The early Latter-day Saint practice of rebaptism was an external act of being (re)commitment to the Church. It also had an ecclesiastical dimension at times, evidenced by the following from 1857:
There is quite [a] reformation
going on here at present. All the true hearted Mormons are being baptized over
again, those who are not, are not considered members of the church. (Letter
from Ellen Pratt McGary to Ellen Spencer Clawson, 8 January 1857, as cited in
S. George Ellsworth, ed., Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters [Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Tanner Trust Fund, 1974], 37)
In his biography of his grandfather (based
on a lot of research by his father, Spencer), Edward Kimball recounted Andrew’s
rebaptism:
In his teen years
Andrew, then fatherless, may have been somewhat careless in his conduct,
experimenting with smoking and drinking and avoiding Church duties. At least in
one of his first meetings as a twenty-year-old deacon he is quoted as saying “that
he was glad to meet with us . . . much better than when he was out and about
the streets learning to smoke and swear” (Salt Lake City Nineteenth Ward,
Deacons Minutes, October 25, 1878). His twin, Alice, accused him of being
sometimes irritable and cross with his mother (Alice K. Smith to Andrew
Kimball, January 6 or 7, 1878, Church History Library).
In 1898, Alice,
asking Andrew to be more patient with her sixteen-year-old-son, Coulsen, who
had given Andrew some difficulty, wrote, “You will remember when you was just
his age you went out to the Half Way House You wanted to start out for your
self. If you had someone then to take you kindly by the hand and shew you a few
things you would have missed many hardships” (Alice K. Smith to Andrew Kimball,
May 15, 1898, Church History Library). And she wrote several months later,
He is more like you
when that age than any one I know of. He had the same spirit as you had at his
age. Nothing would do you must go away from home, you must have a change, a new
experience . . . –Since writing the above I received a letter from Coulsen
telling of his careless accident and how bad he feels. Let him come home with
good feelings about being with you. (Alice K. Smith to Andrew Kimball, November
22, 1898, Church History Library)
To Alice’s comment
about his youthful behavior, Andrew responded,
I have always been a
clean boy, [but] there has been times when I was a little uncertain about
sacred things. You, my sisters and my sainted mother, tried to get me to have
my endowments just before they closed the old [Endowment] house [in 1889], when
the Temple in St. George was completed [in 1877]. I told you I was unworthy. I
did not mean that I had done anything wrong, but I had not been under an environment
that would prepare me for such a sacred ordinance; because I refused, Mother
thot I had done something wrong, and until I told her I would take the right
course in life she could not die in peace. I have kept my word and my angel
mother is honored today. That’s all, Alice.
After he promised his
mother he “would take the right course in life,” he was rebaptized as a
symbol of recommitment and ordained a deacon (in 1878). She died in 1879. (Edward
L. Kimball, Father of a Prophet: Andrew Kimball [Provo, Utah: BYU
Studies, 2011], 11-12)
