William Earl McLellin (January 18, 1806 – April 24, 1883) was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement. One of the original members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, McLellin later broke with church founder Joseph Smith.
Biography
McLellin was born on January 18, 1806, in Smith County, Tennessee, to Charles and Sarah McLellin. His mother was a Cherokee. He married Cynthia Ann in 1829, but she died two years later in 1831. McLellin then married Emeline Miller in 1832 in Portage County, Ohio. They moved to Independence, Missouri that same year. McLellin and Miller were the parents of six children, four sons and two daughters.
Church service
In 1831, in Paris, Illinois, McLellin first had contact with the missionaries of the Church of Christ that Smith founded. He was baptized on August 20, 1831, by Hyrum Smith During 1831, he traveled with Smith, and the two of them preached in Tennessee.
On October 25, 1831, McLellin was called through a revelation Smith said he received to serve a mission in the eastern United States with Samuel H. Smith, Joseph's brother. McLellin complained against the call and was instead tasked with traveling south with Luke Johnson in January 1832.
An experienced schoolteacher and a self-proclaimed physician, McLellin taught penmanship in the Kirtland School for Temporal Education in 1834.
When the Book of Commandments was about to be published, some Latter Day Saints criticized the wording of some of the revelations Smith said he had received. According to Smith, the Lord issued a challenge to see if the wisest member of the church could write a revelation comparable to the least of Smith's revelations. If they could, then the members of the church would be justified in claiming that the revelations did not come from God. McLellin, who was trained as a schoolteacher, was selected by the critics for the challenge. According to Smith's history, McLellin failed to produce a credible text, and the controversy died away.
McLellin was appointed to be a captain in the Missouri State Militia in 1837. This may have been due to the mismanagement of the church's financial institution, the Kirtland Safety Society. McLellin was excommunicated on May 11, 1838, and subsequently actively worked against the Latter Day Saints, becoming involved with Missouri mobs. According to members of the church, McLellin ransacked and robbed Smith's home and stable while Smith was being held in jail,</blockquote>
Previous to that incident, Smith authored a letter to the church from Liberty Jail on December 16, 1838, in which he made allusions to actions by McLellin that he vilified as sins. In that letter, Smith likened McLellin to the biblical magician Balaam whose ass refused to help Balaam curse the Israelites, in the era of Moses. The letter may have been what provoked McLellin to attempt to fist-fight Smith.
After Smith's death in 1844, McLellin first accepted the succession claims of Sidney Rigdon and was appointed one of the Twelve Apostles in Rigdon's organization on April 8, 1845. In 1847, at Kirtland, Ohio, he joined with several others to create a reorganization of the church, designated the Church of Christ. McLellin called on David Whitmer to assume the presidency, claiming that Whitmer had been ordained by Smith as his successor on July 8, 1834. This organization was short-lived. McLellin later associated with churches led by George M. Hinkle, James J. Strang, and Granville Hedrick.
By 1869, McLellin had broken completely with "all organized religion,"
<blockquote>I have set to my seal that the Book of Mormon is a true, divine record and it will require more evidence than I have ever seen to ever shake me relative to its purity. […] When a man goes at the Book of M. he touches the apple of my eye. He fights against truth—against purity—against light—against the purist, or one of the truest, purist books on earth. […] Fight the wrongs of L.D.S.ism as much as you please, but let that unique, that inimitable book alone.</blockquote>
McLellin died on April 24, 1883,
In the aftermath of these crimes, the LDS Church discovered McLellin's writings were already in the church's possession, having been acquired and forgotten in 1908. These were later published in two works, The Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–1836, edited by Jan Shipps and John W. Welch in 1994, and The William E. McLellin Papers, 1854–1880, edited by Stan Larson and Samuel J. Passey in 2007. However, these collections were missing a notebook, known because of photographs in a 1920s newspaper published by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In January 2009, this notebook was located and acquired by Brent Ashworth, one of the original collectors interested in Hofmann's supposed McLellin collection.