Joseph Smith, Plural Marriage, and Revelation

Draft status. Every quotation below was read from a source opened for this draft, and every quotation, number and load-bearing claim carries a footnote to that source. Manuscript transcripts from the Joseph Smith Papers were read through the project's own extractor rather than off the rendered page, so that words a scribe struck out are never promoted into a quotation. Four bodies of scholarship the article names as the poles of the historical dispute — Bushman, Compton, Hales, and Newell and Avery — were not opened, and every place where the article describes their positions says so. The wife-by-wife register at research/plural-marriage-register.md keeps documented sealing, documented cohabitation, and evidence of sexual relations in three separate columns and totals none of them.

Summary

Joseph Smith married many women besides Emma Hale Smith. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now says so plainly in an official essay.¹ The practice began quietly in Kirtland in the mid-1830s, expanded in Nauvoo from 1841, was written down as a revelation on 12 July 1843, was denied in public by Joseph Smith and other leaders while it was going on, was announced openly in Utah in 1852, and was formally ended in stages between 1890 and 1904. That outline is not in dispute between careful critics and careful Latter-day Saint historians. What the outline means is very much in dispute.

This article tests one question. Does the whole sequence — the claimed revelation, the way it was carried out, the public denials, and the eventual reversal — look like the work of a prophet receiving God's will, or like a man managing a human situation with the tools available to him?

The evidence pulls in two directions and both directions are strong.

On one side, the practice was costly, not convenient. Men wept over it. Heber C. Kimball said "I never felt more sorrowful." Brigham Young said it made him desire the grave.¹ Women who entered it lost reputation and sometimes lost husbands, homes, and legal protection. Many of those women defended it for the rest of their lives in their own published words, and thousands of Latter-day Saint women rallied publicly for it. A man inventing a doctrine for his own appetite does not normally build one that his closest friends dread, that hands the same privilege to dozens of other men, that guarantees federal prosecution, and that is defended most loudly by the women in it.

On the other side, the specific shape of the revelation fits the specific situation of the man who dictated it with uncomfortable precision. Doctrine and Covenants 132 answers Joseph Smith's own questions, names Joseph Smith as the one person on earth holding the sealing power, threatens Emma Smith by name with destruction if she does not accept it, and provides an escape clause releasing him from the requirement of her consent. It arrives in July 1843, after roughly two years of sealings and after Emma had already learned of some of them. It reads less like a rule handed down before the fact than like a ruling handed down after it.

Two features of the record resist every friendly explanation offered so far.

The first is the public denials. Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, and the Relief Society under Emma Smith's presidency denounced polygamy in print while Joseph Smith was practicing it. Latter-day Saint historians answer that the denials targeted John C. Bennett's "spiritual wifery" and not authorized celestial marriage, and that exposure meant death. Both points are true. Neither makes the statements honest as ordinary readers received them. The Church's own Gospel Topics essay concedes that the denials were "carefully worded" and "implicitly" left room for the private practice.¹ Joseph F. Smith, an apostle and later Church President, wrote in 1886 that Joseph and Hyrum practiced the doctrine "notwithstanding their seeming denials as published in the Times and Seasons." That is the honest way to describe it, and it is a genuine problem for a prophetic claim, because the denials were not incidental. One of them was published over Emma Smith's own name.

The second is the reversal. Doctrine and Covenants 132 says that those who reject the covenant "are damned." It is still in the standard works today, with its plural-marriage verses untouched, while the practice it commands is grounds for excommunication. New plural marriages continued after the 1890 Manifesto, and the Church now admits it — the essay counts twenty-five in one incomplete ledger between 1890 and 1903.² A prophetic claim can survive a change in practice. It has more trouble surviving a change that was denied while it was happening, twice, thirty-four years apart.

The weakest popular criticisms should be retired. The number thirty-three or thirty-four wives is not a fact; it is one historian's reconstruction, and other historians reach different totals from the same evidence. The claim that Joseph Smith had sexual relations with women who had living husbands is not established for a single named case, and the historians who assert it and the historians who deny it are working from the same thin record. "Joseph Smith wanted sex and invented a doctrine to get it" is a reduction that the evidence does not support and that a fair reader should reject.

The defensible conclusion is narrower and harder. Plural marriage as Joseph Smith practiced it cannot be defended as ordinary nineteenth-century behavior, and it cannot be dismissed as ordinary appetite either. It was a religious system, sincerely believed by many of its participants, that also required its founder to deceive his own church in print, to place a named threat against his wife in the mouth of God, and to propose marriage to teenagers using promises of their families' salvation. A reader who already believes Joseph Smith was a prophet can absorb that. A reader deciding whether he was one will find that this record counts heavily against the claim.

The claim being tested

Four separate propositions get blurred together. They need separate verdicts.

1. Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage. This is established beyond reasonable dispute, by his own church's official essay, by the sworn affidavits of participants, and by the documentary record.
2. He did so under divine command. This is the claim actually at issue, and it cannot be settled by establishing proposition 1.
3. The practice was carried out in a way consistent with a divine command. This is a separate question about implementation — consent, age, honesty, and the treatment of Emma Smith.
4. The 1890 Manifesto and the 1904 Second Manifesto were themselves revelation. This tests whether the same authority that started the practice could credibly stop it.

The authority questions come from the authority matrix. On the first axis, present status, plural marriage scores strangely. Doctrine and Covenants 132 remains canonized scripture in the current standard works. Its plural-marriage verses have never been removed, softened, or footnoted out. Official Declaration 1 sits in the same volume. The Church teaches that monogamy is the standing law and excommunicates members who practice plural marriage, while continuing to publish, as scripture, a revelation commanding the opposite.

On the second axis, historical authority, plural marriage scores at the top. It was not a stray sermon. It was presented as revelation and commandment, taught by Joseph Smith privately and by Brigham Young and Orson Pratt publicly, printed in the Doctrine and Covenants from 1876, enforced through Church discipline, defended in the United States Supreme Court, and preached as a requirement for the highest degree of exaltation. No Latter-day Saint could dismiss it as one man's opinion.

On the third axis, prophetic significance, it scores at the top as well, in both directions. If it was revelation, it tests whether God commanded a practice the Church now forbids. If it was not, it tests whether a man who claimed to speak for God was mistaken about the most consequential private teaching of his life.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

A believing Latter-day Saint should recognize this section as fair.

The practice was a burden, not a prize. The men who first received it describe dread. Heber C. Kimball, quoted in the Church's official essay, said of learning the principle in 1841: "I never felt more sorrowful. I wept days. … I had a good wife. I was satisfied."¹ Brigham Young said that on learning of plural marriage "it was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave," and added, "I had to pray unceasingly, and I had to exercise faith and the Lord revealed to me the truth of it and that satisfied me."¹ Lucy Walker, later sealed to Joseph Smith, wrote that "Every feeling of my soul revolted against it."¹ Benjamin F. Johnson swore in 1870 that when Joseph Smith asked for his sister Almera, Johnson told him to his face that if the proposal was "offered to insult or prostitute my sister, I would take his life."³ These are not the reactions of men enjoying a convenient invention.

It was shared, not hoarded. A founder inventing a doctrine for his own benefit has no reason to extend it. Joseph Smith extended it immediately. The Church's essay counts about twenty-nine men and fifty women in plural marriages besides Joseph and his wives by June 1844, and at least 196 men and 521 women by the 1847 arrival in the Salt Lake Valley.¹ Within a decade the practice defined an entire society.

It was theologically integrated, not bolted on. The 1843 revelation is not primarily about plural wives. Most of its verses concern the eternal duration of marriage, the sealing power, and exaltation. Plural marriage arrives inside a coherent doctrine of eternal family relationships that remains central to Latter-day Saint worship today, long after the plural part ended. The revelation's argument is that a marriage sealed by proper authority survives death, that unsealed marriages do not, and that the patriarchs' plural marriages were an application of that same law. Whatever one concludes about the plural part, the framework is not an afterthought.

It had a scriptural warrant the Church did not invent. Abraham, Jacob, Gideon, David, and Solomon had multiple wives, and the Hebrew Bible nowhere records God condemning the practice as such. Nathan's rebuke of David concerns Uriah, not the number of David's wives, and in 2 Samuel 12:8 Nathan says that God gave David his master's wives. The Book of Mormon, which condemns plural marriage in Jacob 2, contains an explicit exception clause in Jacob 2:30: "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things."⁴ A restoration of all things, which was already Joseph Smith's stated program, plausibly includes restoring a patriarchal practice.

The women's own testimony is the strongest single line of evidence. Dozens of the women involved spent decades defending the practice in print, under their own names, at cost to themselves, when nothing compelled them to. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, sealed to Joseph Smith before her fifteenth birthday, published two pamphlets defending plural marriage as an adult. Emily Dow Partridge Young wrote in 1884, during the federal prosecutions, "For my part I am not ashamed of my religion … Neither am I ashamed of my name, nor would I be even if it was, EMILY DOW PARTRIDGE SMITH YOUNG, ETC." Lucy Walker Kimball described praying through despair and receiving "a powerful and irresistible testimony of the truth of plural marriage, which testimony has abided with me ever since."³ These women were the ones with the most to gain from repudiating it. They did the opposite.

The costs were real and were paid. Latter-day Saints lost property, liberty, and political rights over plural marriage. Men went to prison. Families went into hiding. The Church was dissolved as a corporation by act of Congress in 1887. A religious movement that manufactures a doctrine for convenience does not usually keep it for forty years while the federal government dismantles it.

That is the case at full strength. The rest of this article tests it.

Kirtland: Fanny Alger, about 1835–1836

The first episode is also the least documented. Fanny Alger, born about 1818 in New York, was a young woman working in the Smith household in Kirtland, Ohio. Something happened between her and Joseph Smith in about 1835 or 1836. She left Kirtland; the Alger family moved to Missouri and then to Indiana, where she married Solomon Custer in 1836 and never joined the Latter-day Saints again.

The Church's official essay treats this as the first plural marriage: "Fragmentary evidence suggests that Joseph Smith acted on the angel's first command by marrying a plural wife, Fanny Alger, in Kirtland, Ohio, in the mid-1830s. Several Latter-day Saints who had lived in Kirtland reported decades later that Joseph Smith had married Alger, who lived and worked in the Smith household, after he had obtained her consent and that of her parents." The essay's own hedge is worth noting: "Little is known about this marriage, and nothing is known about the conversations between Joseph and Emma regarding Alger."¹

The contrary reading came from Oliver Cowdery, who was the Church's Second Elder and the second of the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon. On 21 January 1838 Cowdery wrote to Joseph Smith from Far West. The letter is mostly about surveying land and about Cowdery's health; its last paragraph turns: "I learn from Kirtland, by the last letters, that you have publickly said, that when you were here I confessed to you that I had willfully lied about you— this compels me to ask you to correct that statement, and give me an explanation—until which you and myself are two."⁵ The letter never names Fanny Alger. The Joseph Smith Papers editors supply the connection and state the disagreement without resolving it: Cowdery "was almost certainly referring to a dispute the two men had regarding JS's relationship with Fanny Alger, a young woman who had worked in the Smith household. Cowdery viewed JS's relationship with Alger as adulterous, while other church members, including members of Alger's extended family, later stated that JS had married Alger as his first plural wife."⁵

What Cowdery actually said in his own words about the Alger matter survives best in a letter to his brother Warren A. Cowdery of the same date, in the same letterbook, which is where the often-quoted "dirty, nasty, filthy affair" phrase comes from. That letter was not opened for this draft, and this article therefore quotes nothing from it. What can be quoted is the charge sheet read against Cowdery at his Church trial in Far West on 12 April 1838, three months later. The second of four charges was "For seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith jr, by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultry &c."⁶

Three things about this episode deserve care.

First, it matters that the contemporary witness is hostile and the friendly witnesses are late. Cowdery's complaint dates from January 1838, within two or three years of the events, and the Church court that tried him three months later put the adultery insinuation in writing as a charge against him. The accounts describing a marriage ceremony come from Levi Ward Hancock, Benjamin F. Johnson and others writing decades afterward in Utah, when establishing that Joseph Smith rather than Brigham Young originated plural marriage had become an institutional priority.⁵ Both sets of witnesses had motives.

Second, it matters that there is no plural-marriage doctrine on the record in 1835 or 1836 for Joseph Smith to have been obeying. The revelation was not dictated until 1843. The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants contained an "Article on Marriage" stating the opposite. Joseph F. Smith later dated the private revelation to 1831, writing that "the great and glorious principle of plural marriage was first revealed to Joseph Smith in 1831, but being forbidden to make it public, or to teach it, as a doctrine of the Gospel, at that time, he confided the facts to only a very few of his intimate associates."³ That dating is a recollection published fifty-five years after the year it names, and the article does not rest anything on it.

Third, and this cuts the other way, an affair and a plural marriage are not easy to distinguish from the outside in 1836, and Cowdery was not in a position to know which he was looking at. The word he chose reflects his judgment, not necessarily a fact he witnessed. Fanny Alger herself never described the relationship in any surviving document. Her age at the time — about seventeen or eighteen, if the birth year of about 1818 is right — is itself an estimate.

The honest verdict: something happened, the participants disagreed about what it was, and no document written by either principal survives to settle it. It should not be used as a strong data point in either direction.

Nauvoo: the sequence of sealings, 1841–1844

The Nauvoo record is much better. The first securely dated Nauvoo sealing is Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith on 5 April 1841, performed by Joseph Bates Noble. Noble swore to it before a notary in June 1869, and Jenson printed the affidavit in 1887. Noble also recorded Joseph Smith's words when the principle was first explained to him in the fall of 1840: "In revealing this to you, I have placed my life in your hands, therefore do not in an evil hour betray me to my enemies."³ From that date until Joseph Smith's death on 27 June 1844, the sealings came steadily.

The best surviving evidentiary core is a set of affidavits gathered in 1869 and 1870 by Joseph F. Smith, then an apostle, and printed together in Andrew Jenson's Historical Record in May 1887. They are sworn statements taken before notaries and probate judges. They were also taken twenty-five to thirty years after the events, in the middle of a public dispute with the Reorganized Church over whether Joseph Smith or Brigham Young had originated plural marriage. Both facts must stay attached to them. They are the best evidence available, and they are late, interested evidence.³

Jenson's 1887 list named twenty-seven women. His framing sentence reads: "we find that the following named ladies, besides a few others, about whom we have been unable to get all the necessary information, were sealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith during the last three years of his life." That last clause does not fit two names on his own list — he calls Fanny Alger and Lucinda Harris among the first sealed, years earlier — which is a sign of how loosely the list was assembled.³ His list, in his order: Louisa Beman, Fanny Alger, Lucinda Harris, Zina D. Huntington, Prescindia L. Huntington, Eliza Roxcy Snow, Sarah Ann Whitney, Desdemona W. Fullmer, Helen Mar Kimball, Eliza M. Partridge, Emily D. Partridge, Lucy Walker, Almera W. Johnson, Malissa Lott, Fanny Young, Maria Lawrence, Sarah Lawrence, Hannah Ells, Flora Ann Woodworth, Ruth D. Vose, Mary Elizabeth Rollins, Olive Frost, Rhoda Richards, Sylvia Sessions, Maria Winchester, Elvira A. Cowles, and Sarah M. Cleveland.

Three different things are usually collapsed into one number, and this article refuses to collapse them. A documented sealing means a surviving record naming the woman, the date and usually the officiator. Documented cohabitation means a witness stating that the two lived or lodged together as husband and wife. Evidence of sexual relations means a statement by a participant or a direct witness that sexual relations occurred. A case can have the first without the second and the second without the third. Counting them together is the commonest error in the popular literature on both sides.

Scored that way, against the sources this project actually opened, the record is far thinner than either side's rhetoric suggests.

Every other cell reads "none opened," which does not mean no evidence exists — it means this project has not read it. The full row-by-row version, with the reasons, is in the register. Benjamin F. Johnson's is the one row where all three classes are satisfied by a single named witness: he swore that in May 1843 Joseph Smith stayed at his house, "lodging at my house with my sister as man and wife (and to my certain knowledge he occupied the same bed with her)."³ John Benbow swore that Hannah Ells "boarded at his house two months" and that "President Smith frequently visited his wife Hannah at his (J. B's.) house."³

That 1887 list is the base on which every later reconstruction has been built, and every later reconstruction differs from it. The wife-by-wife evidence table in research/plural-marriage-register.md records each name with its date, the woman's age, her marital status, the quality of the evidence, and which historians disagree about that row. The total is a range, not a number, and the article says so wherever the number appears.

The proposals themselves followed a pattern that the sources describe consistently. Joseph Smith approached a close associate first — a father, a brother, an employer — rather than the woman directly. He asked for secrecy before explaining. He often invoked the angel with the drawn sword. And in several cases he attached a promise of salvation for the woman's whole family.

Benjamin F. Johnson's 1870 affidavit gives the clearest sequence. Joseph Smith took him by the arm for a walk, led him to "a secluded spot within an adjacent grove," explained plural marriage, and then asked for Johnson's sister Almera. When Johnson threatened his life, Joseph Smith replied, with a smile, "Benjamin, you will never see that day, but you shall live to know that it is true and rejoice in it." He then told Johnson that when he spoke to his sister, "When you open your mouth you shall be able to comprehend, and you shall not want for evidence nor words."³

Lorenzo Snow swore in 1869 that Joseph Smith told him "the Lord had revealed it unto him and commanded him to have women sealed to him as wives, that he foresaw the trouble that would follow and sought to turn away from the commandment, that an angel from heaven appeared before him with a drawn sword, threatening him with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment."³ Benjamin F. Johnson swore separately that Joseph Smith taught his mother the same thing in his hearing, "declaring that an angel appeared unto him with a drawn sword, threatening to slay him if he did not proceed to fulfill the law that had been given to him."³

Two features of this pattern deserve comment. The angel with the drawn sword is attested by several independent witnesses and is not a later invention; the Church's official essay accepts it. But it is a claim that only Joseph Smith could make and that no one else could check, deployed at precisely the moment when a listener was refusing. And the promise of family salvation converts a marriage proposal into a religious obligation binding on people who were not present to consent.

The revelation of 12 July 1843

William Clayton, Joseph Smith's private clerk, swore out the fullest account on 16 February 1874.³ It is a later firsthand account, thirty-one years after the event, by a participant with a stake in the outcome. It is also detailed, checkable in several particulars, and corroborated in part by Joseph C. Kingsbury's separate 1886 statement.

Clayton describes Joseph and Hyrum Smith entering the office above the Nauvoo brick store on the morning of 12 July 1843, arguing about Emma. Hyrum proposed: "If you will write the revelation on celestial marriage, I will take and read it to Emma, and I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace." Joseph smiled and said, "You do not know Emma as well as I do."³

Clayton then records a striking detail. "Hyrum very urgently requested Joseph to write the revelation by means of the Urim and Thummim, but Joseph, in reply, said he did not need to, for he knew the revelation perfectly from beginning to end." The revelation was dictated straight through, Clayton wrote it down "sentence by sentence," and Joseph pronounced the reading correct.³

The purpose is thus documented by the friendliest possible witness. The revelation was written on that day, in that form, to persuade Emma Smith.

Hyrum returned. "Hyrum replied that he had never received a more severe talking to in his life, that Emma was very bitter and full of resentment and anger." Joseph said, "I told you you did not know Emma as well as I did."³

Newel K. Whitney asked to copy it. Joseph C. Kingsbury made the copy the next day and read it back against the original while Whitney held it. Two or three days later, Clayton says, Joseph told several people that Emma "had so teased, and urgently entreated him for the privilege of destroying it, that he became so weary of her teasing, and to get rid of her annoyance, he told her she might destroy it and she had done so."³ The Kingsbury copy survived, passed to Brigham Young, and is the manuscript in the Church History Library today. The Joseph Smith Papers describe its custody as continuous, and quote Brigham Young telling an audience in 1852 that "this Revelation has been in my possession many years."

So the document that became canonized scripture is a copy of a text that its principal addressee burned within days of hearing it.

What Doctrine and Covenants 132 actually says

The text is worth reading closely, because summaries in both directions distort it.

It opens as an answer to a question Joseph Smith asked. "Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines—"⁷

Verse 4 sets the stakes: "For behold, I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory."⁷

Verse 7 locates the authority in one man, in a parenthesis: "and I have appointed unto my servant Joseph to hold this power in the last days, and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred."⁷

The patriarchal argument runs through verses 29 to 39. "God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. And why did she do it? Because this was the law." Abraham's concubines "was accounted unto him for righteousness, because they were given unto him, and he abode in my law." Isaac and Jacob "have entered into their exaltation … and are not angels but are gods." David and Solomon are placed in the same category: "David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants … and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me." David's fall is attributed solely to Uriah.⁷

Verses 51 to 56 address Emma Smith by name. Verse 52: "let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me; and those who are not pure, and have said they were pure, shall be destroyed." Verse 54: "And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law." Verse 55 promises Joseph, if she refuses, "an hundred-fold in this world, of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, houses and lands, wives and children." Verse 56 asks her to forgive "my servant Joseph his trespasses."⁷

Verses 61 to 65 give the operating rule, the "law of Sarah." A man may take a second wife if "the first give her consent," and the wives must be virgins "and have vowed to no other man." Verse 62: "And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him." Verse 64 warns the first wife that if her husband teaches her this law, "then shall she believe and administer unto him, or she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord your God; for I will destroy her." Verse 65 provides the release: if she "receive not this law," the husband "is exempt from the law of Sarah."⁷

Four observations follow directly from the text, and none of them requires hostility.

The consent requirement contains its own cancellation. Verse 61 requires the first wife's consent. Verse 65 removes the requirement if she withholds it. As a rule for conduct, that is not a requirement at all. The Church's own essay reads the two verses the same way: "The revelation on marriage required that a wife give her consent before her husband could enter into plural marriage. Nevertheless, toward the end of the revelation, the Lord said that if the first wife 'receive not this law' … the husband would be 'exempt from the law of Sarah,' presumably the requirement that the husband gain the consent of the first wife before marrying additional women."¹

The revelation is retroactive. It was dictated in July 1843. The sealings had begun in April 1841, and roughly two dozen had already occurred. Verse 50 has God say "I have seen your sacrifices, and will forgive all your sins." Verse 60 says "he shall do the sacrifice which I require at his hands for his transgressions."⁷ A revelation authorizing a practice already two years old, and speaking of transgressions already committed, is a different kind of document from a command issued in advance.

The threats are personal and one-directional. God is made to threaten Emma Smith by name with destruction, twice, in a text produced specifically to persuade her, dictated by her husband, who is the sole beneficiary of her compliance. No comparable threat is directed at Joseph Smith. Verse 60 instead says "Let no one, therefore, set on my servant Joseph; for I will justify him."⁷

The virginity condition does not match the practice. Verse 61 restricts the plural wives to virgins "vowed to no other man." A substantial number of the women sealed to Joseph Smith were already married to living men. Whatever those sealings were, they were not what verse 61 authorizes.

The believing answer to the last three points is that a revelation may address a live situation, that God may speak sharply, and that eternity-only sealings fall outside verse 61 because they are not marriages in the sense verse 61 contemplates. Those answers are coherent. They are also unfalsifiable, and they leave the pattern intact: at each point where the text could have constrained Joseph Smith, it releases him.

Doctrine and Covenants 132 against Jacob 2

The Book of Mormon condemns plural marriage in the strongest terms the book uses for anything. Jacob 2:24: "Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord." Verse 27: "there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none." Verse 28: "For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women. And whoredoms are an abomination before me."⁴

Doctrine and Covenants 132:38–39 says the reverse about the same two men. "David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants … and in nothing did they sin save in those things which they received not of me. David's wives and concubines were given unto him of me."⁷

The tension is direct and the two texts are both canonized. Latter-day Saints resolve it with Jacob 2:30: "For if I will, saith the Lord of Hosts, raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things." On that reading, monogamy is the standing law and plural marriage is a commanded exception. Both official essays use exactly this argument, and it is a legitimate reading of the verse.

Three difficulties remain, and a fair treatment states them.

Jacob 2:24 calls David's and Solomon's plural marriages "abominable," full stop, with no exception attached. Doctrine and Covenants 132:39 says David's wives "were given unto him of me, by the hand of Nathan, my servant." One text says the thing was abominable; the other says God gave it. The exception clause in Jacob 2:30 explains how a later people might be commanded to practice plurality. It does not explain how the same practice can be both abominable and divinely given in the same two men.

Jacob 2:30's stated purpose is to "raise up seed." No child of Joseph Smith by a plural wife has been documented. The Church's own essay makes the reproductive argument about the practice generally — "Plural marriage did result in an increased number of children born to believing parents" — and does not claim children for Joseph Smith himself.¹ Genetic testing of several long-proposed candidates has been published, and this draft has not yet verified those studies at first hand; the section is marked for completion. What can be said now is that the reproductive rationale fits Utah polygamy far better than it fits Nauvoo.

Jacob 2:31–33 gives the reason for the prohibition: God has "seen the sorrow, and heard the mourning of the daughters of my people," and will not let "the cries of the fair daughters of this people … come up unto me against the men of my people." Jacob 2:35 says "Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives."⁴ That is precisely the harm the Nauvoo practice produced in Emma Smith and in others. The Book of Mormon's own stated concern is the one the later revelation overrides.

None of this makes the Latter-day Saint reading impossible. It does mean that the reading requires the exception clause to carry a great deal of weight, in a case where the exception's own stated purpose was not achieved.

Sealings to women with living husbands

This is the hardest fact in the record and the one where sloppy numbers circulate most freely.

Some of the women sealed to Joseph Smith were, at the time of the sealing, legally married to men who were alive, present in Nauvoo, and in most cases faithful members of the Church. The Church's essay states it plainly: "Following his marriage to Louisa Beaman and before he married other single women, Joseph Smith was sealed to a number of women who were already married."¹

Historians agree that these sealings happened. They disagree about how many there were, what they meant, and whether they involved sexual relations. That disagreement is the honest state of the field, and this article reports it rather than picking a winner by assertion. The wife-by-wife breakdown, with each historian's figure for each row, is in research/plural-marriage-register.md.

What both sides agree on. The sealings were performed. The first husbands generally continued living with their wives. Several of the women later said the sealings were "for eternity only." Complaints from the first husbands are almost entirely absent from the contemporary record. No child has been shown by DNA to have come from any of these unions.

Where they divide. One reading, associated most strongly with Todd Compton, treats these as marriages in the ordinary sense unless shown otherwise, and holds that the distinction between "time and eternity" and "eternity only" was not as clean in practice as the later testimony suggests. The opposing reading, argued at book length by Brian Hales, holds that every one of these sealings was eternity-only and non-sexual, and that the burden falls on anyone claiming otherwise to produce evidence for a specific case. Richard Lyman Bushman sits between them, and Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery read the whole sequence from Emma Smith's side and find it far more damaging to her than the institutional histories allow. None of these four works was opened for this draft, and these one-line characterizations are summaries of the shape of the dispute, not citations. A reader who wants a position defended should go to the books.⁸

What each side rests on. The eternity-only reading rests on the women's own later statements, on the absence of any first husband's complaint, on the absence of any documented child, and on the theological availability of a category that would make such a sealing intelligible. The opposing reading rests on the fact that the surviving statements are late and were given in a legal and institutional context that rewarded exactly the answers they gave, on the ambiguity of the word "wife" in these documents, and on the fact that Joseph Smith did have documented sexual relations with several plural wives who were not previously married, so the practice cannot be assumed to have been uniformly celibate.

The decisive point for a reader is this. The evidence for sexual relations in the already-married cases is absent, not negative. Absence of evidence in a record this thin, about a practice this deliberately concealed, cannot establish either conclusion. Anyone who tells a reader that the answer is settled — in either direction — is going beyond the sources.

What can be said without dispute is that Joseph Smith was sealed to women who had living husbands, that this is not what Doctrine and Covenants 132:61 authorizes, and that the Church's official essay offers three speculative explanations for it while conceding that "Neither these women nor Joseph explained much about these sealings."¹ This article gives no number for these sealings, because it has not audited one. The Church's essay gives none either. The register records which rows this project could and could not fill from opened sources, and the answer for the marital-status column is: almost none.⁹

Age and consent

Two questions must be kept apart: whether the ages were unusual for the 1840s, and whether the manner of proposal permitted meaningful consent. The answers differ.

The ages. The Church's essay states the range: "Most of those sealed to Joseph Smith were between 20 and 40 years of age at the time of their sealing to him. The oldest, Fanny Young, was 56 years old. The youngest was Helen Mar Kimball, daughter of Joseph's close friends Heber C. and Vilate Murray Kimball, who was sealed to Joseph several months before her 15th birthday." Helen Mar Kimball was fourteen. The essay immediately adds the strongest answer available on that case: Helen "spoke of her sealing to Joseph as being 'for eternity alone,' suggesting that the relationship did not involve sexual relations."¹

The essay adds: "Marriage at such an age, inappropriate by today's standards, was legal in that era, and some women married in their mid-teens." Both halves of that sentence are true and neither is the whole picture. Marriage at fourteen was legal. It was not typical. The comparison the essay invites — that "some women married in their mid-teens" — is true and uninformative, because it reports the tail of a distribution without reporting its centre. This project did not open a demographic study of antebellum American marriage ages, so the article states no median and asks the reader to notice only that the essay does not state one either.⁹ The honest position is that the sentence is doing rhetorical work its evidence does not support, in either direction.

The consent. This is the more serious question, and it does not depend on the ages at all.

Helen Mar Kimball's sealing was arranged by her father. Heber C. Kimball had himself been commanded by Joseph Smith to take a plural wife, and his daughter described the effect on him in her 1884 pamphlet: "his anxious and haggard looks betrayed him daily and hourly, and finally his misery became so unbearable that it was impossible to control his feelings," and at night "he would wring his hands and weep like a child, and beseech the Lord to be merciful and reveal to her this celestial principle, for he himself could not break his vow of secrecy."¹⁰ That is the man who then offered his fourteen-year-old daughter, with the understanding that the family's eternal standing was bound up in her answer.

The same structure appears elsewhere. Benjamin F. Johnson was told that if he spoke to his sister, "you shall not want for evidence nor words." Lucy Walker was told to pray about it and promised a testimony if she did, after Joseph Smith had already told her the answer she should receive. In several cases the proposal came attached to a promise of salvation or exaltation for the woman's parents and siblings.

Set aside the ages entirely. A proposal that comes from a religious leader whom the woman believes speaks for God, that is delivered through her father or brother, that must be kept secret from the community and often from the man's own wife, that carries a promise of her family's eternal welfare, and that arrives with the report of an angel who threatened the proposer with death if he did not proceed — that proposal does not leave much room for a free "no." Several of the women said so themselves. Lucy Walker recorded that "Every feeling of my soul revolted against it," and that she found peace only after nights of prayer.¹ Helen Mar Whitney wrote as an adult defending the principle, and also recorded what it cost her father to obey it.¹⁰

That some of them said yes freely is entirely possible and, for some, likely. That the structure made a genuine no very difficult is not seriously arguable.

Emma Smith

Emma Hale Smith is the most important witness in this story and the one who left the least.

She was the president of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, organized in March 1842 with Joseph Smith's blessing. In that office she presided over the Church's most visible campaign against sexual immorality — a campaign conducted while her husband was sealing plural wives.

In March 1844 the Relief Society adopted, unanimously and at four separate overflowing meetings, a document called "The Voice of Innocence from Nauvoo." It was drafted by William W. Phelps, edited by Emma Smith, read by her to the society on 9 March and approved at three further meetings on 9 and 16 March, and published in the Nauvoo Neighbor on 20 March above the names of Emma Smith and Hannah M. Ells.¹¹ Joseph Smith afterward blamed it for his troubles, saying on 26 May 1844 that he "never had any fuss with these men until that Female Relief Society brought out the paper against adulterers and adulteresses."¹¹ Its third resolution reads:¹¹

Resolved unanimously that while we render credence to the doctrines of Paul, that neither the man is without the woman; neither is woman without the man in the Lord, yet we raise our voices and hands against John C. Bennett's "Spiritual Wife System," as a scheme of profligates to seduce women; and they that harp upon it, wish to make it popular for the convenience of their own cupidity: wherefore, while the marriage bed, undefiled is honorable, let polygamy, bigamy, fornication, adultery, and prostitution, be frowned out of the hearts of honest men to drop in the gulf of fallen nature, "where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched!" and let all the Saints say Amen!

The Church Historian's Press, the Church's own scholarly imprint, annotates the moment without softening it:¹¹ "By this point, Emma Smith opposed plural marriage as practiced by her husband and others in Nauvoo. She thus encouraged Relief Society members to follow the published statements of Joseph Smith and the church, as well as her husband's teachings 'from the Stand,' implying that they should abide by his public remarks against spiritual wifery rather than any private teachings regarding plural marriage."

That is a remarkable sentence to find in an official publication. The president of the Relief Society was directing the women of the Church to believe the public teaching rather than the private one, because she disagreed with the private one.

Emma's position moved. The affidavits establish that she consented to at least four sealings — Eliza and Emily Partridge, Maria and Sarah Lawrence — and was present at two of them. Emily Partridge's own account as Jenson prints it says "Emma was present. She gave her free and full consent."³ Emily's wording is careful and worth noticing: Emma "had always, up to this time, been very kind to me and my sister Eliza."³ A separate account has Emily secretly sealed to Joseph Smith in March 1843, two months before the ceremony Emma attended, which would make the May ceremony a repetition performed for Emma's benefit. The source for that earlier date was not opened for this draft, and the article does not rely on it. Lucy Walker swore that Emma consented to the marriage "of at least four other girls to her husband," and that she "was well aware that he associated with them as wives within the meaning of all that word implies," which she supported by saying Emma "on several occasions, kept guard at the door to prevent disinterested persons from intruding, when these ladies were in the house."³

She burned the revelation. Clayton's account has Joseph telling several people that Emma "had so teased, and urgently entreated him for the privilege of destroying it" that he let her, and she did.³ A separate certificate from Hyrum Smith's daughter Lovina Walker, signed in 1869, reports Emma telling her in 1846 "that she, Emma Smith, was present and witnessed the marrying or sealing of Eliza Partridge, Emily Partridge, Maria Lawrence and Sarah Lawrence to her husband, Joseph Smith, and that she gave her consent thereto." That is hearsay at one remove, recorded twenty-three years after the conversation.³

And she denied the whole thing to the end. In 1879, shortly before her death, she told her son Joseph Smith III that his father had never taught or practiced plural marriage. That statement, published in the Saints' Advocate as the "Last Testimony of Sister Emma," is what provoked Joseph F. Smith to publish the affidavits.

Emma Smith's denial is almost certainly false as a matter of fact. It is also the testimony of the person best positioned to know, given under her own name, at the end of her life, with nothing left to gain. Whatever else it shows, it shows what the practice cost her: she was willing to be wrong in public forever rather than admit what her husband had done.

The public denials

This is where the article must be most careful and most honest.

Between 1842 and 1844, Joseph Smith and other leaders publicly denied practicing polygamy while practicing it. The denials appeared in the Times and Seasons, in the Nauvoo Neighbor, in sworn affidavits, and from the stand. Emma Smith's Relief Society passed one of them. The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, still the Church's published law of marriage, printed a "Statement on Marriage" whose fourth paragraph answered the charge directly: "Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again."¹² It remained in print, unretracted, through the whole Nauvoo period. This article relies on Joseph F. Smith's 1886 characterization of those denials and on the Church's own current description of them, not on the original numbers of the Times and Seasons, which were not opened for this draft. What was opened, and what was not, is listed in research/denials-and-public-record.md.

The Church does not dispute the fact. Its official essay says: "The rumors prompted members and leaders to issue carefully worded denials that denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated 'celestial' plural marriage. The statements emphasized that the Church practiced no marital law other than monogamy while implicitly leaving open the possibility that individuals, under direction of God's living prophet, might do so."

Joseph F. Smith, writing in the Deseret News on 20 May 1886 while he was an apostle, put it more bluntly:³

Let all the Latter-day Saints know that Joseph Smith, the martyred Prophet, is responsible to God and the world for this doctrine, and let every soul know that he and his brother Hyrum did practice the doctrine in their lifetime, and until their death, notwithstanding their seeming denials as published in the Times and Seasons, and which are so fervently relied upon as evidence against the fact by a certain class of anti-polygamists. Those denials can be explained, and have been, and while they are true in the sense, and for the purpose for which they were designed, they are not denials of plural or celestial marriage as taught by Joseph and Hyrum Smith and practiced at the time by both of them, and many others in prominent standing in the Church. These seeming denials themselves are specific proofs of the existence of the true coin, the counterfeit of which they denounced.

Three explanations are offered. Each has real force. Each falls short.

The technical distinction. "Polygamy" and "spiritual wifery," on this account, named something different from authorized celestial marriage — a system of seduction associated with John C. Bennett, without priesthood authority, without sealing, without covenant. Denouncing that was not lying about this.

The distinction is real. Bennett's conduct was real, it was scandalous, and Joseph Smith excommunicated him for it. But the distinction only works if the audience shared it, and the audience did not. A member of the Church in Nauvoo reading in the Times and Seasons that the Church practiced no marital law but monogamy would conclude that the Church practiced no marital law but monogamy. That was the intended effect. A statement crafted so that the speaker can defend its literal words while knowing that every hearer will draw a false conclusion is the classic form of a lie by technicality, and calling it "carefully worded" does not change what it did.

The strongest evidence that this was understood at the time is that the denials worked. The dissenters who published the Nauvoo Expositor in June 1844 were not confused men who had misheard a technical term. They were insiders — William Law had been Second Counselor in the First Presidency — who had been taught the doctrine privately and objected to the gap between it and the public teaching.

The danger of exposure. Latter-day Saints in Missouri had been driven from their homes under an extermination order. Joseph Smith had been jailed and nearly killed. Illinois in 1844 was hostile. Admitting polygamy publicly would have brought mob violence, and it eventually did. This is the strongest of the three explanations, and it is not a rationalization: the danger was real and it killed him.

But it proves less than it appears to. Danger explains silence. It does not explain affirmative denial. Joseph Smith could have refused to discuss his private life, as he did on many other subjects. He could have declined to publish denials over his own name and over Emma's. The choice to affirm the opposite of the truth in print is a further step beyond concealment, and it required cooperation from people who were told to sign statements they knew or suspected to be false.

It also cuts against the theological claim. If the practice was a divine commandment on which exaltation depended, the ordinary prophetic response to danger in scripture is not denial. Daniel opened his windows toward Jerusalem. The apostles told the Sanhedrin they must obey God rather than men. A defender may reply that God gave Joseph Smith different instructions, and that reply cannot be refuted; but it also cannot be tested, and it concedes that the behavior does not match the pattern.

Legal peril. Bigamy was a crime in Illinois. Admitting it in print would have supplied the prosecution's case. This is true, and it explains why a lawyer would advise silence. It does not explain the affirmative denials any better than the previous point, and it sits awkwardly with the Church's later position, taken repeatedly from 1852 onward, that plural marriage was a religious duty that must be practiced whatever the civil law said.

The evaluation. The denials are a genuine problem and should not be softened. They were not one slip. They ran for at least two years, involved multiple leaders, were published in the Church's own newspapers, and drew in Emma Smith and the Relief Society. The most defensible thing that can be said for Joseph Smith is that he believed he was protecting a divine commandment from men who would kill him for it, and that in his own mind the technical distinction was not a trick but a real difference. The most that can be said against him is that a prophet's authority rests on his truthfulness, and he spent two years teaching his own church something he knew to be false about his own conduct.

A skeptical reader will find that this alone is close to decisive. A believing reader will find that it is survivable. Neither should be told that it is small.

The Nauvoo Expositor and Carthage

On 7 June 1844 the dissenters published the single issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. The Church's own history topic names them: "a former First Counselor in the First Presidency, William Law; Law's brother, Wilson; Charles Ivins; Charles and Robert Foster; and Francis and Chauncey Higbee."¹³ Their central charge concerned plural marriage, along with Joseph Smith's teachings on the nature of God and his combination of religious and civic power.

On 10 June the Nauvoo City Council, with Joseph Smith presiding as mayor, declared the paper a public nuisance and ordered the press destroyed. The Church's history topic describes what happened: "the marshal and his posse of approximately 100 men removed the press, scattered the type, and burned the remaining copies of the newspaper." It also gives the Church's own legal assessment: "Scholars have concluded that the Nauvoo City Council acted legally to destroy copies of the newspaper but may have exceeded its authority by destroying the press itself."¹³

The destruction produced the charge that took Joseph Smith to Carthage. He and Hyrum submitted to arrest, were further charged with treason, and were murdered by a mob on 27 June 1844.

The chain from the plural-marriage secret to the deaths at Carthage is direct, and this article does not retell it; the theocratic and violent dimensions belong to persecution, theocracy, and violence in early Mormonism. What belongs here is one point. The men who published the Expositor were murdered men's opponents, not disinterested reporters, and they exaggerated. They were also, on the central factual question, telling the truth. Joseph Smith was practicing plural marriage, and he had denied it. The press that said so was destroyed by the man it accused, acting in his capacity as mayor, with a council he led.

Utah: the practice in the open, 1852–1890

Brigham Young brought both the practice and the manuscript revelation west. On 29 August 1852, in a special conference in Salt Lake City, Orson Pratt publicly announced and defended plural marriage, and the revelation was read aloud. It was printed in a Deseret News Extra that September. Neither the conference minutes nor the Deseret News Extra was opened for this draft; the date and sequence are given as the standard account and should be checked against the originals before publication. For the first time the Church defended in public what it had denied in public ten years earlier.

The scale was substantial but smaller than nineteenth-century outsiders imagined. The Church's official essay gives the figures: "Probably half of those living in Utah Territory in 1857 experienced life in a polygamous family as a husband, wife, or child at some time during their lives. By 1870, 25 to 30 percent of the population lived in polygamous households, and it appears that the percentage continued to decrease over the next 20 years."¹⁴ It also corrects a persistent myth: "two-thirds of polygamist men had only two wives at a time."¹⁴ The underlying demographic studies and their disagreements are summarized in research/plural-marriage-register.md.

The federal response escalated through three decades. The essay's summary is accurate: the anti-bigamy legislation began in 1862; the Supreme Court ruled against the Church in Reynolds v. United States in 1879, holding that "religious belief was protected by law, religious practice was not"; the Edmunds Act of 1882 made unlawful cohabitation punishable by six months' imprisonment and a $300 fine; and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 "dissolved the corporation of the Church and directed that all Church property over $50,000 be forfeited to the government."²

This is the period in which the Latter-day Saint case is at its strongest. Men went to prison rather than abandon their families. George Q. Cannon, a counselor in the First Presidency, emerged from five months in the Utah penitentiary writing, "My cell has seemed a heavenly place, and I feel that angels have been there."² Whatever plural marriage was in Nauvoo, in Utah it was a costly public conviction held by ordinary people at real expense.

The women who defended it

Any account that leaves out the voices of the women who defended plural marriage is not describing the nineteenth century. They were not silent, and they were not passive.

Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, sealed to Joseph Smith at fourteen, published two pamphlets in her forties defending the practice. In Why We Practice Plural Marriage (1884) she opened by stating her purpose: "My purpose in publishing another pamphlet on the subject of plural marriage is to throw more light upon it, and to show forth the foolishness and inconsistency of those who hold it up as a 'foul stain that pollutes the very soil where it exists.'"¹⁰ She wrote as a citizen as well as a believer, and much of the pamphlet is a political argument against the disfranchisement bills then before Congress.¹⁰

She also recorded the most humanly credible thing in the whole literature: her mother's account of how she came to accept it. Vilate Kimball, kept in the dark by her husband, prayed until "the vision of her mind was opened, and as darkness flees before the morning sun, so did her sorrow and the groveling things of earth vanish away." What she saw was "the order of celestial marriage, in all its beauty and glory, together with the great exaltation and honor it would confer upon her." She returned to Heber saying, "Heber, what you kept from me the Lord has shown to me." Helen adds that her mother "never saw so happy a man as father was when she described the vision and told him she was satisfied and knew that it was from God."¹⁰

Lucy Walker Kimball's statement is the fullest description of the internal process. She began indignant, telling Joseph Smith "that I did not wish him ever to mention it to me again, as my feelings and education revolted against any thing of such a nature." She described herself before praying as gloomy, downcast and tired of life. Then: "after I had poured out my heart's contents before God, I at once became calm and composed; a feeling of happiness took possession of me, and at the same time I received a powerful and irresistible testimony of the truth of plural marriage, which testimony has abided with me ever since."³

Emily Dow Partridge Young testified under oath in the Temple Lot case in 1892 that she had been sealed to Joseph Smith and had had sexual relations with him. That deposition was not opened for this draft, and the article rests nothing on it; what is verified here is only her own account, printed by Jenson, that Emma Smith "was present" at the May 1843 sealing and "gave her free and full consent."³

Zina Huntington's line, quoted in the Church's essay, states the cost exactly: "I made a greater sacrifice than to give my life … for I never anticipated again to be looked upon as an honorable woman." She added: "I searched the scripture & by humble prayer to my Heavenly Father I obtained a testimony for myself."¹

Latter-day Saint women also organized politically in defense of the practice, and Utah's territorial legislature enfranchised women in 1870. No source for the January 1870 "indignation meeting" or for the suffrage vote was opened for this draft, so the article states the outline and claims no detail; a human should source it or cut it.

These facts do not settle whether the revelation was divine. They do settle that the practice cannot be described as something done to women who had no voice. Many of them had a voice, used it, and used it in favor.

The honest counterweight is that this evidence is selected by survival. The women who defended plural marriage in print were the ones who stayed in the Church and moved to Utah. The women who refused proposals, left, or suffered in silence did not publish pamphlets. Sarah Pratt and the Law family left bitter accounts. Emma Smith left almost nothing but a denial. Testimony from inside a community is real evidence about that community. It is not a random sample.

The Manifesto and what came after

By 1890 the legal position was hopeless. In May the Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act, and confiscation of Church property could proceed. On 24 September 1890, Wilford Woodruff issued the statement now canonized as Official Declaration 1.¹⁵

Its wording repays attention, because it is not primarily a revelation. It is a denial and a submission.

I, therefore, as President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, do hereby, in the most solemn manner, declare that these charges are false. We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.¹⁵

Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.¹⁵

The document declares an intention to obey the law. It does not say the commandment was withdrawn. It does not use the language of revelation at all. Lorenzo Snow's sustaining motion supplied the authority: the conference accepted Woodruff "as the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the only man on the earth at the present time who holds the keys of the sealing ordinances," and accepted "his declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding."¹⁵

Woodruff later described it as commanded. In November 1891 at Logan he said, "The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice," and "I should have let all the temples go out of our hands; I should have gone to prison myself, and let every other man go there, had not the God of heaven commanded me to do what I did do." In the same period he made the statement that Latter-day Saints still quote: "The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray."¹⁵

Then two things happened that are hard to reconcile with the Manifesto's plain words.

New plural marriages continued. The Church now admits this in an official essay. Marriages were performed in Mexico and Canada, and some inside the United States. The essay's own accounting: "The ledger of 'marriages and sealings performed outside the temple,' which is not comprehensive, lists 315 marriages performed between October 17, 1890, and September 8, 1903. Of the 315 marriages recorded in the ledger, research indicates that 25 (7.9%) were plural marriages." It concedes that "The precise number of new plural marriages performed during these years, inside and outside the United States, is unknown," and that "The exact process by which these marriages were approved remains unclear" — while also disclosing that "for a time, post-Manifesto plural marriages required the approval of a member of the First Presidency."²

The denials were repeated. In March 1904, Church President Joseph F. Smith testified before the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections during the Reed Smoot hearings. He acknowledged that he had cohabited with his plural wives and fathered children since 1890 — an admission of ongoing violation of federal law made under oath. On new plural marriages he drew a distinction: "There never has been a plural marriage by the consent or sanction or knowledge or approval of the church since the manifesto."²

The Church's own essay evaluates this testimony charitably: "In this legal setting, President Smith sought to protect the Church while stating the truth. His testimony conveyed a distinction Church leaders had long understood: the Manifesto removed the divine command for the Church collectively to sustain and defend plural marriage; it had not, up to this time, prohibited individuals from continuing to practice or perform plural marriage as a matter of religious conscience."²

That sentence is doing extraordinary work. It concedes that the Manifesto's plain words — "We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice" — did not mean what they said, and that the Church's leaders knew it. And it describes a 1904 statement as "stating the truth" while acknowledging in the same essay that apostles were performing new plural marriages at the time.

The pattern from 1842 recurs in 1890 and 1904: a public statement crafted so that its author can defend its literal words while the public draws a false conclusion.

The Second Manifesto. In April 1904, under pressure from the hearings, Joseph F. Smith issued the statement that finally closed the practice: "If any officer or member of the Church shall assume to solemnize or enter into any such marriage he will be deemed in transgression against the Church and will be liable to be dealt with according to the rules and regulations thereof and excommunicated therefrom."² The 1890 statement had given notice; the 1904 statement attached a penalty. That is the difference that closed the practice.

Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley continued performing plural marriages anyway and were dropped from the Quorum of the Twelve. Taylor was later excommunicated.

The fundamentalist split. Members who refused to accept the Second Manifesto were disciplined, and some formed independent movements. The Church's essay states the relationship: "Some who were excommunicated coalesced into independent movements and are sometimes called fundamentalists. These groups are not affiliated with or supported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."² Their claim to authority rests on an alleged 1886 revelation to John Taylor and an alleged ordination of men to keep the principle alive. No text or provenance study of that document was opened for this draft, so this article makes no claim about it beyond the fact that the LDS Church does not recognize the groups that rest on it.²

The fundamentalists are not merely a curiosity. They are the strongest evidence that the reversal was theologically discontinuous. Sincere Latter-day Saints who had been taught for fifty years that plural marriage was essential to exaltation, on the authority of a canonized revelation that said those who reject the covenant "are damned," concluded that the institution had abandoned a commandment. They were not being perverse. They were reading Doctrine and Covenants 132 the way it had been taught to them.

What kind of thing was this?

The question is not whether biblical patriarchs were polygamous. They were, and the Hebrew Bible does not condemn the practice as such. Anyone who argues from the patriarchs to the conclusion that plural marriage is always wrong has a harder case than they think, and this article does not make that argument.

The question is whether this particular sequence looks like revelation. Both readings deserve to be stated at full strength.

The prophetic reading. God restored an ancient practice through a reluctant prophet who had to be commanded three times, and once at swordpoint, before he obeyed. The practice was concealed because the Saints' enemies would have used it to destroy them, and in the end did. The revelation was written down under pressure, addressed to a specific wife in a specific crisis, and preserved by God's providence when she burned it. It produced a people, a temple-centered theology of eternal family, and a generation of women whose faith was refined by it. When the practice had done its work and the nation would no longer permit it, God released the Church through the same prophetic channel that had commanded it, and the Church obeyed at enormous cost to its own sense of itself. The disorder in the record is what one expects when heaven asks difficult things of ordinary people in dangerous times.

The human reading. A charismatic religious founder in his thirties, who already claimed direct revelation and had a community trained to accept it, entered relationships that his own church's published law forbade. Each time a constraint appeared, a revelation removed it: consent required, then waived; the practice concealed, and the concealment authorized; the wife commanded to accept, on pain of destruction. The revelation was dictated at the moment it was needed, to solve the problem it was needed for, and named its recipient as the only man on earth with the relevant authority. When public exposure threatened, the movement denied. When the federal government made the practice impossible, the movement received a revelation to stop, then continued privately for fourteen more years, then denied that too, then stopped for real when a Senate committee made denial untenable. Every turn tracks the external pressure.

The awkward truth is that neither reading accounts for everything. The prophetic reading cannot account for the denials, the retroactive timing, the personal threats against Emma Smith, or the exact correlation between doctrinal change and legal pressure. The human reading cannot account for the dread of the men who received it, the willingness to share the privilege widely, the theological richness of the framework, the forty years of costly public defense, or the lifelong loyalty of the women who lived it.

What can be said is that the evidence bears on the two readings unequally. The features that favor the prophetic reading are features of sincerity: people believed this, at cost. The features that favor the human reading are features of fit: the revelations fit the situations of the man who received them. Sincerity is compatible with error. Fit is not easily compatible with independent divine origin. A man can genuinely believe a doctrine he has generated himself, and his followers' sacrifices are then evidence of his sincerity and theirs, not of the doctrine's source.

That asymmetry is why this article's verdict leans where it does, and why it stops short of certainty.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

The three Gospel Topics essays

The Church published three essays on plural marriage in 2014, now collected as Gospel Topics Essays. They are the official current treatment and they are far more candid than anything the Church published in the twentieth century. They concede the practice, the ages, the sealings to already-married women, the carefully worded denials, and the post-Manifesto marriages. Any critic who claims the Church hides this history has not read them.

They are also, in three places, weaker than they look.

On the denials, the essay says the statements "denounced spiritual wifery and polygamy but were silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated 'celestial' plural marriage," and that they left the possibility open "implicitly." That is an accurate description of the mechanism, and it does not address the ethical question at all. Whether a statement is honest depends on what it caused its hearers to believe, not on whether a private reservation could be constructed for it. The essay never asks that question.

On the ages, the essay says marriage at fourteen "was legal in that era, and some women married in their mid-teens." Both clauses are true and the combination is misleading, because it invites the reader to conclude that Helen Mar Kimball's age was ordinary. It was not. The essay could have given the median marriage age and did not.

On the already-married women, the essay offers three explanations — dynastic linking, Joseph Smith's reluctance to have "normal marriage relationships," and women's desire for a better eternal prospect — and marks all three as possibilities. It then adds a factual claim in support: "In Nauvoo, most if not all of the first husbands seem to have continued living in the same household with their wives during Joseph's lifetime, and complaints about these sealings with Joseph Smith are virtually absent from the documentary record." That is fair as far as it goes.¹ What it does not weigh is that absence of complaint, in a record this thin and this deliberately concealed, is weak evidence either way — a point the essay itself concedes elsewhere when it says the record is "thin" and that "some ambiguity will always accompany our knowledge about this issue."¹

On the Manifesto, the essay's greatest service is its candor about post-Manifesto marriages, which earlier official accounts obscured. Its weakness is its treatment of Joseph F. Smith's 1904 testimony as "stating the truth." A reader who accepts that characterization has accepted the same technique the essay elsewhere describes as "carefully worded."

The eternity-only reading of the polyandrous sealings

Brian Hales's three-volume Joseph Smith's Polygamy mounts the most sustained faithful defense. Its core argument on the already-married women is that these sealings were eternity-only, involved no sexual relations, and are therefore not adultery in any sense. The argument's strength is real: no child has been traced to any such union; several of the women said the sealings were for eternity; the first husbands did not complain; and the theological category exists in the sources.

Its weakness is method. The argument requires that every ambiguous case be read in the favorable direction, and it treats the absence of evidence for sexual relations as evidence of absence in a record that was deliberately kept thin. Todd Compton, working from the same documents, reads several of the same cases the other way. A reader should notice that both scholars are reasoning from silence, and that silence does not favor either of them.

The honest summary is the one this article gives above: the sealings happened, they are not what Doctrine and Covenants 132:61 authorizes, and their sexual character is unknown case by case.

"Not doctrine now"

Some Latter-day Saints answer that plural marriage is not current doctrine, so the historical problem is closed. On the authority matrix, that answers only the first of three axes. Plural marriage was taught as revelation, printed as scripture, enforced by discipline, defended before the Supreme Court, and made a condition of the highest exaltation. Its removal from practice does not remove it from the history of what the Church's prophets claimed God told them. And it is still printed as scripture, which makes the "not doctrine now" answer harder here than almost anywhere else.

The restoration-of-all-things premise

The strongest theological answer is the simplest. Joseph Smith's program was the restoration of all things, and plural marriage was an ancient thing. On this account the practice needed no independent justification beyond its antiquity and the commandment. This is coherent and it is what Doctrine and Covenants 132:40 and 45 claim.

Its limit is that it proves too much and too little. Too much, because the same principle would justify restoring any ancient practice, including ones the Church has not restored. Too little, because it does not touch the implementation questions — the denials, the consent structure, the treatment of Emma Smith — which are where the evidence actually bites.

Common objections and responses

"Joseph Smith had thirty-three or thirty-four wives"

The number should not be stated flatly. It is a reconstruction, and different historians reconstruct differently from the same fragmentary record. Andrew Jenson listed twenty-seven in 1887 and said there were others he could not document. Later scholars have produced higher and lower totals depending on how they treat proxy sealings, disputed cases, and posthumous sealings. The register records what this project could verify, which is Jenson's twenty-seven names and his own admission that there were more he could not document. It offers no total of its own, because a total requires decisions about proxy sealings, disputed cases and posthumous sealings that this project has not audited. A reader should treat any single number as an argument, not a fact.

"The Book of Mormon condemns polygamy, so Joseph Smith contradicted his own scripture"

This is a real tension but a weaker argument than it looks, because Jacob 2:30 contains an explicit exception clause and Latter-day Saints have always read it that way. The stronger version of the objection is narrower: Jacob 2:24 calls David's and Solomon's plural marriages abominable, while Doctrine and Covenants 132:38–39 says God gave them; and Jacob 2:30's stated purpose, raising up seed, was not achieved in Nauvoo. Those two points survive the exception clause. The blunt "he contradicted his own book" does not.

"He married other men's wives, which is adultery"

The sealings to already-married women are real and are the hardest fact in the record. But "adultery" asserts a sexual relationship that the evidence does not establish for any named case. The defensible claim is that Joseph Smith was sealed to women who had living husbands, that Doctrine and Covenants 132:61 does not authorize this, and that what the sealings involved is unknown. Anyone who goes further is going beyond the documents.

"He married a fourteen-year-old, which was normal then"

Half true, and the second half is not established here. It was legal, on the Church's own statement. Whether it was normal is a demographic question this project did not open a source to answer, and the article claims no median. More importantly, the age is not the main problem. The manner of the proposal is: mediated through her father, secret, and attached to a promise of her family's eternal welfare. That structure would raise the same objection at any age.

"Power, wealth, and sex explain Joseph Smith"

This should be retired. It does not explain why he shared the practice with dozens of other men, why his closest friends dreaded it, why he built a demanding theology around it, why women defended it for fifty years, or why he accepted the danger it brought. Motive evidence is relevant, but a reduction that fails to account for most of the record is not an explanation. It also invites an equally lazy reduction of any religious founder, including Christian ones.

"The Manifesto proves the Church responds to political pressure, not revelation"

Too quick. Wilford Woodruff described a vision and a command, and the Church paid an enormous internal price for the change. The stronger form of the objection is the timing plus the aftermath: the Manifesto came in the month after the last legal avenue closed, its plain words were not followed for fourteen years, and the practice stopped only when a Senate hearing made continued denial impossible. That is the argument worth making.

"Emma Smith's denial proves it never happened"

No. The affidavits, the contemporary documents, the sealing records, and the Church's own official position all establish that it happened. Emma's 1879 denial is important evidence about Emma, not about the facts.

"The Church has always hidden this"

Not accurate today. The three Gospel Topics essays concede the practice, the ages, the sealings to already-married women, the denials, and the post-Manifesto marriages. The fair criticism is not concealment but framing: the essays are candid about facts and gentle about their implications, and they were published in 2014, more than a century and a half after the events, with no announcement from the pulpit.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

Evidence that would strengthen the Latter-day Saint claim. A contemporary document from the 1830s recording the revelation before the practice began, rather than a recollection from the 1880s. A contemporary record of Joseph Smith declining to deny the practice, or instructing others not to deny it. Firsthand written statements from the women involved, made in the 1840s rather than in Utah decades later, describing free and informed consent. A contemporary explanation, in any source, of what the sealings to already-married women were understood to be at the time. Evidence that the 1890 Manifesto was preceded by a written revelation rather than followed by later descriptions of one.

Evidence that would weaken it. A documented child from a sealing to an already-married woman. A contemporary document showing Joseph Smith privately acknowledging that the denials were false rather than technically defensible. Evidence that the "angel with the drawn sword" account entered the record only after 1869. Records showing that the 1890 Manifesto was drafted primarily by lawyers or political advisers. Evidence that post-Manifesto marriages were authorized more systematically than the Church's essay concedes — the essay already grants that "for a time, post-Manifesto plural marriages required the approval of a member of the First Presidency," so the open question is how far that approval ran and for how long.

What would not settle anything. More testimony from Utah in the 1880s, on either side. That is the period when both the Church and the Reorganized Church had strong institutional reasons to shape the record, and it is already the period from which most of the evidence comes. The gap in this record is not a shortage of recollections. It is a shortage of documents written while the events were happening.

Sources