Emma Smith

Emma Hale Smith Bidamon (July 10, 1804 – April 30, 1879) was married to Joseph Smith, Jr., until his death in 1844, and was an early leader of the Latter Day Saint movement, during Joseph Smith's lifetime and afterward as a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS, now the Community of Christ). She was also named in 1842 as the inaugural president of the Ladies' Relief Society of Nauvoo,^[2][3] a women's service organization.

Life

Early life and first marriage, 1804–1829

Emma was born July 10, 1804, in Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, 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, a farmer whose home still stands on the north side of the Susquehanna River on New York State Route 7 in Nineveh, New York, just west of Afton). Although the company found no treasure, Smith returned to Harmony several times to court Emma. Isaac Hale refused to allow the marriage because he considered Smith's occupation disreputable. Finally, on January 17, 1827, Smith and Emma eloped across the state line to South Bainbridge (Afton), New York, where they were married the following day. The marriage site is now the Afton Fairgrounds, located on New York State Route 41 on the east side of the Susquehanna River; and a New York State Historical Marker commemorates the location. The couple moved to Smith's parents' home on the edge of Manchester Township near Palmyra.

On September 22, 1827, Joseph and Emma took a horse and carriage belonging to Joseph Knight, Sr., and went to a hill now known as the Hill Cumorah where Joseph claimed to receive a set of Golden Plates. This created a great deal of excitement in the area. In December 1827, the couple decided to move to Harmony, where they reconciled—to some extent—with Isaac and Elizabeth Hale. Emma's parents helped her and Joseph obtain a house and a small farm. Once they settled in, Joseph began work on the Book of Mormon with Emma acting 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."^[4] While in Harmony on June 15, 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 1830.

"Elect Lady" and the early church, 1830–1839

On April 6, 1830, Joseph and five 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 by Oliver Cowdery on June 28, 1830, in Colesville, New York, where an early branch of the church was established. During the next weeks, Joseph was arrested, tried and exonerated in South Bainbridge for "glass looking" on the state's vagrancy law (glass looking was a common scam in which the glass looker claimed to have the ability to find buried treasure for a fee). 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."^[5] 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 went back to staying in the homes of members of the growing church. They lived first with the Whitmers 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 gave premature birth to twins, Thaddeus and Louisa, who died hours later. That same day, Julia Clapp Murdock died giving birth to twins, Joseph and Julia. When they were nine days old, their father, John, gave the infants to the Smiths to raise as their own. On September 2, 1831, the new family moved into John Johnson's home in Hiram, Ohio. The infant Joseph died of exposure or pneumonia in late March 1832, after a door was left open during a mob attack on Smith.^[6]

On November 6, 1832, Emma gave birth to 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 her natural children to live to adulthood. A second son, Frederick Granger Williams Smith (named for a councilor 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 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 soon followed and made a new home on the frontier in the Latter Day Saint settlement of Far West, Missouri, where Emma gave birth on June 2, 1838 to Alexander Hale Smith. Events of the 1838 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 1839. Of these times, she later wrote:

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 24, 1842 the Ladies' Relief Society was formally organized as the women's auxiliary to the church and Emma became its founding president, with Sarah M. Cleveland and Elizabeth Ann Whitney as her counselors. 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 society. Shortly before this, Joseph initiated the Anointed Quorum—a prayer-circle of important men and women in the church that included Emma.

Rumors concerning polygamy and other practices erupted into the open by 1842. Emma was involved in campaigns to publicly condemn polygamy and deny any involvement by her husband. Emma authorized and was the main signatory of a petition in Summer 1842, with a thousand female signatures, denying Joseph Smith, Jr. was connected with polygamy.^[7] As President of the Ladies' Relief Society, she authorized the publishing of a certificate in October 1842 denouncing polygamy and denying her husband as its creator or participant.^[8] In March 1844, Emma published:

We raise our voices and hands against John C. Bennett's 'spiritual wife system', as a scheme of profligates to seduce women; and they that harp upon it, wish to make it popular for the convenience of their own cupidity; wherefore, while the marriage bed, undefiled is honorable, let polygamy, bigamy, fornication, adultery, and prostitution, be frowned out of the hearts of honest men to drop in the gulf of fallen nature.^[9]

In June 1844, with the publication of the Nauvoo Expositor by disaffected former church members, 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 June 27, 1844, and both Joseph and his brother Hyrum were killed.

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, her and Joseph's 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 alienated from Young's followers, the bulk of the church members gathered in the Nauvoo area. 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 of Nauvoo abandoned the city 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 stepfather to Emma's children. Emma and Bidamon attempted to operate a store and to continue using 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 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, adding the word Reorganized to the name in 1872 (presently known as 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 III called upon his mother to help prepare a hymnal for the reorganization, 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 1871. Emma died peacefully in the Nauvoo House on April 30, 1879. Her funeral was held May 2 of that year in Nauvoo, Illinois, with RLDS Church minister Mark Hill Forscutt preaching the sermon.

Hymns and hymnals

In June 1832 a selection of six hymns was published in the first issue of The Evening and the Morning Star, an early church periodical.^[10]

The first church hymnal came off the press in 1836 (and maybe late 1835) at Kirtland, Ohio.^[11] 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 in 1841. This contained 304 hymn texts.

When her son Joseph III became president/prophet of what would be later known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, she was again asked to compile a hymnal. Latter Day Saints' Selection of Hymns was published in 1861 by what was then called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Polygamy

Newell and Avery, in their biography, Mormon Enigma, make the claim that Emma witnessed several marriages of Joseph Smith, Jr. to plural wives. However, throughout her lifetime Emma publicly denied knowledge of her husband's involvement in the practice of polygamy and denied on her deathbed that the practice had ever occurred. Emma stated,

Emma Smith claimed that the very first time she ever became aware of a polygamy revelation being attributed by Mormons to Joseph Smith was when she read about it in Orson Pratt's booklet The Seer in 1853.^[13] 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 RLDS church (now known as Community of Christ). Over the years many RLDS church historians attempted to prove that the practice had originated with Brigham Young.^[14]

Notes

References

External links

• Biography from Joseph Smith Papers Project

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