Joseph Smith Jr.: In his youth and young adulthood, Joseph Smith Jr. founded the Church of Christ, which gave rise to the most successful religion of American origin, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, popularly called Mormonism. The seeds of the Mormon faith were planted in western New York in 1820, when Joseph was just fourteen. “Joseph the Prophet” and his growing congregation met with persecution in New York and pushed westward to Kirtland, Ohio. Greater persecutions awaited them, however. After the collapse of the Mormon community in Kirtland, succeeding chapters of Smith’s life story and the early history of the Latter-Day Saints were written largely in Missouri and Illinois—places that added to the persecutions of Joseph Smith Jr. and his co-religionists in the first quarter century of the Mormon movement. In 1844, the year he was assassinated, General Joseph Smith, “The Prophet,” had set out to run for President of the United States.