(Redirected from Emma Hale Smith)
Emma Hale Smith
'Emma Hale Smith Bidamon' (
10 July 1804–
30 April 1879) was married to
Joseph Smith, Jr. until his death in 1844, and was an early leader of the
Latter Day Saint movement in her own right, both during his life and afterward as a member of the
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. She was also named in 1842 as the inaugural president of the
Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, a woman's service organization which was later reorganized in
Utah as a significant branch of
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints under the name ''Relief Society''.
Life
Early life and first marriage, 1804–1829
Emma was born
10 July 1804, in
Harmony, Pennsylvania, as the seventh child of Isaac Hale and Elizabeth Lewis Hale. Emma first met her future husband,
Joseph Smith, Jr. in 1825. Smith lived near
Palmyra, New York, but boarded with the Hales in Harmony while he was employed in a company of men hoping to unearth buried treasure (specifically a silver mine for Josiah Stowell). Although the company found no treasure, Smith returned to Harmony several times seeking the hand of Emma. Isaac Hale refused to allow the marriage because he considered Smith's occupation disreputable. Finally, on
17 January 1827, Smith and Emma eloped across the state line to South Bainbridge, New York, where they were married the following day. The couple moved to the home of Smith's parents on the edge of
Manchester Township near Palmyra.
While there, on
22 September 1827, Joseph and Emma took a horse and carriage belonging to
Joseph Knight and went to a hill now known as the
Hill Cumorah where Joseph reported receiving a set of
Golden Plates. This created a great deal of excitement in the area. In December of 1827, the couple decided to move to be with Emma's parents' in Harmony where they reconciled to an extent with Isaac and Elizabeth Hale, who helped Emma and Joseph obtain a house and a small farm. While living there, Joseph began what he termed the "translation" of the plates into the
Book of Mormon, and for a time, Emma acted as a scribe. She became a physical witness of the plates, reporting that she felt them through a cloth, traced the pages through the cloth with her fingers, heard the metallic sound they made as she moved them, and felt their weight. She later wrote in an interview with her son, Joseph Smith III: "In writing for your father I frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us." (History of the RLDS Church, 8 vols. (Independence, Missouri: Herald House, 1951), "Last Testimony of Sister Emma," 3:356.)
While in Harmony on
15 June 1828, Emma gave birth to her first child—a son named Alvin—who lived only a few hours.
In May 1829, Emma and Joseph left Harmony and went to live with
David Whitmer in
Fayette, New York. While there, Joseph finished work on the Book of Mormon, which was published by March of 1830.
"Elect Lady" and the early church, 1830–1839
On
6 April 1830, Joseph and 5 other men established the "
Church of Christ" (whose name was changed to the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" in 1838).
Emma was baptized in
28 June 1830 in
Colesville, New York where an early
branch of the church was established. During the next weeks, Joseph was arrested and tried in South Bainbridge for "glass looking" on the state's vagrancy law. Emma may have been disheartened and Joseph reported a revelation which instructed her to "murmur not" but also comforted her with the assurance, "thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady, whom I have called."
[1] The revelation goes on to state that Emma would "be ordained under [Joseph's] hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church" and further authorizes Emma to "make a selection of sacred Hymns" for the church.
Joseph and Emma returned to Harmony for a time, but relations with Emma's parents broke down, and the couple returned to live again in the homes of members of the growing church. They lived first with the Whitmers again in Fayette, then with
Newel K. Whitney and his family in
Kirtland, Ohio and then into a cabin on a farm owned by
Isaac Morley. It was here on
April 30,
1831 that Emma prematurely gave birth to twins—named Thaddeus and Louisa—who died hours later. That same day Julia Clapp Murdock died giving birth to twins, named Joseph and
Julia. When they were nine days old, their father, John Murdock gave the infants to the Smiths who adopted them and raised them as their own. On
2 September 1831, Emma, Joseph and the twins moved into John Johnson's home in
Hiram, Ohio.
On
November 6,
1832, Emma gave birth to a son, named
Joseph Smith III, in the upper room of
Newel K. Whitney's store in Kirtland. Young Joseph (as he became known) was the first of the children she bore to live to adulthood. A second son,
Frederick Granger Williams Smith (named for a
counselor in the church's
First Presidency), followed on
June 29,
1836.
While in Kirtland, Emma's feelings about temperance and the use of tobacco may have influenced her husband's decision to pray about dietary questions. These prayers resulted in the "
Word of Wisdom". Also, Emma's first selection of hymns was published as a hymnal for the church's use. It was also in Kirtland that Emma's husband began to teach and practice the doctrine of "
plural marriage"—although this was not yet an official doctrine or practice of the church. And it was in Kirtland that the collapse of Joseph's banking venture, the
Kirtland Safety Society, led to serious problems for the church and the family. On
January 12,
1838, he was forced to leave the state or face charges of fraud and illegal banking.
Emma and her family followed after, as they could, and made a new home on the frontier in the Mormon settlement of
Far West, Missouri. There, on
June 2,
1838, Emma gave birth to another son,
Alexander Hale Smith. Events of the
Mormon War soon escalated, resulting in Joseph's surrender and imprisonment by Missouri officials. Emma and her family were forced to leave the state with the majority of Latter Day Saint refugees. She crossed the Mississippi River which had frozen over in February of 1839. Of these times, she later wrote:
:"No one but God knows the reflections of my mind and the feelings of my heart when I left our house and home, and almost all of everything that we possessed excepting our little children, and took my journey out of the State of Missouri, leaving [Joseph] shut up in that lonesome prison. But the reflection is more than human nature ought to bear, and if God does not record our sufferings and avenge our wrongs on them that are guilty, I shall be sadly mistaken."
Early years in Nauvoo, 1839–1844
Emma and her family lived with friendly non-Mormons John and Sarah Cleveland in
Quincy, Illinois, until Joseph escaped custody in Missouri. The family moved to a new Latter-Day Saint settlement in Illinois which Joseph named "
Nauvoo." On
May 9,
1839, they moved into a two story log house there which they called the "Homestead." They lived there until 1842 when a much larger house, known as the "Mansion House" was built across the street. A wing (no longer extant) was added to this house, which Emma operated as a hotel.
On
March 17,
1842 the
Relief Society was formally organized as the women's auxiliary to the church and Emma became its founding president. Shortly before this, Joseph initiated the
Anointed Quorum—a prayer-circle of important men and women in the church that included Emma.
Joseph had continued to practice
plural marriage in secret. In Nauvoo, he began to privately expand the circle of men and women who were taught this doctrine. Joseph always denied the principle of plural marriage in public. Joseph's brother Hyrum was originally a strong opponent of plural marriage and asked Joseph to "seek a revelation" to settle the issue. Reportedly, a revelation that Joseph dictated on
12 July 1843 (although it may have been given earlier) converted Hyrum to the principle and Hyrum convinced Joseph to let him share it with Emma. Rumors of polygamy and "spiritual wifery" had dogged the Mormons for over a decade, and Emma had long been a public opponent of it. The reported revelation addressed Emma specifically and commanded that unless she "cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord." (''See''
Doctrine and Covenants, LDS, 132:54.) According to later reports, Emma took the copy of the written revelation that Hyrum had presented to her and burned it . Further testimonies affirm that she later agreed to let Joseph marry (or re-marry) a number of plural wives. On
May 11,
1843 she took part in a marriage ceremony between Joseph and Emily D. Partridge and Eliza M. Partridge. Nevertheless, throughout her life Emma continued to publicly deny the principle of plural marriage and untruthfully and repeatedly stating that neither she nor Joseph had any part in it . The reasons for the denials is not known, however, Joseph often asked those whom he told never to reveal the doctrine publicly .
Rumors concerning polygamy and other practices threatened to erupt into the open in June 1844, with the publication of the ''
Nauvoo Expositor'' by disaffected former church leaders. The press was destroyed by the town marshal on orders from the town council (of which Joseph was a member) which set into motion the events that ultimately led to his arrest and incarceration in the jail in
Carthage. While he was there, a mob of about 200 armed men stormed Carthage Jail in the late afternoon of
27 June,
1844. Gun shots killed both Joseph and his brother Hyrum.
Later years in Nauvoo, 1844–1879
Joseph's death threw both the church and Emma's family into disorder. Emma was left a pregnant widow—it would be on
November 17,
1844, that she gave birth to
David Hyrum Smith, Joseph's and her last child together. In addition to being church president, Joseph had been trustee-in-trust for the church. As a result, his estate was entirely wrapped up with the finances of the church. Untangling the church's property and debts from Emma's personal property and debts proved a long and potentially dangerous process for Emma and her family.
The church itself was left with no clear successor and a
succession crisis ensued. Emma wanted
William Marks, president of the church's central
stake, to assume the
church presidency, but Marks favored
Sidney Rigdon for the role. After a meeting on August 6, a congregation of the church voted that the
Quorum of the Twelve Apostles should become the new
First Presidency of the church.
Brigham Young, president of the Quorum, then became "de-facto" president of the church in Nauvoo.
Relations between Young and Emma steadily deteriorated, and Emma's friends as well as members of the Smith family were cut off from the church. Relations between the Latter-day Saints and their neighbors also declined into near open warfare, and finally Young made the decision to relocate in the West. When he and the majority of the Latter-day Saints abandoned Nauvoo in early 1846, Emma and her children remained behind in the mostly empty town.
Nearly two years later, a close friend and non-Mormon,
Major Lewis C. Bidamon, proposed marriage and became Emma's second husband on
December 23,
1847. Bidamon moved into the mansion house and became step-father to Emma's children. Emma and Bidamon attempted to operate a store and to continue to operate their large house as a hotel, but Nauvoo had too few residents and visitors to make either venture very profitable. Emma and her family remained rich in real estate but poor in capital.
Unlike other members of the Smith family who had at times favored the claims of
James J. Strang and/or
William Smith, Emma and her children continued to live as unaffiliated Latter Day Saints. Many Latter Day Saints believed that her eldest son,
Joseph Smith III, would one day be called to take his father's place. Knowing the dangers and hardships firsthand, Emma may have preferred a different path for her son. However, when he reported receiving a calling from God to take his father's place as head of a "New Organization" of the Latter Day Saint church, she supported his decision. Both she and Joseph III traveled to a
conference at
Amboy, Illinois and on
April 6,
1860, Joseph was sustained as
president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which later became the
Community of Christ. Emma became a member of this organization without
rebaptism, as her original 1830 baptism was still considered valid.
Emma and Joseph III returned to Nauvoo after the conference and he led the church from there until moving to
Plano, Illinois in 1866. Joseph called upon his mother to help prepare a hymnal for the New Organization, just as she had for the early church.
Major Bidamon renovated a portion of the unfinished "Nauvoo House" hotel (across the street from the mansion house) and he and Emma moved there in 1869. Emma died peacefully in her home on
April 30,
1879. Her memorial service was held May 2 of that year in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Richard Lyman Bushman, in his recent biography “Joseph Smith - Rough Stone Rolling” asserts that Emma’s second husband, Lewis Bidamon, had an affair after he married Emma which produced a child. According to Bushman, Major Bidamon brought the child home for Emma to raise when it was 4 years old and the mistress also lived in the Bidamon household with Bidamon and Emma.
Hymns and hymnals
In June 1832 a selection of six hymns were published in the first issue of
''The Evening and the Morning Star'', an early church periodical (''See'' ).
The first church hymnal came off the press in 1836 (and maybe late 1835) at
Kirtland, Ohio [2]. It was titled
''A Collection of Sacred Hymns, for the Church of the Latter Day Saints'' and contained 90 hymn texts (no music). More than half of the texts were borrowed from other Protestant traditions, but often changed slightly to reinforce the theology of the early church. For example, Hymn 15, changes
Isaac Watts'
Joy to the World from a song about Christmas to a song about the return of Christ (''See''
Joy to the world! the Lord will come!) Most of these changes as well as a large number of the original songs included in the hymnal are attributed to
William Wines Phelps.
Emma also compiled a second hymnal by the same title, which was published in
Nauvoo, Illinois, 1841. This contained 304 hymn texts.
When her son,
Joseph Smith III, in 1860 was called as the president/prophet of the Reorganization (now known as
Community of Christ) she was again asked to compile a hymnal. ''Latter Day Saints' Selection of Hymns'' was published in 1861, although the extent of her involvement is not known.
Female Relief Society of Nauvoo
Emma was elected as the first president of the
Relief Society of Nauvoo,
17 March 1842. The organization was formed to "provoke the brethren to good works in looking to the wants of the poor, [search] after objects of charity...[and] to assist by correcting the virtues of the female community," according to the minutes of the Relief Society.
Polygamy
Main articles: Joseph Smith, Jr. and polygamy
Newell and Avery, in their biography, ''Mormon Enigma'', cite evidence that Emma witnessed several marriages of
Joseph Smith, Jr. to plural wives. However, like all those who participated in early Plural Marriages, Emma publicly denied knowledge of her husband's involvement in the practice of
polygamy.
Her son,
Joseph Smith III, became prophet/president of the Reorganization — which gathered many of the Latter Day Saints still scattered across the Midwest and elsewhere. Many of the Midwestern Latter Day Saints had broken with Brigham Young and/or James Strang because of earnest opposition to polygamy. Emma's continuing public denial of the practice seemed to lend strength to their cause, and opposition to polygamy became a tenet of the Reorganized church (now known as
Community of Christ). Over the years many church historians attempted to prove that the practice had originated with
Brigham Young.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, with increasing professionalization in the reorganized church historians office, some (but by no means all) of the members of the reorganized church have come to accept the evidence that the system originated with Smith himself. Some recent reorganized church historians acknowledge Smith's practice of polygamy. That being said, there remains no actual proof of Smith's involvement, and much of the evidence is claimed by some to be suspect.
References
★
Linda King Newell and
Valeen Tippetts Avery, ''Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith'' (New York: Doubleday, 1984). ISBN 0-385-17166-8. 2nd edition. rev., Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
★ Michael Hicks, ''Mormonism and Music: A History'', (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989; [Paperback Ed., 2003]).
★ Dan Vogel, ''Early Mormon Documents'', Vol. 4, (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002).
★ Roger D. Launius, ''Joseph Smith III: Pragmatic Prophet'', (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
★ Richard Lyman Bushman, ''Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling'', (New York: Knopf, 2005)
External links
#
Emma Tribute/Hymn Festival Information on Emma's life and contribution to hymnody (bicentennial celebration)
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
