Several early manuscripts of the plural marriage revelation exist. The earliest of these is one written by Joseph C. Kingsbury. Three others were written later as copies of the Kingsbury manuscript. These are the Willard Richards manuscript and two manuscripts written by Horace K. Whitney. In the annotated version of Kingsbury's manuscript below, I note differences between it and the Richards manuscript. The bibliographic data for the Whitney manuscripts appears at the end of this addendum.

To write his copy of the July 12, 1843, revelation, Kingsbury used two 12.5 x 14 inch unlined cream-colored sheets of paper, each folded in half, with the fold parallel to the short dimension of the sheet, and he wrote with quill and ink on both sides of each sheet. (Sometime after writing, the bifolia were folded in fourths for filing.)

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Richards followed the same pattern in writing his copy of the Kingsbury manuscript, folding two originally unlined cream-colored sheets of paper. Richards was more or less faithful in copying the Kingsbury manuscript. Pilcrow markings were inserted just as in the redacted version of Kingsbury. Richards made some changes in spelling, such as "entered" for "enterd," and he shortened some sentences by dividing them. Richards overlooked one or two phrases or words, and may have purposely made changes, the differences noted by a later redactor in pencil. For example, Richards wrote the phrase, "a commandment to restore all things" rather than the construction in Kingsbury, "and restore all things." Richards initially wrote one curious thing in the phrase "let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have ... " Richards copied "Emma" over another word. The canceled word appears to be part of "mine handmaid" and was probably the result of a homeoteleuton (eye slip), since the phrase "mine handmaid" occurs in several places in the source. Kingsbury's handwriting partially reflects his own idiosyncrasies rather that Clayton's, but a comparison with other writings by Kingsbury shows that he almost certainly had the Clayton manuscript before him, rather than having it read to him-something he recalls in his Temple Lot testimony five decades later (see Chapter 9).

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Newel K. Whitney's son, Horace K. Whitney (1823-1884), made two copies of the Kingsbury manuscript, probably at Winter Quarters in 1847. Brigham Young requested the Kingsbury manuscript in March 1847, and Horace likely made copies for his father who kept a significant collection of manuscripts of Joseph Smith revelations. Copy one is faithful to the Kingsbury manuscript to the point that the ''.ſs" construction is duplicated, lines end at the same word, and page content is very nearly the same ( these characteristics fade somewhat toward the end of the manuscript). The second Whitney copy is less facsimile-like, and, in its present state, is missing the last paragraph of the revelation.

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Prior to giving up the Kingsbury manuscript, Newell K. Whitney's son Horace K. Whitney produced a near facsimile. . . . Whitney copies MS 4583 very closely, even following Kingsbury's letterforms (such as making upper case a-frame A after Kingsbury, rather than Whitney's apparent normal form, a). However, Whitney does not slavishly follow Kingsbury's capitalization patterns.