“This is a meticulously researched and skillfully written work on Mormon polygamy. The author does not take sides in this tangled web of theology and practice, but instead has produced what may well be the definitive work on polygamy. I highly recommend it.” —Linda King Newell, co-author, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith
“Nauvoo Polygamy is s a thorough investigation of sexual politics in the City of the Saints, the 1840s Mormon headquarters in the U.S. State of Illinois. Written with precision, clarity, and ease, it is a major contribution to Mormon history, groundbreaking in identifying the other polygamists who followed the lead of their prophet, Joseph Smith, in taking multiple partners.” —Klaus J. Hansen, Professor Emeritus of History, Queen’s University, Ontario
“If for no other reason, the inclusion of chapter 6 makes this book worth its price. The chapter quotes liberally from those like Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Bathsheba Smith who accepted polygamy rather easily, those like Jane Richards who accepted it only reluctantly, and those like Patty Sessions who found plural marriage almost unbearable. A bonus is chapter 9 which provides a concise historical overview of polygamous societies in Reformation Europe, touches on similar societies in America, and offers an extended discussion of Orson Pratt’s 1852 defense of plural marriage.” —Thomas G. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of History, Brigham Young University
“George Smith shows how many of the prophet’s followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice ... [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.” —Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.
“An extremely important contribution to the history of polygamy ... that allows us to see how Joseph Smith’s marriages fit into the context of his daily life.” —Todd M. Compton, author of In Sacred loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith
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George D. Smith is a graduate of Stanford and New York University. He is the editor of the landmark frontier diaries of one of the most prominent Mormon pioneers, An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton, and of Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience. He has published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Free Inquiry, the John Whitmer Historical Journal, Journal of Mormon History,Restoration Studies, and Sunstone. He has served on the boards of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, the Kenyon Review, the Leakey Foundation, and National Public Radio.
Introduction
In 1792, Napoleon, then a young soldier in the French army, wrote to his “sweet and incomparable” Josephine of their first night together: “I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest ... What an effect you have on my heart! I send you thousands of kisses—but don’t kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood.”1 The soldier’s adventures had just begun.
Napoleon Bonaparte went on to conquer Austria, invade Egypt, and in 1804 crown himself Emperor of France. Although Josephine was not the only woman in his life, this alluring Creole from Martinique would marry her new lover and become Empress of France.2
A few decades later on the American frontier, another man of ambition, coincidentally inspired by what Napoleon had found in Egypt, wrote his own letter to a young woman. It was the summer of 1842 and the thirty-six-year-old prophet, Joseph Smith, hiding from the law down by the Mississippi River in Illinois, proposed a tryst with the appealing seventeen-year-old, Sarah Ann Whitney. “My feelings are so strong for you,” he wrote. “Come and see me in this my lonely retreat ... now is the time to afford me succour ... I have a room intirely by myself, the whole matter can be attended to with most perfect saf[e]ty, I know it is the will of God that you should comfort me.”3 Three weeks prior to this letter, Sarah Ann had secretly married the self-proclaimed seer and leader of the millennialist Latter-day Saints to become his fifteenth wife.
Historically, it has not been so unusual for the leader of a country or founder of a religion to take an interest in more than one woman. What was unusual in this instance was the further step Smith took, turning a predilection into a Christian obligation, institutionalizing polygamy. Curiously enough, the way Joseph did this was through his passion for ancient Egypt, derived from Napoleon’s invasion of that country a few years before Smith’s birth. Just as soulful kisses and succor appeased one desire in each of these two men, so both men had another inner stirring that was awakened by contact with a forgotten civilization. They showed a fascination with ancient Egypt, especially the hieroglyphic writing that was thought to hold the occult secrets of an unrivaled spiritual and temporal world power. The French adventurer’s findings lit a fire in Smith that inspired even the language of his religious prose.
In 1798 Napoleon entered Egypt by way of the Nile. Following centuries of foreign occupation, he found stunning artifacts that at once consumed public attention. The pictographs appeared impossible to read. These enigmatic scripts enchanted Europeans, who decorated museums with them and designed articles of high fashion with Egyptian motifs. In America, towns named Memphis and Cairo emerged along the Mississippi in 1820 and 1837, not far downstream from where the Mormon capital of Nauvoo, Illinois, would be founded in 1839. It took the linguist Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832) more than twenty years to decipher the hieroglyphics inscribed on the Rosetta Stone and re-discover the social and religious life of a lost culture. His Egyptian Grammar, begun in 1835 and completed in 1841, was published posthumously in Paris; his Dictionary, in 1841-44.
Some thirty years after Napoleon unearthed the glyphs that turned out to hold the key to the ancient language, Champollion and other scholars were still hard at work decoding their meaning when Joseph Smith founded a religion based on what he said were his own translations of ancient Egyptian. While the early hieroglyphs were still indecipherable to most of the world, Smith told New York publisher James Arlington Bennett:
The fact is, that by the power of God, I translated the Book of Mormon from hieroglyphics, the knowledge of which was lost to the world, in which wonderful event I stood alone, an unlearned youth, to combat the worldly wisdom and multiplied ignorance of eighteen centuries, with a new revelation, which would open the eyes of more than eight hundred millions of people...God is my right hand man.4
Smith announced that he had found gold tablets buried in a hill, on which an ancient history was inscribed in “reformed Egyptian.”By the power of God, he proclaimed that he was able to translate the hieroglyphics and in 1830 publish the story as the Book of Mormon.5 This book explained the presence of Indians in the Americas, ascribing to them ancestors from ancient Israel, who were nevertheless not the rumored “lost tribes.” A few years later, Smith published a variant of Genesis called the Book of Abraham, which he said was written on papyrus found in the funeral scrolls he purchased in 1835, complete with Egyptian mummies. Little did Napoleon dream that by unearthing the Egyptian past, he would provide the mystery language of a new religion.
It was in the Book of Mormon that the idea of plural marriage was first mentioned in Latter-day Saint references, an ironic source to justify polygamy since it was said to have been withheld from sixth century BCE Hebrew tribes that had wandered to the Americas. Still, a man’s right to have more than one wife would soon become Mormon doctrine, validating the many marriages Joseph had engaged in up to that point—his desire to wed the young Sarah Ann Whitney, for instance. Using Old Testament polygamy as a model, Smith’s new Church of Christ (ultimately renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1838) revived the custom of the ancient patriarchs. The Mormon prophet introduced polygamy to the frontier, where his band of followers was preparing for the imminent “end of days” to descend upon the world.
The American frontier defined the Mormon Church as its members spent twenty years on the run from one state to the next, blazing new trails and founding new cities. As they were expelled by their neighbors from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, during the 1830s, the homes of friends or converts along the way offered temporary refuge. This is where Smith became acquainted with the young women he would marry a decade later: they were the daughters of friends in the families where he stayed. In Illinois in the 1840s, he was betrothed to teenage women as young as fourteen. He made wedding vows with older women as well. Some of those he married already had husbands and children. However, if loyal to him, the wives and their polyandrous husbands were introduced into an inner circle which formed an aristocratic network of intermarried couples in the elite hierarchy. Beyond his quest for female companionship, Smith utilized plural marriage to create a byzantine structure of relationships intended for successive worlds.
What is also known is that Smith not only persuaded women to marry him, he convinced his closest male followers to expand their own families, adding more wives to their homes. This occurred within the last three years of Smith’s life, ending tragically with an assassin’s bullet after he was arrested for destroying a local press—which incidentally had disclosed the unannounced marriage practice. Over the next year and a half, under the direction of Brigham Young, plural marriages multiplied in Nauvoo so that by the time the Saints abandoned the city in 1846, there were about 200 male polygamists in the church with 700 plural wives added to their families.
Whether Joseph’s wife, Emma, consented to any of these marriages remains a mystery. She was aware of at least five of her husband’s wives whom she sent away from her household, yet she told her children the wives did not exist. Joseph’s family—his mother, wife, and children—refused the leadership of Brigham Young and stayed in the midwest. The founding family remained there, free of polygamy, in a new Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), established in 1853 and, by 1860, presided over by Joseph III, Joseph and Emma’s oldest surviving son.
From the earliest whisperings of extramarital relationships in the 1830s to official records kept in the 1840s, Mormon authorities downplayed reports of polygamy as “anti-Mormon” rumors. However, an 1852 announcement in Utah led to a period of openness about plural wives. Then the polygamists retreated into the shadows again in 1890 when, for reasons of survival and statehood, the church withdrew its endorsement of plural marriage. Thereafter, the LDS Church in Utah tried to distance itself from its polygamous roots, just as the RLDS Church (recently renamed the Community of Christ) had already done. The two communities became united on one front: their mutual disavowal of a doctrine that was once said to be essential to salvation. Yet the memory of Mormon polygamy was kept alive, in part, by contemporary “fundamentalist” Mormon societies, primarily in Utah. Revulsion against their underage plural marriages today conveys a small sense of what the public outrage might have felt like in Illinois in the 1840s.
Smith’s wives remain unacknowledged in the official History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Even so, these women left their mark on the history of the American west. Aside from the thousands of Mormons who revered and emulated them, their participation in an experiment in a family-oriented society has filled the Mormon consciousness for the better part of two centuries. Similarly, the primary characteristic of Mormons, according to outsiders, besides abstinence from coffee, tea, alcohol, and tobacco, is that the men at one time had multiple wives. However, today, in official Mormon circles, Smith’s granting of favors to chosen followers, allowing them to take extra women into the home, is rarely mentioned.
The primary evidence for this arcane practice comes from diaries, letters, marriage records, and affidavits of those who lived in Nauvoo during the 1840s. The extant records constitute a secret chronicle, an addendum, if you will, to the carefully edited official history, from which any mention of the topic has been expurgated for the early period. After 1890, when polygamy went underground again, it became difficult to access records. Church leaders were less than pleased to find historians or journalists investigating this peculiar relic of the past, which had become an embarrassment and was considered a potential obstacle to missionary efforts. Historical items in the LDS Archives became unavailable to researchers. The cyclical nature of this suppression of information, first in Illinois and later in Utah, left a brief window in Mormon history from which most of the documentation has been recovered. During this period, following migration to the Great Salt Lake and until 1890, people collected oral histories and wrote reminiscences. The rest of the nation averted its eyes because its attention was trained on the Civil War and its aftermath. The benign neglect of the Territory of Utah was what Mormons had sought. However, because the history of polygamy in Nauvoo was never officially rewritten, even during the period of openness, Joseph Smith’s initiation of the practice has remained in an historical penumbra to this day.
The story, as pieced together here, begins with Joseph Smith as a teenager in New York State, where he courted and eloped with his first wife, Emma, and published the Book of Mormon, which mentioned the possibility of polygamy. The topic was already on Joseph’s mind, even in the 1820s. Chapter 1 traces Smith’s “restoration” of biblical Christianity, although drawing as much from the Old Testament as the New. Plural marriage is anticipated: sometime before Smith met and courted his “celestial wives.” The next chapter examines his initial marriages, beginning with Louisa Beaman in 1841. After marrying about sixteen wives by mid-1842, internal dissent drew Smith’s actions into question, and plural weddings ceased during the summer and fall of 1842.
Chapter 3 details the resumption of polygamy after a six-month pause, culminating in the summer of 1843 when Joseph was ready to dictate the revelation which sanctioned plural marriages and required this practice for families intent on securing a place in heaven. In chapter 4, Joseph shares the “favor” of celestial marriage with dozens of other men in the community.
Chapter 5 tracks a surge in polygamy involving over thirty families and about two hundred wives, all during Smith’s lifetime. One participant exulted, “I have six wives and am not afraid of another.” After Joseph’s death, the number of plural families swelled to almost two hundred and, after the journey to Utah began in 1846, these same polygamists continued marrying to the point that they had acquired an average of nearly six wives per family. This model became the blueprint for forty years of Utah polygamy.
Chapter 6 illustrates how a household with more than one wife functioned. When was the first wife told of a new courtship and how much was she told? Who determined what household responsibilities each wife would assume? What priorities did Mormon families have? What were the variations of age? How persistent were feelings of jealousy or other hard to reconcile problems?
The next two chapters, 7 and 8, look at the code of silence that prevailed in Nauvoo and how it fared against the inevitability of rumors. The suppressed history of a more or less insignificant river town was preserved through hundreds of extant documents—sources which somehow survived both neglect and contempt so that we are able to know both the facts of the matter and the behind-the-scenes human emotions that played a role in this extraordinary story.
Finally in chapter 9, antecedents to Mormon polygamy are presented from among other, centuries-old “latter-day” millennialists who similarly sought to restore a biblical model of society as they anticipated the end of the world. These predecessors to Mormonism are found in the side currents of Christian Europe, but they place Smith’s innovations within a larger thematic social construct. For instance, three hundred years before the Mormons, a group of fervent Anabaptists in Münster, Germany, strived to restore primitive Christianity on European soil. In fact, descendants of the radical reformers of the sixteenth century settled in colonial America and helped preserve the memory of these older, millennialist offshoots of Protestantism. Through the Enlightenment period, social reformers took up the discussion of polygamy in the context of natural law and saw it as a way of bringing stability to family life. Some of these religious philosophers exported their ideas to America where they sought to create utopian societies.
The legacy of centuries of debate over marriage, which in the sixteenth century centered upon the question of whether marriage was a civil institution or a sacrament, which biblical model was most appropriate, and in the Mormon context, where a man had to be “sealed” to many wives, forms the continued political wrangling over what constitutes marriage. Headlined LDS separatists insist that polygamy is a sanctified form of marriage. This study concludes with some observations on the ambivalence mainstream Mormons exhibit toward a practice that their grandparents considered requisite for heaven. On the one hand, it is an honored history and part of their ancestral...
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