View of the Hebrews and the
Book of Mormon had some rather startling similarities. Not only was there a familial link between the two (Poultney was but a few miles from the birthplace of Joseph Smith, and one of Smith's right-hand-men, Oliver Cowdery, attended Ethan Smith's church), but the subject matter of the two works had a number of
points of contact.
It should be noted that these parallels by themseleves are not sufficient to establish that Joseph Smith knew and used the
View of the Hebrews. Caution should be excercised before coming to such a conclusion. What these parallels do establish, however, is the fact that the idea of Indians-as-Hebrews was a very popular topic of discussion during Smith's era. Other writers, such as Josiah Priest and James Adair also published books in support of the theory, and the contemporary newspapers are filled with speculation on the subject. It should therefore come as no surprise that the young Smith also had his own ideas on the origin of the Indians.
http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/voh/voh.shtml
Main article:
Early life of Joseph Smith
Smith was born on December 23, 1805, in
Vermont, and around 1816 or 1817, his family moved to a farm just outside the
town of Palmyra, New York.
[33] Like many other Americans living on the frontier at the beginning of the 19th century, Smith and his family believed in visions, dreams, and other
mystical communications with God.
[34] For example, in 1811, Smith's maternal grandfather,
Solomon Mack, described a series of visions and voices from God that resulted in his conversion to Christianity at the age of seventy-six.
[35]
George Edward Anderson's photograph of the
Smith Family Farm in
Manchester, New York, c. 1907. (LDS Archives)
Before Smith was born, his mother
Lucy Mack Smith went to a grove near her home in
Vermont and prayed about her husband
Joseph Smith, Sr.'s repudiation of evangelical religion.
[8] That night she said she had a dream which she interpreted as a
prophecy that Joseph, Sr., would later accept the "pure and undefiled Gospel of the Son of God."
[36] She also stated that Smith, Sr. had a number of dreams or visions between 1811 and 1819,
[37] the first vision occurring when his mind was "much excited upon the subject of religion."
[38] Joseph Sr.'s first vision confirmed to him the correctness of his refusal to join any organized religious group.
[39]
The Smith family was also exposed to the intense revivalism of this era. During the
Second Great Awakening, numerous revivals occurred in many communities in the northeastern United States and were often reported in the
Palmyra Register, a local paper read by the Smith family.
[40] In the Palmyra area itself, large multi-denominational revivals occurred in 1816–17 and 1824–25.
[41] In the intervening years, there were Methodist revivals, at least within twenty road miles of Palmyra; and more than sixty years later a newspaper editor in
Lyons, New York, recalled "various religious awakenings in the neighborhood."
[42]
The Smith family also practiced a form of
folk magic,
[43] which, although not uncommon in this time and place, was criticized by many contemporary Protestants "as either fraudulent illusion or the workings of the Devil."
[44] Both Joseph Smith, Sr. and at least two of his sons worked at "money digging," using
seer stones in mostly unsuccessful attempts to locate lost items and buried treasure.
[45] In a draft of her memoirs, Lucy Mack Smith referred to folk magic:
Richard Bushman wrote that Smith "began to be concerned about religion in late 1817 or early 1818, when the aftereffects of the revival of 1816 and 1817 were still being felt."
[56] Milton V. Backman wrote that religious outbreaks occurred in 1819–20 within a fifty-mile radius of Smith's home: "Church records, newspapers, religious journals, and other contemporary sources clearly reveal that great awakenings occurred in more than fifty western New York towns or villages during the revival of 1819–1820 .... Primary sources also specify that great multitudes joined the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Calvinist Baptist societies in the region of country where Joseph Smith lived."
[57] Richard Lloyd Anderson has pointed out there was a Methodist Camp Meeting in Palmyra in 1818, with about 400 in attendance, that is verified by a contemporary journal. This agrees with the three-year time frame of his pondering on religion mentioned in Smith's 1832 account.
[58] Backman cited evidence of a Methodist Camp Meeting in Palmayra in June 1820.
[59]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Vision