LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890—1904

The following brief discussion is a modified message from a private email list. It is presented here as a brief introduction to Quinn's essay. For the full essay, including footnotes, see Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Spring 1985.

This essay is one of the best pieces of Mormon literature we have. Mike went to Gordon B. Hinckley before he ever published this essay and showed him what he had. He then told Gordon Hinckley that if he did not want it published then Mike would not publish it. Gordon B. Hinckley told Mike that he needed to do what he felt best, so Mike published it, because he felt it dealt with a very sensitive issue that needed to be addressed. For the complete story on this episode see Mike's essay in Faithful History edited by George Smith. It is a long piece at over a hundred pages.

Mike has supposedly said that B. Carmon Hardy's book is the book he wanted to write. Mike's and Carmon's work are different in that Mike's is pretty much religious history and Carmon's is social history. Mike saw/sees himself as an apologist for the church, so his work is what I call faithful history. I think both of their works are a must to have and to read.

I

On 24 September 1890, President Wilford Woodruff issued his famous Manifesto which stated in part, "... and I deny that either forty or any other number of plural marriages have during the period [since June 1889] been solemnized in our temples or in any other place in the Territory," and concluded, "And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land."

The Church-owned Deseret Evening News editorialized on 30 September: "Anyone who calls the language of President Woodruff's declaration 'indefinite' must be either exceedingly dense or determined to find fault. It is so definite that its meaning cannot be mistaken by any one who understands simple English."

On 3 October it added, "Nothing could he more direct and unambiguous than the language of President Woodruff, nor could anything be more authoritative." A few days after this last editorial, the Church authorities presented this 'unambiguous' document for a sustaining vote of the general conference. Yet during the next thirteen and a half years, members of the First Presidency individually or as a unit published twenty-four denials that any new plural marriages were being performed.

The climax of that series of little manifestoes was the "Second Manifesto" on plural marriage sustained by a vote of a general conference. President Joseph F. Smith's statement of 6 April 1904, read in part:

Inasmuch as there are numerous reports in circulation that plural marriages have been entered into contrary to the official declaration of President Woodruff, of September 24, 1890, commonly called the Manifesto ... I, Joseph F. Smith, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hereby affirm and declare that no such marriages have been solemnized with the sanction, consent or knowledge of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

What was the 1890 Manifesto? After the document's acceptance by the October general conference, the Salt Lake Herald (of which Apostle Heber J. Grant was publisher) editorialized that the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune "pretends the declaration is a revelation ... although no one to day has heard anyone except the lying sheet say it was a revelation." The majority report of a U.S. Senate Committee declared in bold heading in 1906, "THE MANIFESTO IS A DECEPTION."

The Manifesto was "a COVENANT WITH DEATH and an AGREEMENT WITH HELL," according to Lorin C. Woolley and his polygamist followers among the Latter-day Saints from the 1930s onward. The Manifesto was "merely a tactical maneuver," according to historian Klaus J. Hansen, but to historians James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard it "was not simply a political document."

And bringing the discussion full circle to the sectarian newspaper battles of 1890, Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith did not specifically identify the Manifesto as a revelation in 1922, but affirmed that "the word of the Lord came to him [Wilford Woodruff] in a revelation suspending the practice of plural marriage," Apostle John A. Widtsoe wrote in 1940 that the Manifesto "was the product of revelation," Elder Bruce R. McConkie's Mormon Doctrine has asserted since 1958 that the Manifesto "is a revelation in the sense that the Lord both commanded President Woodruff to write it and told him what to write," President Spencer W. Kimball said in 1974 that the Manifesto was a "revelation," and historians Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton described it as "a divine revelation" in 1979.

Who wrote the Manifesto? For most writers and commentators about the Manifesto, the answer to that question is so obvious that they find it unnecessary to go beyond identifying the document as Wilford Woodruff's Manifesto. However, when asked about it at the witness stand, a secretary in the First Presidency's office, George Reynolds, testified in 1904, "I assisted to write it," in collaboration with Charles W. Penrose and John R. Winder who "transcribed the notes and changed the language slightly to adapt it for publication."

Moving far beyond that statement, John W. Woolley told his polygamist followers in the 1920s that "Judge Zane [a non-Mormon] had as much to do with it [the Manifesto] as Wilford Woodruff except to sign it," and Lorin C. Woolley told Mormon Fundamentalists that Wilford Woodruff was not the author of the Manifesto but that it was actually written by Charles W. Penrose, Frank J. Cannon, and "John H. White, the butcher," revised by non-Mormon federal officials, and that Woodruff merely signed it. Moreover, Woolley and his Fundamentalist followers have accused George Q. Cannon of pressuring Presidents Taylor and Woodruff to write a manifesto abandoning plural marriage, and at least one Fundamentalist called him "The Great Mormon Judas."

Were new plural marriages actually performed after the 1890 Manifesto? In 1907, the First Presidency announced, "When all the circumstances are weighed, the wonder is, not that there have been sporadic cases of plural marriage, but that such cases have been so few."¹³ In 1922, Church Historian Joseph Fielding Smith wrote that "some plural marriages had been entered into contrary to the announcement of President Woodruff, and also a statement made by President Lorenzo Snow."¹⁴ Assistant Church Historian B. H. Roberts wrote in the Church's centennial history that "the injunction of said Manifesto had not been strictly adhered to even by some high officials of the Church of Latter-day Saints and people misled by them."¹⁵

Who performed and entered into these new plural marriages from 1890 to 1904? "A few over-zealous individuals" according to the First Presidency statement of 1907; "a few misguided members of the Church," according to the First Presidency statement of 1933;¹⁶ "devoted but misled members of the Church," according to Apostle John A. Widtsoe in 1951;¹⁷ "some high officials of the Church" according to B. H. Roberts's centennial history which later identified them as Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley who were dropped from the Quorum of the Twelve in 1906 because they were out of harmony with the First Presidency concerning the Manifesto;¹⁸ "a few Church authorities," according to historians Allen and Leonard in 1976;¹⁹ some "diehards" according to historians Arrington and Bitton in 1979;²⁰ "some who held the sealing power. The most prominent among those was John W. Taylor of the Twelve," according to the Secretary to the First Presidency in 1984.²¹

What were the geographic dimensions of the 1890 Manifesto? In 1922, Church Historian Joseph Fielding Smith wrote that John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley resigned from the Quorum of the Twelve because they "maintained that the manifesto applied to the United States only. However, the attitude of the Church was that it applied to the entire world," and in 1930 Assistant Church Historian Roberts wrote that by 1891 "the prohibition of polygamy was to be universal, as well in foreign countries as in the United States-the decrees against its practice were effective in all the countries of the world."²² But in 1947, President George Albert Smith told the general conference that since September 1890, "there have been no plural marriages solemnized in violation of the laws of this land by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."²³

That statement was amplified in 1955 when the Church's Deseret Book Company published a book endorsed by an apostle, wherein the author stated: "For several years after the Manifesto was issued, however, members of the Church in Mexico and Canada were allowed to practice plural marriages, but later it was discontinued throughout the Church."²⁴

In 1968, a Sunday School manual stated, "A few were married after 1890 in Mexico, Canada and the high seas-outside the jurisdiction of the United States. It was not until 1904, under the leadership of President Joseph F. Smith, that plural marriage was banned finally and completely, everywhere in the world, by the Church."²⁵

Church President Spencer W. Kimball approved his biography in 1977 which stated, "There was little or no stigma on polygamy entered into in Mexico after the Manifesto." Under this view, plural marriages performed outside the United States, for example in Mexico or Canada, were immune from the proscriptions of the Manifesto.²⁶

How many new plural marriages were performed between 1890 and 1904? The anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune estimated in 1910 that there were "about two thousand," which was echoed by the schismatic Mormon Fundamentalists forty years later.²⁷ On the other hand, until recently, the official and semiofficial publications of the Church simply rephrased the First Presidency 1907 statement that there were "few" new plural marriage from 1890 to 1904.²⁸

Historians Arrington and Bitton increased that estimate based on reasearch done in 1983 by lawyer-historian Kenneth L. Cannon II who created an annual statistical chart of 150 polygamous marriages from 1890 to 1904 which apparently caused a dramatic shift in the official presentation of numbers.²⁹ In 1984 it was restated that "a comparatively large number of polygamous marriages had been performed after the Manifesto."³⁰

And finally, to what extent were new plural marriages performed from 1890 to 1904 with Church authority? Aside from denials of the First Presidency already cited, the Deseret Evening News editorialized in 1911, "There is absolutely no truth in the allegation that plural marriages have been entered into with [the] sanction of the Church since the manifesto."³¹

Apostle John A. Widtsoe wrote in 1936,

"Since that day [6 October 1890] no plural marriage has been performed with the sanction or authority of the Church,"

BYU historian Gustive O. Larson wrote in 1958 that

"While Presidents Woodruff, Snow, and Smith maintained monogamous integrity of the Church, plural marriages were being performed secretly by two members of the Apostles' Quorum,"

Counselor Stephen L Richards wrote in 1961,

"Since that time [1890], entering into plural marriage has been construed to be an offense against the laws of the Church,"

Apostle Gordon B. Hinckley wrote in 1969,

"Since that time [September 1890] the Church has neither practiced nor sanctioned such marriage,"

Apostle Mark E. Petersen wrote in 1974 that

"the Manifesto put an end to all legal plural marriages,"

historians Allen and Leonard wrote in 1976 that the performance of new plural marriages outside of Utah from 1890 to 1904 "was without official sanction from the First Presidency,"

and historians Arrington and Bitton reaffirmed in 1979 that these plural marriages were "without the sanction of church authority."³²

Significantly, the schismatic Mormon polygamists accept at face value all of these statements, and use them in connection with evidence of the performance of new plural marriages after 1890 as an argument justifying the continued performance of polygamy to the present:

By this action of President John Taylor [in 1886], which it must be assumed was taken in accordance with instructions from the Lord, additional machinery for the continuance of the Celestial order of marriage was set up.... It had been entered into by members of the Priesthood wholly apart and independent of the Church.... It was under this authority conferred under the hands of John Taylor that Anthony W. Ivins exercised the sealing powers in Mexico, after the Church adopted the Manifesto. It was by this authority that John Henry Smith, John W. Taylor, Abraham Owen Woodruff and others joined people in the Patriarchal order of marriage after the issuance of the Manifesto; and it was by the same authority that Abraham H. Cannon, a member of the quorum of the Twelve, entered into Plural marriage, after the Manifesto. The Church neither approved nor disapproved these several actions.³³

II

The 1890-1904 period is only the middle section in a complex history of plural marriage among the Latter-day Saints from 1830 to the present. Understanding this history is complicated by the illegality of plural marriage, by the resulting secrecy connected with its practice, by the fact that polygamy has been the center of a sectarian battleground throughout Mormonism's history, and finally by the problem of the meaning and application of "truth" in Mormon theology and practice as they relate to plural marriage. Although my primary emphasis here is on the 1890-1904 period, dimensions of the Manifesto that have been overlooked or only partially recognized emerge only by reviewing earlier sections of my complete study.

With the exception of a fifteen-year period during Brigham Young's presidency, the solemnizing of plural marriages and the resulting polygamous cohabitation among the Mormons have always been illegal wherever and whenever practiced. In Illinois, Joseph Smith and trusted associates performed dozens of polygamous marriages during the 1840s and cohabited with their wives who were pregnant with polygamous children as early as 1843.³⁵

An 1833 Illinois state law provided two years' imprisonment and a $1000 fine for the married man who married another woman and one year's imprisonment and a $500 fine for the unmarried woman who knowingly entered into a marriage ceremony with an already married man. Illinois statutes defined the resulting sexual cohabitation in such an unlawful union as a continuing offense, with six months in prison and a $200 fine for the first offense that "shall be sufficiently proved by circumstances which raise the presumption of cohabitation and unlawful intimacy; and for a second offense, such man or woman shall be severally punished twice as much as the former punishment, and for the third offense, treble, and thus increasing the punishment for each succeeding offense."³⁶

Better known is the fact that the Congressional Morrill Act of 1862 outlawed bigamy in U.S. territories, ending the quasi-legality enjoyed by Mormon polygamous unions in Utah and other territories since the departure of the Mormons from Illinois in 1846. After the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Law constitutional in 1879, all new polygamous marriages in Utah and surrounding territories were in violation of both Congressional and Constitutional law. Moreover, the U.S. Constitution and statutory law had already extended the jurisdiction of federal law (and therefore all anti-polygamy laws) to any persons and activities aboard U.S. vessels traveling on the high seas.³⁷ But new polygamous marriage ceremonies continued to be performed under the direction of the First Presidency.

Not long after these U.S. Laws were enacted, polygamy and polygamous cohabitation became illegal in both Canadian and Utah law. Polygamy had been illegal in the western territories of Canada since 1878, and the prohibition was specifically reaffirmed in a new statute after the Mormons established settlements in what's now Alberta.³⁸ A Utah territorial statute of 1892 outlawing polygamy and polygamous cohabitation was reaffirmed in the Utah Constitution of 1895 and in state statute of 1898.³⁹

Although most people have a general awareness of these legal prohibitions, a persistent myth among Mormons maintains that polygamy and polygamous cohabitation were not in violation of the laws of Mexico, where the First Presidency established a polygamous refuge in 1885. On the contrary, since 1884 Mexican federal statutes (which were adopted in the states of Chihuahua, Sonar, and Oaxaca where Mormon colonies were established) prohibited marriage between persons where one partner was already legitimately married, defined children of such a union as "spurious," and also refused to recognize as legitimate any marriage performed outside Mexico unless it was "valid according to the laws of the country in which it was celebrated."⁴⁰

Church leaders were aware of this situation from the beginning of the Mormon colonies in Mexico, as indicated by John W. Young's letter from Washington, D.C., in May 1885 to Apostles Brigham Young, Jr., and Moses Thatcher who were in Mexico City to negotiate with government officials or the establishment of the colonies in northern Mexico. Young warned them that he had been advised by a member of the Mexican Congress not to raise the question of the polygamous marriages of the Mormons who would be entering Mexico "as there was a very plain congressional law [in Mexico] on the subject."⁴¹

In practical terms, Mexican officials agreed to turn a blind eye to polygamous Mormons, as indicated in May 1885 when the two apostles asked the federal Minister of Public Works, Don Carlos Pacheco: "If a man came into this country with more than one wife and used prudence would he be interfered with? Not unless the wife complained, was the answer."⁴² Five months later the new Mormon colonists got a scare when authorities of the state of Chihuahua, who apparently had not received the message from the Federal District in Mexico City, "Seemed to be determined not to allow Polygamy in the state of Chihuahua."⁴³ Four months after Wilford Woodruff announced the Manifesto, editions of the Deseret News published Apostle Brigham Young's denial that the Mormons had established a polygamous refuge in Mexico: "The Mormons are a law-abiding people; they have found stringent laws in Mexico, prohibiting the practice of polygamy, which laws they have respected and obeyed in every particular"; and as Utah neared statehood in 1895, the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune reminded the Mormons that there was nowhere in North America where they could legally practice polygamy.⁴⁴

Because polygamy and polygamous cohabitation were illegal everywhere the Mormons might have chosen to go, secrecy characterized these relationships from the beginning. The best statement of that problem was given by Stake President Nephi L. Morris as he was about to excommunicate a man in 1911 for marrying plural wives the previous year:

As a people, we have been in an awkward position for a long time. The practice of plural marriage was indulged in secretly almost from the commencement of the history of this Church. The civil laws enacted against it were evaded, in order that brethren might do what they thought was the Lord's will. The Church has now declared definitely against further plural marriages, wherever they may occur. Those who act contrary to that declaration must suffer the consequences.⁴⁵

As a further complication, polygamy has been the focal point of a four-way sectarian battle that has had several phases throughout Mormon history. At certain times, LDS Church leaders have been willing to violate the law to promote plural marriages, but they have at the same time struggled to defend the institution of the Church against the attacks of anti-Mormons who knew about or suspected the clandestine polygamy. Anti-Mormons for their part have often had little, if any, direct evidence about polygamous practices and therefore have not only depended upon but have also embellished the rumors surrounding the practice.

The RLDS Church defined an official position that not only opposed polygamy among the Mormons of Utah but also denied that Joseph Smith ever encouraged or authorized polygamy in Illinois. Lastly, when LDS Church authorities conscientiously prohibited new plural marriages, some Mormons were willing to challenge Church authority in order to continue the practice. It is a commonplace saying that the first casualty when war comes is truth,⁴⁶ but amid the sectarian warfare involving Mormon polygamy, truth has often simply been a negotiable commodity.

The illegality, secrecy, and self-protection of the individual and the institution all contributed toward the final complication in the history of polygamy among the Mormons: the meaning and application of "truth." In an 1833 revelation dictated by Joseph Smith, the Lord said: "All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself...." (D&C 93: 30). None of the official or semi-official commentaries on Joseph Smith's revelations has pointed out the strong implication of these words that truth ultimately is relative, rather than absolute.

But Joseph Smith's own teachings in connection with polygamy in 1842 explicitly denied that there were ethical absolutes: "That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another. God said, 'Thou shalt not kill;' at another time He said 'Thou shalt utterly destroy.' This is the principle on which the government of heaven is conducted-by revelation adapted to the circumstances in which the children of the kingdom are placed. Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof till long after the events transpire."⁴⁷

Forty years later, Apostle Abraham H. Cannon gave some instructions about polygamy that indicated one dimension of this question: "It is good to always tell the truth, but not always to tell the whole of what we know."⁴⁸

If failure of full disclosure were the only manifestation of relative truth in the history of Mormon polygamy, the problem would be comparatively simple. But the situation has been compounded by Mormons giving specialized meaning to language that has a different (if not opposite) denotation in conventional usage and by instances of emphatic statements about historical events or circumstances which can be verified as contrary to the allegations.

In 1886, a Deseret Evening News editorial presented a particularly significant argument in favor of a specialized approach to truth with regard to polygamy, and B. H. Roberts further popularized the argument in a biography of John Taylor published in 1892. Stating that the secret practice of polygamy was the context, both publications argued that if apostles (and by implication, any Latter-day Saints) were under a divine command or covenant of secrecy which one of the apostles violated by telling others, that those who maintained the sacred covenant of secrecy would be justified in, even obligated to, denouncing the disclosures as false.⁴⁹

III

The first significant and long-lasting manifestation of this problem in the history of Mormon polygamy occurred in 1835 when an official statement on marriage was included as Section 101 in the first printing of the Doctrine and Covenants, a collection of Joseph Smith's revelatory writings and statements. Verse 4 states, "Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have but one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again."⁵⁰

In later years several members of the Church who were prominent in the 1830s would affirm that prior to the canonization of this statement, Joseph Smith had already dictated a revelation authorizing plural marriage, had secretly explained that polygamy would one day become a practice of the Church, and had himself married his first plural wife.⁵¹ This article on marriage became the focal point for a number of polygamy denials during the next fifteen years.

Within a year after Joseph Smith began marrying plural wives himself and performing such ceremonies for others at Nauvoo, Illinois, these practices first were counterfeited and then publicly exposed by one of his counselors, John C. Bennett. On 1 August 1842, Apostle Parley P. Pratt published a rebuttal as an editorial: "But for the information of those who may be assailed by those foolish tales about the two wives [p. 73, "that God had given a revelation that men might have two wives"], we would say that no such principle ever existed among the Latter-day Saints, and never will," yet Pratt's autobiography later stated that Joseph Smith disclosed to him the revelation on celestial marriage in January 1840.⁵² Two months later twelve men and nineteen women signed affidavits that stated in part, "we know of no other rule or system of marriage than the one published in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants."

The signers included Apostle John Taylor and Apostle Wilford Woodruff (who had already been taught the doctrine of polygamy by Joseph Smith), Bishop Newel K. Whitney (who had performed a plural marriage ceremony the previous July for his own daughter and Joseph Smith in accordance with a revelation dictated by the Prophet on the occasion), Elizabeth Ann Whitney (who witnessed the plural ceremony), Sarah M. Cleveland (who had become Joseph Smith's plural wife early in 1842), and Eliza R. Snow (who also married him on 29 June 1842).⁵³

Almost exactly a year later, Joseph Smith, who had performed a ceremony for William Clayton and a plural wife who was now pregnant, reassured Clayton: "just keep her at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging & probably cut you off from the church and then I will baptize you & set you ahead as good as ever."⁵⁴ At a meeting of the Nauvoo City Council in January 1844, Joseph Smith "spoke on spiritual wife System, and explained, The man who promises to keep a secret and does not keep it he is a liar, and not to be trusted," and a month later he and Hyrum Smith announced that they had excommunicated an elder for "preaching Polygamy, and other false and corrupt doctrines."⁵⁵ The previous summer, Hyrum married three plural wives and read to the Nauvoo Stake High Council the revelation on the new and everlasting covenant of marriage and plurality of wives, which (according to William Clayton's diary) went by the code name "Priesthood," yet in March 1844, Hyrum Smith wrote that the claim "that a man having a certain priesthood, may have as many wives as he pleases.. . [is] . . . false doctrine, for there is no such doctrine taught; neither is there any such thing practiced here"; and in June 1844 Hyrum told the Nauvoo City Council and published his affirmation that the revelation he had read to the high council "had no reference to the present time."⁵⁶

Although he had married more than thirty plural wives by May 1844, Joseph Smith told a Nauvoo congregation that he was accused of "having seven wives, when I can only find one." A month later the Prophet wrote a letter to two of his plural wives instructing them to join him as he fled Nauvoo.⁵⁷ These denials never convinced the anti-Mormons, but they caused a good deal of confusion for many Latter-day Saints and ultimately provided the ammunition for more than a century of argument between the polygamous Mormons of Utah and the monogamist reorganized Church. The conventional LDS historical explanation for these denials was that those involved were technically denying only any association with the corrupt "spiritual wifery" taught and practiced by John C. Bennett at Nauvoo in 1841-42, and therefore traditional Mormon apologists have followed the argument of Joseph F. Smith in 1886: "These seeming denials themselves are specific proofs of the existence of the true coin, the counterfeit of which they denounced."⁵⁸ The anti-polygamous Reorganized Church, however, accepted the statements at face value because they in fact went beyond denying association with Bennett's "spiritual wifery" to denying the practice of polygamy or any other form of marriage other than that contained in the 1835 Article on Marriage.⁵⁹

Some elements of these Nauvoo denials obviously did not square with the historically verifiable practice of plural marriage during Joseph Smith's lifetime. In an effort to counter the Reorganized Church's use of these Nauvoo denials, Joseph Fielding Smith, an assistant in the Church Historian's Office since 1901, asserted in 1905:

"I have copied the following from the Prophet's manuscript record of Oct.5, 1843, and know it is genuine" and then quoted Joseph Smith's diary that he alleged concluded, ". . . and I have constantly said no man shall have but one wife at a time unless the Lord directs otherwise." The handwritten Nauvoo diary of Joseph Smith for 5, October 1843 actually ends: "No men shall have but one wife."⁶⁰

12^th Lie-Joseph Smith taught a system of polygamy.

12^th Refutation-The Revelations given through Joseph Smith, state the following ... "We believe that one man should have one wife."

Doctrine and Covenants, page 331.⁶¹

By this date in 1850, John Taylor had married twelve polygamous wives who had already borne him eight children.⁶³

Unlike the situation at Nauvoo, however, the Church president neither authorized nor encouraged such denials once the Mormons settled in Utah. Brigham Young told a meeting of the Utah territorial legislature in February 1851: "Some Deny in the States that we have more wives than one I never Deny it I am perfectly willing that the people at Washington should know that I have more than one wife & they are pure before the Lord and are approved of in his sight."⁶⁴ Nevertheless, not until August 1852 did President Young officially end the secrecy (and the need for denials) by announcing to the world that the Latter-day Saints believed in and practiced "Celestial Marriage."

IV

At this point, plural marriage entered a new dimension of its ambiguous history. Although denials of polygamous practice were no longer necessary and although Brigham Young was in the forefront of an effort to provide institutional and social support for plural marriage within Utah, he actually fostered an ambiguity concerning polygamy that was to last throughout the rest of his leadership of the Church.

The most public evidence of that ambiguity during Brigham Young's presidency involved the 1835 Article on Marriage. In 1852 the Church authorities published the full text of the revelation authorizing polygamy in the Deseret News, LDS Millennial Star, and in other periodicals and pamphlets, but the newly announced revelation was not added to editions of the Doctrine and Covenants until 1876. Instead, the 1835 Article on Marriage (which denied polygamy and defined the Church as strictly monogamous) was printed in four English language editions of the Doctrine and Covenants published in England between 1852 and 1869 by Mormon apostles who were practicing polygamists. It would not have been a difficult matter to have dropped the article from these editions, even if there was reluctance to print the 1843 revelation on the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage within the European editions of the Doctrine and Covenants.

In addition to doctrinal ambiguity during the nineteenth century about whether practicing polygamy was necessary for a man to be exalted in the celestial kingdom,⁶⁵ Church leaders during Brigham Young's presidency sent out mixed messages about the permanence of the practice of plural marriage. In 1855, Counselor Heber C. Kimball publicly announced, "The principle of plurality of wives never will be done away," but three years later Brigham Young was so exasperated by the number of applications for divorce among polygamous marriages that he privately announced that he "did not feel disposed to do any [polygamous] sealing just now."⁶⁶

President Young ended this temporary suspension of polygamy within a short time, but at April conference of 1861 he stated: "I would say, if the Lord should reveal that it is his will to go so far as to become a Shaking Quaker, Amen to it, and let the sexes have no connection. If so far as for a man to have but one wife, let it be so. The word and will of the Lord is what I want-the will and mind of God."⁶⁷ Yet four years later, he said, "As for polygamy, or any other doctrine the Lord has revealed, it is not for me to change, alter, or renounce it; my business is to obey when the Lord commands, and this is the duty of all mankind."⁶⁸

Shortly after Congress outlawed polygamy in 1862, there were apparently appeals from friendly non-Mormons for the Church to voluntarily surrender the practice of polygamy without government coercion. Brigham Young responded in June 1866: "But suppose that this Church should give up this holy order of marriage, then would the devil, and all who are in league with him against the cause of God, rejoice that they had prevailed upon the Saints to refuse to obey one of the revelations and commandments of God to them."

He then affirmed that such a surrender would be followed by a demand to give up all other distinctive doctrines and practices of the LDS Church.⁶⁹ Nevertheless, two months later, Brigham Young said: "If it is wrong for a man to have more than one wife at a time, the Lord will reveal it by and by, and he will put it away that it will not be known in the Church."⁷⁰ As the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 brought the prospect of an increased non-Mormon population in Utah, Apostle George Q. Cannon replied to those who wondered if the Church would surrender the practice of plural marriage: "God has revealed it, He must sustain it, we cannot; we cannot bear it off, He must," and Apostle Wilford Woodruff reaffirmed, "If we were to do away with polygamy, it would only be one feather in the bird, one ordinance in the Church and kingdom. Do away with that, then we must do away with prophets and Apostles, with revelation and the gifts and graces of the Gospel, and finally give up our religion altogether and turn sectarians and do as the world does, then all would be right."⁷¹ Brigham Young demonstrated his resistance to the Morrill Act by fathering five more polygamous children and marrying six more wives after 1862.⁷²

In the early 1870s, at the same time he and other Church leaders were affirming that it was not necessary for a man to be a polygamist to be exalted eternally, Brigham Young was also encouraging private and public discussion of the possibility that the practice of "this most holy principle" could be stopped altogether by another revelation, by special circumstances, or by administrative decision of the Church president. In May 1871, President Young told the congregation at the Salt Lake Tabernacle that if Congress would pass a law compelling every man in the United States to marry honorably, "we would abandon polygamy," and in June of that year he preached:

"If it is right, reasonable and proper and the Lord permits a man to take a half a dozen wives, take them; but if the Lord says let them alone, let them alone. How long? Until we go down to the grave, if the Lord demand it."⁷³

After Brigham Young was indicted for adultery in September 1871,⁷⁴ these public statements were more significantly echoed in the private discussions of the Salt Lake School of the Prophets, attended by the General Authorities and all prominent Church leaders in the Salt Lake Valley. In December 1871, Daniel H. Wells, second counselor in the First Presidency, introduced the subject by stating, "It is possible that we as a people may be denied the principle of a plurality of wives-hereafter, for not honoring it thus far.... If we do not honor this great principle, God will surely take it from us."

At a subsequent meeting of the School that month, Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., said that he personally could not give up the practice of plural marriage, "unless Prest. Young was to take the responsibility upon himself, by counseling us to lay it aside for the time being," following which Counselor Wells read a letter from President Brigham Young that "there was no danger of us having to surrender any portion of our religion-but as to Polygamy, if anything ever caused that principle to be withheld from us, it will be in consequence of the God of Heaven being displeased with many who have gone into it."75

To some, these statements about not surrendering but withholding the practice of plural marriage seemed to be a calculated prelude to the 1872 constitutional effort for Utah statehood, which included a proposed state constitution that invited Congress to establish its own terms for admission of Utah.⁷⁶ But George Q. Cannon, who chaired the committee that adopted the constitutional provision, privately gave the reassurance "that no man of the First Presidency or Twelve Apostles has ever had any idea of giving up the doctrine of celestial marriage, or its practice," but significantly observed that they "certainly have never made such idea, if they have had it, public."⁷⁷ Yet even after the failure of the 1872 statehood effort, Brigham Young affirmed that if every marriageable man would marry, "we would not be under the necessity, perhaps, of taking more than one wife."⁷⁸

For twenty years of his presidency, Brigham Young made and apparently authorized others to make at least tentative suggestions that under certain circumstances the practice of plural marriage could be suspended or stopped altogether with God's sanction. Apostle John Henry Smith (who was a bishop during this time and did not marry a plural wife until the year of Brigham Young's death) observed: "Prest. Young once proposed that we marry but one wife."⁷⁹ Many Mormons may have come to similar conclusions.

V

Young's successor as senior apostle and Church president from 1877 to 1887 was John Taylor, renowned for his unflinching defiance of federal pressure to end polygamy. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Law in 1879, John Taylor told the October general conference that Congress had committed a "shameless infraction of the Constitution of the United States," which the Supreme Court had confirmed but that "no legislative enactment, nor judicial rulings" would stop the Latter-day Saints from following their conscience in obeying God's command to practice plural marriage.⁸⁰ In 1882, Congress passed the Edmunds Law which provided up to five years' imprisonment and a $500 fine for entering into polygamy, six months' imprisonment and $300 fine for the resulting unlawful cohabitation, and which disfranchised polygamists.

President Taylor responded with a sermon in which he asked, "Are we going to suffer a surrender of this point?" and then he answered, "No, never! No, never!"⁸¹ He made his resistance to what was now the Constitutional law of the land more emphatic in October 1882 by announcing a revelation of God which stated: "You may appoint Seymour B. Young [a monogamist] to fill up the vacancy in the presiding quorum of Seventies, if he will conform to my law; for it is not meet that men who will not abide my law shall preside over my Priesthood."⁸² As federal pressure increased to arrest polygamists and otherwise suppress Mormon polygamy, John Taylor responded with greater defiance: at a special priesthood meeting at April conference of 1884 he asked for all monogamists serving in ward bishoprics or stake presidencies either to make preparations to marry a plural wife or to offer their resignations from Church office, and he even called out the names of monogamous stake presidents.⁸³

In his last public discourse on 1 February 1885, John Taylor reminded his Salt Lake City audience of the federal efforts to suppress polygamy, and rhetorically asked if he should disobey God in order to support the government. His answer: "No, Never! No, NEVER! NO, NEVER!"⁸⁴ President Taylor left the stand and went into permanent exile to avoid arrest by federal officers.

For the next two and a half years, John Taylor demonstrated continued resistance to compromise while he was "on the underground" in various hiding places in Utah. In July 1885, he suggested that due to the federal anti-polygamy raid, the American flags on all Church properties be lowered to half-mast for Independence Day, which outraged the non-Mormons of Salt Lake City and nearly caused a riot in the city.⁸⁵ After eight months in hiding, John Taylor and his first counselor, George Q. Cannon, issued a First Presidency letter at October 1885 general conference: "Well-meaning friends of ours have said that our refusal to renounce the principle of celestial marriage invites destruction. They warn and implore us to yield." They reported their response: "We did not reveal celestial marriage. We cannot withdraw or renounce it."⁸⁶ Four months later, Cannon was arrested by a U.S. marshal, remaining free prior to trial on a $45,000 bail bond, which President Taylor had Cannon forfeit so that he could return to hiding.⁸⁷

During this 1884-86 period there were numerous appeals by prominent Mormons and friendly non-Mormons for President Taylor to issue a statement or new revelation that would set aside the practice of plural marriage.⁸⁸ Burdened by his own exile and the sufferings of other Church members, John Taylor "asked the Lord if it would not be right under the circumstances to discontinue plural marriages," in response to which President Taylor received "the word of the Lord to him in which the Lord said that plural marriage was one of His eternal laws and that He had established it, that man had not done so and that He would sustain and uphold his saints in carrying it out."⁸⁹ Presently available documents of 1885-86 are silent about this revelation, but much later documentation and commentary identified this revelation as having been received by John Taylor on 27 September 1886.⁹⁰

Such a revelation on this date would explain the dramatic change in John Taylor's personal circumstances and resistance to federal laws against polygamy. Until 1886, John Taylor's public and private defense against the U.S. government was the argument that he had married his fifteen wives prior to the 1862 Morrill Act, that his last polygamous child had been born in 1881 and therefore all his polygamous children were legitimized by the provisions of the Edmunds Act of 1882, that he had sought to comply with the 1882 Edmunds Act prohibition of unlawful cohabitation by living separately from his plural wives (the youngest of whom was forty-five years old in 1882), "and has entirely separated himself so far as bed is concerned."⁹¹

Yet less than three months after the recording of the 1886 revelation, seventy-eight-year-old John Taylor married as a plural wife twenty-six-year-old Josephine Roueche on 19 December 1886. The ceremony was performed by her father, a high priest, and witnessed by George Q. Cannon and one of the "Underground" guards, Charles H. Wilcken. At the end of 1886, President Taylor had chosen for the first time in his life to specifically violate federal laws on polygamy and unlawful cohabitation, and he lived with his new bride at the Roueche home in Kaysville, Utah, the remaining seven months of his life.⁹²

If anything, John Taylor's public resistance against compromising the practice of polygamy during his presidency was exceeded by the other General Authorities. The second-ranking apostle, Wilford Woodruff, dictated a revelation in January 1880 (accepted as the "word of the Lord" by John Taylor and the Quorum of the Twelve the following April) which stated in part: "And I say again wo unto that Nation or house or people who seek to hinder my People from obeying the Patriarchal Law of Abraham which leadeth to a Celestial Glory . . .for whosoever doeth those things shall be damned." A year later Wilford Woodruff told the Latter-day Saints in two published sermons that "if we were to give up polygamy to-day," they would have to give up revelation, prophets, apostles, temple ordinances, and the Church itself.⁹³ At October 1884 general conference, George Q. Cannon said that the appeal for a new revelation to "lay polygamy aside" was in vain because such a revelation would be useless "unless indeed the people should apostatize."⁹⁴

During the year President Taylor went into hiding, Church periodicals bombarded the Latter-day Saints with the message that stopping the practice of plural marriage was impossible. In April 1885, the Deseret Evening News editorialized concerning "the demand that plural marriage relationship be abolished," and stated, "Were the Church to do that as an entirety God would reject the Saints as a body. The authority of the Priesthood would be withdrawn . . . and the Lord would raise up another people of greater valor and stability."⁹⁵ The next month, Counselor George Q. Cannon published two editorials in the Juvenile Instructor in which he acknowledged that some people suggested that "we do not ask you to give up your belief in this doctrine; we merely ask you to suspend for the time being your practice of it," to which he replied that "I look upon such a suggestion as from the devil," that doing such a thing would demonstrate utter apostasy, and merit the vengeance of God.⁹⁶

In June 1885, the Deseret Evening News lashed out against those who used quotations from the Doctrine and Covenants (presently Section 124:49-50) "in favor of the renunciation or temporary suspension of the law of celestial marriage," and the editorial said that these were "the shallow pretexts of semi-apostates" who were twisting the Doctrine and Covenants quotations out of context, and that this "revelation does not apply even remotely to the present situation."⁹⁷ At least as significant as these public repudiations of suspending the practice of plural marriage was George Q. Cannon's declaration in November 1885 to George L. Miller, an emissary from the Cleveland administration, that even if the First Presidency issued such a statement, the Latter-day Saints would not accept it, "and if they did, and we were to repudiate this principle our Church would cease to be the Church of God, and the ligaments that now bind it together would be severed."⁹⁸

Nevertheless, despite the almost universal historical view that John Taylor refused to compromise the practice of plural marriage, he actually promoted an undercurrent of compromise throughout his entire presidency. Although he gave encouragement, revelation, and an ultimatum for presiding officers of the Church to be polygamists, more than a third of President Taylor's appointments as General Authorities were monogamists, including two of his sons: William W. Taylor (who waited four years after his appointment before marrying a plural wife) and John W. Taylor (who did not marry a plural wife until after his father's death).⁹⁹

The degree to which John Taylor was willing to compromise his own public ultimatums as well as the published revelation of 1882 that required presiding officers to be polygamists is indicated by his refusal to grant permission for plural marriages to John W., to John Q. Cannon, son of George Q. and a member of the Presiding Bishopric, and to Bishop Orson F. Whitney. He undoubtedly did this to protect the men from the jeopardy of arrest. Even after this refusal contributed to John Q. Cannon's excommunication for committing adultery with his long-intended plural wife, John Taylor did not relax this selective suspension of plural marriage for the other two, even though plural marriages continued to be performed from 1885 onward in the Logan Temple and Salt Lake Endowment House.¹⁰⁰

Although historians have examined John Taylor's progression from opposing the inclusion of a prohibition of polygamy in Utah's proposed 1887 Constitution to allowing such a provision, they have underestimated his enthusiasm for that compromise.¹⁰¹ On 15 June 1887, George Q. Cannon presented to President Taylor the constitutional prohibitions of polygamy which had been secretly drafted for the proposed Utah constitution by the Cleveland administration in Washington:

Subsequently President George Q. Cannon stated to him that there were two points which troubled some of the brethren, who had tender consciences, and probably large numbers of our people would think upon these points and would like to be relieved respecting them, by knowing the will of the Lord upon them. The first is, "Will we offend our God by declaring that to be a misdemeanor in our brethren, which He views as a virtue and has commanded them to practice?" Second: "Will we displease Him if as jurors we frame indictments and render verdicts against our brethren as criminals for obeying the law which He has commanded them to observe?" President Taylor said: "There is no necessity for the brethren to be too particular or scrupulous in such matters."¹⁰²

VI

Although Wilford Woodruff had previously been one of the most vocal opponents of surrendering the practice of plural marriage, almost as soon as he became presiding authority of the Church as senior apostle, he favored further compromise. By 17 September 1887, Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Church lawyer LeGrand Young privately expressed themselves as convinced that it was necessary for polygamists to promise the courts to refrain from unlawful cohabitation because they "seem to think it is necessary to do something of this kind in order to convince Congress of the sincerity of our efforts to gain Statehood."¹⁰³ But when Wilford Woodruff presented this as a proposal to the rest of the apostles twelve days later, he did so in a noncommittal way as a "document without date or signature but supposed to have come from the Administration at Washington," to which he added LeGrand Young's draft of the exact wording polygamists might use in making such a promise before the courts.

Woodruff apparently did not express his earnest support for this proposal to the apostles who voted it down because they were of "the almost unanimous opinion that no latter-day saint could make any such promise and still be true to the covenants he had made with God and his brethren when in the House of God and having wives sealed to him."¹⁰⁴

President Woodruff's reason for not simply announcing his decision about this proposed polygamy concession and asking for the apostles' sustaining vote was that he was facing a difficult administrative dilemma that seriously limited his leadership. On one hand, several of the apostles (particularly thirty-year old Heber J. Grant) had already told President Woodruff that they regarded him as too old and wanted a younger, more vigorous man as Church president.¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, the younger, more vigorous, and eminently qualified man to whom Wilford Woodruff looked as his counselor and strength was George Q. Cannon against whom half of the apostles bore various personal and administrative grudges of such intensity that they effectively blocked the organization of the First Presidency for almost two years following the death of John Taylor.

The apostles had already convened on 3 August 1887 for the first of several periodic meetings where they not only severely criticized Cannon but also indicated that they had deep-seated resentments against the former First Presidency for making decisions and setting policy without consulting the apostles. The apostles were so polarized that when Wilford Woodruff specifically proposed organizing the First Presidency in March 1888, four apostles voted against the motion.¹⁰⁶ All this frustrated Wilford Woodruff's desire to organize the First Presidency and choose his counselors, made him hesitant as president of the Quorum to tell the apostles he approved the proposition for which he was ostensibly asking their evaluation but actually seeking their endorsement, and caused him by 1889 to confide to his secretary that "he would about as soon attend a funeral as one of our council meetings."¹⁰⁷

In 1888, Mormon leaders sent out mixed messages about continuing the practice of plural marriage. In February, the Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon testified that President Woodruff had stopped "for nearly a year" giving recommends for plural marriages in the temple; and yet Cannon married another plural wife in the Salt Lake Endowment House the day before he testified and again five months later. During that year polygamous marriages continued to be performed in the Logan Temple by Marriner W. Merrill, in the Salt Lake Endowment House by Franklin D. Richards, aboard ship by Francis M. Lyman, and in Mexico by Moses Thatcher and Alexander F. Macdonald.¹⁰⁸

In April, Wilford Woodruff expressed dismay that some speaker at the general conference had referred to plural marriage, despite a decision by the apostles to avoid such expressions,¹⁰⁹ yet at the dedication of the Manti Temple on 17 May 1888, President Woodruff said, "We are not going to stop the practice of plural marriage until the Coming of the Son of Man."¹¹⁰ Nevertheless, in July the Church's emissaries in Washington, D.C., obtained the commitment from the U.S. Solicitor that the temples would be safe from confiscation under the provisions of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, and in August 1888, Utah's delegate to the House of Representatives, John T. Caine (who was also an unofficial representative of Church authorities) stated in the House: "Mr. Speaker, there is no longer a possibility of objecting to Mormons on account of polygamy. That is a dead issue. It can not be vitalized .... because it has ceased to exist."¹¹¹ Yet when the apostles met before October 1888 conference to discuss the question:

"Shall we repudiate plural marriage to save the half Million dollars the U.S. has seized," they decided to let the Church lawyers conduct the legal challenges as best they could without an officially announced end of polygamy, "and we retain our honor before men, and our integrity to God."¹¹²

That although the evidence went to indicate that the practice of polygamy or bigamy had neither been advised, counseled nor encouraged within the past two years, yet it was nowhere shown that a like modification had been made in the teachings and doctrines of the general Church in such a way as to reach the whole body of members in that Church.... Such a course might have been expected at the last General Conference, but as no movement of the kind had taken place, it was safe and proper to conclude that nothing of the kind might be anticipated in the near future.¹¹⁴

Almost three months later, on 20 December 1888, Wilford Woodruff, still without an organized First Presidency, asked the apostles to consider a document "said to have come from Washington, but no name or names were given to it," which was addressed to the Latter-day Saints in Utah and throughout the United States, "asking them to conform their lives to the Laws of Congress," a document which was supposed to be signed by all the Church leaders when published.¹¹⁶

It is impossible to ignore the parallels between this situation and the circumstances of the September 1887 document that we know Wilford Woodruff wanted approved, even though he did not mention his preference to the apostles who rejected the proposal in 1887. After having his secretary read the 1888 document twice to the Quorum, President Woodruff said, "It is of the greatest importance that we decide by the Spirit what decision to make regarding the same" and, making no comment on the document itself, asked the rest of the apostles to express themselves from youngest to eldest. George Q. Cannon, George Teasdale, and John W. Taylor were absent from the meeting, but all the other apostles rejected the document; and John Henry Smith, Francis M. Lyman, Moses Thatcher, and Joseph F. Smith said that they could not approve such a document without the word of the Lord through Wilford Woodruff, the senior apostle.

After this overwhelming repudiation, Woodruff told the apostles, "Had we yielded to that document every man of us would have been under condemnation before God. The Lord never will give a revelation to abandon plural marriage." If these had been his views before the apostles rejected the document, it is unlikely that he would have asked them to consider signing it. Even the degree of compromise to which Presidents Taylor and Woodruff had already acquiesced by the end of 1888 was unsatisfactory to the apostles, as indicated in Heber J. Grant's comment about this meeting: "I thank God sincerely for a stopping point in the plan of yielding & compromising that we have been engaged in, of late."¹¹⁷ President Woodruff's diary does not state his own feelings about the decision of the apostles to reject what he described as the "Document got up for us to accept to do away with Poligamy," but almost the last words he spoke to the apostles on this occasion had a tone of defensiveness: "I don't feel that I owe any apology in presenting this document and I will now withdraw it and I don't want anything said about it."¹¹⁸

Wilford Woodruff had kept his own counsel about the prospects of ending plural marriages until the First Presidency was organized in April 1889 with George Q. Cannon as first counselor and Joseph F. Smith as second. Then President Woodruff made his position more explicit. In June he replied to a resident of the Mormon colonies in Mexico who wanted permission to marry a plural wife: "The spirit of the Lord suggests that extreme prudence and precaution should be observed in reference to these matters for the present, and perhaps for some time to come, especially in regard to my own acts in relation thereto."¹¹⁹ Even though Alexander F. Macdonald of the Mexican Mission had been allowed to perform two plural marriages for U.S. residents in January 1889, one in May, and two in July, President Woodruff obviously extended the "extreme prudence" of his June letter to a ban on all plural marriages in Mexico: Macdonald performed no other plural marriage there through the rest of 1889.¹²⁰

Wilford Woodruff did not even advise his first counselor of this decision until 9 September 1889. They were asked by the Davis (Utah) Stake president what to do about requests for polygamous marriages: "President Woodruff, in reply, said ... I feel that it is not proper for any marriages of this kind to be performed in this territory at the present time ... He intimated, however, that such marriages might be solemnized in Mexico or Canada." When President Woodruff invited his counselor to respond, George Q. Cannon was stunned:

I made no reply; for I was not fully prepared to endorse these remarks, and therefore thought it better to say nothing.... This is the first time that I have heard President Woodruff express himself so plainly upon this subject, and therefore I was not prepared to fully acquiesce in his expressions; for, to me, it is an exceedingly grave question, and it is the first time that anything of this kind has ever been uttered to my knowledge, by one holding the keys.¹²¹

Coincidentally it was on 2 October that Wilford Woodruff called a meeting of the First Presidency and apostles to announce this policy. He explained that he felt it was necessary due to the publicity of the recent arrest of Hans Jesperson, who had married his plural wife in the Salt Lake Endowment House the previous April. George Q. Cannon had overcome the uncertainty he felt when President Woodruff revealed his intentions the previous month and told the other apostles that he "was not in favor of plural marriages being performed in this Territory, but they might be attended to in Mexico or Canada, and thus save our brethren from jeopardy in attending to these matters." Lorenzo Snow suggested that if this was President Woodruff's new policy, there should be a public announcement of it, but Snow's motion was opposed by Counselor Joseph F. Smith and by Apostles Francis M. Lyman and John W. Taylor. In view of the situation then and thereafter, John W. Taylor's comment at this meeting was prophetic:

This is something that I never expected to hear discussed in this light. I have understood it was policy for the brethren to take wives outside of the United States. You could not publish that you will not give your consent that plural marriages shall be consummated and at the same time have the marriages consummated in Canada or Mexico. I think it will be best policy to let the matter rest without saying anything about it, because if plural marriages are solemnized it will soon be known and we will be considered insincere. I feel to have faith that the Lord will bring something about for our deliverance. If we published anything on this matter it will be impossible for us or the Elders to fully explain to the Saints, and much confusion will ensue.¹²³

"I have refused to give any recommendations for the performance of plural marriages since I have been president. I know that President Taylor, my predecessor, also refused. ". . . I am confident," said the president, "that there have been no more plural marriages since I have been in this position, and yet a case has recently occurred which I will say to you I do not understand at all. It is giving us a good deal of trouble. Perhaps you have heard of it?, The president referred to the Hans Jesperson case . .."It seems incredible if it is true," Woodruff said, "It is against all of my instructions. I do not understand it at all. We are looking into it and shall not rest until we get at all the facts. There is no intention on our part to do anything but to obey the law."¹²⁴

A month later, the Church attorneys urged that it would help the Church's cause in the courts by having John W. Young testify under oath that the First Presidency had ruled no plural marriages were to be performed, and "there was some mention made of this being done in Conference and not in the court." George Q. Cannon vigorously argued against the proposal because it would not persuade the Church's enemies and would "hurt the feelings and faith of our own people.... I want President Woodruff, if I can have my feelings gratified and if anything is to be said on this subject in this direction, to be able to say, 'Thus saith the Lord.' The matter was then dropped."¹²⁷ President Woodruff considered the matter alone for several hours that evening and dictated a revelation of 24 November 1889 which stated in part:

Let not my servants who are called to the Presidency of my church, deny my word or my law, which concerns the salvation of the children of men. ... Place not your selves in jeopardy to your enemies by promise ... Let my servants, who officiate as your counselors before the Courts, make their pleadings as they are moved by the Holy Spirit, without any further pledges from the Priesthood, and they shall be justified.

But if anything, the 1889 revelation painted the First Presidency into a corner. It specifically denied Wilford Woodruff's prayerful request to issue an official statement in court or in a general conference that there were to be no more plural marriages, and inevitably, the General Authorities to whom this revelation had been presented would remember it in responding to future developments.

Events took an increasingly disastrous turn on 3 February 1890, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the section of the Idaho state constitution that disfranchised all Latter-day Saints in Idaho; and on the 10^th of the month, the anti-Mormon political party won the Salt Lake City election.¹²⁹ On the same day the Church lost political control of Salt Lake City, George Q. Cannon's newspaper interview was published in response to the central question: "Why doesn't the head of your Church-the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles-issue an official declaration upon the subject. Why don't you say, as a Church, that polygamy is no longer taught and is not encouraged by the Church?"

Of course this was the very announcement the 1889 revelation prohibited the First Presidency from making, but Cannon obviously did not want to tell the newspaper that. Instead, he said that such an announcement would give ammunition to those who claimed that Mormons blindly followed their leaders, and then President Cannon simply stated: "Plural marriages have ceased. Those of us, men and women, who went into polygamy years ago are dying off. A few years will end that issue."¹³⁰

Plural marriages had ceased in Utah, but (possibly in response to the revelation of 24 November 1889) the First Presidency had already resumed giving recommends for plural marriages to be performed in Mexico. Alexander F. Macdonald performed twenty-four polygamous marriages there from 1 January through 27 June 1890.¹³¹ Meanwhile, George Q. Cannon met on 17 February 1890 with the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Senator Calvin S. Brice, and used similar arguments against Brice's recommendation for a public announcement of the cessation of plural marriages. Cannon added, "How could any man come out and say that it was not right or that it must be discontinued, and set themselves up in opposition to God."¹³² Yet the motivation was increasing for doing something substantial to deflect the federal crusade against polygamy. In April 1890, bills were proposed in the U.S. House and Senate to disfranchise all Latter-day Saints because they belonged to an organization that taught and encouraged polygamy.¹³³

By May 1890, the federal government was pushing the Church further down the road of compromise. On 3 May, the Deseret Evening News editorialized: "The practice of polygamy has been suspended, if not suppressed."¹³⁴ This did not impress federal officials who demanded an official statement ending plural marriages, and two weeks later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Edmunds-Tucker Act was constitutional in its provisions to discorporate the Church and confiscate Church properties.¹³⁵ By mid-May, George Q. Cannon, his son Frank, and other Church emissaries were at the nation's capital in a desperate effort to persuade the House and Senate Committee on Territories to table the bills that would disfranchise all Mormons.

Eight years later, a semi-official history by Orson F. Whitney said that Secretary of State James G. Blaine intervened on the Church's behalf "with the understanding that something would be done by the Mormons to meet the exigencies of the situation."¹³⁶ Blaine did not simply make this assumption, but he also prepared a document "for the leading authorities of the Church to sign in which they make a virtual renunciation of plural marriage," which Counselor Cannon showed to his son, Apostle Abraham H. Cannon, in mid-June 1890 at New York City.¹³⁷ George Q. Cannon appreciated Blaine's good will but, as later events show, ignored Blaine's proposed document as merely one more piece of unsolicited non-Mormon advice.

When Cannon returned to Salt Lake City later in June, the second counselor in the First Presidency, Joseph F. Smith, warned him that plural marriages being performed in Mexico might become public knowledge because "the last few who had gone down there to meet Brother Macdonald had attracted considerable attention." That was an understatement. Early in June, ten couples accompanied Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., and his intended polygamous wife to Mexico. According to the son of one of these couples, the excursion was conducted like a gala outing:

He [Young] sent word through the grapevine that if there was any couples up in this area, these stakes, that contemplated marrying into polygamy that they were to catch this train. They went down to Cache Junction. They caught the train there and went to Salt Lake. There was others that went with them. They went down there [to Mexico] and Brigham Young Jr. married another polygamous wife and he had several wives.

This report confirmed Wilford Woodruff's reluctance for having allowed (possibly at the urging of his counselors) the new polygamous marriages after he had stopped them in Mexico in June 1889 and in Utah in September 1889. "He has not felt very favorable to marriages being solemnized at all," George Q. Cannon wrote, "but has consented to some few being performed in Mexico." President Woodruff had allowed twenty-three recommends to be issued for polygamous marriages in Mexico from December 1889 to the mass marriage of 7 June 1890, after which he had approved only one more marriage which Macdonald performed on 27 June. George Q. Cannon then noted that on the afternoon of 30 June 1890 the First Presidency concluded "for the present" that there would be no plural marriages even in Mexico unless the plural wife remained there.¹⁴⁰

The First Presidency undoubtedly felt impelled to make this decision because they had just received the text of the Senate's new disfranchisement bill. The Deseret Evening News printed it the same afternoon, commenting that it was more likely to be passed in Congress because the bills proposed earlier in the year were too drastic to succeed.¹⁴¹ This decision of 30 June 1890 ended new authorized polygamous marriages throughout the world until the Manifesto-connected events of October 1890.

The next two months were filled with new disasters. On 1 July, the Senate introduced a bill that would bar polygamists or anyone belonging to an organization teaching or promoting polygamy from homesteading in Wyoming; on the 15^th, the anti-Mormon political party won the Salt Lake City school trustees election and now had control of secular education in that city; on the 29^th the Utah Supreme Court ruled that polygamous children could not inherit from their fathers' estates, and on 5 August the anti-Mormon party won most of the county offices in Salt Lake and Weber Counties.¹⁴² Then President Woodruff began to hear rumors that the U.S. government might attempt to confiscate the Church's three most important and sacred buildings, the Manti, Logan, and St. George temples. Before Brigham Young, Jr., left Salt Lake City for a mission to England on 16 August, he heard President Woodruff exclaim, "We must do something to save our Temples."¹⁴³

On 30 August and 1 September came direct confirmation of the government's intent, despite the agreement in 1888 not to disturb the temples.¹⁴⁴ For nine years, Wilford Woodruff had publicly warned that the government would want the Saints to give up all temple ordinances if they gave up the practice of polygamy. Federal officials were now on the verge of confiscating the temples because he would not officially announce the abandonment of polygamy; yet the revelation he dictated in November 1889 specifically instructed: "Place not yourselves in jeopardy to your enemies by promise." It was a cruel dilemma for an eighty-three-year-old man who valued temples and temple ordinances above anything else, and he hurriedly left Salt Lake City with his counselors on 3 September 1890 for San Francisco to avoid being subpoenaed to testify in the court case.¹⁴⁵

VII

While the First Presidency was in San Francisco, two developments provided the final catalysts for President Woodruff's action. First, they met on 12 September with Morris M. Estee, a California judge who had been chairman of the Republican National Committee during the successful candidacy of the current U.S. president. Estee said he and the Church's other influential Republican friends would do everything they could to help the cause of the Church and Utah statehood, which were intertwined, but he affirmed that it would be absolutely necessary "sooner or later" for the Church to make an announcement "concerning polygamy and the laying of it aside." Cannon commented about the "difficulty there was in writing such a document-the danger there would be that we would either say too much or too little."¹⁴⁶ He could also have stated the other problems: When would they issue such a document? What reason would they give for issuing the statement then and not at some other time? Two days later, the Salt Lake Tribune printed the most recent report of the federal Utah Commission, which supervised elections, to the Secretary of the Interior, including the following:

FORTY-ONE NEW POLYGAMISTS

The Commission is in receipt of reports from its registration officers [in Utah] which enumerate forty-one male persons, who, it is believed, have entered into the polygamic relation, in their several precincts, since the June revision of 1889.¹⁴⁷

After returning to Salt Lake City on Sunday 21 September, the First Presidency met the following morning with Church Attorney Franklin S. Richards and Deseret News editor Charles W. Penrose, who stressed the likelihood that the Utah Commission's report would assist in the passage of the disfranchisement bills before Congress. George Q. Cannon's diary reveals the genesis of what became the Manifesto:

They have accused us of teaching polygamy and encouraging people in its practice, and since June 1889, there have been at least 45 plural marriages contracted in this Territory. I felt considerably stirred up over this, and thought that there should be a square denial, and I remarked that perhaps no better chance had been offered us to officially, as leaders of the Church, make public our views concerning the doctrine and the law that had been enacted.¹⁴⁸

Cannon saw a denial as necessary to forestall hostile legislation but also wished to reaffirm the doctrine of plural marriage without specifically promising to obey anti-polygamy laws. He apparently felt that such an official statement would not be a concession of polygamy, would not violate the 1889 revelation's injunction against making "any further pledges from the Priesthood," but would answer the crisis of 1890 by simply denying the accuracy of the Utah Commission's report. Significantly, however, Cannon misread the report made by the Utah Commission as a charge of forty-one new polygamous marriages performed in Utah, whereas the report's heading and context claimed that forty-one male residents of Utah had married polygamous wives in ceremonies performed at unspecified places.

The crucial substitution of new plural marriages in Utah for the actual charge of new polygamists in Utah was also repeated in the Deseret Evening News editorial of 23 September 1890.¹⁴⁹ That same day President Woodruff decided to respond to the situation and told Apostle Moses Thatcher whom he met in Salt Lake City to stay for a meeting the next day. He also telegraphed Marriner W. Merrill at Logan, Franklin D. Richards at Ogden, and Lorenzo Snow at Brigham City to meet with the First Presidency on the afternoon of the 24^th.¹⁵⁰ Yet President Woodruff left his office on the evening of the 23^rd without having written the document he had scheduled the meeting to discuss.

As he entered the First Presidency's office the morning of 24 September 1890, Wilford Woodruff told John R. Winder, then a member of the Presiding Bishopric, that he had not slept much the night before. "I have been struggling all night with the Lord about what should be done under the existing circumstances of the Church. And," he said, laying some papers upon the table, "here is the result."¹⁵¹ George Q. Cannon confided in his diary: "This whole matter has been at President Woodruffs own instance. He has felt strongly impelled to do what he has, and he has spoken with great plainness to the brethren in regard to the necessity of something of this kind being done. He has stated that the Lord had made it plain to him that this was his duty, and he felt perfectly clear in his mind that it was the right thing."¹⁵² What President Woodruff presented in his own handwriting was a document of 510 words. This document was edited to create the published Manifesto's text of 356 words.

George Q. Cannon very carefully outlined the revision process for the Manifesto "because it is frequently the case that when important documents are framed there is a disposition to attribute their authority to one and another, and I have been often credited with saying and doing things which I did not say nor do." He further observed that "I have not felt like doing anything connected with this document, except upon hearing it read to suggest alterations in it." Counselor Cannon described three levels of revision in the Manifesto that occurred on 24 September 1890:

First, the First Presidency was engaged in other deliberations that morning and they asked George Reynolds, Charles W. Penrose, and John R. Winder to "take the document and arrange it for publication, to be submitted to us after they had prepared it." Second, when the document this committee prepared was read, President Cannon himself "suggested several emendations, which were adopted." Third, beginning at 2:30, Wilford Woodruff's Manifesto as already revised by Reynolds, Penrose, Winder, and Cannon was read to the meeting of the First Presidency and Apostles Franklin D. Richards, Moses Thatcher, and Marriner W. Merrill (Lorenzo Snow was not able to attend the meeting), and "one or two slight alterations were made in it." As soon as the First Presidency and three apostles approved these final changes, George Reynolds incorporated the revised Manifesto into a telegram the First Presidency sent for publication in national newspapers.¹⁵³ As the Presidency left this meeting, they greeted a returning mission president, to whom President Woodruff remarked, "We are like drowning men, catching at any straw that may be floating by that offers any relief!"¹⁵⁴

Cannon also recorded some significant alterations in President Woodruff's original draft of the Manifesto. One was the omission of his claim that "as soon as the Edmunds-Tucker law was passed President John Taylor gave orders for all plural marriages to cease" (which thousands of Latter-day Saints knew was untrue). Another was the revision of the statement "we are neither teaching nor practicing the doctrine of polygamy" to eliminate its inclusion of unlawful cohabitation by polygamous couples previously married, and to change the phrase "our advice to the Latter-day Saints is to obey the law of the land" (which would also have included unlawful cohabitation for previously married couples) to the narrowed definition of obedience in the final version: "to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land."

As had been true since 1887, Wilford Woodruff wanted to go further in making concessions about the practice of plural marriage than either his counselors or the other apostles. The final significant change was that President Woodruff drafted the original Manifesto as a third-person statement which he obviously intended to be published over the signatures of the full First Presidency or of the combined Presidency and Quorum of Twelve. Cannon's diary does not comment upon this except to say, "This whole matter has been at President Woodruff's own instance," and apparently his counselors and the three apostles wanted to leave it that way in the published Manifesto.¹⁵⁵ The final document was a personal statement.

Even the revised Manifesto was a curious document because most of its retrospective statements were untrue. The Utah Commission report claimed that forty Utah male residents married plural wives since June 1889. Sealing and genealogical records demonstrate that at least thirty men did so. Since Wilford Woodruff, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith authorized and knew about the polygamous marriages in Mexico for Utahns during that period, they chose to redefine the Utah Commission's report as a charge of new polygamous marriages performed in Utah, and yet even that did not end the difficulty: somebody in the First Presidency also signed recommends for the dozen plural marriages performed in the Salt Lake Endowment House and temples from June through October 1889.

Wilford Woodruff in the final version of the Manifesto referred to the publicized Jorgenson plural marriage in the spring of 1889 and said, "But I have not been able to learn who performed the ceremony." One of the three apostles who approved the Manifesto before its publication was Franklin D. Richards, who had officiated at the Jorgenson marriage and had also performed ten other plural marriages in the Endowment House from June through August 1889. The second of the three apostles who approved the Manifesto prior to publication was Marriner W. Merrill, the Logan Temple president who married a plural wife in July 1889 in that temple and who had performed several other plural marriages there from July to October 1889.¹⁵⁶

Obviously, what set the Manifesto apart was President Woodruff's specific commitment to stop new plural marriages; and in the eyes of many Mormons, this was a painful surrender to government authority. Immediately after the publication of the Manifesto, Thomas C. Griggs wrote, "It makes me sad," and Apostle Abraham H. Cannon observed, "There is considerable comment and fault-finding among some of the Saints because of a manifesto which Pres. Woodruff issued on the 24^th inst."¹⁵⁷ Although President Woodruff wrote in his diary on 25 September 1890 that he published the Manifesto after it was "sustained by my Councillors and the 12 Apostles," only three apostles approved it in manuscript, and half the Quorum was barely supportive when the apostles met on 30 September and 1 October 1890 to discuss the published document. Of the nine apostles present, two said that they were bewildered by the announcement (one referred to the 1886 and 1889 revelations that seemed to prohibit such a declaration), and of the seven apostles who announced their support, four specifically stated that they understood it to apply only to the United States.¹⁵⁸

These reactions indicate why President Woodruff did not consult with the full quorum before publishing the Manifesto, a consultation that would have required a delay of only three days. It seems obvious that President Woodruff's experience with the apostles since 1887 convinced him that at least a portion of them would not approve such a document in advance. Therefore, while the rest of the Quorum was out on conference assignments, Wilford Woodruff invited responses from only four apostles: Lorenzo Snow and Franklin D. Richards (two senior apostles who had consistently supported him in previous confrontations with the younger apostles), Marriner W. Merrill (one of the most junior of the apostles who had not been involved in the earlier administrative conflicts, and who, like Apostle Richards, knew that most of what the Manifesto said was untrue anyway), and Moses Thatcher (who would not be expected to oppose the 1890 Manifesto since he had preached for four years that the Millennium would occur in 1891).¹⁵⁹

When the full First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve formally voted retroactively on 2 October 1890 to sustain what President Woodruff had already done, they discussed whether to present the Manifesto to the upcoming general conference for a sustaining vote, and "some felt that the assent of the Presidency and Twelve to the matter was sufficient without committing the people by their votes to a policy which they might in the future wish to discard."¹⁶⁰ Only because the U.S. Secretary of the Interior demanded it as evidence that the Manifesto was official Church policy did the First Presidency and apostles decide on 5 October 1890 to present the Manifesto the next day for a sustaining vote.¹⁶¹

The general conference of 6 October 1890 was an emotionally charged and dramatic event. For years, Church authorities had publicly and privately expressed the conviction that the Latter-day Saints would not vote to sustain a document like the Manifesto, and George Q. Cannon's diary indicated that President Woodruff was afraid they would not do so today.¹⁶² To prepare the way, he had them first sustain officially the familiar Articles of Faith, written by Joseph Smith, with its now particularly significant twelfth article that previously had been honored more in the breach than the observance: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."¹⁶³ As the Manifesto was next read to the capacity crowd in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, tears streamed down Wilford Woodruff's cheeks, nearly everyone in the audience wept, and the women "seemed to feel worse than the brethren."¹⁶⁴

Although official accounts of this meeting state that the congregation voted unanimously to sustain the Manifesto,¹⁶⁵ that was not the case. William Gibson, later a representative in the Utah legislature, voted against it: "I am not ashamed of my action on the manifesto. I voted 'no' in the conference. When George Q. Cannon announced a clear [unanimous] vote, I said, 'All but one, right here.' We must let Babylon have her way for awhile, I suppose."¹⁶⁶ The majority of the congregation refused to vote at all when the Manifesto was presented, with the result that Apostle Merrill observed "it was carried by a Weak Vote, but seemingly unanimous," Joseph H. Dean recorded "many of the saints refrained from voting either way," and Thomas Broadbent noted, "I thought it A very Slim vote Considering the multitude Assembled."¹⁶⁷

Following the vote, the first speaker was George Q. Cannon who quoted the Doctrine and Covenants (now Section 124:49-50), and stated, "It is on this basis that President Woodruff has felt himself justified in issuing this manifesto." One of those in attendance said that Cannon's remarks "produced a profound sensation," and some of the audience may have remembered that five years earlier the Deseret Evening News had editorialized that only "semi-apostates" would use those verses in the Doctrine and Covenants to justify a declaration ending the practice of plural marriage.¹⁶⁸ Two years later, a Utah bishop observed, "The manifesto disturbed the equanimity of some I know. Several left the church through that."¹⁶⁹ For both the hierarchy and the general membership of the LDS Church, the Manifesto inaugurated an ambiguous era in the practice of plural marriage rivaled only by the status of polygamy during the lifetime of Joseph Smith.

VIII

Another year passed before the First Presidency, though without a conference vote, officially and authoritatively defined the full scope of the Manifesto in a manner exactly the opposite of President Woodruff's assurances in September-October 1890. Although the First Presidency prior to the Manifesto had imposed and then rescinded various kinds of restrictions on performing plural marriages outside the United States, the understanding of the First Presidency and apostles in September-October 1890 was that the Manifesto prohibited new polygamy only in the United States. The First Presidency's secretary, George F. Gibbs, later wrote: "President Woodruff's manifesto of 1890 abandoning the practice of polygamy was not intended to apply to Mexico, and did not, as the Church was not dealing with the Mexican government, but only with our own government; and for the further reason that the Mexican government extended the hand of welcome to Mormon polygamists."¹⁷⁰

As regards continued sexual cohabitation and child-bearing in polygamous marriages entered into before the Manifesto, a meeting of the First Presidency, Quorum of the Twelve, and all stake presidencies on 7 October 1890 clearly indicated the scope of the Manifesto in that respect: "President Woodruff drew the attention of the brethren to the fact that the Manifesto did not affect our present family relations, but it simply stated that all plural marriages had ceased."¹⁷¹

Nevertheless, federal officials demanded that the Manifesto include unlawful cohabitation before they would return the Church's confiscated property, and the First Presidency acquiesced in 1891 by publicly defining sexual cohabitation with pre-Manifesto wives as contrary to the Manifesto and the rules of the Church. In June 1891, Presidents Woodruff and Cannon gave an interview that was reprinted in three editions of the Deseret News:

Would you or any officer of the church authorize a polygamous marriage or countenance the practice of unlawful cohabitation?

Again we have to say we can only speak for ourselves, and say that we would not authorize any such marriage or any practice violative of the law.¹⁷²

As the First Presidency met on 20 August 1891 with the Church lawyers and some of the apostles to discuss the upcoming court appearance before the Master in Chancery to regain the confiscated Church properties:

President Woodruff, expressing himself in this connection, said he foresaw what was coming upon us; that our temples were in danger, and the work for the dead liable to be stopped, and he believed he would have lived to have witnessed the hand of the government extended to crush us; but the Lord did not intend that Zion should be crushed, and He averted the blow by inspiring me to write and issue the manifesto, and it certainly has had the effect of doing it so far.

Two weeks after having the general conference of the Church resustain the Manifesto on 6 October 1891, President Wilford Woodruff took the witness stand in the confiscation case. He made the following statements under oath which were reprinted in three editions of the Deseret News:

A. Any person entering into plural marriage after that date [24 September 1890], would be liable to become excommunicated from the church.

Q. In the concluding portion of your statement [the Manifesto] ... Do you understand that the language was to be expanded and to include the further statement of living or associating in plural marriage by those already in the status? A. Yes, sir; I intended the proclamation to cover the ground, to keep the laws-to obey the law myself, and expected the people to obey the law.

...

Q. Was the manifesto intended to apply to the church everywhere? A. Yes, sir.

Q. In every nation and every country? A. Yes, sir; as far as I had a knowledge in the matter.

Q. In places outside of the United States as well as within the United States? A. Yes, sir; we are given no liberties for entering into that anywhere-entering into that principle.

...

Q. Your attention was called to the fact, that nothing is said in this manifesto about the dissolution of the existing polygamous relations. I want to ask you, President Woodruff, whether in your advice to the church officials, and the people of the church, you have advised them, that your intention was-and that their requirement of the church was, that the polygamous relations already formed before that [Manifesto] should not be continued, that is, there should be no association with plural wives; in other words, that unlawful cohabitation, as it is named, and spoken of, should also stop, as well, as future po