To understand Hyrum, you have to understand that he was older. He was the firstborn living son after Alvin died. He should have been the prophet. He never once acted as though he had been overlooked.
The Elder Brother
The Smith household in Palmyra had an old hierarchy in it before the angels arrived. Alvin was the oldest. Hyrum was second. Joseph was third. Alvin died in 1823 at twenty-five, of a botched dose of calomel administered by a doctor who guessed wrong, and the grief of that death never left the family — Joseph's later doctrine of salvation for the dead has Alvin's face behind it, as we have noted in Joseph Smith. When Alvin was gone, the natural order of the household placed Hyrum, age twenty-three, in the elder-son position. He was the steady one. He was the schooled one — he had spent two years at Moor's Charity School at Hanover, the New Hampshire prep school that fed Dartmouth, and he could read theology and parse Hebrew vocabulary at a level Joseph never approached. He was bigger than Joseph. He was older than Joseph by five and a half years. By every measure that mattered in a Vermont farm household, Hyrum was the man.
And then in 1827 the angel told Joseph where the plates were buried, and Hyrum's whole life rearranged itself behind a younger brother who could not write a coherent sentence and who was now standing in the line that had been Hyrum's.
There is no record of Hyrum resenting it. There is no record of him asking for the call to come through him instead. There is no record of him reaching for the spotlight in any sermon, any council, any disputed decision. From the moment Joseph received the plates until the moment they died together in the same upper room of the same jail, Hyrum stood at the side of a younger brother and let the younger brother carry the lead. The first Aaron — Aharon — was the elder brother of Moses, the prophet's brother, the priest, the spokesman who could speak in places Moses could not. The first Aaron was older than Moses by three years. Hyrum was older than Joseph by five. The pattern is not a coincidence. Hyrum is the New World Aaron, and the same name that the Book of Mormon Aaron carries he carries — quietness in the second seat, with no rivalry in his mouth.
The Witness Who Saw
The Eight Witnesses are easy to forget. The Three Witnesses (Cowdery, Whitmer, Harris) got the angel, the voice from heaven, and the published declaration in the front of the book. The Eight — Hyrum, the Smith family men, the Whitmer brothers — got something less dramatic and, in some ways, more durable. They saw the plates with their natural eyes. They hefted them. They turned the leaves. Hyrum's own statement (signed June 1829, printed at the front of the Book of Mormon ever since): Joseph Smith, jun., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken … and we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work.
That is a sworn declaration from a man who, by 1844, would be murdered for what he had seen. He had every opportunity in the years between to retract. Three of the Three Witnesses left the Church and came back; some of the Eight drifted; some held. Hyrum never drifted, never wavered, never hedged. The witness he gave at twenty-nine he died with at forty-four. He had touched the plates. He knew what he had touched.
Liberty Jail Together
The two brothers spent the winter of 1838–1839 in the same dungeon.
Liberty Jail is described in Joseph's life because he wrote the great epistle from it — the words that became D&C 121, 122, 123 — but the man on the other end of the same cell was Hyrum. They were in a fourteen-foot-square stone room with a four-foot ceiling, in the depths of a Missouri winter, on food the guards openly boasted contained the flesh of murdered Mormons. They were there from December 1 until mid-April. Hyrum had married Mary Fielding fourteen months before. He had buried his first wife Jerusha just over a year before that. He had infant children at home in a city that had been driven out. While he sat in that cell, his wife Mary gave birth to Joseph F. Smith on November 13, 1838 — a son Hyrum would not hold for the first six months of his life.
He did not write. Joseph wrote, and Hyrum sat with the prophet through every word of it. The line peace be unto thy soul in D&C 121 is in the second person — thy. Joseph is speaking to himself, but he is also speaking in the presence of his elder brother. When Joseph dictated the verse that says the rights of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven (D&C 121:36), Hyrum was in the room and Hyrum already held the rights. He was, by then, the second-highest priesthood officer in the Restoration. He was not a passenger in that cell. He was the witness with whom the witness was made.
The Patriarch
In January 1841, by revelation (D&C 124:91–96), Hyrum was called to a calling that has been almost completely forgotten in the modern Church because the office itself has been retired: he was made Patriarch to the Church. The office had been held by their father Joseph Smith Sr. until his death in 1840. Hyrum inherited it not by genealogy but by ordination, and the language of the call is unusually exalted: I give unto him the keys of patriarchal blessings upon the heads of all my people, that whosoever he blesses shall be blessed, and whosoever he curses shall be cursed; that whatsoever he shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever he shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (D&C 124:93)
This is not a low office. Those keys, in nearly identical language, had been given to Peter at Caesarea Philippi and to Joseph at the Mount of Transfiguration of the Restoration. Hyrum is given the binding and loosing — not over a temporal kingdom but over the patriarchal seal of fathers and sons, of generations, of the order from Adam onward. He is also, in the very next verse, called prophet, seer, and revelator alongside Joseph. The two of them, the verse says, hold the keys together. Not Joseph alone. Joseph and Hyrum. The Lord put the keys in two pairs of hands, and one pair was the elder brother's.
Hyrum is the only man in the history of the dispensation who has stood as Patriarch, Assistant President, and counselor in the First Presidency. He did not become any of these things by reaching. They were given to him because the work needed someone the prophet could trust without reservation, and the prophet trusted his older brother more than any other living soul.
The Last Ride
The week of the martyrdom is when everything Hyrum had been comes to its point.
By June of 1844 the situation in Nauvoo had collapsed. The Nauvoo Expositor had been destroyed at Joseph's order; warrants for treason had been issued; Governor Thomas Ford had pledged to bring Joseph to trial at Carthage; the dissenters were calling for blood and the mobs were gathering on the bluffs. Joseph at first refused to go. He crossed the Mississippi with Hyrum at night, intending to go west and disappear until the storm passed. They reached the Iowa shore and stopped, and there, on the western bank, Joseph said the line that is one of the rawest in the historical record: If my life is of no value to my friends, it is of none to myself.
And then he turned around. He came back to face Carthage.
Hyrum had every reason not to turn around with him. Mary was at home with her children. Joseph F. was five years old. Hyrum had been imprisoned once already, in Liberty; he had been driven from Missouri at gunpoint; he knew exactly what kind of "trial" Carthage would be. He could have stayed in Iowa. He could have ridden west. No one in the Church would have faulted him for safeguarding the keys of the patriarchate when the prophet was determined to walk into a trap.
He turned around too. He turned around because Joseph was turning around, and the elder brother had spent his whole life standing where the younger brother needed him to stand. They rode to Carthage together. They were imprisoned together. They sat in the upper room of the Carthage Jail with Willard Richards and John Taylor through the afternoon of June 27, and when the mob came up the stairs and fired through the panel of the door, the first ball took Hyrum in the face. His last words, recorded by Richards: I am a dead man. He fell back, and Joseph cried out, Oh, my poor, dear brother Hyrum! — a sentence that catches in the throat to read because of what it implies: that Joseph knew, instantly, what had just been done, and what was about to be done to him.
He died first. Joseph died seconds later, leaping from the window. The elder brother went first, the younger brother went second. The order of the two deaths is itself a sermon: Hyrum stood in the line. He took the first ball. He had spent twenty years standing in front of Joseph's enemies; he stood in front of them one last time, and his body broke the order of the killing.
D&C 135 — the section that the Twelve added to the canon after the martyrdom — names them together: In life they were not divided, and in death they were not separated! (D&C 135:3). It is a quotation from David's lament over Saul and Jonathan, the great mourning of an elder over a younger, the lament for the friend who would not be parted. The Twelve chose it deliberately. They knew what Hyrum had been.
What He Did Not Take
The clearest measure of who Hyrum was is what he did not take.
He did not take the prophetic seat. He could have argued for it after Alvin died — the elder son's portion in any patriarchal family — and he did not. He did not take the spokesman's role when Joseph stumbled — there is no record of Hyrum interrupting Joseph or correcting him in public, ever. He did not take credit for the Eight Witnesses' testimony when half of them later wavered — his name remained on the title page of the book, unaltered, until his death. He did not take an alternative path during the Kirtland apostasy in 1837, when nearly the entire quorum of the Twelve turned and many of the leading elders went out. He did not take the bait when Sidney Rigdon, after the martyrdom, tried to claim the leadership in the August conference of 1844 — by then Hyrum was already dead, but he had spent his life teaching the Saints how to read who the prophet was, and the Saints chose Brigham because the example Hyrum had set was the example they had absorbed. He did not take a second wife the first time the doctrine was given to him — he reluctantly accepted plural marriage in 1843 only after the Lord required it, and he is on record telling Joseph he did not understand it and did not want it, even after he had received it. He did not take advantage of any of the positions a lesser man would have leveraged. He took only what he was given, and only when he was given it.
The Restoration is full of men who reached and broke. Hyrum did not reach. He held.
What Others Miss
The whole structure of the Restoration's first decade rests on a kind of architecture that has Joseph in the center and Hyrum holding the second pillar of the arch. Take Hyrum out of the picture and the structure does not stand. There is no second witness of the right age, the right loyalty, the right temperament. There is no other figure who could be in the cell at Liberty, in the office of Patriarch, in the carriage to Carthage, and in the line of fire when the door broke. The Lord knew, in advance, that the work would need such a man. He had given the family Hyrum first, by five and a half years, before He gave them Joseph.
Joseph F. Smith — Hyrum's son, born while his father was in Liberty Jail — became the sixth President of the Church and received D&C 138, the vision of the redemption of the dead, in October 1918. The doctrine of the redemption of the dead, which D&C 138 unfolds, is the doctrine the family had been carrying since Alvin's death in 1823. The grandfather's grief about Alvin set it in motion. The uncle Joseph (the prophet) preached it. The father Hyrum sealed it with his blood. The son Joseph F. saw the vision. Four generations of the same family, telling the same story, sealing the same truth. Hyrum's line did not end at Carthage. It went on through the boy who was five years old when his father did not come home, and that boy lived long enough to see the redemption of the dead unfolded in the vision he was given in his old age. The patriarchal keys Hyrum held, the work he set in motion, came through his own house and back into the canon.
That is what the elder brother bought with the silence of standing aside. He bought the lineage that closed the loop.
He never had to be the prophet to do the prophet's work. He had only to be the prophet's brother — and he was, until the morning the door broke, and after, and forever.