Helaman: Military Matters

Many early nineteenth-century readers of The Book of Mormon had direct links to the Revolutionary War. It was to them what 9/11 and COVID is to Americans in the early-twenty-first century and the Civil War was to people like Stephen Crane and builders of the Lady of Victories statue in Portland, Maine (there seems to be a thirty-to-forty year gap between events and official remembrances).

Washington and other Revolutionary leaders were famous when they were alive. In the early 1800s, a few were still living. Jefferson and Adams died on the same day in 1826. Washington had died several years earlier in 1799. Folktales immediately sprang up around him. (Weems invented his story of Washington and the Cherry Tree for his book published in 1800; it was dismissed as ahistorical almost immediately). Washington’s birthday was proposed as a holiday in 1832. Emanuel Leutz’s famous portrait of Washington Crossing the Delaware was painted in 1851. The March to Valley Forge was painted in 1883. The Prayer at Valley Forge by Arnold Friberg in the nineteenth-century tradition was painted in 1975.

Captain Moroni, as portrayed by Friberg (see above), is tough, handsome, big, muscular. I knew plenty of teenage girls at church when I was growing up who swooned over him (the seminary film from around that same time took the devastatingly gorgeous route). Hey, they could have had worse love interests! Though they seemed to ignore the part of Moroni's narrative where he was never home because he was fighting and yelling at people so much (justifiably yelling, but still…)

The point, as raised in the previous post, is that humble, self-sacrificing martyrs were not terribly popular with early-nineteenth-century readers. The self-sacrifice of Helaman’s Anti-Nephi-Lehies--often applauded by modern readers--would have seemed a justifiable thing for other people to do. Helaman's fighting “sons” (who also earned some swooning from my peers) got Friberg’s artwork rather than the seemingly pacifistic parents. (In line with Friberg, even now-a-days, the LDS Jesus is rarely as emaciated as El Greco’s Jesus: Michaelangelo won here.)

Positions regarding pacifism versus warriors-for-the-Faith go in cycles, sometimes within a few decades. And they can vary regarding the same person, depending on that person's role. Although George Washington et al. were glorified and romanticized in the nineteenth century as leaders during the Revolution, they were heavily criticized when alive, especially when they became politicians and issued opinions on other people's wars. (Not everyone favored George Washington getting a birthday since such a holiday smacked of the type of tribute paid to kings and emperors, which tribute carried a different connotation than that paid to generals and captains.)

Early nineteenth-century American culture tended to defend the fight-till-you-drop position when it came to leaders and communities, a perspective that applied not only to wars but to stands against local and Federal government bodies.