1852–1907

Utah Polygamy and the Manifesto

From the 1852 announcement to the 1904 Second Manifesto

12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.

WW

Wilford Woodruff

1807–1898

Fourth church president

As president he issued the Manifesto of 24 September 1890 after concluding that continued practice would cost the church its temples and its leadership. He later told congregations at Brigham City and Logan that the Lord had shown him by vision what would happen if the practice were not stopped. In 1891 he testified under oath that the Manifesto was intended to end cohabitation as well as new marriages, and in the years afterward he authorized a small number of plural marriages in Mexico.

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OP

Orson Pratt

1811–1881

Apostle, public advocate

Brigham Young assigned Pratt to make the first public defense of plural marriage at the special conference of 28–29 August 1852. His discourse set the terms of every later Mormon defense: modern revelation, constitutional protection, the promises to Abraham, and the claim that monogamy bred immorality. He was then sent to Washington to publish The Seer in defense of the doctrine.

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BY

Brigham Young

1801–1877

Second church president

Young directed the 1852 announcement, controlled who could enter plural marriage, and preached it repeatedly in the Tabernacle. His 1866 sermon linking polygamy to godhood is the single most quoted and most disputed statement on the subject. He also agreed to the test case that became Reynolds v. United States.

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JT

John Taylor

1808–1887

Third church president

Taylor refused to yield on plural marriage under the Edmunds Act, told the Saints in his last public sermon that no man had a right to control his conscience, and went into hiding in 1885. He died on the underground in July 1887. A document in his hand dated 27 September 1886 became, decades later, the foundation text of Mormon fundamentalism.

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GC

George Q. Cannon

1827–1901

First Presidency counselor

Cannon edited the Manifesto into its final, shortened, first-person form and defended it publicly as inspired. He also signed recommends for plural marriages after 1890, told the New York Herald in 1899 that such marriages might be performed in Canada and Mexico, and testified in court that he knew of none. He is the pivot on which the question of institutional good faith turns.

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JS

Joseph F. Smith

1838–1918

Sixth church president

Smith was the first witness at the Reed Smoot hearings in March 1904, where he acknowledged cohabiting with five wives and fathering eleven children since 1890 while denying that any plural marriage had been performed with the church's sanction. A month later he issued the Second Manifesto, attaching excommunication to new plural marriages worldwide.

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RS

Reed Smoot

1862–1941

Apostle and U.S. senator

Elected by the Utah legislature in January 1903 while serving as an apostle, Smoot was a monogamist whose seat became the occasion for a four-year Senate investigation of the church itself. The Senate finally voted in February 1907 to let him keep it. His diaries are the closest thing to an insider's running account of the hearings.

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ES

Eliza R. Snow

1804–1887

Relief Society president, poet

Snow organized and spoke at the mass meetings of January 1870 in which Latter-day Saint women publicly defended plural marriage and their own agency in choosing it. She told the Great Indignation Meeting that the women of Utah had been misrepresented and had remained silent too long. She launched the Woman's Exponent in 1872 and died months after the Edmunds–Tucker Act stripped Utah women of the vote.

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EW

Emmeline B. Wells

1828–1921

Editor, suffragist, plural wife

Wells edited the Woman's Exponent through the whole antipolygamy campaign, arguing in print that plural marriage enlarged rather than diminished women. She lobbied Congress and the National Woman Suffrage Association against disfranchisement. Her private diaries record a very different experience of the same marriage, including her husband's indifference.

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MC

Martha Hughes Cannon

1857–1932

Physician, plural wife, state senator

A trained physician and fourth wife of Salt Lake Stake president Angus M. Cannon, she spent years in exile in England and Michigan to keep out of federal reach. In 1896 she ran for the Utah Senate as a Democrat against a Republican slate that included her own husband, beat him, and became the first woman state senator in the United States. Her letters record both the exile and the marriage's collapse.

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GR

George Reynolds

1842–1909

Test-case defendant

Secretary to Brigham Young and husband of two wives, Reynolds volunteered as the defendant in an arranged prosecution meant to test the Morrill Act. The Supreme Court's unanimous 1879 ruling against him held that religious belief was protected but religious practice was not, and it remains a foundation of American free-exercise law.

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LW

Lorin C. Woolley

1856–1934

Fundamentalist founder

Woolley claimed to have been present at John Taylor's hiding place in Centerville in September 1886 when Taylor received a revelation refusing to revoke the everlasting covenant. In accounts given in 1912 and elaborated in 1929 he said Taylor also ordained five men to keep plural marriage alive whatever the church did. Most Mormon fundamentalist groups trace their priesthood claims to that account.

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