I was surprised to read that a general authority did not know that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. In a New York Times interview, a journalist asked Mr Mattsson,“Is it true that Smith took dozens of wives, some as young as 14 and some already wed to other Mormon leaders, to the great pain of his first wife, Emma?”
Mattsson, responded, “That was kind of shocking.”
To tell you the truth, I was shocked that he didn’t know about the polygamy. Mr Mattsson has been a member of the church from birth and held numerous callings, even Area Authority. He says he’s been living in a bubble. I guess in some respects it just goes to show that high callings do not reflect knowledge. But it is also sad that these members do not know the history. It’s time to move on from milk to meat for many of us. One new source — The Joseph Smith Papers which are easily read online.
But looking at that one question, which was negatively charged to begin with — using words like “Smith took dozens of wives” and “as young as” and “to the great pain of his first wife.” It was a carefully crafted question that depicted Joseph as a libertine, and bit of a brute “taking” women, and causing “great pain” to his wife. It was posed by someone who thinks Joseph was a snake. Much like my friend wrote on my Facebook page this month:
“Of course Joseph Smith wanted “liberty” from creeds- he also took for himself the “liberty” to marry more than 13 wives. Why do you follow THIS man and his teachings? And not your OWN discovered truth?”
Mattsson said he read “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling,” a biography by Richard Lyman Bushman, a historian at Columbia University and a prominent Mormon. I’ve read the 740-page book as well. It is a scholarly view of Joseph Smith, written from a neutral point of view (unlike the anti-Mormon books or this interviewer). But it is not necessarily faith-promoting. Bushman carefully details the historical information about Joseph’s plural wives. He writes as a historian, and some Mormons have had problems with the history he shares. I do not. It confirms my belief, I don’t have problems with any of it. But maybe that’s because I learned a lot of this in my 20s.
“In a telephone interview, Bushman said: ‘You would be amazed at the number of Mormons who don’t think Joseph Smith practiced polygamy. It just wasn’t talked about. It was never mentioned in church periodicals. That was policy.’ In the last 10 or 15 years, he said, “the church has come to realize that transparency and candor and historical accuracy are really the only way to go.’” (NY Times)
According to Bushman’s research, there is strong evidence that Joseph was a polygamist by 1835. The date of when Joseph began practicing polygamy is uncertain. When the revelation was written down in 1843, it referred to the path whereby Joseph received it. He had been working on a revision of the Old Testament in 1831, and as was common for Joseph, when he came to the history of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, he asked why they were justified in having many wives and concubines. It is possible that he received the revelation at that time.
Bushman points out that if you analyze Joseph’s language about polygamy, he did not explain it as “a love match or even a companionship…He understood plural marriage as a religious principle.” According to Levi Hancock, he recalled Joseph telling him in 1832 that the Lord revealed the practice of polygamy to raise up a righteous generation to usher in the millennium and second coming of Christ.
It’s been a hot topic because everyone assumes polygamy is all about sex. Rumors were circulated by one of Emma’s cousins (by marriage) that Martin Harris said that Joseph attempted to seduce Elizabeth Winters — however, Harris or Winters never said that was true.
The 14-year old girl story is about Fanny Alger. Her family joined the church in 1830 and she began working as a serving girl in the Smith home sometime thereafter. It is uncertain when Fanny was sealed to Joseph Smith. About 60 years later, in the 1890s, Mosiah Hancock wrote that Joseph asked his father, Levi Hancock to approach Fanny’s father and mother, and Fanny herself with the proposal to be sealed to the prophet. Joseph did not “take” wives or steal away young women. He asked the parents first. Hancock said that his dad performed the ceremony, repeating words that Joseph dictated.
The other source for Miss Fanny comes from an anti-Mormon, Ann Eliza Webb Young (the wife that divorced Brigham Young and left the church). She wrote 60 years after the event, that she thought it was scandalous, but she also reported that Fanny’s parents “considered it the highest honor to have their daughter adopted into the Prophet’s family, and her mother has always claimed that Fanny was sealed to Joseph at that time.”
Ann Eliza made some other claim about Emma throwing out Fanny, but Ann could not have known this, as Ann Eliza was not yet born.
The other reason Fanny has become the one female to get so much publicity is that Oliver Cowdery claimed that Joseph was involved with Fanny and guilty of adultery. Oliver later said that Joseph had never admitted to him of committing adultery. Presumably, Joseph was not guilty, because he and Fanny had been married secretly. No one else made the claims that Oliver did. There are stories that Oliver then experimented with polygamy, against Joseph’s counsel, but still, the evidence is not solid.
Polygamy was one of those things that required approval, and so there were problems with some men jumping the track and sweet-talking young women into marrying them. This further makes a mess of a hot topic. Was Emma upset about the polygamy revelation? I’ve read that she was and then she was accepting, but I think that’s why it was kind of a secretive thing. Joseph didn’t really like the answer to his question about why those bible characters had more than one wife. Now he was told to live it. Brigham Young said it was the first time he desired the grave. I get the feeling it was not all about sex like so many suppose. We don’t know how many women were sealed to Joseph. But I would have thought Mattsson knew that Eliza R. Snow was one of them.
Some people will find that age 14 is young, and maybe it is. But maybe it was like the polygamy of the past — something hard to understand but part of the time. Native Americans in the Northwest Territories practiced polygamy around this same time. Anyway, Fanny left Kirtland in 1836 with her parents and married another (non-Mormon) man where she had nine kids.
Polygamy has been around forever, and young women have been betrothed at age 14. From our perspective, it seems scandalous, but we can’t assume that our view is the only one. How old was Mary, the mother of Jesus when she married? And it seems like she had two husbands, God and Joseph.
If there is one revelation from Joseph Smith that everyone should believe, it’s the one where he says his “name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues, or that it should be both good and evil spoken of among all people.”
Sources: see Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling, pages 323 -327 for sources on Fanny Alger and Joseph’s polygamy
