The King of Confidence

Starred review from February 17, 2020
Journalist Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps) delivers a vivid account of the life and times of American sect leader, lawyer, newspaper editor, and con man James Jesse Strang (1813–1856). After Mormon founder Joseph Smith’s murder in 1844, Strang, a recent convert to the religion who had mysteriously disappeared from his home in Upstate New York and reappeared in Wisconsin, declared himself Smith’s successor. As proof, he produced a forged letter of appointment and brass plates written in an alphabet he alone could decipher. Though the majority of Mormons followed Brigham Young to Utah, Strang convinced hundreds of fellow converts to join him on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, where he crowned himself King of Heaven and Earth. Strang’s remote outpost soon captured the attention of the media and federal authorities for illegal activities including theft, piracy, counterfeiting, and polygamy. Ultimately, Strang’s increasingly authoritarian rule led to his assassination by disaffected members of his congregation. Harvey paints antebellum America as a time of “excesses and delusions” and skillfully explores the era’s technological advances, rising immigration, political violence, religious fervor, and leading literary figures. This evocative tale will astonish and delight fans of American history.

March 1, 2020
A nicely spun yarn of religious chicanery on the frontier in a nearly forgotten historical episode. Harvey has a pronounced fondness for obscure characters from American history. In this book, the center of his attention is James Strang (1813-1856), a scoundrel to most, a saint to others, who "vanished into the night" in western New York in 1843 only to appear some time later in Nauvoo, Illinois. There, though previously a professed atheist, he was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by none other than Joseph Smith. Strang, Harvey allows, may have come there in order to bilk Latter-day Saint settlers, as he had apparently done to New Yorkers before. However, Strang quickly realized that there was more to be made by being a religious leader, and when Smith was killed, Strang asserted that he was heir to his throne. Brigham Young prevailed, but Strang kept up his campaign while establishing an offshoot of the church first in Wisconsin, then on an island in Lake Michigan, fulfilling his "plans to lay claim to a kingdom all his own." Strang, "always alert to the possibility of making a buck," took that kingship seriously, siting his kingdom at a place that steamers plying the Great Lakes would dock in order to refuel on the island's abundant wood. He also horned in on other businesses, including the fishing trade that had sustained inhabitants before Strang's arrival, along with several hundred of his followers. The conflicts that Strang sowed right and left--e.g., he condemned others for adultery while abandoning his repudiation of polygamy and taking multiple wives--soon caught up with him. Harvey notes that the end of Strang's realm coincided with Herman Melville's writing his great novel The Confidence-Man, and the author hazards that there could have been no better model for a character who outshone P.T. Barnum in profiting from gullibility, if only for a short while. Harvey's narrative is a page-turning exercise in popular history perfect for fans of Devil in the White City. Entertaining historical excavation.

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May 1, 2020

James Strang (1813-56) was a talented lawyer, charismatic preacher, newspaper editor, state legislator, self-crowned king of a breakaway Mormon sect, and victim of his own overreach when he died at the hands of disillusioned acolytes. According to Harvey (English, DePaul University; Painter in a Savage Land), Strang epitomized 19th-century American archetypes: the "self-made man" (born into obscurity only to become theocrat) and the "confidence man" (lies and narcissism masked by charisma). With this first account this polygamist cult leader since Roger Van Noord's Assassination of a Michigan King (1997), Harvey has penned a tour de force of popular history. Light on deep or original historical analysis, this work recounts Strang's colorful story, beginning with his original beliefs as an atheist and conversion to Mormonism followed by battling church elders for control of the Latter-Day Saints and leading followers to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, which he turned into his private kingdom. Strang won election to the Michigan state legislature, brazened out allegations of criminal activity, and scandalized contemporaries by traveling with an ostensibly male secretary who would become his second wife. VERDICT A spirited, entertaining read with a twist of insight and a tang of scandal.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

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Starred review from April 15, 2020
Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps, 2000; Painter in a Savage Land, 2008) specializes in true stories of audacious individuals, here attaining new heights of wonderment as he charts the exploits of James Strang, an exceedingly brash nineteenth-century American who exemplified the then newly coined term confidence man. Writing with electrifying pleasure in discovery, Harvey zestfully captures the carnivalesque atmosphere of antebellum America, a land of ferment, spiritual yearning, ambition, hoaxes, conquest, enslavement, artistic and technological leaps, and looming crises. Strang was a lawyer, U.S. postmaster, and small-town newspaper editor as well as a liar and a cheat. He would have been just another scoundrel if he hadn't been baptized in 1844 by Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. After Smith's murder, Strang claimed to be the new Mormon leader, established an enclave on a remote Lake Michigan island, had himself crowned King of Earth and Heaven, took up piracy, became a state representative, and provoked multiplying enemies, all vividly portrayed. As are Strang's allies, especially the second of his four wives, "gender outlaw" Elvira Field, who initially posed as his male secretary. Deftly performing a fresh and telling analysis of the timeless power of the con man over Americans who worship those who invent their own rules and their own truths, Harvey brings to galloping life a forgotten, enlightening, and resounding chapter in America's tumultuous history of searchers and charlatans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)