1831–1844 (documented through 1879)

Joseph Smith's Plural Marriage

Polygamy, polyandry, and the women sealed to the founding prophet

Between the mid-1830s and his death in 1844, Joseph Smith was sealed to somewhere between about thirty and forty women, roughly a third of them teenagers and roughly a third of them already legally married to living men. The practice was kept secret, was repeatedly denied in public and in print while it was being lived, and was written down as a revelation only on 12 July 1843, now Doctrine and Covenants 132. Its exposure in the Nauvoo Expositor in June 1844 set off the chain of events that ended with Joseph and Hyrum Smith shot at Carthage.

What is actually in dispute

In dispute: whether Joseph Smith's sealings to women with living husbands were conjugal or eternity-only, and whether his public denials were lies or narrowly true statements about a differently-defined practice. Faithful-apologetic writers (Brian Hales, FAIR, Interpreter) and critical writers (Vogel, Brodie, the CES Letter, LDS Discussions) read the same affidavits to opposite conclusions, with the academic middle (Bushman, Turner, Newell and Avery, Journal of Mormon History and Dialogue contributors) mostly declining to settle it.

The shape of the evidence

Almost nothing about Joseph Smith's plural marriages was written down at the time by the people who lived them. The practice was conducted in secret and its participants were sworn to it; the revelation that authorised it was not committed to paper until 12 July 1843, by which point Joseph had already entered into roughly twenty-five sealings.1 The church's own essay on the subject says as much: the historical record of early plural marriage is thin, few records of the time provide details, and later reminiscences are not always reliable.2

What survives instead is a body of documents created for purposes other than history. There are sworn affidavits collected in Utah in 1869 and 1870 by Joseph F. Smith, twenty-five years after the fact and specifically to answer the RLDS church's denial that Joseph Smith ever practised polygamy. There are court depositions from the 1892 Temple Lot case, taken to establish which church was the legal successor. There are autobiographies written in the 1870s and 1880s by women defending a practice then under federal assault. And there are hostile accounts, from John C. Bennett's 1842 exposés to Wilhelm Wyl's 1886 interviews, whose factual details are sometimes verifiably right and whose framing is uniformly adversarial.

This is why the same evidence yields opposite conclusions. The disagreement between Brian Hales and Dan Vogel is not usually about what a document says but about how much weight a late, interested reminiscence can carry, and about what silence proves.

Kirtland: an 1831 revelation and a girl in the house

The earliest claimed origin is a revelation given near the western Missouri line on 17 July 1831. No 1831 manuscript survives. What exists is a letter W. W. Phelps wrote to Brigham Young thirty years later, in August 1861, reporting the text from memory, including the line: For it is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just, for even now their females are more virtuous than the gentiles.3 Phelps added that when he asked three years afterward how the married elders could do this, Joseph answered instantly, in the same manner that Abraham took Hagar and Keturah; and Jacob took Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah, by revelation.

Ezra Booth, who had left the church, wrote in the Ohio Star that December that it had been made known by revelation that it would be pleasing to the Lord should the elders form a matrimonial alliance with the Natives.4 FAIR argues the two reports conflict on details and that neither purports to be the revelation in D&C 132; the Tanners treat Booth's contemporaneity as proof. The church's essay splits the difference, saying the revelation's early verses suggest that part of it emerged from Joseph Smith's study of the Old Testament in 1831.

The first relationship anyone can name is with Fanny Alger, a household helper in the Smith home in Kirtland, probably in 1835 or early 1836. There are no first-hand accounts from Joseph, from Fanny or from Emma. What survives is Oliver Cowdery's furious letter of 21 January 1838 to his brother Warren, referring to a dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's.5 Cowdery had probably drafted the Article on Marriage two years earlier declaring that one man should have one wife; three months after the letter he was excommunicated on charges including falsely insinuating that Joseph Smith was guilty of adultery.

Everything else comes decades later and from hostile or second-hand sources: Chauncey Webb's daughter Ann Eliza, William McLellin's report of a 1847 conversation with Emma in which she looked through a crack and saw the transaction, Benjamin F. Johnson's recollection that Warren Parrish and Cowdery knew because Joseph and Fanny were spied upon and found together.6 Turner concludes that Emma immediately put an end to what she simply understood as her husband's unfaithfulness.7 Fanny left Kirtland in September 1836 and married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon her own age, that November. She said nothing about it for the rest of her life.

Nauvoo: the practice begins in earnest

On the evening of 5 April 1841, in a grove near the Mississippi, Joseph Bates Noble sealed his wife's sister Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith, repeating the words Joseph dictated to him. Louisa was twenty-six and, according to Franklin D. Richards's later note, disguised in a man's coat and hat. Noble swore an affidavit to the ceremony in 1869 and, at the 1892 Temple Lot hearings, was asked whether there had been a honeymoon; he answered, I know it, for I saw him in bed with her, and laughed.8

From there the pace increases. Bushman's tally is three sealings in 1841, eleven in 1842, seventeen in 1843.9 By June 1844 Joseph had more wives than any man in Nauvoo; the next-largest household, John Taylor's, had six. The women include the Relief Society's secretary, its two counselors, several boarders and wards of the Smith household, two pairs of sisters, and a fourteen-year-old.

The numbers themselves are contested. Brodie counted forty-eight, Quinn forty-six, George D. Smith forty-two and later thirty-eight, Compton thirty-three, Hales thirty-five.10 Bushman, following Compton, calls twenty-eight to thirty-three most likely and adds that whatever the exact number, the marriages are numerous enough to indicate an impersonal bond. His conclusion is the most-quoted sentence in the faithful literature: Like Abraham of old, Joseph yearned for familial plentitude. He did not lust for women so much as he lusted for kin.11

The women who already had husbands

Between October 1841 and spring 1842, most of the sealings were to women married to living men. Zina Diantha Huntington had married Henry Bailey Jacobs on 7 March 1841 and was pregnant by him when her brother Dimick sealed her to Joseph Smith on 27 October, with their sister-in-law Fanny Maria Huntington as witness.12 Presendia Huntington had been Norman Buell's wife since 1827. Mary Elizabeth Rollins was married to the non-Mormon Adam Lightner and eight months pregnant. Patty Bartlett Sessions was married to David Sessions, and her own daughter Sylvia, herself sealed to Joseph, stood as witness at her mother's sealing.13 Marinda Nancy Johnson was sealed while her husband, the apostle Orson Hyde, was on his mission to Jerusalem.

The two camps read this class of marriage completely differently. Hales and FAIR argue that Nauvoo sealings came in durations, and that these were eternity-only, taking effect after death, so that no woman ever had two husbands at once.14 Critics answer with Patty Sessions's own journal, which records that she was sealed to Joseph Smith by Willard Richards on 9 March 1842 for time and all eternity, and with the observation that the essay's phrasing quietly implies no polyandrous wife ever said otherwise.

For a century the strongest single case for a sexual relationship in this class was Sylvia Sessions Lyon. In 1915 her daughter Josephine signed a statement recording that just before her mother's death in 1882, Sylvia told her she was the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith, she having been sealed to the Prophet at the time that her husband Mr. Lyon was out of fellowship with the Church.15 In 2016 autosomal DNA analysis comparing Josephine's grandson with Smith and Lyon descendants found no shared DNA with Joseph Smith's great-grandchildren and a substantial match with four Lyon relatives. Hales, who had been largely convinced Josephine was Joseph's daughter, accepted the result.16 Every Y-chromosome test for an alleged son of Joseph Smith by a plural wife has likewise come back negative.

That does not settle the general question, only the one case where it could be tested. Compton's point stands on the other side: posterity was central to the Abrahamic promise the revelation invokes, and it would be extremely odd if his actual polygamy did not include the possibility of offspring.

Emma

The earliest date at which Emma Smith is documented to have known about a time-and-eternity plural marriage is May 1843, when she participated in four of them.17 Hales's own chronology shows Joseph had by then been sealed to roughly twenty-five women. Newell and Avery suggest she was told something in April 1842, at the height of the Bennett crisis, and that Joseph deflected her anger by disavowing Bennett's spiritual wifery, which was technically true and entirely misleading.

In May 1843 she agreed that Joseph could take two more wives if she chose them, and chose Emily and Eliza Partridge, the orphaned daughters of Bishop Edward Partridge who were living in her house. She did not know they had already been sealed to him in March. Emily wrote that to save family trouble Brother Joseph thought it best to have another ceremony performed, and that from that very hour, however, Emma was our bitter enemy.18 Saints, the church's own narrative history, records the second ceremony and says Emma was apparently unaware that Joseph had already been sealed to them.19 Emma then gave him the Lawrence sisters, Maria and Sarah, Canadian orphans for whom Joseph was legal guardian and whose inheritance he administered.

Five days later, on 28 May 1843, Joseph and Emma were sealed to each other for time and eternity in the Quorum of the Anointed, the third such sealing in the church. Six weeks after that, on 12 July, Hyrum persuaded Joseph to dictate the revelation so he could read it to her. It ends by addressing her by name: Let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, with the warning that if she abide not this commandment she shall be destroyed.20 Hyrum read it to her. He came back and told Joseph he had never received a more severe talking-to in his life. That evening Joseph told Clayton to deed all the unencumbered lots to Emma and the children.21

A copy survived because Newel K. Whitney had Joseph C. Kingsbury make one. The original was burned. Clayton said Emma teased and entreated until Joseph let her destroy it; McLellin said Joseph pulled open the fire with his fingers and burned it himself after Emma refused to touch it even with tongs; Emma, in 1856, said the statement that she burned it was false and made out of whole cloth.22 Twenty-three years later, weeks before her death, she told her son that Joseph had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have.23

Refusals, and what followed them

Not every woman said yes, and the record of refusals is unusually revealing because it was made in public and in anger. Sarah Pratt, wife of the apostle Orson Pratt, said Joseph propositioned her in 1842 and told her husband; Joseph later told Orson that Sarah lied about me and that he never made the offer she said he did, and Orson eventually testified that Joseph had told the truth.24 Nancy Rigdon, Sidney Rigdon's unmarried daughter, refused, and received a letter arguing that that which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another, and that whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is.25 Bennett printed it in the Sangamo Journal on 19 August 1842. The Joseph Smith Papers place the letter in an appendix rather than as a featured document, because his authorship of it is uncertain.26

The response was not to argue the point but to attack the women. Stephen Markham swore an affidavit describing Nancy Rigdon in a compromising position with Bennett; Nauvoo citizens published counter-affidavits calling Markham a liar, a disturber of the peace and a loafer; two weeks later The Wasp printed a notice, authorised by Joseph, effectively withdrawing the Markham affidavit. The pattern is the reason both Sarah Pratt's and Nancy Rigdon's testimony is treated so differently by different camps: the church's contemporaneous answer was character assassination, which is evidence of pressure and not evidence of fact.

Others declined without consequence. Rachel Ivins told Joseph she would sooner go to hell as a virtuous woman than to heaven as a whore, and remained in the church. Hales's argument is that the calm response in those cases shows the scandals turned on the women going public rather than on the refusals themselves.

Denial as a policy

From 1835 to 1876 the church's own canon contained a printed denial. The Article on Marriage, section 101 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, reads: 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.27 It survived unchanged into the 1844 edition and was removed only when section 132 replaced it, forty-one years after it was written and twenty-four years after Joseph's death.

On 1 October 1842 the Times and Seasons reprinted it, said it was the only rule of marriage practised in the church, and appended signed certificates. The Relief Society's presidency signed: Emma Smith as president, Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Sarah M. Cleveland as counselors, Eliza R. Snow as secretary.28 Cleveland and Snow had both been sealed to Joseph Smith on 29 June, three months earlier. Whitney's seventeen-year-old daughter Sarah Ann had been sealed to him on 27 July, two months earlier, in a ceremony whose exact words Joseph dictated as a revelation to her father.

The most-quoted denial came on 26 May 1844, after a Hancock County grand jury indicted Joseph for adultery and fornication on the Laws' complaint about Maria Lawrence: What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one. I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago; and I can prove them all perjurers.29 FAIR argues this addressed specific charges by named accusers, not plural marriage as such; the CES Letter and LDS Discussions read it as a plain lie by a man with roughly thirty wives. The church's own essay says the denials were carefully worded, denouncing spiritual wifery and polygamy while remaining silent about what Joseph Smith and others saw as divinely mandated celestial plural marriage.

The ages, stated flatly

Helen Mar Kimball was born 22 August 1828 and was sealed to Joseph Smith in May 1843, two or three months short of her fifteenth birthday. He was thirty-seven. Her father, the apostle Heber C. Kimball, proposed the match; Helen wrote that he taught me the principle of Celestial marriage and having a great desire to be connected with the Prophet, Joseph, he offered me to him.30 She recorded that her mother grieved to see her child, who had scarcely seen her fifteenth summer, following in the same thorny path, in her mind she saw the misery which was as sure to come as the sun was to rise and set: but it was all hidden from me. She continued to live in her parents' home and later wrote two books defending plural marriage.

The church's essay states the fact and adds the context: Marriage at such an age, inappropriate by today's standards, was legal in that era, and some women married in their mid-teens. It notes Helen spoke of the sealing as being for eternity alone, suggesting that the relationship did not involve sexual relations.31 Hales adds a circumstantial argument: nine of Joseph's wives were living in 1892, and only the three who could testify to conjugality were called in the Temple Lot case; Helen, who lived in Salt Lake City and had written in defence of the practice, was not. Compton, writing in 2022, said that though there is no solid evidence either way, he does not believe the marriage was consummated. D. Michael Quinn argued that it was.

Helen was not the only one. Nancy Maria Winchester, born 10 August 1828, twelve days before Helen, was sealed to Joseph at some point in 1843 and was therefore fourteen or fifteen; almost nothing else is known about her. Lucy Walker was seventeen, Sarah Ann Whitney seventeen, Sarah Lawrence seventeen, Maria Lawrence nineteen, Emily Partridge nineteen. Of the roughly thirty-three to thirty-five wives, seven were under eighteen. At the other end, Fanny Young was fifty-six.32 Whether that distribution is best explained by nineteenth-century marriage norms, by dynastic sealing strategy, or by something else is exactly what the camps disagree about, and the record does not decide it.

The Expositor and the end

William Law, second counselor in the First Presidency, and his wife Jane were excommunicated on 18 April 1844 without being summoned to the hearing. Law said he would reconcile on one condition: that Joseph Smith would acknowledge publicly that he had taught and practised the doctrine of plurality of wives, that he brought a revelation supporting the doctrine, and that he should own the whole system (revelation and all) to be from Hell.

On 7 June 1844 the Laws, the Foster brothers, the Higbee brothers and Charles Ivins published the only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. It carried affidavits from Austin Cowles, William Law and Jane Law describing the revelation, including the provision granting a man the privilege of marrying ten virgins.33 To answer the paper on the facts, Joseph would have had to disclose plural marriage publicly. On 10 June the city council, with Joseph presiding as mayor, declared the press a public nuisance; the marshal and the Legion smashed it and burned the papers that evening.

The day after, a mass meeting at Carthage resolved to exterminate, utterly exterminate, the wicked and abominable Mormon Leaders. Joseph and Hyrum were arrested for riot and then held on a charge of treason, and were shot in the Carthage jail on 27 June. The practice they had concealed was not publicly acknowledged by the church for another eight years.

What is said about it now

For most of the twentieth century the church's public account attributed plural marriage to Brigham Young and Utah, and the Nauvoo origins went largely unmentioned in manuals. That changed in October 2014, when the Gospel Topics essay Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo appeared, acknowledging in the institution's own voice that Joseph Smith practised it, that the youngest wife was sealed several months before her 15th birthday, that he was sealed to a number of women who were already married, and that denials had been carefully worded.34 Saints, volume 1, followed in 2018 and narrates the Partridge sisters' double sealing and Emma's opposition without euphemism, though it also declines to say plainly that Emma was deceived.

The disagreement that remains is not mainly about dates. Every camp now accepts the calendar. It is about what the calendar means: whether secrecy was prudence under threat of mob violence or the concealment of conduct that could not survive daylight; whether a fourteen-year-old's consent, given at her father's urging under a promise of her family's exaltation, is consent; and whether a prophet who denies in print what he is doing in private has lied to his people or protected them. The corpus holds the best statement of each of those positions. It does not hold a document that decides between them.

Notes

  1. Joseph Smith Papers historical introduction to the Revelation of 12 July 1843 (D&C 132): by summer 1843, JS had entered into about twenty-five confidential sealings, or plural unions. Retrieved via a B. H. Roberts Foundation record reproducing the JSP introduction; the introduction is the editors' work, not the revelation text. → source ↩
  2. Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, Gospel Topics essay (2014), opening section: The historical record of early plural marriage is therefore thin: few records of the time provide details, and later reminiscences are not always reliable. Also: Affidavits collected by Joseph F. Smith beginning in 1869; roughly seventy-five statements from women sealed to Joseph Smith and to other Nauvoo polygamists, compiled after Joseph Smith III and his brothers publicly denied the Nauvoo origins of the practice. → source ↩
  3. W. W. Phelps to Brigham Young, 12 August 1861, reporting a revelation of 17 July 1831 given west of Jackson County, Missouri, before seven elders. Text reproduced in a B. H. Roberts Foundation record and in Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, p. 87. Also: Phelps's appended note to the same letter, describing a conversation about three years after the revelation was given. Also: Gospel Topics essay, The Beginnings of Plural Marriage in the Church. → source ↩
  4. Ezra Booth, letter in the Ohio Star, 8 December 1831, as reproduced in Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism: Shadow or Reality?, ch. 16, and cited by Compton in Journal of Mormon History 22:1 (1996), 180. Also: FAIR, Plural marriage / Lamanites to become white and delightsome through polygamous marriage, arguing the 1861 Phelps letter is the only evidence and that Booth says nothing about plural marriage as such. → source ↩
  5. Oliver Cowdery to Warren A. Cowdery, 21 January 1838, Cowdery Letterbook, Huntington Library. Quoted here in Brodie's transcription (No Man Knows My History, Appendix C). Hales's site transcribes the key noun as scrape with affair overwritten and the closing clause as never deviated from the truth on the matter. Also: Far West High Council minutes, April 1838, charge against Oliver Cowdery, as quoted by MormonThink from the Joseph Smith Papers Journal, March–September 1838; Compton discusses the estrangement in Journal of Mormon History 22:1 (1996), 199. → source ↩
  6. Brian C. Hales, Fanny Alger: Evidence of Sexuality, assembling the five documents: Cowdery (1838), McLellin (1872 and 1875), Chauncey Webb via Wilhelm Wyl (1886), and Ann Eliza Webb Young (1876); Benjamin F. Johnson's report of Warren Parrish is discussed on FAIR's Fanny Alger pages. → source ↩
  7. John G. Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (Yale, 2025), ch. Follies, quoting Eliza Jane Webb: Emma Smith turned Fanny out of her house because of Joseph's intimacy with her. → source ↩
  8. Joseph B. Noble, affidavit sworn before notary James Jack, 26 June 1869; and Noble's testimony in the Temple Lot case, 1892, as quoted in Journal of Mormon History 36:4 (2010), 150. Also: Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, ch. A New Order of Marriage; corroborating details from Franklin D. Richards's journal note of Joseph B. Noble's 1869 remarks, quoted in Journal of Mormon History 36:4 (2010), 149. → source ↩
  9. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005): He married three in 1841, eleven in 1842, and seventeen in 1843. → source ↩
  10. Todd Compton, A Trajectory of Plurality, Dialogue 29:2 (1996), 21: I identify only thirty-three wives; Brodie forty-eight, Quinn forty-six, George D. Smith forty-two and later thirty-eight; Hales, Journal of Mormon History 40:3 (2014), 174: I agree with Todd Compton's list of thirty-three sealed plural wives while adding two more. Also: George D. Smith, Journal of Mormon History 36:4 (2010), 156, tabulating Nauvoo polygamous households through June 1844. → source ↩
  11. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, in the chapter on plural marriage. The passage was verified verbatim against the held text. → source ↩
  12. Zina Diantha Huntington Young, affidavit sworn before Probate Judge Elias Smith, 1 May 1869, naming 27 October 1841, Dimick B. Huntington as officiator and Fanny Maria Huntington as witness. → source ↩
  13. Patty Bartlett Sessions, journal entry of June 1860, as quoted by MormonThink from Claire Noall, Intimate Disciple; the sealing is dated 9 March 1842 in Newel K. Whitney's chamber, with Willard Richards officiating and Sylvia present. Also: Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo, Dialogue 18:3 (1985), 78, on Marinda Nancy Johnson, Presendia Huntington Buell and Sylvia Sessions. → source ↩
  14. Brian C. Hales, Sealings to Legally Married Women and Emma Smith's Path Through Polygamy: it appears Joseph's sealings to legally married women were eternity-only, meaning only applying after death. The women never had two husbands at the same time. Also: The essay states that several women said they were for eternity alone and that other women left no records; MormonThink's response cites Patty Sessions's journal against both halves of that sentence. → source ↩
  15. Josephine Rosetta Lyon Fisher, statement of 24 February 1915, recording her mother Sylvia Sessions Lyon's deathbed statement of 1882; quoted in Dialogue 18:3 (1985), 78. → source ↩
  16. Ugo A. Perego, Jayne E. Ekins and Scott R. Woodward, Resolving a 150-Year-Old Paternity Case in Mormon History Using DTC Autosomal DNA Testing of Distant Relatives, Forensic Science International: Genetics 42 (2019), summarised at BYU Studies as Using Science to Answer Questions from Latter-day Saint History; Hales records that he had been largely convinced Josephine was Joseph Smith's daughter until the 2016 result. Also: Compton, A Trajectory of Plurality, Dialogue 29:2 (1996), 37, on the Abrahamic promise and on Angus Cannon's 1905 exchange with Joseph Smith III about the absence of issue. → source ↩
  17. Hales, Emma Smith Struggles: the earliest documentable date for Emma's awareness of time-and-eternity plural marriage is May of 1843, when she participated in four of her husband's polygamous sealings. Also: Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, on 28 April 1842 and on Joseph's deflection of Emma's anger by disavowing Bennett's spiritual wife doctrine. → source ↩
  18. Emily Dow Partridge, autobiographical account, quoted in Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, and reproduced in Brodie, Appendix C, and on Hales's site. → source ↩
  19. Saints, vol. 1, ch. 40, United in an Everlasting Covenant. Also: Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, on the Lawrence sisters, their approximately eight thousand dollars in English gold, and William Law's later accusation about the guardianship. Gordon Madsen has disputed the accuracy of Law's 1887 recollection on this point. → source ↩
  20. Doctrine and Covenants 132:52, 54. Quoted here as reproduced in Dialogue 35:3 (2002), 146, which notes the passage is seldom quoted in official commentary; the same lines are paraphrased in Saints, vol. 1, ch. 41. Also: Devery S. Anderson, The Anointed Quorum, 1842–45, Journal of Mormon History 29:2 (2003), 156; and Gary James Bergera, Dialogue 35:3 (2002), 53, both dating the Smiths' own sealing to 28 May 1843. → source ↩
  21. William Clayton's journal for 12–15 July 1843, as quoted by Hales, Emma Smith's Path Through Polygamy, and discussed by Bushman: They were in impossible positions. Note that the Clayton Nauvoo journals are held by this corpus only as unverified transcripts, searchable but not citable. → source ↩
  22. Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, p. 154, gathering Clayton's account, McLellin's 1872 report of his 1847 conversation with Emma, Emma's 1856 denial, and Joseph Smith III's 1885 note of James Whitehead's recollection that it was Kingsbury's copy that Emma burned. → source ↩
  23. Last Testimony of Sister Emma, Saints' Herald 26 (1 October 1879), 289–90, as reproduced in Dan Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, vol. 1, 542. → source ↩
  24. Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Personal Polygamy, Journal of Mormon History 38:2 (2012), 198, quoting Joseph's statement to Orson Pratt that Sarah lied about me. → source ↩
  25. George D. Smith, Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy, Dialogue 27:1 (1994), 25, quoting Bennett's account of the proposal and the letter. Also: Rachel Ivins Grant's reported response, quoted in Dialogue 47:1 (2014), 58. → source ↩
  26. Joseph Smith Papers historical introduction to the Nancy Rigdon letter: Because JS's authorship of this letter is uncertain, the letter is presented as an appendix to this volume rather than a featured document. Gerrit Dirkmaat has published a study of the authorship question in Journal of Mormon History 42:3 (2016). Also: FAIR, John C. Bennett and plural marriage at Nauvoo, reproducing the Markham affidavit of 1842, the counter-affidavits by George Robinson and others, and the notice in The Wasp of 3 September. → source ↩
  27. Statement on Marriage, 17 August 1835, printed as section 101 of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants and as section 109 of the 1844 edition; removed in 1876 when section 132 was added. → source ↩
  28. Times and Seasons 3 (1 October 1842), 940, reprinting the Article on Marriage with certificates signed by the Relief Society presidency and others, framed as a refutation of Dr. J. C. Bennett's secret wife system. Also: Revelation of 27 July 1842 to Newel K. Whitney, giving the words of the sealing ceremony for his daughter Sarah Ann; published in Joseph Smith Papers Documents vol. 10 and reproduced in full in a B. H. Roberts Foundation record. → source ↩
  29. Address of the Prophet, 26 May 1844, History of the Church 6:410–11, reproduced verbatim on FAIR, MormonThink and in the CES Letter rebuttal series. The Hancock County indictment for adultery and fornication is dated 23–27 May 1844. Also: Gospel Topics essay, Plural Marriage in Nauvoo, with its footnote defining polygamy in those denials as marriage of one man to more than one woman but without Church sanction. → source ↩
  30. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, 1881 autobiographical account, quoted on Hales's Helen Mar Kimball page and on FAIR. Also: Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, recollection quoted by Richard E. Bennett in his discussion of the sealing as a dynastic union between the Smith and Kimball houses; also quoted, from Van Wagoner, in A Letter for My Wife. → source ↩
  31. Gospel Topics essay, section on the wives' ages: 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. Also: Hales, Helen Mar Kimball, on the 1892 Temple Lot depositions of Emily Partridge, Malissa Lott and Lucy Walker, all of whom affirmed sexual relations, and on Helen's absence from the witness list. → source ↩
  32. Age distribution as tabulated by Compton in Dialogue 29:2 (1996) and by George D. Smith in Dialogue 27:1 (1994) and Journal of Mormon History 36:4 (2010); Nancy Maria Winchester's birth date of 10 August 1828 is given by MormonThink from Compton. Also: William Law, quoted from Lyndon W. Cook's edition of Law's Nauvoo diary and correspondence, reproduced on FAIR's Nauvoo Expositor pages. → source ↩
  33. Nauvoo Expositor, 7 June 1844, affidavits of Austin Cowles, William Law and Jane Law. The single issue is held in the corpus as a scanned original; its OCR is rough. Also: Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, on the 10 June city council order to abate the said nuisance and the destruction that evening; Saints, vol. 1, ch. 43, A Public Nuisance, narrates the same sequence. → source ↩
  34. Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo, published to the Gospel Topics section of the church's website on 22 October 2014. Also: Saints, vol. 1, chs. 37, 40, 41 and 43. LDS Discussions has criticised the phrase apparently unaware in ch. 40 as evasive. → source ↩

Stories from the record

Human-scale episodes inside this topic, each anchored to a source.

A wedding in a man's coat and hat

On the evening of 5 April 1841, Joseph Bates Noble crossed the Mississippi from Montrose and met Joseph Smith under an elm tree near the river. His wife's sister Louisa Beaman, twenty-six years old, stood beside Joseph dressed in a man's coat and hat. Joseph spoke the words of the ceremony and Noble repeated them after him. Franklin D. Richards, recording Noble's account decades later, noted that the whole thing was done in a whisper. It was the first plural marriage in Nauvoo that anyone could later swear to.

Sources: Affidavits on celestial marriage collected… · Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

Emma chooses two wives who are already wives

In May 1843 Emma Smith agreed that her husband could take two more wives if she chose them. She chose Emily and Eliza Partridge, the orphaned daughters of the late Bishop Edward Partridge, who had been living in her house for three years. She did not know they had already been sealed to Joseph in March. Rather than tell her, a second ceremony was performed in her presence on 11 May. Emily wrote that to save family trouble Brother Joseph thought it best to have another ceremony performed, and that from that very hour, however, Emma was our bitter enemy. Within months the sisters were obliged to leave the house.

Sources: Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith · Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus C…

The revelation goes into the fire

On 12 July 1843 Hyrum Smith took the ten pages William Clayton had written down and read them to Emma. He came back and told his brother he had never received a more severe talking-to in his life. Bishop Newel K. Whitney asked whether he might take a copy; Joseph handed it to him and Joseph C. Kingsbury copied it out the next day. The original was burned. Clayton said Emma teased until Joseph let her destroy it. William McLellin, who talked to Emma four years later, said she refused to touch it even with tongs and that Joseph opened the fire with his fingers and burned it himself. Emma, in 1856, said the story was false and made out of whole cloth.

Sources: Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith · Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an Amer…

Four signatures on a denial

On 1 October 1842 the Times and Seasons printed the church's monogamy statement together with a certificate signed by the Relief Society presidency: Emma Smith, Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Sarah M. Cleveland and Eliza R. Snow, declaring they knew of no system of marriage in the church save the one in the Doctrine and Covenants. Cleveland and Snow had been sealed to Joseph Smith three months earlier. Elizabeth Ann Whitney had watched her seventeen-year-old daughter sealed to him two months earlier. Emma had signed as president of a society whose leadership she did not know was already inside the practice she was denying.

Sources: Times and Seasons, volumes 3–5 (1841–1845) · Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

A daughter's deathbed and a DNA test

In 1882, dying in Bountiful, Utah, Sylvia Sessions Lyon called her daughter Josephine to her bedside and told her she was the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sealed to him while her husband Windsor Lyon was out of fellowship with the church. Josephine signed a statement to that effect in 1915. For a hundred years it was the strongest evidence that Joseph Smith had children by women married to other men. In 2016 autosomal DNA from Josephine's grandson was compared with descendants of both families: no shared DNA with Joseph Smith's great-grandchildren, and a substantial match with four Lyon relatives. Brian Hales, who had believed Josephine was Joseph's daughter, published the reversal himself.

Sources: Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo, Dialogue 18:3 · josephsmithspolygamy.org

The last question anyone asked her

In February 1879, weeks before she died, Emma Smith Bidamon sat for an interview with her eldest son, Joseph Smith III, then president of the RLDS church. He apologised before asking. Did he not have other wives than yourself? He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have. Published that October as the Last Testimony of Sister Emma, the answer became the RLDS church's foundation and Utah's provocation. Lawrence Foster later observed that the questions had been carefully prepared in advance, using John C. Bennett's vocabulary rather than the church's own, in wording that allowed for deniability.

Sources: Last Testimony of Sister Emma, Saints' Her… · Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

Mormon Stories leads

Search phrases for the Mormon Stories transcript database. Episode numbers are deliberately absent — the transcript index was not queried for this build, and a guessed episode number is worse than none.

Fanny Alger barn Kirtland Emma Oliver Cowdery dirty nasty filthy affairEpisodes working through the origin question with historians, and how guests handle the absence of any first-hand account from Joseph, Fanny or Emma.
Helen Mar Kimball fourteen years old Heber C. Kimball dynastic sealing consentExtended discussion of the age and consent question, including how faithful and post-Mormon guests each frame Helen's own later writings.
polyandry Zina Huntington Henry Jacobs eternity only sealing Brian Hales Todd ComptonThe Hales-versus-Compton exchange on whether sealings to married women were conjugal, and whether the eternity-only category is documented or reconstructed.
Emma Smith burned the revelation Partridge sisters second ceremony Mormon EnigmaInterviews with Emma Smith biographers or their successors on what Emma knew and when, and on the reliability of the burning accounts.
Joseph Smith public denials 1844 seven wives when I can only find one lying for the LordPanel discussions on whether the denials were lies or narrowly-true statements, and how that question functions in faith transitions.
Gospel Topics essay plural marriage Kirtland Nauvoo 2014 reaction membersReaction episodes from the weeks after 22 October 2014, capturing what members had and had not been taught before the essay appeared.

Related topics

Utah Polygamy and the Manifesto 1852–1907The Succession Crisis of 1844 1834–1860Violence and the Mormon Conflict 1833–1857The Book of Mormon: Origins, Translation, and Witnesses 1820–1830 (with disputes running to the present)LGBTQ Latter-day Saints 1946–2025

People who also appear elsewhere

Joseph Smith Jr.Oliver CowderyWilliam LawEliza R. Snow