Polygamy & Polyandry

Joseph Smith’s Denials — What the Record Actually Shows

The CES Letter frames Joseph Smith’s public denials of plural marriage as ten years of brazen lying. But the exact words he used, the exact legal jeopardy he faced, and the exact people he was shielding tell a story the Letter never lets its reader see.

The Claim: A Decade of Deception

Quoted in the CES Letter

“What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one.” — Joseph Smith, May 26, 1844, weeks before his death, while he had already entered plural sealings with many women.

Read flatly, that sounds like a man caught and lying. But a denial is only as meaningful as the accusation it answers, the danger under which it is spoken, and the words actually chosen. On all three counts the CES Letter strips the context away and hands the reader the harshest possible reading — then treats that reading as the only one.

1. The accusation was not the covenant. In 1842–44 the public charge against Joseph was not “you practice a solemn, priesthood-sealed marriage order.” It was John C. Bennett’s charge of “spiritual wifery” — a seduction racket of secret mistresses and adultery dressed in religious language. Bennett himself had been excommunicated for such conduct. Joseph’s public denials targeted that charge — the harem-and-concubine image the word “polygamy” conjured for 19th-century hearers, sharpened by the licentious “Turkish” stereotype of the age. The clearest articulation of the distinction came later, from his nephew Joseph F. Smith (son of Hyrum Smith), who defended the early denials as rejecting polygamy “in the ordinary and Asiatic sense of the term.” That was the “plurality of wives” the public pictured, and rejecting it was not the same act as denying the sealed, covenantal order the Restoration actually taught — an order different in authority, consent, and intent. (That said, not every denial was this surgical; the marquee “I can only find one” was a denial of number, and that is confronted squarely below.) The CES Letter never names this distinction, because naming it collapses the “brazen lie” reading.

2. The jeopardy was mortal, not merely reputational. Bigamy was a crime in Illinois — not a capital one, and the plural sealings were not registered civil marriages that prosecutors could easily reach as such, so the immediate danger was less the courtroom than something graver. Missouri’s 1838 extermination order against the Saints was still legally on the books; Joseph had already been jailed in Liberty and had watched the Saints driven from an entire state by sanctioned mob violence. A public admission would not merely have embarrassed him; it would have handed his enemies — who were already agitating for his arrest and extradition — the exact pretext they were openly seeking, at a moment when the real threat was the mob rather than the magistrate. Concealment under that kind of pressure is a category the CES Letter refuses to weigh — it judges wartime prudence by peacetime rules.

3. The 1835 marriage article was public posture, not a personal oath broken. The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants “Article on Marriage” — “one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband” — was presented to a conference in Joseph’s absence and is generally credited to Oliver Cowdery. It described the Church’s ordinary, published practice for its overwhelmingly monogamous membership. It was never a covenant Joseph personally swore and then secretly violated in bad faith. The revelation now in Doctrine and Covenants 132, dictated in 1843, addressed the exception by direct command. “Complicated” is the honest word here. “Fraudulent” is not.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

At the denials, two roads opened, and Jeremy Runnells took the shorter one.

The simplistic path (Jeremy’s): quote “I can only find one,” set it beside the sealing records, and declare the gap a lie that voids the prophet. This requires no reading of the surrounding sermon, no attention to what “polygamy” meant to Joseph’s hearers, no weighing of the legal danger, and no distinction between a covenant order and Bennett’s adultery. It is the fastest possible route to a verdict.

The historically-grounded path (the one available to him): read the denials as answers to a specific, false charge — spiritual wifery — spoken under real threat of prosecution and death, worded with deliberate care to protect named, non-consenting women, within a practice for which a scriptural warrant existed — not a blanket license, but the narrow, God-reserved exception of Jacob 2:30, which sits in the very chapter that otherwise condemns the polygamy of David and Solomon as “abominable” and “whoredoms” (Jacob 2:24, 28). The chapter’s logic is precisely that plural marriage is sin unless God commands it — and later fully and publicly acknowledged. This path is not the convenient one. It is simply the one the sources support.

The nuanced path is better supported for a reason a doubter can verify without trusting the Church: the practice was never permanently hidden. Orson Pratt announced plural marriage from a public pulpit in Salt Lake City in August 1852; it was printed in the Deseret News and preached openly for the next forty years; the revelation was canonized in 1876 and has sat in every printed Doctrine and Covenants since. Concealment that ends in a signed, published, canonized public announcement is a wartime measure, not a con. Jeremy’s reading requires the concealment to be the whole truth. The record shows it was a phase, ended by the very people accused of hiding it. For how that covenant order actually operated, see this site’s overview, Joseph Smith’s Polygamy — Context and Evidence.

The Strongest Form of the Objection

An honest response has to face the best version of the charge, not the easy one. So here it is, stated as forcefully as a thoughtful doubter would put it: Carefully-worded denials are still deception. And the “he only denied the caricature” defense has real holes. The most famous denial — “I can only find one” — was not a careful parsing of “spiritual wifery” at all; it was a flat denial of the number of wives, and the number was false. Joseph was sealed to women already married to living husbands, which looks nothing like ordinary monogamy and cannot simply be filed under “not Bennett.” And he concealed the practice from his own wife Emma — not a hostile mob, but the one person with the most right to the truth. Shouldn’t a prophet of God, of all people, refuse to mislead — even under threat?

That objection deserves a straight answer, not a dodge. Begin with the honest concessions. Not every denial was a surgical strike at Bennett’s caricature: the May 26, 1844 “I can only find one” was a denial of number, and by any plain reading it did not disclose the full private reality. The defense cannot be that every public statement was a narrowly, technically-true rebuttal of spiritual wifery — some were general or numeric denials that withheld a practice Joseph was in fact living. What the record does show is a consistent pattern: his public teaching attacked the Bennett version and declined to broadcast the sealings, and those are different acts from confessing them under oath. But the strongest form of the objection is not answered by parsing wording alone. It is answered because Scripture flatly refuses the premise that a true prophet must always disclose everything under threat. Abraham twice concealed that Sarah was his wife to survive foreign kings (Genesis 12; Genesis 20) and remained the friend of God. Rahab, praised for faith in Hebrews 11, lied outright to shield the spies. Peter denied Christ three times under fear for his life and was, that same season, the chief Apostle. The biblical pattern is not that prophets never conceal under mortal pressure; it is that God calls and keeps flawed, pressed, wholly human servants and administers His purposes through them.

Two of the doubter’s specifics deserve to be met here rather than deferred. The polyandrous sealings — Joseph sealed to women still civilly married to living husbands — are the single fact that most strains the “categorically different from Bennett” claim, because on the surface they look more scandalous, not less. What keeps them distinct is not appearance but substance: the participants understood them as eternal priesthood sealings rather than sexual liaisons, several of the husbands knew and consented, and the record shows none of the secret-seduction-under-false-promises pattern that defined Bennett’s conduct. That does not dissolve the difficulty, and the cases are examined name by name in Polyandry and the Youngest Wives; the narrow point here is that “polyandry” does not automatically equal “Bennett,” even though the doubter is right that it cannot be waved away. The denials to Emma are harder still, and no honest treatment should pretend otherwise. Joseph did conceal sealings from his own wife, and Doctrine and Covenants 132 itself records the marital anguish this caused, addressing Emma by name. That pain was real and is not erased by the legal or scriptural arguments above. But anguish inside a marriage under extraordinary strain is a human wound, not proof of the conscious con the CES Letter’s charge requires.

So the strongest objection, fairly stated, still lands somewhere very different from where Jeremy takes it. It establishes that Joseph withheld and guarded a dangerous truth. It does not establish fraud, and it cannot carry the weight of “therefore he was no prophet” — because by that standard Abraham, Rahab, and Peter fall first.

The Nauvoo Expositor

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter points to Joseph’s destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor — a paper that exposed his polygamy — as the act that set in motion the chain of events leading to his death.

Here the fork repeats. The simple story is: critics told the truth, so Joseph silenced them. The specific story is more serious and more human. The Expositor did not report on polygamy in the abstract — its single issue of June 7, 1844 printed sworn affidavits by Austin Cowles, William Law, and Jane Law that exposed the secret doctrine and practice of plural marriage and vilified Joseph by name. In the hostile climate of 1844 Nauvoo, publicizing the practice inflamed the mob already forming against the Saints and endangered the participants and their families — the sealed women and their households — whose safety genuinely depended on that confidentiality.

The suppression was a decision of the Nauvoo city council — not of Joseph alone. The council declared the press a public nuisance, a category that 19th-century American municipalities did use against publications, and Joseph acted as mayor executing that ordinance. That does not make the act wise: it was politically catastrophic and its legal footing is genuinely debated by historians to this day. Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling (2005) treats the suppression as a serious and costly decision — but the decision of a man trying to shield named people from mob retaliation that was already underway, not the reflex of a fraud hiding a crime. The distinction matters, and Jeremy’s telling erases it.

The Affidavits

The CES Letter’s Argument

In 1842, Church members signed statements affirming they knew “of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published” in the Doctrine and Covenants — including women who were already sealed to Joseph, such as Eliza R. Snow.

These 1842 statements were issued to rebut John C. Bennett’s specific charge of a seduction ring — and their wording is more careful than the CES Letter’s paraphrase admits. They affirm no other rule than the one published. That word carries the sentence. The plural order existed, but it had not been promulgated as a published rule of the Church; the revelation would not be canonized until 1876. A signer could truthfully affirm that no published rule authorized any other marriage system — because none yet did — while a private, covenantal arrangement she had entered remained uncodified. That is not the only possible reading, but it is a plausible reading of the exact text, and it is one the CES Letter does not engage.

And the signers were not dupes. Women like Eliza R. Snow were theologically serious adults who understood both the covenant they had entered and the mortal stakes of exposure. They made a deliberate judgment about what they could honestly affirm before a specific false accusation, at a moment when full public disclosure could have been lethal to themselves and to others. The women’s side of this history — including the youngest and the polyandrous sealings the Letter leans on hardest — is treated directly in Polyandry and the Youngest Wives.

The Verdict

What is resolved. The CES Letter’s charge — that the denials prove Joseph was a fraud and therefore no prophet — does not survive contact with the record. The denials answered a false accusation (Bennett’s spiritual wifery), were spoken under genuine legal and mortal jeopardy, guarded the safety of named non-consenting women, and were followed — by the very movement accused of hiding the practice — with a public announcement in 1852 and canonization in 1876. The doctrinal frame — monogamy as the rule, plural marriage only where God expressly commands it — was in place from the start (Jacob 2:30). And the scriptural pattern — Abraham, Rahab, Peter — forbids the inference that concealment under threat unmakes a prophet. Jeremy reached his verdict by taking the shorter road at every fork.

What remains, honestly, open. Not everything ties in a bow, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of CES Letter. Reasonable, believing people can still find the carefully-worded denials uncomfortable, and can still debate whether the Nauvoo council’s legal reasoning was sound. Those are real and mildly open questions about the human administration of a divine work under extreme pressure. They are not open questions about whether Joseph Smith was who he claimed to be — that is answered by the Book of Mormon, the priesthood restoration, the temple, and the witnesses, none of which the denials touch.

Further Study