Mormonism Explained
Emma Smith: Polygamy, the Church, and What She Knew
She was the first convert Joseph ever taught and the last question his critics ever ask honestly. What Emma knew, when she knew it, what she facilitated and what she fought, why she stayed in Nauvoo, whether she was ever excommunicated (she wasn't), and what to make of the denials she carried to her grave — the whole record, stated with the care her life has almost never received from either side.
The Short Answer
What did Emma Smith know about polygamy — and what happened to her?
Emma Hale Smith was Joseph's first and only civil wife, the “elect lady” of a canonized revelation, the founding president of the Relief Society — and the woman on whom plural marriage fell hardest. The honest arc: through 1842 she was shielded from most of the practice — Hales's research reads the era's pattern of eternity-only sealings partly as Joseph's attempt to obey a commandment while sparing her. In May 1843 she came, briefly, to give it her hand: she facilitated four sealings herself, selecting the Partridge and Lawrence sisters. Weeks later she turned against it; the revelation now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 132 was dictated that July at Hyrum's urging, in part to persuade her; it did not, and she burned the original with Joseph's permission — after a copy had been made. She never left him. After Carthage she stayed in Nauvoo when the Saints went west, raised her children, married Lewis Bidamon, and gave her sons to the church they founded — and she was never excommunicated, by anyone, ever; the question is asked constantly and the answer is simply no. The hardest fact comes last: in her final 1879 interview she denied Joseph had practiced plural marriage at all — a denial the sworn record contradicts and historians read variously as protective, carefully worded against “spiritual wifery,” or the settled refusal of a woman entitled to her silence. This page states all of it — because a story that sanitizes Emma's anguish and a story that weaponizes it are both stories about someone else.
Key Takeaways
- Never excommunicated. Emma remained a baptized member her whole life; she declined to go west, later affiliated with the church her son led, and no council ever acted against her. The internet's most-asked Emma question has a one-word answer: no.
- What she knew came in phases: largely shielded through 1842 (per Hales's research); four sealings facilitated by her own hand in May 1843; opposition within weeks; the burned revelation that July.
- D&C 132 was addressed to her situation — dictated at Hyrum's request in the hope of persuading her, including verses directed to her by name. She was not persuaded. Our companion study treats the revelation itself.
- She stayed. Through Missouri, through Nauvoo, through everything — Emma never left Joseph, and her leaving of Utah was a leaving of Brigham's trail west, not of her husband's memory or her own faith in the Book of Mormon, which she affirmed in the same final interview.
- The 1879 denials are real and hard. Her “Last Testimony” denied the plural marriages the sworn record establishes. Historians divide over protective motive, careful wording against Bennett-style “spiritual wifery,” and simple refusal — this page states the readings rather than choosing for her.
- Both camps have used her badly. A century of faithful telling wrote her out for staying behind; the critics' telling keeps only her pain. The record holds a whole person.
Before the Trial
The Elect Lady — the Emma the Arguments Forget
Emma Hale married Joseph Smith on January 18, 1827, over her father's objection, and was beside him for everything that followed: she was riding in the wagon the night he brought home the plates; she served as one of his first scribes for the Book of Mormon translation, writing from his dictation hour after hour; and in July 1830 she became the subject of a revelation now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 25, which addressed her as “an elect lady, whom I have called,” commissioned her to make a selection of sacred hymns, and gave the Church its first published hymnbook in 1835 under her name. In March 1842 she was called as the founding president of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo — the beginning of what is today one of the largest women's organizations in the world — and its minutes preserve her voice as a leader in her own right. Any account of Emma that begins in 1842 with polygamy has skipped fifteen years in which she was not a bystander to the Restoration but one of its principal laborers — and has skipped the griefs that shaped her: she buried her firstborn son within hours of his birth, lost adopted twins and other children in infancy, was driven from three states, and spent the winter of 1838–39 crossing the frozen Mississippi with four children and her husband's manuscript translation of the Bible sewn into her skirts. That is the woman the plural-marriage crisis found. The crisis is real and this page will not soften it; but the person it happened to was already, by 1842, one of the most tested and trusted figures in the movement — which is exactly why what came next cut as deep as it did.
The Phases of Knowledge
What She Knew, and When
The record supports a phased answer, not a flat one. Through 1842, Emma was shielded from most of the practice. Hales's research — the fullest documentary reconstruction — finds her unaware of the plural sealings of that period, and reads the era's striking pattern (nearly every proposal in one stretch going to already-married women, in what the documents support as nonsexual, eternity-only sealings) partly as Joseph's attempt to obey a commandment he had resisted for years while sparing the wife it would wound most. That reading is an inference, marked as such — but the underlying facts are not: the secrecy toward Emma in this period is acknowledged on every side, including by the Church's own essay, and it belongs in the ledger as a real cost, borne by her without her consent. In 1843 the shielding ended — first by Joseph's choice and briefly with Emma's participation, which is the part of the story the meme version cannot use and therefore never tells.
The Hardest Spring
May 1843: The Sealings She Facilitated — and the Revelation She Burned
In May 1843, Emma gave plural marriage her hand — deliberately, conditionally, and on her own terms. The sources record that she consented on the condition that she choose the wives, and she selected four young women she knew intimately: Emily and Eliza Partridge, and Sarah and Maria Lawrence, wards then living in the Smith household. She participated in the sealings — standing witness as the ceremonies were performed — unaware that the Partridge sisters had already been sealed to Joseph that March, a duplication kept from her that the honest ledger must mark as a second deception even inside her moment of consent. Her participation did not last the season. Within weeks she had turned — the sources describe anguish, reversals, and confrontation — and on July 12, 1843, at Hyrum Smith's urging and in the explicit hope that a written revelation would persuade her, Joseph dictated to William Clayton the text now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 132, including verses addressed to Emma by name. Hyrum carried it to her; she was not persuaded; and some days later she destroyed the original — with Joseph's permission, and after a copy had been made, which is why the text survives. Every clause of that sentence matters: the burning was not defiance hidden from her husband but grief enacted with his consent, and the revelation she burned is the one her son's church would spend decades denying and the Utah church would canonize. Our companion study takes the revelation itself — its teaching, its hard verses, and what ended in 1890 — at full length; this page follows Emma.
The Question the Internet Asks Most
After Carthage: Nauvoo, Bidamon, and the Excommunication That Never Happened
When Joseph was murdered at Carthage on June 27, 1844, Emma was thirty-nine, pregnant with their last child, and at the center of a succession crisis she would not resolve in Brigham Young's favor. Their relationship had frayed — over property, over authority, and over plural marriage, which Young intended to continue — and when the main body of Saints left for the Great Basin in 1846, Emma stayed in Nauvoo. This is the decision a century of faithful narrative punished her for, writing her nearly out of the story; and it is the decision critics recast as proof the whole thing was rotten. Both misread it. Emma stayed because Nauvoo held her husband's grave, her children's home, and property she believed hers to defend; she did not renounce the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, or Joseph's prophetic calling — she affirmed all three to the end of her life. In 1847 she married Lewis Bidamon, a non-member, who helped raise her children and with whom she kept the Nauvoo Mansion House. And when her son Joseph Smith III organized the Reorganized Church in 1860, she affiliated with it — the church her children led, which then denied that their father had practiced plural marriage at all.
Which brings us to the single most-searched Emma question, and its flat answer: Emma Smith was never excommunicated — not by the Church in Utah, not by anyone, at any time. The premise of the question is false. She was never subjected to a disciplinary council; she remained a baptized Latter-day Saint by her own understanding until her death in 1879; her separation from the Utah church was geographic and institutional, a parting of trails in 1846, not a court action or a loss of standing. The confusion likely springs from her estrangement from Brigham Young and her later RLDS affiliation, which readers project backward into a formal expulsion that the record simply does not contain. If anything, the direction of feeling ran the other way: Brigham Young spoke of Emma with a mix of grievance and residual regard for decades, and the Utah church's modern treatment — including a 1984 First Presidency-era reconciliation of tone and the warm portrait in the Saints narrative history — reflects an institution that never held her excommunicated because it never was.
The Fact That Stings Most
The Last Testimony Problem
In February 1879, months before her death, Emma gave a final interview to her son Joseph Smith III, published as the “Last Testimony of Sister Emma.” In it she affirmed the Book of Mormon's divine origin and described watching Joseph translate — and she denied that he had ever practiced plural marriage, stating that there were no such marriages and no revelation on the subject. This is the hardest fact in Emma's record, and the honest reader must hold two things at once: the sworn 1892 Temple Lot testimony of the very women Emma herself had selected in 1843 — Emily Partridge and Lucy Walker among them, under oath and hostile cross-examination — establishes that the plural marriages were real and that Emma knew; and Emma's 1879 denial, made to her RLDS son at the end of a long life, states the opposite. The denial is contradicted by the record. What it means is where honest historians divide, and this page lays out the readings rather than pretending one is obvious.
Three readings hold weight. The protective reading: Emma was shielding Joseph's memory and her sons' church, both of which had staked their legitimacy on his monogamy; a widow protecting her murdered husband's name is not a mystery requiring a sinister explanation. The carefully-worded reading: the interview's language may distinguish, as Nauvoo's own denials did, between the “spiritual wifery” of John C. Bennett's corrupt system — which Joseph genuinely never authorized — and the sealings; a denial of the former can be literally maintained while the latter goes unspoken. The settled-refusal reading: Emma had lived the practice's entire cost, opposed it in life, and may simply have declined, at the end, to grant it the reality her assent would have conferred — a refusal she was entitled to. These readings are not mutually exclusive, and none of them requires calling Emma a liar or Joseph innocent of what the sworn record shows. What the denial cannot bear is the weight critics put on it — that Emma's word in 1879 disproves the marriages — because the same standard would discard the sworn testimony of the women who lived them. A record is not a menu; you do not get to keep Emma's denial and the wives' pain while discarding the wives' testimony that sits between them.
Steelmanning the Critics
The Strongest Objection
The strongest form of the Emma argument needs no exaggeration: here is the person who knew Joseph Smith best, longest, and most intimately — and her life reads as a bill of particulars. She was deceived for years about sealings happening in her own city; deceived again in the duplication of the Partridge sealings inside her own moment of consent; presented with a revelation, from her husband, that commanded her acceptance under warning; and left so wounded by the whole practice that she spent her widowhood denying it existed and gave her sons to a church built on that denial. If plural marriage were of God, the critic asks, why did it require deceiving the elect lady, coercing her by revelation, and leaving its founding woman unable to affirm it on her deathbed? Emma's suffering, on this reading, is not a side effect of the practice — it is the practice's own verdict, delivered by its best-positioned witness.
The answer does not minimize the suffering — this page has refused to — but it corrects the frame. First, deception and coercion are the critic's words for facts that also fit a harder-to-caricature reality: a man who resisted a commandment for years, who structured its earliest form to spare his wife, who sought her consent, who dictated the revelation at his brother's urging in hope of persuasion rather than issuing it as a threat, and who let her burn it — this is not the profile of a predator managing a victim, and the same sources critics cite for Emma's pain record Joseph's own anguish over causing it. Second, the elect lady's suffering does not adjudicate the theology — it establishes the practice's cost, which was real and which no faithful account should hide, but a true commandment can still exact a terrible price from those who live it, as scripture from Abraham forward insists; the pain proves the cost, not the fraud. Third, and decisively, the critic's case requires Emma to be an infallible witness in 1879 and a deceived one for the preceding decades — reliable exactly when she serves the indictment and manipulated exactly when she doesn't. The whole Emma, taken at full stature, is a harder and more human figure than either camp's cutout: a woman of faith and fury who never left her husband, never left the Restoration, was never excommunicated, and never surrendered her right to tell the story on her own terms. That is not the verdict against Joseph Smith. It is the cost of what he taught, carried by the person best equipped to make us feel it.
The Honest Answer
So — Who Was Emma?
The elect lady who laid the Restoration's foundations, was shielded and then wounded by its hardest practice, gave it her hand and then her opposition, buried her prophet, stayed, and told the story her own way to the end — never abandoned, never excommunicated, never simple. The one-sentence version: a story that sanitizes Emma's anguish and a story that weaponizes it are both stories about someone else — the real Emma is harder than either, and she is the one worth knowing.
Our Editorial Standard, Shown
The Nine-Principle Review: How This Article Was Stress-Tested
On a biography this contested, the fifth and eighth principles carry the load: a sober tone toward a real person's grief, and accuracy that owns the hardest facts — the deceptions and the deathbed denial alike.
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At a Glance
Quick Answers
Was Emma Smith ever excommunicated?
No — never, by anyone, at any time. She remained a baptized member her whole life; her parting from the Utah church was geographic, not a court action.
NEVER
Church record
Did Emma know about the polygamy?
In phases: largely shielded through 1842; she facilitated four sealings herself in May 1843; then opposed the practice for the rest of Joseph's life.
Yes — and she fought it
Did Emma leave Joseph?
Never. She stayed with him through everything and after Carthage stayed in Nauvoo. She left Brigham Young's trail west — not Joseph, and not her faith.
No
Did she really burn D&C 132?
Yes — the original, with Joseph's permission, after a copy had been made (which is why it survives). It had been dictated partly to persuade her.
Yes — a copy survived
Why did she deny the polygamy in 1879?
Her “Last Testimony” denied it; the sworn record contradicts it. Historians read it as protective, carefully worded against “spiritual wifery,” or a settled refusal — not proof it didn't happen.
Contradicted — read three ways
Did Emma stay faithful to the Book of Mormon?
To the end. In the same 1879 interview she affirmed its divine origin and described watching Joseph translate.
Yes, lifelong
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Emma Smith excommunicated from the LDS Church?
No. This is the most common Emma question and its answer is simply no — she was never excommunicated by the Church in Utah or by anyone else, and was never subject to a disciplinary council. She remained a baptized Latter-day Saint her whole life; after 1846 she declined to follow Brigham Young west and later affiliated with the Reorganized Church her son led, but that was a personal and institutional parting, not an excommunication.
Did Emma Smith approve of plural marriage?
Briefly and conditionally. In May 1843 she agreed on the condition that she select the wives, and facilitated four sealings — the Partridge and Lawrence sisters. Within weeks she reversed and opposed the practice for the remainder of Joseph's life. She had also been kept unaware that two of those four had already been sealed to Joseph in March — a deception the honest record marks even inside her consent.
Why did Emma leave the Church and go with the RLDS?
She didn't “leave” in the sense of renouncing her faith — she affirmed the Book of Mormon and Joseph's calling to the end. She declined to follow Brigham Young to Utah, stayed in Nauvoo, and when her son organized the Reorganized Church in 1860 she affiliated with it. Her estrangement was from Brigham Young and the practice of polygamy he continued, not from the Restoration.
What is the “Last Testimony of Sister Emma”?
Her final interview, given to her son in February 1879 shortly before her death. She affirmed the Book of Mormon and denied that Joseph practiced plural marriage. The sworn 1892 testimony of women Emma herself had selected contradicts the denial; our article lays out the three main ways historians read it rather than choosing one for her.
From the DMs: The Harder Questions, Answered
“He gave his own wife a revelation threatening her if she didn't accept it. That's coercion, full stop.”
Verdict: Read the whole text and the whole situation — it was dictated to persuade her, at Hyrum's urging, and she was free enough to burn it.
Doctrine and Covenants 132 does contain hard language, and this page does not pretend otherwise — our companion study on the revelation takes those verses head-on. But the context the coercion-reading omits is decisive: the revelation was dictated at Hyrum's request specifically because he believed a written text might persuade Emma where conversation had failed; it was brought to her, not imposed on her; and her response was to destroy it with Joseph's permission and suffer no penalty of any kind. A woman being coerced by divine threat does not get to burn the threat and keep her marriage, her standing, and her leadership. The text is hard. The relationship it sits inside was not the one the word “coercion” conjures.
“Emma spent her whole widowhood saying it never happened. Who would know better than his wife?”
Verdict: The women Emma personally selected testified under oath that it did — you cannot keep Emma's denial and discard their sworn word.
Emma is indeed a first-rate witness — which is exactly why her 1843 actions matter as much as her 1879 words. The woman who selected the Partridge and Lawrence sisters as plural wives, and stood witness at their sealings, is the same woman later quoted denying the practice existed. Both cannot be simply true, and the sworn, cross-examined 1892 testimony of those very women resolves which is the historical fact. That leaves the denial to be understood, not weaponized — protective, carefully worded, or a final refusal — and our §05 gives it that respect. What no honest method allows is crediting Emma's word only when it serves the prosecution.
“You keep saying 'never excommunicated' like it matters. She still ended up in a different church.”
Verdict: It matters because the internet keeps asserting the opposite — and because the truth is more interesting than the myth.
The excommunication claim is stated as fact across countless forum posts and videos, and it is simply false; correcting it is basic accuracy. But it matters for a deeper reason: the myth of an expelled Emma flattens her into a casualty the institution discarded, when the record shows a woman who made her own choices and kept her own faith. She affiliated with her son's church because it was her son's church and because it denied the practice she had come to oppose — an act of agency, not a sentence handed down. The Restoration Emma believed in was never taken from her. She declined a trail west and kept a testimony east, and no council ever said otherwise.