“The Lord brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
—Psalm xI.2
(Ann Eliza’s favorite quotation)
Between the time Ann Eliza had presented her polygamy address before President Grant and the period shortly after Congress had passed its first strong anti-polygamy bill, she was at her peak of renown. Her part in the dramatic legislation had not gone unnoticed. “In the great struggle at Washington, during the session of Congress just ended,” wrote the Salt Lake City Tribune, “Mrs. Young’s influence, more than any other, aided in securing the enactment of a salutary law.” And, again: “Her denunciation of the polygamous Apostle Cannon was scathing and tremendous, and her exposure of the evils of marriage and the sins of the Priesthood, produced a powerful effect upon Congress. To her visit to the national capital are we mainly indebted for the passage of the Poland Bill.”
This accomplishment alone, it would seem, by an accidental feminist in an intentional man’s world, should have been enough to make Ann Eliza as self-satisfied as she was famous. This was not the case at all. For Ann Eliza had attained every goal except peace of mind.
“I was comparatively happy, but I was not at rest,” she wrote. “There was something lacking in my life—a void which nothing seemed to fill.”
Her restlessness was a common condition found in apostates. Perhaps, as Kimball Young has suggested in his psychological study of apostates in general, she felt unconscious remorse and guilt at having turned upon those who once trusted her; perhaps she felt that she would suffer violence for her defection; perhaps she felt that her new friends did not wholly trust her because she had once turned on old friends; perhaps she felt that she was being too sensational in order to achieve acceptance and approval from people alien to her.
Or perhaps Ann Eliza was simply lonely for the mother to whom she had clung so long and for the young sons whom she had not seen since her escape from Salt Lake City.
Mechanically she continued her applauded appearances through the East. Her public face, except for the past suffering she exploited professionally and her frequent nervous disorders, was the face of success and contentment. Her secret second face, the one behind the lyceum mask, remained disturbed and distraught. Gradually she was able to sort out one worry more nagging than the rest. She realized that she had, indeed, been existing like a kind of planet of nothingness, adrift in a void, through which she floated for lack of spiritual gravity. She had renounced and condemned the rigors and comforts of the highly organized, paternalistic Mormon religion, but she had not supplanted it with a new faith. She was not an agnostic, for she believed in an attentive Creator. But her God was featureless. She could pray to no one.
It was not until Ann Eliza had delivered a lecture before the Methodist Preachers’ Meeting in Boston, during the spring of 1875, that she first realized what might be troubling her. She had been aware during her talk that one Methodist clergyman, the Reverend Daniel Steele, of Auburndale, had been listening to her with marked interest. What had interested the Reverend Steele the most, he said later, was that her “address contained not the most distant reference to Jesus Christ.”
After the lecture the Reverend Steele was introduced to Ann Eliza. He took her aside.
“Have you found any other religion to take the place of the superstition you have cast off?” he inquired.
“No.”
“Do you have any theoretical knowledge of Christ?”
“I know nothing about Jesus Christ; I am a perfect child,” said Ann Eliza. “Oh, the distressing sense of vacuity in my soul! How I hunger for something satisfying! Will you not help me?”
The Reverend Steele tried to point the way. “You have read the Gospels, have you not?”
“No, I never read a Gospel in my life, nor have I heard more than two sermons since my escape from that false religion.”
Briefly, quietly, the clergyman explained to Ann Eliza the teachings of Christ. Listening to these principles, she said later, “was like a day-dawn after a night of the blackest darkness.”
When her instructor was done, Ann Eliza assured him, “This is what I want—this religion of love.” She begged for his prayers.
“You shall have them, and such Christian instructions as can be communicated by letter.”
As Ann Eliza headed into the Midwest, lecturing steadily, the Reverend Steele’s letters followed her. These instructions gave her some relief, but apparently this was not enough. For by now her mind was on another series of letters that she was receiving, these from her mother in Utah.
The first Mrs. Webb finally had been horrified and disgusted by Brigham Young after his attacks on her daughter. Suddenly she was seeing Brigham as her daughter had seen him, and now she was telling Ann Eliza of her “terrible struggles” to give up the Mormon religion. Ann Eliza hoped to solve her mother’s problem by sending for her and settling her among relatives and old friends in the East. Also, Ann Eliza planned to send for her sons and place them in a private school near New York. But during her journey into the Midwest, Ann Eliza once more fell gravely ill. The canceling of lectures and loss of income made her realize that she could not immediately support her mother and sons. The frustration grieved her deeply. She was, she said, “brokenhearted… in great need of comfort.”
Having recovered sufficiently to resume her tour, Ann Eliza arrived in Delaware, Ohio. Briefly she roomed on the campus of Ohio Wesleyan Female College as the guest of Dr. Lorenzo Dow McCabe, who had been appointed acting president of the Methodist school two years before. Although the author of Divine Prescience of Future Contingencies and other similarly obtuse tomes, Dr. McCabe was a man of human warmth and understanding.
During the week that Ann Eliza stayed on the campus, Dr. McCabe came to visit her daily. At first he was interested in her outer fight against polygamy. Soon he became more absorbed in her inner struggle to acquire peace of mind. What happened next Ann Eliza recorded several months later in a letter to the Reverend Steele:
“I confided to him [Dr. McCabe] all my sorrows and sufferings, and he comforted me by telling me that Jesus stood ready to take them all, and fill my heart with sweet peace if I would believe in Him. He showed me how to do this, and prayed with me until a perfect peace and joy rested upon me and I felt forgiven, and was accepted as one of God’s children.
“Only those who have experienced it can know how happy I was, I felt so near to Him who died to save me. I have never felt that terrible despondency since, and think I never shall. I feel sure that God will care for me in the future, as in the past, if I do as near right as I can. I pray to him daily for help, and I have many times received direct answer to prayer.”
Ann Eliza’s conversion to the Methodist Episcopal faith was printed far and wide. Some cynics sneered that the move had been an opportunistic one. They said that Ann Eliza had become a Methodist to assure herself of continuing church sponsorship on future tours. However, most persons who had seen or heard Ann Eliza accepted the conversion as the natural fulfillment of a deep need. Sensibly she had conformed to a popular and undemanding belief, as they had, because it made life possible—and death less improbable. Thus reinforced, Ann Eliza was able to undertake the one engagement that she had considered and resisted for months—a return to Salt Lake City, to see her family again and to challenge her husband on his own grounds.
Eight months earlier she had fled Salt Lake City in fear of her life. Now she was no longer afraid. Her celebrity was her shield. Furthermore, with every passing month the West was becoming more heavily populated by non-Mormons. A short time before, an apostate’s life “was worth absolutely nothing.” But now, she was sure, the apostate “is comparatively safe from any deeds of violence on their part.” Her enemies might abuse her in print, curse her in the Tabernacle, consign her to hell, but they would not dare to murder her.
On the Wednesday evening of July 15, 1874, Ann Eliza, after a train trip through the Midwest, with a stopover in Laramie and a transfer at Ogden, returned to Salt Lake City. Major Pond, less vocal since the Bloomington scandal, was beside her. The day before, the Tribune had announced her coming as well as the informal reception her Gentile friends planned for her in a parlor of the Walker House. At the depot she was met by General George R. Maxwell, who had recently been her sponsor in Washington, and by a crowd of friends and curious citizens. According to Mormon sources, the general clasped Ann Eliza’s hands and murmured between smiles and tears, “Bless you, Ann Elizer; bless you me chee-ild.”
En route to the Walker House, the general put his guest on her guard by informing her that Victoria Woodhull was in the city for a series of lectures on the Beecher-Tilton case. Forewarned, Ann Eliza avoided her traducer, and there was no meeting between the two.
Both the street before the entrance to the Walker House and the large parlor inside were filled with “a vast assemblage” of friends and well-wishers. There were cheers and shouting as the twenty-seventh wife made her way from the carriage into the hotel. Dazzled by the welcome, Ann Eliza was led upstairs to the crowded second-floor public parlor where Judge McKean, the Reverend Stratton and Mrs. Stratton, Colonel Wickizer, and dozens of other friends and Federal officials quickly surrounded her.
Even as she stood beneath the massive, carved gilded mirror, accepting congratulations on her successful tour, Ann Eliza heard the sound of approaching music. Outside the National Brass Band marched up to the entrance of the Walker House and serenaded Ann Eliza with the strains of “Home, Sweet Home.” Too touched to thank either the musicians or the people in the street, the lady lecturer indicated that she would be pleased if General Maxwell spoke on her behalf.
General Maxwell stepped out on a balcony, and when the band and mob were hushed, he delivered a brief but eloquent address. He recounted some details of Ann Eliza’s triumphal procession through the eastern states and added that her victory had been more remarkable than was known because she had overcome “the assaults and libels levelled at her by the mercenary hirelings of the Mormon Priesthood.”
The general cited, for the first time, two instances of Mormon opposition. Before her Denver debut, Brigham’s agents had offered the publisher of the Denver Tribune the sum of $15,000 “for the use of its columns, to traduce and smirch her unblemished reputation.” Not only had the Denver publisher rejected the bribe, but he had “manfully” allied himself with Ann Eliza’s crusade. Again, after Brigham had succeeded in buying off the Chicago Times, one of the Prophet’s agents in the national capital—delegate Cannon was not mentioned by name—had offered Colonel Davidson, editor of the Washington National Republican, an undisclosed price if he would reprint the scandalous Chicago Times story. Davidson, too, had refused to be bought.
The people in the street exploded with cheers at General Maxwell’s disclosure. Inspired, the general went on to chastize the Mormon newspapers of Salt Lake City for their “cowardly assaults” upon Ann Eliza and the general’s own wife. At the end of his address, the general signaled to Ann Eliza inside. Modestly she appeared on the hotel balcony, bowing gratefully as a great roar of appreciation erupted and echoed through the warm night. Retiring indoors again, Ann Eliza once more joined the reception. Outside the band continued to serenade her for more than an hour.
Before beginning the first of a half dozen lectures in Salt Lake City, Ann Eliza allowed herself five days of relaxation with her sons, mother, and father in South Cottonwood. Then, on Monday evening, July 20, Ann Eliza appeared at the Methodist Church. The room was filled to capacity. When she walked to the lectern and peered into the orchestra seats, she found a surprise awaiting her.
“Brigham did not attend any of my lectures,” she wrote afterward, “but he sent his daughters and daughters-in-law, and bade them sit on the front seats, and make faces at me. They filled the two rows nearest the platform, and, as I saw them there, my heart went out in pity toward them. I knew all of them; many of them had been my dear friends from girlhood, and I had known how unhappy they had been under the cruel system, which I was fighting against. I had been in the confidence of several, and more than one had commiserated me upon my unhappy situation while I was their father’s wife. Instead of annoying me, and causing me to falter and break down completely, as the Prophet hoped, it only lent new strength to my purpose, new fire to my words.”
All but Brigham’s grimacing daughters and representatives from the Mormon press agreed that this was a new Ann Eliza who stood before them. Rarely did she consult the notes before her. She spoke with the assurance of one who had already been crowned a success.
Ignoring her contemporaries from the Lion House, Ann Eliza addressed herself to her Gentile friends. “The feelings with which I again meet you, but for the first time stand before you as a lecturer, are inexpressible,” she began. “But one year ago I left my home in this city, a fugitive seeking the protection of your laws and shelter of your charity. I was experienced in the hollowness and miseries of the system I was leaving, but totally inexperienced in the ways of the world to which I was fleeing. The faith of my childhood had proved the nightmare of my womanhood, and to that I could not cling… I ventured with fear and trembling, and what have I experienced? You received me with a generous confidence when I came, you defended me with a generous charity during my absence, you met me with a generous welcome on my return. If I cannot reward you as I would, let me assure you of this—that whatever happiness can spring from good deeds gratefully acknowledged, and whatever blessings Heaven may visit in answer to sincere and earnest prayer—this happiness and these blessings shall be yours while I live.
“And what shall I say of my experiences during my absence from among you? That I have felt the sting and poison of some Parthian arrows? Yes. That I have had moments of sickness and despondency? Yes. That I have been disappointed with my reception or ever regretted my course? Oh, never!”
Presently Ann Eliza took up the story of her life. During the ninety minutes, said the Tribune, she was “repeatedly and heartily applauded.” The pro-Mormon Herald grudgingly admitted that “her delivery showed much improvement” and hinted that her lecture had probably been written by Major Pond or the Reverend Stratton.
A week later Ann Eliza delivered the second of her lectures at the Methodist Church. Again the hall was crowded. Because the lecture was devoted entirely to a denunciation of plural marriage this time, the Herald was considerably less tolerant of her. The audience, it was true, had enjoyed her, “judging from the much stamping of feet and lusty clapping of hands.” But the fabric of the talk “was a collection of sensational sentences woven together for recital abroad, but entirely ‘too thin’ to be accepted as facts by a Salt Lake audience.” The improvement of delivery noted in her first appearance was not evident in her second, which was “squarely read from manuscript, in high, overstrained tones, without modulation or inflection.” Nevertheless, at the lecture’s end, the majority of the audience swarmed about Ann Eliza to shake her hand and to offer felicitations.
During most of August, Ann Eliza spoke steadily in various outlying communities of Utah and in adjacent Nevada. Her visit to Alta, Utah, attracted the greatest gathering in the history of the mining boom town. Many Mormons were present, among them four sons of Heber C. Kimball, the Apostle who had died in a carriage accident six years before. From Alta, Ann Eliza moved on to Provo, where her dear friend, the Reverend C. P. Lyford, was her sponsor. Outside of the lectures in Salt Lake City, the talks in Provo were Ann Eliza’s greatest successes in Utah. The Reverend Lyford likened her to “Wendell Phillips in his palmiest days.”
After Provo there followed a series of engagements in Bingham, Park City, Tooele, Ophir, Dry Canyon, Evanston, and Ogden. While in Evanston, the mining center that paid $200 to hear her, Ann Eliza remembered her Methodist mentor, Dr. Lorenzo Dow McCabe, in Delaware, Ohio. To express her thanks for the peace of mind that he had helped her find, she purchased a cabinet displaying minerals from the various mines around Evanston and sent it as a gift to the Ohio Wesleyan Female College.
While on the road to Ophir and Stockton, Ann Eliza’s tour was enlivened by the news that her long dormant divorce action against Brigham Young had suddenly been revived. The suit brought by Ann Eliza more than a year before had been set aside while the squabble over jurisdiction was settled. Brigham had demanded that the case be tried in a local probate court, dominated by the Mormons, while Ann Eliza had wished that the case be tried in a district court, dominated by anti-Mormon Federal officials. At last the Supreme Court of Utah Territory had made its decision. The case would be fought out in a district court, with Judge McKean, Ann Eliza’s friend, on the bench.
Ann Eliza’s lawyers renewed their motion for divorce and alimony. Judge McKean then ordered Brigham Young to give his answer. Late in the afternoon of August 25, 1874, in Third District Court of Utah, Brigham finally filed his lengthy reply to his twenty-seventh wife’s suit. His reply, through his legal representatives, caused a front-page sensation from coast to coast. In Salt Lake City the Tribune gave it seven headlines. They read, successively: “Revelation!… Brigham Young Comes Into Court… And Swears That He Has But One Wife… Celestial Marriage and Social Harlotry Identical… Virtue of Law and Sensuality of Religion… A Wife in the State and Concubines in the Church… The Kingdom of God on Its Last Legs.”
In New York City, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald was even more delirious. Easterners were favored with eight headlines, reading successively: “Polygamy… Brigham Young in Trouble With His Nineteenth Wife… Adultery Sanctified… The Difference Between Legal Marriage and “Celestial Concubinage”… The Prophet Accused of Perjury… He Blindly Repudiates the Supernumerary Wives… Good Mormons Indignant… The Nuptial Ritual as Performed in the Latter-Day Church.”
Aware as he was of Congressman Poland’s anti-polygamy bill, Brigham had taken the safe course. He denied that Ann Eliza was his legal wife, since she “was, and still is, the lawful wife of the said James L. Dee, never, as this defendant is now advised and believes, having been divorced from the said James L. Dee.” Furthermore, stated Brigham, he already had one legal wife, and she was Mary Ann Angell, whom he had wedded in Kirtland, Ohio, on January 10, 1834, and she “then and there became, and ever since has been, and still is, the lawful wife of this defendant…” As to the ceremony with Ann Eliza, said the New York Herald, “Brigham does not deny the adultery, but he avers that it was under the name of ‘celestial marriage,’ a kind of mutual arrangement according to faith.”
In his reply Brigham took the time to refute each of those legal complaints which Ann Eliza had been airing for months on public platforms. He flatly denied that he had practiced neglect, cruelty, parsimony, and desertion. “But on the contrary, this defendant alleges that he has always and at all times, treated the said plaintiff with due kindness and consideration.” He had not, he said, forced her to move to The Farmhouse. At no time had he commanded her to get rid of her ailing mother. Not once had he refused to supply her with food or elegant dress. Although he had provided her with a residence in the city, she “voluntarily and without his knowledge or consent and without any cause for fear or violence or hostility or vindictiveness from defendant did leave, desert and abandon defendant’s house and premises…” He had not neglected her in the boardinghouse but had visited her whenever he could. He had supported her children by Dee. He had not known that she was ill. Her present demands for settlement, alimony, and court costs were unreasonable. He denied that he was a millionaire or that his monthly income was $40,000. He said that his total holdings amounted to no more than $600,000 and his monthly income was a paltry $6,000.
Brigham’s answer concluded: “Defendant further says that at the time of the said alleged marriage this defendant had and still has a very large family, that his said family now consists of sixty-three persons, all of whom are dependent upon this defendant for maintenance and support.
“Whereof the defendant prays judgment of the court that he be hence dismissed with his costs herein.”
Brigham’s defense brought an immediate reaction from the nation’s press. In San Francisco the Chronicle remarked: “Brigham’s answer is calculated to enlist in his behalf the sympathies of all non-believers in woman’s rights. It places the inexorable Ann Eliza in the unlovely attitude of a remorseless persecutor of a meek and unfortunate victim of too much matrimony.” In St. Louis the Republican stated: “It is very certain the plural wives of the Saints will never forgive the Prophet for thus declaring them to be concubines… On one side is the fact of polygamy, and on the other hand the sanctification of adultery.” In New York the Herald commented: “The importance of this case cannot be overestimated, as it will become a test question and settle forever what the national Congress is going to permit in this Territory in the name of polygamy. It has another interesting phase, for it will define to the Mormon mind the exact status of the plural wives—what they are and what they are not.”
Undoubtedly there were repercussions in the Lion House. For, even though Amelia Folsom and the other wives had been briefed by five lawyers on the necessity for their husband to publicly disown them, still the public announcement of it must have given them sharp feelings of insecurity. However, if Brigham’s wives protested or berated him, word of it never reached the public. Only Brigham’s first living wife, Mary Ann Angell, obtained any satisfaction from his legal brief. Upon being shown his reply to Ann Eliza, it was said that the old lady wept tears of joy.
Delighted though Ann Eliza was with Brigham’s discomfort, she was indignant at his reply. She said that he had committed perjury in swearing that she had not divorced James L. Dee. She directed Judge McKean and the press to the records of the Probate Court in Salt Lake City, where her divorce from Dee had been filed in 1865. To this Brigham replied in his Deseret News that, since the Supreme Court had recently ruled that no Probate Court could handle a divorce case, the decision automatically nullified Ann Eliza’s old divorce from Dee. A Constant Reader, in the Tribune, went even further: “Ann Eliza was married in the Endowment House, over the same altar, and with the same ceremony, to James L. Dee, as to Brigham Young. If she was married to the former, she was married to the latter. Perhaps Brigham would say she is not married at all. If so, she is only one among the thousands of women seduced through his instrumentality.”
However much Brigham’s lawyers were satisfied that they had done well by their client, the Mormon hierarchy was less certain of this. When one of Brigham’s barristers expounded on the brilliance of his brief, an elder statesman snapped, “You have complied with the law—and knocked hell out of the Kingdom!”
Six weeks after Brigham’s reply, Judge McKean summoned the representatives of both sides into court to argue their cases. At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge McKean said that he would announce his decision early in the following year.
By this time, pursuing the lecture timetable laid out by Major Pond, Ann Eliza had finished a speaking engagement in Virginia City, Nevada, and was on her way to a month of appearances in northern California. On the evening of October 9, 1874, Ann Eliza delivered her first lecture in San Francisco. Competing with the stage play, Davy Crockett, at the California Theatre, Ann Eliza filled “most of the benches” in Mercantile Library Hall. The following night she drew an even larger crowd. Two days later she was at the Methodist Episcopal Church, and because tickets were lowered to the bargain price of fifty cents each, she had another sellout. So popular was her lecture that the same church hired her to present her entire series of three talks again, at the end of the month, for a flat fee of $ 1,000.
After lecturing in Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, and other smaller California communities, Ann Eliza, accompanied by Major Pond and one Latimer Prescott, returned to Salt Lake City early in November for her final public appearances there. One of these appearances particularly held high drama for Ann Eliza. She faced a large audience in the Methodist Church. The majority of the audience was Mormon, including some of Brigham’s daughters again, but the guest of honor was Ann Eliza’s mother. Chauncey and the first Mrs. Webb sat in the front row. While Chauncey had heard his daughter speak before, the first Mrs. Webb had not. It had required, admitted Ann Eliza, “a great deal of persuasion” to woo her to a public place. By now the first Mrs. Webb’s apostasy was known, but she was still ashamed of parading it, especially at an anti-polygamy lecture conducted by her own offspring.
This lecture was one of the final series that Ann Eliza gave in the town of her travail. Soon she was on a Union Pacific train again headed east, but her progress was gradual, for she stopped over in Laramie and Omaha for encore appearances. After that she began an extensive tour of Iowa, speaking in Council Bluffs, Des Moines, Newton, Grinnell, Iowa City, Mount Pleasant, Ottunawa, and Creston. From Iowa she made her way into Minnesota, performing in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Mankato, and then she rode down into Wisconsin, visiting Eau Claire and La Crosse. Her first year of lecturing ended with two engagements in Chicago, where her antagonist, editor Story of the Times, was happily silent.
Somewhere between Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ann Eliza had learned that the last cord binding her to the past had been severed. Someone had sent her the issue of the Salt Lake City Evening News dated November 19, 1874. Buried near the bottom of a column headed “Local and Other Matters,” she found the item that carried her name. “To Whom It May Concern—This is to certify that Ann Eliza Webb Young was cut off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by the High Council, October 10th, 1874.” The notice of excommunication was signed “Geo. E. Wallace, Clerk of High Council.”
Forever after they claimed that they had dismissed her. Forever after she claimed that she had quit them.
Not quite three months later, on February 12, 1875, Ann Eliza’s father, Chauncey Webb, in answer to the charge “of apostatizing from the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” appeared before the Mormon High Council in the Salt Lake City Hall. Among his dozen judges were George E. Wallace, clerk of the council, John T. Caine, editor of the Herald, and Angus M. Cannon, one of his oldest friends.
After prayers the accused was asked if he pleaded guilty or not guilty. To this Chauncey Webb replied heatedly, “Not guilty to the charge of apostacy, although I would have preferred that the charge should allege my dissent from the innovations introduced in the Church by so corrupt a leader as Brigham Young.” Then Cannon arose to explain that though he loved Chauncey as a brother, and regarded him as a person of the best character and greatest liberality, he had recently “fallen into evil ways.”
Chauncey came to his feet at once. No matter what the council’s action, he said, he would forgive them all, that is, all but John T. Caine, editor of the Herald. “The gentleman will remember,” continued Chauncey, glaring at Caine, “that the paper of which he is proprietor and editor, published a whole string of lies and calumnies assailing my daughter’s fair name, and repeated the foul charge with many innuendos. I waited until the libel had been fully refuted, and my daughter stood before the world with character redeemed, and then I addressed a respectful letter to the editor of the Herald asking that the charge be retracted and justice done my daughter. There was nothing unreasonable or improper in this. My feelings as a parent led me to ask simple justice to an injured lady, my daughter, and this letter was responded to by the publication of another article in the columns of the Herald, even more offensive and injurious than those which had preceded… It does seem a farce to have that man sitting in judgment upon my right to a membership in the Church, when he is himself a convicted liar and calumniator.”
Shortly after, the vote for expulsion was taken. The vote was unanimous, and the result was made public three days later. It read: “To Whom It May Concern—This is to certify that C. G. Webb and Eliza Jane Webb were cut off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by the High Council of this State of Zion, Friday, February 12th, 1875.” The signature was that of the ever-busy George E. Wallace.
And so, finally, for the first Mrs. Webb, at least, what had begun so long ago in Kirtland, and been enjoyed and endured in Nauvoo and on the banks of the Missouri and across the plains to early Salt Lake City, was done and ended. Not many months later, the first Mrs. Webb broke another tie. Her daughter had sent her money to come east with her grandsons. While Chauncey Webb, despite his excommunication, elected to live on in South Cottonwood with his surviving wives, the first Mrs. Webb refused to remain. Having left her religion, she now left her husband.
Early in 1875 the first Mrs. Webb, fifty-eight years old, and Ann Eliza’s two growing sons moved to Lockport, New York, near which the first Mrs. Webb had a sister. There, close to the scenes of her birth, the first Mrs. Webb made a home for her grandsons and herself and provided an occasional stopping place for the constantly moving Ann Eliza, first in a boardinghouse, then in a cottage on Walnut Street.
The change seemed to satisfy the daughter more than the mother. A year after it had been made, Ann Eliza wrote of her mother: “I think no one rejoiced in my success more than she did, and certainly no one else has had power to imbue me with such fresh courage and strength. And now that she has abandoned Mormonism, when I think of her, away from the old associations, united in her old age to the friends of her childhood, happy in a home safe from the intrusion of polygamy, every shade of bigotry blotted out, her reason unfettered, her will free, I am happier than I ever can say…
However, the first Mrs. Webb was less ecstatic in describing her lot. In a letter to her son Gilbert, dated January 19, 1876, she wrote: “I do not see much of Ann Eliza she comes about once in six weeks and stays not more than two days, when she is off again to fill her appointments. She is far from strong and her time all occupied with business, so there is very little time for her to visit
“There is quite as much bigotry, superstition, and fanaticism in with me while here… the east as in the west, and more trouble in monogamic marriage than I had supposed; I find there is a ‘skeleton in every closet’; and it really does not seem that the world is nearing the millennium by any means, but rather going the other way… I suppose Heaven knows I have seen enough to disgust me with religious nonsense. I am corresponding with a gentleman who says if he had the making of the Bible, he would change things around, put the New Testament in the forepart of the book, and put the Old Testament in the Appendix, and put the Appendix into the stove. Yet this gentleman thinks the New Testament about right, but I told him I was in favor of both going into the stove together.”
If the first Mrs. Webb made the same complaints to her daughter, it is doubtful that her daughter had time to pay heed. For, with her mother settled among old friends, and her sons, Edward Wesley and Leonard, in a private school and within easy reach, Ann Eliza was able to resume her career of full-time lady lecturer. The first season under Pond and Redpath had been an enormous success. She had lectured 161 times, drawn audiences as large as any attracted by such veterans as Anna E. Dickinson and Mary A. Livermore, and she had earned $20,000.
If she worried that her success had been freakish, based only on novelty, this fear was quickly dispelled by her managers. Major Pond felt that her elocutionary abilities alone would keep her on the lyceum circuit for years. James Redpath believed that as long as polygamy continued to be a raging national issue, and as long as Brigham Young existed as his last wife’s active antagonist, Ann Eliza would be in demand. Her managers were proved right. Requests for repeat bookings—Boston would hear her fourteen times in all—poured in weekly. Early in 1875 Ann Eliza signed a long-term contract with Redpath, agreeing to perform as a featured member of his Star Lecture Course, and soon she was on the road again.
Ann Eliza had gone into lecturing at the perfect moment in lyceum history. Had she arrived on the scene any earlier, her voice might have been drowned out by the babble of too many other voices more strident and professional. In the half century preceding Ann Eliza’s entry into the field, lecturing was still being transformed from a small, erratic, cultural diversion into a highly organized and booming big business.
The first American lyceum group had been formed in 1826 by Josiah Holbrook, a literate Yale man who owned a farm in Millbury, Massachusetts. Holbrook’s group met evenings to listen to each other and to hear authoritative speakers from neighboring villages. Slowly Holbrook’s idea spread, and by 1831 an American Lyceum Association was created to give some unity to the groups throughout the East. Men like John B. Gough, Wendell Phillips, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, and Daniel Webster were the pioneer lecturers. Most often for their services they received not salary but gifts. Emerson’s fee of five dollars and oats for his horse was a typical honorarium. Phillips frequently came away with no more than twenty-five dollars and Gough with fifty dollars.
It was James Redpath who converted these amateur cultural meetings into big business. Redpath had traveled a strange road to his calling. At seventeen, with a knowledge of typesetting, shorthand, and authorship (he had written a volume of folklore with his father), he migrated from Scotland to the United States. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, and in Detroit he was a newspaperman. His abolitionist articles caught the eye of Horace Greeley, and at nineteen he was an editor on the New York Tribune. For five years he hiked through the South, writing a series of sensational articles entitled The Roving Editor, or Talks With Slaves. In Virginia, disappointed over some business ventures, depressed and lonely, he planned to blow out his brains with a pistol but was diverted by the reading of a book, Alone, written by Marion Harland. The book gave him courage to live, and he wrote the author that he would repay her by writing and publishing 1,000 notices praising her work. And this he did.
Resuming his travels, Redpath discovered, encamped near a Kansas creek, a gnarled old man and his gang of armed fire-eaters, all pledged to fight slavery. The old man was John Brown, and Redpath made him a legend in his Tribune articles—after that the Tribune was legally barred from Kansas—and in two books. Talking to his friend, Wendell Phillips, Redpath got the idea of colonizing Haiti with freed American slaves. To explore the feasibility of the idea, he went to Haiti and then published a guide book about the island. Because of his efforts for them, the Haitian government made him their commissioner of immigration in Philadelphia. During the Civil War, Redpath tramped through Georgia with General Sherman and wrote about the experience. In Charleston, South Carolina, Redpath remembered the war dead and originated Memorial Day.
And then, at last, in 1867, he heard Charles Dickens speak in Boston. The following morning at breakfast, he ruminated aloud, “There should be a general headquarters, a bureau for the welcome of literary men and women coming to our country for the purpose of lecturing. They should be made to feel at home among us, and the business of arranging routes of travel and dates for lectures and so forth be in charge of competent workers, and an established fee agreed upon.”
Shortly afterward Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau was opened in Boston, and the lecture platform had its first genius.
In the half dozen years before Ann Eliza came along, Redpath had acquired a virtual monopoly on the nation’s leading speakers. The most popular of his male clients was John B. Gough, a reformed drunkard and an acrobatic orator, who roared out against liquor and stimulants. So intense were Gough’s exhortations that his clothes were soaked through with perspiration after each two-hour lecture. He took to wearing two overcoats at once to fend off pneumonia. In forty-four years Gough delivered 9,600 speeches to nine million listeners. Under Redpath he reached his peak and earned $40,000 in a single season.
Mark Twain signed on with Redpath and eventually made a fortune in lecturing. Twain had a clause in his contract that allowed him to default on any church bookings. “I never made a success of a lecture in a church,” Twain told Redpath. “People are afraid to laugh in church.” Frederick Douglass, the brilliant mulatto who had been a slave and had also been Victoria Woodhull’s running mate when she aspired to the presidency, left the newspaper he published in Rochester, New York, to be handled by Redpath’s bureau. Josh Billings, who was widely quoted for his remark “All girls marry Young—in Utah,” was another client. His most successful lecture was entitled “Milk.” He stood at the lectern, a glass of milk beside him, and delivered an entire talk without once referring to the glass or the milk. Thomas Nast, conqueror of Tammany Hall, sketched cartoons as he spoke and earned $40,000 in his opening tour for Redpath. Wendell Phillips, the polished aristocrat, earned $500 a lecture—twenty times what he had earned on his own—addressing audiences on law, Europe, Indians, and Ireland.
In 1871 there were 150 lady lecturers traveling up and down the land, shrilly dedicated to the suffrage cause, Negro integration, temperance, literature, and the other arts. For his 10 per cent Redpath handled more of these women than any other manager, and he handled far and away the most popular of them. Until the advent of Ann Eliza, Redpath’s foremost female lecturer had been Anna E. Dickinson, an explosive young lady with chestnut hair and a boyish figure. She had entered into lecturing quite by accident. One night, attending her Quaker church, she heard a man abuse the feminist movement. Blindly incensed, Miss Dickinson leaped to her feet and, shaking her fist in the man’s face, annihilated him with a stream of invective. Thereafter she saved her outbursts for paying customers, speaking out in favor of female and Negro emancipation. It is said that her appearances changed Vermont from a Democratic state to a Republican one. She titillated large audiences by her shocking frankness, using such unheard-of words as “legs.” Under Redpath’s guidance she earned from $20,000 to $40,000 a year.
Redpath’s other female clients included Mary A. Livermore, a former reporter and editor, who preached temperance; Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” who spoke on slavery; Lucy Stone, the Oberlin College graduate, who fought against all odds (hoses of water were sometimes directed at her) to gain women the vote.
By the year 1875, most of these renowned clients had passed their peak and their subjects had grown stale. Slavery in reconstruction days was no longer a burning issue. Temperance had been talked to death. Female suffrage seemed a frivolous fantasy. As to the old speakers, John B. Gough had lost his voice; Anna E. Dickinson had abandoned the platform for the theater and would know failure as an actress; Thomas Nast had returned to drawing political cartoons for his newspaper; Henry Ward Beecher had been reviled as a seducer and still lived in disgrace; and even the perennial Josh Billings was beginning to wear thin.
Yet, in 1875, over five hundred lyceum groups, demanding amusement and education, offered opportunity to new blood. It was the best of times for Ann Eliza. She was a young thirty-one, an attractive and a fresh personality, and her subject of polygamy was more topical than ever. In discussing Mormonism, Ann Eliza had only two major female rivals. One was the admirable Mrs. Fanny Stenhouse, whose book had helped inspire Ann Eliza’s escape. The other was Kate Field, who had entered the lecture field four years before Ann Eliza. Miss Field, a pretty clotheshorse, first fascinated audiences with her biographical lectures on John Brown and Charles Dickens. At last she visited Utah and for eight months gave much of her time to interviewing wives in polygamy. This became her favorite lecture subject. She told audiences that Brigham Young was a “vulgar, illogical, wonderful old man.” She thought Mormon treason worse than Mormon plural marriage. She exchanged letters with Mark Twain on the subject. She wanted polygamy dissolved by force; Twain felt laughter was better than violence. He wrote Miss Field: “Am I a friend to the Mormon religion? No. I would like to see it extirpated, but always by fair means, not these Congressional rascalities.” Not until Kate Field became a cremationist—”because I believe cremation is not only the healthiest and cleanest, but the most poetical way of disposing of the dead”—did she ease up on Mormonism. Yet neither of these two rivals gave Ann Eliza serious competition. Mrs. Stenhouse had been married to a relatively little-known polygamist, whereas Ann Eliza had been married to the Prophet. Kate Field was an outsider, without Ann Eliza’s authority, and furthermore, Miss Field only challenged the last year of Ann Eliza’s lecturing career.
Soon after Ann Eliza had gone off on her second swing through the East, she learned that Redpath was no longer her mentor. Mercurial as ever, too restless to remain tied to a desk, Redpath had sold his famous Lyceum Bureau on October 5, 1875, to Major Pond and to George H. Hathaway. For Ann Eliza it was a loss. She had developed a great dependency on Redpath, after he had stood firmly beside her in the Bloomington scandal. In the years that followed, she would watch his career closely.
Foot-loose though he now was, Redpath did not entirely divorce himself from lecture management. He promoted a coast-to-coast tour for Robert G. Ingersoll, the great orator, notorious agnostic, and foe of the Bible. After that he formed the Redpath English Opera Company and introduced Gilbert and Sullivan to the United States. Finally he had a nervous breakdown and gave up the lecture field entirely. After recuperating in the West Indies, he took two trips to Ireland for the New York Tribune. Dismayed by the famine that he observed, and by the brutal activities of landlords like Captain Charles Boycott, Redpath acted. He raised $125,000 for the Irish, and then, recalling how tradesmen resisted Captain Boycott by refusing to sell him wares, Redpath coined the word “boycott” as a synonym for “ostracize.” Soon he had new American crusades, one against New York slum conditions, another supporting the single-tax theories of Henry George. When Ann Eliza next heard of him, he was busily collaborating with Jefferson Davis, ghostwriting the old Confederate chief’s autobiography. He had come a long way from John Brown.
Meanwhile, in Boston, Major Pond, the showman, and Hathaway, the conservative, managed Ann Eliza’s tours. For four years there was friction between the partner managers, and in 1879 Pond sold his half of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau to Hathaway, then set up his own office in New York City. Pond retained Ann Eliza and Henry Ward Beecher as his star clients. After this Pond was rarely to travel with the twenty-seventh wife. He arranged her tours by mail and sent her off with a female companion hired in the East. When he did travel, Pond traveled with Beecher. Only through Pond’s nervy and astute handling was Beecher able to make a comeback. Pond accompanied the tainted clergyman on trips, which eventually covered 300,000 miles. Between American and English engagements, Beecher lectured 1,261 times for Pond.
The decade after 1873 that Ann Eliza gave to lecturing was a dizzying and exhausting experience. In lecture circles she was called “a paying card,” meaning that she attracted large box-office receipts. Even her female competitors felt affection for her. In February of 1875, Mary A. Livermore wrote a lecture committee in Castile, New York: “You will find Mrs. Young a very lovely woman. She is very fine looking, gentle, womanly, and ladylike, utterly removed from the coarseness and ignorance that we associate with Mormon women. I know her personally, and am greatly interested in her, and I can assure you that the people of Castile will not only be pleased with Mrs. Young, but greatly interested in the touching story of her life…”
Ann Eliza lectured eight months out of every twelve. The four free months were spent in Lockport with her sons and mother or in New York City visiting physicians. She delivered between 160 and 180 lectures each year. The Washington correspondent for the New York Independent, Mary Clemmer Ames, drew a word portrait of Ann Eliza in this period of her life: “Her whole presence indicates refinement, sensitiveness, and fineness of organization. She has an acutely nervous temperament, and the delicacy of frame, which always accompanies it. She is slender to fragility, and has the slight throat and small features always apparent where the nervous force predominates over the vital. Her hair is black, and arranged in the heavy coils of the day; her face is colorless, but her complexion remarkable for its purity; her black eyebrows, strikingly defined on her low white brow, are almost horizontal, and from under them look out full, but not large, blue eyes, filled by turns with fire, softness, and sorrow. The prevailing expression of the face is habitual sadness.”
Ann Eliza appreciated Mrs. Ames’ description and decided that they must become friends. In June of 1876, while in New York City for six weeks under the care of Dr. J. Marion Sims, Ann Eliza wrote to Mrs. Ames: “I have always felt the greatest anxiety to meet you, as I can never forget all you have done for me and I love you very dearly for it. I shall leave here next Sunday night for Lockport, N.Y. where my mother and two little boys are and where I expect to spend the summer. I very much hope I may see you.”
In the wake of first Redpath’s and now Pond’s magnificent four-page circulars—containing her biography, description, successes, and recommendations, as well as photographs of the Salt Lake City Tabernacle, a lithograph of Ann Eliza, and woodcuts of the Bee Hive House, the Endowment House, and the Lion House parlor with the various wives at prayer with Brigham—Ann Eliza paraded her sufferings and indignation across the land. One week she was in Mount Morris, New York, another in Rochester, New York (where the Baptist Sunday School gave tickets to her lecture as prizes to honor students), another in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, another in Mishawaka, Indiana, another in East Minneapolis, Minnesota, another in Quincy, Illinois, another in Columbus, Ohio.
The lecture grind was not an easy life in the 1870s. Wendell Phillips, writing Pond from Iowa, gave a vivid picture of the lecturer’s lot: “It has been extremely cold. I have been in the smaller towns and have had poor hotels and a generally hard time, rushed from one train to another, and puffed from station to station. In eleven days I have slept in a regular bed but four nights.”
For Ann Eliza the clapboard hotels, chilling in winter, roasting in summer, the hasty meals in dingy restaurants, the strenuous appearances before acres of faces, these were difficult, but not the worst of it. The worst of it was the claustrophobic train life. Endlessly, it seemed, she was on Mr. Pullman’s sleeper cars, jolting, bumping, stopping, starting, nauseated by the smell of paint and brass and green upholstery, eyes wearied by the constant shifting of scenery beyond the dirty windows.
Most hateful of all were the crude sleeping berths. Ann Eliza found, upon reading an issue of the Daily Times of Leavenworth, Kansas, that she was not alone in her feelings. To this newspaper a lady traveler registered her complaint: “A woman’s toilet, to be satisfactorily performed, demands some other position than prone upon the face. Likewise, it is somewhat more agreeable to perform portions of the toilet unobserved by the multitude… A woman carefully extinguishes herself behind the curtains, slyly unloosens a lace, envelopes herself decorously in a large waterproof, not daring to lay aside her chignon for fear of a surprise… I think if there could be a lady’s car for sleeping and toilet, exclusive of gentlemen, it would be a great advancement in wayfaring civilization. I thought so this morning, especially when I awoke from uneasy slumbers to find the foot-board fallen, and a group of serene browed men gazing smilingly upon my sleeping beauty. Let us have separate cars, good people…”
Yet, despite these discomforts, Ann Eliza did not waver. As long as the Poland Law was proving ineffective and polygamy persisted, and as long as there were paying audiences, she went on and on. By August of 1875, she had added a fourth lecture to her series. This was “Utah As It Was, As It Is.” Time and again she was brought back to communities for repeat engagements, not only because of what she said but for the way she said it. Through the years her forensic abilities constantly improved. As late as 1901, after almost three decades of handling the world’s finest speakers, Major Pond was able to write of Ann Eliza: “I will say now that in all my experience I have never found so eloquent, so interesting, so earnest a talker. I have heard a great many, too. She had a cause. She was in dead earnest. She could sway audiences with her eloquence.”
From the start the eastern book publishers had been after her to commit her story to paper. At last she complied. In 1876, for whatever personal motives there might have been—to bring her crusade before a larger audience, to make money, to enhance her worth as a lecturer—she put her book before the public. It was a formidable 605-page volume, half autobiography, half diatribe against polygamy and Brigham. The coarse brown linen binding carried the title Wife No. 19, or A Life in Bondage… A Full Exposé of Mormonism by Ann-Eliza Young. The publisher was the highly respected Dustin, Gilman and Company of Hartford, Connecticut.
The title of the book invited the first controversy. Was Ann Eliza only wife number nineteen? Actually she was not, and she knew better. When she had married Brigham in 1869, she had become his nineteenth living wife. Forever after, from the lecture platform and in print, she gave herself this numerical standing, without bothering to explain how she had arrived at the figure. The absolute total of Brigham’s wives, living or dead, earthly or spiritual, was not known in Brigham’s time, perhaps not even by the Prophet himself, and this absolute total is not known to this day.
One of Ann Eliza’s favorite anecdotes about Brigham and his marriages seems to support the elusiveness of a correct count. Once, said Ann Eliza, Brigham met a lady in the streets of Salt Lake City and was surprised when she greeted him cordially as Brother Young. He looked at her blankly and remarked, “I know I have seen you somewhere; your face is very familiar, but I cannot recall you.” The lady replied, “You are right; you have most certainly seen me before; I was married to you ten years ago…”
In 1861 Captain Richard Burton said that he had heard Brigham had been married between seventeen and thirty-six times. Most Gentile estimates, at the time and since, ranged between those figures.
Curiously, Mormon sources have been equally inexact. Today in the files of the Archives Room of the Latter-day Saints Genealogical Society—open only to Mormons—in Salt Lake City, there is an official roll call of Brigham’s wives, a list possibly never before made public. According to this record, Brigham had fifty-two wives, and the fiftieth was Ann Eliza.
Of the fifty-two wives listed in the Genealogical Society roster, thirty-one of them married Brigham in 1846, the year of the flight from Nauvoo, Illinois, and the settling of the Saints at Winter Quarters. Seven of these women married Brigham in one day, on February 3, 1846, although of these only Eliza R. Snow ever moved into the Lion House. Eight of these women are also listed in the archives as official widows of Joseph Smith. Thirteen were married by Brigham only for their time on earth, their eternity belonging to previous mates.
This roster, while it presents probably the most complete Mormon record of Brigham’s marriages, does not give the most accurate picture of the Prophet’s actual wives. Almost half of the women mentioned were Brigham’s spouses in name only—spiritual wives—joined to him as a means of receiving his protection. Many of these neither lived with Brigham as real wives nor consummated their marriages with him.
According to three of the best Mormon historians of Brigham’s domestic life—James H. Crockwell, Kate B. Carter, and the Prophet’s daughter, Mabel Young Sanborn, who lived to the age of eighty-seven—Brigham had twenty-seven wives, no more, no less.
Despite the fact that the Genealogical Society records give the date of Ann Eliza’s marriage to Brigham as April 7, 1868, and Mabel Young Sanborn gives it as April 6, 1868, Ann Eliza claimed that the marriage had taken place one year later, on April 7, 1869. At this date eighteen of his twenty-six wives were alive, and so Ann Eliza always assumed that she was number nineteen—perhaps because it made her feel less removed than being called wife number twenty-seven. For this reason her long-awaited book was entitled Wife No. 19.
The 605-page volume, dedicated “To the Mormon wives of Utah,” carried two introductory notes by lecture-platform celebrities. The first, written a year before publication, was by that enemy of alcoholism, John B. Gough, who stated: “I need not assure her of my entire confidence in her sincerity and ability to carry out the work to which she has devoted herself, and the talents God has given her. I believe she has been called to this mission…” The other, written by Mary A. Livermore, remarked that the book had been read “with painful interest, which has deepened into disgust and pity,” and added: “I congratulate her on her complete emancipation, on her reunion with her beloved, whose obvious peril weighed too heavily on her filial and maternal heart, and on the possession of ability to give to the world an exposé of the Mormon horror, such as has never been received.”
The forty-one chapters of Wife No. 19 began with Ann Eliza’s heritage and childhood and ended with her triumphant return to Salt Lake City as a successful lecturer. Once, on page thirty-two, she tried to explain why she had undertaken to write this book:
“It is with a desire to impress upon the world what Mormonism really is; to show the pitiful condition of its women, held in a system of bondage that is more cruel than African slavery ever was, since it claims to hold body and soul alike; to arouse compassion for its children and youth, born and growing up in an atmosphere of social impurity; and, above all, to awaken an interest in the hearts of the American people that shall at length deepen into indignation—that I venture to undertake the task of writing this book. I have consecrated myself to the work, not merely for my own sake, but for the sake of all the unhappy women of Utah, who, unlike myself, are either too powerless or too timid to break the fetters which bind them.”
Although the book purported to relate the story of Ann Eliza’s life, it was so filled with lengthy digressions against various Apostles, against Danites, against polygamy, so crowded with case histories of suffering plural wives, that few personal facts about the author herself came through. Nowhere were given her sons’ birthdays or description of their childhood. Nowhere was Major Pond’s name spelled out. Nowhere was there a chronology of the lectures and difficulties after her first Denver success. Nowhere was there a balanced account of life in a plural household. Instead, page after page was devoted to invective against Brigham Young. “To look at the man,” she wrote on page 269, “rosy and smiling, comfortable in every particular, you would never take him to be the hard, cruel despot he is. He looks clean enough outwardly, but within he is filled with moral rottenness to the very core.”
The prose was marred by unremitting hysteria. A typically anguished passage was that on page 401:
“Why cannot men and women, outside of this terrible system, see the horrors of it, and work for its overthrow? My soul cries out in very agony sometimes, ‘Is there no help for this great evil?’ Everywhere the world seems so dead to it! The enormity does not seem to manifest itself unto them. They speak lightly of Mormonism, as of something to ridicule or laugh at, rather than to condemn. God knows there is nothing laughable or ridiculous in it to its victims. It is the most pathetic, tragic earnestness and reality.”
Nearing the end, on page 591, she defended her outbursts against polygamy:
“I am accused sometimes of exaggeration. In reply to that accusation I would say, that is simply impossible, I could not exaggerate, since language is inadequate to even half unveil the horrors. There are events of daily occurrence, which decency and womanly modesty forbid my even hinting at… Not a word of my story is exaggerated or embellished. The difficulty has been rather to suppress and tone down.”
Occasionally, amid the swamps of turgid prose, the overgrown bypaths of repetitive rumor, there grew a valuable fact about Ann Eliza herself or her life with Brigham and his wives. But as the only one of Brigham’s wives to make public her story in her lifetime (Eliza R. Snow’s autobiography remained unpublished until 1944), Ann Eliza missed her chance for a rare historical contribution by giving way to emotional vengeance. In 1925 M. R. Werner, a biographer of Brigham Young, wrote of Wife No. 19: “One turns from its pages disappointed with the authoress, who did not make nearly the most of her opportunities, bored with her attempts to make of herself a martyr, and more than ever sympathetic with the trials of Brigham Young.”
If historians were dissatisfied with Ann Eliza’s book, her public was not. Dustin, Gilman and Company, the publishers, decided to sell it by subscription, door to door—as Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad had been and Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs was to be sold—and advertised for agents or salesmen to take on the campaign. “No book ever issued from our press,” said the publisher, “has met with such a flattering reception, or given such general satisfaction. Orders are coming in rapidly, and new territory is being engaged day by day; and no time should be lost in securing a field for operation… Agents all over the country are meeting with a success which is most extraordinary, frequently taking as many as 20, 30, and even 40 orders daily.”
Few, if any, top-flight critics reviewed the book. However, clergymen and educators were quick to comment on it, largely in the secular press. Thomas M. Dill, a school principal in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a typical critic. He found Wife No. 19 a “necessary, instructive and entertaining contribution to American Literature.” Similarly, in March 1876, the editor of The Christian Standard reviewed Wife No. 19 as “a plain, unvarnished tale of a woman’s wrongs and sufferings endured in the Mormon church… Ann Eliza’s hook is an obstacle in the way of Josephism.”
More recent critics have questioned Ann Eliza’s authorship of the volume, mainly because her degree of literacy is held suspect, but also because her time between lectures had been so greatly taken up by visits to doctors. According to Brigham’s daughter, Susa Young Gates, in that part of the biography of her father that she withheld from publication: “The book which bore her name, ‘Wife Number Nineteen’ written (according to the testimony of her manager, Major James B. Pond) by Colonel Stratton, who accompanied her on her lectures, was a clever sob-story, with just enough truth in it to get across to a Barnumized public… The Major confessed to me that Ann Eliza did not write one word of her lectures; Major Stanton did that, and he also wrote her book.” The ghost writer Mrs. Gates referred to as “Colonel Stratton” and “Major Stanton” in her only partially proofed manuscript was undoubtedly the Reverend Stratton, who had not accompanied Ann Eliza on her tour, whatever literary assistance he may have provided.
But Stratton is not the only candidate for the actual authorship of Wife No. 19. Mrs. John A. Widtsoe, a granddaughter of Brigham Young, heard that Ann Eliza’s autobiography was ghostwritten by Major Pond. Dr. F. W. Cagle, Jr., of the University of Utah, an authority on polygamy, suggests that the book may have been written by J. H. Beadle, a frequently impoverished editor and hack. In 1870 Beadle had published his own exposé of Mormonism entitled Life in Utah, or The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism, and in 1872 he had ghostwritten Brigham’s Destroying Angel for the reformed Danite, Bill Hickman. Since Beadle was short of funds in 1874 and 1875, it is possible that he had assumed the task of serving as Ann Eliza’s shade. However, the tone of Ann Eliza’s private letters and impromptu interviews with the press on her lecture tours indicates that, although she may have retained a professional writer to correct and polish it, she undoubtedly wrote or dictated Wife No. 19.
Despite the fact that the best sellers of 1876—George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff—outsold Ann Elizas Wife No. 19, this memoir of a life in harem bondage had a widespread and commendable sale. There were at least three printings. No other confession by a polygamous wife, before or after, sold half as well.
Meanwhile, as Ann Eliza delivered her book to the printer, another important event in her life was reaching a climax, one that would keep her in the public eye and renew interest in her lectures. In Salt Lake City, The Deseret News announced that at seven o’clock in the evening of February 25, 1875, Judge James B. McKean would hand down his decision in the divorce case of “Young vs. Young.”
At last the moment of decision for Brigham Young and for his twenty-seventh wife was at hand. Judge McKean summarized the arguments, stating that, in the opinion of the court, Ann Eliza had been legally divorced from James L. Dee, and Brigham’s claims for Mary Ann Angell as his sole lawful wife “must be proved true before they could be admitted as evidence against the plaintiff.” Therefore, continued Judge McKean, the marriage contracted between Ann Eliza and Brigham “was legal and binding according to the laws of the Territory and of the United States, notwithstanding that the forms of the Mormon Church were used.”
In conclusion, said Judge McKean, since Ann Eliza had been the Prophet’s legal wife, he was awarding her $3,000 to cover costs of her suit, payable in ten days, and he was awarding her $500 a month alimony, retroactive to the date the suit was filed, or a total of $9,500, payable in twenty days.
Judge McKean’s decision in Utah caused an uproar of dismay in government circles in Washington, D.C. Until this moment President Grant had refused to recognize polygamy and had labeled all plural marriages as “licensed prostitution.” Now one of Grant’s appointees had, speaking for the Federal government, acknowledged that a polygamous marriage was a legal marriage and, by this act, made Mormon polygamy lawful and acceptable. It is possible that, in his eagerness to strike a blow at Brigham, Judge McKean did not understand the far-reaching consequences of his decision. But the press, as one body, castigated him. Wrote the New York Post: “by this decision the Judge receded from his own principles and may fairly be hailed by the Mormon Church as a convert to the doctrine of polygamy.”
The agitation was soon heightened by Brigham Young’s next act. Blessed though he was to find polygamy accepted as legal, he was indignant at the success of Ann Eliza’s “extortion.” While paying her $3,000 for costs, he refused to deliver the $9,500 due as alimony. Promptly he was summoned into court again.
On March 11, 1875, Brigham, surrounded by his legal staff, faced his archenemy, Judge McKean, once more. Since Brigham had refused to make the alimony payment, the judge wanted to know why he should not be held in contempt of court. Brigham’s attorneys argued that they had filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, so there was no reason to hold Brigham in contempt. Judge McKean replied that his decision was “not appealable.” Then, after briskly summarizing the arguments, he concluded:
“It is, therefore, because of the facts and premises, ordered and adjudged that defendant is guilty of disobedience to the process of the Court, and is therein guilty of contempt of Court.
“And since the Court has not one rule of action where conspicuous and another where obscure persons are concerned; and since it is a fundamental principle of the Republic that all men are equal before the law; and since this Court desires to impress this great fact, this great law, upon the minds of all the people of this Territory:
“Now, therefore, because of the said contempt of Court, it is further ordered and adjudged, that the said Brigham Young do pay a fine of twenty-five dollars, and that he be imprisoned for the term of one day.”
This was not the first time that Judge McKean had sentenced Brigham to imprisonment. Shortly after his arrival in Utah, five years earlier, Judge McKean had set out to prove that the Gentile Federal courts outranked the Mormon territorial courts. Under McKean, cases heretofore tried before Mormon juries were suddenly being tried before Gentile juries. The first major test came when Paul Engelbrecht, a Gentile, tried to sell liquor without a license. Brigham’s police raided the saloon and poured Engelbrecht’s liquor into a ditch. The saloonkeeper sued in a Federal court and was heard by Judge McKean and a non-Mormon jury. Engelbrecht was awarded $59,000 in damages, three times his original loss, and the Mormons appealed the judgment to the United States Supreme Court.
While the Engelbrecht case was being appealed, Judge McKean decided to pit himself against the Prophet, who had recently married his twenty-seventh wife. Invoicing the old 1852 antibigamy law, McKean had his grand jury haul Brigham into court, above Faust’s Stable, for “lewd and lascivious cohabitation.” Released on a bail of $5,000, until a trial date could be set, Brigham traveled to St. George to spend the winter. McKean interpreted Brigham’s trip as a flight from justice and immediately demanded that he appear for trial in Salt Lake City on January 2, 1872. The Apostles feared that Brigham would be persecuted, and there was some talk of an escape to Mexico. Brigham would not have it. “God is in court as well as in battles and miracles,” he said. “There will be no resistance. I shall obey the summons.”
Traveling 300 miles in nine days, using an open buggy and a private train, traveling through the severest winter weather, Brigham returned to Salt Lake City to stand trial. Judge McKean did not hide his bias. “Let the counsel on both sides, and the court also keep constantly in mind the uncommon character of this case,” he said. “It is… proper to say that while the case at bar is called ‘the People versus Brigham Young,’ its other and real tide is ‘Federal Authority versus Polygamic Theocracy’… A system is on trial in the person of Brigham Young.” Speedily Brigham was found guilty and imprisoned in the Bee Hive House, under the constant guard of one Captain Evans. So handsome was the thirty-five-year-old captain that several of Brigham’s older daughters fell in love with him, and one admitted that “we were not at all sorry to have Father under arrest.” After three months of confinement, most of it spent in a rocking chair, after three months of being deprived of his pulpit in the Tabernacle, his evenings in the theater, his travels in the kingdom, Brigham’s fate was settled by the Supreme Court’s decision in the Engelbrecht case, which limited the jurisdiction of Federal courts. On April 15, 1872, Judge McKean received a wire from Washington, D.C.: “Jury unlawfully drawn: summons invalid; proceedings ordered dismissed. Decision unanimous. All indictments quashed.” The Mormon police who had raided Engelbrecht’s saloon were saved, and Brigham was free of house arrest.
The Sunday following his release, Brigham appeared before his congregation in the Tabernacle.
“A word to the Latter-day Saints,” he called out. “Good morning!”
“Good morning!” the congregation echoed.
“How do you do?”
“Very well!” came the chorus.
“How’s your faith in the Lord?”
“Strong!”
“How do you think I look after my long confinement?”
“First rate!”
On the other hand, Judge McKean did not feel first-rate. Patiently he had bided his time, waiting for a new opportunity. Now, on March 11, 1875, acting for his friend Ann Eliza, he had it. For the second time he had sentenced the Mormon leader to imprisonment.
Placed in the custody of United States Deputy Marshal A. K. Smith, Brigham was driven back to the Lion House to share dinner with his wives. Then, after packing a change of clothing, he got into the marshal’s carriage and started for the penitentiary, four miles outside the city. Twenty carriages, filled with friends and sympathizers, followed Brigham. At the jailhouse he was led into a cell already occupied by thirteen criminals. However, by nightfall he had been removed to a small, comfortable room next to the warden’s office. Brigham’s nephew and physician, Dr. Seymour B. Young, as well as Daniel H. Wells, the mayor of Salt Lake City, and a Bee Hive House clerk named William A. Rossiter, spent the night of imprisonment with Brigham. The following day, March 12,1875, his sentence served, Brigham was released.
In the East, between lectures, Ann Eliza briefly enjoyed her victory. Through McKean she had succeeded where all the men who were the Prophet’s enemies had failed—she had forced him to serve out a sentence in a Federal penitentiary.
Curiously, at the bar of the nation’s press, Judge McKean seemed to be regarded as the villain and Brigham Young as the hero. Not unexpectedly, The Deseret News was incensed by the jailing of its leader: “By some few small contemptible people it may be considered a good thing to heap an indignity upon the head of a venerable and much respected gentleman, who has frequently done more for the good of his country and humanity generally in one day than most of his enemies may ever expect to do in the aggregate were they to live to the age of Methuselah.”
But, surprisingly, newspapers outside of Salt Lake City concurred with this indictment of McKean. The Omaha Herald considered McKean’s sentence “a beautiful exhibition of the personal littleness and malice of the Puritan bigot who was kicked out of Congress some years ago.” The Pittsburgh Leader was of a similar mind: “The plain truth is, ‘Judge’ McKean has acted like a bigot ever since he went to Utah.” To which the San Francisco Bulletin added: “The tendency to become partizan appears to be very strong. The result is that the judge rapidly takes on the character of the prosecutor. This was the trouble with the last judge. McKean succumbed to the same influence.”
Five days after Brigham was released from jail, his nemesis Judge McKean was released from his judiciary post. President Grant had suffered through many of his appointee’s irregularities—once, when a mining company in which McKean was a major owner was sued, McKean had sat in judgment of himself—but the legalizing of Ann Eliza’s marriage and the jailing of the Prophet were too much. McKean was fired, the dispatch from Washington said, because his decisions were “ill advised and tyrannical, and in excess of his powers as a judge.” Crushed, McKean retired to a small private law practice in Salt Lake City, which he maintained until his death from typhoid fever in 1879.
McKean’s replacement was Judge David P. Lowe, a former congressman from Kansas. Immediately Ann Eliza sued for her back alimony, and Judge Lowe, apparently under firm instructions, reversed the decision of his predecessor on the bench by decreeing that Ann Eliza’s marriage to Brigham had not been legal and, therefore, she was not entitled to alimony. The Mormon press took Judge Lowe to its bosom. Said The Deseret News: “The ruling is very elaborate, showing the deep attention the Judge has given to the subject, the reasoning being so clear, in every particular, as to appear simply unanswerable, and is considered, by members of the bar generally, to be the most learned opinion ever delivered from the bench in this Territory.”
Mormon ecstasy was short-lived. Judge Lowe resigned, and Judge Jacob S. Boreman took over the further disposition of Ann Eliza’s suit. What happened next was recounted by Brigham in a letter to Albert Carrington, President of the Mormon European mission: “We had thought that the suit, commonly known as the ‘Ann Eliza case,’ so far as alimony pendente lite was concerned, would not be resurrected in the courts, but through a technicality of the law, the plaintiff’s attorneys were enabled to bring the matter up before Judge Boreman, who issued an order upon me to show cause why I should not be adjudged guilty of contempt of court in not having paid the alimony ordered by Chief Justice McKean… after the matter was argued by counsel, he gave his decision that I must pay the amount claimed, or be imprisoned until it was paid. I was committed to the charge of Marshall Maxwell, who, finding I was too sick to be removed, placed me in the care of two of his deputies. At first some little friction was manifested, but now everything is moving smoothly and kindly.”
Eleven days later Brigham wrote Carrington again: “I still remain a prisoner in the care of the United States Marshal, though nobody, saint or sinner, has the least idea that I would run away, if there was not a Marshal or other U.S. officer within a thousand miles.”
Once more Brigham remained imprisoned, under guard, in his harem. Some newspapers considered this cruel and unusual punishment. Others were doubtful that Ann Eliza deserved the $9,500 that Brigham refused to pay her. Among the latter was the Daily Alta California of San Francisco, and Ann Eliza must have been distressed when she read its lead editorial of November 3,1875:
“We have no personal friendship for Brigham Young, nor any toleration for his marital crochets, and in many other things we think him reprehensible; but our dislikes of the man, or disinclination for his religious faith should not disqualify us from pointing out the gross injustice which a woman and a coterie of men are seeking to impose upon him at the present time in offering to him the choice of paying to Ann Eliza, who, in the sight of the law is but ‘a mistress,’ the legitimate and honorable claims of a pure and virtuous wife, or go to prison for disobedience…
“Ann Eliza was old enough to have a good measure of sense for herself. She had experience enough in her father’s family, in her brother’s family, and in the families of the polygamic Mormons around her; she must have seen enough to know exactly what polygamy was before she joined Brigham Young’s lot of women; she was no ‘Spring chicken’…
“Had Ann Eliza gone before the Federal Court and represented that she was degraded in polygamy, and asked the Court to deliver her, if it could, from that relationship with Brigham Young, and prayed the Court to grant what aid and protection it could, Ann Eliza would have merited the sympathy of all who could pity the victims of wild enthusiasm…
“To deplete the treasury of Brigham Young any amount of thousands of dollars, in the manner now proposed, is simply to strengthen in the Mormons their accusations against the Gentile Judges of wilful persecution…”
If Ann Eliza thought that, despite a carping press, she was now closer to victory, she was again mistaken. President Grant had nominated J. Alexander White as Chief Justice of Utah, and now he took over her case. When Brigham presented a writ of habeas corpus, Judge White granted it, and after his five months of confinement, Brigham was once more free. On November 18, 1875, Amos Musser recorded in his journal: “… he was this morning released by order of Chief Justice White on writ of Habeas Corpus. Thus his notice again triumphed over tyranny & oppression thank the Lord.”
Still the divorce case dragged on. In three months Judge White was gone, the Senate having failed to confirm his appointment. In his stead sat Judge Michael Schaeffer, who decided that Brigham must pay alimony but reduced the monthly sum from $500 to $100, and who stipulated that he pay Ann Eliza $3,600 instead of the $18,000 by then due her. When Brigham resisted, Judge Schaeffer confiscated three span of his horses, three span of mules, three cows, three carriages, and three wagons and calmly prepared to auction them off. Wearily Brigham agreed to pay the $3,600 to Ann Eliza and did so.
But the last word in the divorce suit was still to be heard. On April 28, 1877, the New York Times ran a dispatch filed from Salt Lake City the day before. The first headline read: “A Menial Instead of a Wife.” The second read: “The Divorce Suit of Ann Eliza Young—The Decision in the Case—The Alleged Marriage Null and Void.” After four years of incessant legal fencing, Judge Schaeffer had passed the final decision, one that could not be appealed. Ann Eliza, he said, had not been legally married to Brigham Young. Hence, any alimony allegedly due her was annulled. Brigham must pay her court costs. The suit was closed.
In an editorial on May 2, 1877, the New York Times nodded its august approval. “Judge Schaeffer’s decision seems founded in equity and common sense. A woman, to secure legal standing in a suit for divorce, must have been lawfully married. To say that forty-nine women are entitled to lawful separation and divorce from one man, simultaneously, is to say that he was lawfully married to forty-nine wives, and that polygamy is recognized by the statutes. Brigham Young has pleaded that he is living in a condition of mystical concubinage. A United States court confirms that view, so far as the concubinage is concerned. It will be interesting to see what the Mormons, men and women, think of it.”
All parties seemed relieved to be done with it, the Mormons as well as Ann Eliza. Mormon historians called the four-year case a “malicious and vindictive” one, instigated for blackmail, and “a disgrace to those who instituted it.” In winning, Brigham had saved money but forfeited his last chance to give plural marriage a legal status in the nation. Now all but one of his wives were concubines in the eyes of the law. If any one of them left him, she could expect neither social standing nor Brigham’s further financial support. Had Ann Eliza won her suit, it was thought that Mary Van Cott and perhaps one or two more might also have sued for divorce.
With the “Ann Eliza case” settled, there was peace, or resignation, once more in the Lion House.
Despite the stigma of concubinage, Ann Eliza did not mind losing her suit. Although she could no longer honestly advertise herself as the former wife of Brigham Young, the publicity of her defeat attracted larger crowds than ever to her lectures. This rising income was a fair substitute for the alimony she had lost. In defeat she seemed to find the pleasures of a certain victory. As she wrote of Judge Schaeffer’s adjudication in later years:
“No doubt this decision was correct. I lost my suit, but I had compelled the dreaded monster to exhibit his real character in a court of justice, and to save his money by pleading that his whole conduct was contrary to law. Henceforth the decision in regard to the Mormon Prophet’s acts and liability for them rested with the world at large.”
The legal fight against Ann Eliza was Brigham Young’s last earthly combat. Four months later the Mormon giant lay dying.
The end came gradually, almost tentatively. On August 19, 1877, he preached a sermon to 2,500 Saints in Brigham City. The following day he returned by train to Salt Lake City. Except for lines of fatigue across his large face, and an inclination to sit more than stand, he did not seem to show his seventy-six years. On August 23 he was at his desk, between the Bee Hive House and the Lion House, as usual, although complaining of nausea. He led the evening prayer for his wives in the central parlor of the Lion House, and afterward he conferred with Eliza R. Snow on the feasibility of sending several of the other wives and two of his daughters on a lecture tour of the country. Eliza R. Snow thought that these happy women might use the recently published book, The Women of Mormondom, by Edward W. Tullidge, as their text and even sell copies of it. This was an effort to counteract the anti-Mormonism encouraged by Ann Eliza and other anti-polygamy speakers. Brigham considered the proposal an excellent one. “It is an experiment,” he said, “but one that I should like to see tried.” He felt weary and picked up his candle. “I think now I shall go and take my rest.”
At eleven o’clock that night, in his Lion House bedroom, Brigham was stricken with what was then called cholera morbus—acute appendicitis, one daughter defined it later. Dr. Seymour B. Young, Brigham’s nephew, and another physician were summoned, and these two attended him all through the night. In the next two days, there were four doctors. They reported that his bowels were inflamed. He suffered great pain, but occasionally the pain abated, and he made amusing remarks to the relatives gathered about him. By the fourth day, he appeared to be losing ground. Prayers gave way to hot poultices over the heart and hours of artificial respiration. When he groaned in semiconsciousness, someone kneeled close to ask if he was suffering. He replied weakly, “No, I don’t know that I do.”
On Wednesday, August 29, 1877, it was known that he could not recover. His nephew had filled him with opiates and moved him from the canopy bed to one beside the open window. His brother, Joseph Young, and his son, John W. Young, were beside him, as were “several of his wives, and many of his children.” The morning had passed, and it was afternoon. For a moment he seemed to revive. His eyes fluttered open. He stared at the ceiling, his daughter Zina observed, and suddenly he called out, “Joseph! Joseph! Joseph!” Then he lapsed into the last unconsciousness. At one minute after four in the afternoon, as those around him knelt in prayer, he was dead. “Gazing upon that noble face,” said Zina, “I thought he looked like a God.”
Three days later, at repose in a simple pine coffin, he lay in state beneath the arch of the huge Tabernacle. Organ and orchestra played Mendelssohn’s “Funeral March.” George Q. Cannon preached the final sermon. In two days more than forty thousand persons filed past the coffin to view the one that Cannon had called “the brain, the eye, the ear, the mouth and hand for the entire Church…” On September 2, 1877, his coffin was driven to the vault of the private cemetery behind the Lion House. Four thousand of his followers, eight in a row, all in black, followed him to his grave. Sixteen of his seventeen surviving wives were present—only Ann Eliza, it is said, was missing—and his legal wife, Mary Ann Angell, walked arm in arm with his favorite wife, Amelia Folsom. Most of his forty-four surviving children were also present.
“The name of Brigham Young is familiar all over the globe,” wrote The Deseret News. “His greatness is universally acknowledged, but his goodness is known only to the few.” In the East, about to embark on her fourth season of lecturing, Ann Eliza was not one of the few. Respectful mourning did not inhibit her bitterness. Brigham was still “the great deceiver and false Prophet whose teachings brought such strange vicissitudes and misery upon us all… There has probably never existed a more remarkable union of compelling power over men and women and repulsive fraud and meanness.”
In death Brigham returned the compliment. His last will and testament, prepared in 1873 and amended in 1875, rewarded all his living wives except Ann Eliza. Naming George Q. Cannon, Brigham Young, Jr., and Albert Carrington his executors, he designated that they supervise a two-million-dollar trust fund for his wives and children. Since his will was made out the month that Ann Eliza had fled Utah, Brigham was careful to define what he meant by “wife” in it. “To avoid any question,” he wrote, “the words married or marriage in this will shall be taken to have become consummated between man and woman, either by ceremony before a lawful magistrate or according to the order of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or by their cohabitation in conformity to our custom.”
Nineteen “classes” or groups of dependents were named to share the estate. Clara Decker, Harriet Cook, Susan Snively, Eliza Burgess, Margaret Pierce, Eliza R. Snow, Naamah K. J. C. Twiss, and Martha Bowker were willed the Lion House “as their place of residence during their natural lives.” Amelia Folsom and Mary Ann Angell were willed the $100,000 Gardo House. Besides these houses and the cash bequests, Brigham left a $20,000 property to Mary Ann Angell, two properties worth $50,000 and $80,000 to Lucy A. Decker, two properties worth $20,000 and $40,000 to Emmeline Free, a $12,000 property to Emily D. Partridge, two properties worth $30,100 and $5,200 to Clara Decker, a $16,000 property to Zina D. Huntington, and an $18,000 property to Mary Van Cott. Three sons and twenty-seven daughters were also awarded real estate.
Less than two years after Brigham’s death, the executors of his estate turned over nearly one million dollars of the inheritance to officers of the Church. The executors claimed that Brigham had borrowed that much money from the Church for his personal needs, and now it must be repaid. Seven of Brigham’s wives and daughters regarded this action as financial skulduggery, and on June 14, 1879, they sued the executors. The suit was led by one of Brigham’s ten children by Emmeline Free, twenty-six-year-old Emmeline A. Young McIntosh. It seemed that Mrs. McIntosh had been disgruntled from the start, since her father had left her, personally, only a $3,000 lot and a small portion of her late mother’s $60,000 estate. When the suit gained considerable publicity in the East, especially in the pages of the New York Times, the executors agreed to compromise with the seven indignant heirs. Since it was almost impossible to separate Brigham’s personal holdings from Church holdings, the seven wives and daughters agreed to share a cash settlement of $75,000. Accordingly, in September of 1879, the suit was withdrawn, and the injured parties, now subdued, did not make their claims of fraud public.
When Brigham died he left behind him seventeen living wives. Except for Ann Eliza, all of them faded into relative obscurity. Mary Ann Angell, as Brigham’s legal wife, had the right to claim one third of his enormous estate under the law. She refused to do so. Instead, a constant invalid, she kept to the privacy of her own quarters, the abandoned schoolhouse behind the Lion House, which she shared with a cow who lived in a partitioned stall. On June 27, 1882, at the age of seventy-nine, she died.
Lucy Decker, Brigham’s third wife, outlived him by thirteen years and died in January of 1890, at the age of sixty-eight. Harriet Cook, the reluctant fourth wife, gave Brigham a stormy time of it in his last years. In the spring of 1874, she threatened to emulate Ann Eliza and sue for a divorce. According to the Salt Lake City Tribune: “We learn that to save future litigation and further scandal, the sated old polygamist unloosed his purse-strings, and counted out sufficient ducats to meet his defrauded wife’s demand, she took a final farewell of her unloving lord, and did not lose the opportunity of giving the old man her unflattering opinion of his Divine Ordinance.”
As much as she detested her husband, Harriet Cook hated Ann Eliza even more. In Chicago she told the press that Ann Eliza’s lectures were lies—that the twenty-seventh wife had good clothes, sufficient income, and a house worth $20,000, and that Brigham had given her no grounds for divorce. Harriet Cook returned to Salt Lake City, and after Brigham’s death she lived in the Lion House until felled by a heart attack at the age of seventy-four, in November of 1898.
Augusta Adams, wife number five, survived Brigham by nine years. She passed away in 1886, at the age of eighty-four. Clara Decker, wife number six, lived in a private home on State Street, devoted herself to charities, and died in January of 1889, at sixty- one. Emily Dow Partridge, the eighth wife, gave herself to Temple work. She avoided her sister wives and devoted hours daily to making entries in a private journal which she would show to no one, because it contained “harsh” remarks about Brigham. When she died at seventy-five, in December of 1899, she was living in her large two-story home on Third East Street. Like several other of the wives, it was her wish that she not be buried beside Brigham in his isolated cemetery plot.
Susan Snively, the thirteenth wife, despite her illness, was a widow for fifteen long years before succumbing in November of 1892, at seventy-seven. Margaret Pierce, the seventeenth wife, lived on and on. She survived Brigham by three decades, dying at the age of eighty-five in January of 1907. Martha Bowker, the fifteenth wife, was sixty-eight when she died in Salt Lake City in September of 1890.
Zina D. Huntington, the eighteenth wife, took to travel after Brigham’s death. Following two years of mourning, she departed on a mission to Hawaii. Two years after that, she journeyed to New York to preach the Mormon gospel. By 1901, when she was eighty, she was head of the Relief Societies of the Church and on a tour of Canada. There she became ill and was rushed back to Salt Lake City, where she died in August of 1901.
Lucy Bigelow, Ann Eliza’s old foe, remained in the winter house in St. George, Utah, for fifteen years after her husband’s death. She had been much disgraced in Brigham’s eyes when she permitted Dora, the eldest of her three daughters by him, to marry a Gentile named Morley Dunford and furthermore allowed the wedding service to be performed by an Episcopal clergyman. Fortunately for Lucy Bigelow, Brigham was not alive to learn of daughter Dora’s next marriage, which was incredibly to Ann Eliza’s former divorce lawyer, Judge Albert Hagan, then a widower, by whom she had four children and for whom she turned Catholic. In the years after Lucy lost Brigham, she performed several missions abroad, the most notable to Hawaii. In 1898 she lived in Berlin, where she cared for a granddaughter who was studying voice. In February of 1905, at the age of seventy-five, she passed away.
Eliza R. Snow remained in the Lion House, writing her poems, guiding the other wives, doing good works. In December of 1888, when she was eighty-four, she departed this life with the certain expectation that she would be reunited with her first husband, Joseph Smith, for eternity. Eliza Burgess, the twenty-third wife, had maintained Brigham’s home in Provo while he lived. But the year following his death she moved back to the tumult of Salt Lake City. She survived all of the other women in the harem. Her death did not occur until August of 1915, only a few months after the Lusitania had been sunk, Henry Ford had displayed his latest model automobile, and a Hollywood film called The Birth of a Nation had been released to the public. Harriet Barney, the twenty-fourth wife, died in February of 1911. Mary Van Cott, who gave Brigham his last child, had remained discontented after Ann Eliza had left. At one point, on the verge of leaving the Prophet, she was persuaded by her parents to endure her lot. To avoid a second scandal, Brigham soothed Mary by rebuilding her house, adding new furniture, and presenting her with a grand piano. For the sake of her child she gave up the idea of separation. Soon enough Brigham’s death gave her the freedom she desired. She survived Brigham by only seven years, dying prematurely at the age of forty in January of 1884.
It was the boast of Mormon historians that none of Brigham’s widows, with the exception of Ann Eliza, ever married again. However, some evidence exists that two of his wives remarried, one before his death, and the other afterward.
There are two versions of how Mary Jane Bigelow, the twenty-first wife, obtained her secret divorce from Brigham. According to the Mormon version, Mary Jane found that she did not love her husband and that she was unhappy in polygamy. She bared her heart to her sister, Brigham’s twenty-second wife, and her sister advised her to tell the Prophet the truth. This Mary Jane proceeded to do. Brigham proved cooperative and gave her freedom in the present time on the condition that she join him in eternity. According to the Gentile version, Brigham learned that Mary Jane was having a love affair, accused her of adultery, and packed her off to her parents. In either case, Mary Jane separated from Brigham and successively contracted three more marriages, to John Bair, Daniel D. Hunt, and Philander Bell, the last in April of 1868. All of these unions were for time only; eternity was reserved for the Prophet.
The one widow who may have remarried after Brigham’s death was his twenty-fifth and favorite wife, Amelia Folsom. On August 26, 1878, a year after the Mormon leader’s death, the New York Times carried the following dispatch: “A telegram from Salt Lake City, Utah, says that Amelia Folsom, Brigham Young’s favorite wife, was married in the Mormon Endowment House, on Thursday, August 15th, to John Leavitt, General Passenger Agent of the Utah Central Railroad. Amelia is represented to be Mr. Leavitt’s second affinity.” The Mormon press, it might be added, made no mention of Amelia’s second marriage, if it did occur, and today Amelia’s surviving relatives firmly deny that she ever took a husband after Brigham.
Amelia’s widowhood was busy and secure. When the $100,000 Gardo House was completed, she moved into it for a year, then decided that it was too large and ostentatious. She sold it to the Church and moved into a comfortable two-story residence on South First West Street, and this house soon came to be known as Junior Gardo. She kept herself occupied with genealogical research, horticulture, and Church committees, although she would not speak in public. She traveled extensively from California to New York and went abroad, where she spent most of her time in England and France. In 1886 she attended the wedding of her distant cousin, Frances Folsom, to President Grover Cleveland in the White House.
In 1893, when she was fifty-five, Amelia gave a rare interview to a reporter from the Chicago Daily News.
The visitor wondered if her marriage to Brigham had been a happy one.
“I should certainly dislike to think otherwise,” said Amelia. “Why not? We were all members of the same family and treated each other as such. I would sacrifice anything for the surviving wives of President Young, and their feeling toward me I think is the same.”
“How many times did your husband marry after you became his wife?”
“Twice afterward; I don’t know how many times before. His will should show that.”
Later the reporter dared to ask, “You have the name of being Brigham Young’s favorite wife?”
“I can’t say that he had any favorites,” Amelia answered. “He was equally kind and attentive to all in his lifetime and left each surviving wife an equal legacy.”
“Do you still believe in polygamy?”
“Certainly I do. If polygamy was once right it is still right. There is no reason why a polygamous marriage may not be as happy as the ordinary marriage, if it is entered understandingly.”
After some discussion about the future of polygamy the reporter suddenly inquired if Amelia had any children.
“I regret to say I have none,” she replied. “I am constantly sensible to the fact that children would have been an inestimable source of comfort and company to me at the present time. I am living alone here, though visits back and forth with the surviving wives of President Young add great pleasure to my home life.”
“How many of President Young’s widows are living?”
“There are nine of us,” said Amelia. She proceeded to name the nine in order of their seniority but carefully omitted the name of the tenth. She refused to mention Ann Eliza, then living in Manistee, Michigan. She concluded the interview by stating, “We all held a reunion on Thanksgiving Day at the residence of one of President Young’s granddaughters in this city.”
Amelia lived seventeen years after that interview. She died in December of 1910, at the age of seventy-two. A poem by Louisa M. Alcott was read at her funeral, and Richard W. Young used the solemn public occasion to put down forever a rumor that had been long in circulation. “It was one time intimated that by reason of her intimacy with Brigham Young, Aunt Amelia had induced unfair property distribution; but this since has been found to be untrue.”
From time to time, after Brigham’s death, it was said that various of his wives had abandoned Salt Lake City for Gentile pastures. Typically Edgar Cayce, the clairvoyant healer, remembered that when he was seven, in 1883, the new schoolteacher who came to board on his aunt’s farm in Christian County, Kentucky, introduced herself as a Mrs. Ellison, from the West, “where she had been a Mormon, and so she said, one of the wives of Brigham Young.”
But in 1877 the nation was concerned not with the fate of Brigham’s widows but rather with the fate of his Church and its system of polygamy. Many fanatics considered this the ideal moment to wipe out celestial marriage by force. In the Brooklyn Tabernacle the Reverend T. DeWitt Talmadge, notorious for his sensationalism, thundered to his flock, “Now, at the death of the Mormon Chieftain, is the time for the United States government to strike… Turn their vast temple into an arsenal. Set Phil Sheridan after them. Give him enough troops and he will teach all Utah that forty wives is thirty-nine too many.”
However, the loss of the man who had led them for more than three decades left the Saints saddened but in no way weakened. The 120,000 Mormons in the territory defied the 23,000 Gentiles underfoot and the threatening oratory from the East. A week after Brigham had been laid to rest, the Apostles solemnly met and sustained the leader of their Twelve, sixty-nine-year-old John Taylor, of Milnthorpe, England, as their head. In effect, Taylor was promoted to Prophet without the honor. Not until October 10, 1880, in the festive year of the Church’s fiftieth anniversary, did the hierarchy officially elect Taylor to the First Presidency as Brigham’s successor.
The selection of John Taylor as the third Prophet in a half century was, in a sense, a reply to the wishful thinking of anti-Mormons who expected the Church to soft-pedal its stand on polygamy after Brigham’s passing. “John Taylor was a zealous, unscrupulous Mormon in every way, not least in polygamy,” wrote Ann Eliza. “He had altogether seven wives and thirty-four children.” And worst of all, added Ann Eliza, the five wives still alive “were required to earn their own support, and in return he honored them with a call now and then.”
John Taylor, a tall man with a long white beard and the gift of eloquence, “although for a ruler he listens too much to counsel,” said a correspondent of the London Times, had been one of Brigham’s foremost servants and admirers. Leaving his native England at twenty, he had emigrated to Canada and there had become a Methodist preacher. At twenty-eight he had been baptized into the faith of Joseph Smith, and at thirty he was an Apostle. Thereafter his activities were varied and cosmopolitan. In 1840 he was in Washington, D.C., urging Congress to award the Mormons damages for their persecutions in Missouri. In 1844 he was in the Carthage, Illinois, jail when Joseph Smith was murdered and himself had four bullets pumped into his body. In 1850 he preached the faith in England, France, and Germany. In New York he published a periodical, The Mormon, and in Europe he translated The Book of Mormon into French. Now, with forty years as an Apostle behind him, and seven celestial marriages, he could be counted on to perpetuate the tenet of plurality of wives.
From the moment that Taylor had replaced Brigham, Ann Eliza knew that nothing had changed. “American statesmen who were distressed and perplexed by the Mormon problem,” she wrote, “had vainly hoped that when the dictator Brigham Young passed away, the power of the Church would be weakened and its policy changed, and in particular that polygamy would gradually be abandoned. They were dismayed to find the Church as aggressive as ever and polygamy openly advocated and more widely practiced in spite of stringent Federal laws.”
Until 1877 the so-called “stringent Federal laws” against polygamy had been anything but effective. Mormon haters liked to blame the weakness of these laws on Brigham’s lobby in the capital. According to one Gentile source, Brigham was once heard to remark, “When I put my hand into one pocket, I put Congress into the other pocket.” More likely, anti-polygamy laws were soft because hardheaded congressmen were unsure of their ground, aware always that the Constitution carried no specific restrictions on the institution of marriage.
The first anti-polygamy bill introduced in Congress had been written by Representative Justin R. Morrill, of Vermont, and had been passed and signed into law by President Lincoln on July 8, 1862. The Morrill measure made no pretense at being subtle. It began: “An Act to punish and prevent the practice of Polygamy in the Territories of the United States…” The law simply provided that if a man were married to more than one woman at a time, he was liable to a fine of $500 and four years’ imprisonment. However, there were loopholes. In Utah enforcement of Federal law was in the hands of local, not Federal, courts. Since local courts were dominated by Mormons, all cases of polygamy were tried by Mormon juries, who would not convict their own. Furthermore, indicted male polygamists claimed that they had contracted no illegal marriages as defined by United States law, and female plural wives refused to testify against their husbands. Finally, because Lincoln had his hands full with a war, because he was tolerant of the Mormons, and because he was uncertain of the constitutionality of the Morrill measure, he took no steps to enforce it. In the entire history of this law only two polygamists were convicted under it.
A dozen years later, in the summer of 1874, after Ann Eliza’s appearances in Washington, D.C., Representative Luke P. Poland, also of Vermont, sought to strengthen Morrill’s measure with a bill of his own that limited the jurisdiction of the Utah territorial courts and filled the offices of attorney general and marshal with men chosen in Washington, D.C. While the Poland Law strengthened the position of anti-polygamists like Judge McKean, it still made few inroads on polygamy.
What hampered all enforcement of the Morrill and Poland statutes was the lingering doubt of their constitutionality. At last, in 1874, the Federal government, with the cooperation of important Mormons, decided to test the constitutionality of the anti-polygamy bills. George Reynolds, a thirty-two-year-old Englishman who was Brigham Young’s secretary, was selected as the guinea pig. He had just taken a second wife, and now he turned himself over to the authorities as an admitted polygamist. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of $500. A year later, because the first Grand Jury was found to be illegal, he was tried again and again convicted, but this time his sentence was increased to two years’ imprisonment at hard labor. Immediately, as they had planned all along, the Mormons appealed Reynolds’ case to the United States Supreme Court and sat back to await the opinion that the conviction was unconstitutional.
During the four years that the Supreme Court weighed and debated Reynolds’ appeal, the contending parties persistently fought to influence the high tribunal and the nation’s chief executive. In 1877 the fifty-five-year-old Rutherford B. Hayes, a former lawyer, Civil War general, congressman, and governor of Ohio, had just moved into the White House, after defeating Samuel J. Tilden for the presidency by one electoral vote.
From her home in Lockport, New York, Ann Eliza determined to communicate with the new President directly. She was hopeful. In the two years past, she had lost her confidence in the retiring President Grant. First, she had been annoyed over reports of President Grant’s visit to Utah. He had been greeted by lines of children in the street—clean, healthy, beaming children. According to Mormon sources, Grant had turned to George W. Emery, governor of Utah, and inquired, “Whose children are these?” The governor had replied, “Mormon children.” Grant had fallen silent a moment and had then muttered, “I have been deceived.” Second, Ann Eliza had been irked by Grant’s non-intervention in the first trial of John D. Lee, for the responsibility of leading the Mountain Meadows massacre. The prejudiced trial in Utah had resulted in a hung jury, while the President had basked in the sunshine at the popular summer resort of Long Branch, New Jersey. In a temper over the last, Ann Eliza had written the Boston Globe, disowning Grant and appealing to the women of America: “If he is indifferent to the shrieks of the women slaughtered by Lee and Young, let your voice be heard in tones so stern and loud that it will startle him from his slumbers at Long Branch. When assassins are crowned with laurels, it is no time for our rulers to loaf by the sea-side.”
Now, the mellowed Grant had been replaced by Rutherford B. Hayes, and Ann Eliza was once more optimistic that the Mormons would be punished. On September 24, 1877, she addressed a seven-page letter “To His Excellency R. B. Hayes” in Washington, D.C. Her letter read, in part:
“I was born in Mormonism, reared in the firmest of Mormon households, and I know therefore the bondage in which the hearts and consciences of so many thousands of my sisters are held. I was a victim to the power and persecution of the late pretended Prophet, Seer and Revelator, and became his unwilling wife. Then I discovered what an enormous imposition was being practiced upon the sincere believers in this false religion, and so I abandoned it, and I long with all my heart to see broken and dispelled this wicked Mormon despotism and delusion. Oh! How long it had been tolerated! The blood-soaked sod of lonely Mountain Meadows… the thousand murders of the plains… have been crying for vengeance many and many years to deaf ears. Shall the voices that rise out of the gory history of Mormonism, calling for judgment upon it, still be unheeded?
“Do not be persuaded that Mormonism will go down, ere long, under the pressure of Christian competition and execration. It has withstood the competition for forty-seven years, and in that time has risen from a membership of six, to nearly two hundred thousand, and almost monthly, shiploads of deluded recruits arrive without protest or hindrance at the wharves of New York to swell the sorrowful ranks of polygamous wives, or contribute to the working and financial strength of the Church.
“While the Government has tolerated and waited, Mormonism has prospered, until it demands a State to control, and boldly claims recognition as a religious denomination under the constitutional guarantees.
“Nor is it sufficient excuse for ignoring the subject now that emphatic laws against polygamy have already been enacted. I am aware of these laws and enactments, and I also know that Mormons laugh at them as only the impotent frothing of ‘Gentile wrath.’ They have hindered no plan of the Church; they have frustrated no scheme; they have interfered with not a single one of the hundreds of thousands of polygamous marriages consummated since their enactment. They have been words, idle words only. I beseech you to plead with Congress to put into their laws the breath of life, and make them, being the voice of the people, as terrible as the voice of God, to those who dare disobey. Nor again, should it he believed that the late Brigham Young was such a prop and pillar of Mormonism that it is likely to fall in ruins now that he is removed. His present successor, John Taylor, was the boon companion of the inventor of this great fraud, and for years he has been one of the counselors, advisers and confederates of the late ruler. He is a six-wived ‘Saint,’ a veteran in Church intrigue, a bitter hater of ‘Gentiles,’ having been one of the ‘persecuted’ in the early days of the Church, and being ambitious to win a fame equal to that of his notorious predecessor, it may be expected that he will indefatigably labor to prosper his evil cause. And the day is soon coming when younger men, with the enthusiasm, daring, energy and ambition of young men, will succeed to the leadership, to begin new eras of proselyting, recruiting and ‘building up the kingdom.’ Surely, the time to act is today. I pray you, enforce the laws now in existence if they are sufficient; instigate additional legislation if necessary. Mormonism is entitled to no mercy. It invites fire and sword, having defied the force of evaded statutes; it deserves… destruction, having scorned the voice of admonition and warning. Respectfully, Ann Eliza Young.”
Fourteen months after Ann Eliza’s appeal to President Hayes, 200 other Gentile women met in the Congregational Church of Salt Lake City and drew up a petition to the President’s wife demanding that the price of statehood for Utah be the abandonment of polygamy. To counter these moves, 2,000 Mormon women, wives and children of polygamy, met in the Salt Lake City Theater on November 16, 1878. Among the leading speakers was Eliza R. Snow, who told her sisters and the world, in her support of a petition to Congress defending celestial marriage, “I truly believe that a Congress composed of polygamic men who were true to their wives, would confer a far higher honor upon a nation, and would perform better service to the country than a Congress composed of monogamic husbands.”
Finally, shortly after this female agitation, the Supreme Court heard both sides in the Reynolds appeal, and on January 6, 1879, rendered its decision—that all anti-polygamy legislation had been constitutional and that Reynolds’ conviction and sentence was to stand as rendered. Mormondom reeled under the shock. An immediate effort was made to save Reynolds. Thirty thousand persons petitioned President Hayes to show leniency to Brigham’s secretary, but the chief executive ignored these clemency requests. Reynolds was sent to a penitentiary in Nebraska, then returned to one in Utah, where, as a model prisoner, he served out his two years of martyrdom at hard labor.
After this setback given polygamy in the Supreme Court, John Taylor agreed to state the Church’s reaction in an interview granted Colonel O. J. Hollister, the Federal Revenue Collector for Utah, who was also a correspondent of the New York Tribune.
Colonel Hollister began the interview by asking, “Is it not true that marriage is the basis of society?… And is it not therefore within the legitimate scope of the power of every civil government to determine whether marriage shall be polygamous or monogamous under its dominion?”
Taylor would not have it. “When the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted, those high contracting parties did positively agree that they would not interfere with religious affairs. Now, if our marital relations are not religious, what is?”
Later, and somewhat sharply, Colonel Hollister inquired, “Do you regard polygamy as worthy of perpetuation at the cost of perpetual antagonism between your people and their countrymen?”
“We are not the parties who produce this antagonism,” said Taylor. “Our revelation, given in August, 1831, specifically states that if we keep the laws of God, we need not break the laws of the land. Congress has since, by its act, placed us in antagonism to what we term an unconstitutional law.”
“Do you regard polygamy as superior to monogamy…?” Colonel Hollister wanted to know.
“I regard it as altogether superior to the law of monogamy, in a great many particulars,” replied Taylor. “There is in all monogamic countries, the United States not excepted, a terrible state of things arising from the practice of monogamy. We acknowledge our children; we acknowledge our wives; we have no mistresses. We had no prostitution until it was introduced by monogamy. Polygamy is not a crime per se; it was the action of Congress that made polygamy a crime. The British Government allows one hundred and eighty millions of their people to practice it, and by the law protects them in it. It is very unfortunate that our republican government cannot be as generous to its provinces as a monarchial government can be to its colonies.”
At the conclusion of the interview, when the colonel wondered what effect the Supreme Court decision would have on the Mormons, Taylor answered, “I don’t know that it will have any effect, except to unite us and confirm and strengthen us in our faith.” However, Taylor did more than give interviews after the disastrous Supreme Court decision. To counteract the rising tide of anti-polygamy agitation, Taylor decided to show the Gentile world how plural wives really felt about their lot. Instead of memorials he determined to put two of his most attractive exhibits on display.
Early in 1879 Zina Young Williams—daughter of Brigham Young by his eighteenth wife, Zina D. Huntington—married to an Englishman who already had one wife, and Emmeline Wells, plural wife of Salt Lake City’s mayor, traveled to Washington, D.C., to call on the First Lady. At the time the First Lady, forty-eight-year-old Lucy Webb Hayes, married to President Hayes over a quarter of a century, was beginning her third year in the White House. Educated at the Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman’s College, Lucy Webb Hayes was the darling of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for having banished wine, whiskey, and all stimulants from the White House. Throughout the nation, disgusted imbibers called her “Lemonade Lucy.”
The meeting between the First Lady and the two plural wives had been arranged by prominent suffragettes, who tried to ignore the polygamy issue because they were impressed that the Mormons had given their women the vote in 1870. Speaking with the President’s wife, Zina Young Williams and Emmeline Wells explained that plural marriage worked, that the various wives lived in domestic tranquillity, that the system gave every wife a husband and kept every husband from adultery and prostitution, and that enforcement of the old 1862 anti-polygamy law would cause great suffering among the women of Utah. Apparently Lucy Webb Hayes was impressed, perhaps less by the advantages claimed for polygamy than by the evidence that these plural wives were anything but monsters, that they had suffrage, which she did not have, and that, like herself, they were horrified by alcoholic stimulants.
When word of this Mormon lobbying was made public, Ann Eliza was lecturing in De Pere, Wisconsin. She wasted not a moment to counterattack. As once she had passionately appealed to President Hayes, she now sought to open the eyes of Mrs. Hayes. On March 5, 1879, she addressed a long and virulent letter to the First Lady and then released it to the press. It read, in part:
“As an excuse for addressing you in this way, I can urge the fact that the newspapers have lately published the details of a call made upon you by two Mormon women in the interest of the system of Mormon Polygamy…
“Emmeline Wells and Zina Williams came with pathetic pleadings to touch your heart with the picture of what would be the cruel condition of Mormon women and children if the law against Polygamy should be enforced. I recognize the injustice of the law as it now stands and admit that to enforce it would be inequitable and produce great suffering. But these two women came to you with falsehoods in their mouths.
“Polygamy has no brightness such as they described, no excellencies such as they claimed. I could show you a picture out of the polygamous lives of these very women, which would make you shudder and turn heartsick…
“Your late visitors and George Q. Cannon (the husband of six living wives) assert that there is entire harmony in polgyamous families. The assertion is absolutely false! There is not a Polygamous husband in all Utah who does not have a favorite among his wives whom he favors far above all the rest. His time, means, and affection are expended upon her while the other poor souls are left in loneliness and usually in destitution. This fact alone furnishes one of the strongest arguments against the system. The history of thousands of families in Utah proves that it is utterly impossible for a man to love more than one woman at the same time.
“Emmeline Wells is reported to have said that she never quarreled with her husband’s other wives. I think that statement is true. She was placed in a miserable little place next door to my house, three or four blocks from the residence of her fellow-wives, and these sisters never went near her but always spoke of her with the utmost contempt. I lived by her one year and her husband of many titles—’Councilor-to-the-President,’ ‘Commander-of-the-Militia-of-the-territory,’ ‘Mayor-of-Salt-Lake-City,’ and ‘one-of-the-Apostles,’ never visited her during that time. Her condition was that of poverty, and disorder reigned supreme in her dwelling. Her appearance was that of a despairing, hopeless, soul-sick woman. I do not say that she appears so now… By some process Emmeline Wells has come to have an object in life, though an unworthy one, and no longer exhibits, or feels, the misery and desolation so noticeable in former years.
“Zina Williams appears not to have spoken very frankly of her own domestic life. She did not say how her husband’s first wife loved her (the second). She did not mention that the first wife never spoke to her at all, except when she went to the funeral of a child of the former and attempted to go to the coffin to look at the little body, when Mrs. Williams pushed her aside and told her that she should not look at a child of hers. No, these are things to be kept silent—hid from the gaze of the ‘wicked Gentile world.’ But Zina forgot her condition when speaking of her father Brigham Young. She said he treated his family all alike and was kind to them. What a lapse of memory. Why did she forget to compare her mother’s unenviable condition when living in the ‘Lion House’ with twelve or fifteen of her ‘Sisters’ with that of his successive favorite wives—first that of Emmeline Free—and after he tired of her—with that of Amelia Folsom, who reigned supreme the last sixteen years of his life. Oh, what folly, what inconsistency, what madness!…
“One of the arguments advanced by these women is false as well as coarse. I refer to the assertion that the system prevents social immorality. In a time called the ‘Reformation,’ about twenty years ago, Brigham Young, at a meeting at Salt Lake City, called upon all those who had broken their marriage vows to rise, and nearly every one present stood up. He was so startled and taken aback, that he hurriedly told them to sit down, and forthwith, dismissed the meeting. [The incident had occurred in the Social Hall. Brigham requested all the men who had committed adultery to stand up. Immediately three quarters of the hall was on its feet. Certain that his audience had misunderstood, Brigham rephrased his question. The men remained standing.]
“I have been amazed at the endorsement, public as well as private, given to Polygamy by prominent women who favor female suffrage. They do so simply because the victims to the system have the ballot, and without stopping to investigate what effect their voting has upon their welfare, the female suffragists uphold and defend that which defiles and degrades women almost to the level of the animal. Women in Utah are but child-bearing slaves. Every time they vote, they add another rivet to the bonds, which already bind them, for they vote into office such men as George Q. Cannon, who are using all their powers to perpetuate Polygamy. The ballot is no protection to these women, for they vote in utter ignorance of what they are doing and for whom they are voting.
“I voted once—being compelled to do so by Brigham Young—and his coachman was deputized to take me to the polls and show me how to vote. His instructions consisted in telling me to write my name on a piece of paper, which he handed to me, and to this day I remain in blissful ignorance of whom I cast my only vote for. This instance is only one of the least of the outrageous absurdities perpetrated in Utah in connection with the ballot…
“I know that you cannot endorse every Clique or party. But in all that pertains to the real welfare of women, you have heretofore committed yourself frankly and without fear. You did not hesitate to be known as the uncompromising foe of those drinking habits, which so widely desolate the homes of this country. But Polygamy desolates every home which it enters. Surely it will be neither improper nor unwise for you to exert your influence against that vast and increasing crime… I am, dear Madam, Respectfully Yours, Mrs. Ann Eliza Young.”
Publication of this letter awakened immediate and favorable anti-Mormon response throughout the East and Midwest. Certainly, like Ann Eliza’s lectures, it made itself felt inside the White House. Lucy Webb Hayes, it is true, made no comment except perhaps in private to the President. But in his message to Congress during December of 1880, President Hayes took his strongest position yet against plural marriage. “It is the duty and purpose of the people of the United States,” he said, “to suppress polygamy where it now exists in one territory and prevent its extention.”
For Ann Eliza the successful finale of a long and exhausting battle seemed near at hand. The enemy, though still defiant, would soon be routed, then annihilated, for word from Washington indicated that a new and powerful anti-polygamy bill was being drafted and that it might soon be passed and enforced.
Through those crucial years, Ann Eliza never ceased lecturing eight months out of twelve. She had left Major Pond, and now, for the most part, she booked her own tours directly out of Lockport, New York. In August of 1880, the Daily Register of Central City, Colorado, carried the advertisement of Mrs. Young’s latest lecture in the Opera House: “Subject: ‘In and Out of Utah.’ Embracing a brief sketch of her life From Infancy in Mormondom, Her revolt from polygamy and escape by night from Salt Lake City, and incidents, humorous, and otherwise, in her experience as a lecturer. Admission… 25 cents. Reserved seats… 50 cents.”
During 1881, when she was thirty-seven, much of her current tour was reported in the pages of a monogamic house journal known as the Anti-Polygamy Standard, published in Salt Lake City. In March, Ann Eliza was engaged on the lecture platforms of Ohio. In April and May, she was in Michigan, where she confessed to listeners in Battle Creek that she was “discouraged and heartsick” at the indifference of Americans at a time when Colorado, Nevada, and Oregon might fall to Mormonism. She recounted story after story of new Mormon converts in the Midwest and East. She had found “hundreds” of these converts in Georgia, “twenty” in Kentucky, “a number” in Oberlin, Ohio, “one man having six wives, and another two” in northern Michigan, a convert of sixteen in Canton, Illinois, another, a young girl named Gertrude, in Colorado. Entering Covington, Indiana, said Ann Eliza, she found that she had been preceded by “three Mormon missionaries.”
Continuing her tour, Ann Eliza arrived in Evansville, Indiana, in June 1881. Here she implored her audience, “Will you not do something? Year by year this evil is growing great and strong and dangerous. Year after year it is producing more baleful fruits. Will you not from this time forth be known as the active enemies of this monster, and do what you can to destroy it?” In June she was also in Polo, Illinois, held over for a week because of an unseasonable summer snowstorm. After her regular paying lectures in the City Hall, she delivered two free lectures—and was rewarded, said the local Presbyterian minister, with the gift of “a purse containing a considerable sum of money as some small souvenir of her visit and labors among us.”
The torrent of words directed at Washington by Ann Eliza and her fellow anti-polygamists was beginning to have its effect. President Hayes had served his term and quietly bowed out of the White House. In March of 1881, James A. Garfield, a Republican, had been inaugurated as President with Chester A. Arthur as his Vice-President. In his inaugural address the new chief executive stated, “The Mormon church not only offends the moral sense of mankind by sanctioning polygamy but prevents the administration of justice through ordinary instrumentalities of law.”
Before Garfield could act against the Mormons, he was shot down in a Washington railroad station by a despondent office seeker named Charles J. Guiteau, whom the Reverend Talmadge falsely branded as a Mormon. Eleven weeks later, after being in office little more than six months, Garfield was dead. His successor, Chester A. Arthur, took up the polygamy question in a December message to Congress. He spoke of plural marriage as “this odious crime, so revolting to the moral and religious sense of Christendom.”
Now the monogamous legislators joined arms with the President. On December 12, 1881, Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont introduced the strongest law in American history against Utah polygamy. The Edmunds Bill, as it came to be called, attacked the most vulnerable aspects of plural marriage. “Every person,” it began, “who has a husband or wife living who, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter marries another, whether married or single, and any man who hereafter simultaneously, or on the same day, marries more than one woman, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of polygamy, and shall be punished by a fine of not more than $500 and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years.” Furthermore, a juror being considered to try a polygamy case would be disqualified if he either practiced or professed a belief in plural marriage. No polygamist would be allowed to vote in a territory of the United States, and no polygamist would be permitted to hold a Federal office. Amnesty would be granted to all who had engaged in polygamy before the passage of the Edmunds Bill, provided they now complied with the law, and children of polygamists born before 1883 would be legitimitized. Finally, all election laws in the territories were to be revised, and all offices connected with registration and voting were to be vacated until a board of five persons appointed by the President could properly fill them again.
Here was a law that would be accepted as constitutional if passed, and here was a law with teeth. Ann Eliza and her cohorts were jubilant. But effecting passage of the bill in the Senate, as it turned out, would not be easy. A bloc of southern senators, smarting under the persecution their states had suffered throughout northern attempts at southern reconstruction after the Civil War, bitterly opposed its passage.
Senator George Graham Vest of Missouri was one of the most powerful spokesmen against the law. A decade before, in a Warrensburg, Missouri, courtroom, Senator Vest had won a national reputation by defending the value of a foxhound named Old Drum, who had been killed by his client’s neighbor. In his tribute to a dog he had said: “Gentlemen of the jury, the best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter whom he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful… The one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world—the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous—is his dog.” The wet-eyed jurors agreed to the extent of allowing Vest’s client $500 for loss of Old Drum, instead of the $150 requested. Now, on the floor of the Senate, the former defender of a dog spoke out on behalf of an underdog. “While I abhor polygamy,” said Senator Vest, “while I have denounced it, while I have introduced the two first bills introduced in this Senate against it, I revere the Constitution of my country and the rights of personal liberty guaranteed to every American citizen. I tell you now, Senators of the United States, pass the bill and you establish a precedent that will come home to plague you for all time to come. The feeling that exists today against polygamy may exist tomorrow against any church, against any class in this broad land.”
Senator John Tyler Morgan, a former Confederate general and the representative from Alabama, agreed with Vest: “I am not willing to persecute a Mormon at the expense of the Constitution of the United States. I am not willing to go to the Indian tribes where Polygamy is practiced and take up those men and inform them that they shall not have the right to life or liberty because they are polygamists.”
Senator Joseph E. Brown of Georgia echoed the sentiments of his southern colleagues. “I, for one, shall not be a party to the enactment or enforcement of unconstitutional, tyrannical, and oppressive legislation,” he said, “for the purpose of crushing the Mormons or any other sect for the gratification of New England or any other section… Whether the Baptists or the Catholics or the Quakers will be selected for the next victim does not yet appear.”
Despite much vocal opposition, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the Edmunds Bill on February 12, 1882. A month later, after a similar debate, the bill went through the House of Representatives by a vote of 199 to 42. On March 22, 1882, President Arthur affixed his signature to the bill, and it was law.
The aftereffects were felt immediately in both Washington, D.C., and Salt Lake City. Still residing in the nation’s capital was the English Apostle and husband of seven wives, George O. Cannon, who had been reelected Utah territorial delegate to the House of Representatives by a vote of 18,568 to 1,357 little more than a year earlier. Now his right to sit in Congress was challenged on the grounds that not only was he a practicing polygamist but also an unnaturalized alien. In 1883 the House expelled him. Before leaving, Cannon said farewell to his colleagues from the floor: “I am a resident of Utah Territory and one of those people who are everywhere spoken against and against whom many vile charges are made, as were made against their predecessors, the Church of Christ in the early days… Yet I do respect my oath, and I pity any gentleman who with nothing to sustain him but popular sentiment, is willing to trample upon the Constitution and the law and to strike down a people against whom popular sentiment is strong.”
Few Gentiles dared support Cannon, but one of the few who did was Reverend Timothy Hay. Writing in The Independent, the clergyman denounced Congress for its “contemptible hypocrisy,” explaining: “The great crime is not in having many paramours, but in marrying them. A man may keep as many mistresses as he pleases, provided that he acknowledges he is prompted by his own vile lusts and the temptations of the devil. It is only when he claims to be acting conscientiously that his punishment is called for.”
In Utah’s capital polygamists tensely waited for the first blows to fall. According to the United States district attorney in the territory, 100,000 persons out of a population of 144,000 either practiced or believed in polygamy. The London Times correspondent in Utah during 1882 thought that only a relative handful of Mormons were practicing polygamists. He reported: “About one-fourth of married Mormons are polygamous, and of these something less than three per cent, are under forty years of age.”
The Federal government moved in with a test oath distributed to potential voters. It read: “I do not live or cohabit with more than one woman in the marriage relation.” By this questionable criterion a respectable Mormon gentleman with two wives was barred from the polls where a Gentile with one legal wife but who openly kept a mistress was permitted to register. The Saints were embittered. As their historian Brigham H. Roberts wrote: “By this arrangement it will be seen that those who cohabited with more than one woman in adultery or prostitution, were not affected by its provisions. The roué, the libertine, the strumpet, the brothel-keeper, the adulterer and adulteress could vote. No matter how licentious a man or woman might be, all but the Mormons were screened and protected.”
As Federal agents and their spies hunted through Salt Lake City, coercing even frightened Mormon children to inform on their parents, the new Prophet, John Taylor, had just transferred his six living wives and most of their twenty-seven children into a single large home. Now he thought better of this move fearing indictment under the Edmunds Bill, and ordered all but one of his wives back to their separate residences.
The first martyr to the new law was a twenty-seven-year-old Mormon, Rudgar Clawson, who had once heroically saved the body of a dead fellow Mormon from a southern mob and who had gained a reputation for decency and sobriety. Arrested for polygamy, young Clawson was tried and found guilty. Before being sentenced, he was allowed to speak. “Your honor,” he said, “I very much regret that the laws of my country should come in conflict with the laws of God: but whenever they do, I shall invariably choose the latter.” Infuriated, the judge fined him $800 on two counts and sentenced him to four years in the penitentiary. After serving three years, Clawson was freed by President Grover Cleveland.
The Mormon leader Taylor was enraged by the prosecution of Clawson. Had young Clawson engaged in “illicit love,” instead of marrying his loves, said Taylor, and allowed his children to be aborted by Madame Restell (a portly and wealthy Englishwoman who was notorious for practicing illegal birth control in her New York City mansion), then, according to the Edmunds Bill, Clawson would have been regarded as “genteel, fashionable, respectable, Christian-like.” When, on November 17, 1882, a month after the Clawson trial, a Mormon wife, Annie Gallifant, was tried (for refusing to divulge the name of her polygamous husband) and found guilty and sentenced to jail, although in an advanced stage of pregnancy, President Taylor knew that immediate resistance to the Edmunds Bill was impossible. “While the excitement lasts,” he said, “it is useless to reason with the world; when it subsides we can talk to them.”
Despite the “excitement,” convictions for polygamy were difficult to come by, since either confessions or witnesses were required. On the other hand, unlawful cohabitation was easier to prove. Between 1882 and 1889, under the Edmunds Bill, only twenty-four Mormons were convicted for polygamy, but 909 went to jail for unlawful cohabitation. From afar Ann Eliza enjoyed her triumph. But even she confessed to being troubled by some of the strong-arm methods used by Federal agents, who had broken in on Mormon wives while they were in bed or dressing. “It must be admitted,” she wrote, “that some officials took a malicious delight in harassing Mormon women as well as men.”
By 1883, when she was almost forty, Ann Eliza’s mind had at last been diverted from polygamy, for a dramatic change had taken place in her life.
In the several years before 1883, career as lady lecturer had begun to pall on her. After ten years of this career she had grown bone weary of the rattling, uncomfortable trains, the flea-ridden hotel beds, the unceasing public exhibitions. Besides, with Brigham’s death, and the passage of the Edmunds Bill, her lectures were becoming increasingly outdated, almost unimportant, and her audiences were diminishing. She was beating a dead horse, it seemed. She was leading a crusade against an enemy already on its knees.
Also, Ann Eliza’s private existence had become more complicated. No longer could she rely on her mother to look after her growing sons, Edward Wesley and Leonard, in Lockport. In 1880 her mother had fallen severely ill, and Ann Eliza had been forced to remove her from Lockport to a sanitorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. With all that mattered of her family divided between East and Midwest, her tours away from home had become more difficult to manage. Worse, her own bouts with nervous illness and fatigue were more frequent. Much as she feared the loneliness and obscurity of retirement, after a decade of public turmoil, she knew that one day soon she must face up to it.
She was said to have been financially secure in 1883. The money earned in her nearly two thousand lectures had not been a fortune, but it had been a considerable amount, and Ann Eliza had invested it well. Her most lucrative investment was in Colorado mining. On October 14, 1880, the Rocky Mountain News had reported in a dispatch from Dumont, Colorado: “It has never been told that conductor Graham of the Colorado Central is a partner of Mrs. Ann Eliza Young in some of her recent mine speculations at this place. They own valuable property.” It is possible that conductor Graham was her old boarder from Salt Lake City, Malcolm Graham.
But even as she was thinking of retirement, and resisting it because of the bleakness of the prospect, there occurred the series of events that made it all possible. After a lecture in Ohio, perhaps in 1881, Ann Eliza was introduced to a male admirer who had been one of her audience. He was a big, outgoing, middle-aged man with a crippled hand. His name was Moses R. Denning. He was a wealthy and prominent resident of Manistee, Michigan, who had come to Ohio on a visit. Although long married and the father of at least five grown children, Denning made no secret of his interest in Ann Eliza. He invited her to be his house guest the next time that she spoke in Manistee, and Ann Eliza accepted the invitation.
Shortly afterward Denning returned to his home town and Ann Eliza continued with her tour. Though preoccupied with the lady lecturer, Denning did not discourage his wife, Annie Ralston Denning, when she planned a large and lavish celebration for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The party took place on May 6, 1881, in the Denning mansion in Manistee, and 150 guests were in attendance. Reporting the festive gathering, the Manistee Advocate wrote: “Twenty-five years ago Mr. and Mrs. Denning were married in the state of Pennsylvania, and moved to this city about 15 years ago, where they have remained ever since, winning new friends every day by their sociable, friendly disposition. Their house was brilliantly lighted, and the numerous friends seemed to enjoy themselves in the happiness of those whom they had come to send with joy on their journey toward their golden wedding.” To this was added the good wishes of the Manistee Times and Standard: “May no great misfortune or misery mar the happiness of coming years and may the anniversary of their golden wedding find an unbroken family and continued prosperity.”
With Ann Eliza’s arrival in the quiet northern Michigan town, probably late in 1881, the prospect of a golden anniversary for the Dennings was shattered forever. Their silver anniversary was their last celebration together. For fifty-three-year-old Moses R. Denning, lumber and coal tycoon, and director of the Manistee National Bank, and thirty-seven-year-old Ann Eliza, veteran of ten years on the nation’s platform, had fallen deeply in love.
A year passed before Ann Eliza returned to Manistee to give her last lecture there, in December of 1882. By this time Moses R. was in the process of divorcing Annie R. Apparently he had earlier proposed marriage to Ann Eliza, and she had accepted. On February 7, 1883, while Ann Eliza was on her final tour of the Midwest, the marriage of the Dennings was formally dissolved in Manistee. Annie R., who had charged Moses R. with “severe acts of cruelty,” won the divorce and $20,000 in alimony. Two and a half months later, on April 24, 1883, Ann Eliza delivered her farewell lecture—“Utah’s Curse and the Nation’s Shame”—to an audience in Napoleon, Ohio. Thereafter the platform would know her no more.
On May 19, 1883, Ann Eliza and Moses R. met in Lodi, Ohio, where they had mutual friends, and by early afternoon the twenty-seventh wife of Brigham Young was the second Mrs. Denning.
The news of the union was trumpeted throughout the land. The Chicago Tribune, carrying a Lodi, Ohio, date line, told its readers: “Mrs. Ann Eliza Young, of Mormon fame, nineteenth wife of Brigham Young, was married at 1 o’clock this afternoon, to Mr. Moses R. Denning, a prominent banker of Manistee, Mich. The ceremony was performed at the residence of Dr. A. E. Elliot. The Rev. E. A. Stone of Galion, O., officiated. There were a large number of guests present, among whom were some of the most prominent citizens of this vicinity. Miss Julia F. Lee, a noted elocutionist of Utica, N.Y., was also among the number. Mr. and Mrs. Denning will make their home in Manistee.”
As far away as Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ann Eliza’s third marriage created excitement. In The Daily Democrat the wedding was noted: “It affords us unusual pleasure to announce the recent marriage of Ann Eliza (Brigham Young’s 19th flame) to an Ohio man. Not only does it relieve the country of a female lecturer, but at the same time a long suffering nation gets even with the irrepressible Ohio man.”
The greatest sensation of all was seen in Manistee. There “the newsstands were besieged” by citizens who demanded copies of the out-of-town newspapers carrying accounts of the wedding. As for local papers, The Weekly Times reflected a certain civic disapproval: “Everybody wanted to know how it all came about— how and when the parties first became acquainted—and numerous other things which even Mrs. Grundy was unable to explain in a satisfactory manner.” Evidently many of the women of Manistee looked askance at the news that a former harem concubine and home wrecker would soon be in their midst. Only the editors of the Manistee Times and Standard philosophically adjusted themselves to the whims of domesticity. Two years earlier they had wished the first Mrs. Denning a golden anniversary with “an unbroken family and continued prosperity.” Now they wished the second Mrs. Denning luck and fortune and told her in print: “Congratulations are in order.”
In Toledo, Ohio, on her honeymoon, Ann Eliza looked forward, perhaps with trepidation, to an arrival in Manistee, not as lady lecturer but as Christian and monogamous housewife. Perhaps she sensed that it would be her last adventure.