This is not a typical Keepa post for, oh, so many reasons. It was written at the request of a reader who was upset by a tweet reporting a comment apparently made at a scholarly conference in Utah over the past weekend. I don’t feel comfortable identifying those involved because I do not know how accurately the tweet reported the speaker’s words, and I do not want to disparage either speaker or tweeter, both of whom were undoubtedly reporting in good faith. There is error somewhere, however, enough that I thought it worthwhile to blog about it and not merely answer my reader’s question personally.

The tweet:

Now we’re talking about the variety of kinships. Brigham Young sometimes assigned another man to have sex with your wife (a “convenience marriage”) for infertile men. The children were considered the family of the original husband and wife. Some audible gasps from the audience.

The kernel at the heart of this claim no doubt is the case of Edmund Richardson (1816-1874) who was married to Mary Ann Darrow Richardson (1818-1872), and Frederick Walter Cox (1812-1879) who was the biological father of Mary Ann’s two youngest children.

Frederick Cox arrived in Utah with an 1852 LDS wagon company. The Richardson couple, along with two children (ages 6 and 11; two children born early in their marriage had died in infancy) arrived in Utah in 1853. The Richardsons were non-Mormons heading to Oregon, who had to winter over in Utah because of the loss of some oxen; they became Mormon converts and settled in Manti, Utah.

It’s important to note the age of the youngest child, a son: Sometime after that son’s birth in September 1846, and the spring of 1857, Edmund Richardson had become impotent, whether by accident, illness, or other cause is unknown. The Richardsons wanted more children, at least in part because of their Mormon belief in eternal increase through the begetting of children during mortality. That longing was so strong, apparently, that Mary Ann Richardson wrote to Brigham Young for advice in February 1857. Mary Ann’s letter is not publicly available, if it even survives. Brigham Young’s reply, however, is extant. It hints at Mary Ann’s side of the conversation; Brigham Young’s intentions are clear, even if they are delicately worded:

President’s Office.
G.S.L. City 5 March 1857.

Mrs Mary Richardson.
Manti.

In reply to your letter of 22nd Feby. I say, it will be well enough with you and your husband in the eternities, if you do right in time: see what is said of them that become eunochs for the gospel’s sake, and the promises made to them: if I was imperfect and had a good wife I would call on some good bror. to help me. that we might have increase; that a man of this character will have a place in the Temple, receive his endowments and in eternity will be as tho’ nothing had happened to him in time.

Thus you see your position is good enough, if you are mutually satisfied & will do right.

You may show this letter to your husband and Bishop and let this be the end of it, and keep it from every body else.

From your Bror & Friend

BRIGHAM YOUNG

Richardson family lore provides much detail not present in this letter, the sole primary document, so far as I have read, concerning the matter of fathering additional children. I am skeptical of most of the family lore. While there may be elements of truth, it seems unlikely to me that either of the children born to the Richardsons in 1858 and 1860 knew the explicit details of their conception; one died as a young child, and the other was still a young teenager when their parents died; it does not seem likely to me to have been the sort of story that the parents discussed openly before any of their children. Those family stories speak of heavenly visions convincing the Richardsons that they should accept a surrogate to father children for them; they include a detailed account of Brigham Young visiting the couple in Manti a full year after Mary Ann’s letter, and sliding a paper across the table containing the names of three men they should consider as surrogates (a procedure that seems to me to be out of character for Brigham Young, as well as the kind of detail that could be known only to the Richardson parents, and unlikely to have been passed along to their young boys); and garbled accounts of separations and divorces and marriages and remarriages, which appear doubtful to me (they are exactly the details descendants with Victorian sensibilities might have invented to “prove” that their father was legitimate, a concern that would not have been necessary if the situation were “ke[pt] from every body else” as counseled by Brigham Young. Nevertheless, the facts of the boys’ paternity did become known, so I cannot discount the family lore entirely.

In any case, the man the Richardsons asked to father children with Mary Ann was another Manti resident, Frederick Walter Cox. Reluctantly (according to Richardson family lore) he agreed to visit Mary Ann in the absence of Edmund Richardson, and to abstain from any claim to children who might be born, knowing that the Richardsons had been sealed as husband and wife for eternity, and that any children born to Mary Ann would “belong” to Edmund Richardson, according to Mormon belief.

Two sons, Charles Edmund Richardson (1858-1925) and William E. Richardson (1860-1865) were born to Mary Ann Richardson as a result of this arrangement.

This story has been used and abused through the years. Most egregiously, in my opinion, it was used by Lawrence Foster in at least two publications in the ’90s to invent an entirely unknown marriage system supposedly practiced by the Mormons: He claimed that Brigham Young intended to provide sexual partners for Mormon women whose husbands were away on missions, so that they could continue to bear children during their husbands’ absences, therefore continuing to build their husbands’ eternal kingdoms while those husbands were not at home to do the job themselves. This is absolute bunk, without support or foundation in any other known document, built entirely upon the speculation that the bearing of children was so key to Mormon theology that the majority of Mormon women would willingly prostitute themselves in this way. Kathryn Daynes has done an excellent work of destroying Foster’s claims, largely through looking at the meaning of the term “proxy husbands” cited by Foster, discovering that the context for virtually all such references was in vicarious temple work for deceased husbands; in the case of the few remaining uses of that term, she has convincingly established the context of each as something other than a system of sexual partners for women whose husbands were away.

To the best of my knowledge, the case of the Richardsons is the sole – the one, the single, the unique – case known to historians of such an arrangement in Mormon history. Historians have claimed that this practice was common enough to justify the use of a word like “sometimes” in the reported talk over the weekend as if it happened multiple times, if not routinely. Such historians have not produced the evidence, however.

The Richardson situation was specific. As peculiar as it seems to us today, I know of no reason to read more into the story than advice to use the only means of procreation possible in that era: natural conception through sexual intercourse. There was no donor sperm, no artificial insemination, no in vitro fertilization in that era: the oldest way was the only way. There is no justification for any other interpretation, in the absence of additional instances for study.