Abraham O. Smoot

Abraham Owen Smoot was born on February 17, 1815, in Owenton, Kentucky, to George W. Smoot and Nancy Ann (née Rowlett) Smoot.[1] He was of Scottish, Irish, and English descent. He had two brothers and five sisters.[2] His mother's uncle, Colonel Abraham Owen, served William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe. He was also related to General Stonewall Jackson.[3]^: 8 His family moved twice in his childhood, first to southwestern Kentucky and then to the banks of the Blood River in Tennessee. As a young boy, he worked as a farmer and was not educated.[2] He also had a health issue as a child, which he called "a lung disease."[4][3]^: 9 His father died in 1828[2] when Smoot was nine years old,[5]^: 53 and his mother later remarried.[2] His childhood years were mostly spent among his mother's family, the Rowletts. They had a lasting effect on young Smoot, particularly in teaching him to read. There were few schools in Henry County, Tennessee, so the Rowletts' instruction was valuable.[5]^: 54–55

Nancy Rowlett Smoot joined the Church of Christ in 1835,[6] and her son followed suit on March 22 of that same year. Warren Parrish baptized him,[2][7] and David W. Patten performed his confirmation.[3]^: 10 As a child, Smoot had wondered "if the Lord had a church upon the earth". When he heard Parrish and Patten preach, he felt that his question had been answered.[5]^: 256 Patten, while confirming Smoot, promised that the young man would be able to overcome his health issue. Smoot recorded that he "began to grow strong immediately."[3]^: 10 Soon after his baptism, Smoot was given the responsibility of leading a small group of church members in Benton County, Tennessee.[8] He befriended Wilford Woodruff, who began preparing him for missionary work.[3]^: 11–12 The two became companions on a short mission to Tennessee and Kentucky,[9] then traveled to Kirtland, Ohio, together to attend the School of the Prophets. After arriving in November 1836, the two began learning Latin and Greek. This experience instilled the knowledge of the value of education in Smoot.[5]^{: 62, 220} While in Kirtland, Smoot met Joseph Smith and was able to see the sheets of papyrus that were said to contain the Book of Abraham.[2] He also recorded suffering from typhoid fever and pleurisy while living in Ohio. After a blessing from Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, and Hyrum Smith, he recovered.[3]^: 16 He received his patriarchal blessing from Joseph Smith Sr. and planned to return home to Tennessee for his health. After his miraculous recovery, Joseph Smith asked Smoot to work in the southern states as a missionary.[3]^: 17

On February 4, 1836, Smoot was ordained an elder[8] and began preaching in Kentucky and Tennessee with Woodruff, Patten, and others.[2] This first mission lasted nine months. Smoot met both hostile mobs and people who readily accepted baptism.[8] While preaching, he continued to preside over the branch of the church in his hometown. That fall, Smoot's group of missionaries headed north to Kirtland to join the main body of church members assembled there.[3]^: 12–15

Smoot received an assignment from Joseph Smith to gather a group of people from his home state of Tennessee to move to Far West, Missouri. He recruited his family and others, successfully creating a party of about 200 people. After helping his family settle in nearby Daviess County, Missouri,[3]^: 17–18 Smoot assisted in surveying the nearby valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman.[5]^: 6 In 1838, he embarked on a five-month proselytizing mission to southern Missouri and Arkansas. Once he returned to Far West, Missouri state forces invaded;[2] and Smoot, alongside Joseph and Hyrum Smith,[8] was taken prisoner on November 1 during the 1838 Mormon War.[3]^: 24 He then moved to the new settlement of Zarahemla, Iowa, and was chosen as a member of the high council. In April 1842, Smoot began another mission, this time to South Carolina. He preached in Charleston, but found no success and returned to Nauvoo, Illinois, that July. During Joseph Smith's 1844 presidential campaign, Smoot was assigned to travel to Tennessee and oversee both political and missionary efforts in the area.[3]^: 28–31 While preaching and electioneering in Dresden, Tennessee, Smoot came in contact with those who opposed his beliefs. One night, a man attempted to assassinate Smoot, but narrowly missed; the "bullet passed near [his] head and lodged in the ceiling". On another occasion, when "a mob of two hundred men" threatened Smoot while he was speaking, a few audience members protected him after he made the Masonic sign that signaled danger.[5]^: 260 Smoot later wrote: "During my experience I have seen the power of God manifested upon various occasions in preserving my life".[5]^: 263 When he learned of the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum, Smoot returned to Nauvoo.[3]^: 34–35 His next assignment was to lead a branch of the church in Keokuk, Iowa.[5]^: 126 In 1844, he served another mission in Alabama as part of his charge from Brigham Young to direct the church in the South.[2] He gathered a group from this region to move to Nauvoo and eventually journey west.[8] In between his missions, Smoot volunteered as a police officer in Nauvoo and an officiator in the Nauvoo Temple.[2]

In 1851, Smoot undertook another mission, this time to England.[8] His goal this time was to bring converts to the church back to the United States, sponsored by the Perpetual Emigration Fund.[9] Smoot left England within the same month of his arrival and, once back in the U.S., accompanied the band of British immigrants on the trek west. He contracted cholera while traveling, but recovered.[3]^: 56–59 The group arrived in Utah in September 1852.[1] In total, Smoot served nine proselyting missions for the LDS Church,[10] in addition to twice serving as a bishop.[5]

In 1880, when he was 65 years old, Smoot was assigned by John Taylor to travel with his son, Reed Smoot, to the Hawaiian Islands. This was partly a mission for the church[11] and partly a trip designed to improve Smoot's health.[12] While in Hawaii, he met with King Kalakaua and taught him about the faith.[11] Reed, in letters to his mother, wrote that his father exercised and toured the islands every day, despite being there for purpose of gaining some rest.[5]^: 151

Abraham O. Smoot, ca.1880

In early 1838, while serving as a missionary in Missouri and Arkansas, Smoot began writing letters to a widow[3]^: 19 named Margaret Thompson McMeans Adkinson. She was six years older than Smoot.[13] He married her on November 11, 1838[14] in Far West, Missouri[15] while a prisoner of war.[2] Once construction of the Nauvoo Temple was completed, the couple was sealed and "receive[d] their blessings".[5]^: 133 Adkinson had one son from her first marriage named William,[2] whom Smoot adopted. Smoot described his new wife as "zealous and devoted to her religion and ready to sacrifice or endure anything to further its interests."[3]^: 26 The two were forced out of Missouri and fled to Iowa.[2] Smoot was the only man in the company and the driver of the wagon.[16] Adkinson then accompanied Smoot on the way to his mission in South Carolina; the couple stopped in Tennessee and, after visiting with her family, Adkinson returned north to Nauvoo. She later traveled with him to Alabama for his mission there.[2]

On January 9, 1846, Smoot began practicing plural marriage. He was sealed to his second wife, Sarah Gibbens, then to his third, Emily Hill, with the approval of Adkinson. She gave her "fullest and freest consent" for Smoot to enter into polygamy;[3]^: 40 she saw it as "a pure, chaste principle revealed to the Saints through the Prophet Joseph Smith."[5]^: 134 Hill was a widow with two children from her previous marriage, William and Artimisia.[2] She was 39 years old, and Gibbens was 45.[13] On November 23, 1847, once the family had crossed the plains and settled in the Salt Lake Valley, Hill gave birth to Smoot's first biological child, Albert.[3]^: 48 She eventually had three more children: Margaret, Emily, and Zina Beal.[2] In 1850, the family relocated to Big Cottonwood Canyon.[3]^: 53 Gibbens did not emigrate to Utah and requested a divorce from Smoot in 1852.[14]

In 1855, Smoot married Diana Tanner Eldredge.[3]^: 70 The following year, he married Anne Kirstine Mauritsen, an immigrant from Brekka, Norway. Eldredge gave birth to thirteen children and Mauritsen to seven.[2] He later married Hannah Caroline Rogers[17] in 1886 in Logan, Utah.[18][19] He reportedly went to prison for a time because of his plural marriages.[15] In addition to having six wives, Smoot was sealed to some of the deceased ancestors of his wife, including Margaret Adkinson, who had died unmarried.[5]^: 147

Smoot had twenty-four biological children by three of his wives: Hill, Eldredge, and Mauritsen.[5]^: 2 These include Reed Smoot, politician and US Senator;[20] Brigham Smoot, missionary in Samoa;[21] and Ida Smoot Dusenberry, member of the Relief Society General Board.[22]^: 619 Another of his daughters, Zina Beal Smoot, was married to apostle Orson F. Whitney.[22]^: 678 He also adopted eleven children over the course of his life,[5]^: 2 many of whom were the children of his wives by their previous husbands.[5]^{: 147–148} One of these, William Cockhorn Adkinson, became—at a young age—a member of the Quorum of the Seventy formed in Nauvoo.[22]^: 711 Adkinson, as well as "several of [Caroline Rogers'] children by Aaron Daniels" were sealed to Smoot in the temple.[5]^{: 133, 148} As a father, Smoot was strict in teaching his children Christian values; he wanted them to grow up to be stout believers. Their memories of him denote a stern but loving father.[5]^{: 148–149} As was common at the time, the extended Smoot family lost multiple members to disease. When, his young grandchildren passed away, Smoot comforted the parents—his children—through letters and visits. He provided his advice whenever it was asked for.[5]^{: 152–154}

Sickness prevented Smoot from leaving Nauvoo, Illinois with the first group of Mormon pioneers. He and "a large company of his southern friends" began the trek west in May 1846. Two of his wives, Adkinson and Hill, traveled with him, but Sarah Gibbens did not. By July, the group arrived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where Smoot was called as a bishop. He was ordained to that office in January 1847[3]^: 41–43 when the company reached Winter Quarters, Nebraska, and joined the other pioneers.[2] There, Smoot was named the leader of the fourth hundred, a group of a hundred families[3]^: 44 and 120 wagons.[4] He offered "both temporal and spiritual guidance" to his group of 317 people as they made the journey west together.[8] Smoot's company arrived in Utah in September 1847.[23] They were the second group of pioneers to arrive in the Salt Lake Valley.[3]^: 46

Smoot's southern ancestors were slaveholders,[24] and he later became a slaveholder in the Utah territory. However, as a Latter-day Saint missionary, he actively supported Joseph Smith's presidential platform, which called for the gradual elimination of slavery. On a mission to Tennessee, Smoot tried to have 3,000 copies of Smith's presidential platform printed, but the printer refused, since it was illegal to distribute abolitionist literature in the state.[25] While proselyting with Wilford Woodruff in July 1836, Smoot read the April issue of the Messenger and Advocate to refute accusations of their being abolitionists.[26]

In Utah Territory, Abraham and Margaret Smoot owned at least two men and one girl—Tom,[27] Jerry, and Lucy.[28] Tom died in 1862, still a slave.[27] Modern historians have called Smoot, along with Brigham Young, Charles C. Rich, and William H. Hooper, a "respectable minority" of Utah Territory citizens "in favor of slavery."[29]

Smoot was later involved in the 1879 discussions among church leaders about the origins of the priesthood and temple restrictions for black Latter-day Saints.[30] He hosted a gathering at his home in Provo, Utah, with John Taylor, Brigham Young Jr., Zebedee Coltrin, and L. John Nuttall. Smoot remembered that when Patten, Parish, and Thomas B. Marsh were missionaries in the South in 1835 and 1836, they took the question of ordaining black men to Joseph Smith. Southern slave codes limited the ability of enslaved people to assemble or preach.[31] Smoot recalled, "his decision as I understood, was that they were not entitled to the Priesthood, nor yet to be baptized without the consent of their Masters. In [later] years ... I became acquainted with Joseph myself in Far West about the year 1838. I received from Joseph substantially the same instructions. It was on my application to him what should be done with the Negro in the South as I was preaching to them. He said I could baptize them by the consent of their Masters, but not to confer the Priesthood upon them."[32] Pertaining to this statement, professor Gordon C. Thomasson has remarked: "It is extremely difficult to imagine [Smoot] inventing his oft-cited testimony, nor is it likely that the statements can be attributed totally to prejudice acquired or reinforced while serving as [a missionary]."[33]

Smoot died on March 6, 1895, in Provo, Utah. He had celebrated his 80th birthday with a large gathering of family members just 17 days prior. His health had declined after an incident in 1893 when he was hit by a falling tree. Smoot's funeral was held on March 10, 1895, in the Provo Tabernacle[11] and was called "the most impressive ever witnessed in pioneer Utah territory."[5]^: 235 The LDS Church's First Presidency—which included Lorenzo Snow and John Henry Smith—were in attendance. Speakers included George Q. Cannon, Joseph E. Taylor, Joseph F. Smith, Woodruff, and Karl G. Maeser. According to The Latter Day Saints' Millennial Star, "the attendance at the funeral was the largest seen in Provo."[6] In addition, Woodruff recorded that Smoot's funeral procession was "the longest [he had] ever seen in Utah."[39] Smoot was survived by two of his wives and nineteen of his children.[5]^: 236

In 1962, BYU's administration building was named after Smoot. In 2015, he was remembered and celebrated at BYU's homecoming events.[4] In 1994, it was recorded that Smoot had "more than 3,000 descendants."[38] He has been called "one of the most prominent and influential men in the history of the State [of Utah]."[34] A collection of 257 manuscripts documenting Smoot's life, including his journals, letters, patriarchal blessing, and mission call, is included in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library.[10]

• Utah History Encyclopedia: Abraham Owen Smoot, media.Utah.edu
• Guide to A. O. Smoot missionary diaries at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Click "see diary" to see scans of the original diaries.
• A. O. Smoot papers, MSS 896 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University. Contains missionary journals and correspondence written to Abraham Smoot.
• A. O. Smoot papers, MSS 574 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University. Contains letters and patriarchal blessing.