POLYGAMY LIVES. CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATES PLACE THE NUMBER INVOLVED at 30,000—clandestinely in metropolitan Salt Lake City, more openly in southern Utah, adjacent Colorado and Arizona, and some other scattered points west. Some think the actual number is several times that.
They are not hard to find, although in Salt Lake City they live discreetly. An intellectual being interviewed in Salt Lake mentions that a clerk at his favorite Mormon bookstore is a polygamous wife. A desk clerk at a motel near Temple Square says that she regularly sees polygamous wives shopping at supermarkets near her home in Sandy. They are the ones filling their carts with institutional-size boxes of everything, a dozen gallons of ice cream or ten watermelons at a shot. Everyone knows who they are, says the desk clerk, herself a faithful LDS member, but no one makes it an issue, and they keep to themselves.
Every now and then polygamy flashes into national headlines: the occasional murder, barely pubescent brides, abuse of a wife or child. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shudders at such stories and solemnly hastens to emphasize the difference between the Temple Square church and the outlanders. Any LDS member caught practicing polygamy is excommunicated. Polygamous converts in the African missions must become monogamists or they are denied baptism, making Mormonism more conservative on that point than many other churches today. Most people call the modern polygamists Mormon Fundamentalists. The LDS church resents the term. They are not Mormons, headquarters insists. They are not members, and they do not follow the leaders or their dictates, so how can they be called Mormon Fundamentalists?
But the Mormon Fundamentalists, to call them by the term they and scholars studying them use, do exist. And though they embarrass the LDS authorities, they are an awkward part—and by all accounts a growing part—of the Mormon Church’s nineteenth-century legacy that lives on into the new millennium.
Polygamy and slavery were the “twin relics of barbarism,” thundered the first Republican Party platform of 1856, which pledged to stamp out both. The identification of polygamy with Mormonism had become a national issue by then, and it inflamed Americans for decades as Utah repeatedly applied for statehood. California made it into the union by 1850, and Nevada in 1864, but it took Utah until 1896. Tired of territorial restrictions, Mormons were eager for the greater freedom to govern their own affairs that would come with statehood. Outside of Utah, other Americans were suspicious of the church, its economic power, and its theocratic control.
But above all there was the explosive matter of polygamy. Smith and his successors in Utah managed American history’s only wide-scale experiment in multiple wives, boldly challenging the nation’s entrenched family structure and the morality of Western Judeo-Christian culture. The practice greatly aggravated the persecution of the Restored Church, that is, the true church restored through the Book of Mormon and the latter-day prophets.
At first it was hard for even Brigham Young to swallow. When Smith first inducted him into the secret commandment of plural marriage, Young later recalled, “it was the first time in my life that I desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a long time. And when I saw a funeral, I felt to envy the corpse its situation.”
But get over it he did. By his death in 1877 Young had married twenty wives (by the conservative count of the semiofficial Encyclopedia of Mormonism) and fathered fifty-seven children by sixteen of them. When the famous editor and social reformer Horace Greeley interviewed Young in 1859 for the New York Daily Tribune, he asked, “Does not the Apostle Paul say that a bishop should be ‘the husband of one wife’? [I Timothy 3:2]”
“So we hold,” answered Young. “We do not regard any but a married man as fitted for the office of bishop.” Somewhat disingenuously he added, “But the apostle does not forbid a bishop having more than one wife.”
Joseph Smith started it all, and the number of his wives is a matter of some scholarly dispute. Fawn Brodie, in her classic biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, put the number at forty-eight. Brodie, raised Mormon, was a niece of David O. McKay, then an apostle of thirty-nine years’ standing and later church president. The book’s tone was irreverent, and its research, though largely substantiated by later scholarship, infuriated church authorities. She was expelled from the church in 1946. “I was excommunicated for heresy—and I was a heretic—and specifically for writing the book,” she cheerfully said later.
Smith’s biography in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism mentions that he took “at least” twenty-eight plural wives. Stanley Ivins put the number at eighty-four in unpublished research in the 1950s, but many of these were clearly only sacred “sealings” for eternity. D. Michael Quinn counted forty-six. Todd Compton, in his exhaustively researched In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1997), came up with a list of thirty-three well corroborated by affidavits and other written evidence, plus eight “possible” wives with more problematic evidence, and a further eight documented by posthumous sealings conducted shortly after Smith’s death.
In his important biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, LDS historian Richard Lyman Bushman concluded that Joseph most likely wed between 28 and 33 women, ten of them under age twenty and ten already married to other men. The eight women sealed to Smith after his death possibly implied marriages while he lived. Smith never openly formed a plural household but “nothing indicates that sexual relations were left out,” Bushman wrote. He added that “nothing confuses the picture of Joseph Smith’s character more,” given that polygamy violated Christian and societal morals, required deceit, and provoked severe discord among the Saints.
Compton devoted a biographical chapter to each of thirty-three well-documented plural wives. It is an intriguing list. Besides the polyandrous unions in which the wife was already married to another man, there were four sister pairs (Huntington, Partridge, Johnson, Lawrence) and one mother-daughter pair (Sessions) on the list. Although some Mormon apologists have attempted to justify polygamy in part because it sheltered single women beyond marriageable age, the facts show otherwise. The vast majority of plural wives were younger than the first wife, often nubile teenagers. In addition, there typically was a shortage of women on the frontier. Of Smith’s thirty-three well-documented wives on Compton’s list, only three were significantly older than Smith, and those three already had husbands. Other brides of Joseph were as young as fourteen, which was the minimum age for marriage in Utah law until 1999, when it was raised to sixteen or fifteen with court permission.
In these and other Smith marriages, polygamy—the church prefers the term “plural marriage”—covered both polygyny, more than one wife per husband, and polyandry, more than one husband per wife. Polygyny was the usual pattern, apart from Smith himself and possibly a few exceptional early cases involving his closest associates taking wives who already had husbands. Smith, and Young after him, readily granted divorce to either men or women for polygamous marriages that were having difficulty. (Although the divorce rate for temple marriages today is quite low, divorce in Mormonism did not and does not carry the stigma found in Catholic or Evangelical Protestant culture.)
Polygamy wove an intricate web of personal ties in Nauvoo. It became “one of the chief tests of the total loyalty that Smith was coming to demand of his closest followers,” according to the historian Lawrence Foster. Since polygamy “vastly expanded the network of personal loyalties and the range of possible relationships,” it greatly strengthened social cohesion in a time of tribal persecution. Smith often asked close friends for their wives and daughters. Compton reported a family tradition that Henry Jacobs knew about Smith’s marriage to Zina Huntington Jacobs and accepted it as some kind of higher law, but no polyandrous husbands from Smith’s lifetime left memoirs or diaries.
Early Mormon polygamy, with the complexities of its social and theological justifications, clearly involved far more than rationalization for inflated male libidos. Still, some of the activities seemed decidedly non-clinical. A number of Smith’s plural wives were dependent orphans or young women employed and living in his home. Some of the marriages were the result of pressure or spiritual coercion from the prophet: he told prospective wives, especially those who were daughters of his inner circle, that “such relationships would insure their salvation and link their families indissolubly to [himself] and the faith to which they were so committed,” wrote historian Lawrence Foster. Emma did not much cotton to the principle, so mostly the marrying was done behind her back, though over the years it became harder for Smith to conceal his activities.
Evidence of Smith’s unconventional ideas about marriage dates back to 1830, when contradictory accounts imply his hasty exit from Harmony may have been because Emma’s cousin, Hiel Lewis, “accused Joseph of improper conduct with women.” Richard Bushman determined that reports about Joseph’s attempts to seduce Emma’s friend Elizabeth Winters were “tenuous.” Later in Utah, Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner wrote that Smith had told her he had a vision when she was perhaps only twelve, a vision in which she was the first woman God commanded him to take as a plural wife. Lightner actually became a Smith plural wife at age twenty-four, after she had married another man.
There is also disputed evidence that brothers participating in the 1832 mob that tarred and feathered Smith in Kirtland, Ohio, were inflamed by the possibility that Smith had proposed to their sixteen-year-old sister, Marinda Nancy Johnson, who eventually did become a plural bride of the prophet. It was said that the assailants threatened to castrate Smith, but the doctor brought along by the mob refused to carry out the procedure.
The comely sixteen-year-old Fanny Alger, a hired girl living with the Smiths in Kirtland, became the prophet’s plural wife in 1833 when he was twenty-seven. In a pattern that was to be repeated several times, Emma suspected a relationship and threw Fanny out of her house. Rumors were circulating with increasing intensity in Kirtland.
While Smith was away visiting Michigan in August 1835, W. W. Phelps introduced an antipolygamy resolution in Cowdery’s handwriting that was adopted unanimously by a church assembly to quash rumors: “Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy; we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.”
This became a scriptural revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants, appearing in all editions through decades of polygamous practice until it was removed by LDS church authorities in 1876 and replaced by D&C 132, which permits a plurality of wives. It was included in the Reorganized LDS church’s edition of the D&C. The resolution was passed on August 17; Fanny, who later married monogamously, was probably gone from Kirtland by the time Smith returned to Ohio on August 23.
A rift was developing between Smith and Cowdery, the loyal scribe and Book of Mormon witness. Cowdery, probably never a polygamist, apparently had witnessed the sexual relationship between Fanny and Joseph and regarded it as adultery; “the circumstantial evidence is strong that Cowdery’s respect for Joseph diminished after that point,” writes Compton. In early January 1838 Cowdery wrote to his brother about the “dirty, nasty filthy affair of [Smith] and Fanny Alger’s,” and a public reconciliation with Smith was very short-lived. After Cowdery sold his property in Independence, Missouri, at a time when the Saints were encouraged to keep their Missouri land holdings, he faced charges of disloyalty. On April 12, 1838, he was tried and excommunicated for this and for “seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith, Jun., by falsely insinuating that he was guilty of adultry.” Presumably, Smith “felt innocent because he had married Alger,” Bushman commented, noting that Smith never denied their relationship.
The prophet’s defiance of marital law and convention was emboldened beginning in November 1835, when he conducted a wedding for his friend Newell Knight. Smith had been forbidden by a court to conduct marriages, and Knight’s bride was not yet divorced from her non-Mormon husband. Knight’s journal recalled that Smith said, “The Gentile law has no power to call me to account for it.” Over the succeeding two months Smith conducted at least five other illegal weddings.
Smith’s polygamous activities continued in Nauvoo in 1841, with most of his marriages taking place in 1842 and 1843. His youngest bride, in some ways typical, was fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. In her early teens Helen fell in love with Horace Whitney, who was three years older, but the young lovers were fated to be separated in eternity because Smith intervened. Helen was the daughter of Apostle Heber C. Kimball, a close colleague of Smith’s. The prophet first asked Heber for his wife, Vilate. Heber agonized over the situation for three emotionally tortured days; then, “with a broken and bleeding heart,” he led Vilate to Smith. The prophet backed off, saying it had merely been a test of loyalty. A year later, in 1843, the Kimballs’ young daughter Helen became Smith’s bride. Helen herself wrote that her father had offered her to the prophet.
Helen’s feelings are well documented, since nearly four decades later she wrote a first-person memoir for her children. When her father approached her about the prophet’s proposal, she was shocked, for she had never heard of polygamy. In addition, she may have already had a possible sweetheart and a young girl’s dreams.
Smith often put pressure on such decisions by imposing a tight deadline. Helen had twenty-four hours to digest the situation and capitulate. The pressure included a heavy-duty religious component. Smith told her, “If you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation & exaltation and that of your father’s household & all of your kindred.” Helen’s mother bore anguish “none but God & his angels could see.”
Helen wrote a poem expressing the lonely isolation of a young girl’s heart, watching her “youthful friends grow shy and cold,” withstanding “poisonous darts from sland’rous tongues” while aching “like a fetter’d bird with wild and longing heart, / Thou’lt dayly pine for freedom and murmor at the lot.” The poem continues with a tribute to Joseph Smith and eternal glory, and another tribute to her father. Her own writings and other evidence indicate that she felt rebellious at times, and that it is possible she had not grasped before the ceremony that the marriage in time would eventually have a sexual component.
With Smith’s death in 1844, Helen was free to return to the normal life of a teenager and did so, enjoying girlfriends and parties. On February 3, 1846, a few days before fleeing Nauvoo, Helen was married to her real sweetheart, Horace Whitney, “for time” because she was already sealed to Smith for eternity. Horace, in need of an eternal companion, was sealed to an already-deceased female Saint.
Lucy Walker was another teenager who found coping with spiritual coercion difficult. After Lucy’s mother died in early 1842, her younger siblings were scattered in various homes. Smith sent Lucy’s father on a mission and took Lucy into his own home to work for Emma. Lucy was horrified when, probably in late 1842, Smith approached her with a polygamous proposal. She wrote, “No mother to council; no father near to tell me what to do, in this trying hour. Oh let this bitter cup pass. And thus I prayed in the agony of my soul.” Smith backed off for a while.
The prophet resumed his quest in April 1843, telling Lucy, who was now sixteen, that it was a “command of God” and damnation would be her reward if she refused: “I will give you untill to-morrow to decide this matter. If you reject this message the gate will be closed forever against you.” She told Smith that God had not revealed to her that she should become his wife. Smith responded: “You shall have a manifestation of the will of God concerning you; a testimoney that you can never deny. I will tell you what it shall be. It shall be that peace and joy that you never knew.” In response to that pressure, Lucy had the requisite vision and married Smith several days afterward. Later she said, “It was not a love matter,…but simply the giving up of myself as a sacrifice to establish that grand and glorious principle that God had revealed to the world.”
Sarah Ann Whitney, sister of Helen Mar Kimball’s second husband, Horace, was another reluctant teenage plural wife. Helen described her friend and later sister-in-law as “proud and somewhat eccentric; but the influence that she seemed to hold over one was almost magnetic.” The intellectual and artistic Whitney family was part of Mormonism’s elite leadership circle, so this marriage was clearly another dynastic linkage of the prophet with a prominent family of Saints. Smith told Sarah’s father that the reward for him would be “honor and immortality and eternal life to all your house.” Smith feared that Horace Whitney would oppose his sister’s polygamous union, so he removed that obstacle by sending Horace off on a mission. Helen Mar Kimball wrote of her friend, “Sarah felt when she took this step that it would be the means of severing her from the happy circle in which she had moved as one of their guiding stars.”
Some months after Sarah’s plural union with Smith he arranged a cover marriage to help protect the polygamous secret. Sarah married the widower Joseph C. Kingsbury in a civil “pretended marriage.” Smith then sealed Kingsbury to his deceased first wife.
In the busy spring of 1843 Smith married another pair of fatherless daughters who were living in his house. Sarah Lawrence, seventeen, and her nineteen-year-old sister Maria were legal wards of Smith’s, and the prophet had also been named guardian trustee of their rather sizable estate. There is some evidence that Smith borrowed from estate funds. William Law, second counselor to Smith in the First Presidency and a longtime Lawrence family friend, filed suit in Hancock County charging Smith with living in adultery with Maria. A week before Law and his friends published the Nauvoo Expositor in 1844, Smith flatly denied the charge of polygamy in a public declaration: “What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one.” Law, who believed Smith had defrauded the sisters’ estate, and aware that Emma was strapped for money, repaid the sisters’ missing funds himself after Smith’s death.
The most famous of Smith’s plural wives undoubtedly was Eliza Snow, who was close to Smith’s own age when she married him in 1842. She moved into the Smith home and began teaching school. Her presence in the Smith household aroused Emma’s jealousy, and in February 1843 Emma threw her out into the snow. There is one account claiming that Emma actually kicked Eliza down a staircase and that Eliza miscarried Smith’s child as a result.
After Smith’s death, Heber Kimball and Brigham Young offered to marry the prophet’s plural wives to take care of them as proxies for time. Most accepted the offer and moved west; Eliza became a wife of Young’s. In Utah she was the most famous Mormon woman, active as an intellectual, poet, essayist, president of the women’s Relief Society—and defender of polygamy as a doctrine central to “the Gospel of the Son of God.” She traveled widely from Europe to Israel, lectured, and died at age eighty-three in her own apartment at Brigham Young’s Lion House.
The number of Smith’s polygamous offspring is a bit of a mystery. There was only one child from a plural marriage generally acknowledged as such: Josephine, daughter of Sylvia Sessions Lyon. Mary Lightner, a Smith plural wife, wrote there were others, raised in other families and under other names. Such children had, of course, been conceived in secrecy.
Rebuffing a prophet who was capable of yoking the proposal to a choice of salvation or damnation was tough. But at least five women did spurn the prophet’s bid for marriage. The best known was probably the spirited nineteen-year-old Nancy Rigdon, daughter of First Presidency counselor Sidney Rigdon, in an 1842 episode that soured Smith’s relationship with her father in much the same way that the prophet’s association with Cowdery had suffered a decade earlier.
Smith invited Nancy into a private room at a printing office, locked the door behind them, and presented her with his proposal, including the usual appeal that God had revealed to him that she was to be his wife. Nancy had been forewarned by Mayor John C. Bennett, who also found her attractive. (She did not respond to Bennett either.) Nancy threatened to raise a ruckus if Smith did not unlock the door and let her go.
The next day Smith sent Nancy a letter attempting to coax her with the argument that “happiness is the object and design of our existence.” The letter continued, “That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another.” Furthermore, “our Heavenly Father is more liberal in his views, and boundless in his mercies and blessings, than we are ready to believe or receive.” After Nancy showed the letter to her father, Sidney Rigdon confronted Smith, who denied the proposal until Rigdon produced the letter. At that point Smith acknowledged that Nancy’s story was true.
The letter was soon published by Bennett, whose motives may have been suspect but whose knowledge of Smith’s polygamy has been shown to be accurate if sensationalized. Nancy’s story was corroborated not only by the letter and her father’s testimony but by her brother John, her brother-in-law George W. Robinson, and Orson Pratt. Smith loyalists responded with a campaign of character assassination. Bennett continued to publish exposés that posed a threat to Smith. Emma stood by her husband, writing the Illinois governor that Bennett was a “most consummate scoundrel.”
Smith’s steadfast denials that he engaged in polygamy were necessary in order to perpetuate a practice that violated the law. (Apologists point out that plural marriages involved religious ceremonies and should not be confused with bigamy or simple adultery.) In the October 1, 1842, issue of the church newspaper Times and Seasons Smith wrote: “We have given the above rule of marriage [monogamy] as the only one practiced in this church, to show that Dr. J. C. Bennett’s ‘secret wife system’ is a matter of his own manufacture.” With the prophet’s denial, most Nauvoo citizens believed Bennett had made up the stories. But the rumors were getting stronger.
Most historians today agree that there was an unpublished revelation on plural marriage as early as 1831. Yet the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, was conventionally monogamous:
And it came to pass that Riplakish did not do that which was right in the sight of the Lord, for he did have many wives and concubines (Ether 10:5).
Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, Saith the Lord…. Hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none” (Jacob 2:24, 27).
Behold, the Lamanites,…they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers—that they should have save it were one wife, concubines they should have none, and there should not be whoredoms committed among them (Jacob 3:5).
Biblically, the justification for polygamy lay in the practices of some Old Testament patriarchs. The compassionate biblical Levirate concept of marrying and caring for a dead brother’s wife is apparent in Joseph Smith’s taking Agnes Coolbrith Smith, the widow of his younger brother, Don Carlos, as a plural wife in 1842. Something similar may be seen in the marriages of Heber Kimball and Brigham Young to Smith’s plural wives after the assassination.
Polygamy is not countenanced in later Judaism or the New Testament, though Smith was capable of some creative exegesis. While trying to induce Benjamin Johnson in 1843 to act as go-between in convincing his sister Almera to join his polygamous roster, Smith told Johnson to listen closely to a sermon he would preach that evening. The prophet’s text was the Gospel parable of the talents, presented as a “radical critique of monogamy as something inherently inferior and less than sacred.” If a man had lots of talents—that is, wives—God would bless him, but subtract blessings if a man had only one.
Other new religions in that era developed unorthodox sexual practices, including the celibate Shakers and the “complex marriage” of the Oneida Community. The Swedish scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas were discussed in Smith’s hometown newspaper, taught a “spiritual wifery” in which marriage was for eternity. (The polyandrous husband of one of Smith’s plural wives was a Swedenborgian from upstate New York.) And Smith was at least aware of Islam, a polygamous faith, since he included it in the list of religious groups promised freedom of worship in Nauvoo.
Characteristically Smith’s revelations put a special spin on the idea. Nowhere in the Old Testament is polygamy related to salvation, nor does glorification intensify from sheer quantity. It is also not yoked to the idea of eternal marriage in heaven, as in Mormon doctrine. Although in today’s Mormon Church the idea of celestial exaltation and eternal marriage is separate from the doctrine of polygamy, in nineteenth-century Mormonism the tenets were clearly linked. And equally clearly, elite status in heaven had a great deal to do with family quantity. This “celestial marriage” doctrine was strictly patriarchal. A woman could be sealed eternally to only one male, but a male could be sealed eternally to any number of women. Smith’s own multiple marriages, along with those of his closest circle, produced an extensive, interlocked dynasty connected throughout eternity.
In nineteenth-century Utah, church authorities were under pressure to practice polygamy and produce large families. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism says that an estimated 20 to 25 percent of adult Mormons were involved in polygamous families, but “among Church leadership plural marriage was the norm for a time.” This linkage of exaltation and quantity survived into the twentieth century only in the notion that a good Saint’s spiritual duty included providing earthly tabernacles for souls-in-waiting, that is, to have families with a lot of children.
For a long time Smith dodged the issue of polygamy with Emma. The church’s 1842 Times and Seasons declaration of monogamy was signed not only by an unknowing Emma but also by two of Smith’s secret plural wives, Eliza Snow and Sarah Cleveland. Others who had accepted the doctrine were also signatories. Years later, asked how she could have signed the statement, Eliza used a casuistry typical of the issue: “We made no allusion to any other system of marriage than Bennett’s. His was prostitution, and it was truly his…. In those articles there is no reference to divine plural marriage.” The use of legalistic, deliberately evasive code words here and elsewhere sometimes became a defense for what less sympathetic critics might call lies.
After the confrontation between Emma and Eliza in February 1843, Joseph could no longer duck the issue on the home front. Now he had to win Emma over to his new concept of marriage. Until Emma relented, Joseph refused to grant her his new endowment ritual, which he taught was essential to heavenly exaltation. When at last she did relent, he rewarded her on May 28, 1843, sealing them for time and eternity, and later bestowed the endowment.
In theory, the first wife was to be consulted to approve plural wife additions, but the practice was often breached. Now Emma gained the privilege of endorsing plural wives for Joseph. She chose a sister pair, Emily and Eliza Partridge, unaware that they were already plural wives of her husband. To conceal this, Smith performed a second sealing ceremony with the Partridge women. Emma chose another sister pair, the Lawrences; William Law later charged that Emma had her eye on the girls ’inheritance.
For a while the Partridge and Lawrence women lived in the Smith household, with Emma in charge, but it obviously was a rocky relationship. The biographers Newell and Avery write that “the evidence seems clear that Emma gave her permission for plural marriage and immediately regretted that they had been performed. Emma began to talk as firmly and urgently to Joseph about abandoning plural marriage as he had formerly talked to her about accepting it.”
The household situation of the plural wives varied. Those who were polyandrous lived with their first husbands; others lived with their parents, with each other, or with other families of the church’s inner circle that were aware of plural marriage. Unlike polygamous husbands later on in Utah, Smith generally did not support his plural wives. Saints apart from the insider group continued for the most part to be unaware of the practice.
On July 12, 1843, Smith received and wrote the official revelation on plural marriage. It contained a warning to the rebellious Emma: “But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed” (D&C 132:54). The revelation also commanded her to forgive Joseph of all his trespasses. Emma, however, continued to use her position as Relief Society president to oppose polygamy; Joseph responded by suspending the organization in March of 1844. It was not revived until more than three decades later in Utah when Brigham Young ordered it reorganized—with Eliza Snow as president.
It seems clear that, in his way, Smith continued to love and be loyal to his first wife. He once told a critical plural wife, “If you desire my love, you must never speak evil of Emma.”
After Smith’s assassination, Emma remained in Illinois. Quarrels with Brigham Young over the distribution of her husband’s estate led to a permanent breach. Her son Joseph III eventually became president of the rival Midwest branch, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Neither she nor Joseph III were willing to admit that Joseph had been polygamous, as denial erased earlier painful memories. In an 1879 interview shortly before she died, Emma claimed, “He had no other wife but me,” and added, “He did not have improper relations with any woman that ever came to my knowledge.” She also testified, “I know Mormonism to be the truth; and believe the Church to have been established by divine direction.”
In pioneer Utah any man who aspired to become part of Mormonism’s power structure became a polygamist, so any American Mormon whose heritage includes pioneers from prominent Mormon families has polygamous forebears. First wives generally had a higher status than plural additions. The typical polygamous family had two wives; three was uncommon. More than that was rare and generally seen only in the highest ranks of the church.
Men varied in how they handled their polygamous homes. Each woman was usually responsible for her own children. Men tried to provide separate homes, or at least separate apartments, for each of their wives and families, and attempted to rotate their time and attention. Polygamous wives did the work common to pioneer women of their day; often their emotional and social lives centered on their children and, sometimes, fellow “sister” wives.
The church taught that marriage was for eternity, not for romantic love. Sensationalist press accounts to the contrary, Utah was not filled with bawdy licentiousness. Within the premise of plural marriage, the typical polygamous home was strictly moral, deeply religious, and hardworking, and many devout women were among the defenders of the polygamous principle.
But the rest of the country’s reaction against polygamy rose to a crescendo of near hysteria. As some writers point out, this was the Victorian age, the era when the monogamous family became enshrined as the bulwark of civilization. “Mormonism was referred to as the ‘plague spot’ in the Rocky Mountains,” wrote B. Carmon Hardy. “Bracketed with slave-holders as barbarians in the antebellum period, after the Civil War Utah polygamists were cast with blacks as animal and profligate.”
Congress provided the first legal challenge with the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862. The law was written to prohibit bigamy and adultery; Mormons complained that neither category fit the “celestial marriage” of church doctrine. Enforcement, in any case, depended on local judges and juries that were, of course, Mormon, so the law was ineffective in Utah. In 1872 Brigham Young was indicted on a charge of adultery, but the U.S. Supreme Court threw this out on technicalities, along with other indictments pending under that law.
The Poland Act of 1874 stiffened the Morrill Act by placing court jurisdiction in the hands of federal appointees rather than local probate courts. LDS Church authorities asked George Reynolds, husband of two wives and a secretary in the First Presidency, to volunteer for a test case. The Supreme Court issued the final United States v. Reynolds decision in 1879, and it was the turning point. A unanimous court found against Reynolds despite arguments made on his behalf under the religious freedom clause of the Bill of Rights. The decision, rendered by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, said that polygamy was “odious” and that, while laws “cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.” The decision cited human sacrifice as another example of a religious practice that could justify governmental interference. As Sarah Barringer Gordon observed in The Mormon Question (2002), the Reynolds decision was the first time the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted application of the First Amendment. It reasoned that religious freedom claims did not protect Utah’s offensive form of marriage. Citizens were free to believe as they wished but not necessarily to act upon their beliefs. The result was a new law of American federalism and the relationship between church and state.
In 1879, all that was left was open defiance. The Deseret News editorialized vigorously. Polygamous families began to move to other places, including Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, and northern Mexico. Huge demonstrations took place in Salt Lake City. In 1882 Congress responded with the Edmunds Act, which strengthened the Morrill Act by making “unlawful cohabitation” grounds for criminal prosecution.
Church President John Taylor in 1886 said he had received a revelation confirming polygamy: “I have not revoked this law nor will I for it is everlasting and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof, even so amen.” This revelation was never elevated to scriptural status, but today’s Mormon Fundamentalists use it to support their continued polygamy.
Taylor added to his own polygamous family on December 19, 1886, by marrying twenty-six-year-old Josephine Roueche. He was seventy-eight years old. Taylor and a number of other polygamists went underground, some hiding in their own homes. Federal agents combed the area and imprisoned a number of the men. It is a tribute to Mormons that there were no violent standoffs or deaths in this period. Mormon families are full of stories of “cohabs” in hiding. Federal agents would burst into a house to check the closets and bedding. One bishop hiding in a store escaped in a box, crated up as an organ marked “Handle with Care.” President Taylor died in hiding on July 25, 1887.
The federal government continued to pursue the church and in 1887 passed the tougher Edmunds-Tucker Act, which dissolved the church corporation, putting its properties and funds into receivership. Plural marriages continued to be performed, but the church began to hedge. “Celestial marriage,” which had meant achieving the highest degree of glory in heaven through polygamous marriage, gradually began to be redefined as simply eternal marriage. Hardy wrote that one church lobbyist working to persuade Congress to grant Utah statehood insisted that “celestial marriage meant nothing more than being sealed to a single partner for eternity. This shift, taken as one of several moves designed to lessen hostility toward the Saints, would be confirmed after the turn of the century when, again, the church labored with its public image.”
For the Saints, all of this was also exacerbated by a certain millennial fervor. In Joseph Smith’s History of the Church, the prophet in 1835 had predicted that “56 years should wind up the scene,” which brought one to about 1891. He had published as scriptural revelation that God had told him, “Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man” (D&C 130:15). But that revelation is hedged: “I believe the coming of the Son of Man will not be any sooner than that time” (D&C 130:17).
Mormons never backed themselves into official commitment to a certain date the way the Millerites did, but many Saints understood the polygamy crisis in terms of apocalypse. If the kingdom of God was at hand, it was especially important to live according to the highest spiritual principle, which meant polygamy.
Religious authority, in Mormonism, includes the concept of continuing revelation through the current church president, who holds the titles of seer, prophet, and revelator. Earlier doctrine may evolve, but a previous prophet, though superseded, is not “wrong.” The idea of continuity is stressed in interpreting doctrine. Accordingly, when President Wilford Woodruff announced the official end of polygamy on October 6, 1890, he did not teach that Joseph Smith’s D&C 132, the revelation on polygamy, was an error or that it was no longer regarded as doctrine. Woodruff’s proclamation simply said: “We are not teaching polygamy or plural marriage, nor permitting any person to enter into its practice, and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages [as reported since the past June] have during that period been solemnized in our Temples or in any other place in the Territory.” The text was added to the Doctrine and Covenants as an “official declaration.”
As one might expect of any change to such a deep-seated principle, the declaration did not immediately stick. For more than a decade some leaders in the Mormon hierarchy quietly continued to add polygamous wives. For instance, Abraham Owen Woodruff, son of the church president who issued the declaration, became an apostle in 1897 and took a second wife in 1901. D. Michael Quinn listed about ten polygamous marriages that received the private approval of Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the founding prophet, who became church president in 1901. Smith was simultaneously assuring the apostles and the public that new polygamous marriages were not being authorized. He issued the “Second Manifesto” declaration against polygamy in 1904 but personally authorized plural marriages in 1906 and 1907.
Quinn wrote, “The murkiness and ambiguities of these authorized polygamous marriages after 1890 (and especially after 1904) guaranteed the growth of a polygamous underground that continues today in opposition to church policy.” Because of the church’s sensitivity to the issue of post-Manifesto polygamy, Quinn, at the time a tenured Brigham Young University history professor, was denied access to related archival materials in the First Presidency vault in 1982. In a 1981 speech, Quinn said, “One of the most obvious demonstrations [of “faith-promoting” church history that conceals the controversies and difficulties of the Mormon past] is the continued spread of unauthorized polygamy among Latter-day Saints during the last seventy-five years, despite efforts of church leaders to stop it. Essential to this church campaign is the official historical argument that there were no plural marriages authorized by the church or First Presidency after the 1890 Manifesto. This official position adds that whatever plural marriages occurred between 1890 and the so-called ‘Second Manifesto ’of April 1904 were the sole responsibility of two renegade apostles, John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley.”
Quinn stated that more than 250 polygamous marriages took place between 1890 and 1904 with authorization from the First Presidency. For Quinn, the denial of this “in LDS church statements and histories has actually given credibility to Fundamentalists in their promotion of new plural marriages after 1904 in defiance of the First Presidency.” Faced with research by Quinn and other historians in recent years, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism of 1992 mentions in passing that unofficially there were some post-Manifesto marriages, but it avoids mentioning that any post-Manifesto marriages were authorized by members of the First Presidency.
To the present day polygamy claims validation from a secret 1886 revelation supposedly delivered by President John Taylor while he was living underground. And if Mormon Fundamentalists dissemble, they have plenty of precedent in the church’s nineteenth-century casuistry. Hardy wrote that “Mormon Fundamentalism is at least partially a consequence of such tactics.” These Fundamentalists “defend the propriety of reticence and false denial when dealing with the things of God, especially plural marriage. The use of codes and ciphers when threatened by hostile laws is approved.” Dorothy Allred Solomon, who was raised in a prominent contemporary Fundamentalist home, said the resort to distortion was called “Mormon logic.” She remembered her father justifying such evasions with the familiar saying, “We must sometimes disobey a lesser law to keep a higher one.”
Polygamy, of course, is still illegal. The most infamous twentieth-century law enforcement incident was the 1953 raid on a polygamous community at Short Creek, Arizona. The raid, following smaller raids in 1935 and 1944, was covered by 25 cars full of reporters and photographers. The nation was treated to pictures of 263 children torn from their mothers and placed in foster care. Fathers went to prison; mothers were pressured to sign antipolygamy statements. The LDS-owned Deseret News applauded the action. Within two years all the families had been reunited and were still committed to living “the principle” that had once been central to Mormonism. No one has since then had the stomach to mount another major raid. The late twentieth century has had a very different sexual culture: live and let live.
But polygamy continues to break into the news and the courts every now and then. Some of the polygamous sects have a tendency to schism and violence. J. Gordon Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions lists a dozen polygamous denominations in Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and Utah. By Melton’s count, at least seventeen polygamous leaders were murdered in the 1970s, mostly members of the LeBaron clan or its rivals. Additional lurid murder cases were splashed into the headlines in the 1980s and later, regarding the Singer-Swapp clan, the LeBarons, and others—the stuff of pulp fiction.
Ours is a time of “alternative lifestyles.” On December 11, 1997, the “Living Arts” section of the New York Times ran a glamorous spread, two pages including color photos, of wealthy plural marriage family houses, titled “A House, 10 Wives: Polygamy in Suburbia.” The piece treated the subculture affectionately, as a mildly odd variant of an ever-expanding American normalcy, ignoring the soaring welfare caseload that is a more typical symptom of modern-day polygamy.
But at century’s end another twist entered the polygamous picture: wife and child abuse, including charges of pedophilia and incest. In July of 1998 polygamy again made national headlines when a sixteen-year-old plural wife ran away from the Kingston clan and pressed charges against her uncle and father. In June 1999 the uncle was convicted of incest; the father who allegedly performed the ceremony making her a fifteenth wife had earlier pled no contest to a charge of third-degree felony child abuse. Through a support group of former plural wives called Tapestry of Polygamy, stories began to surface about arranged marriages and virtual imprisonment. It’s part of a past that Utah would like to forget. Fourteen months after the warm lifestyle story, the New York Times Magazine ran a quite different piece, “The Persistence of Polygamy,” by Timothy Egan, telling of dusty intermountain towns and young women with limited options.
Polygamy remains a perpetual problem for Mormondom’s image and public relations. In 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her home and found the following year on a suburban Salt Lake street. Brian David Mitchell and third wife Wanda were accused of the crime and entered into extended mental competency hearings. As it turned out, Mitchell was a self-proclaimed prophet who mingled old Mormon themes with his new revelations in “The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah.” Although LDS policy opposes disclosure of information on church tribunals, in this instance the church quickly announced that Mitchell and his wife were former members who had been “excommunicated for actively promoting bizarre teachings and lifestyle” that violated church doctrine. Despite the embarrassment, the Smart case also demonstrated community solidarity as Mormons rallied to support the family and search for the missing teen.
Then in 2005 the leader of the “Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,” Warren Jeffs, was charged with an Arizona felony for arranging underage marriages and went into hiding. The following year, Utah charged him with rape by accomplice regarding an underage marriage. He was arrested after making the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list of fugitives. The “Big Love” television series on HBO gave further currency to the polygamous subculture. And Jon Krakauer’s incendiary book Under the Banner of Heaven (2003) sought to link murders among polygamous schismatics with the supposed violence and irrationality of the LDS heritage.
There are many deeply loyal Mormons, descendants of polygamists, who wish the church would grow beyond its embarrassment about the polygamist past and come to terms with its history. Looking pained during a private discussion of the subject, one of Brigham Young University’s most distinguished faculty members said, “I wish they would deal more honestly and openly with the polygamy which is part of our heritage. They always react with embarrassment, almost denial. I am the descendant of a second wife. Except for polygamy I wouldn’t be here—or my line is illegitimate.”
For years, tourists visiting Temple Square were shown a beautifully photographed film, Legacy, which tells the story of Mormon persecutions and the epic trek to Utah. The central character is a composite figure based in large part on the journal of Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. The movie does not give the slightest hint that Lightner was a polyandrous wife of Joseph Smith. In fact, there is no mention of polygamy at all in Legacy.