19 Joseph married many extra spouses and authorized other Latter-day Saints to practice plural wedding. The training distribute gradually in the beginning. By June 1844, whenever Joseph died, around 29 males and 50 females had entered into plural marriage, along with Joseph and their spouses. As soon as the Saints entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, at the very least 196 males and 521 ladies had entered into plural marriages. 20 individuals in these early marriages that are plural to help keep their involvement confidential, though they expected an occasion if the training could be publicly recognized.
Nonetheless, rumors distribute. Several males unscrupulously utilized these rumors to seduce ladies to become listed on them within an unauthorized practice often known as “spiritual wifery.” If this ended up being found, the guys were take off through the Church. 21 The rumors prompted people and leaders to issue carefully worded denials that denounced wifery that is spiritual polygamy but had been quiet as to what Joseph Smith among others saw as divinely mandated “celestial” plural wedding. 22 The statements emphasized that the Church practiced no marital law other than monogamy while implicitly making available the chance that people, under way of God’s residing prophet, might do this. 23