Role in the conventional record
Sidney Rigdon (1793–1876) was a primary counselor to Joseph Smith, a principal theological architect of early Restoration theology, and later the founder of a rival church movement after the 1844 succession crisis. Conventional biographies are extensive. This file does not retell them.
Role in the Files
Rigdon appears in four committee documents and is conspicuously absent from eleven others where his presence would be expected:
- He is named in the Carthage deposition as having been “sent away on an errand” the morning of June 27, 1844.
- He is not named in the Palisade studio daybook for the week of the alleged photographs, despite being in Nauvoo that week per three independent sources.
- His later memoirs discuss the succession crisis at length and the physical events at Carthage not at all.
- A single line in an 1868 letter to his son — “There were things under the floorboards that were not books” — is the closest the committee has to a Rigdon admission, and it is ambiguous to the point of uselessness.
The committee’s reading
Rigdon either knew and refused to write, or did not know and was carefully kept from knowing. Both readings are compatible with the documentary silence. The silence itself is the document.