The 19th Wife Read online

  The mood in Nauvoo at this time was anxious. Since Joseph’s martyrdom in June 1844, the Saints had been fearful of a massacre similar to the one at Haun’s Mill. There were signs that a major raid was about to come. At night haystacks were burned in open fields. Dogs were beheaded and livestock poisoned. Carriages on the road to Quincy were ambushed. Illinois governor Thomas Ford warned Brigham to lead his followers out of

  Brigham and Chauncey met in the keeping room at the front of the house. Elizabeth remained in the kitchen at the back of the house while her sons, Gilbert, age eleven, and Aaron, age seven, played outside in the orchard. Ann Eliza, now one year old, lay restless in her cradle beside the fire. The Webbs’ house girl, Lydia Taft,3 came and went through the back door, minding the boys in the orchard. They had invented a game of looking for the faces of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Smith in the rotten apples littering the orchard yard this time of year. Lydia and the boys fed the apples to the billy goat, a spotted animal christened (ironically, it must be assumed) Mr. Pope.4

  After half an hour Brigham asked Elizabeth to join them in the keeping room. With baby Ann Eliza in her arms, she went to see her husband and her Prophet. Elizabeth thought she knew the topic of the conversation: “I was certain he had come to remind me of the Revelation I feared most,” Elizabeth writes in one fragment, referring to celestial marriage, or polygamy. “I know now I feared it because it was true.”

  First, Brigham had other business, however. He told her about the wagon order he had just placed with Chauncey. Soon he would announce an Exodus from Nauvoo, he said, commencing the following spring. “Our destination is Zion,” Brigham explained. “Soon God will reveal its location to me.”

  Chauncey would lead the crucial effort to build the necessary wagons for the journey. Elizabeth took understandable pride in her husband’s selection as chief wainwright. “He is a necessary man,” she writes.

  They discussed in detail the requirements.5 Each wagon would need to haul two thousand pounds of supplies. Every fifth wagon would carry a spare front wheel, every tenth wagon a spare rear wheel. Every twentieth required a slot for a beehive. Brigham’s meticulous orders displayed his considerable skills at planning and organizing. Before he was to lead nearly twenty thousand people across the plains and the Rockies, he was to think through every possible requirement and contingency. Between 1847 and 1869, some seventy thousand Pioneers would owe their lives to Brigham’s painstaking planning, staging, and organization. This is why George Bernard Shaw called him an American Moses. This is why his statue stands in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., today, alongside other national heroes such as George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower.6

  It is important to remember that at this time Brigham was still a relatively young man. Our image of him today is based on the later portraits made long after the establishment of the Utah Territory, when he had entered late middle age. In 1845, however, he was a vigorous man of forty-four. One immigrant described his face as “that of a sea captain”—firm, a bit square, with iron-colored eyes. He had wide cheeks, a small mouth, and an altogether determined look.7

  “It was no relief to know that he had come with a request for wagons, and not another,” Elizabeth writes in her Testimony. “For I knew one day he would ask what I dreaded most.” Understandably, she was frightened. Section 132 of the Doctrine & Covenants—the Revelation Joseph Smith had personally revealed to Elizabeth and Chauncey the day before his arrest—says that those who fail to meet the requirements of plural marriage cannot achieve Salvation. It is a point worth emphasizing: The Church—that is, the men Elizabeth believed and trusted most—was telling her that she would be condemned eternally if she did not submit fully to this hated custom.

  “And yet, there is another matter,” said Brigham. With those few words, the mood in the room had changed. The baby began to simper. Even as she minded her daughter, Elizabeth knew her fear had been warranted: Brigham had in fact come to discuss plural marriage.

  “I know Brother Joseph discussed the covenant of celestial marriage with you shortly before his martyrdom. I know he shared the Revelation of plural marriage.”

  “Is it really the will of the Lord?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It is.”

  As much as she loathed the idea, she then knew that this time she could not deny her Lord or her Prophet. She thought back to the meeting with Joseph. We cannot know how many times she blamed herself for his fate by refusing to comply, but such a sentiment appears forcefully in her Testimony.

  “Tell me, Sister,” said Brigham, “what do you say?”

  “I will do as He asks.”

  It was done. Brigham blessed her. Elizabeth wept softly in her husband’s arms.

  A decade later, in a letter to one of his sons, Brigham describes how he had to “console the astonished hearers of this news. I told them that I too heard of it and hated it immediately. Yet if we are to listen to our God, and follow His command, we cannot choose those orders which most please us, and ignore those that cause us pain. For verily, it has been revealed, this is our way to Heaven, and to ignore the path is to ignore Salvation altogether. I remember telling a Brother and a Sister of the Revelation in Nauvoo. Together we fell to our knees and prayed. It was all I could offer, for the truth comes as such.”8

  Next Brigham explained to Elizabeth and Chauncey that the approval of the second wife belonged to the first. “Brother Chauncey must come to you for your consent. The choice of wife, who she shall be, lies with you.”

  A “small fury” burned within Elizabeth as Brigham explained the process. If she must submit to plural marriage, she wanted nothing to do with the selection of the wife. Although it is doubtful she thought of it in such terms, Elizabeth resented the complicity the institution was forcing upon her.

  When Brigham was gone, Chauncey and Elizabeth discussed the matter. Chauncey probably hated the idea even more than his wife did. Unlike Elizabeth, there seemed to be a bottom to his faith. He said he would tell Brigham they could not follow his orders. “He cannot force us.”

  Yet for Elizabeth, it was too late. She had searched her soul and reached a truth. “We must obey,” she said. For her, apostasy was not an option. She remembered what had happened the last time she had defied her Prophet. Thus, in the end, it was Elizabeth who decided Chauncey would take a second wife.

  3.

  Lydia Taft was seventeen when she left her family in Saint Clair County, Michigan, in the summer of 1844. A few months before, a missionary had come to preach from the Book of Mormon in a neighbor’s parlor, electrifying Lydia with his news of the Restoration and his depiction of Nauvoo, the shining city on the hill. She left the meeting with a copy of the Book of Mormon, determined to read it. By the time she turned the last page, her faith was secure. “I knew. Mother, I knew!” she would later write in one of her three surviving letters.

  When news of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom reached her, she decided to travel to Nauvoo to live among the Saints. “The time is now. That’s what Joseph Smith in death has taught me. Now! Oh my dear Mother. Please read this Book! And then come be with me in Nauvoo! It’s a city that gleams upon the river bank, and men can see the white Temple from all directions, and every day the faithful arrive from all over the world.”

  After landing in Nauvoo, Lydia found work in the Webb household. At the time, Elizabeth was pregnant with Ann Eliza. It was a difficult pregnancy and she needed the help. When she hired Lydia, Elizabeth could not have imagined that a little more than a year later the girl would become her rival wife.

  The only known picture of Lydia was taken many years later in Salt Lake. It shows a thin, tired woman with buried eyes. But in 1845, when she was seventeen, she was “pale and lovely,” according to Elizabeth, “with a slow soft mouth and flecks of gold in her eyes.”

  There is conflicting evidence over who first suggested Lydia to become Chauncey’s second wife. In the surviving fragments of her Testimony, Elizabeth writes, “Lydia no doubt loved my children.
I had grown accustomed to her presence and the sound of her feet.” In The 19th Wife Ann Eliza says she recalls her father looking at Lydia “in a manner a husband reserves for his wife.” Perhaps he did so, but Ann Eliza’s memory of it is doubtful (she was one year old at the time). We may not know whose idea it was, but by late 1845 Chauncey and Elizabeth had decided to enter a plural marriage with Lydia. Now they only needed her to agree.

  At some point, Elizabeth writes, Lydia began to eat with the family at the supper table. “She ceased being our servant in many ways.” We don’t know if this was after the idea was broached or before. We have Lydia’s account of the actual conversation preserved in a letter to her mother. It took place late on a blizzardy night, the children already in bed. The snow was blowing hard, and the drifts were mounting past the windowsills. To Lydia, it seemed like the type of storm that would trap them in the house for a week. Chauncey invited Lydia and Elizabeth into the keeping room to pray.

  After fifteen minutes on their knees, Chauncey rose and began to throw more wood on the fire. His back was to the women as he poked the coals. Without turning around, he described the Revelation, as told first by Joseph then Brigham.

  “I know,” Lydia shrugged. “I’ve heard of it too. Girls can talk.”

  Chauncey asked her opinion of the Revelation.

  “I see it only one way. I will do what the Lord asks to carry forth His Kingdom.” This is what Lydia says she said. There is no way to confirm whether or not she truly showed such resolve at such a young age. In reading through a number of letters and diaries by the early Saints, I have noted a pattern of speech that sounds more like religious text than actual dialogue. It is difficult to know if the early Saints truly used such language and diction, or if they recorded their conversations in a way that exalted their words. Even so, there is little reason to doubt that Lydia embraced the idea swiftly.

  In The 19th Wife Ann Eliza says her mother thanked Lydia but privately fumed. I have tried to confirm this particular detail, but there seems to be little record of exactly how Elizabeth felt that night. Given what we know, Elizabeth most likely felt a sense of deliverance, accomplishment, and submission mixed with regret, betrayal, confusion, and jealousy. She writes of comparing her own hands (“worn, raw, scraped on the knuckle”) to Lydia’s (“white as a petal, and just as soft”). There’s a hint that she was surprised—and perhaps appalled—by Lydia’s quick consent. Most painfully, Lydia claims that Chauncey, as he finally turned from the mantel, looked as if he might devour the teenage girl. “I could see he was so overcome with desire for me,” Lydia writes to her mother. “He could not speak. Men, for the most part, reveal their true thoughts in their shallow faces. Concealment will always remain the female art. I thought, if he could he would wed me that night.”

  In the surviving scraps of Elizabeth’s testimony there is one line that stands out. I cannot identify the event that caused it, but it very well could be her description of how she felt after this conversation. “I cried through the night,” she writes. “Until the dawn, and beyond.” There is no reason to think these were tears of joy.

  4.

  On the clear, frozen morning of January 21, 1846, the Webbs and their housegirl gathered at the Nauvoo Temple. Although still under construction, the Temple had been used by Brigham for several months for services and sealing and endowment ceremonies. At the time the Temple was one of the largest buildings in the western United States. Built of white limestone cubes, it was like a beacon to the river traffic going north and south.9

  Much of what we know about the sealing and the wedding ceremony comes from The 19th Wife. Chauncey wore a high collar that irritated his beard. Elizabeth was in a plain dark dress with narrow silk cuffs. Lydia had draped a new lace shawl across her shoulders. Her iron hairpins caught the winter sun. According to Ann Eliza, Chauncey and Elizabeth appeared solemn, while Lydia seemed giddy.10

  Brigham began the ceremony by sealing Chauncey and Elizabeth. The sealing ceremony varies little from most Christian wedding ceremonies. The difference, of course, is that instead of “until death do us part” the couple is united through eternity. Although this is typically one of the happiest moments in the life of a member of the LDS Church, we cannot assume it was so for Elizabeth. “She believed she would be with her husband forever—no doubt a comforting thought—but at what price?” asks Ann Eliza. “My mother stood in the Temple and the sunlight came down upon her. I believe if my mother ever had a moment of doubt, it was now.” Elizabeth’s account of this day was all but destroyed. Yet among the fragments one curious line leaps out: “oh my faith!”

  With Chauncey and Elizabeth now sealed, Brigham instructed Elizabeth to step aside. He guided her to his left, replacing her with Lydia, who “was bouncing on her toes.”11 Quickly he united Chauncey and Lydia in marriage. Their vows were also similar to those used at most Christian weddings. Here, at death, their marriage would cease. In the afterlife, Chauncey would have one wife, the woman who had just been ushered aside. How did Elizabeth feel as she stood by and listened to her husband devote himself to a girl almost half her age? How did she feel, knowing they would all return home, share in a wedding feast, followed by her husband withdrawing to Lydia’s bedroom to consummate the marriage?

  We must rely on her children, and our imaginations, for the answer. Ann Eliza writes: “After supper, the newlyweds retired to Lydia’s room off the kitchen. My father had purchased a new brass-post bed. The lamplight reflected off the brass exotically, casting the room in a golden glow. My mother saw Lydia go in first, sit upon the bed, and remove the pins from her hair. Her hair fell to her shoulders in a flaxen wave. She brushed it out and it shone around her head like a halo. When my father came to Lydia’s door she held her hand out and said, ‘Come.’ He closed the door behind him, leaving my mother to the dirty dishes in the pan.”

  Gilbert, Elizabeth’s illegitimate son, witnessed the same scene, recording it in his diary.12 “Lydia seemed eager for the night to come to an end. Her foot tapped as we ate and she said she was too tired for singing. After supper she disappeared into her room. Soon my father followed. I helped my mother with the dishes and the pots. I went outside to fetch water from the well. I had to pass by Lydia’s window. I would be a liar if I said I did not look in. I witnessed what I expected—a mound of flesh. I didn’t like the idea that they were doing this because of God. It’s terrible to see your own Pa in such a manner.”

  It is worth noting that we have diaries and letters from many women who praised the day a second (or third, fourth, or even fifth wife) entered her house. A sister wife meant a woman was fulfilling her religious obligations. It meant she was that much closer to Heaven. More practically, a sister wife also meant help with the household chores and, typically, some relief from conjugal relations. Many women found joy in the institution. But many did not. The evidence suggests Elizabeth was among those who mourned the night she passed her husband to another woman. As one Pioneer woman described it a decade later, “A piece of my soul chipped off that night and fell away.”13

  A curious postscript to Chauncey’s first plural marriage: Brigham himself may have entered into up to eleven plural marriages the same month. The numbers have been a source of debate for more than 150 years. I have little hope of settling the matter here. According to some accounts, on January 21, 1846, the same day he sealed Lydia to Chauncey, Brigham took two wives himself, Martha Bowker (1822–1890) and Ellen Rockwood (1829–1866). The evidence for these weddings is far from ideal: mostly secondhand testimonies or statements made long after the fact. Yet given the secretive and illegal nature of plural marriage in general, and especially those of the leader of the Latter-day Saints, it is understandable that there is little paper trail.145.

  According to Ann Eliza, the wedding night was an extended affair. Like many homes in Nauvoo, the Webb house, although comfortable, was not large. It is easy to imagine noise traveling from one room to the next, across the floorboards or through the space wh
ere a door meets its jamb. “My father tried to quiet the girl,” Ann Eliza writes in The 19th Wife. “But she did not care. Lydia squealed like a pig at the docking of its tail. Someone less forgiving might say she wanted my mother to hear.” This is the kind of secondhand reporting and passive-aggressive tone that Ann Eliza uses throughout her memoir; it’s why many have dismissed it as unreliable. No doubt Ann Eliza is taking sides here; her bias is hardly veiled. But when compared with Gilbert’s version of events, one can see that she was more or less reporting the truth, even if her tone is sharpened: “That first night,” Gilbert writes in his diary, “Lydia made herself known to my father and the rest of us too. I went to the barn to sleep, knowing the horses to be more quiet and always preferring their company.”

  “People change.” That’s Ann Eliza’s assessment of Lydia following her marriage to Chauncey. The former house girl now expected to be treated as the woman of the house. Almost at once she refused to participate in the household work, demanding that Chauncey hire a girl to take over her old chores. She wanted a replica of every finery in Elizabeth’s wardrobe: hat, pin, and glove. There was a nasty spat over a piece of jewelry Chauncey had given his wife when Ann Eliza was born, a pearl on a gold stick. Ann Eliza reports a fight between the two women. “Lydia scratched my mother until there was blood,” she writes in her memoir. Elizabeth responded with a slap and pulling Lydia’s hair. Ann Eliza analyzes this particular episode astutely: “So often plural marriage reduces a thoughtful, generous, mature woman to a sniveling, selfish little girl. Perhaps it is the cruelest outcome: the removal, and destruction, of a woman’s dignity. I have seen it too many times to count. I forgive the men who have done this to womankind, but I never forget.”

  “In conjugal matters,” Ann Eliza writes frankly, “[Lydia’s] demands were even greater.” It was common in a plural marriage for the newest wife to resent sharing her husband’s affections with the previous spouse or spouses. According to Ann Eliza, “In the first two weeks of marriage, my father spent each night with his new bride. He offered little attention to his original wife. When it was time to retire he would kiss my mother on the tip of the nose and slip into Lydia’s room. I know my mother wondered if she would ever see her husband again.”