Joseph Smith III
(1832-1914)

            The first surviving son born to Emma and Joseph, was named after his father and his grandfather. He would go through his early life as ‘Young Joseph’ – later he was called Joseph III – a name of which he was justifiably proud.

            He was born on November 6, 1832, about 7 months after the death of Joseph Murdock Smith, whose death was caused by mobocrasy.  He entered the world in the upstairs apartment which had been prepared for his parents above the Whitney Store in Kirtland, Ohio.  Little Julia, the other Murdock twin, was about 19 months old.  These children filled their mother’s days with delightful duties, and their father loved them greatly. 

            For five years the family enjoyed many rare moments of peace as the church flourished and missionary efforts bore fruit in the States and in foreign lands.  The Kirtland Temple was built and dedicated—thousands gathered—and the place for Zion, the New Jerusalem was chosen in Jackson County, Missouri.  A baby brother came along in June 1836.

            In Kirtland, Young Joseph played in the friendly streets and fished in the Chagrin River, which posed no threat, as it rambled past the Smith’s farmhouse, a few blocks from where the temple was built. On one occasion his mother gave him a willow pole with a string, armed with a bent pin, so he could fish with the big boys. His luck was such that to his great delight a small fish somehow lodged itself on the pin. He pulled it ashore and ran to the house crying, “Mother, Mother, I got one! I got one!”  Tiny though it was, his mother cooked the fish for him.

            He recalled looking through the slats of a barn where he saw a toy wagon being built and painted red. He understood this was to be his. However, before he was able to claim the precious gift, his family was forced to leave Kirtland. He was six years old—and his memory of the journey from Kirtland to Far West Missouri was limited. He recalls that they crossed several large rivers on their way west and on a certain stretch of the way he recalled walking a goodly distance over the corduroy road, ‘holding onto the hand of my mother.’  (Joseph III Memoirs)

            His mother was pregnant. Certainly walking over that bumpy road would have been safer and less painful for her than riding in the wagon.  The baby, Alexander Hale Smith arrived on June 2, 1838, two and-a-half months after they arrived at Far West. But Joseph III doesn’t mention his being particularly impressed with his siblings. He did remember is father’s being arrested, and the horrible treatment heaped upon himself and his mother by the guards who roughly pushed him away with a drawn sword when he tried to embrace his father as they were taking him away. 

            The young boy’s life was filled with traumatic experiences. Scenes of riot, cruelty, injustice must have seared the young boy’s soul, for he remarked later in life that he developed a personality almost impervious to showing emotion.

            After leaving Ohio, the Smiths spent one short year in Missouri.  They entered the state by crossing the frozen Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois, in February 1838 and they left the state crossing the same river, again frozen, back into Quincy, in February 1839.       

            When his father was under arrest, the guards brought him by the house before taking him to jail.  Young Joseph tried to hold onto his father’s leg, but the guard thrust him away with the broad side of his sword. 

            While his father was at Liberty Jail, he wrote to his family. One particularly tender passage the prophet Joseph wrote to Emma saying, “I want you should not let those little fellows forgit me, tell them Father loves them with a perfect love, and he is doing all he can to get away from the mob to come to them, do teach them all you can, that they may have good minds, be tender and kind to them, don’t be fractions to them, but listen to their wants, tell them Father says they must be good children, and mind their mother,  My Dear Emma, there is great responsibility resting upon you, in preserving yourself in honor, and sobriety, before them, and teaching them right things, to form their young and tender minds, that they begin in right paths, and not git contaminated when young, by seeing ungodly examples.”

            Replicating the spelling gives us an idea of the down to earth person Joseph Smith was, and that is the person Joseph III remembers as his father.

            Young Joseph went several times with his mother to visit his father in Liberty Jail. In his memory of those visits, he held no malice for the situation—rather he was fascinated by the men who entertained singing ballads such as “Remember the Raisin”, and other songs.  Being very fond of music, the boy held that memory above others. However, he did remember being blessed by his father while he was in Liberty Jail.

            When the Prophet Joseph managed to join his family at Quincy, Illinois in April 1839, they soon traveled north to Commerce, where they settled into an old block house known as the White Homestead.  Young Joseph as seven years old when his family settled there.

            Commerce eventually was renamed Nauvoo—a name meaning Beautiful Resting Place.  Young Joseph and his siblings were taught the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, in various school arrangements.  He loved to read and study. He was a serious youth, who enjoyed playing soldier with his friends, on the parade grounds while the Nauvoo Legion practiced their drills.  He was surrounded by many cousins, whose company he enjoyed. 

            When his grandfather, Joseph Smith Sr., died, 14 September 1840, he was eight. His aunt chided him because he didn’t show any emotion regarding the loss of his grandfather. The boy was indignant, asking why they should expect him to be sorrowful when everyone was saying he was going to a better place.  His reaction, viewed from a distance, seems to reflect how seared his feelings must have become by the hard things he had seen and endured during the war in Missouri.  On one occasion he recalled seeing the wounded David Patten lying on a couch and he witnessed them attempting to cleanse the wound in his side by drawing a silk handkerchief though the hole.  The fact that he witnessed this scene tells us that more than likely his mother was one of those attending to the wounded man. 

            He was not yet twelve when his father was taken to Carthage, along with his uncle Hyrum, and others.  His horror and dismay over the death of his father and uncle were swallowed up in the mass grief of thousands.  Already made hard in his emotions, he became harder after this awful event which was followed in quick succession by the death of his beloved uncle Samuel Harrison Smith, who died about a month after Joseph and Hyrum. When the bodies of his father and Uncle Hyrum were buried, secretly, in the basement of the unfinished Nauvoo House, he was probably not involved. However, when they were dug up later and moved to the basement of the spring house, he was not only present, he saw their dead faces, as hair was cut from each of them to be given his mother to keep.  For a boy not yet twelve years of age, this must have constituted a terrible shock on his emotions.

            After the martyrdom, guards were placed around the Smith’s home, at the order of Brigham Young, to protect the family who were under threat of death. Rather than viewing this as an effort to protect them, which it was, Joseph III seems to have looked on it as a means of watching them, keeping them under control.  In later years he revised this perception, but it was a strong impression within him during his youth. He grew to resent Brigham Young and funneled his bad feelings through that channel for much of his life.

            Young Joseph was fourteen when Brigham Young led the bulk of the church membership to the west.  He and is brothers watched their cousins depart---and they themselves were taken away from Nauvoo for a time, in the face of the Nauvoo War, in September 1846.  The trip up river on the Riverboat Toby was a grand adventure for the children; Joseph and Julia enjoyed some of the first social pleasures of their young lives while in Fulton that winter.  But in January 1847, they were hurried back to Nauvoo, where their mother had to stop the man who had rented her hotel from robbing her of her furnishings.  After that the family operated the store, the hotel, and the farm with varying degrees of success and failure.

            That winter, 1847, he saw his mother remarried.  Major Louis C. Bidamon came into the family at a time when the boys badly needed a masculine hand to give them discipline. Young Joseph accepted his step-father respectfully, but without undue subservience. He and his brothers ran fairly freely in the country, hunting, fishing, boating—their schooling was a struggle to come by, but their mother saw to it they were given as much education as she could manage to arrange for them.  For Joseph III, education was a life long ambition.  When he was able, he saw to it Graceland College was built at Lamoni.

            One constant duty in their home was the care of their grandmother, Lucy Mack Smith, who had become crippled with arthritis. Major Bidamon made her a wheel chair and the children often wheeled her out in it to enjoy the sunshine and fresh air.  Young Joseph was present with his grandmother when she passed away in July 1856.  Again, his observation of this passing is without emotional reflection.

            That fall, 22 October 1856, he married, at Nauvoo, Emmeline, daughter of Elias and Lucinda Griswold. She bore him five children: Emma Josepha, Evelyn Rebecca, Carrie Lucinda, Zaide Viola, and Joseph Arthur. Two of these children, Evelyn Rebecca and Joseph Arthur, died in infancy and are buried in the Smith Family Cemetery at Nauvoo.  The mother, Emmeline died at the age of thirty, 25 March 1869, at Plano, Illinois.

            Four years after he married Emmeline, in 1860, he accepted the invitation to become the president and prophet of the Reorganization . This church had been built up by men who had gathered up some of the former latter day saints who had not gone west with Brigham Young. Under the tutelage of these men, some of whom had been apostates from the church in Nauvoo, his antipathy against Brigham Young would become so entrenched it would dominate the entire focus of his ministry for the rest of his life.  The whole ambition of his life’s ministry was to clear his father’s name of the stain he felt had been put upon him because of the doctrine of plural marriage. 

            From his viewpoint, plural marriage was wrong, equivalent with adultery. He said he believed his father was a good man, and a good man, he believed, would never have introduced such a practice. He often stated that  it is“neither here nor there! If he did it, it was wrong; whoever did it, it was wrong—wrong in the sight of God and against the teachings of the standard books of the church.” (Mary Audentia Smith Anderson, p. 368)

            This led him into direct conflict with his cousin, Joseph F. Smith, who had become president of the Church in Utah. They corresponded over the course of their long lives debating the issues, each begging each other to repent and accept truth—neither ever fazing the other’s convictions. 

            Joseph III married a second time, 12 November 1869, Bertha, daughter of Mads and Mary (Thomason) Madison. Her daughter, Mary Audentia Smith Anderson would write of her:

            “She was a woman of sterling qualities of mind and heart, and the possessor of a strong personality which won for her many devoted friends.”

            This couple had eight children born to them in their 30 year marriage: David Carlos, Mary Audenia, Frederick Madison, Israel Alexander, Kenneth, Bertha Azuba, Hale Washington, Blossom, and Lucy Yeteve. Four of these children died young.  Then, a few weeks after suffering injuries in an accident, the mother, Bertha died, 19 October 1896.  She was laid to rest in Rose Hill Cemetery, at Lamoni, Iowa.  Her daughter wrote of her, “She is but a memory, now, to the sons and daughters who owe more than they can realize, perhaps, their splendid heritage of health and serenity to the wholesome sweetness and poise of her life and character.” (Audentia, p. 371)

            Two years after he lost Bertha, 12 Joseph III married again on January 1898

            His third wife, Ada Rachel, daughter of Alexander and Mary (Middleton) Clark, was born 23 July 1871. A native of Canada, and much younger than Joseph, she would bear the task of attending to him in his declining years.  They had sixteen years together. She bore him three children: Richard Clark, William Wallace, and Reginald Archer. 

            Joseph III’s last four years were spent in total blindness. He suffered terrible pain due to facial neuralgia. He bore his pain patiently, never complaining. His daughter wrote of his declining health:

            “His last illness, which was of two weeks’ duration, was marked by many expressions of his love and thoughtfulness for those around him. Gifts of fruit or flowers he directed should be passed on to others of whose illness he had learned. His mind reverted to the scenes of a long and busy life, and from its riches of memory and experience, he drew valuable counsel for his children. “I am not afraid to die,” he said, “and I am ready when the Lord shall call me. I have never owned a dishonest dollar in my life, and I have not knowingly wronged man, woman, or child. And I haven’t an enemy in the world that I know of—unless it be one, and some might consider him my enemy.” (He referred to his cousin of similar name, then president of the church in Utah.) And after a pause he added, “And deep down in his heart, he knows I have been right in this controversy, all along!”

            President Joseph Smith passed away at his home in Independence, Missouri, shortly after noon on the 10^th day of December, 1914. His widow, not long surviving, died on 20 October 1915. They are both buried in Mound Grove Cemetery in Independence, Missouri.  

            He had spent 55 years as president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—from  April 1860 until December 1914. 

            To close this profile, it is well to contemplate the last words he spoke before his death:

            On November 26, 1914, his physician, Doctor Joseph Luff, told him bluntly that he would probably not survive much longer. He expressed a desire to leave a last statement. The doctor advised him that if he had anything to say, he better say it soon. His family drew close around his bed, and his son, Fred M., sat waiting to write what his father would say.

            As all listened intently, the words came, ringing with sincerity and conviction.

            “I know that Jesus is the Christ. The Son of the Living God.”