James Strang - Childhood, Education and Conversion To Mormonism

Childhood, Education and Conversion To Mormonism

James Jesse Strang was born March 21, 1813, in Scipio, Cayuga County, New York. He was the second of three children, and his parents had a good reputation in their community. James' mother was very tender with him as a consequence of delicate health, yet she required him to render an account of all his actions and words while absent from her. In a brief autobiography he wrote in 1855, Strang reported that he had attended grade school until age twelve, but that "the terms were usually short, the teachers inexperienced and ill qualified to teach, and my health such as to preclude attentive study or steady attendance." He estimated that his time in a classroom during those years totaled six months.

But none of this meant that Strang was illiterate or simple. Although his teachers "not unfrequently turned me off with little or no attention, as though I was too stupid to learn and too dull to feel neglect," Strang recalled that he spent "long weary days...upon the floor, thinking, thinking, thinking....my mind wandered over fields that old men shrink from, seeking rest and finding none till darkness gathered thick around and I burst into tears." He studied works by Thomas Paine and the Comte de Volney, whose book Les Ruines exerted a significant influence on the future prophet.

As a youth, Strang kept a rather profound personal diary, written partly in a secret code that was not deciphered until over one hundred years after it was authored (by Strang's own grandson Mark Strang, a banker in Long Beach, California). This journal contains Strang's musings on a variety of topics, including his desire to "rival Caesar or Napoleon" and his regret that by age nineteen, he had not yet become a general or member of the state legislature, which he saw as being essential by that point in his life to his quest for fame. However, Strang's diary equally reveals a sincere desire to be of service to his fellow man, together with agonized frustration at not knowing how he might do so as a penniless, unknown youth from upstate New York.

At age twelve, Strang was baptized a Baptist. He did not wish to follow his father's calling as a farmer, so he took up the study of law. Strang was admitted to the bar in New York at age 23 and later at other places where he resided. He became county Postmaster and edited a local newspaper, the Randolph Herald. Later, in the midst of his myriad duties on Beaver Island, he would find time to found and publish the Daily Northern Islander, the first newspaper in northern Michigan.

Strang, who once described himself as a "cool philosopher" and a freethinker, became a Baptist minister but left in February 1844 to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He quickly found favor with Joseph Smith, though they had known each other only a short time, and was baptized personally by him on February 25, 1844. On March 3 of that year he was ordained an Elder by Joseph's brother Hyrum Smith and sent forthwith at Smith's request to Wisconsin, to establish a Mormon stake at Voree. Shortly after Strang's departure, Joseph Smith was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in Carthage, Illinois.