“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

 

416 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316463591

Mr. House, my high school college prep history teacher, claimed that an ancestor of his assassinated a man who proclaimed himself to be the Imperial primate and actual Sovereign Lord and King on Earth in northern Michigan, and so when I discovered 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 about James Jesse Strang, the very same man, I was intrigued – although a perusal of the index saw no mention of Mr. House or his ancestor. Pity.

So anyway, in 1844 Strang claimed to have been appointed to be the successor of Joseph Smith as leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, claiming that he had possession of a letter from Smith naming him as such and that, furthermore, an angel had confirmed him in his appointment. Not all Mormons bought this and instead followed Brigham Young out west to what would become Utah, leaving Strang and his followers to establish themselves on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan where the increasingly monomaniacal Strang would hold “court”.

But it turns out that The King of Confidence is more than a dissection of this singular individual who, through sheer force of will, made himself into the master of his sect’s lives both on Earth and in Heaven; it is also an exploration of a time and place in which liars, tricksters and charlatans – Confidence Men – lived, thrived and survived like no other. This era of American history saw an anxiousness like no other in its brief history in which lost people cast around for something to believe in and someone to guide them, and so: Comes the Age; Come the Man.

Although the man in question remains elusive. Was he calculating or delusional? Did he in fact believe in his brand of Mormonism or was it all an elaborate con? Did his followers truly see him as their “Sovereign Lord and King on Earth” or did they grasp at straws in an uncertain age? We have only what they left behind them to go on, which would imply a great deal, but not necessarily so: so much of what people in this more-literate society wrote amounted to nothing more than justification for the future and, thus, must be taken with a grain – or more – of salt.

The King of Confidence is replete with so much more that brings this peculiar era to life, with so many thumbnail sketches of things one would not immediately think of when regarding 19^th Century America, such as John Brown and his antislavery crusade, the Underground Railroad and all its works, John Deere and the founding of one of the US’s first successful corporations, the Brontë’s and their multifarious works, mesmerism and its effect on the age’s psyche, newspaper exchanges as a kind of proto-internet, the founding of the Illuminati by Strang himself…

And much, much more besides. This all serves to recapture the hyper-dynamism of Antebellum America and the lead up to the Victorian Era and the American Civil War in which all of these conflicting and chaotic elements would at last explode across the continent. It was, in short, an age in which the US at last attempted to truly wean itself from the Old World and instead build a World Anew in all of its madcap chaotic glory in this “this stammering century”, as Horace Greeley said. The Birth pangs of our own, chaotic age and the eras in-between.

As Harvey says, Confidence is the “de facto national [American] currency”, and The King of Confidence shows unequivocally just how much this currency buys when paid out by a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain.