Polygamy & Polyandry
For roughly a decade in the 1840s, Joseph Smith and a small group of early Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage, the arrangement of one man sealed to more than one woman. A "sealing" is the temple rite that binds a husband and wife for eternity, not just for this life.
Two more terms matter here. Polygamy is the word for a man with several wives. Polyandry runs the other way, a woman tied to more than one man, and several of the women sealed to Joseph already had living husbands. This section deals with all of it.
The record is hard, and any response that tried to soften it would have already lost your trust.
Besides his wife Emma, Joseph was sealed to somewhere between three and four dozen women. A handful of them already had living husbands. The youngest, Helen Mar Kimball, was fourteen. A few of the sealings came with a promise of eternal blessings for the woman's family, and one was tied to the story of an angel holding a drawn sword.
There is also the matter of what he said about it. In 1844, with critics charging that he had seven wives, Joseph stood before a congregation and said he could "only find one."[1] All of that is true.
The CES Letter runs those facts past you in a hurry, the head counts, the young ages, the sword, the denials, and finishes with a chart that lines Joseph up against Warren Jeffs, the polygamist convicted of raping a child.[2] The design is to let the shock decide for you. Read enough of it fast enough and a verdict forms before you have examined any one piece of it.[3]
A chart can only graph what fits in a bar: wife counts, ages, how many were sisters. It cannot graph the two questions those bars are really standing in for. What was this man after? And what did the women themselves, the ones who lived through it, have to say?
Those are the questions that decide the case, and on both of them the evidence runs against the verdict the chart is steering you toward.
What the chart leaves off
The first thing a predator leaves behind is children, so begin there. Joseph had more than thirty plural wives and, with all of them combined, zero confirmed offspring. Over the years a handful of people were rumored to be his children by a plural wife; each rumor that survived to be tested has been run through DNA analysis, and in every case the result points to the woman's legal husband or to some other man, not to Joseph.[4] Ten years of plural sealing left none of the biological trail that predation leaves.
Nor does he come across as a man chasing the practice. Around twenty separate sources describe him resisting the command for years until he was pushed into obeying it. Even the angel with the sword cuts against the CES Letter's use of it. The CES Letter raises that detail to make plural marriage feel coerced, but in the accounts the threat is pointed at Joseph for dragging his feet, never at the women.[5]
The sealings to already-married women point the same direction. Those women went on living in their own homes; there is no sign any of them moved in with Joseph, left a husband, or bore a child by him.
For more than a century the best single case for a physical relationship was Sylvia Sessions, who on her own deathbed in 1882 named Joseph as the father of her daughter Josephine. A 2016 DNA test settled it by matching Josephine to Sylvia's legal husband.[6] So the one piece of evidence the predatory reading leaned on hardest did not survive the lab.
The women the CES Letter never lets speak
For all the times the women show up in this section, you never actually hear from them. The CES Letter tallies them and prints their ages, but it quotes none of them.
In fact these women spoke for themselves, at length. They stood by the sealings to the end of their lives, openly, with their names attached, and some of them did so after leaving the Church, when bitterness would have been the easy choice. Not one of them ever went public to say Joseph had harmed her.[7]
Take Helen Mar Kimball, whom the CES Letter shows us only as a scared girl of fourteen. The woman she became wrote two books in defense of plural marriage and contributed to the Woman's Exponent for twenty years. She called the principle one of the greatest blessings of her life in the same breath that she called it one of the sharpest trials of it.[8] She held both of those at once, and she had no reason to say either except that she believed it.
The three articles
What the three articles below mostly do is hit the pause button on that rush of feeling and bring the women's testimony back into the room.
Joseph Smith's marriages is about the marriages themselves: how a single scary number quietly blends three very different kinds of sealing, what Helen's case actually involved, why he denied it, what the DNA shows, and how the Warren Jeffs comparison reads when you judge the two men by what they did rather than by how tall their bars are.
Polyandry is about the sealings to women who still had living husbands: the idea of a bond meant for the next life only, the absence of any shared household or offspring, the surprising spot where believing and skeptical historians end up agreeing, and the tougher matter of why so much of it was kept quiet.
D&C 132 contradictions is about the revelation the CES Letter treats as a rulebook Joseph supposedly authored and then violated, and what that text says once you read the whole of it rather than a few lifted lines.
Where this leaves us
None of this ties up in a bow. Parts of it stay genuinely uncomfortable, and the worst of them are the public denials. Charged in print with taking many wives, Joseph said:
"I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago... when I can only find one."[1:1]
He had taken plural wives, and he stood up and told the public otherwise. Knowing who his accusers were softens that, but it does not erase it. A fourteen-year-old is hard to read past. The secrecy was real and it carried a price, and people have walked away from the Church over smaller things than this.
What that discomfort cannot do is deliver the verdict the CES Letter is after. Set the whole of the evidence side by side, the DNA that turns up no children, the wives who stood by their own account for life, the documented reluctance, the polyandrous sealings with no household behind them, the revelation that flatly outlaws what critics claim it was written to permit, and a predator or a swindler is not what the record describes.
What it describes is harder to caption: a man and a community working through a costly doctrine out of public view, and leaving behind testimony that is painful in spots and clearing in others. The pain is real. It just does not get to decide a question the evidence answers the other way.
When a stretch of history is this heavy, it helps to remember what is not in doubt. A few years before any of these marriages, the same young man dictated the Book of Mormon aloud in one short span of 1829, working from nothing and changing nothing of substance afterward, and that book is still the firmest footing the Church's claims stand on. This chapter is hard, but it is not the floor any of that rests on, and it never was.
Read the three articles, and then give the women the last word the CES Letter took from them. The grown Helen spent decades telling people exactly what she had concluded about plural marriage, and that voice deserves the room every bit as much as the scared girl the chart wants to leave her as.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 57–58, quoting History of the Church 6:411 ("I am the same man, and as innocent as I was fourteen years ago... when I can only find one"). ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 55, 59. The side-by-side "Joseph Smith vs. Warren Jeffs" chart compares the two men across six surface metrics (number of wives, age of youngest wife, other men's wives, mother/daughter pairs, biological sister wives, under-age-18 wives). ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Polygamy | Polyandry," pp. 51–52. The section opens (p. 51) with an epigraph from Church Historian Marlin K. Jensen defining the terms and noting "Joseph did both," and builds (pp. 51–52) toward the claim that the marriages reveal "the real origins of polygamy and how Joseph Smith really practiced it." ↩︎
Ugo A. Perego, "Joseph Smith, the Question of Polygamous Offspring, and DNA Analysis," in Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L. Foster, eds., The Persistence of Polygamy: Joseph Smith and the Origins of Mormon Polygamy (Independence, MO: John Whitmer Books, 2010). See also Perego et al., "Resolving the Paternities of Joseph F. Smith, Mosiah L. Hancock, and Zebulon W. Jacobs," Forensic Science International: Genetics (2019). Every credible historical claim of a Joseph Smith biological child from a plural wife that has surfaced for testing has been DNA-excluded. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Encouraging Joseph Smith to Practice Plural Marriage: The Accounts of the Angel with a Drawn Sword," Mormon Historical Studies 11, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 69–70. Hales's catalog identifies more than twenty independent accounts of the angel-with-drawn-sword tradition, in which the angel threatened Joseph, not the women, to compel his compliance. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Sexual Polyandry and the Emperor's New Clothes: On Closer Inspection, What Do We Find?" Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2013). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/joseph-smiths-sexual-polyandry-and-the-emperors-new-clothes-on-closer-inspection-what-do-we-find/ On the 2016 autosomal DNA exclusion of Joseph as the father of Josephine Lyon (the strongest historical case for sexual polyandry), see Ugo A. Perego, cited above. ↩︎
Brian C. Hales, Joseph Smith's Polygamy, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013). See vol. 2 for extensive firsthand accounts from plural wives including Helen Mar Kimball, Lucy Walker, and Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. ↩︎
Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Plural Marriage as Taught by the Prophet Joseph (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1882); Why We Practice Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884). In the 1884 work Helen wrote that plural marriage "had also proven one of the greatest of blessings" even as she described it as "one of the severest" trials of her life. ↩︎