Joseph Smith and Polygamy: How It Began, How It Worked, and What the Record Shows

The Practice, Year by Year

Thirteen dated entries carry the arc from Joseph Smith’s first marriage to the Manifesto that ended the practice forty-six years after his death.

How It Began: An Angel, a Servant Girl, and Thirteen Silent Years

The practice’s origin story, as the participants told it: while revising the Bible in 1831, Smith prayed about the plural marriages of Abraham and Jacob and received the principle — then sat on it. Multiple associates later recounted that an angel appeared to him three times between 1834 and 1842 commanding the practice — in the final visit, they said, with a drawn sword.

Sometime around 1835–36 in Kirtland he was sealed to Fanny Alger, a young woman working in his household — a union Oliver Cowdery angrily called “a dirty, nasty, filthy affair” and the essay calls a marriage; the Fanny Alger article walks the sources. Then — nothing, publicly, for years.

The Nauvoo phase began April 5, 1841, with the sealing to Louisa Beaman, and expanded through 1843: the Twelve introduced one by one, resistance (Brigham Young: “the first time I heard of it, I desired the grave”), and secrecy enforced by the very real threat of mob violence and law.

How Many Wives — and How Old Were They?

The count depends on which sealings you accept as documented: careful estimates run 30 to 40, with Brian Hales documenting 35 and Todd Compton counting 33. The ages are the hardest fact in the record and belong in the first screen, not a footnote: the youngest was Helen Mar Kimball, sealed several months before her fifteenth birthday, and the oldest was Rhoda Richards, fifty-eight. The church’s essay names Fanny Young, fifty-six, as the oldest; the documentary lists behind our own wives chart put Rhoda Richards above her.

The distribution is the honest artifact, and it cuts both ways: the teenage bracket is the largest single band, and a third of the wives were thirty-one or older.

Two more facts complete the honest picture. No children by any plural wife have ever been confirmed — DNA testing led by geneticist Ugo Perego has excluded every tested claimant, including the most frequently cited case, Josephine Lyon. And several wives, including Helen, said explicitly that their sealings were about eternity, not cohabitation, while testimony from the Temple Lot case confirms other marriages included “the full rights of matrimony.”

The count question has its own article — How many wives did Joseph Smith have? — and every wife has a documented life. Start with our Record Series profile of Helen Mar Kimball and the full Joseph Smith’s wives hub. This page is the practice; that one is the people.

Was It Illegal? The 1840s Law Question

The reflex answer — obviously, bigamy — turns out to be a live scholarly dispute. The common assumption, which Hales himself repeats, is that Nauvoo plural marriage violated Illinois bigamy and adultery statutes. But legal historian M. Scott Bradshaw has argued the statutes were narrower than the assumption: Illinois’s 1833 criminal code defined the offenses in ways — requiring, for instance, an open state of cohabitation for adultery — that secret ceremonial sealings may not have met, making Joseph’s legal position more substantial than has been previously recognized.

This is a historical argument about 1840s statutes, not a moral one — and prosecutors never tested it: Smith was killed while under indictment stemming from the Expositor affair, not convicted of bigamy. The point for readers: even the story’s simplest-sounding claim — “it was illegal” — has a literature.

Why? The Reasons Given — and the Ones Scholars Add

The theological case, as taught then and summarized by the essay now: the restoration of “all things” included the marriage order of Abraham; the Book of Mormon’s lone allowance — that God may command it to raise up seed (Jacob 2:30), in a chapter that otherwise condemns plural marriage outright — and sealing as the binding of an eternal family web. Scholars add the context: a restorationist age experimenting with marriage (Shakers, Oneida), and a theology in which kinship, not romance, organized heaven. The revelation on plural marriage and polygamy in the scriptures hold the doctrinal depth.

What the theology never was: a response to surplus women (there wasn’t one) or, in Nauvoo, a public doctrine — it was taught to a circle, denied to the world, and that gap is what killed him. The Expositor’s exposure of plural marriage in June 1844 set off the chain that ended at Carthage.

Brian Hales’s three-volume study — the most exhaustive treatment in print, nearly 1,500 pages built with researcher Don Bradley — reconstructs three rationales from the surviving record: first, the “restitution of all things,” which in Smith’s theology necessarily included the marriage order of Abraham; second — cited to later reminiscences by Charles Lambert and Helen Mar Kimball — the need for devout families to receive “noble” premortal spirits; third, a solution to eternal singleness: in Doctrine and Covenants 132’s logic exaltation requires marriage, and plural marriage, in Hales’s summary, “allows for the exaltation of an excess of worthy women... should there be any.” Hales himself calls plural marriage “a necessary, but relatively minor, doctrinal precept” within Smith’s larger theology.

Just as important is what the record rules out. The folk explanation — that pioneer women outnumbered men and polygamy absorbed the surplus — fails on the census: there was no female surplus in Nauvoo or early Utah, and Hales discounts the rationale explicitly. And the reductive explanation — libido dressed as revelation, the reading made famous by Fawn Brodie’s 1945 biography — is precisely what the last generation of scholarship has re-litigated: Hales argues Brodie’s “cool assurance” outran her documentation, and even Compton, no apologist, faulted her reliance on antagonistic sources since proven unreliable. The honest position is narrower than either camp’s slogan: the theology is documented, the private motives are not, and the man himself left almost nothing.

William Clayton — Smith’s scribe, present at the dictation of Doctrine and Covenants 132 on July 12, 1843 — recorded in 1874 that Joseph reviewed the transcript, “pronounced it correct,” and remarked on how much more there was to say.

Whatever more there was, he never wrote it. Every history of this subject — including this one — is built around that silence.

How This History Got Written

Because the practice was secret and Joseph left no personal account, nearly the entire documentary base was assembled after the fact — and knowing the main collections is the fastest way to evaluate any claim on this page.

On that base sits a small shelf of books that define the modern argument. Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) made the libido reading canonical outside the church; Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness (1997) built the first rigorous wife-by-wife account; Brian Hales’s three volumes (2013, with Don Bradley) aimed to gather the great majority of available evidence and argue the faithful case at full scholarly length; and in 2014 the church’s own Gospel Topics essays conceded the practice’s outline in official print for the first time. The arguments among them are real — Hales and D. Michael Quinn conducted a years-long documented duel over the polyandrous sealings — but the sources they argue from are the same stacks. Everything on this page traces to them.

Frequently Asked Questions