Many Mormons have stressed that when Joseph Smith approached married women with polyandrous proposals he was merely testing their faith or loyalty. In Sarah Pratt’s case, for example, the New York Herald, 14 September 1877, reported: “It is said that the Prophet admitted to [Pratt] the attempt he made on his wife’s virtue, but that it was only done to see whether she was true to her absent husband.” In several other cases Smith “tested” an apostle by asking him for the hand of his wife. Church president Wilford Woodruff recounted the test of Apostle John Taylor: “The Prophet went to the home of President Taylor, and said to him, ‘Brother John, I WANT LEONORA.’” Taylor was stunned, but after walking the floor all night, the obedient Elder said to Smith, “If GOD wants Leonora He can have her.” Woodruff concluded: “That was all the prophet was after, to see where President Taylor stood in the matter, and said to him, Brother Taylor, I dont want your wife, I just wanted to know just where you stood” (Whitaker, 1 Nov. 1890).
A similar “test” was evidently required of Apostle Heber C. Kimball. Kimball’s biographer, Stanley B. Kimball, recounts the incident: “Joseph demanded for himself what to Heber was the unthinkable, his Vilate. Totally crushed spiritually and emotionally, Heber touched neither food nor water for three days and three nights and continually sought confirmation and comfort from God.” Finally, after “some kind of assurance,” Heber “took Vilate to the upper room of Joseph’s store on Water Street. The Prophet wept at this act of faith, devotion, and obedience. Joseph had never intended to take Vilate. It was all a test” (Kimball 1981, 93).
Jedediah Grant, second counselor to Brigham Young and father of church president Heber J. Grant, commented on such tests in a Utah sermon delivered on 19 February 1854. “When the family organization was revealed from heaven—the patriarchal order of God, and Joseph began, on the right and on the left, to add to his family, what a quaking there was in Israel.” But, asked Grant, “Did the Prophet Joseph want every man’s wife he asked for? He did not but in that thing was the grand thread of the Priesthood developed. The grand object in view was to try the people of God, to see what was in them” (JD 2 [19 Feb. 1854]: 13-14).
In some instances, however, Smith’s actions went beyond “trying the people.” He sought to marry wives of several living men, refusing to recognize their civil marriage. Despite the clause in the canonized 1835 Mormon marriage statement recognizing that “all legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled,” Smith viewed as invalid those marriages not sealed by his blessing. As God’s earthly agent, he believed he had been given powers that transcended civil law. Claiming sole responsibility for binding and unbinding marriages on earth and in heaven, he did not consider it necessary to obtain civil marriage licenses or divorce decrees. Whenever he deemed it appropriate he could release a woman from her earthly marriage and seal her to himself or to another with no stigma of adultery.
This thinking is similar, in part, to the revolutionary “spiritual wifery” philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg, an eminent Swedish scientist who turned to theology in middle age, wrote a number of books setting forth “heavenly doctrines” which he claimed were based on biblical teachings interpreted by him through direct communication with the spiritual world. “Two souls which grew up together before life are bound to find each other again on earth,” he wrote; “in heaven as on earth there are males and females. Man was made for woman and woman for man. Love must unite them eternally, and there are marriages in heaven” (Cairncross 1974, 174-75).
William Hepworth Dixon, describing the Americanization of spiritual wifery, discussed the “theory of Spiritual Wives” as pronounced by Joseph Smith’s New York contemporaries, the Perfectionists: “The theory is, that a man who may be either unmarried before the law or wedded to a woman whom he cannot love as a wife should be loved, shall have the right, in virtue of a higher morality, and a more sacred duty than the churches teach him, to go out among the crowd of his female friends, and seek a partner in whom he shall find some special fitness for a union with himself.” When he finds such a “bride of the soul,” he has the right to court her, “even though she may have taken vows as another man’s wife, and of entering into closer and sweeter relations with her than those which belong to the common earth.” The Perfectionists taught that all previous “vows on his part and on her part [were] to this end thrust aside as so much worldly waste” (Dixon 1868, 1:88-89).
New England proponents of spiritual wifery in the 1830s were asking such pointed questions as: Does a true marriage on earth imply a true marriage in heaven? Can there be a true marriage of the body without a binding covenant for the soul? Is not the real marriage always that of the soul? Are not all unions which are of the body only, false unions? Dixon noted that leaders of the movement proclaimed that “all true marriages are good for time and for eternity; … all other combinations of the two sexes, even though they have [been] sanctioned by the law and blessed by the Church, are null and void” (ibid., 1:94). Erasmus Stone, a prominent Perfectionist leader, taught that “all arrangements for a life in heaven may be made on earth; that spiritual friendships may be formed, and spiritual bonds contracted, valid for eternity” (Ellis 1870).
In many aspects the Perfectionists’ theology paralleled Joseph Smith’s 1840-44 teachings. His 21 May 1843 diary, for example, records a public address in which he said, “We have no claim in our eternal comfort in relation to Eternal things unless our actions & contracts & all things tend to this end.” William Clayton’s 16 July 1843 journal notes Smith preaching “that a man must enter into an everlasting covenant with his wife in this world or he will have no claim on her in the next” (Tanner and Tanner). Yet Smith went a step farther than either Swedenborg or the Perfectionists by advocating what he termed “celestial marriage”—a mixture of eternal marriage and polygamy.
Mary Elizabeth Rollins, married to non-Mormon Adam Lightner since 11 August 1835, was one of the first women to accept the “celestial marriage” teachings of the prophet. “He was commanded to take me for a wife,” she declared in a 21 November 1880 letter to Emmeline B. Wells. “I was his, before I came here,” she added in an 8 February 1902 statement. Brigham Young secretly sealed the two in February 1842 when Mary was eight months pregnant with her son, George Algernon Lightner. She lived with Adam Lightner until his death in Utah many years later. In her 1880 letter to Emmeline B. Wells, Mary explained: “I could tell you why I stayed with Mr. Lightner. Things the leaders of the Church does not know anything about. I did just as Joseph told me to do, as he knew what troubles I would have to contend with.”1 She added in an 1892 letter to John R. Young: “I could explain some things in regard to my living with Mr. L. after becoming the Wife of Another, which would throw light, on what now seems mysterious—and you would be perfectly satisfied with me. I write this, because I have heard that it had been commented on to my injury.”
Sarah M. Kimball, a prominent Nauvoo and Salt Lake Relief Society sister, was also secretly approached by Smith in early 1842. Despite her solid 1840 marriage to non-Mormon Hiram Kimball, Sarah later recalled how Smith taught her “the principle of marriage for eternity, and the doctrine of plural marriage. He said that in teaching this he realized that he jeopardized his life.” But, Sarah added, God had “instructed him to teach it with commandment, as the Church could travel (progress) no further without the introduction of this principle” (Jenson, Historical Record, 6 [May 1887]: 232). Sarah, however, rejected Smith’s polyandrous proposal, asking him to “teach it to someone else.” Although she kept the matter quiet, her husband and Smith evidently had difficulties over the incident. On 19 May 1842, at a Nauvoo City Council meeting, Smith jotted down and “threw across the room” a revelation to Kimball which declared that “Hiram Kimball has been insinuating evil, and formulating evil opinions” against the prophet, which if he does not desist from, he “shall be accursed” (HC 5:12-13). Sarah remained a lifetime member of the church and lifelong wife to Hiram Kimball, who eventually joined the church and was killed in a steamship explosion on a mission to Hawaii.
Nancy Marinda Johnson, sister of apostles Luke and Lyman Johnson, married Orson Hyde in 1834. A year before Hyde returned from Jerusalem in 1843, Marinda was sealed to Smith (in April 1842), though she lived with Orson until their divorce in 1870.2 In another instance, Josephine Lyon Fisher, born to Windsor P. Lyon and Sylvia P. Sessions on 8 February 1844, less than five months before Smith’s martyrdom, related in a 24 February 1915 statement her mother’s deathbed testimony of 1882: “She then told me that I 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.”3 Prescindia Huntington married Norman Buell in 1827 and had two sons by him before accepting Mormonism in 1836. She was sealed to Smith by her brother Dimick on 11 December 1841, though she continued to live with Buell until 1846, when she left him to marry Heber C. Kimball.
Prescindia’s sister, Zina D. Huntington, lived in the Smith home. Henry B. Jacobs married the twenty-year-old Zina in March 1841. According to family records, when the Jacobs asked Smith why he had not honored them by performing their marriage, allowing John C. Bennett to officiate instead, he replied that “the Lord had made it known to him that she [Zina] was to be his Celestial wife” (Cannon, “History,” 5). Believing that “whatever the Prophet did was right, without making the wisdom of God’s authorities bend to the reasoning of any man” (ibid.), the devout Jacobs consented for the six-months-pregnant Zina to be sealed to Smith on 27 October 1841. Though sealed to Smith for eternity, she continued her connubial relationship with Jacobs. On 2 February 1846, pregnant with Henry’s second son, Zina was resealed by proxy to the murdered Joseph Smith and in that same session was “sealed for time” to Brigham Young. Faithful Henry B. Jacobs stood as an official witness to both ceremonies (ibid., 7).
This polyandrous triangle became even more complex. Zina and Henry lived together as husband and wife until the westward-bound Saints reached Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. At this temporary stop on the pioneer trail, Brigham Young announced “it was time for men who were walking in other men’s shoes to step out of them.” “Brother Jacobs,” he advised, “the woman you claim for a wife does not belong to you. She is the spiritual wife of brother Joseph, sealed up to him. I am his proxy, and she, in this behalf, with her children, are my property. You can go where you please, and get another, but be sure to get one of your own kindred spirit” (Hall 1852, 43-44).
Young then called Jacobs on a mission to England. Witnesses to his departure commented that he was so ill they had to “put him on a blanket and carry him to the boat to get him on his way” (Cannon, “Short Sketch”). Though his health returned, his spirits remained low. On 27 August 1847 his missionary companion and brother-in-law, Oliver Huntington, received a letter from his wife informing the two missionaries that “Zina had gone to Salt Lake City to live with President Young’s family” (Firmage). Oliver dashed off a letter to Zina, lamenting that “Henry is here and herd the letter. He says all is right, he don’t care. He stands alone as yet. I have had almost as much trial about you as he has. I have had to hear, feel and suffer everything he has—If you only knew my troubles you’d pitty me.”
Henry returned from his mission and settled in California. But he was still in love with Zina, now a plural wife of Brigham Young. His letters to her were frequently heartrending. On 2 September 1852 he wrote: “O how happy I should be if I only could see you and the little children, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” “I am unhappy,” Henry lamented, “there is no peace for poor me, my pleasure is you, my comfort has vanished.… O Zina, can I ever, will I ever get you again, answer the question please.” In an undated valentine he added: “Zina my mind never will change from Worlds without Ends, no never, the same affection is there and never can be moved I do not murmur nor complain of the handlings of God no verily, no but I feel alone and no one to speak to, to call my own. I feel like a lamb without a mother, I do not blame any person or persons, no—May the Lord our Father bless Brother Brigham and all purtains unto him forever. tell him for me I have no feelings against him nor never had, all is right according to the Law of the Celestial Kingdom of our God Joseph.”
One might ask why a man so obviously in love with his wife would give her up to another. Oliver Huntington, writing of this incident in his autobiography, explained: “Zina’s husband took to himself another woman before he had returned from England to the Bluffs … and [Zina] chose a guardian, who could supply her with whatever she wanted, which she could not get, this supply came from the Church. She became the wife of Brigham Young.” Brigham and Zina’s only child clarified the incident further: “President Young told Zina D. if she would marry him she would be in a higher glory” (ibid., 15). Brigham himself provided the clearest insight into this situation in an 8 October 1861 General Conference statement on divorce: “There was another way—in which a woman could leave a man—if the woman preferred—another man higher in authority & he is willing to take her. & her husband gives her up—there is no Bill of divorce required in the case it is right in the sight of God” (Beck Notebooks, vol. 1).4
Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young was not the only woman sealed in a polyandrous relationship to Brigham Young. Augusta Adams Cobb, baptized a Mormon in 1832, was a stalwart church member in the Boston area. But her husband was not converted. Returning to Boston in the fall of 1844 after an extended visit to Nauvoo, Augusta was quoted in the 22 December 1847 Boston Post as having declared to her husband that she loved Brigham Young and, “live or die, she was going to live with him at all hazards.” She returned to Nauvoo and her husband successfully sued for divorce. But church leaders had obviously not recognized her civil marriage in the first place; she and Brigham Young had been secretly sealed on 2 November 1843.
“Gentile Law,” with its civil marriage, was publicly denounced as early as 1847 by Orson Pratt in a sermon recorded by Wilford Woodruff: “As all the ordinances of the gospel Administered by the world since the Aposticy of the Church was illegal, in like manner was the marriage Cerimony illegal.” Thus, according to Pratt, “all the world who had been begotton through the illegal marriage were bastards not Sons & hence they had to enter into the law of adoption & be adopted into the Priesthood in order to become sons & legal heirs to salvation” (Kenney, 3 [27 Aug. 1847]: 260).5 Elenore McLean, twelfth wife of Apostle Parley P. Pratt, amplified this theology in a 23 November 1869 newspaper interview in the New York World. In an 1857 Arkansas dispute, Elenore’s legal husband, Hector, murdered her extralegal Mormon husband, Parley. Trying to clear up the confusion of the polyandrous relationship, she dismissed her legal marriage: “The sectarian priests have no power from God to marry; and a so-called marriage ceremony performed by them is no marriage at all” (Pratt 1975, 233).
Elenore was on safe Mormon ground theologically; her source could have been the published writings of her brother-in-law, Orson Pratt. In his church-sponsored The Seer, Pratt had explained in 1853: “Marriages, then among all nations, though legal according to the laws of men, have been illegal according to the laws, authority, and institutions of Heaven.” As a result, Pratt went on, “all the children born during that long period, though legitimate according to the customs and laws of nations, are illegitimate according to the order and authority of Heaven” (p. 47).
Even Mormon marriages prior to the fall of 1835, when priesthood authority began to be evoked in marriage ceremonies, were adjudged invalid. Joseph Smith’s own marriage to Emma Hale 18 January 1827 by Squire Tarbill qualified as “illegal according to the law of heaven.” John D. Lee, a member of the secret Council of Fifty and an adopted son of Brigham Young, later commented, “About the same time the doctrine of ‘sealing’ was introduced … the Saints were given to understand that their marriage relations with each other were not valid.” That new-found awareness that “they were married to each other only by their own covenants,” according to Lee, opened up some interesting possibilities: “If their marriage had not been productive of blessing and peace, and they felt it oppressive to remain together, they were at liberty to make their own choice, as much as if they had not been married” (Lee 1877, 146-47).
Lee, though a hostile witness at the time of this narrative, is supported by earlier accounts of Mormon marriage customs in Nauvoo. Increase McGee and his wife, Maria, a couple who participated in sacred temple rites and later wrote about the experience, viewed the ceremonies as “the commencement of the Law of god, and the laws of the land are no more binding on us; all our former ties of marriage, &c., are all now cut asunder, and we are all thrown loose upon the world as if never married.” Thus “it is now the woman’s privilege to choose whom she sees fit; if she likes the one she had been living with, she can keep him; if not, she is at liberty to ship him and take another; and it is the man’s privilege to have one, two, four, ten, or twenty, according to his standing in the church.” The couple thus clarified the “object a man has in getting more than one wife”: “He is to be promoted through all eternity, according to this theory, by his posterity, which are the subjects of his dominion; and of course the more wives, the more numerous his posterity” (1847, 16.)6
Emphasis on posterity formed the framework for Smith’s concept of the “Kingdom of God.” His friend Benjamin F. Johnson recalled, as an elderly patriarch, that “the Prophet taught us that Dominion & power in the great Future would be Comensurate with the no[.] of ‘Wives Childin & Friends’ that we inherit here and that our great mission to earth was to Organize a Nucli of Heaven to take with us. To the increace of which there would be no end” (Zimmerman 1976, 47). Smith, viewing earthly and heavenly ordinances as inextricably intertwined, considered himself “God’s earthly agent.” After establishing a secret 1844 organization, the Council of Fifty, to promote in part his U.S. presidential candidacy, the prophet was clandestinely crowned a “King, Priest, and Ruler Over Israel on Earth” (Quinn 1980, 163-97). His kingdom, like Old Testament kingdoms, was patriarchal in nature. Salvation for women depended on their being sealed to a “Lord”—a worthy man.
Orson Pratt, eventually recognized as the “Apostle of Polygamy” for his spirited defenses of the principle, published the first theological discussion on the necessity of a woman’s being sealed to a worthy man in order to receive heavenly exaltation: “You will clearly perceive from the revelation which God has given that you can never obtain a fulness of glory without being married to a righteous man for time and for all eternity.” To fail to do so meant “losing the privilege of enjoying the society of a husband in eternity. You forfeit your right to an endless increase of immortal lives. And even the children which you may be favored with in this life will not be entrusted to your charge in eternity; but you will be left in that world without a husband, without a family, without a kingdom.” Mormon marriage theology relegated those with marital failures to the role of “servants and angels” (Pratt 1854, 140).
Steeped in such philosophy, married Mormon women such as Mary Elizabeth Lightner, Sylvia Sessions, Prescendia Buell, Zina D. H. Jacobs, Augusta Cobb, and Elenore McLean were persuaded that their non-Mormon or Mormon laymen husbands could not take them to the highest degree of the Celestial Kingdom. A Mormon male of hierarchical rank, his feet firmly planted in the priesthood, seemed a more sure ticket to heaven.7
1. After her sealing, or marriage, to Smith, Mary Lightner had seven more children by Adam Lightner. It was not unusual for Smith to encourage his polyandrous wives to remain with their legal husbands. Joseph Kingsbury wrote that he served as a surrogate husband for the prophet: “I according to Pres[ident]. Joseph Smith & Council & others, I agreed to stand by Sarah Ann Whitney [sealed to Smith 27 July 1843] as though I was supposed to be her husband and a pretended marriage for the purpose of shielding them from the enemy and for the purpose of bringing about the purposes of God” (p. 5).
2. Faulring 1987, 396; see also Quinn, “Prayer Circles,” 98. According to Nancy Hyde’s testimony during the 1860s, however, she was sealed to Smith in May 1843 (Bachman 1975, 333).
Smith was also sealed by proxy to Mary Ann Frost, wife of Apostle Parley P. Pratt, on 6 February 1846. She had had difficulty accepting Pratt’s polygamy and had become alienated from him. Parley wrote in the diary of plural wife Belinda Marden on 11 March 1851 that “By mutual concent of parties and by the advise of President Young [Mary Ann was] sealed to Joseph Smith [the deceased president of the church] for Eternity and to her former husband [Parley] for time, as proxy.” Similarly, in 1870 Apostle Amasa Lyman, excommunicated for “teaching false doctrine,” was left by one of his wives, who was afterwards sealed to Smith. Her daughter recorded that Caroline Partridge Lyman “felt she must have the protection and the security of the Priesthood in her children’s lives.… Evidently in her dire circumstances she felt that the Prophet was the only secure anchor to be sealed to” (Lyman 1958, 280).
3. Josephine L. Fisher statement to Andrew Jenson, 24 Feb. 1915. On 12 October 1905 Angus M. Cannon discussed this incident with Joseph Smith III and his son Frederick. In response to the elder Smith’s inquiry, “where is the issue in evidence of my father’s having married plural wives,” Cannon described “one case where it was said by the girl’s grandmother that your father has a daughter born of a plural wife. The girl’s grandmother was Mother Sessions, who lived in Nauvoo and died here in the valley. Aunt Patty Sessions,” according to Cannon, “asserts that the girl was born within the time after your father was said to have taken the mother” (Cannon, “Statement”).
The question of whether Joseph Smith cohabited with his wives has long intrigued Mormons. Emily Partridge said she “roomed” with him (Complainants, 364, 367, 394), and Melissa Lott Willis testified she was his wife “in very deed” (Bailey 1952, 98-100). The fact that Emma Smith so strongly opposed her husband’s polygamy implies she was concerned about the possibility of physical rather than spiritual relationships. But those who disbelieve Smith’s involvement in polygamy raise a significant issue: Where are the children? Lucy Walker, sealed to Smith on 1 May 1842, explained that because of his “hazardous life he lived in constant fear of being betrayed by those who ought to have been true to him” (Kimball, “Recollections,” 41). However, Lucy lived in Smith’s home, under Emma’s watchful eye. Sarah Ann Whitney did not. She was sealed to Smith with her parents’ permission on 27 July 1842. In an 18 August 1842 letter to the Whitneys, Smith, hiding from Missouri law enforcement officials, detailed his problems in getting to see Sarah Ann without Emma’s knowledge. “My feelings are so strong for you since what has pased lately between us … if you three would come and see me in this my lonely retreat, it would afford me great relief, of mind, if those with whom I am alied, do love me, now is the time to Afford me succor … the only thing to be careful is to find out when Emma comes then you cannot be safe, but when she is not here, there is the most perfect safety.”
Mary Elizabeth Lightner provided further perspective. “I knew he had three children,” she said in a 1905 statement. “They told me. I think two of them are living today but they are not known as his children as they go by other names.” Though the matter is highly speculative, these three mentioned children may be Josephine L. Fisher, Zebulun Jacobs (b. 2 Jan. 1842), and Mary Lightner’s own son, George Algernon (b. 22 March 1842). Zina H. Jacobs and Mary Lightner were both in advanced stages of pregnancy when Smith was sealed to them. Oliver Buell (b. 1838-39), son of Prescindia Huntington Buell, is also considered by some to be a possible son of Joseph Smith, though he was born before the prophet was sealed to his mother on 11 December 1841 (Brodie 1975, 301-302).
4. Young’s theology came from Joseph Smith. Wilford Woodruff wrote in his 2 June 1857 journal: “Brigham Young Said Joseph taught that when a womans affections was entirly weaned from her husband that was Adultery in spirit. Her Affections were Adulterated from his. He also said that there was No law in Heaven or on Earth that would Compel a woman to stay with a man either in time or Eternity.” When asked what would happen if a woman did not wish to go with a high priest who claimed her, Young replied: “You will find then that any man who gets a glory & exaltation will be so beautiful that any woman will be willing to have him if it was right—& whareever it is right for the woman to go thare she will be willing to go for all those evils will vanish to which we are subject in this life” (Kenney 1983-85, 5:55-56).
5. Pratt added in 1873: “I said their [non-Mormon] baptisms are illegal. Now let me go a little further, and say that the ordinance of marriage is illegal among all people, nations and tongues, unless administered by a man appointed by new revelation from God to join the male and female as husband and wife” (JD, 16 [31 Aug. 1873]: 175).
6. A similar account is found in a contemporary letter: “The Saints are carrying on amongst themselves worse than ever, the council had declared all marriages null and void giving either party leave to choose for themselves if they agree to live together, then the man has the right to as many more wives as he can get to live with but his first wife is mistress of all” (Hardin to Warren, 12).
7. For a complete discussion of Mormon polyandry, see Van Wagoner 1985.