The Man Who Would be King (of Michigan and Wisconsin?)

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Photo credit: Anne Ryan

Author Miles Harvey

In 1845, as P.T. Barnum was getting his act together, a less remembered mountebank arrived in Burlington, Wisconsin. There, in that muddy pioneer town, he built a tabernacle and gathered a “utopian” community. That mountebank, James Strang, clutched a letter allegedly written to him by Joseph Smith, founder of the (Mormon) Church of Latter-day Saints. Strang claimed that he was appointed by Smith as his successor shortly before the Mormon leader was murdered. The Latter-day Saints’ leadership denounced Strang as a fraud. In his new book The King of Confidence, Miles Harvey agrees with their assessment. With a neat bit of forensic work, Harvey explains how Strang likely forged Smith’s epistle.

Harvey, who previously authored The Island of Lost Maps, will engage in a virtual conversation with Boswell Books’ Daniel Goldin, 7 p.m. Thursday, July 30 (visit boswellbooks.com for more information).

The King of Confidence is cinematic in its vivid writing—it could make a great Netflix series (with Daniel Day-Lewis as Strang?). Eventually, the self-anointed prophet, a real estate swindler and atheist until he caught wind of the potential in visions of angelic messengers, made his way to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. He declared himself king—not just of Michigan but of “Heaven and Earth”—and ran an extensive criminal enterprise under the cover of religion. It was, as Harvey implies in The King of Confidence, an especially perverse version of the American Dream of starting over, getting out from under the past and building a new world. I asked the author some questions.

What drew you to the James Strang story?

It just so happens that my brother-in-law grew up in Burlington. One day about 15 or 20 years ago, as we were driving around town together, he started pointing to old buildings and telling me wondrous tales about a prophet who had once lived in his hometown. I remember being impressed, but I didn’t think much about Strang after that until about six years ago, when an editor from the New York publishing house Little, Brown and Company contacted me about writing a book on this stranger-than-life figure.

There had already been several books on the prophet by that time, a few of them quite good. But they tended to portray Strang as either a fascinating footnote to Mormon history or as the subject of a quirky Midwestern saga. And from the start, I was less interested in those aspects of Strang’s story than in how he fit into the broader epic of mid-19th-century America. The antebellum era—the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War—was a time of violent discord but also of an overflowing idealism, a time of deep religious belief but also of widespread counterfeiting and fraud. I saw the prophet as a kind of lightning rod for all the fierce enthusiasms and vibrant social movements of the mid-19th century—apocalyptic religious sects, utopian social communities and vibrant reform movements. I also saw him as the product of sweeping economic  and social changes that gave rise to a suddenly mobile and anonymous America—a place where, as one contemporary chronicler put it, “larceny grew not only respectable, but genteel, and ... swindling was raised to the dignity of the fine arts.” The term “confidence man” came from this era, and what interested me most about Strang was the way he inhabited the vague borderland between fraud and faith.  

Aside from its value as a colorful episode from America’s frontier days, does Strang’s career have something to say to us today?

It’s interesting that you ask that question. I make only two oblique references to our own period of history—one of them at the beginning of the book and one at the very end. But a number of readers and critics have already pointed out parallels between the mid-19th century and the Trump era. And while it’s always dangerous to equate two very different periods of history, I think there are some legitimate points of comparison.

Strang lived in a time of massive political and cultural upheavals and equally massive technological revolutions. It was a historical period—not unlike our own—when everything suddenly became unstable, indeterminate, and called into question, including the truth. People who can create their own truths and convince others to buy into their visions of reality, thrive at times like these. And in the case of both Strang and Trump, those “truths” often take the form of simple solutions to complex problems. Strang promised that the Second Coming would happen on Beaver Island; Trump promises that one day the COVID-19 pandemic will just miraculously disappear. In both cases, it’s precisely what their followers want to believe.

What are your thoughts about Strang’s murder? Was it a random incident or the result of his political-sectarian activities?

Strang was shot down by a couple of assassins in what appears to have been a well-organized conspiracy involving a number of his enemies, possibly including the U.S. government and State of Michigan. So, it certainly wasn’t random. Ostensibly, much of the motivation for the murder was Strang’s insistence that all women on Beaver Island must wear pantaloons—loose fitting trousers, gathered at the ankles. These garments don’t look particularly shocking to our 20th-century eyes, but to many women of the mid-19th century, pantaloons were radical and scandalous. No doubt a number of women on the island were upset by Strang’s directive, but I’ve come to see pantaloons in symbolic terms. Women who wore them were showing their devotion to the prophet; those who refused were showing their discontent—an unhappiness that went far deeper than the issue of attire. It’s not unlike our own weird times, when wearing or not wearing of masks has come to symbolize one’s opposition or support for the current president.

Is it fair to say that social mobility was greater in the period covered by The King of Confidence than today?

I’m not a sociologist or demographer, so I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that question. What I can say is that people in the antebellum period greatly valued the idea of social mobility. This was, after all, the era that gave rise to the notion of the “self-made man,” a figure who rose from obscurity and poverty to become a prominent force in American culture. Abraham Lincoln would be an obvious example. And one of the interesting things about Strang is how closely his career path paralleled that of Lincoln. Both men were farm boys who became postmasters, studied law and got elected as state representatives during their rise to the national spotlight. And for much of their careers, Strang was the more famous of the two men.   

How does lack of knowledge and understanding of America’s past shape the political and social conflicts of the present?

The years I spent working on The King of Confidence pretty much overlapped with Trump’s run for the presidency and term in office. And to be honest, I don’t know if I would have written the same book if I’d done it in a different time. Trump has helped me understand Strang—but the opposite is also true. I’m grateful to James J. Strang for helping me make sense of Donald J. Trump. One of the things I came to appreciate while researching the book is that Americans have a long-running infatuation with scoundrels. When the great British writer Charles Dickens came to the United States in 1842, he was amazed and appalled by what he called the American love of “smart dealing” and “smart men.” He later wrote about how Americans would all too easily excuse people who conned or deceived others. Somehow being able to pull off a big lie was a thing to be applauded and respected.

Such swindlers are, of course, greatly aided by Americans’ ignorance about our own history. It’s hard to get upset about Trump’s disregard for the U.S. Constitution or his contempt for political norms when you’ve never read the Constitution and have no idea what those norms might be. So understanding the past is of vital importance. People who’ve read The King of Confidence often talk about how wild Strang’s story is and how much fun it is to read—and that’s exactly what I want them to get out of it. But I also hope that it gives them some perspective on our own tumultuous times.

To read more book previews and reviews, click here.

To read more articles by David Luhrssen, click here.