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Although during this period Nauvoo was fast becoming the most notorious city in Illinois, outwardly it was a model of propriety. There was not a saloon in the city, and if a man wanted to drink he had to buy his whiskey from a shop specially licensed by the mayor and take it home with him. “If you want to retire from the noise of the Bacchanalian’s song,” said theTimes and Seasons, “the midnight broils, and the scenes of drunkenness which disgrace so many of our cities and villages, come to Nauvoo — No such proceedings are allowed.”
Nauvoo’s self-righteous holiness did not endear her to her sister cities. They resented the pious-speaking city council, which would pass an ordinance threatening vagrants, idle persons, and those who could not “give a good account of themselves” with a five-hundred-dollar fine and a six-months jail sentence merely for indulgence in “profane or indecent language.”! Did a sect have the right to impose its own standards on the casual visitor? they asked. Or was not this ordinance a device to keep non-Mormons out of the city? What were these “Saints” so anxious to hide ?
Joseph requested — and received — from Governor Carlin the commission of lieutenant-general and thereafter frequently jested about his outranking every military officer in the United States. He came to prefer the title “General” even to “President” and used it in much of his correspondence. His uniform was smartly designed: a blue coat with a plentiful supply of gold braid, buff trousers, high military boots, and a handsome chapeau topped with ostrich feathers. On his hip he carried a sword and two big horse-pistols. Delighting in the pomp and splendor of parades, he called out the Legion on
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In mid-September 1840 the first sheriff materialized, bearing a writ for Joseph from Governor Reynolds of Missouri, reinforced by a demand from the Illinois Governor, Thomas Carlin. When Joseph learned of the sheriffs approach, he immediately went into hiding. The sheriff returned the writ to Carlin and made no further effort to catch his prey. Thereafter Joseph appointed a bodyguard of twelve men, his toughest fighters and most devoted friends. Among them were Porter Rockwell, William Hickman, Hosea Stout, Jonathan Holmes, and John D. Lee. The bodyguard, dressed in white uniforms, made a
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A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become. Joseph Smith always dictated his journal with an intense consciousness of his audience, and in the 1840’s, when he began in earnest to write the official history of his church for the edification of posterity, he reconstructed his past as only a celebrated prophet of the nineteenth century would have lived it. It was all of one color, a succession of miracles and revelations, and in no sense an
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All of the golden plate “witnesses” save his two brothers, Samuel and Hyrum, had either died or left the church. Oliver Cowdery had carried off one copy of the manuscript when he apostatized, leaving the other as the only tangible reminder of the book’s origin. This manuscript Joseph decided to bury in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, along with a few other relics, and interrupted the ceremony of laying the stone in order to bring the manuscript from his home. Ebenezer Robinson was shocked to hear him say as he flipped through the pages to make sure it was complete: “I have had trouble
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It has been stated that this word was derived from the Greek wordmormo.This is not the case. There was no Greek or Latin upon the plates from which I, through the grace of God, translated the Book of Mormon. ... We say from the Saxon,good;the Dane,god;the Goth,goda;the German,gut;the Dutch,goed;the Latin,bonus;the Greek,\alos; the Hebrew,fob;and the Egyptian,mon.Hence, with the addition ofmore,or the contractionmor,we have the word Mormon; which means, literally,more good.%
The close affinity of religious and phallic rites is a commonplace in social history, and Mormon ritual doubtless had its roots in the same unconscious drives that led the prophet into polygamy. The endowment ceremony was essentially fertility worship, but its basic nature was so camouflaged that only the skeptical felt a sense of outrage.
Although he had peppered the Book of Mormon with anti-Masonic strictures stemming from the Morgan hysteria, he had long since lost his hostility to the craft. Masonry was now as respectable as before 1827, and when Judge James Adams, Deputy Grand Master of the Illinois Masonic Order, urged him to set up a lodge in Nauvoo, he complied at once. The lodge was formally installed on March 15, 1842, with headquarters in the big room over Joseph’s store.
There is no doubt that Joseph’s primary interest in Masonry lay in its ritual. Like Solomon he was a temple-builder. Whatever had come down through the ages that was of value he meant to incorporate into his church. Six weeks after the installation of the lodge he called seven of his leading men — Masonic Grand Master James Adams among them — and instructed them “in the principles and order of the Priesthood, attending to washings, anointings, endowments and the communication of keys.” In this council, he said, “was instituted the ancient order of things for the first time in these last days.”
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The men were stripped, washed, anointed, and then, as in the Masonic ceremony, dressed in a special “garment” which was held together with strings or bone buttons, metal being forbidden. According to John C. Bennett, this garment at first was a kind of shirt, which was worn only during the ceremony and then hidden away as a kind of security against Destroying Angels. But it was shortly changed into an unlovely and utilitarian long suit of underwear, which the novice was instructed to wear always as a protection against evil.
and
The Masonic square and compass were cut into the garment on the breast and a slash was made across the knee. In the beginning the cut across the knee was apparently deep enough to penetrate the flesh and leave a scar, but this practice was eventually abandoned as a result of protests from the Mormon women. There was also a slash in the garment across the abdomen, symbolic of the disemboweling that would be the fate of anyone who revealed the sacred secrets.
After swearing to an oath of secrecy the initiate was dressed in white robes and permitted to witness a long allegorical drama depicting the creation of the earth and the fall of Adam. Joseph, it is said, took the role of God, Hyrum Smith that of Christ, and Bishop George Miller that of the Holy Ghost. The drama followed the language of Genesis, with God pretending to create Eve from the sleeping Adam, with Eve plucking raisins from a tiny tree symbolizing the tree of knowledge, and with W. W. Phelps as the devil crawling about serpent-like on his stomach.
After being expelled from the Garden of Eden, the actors representing Adam and Eve donned tiny white aprons which were exactly like the Masonic aprons except that they were painted with green fig leaves. Then followed instruction in certain grips, passwords, and “keys.” Each man was given a secret name by which he was to be known in the kingdom of heaven.
They would have been blind indeed not to see the parallelism between the costuming, grips, passwords, keys, and oaths. Joseph made free use of other Masonic symbols — the beehive, the all-seeing eye, the two clasped hands, and the point within the circle.
Joseph taught his men simply that the Masonic ritual was a corruption of the ancient ritual of Solomon, and that his own was a restoration of the true Hebraic endowment.*
Of course he did.
The elaboration of the temple endowment transformed the Mormon Church into a mystery cult. The secrecy, pageantry, and veiled phallicism appealed to very basic human instincts, and the fact that they seemed to be rooted in Old Testament tradition gave them an authenticity demanded by this Bible- reading people.
Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians had made an ambiguous reference to baptism for the dead, and at least one German sect had practiced this ritual in Pennsylvania. Joseph taught it openly.f At first the Mormons were baptized in the Mississippi and later in an elaborate font standing upon the backs of twelve white wooden oxen in the temple basement.
This was no mere word-spinning; it is clear that Joseph was coming to look upon himself as the key figure in the setting up of a great religious kingdom which would free the earth from oppression, tyranny, and bloodshed.
In the next canvass we shall be influenced byno party consideration... we care nota FIG for WHIGor DEMOCRAT; they are both alike to us, but we shall go for our friends, our tried friends, and the cause of human liberty, which is the cause of God. We are aware that ‘divide and conquer’ is the watchword with many, but with us it cannot be done — we love liberty too well — we have suffered too much to be easily duped — we have no catspaws amongst us.
it. His good- humored tolerance of human frailty lost him no strong men.
‘Sometimes Mr. Smith speaks as a prophet, and sometimes as a mere man. If he gave a wrong opinion respecting the book, he spoke as a mere man.’ ” +
From the beginning, this excuse has been used.
35,43- annoyed by tales of converts who apostatized when they saw him playing with his children or wrestling with his friends, Joseph often said impatiently: “A prophet is a prophet only when he is acting as such.” *
The plates were sold to a St. Louis museum, and Fugate did not publicly admit the fraud until thirty-six years afterward.[49]
Although Joseph was done with translations, he never ceased delighting in exhibiting his linguistic talents. Occasionally in his letters and printed appeals for national support he made proud displays which so embarrassed later historians of his church that they were quietly deleted from the official histories. The most notorious example was his “Appeal to the Freemen of the State of Vermont, the ‘Brave Green Mountain Boys,’ and Honest Men,” in which, with a blithe disregard for accuracy, he quoted from seventeen different languages. Were I a Chaldean I would exclaim: Keed’nauh ta-meroon le-
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As they entered the Nauvoo Museum, Joseph introduced Lucy Smith: “This is my mother, gentlemen. The curiosities we shall see belong to her. They were purchased with her own money at a cost of six thousand dollars.” Opening pine presses along the wall, he disclosed four black, shrunken bodies. “These are mummies,” he said. “I want you to look at that little runt of a fellow over there. He was a great man in his day. Why that was Pharaoh Necho, King of Egypt!” He pointed to various hieroglyphs on the papyri, which were preserved under glass. “That is the handwriting of Abraham, the Father of the
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he was ready to acknowledge that this man, more than almost any other he had ever met, was “best endowed with that kingly faculty which directs, as by intrinsic right, the feeble or confused souls who are looking for guidance.”
Any protests of impropriety dissolved before his personal charm. “Man is that he might have joy” had been one of his first significant pronouncements in the Book of Mormon, and from that belief he had never deviated. He was gregarious, expansive, and genuinely fond of people.
And it is no accident that his theology in the end discarded all traces of Calvinism and became an ingenuous blend of supernaturalism and materialism, which *Figures of the Past, from the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston, 1883), pp. 377-400. promised in heaven a continuation of all earthly pleasures — work, wealth, sex, and power.
Very popular in new American churches of the time.
But such moods were momentary. He went on in this same sermon with a vivid self-characterization that more genuinely represented what Joseph had come to believe himself to be: “I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain; and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force against religious bigotry, priestcraft, lawyer-craft, doctor-craft, lying editors, suborned judges and jurors, and the authority of perjured executives, backed by mobs, blasphemers, licentious and corrupt men and women
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#PersecutionComplex
But it was Jacob’s polygamous marriages that particularly interested Joseph Smith, and he frequently referred to the new marriage principle as the blessing of Jacob. He was fond of pointing to the commandment in Exodus: “And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.” The sin of adultery lay not in the act itself but in the subsequent desertion. It was the abandonment of the humbled maid that led to the unspeakable evils of prostitution and infanticide.
Such a wife must not be divorced, he said, for “a divorced man is not known in the whole canon of scriptures.” But for her to continue performing the rituals of the marriage bed without any love for her husband — which he labeled “fornication in the wife” — was a gross sin. “In ancient times under the law of God,” he concluded, “the permission of a plurality of wives had a direct tendency to prevent the possibility of fornication in the wife.” Whether Jacob was describing his own married state, or Joseph’s, or simply that of any poor bedeviled male, one cannot know. But there is no doubt that
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Paul had said that in heaven there would be no marriage or giving in marriage, but Joseph taught that this would not apply to his Saints. That which he and his elders sealed on earth would be binding also in heaven. There a man would have not only his wives and children, but also the prerogative of procreating more, until, as he expressed it to Parley Pratt, “the result of our endless union would be offspring as numerous as- *Manuscript entitled The Peacemaker, or the Doctrines of the Millennium, bring c treatise on religion and jurisprudence, or a new system of religion and politicks (Nau.
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A man’s glory in the next world would be determined by the knowledge he had gained and the excellence of his works upon earth. He who entered heaven with “ten talents” would have tenfold the glory of a man with one, and his rate of progress toward godhood would be ten times as rapid as that of the man who had been blind to the truth upon earth. Similarly, if a man went to heaven with ten wives, he would have more than tenfold the blessings of a mere monogamist, for all the children begotten through these wives would enhance his kingdom. The man with only one wife, on the other hand, would be
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Joseph taught that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man.” He had increased in skill and wisdom until He had come to govern myriads of worlds peopled by spirits of His own procreation. Ahead of every man there stretched this same boundless opportunity for progression throughout eternity. The rate of his spiritual growth would accelerate in direct proportion to the speed with which he accepted God’s laws and performed God’s rituals. Lorenzo Snow caught the essence of this philosophy in a terse and provocative line: “As man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become.”
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Converts reared on a diet of harps and angels found this heaven exciting. To those infected with the prodigious optimism and enthusiasm of America, it seemed only reasonable that there need be no end to the explorations of the human spirit. To men who loved then- wives, it was pleasant to hear that death was no separation, and to men who did not, it was gratifying to hear that there could be no sin in taking another.
Although many of the leading Mormon officials converted their first wives to polygamy before taking a second, Joseph did not take Emma into his confidence. Neither did he confide in his friends; there was disagreement among them in later years even over the identity of his first plural wife. Some, like Benjamin Johnson, were certain that it had been Fannie Alger, who after being expelled from Joseph’s home in Kirtland had gone to Indiana, where she married and raised a large family. But others held that plural marriage was not officially inaugurated until April 5, 1841, the eve of the eleventh
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The extreme informality attending Joseph’s earliest marriages (at least as it appears in the available records) is even more evident in the story of the prophet’s relationship with Prescindia Huntington Buell. During the Missouri troubles of 1838-9 her husband, Norman Buell, temporarily left the church. About this time Prescindia bore a son. She admitted later that she did not know whether Norman Buell or the prophet was the father. But the physiognomy revealed in a rare photograph of Oliver Buell seems to weight the balance overwhelmingly on the side of Josephs paternity. And there is
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Before the expulsion of John C. Bennett in June 1842, Joseph had been married or “sealed” to an imposing list of women, almost all of them already married. In addition to Louisa Beaman, Mrs. Harris, and Mrs. Buell, there were Mrs. Zina Huntington Jacobs, Mrs. Mary Rollins Lightner, Mrs. Patty Sessions, possibly Mrs. Clarissa Hancock and Mrs. Sally Gulley, and probably Mrs. Nancy Hyde, with a doubtful Mrs. Durfee at the bottom of the list.
Most attractive of all these women was the vivacious twenty- year-old Zina Huntington Jacobs, whom Joseph had taken into his home for a time during the great plague of 1840. Zina had been married to Henry B. Jacobs on March 7, 1841, and at the time of her sealing to Joseph, on October 27, 1841, she was seven months pregnant with Jacobs’s child. Jacobs then apparently knew nothing of this special ceremony, for when he toured southern Illinois with John D. Lee in the winter of 1842, he talked constantly of his wife’s loveliness and fidelity.
t In January of that year, eighteen months after Joseph’s death, her marriage to the prophet was again solemnized, this time in the newly completed Nauvoo temple. She was sealed to Joseph “for eternity,” and to Brigham Young “for time.” Jacobs stood humbly by as a witness. See the Nauvoo Temple Record, 1846, also Appendix C.
Joseph’s brother Don Carlos fought polygamy before his death in 1841. “Any man,” he said to Ebenezer Robinson in June of that year, “who will preach and practice spiritual wifery will go to hell, no matter if it is my brother Joseph.” f
But the true measure of the magnetism of plural marriage can be seen best in the attitude of the Mormon women. They required very little more persuasion than the men, though the reasons are not so obvious. Nauvoo was a severe town, puritanical and acutely self-righteous. But it was a town full of “church widows,” whose husbands were out proselyting, spreading the gospel, in the East, in the South, in Canada, and in England. Several were making ready to go to the South Sea Islands. Orson Hyde, on the way to Palestine to dedicate that land to the restoration of the Jews, was exploring the
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Marriage standards were extremely flexible all along the frontier. It was easy, therefore, for many of the penniless and lonely women converts to slip into polygamy. But for every woman who entered the system for reasons of security — and a fragile security at that — there were a dozen for whom this necessity did not arise. There was no need whatever for the attractive virgin to become a second, third, or thirteenth wife, since frontier areas always had a surplus of men. And what of the married women who gladly signed themselves and their children over to the prophet’s keeping and glory for
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#Their names were Mary Jones, Priscilla Morgridge, Sarah Libby, and Hannah Libby. See the testimonies of several of these women published in theTemple Lot Case,pp. 380, 364; also J. F. Smith, Jr.:Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage, p. 49.
Itshould have been obvious to Joseph that polygamous marriages could not long be kept secret. And soon the first fruits of “spiritual wifery” began to appear. Up to this time Joseph had taken care that almost all of his own plural wives were married women, but his leading elders could not easily follow his example.
No one in the whole of Nauvoo had a more strategic vantage point from which to discover exactly what was going on than the famous midwife Patty Sessions. A slim, wiry woman with hands admirably small for her work, she delivered babies for fees ranging from fifty cents to three dollars and was more esteemed than any doctor in the city. In the spring of 1842 Joseph added her to his circle of wives. Her daughter, Sylvia, who stood as witness at the marriage of her mother, also became his wife, but this, apparently, Patty never knew. She recorded her own marriage proudly in her secret journal, and
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Joseph H. Jackson, who claimed to have been in the prophet’s confidence for a time, stated that Mrs. Sessions, Mrs. Durfee, and a Mrs. Taylor were called “Mothers in Israel,” and their duty was to instruct the younger women in the mysteries of polygamy.
The Brother- tons in high dudgeon took a steamboat to St. Louis, but not before they had given Martha’s recital enough circulation so that everyone in Nauvoo knew it within a week. Eventually Martha published her account in a St. Louis paper.* But even before it appeared, Joseph had taken measures to kill the rumors her departure had set in motion.
