by Alex Beam
Within just a few months, Emma threatened that “blood would flow” if the marriages were not undone, and the sister wives were evicted. Joseph sheepishly arranged for the girls to board elsewhere in Nauvoo. William Clayton reported that Emma was threatening to sue for divorce, an untenable proposition for Joseph. Despite her many humiliations, Emma remained the “Elect Lady” of the Latter-day Saints and was quite popular among the Mormon rank and file. She was a principal player in the brief history of the Mormon Church. Joseph often mentioned that the angel Moroni refused to show him the golden plates until Joseph was married, and that Moroni specified Emma Hale as the desired spouse. Emma was Joseph’s first scribe and an early and ardent believer in the plates (“I felt of the plates as they lay on the table,” she later told her oldest son) and in the doctrine of the newly restored gospel.
During his nine-month-long jail term in Liberty, Missouri, Joseph and Emma exchanged tender letters. She visited her husband three times, with their children, before being forced to flee Missouri for Illinois. Rather than risk a messy break with his wife of seventeen years, Joseph generally assuaged Emma’s public demands and did his best to conduct his private life in private.
In a famous incident, Emma is supposed to have surprised Joseph and another mansion lodger, the raven-haired poetess Eliza Snow, kissing on a second-floor landing. With her children begging her not to harm “Aunt Eliza,” Emma grabbed Snow by the hair, then threw her down the stairs and out into the street. Snow was said to have suffered a miscarriage as a result. The tale looms large for the Saints because Snow became the poet laureate of Mormon culture, and a grande dame in the Saints’ new Zion of Salt Lake City. A plural widow of Joseph Smith, she married his successor, Brigham Young, and outlived him by a decade. Snow never spoke of the stairway incident, confirming only that she had been the Prophet’s wife and lover.
A Gentile visitor from Carthage, while paying a call on Emma, innocently inquired, “Mrs. Smith, where does your church get the doctrine of spiritual wives?”
Emma’s face flushed scarlet, the guest reported, and her eyes blazed with fury. “Straight from hell, madam.”
EMMA SMITH’S HORRIFIED REACTION TO POLYGAMY WAS THE RULE, not the exception, among the devout Saints. Joseph’s brother Don Carlos said, “Any man who will teach and practice the doctrine of spiritual wifery will go to hell; I don’t care if it is my brother Joseph.” Brigham Young, doggedly loyal to Joseph and his teachings, said that learning about plural marriage “was the first time in my life that I desired the grave.” Apostle John Taylor called plural marriage “an appalling thing to do. The idea of going and asking a young lady to be married to me when I already had a wife!” (Joseph told Taylor that if polygamy is “not entered into right away, the keys will be turned,” meaning Mormons will be denied entry to heaven.) “The subject was very repugnant to my feelings,” Eliza Snow wrote upon learning the doctrine. Don Carlos died without experiencing the Saints’ full embrace of polygamy. Snow and Young accommodated themselves to the new teaching. By 1846, John Taylor had married thirteen wives.
In the early 1840s, Joseph encouraged the apostles to take additional wives, and the inner circle sometimes engaged in dynastic polygamy, or sealed marriages that seemed primarily political in nature. Joseph married Willard Richards’s fifty-eight-year old sister Rhoda, and soon afterward married Brigham Young’s fifty-six-year old sister Fanny. He urged Richards to marry two teenage girls in 1843. Richards’s first wife, Jennetta, died just two years later, “of a broken heart,” according to her son Heber.
A rare 1845 daguerreotype of Willard Richards, his first wife Jennetta, and their son, Heber. Richards married two teenage girls in 1843, and Jennetta died at age 27, two years later and three months after this picture was taken. Heber “always maintained that his mother died of a broken heart,” according to biographer Clair Noall. Credit: Daughters of Utah Pioneers
Most polygamous marriages were for “time and eternity,” signifying that the man and the woman might have sexual relations on earth (“time”) but also be joined in a larger family at the end of time (“eternity”). The larger the family that gathered to greet the Second Coming, Joseph taught, the greater the heavenly exaltation for all concerned. It is probable that Joseph married Rhoda Richards and Fanny Young for dynastic reasons, for “eternity” only. After Joseph’s death, Brigham Young married many of the Prophet’s widows, including Brigham’s first cousin Rhoda Richards, partly to ensure that the two massive clans would be together for all time.
Smith eventually married dozens of wives, including five pairs of sisters and two pairs of mothers and daughters, of whom fourteen were already married.* He introduced thirty-three of his followers to plural marriage. By the time of his death, there were 124 plural wives living in Nauvoo. At times, his invocation of the new rite seemed quite casual. One day Joseph was chatting about celestial marriage with Brigham and the unmarried Fanny Young. Fanny ventured the opinion that she planned to be alone in heaven. “I shall request the privilege of being a ministering angel,” she told the men. “That is the labor that I wish to perform. I don’t want any companion in that world.”
“Sister, you talk very foolishly,” Joseph upbraided her. “You do not know what you will want.” He turned to Brigham. “Here, Brother Brigham, you seal this lady to me.”
They were married on the spot.
The Prophet’s relation with the Sessions family illustrates the claustrophobic nature of Nauvoo polygamy. In 1838, Joseph officiated at the wedding of nineteen-year-old Sylvia Sessions to Windsor Lyon. Four years later, Joseph married Sylvia himself. A few weeks after that, he married Sylvia’s mother, Patty Bartlett Sessions.
Smith didn’t limit himself to asking his closest friends if he could marry their sisters. He also wooed their own wives and daughters. One day in 1841, after Apostle Heber Kimball had returned from a proselytizing mission to England, Joseph approached him and said God had commanded him to marry Heber’s wife, Vilate. “He was dumbfounded,” his grandson Orson Whitney said. Kimball didn’t eat, drink, or sleep for three days, and prayed continually.
Finally, Heber and Vilate walked over to meet Joseph in a private room at the Nauvoo Mansion. “Brother Joseph, here is Vilate,” Kimball said.
Smith “wept like a child” and proceeded to seal, or marry, Heber and Vilate to each other “for time and all eternity.” “Brother Heber, take her and the Lord will give you a hundredfold.”
It was a test of love and faith, Joseph explained. He had never wanted to marry Vilate after all. Smith called this the “Abrahamic test.” He acted out almost the same scenario with his friend, the Apostle John Taylor.
But he did want to marry the Kimballs’ fourteen-year-old daughter.
By 1843, Joseph had won both Vilate and Heber over to the doctrine of plural marriage. At the Prophet’s urging, Heber had married a young woman named Sarah Noon, whose husband had deserted her. After considerable praying, Vilate grudgingly accommodated herself to the union. “Her heartstrings were already stretched until they were ready to snap asunder,” her daughter Helen later wrote. Then Joseph asked the couple for their only daughter’s hand in marriage.
Speaking with his daughter in their home, Kimball, a pillar of the church, broached the subject of polygamy delicately. Would you believe me, he said, if I told you it was right for married men to take other wives?
I would not! exclaimed Helen, who had never shown anger to her father before.
Heber stunned his daughter by telling her that her close friend, Sarah Ann Whitney, had already joined Joseph in celestial marriage. Helen was close to the Whitneys; in fact, she was infatuated with Sarah’s brother, Horace, and hoped to marry him. Heber insisted that she bow to Joseph’s will. “If you will take this step, it will ensure you eternal salvation and exaltation and that of your father’s household and all your kindred,” Heber explained to her.
In her autobiography, Helen hinted that she contemplated fleeing, or something worse; “I
will pass over the temptations which I had during the twenty four hours after my father introduced me to the principle.”
The family again presented themselves to the Prophet. “None but God and the angels could see my mother’s bleeding heart,” Helen wrote, when Joseph asked if Vilate would agree to the union.
“If Helen is willing I have nothing more to say,” Vilate replied. “In her mind, she saw the misery which was so sure to come,” Helen recalled. “But it was all hidden from me.” Joseph married her in the upper room of his redbrick store, on a cold rainy Sunday, May 28, 1843.
Helen Mar Kimball was a devoutly religious, unworldly young girl raised in the insular Mormon culture. Apparently no one had prepared her for what Joseph would do to her when they were alone. She was three months shy of fifteen years old; young, but of marriageable age. (Nauvoo required a girl to be fourteen years old to marry. Statewide, the age of consent was ten.) “I would never have been sealed to Joseph, had I known it was anything more than a ceremony,” Helen later told her mother. “I was young and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.”
People change. Forty years later, with the US government waging a full-scale war against Mormon polygamy in Utah, Helen Mar Kimball Whitney—she did marry her childhood sweetheart, though “for time only”—published an eighty-page brochure-apologia, “Why We Practice Plural Marriage,” refuting “those who make our religious faith a pretext for stirring up the public mind against us.”
An adventure not unlike the Kimballs’ befell Apostle Orson Pratt. After her husband returned from a mission trip to England, Sarah Pratt complained that Joseph Smith had tried to seduce her. Sarah said she rebuffed Smith. As he often did when confronted by female accusers, Joseph smeared her, publicly accusing her of adultery with another man. He went so far as to suggest that Pratt “marry a virtuous woman—and sire a new family.” Orson Pratt fled his home and temporarily lost his mind. Brigham Young spent several days with his disturbed colleague, “whose mind became so darkened by the influence and statements of his wife, that he came out in rebellion against Joseph, refusing to believe his testimony or obey his council.”
The Quorum of the Twelve excommunicated both Pratts, although within a few weeks they reconciled with Joseph and rejoined the Saints. Orson “repented in dust and ashes.” Sarah’s return proved to be temporary. She later divorced Orson and helped found Salt Lake City’s Anti-Polygamy Society. She evinced nothing but contempt for her “gray headed” husband, “taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage. Of course there could be no joy for him in such an intercourse except for the indulgence of his fanaticism and of something else, perhaps, which I hesitate to mention.”
Then Joseph tried to seduce the wife of his second counselor, William Law.
WILLIAM LAW WAS A DISTINCT AND POWERFUL PRESENCE IN Nauvoo. Unlike most of the faithful, he had not suffered persecution in Missouri with Joseph, nor had he freshly arrived from England. Neither was he poor, and dependent on the charity of Joseph or the Saints’ tithings to bankroll his arrival in Illinois.
Law was a tall, blue-eyed, charismatic Irishman who had made a considerable fortune operating a lumber mill in Ontario, Canada. At age twenty-four, he married the nineteen-year-old Jane Silver-thorn, who inherited a substantial estate from her father. Law was the president of the Mormon stake in Churchville, Ontario, and migrated south at Joseph Smith’s suggestion. During a missionary visit to nearby Toronto, Joseph worried that political unrest might affect his flock and suggested that Canada’s Saints gather south of the border. (Apparently, Joseph was unaware that Law was a MacKenzieite, a follower of William Lyon MacKenzie, the leader of an ineffectual armed rising against Canada’s British sovereigns.) By coincidence, Joseph happened upon William Law’s small caravan of seven wagons while they were emigrating from Ontario to Nauvoo in 1839. Smith, accompanied by Porter Rockwell and Dr. Robert Foster, was heading to Washington, DC, to demand reparations for the Saints’ Missouri expropriations from President Martin Van Buren.
Law, who had trained as a doctor, arrived in Nauvoo with $30,000, which Joseph urged him to invest in the city. “You must not be a doctor here, let some Gentiles come and do that,” Smith counseled him. “Buy lands, build mills, and keep a store to keep you running.”
William and his brother Wilson did just that. They opened a steam-powered flour mill and a lumber mill on Sydney Street, where the Mississippi lapped against the southern edge of the new town. They bankrolled a general store, which competed with Joseph’s redbrick store right across Water Street, and they purchased a dozen full-sized building lots on the slopes of the hill where the Nauvoo Temple was slowly taking form. They also operated a brickyard, and owned 580 acres of farmland on the prairie east of the city. The Laws were devout and energetic members of the Nauvoo community. “No man could be better fitted to his station,” a newspaper reported, calling Law “wise, discreet, just, prudent—a man of great suavity of manner and amiability of character.” The paper likewise praised Law’s “correct business habits” and “great devotion to God.” When Joseph’s father died in 1841, Smith appointed his brother Hyrum to the vacant office of church patriarch, and by revelation assigned Hyrum’s job as counselor in the First Presidency to William Law. According to a special revelation, Law had been granted the power to heal the sick and cast out devils.
Wilson Law also became a member of Nauvoo’s ruling inner circle. Wilson was commissioned a brigadier general in the Nauvoo Legion and served as president of the City Council. When the Missouri sheriffs kidnapped Joseph in Dixon’s Ferry, the Law brothers led a flying squad of sixty mounted Nauvoo Legionnaires that galloped northward to rescue the Prophet. When Joseph first caught sight of his rescuers, “I walked out several rods to meet the company,” he said. “William and Wilson Law jumped from their horses, and unitedly hugged and kissed me, when many tears of joy were shed.” Two streets in Nauvoo were named after the brothers: Wilson Street and Law Street.
Writing to a faith-challenged Mormon friend who refused to follow Joseph Smith to Nauvoo, William Law called the Prophet “a honest upright man . . . I have carefully watched his movements since I have been here,”
And I assure you I have found him honest and honourable in all our transactions which have been very considerable . . . as to his follies let who ever is guiltless throw the first stone at him, I shan’t do it.
When a court in the state capital of Springfield, Illinois, allowed Joseph to elude yet another arrest warrant from Missouri, Wilson Law hailed the event with a devotional poem in Nauvoo’s official Times and Seasons newspaper:
All hail to our Chief! Who has come back with honor—
With glory’s bright halo encircling around;
From the highest tribunal in this great republic,
Where falsehood and slander caused him to be bound.
William Law first caught wind of the plural marriage doctrine in early 1843. He reacted strongly: “If an angel from heaven was to reveal to me that a man should have more than one wife, if it were in my power I would kill him.” In Joseph’s inner circle, only two men refused to accept the new teaching, Law and William Marks, the stake president, or nominal religious leader of Nauvoo. Joseph recognized Law’s power, and sent his brother Hyrum to the Laws’ home with a copy of the polygamy revelation. It “paralizes the nerves, chills the currents of the heart, and drives the brain almost to madness,” Law confided to his diary.
Law told his wife, Jane, that he would take the matter up with the Prophet, who would surely renounce this adulterous blasphemy. Don’t count on it, Jane predicted, as she had every reason to know. Joseph had already attempted to seduce her, and when her accusation later became public, he denounced her as a whore.
Why would Joseph try to seduce the wife of the powerful, independent-minded Law? Most likely, he lusted after the beautiful Jane Law, and intended to exercise his droit du seigneur. Smith’s loyal secretary William Clayton offered a different exp
lanation. Clayton reported that a restive Emma was agitating for a plural husband in 1843, in exchange for her continued silence on polygamy. Supposedly, Emma desired William Law as her consecrated lover, thus Joseph Smith was in effect proposing a wife swap. Another dubious story that circulated in official church circles held that Joseph refused to seal William and Jane Law for eternity because William was an adulterer. Thus it was Jane who seduced Joseph on her own behalf, seeking a companion to greet the Second Coming. William Law’s son Thomas later opined that Joseph wouldn’t have had the gumption to make advances to his mother. “In such a case, my father would not have started a paper against him,” Thomas told an interviewer. “He would have shot his head off.”
In his dairy, Law noted that Joseph “had lately endeavored to seduce my wife, and had found her a virtuous woman.”
When William Law confronted Joseph with a copy of the polygamy revelation, it turned out that Jane had guessed right. Joseph stood by the new doctrine.
“Yes, that is a genuine revelation,” the Prophet said, at what was to be the two men’s final encounter in January 1844.
“But in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants there is a revelation just the contrary of this,” Law replied.
“Oh, that was given when the church was in its infancy,” Joseph explained. “Then it was all right to feed the people on milk, but now it is necessary to give them strong meat.”
