Julie: When the Saints moved to Utah in 1847 they were in what was then a province of Mexico known as Upper-California. I have no idea if polygamy was legal under Mexican law. I doubt it. De facto, there was no Mexican law in the Great Basin and the closest Mexican authorities were in Santa Fe, which by that time had already been occupied by American troops as part of the Mexican American war.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848 ceded the Great Basin to the United States. The treaty contained a provision guaranteeing protection to existing religious establishments and free exercise of religion. It was meant to cover Catholics and Spainish missions in California, but for years thereafter, the Mormons claimed that the treaty applied to them. To my knowledge this claim was never tested in Court.

With the annexation of Upper-California, the Great Basin was what was known as “unorganized territory.” This meant that it was U.S territory but was not subject to the jurisdiction of of any state or territorial government. The Great Basin remained in this status until 1850, when the Territory of Utah was created as part of the Compromise of 1850. During this two year interregnum, the Saints established the State of Deseret, with a functioning legislature, which passed criminal laws, etc. The laws of Deseret did not forbid polygamy, and actually allowed for the legal ratification of polygamous marriage through the roundabout means of a provision in the corporate charter of the church.

Unorganized territory was subject to the exclusive control of federal law. Prior to 1862, there was no federal law forbidding bigamy. Bigamy was a crime at common law, but an early 19th century case by the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly held that common law crimes did not exist as a matter of federal law.

Once the Territory of Utah was organized, it adopted all of the legislation passed by the provisional government of the state of Deseret.

In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy act, which forbade polygamy in the territory. This, I think, is the first time after the Saints left Iowa (which I assume had a territorial statute forbidding bigamy) that they were arguablely subject to a law criminalizing polygamy. (Assuming that no Mexican prohibition was in effect from July 1847 to early 1848 when the Treaty was signed.)

The legality of the Morrill Act was suspect on three grounds. First, there was the notion that it was repugnant to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Second, there was the claim that it violated the First Amendment. Third, the extent of congressional power over the Territories was very much an open question.

Today, it is well established that Congress has plenary power over the territories. However, in the 19th century there was a well articulated position that Congress did not have power to legislate in the territories on purely local matters, such as — the Mormons argued — marriage. Furthermore, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court seemed to adopt this position, arguing that Congress could not pass a law — in this case the Compromise of 1850 — that regulated domestic institutions — in this case slavery — in the territories. Even after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments, most jurists assumed that Dred Scott remained good law as to the structural relationship between the federal government and the territories.

As a result of these legal concerns and — more importantly — the practical impossibility of prosecuting Mormons for polygamy in Utah Territory, the Morril Act remained a dead letter for about ten years. Then in the early 1870s, Judge McKean launched a wholescale prosecution of the Mormon elites — BY, George Q. Cannon, etc. — for, inter alia, violating the Morrill Act. These prosecutions failed because of procedural errors on McKean’s part. The Mormons then used their fiscal control of the local courts to shut down all prosecutions of any kind in Utah. Congress intervened to eliminate this stalemate by passing a law in 1874 known as the Poland Act, that removed budgetary control of the criminal trial processs from the Mormons. This resulted in the trial of George Reynolds as a test case. After a great deal of litigation, his case arrived in the Supreme Court, which upheld the Morril Act on Reynolds v. United States in 1879.

Hence, as to plural marriages in Utah, the earliest date for illegality is 1862, but this fact was not clearly established until 1879. Furthermore, it should be clear that the Mormon legal arguments in Reynolds were reasonable in light of then existing law. In other words, it was not as though the Mormons were relying of wholly ridiculous legal theories to support their claim that the Morrill Act was illegal. Furthermore, ten years of more of deusetude seemed to reinforce their position.

After 1879, there is no question, however, but that plural marriages contracted in Utah were illegal.

Nate, thanks for your lawyerly statement — which, I’m happy to note, closely parallels my own. Furthermore, the two of us provided somewhat different details regarding the historical process in question. Hence, between the two comments, readers should have a reasonably good summary of the issues at hand!

Why bother discussing legality? “Deseret” was basically its own country and should be treated as such. Lines drawn on maps meant little to the pioneers I would suspect.

Why worry re: polygamy & the past? Frankly, I’m just as happy that it isn’t discussed. I don’t find it very interesting; other than as an excuse used by the U.S. government of that time (& the nascent GOP) as an opportunity to steal land and increase the size of the country at the expense of an insular minority.

Widespread misperceptions? Among whom? How do you know they are widespread? Or are we presuming that because it isn’t taught in Sunday School that the general body of the Saints are ignorant?

RT: The liscense argument with regard to early Mormon marriages is probably false. It has been put forward by Quinn as the earliest example of Mormons proceeding in violation of the laws of the land. He makes the claim as to monogamous marriages performed by Joseph in Kirtland. The problem with the claim is that Quinn seems to be misreading the statutes in question. The issue wasn’t whether or not one got a marriage liscense — a relative new phenomena — but whether or not the person performing the marriage in question had the legal authority to do so. Under Ohio law — and the laws of most states — pastors and other heads of religious congregations had the authority to perform marriages. Joseph Smith’s position as president of the Church seems well within the purview of the Ohio law that Quinn invokes.

…unanimously supporting a statement…

I don’t have anything close by to look this up, but I thought there was several important indaviduals who did not sustain it, though the quorum of the 12 did.

Thanks for a most interesting post. The details are excellent. I wish the church would be more open about what really happened. I guess they feel we can handle the truth.

In November’s issue of the American Political Science Review Sarah Song, of MIT, uses the debate over combatting polygamy in a very interesting and illuminative way, one I have not heard before, in her article “Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality”. Essentially, she argues that the passage of the laws against polygamy was part of a wider effort to divert 19th century mainstream feminism, by tarring it as supportive of polygamous immorality. The Feminist movement of the time (for instance Stanton, Anthony, Grimke) was very strongly opposed to the Morrill, Edmunds, and Edmunds-Tucker acts, the last of which disenfranchized women in the territory, who had been voting for 17 years; interestingly from present-day perspective, one of the other objects of this campaign was the ease of divorce in Utah, which apparently had the most lenient divorce law in the US at the time. She also quotes the legal historian Orma Linford as describing the Fed Govt’s fight against polygamy as a campaign with “a zeal and concentration…unequaled in the annals of federal law enforcement.” She also quotes from Stanton, Anthony, and Gage’s History of Women Suffrage, in which they argue against the use of “federal power to disenfranchize the women ofUtah, who have had a more just and liberal spirit shouwn them by Mormon men than Gentile women in the States have yet percieved in their masters.”

If you get the chance, look at the article, it puts the debate in an interesting and more complicated context, than seems to be the case when it’s looked at by Utah-centric cultural mormons.

RT: It has been a while since I looked at the Ohio law. If I recall correctly, it said that marriages could be legally solemnized by two sorts of people: those that had liscense to perform them, and those that were pastors, heads of congregations, etc. etc. Quinn read them as being necessary requirements when in fact they were sufficient. I could be wrong on this, but I remember thinking at the time that the critique of Quinn’s reading of the statute was pretty good. Like I said, though, it has been a while since I looked at this.

Nate, fair enough, and you are certainly a better voice on the law than I am. In any case, it’s redundant due to bigamy legislation in all three states.

RT: If I recall correctly, the Ohio marriage was not polyanderous in the same sense as the Nauvoo marriages. You had a situation where a person had been abandoned by their spouse who was now in places unknown. This was actually a pretty common problem in the nineteenth century. Lots of people got around it with common law marriages or bigamous marriages. As one might imagine a fair amount of litigation resulted and the courts became rather ingenious in coming up with ways of disolving marriages in the absence of divorce. (One favorite trick was a presumption that a person gone and not heard from in a certain period of time would be deemed legally dead.)

That said, I have no doubt that Joseph Smith performed illegal marriages. My legal quibbles are offered as quibbles not as apologetics. As it happens Mormon legal history is one of my hobbies, so I like fishing through the details…

You’ll do better looking for “plural marriage” on the Church website rather than polygamy. I got over 50 hits that way.

And it seems pretty easy to see why the subject gets little discussion in Church teaching materials— it is not something we are asked to live. Our manuals are very much about good behavior. Plural Marriage was secret for the first twenty years that it was done. Prophets talked about it when we were to obey it, thus allowing people to gain a witness of their words through the spirit. But it seems a little awkward now, since God certainly does not want people to gain a strong testimony of the importance of living polygamy, as witnesses are tied to obedience. God typically teaches principles for us to _obey_, but we are not to live this principle. Thus we don’t talk much about the United Order and we don’t talk much about polygamy. Academics like to talk about these things alot, but scriptures, and international Church manuals, have a different focus. Perhaps you would have been also concerned by the curriculum Alma established in the Book of Mormon. They were to teach nothing but first principles!

Joseph Smith, apparently, felt that what he was doing was very different than “bigamy” or polygamy. Apparently he felt free to deny engaging in bigamy because he seemed to see priesthood authorized plural marriage as being different. Apparently the Church leaders today share some of those sentiments about word choice.

It is important to note that there were polygamous marriages performed by high church leaders (apostles, perhaps some members of the FP) AFTER the Manifesto. The view was that polygamy was good doctrine despite what the government said and that the point of the Manifesto was simply to save the Church not to end polygamy, so there was nothing wrong with performing plural marriages so long as one didn’t get caught. There was some disagreement among the leading Brethren as to whether or not this interpretation of the Manifesto was correct. It is also worth noting that the wording of the Manifesto itself is ambigious: It takes the form of a formal endorsement of a press release issued in response to accusations made by the Utah Commission that plural marriages were still being performed despite an unofficial “stop” put out by the FP earlier. I think that in context, it makes more sense to understand the end of polygamy something along these lines:

The legal pressure got really, really, really hot. Church leaders were trying to negotiate some sort of a settlement with the powers in Washington. To aid these negotiations they placed a temporary hold on performing new plural marriages. The Utah Commission (a body created by the Edmunds-Tucker Act) produced a report that plural marriages continued to be performed. This threatened to blow up the delicate negotiations in Washington. The Church issued the Manifesto as a way of reiterating and denying the Utah Commission’s charges. Some high leaders understood the Manifesto to mean the end of polygamy. Some understood it to mean a temporary ceasing. Some understood it to mean little more than that the Church was trying to outwit the feds. Furthermore, the opinions of different leaders shifted from one position to another position over time. Plural marriages continued to be performed on a limited basis and in secret. Word leaked out. Pressure began to build. It came to a head in the Reed Smoot Hearings. It looked as though the anti-polygamy crusades were going to get started again. Joseph F. Smith told Congress that polygamy was completely over (which was not true), and then returned to Utah to make sure that it would be over. Some Apostles were dropped from the Quorum and/or excommunicated. The FP issued a statement in General Conference sometimes called the Second Manifesto, stating that the Church had well and truely abandoned plural marriages. It also instituted a policy of excommunicating those who performed such marriages. This, however, was a good twenty years or more after the issuing of the Woodruff Manifesto.

I think that the best sources on this are:

_Political Deliverance: The Quest for Utah Statehood_ (explains the political and legal context of the Woodruff Manifesto very well.)

_The Politics of Religious Identity_ (explains the political and legal context of the Smoot hearings and the Second Manifesto very well.)

D. Michael Quinn’s article on post-Manifesto polygamy in Dialogue (collects sources on post-Manifesto polygamy. Some dispute how far Quinn takes his sources — e.g. Tom Alexander doesn’t believe that Woodruff contracted post-Manifesto marriages; Quinn does — but no one disputes his basic facts or sources.)

Frank,

I tried searching for “plural marriage” and only got 13 hits. 5 of those hits were in introductions to various “presidents of the church” Priesthood/RS manuals. If you look at the other citations, you’ll see that none provides more than the most cursory mention of this practice, with no discussion longer than a couple of sentences, often less. The phrase “United Order” got 65 hits. (It’s possible the differences in our counts could be due to the truly terrible search features at lds.org. I used the “exact phrase” box under “Advanced search.” That’s the only way I know how to search for phrases, since it doesn’t seem to understand quotes.)

Your point is basically a good one…we shouldn’t spend too much time talking about various rules or commandments that are no longer in effect. It’s completely understandable that there is not a big focus on plural marriage. On the other hand, we DO spend a not insignificant amount of time talking about church history, and plural marriage was a very very important part of the history of the church. But clearly one that the church leaders enjoy talking about much less than do the denizens of the bloggernacle.

These are some great summaries.

I don’t think the lds.org search engine covers the institute manuals. The Church History manual probably has the most detailed information of any current Church publication. Available here.

Wow! Great post.

Personally, I’m pretty happy with half-a-step forward. It is forward.

By the way, the D&C Sunday School curriculum has an entire lesson on the United Order (see lesson #14, “The Law of Consecration”). No lesson on polygamy, though.

Ed: I used Google and limited it to the lds.org web site. But it sounds, after your revision, like the two are surprisingly comparable in terms of coverage.

RT: The United Order is not the Law of Consecration. We are still bound by covenants related to consecration (as that lesson makes clear), thus it is very much a relevant topic for obedience. The United Order, specifically, gets about as much play in that lesson as plural marriage does in the Eternal Marriage lesson.

Frank,

I find it troubling that you are invoking divine pedagogy to shield Mormon proselytizing from the requirements of honesty.

If I buy a used car I have the right to get the history of the vehicle disclosed. I would expect that people who claim divine authority rise to higher standards than used car salesmen.

It is dishonest to hide polygamy. We actually asked and were told:
•Polygamy was necessary because there was a surplus of women.
•The purpose of polygamy was to take care of widows.
•No polygamy without the consent of the first wife.
•No polygamy unless each wife has her own house.
•No more than three percent of Mormons participated in polygamy ever.

Apparently the mission leaders believed that they would lose converts if they gave us the straight scoop about polygamy. Anyone who had ever seen the Lion House knew that the polygamy language was not truthful.

It is even more troubling that nineteenth century missionaries also prevaricated about polygamy. I can only imagine how European converts must have felt when they realized the truth upon arrival in Utah, many of them without the means to leave.

Great post, and comments.

Anyone have suggestions for books or articles regarding President Woodruff more generally, aside from the polygamy angle. Greg Prince’s book has been a great resource in teaching the priesthood lessons this year. It would be nice to find something, or perhaps several things, that could serve a comparable role in teaching next year.

Frank, the United Order/United Firm period in Kirtland was the historical context for the major statements on the Law of Consecration. Furthermore, there is good reason to believe that current church manuals use “Law of Consecration” as a synonym for “United Order.” Consider, for example, the following quote from the Our Heritage manual describing the United Firm period in Kirtland:

In 1831 the Lord began revealing aspects of the law of consecration, a spiritual and temporal system that, if followed in righteousness, would bless the lives of the impoverished Latter-day Saints. Under this law, members of the Church were asked to consecrate, or deed, all their property to the bishop of the Church. He then granted an inheritance, or stewardship, back to the members. Families administered their stewardships as well as they could. If at the year’s end they had a surplus, this was given to the bishop to use in caring for those in need. Edward Partridge was called by the Lord to serve as the first bishop of the Church.

Clearly, what is described here as the “law of consecration” is the full institution of the United Order.

The Gospel Doctrine lesson manual also gives a relatively great deal of institutional detail regarding the United Order, providing information and scriptural quotes about the means of consecrating posessions, about the receipt of stewardships, about the treatment of surpluses, and so forth. All of this is a great deal of information that is not directly relevant to our ongoing obligations with respect to the Law of Consecration. The contrast between this degree of attention to an important historical institution in the church and the relative stinginess of detail about polygamy seems noteworthy to me.

Of course, the lack of a chapter on the Manifesto in the new Woodruff manual is far more noteworthy. As I suggested in the original post, the Manifesto is almost certainly the most important thing Woodruff did during his lifetime, both from a historical perspective and from a spiritual one. Hence, not really addressing it in a book on his teachings is an interesting decision.

Randy, there’s an excellent, if somewhat intimidating, list of Woodruff-related resources by Ben S. at Millenial Star. Out of those many listed books and articles, let me direct people’s attention to the Thomas Alexander biography, Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet. This book is the Woodruff-focused equivalent of the Prince bio of McKay: thoroughly-researched, non-judgmental, and scholarly.

Randy: I would take a look at Alexander’s biography. Also, I suggest _Things of Heaven and Earth_ which is a VERY abridged, one-volume edition of his journal. It has lots of wonderful stuff in it, and reading Woodruff you get a great sense of what he was like. Also, my mom was the editor of the one volume edition and she might even still get some sort of royalties for it (although I doubt it).

I believe Nate meant to give the title “Waiting for World’s End,” the abridged journal edited by his mother. (”Things in Heaven and Earth” is the Alexander bio.)

Nate Oman, I adore you. The very idea that you exist, and you think that Mormon Legal History is a fun little hobby. Sniff. It’s a beautiful thing.

Hellmut–As an active and believing Latter-day Saint, I agree with you.

Frank–a few points:

We’re not just talking about men here. Women practiced plural marriage as well, and the LDS church practice of polygamy included polygyny and polyandry.

Second, maybe Abraham was wrong to be willing to sacrifice Isaac. Maybe he thought that’s what God wanted since he’d come from a culture of child-sacrifice. To me the essential point of the story is that the Living God does NOT delight in sacrifice, and that God (Jesus) sacrifices himself for us, not the other way around. We are not Abraham’s judge any more than we are Joseph Smith’s, but we still must take responsibilities for the decisions we make about behavior. God’s grace is sufficient for all people, even prophets.

Do we not believe that God is Righteous and Good and Perfect? According to what standard? Any old arbitrary rules He and She set up? What about the Book of Mormon’s phrase God would cease to be God? I believe God is the law-giver, and that divine law is not created ex nihilo any more than this physical earth was. I also believe that the conscience or light of Christ that we have each been given about right and wrong is a divine spark which helps orient us towards God. I don’t think an attempt to extinguish that spark is productive in any way here.

I think there are other possibilities than the black and white options you are respresenting here.

Frank,

If the concept of a testimony means that prophets can do anything then Jesus’ admonition about the fruits of a prophet becomes meaningless. The metaphor of fruits refers to observable evidence. The metaphor implies that the observers of prophets can tell the difference between good and bad fruits because this difference empowers them to tell the false prophets. Jesus did not say “pray about the evidence.” He told us to evaluate the evidence.

Clearly, there are limits to what a man or woman of God can do without being considered a false. May be, polygamy is not that limit but the gospel does not teach if it feels good, do it. Rather Christ teaches that those who claim to be prophets ought to be judged by their actions.

There are two essential differences Abraham’s sacrifice and Joseph’s polygamy. First, Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac. Joseph consumed polygamous marriages. Second, if Abraham did receive a revelation to sacrifice his son then it hurt the prophet’s self-interest. If there was a revelation that Joseph shall marry his maid, his foster daughters, the wives of his supporters, and a number of teenage girls then it served the self-interest of the prophet. Hence one must not only be more skeptical about Joseph’s prophetic claims but there is no parallel between polygamy and Abraham’s sacrifice.

Lisa’s interpretation of Abraham’s sacrifice reminds me of Kirkegaard.

Frank, our leaders don’t have a monopoly on truth. Our job is to try an idea and see if it seems true, regardless of where it comes from. Lisa’s comments about Abraham’s sacrifice seem true to me, so I see no utility in waiting for anyone else to repeat them…

Clark, it’s not actually true that polyandry stopped after Joseph’s death. Brigham Young initiated polyandrous marriages with some of Joseph’s polyandrous wives. The sad story of Zina Diantha and Henry Jacobs wasn’t too sad during Joseph’s time; the two lived together throughout Joseph’s life, in spite of Zina also having a marriage bond with Joseph. But when Joseph died, Brigham sealed Zina to Joseph for eternity and to Brigham for time — in spite of the fact that Zina’s legal husband was actually present in the temple for the ceremony. A little while later, Brigham sent Henry Jacobs on a mission and had Zina move in with him in her legal husband’s absence. That sounds polyandrous to me.

Can we blame the fact that the missionaries give out inaccurate information when asked about polygamy on the reticence of the Church to allow discussions of the topic in various church lessons? I’ve seen lesson manuals that actively discourage discussion of the history of OD1 and instead tell the instructor to focus on the idea of continuing revelation.

Given that manuals dicourage informing members on these topics how can we hope that they have accurate information to tell others?

HL: I think we’ve gone about as far as we can go on this. I agree that the question is one of personal spiritual witness. Emma’s lack of a testimony, Hyrum’s witness, and my testimony are not what you need. You need your own fruit.

“The problem with polygamy is not only that it is obviously an abusive practice, though that ought to be sufficient to reject it as a divine practice, but that Smith’s theological justifications don’t make sense. ”

Obvious to you, doesn’t make sense to you, rejected by you. But God is not you nor me. You say that polygamy as a trial doesn’t make sense because it was not as bad as killing your child? Well, ok, but Joseph had to actually go through with it, so who’s to say which ended up being worse? But none of this really matters if you don’t have a testimony of the prophet.

Hellmut,
You should post your story some time. Did I miss a bio somewhere? Are you German? Sounds like you have an interesting background. Many will not agree with the conclusions your story brings you to, but it would help if we had some better context. Do tell!

I agree with you, Barney that the motives of Joseph Smith and those of his followers are most likely an entirely different matter.

Some of my wife’s ancestors were polygamists as well. Before that they owned slaves. So I guess there was progress. To the credit of my wife’s family, another branch operated a station of the underground railroad.

Anyways, some of my family members were Nazis. So I can’t really talk about skeletons in other people’s ancestry.

Barney - you’ve put words to an idea I’d been trying to figure out: “I view Joseph as having erred in introducing polygamy. I think it’s possible polygamy was divinely inspired, I think it is more possible that in his passion to restore the primitive church (including Old Testament beliefs), Joseph mistakenly let his passions affect his theology.”

Thanks for that.

I could never square the failure of polygamy with the idea that it was a revealed doctrine. For example, we’re taught that the reason the Saints were driven out of Missouri, and hence out of the new Zion, was because of their wickedness. If only the Saints had been faithful enough, God would have supported them and softened the hearts of their enemies, and Jackson County would have been the New Jerusalem.

In my studies of polygamy, I’ve been impressed by how faithful the early Saints were in sacrificing everything to live the Principle. I’ve yet to read a sermon in which a Church leader tells the people that the polygamous persecutions are because they aren’t living polygamy faithfully enough. And yet God didn’t defend his Saints and soften the enemies’ hearts. Instead, the Principle of plural marriage was rescinded to rescue the Church.

If polygamy was that important, and that inspired, the persecutions of men would not have been able to end it.

Near the top of this thread, there was a question about whether polygamy was legal under 1847 Mexico law (Mexico claimed Utah then, to the surprise, I’d guess, of the Shoshone, Utes, Paiutes, etc.)).

In Quinn’s 1985 article, “Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904,” he discusses the status of post-manifesto polygamy under Mexican law. He doesn’t specifically look at the 1840s time period, but what he writes suggest that the federal anti-polygamy law didn’t show up until 1884.

From page 17 of that article:
“[A] persistent myth among Mormons maintains that polygamy and polygamous cohabitation were not in violation of the laws of Mexico, where the First Presidency established a polygamous refuge in 1885. On the contrary, since 1884 Mexican federal statutes (which were adopted in the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, and Oaxaca where Mormon colonies were established) prohibited marriage between persons where one partner was already legitimately married, defined children of such a union as “spurious,” and also refused to recognize as legitimate any marriage performed outside Mexico unless it was “valid according to the laws of the country in which it was celebrated.” FN40
“Church leaders were aware of this situation from the beginning of the Mormon colonies in Mexico, as indicated by …”
Quinn, D. Michael. “Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 1 (1985).

Thanks, Rosalynde. With respect to the bigamy statute, although your description of the purpose may allow for some wiggle room with respect to the legality of polygamy, the language of the law itself seems not to. On the one hand, it’s easy to see how a reasonable person engaging in motivated thinking could conclude that polygamy was okay under that bigamy law. However, on the other hand, one suspects that the courts would have concluded otherwise — perhaps in part because of anti-Mormon sentiments, but also because polygamy quickly came to be seen as a threat to the Christian family.

(Oops, RT, I read your response too quickly: you addressed the Illinois situation, I in turn addressed the Ohio situation.)

So, a summary statement of sorts (and please do correct me if I get parts of this wrong). Polygamy was probably illegal in each of the states where it was practiced, although there is some ambiguity due to the intent of the law and the fact that nobody tried to prosecute polygamy in Ohio. After the Utah exodus, polygamy was legal until 1862. From 1862 until the present, polygamy has always been illegal in Utah, although Mormons held onto a hope that the Supreme Court would invalidate anti-polygamy laws until 1879. From 1879 on, Mormon polygamy was practiced in the face of well-established law.

This chronology conflicts with the implications (although not the explicit text) of the Woodruff manual, which hints that polygamy was made illegal during the 1880s. It also causes serious difficulties for the interpretive line that the church abandoned polygamy when it became illegal; even under the most generous dating, polygamy became illegal more than a decade before the Manifesto.

All this tells us, of course, is that 19th-century Mormons valued obedience to what they perceived as God’s commands over obedience to the law. I’m not sure that ought to be a troubling fact; in fact, I rather like it when people favor what’s right over what’s legal (see, e.g., Oskar Schindler, the Underground Railroad, etc.).

Thanks to Nate and Rosalynde for your help in clarifying the legal history involved here. As may be evident from my discussion, I do the best I can with legal-historical issues, but they’re probably my single biggest weakness in talking about Mormon topics. (And that’s saying something…) So thanks again to the two of you for the clarification and explanation.

Lisa, I think the defaming way that Mormon history discusses William Law is a great tragedy. Law was an element in Joseph Smith’s death, to be sure. But he evidently acted out of conviction rather than malice. And the great majority of what the Nauvoo Expositor printed in its one issue was factually correct.

When Serenity Valley and I start our Mormon history podcast in January, one of our early episodes will focus on the apostasy of William Law. We’ll use sources written by him and by faithful church leaders to try to understand both Law’s motives and the reasons that the faithful leaders saw his actions as treachery.

RT,
Hmm. You may be right, but at least initially, I disagree that the text was intended to authorize polygamy, in part because the preceding clause states, “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare…”
There is a distintion between the polygyny/polyandry phrases, but I think that in context the phrase “one man should have one wife” does preclude “one man having 4 wives.”
I grant I could be wrong. To feel more confident with my interpretation I’d like to know more about the history of why that verse was written, and what its contemporary interpretation was.

Stirling, my interpretation is that the D&C text was written so as to give the public impression of forbidding polygamy while privately allowing it. After all, Joseph Smith had been practicing polygamy since 1833. Hence, we are forced to interpret this D&C section either as an outright lie or as a subtle misdirection.

Verse 2, of course, seems to shade in the direction of outright falsehood.

Is this the marriage pronsouncement that was written while Joseph was out of town?

For once I agree with Frank! It has been my understanding for years that this section was authored by Oliver Cowdery and was presented and voted on without Joseph present. I have no idea if this is true or simply a folk tale that has been propagated.

Some have argued that W.W. Phelps wrote it or that Cowdery and Phelps worked on it together.

The question is: Why would a meeting of this import be held without Joseph Smith and Frederick G. Williams? Van Wagoner suggests, without much evidence, that Joseph Smith timed his trip to miss the meeting and that the document was introduced by Phelps at Joseph Smith’s request to counter Kirtland rumors about a relationship between Smith and Fanny Alger.

That sounds nice, but I am not convinced that God works that way or wants His Church to. He does not give all the info first and then let us decide. He reveals things, often important things, later after we have already made an initial commitment.

Let me be clear, _I_ don’t know if that gnostic approach is how He wishes the Church to approach polygamy for investigators, but it is naive to dismiss the possibility.

Hellmut,
3 Nephi 26:11 says “Behold, I was about to write them, all which were engraven upon the plates of Nephi, but the Lord forbade it, saying: I will try the faith of my people.”

Perhaps some of the trying of faith isn’t in not knowing, it’s in finding out.

Andermom, why should history be a matter of faith? The facts about polygamy are fairly well known. When investigators ask, they have a right to get straight answers.

Some kids from Utah go to foreign countries and ask people to antagonize their neighbors and families, and LDS leaders do not disclose the facts about their faith? How can that be anything but deceptive?

RT–

Are you saying that if JS married a woman already married to another man, he understood that she was effectively divorcing the first husband?

Thanks, RT.

Thanks, SA. An interesting story! Do you have a full citation for the Walker article, by any chance?

What a trip.

My own family (coming from my mother’s side) is openly proud of its Brigham Young descendancy by Emily Partridge…but in the quiet and hushed tones of sacred subjects I’ve heard them speak of being the family of Joseph Smith due to Emily’s eternal sealing to the Prophet…which of course is a most royal heritage…and I have sold mine for a pot of proverbial porridge by discounting this obsession with spiritual and/or blood linage.

I’m nevertheless fascinated by what Todd Compton refers to as the “dynastic” motivations behind plural marriage…this is the most profound of obsessions, especially considering the doctrine of eternal family and unity of all god’s children.

So why does this concept of dynastic marriage smack of Multi-Level Marketing?…where not all down lines are created equal?

Justin, thanks for the Dialogue cite, I wasn’t aware of that.
BYU Studies volume 43 is a collection of essays by Walker on Grant. Together the thick volume is a biography. The cite for the BYU Studies article and “sooner go to hell as a virtuous woman than to heaven as a whore” quote is Ronald W. Walker, “Qualities That Count: Heber J. Grant as Businessman, Missionary, and Apostle.” BYU Studies 43, no. 1 (2004), 22.
That BYU Studies issue isn’t available on-line yet because it is so recent. But the ‘82 Dialogue article is at http://dialoguejournal.com/search/, or more precisely, here .

Regarding the conference sermon Justin quoted, that HJG said “I had always understood and known that …Brigham Young had told my father that he would not marry my mother to him for eternity, because he had instructions from the Prophet that if anything happened to him before he was married to Rachel Ivins she must be sealed to him for eternity, that she belonged to him .”
I would be interesting to learn how HJG had “understood and known that.” (Improvement Era, Nov. 1942, pp. 756-757.) Did his mother tell him, did he learn it from someone in the Church Historian’s office who read a communication by BY, etc.?

Watt,
you mentioned “this obsession with spiritual and/or blood linage.”
Are willing and able to share any details on your now-living family members’ understanding of their “royal heritage?” Specifically, as a result of the B.Y. and J.S. connection, do they consider themsleves literal descendants of any historical figures from ancient times? Or is the royal heritage/blood line more a symbolic or spiritual connection?

Realistically, what more do we expect the Church to put in a manual or official publication? It’s not like people can’t buy LDS history books at their local store or online. Anyone can Google “Mormon polygamy” and get plenty of information. Since any “official” statement gets put under a microscope, no organization is eager to make detailed statements about bad PR events lurking about in its history.

I actually think the paragraphs quoted from the Woodruff manual are about as good as it’s going to get. Anyone who wants more can go read Van Wagoner, Quinn, Hardy, Compton, or Newell and Avery.

[…] For the most part, yes. The series of “Teachings of the Presidents” manuals has consistently struggled to find a way to address controversial themes or historical evolution within the church. See, for example, my earlier remarks on last year’s Wilford Woodruff manual. Race in Kimball’s life, like polygamy in Woodruff’s, is such a central theme that it would be astounding if the manual managed to disregard it completely. (In Edward L. Kimball’s 2005 partial-life biography of Kimball, for example, at least 6 chapters focus on racially-related themes.) Yet the manual comes very close indeed to deleting race entirely. […]

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