Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Nauvoo Polygamy/Chapter 4

Chapter 3 (pp. 159-240)

A FAIR Analysis of: Criticism of Mormonism/Books A work by author: George D. Smith

Chapter 5 (pp. 325-351)

Claims made in "Chapter 4" (pp. 241-324)

Claim

• William Clayton and plural marriage

Response

• See below

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The book speculates that John Bennett's marriage record "may have been deleted" after his disagreement with Joseph Smith.

Response

• No source provided.

John C. Bennett (edit)

Claim

• The book speculates that Joseph and Clayton were "conspiring to alter" his wife's "marital status."

Response

• No source provided.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• Joseph instructed Clayton to send for Sarah Crookes, a close female friend he had known in England, to which Clayton replied that “nothing further than an attachment such as a brother and sister in the Church might rightfully entertain for each other” occurred between them. “But in fact,” G. D. Smith editorializes darkly, “Clayton’s journal recorded the depth of emotional intimacy he had shared with her."

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 32, 41, 52, 29, 556.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote: "…instead of waiting for [Sarah’s] arrival, [Clayton] married his legal wife’s sister Margaret on April 27. This was before Sarah’s ship had even set sail from England."

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 94, 99, 107, 556.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author states:

…Clayton wrote on October 19 about needing to protect "the truth" by telling untruths, in this case the strategic charade of publicly rebuking someone while privately embracing them. Clayton wrote about Smith's advice: "Says he[,] just keep her [Margaret, his plural wife] at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging and probably cut you off from the church and then I will baptise you and set you ahead as good as ever." [Italics and quotation marks as in The author's original.]

Response

•  Citation error
• The author's source is given as "Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 122 (emphasis added)." No italics have been added by the author to any portion of Clayton's journal. All italicized material is G.D. Smith's words, not Clayton's.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author states that William Clayton's journal " disclosed his own extracurricular romances."

Response

• No source provided.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

• The author then describes Clayton’s 1853 mission to England, during which, “instead of persuading the flock of the correctness of [polygamy], Clayton contributed to defections and was personally suspected of ‘having had unlawful intercourse with women.’”

Response

• Smith, Intimate Chronicle, xlviii-l.

William Clayton (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote: "The prophet went on to ask Benjamin [F. Johnson] for his sister Almera [in plural marriage], provoking his protégé to comment that if Smith did anything to 'dishonor or debauch his sister, he would have Benjamin to contend with. As Smith casually deflected this threat, his 'eye did not move from mine,' Johnson reported."

Response

• Johnson to Gibbs, Apr.-Oct. 1903, 28–29.

Claim

• Benjamin Johnson is said to have been "[i]mpressed by the prophet's inner calm but not fully convinced."

Response

• Johnson to Gibbs, Apr.-Oct. 1903, 28–29.

Claim

• The author claims that Joseph "was able to wrap himself in the authority of the Bible…."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author speculates: "In a theological explication, perhaps partly inspired by convenience, Smith saw the church hierarchy as an extended family that would continue to live together in an afterlife community."

Response

• Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, 212; Extensions of Power, 163–97; Herbert R. Larsen, "Familism in Mormon Social Structure," Ph.D. diss., U of Utah, 1954.

Joseph Smith: cynical motivations (edit)

Claim

• Benjamin F. Johnson is claimed to be "representative of the mainstream in LDS practice" because he married seven wives…
• The publisher's response to this original claim generated a new claim: That Joseph "justified taking a monagamist's wife and giving it to a man who already had ten."

Response

• No source provided.

Statistical problems (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote: "We do not know how long Joseph Smith had been contemplating polygamy, but the earliest conversations in which he explicitly addressed the topic were in late 1840 and early 1841."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author quotes Ann Eliza Young regarding events that happened in 1842: "She wrote that some of the events she related depended upon the 'experience of those so closely connected with me that they have fallen directly under my observation.'"

Response

•  History unclear or in error
• Wife No. 19, 74.

Claim

• John C. Bennett is claimed to have "publicized Young's clumsy attempt to entice [Martha] Brotherton" into plural marriage.

Response
John C. Bennett (edit)

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have had an "overall materialistic theology."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have ridiculed geologists who "tell us that this earth has been in existence for thousands and millions of years."

Response

•  Citation error
•  History unclear or in error
• Journal of Discourses 12:271 [Smith provides the wrong citation: should be 14:115.]

Claim

•  Author's quote: "In part, Smith's organizational labyrinth helped keep the church together…."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• Brigham Young is claimed to have "worked out a scheme" in which church members were organized into companies of 'tens' and 'fifties'….[footnote] The author then notes that "[t]he first LDS divisions of this kind were in Missouri, where Samson Avard….told men it would soon be their privilege to "….take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly gentiles."

Response

• Andrew Jenson, "Caldwell County, Missouri," Historical Record 8 [Jan 1889]: 701.

Claim

•  Author's quote: "a history of the Mormons in the West would be … a history of a mad prophet's visions turned by an American genius into the seed of life."

Response

• Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 92-101, 469.

Claim

•  Author's quote: "When the opposition newspaper appeared and devoted space to polygamy, Smith and the ruling councils had it destroyed."

Response

• No source provided.

Nauvoo Expositor (edit)

Claim

•  Author's quote: "…since institutional histories have minimized the incidence and profile of polygamy (see chapter 1), it is easy to imagine that most men who entered polygamy did so in a cursory way." "In reality, the typical Utah polygamist whose roots in the principle extended back to Nauvoo had between three and four wives, with a higher incidence of large families."

Response

• No source provided.

Statistical problems (edit)

Claim

• The author states that as Nauvoo was gradually depopulated, it became increasingly lawless.

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• It is noted that "Mormons brought about 100 black slaves with them to Deseret, representing two percent of the total population, from 1847 to 1850" and that "[s]lavery and polygamy formed a witch's brew that isolated Deseret from the rest of the U.S. through its territorial period to he 1890s."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

•  Author's quote: "No doubt, [Heber C. Kimball's] hesitation [in further plural marriages] had been similar to Young's, due to the weight of responsibilities involved in running church operations and because of the adverse publicity from Bennett's disclosures."

Response

• No source provided.

Claim

• The author speculates that there would have been six plural husbands in Nauvoo by 1842 if John Bennett "had not been expelled…."

Author's source(s)

• No source provided.

John C. Bennett (edit)

Response

• The author again presumes (with no evidence, and against a great deal of evidence) that Bennett's adulteries were ever sanctioned.
• John C. Bennett

== Notes ==

1. [note]  Smith, Intimate Chronicle, xlix, 488–489, 490 n. 444.
2. [note]  Steven Epperson, ""The Grand, Fundamental Principle": Joseph Smith and the Virtue of Friendship," Journal of Mormon History 23/2 (Fall 1997): 81-101. See also DC 84꞉63,77-78, DC 88꞉3-4,62,113,117, DC 93꞉51, DC 94꞉1, DC 97꞉1, DC 100꞉1, DC 103꞉1, DC 104꞉1, DC 105꞉26, DC 109꞉6, DC 121꞉9-10, DC 125꞉25, JS-H 1꞉28.
3. [note]  See, for example, Augusta Joyce Crocheron (author and complier), Representative Women of Deseret, a book of biographical sketches to accompany the picture bearing the same title (Salt Lake City: J. C. Graham & Co., 1884). See also Stanley B. Kimball, "Heber C. Kimball and Family, the Nauvoo Years," Brigham Young University Studies 15/4 (Summer 1975): 466; citing Heber C. Kimball to Vilate Kimball, 12 February 1849. Original letter formerly in the possession of President Spencer W. Kimball, and now in the Church Historical Department; and Vilate Kimball to Heber C. Kimball, 16 October 1842 as quoted in Helen Mar Whitney, "Scenes and Incidents," 11 (1 June 1882):1-2.

Further reading

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