Love, marriage, and family under some of the most trying of circumstances.

The letters between Joseph and Emma Smith.

Coming up next on the Joseph Smith Papers.

K-jazz Television, in cooperation with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of the Joseph Smith Papers. And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

It has been said that to know who a man really is,

observe him by his fireside.

Joseph Smith was the Prophet of the Restoration.

And with that came heavy responsibility and much persecution.

But Joseph was also a husband and a father,

and he took those roles very seriously.

Today, through the letters that they wrote to each other,

we take a closer look at Joseph and his wife, Emma,

their home, their family, and their marriage.

Considering how many times Joseph and Emma Smith were separated during their brief 17 year marriage, it's really unfortunate that we don't have more letters. We know that they wrote often to each other because the letters we do have indicate that they are responding to something one or the other had written.

But the few that we have,

I think give us some insight into how they dealt with the problems in their lives, their feelings toward each other,

and the circumstances in which they found themselves living at particular times.

There are 21 letters that that were sent between Joseph and Emma, and there were others.

I originally thought maybe we could collect those 21 letters and get the

love letters. They don’t read that way.

The frontier mindset was more conservative about expressing emotion. And you can see the love that they had and the loyalty that they had. But above all, the loyalty to God.

We couldn't really characterize their letters to one another as love letters in the traditional sense, but they're certainly filled with the kind of concern that they had for one another, and their concern for their children. But there are places,

little sentences here and there that we might call terms of endearment,

particularly from Joseph. In 1832, from Missouri,

he wrote, “The thoughts of home, of Emma, and Julia, rushes upon my mind like a flood,

and I could wish for a moment to be with them.”

On another occasion, he called her “my dear and beloved companion of my bosom in tribulation and affliction.”

He often reminded her in the letters that “my heart is entwined around yours forever and ever.” You can see that he was always torn between the duties he had as Prophet and the duties and responsibilities and love he had as a father and as a husband.

And on another occasion, when he was under arrest in Missouri, he wrote, “Oh, God, grant that I may have the privilege of seeing once more my lovely family

to press them to my bosom,

and kissing their lovely cheeks would fill my heart with unspeakable great gratitude.”

We don't have as many statements like that from Emma's letters, but from a couple of them, I could read these.

“I cannot tell you my feelings when I found I could not see you before you left.

Yet I expect you can realize them.” They knew each other. She knew he understood. He understood her feelings.

Another time she said, “I wish it could be possible for you to be at home.

The children are sick.

You must remember them, for they all remember you.

And I can hardly pacify Julia and Joseph when they found out you were not coming home soon.”

The children felt his absences as much as Emma.

Few of Emma's letters have survived to the present day,

and there are reasons for that.

But there are enough of both of their letters for us to get some idea of what they were like

and what they held most dear in this life.

She was in a position to save his letters.

She was always home, wherever home was when he wrote to her.

But he was not. He was either in hiding, living in someone else’s home,

he was in prisoned, or he was traveling

on Church business with Zion’s camp, for example, or going to Washington or to Salem, to New York.

And he probably didn't have the means to preserve those letters.

What comes through to me as I read their letters is what a close partnership they seem to have. She was a very astute woman. She was educated. Her letters show that education. As I have read his letters,

it's easy to forget the fact that he can't use all of the proper grammar and spelling, punctuation and so on, because the loftiness of his language is what affects me as I read through. He seemed to just have a vocabulary and an understanding and a sense of imagery that comes through, and you forget the fact that maybe something is spelled phonetically.

While their letters were not love letters in the traditional, romantic sense. Joseph and Emma were real people.

Their letters were filled with the business of life,

and they represent the mature expressions of two people in a marriage, relying on one another for strength in their respective roles.

Emma's letters primarily talk about home affairs, and they're not always very pleasant.

She is having a difficult time in every one of the five letters,

in keeping the family intact, finding places to live,

having the proper means. Another major concern of hers in the letters is the family.

And of course, first she has just little Julia and the three boys come later. She loses children along the way, as we know. But she often says, when one or the other is sick,

if you could just be here, Joseph, it would help so much. And you can imagine being alone, without a home of her own most of the time, living with others.

She just felt she needed the kind of support he could give her.

And he did give her a lot of support through the letters,

but he was not there physically during these difficult times. So she did her best with what she knew.

And I'm sure that he did share with her as much as he possibly could. Now, his letters, on the other hand,

reflect the letters that anyone would write who is away from home.

He's homesick. He's just nostalgic for what life was.

As difficult as it was, he was at least home, and particularly

when he was either imprisoned or arrested

or when he was in hiding, he

just longed to hold the children, he longed to be with Emma,

he wanted to talk to them.

The first letter we have written by Joseph was written in 1832 from, of all places, Greenville, Indiana.

Joseph was returning from Independence, Missouri, to Kirtland when Bishop Whitney, his traveling companion,

was involved in an accident and broke his leg.

Joseph remained behind to take care of him. While he was there,

he had many quiet hours to reflect and to ponder.

He wrote the following to Emma.

“I have visited a grove,

which is just back of the town almost every day,

where I can be secluded from the eye of any mortal,

and there give vent to all the feelings of my heart in meditation and prayer.

I have called to mind all the past moments of my life,

and I’m left to mourn and shed tears of sorrow for my folly

in suffering the adversary of my soul to have so much power over me as he has had in past times.

But God is merciful and has forgiven my sins.”

But the next one, I think, is quite interesting, because it tells us a little bit about his feelings about

the letters that he wanted to have from Emma and how he felt when he didn't get them. So he writes this.

He said, “Sister Whitney wrote to her husband,

which was very cheering, and being unable at that time and filled with much anxiety, it would have been very consoling to me to have received a few lines from you. But you did not take the trouble.

I will try to be consoled with my lot,

knowing that God is my friend. In Him I shall find comfort.”

Now, what Joseph did not know,

and which I think explains Emma's lack of writing, is this.

He evidently had made arrangements with Newell K. Whitney before leaving to go to Missouri, to have Emma and Julia, the only child she had at that time,

leave the Johnson Farm, where there had been so much mob action just shortly before,

and go into Kirtland and stay with Elizabeth and Whitney

for her safety. Evidently.

and we have to just surmise some of these things,

Brother Whitney did not tell his wife about the plans.

So when Emma arrives on her doorstep,

she is not really welcomed. So to me, it is no wonder why Emma was not writing to Joseph. Perhaps, on the one hand, a little chagrined that plans had not been a little more definite. But certainly she was trying to find a place to stay for herself

and for her daughter.

So when we put those circumstances together, we understand what the letter means.

In the late fall of 1838,

Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued his infamous extermination order, and the citizens of Missouri determined to drive the Mormons out of the state.

Joseph was betrayed and arrested. While being held as a prisoner

and pending a hearing,

Joseph was given pen and ink and wrote a letter to Emma back home in Far West.

“My dear and beloved companion of my bosom in tribulation and affliction.” And that phrase comes up a little more often as we go on. Then he said, “I have great anxiety about you and my lovely children.

My heart mourns and bleeds for the brethren and sisters, for the slain of the people of God.

May God give you wisdom and prudence and sobriety, which I have every reason to believe you will.

Those little children are subjects of my meditation continually. Tell them that Father is yet alive.

God grant that he may see them again.

Oh, Emma, for God's sake, do not forsake me, nor the truth. But remember me if I do not meet you again in this life.

May God grant that we may meet in heaven.

I cannot express my feelings. My heart is full. Farewell,

oh my kind and affectionate Emma. I am yours forever. Your husband and true friend.” This is right off the tip of Joseph’s own pen. That's as close to the heart of Joseph Smith as anyone can ever find. The Savior said, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh,” or writeth, as the case may be.

That's really Joseph right there.

It's not filtered through a scribe.

No, not at all. He’s speaking his heart. And even in the letters where he does use a scribe, and five of the letters are written by others, they are Joseph’s words. In one of the letters he said

to Emma, how will you feel, or how do you feel about having a husband who has been in jail?

He’s so concerned about her feelings and her,

the children’s feelings about their father, “Tell them I am yet alive,” tell them I love them. And he just wants them to feel that, in spite of all that is happening to him, he's still a loving husband, he's still a loving father,

and that nothing could destroy that close relationship that they evidently have had up until this time when he is separated from them for such a long time.

While Joseph and his companions spent the winter of 1838 and ’39 in Liberty jail,

Emma and the children fled from their home in Far West in uncertainty, traveling east toward Illinois.

Eventually they crossed the Mississippi to Quincy,

where they were taken in by the Cleveland family.

From there, in March of 1839, Emma wrote to Joseph, who remained behind in Liberty.

“But I shall not attempt to write my feelings all together, for the situation in which you are,

the walls, bars, and bolts, rolling rivers, running streams, rising hills, sinking valleys, and spreading prairies that separate us,

and the cruel injustice that first cast you into prison

and still holds you there, with many other considerations,

places my feelings far beyond description.

Was it not for conscious innocence and the direct interposition of divine mercy,

I am very sure I never should have been able to have endured

the scenes of suffering that I have passed through.

But I still live and am yet willing to suffer more if it is the will of kind heaven that I should, for your sake.”

Isn’t that wonderful sense of commitment,

an expression of commitment to Joseph?

She talks a little bit then about the children and the fact that Frederick has been sick and little Alexander is now beginning to walk and pushes a chair around the room, and how much Joseph will enjoy Alexander when he can be with him.

And then she goes back to the same feelings as in the first paragraph. She writes,

“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 you shut up in that lonesome prison.

But the reflection is more than human nature ought to bear.

And if God does not record our suffering and avenge our wrongs on them that are guilty, I shall be sadly mistaken.”

When Joseph received Emma's letter,

you can imagine it brought him much joy.

Immediately he sat down and wrote a reply.

The first was a cover letter directed to Emma, and then following that was a twenty-nine page letter— an epistle, he called it— directed to the Church at large.

Now, eventually, that became more than just a personal letter.

It became what we know today as sections 121 through 123 of the Doctrine and Covenants.

“My dear Emma, I very well know your toils

and sympathise with you.

If God will spare my life once more to have the privilege of taking care of you,

I will ease your cares

and endeavor to comfort your heart.

I want you to take the best care of the family you can,

which I believe you will do all you can.

I was sorry to learn Frederick was sick,

but I trust he’s well again and that you are all well.

I want you to try to gain time to write me a long letter and tell me all you can.

And even if Old Major [the dog] is alive yet

and what those little prattlers say that cling around your neck.

Do you tell them that I am in prison

that their lives might be saved?”

He’s a father and says so. I’m a husband. I’m a father.

He’s also the Prophet and the President of the Church.

And I think it’s just amazing to catch these letters in the middle of persecution

and see that they are willing to receive as much persecution as God allows them to have and still be loyal to each other and still be loyal to the cause of the Restoration of the gospel.

They are a team. They are sharing these things together and these few letters let us know how close closely entwined they were. In fact, he even uses that term.

“My heart is entwined with with you, Emma.”

And their lives are entwined.

April the 4th, 1839.

The night before Joseph and his friends were taken from Liberty Jail to stand trial in another county. Joseph wrote to Emma.

And in spite of all that they had endured as a result of mobocracy, still, he counseled her in the letter, “Do not be self-willed

neither harbor a spirit of revenge.”

And there was more in the letter than just that.

“It is, I believe, now about five months and six days since I have been under the grimace,” And he has that underlined, “of a guard,

night and day, and within the walls, grates and screeching iron doors of a lonesome, dark, dirty prison with emotions known only to God.

Do I write this letter?

The contemplations of the mind under these circumstances defies the pen or tongue or angels to describe or paint to the human being who never experienced what we experience.

I want to see little Frederick, Joseph, Julia, and Alexander, and Old Major.

And as to yourself, if you want to know how much I want to see you, examine your feelings,

how much you want to see me, and judge for yourself.”

Just before he’s released from jail and ready to see her,

he said, “I would walk naked and barefoot and

and think nothing of it if I could see you.” Interesting, when he left jail, his boots were such a misfit that they were bleeding inside the boots. When he took them off, there was blood.

And so he did walk almost barefoot, with old, tattered clothes on to see his wife.

And then near the end of the letter,

he says something that I think is indicative not only of his feelings of what he wants

Emma to feel toward him, but I think it’s how he feels about the friends that he knows are loyal to him and those that have have gone by the wayside. He said to Emma,

“Never give up an old tried friend who has waded through all manner of toil for your sake and throw him away, because fools may tell you he has some faults.”

“Nothing but a sense of humanity,”

Joseph wrote to Emma, “could have urged me on to so great a sacrifice. But shall I see so many suffer and not seek redress?”

Joseph wrote these words to Emma while traveling to Washington DC in late 1839 to seek redress for the Saints.

Emma, back in Nauvoo, would soon write in reply.

So she writes a letter to him and tells him a little bit about what is happening in Nauvoo at that time.

And as we know, that first year or two, most families were touched by malaria and the other sicknesses that just swept through that swampy area

that they were trying to turn into a beautiful city,

and eventually did. But she writes about

the sickness of her own children. Of course, that Frederick again is sick, that he has had a touch of malaria and has severe nosebleeds.

But they finally were able to take care of that.

She is a nurse to so many people. They come, they stay with her.

She takes care of them when they're sick. She provides a home for them when they are well.

She never really has a home that is strictly her own for her own family. Even when she has the mansion house,

it is open to others. And people stay with her. And she ends the letter by saying how anxious the people are for his success in Washington.

Carthage Jail, June 27th, 1844, 8:20 a.m.

Joseph dictates a letter to his wife, Emma,

written by his scribe Willard Richards. The letter is short,

mostly just news of his situation,

but still it contains true principles that would govern Joseph’s actions up to the very end.

That would be the last letter he would ever write to Emma.

Some nine hours later, he was martyred.

He said, “There is a principle which is eternal.

It is the duty of all men to protect their lives, of their household whenever necessity requires.

And no power has the right to forbid it

should the last extreme arrive.”

And I know there's been some question among some people as to why he took a pistol with him and actually fired it when he was in the Carthage Jail.

But he’s explaining to her, and hopefully to everyone, how he feels, that it is his duty to try to protect himself and to protect his family.

Then he writes a PS to this letter,

the last he ever wrote in his own hand, to Emma.

He writes, “I am very much resigned to my lot,

knowing I am justified and have done the best that could be done.

Give my love to the children and all my friends, and as for treason, I know that I have not committed any, and they cannot prove one appearance of anything of the kind. So you need not have any fears that any harm can happen to me on that score. May God bless you all. Amen.

Joseph Smith.” And that is how he concludes the correspondence with his wife.

So behind the scenes, husband and wife agonizing, worried about their children, worried about the kingdom, worried about being honest

and true to their testimony of the kingdom.

That’s the message of the letters of Joseph and Emma.

Because Joseph's wife, Emma,

didn’t join the Saints in the West,

there’s been a lot written and said about her, and not much of it very kind and understanding.

Because of that, I asked Carol Mattson,

who’s devoted so many years of her life to studying Emma, to describe her.

But as I think about her,

I see a very intelligent and capable woman.

She certainly had to be self-reliant.

She was left alone so often.

I also think of her as a very strong woman,

mentally and physically, but particularly emotionally.

When we look back over her life and think of all the difficulties she had, the losses she sustained,

I also think that she was strong willed.

I think any woman that defies her parents to marry

the man that she loved had to have

a certain amount of strong will to do that. And I think she exhibited that characteristic often throughout his life when she felt obliged to give her opinion about some of his actions and activities.

But she was also very longsuffering and patient.

And she was so dedicated, I believe, and steadfast in her faith in Joseph and in his mission, that she was patient with all of these things and she was willing to suffer through them, as she said in one of the letters.

I will do whatever I have to do for your sake.

There seems to be so many stories when Joseph would feel sorry for someone and bring them home and Emma would be the one who took care of them.

That's right. They kept coming and they never went away with a feeling that they had been intruding or been imposing on their life, at least the records that I have read.

So she was very endearing to the community. And I think that's why the women who left Nauvoo and came West still remembered her with fond memories and for the friendship that they had experienced with her.

But I also think, as I look over her life,

that with all of the strength of her character, she was a very vulnerable woman. And I think that vulnerability came from her intense love

for Joseph Smith. I think

that she really

felt that she could not abide anything or anyone that might threaten the bond that their shared experiences and their intense love had created between the two of them.

I think, first of all,

it would be difficult for us to walk in her shoes and know all the circumstances. We know the externals of her life.

But we don't know very much about her deepest feelings.

And so I think that we withhold judgment.

I think that we acknowledge her for the great love and support she gave to Joseph. And that's how I look at Emma.

We have every evidence of the loyalty of both parties to the other end of the greatness of Emma and contributing to the restoration of the gospel, for without her support of Joseph,

he would have been less than what he was.

I also believe that Joseph Smith could not have endured all the things that he did without the love and support of his beloved Emma.

Joseph and Emma Smith could be called the first family of Mormonism. In spite of their personal struggles,

their letters clearly reveal their devotion to God and to each other. Whatever else can be said,

they loved each other.

It was in Nauvoo that they were sealed as husband and wife for time and all eternity.

The rest is left with God. Next week on the Joseph Smith Papers:

Joseph Smith the Revelator and his revelations.

I’m Glenn Rawson. Thanks for joining us.