One | The “Restoration of All Things”
Joseph Smith, Jr., the charismatic founder of Mormonism, emerged from the ferment of Jacksonian America during a time when religion was regaining its hold over American life, when abolitionist groups, temperance movements, and benevolent societies were thriving. Utopian experiments testified to the exuberance of a nation advancing from infancy to childhood. Innocent vitality, limitless resources, a booming economy, and westward expansion nurtured a profound belief in America as a land of new hope, a light to the world.
Into this light came Joseph Smith, the twenty-four-year-old New York farmer who founded a religion based on his translation of a set of gold plates delivered by an angel. The Book of Mormon, a record of God’s dealings with the pre-Columbian ancestors of the American Indian, not only explained the Hebrew origins of the Indian but established America as a chosen land destined to receive the fullness of the everlasting gospel. Written in King James English, Smith’s translation sounded biblical, but its location and conceptual framework were American. The Book of Mormon gave America a sacred past and a millennial future. It became the keystone of a new American religion.
God could not have chosen a better place, a better time, or a better people than early nineteenth-century Americans for the “restoration of all things.” After a decade of religious revivalism, the blossoming economy of the 1830s had ripened millennial expectations. Word of angelic visitations was greeted enthusiastically. The heavens were being rolled back. Old men were dreaming dreams and young men prophesying. Women were speaking in tongues and children conversing with angels. New faiths mushroomed.
Western New York, where Joseph Smith grew up, was so frequently swept by the fires of religious enthusiasm that it came to be known as the “burned-over district.” It was in this milieu that Smith organized the Church of Christ on 6 April 1830, later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Like other dynamic movements of the day, the foundling church was influenced not only by restoration Protestant sectarianism but by flourishing contemporary social experiments. Smith’s ability to blend current ideas with his own visionary experiences is evident in the growth of his communal vision. His earliest exposure to utopian thought and practices may have stemmed from a religious sect called the Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Popularly known as Shakers, the group established a community a few miles from Smith’s birthplace in Vermont (Arrington, Fox, and May 1976, 20). Mother Ann Lee’s celibate society was one of the first communitarian organizations of this kind in the United States.
Joseph Smith was probably also familiar with the Harmonists, who claimed that George Rapp, a Lutheran minister and social reformer, was responding to a vision from the angel Gabriel when in 1804 he brought his followers from Germany to Harmony, Pennsylvania, twenty-five miles north of Pittsburg. The Harmonists, who migrated to Indiana to found New Harmony in 1815 before returning to Ambridge, Pennsylvania, in 1825, experimented, like the Shakers, with shared property and celibacy.1
Robert Owen, a wealthy Scottish reformer and industrialist, may have also indirectly shaped Joseph Smith’s utopian ideas through one of his most influential American followers. Arriving in the United States in the mid-1820s, Owen promised a “new Eden in the far west” and began establishing communities based on common ownership and equality of work and profit. After purchasing New Harmony from the Harmonists in 1825, he established several other communitarian societies in Ohio, at Kendal and Yellow Springs. Sidney Rigdon, a prominent Protestant minister in the Western Reserve area of Ohio and a follower of Alexander Campbell’s Disciples of Christ, attended a debate between Owen and Campbell in 1829. Taken with Owen’s system of “family commonwealths,” he tried to implement such a communal order within the Disciples of Christ (Ericksen 1922, 17). Campbell’s objections caused Rigdon to leave the Disciples and, with other dissenters, to set up “common-stock” societies at Mentor and Kirtland, Ohio. By the fall of 1830 Rigdon and more than one hundred members of “the family,” as they were known, had converted to Mormonism, which, by then, numbered nearly one thousand.
After arriving in Ohio from New York in February 1831, Joseph Smith convinced Rigdon’s communal group to abandon the common-stock principle in favor of the “more perfect law of the Lord.” On 9 February 1831 Smith announced God’s “Law of Consecration and Stewardship.” Members were advised that “all things belong to the Lord” and were directed to deed all personal property to the bishop of the church. The bishop then returned a “stewardship” to each head of a household, who was expected to turn over any accrued surplus to the church. Known as the “Order of Enoch,” “the Lord’s Law,” and the “United Order,” the Mormon principle of stewardship was intended as a pattern of social and economic reorganization for all mankind. The dream was to unify “a people fragmented by their individualistic search for economic well-being.” The Saints, as a group, divested of personal selfishness and greed, were to be prepared by this communal discipline to usher in the millennial reign of Jesus Christ (Arrington, Fox, and May 1976, 2-3).
Smith’s ideas derived much from the New Testament Christian Primitivism of the day. But the deeper roots of his theology lay in his interpretation of the Old Testament. His concept of the Kingdom of God paralleled Israelite theocracy. The idea of a temple, as well as accompanying ordinances of washings, anointings, and covenants, was central to Hebrew worship. Smith’s theology of marriage and family too may have drawn on ancient Israelite traditions. Like the biblical patriarchs of old, Mormon males empowered with priesthood were entitled to receive divine guidance in family matters. Women, on the other hand, were denied both priesthood and hierarchic position. This Old Testament focus evidently also drew Smith to the idea of biblical polygamy as part of the “restitution of all things.” According to a close friend, Joseph B. Noble, Smith became convinced of the theological necessity of polygamy “while he was engaged in the work of translation of the Scriptures” (“Plural Marriage,” 454), evidently a reference to Smith’s and Rigdon’s early 1830 revision of the Bible published later as The Inspired Version.
Though polygamy is strongly denounced in several Book of Mormon passages (Jac. 1:15; 2:23-27; 3:5; Mos. 11:2-4, 14; Eth. 10:5), a reading of the Old Testament provides ample evidence that it was acceptable in ancient Israel. Abraham was not the only husband of multiple wives. Jacob had two wives and two concubines (Gen. 29-30); Elkanah had two wives (1 Sam. 1:2); Rehoboam had eighteen wives and sixty concubines (2 Chron. 11:21); Abijah married fourteen women (2 Chron. 13:21); David had a large harem (1 Chron. 14:3); and Solomon managed seven hundred wives and more than three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
It is difficult to determine exactly when Joseph Smith first felt compelled to practice polygamy. W. W. Phelps recollected three decades after the fact in an 1861 letter to Brigham Young that on 17 July 1831, when he and five others had gathered in Jackson County, Missouri, Smith stated: “It is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites [Indians], that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just.” Phelps added in a postscript that “about three years after this was given, I asked brother Joseph, privately, how ‘we,’ that were mentioned in the revelation could take wives of the ‘natives’ as we were all married men?” He claimed that Smith replied, “In the same manner that Abraham took Hagar and Keturah; and Jacob took Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpha, by Revelation.”2
In 1869 Mormon apostle Orson Pratt added another perspective, remembering that in early 1832 “Joseph told individuals, then in the Church, that he had inquired of the Lord concerning the principle of plurality of wives, and he received for answer that the principle of taking more wives than one is a true principle, but the time had not yet come for it to be practiced” (JD 13 [7 Oct. 1869]: 192).3 Polygamy would not be a public practice of Mormonism until 1852, eight years after Smith’s death. Smith never publicly advocated polygamy. New Testament monogamy, the official church position throughout his lifetime, was clearly outlined in Smith’s 1831 revelations: “Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shall cleave unto her and none else” (D&C 42:22); “It is lawful that [a man] should have one wife, and they twain shall be one flesh” (49:16).
But from the early days of the church rumors hinted that Smith maintained a private position different from his public posture. His abrupt 1830 departure with his wife, Emma, from Harmony, Pennsylvania, may have been precipitated in part by Levi and Hiel Lewis’s accusations that Smith had acted improperly towards a local girl. Five years later Levi Lewis, Emma’s cousin, repeated stories that Smith attempted to “seduce Eliza Winters &c.,” and that both Smith and his friend Martin Harris had claimed “adultery was no crime” (Susquehanna Register, 1 May 1834, reprinted in Howe 1834, 268; see also Newell and Avery 1984, 64). Similar allegations in Hiram, Ohio, reportedly caused problems for Smith in 1832. One account related that on 24 March a mob of men pulled Smith from his bed, beat him, and then covered him with a coat of tar and feathers. Eli Johnson, who allegedly participated in the attack “because he suspected Joseph of being intimate with his sister, Nancy Marinda Johnson, … was screaming for Joseph’s castration” (Brodie 1975, 119).4
Rumors about Smith multiplied. Benjamin F. Winchester, Smith’s close friend and leader of Philadelphia Mormons in the early 1840s, later recalled Kirtland accusations of scandal and “licentious conduct” hurled against Smith, “this more especially among the women. Joseph’s name was connected with scandalous relations with two or three families” (Winchester 1889).5
One of the women whose name was linked to Smith in Kirtland was Vienna Jacques. A second-hand story remembered many years after the event by a “Mrs. Alexander” contended that Polly Beswick, a colorful two-hundred-pound Smith domestic, told her friends that “Jo Smith said he had a revelation to lie with Vienna Jacques, who lived in his family” and that Emma Smith told her “Joseph would get up in the night and go to Vienna’s bed.” Furthermore, she added, “Emma would get out of humor, fret and scold and flounce in the harness,” then Smith would “shut himself up in a room and pray for a revalation … state it to her, and bring her around all right.”6
During an 1873 interview Martin Harris, Book of Mormon benefactor and close friend of Smith, recalled another such incident from the early Kirtland period. “In or about the year 1833,” Harris remembered, Joseph Smith’s “servant girl” claimed that the prophet had made “improper proposals to her, which created quite a talk amongst the people.” When Smith came to him for advice, Harris, supposing that there was nothing to the story, told him to “take no notice of the girl, that she was full of the devil, and wanted to destroy the prophet of god.” But according to Harris, Smith “acknowledged that there was more truth than poetry in what the girl said.” Harris then said he would have nothing to do with the matter; Smith could get out of the trouble “the best way he knew how” (Metcalf n.d., 72).
William E. McLellin, a Mormon apostle who was excommunicated in 1838, further detailed this situation with the unnamed “servant girl” in an 1872 letter to the Smith’s eldest son, Joseph III: “I visited your Mother and family in 1847, and held a lengthy conversation with her, retired in the Mansion house in Nauvoo. I did not ask her to tell, but I told her some stories I had heard. And she told me whether I was properly informed. Dr. F[rederick] G. Williams practiced with me in Clay Co. Mo. during the latter part of 1838. And he told me that at your birth [6 November 1832] your father committed an act with a Miss Hill—a hired girl. Emma saw him, and spoke to him. He desisted, but Mrs. Smith refused to be satisfied. He called in Dr. Williams, O. Cowdery, and S. Rigdon to reconcile Emma. But she told them just as the circumstances took place. He found he was caught. He confessed humbly, and begged forgiveness. Emma and all forgave him. She told me this story was true!!”
Accounts such as these have led some historians to conclude that Joseph Smith was licentious. But others have countered that these stories merely indicate his involvement in a heaven-sanctioned system of polygamy, influenced by Old Testament models (Bachman 1975; Hill 1968; Foster 1981).
If Smith did take a plural wife in Kirtland during the early 1830s under such a system, the woman was likely Fanny Alger. McLellin’s 1872 letter described Alger’s relationship with Smith. “Again I told [your mother],” the former apostle wrote, that “I heard that one night she missed Joseph and Fanny Alger. She went to the barn and saw him and Fanny in the barn together alone. She looked through a crack and saw the transaction!!! She told me this story too was verily true.” McLellin also detailed the Alger incident to a newspaper reporter for the 6 October 1875 Salt Lake Tribune. The reporter stated that McLellin informed him of the exact place “where the first well authenticated case of polygamy took place.” According to the article, the marriage occurred “in a barn on the hay mow, and was witnessed by Mrs. Smith through a crack in the door!”7
Fanny Ward Alger, one of ten children born to Mormons Samuel Alger and Clarissa Hancock, was nineteen years old when she became a maidservant in the Smith home in 1835. Benjamin F. Johnson, a long-time friend of Smith, described Fanny as “a varry nice & Comly young woman…it was whispered eaven then that Joseph Loved her.” Warren Parrish, Smith’s personal secretary, told Johnson that he and Oliver Cowdery both knew that “Joseph had Fanny Alger as a wife for They were Spied upon & found together” (Zimmerman 1976, 38).
Rumors of Smith’s relationship with Alger, whispered about Kirtland during the summer of 1835, may have been the catalyst for the church’s announcement of its official position on marriage as well as motivation for Smith’s frequent addresses on marital relationships that fall. While Smith was in Michigan his secretary, W. W. Phelps, presented to the church’s 17 August 1835 General Assembly a “Chapter of Rules for Marriage among the Saints.” This declaration stipulated in part: “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 the case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.” The assembled Saints voted to accept the statement as part of “the faith and principle of this society as a body” by canonizing it in the official Doctrine and Covenants of the church.8
This important document, probably introduced by Phelps at Joseph Smith’s own request,9 includes a marriage ceremony and what may be the first scriptural reference to the concept of eternal marriage. Evidently alluding to this, Phelps wrote to his wife Sally on 9 September 1835: “I have it in my heart to give you a little instruction, so that you may know your place, and stand in it, believed, admired, and rewarded, in time and in eternity.” One week later he noted that “Br[other] Joseph has preached some of the greatest sermons on the duty of wives to their husbands and the role of all Women, I ever heard.” Phelps then expounded on his newly gained understanding of eternal marriage, “Sally … you closed your 4th letter to me … after the manner of the Gentiles: says Sally ‘I remain your till death.’” But, Phelps explained, “you will be mine, in this world and in the world to come … you may as well use the word ‘forever,’ as ‘till death.’” Phelps’s letters make clear that “eternal marriage” was distinct from polygamy, at least in his mind: “I have no right to any other woman in this world nor in the world to come according to the law of the celestial Kingdom.”
Despite these 1835 indications of an understanding of the principle of eternal marriage, which would subsequently become synonymous with plural marriage, a distinctly polygamous marriage ceremony was apparently not performed until Joseph Smith was “sealed” to plural wife Louisa Beaman on 5 or 6 April 1841.10 Smith evidently viewed all marriages prior to this time, including his own to Emma, as valid for “time” only. As late as 1840 he occasionally signed letters to Emma with the benediction “your husband till death.”11 It was not until a 28 May 1843 meeting of the Endowment Council12 in Nauvoo, Illinois, that the Joseph and Emma Smith were finally sealed for time and eternity in the “new and everlasting covenant of marriage” (Ehat 1982, 2).
But as early as 1835 Smith wanted Mormon couples married by Mormon elders rather than by civil authorities or leaders of other religions. Ohio law refused to recognize Mormon elders as ministers. In a bold display of civil disobedience on 14 November 1835, Smith married Lydia Goldthwait Bailey to Newel Knight. Initially Seymour Brunson, who held a valid minister’s license, was to perform the marriage. But as Hyrum Smith began the introductory comments, Joseph Smith stepped forward, stopped his brother, and declared his intent to officiate. The bride later recalled his saying, “Our Elders have been wronged and prosecuted for marrying without a license. The Lord God of Israel has given me authority to unite the people in the holy bonds of matrimony. And from this time forth I shall use that privilege and marry whomsoever I see fit” (Homespun 1893, 31).
Smith’s performance of this marriage was one of his earliest efforts to apply heavenly guidelines on earth despite legal technicalities. Not only was Smith not a lawfully recognized minister, but Lydia Bailey, whose non-Mormon husband had deserted her, was never formally divorced. Obviously, Smith saw marriage not as a secular contract but as a sacramental covenant to be sealed by priesthood rather than by civil authority. He commented at the conclusion of the Knight ceremony “that marriage was an institution of heaven, instituted in the garden of Eden; that it was necessary it should be solemnized by the authority of the everlasting Priesthood” (HC 2:320).
During the next few weeks Smith officiated at numerous other weddings. At the January 1836 wedding of Mormon apostle John F. Boynton and Susan Lowell, he read aloud a license granting any “Minister of the gospel the privilege of solemnizing the rights of matrimony.” He then alluded to an “ancient order of marriage” and pronounced upon the bride and groom “the blessings of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” The next day he signed a certificate of marriage for William F. Calhoon and Nancy M. Gibbs affirming that the ceremony had been performed “agreeable to the rules and regulations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Matrimony” (ibid., 377).
Smith’s plans for Mormon utopia in Ohio and Missouri failed. A national recession devastated his economic plans in Kirtland. And non-Mormons in both places became increasingly nervous about the growing political clout of Mormons. Ohio and Missouri natives were suspicious of the close-knit Mormon lifestyle so contrary to mainstream American life. Disaffected Mormons vied with non-Mormons in hurling accusations against the church. Speculations that the Saints were practicing polygamy compounded such problems.
Within such an environment of suspicion, detractors suspected that the Mormon “Law of Consecration” included a “community of wives.” If churchmen could share their property, why not their wives, too? Similar communitarian groups advocating a “community of wives” and other marital variations may have become confused with Smith’s followers in the public mind. Parallels were compelling. In the early 1830s another group of “Saints” emerged from the social upheaval in New York. Disciples of revivalist preachers Erasmus Stone, Hiram Sheldon, and Jarvis Rider claimed they were perfect and could no longer sin. They became known as “Perfectionists.” As a part of their doctrine, adherents advocated “spiritual wifery,” a concept nearly identical to Mormon eternal marriage, wherein “all arrangements for a life in heaven may be made on earth … spiritual friendships may be formed, and spiritual bonds contracted, valid for eternity” (Ellis 1870). In 1832 Mormon missionary Orson Hyde, a former member of Sidney Rigdon’s “family,” visited a group he called “Cochranites” and disdainfully described in his 11 October 1832 journal the group’s “Wonderful lustful spirit, because they believe in a ‘plurality of wives’ which they call spiritual wives, knowing them not after the flesh but after the spirit, but by the appearance they know one another after the flesh.”
Another practitioner of spiritual wifery was Robert Matthews, alias “Matthias the Prophet.” Matthews announced that “all marriages not made by himself, and according to his doctrine, were of the devil, and that he had come to establish a community of property, and of wives” (“Memoirs”). In 1833 Matthews convinced two of his followers that, as sinners, they were not properly united in wedlock. He claimed power to dissolve the marriage, married the woman himself, prophesied that she was to “become the mother of a spiritual generation,” and promised to father her first “spiritual child” himself. After a brief prison sentence, Matthews turned up on Joseph Smith’s doorstep in Kirtland as “Joshua, the Jewish Minister” (Ms History, 8 Nov. 1835).
Smith’s account of the two-day meeting is sketchy, but apparently Matthews was sent on his way after a disagreement on the “transmigration of the soul.”
Linked in the public mind with such colorful religionists as Matthias, Shakers, Harmonists, Perfectionists, Rappites, and Cochranites, Joseph Smith was viewed skeptically by many outsiders. But the real problems in Ohio were caused by insiders. The instability created by disastrous financial decisions involving Smith’s Kirtland Safety Anti-Banking Society was compounded by stories about Smith’s 1835 relationship with Fanny Alger. Benjamin Johnson years later noted that the Alger incident was “one of the Causes of Apostacy & disruption at Kirtland altho at the time there was little Said publickly upon the subject” (Zimmerman 1976, 39). At least one account indicated that Fanny became pregnant. Chauncy G. Webb, Smith’s grammar teacher, later reported that when the pregnancy became evident, Emma Smith drove Fanny from her home (Wyl 1886, 57). Webb’s daughter, Ann Eliza Webb Young, a divorced wife of Brigham Young, remembered that Fanny was taken into the Webb home on a temporary basis (Young 1876, 66-67). In fact Joseph Smith’s journal entry for 17 October 1835 may contain a cryptic reference to this event: “Called my family together arranged my domestick concerns and dismissed my boarders.”13
Fanny left Kirtland in September 1836 with her family. Though she married non-Mormon Solomon Custer on 16 November 183614 and was living in Dublin City, Indiana, far from Kirtland, her name still raised eyebrows. Fanny Brewer, a Mormon visitor to Kirtland in 1837, observed “much excitement against the Prophet … [involving] an unlawful intercourse between himself and a young orphan girl residing in his family and under his protection” (Parkin 1966, 174).
Much of the excitement was evidently caused by the strong reaction of Smith’s close counselor and friend Oliver Cowdery to Smith’s presumed liaison with Alger. Apostle David W. Patten, visiting from Missouri in the summer of 1837, went to Cowdery in Kirtland to “enquire of him if a certain story was true respecting J[oseph] Smith’s committing adultery with a certain girl.” Patten later said that Cowdery “turned on his heel and insinuated as though [Smith] was guilty, he then went on and gave a history of some circumstances respecting the adultery scrape stating that no doubt it was true. Also said that Joseph had told him, he had confessed to Emma” (Cannon and Cook 1983, 167).
Church leaders in Missouri questioned Cowdery regarding the Alger incident when he arrived in Far West in the fall of 1837. Thomas B. Marsh, president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, stated that when Cowdery was asked “if Joseph Smith jr had confessed to his wife that he was guilty of adultery with a certain girl,” Cowdery “cocked up his eye very knowingly and hesitated to answer the question saying he did not know as he was bound to answer the question, yet conveyed the idea that it was true.”15
Later that fall, during a discussion at the Far West home of George W. Harris, Marsh reported a conversation “between Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery when J. Smith asked him if he had ever confessed to him that he was guilty of adultery, when after a considerable winking &c, he said No.” Smith then gave an apologetic history of the “girl business,” adding that “Oliver Cowdery had been his bosom friend, therefore he intrusted him with many things” (ibid., 167-68).
After Smith returned to Ohio from Missouri in late 1837 rumors circulated that Cowdery had spread scandalous lies about the prophet and had been chastened by him. The “Second Elder” was furious. He dashed off a 21 January 1838 letter to Smith complaining, “I hear 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 then you and myself are two” (in Cowdery to Cowdery). Apparently the word from Kirtland had come from Warren Cowdery, Oliver’s brother, because Oliver included a copy of the letter to Smith in a separate letter to Warren. “I can assure you and bro. Lyman [Cowdery],” Oliver angrily wrote to his brother, “I never confessed insinuated or admitted that I ever willfully lied about him. When he was there we had some conversation in which in every instance, I did not fail to affirm that what I had said was strictly true” in the matter of “a dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Algers.”
Smith did not respond to Cowdery’s letter. He was embroiled in trying to hold the church together in Kirtland. Prominent church leaders Luke Johnson, John Boynton, Warren Parrish, and others had united to denounce Smith as a heretic and “fallen prophet.” They urged church members to rally around them in re-establishing the “old standards.” After a clamor of accusations from both sides, leaders of the Johnson faction were excommunicated. But then one of the dissidents obtained a warrant for Smith’s arrest on a charge of fraud. Under cover of darkness on 12 January 1838 he and first counselor Sidney Rigdon decided to “escape mob violence, which was about to burst upon us under the color of legal process” (HC 3:1). They fled to Far West, Missouri.
While Smith was en route to Missouri, charges against Oliver Cowdery’s church membership were initiated in Far West. Prominent on the list of nine charges was “seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith jr by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultry &c.”16 Though Smith arrived at Far West on 14 March 1838, he evidently would not grant Cowdery a requested interview. The Second Elder was excommunicated 12 April 1838, effectively disarming his accusations against the prophet.
Confusion over the exact nature and extent of Joseph Smith’s involvement with Fanny Alger has remained to this day. That there was a sexual relationship seems probable. But was Smith’s association with his house servant adulterous, as Cowdery charged? Or was she Smith’s first plural wife? Apostle Heber C Kimball, many years later, introduced Fanny’s brother John Alger in the Saint George Temple as “brother of the Prophet Josephs first Plural Wife” (Zimmerman 1976, 45). And in 1899 church leaders performed a proxy marriage for the couple. “The sealings of those named,” a temple recorder noted of Alger and the ten other women listed, “were performed during the life of the Prophet Joseph but there is no record thereof. President Lorenzo Snow decided that they be repeated in order that a record might exist; and that this explanation be made” (Tinney 1973, 41).
If Smith and Alger were sealed in a plural marriage as 1899 church leaders were persuaded, who stood as witness for the ordinance? Who performed the ceremony? In the absence of an officiator or witness, did God himself seal the couple, or did Smith, as God’s only legitimate earthly agent, marry himself to Alger? Smith did not claim publicly the power to “bind on earth and seal eternally in the heavens” until 3 April 1836, perhaps one year after the Alger incident (D&C 110:13-16). Could he have viewed her as his common-law wife, married by connubial relationship rather than by wedding ceremony?17
Unfortunately, Smith himself provided no help in clarifying his relationship with Alger. His public denouncements of polygamy during this period compounded the confusion. Only three weeks after Cowdery’s excommunication, Smith published a statement in the July 1838 Elder’s Journal answering several questions about Mormonism. To the question, “Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?” he responded emphatically, “No, not at the same time.” Several months later, in mid-December, while incarcerated in Liberty, Missouri, he wrote a “Letter to the Church” which reflected his personal difficulties. Perhaps alluding to the Alger rumors, he asked, “Was it for committing adultery that we were assailed?” He then denied the charge as the “false slander” of “renegade ‘Mormon dissenters’ … running through the world and spreading various foul and libelous reports against us.” He dismissed the persistent allegation that the Mormons had “not only dedicated our property, but our families also to the Lord; and Satan, taking advantage of this, has perverted it into licentiousness, such as a community of wives, which is an abomination in the sight of God” (HC 3:230).
The difficulties between Smith and Cowdery could probably have been resolved if Smith had admitted, at least to Cowdery, that he was introducing plural marriage into the church. But Cowdery, who left viewing Smith’s behavior as adulterous, never became reconciled to Mormon polygamy. Church leaders much later unfairly accused Cowdery of taking a plural wife himself. Brigham Young is recorded in 1872 as having said that “while Joseph and Oliver were translating the Book of Mormon, they had a revelation that the order of Patriarchal Marriag and the Sealing was right.” Cowdery, according to Young, proposed to Smith, “Why dont we go into the Order of Polygamy, and practice it as the ancients did? We know it is true, then why delay?” Smith warned that “the time has not yet come.” Ignoring the prophet’s counsel, “Oliver Cowdery took to wife Miss Annie Lyman, cousin to Geo A. Smith. From that time he went into darknes and lost the spirit. Annie Lyman is still alive, a witnes to these things” (Larson and Larson 1980, 1:349).18
This second-hand statement of Young, who may not have even been a Mormon at the time of the purported incident, lacks credibility. The Book of Mormon not only consistently denounces polygamy, but it would have been impossible for Cowdery to have been living polygamously during the period charged by Young (1827-30). Cowdery’s marriage to his only wife, Elizabeth Ann Whitmer, occurred in 1832, three years after the translation of the Book of Mormon.19 Furthermore no charges of sexual misconduct were made against Cowdery during his 1838 excommunication trial when there would have been ample opportunity and strong incentive for such retaliation.
Cowdery returned to Mormonism for a short time before his death in 1850 and was shocked when his sister and her husband, Daniel and Phebe Jackson, wrote to him from Illinois in 1846 confirming that polygamy was being practiced by church leaders. “I can hardly think it possible,” he wrote, “that though there may be individuals who are guilty of the iniquities spoken of—yet no such practice can be preached or adhered to as a public doctrine.” Cowdery viewed polygamy as morally and culturally unthinkable: “Such may do for the followers of Mohamet, it may have done some thousands of years ago, but no people professing to be governed by the pure and holy principles of the Lord Jesus, can hold up their heads before the world at this distance of time, and be guilty of such folly—such wrong—such abomination.”20
Neither Oliver Cowdery’s dim view of polygamy nor the difficulties the Fanny Alger situation caused seriously hampered Joseph Smith’s apparent enthusiasm for plural marriage. But shortly after Cowdery’s excommunication, events in Far West reached such crisis proportions that the church was again forced to uproot and move.
1. Rapp’s Harmony is not the community where Joseph Smith lived intermittently from 1825 to 1827. Smith’s Harmony, now Oakland, was located three hundred miles to the east in the northeastern section of the state.
2. Though the Phelps letter has been widely touted as the earliest source documenting the advocacy of Mormon polygamy, it is not without its problems. For example, Phelps himself, in a 16 September 1835 letter to his wife, Sally, demonstrated no knowledge of church-sanctioned polygamy: “I have no right to any other woman in this world nor in the world to come according to the law of the celestial kingdom.” Other contemporary evidence suggests, however, that Smith’s revelation was not intended to foreshadow polygamy but rather to remove obstacles to missionary work which Indian agents in Kansas-Missouri had created. Ezra Booth, a prominent ex-Protestant minister turned Mormon apostate, was also in Missouri in 1831 and published an account of the revelation in the 8 December 1831 Ohio Star. According to Booth, “it has been made known by revelation,” that it would be “pleasing to the Lord if the elders formed a matrimonial alliance with the natives,” whereby Mormons might “gain a residence” in Indian territory, despite the opposition of government agents. (See also Whittaker 1985, 35.)
Oliver Cowdery and Parley P. Pratt had led a team of missionaries to Kansas-Missouri in the spring of 1831. Though the group had high hopes of success among the Indian tribes in the area, Cowdery wrote that the Indian agent was a “difficult man and we think some what strenuous respecting our having liberty to visit our brethren the Lamanites” (Messenger and Advocate, Oct. 1835). Pratt added that the men “were soon ordered out of the Indian country as disturbers of the peace” (Pratt 1874, 57).
Phelps could also have mistaken the “we” in his recollection. Smith may have intended miscegenation as a general Mormon rule rather than a specific directive to the seven men on the trip. Though intermarriage between Mormon males and Indian women became an accepted Mormon custom, none of the seven men married an Indian woman. Mormons of Brigham Young’s day, however, commonly taught that the Indians would become a “white and delightsome people” through intermarriage. As early as 1852 William Hall noted that Young taught “the curse of their color shall be removed” through intermarriage (p. 59). And Elder James S. Brown, an 1853 missionary to the Shoshone, recalled instructions from church leaders “to identify our interests with theirs, even to marrying among them, if we would be permitted to take young daughters of the chief and leading men.… It was thought that by forming that kind of an alliance we could have more power to do them good and keep the peace among the adjacent tribes” (Brown 1900, 320).
The concept of Indians becoming a “white and delightsome people” is based on such Book of Mormon passages as 2 Nephi 30:6: “The scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white and delightsome people.” Though the printer’s copy and the 1830 and 1837 editions of the Book of Mormon all read “white and delightsome,” Mormon church leaders in 1981 changed the verse to read “pure and delightsome,” paralleling the 1840 edition.
3. Pratt made essentially the same comments before an 1878 audience of RLDS Mormons in Plano, Illinois. He recalled that his 1832 missionary companion, Lyman Johnson, told him that “Joseph had made known to him as early as 1831, that plural marriage was a correct principle. Joseph declared to Lyman that God had revealed it to him, but that the time had not come to teach or practice it in the Church, but that the time would come” (MS 40 [16 Dec. 1878]: 788).
4. That an incident between Smith and Nancy Johnson precipitated the mobbing is unlikely. Sidney Rigdon was attacked just as viciously by the group as was Smith. And the leader of the mob, Simonds Ryder, later said that the attack occurred because members of the mob had found some documents that led them to believe “the horrid fact that a plot was laid to take their property from them and place it under the control of Smith” (Hill 1977, 146). Besides, John Johnson had no son Eli. His only sons were John, Jr., Luke, Olmstead, and Lyman (Newell and Avery 1984, 41).
Nancy Johnson, who married Orson Hyde in 1834, became one of Smith’s plural wives in February 1842 while Hyde was on a mission to Palestine (Quinn, “Prayer Circles,” 88). Mrs. Hyde evidently first became linked with Smith’s secretary, Apostle Willard Richards, whose wife was in Massachusetts. Ebenezer Robinson, who lost his job as editor of the Times and Seasons because of his wife Angeline’s support of Emma Smith’s anti-polygamy stance, noted in The Return 2 (Oct. 1890): 346-47 that in late January 1842, after his family vacated the printing office, “Willard Richards nailed down the windows, and fired off his revolver in the street after dark, and commenced living with Mrs. Nancy Marinda Hyde.” John C. Bennett made the same accusations in his book (1842, 241-43). Sidney Rigdon’s Latter Day Saint’s Messenger and Advocate in a 15 March 1845 letter “TO THE SISTERS OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER DAY SAINTS” commented: “If R[ichards] should take a notion to H[yde]’s wife in his absence, all that is necessary to be done is to be sealed. No harm done, no adultery committed; only taking a little advantage of rights of priesthood. And after R[ichards] has gone the round of dissipation with H[yde]’s wife, she is afterwards turned over to S[mith] and thus the poor silly woman becomes the actual dupe to two designing men, under the sanctimonious garb of rights of the royal priesthood. H[yde] by and by finds out the trick which was played off upon him in his absence, by his two faithless friends. His dignity becomes offended, (and well it might) refuses to live with his wife, but to be even with his companions in iniquity, takes to himself three more wives.”
Orson and Nancy Hyde continued to live together for a short time after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. But their relationship was unsteady, ending in divorce in 1870 (Quinn, “Prayer Circles,” 98). Ann Eliza Young commented in her 1876 book that when Hyde returned from his mission “it was hinted to him that Smith had had his first wife sealed to himself in his absence, as a wife for eternity.” She added that years later Brigham Young “informed his apostle that [Nancy] was his wife only for time, but Joseph’s for eternity” (1876, 324-26).
5. When Winchester was excommunicated after Smith’s death for “disobeying counsel,” he alleged that the real reason for church action was because he was a “deadly enemy of the spiritual wife system and for this opposition he had received all manner of abuse from all who believe in that hellish system (Grant to Young, 7 Sept. 1844).
6. Vienna Jacques was eighteen years older than Joseph Smith. She lived to be more than ninety, and was sealed to Smith by proxy on 28 March 1858 (Jessee 1984, 293-94).
7. Newell and Avery have surmised that McLellin in his “old age” perhaps confused Fanny Alger with the Fanny Hill of John Cleland’s 1749 novel and “came up with the hired girl, Miss Hill” (1984, 66). But McLellin’s wording implies two separate situations. After telling young Joseph the Miss Hill story he then wrote, “Again I told [your mother].… She told me this story too was verily true” (italics mine). Also Martin Harris’s account of the servant girl noted “In or about the year 1833,” while McLellin’s account says at the time of Joseph III’s birth—6 November 1832. Alger did not live in Smith’s home until 1835.
8. Mormons have not given the 1835 marriage statement the attention deserved by its pivotal historical significance. The neglect is understandable: the section is no longer in Mormon scripture. When the church officially announced its polygamy in 1852, the 1835 statement seemed obsolete. It was removed in 1876, replaced with a revelation on “celestial marriage” (D&C 132) which had been revealed to Smith on 12 July 1843 but not accepted by the Saints until 1852.
An additional reason the 1835 marriage statement receives little attention despite its status as the present law of the church is that Smith was not present during the 17 August general assembly which voted on the measure. He had planned a brief missionary venture to Michigan to coincide with the 17 August meeting. Cowdery remained behind not only to conduct the conference but to be with his wife, Elizabeth, who gave birth to a daughter, Maria, on 21 August.
Rumors circulated years later that Cowdery authored the marriage statement against Joseph Smith’s wishes (see Brigham Young, in Joseph F. Smith Journal, 9 Oct. 1869). If true, Smith would have had ample opportunity to modify or delete the statement before publication. A “Notes To The Reader” addendum in the 1835 edition, detailed changes in the statement after it had been canonized but prior to publication. No changes were made to the section detailing the opposition to fornication and polygamy. Moreover Smith later authorized the second printing of the edition after proofreading the text.
Statements that Smith and other church leaders subsequently made, as well as the fact that Smith performed marriages using the ceremony canonized in the 1835 declaration, argue for his approval of the statement. In 1842 Smith declared the 1835 marriage statement the only “rule of marriage … practiced in this Church” (TS 3 [1 Oct. 1842]: 939). President Wilford Woodruff added in court testimony in 1893 that before the revelation on plural marriage was given in 1843, “there could not have been any rule of marriage or any order of marriage in existence at that time except that prescribed by the Book of Doctrine and Covenants” (Complainants, 304). Woodruff further testified at the same hearing that this was “all the law on the question” of marriage that was given “to the body of the people” (p. 309). Lorenzo Snow, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, added that the section on marriage was the “doctrine and law of the church upon marriage at that time [early Nauvoo]” (p. 317).
In addition, the ceremony outlined in the marriage statement was evidently used by Smith in performing marriages—even plural marriages. Mercy Fielding testified in 1893 that on 4 June 1837 Smith married her to Robert Blashel Thompson using the “ceremony prescribed by the Church and set forth in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants.” She added that the ceremony was also used when she became the plural wife of Hyrum Smith in 1843 (Complainants, 344-45).
9. An examination of the W. W. Phelps papers at LDS Archives reveals that Phelps was Smith’s ghostwriter on several occasions. In 1844, for example, after Phelps had written Smith’s U.S. presidential platform position entitled “Views of the Powers and Policy of the General Government,” Smith directed Phelps to read the paper at many private and public settings (HC 6:210, 214, 221).
10. Louisa Beaman (also spelled Beeman or Beman), daughter of Alva and Betsy Beaman, was born in Livonia, New York, 7 February 1815. She was sealed to Smith for eternity and to Brigham Young for time on 14 January 1846. She died in Salt Lake City four years later on 15 May 1850.
11. Joseph Smith to Emma Smith, 20 Jan. 1840 (Jessee 1984, 454). See also Joseph Smith to Emma Smith, 9 Nov. 1839 (Smith and Smith 1952, 2:376-77). Jessee (1984, 448-49) cites the latter letter but explains that the closing benediction and Smith’s signature have been cut away. Interestingly, in a 16 August 1842 letter to Emma, Smith closes “your affectionate husband until death, through all eternity for evermore” (Jessee 1984, 527). This letter precedes by more than nine months the Smith’s eternal sealing on 28 May 1843.
12. This secret organization was also called the “Endowment Quorum,” the “Holy Order,” the “Quorum of the Anointed,” “Joseph Smith’s Prayer Circle,” or simply the “Quorum.” Its primary function was to introduce a select group of men and women to instructions that would help them obtain full salvation with God. A secondary function was to “test” initiates’ ability to keep a secret prior to their introduction to plural marriage. The introduction of Masonry to Mormonism in 1842 also apparently served this purpose· See Quinn, “Prayer Circles.”
13. If Alger did become pregnant in 1835, the baby either died or was raised by someone else. Her first known child, listed on the 1850 census of Dublin City, Indiana, was a daughter born in 1840.
14. Wayne County, Indiana, marriage license, copy in author’s possession. Fanny and Solomon, the parents of nine children, lived in Dublin City their entire married life and were members of the Universalist church (Richmond Telegraph, 1 April 1885)· For additional background information on Fanny Alger Custer, see Samuel Alger/Clarissa Hancock Alger Family Group Sheet, LDS Genealogical Archives; Samuel Alger Obituary, Deseret News, 6 Oct. 1874; Wayne Co., Indiana, census records 1850, 1860, 1880 (Dublin City). The 1850 and the 1860 census list the Custer’s children: Mary A. (b. 1840), Lewis A. (b. 1844), Benjamin Franklin (b. 1850), and Lafayette (b. 1854).
15. See further details in Thomas B. Marsh’s letter in Elder’s Journal, July 1838, 45-46. Marsh worried “that such foul and false reports” were being circulated, but he assured Smith that “none but those who wish your overthrow, will believe them, and we presume that the above testimonies will be sufficient to stay the tongue of the slanderer.”
16. The following list of charges is from the “Far West Record”: “1st, For stirring up the enemy to persecute the brethren by urging on vexatious Lawsuits and thus distressing the innocent. 2nd, For seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith Jr by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultry &c. 3rd, For treating the Church with contempt by not attending meetings. 4th, For virtually denying the faith by declaring that he would not be governed by any ecclesiastical authority nor Revelation whatever in his temporal affairs. 5th, For selling his lands in Jackson county contrary to the Revelations. 6th, For writing and sending an insulting letter to President T. B. Marsh while on the High Council, attending to the duties of his office, as President of the council and by insulting the whole Council with the contents of said letter. 7th, For leaving the calling, in which God had appointed him, by Revelation, for the sake of filthy lucre, and turning to the practice of the Law. 8th, For disgracing the Church by being connected in the “Bogus business” as common report says. 9th, For dishonestly retaining notes after they had been paid and finally for leaving or forsaking the cause of God, and betaking himself to the beggerly elements of the world and neglecting his high and Holy Calling contrary to his profession.”
17. Apostle Willard Richards in December 1845 entered into such a plural marriage with Alice Longstroth. His 23 December diary entry reads: “At 10 P.M. took Alice L[ongstrot]h by the [hand] of our own free will and avow mutually acknowledge each other husband & wife, in a covenant not to be broken in time or Eternity for time & for all Eternity, to all intents & purposes as though the seal of the covenant had been placed upon us. for time & all Eternity & called upon God. & all the Holy angels—& Sarah Long[stro]th. to witness the same.” Apostle Abraham H. Cannon noted in his 5 April 1894 diary that both George Q. Cannon and Wilford Woodruff approved of such arrangements. “I believe in concubinage,” George Q. is recorded as saying, “or some plan whereby men and women can live together under sacred ordinances and vows until they can be married.” Woodruff responded to Cannon’s suggestion, “If men enter into some practice of this character to raise a righteous posterity, they will be justified in it.”
18. See also George Q. Cannon’s second-hand account in the Juvenile Instructor 16 (15 Sept. 1881): 206; and Joseph F. Smith’s account in JD 20 (7 July 1878): 29.
19. In addition, Cowdery was ordained an “Associate President” of the church on 5 December 1834—a position superior to counselors in the First Presidency. He also helped to supervise the selection of the original Quorum of Twelve Apostles in 1835, administered the first endowments in the Kirtland Temple in 1836, and on 3 April 1836 shared with Smith a temple vision of Jesus, Moses, Elias, and Elijah. It is unlikely that Cowdery would have been allowed to participate in any of these events had the “Associate President” been involved in an unsanctioned polygamous relationship.
20. Another example of Cowdery’s opposition to polygamy is found in his 25 January 1836 “sketchbook” entry: “Settled with James M. Carrel who left the office. I gave him a reproof for urging himself into the society of a young female while he yet had a wife living, but he disliked my admonition: he however confessed his impropriety.” A third example is in an 1884 reminiscence of Cowdery’s former law partner, W. Lang, who said, “Cowdery never gave me a full history of the troubles of the Mormons in Missouri and Illinois but I am sure that the doctrine of polygamy was advocated by Smith and opposed by Cowdery” (Ivins Collection, Notebook 2:33-34).