This biographical sketch, “It Is the Truth, I Can
Feel It” By Don L. Searle, Assistant Managing Editor is from the Ensign,
July 1999, page 47.
To know God’s truth was Levi W. Hancock’s desire from
childhood. Once he found the gospel, he followed the Lord’s prophet no
matter the sacrifice.
As early as age four, Levi W. Hancock was concerned
about his standing before God and about his salvation. Later, it weighed
on his young mind when his baby sister died and the minister who conducted
her funeral offered little hope for her salvation because she had not been
baptized. And when at about nine he had a “curious dream” of the Savior
offering him salvation, his brothers began calling him “the little Christian.”
Thus, knowing God’s will was a priority for him as
an adult, and in the fall of 1830 when he first heard the gospel preached,
he recorded this reaction: “It is the truth, I can feel it.”
This testimony would stay with him throughout a life
of service and sacrifice for the kingdom of God on the earth. His strong
faith and willingness to labor were manifest from the day he was baptized.
Whenever the growing Church or its prophet needed him, Levi Hancock was
there. Elder Hancock would serve as a General Authority for nearly 50 years,
continuing in his faith long after the martyrdom of Joseph
Smith. Because Brother Hancock liked to write, the record of his personal
labors is more extensive than that of some other members, yet his sacrifices represent
for us the devotion of many Latter-day Saints who toiled selflessly during
that era while the restored Church was being established.
Levi Ward Hancock was born 7 April 1803 in Old Springfield,
Massachusetts, a son of Thomas Hancock and Amy Ward. His father later moved
the family to Bristol, New York, then Chagrin, Ohio. At one point he lived
with a brother who “sent me to school long enough to learn the letters,”
he recorded. At 14, employed by an expert woodworker, Levi had already
built his own turning lathe and learned to make furniture. His lifelong
trade would be making furniture and cabinets, but he would also
construct houses and buildings.
Looking back later, he wrote: “At the age of four,
I began to call upon the Lord seriously. My mother was a praying woman
and trusted the Lord to hear and answer her prayers.” He learned from her
example. The “curious dream” he wrote of fed his
faith. In it, the Savior offered him a decanter filled with white liquid,
saying, “Drink of this, it is for you.” Levi wrote: “When I tasted it,
it filled me with the love of God until it cast out all fear of death.”
By age 19, through industry and effort, he had helped
pay off his father’s farm along with a small place of his own “and had
cash in my pocket. I had all the things I wanted to make me comfortable.”
At one point, he tried the role of merchant with the help of a man who
owned a store. “But I gave away my goods to the poor and never made one
cent.”
In November 1830 Levi first heard of the restored
gospel. His brother, Alvah, told him of four men who had come with a book
they said was a record of the people who inhabited the Americas in ancient
times. These men preached the same gospel Jesus Christ had taught to His
followers in the Old World, Alvah said, and “they lay hands on those they
baptize and bestow on them the Holy Ghost.” Levi recalled: “At these last
words I gathered faith and [i]t seemed like a wash of something warm
took me in the face and ran over my body which gave me a feeling I cannot
describe. The first word I said was ‘it is the truth, I can feel it.’ ”The
man who was preaching was Elder Parley
P. Pratt. Two days later, Levi followed the men to Kirtland and was
baptized by Elder Pratt. (Levi’s father and sister had already been baptized,
and other members of his family would join later.) A few days after baptism,
Levi was ordained an elder and soon began to preach the gospel in the town
where he lived.
The following month, December 1830, he had a vision
that would confirm the course of his life. In it, he saw a personage he
knew to be the Savior holding a small yoke in his hands. “This is the yoke
of Christ,” He said, and told Levi, “You are my servant.” Levi later recalled,
“I realized many things that I am not able to write or express with my
tongue. I was told by the spirit to bear testimony to the world of the
truth of the work.” He bore that testimony to the end of his days.
His testimony was strengthened by his association
with the Prophet Joseph Smith. Levi
wrote in his journal that he was present at the meeting in a small log
schoolhouse in Kirtland when the Prophet taught that the kingdom of Christ
“was like a grain of mustard seed … and some should see it put forth its
branches and the angels of heaven would some day come like birds to its
branches just as the Savior had said.”
Called with others to go on a mission to Missouri
in 1831, Levi accepted unhesitatingly, though it meant walking hundreds
of miles. He wrote, “Although there were but a few of us, we did go to
work and the Lord labored with us.” After hearing Levi Hancock and Zebedee
Coltrin preach in Indiana, one man testified, “You are men sent to
administer the words of eternal life to me and I want to be baptized.”
They established two strong branches in the state. But they also suffered
hardships on their journey. Levi fell ill because of an infection in his
feet and had to spend time recuperating with a family who took him in while
Zebedee went on without him. Later, in Missouri, he continued to struggle
with illness and chafed at times because of his inability to do all he
wanted. But grateful to serve, he wrote: “I have to be honest before God
and do all the good I can for this kingdom or woe is me. I care not for
the world nor what they say. They have to meet my Testimony at the Judgment
seat. I mean that my conduct shall be such that my words will be believed,
the Lord being my helper.”
Later, he recovered his health enough to use his
building skills in constructing the Church's printing house in Jackson
County, Missouri.
Once back in Ohio, he was “a zealous and faithful
worker [who] contributed liberally toward the erection of the Lord’s
House at Kirtland.” He attended the School of the Prophets and worked
on building projects for the Prophet, and when
Joseph Smith needed money, Levi gave him what was left from the sale
of his own property. “The Prophet Joseph was often in trouble. If his friends
gave him money, he [was] stripped of it all by his enemies. I know for
I did all I could do to hold up that
good man. My heart would ache for him. He had to stand against thousands
of his pretended friends seeking to overthrow him. It was terrible the
abuse he suffered.”
Through Joseph Smith, Levi Hancock met Clarissa Reed,
whom he married 29 March 1833. Their first child was born 9 April 1834
and named Mosiah Lyman Hancock.
Shortly after his son’s birth, Levi left to march
to Missouri with Zion’s Camp. Latter-day Saints in Jackson County were
being mobbed and driven by their enemies, and the small band of Zion’s
Camp was going to their aid. But the mission was never one of vengeance
or belligerence, Levi explained. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught those
in the group that “we had to unlearn what we had learned from the world,
[T]he first lesson was that Israel’s God was a man of reason and did
not delight in the death of the sinners, but wanted [them] to turn and
live.
“He was a new God to me. So, we gladly received his
words and fell into ranks and went up to Missouri to see what the matter
was, that our people could not stay on their land.”
In retrospect, while “Zion’s Camp failed to achieve
its ostensible purpose of protecting the Jackson County Saints,” it brought
to the fore faithful men who were willing to answer, at whatever cost,
“the Lord’s call. … Nine of the first twelve apostles and all of the first
Quorum of Seventy (seven presidents and sixty-three members) were later
called from the ranks of Camp members.” When these calls came in
February 1835, Levi Hancock was chosen as one of the Presidents of the
Seventy.
[A curious incident occurred in 1837. It was discovered
that a number of the Seventy had previously been ordained High Priests
and were removed from the Quorum and their callings therein. At this time
Levi W. Hancock was removed from the Quorum, it being believed that he
was a High Priest. When it was discovered that he was not a High Priest,
he was restored to his place in the First Quorum and in the Presidency
thereof.]
Elder Hancock was one who moved his family to northern
Missouri in response to the Prophet’s call. With other Latter-day Saints,
he and his family suffered through the persecutions there in the late 1830s.
Because his own handwritten journal ends at that time, it is through the
recollections of his son Mosiah that we see much of what occurred next.
Only a small boy at the time, Mosiah nevertheless
remembered that when Far West was betrayed into the hands of Latter-day
Saint enemies in 1838 and Church leaders were taken prisoner, many of the
Saints went into hiding to escape the depredations of mobbers. Members
of the Hancock family had several guns they had not given up. “The Hancock
brothers, Levi, Joseph, and Solomon, … guarded and fed 600 men, women,
and children while camped in the woods after they had been driven from
their homes. They were waiting for an opportunity to get away. … Some of
the brethren made three hundred tomahawks for protection.”
Mosiah also recalled fleeing Missouri on foot with
their belongings in a cart. It was winter and he had no shoes. His mother
had only an old, badly worn pair and suffered terribly on the trek. Once
when they stopped to rest, she took them off to ease her feet. Her husband
said to her, “You shall have a pair of shoes delivered to you before long,
in a remarkable manner.” When they were ready to move on, Clarissa reached
for her shoes and found a new pair in their place.
Mosiah remembered life in Commerce, Illinois, the
settlement that would become Nauvoo, as very hard at first because of sickness
in the swampy, humid area. “At times we children were so hungry and sick
that it seemed we were destined to starve
to death. … Sometimes when our parents were sick and could not cook
greens, we ate them raw. I have pulled up grass and ate it, also basswood
buds and elmbark.
“When the people began to move into Nauvoo and were
dying off so fast, father would work day and night making caskets, when
he was not sick.” But, “when father was able to, he preached the Gospel
as often as possible.”
Levi Hancock filled a number of roles in Nauvoo,
including policeman. Through associations in the community, his family
developed a strong friendship with the Prophet. Joseph Smith apparently
placed great confidence in his friend Levi. Mosiah
Hancock recalled: “I stood on the rail of the fence in front of the
mansion. When the Prophet said, ‘Brethren, the Lord Almighty has this day
revealed to me something I never comprehended before! That is—I have friends
who have at a respectful distance
been ready to ward off the blows of the adversary. (He brought his
hand down on my father’s head as he was acting as bodyguard to the Prophet.)
While others have pretended to be my friends, and have crept into my bosom
and become vipers, and have been my most deadly enemies. I wish you to
be obedient to these true men as you have promised.’ ”
The martyrdom of the Prophet Joseph and Hyrum Smith
was a shock and severe blow for the Hancocks. But there never was a question
in Elder Hancock’s mind about the course he had chosen. His place would
be with the Latter-day Saints.
When he and his family joined the exodus from Nauvoo,
their journey westward was slower because he was responsible also for his
wife’s aged mother and two young relatives. They caught up with the Saints
just in time for him to be called to join the Mormon Battalion; he was
the only General Authority to participate in the battalion’s historic trek.
After their discharge in California, he traveled eastward to meet his family
on the trail in Wyoming in mid-1848. Returning to the Salt Lake Valley
with them, he made a place to live and took up his trade of carpentry.
His was never to be the settled life, however. He
moved to Payson in Utah County, about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City,
where in 1851, he represented the county in the first territorial legislature.
There followed a series of moves that took him finally, in the mid-1860s,
to southern Utah, where his son Mosiah had gone. Elder Hancock lived successively
in three small communities there, dying in Washington (about six miles
north of St. George) in 1882 at the age of 79.
Levi Hancock’s commitment to service in the gospel
stayed strong throughout his life. Two years before his death, he attended
the Church’s Golden Jubilee and was honored as one of the two remaining
members of the original First Council of the Seventy.
But whatever recognition came to him, he might have
appreciated most the tribute paid by his son Mosiah: “My father seemed
a savior as he strove to bring me up in the admonition of the Lord.”
