A doctrine announced in the open
For nine years the revelation on plural marriage existed as a manuscript known to a few hundred people. On 29 August 1852, at a special missionary conference in Salt Lake City, Orson Pratt stood up and made it public. He opened by saying it was quite unexpected to be called on that forenoon, and still more so to address the congregation on the principle which had been named, namely a plurality of wives. It was, he said, rather new ground.1
The disclaimer was almost certainly staged. Pratt's discourse is too carefully built to have been improvised, and scholars working from the sources conclude that leaders had been preparing the announcement for weeks. What Pratt delivered was a complete apologetic: the practice came by modern revelation; it was protected by the constitution; it fulfilled the commandment to multiply and the promises made to Abraham; polygamy was historically the human norm and monogamy the exception; and monogamy, being unnatural, invited immorality. He denied at the outset that the doctrine existed to gratify the carnal lusts and feelings of man.2
At the same conference the 1843 revelation was read aloud for the first time. Brigham Young then sent Pratt to Washington to publish a periodical, The Seer, in defense of it. Pratt printed the revelation there under the heading Celestial Marriage: A Revelation on the Patriarchal Order of Matrimony, or Plurality of Wives. Until 1890 the phrase celestial marriage and the word polygamy were, in Mormon usage, very nearly the same thing.3
How it was preached
The Journal of Discourses, which runs from 1854 to 1886, is where the doctrine was argued in public in its own words, and it is held complete in this corpus. The recurring frame is Abrahamic: obedience to the same law under which the patriarchs lived, with eternal increase as the promise. Pratt returned to it repeatedly, arguing that God had commanded some of his servants to take more wives and that refusing a command once revealed brought damnation.
The single most quoted sentence comes from Brigham Young on 19 August 1866. He told the congregation that if they desired with all their hearts to obtain the blessings which Abraham obtained, they would be polygamists at least in their faith, or they would come short of enjoying the salvation and the glory which Abraham had obtained. Then: the only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy. Others attain unto a glory and may even be permitted to come into the presence of the Father and the Son, but they cannot reign as kings in glory, because they had blessings offered unto them and they refused to accept them.4
That passage is a live dispute, and it should be reported as one. Critics from the Tanners to the CES Letter quote the second sentence to show that plural marriage was taught as necessary for exaltation.5 FAIR replies that the surrounding text is regularly omitted, that Young was addressing people who wished the doctrine did not exist, and that the requirement he stated was faith in the principle rather than its practice.6 Both sides are quoting the same page. What is not in dispute is that Charles W. Penrose could say in 1883 that plural marriage and marriage for eternity were indissolubly interwoven, and that Orson Pratt argued that if a man had no divine right to marry two wives, then marriage for eternity was not true either.7
How many, and who
The numbers have been contested since 1866, when a congressional hearing asked what proportion of the Mormon people were practising polygamists and received answers ranging from one sixth to one half. In 1885 John Taylor and George Q. Cannon told the world that men practising plural marriage did not exceed two percent of the entire membership of the church, a figure computed against a denominator that included women, children and members outside the mountain West. At the Smoot hearings Joseph F. Smith, having asked stake presidents to count, offered three or four percent of the male population.8
Later data-based work put the figure much higher. The church's own Gospel Topics essay now states that by 1870 twenty-five to thirty percent of the population lived in polygamous households, that probably half of those living in Utah Territory in 1857 experienced life in a polygamous family at some point, and that two thirds of polygamist men had only two wives at a time. Studies built from family group records rather than census inference find the fraction of Mormon males with more than one wife falling between thirteen and thirty-three percent depending on time and place, and the fraction of women considerably higher, since one man's second marriage adds one husband and one wife to the count.9
Place mattered enormously. In St. George, Utah's first temple city, roughly forty-one percent of the population was living in plural families in June 1880, and nearly three in ten of the polygamous husbands enumerated had entered plurality only in the three and a half years since sealings began in the new temple. In a longitudinal study of the same town, two thirds of all wives' experience before 1880 was spent in plural marriages and half of all child-years were spent with a shared father. Whatever the male participation rate, the practice shaped the experience of women and children far more than a headcount of husbands suggests.
Women speaking for themselves
The antipolygamy campaign rested on a premise: that Mormon women were captives who would repudiate the practice if given a voice. In January 1870 they were given one, and used it the other way. On 6 January, in Sarah M. Kimball's Fifteenth Ward Relief Society hall, women drafted resolutions against the pending Cullom Bill and resolved to petition for the vote. A week later, in snow, between three and five thousand women filled the old adobe tabernacle for a Great Indignation Meeting. No men were present but reporters.10
Eliza R. Snow told them that while they had been misrepresented by speech and press and exhibited in every shade but their true light, the ladies of Utah had as a general thing remained silent, and that it was time as women of God to break that silence. Sarah Kimball opened by declaring that they were not there to advocate woman's rights but man's rights, a line the eastern press seized on with relief. Amanda Smith described the killing of her husband and son at Hawn's Mill. Phebe Woodruff asked that if the nation would imprison the Saints for obeying this law, it grant one last request and make its prisons large enough to hold their wives, for where they went the women would go also.11
A month later the all-male territorial legislature passed woman suffrage unanimously and the acting governor signed it. About twenty-five Salt Lake women voted on 14 February 1870, the first women in the nation to vote under an equal suffrage law. Similar mass meetings were held in fifty-eight towns. The Woman's Exponent, founded in 1872, gave the argument a permanent platform, and Emmeline B. Wells wrote there that plural marriage gave women the highest opportunities for self-development and exercise of judgement, making them more independent in thought and mind.12
The private record is not the same record. Wells wrote in her diary of being tortured by her husband's inattention: O if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem to be perfectly indifferent. Martha Hughes Cannon, a physician who spent years in exile in England and Michigan to keep out of federal reach, wrote to her husband at the end of 1891: Oh for a home! A husband of my own because he is my own. A father for my children whom they know by association.13 Both women meant both things. A synthesis that reports only the public defense, or only the private grief, misrepresents them.
In 1887 the Edmunds–Tucker Act took the vote from every woman in Utah, polygamous or not, Mormon or not. It is the only time in American history that Congress has disfranchised women. Emmeline Wells and Zina Young Williams had already been lobbying in Washington and speaking at National Woman Suffrage Association conventions; after 1887 they organized formally, and when statehood came in 1896 the new constitution restored what the federal government had taken.14
The federal vise
The legal campaign came in stages, and each stage closed a gap the previous one had left. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 made bigamy in the territories a five-year felony, annulled the church's territorial incorporation and capped its property holdings at $50,000. It was almost unenforced: bigamy required proof of a marriage ceremony, and such proof was nearly impossible to obtain. The Poland Act of 1874 handed jurisdiction and jury selection to federal judges.15
Church leaders, believing the Morrill Act unconstitutional, arranged a test case. George Reynolds, secretary to Brigham Young and husband of two wives, cooperated with prosecutors. On 6 January 1879 a unanimous Supreme Court ruled against him. Chief Justice Waite wrote that laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. The constitutional defense was gone.16
The Edmunds Act of 1882 supplied what Morrill had lacked. It created the misdemeanour of unlawful cohabitation, which required no marriage ceremony to prove, disqualified polygamists from juries, office and the ballot, and replaced Utah's election machinery with five federally appointed commissioners who promptly invented a test oath. The mass prosecutions did not begin with Reynolds; they began here, and in particular after December 1885, when the Supreme Court affirmed Angus M. Cannon's conviction on the prosecution's definition that holding out more than one woman to the world as a wife was enough.17
The Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887 was aimed at the institution rather than the men. It dissolved the church corporation and the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, directed the attorney general to escheat property held in violation of the 1862 act, abolished spousal privilege so that wives could be compelled to testify against their husbands, allowed prosecutors to jail uncooperative witnesses before trial, added adultery, incest and fornication to the available charges, required an antipolygamy oath of voters, jurors and officeholders, and revoked woman suffrage. In May 1890 the Supreme Court sustained the escheat.18
The underground
Rudger Clawson was the first man convicted under the Edmunds Act, in the autumn of 1884. Offered leniency, he told the court that he very much regretted that the laws of his country should come into conflict with the laws of God, but that whenever they did he would invariably choose the latter. The judge gave him four years and $800 in fines, and he spent his first night among the territory's hardened inmates.19
What followed was called the Raid. Marshals arrived at night, ransacked houses and turned children out of beds; by 1886 nearly every Utah settlement had been searched. Assistant church historian Andrew Jenson later compiled a digest of 883 Mormon men and women prosecuted for polygamy-related offenses between 1884 and 1892, and it did not include those merely fined. From 1885 the leadership itself went into hiding. Wives took assumed names, some for the rest of their lives. Annie Gallifant Connelly, pregnant, was sent to the penitentiary in 1882 for refusing to answer a grand jury; Belle Harris served three and a half months there with her infant.20
Two escape routes opened. In 1885 the First Presidency established colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora, which became Colonia Juarez, Colonia Dublan and Colonia Diaz. In 1886 and 1887 Charles Ora Card, the Cache Valley stake president and himself under warrant, led families into southern Alberta and founded Cardston; of the sixteen men in the first party, fifteen were polygamists. Neither refuge was legally clean. Mexican federal statutes since 1884 prohibited marriage where one partner was already married, a fact church leaders were warned of before the colonies were founded, and in 1888 Card and two apostles were politely refused permission to practise plural marriage in Canada. John Taylor died in hiding in July 1887 with a price on his head.21
The Manifesto
On 25 September 1890 Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal that he had arrived at a point in the history of his life as president of the church where he was under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the church, that the United States government had passed laws to destroy the Latter-day Saints on the subject of polygamy, and that after praying and feeling inspired by the Spirit he had issued the proclamation.22
The document is short and worth reading as written rather than as remembered. It opens by denying a specific press claim, that forty or more plural marriages had been contracted in Utah in the past year. It then states: Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise. It closes: And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.23
What it does not say matters as much. It says nothing about existing plural families, nothing about cohabitation, and nothing about jurisdictions where the law of the land did not forbid plural marriage. FAIR observes, accurately, that Woodruff drafted it in the third person for signature by the Presidency and the Twelve, that George Q. Cannon shortened it by roughly 150 words, and that it went out as one man's declaration of intention and advice, without other signatures. Quinn observes, from the same facts, that several of its retrospective factual claims were untrue: sealing records show that at least thirty Utah men had contracted plural marriages since June 1889, and someone in the First Presidency had signed recommends for a dozen plural marriages performed in the Endowment House and temples between June and October 1889.24
On 6 October 1890 Lorenzo Snow moved that the conference, recognizing Woodruff as the only man on earth holding the keys of the sealing ordinances, consider him fully authorized to issue the Manifesto and accept his declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding. The vote was unanimous. Zina D. H. Young wrote that day that the hearts of all were tried but looked to God and submitted. Some plural wives reported great relief; Eugenia Washburn Larsen reported dense darkness at the thought of wives and children being turned adrift.25
Woodruff spent the next year explaining. At Brigham City and Logan in 1891 he put the Saints a question the Lord had told him to ask: which was the wiser course, to continue attempting plural marriage against the laws of the nation and the opposition of sixty millions of people and at the cost of the confiscation of all the temples and the imprisonment of the First Presidency and Twelve, or to cease and submit. He said the Lord had shown him by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if the practice were not stopped, that all ordinances would be stopped throughout the land of Zion, and that he would have let all the temples go out of the church's hands and gone to prison himself had not the God of heaven commanded him to do what he did. Those excerpts are printed today in the Doctrine and Covenants after Official Declaration 1.26
After the Manifesto
In October 1891, testifying before a master in chancery on whom the return of the escheated property depended, Woodruff was asked whether his advice had been that existing plural relations should not be continued, that unlawful cohabitation should stop as well as future marriages. He answered that that had been the intention. George Q. Cannon testified the same month that he had never heard of any member entering a plural marriage since the Manifesto.27
Both statements were, at best, incomplete. Quinn's reconstruction found that from the publication of the Manifesto through November 1890 the First Presidency authorized seven residents of the United States to go to Mexico to marry; that marriages resumed under verbal authorization in 1891; that in 1894 the Presidency committed itself to the position that there were circumstances in which plural marriages would be not merely permitted but encouraged, and that year one occurred in Canada, six in Mexico and two in Utah temples; that in 1902 the Juarez stake president was authorized to resume performing them; and that 1903 was the climax, with apostles officiating in both the United States and Mexico. His summary judgement is that ninety percent of new polygamous marriages contracted between September 1890 and December 1904 directly involved church authority, and that during the same thirteen and a half years the First Presidency published two dozen denials.28
B. Carmon Hardy, whose Solemn Covenant is the standard study, put the total at somewhere between two hundred and perhaps three hundred marriages between 1890 and 1910, and noted that at least seven apostles took plural wives after the Manifesto and that members of the First Presidency approved and assisted them. What struck him more than the numbers was the identity of the participants: former missionaries, bishops, stake presidents, people counted among the most faithful.29
The reckoning came through an election. Reed Smoot, an apostle and a monogamist, was chosen for the Senate by the Utah legislature in January 1903, and the Salt Lake Ministerial Association petitioned that he not be seated. The Senate seated him and then investigated the church for four years, hearing more than a hundred witnesses and generating over three thousand pages of testimony. Joseph F. Smith was the first witness, testifying on six days in March 1904. He acknowledged cohabiting with five wives and fathering eleven children since 1890, saying he had simply taken his chances, preferring to meet the consequences of the law rather than abandon his children and their mothers. Asked about new plural marriages, he testified that there never had been one by the consent or sanction or knowledge or approval of the church since the Manifesto, drawing a distinction between what the church had ratified in its councils and what individuals had done.30
A month later he issued the Second Manifesto. It affirmed that no such marriages had been solemnized with the sanction, consent or knowledge of the church, then announced that all such marriages were prohibited, and that any officer or member who assumed to solemnize or enter one would be deemed in transgression and be liable to be excommunicated. Francis M. Lyman explained afterward that the 1890 statement had simply given notice that the Saints need not enter plural marriage any longer, and that the 1904 action made that manifesto prohibitory. Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley, who had continued both to marry and to solemnize, signed resignations in October 1905; these were announced at general conference on 8 April 1906. Taylor was excommunicated in March 1911; Cowley was deprived of priesthood authority in May.31
What was left
Utah became a state on 4 January 1896 under a constitution guaranteeing perfect toleration of religious sentiment and providing that polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited. The People's Party had dissolved in 1891 and members were directed into the national parties. Woman suffrage went back into the constitution after the convention's most heated debate, and in November 1896 Martha Hughes Cannon, a plural wife and physician, beat her own husband for a seat in the state senate. Once statehood arrived, the federal antipolygamy statutes no longer applied and enforcement relaxed markedly.32
Those who would not stop found their charter in a document dated 27 September 1886, in John Taylor's hand, declaring that everlasting covenants cannot be abrogated. That much is not disputed. What is disputed is Lorin C. Woolley's account, sketched in 1912 and elaborated in 1929, that Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ appeared to Taylor that night and that Taylor afterward ordained five men to keep plural marriage alive whatever the church did. Woolley organized a priesthood council in 1929; after a 1933 First Presidency statement rejecting the claim, the church began systematically excommunicating those who supported the practice, and adherents gathered at Short Creek on the Utah–Arizona line. The 1953 Arizona raid there, which put more than 160 children into foster placements for nearly two years, produced a public backlash and left the community stronger than it found it.33
The doctrine itself was never withdrawn. Doctrine and Covenants 132 remains canonized. Under current handbook policy a living woman may be sealed to only one husband and must obtain a cancellation before being sealed to another, while a man whose wife has died may have a second woman sealed to him without cancelling the first. Deceased women may be sealed to all the men they married in life, with the choice left to the next world. Brian Hales, defending the policy inside a faithful venue, states the position squarely: church leaders have taught that eternal polygyny can occur and eternal polyandry cannot, and altering the sealing practice would mean altering that. Critics from the CES Letter onward make the same observation as an accusation: the practice ended in 1890, the doctrine did not.34