Fanny Alger - Relationship With Joseph Smith

Relationship With Joseph Smith

In January 1838, some months after the Algers had left Kirtland, Oliver Cowdery—one of the Three Witnesses to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon—wrote his brother concerning his indignation at Smith's relationship with Alger. Cowdery said he had discussed with Smith the "dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's...in which I strictly declared that I had never deserted from the truth in the matter, and as I supposed was admitted by himself." As Richard Bushman has noted, Smith "never denied a relationship with Alger, but insisted it was not adulterous. He wanted it on record that he had never confessed to such a sin." The best statement Smith could obtain from Cowdery was an affirmation that Smith had never acknowledged himself to have been guilty of adultery. "That," wrote Bushman, "was all Joseph wanted: an admission that he had not termed the Alger affair adulterous." In April 1838, Mormon leaders meeting as the Far West High Council excommunicated Cowdery, in part because he had "seemed to insinuate" that Smith was guilty of adultery.

At this point, Alger disappeared from the historical record of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, only to have a number of stories about her relationship with Smith arise during the late nineteenth century. All of these second-hand witnesses, Mormon and non-Mormon, agreed that Smith had married Alger as a plural wife. In his compendium of Joseph Smith's plural marriages, Todd Compton discusses this late nineteenth-century evidence and its differing reliability, concluding that Smith's relationship with Alger, though fleeting, was more than a casual sexual affair and that she was "one of Joseph Smith's earliest plural wives."

Nevertheless, historian Lawrence Foster disputed Compton's assumption, arguing that although "contemporary evidence strongly suggests" that Smith and Alger engaged in sexual relations, the evidence does not indicate that the relationship was "viewed either by Smith himself or by his associates at the time as a 'marriage.'" Foster noted that before Smith's first documented plural marriage to Louisa Beaman in April 1841, Smith's "earlier sexual relationships may have been considered marriages, but we lack convincing contemporary evidence supporting such an interpretation."

After Smith's death, Alger's brother asked her about her relationship with the Prophet. She replied, "That is all a matter of my own. And I have nothing to communicate."