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Rob Fotheringham: “Evaluation of 1842 Whitney ‘Revelation’ “
Transcript
[00:00] Michelle: Welcome to 132 Problems revisiting Mormon polygamy. I have already done two full episodes on the Whitney documents. We covered first the revelation and then the letter, and yet this is such a complicated and intriguing set of documents that there is still more to say. So thank you so much for joining us as I take you on my adventures with the Whitney blessing. I hope you are all up to speed on the two parts that we’ve already done on the Whitney documents. Part one on the Whitney revelation and part 2 on the letter. And in this episode, we are going to delve mainly into the Whitney blessing, which is fascinating. And I have to tell you, the more I have gotten into all of these documents, but particularly this week, as I’ve really delved into the blessing, The more complicated, mysterious, and confusing these documents have become, and I’m really excited to take you on the journey I’ve gone on to dig into this blessing and try to figure out what in the world is going on here. One of the main questions that I’m hoping to address as we spend all of this time on the Whitney documents is whether they deserve the, um, special status that is often attributed to them. Being the very best contemporaneous documents we have as evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. I think if that is true, that this is the best evidence, then still that narrative is in a lot of trouble. And so that’s, that’s the journey we are going to go on. Buckle up. I have to warn you from the outset that even after all of the investigation I’ve done, I still have far more questions than answers, far more that this is a like, the mystery just has to be part of the fun on this one, because I don’t know that I can provide the answers, and I will be interested to hear everybody’s thoughts as we go through all of this. So, first of all, this is the blessing that we’re going to be talking about. This special blessing that Joseph Smith not only gave to Sarah and Whitney, well, I, I guess she was already his wife at this time, according to the narrative. But, um, that he actually wrote down for her in his own hand on this special paper. This document from the beginning, from the first time I saw it, was just very interesting to me. It, I have so many questions about it. The paper is so unique. Why would Joseph Smith write a blessing for Sarah? Why would he write it on this special paper in his own hand? Why was it given? Why do we still have it? What does it mean? All of these, all of these questions I’ve had that we’re going to try to answer. So first, I want to put it into context. You can see that this blessing claims to have been given the date on the top of the page written apparently in Joseph Smith’s own handwriting the day he gave it is March 20, 1843. So to put that in context, hopefully you’ll remember that in part one we talked about Joseph C. Kingsbury’s later reminiscence. I hope it’s not called his journal. It was written, I believe, in the Utah period. And looking back at some of these events, this is the document where he talks about his pretend marriage. So to fill you in, I mean to catch you up to speed if you just to give you the reminders, um, Sarah Anne Whitney was married to Joseph C. Kingsbury, and Joseph C. Kingsbury wrote this later journal claiming that it was just a pretend marriage to cover for Joseph actually being married to her. He, it’s a very, very strange claim that really makes no sense whatsoever. So. A lot of questions about it. But in this, um, journal, he claims that Joseph Smith gave him a blessing the same day. That first underline says, the blessing that President Joseph Smith sealed upon my head on the 23rd day of March 1843 as follows. So it’s the same day that he gave the blessing to Sarah. He then writes a blessing. He says Joseph gave to him that day. We’ll talk about the details later, and says the witnesses. Above blessing. This is the next underlying renewal OK. Whitney, Elizabeth Ann Whitney, and Sarah Anne Whitney. So both blessings given the same day by Joseph Smith in the city of Navvo, right? And these are often interpreted to be evidence somehow of, um, they’re often interpreted to be connected to the pretend marriage that occurred a little over a month later. Neither of these blessings says anything at all about polygamy, so it’s hard to understand why they would be, um, Why they would be interpreted that way as evidence of that pretend marriage. So it’s also really not all that in the validity of these isn’t that central to the question of Joseph Smith’s polygamy either way. Um, the Kingsbury blessing is actually a proxy ceiling. It seals Joseph C. Kingsbury to his deceased wife, Caroline, which other than the date of the blessing, matches very well to the speech that Hirum gave, um, April. 8, 1844. So I think I want to talk about that more when we go in the episode when we talk about ceilings, because it is very interesting. But it doesn’t say anything really about Sarah and Whitney. It just talks about sealing, sealing Joseph C. Kingsbury to his deceased, his one deceased wife, Caroline. But even though these blessings aren’t about polygamy, there was still something about them that bothered me. They just, I couldn’t put my finger on. It didn’t really make me seem to make sense. I’ve been thinking about it, but And as I was wondering about it, and, and I, I was in a hurry as well. So I decided to call my good friend, Whitney Horning, who I think is brilliant and always has marvelous insight. So I called her just to try to get her take on it. And she actually didn’t remember having seen this letter before. She wasn’t immediately aware of it, but her reaction as soon as she started reading it was priceless. She just said she started reading the wording and just said, This is not Joseph. And And, um, that was the first time I had even really considered whether or not this blessing was legitimate, whether I should even ask that question, whether this was a legitimate document written by Joseph Smith on that day in Joseph Smith’s handwriting, or whether it was another later production. So that opened up a whole new investigation, and that’s what I spent the rest of my time trying to figure out. So that That’s the journey I’m going to take, take you on. So the first incredible thing, and this is a huge problem with this document, are the dates. This is actually what Whitney and I discussed while we were on the phone, the very first conversation, all of this unfolded. So these are the two blessings, right? The first is the one in Joseph Smith’s hand to Sarah. The second one is Kingsbury’s reminiscent writing about his blessing. And you can see that they both claimed to be given in Navvo City and um that they both were on the 23rd of May, right? Here’s the problem. You don’t need to get very deep in your investigation of these documents at all to find out that Joseph Smith was apparently not in Navo on March 23, 1843. Already from the beginning, there is a crazy mystery you can see here in um the the historical introduction for this document, it says Joseph Smith noted that he wrote the document in Navo City. So at the time, he was supposed to be on a trip to Shikokkin, Illinois. I think you pronounce it Shikokin, Illinois. If I got that wrong, please forgive me. So, OK, what’s going on with that? That’s already a huge problem, right? So we went ahead and checked Joseph Smith’s journal, but we have different sources we can look at. So let’s look at Joseph Smith’s journal. Here it is, and you can see that on the 21st, and it says Tuesday, March 21st, the 22nd is crossed out. They wrote the wrong date and 21st is written in 1843, called at the office about 9, and wrote an order and took leave for Shikokan. And then you could see the next one is the 22nd. I didn’t have room to include the 23rd. Those are both left blank. No record of his daily doings is listed, which seems to be further evidence that he wasn’t there. And then on Friday, March 24, 1843, it says, having been out west, Arrived at home about 1 or 2 o’clock. So Joseph’s journal substantiates that he was not in Navo on March 23rd. He was out of town. So we should also go ahead and check the info for the Kingsbury blessing, right? That is written on the Joseph Smith Papers. Since it was the same day, and Joseph C. Kingsbury says that Joseph Smith was there to give him a blessing that day, along with the King, the Kingsbury family. So this historical introduction it says William Clayton indicated in his own journal that he and Joseph Smith started the trip to Shikokin together on the 21st of March. So I, we don’t have access to this part of William Clayton’s journal, but the Joseph Smith Paper’s editors do, and William Clayton’s Journal also validates substantiates that Joseph Smith went out of town to Shukhon on the 21st. I don’t know for sure which of these is correct, whether um William Clayton and Joseph’s journal is correct or whether the two blessings are correct, but it seems that there is a big problem with these two pieces of evidence going together, right? It seems at this point that either William Clayton is correct in his journal and Willard Richards is correct in his record of Joseph’s. Smith’s journal, and then we have a big problem with the, um, two blessings or the blessings are correct and that calls into further question William Clayton’s journal and Willard Richard’s, um, you know, journal Journal of Joseph Smith’s happenings and doings. So I don’t know which one it is, but either way, this seems to pose a problem already for the validity of these documents in some. One way or another. So it’s interesting because the Joseph Smith papers seems to hint at a very interesting potential workaround that actually opens a whole new can of worms. So let me go ahead and read this slide. I’ve got to get there. It says, however, Joseph Smith left Clayton, meeting up with him again on the 24th of March, after which they returned to Navu together. So then it goes on to say, apparently, Joseph Smith’s sec secrecy proved effective. As of at least 2 years later, Clayton, a close confidant of Joseph Smith, evidently still believed that the marriage between Kingsbury and Sarah and Whitney was genuine. OK, this blew my mind so many things to think through that, OK, it seems to be claiming that Joseph Smith was keeping secrets from his supposed closest polygamy confidant, William Clayton, right? And he was so secretive that according to this narrative, what I’m gathering from it is that they seem to be implying that Joseph Went out of town with William Clayton. But, um, on their way back, or when they split up, Joseph stealthily left Clayton and snuck back to Navu to give these two blessings, which for some reason had to be kept secret from Clayton, so much so that then Joseph went back out of Navu to meet up with Clayton, so he could pretend that he hadn’t been back to Navu so that they could go back to Navu together. Uh, that seems to be what they’re saying. I haven’t had time to think through all of the implications of this, but I have no idea how that would possibly make sense in any way. that Joseph would need to go to these lengths to keep his activities secret from William Clayton. Why William Clayton would automatically assume that a blessing meant that he was married to them if it was true that William Clayton didn’t even know about plural marriage at this time. And As I said, I haven’t had time to go in fully to dig into the timeline. I know that William Clayton in one source claims that, um, it was after this that Joseph Smith taught him about plural marriage. We have other sources where he claims that he learned about it sooner than this, where he claims that he was taught about it by Brigham Young. So we’ll need to do more episodes on William Clayton to dig into this. We also have William Clayton’s journals, where we know that he was involved in all of the, um, spiritual wife Falderal, um, earlier in with the oranges and the raisins and the washing feet and spending time with women all hours of the day and night. So I have no idea how to know exactly what William Clayton knew and when. But according to the Joseph Smith papers, William Clayton actually did not know about the marriage between Joseph and Sarah and Whitney. And so that’s the and and the attempt to try to make this all make sense is that Joseph. Stealthily hid his activities. They weren’t recorded in his journal. William Clayton didn’t know about them, so he could sneak back into Navu to. Nobody would know he was there, so he could give these blessings and then sneak back out. I, I don’t know. I’m curious what you guys think. I don’t know how to make sense of that. It seems, it seems quite hysterical, actually, to me. A couple more things that we do need to think about with the implications of whether or not William Clayton knew about. This wedding to Sarah Anne is that William Clayton is the one who dated the letter that Joseph wrote to the Whitneys, right? And, and we’ll go into that a little bit more to talk about who delivered it and some other questions about it. But for those claiming that this letter is evidence of of polygamy, we have to remember that William Clayton was the one recording Joseph’s actions during that week that we covered last week, all of the context of what was going on, what that letter was written. So if William Clayton was a polygamy outsider who dated that letter, clearly that letter has absolutely nothing to do with polygamy, because William Clayton saw it and didn’t think that it had anything to do with polygamy, right? To the point that Joseph. A year after that, snuck around to give this blessing secretly. So, I mean, there are so many complications with this. We don’t know if William Clayton was with Joseph, or maybe someone else was like a Rasta Derby or someone else might have been writing notes of what Joseph Smith was doing, and then William Clayton copied it later into the Book of the Law of the Lord. It’s easy to assume that he didn’t have the giant book of the law of the Lord with him in hiding with Joseph Smith. I think that’s highly unlikely. But, um, anyway, all of this comes into Great question. There are so many things to think through. If the narrative now is that William Clayton, well, I guess it’s, I’m just realizing that William Clayton apparently didn’t know about the marriage to Sarah and Whitney. That’s huge. That’s complicated. And then also this huge piece already that Joseph Smith, by every source we have, was out of town the day that these blessings were given. All of this is already a big old mess that we have to keep digging into. And I Keep thinking of other things that I wanted to add to this. This also demonstrates the importance of the William Clayton journals being released in the, in, in, um, being released completely, right? So we have access to all of them, and it shows us some of the work we’re going to have to do to get in and figure out timelines. I appreciate that that the, um, church historians are already doing a lot of that work for us, but I think that we’re going to have to do that too, to investigate what this means for the narrative, the polygamy narrative. In all, in all of these aspects because there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. So I’m thankful that the Joseph Smith editors are adding this information from the William Clinton journals into the historical information that they are including on the Joseph Smith papers. And I’ve been, I’ve heard from other sources that they are supposed to be released within a year, which would be fantastic. I hope that they will be released completely, and I hope people are eager to start digging in and seeing what kinds of. Things we can find because I anticipate there will be more things like this. Moving on with our discussion of the blessings, the dates alone might be enough to just throw out these blessings as legitimate, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to keep looking into them because there are, you know, this is complicated and probably important. So I think it warrants more investigation. And also, I’m, I, uh, I’m not sharing my journey exactly in order that it went up just sharing the different aspects I have looked at. So one question I had. That I think warrants investigation is did Joseph Smith give these kinds of blessings? We don’t have many others like this. Kingsbury quotes his as a patriarchal blessing. So he says that Joseph, as he’s quoting it says, I, I lay my hands on your head to give you a patriarchal blessing. That’s really weird. Oh yeah, here’s the wording. Brother Joseph, I lay my hands upon thy head in the name of Jesus Christ to bestow upon me a patriarchal blessing. Kingsbury had already received a patriarchal blessing from Joseph Smith’s. Senior, the church patriarch, who was the one assigned to give patriarchal blessings before it became Hirum after Joseph Smith Senior’s death. So, um, Kingsbury received his patriarchal blessing February 18, 1835. So I don’t know if it was common for people to receive more than one patriarchal blessing. I, I don’t believe so. That’s not something that seems to, that you seem to find on the Joseph Smith papers. If I’m wrong, someone show me that. So there’s another question that might, um, you know, another issue that might call Kingsbury’s record of his, um, blessing into question. So I also will show you that Joseph Smith Senior’s patriarchal blessings were very carefully recorded. This is um the book of patriarchal blessings where all of the patriarchal blessings were recorded. I believe that Joseph C. Kingsbury’s blessing is here as well. So again, the importance of records, these blessings need to be recorded. So that begs the question, where is the original for Joseph C. Kingsbury’s blessing that he recorded in his journal years. Later, in the Utah time period, right? So was he copying it, copying it from another source, or was he just writing it? Um, maybe we could, I mean, we could say he was writing it from memory. That’s a lot of years later to remember a word for word blessing. Or is there another explanation? So, um, this is, again, from the Joseph Smith papers. Kingsbury’s unique spelling of several words suggests that he may have recorded the blessing himself. So he didn’t have an original source is what it seems to be saying, cause he used his own unique spelling his own unique spelling errors are in his blessings that are in the rest of his journal, so he wasn’t copying it. So says perhaps he made notes during or immediately following the blessing, and then he recorded it later. We don’t know. But what we do know is that Joseph C. Kingsbury recorded this, wrote, wrote this record years later in the Utah time period, wrote a word for word. Blessing and doesn’t seem to have had an original source. So that’s another problem, right? And then, um, another question I wanted to ask while I was investigating this is, are there other blessings like this from Joseph? Did he give other patriarchal blessings? And, um, there’s one that the Joseph Smith Papers know about, and it is an unidentified writing. It’s a, um, blessing to James Ivins, um, in January of 1840. And, Um, it says it’s unidentified handwriting, so we don’t know who wrote it down. And then this is the description of how, of, of the source. The leaf was taped to the end paper of of the Patriarchal blessing book one, sometime after the church historian’s office received the document from Delos H. Patton on the 22nd of August 18, 1956. So this came to the church, August 1956. Patton donated it on behalf of Ivans of an Ivans descendant. The custodial history of the document before that time is unknown. So, again, another document, we don’t know whose handwriting this is. You can see what it says, um, right there in the, the portion that I blew up. James Ivan’s patriarchal blessing from Joseph Smith, prophet of the Mormons. So clearly that wasn’t written by, um, a Mormon source, right? And so it’s, it’s really hard to know if this is genuine or not. Yeah, um, the Joseph Smith Papers also says it is unclear why Joseph Smith gave Ivans a patriarchal blessing. No record exists of Joseph Smith pronouncing patriarchal blessings on any on other men or women in the eastern United States during his travels in that region. And from what I can see, I don’t know that other records exist of Joseph pronouncing patriarchal blessings in other areas either. If it’s just limited to that area. I didn’t see other patriarchal blessings from Joseph Smith. Um, on the Joseph Smith papers. In some ways, this blessing, um, sounds a little more like Joseph Smith than than, well, than the Sarah Anne Whitney blessing does. So it could be legitimate. It does use the word seal twice. It says, it shall come to pass that in after time, the holy priesthood shall be sealed upon thy head, and it says, I seal thee up unto eternal life. So those are accurate uses. Because of how Joseph Smith used the term ceiling. There are some parts that sound like they could be Joseph Smith, some parts that sound a little bit strange. So I don’t know exactly what to do with that patriarchal blessing either. And, and neither one of them seem solid enough to be like, Oh, Joseph Smith totally gave patriarchal blessings. So that’s another question. And then, based on, um, my already when I read through the Sarah and Whitney blessing, like, this is so weird. What do I do with this? Like, So, you know, it’s, it’s really hard cause sometimes Joseph Smith says things that seem like just strange and it’s hard to know if it is his voice or if it’s not. But based on Whitney just being like, this is not Joseph Smith. I, I wanted to do a more in-depth textual analysis. So I’m going to go ahead and put the blessing up with the wording, and we’ll read through it talking about elements and aspects of it. I’m, this is by no means claiming to be comprehensive. These are just some of the things that I looked up and everybody just needs. To do their own investigations. So I also have to say, a textual analysis of Joseph Smith is challenging because of what I said. We don’t have anything like a full complete collection of all of his words. Most of what we have, as you already know, are, um, were recorded by other people. And when you’re listening to someone speak and writing it in your journal, who knows how many of, um, your own thoughts you’re adding to it, or, you know, who knows how accurate these records are? I know there are several speeches where we have Different, um, records of it, and they’re all completely different. They can seem like they were completely different speeches. So that’s, you know, that’s one challenge, and we don’t have that much that Joseph Smith wrote himself. So I think it’s hard to necessarily say Joseph would never have said that. I don’t know that we can automatically claim that, but I do think it’s interesting to get in and seem and, and do our best to say, does this seem in or out of character. So, right, right from the very beginning, you can see on the very top, it says Navvo City. That’s really important. Um, Joseph always wrote Navu. I haven’t seen anything else where he wrote Navvou City, that’s backed up by some other people that we’ll go into in a little bit. And then it has the date. That’s important as well, right? Then he starts the blessing with, Oh Lord my God, Thou that dwellest on high. OK, this one is important. I think this one more. Investigation. So, oh Lord my God, I have only found that on the JSP, on the Joseph Smith papers in connection to the martyrdom. I can’t find where Joseph Smith ever said that, except at his death, according to the martyrdom accounts. So first, here, I put them right here. First, we have John Taylor’s martyrdom account. And I know there are other People who know far more about these, um, documents than I have. I haven’t looked into these very much. But, um, John Taylor says that after dragging John Taylor to a separate room, Brother Richards, that’s Willard Richards, the other one there, was very much troubled and exclaimed, Oh, brother Taylor, is it possible that they have killed both Brother Hiram and Joseph? It cannot surely be. And yet I saw them shoot them. And elevating his hands 2 or 3 times, he exclaimed, Oh Lord my God, spare thy servants. So that’s one of the times that oh Lord my God is written on the Joseph Smith papers, and it’s John Taylor quoting, not Joseph Smith, but quoting Willard Richards after Joseph and Hyrum were dead. OK, that’s really strange. And then the other account we have is the official, um, A um, the martyrdom account that was included as Doctrine and the Covenant Section 11111 in the 1844 Doctor and the Covenant. So that my understanding is that that was already ready um to go to print that 1844 version of the Doctrine of the Covenants, and they quickly, um, as they quickly as they could wrote up this martyrdom account to be able to be included to add it last minute to the printing of the 1844 doctrine. And this is what it says. Hyrum was shot first and fell calmly exclaiming, I am a dead man. Joseph leapt from the window and was shot dead in the attempt, exclaiming, Oh Lord my God. They were both shot after they were dead in a brutal manner, and both received 4 balls. So there in the, so we have John Taylor’s account that has Willard Richards saying it. But then for some reason in this, um, the, in the. the covenant’s account, this is where we have Joseph Smith yelling it as he cramed out of the window. And I know there’s been a lot of, um, speculation that Joseph was giving the, um, Masonic distressed distress call for help that starts, I believe, oh Lord my God, is there no help for the widow’s son? And so that’s a possibility, but this is so confusing, right? Where do we get the claim that these were his words? And in any case, I think it’s worth noting. That we don’t have record of Joseph ever saying those words other than at his death, right? So it’s interesting that this blessing would start that way. We also have these much later accounts that were crafted in the Utah era where they were doing they were creating the history and um we’ve talked about this so much, the, um, draft version and then the finalized versions that they would do. And here you can see the. Draft version and the finalized version, they’re very similar in the martyrdom account. The sourcing for it, again, doesn’t seem to be great, so I don’t know, but I’ll just read what it says. Joseph, seeing there was no safety in the room and probably thinking that it would save the lives of his brethren in the room if he could escape, turned calmly from the door, dropped his pistol on the floor, and now this next part is in the draft history but was cut from the finalized version. So it says, dropped his pistol on the floor, saying, There, defend yourselves as well as you can. That part was cut, and it goes on to say, he sprang into the window when two balls pierced him from the door, one entering his right breast from without, and he fell outward into the hands of his murderers, exclaiming, O Lord my God. So this martyrdom account that was, um, put into the official church history, the history of Joseph Smith, it made these Joseph’s famous last words, right? So we don’t have evidence of him saying them during his life, at least until this time. But if you were crafting a document that you wanted to sound like Joseph Smith, you may very well use these words because they became Joseph’s. Famous, famous last words. So, so, right, there’s another interesting element to it from the very beginning. So let’s keep reading through it so we can try to give you a sense of why Whitney just immediately said, that is not Joseph, which makes a lot of sense to me. So, again, oh Lord thy God, then it says, Thou that dwellest on high, I searched the Joseph Smith papers, didn’t see that Joseph ever used that term. He says, I beseech of thee. And again, That is used in scripture that it has besieged, but Joseph, I don’t see him ever using it in any of his blessings or prayers or sermons or revelations. It has one use that he was writing in a letter to Isaac Galland beseeching him to please help them. He owed him money for the property he was buying. He was in a really difficult situation. So that’s the one time he used that, but I don’t see him using it toward the Lord. So bless I beseech. of the, the one into whose hands this may fall. Again, so strange. Nothing like that. When Joseph is giving a blessing or a revelation, it’s my servant, Noel, my daughter Emma, my, you know, they should say, my daughter Sarah, or something like that. So that’s very strange. He never says anything like that. Um, we’ll keep going. Let’s see. Um, and crown her with a diadem of glory in the eternal world. OK, that’s an interesting part as well. Some people try to use, I suppose, diadem, at least I’ve heard, to claim that it’s about polygamy somehow, because I, I don’t know. That’s interesting, but that makes no sense to me. I don’t understand why they say that. We do know that Joseph had just used the word diadem in the blessing he gave to Erastus Derby while he was in hiding, the one we covered. This is what he says about Erastus Derby. Let there be a crown of glory and a diadem upon his head. Let the light of eternal truth shine forth upon his understanding. Let his name be had in everlasting remembrance. Let the blessings of Jehovah be crowned upon his posterity after him, for he rendered me consolation in the lonely places of my retreat. And that’s also really interesting to speak to, um, the letter, right? That we claim is about polygamy and seeing that the way he spoke about his lonely retreat is not necessarily about polygamy, because he said the same things to Erastus Derby. Here’s part of what he said to the Whitneys. 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 allied do love me, now is the time to afford me succor. In the in the days of exile. It sounds very similar to what he wrote to Erastus Derby, which clearly did not have romantic connotations. So again, I don’t know how to have it. I have romantic connotations in the letter. That was a little bit of a sidetrack because I said we’re going to talk a bit about the letter and the revelation as as well as the blessings. It all kind of goes together. So then he continues on, um, oh, let be sealed this day on high. See how strange it is? Sealed this day on high or sealed on high. Again, no, um, uses from Joseph Smith and the Joseph Smith papers. We will go on in another episode. I don’t think I can fit it into this one to talk about sealing and what Joseph always meant by sealing every time he used it. Right? Um, let’s see, we’ll continue on, um, that she shall come forth in the first resurrection to receive the same. OK. Shall come forth in the first resurrection. That is present. In Mosiah 15 and in section 132. So I want to just really quickly talk about, well, I guess we’ll have to say that. You guys, I’ll let you look that up on your own. It’s interesting to consider what that would mean and how different it is in those two contexts. Um, it says, and verily it shall be so sayeth the Lord, if she remain in the Everlasting covenant. The word there. Let me just finish that sentence. The everlasting covenant to the end. Also, all her father’s house shall be saved in the same eternal glory. And if any of them shall wander from the fold of the Lord, they shall not perish but shall return, sayeth the Lord. So, OK, one thing I have to rob Fatheringham, if you haven’t watched his excellent episode he did on the Whitney documents, I highly recommend it. But he points out one thing that speaks in favor of this blessing. He’s not asking the question of whether or not it is legitimate. But he does point out that this at least has conditional blessings, that it’s kind of an if then rather than the revelation, which gives unconditional blessings, which makes it even more suspect. But this, this bringing up everlasting covenant here is really interesting, and I want to go into that. This is going to be a bit of a sidetrack talking about Joseph’s use of the term everlasting covenant, but I think it is worth it. This is a really important topic to understand. So having everlasting covenants show up in this blessing is really interesting for a number of reasons. A lot of people like to use him saying if she remained in the Everlasting covenant here as evidence of not only Joseph’s polygamy, but of the fact that he was married to Sarah and Whitney, saying that if you will be true to our ceiling, then you’ll have all of these blessings. I, I think there is a really big problem with that. So it’s somewhat an act. to see that show up in this blessing at this point and from March of 1843. And so we’ll go into why I, uh, if he is using Everlasting Covenant at this point, it has to be in the way that he always used it during his lifetime until we get sections 131 and 132, which again, Were not brought forward until 1852, well, well after eight years after Joseph Smith’s death, and not added until the Doctrine of Covenants until after Brigham Young’s death. So let’s go ahead and look at at Everlasting Covenant. So this is Joseph, the Joseph Smith Paper’s summary of the Everlasting Covenant. It generally referred to the fullness of the gospel. Yes, we’re going to look at the scriptures and how Joseph Smith referred to Everlasting Covenant, what it meant to him, and if we believe he was receiving. Revelation, what it meant to the Lord. It’s the sum total of the church’s message geared toward establishing God’s covenant people on the earth. Then it goes on to say, it also, it is also used to describe individual elements of the gospel, including marriage. That footnote refers to Doctrine Covenants 132, right? So sections, as I said, 131 and 132 change the definition of the everlasting covenant that Joseph Smith restored. So we’ll go on. According to the Joseph Smith, according to Joseph Smith, the everlasting covenant was contained in in holy writ and the things that God revealed unto us. A Joseph Smith revelation stated that God revealed the everlasting covenant to the earth so that individuals might have life and be made partakers of the glories which are to be revealed in the last days. So the Everlasting covenant is what is like the encapsulation of the gosp of what Joseph restored to the earth, right? What was missing. And so on on the 16th of April 1830, a revelation concerning baptism introduced the term new and everlasting covenant. So, already at the beginning, new and everlasting covenant meant the baptism into the gospel, right? The first principles and ordinances of the gospel, faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost, the confirmation, right? That’s important to recognize that’s what the Everlasting covenant referred to, which was later used with reference to marriage ceilings, including Plural marriage by church priesthood authority. So, OK, there we see the challenge of this term everlasting covenant. What did it mean? What did it mean to Joseph Smith? Does what does it mean to the Lord? Is it valid that it changed? So I want to go ahead and read through the scriptures that speak about the Everlasting covenant, so everyone can kind of understand what it is this is talking about and decide for yourselves where the truth lies. I gathered several examples of this term from Joseph’s, um, revelations, and I tried to put them in order. We’re going to go through a couple of them. So the first one was referred to in the Joseph Smith, um, overview, the summary of this term. It’s Doctrine the Covenants, Section 22 verse 1. This was given April 16, 1830, and it’s speaking of baptism, it says, this is a new and an everlasting covenant, even that which was from the beginning. So it’s new because it’s restored to the earth. Newly this time it’s everlasting because it’s always the same gospel, just like it says in other places in the Book of Mormon that this is an eternal ordinance, right? This is an eternal order that has always existed from before the world and that it just keeps being restored to the earth and that we are not allowed to change, right? We’re supposed to not change the ordinances. So that’s really interesting. Then we’ll go forward. This is, um, section 45. This was March 7th, 1831, so just a year later, verse 9. That says, I have, I, I have sent my everlasting covenant into the world. So God is saying He has already sent it. That’s, that’s the point I’m trying to make. In April 30, the new and everlasting covenant had already been restored to do its work, right? That’s being restated in 1831. God says, I have sent my everlasting covenant into the world to be a light to the world. So it’s not supposed to be kept secret. You’re not supposed to put your light under a bushel, right? And to be a standard for my people and for the Gentiles to seek to it, and to be a messenger before my face to prepare the way before me. So whatever this everlasting covenant is, it’s supposed to shine to the Gentiles and attract the Gentiles. It’s something that the Gentiles will want to come to. It’s the measurement that the people are measured against, and it is They are supposed to go out and proclaim to the world to convert people to. That’s very different than what happened with polygamy, which they had to keep secret, and which made all of the Gentiles, the Americans, the, you know, the the like that made them completely turned off from the restoration, made it become a bit of a hiss and a byword to the rest of the country. So we’ll go forward to Doctrine Covenant 66 2. This was the Doctrine Covenant 66 was October 29, 1831, and it says, Verily I say unto you, blessed are you for receiving my everlasting covenant. So it had already been given, and the people had already received it. Even I have a hair on my face. Sorry about that. Even the fullness of my gospel, the everlasting covenant is the fullness of the gospel. It had already been revealed to the people, proclaimed. The Gentiles received in its fullness by 1830 and 1831. So, and it’s the fullness of my gospel sent forth unto the children of men that they might have life and be made partakers of the glories which are to be revealed in the last days, as it was written by the prophets and apostles in days of old. This is what the restoration was. It’s the restoration of the gospel, the baptism, the, the gospel of God. With the authority of Jesus Christ that Joseph Smith restored to the earth. This is what Joseph Smith believed and taught to the people. We’ll go on November 1831. This is November 1st, um, Doctrine and Covenants 1, this is when they received the, um, first section of the Doctrine and Covenants, right? This is verse 17. Read a couple of verses here. Wherefore, I, the Lord, knowing the calamity which should come upon the inhabitants of the earth, calls upon my servant, Joseph. Jr. and spake unto him from heaven and gave him commandments, skipping to verse 22, that my everlasting covenant might be established. So God has already done this. He’s already reached out to Joseph Smith, given him the commandments so that he could establish His everlasting covenant, which has already happened, continuing on, that the fullness of my gospel might be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world before kings and Rulers. And then it, it’s interesting. I’m just gonna refer back to verse 14, and we’re supposed to liken all scriptures to ourselves. So I don’t think we should just apply it to the non-members at the time of Joseph Smith. We should liken it to ourselves. It says, And the arm of the Lord shall be revealed, and the day cometh that they who will not hear the voice of the Lord, neither the voice of his servants, neither give heed to the words that the prophets and apostles shall be cut off from among the people. For They have strayed from my ordinances and have broken my everlasting covenant. We are being told repeatedly what the everlasting covenant is. If we claim that it is something different than what God said it is, what God revealed, what God reinstated, restored with Joseph Smith, then we are straying from the ordinances. We are changing, altering the ordinances and breaking the everlasting covenant. That It’s important for us to recognize. Then we’ll go forward to December 1833. This is Section 101 in our current doctrine and covenants, verse 38, and seek the face of the Lord always, that in patience ye may possess your souls, and ye shall have eternal life. When men are called unto my everlasting gospel and covenant with an everlasting covenant, they are accounted as the salt of the earth and the savior of men. So it’s consistent what the everlasting covenant is. It was restored at the very beginning. It was available from the very beginning of the organization of the church. It was what they took forward to the people. It was not something hidden, secret, and that later had to be restored through these really back, um, back alley channels, right? It just, that, that is not what God is talking about here. God restored an everlasting. Covenant through Joseph Smith and told him to proclaim it, didn’t tell him, Oh, you have to do this, by the way, this is really the everlasting covenant. This polygamy is really how you receive the blessings I’m promising, exaltation and, and, and the glories that are to come that the gospel is speaking of. And, and, and you have to keep a secret, not proclaim it in opposition to all of these scriptures. So I think that’s really worthwhile to pay attention to. So now I want to go ahead and look at where it all of a sudden change. Changes. And again, that’s Doctrine and Covenants, Section 131 and 132. This is the first time we get anything that is equating the everlasting covenant with marriage at all, let alone a plural marriage. And I just have to say, neither of these sections have anything like reasonably good provenance. So we will talk about that. So section 131 says, in the celestial glory, there are 3 heavens or degrees. And in order to obtain the highest, A man must enter into this order of the priesthood, added in, meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. So all of a sudden, we are changing the new and everlasting covenant to be marriage. And if he does not, he cannot obtain it. He may enter into the other, but that is the end of his kingdom. He cannot have increase. OK, I think it’s good to pay attention to where we get this section. So there is a really useful page on the, um, Joseph Smith papers that I’ll leave. To below that tells us the sources behind the doctrine and covenants. Hopefully you can see it here. It’s so great because you can go down and each section, you can see tells us where it comes from. So you can attach, you know, you can go to the original of the revelation that is recorded. So let’s go to section 131, shall we? And you see, verses 1 through 4, which is just what what we just read, it is instruction on the 16th of May, 1843, as reported by William Clayton. The only source for this is it is William Clayton’s journal, which was, as I have said repeatedly, was never released and which has a lot of questions, a lot of problems with it. So also it’s interesting to note that that uh that entry in William Clayton’s journal does not say the same words that we just read in those verses. It’s William Clayton. Reporting a private conversation he had with Joseph Smith, and he says that Joseph said, quote, um, oh, well, quote William Clayton. He said that except a man and a wife, enter into an everlasting covenant and be married for eternity while in this probation by the power and authority of the holy priesthood, they will cease to increase when they die. So that is not the same wording at all as In what is in section 131. And I can’t find anything anywhere on the Joseph Smith papers that equates to that wording, um, except for Volume D of the history that was created after Joseph Smith’s death, where they conglomerated a bunch of these things and claimed to say a lot of things that Joseph Smith said, and that could have been used to create Section 131. So it could have been that they created this history, used. In Clayton’s journal as one of the sources as they kind of created that, made that up. And then since it was written in the history, they decided to add it to the doctrine and covenants as Section 131. So I’m not saying that Joseph absolutely didn’t say this, didn’t didn’t say any teaching about the necessity of marriage. I think that’s something to prayerfully investigate for, you know, for each of us to do. But what I am saying is It’s, there is no evidence to say that that is that Joseph in any way ever equated that to the new and everlasting covenant. I don’t see any good evidence to say that it is the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. That seems like a real stretch that really can’t be substantiated. Now we’ll go back to the slide and look at what, um, Section 132 added. Remember, these two sections were added to the doctrine covenants at the same time in 187. And, um, we, I, I just told you the providence of Section 131. There’s really none. There’s no provenance for it. It was just created in Joseph Smith’s history, the best I can see. Again, always, if someone has different information, please present it to me. I am, I never want people to just take my word for things. I’m just sharing my journey, and I’m always interested in learning more and see if there’s anything I missed. So, but now I’ve already, I have already covered in depth the provenance of Section 132. I, I know that people like Brian Hailes likes to claim a Husker Province. It, it doesn’t. It just simply doesn’t. Brigham Young pulled it out of his desk in 1852. And so here are just a few of the uses of this term in Section 132, verse 4. For behold, I revealed unto you a new and an everlasting covenant. And if ye abide not that covenant, then are ye damned, for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into. My glory. So again, this is so interesting. According to the polygamy narrative, Joseph, um, dictated this in 1843, July of 1843. And so it’s not until now that God is revealing unto them, this new and everlasting covenant that was revealed clear back at the beginning of the establishment of the church. How does that make sense? Also, we get the new and everlasting covenant equated as I said, with not only marriage, but here very strongly with plural marriage, with the threat of damnation, if you reject it. That’s brand new as well. So we’ll go on to verse 6. And as pertaining to the new and everlasting covenant, it was instituted for the fullness of my glory, and he that receiveth the fullness thereof must and shall abide the law, or he shall be damned, sayeth the Lord God. So there it’s restated again. I think I just included one more verse. You can search this on your own if you’re interested in seeing every use. Verse 41. And as ye have asked concerning adultery, verily, verily I say unto you, if a man receiveth a wife in the new and everlasting covenant, and if she be with another man, and I have not appointed unto her by the holy anointing, so apparently a woman could be with another man. If God gave her a holy anointing, that helps us see some of these, some insight into the um what looks like wife swapping or marrying up or, you know, all of the weirdness that was happening. But, um, if I have not appointed unto her by the holy anointing, she hath committed adultery and shall be destroyed. So again, the promises of the threats of damnation and destruction all of a sudden become equated with the new and that everlasting covenant, which becomes equated with marriage and plural marriage out of the blue. I don’t see how that makes sense, that that is what the new and everlasting covenant is. So this is something that I hope each of you will investigate on your own. And see what you think. I think it’s very important for us to understand what the everlasting covenant is. Thank you for letting me take that little sidetrack. I hope you thought it was a worthwhile use of our time. But now let’s just quickly finish up this letter. Let me add it back to the screen. We’ve just got a couple of sentences left. So, um, we’ll look right here. Let’s see. Um, the same, and if they shall wander from the fold, F O A L D. That’s interesting. I haven’t seen any uses of that from Joseph Smith, but even the term wander from the fold with the regular spelling of fold. I don’t see that on the Josephs in the papers. That, again, doesn’t mean he couldn’t have used it. Doesn’t, this doesn’t mean it’s not his wording. It just, we don’t see a lot of this wording from him. We don’t see it anywhere else. And then, um, the fold of the Lord, I also don’t see that word wording. We’ll continue. Um, they shall not perish but shall return, sayeth the Lord and be saved. S A I V E D. Again, I don’t, don’t see Joseph ever spelling saved that way. But um 11 thing that we’ll get into um the the um expert that I am going to include in this video in just a little while, he said that the less educated somebody is, the harder it can be to discern their handwriting and their spelling because they will have a lot less consistency, right? When someone is very well educated their handwriting should be more consistent and their spelling should be more consistent and Joseph Smith didn’t have that much education. So he could spell different he could potentially spell different words, different ways at different times and write different ways at different times. So it’s it’s hard to know, right? Um, but we’ll finish up and by repentance be crowned with all the fullness of the glory of the everlasting gospel. Again, at least it’s conditional, right? Requires repentance. That’s different than the revelation, as Rob, a father and points out, that’s another point in favor of this being a valid blessing from Joseph Smith. Um, these promises, I seal upon all of their heads, all of their heads, I guess all of their, um, all of the family. Um, it’s very strange. In the name of Jesus Christ, by the law of the holy priesthood, even so, amen. And then it lists Sarah and Whitney. And Joseph Smith. So again, um, by the law of the holy priesthood, I don’t see that anywhere on the Joseph Smith papers ever using, um, ever used by Joseph Smith. A lot of these wordings do sound very unusual, and the blessing just from top to bottom seems weird for all of these reasons. So I’m going to continue, continue to take you along my, um, investigation on this, and I’m going to share some of the discoveries I’ve made. These, I, I. Made this week. These are not necessarily in order, but I think they’re all fascinating. So here’s the first thing I want to share in this section. I learned that I had been completely wrong in my last episode. I hypothesized, I tried to figure out where these things would have come from, how did Joseph F. Smith get them, right? And I thought that maybe Elizabeth and Sarah, if they did indeed bring the letter in 1869, that they probably brought these other documents at the same time. Right? It would make sense to me that they had them and delivered them all together. I learned that I was completely wrong about that. So I have to correct that. So this is the source, again from the Joseph Smith Papers. It says that Gru, that’s, um, Orson F. Whitney’s aunt, we’ll get into that, gave this document to her nephew, Orson F. Whitney, and in 1912, he donated the document to Joseph F. Smith, who was then serving as president of the church. OK. That’s a really big deal because that is when Orson F. Whitney brought the revelation. So I realized, oh my gosh, this came along with the, I think, very suspect revelation. It did not come with the early letter that also is problematic that we’re going to get into. Tons of questions have opened up, opened up with this. So this is the revelation that we talked about in the first episode, and the source note says, Orson F. Whitney. A type script of the revelation at the request of church president Joseph F. Smith, probably in early 1912, and gave the typescript to Smith on April 1, 1912. Remember April Fool’s Day? We talked about that. And then the historical introduction as this is what I have highlighted here. The original manuscript of the of the revelation featured here is apparently no longer extant. In 1912, Orson F. Whitney used a copy of the Revelation in the possession of his father. So we’re going to talk about what that copy. Of the revelation might possibly be. I think we know. Um, he used a copy that was in the possession of his father, Horace Whitney, to make a type script. We’re going to look at where what the source actually says and see how accurate that, um, summary of it is. I’m not sure how exactly spot on it it is. So it goes on to say, Orson Whitney believed that his father had received a copy of the revelation from his own father, Newell K. Whitney, that would have been Orson’s grandfather. Orson Whitney gave the types. to church President Joseph F. Smith on the 1st of April 1912, along with a cover letter. OK. So now the picture is getting clearer. So Orson Whitney gave the revelation along with, I believe, other documents along with this cover letter. So let’s go ahead and see if we can find the cover letter, shall we? And I have to thank people who have helped me in this episode. I have had, um, I, I, the Cheryl Bruno and I have been talking like crazy. So a lot of this has been fun discovery with her. As well. And, um, just figuring things out, hypothesizing the same as I’ve done with Whitney and with many other people. So thank you everyone who has chipped in to help me find all of these sources, because sometimes things can be difficult to find. So I had a hard time finding this, and I needed some help. But anyway, this is the cover letter. It’s on the, um, church history library that Orson Whitney typed up to give to Joseph F. Smith. You can see it looks very similar. It’s similar paper and similar type. That’s the revelation. And this is the cover letter. So this is very interesting. Here’s the introduction. Dear brother and friend, agreeable to your request, I herewith present a statement concerning the sacred relics pertaining to the prophet Joseph Smith, which I had the honor and pleasure of presenting to you a few days since, and which you returned to me in order that I might accompany the pre presentation with such a statement. So, OK, so, um, Orson had already given these to Joseph F. Smith. Joseph. Smith gave them back and said, No, give me a statement with them so that I have documentation. So that’s pretty good. Then he goes on then and lists the four, items which he includes. So he includes them in the cover letter. Here are pictures of them. The first is a bless the blessing. That’s what we’re going to talk about. The second, he lists as number 2, is a chip of woods that he claims is spotted with Joseph Smith’s blood that was picked up at the martyrdom by the well. Um, number 3. Is a lock of Joseph Smith’s hair. everyone can decide what to do with these, right? And number 4 is a typed copy of the revelation that we were just looking at that we were talking that we will talk about. So those four things all came in together to Joseph F. Smith from Orson Whitney, um, on this day in 1912. That’s where they came from. So he describes the blessing as, quote, the document signed by Joseph Smith and addressed to Sarah Anna Whitney. That was Orson’s aunt and says it was found by another aunt, Mary Jane Whitney Gre among his his grandmother’s papers after her death. So these relics, this blessing to Sarah Anne Whitney was among her mother’s things. Elizabeth and Whitney, apparently, according to this, Elizabeth Ann Whitney in her old age went to live with her other daughter named Mary Anne Whitney Grew. And after Elizabeth died, Mary Anne went through the paper. The papers, found the, these, um, documents and gave them to Orson Whitney. And then Orson Whitney gave them to Joseph F. Smith. So that’s the provenance we have. So, again, so much to think about. If this blessing is a forgery, we have to think of who might have forged it and why. So I can see some possibilities, but I can also see that, you know, there are arguments against them. So, um, I think that potentially the reasons could be to somehow valid. Validate Kingsbury’s story of the fake marriage, the way that it’s used, right? It could be to create a meaningful keepsake. I’ve talked before about how people just created things. Um, they create false histories. They create something that’s supposed to be from Joseph Smith. Maybe it’s someone who was able to write in Joseph Smith’s handwriting, wanted to make something special that sounded like Joseph Smith, like, there could be all kinds of reasoning, um, reasons. It doesn’t have to be an official intentional forgery, although it also Could be. But then if it’s genuine, we have to ask, why wouldn’t they, why wouldn’t Elizabeth have given it to Joseph F. Smith along with the letter in 1869 when they were trying to prove Joseph Smith’s polygamy, right? And why was it just kept? Why was it never spoken about? Why didn’t she talk about it in her, um, autobiography? But then at the same time, if it’s a forgery trying to prove the narrative, why isn’t it more explicitly about plural marriage? So there are a lot of challenging questions to ask a Both sides. But now I want to go into another one of the questions I asked that actually turned out to be one of the really fun parts of this investigation this week. Again, the paper is so strange, right? I’ll add this back up. It’s the, it’s all of them. But just so you can see that paper, there really is nothing else remotely like it that I have seen on the Joseph Smith papers. It, it seems very strange, almost like it doesn’t fit in that era. I, I, I just had a lot of questions. We’re with this one piece of Paper that had this shape and this, um, decoration come from. Why would Joseph have used it? Why would he use it for this one very strange blessing, right? It’s just a lot of questions that seemed really strange to me. And I didn’t think that much of it, other, other than it just seemed weird, until the possibility of it not being genuine emerged with what Whitney said. So because of that possibility, I went ahead and immediately called. John Hayacek, who is, I believe he is a material culture specialist. He really looks at the artifacts, right? The hands-on documents is his specialty. And I was like, if anyone would be able to answer some of these questions, it would be him. And so I called him and he knew what I was talking about. I sent him the link so we can look at it right then with me as well. He said he is very familiar with this type of paper. He told me it’s actually stationary, which, oh, of course, that’s what it is. It’s stationary, right? And he said it did, it was developed in the mid-19th century, but not in America in the 1840s. He said it was actually very prevalent that you start to see this kind of stationery during and in the 1860s, it was everywhere in the Civil War era. He said you can even find it quite a bit in the 1850s. So if he were seeing this document, he would date it the 1850s, most likely the 1860s. That’s what he told me. Um, and he said that in the tens of thousands of dollars. Documents he has looked at during this era, this, um, 18th century era, he has never seen what he calls, he says that this is called a lady’s envelope, that, um, you would fold it up and, and the stationery would become its own envelope. He said he has never seen anything like this from the 1840s. He said it would be extremely surprising. He used the word incredible to see anything like this kind of stationery in the 1840s. But then he said he would need to examine it in person to be more certain. And so he was frustrated that, that, um, that he couldn’t go and examine it at the church history library. But, um, he did say that it was certainly not being produced in America at that point, that this kind of stationery was not, was not, um, anywhere in America at this point. So the only reason he couldn’t rule out completely is that it could have, it, it could have been being produced in Europe in the 180. 40s. And so it might be possible that perhaps one of the elders that were serving missions in Europe could have brought some stationary home from their missions in England. So that’s a possibility, but that’s a challenge because it couldn’t have been Noel K. Whitney who brought it home because he was the bishop and he didn’t serve abroad, right? He, he was running all of the matters at home in Navvo. And so it would have had to be one of the elders. So it couldn’t have been Joseph Smith and it couldn’t have been Newell K. Whitney, the two involved in this blessing. So it’s hard to explain, um, how it would be used for a blessing for Sarah and Whitney. But then the other possibility is that perhaps, um, it could have been purchased and as imported paper to be sold in the red brick store. Newell K. Whitney ran the red brick store for Joseph Smith, and, um, and he was acquiring the things to sell in the store. So there could be, and, and we know that things were being shipped from, um, Europe to America. So that could. be a possibility. So I decided to try to look into that. So I want to read you a summary about the red brick store on the Joseph Smith papers. It says, in order to stock the store, Joseph Smith sent sent John W. Latson, Bishops Newell K. Whitney and George Miller, and possibly others to purchase goods at his as his financial agents. He also wrote to Edward Hunter, a latter-day saint and prominent Pennsylvania businessman, requesting that he purchase goods and ship them to Navu. So many purchases in late 1841 appeared to have been made in the northeastern United States, in places like New York City and Pennsylvania through wholesale merchants. Additional goods were purchased in St. Louis. The goods in the store were predominantly dry goods and fabric, with some tools and other specialty items. Perishable foodstuffs such as eggs and butter were also. sold when available. OK, so that gives us a good sense of what was being acquired and how it was being acquired to be sold at the store. So it makes it clear that things, they were not, um, shipping things from Europe for the red brick store. And the red brick store was really about the necessities of everyday life in this new city, right? So people could have what they needed. Also, shipping costs were extremely expensive. Then, so buying something in this little frontier store would be far more expensive than buying it back east, right? So, um, it’s hard to think that they would have specialty items. I mean, it does say that there were other, there were other specialty items available. So I guess very expensive, um, cutting edge stationery from Europe could be included in specialty items. It’s hard to know. It seems unlikely, but it’s hard to know. It, it doesn’t seem that that would be what they would be prioritizing in this frontier store trying to develop this new city, right? But I thought that we should, you know, look at what we can. So I decided to, I had the idea to check the Joseph Smith store daybook. So this is a really useful source that’s come in handy in Um, other episodes that I have done. And it’s where they kept track, usually knew Whitney that he ran the store, but some of the other clerks as well, sometimes Kingsbury, writing down the purchases, the orders and the purchases. So unfortunately, we only have Day Book A that only goes until July 1842. So we don’t have the um book that would cover 1843 when this blessing was given. So I, I don’t know if it’s likely that stock would have changed that much in the course of a year, you know, what the store carried. I guess it’s possible, but I thought it was still worth a try because if they were carrying things like that kind of specialized, um, stationery, then it would probably show up somewhere. So I went ahead and looked and I saw plenty of purchases for paper throughout. Um, throughout the book. I searched for paper and looked at all of them. I, I’m ridiculous and I do these kinds of things instead of sleeping because it’s just really fun and really fascinating. So there are plenty of purchases for what are called choirs of paper, Q U I R E. A choir is 1/20 of a ream. We still use the word ream. That’s, I believe, 500 sheets, and a choir is 25 sheets, and that’s usually what was ordered, requires of paper. Um, they were. the order, the main place that was ordering was was the printing office, which makes perfect sense. I love that there was a printing office, um, but there were also other offices like the temple office, the Navvo House, and several different organizations, the relief society, the, you know, the different organizations in the church. There were also several orders for Willard Richards, which makes sense since he was doing the history, and other clerks and lawyers, the laws that You know, many things like that. Um, the orders often differentiate between letter paper or writing paper, which I thought was interesting. So this is a fun entry. It’s fun to do, like investigate paper in Navu in the 1840s. I think it’s useful to help us investigate this piece of paper that’s so mysterious. This is the kind of work I think we need to do to try to get to the bottom of this. So I really liked this entry. This is Wednesday, January 26th. And, um, Joseph Smith sent his daughter, I assume that must be Katherine, to get him 6 cents worth of paper. And then a little later that day, he sent his son, I assume that must be Joseph Smith the 3rd, to get him 6 cents more of more worth of paper. So that’s a fun entry, and you can see that, um, you know, this is how it’s collected and the kind of paper they’re buying. It was very, um, Utilitarian, like they just had what they needed, the essentials, right? And I checked Joseph’s journal just for fun, and one of the entries is that he that he transacted a variety of business that day. So I guess he needed a lot of paper that day and he, it’s fun to see how he had his kids run errands for him, go get something at the store for me. So then, um, this is another interesting entry that I really liked. This is Friday, April 1st, 1842 on behalf of the relief Society, which remember was organized in part to sew clothes for the temple workers. Emma Smith purchased 1010 yards of bleached factory cloth, 5.5 yards of fabric for vests, 4 dozen vest buttons, 12 skeins of silk, I believe that’s thread for sewing, and then underlined 6 sheets of paper. Her total for the order was $4.56. So this is fun because you can see exactly how much the paper costs. Six sheets of paper costs 9 cents. So in today’s money, that 9 cents is about $3.50. So that means it’s about 60 cents a sheet per paper. That’s how expensive paper was back then, how, um, precious it was. And so that’s why they would buy it sometimes 6 sheets at a time, or the professional organizations, I mean, The, like the printing office 25 sheets at a time, right? And it paper wasn’t something that was nearly as disposable as it is today. And so, um, and that also, since regular paper costs that much, we can only imagine how much that kind of stationery would cost. And so she also bought, um, oh, that order continues below the line. She also bought some fabric and 13 cents a 13 cent pair of suspenders for Joseph on a separate order. So I think that that’s fun. So throughout the book, and throughout this entire daybook, prices are pretty consistent. It’s usually 19 cents for a half choir of paper or 38 cents for a full choir. It, it varies just a little bit, maybe sometimes down to 16 cents for a half choir, but it’s right around there. My search, I will admit, was not completely exhaustive. And like I said, we only have this daybook A, but I Didn’t see anything at all like stationary or other imported luxury items that would, um, make it seem like they would carry this kind of stationery in a little frontier store. So, um, so, you know, that’s where we are with that point. But this is really exciting. There is actually another document that is Written on the same paper, the exact same paper. If you look at this, you can see the same shape, the same exact outline. This is the same paper. This is a painting and poem that Helen Mar Kimball painted and wrote for her mother, Violet. This is incredible. And so what is even more exciting about it is that it is held at special collections at BYU where we could go and look at it. As soon as I tracked this down, I was so excited because John had said, if I could look at it, then I could tell better when it’s from, is what he thought. So I immediately Called John Hayuzek and told him this was at BYU and that I had already called and set up and you know that they had they were getting it for me and that did he want to meet me there at BYU to go look in person at this paper that was the same paper as the blessing. This was incredible. So I’m going to take you with us on that adventure. This is the one other document I was able to find that is on the same stationery as the blessing that Joseph supposedly wrote for Sarah Anne Whitney that’s that we are investigating. This painting actually, I believe, must have been done by Helen Marr, um, Whitney, this was Helen Mar Whitney to her mother. The expert that I have spoken to says that this is. Um, in all of the many tens of thousands of documents he’s looked at this. It is not likely at all to be from the 1840s. He said this was very common in the 1860s to see this kind of stationary and this kind of ladies’ envelope. It could be from the 1850s, but he has never once seen any. Like this from the 1840s, so I think that’s important for us to know we are investigating this paper as one of the many clues of whether Sarah Anne Whitney’s blessing from Joseph Smith is likely to be a legitimate Joseph Smith document or a later forgery. I am joined by John Hayazek, specialist in material culture of Mormon history, and I have asked him to join me to do his best to analyze and try to time to date this paper, this document. So John, if there’s anything I missed telling people about your expertise, please fill us in.
[1:11:23] John Hajicek: No, that’s good.
[1:11:24] Michelle: OK. And then we have been examining, well, you’re going to just go ahead and tell us, tell them what we’ve been looking at. It’s been,
[1:11:31] John Hajicek: we’re looking at a collection identified as the Orson F. Whitney collection, and it is an assembled synthetic collection of documents that came down through the Orson Whitney family, uh, beginning with Helen Mar Kimball or Violet uh Kimball, her mother. And so we’re looking at some documents that are alleged to have come from Navvo in some cases, winter quarters and from Salt Lake City.
[1:12:00] Michelle: I think the earliest in this collection is this letter from Winter Quarters from Violet to
[1:12:05] John Hajicek: Horace, correct? It is the earliest from 1847 in winter quarters.
[1:12:11] Michelle: OK. And the reason we’re we came to look at this is in particular we are interested in this paper. That Helen wrote, drew a drew a painting and wrote a letter to her poem to her mother.
[1:12:26] John Hajicek: So this is an extraordinary piece. If I saw this and there were no writing on it, I would have guessed this to be most likely 1850s, possibly uh 1860s, and maybe even as late as the 1870s. I would not have guessed this to be 1840s, although it could be. They did start to make some envelopes, some adhesive postage, and Um, And some printed envelopes as early as 1840, but not in America. You can go through boxes, thousands, hundreds of thousands of documents in America from places like New York and Ohio and Illinois and not find envelopes. In those days, you folded a letter to create an envelope. And it was, it’s just extraordinary to have this lancet shaped. Uh. Arch with a machine printed red double rule uh border and uh some examples of this particular stationer have panels on the back to create an envelope.
[1:13:34] Michelle: So this would be called a lady’s envelope.
[1:13:36] John Hajicek: And in that size it’s called a lady’s envelope. It’s just maybe a. Less than 2 inches high and 4 inches wide or more. Uh, so very horizontal and short. It was meant to be feminine and and you know, popular in the Victorian era. They were embossed envelopes, printed envelopes, lacy envelopes and things like that, invitations and very feminine exchanges, not business.
[1:14:05] Michelle: And so you said that this would be printed most likely on a large sheet that would be cut out.
[1:14:09] John Hajicek: I would be printed on a sheet where the buyer of the stationery perhaps themselves cut. The individual panels out with the scissors
[1:14:18] Michelle: and we were able to see the what looked like an outline to cut a guide for them to cut on printed on it.
[1:14:25] John Hajicek: There’s a line here cutting line that’s the cutting line
[1:14:28] Michelle: and then also the scissor marks that it’s not that it’s cut
[1:14:31] John Hajicek: and print these in sheets there, it’s known as tiling, so they would print. Quite a lot of these on a large sheet,
[1:14:37] Michelle: I think. So you’re very familiar with this type of stationery.
[1:14:42] John Hajicek: Well, in 1860s and sometimes in the 1850s where where it becomes popular like photography does, it, it’s. You could say it existed in 1840, but you don’t see it.
[1:14:54] Michelle: Have you ever seen this kind of stationery, a lady’s envelope from the 1840s and the tens of thousands of documents you’ve looked at? So, so it could possibly exist, but you’ve never seen one.
[1:15:06] John Hajicek: So I would think that this came from. England or France, maybe it’s imported paper if this existed in the novel period. It’s also got a feeling of of a later paper of an 1860s or late late 1950s paper.
[1:15:21] Michelle: OK, so you would date this if you saw it, your expert opinion would be most likely, did you say 1860s, possibly 1850s,
[1:15:28] John Hajicek: right?
[1:15:29] Michelle: And, and if, if, if this happened to be from the, not only like, like the early mid 1840s, 1842, 1843, if it came from there, this would be an exceptional find because you’ve never seen one before from that era on this kind of paper.
[1:15:47] John Hajicek: Correct, right, that’s true. In 1840, the government in England started to print an envelope that included the postage on the envelope. But that was not being done in the United States. You don’t see a lot of printed envelopes until the Civil War, but see, this is a, this is meant to be a this lancet top on the arch is meant to be the flap of an envelope. It’s meant to be folded up on the outside and the address on it on the other side. So
[1:16:15] Michelle: can I ask you if this is called a ladies’ envelope and it’s meant to be delicate and you said it was quite feminine, would it be common for men to use these to write documents
[1:16:24] John Hajicek: on? It’s unheard of for me to see a. what we call a lady’s envelope, that feminine narrow lacy embossed or printed envelope with a letter from a man to a man or a man to a woman even for that matter or any business or anything like that.
[1:16:41] Michelle: So does that, so, so with all of this that we’ve said, I know that this is a the the blessing to Sarah Anne Whitney is complicated. But having it be written in Navu in 1843 by a man, does that give you pause? What what are your thoughts on that?
[1:17:02] John Hajicek: It’s extraordinary. Yeah. Joseph Smith in 1843, he’s been the president of the church. He’s about to be a presidential candidate. He’s doing land transactions. He’s creating revelations and translations and scriptures. He’s got a professional office with professional paper and creating a. Infinite number of business and legal documents. Um, you don’t see Joseph Smith using feminine paper. You don’t see any love letters to anybody except Emma and their um normal full scap or folded.
[1:17:36] Michelle: You would say it would be for you at this point unheard of to see this kind of paper in an 1840s document in
[1:17:46] John Hajicek: Navvo. Sure, I would challenge you to find anything like it in any of the Joseph Smith papers. Find a patriarchal blessing on this type of paper. It’s just not It’s not the way the church recorded blessings or recorded revelations or translations.
[1:18:03] Michelle: That was so much fun to go look at those documents. It was actually an incredible experience. And, um, being there, you know, we didn’t necessarily get to the bottom of it, like I hoped we would. John was hesitant to declare one way or the other whether that paper, whether the revelation could have been genuine based on the paper. So we still have all of these questions like, How would it have gotten across the plains? When was it turned in by the same questions that came up. And so, um, one of the reasons that John was hesitant to say certainly that it wasn’t a valid revelation is that the Joseph Smith papers said that it was Joseph Smith’s handwriting, right? And so he assumed that meant that they had done some deep since, um, intensive analysis. to determine that that was, in fact, Joseph Smith’s handwriting. So I looked at it. I had already looked at it earlier in my conversations with Whitney. And these are two on the two sides are two letters that Joseph Smith wrote in his own hand to Emma. The first is October of 1832 and November of 1839. But, um, so it was interesting getting in there and trying to look close up. You really need to look at the formation of each letter and you know, so to try to get a sense, I’m not a handwriting expert and as John said, it’s more difficult with less educated people, so I really don’t know. However, I’m not as certain as John is that um the fact that the Joseph Smith papers says it’s Joseph Smith’s handwriting definitively means that it is or that they have done, um, deep investigation because on the, um, in historical introduction of the revelation. They also say this. In 1869, Sarah, that’s Sarah Anne Whitney, signed two affidavits affirming her ceiling to Joseph Smith, but it goes on to say, but she left no documentation offering her perspective on their relationship. The first affidavit attested to her ceiling to Joseph Smith, while the second verified an 18 August 1814. To letter written by Joseph Smith. OK. So what they are talking about are is what we covered in the previous episodes, these affidavits that I think are so deeply problematic. This is the one about the letter that is clearly not Sarah Anne Whitney’s signature, right? That that is clearly Joseph F. Smith’s. Handwriting both throughout the letter and in the signature, which looks exactly the same. And again, we can go to the um comparison I did. Those first two are from Joseph F. Smith’s two versions of the first affidavit about the marriage and the second one about the letter, and you can see how all of that is most likely Joseph F. Smith’s handwriting. The first is just that jaggedy sort of. Writing, I think he does when he’s trying to make it look like someone else’s signature that as I said, we’ll go over that and I’ll show you more examples of it and then um in the future episode and then, um, you know, I can’t say for certain, but those second set of signatures are certainly absolutely not Sarah and Kimball. So the fact that the Joseph Smith Papers editors says that those are um. Her, her Sarah’s handwriting makes me wonder how careful they are with all of their handwriting analysis. I, I actually sent a letter to them to ask. I sent an email, and they haven’t responded yet. They’re usually really good about responding to email. I, I actually really like the Joseph Smith papers. I, I never want to be too hard on them because I appreciate it so much. But um so I asked them um what kind of analysis they do to determine handwriting on documents and if they do that on every document if it always follows the same process or if they mainly just take the information in the document to say whose handwriting it is like if it says it was written by Joseph Smith, do they say it was Joseph Smith’s handwriting just like they apparently did with um Sarah Anne Whitney’s signature. So, um, I will share when I hear back from them what their answer is because I think that’s an important part of this. But I do also want to point out one other thing when we’re talking about the possibility of this not being, um, a valid revelation and who might have been able to do that. I don’t know, but it does seem that we have some sources that at least imply that there was the ability to copy handwriting to maybe forge documents or for other purposes. So here are just two quick examples. There are others as well, but these are just the two I grabbed. This is on display in you. And, um, I don’t know how valid it might be, but it seems to be valid. It says Hubert J. Grant said, If I see a man hold a pen, I can write his signature. The following signatures were written from memory by Heber J. Grant. His friends stated they could not tell his signatures from their own. So he was a very adept forger, and I’m not, I’m not saying that means that he was the one that wrote this letter if somebody did. I’m just saying that this was something that happened. And we don’t know, there’s another um Another source that, um, I, I, I asked people to help me with these sources because I couldn’t remember them all, so people are so generous and sent these to me again. So this was a discourse from Brigham Young, May 6, 1855. And one of the things he says in it is that he believed it was possible to, quote, get hold of a person’s hand and make him write in every style you can think of. Imitating, let’s see, imitating George Washington’s, Benjamin Franklin’s, Joseph Smith’s, and others’ autographs. Can you tell whether that is by the power of God or the power of the devil? No, unless you have the revelations of Jesus Christ. So it’s interesting that Brigham Young would even talk about that, about writing in other people’s hands and including Joseph Smith in his list of people that they that there was power to forge their handwriting, right? So. So I don’t think, again, that we can say definitively either way whether whether it’s possible that this is a forgery or whether it’s possible that it’s genuine. OK, so I think that’s most of what we’re going to cover about the blessing. I’ve tried to present the information and I’ll be interested to see, to see what everyone thinks. Is it a genuine Joseph Smith document, or is it a later creation? I think it’s up in the air to some extent. I know I have my thoughts that go back and forth for a variety of reasons. I’ll be interested to hear what you think. But I want to talk about something else, because while I was doing this investigation, another crazy possibility opened up that’s kind of blown my mind that I’ve tried to talk to a couple of people about and see what their thoughts are, but this is fascinating. How do we know that the Whitney letter that I covered in the last episode, right, the Comfort Me Now letter, how do we know that that actually was ever delivered to the Whitneys? I’ve had so many questions about it and all of a sudden this possibility that that letter was never delivered seems to Answer several of the mysteries about it or the concerns that I’ve had about it. So I want to just look into that to present that idea, even if it seems a little bit out there at first. I want people to think about it, and we can add this possibility to the conversation and the discussion about these documents. So let me first present some of the reasons that I think that this might be a possibility. So this is backtracking a little bit, but first, I want to remind people, um, One of the central points of the perspective that I have and other people who doubt Joseph’s polygamy have, is that we don’t view William Clayton as a credible source, right? We think that he was up to something in the journals that he was crafting. I’m not necessarily saying he was crafting them later, or not all of them later. I think he was working on the narrative in Navu and after Navu. So a couple of things that we know, this is a review for people who’ve been following along, but we know that William Clayton was trained up. By Brigham Young and Hebrew C. Kimball in England, who, according to various letters and journal entries, as well as their own later testimonies, they were both aware of and involved in some sort of spiritual wifery in England. That’s talking about Brigham Young and William Clayton. We’ve covered that in depth and other episodes. And according to Clayton’s England Journals, which we’ve also got in depth in in other episodes, he also was seemed to be deeply above. Involved in some sort of spiritual wifery shenanigans before he ever came to Navo. All of the information about him spending so much time at all hours of day and night with other women, other than his wife, being gifted oranges and raisins, expressing his love for these other women and his concern that one of them might marry someone else, all the while never even mentioning his own wife. So all of that is Interesting, and that was before he came to Navu. And then when he did come to Navu, he quite quickly became one of Joseph’s secretaries or scribes, at least for a time, until, according to James Whitehead’s testimony, he was demoted for dishonesty. So, um, Clayton had Only become Joseph’s secretary a few months before Joseph had gone into hiding. In the episode we covered on the letter when he kept his journal that we covered in part two, and we don’t know what that means. The Book of the Law of the Lord is a big old book. He wasn’t hefting it with him into hiding with Joseph, that that seems pretty certain. So I don’t know if maybe Erastus Derby was taking notes for Joseph Smith that then would be sent and that Clayton would copy into the book. I don’t know if there were other people involved. I don’t know if Clayton was with Joseph. We know he was at the meeting on the island, but we don’t necessarily know that he was with Joseph all the time. So there are a lot of questions that we don’t know the answers to. But what we do know is how William Clayton came to be the secretary. So I’m going to quote this article by James Allen that I’ll link below. It says, On February 2 on February 10, 1842, Here C. Kimball told Clayton to report to Joseph Smith’s office. Willard Richards was acting as reporter for the Navo Temple, but was overwhelmed and needed an assistant. Joseph Smith gave Clayton the assignment. On June 29th, all the work of the Prophet’s office, so that’s June, right? June 29th, the work of the Prophet’s office was turned over to Clayton as Richards had to travel east. So that’s interesting. Um. Here C. Kimball and Willard Richards, who in our model are two of the primary polygamy conspirators, were responsible for getting um Clayton into that position with Joseph Smith. We also know that reports were being spread by many different people, not just John Bennett and his conspirators, but others as well, claiming that Joseph was on board, claiming this was Joseph’s doctrine, that Joseph had had a revelation. We’ve talked about that in other episodes as well. And so It is totally, it’s, it seems very possible that people were trying to to gather or construct or create evidence to show people as to verify, look, Joseph’s involved in this. This is what Joseph wants. All the while Joseph is saying, no, this is not what I want. Hirum is saying, no, Joseph and Me Hiyrum are doing everything they can to fight against it, right? That’s the dynamic that we need to get to the bottom of. And so I think that this possibility that This letter was never delivered answers several problems that we are going to think about. First, we don’t know for sure who Joseph asked to deliver the letter, but the most likely candidates from the record that we have seem to be either William Clayton or Emma. Emma was there the night before Joseph wrote the letter, most likely stayed all night, so could have very easily been there while he was writing it. We know that she queried letters for Joseph, and then Clayton also could have been a possibility. Because we don’t know if he was there or not, but, um, he is the one that compiled the record. And this is interesting. William Clayton wrote the city and the date on the top of this letter. That has really bothered me. When did he do that? How does that make any sense? Here, Joseph Smith wrote a letter that was to be delivered that day in secret, and then burned for a visit that night. Why did the city and the date need to be written on it? And when would Clayton have done that? So that’s one of the reasons that it seems that maybe Clayton delivered it. But he first wrote the city and the date on it before delivering it. That makes no sense. And, and keep in mind, um, the fact that Clayton didn’t know about this marriage at this point, that, um, Joseph’s marriage to Sarah shows that there is no polygamy in this letter cause Clayton didn’t see any polygamy in it when he signed and dated it, if that’s the story. However, I’m wondering about, it makes way more sense for a letter like this to have the city and the date written on it, if it was to be filed than it does if it was to be delivered, right? That would not need to be written on it to be delivered. It would need to be written on it in order to be filed. And it does seem That there was this effort to convince people that Joseph was a polygamist, while I think there was possibly an ongoing effort to actually convince Joseph of polygamy. That might have been what was happening at this point. One small evidence of that, there are many others, but remember, I’ve talked about this in a previous episode. This was from Brigham Young’s England Mission Journal, and it’s on the written on the back page, upside down, says Question to ask Joseph, and it says, Was David a man after God’s own heart. So you’ll recall, I mean, it’s so interesting. Brigham Young and the others hadn’t seen Joseph’s translation of the Bible. They didn’t have access to it, where David, where Joseph heaped the condemnation onto David. So we know his perspective of David. And yet Brigham and others seem to be glorifying David, which shows up in many of these themes that we’re going to keep talking about. But it does seem to make sense how this letter could potentially be utilized and why it would need to be. Filed instead of delivered. That’s a possibility. Another question that it answers is why this letter wasn’t burned. That has really confused me as well. We know that the Whitneys were very loyal to Joseph Smith. They were devoted to him, and they would have been obedient to him. It’s hard to explain them disobeying this direct request from Joseph Smith. And, um, that was, that was requested in order to protect him, right? So why was the letter saved instead of burned? That’s easier to understand. If it was going to be filed and utilized, well, utilized right then, potentially showed to other people, or at least filed away. I also remembered that there started to be rumors, the story we’re told is that rumors started to spread about Sarah Anne, and that that was why they arranged the, um, the fake marriage to Kingsbury. All of that is just does not seem believable, but maybe this could explain how some of the rumors started to spread if this letter was being shown to anybody in this way. I, who knows. But it does explain why it wouldn’t have been burned. It also helps us understand why the Whitneys wouldn’t have come. We don’t know for sure. The record records so much from the 17th and it including that Emma came after dark and that they moved him, right? And then it includes on the 19th that he was visited by his aunt Temperance. It seems to be this complete record, but for some reason, it’s completely silent on the 18th, which is strange. That’s the night that the Whitneys would have come. And, and I want to, oh, there’s where it says, um, burn this letter. I guess I needed to show you that, but this is where Joseph is explaining the reason he wants them to come, or one of the reasons other than to keep him company, he says, one thing I want to see you for is to get the fullness of my blessings sealed upon our, our heads. So again, it’s hard to understand why the Whitneys wouldn’t have have gone in order to fulfill this request from Joseph Smith, and we just don’t have the information that he did. But I’m going to go on to show Something a little bit later in this episode, hopefully, that I think will answer, or at least shed a little bit of light onto whether these blessings were sealed on their heads, what they might have been, and whether that happened this night or potentially another time. And again, as I’ve already talked about, I wondered how in the world Joseph F. Smith acquired this blessing, how he knew about it and knew to ask for it, or why Sarah or Elizabeth would at this point think to bring it to him and know that he wanted it, right? Joseph F. Smith wasn’t advertising, as far as I Seen that he was collecting collecting his affidavits. I haven’t seen like a notice in the newspaper or in the conference report saying, I need evidence of Joseph’s polygamy, so I haven’t been able to figure out how, how this, they would have gotten this. But all of a sudden, if he got it either from the records that Clayton had compiled and he was going through things and he found it there, or if Clayton maybe brought it in at this point, I tend to think that Clayton would have, it would have been included with the records Clayton had already turned in. That makes so much more sense to me. People have to decide. But to me, that makes so much more sense of how he got it. And then he tried to create a paper trail explaining how he got it, right? Which is where we get this very confusing affidavit that’s in book two. So again, out of chronological order, where he copies the letter verbatim, and then, and then forges the signatures of, um, Elizabeth and Sarah and Whitney. They’re both clearly Joseph F. Smith’s own handwriting. So all of a sudden, that makes a lot more sense as well. I had also wondered how a document like this made it safely across the plains, right? I talked about how strange it was that Elizabeth or Sarah, whoever it was, was able to so carefully preserve this with all of their moves and the poverty they experienced and that. But that, that, that was confusing to me. However, we know that William Clayton was preserving documents and seeing that they were all packed up neatly for the 12 to bring across the plains to be opened. Up in the historian’s office there. So all of a sudden, that makes far more sense. I, I think it’s easier to explain it happening this way than the other way. So I think it’s something to, to include in our list of possibilities. If someone presents a reason, I, I have thought this through a couple of different times of talking to different people, and I don’t know if I’m remembering all of the arguments that I came up with, but so far, it seems, this seems like a more plausible. Um, possibility than the alternative that it actually was kept by Elizabeth against or Sarah against Joseph Smith’s wishes, carefully preserved and turned in just perfectly at this time, but with a forged affidavit, right? This seems to make much more sense to me. And when we combine all of this with the Joseph Smith paper’s interpretation of Clayton’s journal, which makes them say that he didn’t know Joseph was married to Sarah Anne Whitney. Just this whole thing gets messier and messier and more and more complex. I think that is huge. I personally, from from where I’m looking at, I, I am not seeing how we can continue to claim that Joseph was married to Sarah Anne Whitney. I shouldn’t say that. I don’t want to overstate it. I know that we The only um the only actual firsthand testimony that we have of Joseph, that Joseph was married to Sarah and Whitney is Elizabeth Whitney, right? We can decide whether her affidavit, her 69 affidavit is her signature or is a forgery, and then we have her later ghostwritten. Um, autobiography that was written by Emily, Emmeline B. Wells, but approved and um like the like it seems to me the process was Emmeline B. Wells would interview Elizabeth and Whitney, write the autobiography, and then um read it back to her for her approval. So that seems to be the process, the best that I have been able to figure it out from the doc from the sources in Emmaline Wells’ journal and so. The problem is, that’s the only, um, account we have. We don’t have anything from Sarah. We don’t have anything from Newell. We obviously don’t have anything from Joseph. We, we have William Clayton, who’s the primary source, not thinking that this was a marriage. Even when he saw the letter, even it’s, it’s, it’s October of 1845, William Clayton says in his journal something about The, the genuine like the marriage between, um, Kingsbury and Sarah Whitney that makes him think that it is, it is a genuine marriage. He doesn’t think it’s a pretend marriage. So that’s another huge piece to add to all of this. And so the fact that all we really have is that, um, autobiography is a big deal. But then when you consider that the autobiography Contradicts in the most core central ways all of the other evidence. The, um, earlier affidavit, the revelation, that messy revelation that we’ll talk about just a little bit more, the letter, all of the rest of it does not, none of it goes together, none of it works together. And so this is why I think, I, I think we are on very good footing to say that the pos that to, to say that the marriage of Sarah and Way. Me and Joseph Smith needs to be re-evaluated. We need to look at this and say, does it make more sense that there was a marriage here or that there wasn’t a marriage here from the documentation we have. Not just the later, um, trying to cobble a story together, which was started to happen in ’69. And, well, it didn’t start, it was happening earlier then. But that earlier than that. But that’s when it really started in earnest and then continued on. We can’t just look at that story. We need to look The earlier evidence and say what, and the later evidence and Elizabeth’s autobiography and see what makes the most sense. To me, this, it falls pretty clearly into my model that Joseph was not a polygamist, but there was an attempt to paint him as one early on in Navu by those who wanted to promote polygamy, and then also later on in Utah. I think the evidence fits that model the best. We could go ahead and end there, but there is one more piece that I really want to show you, and I don’t know when else I will cover it. So I’m just gonna go into it now really quickly, and this speaks again to the um The viability of the revelation, the Whitney revelation, which I think this is just another piece to call it into question to show how suspect it is, and also to show how confusing these documents are and what we can take from them. So I’m going to go back to the letter, right? And you’ll remember it says, one thing I want to see you for is to get the fullness of my blessings sealed upon our heads. That is very Interesting wording, and it’s hard to know what that would mean in the context of polygamy, right? If, if, if, um, Sarah were a wife and Joseph and Sarah had already been sealed by that revelation that we, that is purported to have been revealed by Joseph to, um, Newell, then those blessings would have already been sealed upon their heads, right? So what is this speaking to that’s to the entire family. And how can we understand it? Well, I think that to try to get maybe a little more insight to that, we need to go back to the revelation. So first, we’re going to go to this cover letter. This is a fascinating cover letter that Orson turned in with all of these documents that he turned in in 1912, and I think it gives us some information about it. So I’m going to go ahead and read that last paragraph on the last page. It says, I also sent you a copy of a document. In the handwriting, this is speaking about the revelation, right? So a copy of a document in the handwriting, as I supposed, suppose he thinks that the handwriting is his grandfather, Newell K. Whitney, but we know it’s not. The Joseph Smith Papers has apparently done that handwriting analysis and says it’s unidentified handwriting, right? So, Orson is mistakenly thinking it’s the handwriting of his grandfather, and which I myself have found among his paper. held by my father at the time of his death in 1844. So Orson’s father, I believe Horace, died in 1844, and among the papers he found this document that he thinks was maybe written by his grandfather, but we know it wasn’t. I have kept the original for the reason that it contains other matters not mentioned in the copy of Interest only to the Whitney family. OK, that’s important right there. So what Orson has As the original copy of this revelation, he says, contains other information that he didn’t include, and that explains why he only sent in a typewritten copy. OK, that’s important for us to understand as we’re trying to figure out what the original is that, um, Orson might have been using to make his copy from. I’m going to show you what I think it might be, and we, we covered it when we talked about this, um, in the episode on the revelation, this will just give a little more information into it. The greater part of the document um herewith enclosed is, as you will see a revelation from God. So the most of the document, the part that he’s enclosed, is the revelation from God embodying the ceremony which Newell K. Whitney was directed to pronounce in in sealing his daughter Sarah Anne to Joseph Smith. The revelation was, of course, through the prophet, and the date of it in all probability was that upon which the marriage Which took place, so we have this this document that seems to be undated, right? That that is most of it is a revelation, but that it contains more that um wasn’t revealed. So we have to wonder if there was some other copy that um Orson Orson had access to or if it was just these handwritten copies. So this is the typewritten copy that he included. And these are the two handwritten copies in unidentified handwriting that that were just found somewhere in the 1920s that are assumed to be from the 1870s, and we don’t know who the handwriting is. I think, I, I guess there is a possibility that maybe there was another version somewhere that, um, contained the revelation and then additional information on the end of it. And these were two copies made from that. We could, but We could wonder that, but then where would that original copy be? We know that Orson was taking very good care of these papers, right? And the Whitney documents are in the library at BYU, and I didn’t see any original version of this revelation. Also, the Joseph Smith editors would have found it if it were there. So these are the only originals that we have, and I, I think the strongest case can be made that these are what one of these at least. is what Orson was copying from, because remember, these are circa 1870s. He was copying it in 1912. He found this among his father’s papers. So if these had been copied and passed out to um relatives or family members, they would have been known about, right? So I think that there are a lot of reasons to think these are what he was working from, either one or both of these handwritten copies. There’s a docket written on this by some. On hand, saying that it’s a revelation on this date. So, um, so maybe since he didn’t know for sure the date of the revelation, we could assume that it’s handwriting that he was working from. I don’t know if people could do more investigation into that, but that is what I think is that he was using these to make his copy. So this is what I want to look at. At the end of both of these handwritten copies, it does go immediately, seamlessly into information about Blessings that it seems that that that it seems that maybe it’s taken from a journal from Newell K. Whitney. Again, we don’t have that journal. So right here where I have made this box, this is where the supposed revelation ends, and this journal recording, whatever it may be, seems to begin. And again, it’s seamless. There’s not, it even just continues on the same line. So we’ll just start reading at the very end of the blessing. It says, In the name of the Lord, all those Powers to concentrate in you and through you to your posterity forever. All these things I do in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that through this order, he may be glorified, and through the power of anointing of anointing, David may reign king over Israel. Again, that’s really strange because Joseph Smith never glorified David. It was quite the opposite. Yeah, 1:32, and the polygamist did glorify David, as I showed you from even that journal entry, it fits better into that. Category, but I’ll keep going. David may reign king over Israel, which shall hereafter be revealed. Let immortality and eternal life henceforth be sealed upon your heads forever and ever, with no break on the same line, you can see that the first word on that top line is ever. Then it goes immediately here. I’ll I’ll go forward so you can see it a little bit more close up. That that last ever is right there, that last word on the top, and it goes immediately to say part in the first resurrection together with other blessings now added. Sunday, 27th day of August 2, 1842, myself and wife, I now blessed with part of the first resurrection, also with many other blessings, together with the promise to all of my house, the same day, etc. of the same time, 27th August 1842, Saturday evening, myself and wife. So I just have to point out how strange this is. It starts like it’s a new sentence, but it’s not. It just, it, uh, I mean, it’s just this part in the first resurrection together with Other blessings now added, right? That’s the part that, um, Orson Pratt omitted. And it continues on to say that on the 27th of August, Saturday evening, myself and wife too were baptized for remission of sins. So that would have been a rebaptism Sunday. And for part of the day, we were all confirmed and blessed again in all good things and eternal life in first resurrection. I was blessed above others with long life, the keys of the priesthood, a double portion of the spirit, hence, Or conferred upon my fellows with all gifts possessed by my progenitors who held the priesthood before me anciently. OK. That is a lot, and I don’t know how to make complete sense of it, but I think it’s interesting that this is included here in the context of Joseph saying there are he wanted to get his blessings sealed upon their heads. And here we have, um, uh, what was that? That was on the 18th. This is the 27th. So 9 days later, we have this. Account, wherever it comes from, of all of these blessings being sealed by Joseph. I, I was assumed by Joseph on, um, Newell’s head, right? And so, and you can see the same thing in this other version. This is the second version of the handwritten, and here it at least starts on a new line, but it does the same thing and has the same wording. So I don’t know exactly what to do with this, but I think it’s really interesting. And I think it’s important for all of us to see this is the only record we have, at least the only one. That I’m aware of and the only one that that Joseph Smith papers references, so that seems the only one they’re aware of to make the case that Newell and Elizabeth were sealed with, I mean, we’re blessed with these things a few days later and, and that is utilized to play into the polygamy narrative. I don’t know exactly how to make sense of that, but I wanted to show you this so that you could see what the source is and how, how, again. Complicated these documents are, right? And the fact that Orson had either this document, I think this document, because I think someone would have to show another document. He said he had a document that he thought might be, he assumed was probably in his grandfather’s writing, and he copied most of it, but left off the rest because I only referred to his own family. And then we have these documents. So I think it would be incumbent on people who want to say there was some other original to Show us where it is or what happened to it, or at least I think it’s fair to hypothesize that this was most likely the original. It’s very strange, very complicated and convoluted, and I, so I, I again want to say if the Whitney documents are our best sources, they leave a lot in the air, a lot up in the air. And then again, I think that I don’t know, the best sense I can make of it is maybe this was taken from an actual. Account written somewhere, a journal or a just a document, uh, maybe, who knows? And then I do think that there is a lot of evidence to think that this revelation portion was created. And so maybe that that end portion was created on, was added on to it to try to validate it in some way. So I’ll just give a few additional reminders of, I mean, insights and reminders of why I think this revelation. is so suspect. I’ve already shared in that episode on the revelation, many of the reasons that I think this is so suspect. To just highlight a couple of them quickly. Remember, it says SA Whitney tells Newell to call his daughter SA Whitney, which is very strange. I, as I just mentioned, it glorifies David. It seems to have an awkward, um, attempt to try to fit in portions of, um, of the statement on marriage. That gave the actual instructions of how to marry, how to perform marriages in the church. For example, it says, you both mutually agree, calling them by name to be each other’s companions so long as you live, um, so long as you both shall live preserving yourselves for each other and from all others. So the statement on marriage gave us a very monogamous marriage ceremony that was awkwardly. Included in this revelation when how could Joseph preserve himself from all others? It told both of them to. That’s very strange. There are so many other parts of this. I will refer you again to the great video Rob Fotheringham did on this, um, where he called into question much more of this and gave his hypothesis of who he thinks is the best case for who may have written the original that this may have been copied from.
[1:51:19] Rob Fotheringham: Given the unusual spelling of the word priesthood as P R E A S T in both the purported Whitney revelation and Hebrew’s letters and multiple journal entries, I would not be surprised to find out eventually that the source for this claimed revelation was Hebrew C. Kimba.
[1:51:34] Michelle: And the last point I’ll make on this revelation is that We have very specific wording given to us for for ordinances, right? From, from the the the very first baptism to, um, the sacrament prayer that’s said to all of the temple ordinances, including ceilings. So it’s very strange that this would be a revelation from the Lord on how to perform a ceiling. If it were that, we should be paying more attention to it and incorporating the wording from it, right? Why wasn’t it ever used at any point in the church to, to perform. Feelings. It makes more sense that it was a revelation created later to try to shore up the case that Joseph Smith was a polygamist when the actual evidence would say that he’s not. That’s how it looks to me anyway. So I hope that this has been interesting to you. I know that this has been a little bit all over the place. That’s what I’m feeling right now. I’m actually, when I’m recording this, I’m about to head out to, um, the JWHA conference that I was supposed to be presenting at. So I’m hoping that will go well. We have some, we’re going to have some very Exciting announcements in the not too distant future. So stay tuned for those. I will let you know soon how things go at JWHA. I, I’ll, it’ll be the last day when this is released, so hopefully it all goes well. But anyway, thank you for sticking around. I hope that this has been informative to you. I’m really interested in hearing your thoughts and insights on all of the things that we’ve covered. As I said, more questions than answers in this one, but I guess that’s gonna be the nature of this investigation. Thanks for joining me. I will see you next time.
