In spite of their leaders’ public defiance of the 1879 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, many Mormons were uneasy about living in opposition to constitutional law. Some presumed that God would shortly intervene and that their opponents would be overthrown. Wilford Woodruff, soon-to-be president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, received a revelation on 26 January 1880 supporting this position. “Woe unto the nation or house or people who seek to hinder my people from obeying the patriarchal law of Abraham, which leadeth to celestial glory,” the revelation warned, “for whosoever doeth these things shall be damned, saith the Lord of hosts, and shall be broken up and wasted away from under heaven by the judgments which I have sent forth.… And thus, with the sword, and by bloodshed, and with famine and plagues and earthquakes and the thunder of heaven, and the vivid lightnings shall this nation and the nations of the earth be made to feel the chastening hand of Almighty God.”1
In the spring of 1880 senior apostle John Taylor, during a session of General Conference, sought continued church support for defying the Supreme Court ruling: “Has God given us a law? Yes! Have they made a law to punish us for obeying His law? Yes. All right we will get along and do the best we can, but we won’t forsake our god[;] and all those who are willing to abide by the law of god signify it by raising the right hand” (Deseret News Weekly, 12 May 1880). Reportedly the vote of support for Taylor’s proposal was unanimous. As the government stance became more threatening, Taylor reiterated the Mormon position. “Polygamy is with us a matter of revelation,” he was quoted in the 12 November 1880 Deseret News Weekly, “also a natural law which rules the lives of millions on this globe. One sure thing is that we will not surrender polygamy.” “Though they may imprison or kill most Mormons,” he was quoted in the 25 February 1885 Deseret News Weekly, “there will always be somebody left to carry on the work.” But he warned the Saints not to rebel openly against the “powers that be.” He advised them to observe God’s laws but with no “bloodshed, no rendering evil for evil.”
Leaders of the monogamist Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints proposed a compromise to U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes which they hoped would avert bloodshed on the polygamy issue. They suggested that he appoint Joseph Smith III as governor of Utah, reasoning that such a move would launch a missionary campaign in the territory which would encourage a grassroots anti-polygamy revolt in the church (G. Larson 1971, 93). Predictably, the RLDS suggestion was not implemented and leaders of some denominations were far less concerned about shedding Mormon blood. Prominent eastern minister DeWitt Talmage, for example, argued that “Mormonism will never be destroyed until it is destroyed by the guns of the United States Government.… If the Mormons submit to the law—all right. If not, then send out troops … and let them make the Mormon Tabernacle their headquarters, and with cannons of the biggest bore, thunder into them the seventh commandment” (Deseret News, 13 Oct. 1880).
President Hayes, who had visited Utah in September 1880, made several strongly worded suggestions to Congress in December. “Polygamy will not be abolished,” he argued, “if the enforcement of the law depends on those who practice and uphold the crime. It can only be suppressed by taking away the political power of the sect which encourages and sustains it.” He recommended that the “right to vote, hold office and sit on juries in the Territory of Utah be confined to those who neither practice nor uphold polygamy” (Richardson 1896-99, 7:606). Hayes’s 1881 successor, James A. Garfield, who in his inaugural address said that polygamy “offends the moral sense of manhood,” also urged congressional action against polygamy, as did Chester A. Arthur, who assumed the presidency on Garfield’s assassination. During his first annual message to Congress on 6 December 1881, Arthur reviewed the previous executive and legislative actions against polygamy, noting that the “existing statute for the punishment of this odious crime, so revolting to the moral and religious sense of Christendom, has been persistently and contemptuously violated ever since its enactment.” He argued that the Mormon practice of polygamy “imposes upon Congress and the Executive the duty of arraying against the barbarous system all the power which under the constitution and the law they can wield for its destruction” (ibid., 57).
Arthur found a strong supporter for his anti-polygamous posture in Vermont senator George Edmunds. After visiting Utah in 1881, the senator reported his findings in the January 1882 Harper’s Magazine. “It is the object of the Mormons,” he explained, “as shown by repeated and persistent efforts, to set up for themselves and maintain an exclusive political domination in the Territory of Utah, and to so frame and administer laws as to encourage rather than repress polygamy.” Edmunds correctly assessed: “These people have plainly seen that once established as a State in the Union, their domestic concerns, including polygamy and every revolting practice which they might choose to set up, would be absolutely beyond the legal reach of the people of other States.”
An aggressive drive for Utah statehood later that year was virtually ignored by Congress, which was considering Senator Edmunds’s proposed anti-polygamy bill, an amendment to the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act of 1862. On 16 February the Senate passed Edmunds’s legislation, laying legal groundwork for court action against Mormons not only for the difficult-to-prosecute offense of polygamy but also for the more easily substantiated “unlawful cohabitation.” The Edmunds Act was intended to disfranchise polygamists and make them ineligible for public office and jury duty. All voter registration would be cancelled by the act, and all elective offices would become vacant. In addition, not only would amnesty be offered to polygamists who complied with specific conditions but children born to plural marriages prior to 1 January 1883 would be declared legitimate.2
House debate on the bill began on 13 March. Apostle John Henry Smith, sent to Washington to lobby against the act, followed the action closely, as did Utah congressional delegate George Q. Cannon, who would lose his seat if the bill became law. Apostle Smith, who described Senator Edmunds as a man with the “face of a monkey” who “looks to me as if he would take the cat’s paw to put in the fire,” was greatly dismayed on 14 March when the House passed the bill by a vote of 199 to 42 (Pusey 1982, 135). “The Republicans were filled with venom,” Smith wrote in his 14 March journal, “and were bent upon the accomplishment of their purpose.… God our Father must judge these men for their evil design and [I] doubt not he will do so in his own due time.”
President Arthur signed the Edmunds Act into law on 22 March and appointed a five-man Utah Commission to oversee new elections, as prescribed by the act. Two weeks later, in General Conference addresses, church president John Taylor left no doubt in the minds of observers what his position would be respecting the new law. “Let us treat it,” he said in one speech, “the same as we did this morning in coming through the snow storm [and] put up our coat collars (suiting the action to the word) and wait till the storm subsides. After the storm comes sunshine. While the storm lasts it is useless to reason with the world; when it subsides we can talk to them” (Roberts 1965, 360-61). “We shall abide all constitutional law, as we always have done,” he added, “but while we are godfearing and lawbiding and respect all honorable men and officers, we are no craven serfs, and have not learned to lick the feet of oppressors.” Taylor clearly demarcated the Mormon course of action: “We will contend, inch by inch, legally and constitutionally, for our rights as American citizens, and for the universal rights of universal man” (JD 23 [9 April 1882]: 67).
President Taylor also recorded a revelation on the matter. In response to the question, “Is the law of Celestial Marriage a law given to this nation or to the world,” Taylor dictated the “word of the Lord” on the subject. “Concerning the course taken by the United States,” the document reads, “they have a right to reject this law themselves … but it is contrary to the provisions of the constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, for them to prohibit you from obeying it. Therefore abide in my law which I have revealed unto you, saith the Lord God, and contend for your rights by every legal and constitutional method” (Taylor Collection).
As the legal wheels set in motion by the Edmunds Act began to turn slowly, disruption of Mormon life became extensive. Scores of federal officials were brought into the territory to conduct “cohab hunts,” and bounties were offered for information leading to the arrest of polygamists. Mormons not wishing to give up their plural wives and children faced dismal options—legal prosecution, a life in hiding on the “Mormon underground,” or complete exile. Despite the bravado demonstrated by the “cohabs,” as polygamists were called, those who did not submit to arrest had to be constantly on the move. Women and children were left to provide for themselves as best they could. Secret codes were employed in letters and messages, and children were taught to be evasive under questioning so as not to give away the details of polygamous relationships.
When marshals came to Lehi, Utah, young Ed Ross had been prepared by his elders. Questioned as to the whereabouts of his grandfather William Clark, he replied, “He has gone as far as you can run north, and as far as you can run west with your mouth full of chicken manure” (Watkins Interview). Agnes W. Roskelley approached the matter more seriously. She simply taught her sons “that they didn’t know what their name was; they didn’t know where they lived; they didn’t know who their dad or mother was” (Embry 1987, 22).
Mormons were angered at what they deemed inconsistent interpretations of the law as well as violations of their civil and religious rights. “The paramour of mistresses and harlots, secure from prosecution, walks the streets in open day,” they argued in a 2 May 1885 petition to President Grover Cleveland, and “no United States official puts a spotter on his ‘trail,’ or makes an effort to drag his deeds of guilt and shame before a judge and jury for investigation and punishment.” Noting the persecution heaped upon Mormon polygamists in Utah and surrounding states, the petitioners pointed out that “‘Spotters’ and spies dog their footsteps. Delators thrust themselves into bedchambers and watch at windows. Children are questioned upon the streets as to the marital relations of their parents. Families are dragged before commissioners and grand juries, and on pain of punishment for contempt, are compelled to testify against their fathers and husbands.” The treatment, the polygamists felt, was not only demeaning but immoral: “Modest women are made to answer shamefully indecent questions as to the sexual relations of men and women. Attempts are made to bribe men to work up cases against their neighbors. Notoriously disreputable characters are employed to spy into men’s family relations.” Furthermore, the petitioning Mormons complained, “contrary to good law,” those accused of crime were considered guilty until proven otherwise. “Trial by jury in the Territories is no longer a safeguard against injustice to a Mormon accused of crime,” they argued; “accusation is equivalent to conviction. Juries are packed to convict, and if they fail to find a verdict against the accused when he is a Mormon, insult and abuse are heaped upon them by the anti-Mormon press. Men, fearful of not obtaining justice in the courts, are avoiding arrest, believing no fair and impartial trial can be had under existing circumstances” (Salt Lake Tribune, 3 May 1885).
Many Mormon men on the underground hid near or within their own homes. Hidden compartments and cellars—”polygamy pits” as they were called—secreted men who had scurried for cover when an unexpected knock was heard at the parlor door. But as lawmen became more numerous and sophisticated it became more difficult to escape. Francis W. Kirkham’s diary account of the 8 December 1886 arrest of his father provides a poignant description of a successful polygamy raid: “How vividly the picture presents itself to me. Pa was expecting John who was staying in the tithing yard to call him at about 4 oclock in the morning, & of course when he heard a knock at about that hour he said, ‘All right John I’ll be there.’ Imagine his surprise when a stranger accosted him by saying, ‘I arrest you in the name of the law.’ I was laying in the next room, & I was perspiring with excitment. Of course the household was soon up. My mother started a fire & soon had some warm tea for one of the Deputies who was sick [drunk].… Pa was summoned to court & he being true to his religion was taken to the Utah Pen on March 21 1887” (pp. 12-15).
James Kirkham and nearly 1,000 other Mormon men and a few women were jailed for polygamy, “unlawful cohabitation,” or both.3 These “prisoners for conscience sake” were incarcerated in locations as widespread as Arizona, Michigan, South Dakota, and Idaho. The majority were jailed in the Utah Territorial Penitentiary on the present site of Sugar House Park (2100 South 1400 East) in Salt Lake City. Considering the bitterness between Mormons and anti-polygamists, it is surprising that only one life was lost during this intense period of prosecution. Polygamist Edward M. Dalton was killed in 1886 by a pursuing deputy marshal (Dix 1973).
Twenty-seven-year-old Rudger Clawson was the first person to be tried under the Edmunds Act, a distinction that added to his stature as a folk hero among the Mormons.4 On 24 April 1884 he was indicted by a grand jury for polygamy, arrested, and released on $3,000 bail. In October his case came before the docket of Judge Charles S. Zane. Widely recognized as a fair and impartial judge, Zane became the major judicial force in the government actions against polygamists. Although he viewed the Mormon marriage system as a violation of basic moral standards, he demonstrated considerable leniency towards those who were willing to obey the law and abandon plural marriage.
Clawson appeared in Zane’s court one month after the judge had taken office. Refusing to compromise his integrity, the fiery Mormon would not plead guilty. The court subpoenaed both Clawson’s mother and his plural wife Lydia Spencer to testify, but they could not be found. Other testimony was less than convincing, and the jury dismissed the case. That evening, however, Lydia was apprehended by federal deputies and the case was retried. She initially refused to testify, but, after spending a night in jail under threat of indefinite imprisonment, she agreed to cooperate.
On 3 November 1884 Clawson appeared before Zane’s bench for sentencing. When asked why judgment should not be pronounced, he retorted, “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.” Clawson explained that “the law of 1862 and the Edmunds Law were expressly designed to operate against marriage as practiced and believed in by the Latter-day Saints. They are therefore unconstitutional, and of course cannot command the respect that a constitutional law would.”
Zane leaned back in his chair and contemplated the response for more than a minute before speaking. “While all men have a right to worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, and to entertain any religious belief that their conscience and judgment might reasonably dictate,” he pronounced, “they have not the right to engage in a practice which the American people, through the laws of their country, declare to be unlawful and injurious to society” (Deseret News, 3 Nov. 1884). Clawson’s declaration that he believed it right to violate the law resulted in a stiff sentence of three and one-half years in prison and a $500 fine for polygamy, plus an additional six months and $300 for unlawful cohabitation.5
As the Utah penitentiary population gradually became predominantly Mormon, polygamy sentences became a mark of status and honor.6 Frequently Mormon wards staged elaborate social functions in honor of the departing or returning “cohab.” But early prisoners for polygamy found prison life difficult. After the new “fresh fish” was processed, the prisoner found himself in the company not only of polygamists but also of common criminals. Rudger Clawson found this introduction uncomfortable—sixty men gathered around him and “stood gazing like wild beasts ready to pounce upon their prey and devour it” (Bashore 1979, 28). “Oh! the awful Scene that met My Eyes,” John Lee Jones wrote of his first night in a cell. “I could precive dark ugly Visiages in human Shape each one was sucking a dirty Pipe the smoak darkened the cell till you could Scarsely distinguish anything inside. The dense clouds of sinoak imited from the Pipes turned me heart Sick.” And the cells were less than clean. “We looked around or rather groped our way to one corner of the Cell,” Jones wrote, “where we found an empty dirty bunk with some Straw in it & torn or tattered Bed Tick. One of the inmates informed us that was our Bunk to Sleep in” (Jones Diary, 73-75).
Rudger Clawson’s first night was, in his own words, “oppressive to a degree almost maddening.” The stench of tobacco was overwhelming; the noise from throat clearing, spitting, and prisoners’ screaming in their sleep prevented him from sleeping at all. The bedbugs were so thick that Clawson reported “a man could write his name with the blood of bugs by pressing his finger against them as they crawled along the wall” (Bashore 1979, 31). James Kirkham, on the eve of his release from the prison, celebrated the occasion by spending most of the night on a bedbug hunting expedition. “Such a night I shall never forget,” he wrote: “we spent the whole of the time fighting bedbugs. We killed by actual count 249” (Kirkham Diary, 19 Aug. 1887).
As increasing numbers of polygamists entered the prison system, they were initiated into the “brotherhood” by being required to entertain the group singing a song, dancing a jig, making a speech, or performing some other outlandish act. But whereas comradery helped lift their spirits at times, prison life was rarely so jovial. Abraham H. Cannon, son of George Q. Cannon, noted that during his 1886 stay at the prison the men had been complaining for several days about the poor quality of coffee sent to them. “On being mentioned to the Warden,” Cannon wrote in his diary on 28 May 1886, “he said that a bottle of carbolic acid had accidentally been dropped into the coffee, and the kettle in which the drink was made had not been cleaned out for some time. But this had now been remedied.” Cannon had other culinary complaints. “The bread for two days has been so sour that we could scarcely eat it. Radishes that were sent in last night were so tough that they could scarcely be eaten, and lettuce sent in the night previously was nearly covered with worms. It is something new for us to receive anything green to eat from the Penitentiary ranch, but it would be better to have it in an eatable condition.”
Abraham’s father, George Q. Cannon, was the federal officials’ most-wanted polygamist. His commanding presence, as well as President Taylor’s advanced age and Joseph F. Smith’s “exile” in Hawaii, caused the elder Cannon to be considered “the power behind the throne.” Cannon surrendered himself in 1888 to show that “the leading men are willing to suffer but not to concede.”7 His experiences with prison life, well documented in his journal, seem more pleasant than those of others. During his initial processing, he specifically requested no special “favors that would embarrass [prison officials] by calling forth attacks from our enemies” (Cannon 1947, 396). However, Warden Arthur Pratt, anti-polygamous son of Apostle Orson Pratt, allowed Cannon numerous advantages, including keeping his cell door open when he wished. After one week of prison life, Cannon told a new arrival, Reddick Allred, that “he would not miss [the prison experience] for anything” (“Diary of Reddick Allred,” 354). Cannon made good use of the duration of his sentence, collaborating on a biography of Joseph Smith with his sons, writing magazine articles, organizing a Sunday school and teaching a Bible class, acquiring an organ for the prison, entertaining hundreds of visitors, and having his picture taken in “prison stripes.”
Few prisoners were able to make as much of jail stays. For many, the hours with little to do added new dimensions to their meaning of eternity. One commented: “At morning I long for the evening/At evening I long for the day” (Bashore 1979, 40). Rudger Clawson, who endured the longest sentence of any polygamist, wrote that “one day so nearly resembles another in every particular as almost to create confusion in the mind … one long, tedious, never-ending day—a living death” (ibid.).
Not all polygamists were as willing as Clawson to suffer imprisonment and financial hardship. Orson P. Arnold became the first Mormon to renounce polygamy in order to escape judicial action. Judge Zane fined him $300 but did not impose a prison sentence. Individuals who followed suit were strongly criticized by church leaders. The most prominent Mormon dissenter from that official line was John Sharp, bishop of the Salt Lake City twentieth ward. “I acted according to the dictates of my conscience,” he later explained, “and just as in all wisdom I should have acted.… I do not renounce my religion or any part thereof. I simply give up the practice of polygamy, because the United States law forbids my indulging in it any longer. As long as I am a citizen of the United States I do not see how I can do otherwise.”8
Sharp’s law-abiding position came under intense criticism from both the church-owned Deseret News and high-ranking church leaders. The 19 September 1885 News lamented that Sharp had missed the “one opportunity of his life” to sustain a principle he believed divine. Joseph F. Smith, hearing of the situation while in Hawaii, wrote to George Q. Cannon on 12 November 1885, “I am truly sorry for br. John Sharp.… I can see no way for him but repentance, and a full acknowledgement of his error and a full return to the responsibilities devolved upon him by reason of the covenants he had made.” But Smith acknowledged this might be impossible, complaining that “the material of which martyrs were made in olden times has become very scarce in these latter days in the civilized world.”
Five days after his court appearance Sharp was interviewed by his ecclesiastical superior, acting Salt Lake Stake president Joseph E. Taylor.9 Asked to resign as bishop, Sharp refused. A short time later the Salt Lake high council decided that Sharp had rendered himself ineligible to retain his office. He appealed the decision to the First Presidency, who supported the high council’s finding. The response of church leaders to John Sharp’s course of action fully conformed to their opinion of the amnesty clause in the Edmunds Act. “A premium is placed on perfidy and heartless villainy,” the Deseret News editorialized on 27 January 1885, “by offering amnesty to polygamists who will throw their manhood to the dogs and enter the ranks of the debased by discarding their helpless and dependent wives and children, an alternative that death itself would not induce a true Latter-day Saint to accept.”
Despite the harshness of their language, church leaders desperately sought alternatives for polygamist Saints. In January 1885 President Taylor, with his counselor Joseph F. Smith and others, traveled to southern Arizona to examine the possibility of Mormon polygamy in Mexico. When the group reached California, Taylor received word that federal officials had ordered his arrest. Despite the danger, he returned to Salt Lake City on 27 January 1885. Five days later he preached his last public sermon, declaring that he would submit to arrest “if the law would only be a little more dignified.” That night he disappeared from public view and went into hiding.
With many leaders on the underground, church activities were severely limited. General Conferences, usually held in Salt Lake City, were scheduled in outlying areas. Federal officials haunted these conferences, hoping to arrest polygamists who might attend. By the end of 1888 federal marshals had swooped down on nearly every community in Utah and southern Idaho looking for “cohabs.” Those polygamists who expected quick divine intervention in resolving their predicament were sadly disappointed.
1. This unpublished revelation, often called “A Revelation to Wilford Woodruff in the Wilderness,” was received by Woodruff in an area some forty miles from Sunset, Arizona, and recorded in his journal (Kenney 7 [26 Jan. 1880]: 546, 615-21). It was accepted as the “word of the Lord” by John Taylor and the Quorum of the Twelve the following April.
2. For a discussion of the church’s position towards the amnesty clause, see Allen 1980. The Utah Commission is treated extensively in Poll 1939 and 1958, and Grow 1954.
3. In July 1889, Utah territory’s district attorney reported 970 convictions and 106 acquittals for violations of federal laws during the years 1885-89. The following year church leaders would claim that 1,300 Mormons had been imprisoned for these types of offenses (Driggs 1988, 120).
4. Clawson and Joseph Standing, missionary companions in Varnell’s Station, Georgia, were attacked by a mob on 21 July 1879. Standing was shot to death trying to escape. When the mob turned its attention to Clawson he calmly folded his arms, faced the men, and said, “Shoot.” Reportedly, his composure so unnerved the mobsters that he was allowed to go free (Nicholson 1886).
5. Clawson was pardoned on 12 December 1887 by President Grover Cleveland. Two weeks later he was set apart as a stake president in Brigham City. Ten years later he became a forty-one-year-old apostle, and in 1921 he began a twenty-two-year assignment as president of the Quorum of the Twelve.
6. George Q. Cannon vividly expressed this point in a 1 September 1886 essay in The Juvenile Instructor: “What is the use of punishment if it does not punish?” he argued. “Any attempt to degrade a man is a miserable failure if he accepts the intended degradation as an honor.” Adding that the Mormon prisoners do not view themselves as criminals but rather as religious martyrs, Cannon insisted that the Saints esteemed them “sufferers for righteousness the defenders of the great and sublime principle of religious liberty.” Even their enemies and persecutors, according to Cannon, are “forced to acknowledge that with all the machinery of punishment at their control they cannot make the Latter-day Saints bow to their wishes. This utter inability to bring the people to their terms causes them to boil with rage.”
7. Marshal E. A. Ireland on 8 February 1886 offered a $500 reward for information leading to Cannon’s arrest. Federal officers made numerous raids on church offices and Cannon’s places of residence in an effort to capture him. President Taylor, concerned for his counselor’s safety, sent him to Mexico to negotiate a land contract. En route he was apprehended by federal marshals near Humbolt Wells, Nevada. The returning party occupied a stateroom in the rear of one of the railroad cars. During a night-time restroom trip, Cannon stepped outside the rear of the car to assess the possibilities of escape. The train lurched; he was thrown from the car and later recaptured in a dazed condition, bleeding profusely from a badly broken nose.
Boasts were made that Cannon would be imprisoned for life and that he would be sent to a distant prison where his condition would be made “unbearable.” On the advice of President Taylor and with the approval of his bondsmen, Cannon returned to the underground and forfeited a $45,000 bond. After considerable effort in Washington, Cannon’s son Frank, an eventual U.S. senator from Utah, was able to gain an audience with President Grover Cleveland and persuade him to replace punitive federal judges in Utah with more lenient ones. As part of this agreement, George Q. Cannon voluntarily appeared before Judge Elliott Sandford and pleaded guilty to two charges of “unlawful cohabitation.” He was fined $450 and sentenced to 175 days in prison.
8. See accounts in Deseret News, 14 April, 20 July, and 21 Sept. 1885; Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Sept., 7 Nov. 1885. This situation is extensively covered in Allen 1980, 149-74.
9. Sharp’s stake president, Angus M. Cannon, was then serving time in the penitentiary for “unlawful cohabitation.” A short time before his imprisonment, Cannon had declared in stake conference, “When a man professing to be a Latter-day Saint will cower before our enemies and beg for mercy, forgetting or renouncing the promises of God, he considered him a contemptible hypocrite” (Allen 1980, 169). Under the circumstances it is not difficult to see why Sharp’s ecclesiastical leaders were less than sympathetic towards his position.