The subject of Joseph’s covenants with women is not a topic casually broached in faithful Mormon circles, even among those who are aware of the origin of the Mormon practice of plural marriage. Correlated lesson materials tend to minimize discussion of important historical points relating to plural marriage in order to avoid distracting from discussion of core gospel truths.
Unfortunately, this has led to polarized versions of early Mormon history. One is the sanitized hagiography familiar to modern Mormons, featuring a Joseph portrayed as monogamously devoted to his beloved Emma. The other is the bawdy tale accepted by non-Mormons and some Mormons, where Joseph deceived Emma and his followers while slaking his sexual appetite on dozens of women.
Joseph covenanted with dozens of women, based on the affidavits these women signed in the late 1860s and 1870s. Those familiar with the affidavits have presumed Joseph was married to these women, with all the conjugal privileges marriage implies. Thus knowledgeable scholars have presumed that Joseph had sex with the women he covenanted with unless the relationship was explicitly described as only for “eternity.”
Importantly, no one has both embraced the information regarding Joseph’s covenants with women yet suggested that many or all those covenant relationships might have been celibate. It has simply been an unexplored possibility. If it is a false possibility, it should be easy to dismiss.
Nightfall at Nauvoo
I was fourteen when I first came face to face with unpleasant possibilities regarding the life of Joseph Smith. My mother had just finished reading Nightfall at Nauvoo, then a newly-released novel written by her uncle, Samuel W. Taylor.
Mother put the thick paperback down and cocked her head. “I think Sam presents an overall positive view of Joseph Smith,” she said.
Presuming Sam’s book was therefore “safe,” I began reading. I was a child who was shocked to hear detractors had called Joseph Smith “Joe.” I was completely unequipped to deal with the salacious accusations made by John Bennett and Thomas Sharp, which Sam repeated in his book. My youthful belief in the validity of the Mormon faith was destroyed.
I white-knuckled for two decades harboring serious doubts about Joseph Smith and the Church. Even so, I went on to graduate from Seminary, earn the Young Womanhood in Recognition Award, be a Relief Society President, serve a mission, and marry in the temple.
In 1999 I realized that the God at the center of Joseph Smith’s theology was the God I had experienced in my life. But I still had no acceptable explanation for Joseph and polygamy.
Elvira Annie Cowles
In 2001 a friend asked me to present a 5-minute spotlight in Relief Society on a notable Mormon woman. As she rattled off the names on her list, I recognized the name of my ancestor, Elvira Annie Cowles. Elvira Annie was the treasurer for the first Relief Society when Emma Smith was Relief Society President. I remembered my mother telling me as a teenager that Elvira Annie had covenanted with Joseph Smith during his lifetime.
By 4 am the Sunday of the presentation, I had pieced together the fact that Elvira Annie Cowles was mother of the three sisters who married Job Welling and grandmother of two women who married rogue Apostle John Whitaker Taylor in 1901. As I sat looking at the short history I had assembled, I knew I had to write about these women. Yet I also feared writing about these women, certain that the story of Joseph’s plural marriages necessarily involved sexual relations that moderns would consider inappropriate.
In the years since 2001, I immersed myself in the history and documents related to early Nauvoo events. I initially despaired of ever being able to write a serious history. So I attempted to tell the story in novel form. Revisions conducted with dozens of advance readers forced the story to take on a life of its own. One reader criticized my villain, Dr. Bennett, as one-dimensional. Another said I should tell the story from a male point of view to retain male readers. One non-Mormon man said the sexual tension between my heroine and Joseph Smith was uncomfortably intense, even though I did not portray them as sexually intimate. As I expanded and modified the story in response to these comments, I had to dig deeper into the history, delving beneath the facile understanding I had had of events and motivations. Causalities emerged to which I had previously been blind.
No Sex?
Some of my friends live without any form of birth control. I saw in their lives the typical pattern for most married couples in the 1800s. A child is born within the first year, and other children arrive every two years thereafter. Watching these friends, I realized something was wrong with Elvira Annie’s reproductive history.
Elvira Annie’s first child was born in October 1845, nearly three years after her public marriage to Jonathan Harriman Holmes and over a year after Joseph’s death. Elvira Annie continued to bear children regularly whenever Jonathan was around. For example, Elvira’s second daughter was born nine and a half months after Jonathan returned with his Mormon Battalion unit. Elvira Annie bore her final child when she was 43 years old.
Elvira Annie was fertile. Jonathan was virile. Joseph was also virile, producing children with Emma regularly. Yet Elvira Annie did not produce a child for years after the ceremonies I presumed would legitimize intimacies between Elvira Annie and either Joseph or Jonathan.
Around this time I came across Ugo Perego’s DNA research looking into possible offspring of Joseph Smith by women other than Emma Hale. [i] Not a single suspected child of these other women has been proven to have been fathered by Joseph. None of the single women with whom Joseph covenanted appear to have conceived children prior to Joseph’s death.
Perhaps Joseph wanted to avoid engendering children with other women while enjoying sex. But if this were the case, there were few methods of birth control available to Joseph, and these were considered criminal. [ii] The rhythm method would not be generally understood until the 1930s. [iii] While lack of children does not prove lack of sex, it leaves lack of sex as a potential cause for the available data.
Modern belief in Joseph’s sexual activities with women other than Emma, therefore, is based on rumor and written reports, rather than objective evidence. [iv]
There are three prominent views of Joseph Smith.
- He was a practicing polygamist who was loved and honored by his followers. Many of his covenant wives so testified in seemingly unambiguous terms, including under oath in 1894. [v]
- He was a monogamist who rejected polygamy. His wife, sons, and thousands of others supported this view. [vi]
- He was an abusive philanderer. Two men who had served as Assistant Presidents of the Church made these accusations, as did numerous others of his contemporaries. [vii], [viii]
To quote Joseph’s own words, “I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together?” [ix]
Is there a way that each of these contradictory views might express a species of truth? What is the common truth that can explain these divergent viewpoints?
Modern Mormons do not talk of polygamy, do not preach of polygamy, and they most certainly do not rejoice in polygamy. And yet it is crucial that we understand our past, so that we and our loved ones may know which assertions regarding polygamy are true, and which are lies.
Meg Stout
Annandale, VA
April 6, 2016
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2nd edition: corrected miscellaneous errors.
3rd edition: added Joseph’s alleged children by other women, Appendix C
4th edition: added the hypothesis that Esther Dutcher [Smith] was the Esther Smith who testified before the Nauvoo High Council. Also added a table showing which of the women who covenanted with Joseph may have given birth as reported by George Albert Smith.
5th edition: added confirmation that Josephine Lyon was not the biological daughter of Joseph Smith.
6th edition: refined the analysis of how the heresy of illicit intercourse spread in Nauvoo during 1841 and why so little is documented.
Preface – Notes
There are widely divergent accounts of Joseph Smith, from righteous man second only to Christ (e.g., John Taylor, D&C 135) to evil villain second only to Lucifer (online commentary for just about any Mormon-themed news story).
Stout first encountered troublesome possibilities regarding Joseph Smith when she was a teen, reading Nightfall at Nauvoo. She stayed within the Mormon faith tradition, but harbored major doubts about Joseph Smith and the religion he had “restored.” Even after eventually coming to peace with Mormonism as a religion, Stout could not reconcile the stories of Joseph Smith’s polygamy with the loving God she knew.
In 2001 a friend requested Stout present a vignette on a famous Mormon woman. Selecting an ancestor, Stout realized that her own ancestry contained women at the very beginning and very end of Mormon polygamy. She felt she had to write about these women, but dreaded the task.
Over the years, Stout realized her ancestor who was Joseph Smith’s plural wife should have conceived before 1845 if she had been intimate with either her public husband or Joseph Smith. Around this time, Stout learned that DNA research has failed to confirm Joseph engendered any of the children born to women considered to be his plural wives.
As Joseph said, “I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together?”
Considering the grossly different historical interpretations of Joseph’s life, Stout devoted herself to finding a common truth that could explain all the evidence. Appendix A contains a summary of tenets adhered to by conscientious historians and which Stout used in her efforts.
[i] Perego, Ugo, “Joseph Smith and DNA,” The Persistence of Polygamy, Vol. 1, pp. 233-256. Also see Appendix C.
[ii] Massachusetts doctor, Charles Knowlton, wrote a book in 1832 titled The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People, which explained methods of birth control. He was sentenced to three months hard labor. As late as 1877 people were being prosecuted for attempting to publish Knowlton’s book.
[iii] It was believed there was a “safe” period, but a proper understanding of the gynecological basis for this safe period was developed in the 1920s independently by Kyusaku Ogino in Japan and Hermann Knaus in Austria. The Rhythm Method was popularized in 1932 by a Roman Catholic doctor in America, Leo J. Latz, who considered the rhythm method consistent with Catholic doctrine. See Latz, The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women, 1932.
[iv] Objective evidence here refers to physical evidence, such as children or disease. As early as 1825, Jeremy Bentham’s A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1825) argued that testimony needed to be backed up by material proof.
[v] Brian Hales’s book and website, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, contains all public journals and records regarding this matter. Three primary sources are the Joseph F. Smith collection of affidavits, gathered circa 1869, Andrew Jensen’s affidavits also gathered circa 1869, and the 1894 appeal to the Temple Lot ruling. The express purpose of the gathered testimonies was to confirm that Joseph Smith had covenanted with women other than Emma Hale.
[vi] Hales, Emma. Last Testimony of Sister Emma, February 1879. When asked if Joseph had other wives, she replied, “He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have.”
[vii] Bennett, John Cook, History of the Saints, 1842.
[viii] Law, William, affidavit published in the only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor, May, 1844.
[ix] Joseph Smith – History 1:10