The first Latter-day Saint autobiography,

intimate in its approach and invaluable to the Saints.

And it was written by the Prophet’s mother,

Lucy Mack Smith.

I have met many women of faith in my lifetime, but I think Lucy surpasses them all.

Coming up next on The Joseph Smith Papers.

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

Just imagine yourself living in Nauvoo in late 1844, after the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum. Brother, Joseph’s gone. He’s no longer available to answer questions.

Now even though he had begun a history before he died,

still, a lot of questions about the early days of the Restoration remained, and people wanted answers.

So they began to go to that person they thought would have those answers: Lucy Mack Smith.

And out of that came one of our most valuable pieces of early Latter-day Saint history and biography.

In Nauvoo, after the martyrdom, there was left the widows of Joseph and Hyrum, and mother Lucy

and her children. And in that time,

if you could envision living in Nauvoo,

you could go to the mother of the prophet and say, “Well, what happened when Joseph got the plates and he brought them to your house?”

And the fascinating thing is that Lucy produced a history basically out of that experience in Nauvoo and says, as we will read in a letter she wrote to William, that she was going to write these questions down so she didn't have a hoarse voice answering the same question time and time again.

So writing to William, she says, this is what I’ve

been doing, William.

“People are often inquiring of me,

the particulars of Joseph’s getting the plates,

seeing the angels at first, and many other things which Joseph never wrote or published.

I have told over many things pertaining to these matters to different persons to gratify their curiosity. Indeed,

I have almost destroyed my lungs

giving these recitals to those who felt anxious to hear them.

I have now concluded to write down every particular as far as possible and if those who wish to read them will help me a little bit, they can have it.”

So she is, actually we know from other records, she has actually dictated almost all of her history at this time.

She started it in 1844. She finished it in 1845.

But the thing I'm hearing you say is that this book came to satisfy public demand. Essentially. that’s what I’m saying, and what she said in the letter.

Lucy’s in her late 60s when she dictates her account.

And because of that, some have charged that her account isn’t accurate because age has clouded her memory.

The mother of the prophet was a daughter of the Revolution, I've said elsewhere. She was born in July of 1775,

and that spring the Battle of Concord Bridge had already happened, and she died in 1856. So she had reached her early 80s by the time she died.

Some people have thought that Lucy was not too coherent at that time and maybe her recollections were not totally accurate.

But John Taylor left an 1846 journal in Nauvoo,

and he said, I visited Lucy and she’s sharp. Her memory is clear and she can tell events in the life of the Prophet as though it were yesterday. Which is to say then that her historical recollections are good. They are good because they're testable.

Now Lucy’s book came in three stages.

A young woman, who was a schoolteacher,

wrote that book down for Lucy.

Her name was Martha Jane Coray,

and she married Howard Coray, who

originally was a secretary to Joseph Smith.

So these two people are literate and interested in Lucy.

And Martha Jane Coray left an early notebook,

which we have at Brigham Young University,

which gives just recollections, not even in sequence.

And that notebook in Martha Jane's handwriting represents the first interview stage when she was probing episodes with

with Lucy. After this small notebook,

jotting down events, Martha Jane

quite clearly made a preliminary compilation. Is that when we look at Lucy's published book,

the raw manuscript has a lot of episodes in it that didn't make it into final print. But yet they're obviously coming from Lucy.

Colorful language that she uses in the raw manuscript. Is this the raw manuscript?

This is raw manuscript. This is actually Martha Jane’s hand right here. This is Martha Jane’s hand.

Some additions in her hand.

Howard, her husband, probably helped her occasionally, but this is basically her production.

And so from her interviews and a small notebook,

which must be typical of that process,

she moves to a preliminary compilation.

And we're looking at that preliminary compilation.

The Corays interest in Lucy’s history came because of their deep affection for Joseph.

Indeed, if it hadn't been for Joseph in a manner of speaking,

they may not have met and been married in the first place.

One could easily ask, “Why? Why this couple?”

And there's a few reasons why Martha took a personal interest in recording the events relative to Joseph Smith's life.

When she was baptised and shortly after her baptism,

she was introduced to Joseph Smith and she was immediately fascinated with him. And

so this fascination carried over into her recording of events.

Howard, his story is very interesting.

In 1840, he began working on Joseph Smith’s history.

You have a married couple who knows a lot about the Smith family already. And so by the time 1844

and 1845 roll around, this is the perfect— these are the perfect people to write this history.

Howard served us as Joseph’s clerk for a time, one of the most amusing stories with Joseph and Howard,

there’s a point where Joseph asked Howard. He said, “I wish that you were a larger man, than you are. I would like to have a little fun with you.” Now Joseph was a little over 200 pounds.

Howard was 130 pounds soaking wet.

And he said, “Well, you know, you can as it is.”

Well, Howard had a paralytic limb. It was one of his arms or hands, probably both were withered.

And so here you have this 130-pound man who,

you know, in terms of wrestling with Joseph,

it's quite farcical to think of that occurring. And so when Howard says, “Well, I believe you can anyway,” Joseph, of course, starts wrestling with him. He ends up breaking Howard’s leg.

And Joseph is just devastated, you know,

that all this fun and games has turned to this. But Howard says, “Well, Jacob wrestled with the angel and he received a blessing.

Shouldn’t I? Don’t I deserve a blessing at this point?” And he said, “Well, you know,

I’ll have my father give you a blessing.”

But in the process of all of this,

he told Howard that he would find a woman suitable to his condition,

that she would cling to him like the cords of death,

and that they would have a good many children.

And they did have a good many children and they were very much suitable to each other’s needs.

Near the end of her life, Martha Jane Coray said the following about Joseph: “That he was the greatest miracle she had ever seen

and she valued her acquaintance with him almost above everything else.”

It was because of this deep affection that she had for Joseph, that Martha Jane dedicated her life to preserving his legacy for those who came after.

Martha Coray was an amazing woman. She had a lot of interests.

George A. Smith, at the time of her passing, said that she had done more to capture the words of Joseph Smith and had done more

with that endeavor than any other woman in the Church.

But her intent, she said,

in getting involved with the creation of the history, was that she wanted to capture information relative to Joseph Smith's experience for a children's reader.

And so, Martha indicates that she would go to Mother Smith

and Mother Smith would recall information,

would dictate information to her,

and she would write it down and they would review those notes. And essentially they would go ahead and work on writing the history, until Mother Smith would grow weary. At the time, her health was not too good. And there comes a point when in creating the history,

Martha and Lucy use multiple accounts coming from other sources. So this isn’t just Lucy Mack Smith dictation.

There are points where the history of Joseph Smith is published in The Times and Seasons. It’s incorporated into this. Lucy incorporates her father’s autobiography.

There are letters from family members.

So there’s a wide variety of material that is culled and utilized in the creation of this history. It would seem then that this was not just Howard and Martha sitting down, taking Lucy's remnant.

This was a major project. They were gathering information. This was something big, something official.

It was. The information that was used in the creation of the history is coming from all sorts of sources.

It was quite an endeavor to select the sources

and to use them for part of the history. How long did it take to complete this history?

We know that it took about a year?

They began working on it in the winter of 1844

and then definitively it’s finished by October of 1845, possibly a little bit earlier. We know that from Martha Coray’s daughter, Martha Lewis,

she says, “My mother did this as a labor of love.”

In the course of any historical work produced from memory,

there's going to be errors and misstatements.

And Lucy's history was no different.

But none of those errors were serious and none were intentional.

It was published in 1853.

There were problems—perceived problems with it.

One of them was, as you could see from the manuscript, they had all the corrections in it, the genealogy.

So there there were problems with that from that perspective, but there was nothing significantly wrong with it, substantially wrong to really warrant not publishing it.

This edition of Orson Pratt’s circulated from 1853 to into the 1860s.

And then—one of the

the few times this has happened in the history of the Church—the president of the church

recalled the edition and

he wanted it made correct.

And some people have said, and I have said, he was offended by Lucy’s promotion of her son, William, because William was really the bad boy of the 12 anyway. And he sought his own interests,

and Brigham Young felt that he was unreliable.

Now, please remember here that William Smith is the prophet's younger brother.

He had been ordained a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

And when the Saints went west, William remained behind.

Not long before Mother Smith’s history was published in 1853, William petitioned Congress and US President Zachary Taylor,

claiming that the Saints in Utah were treasonous and enemies of the state. Church leaders were not warmed toward William.

The larger issue is that there's a promotion of the Smith family

and two sons of Emma Smith,

she had three sons who became missionaries to Utah,

and that missionary work was going on, and Brigham probably felt he did not want the Latter-day Saints to believe that the Smith family had

a right to the keys of the priesthood and the leadership of the church. Like a royal legacy.

Like a royal legacy. Exactly. And I'm going to read

from Wilford Woodruff’s journal. Wilford Woodruff, I believe, was a historian of the Church at this time.

The journal is in

his own hand, of course, and it’s approximately 1870.

I cannot give you the date on this,

but it’s after the

desire to recall the

the edition of Lucy Smith’s history.

And Wilford said, “At the close of the meeting,

President Young and Wells and John Taylor, Woodruff, and Richards and George Q. Cannon met in the historian’s office for prayer.

The subject of the history of Joseph the Prophet as published by Mother Smith was taken up.”

And President Young said, “Brother Woodruff,

as soon as George A. Smith comes home,

I want you to get Elias Smith, [another cousin of the prophet],

and set down and correct the errors in the History of Joseph Smith as published by Mother Smith and then let it be published to the world.”

So Brigham's point was not to obliterate Lucy's memory,

but to have it accurately told.

Especially it was not to suppress it as has been charged.

Exactly. It was to amend, corrected. Well spoken.

So, Brigham had the goal of giving

the most reliable information into the hands of the Latter-day Saints. The question automatically comes up, Brother Anderson, what was in error in the original manuscript? Some of the William Smith references are modified,

some episodes where Lucy wasn't there personally.

But on the whole, there is a fairly light touch in the editing. And on the whole,

Brigham was more afraid of what might be there than what was there. And he was acting responsible to be sure that the

Latter-day Saints had their historical heritage straight.

Now, after hearing this,

viewers would be mistaken to come to the conclusion that Mother Smith's history isn't accurate and shouldn't be trusted.

There are critical moments in early Latter-day Saint history

that we would know little or nothing about if it were not for Mother Smith.

It comes back in 1901. In 1900,

Lorenzo Snow approved the publication of it. He says, this is a wonderful record. We need to have this out there. And so it begins to be published.

She tells the record of the coming forth of The Book of Mormon because that’s what she knew.

And if you compare her record with Joseph's record,

Joseph probably devotes about 40 pages of the history to the coming forth of the Book of Mormon

and doesn’t go into much detail as to how the plates were in the house and a lot of things that only a mother would observe and remember. But Lucy gives 60 pages on only the Book of Mormon, and it's filled with details.

So if we didn’t have Lucy’s book,

we wouldn't have the record of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in full.

It is a substantial contribution to the understanding of the history of the Church and to the understanding of the Smith family. It’s actually the first attempt at autobiography

within the Church. And so it’s part autobiography, it’s part biography, because Lucy is borrowing from other people and materials.

But it is very important in understanding the Smith family

and understanding circumstances relating to Joseph.

There are aspects of Joseph Smith's life that we really don't get the sense of the degree of which he is concerned. Take, for instance, in the manuscript where Emma has just lost their first child. And at that point, Martin Harris had the 116 pages

and had taken them. And Joseph was so worried about leaving Emma

because he was afraid that she would die.

And you get the sense in Lucy Mack’s record of Joseph’s total concern

for his family at that time,

that you get the sense of it to a degree, but not in such intimate detail as you do in Lucy’s history. Ultimately the value of this history,

there are things in the history that are recorded there that are recorded nowhere else.

And Joseph’s history, he talks about the First Vision. He talks about the visitation of

the angel Moroni. In Lucy Mack’s history, we hear about Joseph’s leg operation.

We hear about the Mack family.

We hear about Lucy’s father and his involvement in wars

and the sense of patriotism that occurs within the Smith family.

One incident that's very vivid in her history is that she was

allowed to say goodbye to Joseph as he was taken from Far West, first to Independence and then to a trial back in Richmond and then to Liberty Jail.

And she tells how Joseph was not allowed to see her, but could only reach out his hand out of the covering of the wagon and say, “Good bye, mother.” Now, that’s vividly first hand.

She knew and felt Joseph in that episode.

Lucy is writing to William and saying, “I once had five noble and manly sons.” Now let’s clock those off.

Alvin, her oldest son, died just pre-translation of The Book of Mormon in 1823 in New York.

And then

her son Don Carlos died of pneumonia in the early days of Nauvoo.

And she lost

Joseph and Hyrum at the martyrdom in 1844.

And then Samuel died as a result of injury, possibly trying to ride to be there and save Joseph and Hyrum. And so those five sons she’s probably referring to when she says, “I once had five noble and manly sons.

A companion who was the delight of my heart.” and that’s Joseph Smith, Sr., who died in early 1840 in Nauvoo.

“Besides three dutiful and affectionate daughters, whose affections with the favor of God made me as happy as it was.

Four of those sons with their father are laid in the cold and silent mansion of the tomb

by persecution and I’m a widow,

my health destroyed, and my happiness destroyed.”

That is poignant. It is poignant. To realize that she could look back upon her life and of 11 children,

she had her three daughters and William only. And so

the history she writes is a history of her family and also the history of persecution of her family for the gospel’s sake.

There is a sense of a family that relies upon God,

a family that knows that their petitions to God regarding the wrongs and injustices that have been placed upon them, that God will make things right in the end.

That sentiment is echoed in Lucy’s life. It's echoed in Joseph's life. Lucy concludes her record.

She says, “Having carried the history of my life as well as that of my family as far as I intend to do for the present,

I shall leave the world to judge concerning what I have written as seemeth them good, but this much I will say that the testimony which I have given is true and will stand forever

and the same will be my testimony in the day of God Almighty

where I shall meet them concerning whom I have testified

before angels and the spirits of the just made perfect, before archangels and seraphim’s, cherubim’s, and gods,

where the brief authority of the unjust man will shrink to nothingness before Him,

who is the Lord of Lords and God of Gods, and where the righteousness of the just shall exalt them in the scale wherein

He weigheth the hearts of man and having in common with the Saints appealed in vain for justice to Lilburn W. Boggs,

Thomas Carlin, Martin Van Buren and Thomas Ford.”

So we have the sense of appealing to the multiple levels,

“I now bid them a last farewell until I shall appear with Them before Him

who is the judge of both the quick and the dead

and to whom I now do solemnly appeal in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

That is powerful. Sometimes we have a tendency to make historical figures larger than life, almost

untouchable. But Mother Smith assures us in her history,

Joseph was an ordinary boy through whom the Lord could accomplish marvelous things.

In fact, the Lord himself even said to Joseph, in Doctrine and Covenants 124:1,

“Unto this end have I raised you up that I might show forth my wisdom through the weak things of the earth.” As Lucy tells the story in Nauvoo in 1845,

she sees it from the perspective of her family.

And she begins by telling her background and then how Joseph came into their lives,

and then she introduces Joseph by saying, I haven't said much of Joseph because in his youth, he didn’t have a spectacular boyhood.

She's implying that people want to make something more miraculous out of it than he really was.

So he had an ordinary boyhood.

But what made Joseph in her eyes, the eyes of the mother,

was what God called him to do. Not what a spectacular person he was. She was a mother of 11 children and loved them all. And Joseph was one of those children. But God called Joseph.

And so Joseph appears in the second act of her book, as it were. Some people have thought that the closer

a person is to a prophet,

the more biased he or she might be.

And yet, Lucy backs up her faith in the prophet Joseph Smith with story after story of how he exceeded his abilities and how the Lord directed him.

And she was aware of what was going on in his life,

even to the extent of his showing to her, under a cover, the

the breastplate and allowing her to feel the Urim and Thummim.

So Lucy is a witness of the restoration and her history is a significant religious document for the whole world.

This is the record that tells us how Joseph was impacted by his family and by events that were occurring in his life,

the religious upbringing that he had.

You know, Joseph was a man of courage and backbone.

But you listen to the words of his mother and you can see where some of that came from.

Yeah. She is a woman of insurmountable faith.

I have met many women of faith in my lifetime, but I think Lucy surpasses them all.

The history produced by Lucy Mack Smith, then, is an integral part of our history and heritage and valuable to us. Now next week, one of Joseph Smith’s most intense and driving passions during his life,

the production of the official history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That’s next week on The Joseph Smith Papers. I’m Glenn Rawson.

Thank you for joining us.