Among the first elements in Mosiah
Hancock’s account are his description of Smith and Alger’s relationship as
polygamy and his characterization of polygamy as an expected feature of Mormon
family life. This expectation, however, is anachronistic in 1833, when he says
Smith and Alger were married. In Jacksonian America, polygamy was decidedly
counter-cultural and the assumption that a servant girl would become a second
wife to the master of the house because she got along with his first wife would
have been alien and absurd. In treating the “exchange of women” in polygamous
marriage as a cultural norm, Hancock’s 1896 narrative introduced an anachronism
that reflected the Utah culture in which he came of age. He was seven years old
when polygynous norms began to develop in Nauvoo and fourteen when his father
took the first of five polygamous wives. The anachronistic logic of Hancock’s
narrative suggests that he misinterpreted or imaginatively embellished a family
story.
Levi Hancock may have exchanged his
niece Fanny for Clarissa Reed, but as a replacement house girl, not in an
exchange of wives. Levi married Smith family house girl Clarrisa Reed on Mach
29, 1833. The following day another Smith family house girl assisting Emma,
Mary Beal Johnson, died of illness. These two closely paired events would have
left Emma, who was still recovering from her life-threatening labor in giving
birth to Joseph III, short on and perhaps bereft of household helpers almost overnight.
Levi Hancock’s marriage to Clarissa contributed to this deficiency. In exchange
for removing Clarrisa from the home in Emma’s time of need, he would have done
well to arrange for his niece to take her place. Such a substitution would
account for the coincidence of Levi’s close connection with two of the Smith’s
house girls, and dovetail with Eliza Jane Webb’s statement that Alger lived in
the Smit household for “several years” prior to 1836. Mosiah Hancock perhaps
misunderstood these inter-family movements through the lens of later Utah
polygamous norms and conflated is parents’ 1833 marriage with a later marriage
or relationship between Smith and Alger.
Outside of Mosiah Hancock’s narrative,
no evidence suggests a marital exchange or an intimate relationship between
Smith and Alger at the time of the 1833 marriage between Levi Hancock and
Clarissa Reed. Rather, Eliza Webb said that Fanny Alger’s own mother, Clarissa
Hancock Anger, cited a later date for the union: “Fanny was sealed to Joseph by
Oliver Cowdery in Kirtland in 1835—or 6.” (Webb to Bond, Apr. 24, 1876) (Don
Bradley, “’Dating’ Fanny Alger: The Chronology and Consequences of a
Proto-Polygamous Relationship,” in Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early
Mormon Polygamy, ed. Charyl L. Bruno [Salt Lake City: Signature Books,
2024], 150-51)
The
most fruitful approach to dating the obscure beginning of the Fanny Alger
relationship is to locate its less obscure ending and work backward from there.
Alger left the Kirtland area with her uncle Levi Hancock in late August 1836,
and Joseph Smith left Kirtland for New England still earlier, on the evening of
July 25, and returned after Alger had moved westward. (Joseph placed his return
to Kirtland “from Salem and vicinity . . . some time in the month of September.”
Joseph Smith, History, vol. B-1, 750, JSP) Thus, for both of them to have been
present, Emma Smith’s discovery of the relationship could have occurred no
later than the night of July 24. With this upper limit established, we can look
for cues to date the incidents more precisely, triangulating reminiscent
sources with contemporaneous data.
Fanny’s
mother, Clarissa, mentioned a sealing that took place “in 1835—or 6.” And
Oliver Cowdery’s behavior toward Joseph Smith augurs a narrow timing within
this window. Contrary to the apparent beliefs of Fanny’s family, Cowdery almost
certainly would not have agreed to perform a polygamous marriage for Smith and
Alger. Where we have him expressing his view of their intimate relationship, he
referred to it as a “dirty, nasty, filthy scrape.” (Oliver Cowdery to Warran A.
Cowdery, 81) Yet during Holy Week, 1836, the buildup to Easter and to Smith and
Cowdery’s visionary encounters, Cowdery accepted Smith’s participation in and
leadership over the March 27 dedication of and March 30 solemn assembly at the
Kirtland Temple—events for which participants were required to morally,
physically, and ritually purify themselves. Additionally, if Smith’s relationship
with Alger had occurred prior to Smith and Cowdery’s experience of the
resurrected Christ pronouncing upon them, “Behold, your sins are forgiven you.
You are clean before me,” then it would have been incongruous for Cowdery to
treat any sin he perceived between Smith and Alger as still an open moral and spiritual
question after witnessing Christ forgive and cleanse him of it. Thus, whenever
Smith and Alger’s intimacy emerged and Cowdery was called in to meditate, it
was likely after the April 3, 1836, temple theophany. (Don Bradley, “’Dating’
Fanny Alger: The Chronology and Consequences of a Proto-Polygamous Relationship,”
in Secret Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, ed. Charyl
L. Bruno [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2024], 153)
What was the nature of these sealings?
The close sources identify them as adoptions. And this agrees with Malachi’s
prophecy and Elijah’s declaration. Per both Malachi and Elijah, the
relationship that was in immediate need of sealing by Elijah’s keys was not a
spousal bond but a generational one. The sealings of imminent importance after
Elijah’s April 3, 1836, bestowal of keys upon Smith and Cowdery would have been
those sealing “the fathers” to “the children.” By this time, as we have seen, Smith
had already developed and put into ritual practice a theology of “adoption” or
proto-adoption, whereby the saints could receive new “fathers” and fathers
could receive new children. Against the backdrop of the 1835 Kirtland efforts
to provide spiritual “orphans” with substitute patriarchal fathers from whom
they could receive the blessings of the priesthood, Elijah’s keys offered a way
to formalize that relationship and to legitimize an orphan’s spiritual
inheritance through adoption. Smith thus now had not only a theological rationale
for adoptive sealings but also authority to perform them.
He also had a place to do so. In
Nauvoo, Smith would wait for the completion of the temple to perform generational
sealings. His death prior to the temple’s completion would prevent him from
performing any such sealings. But he did have a completed and dedicated temple
available to him in 1836 Kirtland—one to which Elijah brought the sealing power
in order to bind the generation.
So, as of April 3, 1836, Smith stood
at a crucial nexus. For the first time, he had the theology to conceptualize
adoptive sealings, the power to perform them, a commandment to do so, a sense
of urgency, and a venue to perform them in. He also had, in Alger, a potential
daughter to whom he could be sealed and, in Cowdery, a potential officiator for
that sealing. For these reasons, we can believe the interlocking primary
sources when they tell us that Smith and Cowdery performed adoptive sealings
for each other: that Alger’s parents “considered it the highest honor to have
their daughter adopted into the Prophet’s family, and her mother has always
claimed that she was sealed to Joseph at that time”; that “Oliver had a girl
sealed to him at the same time,” and that Cowdery’s dealing to Fuller, like
Smith’s to Alger, meant he had “adopted [her] as his own child.” Further, we
can likely date the hypothesized sealing to April 1836, and we can infer that
the ritual made the girls not only spiritual daughters of Smith and Cowdery,
but also daughters of Abraham and Aaron and—like Emma before them—Jehovah’s “daughters
of Zion.” (Don Bradley and Christopher C. Smith, “Of Generations and Genders:
Fanny Alger and the Adoptive Origins of Ritual Sealing,” in Secret
Covenants: New Insights on Early Mormon Polygamy, ed. Charyl L. Bruno [Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 2024], 212-13)
