ON JANUARY 29, 1844, Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, translator of the Book of Mormon, and mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, met with Church leaders in his mayor’s office and announced his candidacy for president. Roughly a week later, in a manifesto for his presidential campaign, he called on Congress to put an end to slavery by purchasing slaves from slave owners. He weighed in on issues from prison reform to congressional salaries to national banking, quoting from Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and other “venerated fathers of freedom.”1
Not many non-Mormons saw such a neat fit between Mormonism and Americanism. In the sole issue of the Nauvoo Expositor, published June 7, 1844, dissident Mormons charged that America’s newest presidential candidate was a preacher of “false and damnable doctrines,” a swindler, theocratic despot, secret polygamist, and the mastermind behind an intra-Mormon inquisition as vile as any tyranny in medieval Spain.2
Smith and his city council answered these charges in a manner that seemed intended to prove them—by ordering the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor’s printing press. Smith and his brother Hyrum were then arrested and imprisoned for treason in Carthage, Illinois. On June 27, 1844, an anti-Mormon mob stormed the jail where the Smiths were being held and shot them both dead. Many thought this would be the end of Smith’s church. But what killed their founder only made them stronger. Smith became a martyr and model for millions of Mormons to come.
Smith’s assassination was part of a culture war on Mormonism that began even before the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830. It played out in some respects like the culture war on Catholicism. Once again, Protestant conservatives saw a religious minority as a threat to the American way of life. Once again, they attempted to banish members of that religious minority from the American family, arguing that, because of their enslavement to a religious despot, their liberty was incompatible with American liberty. The anti-Mormon wars were more bitter and bloody than the anti-Catholic wars, however. Mormon leaders would be sued, jailed, beaten, stripped naked, tarred and feathered, and murdered. Members would be chased from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois to the Utah Territory. Politicians would call for anti-Mormon genocide. But the Mormon counterattack was fiercer, too. Almost every LDS leader took up the bellicose posture of “Dagger John” Hughes, refusing until the bitter end to assimilate or compromise.
Today members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are widely regarded as incontestably American. They run for president, captain football teams, write bestselling novels, win on Jeopardy, serve in Congress, wear the Miss America crown, and star (and win) on reality shows such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. But as Smith’s ill-fated run for the White House indicates, it has not always been thus. In fact, Americans were at war with Mormonism even before it was born.3
Prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon in March 1830, critics were denouncing Smith’s “Golden Bible” as “a ‘new thing’ in the history of superstition, bigotry, inconsistency, and foolishness.”4 Within days of its appearance, that book was decried in print as “evidence of fraud, blasphemy and credulity, shocking to the Christian and moralist.”5 Later criticism proceeded almost at the pace of today’s social media. Within months a satire (“The Book of Pukei”) had appeared, and by the next New Year’s Day a local paper was reporting that “one of Jo Smith’s Gold bibles was lately burnt at the stake.”6 By 1831, critics as far away as Ohio were already comparing the “abject slavery of the mind” of Smith’s followers with “the chains of Popery.”7 They were also referring to these “slaves” as “Mormonites” (later shortened to “Mormons”) because of their use of the Book of Mormon, which was itself named after the ancient prophet said to have compiled much of the book.8
In some respects, Mormonism was just another product in the rough-and-tumble spiritual marketplace of early-nineteenth-century America. Like others swept up in the ecstasies of the Second Great Awakening, Mormons praised Jesus, spoke in tongues, sang hymns, visited with angels, and baptized converts. But Saints (as Mormons called themselves) refused to see their Church as yet another Protestant denomination. In an era that genuflected to self-reliance and individual experience, Mormons emphasized collective practices such as plural marriage, baptism for the dead, and ritual adoption, each of which brought the faithful together into an extended family of God. “If men are not saved together, they cannot be saved at all,” said Smith’s successor Brigham Young.9
But Saints did not simply separate themselves from the “Gentiles” (as they called non-Mormons). They also believed themselves to be superior. While still a teenager, Smith had knelt down and begged God to tell him “which of all the sects was right . . . and which I should join.”10 None of the above, God replied, and Mormonism was born. After the Book of Mormon appeared, Mormons described their organization as the one true church and denounced as apostates Christians who refused to join them in restoring the gospel to its original glory. Like Protestants, Mormons accepted the Bible as true. Unlike Protestants, they did so only “as far as it is translated correctly”11 Rejecting the “Bible alone” slogan of the Protestant Reformation, they insisted that the Book of Mormon was scripture and that revelation was ongoing.
“Gentiles” did not take kindly to these provocations. In fact, over ensuing decades, LDS members would endure the most wide-ranging assault on any religion in U.S. history. The State of Missouri and the U.S. Army would wage war against them. Mobs would shoot at and kill their missionaries, burn down (and blow up) their homes and places of worship, and threaten members with whippings and worse if they did not pack up their belongings and get out of town. In one particularly outrageous case, the good citizens of Fleming County, Kentucky, went to the trouble of tearing down an LDS church stud by stud in order to prevent members from collecting fire insurance.12 Meanwhile, revivalists railed against Mormonism in the pulpit and in print, denouncing its founder as “a compound of ignorance, vanity, arrogance, coarseness, stupidity and vulgarity.”13 Newspapers attacked Saints as “lawless and licentious fanatics,” “scoundrels,” and “moral lepers.”14 Political cartoonists depicted them with horns.15 Anti-Mormonism would also make its way into novels and onto party platforms.
James Garfield had been president for only a few months when he found time to denounce the Mormons for offending “the moral sense of manhood by sanctioning polygamy.”16 President Chester Arthur would decry polygamy in all four of his State of the Union addresses. Governors would issue executive orders to end it. Judges would fine and imprison members. Congress would take away the suffrage of Saints and seize Church property. The House of Representatives would vacate the seat of a Mormon delegate and refuse to seat another. And when a Mormon was finally elected to the Senate, senators would debate for four years whether to admit him. Even the Supreme Court would weigh in. Its justices, in their first-ever decision on the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, would rule that religious liberty extended only to belief, not to the controversial Mormon practice of plural marriage.
Through it all—through the threats, the name-calling, the mob violence, the lawsuits, the imprisonments, the arsons, the murders, and the mobilization of the coercive powers of all three branches of the federal government against them—Mormons rarely compromised. Instead of making nice to their Protestant neighbors, they continued to insist that theirs was the one true church and that all other churches had left Jesus behind. Instead of making nice to their fellow Americans, they denounced the United States as a “wicked nation,” its legislators as “liars, thieves, whoremongers, gamblers, and drunkards,” and its people as “steeped in sin and ripened for the damnation of hell.”17 Meanwhile, Mormon theology became less orthodox over time and Mormon rites more distinctive. Rather than blending in, Mormons followed a policy of “gathering” in close-knit communities where they could build temples, perform rituals, patronize one another’s businesses, vote in blocs, and otherwise enjoy the economic, political, social, cultural, and spiritual benefits of living in close proximity to one another. These places of gathering, however, quickly became magnets for anti-Mormon violence.
So the Mormons moved and gathered and moved again. And wherever they gathered, trouble was never far behind. From Palmyra, New York, where the Book of Mormon was criticized before it was published, they moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where Smith was arrested for bank fraud. Next they moved to Missouri, where Smith was arrested for treason, and to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith met his maker at the trigger finger of a mob. According to historian Patrick Mason, “The pattern was depressingly familiar: the arrival of Mormons followed by a gradual rise in community violence, culminating in extralegal violence, and finally concluding with forced expulsion.”18 But as this pattern played out—from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and beyond—Mormons wrote in their own blood a narrative of persecution in a land supposedly dedicated to the proposition that all religions are created equal. They were God’s chosen people, modern-day Israelites forever leaving Egypt behind, wanderers in search of a New Zion. In this case, however, Babylon was in hot pursuit.
IN THE BEGINNING, both Mormonism and anti-Mormonism were local, confined to areas where Saints gathered or their missionaries were active. Focusing on the founder rather than the Church, and on scripture rather than ritual, early critics argued that Smith was a fraud and the Book of Mormon a hoax. Resurrecting his past as “a noted money-digger,” they insisted that Smith—“a man of questionable character, of intemperate habits”—had given up treasure hunting for revelation forging, all in pursuit of the almighty dollar.19 Anyone who believed that the LDS prophet was out for anything other than profit they dismissed as a dupe.
In the first anti-Mormon pamphlet, Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (1832), Disciples of Christ preacher Alexander Campbell took on Smith and his scripture. According to Campbell, “this Atheist Smith” was “as ignorant and impudent a knave as ever wrote a book.” And his book—an “impious fraud”—was no Bible. “I would as soon compare a bat to the American eagle [or] a mouse to a mammoth,” wrote Campbell, “. . . as to contrast it with a single chapter in all the writings of the Jewish or Christian prophets.” But above all Campbell charged Smith with anachronism. Though Smith slathered his book with ancient sounding “Smithisms”—“all the King James’ haths, dids and doths”—the volume he produced had all over it the fingerprints of upstate New York in the 1820s. In the Book of Mormon, Smith includes “every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years,” Campbell wrote. “He decides all the great controversies—infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man.”20
Many early critics saw Mormonism through the lens of anti-Catholicism, sneering at “Pope Joseph the First” and LDS “priestcraft.”21 In 1842, former Mormon leader John Bennett charged Smith with plotting “a daring and colossal scheme of rebellion and usurpation” that would crown him as “emperor and pope” of “a despotic military and religious empire” stretching from Ohio to Iowa.22 In a political cartoon, Thomas Nast drew a crocodile called “Roman Church” and a turtle called “Mormon Church” crawling onto the Capitol dome. The caption read: “Religious liberty is guaranteed—but can we allow foreign reptiles to crawl all over us?”23
Other critics compared Mormonism with Islam, calling the Book of Mormon “a new Alcoran” and Smith the “Yankee Mahomet.”24 This was not meant as a compliment. Like Muhammad, these critics argued, Smith was a false prophet peddling a false Bible and willing to advance his false religion by force. Writing from Henderson, Illinois, in 1841, Congregationalist minister S. G. Wright referred to Mormonism as “a second edition of Mohammedanism,” adding that there was “cause to fear” this Second Coming because LDS members were “intending to support their claims to this country at the point of the bayonet.”25 According to some witnesses, Smith wore the “Mormon Mahomet” sobriquet as a badge of honor.26 Ex-Mormon Thomas Marsh swore in an 1838 affidavit, “I have heard the prophet say that he should yet tread down his enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; that if he was not let alone he would be a second Mahomet to this generation, and that he would make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean; that like Mahomet, whose motto, in treating for peace, was ‘the Alcoran, or the Sword,’ so should it be eventually with us, ‘Joseph Smith or the Sword.’”27
But early anti-Mormonism was not driven entirely by theological concerns, or by unflattering comparisons with Catholicism and Islam. Wherever Mormons gathered, local critics found social, political, economic, and cultural reasons to hate them. They were poor and unkempt. They were wealthy and they inflated land prices. They opposed slavery. They stuck to their own. Missouri’s “old settlers” were particularly concerned about bloc voting. Critics saw this Mormon practice as an affront to republican virtue in a country where each individual was supposed to cast his own vote in keeping with his own conscience. They also saw bloc voting as a political threat. “It requires no gift of prophecy,” read an 1833 citizen declaration demanding the removal of Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri, “to tell that the day is not far distant when the civil government of the county will be in their hands; when the sheriff, the justices and the county judges will be Mormons, or persons wishing to court their favor from motives of interest or ambition.”28
Efforts to bar Mormons from voting led to an election riot in 1838 in Gallatin, Missouri, which sparked a “Mormon War” in the northwestern part of the state. During this conflict, critics denounced LDS members as a “tribe of locusts” who threatened “to scorch and wither the herbage of a fair and goodly portion of Missouri.”29 Others compared the LDS influx to a black cloud or a volcano. But it wasn’t just names that hurt them. Mormons were driven from Jackson County to Clay County to Caldwell County by Missourians who destroyed their houses, tarred and feathered their leaders, and threatened graver harms if the Mormons in their midst did not take their fanaticism elsewhere. Naïvely, Mormons appealed to the courts and the governor to protect their lives, liberty, and property. When these appeals fell on deaf ears, Mormons decided to fend for themselves.
Following the Ursuline convent riot of 1834, Bishop Fenwick had told Boston’s Catholics to turn the other cheek. On July 4, 1838, LDS leader Sidney Rigdon chose another path, delivering a stern “declaration of independence” from mobocracy in which he solemnly swore that the Mormons were done with suffering passively at the hands of bloodthirsty mobs. After warning enemies of his church “to come on us no more forever,” he pledged that, for anyone who did, “it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us.”30
This fiery rhetoric fired up the Mormons, who mobbed people they suspected of plotting to mob them and burned down buildings in the process. It also fired up the opposition, sparking battles between Mormon and anti-Mormon militias. On October 27, 1838, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, finding the Mormons in defiance of the laws of the state and at war with its people, issued a notorious executive order that read: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”31 Three days later, in the bloodiest day of Missouri’s Mormon War, a mob attacked an LDS settlement at Haun’s Mill, killing at least seventeen men and boys. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Smith and other LDS leaders were captured and imprisoned. Held for months on charges of treason, they narrowly avoided execution by firing squad.
As Missouri was emptied in the late 1830s of Mormons (including Smith himself, who escaped from prison on April 15, 1839), it became plain that the governor, his militia, and the mobs had won. But there was some sympathy in more liberal quarters for members of an upstart religion who, according to many eastern newspapers, were (to quote Shakespeare) “more sinned against than sinning.”32 Unitarian minister William Henry Channing contributed to this tepid liberal counterattack by describing the “madness” of Missouri anti-Mormonism as “a tragedy of almost unequalled horror.” He also connected the dots between anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, decrying both the “unbridled mobocracy” unleashed on the Mormons and “the burning of the convent at Charlestown.”33 Such sympathy from eastern liberals swelled in the years after Missouri’s Mormon War, as Saints scattered and gathered and scattered again.
Invited to Illinois by citizens sympathetic to their suffering and a governor keen for their votes, Mormons built Nauvoo, Illinois, into the second largest city in the state (after Chicago) in the early 1840s. Given the sorrows that had accompanied their separatism, Smith might have opted for a strategy of accommodation. Instead he introduced theological and ritual innovations that piqued the curiosity of locals and outraged critics. As R. Laurence Moore has argued, Smith deliberately invented and aggressively advertised “Mormon difference,” inviting persecution (and attracting followers) along the way.34 Rather than assimilating, Mormon leaders repeatedly doubled down, staking a claim to their Americanness by emphasizing their outsiderhood. “Let us alone and we will evangelize the world and not make much fuss about it,” the ever-defiant Brigham Young said in 1844. “Mob us & we will do it sooner.”35
In Nauvoo, Smith taught that God was corporeal, with “flesh and bones,” and that divinity was many, not one—that we, too, could be gods.36 He instituted (secretly) the practice for which his movement would become notorious: plural marriage. And by the Church’s own admission he took as many as forty wives himself. But Smith did not just lord over a church increasingly at odds with nearby Methodists and Baptists. He also crafted a “theodemocracy” (his term) in which he personally controlled the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government plus a local militia called the Nauvoo Legion. These actions provoked the mobs that cost Joseph Smith his life and the Mormon people yet another Zion.37
After Smith’s assassination in 1844, Mormons went west under the direction of their second president and prophet, Brigham Young. Long-standing believers in the promises of America and the divine inspiration of the Constitution, LDS leaders by the 1840s had come to see the United States as a site of corrupted Christianity and corrupted republicanism—a reprobate republic that had betrayed its founding promises. So with Missouri laid waste and Nauvoo besieged, they began an epic journey into what was then Mexico—across the Great Plains and into the Great Basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. As they left a country they had come to see as unjust, Mormon matriarch Eliza Snow urged them on:
Let us go, let us go where our rights are secure,
Where the waters are clear and the atmosphere pure,
Where the hand of oppression has never been felt,
Where the blood of the Prophets has never been spilt.38
THIS EXODUS MIGHT have put an end to the bloodshed, but a series of events conspired, first, to reconnect these expats to other Americans and, then, to metamorphose the “Mormon menace” from a local concern into a national crusade.
Less than a year after the first Mormons arrived in lands surrounding the Great Salt Lake in 1847, the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in northern California in 1848 put an end to their brief isolation by sending entrepreneurs from the east scurrying across their lands. Also in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the Mexican–American War, transferred control over the Salt Lake Valley from Mexico to the United States. In the Compromise of 1850, Congress turned that land, home to over eleven thousand Mormons, into the Utah Territory. That same year President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young Utah’s governor, turning any “Mormon problem” that might develop there into literally a federal case.
A more crucial catalyst for the nationalization of anti-Mormonism came in August 1852, when the LDS Church, in an announcement literary critic Harold Bloom characterized as “the most courageous act of spiritual defiance in all of American history,”39 went public with its doctrine of plural marriage (also known as “celestial marriage” or “the Principle”). Joseph Smith may have believed in this doctrine as early as 1831, and as the Nauvoo Expositor controversy indicates, polygamy had been an open secret among Mormon leaders from the early 1840s forward. In January 1852, Ohio congressman David Cartter observed that this practice was being “whispered, and more than whispered” in the Utah Territory.40 At a special conference in Salt Lake City in August 1852, that whisper turned into a shout when Orson Pratt, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the highest LDS governing body after the presidency), announced publicly “that the Latter Day Saints have embraced, as part and portion of their religion, the doctrine of a plurality of wives.” Pratt defended that doctrine on the basis of the Bible, ongoing revelation, anthropology, and sociology. Four-fifths of the world is polygamous, he observed, and in monogamous nations “whoredom, adultery, and fornication” predominate. Moreover, plural marriage had been practiced by Abraham and other biblical patriarchs. Anticipating legal battles to come, Pratt also argued for plurality of wives on religious-liberty grounds. He rejected the view that this doctrine was “something that pertains to domestic pleasures, in no way connected with religion.” In fact, it was “part and portion of our religious faith . . . necessary for our exaltation to the fullness of the Lord’s glory in the eternal world.” To forbid this “essential doctrine” would be to forbid Mormonism itself. Therefore, “it is constitutional.”41
After Pratt concluded his Great Announcement, Brigham Young endorsed this “essential doctrine” with his trademark gusto, observing matter-of-factly that Smith “had more wives than one” and prophesying that plural marriage will one day “ride triumphantly above all the prejudice and priestcraft of the day; it will be fostered and believed in by the more intelligent portions of the world, as one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed to any people.” Thomas Bullock then read a previously undisclosed “revelation on celestial marriage” from 1843 in which God instructed Joseph Smith to embrace marriage for eternity and a plurality of wives.42
This epiphany opened the door to a nationwide culture war, and critics of the “Mormon menace” rushed in. During the second half of the nineteenth century (and particularly after the end of the Civil War put an end to the slavery debate), these critics founded antipolygamy societies, wrote and read antipolygamy novels, delivered and listened to antipolygamy sermons and lectures, chuckled at antipolygamy political cartoons, laughed at antipolygamy jokes, applauded at antipolygamy plays, read antipolygamy editorials, and agitated for antipolygamy legislation. Mark Twain and New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley traveled to Salt Lake City and filed reports. So did the British adventurer and Kama Sutra aficionado Sir Richard Burton (who found, to his regret, that Mormon marriages were as boring as monogamous ones). Before the “Mormon question” was settled, the nation would also hear from congressmen, senators, presidents, and Supreme Court justices.
Some of this talk would be civil. But much of it bordered on hysteria. For the leader of a church, Young used surprisingly smutty language, calling lesser Mormon leaders “my niggers” and delighting in shocking reporters.43 “The only difference between your system at the East and ours,” he told the New York Times, “is that you keep your whores and treat them like brutes, and we keep ours and treat them like human beings.”44 Meanwhile, Young’s critics struggled to outscream one another. A book called The Mormon Monster gave this queasy history of the Mormon movement: “It was born in the womb of imposture, nursed in the lap of fraud, rocked in the cradle of deception, clothed in the garments of superstition, fed on the milk of ignorance, and fattened on the strong meat of sensualism, despotism, fanaticism, crime, bloodshed, and rebellion.”45 Even church historian Robert Baird let his emotions get the best of him, calling Mormonism “the grossest of all the delusions that Satanic malignity or human ambition ever sought to propagate.”46 Apparently these delusions had some real-world effects, or so said Southern preachers who blamed a spate of cyclones on Mormon missionaries.47
As in other culture wars, conservatives launched the first attacks. Mormons counterattacked by chastising their opponents for warring on religious liberty and trampling the Constitution. Anti-Mormons responded by arguing that the Constitution provided no cover for tyranny and licentiousness. “Polygamy marks the line . . . between all that is depraved, selfish, and corrupt, and all that is pure, noble, and exalted,” argued Rep. Hiram Walbridge (D-NY) in 1854. It may be fit for “the semi-barbarous nations of China, Turkey, Tartary, and the savages of our forest, and the barbaric tribes of benighted Africa,” he said, but it is unfit for a U.S. territory. “It wars against virtue, the spirit of public liberty, and the dignity of our race. It is an enemy not only to be resisted, but overcome, not only to be held in check now, but put down forever.”48
When the center of gravity of anti-Mormon concerns shifted in the 1850s from a person (Smith) to an institution (the LDS Church) and from a scripture (the Book of Mormon) to a practice (polygamy), Mormons ceased to be seen as a threat to good order in Kirtland or Nauvoo alone. They came to be seen as a threat to a still fragile republic. Decades earlier, conservatives had feared a Catholic takeover of the Midwest. Now they feared a Mormon takeover of the West—“a vast military domination . . . from California to Cape Horn.”49 Some came to believe it was time to put an end to “Mormondom” itself. Rep. Emerson Etheridge, a former Know-Nothing from Tennessee, called for the “extirpation of Mormonism in Utah.”50 A preacher (also from Tennessee) argued in a commencement speech for genocide. “The strong arm of government should be employed,” he said, “to wipe from the face of civilization every Latter-day Saint in Utah, men, women and children.”51
A few liberal “Gentiles” defended the Mormons against their conservative despisers. Illinois’s Stephen Douglas, now remembered for sparring with Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln–Douglas debates, advocated for the Mormons so forcefully that some accused him of being a closet Mormon. Viewing antipolygamy as a hammer that threatened to smash not only the “peculiar institution” of Utah but also the “peculiar institution” of the South, he argued on the basis of the principle of popular sovereignty against federal interference in either polygamy or slavery. Rabbi Louis Weiss, in a letter to the Chattanooga Times, called on the governor of Georgia to come to the defense of Mormons who had been assaulted by mobs in that state. Of this mob violence, Weiss wrote: “I can safely say that such action is not Christian; it is surely not religious; and it is positively not in accord with biblical injunction.”52
As they debated how to answer the Mormon question—would “gunpowder and cold steel” be necessary, or would a war of words do the trick?53—Americans once again considered whether the United States was a secular nation or a Christian one, and if Christian, what manner of Christian should it be. The Great Basin may have been, in the words of Brigham Young, “a good place to make Saints,” but it was also a good place to make (and find) trouble.54 And for the rest of the century the Mormons did some of both.
IN 1856, THE new Republican Party listed polygamy alongside slavery as one of the “twin relics of barbarism” and urged Congress to outlaw it in all U.S. territories. But when Democrat James Buchanan was elected president that year, his party initially sidestepped the Mormon question on the theory that any meddling with the domestic arrangements of husbands and wives in the West might justify meddling with the domestic arrangements of slaveholders and slaves in the South. In April 1857, however, barely a month after Buchanan’s inauguration, an adviser urged him to stir up trouble in Utah in order to divert attention from slavery. “I believe,” Robert Tyler (son of former president John Tyler) told Buchanan, “that we can supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost universal excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade . . . and the piping’s of Abolitionism will hardly be heard amidst the thunders of the storm we shall raise.”55 One month later, Buchanan declared the Utah Territory to be in a state of rebellion against the United States, dismissed Young as its governor, and ordered the U.S. Army to march on Salt Lake City to install his replacement by force. This ill-fated effort to combat what Buchanan called the “despotic power” of Young and the “frenzied fanaticism” of his followers bogged down in winter weather and never engaged Mormon militias.56 But “Buchanan’s Folly” did prompt a tragedy that helped to turn the nation against the LDS Church.
Long before Buchanan’s soldiers were anywhere near Salt Lake City, Young made it clear he would neither compromise nor accommodate. He had reasons to resist, including popular sovereignty and religious liberty. But most of his rhetoric was emotional, even apocalyptic, referring to territorial officers as “poor, miserable blacklegs, broken down political hacks, robbers and whoremongers,” and to the impending “Utah War” as a battle between “kingdoms of darkness” and “the kingdom of God.”57
In an August 5, 1857, gubernatorial proclamation, Young rehearsed the sorry saga of Mormon persecution in the New World:
For the last twenty five years we have trusted officials of the Government, from Constables and Justices to Judges, Governors, and Presidents, only to be scorned, held in derision, insulted and betrayed. Our houses have been plundered and then burned, our fields laid waste, our principal men butchered while under the pledged faith of the government for their safety, and our families driven from their homes to find shelter in the barren wilderness and that protection among hostile savages which were denied them in the boasted abodes of Christianity and civilization.
And why did this Christian civilization persecute them? “Because of our religious faith,” and because of the prejudices of “hireling priests and howling editors who prostitute the truth for filthy lucre’s sake.”58
Recalling American Revolution patriots and Mormon martyrs (and anticipating the “by any means necessary” rhetoric of Malcolm X), Young asserted the right of self-defense against “oppression” and vowed to exercise it. “Our duty to ourselves, to our families, requires us not to tamely submit to be driven and slain, without an attempt to preserve ourselves,” he wrote. “Our duty to our country, our holy religion, our God, to freedom and liberty, requires that we should not quietly stand still and see those fetters forging around, which are calculated to enslave.” Young then forbade the U.S. Army from entering Utah, called on Utah militias to prepare to fight, and declared martial law.59 But he did more than ready for war. He also got up a religious revival now remembered as the Mormon Reformation. Church leaders preached hellfire and damnation. Church members were rebaptized. Men and women were encouraged to enter into plural marriages.
As federal soldiers approached, non-Mormon migrants from Arkansas and Missouri were driving cattle through Utah on the way to California. On September 11, 1857, Mormon militiamen, accompanied by Paiute Indians, massacred more than one hundred twenty migrants, demonstrating that the violence in this culture war could be inflicted by Mormons as well as on them. Reports and illustrations of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it came to be called, seared into the nation’s consciousness the image of Mormons as western vigilantes. But according to Patrick Mason, this tragedy did more than that. It demonstrated “the dangerousness of ‘fanaticism,’ the utter depravity of Mormonism, and the lawlessness of Utah.”60
Still, Congress did not take on polygamy, at least not before the Civil War. Efforts to twin slavery and polygamy energized many Northern Republicans, who argued that, like slavery, polygamy was “a great moral, social, and political evil” “at war with all true liberty” and at odds with “the law of God” and “the law of every State in the Union.”61 But the family resemblance between these two “peculiar institutions” boxed in Southern Democrats. As Rep. Lawrence Branch (D-NC) put it, “If we can render polygamy criminal, it may be claimed that we can also render criminal that other ‘twin relic of barbarism,’ slavery.”62 In congressional debates, Southerners typically expressed their personal disdain for the “nauseating and disgusting crime” of polygamy only to conclude that any effort to outlaw it would be unconstitutional.63 Some spoke of limits on federal power. “Sir, I think polygamy a burning shame upon any community . . . and I will extirpate this disgraceful evil as quickly and as sharply as any man, if I can but see the power of Congress to do it,” said Laurence Keitt (D-SC).64 Others emphasized religious liberty. “What right has this Government to interfere with the religious relations of the people in this Territory?” asked William Boyce of South Carolina.65 Alexander Stephens of Georgia said, “If we discriminate to-day against Mormons, to-morrow, perhaps, we shall be asked to discriminate against Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, or Catholics.”66
By 1862, the Confederacy had seceded from the Union and Southern Democrats had left the House and Senate, so Congress was able to pass legislation criminalizing polygamy in the territories. This bill, the Morrill Act, was sponsored by Justin Morrill of Vermont (the birth state of both Smith and Young), who as early as 1857 had argued on the House floor against both “the foul abomination of spiritual wifery” and any notion “that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency which artful men may seek to hide under the name of religion!”67
On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which proved to be a dead letter. It provided no means for enforcement in a territory in which the executive, legislative, and judicial branches (juries included) were dominated by Mormons. And there was little will in Washington to try to enforce it. When asked by an LDS member what he intended to do about the Mormons, Lincoln told this story:
When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.68
But the Morrill Act was not without effect. As many Southern defenders of the Mormons had feared, federal interference with the domestic institution of polygamy did prepare the way for federal interference with the domestic institution of slavery. On January 1, 1863, just six months after Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “all persons held as slaves . . . shall be . . . thenceforward, and forever free.”69
After the nation settled the slavery question by blood and bayonets, Lincoln’s live-and-let-live attitude gave way to a consensus in the nation’s capital that plowing around the not-so-saintly Saints had gone on long enough. The ensuing clash, which the Atlanta-based Christian Index deemed “the most important that has ever engaged the attention of our National Government,” stretched across the Atlantic Ocean to England, where A. Conan Doyle gave Mormon polygamy a prominent place in his first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” and Pope Leo XIII condemned it (and Mormonism itself) in an encyclical.70
Back in the United States, polygamy became the cultural preoccupation of the 1880s.71 Efforts to effect a “Second Reconstruction” in Utah brought together “southerners with northerners, states with the federal government, Democrats with Republicans, and clergy and lay members of various Protestant denominations.”72 This conservative coalition also included presidents of both major parties. Beginning with Rutherford Hayes, five consecutive presidents denounced what Chester Arthur referred to as the “odious crime” of polygamy.73 After the paroxysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Mormons helped to bind up the nation’s wounds by providing it with a common enemy.
This culture war proceeded on two fronts, one moral and the other political, as conservatives blasted the LDS Church for spreading polygamy and theocracy. For some conservative culture warriors, this was a fight for Christian civilization. For others, it was a defense of the American republic. But for most, these two agendas blurred into one moral crusade—for democracy, Christianity, and the American family. “Let Mormonism prevail,” said Rev. William Strickland of Tennessee, “and we sap the very foundation of society and wipe out the Christian home.”74
ACCORDING TO ONE critic, the list of Mormon offenses against the nation and its God included “infidelity, deism, atheism; lying, deception, blasphemy; debauchery, lasciviousness, bestiality; madness, fraud, plunder; larceny, burglary, robbery, perjury; fornication, adultery, rape, incest; arson, treason, and murder.”75 But polygamy topped the list. This “scarlet whore,” in the words of Rep. John McClernand (D-IL), was a key theme in anti-Mormon literature before the LDS Church publicly proclaimed the doctrine in 1852, but thereafter it was the preoccupation.76 Polygamy was primitive, according to the racist logic of secretary of the Territory of Utah Benjamin Ferris, belonging not to advanced nations but “to the indolent and opium-eating Turks and Asiatics, the miserable Africans, the North American savages, and the Latter-day Saints. It is the offspring of lust, and its legitimate results are soon manifest in the rapid degeneracy of races.”77 (In this way, Mormons, like Jefferson before them, were also “twinned” to Muslims [a.k.a. “Turks”].)
Like anti-Catholics, anti-Mormons promoted their cause through a variety of literary genres. Some of these works were marketed as fiction. Others were, in the words of scholar Eric Eliason, “pseudononfictional”—“true life” tales that refused to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.78 This literature presented Mormonism (like Catholicism in convent captivity narratives) as a religion that sacrificed the innocence of women on the altar of male lust. Tabloid titles and purple prose showcased the tragedies of innocent heroines duped by despotic religious leaders. Instead of being forced into nunneries to satisfy the carnal desires of Catholic priests, however, these women were forced into “harems” lorded over by “libidinous ‘Saints’ and lecherous ‘prophets.’”79 Once again, Gothic tropes of horror predominated: demonic men, innocent women, lust, madness, imprisonment, seduction, betrayal, rape, and underground torture chambers. In this case, the stories were set in the Wild West and unveiled the mysteries of Salt Lake City, “the biggest whorehouse in the world.”80
Following Harriet Beecher Stowe, who used her talents as a sentimental novelist to bring down slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, antipolygamy writers sought to stir the sympathies of their readers against this grave threat to women and their families. In other words, they portrayed polygamy as an assault on family values—“an organized, systemized attack on the permanence and purity of the Christian home.”81 Mormon wives were “enslaved, hopeless, helpless.”82 Their husbands were the “hyenas of society,” sexual predators whose unbridled lust turned homes into harems and Salt Lake City into “the Sodom of the Occident.”83 Ministers, social reformers, and journalists denounced this “congregation of sensualists” in pulpits, newspapers, and magazines.84 Also joining this conservative opposition were leaders of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a breakaway group that flatly denied that Joseph Smith ever practiced plural marriage and condemned the “Brighamites” for introducing it.85 But the most powerful antipolygamy voices belonged to Mormon defectors, whose memoirs read like a combination of Puritan-era captivity stories and slave narratives.
Wife No. 19 (1875), a memoir by Ann Eliza Young, who left the LDS Church and sued Brigham Young for divorce in the early 1870s, was a huge hit. Billed as “The Rebel of the Harem,” she went on a nationwide lecture tour that included a stop in Washington, DC, where President Ulysses Grant and members of Congress heard her describe her “life in bondage” to the Church and her exodus from the clutches of a Mormon pharaoh. Mormonism’s “chief ‘beauties,’” she contended, were “incest, murder, suicide, mania and bestiality.”86
The “pseudononfictional” answer to Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures was Maria Ward’s Female Life Among the Mormons (1855), which presented Mormon plural wives as victims of (among other things) mesmerism and cannibalism. In a lurid passage on “Mormon Barbarities,” a plural wife who dared to criticize Mormonism’s signature institution “was taken one night when she stepped out for water, gagged, carried a mile into the woods, stripped nude, tied to a tree, and scourged till the blood ran from her wounds to the ground, in which condition she was left till the next night, when her tormenters visited her again, took her back to her husband’s residence, and laid her on the door-step, where she remained till morning.”87
As this story intimates, antipolygamy novelists drew frequent parallels between African slavery in the South and “white slavery” in the West. Repeatedly, conservatives described polygamy as bondage and the movement to uproot it as the new abolitionism. After witnessing female converts on a boat heading to America under the aegis of a “snaky” Mormon missionary, Jennie Fowler Willing wrote:
My heart ached for them, for I knew the plunge into the awful sea of sensuality that awaited them. They would be taken to Utah, and at each station, the men would flock about the train, picking out the girls that suited their fancy, paying the missionary for them, each loading his purchases into a wagon, and driving off to the farm where the poor thing would be set to raising pigs, poultry, and babies, for her master’s enrichment and aggrandizement.88
In Boadicea: The Mormon Wife (1855), Alfreda Eva Bell wrote that Mormon wives are “white slaves” who “are required to do all the most servile drudgery; are painfully impressed with their nothingness and utter inferiority . . . and are frequently . . . subjected to personal violence and various modes of corporeal punishment.”89 In her dedication “to the Mormon wives of Utah,” which appeared in Wife No. 19, Ann Eliza Young prayed “for your deliverance from the worse than Egyptian bondage in which you are held.” “Come out of the house of bondage!” she commanded these “Mormon wives.” “This Christian realm is not ‘Babylon,’ but THE PROMISED LAND!” Later in the book, Young argued that polygamy was “more cruel than African slavery ever was, since it claims to hold body and soul alike.”90
Harriet Beecher Stowe hit similar notes in a preface to a book by another runaway from polygamy’s chains. After commending Fanny Stenhouse’s Tell It All (1874) as “a plain, unvarnished tale of truth, stranger and sadder than fiction,” Stowe wrote:
Our day has seen a glorious breaking of fetters. The slave-pens of the South have become a nightmare of the past; the auction-block and whipping-post have given place to the church and school-house; and songs of emancipated millions are heard through our land.
Shall we not then hope that the hour is come to loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters—a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the family?91
In a later piece in the Anti-Polygamy Standard of the Ladies’ Anti-Polygamy Society, Stowe made a similar appeal to the “Women of America”: “Let every happy wife and mother who reads these lines give her sympathy, prayers and effect to free her sisters from this degrading bondage.”92
Stowe’s appearance on this cultural battlefield might suggest that the real liberals in this culture war were the anti-Mormons, who labored to end the sin of “white slavery” just as abolitionists labored to end the sin of black slavery. And antipolygamists did draw on liberal themes, presenting themselves as champions of religious liberty and women’s rights. But appearances can be deceiving. Throughout the history of America’s culture wars, conservatives have latched on to the rhetoric of the Left. Today conservatives quote Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose affirmative action and cite Gandhi to justify blowing up abortion clinics. During the nineteenth century, proponents of Protestant America drew on abolitionist tropes in their efforts to eliminate their religious rivals. So while Stowe was a progressive evangelical on the slavery question, she was a conservative evangelical when it came to Mormons (and Catholics). The ligature connecting these positions was her commitment to the traditional family.
As literary critic Nancy Bentley has observed, antipolygamists such as Stowe described slavery and polygamy as “nearly identical crimes against the family.”93 In a society committed to the “cult of true womanhood,” each of these “twin barbarisms” compromised the piety of American women, the purity of the American home, and the strength of the American republic.94 In this way, polygamy came to be seen as both a corruption of female virtue and “a form of treason” against the nation.95
Given this identification of polygamy with “white slavery,” outsiders struggled to understand why any woman would choose to become one wife among many—to receive one-half (or less) of her husband’s affection.96 And what most Mormon critics decided was that little choice was actually involved. In the antipolygamy novels of the second half of the nineteenth century, women were either brainwashed or duped into polygamy. Some fell under the hypnotic talents of Mormon con men. Others set sail from England and entered into marriages in Utah in good faith, only to discover to their horror that they were wife number two or three or more.
POLYGAMY WAS NOT the Mormons’ only sin. Theocracy was, according to many, an equal danger, because it undermined the patriotism of “traitorous” LDS leaders and rank-and-file Mormons alike.97
“Is not Mormonism inimical to the institutions of our country?” asked William Harris in Mormonism Portrayed (1841). After all, Mormons were obliged to follow Smith’s revelations wherever they might lead, and often they led headlong into politics. According to Harris, Mormons “have voted, almost to a man, with Smith”—a clear violation of the “civil compact,” which says that “all shall think and act for themselves.” Suppose that Mormons became a majority in a state. “Would it be right that such a majority, controlled by one man, should rule? Would not such a state of things be a total subversion of Republicanism, and the establishment, in effect, of a despotism?”98
The Nauvoo Expositor’s attack on Smith featured sharp critiques of his post–Book of Mormon innovations, including polygamy and “the doctrine of many Gods,” but the main issue was abuse of power. In his “attempt to unite church and state,” Smith had set himself up as “king or law-giver” and thus created a “religious despotism . . . incompatible with our free institutions.” Moreover, Smith had used his nearly unlimited power in Nauvoo for personal gain. The practice of the gathering “has been taught by Joseph Smith and others for the purpose of enabling them to sell property at most exhorbitant prices, not regarding the welfare of the Church.” In this way, “the wealth which is brought into the place is swallowed up by the one great throat, from whence there is no return.”99
Later critics were convinced that Young’s appetite for economic and political power was equally prodigious. In 1851, an LDS envoy returning from Washington told Young that President Fillmore “hoped you would not mingle your religion with your public duties.”100 But mingle he did. In fact, Young lorded over Utah like Smith had lorded over Nauvoo. Utah’s economy ran across his desk. And thanks to Mormon militias, both rumored and real, Young was the most powerful military man west of the Mississippi.
On postcards and in political cartoons, Young was depicted as the fat man from Utah with more wives (and crying children) in his bed than he (or his biographers) could count. In Utah, critics described “the old Boss” as the territory’s robber baron, monopolizing not only ecclesiastical, political, and military power but also economic life. According to Representative Morrill, Young wielded “more despotic power than is now exercised by any ruler on the globe where written constitutions are observed.” Moreover, because of a tithing policy requiring members to contribute 10 percent of their income to his church, Young was making “a princely revenue.”101 According to the New York Times, Young—“as thorough a despot . . . as ever held the scepter”—served as Utah’s de facto “Prophet, Priest and King.”102
In making these arguments against LDS tyranny, anti-Mormon critics drew on anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim tropes of earlier decades. This time they raged against Young instead of Smith, conjuring up the specter of a new Vatican in the West. “An ecclesiastical hierarchy exists in Utah, with a plenitude of power greater than that which can to-day be exercised by the Pope of Rome,” Morrill contended. “Its grasp is more merciless and far more selfish than Pius IX would dare attempt.”103
Josiah Strong’s Our Country (1885) is typically remembered as a nativist attack on Roman Catholicism, but it also includes an anti-Mormon chapter. There Strong argues that the real peril of Mormonism was political, not sexual. “Polygamy is not an essential part of Mormonism” (since the movement began without it) “nor is polygamy a very large part of Mormonism” (since a very small percentage of Mormons practiced it). The real peril of Mormonism is its “ecclesiastical despotism.” There existed, in Strong’s judgment, an “irrepressible conflict between Utah Mormonism and American republicanism.” Unlike democratic America, in which “we the people” ruled, the LDS Church was “ruled by a man who is prophet, priest, king and pope, all in one.” And its power was growing day by day, via missions, childbirth, and the “systematic colonization” of “vast tracts of land.”104
Picking up on earlier attempts to tar Mormons with the stain of Islam, critics denounced the LDS Church as a false religion with a false prophet peddling false revelations. This time, however, the despot was “the Mohammed of Salt Lake.”105 Observers continued to complain that both Mormonism and “Mohammedanism” supplemented the Bible with “a volume of miserable fables” and a “spurious prophet.”106 But in searching for what the Methodist Review called “the points of contact and resemblance between the Mohammedanism of the East, and the Mormonism of the West,” critics after the Great Announcement of 1852 also homed in on polygamy.107 According to Jennie Fowler Willing, whose On American Soil; or, Mormonism the Mohammedanism of the West (1906) gave voice to more than half a century of anti-Mormon anxiety, Utah’s “Mohammedanism” aped Islam by offering its followers polygamy in this world and “a sensual, material heaven” in the next. But Willing also took aim at political and economic life among the Saints, arguing that both Islam and Mormonism “proselyte by violence” and “aim at universal domination.” The LDS isn’t a religion of salvation, she wrote in a claim that would be resurrected in the twenty-first-century Islam wars. It is “a great financial and political scheme”—a “bossism” of the West in which the Saints’ reigning prophet serves as “absolute ecclesiastical ruler” and “political monarch.”108
Attempts to prove the Church’s guilt by association with Islam were so widespread that as early as 1861 the LDS paper The Millennial Star found itself plea-bargaining. “Nearly everybody who has heard or read of ‘Mormonism’ and the ‘Mormons’ from Gentile sources has found the name of Joseph and Mahomet coupled, and the religious systems founded by the Eastern and Western Prophets classed together and likened one to the other,” Mormon missionary E. W. Tullidge observed. The purpose of trotting out this “caricature” was to “blacken” Smith and the Church. Nonetheless, the analogy was “much more in our favour than against us,” since it illustrated “the Saints as empire-founders.” Unlike Islam, Tullidge reasoned, Mormonism “has not a military mission, nor has it been built up by the sword, nor will it be built up or extended by military aggression and conquests.” Saints built their empire by preaching and gathering. “Their forced exoduses from the Gentiles,” rather than shrinking their numbers, only augmented them.109
Still, many critics saw “Mormondom” as a threat to the Christian family and the American republic. To bring this point home, critics depicted Mormon women as serfs and Mormon men as tyrants. The suffragist and freethinker Matilda Joslyn Gage classified Mormonism among the religions that “subjugate the many to the caprice of the few.” She, too, objected to polygamy, but chiefly in political terms. “The Mormon marriage formula,” wrote Gage, “directs the man to look to God, but enjoins the woman to look toward her husband as God, rendering him the same unquestioning obedience that has been demanded from all Christian wives through the ages.”110 Women’s rights activist Kate Field, who lectured widely on “The Mormon Monster” in the 1880s, described polygamy as “only a secondary evil.” The real crime was tyranny, which turned rank-and-file Mormons into “slaves to the church and traitors to the United States Government.”111
Utah women were the first Americans of their gender to vote (in 1870), but what good was female suffrage if wives were forced to cast their ballots as their husbands saw fit? “It does not take much arithmetic,” wrote Willing, “to see that the man who can march to the polls with the votes of ten wives, and twenty daughters in his vest pocket, is a powerful man. He has multiplied himself by thirty-one.”112
A memorial opposing Utah statehood and passed in 1889 by both houses of the Idaho legislature broadened this critique to cover the control exercised by the leaders of this “treasonable” church over their flocks:
The turning over of a State government to said Mormon Church, or the leaders thereof, would be unsafe and impolitic, because said church is composed by a large majority of the lowest and most densely ignorant classes of the Old World peasantry, who are in no way Americanized, and who have nothing in common with our aims or our republican institutions. They are serfs, and serfs only—slaves to the most tyrannical and despotic organization in existence. They are absolutely under the control of their leaders, and the use of the ballot in their hands would be entirely under the direction of said leaders, and a travesty of the elective franchise.113
ONE SCHOLAR HAS observed that, in the “war of words” between Mormons and their opponents, “both sides delivered as many blows as they observed.”114 That is incorrect. Mormons did fight for their civil rights and their religious freedom. At times they provoked their opponents to violence. They also inflicted violence themselves. But like all U.S. culture wars, this one was lopsided. In fact, it was the most lopsided culture war in American history. Mormons were a tiny minority in this fight, and liberal defenders of religious liberty largely abandoned them. Even legislators who opposed antipolygamy legislation went out of their way to denounce the LDS Church. And the wider crusade of “the home against the harem,” which preoccupied not only legislators but also novelists, journalists, and ministers, was even more one-sided.115 By the time Utah statehood came in 1896, Mormons likely had absorbed a thousand blows for every one they had delivered. But Mormons did strike back.
Anti-Mormons had repeatedly argued that polygamy was hazardous to one’s health, likening it to the “plague,” “malaria,” a “cancer in the breast of the nation,” and an “Asiatic and African pestilence.”116 Senator Douglas, who had previously supported the Mormons, turned on them in a debate with Lincoln on June 12, 1857, calling on Congress “to apply the knife and cut out this loathsome, disgusting ulcer.”117 But Mormons saw plural marriage as a cure. Taking their cues from Orson Pratt’s famous defense of polygamy, they argued for plural marriage on biblical, theological, sociological, and constitutional grounds.118
Biblically, Mormons argued that polygamy was better than monogamy at fulfilling God’s commandment to “multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). They described plural marriage as an “everlasting covenant,” underscoring the fact that Abraham, Moses, and David had taken more than one wife.119 And they said that God had reaffirmed this covenant in a revelation to Joseph Smith. Some even found warrant for “Abrahamic marriage” in the New Testament, claiming that Jesus (who was born into the polygamous line of David) married many wives and fathered many children.120
When it came to polygamy and the Bible, fair critics had to concede that the Mormons had a point. The New York Herald hoped for the “subjugation” of Mormonism and gave voice to the genocidal fantasies of others to see the “fields of Utah laid waste, and the Mormons hung by hundreds.” It admitted, however, that the LDS Church had “unanswerable evidence” from scripture on its side: “So far, therefore, as the Holy Bible is concerned, the Mormons are, according to strict logic, much better qualified to persuade us to take four wives, than we are to induce them to stick to one.”121 “The Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll wryly described polygamy as “one of the institutions of Jehovah.” “It is protected by the Bible,” he wrote. “It has inspiration on its side.”122 If the Mormons had the Bible, however, they did not have the Book of Mormon. There God calls polygamy as “abominable before me” (Jacob 2:24).123
Theologically, Mormons placed the practice of polygamy inside a theology that spanned time and eternity. According to this theology, human souls live before they are incarnated on Earth, and polygamy is a way to bring more of these preexisting souls into the world. But Mormons looked forward as well—to their “exaltation” and even deification. Plural marriage brought husbands, wives, and children together into eternal glory.
Mormons also argued that monogamy was unnatural: by nature, men seek variety in sexual relations, and in monogamous societies they will do so in brothels and extramarital affairs. Look at Paris, said Orson’s brother Parley Pratt, where one-third of the children are illegitimate, or to cities on America’s Eastern Seaboard, which breed sexual sins. Turning the tables on antipolygamists, Pratt argued that the fruits of monogamy included “whoredoms, intrigues, seductions, wretched and lonely single life, hatred, envy, jealousy, infanticide, illegitimacy, disease and death.”124 But prostitution was unknown in Utah, which also had strict laws against adultery and fornication. No wonder monogamy is the outlier in world history, Mormon apologists said.
In defending polygamy on social grounds, Mormons did the math. The U.S. Census reported more female than male births, and the killing of men in wars further upset the gender balance. In an exclusively monogamous society, these numbers would doom many women to single life, but polygamy solved this demographic problem.
Mormons also worked hard to refute the claim that polygamy was antiwoman, responding to books such as Wife No. 19 with stories of wives who not only consented to plural marriages but thrived in them. Defence of Polygamy, by a Lady of Utah (1854) began as a letter from Belinda Pratt, the sixth wife of Parley Pratt, to her sister in New Hampshire. Pratt made some familiar arguments (about how monogamy is unnatural for men because “it is his to move in a wider sphere”), but she also spoke surprisingly candidly about how polygamy gave women respite during menstruation from the otherwise overwhelming sexual needs of their husbands.125
Mormon women also hit back on the pages of the Woman’s Exponent (est. 1872), a periodical run mostly by women. And Mormon women in both monogamous and polygamous marriages gathered en masse in favor of polygamy as divine commandment and common sense—“the only family system that safely contained men’s sexual urges.”126 On January 13, 1870, prompted by proposed legislation that would have denied the right to vote to anyone who even believed in polygamy, a few thousand Mormon women protested at an “indignation meeting” at the Old Tabernacle on Salt Lake City’s Temple Square. At a similar meeting that same year in Provo, Mormon women gathered “to stand up and defend this heaven-revealed principle.”127 The bill was defeated.
MORMONS AND A few liberal defenders also argued that efforts to outlaw polygamy violated the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause. Mormons were convinced that their opponents were driven first and foremost by religious animus—that Protestant ministers were the masterminds behind the anti-Mormon crusade. They sharply denounced their critics’ efforts to run around the First Amendment by pretending that polygamy was not a religious matter. Polygamy was a keystone of Mormon faith, they insisted, and deserving of constitutional protection.
Utah delegate William Hooper, speaking on the House floor against the bill that would have criminalized belief in plural marriage, delivered an impassioned brief for religious liberty on behalf of the “most vigorously lied about of any people in the nation.” He spoke of the Puritans who had “fled from their homes in Europe to the wilds of America” so “that they might worship God in accordance with the dictates of conscience.” He raised the specter of those “fearful days of the Spanish inquisition, or the days when, in New England, Quakers were persecuted or banished, and witches burned at the stake.” And he denounced the bill as “a disastrous precedent for future tyranny . . . in direct opposition to that toleration in religious belief which is characteristic of the nation and age.” Channeling his inner Jefferson, he described belief in plural marriage as “an essential feature in our religious faith” and called on House members to cast a vote for religious liberty:
It is not permitted, Mr. Speaker, that any one man should sit as the judge of any other as regards his religious belief. This is a matter which rests solely between each individual and his God. . . . Our Constitution throws over all sincere worshipers, at whatever shrine, its guarantee of absolute protection. The moment we assume to judge of the truthfulness or error of any creed the constitutional guarantee is a mockery and a sham.128
To such constitutional salvos, anti-Mormons responded in two ways. Some conceded that Mormonism was constitutionally protected but that polygamy and theocracy were not. “It is not a matter of religion,” said a Virginia congressman. “It is a matter of vice.”129 Others made a more radical claim. Again anticipating twenty-first-century arguments against Islam, they asserted that Mormonism wasn’t really a religion. It was a polygamous scheme, or a moneymaking racket, or a power grab, or all of the above. This argument circulated as early as the 1830s, when critics called Smith’s “Gold Bible” yet another attempt by a money digger at self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. It caught on in the 1870s and 1880s, when critics argued that the LDS Church was really a front for sexual license, political skullduggery, and economic gain. Moving far beyond those who had denounced Mormonism as a false religion, these critics drew on metaphors of disguise and anxieties about confidence men to argue that Mormonism was a non-religion. Mormonism “is not a religion according to the American idea and the United States Constitution,” wrote a Congregationalist critic.130 Some even put the term in scare quotes, as in “the vileness and villainies of Brigham Young’s ‘religion.’”131 From this perspective, freedom of religion was inviolate, but did not extend to LDS polygamists and theocrats because they were only acting “under the guise of religion.”132 Whatever religion there was in Mormonism was a “cloak” for something else—an “excuse for unbridled license.”133 Legislators thus had every legal right to outlaw polygamy, disenfranchise Church members, and seize Church property.
Mormon leaders objected strenuously to efforts to deny Mormons their constitutional rights. In a debate with John Taylor, who would go on to become the third LDS president, U.S. vice president Schuyler Colfax denied that polygamy was “a question of religion.” Taylor replied, “If a revelation from God is not religion, what is?”134
This constitutional debate also extended to the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Some legal scholars have argued that strict separationism—the view that the First Amendment requires what Jefferson referred to as a “wall of separation between church and state”—did not become a mainstream legal theory until the twentieth century when (ironically) it was used as a cudgel to beat Roman Catholics (who allegedly refused to respect that “wall”). Legal scholar Sarah Barringer Gordon finds a parallel development much earlier, when nineteenth-century Americans embraced something like strict separationism as a cudgel to beat Mormons and in the process “remade legal history and constitutional law.”135
Setting the establishment clause aside, some evangelicals had argued against bringing Utah into the union on the theory that the United States was a Christian country. “As a Christian nation can we consent to take anti-Christian states into the union?” the Christian Advocate and Journal asked in 1855.136 But Morrill based his novel argument on strict church–state separation. At the time, disestablishment was mandated at the federal level, not in the states. But just how separate church and state should be in the territories was up for grabs. “If Congress is prohibited from making an established religion, a Territory must be equally prohibited, for a Territory is the creature of Congress, and Congress cannot authorize a Territory to authorize an incorporated company of priests to do what it may not do itself,” Morrill reasoned. He then turned to Utah to bring his argument home. “The republican form of government in Utah is a dead letter . . . while the real bona fide government is that of the Mormon priesthood.”137
IN A STEM-WINDER of a House speech, Morrill asked whether there was any limit to the crimes one could commit under the guise of religious liberty. “Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act done in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury, or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?”138 The Supreme Court settled this question in Reynolds v. United States (1879). George Reynolds, Young’s secretary and the husband of two wives, argued that his arrest under the 1862 Morrill Act violated his religious liberty. Rejecting this argument, the Supreme Court ruled that Mormons had every right to believe in polygamy but no right to act on that belief. This historic ruling—the Supreme Court’s first on the free-exercise clause—closed the door on constitutional questions regarding polygamy even as it opened the door to new antipolygamy legislation.
In 1882, the U.S. Congress responded with the Edmunds Act, followed by the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887. This one-two punch put muscle into antipolygamy legislation for the first time by targeting individuals and the LDS Church. The Edmunds Act forbade polygamists from voting, holding public office, or serving on juries. The Edmunds-Tucker Act, in an effort to smash what Sen. George Edmunds of Vermont saw as a Mormon monopoly over the Utah economy, disincorporated the LDS Church and seized much of its property. On the theory that votes for women in Utah gave outsize influence to husbands with many wives, this act also abolished woman suffrage in the territory.
By the 1880s, Mormonism was no longer just a local nuisance or a theological error. It had become criminal. All told, roughly a thousand men in Utah were convicted of polygamy, unlawful cohabitation, and similar charges.139 Many female Saints were arrested for refusing to testify against their husbands. Pregnant plural wives were indicted for fornication. And all efforts to grant statehood to Utah were put on hold.
During this period—Mormons call it “The Raid”—virtually the entire LDS leadership (including George Q. Cannon, who in 1882 lost his job as territorial delegate to the U.S. House) went into hiding, where they ate, slept, and conducted Church business in their own version of the Underground Railroad. Meanwhile, LDS president John Taylor vowed massive resistance to U.S. authority. “Are we going to suffer a surrender of this point? No, never. No, never,” he said in an August 20, 1882, sermon that foreshadowed Alabama governor George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation now!” speech.140 On July 4, 1885, Taylor called for American flags to be lowered to half-staff to mourn the death of religious liberty.
AS THE STORY is typically told, all this drama—the indictments, the convictions, the running, the hiding, the charges, the countercharges—came to an end on September 24, 1890, when LDS president Wilford Woodruff finally bowed to government pressure and proclaimed Mormon opposition to “any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.”141 The language of “The Manifesto,” as it came to be called, was advisory only, but it was enough. Property seized from the Church was returned. Many convicted polygamists were pardoned, and existing prosecutions were set aside. In 1896, Utah finally became the forty-fifth state.
“The Manifesto” did not stop anti-Mormon activism, however. Neither did it stop LDS polygamy, since those who were in plural marriages often remained in them and new plural marriages continued to be celebrated.142 In 1898, Utah elected as its congressman B. H. Roberts, who had multiple wives. The House refused to seat him. In 1902, Utah elected Reed Smoot (who was not a polygamist) to the Senate, which held four years of hearings before seating him in 1907. This was only possible, however, after Joseph F. Smith, who had succeeded Woodruff as LDS president, issued a “Second Manifesto” in 1904 denying that the Saints were still secretly performing plural marriages, and promising to excommunicate those who continued to do so.
Of all the culture wars explored in this book, this one was the closest to a draw. In the nineteenth century, at least, the anti-Mormons won. In fact, as historian Cristine Hutchison-Jones has observed, anti-Mormonism survived even this “Second Manifesto.”143 Congress backed off, as did presidents and the Supreme Court. But anti-Mormon exposés continued to appear in popular magazines such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and McClure’s. And Hollywood produced a series of anti-Mormon films, including A Mormon Maid (1917) and Trapped by the Mormons (1922), which indulged in sex, murder, and suicide alongside long-standing stereotypes, from Mormon leaders converting comely maidens in order to bed them to Mormon vigilantes slaying opponents for sport.
Nonetheless, the anti-Mormon culture wars have been over now for nearly a century. Like Catholics, Mormons accepted the separation of church and state. And while some breakaway Mormon groups continued to practice polygamy, the LDS Church conformed to the norm of monogamy. Increasingly, Mormons found their identity as a “peculiar people” in more socially acceptable markers, including prohibitions against tobacco, alcohol, tea, and coffee they refer to as the Word of Wisdom. These compromises bought Mormons some measure of respectability in the early twentieth century. In fact, according to historian Jan Shipps, positive media depictions of Mormons were outweighing negative depictions as early as the 1930s.144
Back in 1857, Harper’s Weekly had struggled to find reasons for the U.S. Army to march on Utah: “It may be said that marriage, as we understand it, is a Christian rite, and that we are a Christian people; and that no abomination like polygamy can be tolerated in a Christian country.” Yet its editors were fair-minded enough to ask their readers (and themselves) whether “in the cold, clear eye of the Law and of the Constitution, we are a Christian people.” They also allowed themselves to entertain the possibility (however briefly) that there were no easy answers to that question. In the end, however, Harper’s editors determined that there is “no doubt” that “this is very certainly a Christian country.” Therefore, the Mormon question would not be settled by debate but “on feeling and sympathy, or, rather, on hatred and disgust.” Americans “never would, and never will, tolerate a set of obscene, licentious wretches as their fellows and equals. They never would, and never will, permit a horde of creatures, in every respect worse than Turks, to defy our habits, our tastes, our feelings, and our civilization.”145
Americans continue to debate whether we are “a Christian country” and “a Christian people,” but there is no longer any debating whether there is space for Mormons among us. Once again, a bitterly fought culture war produced a new cultural consensus. In this case, Americans agreed that their sacred canopy would cover not only Protestants and Catholics but also Mormons. Today almost no one claims that Mormons cannot be patriotic Americans. Liberals and conservatives alike affirm the freedom of members of the LDS Church to believe what they believe and to practice their religion as they see fit. In fact, Mormons—“quintessential Americans,” in the words of conservative columnist George Will146—are overrepresented both in popular culture and on Capitol Hill. During the 2012 presidential election campaign, some cultural conservatives threatened to refuse to vote for Mitt Romney because they did not want a Mormon to become president. But when the votes were counted, white evangelicals voted for Romney in even greater numbers than they had voted for George W. Bush four years earlier. Romney may have lost, but Mormons won.