Official LDSThe Church's own account
The Church teaches that Joseph Smith conferred all the keys of the kingdom on the Quorum of the Twelve before he died, so that the authority to lead was already in place when he was killed. Saints, the current official history, has Brigham Young in Massachusetts striking his knee and saying, 'The keys of the kingdom are right here with the church,' and has him telling the Nauvoo congregation that 'the Quorum of the Twelve have the keys of the kingdom of God in all the world' and that 'no man can put another between the Twelve and the prophet Joseph.' It includes Emily Partridge glancing up to be sure it was not Joseph speaking. In general conference the Church has said plainly that the members of 1844 did not understand the principles of succession as well as they do now, that Rigdon 'wanted the Church to accept of him as the Guardian,' and that Joseph Smith had at various times indicated a number of men who might possibly succeed him. When the Joseph Smith III blessing surfaced in 1981 the Church answered that it was a blessing and not an ordination, quoting Joseph Smith III's own 1893 testimony in a Kansas City court: 'I was not ordained by my father as his successor: according to my understanding of the word ordain, I was not.'
Faithful / apologeticThe defenders' case
Apologetic writers accept that the succession was genuinely contested and answer it on the merits rather than by denying the mess. R. Jean Addams's Interpreter survey walks through every claimant and rests the Twelve's case on two supports: the 1835 revelation making the Twelve equal in authority to a First Presidency that dissolves at the president's death, and the March 1844 'last charge,' in which Joseph told the Council of Fifty, 'I roll the burthen and responsibility of leading this church off from my shoulder on to yours.' FAIR's wiki frames the crisis as an ordinary problem of authority with an available answer, and points readers to Ronald W. Walker's 'Six Days in August' and Andrew Ehat's thesis on temple ordinances and the succession question. On the transfiguration, this camp leans on the sheer number of independent later witnesses — Daniel C. Peterson and Lynne Jorgensen count around 129 — and on Ronald Esplin's formulation that though there is no contemporary diary account, the number of later retellings, many in remarkable detail, argues for the reality of some such experience.
NuancedThe confessional scholarship (BYU Studies, Dialogue)
Scholarship published inside the tradition has done most of the archival work and has not protected the story from it. BYU Studies published LaJean Purcell Carruth and Robin Scott Jensen's transcription of Thomas Bullock's shorthand of the 8 August morning meeting, which shows Rigdon making a far more modest argument than the standard retelling allows — that authority 'is in the church,' that 'every man will stand in his own place and stand in his own calling,' and that he asked only to be spokesman for the dead prophet. BYU Studies also published Jorgensen's collection of mantle testimonies while stating in the article itself that records do not indicate Brigham Young publicly acknowledged the manifestations at the time. Dialogue published Quinn's inventory of the many designations Joseph made before 1844 and Van Wagoner's dismantling of the transfiguration story. This camp's shared position is that the crisis was real, that the evidence is uneven, and that both facts can be said out loud.
Neutral academicThe academic reading
Independent scholarship treats 1844 as a textbook case of a charismatic founder failing to routinize his own authority. Quinn's 1976 BYU Studies article, still the standard account, identified eight alternative methods of succession, each with some colour of authenticity from something Joseph had said or done, and concluded that in August 1844 the Twelve were simply in the strongest position. Turner writes flatly that Joseph 'never outlined any sort of succession plan.' Reid Harper argues that the Twelve did not need a miracle in August 1844 and that Brigham Young's failure to invoke one three years later, when apostles at Winter Quarters were asking for a revelation, is telling. Edward Leo Lyman shows that the seniority rule modern members assume has always applied was not in place in 1844 or 1847, and that Orson Pratt objected systematically to reconstituting a First Presidency at all. The Journal of Mormon History has also mapped the losing branches: Wight and Cutler grounding their independence in the Council of Fifty, William Smith carrying lineal priesthood into the Midwest.
Critical / secularThe critics' reading
Critics argue that the succession was won, not inherited, and that the miracle was written in afterwards. Van Wagoner's Dialogue article — reproduced at length on MormonThink — assembles the case: no 1844 source describes a transfiguration; Wilford Woodruff wrote seven pages in his journal that day without mentioning one; Parley P. Pratt's autobiography, finished in 1856, says nothing miraculous; Bishop George Miller, who was there, later recalled that Young made a 'long and loud harangue' whose only point he could see was to overturn Rigdon's pretensions; the first public 'transfiguration' claim comes in 1857; and one diary long cited as contemporaneous has been shown to be a later copy. Rigdon himself wrote to Young in 1870 accusing him of encouraging the story. Critics also quote Brigham Young's own remark of 1860: 'The brethren testify that brother Brigham Young is brother Joseph's legal successor. You never heard me say so. I say that I am a good hand to keep the dogs and wolves out of the flock.' The Tanners' contribution was different in kind — it was their pressure on the provenance of the Joseph Smith III blessing that helped unravel a forgery both churches had accepted.
Secondary sourceThe Reorganized / Community of Christ counter-reading
The Reorganization's founding premise was that the presidency belonged to the seed of Joseph and that the Twelve's assumption of power in 1844 was a usurpation — and, further, that the church the Twelve took west had been corrupted by doctrines their prophet had never taught. Jason Briggs and Zenas Gurley built the movement on lineal succession after breaking with William Smith, who had taught it to them; the appeal was strongest among those, like Emma Smith and William Marks, who had opposed plural marriage in Nauvoo. Joseph Smith III used his fifty-four-year presidency both to reject polygamy and to deny that his father had advocated or practised it, and by about 1880 the RLDS Church had discarded most of the Nauvoo innovations in favour of what scholars call a Kirtland theology. Community of Christ historians writing since have been considerably more candid than nineteenth-century RLDS apologists about what Joseph Smith Jr. actually taught, which has made the lineal argument itself a live internal question rather than a settled boundary marker.
What it cost people
Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people in one river town had to decide, within six weeks of a murder, whom to trust with the rest of their lives. Most of them had already been driven out of two states. Families split: William Smith went to Voree and his mother followed for a time; Emma Smith stayed in Illinois while the wives of the apostles crossed the Mississippi in February; men who had gone to Wisconsin to cut pine for the temple ended up in Texas. A man returning to Nauvoo in 1845 to settle his affairs could be whittled and whistled out of the city for having read the wrong newspaper. The cost of the crisis was not doctrinal; it was measured in households that never spoke again.
The moral question the record poses
Joseph Smith told several men, in private, that they might succeed him, and never told the church which of them he meant. Whether that was carelessness, deliberate flexibility, or a man who did not expect to die at thirty-eight, the effect was to leave thousands of people holding incompatible promises, all of them genuine. The moral question the record poses is about the duty a leader owes to the people who will outlive him — and about what happens to sincerity itself when several honest men each remember a different private assurance and none of them can be checked.
What it asks of an institution — and of you
The 8 August vote is the one moment in the tradition when ordinary members decided who would lead them, and it was immediately made unrepeatable: within three years an incomplete quorum meeting in a house on the Missouri set the precedent that still governs, and the show of hands became a ratification rather than a choice. An institution that tells the succession story as a miracle has to decide what to do with the fact that no 1844 document records the miracle — its own scholars have published that plainly, in its own university's journal. A person deciding what to do now has to weigh whether a founding story that formed a decade after the event is thereby false, or whether communities routinely and legitimately understand what happened to them only in retrospect.
Questions to carry away
- If Joseph Smith had a settled plan, why did he never state it publicly, and why did the Twelve need to draft a declaration about the 'last charge' months after it would have decided the question?
- Does the absence of any 1844 record of the transfiguration make the later accounts false, or does it show something about how communities come to understand what happened to them?
- Would the outcome have been different if Hyrum Smith had not gone to Carthage, or if Samuel Smith had lived past July?
- What is owed to the losing claimants — Rigdon, Wight, Cutler, Strang, William Smith — whose followers were as sincere as anyone in Nauvoo?
- If the seniority rule was assembled out of contested precedents rather than revealed, does that change what it means to sustain a president today?
