Josiah Quincy's Prediction — Future Textbooks Will Name Joseph Smith the Most Influential American of the Nineteenth Century

In May 1844, weeks before the martyrdom at Carthage, the Prophet Joseph Smith hosted Josiah Quincy — soon to become mayor of Boston — and his traveling companion Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, during their famous visit to Nauvoo. Quincy studied the Prophet closely that day. Nearly forty years later, in his book Figures of the Past (1883), he judged Joseph Smith to be a force of surprising significance in American history. Quincy predicted that some future textbook, 'for the use of generations yet unborn,' would ask which historical American of the nineteenth century had exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen — and would answer, 'Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet.' He conceded that the reply would seem 'absurd' to most men then living, yet might be 'an obvious commonplace to their descendants.' The prediction, made by a non-Latter-day Saint Boston statesman on the strength of his own personal encounter with the Prophet, has grown steadily less improbable: Joseph Smith now appears regularly among the most influential figures in American history in scholarly and popular assessments alike.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

It is by no means improbable that some future textbook, for the use of generations yet unborn, will contain a question something like this: What historical American of the nineteenth century has exerted the most powerful influence upon the destinies of his countrymen? And it is by no means impossible that the answer to that interrogatory may be thus written: Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. And the reply, absurd as it doubtless seems to most men now living, may be an obvious commonplace to their descendants. History deals in surprises and paradoxes quite as startling as this. The man who established a religion in this age of free debate, who was and is to-day accepted by hundreds of thousands as a direct prophet of God, cannot be disposed of by pelting his memory with unsavory epithets. Smith acts and is acted upon. If he can be shown to have been a man of the highest order of genius, and if his influence can be traced through the channels of American history, then he is a subject for the historian, and not for the moralist.