Joseph Smith was born on 23 December 1805 in Sharon, Vermont, the fourth of eleven children in a poor farming family that moved, when he was a boy, to the neighbourhood of Palmyra in western New York. He grew up amid the intense revivalism of the "burned-over district," and from about 1820 he reported visionary experiences, later including the visits of an angel named Moroni and the recovery of golden plates that he published as the Book of Mormon in 1830. That same year he organized a church and began to gather followers, moving the community first to Kirtland, Ohio, and then to Missouri, dictating along the way a stream of revelations that were collected as the Doctrine and Covenants and undertaking a fresh "translation" of the Bible.
Conflict with neighbours pursued the Saints from Ohio to Missouri, from which they were violently expelled, and on to Illinois, where they built the city of Nauvoo and Smith served as mayor and militia commander. There he introduced temple ordinances and, privately, plural marriage. In 1844 he announced a campaign for the United States presidency; that spring, after the destruction of a dissident newspaper press led to his arrest, he was held at Carthage, where on 27 June an armed mob stormed the jail and killed him and his brother Hyrum.