Book or Mormon Witnesses by Richard Lloyd Anderson.
Let's examine each of these men individually to establish their characters. I will start with Martin Harris because he was older. Oliver Cowdery was a young school teacher; not too many people paid attention to him. David Whitmer was a young farmer; he was not really very visible. But Martin Harris was visible. He had a large farm of multiple acres (perhaps a total of around three or four hundred), and that farm was a matter of business through the whole community. The townspeople knew who he was. They knew his reputation. So what did the members of the community think of Martin Harris?
The townspeople said two things about Martin Harris. The people who talked to him accused him of being a fanatic because he believed in the Bible. That sounds like a strange fact, but I think we see that in our own culture as well. We tend to look at people who are secular as pleasing; they don't really ruffle our feathers in any way. But religious people stir us up, challenging us to be better. Martin Harris had read the prophecies in the Bible that God would do a great work in the latter days, and he believed them. He was a believer, so sometimes he was accused of being religiously overdone.
Second, the townspeople said Martin Harris was honest. Every one of the individuals in Palmyra who commented on Martin's character said he was an extremely honest individual. In fact, one of the people who set the type for the Book of Mormon, Pomeroy Tucker, later wrote a book about the early Mormons in the community and said that Martin's usual honesty was a very puzzling thing to him. Tucker wondered, How could Martin Harris, who was such an honest man and an intelligent man, say that he had seen an angel and plates? Well, that's simple. Martin was being honest; it really happened.
When Martin Harris moved out of the community quite a few months after the book was printed, E. B. Grandin, whom Harris paid three thousand dollars to print the Book of Mormon, published his opinion of Harris in the local newspaper for the community to read. The statement almost sounds like a funeral eulogy. Grandin wrote: "Mr. Harris was among the early settlers of this town, and has ever borne the character of an honorable and upright man, and an obliging and benevolent neighbor. He had secured to himself by honest industry a respectable fortune--and he is left a large circle of acquaintances and friends to pity his delusion."
Martin Harris was born in 1783, which means he was middle-aged when he became a Book of Mormon scribe and witness in 1828. He mortgaged his farm to pay for the first edition of the Book of Mormon. Then in early 1831 he moved with the faithful Latter-day Saints to upper Ohio, and there he continued to contribute to the success of the restoration of the gospel in Kirtland, Ohio. Harris was extremely faithful for a time, but all three witnesses became disenchanted with the policies of the church, and in 1837 and the beginning of 1838, they were each excommunicated from the church because they simply were not in harmony with church leadership.
The Three Witnesses left the church because they disagreed with Joseph's policies, but they never once threw doubt upon their testimonies. (Even Peter and Paul, who had both seen visions, sharply disagreed on policy at times.) Had they not really seen the plates, when they were out of the church, the Three Witnesses would have disavowed their experience, and they would not have tried to keep ties with the church. All three witnesses left the church for a time, but two came back before their deaths to make peace with God, and they all continued to bear witness to the Book of Mormon and their vision of the plates to the end.
Let me give an example of Martin Harris's testimony. Just before his rebaptism in 1870, a relative, William H. Homer, who was passing through Kirtland went to Martin's house, and Martin Harris volunteered to take him, as he did many people, to the Kirtland Temple. In the temple Martin expressed some fairly bitter feelings toward some of the Latter-day Saints in Utah and even displayed a jealous spirit toward the leadership of the church, saying, "I should have been president of the Church." Then Homer asked Martin Harris, "'Do you still believe that the Book of Mormon is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet?" Martin Harris, standing in the Kirtland Temple on a bright, winter day, pointed to one of the arched Gothic windows where the sun was streaming through it and said, "Do I see the sun shining? Just as surely as the sun is shining on us . . . I saw the plates; I saw the angel."
As a very old man, Martin went to Utah and spent the last five years of his life there in upper Cache Valley. When people in his community asked him about the plates of the Book of Mormon, he continued using physical objects like the sun to illustrate his testimony. One time he raised his hand and asked, "'Do you see that hand? . . . Are your eyes playing you a trick or something? . . . Well, as sure as you see my hand so sure did I see the angel and the plates." Martin Harris, like all the witnesses, was especially desirous at the end of his life to have people hear and repeat his testimony.
Now let's turn to Oliver Cowdery's life. Oliver was born in 1806 about a year after Joseph Smith. Later in his life, he said that the days he acted as scribe for Joseph were never to be forgotten. As he sat within the sound of the Prophet's voice, he could feel the Spirit of the Lord. Oliver always remembered the spirituality of that experience. The first thing he did of real significance in New York after the Church was organized was lead a mission west to Kirtland, where he and four other missionaries converted about one hundred people within a few weeks. As with Martin Harris, those who knew Oliver may not have agreed with his testimony, but they agreed that he was of admirable character. A vigorous leader of a Shaker community gave a candid impression of Oliver coming into his community. He recorded that Oliver claimed that "he [Oliver] had been one who assisted in the translation of the golden Bible, and had seen the angel, and also had been commissioned by him [the angel] to go out and bear testimony that God would destroy this generation. . . . [We] gave liberty for him to bear his testimony in our meetings. . . . He appeared meek and mild."
10 That characteristic of Cowdery is reflected in other sources--he was a man of powerful witness, but he was also a man of great personal humility.
Another description of Oliver is given in a history of Seneca County written in about 1880 by P. W. Lang. After Oliver was excommunicated in Missouri, he returned to Ohio and became an attorney. And for ten years, when he was outside of the church, he was very active in all the community circles where an attorney would have circulated in those days. P. W. Lang, who apprenticed in Oliver's law office and whom Oliver tutored in law for two years, wrote this candid description of Oliver:
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He continued by saying, in essence, "I read law with Mr. Cowdery in Tiffin [Ohio] and was intimately acquainted with him from the time he came here until the time he left, which afforded me every opportunity to study and love his 'noble and true manhood.'"
So Oliver was a person respected by those inside and outside the church wherever he lived. Later in life Oliver returned to the church. As he came back in 1848, he stood in the church conference in Kanesville, Iowa--Winter Quarters, or Council Bluffs, as it was called at that time--and said that Sidney Rigdon did not write the Book of Mormon. He said, "I wrote . . . the entire Book of Mormon . . . as it fell from the lips of the Prophet [Joseph Smith]." He said, "I beheld with my eyes, and handled with my hands, the gold plates from which it was translated. I also beheld the Interpreters."
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Now let's turn to David Whitmer's story. David Whitmer was born about a year before Joseph Smith, at the beginning of 1805. After becoming a witness, David joined with his family in selling their rather well-to-do farm holdings in Seneca County, New York. They moved for a short time to Ohio and then moved quickly to Jackson County, Missouri, a tragic experience for them and about three thousand other Latter-day Saints because they were forced out of Jackson County at gunpoint. David was a strong personality and was very visible in helping to defend and protect the Mormon community. He was appointed president of the church in Missouri, for Joseph Smith had a great deal of confidence in him. But in 1838 David exerted his will, disagreed with Joseph Smith, and was excommunicated.
David stayed in Richmond, Missouri, for fifty years and became the most interviewed of all eleven witnesses of the Book of Mormon because he lived longer than any of them. David summed up the testimonies of all the witnesses, and he had an irreproachably honest character. He parlayed an investment of a team and a wagon into a whole livery business and became a prominent business man, providing transportation and rentals and even funeral transportation in Richmond, Missouri.
One proof that David was a distinguished and respected individual was that he appeared in an 1877 historical atlas of Ray County, Missouri, as one of twenty prominent members of the community. (From one point of view, those pictured had to be prominent; from another point of view, they probably had to have enough money to pay for the picture.) David is pictured on a page of the atlas with his nephew David P. Whitmer underneath him. David P. Whitmer was the son of Jacob, one of the Eight Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and he was named after his uncle David. To the left of David Whitmer, on the top line, is Alexander Donaphen, who was a lawyer for Joseph Smith at one time and who actually saved Joseph's life by refusing to execute an order of the court-martial. So David's reputation in the community was appreciably strong. Everybody respected him. Time and again, Mormons and non-Mormons came into the community and interviewed David, and he insisted that he had seen the plates and the angel.
Let me give the flavor of two interviews with David Whitmer. First, Orson Pratt, who had known David as a fellow leader of the church before David left the church, visited David as an old man. Pratt was accompanied by Joseph F. Smith, who was then a young Apostle, but who later became president of the church from about 1900 to 1918. As these two men interviewed David, Joseph F. Smith wrote down what David said:
We not only saw the plates of the Book of Mormon but also the brass plates, the plates of the Book of Ether, the plates containing the records of the wickedness and secret combinations of the people of the world. . . . The fact is, it was just as though Joseph, Oliver and I were sitting just here on a log, when we were overshadowed by a light. It was not like the light of the sun . . . but more glorious and beautiful. It extended away round us . . . [We saw] many records or plates . . . besides the plates of the Book of Mormon, also the Sword of Laban, the Directors . . . and the Interpreters. I saw them just as plain as I see this bed (striking the bed beside him with his hand), and I heard the voice of the Lord, as distinctly as I ever heard anything in my life, declaring that the records of the plates of the Book of Mormon were translated by the gift and power of God.
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My favorite interview of David was done by James Henry Moyle, whose son, Henry D. Moyle, served as one of President McKay's counselors. On his way back to Utah after he completed his law school training in Michigan, James Henry Moyle stopped in Richmond to see David Whitmer. Henry was a young man, and he wanted to be certain that David had been telling the truth. He wanted to cross-examine him and see what kind of a man he was.
That Moyle was a man of great quality, is indicated by Gordon B. Hinckley's biography of Moyle, written while Hinckley lived in the Cottonwood area in Salt Lake City and knew Moyle. Moyle became one of the very first Latter-day Saints to succeed in national politics. Although his candidacy for senator and governor was unsuccessful in Utah, his party rewarded him with the post of undersecretary of the treasury in the cabinet in Washington, D. C. Later he was appointed as collector of customs in New York City for eight years. He was a very close friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Furthermore, Moyle was a singularly candid, intelligent, and honest man all his life.
Later, when Moyle talked about the David Whitmer interview in an address given in Salt Lake City, he said he wondered if it was possible that David Whitmer might have been deceived. Moyle stated:
I induced him to relate to me, under such cross-examination as I was able to interpose, every detail of what took place. He described minutely the spot in the woods, the large log that separated him from the angel, and that he saw the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. . . . I asked him if there was any possibility for him to have been deceived, and that it was all a mistake, but he said, "No." I asked him, then, why he had left the Church. [He answered by talking about the policies that differentiated him from Joseph Smith.] He said he knew Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, that through him had been restored the gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter days. To me this was a wonderful testimony.
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Did the Eight Witnesses also maintain their testimony to the end? Yes! David Whitmer quoted both the Three and the Eight Witnesses in a pamphlet published a year before his death in 1887. In this pamphlet, addressed to all believers in Christ, David tried to put his message and his own feelings about the Book of Mormon in such a way that they would be available to everybody. Toward the beginning of the pamphlet, Whitmer said the following in answer to articles in two encyclopedias that had reported him as having denied his testimony:
I will say once more to all mankind, that I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof. I also testify to the world, that neither Oliver Cowdery or Martin Harris ever at any time denied their testimony. . . . I was present at the death bed of Oliver Cowdery, and his last words were, "Brother David, be true to your testimony to the Book of Mormon."
