To understand Sidney, you have to hold two things in your hand at once: the man who saw the heavens open with Joseph in February of 1832, and the man who stood in the Nauvoo grove in August of 1844 and could not finish the work the heavens had given him to do. Both are him.
The Preacher Who Was Already Famous
He came to the Restoration as the most accomplished man it would ever recruit.
By the time Parley P. Pratt walked up the lane to his house at Mentor, Ohio, in October of 1830, Sidney Rigdon was thirty-seven years old and one of the best-known Reformed preachers on the Western Reserve. He had been pastor of First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh. He had been a leading voice in the Campbellite movement — the great American "restorationist" revival that sought to recover the simplicity of New Testament Christianity by tearing the creeds down to their roots. He was the orator Alexander Campbell had begun to suspect was outshining him. He had a congregation of more than a thousand people on the Reserve who would follow him wherever he went, and they did. When he was baptized into the Church of Christ in November 1830, he brought most of Kirtland with him. The Restoration, which on April 6, 1830 had consisted of six members in a Fayette farmhouse, by Christmas of that same year had its first frontier stronghold because Sidney Rigdon had given it one.
This is the thing readers tend to miss about him. He was not a boy looking for a cause. He was already a successful man. He was older than Joseph Smith by twelve and a half years. He had a wife of ten years, a houseful of children, a reputation, and a salary — and he walked away from all of it in his late thirties to follow a twenty-four-year-old farmer from Manchester who had a book printed by Egbert B. Grandin and a story about angels. He gave up more, in worldly terms, the day he joined the Church than almost anyone else who joined it. That detail matters when we read what he became later. It complicates the easy reading of him as merely an ambitious man.
The Spokesman
His first revelation (D&C 35) is one of the gentlest in the canon. Behold, verily, verily, I say unto my servant Sidney, I have looked upon thee and thy works. I have heard thy prayers, and prepared thee for a greater work (D&C 35:3). The Lord knew exactly who He was calling. Thou wast sent forth, even as John, to prepare the way before me, and before Elijah which should come, and thou knewest it not (D&C 35:4). The Campbellite years had not been wasted. They had been preparatory. Sidney was being told, by the voice of the Lord, that the work he thought he had been doing on his own had in fact been a long apprenticeship for a work he did not know was coming. And then the Lord gives him his role: I have called him to be a high priest unto me … and he shall preach my gospel and call on the holy prophets to prove his words … He shall write the things which I shall command him (D&C 35:18–20).
He shall write for Joseph. He shall be the scribe. From December 1830 through July 1833, Sidney sat next to Joseph through the inspired translation of the Bible — the Joseph Smith Translation, the textual work that produced not only the JST corrections but Moses 1 through 8 (the great revelations on the antemortem council, the visions of Enoch, the calling of Moses to the high mountain) and the framework for the Book of Abraham translation that would follow. The largest doctrinal production of the early Restoration came through that scribe's chair, and the man in it was Sidney. The first Aaron was a spokesman because Moses was slow of speech. The Sidney that the Lord called was the spokesman because Joseph was unschooled — and Sidney, the orator of Pittsburgh, supplied the literacy, the cadence, the breadth of phrasing that the prophet did not have. He was, in the most literal sense, the voice that made Joseph's revelations into English the Saints could read.
The Vision
And then came February 16, 1832.
The two of them were at the John Johnson farm at Hiram, Ohio, working on the translation of John's gospel. They had reached John 5:29 — they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation — and the language stopped them. Damnation is too simple. Two resurrections only? Sidney and Joseph paused over the verse, and as they paused, the vision opened.
What followed is D&C 76, the Vision, and it is the single most expansive theological revelation in the standard works. The three degrees of glory. The celestial sun, the terrestrial moon, the telestial stars. The sons of perdition. The fate of those who reject the Holy Ghost after having known it. The vision of the Savior at the right hand of God, and we saw and heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father — that by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God (D&C 76:23–24).
Two men saw it. Two men bore witness. The section is written in the first-person plural — we saw, we heard, we testify — and the second of the two pronouns is Sidney. Without him in the room, the Vision is Joseph's account alone, and it stands as one prophet's witness. With him in the room, it is the testimony of two men, in concert, of the same heavens. The principle from the Old Testament that in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established (Deuteronomy 19:15) is satisfied at the doctrinal heart of the Restoration by Sidney. Without Sidney, the Vision is a single witness. With Sidney, it is sealed.
That has not changed. It will never change. Whatever else Sidney became, that hour in Hiram is on his record forever.
Days later the mob came for both of them at Hiram, dragged Joseph out of the bed where he was sharing it with the dying Murdock baby, and dragged Sidney out of his house by his heels. They beat Sidney unconscious, his head bouncing on the frozen earth, and he was bedridden afterward for many days, his mind not the same. The first time he stood up to preach again, the saints noticed that he was different. The fire was still there, but something in the focus had cracked. He had paid a price for the Vision that no one else had paid in the same way. Joseph was tarred. Sidney's head was beaten on rocks. They were not even injuries of the same kind, and Sidney would carry the consequences of his for the rest of his life.
The Counselor
Between 1833 and 1844 he was First Counselor in the First Presidency, and the record is uneven.
When he was on, he was incandescent. His sermon at the dedication of the Kirtland Temple in March 1836 ran two and a half hours and the crowd never stirred. His addresses through the Missouri period swung whole congregations. Joseph relied on him for the public face of the Church in a way that no other early counselor was relied upon. When the prophet needed someone to speak, Sidney was the man he sent. He was a literal spokesman, and a great one.
But after Liberty Jail he was not the same.
That is the thing the histories tend to soft-pedal. The winter of 1838 broke him in ways it did not break Joseph and Hyrum. He was older — forty-five going on forty-six — and he had already been broken once at Hiram. The combination of the 1832 head injury and the confinement of 1838–1839 produced what the modern reader, without forcing the diagnosis, can recognize as something like a chronic depressive disorder with periods of disorganization. He came out of Liberty Jail thin, ill, and never operationally well again. By 1840 he was in Nauvoo physically but absent more often than not. By 1842 Joseph could not get him to attend council meetings. By 1843 he and Joseph had begun to drift in ways that everyone close to them could see. The doctrine of plural marriage came between them — Joseph approached Sidney's daughter Nancy in early 1842, Nancy refused, the family was wounded, and Sidney's loyalty cracked along that fault line. He never publicly opposed Joseph during these years, but the closeness that had carried them through the Vision had been replaced by a distance the Saints could feel.
And yet — in January 1844, when Joseph announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, the man he asked to be his vice-presidential running mate was Sidney Rigdon. Joseph still wanted him there. Sidney accepted. Their last great public act together was a campaign neither of them would live to finish.
The Succession Contest
When Joseph and Hyrum died on June 27, 1844, Sidney was in Pittsburgh, where he had been living for months — Joseph had counseled him to move there, perhaps as much for Sidney's health as for any organizational reason. He hurried back to Nauvoo. The grove conference of August 8, 1844 is the moment in his life that has, ever since, been the lens through which most readers have read him.
He arrived ahead of the Twelve. He stood up before the gathered Saints on August 8 and presented himself as the guardian of the Church, the one who should lead in Joseph's absence. He spoke for an hour and a half. He laid out his claim: he was the surviving member of the First Presidency, the senior counselor, the one to whom the prophetic mantle should now descend. He did not, in his own mind, see this as a usurpation. He saw it as the simple order of succession. Joseph had been the prophet; he had been the counselor; with the prophet dead, the counselor stewards what is left.
Then Brigham Young rose and spoke, and the historical record is unanimous that something extraordinary happened: the voice and the figure of Joseph Smith appeared to fall upon Brigham. Wilford Woodruff, William C. Staines, George Q. Cannon, Mosiah Hancock, Benjamin F. Johnson, and others — independent witnesses, some writing decades later — all describe the same phenomenon. Brigham looked like Joseph; he spoke like Joseph; the Spirit of Joseph rested on him. The Saints voted, and the Twelve, with Brigham at their head, were sustained as the body bearing the keys. Sidney was set aside.
He was excommunicated a month later. He returned to Pittsburgh and organized a small Church of Christ that fractured within five years. He tried again in the late 1840s and again in the 1860s. None of his organizations survived him. He spent the last twenty-five years of his life in upstate New York, in obscurity, slowly forgotten.
Two Things at Once
And here is where reading Sidney with charity becomes hard, and necessary.
It would be easy to read him as a man whose ambition broke through at Nauvoo and undid him. There is some truth in that reading. He did press a claim. He did, in the August 8 sermon, place himself in front of the Saints in a way Joseph had never asked him to. He did not yield gracefully. He did not, after the excommunication, repent and return — he died outside the Church he had helped to plant.
But there is another reading that the easy verdict cannot accommodate. Sidney was the man who, in 1830, gave up a salary, a congregation, and a reputation to follow Joseph. He was the man who scribed the JST through three years of inspired translation. He was the man who saw the heavens open at Hiram, who lay bedridden with a broken head for the privilege of seeing them. He was the man who froze in Liberty Jail and never recovered. He was the man Joseph chose, as late as January 1844, as his running mate when he could have chosen anyone. He had been with Joseph longer and more closely than almost any other living soul. When the Saints set him aside at the grove, the man who was set aside was not a stranger. He was the second pillar of the Vision. And the setting-aside, however correctly the keys descended to the Twelve, fell on a man who had already been broken twice in the work — first at Hiram, then at Liberty — and who did not have the strength to rebuild a third time.
The stance chip on this portrait reads mixed because Sidney's life is mixed. His witness was not. His testimony of the Vision he never denied. His testimony of the Book of Mormon he never denied. The final witness recorded from his sickbed in 1876 — eighty-three years old, decades outside the Church, no organizational stake left to defend — affirmed both. He died saying the Restoration was real.
What the Vision Cost the Visionary
There is a kind of cost the Restoration extracted from some of its witnesses that the standard hagiographies cannot fit into a sentence. Sidney is the clearest case. He saw, with his own eyes, the Father and the Son in the Vision of 1832. He testified of it. And then he lived another forty-four years in the aftermath of having seen what he had seen — through head injuries, through prison, through grief, through ecclesiastical exile — and the truth of what he had seen never let him go, even after he could no longer be in the body of Saints that had been gathered around what he had seen. There is something biblical about that arc. Saul saw the heavens open on the road to Damascus. Balaam saw the angel in the way. Caiaphas prophesied truly. Sidney saw the Vision. The vision does not guarantee the visionary. It guarantees what was shown. And the burden of carrying it forward, when the visionary's own life has been shattered by the carrying, is not a burden every man can finish.
The Aaron-pattern in the Book of Mormon — the prince who laid down a crown to walk into the country of his enemies — is the pattern of Aaron, not of Sidney. The Aaron-pattern in the Restoration — the elder brother who held the second pillar of the arch and died in the same upper room as the prophet — is the pattern of Hyrum Smith. The pattern Sidney occupies is different. He is the witness who was given the same vision as the prophet and who could not, in the end, follow where the prophet's keys went. That is its own kind of testimony. It is not the testimony we would have wished for him. But the part he is responsible for — the witness of what he saw — he discharged. The part that broke him — the long aftermath of seeing — was bigger than his life.
What Others Miss
The lazy reading of Sidney is that he was an apostate of the August 1844 succession contest. The full reading is that he is the second witness of D&C 76, the scribe of the JST, the spokesman of the first Restoration decade, the man whose head was beaten on Hiram rocks and whose body wintered in Liberty Jail, and a man whose later years were lived in a confusion that the early years had every right to predict.
If we owe Hyrum the recognition that the Restoration would not have stood without him, we owe Sidney the recognition that the Restoration's theological vocabulary — the language we use to describe the heavens, the kingdoms, the sons of God, the inheritances of glory — was opened to us in a room he was in. Without Sidney in the room, the Vision is Joseph's account alone. With Sidney in the room, it is two witnesses, and that is what the law of witnesses, given from Moses forward, has always required.
He was a flawed man. So were they all. The flaws of the others were ground down by the work. Sidney's flaws were exposed by the work, and he could not be ground down a third time. That is a sadness for the Restoration to carry, and it does, in the silence of a counselor's seat that was empty at the grove on the day Brigham rose to speak.
The witness was true and the witness was given. The witness who gave it could not in the end stand among the body of saints he had helped to gather. Both things are true. The Vision he saw is in the canon because he saw it. He paid for the seeing. The Lord will judge him in the light of what he gave, and not only in the light of what he could not.