American Crucifixion

by Alex Beam

  When the British Mormon leader Joseph Fielding settled his flock in Warren, problems arose. He reported that Aldrich and Warren’s partner was price gouging the Saints on flour sales, even selling them mill sweepings at exorbitant markups. The rents were rising even as the Saints were moving in, and the Mormons were forbidden from collecting wood in the area. When Joseph heard the complaints, he immediately recalled the English Saints to Nauvoo. Not long after, Aldrich and Warren demanded an audience with the Prophet, and laid out their case. Warren said he would go broke if the Saints backed out of the deal and offered “liberal benefits” to lure the Mormons back. But Joseph responded with a tirade, damning Warsaw and its noxious citizens to hell. “I prophesied in the name of the Lord, that the first thing toward building up Warsaw was to break it down, to break down them that are there,” Joseph thundered, “and to let Sharp publish what he pleases and go to the devil, and the more lies he prints the sooner he will get through.” He predicted that Warsaw would never prosper until “capitalists from the Eastern States, say from Pennsylvania” introduced rational business practices to the downstate backwater. Perhaps his remarks were calculated to offend. Southern Illinois residents despised Yankee meddlers of all stripes and colors.

  As a result of the Warren debacle, both Aldrich and attorney Warren declared bankruptcy. (Warren was a bankruptcy specialist, whom Joseph had retained in an earlier, unsuccessful effort to make his general store’s indebtedness disappear.) But both men would be heard from again, as stalwart, fanatical Joseph Smith–haters who changed the course of Mormon history.

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  POLYGAMY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another.

  —Joseph Smith, letter to Nancy Rigdon, April 1844

  IN 1830, MARY ELIZABETH ROLLINS WAS A PRETTY, PRECOCIOUS twelve-year-old girl living with her aunt and uncle in Kirtland, Ohio. Her father had perished in a shipwreck on Lake Ontario when she was two years old. Mary and her mother went to live with her uncle Sidney Gilbert, an early convert to Joseph Smith’s new religion. Soon the mother and daughter became Saints, baptized in a stream near their home.

  Visiting a neighbor’s house, Mary spotted a rare Book of Mormon. Only a few hundred copies had been printed, mostly reserved for the use of missionaries wending their way around the northeastern United States. Mary begged to borrow the book for an evening. In her autobiography, she reported that she and the Gilberts savored the “Golden Bible” until late at night. She woke up early and memorized the first verse of Nephi, the first book in the Mormon bible: “I, Nephi, have been born of goodly parents. . . .”

  When she returned the book early the next morning, her neighbor chided her. “I guess you did not read much in it.”

  “Actually, I read quite a lot,” she insisted.

  “I don’t believe you can tell me one word of it,” the skeptical man replied.

  “I then repeated the first verse, also the outlines of the history of Nephi,” Mary remembered.

  “Child, take this book home and finish it,” her neighbor replied. “I can wait.”

  Soon afterward, Joseph Smith himself settled in Kirtland and paid a call on the Gilberts. He spotted the Book of Mormon and asked who had been reading it. Everyone, the Gilberts replied, even our twelve-year-old niece.

  “Where is your niece?” Joseph asked.

  “I was sent for,” Mary later wrote, “and when he saw me, he looked at me so earnestly, I felt almost afraid and I thought, ‘He can read my every thought,’ and I thought how blue his eyes were. After a moment he came and put his hands on my head and gave me a great Blessing and made me a present of the Book.”

  Just a few days later Mary and her mother attended an evening prayer gathering with other Saints at Joseph’s house. Mary watched the proceedings from a corner, sitting on a plank suspended between two boxes. After some prayers and hymn-singing, Smith suddenly froze.

  “His countenance Shone,” Mary recalled, and seemed almost transparent.

  It seems as though the solemnity of Eternity rested upon all of us. He seemed almost transfixed, he was looking ahead and his face outshone the candle which was on a shelf just behind him. He looked as though a searchlight was inside his face and shining through every pore. I could not take my eyes from his face.

  “Who do you suppose has been in your midst this night?” Smith asked.

  “An angel?” one of the faithful suggested.

  Then Martin Harris, who financed the printing of the Book of Mormon, prostrated himself in front of Joseph, grabbing the Prophet’s leg. “I know,” Harris said. “Jesus Christ was here.”

  “That is right,” Smith testified, “Brethren, our Saviour has been in Your Midst, and talked with me face to face.

  He has commanded me to seal you up unto Everlasting life, and he has given you all to be with me, in his kingdom, even as he is in the Father’s kingdom. And he has commanded me to say unto you, that when you are tempted of Satan, to say get thee behind me Satan, for my salvation is secure.

  “I felt he was talking to the Lord and the power rested upon us all,” Mary wrote.

  Mary Rollins’s life continued to be eventful. Possessed of the gift of tongues, she sometimes interpreted Indian languages and even engaged in religious prophecy, which occasionally set her at odds with her Mormon elders. She was a talented seamstress. When she and the Gilberts followed the Saints to Missouri, the newly elected lieutenant governor, Lilburn Boggs, asked her to help tailor a formal suit for his inauguration. Impressed by Mary and her work, Boggs tried to convince her to leave the church and join his family. Four years later, Boggs would issue the Extermination Order that would send Mary and thousands of Saints fleeing for their lives across the frozen Mississippi river.

  In 1839, Mary, her Gentile husband, Adam Lightner, and their two young children did indeed flee Missouri and settle not far from Nauvoo. Lightner suffered business reverses and had trouble earning a living. Mary taught art to young children, including to Joseph Smith’s adopted daughter Julia. She was living with her family in a tiny dwelling near the Nauvoo Mansion when Smith first asked her to marry him in early 1842.

  Mary was twenty-three years old, married, and pregnant with her third child. Joseph was thirty-six years old, the father of four children and, unbeknownst to Mary and almost every other member of his church, was husband to eight wives, including Emma, the mother of his children.

  Joseph explained to Mary, as he would to many other women, that an angel of the Lord had revealed the doctrine of plural marriage to him three times since 1834. Naturally, he had at first found the teaching shocking and repugnant. On the final visit, the angel, brandishing a sword, “said I was to obey that principle or he would slay me.”

  Joseph told Mary that the two of them had already been together, that “I was created for him before the foundation of the Earth was laid.” He further explained—and he would repeat this to many women—that God had granted him eternal life. “I know that I shall be saved in the Kingdom of God,” he said. “I have the oath of God upon it and God cannot lie.” Furthermore, his wives and children would be granted salvation with him at the end of time.

  Mary worshipped the Prophet, but she had doubts about this new revelation. If you saw an angel, she asked, why didn’t I? And how do you know the angel came from heaven? Perhaps Satan sent one of his angels? Mary said she would accept this new teaching only if an angel came to her. That will doubtless happen, Joseph said. And in the meantime, please don’t repeat this conversation to anyone.

  I wouldn’t dream of it, Mary answered: “I shall never tell a mortal I had such a talk from a married man!”

  Mary prayed as Joseph counseled her, and one night, she reported that “a Personage stood in front of the Bed looking at me.

  Its clothes were whiter than anything I had ever seen, I could look at its Person, but when I saw its face so bright, and more beautiful than any Earthly Being Could be, and those ey
es pearcing me through, and through, I could not endure it, it seemed as if I must die with fear, I fell back in Bed and Covered up my head.

  Mary shared the bedroom with her mother and her aunt, who also saw “a figure in white robes pass from our bed to my mother’s bed and pass out of the window.”

  This was the sign, Mary concluded. In February 1842, on the second floor of Smith’s redbrick general store, Brigham Young sealed Mary and Joseph as husband and wife for “time, and all Eternity.” She was told to remain married to Adam Lightner, who was out of town on business.

  SECURE ATOP HIS INDEPENDENT CITY-STATE, JOSEPH SMITH WAS boldly re-creating the Mormon religion. He had introduced the doctrine of baptism of the dead, ensuring that the Saints’ forbears—and ultimately the nations of Gentiles—would be prepared to greet Jesus Christ in the glory of the Second Coming. He had refined and formalized the endowment ritual required for men and women to enter the Mormon priesthood, borrowing heavily from his new enthusiasm for Freemasonry. The King Follett sermon shook the theological foundations of his own church, announcing the doctrine of plural gods, and of the humanity of the Christian God. But the most controversial new teaching, which Smith insisted was a very old teaching, firmly rooted in the Old Testament experience, was polygamy, the doctrine of plural wives.

  From the moment he received his first revelation, Joseph never wavered from his insistence that Mormonism was a restoration of the original church of Jesus Christ, and of the Old Testament prophets. Thus Joseph styled himself to be a prophet, aided on earth by twelve apostles. All Old and New Testament teachings, along with the Book of Mormon, were true, Joseph said. According to him, the established churches had distorted and polluted God’s messages over time. Joseph knew the Bible backward and forward and often mentioned the multiple wives of such Old Testament figures as Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and King David. The great Hebrew king was said to have had over twenty wives and concubines, and his son Solomon had “seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines,” according to 1 Kings 11:3. In the original polygamy revelation of 1831, God reminded Smith that “David also received many wives and concubines, and also Solomon and Moses my servants . . . from the beginning of creation until this time; and in nothing did they sin.” In a separate revelation the same year, God suggested that the Mormons might convert the Native Americans, supposedly descendants of the Book of Mormon’s Lamanites, through polygamous intermarriage:

  For it is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and Just, for even now their females are more virtuous than the gentiles.

  Although a few Mormons did marry Native American women later in the century, the revelation—which the church never published—went unfulfilled.

  Joseph received so many revelations that they inevitably conflicted. The Lord did advise him, just as he had counseled Moses in the Ten Commandments, to “love thy wife with all thy heart, and cleave unto her and none else” (Doctrine and Covenants 42:22). And it could hardly go unnoticed that the Book of Mormon, which Joseph compiled before 1831, condemned polygamy, in two passages from the Book of Jacob. The dissolute Nephites

  began to grow hard in their hearts and indulge themselves somewhat in wicked practices, such as like unto David of old desiring many wives and concubines, and also Solomon, his son (Jacob 1:15).

  In Jacob 2, the Lord speaks even more directly, noting that “David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me.” “Nephite Men Should Have Only One Wife” the book sternly warns, and God speaks yet again on this subject to his people:

  For there shall not be any man among you save have it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none. For I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women and whoredoms are an abomination before me (Jacob 2:27–28).

  In the same chapter, the Lord makes the ambiguous statement, “For if I will raise up seed unto me, I will command my people; otherwise they shall hearken unto these things.” For decades, Joseph and other apologists for Mormon polygamy claimed they were “raising up seed” to their Lord, his previous strictures notwithstanding. In a famous letter to nineteen-year-old Nancy Rigdon, who repelled his advances, Joseph simply explained that “whatever God requires is right,” and he was the one entrusted to interpret God’s intentions: “That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another.”

  Joseph had been confiding his thoughts about plural marriage to his most trusted confederates throughout the 1830s. It seems that Joseph was practicing polygamy without benefit of clergy during that time. “Joseph’s name was connected with scandalous relations with two or three families,” according to his friend Benjamin Winchester. “There was a good deal of scandal prevalent among a number of the Saints concerning Joseph’s licentious conduct, this more especially among the women.” In 1835, rumors of Mormon polygamy were so intense that the Saints’ general assembly issued a statement asserting, “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy; we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman but one husband.” The Saints adopted the measure while Joseph was absent on a missionary trip to Michigan.

  It is possible that he married his first “celestial wife” in 1838, although his first recorded plural marriage took place in 1841. Joseph shrouded polygamy in great secrecy, for several obvious reasons. Not only was the practice morally shocking and contradicted by passages in both the New Testament and the Book of Mormon, it was also illegal in Illinois. Nonetheless, defectors and apostates were reporting Joseph’s scandalous views to the world. “Old Joe’s Mormon seraglio” quickly became a stock phrase in the nation’s newspapers, despite the Saints’ heated denials.

  Polygamy was not an idea that occurred to Joseph alone. Utopian ideologue John Humphrey Noyes had been propagandizing free love during the 1830s and introduced a system of “complex marriage” at his upstate New York Oneida colony in 1848. At Oneida, all men and women were married to each other, and exclusive attachments were forbidden. It was Noyes who famously observed that “there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law than why eating and drinking should be.” There is no evidence that Noyes and Smith ever met, although it seems likely they would have known about each other from the popular press. Smith did meet the notorious Robert Matthews, who claimed to be the reincarnation of the disciple Matthew, returned to earth “to establish a community of property, and of wives.” After a short prison stint, Matthews showed up on Joseph’s doorstep in Kirtland, Ohio, masquerading as “Joshua the Jewish Minister.” After forty-eight hours of intense discussions, Joseph decided that “Joshua’s” doctrine “was of the Devil,” and he escorted him out of town.

  Smith definitely knew about Jacob Cochran’s doctrine of spiritual wifery at his Saco, Maine, colony, because the Mormons had tried to convert the Cochranites. Future apostle and polygamist Orson Hyde visited a Cochranite community in 1832 and reported on their “wonderful lustful spirit,

  . . . because they believe in a “plurality of wives” which they call spiritual wives, knowing them not after the flesh but after the spirit, but by the appearance they know one another after the flesh.

  In 1841, Joseph discussed polygamy with his Apostles, and the doctrine was formally recorded, albeit secretly, in July of 1843. In the revelation, God invoked the names of the Old Testament polygamists, and continued: “Verily I say unto you, my servant Joseph, that whatsoever you give on earth, and to whomsoever you give any one on earth, by my word and according to my law, it shall be visited with blessings.” In the next to last verse of the lengthy revelation, God invoked the “law of Sarah,” an insidious stricture for women who didn’t want to share their husbands. If a wife refused to consent to polygamy, the revelation instructed, the husband no longer needed her assent to take on other wives.

  God also included a special message fo
r “mine handmaid Emma,” whom he correctly imagined might greet the new doctrine with muted enthusiasm:

  And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law (Doctrine and Covenants 132:54).

  A decade earlier, God had issued a revelation, through Joseph, that Emma should “murmur not because of the things which thou hast not seen, for they are withheld from thee and from the world” (Doctrine and Covenants 25:4).

  God might well worry that Emma would “murmur” against polygamy. Joseph’s scribe William Clayton wrote down the polygamy revelation sentence by sentence in the Prophet’s second-floor office of the redbrick store, while Smith dictated. (The revelation was hardly news to Clayton; Joseph had urged him to marry his first plural wife earlier in the year.) Joseph’s brother Hyrum was the only other person in the small room. The men realized that someone would have to show the text to Joseph’s wife.

  “If you will write the revelation, I will take and read it to Emma,” Hyrum assured his brother. “I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace.”

  Hyrum’s mission failed utterly. Returning from his audience with Emma at the Mansion, he announced that “I have never received a more severe talking to in my life. Emma is very bitter and full of resentment and anger.”

  Emma “did not believe a word” of the revelation, Clayton wrote in his diary, noting that she destroyed the text Hyrum had handed her.

  Emma hated polygamy all her life, even though there were moments when she reconciled herself to the new theology. For instance, in a gesture that must have tried her soul, she allowed Joseph to marry two pairs of young sisters who lived in the mansion with the Smiths: Emily and Eliza Partridge, and Sarah and Maria Lawrence. Joseph thanked Emma profusely, never informing her that he had in fact married the Partridge sisters two months beforehand, or that he already had sixteen other wives. Right after the marriage ceremony, Emma “was more bitter in her feelings than ever before, if possible,” Emily Partridge recounted, “and before the day was over she turned around and repented what she had done.” Emma “kept close watch on us,” Partridge added. “If we were missing for a few minutes and Joseph was not at home the house was searched from top to bottom and if we were not found the neighborhood was searched until we were found.”