The Mormon Question, Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Gordon's superb study of the nineteenth-century controversy surrounding Mormon polygamy in the United States ought to be required reading for every graduate student in U.S. history, law, and religion. Its organizational structure, effective use of sources, clarity of argument, and excellent prose set a standard of interdisciplinary scholarship to be emulated by all academics. Gordon retrieves from obscurity a virtually forgotten episode amid the remarkable transformation of the United States during that century, and by "untangling the strands ... brings tolight a world of struggle for legitimacy and power, furious battles overthe meaning of the Constitution and the relationship of liberty to faith" (238). The conflict between anti-polygamists who perceived Mormon power and the practice of polygamy as direct threats to civilization, and the Mormon faithful who upheld the Patriarchal Principle as a cornerstone of virtue and salvation escalated between 1850 and 1890, shaping a crucial national dialogue on religion, sectionalism, federal power, constitutional interpretation, economic concentration, sexuality, and women's rights. In the end, the Mormon leadership disavowed polygamy, but not before culture, law, and politics combined to break their resistance.

Gordon is adept at marshaling evidence from a variety of sources and disciplines. From an analysis of anti-polygamy novels and popular literature, she reveals the identification of monogamous marriage as the foundation of Christian virtue, protector of women, and guarantor of American democracy. In contrast, these works associated polygamy with images of sexual perversion, abuse of women, excess of power, greed, crime, and slavery. They provided the emotional argument for the legal remedy—federal intervention in territorial affairs through legislation and court enforcement to bring the resistant Mormon religious and social order into conformity with the rest of the nation.

But creation of the apparatus to carry out the remedy required more than just condemnation. In the 1850s, the Untied States experienced the birth of the third-party system, in which the new Republican party threatened the power of the Democratic party, the South, and states' rights by calling for abolition of the "twin relics of barbarism," slavery and polygamy, in the territories (55). Here again, Gordon carefully assembles a highly nuanced and multilayered political theory and case-law argument that involved domestic relations, states' rights, disestablishment of religion, popular sovereignty, common law, women's suffrage, mortmain, and the Declaration of Independence. With the South out of the government, the Morrill Act of 1862 outlawed bigamy, annulled the incorporation of the Mormon Church, and placed limits on church property ownership.

The most fascinating chapters of the book trace the Mormon strategies of resistance and defiance. Using complicated legal and constitutional arguments, passive resistance, litigation of test cases, and sub-ornation of perjury, the Mormons bought time and rendered the MorrillAct a failure. The post-Civil War government committed itself to a lengthy campaign of additional legislation and law enforcement withlimited results until the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act confiscated church property. Gordon's absorbing narrative provides a major contribution to an understanding of this complex political, religious, and social battle.