The king of confidence : a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier schemers, true believers, false prophets, and the murder of an American monarch / Miles Harvey.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The "unputdownable" (Dave Eggers, National Book award finalist) story of the most infamous American con man you've never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, "perfect for fans of The Devil in the White Cit y" ( Kirkus )



A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Finalist for the Midland Authors Annual Literary Award

A Michigan Notable Book

A CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the Year



"A masterpiece." -- Nathaniel Philbrick



In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king.



From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country.



The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country's boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

James Strang (1813--56) was a talented lawyer, charismatic preacher, newspaper editor, state legislator, self-crowned king of a breakaway Mormon sect, and victim of his own overreach when he died at the hands of disillusioned acolytes. According to Harvey (English, DePaul University; Painter in a Savage Land), Strang epitomized 19th-century American archetypes: the "self-made man" (born into obscurity only to become theocrat) and the "confidence man" (lies and narcissism masked by charisma). With this first account this polygamist cult leader since Roger Van Noord's Assassination of a Michigan King (1997), Harvey has penned a tour de force of popular history. Light on deep or original historical analysis, this work recounts Strang's colorful story, beginning with his original beliefs as an atheist and conversion to Mormonism followed by battling church elders for control of the Latter-Day Saints and leading followers to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, which he turned into his private kingdom. Strang won election to the Michigan state legislature, brazened out allegations of criminal activity, and scandalized contemporaries by traveling with an ostensibly male secretary who would become his second wife. VERDICT A spirited, entertaining read with a twist of insight and a tang of scandal.--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Publishers Weekly Review

Journalist Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps) delivers a vivid account of the life and times of American sect leader, lawyer, newspaper editor, and con man James Jesse Strang (1813--1856). After Mormon founder Joseph Smith's murder in 1844, Strang, a recent convert to the religion who had mysteriously disappeared from his home in Upstate New York and reappeared in Wisconsin, declared himself Smith's successor. As proof, he produced a forged letter of appointment and brass plates written in an alphabet he alone could decipher. Though the majority of Mormons followed Brigham Young to Utah, Strang convinced hundreds of fellow converts to join him on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, where he crowned himself King of Heaven and Earth. Strang's remote outpost soon captured the attention of the media and federal authorities for illegal activities including theft, piracy, counterfeiting, and polygamy. Ultimately, Strang's increasingly authoritarian rule led to his assassination by disaffected members of his congregation. Harvey paints antebellum America as a time of "excesses and delusions" and skillfully explores the era's technological advances, rising immigration, political violence, religious fervor, and leading literary figures. This evocative tale will astonish and delight fans of American history. (May)

CHOICE Review

Known in particular for his Island of Lost Maps (2000), Harvey (English, DePaul Univ.) has now written a readable, engaging biography of American religious figure James Strang (1813--56), who challenged Brigham Young for the allegiance of Latter Day Saints after the assassination of LDS founder Joseph Smith in 1844. Harvey's facility with language results in a narrative that will interest a broad audience, and in that regard the book stands opposite Vickie Cleverley Speek's "God Has Made Us a Kingdom": James Strang and the Midwest Mormons (CH, Dec'07, 45-2234), Roger Van Noord's King of Beaver Island (1988), and Milo Milton Quaife's The Kingdom of Saint James: A Narrative of the Mormons (1930). Harvey's method is to take readers into the world of a character reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn's Dauphin, except that Strang was real. Other biographers have interpreted Strang more seriously as a religious figure; Harvey approaches him as a straightforward con man and his religious career as a grand confidence scheme. Easily the most readable account among the several Strang biographies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. --Richard L Saunders, Southern Utah University

Booklist Review

Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps, 2000; Painter in a Savage Land, 2008) specializes in true stories of audacious individuals, here attaining new heights of wonderment as he charts the exploits of James Strang, an exceedingly brash nineteenth-century American who exemplified the then newly coined term "confidence man." Writing with electrifying pleasure in discovery, Harvey zestfully captures "the carnivalesque atmosphere" of antebellum America, a land of ferment, spiritual yearning, ambition, hoaxes, conquest, enslavement, artistic and technological leaps, and looming crises. Strang was a lawyer, U.S. postmaster, and small-town newspaper editor as well as a liar and a cheat. He would have been just another scoundrel if he hadn't been baptized in 1844 by Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. After Smith's murder, Strang claimed to be the new Mormon leader, established an enclave on a remote Lake Michigan island, had himself crowned "King of Earth and Heaven," took up piracy, became a state representative, and provoked multiplying enemies, all vividly portrayed. As are Strang's allies, especially the second of his four wives, "gender outlaw" Elvira Field, who initially posed as his male secretary. Deftly performing a fresh and telling analysis of the timeless power of the con man over Americans who worship those who invent their own rules and "their own truths," Harvey brings to galloping life a forgotten, enlightening, and resounding chapter in America's tumultuous history of searchers and charlatans.

Kirkus Book Review

A nicely spun yarn of religious chicanery on the frontier in a nearly forgotten historical episode. Harvey has a pronounced fondness for obscure characters from American history. In this book, the center of his attention is James Strang (1813-1856), a scoundrel to most, a saint to others, who "vanished into the night" in western New York in 1843 only to appear some time later in Nauvoo, Illinois. There, though previously a professed atheist, he was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by none other than Joseph Smith. Strang, Harvey allows, may have come there in order to bilk Latter-day Saint settlers, as he had apparently done to New Yorkers before. However, Strang quickly realized that there was more to be made by being a religious leader, and when Smith was killed, Strang asserted that he was heir to his throne. Brigham Young prevailed, but Strang kept up his campaign while establishing an offshoot of the church first in Wisconsin, then on an island in Lake Michigan, fulfilling his "plans to lay claim to a kingdom all his own." Strang, "always alert to the possibility of making a buck," took that kingship seriously, siting his kingdom at a place that steamers plying the Great Lakes would dock in order to refuel on the island's abundant wood. He also horned in on other businesses, including the fishing trade that had sustained inhabitants before Strang's arrival, along with several hundred of his followers. The conflicts that Strang sowed right and left--e.g., he condemned others for adultery while abandoning his repudiation of polygamy and taking multiple wives--soon caught up with him. Harvey notes that the end of Strang's realm coincided with Herman Melville's writing his great novel The Confidence-Man, and the author hazards that there could have been no better model for a character who outshone P.T. Barnum in profiting from gullibility, if only for a short while. Harvey's narrative is a page-turning exercise in popular history perfect for fans of Devil in the White City. Entertaining historical excavation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Miles Harvey began reporting on Gilbert Bland in 1996 for Outside. He spent over a year on the magazine article and three more years on the book. He has worked for UPI, In These Times, and Outside, where he was the book-review columnist. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (B.S. in Journalism, 1984) and the University of Michigan (M.F.A. in English, 1991), he has had a lifelong fascination with maps.

(Bowker Author Biography)