The framers of the Edmunds-Tucker Bill intended their legislation to destroy the Mormon theocratic system. Though polygamy was the war cry of these and other lawmakers, a 15 February 1885 Salt Lake Tribune article hit on a more basic motivation for opposition to plural marriage. “The essential principle of Mormonism is not polygamy at all,” the paper warned, “but the ambition of an ecclesiastical hierarchy to wield sovereignty; to rule the souls and lives of its subjects with absolute authority, unrestrained by any civil power.” Utah’s non-Mormon governor, Caleb West, echoed this point in an 1888 letter: “In the Mormon policy established and governing the people of this Territory since its settlement, the unity of the Church and state is perfect and indissoluble. It is based upon the complete, and absolute control of a priesthood.… This priesthood not only rules the Church, it governs the state.”1
Regulations of the Edmunds-Tucker Bill declared that marriages not publicly recorded were felonies, that wives could be forced to testify against husbands, and that children of plural marriages would be disinherited. Female suffrage was abolished, and a test oath was administered which disfranchised all polygamists and prohibited them from jury service or political office. The most serious stipulation of the bill, however, was the threat to dissolve the legal entity of the church corporation and to confiscate all church property in excess of $50,000.
On 30 July, the day after President John Taylor was buried, the government initiated the legal moves necessary to destroy the economic base of the church. The U.S. attorney general filed suits in the Utah Supreme Court against both the church corporation and the Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company. The church answered the suits by affirming that its status as a corporation had already been dissolved on 1 July 1862 by the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Law. The church testified that Trustee-in-Trust John Taylor had disposed of all church property, except enough to pay its debts, on or before 28 February 1887. This property, with the exception of Temple Square, the church president’s office, the church farm in Salt Lake City, and several Indian farms, had been secretly deeded to various trusted individuals throughout the church.
When hearings on the issue began on 17 October 1887, the church unsuccessfully sought to force the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, on 5 November, Marshal Frank H. Dyer was appointed receiver of the church’s estate and began immediately taking over the escheated property.
Church leaders, scattered over much of the western United States and Mexico, were confident that once their case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, the property would be returned. In the meantime they continued their efforts towards achieving Utah statehood. In January 1888 the Utah territorial legislature enacted a bill prohibiting polygamy and requiring all marriages to be publicly recorded in the appropriate county clerk’s office. Pressures to abandon polygamy mounted, both from within and outside the church. Some Saints argued that if church leaders had in fact discontinued approving plural marriages, a public announcement of such practice should be made for its public relations value.
Non-Mormon friends of the church advised abandonment of polygamy. L. John Nuttall, a secretary to the First Presidency, noted in his journal of 19 December 1888 a letter to President Woodruff from “friends in the East,” asking church members to “conform their lives to the Laws of Congress.” The letter endeavored to show “reasons why the church should openly renounce the practice of Polygamy in the future, [or] until the time comes when the saints can again practice that principle of their religion unmolested.” After lengthy discussion in the Quorum of the Twelve, “the brethren were very emphatic in opposing or accepting such a measure, [which] they felt had not come from the right source.” Woodruff then said, “You have spoken right. Had we accepted this proposition the Lord would have rejected us.” In words echoing the 1886 revelation of President John Taylor, Woodruff added, “The doctrine of plural marriage has come to stay for all time” (John Henry Smith Journal, 20 Dec. 1888).2
President Woodruff was confident that the situation would be resolved either by a favorable Supreme Court decision or by attainment of statehood. In a 26 February 1889 letter to James Q. Broadhead, a legal consultant to the church, Woodruff commented on the legal brief Broadhead had prepared in defense of the church’s position: “I never read a more forcible and unanswerable argument in my life upon any subject. It certainly will require something more than sophistry of unprincipled men to override that iron bulwark of constitutional and fundamental law which you have placed before them.” Woodruff was convinced that the Supreme Court could not possibly, in the face of unassailable argument, “attempt to escheat and confiscate the real and personal property of the Latter-day Saints. If they do, I tremble for my country.”
Woodruff wrote of his hope for Utah statehood to his good friend William Atkin on 18 March 1889: “We are now, politically speaking, a dependency or ward of the United States; but in a State capacity we would be freed from such dependency, and would possess the powers and independence of a sovereign State, with authority to make and execute our own laws.” President Woodruff then reflected on his oft-quoted expectation that the federal government would soon collapse: “We would, in the event of the disruption of the general government, be independent of all earthly powers and clothed with legal as well as divine authority to assume the position in the earth god has designed or may design us to fill in such an event.”3
For all the firmness of his hopes, Woodruff, unlike his predecessor John Taylor, did not desire to antagonize the government through defiant actions or inflammatory public rhetoric while the question of statehood was being debated. The issue was so sensitive during his administration that he reprimanded assistant church historian Andrew Jenson on 6 August 1887 for publishing a list of the known plural wives of Joseph Smith. “We do not think it is a wise step to give these names to the world at the present time in the manner in which you have done in this ‘Historical Record.’ Advantage may be taken of their publication and in some instances, to the injury, perhaps, of families or relatives of those whose names are mentioned.” Woodruff, though not in attendance at the April 1888 General Conference, went so far as to instruct the senior apostle present, Lorenzo Snow, that “if anyone attempted to speak about polygamy to throw his hat at him.” Snow either forgot or ignored the advice, and popular Rudger Clawson, just released from prison, defended the doctrine before conference attendees. “We were considerably annoyed,” Woodruff later wrote to two church leaders, “not to say mortified, at the want of care which was manifested in cautioning the brethren who spoke not to touch on topics that at the present time, were likely to rouse prejudice” (Woodruff to Richards/Penrose).4
In efforts to reduce even further the frictions against Utah statehood, Woodruff began refusing permission for plural marriages shortly after he organized the First Presidency in April 1889. He did not inform his first counselor, George Q. Cannon, of this decision until the fall. Asked by a stake president what to do about plural marriages, Cannon recorded in his 9 September diary that Woodruff said, “I feel that it is not proper for any marriages of this kind to be performed in the territory at the present time.” Cannon then noted that Woodruff had “intimated, however, that such marriages might be solemnized in Mexico or Canada.” Cannon wrote that this was the “first time that anything of this kind has ever been uttered to my knowledge, by one holding the keys” (Quinn 1985, 36).
A feeling was developing among many that the church was finally bowing to government demands on polygamy. This feeling was enhanced on 20 October 1889 when Woodruff was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune as saying, “I have refused to give any recommendations for the performance of plural marriages since I have been President … and have instructed that they should not be solemnized.” One week later, in the 27 October 1889 Salt Lake Herald, Woodruff was asked, “What is the church attitude toward the law prohibiting polygamy?” Woodruff replied, “We mean to obey it. We have no thought of evading or ignoring it. We recognize the laws as binding upon us. I have refused to give any recommendations for the performance of plural marriage since I have been President.”
John W. Young and other influential individuals sought during this tense period to influence Woodruff to make a more pointed official announcement that he was no longer authorizing plural marriages. After Young met with Woodruff and church attorneys, at least one individual feared the church president had been converted to Young’s position. L. John Nuttall, secretary to the First Presidency, noted in his 24 November journal, “When Pres’ Woodruff commenced talking to me this evening I felt he had become converted and [I] actually trembled[,] for I knew such had not been Pres. Woodruff’s feelings before.” Woodruff sought guidance from his counselors, but both refused to advise him on the issue. Apostle Abraham H. Cannon wrote in his 19 December 1889 journal that Woodruff “laid the matter before the Lord.” “The answer came quick and strong,” he observed of Woodruff’s 24 November revelation: “The word of the Lord was for us not to yield one particle of that which He had revealed and established. He had done and would continue to care for His work and those of the Saints who were faithful, and we need have no fear of our enemies when we were in the line of our duty. We are promised redemption and deliverance if we will trust in god and not in the arm of flesh.”
On the eighty-fourth anniversary of the birth of the prophet Joseph Smith, 23 December 1889, Mormons observed a church-wide day of fasting and prayer, seeking God’s intervention on their behalf. Church leaders issued an appeal to the nation for greater understanding and tolerance. President Woodruff, viewed by some of his colleagues as a better fisherman than administrator, was keenly aware of the precarious position of the church at the close of 1889. He wrote in his journal on New Year’s Eve: “Thus Ends the year 1889 And the word of the Prophet Joseph Smith is beginning to be fulfilled that the whole Nation would turn aginst Zion and make war upon the Saints. The nation has never been filled so full of lies against the Saints as to Day. 1890 will be an important year with the Latter Day Saints & American nation” (Kenney 9 [31 Dec. 1889]: 74).
Woodruff’s statement was prophetic. On 19 May 1890 the Supreme Court’s decision in The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ v. United States upheld the seizure of church holdings by the federal government. Perhaps feeling polygamy’s days were numbered, Woodruff secretly authorized at least twenty-three plural marriages between December 1889 and 7 June 1890 (Quinn 1985, 41). At the same time church leaders initiated several tactics designed to promote statehood and thus to save the church from the effects of the government’s legal maneuverings. On the advice of the leaders of both major U.S. political parties, church authorities began to disband the church-sponsored People’s Party and encouraged the Saints to divide along national party lines. In elections held in February, the local non-Mormon Liberal Party won most of the Salt Lake City offices. For the first time in Salt Lake City’s history, political control of the Mormon city fell into “gentile” hands.
The church suffered a staggering blow later that same month when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Idaho test oath which disfranchised Idaho Mormons. Utah Liberals immediately sought the disfranchisement of all Mormons in their territory, sending Robert Baskin to the nation’s capital with a quickly drafted document patterned after the Idaho law. This legislation, which became known as the Cullom-Strubble Bill, was intended to strip all Utah Mormons of their rights as American citizens.
Church leaders quickly formulated opposition to the Cullom-Strubble Bill. In April, Woodruff declared that no plural marriages could occur “even in Mexico unless the contracting parties or at least the female has resolved to remain in that country” (Abraham H. Cannon Journal, 10 April 1890),5 and on 3 May the Deseret Evening News editorialized that “the practice of polygamy has been suspended if not suppressed.” In addition to the rhetoric, a defense fund was organized, and George Q. Cannon headed a Washington delegation to lobby against passage of the bill. Professional lobbyists Judge Jeremiah M. Wilson and A. B. Carlton, former chair of the Utah Commission, were also hired to advance the church’s position. Frank J. Cannon, a personal emissary of his father, George Q., sought audience with several influential Republicans. Secretary of State James G. Blaine, a friend of the senior Cannon, granted an interview. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” Blaine prophetically remarked at the conclusion of the discussion. “Wouldn’t it be possible for your people to find some way—without disobedience to the commands of God—to bring yourselves into harmony with the law and institutions of this country?” “Believe me,” the astute politician added, “it’s not possible for any people as weak in number as yours, to set themselves up as superior to the majesty of a nation like this. We may succeed this time, in preventing your disfranchisement; but nothing permanent can be done until you ‘get into line.’”6
Blaine drafted a statement which he urged church leaders to adopt. Apostle Abraham H. Cannon noted in his 12 June diary that Woodruff “showed me a paper which Secretary of State Blaine had prepared for the leading authorities of the Church to sign in which they make a virtual renunciation of plural marriage.” Cannon found that his “feelings revolt[ed] at signing such a document.” Others apparently felt the same way, and the document was not endorsed by church leaders. Meanwhile the Utah Commission, which had recommended that all Mormons, whether polygamists or not, be disfranchised, issued a 22 August 1890 “Annual Report” to the Department of the Interior pointing out that “authoritative and explicit” disavowal of polygamy had been made by church leaders. The commission felt that these statements would be accepted by most Mormons without question and a “settlement of the much discussed ‘Mormon question’ would soon be reached.” More disconcertingly, however, the report noted “forty-one male persons … have entered into the polygamic relation, in their several precincts, since the June revision in 1889.”
This report spelled trouble for church leaders who had publicly stated that they were no longer approving plural marriages. And time was running out in Washington. Frank J. Cannon returned from the capital and informed President Woodruff that he had repeated to prominent congressional leaders the promise his father had made that “something will be done.” He emphasized that it was George Q. Cannon’s promise that made it possible for the Cullom-Strubble Bill to be “held back—with the certainty that it would never become law if we met the nation half way.” “To be very plain with you,” young Cannon told the church president, “our friends expect, and the country will insist, that the Church shall yield the practice of plural marriage.” “I had hoped,” Woodruff sadly responded, “we wouldn’t have to meet this trouble this way. You know what it means to our people. I had hoped that the Lord might open the minds of the people of this nation to the truth … Our prophets have suffered like those of old, and I thought that the persecutions of Zion were enough—that they would bring some other reward than this” (Cannon and Higgins 1911, 103-11).
On 3 August 1890 President Woodruff and several others began a 2,400-mile trip to visit the Saints in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The eighty-three-year-old leader was able to see firsthand the terrible circumstances of polygamist Saints. Shortly after returning from this extensive trip, Woodruff and George Q. Cannon left Salt Lake City for California. The Republican Party had recently come to power with the election of Benjamin Harrison, and church leaders discussed the Mormon position with Republican power brokers in San Francisco. They conferred with Judge Morris M. Estee, Republican National Chair, sometime-church-agent Isaac Trumbo, U.S. senator Leland Stanford, Henry Biglow of the San Francisco Examiner, and several others. The meetings were crucial not only for the church but for officials of the Republican Party who knew Mormons held a potential balance of political power in several western states. Estee promised Republican support for Utah statehood but affirmed that “sooner or later” the church would have to make an official announcement “concerning polygamy and the laying of it aside.” George Q. Cannon, writing of Estee’s comments in his 12 September 1890 diary, worried 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” (Quinn 1985, 43).
Woodruff and Cannon arrived back in Salt Lake to find an 18 September telegram from the church’s Washington agents informing them that the Utah Commission’s unfavorable report to the Secretary of the Interior would likely result in the passage of more explicit disfranchisement bills. The report compelled a decisive response. Three days later, on 24 September, Woodruff and Cannon met with counselor Joseph F. Smith and three members of the Council of the Twelve “upon an important subject.” A member of the Presiding Bishopric, John E. Winder, later said that when Woodruff entered the meeting he commented that he had not slept much during the night. “I have been struggling all night with the Lord,” he related, “about what should be done under the existing circumstances of the church.” Laying some papers on a table, he said, “Here is the result” (ibid., 44). George Q. Cannon added in his 24 September diary: “This whole matter has been at President Woodruff’s 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” (ibid.).
Frank J. Cannon, who was apparently invited to the 24 September meeting, later described the setting. “The portraits in oils of the dead presidents, martyrs, and prophets of the Church, looked down on us from the facade of a little gallery.” Standing against the backdrop of the paintings, Woodruff appeared to be “so old and other-worldly,” Cannon remarked, “that he seemed already of their circle rather than ours.… He had called the brethren together (he said) to submit a decision to their consideration, and he desired from them an expression of their willingness to accept and abide by it.”
Woodruff provided a brief history of the sufferings of the polygamous Saints in opposition to government regulations and declared that the courts had decided “against us.” He then pointed out, according to Frank Cannon’s account, that “Brother George Q. Cannon, Brother John T. Caine, and the other brethren who had been in Washington, had found that the situation of the church was critical. Brother Franklin S. Richards had advised that our last legal defense had fallen.” With “broken and contrite spirit,” President Woodruff “had sought the will of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit had revealed that it was necessary for the church to relinquish the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives.”
After a brief period of silence, Woodruff asked the group for individual reactions. “The matter is now before you,” he said “I want you to speak as the Spirit moves you.” When no one spoke, Woodruff asked his counselor George Q. Cannon to respond. After his supportive comments, several men asked questions. Did this decision mean the absolute cessation of plural marriage? Would they be required to discontinue living with their plural wives and families? According to the account of Frank J. Cannon, the answer to both of these questions was yes.7 Woodruff explained that church agents in Washington saw no other solution to the problem and “that it was the will of the Lord; that we must submit.” “I saw their faces flush and then slowly pale again—and [then] the storm broke,” Cannon reported. “One after another they rose and protested, hoarsely, in the voice of tears, that they were willing to suffer ‘persecution unto death’ rather than to violate the covenants which they had made ‘in holy places’ with the women who had trusted them.”
After each man had had the opportunity to express himself, George Q. Cannon again addressed the group. He reviewed the long unsuccessful efforts of the church’s legal department and concluded that as “citizens of a nation, we were required to obey its laws. And when we found, by the highest judicial interpretation of statute and constitution that we were without grounds for our plea of religious immunity, we had but the alternative either of defying the power of the whole nation or of submitting ourselves to its authority.” Cannon declared himself “willing to do the will of the Lord. And since the Prophet of God, after long season of prayer, had submitted this revelation as the will of the Lord, he was ready for the sacrifice” (Cannon and Higgins 1911, 96-98).
That afternoon Woodruff dispatched a press release to the Associated Press in Chicago. The following day he sent a similar telegram to Utah’s congressional delegate John T. Caine and to First Presidency secretary L. John Nuttall in Washington. Nuttall labored the following week to print and distribute more than a thousand copies of the press release to “the President, Cabinet, Senate & House of Reps & other leading men.” Denying the Utah Commission’s report that plural marriages were still being encouraged and solemnized, Woodruff announced the policy change that had long been sought by government officials: “Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of the last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise.… And now I publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the laws of the land.”
1. Caleb West to Department of the Interior, Oct. 1888, in G. Larson 1971, 245. West was not alone in this opinion. “The government of Utah to-day has no semblance to republican government,” Senator Bayard had declared during 1882 debate on the Edmunds Act. “All that was intended to be conserved of republican institutions and theory has been displaced by a system of theocracy. And therefore for the purpose of obtaining the spirit and meaning and principle of republican government it is necessary that the theocracy shall be displaced” (Congressional Record, 47th Congress, 1st session, 13 [1882]: 1202-1203.)
2. At the dedication of the Manti Temple on 17 May 1888, Woodruff proclaimed that “we are not going to stop the practice of plural marriage until the coming of the son of man” (John Henry Smith Journal).
3. Atkin, the founder of a one-family village at Bloomington (near St. George), Utah, on several occasions provided Woodruff with refuge to escape U.S. marshals. Grace Atkin Woodbury recalled that Woodruff, an avid outdoorsman, to escape detection would often go hunting in a sunbonnet and Mother Hubbard dress. During a three-month period at the home in 1887, the eighty-year-old apostle made more than forty visits to the Atkin pond. This slough near the Virgin River, surrounded by cattails and rushes, not only made for good fishing and duck hunting but served as an excellent hiding place when federal marshals were in the vicinity. On one such occasion Woodruff was alerted, and the Atkin family quickly loaded him, his bed roll, food and water, books, and his fishing tackle into a large boat. Grace Woodbury recalled that “when the danger was passed, William [Atkin] went out to the pond, made a noise like a duck and Woodruff quacked back in reply” (Mulder and Mortensen 1958, 411-15).
4. Clawson boldly announced in his conference talk that “If the gospel is worth anything to us it is worth everything. There is no sacrifice we can make for it that should be too great. We should be willing to go to prison for the truth.” He reminded the congregation that he had been willing: “In 1884 I was convicted and sentenced to prison for keeping a commandment of God.… I was sentenced to four years imprisonment, and was incarcerated three years and one month. I saw 300 of my brethren enter the penitentiary for similar reasons and 220 of them emerged from prison while I was there. I feel none the worse for my experience. My testimony is stronger than ever. It is pleasing to God for men to go to prison under an unjust law rather than act contrary to their covenants. The brethren who were imprisoned exhibited great patience in the midst of the worst class of criminals. It was better for them to do this than to enter into an agreement not to serve God” (Deseret News, 7 April 1888.)
5. Angus M. Cannon, brother of George Q. Cannon and president of the Salt Lake Stake, in 1888 testimony before a U.S. commissioner explained that the church no longer “sanctioned” plural marriages. When asked when such practices had been discontinued, he replied, “It must be a year I think, very near a year, not quite, since persons applying have been refused.” To the question, “Has this refusal been since the death of President Taylor only,” Cannon replied, “I have understood that it existed before his death, but I was not conscious of it. I had no occasion to sign any marriage recommends for some time” (“Report of Utah Commission,” 24 Sept. 1888). Wilford Woodruff reported in the 20 October 1889 Salt Lake Tribune that President Taylor refused to recommend plural marriages “since the Edmunds-Tucker Law [3 March 1887].”
An example of Woodruff’s refusal to allow a plural marriage is his 2 June 1889 letter to Ammon M. Tenney in Diaz, Mexico. “It is a very delicate matter, on which you write,” the church president penned, “to be made the subject of correspondence between yourself and me, under existing circumstances.” “Prudence and precaution” were advised by Woodruff, “especially in regard to my own acts in relation thereto.” Tenney’s request was refused: “I have deemed it wise and best for the present to advise the Saints to … await patiently His providences for our relief.… I am somewhat familiar with your circumstances … and am constrained to say that I think it will be wise for you not to take the step proposed at present, but rather carefully watch over the interests and guard the blessings and bear the burdens you already have, until the Spirit of the Lord shall direct otherwise.”
6. Frank J. Cannon’s account in this treatment is taken from Cannon and Higgins 1911. Cannon, though friendly towards Mormonism at this time, was excommunicated 14 March 1905 for “unchristianlike conduct and apostasy.” As editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, Cannon unleashed a barrage of critical editorials against church leaders, particularly President Joseph F. Smith. For details on the life of Frank J. Cannon, see Van Wagoner and Walker 1980, 44-48.
7. If Cannon correctly reported the answer to this second question, church leaders soon changed their position. Six days following the release of the Manifesto, during a Quorum of the Twelve meeting, Apostle Francis M. Lyman said: “I endorse the Manifesto, and feel it will do good. I design to live with and have children by my wives, using the wisdom which God gave me to avoid being captured by the officers of the law.” And during a 1 October quorum meeting Apostle John Henry Smith said: “I cannot feel to say that the Manifesto is quite right or wrong. It may be that the people are unworthy of the principle and hence the Lord has withdrawn it. I cannot consent to cease living with my wives unless I am imprisoned” (Abraham H. Cannon Journal, 30 Sept., 1 Oct. 1890). For further discussion of the unresolved issue of post-Manifesto cohabitation, see ibid., 19 Oct. 1891.