Stan Larson reviews the VOTH controversy and discusses Thomas Stuart Ferguson's loss of faith.
Stan Larson, Quest for the Gold Plates: Thomas Stuart Ferguson's Archaeological Search for the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Freethinker's Press, 1996), 144–149, 167–170
Ethan Smith (no relation of Joseph Smith), a popular Congregational minister in Poultney, Vermont, wrote View of the Hebrews in 1823, with an enlarged, second edition just two years later (fig. 26). This book presented the then-known information about the antiquities of the American Indians and how this data related to his interpretation of the lost ten tribes of Israel in the Bible." During this same period Ethan Smith wrote a series of articles on "The History of the Jews" in the local newspaper." He also published at Poultney The Blessing of Abraham Come on the Gentiles and View of the Trinity. Many of his Sunday sermons were also separately published. Several individuals have suggested that View of the Hebrews might have influenced Joseph Smith in the production of the Book of Mormon. In his later years Ferguson decided that Joseph Smith somehow had acquired a copy of Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews in order to write the Book of Mormon.
However, there is no direct evidence that Joseph Smith ever read Ethan Smith's book in the 1820s—before the Book of Mormon text was dictated in 1829. Dale L. Morgan, an historian of nineteenth-century Mormonism, suggested that even though the parallels between the Book of Mormon and the View of the Hebrews are impressive, "it is more important that the ideas common to the two books should have been the common property of their generation." The only definite indication of Joseph Smith's awareness of this book appeared in 1842, when an article was published in the church-owned Times andSeasons during his editorship. This article quoted from Josiah Priest, who in turn had quoted from Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews.
. . . Ferguson wrote in 1979 that he had been able (through the research of a close friend) to establish that "Oliver Cowdery was in Ethan Smith's congregation" in Poultney, Vermont, before meeting Joseph Smith. If he meant by this that Cowdery was a member of Ethan's church, then he went beyond the evidence, since it is only known that Cowdery's stepmother, Mrs. Keziah Pearce Austin, had enrolled as a member of that congregation. However, if Ferguson meant that Cowdery attended Sunday meetings in that church, then probably right. . . . Cowdery's half sisters (Rebecca Marie, Lucy, and Phoebe) were baptized on 2 August 1818 at the Congregational Church in Poultney, though Ethan Smith himself did not serve as minister there until three years later-from November 1821 through December 1826.
Ferguson continued to investigate the influence that Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews may have had on Joseph Smith. He recommended that a friend purchase a reprint copy of View of the Hebrews as a significant document in understanding the origin of the Book of Mormon. Because Ferguson learned about the Cowdery family's connection to Ethan Smith's congregation, he concluded that Oliver Cowdery had "influenced the text of the Book of Mormon by adding material ideas from Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews." His idea that Cowdery was a conscious conspirator with Joseph Smith in the production of the Book of Mormon goes against indications in the original manuscript that it was a dictated text with no signs of collusion."