Nauvoo Polygamy: "…but we called it celestial marriage"
Autor George D. Smithen Limba Engleză Paperback – 14 mai 2011 – vârsta ani
“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
“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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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781560852070
ISBN-10: 1560852070
Pagini: 738
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 56 mm
Greutate: 0.96 kg
Ediția:2nd Edition
Editura: SIGNATURE BOOKS INC
Colecția Signature Books
ISBN-10: 1560852070
Pagini: 738
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 56 mm
Greutate: 0.96 kg
Ediția:2nd Edition
Editura: SIGNATURE BOOKS INC
Colecția Signature Books
Notă biografică
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.
Extras
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 heritage; on the other hand, it now warrants harsh condemnation and dismissal from their long-since Americanized church. These events, which arose years ago on the banks of the Mississippi River, are part of an age-old discussion that can be seen as the confluence of two strains of thought: the attempt to adapt religion to human nature and, conversely, the attempt to conform human nature to accepted religious practice.
Before polygamy was a Mormon template, the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton (known for his portrayal of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost) advocated the practice in an unpublished essay that was rediscovered and reviewed in America in 1826. The review appeared the year before Joseph Smith began dictating to his newlywed wife, Emma, a text that would mention polygamy and become a scripture for a church he would soon found. The New York Public Library also provided the perspective of sixteenth-century “latter day saints” in Münster, Germany, where radical Christians formed a polygamous biblical community to await the end of the world.
In 1994 I visited the Stadtmuseum in Münster which displayed images of the Dutch Anabaptist prophet Jan van Leyden, assembled with his several “queens” for dinner. Among the German historians who directed me toward analysis of the Münster Anabaptist community were Dr. Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, known for his ground-breaking source-critical examination of the 1534-35 experience, and Dr. Gerd Dethlefs of the Stadtmuseum. Dr. Dethlefs confirmed that the Münster Anabaptists imitated biblical models as they legitimized themselves as chosen of God and sought to remedy contemporary social problems of unmarried women by reenacting polygamous practices described in the Bible. Dethlefs highlighted primary source tracts from sixteenth-century Anabaptist preacher Bernhard Rothmann in Robert Stupperich, ed., Die Schriften Bernhard Rothmanns. Among other valuable sources were Ralf Klötzer, Täuferherrschaft von Münster, and Günther Bauer, Anfänge täuferischer Gemeindebildungen in Franken. Also important were Dr. Ernst Laubach’s writings (Historisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster), as well as George Huntston Williams’s Radical Reformation,Cornelius Krahn’s Dutch Anabaptism, and James M. Stayer’s Vielweiberei.
Of invaluable assistance in translating many of the above texts and in facilitating my correspondence with German scholars was Professor of German Henry Lee Miner (University of Evansville, Indiana). I also benefited from the perusal of some German sources by Ron Priddis, not to mention his careful reading of the manuscript.
Along with New York and Münster, the University of California at Berkeley was a key source of European interest in polygamy. The Graduate Theological Union at the university houses the Mennonite Quarterly Review,which reflected the long Anabaptist effort at historical rediscovery. Other volumes defined the Beichtrat Protestant reformers granted Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who, like England’s Henry VIII, wanted official permission to marry a second wife.
The Bancroft Library at Berkeley has an important Mormon collection which documents the American west and polygamy in Utah. Special thanks to Bancroft Director Charles B. Faulhaber, who guided me to Egyptian and Mormon source documents as well as read and helped to edit the manuscript. Berkeley’s Doe Library has important sources which reflect centuries of marital debate in Europe concerning canon and natural law.
The primary records of Mormon polygamy are centered in and around Salt Lake City, Utah. The LDS Church Archives and Library in Salt Lake, administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, contain letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographical reflections of key participants and eyewitnesses to celestial marriage as it unfolded in the 1840s along the banks of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo, Illinois. Thanks are due to a highly professional team of archivists led by H. Randall Dixon,William Slaughter, and Ronald Watt, among others. Collections at the Utah State Historical Society, the University of Utah Marriott Library, the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University (Provo) and the library at Utah State University (Logan) are important sources. I recall the helpful direction of Leonard J. Arrington (now deceased) who served both this university and acted as official LDS Church Historian during a period of expanding scholarly use of Church Archives. Special Collections Librarian Everett L. Cooley (now deceased) is remembered for his service to the University of Utah and for his assistance to me in research and writing efforts; Gregory C.Thompson continues Cooley’s professional tradition at this library.
Important collections are found at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Historical Society, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Community of Christ archives and library in Independence, Missouri.
I am also indebted to Gary James Bergera, Todd Compton, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Peter Boothe Wiley, H. Michael Marquardt, Maria H. Marquez, Peter MacGuinness, Kathy E. Evans, and Camilla M. Smith for reading the manuscript and offering valuable editorial suggestions. Thanks also to Arnold W. Donald and Janet L. Visick for reviewing an early draft of this manuscript, and to Fawn M. Brodie, D. Michael Quinn, Richard S. Van Wagoner, Todd M. Compton, Lawrence Foster, Danel Bachman, Linda K. Newell, and Valeen T. Avery (now deceased) whose early research provoked interest in this story.
Thanks to Robert N. Evans and Jake Evans for data analysis and presentation of the some 200 Nauvoo plural families in Appendix B. Special thanks to Karen Lau for her skilled analysis of verbal and quantitative data which she brought into a coherent whole, applying access and cross-referencing systems to a cascade of historical events which compliment and frame years of research.
The record-keepers of former years should also be acknowledged for reporting contemporary events. Their decisions and labor to record what they witnessed are, of course, essential to our ability to look back into a prior age.
Thanks to Connie Disney for the design, and typesetting of this book; thanks also to Keiko Jones and Jani Fleet for their preparation and copy editing, to Tom Kimball for communications planning, and to Greg Jones for his role in production and distribution.Without the contributions of these many people, this book could not have been completed. However, I alone am responsible for any errors or omissions.
I should also mention how patient my wife and children and friends have been while I have been consumed with this topic.
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 heritage; on the other hand, it now warrants harsh condemnation and dismissal from their long-since Americanized church. These events, which arose years ago on the banks of the Mississippi River, are part of an age-old discussion that can be seen as the confluence of two strains of thought: the attempt to adapt religion to human nature and, conversely, the attempt to conform human nature to accepted religious practice.
Acknowledgments
While editing William Clayton’s journals, I came across his record of Joseph Smith’s “celestial wives” in Nauvoo, Illinois, which raised questions about the extent of polygamy in this early “latter-day” community. An account of Smith’s wives and the wives he allowed his inner circle of friends—about 160 polygamous husbands and wives, rising to about 900 by 1846s—had not yet been published when I subsequently searched polygamy references in the New York Public Library. The library mentioned not only Mormon polygamy and a range of American millennialist and utopian societies, it confirmed and delineated various marital practices, debated back through earlier centuries in different parts of the world.Before polygamy was a Mormon template, the seventeenth-century English poet John Milton (known for his portrayal of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost) advocated the practice in an unpublished essay that was rediscovered and reviewed in America in 1826. The review appeared the year before Joseph Smith began dictating to his newlywed wife, Emma, a text that would mention polygamy and become a scripture for a church he would soon found. The New York Public Library also provided the perspective of sixteenth-century “latter day saints” in Münster, Germany, where radical Christians formed a polygamous biblical community to await the end of the world.
In 1994 I visited the Stadtmuseum in Münster which displayed images of the Dutch Anabaptist prophet Jan van Leyden, assembled with his several “queens” for dinner. Among the German historians who directed me toward analysis of the Münster Anabaptist community were Dr. Karl-Heinz Kirchhoff, known for his ground-breaking source-critical examination of the 1534-35 experience, and Dr. Gerd Dethlefs of the Stadtmuseum. Dr. Dethlefs confirmed that the Münster Anabaptists imitated biblical models as they legitimized themselves as chosen of God and sought to remedy contemporary social problems of unmarried women by reenacting polygamous practices described in the Bible. Dethlefs highlighted primary source tracts from sixteenth-century Anabaptist preacher Bernhard Rothmann in Robert Stupperich, ed., Die Schriften Bernhard Rothmanns. Among other valuable sources were Ralf Klötzer, Täuferherrschaft von Münster, and Günther Bauer, Anfänge täuferischer Gemeindebildungen in Franken. Also important were Dr. Ernst Laubach’s writings (Historisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster), as well as George Huntston Williams’s Radical Reformation,Cornelius Krahn’s Dutch Anabaptism, and James M. Stayer’s Vielweiberei.
Of invaluable assistance in translating many of the above texts and in facilitating my correspondence with German scholars was Professor of German Henry Lee Miner (University of Evansville, Indiana). I also benefited from the perusal of some German sources by Ron Priddis, not to mention his careful reading of the manuscript.
Along with New York and Münster, the University of California at Berkeley was a key source of European interest in polygamy. The Graduate Theological Union at the university houses the Mennonite Quarterly Review,which reflected the long Anabaptist effort at historical rediscovery. Other volumes defined the Beichtrat Protestant reformers granted Landgrave Philip of Hesse, who, like England’s Henry VIII, wanted official permission to marry a second wife.
The Bancroft Library at Berkeley has an important Mormon collection which documents the American west and polygamy in Utah. Special thanks to Bancroft Director Charles B. Faulhaber, who guided me to Egyptian and Mormon source documents as well as read and helped to edit the manuscript. Berkeley’s Doe Library has important sources which reflect centuries of marital debate in Europe concerning canon and natural law.
The primary records of Mormon polygamy are centered in and around Salt Lake City, Utah. The LDS Church Archives and Library in Salt Lake, administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, contain letters, diaries, journals, and autobiographical reflections of key participants and eyewitnesses to celestial marriage as it unfolded in the 1840s along the banks of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo, Illinois. Thanks are due to a highly professional team of archivists led by H. Randall Dixon,William Slaughter, and Ronald Watt, among others. Collections at the Utah State Historical Society, the University of Utah Marriott Library, the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University (Provo) and the library at Utah State University (Logan) are important sources. I recall the helpful direction of Leonard J. Arrington (now deceased) who served both this university and acted as official LDS Church Historian during a period of expanding scholarly use of Church Archives. Special Collections Librarian Everett L. Cooley (now deceased) is remembered for his service to the University of Utah and for his assistance to me in research and writing efforts; Gregory C.Thompson continues Cooley’s professional tradition at this library.
Important collections are found at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Chicago Historical Society, the Illinois State Historical Society, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the Community of Christ archives and library in Independence, Missouri.
I am also indebted to Gary James Bergera, Todd Compton, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Peter Boothe Wiley, H. Michael Marquardt, Maria H. Marquez, Peter MacGuinness, Kathy E. Evans, and Camilla M. Smith for reading the manuscript and offering valuable editorial suggestions. Thanks also to Arnold W. Donald and Janet L. Visick for reviewing an early draft of this manuscript, and to Fawn M. Brodie, D. Michael Quinn, Richard S. Van Wagoner, Todd M. Compton, Lawrence Foster, Danel Bachman, Linda K. Newell, and Valeen T. Avery (now deceased) whose early research provoked interest in this story.
Thanks to Robert N. Evans and Jake Evans for data analysis and presentation of the some 200 Nauvoo plural families in Appendix B. Special thanks to Karen Lau for her skilled analysis of verbal and quantitative data which she brought into a coherent whole, applying access and cross-referencing systems to a cascade of historical events which compliment and frame years of research.
The record-keepers of former years should also be acknowledged for reporting contemporary events. Their decisions and labor to record what they witnessed are, of course, essential to our ability to look back into a prior age.
Thanks to Connie Disney for the design, and typesetting of this book; thanks also to Keiko Jones and Jani Fleet for their preparation and copy editing, to Tom Kimball for communications planning, and to Greg Jones for his role in production and distribution.Without the contributions of these many people, this book could not have been completed. However, I alone am responsible for any errors or omissions.
I should also mention how patient my wife and children and friends have been while I have been consumed with this topic.
Descriere
Mormon Mormon polygamy began in Nauvoo, Illinois, a river town located at a bend in the Mississippi about fifty miles upstream from Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri. After church founder Joseph Smith married some thirty-eight women, he introduced this “celestial” form of marriage to his innermost circle of followers. By early 1846, nearly 200 men had adopted the polygamous lifestyle, with an average of nearly four women per man—717 wives in all. After leaving Nauvoo, these husbands would eventually marry another 417 women. In Utah they were the polygamy pioneers who provided a model for thousands of others who entered into plural marriages in the nineteenth century. Their story is colorful, wrapped in images of people in the next life piloting celestial worlds. Plural marriage was not initiated all at once, nor was it introduced though a smooth progression of events but rather in fits and starts, though defenses and denials, hubris and mea culpas. The story, as told here, emphasizes the human drama, interspersed with underlying historiographical issues of uncovering what has hidden—of explaining behavior that was once allowed and then denied as circumstances changed.