This is a rebroadcast of our 2022 interview with attorney & independent historian Mark Tensmeyer who will polygamy skeptics claims. We’ll discuss contemporary evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy. This is the entire interview that has never been published publicy before.  Check out our conversation…

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Introduction

In a conversation with Denver Snuffer, he claimed that if we threw out all evidence after Joseph Smith died, there is little evidence Joseph practiced polygamy.  While I’m sure that’s an appealing tactic of a defense attorney, is that something a judge would allow?  I’m excited to introduce Mark Tensmeyer, an attorney from Texas and we’ll talk about rules of evidence. What exactly is hearsay evidence? Mark will explain.  Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  01:03  Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have a person who’s certified in law to talk about rules of evidence.  Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where you’re calling from?

Mark  01:16  I’m Mark Tensmeyer. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

GT  01:21  And you are a lawyer by trade?

Mark  01:23  I am. Yes.

GT  01:25  So, you have a good grasp of law. Now, I know Denver Snuffer is a lawyer, as well. So, we kind of have a little bit of a difference of opinion on whether Joseph was a monogamist or a polygamist. I decided to have Mark on here. We’re going to try to settle that and talk about some of the common arguments of the “Joseph was a monogamist” crowd. I’m not going to claim to be unbiased on this. But I am going to try to be as fair as possible. I think you are going to do the same thing right, Mark?

Mark  02:03  Right.  I don’t think anybody who approaches this is really unbiased, even if they might think they are. I think very few people, if anybody, is truly unbiased. But I like to think that people can come to conclusions based on evidence, regardless of whatever their personal bias might be. I have that much faith in the human intellect.

GT  02:30  Alright. One of the things I’d like to start off with, especially given your law background, is, let’s talk a little bit about rules of evidence. I know in my previous interview–and I know there are a lot of people that love to email me and say, “Hey, you’ve never talked to somebody who believes Joseph was a monogamist, which, number one, is not true. I’ve talked to Denver. I’ve also talked to Jim Vun Cannon. So, if you haven’t seen those, go watch them, and you can hear their arguments firsthand.

Mark  03:02  Yeah.

GT  03:03  I gave him a fair hearing. But I know in Denver’s case, and I wanted to talk about him, because he’s a lawyer just like you, Mark.

Mark  03:12  Right.

GT  03:13  One of the things that Denver said that I’d really like to question you on is Denver went to Michael Quinn, and said, “Well, if we cut out all the evidence after Joseph Smith died, June 27, 1844, then there’s not very much evidence that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.”  Personally, I think, if I was a defense lawyer, that’s exactly what I would do. I try to throw out as much evidence, especially, of course, bad evidence that wasn’t helping me, as possible. So, I think it’s a great defense tactic. I don’t know that a judge would necessarily buy that. Can you tell us about that?

Mark  03:53  Yes, I can speak to that. First off, the legal rules of evidence ought to be seen in the context of the legal case. I mean, they don’t necessarily apply to weighing and balancing evidence, like in history or in any other situation in real life. We have laws that govern what kind of evidence can be considered, but the law doesn’t give us a lot of direction on how to weigh and balance evidence or what kind of weight to give evidence. So, Denver Snuffer, he said that we ought to just cut off all evidence after Joseph Smith died. I’ve watched that interview.  He said [that] you need to cut that off because you can’t use evidence of what a dead man said after he’s dead. So, in the law, there’s the hearsay evidence about how anything that was said outside of a courtroom setting is hearsay. But that applies to all oral communications. So, since Joseph Smith is dead, everything he ever said, or did pretty much is based on hearsay. So, even Joseph Smith’s denials that he was a polygamist, is based on hearsay. I mean, it’s hearsay.

GT  05:33  Important point, there.

Mark  05:35  A lot of people, well, I mean, this is really the core argument, is they say, “Well, we need to have something that comes directly from Joseph.  We need to have his thoughts on this, not what somebody else thought about him doing.” That’s one of the major points.   But what does that even mean? I mean, he’s not here to tell us. So, everything he said, is hearsay. I mean, when you say, “Well, we have this from Joseph, these articles in the Times and Seasons…” So, we have newspaper articles that quote him, and I think we can be very confident that he actually said those things.

Mark  06:07  But, then there’s other things, too, we can look at to try to get at what he did. So, I watched that interview with Denver Snuffer, where he said, “You can’t get it from a dead man.” I think he might be talking about the dead man statute, which a few states have. In most cases it’s very, very restricted. So, here in Texas, where I’m licensed, it only applies in intestacy cases, where you’re talking about something that the decedent said to a beneficiary about a will or something like that, something of that nature.  That’s really the only place where that applies in Texas. There are hearsay laws. But then there’s all kinds of exceptions to the hearsay laws. One of the exceptions to the hearsay laws is ancient documents law. So, any document is over 20 years old is admissible. So, that would qualify for most of any document we have, as long as it’s found in place where there’s a reasonable chain of custody there, to where it’s found, and whoever said it. A lot of states have that, the ancient documents rule. So, no, I don’t think even using legal things, you could really just cut off the rules at Joseph’s death. Even if you did, there’s still plenty there.

GT  07:44  I just want to point out that in any murder case, the evidence was collected after the crime happened. So, I think it’s kind of a crazy argument to say, “Well, he’s dead.”

Mark  07:56  In any intestacy case, in any inheritance case,  in any probate case, where people are arguing who should be getting what, from this person who’s dead. All the evidence…

GT  08:10  All the evidence is collected after the death.

Mark  08:13  Yes, there’s always going to be a lot. This kind of goes to the idea, in these discussions, it’s very, very easy–I use the term polygamy skeptics, because it’s a neutral term. I don’t like to say polygamy denier, conspiracy theorists or that sort of thing, because I don’t like to be dismissive. Whereas I obviously disagree with these people about how reasonable this outcome is objectively, I do understand that there are some aspects of this, that your average person would find compelling. Your average person, if you went out there and showed them a lot of the arguments that Richard or Pamela Price or Denver Snuffer, or it’s in the Joseph Smith Nauvoo paper, that they would find compelling. I don’t blame people for thinking that Joseph Smith was a monogamist.  That said, I don’t think that objectively it holds up. The reason that I it’s reasonable that people should think that, should feel that, is because Joseph Smith’s polygamy, Nauvoo polygamy is a very unusual situation. You have activities. Nauvoo polygamy starts in–of course, there’s…

GT  09:55  Before you go there, I want to talk about hearsay. What is considered hearsay?  I know that’s a great way to dismiss arguments.

Mark  10:02  So, if you want to target those things–hearsay is anything you heard somebody else say. So, in the legal sense it’s anything that’s said outside of the courtroom. It’s anything said outside of the courtroom where the issue is being adjudicated. But, when you usually say hearsay, it means anything that you heard somebody else say. Say, for example, when Lorenzo Snow says, “I talked to Joseph. He said he took my sister, Eliza R. Snow as a wife.” I mean, that’s hearsay, because he didn’t actually see that. He only knows because it was told to him.  That might still be something you want to consider. But technically, that would be hearsay. If you have any..

GT  10:21  But, it could admissible in court, though, right?  Like he’s breaking a polygamy statute or something.

Mark  10:55  Oh, yeah. I mean, Lorenzo Snow did testify to that in a deposition. I think it was in the Temple Lot case. All the evidence was taken by deposition. So, he did testify to that, in that case.  I believe it was objected to. I mean, it’s all done by deposition.

GT  11:14  Was the objection sustained?

Mark  11:18  Oh, there’s no judge there. It’s a deposition. So, how it works in a deposition is you just have the lawyers from both sides there. They question the witness. If the witness says something that the other lawyer doesn’t like, they say, “Objection this.” Then it’s up to the judge whether or not to keep that in the record. It really only matters if it’s going to be a jury that reviews it. So, the judge can take that out, so the jury doesn’t see it. But I mean, if the judge is going to decide, which was the case in the Temple Lot Case, then they’re going to see it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. But the theory there is the judge knows the rules of evidence and knows what to consider and what not to [consider.]

GT  11:56  So, if it were a live case where we were trying to decide if somebody committed adultery, which is against the law, or bigamy, which is against the law, and Wilford said that, would that be admissible in court?

Mark  12:09  Or Lorenzo. Yeah, it would be.

GT  12:11  Oh, I said the wrong Snow.

Mark  12:12  Well, yeah, I think it would be because there’s hearsay, and then there’s exceptions to that. I think it would be because that would be illegal. I mean, it may or may not have been. It was arguably illegal, but it might have been. But let’s say, somebody like Joseph Bates Noble, who testified in the Temple Lot case, who facilitated a plural marriage. He performed the ceremony. He approached Joseph. He said that Joseph approached him about whether he would arrange for him to take Joseph Bates Noble’s sister-in-law, Louisa Beaman as a plural wife. So, he did.  He arranged that.  He performed the ceremony. He’s testified, too, that he knows that they roomed together that night.  He saw them go there, and they came up the next morning. So, I mean, that’s not hearsay. The parts about Joseph maybe approaching him to talk to him, maybe. But the parts about him performing ceremony? Absolutely not. I mean, in the Temple Lot case, you had three women who testified that they had been plural wives with him. One of them really didn’t want to answer the question, understandably. But the other two said positively that they had marital relations with him. That’s not hearsay. So, a lot of the conversations I hear when people say, “Well, it’s hearsay.” I think what they really mean is, “We’re not getting it from Joseph directly.” That’s not hearsay. If that was the definition of hearsay, then the only person who would testify in any criminal case would be the defendant.

GT  13:58  Who is obviously going to deny anything, right? You’re never going to get a conviction if you had to rely on confessions.

Mark  14:04  Right. There are places in the world where that’s basically how the criminal justice system works, but I don’t think it’s a great idea. So, the idea there is either they confess, or you have to get hard forensic-type evidence. Again, you really see the core issues with this and why people think this is because… What people like a lot, I put out a few informal surveys among people who are skeptical that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. I’ve asked a number [of people,] and the most consistent response I got back on any question about anything, was people said that there needed to be hard physical evidence that Joseph Smith was a polygamist before we can believe that he was.

GT  14:54  Like a child, right?

Mark  14:55  Yeah, and of course, the thing is that if we had DNA evidence of a child, and so in the absence of that kind of thing, what we’re left to is we have testimonial evidence. There’s conflicting testimonial evidence. I mean, you have all those newspaper articles or public denials that Joseph made.  Shortly before he died, he said, “You know, I will prove all the people who have charged me with plurality of wives as perjurers. What a thing it is to be accused of having seven wives, when I can only find one.” I mean, you have all kinds of stuff like that.  You have Emma’s denials.

Mark  15:32  I mean, usually a lot of the counters that people that are coming at this from a more of an academic mainstream perspective say, “Well, you’re calling a lot of these women liars.” You’re calling Eliza Snow [a liar.] You’re calling Lucy Walker[a liar.] It was Lucy Walker, Melissa Lott, and Emily Partridge that testified in the Temple Lot case. You’re calling them liars. But the counter that polygamy skeptics will take is, “Well, you’re calling Emma a liar. I mean, that’s another woman that you’re calling a liar.” So, you can start to see that and to be fair to a lot of the polygamist skeptics, we have lots and lots and lots testimonials about the transfiguration of Brigham Young, and mainstream historians are more than happy to dismiss those all as later recollections and say that that’s reflective. I mean, they are. There’s a lot of things. I think they bring up things that are good questions, that I think that they’re sincere at, that they haven’t really had answered. That’s part of what I’m trying to do with all of this, too. I would say I understand. At least, I think I can understand where they’re coming from. There are some answers to that.

GT  16:57  So, just because something is late, doesn’t mean it’s unreliable.

Mark  17:02  Right, and so, well…

GT  17:04  It sure is convenient when it helps your case, though.

Mark  17:07  Yeah, it is, and in a lot of cases, a lot of the people that will make that argument, don’t have any problem considering these later statements from Emma Smith or William Smith, about what they think happened. A lot of folks doing this don’t have any problem taking those statements at face value.

Mark  17:33  But, it is an unusual situation, because Nauvoo polygamy possibly starts as early as 1831. There’s the Fanny Alger incident in the mid-1830s. But, when polygamy really starts is–the time when we can most definitely say, is April 1841. and it’s not until 1852 that it’s announced, that anybody is speaking about it publicly.

GT  18:09  Publicly.

Mark  18:10  Yes, in any kind of thing like that.  It’s an unusual thing because some of the principal actors in the early part, Joseph and Hyrum Smith, died pretty early in that. So, I use this example in the paper I’m coming out with.  I’m going to include that in the book.  Alexander Hale Smith, who is Joseph Smith’s son, makes this argument.  He says, “I would much rather take the words of Joseph and Hyrum,” and he quotes a lot of things in the Times and Seasons that have been published in the Nauvoo newspaper, “than I would over these old wives’ tales being recorded late.” So, he says that, too.  He says, “Well, we have their words and so that’s contemporary. That should carry more weight than these later recollections from the Utah Mormons.

Mark:  But, then he also goes on. He quotes at length, many of the statements from Parley P. Pratt, John Taylor, denying that they are practicing polygamy, when clearly, they were. They later admitted that they had been all along. So, for him, it just is not possible that that’s exactly what his father was doing as well. He says, “No, Joseph and Hyrum wouldn’t do that.  They braved a prison, rather than deny the truth.”  Well, so did Parley Pratt. I mean, he went to prison when they did too, and was in prison for longer than they were. He’s one of the guys, too. So, I can see why, especially as a as a religious apologetic, you could say, “Well, he’s the Prophet. We know that he tells the truth because he’s the Prophet.” That may or may not be true. If he knows that he lied, and that means that he’s not the prophet has implications. Well, that may or may not be true. I think that’s an important discussion. But it’s irrelevant to whether or not it actually happened. We can talk about implications after we establish facts. So, there’s that. So, because this is an unusual situation…

GT  19:13  Let me just throw in something here really quick. Polygamy was obviously against the law. So, wouldn’t it make sense for anybody who’s breaking the law, whether they’re robbing a bank or killing somebody or doing polygamy or adultery or whatever, to hide evidence? Wouldn’t that be just human nature?

Mark  20:51  I think it would be and I think there were much bigger things than the law going on, too. I mean, you’ve got to remember Nauvoo, 1837, there’s a massive internal apostasy, including many high levels of the church, that just escalates and causes more external problems. They have to leave Kirtland. They have to leave behind the temple in 1837.  The very next year, the same thing happens in Missouri. They finally have a place that really is the saints’ home. It’s a chartered area, a city that they basically founded, and they want to build the temple. They want to have the church to stay. They want to do missionary work and bring more people in. That’s really just not going to happen with polygamy. I think, had Joseph been public about polygamy, then I think there would have been massive fallout. I don’t think the temple would have ever gotten anywhere close to being finished. So, I think that’s part of why he did it in secret. It depends. If you’re looking at Joseph Smith…

GT  22:06  It should be natural to expect secrecy.

Mark  22:10  Yeah, I think it should be. I mean, if you’re looking at Joseph Smith from more of a sympathetic, worship, sincere perspective, you could look at it like he was using consequentialist morality. He thought that it was important that he implement this celestial marriage while also doing these other things. That’s how he decided to do it. You may disagree with the ethics of that. But it is understandable that he did it that way.

Mark  22:44 So, if you’re looking at it, I mean, Nauvoo polygamy and Joseph Smith polygamy is a messy topic. There’s really no way to look at it in a way that completely sanitizes all of it.  You look at it for what it is, and such. I think that that’s it. I don’t really know. It’s an interesting question of what his game plan was. Was he planning on going public with it at some point? I mean, I don’t really know. Joseph Bates Noble is the one that facilitates that first sealing and marriage to Louisa Beaman, and he says that Joseph told him, “I’m putting my life in your hands. I’m asking you not to betray me to my enemies, by asking you to do this.”  Was that going to be forever? I don’t know. I mean, they certainly could have gone public with it a lot earlier than they did in Utah. I believe it’s Lucy Walker, who writes at one point, that Joseph told her that he would be able to publicly acknowledge her as a wife after they had left Nauvoo and gone to the Rocky Mountains. I don’t know if we should consider that statement reliable. But I think part of what he did is he wanted to introduce it slowly into trusted people. By doing it that way, by introducing it to trusted people, like the Quorum of the Twelve, like some of his close friends that weren’t particularly high in the hierarchy, like say Joseph Bates Noble, thereby introducing it to them and having them doing it, it would be easier for the Church to accept it. In a way, it worked. I mean, they were able to have a substantial number of people enter into plural marriage, by the time they left Nauvoo just a few years later. So, in a way, that way did work, and it also stretched out whatever fallout they had.  Of course, there was fallout. So, if it’s secret, the real question is, what kind of evidence should you reasonably expect in a scenario like that?

GT  25:09  Yeah, if you knew it was secret.

Mark  25:12  If you know something is a secret and so something where they’re not admitting it, where the people involved are denying it openly…

GT  25:18  And polygamy skeptics should at least acknowledge that if this did happen, it was secret.

Mark  25:23  I think so.  If you’re going to look at the contemporary evidence of Joseph Smith’s polygamy and say, “That’s deficient. I’m expecting more than that.” You should compare that to the evidence for the other people that did it. So, of course, the person we most closely associate with the Joseph Smith’s monogamy argument is Joseph Smith, III, his son, who advocated it for many decades. He has a hard time settling on what exactly he thought his father was doing. At some point, he thought, “Well, he was just doing sealings that were not actually husbands and wives in the full sense of the word. At another point, he says, “Well, Joseph facilitated sealings, he didn’t know where it was going, and other people took it and made it polygamy, and he didn’t find out about it until it’s too late to do anything.” He says that at another point. But, really, most consistently, this was the traditional RLDS argument is that polygamy wasn’t happening while Joseph Smith was alive. John Bennett sort of did his thing there. But, in terms of polygamy happening within the leadership of the Church, it wasn’t happening while Joseph Smith was alive.

GT  25:39  So, not Joseph, not Brigham, not Hyrum.

Mark  26:05  My understanding of it, really, that’s what it is.

Introduction

The RLDS Church has historically claimed Joseph Smith never practice polygamy.  We’ll talk about Joseph Smith, III’s views on the topic, as well as modern-day beliefs.  Check out our conversation….

Interview

Mark:  So, the argument they have, there’s a book that was written in 1900 that’s the most comprehensive book on the RLDS part of a narrative. It’s written by a man by the name of Willard Smith, who’s not a relation to the Smith family. But it’s the most comprehensive thing that I think [is out there] and what he argues is, and I think this is reflective of the other things. He put it together, where a lot of those arguments are that Brigham Young starts polygamy. He and Heber C. Kimball and others marry these women at the Nauvoo Temple, and then they seal these women to Joseph for eternity, to themselves for time. Then, later, to legitimize polygamy, they influence these women, or maybe these women want to do it just because they want to support it anyway, to say that they were married to Joseph while he was alive. So that’s the argument they use. As time goes on, and more contemporary evidence comes to light. There are things like the Expositor.  Joseph Smith, III hardly ever mentioned the Expositor, and I don’t think he really even knows the content of it.

GT  26:11  He was just a young boy then, right?

Mark  28:12  He was. In the Temple Lot case deposition, he was asked about the Expositor, and he remembered it being destroyed. He remembered hearing about it being destroyed. But he was asked, “Did you ever see it?”

He said, “Well, I saw a portion of it. I saw an excerpt a long time ago, but I hadn’t actually seen it again until now.”

I got a bunch of transcripts of his letters at Community of Christ Archives. He had heard about William Law’s statements to the Salt Lake Tribune that were done in the 1880s.  He said he didn’t think that William Law really had known anything or had said anything before that. So, as time goes on, there’s the Apostle Paul Hansen from the RLDS Church in the 1920s who really looked out for a lot of documents. He found a bunch.  He found a lot of really great stuff that didn’t come from Brighamites, about Joseph Smith and polygamy. A lot of it was contemporary.  I love reading his letters.  He said, “I’m not really I’m ready to say that Joseph Smith was a polygamist, but there’s a lot of evidence here that I really don’t know how to explain.”

GT  29:36  So he was the B.H. Roberts of the RLDS Church.

Mark  29:39  He was private about all of his stuff. We have it in here. He said, “We don’t need to go shout this from the rooftops,” is one of the things he said.  “But if anybody asks us about it, we shouldn’t be afraid of our own minds. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace the truth, if that’s what the truth is.”  Joseph Smith, III’s son–and there’s Frederick M. Smith is the president of the RLDS church, then it is Israel A. Smith, who is president. I don’t know when the years are.  He was president for part at least part of the 1950s. He really, really tries. He has a spiritual experience. He really drives home that Joseph Smith was not oblivious that his grandfather was not… But, he tries to adjust the narrative. He admits that there was a revelation on marriage that was probably about sealing.

GT  30:33  Oh.

Mark  30:34  He does, but he thinks that this was something that was altered…

GT  30:43  By Brigham.

Mark  30:44  By Brigham Young to be what we know as section 132. So, he says that, and then it’s in the 1980s, when this really comes to a head. Here’s the president of the [RLDS] Church at the time, Wallace B. Smith asked the official church historian, Richard Howard, to write a paper that really gets to the bottom of this.  He does, and he does even a brilliant genius thing, where he writes a paper on Joseph Smith’s polygamy and he only uses publicly available sources like the Expositor, like the article in the Nauvoo Neighbor that details Joseph and Hyrum’s reactions to the Expositor. Then, he uses evidence that he collected from a lot of different places; evidence that came from people that were not Brighamites, so, people like Sidney Rigdon, people like William Marks. He makes the case from that, that Joseph Smith was a polygamist. He puts all these arguments in there and in the end of the paper, comes up with the conclusion that, “Well, we at least know Joseph did sealings for eternity. He may or may not have done polygamy, so, kind of reflecting the RLDS position.”

A lot of his contemporaries were like, “Well, the body of your paper was great.  The conclusion just is off. A lot of people suspected that maybe that was like an editorial mandate, because this was originally supposed to be published more in the official channels in the RLDS Church, and finally, they said, “Well just publish it in the John Whitmer Journal.”

GT  32:20  Well, that’s interesting.

Mark  32:22  Yeah, and so a lot of people suspected it was an editorial mandate. Newell Bringhurst wrote an article about that, that was part of the Persistence of Polygamy series.[1] He interviewed Richard Howard. Howard is still alive and still working.

GT  32:36  He’s still alive, I think.

Mark  32:38  Yes, he is.  You ought to get him.

GT 32:40  I do need to get him on.

Mark  32:43  He confirmed that that was true, that he had some editorial oversight from committees. So, it was a compromise. He has since gone on record, on a lot of other things about Joseph Smith being a polygamist. That, really [solidified things.] When I read Paul Hansen’s letters, and I read that that says that it completely destroys the myth that polygamy wasn’t happening when Joseph Smith was alive. I mean, Joseph Smith, III asked his mother, in that last year, “Was there anything like polygamy revelation?”

She says, “No, I didn’t hear anything of that nature.”

Well, the Expositor explains the revelation pretty clearly.

GT  33:33  Right.

Mark  33:34  Joseph and Hyrum, give a partial admission to it in the Nauvoo Neighbor, the article published there. So, she’s not forthcoming there about that. But you can see kind of why Joseph Smith, III may have settled on that. Because, the other thing is, if polygamy is not happening when Joseph’s alive, then you can’t really blame him with it, and you also can’t blame him with being negligent in allowing it to happen. So, Paul Hansen’s letters say it was clearly happening. It clearly was. That’s some of the things, and so from that point on the RLDS Church, as an institution, drops the issue.

GT 33:35  This was about 1980, you say?

Mark  34:24  Yes, this is in 1983. They dropped the issue. They say, Wallace B. Smith adopts this thing where publicly he says, “I’m agnostic about it. But you know, it’s not an issue we’re going to pursue.” So, they drop the issue there. It doesn’t become their official position, and it still is not. What they’ll say now is that they don’t have official positions on historical issues.

GT  34:50  Oh, really? Because I know President Steven Veazey has talked about that.

Mark  34:54  Oh, year, as has…

GT  34:57  And he’s the current president.

Mark  34:58  Yeah, the church leadership will say it all the time.

GT  35:02  But it’s not official?  The president is not official?

Mark  35:04  As did Grant McMurray.

GT  35:06  Oh wow.

Mark  35:09  And there have been books that have come out that have been done by Herald House, which is their official publishing house.  But it’s still not the official position of the church. The Community of Christ gives a lot of leeway for diversity on that.  They say, “We know, we’re open to people doing that.”  I know several people, at least I’m acquainted with several people in the Community of Christ. Some of them very liberal members of the Community of Christ that believe that he wasn’t a polygamist.

GT  35:42  Oh, really?

Mark  35:44  Yeah. I mean, it’s still believed in in the Community of Christ. So, that’s where that’s at. But the reaction to that, that’s the interesting thing. Soon after that is when Richard Price, he writes a full–it was a paid advertisement.  It was a full-page thing in the local newspaper in Independence, where he outlines his response to that. The Prices, Richard and Pamela Price worked on it for a long time. Whenever you talk about things like this, like I’ve kind of alluded to, we get to the us versus them. I mean, I think the world of Richard and Pamela Price.

GT  36:29  Well, let me just say this also, I’ve actually invited them on to my podcast, and they have refused. I’ve talked to Denver Snuffer, and I’ve talked to Jim Vun Cannon, who are both polygamy skeptics.

Mark  36:44  Right.

GT  36:45  I do want to, for the record, say that, because I get this all the time, people say, “Oh, you don’t give our side of the story.”  I have. I’ve done it, and people won’t come on.

Mark  36:56  I don’t necessarily think that it speaks ill of the person not wanting to give an interview or something. I mean, some people are private like that. I understand that. Pamela Price is very generous to me in providing documentation about things. I mean, Richard and Pamela Price really did a lot to help give the Restorationist movement some feet, give it some direction. So, they’re the ones that decided to continue the charge for this. This becomes part of the much larger issue, for lack of a better term, the liberalization of the RLDS Church. This is happening at about same time, 1983, that we had the paper come out from Richard Howard.  It’s 1984, that the revelation coming out allowing, giving women the priesthood comes out.

GT  38:08  Right.

Mark  38:09  And so, coming up to this, that was the culmination of decades of a culture war in the RLDS Church. About there, there’s a split.  I’ve heard estimates anywhere from about a fifth to about a third of the RLDS Church becomes disaffected. I mean, that’s huge. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine one out of every five–looking around your ward and finding one out of every five people there was gone? Yeah. Wow. Who are faithful believers? Yeah. So, this becomes part of the liberalization and Richard and Pamela Price played a very big role in helping these people find someplace to go. Have you ever been to a Restoration branch service? I know you’ve been to a few different ones.

GT  39:05  Let’s see. I’ve been to a Temple Lot service. I’ve been to RLDS services. I’ve been trying to go to the Remnant, but that never works out for some reason.

Mark  39:17  I’ve been. There’s a Restoration branch in Dallas. I’ve been to it, and I had a wonderful time there. It’s great.

GT  39:22  Oh, yeah, they’re always really friendly.

Mark  39:25  Yeah, it really was great.  I can very easily see why people that go there would feel like the Community of Christ, it’s now known as the Community of Christ, sort of left them out. I mean, that’s a much bigger issue and that sort of thing. William Russell, Bill Russell’s writing a book about that.

GT  39:50  I definitely have to get Bill Russell on. He’s the best.

Mark  39:52  I am very much looking forward to that. But I say that to show that the Prices, we call it the Restorationist movement.

GT  40:02  Yeah.  I have been to the Price’s bookstore before, by the way.

Mark  40:06  Okay, yeah. They played a big role in making all of that happen. I’m glad that that’s there, that spiritual home for the for the thousands of people that it is. I think the world of Richard and Pamela Price. It’s really easy to look at things like this and reduce a person’s identity to just the one thing you disagree with them on. I’m trying. I’m not perfect about that, but I am really trying to be better about that. But, anyhow, Richard and Pamela Price, well, Richard Price comes out with that article. He follows that up with the pamphlet called the Polygamy Conspiracies. That, of course, is followed up by the articles and division that get collected into the books, Joseph Smith Fought Polygamy. So, they, the Prices agreed that the narrative that had been told that far was not sufficient. They agree.

Introduction

Polygamy skeptics claim that a religious group out of Maine introduced LDS apostles about spiritual wifery, and those apostles (not Joseph) introduced polygamy into the Church.  Is there good evidence for this? Check out our conversation….

Interview

Mark:  So, what they say is that they come up with this new narrative that the Quorum of the Twelve were rogue, pretty much from the beginning. So, around here is where, as far as I’ve been able to tell, and I’d be interested in seeing documentation and maybe someone can show talking otherwise, this is when they say, “Well, the Quorum of the Twelve, they’ve encountered and they’re influenced by the doctrine of the Cochranites during their missionary travels in the early to mid-1830s. This is another group of people that practices spiritual wifery.

GT  41:47  Yeah, the Cochranites, I’m glad we’re talking about that because that is a big issue.

Mark  41:53  Yeah, it is. I think that’s an interesting thing and I would really like to have someone explore it, and I think after I’m done with this, working on this paper and done, that I think that’s something I really would like to look into. That’s the idea is that Cochranitism, there’s a special connection. I don’t know quite that there is. What it is, is the first contact with them is 1832. It’s Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith. They go to Maine and they talk to a lot of Cochranites. Of course, as traveling elders, they stay with people and do work for them. They would preach in churches, and they went to the Cochranite churches.  There’s a prayer/preaching meeting that they have in Boston before they get there where there’s a Cochranite. There’s a couple of people that are making a big fuss about or make a big scene about Cochranism and so they encounter it there. But, their journals, I’ve read them, but they think it’s awful. People question, “Why are you preaching these people?” Orson Hyde writes in his journal and says, “Well, it’s because we’re supposed to preach the gospel to everybody and if they repent, they can repent and gather.”

GT  43:12 So when did the Cochranites start? Do we know that?

Mark  43:15  Oh, the Cochranites. I’ll give some background. Well, the proper name is the Society of Free Brethren. It started by a man named Jacob Cochran in 1816 in Saco, Maine around that area in York County, Maine. One of the things they preach is they call it having spiritual wives. Actually figuring out what their doctrine is, is pretty hard because the only real contemporary evidence we have, there’s a pamphlet that was produced by a man named Ephraim Stinchfield, and it really portrayed the Conchranites as just having all kinds of weird ceremonies that they do. It says how they reenact the Garden of Eden naked. He says, Jacob Cochran takes his turn. He just calls a woman his spiritual wife and takes her to bed and all of that stuff. So there’s a lot of that kind of thing.

GT  44:19 Is it kind of a free love movement? Or…

Mark  44:22  That’s how he depicts it.

GT  44:24  So, there’s no marriage at all?

Mark  44:27  Again it’s hard to say because I mean reading that is like… Well, can you imagine if all we knew about Mormonism is what we read in E.D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed? Can you imagine that? I mean, you would get some ideas about stuff, but that’s pretty much what we’re looking at. I read it recently. Well I’m getting ahead of the story. I’ll go back. So, there’s this heyday of Cochranism where they’re really into gifts of the spirit. I mean, when you read about the early Kirtland Mormonism and they have these revelations to say, “Oh, you’ve got to try the spirits.”

“No, you’ve got to back down from that sort of thing.”

You read about that. That’s the type of thing they were doing. There was a lot of it.

GT  45:14  Well, I just want to throw in here really quickly two other groups. My interview with Dr. Larry Foster, he talked about the Shakers who were completely celibate: no marriage, no sex, no anything. He compared those with Mormons who obviously know about polygamy. Then, the third group was the Oneida Community where marriage was banned. But you could have [sex.] They had very strict rules about, basically you can have sex with anybody, according to their rules.

Mark  45:47  Yeah, yeah, it was very regulated.

GT  45:49  It was very regulated. But marriage was banned. But sex was fine. So, I’m curious if the Cochranites were like the Oneida Community.

Mark  45:59  Right. So, a lot of these were millenarian groups. In a lot of ways, the Cochranites were very similar to the Latter-day Saint movement. I mean, they’re Christian millenarians. They are people that believe that basically society’s gone to pot, and the Second Coming is going to happen soon. The Christian world doesn’t get Christianity at all. You need to get back to the original teachings. They need to do it in a radical way. So, in a lot of ways, you can see how, at least especially to an outsider, both groups seem very similar. One contemporary account that gives a bit more sympathetic comment to Jacob Cochran said, “He was neither trying to destroy churches, nor create his own church. He just wanted to bring back the gifts of the Spirit and apostolic Christianity to the churches that were already around.” So, it’s hard to say what exactly their doctrine was, but spiritual wives is definitely part of it.

Mark  47:07 He [Jacob Cochran] gets put on trial for lewdness in 1819, and Jacob Cochran goes to jail for four years. During that time, the movement kind of falls apart. A lot of these very charismatic movements, they fall apart when their leader is no longer available. Charismatic movements are started around one person.  It happens a lot.  People thought that was going to happen to Mormonism, and it didn’t.

GT  47:35  Right.

Mark  47:36  But, for a lot of these, especially smaller groups, then that that’s what happened, and it did. So, what happened is, is that there’s a couple of groups that still have congregations up, through the 18–, I don’t know for the next few decades. Jacob Cochran gets out of prison, and he doesn’t really lead a church anymore, even the church that still kind of believes his doctrine. He has a group that he wants to go settle in New York, and they go. I haven’t really heard what really happened with that. So that’s pretty much it.

GT  48:10 The Cochranites only lasted for a decade? Is that what you’re saying?

Mark  48:16  Their heyday is only about three years long. And then they’re around…

GT  48:19  So, 1816 to 1819. So, this pre-dates the First Vision.

Mark  48:22  I think they are around. There are remnant groups that are around into the 1840s in the area, but nowhere near to the same size. It is interesting. One of the things that the two elders say a lot is that the area is just totally turned off to gifts of the Spirit type things or any of those things that Mormonism [supports], like revelation.

GT  48:43 Like speaking in tongues, and that kind of thing.

Mark  48:44  Oh, yeah. They’re completely turned off. They don’t want anything to do with that. That’s the Cochranites. I think that maybe some of those ideas might have influenced what we see in Mormonism. But I think the case is very circumstantial. Again, Samuel Smith and Orson Hyde only uniformly say that they were absolutely appalled by it.

GT  49:07  So, the idea is Samuel Smith and Orson Hyde, is that what you said?  They’re the ones who introduce polygamy to everybody?

Mark  49:13  Oh, they think that. Yeah, so they baptize, I think, like six or seven people. I don’t know if we can really definitively say any of those people are Cochranites.

GT  49:25 In Maine?

Mark  49:25  Yeah. But, the person that really does a lot of the work there–oh, what’s his name? One of the apostles who, it’ll come to me in a minute. It’s one of the apostles who apostatizes during the 1837 deal in Kirtland.

GT  49:49  McLellin, Marsh?

Mark  49:52  No, it’s not Marsh. It’s not one of the Johnson brothers. It’ll come to me in a minute. So, he’s the one that does most of the baptizing. [John Boynton] He baptizes a lot of the people there. We don’t have his journal, because he leaves the Church. But, we do have his companion’s journal, and I’ve looked through it.  He never mentions the Cochranites. He never does. I think part of that was because they were doing a lot of their work in Saco, where a lot of the remnant groups were actually in some of the surrounding villages. Anyhow, they get a congregation. They get a branch of about 60 people, which is a good-sized branch.

Mark  50:31  So, they’re around. The argument is the majority of the Quorum of the Twelve go to a conference there in 1835. The idea is that they think that there’s influence there, that somehow the apostles picked it up. I think the case is pretty circumstantial. One of the arguments is that there’s a lot of similarity in terminology, like spiritual wives and things like that. To the extent that that’s true, I don’t think that that speaks to an influence directly, or to the Quorum of the Twelve specifically, because Joseph Smith had plenty of exposure to this, too.  His brother-in-law, Arthur Milliken, was born and raised there at Saco, Maine. So, he actually has two members of his family, two siblings that marry people from that area. The other one is his Don Carlos’ wife, Agnes Coolbrith. She’s from that area too. She gets baptized by Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith on that mission. She’s living in Boston. Her parents still live in the area. They visit their parents while they’re up there. So, there’s this.  There’s lots of places he could have been influenced by that. So Joseph…

GT  51:58 That’s funny, because that timeline is roughly Fanny Alger time period too.

Mark  52:04  It’s a bit before. I guess roughly. So, maybe it does. It’s interesting. His sister, Lucy and her husband, Arthur Milliken, actually go back to Saco in the Nauvoo period. Their son, Don Carlos Smith Milliken was born there. There’s a lot of connections there. Of course, Joseph’s brother, Samuel, was in that mission, too. So, he has a lot of people in his family that know about this. My point is, if you’re going to argue based on circumstantial evidence…

GT  52:43  It’s pretty weak.

Mark  52:43  I mean, you can look at circumstantial evidence and connections in a lot of other places, too. Another one that Richard and Pamela Price may have said was that there’s Augusta Cobb, who’s Brigham Young’s second plural wife. She gets baptized by Samuel and Orson in that mission in Boston before they go to Saco. But it’s a day or two after that they baptize her that there’s that incident in Boston, where there was those Cochranite people expressing Cochranite doctrine in a meeting that they had. So, they say, “Well, that means that she was a person that was well acquainted with Cochranism.”  I really don’t see that really being a connection. Again, Agnes Coolbrith is also in that same group that gets baptized. She’s actually from that area. She actually becomes a plural wife to Joseph Smith. So, if you’re going to argue circumstantial evidence and exposure leads to this and that, then I think that’s a much stronger connection than anything.

GT  52:48 To Joseph.

Mark  53:50  Yeah, to Joseph.  So, when it comes to the Cochranites, that’s something I don’t particularly find compelling. There’s another thing they say is, “Well, the apostles did foot washing in England. You even have William Clayton, who has never been there so they must have picked up that and footwashing from the Cochranites, which they did.  Foot washing is a very common Christian practice.

GT  54:13  Right. There’s a lot of people who do it.

Mark  54:14  It’s in the Bible. I mean, yeah.  I don’t know. I don’t think that they really needed the Cochranites, that anybody really needed them to learn about polygamy or anything like that. I mean, it’s in the Bible. There’s a lot of other groups. The term spiritual wife had been, was widely used at the time. It wasn’t something that they were having an exclusive thing on. So, yeah, that’s something I really don’t think there’s a lot of merit. I would be interested in exploring that a little bit more. I mean, there were a lot of converts to it, but  I sat down, actually, to look to see what kind of converts from Cochranism came into the Church who actually gathered. What I found is that there’s a lot of RLDS members that came from that area. I don’t know if they were Cochranites. There’s a lot. Josiah Butterfield, who was in the high council in Kirtland, he’s one. He’s from that area. There’s quite a few of the Milliken families. There’s Milliken’s that are distant relatives to Arthur, they are cousins or something that stayed in Kirtland and then affiliated with the RLDS Church. So, there’s actually quite a few.

GT  54:45 So, that would be some strikes against it, right?

Mark  55:27  Yeah. Yeah, and the biggest thing, I think, too, is I really haven’t found any sources about anybody who knew the Quorum of the Twelve, who actually knew the Cochranites, who made that connection. I think it’s towards the late 1800s, that people start making the argument that there’s a connection. And when they make the argument, they connect Joseph Smith,. They connect it to Joseph Smith.  They don’t say it’s the Quorum of the Twelve that’s a rogue unit. So, anyhow, that’s about it. Basically, the Prices use that argument. They say that they start experimenting with polygamy in England, and then when they come back to Nauvoo, they’re doing it behind Joseph’s back. After he dies, then they, when they assume control of the Church, that’s when they put polygamy in the base. So, they’re not saying what Joseph Smith III said, that it happened after.  It’s not the traditional RLDS position, this is a new position. So, that really becomes the basis for a lot of the arguments now.  That’s the narrative that you hear most commonly today.

Mark  56:36  So, Denver Snuffer–so with the rise of the remnant movement, Denver Snuffer, and a lot of the, I use the term Neo-primitivist, people that are, that come–I don’t know if that’s going to catch on, if they like that term. I’ve also heard the term Neo-fundamentalist. It’s people like Denver Snuffer that have that come from a Utah-based LDS background. I use the term LDS here in contrast and compare as opposed to other restoration churches, because we are talking about other restoration churches that have become disillusioned with the current church and the Utah-era church as well. They believe that we ought to get back to what they see as the pure form of Mormonism taught by Joseph Smith. Part of that involves taking polygamy out of picture.

GT  57:30  Right.

Mark  57:32  That group is a little, they’re a little bit different. Now, from whatever I’ve read of Denver Snuffer, I’ve never heard him refer to the Cochranites or really say that the Quorum of the Twelve is rogue.

GT  57:43 Yeah, me neither.

Mark  57:44  I don’t know that he has.  He didn’t say that your interview. And then the papers and things from him, I haven’t heard him say that. But there are a lot of people associated with the remnant groups that [think that.]

GT  57:53  And Denver does say that he, I mean, he puts it all on Brigham, nothing on Joseph.

Mark  58:00  Denver Snuffer says something that’s interesting, definitely. Joseph Smith, III, kind of played with this idea. He later said, “No, this isn’t what happened. I don’t think this is what happened now.” But the idea that Joseph did do sealings.  He did sealings between people. He sealed people to himself, but it wasn’t polygamy.

GT  58:23  That’s kind of what Denver says.

Mark  58:24  That is what Denver says.  I don’t know that he’s ever really fleshed out exactly all what that entails.

GT  58:34  I know in this book, Passing the Heavenly Gift, one of the things that Denver said was D&C 132, and he doesn’t stand by this anymore…

Mark  58:44  No, he doesn’t.

GT  58:45  But, I think it’s part of his evolution of thought, is D&C 132 is four revelations, and that people conflated polygamy with the sealing power.

Mark  58:55 Right. That’s part of the argument now, too, that that was misinterpreted to be the sealing power, or that the sealing power was interpreted to be polygamy.  It was corrupted to be that.  He says what happens was the law of adoption. You have somebody like Joseph Smith he has the position to hold the keys and you can use various terms for that.  He’s the person who has had his calling and election made sure. He’s a dispensation head. There’s a lot of different ways you can say that. So, you get sealed to Joseph Smith, and then you seal your ancestors to you, and that’s how the family of God becomes united. And that’s true, Joseph Smith was teaching that.

GT  59:37 Yes.

Mark  59:39  But, what they’re saying is that he was teaching that, and not polygamy. So, that’s what that’s what became… Whitney Horning wrote the book, Joseph Smith Revealed. I don’t know that she’s associated with the Remnant [Church.] I haven’t heard that she has been.  But her book is popular among the Remnant.  And that’s the position she takes. What she says is people like Sarah Ann Whitney were sealed to Joseph Smith, in the book she says “as wives,” but that was merely like a ceremonial term. And it’s later Brigham Young adds a part where “by wives,” you mean that you live together, that you have marital relations together, that you have children. That’s something that comes along later, and then and then that gets retroactively applied by the people to when Joseph Smith was alive, to give it more legitimacy. So, that’s kind of that narrative here.

Mark  1:00:48  So, today, I think there’s basically those two narratives. You’re going to have the Prices’ narrative where they talk about how polygamy is a complete fraud, complete falsification. There’s nothing going on like that.  Ron Karren, who wrote the Exoneration, I think it’s called. I’m going to get the name right. The Exoneration of Emma, Hyrum and Joseph. He goes along with the Prices, too. He elaborates on there. That’s a popular book you’ll hear quoted quite a bit. So, that’s the one narrative, that it’s a complete fraud. The other one is, that’s very popular among remnant, and that’s the partial fraud thing about how it was sealings, and I believe of one of my interactions, the people that..

GT  1:01:39  Oh, sealings and polygamy got tied together, is that what you’re saying?

Mark  1:01:42  Yeah.  The most vocal group right now is another group that’s kind of similar is by Phil Davis. He is another individual that’s come out recently. His is much smaller group, but he’s got some pretty media savvy people that work with him and they’re the ones that are very much leading the charge on the Utah front on this, too. They run the site, Hemlock Knots.[2] You’ll see references to that a lot. From what I can tell, at least they kind of go along with, it was sealings that was converted to polygamy. So, those are your major counter narratives that we have out right there right now. There are variations on those, and it really depends on who you talk to you what all the little nuances are. That’s basically it, or at least as a general idea, that’s it. So, that’s kind of the evolution of that, the development of that.

Introduction

I think most people agree that polygamy was practiced secretly in Nauvoo.  Polygamy skeptics like to blame it on Brigham Young, but even if that were true, what types of secret evidence would we expect to see?  Would that apply to Joseph if he was secretly practicing polygamy as well?  Check out our conversation….

Interview

GT  1:03:06  One of the things I’d like to do, if we could, is talk about some of the evidence. I’d like to go back to Kirtland, but I know in your paper you’ve stuck with Nauvoo.

Mark  1:03:19  Right. We could.

GT  1:03:23  Let’s go with the strongest evidence first, and then we can jump back to Kirtland.

Mark  1:03:26  Yeah, you have the strongest kind of evidence. So again, since polygamy is something that was being denied openly while being practiced privately, you’re going to have, basically, a few kinds of evidence. You’re going to have, (I would say) four kinds of evidence. And it’s important to look at all of these. You’re going to have privately held evidence that are private records by the people that are participating, that are pro-polygamy that are faithful. You’re going to have that.

GT  1:03:45  Faithful to the LDS Church.

Mark  1:04:07  Yes, faithful to LDS. Because somebody who is faithful is not going to talk openly about polygamy at that time. They’re not going to do it.

GT  1:04:18  Because it is against the law for one thing.

Mark  1:04:21  Yeah. Well, because it’s against Joseph’s wishes.

GT  1:04:25  Joseph doesn’t want people talking about it.

Mark  1:04:27  Joseph doesn’t want people to talk about, so they’re not going to do it. The other people are the people who have some insight and knowledge that feel no obligation to honor Joseph’s wishes on that.

GT  1:04:41  Dissidents.

Mark  1:04:40  Yeah. So, they’re dissidents. They’re people, a lot of times, it’s because of polygamy, that they’re dissenters. That’s what’s turned them off. Other times it’s other reasons that they’ve been turned off and since they have this, they’re going to use this as retaliation. It’s going to be that. So you’re going to have those. Those are going to be your contemporary evidences. It’s going to fall into those two categories. Those are really the only reasonable expectations.

Mark  1:05:06  Then, you’re going to have later evidence from friendly people who are participants that are going to talk about it after the secret’s out. Then, the fourth category, I think this is a very good, big, important one to talk about, is third party evidence. So, this is going to be accounts from people, usually later, after the secret’s out, who are neither anti-Mormon dissenters nor pro-polygamy. So, people who have no reason to want to discredit Joseph Smith, [nor] who want to attack to Joseph Smith, and have no reason to want to promote that he was a polygamist.

Mark  1:05:54  Now you asked about rules about evidence. There is another thing about hearsay. It’s called the statement against interest. If somebody says something that goes against their interest, that carries some weight. So, we can look at some of the contemporary evidence. Do you want to start with contemporary evidence?

GT  1:06:16  Let’s go with contemporary evidence.

Mark  1:06:18  Yeah, there’s some of it. Again, for the vast majority of Nauvoo plural marriages, and whenever you talk about the contemporary evidence for Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, you have to ask how does it fit in the context of plural marriage generally, in Nauvoo? In other words, is the evidence of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, is it more or less than it is for the other plural marriages that happened at the time? Really, for the vast majority of plural marriages that happened in Nauvoo, the first time it’s ever on paper, is when the temple was operational, when they started doing sealings in the Nauvoo Temple in January and February 1846. Now, this is after Joseph has died. So even a lot of Brigham Young’s [marriages] like Lucy Decker, who’s Brigham Young’s first plural wife. That’s the first time we see it on paper, that he and Lucy Decker [were married.] Even though they have a child by this point, that’s the first time we’ve seen it on paper. We don’t get the date when they were actually sealed in 1842, until the 1869 affidavits, when Lucy Decker wrote an affidavit saying that she was sealed to Brigham Young in 1842. That’s the first time we get the dates about when it happens. So, that kind of gives you an idea about how [secret