Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Nauvoo Polygamy/Index/Chapter 4

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Chapter 3 (pp. 159-240)

A FAIR Analysis of: Nauvoo Polygamy: "... but we called it celestial marriage" A work by author: George D. Smith Index of Claims, Chapter 4 (pp. 241-324)

Chapter 5 (pp. 325-351)

Note: This is a review of claims and/or responses to misrepresentations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found in this work. The inclusion of an author's work here does not imply that he or she is "anti-Mormon," or that none of his or her works have value. Those who do not wish to examine the claims contained in what some would consider an "anti-Mormon" work are advised to proceed no further.

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Claims made in "Chapter 4" (pp. 241-324)

Claim

• William Clayton and plural marriage

Response

• See below

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The book speculates that John Bennett's marriage record "may have been deleted" after his disagreement with Joseph Smith.

Response

• No source provided.

John C. Bennett (edit)

Claim

• The book speculates that Joseph and Clayton were "conspiring to alter" his wife's "marital status."

Response

• No source provided.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• Joseph instructed Clayton to send for Sarah Crookes, a close female friend he had known in England, to which Clayton replied that “nothing further than an attachment such as a brother and sister in the Church might rightfully entertain for each other” occurred between them. “But in fact,” G. D. Smith editorializes darkly, “Clayton’s journal recorded the depth of emotional intimacy he had shared with her."

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 32, 41, 52, 29, 556.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote:"…instead of waiting for [Sarah’s] arrival, [Clayton] married his legal wife’s sister Margaret on April 27. This was before Sarah’s ship had even set sail from England."

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 94, 99, 107, 556.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author states:

…Clayton wrote on October 19 about needing to protect "the truth" by telling untruths, in this case the strategic charade of publicly rebuking someone while privately embracing them. Clayton wrote about Smith's advice: "Says he[,] just keep her [Margaret, his plural wife] at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging and probably cut you off from the church and then I will baptise you and set you ahead as good as ever." [Italics and quotation marks as in The author's original.]

Response

•  Citation error
• The author's source is given as "Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 122 (emphasis added)." No italics have been added by the author to any portion of Clayton's journal. All italicized material is G.D. Smith's words, not Clayton's.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author states that William Clayton's journal " disclosed his own extracurricular romances."

Response

• No source provided.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author then describes Clayton’s 1853 mission to England, during which, “instead of persuading the flock of the correctness of [polygamy], Clayton contributed to defections and was personally suspected of ‘having had unlawful intercourse with women.’”

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, xlviii-l.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote:"The prophet went on to ask Benjamin [F. Johnson] for his sister Almera [in plural marriage], provoking his protégé to comment that if Smith did anything to 'dishonor or debauch his sister, he would have Benjamin to contend with. As Smith casually deflected this threat, his 'eye did not move from mine,' Johnson reported."

Response

• Johnson to Gibbs, Apr.-Oct. 1903, 28–29.

Claim

• Benjamin Johnson is said to have been "[i]mpressed by the prophet's inner calm but not fully convinced."

Response

• Johnson to Gibbs, Apr.-Oct. 1903, 28–29.

Claim

• The author claims that Joseph "was able to wrap himself in the authority of the Bible…."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author speculates: "In a theological explication, perhaps partly inspired by convenience, Smith saw the church hierarchy as an extended family that would continue to live together in an afterlife community."

Response

• Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, 212; Extensions of Power, 163–97; Herbert R. Larsen, "Familism in Mormon Social Structure," Ph.D. diss., U of Utah, 1954.

Joseph Smith: cynical motivations (edit)

Claim

• Benjamin F. Johnson is claimed to be "representative of the mainstream in LDS practice" because he married seven wives…
• The publisher's response to this original claim generated a new claim: That Joseph "justified taking a monagamist's wife and giving it to a man who already had ten."

Response

• No source provided.

Statistical problems (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote:"We do not know how long Joseph Smith had been contemplating polygamy, but the earliest conversations in which he explicitly addressed the topic were in late 1840 and early 1841."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author quotes Ann Eliza Young regarding events that happened in 1842: "She wrote that some of the events she related depended upon the 'experience of those so closely connected with me that they have fallen directly under my observation.'"

Response

•  History unclear or in error
• Wife No. 19, 74.

Claim

• John C. Bennett is claimed to have "publicized Young's clumsy attempt to entice [Martha] Brotherton" into plural marriage.

Response
John C. Bennett (edit)

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have had an "overall materialistic theology."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have ridiculed geologists who "tell us that this earth has been in existence for thousands and millions of years."

Response

•  Citation error
•  History unclear or in error
• Journal of Discourses 12:271 [Smith provides the wrong citation: should be 14:115.]

Claim

•  Author's quote:"In part, Smith's organizational labyrinth helped keep the church together…."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have "worked out a scheme" in which church members were organized into companies of 'tens' and 'fifties'….[footnote] The author then notes that "[t]he first LDS divisions of this kind were in Missouri, where Samson Avard….told men it would soon be their privilege to "….take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly gentiles."

Response

• Andrew Jenson, "Caldwell County, Missouri," Historical Record 8 [Jan 1889]: 701.

Claim

•  Author's quote:"a history of the Mormons in the West would be … a history of a mad prophet's visions turned by an American genius into the seed of life."

Response

• Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 92-101, 469.

Claim

•  Author's quote:"When the opposition newspaper appeared and devoted space to polygamy, Smith and the ruling councils had it destroyed."

Response

• No source provided.

Nauvoo Expositor (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote:"…since institutional histories have minimized the incidence and profile of polygamy (see chapter 1), it is easy to imagine that most men who entered polygamy did so in a cursory way." "In reality, the typical Utah polygamist whose roots in the principle extended back to Nauvoo had between three and four wives, with a higher incidence of large families."

Response

• No source provided.

Statistical problems (edit)

Claim

• The author states that as Nauvoo was gradually depopulated, it became increasingly lawless.

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• It is noted that "Mormons brought about 100 black slaves with them to Deseret, representing two percent of the total population, from 1847 to 1850" and that "[s]lavery and polygamy formed a witch's brew that isolated Deseret from the rest of the U.S. through its territorial period to he 1890s."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

•  Author's quote:"No doubt, [Heber C. Kimball's] hesitation [in further plural marriages] had been similar to Young's, due to the weight of responsibilities involved in running church operations and because of the adverse publicity from Bennett's disclosures."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author speculates that there would have been six plural husbands in Nauvoo by 1842 if John Bennett "had not been expelled…."

Author's source(s)

• No source provided.

John C. Bennett (edit)

Response

• The author again presumes (with no evidence, and against a great deal of evidence) that Bennett's adulteries were ever sanctioned.
• John C. Bennett

Endnotes

1. [note]  Smith, Intimate Chronicle, xlix, 488–489, 490 n. 444.
2. [note]  Steven Epperson, ""The Grand, Fundamental Principle": Joseph Smith and the Virtue of Friendship," Journal of Mormon History 23/2 (Fall 1997): 81-101. See also DC 84:63,77-78, DC 88:3-4,62,113,117, DC 93:51, DC 94:1, DC 97:1, DC 100:1, DC 103:1, DC 104:1, DC 105:26, DC 109:6, DC 121:9-10, DC 125:25, JS-H 1:28.
3. [note]  See, for example, Augusta Joyce Crocheron (author and complier), Representative Women of Deseret, a book of biographical sketches to accompany the picture bearing the same title (Salt Lake City: J. C. Graham & Co., 1884). See also Stanley B. Kimball, "Heber C. Kimball and Family, the Nauvoo Years," Brigham Young University Studies 15/4 (Summer 1975): 466; citing Heber C. Kimball to Vilate Kimball, 12 February 1849. Original letter formerly in the possession of President Spencer W. Kimball, and now in the Church Historical Department; and Vilate Kimball to Heber C. Kimball, 16 October 1842 as quoted in Helen Mar Whitney, "Scenes and Incidents," 11 (1 June 1882):1-2.

Further reading

A FAIR Analysis of Critical Works

• American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows— (Index of claims)
• An Insider's View of Mormon Origins — (Index of claims—Use of sources)
• Archaeology and the Book of Mormon
• Ashamed of Joseph: Mormon Foundations Crumble
• Becoming Gods: A Closer Look at 21st-Century Mormonism/Inside Today's Mormonism — (Index of claims—Use of sources)
• Behind the Mask of Mormonism
• Specific works/Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
• Specific works/By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus
• Counterfeit Gospel of Mormonism
• Covering Up the Black Hole in the Book of Mormon
  • Answering Mormon Scholars, Vol. 1
  • Answering Mormon Scholars, Vol. 2
• Decker's Complete Handbook on Mormonism
• Early Mormonism and the Magic World View — (Index of claims—Use of sources)
• Specific works/Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Mormonism
• Faithful History: Essays on Writing Mormon History
• From Captain Kidd's Treasure Ghost to the Angel Moroni: Changing Dramatis Personae in Early Mormonism
• In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith — (Index of Claims)
• Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon
• Inventing Mormonism: Tradition and the Historical Record
• Is the Mormon My Brother?
• Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet
• Joseph Smith and the Origins of The Book of Mormon (2nd edition)—(Index of claims)
• Joseph Smith's New York Reputation Reexamined
• The Kingdom of the Cults (Revised) — (Index of claims)
• Leaving the Saints
• Letters to a Mormon Elder
• Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church — (Index of claims)
• Mormon America: The Power and the Promise — (Index of claims)
• The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power — (Index of claims)
• The Mormon Mirage: Seeing Through the Illusion of Mainstream Mormonism
• Mormonism 101—Index of claims
• Mormonism (Kurt Van Gorden)
• Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? — (Index of claims)
• The Mysteries of Godliness—A History of Mormon Temple Worship
• Nauvoo Polygamy — (Index of claims—Use of sources—Prejudicial language—Presentism—Mind reading—Censorship—Romance—Assumptions—Magick)
• New Approaches to the Book of Mormon
• New Mormon Challenge
• No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith — (Index of claims)
• One Nation Under Gods — (Index of claims—Use of Sources—Prejudicial language—Absurd claims—Presentism—Mind reading—Rewording—Omissions—Sarcasm)
• The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844
• Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example — (Index of claims)
• Sidney Rigdon: A Portrait of Religious Excess
• The Changing World of Mormonism — (Index of claims)
• Trouble Enough: Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon
• Under the Banner of Heaven — (Index of claims)
• Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture