1831–1844 (documented through 1879)
Polygamy, polyandry, and the women sealed to the founding prophet
12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.
He introduced, practised and concealed plural marriage, taught it privately to a small circle from at least 1841, and dictated the revelation now canonised as Doctrine and Covenants 132. He publicly denied being a polygamist as late as 26 May 1844, a month before his death, when he had been sealed to roughly thirty women. Historians differ sharply on his motives, and he left no personal explanation of them.
Emma opposed plural marriage, briefly consented to four of the sealings in May 1843 on condition she choose the wives, and signed public statements denying any system of marriage other than monogamy. She reportedly burned a copy of the revelation in August 1843. In her last recorded interview, in 1879, she denied her husband had ever had another wife.
A household helper in the Smith home in Kirtland, she is named by Utah-era Latter-day Saints as Joseph Smith's first plural wife, probably in 1835 or early 1836. Emma expelled her from the house; Oliver Cowdery called the relationship a dirty, nasty, filthy affair. Fanny married Solomon Custer, a non-Mormon, on 16 November 1836 and never spoke publicly about Joseph Smith.
Sealed to Joseph Smith on 5 April 1841 by her brother-in-law Joseph Bates Noble, in a grove near the Mississippi, wearing a man's coat and hat. Noble swore an affidavit to the ceremony in 1869 and testified about it again in the 1892 Temple Lot hearings. Hers is the earliest Nauvoo plural marriage that can be dated from a sworn statement.
Married to Henry Bailey Jacobs in March 1841 and pregnant by him, she was sealed to Joseph Smith on 27 October 1841 by her brother Dimick Huntington. She continued to live with Jacobs, later married Brigham Young for time, and became the third general president of the Relief Society. Her own words about the sealing are the most quoted first-person witness on either side.
Sealed to Joseph Smith in May 1843, some three months before her fifteenth birthday, after her father Heber C. Kimball proposed the match. She later became one of plural marriage's most articulate public defenders while also writing about the grief the sealing caused her and her mother. Whether the marriage was conjugal is disputed and undetermined.
Secretary of the Nauvoo Relief Society and a signer of its October 1842 public denial of polygamy, she had been sealed to Joseph Smith on 29 June 1842, three months earlier. She left one of the earliest accounts of the angel with a drawn sword and became, in Utah, the leading female voice for plural marriage.
Orphaned daughter of Bishop Edward Partridge, she lived in the Smith home and was sealed to Joseph Smith on 4 March 1843 without Emma's knowledge, then sealed again on 11 May in Emma's presence after Emma chose her. Her autobiography and her sworn 1892 Temple Lot testimony are among the most detailed first-person accounts of a plural marriage in Nauvoo, including of its conjugal character.
Married to Windsor Lyon and sealed to Joseph Smith in February 1842 or 1843, she told her daughter Josephine on her deathbed in 1882 that Josephine was Joseph Smith's child. For a century that statement was the strongest single case for sexual polyandry. DNA analysis published in 2016 identified Windsor Lyon as Josephine's father.
Probable author of the 1835 Article on Marriage that declared one man should have one wife. In an 1838 letter to his brother Warren he described Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger as a dirty, nasty, filthy affair, and was excommunicated that April on a charge that included insinuating that Joseph Smith was guilty of adultery. He is the only contemporary in Kirtland to make the accusation on the record.
Mayor of Nauvoo and assistant to the First Presidency until his fall in May 1842 amid charges of sexual misconduct, after which he published a series of exposés naming women he said Joseph Smith had approached, and printed the letter to Nancy Rigdon now called the Happiness Letter. His accuracy on names and dates is often good and his framing is hostile, which is why every camp uses him selectively.
Second counselor in the First Presidency until April 1844, when he and his wife Jane were excommunicated. He demanded that Joseph Smith publicly acknowledge plural marriage and disown it as from hell, then published the plural-marriage revelation's substance in the single issue of the Nauvoo Expositor on 7 June 1844. Its destruction three days later led directly to Carthage.
