135: Whitney Documents, Part 2 – The Letter

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The collection often referred to as “the Whitney documents,” which includes contemporary sources written in Joseph’s own hand, is generally considered to be the strongest evidence of Joseph’s polygamy. Recently multiple historians I have engaged with have gone directly to the Whitney documents to explain to me why the history of Joseph’s polygamy is settled.
I strongly disagree with them. But, I realized I needed to directly address the Whitney documents to explain why I and many others do not see the Whitney collection as evidence of Joseph’s polygamy — but instead as evidence of something very different.

Links

Emma’s efforts to avoid being followed to Joseph’s hiding place

Joseph’s letter to Emma, August 16, 1842

Emma’s response to Joseph, August 16, 1842

Joseph’s letter to the Whitneys, August 18, 1842

Emma’s letters to the governor

Transcript

[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon Polygamy. I am so excited to finally be recording part two of the Whitney documents. This I wanted to have out weeks and weeks ago, but craziness has ensued, so we are finally getting to it, and this is the episode on the Whitney Letter. Thank you for joining me. I am really sad that it has taken over a month to get part two out, and I, so that’s why I’m so excited that it’s finally here. I hope that people still have part one somewhat fresh on their mind when we talked about the Whitney revelation. And I laid out the evidence I have and the reasons that I, in my, um, opinion, this is almost certainly a forgery. I don’t believe that this is A valid revelation from Joseph Smith. So hopefully people have watched that and still have it fresh in their minds. And we are finally now going to talk about the Whitney letter, which is really one of the most important, um, documents in the discussion of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, for the reasons that we will go on to talk about. So I, I felt bad that in part one, I laid it out, um. Really, I, I gave the, the historian’s perspective of this, as it’s usually discussed, and then I didn’t get right back to it. So I’ve had people, um, messaging me or commenting saying, how can you believe Joseph isn’t a polygamist? This letter is so horrible. I liked him, but I think this is awful, so I feel bad that I’ve left that sitting there for so long. So I really hope People will engage with this episode. I think these are really important discussions to be having. So I’m really glad that you’re tuning in. So, just as I did my best, I tried to lay out the two different perspectives and models of the evidence of Joseph’s Joseph’s polygamy in part one, I want to try to lay out the two perspectives of this letter here, how people see it. So, this is my understanding again, feel free to correct me if I don’t represent it accurately. I am trying to. So one viewpoint is that this contemporaneous letter written in Joseph’s own hand is the closest thing we have to a smoking gun to prove that Joseph was a polygamist and that he was keeping it secret from Emma, who, um, it appears from this letter that he was perfectly willing to completely. tray. And so they see it as a secret love letter from Joseph to his new teenage wife, arranging what appears to be a sexual rendezvous, at least that’s how it’s often presented, behind Emma’s back. So that’s one perspective. The other perspective is that this is a letter that Joseph, who was deeply in love with and devoted to his wife, who was working very hard to protect him. This is the letter that Joseph wrote to dear friends in a time of trouble when his heart was both heavy and full, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with polygamy or a sexual encounter and is not evidence of any kind of betrayal of Emma. So that’s, um, those are the two perspectives that we’re going to go over. And as we did last time, I’ll do my best to present the evidence, and people will just have to decide which story they think is more credible, which Is better backed up by the evidence of which one makes more sense. To me, the answer is quite clear. So I will be interested to know how, how other people, um, you know, feel after watching this. I, I hope that the discussions will discussions on this will get revved up and will continue. I think that it’s really important to have these conversations. So as we do this, as we present the two, perspectives or present the evidence in in regard to the two perspectives. The really important things we need to to cover and consider are first, the contents of the letter, which I think you will see is almost always both misrepresented and misunderstood. That’s how it looks to me. The second element we need to consider is the context surrounding the letter, which is. Most often, almost always completely ignored and omitted from the discussion. And then third, we will look at the problems of interpreting this letter as evidence of polygamy and consider whether this interpretation needs to be critically re-examined. We won’t go in perfect order on those because it’s gonna be mixed up a little bit, but, um, those are, those, those are basically the elements that we’re going to discuss in this episode. So we will, we will, um, consider first, actually some of the evidence of why it’s of it’s, um, interpret. It this way, and we will talk about that. So, but first, let’s clear up just one piece of content that we’ll start with. We’ll talk about this more, but right from the beginning, we need to talk about who this letter is actually to. Oh, I, you can’t see it right there. I’ll show it more, um, as, as we get into it more. But practically every time I have seen this letter brought up in the discussions on polygamy, in posts, comments, online discussions, or videos, the claim is that it is, it is a love letter from Joseph. Smith to Sarah and Whitney. So I, I would say that most people in the church or in these discussions don’t necessarily know about this letter because, you know, they’re not, they just know what the historians all say. But people who study polygamy generally seem to know about this letter, and that is how it’s almost always presented. And so I think that, um, I, I want to point out why people see it this way and talk about it this way and are so certain about it. I think that they actually come to that perspective, honestly, because that is how it has been presented. to them. So I want to start by just showing how, um, um, different historians have handled this letter in their writings. And so just, just to kind of help us understand where we’re coming from and what we are trying to argue against and and to see if the assumptions that historians, I believe, have made about this are as well founded as we seem to think they are based on how they talk about it. So, this is George D. Smith’s book, Novu Polygamy, but we called it celestial marriage. And this is maybe the best example. Of how this letter is so often misused by those who seem eager to accuse Joseph Smith of polygamy. I’m not necessarily saying that about George D. Smith. I’m saying that about people who I have engaged with online and people who talk about this, um, in, in their discussion. So this is from the introduction of his book, how he lays out the entire theme, the context he gives it. In 1792, Napoleon, then a young soldier in the French army, wrote this to his quote, sweet and incomparable Josephine of their first night. Together. I have awakened full of you. The memory of last night has given my senses no rest. He goes on to say, What an effect you have on my heart. I send you thousands of kisses, but don’t kiss me. Your kisses sear my blood. The soldier’s adventures had just begun. A few decades later, on the American frontier, another man out of ambition wrote his own letter to a young woman. It was in the summer of 1842 and the 36-year-old prophet, Joseph Smith, hiding from the law down by the Missouri River in Illinois. proposed a try with the appealing 17-year-old Sarah Anne Whitney. He quotes, My feelings are so strong for you, he wrote. Come and see me in my, in this, my lonely retreat. Now is the time to afford me succor. I have a room entirely to myself. The whole matter can be attended to with the most perfect safety. I know it is the will of God that you should comfort me. Three weeks prior to this letter, this letter, Sarah Anne had secretly married the the self-proclaimed seer and Leader of the millennialist Latter-day saints to become his 16th wife. So, as I said, that is, this is the, um, evidence that that he chooses to use in the very introduction of his book to paint the character of Joseph Smith. And he puts it completely, he compares it to that very, um, sexually, um, focused letter from Napoleon and puts it exactly in that same context. I think that’s a very telling and interesting choice of how he is choosing to use it. He goes on to talk about it more in chapter 2, which is titled Joseph’s Wives and subtitled Comfort Me Now, Again, a direct quote from the letter. He begins by again quoting this letter, I think Emma won’t come tonight, Joseph Smith wrote anxiously in August of 1842. To be sure, he recommended that his friend, whose 17-year-old daughter he had just married, should quote, come a little ahead and knock at the window. For when Emma is not here, he wrote, there is the most perfect safety. The prophet then poured out his heart, writing to his newest wife. My feelings are so strong for you. Now is the time to afford me succor. I know it is the will of God that you should comfort me now. George Smith goes on to say, Emma Hale, Joseph’s wife of 15 years, had left his side just 24 hours earlier. Now Joseph declared that he was quote lonesome, and he pleaded with Sarah Anne to visit him, visit him under cover of darkness. After all, they had been married just 3 weeks earlier. So he actually quotes from this letter repeatedly throughout this book, using it really as the foundation to establish the character of his version of Joseph Smith. The problem is, as you can see from this slide, the letter actually says, My dear and. Beloved sister Whitney. Oh my dear and beloved brother and sister Whitney and etc. or so and so. It is clearly addressed to Newe and Elizabeth, who who Joseph refers to as dear and beloved, and a third person who is unspecified. Um, the, the polygamist perspective is that she’s unspecified because it was too dangerous to say her name. I, I, we will get into that. I think it’s much more likely and, um, in, um, in, in alignment with the evidence to say that maybe the third person wasn’t named. This is what I will propose because it was less important. The third person was not the primary recipient. The third person was sort of a tag line, the, the least important, um, recipient of the letter, and perhaps. It was even somewhat up to Newell and Elizabeth to choose who to bring with them. That’s, that’s what we’re going to talk about later later. In any case, it is clear to see from the evidence that the letter is not actually addressed to Sarah. The salutation is to Joseph’s dear and beloved friends, Newell and Elizabeth, which means the content of the letter is meant for them as well. We have the address to Newell and Elizabeth, and you can see how George D. Smith at the beginning said that Joseph wrote a letter to his 17-year-old newest wife, right? And that and painted it in those sexual terms. That this is really a critical point to to keep in our minds that if we want our conclusions to be consistent with the historical record, we need to pay attention all the way through to who this letter is addressed to and therefore who it is written to. So it really is a problem that from the faulty assumption that the third person is, of course, Sarah, who couldn’t be named, we then make the unsupported logical leap to Claimed that the contents of the letter are also directed to Sarah instead of Newell and Elizabeth, to whom the letter is actually addressed. So this misattribution causes people to erroneously read this as a romantic love letter, as we just pointed out, pointed out to a new wife, instead of, as the heartfelt plea to the dear beloved friends bonded through sacrifice, suffering, and loving support. So I wanted to start that out from the beginning, just to paint how every little bit of this and how it is interpreted shapes. The two different interpretations of this letter. We are going to get into it much more, but right from the beginning, I wanted to just um, lay that out the best that I could. So we’re gonna, I’m going to go on to read some more examples of how this letter is covered with the, um, certainty that, that it is actually to Sarah Anne, and it should be read in that way. I will go on and explain the evidence and why people feel comfortable, why historians feel comfortable speaking about this with such such uncertainty. that this letter is to Sarah and Whitney. We’ll show that and let people determine for themselves how solid they think that evidence is. And if it, it is, if it is solid enough to justify the certainty with which this letter is presented as being to Sarah Anne. So, but first, let’s just show how it is universally claimed to be to Sarah Anne, to some, some historians like George D. Smith, when it’s useful to him, says it’s just to Sarah Anne, or at least implies that as he does in the introduction. Usually they will acknowledge that it’s to the parents and Sarah Anne, but say some parts were met, especially for Sarah Anne. So let’s talk about that. Todd, Todd Compton is a good example. He, like most of the others, completely omits the context, which is really, um, I, I don’t know, but that, that seems like an important thing to include. So we are going to cover that in this. But Todd writes a letter sent by Joseph Smith to Noel, Elizabeth and Sarah, dated about a month after the marriage shows how secretly Smith was forced to live in plurality. He addresses father and mother and daughter, U3, but cautiously avoids writing Sarah’s name. So Todd, from what I have seen, he didn’t provide any support for that assumption, didn’t provide a footnote. He just states it as if it were settled fact. And from there, he claims, I’m quoting Todd again, Clearly Emma does not know of the marriage to Sarah Anne. So Joseph must meet Sarah only when there is no risk of his first wife finding out. In his end notes, he is less careful. Um, he says, there is a letter from Joseph Smith to a wife, Sarah Anne Whitney. So again, the letter is to the wife in which he arranges a secret meeting with her and her parents. In this letter, he instructed the family to come only if Emma was not there and to burn the letter after reading it. So all of that is, um, it is interpreted in this way as evidence of secret polygamy. Um, in Mormon Polygamy, A History, Richard Richard Van Wagener also omits the context. This is from page 64. In an 18. In an 18 August 1842 letter to the Whitneys, Smith, hiding from Missouri law enforcement officials, details his problems in getting to see Sarah Anne without Emma’s knowledge. He quotes, My feelings are so strong for you since what has passed lately between us. If you three would come and see me in, in this, my lonely retreat, it would afford me great relief of mind. If those with whom I am allied do love me, now is the time to afford me succor. The only thing to be careful is to find Out when Emma comes, then you cannot be safe. But when she is not here, there’s the most perfect safety. So it’s all framed that Emma is the danger, right? Emma is the reason this has to be all secret and safe, and Emma is why Joseph and others are in danger. That’s how this is always being presented. Um, in his paper, The Strange Marriages of Sarah and Whitney, Michael Marquardt writes, quote, from reading this letter, one can gain an insight into the thought. Patterns of Joseph Smith, especially what he thought of his wife, Emma Smith. Oh, that just hurts. But like, uh, Michael is actually accurate in this. And again, I really appreciate his, um, help with, you know, none of this is meant to be personal attacks or criticisms. I just think that we have a narrative that has been accepted as as axiomatic without being investigated. And that is actually why I think voices like mine are really important to be added to the conversation. So that it forces us to get out of groupthink. It forces the historians to get out of group groupthink, and just assuming their assumptions are correct when they might not be, and they need to be carefully critically thought about and examined, and they need to be defended. So I’m, I’m just going to go on with what Michael said because that was so harsh that he um correctly reads this letter in this interpretation. It says it especially. shows what Joseph Smith thought of his wife, Emma Smith. In this letter written by Joseph Smith in his own hand dated August 18, 1842, he wrote the following remarks concerning Emma. The only thing to be careful of is to find out when Emma comes, then you cannot be safe. But when she is not here, there is the most perfect safety. Also, I think Emma won’t come tonight if she don’t, don’t fail to come tonight. So I just think that is such a painful interpretation, and I don’t think it’s accurate. I do appreciate historians that are more honest about what this actually would mean if this were the interpretation. Try it instead of trying to kind of soft pedal or whitewash or ignore it. So, um, Richard Bushman in Ruth Stone Rolling presents it this way, and I think he handles it, um, actually really responsibly in, in the context of this interpretation. So he says, on August 18th, Joseph wrote to Newell and Elizabeth Whitney asking them to come with their 17-year-old daughter Sarah Anne. The three weeks before, on July 20th, Joseph had married Sarah Anne. When Joseph invited the three of the, the three of them to visit him in hiding, he told them his feelings were quote so strong for you since what has passed lately between us. So there he connects that directly to the marriage. He says that’s what that must be referring to. Then he spoke of his loneliness after just a few days without. Company. Emma had just been there the night before, I’m adding that in. If you three would come and see me in this, my lonely retreat, it would afford me great relief of mind. If those with whom I am allied do love me, now is the time to afford me succor in the days of exile. He continues to say, the Whitney’s stole away from Navu without Emma knowing. She was unaware of this marriage and perhaps most of the others. Again, Those um those claims aren’t supported in ways that I see. It’s just the narrative, he’s just telling the narrative, and I Find this to be so deeply problematic for so many reasons. So, um, of course, Brian Hailes unabashedly claims that the third person is Sarah Anne Whitney, quoting from his website. One month after their sealing, the prophet was in hiding and alone. He wrote to Newe Elizabeth and Sarah Anne Whitney on August 18, 1842. So, uh, so right, I guess. Like, case closed, There it all is. They all say it this way. So I guess it is actually not a surprise that it’s presented this way on the Joseph Smith papers, right? You can see how it is labeled here letter to Newe K um, Elizabeth Ann Smith and Sarah Anne Whitney. I just find this to be so troubling. I appreciate. That most of the historians, most of the time when they talk about it, at least do acknowledge that it is to both of the parents, even if they include Sarah Anne with it, instead of being, you know, there are times you can see how they actually think about it, like how George Smith introduces it in his introduction and how Todd talks about it in his notes that even though they acknowledge that it’s to the parents, they tend to read it just as being to Sarah Anne. And so Anyway, this, this is really troubling to me that this is just universally interpreted to be Joseph arranging a secret try with the 17 year old new wife behind Emma’s back. Because I don’t think the evidence supports that. I love that the Joseph Smith papers, it’s such an incredible resource for us. I love when it provides additional information on sources, such as giving us the provenance of documents. That’s so helpful and the historical introductions are often, often very helpful as well, particularly when they simply provide relevant information rather than trying to build in their own narrative and tell us how to interpret this. I think that the appropriate title for this would be. letter to Newe Kay and Elizabeth and Whitney and etc. or an unnamed third party. That is what the letter says. And so in the very title they are building in a narrative to that seems to be intended to shape the way people interpret and think about documents instead of just providing pertinent information and allowing people to read and interpret the sources for themselves. I think it would. Be fine to, in the historical introduction, say this source says that it’s Sarah, and so we can, you know, but, but they can’t, I, I just don’t understand how they can title the document this way when it’s based on an interpretation of another source. It’s not what the document actually says or should be titled. So it’s, it’s really, um, frustrating. I’m going to go in, go ahead and read part of what they say. The historical introduction. It explains more. They say in addition to the to the directly named recipients, Navo Bishop Noel K. Whitney and his wife Elizabeth Ann Smith Whitney, the letter was intended for their 17-year-old daughter Sarah Anne Whitney, who lived with her parents in Navvo. Joseph Smith’s request for stealth was at least partially intended to keep his whereabouts secret, given the threat of arrest and extradition. That initially drove him into hiding in the fact and the fact that the posses were searching for him in Illinois and Iowa territory, making him here for his life. Yes, exactly. That is what we are going to get into a lot more. The evidence supports that strongly and, and very, um, contemporaneous evidence, certain evidence that we can rely on, right? But, and, and so I’m glad that they included that, because that’s better than most of the historians have done in how They have presented this letter, but then it goes on to say, Joseph Smith’s desire for secrecy also likely arose from his practice of plural marriage, a principle he had shared with only a small group of trusted friends at that time. According to the letter, Joseph Smith may have wanted to keep knowledge of the Whitney’s visit from his wife, Emma Smith, who had been away from Navvo at the time of Joseph Smith’s stealing to Sarah Anne. It then goes on to say, well, most of the letter was directed to all three members. The Whitney family. Some sentiments appear to be particularly intended for Sarah Anne and suggest that Joseph Smith wanted to spend time with his recently married plural wife. So again, it gives us that interpretation that Joseph Smith is writing to these parents to arrange a sexual rendezvous with their teenage daughter, right? That’s and, and again, we are making that logical leap to say if we are claiming that the third person is Sarah Anne, then we can assumed that the content of the letter was meant for her in this um very um infatuated sexually charged way and, and those are claims that I just think are. Um, I, I, I don’t know. I, I just do not think that they are the best explanation of this. So now that you have gotten a good sense of how this letter is treated, including by the Joseph Smith Papers Project, I want to explain exactly what the evidence is that people rely on to make these claims with such certainty. So this is what we are going to talk about now. It all rests on the 1869 affidavits that Jill. Joe Smith filled out for Sarah and Elizabeth and Whitney and may or may not have had them signed. So we’re going to talk about these a bit because they are critically important to the interpretation and the, um, the, the presentation of the Whitney letter. And they also seem to explain why so much of the content is ignored and seen as, I guess, not relevant to helping us understand the letter. I, I think that a different approach is much better. So, um, we discussed these in the first episode of it, these, um, um, part one on the Whitney documents, these, um, affidavits, but I want to go into a little more depth about them here and um I think it will actually be good to start by helping everyone make a little more sense of these confusing affidavits of all of Joseph F. Smith’s 1869 affidavits. Now I will say, um, I’m going to talk about these. A bit, but I, I, this is not my presentation on the affidavits. I haven’t studied them as much as I need to in order to present a full, um, explanation of them or the best I can. That, that is something I really want to get to. So I fully acknowledge that there is a lot more work that I and others need to do on these affidavits. But I want to let you know, um, just a, a better overview of them than a lot of people have. They can be quite confusing, so I’m hoping that this will be helpful. These are the books of affidavits that Joseph F. Smith compiled, mainly in 1869. They were done in response to Emma’s and Joseph’s sons coming on missions to Utah, telling telling the people that polygamy was not of God and that their father had never been a polygamist. So it’s really interesting to read the reactions that were happening in Utah in the wake of David and Alexander. Smith coming to Utah and having so much success. Their message converted more than a few Mormons, and it is what inspired the effort to, to gather desperately needed evidence that Joseph had been a polygamist, which, um, seems, it seems that Joseph F. Smith really took up the mandate to do that with these books. It’s also interesting to read, um, maybe I’ll do it at another time, but Read some of Brigham Young’s sermons given in the wake of Joseph, Joseph’s and Emma’s sons coming to Utah. That’s when we get the sermons about Emma trying to kill Joseph and how terrible Emma was, and about how, uh, you old Mormons, stop thinking about Joseph, uh, about young Joseph Smith. He’s not supposed to leave the church, and we get, we start getting these really interesting sermons against the Smith family. As Brigham is defending his position against the missionaries that were coming and that we were making a stir in Utah and and gaining converts. So this is what I think inspired Joseph F. Smith to create these books. And so, I don’t know whether it was whether it was by assignment from Brigham Young or other leaders, or whether Joseph F. Smith did this on his own volition, but he seems to have gone full steam into trying to track down people. to swear out affidavits. So you can see the label on the first one. I hope it comes across in the slide. It says, 40 affidavits on celestial marriage. That’s really interesting. I want to talk about that just a little bit. The second one is unlabelled, but also contains collected affidavits and testimonies on polygamy. That’s what both of these are. Um, the Church history library refers to them as book 1 and book 2. So this is book one and book 2 of Joseph F. Smith’s. affidavits and testimonies on polygamy, right? And I think it’s useful to note that he labels them affidavits on celestial marriage, which is also how the church history library labels them. This makes it as clear as it could be that for the early church leaders, celestial marriage was absolutely 100% synonymous with polygamy. That’s I want to point that out because that is something that is, um, argued and Dismissed, like, like Brian Hills tells us a lot that the early church leaders never said that polygamy was necessary for exaltation, or that, you know, that celestial marriage wasn’t the same as polygamy. I am thankful that um elder, well, then elder Nelson in 2008, carefully tried to redefine celestial marriage to mean any temple marriage. And so that’s a quote from his talk on celestial marriage. He says a temple marriage is also called a celestial marriage. So he is Actively redefining the term for us in our day, which I think is great. I think it’s that we shouldn’t think of, um, the celestial marriage as polygamy, as if polygamy is what’s going to be happening in the celestial kingdom and is required for the celestial kingdom. But I also think it’s important for us to, um, remember the context of how it was talked about by the polygamist leaders so that we can be accurate about our history. So, oh yeah, this just shows how it’s labeled on, um, the On a church history library. So you can see that they still call it affidavits about celestial marriage, because that’s how the books are labeled when what the books are are affidavits about polygamy. So it’s just important for us to understand that our definition today of celestial marriage is not the same as what it was. So now back to, um, Joseph F. Smith’s compilations of affidavits. Um, there’s way more than I can explain in this episode. I just do want to give you this overview. A couple of things to know about them. It’s interesting because you would think they might. In chronological order as Joseph F. Smith is, um, creating them or having them written, but that’s not the case at all. For example, um, let’s see that a lot of them are all over the place. Book two starts with the affidavits collected in March 1870, but also but almost immediately reverts back to August and then July of 1869. So those are all over the place. It’s, it’s, it’s hard to, and, and book one also is not in chronological order. I’ve heard some people hypothesize that perhaps Jose. F. Smith was copying um affidavits from other places. I, um, I really think that there is strong evidence to say that’s not the, um, that’s, that’s, that would be hard to claim according to these records. They were meant to be original affidavits based on a number of different factors that we’ll go into in that episode that I like, I think it’s really useful to study these out more, which we will do, to try to get, um, more into Joseph F. Smith’s thought process or Methodology for what he was doing when he was creating these. But I need to add one more point of complication because what’s even more strange is that Joseph F. Smith made a 2nd copy of each book. So this is the first copy, and this is the 2nd copy. The Church History Library calls them series 1 and Series 2, and it’s really interesting. You can see he bought the same style of books for both copies of book 1 compared book 1. That’s the same kind of print and um right there and the same thing with book number 2, you can see book number 2 right there on the right side of both of those two slides. So it’s um it’s interesting to try to understand what he was doing. He was sort of making a carbon copy of himself, but the signatures in both series 1 and Series 2 match. So if he was actually having people fill out or sign affidavits, they would have had to stay there while both were filled out so they could sign both. Or unless both were created in advance and they signed both unless, um, unless the signatures were were created or gathered in some other way than having the person actually sign them. These are all questions that would need to be investigated that I, I, from the investigation I have done so far, I have some thoughts on those questions that we will get to. But right now I want to show you that, um, Sarah and And Elizabeth and Whitney’s affidavits are both in book number one. We have them in book number 1, series 1, and book number 1, series 2. So right here are the two copies of Sarah’s affidavit, supposedly signed by Sarah A. Kimball, June 19, 1869. Those are the two copies from the two versions of book one. And then we also have the um two copies of the um affidavit from Elizabeth that was supposedly signed August 30th, 1869. So this is this is why I’ll sometimes show two copies of affidavit because we have series one and series two, and we are going to look at these more because they are very important. But in addition to these, um, to the affidavit from Sarah and Elizabeth in book one, we also have in book two, a very interesting affidavit supposedly also from Elizabeth and Sarah Anne. And um it’s in, it’s copied in book 2 and in book 2 series 2. So first, um, I’m just including the first page here. Joseph F. Smith made a word for word copy of Joseph Smith’s letter to Newell and Elizabeth Whitney in each book. So that letter that I’m showing that we have the original of, Joseph F. Smith also copied it in, um, both both series 1 and series 2 of book 2 of his collected testimonies. So, um, it’s a. Three-page copy in each book. And I, I will say really quickly, while I was trying to figure out whose handwriting this was, that, that was one of the questions I had. Um, I looked to try to find samples of Joseph F. Smith’s handwriting, and I came across this. This is another book that is identical to the, to the books that he used to record his, um, the, the, um, affidavits that he was collecting. And, but this his reminiscent autobiography, which he started at the same time in 1869. So I find it really interesting that he purchased all of these books at the same time. And since he did, since the, the purpose for purchasing these books was to collect testimony of Joseph’s and his father’s polygamy, Hiram Smith’s polygamy. I, I, I, I just naturally wonder and and probably assume. That the reason he was going to write his reminiscent history was also to provide evidence of their, of their polygamy. I think that that’s a, a, a, a fair assumption that that was what he was going to do. And, um, just as so many of the other reminiscent histories were written for that purpose in this, um, debate, that in this need for evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, that’s when so many of the women and others. Wrote the reminiscent histories and for that purpose. But it’s interesting because Joseph F. Smith didn’t get very far into his. He only wrote about 20 pages of the nearly 300 pages of the book, and he only recorded his earliest childhood before even arriving in Utah before he stopped. And the rest of the book is blank. And, and maybe, you know, I, I, I think that’s interesting, but really, Joseph F. Smith was just a little boy, so he wouldn’t have any personal Evidence or recollection of polygamy. And so that could be why he realized, oh, I don’t have that much to write about this. These are all conjectures and assumptions. I think it’s interesting to think about the fact that he bought all 5 of those books, you know, leaves, leaves it up for debate. So the really important part of this, however, is that you can get a sample of Joseph F. Smith’s handwriting. That’s what this was most useful for. It and from seeing his handwriting in this fifth book, which is His affidavit, it makes it quite clear that the majority or that many of the, um, form letter affidavits that he recorded in his 4 affidavit books are also his handwriting. So I think that’s a good thing to know. We can ask questions about what that means. I think we need to look at it more specifically in each separate affidavit. I don’t think we can use that to throw out all of the affidavits because it, you know, there are reasons that that could make sense, but we also need to look. At, um, some reasons that it might be problematic in some cases. So now going back to the second affidavit book that he, um, wrote the Whitney letter, you can see that that is his writing again when he wrote, um, when he copied the Whitney letter. And you can also see that after he copied the letter, there was another affidavit that was supposedly again from Elizabeth and Sarah. So this is, uh, I, I’m hoping this isn’t too confusing. I, I don’t know if Explaining this very well. In book one is Sarah’s affidavit and Elizabeth’s affidavit, claiming that they were married to Joseph Smith. In book two is copied in both series 1 and series 2 of both of these books. In book 2 is a copy of the Whitney letter, followed immediately by another affidavit that is supposedly from Elizabeth and Sarah. So it says that on the 13th of August 1869, they brought the letter to Joseph. Smith and gave it to him to deposit in the church historian’s office. More importantly, it says that the third recipient for the letter was Sarah Anne. So I’m quoting it, Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Sarah Anne Smith Kimball, upon their oaths say that the foregoing is a true copy of a letter written by President Joseph Smith to Newell Kay and Elizabeth Ann Whitney and their daughter Sarah Anne Smith, who was married or sealed to President Smith July 20th, 1842. So there it is. This is the piece of evidence that is used to justify knowing with certainty that that letter was written to the parents and the daughter, right? To the parents and the wife like to that Joseph was really writing it to his wife and his new in-laws. This is the piece of evidence used. So, so I understand why historians do this and say, case closed. There it is. This validates the letter, right? But I think we should look at it more closely and a bit more critically. I hope that historians will take this seriously, even if I’m stumbling through this and if I’m not the best presenter, hopefully I can write this in a paper, but in the meantime, hopefully they can at least just engage with the evidence of. Some historians write this, watch this, or if some take notes, they can share it with other historians, or I’ll be happy to try to do that if they will engage with me, because I think these are important things to discuss. So again, we know that all of these affidavits are entirely in Joseph Smith’s handwriting and in addition, Look at how he lists their names on this affidavit, right? Sarah and Whitney and Sarah Anne Smith Kimball. This is the very first time Sarah Anne Whitney Kingsbury Kimball is ever called Sarah Anne Smith, which is, is just Made up completely made up out of whole cloth, as Emma Smith would say. There, there is no reason to call her that. It was never her name. Just like all the rest of Joseph’s supposed wives, she never went by the name Smith ever. Nobody ever called her that. It is not written anywhere or recorded in any record. It seems to me to be a deceptive tactic. This Someone, same one that Todd Compton uses in Sacred Loneliness. It seems to be trying to somewhat dishonestly give all the supposed wives that last name when none of them ever took it or went by that name to give validity to their marriages, when we should acknowledge that maybe them not having that last name should question the validity of their marriages, right? Instead of using that last name falsely. I, I, I think I really have a problem with that. So, um, if they were married to him and they, and they should have taken his last name as a result, if historians want to say that, then they should have taken his last name, right? It’s, it’s, it’s not honest to give them his last name later, decades later, or, you know, centuries later, as Todd Compton does in his book, that is not a good tactic. At all, in my opinion. So, anyway, um, remember that Sarah went by her legal name, Sarah Ann Kingsbury, long after Joseph’s death. That was her legal name because she was married to Kingsbury, even after having, even having that name recorded in the Navu Temple registry in 1846, when she was sealed for time to Hebrew. And for eternity to Joseph Smith with Hebrew standing proxy, according to, um, Lyle Brown’s record book. That’s, that’s what we have. She even then was listed as Sarah Ann Kingsbury. And then in the 1850, I went over much of this in episode one. In the 1850 census, she was listed as Sarah Anne Whitney, still not Smith, and not even Kimball, even though she was already married to him. And in the 1860 census, and um she was also listed that way. And on the previous affidavit that Joseph F. Smith wrote out for her, she was, she was Sarah Anne Kimball, and she signed it Sarah A Kimball. That was her name just a few months. That was in June, but then all of it, all of a sudden in August, Joseph F. Smith pretends that her name is Sarah Anne Smith, which it never was. If people want to claim that she was married to um Joseph and Joseph F. Smith is just trying to make that more clear and to strengthen the evidence of that, OK, you can go ahead and claim that, but you in that claim, you are acknowledging that Joseph F. Smith was fudging things, was, was trying to create evidence and that his affidavits are not strictly speaking, truthful, credible affidavits in the way that you would expect affidavits to be. This was a motivated effort to try to create. Evidence even through some deceptive tactics at the very least I think you have to acknowledge that and and I, I agree with you. I think the question is just how much of it was deceptive tactics and how much of it is credible because we agree that there is, there are deceptive tactics at play here, but there are, um, I think this may becomes even more problematic when we look at the signatures on this affidavit. So again this is um we’re looking at. Series one, these are the signatures of Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Sarah Anne Smith in parentheses Kimball, and this is in series 2. So these are his two versions of this affidavit. Sarah apparently signs her name, Sarah Anne Smith Kimball, just as it as it is written in the affidavit. And it’s strange how she uses parentheses, again, just like the affidavit. And it’s interesting how similar Elizabeth and Sarah’s handwriting is. Right? So, like, if you only got this far, people might argue, well, maybe it’s because they’re mother and daughter. These are all arguments I encounter as I, um, engage with various people, you know, of, of ways that they explain these things until we show them more. But, um, I want you to note how similar their handwriting looks to Joseph Smith’s handwriting as well throughout the document. You can see every time Sarah and Smith Kimball’s name is written and how, um, It is identical to the signature. I confess that I am, I freely admit that I am not a formally trained handwriting expert. However, in this case, I’m not sure that kind of advanced training is necessary. I think we can all look at this and wonder if that is actually Sarah Anne Smith’s signature on either of those affidavits. Um, I, I, I like, if Anyone wants to argue that it is, or we can talk about whether or not that matters, right? These are good discussions to have. But we need to acknowledge that this affidavit being used as this certain of information to be able to even have the Joseph Smith papers label this as being a letter to Newell and Elizabeth and Sarah Anne. I, I just don’t know that this is credible enough to Warrant that kind of certainty. I think it would be better to say this, this is a letter to Newell and Elizabeth and the third and a third unnamed party, and then somewhere in the historical introduction, bring up this affidavit and say, according to this affidavit, the third party is Sarah Anne. That would be, in my opinion, a more responsible approach based on the information and the evidence that we have. I think it’s useful to do even a little bit more analysis of this and look at Sarah Ann’s different versions of her signatures. So this is apparently her signature in, um, in this August 13th affidavit. And you can see both versions right there of both of their signatures. This is from that, um, this, the book to the affidavit about the letter. And here we are going to compare Sarah’s signatures. From the first affidavit and the second affidavit. There are some interesting things here that I think we will go over more, um, when we do our episode on affidavits. But, um, different people have mentioned to me that that actually looks like the signatures were probably made by the same person if you look at how the Ks are formed and how the, the slant of the letters and a number of other things. And I don’t disagree. Often in the affidavits, I find this sort of what looks to me as like kind of a scratchy hand. Writing, you know, there, it’s a little bit, um, strange. It, it, what, what I first thought when I first was looking at the affidavit is that reminds me kind of of how I would try to forge my mom’s signature in junior high or high school. If she ever told me to like, write a note to, to give to my teacher, I would try to, you know, she would sometimes say, just sign it for me. And I would try to, and I would make it look a little bit like that. So that’s what I first found interesting. I haven’t been able to find, maybe someone else can. I wasn’t, I didn’t, wasn’t. Yet able to find a a handwriting sample of Sarah A. Kimball of Sarah and Kimball to compare. But I think that that’s a suspicious sort of squiggly, um, scratchy handwriting that I actually have seen on in many of the other affidavits. So it will be interesting to do the analysis to compare because, because my just basic as my first wondering is, oh, is that evidence of someone trying to make a signature look like someone else’s? Cause a lot of them look like that, and I think it’s interesting. And then in the second one you couldn’t see that there wasn’t even an attempt to make it look like like someone else. So I, I want to say like, it is possible that this handwriting on both of these signatures is the same person, but That would mean it’s Joseph F. Smith, because I think we can know for a fact that those last two, signatures are Joseph F. Smith because of how they match every other time he wrote this name in that affidavit. So I think that we would be hard pressed to claim that Sarah was signing any of these affidavits. We know, I think, quite certainly that she didn’t sign the second one. And now let’s go ahead and look at Elizabeth’s signatures from Two different affidavits. The first affidavit that’s from book one, that’s just hers about Sarah being married to Joseph, that was August 30th. The second one that is about the letter being to, um, to both of them and Sarah, is actually from two weeks earlier, from August 13th. So her signature in two weeks changed that much. So I think it’s Interesting to consider. Maybe that first one was signed by Elizabeth. I, that’s very possible. Again, the second one wasn’t, and we would have to ask why Joseph wanted her to sign the first one, didn’t care if I, I mean, Joseph F. Smith didn’t care if she signed the second. What’s going on here? Were these affidavits really created all of them when they said they were? Why is the August 13th affidavit about the letter in book two. Instead of in book one, when it’s 2 weeks before this other one collected in book one, right? And why does it have these different signatures? I think it’s at least fair to wonder if Joseph F. Smith was creating a narrative, right? And using the information he had as he had it to try to, to tell us a story about Joseph Smith that fit the narrative that he was working so hard to support. A couple of things that it’s useful to keep in mind is that I’ll just remind you that, um, Elizabeth and Whitney didn’t know Sarah’s wedding date or even wedding year in her, uh, that was, that was recorded in these affidavits many years later in her Abi. biography that she that was published decades later that she wrote with the help of Emmeline B. Wells, right? In these affidavits, the claim is that, um, Elizabeth I mean that Sarah was married July 27, 1842. According to the narrative in the autobiography. Elizabeth makes it very clear that they, she and her husband didn’t learn about polygamy until the revelation was written down, which happened in July 1843. She connects it directly to her husband having a copy made and then coming and teaching it to her, and then them praying about it and having a confirmation that made them give their daughter to Joseph Smith. That’s the version that she tells later on with prodding and with help. Right, in her old age, many years after this affidavit. And I, I talked about this in part one, but, um, we, we know that people tend to remember narratives much better than specific dates. So we have some real problems with these affidavits, and I’m showing some other problems, which are the signatures, the dates they were collected, the stories they tell. There are a lot of problems with these affidavits. So however we want to interpret them, I hope we can at least acknowledge and agree that there are too many questions about them to use them as the, um, one piece of evidence to claim with certainty what this letter is about. I have, um, sometimes been accused of ignoring evidence that came after 1844, which I, I don’t think is a fair accusation at all. I don’t do that at all. I very carefully look at all the Evidence I can find as I just am doing with these affidavits, both during Joseph’s life and after, and I try to make sense of it. So these affidavits are a good example. I have tried to enclo to examine them closely, and I wish more people would do that because I think they are important pieces of evidence that need to be carefully examined. I’m, you know, it’s discouraging that historians haven’t done that same careful analysis yet have just used these. In this way, I honestly, based on my interpretation of them right now and my analysis of them, I tend to think that these affidavits are far more useful to tell us what was happening in Utah in 1869 than they are to tell us what was happening in Navvo in 1842. That seems to be the 1842 or 1843. That is the consistent pattern that seems to show up with them. And I think that that is a conversation that needs to be had. Another thing we need To consider is that we know that Joseph F. Smith, like so many other polygamists, was quite expert at twisting words and reworking sources to claim they said, often the opposite of what they actually said, whatever was needed to, to push the polygamy narrative. So we can’t give him credit for the Jacob 230 spin. He inherited that, I believe, from Orson Pratt, if it didn’t come sooner. That’s, I think, the source that I’ve seen from it. But The but one interpretation of Section 101 that Brian Hailes made somewhat famous in my interview with him, where it says that a husband can have one wife and a woman but one husband. And the idea that that but one clarifies that there’s a difference there, right? That was Joseph F. that came up with that. We know that he would go on to say anything he thought he needed to in order to defend polygamy, including blatantly lying in his sworn testimony in front of the United States Senate Senate during the Reid Smoot hearings. We have a lot of this kind of evidence of Of knowing that the motivations to defend and prove polygamy for this um group of polygamist leaders who believed in polygamy and believed in lying for the Lord, that motivation was stronger than their motivation to tell the literal actual truth. The morality was what helps push, um, polygamy, not what is the truth. That is how they view things. So we need to keep that into consideration when we are wondering how credible to see these affidavits based on that understanding of what the, um, evidence actually is, what is actually written in these affidavits, whose handwriting they are in, and what we know about the people gathering this information, specifically Joseph F. Smith. I would say the only thing we can say we know for sure, based on this affidavit, is that Joseph F. Smith very much wanted this letter to be interpreted this way. That’s the only thing we can say for sure. We can’t even, we certainly can’t say that the letter was addressed to Sarah and Smith. We can’t even say for sure that Elizabeth and Sarah Said or agreed to say that the letter was written. Was it that Sarah was the 3rd recipient. The only thing we can say is that Joseph F. Smith wanted it to be interpreted that way, enough that he was motivated to create evidence to claim that. So that that’s the only thing I think we can say for sure. Those other things may be true. People could argue them, but we certainly can’t just have the assumption that those things are true. I do think it’s also interesting to consider how Joseph F. Smith learned about these documents and how he eventually gained possession of them. So the affidavit only mentions the letter that it says that Sarah and Elizabeth brought this letter to Joseph F. Smith on August 13th, the day that the affidavit was, was, um, created. That’s what it says in it. But I think it’s safe to assume that that’s at that same time that they brought the letter, they likely also gave him the Other papers they had so carefully kept. The deed to, um, Sarah. These are really unique documents. The blessing that Joseph wrote out to Sarah and the marriage receipt that Joseph wrote out between Sarah and, um, Joseph Kingsbury. Right? Again, these documents really are just unbelievably unique and valuable. We don’t have anything like this for anybody else. They were extremely carefully preserved by either Elizabeth or Sarah for years, especially considering what they had to pass through. Many moves, leaving Navvo in in some level of chaos, being unsettled for years, crossing the plains, then having to be resettled in Utah, that is a lot for documents to be carefully protected through, especially when you consider they didn’t have things like plastic coverings to protect them from water damage. This had to very intentionally kept this safe. They meant a lot to whoever preserved them in this way. And so that’s one of these, one or both of these women cared deeply about these documents, as evidenced by how the by the great lengths they went to to preserve them. So, so I wondered why would they just turn them over to Joseph Smith. And just at this time when Joseph F. Smith was trying to collect information and evidence of Joseph’s polygamy, I don’t, I don’t want to set it up. Because if I have the answer, I don’t have the answer. I just think these are really interesting questions to consider what what work was being done to gather these things, right? To have people bring them. I, I do want to at least consider a few things that I think are relevant. Again, looking at the context of what was happening at this time, at this time, that these, um, documents were gathered. These were two widows in Frontier, Utah, and, um, we’ve already talked some in previous episodes. About the situation in Utah, there was no um, social safety net, right? This was a harsh frontier climate and land and, uh, harsh living conditions and not, not much care for the poor readily available. My understanding is that Hebrew’s wives and children had never been very well provided for, reading some of the histories, you get that impression that it was hard living conditions, all of them in one house, trying to get along. And, um, after his death, they were left without anything. It’s really hard to find any information about Sarah after, after these initial things that paint her Joseph’s wife, right? Once Here is dead, I, it’s really hard to find anything. I did find a, um, let’s see, in one family history written by, I believe, a great granddaughter or a granddaughter. Oh, I think it was a row. Daughter. It says some of Hebrew’s wives went to the Bear Lake area to live after Hebrew’s death. The oldest boys in the family took care of their mothers. That’s the only information I could find, and that would mean that they had no support. The teenage boys had to struggle to try to provide for their entire families, was the situation that these women were in. So Sarah Anne and Elizabeth, Hebrew had just died. Let’s see. I think he had only died a year before this. Yeah. Sarah and Elizabeth brought these documents to Joseph F. Smith 1 year after Heber’s death. Sarah was a 43-year-old impoverished widow with 5 children at home. That was her situation when she brought these documents in. She died a short Five years later. And as I said, as difficult as it is to find anything, I was able to find just this one very, um, sparse, um, obituary. Um, all it says is that she died of general debility at 48 years old. General deability at 48 years old. That’s my age. I’m 48. That’s not old. And, um, that’s, and, and, and it was just this short little affidavit, like, like she seems to have really been forgotten. So that is something to consider as well. I, I, I find myself hoping. That, um, at least, um, Sarah and Elizabeth were paid something for turning over these precious documents, you know, I can’t help but wonder if there was some level of desperation. They clearly cared very much about these documents, but I think it’s safe to assume that maybe they were in, especially Sarah, may have been in very dire straits. So we’ve gone to all of that effort and discussion to cover one piece of the content because I think it’s such an important piece, who this letter is actually to, who it is addressed to. I hope that this has been a sufficient discussion to at least open people’s minds to the recognition that we cannot claim for certainty that this letter was to Sarah. I think that, um, I think that is the conversation at the very least, like, people who have share my perspective would say, it’s ridiculous. To explain this is to Sarah based on that information, right? But I think that people on both sides at least hopefully can acknowledge that that needs to be, um, debated more rigorously than it has been. I don’t think it should just be accepted as axiomatic. So now that we’ve covered that piece of content, let’s go on to look at the context which is which is actually the more important part of this, um, conversation. So we’re going to spend the rest of the time covering the context, then we’ll go back and read through the entire letter. So we’ll look at the full content one more time. With the understanding we have gained of all of this content. So, uh, first, I need to lay out some important background information. On May 6, 1842, Governor Boggs was shot through the window. Investigators found the, found the revolver dropped at the scene, likely because of the unexpected recoil from the unusually large shot. So they think that whoever the shooter was used too large a shot, so the recoil was so hard that the gun dropped out of his hand, and he was unable to retrieve it on. The dark rainy night. That’s what the, the, the history and the information says. The gun had been stolen from a local shop. They knew that and were able to identify it. The shopkeeper identified, quote, that hired man of wards, the laborer of a local resident, as, quote, the most likely culprit. So the identification of the most likely suspect is one of the many reasons it was unlikely to have been Porter Rockwell, who shot. Governor Boggs, those who know this story know that that Porter Rockwell was accused, right? In addition, Porter would have had his own guns and wouldn’t have needed to steal one, and he wouldn’t have run the additional risk of stealing a gun. He was also an adroit gun hand and would not have used the wrong size shot and would not have been clumsy enough to drop and lose his gun at the scene. That, like, that, that’s not who we who Porter Rockwell was from anything we understand about him. So there was no thought of blaming the Mormons until July 15, 1842, when John Bennett’s second letter was published in the Sangamo Journal, falsely accusing Joseph Smith and Porter Rockwell of the attempted murder of Boggs. He wrote, quote, In 1841, Joe Smith predicted or prophesized in a public congregation in Navvo that Lilburn W. Boggs, ex-governor of Missouri, should die by violent hands within one year. Um, I, I will say I have not seen any evidence of that, that it was recorded anywhere, right? That, that Joseph ever said that. Um, if I’m misspeaking, show me, because maybe I’ve missed something. I haven’t seen it. I, I don’t see evidence to show that Bennett was telling the truth here. Um, let’s see. From 1 or 2 months prior to the attempted assassination of Governor Boggs, Mr. OP Rockwell left Navvo for parts unknown to the citizens at large. I was then on. Of close intimacy with Joe Smith and asked him where Rockwell had gone. Gone said he’d gone to fulfill prophecy. So that is what John Bennett wrote in the Saint Journal. I think it’s fair to ask why didn’t you report it, John Bennett, if you knew that Joseph Smith was sending Porter Rockwell to murder Governor Boggs? How, how are you claiming that you’re so innocent, right? So anyway, July 20, 1842, based on this article by Um, Bennett, Missouri Governor Reynolds requested, quote, the surrender and delivery of the said Joseph Smith. Illinois Governor Carlin issued arrest warrants for Joseph Smith and Porter Rockwell. So this is the series of events, uh, um, um, an attempted murder of ex-Governor Boggs that Joseph almost certainly had nothing to do with all of a sudden because of Bennett, resulted in Joseph Smith, I Again, having to face the situation that he has to face, it’s really, really tragic to understand what was happening. So that sets the stage by establishing the history that led to Joseph being in hiding in the first place. We are now going to go through the daily series of events during this time period that led up to Joseph writing the letter. This is so important to understand in order to, in my opinion, correctly interpret why Joseph Smith wrote the letter and what What the words he wrote in his letter actually means. So this is something, this, this is like the most important part of this episode in many ways. I wanted to find a way to make it a little more comprehensible and, um, memorable than just me talking. So we are going to do a NASA-style countdown. Um, NASA uses launch time for their L minus countdown. We’re going to do the same, but, um, ours is going to be letter time instead of launch time. The letter is dated August 18th. 1842. So that is our letter day that we’re going to count up to. And I know there should be some joke in there about, I guess for now, we are being the letter day saints. So I forgive me. So stupid. It just is funny that it’s letter day. So, here we go to establish the timeline for this letter. So we’ll start with L-minus 10. This is August 8, 1842, 10 days before Joseph wrote the letter. On this day, Joseph Smith and Porter Brockwell were arrested. By Adams County officers to be extradited to Missouri, where they believed they were Joseph and the entire community believed that they would certainly be killed. So because of the Navo City charter that didn’t allow for extradition, the the city government had to allow them to be extradited. So the Navvo court ordered them released on habeas corpus and the officers left frustrated. So while this was frustrating, this was the very reason. The Navo Charter was established this way and was allowed to prevent this exact thing. And so, um, the, the officers were frustrated, but what, what Joseph was doing was completely following the law. So then we’re going to skip to L minus 8 the next day we have a record. I should establish this comes, much of this comes from, um, the Book of the Law of the Lord, the history of Joseph Smith, his journal that was much of it, much of it was recorded by, um, William Clayton, who spent a lot of time with him during this time. And then some of it is also written by, um, oh, Erastus Derby, I want to say, and Eliza Snow. I think they copied some of the letters that we have as well. But this is where this history comes from. If people want to read through it. I’ve brought in other sources as well, but you can find most of this information in that source, which is actually invaluable. It’s really good that we have it. So now we’re going to skip to L minus 8, which is August 10th. On this day, the officers returned, but they could not. Find Joseph and Porter, who had gone into hiding. So it, um, the deputy was frustrated, and it says that he endeavored to alarm Sister Emma and the brethren by his threats, but could not do it. They understanding the nature of the law in that case. I have to apologize. I feel like I have a little bit of a lisp. I had to pause this recording halfway through, because I had a dentist appointment. And so I had to come back and wait till I wasn’t numb anymore. And I’m still just a little bit swollen as you can see, and a little numb. So if there’s a little bit of a lisp, I apologize, please forgive me, I have to get this recorded today cause it’s my only day to do it, so such is life. So now we’ll go on, if, if you want to know, I’m also in pain and still recording. So, so I guess we’re all just having to sacrifice a little bit together. I have to be in pain and you have to hear a list. Let’s continue on. So, L minus 7 is August 11th, and Joseph, um, this is what it says in the book, Joseph, who was at this time at Uncle John Smith’s and Zara at Zarahemla in Zarahemla, sent word that he wished to see Sister Emma, Brothers Hiram Smith, William Law, and Others with instructions to meet on the island between Navu and Montrose after dark, whereupon Emma Hirum, William Law, Newell K. Whitney, George Miller, George Miller, William Clayton, Dimock B. Huntington met at the waterside near the brick store sometime after dark and proceeded in a skiff to the island. This is really important. This is a central event that we need to pay close attention to that. Again, doesn’t come into the conversation. After waiting a very little while, the skiff arrived from the opposite shore, and in it, Joseph and Era and and brother Erastus Erastus Derby. They discussed the warrants and the strategy, and Joseph went into hiding afterwards at Edward Sayers. So one skiff came from one side of the river, the other one came from the other side, and they met on an island in the middle of the river. This is a very important meeting that we’re going to hear quite a bit more about. And you heard who was included in that meeting. Now we’re going to go to L minus 6. This is August 12th. Emma spent the day working on Joseph’s case, counseling with others and deciding to send a message with a letter to an out of town lawyer who could meet with the governor to try to get to the bottom of things. To avoid the sheriffs and bounty hunters, evasive action had to be taken. So Emma, so she’s already sent Joseph off in hiding, then she’s gone to the effort of crossing the river and going to this meeting, right, on the island. Then she spends her day in counseling and writing letters and trying to strategize to try to get to the bottom of this. She really is dedicating herself completely to helping manage this situation. And the next part of this entry for this day is also essential to pay attention to. They were trying to keep Joseph’s hiding place from being found, so they had to they intentionally took evasive action to confuse the many bounty hunters who had come into town to try to find Joseph. More and more were coming all the time. So this is what it says in the book of the law of the Lord. Accordingly, Joseph’s new horse, which he rides. was got ready and William Walker proceeded to cross the river in sight of a number of persons. On chief design for in this procedure. One chief design in this procedure was to draw the attention, the attention of the sheriffs and public away from the all idea that Joseph was on the Navu side of the river. At night, William Clayton and John D. Parker left Navu after dark and went to see Joseph and found him cheerful and in good spirits. So he’s been in hiding. Just a few days so far, he’s still holding up pretty well. But you can hear, you can hear what they are already doing to try to confuse the many people looking for Joseph, to keep them not knowing where he is. So, um, now we’re going to go to L minus 5 August 13th. Joseph had requested Emma to come see him so they could consult together about what to do. The sheriffs noticed her carriage getting ready and kept Close watch. So on L minus 6, on the 12th, Emma had written the letter, done these other things. On the 13th, the next day, she is going to see him. But again, evasive maneuvers had to be taken. So to throw off the sheriffs that were hunting for Joseph, Emma instead snuck out and walked to Sister Durphy’s, while William Clayton and Lauren Walker rode in her carriage with the shades up. I think that means open. So the sheriffs could see that Emma wasn’t in it. So this was all being plotted to make sure that they didn’t know where Emma was going to see Joseph because she was being watched closely and followed, of course, because she was Joseph’s wife, and they were looking for Joseph, right? When, um, when this, when, um, William Clayton and who was it Lauren Walker saw that they weren’t being followed, they went to pick up Emma and then they. Drove an extremely circuitous route, 4 miles down the river road, then drove to the prairie and circled 2 miles out from the city until they were 1 mile from Sayer’s farm when Emma stealthily got out and walked the rest of the way there and the carriage returned. So no hint would possibly be given where Joseph was. Now think of how slow these carriages went and how long it takes to walk, right? This like the time that Emma spent in these evasive actions just to prevent anyone from finding Joseph is something we should pay attention to. They were going to these great lengths because they knew that Emma was being followed, right? Now I’m going to quote a report came over the river that there are several small companies of men in Montrose, Nashville, Kirkuk, etc. In search of Joseph, they saw his horse go down the river yesterday and was confident he was on that side, so it worked. They swear they will have him. It is said there is a reward of $1300 that would be $55,000 today, offered for the apprehension and delivery of Joseph and Rockwell, and this is supposed to have induced them to search, to get this to get the reward. Sheriffs swore they would stay a month if needed and would burn the city to find him. That is the situation. So that’s why they’re doing this. More and more people were pouring in, hunting for Joseph, inspired both by their, um, resentment and their hatred of Joseph and hatred of the Mormons and their sense of justice because they thought that he had done these things, and also by now a financial reward, right? More and more people were coming to join in the search. It was very serious. It was very dangerous. So, um, Emma, that night, she, she went to visit Joseph, then she spent the night. So She’s there the next day as well. Now we’re going to go to L minus 4 the next day. This is August 14th. Um, quote, quoting from the book, Spent the forenoon chiefly in conversation with Sister Emma on various subjects. And in reading this, this history with her. That gives us another, um, reason to have confidence in this history, right? Because it was being kept and Emma and Joseph read it together that day. Both felt in good spirits and were very cheerful. And then Joseph spent the Entire day counseling and talking happily with Emma. They spent that day entirely together. Also, Joseph wrote a letter to Wilson Law who was helping him with this case at this time they were on good terms, and Wilson was a lawyer. Um, so we wrote this letter to Wilson Law giving him instructions, the PS included, the bearer of this will be able to pilot them in a way that will not be prejudicial to my safety, meaning the letters that you’re going to send back to me. We’re gonna read a little bit more of that quote a little later on. Um, Joseph had asked Emma to deliver the letter, so Emma was a courier of letters, and Joseph was entrusting her with his safety. Even though William Law was helping with the case, Joseph didn’t tell William Law where he was staying. He said, Give the letters to Emma. She can get them to me without endangering my safety. So, again, Emma stayed, so she had come the night before or the day before. I’m not, I can’t remember what time. She stayed overnight and she stayed until after dinner, and then at great difficulty and danger because of the strong wind, instead of just going back home. Because remember, Joseph was actually on the Navu side of the river, but they were trying to pretend he was on the other side. So in order to help keep that deception up, even though there was a strong wind and a bit of a, and a storm, she crossed the river in a skiff to make it appear that they were coming from the other side, right? Still in that same effort. They finally made it to Montrose and got in another skiff. It was a dangerous journey to Montrose. When they got there, they got into another skiff to cross from there to Navvo again with wind and toil and danger. Um, and. They made it, but it was scary. These are the efforts Emma went to to see Joseph, to be with him, to help him, and to keep him safe. And this is contemporary evidence of how much he relied on her and how good their relationship was. There really is zero indication that he was in any way betraying her or that she was struggling with him taking additional wives, or if she didn’t know that he was doing these things behind her back, that they had had the contentions that just I, I think we should look at the evidence that exists here instead of just relying on that 1869 affidavit, right, with how problematic it is. So now we’ll go on to L minus 3. This is August 15th. Emma delivered Joseph’s letter to Wilson Law. More reports of mobs and armies coming to raise Navvo if Joseph wasn’t found. I’ll quote now. In consequence of these reports, it was considered wisdom that some of the brethren should go and inform Joseph. According about 9 o’clock, Hiram and 6 other men, including Newell K. Whitney, I won’t name them, started by different routes on foot and proceeded to the place where Joseph was, was. So all of them intentionally took way longer to get there because they all went out in different directions till they got far enough away that they could circle back to where Joseph was. Um, that’s the constant evidence of the extreme care that needed to be taken to ensure his hiding place. Then we’ll go to L minus 2 August 16th. It says, wrote a letter to sister Emma giving her instructions how to proceed in my case, in case they had to go to to the pine country. So I’m going to read part of this letter because these are also really important to take into consideration in our narrative that we’re setting up. So, my dear Emma, I embrace this opportunity to express to you some of my feelings this morning. First of all, I take the liberty to tender you my sincere thanks for the two interesting and consoling visits that you have made me during my almost exiled situation. Joseph is starting, I think it’s starting to wear on him a little bit more, being inside, cooped, cramped inside alone. We’ll talk about that a little bit more. Tongue cannot express the gratitude of my heart for the warm and true-hearted friendship you have manifested in these things toward me. The time has passed away since you left me very agreeably. Thus, thus far my mind being perfectly reconciled to my fate. Let it be what it may. I have been kept from melancholy and dumps by the kind-heartedness of Brother Derby and his in chit chat from time to time, which has caught my mind from the more from the more strong contemplations of them and subjects that would have preyed more earnestly upon my feelings. Remember, he’s falsely accused of this. He’s basically In con in practically solitary confinement, he’s at least with Brother Derby right now, but for not for nothing that he did, he was not involved in this, right? For more false allegations coming from John Bennett. It’s just, it’s just so heart-wrenching. So he writes of the men’s concerns about his safety and insistence that he leave, so those 6 men that came and insisted that he go out of town. He writes of what seems to be Emma’s offer or desire to go see the governor and tells her to not go see him, but to write him if she wants to. He continues, Brother Miller again suggested to me the propriety of my accompanying him to the pine woods, and then he returned and bring you. And the children. My mind will eternally revolt at every suggestion of the kind, more especially since the dream and vision that was manifested to me on the last night. So last night, he’d had a dream or a vision. My and this is what it said, My safety is with you if you want to have it so. Anything more or less than this cometh of evil. My feelings more or less than his reliance on Emma and And his safety with Emma. What a gift that we don’t have the original letter or I would be showing it. It’s recorded in the book of the law of the Lord. All of these letters they exchanged this time were recorded, and I think that’s, uh, such a gift to us. Um, my feelings and counsel, I think, ought to be abided. If I go to the pine country, you shall go along with me and the children. And if you and the children go not with me, I don’t go. I I do not wish to excite exile myself for the sake of my own life. I would rather fight it out. It is for your sakes, therefore, that I would do such a thing. I will go with you then in the same carriage and on horseback from time to time as occasion may require, for I am not willing to trust you in the hands of those who cannot feel the same interest for you that I feel, to be subject to the caprices temptations or notions of anybody, whatever. And I must say that I am prepossessed somewhat with the notion of going to the pine country anyhow, for I am tired of the mean, low, and unhallowed vulgarity of some portions of the society in which we live. And I think if we could have a respite of about 6 months with my family, meaning Emma and his and their children, it would be a savor of. and to life with my house. Um, he then continues to give her instructions of what to gather for him and how to take care of all of their business. He continues and says, Tell the children that it is well with their father as yet, and that he remains in fervent prayer to Almighty God for the safety of Himself and for you and for them. Tell Mother Smith that it shall be well with her, that it shall be well with her son, whether in life or in death, for thus saith the Lord God, tell her that I remember her all the while, as well as Lucy and all the rest, um, Lucy, his little sister. They must all be of good cheer. Yours in haste, your affectionate husband until death through all eternity evermore, Joseph Smith. That’s the letter he wrote. And when we talk about other women being his wives, I, and there are so many things to bring up into this. This is the relationship that Joseph and Emma had, and I know that people envision, based on these later affidavits and these later claims, and they envision, um, Joseph loving Emma, but also loving these other women and feeling, you know, like, like I’ve talked to John Hammer and some others, and they’re like, yeah, he totally loved Emma, and he was betraying her. And I, I just, um, I guess everyone, it’s up to them to see what they. I think, but we don’t have a letter like this to anybody else, to any other woman. We see how much Joseph was relying on him, and how much of a partnership they were. And it does, it to me, it does not make sense at all to impose other women into that and to create this, this narrative of who Joseph was. And then at the same time, for at least members of the church to claim he was a prophet of God, right? That he was being this false and fake in writing these things to Emma. He wants to go away with her. Why doesn’t he need all of the other wives? He’s concerned about her safety, but all of his other wives, they can just take care of themselves, right? There’s no financial help. There’s no connection. We see from this letter, the kind of husband that Joseph Smith was. Shouldn’t we expect him to be something like a reasonably decent husband to these other women he’s supposedly married for eternity, even though, I, I mean, anyway, I won’t go into it too much. I just think that this ought to be really seriously considered and not thrown away quite so lightly. Emma wrote back to Joseph the same day, Dear husband, I am ready to go with you if you are obliged to leave. And Hiram says he will go with me. I shall make the best arrangements I can and be as well prepared as possible. But still, I feel good confidence that you can be protected without leaving this country. There is more ways than one to take care of you. And I believe that you will, that you can still directing your business concerns if we are all of us prudent in the matter. This, oh, there’s So much. I, I, I’m going to talk a little bit about Emma’s letter, but she was actually concerned about all of the other people in the city. She knew how involved Joseph was in all of the business of the city. And if that if he left, many people would suffer because, um, he was so integral and important to the city. So she’s not, she’s, she’s, she’s so smart, and it is so brilliant that when she says there’s more ways than one to take care of you, she is the one arranging this, negotiating, um, mastermind. in many ways. She’s so smart and she’s so caring about all of the other people there. That’s, that comes through in her letter to Governor Carlin. So I think it’s worth reading that when we get to it. Um, I mean, I won’t be able to read the whole thing in this episode, but I hope that, that you guys will. So, um, you can still directing your business concerns if we are all of us prudent in the matter. If it was pleasant weather, I should contrive to see you this evening, but I dare not run too much risk on account of so many people going to see you. Yours affectionately for Emma Smith. So those other 6 men had gone to see Joseph, right? So Emma would go to see him, but she’s really nervous that that might draw too much attention when others have gone to see him. They have to be very strategic, very careful. Emma has to be very careful that when she goes, nobody else goes, right? And that she doesn’t go when anybody else might be going to avoid giving up his hiding place. Another crucial piece of information that we need to pay attention to. So now this, oh, this is the same day, L minus 2. Joseph recorded his deep, loving sentiments in his journal. So now Joseph has been in hiding, what I think it’s 5 days, if I’m getting that right. And, um, it’s probably starting to wear on him, right? These were little houses, dark like in this day, they didn’t have electricity and they had small spaces. They lived outdoors for for the most part. That’s really where a lot of their lives took place was outside. And also, Joseph was so social. Gregarious and outgoing and active and young and high energy. This must have been extremely difficult for him to stay in hiding like this. But, um, he becomes very, um, thoughtful and sentimental, and we get this beautiful, beautiful record in his journal of his thoughts. I’m going to read part of it. This is when he’s talking about that meeting in the island on the island that I talked about. How glorious were my feelings when I met that faithful and friendly band on the Night of the 11th on Thursday on the island at the mouth of the slough between Sarah Henna and Navu. With what unspeakable delight and what transports of joy swelled my bosom when I took by the hand on that night, my beloved Emma, she that was my wife, even the wife of my youth and the choice of my heart. OK, I have to pause here for a minute because Joseph uses at least one extremely critical phrase phrase that caught my attention. It’s the wife of my youth. I’ve heard some people bring that up to say, see, he was, she was the wife of his youth, but then he had other wives later on as he was older. She was just the first one, right? Kind of like that but one type of argument. But actually, if you look this up in the scriptures, it reveals something crucial. And these kinds of things, I just feel like, man, there was a lot of inspiration going on here. I know Joseph knew the Bible well, so I have to think that phrase was chosen intentionally, and It also is just very inspired because of the instruction it gives us. That phrase is found in Proverbs 5 and in Malachi 2, and I highly recommend reading both of those chapters in their entirety, because they are actually profoundly important in this discussion of Joseph Fligy and the fact that he intentionally called Emma the wife of his youth. So I’m just going to, I, I cut a few verses out. So I’m going to read a portion of each of these, but I hope you’ll go read them. On your own. This is Proverbs 5. And listen what the message is about the phrase, the wife of thy youth. My son, attend unto my wisdom and bow thine ear unto, and bow thine ear to um, to my understanding. For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil, but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Hear me now, therefore, O ye children, and depart. Not from the words of my mouth, remove thy way far from her and come not nigh to the door of her house and say, how have I, if I, I cut out some verses, they will say, How have I hated instruction? And my heart despised reproof and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to them that instructed me. They’re they’re saying, What have we done wrong? And he’s saying, You haven’t listened to this council. He goes on to counsel them, Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running. Running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountain be blessed and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant row. Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman and embrace the bosom of a stranger? For the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponddereth all his goings. The term, the wife of my youth or the wife of thy youth is a very sensual, affectionate, loving term about a couple, a married couple who are supposed to stay faithful to each other and not be ravished with a strange woman. Right? That is exactly what it’s about. This is a profound chapter about monogamy, about God’s commandment of monogamy and the cursings that come upon those who stray from that. We can go on. To Malachi 2, if we need a second witness. These are the two places I found this in the scriptures. And again, Malachi 2, please read the whole chapter. I just pulled out some verses, so, um, I didn’t want to take too long on it. But now I will read this. So I’m going to start at verse 1. And now, oh ye priests, this commandment is for you. If you, if you will if you will not hear, and if you will not lay it to heart to give glory unto my name, sayeth the Lord of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Yeah, I have cursed them already because you do ye do not lay it to heart. I strongly recommend reading Malachi 2 in particular, side by side with Jacob chapter 2. There are so many important similarities. First of all, here we have a warning of a cursing, just as Jacob 2 says that if they don’t heed the Lord’s commandment of monogamy, cursed will be the land for their sakes, right? It continues on. I’m going to verse 5. My covenant was with him a life. and peace. It talks about the messenger that the Lord sent. The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips. He walked with me in peace and equity and did turn many away from iniquities. For the priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts. He’s telling all of the priests, all of the elders, we could say, to listen to what the messenger is saying. At least if you share. This interpretation, I think it’s an interesting one. I know that scriptures have many interpretations, but boy, the fact that Joseph Smith included this in this journal entry about Emma that he insisted be written down, right, during this week that he supposedly wrote this other letter while we’re doing this investigation. It just feels like a divine gift that this was given to us, that this was included and that, you know, that I, I happen to have the inspiration to look it up. And I, and I think it’s important. Maybe others have looked it up. I hope so, because I think this should be part of the conversation. For the priest’s lips should be, should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law of his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord. But ye are departed out of the way. Ye have caused many to stumble at the law. Ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, sayeth the Lord of hosts. Judah hath dealt treacherously and an Abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. Remember, abomination, Jacob too, right? For Judah hath profaned the holiness of the Lord which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god, bringing in that marriage symbolism, the strange god, say, of many wives and concubines, the false god of Section 132. Um, I, I, there are important verses 12 and 13 are very important. I cut them for now. Please go read them. I’ll go to 14. Yet ye say, wherefore? How have we broken the covenant? Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously. Yet is she thy companion and the wife of thy covenant. Could it be more clear? Again, compare it to Jacob True too. The betrayal of the women, the broken hearts of the women is why God condemns this. And this is what he uses. This is what is used here as well, is the betrayal of the wife of your youth. You are not allowed to deal treacherously with her. So if we are claiming that Joseph Smith is dealing treacherously with Emma in this way, what does that mean about him? How do we interpret this script? I know that this is a scriptural um argument, but at the very least, if we want to look at this only historically, we know that Joseph Smith knew these scriptures, right? But I think from my perspective, I like to look at it also theologically and scripturally because I think that there is power there and there’s truth and that that is worth considering there and why this was included and why this scripture says this, that aligns so perfectly with Jacob too. With this topic. So you, you, um, what God has against them is that they have dealt treacherously with the wife of thy youth when she is thy companion and the wife of thy covenant, the wife of thy covenant, consistent with everything Joseph taught, consistent with the true portions of Section 132 that teach about the covenant of marriage and eternal marriage. Um, go on to verse 15. And did he not make one? Did God not Make this couple one, just as he said, what God hath put together, let no man tear asunder, right, cleave unto thy wife, and none else. It says it everywhere. Yet had he the residue of the Spirit. And wherefore one, why are they made one, that he might seek a godly seed. Again, compare that to Jacob 2, verses 27 and 30, right? That God wants to raise up seed. And he does that through command. monogamy and insisting that his people live within the covenant so he can raise up a covenant people, which is what that means. It aligns perfectly. That is why God made them one and commanded that there be no other wives, that you cannot deal treacherously with the wife of your youth, because God wants to raise up a godly seed. Therefore, take heed to your spirit and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. OK. There we have it. For those who want to claim. That Joseph was a prophet and was doing this, I think that needs to be taken very seriously. Hey, let’s go on with the letter. It continues. Many were the reverberations of my mind when I contemplated for a moment the many scenes we had been called to pass through, the fatigues and the toils, the sorrows and suffering, and the joys and consolations from time to time had strewn our paths and crowned our board. Oh, What a co mingling of thought filled my mind for the moment, the moment when he took her hand and helped her onto the island. Again, she is here, even in the 7th trouble, undaunted, firm and unwavering, unchangeable, affectionate Emma. Many of us know that entry in Joseph’s journal. I’ve, I’ve read it many times before. The important thing to recognize is that this, he wrote in his journal, what was it? 2 days? Are we on L minus 2? I believe 2 days before he wrote the letter that we claim is him betraying Emma and saying, don’t. Come if Emma’s around, right? I need to, I, I need to see you. We’ll, we’ll get to it, but this needs to be taken into consideration in this conversation. He wrote this in his journal two days before that. Then he goes on, and he talks, he’s talking about the people that came to this sacred meeting on the island. In Joseph’s mind, this was sacred. There was Brother Hiram, who next took me by the hand, a natural brother. Thought I to myself, Brother Hiram, what a faithful heart you have got. Oh, may the eternal Jehovah crown eternal blessings upon your head as a reward for the care you have had for my soul. His whole life, Hiram sat with Joseph while he was in so much pain as a little eight year old, right? This is just The relationship between these two brothers that also is demeaned by the later polygamist tales, um, trying to insert themselves instead. Oh, how many are the sorrows that we have shared together. And again, we find ourselves shackled with the relenting hand of oppression. Hiram, thy name shall be written in the book of the law of the Lord, for those who come after thee to look upon, that they might, that they may pattern after thy works. Said I to myself, Here is Brother Newell K. Whitney also. Newell K. Whitney, the recipient of the letter we’re going to. How many scenes of sorrow have strewed our paths together, and yet we meet once more to share again. Thou art a faithful friend in whom the afflicted sons of men can confide with the most most perfect safety. Let the blessings of the eternal be crowned upon his head. Um, how worn that heart, how anxious that soul, for the welfare of one who has been cast out and hated of almost all men. Brother Whitney, thou knowest thou knowest not how strong those ties are that bind my soul and heart to thee. My heart was overjoyed as I took the faithful band by hand that stood upon the shore one by one. OK, so we have read Joseph’s feelings about Emma, Joseph’s feelings about Hiram, and Joseph’s feelings about Newell K. Whitney. He says, Thou knowest not how strong those ties are that bind my soul and heart to thee, right? Because he’s helping him in this situation. He came to this meeting, this meeting on the island when Joseph was in such need and that no. Has also been the bishop of the church, done so much work, so much effort. These men had served together under dire conditions. So, yes, he did have these feelings for Newe K. Whitney as well. So we have to remember that this meeting is an extremely important event, both just for the life of Joseph, but also especially for what we are going. Over on what we are, what we are going to be reading. It’s one of the only times Joseph recorded feelings like these that that were this effusive and this deep. And, um, we are going to refer to this meeting later. But also, I mentioned it a little bit before, but please take note, Brigham Young, who had secretly married a plural wife two months before these events, who would also have us believe later on that He was Joseph’s closest friend and most trusted adviser and confidant, even above Hirum and Emma, he was not included in this meeting, right? This included Hiram and Emma and Newell K. Whitney, and William, um, Clayton, who was the, um, scribe, and William Law, who at this time was Joseph’s first counselor and a lawyer and a devoted friend, right? So they were all included in it. Brigham. had nothing to do with this. Brigham goes on to demean both Emma and Hirum extensively and to try to insert himself in their place, right? The evidence does not bear that out. In fact, there’s very little said about Brigham in Joseph’s journal. It seems that, and all of It’s kind of official business or meeting with other apostles. There’s really practically no personal interactions between Joseph and Brigham at all recorded on Joseph’s end. We get them all through Brigham decades later when he’s trying to promote his doctrines by claiming that he was Joseph’s confidant. So Anyway, we’re going to continue on. Joseph also expressed some other sentiments in this record that he recorded this night that are essential to point out in this conversation. So there are some facts that no matter where people are on the polygamy debate, there are facts that are universally agreed on. One is that Emma adamantly opposed polygamy, and that in 1842, Hyrum adamantly opposed polygamy. Both of them were doing everything they could to fight against it. They vehemently. We opposed it, correct? And yet, this is what Joseph wrote this day in his journal about primarily Emma and Hiram and Nuo Kay Whitney. These love the God that I serve. They love the truths that I promulgate. They love those virtues and those holy doctrines that I cherish in my bosom with the warmest feelings of my heart, and with that zeal which cannot be denied. So again, if you would have us believe that Joseph was a secret polygamist and that he really wanted Emma and Hiram to join in, and he was and he and he shared it with his closest confidants like Brigham. How do you explain this, right? Who was Joseph writing this for? These were the thoughts of his own heart that he was having William Clayton record. Who was this for? Who was he faking it for? That’s what we want to claim that he was doing, being this duplicitous. I think at least those for, I mean, I, I, I think that all groups should take this very seriously, but certainly those who consider Joseph Smith to be a prophet of God, or in any way. Respect him as any kind of an honorable or good man should really take these things seriously. And I, I know that people will have their other ways of explaining them. We can have those conversations, but we need to have those conversations, because this needs to be included. Joseph said about primarily Emma and Hiram on this night, they love the truths that I promulgate and those holy doctrines that I cherish. That needs to be included in the conversation. So that was 2 days before the letter. Now we are finally to L minus 1. This is the day before letter day. This is the 17th. Emma wrote a letter to Governor Carlin on Joseph’s behalf. This letter, it is truly beautiful and brilliant. It’s it’s really quite breathtaking. Emma must have spent considerable time and effort, effort crafting it, and it tells us much about who she was. I recommend reading it and it’s Trey, I will definitely link it below. Um, this, I, I wanted to read at least portions of the letter, but it’s so well crafted and so well put together that I couldn’t decide which portion to read, and pulling out portions don’t, don’t do it justice because of how it goes together so beautifully. The arguments that she makes and the language that she uses, her clarity of, I, I just, I just, it makes me love Emma just that much more. So, um, this is from a paper on this correspondence written by Andrew H. Hedge. and Alex D. Smith. They are both um church historians, very well educated church historians. They wrote, as her expressive and thoughtful, thoughtful letters show, she was a woman of extraordinary ability and temperament, fully capable of understanding the finer points of a complex issue and and articulating an intelligent argument. After reading her first letter, Carlin himself, that’s Governor Carlin, who she was writing to, who had issued the arrest warrant. Um, that he himself, we are told, quote, expressed astonishment at the judgment and talent manifest in the manner of her address. And I think that’s true. So Emma was doing all of this for Joseph, with Joseph. This is how smart she was, this is how strong she was, this is how Joseph thought about her, this is how she thought about Joseph. This is the contemporary evidence of their relationship. The same day, the day before letter day, while or on the same day that Emma was working on this letter, Um, Joseph went for a walk in the woods to get some exercise. The poor guy cooped up, right? He and Brother Derby went for a walk in the woods, and he was seen. Uh, a boy saw them, and that same day, rumors began to be had that he had been discovered. Thus, it was no longer safe for him to remain at Brother Sayers’s. Consequently, Sister Emma went to see him at night and informed him of the report. So that’s, that’s quoting again from the journal, as always. Her first priority was his safety. She spent probably that entire day working on the letter. Then all night she again dropped everything to stealthily go see him and warn him and arrange a new hiding place. Um, I’ll continue to quote, It was considered wisdom that he should remove immediately, and accordingly, he departed in company with Emma and brother Derby Derby, and went to Carlos Granger’s. So, um, that’s, that’s, this is what’s happening right. Now, right? I don’t know what time it was that Joseph and Emma got to the Grangers and that Joseph got settled, but Emma didn’t even leave to go warn him until after dark. We can assume she had to take similar, um, precautions to get there. Travel was slow, right? Then they had to have the conversation, figure out what to do, go figure out the arrangements. Maybe she had already made them, but that was on the day. I don’t know. What I’m saying is, it seems most likely that Emma would have stayed. To sleep and left sometime the next day because in any case, it would have been like, it would have certainly been past the middle of the night and probably well into the morning hours by the time they got this all finished. So we don’t know exactly what, when Emma left, but it makes sense that she would not have, that she would have needed some sleep, right? She’d had a lot of busy days. She would have been tired, wouldn’t have been that. They probably didn’t love having her travel alone after dark, and with all of this happening. So anyway, that was the that was, I guess, the night of the 17th and the 18th, the middle of the night. She spent traveling, rearranging Joseph, and then I presume, staying with Joseph until our day, letter day. Here we are, August 18th. There’s no entry in Joseph’s journal for this day. But according to the date that William Clayton added to this letter, that, that, um, Navvo, August 18, 1842 is in, um, William Clayton’s handwriting, the rest is in Joseph’s hand. This was the day Joseph wrote his letter to the Whitneys. Um, just after Emma, who he had been overflowing with love, with his love for this entire time, had again risked everything and given up another night’s sleep to keep him safe. And, as I said, was very possibly still there with him when he wrote it. In fact, it is entirely possible that just as she had delivered other letters for him, she might have Delivered this one as well, because she was there and going back to town, and she curried letters for him. We don’t know who delivered this, but Emma is as likely as a of a candidate as anybody else, if understood in what I think is the proper way. So hopefully now you understand why the context, the surrounding events around this letter are so important to understand. So you can see Emma’s involvement with Joseph, right? We are to believe that Emma did this again, and then After she left, Joseph wrote this letter in betraying her treacherously to her, as we will see going on. So, um, so we’ve laid out the context. I’ll just hurry and wrap up the saga so you kind of have an idea of where it goes from here. So now we’ll go to L +1, August 19th, the day after Letter Day. Joseph went home that night. It seemed like he couldn’t take it anymore. Um, it says in his record, it concluded to Terry at home until something further transpired with regard to the designs of his. Persecutors. He was very low in spirits during this time. There are visits from his mother and his mother and his aunt, and, you know, they tried to keep him cheered up, but this was weighing on him heavily. You know that, because the next day, L +2, um, August 20th, Joseph, he, instead of staying in his home, he was hiding in the room above the store, and he was sick. He got very, very sick, probably from a result of all of this. And then we have L + 5, that’s August 23rd, finally in the p.m. President Joseph received a few lines from Sister Emma informing him that she would expect him home this evening, believing that she could take care of him better at home than anywhere else. Accordingly, soon after dark, he started for home and arrived safe without being noticed by any person. All is quiet in the city. So we can presume that the hunt had died down. Some of the people had lost interest over that many days. How many days has it been from the 8th to the 23rd, right? And so, um, people had probably He left, he was, I believe, staying in the upper room of the store that whole time until Emma was like, Joseph, come home. This is ridiculous. Come home, we will take care of you. So for now, the crisis seems to have been averted for this round, although he was right back in hiding, just within a week or two. I think, I think within a week. By early, yeah, yeah, because by early September, which happens to be when he wrote his two letters equating record keeping with ceiling that we now have recorded as Doctrine and Covenants 127. And 128 that I’ve spoken about in other episodes again where he says the power to seal is the power to record as it is recorded on Earth, so it is recorded in heaven, talking about the essential nature of records for eternal ceilings, right? And so again, Emma made these three visits to him. No other women made any visits to him. We have the um legal record of Joseph and Emma being married. There are no other records of Joseph being married to anybody. So things to note. The evidence through this entire period makes it very clear that Joseph and Emma genuinely and sincerely loved each other with their whole hearts. And I think they just, they honestly had the kind of partnership that every marriage aspires to. They relied on each other wholly. They both consulted with one another, continually, relied on one another completely and prioritized one another above all else. They spoke to and about one another with The deepest and purest of feelings. There are no signs whatever of any sort of division, betrayal, or deception that I can find in the actual records of this day. I mean, of this time period, these contemporary records, claiming that Joseph would write these things to and about Emma that we’ve just read and let her make all of the sacrifices she made, spend this time with her and express such gratitude for her visits. I’ll, all while lusting out. After a 17-year-old behind her back to the point of, again risking his safety in order to satisfy that lust that according to the scriptures we just read, would be adulterous, right? Like he would be dealing treacherously with Emma in the face of all of this evidence. That just, for me, that stretch stretches credulity. I, I, I would need to hear better arguments to support this than what we have so far. So, Most historians, especially the um apologetic ones that aren’t just out to um demean and condemn Joseph, they tend to avoid this huge problem, the huge problem of this context by completely ignoring the timeline. They just omit it and don’t really talk about it, but those who look at it recognize how deeply problematic it is and that there really is no way to make Joseph anything but. But a betrayer of his, of the wife of his youth, but to make him a really bad guy, if this narrative were true, at least in his dealings with Emma. George D. Smith, he, I read him at the beginning. I read the introduction. The one he is one historian who does deal with this timeline, and he acknowledges how really bad it is. I’ll quote from his book. Um, it was the 9th night of Joseph’s concealment, and Emma had visited him 3 times, written. Several letters and penned at least one letter on his behalf. She no doubt passed along messages either written or verbal from trusted associates. For his part, Joseph’s private note about his love for Emma was so endearing it found its way into the official church history. In it, he vowed to be hers forever more. Yet within this context of reassurance and intimacy, a few hours later, the same day, even while Joseph was still in grave danger. And when secrecy was of the utmost urgency, he made complicated arrangements for a visit from his 15th plural wife, Sarah Anna Whitney. On Thursday, August 18th, just after Emma’s departure, he’s assuming that to try to make sense of it. But we know that Emma had just been there, most likely spent the night with him, right? So just after Emma’s departure, writing in his own in his own hand, Smith urged his 17 old bride to quote come tonight and comfort him, but only if Emma had not returned. It is not clear who the courier was, presumably not Emma, he says, because of how he’s interpreting this. But Joseph judiciously addressed the letter to brother and sister Whitney and etc. The letter itself leaves no doubt who etc. was. So that is how this is. Handled again, right? This series of events is used by those who vilify and hate Joseph to paint him in such a terrible light. This is, this is such good fuel for them, because how do we defend this in a faithful perspective if we interpret it this way? And I, I’m, I’m trying to speak less, uh, aggressively and less offensively to those who disagree with me. So, so I don’t want to overstate it, but I would invite people to engage and Let’s talk about this because I think it looks really, really bad. It’s hard for me to see this in a prophetic light that wouldn’t disqualify someone from being a prophet. Uh, a historian that I was engaging with just this week told me that I was fighting against the church and destroying the church because if Brigham Young altered records and, and told, you know, forged documents and encouraged people to create false documents, then that would eliminate him for being a prophet of God. I was like, really? Really, that’s the high crime against God. And this isn’t, I, I, like, that’s really hard for me to make sense of. I see it very, very differently, very differently. I think this would, um, make it hard to claim that Joseph was a prophet if this were true. Luckily, I don’t think it is. Uh, one, sure thing, I should have said this before, before going on about that, because another fact we need to add to this conversation. Is that Emma would almost certainly still be still be deeply grieving the two children she had recently lost. Her little Don Carlos, who they had lost less than a year earlier and who she never fully recovered from losing. She never fully got over that loss. And she had had another stillborn baby boy that they had Married just 6 months earlier. This was the state that Emma was in, and these were brutal losses for her. I look at how I, people like to use my losses against me to somehow claim that I’m not capable of being logical if I have, have grief, you know? That’s not true. Look at how logical and brilliant Emma was. I’m bringing that up to say, for Joseph to do this to Emma. With all of this that was happening, including Emma’s pain and losses, what they had endured together, I, I, that just adds a whole another level, a whole other level to it. I think that, um, these losses are a big part of why they made Emma the relief Society president. All of the women who loved her so much and wanted to help her rally out of her grief. She lost her baby. In February, her stillborn after losing Don Carlos, and then, um, in March they, they established the relief Society and she was selected by the women as president and sustained by Joseph as president and to me I see in that a desire to give her purpose and, um, uh, you know, hope and, and, and uh outlet for her brilliance and her energy when she was. So struggling with grief that’s how I interpret that of course that’s my interpretation, but everyone is free to their own, but I do think we need to consider also that level uh I mean the, the fact of Emma’s losses and grief when we are talking about how Joseph treated her. So, um, fortunately the standard polygamy narrative is by far not the best explanation for this letter in my opinion. In fact, going over this timeline, I think not only exposes how massively problematic this interpretation of Joseph’s letter is, but also how weak the entire polygamy narrative is because critics of our perspective constantly claim that it is impossible that men would or could scheme to create false evidence so that women could have affidavits in their names that might might not be true. Yet they claim that Joseph would go to these lengths to record such false sentiments in his own journal. And in all of his. Interactions with Emma and everyone else, and that all of his helpers would be perfectly complicit and silent complicit and silent and able to hide everything from everybody, only to be mentioned for the first time almost 30 years later. I don’t understand that. Especially when we consider the fervent and consistent testimonies that Joseph and Emma, and Hiram and Joseph Smith the Third, and Lucy MacSmith, and so many others gave throughout their lives that they were faithful to one. Another and had no part of polygamy add to it. Things like, there are no children, there are, like, we could go on and on and on. I, I think that we need to reconsider our entire narrative. So now that we have fully established the context for the week leading up to this letter, and looked at the actual evidence of Joseph and Emma’s relationship, the actual contemporary evidence that should be prioritized, and Joseph’s feelings during this entire time, we can examine the content of the letter and consider. What it actually says. We’ll go through it and break many parts of it down. So I’m going to go ahead and add this to the stage, and we are just going to read through the letter. It starts Navvo, August 18, 1842, as I said, that was added by William Clayton. Dear and beloved brother and sister, Whitney, etc. Again, we have covered this is who the letter is addressed to. The only evidence we have that Sarah Anne was the etc. who was who should be seen as the least important. The part is based on that affidavit that I hope we have shown needs more evaluation and explanation before we rely on it. So I think it is a far better explanation to see that this is going to Newell and Elizabeth and a third party. I’m gonna quickly throw in a proposal. I, I’m not claiming this to be the fact, just as I’ve been thinking about this. It’s one thought that occurred to me. We know from the rest of the letter as we go through it, we know that, um, there was something, Joe. wanted to seal blessings upon their heads, his, his as well. So there was some sort of, um, ordinance or ceiling that Joseph was going to do. We’re going to talk a little bit about what Joseph saw as ceilings. But what we know from this time period as well is that these kinds of things often needed a witness, right? It’s the next week that we get the letters that become sections 127 and 128. I’ll quote little snippets from those. Let there be a recorder and let him be an eyewitness. That’s 127 verse 6. 128 verse 2 says, it was declared in my former letter that there should be a recorder who should be an eyewitness, and also to hear with his ears that he might make a record of a truth before the Lord. These were things that Joseph was thinking about a lot, was already applying, I believe, and formalized for everybody that was doing baptisms just a week after this. So that’s one thing to consider. We know from a variety of sources that it was considered necessary to have witnesses. for ordinances we can look at just the polygamy documents. These are some of the affidavits I’ve talked about before. This is that very interesting one for Sylvia Lyon where her her name is misspelled and nobody’s in um there’s there’s nothing filled out in it, but the form letter, and you can see it says in the presence of that was included in all of the affidavits, practically all of them. I don’t want to overstate, but, you know, I can’t think of any exceptions off the top of my head. These are two more affidavits that, um, This Ruth V Sayers and Emily Partridge, they both say in the presence of, but doesn’t list anyone. So that again shows us how it was just included in the form letter, even if they’re, even if they failed to list somebody. And then the last thing I’ll point to is Melissa Lott’s temple and her temple testimony. Um, the, the, um, lawyer was questioning her on who was at her marriage. That’s a fun thing that we’ll have to go over at some point. But at one point she includes the witnesses that were necessary when she was. Trying to list a believable list of who was at her wedding. So based on this, I find myself wondering whether the third non-specified person that Joseph included might be someone to act as a witness of the blessings that Joseph wanted to seal on their heads. So maybe it could have been one of their children, but I would think it’d make more sense to have it be their oldest. Horace, their son, who was actually 19, right? Could have been him or a neighbor or somebody else. We should not, um, limit our. to think it had to be Sarah, because we need to look at what that affidavit is. That’s what shapes it that way. We need to be able to think outside of that box, even if, you know, we have to break out of some of our old trained mindsets because the letter is addressed to N and Elizabeth and someone else. What could the reason for that be? So, goes on to say, I take this opportunity to communicate some of my feelings privately at this time, which I want you three eternally to keep in your own bosoms. OK. Again, just to Couple of things to notice. What he’s telling them to keep in their own bosoms is what is included in this letter, because he’s taking time right now to communicate some things to them. Right? So, and we can decide if that means keep these things secret to yourselves or keep them close to your heart and ponder them often, because that was another way that keep this in your bosom was used by Joseph and in the scriptures. But, um, if it is about keeping it secret, it, it would be really tough to claim that it’s saying, you have to keep this secret until some future. Date when it’s safe to lift polygamy, right? He tells them to keep it secret for eternity, which, by the way, they didn’t do as soon as they turned over this letter, right? But there’s nothing in the letter about polygamy. What would he be telling them to keep secret? So it’s really hard to claim that that is something untoward and some secret he’s trying to keep. I think it’s better to read that in context of a letter that he wrote 4 days earlier, which included the same sentiment. This was written to Wilson Law, not about polygamy, but Just dealing with the situation. Wilson, who was his adviser. He said, I am not willing that anything that goes from my hands to you should be made a public matter. I enjoin upon you to keep all things in your own bosom. And I want everything that comes from you to come through my AIS. Meaning at this time, Emma, right? So keep it in your bosom is not something that implies something untoward or something about polygamy, right? OK, we’ll continue on with the letter. For my Feelings are so strong for you since what has passed lately between us. OK. Speaking primarily to the addressee, Nel and Elizabeth, what record do we have as what of what has passed lately between them? Right? We cannot automatically assume this must be Joseph and Sarah’s marriage that we have no record of until the the decades later affidavit. There is no record of any marriage, right? And those affidavits are problematic. What We do have are Joseph’s own words contemporaneously expressing his intense feelings and his love for Newell Whitney just two days before he wrote this letter. This is what he wrote. I’ll read it again. Brother Whitney, thou knowest not how strong those ties are that bind my soul and heart to thee. My heart was overjoyed as I took by the faith, um, took the faithful band by hand that stood upon the shore one by one. Could this not be the event that has recently passed between them, that Joseph’s love is overflowing for them, right? We have contemporaneous evidence for it. It just happened a few days before. It makes perfect sense, and I think it explains this letter so much better. So now, now let’s go on to the next part. We’ll forward the slide. OK, that the, um, um, that the time of my absence from you seems so long and dreary that it seems as if I could not live long in this way. So again, this was an utterly dismal time for Joseph, a young, active, highly energetic and social man who knew he couldn’t even go outside at this point since just trying to go for a walk in the woods the day before resulted in them having to find him a new hiding place. It’s probably not as good of a hiding place cause it’s down the list of where they would have wanted to be. He is facing An unknown sentence of solitary confinement inside a small one room, no electricity, just sitting alone, hour after hour with no idea of how long it will last. I can see that he was desperate for, um, connection with those that he loved. He was hungry for all of his loved ones who he likely regular, regularly saw. Um, daily, or at least on a regular basis, the people he worked this closely with, right? So I think it makes total sense that Emma is leaving. He’s gonna be alone in this little room, and he’s desperate to have some company. So he goes on. And if you three would come and see me in this, my lonely retreat, it would afford me great relief of mind. If those with whom I am i do love me. Now is the time to afford me succor in the days of exile, for you know, you know, I foretold you about these things. I’m actually super curious about what he’s referring to in that, that he foretold them of. I looked through um the revelations. I didn’t see anything. So if anyone has an idea of what that might be talking about, I would be really interested to know. But now he gives the critical part of this letter. This is the Incredibly dangerous part of this letter. It says, I am now at Carlos Granger’s, just back of Brother Hiram’s barn. It is only 1 mile up from town. This is the dangerous information, right? They had just moved him to a new spot. The town is crawling with people looking for him who want to do him harm, who want to kill him. His life is in danger, and he He’s writing down his hiding place, ignoring this and focusing on Sarah, claiming that it was too dangerous to include her name when the letter includes his hiding place, right? Like, who, how is his life in danger from polygamy at this point, from someone finding out about polygamy? It’s too dangerous to write Sarah’s name. Can we finally, like, just once and for all, call out how weak that argument is or that Explanation for why there are no records. We can’t just always revert to that. We have to do better, I think. If he could include his hiding place, he could include anything in the letter because this is the thing that put him in danger. So, OK, we’ll continue on. The nights are very pleasant indeed. All three of you can come and see me in the 4th part of the night. He’s wanting all 3 of them to come, right? Now, the next part shows that it’s not safe for them to wait outside. Let Whitney, come a little ahead and knock at the southeast corner of the house at the window. It is next to the cornfield. I have a room entirely by myself. The whole matter can be attended to with the most perfect safety. It means the matter of getting there without being caught, right? The matter of how to knock on the window and then come in and not be standing outside without all the sheriffs and bounty hunters following them. Joseph has a single room where he wants all three of them to come, right? I, I do not know how we explain this in a romantic context as a sexual rendezvous. I, I just don’t get that he is writing to the parents of a 17-year-old saying, I have one room where the matter can be attended to in perfect safety. We should also point out that Carlos, this was Carlos Granger’s house. Carlos Granger was never a polygamist. He didn’t follow Brigham Young. He was never a polygamy insider in any way. There’s no indication that he had Separate door that Carlos Granger wouldn’t be aware of what Joseph was doing in his room, right? And like, like, there are so many problems, I think, with this narrative. So, OK, let’s continue going on. He says, I know it is the will of God that you should comfort me now in this time of affliction or not at all. Now is the time or never. But I have no need of saying any such thing to you, for I know the goodness of your hearts, and that you will do the will of the Lord when it is made known unto you. The one thing to be careful of is to find out when Emma comes, then you cannot be safe. But when she is not here, there is the most perfect safety. Another critical part of this letter. Again, let’s define and clarify what the danger is, right? Is the danger being caught by Emma, or as the entire body of evidence makes it clearer, it should make clear to all of us, the danger is being found by the many, many. Then in town hunting for him and swearing to find him and kill him, drag him to Missouri, where, where he will be killed, right? Let me again quote the last sentence of Emma’s letter from the 16th, 2 days earlier. If it was pleasant weather, I should contrive to see you this evening, but I dare not run too much of risk on account of so many going to see you. We know that Emma couldn’t go out the same time as other people going, right? If Emma’s not here, don’t, I mean, if Emma’s not here, it’s to come. If Emma is here, it’s not safe to come. How is that hard to understand, right? I just, again, how is his life in danger of polygamy at this point? How, who’s going to find Sarah’s name written on this letter that had to be burned? And Emma is the danger when she is going to these lengths to save him from actual danger. This is actual danger he’s facing right now, not some future hypothetical danger that could come about because of polygamy. Uh, which, by the way, had already been published in the Sagamore Journal in John Bennett’s letters, right? The reason Joseph is in hiding is because of the letters. Bennett was already exposing all of his claims about Joseph’s polygamy. OK, and going on, even without Emma coming, he tells them, only be careful to escape observation as much as possible. Yes, please don’t let people know where my brand new hiding place is. I know it is a heroic undertaking. If he acknowledges it’s a heroic undertaking for them, then it is also always been a heroic undertaking for Emma, right? Especially when she had to cross the river twice in the middle of the night in such a bad storm. He continues on, but so much the greater friendship and the more joy. That would also apply to Emma, right? That’s how he would see her efforts to do this for him. Um, when I see you, I will tell you of my plans and again what might this refer to? I think that that is interpreted to mean my future plans for us as husband and wife or for me with your daughter, right? that again Whitney was the bishop of the church they were. Worked closely together because Whitney was in charge of the um temporal um necessities of of the church, right? So is it possible that is, it is about Joseph’s plans for the church and the city that he and Whitney must have discussed often and worked together off and on. He says, I cannot write them on paper. Again, that’s like thought. It’s the future plans for him and Sarah, and it’s not safe to write them down. Maybe it wasn’t because they needed to be kept secret, because again, his location needed to be kept secret. Maybe it’s just because it was a lot to talk about, and he couldn’t write it all out, kind of like when you say, oh, you know what, I’m going to text someone and I’m like, I’ll just call them. There’s too much, too much to text, right? This is, I, I think, uh, these are better possibilities. And then he says, burn this. Letter as soon as you read it. Yes. Burn this letter, please, that says, my location. Oh, Again, how is that betrayal of Emma? It’s revealing his location. Then he goes on to say, Keep all locked up in your breasts. My life depends on it. Don’t tell my location. Please, don’t let anybody know. Just keep it to yourselves. It is because his life actually does depend on it. His life is not In danger of being found out about polygamy. His life is in danger right now because, uh, because they think he’s guilty of ordering the murder of Governor Bonds. We can’t ignore that and, again, have some hypothetical future danger that we are applying this to. We have to look at what’s happening right then and what it is actually referring to. One thing I want to see you for is to get the fullness of my blessings sealed upon our heads, etc. I wanted to go into this, but this is already much Longer than I expected it to be. I, I won’t go into it now. I’ll save it for the episode I do at some point on ceilings. Just, I would recommend to anyone, search, um, the Doctrine of Covenants, the Book of Mormon, all of the scriptures for seal, ceiling, ceiling power, seal on heaven and on earth, right? And also search the Joseph Smith Papers for seal. And you’ll understand that Joseph seemed to have a very different, um, interpretation or idea of sealing than we have now. It usually meant sealing people. Up and eternal life, right? And that, that’s usually what he was referring to. 132 gives us a new interpretation that wasn’t until 1852, remember? And then Wilfred Woodruff adjusts that again, and that’s where our interpretation of ceiling comes from. I think we should open our, um, our minds to understand that in a broader context based on what Joseph would have understood it to mean. So we’ll just go on with the rest of the letter. You will pardon me for my earnestness on this subject when you consider how Lonesome I must be. Again, this lonesome is presented to us often that it’s as it’s, if it’s supposed to be read as a euphemism for lustful or aroused or something like that, right? That it’s not a sincere sentiment of a man sitting alone day after day inside in near solitary confinement. And it seems like Brother Granger’s house must have been a more dreary place for him to be based on the information that keeps coming in after this. Can We believe that he was actually lonely and it’s not a euphemism for, even though Emma has been with him 3 times in this short 10 day period and just was with him the last night that he needs to make an arrangement with another, with another girl, I can do we have to read it that way? Your good feelings know how to make every allowance for me. I closed my letter. I think Emma won’t come tonight. If she don’t, don’t fail to come tonight. Again, we’ve already explained what that means, right? He needs company, and if Emma can’t come, it’s safe for them to come. I subscribe my and how would they know if Emma was not going to come, right? I’m just realizing this. They would probably have to check with her. They were going on these circuit circuitous paths. It would have to be arranged with Emma, most likely to know when she was coming. That, that makes sense as well, right? They weren’t going to go and see is Emma there? They would have to know from Emma if she was going. So that’s another good thing to come to, um, consider. Um, let’s see, I subscribe myself your most obedient and affectionate companion and friend, Joseph Smith. OK. There is the content of the letter read in that context. I really wish that, like, we were doing this live so we can Have a discussion and I could ask if there are any questions or any thoughts or any feedbacks. I’d love to have those conversations, but I guess the best I could do is I want to end with um the video that Ben Park made. So Ben Park is again a PhD historian who has written it’s on Nu, he’s written a lot of books on Mormon history. And he made a TikTok video about the Whitney documents. So I think it might be worthwhile to play that now just so we can hear um how this is presented to us. And now that we have a much better understanding of both the context and the content of the letter, we can consider this in a new light, I think. I won’t say the whole video. I’ll link it below though. Ben starts out by talking about people who don’t believe that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, and he says that it’s a religious argument that that people pray about it and don’t believe Joseph is a polygamist. So therefore, they go to the history without already having that conclusion, or that people. Say Joseph was a prophet. A prophet needed to be a good man. Therefore, I believe that, and if he did polygamy, he wouldn’t be a good man. So he, he frames it in that way, which I strongly object to. And so we’ll go on to say, I’m only playing the part that he talks about the Whitney letter because that’s what this episode is about. So we’ll go ahead and start there and play this part.

[2:13:12] Ben Parks: That God answers prayers. God tells me that Joe Smith was a monogamous. Therefore, Joseph Smith was monogamous, all that their evidence can be dismissed. That’s not good history. But if you want to see records from the time in Joseph Smith’s own hand, let’s dig into a few. Now history is messy, which means we need to look at documents through critical eyes, understanding their context, their creation, and maybe the meaning that’s hidden between the lines. Let’s look at one example, a letter written by Joseph Smith on August 18, 1842, while he was in hiding from an extradition charge from Missouri. He writes this letter in his own hand, a very, a rarity among this time period, to Noel K, Elizabeth Whitney, and so on. It’s, it’s a hidden term that for that that last term, and so on. He doesn’t actually want to write it out because who is it? Well, he’s actually writing to Nou K, Elizabeth, and their daughter, Sarah Anne Whitney.

[2:14:17] Michelle: Now, I’ll just pause it here because at the beginning of that clip, um, Ben said, it’s really important to look at the context of these letters, right, and to try to read them in the context of what they are. I want to ask, who is doing that? Is he doing that at this presentation, or is it possible that maybe I’m doing it in my presentation is his argument that we are just, um, motivated by our need to have Joseph Smith be a good man and that we are not applying good historical practice. Is that valid in in our two hand the ways that the two of us are handling this document?

[2:14:52] Ben Parks: Now Sarah was the Whitney’s 17 year old daughter who just several weeks earlier had been sealed to Joseph Smith as a plural wife. How do we know this? Well, we have Noel K. Whitney letters, diaries, and blessings from this time, making it clear, also.

[2:15:07] Michelle: OK, I want to say we have those affidavits. The revelation we have is a forgery. The blessings, I’m going to have to do some bonus content to go over the Sarah Anne Whitney blessing, which there’s a Joseph Kingsbury blessing the same day. There’s a very similar blessing to, um, to Derby in the, the records that we Just were going through. So I will handle the blessing, but I believe he is really overstating the certainty of the claim that he is making. It really is based on the affidavits. And the, the, the affidavits shape the interpretation of everything else, including this letter.

[2:15:45] Ben Parks: Making it clear that she was the unnamed 3rd recipient of that letter. So if we have this record of her being sealed, why don’t we have more records referring to Joseph’s poor wives? Well, let’s dig into that letter.

[2:16:01] Michelle: Again, look at how this letter is used to justify the lack of any of any actual records or any actual evidence.

[2:16:09] Ben Parks: Here’s the second page of that letter in Joseph Smith’s hand to the Whitney parents and the Whitney daughter, in which he makes two points that I have highlighted. First, he tells them, do not come when Emma is here, making it clear that he is keeping the relationship secret from Emma, if that were.

[2:16:28] Michelle: Is it really making that clear? Is that really clear? Can we just assume that based on just reading the letter and believing that Joseph was a polygamist, or do we need to look at this context? I think that something else has become abundantly clear by looking at the context.

[2:16:44] Ben Parks: Just Newell Kay and Elizabeth, good friends with Emma. There’s no reason of keeping it secret. And second, he says, burn this letter as soon as you receive it, making it clear that he recognized the scandalous, controversial nature of this polygamous arrangement. And this is also why, by the way, we don’t get a lot of. Temporary records because they knew the danger of what would happen and they if they fall into other hands. So note in this letter that is clearly written to, uh, Sarah Whitney and her parents. He doesn’t mention Sarah’s name because he wants to keep that hidden. He tells them to keep it secret from Emma, and he tells them to burn it, even after all these measures of secrecy. That shows how deep it is that they wanted to keep this confidential.

[2:17:34] Michelle: OK. I cannot help but see so much circular reasoning in this. We don’t, we, we don’t have any records because it was too secret. And the way we know it was too secret is because we don’t have any letters, because we have this one letter that we can ignore the entire context and pretend that the danger was Emma. And the danger was polygamy when the danger was the situation that Joseph Smith was in, and then we can use that to extrapolate further to explain why there are no letters, information, why there’s this complete paucity of evidence that we absolutely should expect to see if any of this were actually happening. This is highly, highly problematic.

[2:18:15] Ben Parks: So again, history is messy. So while we don’t have, you know, the direct signed affidavit from Joseph Smith in his own penmanship saying, I am a polygamist, you have all these other documents from Joseph Smith, many written in his own handwriting that only makes sense in the context of polygamy, more they even dictate why. They have to be so secretive about it because he knew knew how scandalous it would be both in terms of his relationship to Emma as well as his relationship to the law, because polygamy was illegal. So that’s why historians who know the documents are unanimous in agreeing with the scholarly consensus that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy.

[2:19:01] Michelle: OK, I hope that some historians are able to watch this and are able to see because I want to say right there. You can say this is why the historians unanimously agree that Joseph Smith practices polygamy. I want to say to you, this is why so many of us don’t believe the historians. The way that that was just presented does not increase our, um, trust or the in the historians or their credibility or our, um, our belief that we are going to get and it’s a true and um. Comprehensive narrative from what the historians are telling us who are engaging in this way on this topic. That is why what I and others are doing is so important. We need more voices and more perspectives in these debates. Even if people disagree with me still or don’t like the way I engage or, you know, whatever the problem might be, these voices are needed. did. The both sides are needed to be at the table to discuss these things because we do not have good thinking going on right now. We have a lot of circular thinking thinking, a lot of groupthink, and a lot of uninvestigated, unexamined assumptions that I don’t think hold up well to the evidence. So, thank you. I’m sorry that episode took so long. I hope that this was useful, and I will look forward to seeing you next time.