As we continue our conversation with Dr. Todd Compton, we’ll discuss some of the more controversial marriages of Joseph Smith. Fanny Alger was just 16 years old in 1833. Was her marriage to Joseph that early, or as late as 1836 as some claim? We’ll also discuss Sylvia Sessions Lyon. Was she having sexual relations with both Joseph Smith and Windsor Lyon when Josephine Lyon was conceived? Todd seems to think so. Check out our conversation…
Full Video Interview: Todd Compton
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Counting Joseph Smith’s Wives
GT 00:38 I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think one of the important things that In Sacred Loneliness brought out was the number of wives that Joseph had, which I know is still kind of disputed. How many did you have in In Sacred Loneliness? How many did you document?
Todd 01:01 Well, I found another list of Joseph Smith’s wives. It wasn’t like a modern footnoted list, like the one that was in Fawn Brodie’s biography, but it was a good list. It came out —. When did it come out? It was the Andrew Jenson list.
GT 01:27 Right.
Todd 01:28 [It came out in] what? 1880’s, was it? I should know the year. [1887]
GT 01:31 Somewhere around there.
Todd 01:33 So, he had [27] in his list. So, this was really helpful when I found that. A lot of Nauvoo veterans were alive [in the 1880s]. A lot of the plural wives of Joseph Smith, were still alive. He could consult with them. William Clayton, who had been in Joseph Smith’s private polygamy circle, was alive. So, Andrew Jenson had good sources available for this list, and I think there were [27]. So, I accepted all [27] of his wives. I felt that he was a good source. Obviously, he wasn’t in Nauvoo, but he had a lot of sources there who were in Nauvoo, and who were Joseph Smith’s plural wives and someone like William Clayton [to corroborate the information.] In fact, Andrew Jenson’s idea was, he was going to have little biographies of each of the plural wives.
GT 02:47 Just like you did.
Todd 02:48 Yeah, and, in fact, some of the places where he set in type, [he put in] the name of one of the plural wives, and then nothing [no biography]. Some of the wives he did have biographies, but some he didn’t. I suspect it was because of the wives who were married to other husbands, who I call polyandrous wives.
GT 03:18 Right.
Todd 03:19 In other words, Zina Diantha Huntington was married to Henry Jacobs, and had a couple of kids with Henry Jacobs. And at the same time she was married, she had a marriage ceremony with Joseph Smith. So, she was married to Joseph Smith at the same time she was married with William Henry Jacobs. By the way, this is one thing [line of research] that was started at the Huntington Library, as I said, as I tried to find the documents behind these polyandrous marriages and [was] trying to document what was going on. One of my big questions was, did they leave the first husbands when they married Joseph Smith? So, diaries were very helpful. In fact, Zina Diantha kept a diary through Nauvoo, which was very helpful. What I came to find was that these plural wives, who were married to other men, they did not leave these other men. They continued to live with these other men, and sometimes had children with these other men.
Todd 04:31 So, I was trying to document these lives and find out what was going on. But this is my theory — is that in Mormon history [and culture], the plural wives of Joseph Smith became a taboo subject. I think part of the reason was because this issue of Joseph Smith marrying women who were married to other men became an especially taboo subject. And they didn’t know how to explain it. And it’s well documented. It’s well documented. So, I suspect that when Andrew Jenson started this project of writing the lives of all these plural wives, when he came across that issue, either he stopped doing the project because he didn’t want to write about the details of those kinds of marriages, because he didn’t understand them. Or someone else advised him and said, “It’d be a good idea to not tell the lives of these women like Zina.” But now, it’s all well documented. You can’t ignore it.
GT 06:02 Right.
Todd 06:03 And someone like Zina, when I was thinking about the whole issue of writing about Joseph Smith’s polygamy in Nauvoo and writing about these women, I was an active member of the Church. So, I was thinking, “Is this the right thing for me to do?” One of the things I realized was, these women are major, major historical figures in Mormon history. And Joseph Smith is a major historical figure, not just in Mormon history, but in American history. If you have a major historical figure, you can’t just ignore their marriages. So, I came to believe that it was the right thing to do that. What? If I don’t document these women, someone else will do it, very quickly, and people had already started doing it, conservative writers like Danel Bachman and liberal writers like Fawn Brodie and Richard Van Wagoner.
Todd 07:24 So, Andrew Jenson came up with [27] wives of Joseph Smith. I accepted all those. Then, I found a few others that are documented in other places. And there’s some sources in Nauvoo, some contemporary sources, like William Clayton journal/diary. So, I came up with 33, who I felt were well documented, that I was satisfied were plural wives of Joseph Smith during his lifetime. However, that is not a scientific number.
GT 08:07 I think Brian Hales came up with a few more, too, didn’t he?
Todd 08:09 Yeah, Brian Hales, I think he gives 35.
GT 08:12 Right.
Todd 08:15 One thing I did was I had those 33, but then I said, “possible wives,” where there’s some documentation, but not quite enough for me yet. Then I had early proxy wives. In other words, they’re married to Joseph Smith, like in the Nauvoo Temple, and that’s evidence that they may have been wives of Joseph Smith during his lifetime. Because all of the wives that are well-documented, they did have these proxy marriages. However, a couple of people had proxy marriages where they had not been married to Joseph Smith during his lifetime. One was Cordelia Morley. Joseph had proposed to her, and she turned him down. Then she felt bad after his death, and she had a proxy marriage.
GT 09:03 Oh, really?
Todd 09:05 Yeah. So, there’s, it’s not a scientific thing, and scholars can disagree. I think Richard Bushman, in Rough Stone Rolling, he accepted my 33, but he felt one was not adequately documented. So, he has 32 on his list. He rejected Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris Smith. I forget her last marriage, but she had an early…
GT 09:46 She was the one that was married to William Morgan, the Mason.
Todd 09:49 Yeah, the Masonic martyr. So, she had an early proxy marriage to Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo Temple. And she’s on Jenson’s list. So, I accepted her as a wife of Joseph Smith. You have other people [historians] who are going to have fewer [wives on their lists]. Then you have people who totally reject that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy at all.
GT 10:21 Right.
Todd 10:22 So, we disagree on that.
GT 10:25 Do you have anything to say to those people? (Chuckling)
Todd 10:32 Uh.
GT 10:33 They pop up on my channel all the time.
Todd 10:35 I think the reliable evidence is overwhelming.
GT 10:40 I do, too.
Todd 10:42 So, you can disagree about one piece of evidence and stake…
GT 10:55 Well, let me ask you this.
Todd 10:56 You can put a lot of emphasis on one piece of evidence, but when you have so much that’s reliable…
Show Me the Children
GT 11:02 What do you say to those people who say, “Well, where are the children?”
Todd 11:06 Well, first, let me say that some people say, “Okay, Joseph had these marriages. We accept that he had actual marriages.” I state in my book, this is how I am judging whether there was a marriage or not. Was there a marriage ceremony? So, some people have said, “Okay, we agree. There was a marriage ceremony. But there were no sexual relations and no kids.”
Todd 11:46 My point of view is that with marriage, sexual relations and kids is such a standard part of marriage, that this is what you expect. And if you think there is no sexual relations, it’s your burden of proof to prove that there were no sexual relations. And there were other special things about the Nauvoo situation, and one was that it was very, very secret. So, if there are going to be kids, they would not be raised by Joseph Smith in the Joseph Smith household. And Joseph Smith was not living [openly] with his plural wives. In Utah, you might have someone, a polygamist and he has, say, four wives, and he visits one wife part of the month, the other wife part of the month. He visits them regularly and has sexual relations regularly. That wasn’t the case with Joseph Smith. He had a problem with Emma, who wouldn’t accept polygamy. And even when she accepted the marriage of Emily and Eliza Partridge, she kicked them out of the house very soon after. So, with Joseph, this was not open polygamy, as in Utah.
Todd 13:30 So that said, there is good documentation that — at least these women later testified that— he had relations with them.
GT 13:43 In the Temple Lot case.
Todd 13:44 In the Temple Lot case. In fact, I have Melissa Lott’s Temple Lot testimony in The Documents book. That’s the only thing I had from her. It’s an interesting document, where she, under oath, she testified — I forget her exact language, but she testified that there were sexual relations. Emily Partridge did, also. She also testified in the Temple Lot case. So, here’s another document that may have some bearing on this issue is that Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, who was a plural wife of Joseph Smith, she said, “Yes, Joseph Smith, his plural wives had children, and I know three who were raised under other names.”
GT 14:51 Right.
Todd 14:53 And we have…
GT 14:57 Were these polyandrous marriages or not?
Todd 15:02 Mary Elizabeth didn’t give us the names of who she was thinking about.
GT 15:07 Referring to, yeah.
GT 15:09 Because I know there’s been DNA tests on six, I believe, possible [progeny.] I know the biggest one, the most recent one was the Sylvia Sessions Lyon. And that was ruled that her husband, Brother Windsor Lyon was the father, not Joseph.
Todd 15:28 Right.
GT 15:29 And so, do you think, especially in that one case, that it indicates that she didn’t know who the father was?
Todd 15:38 Probably, yes. But let me get to that in just a second.
GT 15:41 Okay.
Sylvia Sessions Lyon
Todd 15:42 We have another document that says, well, testimony [of] Ebenezer Robinson, who actually was kind of in the RLDS tradition at that point. They had this idea that these were all eternity-only marriages, all of them. Ebenezer Robinson, even though he’s in that tradition, he said, “Yes, there was a place in Iowa, where the plural wives would go to have children.” In other words, it wasn’t a publicly accepted thing in Nauvoo, itself, but they would go someplace else and have children. I forget if he was talking about Joseph Smith’s children.
GT 16:30 He was just talking about polygamy, in general.
Todd 16:32 So, according to him, that was going on. According to Mary Elizabeth, there were kids. We don’t have them documented, as far as names go, but there were kids. So, in addition to this situation, where it was secret, Nauvoo polygamy, where Joseph Smith wasn’t visiting all his wives regularly. Then we have the case of Sylvia Sessions Lyon Smith Kimball. She was daughter of Patty Bartlett Sessions Smith Parry, widely known as Patty Sessions. Both Patty and Sylvia married Joseph Smith polyandrously. In other words, they were married to other men when they married Joseph Smith. So, Sylvia was married to a businessman, Windsor Lyon. He had a store and they were pretty well to do. They had a good house. She had a daughter in Nauvoo named Josephine. She was raised as Josephine Lyon. And it’s interesting. I think she was the only child of Windsor Lyon, and Sylvia. I think she was their only child who survived, this Josephine Lyon.
GT 17:03 Because she [Sylvia] had children through other men?
Todd 18:21 Well, later she did.
GT 18:25 Yeah.
Todd 18:26 But, with Windsor Lyon, she only had the one who survived, Josephine. All the others died young. She had four or five kids, and they all died young, except for Josephine. So, flash forward ahead to Utah — well, a little before that she married. When other Mormons went to Utah, she married a non-Mormon here in the Nauvoo area. So, she stayed back here and had like three or four kids with this person. So, she could have kids. Then she decided she wanted to be with her family in Utah, and she left this non-Mormon and went to Utah. So, this non- Mormon, he was kind of a banker. He always helped with his kids, financially, in Utah. They would go back and visit him.
Todd 19:32 But anyway, Sylvia Sessions Lyon ended up in Utah. Again, she was also married to Heber C. Kimball. And, though she never lived with Heber C. Kimball, she ended up living in Bountiful, near her mother and her brother. So, she was approaching death and she had kids. She had this child who was raised as Josephine Lyon. Windsor Lyon died, by the way. She [Josephine] later married someone named Fisher. So, her name was Josephine Lyon Fisher, technical name. But when Sylvia Sessions was approaching death, she called Josephine to her and told her that she was the child of Joseph Smith and told her a little bit about the circumstances of her marriage to Joseph.
Todd 20:40 Much later when Josephine was a bit older, she put all this down in an affidavit. And it was Joseph F. Smith [who] was collecting affidavits. He had heard [about Josephine]. People heard, people knew. There’s other evidence of people saying, “Oh, yeah. There’s a woman in Bountiful, who has a daughter, who was a child to Joseph Smith,” from other sources. So, Josephine Fisher put this all down in the affidavit, and it was a legal document. And there were witnesses and so on, and so on.
Todd 21:30 So now, way fast forward into modern times, and there’s a Mormon, who’s a scientist who deals with DNA issues. So, I am not a scientist, so I don’t know how to explain, exactly, how he has gone ahead. But he has felt that he has proven, scientifically, that Josephine Fisher was not the child of Joseph Smith. She was the child of Windsor Lyon.
GT 22:09 Right, Ugo Perego.
Todd 22:12 Ugo Perego. I’m not a scientist. I would really like to be a scientist and be able to assess this better as a scientist. But, for now, I accept it. So, if we accept it, I think we have to agree that that Sylvia Sessions felt that Josephine was the daughter of Joseph Smith. However, she was the daughter of Windsor Lyon. So, in one of these polyandrous marriages, she was having sexual relations with Joseph Smith, but also with Windsor Lyon. So that is what is going on with that. So, I think we still have evidence that there were sexual relations in one of these marriages, and this is a polyandrous marriage. So, that’s how I understand the situation. Again, I’m not a scientist. I’m provisionally accepting that Josephine was the daughter of Windsor.
Dating Fanny Alger Sealing
GT 23:21 So, one more thing I wanted to talk about was, I was surprised last night. We had dinner and you had dated Fanny Alger’s marriage much earlier than I expected. And was there a marriage ceremony? I guess that’s a good another good thing, or was it an affair?
Todd 23:41 Well, your second question I can answer very quickly. Yes, there was a marriage ceremony.
GT 23:49 Okay.
Todd 23:50 And, as you know, that’s important to me, because I’m using that as the criteria for whether there really was a marriage. So, here’s the story on that one. Again, here we are back in– after I did research at the Huntington Library, and decided I wanted to continue with my research, I knew I had to go to a lot of different libraries in Utah. And I had family up here, so I could stay with them, and go visit these libraries and take my laptop and take notes and transcribe things. Again, the internet was in its infancy, so we couldn’t get these primary documents online. I went and I spent many wonderful weeks at the–we called it Church Archives back then. I guess now we call it Church History Library and Archives. It was in a different building, then. Everywhere I went, I told them what I was working on. I decided, they may be less willing to be forthcoming, but I thought it was important to tell them what I was working on. So, I did tell them I was working on the plural wives of Joseph Smith. But I did tell them, I was working on their biographies, which included Nauvoo and Joseph Smith. But I was also doing a lot of work on their later lives. I found out to get a good birth date, you needed to know about their younger lives, often, and their marriage history and so on.
Todd 25:41 So, anyway, I was doing a lot of work at Church Archives. And when I came, it was a lot more open than it had been earlier. And you could just go type in the names of these women. The documents had been sorted and identified well enough, that you had good responses when you put in these names. I put in a name, and you might have 20 documents I had to look at, which is great, wonderful. Anyway, I’m getting back to Fanny Alger, aren’t I? So, I didn’t type in Fanny Alger, for this document I’m going to talk about. I knew that Levi Hancock was a prominent Mormon in early Utah. He was part of the Mormon Battalion, but he was back in Kirtland. He was back in the Kirtland era. And he was the uncle of Fanny Alger, and his son was Mosiah Hancock, who was the full cousin of Fanny Alger. So, they came out to Utah, and they wrote memoirs, these autobiographies. They had been published. I had read these published versions, and they’d been published non-professionally, and that’s fine. That’s wonderful that they had done that. And that’s a step forward if you have it published in any way. But a document that’s published and edited by a historian who’s been trained in college, they know more about going through, identifying the people, even the transcription.
Todd 28:02 One thing that happens is people go through a transcription, and it’s their grandmother, and they have no academic background. So, “Oh, grandmother misspelled this word. I better correct that.” And, “Oh. This one is misspelled. I better correct that.” And sometimes it’s like, “Uh oh. Here she’s talking about a plural marriage we didn’t know about, and we don’t want to know about.” That doesn’t go into the transcription.
Todd 28:37 So, because these Hancock autobiographies were published, in a non-scholarly way, I wanted to see the originals. I love seeing the misspellings, and often the way they wrote was how they talked. And they talked differently than, obviously, modern people, but it’s really wonderful how they talked. And that comes through and sometimes modern researchers who aren’t doing it exactly the way it should be done, they correct. Like, “Oh, they’re using the word, ain’t. We don’t want that. We’ll change that, too.” So, it’s now a nice, modern grammatical text.
Todd 29:40 Anyway, so that’s why I was looking at the Hancock journals, because he had just mentioned briefly Fanny Alger. Joseph Smith asked him when they left Kirtland, “Will you keep an eye on Fanny,” which is kind of odd because Fanny’s family was still there. She could have traveled with her parents. So that shows special interest Joseph Smith had. It’s one of these little problems that you want to figure out what’s going on. Why [is there] this special interest? By the way, at this point I had accepted Fanny Alger, as a wife of Joseph Smith. She was on Jenson’s list, and I had accepted her. Another early insider in Nauvoo polygamy was Benjamin Johnson and he talked about her being a plural wife of Joseph Smith. And it’s late, but again, [I don’t reject late sources.] Of course, at that point, it’s secondhand. He talked about Joseph Smith’s marriage to his sisters as a firsthand witness, but he wasn’t a firsthand witness of Fanny Alger marrying Joseph Smith. Anyway, I’m saying there were other sources for Fanny being married to Joseph Smith. So, I had accepted it at that point.
Todd 31:04 But I wanted to see. [In the Hancock memoirs,] are there primary documents behind these typewritten sources that had been published? And there were. So, you could have said, “Well, this may not be that important.” Because I had limited time. Because, this isn’t Fanny writing. It isn’t her brother writing. Anyway, I decided to look through [the Hancock autograph documents] and see what I could find. And the Levi Hancock document was about the same. It had that bit about, “Joseph asked me to take care of Fanny, when they left Kirtland.” But the Mosiah Hancock document, he had the section where he’s talking about his father. And he’s talking about his father being in Kirtland. Then, he started telling the story of how his father performed the marriage of Fanny Alger to Joseph Smith. I had never seen it anywhere else, so this was an exciting discovery for me. It wasn’t like I had made some adventurous journey to a long lost relative of Fanny Alger in Illinois or something like that. It was just there in the Church Archives. I was checking a document that had been published in a non-scholarly way. But, anyway, there’s this whole story, and the person who had published that Mosiah Hancock diary…
GT 33:03 They had left it out.
Todd 33:03 Yeah, they had edited it out.
GT 33:11 Wow.
Todd 33:07 This is exactly why you always need to go and look at the primary document.
GT 33:12 Wow.
Todd 33:13 Even scholarly editors/historians make mistakes. So, if it’s a really important passage, you need to go and look at it yourself.
GT 33:33 So, you weren’t trying to be sneaky and trying to find Fanny Alger’s things through this other way. You were just checking the document.
Todd 33:39 Yeah. And I knew it could be a Fanny Alger document, because there had been that little bit in the Levi Hancock document about, “Joseph Smith told me to take care of Fanny.” Anyway, in the Mosiah Hancock [diary,] I got this whole story.
Todd 34:03 So, Joseph Smith said to Levi, “Levi, will you help me marry Fanny? And if you do, I will help you marry Clarissa Reed.” So, Joseph Smith was making an agreement. You know, “I’ll help you with this, if you help me with this.”
Todd 34:25 And Levi Hancock said, “Yes. Okay. I’ll help you, Joseph.” I think. And it says, explicitly, that Levi performed a marriage ceremony.
GT 34:40 Does it have a date in there?
Todd 34:41 No, no date.
GT 34:43 Okay.
Todd 34:44 But it is linked with this Levi Hancock’s marriage, where Joseph Smith helped him marry this other woman.
GT 34:51 The quid pro quo, alright.
Todd 34:53 Right. So, it’s linked with that marriage and that marriage is well documented as [taking place in] 1833. Here’s part of the problem which we have with polygamy, providing that we accept that Levi Hancock account — is the regular civil marriage is well documented. Lots of people come to the wedding, and often it’s written in the family Bible, and all kinds of ways it’s documented for a regular marriage. But the Fanny Alger marriage wasn’t documented at all like that. It wasn’t public. It was secret.
Todd 35:39 However, if we accept the story, Levi Hancock told it to his son, Mosiah, and Mosiah wrote it down in his memoir. Now, we’ve been talking about analyzing documents. This is a late document. So, some people just say it’s a late document. We have to reject it.
GT 36:06 Right.
Todd 36:08 I’m definitely not like that. One thing you do is you look at it. Does it make sense? Is this something Joseph Smith would do? And the people who think that the Fanny Alger relationship was an affair, they’re thinking that [the editors thought], “Okay. We don’t like there being an affair. So, we want to show that it was a marriage.” So, that’s why they’re putting that marriage in there. And we have all these issues with late documents. And people who are interested in the Fanny Alger relationship being an affair, they’re not going to like this document. So, I accept the document. I accept that it happened this way. And one thing is that if it’s an anecdote, it isn’t as likely to be a fabrication, if it’s an expanded anecdote. Because people wouldn’t lie at great lengths, in theory, though, it can happen. Okay. Now we don’t have a diary from the same period. So, we’re always looking for documentation that will support it, but we have a situation where I accept it, and another good historian using their judgment, they can say, “I don’t accept that.”
GT 38:12 Because Don Bradley’s given a scenario where he thinks it’s [the Fanny Alger-Joseph Smith wedding date] after the dedication of the Kirtland Temple in 1836. So, you’ve got it three years earlier. The benefit of 1836 is Moses and Elijah and Elias have come and restored the sealing power. In 1833, that hasn’t happened. Because from my opinion, most people reject both 1833 and 1836, too soon and too late. And so [they believe it was] 1834-1835. Do you have a comment on that?
Todd 38:58 What they need to do, [if they are totally rejecting the Mosiah Hancock story] if they say, “I don’t believe it,” they need to say, “Here’s why I don’t believe it, because I don’t think it makes sense that it would happen in this way,” and deal with the story. And also say, “Yes, it’s late. Also there’s maybe a dating problem, and we don’t like that it’s happening before a certain event, or something like that. We don’t think it happened, like that.”
Todd 39:38 So, I think they have to consider the story in detail. What I’m saying is they have to [look at the story carefully and] deal with that story and say, “I reject it for these reasons.” But what I don’t like is when they just say, “Fanny Alger had an affair, and then they don’t deal with the story, the Hancock story. And in support of the Hancock story, even if it’s late, is this was a first-hand account, Levi Hancock. Well, when he told Mosiah, it was a firsthand account, he was a witness. And these people, Levi and Mosiah, were closely related to Fanny Alger, to the Alger family.
GT 40:15 Right.
Todd 40:19 Okay, that’s in favor of the story. So, historians who flatly reject the Hancock memoir, what they need to do is, they need to deal with that story [fully] and say why they reject it. Often they’re not doing that. So, it’s an important story. It’s an important family tradition. It needs to be part of [the explanation.] Anyone, if they’re dealing with Fanny Alger, they need to have that in there and say, “We reject this for these reasons,” — and often they’re not doing that.
GT 40:50 Right, so if it’s 1833…
Todd 40:54 Oh, I think Brian Hales, in his book, yeah, he accepts the Levi Hancock story, and Bushman accepts it too. [Quinn accepts it too, I think.] However, then, even though there’s this connection with the marriage of Clarissa Reed to Levi…
GT 41:18 In 1833.
Todd 41:19 Yeah, I think you’re stuck with that 1833 date. [Brian Hales] dates it to 1835, [I think].
GT 41:28 Right.
Todd 41:29 And he says the Benjamin Johnson document supports 1835. This is an interesting example of how you’re using two documents to create the whole story. But Benjamin Johnson wasn’t a firsthand witness [to the marriage ceremony] even though he was in Kirtland. And he wasn’t part of the family of Fanny Alger and Hancock and so on. Brian really hasn’t explained how the marriage of Levi Hancock to Clarissa is still there [dated in 1833]. He accepts the Hancock story, but he still dates it later.
GT 42:25 Right.
Todd 42:27 It doesn’t work for me. I think, Don Bradley, I think he’s working on Fanny Alger, right now, and putting more stuff together. I think he just totally rejects the Hancock story. Though, in what I’ve read of his, [recently] he didn’t do what I think you should do, [which] is look at it in detail and explain why you reject it. So, if he finally publishes his Alger research in a book or something, I think he should do that.
GT 43:00 Okay. Because I know he has that one essay in Persistence of Polygamy. It is volume [one.][1]
Todd 43:07 [Yes, in that essay, he did consider the Hancock story in some detail.] Of course, I’m biased. I found that document.
GT 43:13 So, I guess my question is, though, if it happened in 1833, let’s assume it did. That’s before the sealing power was restored, right? So, is this just another marriage without being sealed in heaven? Or, I mean, do you have any comment on that? I mean, that’s more of a theological question, I guess.
Todd 43:34 Yeah. You know, it’s kind of funny. I also date the Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris marriage in 1838, in Missouri, probably right up in Far West, where we were [today].
GT 43:52 Oh, at the temple site?
Todd 43:54 Around there. They lived in Far West, she and her [second] husband, George Harris.
GT 44:01 Okay. George was her first. No, William Morgan was her first husband.
Todd 44:07 [Correct, I meant “second.”] A lot of this theological development that happened in Nauvoo wasn’t around. Things were a lot less theologically developed.
GT 44:18 Right.
Todd 44:19 Okay. So it might not have been a marriage for eternity. But one of the really important things about that Hancock document is that he says, specifically, [that] there was a marriage ceremony.
GT 44:34 Right.
Todd 44:35 And so we know it was a marriage with a ceremony. I’m accepting that Lucinda Pendleton was, too, in 1838.
GT 44:46 Okay.
Todd 44:48 I don’t know if you’re picking it up, but I’m being conservative to moderate quite a bit of the time. Whereas when my book came out, some conservatives really attacked me as this horrible person who’s attacking Joseph Smith, and so on.
GT 45:06 Yeah. Well, yeah, so, let me throw one more thing at you, because I talked to Mark Staker. And one of the things that he said was, “Well, in 18–,” I know there’s a discrepancy on the date when the Melchizedek Priesthood was restored. I’m going to pick the latest date, which is 1831. It’s still before 1833, of course. When the Melchizedek Priesthood was restored, Peter, James, and John gave Joseph the sealing power. So, even if you want to go with 1833 as the Fanny Alger sealing, Mark says, “Well, Joseph had the sealing power,” although Oliver Cowdery certainly didn’t understand it that way. Do you have a comment on that?
Todd 45:51 The word “seal” meant something different back in [Kirtland and Missouri], I think. If you look at my Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner Chapter…
GT 46:04 In The Documents?
Todd 46:06 It’s in The Documents, yeah, and it’s in the other book, too.
GT 46:09 Okay.
Todd 46:09 Whereas, the Levi Hancock document isn’t in here, because a woman didn’t write it.
GT 46:15 Okay. You have to go to the first book for that one.
Todd 46:19 Yeah, you have to go different places, and [the] Levi and Benjamin Johnson document isn’t in here, because he wasn’t one of the plural wives of Joseph Smith. If I had included everything the men wrote about other women…
GT 46:40 It’s already 1000 pages.
Todd 46:41 …it would be too long. But that would have been nice to do that. But it’s nice just having their words [of the women] themselves. It’s really wonderful.
GT 46:50 So, In Sacred Loneliness, there’s a real female spirit. Did your wife have any input on how that was [written]?
Todd 46:55 Our friend Jenna asked this. I don’t know if you could hear it all. Do you want your last name in there?
Jenna 47:00 {inaudible}
Todd 47:01 I don’t know your last name. But anyway, she asked about that and if my wife had an impact on how I wrote it, and researched it, and so on. See, here’s where you need to know marriage dates. When I got married, In Sacred Loneliness was already published. Possibly it was the impact of my mother and I have wonderful sisters, great sisters. I’ve had great friends who are women through the years. At UCLA, I had graduate student friends who were women, who were really close friends. One of my friends who’s a woman, she’s the one who said, “Todd, you ought to apply for this Huntington fellowship.” It never would have happened, unless she’d done that. Anyway, and I guess you could just say, I was overwhelmed by the power of what they wrote, sometimes. Another of my great discoveries, just at the Church History Library, (and so I hope it’s coming through that I had a great experience with the Church History Library). They have some things that are still restricted. But they had so much that was available and easy to find that I had a wonderful experience. I was really able to fill out all of those biographies I’d started. One experience I had, it’s kind of like the Levi Hancock experience. We have this one woman named Louisa Beaman Smith Young. She was the first plural marriage in Nauvoo, so she’s well known for that. We have accounts about that marriage.
GT 48:24 [It was in] 1841, I think. Is that about right?
Todd 49:18 Yeah, though, we’ve got alternate dates, since my book came out. In the Wilford Woodruff writings, he had a list of, like, four women. Some of these early women might have included Louisa. It included, definitely, Zina Diantha Huntington Jacob Smith Young. So, Woodruff had the dates of their marriage, which is good. It’s good we have attestation, but he put them all a year earlier, like 1840.[2]
GT 49:56 Oh, okay.
Todd 49:57 So, I forget if Louisa Beaman was one of those [she was], but we have an alternate date. And some really good scholars, good historians, have looked at those dates and worked with those 1840 dates, and they think they’re preferable. I’m still thinking there’s a weight of evidence for those 1841 dates. So, I’m preferring the 1841 dates, but I think those 1840 dates are very possible. And that’s really an important document in the Wilford Woodruff papers. I think it’s a loose paper in his diaries, something like that — he had a different date. It’s wonderful we have a date. It’s both frustrating, and interesting, and attractive, that he has a different date. So, yeah, one thing in history, we’ve been talking about the craft of history, as we’ve been talking here. Often you have conflicts. Like, I mentioned, how often you have pieces of the puzzle. You have different documents. You put them together, and they make a unified picture. But sometimes you have different documents, and you try to put them together and they don’t fit at all. Then, you have to worry about why are they contradicting each other. Which one is preferable? Or are they both right? Are they both half wrong and half right? So, let’s see. How did I get onto that? We were talking about the 1840 dates. Yes, I think that she was the first and she was married in Nauvoo. She was the first [plural wife] married in Nauvoo, and it was 1841 [by the standard dating].
GT 51:55 Okay, and then then back to the sealing. Do you care about that issue at all?
Todd 52:02 I haven’t gone into looking at those early marriages and wondering about the…
GT 52:09 The theological implications.
Todd 52:11 …theological [implications].
Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner
Todd 52:12 And I’ll tell you that story from that Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner autobiography. And that’s a wonderful document. She’s a great storyteller. And what she went through in her life is really, really interesting. She’s one who was a plural wife of Joseph Smith. But she was married to another man who was a non-Mormon, Adam Lightner. So, he was there with her in Missouri, here in Independence, Missouri. So, Mary Elizabeth Rollins has a really nice section on her living in Independence, Missouri, and she was good friends with Lilburn W. Boggs.
GT 53:01 Really? Oh my!
Todd 53:02 Yeah, she made clothes for Lilburn W. Boggs.
GT 53:06 And it’s quite a connection.
Todd 53:07 Then she married this non-Mormon, but she also has a section on–oh, and I was going to mention that in Nauvoo, she’s married to Adam Lightner and has kids with him. And Joseph Smith proposes to her, and she tells the kind of language he uses. What he says is the motivation and why she should marry him. And that’s really a remarkable document. And again, it’s late. It’s retrospective. But, again, I don’t reject anything, simply because it’s late. It’s worth looking at and comparing it with other documents and putting it into the picture. So, it’s a really remarkable document and the whole thing is in this book [The Documents]. In the other book, the first book, I have liberal quotations from it, but the whole thing is in here and it’s really worth reading the whole thing.
Todd 54:14 So, let’s see. She has a Kirtland section, and she has a section on the Book of Mormon, and her first experiences reading the Book of Mormon, before Joseph Smith visited. Then she has a full section about how he visited, and then there’s a there’s a sealing meeting. And Joseph Smith seals up this whole group to be with him in the next life. The idea is sealing is kind of like putting a seal on someone. That [he] will be with them in the next life and they’ll go up into the highest sections of the Celestial Kingdom. Later, sealing came to mean this connection idea, connecting people. So that’s probably related to the original idea is, you put a seal on someone. So, Joseph Smith would go around, and other people would go around and seal up whole congregations into salvation. It’s just an example of how the theology was different back then.
Todd 55:29 Of course, some people, good historians, they just say, “I reject Andrew Jenson. I think he was wrong. So, they do not accept Fanny Alger, and his first two [plural wives] [two of his first three] were Fanny Alger, and Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris. So, some people just simply [reject] those as wives of Joseph Smith, where I accept them. And that’s kind of a moderate point of view, because some people think that you have to accept them as [something other than] marriages. They can make a case that they were not marriages. I can see that, and good historians could make a case [for that], and you could reject Andrew Jenson on good grounds. [You could say,] obviously, he wasn’t there in Nauvoo. He’s not a firsthand witness, and it’s late, and so on, and so on. But I’m just saying [that] I do accept them [Fanny Alger and Lucinda Pendleton] as plural wives of Joseph Smith, with marriage ceremonies.
Todd 56:42 But I’ve never actually examined what the theology of the marriages would have been. Obviously, I don’t see it as Nauvoo theology, back then. I just assumed they were probably regular marriages with regular marriage vows, with the standard religious elements to them. It would be great to know if there was anything about being married in the eternities. But I don’t know. I assume all of them in Nauvoo were marriages for eternity. Though, again, we don’t have exact records of what the marriage ceremonies were like. But for that first one, Louisa Beaman, the first in Nauvoo, the person who performed the marriage, Joseph Noble, he gave really good testimony that there was a marriage ceremony and where it was done on the bank of the river. So, I think, definitely, there were marriage ceremonies, which is one of the things I was interested in.
GT 58:01 Yeah, that was one of your criteria. Very good.
Louisa Beaman
GT 57:59 Well, I know I’ve kept you long time. What I thought we could do maybe to finish up, do you have any favorite stories from this book that you’d like to share?
Todd 58:16 Yeah, I was thinking I ought to read a little bit from this book. In the end, I was just talking about Louisa Beaman. And I’m attached to a lot of these women and some of the women, there’s just hardly any documentation at all, so you can’t get as attached to them.
GT 58:42 Right.
Todd 58:43 But, like, Maria Lawrence, we know very little about her, and she wrote nothing that we know about. So, some of them, because they’ve written a lot, you get more attached to them.
GT 58:54 Right.
Todd 58:56 Louisa Beaman, we just knew her as this first plural wife in Nauvoo. And there are a few references to her in the Patty Sessions diary and Eliza Snow diary. But she didn’t have a personality, in her own right. Then, one day, I walked into the Church History Library and typed in Louisa Young or Louisa Beaman Young or something like that [into the catalog], and there it was. She had written some letters that were written to another plural wife of Joseph Smith, Marinda Johnson Hyde Smith, the wife of Orson Hyde. So, I ordered them and I saw all of this on microfilm and rolled it up and started reading. And there were letters she had written in Utah to Marinda Hyde who is not in Winter Quarters, but across the river in Kanesville, or Council Bluffs. So, the first one is dated April 8, 1849. She wrote like she talked. You can tell. So, it was really wonderful. It was like hearing her speak. So, all of a sudden, she came alive, as I was reading that in the reading room of the Church Archives. So, let me just read this passage. And after Joseph Smith had died, she married Brigham Young. And her first kids were twins, to Brigham Young.
Todd 1:01:15 [They were] named Joseph and Hyrum, and they died as children. I think, really soon after leaving Nauvoo, they died. Then, she was in Winter Quarters, and she had another son, another child, named Moroni. He died in Winter Quarters. So, she had lost three children. So, she crossed the plains in 1848. And on April 8, 1849, she writes to Marinda and two of Marinda ‘s sister wives in the Hyde family. After her initial greeting, she writes–oh, and I read this yesterday in my talk. I had a hard time reading it. So, let’s see if I can get through this, because it’s so tragic.
Todd 1:02:33 “I am led to think, at times, there is not much else but sorrow and affliction in this world for me. The next day after I arrived in the valley,” oh, I left out [that] while she was crossing the plains, she had another set of twins. So, she was caring for them as twins, all the way into Salt Lake City and they made it to Salt Lake City.
Todd 1:03:02 “I am led to think, at times, there is not much else but sorrow and affliction in this world for me. The next day after I arrived in the valley, my babes were both taken sick with the bowel complaint. The canker set in and on the 11th of October I was called upon to give up the oldest one and his little spirit took its flight to join with his brothers and Father in Heaven. My anxiety was all turned toward the other that was living. The next day after this one was buried, the other commenced to get better. He got so that he seemed well, and grew fleshy, as fast as ever I saw a child and I even dared to hope that I should raise him. But I no sooner hoped, than my hopes were all blasted one day, all in a moment. As it were, he was taken down again with the same complaint. And all I could do, both by faith and works, did not seem to do any good. And on the 16th of November, he breathed his last and I was, again, left alone. You that have been mothers and lost children can better imagine my feelings than I can describe them. I had fondly hoped I should raise them. They looked very much alike, indeed. Their eyes were just of a color. I called them Alva and Alma. But they are gone, and I must be reconciled to the will of God. And I desire ever to acknowledge his hand in all things. I look forward to the time when I shall, again, behold them and clasp them to my bosom. Will not my joy be full.” So, it’s hard to read.
GT 1:05:03 That’s tough.
Todd 1:05:04 But beautifully written. It’s a beautiful account of her experience.
Todd 1:05:11 And she went on and had major health problems in the next year or two, and died of breast cancer.
GT 1:05:22 Oh….
Todd 1:05:25 So, what a tragic life. But everyone loved her. I shouldn’t have tried to do this. This is kind of what happened yesterday. But I was so thrilled to find that document and to have her come to life the way she did [in that letter].
GT 1:06:09 Did you have that in the first book or was that for this one?
Todd 1:06:14 I did have that excerpt in the first book. So, the story is definitely there.
GT 1:06:21 Yeah.
Todd 1:06:24 But in this book, you have the whole letter. She goes on and tells about what life was like in early Salt Lake City, and [she’s] chatty. You can see what kind of a person she was. And it’s a nice record for historians. It’s a nice record of early Salt Lake City, too. On the bus trip yesterday, just in things people said, they were talking about different people [in Missouri history]. And they were talking about how they lost kids. And they lost kids more than we do.
GT 1:07:08 Oh, much more.
Todd 1:07:09 So, I focus on this, because Louisa was– it’s such a beautiful letter. And also, because she lost all her kids, all five kids. Then [she] died so tragically, herself. But this wasn’t an uncommon experience among the pioneers in early America. Patty Sessions, she had like 8 kids with her first husband. And only two or three survived. And often you had these diseases that came through a town and killed off a whole bunch of people. And people going west, on the plains, cholera was [terrible.] A lot of people died of cholera, crossing the plains. So, I mean, obviously, she isn’t unique. But it’s such a beautiful letter that it really stands out.
Ina Coolbrith’s Tirade Against Polygamy
Todd 1:08:20 Okay, anything else? Now, did we want another reading?
GT 1:08:25 It’s up to you. Yeah, I was just going to say, do you have anything else you want to share?
Todd 1:08:28 Well, the problem is deciding what. I can read the other thing I read yesterday. This is really [good.] It’s another letter. And this is a really interesting woman. She’s known as Ina Coolbrith. She’s known as the first poet laureate of California. She wrote poetry, and [she was] quite well known for that. She was a friend of people like Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, and John Muir, close friends with John Muir, and that whole literary circle in early San Francisco.
GT 1:09:21 I like these because these are women we don’t normally hear about. We hear about Fanny Alger and all these other ones, but…
Todd 1:09:27 Yeah, and people who have read about–she’s [Ina has] become fairly famous and there have been a couple of biographies written about her by non-Mormons. But she was the daughter of Don Carlos Smith, Joseph Smith’s brother. So, she was the niece of Joseph Smith, I guess. Her mother, Agnes Coolbrith Smith Smith Smith Pickett, she had been the wife of Don Carlos Smith. He died in Nauvoo. Then, she married Joseph Smith, and he died. Then she married, who was it? Was George A. Smith?
GT 1:10:32 Who was a cousin, right?
Todd 1:10:38 Yeah. And then she married a kind of a lapsed Mormon, or a Mormon who became a lapsed Mormon, named William Pickett. She had twins with him, and they grew up in California, and followed after their father in some ways. So, William wanted to go to California to the Gold Rush. That’s why Ina ended up in California. So, we have some really great fun letters written by her when she was living in California, Los Angeles. And she’s written a letter to Joseph F. Smith, who was her cousin, and he was on a mission in Hawaii. So, they were able to exchange these letters to each other, and they’ve been saved. So, in Los Angeles, not too far away from San Bernardino, and before 1857, there was a big Mormon community in San Bernardino. So, Agnes and Ina would go visit. So, we have accounts of them visiting from the diaries of the people there. They had visited Utah for a while, but they came with Pickett to California, and were living there, at the time of the letter [that] I’m going to read from, in 1857. So, it would be interesting to have a long interview with Ina about how she felt about what was happening with her Mormon background. Later in her life, people didn’t know she had a Mormon background. She was just this famous poetess. However, in this letter she wrote to Joseph F. Smith, in 1857, she went on a tirade against polygamy, and it’s pretty interesting. This paragraph was a really interesting passage. And you can see, she was a brilliant, bright person, and lively writer. And I include these whole letters. You don’t have just the paragraph. You have the whole letters. So, it’s fun, obviously, to read the whole letters.
Todd 1:13:32 She writes to Joseph F. Smith, who later became a full polygamist with, like, six wives and something like 40 kids or something like that. “Is it right for a girl of 15 and even 16 to marry a man of 50 or 60? Can there be any love there? And has not God willed a woman to love, honor and obey her husband? And can it be right, thus, to pledge false vows at the altar, in perfect mockery of all that is good and pure in God’s most holy laws? I think I see myself vowing to love and honor some old driveling idiot of 60, to be taken into his harem and enjoy the pleasure of being his favorite sultana for an hour and then thrown aside whilst my godly husband is out sparking another girl in hopes of getting another victim to his despotic power. Pleasant prospect, I must say.” [There’s] a lot of underlining through all of this, even some double underlining. “And this Joe, this is of God?” So, Joseph F Smith to her is Joe.
GT 1:14:43 Oh, really?
Todd 1:14:45 “And this Joe, this is of God, is it? No, never, never, never. You may preach. You may talk to me from now to eternity, but you never will make me believe that polygamy is true.”
GT 1:14:58 Wow.
Todd 1:14:59 So, you wonder, did she talk with her mother about polygamy? Did she have a bad experience, seeing polygamy happening in Utah, when she spent a year or two in Utah? It’s hard to tell. So, we have Joseph F’s responses. And he’s a very devout Mormon, and he very strongly defends polygamy. But that was a 16-year-old girl writing. She was a brilliant person. And Joseph F. was a very strong-minded, and a very well-educated person, too. So, they were interesting cousins.
GT 1:15:46 Wow.
Todd 1:15:48 So when I did the reading, at Sunstone, we had readings after I kind of introduced this book, and I had one of the women defending polygamy. I’ll just tell about it. That was [Eliza Partridge Lyman], like in the 1870s, and 1880s. And there was a group of non-Mormon women who started this anti-polygamy society, and had these meetings. That made the Mormon women mad. So, they had these meetings in favor of polygamy and defending polygamy. And so, Eliza Partridge Lyman, was asked to be part of this. She spoke, and she wrote a talk. It’s in her diary. So, we have it preserved, and so it’s in here. She talked about how people say that our polygamous kids are not as good as yours. And they’re every bit as good, she said. She talked about how polygamy, the Mormon doctrine was you had to be a polygamist to enter the Celestial Kingdom, how it was an important part of our religion. So that’s kind of the other side to this funny attack by Ina.[3]
The whole book is full of these great documents from women who really come alive. And it’s great to read the whole documents. So, I recommend In Sacred Loneliness: The Documents.
GT 1:17:29 Yeah, because it just came out in print, just this week, right?
Todd 1:17:34 Yeah. I should tell a little bit more about it. When I was doing the research for the first book, as I say, the internet was not really too operational back then. There were no primary documents on the internet. So, I would just go around to different archives and get these primary documents and then type out the whole document, if I could. If it was a letter, you can type out the whole document, sometimes autobiographies. Sometimes diaries were so long, you couldn’t type out the whole thing. So, you read through and took notes. Anyway, I took a lot of [notes.] I transcribed a lot of complete documents, and my friend Joe Geisner asked me to write an article about how I wrote that first book.
GT 1:18:35 Writing Mormon History, right?
Todd 1:18:37 Yeah. I thought you were pointing to it. And it’s a great book.
GT 1:18:45 I need to get Joe on.
Todd 1:18:46 And so, as I was writing that article, I went back into my computer files, and I found a lot of these documents, and I thought, “These should be published, publicly. They’re already transcribed. All I need to do is collect them and do some identifying, annotation, identifying odd words and women and men.” So, Signature Books, Gary Bergera was interested. So, I collected them all together, and it came out, just the 12th [of September.] What is that six days ago? Almost a week.
GT 1:19:36 And it’s just a short 1000 pages. (Chuckling)
Todd 1:19:39 It’s like 600 pages, but then there’s a lot of notes, and I put in some useful appendices too.
GT 1:19:48 Right.
Todd 1:19:49 You have the Brigham Young wives with footnotes and Heber C. Kimball wives with footnotes, so, it should be a good reference book, also.
GT 1:19:58 Yeah, definitely. Well, Dr. Todd Compton, I really appreciate you taking so much time and sit down with us and sharing your book with us. So, thanks a lot for being on Gospel Tangents.
Todd 1:20:11 Thank you for having me.
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[1] “Mormon Polygamy Before Nauvoo?: The Relationship of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger,” in The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy, Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster, ed. (Independence, Missouri: John Whitmer Books, 2010), 14-58.
[2] Gary James Bergera. “Memory as Evidence: Dating Joseph Smith’s Plural Marriages to Louisa Beaman, Zina Jacobs, and Presendia Buell.” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 4 (Oct. 2015): 95–131.
[3] From Eliza Partridge Lyman’s speech: “It is now about thirty one years since the Prophet Joseph Smith taught to me the principles of Celestial marriage. I was then married by that order and have raised a family of both sons and daughters in what is called Polygamy, and I am not afraid to say that it is one of the most pure and holy principles that has ever been revealed to the Latter day Saints, and one that is necessary to our exaltation. The Anti-Polygamists say the laws of Celestial marriage are a curse to our children. Will they be kind enough to tell us where it is any disadvantage to them? We are not afraid to compare our children with those born and raised in Monogamy.”
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