Polygamy, Part 2: Proposals and Key Marriages — A Scholarly Response

Examining the historical claims about Joseph Smith’s plural marriage proposals through primary sources, scholarly research, and proper historical method.

Introduction: Method Matters

The LDS Discussions overview of Joseph Smith’s plural marriage proposals opens with a lengthy comparison to convicted criminals and cult leaders — Warren Jeffs, David Koresh, and others. This rhetorical framing is repeated throughout the piece as a substitute for historical argument. It is worth naming what this technique is: it is an extended ad hominem by association, designed to bypass careful analysis of evidence by anchoring the reader’s emotional responses before any facts are examined.

A rigorous historical response does not require defending every aspect of nineteenth-century polygamy as comfortable or uncomplicated. Much of it was neither. What it does require is that we apply consistent evidentiary standards, engage seriously with the best available scholarship, and resist the pull of anachronistic moral presentism — judging 1840s religious actors by 2020s secular legal categories. The LDS Discussions overview fails this standard repeatedly. This response identifies those failures point by point.

The single most comprehensive scholarly resource on this subject is Brian C. Hales’s three-volume Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology (Greg Kofford Books, 2013), supplemented by the collaborative website JosephSmithsPolygamy.org. Hales personally examined or acquired copies of every known document on the subject. His work is cited more frequently than any other single author in the Church’s official Gospel Topics Essay on plural marriage — not because he is an apologist, but because he is the most thorough documentary historian on the topic. The LDS Discussions overview engages this scholarship only selectively and dismissively. We will remedy that here.

Claim 1: Joseph Systematically Targeted Women Living in His Home

LDS Discussions argues that Joseph Smith deliberately positioned himself to prey on women residing in his household, describing this as a calculated grooming strategy. The framing implies predatory intent as the only explanatory variable.

The historical picture is more complex. Joseph Smith’s home was a hub of the early Nauvoo community — people stayed there because it was a gathering place for church leadership and new converts, not because Joseph was engineering proximity to potential wives. The Partridge sisters, for instance, moved into the Smith home following the death of their father, Edward Partridge, the first Bishop of the Church and a man who had sacrificed enormously for the movement. Lucy Walker’s family was housed at Joseph’s invitation precisely because her father’s health was failing.

Critically, LDS Discussions’ own account documents that Emily Partridge rejected Joseph’s initial proposal flatly, and he dropped the subject for several months. This pattern — a proposal made, rejected, and not pursued by force — contradicts the predatory framework. Brian Hales documents a minimum of seven women who refused plural marriage proposals from Joseph Smith and faced no retaliation or coercion afterward, including Sarah Granger Kimball, Rachel Ivins, Lydia Moon, and Nancy Rigdon.¹ A predator who accepts rejection and moves on is categorically different from the Warren Jeffs comparison the overview invites.

“A woman would have her choice; this was a privilege that could not be denied her.” — Lucy Walker, recalling Joseph Smith’s own teaching on women’s agency in plural marriage.

¹ Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, Vol. 1 (Greg Kofford Books, 2013); FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Did Joseph Smith Coerce Women to Marry Him?” fairlatterdaysaints.org

Claim 2: Using Older Wives to “Recruit” Younger Ones Was Predatory

LDS Discussions characterizes the use of existing plural wives as intermediaries in proposals as a manipulation tactic providing Joseph “plausible deniability.” The language of recruitment and grooming is deployed to cast this as inherently sinister.

An alternative and more historically grounded explanation is straightforward: introducing an unfamiliar and socially radical doctrine through a trusted female peer was simply a more culturally appropriate and less coercive method than a direct male-to-female proposal in a nineteenth-century Victorian context. A man proposing marriage directly to a young woman in 1843 Nauvoo without any family or community mediation would itself have been considered improper and high-pressure. Sending a trusted woman to explain the doctrine first gave prospective wives private space to ask questions and consider the matter without the full social weight of a direct prophetic proposal.

In Emily Partridge’s case, it was Elizabeth Durfee who inquired about the rumors of spiritual wives — without identifying herself as a plural wife or revealing who had sent her. Emily was not persuaded at that time, and again, no force followed. The intermediary approach in this case functioned as a lesser form of pressure, not a greater one. The LDS Discussions framing inverts the actual social logic of the period.

Regarding Elizabeth Durfee’s role: she was a committed believer who understood herself to be participating in a divine covenant, not an agent of manipulation. The assumption that she was acting in bad faith is an interpretive imposition, not a documented fact.

Claim 3: The “Angel with a Drawn Sword” Was a Coercive Tool Deployed Against Women

This is one of the most important mischaracterizations in the LDS Discussions overview. The overview asserts that the angel-with-sword narrative was a device Joseph weaponized against reluctant women, telling them that if they refused, an angel would destroy him, thereby making them responsible for his death if they declined.

This conflates two distinct narratives. The angel-with-sword accounts, documented by Brian Hales across twenty-one separate accounts from nine different sources, were consistently framed as divine commands to Joseph to proceed with establishing the practice of plural marriage generally — not as threats directed at individual women to compel their compliance.² The accounts describe an angel commanding Joseph to move forward when he was himself hesitant, threatened with destruction for his own failure to obey. This is a narrative about Joseph’s private divine command, not a coercion device deployed in individual proposals.

Hales further documents that the angel narrative appears in only a small number of contexts and was never the primary vehicle of Joseph’s proposals. Laura Hales’ FAIR conference analysis notes the account appears “only twice” in recorded priesthood discourse of the period, contradicting LDS Discussions’ suggestion that it was a standard repeated manipulation tool.³

The one case where the angel narrative was relayed to a specific woman — Zina Huntington — came through her brother, as a second-hand message, not as a direct face-to-face ultimatum. And even in that case, Zina’s own documented response reflects genuine religious struggle, not the paralyzed terror of a woman being threatened by an abuser.

“I made a greater sacrifise than to give my life for I never anticipated a gain to be looked upon as an honorable woman by those I dearly loved.” — Zina D. H. Young, reflecting on the sacrificial nature of her choice.

Zina’s own words here are instructive: she describes her decision as a sacrifice — the language of moral agency, not victimhood. One does not speak of sacrifice when one has no choice. The LDS Discussions overview quotes this passage but misses its plain meaning.

² Brian C. Hales, “Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword,” Ensign Peak Foundation, 2013. ensignpeakfoundation.org

³ Laura Harris Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward a Better Understanding,” FAIR Conference, August 2015. fairlatterdaysaints.org

Claim 4: The Happiness Letter to Nancy Rigdon Was “Spiritual Extortion”

The LDS Discussions analysis of the Happiness Letter is lengthy and rhetorically powerful, but it makes several errors that undermine its conclusions.

On the letter’s authenticity and provenance: The document was published by John C. Bennett, a man who had been excommunicated for running what was essentially a seduction scheme under the cover of “spiritual wifery” — a practice Joseph publicly repudiated and for which Bennett was removed from church leadership. Bennett had every incentive to manipulate, misquote, and embellish. The LDS Discussions piece accepts the letter’s Bennett-mediated text without addressing this evidentiary problem.

On the letter’s philosophical content: LDS Discussions characterizes the letter’s argumentation as inherently manipulative. But considered without the predetermined conclusion, the letter is a carefully reasoned religious-philosophical document addressing moral relativism, divine commandments, and the nature of happiness. The exact same line of reasoning — “that which is wrong under one circumstance may be right under another” — appears throughout mainstream religious ethics, from Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical to Aquinas’s natural law theory. The letter is theologically consistent with its era.

On the “threatened blessings” language: LDS Discussions characterizes the letter’s conditional-blessing language as coercion analogous to criminal threats. This requires ignoring that conditional promise structures are universal in religious literature — from Old Testament covenant warnings to New Testament parable language. The Sermon on the Mount employs identical logic: those who reject the kingdom lose something they might otherwise have gained. Describing religious warning language as “spiritual extortion” proves too much — it would condemn virtually every religious tradition’s teachings on sin and repentance by the same standard.

The outcome speaks loudest: Nancy Rigdon refused. She faced no violence, no ecclesiastical discipline, no lasting harm to her freedom. Joseph acknowledged to her brother John that she had “blabbed it” — an exasperated private comment that LDS Discussions frames as sinister, but which in context simply reflects frustration at a secret being broken, not an ongoing threat. The most significant historical fact about this case is the one LDS Discussions cannot explain away within its own framework: she said no, and nothing happened to her.

Claim 5: Lucy Walker’s Marriage Was an Abuse of a Vulnerable Minor

Lucy Walker’s account is emotionally compelling, and no careful historian should minimize the genuine anguish she experienced. But the LDS Discussions presentation of her case contains several errors of omission and interpretation that materially distort the picture.

On age and historical context: Lucy was sixteen when first proposed to and seventeen at sealing in May 1843. LDS Discussions treats this as self-evidently criminal. But the mean age of first marriage for women in 1840s America was the mid-to-late teens, and U.S. Census data from 1850 shows 41.7% of women married as teenagers. Applying modern statutory age frameworks to 1843 Nauvoo is textbook historical presentism — judging a different era by standards that did not yet exist and that the entire surrounding society did not share.⁴

On the “gate closed forever” language: Joseph’s statement that if Lucy did not decide by the next morning “the gate will be closed forever” is presented by LDS Discussions as a standard coercive ultimatum. FAIR’s documentation shows this was the only case in which any kind of timeline was set, and it arose in the specific context of Joseph observing Lucy’s extended, visible distress over months of hesitation. It was a deadline offered to resolve her prolonged anguish, not a manufactured pressure tactic deployed against a fresh target.⁵

Lucy’s own testimony over decades: LDS Discussions cites Lucy’s Temple Lot trial testimony that the marriage “was not a love matter” as evidence of exploitation. But they omit that Lucy was stating this in 1892 specifically to defend the religious character of the marriage against critics who characterized it as mere romance. She was saying: this was not trivial or carnal, it was a sacred covenant. She spent the rest of her life as a committed defender of plural marriage and wrote extensively in its support. Her full body of testimony is not that of a victim — it is that of a woman who made a difficult religious decision and honored it for the rest of her life.

“I gave myself up as a sacrifice, for it was not a love matter, so to speak… but simply the giving up of myself as a sacrifice to establish that grand and glorious principle that God had revealed to the world.” — Lucy Walker, Temple Lot Trial, 1892.

⁴ FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Joseph Smith/Polygamy/Marriages to Young Women.” fairlatterdaysaints.org

⁵ FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Did Joseph Smith Coerce Women to Marry Him?” fairlatterdaysaints.org

Claim 6: Zina Huntington’s Marriage Was Forced Polyandry

The Zina Huntington case is among the most emotionally resonant in the LDS Discussions overview, and Henry Jacobs’ love letters — written after Zina had been sealed to both Joseph and later Brigham Young — are genuinely heartbreaking. That pain is real, and this response does not dismiss it.

What the overview misrepresents is the nature of the sealing relationship itself. The distinction between an eternity-only sealing and a time-and-eternity sealing is essential here. Brian Hales documents that Zina’s sealing to Joseph was specifically an eternity-only sealing — she was sealed to him for the next life while remaining Henry’s wife for this life.⁶ LDS Discussions briefly acknowledges this distinction, then dismisses it by asserting sexual relations were probable anyway. That supposition rests on nothing more than inference; Hales finds no documentary evidence of sexual relations between Zina and Joseph. The logic of eternity-only sealings is well-established across multiple documented cases — including Ruth Vose Sayers, who explicitly requested an eternity-only arrangement with her husband’s full knowledge and consent. Researcher Rex E. Cooper notes that “women might have just preferred to be sealed eternally to Joseph Smith rather than to the man that they had married,” understanding the sealing as a spiritual honor operating on a different register than civil marriage.⁷

On Henry standing as a witness at the sealing: LDS Discussions frames this as a humiliation imposed upon him. But Henry’s own words — “Whatever the Prophet did was right” — reflect a man who had internalized a theological framework in which eternal covenants operated on a different plane than civil marriage. We may disagree with that theology. But representing it accurately requires acknowledging that Henry was not forced to stand there as a spectator to his wife being stolen; he was a faithful believer who understood the sealing as belonging to a different order of existence than his own earthly marriage.

Brian Hales further documents that of Joseph’s twelve polyandrous sealings, ten of the husbands were not on missions at the time of the sealing, directly refuting the suggestion that Joseph systematically waited for husbands to be absent before approaching their wives. This is a factual correction of a widely-repeated claim.⁸

Zina’s 1898 interview statement that her marriage to Henry “was unhappy” is noted by LDS Discussions but dismissed as late-life rationalization. This is selective source criticism. The overview accepts Zina’s earlier anguished quotes as reliable but rejects her later mature reflections as contaminated. Historians must be consistent: the same evidentiary standards that make early testimony credible must also be applied to the long-term testimony of the same witness.

⁶ Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, Vol. 2 (Greg Kofford Books, 2013); josephsmithspolygamy.org

⁷ JosephSmithsPolygamy.org, “Joseph’s Proposals.” josephsmithspolygamy.org

⁸ Brian C. Hales, cited in FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Joseph Smith/Polygamy/Polyandry/Knowledge and Consent of Living Husband.” fairlatterdaysaints.org

Claim 7: The Nancy Marinda Hyde Revelation Was a Device to Obtain Her as a Wife

LDS Discussions presents the December 1841 revelation regarding Nancy Marinda Hyde as evidence that Joseph was weaponizing prophetic revelation to extract wives while husbands were away. The revelation directed that Nancy “hearken to the counsel of my servant Joseph in all things.”

The primary purpose documented in the revelation was Nancy’s safety and material care while Orson was on his Jerusalem mission — a lengthy and physically dangerous assignment at the time. The command to heed Joseph’s counsel was given in the context of providing for a vulnerable woman whose husband was abroad indefinitely, consistent with Joseph’s role as president of the Church caring for members in difficult circumstances. The overview assumes its conclusion — that the revelation was purely a sealing-acquisition tool — and reads backward from that assumption to find it in the text.

Furthermore, Nancy Hyde was an adult woman with her own convictions. LDS Discussions characterizes her role in the Nancy Rigdon proposal as pure instrumentalization — a tool deployed by a predator. But the historical record presents Nancy Hyde as a woman who had accepted plural marriage as a genuine religious covenant, who believed in its divine origin, and who acted voluntarily as a person of faith. Reducing her to a passive instrument in Joseph’s hands is itself a form of erasing women’s historical agency.

The Deeper Methodological Problem: Presentism and the Cult-Leader Framework

The LDS Discussions overview repeatedly asks readers to “read this as you would read it from any other religious leader.” This sounds like an appeal to neutrality but contains a significant logical trap: it demands that we import our contemporary secular moral taxonomy — formed by exposure to modern cult awareness, statutory law, and clinical psychology of manipulation — into a nineteenth-century frontier religious community, and then treat that imported modern judgment as the obvious neutral response.

Non-LDS historian Ernst Benz characterized Mormon polygamy as tied to a “patriarchal family order” demonstrating “selflessness and sense of duty” — not predatory opportunism. Brigham Young’s own testimony about plural marriage was that it was “the first time in my life that I had desired the grave.” John Taylor described it as “an appalling thing” requiring divine knowledge to accept.⁹ These are not the words of men joyfully participating in a system designed to service their desires. These are the words of men who understood themselves to be obeying an uncomfortable divine command.

The comparison to Warren Jeffs and David Koresh deserves direct engagement rather than emotional dismissal. The structural differences are not merely matters of theological preference:

• Warren Jeffs practiced systematic fraud, physically isolated followers, conducted marriages with children as young as twelve in documented defiance of consent, and was convicted of criminal sexual assault. Joseph Smith’s plural marriages were conducted with adult women’s documented consent, the knowledge of at least some family members, and within a community structure that did not physically isolate or imprison anyone.
• David Koresh led a group whose members were physically unable to leave and who were subjected to documented physical violence. LDS Discussions itself documents women who freely refused proposals, openly discussed the practice, and publicly exposed it — without suffering harm beyond the social consequences normal to any breach of confidentiality in any community.
• Brian Hales — who has personally examined every available primary source on Joseph Smith’s polygamy — concludes that while the practice was complicated, the evidence of predatory abuse on the scale implied by the Koresh-Jeffs comparison does not exist in the documentary record.

This does not require concluding that plural marriage was ideal or easily defensible by modern standards. It requires only that we be honest about what the evidence actually says, rather than importing the most extreme possible framework and demanding it be accepted without scrutiny.

⁹ FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Did Joseph Smith Have Lustful Motives?” fairlatterdaysaints.org

The Theological and Covenantal Framework

LDS Discussions treats the theological framing of plural marriage — eternal covenants, exaltation, raising up seed — purely as rhetorical cover for sexual desire. This interpretive move requires assuming bad faith in the first person rather than testing that assumption against evidence.

Brian Hales documents that Joseph Smith sealed himself to approximately thirty-four women, with manuscript documentation supporting this number. He further documents that many of those sealings were explicitly eternity-only arrangements — permanent spiritual covenants with no earthly conjugal dimension. If Joseph’s goal were sexual gratification, why would he seal himself to any woman on an eternity-only basis? The existence of these sealings — acknowledged by LDS Discussions — directly falsifies the reductive “it was about sex” explanation the overview consistently implies.

Furthermore, Hales concludes that sexual relations were likely present in “probably much fewer than half” of Joseph’s plural marriages and were “not a common occurrence” even within those. He finds “no historical data supporting sexual relations” with his two youngest wives, Helen Mar Kimball and Nancy Winchester. The portrait of a sexually voracious polygamist — implied throughout by the cult-leader framework — does not survive contact with the documentary record.¹⁰

¹⁰ Brian C. Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Personal Polygamy,” 2012. josephsmithspolygamy.org

The Evidence LDS Discussions Suppresses: Women’s Agency

Perhaps the most consequential omission in the LDS Discussions overview is its systematic suppression of evidence for women’s genuine agency in these relationships. In focusing exclusively on moments of anguish, fear, and social pressure — all real and documented — it erases an equally real body of evidence that these women made genuine choices, held firm convictions, and in many cases spent the rest of their lives defending those choices.

Consider the evidence the overview omits:

• Eliza Partridge wrote: “Nothing but a firm desire to keep the commandments of the Lord could have induced a girl to marry in that way.” This is a statement of principled agency under difficulty — not victimhood.
• Helen Mar Kimball wrote two entire books defending plural marriage and stated: “I have encouraged and sustained my husband in the celestial order of marriage because I knew it was right.” LDS Discussions mentions the disputed “confession” attributed to Helen but omits her decades of consistent advocacy for plural marriage.
• Almira Hanscom actively refused Joseph’s proposal. The LDS Discussions framework predicts devastating consequences for women who refuse. The historical record documents none in her case.
• Sarah Granger Kimball refused even to hear the plural marriage teachings explained. Joseph’s documented response was to respect her refusal and pray for her understanding.¹¹
• Ruth Vose Sayers apparently initiated her own sealing to Joseph, with her living husband’s knowledge and consent — explicitly requested as an eternity-only arrangement. Her husband Edward consented, having no objection to a purely spiritual covenant.

Historians Linda Newell and Valeen Avery note that the plural wives’ accounts “attest that, for the most part, they felt Joseph cared for them, and they felt important to him.” This is not the testimony of a traumatized community of victims. It is the testimony of women who experienced a difficult religious practice and interpreted it through a framework of divine covenant and mutual regard.

The later Nauvoo Temple sealing ceremony explicitly required acknowledgment that all participants were present “of their free will and choice.” Consent verification was structurally embedded in the ordinance itself. This is not the architecture of a coercive system.

¹¹ JosephSmithsPolygamy.org, “A Woman’s Choice.” josephsmithspolygamy.org

Conclusion: Honest History Requires More Than Outrage

The LDS Discussions overview of polygamy proposals is emotionally effective precisely because it contains real historical material presented in its most disturbing possible light. The anguish of Lucy Walker, the heartbreak of Henry Jacobs, the courage of Nancy Rigdon, the complexity of Zina Huntington’s situation — these are not inventions. They are documented historical realities that believing Latter-day Saints must take seriously rather than dismiss.

But honest history also demands:

• Engagement with the best counter-scholarship, not just the most rhetorically convenient sources. Brian Hales’s three-volume documentary history exists. Its conclusions are inconvenient for the LDS Discussions narrative. They are cited in the Church’s own official historical essays because they represent the most thorough documentary record available.
• Consistent evidentiary standards. You cannot selectively trust sources when they condemn and reject them when they defend. The same critical apparatus must be applied to John C. Bennett’s publication of the Happiness Letter as to the testimonies of plural wives who affirmed their marriages.
• Resistance to anachronism. Nineteenth-century marriage, religious authority, and social norms were genuinely different from our own. This does not place those practices beyond moral critique. It means the critique must be grounded in what the historical actors understood, not what we would understand in their place.
• Respect for women’s agency in both directions. Women who anguished over plural marriage deserve to have their pain acknowledged. Women who embraced it, defended it, and found meaning in it deserve to have their convictions taken seriously — not explained away as false consciousness or psychological manipulation.

The historical reality of Joseph Smith’s plural marriage proposals is complex, theologically rooted, socially fraught, and not reducible to either the triumphalist narrative of early Church manuals or the predator-cult narrative of LDS Discussions. The truth — documented in primary sources, analyzed by scholars, and preserved in the words of the women themselves — is more demanding than either of those comfortable poles.

That demanding truth is what both historical integrity and genuine faith require us to pursue.

Key Sources and Further Reading

• Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: History and Theology, 3 vols. (Greg Kofford Books, 2013) — josephsmithspolygamy.org
• Brian C. Hales and Laura Harris Hales, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy: Toward a Better Understanding (Greg Kofford Books, 2015)
• FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Joseph Smith/Polygamy” — fairlatterdaysaints.org
• Brian C. Hales, “Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword,” Ensign Peak Foundation, 2013 — ensignpeakfoundation.org
• Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Signature Books, 1997)
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essay: “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo” — churchofjesuschrist.org
• Martha Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, “Plurality, Patriarchy, and the Priestess: Zina D. H. Young’s Nauvoo Marriages,” Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 1994)