{"id":8027,"date":"2026-05-09T20:36:46","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T03:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=8027"},"modified":"2026-05-09T20:52:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T03:52:38","slug":"hyrum-smith-the-mildness-of-a-lamb-the-weight-of-a-crown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/05\/09\/hyrum-smith-the-mildness-of-a-lamb-the-weight-of-a-crown\/","title":{"rendered":"Hyrum Smith: The Mildness of a Lamb, the Weight of a Crown"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seventh in the Early Mormon Personalities Series<\/b><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The Faithful Witness: How Hyrum Smith\u2019s Loyalty Carried<\/em>
\nA Movement and Concealed Its Contradictions<\/em><\/p>\n

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I. Carthage, June 27, 1844 \u2014 A Cinematic Opening<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The afternoon was hot and slow on the Illinois prairie. Inside an upstairs room of the Carthage Jail, four men in shirtsleeves talked in muted voices, fanned themselves, and waited. A bottle of wine, brought up to revive their flagging spirits, sat half-drunk on the table. John Taylor had been singing \u201cA Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Joseph Smith \u2014 prophet, mayor, lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion, declared candidate for the presidency of the United States \u2014 lay across the bed in a state of resigned exhaustion. And beside him, calm, unshaken, almost preternaturally still, sat his older brother. Hyrum.<\/p>\n

He was forty-four years old. He had spent more than half his life walking three paces behind his younger brother, defending him, anchoring him, suffering for him. He had been beaten by mobs in Missouri, frozen in the dungeon of Liberty Jail, robbed in Kirtland by the very men who had once shared his bread, and now, at the request of an Illinois governor whose protection meant nothing, he had ridden willingly into a town that was already loading its rifles.<\/p>\n

Two days earlier, on the western bank of the Mississippi, Joseph had asked him, \u201cYou are the oldest, what shall we do?\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hyrum had answered without flourish: \u201cLet us go back and give ourselves up and see the thing out. \u2026 If we have to die, we will be reconciled to our fate.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> That was Hyrum Smith \u2014 plain, deliberate, unhurried. The words could have been carved on his headstone.<\/p>\n

At a little past five o\u2019clock that afternoon, a mob of perhaps two hundred men with blackened faces stormed up the stairs. A musket ball passed through the panel of the wooden door and struck Hyrum on the left side of the nose. A second ball, fired through the window from outside, drove through his back, exited his chest, and shattered the watch in his vest pocket. He staggered, fell, and said simply, \u201cI am a dead man.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> In the next forty-five seconds, his younger brother would also be dead, John Taylor would be lying behind a bedstead with four bullets in him, and the whole edifice of early Mormonism would suddenly be standing on the corpses of its two founders.<\/p>\n

To understand Mormonism, you must understand Hyrum Smith. He was the first to believe Joseph and the last to leave him. He was the lever that gave the prophet leverage. Without Hyrum\u2019s integrity, his Masonic standing in Palmyra, his school-trustee respectability, his quiet endurance under pressure, the new church might never have survived its New York and Ohio infancy at all. And yet \u2014 and this is the heart of the matter \u2014 the Hyrum Smith celebrated in modern Latter-day Saint discourse is in important ways a curated Hyrum, his contradictions sanded smooth, his hardest sayings reframed, his actual final words on the subject of plural marriage relegated to footnotes the average member never sees.<\/p>\n

This essay walks the long road with him. From a fever-ravaged Vermont farmhouse to a jail cell on the Mississippi. From the printer\u2019s shop in Palmyra, where he hid the Book of Mormon manuscript under his vest, to the upper room of a red brick store in Nauvoo, where he received endowment ordinances his Methodist neighbors would have called blasphemy. From a public sermon in which he threatened to \u201cwring the nose\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> of any elder who taught the spiritual-wife doctrine, to two private polygamous marriages contracted within months of that very sermon. We will examine him through Latter-day Saint eyes, through hostile eyes, and through the eyes of historic biblical Christianity, and we will let the contradictions stand where they stand. He deserves, above all, an honest reading.<\/p>\n

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II. Origins: A Vermont Childhood and the Forging of a Bond<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Hyrum Smith was born on February 9, 1800, in the hill town of Tunbridge, Vermont, to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. He was the third son, but the firstborn had died at birth, so in practical terms, he stood second after Alvin in a household that would eventually number eleven children. The Smiths were New England yeoman stock \u2014 farmers, coopers, occasional storekeepers, restless and devout, persistently chased by debt and bad weather and the thin soil of the upper Connecticut River valley. Between Hyrum\u2019s birth and his fifteenth year, the family moved at least eight times, drifting from Tunbridge to Royalton to Sharon to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and finally west to Palmyra in upstate New York.<\/p>\n

In the autumn of 1811, Hyrum, then eleven, was enrolled in Moor\u2019s Indian Charity School on the campus of Dartmouth College, an opportunity none of his siblings would equal. He stayed roughly two years \u2014 enough to lift him slightly above the educational average of the New England farm boy and enough, later, to qualify him as a Palmyra schoolteacher and trustee. The historian Richard K. Behrens has argued that Hyrum\u2019s exposure at Moor\u2019s to Dartmouth Arminian theology \u2014 with its emphasis on free moral agency, the perfectibility of man, and the rejection of strict Calvinist predestination \u2014 quietly shaped the entire Smith family\u2019s religious imagination, and through them shaped Mormonism itself. It is a striking thought: that the doctrinal soil of Latter-day Saint theology was tilled, in part, by an itinerant Indian-mission school in Hanover, New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

But the formative event of Hyrum\u2019s boyhood was not academic. It was a sickness. In late 1812, a typhus epidemic swept the upper valley. Several Smith children fell ill. The youngest brother to be stricken seriously was seven-year-old Joseph Jr., whose infection settled in his left leg and decayed into the bone. The agony was extraordinary. There was no anesthesia. The decision to operate without amputation \u2014 unusual at the time \u2014 was made over the desperate pleading of Lucy. And throughout the long ordeal, it was Hyrum, then twelve or thirteen, who took up the bedside vigil. Lucy Mack Smith\u2019s description of it has become one of the iconic passages of early Mormon family memory:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHyrum, who was rather remarkable for his tenderness and sympathy, now desired that he might take my place. As he was a good, trusty boy, we let him do so, and, in order to make the task as easy for him as possible, we laid Joseph upon a low bed and Hyrum sat beside him, almost day and night for some considerable length of time, holding the affected part of his leg in his hands and pressing it between them, so that his afflicted brother might be enabled to endure the pain.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Lucy Mack Smith,<\/strong><\/span> History of Joseph Smith by His Mother, p. 55<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Modern Latter-day Saint writers return to that scene almost reflexively, and rightly so. It is the spiritual hinge of the brothers\u2019 entire relationship. From that bedside forward, Joseph would never doubt Hyrum, and Hyrum would never abandon Joseph. When, eight years later, the fourteen-year-old Joseph would tell his startled family that he had seen God the Father and Jesus Christ in a Palmyra grove, Lucy reports that Hyrum and the rest of the family heard him \u201cjoyfully,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>giving \u201cthe most profound attention\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> to a boy \u201cwho had never read the Bible through in his life.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> There is no recorded moment, in twenty-four years of subsequent prophetic claim and counter-claim, when Hyrum publicly questioned his younger brother.<\/p>\n

From a Christian historical standpoint, this fraternal devotion \u2014 born in a sickroom \u2014 is exactly what makes Hyrum\u2019s case so consequential. The credibility of early Mormonism, especially among its first New York neighbors, leaned heavily on the unimpeachable reputation of the older brother. Hyrum was the steadier figure. He was admitted in 1828 to the Mount Moriah Masonic Lodge No. 112 in Palmyra and elected by his neighbors that same year as a trustee of the local school board. Even Presbyterian skeptics conceded the point. \u201cWhatever other Mormons may have been,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> one Kirtland Presbyterian minister later wrote, \u201cHyrum was a perfect gentleman.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That kind of social capital, in a tight rural community, was not transferable; it was earned. And Joseph would draw on it, again and again, for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

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III. Spiritual Quest: Why a Sober Older Brother Believed<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To understand why a respectable, Mason-affiliated, school-trusted thirty-year-old farmer-cooper from western New York would bind his entire fortune to his younger brother\u2019s claim of golden plates and angelic visitations, one must understand the religious atmosphere of the so-called Burned-Over District in the 1810s and 1820s. Western New York in those years was the spiritual equivalent of a brushfire: Methodist circuit riders, Presbyterian revivals, Baptist camp meetings, Universalists, Restorationists, Shakers, and every flavor of millenarian and primitivist preacher passing through every season. The prevailing question was not \u201cIs Christianity true?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 nearly everyone assumed it was \u2014 but \u201cWhich Christianity?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Smith family\u2019s answer, by Joseph Sr.\u2019s lights, was: none of them. Joseph Sr. drifted toward folk universalism and seer-stone treasure-seeking; Lucy oscillated between Methodist sympathies and a yearning for a more visionary form of faith; the children grew up in an atmosphere of restless searching that the historian Richard Bushman has called \u201crough-stone rolling.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (PDF download<\/strong><\/a>). Hyrum himself was briefly \u2014 reports differ \u2014 either a Presbyterian sympathizer or simply a religiously serious young man without firm sectarian commitment. What is certain is that he, like his younger brother, found the existing denominations inadequate.<\/p>\n

When Joseph announced in 1820 that two heavenly personages had told him to join none of them, Hyrum heard it with a believing heart. When Joseph began producing the Book of Mormon manuscript in 1828\u20131829 in Harmony, Pennsylvania, Hyrum traveled there at his own expense to learn how the work was progressing. By late May or early June 1829, the work was nearly finished. It was on one such visit that Joseph received what is now Doctrine and Covenants section 11, addressed to Hyrum, with the now-famous instruction:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSeek not to declare my word, but first seek to obtain my word, and then shall your tongue be loosed; then, if you desire, you shall have my Spirit and my word, yea, the power of God unto the convincing of men.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 Doctrine and Covenants 11:21<\/i><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Latter-day Saint commentators read this as the founding charter of Hyrum\u2019s scriptural ministry; a Christian reader, by contrast, may notice the language\u2019s functional resemblance to a workplace probation study before you preach. Either way, Hyrum took it seriously. In June 1829, he was baptized in Seneca Lake. Within weeks, he became one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon plates, signing the Testimony that has since appeared in every printed edition of that book:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken. \u2026 And we lie not, God bearing witness of it.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Testimony of Eight Witnesses,<\/strong><\/span> Book of Mormon (1830)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Two doctrinal observations follow. First, in his own theological self-understanding, Hyrum was not joining a new religion \u2014 he believed he was joining the restored ancient Christianity that all the surrounding sects had lost. The conceptual force of the move, for him, was not \u201cleave Christianity\u201d<\/strong><\/em> <\/span>but \u201crejoin true Christianity.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That sincerity must be conceded. Second, the historic-Christian objection is not principally that Hyrum lied about handling plates \u2014 it is that the Book of Mormon, even granting his subjective sincerity, presents a gospel that diverges from the apostolic faith on the nature of God, the nature of man, the means of salvation, and the closed canon of Scripture (Galatians 1:8\u20139; Jude 3; Revelation 22:18\u201319). On those issues, the Christian and the Latter-day Saint reach a sober but real impasse.<\/p>\n

Hyrum\u2019s convictions, however, were not driven by abstract systematic theology. They were driven by his brother. Joseph said it; therefore, Hyrum believed it. The faith was personal long before it was creedal. That is honorable in the manner of Ruth\u2019s loyalty to Naomi, and tragic in the manner of any deeply loyal man whose loyalty has been pledged to the wrong altar.<\/p>\n

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IV. Role in the Early Movement: The Indispensable Lieutenant<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The Charter Member and Book of Mormon Facilitator<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

On April 6, 1830, in the log Whitmer cabin at Fayette, New York, six men signed their names as charter members of the new Church of Christ. At thirty, Hyrum was the eldest. He had not founded the movement. He had not received the visions. He had not produced the book. But every visible piece of organizational scaffolding around the prophet bore Hyrum\u2019s fingerprints.<\/p>\n

During the printing of the Book of Mormon at Egbert B. Grandin\u2019s shop in Palmyra, Hyrum was entrusted with the printer\u2019s manuscript. Royal Skousen\u2019s textual study has shown that Hyrum himself briefly served as scribe on five separate stretches between Mosiah 28 and Alma 5, and the typesetter John Gilbert later recalled that Hyrum carried installments of the manuscript daily \u201cunder his vest, and vest and coat closely buttoned over it. At night, Smith came and got the manuscript, and with the same precaution carried it away.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Even more dramatically, when Hyrum felt a sudden Sunday-afternoon impression that something was amiss at the print shop, he and Oliver Cowdery went and discovered the local newspaperman Abner Cole using Grandin\u2019s press to print pirated excerpts of \u201cJoe Smith\u2019s Gold Bible\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>in his own paper. Hyrum confronted Cole, who threatened to fight him. Hyrum simply outlasted him, calmly waiting until Joseph could return from Pennsylvania to negotiate the cessation of the unauthorized printing. The episode is small but characteristic. Throughout his ministry, Hyrum supplied the practical, calm, executive courage that his more volatile brother often lacked.<\/p>\n

Missionary, Foreman, and Builder of Temples<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

Between 1830 and 1840, Hyrum filled almost every conceivable practical office in the new Church. He presided as branch leader at Colesville, New York. He preached evangelistically through New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio, and once was sent on a thousand-mile assignment by way of separate routes with John Murdock to Missouri and back. He took up a scythe and helped clear the temple ground at Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833 \u2014 the first man, by his own boast to his mother, to strike the first blow on the foundation. He served as foreman of the stone quarry that supplied the limestone for the Kirtland Temple\u2019s walls. In 1834, he and Lyman Wight recruited Michigan Saints into Joseph\u2019s ill-fated paramilitary expedition known as Zion\u2019s Camp.<\/p>\n

From the autumn of 1837 onward, he held real ecclesiastical office: Assistant Counselor in the First Presidency from September of that year, then Second Counselor from November. From January 24, 1841, until his death, he held the unique double office of Assistant President of the Church (replacing Oliver Cowdery, excommunicated three years earlier) and Presiding Patriarch (replacing his father, who had died in September 1840). His doctrinal and administrative reach was vast. As a member of the Council of Fifty, the Nauvoo Temple Building Committee, the Nauvoo City Council, the Nauvoo Legion (with the rank of brevet major general), and even the vice-mayoralty of the City of Nauvoo, Hyrum touched virtually every lever of early Mormon civic and religious life.<\/p>\n

The Living Anchor of the Smith Family<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

All of this happened against the backdrop of constant family upheaval. After his older brother Alvin\u2019s death in November 1823, the dying twenty-five-year-old had charged Hyrum with the family\u2019s welfare in words that became, in effect, the second commission of his life: \u201cI have done all I could to make our dear parents comfortable. I want you to finish the house and take care of them in their old age.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hyrum did. When the Smiths lost their farm to predatory creditors during Joseph\u2019s adolescence, Hyrum and his first wife, Jerusha Barden \u2014 whom he married on November 2, 1826 \u2014 took the entire extended family into their small log cabin. He did this without complaint and apparently without regret.<\/p>\n

The toll of public ministry on his private life was crushing. He was on a missionary assignment in Far West, Missouri, in October 1837 when he received the news that Jerusha had died, two weeks after delivering their sixth child. The letter, jointly drafted by his younger brothers Samuel and Don Carlos, included the chilling line that Jerusha\u2019s last message to Hyrum had been: \u201cthe Lord had taken their mother and left them for you to take care of.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>He left immediately for home. Within ten weeks, on Christmas Eve 1837, on Joseph\u2019s explicit revelatory direction, Hyrum had married a thirty-six-year-old English convert named Mary Fielding, who would bear him a son and a daughter and rear his five surviving children from Jerusha. Their son, Joseph F. Smith, born in November 1838 while Hyrum was already in Missouri custody, would one day become the sixth president of the LDS Church.<\/p>\n

Three weeks of married life. Then Mary saw him taken away in chains.<\/p>\n

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V. Liberty Jail: The Crucible of the Patriarch<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

On the morning of November 1, 1838, in the wake of the so-called Mormon-Missouri War and Governor Lilburn W. Boggs\u2019s notorious Extermination Order<\/strong><\/a>, a militia company arrived at Hyrum\u2019s home in Far West with bayonets fixed. Mary, sick, was within days of giving birth to Joseph F. The militia did not care. They marched Hyrum at bayonet point to the camp where his brother was already held, and from there, with Joseph and three others \u2014 Lyman Wight, Caleb Baldwin, and Alexander McRae, plus Sidney Rigdon, who would later be released \u2014 they were transferred to the small unheated stone-and-log jail at Liberty, Clay County, Missouri.<\/p>\n

They were confined there from December 1, 1838, until April 6, 1839 \u2014 four months and six days in a cell so cramped that men could not stand fully upright in the lower dungeon, where straw beds rotted on the stone floor. Hyrum later testified, in a sworn statement before the Nauvoo Municipal Court, that during their confinement \u201cpoison was administered to us three or four times,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> producing violent vomiting; and that on one occasion they were offered for food \u201chuman flesh \u2014 for the space of 5 days or go without food, except a little coffee or a little corn bread\u2014the latter I chose in preference to the former. We none of us partook of the flesh except Lyman Wight.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Whether his perception of the meat was accurate or whether the guards were taunting them with that lie, the psychological reality was the same: he believed it was human flesh.<\/p>\n

Yet of all the prisoners, Hyrum left the most extensive paper trail of the experience. Eight letters written from his hand survive, written between mid-March and early April 1839, all but one addressed to Mary Fielding Smith. The Brigham Young University historians Kenneth Alford and Craig Manscill have shown that several of these letters predate Joseph\u2019s great March 20 letter to the Church, the letter portions of which would be canonized as Doctrine and Covenants sections 121, 122, and 123. The two brothers, in other words, talked through the doctrines together in the cell before either of them committed them to paper. The serene voice of D&C 121 \u2014 \u201cMy son, peace be unto thy soul\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 has Hyrum\u2019s breath in it as well as Joseph\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Hyrum\u2019s own most affecting line, written in March 1839 to Mary, is a small monument to spousal love under impossible circumstances:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cO God in the name of thy son preserve the life and health of my bosom companion, and may she be precious in thy sight, and all the little children, and that is pertaining to my family; and hasten the time when we shall meet in each other\u2019s embrace.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Hyrum Smith to Mary Fielding Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>Liberty Jail, March 16, 1839<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On April 6, 1839, the prisoners were finally transferred to a venue change. The sheriff, almost certainly under unspoken instructions, allowed them to escape. Hyrum, weakened by months of confinement and by acute rheumatism in his hands, made his way slowly across Missouri and into Illinois. By April 22, he and Joseph had reached Quincy and rejoined their families. Their misery had ended. Their public significance had only begun.<\/p>\n

From a Christian theological vantage, Liberty Jail forces an honest reckoning. Whatever one concludes about Joseph Smith\u2019s claims, no fair reader can question that Hyrum suffered, that he refused to recant, and that he believed himself to be suffering for the cause of Christ. The book of Hebrews praises those \u201cof whom the world was not worthy\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>who were \u201cdestitute, afflicted, tormented\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Hebrews 11:37\u201338). Hyrum stood in that suffering. The question \u2014 the searching, painful question for the Christian \u2014 is whether the cause for which he suffered was, in its deepest doctrinal claims, the gospel of Jesus Christ as preached by the apostles. On that point, honest disagreement remains unavoidable. But the suffering itself we honor; we do not minimize it.<\/p>\n

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VI. Nauvoo: The Patriarch at His Zenith<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

In the malarial bend of the Mississippi at the swampy hamlet then called Commerce \u2014 soon renamed Nauvoo \u2014 the Saints rebuilt themselves with astonishing speed. By 1842, the city had over ten thousand inhabitants, a temple rising on the bluff, a militia of perhaps four thousand men, and a charter of municipal liberties extracted from the Illinois legislature so generous that the city\u2019s council could legally declare martial law in its own jurisdiction \u2014 a clause that, four years later, would be the immediate trigger of Joseph and Hyrum\u2019s deaths.<\/p>\n

In this miniature theocracy, Hyrum stood second only to his brother. On January 19, 1841, in the revelation now canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 124, the Lord (in Joseph\u2019s voice) told the Church:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cFirst, I give unto you Hyrum Smith to be a patriarch unto you, to hold the sealing blessings of my church, even the Holy Spirit of promise, whereby ye are sealed up unto the day of redemption \u2026 that he may be a prophet, and a seer, and a revelator unto my church, as well as my servant Joseph; \u2026 that he may act in concert also with my servant Joseph.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Doctrine and Covenants<\/strong> <\/span>124:124, 91, 94<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And further, in language that has provoked Latter-day Saint historians ever since:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cBlessed is my servant Hyrum Smith; for I, the Lord, love him because of the integrity of his heart, and because he loveth that which is right before me, saith the Lord.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Doctrine and Covenants<\/strong><\/span> 124:15<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Two things must be said about this revelation. First, it elevated Hyrum to the rare and ambiguous office of \u201cAssistant President of the Church\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 only ever held by Oliver Cowdery before him \u2014 making Hyrum the formally designated successor to Joseph. Had he survived his brother by even one hour, he would have become president of the LDS Church. The entire subsequent leadership trajectory of Mormonism \u2014 Brigham Young, the Quorum of the Twelve, the move to the Great Basin \u2014 ran on the historical contingency that Hyrum did not survive. Second, the revelation explicitly inherited the office of Patriarch from Joseph Smith Sr., on the principle of bloodline. Joseph Jr. famously declared in 1843 that \u201cthe patriarchal office is the highest office in the Church\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 a staggering claim that, as Apostle LeGrand Richards later observed, modern Saints find difficult to accept.<\/p>\n

This is where one of the most embarrassing later sanitizations of Hyrum\u2019s legacy will eventually occur, and we will return to it below.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, his Nauvoo work was relentless. He chaired the temple committee. He served on the Nauvoo City Council. He was vice-mayor of Nauvoo. He held membership in the Council of Fifty, an extra-constitutional theocratic body that prepared for the literal political kingdom of God. He sat in the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge. He pronounced \u2014 by O\u2019Driscoll\u2019s tally \u2014 hundreds of patriarchal blessings, working his way through immigrant convert after immigrant convert, often in his cramped front room, with a clerk taking down each blessing in longhand. In 1842, it fell to him publicly to clarify that the \u201chot drinks\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> forbidden in Joseph\u2019s 1833 Word of Wisdom revelation were tea and coffee \u2014 a rule of Mormon practice that endures, virtually unaltered, into the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

And on May 4, 1842, when Joseph realized that he might not live to see the Nauvoo Temple finished, he gathered nine men in the upper room of his red brick store on Water Street and administered to them, for the first time in this dispensation, the temple endowment ceremony. Hyrum was among those nine. Whatever one believes about the legitimacy of that ceremony \u2014 a question to which this essay will return \u2014 it is striking how completely Hyrum stood at the center of Mormonism\u2019s most innovative, most theologically distinctive, most non-Protestant ritual development. He was not a peripheral figure. He was an architect.<\/p>\n

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VII. The Polygamy Problem: Hyrum\u2019s Two Voices<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Of all the painful questions surrounding Hyrum Smith, none is more difficult \u2014 and none more carefully managed by official LDS historiography \u2014 than the question of plural marriage. The standard Latter-day Saint biographical line, repeated in Church Manuals and in lay biographies like Pearson H. Corbett\u2019s and Jeffrey S. O\u2019Driscoll\u2019s, runs roughly as follows: Hyrum initially opposed plural marriage when Joseph introduced it to him; he came to accept it after a personal spiritual struggle in 1843; he then married two plural wives \u2014 Mercy Fielding Thompson (his deceased wife\u2019s sister) and Catherine Phillips \u2014 and helped present the revelation now known as Doctrine and Covenants 132 to the Nauvoo High Council on August 12, 1843.<\/p>\n

That account is not false. But it is selective in a way that obscures something important: in the very months that he was contracting his own plural marriages and presenting the revelation to the High Council, Hyrum Smith was publicly and with unmistakable vehemence denouncing plural marriage as an abomination, threatening to disgrace any elder who taught it, and stating in writing in the Church\u2019s newspaper that \u201cthere is no such doctrine taught here, neither is there any such thing practiced here.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Three primary documents establish this beyond dispute.<\/p>\n

Sermon at the Temple, May 14, 1843<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

In a sermon at the unfinished Nauvoo Temple, three months before his own first plural sealing, Hyrum addressed the people from the second chapter of Jacob in the Book of Mormon \u2014 the very passage in his church\u2019s scripture that explicitly condemns the David-and-Solomon model of plural wives. The minute-book recorder wrote down what he said:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThere were many that had a great deal to say about the ancient order of things as Solomon and David having many wives and concubines \u2014 but it\u2019s an abomination in the sight of God \u2014 if an angel from heaven should come and preach such doctrine [I] would be sure to see his cloven foot and cloud of blackness over his head, \u2014 though his garments might shine as white as snow. \u2026 A man might have one wife, \u2014 concubines he should have none. \u2026 I am a plain man, to God I am responsible, I deal in plainness. \u2026 I feel myself ashamed of such conduct amongst us, trifling with property and chastity of one another.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Hyrum Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>Temple Sermon, May 14, 1843; Church History Library, Volume 18<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Public Letter to the China Creek Saints, March 15, 1844<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

On March 15, 1844 \u2014 just over three months before his death, and seven months after his own plural marriages \u2014 Hyrum wrote a public letter, later printed in the Times and Seasons, to the Saints living on China Creek in Hancock County, Illinois. A man named Richard Hewitt had told Hyrum that local elders were teaching that men holding a certain priesthood could take \u201cas many wives as he pleases.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Hyrum\u2019s reply was unambiguous:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI say unto you that that man teaches false doctrine, for there is no such doctrine taught here, neither is there any such thing practiced here. And any man that is found teaching privately or publicly any such doctrine is culpable, and will stand a chance to be brought before the high council, and lose his license and membership also.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Hyrum Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>Public Letter, March 15, 1844, Times and Seasons<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This letter, it should be noted, was edited out of the official six-volume manuscript History of the Church when that history was prepared for publication. It was an inconvenient document. The Joseph Smith Papers Project has since restored it to its proper place in volume E-1 of the manuscript history.<\/p>\n

Conference Address, April 9, 1844<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/h3>\n

Less than three months before he was killed, with both his plural wives still living and the revelation on plural marriage already drafted and circulating among insiders, Hyrum addressed the Church\u2019s general conference. His language was so emphatic that it has rarely been quoted in full in faith-promoting literature:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAny man who comes in and tells any such damn fool doctrine, [tell him] to give up his license. None but a fool teaches such stuff; the devil himself is not such a fool, and every Elder who teaches such stuff ought to have his nose wrung. \u2026 I despise a man who teaches a pack of stuff that will disgrace himself so; for a man to go into the world, and talk of this spiritual wife system he is as empty as an open sepulchre. \u2026 I would call the Devil my brother before such a man.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Hyrum Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>General Conference Address, April 9, 1844<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How does one reconcile this with the documented fact \u2014 confirmed by Brian C. Hales\u2019s exhaustive Joseph Smith\u2019s Polygamy and acknowledged by the Church\u2019s own \u201cHyrum Smith\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Topics essay \u2014 that Hyrum had himself been sealed for time and eternity to Mercy Fielding Thompson on August 11, 1843, and to Catherine Phillips that same month? The standard apologetic answer is that Hyrum drew a sharp distinction between the public spiritual-wife teaching of the Cochranite\/Bennett type \u2014 unauthorized, lecherous, often de facto adulterous \u2014 and the private, sealed, divinely-authorized plural marriages performed under priesthood keys. He could publicly denounce the former while privately accepting the latter, on the theory that the former was a counterfeit and the latter was the divine original.<\/p>\n

That distinction is intellectually intelligible. It is also, from a Christian standpoint, deeply troubling. It requires Hyrum, as Patriarch and second president of the Church, to knowingly deceive the Saints from the public pulpit about what their leaders were practicing in private. It requires him to use the strongest possible language of moral disgust \u2014 \u201cdamn fool doctrine,\u201d \u201cabomination,\u201d \u201cas empty as an open sepulchre\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 against a practice he was at that moment engaged in himself. The Apostle Paul\u2019s instruction in 1 Timothy 3:2 that an overseer \u201cmust be \u2026 the husband of one wife,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> and the requirement of all Christian ministry that we \u201crefuse to walk in craftiness\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>and \u201cnot handle the word of God deceitfully\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(2 Corinthians 4:2), bear directly on the difficulty.<\/p>\n

It is fair to say, charitably, that Hyrum was caught between competing loyalties he could not openly resolve: to his brother\u2019s revelations, to the doctrinal sensibilities of the rank-and-file Saints, to public order, to his own conscience. It is also fair to say that the modern LDS treatment of this episode \u2014 emphasizing the eventual private acceptance and minimizing the documented public denunciations \u2014 sands the moral grain in one consistent direction. The China Creek letter is essentially absent from Sunday lesson manuals. The April 9, 1844, conference quotation about wringing noses and damning fool doctrine is essentially absent from Ensign articles. And the contemporaneous claim in the Manuscript History that Hyrum\u2019s first wife Jerusha would speak from beyond the grave through Mary Fielding to be sealed to Hyrum \u2014 a passage that, as the researcher Lucas Jackson has shown, was added to the manuscript history by post-Nauvoo editors and is not in the original \u2014 has been used for more than a century to soften the picture, even though it is not what Hyrum actually said.<\/p>\n

On the matter of plural marriage, then, we must at minimum say: Hyrum\u2019s legacy is more complicated than the official narrative permits, and his integrity \u2014 the very quality the revelation in D&C 124:15 most praises \u2014 is the quality most strained by the documentary record.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

VIII. Theological Departure from Biblical Christianity<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Hyrum Smith was no theologian in the academic sense. He produced no systematic treatises. The doctrines he defended in print and pulpit \u2014 chiefly the divinity of the Book of Mormon, the literal authority of the Restoration priesthood, baptism for the dead, the necessity of latter-day temple ordinances, and the patriarchal-priesthood succession through Smith family bloodlines \u2014 were articulated by Joseph and faithfully transmitted by Hyrum. Hyrum\u2019s theological role was thus the indispensable mediating one: he was the steady, plain-speaking older brother who lent his unimpeachable reputation to Joseph\u2019s most innovative ideas, making them seem reasonable to ordinary, hard-working converts who would never have accepted them on Joseph\u2019s authority alone.<\/p>\n

From the standpoint of historic, biblical, creedal Christianity \u2014 the Christianity of the Apostles\u2019 Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Reformation confessions, and the consensus of the Christian centuries \u2014 the doctrines Hyrum defended depart from the apostolic faith on at least seven significant points.<\/p>\n

First, on the nature of God.<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Joseph\u2019s mature theology, articulated most fully in the King Follett Discourse of April 1844 \u2014 a sermon Hyrum heard, less than three months before his death \u2014 taught that God the Father is an exalted, embodied man who once lived as a mortal and progressed into deity. \u201cGod himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Joseph said. The biblical witness contradicts this directly. \u201cGod is spirit\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (John 4:24); He is \u201cthe King eternal, immortal, invisible\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(1 Timothy 1:17); \u201cFrom everlasting to everlasting, thou art God\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(Psalm 90:2). The doctrine of an embodied, formerly mortal Father is not a Christian distinctive sharpening but a categorical departure.<\/p>\n

Second, on the nature of man.<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Mormon doctrine teaches that human beings are pre-existent spirit children of heavenly parents and may, through priesthood ordinances and obedience, progress to godhood \u2014 the famous Lorenzo Snow couplet, \u201cAs man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Hyrum, as Patriarch, sealed people \u201cup unto eternal life\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> under that covenant. Scripture is unambiguous: \u201cYe shall be as gods\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>was the serpent\u2019s lie in Eden (Genesis 3:5). The biblical doctrine of glorification (Romans 8:30; 1 John 3:2) speaks of conformity to the image of Christ, not ontological transition into deity.<\/p>\n

Third, on the canon.<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price stand alongside the Bible as scripture in the LDS view. Hyrum testified to the divine origin of the Book of Mormon at the cost of his life. The Bible declares its own sufficiency: \u201cAll Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(2 Timothy 3:16); \u201cIf any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(Revelation 22:18). The closure of the apostolic canon is not a Catholic-versus-Protestant question; it is a settled matter for both.<\/p>\n

Fourth, on the priesthood.<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Hyrum, as Patriarch, exercised what Mormonism calls the patriarchal priesthood, an Old Testament office allegedly restored. The Book of Hebrews teaches that the entire Levitical and patriarchal priesthood structure has been fulfilled and superseded in Christ, our \u201cgreat high priest who has passed through the heavens\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(Hebrews 4:14). The New Covenant priesthood is the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9), not a hereditary office passed through Smith family bloodlines.<\/p>\n

Fifth, on the temple ordinances.<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hyrum was among the first to receive the endowment in the upper room of Joseph\u2019s store on May 4, 1842 \u2014 a ritual indebted, as both LDS and non-LDS historians acknowledge, in significant part to Joseph\u2019s March 1842 induction into Freemasonry. The biblical pattern is the opposite: the veil of the temple was torn at the crucifixion (Matthew 27:51), and access to God is now \u201cby a new and living way which He has consecrated for us through the veil, that is, through His flesh\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Hebrews 10:20). The closed-door temple ordinance, restricted to the worthy, runs against the grain of the open-door gospel.<\/p>\n

Sixth, on plural marriage.<\/strong><\/em><\/span> We have already explored the documentary tangle. Christian biblical theology rejects polygamy, both as a Christian moral standard (Matthew 19:4\u20136; 1 Timothy 3:2) and as the model of the kingdom (Ephesians 5:31\u201332).<\/p>\n

Seventh, on the gospel itself.<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, taken in their fullest doctrinal expression, proclaim a salvation conditioned on continuing obedience, ordinances, and progression. The Pauline gospel proclaims salvation by grace through faith in Christ, \u201cnot of works, lest any man should boast\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> (Ephesians 2:8\u20139). Hyrum was a profoundly moral man working within the only theological framework he had ever truly known, and he labored as a Christ-loving man within it. But the framework itself, in the historic Christian judgment, miscarries the gospel.<\/p>\n

These differences are not nuances. They are foundations. To name them is not to despise Hyrum or to deny his sincerity. It is simply to be honest about the doctrinal cost of confusing the warm word with the right word.<\/p>\n

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IX. Eyewitnesses: How Contemporaries Saw Him<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To leave Hyrum in the abstract would be to misrepresent him. The most extensive single tribute in the historical record is from his younger brother. Joseph Smith wrote in his journal:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI could pray in my heart that all my brethren were like unto my beloved brother Hyrum, who possessed the mildness of a lamb, and the integrity of a Job, and in short, the meekness and humility of Christ; and I love him with that love that is stronger than death.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Joseph Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>Journal, History of the Church 2:338<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And again, in tribute to a brother who had been at his side through Liberty and Carthage and every disaster between:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cBrother Hyrum, what a faithful heart you have got! Oh may the Eternal Jehovah crown eternal blessings upon your head, as a reward for the care you have had for my soul! O how many are the sorrows we have shared together.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Joseph Smith to Hyrum Smith,<\/strong> <\/span>History of the Church 5:107\u2013108<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

John Taylor, who was wounded grievously beside Hyrum in the upper room of the Carthage Jail, recorded a graveside meditation that captures the man as the survivors saw him:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThere he lay as I had left him. \u2026 He had not moved a limb; he lay placid and calm, a monument of greatness even in death. \u2026 If ever there was an exemplary, honest and virtuous man, an embodiment of all that is noble in the human form, Hyrum Smith was its representative.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>John Taylor,<\/strong> <\/span>in B. H. Roberts, The Life of John Taylor, p. 142<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lucy Mack Smith, his mother, characterized him in a phrase: \u201crather remarkable for his tenderness and sympathy.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Apostle Heber C. Kimball, sent in 1837 on the historic mission to England, recalled that Hyrum \u201cwas continually blessing and encouraging me\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> when he felt unequal to the task. The Methodist convert Mary Fielding, before she became Hyrum\u2019s second wife, watched him preach in Kirtland and wrote that he \u201cseemed to be filled with the Spirit and power of God,\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>after \u201csitting down for a short time to give vent to his feelings.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>William E. McLellin, before his eventual disaffection, recorded that he had heard Hyrum speak \u201cof the truth of the book\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> to a congregation of some five hundred people, and was persuaded by the testimony.<\/p>\n

Even neighbors who never accepted Joseph\u2019s religious claims spoke generously of Hyrum. Lorenzo Saunders of Manchester, New York \u2014 no friend to Mormonism \u2014 remembered Hyrum at the time of the Saunders family\u2019s bereavement: \u201cHyrum Smith in particular \u2026 was at our house all the time \u2026 he was attentive, \u2026 always ready to bestow anything.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> That is the testimony of an outsider, and it is consistent with his lodge records and his school-trustee election.<\/p>\n

Hostile contemporaries are conspicuously rare. The polemical anti-Mormon literature of the 1830s and 1840s, including Eber D. Howe\u2019s Mormonism Unvailed<\/em> (PDF download<\/strong><\/a>), has very little personally to say against Hyrum. The standard hostile move is to subsume Hyrum under the criticisms made of Joseph and the Smith family generally; few critics felt able to attack Hyrum on his own conduct. Even his disaffected brother William, who broke with the Twelve in 1845 and was excommunicated, never publicly impugned Hyrum\u2019s personal character. The reason is plain: there was nothing personal to impugn.<\/p>\n

The single area where the evidence pulls against the official portrait is, again, plural marriage \u2014 not because contemporaries denounced Hyrum for it (most did not know), but because Hyrum\u2019s own surviving public addresses contradict his private practice in ways that any unbiased reader would describe as duplicitous. That is a real shadow on the picture. Honesty requires that it be named.<\/p>\n

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X. Carthage: The Slow Walk to the Window<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

On June 7, 1844, dissident former Mormons led by William Law and Wilson Law published the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor<\/strong><\/em><\/a> (replica PDF download<\/strong><\/a>), a four-page newspaper denouncing Joseph Smith\u2019s theological innovations \u2014 chiefly plural marriage and the doctrine of plurality of gods \u2014 and calling for repeal of the Nauvoo charter. Three days later, the Nauvoo City Council, with Joseph as mayor and Hyrum as a councilor, declared the press a public nuisance. On June 10, the city marshal, acting under a council order, destroyed the Expositor press.<\/p>\n

It was, in legal hindsight, a defensible municipal action under the doctrine of public nuisance as it then stood; it was also catastrophic as a public-relations matter. To Illinois settlers already alarmed by Mormon political bloc-voting and the size of the Nauvoo Legion, the destruction of an opposition press by a Mormon mayor looked like the opening move of a theocratic seizure of state power. Within ten days, a citizens\u2019 militia was massing around Carthage, the county seat, demanding Joseph\u2019s arrest. Governor Thomas Ford traveled to Carthage and issued a written promise of safe conduct.<\/p>\n

On the night of June 22, Joseph and Hyrum crossed the Mississippi to Iowa, intending to ride west and disappear. By the morning of June 23, accusations of cowardice were already racing through Nauvoo. Joseph wavered. It was at this moment, on the riverbank, that he turned to his older brother and asked: \u201cYou are the oldest, what shall we do?\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hyrum\u2019s answer \u2014 \u201cLet us go back and give ourselves up and see the thing out\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> \u2014 sealed both their fates.<\/p>\n

They returned. On June 24, escorted by Captain Robert Dunn, the brothers rode east toward Carthage. Joseph said, in one of his last public utterances, \u201cI am going like a lamb to the slaughter, yet I am calm as a summer\u2019s morning. \u2026 I shall die innocent.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>They reached Carthage near midnight. Crowds jeered as they passed.<\/p>\n

On June 25, they were charged with riot and posted bail. They were then re-arrested on the additional charge of treason \u2014 stemming from their having put Nauvoo under martial law to defend it \u2014 a non-bailable offense. They were transferred to the Carthage Jail. There they spent forty hours: praying, talking, reading the Book of Mormon, singing \u201cA Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hyrum, on the morning of his death, opened the Book of Mormon to Ether 12:36\u201338 and folded the page. The passage reads, in the tongue of the Book of Mormon\u2019s Moroni:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIf they have not charity it mattereth not unto thee, thou hast been faithful; wherefore thy garments are clean. \u2026 Thou shalt be made strong, even unto the sitting down in the place which I have prepared in the mansions of my Father. \u2026 I bid farewell unto the Gentiles; yea, and also unto my brethren whom I love, until we shall meet before the judgment-seat of Christ.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Book of Mormon,<\/strong> <\/span>Ether 12:37\u201338, marked by Hyrum Smith on his last morning<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At about 5:00 p.m. on June 27, 1844, the mob from Warsaw arrived at the jail with blackened faces. Most of the Carthage Greys, ostensibly guarding the brothers, joined them. The mob rushed the stairs. The four men in the upper room \u2014 Joseph, Hyrum, John Taylor, Willard Richards \u2014 leaned against the door. A musket ball through the panel struck Hyrum in the face. A second ball, fired through the window from outside, struck him in the back, exited through his chest, and shattered the watch in his vest pocket. He fell, said, \u201cI am a dead man,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> and died. Joseph emptied a six-shooter through the partly open door, leapt to the window, and was shot from front and rear. He fell two stories to the ground. \u201cO Lord, my God\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> were his last reported words \u2014 a phrase, the historian D. Michael Quinn has noted, that was also a Masonic distress call. He was finished off against the well curb in the yard.<\/p>\n

Hyrum was forty-four; Joseph was thirty-eight. The two bodies were carried back to Nauvoo on June 28 and viewed, weeping, by perhaps ten thousand mourners. They were quietly buried in secret, by night, in the basement of the Nauvoo House and afterward in unmarked ground at the Smith homestead, to keep them safe from desecration. They lay there, reburied at intervals, until 1928, when their bodies were finally exhumed and re-interred in the Smith Family Cemetery overlooking the Mississippi.<\/p>\n

On August 8, 1844, in a famous open-air meeting, the Saints in Nauvoo had to choose between Sidney Rigdon\u2019s claim to be \u201cguardian\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>of the Church and the Quorum of the Twelve\u2019s claim of collegial succession. Most accounts \u2014 mythologized later \u2014 say that Brigham Young, when he rose to speak, was momentarily transfigured into the appearance of Joseph Smith. The vote went to the Twelve. Within two years, the main body of Saints would leave for the Great Basin. Hyrum, the designated assistant president and theoretical successor, was already in his grave.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

XI. The Newspapers: A Continent Reacts<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

News of the Carthage murders raced across the country. The reaction is itself a small portrait of antebellum America. The New York Sun, more sympathetic than most, wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt is no small thing, in the blaze of this nineteenth century, to give to men a new revelation, found a new religion, establish new forms of worship, to build a city, with new laws, institutions, and orders of architecture, to establish ecclesiastic, civil and military jurisdiction, found colleges, send out missionaries, and make proselytes in two hemispheres: yet all this has been done by Joe Smith.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>The New York Sun,<\/strong><\/span> July 1844<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Boston Daily Evening Transcript, with cooler eyes, foresaw what would actually happen:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cHe will be eulogized by his disciples, and worshiped as a God. Time and distance will embellish his life with new and rare virtues, and more than earthly power; his doctrines will flourish, his influence will extend to ages yet unborn, and future generations will celebrate his birth and death by public festivals, public prayers, and an unlimited devotion.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Daily Evening Transcript,<\/strong><\/span> Boston, July 1844<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Quincy Herald in Illinois, neighbor and witness to the affair, drew a line many secular Americans drew \u2014 disbelief in the prophet, condemnation of the murder:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt will probably never be known who shot Joseph and Hyrum Smith \u2014 but their murder was a cold-blooded cowardly act, which will consign the perpetrators if discovered to merited infamy and disgrace.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Quincy Herald,<\/strong> <\/span>July 1844<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Reverend William G. Brownlow\u2019s Jonesborough Whig, by contrast, exhibited the worst of frontier Protestantism unrestrained by charity:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSome of the public Journals of the country, we are sorry to see, regret the death of that blasphemous wretch Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Our deliberate judgment is, that he ought to have been dead ten years ago. \u2026 THREE CHEERS to the brave company who shot him to pieces!\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Rev. W. G. Brownlow,<\/strong><\/span> Jonesborough Whig, July 1844<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That last quotation belongs in this essay for one reason: it shames the Christian reader. Whatever theological objections we hold against Joseph Smith\u2019s and Hyrum Smith\u2019s doctrines \u2014 and the objections are real and weighty \u2014 a vigilante mob breaking into a jail to murder the prisoners is a sin against God and man. The cheering of that murder by a Protestant minister is not Christian conduct. The Apostle Paul\u2019s direction to \u201coverturn arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>(2 Corinthians 10:5) is a war fought with words and prayer, not with rifles. Hyrum Smith was killed by men whose moral universe was, on that day, even smaller than his own.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

XII. Character Study: Strengths, Contradictions, Blind Spots<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To assess Hyrum Smith honestly, we must hold three things in view simultaneously: his genuine virtues, his genuine contradictions, and the social and theological context that shaped both.<\/p>\n

His virtues are formidable. He was, by every contemporary account, gentle, honest in business, faithful in marriage to whichever woman he was at that moment treating as his sole spouse, hard-working, generous to strangers, devoted to his children, slow to anger, and almost incapable of holding a grudge. He sustained his mother and father in old age. He nursed his younger brother through agony. He sat through Liberty Jail without breaking. He was so good a peacemaker that Joseph quipped, \u201cIf Hyrum could not make peace between two who had fallen out, the angels themselves might not hope to accomplish the task.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> He was, in the simple older sense of the word, a good man.<\/p>\n

His contradictions are also formidable. He preached repentance and the moral law from Joseph\u2019s pulpit while quietly inhabiting Joseph\u2019s most legally questionable innovations. He denounced spiritual wifery from the General Conference rostrum while sealed to two plural wives. He gave hundreds of patriarchal blessings to ordinary Saints, assuring them of glorious eternal destinies, while being one of the very small number of insiders aware that the public theology of the Church and the inner-circle theology of the Church were significantly different. He defended the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor press \u2014 an act not only legally dubious but, on the merits, an act against the very freedom of inquiry that Hyrum himself had benefited from in 1820 when his teenage brother had announced an unpopular theological discovery and the surrounding world had merely mocked rather than mob-attacked him.<\/p>\n

His blind spots are inseparable from his deepest virtue. The very loyalty to his brother that made him heroic also made him uncritical. The Apostle Paul, in writing of his rebuke of the Apostle Peter at Antioch (Galatians 2:11\u201314), gave Christianity a permanent example of the duty of correction even toward the closest brother in the faith \u2014 \u201cI withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>That kind of correction, addressed to Joseph by Hyrum, would have changed the whole course of Mormon history. There is no record that Hyrum ever offered it on substantive doctrinal innovations \u2014 only on smaller domestic and procedural matters. The historian who longs for a Hyrum who, at some point in 1842 or 1843, had sat his younger brother down and said, \u201cJoseph, the spiritual-wife system has to stop, and I cannot follow you here\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>\u2014 that historian is left wishing for what does not exist in the documents.<\/p>\n

In Christian terms, the deepest tragedy of Hyrum Smith is the tragedy of misplaced loyalty. \u201cHe that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Jesus said (Matthew 10:37). The principle applies to brothers as well as to parents. Hyrum loved his brother \u2014 honorably, beautifully \u2014 with a love stronger than death. But when love of a brother becomes the structure inside of which we adjudicate all doctrinal questions, the brother has displaced Christ at the center, however unintended the displacement. From the outside, looking in, that is the sorrowful single sentence one wants to write across Hyrum\u2019s entire life.<\/p>\n

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XIII. Legacy and the Manufacture of Sainthood<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

After Hyrum\u2019s death, the LDS movement did something quite specific with him. It made him a saint. Not in the Catholic juridical sense \u2014 there is no LDS canonization process \u2014 but in the sociological and devotional sense. His name was \u201cwritten in the book of the law of the Lord\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>under D&C 124:96, \u201chad in honorable remembrance from generation to generation, forever and ever.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>Hymns were written about him. Statues were erected of him, most notably the Stanley J. Watts and Kim Corpany sculpture group of the brothers riding to Carthage on horseback that stands today in front of the Nauvoo, Illinois Temple. His descendants intermarried into the highest tiers of Latter-day Saint ecclesiastical aristocracy: Joseph F. Smith, his son by Mary Fielding, served as President of the Church from 1901 to 1918; Joseph Fielding Smith, his grandson, served as President from 1970 to 1972; M. Russell Ballard, the late acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve, was a direct descendant. By the year 2000, his living descendants numbered an estimated 31,000.<\/p>\n

In Catholic tradition, the cult of a saint develops through canonization, intercessory prayers, relics, and holy days. In Latter-day Saint tradition, the equivalent process happens through a different vocabulary: revelations attesting to the saint\u2019s unique standing (D&C 124:15, 96; D&C 135:3); General Conference addresses in which apostles, often themselves descendants of the figure, urge the Saints to \u201cpattern after his works\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span> (Elder M. Russell Ballard\u2019s October 1995 address \u201cHyrum Smith: \u2018Firm As the Pillars of Heaven\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> being the canonical modern example); Ensign articles fronting his \u201cmildness of a lamb, integrity of Job\u201d<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>characterization (Ronald K. Esplin, February 2000); books with the indicative subtitles A Life of Integrity (O\u2019Driscoll, 2003) and Patriarch (Corbett, 1963); and a steady flow of devotional artwork. The cumulative effect is a Hyrum so smooth, so tender, so resigned, so unconflicted, so saintly that he ceases to look like the actual flesh-and-blood man of the documentary record.<\/p>\n

In the Joseph Smith Foundation tradition, the rhetoric edges further still. Hyrum is invoked as a figure of singular spiritual authority; some authors speak of him in language reserved in Catholic tradition for the canonized blessed. Whitney Horning\u2019s 2022 book Hyrum: The Prophet, Unsung<\/em>, makes the explicit case that Hyrum, not Brigham Young, ought to have led the Church after Joseph \u2014 a position with theological as well as historical implications, since it suggests the entire post-1844 development of Mormonism rests on a defective succession.<\/p>\n

All of this hagiography would be merely sentimental if it did not also operate to suppress the harder edges of the documentary record. As the LDS independent ministry Mormonism Research Ministry has documented in detail in \u201cThe Presiding Patriarch Problem,\u201d<\/em> <\/span>the office of Presiding Patriarch \u2014 the very office Hyrum filled, the office that Joseph called \u201cthe highest office in the Church\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span> in 1843, the office whose succession through Smith family bloodlines the revelations of 1841 explicitly ratified \u2014 was quietly and permanently discontinued by President Spencer W. Kimball in October 1979. The last incumbent, Eldred G. Smith, was \u201crelieved, not released\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span> and given the title Patriarch Emeritus until he died in 2013 at the age of 106. No replacement was ever appointed.<\/p>\n

The implications are searching. If the office Joseph identified as \u201chighest in the Church\u201d<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>\u2014 the office that revelation declared would be inherited \u201cforever\u201d<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>through Hyrum and his posterity \u2014 has been silently retired, then either the original revelation was mistaken, or the modern Church has departed from a divinely-instituted office. By the LDS Church\u2019s own logic, applied to historic Christianity in the doctrine of the Great Apostasy, the discontinuation of an apostolically-instituted office is itself a marker of apostasy. As the MRM article asks: \u201cIf the Presiding Patriarch held the keys of the patriarchal priesthood, what has become of those keys?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Christians watching this from outside should resist any temptation to triumphalism. The deeper observation is simply that Hyrum Smith was a real man trapped inside a system whose later developments his own theological framework cannot fully sustain. The system venerates him with one hand and edits him with the other. The man we meet on the page \u2014 with his China Creek letter, his temple-quarrying scythe, his bedside vigil over a feverish little brother, his polygamous sealings, his disgust at the spiritual-wife teaching, his unflinching last walk to Carthage \u2014 is more interesting and more tragic than the saint in the lithograph.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

XIV. The Intensity of Hyrum\u2019s Belief<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

How deeply did Hyrum Smith actually believe? The question deserves direct attention. Critics of Mormonism sometimes imply that the early leadership was a self-aware confidence game; defenders sometimes imply that doubt never touched the inner circle. Both pictures are too simple.<\/p>\n

The evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that Hyrum Smith\u2019s belief was profound, sincere, and continuous. Several considerations converge on this assessment. First, the cost. He spent four months in Liberty Jail, was poisoned, was repeatedly threatened, lost his first wife while he was on assignment, lost most of his property at least three times to mob violence, and ultimately gave his life. Self-interest does not explain his trajectory. Second, the privacy. His private letters from Liberty \u2014 to Mary, to Hannah Grinnals, to his children \u2014 contain no detectable note of doubt. They describe sufferings, longings, weariness, and quiet faith. The man writing those letters believed what he professed. Third, the death scene. On the morning of his murder, knowing he was about to be killed, Hyrum opened the Book of Mormon to Ether 12 and read its promise that \u201cthou hast been faithful \u2026 thy garments are clean.\u201d<\/strong> <\/em><\/span>He read it for himself. He folded the leaf. That is not the gesture of a fraud.<\/p>\n

In his December 1839 letter \u201cTo the Saints Scattered Abroad,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> published in the Times and Seasons, he wrote, in a voice that does not waver:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI had been abused and thrust into a dungeon, and confined for months on account of my faith, and the testimony of Jesus Christ. However I thank God that I felt a determination to die, rather than deny the things which my eyes had seen, which my hands had handled, and which I had borne testimony to, wherever my lot had been cast.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014 <\/strong><\/span>Hyrum Smith,<\/strong><\/span> Times and Seasons 1, no. 2 (Dec. 1839)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It does not follow from this that the things he saw and handled were what he believed them to be. The Christian assessment of the Book of Mormon\u2019s historical claims rests on independent grounds \u2014 archaeology, linguistics, anachronism, and theological coherence \u2014 that this essay has not attempted. But the question of Hyrum\u2019s personal sincerity must be answered in his favor. He believed. He died believing. The point is significant pastorally: Latter-day Saint friends and neighbors who sense in their hearts the same kind of devotion Hyrum had are not necessarily insincere. They may simply be loyal, as Hyrum was, to the only doctrinal world they have ever known. Christian witness to such friends is best modeled on the Apostle Paul on Mars Hill (Acts 17): respect the existing devotion, name what is unknown, point to the resurrected Christ.<\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

XV. Conclusion: The Older Brother in the Mirror<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

To stand at the small Smith family cemetery on the bluff above Nauvoo and look down at the bend of the Mississippi is to look back through Hyrum Smith\u2019s eyes at a long story. He was forty-four years old and had been on the road, by every kind of horse and wagon and flatboat, for most of his adult life. He had buried a daughter at age two, a wife in her thirties, his father, an older brother, and finally, in the next plot, his younger brother to whom he had given his entire life. He had endured Liberty Jail without breaking. He had carried the manuscript of the Book of Mormon under his vest down the streets of Palmyra. He had laid the first stone of two temples and seen a third begun. He had pronounced patriarchal blessings on hundreds of people whose names he barely knew. He had married three times. He had served as a councilor, a city councilor, a major general, a mayor in waiting, an Assistant President, and a Presiding Patriarch. He had taken a musket ball in the face for a doctrine he believed to be the gospel of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n

The Christian historian will not pretend the doctrines were what he thought them to be. Where the Book of Mormon contradicts Galatians, Galatians wins; where the Doctrine and Covenants contradicts Hebrews, Hebrews wins; where Hyrum\u2019s plural sealings contradict the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Mount wins. The integrity of the apostolic faith is not negotiable, however attractive the older brother might be.<\/p>\n

But the Christian historian will also refuse, on pain of the eighth commandment, to slander Hyrum Smith. He was a man of demonstrable kindness, a sufferer, a comforter, a husband and father who longed to see his children grow up. He was a martyr in the etymological sense \u2014 a witness who sealed his testimony with his blood. We may grieve that he sealed it for the wrong testimony. We will not grieve his death.<\/p>\n

The deeper question Hyrum Smith poses to the modern reader is the question all sincere people pose: To whom shall I be loyal, and how shall I test the worth of that loyalty? Loyalty to a brother is one of the oldest and best of the human virtues; Cain\u2019s sneering question \u201cAm I my brother\u2019s keeper?\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> is the moral counter-image, and Hyrum\u2019s entire life is the answer. But loyalty to a brother that is never tested by loyalty to truth becomes, in the end, complicity. \u201cFaithful are the wounds of a friend,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> Solomon wrote (Proverbs 27:6). Joseph never had to bear those wounds from Hyrum. We may suspect, charitably, that Joseph would have been the better man if he had.<\/p>\n

The story closes the way it opened: in the upper room of a small Illinois jail, on a hot Thursday afternoon, with four men praying and singing and waiting. The door panels splinter. The musket ball passes through. Hyrum Smith says, \u201cI am a dead man,\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/span> and his eldest brother’s chapter ends. The chapter of his historiographical sanctification then opens, and has run, virtually unbroken, for one hundred and eighty years. To read him fairly today \u2014 to honor what is honorable in him, to lament what is lamentable, and to use his story as a sober occasion for renewed clarity about the apostolic gospel \u2014 is the work of any Christian who takes both history and the love of neighbor seriously. He deserves at least that. So do we.<\/p>\n

In life, he was not divided from his brother;<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In death, they were not separated. The truth, however, must be.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2766 \u2766 \u2766<\/span><\/p>\n

Primary Sources Consulted<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

This essay is documented from the following sources, drawn from both Latter-day Saint and independent venues. URL citations follow.
\n\u2022 Wikipedia,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cHyrum Smith\u201d<\/em>: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hyrum_Smith<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Church History Topics,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith\u201d<\/em> (LDS Church): https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/history\/topics\/hyrum-smith?lang=eng<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 M. Russell Ballard,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith: Firm As the Pillars of Heaven\u201d<\/em> (Oct. 1995): https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/general-conference\/1995\/10\/hyrum-smith-firm-as-the-pillars-of-heaven?lang=eng<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Ronald K. Esplin,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cHyrum Smith: The Mildness of a Lamb, the Integrity of Job\u201d<\/em> (Ensign, Feb. 2000): https:\/\/www.churchofjesuschrist.org\/study\/ensign\/2000\/02\/hyrum-smith-the-mildness-of-a-lamb-the-integrity-of-job?lang=eng<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Lawrence R. Flake,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith,\u201d<\/em> BYU Religious Studies Center: https:\/\/rsc.byu.edu\/prophets-apostles-last-dispensation\/hyrum-smith<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Kenneth W. Godfrey,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cRemembering the Deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith\u201d<\/em>: https:\/\/rsc.byu.edu\/joseph-smith-prophet-man\/remembering-deaths-joseph-hyrum-smith<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Alford and Manscill,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith\u2019s Liberty Jail Letters\u201d<\/em>: https:\/\/rsc.byu.edu\/foundations-restoration\/hyrum-smiths-liberty-jail-letters<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Bradley Campbell,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cThe Presiding Patriarch Problem\u201d<\/em> (MRM): https:\/\/mrm.org\/the-presiding-patriarch-problem<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Lucas Jackson,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith Discourse on Polygamy\u201d<\/em> (Awake and Arise): https:\/\/www.adamawake.com\/hyrum-smith-polygamy\/<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Daniel Peterson,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cHyrum Smith Is an Impressive Witness\u201d<\/em> (Deseret News): https:\/\/www.deseret.com\/2016\/9\/29\/20597155\/hyrum-smith-is-an-impressive-witness\/<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Scripture Central,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cHow Did Hyrum Smith Help Bring Forth the Book of Mormon?\u201d<\/em>: https:\/\/scripturecentral.org\/knowhy\/how-did-hyrum-smith-help-bring-forth-the-book-of-mormon<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Scripture Central,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cWhy Was Hyrum Faithful to His Witness?\u201d<\/em> (republished at Meridian): https:\/\/latterdaysaintmag.com\/why-was-hyrum-faithful-to-his-witness-of-the-book-of-mormon\/<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Bruce A. Van Orden,<\/strong> <\/span>\u201cHyrum Smith,\u201d<\/em> Encyclopedia of Mormonism (LightPlanet): https:\/\/www.lightplanet.com\/mormons\/people\/hyrum_smith.html<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 \u201cHyrum Smith, Part I\u201d,<\/strong><\/span> History of Mormonism: https:\/\/historyofmormonism.com\/2009\/12\/04\/hyrum-smith\/<\/u><\/span><\/a><\/span>
\n\u2022 \u201cHyrum Smith, Part II\u201d,<\/strong> <\/span>History of Mormonism: https:\/\/historyofmormonism.com\/2009\/12\/04\/hyrum-part2\/<\/u><\/span><\/a>
\n\u2022 Jannalee Sandau,<\/strong><\/span> \u201cWhat Newspapers in the 1800s Said about the Martyrdom\u201d<\/em> (LDS Living): https:\/\/www.ldsliving.com\/what-newspapers-in-the-1800s-said-about-the-martyrdom-of-joseph-and-hyrum\/s\/81932<\/u><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar\u2014capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross\u2011referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author\u2019s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI\u2011generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer\u2011reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found\u2014and they were found\u2014corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed, historical details are precisely rendered, and theological claims fairly represent the positions they describe or critique.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader\u2014whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here\u2014and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, a misrepresented teaching, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. The goal of this work is not to win a debate but to get the history right. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into future editions without hesitation.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Truth, after all, has nothing to fear from scrutiny\u2014and neither does this work.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seventh in the Early Mormon Personalities Series The Faithful Witness: How Hyrum Smith\u2019s Loyalty Carried A Movement and Concealed Its Contradictions \u2766 \u2766 \u2766 I. Carthage, June 27, 1844 \u2014 A Cinematic Opening The afternoon was hot and slow on the Illinois prairie. Inside an upstairs room of the Carthage Jail, four men in shirtsleeves…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47,181,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-history","category-latter-day-saints"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Hyrum-Smith-header.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8027"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8036,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8027\/revisions\/8036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}