The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey

Little, Brown, 426 pp.

By Ann Fabian

I once had a colleague in the English department who tried to persuade me that we should get together and teach a course on the United States in the 1840s. It would be great, she said. Students could read Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville and Frederick Douglass. The class could spill over into the 1850s, and we could loop in Harriet Beecher Stowe and end it all in 1857 with Melville’s weird novel, The Confidence-Man, his masquerade.

That’s when she would turn to me. “You have a Ph.D. in American Studies, you can teach them about confidence men.” A frightening thought. She’d teach classes on the literary greats. I’d be in charge of shape-shifting scoundrels and enigmatic rogues, schemers ready to dupe slow-minded American innocents, lift their wallets and watches, sell them swampland, and enlist souls in some far-fetched religious plans.

Reading Miles Harvey’s The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch made me think that her idea might not be so bad. Harvey resurrects the life of James Jesse Strang, a shape-shifting Mormon prophet who connived his way to fame in the 1840s.

Strang was born in 1813 in western New York, a region so hot with religious fervor historians have labeled it “the burned over district.” He kicked around a bit, working as a lecturer and editor. But he was not a man to shy away from the main chance. After Mormon founder Joseph Smith was murdered in 1844, Strang conjured a visit from an angel and produced a letter anointing him Smith’s heir. He also dug up some buried tablets, which he translated. All of this seemed right in America in the 1840s. Visits from angels. Buried tablets.

Brigham Young led adherents to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, but Strang took a few believers to a town he called Voree in Wisconsin. A few years later he moved the community to Beaver Island, a wooded spot in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan. With the help of an itinerant actor, he recruited a handful of converts, built a tabernacle, abandoned the wife of his youth and took on four new ones, and, in 1850, crowned himself King of Heaven and Earth.

Strang dabbled in Michigan politics, tried to persuade Franklin Pierce to name him governor of Utah, and fought with Beaver Island’s non-Mormon residents. True-believers may have felt welcome in Strang’s tight-knit world. Outsiders were sure his island kingdom was a refuge for counterfeiters, land pirates, horse thieves and timber poachers.

In 1856, angry Michiganders shot and killed Strang.

Strang fed on publicity, and newspaper editors printed and reprinted stories about him. By the early 1850s, Strang had become a “bona-fide celebrity,” Harvey writes. Without that press coverage, Strang’s story likely would have been preserved as a trace memory in the chaotic history of early Mormonism or sunk into footnotes on weird doings in pre-Civil War America. But Harvey has chased Strang’s story through archives and special collections and through the newspaper databases that now let a researcher turn up even miniscule traces of a man like Strang.

Readers of Harvey’s first two books know that he’s a remarkable sleuth, a writer with a passion for maps and islands and the patience to tell a complicated story. In The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (2000) and Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (2008) Harvey tracked stories through libraries, auction houses, courtrooms, archeological digs, and into the living rooms of widows and estranged wives.

I had a harder time finding Harvey in The King of Confidence. I missed Harvey, the intrepid reporter, often brave and sometimes baffled. That adventurer’s voice has gone quiet in The King of Confidence. Harvey tells us he took up this story at the urging of an editor. But he never tells us why. He also doesn’t explain what appealed to him in the story or what he learned from it or why Strang might help us navigate these years when stories of a con-man-in-charge again dominate our news cycles.

The great surprise of Harvey’s book isn’t a revelation of some polished truth about Strang, the sanctimonious rascal who occupies the center of the book as a kind of moral vacuum. Strang is as slippery now as he was in 1850. Instead, Harvey has spun out amazing connections to just about everything and everyone present in Strang’s world. Marx and Darwin are here. So are Charlotte Bronte and John Brown. Abraham Lincoln, of course, and John Wilkes Booth and P.T. Barnum. Even Freud, decades unborn, has a cameo. And dozens of minor characters come and go.

But the most important takeaway brought me back to that untaught course. Strang’s nasty story with its thievery, theatricality, and deceptions, lures us into those writers who tried to so hard to wrestle with the contradictions of America’s past. Harvey shows us just how Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Twain shared Strang’s imagined world. They turned confidence schemes into art. Maybe we should try to do that again.

Ann Fabian is Distinguished Professor of History, emerita, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.