- REC911 on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “my 2 cents on the subject based on my limited study of it…. At best, polygamy is a hot mess. You had so many versions of polygamy/sealings/adoptions/marriages etc that were being done, I think we try and lump them all into one thing/type and we cant. It was also a moving target, meaning what they did and did not do changed over the years. To pretend we know/understand what actually happened or what people actually felt/experienced (good and bad) 190 years ago is almost impossible to get accurate based on our current world views. I am sure we have many members in the past who felt 100% that polygamy was from God and were blessed to be a part of it. The opposite can be found as we all know. IMO, none of us are qualified to correctly judge what they did and why. We have current scholars that are on completely opposite views of basic polygamy. (JS did it, no he didn’t) I have my own strong opinions and views based on my current knowledge and info today. I could be completely wrong. Polygamy is just a hot mess.” May 25, 15:01
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John, “Noting that a woman who refused a powerful man’s proposal had a son who rose to lead the institution that man founded is not complexity. It’s the system working as designed” doesn’t make logical sense, but it’s not the main topic here so let’s move on. I think you’re mistaken about what historical research involves, so you’re looking for a value judgment in my post that isn’t there. Where relationships are contested or ambiguous – including in the context of slavery – then yes, part of the process is clarifying someone’s status on the basis of documents or other evidence. That process of clarification isn’t a defense of anything, it’s just establishing the facts or the most likely interpretation of evidence. In the case of Helen Mar Kimball, there are contested facts and ambiguity, so some basic historical work is required before the argument about value judgments can begin. Helen seems to describe the sealing to Joseph Smith as “for eternity” only: I thought through this life my time will be my own The step I now am taking’s for eternity alone, (You asked above about signalling irony: I see now that I forgot the lines that make the ironic distance between adult author and teenage subject explicit: But could’st thou see the future & view that glorious crown, Awaiting you in Heaven you would not weep nor mourn. Sorry, my bad.) Of course that’s expressed as verse, and is a 52-year-old woman’s woman’s recreation of a 14-year-old girl’s thoughts, about which opinions can differ. But I think the preponderance of evidence points in the same direction: a sealing “for eternity” as part of Joseph Smith’s expansive project of linking the human family, rather than a case of child marriage similar to that of Chad’s ancestor impregnating a 13-year-old. Todd Compton regards the relationship between Helen Mar Kimball and Joseph Smith as unconsummated. So, about those value judgments. You bring up the question of consent, as does Helen: “This promise [of eternal salvation and exaltation for herself and her family] was so great that I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.” But also: Her mother “had witnessed the sufferings of others who were older and who better understood the step they were taking…but it was all hidden from me.” Does that sound like how we want to organize sealings? No, it does not. We agree on that point. But I lean toward accepting the past on its own terms, and we shouldn’t overestimate anyone’s freedom of action in a context that was radically more impoverished and precarious than anything we know today. I don’t know how much more we agree on. I agree with Helen Mar Kimball that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that the salvation and exaltation he spoke of are real rather than tools of manipulation, and that the principle of plural marriage allowed my grandfather to be buried between the graves of my grandmother and the wife he married after my grandmother’s death, secure in the knowledge that both relationships would continue after death. I don’t know how much of this is included in the frameworks or structures you mention and seem to regard as illegitimate.” May 25, 14:25
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “Dynastic sealing is not Helen’s language. It’s not in her letter. It’s a category invented after the fact to drain the sealing of its content and applied to a child’s life by people who were not that child. The angels now weep not at what was done to her but at how society misunderstood her. Every time the plain description gets close, the framework produces a new term, a new reframing, a new category. That’s not historiography. That’s what a closed system does. It doesn’t defend a position. It generates positions. The specific content of each defense is less important than the capacity to keep producing them. To ensure that plain description never quite lands, that there’s always another layer of complexity, another term, another reframing available. I don’t know what the solution is here or a path forward to better understanding. I guess one solution that has somewhat works is external pressure – or internal fracturing. The beneficial slavery literature didn’t collapse because abolitionists out-argued it in footnotes. It collapsed because the moral consensus outside the institution became impossible to ignore and enough people inside agreed and took action. I think the Gospel Topics Essays and the Saints books are some evidence that’s some of this is happening inside the Church. We have had to acknowledge certain facts because denial became untenable. Again, thanks for the good conversation here. I do appreciate the good faith engagement on this sensitive topic.” May 25, 10:47
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John C., I wasn’t clear. I meant to convey the notion that she didn’t know the trials she would suffer as a *result* of the sealing. The angels could see her (near) future–and the troubles she would endure because of being misunderstood by respectable society. That’s what they lamented–not the “fact” that she was being forced into an obscene arrangement. And I should add–for further clarification–that Helen seems to view her sealing to Joseph as just that: a sealing only. And so, while it is difficult to calculate an alternate future (e.g., what would’ve happened had Joseph had not been killed at Carthage) the whole thing seems to be the result of an effort on the part of Joseph and Heber to create an unbreakable link between them and their families. And so while the situation may seem to bear some of the earmarks that should raise our modern hackles–and being a father of five daughters I really do understand your concerns–she was not given to Joseph as a “child bride.” It was a “dynastic sealing” as some folks like to call it and nothing more–so far as I’m able tell.” May 25, 08:53
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “I appreciate this more than anything else written here. Child brides are sick and wrong, full stop. We don’t currently have a Journal of American Slavery dedicated to careful historiographic analysis of whether enslaved people’s later testimonies should be read ironically, or whether the complexity of the antebellum economy requires us to avoid “soundbites”, or whether we are being too modern in our moral judgments. That journal doesn’t exist because somewhere along the way we decided that some institutions are not neutral objects of analysis requiring careful suspension of judgment. The question of whether the sealing happened is only a scholarly question worth careful treatment if the institution that produced it is granted legitimate scholarly status. Slavery historiography exists. But nobody writes careful documentary defenses of whether a particular enslaved person’s “sealing” to their owner was historically verified. Or worse, that the enslaved person actually benefitted from being enslaved in some way. I genuinely don’t understand the goal here. Appreciate the respectful conversation nonetheless.” May 25, 08:09
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John C., I think that you are right in what you are saying, but I also think that you’re not quite speaking to what the original post was trying to say. Having child brides in Mormon polygamy (or anywhere else) is sick and wrong, no matter who the husband was and when it happened (or happens). I had to deal with this issue in the biography of an ancestor who married a 13 year old girl during the Mormon Reformation and got her pregnant right away. It’s hard to stomach and something we need to protect against today. I very much agree with your perspective and the point you are making. That being said, the argument Jonathan is making is against someone who is saying that Helen Kimball didn’t have that experience at all and the story was a fabrication to support a later polygamy structure. Given that he was answering a different question than the one you want the conversation to be about, it makes sense that the answer would be different than the one you want him to give.” May 25, 07:36
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “The angels weep because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through. A child who didn’t understand. An adult authority who did understand. A structure that reprocessed her distress as sacred sacrifice only recognizable through the institution’s own lens. That is a description of grooming. Not in the salacious and sensationalist sense this conversation has been careful to dismiss, but in the structural sense. The child doesn’t need to understand. That’s the point. Stephen C. says Helen doesn’t need anyone to speak for her. Correct, I agree. Jack just let her speak. The angels wept because she didn’t understand what was being done to her. The question this conversation has been avoiding is not whether Helen later found meaning in her sealing. It’s whether a child who didn’t understand what was happening to her was in a position to consent to it. I think Jack has answered that question. And I guess we’re expected to receive this as a faith-affirming reading, extend scholarly courtesy, and move on. The framework Jack has just described with perfect clarity continues to operate today. Not as history. The institutional structures that made a 14-year-old’s confusion into sacred sacrifice are intact. The interpretive machinery that converts a child’s distress into testimony is still running.” May 25, 06:37
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “I read Helen’s letter through–and it seems to me that when she transitions into the rhyming section she’s telling the story of her sacrifice. But interestingly it’s the angels who weep for her because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through because of her sealing to Joseph. But when she transitions back into regular prose–then we get her clear and unequivocal witness that she had done the right thing by being sealed to Joseph and that she and thousands of others would continue to be blessed because of the sealing she had received. And so, let’s be careful not to misjudge what she had experienced — as some sort of horrific abuse — when she herself sees it as the very thing that would bless her and her loved ones with exaltation.” May 24, 23:04
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: ““They were people.” Right, people who are very capable of speaking for themselves, left their own accounts, and don’t need you to speak for them.” May 24, 21:31
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “Noting that a woman who refused a powerful man’s proposal had a son who rose to lead the institution that man founded is not complexity. It’s the system working as designed. And calling that observation a soundbite is the same move that has been made throughout this conversation treating clarity as a failure of sophistication. The women weren’t complex historical puzzles. They were people. You are importing elaborateness where the evidence is actually straightforward and glossing over the genuinely complex question of what meaningful consent looks like inside a total institution like 1840s Nauvoo.” May 24, 21:20
