Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Excerpts from Two Recent Essays on Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger

  

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)