She is the woman who paid the most and got named the least in the history that came after. The portrait owes her better than the history did.
The Woman Joseph Loved
We have to begin where the record begins, with a young woman in Harmony, Pennsylvania, twenty-one years old, dark-haired, tall, the daughter of a hard father, with a singing voice that the few people who heard it still remembered fifty years later. Joseph Smith, ten months her junior, boarded at her father's house during the months he was looking for buried silver with Josiah Stowell. Isaac Hale watched the country boy from Vermont fall in love with his daughter and decided he would have none of it. Joseph was an unschooled fortune-seeker who claimed to see in stones; Isaac was a Methodist farmer who saw nothing of value in him. He refused his consent. Emma climbed into a sleigh on January 18, 1827, drove with Joseph across the line into New York, and was married without her father's blessing. She would not see Isaac again for two years, and when she did, the visit ended badly. She gave up her father for Joseph and never got him back.
That is the first thing to understand about Emma. The cost began before the angels did.
The Carriage on Cumorah Hill
When Joseph went to receive the plates from Moroni on the night of September 22, 1827, Emma drove. The wagon, the horse, the road in the dark — these are details preserved almost in passing in Lucy Smith's history, but they belong to her. She was twenty-three. She had been married eight months. She was the only other human being present at the moment her husband took the record into his hands. She did not see the plates that night, but she had taken him to them, and she would carry them in linen on her lap through the road home, with Joseph walking ahead through the woods to draw off the men who had been hired to take them from him.
You have to picture that carriage. A young wife, alone, holding a covered object she had been told was a record of God, while her husband fought in the dark to keep the men with knives away from the road she was on. The Restoration did not arrive into Joseph's hands alone. It arrived into a partnership. He has been remembered. She has, by and large, not.
The First Scribe
In the spring of 1828, before Martin Harris, before Oliver Cowdery, the person sitting on the other side of the curtain in the Harmony farmhouse with a quill in her hand was Emma. She wrote portions of what would become the lost 116 pages. We do not know which portions. We do know that she was the first human being other than Joseph to hear the Book of Mormon dictated, and that she heard it in her own kitchen, in the rooms where she had also lost her firstborn son just weeks before. The boy was born June 15. He did not live the day. Emma nearly died with him. Through the late summer of 1828, while Martin Harris went off with the manuscript and lost it, while Joseph collapsed under the weight of having defied the Lord's "no" three times, Emma was recovering from a delivery that had nearly cost her her life and grieving a child she had never been able to hold. The Restoration was building inside a marriage that was also bleeding.
She left a single witness about the translation, given near the end of her life. Joseph could not write a coherent letter, she said. He could not have dictated the book by himself. The pages came from him "hour after hour" with no notes, no books, no manuscript in front of him. "It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this; and, for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply impossible." She was the most skeptical witness Joseph ever had. She lived with him. She watched him every day. She knew what he did and did not know. And she said, at the end of her life and at the end of her tolerance for him, the work is true.
That testimony is one of the load-bearing testimonies of the Restoration, and it is given by the woman who, by then, had the most reasons in the world to walk away and did not.
The Elect Lady
Section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants was given to Emma in July 1830. Read it slowly. Hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, while I speak unto thee, Emma Smith, my daughter; for verily I say unto thee, all those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my kingdom. A revelation I give unto thee … thou art an elect lady, whom I have called. (D&C 25:1–3)
The phrase elect lady is not throwaway language. It is the salutation of 2 John 1:1 in the New Testament — the elder unto the elect lady — and it had a particular early-Christian sense of a woman who held a leadership stewardship in the Church. The Lord uses it on Emma directly. She is called to be a comfort to her husband "with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness." She is called to expound scriptures and to exhort the church, "as it shall be given thee by my Spirit." She is called to be a scribe. And then, in the verse the saints have most often forgotten, she is given a publishing assignment: "And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns, as it shall be given thee, which is pleasing unto me, to be had in my church."
She did it. By 1835 she had compiled the first hymnal of the Restoration — A Collection of Sacred Hymns for the Church of the Latter Day Saints, ninety hymns, no music, just texts, many of them by William W. Phelps and Parley P. Pratt, some of them by Eliza R. Snow, and at least some of them likely selected and edited by Emma herself. The Spirit of God like a fire is burning, Redeemer of Israel, Now let us rejoice, Joy to the world — they were in her hand before they were in ours. Every time a Latter-day Saint sings, they are singing from Emma's collection, in the direct line that began with the revelation she received at twenty-five.
She was the first president of the Relief Society of Nauvoo, organized March 17, 1842. The minute book records Joseph telling the sisters that he was turning the key to them — not opening a door for them, but giving them the key to open doors for themselves. He said it in the room where Emma was president. The work of women in the Church has, ever since, been built on the floor she helped lay.
The Cost
And here is where the empathy has to come, because Emma's life is a chronicle of loss the way Job's is, and most readers know almost none of it.
Of the eleven children she carried or adopted, only five lived to adulthood. The firstborn Alvin died at birth, June 1828. The twins Thaddeus and Louisa died at birth, April 1831 — the same week Joseph and Emma took in the Murdock twins whose own mother had died in childbirth. The Murdock boy, named Joseph after his adoptive father, was eleven months old in the spring of 1832 when the mob at Hiram dragged Joseph out of the bed Emma was sharing with him, tarred him, beat him, tried to pour aqua fortis (nitric acid) down his throat, and left the door open behind them. The baby caught a fatal cold from the exposure and died five days later in Emma's arms. The mob took Joseph; the consequences killed the child. Don Carlos Smith was born in 1840 and died at fourteen months. The 1842 son was stillborn. The list is unbearable, and it is hers.
She lived as a refugee. New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. Furniture left behind. Houses she had painted abandoned to mobs. Possessions sold in the panic of escape. She forded the frozen Mississippi in February 1839 with two living children clinging to her skirts and the manuscripts of Joseph's translation of the Bible sewn into the pockets of her dress. She lost almost everything she ever owned at least three times before she was thirty-five. By 1842 she was running a hotel — the Nauvoo Mansion — for a husband who was rarely home and was constantly on the run. By 1844 she was forty years old, pregnant for the ninth time, and her husband and his brother were both murdered in the same room a hundred miles away. She gave birth to David Hyrum five months later in a house that no longer had a master.
The Difficult Part
And then there is the part of her life that most readers either skip or use against her, and we should do neither.
Plural marriage broke her. There is no honest way to read the Nauvoo years and not acknowledge it. The doctrine was given through her husband; it was sealed upon him and upon the men he trusted; it was practiced in Nauvoo before it was preached; and it was practiced, in some cases, without her knowledge and against her express opposition. Joseph and Emma's marriage, the great love story of the Restoration, was the marriage on which that doctrine fell hardest. She tried, several times, to accept it. She gave Joseph wives with her own hand and then took the consent back. She read D&C 132 in tears. She is named in that section — "let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph" — and she could not. She did not.
After the martyrdom she stayed in Nauvoo. She would not go west. She would not let her sons be raised by Brigham Young. She married a non-member, Lewis Bidamon, in 1847, and lived out her days in the Mansion House in a city that was no longer the city of the Saints. Her oldest living son became, in 1860, the founding president of the Reorganized Church — the branch of the Restoration that, until very recent decades, denied that Joseph had ever taught or practiced plural marriage at all. Emma let him do it. In one of the late interviews, asked outright whether her husband had married other women, she said he had not. She had every reason to believe her own answer was protective. We have every reason to believe it was not factually true.
You can read this two ways, and most have read it one way: the apostate Emma, the widow who would not gather, the woman who covered up the very revelation her husband had died for. There is a Spirit-led reading that goes the other way. Emma had carried the cost of the Restoration in her body and in her bed and in the graves of her children, and the doctrine that had broken her marriage in life she could not consent to in widowhood. She did not deny the First Vision. She did not deny the Book of Mormon. She did not deny the priesthood, the temple keys, the divine call of Joseph, or anything else she had witnessed firsthand. What she could not bear was the part of the record that had broken her, and what she did with that unbearable part was the most human thing a widow could have done with it. Whether she was right or wrong is for the Lord. That she was wounded is between us and the duty to read her with charity.
What She Said At the End
She lived to be seventy-four. Her last week was the week of her death in April 1879. Her son Alexander sat with her. She had been weakening for days. In the last hours she stirred, lifted herself slightly off the pillow, lifted her arms as if to receive someone she saw in the room, and called out, Joseph! Joseph! And then, Yes, yes, I am coming. Then she lay down and was gone.
We do not have to ask whom she was reaching for. The marriage that the world had broken in life, she met again in death. Whatever the long wound between them, when she crossed the veil the first name she spoke was his.
What Others Miss
Readers who have only encountered Emma in the polemics — as the wife who would not follow, as the founder of the wrong church, as the woman who denied the polygamy — have never met her. The Emma of the record is the woman who climbed into the sleigh, who drove the carriage to Cumorah, who wrote the first sentences of the Book of Mormon in her own hand, who compiled the first hymnal, who buried six children, who forded the Mississippi with her husband's translation of the Bible sewn into her dress, who presided over the founding of the Relief Society, who received a revelation in her own name, who carried the title "elect lady" given to her by the voice of the Lord, and who, dying, called out for Joseph. The woman who reached him.
She is, in every measurable sense, the first witness of the Restoration after Joseph himself. And she paid a price for that witness that no other woman in the history of the Church has come close to paying.
The Restoration did not come to Joseph alone. It came to a marriage. The cost of it was carried, in disproportionate share, by the wife. To read her with reverence is not to absolve her of every choice — it is to recognize that the woman the Lord called His elect lady was elected not for her ease, but for her endurance, and that she endured it.