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Joseph Smith -
Honest Seer or Lying Polygamist
13. Evidence suggests that it was Brigham not Joseph that started plural marriage.
Brigham Young had come to her mother’s home and explained the polygamist doctrine to her mother and herself and as he left telling them “you must tell no one of this, we must keep it quiet for as yet Bro. Joseph is not with us.”Sidney Rigdon accused the Twelve of carrying on spiritual wifery less than four months after Joseph died.
It is a fact, so well known, that the Twelve and their adherents have endeavored to carry on this spiritual wife business in secret ... and have gone to the most shameful and desperate lengths, to keep it from the public. ... How often have these men and their accomplices stood up before the congregation, and called God and all the holy Angels to witness, that there was no such doctrine taught in the church ; and it has now come to light, by testimony which cannot be gainsaid, that at the time they thus dared heaven and insulted the world, they were living in the practice of these enormities; and there were multitudes of their followers in the congregation at the time who knew it. (Sidney Rigdon, Messenger and Advocate 1 [October 15, 1844]: 14 (emphasis added) )
If Joseph Smith originated plural marriage in the church, why was their a large increase in those marriages after he died. In the six months of 1844 following Joseph’s death, Brigham Young increased his plural wives from 4 to 14. Heber C Kimball increased from 1 to 10. In the church at large, there were 56 new plural marriages in 1845. And in 1846, there were an astonishing 255.
Additionally, there was hardly any children born to polygamous unions while Joseph was alive.
According to an analysis by George D. Smith, there were a total of 42 alleged plural marriage unions involving 25 men (excluding Joseph Smith’s alleged activity) while Joseph was alive. There were 5 such unions in 1842, 21
in 1843, and 14 more before Joseph’s death in June 1844.
George Reynolds, a secretary to the First Presidency, hypothesized about the low birth rate as follows:
"The facts that you refer to are almost as great a mystery to us as they are to you; but the reason generally assigned by the [plural] wives themselves is, that owing to the peculiar circumstances by which they were surrounded, they were so nervous and in such constant fear that they did not conceive."(First Presidency Letterpress Copybooks , Letter to H. Neidig June 7 1892.)Reynolds does not dispute the lack of children. Instead he asserts that conception was
simply prevented by fear. However, it seems implausible that nearly all 40 women would be so
distressed over a period of 3 years that conceiving was virtually impossible. As Bergara points
out, during this same period of time before Joseph’s death, there were 14 children born by the
legal wives of the alleged polygamists.(Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-44
, p. 50)