This is a rebroadcast of our 2022 interview with attorney & independent historian Mark Tensmeyer who will polygamy skeptics claims. We’ll discuss contemporary evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. This is the entire interview that has never been published publicy before. Check out our conversation…
Check here for more info on polygamy! https://gospeltangents.com/lds_theology/polygamy/
Copyright © 2024
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.
Examining Polygamy Skeptics Claims
Introduction
In a conversation with Denver Snuffer, he claimed that if we threw out all evidence after Joseph Smith died, there is little evidence Joseph practiced polygamy. While I’m sure that’s an appealing tactic of a defense attorney, is that something a judge would allow? I’m excited to introduce Mark Tensmeyer, an attorney from Texas and we’ll talk about rules of evidence. What exactly is hearsay evidence? Mark will explain. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 01:03 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have a person who’s certified in law to talk about rules of evidence. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where you’re calling from?
Mark 01:16 I’m Mark Tensmeyer. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.
GT 01:21 And you are a lawyer by trade?
Mark 01:23 I am. Yes.
GT 01:25 So, you have a good grasp of law. Now, I know Denver Snuffer is a lawyer, as well. So, we kind of have a little bit of a difference of opinion on whether Joseph was a monogamist or a polygamist. I decided to have Mark on here. We’re going to try to settle that and talk about some of the common arguments of the “Joseph was a monogamist” crowd. I’m not going to claim to be unbiased on this. But I am going to try to be as fair as possible. I think you are going to do the same thing right, Mark?
Mark 02:03 Right. I don’t think anybody who approaches this is really unbiased, even if they might think they are. I think very few people, if anybody, is truly unbiased. But I like to think that people can come to conclusions based on evidence, regardless of whatever their personal bias might be. I have that much faith in the human intellect.
GT 02:30 Alright. One of the things I’d like to start off with, especially given your law background, is, let’s talk a little bit about rules of evidence. I know in my previous interview–and I know there are a lot of people that love to email me and say, “Hey, you’ve never talked to somebody who believes Joseph was a monogamist, which, number one, is not true. I’ve talked to Denver. I’ve also talked to Jim Vun Cannon. So, if you haven’t seen those, go watch them, and you can hear their arguments firsthand.
Mark 03:02 Yeah.
GT 03:03 I gave him a fair hearing. But I know in Denver’s case, and I wanted to talk about him, because he’s a lawyer just like you, Mark.
Mark 03:12 Right.
GT 03:13 One of the things that Denver said that I’d really like to question you on is Denver went to Michael Quinn, and said, “Well, if we cut out all the evidence after Joseph Smith died, June 27, 1844, then there’s not very much evidence that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.” Personally, I think, if I was a defense lawyer, that’s exactly what I would do. I try to throw out as much evidence, especially, of course, bad evidence that wasn’t helping me, as possible. So, I think it’s a great defense tactic. I don’t know that a judge would necessarily buy that. Can you tell us about that?
Mark 03:53 Yes, I can speak to that. First off, the legal rules of evidence ought to be seen in the context of the legal case. I mean, they don’t necessarily apply to weighing and balancing evidence, like in history or in any other situation in real life. We have laws that govern what kind of evidence can be considered, but the law doesn’t give us a lot of direction on how to weigh and balance evidence or what kind of weight to give evidence. So, Denver Snuffer, he said that we ought to just cut off all evidence after Joseph Smith died. I’ve watched that interview. He said [that] you need to cut that off because you can’t use evidence of what a dead man said after he’s dead. So, in the law, there’s the hearsay evidence about how anything that was said outside of a courtroom setting is hearsay. But that applies to all oral communications. So, since Joseph Smith is dead, everything he ever said, or did pretty much is based on hearsay. So, even Joseph Smith’s denials that he was a polygamist, is based on hearsay. I mean, it’s hearsay.
GT 05:33 Important point, there.
Mark 05:35 A lot of people, well, I mean, this is really the core argument, is they say, “Well, we need to have something that comes directly from Joseph. We need to have his thoughts on this, not what somebody else thought about him doing.” That’s one of the major points. But what does that even mean? I mean, he’s not here to tell us. So, everything he said, is hearsay. I mean, when you say, “Well, we have this from Joseph, these articles in the Times and Seasons…” So, we have newspaper articles that quote him, and I think we can be very confident that he actually said those things.
Mark 06:07 But, then there’s other things, too, we can look at to try to get at what he did. So, I watched that interview with Denver Snuffer, where he said, “You can’t get it from a dead man.” I think he might be talking about the dead man statute, which a few states have. In most cases it’s very, very restricted. So, here in Texas, where I’m licensed, it only applies in intestacy cases, where you’re talking about something that the decedent said to a beneficiary about a will or something like that, something of that nature. That’s really the only place where that applies in Texas. There are hearsay laws. But then there’s all kinds of exceptions to the hearsay laws. One of the exceptions to the hearsay laws is ancient documents law. So, any document is over 20 years old is admissible. So, that would qualify for most of any document we have, as long as it’s found in place where there’s a reasonable chain of custody there, to where it’s found, and whoever said it. A lot of states have that, the ancient documents rule. So, no, I don’t think even using legal things, you could really just cut off the rules at Joseph’s death. Even if you did, there’s still plenty there.
GT 07:44 I just want to point out that in any murder case, the evidence was collected after the crime happened. So, I think it’s kind of a crazy argument to say, “Well, he’s dead.”
Mark 07:56 In any intestacy case, in any inheritance case, in any probate case, where people are arguing who should be getting what, from this person who’s dead. All the evidence…
GT 08:10 All the evidence is collected after the death.
Mark 08:13 Yes, there’s always going to be a lot. This kind of goes to the idea, in these discussions, it’s very, very easy–I use the term polygamy skeptics, because it’s a neutral term. I don’t like to say polygamy denier, conspiracy theorists or that sort of thing, because I don’t like to be dismissive. Whereas I obviously disagree with these people about how reasonable this outcome is objectively, I do understand that there are some aspects of this, that your average person would find compelling. Your average person, if you went out there and showed them a lot of the arguments that Richard or Pamela Price or Denver Snuffer, or it’s in the Joseph Smith Nauvoo paper, that they would find compelling. I don’t blame people for thinking that Joseph Smith was a monogamist. That said, I don’t think that objectively it holds up. The reason that I it’s reasonable that people should think that, should feel that, is because Joseph Smith’s polygamy, Nauvoo polygamy is a very unusual situation. You have activities. Nauvoo polygamy starts in–of course, there’s…
GT 09:55 Before you go there, I want to talk about hearsay. What is considered hearsay? I know that’s a great way to dismiss arguments.
Mark 10:02 So, if you want to target those things–hearsay is anything you heard somebody else say. So, in the legal sense it’s anything that’s said outside of the courtroom. It’s anything said outside of the courtroom where the issue is being adjudicated. But, when you usually say hearsay, it means anything that you heard somebody else say. Say, for example, when Lorenzo Snow says, “I talked to Joseph. He said he took my sister, Eliza R. Snow as a wife.” I mean, that’s hearsay, because he didn’t actually see that. He only knows because it was told to him. That might still be something you want to consider. But technically, that would be hearsay. If you have any..
GT 10:21 But, it could admissible in court, though, right? Like he’s breaking a polygamy statute or something.
Mark 10:55 Oh, yeah. I mean, Lorenzo Snow did testify to that in a deposition. I think it was in the Temple Lot case. All the evidence was taken by deposition. So, he did testify to that, in that case. I believe it was objected to. I mean, it’s all done by deposition.
GT 11:14 Was the objection sustained?
Mark 11:18 Oh, there’s no judge there. It’s a deposition. So, how it works in a deposition is you just have the lawyers from both sides there. They question the witness. If the witness says something that the other lawyer doesn’t like, they say, “Objection this.” Then it’s up to the judge whether or not to keep that in the record. It really only matters if it’s going to be a jury that reviews it. So, the judge can take that out, so the jury doesn’t see it. But I mean, if the judge is going to decide, which was the case in the Temple Lot Case, then they’re going to see it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. But the theory there is the judge knows the rules of evidence and knows what to consider and what not to [consider.]
GT 11:56 So, if it were a live case where we were trying to decide if somebody committed adultery, which is against the law, or bigamy, which is against the law, and Wilford said that, would that be admissible in court?
Mark 12:09 Or Lorenzo. Yeah, it would be.
GT 12:11 Oh, I said the wrong Snow.
Mark 12:12 Well, yeah, I think it would be because there’s hearsay, and then there’s exceptions to that. I think it would be because that would be illegal. I mean, it may or may not have been. It was arguably illegal, but it might have been. But let’s say, somebody like Joseph Bates Noble, who testified in the Temple Lot case, who facilitated a plural marriage. He performed the ceremony. He approached Joseph. He said that Joseph approached him about whether he would arrange for him to take Joseph Bates Noble’s sister-in-law, Louisa Beaman as a plural wife. So, he did. He arranged that. He performed the ceremony. He’s testified, too, that he knows that they roomed together that night. He saw them go there, and they came up the next morning. So, I mean, that’s not hearsay. The parts about Joseph maybe approaching him to talk to him, maybe. But the parts about him performing ceremony? Absolutely not. I mean, in the Temple Lot case, you had three women who testified that they had been plural wives with him. One of them really didn’t want to answer the question, understandably. But the other two said positively that they had marital relations with him. That’s not hearsay. So, a lot of the conversations I hear when people say, “Well, it’s hearsay.” I think what they really mean is, “We’re not getting it from Joseph directly.” That’s not hearsay. If that was the definition of hearsay, then the only person who would testify in any criminal case would be the defendant.
GT 13:58 Who is obviously going to deny anything, right? You’re never going to get a conviction if you had to rely on confessions.
Mark 14:04 Right. There are places in the world where that’s basically how the criminal justice system works, but I don’t think it’s a great idea. So, the idea there is either they confess, or you have to get hard forensic-type evidence. Again, you really see the core issues with this and why people think this is because… What people like a lot, I put out a few informal surveys among people who are skeptical that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. I’ve asked a number [of people,] and the most consistent response I got back on any question about anything, was people said that there needed to be hard physical evidence that Joseph Smith was a polygamist before we can believe that he was.
GT 14:54 Like a child, right?
Mark 14:55 Yeah, and of course, the thing is that if we had DNA evidence of a child, and so in the absence of that kind of thing, what we’re left to is we have testimonial evidence. There’s conflicting testimonial evidence. I mean, you have all those newspaper articles or public denials that Joseph made. Shortly before he died, he said, “You know, I will prove all the people who have charged me with plurality of wives as perjurers. What a thing it is to be accused of having seven wives, when I can only find one.” I mean, you have all kinds of stuff like that. You have Emma’s denials.
Mark 15:32 I mean, usually a lot of the counters that people that are coming at this from a more of an academic mainstream perspective say, “Well, you’re calling a lot of these women liars.” You’re calling Eliza Snow [a liar.] You’re calling Lucy Walker[a liar.] It was Lucy Walker, Melissa Lott, and Emily Partridge that testified in the Temple Lot case. You’re calling them liars. But the counter that polygamy skeptics will take is, “Well, you’re calling Emma a liar. I mean, that’s another woman that you’re calling a liar.” So, you can start to see that and to be fair to a lot of the polygamist skeptics, we have lots and lots and lots testimonials about the transfiguration of Brigham Young, and mainstream historians are more than happy to dismiss those all as later recollections and say that that’s reflective. I mean, they are. There’s a lot of things. I think they bring up things that are good questions, that I think that they’re sincere at, that they haven’t really had answered. That’s part of what I’m trying to do with all of this, too. I would say I understand. At least, I think I can understand where they’re coming from. There are some answers to that.
GT 16:57 So, just because something is late, doesn’t mean it’s unreliable.
Mark 17:02 Right, and so, well…
GT 17:04 It sure is convenient when it helps your case, though.
Mark 17:07 Yeah, it is, and in a lot of cases, a lot of the people that will make that argument, don’t have any problem considering these later statements from Emma Smith or William Smith, about what they think happened. A lot of folks doing this don’t have any problem taking those statements at face value.
Mark 17:33 But, it is an unusual situation, because Nauvoo polygamy possibly starts as early as 1831. There’s the Fanny Alger incident in the mid-1830s. But, when polygamy really starts is–the time when we can most definitely say, is April 1841. and it’s not until 1852 that it’s announced, that anybody is speaking about it publicly.
GT 18:09 Publicly.
Mark 18:10 Yes, in any kind of thing like that. It’s an unusual thing because some of the principal actors in the early part, Joseph and Hyrum Smith, died pretty early in that. So, I use this example in the paper I’m coming out with. I’m going to include that in the book. Alexander Hale Smith, who is Joseph Smith’s son, makes this argument. He says, “I would much rather take the words of Joseph and Hyrum,” and he quotes a lot of things in the Times and Seasons that have been published in the Nauvoo newspaper, “than I would over these old wives’ tales being recorded late.” So, he says that, too. He says, “Well, we have their words and so that’s contemporary. That should carry more weight than these later recollections from the Utah Mormons.
Mark: But, then he also goes on. He quotes at length, many of the statements from Parley P. Pratt, John Taylor, denying that they are practicing polygamy, when clearly, they were. They later admitted that they had been all along. So, for him, it just is not possible that that’s exactly what his father was doing as well. He says, “No, Joseph and Hyrum wouldn’t do that. They braved a prison, rather than deny the truth.” Well, so did Parley Pratt. I mean, he went to prison when they did too, and was in prison for longer than they were. He’s one of the guys, too. So, I can see why, especially as a as a religious apologetic, you could say, “Well, he’s the Prophet. We know that he tells the truth because he’s the Prophet.” That may or may not be true. If he knows that he lied, and that means that he’s not the prophet has implications. Well, that may or may not be true. I think that’s an important discussion. But it’s irrelevant to whether or not it actually happened. We can talk about implications after we establish facts. So, there’s that. So, because this is an unusual situation…
GT 19:13 Let me just throw in something here really quick. Polygamy was obviously against the law. So, wouldn’t it make sense for anybody who’s breaking the law, whether they’re robbing a bank or killing somebody or doing polygamy or adultery or whatever, to hide evidence? Wouldn’t that be just human nature?
Mark 20:51 I think it would be and I think there were much bigger things than the law going on, too. I mean, you’ve got to remember Nauvoo, 1837, there’s a massive internal apostasy, including many high levels of the church, that just escalates and causes more external problems. They have to leave Kirtland. They have to leave behind the temple in 1837. The very next year, the same thing happens in Missouri. They finally have a place that really is the saints’ home. It’s a chartered area, a city that they basically founded, and they want to build the temple. They want to have the church to stay. They want to do missionary work and bring more people in. That’s really just not going to happen with polygamy. I think, had Joseph been public about polygamy, then I think there would have been massive fallout. I don’t think the temple would have ever gotten anywhere close to being finished. So, I think that’s part of why he did it in secret. It depends. If you’re looking at Joseph Smith…
GT 22:06 It should be natural to expect secrecy.
Mark 22:10 Yeah, I think it should be. I mean, if you’re looking at Joseph Smith from more of a sympathetic, worship, sincere perspective, you could look at it like he was using consequentialist morality. He thought that it was important that he implement this celestial marriage while also doing these other things. That’s how he decided to do it. You may disagree with the ethics of that. But it is understandable that he did it that way.
Mark 22:44 So, if you’re looking at it, I mean, Nauvoo polygamy and Joseph Smith polygamy is a messy topic. There’s really no way to look at it in a way that completely sanitizes all of it. You look at it for what it is, and such. I think that that’s it. I don’t really know. It’s an interesting question of what his game plan was. Was he planning on going public with it at some point? I mean, I don’t really know. Joseph Bates Noble is the one that facilitates that first sealing and marriage to Louisa Beaman, and he says that Joseph told him, “I’m putting my life in your hands. I’m asking you not to betray me to my enemies, by asking you to do this.” Was that going to be forever? I don’t know. I mean, they certainly could have gone public with it a lot earlier than they did in Utah. I believe it’s Lucy Walker, who writes at one point, that Joseph told her that he would be able to publicly acknowledge her as a wife after they had left Nauvoo and gone to the Rocky Mountains. I don’t know if we should consider that statement reliable. But I think part of what he did is he wanted to introduce it slowly into trusted people. By doing it that way, by introducing it to trusted people, like the Quorum of the Twelve, like some of his close friends that weren’t particularly high in the hierarchy, like say Joseph Bates Noble, thereby introducing it to them and having them doing it, it would be easier for the Church to accept it. In a way, it worked. I mean, they were able to have a substantial number of people enter into plural marriage, by the time they left Nauvoo just a few years later. So, in a way, that way did work, and it also stretched out whatever fallout they had. Of course, there was fallout. So, if it’s secret, the real question is, what kind of evidence should you reasonably expect in a scenario like that?
GT 25:09 Yeah, if you knew it was secret.
Mark 25:12 If you know something is a secret and so something where they’re not admitting it, where the people involved are denying it openly…
GT 25:18 And polygamy skeptics should at least acknowledge that if this did happen, it was secret.
Mark 25:23 I think so. If you’re going to look at the contemporary evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy and say, “That’s deficient. I’m expecting more than that.” You should compare that to the evidence for the other people that did it. So, of course, the person we most closely associate with the Joseph Smith’s monogamy argument is Joseph Smith, III, his son, who advocated it for many decades. He has a hard time settling on what exactly he thought his father was doing. At some point, he thought, “Well, he was just doing sealings that were not actually husbands and wives in the full sense of the word. At another point, he says, “Well, Joseph facilitated sealings, he didn’t know where it was going, and other people took it and made it polygamy, and he didn’t find out about it until it’s too late to do anything.” He says that at another point. But, really, most consistently, this was the traditional RLDS argument is that polygamy wasn’t happening while Joseph Smith was alive. John Bennett sort of did his thing there. But, in terms of polygamy happening within the leadership of the Church, it wasn’t happening while Joseph Smith was alive.
GT 25:39 So, not Joseph, not Brigham, not Hyrum.
Mark 26:05 My understanding of it, really, that’s what it is.
RLDS Positions on Joseph’s Polygamy
Introduction
The RLDS Church has historically claimed Joseph Smith never practice polygamy. We’ll talk about Joseph Smith, III’s views on the topic, as well as modern-day beliefs. Check out our conversation….
Interview
Mark: So, the argument they have, there’s a book that was written in 1900 that’s the most comprehensive book on the RLDS part of a narrative. It’s written by a man by the name of Willard Smith, who’s not a relation to the Smith family. But it’s the most comprehensive thing that I think [is out there] and what he argues is, and I think this is reflective of the other things. He put it together, where a lot of those arguments are that Brigham Young starts polygamy. He and Heber C. Kimball and others marry these women at the Nauvoo Temple, and then they seal these women to Joseph for eternity, to themselves for time. Then, later, to legitimize polygamy, they influence these women, or maybe these women want to do it just because they want to support it anyway, to say that they were married to Joseph while he was alive. So that’s the argument they use. As time goes on, and more contemporary evidence comes to light. There are things like the Expositor. Joseph Smith, III hardly ever mentioned the Expositor, and I don’t think he really even knows the content of it.
GT 26:11 He was just a young boy then, right?
Mark 28:12 He was. In the Temple Lot case deposition, he was asked about the Expositor, and he remembered it being destroyed. He remembered hearing about it being destroyed. But he was asked, “Did you ever see it?”
He said, “Well, I saw a portion of it. I saw an excerpt a long time ago, but I hadn’t actually seen it again until now.”
I got a bunch of transcripts of his letters at Community of Christ Archives. He had heard about William Law’s statements to the Salt Lake Tribune that were done in the 1880s. He said he didn’t think that William Law really had known anything or had said anything before that. So, as time goes on, there’s the Apostle Paul Hansen from the RLDS Church in the 1920s who really looked out for a lot of documents. He found a bunch. He found a lot of really great stuff that didn’t come from Brighamites, about Joseph Smith and polygamy. A lot of it was contemporary. I love reading his letters. He said, “I’m not really I’m ready to say that Joseph Smith was a polygamist, but there’s a lot of evidence here that I really don’t know how to explain.”
GT 29:36 So he was the B.H. Roberts of the RLDS Church.
Mark 29:39 He was private about all of his stuff. We have it in here. He said, “We don’t need to go shout this from the rooftops,” is one of the things he said. “But if anybody asks us about it, we shouldn’t be afraid of our own minds. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace the truth, if that’s what the truth is.” Joseph Smith, III’s son–and there’s Frederick M. Smith is the president of the RLDS church, then it is Israel A. Smith, who is president. I don’t know when the years are. He was president for part at least part of the 1950s. He really, really tries. He has a spiritual experience. He really drives home that Joseph Smith was not oblivious that his grandfather was not… But, he tries to adjust the narrative. He admits that there was a revelation on marriage that was probably about sealing.
GT 30:33 Oh.
Mark 30:34 He does, but he thinks that this was something that was altered…
GT 30:43 By Brigham.
Mark 30:44 By Brigham Young to be what we know as section 132. So, he says that, and then it’s in the 1980s, when this really comes to a head. Here’s the president of the [RLDS] Church at the time, Wallace B. Smith asked the official church historian, Richard Howard, to write a paper that really gets to the bottom of this. He does, and he does even a brilliant genius thing, where he writes a paper on Joseph Smith’s polygamy and he only uses publicly available sources like the Expositor, like the article in the Nauvoo Neighbor that details Joseph and Hyrum’s reactions to the Expositor. Then, he uses evidence that he collected from a lot of different places; evidence that came from people that were not Brighamites, so, people like Sidney Rigdon, people like William Marks. He makes the case from that, that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. He puts all these arguments in there and in the end of the paper, comes up with the conclusion that, “Well, we at least know Joseph did sealings for eternity. He may or may not have done polygamy, so, kind of reflecting the RLDS position.”
A lot of his contemporaries were like, “Well, the body of your paper was great. The conclusion just is off. A lot of people suspected that maybe that was like an editorial mandate, because this was originally supposed to be published more in the official channels in the RLDS Church, and finally, they said, “Well just publish it in the John Whitmer Journal.”
GT 32:20 Well, that’s interesting.
Mark 32:22 Yeah, and so a lot of people suspected it was an editorial mandate. Newell Bringhurst wrote an article about that, that was part of the Persistence of Polygamy series.[1] He interviewed Richard Howard. Howard is still alive and still working.
GT 32:36 He’s still alive, I think.
Mark 32:38 Yes, he is. You ought to get him.
GT 32:40 I do need to get him on.
Mark 32:43 He confirmed that that was true, that he had some editorial oversight from committees. So, it was a compromise. He has since gone on record, on a lot of other things about Joseph Smith being a polygamist. That, really [solidified things.] When I read Paul Hansen’s letters, and I read that that says that it completely destroys the myth that polygamy wasn’t happening when Joseph Smith was alive. I mean, Joseph Smith, III asked his mother, in that last year, “Was there anything like polygamy revelation?”
She says, “No, I didn’t hear anything of that nature.”
Well, the Expositor explains the revelation pretty clearly.
GT 33:33 Right.
Mark 33:34 Joseph and Hyrum, give a partial admission to it in the Nauvoo Neighbor, the article published there. So, she’s not forthcoming there about that. But you can see kind of why Joseph Smith, III may have settled on that. Because, the other thing is, if polygamy is not happening when Joseph’s alive, then you can’t really blame him with it, and you also can’t blame him with being negligent in allowing it to happen. So, Paul Hansen’s letters say it was clearly happening. It clearly was. That’s some of the things, and so from that point on the RLDS Church, as an institution, drops the issue.
GT 33:35 This was about 1980, you say?
Mark 34:24 Yes, this is in 1983. They dropped the issue. They say, Wallace B. Smith adopts this thing where publicly he says, “I’m agnostic about it. But you know, it’s not an issue we’re going to pursue.” So, they drop the issue there. It doesn’t become their official position, and it still is not. What they’ll say now is that they don’t have official positions on historical issues.
GT 34:50 Oh, really? Because I know President Steven Veazey has talked about that.
Mark 34:54 Oh, year, as has…
GT 34:57 And he’s the current president.
Mark 34:58 Yeah, the church leadership will say it all the time.
GT 35:02 But it’s not official? The president is not official?
Mark 35:04 As did Grant McMurray.
GT 35:06 Oh wow.
Mark 35:09 And there have been books that have come out that have been done by Herald House, which is their official publishing house. But it’s still not the official position of the church. The Community of Christ gives a lot of leeway for diversity on that. They say, “We know, we’re open to people doing that.” I know several people, at least I’m acquainted with several people in the Community of Christ. Some of them very liberal members of the Community of Christ that believe that he wasn’t a polygamist.
GT 35:42 Oh, really?
Mark 35:44 Yeah. I mean, it’s still believed in in the Community of Christ. So, that’s where that’s at. But the reaction to that, that’s the interesting thing. Soon after that is when Richard Price, he writes a full–it was a paid advertisement. It was a full-page thing in the local newspaper in Independence, where he outlines his response to that. The Prices, Richard and Pamela Price worked on it for a long time. Whenever you talk about things like this, like I’ve kind of alluded to, we get to the us versus them. I mean, I think the world of Richard and Pamela Price.
GT 36:29 Well, let me just say this also, I’ve actually invited them on to my podcast, and they have refused. I’ve talked to Denver Snuffer, and I’ve talked to Jim Vun Cannon, who are both polygamy skeptics.
Mark 36:44 Right.
GT 36:45 I do want to, for the record, say that, because I get this all the time, people say, “Oh, you don’t give our side of the story.” I have. I’ve done it, and people won’t come on.
Mark 36:56 I don’t necessarily think that it speaks ill of the person not wanting to give an interview or something. I mean, some people are private like that. I understand that. Pamela Price is very generous to me in providing documentation about things. I mean, Richard and Pamela Price really did a lot to help give the Restorationist movement some feet, give it some direction. So, they’re the ones that decided to continue the charge for this. This becomes part of the much larger issue, for lack of a better term, the liberalization of the RLDS Church. This is happening at about same time, 1983, that we had the paper come out from Richard Howard. It’s 1984, that the revelation coming out allowing, giving women the priesthood comes out.
GT 38:08 Right.
Mark 38:09 And so, coming up to this, that was the culmination of decades of a culture war in the RLDS Church. About there, there’s a split. I’ve heard estimates anywhere from about a fifth to about a third of the RLDS Church becomes disaffected. I mean, that’s huge. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine one out of every five–looking around your ward and finding one out of every five people there was gone? Yeah. Wow. Who are faithful believers? Yeah. So, this becomes part of the liberalization and Richard and Pamela Price played a very big role in helping these people find someplace to go. Have you ever been to a Restoration branch service? I know you’ve been to a few different ones.
GT 39:05 Let’s see. I’ve been to a Temple Lot service. I’ve been to RLDS services. I’ve been trying to go to the Remnant, but that never works out for some reason.
Mark 39:17 I’ve been. There’s a Restoration branch in Dallas. I’ve been to it, and I had a wonderful time there. It’s great.
GT 39:22 Oh, yeah, they’re always really friendly.
Mark 39:25 Yeah, it really was great. I can very easily see why people that go there would feel like the Community of Christ, it’s now known as the Community of Christ, sort of left them out. I mean, that’s a much bigger issue and that sort of thing. William Russell, Bill Russell’s writing a book about that.
GT 39:50 I definitely have to get Bill Russell on. He’s the best.
Mark 39:52 I am very much looking forward to that. But I say that to show that the Prices, we call it the Restorationist movement.
GT 40:02 Yeah. I have been to the Price’s bookstore before, by the way.
Mark 40:06 Okay, yeah. They played a big role in making all of that happen. I’m glad that that’s there, that spiritual home for the for the thousands of people that it is. I think the world of Richard and Pamela Price. It’s really easy to look at things like this and reduce a person’s identity to just the one thing you disagree with them on. I’m trying. I’m not perfect about that, but I am really trying to be better about that. But, anyhow, Richard and Pamela Price, well, Richard Price comes out with that article. He follows that up with the pamphlet called the Polygamy Conspiracies. That, of course, is followed up by the articles and division that get collected into the books, Joseph Smith Fought Polygamy. So, they, the Prices agreed that the narrative that had been told that far was not sufficient. They agree.
Did Cochranites Start Mormon Polygamy?
Introduction
Polygamy skeptics claim that a religious group out of Maine introduced LDS apostles about spiritual wifery, and those apostles (not Joseph) introduced polygamy into the Church. Is there good evidence for this? Check out our conversation….
Interview
Mark: So, what they say is that they come up with this new narrative that the Quorum of the Twelve were rogue, pretty much from the beginning. So, around here is where, as far as I’ve been able to tell, and I’d be interested in seeing documentation and maybe someone can show talking otherwise, this is when they say, “Well, the Quorum of the Twelve, they’ve encountered and they’re influenced by the doctrine of the Cochranites during their missionary travels in the early to mid-1830s. This is another group of people that practices spiritual wifery.
GT 41:47 Yeah, the Cochranites, I’m glad we’re talking about that because that is a big issue.
Mark 41:53 Yeah, it is. I think that’s an interesting thing and I would really like to have someone explore it, and I think after I’m done with this, working on this paper and done, that I think that’s something I really would like to look into. That’s the idea is that Cochranitism, there’s a special connection. I don’t know quite that there is. What it is, is the first contact with them is 1832. It’s Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith. They go to Maine and they talk to a lot of Cochranites. Of course, as traveling elders, they stay with people and do work for them. They would preach in churches, and they went to the Cochranite churches. There’s a prayer/preaching meeting that they have in Boston before they get there where there’s a Cochranite. There’s a couple of people that are making a big fuss about or make a big scene about Cochranism and so they encounter it there. But, their journals, I’ve read them, but they think it’s awful. People question, “Why are you preaching these people?” Orson Hyde writes in his journal and says, “Well, it’s because we’re supposed to preach the gospel to everybody and if they repent, they can repent and gather.”
GT 43:12 So when did the Cochranites start? Do we know that?
Mark 43:15 Oh, the Cochranites. I’ll give some background. Well, the proper name is the Society of Free Brethren. It started by a man named Jacob Cochran in 1816 in Saco, Maine around that area in York County, Maine. One of the things they preach is they call it having spiritual wives. Actually figuring out what their doctrine is, is pretty hard because the only real contemporary evidence we have, there’s a pamphlet that was produced by a man named Ephraim Stinchfield, and it really portrayed the Conchranites as just having all kinds of weird ceremonies that they do. It says how they reenact the Garden of Eden naked. He says, Jacob Cochran takes his turn. He just calls a woman his spiritual wife and takes her to bed and all of that stuff. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing.
GT 44:19 Is it kind of a free love movement? Or…
Mark 44:22 That’s how he depicts it.
GT 44:24 So, there’s no marriage at all?
Mark 44:27 Again it’s hard to say because I mean reading that is like… Well, can you imagine if all we knew about Mormonism is what we read in E.D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed? Can you imagine that? I mean, you would get some ideas about stuff, but that’s pretty much what we’re looking at. I read it recently. Well I’m getting ahead of the story. I’ll go back. So, there’s this heyday of Cochranism where they’re really into gifts of the spirit. I mean, when you read about the early Kirtland Mormonism and they have these revelations to say, “Oh, you’ve got to try the spirits.”
“No, you’ve got to back down from that sort of thing.”
You read about that. That’s the type of thing they were doing. There was a lot of it.
GT 45:14 Well, I just want to throw in here really quickly two other groups. My interview with Dr. Larry Foster, he talked about the Shakers who were completely celibate: no marriage, no sex, no anything. He compared those with Mormons who obviously know about polygamy. Then, the third group was the Oneida Community where marriage was banned. But you could have [sex.] They had very strict rules about, basically you can have sex with anybody, according to their rules.
Mark 45:47 Yeah, yeah, it was very regulated.
GT 45:49 It was very regulated. But marriage was banned. But sex was fine. So, I’m curious if the Cochranites were like the Oneida Community.
Mark 45:59 Right. So, a lot of these were millenarian groups. In a lot of ways, the Cochranites were very similar to the Latter-day Saint movement. I mean, they’re Christian millenarians. They are people that believe that basically society’s gone to pot, and the Second Coming is going to happen soon. The Christian world doesn’t get Christianity at all. You need to get back to the original teachings. They need to do it in a radical way. So, in a lot of ways, you can see how, at least especially to an outsider, both groups seem very similar. One contemporary account that gives a bit more sympathetic comment to Jacob Cochran said, “He was neither trying to destroy churches, nor create his own church. He just wanted to bring back the gifts of the Spirit and apostolic Christianity to the churches that were already around.” So, it’s hard to say what exactly their doctrine was, but spiritual wives is definitely part of it.
Mark 47:07 He [Jacob Cochran] gets put on trial for lewdness in 1819, and Jacob Cochran goes to jail for four years. During that time, the movement kind of falls apart. A lot of these very charismatic movements, they fall apart when their leader is no longer available. Charismatic movements are started around one person. It happens a lot. People thought that was going to happen to Mormonism, and it didn’t.
GT 47:35 Right.
Mark 47:36 But, for a lot of these, especially smaller groups, then that that’s what happened, and it did. So, what happened is, is that there’s a couple of groups that still have congregations up, through the 18–, I don’t know for the next few decades. Jacob Cochran gets out of prison, and he doesn’t really lead a church anymore, even the church that still kind of believes his doctrine. He has a group that he wants to go settle in New York, and they go. I haven’t really heard what really happened with that. So that’s pretty much it.
GT 48:10 The Cochranites only lasted for a decade? Is that what you’re saying?
Mark 48:16 Their heyday is only about three years long. And then they’re around…
GT 48:19 So, 1816 to 1819. So, this pre-dates the First Vision.
Mark 48:22 I think they are around. There are remnant groups that are around into the 1840s in the area, but nowhere near to the same size. It is interesting. One of the things that the two elders say a lot is that the area is just totally turned off to gifts of the Spirit type things or any of those things that Mormonism [supports], like revelation.
GT 48:43 Like speaking in tongues, and that kind of thing.
Mark 48:44 Oh, yeah. They’re completely turned off. They don’t want anything to do with that. That’s the Cochranites. I think that maybe some of those ideas might have influenced what we see in Mormonism. But I think the case is very circumstantial. Again, Samuel Smith and Orson Hyde only uniformly say that they were absolutely appalled by it.
GT 49:07 So, the idea is Samuel Smith and Orson Hyde, is that what you said? They’re the ones who introduce polygamy to everybody?
Mark 49:13 Oh, they think that. Yeah, so they baptize, I think, like six or seven people. I don’t know if we can really definitively say any of those people are Cochranites.
GT 49:25 In Maine?
Mark 49:25 Yeah. But, the person that really does a lot of the work there–oh, what’s his name? One of the apostles who, it’ll come to me in a minute. It’s one of the apostles who apostatizes during the 1837 deal in Kirtland.
GT 49:49 McLellin, Marsh?
Mark 49:52 No, it’s not Marsh. It’s not one of the Johnson brothers. It’ll come to me in a minute. So, he’s the one that does most of the baptizing. [John Boynton] He baptizes a lot of the people there. We don’t have his journal, because he leaves the Church. But, we do have his companion’s journal, and I’ve looked through it. He never mentions the Cochranites. He never does. I think part of that was because they were doing a lot of their work in Saco, where a lot of the remnant groups were actually in some of the surrounding villages. Anyhow, they get a congregation. They get a branch of about 60 people, which is a good-sized branch.
Mark 50:31 So, they’re around. The argument is the majority of the Quorum of the Twelve go to a conference there in 1835. The idea is that they think that there’s influence there, that somehow the apostles picked it up. I think the case is pretty circumstantial. One of the arguments is that there’s a lot of similarity in terminology, like spiritual wives and things like that. To the extent that that’s true, I don’t think that that speaks to an influence directly, or to the Quorum of the Twelve specifically, because Joseph Smith had plenty of exposure to this, too. His brother-in-law, Arthur Milliken, was born and raised there at Saco, Maine. So, he actually has two members of his family, two siblings that marry people from that area. The other one is his Don Carlos’ wife, Agnes Coolbrith. She’s from that area too. She gets baptized by Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith on that mission. She’s living in Boston. Her parents still live in the area. They visit their parents while they’re up there. So, there’s this. There’s lots of places he could have been influenced by that. So Joseph…
GT 51:58 That’s funny, because that timeline is roughly Fanny Alger time period too.
Mark 52:04 It’s a bit before. I guess roughly. So, maybe it does. It’s interesting. His sister, Lucy and her husband, Arthur Milliken, actually go back to Saco in the Nauvoo period. Their son, Don Carlos Smith Milliken was born there. There’s a lot of connections there. Of course, Joseph’s brother, Samuel, was in that mission, too. So, he has a lot of people in his family that know about this. My point is, if you’re going to argue based on circumstantial evidence…
GT 52:43 It’s pretty weak.
Mark 52:43 I mean, you can look at circumstantial evidence and connections in a lot of other places, too. Another one that Richard and Pamela Price may have said was that there’s Augusta Cobb, who’s Brigham Young’s second plural wife. She gets baptized by Samuel and Orson in that mission in Boston before they go to Saco. But it’s a day or two after that they baptize her that there’s that incident in Boston, where there was those Cochranite people expressing Cochranite doctrine in a meeting that they had. So, they say, “Well, that means that she was a person that was well acquainted with Cochranism.” I really don’t see that really being a connection. Again, Agnes Coolbrith is also in that same group that gets baptized. She’s actually from that area. She actually becomes a plural wife to Joseph Smith. So, if you’re going to argue circumstantial evidence and exposure leads to this and that, then I think that’s a much stronger connection than anything.
GT 52:48 To Joseph.
Mark 53:50 Yeah, to Joseph. So, when it comes to the Cochranites, that’s something I don’t particularly find compelling. There’s another thing they say is, “Well, the apostles did foot washing in England. You even have William Clayton, who has never been there so they must have picked up that and footwashing from the Cochranites, which they did. Foot washing is a very common Christian practice.
GT 54:13 Right. There’s a lot of people who do it.
Mark 54:14 It’s in the Bible. I mean, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think that they really needed the Cochranites, that anybody really needed them to learn about polygamy or anything like that. I mean, it’s in the Bible. There’s a lot of other groups. The term spiritual wife had been, was widely used at the time. It wasn’t something that they were having an exclusive thing on. So, yeah, that’s something I really don’t think there’s a lot of merit. I would be interested in exploring that a little bit more. I mean, there were a lot of converts to it, but I sat down, actually, to look to see what kind of converts from Cochranism came into the Church who actually gathered. What I found is that there’s a lot of RLDS members that came from that area. I don’t know if they were Cochranites. There’s a lot. Josiah Butterfield, who was in the high council in Kirtland, he’s one. He’s from that area. There’s quite a few of the Milliken families. There’s Milliken’s that are distant relatives to Arthur, they are cousins or something that stayed in Kirtland and then affiliated with the RLDS Church. So, there’s actually quite a few.
GT 54:45 So, that would be some strikes against it, right?
Mark 55:27 Yeah. Yeah, and the biggest thing, I think, too, is I really haven’t found any sources about anybody who knew the Quorum of the Twelve, who actually knew the Cochranites, who made that connection. I think it’s towards the late 1800s, that people start making the argument that there’s a connection. And when they make the argument, they connect Joseph Smith,. They connect it to Joseph Smith. They don’t say it’s the Quorum of the Twelve that’s a rogue unit. So, anyhow, that’s about it. Basically, the Prices use that argument. They say that they start experimenting with polygamy in England, and then when they come back to Nauvoo, they’re doing it behind Joseph’s back. After he dies, then they, when they assume control of the Church, that’s when they put polygamy in the base. So, they’re not saying what Joseph Smith III said, that it happened after. It’s not the traditional RLDS position, this is a new position. So, that really becomes the basis for a lot of the arguments now. That’s the narrative that you hear most commonly today.
Mark 56:36 So, Denver Snuffer–so with the rise of the remnant movement, Denver Snuffer, and a lot of the, I use the term Neo-primitivist, people that are, that come–I don’t know if that’s going to catch on, if they like that term. I’ve also heard the term Neo-fundamentalist. It’s people like Denver Snuffer that have that come from a Utah-based LDS background. I use the term LDS here in contrast and compare as opposed to other restoration churches, because we are talking about other restoration churches that have become disillusioned with the current church and the Utah-era church as well. They believe that we ought to get back to what they see as the pure form of Mormonism taught by Joseph Smith. Part of that involves taking polygamy out of picture.
GT 57:30 Right.
Mark 57:32 That group is a little, they’re a little bit different. Now, from whatever I’ve read of Denver Snuffer, I’ve never heard him refer to the Cochranites or really say that the Quorum of the Twelve is rogue.
GT 57:43 Yeah, me neither.
Mark 57:44 I don’t know that he has. He didn’t say that your interview. And then the papers and things from him, I haven’t heard him say that. But there are a lot of people associated with the remnant groups that [think that.]
GT 57:53 And Denver does say that he, I mean, he puts it all on Brigham, nothing on Joseph.
Mark 58:00 Denver Snuffer says something that’s interesting, definitely. Joseph Smith, III, kind of played with this idea. He later said, “No, this isn’t what happened. I don’t think this is what happened now.” But the idea that Joseph did do sealings. He did sealings between people. He sealed people to himself, but it wasn’t polygamy.
GT 58:23 That’s kind of what Denver says.
Mark 58:24 That is what Denver says. I don’t know that he’s ever really fleshed out exactly all what that entails.
GT 58:34 I know in this book, Passing the Heavenly Gift, one of the things that Denver said was D&C 132, and he doesn’t stand by this anymore…
Mark 58:44 No, he doesn’t.
GT 58:45 But, I think it’s part of his evolution of thought, is D&C 132 is four revelations, and that people conflated polygamy with the sealing power.
Mark 58:55 Right. That’s part of the argument now, too, that that was misinterpreted to be the sealing power, or that the sealing power was interpreted to be polygamy. It was corrupted to be that. He says what happens was the law of adoption. You have somebody like Joseph Smith he has the position to hold the keys and you can use various terms for that. He’s the person who has had his calling and election made sure. He’s a dispensation head. There’s a lot of different ways you can say that. So, you get sealed to Joseph Smith, and then you seal your ancestors to you, and that’s how the family of God becomes united. And that’s true, Joseph Smith was teaching that.
GT 59:37 Yes.
Mark 59:39 But, what they’re saying is that he was teaching that, and not polygamy. So, that’s what that’s what became… Whitney Horning wrote the book, Joseph Smith Revealed. I don’t know that she’s associated with the Remnant [Church.] I haven’t heard that she has been. But her book is popular among the Remnant. And that’s the position she takes. What she says is people like Sarah Ann Whitney were sealed to Joseph Smith, in the book she says “as wives,” but that was merely like a ceremonial term. And it’s later Brigham Young adds a part where “by wives,” you mean that you live together, that you have marital relations together, that you have children. That’s something that comes along later, and then and then that gets retroactively applied by the people to when Joseph Smith was alive, to give it more legitimacy. So, that’s kind of that narrative here.
Mark 1:00:48 So, today, I think there’s basically those two narratives. You’re going to have the Prices’ narrative where they talk about how polygamy is a complete fraud, complete falsification. There’s nothing going on like that. Ron Karren, who wrote the Exoneration, I think it’s called. I’m going to get the name right. The Exoneration of Emma, Hyrum and Joseph. He goes along with the Prices, too. He elaborates on there. That’s a popular book you’ll hear quoted quite a bit. So, that’s the one narrative, that it’s a complete fraud. The other one is, that’s very popular among remnant, and that’s the partial fraud thing about how it was sealings, and I believe of one of my interactions, the people that..
GT 1:01:39 Oh, sealings and polygamy got tied together, is that what you’re saying?
Mark 1:01:42 Yeah. The most vocal group right now is another group that’s kind of similar is by Phil Davis. He is another individual that’s come out recently. His is much smaller group, but he’s got some pretty media savvy people that work with him and they’re the ones that are very much leading the charge on the Utah front on this, too. They run the site, Hemlock Knots.[2] You’ll see references to that a lot. From what I can tell, at least they kind of go along with, it was sealings that was converted to polygamy. So, those are your major counter narratives that we have out right there right now. There are variations on those, and it really depends on who you talk to you what all the little nuances are. That’s basically it, or at least as a general idea, that’s it. So, that’s kind of the evolution of that, the development of that.
4 Types of Polygamy Evidence from Nauvoo
Introduction
I think most people agree that polygamy was practiced secretly in Nauvoo. Polygamy skeptics like to blame it on Brigham Young, but even if that were true, what types of secret evidence would we expect to see? Would that apply to Joseph if he was secretly practicing polygamy as well? Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 1:03:06 One of the things I’d like to do, if we could, is talk about some of the evidence. I’d like to go back to Kirtland, but I know in your paper you’ve stuck with Nauvoo.
Mark 1:03:19 Right. We could.
GT 1:03:23 Let’s go with the strongest evidence first, and then we can jump back to Kirtland.
Mark 1:03:26 Yeah, you have the strongest kind of evidence. So again, since polygamy is something that was being denied openly while being practiced privately, you’re going to have, basically, a few kinds of evidence. You’re going to have, (I would say) four kinds of evidence. And it’s important to look at all of these. You’re going to have privately held evidence that are private records by the people that are participating, that are pro-polygamy that are faithful. You’re going to have that.
GT 1:03:45 Faithful to the LDS Church.
Mark 1:04:07 Yes, faithful to LDS. Because somebody who is faithful is not going to talk openly about polygamy at that time. They’re not going to do it.
GT 1:04:18 Because it is against the law for one thing.
Mark 1:04:21 Yeah. Well, because it’s against Joseph’s wishes.
GT 1:04:25 Joseph doesn’t want people talking about it.
Mark 1:04:27 Joseph doesn’t want people to talk about, so they’re not going to do it. The other people are the people who have some insight and knowledge that feel no obligation to honor Joseph’s wishes on that.
GT 1:04:41 Dissidents.
Mark 1:04:40 Yeah. So, they’re dissidents. They’re people, a lot of times, it’s because of polygamy, that they’re dissenters. That’s what’s turned them off. Other times it’s other reasons that they’ve been turned off and since they have this, they’re going to use this as retaliation. It’s going to be that. So you’re going to have those. Those are going to be your contemporary evidences. It’s going to fall into those two categories. Those are really the only reasonable expectations.
Mark 1:05:06 Then, you’re going to have later evidence from friendly people who are participants that are going to talk about it after the secret’s out. Then, the fourth category, I think this is a very good, big, important one to talk about, is third party evidence. So, this is going to be accounts from people, usually later, after the secret’s out, who are neither anti-Mormon dissenters nor pro-polygamy. So, people who have no reason to want to discredit Joseph Smith, [nor] who want to attack to Joseph Smith, and have no reason to want to promote that he was a polygamist.
Mark 1:05:54 Now you asked about rules about evidence. There is another thing about hearsay. It’s called the statement against interest. If somebody says something that goes against their interest, that carries some weight. So, we can look at some of the contemporary evidence. Do you want to start with contemporary evidence?
GT 1:06:16 Let’s go with contemporary evidence.
Mark 1:06:18 Yeah, there’s some of it. Again, for the vast majority of Nauvoo plural marriages, and whenever you talk about the contemporary evidence for Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, you have to ask how does it fit in the context of plural marriage generally, in Nauvoo? In other words, is the evidence of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, is it more or less than it is for the other plural marriages that happened at the time? Really, for the vast majority of plural marriages that happened in Nauvoo, the first time it’s ever on paper, is when the temple was operational, when they started doing sealings in the Nauvoo Temple in January and February 1846. Now, this is after Joseph has died. So even a lot of Brigham Young’s [marriages] like Lucy Decker, who’s Brigham Young’s first plural wife. That’s the first time we see it on paper, that he and Lucy Decker [were married.] Even though they have a child by this point, that’s the first time we’ve seen it on paper. We don’t get the date when they were actually sealed in 1842, until the 1869 affidavits, when Lucy Decker wrote an affidavit saying that she was sealed to Brigham Young in 1842. That’s the first time we get the dates about when it happens. So, that kind of gives you an idea about how [secret it was.]
Mark 1:07:38 I don’t think Joseph Smith’s plural marriages are less documented than the other ones or less documented than the other ones would be, had those participants also died early in the game. So say, if you were to cut off the evidence that Brigham Young was a polygamist in June 27, 1844, you’d have much the same thing, even though he clearly was. At this point, nobody’s really arguing that he wasn’t.
GT 1:08:08 Right. Brigham was a denier up until then.
Mark 1:08:11 Right, right. Nobody’s really arguing that he does it. So, that’s the thing; using these denials as being really dispositive prima facia evidence, that becomes less weighty once you’ve established that polygamy was happening in secret. So, with that, I think some of the things that we look at, that we’ll see. I mean, one of the big things, of course, is there’s Joseph Kingsbury’s copy of the revelation that Joseph Smith dictated to William Clayton. There’s William Clayton’s journal. It is a huge, huge thing that details a lot of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages. You’d have to argue that was falsified to discount that. He’s very direct. He says a lot of times he talks about Joseph facilitating his own plural marriages, William Clayton’s. He talks about how he performed the plural marriage, how he performed the ceremony between Joseph Smith and Lucy Walker.
Mark 1:08:11 He talks he talks about Joseph’s conflicts with Emma over the issue. He talks about scribing the revelation. So yeah, that’s a big thing, William Clayton’s journal.
GT 1:08:24 Yes.
Mark 1:09:37 A lot of the contemporary evidence is fragmentary, meaning you can tell the people are trying to avoid openly saying Joseph Smith is a polygamist, but, they kind of are still trying to so. Brigham Young writes in his journal, when Joseph Smith marries Agnes Coolbrith. He says Joseph Smith, Agnes Coolbrith, and he uses Royal Arch Masonic cipher, to abbreviate wedding sealed, WAS, which is also the same phrase that he uses later to denote his plural marriages later.
GT 1:10:16 Oh.
Mark 1:10:17 Yeah, and that’s used a few times.
GT 1:10:20 So, if you know the code you can decipher what happened.
Mark 1:10:22 Right, and another one is Joseph Smith’s journal. So, Willard Richards was the primary person keeping Joseph Smith’s journal at the time. He doesn’t really write in there much about plural marriage. But, when Joseph Smith married his wife, Rhonda, who was Willard’s sister and then at the same time, he seals Willard Richards to a plural wife, he writes it in Taylor shorthand. You can go to the Joseph Smith Papers and see that. He uses Taylor shorthand. He does that a few times when he writes about things that are of a sacred nature, like whenever he talks about the second anointing or something, he will write the person’s name and then write “and wife anointed” in Taylor shorthand. I may want to have that. There’s a letter that they have from Vilate Kimball to her husband, Heber, where she writes about how she met with Parley Pratt and his wife and how she writes J….[h] met with Parley and told him that… She never says directly polygamy. She says that he can take his privilege. His wife doesn’t know how to feel about it. Joseph has picked out someone to be his privilege for her and I’ve spoken both to her and to Sister Pratt about it. So, I mean, you’d have no idea what they were talking about.
GT 1:10:30 Right.
Mark 1:10:52 …if you didn’t know. And she doesn’t even want to write Joseph’s name out. But it’s very clear that’s who it is. I mean, she writes Joseph, she has J….h at the end, and then has the correct number of dots of letters in his name between J and h.
Mark 1:12:21 Yeah, so there’s another one. So, there’s the Lott of family. I mentioned Melissa Lott earlier. So, when she had her ceremony, Joseph and Hyrum sealed her parents together in what was, at least at the time, a monogamous sealing. And so, they write that in their family Bible: sealing performed by Hyrum under Joseph’s seal. Hyrum performed it and then Joseph sealed that ceremony between them. Then, it says, “Gave daughter, Melissa to wife.”
GT 1:12:22 Wow.
Mark 1:12:22 Yes, on the very same date. So basically, they had a deal where they got together and the secret thing and they married. They did a ceremony for the parents, and Melissa then takes a husband. In the next few entries in the Bible, her last [name] is Melissa Smith.
GT 1:13:32 Oh.
Mark 1:13:33 So there’s these very oblique things. When, Joseph Smith, III came to visit Melissa Lott, she showed him that and he thought, “Okay.” He had to admit that seemed likely. He asked a bunch of other things. “Did you ever cohabit with my father?”
She said, “Well, no, of course I didn’t. We didn’t do that.”
He goes, “Okay. Well, maybe she was just sealed to him.” He writes that in a letter to one of his associates in Utah.
Mark 1:14:08 He says, “I believe Melissa Lott was adopted into my family.” So, he finds that pretty compelling. So, that’s one thing. There are quite a few little things like that. It’s fragmentary, but that’s also the case for the other plural wives, too, the other things that happened at the time. So, there’s a private contemporary evidence. It’s about what I would expect it to be given the circumstances. So, do you want to talk about public evidence?
GT 1:14:49 Definitely. That’s exactly where I was going next.
Mark 1:14:51 Yeah, let’s talk about public evidence. So, in that case, there starts to be rumors, at least, by April. Well, the story starts to go by April 1842. So, as the circle expands, as more people know about it–he did a pretty good job keeping a lid on it and keeping it within the circle in 1841. But, in April 1842, that’s when Martha Brotherton starts telling her story that Brigham Young proposed to her in the upper floor of the Red Brick store after she moved from England. When she said no, he went got Joseph and Heber C. Kimball and they tried to convince her and she wasn’t having any of it. So, she leaves the Church because of that.
Mark 1:15:46 So, she starts telling that story. We don’t really get a full detailed account of her until John Bennett, later, but she starts telling it in April. You hear references to it beginning in April. That’s also when the Relief Society goes to investigate the rumors that Joseph is paying too much attention to Agnes Coolbrith. I don’t know if I mentioned that, his [Joseph’s] brother Don Carlos is dead at this point. She’s his brother’s widow. So, that starts happening.
GT 1:16:23 Is that like a Levirate marriage?
Mark 1:16:24 Yeah, that’s typically how it’s characterized. So there’s that. Then, there’s the fallout with John Bennett. So, John Bennett’s activities come to light. There is actual academic disagreement on how connected, if at all, John Bennett’s activities are to Joseph’s. Fawn Brodie just says they’re one and the same. She treats them like they are one in the same and says that basically at this point, Joseph is kicking Bennett under the bus so he can defray suspicion of him and such. Brian Hales, for instance, on the other side of the spectrum goes, “Absolutely not.” Bennett is no way connected in any way. I think kind of the majority opinion, and these are people like Gary Bergera. He’s written some excellent papers on this. He said Bennett has some inside knowledge.
GT 1:17:26 I know Larry Foster has said, “You have to verify what Bennett knows, because he exaggerates a lot.”
Mark 1:17:33 Oh, he absolutely exaggerates a lot, and that’s part of the thing. That actually makes it easier to disclaim polygamy, because you can say, “Well, all the stuff that John Bennett is saying that we’re doing, we’re not doing.” And you are technically telling the truth. Brian Hales wrote a wonderful paper about that. I think it’s called Nineteen Denials [Denying the Undeniable] where he goes to the context of each one. He says that to the extent possible, they were trying to tell the truth. So, John Bennett gets excommunicated. There are about four or five other men that do in 1842, that are connected to Bennett. Joseph brings sexual slander laws against Chauncey Higbee, who was one of his associates and that was supposed to go to trial in Carthage. It doesn’t. The Prices point to that and say, “Well, Joseph was ready to defend it in front of an actual, civil or criminal court that he wasn’t in control of in Carthage.”
Mark 1:18:36 But, he couldn’t do it because he had a warrant out for his extradition back to Missouri. He had to go into hiding in October when they were supposed to go to trial. But he didn’t have to. There’s lots of stuff there. I don’t think he actually had to be there to take it to trial. It was criminal charges. It was a criminal case he was prosecuting. He could have had anybody else. It was State of Illinois versus Chauncey Higbee, not Joseph Smith versus Chauncey Higbee or anything like that. He had done other things during that time where he had legal representatives go represent him in legal matters in Carthage during that time. Part of that is when Chauncey Higbee was first tried, he didn’t really have any inside knowledge of what Joseph was actually doing. He only just did it because John Bennett told him Joseph was doing it. He even swore an affidavit saying that, too. But, then after John Bennett, so John Bennett in July 1842, is when John Bennett comes out with a lot of these letters. John Bennett talks about Joseph proposing to Nancy Rigdon, who is Sidney Rigdon’s daughter.
GT 1:19:47 The Happiness Letter.
Mark 1:19:48 Yeah, there’s The Happiness Letter. He publishes that.
GT 1:19:53 Bennett publishes the Happiness Letter.
Mark 1:19:54 Bennett publishes The Happiness Letter.
GT 1:19:56 Tell why that’s an important line because we still use it in General Conference.
Mark 1:20:00 We do, and, again, there’s disagreement, even among academic scholars. In the Joseph Smith Papers, they said it’s a possible Joseph Smith document. So, there’s that.
GT 1:20:14 But Joseph says in there, and this is why it’s important. “What is wrong under one circumstance, is right if God commands it.”
Mark 1:20:21 Right, so he basically gives a doctrinal exposition on the Divine Command Theory of morality. “What God commands to be right is right, no matter how we might feel, and we will understand those things once we do it and see the blessings.” I think he could have. There’s debate about it. I would say that The Happiness Letter is not one of those things that you would hang your hat on as far as Joseph Smith may have written it.
GT 1:20:46 But, I do know that has been quoted, even recently in General Conference.
Mark 1:20:50 It has. Yes. I think the most compelling thing that Bennett puts forward is he gives a list of a few of Joseph’s wives. He lists this in the History of the Saints that he publishes later in 1842. He correctly identified some of them. He correctly identified Prescindia Huntington. He correctly identified Louisa Beaman. He correctly identified Agnes Coolbrith. He does a similar thing to what I told you about that Vilate Kimball did.
GT 1:21:24 Vilate.
Mark 1:21:25 Vilate Kimball did about Joseph Smith. So, he takes the women’s names out, and probably because he doesn’t want to open himself up to a sexual slander. John Dinger wrote an excellent paper on that. I recommend Sexual Slander Laws, and so he takes the first letter of their name, and then he’ll have dots for the rest of their letters. So, if you know who they are, it fits.
GT 1:21:51 It’s got the right number of letters.
Mark 1:21:53 Right. He also says outright, “We use Louisa Beaman’s name,” and he says, “performed by Joseph Bates Noble.” With Agnes, he says, “Agnes Smith,” because that’s her married name. She’s the widow of Don Carlos Smith. So, that’s her married name is Agnes Smith, “by Brigham Young.”
GT 1:22:19 Couldn’t Brigham get him for sexual slander on that or not?
Mark 1:22:24 Well, maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Probably not. Because it wasn’t him doing it.
GT 1:22:30 He was just performing the wedding or the sealing.
Mark 1:22:36 That’s an important thing. That’s something that’s supported by other evidence. You have Joseph Bates Noble’s testimony saying, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I did.” If you look at that, you can say at the very least, this isn’t something that Joseph Bates Noble made up whenever he swore at the affidavits in 1869.
GT 1:23:01 Right.
Mark 1:23:01 You can’t say that, because there it is in print.
GT 1:23:07 And this was published in 1842, you said?
Mark 1:23:09 Yeah.
GT 1:23:11 So, Joseph is still alive.
Mark 1:23:12 Yeah, so that’s kind of where I’m going with all of this. You really see how this evidence intersects. There are things where we don’t know. There are things that disagree. There are so many of these little places where it intersects that I think I can say it is a pretty compelling case. That’s not to say that these public denials by Joseph and Hyrum and Emma later in life are not really enough to explain this and why I don’t think necessarily a Brighamite conspiracy, even if it hypothetically did exist, would explain this evidence. So, that’s 1842.
Nauvoo-Era Polygamy Evidence
Introduction
What polygamy evidence is there in the Nauvoo period? Mark Tensmeyer will tell us about the Sarah Pratt case, Hyrum Smith before the high council, and other evidence polygamy was secretly practiced by Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo period. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 1:23:47 Up to this time, Joseph only had up to eight [wives.] Is that right?
Mark 1:23:51 Yeah about [eight.]
GT 1:23:52 Does that include Fanny?
Mark 1:23:54 Oh, no. I’m not counting Fanny in that.
GT 1:23:58 Okay.
Mark 1:23:58 So, I think it is. Really, they pretty much get a handle on it though. They really do a lot of things. The other issue I want to mention is Sarah Pratt, where John Bennett writes a letter that Sarah Pratt was proposed to by Joseph while Orson Pratt is out on a mission. That letter comes out. Orson Pratt nearly commits suicide. They find his suicide note outside the print shop in Nauvoo, and there’s a search. They find him about five miles down the riverbank, just distraught. Because he’s asked Sarah about it, and she says, “Yes, that happened.” He says, ” I don’t know who to believe: Joseph or Sarah.”
GT 1:24:47 So Sarah said yes, and Joseph said no.
Mark 1:24:50 Yes. What they did, and so the response to that is that Sarah Pratt had an affair with John Bennett, and so she’s just saying this to throw off suspicion onto her. I don’t know. Maybe she did have an affair.
GT 1:25:09 She’s got suspicion either way.
Mark 1:25:11 Yeah. So, you can kind of go back, too. You can see how a lot of these things, if you look at a lot of these public incidents in isolation, you can see how they could go either way. So, when I said that, I think that polygamy skeptics, I can see where they’re coming from. If you look at a lot of these public situations, you can see how they could go either way. Like I said, the Chauncey Higbee case. I noticed that when I said about the court, like what was happening there? Did Joseph drop the case because Chauncey Higbee then subpoenas Nancy Rigdon and Sarah Pratt, and they’re going to come testify in Carthage, and Joseph doesn’t want that to happen? Is that why he drops the case? I don’t know. There’s not any direct evidence. Or does he drop the case because he just didn’t think was important anymore? He thought he proved his point, and he just wasn’t able to pursue it at that time, and he just didn’t think it was important enough? I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, if you’re looking at these events in isolation. Because, these are things where, again, it’s almost a “he said/she said.” They look at these things. It’s almost like a he said/she said, situation. You have Joseph that says, “No, this isn’t what happened. This is what happened with Sarah Pratt.” And yes, you have John Bennett saying this. Between those, who do you believe? John Bennett is not a reliable person. Sarah Pratt has some reliability issues.
GT 1:25:19 It’s like Jose Canseco.[3]
Mark 1:26:07 I mean, yeah, So, I’m saying that because I am looking at things like this. This is where I’m at least sympathetic to people like the Prices, to polygamy skeptics in general, because you look at these public things, you can kind of see how a lot of these, they could go either way, if you’re looking at them in isolation.
GT 1:26:57 But at some point, don’t you say, “Where there’s this much smoke, there’s got to be a fire?”
Mark 1:27:03 Yeah. You know what, that was actually addressed at one point. Joseph said that too. He said, “I hear people saying that and it’s not true.” But yeah, I mean, if you look at this, too, I mean, this is an incident that involves the Rigdons. This is an incident that involves the Pratts. These aren’t just random people. These are high ranking people in the Church. And it’s hard to say. At one point, Orson Pratt objects, and they take a vote about sustaining the good character of the prophet, and Orson Pratt goes, “I abstain.”
GT 1:27:36 Oh!
Mark 1:27:39 Yeah, he does. He does that vocally. Yeah.
GT 1:27:43 Oh wow.
Mark 1:27:46 About the spiritual wives doctrine, Joseph says, “Well, wait. Have you ever seen personally, me ever do anything untoward in that nature?”
And he [Orson] says, “No, I haven’t.”
Then people respond to him. The first person to respond to him is Brigham Young, who challenges him about the spiritual wife doctrine, about accusing Joseph about spiritual wife doctrine. It’s Brigham Young that writes to Orson’s brother, Parley Pratt, who is still in England says, “Yeah, we’ve had this deal with Orson and Sarah. His wife has sort of led him astray on this. But Orson is too good of a guy for us to let him go. We’re going to get him back.” And he comes back into full fellowship.
GT 1:28:37 Well, it’s funny that Orson ends up being the guy who makes the public announcement.
Mark 1:28:41 It is! Yeah. It really does make you think about a lot of these things, too. I mean, how does that all work out? Let’s say the apostles really were this secret cabal practicing polygamy in England. Why is Orson Pratt publicly accusing Joseph while he’s alive and all this? I mean, there’s a lot of these things that just really don’t fit. So, there’s that incident. But a lot of these, I’m not even sure if I know what really happened there. Did Joseph really propose to Sarah Pratt? I don’t know. Because there’s things that would suggest that he did.
GT 1:29:22 Sarah, I don’t know. That’s hard.
Mark 1:29:25 There’s a part later on where John Bennett sends a letter to Sidney Rigdon and Orson Pratt. He says, “After what’s happened to you, you should want to join up with me and fight this good fight.”
And Sidney takes it to Orson who takes it to Joseph and says, “Look. I’m not on board with Bennett. I’m not your enemy.” That’s one of the things that helped them reconcile. But, at the same time, it’s like what did John Bennett really think [they would help?] Why would John Bennett send them a letter trying to solicit their support, if he had an affair with Orson Pratt’s wife?
GT 1:30:05 If Bennett had an affair.
Mark 1:30:06 Yeah, and he’s sexually slandering, and he made publicly a fool out of Sidney Rigdon’s daughter? So, there’s stuff like that. I mean, there’s stuff like that that you can say, “Maybe he would.” I mean, he’s a pretty flamboyant guy, John Bennett. Maybe he would. I don’t know. I don’t know. So, there’s a lot of those things. But, then that’s Bennett.
Mark 1:30:28 Around early 1842, Hyrum Smith is still not aware of his brother’s activities, and he’s still very much against it. There’s one point where Heber C. Kimball, it says in William Clayton’s journal. This is where William Clayton comes on board. He says, “Brother Hyrum, we’re afraid that he’s trying to lay a snare for the secret priesthood,” meaning polygamy and people doing it. But, then a few days later, it says, “Hyrum has come aboard. He’s accepted the priesthood.” William Clayton writes that and we have a lot of evidence and I think we’ll probably get into this in the course of discussion that what happens is Hyrum hears that polygamy has come by revelation. That’s something Joseph has by revelation from God, and he gets a testimony of it. He gets all into it.
Mark 1:31:21 And so that’s when in July, he asked Joseph Smith, “If I can just have a written revelation… ”
GT 1:31:32 For Emma.
Mark 1:31:32 …on this.” Yeah. “Then maybe Emma will come around.” So, they dictate it to William Clayton. William Clayton writes about it in his journal. Emma doesn’t want anything to do with it. Joseph says, “Transfer the unencumbered lots to Emma,” which is actually reflected in the record throughout that time. They transferred a lot of the encumbered lots in Nauvoo to Emma, and put in Emma’s name to give her some kind of security, because she’s afraid what the fall might be. But, what really sets things in motion is Hyrum takes this thing, and he thinks that now that there’s revelation on it, people are going to come around like he did. In a lot of cases, he’s right. People do. But there’s a few cases he doesn’t. So, one of the things he does is he takes it to the High Council. So, he’s in the First Presidency. He’s co-president of church. So there’s some times where he presides over the high council’s proceedings. So, in August, he shows them the revelation.
GT 1:32:01 Is it from the high council minutes?
Mark 1:33:02 No. The High Council minutes said they received some instruction for that day, they received some instruction from Brother Hyrum and Brothers Marks. You see, every kind of evidence is going to have its limitations. I mean, even journals have their limitations because they’re often hastily made, and they’re fragmentary. They’re kind of day to day and a lot of times people tend to talk about day-to-day mundane things. A lot of times meeting minutes are very brief. It’s unfortunate. It’s kind of like with the Fanny Alger incident with Oliver Cowdery. I mean, Joseph talks about how there was girl business, but the minutes don’t elaborate on that. So, we really don’t know. So, the High Council minutes don’t really. But there are three members of the High Council that are not on board with this. They are William Marks, who is the stake president. And William Marks is a neat guy because he’s a guy who’s totally faithful throughout the whole thing. He’s totally privy to all the secret stuff going in Nauvoo: the Council of Fifty, plural marriage, temple ordinances. He’s privy to all of that, but he doesn’t really like that. He’s not really into that. But he kind of hopes that it’s going to [go away.] Later he writes, “I just hoped that that would all pass.” So, he doesn’t go apostate. He says that he would hope it would go pass, and “We would go back to the true, good version of Mormonism that I remember from Kirtland.” So, he’s one of those.
Mark 1:34:36 Another one is Leonard Sobey. Then, another one is Austin Cowles. Austin Coles doesn’t like it and then a few days after that, Austin Coles brings charges against George J. Adams for practicing plural marriage. Now, what had happened was, he’d been accused of soliciting plural wives when he was on his missions back east. The Quorum of the Twelve took his license away. It would have had to have been the Quorum of the Twelve taking his license away. And, after he provides testimony against Benjamin Winchester, who’s another person who had been accusing Joseph doing these things, Joseph gives him his license back. He reinstates him. Then, Austin Cowles says, “All right.” He brings charges saying he’s continued to do these same things. He brings evidence against them, and the High Council does nothing. And he resigns a few days later.
Mark 1:35:48 So the other people see this revelation. So, the next thing you have are the Laws. The Laws are the ones that, again, late 1843, early 1844, William, Jane, and Wilson Law, are the ones. Now what exactly? The Laws, we are trying to figure out their motivations. There are all kinds of things. Was William Law aspiring to an office? Did William Law commit adultery and was upset that he wasn’t allowed to have his temple ordinances, or be sealed to a plural wife because he had committed adultery? Or did Joseph propose to Jane Law? We really don’t know. There is so much conflicting evidence about that. It’s pretty hard to do. So [what are] his motivations? Do they start off where he’s really sincere, and then later on, he’s not? I don’t really know. It’s hard to say. But, in any case, there is the deal where in January 1844, Joseph and William Law are holding a city council meeting, and William Law is questioning a witness. He asked him, “Well, what did we talk about? What did you and I talk about on that day?”
Mark 1:37:13 “We talked about the doctrine of plurality of wives, the rumors about it. It’s really messing up families. It’s causing a lot of pain to a lot of people.” And William Law says there on the record, “…and don’t you think there’s some truth to those things because Joseph and Hyrum blew up the matter before the High Council, and the Elders quorum?”
Mark 1:37:37 And so Joseph responds by saying, “A man who promises to keep a secret and doesn’t, cannot be trusted in anything.”
GT 1:37:51 Meaning that Wil[liam] broke a secret.
Mark 1:37:53 That William broke a secret. Yes, he did. So, what secret did he break? So, it kind of inadvertently [discussed polygamy.] It’s after that, that things really start to fall out between Joseph and the Laws. William Law starts the Reformed Church, and a number of people join. One of the things you’ll hear a lot is that all these people coming out to people with these ulterior motives that are not people of good character. And that might be true. That might be true of William Law. Like I said, that’s a hard call. William Law, he’s kind of a–What’s the phrase Winston Churchill had? He’s kind of a riddle, wrapped in the mystery inside an enigma. I mean, there’s so many of these things where it’s hard to tell. But there’s a lot of people.
Mark 1:38:46 One of the people that joins up him is Austin Cowles. Another one is James Blakeslee. He was a fantastic missionary. He comes to Nauvoo. He wants to investigate it. He investigates. He becomes convinced that it’s true. He talks first to people that know firsthand that Joseph is a polygamist. So, he starts preaching [against] it. James Blakeslee goes on to become an apostle in the RLDS Church. Yeah, so, that’s what I’m saying, he’s the kind of person. Then, of course, William Law, his attack on there, it’s really two-pronged. The one thing he does is he files criminal charges against Joseph in Carthage for unlawful cohabitation with Mariah Lawrence and others. That goes before a grand jury. A grand jury indicts. People in that grand jury include active elements, including people from the Mormons. It includes Daniel H Wells. It includes William Marks. He’s there as part of it. It includes Willard Griffith.
GT 1:39:58 The grand jury includes all these people?
Mark 1:40:00 It includes Mormons, and they say that there was probable cause. They indict him. So, they say that there is probable cause that these charges against Joseph Smith are true. They bound him over for trial in October 1844. Now, of course, that trial never happens. We know why. Because Joseph died before that, but had Joseph not been killed in June 1844, then there would have been a full-on trial about polygamy. So that trial that Joseph was put on trial almost happened.
Mark 1:40:38 Yeah. Of course, the other thing they do is they publish The Expositor. The Expositor says a few things about polygamy. It says things like, they’re taking these women and it exaggerates some things. “They are leading them out into the wilderness, if they say no, and all kinds of things.” But what it also has is it has three affidavits by Austin Cowles, William Law and Jane Law. William Law says, “Hyrum gave us revelation. It allowed for people taking plural wives.” Jane Law says it did and it said he can take up to 10. Doctrine and Covenants section 132 doesn’t say you can take up 10, but it does mention ‘if a man takes 10 wives and they are virgins…’ it says that one point.
Then Austin Cowles has an affidavit in there. His is detailed. He said, “Late last summer, Hyrum Smith read a revelation to the High Council. The first part said that if a person was sealed up to eternal life, and they could not lose their exaltation unless they commit murder.” Then, it talks about how Abraham and Jacob, their doctrine in taking plural wives. It says that it allowed for a man to take plural wives. So, he gives a description that’s actually really good summary of Doctrine & Covenants Section 132 as we know it. It’s brief, but a pretty comprehensive summary there.
Mark 1:40:40 So, he says, “Hyrum read that to us.” Anyhow, the interesting thing about that is Joseph and Hyrum’s reaction. They hold the city council meeting a few days later, and the minutes of this is published in the Nauvoo Neighbor. They say, “Well, we need to address this.” Hyrum says, “Well, what Austin Cowles said, he was mistaken.” He doesn’t call him a liar. He says he’s mistaken. He says he thought that the doctrine about plurality wives applies to the current day. It does not. It only applies to the former times. So, this only explains why Abraham and Jacob were doing it. This only talks about them. It has no bearing to the day, so he must have misunderstood.
Mark 1:42:32 Later in that same meeting, Joseph says, “The revelation was about how I was thinking about the verse in the New Testament about how in the heavens, they neither marry nor given in marriage. And it says that a man and a woman must marry with a view of eternity to be married in the hereafter,” which actually the revelation does talk about. So, he says, that was the entire subject of the revelation. So, you see a problem there. They’re saying that in reaction. So, they give a partial [explanation.] This is one of the things when I said about how [RLDS Church president] Israel Smith starts finding these things [in the 1940s], he starts sort of walking back from the very definite position he had earlier about it not happening. This is one of the things he sees. He says there definitely was a revelation. Because these two topics together, you have the Expositor, you have Joseph and Hyrum’s response to the Expositor published in the Nauvoo Neighbor. That’s an official Church source that excludes the possibility that what we know as Doctrine & Covenants 132 is a complete later fabrication on the Utah period.
GT 1:43:32 Which is what the polygamy skeptics love to claim.
Mark 1:44:34 Well, no. That’s what they did. That’s what Joseph Smith, III and people were saying.
GT 1:44:40 Okay.
Mark 1:44:41 Yeah.
GT 1:44:42 Well, Denver Snuffer does that, too. Doesn’t he?
Mark 1:44:44 No. Denver Snuffer actually doesn’t. Denver Snuffer, the argument they make is that–this is another one of the things. We have two versions of the story. We have the one accuser and Joseph’s defense. So, why should we prioritize Joseph’s account over Austin Cowles and the Laws? Why should we take their word over them? They’re both giving opposite things. So, I think this. I think the revelation is the best thing to look at, if you really want to get into this, because there’s just so many sources about it. If the revelation, Doctrine & Covenants 132 is authentic, then that ends the debate right there. It doesn’t matter who Joseph took as plural wives. He taught it. Doctrine & Covenants, in Section 132 says very basic, very clear, that that kind of plural marriage includes having children with plural wives. It says the man cannot commit adultery with his plural wives. If that document is authentic, that solves the debate.
3rd Party Polygamy Evidence
Introduction
The LDS and RLDS Churches have fought about Joseph Smith’s polygamy for a century. Is there 3rd party evidence that could settle this? Mark Tensmeyer discusses evidence outside the two churches that can help settle the matter as to whether Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. Check out our conversation….
Interview
Mark: So, this is kind of what we’re going to go into maybe later evidence of third-party evidence, which are the other two categories. I look at that, and I think well, if we left it right there, so, we just looked at the Expositor and the Nauvoo Neighbor account, we really could say it’s a “he said/she said” situation. One person said one thing happened. Another person said another thing [happened.]
Mark 1:46:16 One thing I will say about Joseph and Hyrum’s accounts, are they’re internally inconsistent. Hyrum says in the first place, “Well, it was about polygamy, but it was just about former times.” Later, Joseph says the entire subject is about eternal marriage. Well, I mean, that’s an inconsistency. So, the question is, and Israel A. Smith raised this: “Well, if it was all it was fake, if they’re lying, why did they even admit it at all?” I think the answer to that is because at this point, a lot of people had heard about this thing, a lot of people had seen this thing. So, at this point, Hyrum had showed it to quite a few people.
GT 1:47:01 Right.
Mark 1:47:03 At this point, denying it maybe would do more harm than good. There might have been a better way to try to say there’s something to it. So, then, of course, we know what happens soon after the Expositor drops. That’s when everything in Carthage [happens] and Joseph and Hyrum die. So, 1852 is when Brigham Young [had Orson Pratt] announce this thing, and they released this publicly. But there are a lot of other things about this. The first time that a lot of people are really starting to tell stories about Joseph Smith and polygamy, it’s when Joseph F. Smith starts collecting affidavits in 1869. He collected it from three individuals who are there in the high council and they say, “Yeah, Hyrum showed us a revelation. It was on polygamy. That’s 1869.
Mark 1:47:55 Here is something that’s very interesting. This is something Richard Howard found, and he wrote about this in this paper. This is one of his big finds. In 1865, in a meeting in the RLDS Church, with the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve, the topic comes up, was Joseph, the martyr, a polygamist? It says, “President Marks,” so, this is William Marks, who is now serving as the first counselor in the RLDS First Presidency says, “I spoke to Hyrum Smith. He said that if he got a revelation on polygamy, he would believe it. Shortly after that, he read a revelation on polygamy to the High Council. I did not believe it, but I saw the rest of the council receive it.” So, William Marks confirms Austin Cowles’ story. He confirms that he said it was about polygamy.
Mark 1:49:00 Another section, after William Marks is dead, there’s one of the apostles by the name of Zenas Gurley, Jr, whose father was very instrumental in founding the LDS Church. He’s wanting to get to the bottom of this. I think it’s 1880s and William Marks is dead at this point, but Leonard Sobey, who was the other member of the High Council, he did not become a Brighamite. He followed Rigdon and after Rigdon’s church fell apart, he just sort of stayed out there and remained unaffiliated, but still believed. He goes out to Leonard Sobey and asks him, “What happened? What really happened?”
Sobey said, “Hyrum Smith read a revelation on plural marriage. As near as I can recall, it’s the exact same revelation the Utah church put out.”
GT 1:49:45 Oh, wow. That would sure be nice to throw out if you’re a polygamy skeptic. That’s after June 27, 1844.
GT 1:49:54 Right, and so you have these people and another one Ebenezer Robinson, who had been an editor of the Times and Seasons. He had been a very prominent member. It’s really throughout the 1860s, Joseph Smith, III would say that he didn’t believe his father was a polygamist, but he didn’t push the issue as the RLDS Church’s orthodox position.
GT 1:50:19 I know John Hamer said [that Joseph, III said,] “But if he did it, it would have been wrong.”
Mark 1:50:24 Yeah, that’s right. But, I mean, that’s a whole ‘nother topic. He [Joseph, III] really starts pushing it, and he gets significant pushback on that.
GT 1:50:36 Especially from the Utah Church and his cousins.
Mark 1:50:38 No, especially, he gets huge pushback on that from his own church leadership.
GT 1:50:43 Oh, really?
Mark 1:50:43 Oh, yeah. I mean, this is an incident of this is where some missionaries spent more time in Utah. He’s going, “Maybe there is something to this.” So, that’s when Zenas Gurley, Jr. says to Joseph, “We need to get to the bottom of it.”
Another one is Ebenezer Robinson, who is the editor of the Times and Seasons. He’s all these things. When all that starts happening, he goes, “No, Hyrum came to me and my wife, and he said that he had heard the voice of revelation. He had seen a revelation on plural marriage. He instructed me that I could take plural wives.” He said, “If any children came of those, then we had a plan for that. We would take the women, in general. We take them to some remote place, they’d have a baby there. So, nobody would really know any better. But this is the thing. I was skeptical about it. But after I heard that revelation, I believed.” By the way, William Marks, also told that story again to John Hawley. He wrote that down in his autobiography. So, you have these different sources that really confirm the same thing.
You have Emma, when she’s asked about, “Was there anything like a polygamy revelation?”
She goes, “No, I didn’t hear anything about that.” So, she doesn’t really account for that. So, you have this…
GT 1:52:12 But, yet we have all these stories that she burned it, right?
Mark 1:52:16 Right. Yeah. The only person that really backs up that revelation was not about polygamy, it was about sealings, is an individual named James Whitehead. He was a clerk for Joseph Smith. At one point, he tells Joseph Smith, III that he saw the revelation that his mother burned. It was just about sealing, not about plural marriage. At another point in the Temple Lot case, he testifies that he left the Church because he didn’t want anything to do with Brigham Young. But he visited Newell K. Whitney in Winter Quarters in 1846. Newell K. Whitney showed him a document, a one-page revelation, about sealing for eternity. He said that when D&C 132 came out, he saw that it had been, that revelation had been completely changed and morphed into this thing. So, that’s his testimony. So, he says that. He said, “Well, I saw a revelation earlier, and they had completely changed it.
GT 1:53:34 Who changed it?
Mark 1:53:35 It prohibited polygamy. It was about eternal sealings, they changed it to be about polygamy. That’s really the only source, but there’s problems with that. James Whitehead is an interesting guy. He’s kind of all over the place. Whether he was talking about Joseph Smith III’s, ordination or anything like that. So, he’s kind of all over. At one point, he actually says Joseph Smith was a polygamist and Emma knows it. She was sealed. She placed her hand on some of his wives in the ceremony. He told that to Alexander Smith, Joseph’s son. He told that to William W. Blair, who was the other apostle. So, he said that another time.
Mark 1:53:36 What really is important is on cross examination. Now, when a lot of polygamy skeptics read this, they don’t read the actual deposition transcript, they read the RLDS abstract of it, which is heavily edited, and they leave this part out. The attorney for the for the Temple Lot Church hands him a copy of the Doctrine and Covenants and says, you tell me which parts were in the document you saw. He looks at it and after looking at it, he says, “You know, I’m not sure. I can’t tell that any of them have been.” He says, “I’m not even sure if it was the same document at all.” And here’s the thing. Newell K. Whitney had another revelation, an 1842 revelation that Joseph gave about performing the sealing between him and Sarah Ann, and other than naming Sarah Ann and Joseph, it doesn’t say anything about polygamy. Arguably, it argues against it because it says you two take each other and none else.
GT 1:55:17 Hmm.
Mark 1:55:19 So he looked at it and he says, “If they did, they changed it entirely.” He says he can’t even… So, that’s really the only supporting evidence. So, if you really look at it, there’s really, any argument for the document being about monogamous sealings, really, you just have to simply say, “We’re taking Joseph and Hyrum’s words at face value.” Well, there’s all kinds of problems with that. There are all kinds of evidence from these other places. I mean, you could take off almost everything that the Brighamites, off the table, and you’d still have all this other stuff. I don’t know how. I mean, that’s a big thing. Because I think that’s the biggest thing is this evidence is so intricate, that it doesn’t seem plausible to me that even if you think Brigham Young is this big conspirator, that he would even be able to pull it off.
GT 1:56:18 Yeah, how would he get all these RLDS people to testify?
Mark 1:56:21 Yeah, how would he? There’s a lot more about the revelation [that] we could talk about, but I think that’s really the biggest reason. So, if someone were to ask, “how do you counter all of these documents, all of this evidence against Joseph being a polygamist?” I would say that. I’d say the evidence for his being a polygamist comes from so many different places. It actually fits what I would expect it to be given the circumstances that it happened. And it comes from so many different places. I don’t know. If it really was just Joseph Smith versus John Bennett on the issue, I would think that polygamy skeptics….
GT 1:57:06 Joseph Smith would win that.
Mark 1:57:07 Yes. I think so. I think if it was just Joseph Smith, and the Expositor, if the Expositor was the only thing, I think that would be. I think that we could do. If it was just the 1869 affidavits. I think it would be, but there’s all these arguments that come from so many different people, from so many different interests that I can’t come up with any narrative that’s not just wildly speculative about how that could have happened. I mean, the alternatives as well, Brigham Young made up the record of the revelation prior to Joseph dying, and that’s what Austin Cowles saw. Well, Austin Cowles didn’t say it was Brigham Young that showed him. He said it was Hyrum Smith. So, you really have to discount that. That’s speculative. You don’t have any evidence that it was Brigham who showed it to Austin Cowles and the high council.
Mark 1:58:04 You could say, “Well, maybe he took the revelation afterwards, and then added stuff that Austin Cowles had written. So, you have two different groups. You have Austin Cowles who just decided to make this false report, and it just happened to be what Brigham needed to put into this thing that he put together later.
GT 1:58:24 (Chuckling)
Mark 1:58:26 I mean, I think at the very least, it runs afoul of Occam’s razor, which is the idea, the philosophy that where you have two narratives, two explanations for something, and one of them requires a great deal more, substantially more speculation of assumptions beyond the evidence, then you go with the one that requires the relatively less. In this regard, I think that the arguments, if you’re going to say for the sake that Joseph wasn’t a polygamist, if you’re going to say that those public denials are dispositive, you have to engage in a great deal of speculation.
Mark 1:58:40 There’s all kinds of little things. I mean, you may have noticed all the references I made to Agnes Coolbrith. There’s so much more. And she wasn’t a Brighamite. She didn’t follow Brigham Young.
GT 1:59:25 Right.
Mark 1:59:26 So, there’s all these things, all kinds of things like that, that really stick out, that don’t really match. So, I think that’s what really runs afoul of polygamy skeptics. There are some things that with Joseph Smith’s polygamy, we do have to look at, like why there’s no children. We have to maybe come up with theories as to why that might be. But, if you compare the two, I don’t think it’s a comparison at all. I don’t think those two narratives are equally plausible at all. I would say that’s it. That’s the biggest thing for me is the evidence comes from too many different places. It just doesn’t work. These alternative narratives really just don’t account for the evidence.
Kirtland-era Polygamy Rumors
Introduction
Joseph Smith was involved with Fanny Alger in some type of “girl business” probably around 1836, and Oliver Cowdery referenced this in 1838. What other types of evidence exists of polygamy in Kirtland? Mark Tensmeyer will tell us more. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 2:00:05 Welcome back to Gospel Tangents. We went so long last time that I asked Mark to come back and just tie up a few loose ends that we wanted to talk about. We’ve talked mainly about the Nauvoo period. I’d like to start out talking a little bit about some of the Kirtland-era rumors about polygamy. So, what I thought we could do is start with the 1831 revelation. Mark, could you give people a little background on what that is and give us some details on it?
Mark 2:00:43 A lot of my research that I’ve done, or a lot of the writing, I should say. My research for my writing has focused on Nauvoo because that’s when we really have the most sources on polygamy. That’s when we know for sure that it really was coming about. But we also know that it probably didn’t start there, but we’re not really sure when, and a lot of the evidence that we have, other sources we have on earlier polygamy come from later sources that are told in the context of, “This is a precursor to the Nauvoo polygamy.” So, we want to talk to the 1831 revelation. 1831 is the absolute earliest that we have any sources that indicate Joseph was thinking about polygamy.
Mark 2:01:33 So, a lot of times, the 1831 revelation is called the Lamanite revelation. There are pretty much two sources on this. One is a contemporary source,1831, from Ezra Booth, who is one of the first anti-Mormons, one of the first groups to leave the Church and then dedicate themselves to trying to disprove the Church. He says that at one point, he says that there was a thing where Joseph told some of the elders that were going on a mission in 1831, to the Native American people to take wives of the Lamanites, and such. So, William W. Phelps, years and years later, during the Utah period, produced a document that he didn’t claim to be an original from that period, but a reproduction copy of a revelation that Joseph gave him in 1831, where it says to take wives of the native people. The implication being that since some of the men were married, that the Lamanite women they’d be taking as wives would be plural wives. So, that’s pretty much the sources on that.
GT 2:02:58 So, it’s pretty late source with Phelps as far as producing this?
Mark 2:03:02 I believe Phelps evidently reproduced it from memory. I don’t know that he claimed to have a copy or something of that document that he copied the paper off of it. I don’t know too much about it. But it definitely comes from the Utah period. Now, there is some support in that the Ezra Booth account. Even there, that doesn’t mean that it’s supposed to be all the men that we’re supposed to take wives. I’d have to look at it. I know Martin Harris is one that was married, and he might have been the only one. He, of course, was estranged from his wife by that point. So, I don’t know. I think it’s one of those maybe. I mean, it’s one of those things that, for my purpose of trying to show that yes, polygamy is a real thing that Joseph Smith did. I mean, that’s not something I would hang my hat on at all. But, once you’ve established evidence from Nauvoo, that polygamy is something that Joseph Smith did, then something like this seems a bit more plausible. It seems a bit more possible that it might be.
GT 2:04:14 I was just going to say, Dr. Larry Foster from Georgia Tech, he’s non LDS. He’s been one that really kind of goes along with this 1831 revelation.
Mark 2:04:25 I haven’t looked into it too deeply. That’s been my understanding that that’s it. I’m open to the idea. But I think it’s mostly late sources, and the contemporary source, I think the idea of Joseph expressing to these missionaries to take wives of Native American women, I think there’s good possibility that that’s true, but I don’t know that necessarily he meant for married men to take additional wives, when that there may or may not be the case. I don’t know.
GT 2:04:59 Okay, interesting. Let’s move on to the Fanny Alger scrape, affair, whatever you want to call it, and then how Oliver Cowdery testified over that. I think the affair or the scrape or whatever want to call it, I guess there’s been a difference of opinion [that] Don Bradley’s found.
Mark 2:05:21 Yeah, Don Bradley has done some great work on that. I’m not quite sure about the dating on that. I don’t know. I would go with what Don says. He seems to know. He would know what he was talking about there. It happened long before the Oliver Cowdery allegations arose. We know that.
GT 2:05:40 Right. There’s a dispute on the dating of the affair. 1834 is, I think, the earliest. I don’t think most people go with that earlier date. But, as late as 1836, I know some scholars believe it was after the dedication of the Kirtland Temple. At that point, the vision of Elijah would have restored the sealing powers. I know some people think it’s that late. I know Brian Hales is kind of in between, probably, between 1835-1836.
Mark 2:06:13 My understanding of it, if I remember this correctly from Brian Hales, he says that the sealing power didn’t necessarily need to be there for there to be a plural marriage. I mean, we typically think of plural marriage and sealings happening, you know, one meaning the other, and they don’t necessarily. It might have been a prototype. I don’t know.
GT 2:06:32 Well, and I’ll even throw one other theory out there. Mark Staker, in my first interview with him, he said that when Peter, James and John came in 1830, that they bestowed all the rights needed, even the sealing power.
Mark 2:06:48 Yeah, I mean, that depends on your understanding of priesthood. I mean, the Melchizedek priesthood, has all of the authority to do all that, you just need the authorization to use it. Did they give the keys of the apostleship, which by necessity, carries that? I mean, Peter is given [the keys.] We point to that chapter in Matthew about Peter being given the power to seal on Earth, and he’s one of the ones there giving it. So, I don’t know. It really depends on how you look at that. It’s a theological question more than it is a historical question about that. On Fanny Alger, it’s pretty much the mainstream consensus that something happened between Fanny Alger. People are divided about whether it was just an extramarital affair, that later on, people picked up and just included in polygamy, or if it was an early plural marriage. It’s kind of hard to say. The contemporary records of it are just that letter book from Oliver Cowdery, the letter that’s recorded in his letter book, where he describes it as the filthy, nasty affair. Don Bradley did that research, which you said it was in the letter book, it was first written scrape, and it’s crossed out and replaced with affair, which in the terminology of the day was not as offensive a word. It just means a thing.
GT 2:08:19 I know he also referred to as the girl business.
Mark 2:08:23 So, then the other thing is the High Council minutes for Oliver Cowdery’s excommunication. These are both dated 1838. This is a pretty good example about how if you’re just looking at some of these incidents, not all of them, but some of these incidents in isolation, how you can see it could go either way. Because Oliver Cowdery, he’s absentee for this trial. Joseph was presiding. There’s like eight charges against them. All of them except for the one unrelated to Fanny Alger and related to much of the other incidents that were happening and conflicts that were happening within the leadership of the Church at the time. So, one of the charges was that Oliver Cowdery had slandered Joseph with these with these allegations of adultery.
Mark 2:09:22 A couple of gentlemen, I believe it’s Thomas Marsh and David W. Patten, apostles, bore testimony that they saw a confrontation between Joseph and Oliver about her, and that Oliver had told them that Joseph admitted to committing adultery and then Joseph had confronted Oliver about that. He says it’s a pretty unique way. Richard Bushman makes a point of this is Joseph says, “Did I admit to committing adultery?” Oliver said, “Well, no, you didn’t admit to committing adultery.” Then, the minutes go on to say that Joseph told the High Council that he had confided in Oliver Cowdery, because Oliver Cowdery was a close friend of his and a confidant of his, so he confided in Oliver Cowdery what happened with this girl business. Then, the minutes don’t go on to explain what that means. But it does say that the high council did sustain the charge of Oliver Cowdery unjustly slandering Joseph Smith with adultery. Then, of course, as Oliver Cowdery years later said, “It was a nasty, filthy affair.”
Mark 2:10:36 That’s all the contemporary sources. We have later sources. Ann Eliza Webb, who wasn’t born yet, but she was a relative of Fanny Alger and Fanny Alger with her parents for a bit. She tells stuff that’s very late and it’s completely second hand. There’s William McLellin’s letter.
GT 2:10:58 What does she say?
Mark 2:11:00 Oh, she says it was a marriage. Eliza R. Snow in the Andrew Jensen notes classifies it as a marriage. She says it was a marriage. William McLellan, I can’t remember if he says that there was a marriage or not. But he’s the one that says Emma witnessed the exchange in the barn and a lot of people interpret that to mean, them being caught in the act of intimacy right there in the barn and Emma walking in on them. The exchange is what he says. So, that that’s where it is. So, Levi, of course, the other one is Levi and Mosiah, really Mosiah Hancock who recounts the deal when he’s finishing his father’s autobiography, saying that his father officiated in the ceremony between Joseph and Fanny, so there’s that. According to Benjamin F. Johnson, her brother had asked her, “What exactly happened between you and the Prophet?” Her response is, “That’s a matter of my own of my own concern,” I think it was or “a matter for myself.”
GT 2:12:23 Mind your own business, basically.
Mark 2:12:26 Right, which confirms that something, there was something. It’s one of those things where you can look at it, if you look at contemporary evidence, you can tell that something definitely happened, more than what you’re really told the whole story of. It’s open to interpretation. If you want to include some of this later evidence as reliable, and I do. Personally, I do, then you could say it’s an early…
GT 2:12:56 Probably one of the earliest legitimate references to polygamy.
Mark 2:13:00 If you’re saying it might be where Joseph tried something out, or if you’re looking at it from the point of a believer, looking at it as polygamy being a commandment of the Lord, this is Joseph saying, “Here, look, this is a commandment. I need to do it. Okay, I did it. I checked that box. I did it.” I think that that’s it. It’s one of those things that again, you have to look at later efforts, if you really want to flesh it out.
GT 2:13:35 Interesting.
Why So Few children of Polygamy in Nauvoo?
Introduction
Polygamy skeptics love to point out that DNA evidence has ruled out Joseph as the father of several possible polygamous unions. But is there no evidence of polygamous pregnancies in Nauvoo? Did John C. Bennett perform abortions? Can two people have sex and not get pregnant? We’ll talk about these possibilities with Mark Tensmeyer. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 2:13:36 All right. So, another couple of the topics that I’d like to address are the rumors about Dr. John C. Bennett and abortion, that he was stopping pregnancies with abortion. Can you tell us about that?
Mark 2:13:57 My understanding on that is that there’s basically two sources on that. There’s a source, I’d have to find it. It came out in the trials of the men that were associated with John Bennett. They were going through his excommunication process and they either did it right away or he left the Church and left town before they had the chance to [excommunicate him or] he resigned. He claims he resigned and then left town. So, it’s really when his own associates who are involved with him, so Chauncey Higbee, Justus Morse, Lyman Littlefield, those individuals who are involved with him, when they’re put on trial in the High Council, that a lot of this stuff comes out. Some of the women that testified that John Bennett had told them, or one of them had them that if a pregnancy occurred as a result of their activities, then John Bennett would be able to take care of [it.] He’d be able to remove the baby. He knew how to do that as a doctor. He could terminate the pregnancy. So, there’s that source. Then the other source is also years later. It’s at least the 1880s. It’s Sarah Pratt. She says that in an interview with Salt Lake Tribune, that John Bennett had an instrument he had used to perform abortions for Joseph Smith. So, those are pretty much the sources on that.
GT 2:15:35 So, we don’t have any documented record of any abortions that actually happened. These are more rumors. Is that right?
Mark 2:15:40 Um, well…
GT 2:15:45 I guess it should be pointed out that abortion, there was no legality issues.
Mark 2:15:50 There was no legality for plural wives, either, technically speaking.
GT 2:15:55 But, there weren’t any laws against abortion is what I’m trying to say, were there?
Mark 2:15:58 Were there? I don’t know. It was…
GT 2:16:02 I don’t think those happen until much later.
Mark 2:16:03 It might have been. There are a few issues with that. I mean, one is we don’t really know how involved, if at all, John Bennett was with Joseph. That’s one of the things that scholars’ debate. Like, a Fawn Brodie would say, “Yeah, Joseph and John Bennett were doing exactly the same thing. They were involved.”
GT 2:16:27 Well, he was Assistant President of the Church and Mayor of Nauvoo when he was on good terms.
Mark 2:16:32 Right. So, that’s the argument for that. He was. At the other end of the spectrum, you have Brian Hales who says, “John Bennett is not an insider to polygamy at all. He just is repeating rumors.” But, I think, really, the majority opinion, like if you read Nauvoo Polygamy by George D. Smith, he kind of goes, maybe/maybe not. He doesn’t take a stand. He goes, maybe it was. At one point he says, “Brigham Young would have been the first man, besides Joseph, who became a polygamist in Nauvoo that was authorized by Joseph.” Unless John Bennett was. We don’t really know. It could be the case of John Bennett was, or that he wasn’t. He [George D. Smith] doesn’t take stand. I think Gary Bergera wrote a couple of good articles about John Bennett. His position, I think, I would call the majority opinion of scholars, and, I think, the moderate opinion, and that is that John Bennett does have inside knowledge about plural marriage. I think that that’s true, because a lot of the stuff he says is absolutely ridiculous and not supported by anything else. But then there are a few things like I said earlier, the identity of those five women.
GT 2:17:53 They were plural wives of Joseph.
Mark 2:17:55 Yes, they were plural wives of Joseph Smith. Then, in the case of two of them, he correctly identifies who it was that performed the ceremony. So, he could have gotten that somewhere else. But I don’t know. But I think it does show that he has some [inside knowledge.] Anyway, Gary Bergera says he has some inside information, but his activities were not authorized by Joseph Smith and the methods that he employed by convincing these women what he did with them was not reflective of what Joseph was doing. So, John Bennett told women it’s no crime for a man and woman to have carnal relations, as long as they keep it a secret. There’s no talk about a ceremony. There’s no reference to John Bennett ever doing any kind of marriage ceremony. The women that testify all testified against the same man as being involved with each of them. So, that’s the majority opinion, and I’m partial to that.
GT 2:19:02 Well, he called it spiritual wifery, which was not the term that Joseph ever used. Right?
Mark 2:19:07 Yeah. So that’s it. I mean, there are times when–yeah, that’s another thing. They [insiders] use celestial marriage. But sometimes the idea is that they would use the term spiritual wife, sometimes. It’s because that was a term that was thrown about so much that they just ended up using it sometimes out of convenience, because it’s what people are familiar with, maybe. So, that’s that. I think, part of the thing, is if we’re talking about John Bennett as an explanation for why we don’t have any real sure documentation of any offspring of Joseph….
GT 2:19:48 Yeah, that’s where I really wanted to go.
Mark 2:19:50 …Bennett doesn’t really work for that, because he’s out of the picture by April or May 1842, which is really early in the game. At that point, Joseph’s has like eight or 10 plural wives. Most of them either don’t live in Nauvoo–I think all of them either don’t live in Nauvoo, or they have a legal husband. So, theoretically, there’s not really a reason for them to hide a pregnancy. They have a legal husband who is aware of the plural marriage. So, there’s not really a reason to hide it. It doesn’t arouse suspicion that they would become pregnant.
Mark 2:20:37 But, really, it’s 1843 is when Joseph is married. In the middle of 1843, he’s married to the Partridge sisters, and Lucy Walker and Melissa Lott. [These are] younger women that actually stay at the Mansion House, in his house. John Bennett is out of the picture long before that.
GT 2:21:01 Okay.
Mark 2:21:01 Yeah. So I don’t think that that really works. Is it possible that John Bennett [performed abortions] I mean, I’ve got to admit my bias as a believing member, that I don’t like the idea of Joseph Smith doing abortions. Objectively speaking, I can’t really discount it. But I don’t think the evidence is so strong that we should say it did happen. I mean, we really just have one source that says that John Bennett suggested it, not necessarily Joseph did. Then, there’s Sarah Pratt, who has some reliability issues. The question came up when William Law was doing his interview with Wilhelm Wyle at the Salt Lake Tribune. At that point, William Law is really [antogonistic.] I mean, he really paints Joseph in a very, very bad picture. But the question comes up. Were there abortions? And he said, “I don’t think so.” Of course, he wasn’t privy to what was going on when John Bennett was around, but Chauncey Higbee was and he knew Chauncey Higbee pretty well and worked with Chauncey Higbee. And he says, “I don’t think so. I didn’t really hear anything about it.”
GT 2:22:05 So, it seems unlikely that abortions would have happened, right?
Mark 2:22:08 Unlikely. I mean, I can’t say objectively that I could rule it out. Again, there are sources. But I can say that I don’t think the sources we have really direct us to that conclusion.
GT 2:22:25 I’ll just add one other story. There’s a great book. Do I have it here? Real Native Genius. It’s somewhere on my shelves here. Warner McCarry [married] his wife, Lucy Stanton, who was the daughter of the stake president in Nauvoo. They left town and she later performed some abortions in New York and the women died. So, abortions were obviously hazardous to your health. Lucy was actually jailed for years in New York, for manslaughter for performing these abortions and the women died. So, I think that adds even more…
Mark 2:23:07 I think it is. I mean, that’s something you could look at and say that’s something that would have been really hard to keep under wraps. There would have been safer ways to handle a woman becoming pregnant, like passing it off as somebody else’s kid.
GT 2:23:19 Right.
Mark 2:23:20 There would have been easier ways to do that. Yeah. That’s my thoughts on that.
GT 2:23:28 Okay. So the other issue is, I know that Brian Hales and Ugo Perego did the tests to see if there were children of other women. I know a lot of polygamy deniers have said, “Hey, where’s the DNA evidence?” Because in all five or six cases, Joseph Smith has been ruled out as the father of these children. But, of course, there are other ways to have sexual relations that don’t produce babies.
Mark 2:23:58 Right. I don’t think that those DNA evidences really discredit anybody. In all cases, but one, they really weren’t good candidates to begin with.
GT 2:24:11 I know Sylvia Sessions Lyons was probably the best candidate.
Mark 2:24:14 Yes, that’s the only one. In every other case, the mother themselves, you don’t have any indication that they ever claimed that that was their child. We’ve kind of looked at circumstantial evidence or looked at later things. One of them is Zebulon Jacobs, who is Zina Huntington’s son. I mean, his birth date and the date he would have been conceived just doesn’t fit with the timetable [of Zina and Joseph’s marriage]. But, you know, maybe? There are those things. You can never know for sure. So, you might as well [test], especially if this is y-chromosomal testing. It’s easy enough to do, if you have the people.
Mark 2:24:49 But yeah, Sylvia Lyons Sessions is the only one and even that there’s some ambiguity as to whether or not she was claiming that Josephine was the biological child of Joseph Smith. Unfortunately, all we have is a very late secondhand account for it, too. We have something that Josephine gave in the 19-teens, about something her mother said 30 years ago. She quotes her mother saying, “She wanted to let me know that. She didn’t want to cause a spectacle. But she said that I’m actually Joseph’s Smith’s daughter, my father being out of fellowship with the Church at the time.” So I mean, does that mean that, Joseph’s her legal father or spiritual father, in the sense she was her father was out of fellowship with the Church at the time she was born? But, at the same time, why would she really want to keep that a secret? Why would she think that would cause a spectacle? Yeah, I don’t know.
Mark 2:25:38 But, in any case, the common interpretation of that is that Sylvia had reason to believe that Joseph was the father, but [he] wasn’t. So, the common interpretation is that she was sexually active with her legal husband, Windsor Lyon and Joseph at the same time. And she just assumed that Sylvia was Joseph’s daughter, incorrectly. So, I mean, that’s that.
Mark 2:25:43 But, the question, too, is why isn’t there any DNA evidence? Why are there no children? So, that argument is what you would call in logical terms, a denying the antecedent argument or using the absence of evidence as evidence of absence. So, the argument goes, if Joseph Smith was sexually active with his wives, there would be a verifiable child. There is no verifiable child, therefore, Joseph Smith was not sexually active with any other woman besides Emma. In order for that argument to really hold up, one, you have to show that there were no children. We really don’t have any way to say that there weren’t any. We know that there’s not any that we know about. But, if you’re arguing exclusion, if you’re arguing that premise, then you have to show that there wasn’t any. And there could be all kinds of reasons. Maybe there are and we don’t know who they were. Maybe infant mortality plays a big role in that. Joseph and Emma were married five years before they had any child that lived and that we can verify by anything, aside from documents, especially aside from later documentation. Some of it [came] after Joseph died. That’s because they had had children, they are just not children that lived much past childbirth, if even that far. Five years is longer than Joseph was ever involved in polygamy.
Mark 2:27:44 His first plural wife in Nauvoo, Louisa Beaman, I mean, she had five children with Brigham Young after she married him, before she died, and all of them died, either at childbirth or not long after. So, infant mortality is a big thing. A lot of times with infant mortality, there’s not records left of those children. They’re not included. It just was a thing that happened there. There’s a lot of Joseph’s children who died at childbirth that we only know about because Lucy Mack Smith wrote that book. But all of it came in the 1850s. So, infant mortalities, so that’s one way. Another way is the way you kind of alluded to is maybe it was sexual activity that they were able to avoid conception with.
GT 2:28:37 Monica Lewinsky didn’t get pregnant from Bill Clinton either.[4]
Mark 2:28:42 But, yeah, well, I mean, birth control is a bit more common in the 1990s, than it was in the 1840s. But, I mean, it’s possible. I mean, birth control is a possibility. But, again, that’s something–I don’t have any evidence that says there’s birth control, not that I really would expect there to be. Joseph Smith never really talked about that.
GT 2:29:05 That does bring up the idea, I know Dr. Larry Foster brought up the Oneida Community, who were kind of a free love movement. He said they had the most unusual form of birth control, which was basically don’t get the man too excited. In 20 years, there were less than [10 births.]
Mark 2:29:27 Of unplanned pregnancies.
GT 2:29:28 Right. So, he said it was amazingly effective. So, I mean, clearly the people in the 1840s knew what caused birth and could do everything except for intercourse, I guess.
Mark 2:29:44 It’s possible. I mean, these are 1840s people. But, these are people that are doing plural marriage. I mean, there are people that are…
GT 2:29:54 They had a reason to keep from getting pregnant, too.
Mark 2:29:57 Yeah, that’s the thing too, is people say one of the purposes, if not the purpose for polygamy is to raise up righteous seed. And that might be true. But I think in a lot of cases, especially in Nauvoo, Joseph was laying the foundation for that. I mean, Joseph could be a pragmatist when he needed to be. So, having plural wives, especially when his legal wife doesn’t know about a lot of cases. [Emma] doesn’t know and doesn’t approve, in any case, really. Yeah, I mean, he wasn’t an idiot. Maybe he took some risks, but he wasn’t an idiot. One thing we know is when William Clayton’s plural wife conceives, and becomes pregnant, he approaches Joseph. The way William talks to Joseph about it and the way Joseph responds is they think it’s a mistake. They don’t think it’s a transgression, like he did something wrong by it, in a moral sense. But something that is maybe not the smartest thing to do. And it’s something that they need to figure out what they’re going to do now. So, I think that kind of gives you some insight into their…
GT 2:31:21 So when did this happen?
Mark 2:31:22 This is 1843. I’m not sure when.
GT 2:31:25 And so we have a reference to a polygamous pregnancy prior to Joseph’s death.
Mark 2:31:31 That’s correct. We do. The other one is Joseph Bates Noble and his plural wife Sarah. They have a pregnancy before that. Because, I mean, that’s one of the things that polygamy skeptics bring up is not only do we not have any pregnancies from Joseph Smith, but we don’t have any from anybody that was involved. Laurel Ulrich addresses that in “A House Full of Females,” which I highly recommend. She’s one of the best, I think, the best prose writer who’s ever written on Nauvoo polygamy. Reading the book, it reads really well. She addresses that and she cites a letter by Vilate Kimball to her husband, Heber C. Kimball about Joseph Bates Noble and Sarah. She says, “Oh, you were right.” She alludes to they are expecting a child. Then she says, “We don’t have the faith for that yet. We’re not quite ready for that.” I think that’s part of it, is these people didn’t go from having very Victorian, very traditional Christian mores about marriage and sex to becoming full blown polygamists overnight, not most of them. So, they had to get used to the idea. Then once more people did it, once their friends started doing it, then it becomes more normal to them. So, I think that that’s a big part of it, too. So, there’s a few other things.
Mark 2:33:03 The other one is, and Laurel Ulrich makes this point that I should bring out, too. It’s often cited that Heber C. Kimball and his wife, Sarah Peake, who’s his first plural wife, that they had had a child together earlier. But, there’s conflicting evidence about whether or not… Her husband had come from England with her. Laurel Ulrich makes the point, and I agree with her, that letter implies that that child was not Heber’s.
GT 2:33:09 That’s interesting.
Mark 2:33:44 Yeah, so I’m inclined to agree with that. So, the other possibility is the low frequency of sexual relations. I mean, we don’t really know. For a lot of these, we know that there was a ceremony. That there were sexual relations might be implied. We have positive evidence in a few cases, at least. But we don’t really know very much about frequency, or really the extent and so I mean…
GT 2:34:27 More than likely the frequency was not very often.
Mark 2:34:31 Not very often, and it could be that for some of them, Joseph may have had one or two encounters with those women, if at all, and then not again. So, in a situation like that, women are usually only fertile one or two days out of the month, and even then there’s maybe what, a quarter percent or, a 25% chance that a conception is going to happen.
GT 2:34:57 Right.
Mark 2:34:58 So, in a monogamous situation, where you have a married couple that’s having relations regularly throughout the month, and yeah, I know within three or four months, they conceive, and then it’s likely. But, in a situation where maybe [sexual relations] was sporadic, it happens once or twice, and that’s it. In a situation, where they don’t have it that often, and it’s not very extensive, then it’s plausible [not to have pregnancies.] It’s not so likely that a child would be conceived, that we can say that since a child wasn’t verified that we can say, “No, it didn’t happen.” So, if you really combine all those things together, infant mortality, we don’t really know about frequency, I wouldn’t say that the lack of children is a good reason to exclude the possibility that Joseph was sexually active with women other than Emma.
Is D&C 132 a Forged Revelation?
Introduction
Polygamy skeptics love to claim that D&C 132 is a revelation forged by Brigham Young, and note the revelation wasn’t written in Joseph Smith’s handwriting. They conveniently forget that almost every revelation was written by scribes. We’ll look into this charge with Mark Tensmeyer and see if there is evidence of a forged revelation. Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 2:35:57 Very good. All right. Well, let’s move on to one of the big issues with polygamy skeptics: section 132. A lot of people I know say, “It wasn’t written by Joseph.” Obviously, Joseph didn’t write much. Most things were written by scribes.
Mark 2:36:17 Almost everything was written by scribes.
GT 2:36:19 Yeah, which, it seems like the skeptics seem to fail to acknowledge [that fact.] So, let’s talk about 132.
Mark 2:36:29 Right. So we talked about that. What we have is we have the manuscript in the handwriting of Joseph Kingsbury. Now, Joseph Kingsbury, he’s involved in a couple of ways. One, he’s the legal husband of one of Joseph’s plural wives, Sarah Ann Whitney, and he marries her after Joseph marries her as a plural wife and at Joseph’s request. So, the idea is that him being Sarah’s husband would mean that she was not available for courting or anything like that. So, there’s that and he’s also the widower of Sarah’s sister, Carolyn. The sister, her sister, Carolyn had died, and he had married her. Joseph had promised to seal him to Carolyn to as part of this arrangement, sealing for eternity to Carolyn.
Mark 2:37:27 He’s also the employee of his father-in-law, Newel K. Whitney, Bishop Whitney. He’s a clerk. The story is that after Hyrum gets this revelation, like I said earlier, he wants to show it to people and wants them to think that this is great and so forth. He shows it to, shortly after it’s committed to paper. He shows it to Bishop Whitney. Bishop Whitney wants a copy of it, and they allow him to. Now the thing is, Newel K. Whitney kept the running collection of manuscripts of Joseph’s revelations and had for a long time. Oliver Cowdery and the scripture committee that compiled the Doctrine & Covenants in 1835, borrowed from Newel K. Whitney’s collection. So, he had canonized, and he had uncanonized revelations. He had a collection of them. So, it’s not unusual that he would, and a few other people did. So, it’s not unusual that he would ask for it, and given [that] Whitney’s obviously an insider into polygamy, as is Joseph Kingsbury. It’s not unusual that they would be involved. So, one of the things that people will argue is well, Joseph Kingsbury is not one of Joseph’s known scribes. That would be significant if this was Joseph’s personal copy. It wasn’t. William Clayton, who was one of Joseph’s known scribes scribed the original copy. This was a copy that was kept by the Whitneys. Brigham Young eventually asked for it in like 1847/1848 at Winter Quarters. Before he does Newell K. Whitney’s son, Horace makes two copies of it, which the family keeps. Those copies are now in the Church History Library. You can review them, and they are word for word the same as the Kingsbury manuscript.
Mark 2:39:34 So, I really don’t see any evidence that the Kingsbury manuscript is a later fabrication. Joseph Kingsbury testified to all this both in an affidavit and then also in the Temple Lot [case.] The argument made by a lot [of people] is that “Well, he didn’t he wouldn’t swear to testimony in the in the Temple Lot case.” But, he affirmed it. He says in there, contrary to how it reads the RLDS abstract, he never said that he was afraid of perjury. He just said that it was his preference to affirm his testimony, rather than to swear it. He’s asked a lot of things throughout about whether he’ll swear to things that are not even controversial, like when he became a High Priest and things like that. He won’t swear to that, either. It’s just, he just didn’t want to do that. He didn’t like to swear to things.
GT 2:40:35 Is that kind of a New Testament thing where Jesus says you’re supposed to yea, yea, don’t swear.
Mark 2:40:40 You know, a lot of people have that. In the law, too, affirming your testimony here is the same consequence of perjury, if you testify falsely. But, some people, you can say, affirm. In a lot of the federal hearings, I listen to, the judge will just say, “Do you swear or affirm?” The answer is just yes. You don’t have to say which one.
GT 2:41:00 So, legally, it’s the same?
Mark 2:41:03 Yeah, legally, it’s the same. I find his testimony pretty credible. He says what he knows and if he doesn’t, if he’s not sure about something, he says he’s not sure, I can’t remember. So, there’s things he’s not very forthcoming about, like when he was asked about whether or not he had been involved in polygamy. He would not answer that question. But, about a lot of other things about the revelation, yeah, he told the story that he did. I don’t really see any reason for why Kingsbury manuscripts should be considered a forgery. I mean, there’s the provenance and like I said, earlier, Leonard Soby, who was not a Brighamite, who was there when Hyrum Smith read the revelation to the High Council, said, “Yeah, as far as I can remember that is the exact same document.
GT 2:41:03 Yeah.
Mark 2:41:08 And what is said there in the Kingsbury manuscript is pretty consistent with what Austin Cowles wrote in the affidavit in the Expositor. There are some key phrases from the Expositor that appear there in Joseph Kingsbury’s [manuscript.] So, I don’t really see any reason to disregard it.
GT 2:42:28 Of course, the other copy, was it the Clayton copy? Was the one that got burned when Emma threw it in the fire?
Mark 2:42:33 Yeah, or that Joseph burned on her behalf. But, for one reason or another is non-extant. But that’s kind of another thing is you look at a lot of these things. If there was this conspiracy, it seems like these guys go through a lot of effort that’s pretty unnecessary. I mean, why come up with a story about Emma burning the original copy, when you have William Clayton right there? If you’re going to have Joseph Kingsbury, make a copy, why not have William Clayton do it, or Willard Richards? They’re both there. And they’re both Joseph’s own scribes. Why wouldn’t you set up somebody as a as a child of Joseph Smith, why wouldn’t you? If you’re going to have women lie about being his wife, why wouldn’t you have somebody lie about being his child. There’s just so many of these things like that.
GT 2:43:26 So, did the polygamy skeptics kind of just deny that story that Emma burned it at all?
Mark 2:43:33 She said she didn’t. I think that that’s actually possible, that it wasn’t Emma that did it, because, we don’t really have firsthand accounts that she did. William Clayton says that. Well, Brigham Young says that in 1852, but, he doesn’t know firsthand. He doesn’t say how he knows that. William Clayton didn’t know it firsthand. It’s one of the things that I think it’s possible that maybe she did burn it, but not until much later. I don’t know. I mean, we have to account that it’s gone. It’s non-extant.
GT 2:44:11 Okay. What are some of the other documents that polygamy skeptics say are forged documents that are…
Mark 2:44:22 Well, there’s the William Clayton journal. The William Clayton journal is in there and, well, pretty much any of the documents that we talked about before are going to have to be falsified in order for Joseph Smith not to have been a polygamist. And even ones we didn’t talk about. We didn’t talk about the letter to the Whitney’s that’s actually in Joseph’s handwriting.
GT 2:44:49 Oh, really?
Mark 2:44:50 Oh, yeah. It’s a letter. When Joseph is in hiding during one of the attempts to [get him] extradited back to Missouri. He writes a letter. He writes it out to Brother Newell and Elizabeth and blank Whitney. It says, “I want you three to come.” He doesn’t mention polygamy directly. He says, “I want to seal the blessings you had earlier. I really want to see you. I’m lonely. I need your presence for things.” The interesting thing he says is, “If Emma is coming, you need to stay away.” The implication there, it’s not direct, but it’s pretty clear. Why else would the Whitney’s need to avoid Emma, when they’re going to see Joseph? So, it confirms that part of the mainstream narrative of Joseph Smith’s thing. The response to that usually, it’s either A, it’s a forgery, or B that he’s not saying they’re to stay away from Emma, as far as Emma catching them, but he’s afraid that that Emma is being followed by the law enforcement officers who were trying to arrest him. But, that explanation, I mean, his letter shows concern for them. It shows that he does want the Whitney’s to make sure that they’re not being followed by his enemies, and he wants to be safe from his enemies.
Mark 2:46:21 But, he makes it very clear that, I mean, his explanation that he wants them to avoid Emma because they might lead [authorities to him,] doesn’t make any sense, because he’s not concerned about Emma coming to see him. He talks about Emma is coming to see him and he’s not concerned about that. He talks about it. He doesn’t say, “If Emma catches you, I won’t be safe.” He says if Emma catches you, you won’t be safe. So, it doesn’t…
GT 2:46:46 Because you have the Partridge sisters where Emma got really mad. You have the Fanny Alger issue where Emma got really mad.
Mark 2:46:55 Yeah, Emma it does go on record of not really being very tolerant of this. I can’t say I really blame her.
GT 2:47:03 Right. I don’t blame her, either.
Mark 2:47:05 Oh, not at all. Yeah, I don’t blame her in any of this stuff here. I don’t even blame her for denying it later. But, yeah, so, that’s another document, not by Clayton.
GT 2:47:17 We didn’t even mention. Although, I guess, have we decided that the Eliza Snow, getting pushed down the stairs, that’s not a true story?
Mark 2:47:26 Yeah, that’s not a true story.
GT 2:47:27 Yeah, I know Don Bradley talked about that, in my interview.
Mark 2:47:30 Not every story about Nauvoo polygamy has to be true for any of it to be true.
GT 2:47:36 Right.
Mark 2:47:36 I mean, like, the underground railroad. There is another thing that there’s not really a lot of contemporary evidence about later evidence comes about, yet there’s a lot of folklore stories in there, too. But, if you want to argue that the underground railroad didn’t happen, because a lot of these later stories about it are not true.
GT 2:47:58 Yeah.
Mark 2:47:58 So, there’s a lot of those documents. The William Clayton journal is one. The argument there is that William Clayton starts writing in one journal and then when he gets introduced into polygamy, when he marries his plural wife, he switches to a second notebook, and he continues to make some concurrent entries.
GT 2:48:25 In both journals.
Mark 2:48:27 Yes, some. We don’t know how many. In the published accounts of his journals, I’ve only been able to find one entry and that’s that very first one, where he marries his first plural wife. Then, in September 1844, he goes back to writing in the first journal, in the first notebook. So, the argument is, well the second notebook is something that he wrote later, using entries from the first one and he added these things. And that happens, Latter-day Saints did that quite a bit. They go back and they’d rewrite a journal, and they would add things to it. But, in any case I’m aware of, they didn’t really represent that they wrote these things contemporary. They made it clear that the things in there were memories that say, “Now I remember, this happened also.”
Mark 2:49:19 Anne Frank did the same thing, actually, with her journals.
GT 2:49:23 Oh.
Mark 2:49:24 Yeah, she did. She went back. When she decided that she wanted people to actually read this,]. She went back and rewrote it from the beginning and added things and took things out. So, there’s actually two copies. There are two drafts of the Anne Frank journal and neither one of them are complete. You have to use both of them in order to patch together what happened.
GT 2:49:51 Oh, that’s interesting.
Mark 2:49:52 Yeah, it is. So, it’s something that people did. I don’t I don’t think that that’s really the case with William Clayton, here. Of course, the William Clayton journals haven’t been released yet. They’re going to be released as part of Joseph Smith Papers. That’s going to be really neat. But that’s in the future. But, from what we know, one thing is he doesn’t really talk about future. He doesn’t really sound like he’s making a Brighamite case. Ironically, William Clayton’s journal is one of the only places where it talks about Joseph having any kind of conflict with Brigham Young or thinking that they have a contemporary document where Joseph says that Brigham Young sinned and needs to repent. Ironically, it the William Clayton journal. [It’s in] notebook two. It’s the second notebook, where it says it, too.
GT 2:50:41 The forged notebook?
Mark 2:50:43 Yeah, and the other one, too. The other thing it says, “Joseph told me that if anything happened to him, or anything happened to him and Hyrum, that Samuel will be the President of the Church.” William Clayton says that. So, again, definitely not something that supports the Brighamite narrative.
GT 2:51:03 Right.
Mark 2:51:04 Then, the other big thing, this has been brought up. Joe Geisner brought this to my attention first. This is Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee talk about this in their essay that’s in Producing Ancient Scripture, where there’s the Kinderhook Plates. I believe it’s June 1st, or it might be June 5th, 1843. Joseph has shown the Kinderhook Plates. William Clayton takes one of the plates and he traces it in his journal. The Kinderhook Plates are only there in Nauvoo for a few days. Years and years, decades later, when the Church got possession of one of those, Stanley Kimball measured the tracing against the Kinderhook plates and it was a perfect fit.
GT 2:51:49 Oh, wow.
Mark 2:51:50 So, there’s an item that is only in Nauvoo for a little bit of time, and potentially only had access to for a short time. William Clayton traced it right there. It’s in the same day, under the same entry for the marriage ceremony between Joseph and Lucy Walker.
GT 2:52:07 Oh, well, [that speaks] even more to the authenticity of it.
Mark 2:52:10 Exactly, and so that’s in notebook two. So, there’s that, too. So, there’s a lot of these things. In the law, you asked me in the beginning about like legal standards and stuff. In most any situation I’m familiar with, like in the case of wills or anything, if one party is arguing fraud, the burden is on them to show by clear and convincing evidence, which is the standard of evidence that’s between preponderance of the evidence and beyond reasonable doubt, that fraud actually did happen. It’s not the burden of the other person to prove that fraud didn’t happen. For these things like a journal that’s something that we have provenance for, or the Kingsbury manuscript that we have provenance for, to show that those things weren’t fake. I brought up Anne Frank. I mean, there are lots of people that say the Anne Frank Journal is fake. The Anne Frank House subjected that journal to every test possible, to prove authenticity, and there’s always another argument that naysayers can come up with. There’s just really only so much you can do to prove something [isn’t forged]. It’s refuting a hypothetical, to prove something didn’t happen, and that’s just–logically, you can’t do that. But, based on what I can see, I don’t really see reason to think that the William Clayton journal is a later forgery.
Get Peer Reviewed!
Introduction
Polygamy skeptics complain that their work isn’t taken seriously. I’m going to issue a challenge to them to get peer reviewed. We’ll also talk about the charge that some people complain that saying Joseph Smith was a polygamist impugns his character. What does Mark Tensmeyer say about that? Check out our conversation….
Interview
GT 2:53:40 Well, I think this all brings us up to the idea that if the polygamy skeptics want to be taken seriously, they’ve got to become peer reviewed, don’t they?
Mark 2:53:52 Yeah, if they want to engage the academic community, then they absolutely do. Because that is how you engage the academic community. Up until the 1970s, it was that common belief that Joseph Smith was the founder of the priesthood ban. It was Lester Bush, and a few other people that challenged that academically and we’ve got to respond to that is now the consensus that he was not.
GT 2:54:14 Right.
Mark 2:54:15 So, if you want to engage the academic community, if you want them the academic community to respond to you, that is how you do it. That’s how it happens for any discipline.
GT 2:54:25 You’ve got to start writing in Dialogue or Journal of Mormon History, or John Whitmer, or something.
Mark 2:54:29 Not even that. I mean, just write in any kind of peer review [journal.] Write in, like a history of Illinois journal, just somewhere.
GT 2:54:44 Yeah.
Mark 2:54:45 If you really want to engage…. I think one of the arguments for positive evidence of forged documents is History of the Church. In History of the Church, things are changed quite a bit in the Nauvoo period. There’s one quote from Brigham Young. He’s completing the History of the Church. He spent all day revising the history of Joseph Smith. There’s a journal entry, it’s in October 1843, 1842, I don’t remember, where it says Joseph is walking up the street and he’s saying how to handle people that are teaching plurality of wives, and that it’s his position that a man should only have one wife. In the History of the Church, when that got written and published in the 1850s, they changed that to say a man can only have one wife, unless he’s been commanded to otherwise by revelation from he who holds the keys. That was added. So, they say, “Well, that’s proof of forged documents.”
Mark 2:55:50 Well, you have to understand that there’s a difference between writing a history, a secondary source, and changing primary sources. There’s a big, big difference there. That was a pretty common way of telling history and producing documents. Joseph Smith, himself, did so extensively, when he started the History of the Church. He rewrote things and he put the 1835 versions of revelations in, as if those had been how those revelations had gone since the 1820’s, from the beginning.
GT: Yes.
Mark 2:56:32 With no explanation, he completely removed Jesse Gause, who was the first 2nd counselor in the First Presidency.
GT: That’s right.
Mark 2:56:32 He [Jesse] had played a major role in the establishment of the United Order. He [Joseph] completely removed him and reworded everything that originally Frederick G. Williams had… He did stuff like [that,] and that was, actually, a fairly common way of writing history at the time. The documented history of George Washington, which came out about the same time, did a very similar thing. People just wanted to create a cohesive narrative. So, that’s really what that was. I don’t see how that discredits the Utah era of Mormonism and discredits Joseph Smith, because they both did it. Also, it doesn’t mean that because they did that, that they actually went and changed the primary documents, themselves.
GT 2:57:31 I mean, how do you even do that?
Mark 2:57:33 I guess you could. They didn’t. Because we have the History of the Church. We know what they want the documents to have said to have matched their thing. We also have Joseph’s journal. They don’t match. So, again, if they’re going to go through all this trouble, why even keep the original documents around to show that you had forged things, if you’re going to go to that effort to do it.
GT 2:57:58 Right.
Mark 2:57:59 I mean, again, it goes back to, they did go through so much effort to do all these things, when it’s a conspiracy. So, I don’t really think that’s [credible.] Yeah, so [the story on] forged documents. I mean, later documents, you can classify them as what they are, as Utah-era documents, but as far as primary source documents being forged, I don’t see a case for that. I mean, all these documents would have to be faked and there’s not really good evidence that there is.
GT 2:58:31 I just want to throw out a challenge to all the polygamy skeptics out there. Get your stuff peer reviewed and I’ll be more than happy to talk to you.
Mark 2:58:43 Well, yeah, because the fact that it’s peer reviewed, doesn’t mean it’s true or false. It’s on a bandwagon, where people will argue. But, if you want to at least engage the academic community, that is how you do it. If you’re of the opinion that objectively that position is reasonable, that it’s not a religious apologetic, then I think it’s a fair expectation that you should be able to make the case through using academic standards.
GT 2:59:20 Alright, one more thing I wanted to talk about was, you know, there are some people that get very upset when you talk about Joseph Smith practicing polygamy, and will say, “You’re impugning Joseph Smith’s character. He would never have done something like that, or he couldn’t have been a prophet.” How would you respond to those kinds of accusations?
Mark 2:59:46 Well, I’ll tell a quick story about that. About three years ago, I was with the family. We were at the Temple Lot, and we stopped and we visited the Temple Lot. I wish I had caught his name, the name of the gentleman that was the guide there. I assume he’s an elder or something.
GT 3:00:01 Was it Randy Sheldon?
Mark 3:00:02 Oh, no, this is after he died.
GT 3:00:05 Oh, Randy’s dad died. Yeah, I’m trying to remember what his name was, but Randy’s still there.
Mark 3:00:10 Oh, maybe. Possibly. So, one of the things I said to him was,, “I’m really impressed by how your church has had a commitment to tell the truth about our history, regardless of damage.” Now, remember, the Temple Lot Church is about as anti-polygamy as they come…
GT 3:00:31 That’s, right.
Mark 3:00:32 …in the Mormon world. They are, in terms of primitivism of not having newer revelation that contradicts older revelation, they do that more than anybody. I mean, they reject a lot of Joseph Smith’s revelations. They reject the three degrees of glory, because they say that contradicts the Book of Mormon. They reject offices that aren’t in the Bible, or the Book of Mormon. And they reject polygamy as being a true doctrine, but they’ve always maintained that Joseph did it.
Mark 3:01:09 So, I mentioned that to him andb said, “I’m really impressed that your church-and always has been committed to tell the truth, no matter what.”
He said, Absolutely.” He said, “Our job is not to be here to defend Joseph Smith. The gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of truth.” I would add that you’re not slandering Joseph Smith, by telling the truth about what he did. If it’s something he did, it’s not slander. If it’s true, it’s not slander. The definition of slander is things that are not true. So, I fully understand that there are people that look not only at polygamy, but the circumstances about how it was introduced, and how Joseph went about it, that can look at that and say, “Wow, that shows that he’s not an honest person. We can’t trust anything he says.” I can understand that. I don’t feel that way. But I can see how people would and I understand that. But because something challenges a deeply held conviction of yours, or is uncomfortable to you, doesn’t make it not true. Personally, I would much rather look at Joseph Smith as he was, and decide from there, if that’s somebody I can believe in as a prophet, than have to imagine somebody who wasn’t, in order to believe in him as a prophet. I suppose that’s my thoughts on that. I’m saying, it’s a tough thing.
Mark 3:03:07 Another thing, I don’t think him being a prophet, if we’re looking at this as polygamy being a crime, something that discredits him or impugns his character, I don’t necessarily think it does. But, if we’re going with that, I don’t think he’s entitled to any more benefit of the doubt than any other person would be. I mean, if you’re looking at this body of evidence, and if it was anybody else, and you would say it’s obvious, then it shouldn’t be any different for him. If it’s something he did, and that’s what he did. If the evidence shows that’s what he did, then that’s what he did. I would love it if it was really the Indians who massacred the settlers in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and it wasn’t the Mormons. Those poor people still would have been killed, but at least it wouldn’t have been my people that did it. But that’s not what happened. I’d much rather look at the reality and come to terms of that truth, and come to a full reconciliation. I’d rather find the truth, accept the truth and then decide where I go from there, than try to argue that, that that’s not what happened. So those are my thoughts on that.
GT 3:04:25 All right. Was there anything we missed? Was there anything that polygamy skeptics bring up that kind of blindside people who aren’t familiar?
Mark 3:04:35 A lot of things that brought this up, and, I guess, really quickly on this, it’s the supposed admissions that Brigham Young made that he actually is the one that had the revelation on polygamy.
GT 3:04:47 Okay.
Mark 3:04:48 Now, let’s go over one of them. This is one people point to. It’s an 1875 conference where he said, when he was in England, “The Lord manifested to me visions in the spirit that I did not then understand. I never opened my mouth to any person concerning them until l came to Nauvoo. Joseph had never mentioned this. There had never been a thought of in the Church that I ever knew anything about at the time. But I had this for myself, and I kept it to myself.” He’s talking about polygamy. So, he’s saying that he had this revelation, independent of Joseph Smith, that polygamy was a true principle while he was still in England. So, they think that’s an admission. But, even then, maybe Brigham Young did, maybe he didn’t. Personal revelation is a thing in Mormonism. Having revelation about something that’s going to happen in the Church is a common thing. In that same speech of Brigham Young’s, he goes on a length about baptism for the dead being something that he had revelations about before Joseph did, and that was something Joseph implemented what the apostles were in England.
Mark 3:05:56 There’s actually contemporary evidence that in England, the apostles had thought about baptisms for the dead before they heard that Joseph was doing it. So, I don’t think it does. He says that he didn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t until he came home and Joseph explained it to him that he understood what it was that that was about. So, maybe he did. That’s a common thing.
Mark 3:06:22 Lucy Mack Smith writes about that sort of thing all the time in her book, about how one of them or how Joseph Smith, Sr. had this revelation that later or something showed up in the Book of Mormon or things of that nature. I mean, it happens. I don’t think that that’s an admission.
Mark 3:06:40 The other one is a quote from Schuyler Colfax, who was a congressman at the time, and he later became the Vice-President of the United States. He visited Brigham Young in 1865. They had a conversation. Schuyler wrote about it. Well, he suggested that Brigham Young abolish polygamy, And he says he pointed to it. Then, Brigham Young said he’d be glad [to abolish polygamy] if he could have a revelation, suspending polygamy. It had been a great trial for him to submit to it, that the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants point to monogamy, but that polygamy is a later revelation commanded by God to him and a few others, permitted and advised to the rest of the Church.
Mark 3:07:29 So, basically, all that Brigham Young says is that the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants, which at the time was the 1844 Doctrine and Covenants, that didn’t have section 132 in it, that still had the old article of marriage that said that monogamy was a standard. He said that the revelation on plural marriage came after those revelations. That is really all he said. He says, “It was commanded to me and a few others to take plural wives.” He doesn’t say that it was a revelation he had. That’s from a journalist of Schuyler Colfax that was published later. I found another source on this, how Colfax had written a letter to the War Department, at about same time, and he recounts the same conversation. In that one, he says that Brigham Young says it was Joseph Smith that had the revelation on plural marriage. [Note: I have been able to find this document since, but have found an 1865 article from Albany NY’s Country Gentleman
GT 3:08:23 Okay.
Mark 3:08:25 The quote I read earlier, he doesn’t say that it was him and not Joseph. He just said it came later. These are the things that people look at as admissions, as kind of your smoking gun type things that Brigham Young started polygamy, not Joseph Smith. I don’t think that they are. I don’t see how looking at them like that, you can come to that conclusion. So, there you have it.
GT 3:08:53 All right. So, that’s it. (Chuckling) After three hours, that’s it.
Mark 3:09:00 Yeah, I think we covered a lot of the stuff that’s in there.
GT 3:09:08 Well, Mark Tensmeyer, I really appreciate you sharing with us all this knowledge about the polygamy skeptics on how we can talk about those. Do you have any upcoming articles or books? Can you remind us about that?
Mark 3:09:23 There’s the one I wanted to talk about. It’s a chapter that’s going to be in a book by Signature Books that’s just about early Mormon polygamy. My chapter is about some of the things we’ve been talking about. We covered a lot more things than I talk about in that chapter.
GT 3:09:40 Oh, wow. So, we got the comprehensive view.
Mark 3:09:43 Yeah, I didn’t want to leave too much out. But, then again, there’s always stuff that’s left out, so it’s my hope and my expectation that this will be followed up by more things, either by me or by somebody else that covers things like Cochranites, all kinds of things like that.
GT 3:10:08 Do we have a name of the book yet?
Mark 3:10:10 I don’t know if we do. It’s by Signature Books. There might be a name for it, but I don’t know it.
GT 3:10:16 You don’t know what it is, yet. No release date or anything?
Mark 3:10:19 It’s going to be year after next, at least, at the soonest.
GT 3:10:25 Okay.
Mark 3:10:26 So, I’m glad that we have this interview here for people to use in the meantime.
GT 3:10:35 Yeah, that’s great.
Mark 3:10:38 I might follow up about this with other things. I might follow the paper up with just an article just goes over miscellaneous arguments people had made, because there’s a lot of other stuff we covered here today. I don’t go into in the article, and I think it’d be good to just have someplace where the work could be. Who knows? Maybe somebody else will beat me to it for that, which I’d be happy about. I think that would be fine.
GT 3:11:13 All right. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me here on Gospel Tangents. I really appreciate it, Mark.
Mark 3:11:20 I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
[1] Part 1 can be purchased at https://amzn.to/33oWvd9. Part 2 can be purchased at https://amzn.to/2Kb5qpp.
[2] Mark Curtis added a correction to this point. “Hemlock Knots is erroneously associated with Phil Davis. It has nothing to do with him, and he would admit that. HK was an independent research project I started a year before ever meeting Phil Davis. He has zero involvement in that project, website, YouTube channel, and even the Facebook pages and groups which he isn’t even participating in, let alone running. While it’s true that I know Phil Davis and others that associate with him and have studied many topics with him (some agreed upon, others I don’t agree), it’s not tied to him or any other person, group, movement, etc. It’s literally a synthesis of all sources (LDS, RLDS, CoC, non-Mormon, whatever). If it’s history, we want it on the timelines to discuss. Anyway, hope that adds some much clarity on the associations being assumed, probably from rumor.” For more info on Mark starting Hemlock Knots, see https://youtu.be/bohu90AkVuw .
[3] Baseball player Jose Canseco never admitted to using steroids as a player. After his career, he told names of players, including teammate Mark McGuire, who used steroids. Many called Jose a liar, but he was vindicated when leaked drug test results showed he was correct.
[4] Because she performed oral sex.
Copyright © 2024
Gospel Tangents
All Rights Reserved
Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:12:20 — 176.1MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Email | | More
