The King of Confidence

A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

By: Miles Harvey

Narrated by: Rengin Altay

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 City" (Kirkus)

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
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.

Critic reviews

“A jaunty, far-ranging history... Despite the frontier setting, there is something eerily contemporary about Harvey’s portrait of a real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative relationship to debt, and a genius for mass media... Harvey deploys small scraps of knowledge to great effect. His account of Strang’s rise and fall is littered with thumbnail histories of nineteenth-century cross-dressing, John Brown, John Deere, the Brontës, bloomers, the Underground Railroad, mesmerism, newspaper exchanges, the Illuminati, and much else. This approach amounts to a sort of historical pointillism, bringing the manic, skittering mood of the era into focus. It is a style of history well suited to the antebellum decades, when American culture was most unabashedly itself... Harvey’s wonderfully digressive narrative is interspersed with news clippings, playbills, land surveys, and daguerreotypes, as if to periodically certify that all of this madness is really true... Rather than a biography of a single man, he offers a vivid portrait of the time and place in which a character like Strang could thrive.”—Chris Jennings, New York Times Book Review

“Harvey is a skillful writer and thoughtful researcher... He examines the bedeviled society [of antebellum America] through the life of James Jesse Strang, a strange man of many parts---most of them bad.”—Howard Schneider, Wall Street Journal

"The story of James Strang--a messianic con man who wreaks havoc on an island community of his own devising--is amazing in itself. But it is the telling of the tale--think Herman Melville meets Mark Twain--that makes The King of Confidence a masterpiece. This book has talons that sink into you and won't let go."—Nathaniel Philbrick, New York Times bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea and Mayflower

“Deeply researched, artfully written, and splendidly compelling... Great writers deserve great subjects, and Miles Harvey, who has proven himself a great writer in two previous books, has found another subject worthy of his skills... A riveting book.”—Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune

"The King of Confidence is a ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable read--a book with unsettling (but also weirdly comforting) parallels to our time. By illuminating this forgotten moment in American history, where a group of rational adults fell under the spell of a charismatic madman, Harvey reminds us of the endlessly repeating nature of history and humanity."—Dave Eggers, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Zeitoun and What is the What

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT !!

I'm confident you will love this book!! So close to home and I had no idea.

An alternate view of history

Narrator was good, however the story left me wondering when and how it would end.

Amazing that this is news to me

Great book. I’m a little embarrassed that I never heard about this interesting story and I’m grateful to have it so well told.

Insightful and Enlightening

As an ex-mo this book showed me the Mormon faith in its early years from the outside. It was enlightening on the details of the early church and its divisions normally withheld or sanitized in the approved Mormon doctrine distributed by CES. If you are in search of something in that vein, this is worth your time.

deep dive into a wild American past

Story and overall: Here is my 5-star comment on "The King of Confidence" in Amazon:

Miles Harvey's superbly researched "The King of Confidence" metamorphoses what might seem to be unpromising material--the sketchily documented life of a once nationally famous, paradoxical religious conman--into an examination of mid-nineteenth prophets and cults and their true believers.

The history the book uncovers, focusing on an offshoot branch of Mormonism, is fascinating. There are enough twists and turns and action (sometimes violent) for a movie. But the best part, for me, is Harvey's analysis of the ideological roots of all this turbulence, including Manifest Destiny, the religious revival centered in New York's Burned Over District, and American and Mormon patriarchy. On the topic of Mormons, Harvey is scrupulously factual and more inclined to see the positive sides of his central figure's character than Brigham Young, his chief Mormon opponent, did.

This central figure is the sometimes shadowy, always grandiose farmer's son, James Strang--a dreamer, swindler and occasional idealist. Harvey fills in the gaps in Strang's life through what one reviewer called his "pointillist" technique of contextualizing Strang in the history of his era and connecting him with better-known historical actors such as Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Joseph Smith, P.T. Barnum, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Yet "The King of Confidence" is far from being just a tale of charismatic men. We learn about Strang's wives, notably the cross-dressing Elvira Field/Charles Douglass, and their aspirations and disappointments in a time when they were legally subject to their husbands. Harvey illuminates their plight though the life and writings of their feminist contemporary, Margaret Fuller.

"The King of Confidence" is, apart from its broad historical vision, an engagingly written book, worth reading for its tour de force Prologue alone. And most readers will shiver with recognition when they shift from Harvey's mid-nineteenth century America to our national present.

Footnote: some of the repetitions in the book stem from historical repetitions and parallels, and the repeated chapter title format ("in which...") echoes nineteenth-century usage.

Performance: Rengin Altay's midwest-accented reading is flawless and lets the text speak for itself.