The determination of the federal government to eradicate plural marriage eventually forced the church to capitulate. Polygamists resisted as long as they could. When attempts to overturn various pieces of anti-polygamy legislation failed, church leaders began pursuing a variety of other equally ineffective measures to maintain plural marriage. When federal raids made shambles of Mormon communities in the mid-1880s, for example, George Q. Cannon suggested to President Taylor that polygamists burden the courts by surrendering en masse, pleading that “the laws of congress conflict with my sense of submission to the will of the Lord, I now offer myself, here, for whatever judgment the courts of my country may impose” (Van Wagoner and Walker 1982, 53-54).
A less dramatic solution was for polygamists to move in great numbers to remote areas. During the final years of Brigham Young’s administration, when the polygamy issue first began to heat up, church leaders established settlements in areas they thought beyond reach of government harassment. In the three-year period from 1876 to 1879, more than one hundred new settlements were founded outside Utah, mostly in Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. These settlements, essentially efforts to expand Mormon influence, became havens for fleeing polygamists in the mid-1880s.
The first Mormon expedition to Mexico in 1875 also sought suitable areas for settlement, and serious colonization began in the mid-1880s. In early 1884, President John Taylor instructed stake president Christopher Layton to move his congregation from Saint Joseph, Arizona, to Mexico to escape the harassment of government authorities. Taylor and other church leaders visited southern Arizona and northern Mexico in 1885 and again encouraged polygamous Saints to move south of the border. They first chose a spot near Casa Grande in Chihuahua. After purchasing land word was sent “by mail or by messengers, it was grapevined to remotest hamlets in the Region. In St. Johns, Snowflake, Sunset, Luna, Smithville in Arizona, in Savoy, Socorro and other locations in New Mexico and even in many towns in Southern Utah troubled men heard the message and were moved to go in search of the promised land” (Embry 1987, 23).
By the end of 1885 hundreds of Mormon colonists were pouring into Chihuahua in northern Mexico. “Our affairs in Mexico for opening settlements for our people, are quite satisfactory at present,” L. John Nuttall, secretary to the First Presidency, wrote to his son. “When the United States find they have not got us in a corner, and cannot prey upon us, they may see that the business of crushing out Mormonism is not likely to be successful as they had anticipated.” The Mormon population in Mexico continued to grow. In less than a decade more than three thousand Saints had established eight polygamous colonies in Mexico—six in Chihuahua and two in Sonora. Though polygamy was outlawed by the Mexican states where the Saints settled, enforcement of the laws by Mexican officials was virtually nonexistent.1
Other polygamous colonizers moved north to the Canadian province of Alberta. Charles Ora Card, president of Cache Stake in Logan, Utah, had been instructed by John Taylor to seek out a place of “asylum and justice” in Canada. On 27 April 1887 he selected a place for a settlement on Lees Creek, Alberta—the present site of Cardston. Polygamy was outlawed by Canadian law as definitely as by American and Mexican statutes. Utah leaders in 1888 sent to Ottawa a three-man delegation consisting of Charles O. Card and apostles Francis M. Lyman and John W. Taylor to defend Mormon polygamy to Prime Minister John A. MacDonald. The contingent made an appeal on behalf of polygamous Saints in Alberta to bring their plural families into the province. “We would respectfully ask the government of the Dominion of Canada,” their lengthy written petition began, to allow polygamists “an abiding place in peace in Canada where they can provide for their families, educate their children, and not be compelled to cast them off and subject them to the charities of a cold world, thus breaking faith with their tender and devoted wives, innocent children and with God our Eternal Father, from whose hand we received them” (Carter 1953, 2:80-83).
Though the Canadian government was pleased to have the industrious Saints colonize the sparsely settled plains of western Alberta, Prime Minister MacDonald made it clear that Mormon polygamy would not be tolerated in Canada. But the Mormon premise that God had commanded them to enter plural marriage led them to view polygamy as a “higher law,” thereby justifying their disobedience of Mexican and Canadian statutes as they had earlier justified their disobedience to Illinois state law forbidding polygamy.2
A far more convenient means than colonization for obtaining release from government pressures would have been statehood. Church leaders recognized that entry into the union would reduce federal control over their domestic affairs. Though a congressionally approved constitution would certainly outlaw polygamy, local administrative and judicial officials could see to it that anti-polygamy laws would be lightly enforced or conveniently ignored. Federal officials, aware of this possibility, consistently rebuffed statehood bids. Government leaders continued to pressure church leaders to issue a statement abandoning plural marriage. George Q. Cannon rejected the Cleveland administration’s November 1885 attempt to obtain such a statement, insisting that even if the First Presidency issued such a manifesto, the Saints would not accept it. “If they did,” he noted, “and we were to repudiate this principle our church would cease to be the Church of God, and the ligaments that bind it together would be severed” (Quinn 1985, 31).
Statehood became such an important goal for Mormon leaders that they sometimes resorted to bribery to help pave the way. In January 1885 all three members of the First Presidency and several apostles joined in two days of discussion on a private railroad car en route to Cheyenne, Wyoming. The group decided to send Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., and Deseret News editor-in-chief Charles W. Penrose on a mission east to try to place $20,000 of church funds where such a sum would help “get U[tah] in U[nion]” (Seifrit 1983). The apostles could not find viable takers and the mission failed. Trying another avenue, George Q. Cannon was sent to Washington, D.C., in an effort to gather political support for statehood. The former congressman visited each member of the cabinet and paid three visits to President Cleveland. Cannon returned from the trip convinced that Utah polygamists should leave the territory until statehood could be obtained. He believed the exiles could then return to a state government that would either allow polygamy or be soft on interpreting laws against the practice.3
Congressional debate on the newly proposed Edmunds and Tucker bills in 1886 provided vivid headlines for Utah’s newspapers, and the debates in Congress and in the press intensified rumors that church leaders might be considering the abandonment of plural marriage. Many feared President Taylor would initiate such action; others prayed that he would. On 11 January 1886 he received an anonymous letter from a member of the latter—and perhaps predominant—camp. “You are hidden away and cannot know the true feelings of our people,” the writer charged: “The people say that you and Cannon and Smith have run away and left the masses to go to the penitentiary or humiliate themselves before the courts.… You will force men to go to the pen when you will not go yourselves.” Though the writer did not want to see President Taylor in prison, he pleaded with him to “Save us from division and contention within and reproach from without. We appealed to the highest tribunal as a last resort but this did no good, now what can we do?” Seeing the abandonment of polygamy as the only possible solution to the church’s difficulties, the letter urged Taylor, if he did not want to “take the responsibility of doing away with polygamy,” to “order an election of all the people and let them say Yes or No without fear or hindrance, and you will see for yourself how they feel, and you will be exonerated from all blame” (Taylor Collection).
President Taylor, however, was adamant in his refusal to capitulate on the plural marriage issue, predicting that government harassment would eventually decrease. Apostle Abraham H. Cannon recorded in his 28 March 1886 journal that Taylor received a revelation which stated that “God was satisfied with the sacrifice made by the people in this crusade and that he would now turn [government] wrath aside.” Six months later, while Taylor was being hidden in the John W. Woolley home in Centerville, the church president received one of the most controversial revelations in the history of Mormonism. He had petitioned the Lord respecting the possibility of giving up plural marriage. “All commandments that I give must be obeyed,” he was answered, “unless they are revoked by me or by my authority and how can I revoke an everlasting covenant for I the Lord am everlasting and my everlasting covenants cannot be abrogated nor done away with but they stand forever.” The message was absolutely clear: “I have not revoked this law nor will I for it is everlasting and those who will enter into my glory must obey the conditions thereof, even so amen.”4 Three months later, on 19 December 1886, seventy-eight-year-old John Taylor took as a plural wife twenty-six-year-old Josephine Roueche (Quinn 1985, 30).
In early January 1887 a proposal for a state constitutional convention was drafted by church agents in Washington, D.C. John W. Young, counselor to the Quorum of the Twelve, prominent businessman and promoter, and son of Brigham Young, headed the lobbying efforts of a group composed of John T. Caine, Utah delegate to Congress; Franklin S. Richards, church attorney; and Richards’s non-Mormon legal associate, George Ticknor Curtis. These politically astute observers had witnessed the passage of the Edmunds Bill in early 1886 and recognized the danger the impending passage of the more extreme Tucker Bill would pose for the church and Utah citizens alike.
J. Randolph Tucker, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, drafted the Tucker Bill as a substitute for the Edmunds Bill. The Tucker Bill not only provided for escheatment of church property but proposed that federal officials not be required to prove marriage in polygamous relationships, a modification posing far greater legal entanglements for polygamists than previous legislation. Another worrisome area of the bill was its threat to destroy the church’s political influence by making all offices in the territory appointive rather than elective, potentially placing law enforcement agencies under complete control of the non-Mormon element.
The church lobby in Washington saw little hope of defeating the Tucker Bill once it reached the House floor. They were successful for a time in keeping the bill in committee but recognized the inevitability of passage. George T. Curtis, the non-Mormon member of the lobby, informed the First Presidency of their seemingly hopeless position. “I am perfectly convinced that public opinion has become so crystallized on what is called ‘the Mormon question,’” he wrote on 23 January, “that it is idle to expect to modify or change it.” Curtis saw polygamy as politically doomed: “I have never known anything in the course of my life that presented such a phenomenon. In the ante-bellum period, when the whole country was so much excited about slavery, there were great and powerful States interested in defending it, which could combine for that purpose; and throughout the North there were at least large masses of people who, before actual war had begun, cordially and heartily stood by the South.” But the Saints, said Curtis, were without allies “you are a mere handful of people; 150,000 against 50 or 60 millions, and those millions have made up their minds that polygamy shall be exterminated.”
The lobby felt the only hope for defusing the explosive situation was to offer some Mormon concession. Without consulting the First Presidency, the group drafted an amendment to the Tucker Bill. This resolution proposed that the effective date of the bill be postponed for six months after passage. During this period a constitutional convention would be held in Utah Territory. If the proposed constitution, accepted by Utahns, prohibited polygamy, as the agents anticipated, the Tucker Bill would be withheld until Congress had examined the constitution and determined whether Utah should be granted statehood. Members of the lobby presented the newly drafted resolution to House Democrat William L. Scott of Pennsylvania, who had been opposing the Tucker Bill. Scott submitted the amendment, but it was not well received by the House. Members recognized the long-standing Mormon opposition to anti-polygamy legislation and viewed the church effort as a ploy to buy time.
While the Tucker bill was being debated in committee, John W. Young took the Scott Amendment to President Grover Cleveland. Young argued that polygamy could never be eliminated without Mormon cooperation and that passage of the Tucker Bill without the Scott Amendment would only anger Mormons and strengthen their resolve. Cleveland, who felt favorably disposed toward the Mormon situation, had sought on several occasions to resolve the polygamy issue. In the Scott Amendment he saw a glimmer of hope that the standoff between the government and the church might end. But church president John Taylor, upon receiving word of the conditions of the amendment, ordered his agents to “go slow” (Jack to Young). Taylor feared that any indication of concession on his part would be interpreted as a step towards surrendering plural marriage. “It will not do for us,” he wrote to the church’s agents on 27 January 1887, “after enduring what we have for the sake of our religion and its principles, to put ourselves in a position where our words and actions may be construed into a surrender of that for which we have ever contended” (Taylor/Cannon to Caine/Young).
Church agents strove behind the scenes to effect a compromise between the First Presidency and government officials. On 15 February 1887 the House Judiciary Committee completed work on the Edmunds-Tucker Bill, a compromise of two bills in committee, which passed both houses of Congress in quick order. John W. Young once again met with President Cleveland. The president was “entirely satisfied with the wording of the Scott Amendment,” Young wired the First Presidency; he said “no good man could ask for more” (Young to Jack). The amendment, Young concluded, could be viewed as a peace overture from the president of the United States to Utahns.
Young’s telegram reached President Taylor on 27 February 1887, shortly after the church president had been informed of the death of his wife Sophie. “If Scott amendment will satisfy President Cleveland,” the mourning church leader telegraphed Young, “it will be acceptable to us. If it shall become law [I] see no objections to people carrying out its provisions.” He added, however, that acceptance of the amendment in no way should imply that the church was altering its position on plural marriage. “We desire it distinctly understood,” he noted, that “we accept terms of Scott amendment as a political necessity, and that in doing so we neither yield nor compromise an iota of our religious principles” (Taylor to Jack).
President Cleveland allowed the Edmunds-Tucker Bill to become law without his signature on 3 March 1887, and the Scott Amendment was defeated. But church agents in Washington were encouraged by Cleveland’s support of the amendment and pressed church leaders for their support of an anti-polygamy constitution for Utah. In April 1887, President Taylor, still in hiding, announced to the church by letter that henceforth he would deny recommends for plural marriages. “The Church is now passing through a period of transition, or evolution,” he wrote: “Such periods appear to be necessary in the progress and perfecting of all created things, as much so in the history of peoples and communities as of individuals. These periods of transition have most generally their pains, perplexities and sufferings” (Clark 1965-75, 3:127).
Shortly after the reading of President Taylor’s letter to a General Conference of the church, a territorial convention was called to draft a state constitution. John Taylor and George Q. Cannon both endorsed the drafted constitution, which declared polygamy a misdemeanor. Church leaders began an immediate campaign to see that the constitution was accepted by the Saints. On 7 July 1887 Cannon urged all local church leaders to vote for the state constitution, declaring that in so doing they “would not offend God nor violate his laws” (L. John Nuttall Journal). Members of the Quorum of the Twelve were sent on short-term missions to convey this message to the Mormon populace. To encourage popular support for Utah statehood on a national level, church leaders sought to “secure the press of the country” by placing large cash payments with major newspapers. Apostle Heber J. Grant noted in his 12 August 1887 diary that “President Cannon stated that the parties with whom they were negotiating could secure … the leading papers of New York and other cities, to write articles in favor of our admission to the union for the sum of $74,000 cash and an additional $70,000 after we are admitted” (Lyman 1981, 160-61.)5
President John Taylor, the longtime champion of plural marriage, did not live to see either the overwhelming acceptance of the state constitution on 1 August or eventual statehood. He died at the Roueche home in Kaysville on 25 July. “Few men have ever lived who have manifested such integrity and such unflinching moral and physical courage,” George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith eulogized in the 26 July 1887 Deseret News. They lamented that Taylor had been “killed by the cruelty of those officials who have in this Territory misrepresented the government of the United States.”
The anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune came to the defense of the government officials in its 27 July issue. “George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith seized upon the opportunity presented by the death of a worn-out old man,” the paper reported, “to grossly slander some gentlemen whose only crime has been their efforts to perform their official duties under their oaths.” The Tribune took issue with the charging of John Taylor’s death to the persecution of federal officials: “There has not been one moment during the past two and a half years that John Taylor could not have shaken all fear of Federal officials by simply appearing before the District Court and promising to henceforth obey the laws.”
On 3 August the Quorum of the Twelve met to discuss the leadership void left by Taylor’s death. The meeting did not go smoothly. Several of the apostles took advantage of the opportunity to lodge complaints against the actions of George Q. Cannon, who had essentially been running the church during Taylor’s years of declining health (see John Henry Smith Journal, 3 Aug. 1887, 20-26 March 1888). Difficulties again broke out during the October 1887 conference week. Apostles Moses Thatcher, F. M. Lyman, Heber J. Grant, and John Henry Smith demanded explanations from Cannon on actions he had taken on several matters without consulting the quorum. The meeting remained in session until 2:00 A.M. before most objections were finally resolved.
On 20 March 1888 Wilford Woodruff, president of the Quorum of the Twelve and next in line for the church presidency, called the Twelve together and suggested that it was “about time to organize the First Presidency.” Controversy again sparked the meeting, however. Several apostles opposed George Q. Cannon’s serving in the First Presidency, and both Heber J. Grant and Moses Thatcher objected to Wilford Woodruff’s leadership on grounds that the aging apostle would lack the resilience to handle the pressure of anti-polygamy actions launched by the federal government. Tension was so great during this period that Woodruff remarked to his secretary that “he would about as soon attend a funeral as one of our council meetings” (L. John Nuttall Diary, 27 Feb. 1889). It was not until 7 April 1889, nearly two years after John Taylor’s death, that members of the quorum were united enough to sustain Wilford Woodruff as the fourth president of the church, and contrary to Grant’s and Thatcher’s opinion, the eighty-two-year-old Woodruff proved to be the man of the hour. His administration solved the long-standing difficulties with the federal government by issuing the “Wilford Woodruff Manifesto,” setting the wheels in motion for 1896 Utah statehood.
1. Mexican statutes, after 1884, prohibited polygamy. Mexican law also refused to recognize marriages performed elsewhere unless they were “valid according to the laws of the country” in which they took place. See Quinn 1985, 17; Jorgenson and Hardy 1980, 18. Though church leaders often made statements suggesting they were ignorant of Mexican anti-polygamy laws, they had been apprised of such opposition in early 1885 by church agent John W. Young. In a 21 May letter to apostles Brigham Young, Jr., and Moses Thatcher, who were in Mexico, he warned that a member of the Mexican Congress had advised him not to raise the issue of Mormon polygamy in that country because “there was a very plain congressional law on the subject.” The 14 November 1895 Salt Lake Tribune reminded Mormon leaders that nowhere in North America could they legally practice polygamy. Moreover, when giving newly appointed Juarez stake president Anthony Ivins instructions on 5 October 1895, President George Q. Cannon told him, “If you have occasion to meet Porfio Diaz, President of Mexico, we want you to tell him that we are NOT practicing polygamy in Mexico” (H. G. Ivins, 5).
2. Most Mormon polygamists in Canada brought only one of their plural wives across the border. Few, if any, plural marriages in Alberta were performed until after 1890. For a specific treatment of plural marriage in Canada, see Embry 1985. For general treatment of Alberta settlement, see Wilcox 1950 and Lee 1968.
3. George Q. Cannon was the architect of much of the church’s official position respecting late nineteenth-century polygamy. For example, President Joseph F. Smith in an 11 April 1911 telegram to Senator Reed Smoot noted that “Prest. Cannon was the first to conceive the idea that the Church could consistently countenance polygamy beyond confines of the republic where there was no law against it, and consequently he authorized the solemnization of plural marriages in Mexico and Canada after manifesto of 1890” (Smoot Collection).
4. A copy of this uncanonized revelation is in the John Taylor Letter File, LDS Archives; see also discussion in chapter 17.
5. In 1888 the arrangement with subsidized newspapers was expanded. Church agent Alexander Badlam informed Hiram Clawson of his activities in this area: “I was compelled to come here [from Washington, D.C. to New York City] and proceed to Boston and four or five other New York and New England cities to see some newspaper men and pacify them a little which I will do cheerfully for they have in almost every instance done handsomely with us, in fact I am proud of this branch of our labors as good results have come through from our efforts. The puritanical and sectarian press here have been looked after and their material interest consulted in so handsome and economical a manner that you must pardon me for reference again to it.… When a certain question [statehood] comes up properly before Congress I am satisfied it will have strong support, where formerly enmity existed” (Lyman 1981, 173).