In Sacred Loneliness by Todd Compton

Author:Todd Compton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Signature Books
Published: 1997-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

19. “Everything Looks like Desolation and Lonesome”

Eliza Maria Partridge (Smith Lyman)

I. Amasa Lyman

As with all of Joseph Smith’s wives, Eliza undoubtedly grieved deeply for her prophet and husband at his passing. She was still with the Coolidges at the time. But her next marriage was quickly approaching. After little sister Caroline, age seventeen, married apostle Amasa Lyman, thirty-one, as his first plural wife on September 6, Eliza, twenty-four, married him only a few weeks later on the 28th.

Born in 1813 in Lyman, Grafton, New Hampshire, Amasa became a Mormon in April 1832 at age nineteen and served in Zion’s Camp two years later. He married Maria Tanner in 1835. After settling in Far West in 1837, he endured the late Missouri persecutions, then relocated in Nauvoo in 1841. His great intellectual and leadership gifts were by now apparent, for he was ordained an apostle on August 20, 1842 to take the place of Orson Pratt when Pratt was dropped from the Twelve. But when Orson was reinstated in January 1843, Amasa was called as a counselor in the First Presidency, then served a number of short missions before becoming a member of the Twelve again on August 12, 1844.

Following her marriage, Eliza moved to her mother’s house “for awhile,” then lived with Amasa and Maria. Entering into this second plural marriage was not easy for her. She later wrote:

Times were not then as they are now in 1877 but a woman living in polygamy dare not let it be known and nothing but a firm desire to keep the commandments of the Lord could have induced a girl to marry in that way. I thought my trials were very severe in that line and I am often led to wonder how it was that a person of my temperament could get along with it and not rebel, but I know it was the Lord who kept me from opposing his plans although in my heart I felt that I could not submit to them, but I did and I am thankful to my Heavenly Father for the care he had over me in those troublous times.

On November 14 Amasa took a fourth wife, Cornelia Leavitt, nineteen years of age. Ten days later Zina Huntington Jacobs wrote in her journal, “Eliza Partridge and Caroline P ware here and took Dinner with us. Also Cornelia Levet was here.” Only family history and an early Mormon context allows the reader to understand that three wives of Amasa Lyman were visiting Zina Jacobs on this occasion. In July 1845 Amasa took a fifth wife, twenty-nine-year-old Dionitia Walker.

Eliza received her endowment in the Nauvoo temple on the first day of 1846 in a session with her sister Caroline and former sister-wives Helen Mar Kimball, Sarah Ann Whitney, and Mary Houston. On January 13 she repeated, in the temple, her earlier proxy marriage to Amasa for time.

Three days later Amasa married his sixth and seventh wives, Paulina Phelps (eighteen) and Priscilla Turley (sixteen). On January 28

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