Those interested in this topic may also be interested in the parallels between The Late War and the Book of Mormon. In my opinion as a professional data analyst, there are two many similarities between these two books to be coincidence.
Joseph Smith almost certainly cribbed significant portions, plot points and phrases directly out of The Late War.
The Book of Mormon and The Late War
Don't ya think some Mormons have looked at this!
First of all you have to prove Joseph Smith read the book, not a person ever mentioned it. You would think someone living at the time would have said gee this sounds just like that book I read as a kid. No one ever did.
An example of what he does
From the late war;
19:13
And ...
weapons of war were of
curious workmanship
then they give this example from the Book of Mormon Ether 10
And ...
weapons of war ... of exceedingly
curious workmanship
What Ether 10 actually says is
25 And they did make all manner of tools to till the earth, both to plow and to sow, to reap and to hoe, and also to thrash.
26 And they did make all manner of tools with which they did work their beasts.
27 And they did make all manner of weapons of war. And they did work all manner of work of exceedingly curious workmanship.
They don't tell you it came out of a different sentence.
Now you need to look no further than the Bible to see the source or the wording; Ex 35:32 And to devise
curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass,
The point is both books use Biblical wording and so would have many many phrases in common.
another example
Alma 10:6:
the fourth day of this seventh month, which is in the tenth year of the reign of the judges.
The Late War 26:1:
the fourth day of the seventh month, which is the birth day of Columbian Liberty and Independence,
Now just two examples from the Bible
Zechariah 7:1: And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Darius, that the word of the Lord came unto Zechariah
in the fourth day of the ninth month, even in Chisleu;
Nehemiah 9:1: Now in
the twenty and fourth day of this month the children of Israel were assembled with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth upon them.
The Bible uses this combination of words to count time many times as does the Book of Mormon. The forth of July is not something special, in Alma 56:42 he uses the 3rd of our July. "But it came to pass that they did not pursue us far before they halted;
and it was in the morning of the third day of the seventh month" .
One odd thing about the Book of Mormon it only seems to have eleven months nor any 30th day. They also switch calendars, first they count from the time they leave Jerusalem and then about 92 bc they switch and start counting from the reign of the judges. Then after the coming of Christ they switch again and start over.
There seems to be a three cycle time counting going on, the time they left Jerusalem, the reign of the judges and then the days from the time Christ visited them. Interestingly the calendar used by many Central American natives like the Olmec and Maya has 3 cycles too. They don't correspond in anyway but it is interesting.
Ya don't find anything like that in The Last Great War.
FairMormon has gone through this claim and have a major point to make;
"The authors of the study present us these lists of similarities. In presenting this list, we get presented with a fallacy that is called the Texas Marksman (or the Texas Bulls Eye). Essentially, the way the reference works is that you shoot a bunch of rounds into the side of your barn, and then you go up to the holes and paint your target around them (giving you the best and tightest clustering). Usually, the way these models work in accepted applications is that you start by testing the model in situations where you already know the outcome. That way, you can see how reliable your new model is. And if it is highly reliable in known cases, then you can start cautiously applying it to unknown models (you don't create your own target this way).
By intuiting that it must be right, this model used with The Late War simply skipped the testing part. But this created one of the biggest obvious problems with the theory. They didn't stop with the Book of Mormon. They ran a test on a Jane Austin novel, and found a source (a relatively unknown book from 1810). Why is this important? Austin was a prolific writer, sending thousands of letters during her lifetime detailing what she was reading, her influences, writing about her writing, and so on. We have a huge body of literature devoted to dealing with her writing (she was one of the most important writers of the period). So when you have a statistical model that produces a brand new source, not noticed by anyone previously, not mentioned in any of her letters, and so on - there ought to be a bit of a red flag raised. But there wasn't. Had this theory been introduced to academic literary theorists - this would have been the major point of dispute (since they don't really care about the Book of Mormon). Did this model really find a previously unknown and unidentified source of Jane Austin's work? Or did it simply create the illusion of doing this by painting a bulls eye after clustering its data? I am pretty confident it was the second option here. (As a side note, discovering a new source for Jane Austin would be a thesis significant sort of discovery)."
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www.fairmormon.org/answers/Book_of_Mormon/Plagiarism_accusations/The_Late_War#Question:_Did_Joseph_Smith_plagiarize_passages_from_Gilbert_Hunt.27s_book_The_Late_War.2C_between_the_United_States_and_Great_Britain.2C_from_June.2C_1812.2C_to_February.2C_1815.3F
